creatively bankrupt newish chillwave/post-AnCo bands whose names are just '80s ephemera

saw a band called wet assed band with a table of xmas presents called beaty heart supporting teengirl fantasy on friday and though im not sure what it means they deserve to be here with bullets in the ass.

― straightola, Tuesday, January 25, 2011 2:34 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I happened to see this Beaty Heart lot last night and fucking hell. Either Animal Collective is the only band they've ever heard or they're an Animal Collective tribute band who forgot all the songs but boldly went for it anyway. It went from mildly amusing to hilarious to distressingly uncanny pretty quickly. How have they managed to be around for at least a couple of years without someone having a word and them realising the horrible emptiness of it all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb3PTbBBlvo

that watered-down doumbek type beat has a very World Music vibe to it. Vocals are pretty awful, and there's not much else going on.

i went to Goldsmiths with Beaty Heart...they've always been not great/sounded like Animal Collective. It was quite exciting at the start though, in a weird way. Just in that you go from living outside london and the bands your age are metal acts/funk-rock/sub-kooks indie and suddenly there's a band who sound like AC/Gang Gang Dance playing at houseparties and stuff.

chillumayowave

Does anybody know of a band called Super C? Like the sequel to Contra? I googled it a bit and can't find one, and I think that would be a really badass name for a band, if one were to go the creatively bankrupt route.

I would go see them if they were a creatively bankrupt, ten-minute Nintendocore deconstruction, Vitamin C cover band.

And now there's a band just simply called Twin Peaks
https://soundcloud.com/twinpeaksdudes/stand-in-the-sand

How about a creatively bankrupt Nintendocore Can cover band?

i think the chillwave sound can be amazing when it "works" -- i.e. makes you feel like you are woozy from too much sunlight and drifting off to sleep in a hammock, free-associating memories from your childhood -- i mean, nostalgia is powerful shit, and for people of a certain age the sounds that ducktails and neon indian and toro y moi and whatever work with can be pretty potent if they are decontextualized in just the right way... i don't know i am a fan of chillwave. i don't really care if there a million of these bands because how is it different than a million mediocre punk bands? as a genre it is cool, and a predictable but pleasant manifestation of how everyone with a macbook has access to every synth sound they could ever want.

ducktails is my favorite of these bands, especially their third album arcade dynamics, which i think is one of the top three or four albums of the new decade so far. a modest masterpiece. it's just so transcendentally chill, like playing frisbee with my golden retriever. chillness as a mood gets a bad rap because it is associated with horrible music -- jimmy buffett, dave matthews, idk, the eagles' "take it easy" might be a key text here -- so it's good to have an album that does justice to feeling relaxed on a lazy summer afternoon, maybe reading a book that you're not really paying attention to, just letting your eyes drift over the page...

smh at this Universal Studios Florida pfork rising article from 2009 http://pitchfork.com/news/36595-rising-universal-studios-florida/

chillness as a mood gets a bad rap because it is associated with horrible music

Chillness as a mood is sort of the definition of 'cool' isn't it? The 'horrible music' you listed is some of the best-selling music ever, and seems to be hated mainly by the 'cool' people that would like chillwave.

hm, good point. i guess chillwave is explicitly marketed chillness, so it is (kinda) unique in that sense as a thing that is marketed toward cool people. like grunge music appealed to slackers, but it was all about bitterness, disaffection, anger, and even in some cases severe depression. although there is this undercurrent of melancholy and loss in most chillwave acts (but not in the ducktails album!) that distinguishes it from the great selling "chill" music. i guess it's just the ducktails album that i feel like reclaims afternoon-drinking-corona-on-the-porch music for hipsters.

so basically chillwave is the gentrification of chill, which doesn't sound very good when written out like that, but i'm enjoying my ride on this wave.

maybe chillwave is just grunge to electroclash's hair metal

the timeline is reversed though, because hair metal preceded grunge and electroclash preceded chillwave. otherwise that analogy is fine, i guess. i think chillwave is just a result of the democratization of sampling and similar studio procedures. electronic music can be low budget now, and so more personal than it ever was before.

That was exactly what Adam said

oh yeah, i see now. sorry. good analogy.

why does drinking corona on the porch need to be reclaimed? who stole it from humanity? who is doing this reclaiming?

everything got sunny/beachy/tropical a while back, not just the chillwave stuff. i don't think that vibing out was ever in much need of reclamation, though.

someone quickly reclaim getting high & having a barbecue, summer's almost on us

i think yer first point is kinda wrong -- tbh, at the same time there was the chillwave phenomenon there was also a resurgence in various willfully dark strains of new wave/synth pop/'minimal synth.' tons of reissues of obscure european and american obscurities have come out in the last few years that most decidedly not sunny, even within this post-punk/indie rock/new wave/'underground' framework.

xp to contendorizor

gothwave

i think it's true that the post punk indie synth stuff contains multitudes, but i think the sunnier end of chillwave is still it's own thing, that tried to bring hipster music out of the bedroom/dive bar and onto the lawn.

and xpost i consider best coast/waaves/late 2000s sunny guitar indie pop a part of this trend, but one that is less interesting to me than the more stoned sounding synth end of things

Wasn't the phrase invented as a mock genre by Hipsterrunoff?

it was, but it is still an accurate term to describe a cluster of bands with similar sensibilities that were emerging around 08-09

you can call them hypnagogic pop bands if u want

hypnagogo bands

i think yer first point is kinda wrong -- tbh, at the same time there was the chillwave phenomenon there was also a resurgence in various willfully dark strains of new wave/synth pop/'minimal synth.' tons of reissues of obscure european and american obscurities have come out in the last few years that most decidedly not sunny, even within this post-punk/indie rock/new wave/'underground' framework.

― i guess i'd just rather listen to canned heat? (ian), Sunday, April 28, 2013 12:24 PM (8 hours ago)

in case it wasn't clear, i didn't mean everything everything. just regular everything.

is Robert Ashley a forerunner of chillwave?

yes. this influence was strikingly apparent when the Metropolitan Opera did an orchestral version of Neon Indian's Psychic Chasms last fall

the dude from Washed Out
I think they burned him

Take it Easy is a great song, one of the few great eagles songs

completely missed how dope com truise is amidst all this lolling

the ol come trues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLiJnFS4Hkw

reminds me a lot of DJ Shadow in the way he constructs tunes, but with a different sonic palette

BURT BACHARACH TO THE FUTURE

lol

Bacharach to the Future would have been sufficient.

Now I'm waiiting for a DJ duo, Bert & Ernie Hudson.

I think I like Bleeding Rainbow

i fucken love em

chet faker

Tera Melos premiere "Slimed" video via Brooklyn Vegan

think there's a bit more to tera melos than this, but not as much as I'd hope

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Remember-Lite-Brite/176839312438663

Someone must have told this guy that there's already a band called Twin Peaks: http://www.obscuresound.com/2014/07/pin-tweaks-girl-wire/

AND there's already a Pwin ▲▲ Teaks

http://cinyf.wordpress.com/reviews/pwin-%E2%96%B2%E2%96%B2-teaks-aoxomoxoa/