The Lumineers

like i'd probably say this insufferable disney shit could eat a cookie even if their clawhammer technique was on point

lol

(hey!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3fAzQzgeSc

^ best pillow

Meanwhile, back at the farm
http://www.encorepub.com/welcome/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/810music-bella.jpg

the guy in the back with the (banjo-looking) stand-up bass and the wizard robe seems authentic. everyone else in that band is a poseur.

dat's one of those fancy guitars all metal guitars right?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/88/Lee_Ritenour_-_Earth_Run.jpg

looks like a pinball machine.... cool?

didn't know Daryl Hall played concertina in the lumineers

A co-worker must have heard the constant onslaught of acoustic beardy guy music I'm always listening to at work (stuff like CS+N, Neil, Fairports, Wilco, John Martyn, Fleet Foxes, etc. — because it doesn't offend anyone and I never mind hearing that stuff) and assumed I was into these guys on principle.

Her: (excited voice) "Do you like the Lumineers?"
Me: (fake smile) "Never really listened to them. . ."

Politely didn't add, "Because once was enough!"

I felt nauseous for about ninety minutes afterwords.

Yeah, this band sucks.

fleet foxes? same stuff isn't it?

does anyone really care whether or not mumford & sons are as authentically steeped in olde-tyme goodness as their outfits suggest?

basically how i feel. re: my comment above above "authentically authentic" vs. "fakely authentic", yes, i was kidding, but at the same time... my thoughts on authenticity and its signifiers are evidently not nearly as complex as some people's. i generally couldn't care less how faithfully an artist conveys the musical tradition, if there is any, that people perceive them as belonging to. if i dislike a band like mumford & sons, it's because i think their music is crap, not because i feel offended and lied to.

for the record i think "ho hey" is a decent enough song despite its simplistic sing-songy chorus and the title gimmick, so maybe this negates all my thoughts on the subject

also i liked about half of the first fleet foxes album and find it funny that people actually make fun of others for liking fleet foxes

hm. i don't think it's about feeling "lied to," for me, as much as it is feeling like i don't wan to connect to a band that presents itself in such "bad faith" (to borrow a term from sartre.) this isn't even so much about the authenticity/conceit question -- re. the stones blatant appropriation not being necessarily "inauthentic" -- as much as it is about wanting artists to have a measure of transparency, both to themselves and to their fans, about who they are and what they do and why.

fuck that. i don't want artists to be transparent. i want them to be good.

by transparent i don't mean honest in interviews or something. i don't know. i want them to be people doing stuff they want to do, or feel compelled to do... expressing something or taking music somewhere... no people creating a bland entertainment product. the lumineers are the musical equivalent of a thomas kinkade painting; no matter how "good" it might be, there is something sickening about it all the same.

yes, you detect the presence of evil, and psychic spines extend from the surface of your astral shell into the offending region. i think we're on the same page.

what does "good" and "bad" even mean except "i like it" or "i don't like it"? and then, once you decide whether you like something, isn't the next step to decide why -- what it is that you like? i don't think there is such a thing as "objective" goodness, and i also don't think there is such a thing as a "pure" experience of music... everything is mediated through our own prejudices, preferences, preconceptions, etc. if a band is presenting a prefabricated disneyfied rustic country experience that is like, blatantly hokey and theatrical... that is just going to be offputting to me.

this feels like looper

sweet. i liked looper. i saw it at nitehawk cinema in brooklyn and got really, really drunk.

fleet foxes? same stuff isn't it?

Here's two responses. Pick whichever you like.

<slightly intoxicated Austin>
**rolls up sleeves** Motherfucker, have you even listened to them?
</slightly intoxicated Austin>

<having to go to work in the morning Austin>
Hardly.
</having to go to work in the morning Austin>

Yes, I threw them into that list intentionally.

Just to offend your sensibilities further, I almost included Andrew Bird.

sweet.

um but yeah, i guess the problem for me isn't so much the hokeyness (i mean, i like queen & adam and the ants & turbonegro, so hokey clearly isn't the issue), but rather that the music's not really hitting my sweet spots. it used to be easier for me to get worked up about what i saw as WRONG with the art & culture i wasn't feeling, but these days i'm more inclined just to say that it's for someone else.

i am actually pretty interested in this whole conversation even if i don't really get it. how else could an artist be transparent about their inauthenticity other than approaching their performance with some kind of implicit wink or overt campiness?

like they should be playing at tom sawyer island in disney world made me lol

maybe. tbh, i feel like i still haven't fully worked out my feelings on the authenticity/conceit, hokeyness/sincerity question. i mean, i like hokeyness, even camp, too sometimes: no album means more to me than 69 love songs. however, i still suspect there is an answer to this dilemma, and i think it has something to do with self-awareness rather than just "musical quality", which is too hazy a concept for me to be comfortable with i think.

sorry my last post was to contenderizer. thanks for the lol dyl, i was happy with that comment too. i think, yeah, overt campiness is more authentic, in some ways, then like... what the lumineers do, which affects sincerity, and like wants you to clap along and *feel* something.

[cont'd] i guess that's what bugs me (slightly) about the inauthenticity criticisms, or the lack of transparency or w/e. afaic, this is some shitty happytimes sadpop for other people, people i barely understand. they probably get something real out of it, but how the fuck would i know? and relative to that transaction, the lumineers are probably coming from a rilly real place. maybe. it's weird shit. like candle shops at the mall. wtf. how is that even part of anyone's life? but it is, and there you go.

maybe it sounds like i'm advocating apathy in the face of evil, but i'd rather say that the hatred evil inspires need not excuse itself rationally. it only need kill without cessation or remorse.

lol. maybe i'm just not secure enough in my taste to not try to provide some sort of critical explanation for all of my preferences. although something about the mumfords/lumineers feels sinister in a "political" way, almost, like thomas kinkade paintings... something about the usurpation of real aesthetic experience with a smiling facsimile. i think i am going to read "avant garde and kitsch" again tomorrow and see if i can get some ideas from that, although that essay doesn't give an account of postmodernism and is obv. very dated...

I get what both of you a re talking about.

And I know that adds nothing to all of this.

But the Lumineers are very clearly poseurs.

I got the same sort of vibe from Ray Lamontagne (sp?), the Killers and Kings of Leon (and, to a lesser, though more controversial extent, White Stripes) the first time I respectively heard all of them.

ooh i disagree strongly with the white stripes inclusion. it's a difficult question though; you can never precisely say *what* it is about an artist that makes them awful when there are tons of artists you love that could theoretically be subject to the same kind of criticism.

almost, like thomas kinkade paintings... something about the usurpation of real aesthetic experience with a smiling facsimile

i feel you, but have lately been attracted to a somewhat freudian accounting of this sort of taste. the problem with thomas kinkade and mssrs mumfords is not that they are false, smiling facsimiles, but that they are insufficiently dissatisfied. i am dissatisfied. i chafe against the world and myself, constantly test things and people for the adequacy, constantly find them lacking. i'm rankled. i'm critical, oppositional, a bad robot. (that sounds self-aggrandizing, but it's a mixed bag at best.)

anyway, this puts me at odds with art and culture that arises from a more satisfied, well-adjusted place. i'm trying to avoid words like "complacent" here, cuz my point is that taste is more about identification than evaluation. we tend to stick with our kind. and it's not really that there's anything wrong with other kinds, just that they're, well, other. i mean, i like the fucking fall. and wolf eyes. i've chosen sides.

as a consequence, i have a hard time with the lumineers just as i have a hard time with most pop country, with the dave matthews band, and with pomplamoose. it's not that they make "bad music", i phrase i can hardly relate to. the problem is that shit seems to arise from and slip most happily into brains very different than mine. which is cool. so long as they don't cross this line...

ooh i disagree strongly with the white stripes inclusion

**shrug**

I know.

Many people seem to think my favorite band (previously mentioned Foxes) are as bad as anything else currently going in this shit, half-hearted "folk rock revival" (if I may call it that). But I connect and get something genuine from them.

Not saying this could never ever happen with the Lumineers.

But perhaps I'd like to think of them as a "gateway drug" in the same way that I think of Owl City as a "gateway drug" to bigger (and presumably better) things.

xpost thanks for that post contenderizer. i hear what you're saying, and it's cool that you've arrived at such a tolerant, relativistic place. i guess what i would add to that is that it is important to keep in mind that oppositional art, the avant garde, has a richer history in the past 130 or so years than does, like, affirmative, conflict-free art, that ultimately exists to reaffirm power systems. maybe we won't change the world by consuming art that insists on facing the inadequacy of life in our society... which includes more than just grim punk music or w/e in my view, any self-reflexive art counts to an extent... but we will keep alive a flame of possibility, a sense that is society *isn't good enough*. that is like, kind of a marxist account of this question, and not all modernists were leftists, but i think there is something subversive about refusing, not necessarily "escapist entertainment" (I defended the new Justin Timberlake album on a different thread, lol) but escaping *into* entertainment. What's bad about the Lumineers, ultimately I think, is that they present you with a dream world, and to accept their happy, nostalgic, vaguely spiritualized version of the past would mean to forsake a vigilance I just am not willing to give up.

sorry if that was like, super ott. i think this thread has gone in an interesting direction.

but yeah, reading over that, what i said seems kind of aggrandized. but i think my resistance -- and from what you described, it seems similar -- to the kind of inauthenticity present in things like dave matthews and mumfords is that theirs is a vision without real conflict and antagonisms. and whatever your politics, there is something kind of unnerving about that.

tbh, i feel like i got to into college critical theory mode with that post above. i still stand by what i said but watered down about 30x. there's nothing "truly sinister" about the lumineers, their schtick is just based on an inauthentic, romanticized vision of the world that is unappealing to me, and seems incompatible with a critical viewpoint on society. however, about 6,000,000x artists i like could probably be exposed to the same sorts of criticisms.

wow this thread really took a turn huh

"dream world" is an interesting choice in this context. i say that because one of the most appealing things about film is its ability to construct dreams. i often describe films as shared dreams (a received idea), and like best those that create dreams i wish to inhabit. these aren't necessarily the most pleasant or welcoming oneiric spaces, but rather those that seem richest and most seductive. and i like a lot of music that i find simply beautiful, even if its beauty is more reassuring than challenging. to listen to john fahey or arvo part is to submit to a dream, and the pleasure such music provides isn't tied to punk's oppositional exhilaration. it's hard for me to say why i find arvo part's reliance on simple loveliness less off-putting than thomas kinkade's. they both seem to express a longing for an unattainable spiritual embrace. in kinkade's case, this is represented in an idealized vision of "home", where the object of part's yearning is harder to pin down. maybe that ambiguity is what draws me in. i think i tend to prefer art that questions more than it answers.

anyway, there's an interesting conversation currently going on on ILM where kinkade's paintings are compared with the recent films of terrence malick. it might be said that both present spiritual yearning in similarly vague and prettified terms, but malick's work refuses kinkade's easy answers. you instantly know what's being offered when you glance at kinkade. there's no mystery. the dream is very shallow. malick, meanwhile, insists on a language that is his alone, and that is, despite its superficial loveliness, very much at odds with the conventions of american narrative cinema. the dream he creates refuses to reassure us in the simplest possible manner. we have to work ourselves into some accommodation with them.

fahey, meanwhile, provides an interesting comparison point to mumford et al. he conjured a "old-timeyness" to combat what he saw as the loss of meaning in the world, and i suppose that's what the vest brigade do too. fahey's knowledge of the tradition he responded to is unassailable, but i don't think that's what i respond to in his music. the virtuosity and beauty are part of it, but i imagine i detect a sort of restlessness, a dissatisfaction. fahey's ideas travel in circles, looping in and around themselves, and while the lines stay clear, there's the sense of a knot that's never quite untangled. i dunno. i'm overstating it, i do that. his music may be easy to enjoy, but it never kisses your ass. it never mugs and prances and begs for your affection. it makes the offering and that's that. i respect the approach. it suits me.

that was a response to:

What's bad about the Lumineers, ultimately I think, is that they present you with a dream world

however, about 6,000,000x artists i like could probably be exposed to the same sorts of criticisms.

bottom line, that's the real problem with critical line-drawing. i find that everything i fault in the music i hate i embrace in the music i love. tbh, i suspect that emotion precedes rationalization wherever i have really strong feelings.

i think the key thing here might be, as you said, the issue of asking questions vs. providing answers. the former opens us to an awareness new, undreamed of possibilities -- points, however vaguely, to the future -- while the latter is a dead end. i think beautiful artworks, like malick films, even beethoven symphonies, have more in common with "oppositional art" than they do with thomas kinkade paintings, because both oppositional avant garde works and well-executed, lyrical works are aware, yet dissatisfied with, their own limits, and so are involved in the contemplation of possibility. for kinkade to locate utopia in the suburban home is just too easy, and it's depressing because it settles for an easy, false answer. the other side of this complacency, i feel, is a kind of fatalism, a refusal to imagine things otherwise. it's for this reason, i think, that his works don't really "live"; they're just pastorals closed unto themselves, and a world in which that is "the beautiful" is a world that has nothing left to show us, and there is something very depressing in that.

i think music like the lumineers is similar to kinkade paintings in that it is committed to a vision of the past, of (i guess) 19th century rural american life, that is closed and comfortable. it has nothing to do with the actual past, but it has everything to do with this idea that beauty is something we already understand. the lumineers don't mine their sources to discover new depths, they don't reconfigure anything in the tradition to make us look at it anew, they just take from it what they know will be immediately appealing. and there is just something bleak about this complacency. i don't think that every artist should be experimental -- should try to reinvent the wheel everytime, or be endlessly critical and oppositional -- but i do think that they should aspire to *do* something, to make us stop and think about what, exactly, is going on. idk. these are hastily sketched thoughts about big questions.

and yeah, cosign on the emotion preceding rationalization thing. it's taken me a long time to accept that's how i operate, and i'm still not fully comfortable with it, but it's undeniable. i still think it's good to examine my preferences anyway, and try to understand why i feel the way i do, even if this is doomed to always be, at least in part, a mythology constructed after the fact.

i find that everything i fault in the music i hate i embrace in the music i love.

see kogan's boney joan rule

I don't listen to Fleet Foxes, but at the least the band can sing. Mumford et al. mostly yelp and stuff.

people that YELP are scumbags

There's a lot more going on musically in Fleet Foxes songs than in Lumineers, so at least I'd get less bored listening to them

yeah i don't see things like fleet foxes and things like the lumineers as the same thing, really.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MJ9ZgogB5so/TklaQXzbkHI/AAAAAAAAFUo/rxkAbPy_44s/s1600/thing+1+thing+2.jpg

lol.

Authentic beardos in a flock. Fuck 'em.