so tell me, why is Kaputt better or worse than Let England Shake?

dude is smart and shit.

from an interview fwiw:

What ideas did you have in mind for Kaputt? What did you want to do differently, perhaps, this time?

"I had the instrumentation in mind. Treated trumpets. I had Joseph Shabason in mind, I'd spent a few weeks on tour listening to his playing and it always struck me. I had Nic in mind, cause I always do, and deep down I knew it would be good for the record to have a few explosive moments, which is something he can bring, amongst a bunch of other things. I knew I wanted played drums mixed with programmed drums, cause someone told me that's what [Roxy Music] did on Avalon. And I really like the linndrum sound. I knew I wanted fretless bass, and really loud bass in general, played in that way where what disco and new wave thinks of jazz music seems to overlap. I wanted to barely sing, by this I mean be fiercely casual; I wanted way more time for the music to be music. I wanted an absence of chord structure tyranny —though in pop music you can't really ever get away from that— and synths are a good way of doing that, kind of. And at some point I decided, not that I really wanted back-up vocals on the record, but that I wanted Sibel [Thrasher] on the record. I was also a little hung up on the record Avalon, I should be honest about that. Once in a while I thought about [Primal Scream's] Screamadelica."

tbh I think Let England Shake plays with temporality just as much as Kaputt and I feel like Harvey says more with her games than Bejar. I have not heard enough of either album to really dig in exigetically, but this:

...I mean he's poking fun at 70s/80s signifiers while at the same time making remarkably pretty music w/ 70s/80s signifiers. the tension between those two things is what makes the album. imo.

kind of sums up the sort of postmodern nostalgia that Kaputt traffics in, whereas I think the ethereal atemporality that permeates PJ Harvey's album is not so simple and a hell of a lot more profound.

no don't think about primal scream...

elsewhere:

AVC: The new album has a vibe reminiscent of the softer side of early ’80s British new wave: Haircut 100, Spandau Ballet, et cetera.
DB: The sonic templates I had in my head didn’t change too much, but they were not Spandau Ballet or Haircut 100. All that stuff is a strident, young, composed version of romantic. And I don’t think my singing sounds anything like those guys. And I don’t think most of the playing sounds anything like the playing on those records. I guess music that has both horns and synths pushed to the fore, and a rigorously ’80s drum sound, is gonna get compared to that shit. Maybe John Collins and Dave Carswell pulled a fast one on me and it sounds exactly like that stuff, I don’t know. I wish there were more sound effects.

I don't think pj harvey makes an interesting comparison point to this regardless. you liked it more? great, so did thousands of other people.

i think that we have found that there are thematic similarities.

yeah you're right I shouldn't have come into a Destroyer thread talking about a PJ Harvey album xp

what would the "outer reaches" of this particular aesthetic look like to you?

impossible to say until someone gets there, right?

i can only say that, in my entirely subjective estimation, kaputt feels like the product of someone laying back in a comfortable, well-defined place and doing what feels right. let england shake, otoh, feels like the product of someone deliberately stepping out of their comfort zone and pushing through to make sense of unfamiliar territory. neither approach is necessarily any better or worse than the other, but like i said, i get more, personally, out of what PJH came up with in the process. and i'm inclined to describe it as more artistically "ambitious".

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Sunday, February 5, 2012 6:51 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is complete baloney, if for no other reason than that kaput sounds little like anything else bejar had done to date

if only he'd been ambitious enough to use an autoharp

This is why I have difficulty with contenderizer talking about this album as comfortable and unambitious; whether you think it succeeds or not, it strikes me as an album where a huge amount of thought has gone into how all of these things come together, how the music frames the words and vice versa. The reductive reading of this album is all "lol he ironically uses saxaphones"; this is wrong of course but in its wrongness still points to something. The album strikes me as being about time and temporality, about fashion and zeitgeist and living in the present and what that mode of living means when it becomes a past viewed from the vantage point of a wisened future.

― Tim F, Sunday, February 5, 2012 7:02 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's fair. kaputt is a subtle album, especially in comparison with let england shake, which pushes its concerns, attempts and experimentalism to the fore. i mean, i'd never say that bejar lacks ambition as a lyricist. he's phenomenally gifted, even when he's just laying out a few abstract strokes, as he does here with "song for america". still, to say that a work of art is sophisticated, mature or thematically complex is not necessarily to say that it's particularly ambitious. i'm still a bit confused about why this is such a controversial point. kaputt doesn't attempt to deliver some grand summary statement on the era it evokes or the themes it elliptically addresses. though it puts a fresh new suit of clothes on bejar's sound, it doesn't experiment much within that framework or seem to push terribly hard for transcendent moments. it's more about creating and sustaining a comfortable mood for the duration. these aren't marks against the album. self-evidently vaunting artistic ambition isn't an unambiguous good. in fact, it seems to gives rise to some of the most egregious sins of taste. a great deal of the best music is made by accomplished, mature artists attempting in a workmanlike way to refine what they do best. maybe to experiment a bit along the way, but not in any dramatically "ambitious" fashion. that's how i see kaputt, and i respect it for its modesty, cleverness and skill. the fact that i prefer let england shake says more about me, of course, than the quality of either album.

big surprise that the Destroyer fans are smug conformists

tbh I think Let England Shake plays with temporality just as much as Kaputt and I feel like Harvey says more with her games than Bejar. I have not heard enough of either album to really dig in exigetically, but...

This may even be correct but if so it would be by accident, I think. Like a lot of records in this vein, Kaputt is both deep and shallow in that you can "get" it very quickly but then it holds and intensifies its resonance, or at least it has for me.

Let England Shake, conversely, is an album that wears its interpretive inexhaustibility very openly - listening to it, you know there's more to get than you've gotten so far.

So the appeal of the engagement process is quite different in that regard. Let England Shake is an actively intriguing listen; with Kaputt insight sneaks up on you.

Conversely the experience of disliking these albums is quite different: I suspect people who don't gel with LES have the listening experience of tl;dr, whereas with kaputt it's more like "is that all there is?"

These differences are worth thinking about but neither approach is determinative either of how profound or of how ambitious these two albums are in their own ways.

like, i'd call "suicide demo for kara walker" an extremely ambitious piece of writing, lyrics as poetry style, but bejar plays it pretty safe musically.

Maybe one sticking point for me is that as much as I really really like Let England Shake I'm not sure I see how it constitutes "some grand summary statement on the era it evokes or the themes it elliptically addresses." Or at least not any more than other records that deal with past war e.g. Piano Magic's Artists' Rifles.

that seems very fair Tim F; I think 'interpretive inexhaustibility' has a lot to do with why I like it so much. To say I find Let England Shake is not necessarily a diss to the Destroyer album; I think LES is more profound than most albums.

that's an answer to your next-to-last post, Tim; my bad for not using 'xpost'

imo I'm not sure that Bejar on his own intentions/influences is the most reliable narrator in the world

this is dance music to me. techno, house, whatever. and i feel like those are the people who have explored those past 80's trajectories the most successfully. since 1990!

Obv rock is playing this game with a handicap.

Those quotes seemed pretty lucid to me. And it's understandable that he'd want to say something to contradict the idea that it sounds like Haircut 100 or Spandau Ballet.

xp

yeah this is complete baloney, if for no other reason than that kaput sounds little like anything else bejar had done to date

― tebow gotti (k3vin k.), Sunday, February 5, 2012 7:45 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, no, i get that. the soft and faded 80s tones are a new outfit for bejar. kaputt isn't devoid of risk, and dude isn't treading water. but the sound here is (again) similar to certain kurt vile and ariel pink tunes of the last few years, and while i love those guys, i wouldn't hold either as a paragon of artistic ambition, sonically speaking. and they did more to invent the language in question than bejar.

as much as I really really like Let England Shake I'm not sure I see how it constitutes "some grand summary statement on the era it evokes or the themes it elliptically addresses." Or at least not any more than other records that deal with past war e.g. Piano Magic's Artists' Rifles.

― Tim F, Sunday, February 5, 2012 7:55 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

okay, then we see it differently. i see let england shake as an attempt to wrestle with the englishness and the 20th century's legacy of imperialism, injustice and violence. it allows itself to come apart at the seams, forces itself to come apart, because PJH knows that she cannot possibly say what she is trying to say, understand what she is trying to encompass. i called it "sharp, bright and ringing" earlier, but it often shares with kaputt a muffled sort of distancing, a gauzy haze that separates sounds and emotions from their origins. it sounds like an alarm, but an alarm that has been ringing forever, has grown so used to ringing that it transmits only faint panic at the edge of exhaustion. the voice of protest when there is too much pain to articulate and no hope of rescue.

lol, "the englishness" = "englishness"

like, i'd call "suicide demo for kara walker" an extremely ambitious piece of writing, lyrics as poetry style, but bejar plays it pretty safe musically

I don't think it makes a difference one way or the other, but just as an FYI: those lyrics were written by Kara Walker.

i see let england shake as an attempt to wrestle with the englishness and the 20th century's legacy of imperialism, injustice and violence.

I see this, I just don't see how it's a grand summary statement unless that summary is "the issue cannot be summarised (grandly or otherwise)."

yeah, exactly. but it's not just a matter of PJH throwing her hands up in the air and saying "fuckit". she does a damn good job of describing the enormity by embodying the confusion, dissonance and contradiction inherent in the attempt. and she makes music sense of the incoherence without just getting loud and crazy, no mean feat. my main point is that she takes on a huge project and brings all her guns to the table, lyrically, musically and formally. she's attempting to do the undoable, and she takes some pretty big risks in the process. that, to me, is artistic ambition, all caps. not necessarily a virtue, but something i do respect enormously when someone has the skill, wit and soul to pull it off.

"soul". i dunno. compassion, depth of feeling, w/e.

I don't hear any irony in Kaputt, but I don't listen for irony in music, and when it's something I can't ignore, I usually turn the music off, like LCD Soundsystem. In Kaputt, I only hear the romanticism, but I'm a romantic person. I love 70's and 80's AOR wholeheartedly that this record draw from. I haven't listen to PJ Harvey since Rid Of Me, Is LES her folk record?

"music sense" = "musical sense" duh

got to start proofing this shit

yeah, exactly. but it's not just a matter of PJH throwing her hands up in the air and saying "fuckit". she does a damn good job of describing the enormity by embodying the confusion, dissonance and contradiction inherent in the attempt. and she makes music sense of the incoherence without just getting loud and crazy, no mean feat. my main point is that she takes on a huge project and brings all her guns to the table, lyrically, musically and formally. she's attempting to do the undoable, and she takes some pretty big risks in the process. that, to me, is artistic ambition, all caps. not necessarily a virtue, but something i do respect enormously when someone has the skill, wit and soul to pull it off.

I think this is a much stronger attempt at capturing the qualitative (as in categorical) difference between the two albums which you're pressing, contenderizer.

And I think it's a reasonable basis upon which to prefer Let England Shake (not explicitly vis a vis Kaputt, but over and above most albums generally), even if I feel bit differently.

I'm coming to this thread late but I'm reminded that I read no single published review as thoughtful as the stuff posted about Kaputt on this and the main thread.

This is the best I can say about eighties Ferry, the Blow Monkeys, and stuff that SOUNDS like Kaputt without quite evoking it.

I feel like Let England Shake is, on one level, a protest record for aesthetes,--which may be why the record feels like an irgent statement despite having such esoteric subject matter--and being such, it is about war but it makes its points obliquely. Perhaps that is one reason for the preoccupation with WWI: she needs to peer at war from a hazy distance. And yeat, maybe not: the distance between then and now is traversed without comment in "Written on the Forehead": with very little shift in tone or production, suddenly we are in present-day Iraq, and I suspect that through the shoegazey fog that Harvey is intimating that all wars are the same war (a point maede by many creative people before her) and that war, ostensibly what the album is 'about', is also a metaphor of the 'ethereal atemporality' I mentioned upthread. History is the myth of mankind's forward progress through the centuries, but things are the same as they always have been and here is the bloodshed--the deformed children--to prove it.

That view of collapsible history is something she shares with, say, TS Eliot, along with a method of juxtaposing wildly disparate sources and allowing them to comment ironically on each other: Doran has already pointed out how the first half of "The Words That Maketh Murder" are strongly reminiscent of Goya's painting (along with Shirley Collins' WWI-themed folk songs as La Lechera pointed out to me) whereas the ending quotes "Summertime Blues". Of course collage is nothing new in pop music, but the peculiar piquancy that results from those distinct modes scraping up against each other is an effect you wouldn't find in Odelay, for example. And like Eliot, who sbsequently wrote massive annotations crediting all the different sources that went into The Waste Land, Harvey also listed everything that she sampled, or just drew inspiration from. Confronted with the thematic and compositional affinities with Eliot, suddenly the WWI preoccupation comes into sharper focus. Perhaps this is another reason she wrote about that war was that she was confronting a particular cultural moment--early 20C modernism--head on, and that is the legacy she is wrestling with. Of course the question I always end up asking is: why? What is she looking for back then that she can't find right now?

I probably have given this album short shrift: I haven't mentioned much about how she operates in the folk tradition, or how she is commenting on English imperialism; there's likely much about the album I will never fully understand. But there's no doubt that the album is uncommonly rich in potential meaning, and that it sets the bar fucking high for the decade.

Wow that's longer than even I thought it was going to be. Good luck :\

why does this shitty thread have so many posts in it? should i read it or is it some you had to be there thing now?

i really want to have some cool opinions to share with ilm re: this thread but everytime i think abt listening to 'pj harvey' on utube i start mentally totaling up all the time ive spent waiting for the subway in the morning, staring at nothing and wishing i was i still in bed

Lol I wish I had already gone to bed

holy fuck, drugs, thanks for saying what i imagined i might be thinking so much better than it might ever have actually though it, had i had the wherewithal.

Perhaps this is another reason she wrote about that war was that she was confronting a particular cultural moment--early 20C modernism--head on, and that is the legacy she is wrestling with. Of course the question I always end up asking is: why? What is she looking for back then that she can't find right now?

why? because that was the last war with which the folk tradition, the human tradition with which PJH is attempting the engage, was itself meaningfully engaged with the human experience. that was the point at which the mechanisms of society diverged from the course of human affairs, when the "merely human" became truly mere in the grand imperial scope of things. modernism was a reaction to but also a ratification of the culture of the machine, of human demographics, and that's a big part of what she's responding to, the break between the human (individual) and the ostensibly meaningful (the mechanically social). i'm gonna take my problem to the united nations...

think LES is over-reaching and within that its great at what it does. BUT honestly think 'the good the bad and the queen' album did it much better and more succinctly years ago tbh. 'kuputt' is a uber swazzy and fricking beautiful yacht rock album for the ages

xp I can totally see what you mean contenderizer re: folk/humanism vs. mechanical/social

there are some great posts in here about LES but i also want to make the point that it's not just its "importance" or "ambition" that make it so great - PJH's mastery of the sounds and arrangements on her record has always been incredible, and that's the case here too - as pure sound the windswept layers of "let england shake" and "the glorious land" are thrilling & unlike anything else, as evocation of an exact place both emotional and geographic "the last living rose" does an immense amount with relatively few ingredients, the way she uses specific modes of singing to convey both the emotion of the songs and the observation-from-the-sidelines journalistic quality she was aiming for is what makes it such a moving album. every sound on every song is there for a reason. and the melodies are amazing too, both the ones that sound ethereal and elemental and the ones that sound like some ancient pub drinking song.

lots of people seem to be talking about kaputt in terms of sounds and arrangements - i couldn't care less about the retro-nostalgia aspect of it b/c i mostly haven't heard the originals of what he's pastiching, though that quality would be useless to me even if i had (AND SHOULD BE USELESS TO EVERYONE NOSTALGIA IS THE ULTIMATE ADMISSION OF DEFEAT KMT). but this "fresh sounding" stuff just seems nonsense, the arrangements are dull and non-evocative and do not take me anywhere. scott made the comparison to dance music upthread and that seems key to destroyer's uselessness for me - i listen to so much balearic/nu disco stuff that effortlessly achieves the vibes i think destroyer is attempting, why would i need his failed take on it with added disgusting vocals?

i do not get the impression that a lot of destroyer fans in this thread have heard the PJH album though

I'm a huge PJ Harvey fan.
Katy B was in the top of 5 of my ballot.
Kaputt was number 1 though.
I am from England.
PJ was nowhere to be seen in my ballot, i've probably listened to it twice since it came out.
I enjoy the Kaputt album a lot more than I enjoy the PJ Harvey album.

Please analyse.

along with 80s new romantic smoothness, kaputt does recall 70s futurist smoothness, al stewart type stuff, and the way that sound moved into the 80s with the likes of alan parsons or w/e. still, i hear it primarily as 80s pastiche.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Sunday, February 5, 2012 9:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh i was kind of trollin w/ my post in the first thread about it i think i said it sounded a lot like 'avalon' to me (which was one of my dad's '80s car trip tapes like 'graceland') which is '80s' but in a hyperspecific way, but i think the reference pts being SO specific makes it feel less like 'period pastiche' to me the way gated drums sound or w/e and more like a continuation of a discussion that was happening a few years back, like when someone revives an old ilx thread & argues with some point made by a belle & sebastian listserv fan who hasn't posted on ilx in 7 years

^^^^ yeah this is part of what I was getting at upthread, this is not general 80s nostalgia. That's a fantastic analogy for it though.

Scott's invocation of dance music is useful in this regard not so much because "dance music does this better" but because this approach seems much less controversial in dance music circles, perhaps because the music's present use is foregrounded. Interestingly you don't see the word "pastiche" used so much to describe retro dance music except in respect of the most ostentatiously magpie-like produces (Pictureplane, say), perhaps because (a) panning the (sub-30 years) past for gold is so second nature; and (b) dance music then organises itself among much more specific lines of derivation and descent.

*which is correct but mostly in the sense that dance music does just about everything it attempts to do more efficiently than rock and other song-oriented musics - the attraction of rock etc. in this regard, perversely, is its inefficiency: rock struggles to evoke the layered bittersweet feeling of observing the past from the viewpoint of the present with the purity that dance music does precisely because the idiosyncrasy of the music's presentist persona gets in the way; and if it doesn't it seems lacking in persona. This is one of the more unexpected ways in which dance music can be more "functional" than rock, but it hardly bears repeating in the absence of a strawman kaputt listener who doesn't like nostalgist dance music, of which I suspect this thread contains none.

Footnote above is a footnote to the "dance music does this better" claim.

Equal parts sense and guff in this thread.

i dont really think of kaputt as "making fun of the 80s." its def more an ariel pink move. its not about irony. thats not to say the sonic signifiers are not there as signifiers. its dense and woozy with this feeling of time layered up and piled up on itself. it feels more like those records than they themselves do. this strange mix of machine exactness and thick, smoky density. it feels alien and strange, a kind of uncanny approximation. and yeah i do think its a sort of retro futurism but not in the "this is what the future looked like in the past" way, but this is how the future might put the past back together. its like reading a google translation, what is foregrounded is how everything is just slightly off, every angle too crooked, every surface overly buffed. its a difficult record to explain because maybe you pick up on this or you dont. but its a subtle album or an album that is about its subtleties.

^^^ good post.

I have been thinking for a while that judith is an a+ poster and this seems like a good moment to pause, take stock, and acknowledge that.

Kaputt is to the eighties what Disney's Tomorrowland is to the future.

So I've been trying to listen to Kaputt and so far I'm coming up with nothing. I get how people like this luxurious, oddly sedate sound, but to me it's way too one-note in mood for me not to get absolutely racked off after any more than three songs.

Nostalgia in itself isn't a bad thing if used effectively. But good grief, isn't the eighties retro thing just a LITTLE BIT played out now? I think I still have a little time left for the ongoing excavation and development of my childhood decade - it's a rich seam of inspiration so why not keep tapping it? But Kaputt feels like it's trying to explain the punchline way after the joke has run its course: We get it. Wet drums, synths, yachts, saxophones - WE GET IT! FFS we got it in 2001, we get it now, but instead of subtly recalling some faded impression of the past you're just piling on the Enola Gay and Digging Your Scene vamps. Buying one of those cut-price 'Electric Eighties' compilations from the rack in the Shell garage is more likely to have an effect on me than this.

I feel that this kind of thing has been executed a lot better by others. That Gayngs album from 2010 wasn't perfect, but at least it wasn't actively annoying. Kaputt makes no bones of smacking you round the head with its touchstones. The telltale sign is on the title track: "Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, all sound like a dream to me". This is NOT charming - it's sycophantic romance lisped in this over-affected Anglo-side accent. He's going for Neil Tennant, ends up sounding like a fruity pantomime dame. The more I think about it, the more his voice grates on me.

And yeah, if this hadn't beaten out PJ in the poll, I'd be pretty indifferent - a bland bland album by some indie guy who's decided to go "all eighties" - that's harmless enough, I can ignore it. But put it next to Let England Shake and what do you have? It just seems so effete - so asinine by comparison on pretty much every level: inspirationally, musically, lyrically, conceptually. You can't compare them because Kaputt is virtually invisible next to LES's towering heights.