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

im not gonna lie i did enjoy like a prayer just there

teh destroyer record sounds like al stewart not 'the 80s'

also its dope

oh shut up you're such an unfun crank, so i recalled a post you made a month ago, that's a cheap shot

lol I apologize dude I'm still mad at you from a shot you took at me earlier this week & also I'm tipsy, yr right I'm an unfun crank it's a personality defect I work on, sorry I popped off atcha man I just got mad

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 5, 2012 7:58 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its cool--tbh i was pretty stoked for an epic flameout but i can't not accept an apology & you managed to slip one in while i was out of the room. also happy to know those posts got under your skin ;-)

lol fu flopson beef 4ever :)

teh destroyer record sounds like al stewart not 'the 80s'

how can I, drinking beer, resist this

which particular al stewart album is this synth-heavy deej

Year of Kaputt

rule: don't ever believe any music made today is as good as al stewart

I definitely thought his voice sounds a little like Al Stewart also.

both of them sound like Peter Lorre

al stewart mating with neil tennant or something.

it's one thing to champion an era as some creative peak, it's another to answer "pick a side: prime thrash vs. early dm" or w/e. there's like a plague of ppl goin nuts about "the 80s" but I as I said in my initial post, I think historical discussion's potentially interesting whereas rose-tinted back-whenism is terrible, which is where I think a lot of retro shit is coming from. iirc the thread you're citing was a "choose between these two" thread in which I participated; you're not likely to catch me swinging into a present-day rap thread goin "X-Clan was better!", I may feel that way but that's on me, it's not like I think genres have to arrest themselves to keep me happy with some idealized frozen historical-present

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 5, 2012 8:05 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mmm think i essentially agree with you on this. i think a statement like "I loved The Chronic and Doggy Style ... but the element of rap that was like mindblowing sheer sonics gave way to what were essentially rock records structurally" is reductive in the same way many arguments about rock post-70's/rave post-90's/jazz post-60's are reductive: rap continued/continues to be innovative in terms of mindblowing sheer sonics, despite including chord progressions and elements of rock structure

also, while we 99% of the time rightly assume that the person who shows up to say "x-clan did it better" is someone with not-super-interesting ideas about music, i believe it's the responsibility of vocal fans of contemporary music in genres with encroaching histories to counter such claims with examples of great contemporary music and vivid, well-argued enthusiasm, not to automatically call someone a moron for holding such an opinion based on an abstract and rigidly held belief that genres never regress. sometimes they do, and sometimes very smart people argue it convincingly

i get where you're coming from but i dunno i dont listen kaputt or west coast and go "oh cool 80's sounds here" i just hear awesome fresh music

― ⚓ (gr8080)

? the past-ness, other-era-ness of the sounds in Kaputt seems like a big part of what the album's "about" to me

it sounds futuristic imo

Year of the cat is one of my favorite jawns

I think that sort of futurism is a specifically what-the-future-was-imagined-as-in-the-past kinda deal

if you take a time machine back to 1970 maybe

xps

how could you read the lyrics of the title track to be futuristic?

I think that sort of futurism is a specifically what-the-future-was-imagined-as-in-the-past kinda deal

exactly. this is 'the nightfly'.

On our local sports talk station, dan ”the common man” cole is originally from detroit, so he likes to troll vikings fans by saying ” the roar has been restored” and then he plays ” year of the cat” but they edit in a lions roar every time the chorus comes in

\(o_0)/ you guys are so weird

I think that typically we can overstate the importance of retro sonic signifiers in respect of stuff that sounds a bit like 1982-1987, certainly as compared to stuff that sounds like 1977-1981, or 1966-1968, or etc.

Which is not to say that a lot of contemp. music isn't just deliberate 80 ephemera, but I think one of the reasons for the popularity of that particular era now is the fact that there are a lot of trajectories bracnhing off of it which can be fruitful to explore, in the same way that people can habitually return to punk or etc. and use it to orient themselves as they move elsewhere.

In the case of Kaputt, the album does strike me as a "what-the-future-was-imagined-as-in-the-past kinda deal" - or, more specifically, a "what-the-present-was-imagined-as-in-the-past kinda deal", but the form of the past-imagined present, especially once vocals and lyrics are factored in, is very specific and relies on following the lines of the music, the lyrics, the vocals, to where they meet as a vector. This is not a generic (I use this term descriptively rather than negatively) vision of the 80s which "we" can all identify with.

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.

i do think i enjoy modern music that reflects on the past and uses the past but that feels entirely now. which is one of the reasons i loved PJs album. it was all about the past! but it was very 2011.

and the destroyer sound is now too, but its constantly reminding me of its origins.

so many ppl otm...

why is everyone hating the 80's? Lots of great music came out in the 80's. I don't understand this thread anymore.

― JacobSanders, Sunday, February 5, 2012 5:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the 80s were great! there's value in resisting the lure of nostalgia, but that doesn't mean you have to write off the formative music of your youth and/or the hold it exerts on you. you just have to watch out for getting entirely sealed up in it. it's safe to dance.

teh destroyer record sounds like al stewart not 'the 80s'

― D-40, Sunday, February 5, 2012 5:18 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.

? the past-ness, other-era-ness of the sounds in Kaputt seems like a big part of what the album's "about" to me

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 5, 2012 6:36 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it sounds futuristic imo

― ⚓ (gr8080), Sunday, February 5, 2012 6:36 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that sort of futurism is a specifically what-the-future-was-imagined-as-in-the-past kinda deal

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 5, 2012 6:37 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aero OTM. listening to this record only as awesome fresh music, divorced from the things it's very obviously referencing and even explicitly addressing (name dropping New Order, for instance), seems crazy to me. it's like discussing let england shake without acknowledging the debt to english folk and the other forms PJH interpolates.

"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."

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!

there's a layer of irony that prevents this from romanticizing anything imo

...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.

― iatee, Sunday, February 5, 2012 4:38 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, that's a good point. i acknowledge the irony, but this is a pretty romantic album, and the 80s moves he's copping were romantic in the first place (new romanticism, f'rinstance). so the irony's there, but it doesn't really subvert the romance. that's why i'm inclined to say that it does romanticize the 80s, overall. it uses a period voice to create much the same effect it did the first time around.

excellent & insightful post from Tim F, as per usual - you rule, dude

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.