Julia Holter

I feel that misrepresents my criticisms

I'm only joking. No insult intended

OK the first song to save me from distress is maybe In Gardens' Muteness

the beginning of the bangers

imago is a pointilliste.

I had to pause due to work but I did like that song. It ditched all the gooey echoey muzak nonsense and tried to actually yknow be a song or whatever rockist pointillist thing I believe in

Will listen to the rest presently

So yeah, there are (imo) two good songs, and they both sabotage themselves because JH has seemingly no sense of momentum, or when she has a good thing on her hands. In Gardens' Muteness is really good for about five minutes, then the climax of the song is this clunky one-note piano thudding that sort of works but I'm sure wasn't the best way for it to go. And then - worse - Les Jeux To You (these fucking TITLES) actually hits an awesome art-rock groove - like, after so much flimsy muzak, something with purpose! - and then instead of riding with it to the stars as she threatens to, she just abandons it and returns to the muzak for no apparent reason. I just can't deal with it. If it was just those two songs then I could deal with it as a good but flawed single but today I've sat through this album for three full hours and gawped at its RYM average score and wondered how everyone's brain is wired up compared to mine with increasing alarm. What is wrong with me/you?

idk man maybe it's bc you keep referring to it as muzak

TS: clocks or clouds.

Chaitius which I'm enduring right now is basically high-budget muzak with some terribly affected echo-mumbling on top.

idk are you listening to the bass in this track? the tightly turning strings that make up the first part of it? the silence it drops away into leaving her uttering clipped unintelligible syllables in empty space? "muzak" feels intentionally distancing

extremely LJ titles on this (e.g. les jeux to you)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNOTz3M-gbQ

^ this film is useful if you haven't seen it and are wondering what holter's intentions were

imago, what's your opinion on I Shall Love 2? That's the hit for me.

sounds like spiritualized badly covering joy division but then the last 30 seconds are good

also if you can get through that video with a straight face then i don't know how to help you

I love Have You in My Wilderness a lot, but I’ve never really gotten into any of her other albums. I think I will not be in a hurry to give this a listen.

sounds like spiritualized badly covering joy division but then the last 30 seconds are good

Oh Icarus.

It is both hilarious and predictable that after literally years of playing musicological pin-the-tail on the donkey every time you want to elevate an artist you like over one you don't, when you're confronted with an artist at least adjacent to the indie rock mainstream making highly composed, ambitious, dense and yes in places microtonal music - and a classically-trained artist who knows what she's doing at that - all you can think of to do is term it "muzak" or reach for the most off-the-peg "art-rock" reference points imaginable.

It's almost like your entire schtick was hot air all along and now you're trying to belittle the music to try and deflect that. It was better - and more honest - when you just admitted you didn't understand it or didn't like it. (I don't understand it either but happily I at least I like the noise it makes).

His dislike of ambient music is remotely relevant here. I also get the sense that 'atmosphere' is not a category he's interested in for its own sake – it ultimately boils down to narrativity (albeit of the bizarre and non-linear variety), hence his insistance on 'songwriting'. Anyway, props for your commitment to genuinely unpopular opinions, imago, I'm personally a fan even when I disagree (p.s.: Black Dresses are quite cool on the purely instrumental front, but I can't stand the singing at all, at least in the absence of fountains of youth).

Maybe but I don't get the sense (at all!) that this record is about atmosphere for its own sake. There's clearly a narrative here, the songs keep moving forward and rarely revisit previous territory, in a way that is obviously going to frustrate a lot of listeners who were brought up on pop or rock music and like repetition and easily identifiable structures.

What it isn't particularly interested in offering are those cathartic rock moments (and even most of what is usually termed 'art-rock' tends to rely on those moments as well) where everything *kicks in*, probably the big thing that someone would get out of These New Puritans or even later Radiohead and not this, for example. It shares that with a lot of ambient music obviously but also a lot of post-war notated music.

I could provide literally hundreds of examples of non-linear unrepeating music that I love - and just as many examples of music that offers non-obvious catharsis. And it's not like this album doesn't have builds or climaxes. I'm just not sure it handles any of those things in a way I like.

It's also I suspect why he gets frustrated when the banging bit in Le Jeux To You gallops off into the distance never to be seen again, even though the ghost of that refrain continues throughout the last section of the song.

I dunno, a lot of the time it basically comes down to whether you've heard enough to convince you to meet the music half-way and treat it as a puzzle to be solved rather than one to be railed against. I wouldn't blame anyone for not being arsed with this record but defaulting to a Richard Keys level of criticism doesn't benefit anyone.

(xpost)

'Atmosphere' can also be Ligetian…

There is, of course, narrative in all things. I just don't think it's especially foregrounded here – if anything, there's a fragmentary logic at work, as if all of it were dénouement, from beginning to end. I do agree that there is precious little release from the aviary (but it's not completely lacking, either).

xps

As for 'muzak', well obviously I wish I had the theoretical chops to explain why the melodies here are dull and even maddening (with the two exceptions given) but I don't. SAVE US SUND4R, basically. What I'll say is that In Gardens' Muteness is basically just her + keys, and I think that having that sonic limitation forces her to think more creatively about the melodies and the song-structure, as opposed to the more 'composed' songs, where she's going for a sort of grand ensemble sound-feeling that while skilfully put together with classical training or whatever has a deadening effect on me (again, I've acknowledged that I may be the problem here).

The 'ghost' of that refrain in LJTY (lol) is too cryptic! It's too denying! Too astringent!

I'm just not sure it handles any of those things in a way I like.

Dude that's fine but don't try and reduce it to the level of hold music just because you don't like it! You're doing it again here, you're trying to appeal to classical qualities you don't know or understand in order to 'prove' your argument when it's obvious to everyone else that it can't be proven.

Literally no musicologist would be able to explain why "the melodies are dull", I mean they could but it would be a completely fraudulent exercise even if you accept that melody is the point here.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the underpinning chords and progressions are mostly quite basic and ARGUABLY uninteresting, but I'd need to listen and relisten to confirm this.

Everyone should read @jennpelly's fantastic review of @JULIA_HOLTER's Aviary today. It's one of the finest albums of the year, and Jenn did an incredible job of translating what makes it such an achievement (and a pleasure to listen to). https://t.co/vZCdSqnLtc

— Philip Sherburne (@PhilipSherburne) November 2, 2018

gotta pick this album up. i'm not overly familiar with her music, but I saw her (and the other musicians) perform a version of that cover of Condemnation I posted upthread at a mutual friend's memorial service, and it was so genuinely moving. It was later released as a 7" via Domino w/proceeds going to a mental health service.

That friend spoke highly of her and her process and craft, it's kind of impossible of me to think of her without thinking of him playing one of her records for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnKwro7dO0c

stumbled across this lovely cover of That's Us/Wild Combination she did

This album is made for playing loud and on headphones. There's so much texture and depth, it's wonderful.

Ha, I put it on for the first time last week. At first, it seemed almost like it was incapable of reaching me or making any impact, although I could see that there were interesting things going on. Then I turned it up and it sounded like the greatest thing.

(I doubt I can save anyone, though, given that i) I only listened to it once and not that analytically and ii) even the analytical presentation that I did put time into seems riddled with holes right now.)

Then I turned it up and it sounded like the greatest thing.

This was my experience with "Chaitius" in particular. It didn't make sense until I turned up the volume and could take in all of the detail.

I'm not sure which track I like most yet. One of "Underneath the Moon," "In Gardens' Muteness," or "Turn the Light On" probably.

One of the major stumbling blocks for Julia's music, that I still have to kind of mentally ignore, is her tendency to rely upon kick-snare-kick-snare kind of straight-ass patterns, from Ekstasis onward this became a real part other language, this rhythmic squareness that seems at times deliberately static and numbing. On the new one, this "Polka setting" sound is only really a feature in a couple songs-- "Les Jeux To You" has a knees-up-Mother-Brown moment. It is not my favourite thing about Julia's music, it reminds me of St. Vincent's over-reliance on "straight-4 kicks on almost every song", and seems to (to my ears) often keep the music grounded instead of allowing it to take flight. That's my only perennial criticism about her stuff, she's one of my favourite musicians otherwise. It's great to hear (on this album) a return to the more formless stuff that first attracted me to Tragedy

that rhythmic squareness is something that really bugged me about her music previously and always prevented me from really getting into it up until this album. on the rare occasion it does show up on Aviary it doesn't bother me though because it actually works with the songs it's used on

Yeah I agree

"Colligere," what a beautiful track.

vinyl feels like the right format for this record, the chunking helps it feel less oppressive

She's playing the Funkhaus? Ooh!

Just booked tickets. Thanks!

I have never been there, are you supposed to sit? I saw her in the Berghain on the Wilderness tour and it was great.

I listened to it again today and agree with Alex. Even by the time I got to the second half (did someone here call that half the "bangers"? because they aren't bangers), I felt worn down. I suspected that, objectively, I was hearing good songs - but I'd grown so accustomed to her vocal and musical personality by that point that they didn't feel fresh.

(did someone here call that half the "bangers"? because they aren't bangers)

i was joking but the melodies do get straighter in that half imo

"Everyday is an Emergency" is the hardest track for me, though I'm not sure that it's meant to become easy. The rest of the first disc really opened up with repeated listenings. I didn't expect that "Another Dream" would be one of my favourites.

Surprised no-one has name-checked Alice Coltrane here, as a reference. This is such a free-jazz record, in terms of creating your own space and inhabiting it like no on else could. Presenting us mortal listeners not just a world of sound, but presenting a world of sound and escaping from it, traveling to new worlds, all in the same 60 minutes or so. It's incredible. This record is huge.

Man, I love the section in "I Shall Love 1" from 1:25 until the vocals come back in.

wow i'd never heard the walking by jane siberry, what a record!

The rhythmic stiffness thing has occasionally bothered me about JH but usually only when the tempo goes above a certain level (When The Sea Called Me Home is my least favourite on the last album). And it really hampers the second song, Whether, here.

The counterpoint to this is that if that was all she was interested in doing rhytmically then you wouldn't get, say, the weird lopsided skank on Underneath The Moon, and there's always a lot going on in the rhythmic interplay between the various instruments.

I think "Whether" is effective as grounding and contrast within the album as a whole. I like the big outro. But I haven't heard any other Julia Holter albums yet, so the last thing I noticed while listening to Aviary was an over-reliance on heavy-plodding rhythmic stuff.