La música de Doom. 

DIGITALISM: Idealism (Astralwerks)

For me, the summer of 2007 was defined by Digitalism’s first full-length album Idealism, which came out in May and was listened to by yours truly almost continuously for the duration of that coming summer. Its rough dirty beats, gritty synths and surprisingly catchy vocal offerings served as an ideal soundtrack for my prowlings about the sweaty New York City streets. Stuffed into a subway car trying not to rub up against strangers, the distorted grooves surged insistently with the irrepressible energy of the city around me. Stylistically, they represented the emergence of a new indie culture as comfortable pumping devil horns in the air as shaking thang on the dance floor, a creative cross-roads: club music that rocks, hard.  

The album that defined my 2007 dropped out of my consciousness as soon as the year was done, that is, until recently when I stumbled upon On Hands Idealism which came out in December of 2008. While technically a remix album of their previous endeavor, many of the songs undergo radical treatment and stand up as unique and original tracks in their own right.  But mostly, the new release just reminded me how hard these beats rock, how the sputtering synth lines and occasional vocals carry unexpected hooks that remained barbed in me for months at a time, merits obvious in a way your body remembers more so than your head.

The German DJs turned remixers turned rockstars got their start in Hamburg in the early 00s and, fitting to their sound, have spent as much time on the festival circuit as in the clubs. Their debut single Zdarlight, which came out in 2005, begins with a groove lifted straight from their native German minimal techno origins, but opens up around mid track with an expansive anthemic almost-guitar line progression. Jupiter Room, another early 12” demonstrates their love of distortion, giving the repetitive programming a feel like living and dying rolled into one, strangely organic and mercilessly mechanical at the same time. The duo’s breakout club hit Digitalism in Cairo, their re-re-remix of the Cure’s Fire in Cairo established the obvious debt their sound owes to 80’s new wave and synth acts like Depeche Mode and Joy Division.

While I’m no longer prowling the streets of New York, Digitalism sees to it that I’m still sweating, not to mention shaking thang.     

BEIRUT: March of Zapotec & Realpeople - Holland (Pompeii Records)

What do you get when you lock a sorrowful indie rock crooner in a room with a Mexican brass band? 

In a word: awesomosity.

I’m aware that this word may not technically exist per se. If not, I will reserve the right to invent it for the purpose of describing Beirut’s stunningly original sound, mournful mail vocals paired fearlessly with the rich flush of tuba and trumpet. That this mind-blowing marriage works so well is testament to the creative genius of Beirut’s Zach Condon, New Mexican native who developed a love of brass folk music during his travels in Europe. At least this latest collaboration is geographically reasonable considering his origins; his first album, Gulag Orkestar, featured the backing of a Balkan gypsy oom-pah band. 

This time around, Condon finds himself working with the Jimenez Band from the state of Oaxaca, performing music written by him and featuring his beautifully sad, modestly melodramatic vocal stylings, compared at times to Rufus Wainwright or Stephin Merritt. The album opens with El Zócalo, a traditional and energetic romp recorded, it would seem, right on the street in the bands native environment. Then comes the stunning La Llorona, with its percussive, rolling, always off-accent horn stabs and Condon’s wilting lullaby. The middle of the track rises in a cinematic flourish, drum and symbol and swelling horns, like a Mexican western that never was. The result is beautiful and melodic, captivating in unexpected ways.   

The second half of the album introduces a new sound into the mix, melodic electronics and subdued dance beats, veering away sharply from the brass sounds of the first half but remaining firmly coherent thanks to Condon’s beautiful songwriting and mournful croon. Demonstrating an anything-goes ethic of song craft; guitar, horn, drum machine and synthesizer, Condon promises fertile creative ground and I know that I’ll have my ear to the soil, listening for the next unexpected crop.

Sholi  – Sholi (Quarter Stick)

Sholi are a Bay Area band whose impressive debut effort was released in February on Quarter Stick. This three piece make moody and ecstatic noise drawing from the coolest bits of fifty years of rock history. Duality persists as a running theme throughout this record; the contrast of light and dark, loud and soft, beauty and despair. The vocals are clean and even toned, almost without emotion. And yet the music drunkenly stumbles between extremes, reaching the highest highs and the lowest lows. It’s an unsettling experience, one’s footing never secure. But in letting go of your usual points of reference, in drifting free and trusting the journey, there are rewarding moments, uplifting and enthralling, all the more rapturous for the murk of lose and doubt through which you’ve come.

The album’s opener, All That I Can See sets the murky tone, a formless interchange of sounds, the guitars and drums searching for their parts, from which gradually emerge the gentle camp-fire strumming of acoustic guitar, a breathy sing-along, effortlessly melodic. Freeform experimentation gives way just as easily to grooving riff and funky drum, a rocking, swaying jangle of warm distortion, at times channeling the Doors, at others, Pavement.

You’ll appreciate their sound more if you’re one familiar with the dark side of the human soul, the depths to which you can fall in your own mind, all the while striving for release and renewal. I’m not sure if that release is truly found anywhere on this album, but the darkly beautiful discord of the guitars, the shuffling formlessness of the drums shifting always in and out of synch, suggests that release is just around the corner, if only we hold on a little bit longer.

Podcast Highlight: Dubstep FM (www.dopelabs.com)

The primordial sludge of UK underground dance culture has evolved beyond all reason in a short span of time, producing innumerable subgenres more like mad scientist experiments, groove and soul with artificial intelligence. In the eighties there was Acid House, a high tech and harder edged answer to Detroit House music, which grew into the dangerous DIY ethic of Rave from which came Techno, fast, hard beats as suited to moshing as to dancing. In the mid nineties the tempo went into overdrive with Jungle and Drum’n’Bass, James Brown and Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legacies cut, looped, distilled down and spit out at 3 X their intended tempos.

By the start of the current decade, American Hip Hop and old school House music again enforced their dominance, transforming Rave into Garage, equal parts good old fashion four on the floor party ‘till dawn and downtempo Anglo-Saxon meets Kingston beat poetry. Perhaps the greatest overachiever in the nations long history of cool, the Garage culture has produced even more experimental and edgy sounds with names like Broken Beat, 2-Step, and Grime, underground dance music of the most impenetrable variety, but has also produced breakout world famous phenomena like Mike Skinner AKA The Streets, Lady Sovereign, MIA and Dizzee Rascal.

Dubstep, one of the more interesting underground styles to come out of the scene in recent years can be heard on the Dubstep FM podcast (www.dopelabs.com), which, though based out of Seattle, produces long sweaty mixes by DJ’s from all over the US and Europe. Overachievers in their own right, they manage to produce fresh mixes - usually at least two hours long each - nearly everyday. Not that I have remotely enough time to listen to them all, but I’m rarely disappointed to drop in on them when I get the chance.

Dubstep is just the latest evidence of the irreplaceable roll Jamaican music and culture play in the UK musical underground, which has been shot through with Reggae and Dub influences over the past thirty years. Dubstep sounds like your friendly neighborhood Rasta beamed back from the twenty-second century. He has steel wool dreds and rocks the latest in Borg implants. Oh and he’s seen the end of the world and he’s here to let us know that it’s gonna hurt like hell, but that dance is the universal age old anesthetic for pain and suffering and that we may even learn to enjoy the mayhem. The mix skitters and lurches from track to track like cyborgs gone wild, with throbbing, stuttering sub-bass, jittery double-timed highhats and sluggish, thuggish downtempo beats. The marriage of laid back dub tempo and high-tech violence is unsettling to say the least, but that’s precisely what fascinates, a glimpse of our inhuman future for us to relish within or rail against. Either way, it’s a stage in our evolution that must be recorded…for the record.       

The New Al Qaida

The New Al Qaida?

 Should we be worried? Is it time to panic? Or should I watch a little less news? Perhaps it’s just the subject matter I’ve been reading about this semester: the CIA sponsored coup of the democratic Guatemalan government in the 1950s. Sometimes I get confused about what time and country I’m living in, but I know I’m being silly. Silly boy. That could never happen here, right?

Back then in Guatemala - totally different scenario - they had this powerful elite who’d gotten wealthy on the backs of the working man. And these elite were so threatened when a reformer president came along, popular and democratically elected, fair and square, that they engineered a “popular” uprising in the form of a military coup. The coup, of course, resulted in decades of brutal dictators who murdered anyone they even suspected of opposing them, the usual story. And all this because a handful of rich people didn’t want to pay slightly higher taxes. The reformers actually wanted that wealth to benefit the working man just a tiny little bit more than it was, which was not at all.

Commies.  

Of course, the rich people didn’t do it by themselves, they had to convince at least some ordinary people, preferably people with guns, that the reformers were evil conspirators, communists, tyrants, baby-eaters. I mean, they were going to raise the rich people’s taxes a little bit, if that doesn’t scream “tyranny!” then I don’t know the meaning of that word.

So in conclusion, that could never happen here…right?

Sure, I occasionally pick bits and pieces of loud angry rhetoric out of the ether, over the airwaves, accusing our democratically elected, fair and square, popular President of being a tyrant because he wants to raise rich people’s taxes a tiny little bit. I’ll give you that one. Sure, they’ve even dedicated a lot of funds and organizational savvy behind what would appear to be wide spread popular outrage over the tyrannical-ness of our new President’s policies concerning rich people’s taxes. There’s also some stuff about wanting to take people’s guns away from them, which seems to come out of left field (or would it be “right field” in this case?), but I won’t try and wrap my head around that one now, other than to point out that these outraged people are pretty much the ones who have all the guns.

So, yeah, there are some similarities if I let myself harp on it too much, but I’m a silly boy. Yeah, the government did just issue a report about “Right Wing Extremism” which might imply the existence of wide-eyed radicals huddled in a dank basement somewhere. And yet, from a wider perspective one would almost be inclined to include one of the largest media networks in the country in that description, with household verb/names like Rush and Bill who enjoy nationally syndicated radio and television programs reaching millions of ordinary Americans every day of the week.

I’ll admit it’s a little concerning to hear people with that much influence and reach branding our popular democratically elected President an illegitimate tyrant, and then to have almost those exact same words coming out of the mouths and off the placards of those same before-mentioned stunningly angry gun-owners on the streets of America the very next day. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if those exact same justifications are uttered from the mouth of the next Timothy McVeigh after he blows something up. I mean, what else can you do with a tyrant but blow up his buildings?   

But I’m probably just exaggerating. Either that, or these expert pundits and talk show hosts and their political cohorts are the most staggeringly irresponsible bunch of overgrown toddlers to ever hold the fate of our great nation in their hands at precisely the moment when we most need to work together if we’re going to pull ourselves out of this mess.

There is a deep and tragic irony in listening to the very people who gave us the most anti-Constitution president this county has probably ever seen, crowing loud and often about the supposed police state they think our current president is leading us to. These are the same people who brutally attacked anyone who dared to question our last walking tsunami of a president, calling us “traitors”, “Anti-American”, “terrorist supporters”, even though all our concerns turned out to be justified.

Does it make sense? Well, of course not. But neither does the toddler who’s just had his favorite toy taken away from him after he punches his sister. He screams, red faced and outraged, and his extravagant display of anger isn’t logical, but we don’t expect it to be. We understand that it’s just because the spoiled little brat’s never encountered disappointment before. He’s never had anyone take anything away from him, never taught to share, never heard the words “No, don’t do that. Bad boy!”.  As adults, we understand that losing an election is literally the worst thing that’s happened to him in his entire petty little life. He just doesn’t know any better.