Stray Tracks of the Week (2/17-2/25/11)

*This post is also posted on The Pop Stalinist, my personal blog. There were a few reviews that didn’t make it over here this week.*

I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Thursday or Friday night, mods willin’.

This week was actually pretty light, with a lot of my listening time devoted to older Swans records and newer Angels of Light recordings, which I have dug up in light of an incredible show put on by the former that I attended in Denver this past week. These are musical supplements I’ve been taking. I put in entirely too much work last week resizing Youtube (and apparently it slows WordPress down) so I’m just linking to songs this time.

Antena – Camino del Sol (from Camino Del Sol on Le Disques du Crepsecule / Numero)

This is actually an old song, from a band I wasn’t even aware of until Numero re-released their 1982 Camino Del Solcompilation / mini-album on vinyl not too long ago. Antena was a French band originally signed to Le Disques du Crepsecule, a small Belgian indie that became notable for its close relationship with the Benelux subsidiary of Factory Records, who in large part birthed the “Madchester” scene from which Joy Division / New Order and many other notable post-punk bands emerged. Unfortunately for Antena, Manchester’s heat didn’t rub off on them (though Factory Benelux artists, such as A Certain Ratio, did meet with some success) and they and they became the sort of act that obscurity collectors raved about but few really remembered.

It’s somewhat sad to contemplate, given a track like “Camino Del Sol”. This is certainly a sort of pop music, albeit the sort of pop that goes ignored all too often. Antena’s stock-in-trade is tropicalia (or as Neil Tennant called it, “electro-samba”), which, as you might expect, translates into typically sunny moods, but Antena’s song (and most of the album from which it is culled) contains a remarkable melancholy largely attributable to Isabelle Powaga’s whisper-sung vocals and the (synth harpsichord?) chords that make up the melody, giving it an extra depth. In terms of production, it near-perfect, so good as to feel contemporary, with the electronic elements blending seamlessly in with the percussion and the vox. It feels like a lost classic, perfect for a warm Summer, or a Roger Moore Bond film. One wonders what more Antena would have produced had they received the attention they deserved.

“Camino Del Sol” on Youtube.

(Camino Del Sol is currently being sold in vinyl format on Boomkat, but if digital music is your thing I’ve only been able to find it on iTunes, which is weird!)

Hype Williams – Business Line (from One Nation, forthcoming on Hippos In Tanks)

I admit that I reacted poorly when “Witch House” became a thing. Beyond being unimpressed with Salem‘s inexplicably acclaimed minstrel act and wary of blog-defined microgenres (as opposed to, say, regionally defined ones), beyond the universally irritating use of wingdings in band names and cheaply acquired occult signifiers, as an industrial music fan I had a chip on my shoulder over Witch House’s debt to that venerable scene. Every booster of Witch House (some bloggers briefly tried to rebrand it as “Drag Music” when it was clear the “House” designation was an albatross) seemed to go on about how a given act (usually Salem) was creating totally unprecedented music – dark electronic music with a debt to hip hop. I felt this was clearly bullshit, and I was ready to write the whole thing off.

But as the bloom came off Witch House in the mainline indie press and the paremeters of the sound, which were always nebulous, started to expand beyond acts that had hit my shitlist almost immediately (Salem, Tri Angle records, and Creep, who will always and forever be that band who called their music “rapegaze”), it started to sound better. All it really needed was a de-emphasis of the Screw Musicinfluences and the tacky triangles-and-hoods bullshit. Hype Williams was more than willing to offer those things. It’s not entirely clear what their story is – it’s possible that they’re an anonymous collective, but the public face of the group, such as it is, is a duo, Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt, hailing from Russia and London respectively. Perhaps their distance from the States (and the general lack of hype from the usual blogroll suspects) made them better candidates to push Witch House forward, but whatever the case, their sound palette has proved quite diverse in the project’s short history.

“Businessline” is from their forthcoming LP debut on Hippos In Tanks, and what’s striking about it is how out-of-time it seems – It could certainly have come from the same 80?s VHS haze as “chillwave” did, but the winding synthline brings it forward to the 90?s as well, when Richard D. James was intermittently putting out demo-quality tracks that  brought a certain rough-hewn pop sensibility to IDM. It’s a short track, but its unmannered lightness stands in sharp contrast to the sort of contrived gloom that defined Witch House when it was born. If I had to wager I’d put money on Hype Williams being one of the few bands that survives and moves on when that house of cards collapses, assuming they’re anywhere near the premises when it happens.

“Businessline” on Youtube

(“One Nation” will be available from various retailers in just about a week’s time. In the meantime, you can download “Businessline” from XLR8R, for free.)

Solar Bears – Cub (Keep Shelly in Athens Remix) (Unreleased)

Solar Bears’ She Was Coloured In was one of my favorite LPs from last year (I think it ended up on #2 or #3 on my list) but “Cub” was probably the weakest track on the album. At first listen it sort of fits into the Geogaddi-era Boards of Canada sound that Solar Bears appeared to be tapping into when their music first hit the blogs. But on She Was Coloured In they showed a range of influences and capabilities beyond mere imitation of BoC (and there are far worse acts to hound). As it stood, “Cub” was an anemic sketch, really little more than a tasteful hippy guitar jam that goes nowhere over 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Worse than pastiche, it was bad pastiche.

Luckily for us, Keep Shelly In Athens (who I had never heard of before this) took to remixing duties on “Cub” and pushed the BoC era a bit forward, to The Campfire Headphase day, doubling the song’s length and adding all the dramatic bombast and sonic texture that the original lacked. I’d be remiss to say there wasn’t something a little bit off about the track – probably the fact that all the song’s emotion is front and center, on its sleeve, so to speak, and the meticulous production is sort of wasted on that bluntness. But it’s still head and shoulders above the original in terms of efficacy and quality.

“Cub (Keep Shelly In Athens Remix)” on Youtube.

(This remix isn’t on any official releases. XLR8R has it for free download, however, along with a surprising number of other Solar Bears tracks.)

 

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *