Stocktaking part two. Last week I was watching some youtube montage video I can no longer find called something like 'This Was 1994' which collated pop culture debitage alongside fragments of that year's notable tunes. Despite the fact that probably the most important album in my teenage music education was released that year, I ended up entranced by how absurdly colourful all the clothes were. I didn't have a mustard-coloured shirt, did I? Oh god, I did. And curtains. Anyway, that's enough bollocks reminiscing. I got to wondering how, nineteen years from now, I'll remember what 2013 sounded like. Three mainstream debut albums from this year seemed to somehow capture the soundgeist of the zeit (ugh): The Bones Of What You Believe, If You Wait, and Pure Heroine. In many ways three very different albums, variously channelling a wide rage of influences and cutting different new turf, but I think there's some overlap, especially in the production values: a lot of the percussion relies on artificial hi-hat, the synth lines (...we all play synth...) sound like the keyboardist of The Human League having an on stage mid-gig panic attack, reverb on the vocals, and the aforementioned attention on the spaces between the notes as much as the notes themselves. I love all three albums, but I'm still playing the CHVCHES one especially hard at the moment.
The London Grammar album somehow managed to remind me of Massive Attack without sounding anything like them. I have no idea what's up with that. Their cover of Kavinsky's 'Nightcall' was justly celebrated over the year, although I heard several pretty dreadful remixes of it.
And Lorde of course gave us the undisputed single of the year. I note the youtube stats for the various iterations of this tune are now up to something like 150 million, which is both mind-boggling and delightful: if you build it, they will come.
*How* did I not know about the 'we all play synth' video?? Utterly brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right that the neo-1980s sound will probably be what we remember from this period. The album that will sound the most like this year for me will inevitably be Yeezus, but there's no denying the 1980s influence on that either.
I came of age as a person buying her own music in the 1980s, and I loved every synth chord of it. (I was one of those girls who papered her room with Duran Duran posters.) So it is strange how little the music that sounds the most retro-1980s in the present appeals to me. Of the three things you've posted, it's the CHVRCHES that does the least for me. (I sampled the album a while back and decided not to get it.) I wonder if it's something about my relationship to the original music that makes the return appeal less. You would think it would be the reverse.
I had never heard the London Grammar but it's beautiful. I'm definitely going to listen to the rest of the album. I think the Lorde album is good and just...charming, I guess is the word. I wonder, do you see a relationship between what Lorde is doing and Lana Del Rey? To me there is something about the delivery, the skewed but unmistakable relationship to hip hop, and the ironic torchiness, that LDR seems to have paved the way for, but I'd be curious to know if you agree.
I'm interested in the way that the CHVRCHES album (and some of the tracks on the Lorde album) deconstruct their influences rather than reconstruct with them. That is to say, it's more about what they've stripped out and taken away from the 80s snyth-pop than what they've used as a base to build on. Especially 'Lungs': there's something fearless about what's not there as much as what is. It's possible that's part of their [lack of] appeal: they sound like the exhumed skeletons of their forebears, rather than their reanimated replicants.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about Lorde and Lana Del Rey. There may be something there about how they both 'took' the year by inhabiting carefully crafted personae of the 'outsider artist', being authentic selves that were intended to be viewed as the antithesis of the manufactured popstrels churned out by Reality MusicMedia Inc. I'm nterested that both deploy lyrics that are extremely referent-heavy (in so far as they identify objects/brands by name), but that may be symptomatic of wider music culture these days.