Where has my love for singer-songwriters gone? (long time passing)

My only mp3 player these days is my phone, which it doesn't have that much room for music on it, so what gets put on there is a pretty good snapshot what's in heavy rotation for me at the moment. I was at the gym today with all the songs on shuffle and realised that, of the 21 albums on my phone, not a single one of them belongs the category that once defined my music taste: guitar-centric folk/rock with a heavy emphasis on the lyrical articulation of complex emotions. I tend to think of this as singer-songwriter music even when it includes bands like Mumford and Sons.

Not only do I no longer keep up with this music, I actually seem to have developed something verging on an antipathy to it. I have scoffed my way through various people's attempts to get me to the appreciate the likes of Iron and Wine, that other one I confuse with Iron and Wine (maybe it's the one you went to see that had suddenly included a horn section? or was that actually Iron and Wine), the National, Kurt Vile, you name it. I swear I look at the beard-y faces of these guys and I just...can't. Even when I can't see their faces--even if they don't have facial hair!--I feel like I can hear the beards.

Probably my problem has something to do with the earnestness, the sincere-but-ironic-but-sincere thing that Gen Y has made its signature, but honestly with the exception of the ever-brilliant James McMurtry I can't really stand much of this sort of thing from people Gen X or older either. I would crawl through glass (ok, just figuratively) if someone told me that on the other side was the music of a woman as brilliant and edgy and musically inventive as PJ Harvey or Liz Phair in their prime, but no one like that has come down the pike in quite some time. (Laura Marling and Martha Wainwright are probably the closest in recent years, but neither has quite the teeth of PJ or Liz for me.)

So yeah, it's kind of a gender problem. But it's a gender problem because it's an identification problem. I don't feel engaged by the feelings being conveyed, and to me that's what singer-songwriter music is all about. I can't find the women who would speak to me, and these days the men really don't. (I have no such problem with Elliott Smith, who I love unequivocally; I still haven't quite worked that one out.)

As this state of affairs has gone on longer and longer, I've grown to dislike even the signature sound of singer-songwriter-y music: the unprocessed voice, the bright, right-in-your-ear guitar strumming, the unmistakeable sound of yearning. Give me something so glossy that discerning sincerity in it is actually work (the Beyonce tracks I linked to before).

Or something harsh and performative and slick:

or humming with affects that are compelling because they are not identifiable:

or with its emotion couched in music so dark that its delivers its feelings with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for smirk:

or that's an express refusal of all emotion:

All these songs are, not incidentally, from albums that would easily make my top ten or 20 of 2013. Their gender politics are no better--and in some cases they are much, much worse--than the Iron and Wines of this world, but I guess the difference is that I'm not expecting to identify. I don't feel as if the point of the music is to present me with a set of feelings that I can recognise as sincere and embrace accordingly. At this point in my life, I can deal with Kanye's straight-up misogyny better than I can the introspective musings of a sincere guy I'm supposed to like but can't.

My embrace of emotional distance in music probably explains why the first-person songwriting I've enjoyed the most in the last five or so years has come more out of hiphop than folk traditions. It has as much of an individual perspective and distinctive musical signature as what would usually be classed as singer-songwriter stuff: the feeling of another person there, thinking aloud, in a personal musical style. But the generic difference makes a difference. I think it's because the conventions of hiphop are all about how specific and in some way unknowable the life being described is. This track by Skinnyman is so brilliant because he tells us all the reasons why it's so hard to understand his world, but then manages to deliver a slice of it anyway.

Tilted, Woozy

Ten days ago, on New Year's Eve, XXYYXX released a new album via his bandcamp. This album, his third, followed up his self-titled debut which came out almost two years ago, and Mystify, which followed shortly afterwards. This new album, though, was released under his own name, Marcel Everett; entitled (II), it signals a change in musical direction for the artist, shifting slightly away from the warped and twisted sonic textures of his first two albums, towards more experimental soundscapes. 2014 is certain to be a big year for Everett, not least because he'll graduate from high school and head off to college.

I think it's easy to get side-tracked by his astonishing precocity when discussing his music: frankly, his debut album would have been amazing from any musician, let alone a sixteen year old kid who made it in his bedroom. I fucking loved the album opener, 'About You', so hard back in 2012; putting together this post, I was amazed that it has a scarcely credible 13 million views on the youtubes, something surely related to the video's crazed 420 aesthetic, because that's a mind-poppingly high number for such a baroque, weirdly tilted and woozy tune, no matter how brilliant (or, alternatively, there are a lot more people with a lot better taste out there than I imagine).

Another favourite from the first album was 'Good Enough', which, when the sample reveals itself for the first time, surely provokes an exclamation of pure joy from the listener.

I listened to the new album a couple of times on train journeys since it was released. Its ambitiously experimental; he's a long way from the dancefloor here, and there's even something here of Holly Herndon's cerebral stylings. I seriously like it.

Probably the artist XXYYXX reminds me of the most, especially in his handling of a sample, is Jacques Greene. I was first aware of him even before I heard his music or knew his name, because he was the cute guy in the glasses that Azealia Banks was shouting at deliciously in the '212' video.

I gather he's something of a superstar DJ, in demand behind the wheels of steel these days, but he's been fairly consistently releasing EPs over the last couple of years. Insanely good was the track 'Another Girl', which again has an astonishingly dexterous treatment of its main sample, toying with the listener through the syntax of the song, just playing with the looping repeated phrases until eventually all becomes clear.

Last year saw him release 'On Your Side', a tune in collaboration with How To Dress Well. Now I'm not bashful in saying that Tom Krell is hands down my favourite musician working at the moment, and as far as I'm concerned the man walks on fucking water, but I really struggled to like 'On Your Side' (and am still struggling: still, no-one bats 1.000, right?). Much better was the last track on that EP, 'Quicksand'. At any rate, they're both pushing beyond whatever the hell 'chillstep' was supposed to be two years ago, and the woozy aesthetic they inhabit is something I hope they both forge on with, because I love it.

Epicshimmerpop

Another case of me randomly making up genre names here, but there's a kind of circle of stuff I've been listening to lately that I think of as 'epic shimmer-pop'. There's invention, looking back at old Slowdive shoegaze through a filter of more recent Beach House-type dream pop, but adding a kind of soaring aesthetic that made Funeral Arcade Fire's only good album (there: I said it!). Money, in particular, have absolutely aced this sound: they've made it oddly sparse, detached, icy, but with so much heart. Alongside Rhye's Woman, their album Shadow of Heaven  was my favourite debut of 2013. Somehow they've allowed their admiration for 'I Wanna Be Adored' and 'Waterfall' be a license to make music that sounds brilliant, rather than an excuse to make music that sounds shit, as so many other bands have done in the past.

One of the best bands I saw live last year was G R E A T W A V E S, supporting How To Dress Well at the Whitworth in Manchester. They played an absolutely incredible set filled with audio-visual soundscapes, blowing me away. There's more blissed-out ambience here than in the Money album, but I simply cannot wait for more releases from them. 

Also ambient, and also Manchester-based in as far as I can make out, is whoever is releasing as transmission13. It's instrumental, much quieter than the other two, but still haunting and shimmering. 

Lastly, I'll put in a word for Lanterns On The Lake. I hate the video for this, because it pulls perilously close to horrid Wes Anderson-esque twee (but just about gets out of jail because I think it reminds me of a Smashing Pumpkins video, but which one I can't remember). Anyway, it's easily the most radio-friendly tune here, but their album still has something of the shimmering soar about it, despite its more obviously commercial hooks.

Our Doom

Problematically, because I read almost no music journalism at all, I frequently have no idea what the music I'm listening to is called. Or rather, I have no idea about the terminology other people commonly use to use to describe the genre-maps of contemporary music. Sometimes I find out belatedly, inadvertently, and it makes the music better (I was glad to find out that the oOoOO stuff I'd been listening to was called 'Witch House': that name suited it). Other times I end up making up my own names and labels that I stick on stuff. I hear genealogies that possibly don't exist, or at least only do in my own ears. A lot of what I've been listening to lately I call 'Doom'; I'm quite sure that's not what it's meant to be called, but there mustn't be a huge degree of consensus anyway because lots of different words seem to crop up on the internets: drone, glitch, industrial, dark-ambient (it's definitely not hauntology: I want to write more about Ghost Box in a later post). Anyway, quite frankly, a lot of it scares the shit out of me and I love it. In retrospect, the gateways into this were probably Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 album and some Demdike Stare tunes from back in 2009. Recently I've been listening to stuff that's been even more laced with doom and anxiety. The Haxan Cloak's second album Excavation came out in the spring: a less likely time of year to release it I cannot imagine. It featured one of the most memorable cover images I can recall, it opened with the sound of sheer terror, and it went onwards from there to a brutal finale. 

More recently, the brutalism of Vatican Shadow has been entrancing. His famously enigmatic song titles, subtitles culled from the past decade's newspaper articles, capture a sense of mounting dread and discomfort: electronic ghosts of the future dead.

Lastly, I've been exploring some of the output of a "Finnish death dub technician" (hell, if one of the upsides to be being an artist is that you get to write your own job-title, then why not make it sound totally awesome) named Grmmsk. It's plenty startling.
I think there's real fear here, although I'm not certain of what exactly: the ever-present fear of mortality just given a new articulation, or a newer fear of collapse (twelve years since the endless war began, five years since the economy exploded, and only a generation until human society itself melts down across the entire face of the globe). Whatever eschaton is being invoked, this is the sound of that rough beast slouching towards its incarnation.