Bloc Party: Silent Alarm

BLOC PARTY: SILENT ALARM (2005)

1) Like Eating Glass; 2) Helicopter; 3) Positive Tension; 4) Banquet; 5) Blue Light; 6) She's Hearing Voices; 7) This Modern Love; 8) Pioneers; 9) Price Of Gas; 10) So Here We Are; 11) Luno; 12) Plans; 13) Compliments.

Here is another band whose recent status as «critical darlings» has pissed off so many people that, behind the endless discussions on the nature of overratedness, one almost forgets to talk about the nature of Bloc Party. Here are the bare facts. Bloc Party is an Essex-based rock band, formed from 1999 to 2003 by a bunch of college students/dropouts of highly mixed origin (lead guitarist and bass players are Brits, lead singer and rhythm player Kele Okereke is of Igbo descent, drum­mer Matt Tong is Malaysian — a melting pot paradise) and highly developed intellect. The band's first recordings provoked interest on the part of figures like Franz Ferdinand, and their first album became a smash success in the UK, making them hip-hip-hip for most of 2005, all the way up to their being blown away as the next best hip-hip-hip thing by the Arctic Monkeys next year.

It goes without saying that, these days, three guys with guitars and one guy with drums cannot become a smash success if they do not make strange new tricks with these things, or, as it more frequently turns out, if they do not give out the popular impression that they are making strange new tricks with these things. On the general scale, what they give out is a post-punk type sound, songs that are simple and complex at the same time, combining fast three-chord riffs in so many different ways that they start sounding like multi-note riffs, not to mention fluent, impressive in­terplay between the two guitarists that certainly took quite a bit of sweat to orchestrate. On the more particular scales, they occasionally bring in small bits of electronic sound that they also in­herited from their Eighties' childhood, and melodies that are fairly hard to crack. Either they do not really know how to write them, or I do not really know how to read them.

I do not want to reduce these guys to the sum of their influences, which include quite a few res­pectable outfits from around 1978 to around 1999. People have done that — successfully — and, as usual, it has led to some dismissing them as talentless copycats and others to endorsing them as bona fide inheritors. For me, the one impressive thing about this band is the playing. Even if the melodies as such usually do not work, all four of these guys sound like seasoned pros. Particular kudos goes to drummer Matt Tong, whose inventive fills and overall precision level I would im­pressionistically rate among the finest I'd heard from the 21st century; but the rest of the guys are no slouches, either — phenomenal coordination and discipline, even when it comes to relatively difficult passages. The entire album went very smooth with me for that reason alone.

The weakest spot is arguably Kele Okereke's singing. He certainly can sing, and he is expressive enough, but a voice is a voice: you can pour as much fiery spirit in your guitar playing as your body contains, but the vocal tract is a far less reliable mediator, and it always sounds like he is seriously constrained by it — wants to give out a hundred percent but only comes out with fifty, so to speak. As a result, most of the time it sounds like he's pitifully whining about life rather than apocalyptically threatening about it, and pitiful whining just doesn't sit too well with the musical moods they create. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that, as a modestly preservable piece of art, Silent Alarm might have worked better as a completely instrumental album.

Like I said, the songs aren't catchy; in fact, even as I am giving it a fourth and fifth listen, all of them are instantaneously forgettable on their own. What could you ask, after all, from an album based on generic pop-punk riffs, not a single one of which stays around for too long at that? An album whose chorus lines do not rhyme and are usually hard to separate from verse melodies? An album on which every second song plays at the exact same tempo, and almost every first song has the exact same arrangement? With the hit singles completely interchangeable with the LP-only tracks? Nothing.

What does the album aim for as a whole? Hard to say. It is clear that these guys are being serious; tired of endless cynicism and post-modern intellectualism like so many of their peers, they create this dreary grey landscape against which they stand, complaining and complaining and complai­ning about every aspect of life. Just look at this: (1) "It's so cold in this house, like drinking poison, like eating glass"; (2) "Are you hoping for a miracle? Some things will never be dif­ferent"; (3) "You're just as boring as everyone else, nothing ever happens"; (4) "Heaven's never enough, we will never be fooled"; (5) "You didn't even notice when the sky turned blue"; (6) "I'm tearing down posters, I was never ever alive"; (7) "This modern love breaks me, this modern love wastes me"; (8) "We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?"; (9) "Nothing ever comes for me, the ghosts are here, red white and blue"; (10) "I really tried to do what you wanted, it all went wrong again"; (11) "You've been lying to me, you deserve it"; (12) "Stop being so laissez-faire, we're all scared of the future"; (13) "We sit and we sigh and nothing gets done... what are we coming to, what are we gonna do?" Yep, that's all of the songs in a nutshell. Seems like there's more depression inside of Kele than in all the Igbo people combined.

I would not buy this attitude without a second thought. It is nice to think of it as a good antidote not just for MTV-type cultures, but also for the animalistic hedonism of the hipster club ones, but it does not always seem like the band is speaking with its own voice; their desire to be heard is obviously sincere, but what they say is such goddamn old news that it would have taken more than Kele Okereke's whiny delivery and the combined professionalism of his band to make it work in a new way. A decade from now, Silent Alarm will be a fascinating culturological study for those interested in the average intelligent mindset of a typical mid-noughties' youth from the EU; but in the meantime, it will be inevitably washed away by a couple dozen «no better, no wor­se» albums exploring more relevant musical trends and speaking more actual lyrical jargons.

But lingering still in my memory is the superb musicianship, for which alone thumbs up are guaran­teed. If you find a karaoke version of the record lying around, let me know.

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Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92

APHEX TWIN: SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS 85-92 (1992)

1) Xtal; 2) Tha; 3) Pulsewidth; 4) Ageispolis; 5) I; 6) Green Calx; 7) Heliosphan; 8) We Are The Music Makers; 9) Schottkey 7th Path; 10) Ptolemy; 11) Hedphelym; 12) Delphium; 13) Actium.

Musical genre names do not get much sillier than «IDM». Where does one draw the line between «intelligence» and its opposite (say, «dumbness») in dance music? So let us assume that the ave­rage nameless techno rave at your local club, say, three or four notes looped ad infinitum with a minimum of pitch and tone mutations counting as «development» is «dumb dance music», as op­posed to the «intelligent» works of Richard D. James. But just where exactly do we draw the line? And what about history? How come we apply the moniker of IDM to Nineties' electronica? Isn't Prince supposed to be IDM? The early Beatles? Chuck Berry? Johann Strauss, Sr.?..

Pangaeian reverence does not get much stranger than the pedestal established for Aphex Twin and, in particular, this album, critically acknowledged as his masterwork. If anything, it mostly goes to show how deep in the ground all the talentless people had managed to bury the classic achievements of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and Klaus Schulze by the end of the Eighties that it took somebody like Richard D. James to dig 'em up, give 'em a good dusting, mo­dernize them with techno beats and, in the process, become a worshipped trendsetter.

Now it has to be made clear that, by any possible standard established in the vast jungle world of Electronica, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is a damn good album. The title seems a bit suspi­cious, not just for the well-noted fact that, if «85-92» is to be believed, James must have recorded some of these tracks when he was 13 years old (he is not trumping W. A. Mozart in any case), but also for the fact that the whole record does not at all sound like a collection of disjointed outtakes — on the contrary, it has a conceptual solidity, meaning that he either had the whole idea already fleshed out in 1985, or just hoaxed us all. (It is also very notably different from his first EP, Dige­ridoo, released only a year before and focusing far more on hardcore techno and synth fart noi­ses — not recommendable unless you're one of those hopeless electronica freaks who regards elec­tric guitars on the same plane with stone choppers).

The «melodies» of Aphex Twin are by no means as «intelligent» as the odd label of IDM would suggest. Take a minimalistic keyboard pattern, along the lines of one of Brian Eno's typical ambi­ent records, add a few equally minimalistic «noisy» synth backgrounds, and you've got it made; the only thing that remains is to make it rhythmic (and here, actually, James has to be given credit: his percussion textures, even if mostly following the four-on-the-floor principle, are pretty di­verse, with no two tracks given the exact same rhythm contour). Selected Ambient Works is not a «deceptively simple» album: it is a simple album, period. By the standards of Klaus Schulze, this guy would be like a three-year-old trying to bang out 'Chopsticks' on a piano.

But these are, after all, selected ambient works, not a sprawling electronic symphony honouring King Ludwig of Bavaria. «Ambient» works if and only if it is truly ambient, that is, manages to set up an ambience. And that's one task for which Aphex Twin is quite qualified. From the warm ope­ning sound waves and mysterious, faintly heard shadows of human voices that ride them on 'Xtal', and right down to the ridiculously simple, but captivating interaction of the nine-note key­board riff and the stern funky bassline on 'Actium', these tracks establish, build up, and substanti­alize an individual — not to abuse the term «unique» — universe. You can fantasize about it on the macrocosmic level (asteroids bopping around in space, galaxies forming etc. etc.), or on the microcosmic level (hemoglobin cells traveling through the organism and shit), or on any level you like, it's all open to and well tunable for all interpretations.

Even so, to my ears, James' seventy minutes of techno/house-filtered ambience is just another fine addition to the already huge canon of minimalist music. Its huge influence on the house scene is not something I could be informed enough on to contend, the talent of its maker not some­thing I could be arrogant enough to deny. But the immenseness of its popularity seems to at least have as much to do with the intangible «Zeitgeist» as with its own context-free value. If one were, for instance, to play all of Tangerine Dream's hundred-plus album discography in chrono­logical order, surreptitiously inserting Select Ambient Works around 1992, would it still be able to produce a shock effect on the listener? In other words, just how many people have hailed it as a classic simply because it, along with several other «seminal» works in the same genre, managed to «reboot» the electronica franchise in the early Nineties, serving as a gateway into that par­ticular world for impatient listeners who refused to trust anyone over thirty?

"Selected Ambient Works 85-92", writes a glowing David M. Pecoraro from Pitchfork, "...was the very first elec­tronic music I ever bought, and certainly the first I ever heard over and over again... back then, Aphex Twin was making music like nothing I'd ever heard before... What's become apparent since is that I probably wasn't the only one affected." Then he proceeds to give it a 9.4/10 rating. Sure enough, if you compare it to Nirvana or MTV-era Aerosmith, it definitely sounds like nothing you'd heard before. But if... (see above)?

These are questions that, for some reason, no one ever seems to pose when raving, or not raving, about the album; everybody wants to discuss it on its own, probably because for so many people Aphex Twin was indeed their introduction to the world of electronic music, or, better still, to the world of intelligent electronic music. But I have a nagging feeling that eventually, in between all the major electronic pioneers of the Seventies and all the gradual advances that have been made in the genre ever since, the importance of Selected Ambient Works will fade away, exposing it for what it is: a pleasant otherworldly mood-setter to brighten your evening, no better and no worse than any other pleasant otherworldly mood-setter.

Then again, it should also be noted that Selected Ambient Works need not necessarily be taken as the album that defines Aphex Twin; by no means does it cover all of Richard D. James' versa­tility, importance, and all-around awesomeness. After all, he may have been 13 years old when he created these tracks — and if you can do likewise when you are 13 years old, congratulations, you fall under the same category of dementia.

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The Art Of Noise: Below The Waste

ART OF NOISE: BELOW THE WASTE (1989)

1) Dan Dare; 2) Yebo!; 3) Catwalk; 4) Promenade 1; 5) Dilemma; 6) Island; 7) Chang Gang; 8) Promenade 2; 9) Back To Back; 10) Flashback; 11) Spit; 12) Robinson Crusoe; 13) James Bond Theme; 14) Finale.

Paul Morley never had much respect for Art Of Noise and their work since he left the project in 1985. Obviously, he had a certain right to be pissed; and when his former colleagues scored their biggest commercial hit (a cover of Prince's 'Kiss') in the form of a collaboration with Tom Jones, he had himself a golden pretext to dismiss them in interviews as sellouts and novelty goons. Then out came Below The Waste, an album that showed maybe about a third of the inventiveness and maybe about a thirty-third of the humor of their glory days, and then The Art Of Noise was shot down, burned, and buried by popular and critical opinion alike. Leading them into disbanding the following year, disgruntled and confused.

The ultimate irony of it all, of course, is that it was exactly the Morley/Horne years when the pro­ject was a true «novelty» act. Throughout all of the four years that they spent free of their artistic gurus' domination, Dudley and Jeczalik had been trying to find the ideal middle ground between crazy cutting-floor wizardry and common appeal; ultimately, they did not succeed, and ended up with curses from hardcore fans and relative indifference from the general public. But they tried all the way, and Below The Waste, be it or not their weakest original-period album, by no means shows any slackening of the spirits.

It is different, and arguably the most «accessible» of all their albums, in the sense that there is al­most no «sonic hooliganry» going on anywhere. The individual tracks are melodic, semi-live, se­mi-electronic compositions, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes rocking out, and they go real ea­sy on sampling, copying, and pasting. 'Yebo!' lasts all of seven minutes, and all of them essential­ly on the same groove — a thing unheard of in the early days. Play it all at mid-level volume and even the most generically-oriented of your buddies may remain unstimulated to ask the sacred question of «what the fuck is that shit». No question about it: the original ideology of the band has been shelved. Art Of Noise? More like Art Of Nice, if you ask me.

All that remains is take Below The Waste on its terms and see if it helps. I have always believed that it actually does. There is moody filler, of course, but there are also compositions that have a life of their own. For one thing, this is the only spot in their career where they were trying to acti­vely toy with «world music», incorporating various ethnic elements into the usual electronic fra­mework. This is especially characteristic of the first two tracks. 'Dan Dare' has much less to do with The Pilot Of The Future than it has to do with an odd mix of African tribal chants, North In­dian war cries, Andean panflutes, and quite European classical strings arrangements (I may be ex­aggerating the diversity a bit, but that the tune is chockfull of syncretism is inarguable).

'Yebo!' is even better, and, I dare say, one of the ultimate classics of the entire «world music» craze. With vocals provided by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, a world-famous Zulu band ('Yebo!' means 'yes' in Zulu, in case you wanted to know), it somehow manages to respect and send up the trend at the same time — they set up a captivating dance groove, load it with a catchy Bantu vocal melody, then loop it all up in ridiculous proportions. The most seductive thing about it is that there is none of that in-your-face kowtowing before the sacred age-deep wisdom of the Tribal Elders that makes so much of «world music» from the likes of Paul Simon or Sting such an in­tolerable bore, none of that fake reverence that prevents you from sucking in musical influences with the best of all goals — to have fun. 'Yebo!' is fun, from head to toe.

African and other tribal elements pop up on 'Dilemma', 'Chang Gang', and 'Spit' as well, but the assault is not as focused on these tracks as on 'Yebo!'; besides, they are heavily interspersed with pure, and somewhat fillerish, mood pieces ('Island', 'Robinson Crusoe'). The band also came un­der heavy fire for including their interpretation of the James Bond theme — five minutes of elec­tronic surf-rock that, for many listeners, seemed to have become an unpleasant overload of all things Bond-related. (It might not have been such a total coincidence that the year's Bond movie, License To Kill, is recognized as one of the least financially successful in the franchise; perhaps the same people who hated Timothy Dalton took this hatred one step further?). I would say that 'The James Bond Theme' is, indeed, the most «novelty»-like track on the album, but I still like all the weird things they did with it — for instance, how they begin with a very faithful rendition, then proceed to completely deconstruct the thing in the middle, and then make it interbreed with ele­ments of free jazz for a change.

Overall, Below The Waste is like totally that particular type of record that is going to be actively hated by 20% of the people, actively ignored by 78% of the people, and liked by about 2% that happen to include this here reviewer — a «compromising» album in a world mostly populated by people that don't give a shit about the complex art of compromising. 'Yebo!' alone is enough to guarantee it a heartfelt thumbs up, and then they're raised further up through reasonable analysis that states it a federal crime to condemn albums so cleverly conceived and executed.

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Alan Parsons Project: The Turn Of A Friendly Card

ALAN PARSONS PROJECT: THE TURN OF A FRIENDLY CARD (1980)

1) May Be A Price To Pay; 2) Games People Play; 3) Time; 4) I Don't Wanna Go Home; 5) The Gold Bug; 6) The Turn Of A Friendly Card (i. Part One; ii. Snake Eyes; iii. The Ace Of Swords; iv. Nothing Left To Lose; v. Part Two).

The pooled brainpower of Parsons and Woolfson is admirable. This follow-up to Eve, skilfully crafted according to their continuously high standards, when dissolved into simple separate com­ponents, is just as «pop» as its predecessor — and yet, through subtle shifts of palette, a more dis­tinct emphasis on conceptuality, and a correctly calculated touch of musical feng shui, it restores the «art-rock» feel of the band's first three albums that some fans had started missing on Eve.

The record is about gambling — look at the song titles. But, of course, it is not literally about gambling: we only take the art of gambling as a metaphorical pretext to reflect on the concepts of chance, luck, risk, etc., and their role in and effect on people's lives. Nothing way too deeply phi­losophical, but, just like with Pink Floyd, it works because the simple, age-old truths of the lyrics are well attenuated by new musical ideas.

«New», however, not in the sense that The Project pay a lot of attention to trends — The Turn sounded quite archaic in 1980 (one reason why it sounds surprisingly modern today). Sometimes the musicians resort to specific «25th frame»-style techniques — look, for instance, how surrepti­tiously 'May Be A Price To Pay' hops into a sort of Saturday Night Fever-ish dance groove for its instrumental break, then snaps back out as if it were only a brief dream; or the small out-of-no­where reggae bit after 'Nothing Left To Lose' — but for the most part, this is the same classically or folk-oriented balladry, and the same funkified pop they'd been doing for ages. None of that New Wave shit for brainwashed kids. Serious adult music for serious adult people.

For me, it works. First, it works as a concept. These guys were born to lament the ills and misfor­tunes of humanity, and the gambling disease, taken both literally and figuratively, is right up their alley (besides, it's also a far safer topic for the critical eye than the «woman disease» of Eve). There may be only two basic moods explored — the ominous/angry/frustrated and the melancho­lic/pitiful/desperate — but, after all, those are the two basic moods of gambling, and they are interspersed well enough so that the record never feels monotonous.

Second, it works as individual songs. The hit 'Games People Play' is, composition-wise, probably one of the most trivial tunes on the album, a simple keyboard pattern expanded into a simplistic dance number whose main source of inspiration almost seems to have been ABBA's 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!' (classy smooth guitar breaks, though). However, the other hit, 'Time', is one of the best Pink Floyd songs that Pink Floyd never wrote (probably because they already had a 'Time' of their own, har har). There is no presumption of innocence for pretentious artists that name one of their songs 'Time', letting us mortals know that they have a better existentialist grasp on the issue of chronospace than every one of us; and this is exactly why this combination of swe­et McCartney-like vocals, Harrison-like slide, and Parsons-only synth backdrops works so much better than simply «well».

Among those who take great care to separate the «intelligent» bits of The Project from the «sell­out» bits, 'Time' has garnered a fair amount of hatred — for its silly clichéd lyrics (indeed), and its monotonous melody with no sense of development. Not everyone thinks that it was a good choice to let Eric Woolfson, first time ever, step up to the mike, either. I beg to disagree: 'Time' is no more a pop sellout than something like Floyd's 'Us And Them' (whose verse melody it brings up very vividly in my mind), and Woolfson has a sweet, sensitive, charming voice — which he also puts to great use on 'Nothing Left To Lose' — that should have been used much earlier. It may not be more complex in its melody than quite a few Styx or Journey ballads that we are trai­ned to despise, but the important thing is that it assumes far less: nobody is ripping his shirt off and sticking his sweaty, smelly heart right under your nosdrils. So to speak.

The entire second side is one big song... nah, not really. It is four completely distinct songs (one of them in two parts), joined together with brief interludes and, sometimes, instrumental reprisals. But, hey, artistry on the rampage. 'Nothing Left To Lose' is the band's finest exercise in the folk pop genre, a song that would be an unusually high-standard attraction on a Barclay James Harvest album, perhaps, or, come to think of it, on a Baby James Taylor one as well (although, the way I see it, spoiling the spoils with cheesy Bee Geesy backup vocals was not a good thing). 'Snake Eyes', getting us back into angry mode, has the most memorable guitar riff on the album. And the title track has us witness more of Parsons' skill in brass arrangements, as its second part gradually transforms from a medievalistic ballad into an all-out apocalyptic romp (last time they did it so well was four years earlier, on 'Cask Of Amontillado').

The only thing that is somehow devoid of interest are the instrumentals: 'The Gold Bug' is a de­cent sax-dominated «fusion» romp that really just works as an interlude, and 'The Ace Of Swords' is, by all means, just an interlude, fairly well lost in between the big guitar sound of 'Snake Eyes' and the folksy prettiness of 'Nothing Left To Lose'. As with Eve, this is not a good sign: clearly, the band is investing most of its powers into the vocal hooks, neglecting the harmony exploration that used to be such an integral part of their sound. But all you have to do to stop worrying is just accept that, ever since Pyramid, maybe even since I Robot, The Project had been an «adult pop» band — leaving only the more anally-obsessed ones to argue about the exact prog-to-pop ratios of each of their albums. And Turn Of A Friendly Card, with all of its songs ranging from tolerably decent to openly beautiful, is one of the best «adult pop» albums ever recorded. Thumbs up.

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