Making a case for actually taking the time to listen to an actual vinyl LP from end to end the gargantuan rich and warm new double album ‘Veckatimest’ from Grizzly Bear just arrived in the mail! Case made, we’re taking that time now.
‘Veckatimest’ is dense, and clever like the kind of record they used to make back when The Beatles were trading blows with The Beach Boys and the likes of “Odessey & Oracle” and “Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society” were falling through the cracks.  12 songs, 3 per side, each like a little pocket symphony complete with choral & string arrangements and touched as much by a late 60’s/early 70’s southern California sunlight as it is by the very English rain of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ era Pink Floyd. It’s a big record with big ideas but one that never cheats to challenge with needy pretension. Instead, the tracks are soothing and lovely proper songs that at times like single ‘Two Weeks’ astound with their pop-fantastic status.

But as well grounded and connected to their lineage as they are, there’s also something very immediately ‘new’ about things. Throughout, the songs maintain an honestly refreshing class while the angst hidden within them exists very much in the ‘Post’–post-punk, post-indie, post all those collective naughties-breakthroughs–in a way that seems to allow them the space to stretch out with confidence. ‘Veckatimest’ breaths and swells, rising from track to track with an assurance and confidence accumulating in the giddy crescendos of ‘I live With You’ and the simple melancholic elegance of ‘Foreground’. That song’s final unexpected and fleeting rise of choral harmony to conclude the record could sum-up so much of what’s right about the orchestration. Never once does the quote un-quote sophisticated production overwhelm the tracks or draw attention to itself for the sake of it. It might be a youth choir, but it’s so seemingly graceful and natural it’s hard to think of it as any more indulgent than the act of plugging a guitar into an amp. Conversely, it’s more than satisfying to hear a clever band getting by on ideas and real musicianship that moves well beyond trading on delay pedals, swaths of reverb, and lo-fi grit. And finally, everything about the LP, from the songs and sounds to the cover art, tinted paper of the inner sleeve and full color photo booklet, are of a similar, effortlessly-beautiful quality. It’s a quality you would hope still earns a place in this physical world. 

 
Representing NYC is an ambitious new initiative from Sam Hillmer that tries to empower the youth of East-New York by building stronger ties between them and the producers and indie-artists now beginning to live in their community. Hiller plays saxophone with Z’s, a New York band self described as No-wave/Brutal-prog/post-minimalist, but he’s also a teacher working in the New York Public School system and that experience lead him to create Representing NYC. Backed by several youth organizations, Hiller hopes this alliance of local kids and artists will “create connections in the rapidly changing neighborhoods of east Brooklyn, and give youth a much-needed opportunity to represent their New York.”
The first RNYC release, “Da’ Bratz From Da’ Ville” pairs Brownsville 8th graders Tamera and Ameena, aka ‘Angel’ and ‘Sophia’, aka The Fly Girlz, with Excepter’s Nathan Corbin AKA ‘Zebrablood’. The result is a super cool LP sliding between a spooky experimental noise pop and an urban Alan Lomax field recording, somewhat like what a Gang Gang Dance remix of ‘Buffalo Girls” might sound like: grizzled synths and crushed beats swirling around impetuous young voices perfect for a sticky urban spring. But, it would be impossible to think of this record without also thinking about the larger context it appears in.

Like other folk music traditions, the roots of rap are based in part on self-empowerment. At it’s beginning, rap was a reclamation and reinvention of ‘Community’ emerging from out the disintegrating structure of Bronx neighborhoods pushed to the brink by the spiraling decline of New York in the 1970’s. That music, the music of hip-hop’s first wave, was capital EEFF Fun in the face of an abrasive and corroded environment. The music was the sweat and heat of re-imagined disco, Rn’B and minimal break-beats. MC styles usually came in two varieties of sexy laidback braggadocio or up and anthemic party leading gang vocals. The Bronx may have been burning but that fire lit the party and carried down the line in the mazy trails of subway graffiti.

All the while, in the East Village and SOHO, self-empowerment took on a more hedonistic bent in the clannish no-man’s land of the downtown art scenes. No-wave and punk attitudes swelled with the boastful romanticism of a latch key generation still wistful for their A.M. radio. It may just have been Wendy and the Lost Boys playing cowboys and Indians, but their escapist fantasies also percolated with the self-promotional skills of Buffalo Bill and they were savvy enough to marry their bleak ethos to the other more ‘high’-minded art venues, galleries and performance spaces first beginning to open in and around SOHO.


What’s often now overlooked is how openly and immediately those two scenes interacted. A great citywide exchange of ideas and styles was taking place in late 70’s and early 80’s New York. Right from the start, while the godfather DJ’s were cutting up continental fare like Kraftwerk, a certain Krylon attitude was mixing with the ripped mannerisms of the downtown scenes. By the early eighties, Basquiat was all the rage and Liquid Liquid’s mutant disco was coalescing in ‘White Lines’. In The Bronx, in Manhattan, Artists’ eyes and ears were open to the changes and exchanges going on around them. Those participants of that New York were of their place; migrants and recent transplants maybe, but just as often, the children of the boroughs and they all carried with them an affection for their community and a sense of belonging to the people who came from those shared neighborhoods.

Now, more than a decade after New York’s 90’s rebirth, as once forbidden areas grow more Hollywood-like, sunny in disposition and laidback temperament, it’s easy to forget that despite the back-lot perfection of the L.E.S set, the integrated lineage of that New York isn’t as easily adopted as the clipped haircuts, vintage high-tops and Voidoid lean. It’s no secret the neighborhoods have been changing and as long as the change has been going on, the ‘G’ word has been flippantly tossed about like a cuss by the very same middle-class moving in. Gentrification and expansion has brought with it the swelling numbers of aesthetes and intellectuals self-aware enough to be embarrassed enough to see themselves as outsiders, and that’s part of the problem. “It’s their neighborhood, I just live here,” is the oft-tossed cop-out, used to justify a sort of cultural tourism, as if to belong is to co-opt.

Hillmer clearly see things different. He’s approached the kids he works with in the schools with absolute respect. It’s his opinion that he has as much to learn as to teach. “We see New York through the lense of Hip-Hop on the street level, in the lunch-room, on the stoop,” he writes on RNYC’s myspace. Really, it’s a perfect confluence of events. An artist embedded in the neighborhood who has connections, the self-reflexive desire to do good and the ear to recognize the value in what others might wrongly call unsophisticated.

On the debut RNYC LP–hopefully the first of many more–Ameena and Tamera avoid the pitfalls and pressures of their environment by learning to move deeper into it and re-approach their lives from a different angle. “The best thing about Brownsville is, like, to stay out of trouble and have fun. The worst thing about Brownsville is, like, the shooting and the trouble and violence around here,” one of the girls said on a recent WNYC interview. It’s a rough place but these girls voices sound unbroken and the tracks reflect a real hope and strength in the face of extreme chaos. The girls catalogue the hardships of their neighborhood but they also go off on ordinary teen tangents rapping with a totally fresh energy and spark.

And Corbin’s production stays free of pre-conceived ideas of what modern rap music is and also avoids the trappings of what could have been nothing more than old-school revivalism. Instead he approaches it on his own, indie/noise, terms and this, sometimes abrasive, production leads to something utterly unique. On that same WNYC interview, the girls admit that at first they didn’t know what to think of some of the sounds their collaborator made for them. It’s certainly hard to imagine them or any of their peers quite knowing what to do at a Z’s or Excepter show. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine most of Z’s and Excepter’s peers knowing quite how to move beyond their familiar and comfortable loft party affectations. Representing NYC is a mutual push into unexpected territories. It’s a gentle shoving in hopes of engendering even more ambitious experiments somewhere down the road from Brownsville.

If you grew up almost anywhere in America in the staggeringly ignorant days of being a teenager before the internet and were at all interested in bands beyond the regular MTV rotation, what you probably used to do was, get out a pen and paper and send away to the indie record labels for catalogues being sure to include a self addressed stamped envelope.
Many, many weeks later the catalogue would arrive. It was never too big, often Xeroxed or a simple single b/w sheet. Maybe there were a handful of bands you already knew and some that seemed larger than life just because you kept seeing them there in these catalogues or mentioned in interviews. In reality maybe a hundred kids cared about most of these but, in those days, there were no ‘friend counts” or page views and they were mysterious, mythological and known only by what you could figure out from reviews and articles in imported mags from England or the one time you saw that video on 120 minutes at 1 a.m. already dreading the Monday morning alarm clock. And so, you’d read and re-read the catalogue studying the blurb and the picture and the song titles and band names and eventually you’d check the boxes to the record you already knew you wanted taking a chance on two or three other singles you knew next to nothing about and then send it back and begin the wait by the postbox for your records to arrive.

It’s so strangely archaic now; it was so insular and personal. There was no immediacy or rush because you were alone in your development and nobody you knew had heard or seen these records and the anticipation was yours and yours alone. From SST I grew old waiting on Screaming Trees, Sub Pop made me grey waiting for Superfuzz and Bigmuff, Drag City made me hold out for months for Pavement’s first 10′, while Merge let me waste away awaiting Superchunk. I’ve long since forgotten the abysmal failures, the waste of wax singles from absolutely terrible bands but the good ones were prized scalps. It was a time when ‘I knew them first’ status was remarkably inclusive, measured in years not weeks. It was brutal and absurd. No doubt the kids are now more than all right being able to glom the entire history of The Fall or some such in a night grabbing the back-catalogue via wikipedia and few clicks. And the price we pay is of course that blog life has made everything passé three weeks from release. But those of us old enough to remember, do have a certain right to bemoan the miles we walked barefoot and the dues the youth of today take for granted if only because it stunk and we earned it.

The relevance of all this is that a few weeks ago I gave up a Sunday trying to track down The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart debut on vinyl. I went to no less than four NY shops looking for it only to find everywhere was sold out. ‘We’ll have more in next week,’ they all said. ‘Ridiculous,’ I thought annoyed at having to wait for it. And thus, impatient and either forgetting exactly how long mail-order used to take or made wonderfully nostalgic by the few TPOPAH mp3’s I already had to go on, I went home and straight to the Slumberland records site to order it. I hadn’t even thought of doing such an absurd thing since high school and I immediately regretted the decision.

 The weeks went by, and I was reminded of the above memories, and then Pitchfork gave the album a huge review and totally like stole any shot I might have at ‘I knew ‘em foist,’ status but now you know what? I totally don’t even care. It arrived today and so, I’m happy to report that indie labels have become far more responsible and prompt in the years since I was made to suffer.  A scant few weeks after I ordered it, we’re listening to it on, what to god I hope is, one of the last truly cold nights of this winter.

This record is so brilliantly Vaselines and Jesus & Mary Chain and Shop Assistants and any number of sounds I would have truly flipped on in junior high and high school that it’s almost as if it’s a long forgotten mail-order only just arrived. Not that it’s dated or purely nostalgic, because there is certainly a something new about it all if for no other reason than it’s re-contextualizing of those sounds. But their name says it all.  The songs are great, classic ‘Left of the Dial’ hits sounding tinged with melancholia and the hope that maybe this week the new girl will show up in your class, be given the seat next to yours. Romantic titles, love obsessed and innocent, single string solos washed in fuzz, it’s maybe the perfect way to wait out these last heartsick, dark days of winter. 

Insanely catchy, densely layered and nothing but beautiful, this, Luke Temple’s first record under the Here We Go Magic name, has just become our favorite Saturday morning LP for 2009.
Wrapping acoustic guitars and shimmering vocal lines into the textures of retro synthesizers and poly-phonic beats, this record hits all the right Gang Gang Black Beach Bear Collective contemporary experimental reference points as well as touching on perpetual left of center obsessions like Can, Eno or the The Ethiopiqués series. But, unlike a lot of similar paced and themed records of late, here the haze of drone and reverb pulls back to reveal well-crafted and classic songs befitting a much less-cynical time. It’s totally unique, experimental and artsy, but it’s also timeless and elegant, and, Amazingly, what the melodies and vocals evoke most is the entire Paul Simon songbook turned inverted art dream.

There’s certainly something otherworldly and alchemical in the sound of Here We Go Magic. The scope of the writing is so broad and the instrumentation so varied and mysterious that it’s impossible to really figure out how it’s being done. Tape compression has warmed the sound pulling everything into a tightly packed mass with only flickers of strumming allowed to escape.

The first four songs all open to one another expanding and growing the concept until finally landing on central track ‘Tunnel Vision‘. It’s the kind of track that stays with you for days and when it finishes it’s a relief to escape into relative simplicity of ‘Ghost List‘, an ambient tumbling of loops that builds into a storm. It’s then that the far reaches of this record begin to be touched developing evermore Eno-like, scenic, ‘weird’ and wired until final track ‘Everything’s Big‘ leaves you feeling ‘everything’s going to be all right’ with a come down and say goodnight worthy of Nina Simone or ‘On The Beach‘ era Neil Young.

Check out more here

Australian Mark Pritchard closes the year with a 12′ single for his Harmonic 313 project leading toward an album out on Warp early next year. An obliterated dub mix, the four cut Dirtbox 12′ rattles the low end like a Super Sound-System Backed Mario Brothers. Ominous and soiled, it fits well alongside two of this year’s other big releases The Bug and label-mate Flying Lotus but mixes a playful dose of low-bit beeps and melodies to the Bug-like crushed dancehall beats and hazy Flying Lotus-ish production.

The long running, anonymously black labled 12′ series mysteriously known only as Pom Pom has just come out with a full length CD for the first time. 14 tracks beginning in a slumbering dystopian hum, rising to a cathartic pulse and ending in a zone-out run of deep bone rattling floor-stompers. With a psychotic wiriness, the tracks grow stronger and stronger and hold together with a surprising amount of clarity and humanity for such a willfully edgy, cold and defiant project.

Everything in the Pom Pom series, from its creator’s secrecy, to the stripped black design and coolly austere tracks, suggests an insolent modernist edginess. It’s arty and lean and full of petulant grit. This is dark dance music, experimental, underground and at much at home with the nervous simplicity of Manchester post-punk as it is with the utilitarian hedonism of Berlin techno. The sound is of analogue and dirty electronics running in sinewy patches. Early on, icy hi-hats scrape, by mid-disc the subs billow in the stomach until the final track lets out the air on this tightly wound collection with a shimmering of electronic sparks.

POM POM 32 no.8 POM POM 32 no.6