MUSIC: Damon the Robot

It's been 20 years now since Blur hit the big time internationally with that slice of Duran Duran-inspired dance pop 'Girls and Boys.' Frontman Damon Albarn has been through many musical incarnations: Blur, Gorillaz, The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, and now a debut solo album 25 years into the music biz.

Everyday Robots is a mellow affair. In a way, it's like Albarn's own  version of Bjork's Vespertine: quiet, sparkly, intimate, hushed - with field recordings of children playing, simple percussion, and his trademark melancholia still intact.

Albarn sings a lot about disconnection, non-connection, and technology taking us away from each other instead of closer together. Not entirely the most original lyrical idea, but he is an adept lyricist at this point and all the descriptive details really set the songs above hum-drum talking points.

Plaintive piano and acoustic guitar are some of the main sounds on the album, which only slightly breaks the formula on the upbeat 'Mr. Tembo' adding a gospel choir and a lively pulse that is absent from a lot of the rest of the collection.

Some of my favorite Albarn songs are the ballads: Blur's 'To the End' and 'The Universal,' Gorillaz' 'Empire Ants,' and The Good, the Bad's... 'Kingdom of Doom' to name just a few. The addition of downtempo Damon is right up my alley.

One of my favorite albums of the year so far.

FILM: Not Skin Deep

I haven't seen a mindscrambler/sit-with-it-for-days type of movie in ages until I saw the new Jonathan Glazer film Under the Skin yesterday. Haunting, creepy, meditative, weird, hypnotizing.

I won't give away too much of the plot (what there is of one) but think of it as a modern re-imagining of the '70s cult film with David Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Instead of searching for water on Earth, like Bowie, Scarlett Johansson, the main character of the film, searches for...well, male flesh(?) I end with a question mark because you never really know what she is taking from these men she picks up in desolate urban and rural Scotland.

It seems to follow a horror bent, like a reverse slasher film, with the woman as predator but evolves into psychedelic sci-fi death traps.

The movie has so many echoes of other films but never apes anything too overtly. Ideas come from Blade Runner (non-humans replicated to look like humans who try to feel like humans), David Lynch dream logic a la Inland Empire or Mulholland Drive, a bit of Lars Von Trier's studies of a woman's suffering, the existential aimlessness of Lynne Ramsey's films like Morvern Callar, maybe Kubrick films too, like 2001. Most overtly, my mind kept going back to the weird late '70s/early '80s psychedelic sci-fi of the 2010 film Beyond the Black Rainbow.

Who knew ScarJo could come back from the brink of comic book/cheeseball action flicks? I was hoping that former indie darling could do it, and she did.

One of the best films of the year.

MUSIC: Another Day in Paradis

I studied film for a year at the University of Warwick in England and that's where I stumbled across a treasure-trove of UK (the beginnings of Britpop) and Europop.

I kept hearing the UK Top Ten single 'Be My Baby' out and about at stores or on the radio. It sounded like a modern-day Supremes song, so I had to find out who sang it. It was Vanessa Paradis, a French singer/model/actress who had become famous at 14 for singing 'Joe Le Taxi' a song that spent three months as a Number One single in France in 1987. The video has a bit of Six Flags Make Your Own Music Video vibe about it:

After appearing in a famous Chanel ad:

And having French legend Serge Gainsbourg write a full album for her while still a teenager (I'm sure there was nothing salacious about his intent), she hooked up with (creatively and romantically) Lenny Kravitz and recorded her first English-language album, 1992's self-titled collection, written almost entirely by Kravitz. The album, like a lot of Kravitz's work, tries hard to recreate an authentic '60s/'70s RnB/funk/pop sound. Her light, airy voice is no powerhouse talent, but it's fluffy and fun and makes you wish Kravitz did more music like this, instead of his constant attempts to do "ROCK."

The girl-group cute Be My Baby:

The Monkees-style 'Sunday Mondays':

The Madonna-like 'Future Song'

She went on to do more albums (mainly French language) and act, but she never came back to that English-language pop crossover moment again.

MUSIC: OOO the World of a Lost Classic

25 years ago was a weird time for the music industry, when they had more money than they knew what to do with and threw it at anything that remotely smelled like a hit.

Sire, a subsidiary of Warners, that housed both Madonna and The Smiths at the same time, decided to take their own stab at this ever-growing club trend of house and acid house music. But how does one market that to an American mainstream audience that has no idea what 'house' is, let alone 'acid house'?

Rhythm King (see previous blog entry) released UK artist Baby Ford's debut release, an EP called 'Ford Trax' in 1988, songs that added a vocal element to the squelches and noise of early acid house.

For a debut album, Ford went for a more pop slant. With a voice that was a fey cross between Neil Tennant and Boy George, he cooed and whispered his way through a T.Rex cover:

Haunted us with the eerie and pretty swirling psychedelic 'Milky Tres/Chikki Chikki Aah Aah':

Needless to say, none of these tracks bothered any of the U.S. charts and Ford was dropped from his major label moment after the even bigger commercial misfortunes of his next release. 

This release, 1992's 'BFORD9', an album that stripped out almost all vocals, left us with early moments of minimal techno and a new direction for Ford.  

MUSIC: I Was a Teenage Rhythm King Fan

Amidst the barren late '80s American musical landscape (Mr. Mister or Cutting Crew, take your pick) where import magazines become your paper internet, I somehow managed to stumble on a series of records by UK dance/pop label Rhythm King. Not bad for a Minneapolis Catholic schoolboy in a musical wasteland surrounded by Guns n Roses and classic rock.

Rhythm King started as a Mute label offshoot (odd) and floundered a bit before hitting a stride at the beginning of 1988 with the Cookie Crew-assisted single by The Beatmasters, 'Rok da House':

1988 was the beginning, and probably the peak of their powers. We got the #2 UK single 'Beat Dis' by Bomb the Bass, one of the first sample-heavy singles in the charts:

Similarly sampladelic, on a more RnB/disco tip, S'Express made an even bigger splash with their 'Theme' tune, which became arguably one of the first acid house-tinged #1 singles anywhere; this actually slightly dented the U.S. charts:

The Beatmasters had a sadly neglected debut album and really pushed the subgenre of 'hip-house'; MC Merlin was omnipresent on multiple Rhythm King artists' releases, including this:

Every scene needed a pretty diva and Betty Boo was Rhythm King's, even if her releases didn't hold up as the label's best:

The label really had a pop heyday (1988-90) before creating offshoot labels (Outer Rhythm that released Leftfield and others) and getting a distribution deal with Sony. By the mid-90s they were signing rock acts like Echobelly and Sultans of Ping before ultimately closing by the end of the century.

But who could forget their late '80s moment of not only being on the pulse of pop/dance music but creating it.

MUSIC: Tricks and Treats

I stumbled across a CDR from 2008 with several band names written across the top; Tricky was one of them. I didn't know which album of his it was, so I put it in the car stereo during a night drive somewhere. It was the remastered version of his debut and his immediate zenith, Maxinquaye. 

A simple sidenote to the album is that it birthed the career of Alison Goldfrapp, that's how epic and genre-shaping this album was, and is. Nearly 20 years later (next year will hit that anniversary), it still sounds fresh.

Even though Portishead's Dummy had come out in the fall of '94, Maxinquaye was the quintessential 'trip-hop' album for me. Born from the collective of Massive Attack, Tricky mined darker territory - biographically, lyrically and sonically.

The gem in Tricky's crown was his teenage compatriot Martina Topley-Bird, a smokey-voiced chanteuse who sounds shockingly older than her age and stuck with Tricky (creatively and romantically) for four albums.

From Maxinquaye:

From Nearly God (a Tricky album in all but artist name):

From Pre-Millennial Tension:

From Angels with Dirty Faces:

By the dawn of the new millennium, Tricky had lost the plot a bit. A series of weak albums carried him through most of the decade. In 2008, after a five-year gap of not releasing music, he came back with the decent Knowle West Boy and has completed a trio of albums that may not be as groundbreaking as his early work but restore the quality of his output.

His '90s work is hard to match, even for a modern day Tricky himself.

MUSIC: RoMo No-No

In the fall of 1996, on one of our many (OK, one) transatlantic phone calls, Neil Tennant (lead singer of Pet Shop Boys) and I discussed the current state of UK pop for a newspaper interview.

"How do you feel about this new New Romantic revival?" I asked.

"You mean RoMo? Neil asked, with a laugh. "You know, that never even really happened."

"You mean it was just a press thing?" I asked.

"It wasn't even a press thing. It was only in the Melody Maker!" he laughed again. "But it would have been nice to have a counterpoint to the whole Britpop thing, which is getting a bit 'laddish' at the moment."

[Reminder: find someone who can transfer audio cassette to either a CD or MP3 audio file. It's a great 45 minute interview]

'RoMo' (short for 'Romantic Modernism' - how pretentious, right?) was a short-lived fad in the mid '90s that was a reaction to the 'everyday lad/bloke' look of Oasis and their sound-a-like children. No more jeans and hoodies. RoMo was the first musical retro look back to the '80s.

Taking cues from early Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell and Human League, among many others, RoMo celebrated synths and boys in make up. Club nights sprung up in London to play these early '80s synthpop hits. But dancing to records wasn't enough and soon RoMo bands sprouted up; a few of the bigger names were:

Orlando

Sexus

By 1996 it had gone mainstream, with a piece about RoMo on Sunday TV in the UK:

By then the fleeting interest had dissipated. By 1997, RoMo was another footnote. All hype, no hits. Some thought that RoMo was just a precursor/think tank for the more successful Electroclash movement that bubbled up three-to-four years later. The Electroclash looks may have been more subtle, but the music was better.

MUSIC: The New Wave of New Wave of...this trend never happening.

Now that I'm on the subject of 20th musical anniversaries (see previous blog entry about Hole), I was one of about 15 Americans who cared about this new 1994 sub-genre: The New Wave of New Wave (TNWONW; yes, there was an acronym too).

During my most voracious period of music consumption (hell, my entire 20s/the '90s basically), I was attuned to all of these microgenres (I'll do a piece on RoMo next) and reading NME, The Face, Melody Maker, Select, Q, etc. constantly.

TNWONW consisted of British bands aping the sounds of late '70s NYC (Blondie, Talking Heads) and late '70s post-punk (Wire, The Stranglers) with a post-Grunge twist. Some of these bands were one-hit wonders (in the UK) but most were no-hit wonders.

I saw These Animal Men live at the 7th St. Entry in Minneapolis (1995); it was all about the Keith Richards moptops. This is better than I remember:

S*M*A*S*H (OK, you've got to admit that's a great band name) never came to the U.S. but I still bought their LP (did they have anything else?) Hmm, they were a bit too noisy for me after all. They never became the new Clash they so obviously wanted to be.

This microgenre ran out of steam before it started, but two of the artists escaped on lifeboats and sailed in to Britpop's safe and open arms. Both had a poppier edge and were female-fronted. Once again, women save another musical genre from oblivion:

Echobelly - A British woman of Indian heritage sounding like the lovechild of Debbie Harry and Morrissey

and the most famous refugee-turned-Britpop stars, Elastica. Their first single/video relishes in the bare-bones, punky minimalism of the white backdrop, but we know they wanted to be glossy stars. TNWONW was dead already.

MUSIC: Live Through Twenty

This month is the 20th anniversary of the release of Hole's Live Through This... and some singer's suicide.

I was too busy being excited about Madchester (1990), then Shoegaze (1991-2), then the early signs of Britpop (1992-3) to care about America's attempt at a '90s music genre. It all seemed like new heavy metal to me. I never cared about anything to do with Grunge...except this Hole record, Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and, tangentially, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me.

I guess it's all the women of Grunge (Courtney, PJ,..umm...D'Arcy Wretzky) and the fey men (Billy Corgan) that I found truly interesting and adventurous.