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June 01, 2007
Hip n' Prickly
It often happens on this site that we get a little too excited about our record collections to remember that some anonymous citizens out there might be looking for, you know, NEW music. Apologies, children. Sleep sound with the knowledge that we are just as concerned with finding the forgotten old songs of the future by sifting through the internet wreckage for legitimately exciting new sounds. Now, for regular readers, the sounds produced by these three bands won't be like, super-new, as the artists in question have been prominently featured here before. But when the choice goods keep coming why set up an embargo?
Know you nothing of proper embargo deployment? Bah!
Prinzhorn Dance School - "Up! Up! Up!"
Though suffering slightly for its divorce from the charming video, the second proper single from Prinzhorn Dance School is as doggedly minimal as the first. For the song's first portion all we get is an aloof bassline and the repetition of three harsh drum strikes. Soon, those strkes are echoed by the infectious shouting of the three titular syllables. Tobin Horn drawls his trademark absurdities, rambling through lines about hotel bars and unappealing ice cream, but it's Suzie Horn's relentless energy that moving things forward. When a guitar finally enters, the song counter-intuitively slows down instead of ramping up. The bass takes on an ominous quality, not unlike the one from Low's narcotic cover of Joy Division's "Transmission." It's only in the return to the initial section that the guitar achieves real power. Smartly, the prolongued anticipation makes what is essentially a reprise feel like a raging climax. Throughout, the undeniability of those three words in percussive succession is liable to move your fist in the prescribed direction.
// Prinzhorn Dance School - website
// DFA Records - MySpace
These New Puritans - "Navigate, Navigate"
Though the learning curve for These New Puritans early work has been fairly steep, I don't think anyone was expecting the 12 and a half minute monster of a new single, "Navigate, Navigate." As it begins, with a minute of ambient burbling, you think to yourself, "Oh, so it's going to be one of those 12 and a half minute songs. One that pads it's time with feet shuffling before getting to any semblance of a point." But after a minute of this, the incidental effects are sucked out of an airlock and replaced by the brittle drum pattern that will be the breadcrumb trail guiding us through all of the remaining time. Jagged guitars and a steady bass rhythm form the core sound, though the song's densest moments are the result of three or more voices overlapping and complementing each other. It moves through various permeations of this pattern throughout its epic length, but always recombining in ways that are slightly new, slightly alien to what came before them. Here comes a more restrained guitar line, here a swell of angelic synth. Despite the incomprehensibility of the lyric sheet, the delivery is usually strident, that is unless it's spoken or sweetly harmonized, sometimes all of these at once. Whether these babbling slogans are made unintelligible by accent or by production design is hard to say, but the only lyrics I'm stone sure of are the simultaneous call and response of "You Go! You Go!" and "Duh-duh-duh-du-huh, duh-duh-duh-du-huh" around the five minute mark, and the repeated mantra, "regal and strange," sometime later. That it most certainly is. You keep expecting this thing to run out of steam, and it just never does. Slightly sloppy, but brazenly exciting excess.
What, oh what is the record going to sound like?
// These New Puritans - website
// These New Puritans - MySpace
And then we have the pre-eminent art bashers of their day, the mighty Liars. Already an influence amongst younger experimental rock bands and name checked by elder statesman like Thom Yorke, the former Brooklynites/ current Berliners have enough of a balance in the cred bank to continue pursuing whatever path that they see fit. So it was a bit shocking and wildly intriguing when news of their self titled fourth album suggested a retreat from explorations into the vicious. Supposedly it's all 4/4 time signatures and guitar solos and puppies and rainbows now. I'll believe it when I hear it, but that can not come fast enough.
For now we have this track, "Sunset Rodeo," recently supplied gratis by the stoned ponies in charge of Adult Swim. Though only total dicks would call this straightforward, it is a touch less rhythmically punishing than the majority of the band's recent output. Given much more prominence than the stuttering background beats is a hypnotically simple guitar swell and a fuzzy Angus Andrew falsetto, which is highest in the mix. The Cartoon Network types didn't have the attention span to fill us in on the details of its creation, but it could pass for a too sweet outtake from Drum's Not Dead. Perhaps exiled because it would have lessened the shock value of "the Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack"? I wouldn't count on it for a sign of things to come, but it is technically verse-chorus-verse. Hopefully the punchdrunk synth bridge at the 2 minute mark is a legitimate harbinger of a future direction.
We'll know soon, friends...
// Liars - website
// Liars - MySpace
Posted by Jeff Klingman at June 1, 2007 02:15 PM
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