August 2024: Genre / Tropes, Part Two
Manifesting new musical categories, Plini live, and blackgaze beauty from Alcest
“Hit em!”
July 29th, 2024: Drew Daniel, after having what sounds like quite a fun dream, posts about it on X:
As I write this five days later, an Internet phenomenon has exploded - armies of bedroom music producers and beyond have begun to manifest “hit em” into actual music. The original post has close to five million views; replies and quote tweets abound of video clips of DAWs playing demos of crunchy electronic music at blistering tempos in 5/4 time signature. Compilation releases are under active discussion. There’s news coverage on MusicRadar and The Guardian.
I’m no electronic music expert (and this is still ostensibly a post-rock blog!) but I find this utterly fascinating. We have a rare example of social media driving something that isn’t actively progressing us towards the death of humanity and culture, the outputs of which are creative, fun, and absent of drama. The variety of what’s produced is surprisingly broad - there are the scratchiest of 30-second demos all the way to immaculately produced full-length songs. Those beguilingly simple parameters, as prescriptive as they may sound, leave space for all sorts of interpretations, from chilled lo-fi through to the most intense rave music you could imagine. (It’s also much less annoying and cynical than the Man In Finance TikTok phenomenon.)
So the big question - is this a flash-in-the-pan “online moment”, or a bona fide new genre? I’ve discussed genre a few times before in this newsletter - putting forward a pattern for identification (in the context of this newsletter’s original remit) based on tropes: common patterns, sonic phrasings, specific musical theory elements. This was far too simple to be catch-all, though it hasn’t escaped me that the “hit em” specification is a list of three traits. But even a cursory listen to two or three “hit em” tracks will reveal a plethora of different takes - some realise that 212bpm is insanely fast for realistic human consumption and half-time everything (the cowards); others double down on glitchy breakcore. Without the humorous prompt, even a novice in electronic music such as myself, who thought gabba was a misspelling of a Star Wars villain, can see these would be identified as separate types of music.
Genre’s use in music classification has developed at an accelerating speed over the last 50 years. Whereas once new high-level genres would evolve slowly, out of specific examples that made waves in other spaces (see: the proto-metal of Queen’s Stone Cold Crazy; MC5’s Kick Out The Jams setting a very early template for punk), we shifted to an ever-expanding constellation of subgenres to categorise increasingly minor differences between artists - hundreds of modifiers like “surf”, “progressive” and, yes, “post” mixed and matched to the base stems of “metal”, “jazz” and “rock”.
An alternative specification is based on communities - the hypothesis that overlapping fan bases between different acts constitute a similarity in genre between them. This is a compelling view from the social angle of music, setting aside the snobbish characterisations of technical composition elements that most music enjoyers couldn’t give a damn about. Its true driver is the Data Age and widespread use of music streaming, enabling data geeks to actively catalogue where these community overlaps lie - bringing together self-identification, location, and common listening habits to discover thousands of Venn diagram loops across bands. This was exemplified by the Every Noise At Once project on Spotify, heralded as a driver of music discovery to listeners until late-stage capitalism caught up and laid off the project team, leaving it broken. Though it’s worth noting that, whilst common music groups could be identified from data, it was up to a human to provide names - “hands up”, “slovenian electronic” and “cyber metal” being just a few of the occasionally wacky identifiers.
That hypothesis of communities doesn’t necessarily hold up, as popularity plays an outsized role in common listening habits (and, Internet trolling aside, I think we can agree that Imagine Dragons and Sleep Token belong to different genres). Thus we reach the paradox (and tyranny) of any labelling system - its existence is useful to enable common understandings and terms of reference, but no system can ever be perfect. Unlike human labels such as sex, ethnicity or nationality, the pain of falling through the cracks or holding an ostracised genre label in music is not so high, though it can still exert a penalty on discovery, or label backing.
So whether “hit em” is itself a new genre is ultimately a moot point. It’s far more important as a call to arms, an Internet joke turned into rich creativity, the musical equivalent of a game jam or hackathon. And it’s fun! It’s in 5/4! It’s almost too fast to comprehend! All we need now is a version with rapid reverb-drenched guitar picking and heavy sonic catharsis…
Next month: The big ArcTanGent 2024 review! Grab yourself a ticket and we can hang out whilst Meshuggah and Explosions In The Sky do their thing. And get subscribed so you won’t miss reading about how good Mogwai are live.
Also - it’s a bumper playlist this month, covering the last 2-3 months of releases. Scroll to the bottom for some heavy/poignant soundtracking to your day.
From the Pit: Plini
O2 Academy Islington, London, 25th July 2024
“But Chris,” I hear you cry. “You know that Plini is playing ArcTanGent this year? Must you need to see him twice in two months?” Yes, yes I must, and here are three reasons why:
Thanks to a bout of Covid, scheduling, and other personal issues, it’s been a good two months since my last live gig, and I’m stir-crazy
I’m distraught that I missed his previous headline tour with Sungazer and Jakub Zytecki
It’s Plini! He’s probably my favourite guitarist! He’s the main reason I own a .strandberg guitar!
That previous headline tour must have done well, with this show initially slated for Shepherd’s Bush Empire, but later downgraded to a reasonably full but far from sold-out O2 Academy Islington. Global headline tours for Plini are something of a new phenomenon, built over a decade of acclaim as the saviour of progressive, virtuosic guitar, a Steve Vai for the Instagram age but with a much-improved songwriting ear. My previous live encounters had significantly lower stakes - opening for TesseracT and Between The Buried And Me in 2018, and a guitar masterclass with Richard Henshall (of Haken fame) in 2021.
The step up is handled with aplomb. Presumably one of the advantages of running everything on Quad Cortex pedals rather than massive Marshall amps is more room in the van for a lighting rig - a strong investment, with the stage regularly bathed in glorious technicolour. No thick fog and darkness here; the lighting engineer clearly understood the assignment - much like the Animals As Leaders set I reviewed in December, most of us are here to stare in amazement at those fretboards, the opening songs met with a sea of cameraphones all zoomed in to the real estate around the 12th fret.
The energy levels are a bit different to that gig - if there's a clear progression in the songwriting over the years, it’s been to a mellower, laid-back sound, and the opening salvo of The Red Fox - I’ll Tell You Someday - Papelillo shines with effortless technical brilliance. And I mean effortless - at centre stage, Plini is completely still apart from his arms and head, barely breaking a sweat, looking like a zen, curly-haired, Aussie Frank Turner. There’s no hint of the change in difficulty switching between simple beautiful melody lines, syncopated chugs, devilish string skipping with impossibly spreadeagled fretting hand, or the smoothest sweep picking you’ve ever seen. Occasionally he wanders to the side of the stage, casually sharing jokes with and then ceding space to his talented bandmates - we get a couple of crashingly fast drum solos and impossible bass lines. All of this is conducted in prime number time signatures (and I don’t mean 2, 3, 5 or even 7), not that you’d notice - the real hidden talent here is the deft comfort of taking those progressive structures and making them feel natural, unjarring.
We get a few tonal shifts dotted into the set - there are throwbacks to older material, with Moonflower showcasing a full-on instrumental metal sound, and a prompted mosh pit finally releasing the crowd’s pent-up energy, conserved to that point for keeping those phone cams steady for the ‘gram. They must have read my Tropes Wishlist too, bringing on a tenor sax to inject some gravitas for a few songs, including the beautiful Sunhead off my favourite of the EP back catalogue. Instrumental virtuoso guitar is not an easy sell for the unconverted but, if you have even a passing interest in the genre, or guitar skills in general, I’ve seen few do it better.
I’m still seething that I missed the previous tour’s stacked support line-up, instead getting German prog stalwarts The Intersphere. It’s evident they’ve evolved with the trends of prog over the years - there’s an undercurrent of Marillion spirit throughout, but you can sense the dividing line between songs that follow the early 2010s patterns of, say, The Dear Hunter, and material written after Periphery became a big deal. The execution is good, with typically dynamic prog vocals; but it’s hard to settle into, the songwriting feeling dated in places.
On Rotation: Alcest - Les Chants de l’Aurore
Released 21st June 2024 on Nuclear Blast
Over twenty years and seven albums in, the French duo of multi-instrumentalist Neige and drummer Winterhalter continue to refine the pioneering blackgaze sound of Alcest. The ear for melody and theatricality is foregrounded expertly across the seven tracks of Les Chants de l’Aurore, with some immaculate production balancing the otherwise polarising sonic extremes of black metal.
Indeed, opener Komerobi could be mistaken for something that fellow countrymen M83 might put out, were it not for the injections of rapid-fire drums and tremolo guitar picking. Throughout, the album rouses the spirit with heavy use of choir, backing vocals and multi-layered guitars, all sat behind the ethereal vocalisations of Neige, perfectly complementing that dreamlike feeling. There’s no hiding behind an avalanche of reverb - it’s arguable that at this stage of their career, Alcest have more in common with neighbouring genre dream-pop than shoegaze. (Dream-metal?)
Besides the occasional dynamics, the album is tonally uniform, which, if you’re not into the core sound of catharsis scaffolded upon straightforward heart-string chord progressions, could become tiresome. There are a few minor interludes - we get the piano interlude of Réminiscence, and a plaintive, gentle album closer in L’Adieu. L’Enfant de la Lune opens with a spoken-word section and synth bass for about thirty seconds before the blast beats kick in. The mixing is admirably restrained - the metal sections hit hard but pull back from the wider genre’s over-reliance on heavy compression in the loudness wars, instead deferring to the broader palette. The richness of the layered clean guitar parts across the album, particularly on standout track L’Envol, is a delight.
It may be valid to ask if, at this stage of the band’s evolution, the legacy black metal elements are necessary or add value to the musical message here. With earworm chorus riffs on the likes of L’Envol and Flamme Jumelle, there’s an argument that cross-over success could be obtained with more sandpaper application on those abrasive parts. But then you get the sparsely deployed screams of anguish six minutes into L’Envol, kicking the emotion into another gear and realise - this is exactly what it’s supposed to be, and better for it, even if it does sit awkwardly next to its peers on either side.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
Alcest will tour the UK in December, with dates in London, Manchester and Glasgow; supported by Svalbard and Doodseskader.
Also on heavy rotation for me the last two months is Hippotraktor’s 2nd album, Stasis, out on Pelagic Records. Titanic riffs, visceral vocals, and a syncopation/Phrygian dominant one-two on Renegade that is now etched into my brain. I’d be surprised if it didn’t score high in my end-of-year reviews. Spotify | TIDAL
Can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this blog, Chris.