Album Club Reviews, Weeks 13-16
Satyricon, Laura Marling, Counting Crows, Liquid Liquid
Could you have a more diverse set of albums? A pioneering lo-fi black metal leviathan, a brand new singer-songwriter release, early 00s American pop-rock and 80s New York no wave. You gotta love Album Club. Links to listen along at the bottom.
Satyricon - Dark Medieval Times
Oddly enough, Dark Medieval Times evoked a sense of nostalgia in me. It took me a minute to figure out why this is - I've never heard the album before, and my knowledge of music from metal bands before the year 2000 that aren't the Big 4 of thrash, Iron Maiden or Judas Priest is minimal. (Except Anvil, but only because of the exceptional documentary.) And then I realised - this sounds like a 90s videogame music soundtrack.
There are some obvious reasons for this. The 90s were a weird liminal period in gaming music where you weren't limited to 8-bit chiptune drivers, but the MP3 was just a cool Fourier transform application some German dude had come up with yet to catch on, and there wasn't enough room on floppy disks to store high-quality audio. So you get super (storage-)compressed music and real instruments modelled with basic synthesisers. So too, on Dark Medieval Times.
Black metal was, at this point, an emerging genre in Norway and the continent, and when you recall the days of Satanic panic in media of the 80s and 90s, these bands were the poster boys for the extreme. Its definition is, however, a broad church. (Well, not that church.) Lo-fi production was originally a necessity in the genre, but it became a hallmark for some. Here, it's the former. Band leader Satyr was maybe 17 or 18 when he wrote, recorded and self-produced this record? In the early 90s, before DAWs, everything to tape. Through that lens, this is an incredible feat.
Let's also take a moment to recognise drummer Frost, who I would argue is the best drummer we will hear on this season of Album Club. Opener Walk The Path Of Sorrow, after scary synthetic video game drama ("The Princess has been captured, but also you're in Hell and there's no escape"), breaks into blisteringly fast kick drumming that would have Motorhead sweating buckets. That pace never lets up across the album whenever the band kick in, an aural assault of guitars that sound like walls of lightning, blurred beyond recognition, a live wire. And, of course, the signature vocal shrieks of the genre. I will concede this to be an acquired taste in general.
The greatest asset of Dark Medieval Times is also its greatest weakness. Satyr and Frost attempt to fuse this wall of fury and sound with Castlevania strings, woodwind and other, ah, medieval textures. Some of these are great - the Spanish guitar breaks, the melodramatic false choral stabs, the icy wind you can feel ripping through your bones in the introspective Min Hyllest Til Vinterland. However, ambition inevitably exceeds the production. Those loud band sections lose all dynamic range and impact against the softer elements, and it always feels like a hard transition between two modes; no middle ground achievable at such a punishing recording volume.
There are some fun riffs if your ears squint hard enough to make them out. And plenty of unexpected change-ups. But the whole affair is exhausting, and not just because it's a black metal album. I'm curious to know what Satyricon with money sound like and whether they held their ground on the lo-fi aesthetic (eschewed by many crossover bands in the age of the DAW) or paid a mixing engineer to sort out some low-end. But this is without question a foundational record.
But do I like it? Bizarrely, I think its closest peer in Album Club is Joanna Newsom's Divers - similarly hard to access but of irrefutable intelligence and quality. That one has grown on me since well beyond a 6/10. I fear Dark Medieval Times will not - my ears are trained too much on what Satyricon's successors did with the genre. It's more of a historical curio at this point. I will absolutely listen to your gramophone if you have one, but I'm not getting rid of the Cambridge Audio hi-fi. 5/10
Laura Marling - Patterns In Repeat
Laura Marling - an artist my younger self gave zero attempt to get into. I've never really been a radio listener - not owning a car is a significant factor there - and my mental music model had filed her along with the late ‘00s/early ‘10s pop-folk scene of Mumford & Sons, Noah & The Whale et al., none of which I ever had much time for. (There are all sorts of unflattering prejudices I've held there to unpack, but not today.) So I'm going in blind here.
I get the impression that Patterns In Repeat is not the best entry point to her oeuvre. The whole album feels very safe; assured in performance and craft, but lacking ambition. The context given is Marling's recent motherhood and a desire to create an album focused on the patterns writ across generations, which is fine. But it also feels like an 8th studio album from an artist who's already achieved plenty in her career, whose fanbase is well-established and in for the long haul. An unkind comparison would be to R.E.M.'s Around The Sun, another album with decent individual songs lacking any unifying spark, a band going through the motions.
There are some moments I like in this album. It gets a lot better as it goes on; once past the interlude, the songs get significantly more interesting. Caroline is a nice looping construction, a rare island of energy undercut by a lazy chorus lyric and otherwise falling just short of something great. Both Looking Back and Patterns In Repeat echo James Taylor's fingerstyle patterns; the latter is much more lyrically and musically interesting with the ethereal vocal textures of its outro and callbacks to the earlier Patterns. Lullaby is a beautiful song from a bygone era - the kind of thing that, if featured in a classic movie (something like Meet Me At St. Louis), would have been a mega-hit.
But it's too little, too late for me. Some of this is just personal preference - the lapsing into spoken-word at the end of phrases an irritating affectation; the over-reliance on strings for escalation (The Shadows is the worst culprit for this, descending into melodrama when its sparser earlier feel was sufficient). The guitar playing is of high quality, but feels accomplished rather than creative; just another combinatoric in a well-worn formula.
I've already been quite rude, so let's double down: Maybe part of the problem here is that the overall feeling of this album is of contentment? Everything is at a sedate lullaby energy, which is fine; you don't need to have crashing dynamics to make a good album. And everyone wants this contentment - the removal of anxiety, of that pervasive sense of existential dread, of self-doubt, self-obsession, self-loathing, depression, fear, panic, stress, sadness, to dissolve away into the pure and calmest joy. I just don't know that it makes for great art. We all want to see Sam and Diane get their happy-ever-after moment, but we aren't sticking around once they do. 4/10
Counting Crows - Hard Candy
I wrote in November about the increasing prevalence of backing tracks in live music and the technological and capitalist drivers of this. With the rise of in-ear monitors, high-quality instrument sampling, and lower barriers to entry of production through user-friendly digital audio workstations, modern rock bands (even at the lowest levels of the rung) are increasingly creating precise, sculpted recordings and live shows, uniformly quantised to the beat, every element designed with pre-planned thought and purpose. As such, Hard Candy is mildly refreshing as a looser kind of album - the hooks pre-planned, but the supporting instrumentation and solos care-free, playful. It harks back to a different era of seat-of-the-pants musicianship and jam bands.
That being said, there are several irritating properties on this album. For one, it's far too long. The physical LP set the proper benchmark for album length - two sides of roughly 20 minutes. Any longer, and you'll get inner-ring distortion or need another piece of plastic. By 2002, the CD and its 74-minute capacity was ubiquitous, and bloat abounds. The opener and title track is a good hit of 90s American pop rock (following in the footsteps of bands like Hootie and the Blowfish in taking the jangly fun bits of R.E.M. and The Byrds and giving them a corporate polish), with some compelling chaotic energy in the layered instrumentation. But it outstays its welcome by a good minute, setting a template for needless excess.
There are some nice moments on the record. Good Time has a slower tempo and sexy wah pedal - the kind of thing that's surprisingly tricky to execute well. Miami also pays off on a long build of overblown indulgence (though how this was ever a single boggles the mind). American Girls has a heart-string chorus melody, the kind of thing you'd make a Faustian pact to have written. And yet - its "girls" are forever the subject, never an agent. This extends to the guest spot from Sheryl Crow (Sheryl Crow!), relegated to some harmonies and woahs. Man, imagine getting Sheryl Crow to feature on your album and then treating her as a backing singer. I can't fathom the Main Character Energy needed.
But too much of the album drags. Black and Blue, New Frontier, and Why Should You Come When I Call? are disappointingly slight, all momentum sapped from the album by this point (though the Leona Naess guest spot on the former at least gives her more to do than Sheryl Crow). Carriage could hit some of those devastating notes and even goes so far as to deliver a Single Brass Instrument Of Sadness, but the song can't help itself and starts busting out jazz licks, undercutting the message. There's not much more to say about the corporate nightmare that is Big Yellow Taxi: a cynical cover with a cynical guest spot for a cynical Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock rom-com. Joni Mitchell's original is a hair over two minutes; why is this a four-minute song?
Hard Candy is trying to square the circle between sharp, catchy and/or emotional pop-rock songs and the excess of a jam band. For me, it needs to pick a lane - it's too long to fulfil the promise of the former, and despite some fun moments (that motorcycle-revving guitar solo on If I Could Give All My Love), it doesn't really hold a candle to, say, Spin Doctors' Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, or the free-wheeling psych excesses of Spiritualized. By no means is this a bad record, but given the raw ingredients available, it could be so much more. 5/10
Liquid Liquid - Liquid Liquid
Listening to Liquid Liquid feels like immersing one's head inside a jumbo bowl of primordial soup. There are a few reasons for this. One is that this is a compilation album - three EPs, going back in time from their last (Optimo) to their self-titled first release, with some live cuts from a 1982 show thrown on at the end for good measure. It amounts to their entire discography to that date. What you have here is not an album in an intended sense, but an archive of the band's ephemeral, three-year active existence, rolling back from end to start like Benjamin Button tapping polyrhythms on the fast forward button.
Liquid Liquid were also at the vanguard of a new scene - no wave, a New York avant-garde offshoot of the contemporary punk scene, keen not to recycle old rock ‘n' roll tropes but to create something genuinely novel. So - no need for harmony or conventional song structure. No need for concordant melody - what we get is all dissonance or atonality, like the piano stabs in Lock Groove, the heavy reliance on bass natural harmonics on Optimo, the affected trumpet weirdness of Rubbermiro. No need for coherent vocals - Salvatore Principato's voice a texture of yelps, cries and weirdness.
It's hard to write about music that feels so intertwined with a particular Scene or Moment. The same was true of Satyricon - it's almost impossible to truly understand the early 90s black metal scene and its Lo-fi tropes without understanding the context of its emergence in Scandinavia. But this feels more extreme - a sound that hinges so much on its live context in the city that never sleeps, the spiritual home of creative jazz and dance-punk. The live tracks hold an energy that the recorded EPs don't, but it still feels like you're listening to a grainy documentary, detached from something truly nascent and exciting.
Liquid Liquid is challenging as, whilst there are some nice ideas and plenty of groove here, nothing truly stands out or is memorable. Instead, what you can hear is prototype ingredients that permeate across so much of music of the past 40 years - the later 80s hip-hop scene, the abrasiveness of Sonic Youth, the dance-punk grooves of Echoes by The Rapture (an album overrated on its release and underrated today), even on the Afrobeat London jazz of Black Focus by Yussef/Kamaal. And really, its apotheosis is modern-day LCD Soundsystem, for whom Liquid Liquid is a cornerstone influence (to the point that they were the support act for LCD's 2011 Madison Square Gardens farewell shows). It's a blueprint as much as it is a documentary. Its success to the modern listener hinges on whether you can truly feel that underlying spark, of something unique and impactful being born. Otherwise, it's a solid 5.
6/10