2018 in taste and appetite - 1: Reading

If there was ever an "end" to meta-narratives it was only a brief moment, enjoyed by the few who could name it as such — an alibi for those with resources and the freedom to spend them. For the rest of us, common stories continue but with renewed urgency. Climate change presents a very real and tangible meta-narrative, even if we don't yet have eyes to see or ears to hear. What we value, consume and celebrate in this moment will forever be relativized by our current way of relating to the planet and the destructive systems that plunder it. History, it seems, will not be kind to us in 2018, no matter how much music we listened to or how many books we read.

We all have rituals that help us cope with the forces that lie beyond our control. Each day I check my news feed because I want to see a breakthrough, a way to avert the coming catastrophe or halt this environmental assault on lives around the globe. But this expression of anxiety — my need to keep up with the news cycle — usually makes me more anxious. Time passes. Sometimes I simply want that impending limit, however destructive, to arrive and prove once and for all that our current trajectory is doomed. In those moments, which are frequent, I realize the pessimism of my appetite. This is not fruitful behaviour, nor is it a healthy place to be. 

Much of what appears in the list below prevented me from lingering there, on the edge of my news feed, for too long. Twitter helped but it also didn't help.

This year, I spent a fair amount of time reading about aesthetics, mostly from Marxist perspectives. Terry Eagleton's major study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic was a springboard for readings from Kant, Schiller, Marcuse, Sontag, Ranciére, Ngai and others. Those readings, mostly essay-length, were left off the list. The big highlights of my year in reading were Billy-Rae Belcourt's poetry collection, This Wound is a World, Miriam Toew's Women Talking and John Berger's posthumous collection, Landscapes. 

I was able to see Belcourt read and discuss his writing with Rosanna Deerchild this past November. His ability to weave through poetics, theory and the politics of indigeneity left a deep impression on me. I've been following his work since finding him in GUTS magazine's "futures" issue. At once personal and philosophical, Belcourt's writing navigates around and through the loneliness rendered by colonization — a form of negativity that "stalks" indigeneity — all the while gesturing toward a future that can't be contained by settler logics. Belcourt thinks deeply about his writing practice, at an almost ontological level, but he avoids the pitfalls of esotericism or academic jargon. I look forward to reading more of his work down the road. 

Miriam Toews also came through Winnipeg this summer to promote her new book. I've never seen McNally Robinson so crowded. Women Talking takes its premise from horrific real-world events — over several years, hundreds of women and girls living in a conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia were drugged and raped in their sleep. Toews's novel imagines a scenario in which the men of the colony have all gone to town, leaving the women behind to determine whether stay and fight or quickly pack up their belongings and flee. I found the novel quite moving and read it quickly. But in discussing the book with other Mennonites, I've come to realize that many of them have complicated feelings about the book and the way that it frames its subject matter. More than once I heard the complaint that Toews was stealing a story that doesn't belong to her and conflating cultural categories. How many of them actually read it, before levelling those critiques, is another question. I'm suspicious of those who treat Toews as inauthentic or even dangerous because she is "outside" the Mennonite church proper. Her work has always fallen somewhere between truth and fiction, and I can't help thinking that at least part of the Mennonite critique of Miriam Toews is couched in sexism. (It's not uncommon for Rudy Wiebe to be held up as the shining example of what a Mennonite writer should be.) Women Talking raises the stakes, helpfully for some, arguably less helpfully for others. 

In 2018, I continued to read more John Berger. Landscapes collects essays from his long career of art criticism but it's his discussion of drawing, which emerges in several essays, that interests me most. "For the artist," he writes, "drawing is discovery. . . . A line, an area of tone, is important not really because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see." Perhaps that is why I continue to draw, why it so often lifts my spirits. Drawing, at its best, is for me a practice of remaining open to the possibilities of whatever comes next. Often the effect of this practice arrives like the opposite of anxiety. 

Poetry
This Wound is a World by Billy-Rae Belcourt
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Fiction
Women Talking by Miriam Toews (2018)
The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère
No Strangers in Exile by Hans Harder
Little Fish by Casey Plett (2018)

Non-fiction
Landscapes by John Berger
Stolen City by Owen Toews (2018)
Martin Heidegger by George Steiner
Civil Imagination by Ariella Azoulay
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Mourning Becomes the Law by Gillian Rose
Aesthetics and Politics by Adorno et al.

Comics
Why Art? by Eleanor Davis (2018)
Beverly by Nick Drnaso
Wendy by Walter Scott
Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero by Michael Deforge

Some favourite songs of 2017

The year started like this: cold and foreboding, with many of us incredulous about the results of American election and somehow naive about its implications. But in the darkness of January, there was also Julie Byrne.

Natural Blue – Julie Byrne

Julie Byrne's “Natural Blue” rehearses a memory as warm as the sun. “Back on tour / driving through southwestern towns / that I had been in before.” But this time, something different happens: there is a first encounter. In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes quotes John Ruysbroeck, a 14th century Flemish mystic: “Now, take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man — all of this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.” If this song is romantic, it is also about being locked into a posture of retrospection, where a remembered detail might gain a new kind of significance by its association with the beloved, might become a symbol of love’s excess. To quote Barthes again: “Excess has led me to proportion; I adhere to the Image, our proportions are the same: exactitude, accuracy, music: I am through with not enough. Henceforth I live in the definitive assumption of the Image-repertoire, its triumph” (55).

XXX. – Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar completed another victory lap with DAMN. and, true to form, he brought a lot of other artists along for the ride. XXX is miraculous for a number or reasons. Lamar delivers a blistering performance, meditating on gun violence in America and again demonstrating how the personal is political; in addition, he also achieves something few artists could pull off: seamlessly incorporating U2 in a way that doesn’t detract from XXX.’s style, deaden its impact or cheapen its spectacle.

Mythological Beauty – Big Thief

With Mythological Beauty Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenke unravels her own story of family trauma, a second person account of her mother, who gave up a son for adoption, with the eyes of an unknowing child, alert to her surroundings, who now sees the actions of mother with empathy. On her second album with Big Thief, Lenke demonstrates that she’s already a master songwriter, and with Mythological Beauty she strikes that rare balance between rhythm and wordplay, observation and introspection.

Dum Surfer – King Krule

The joy of Dum Surfer lies in its power of estrangement. Since its release, I’ve returned to this song again and again, as addicted to its dizzy blend of genres (post-punk, house, reggae, etc.) as I am to its dystopian vision. You feel as though you’ve stepped into a scene from a crass film noir, where the familiar referents of urban life appear distorted, charged with meanings that you haven’t before encountered. Here is the world sparkling under a ghoulish tint. Here is the seedy underbelly you’ve heard about, lurking beneath the surface of everything.

Happy to Be Here – Julien Baker

This is a song for unbelievers of all kinds, but it’s especially for those of among us who aren’t able to believe that the God they worship has enough grace for LGBTQ* folks, or that such lives and experiences are in any way secondary to those of heterosexual, cisgender folks. If you’re still living in doubt, or if you prefer abstractions to people, then accept this song as a grace: another chance to consider which god you serve.

Prom – SZA 

Like all of SZA’s songs from Ctrl, “Prom” highlights her vocal agility, navigating the uncertainties of interpersonal relationships while exploring just how spacious they can be. The “Prom” of the title is both promise and prominade: love’s performance, where emotions crash against expectations, where the couple form takes hold and we learn how to maneuver around/within it.

You Look Certain (I’m Not So Sure) – Mount Kimbie

In this hypnotic but understated track, Andrea Balency’s voice glides over a steady beat. In one moment she sounds detached; in another she sounds fully present. With its backing music, Mount Kimbie echoes the shape of a party approaching its climax. There is chaos, confusion, cacophony but the song’s momentum doesn’t slow. Whether or not you’re having a good time, the world will look different tomorrow.

Slip Away – Perfume Genius

On every outing, Mike Hadreas writes an anthem that seems to steal the light from everything around it. “Slip Away” quite literally silences the haters and detractors who bully us into thinking ourselves unworthy, our desires invalid. A celebration of consensual love in all its forms, at once embodied and ennobled.

The Bus Song – Jay Som

All day, every day individuals are collected into a metal box entrusted to someone who knows how close he can get to a curb or a car. Together, they lurch forward as their driver makes a sudden stop. For some of us, the bus is a space where we can steal some time to think, huddle over a phone, turn the page of a textbook, ask for directions. Jay Som’s Melina Duterte also sees the bus as a space of possibility. With The Bus Song, she turns a few contemplative moments in transit into one of the angstiest and uplifting songs of the year.

Blood on Me – Sampha

Despite it’s upbeat tempo and chorus, “Blood on Me” is as vulnerable as anything else on Sampha’s debut. It’s a song less about fear than about how one navigates one’s emotional terrain in the midst of crisis. How much fear belongs to us and what makes it counts as legitimate? “Blood on Me” is the sound of adrenaline facing off with existential ambiguity.

And, finally, here's a playlist that goes far beyond what's been annotated above.

Postlude

They released albums this year but we paid them little notice. They defined the sound of indie rock in the first decade or so of the 2000s and now appear as the tired establishment: Arcade Fire, Dirty Projectors, Wolf Parade, Grizzly Bear, Feist, The National, LCD Soundsystem, Broken Social Scene, Fleet Foxes.

On a personal note: I enjoyed songs from around half of the artists mentioned (I even witnessed Broken Social Scene perform a nostalgia-infused set at a summer festival), but I’ve grown bored of bands like the National, Fleet Foxes and Wolf Parade, and by now I’m mostly annoyed by the Arcade Fire and Dirty Projectors. This year Grizzly Bear released what might be the most inaccessible album of their career and, generally, I liked it, mostly because it sounded like Grizzly Bear. (“Four Cypresses,” in particular, is the sort beautiful, dense song that only a band like Grizzly Bear could pull off.) Feist channeled PJ Harvey and delivered a spare, guitar-driven album with songs (“Pleasure,” “Century,” “Any Party”) that resonated with me almost immediately. I’m fairly certain I will always like Feist.

When I look at my favourite songs from 2017, I observe what’s become a commonplace mixture of rap, r&b, indie rock/folk, and electronic music, but I also see a lot more diversity in the artists making it. To say my demographic (white, male, cisgender) is typically overrepresented at shows is an understatement. It’s one thing to observe new trends in the music scene, but it’s another thing to understand why they occur. And while it might look like the dominance of one is slowly receding with age, it should be noted that there has also been a lot of work done, most of it unrecognized, to claim space in the music scene for those it has traditionally excluded; there have been efforts to make concerts safer for people of colour, for women, queer and non-binary folks; there has been work done to create platforms for emerging artists who don’t experience the forms of privilege that indie rock has fostered over the years. And this is vital work that needs broader support in the new year and beyond.

Girlpool – Ideal World

Diiv - Bent (Roi's Song)

Soporific, sure, but so are some of the best guitar-driven post-punk albums of the last few decades. Like other moody artists that annoyed the critics and gatekeepers of their day (the Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.), Diiv's music is cloying, repetitive, hopelessly nostalgic and altogether soothing. 

"That Battle is Over"

"That Battle is Over" is a song overflowing with sarcasm, a glib survey of contemporary post-feminism – a site of conflict now dominated by what Nina Power has described as the "one dimensional woman," the feminine subject of late capitalism, where the hard won freedom of past feminist struggles culminates in the freedom to buy and the imperative to safeguard one's identity against precarious material conditions. Now Power's critique has a video to match.

Hval's song parodies the route taken by a good deal of anti-(or post)feminist discourse: gender equality has been won – that battle is over – and it's now simply up to individuals to choose the life they want. It's not uncommon for that same discursive field to privilege victim blaming, to understand power/agency as a matter of individual choice. What such discourse overlooks, in other words, are the conditions under which one's choices take place, the intersectional nature of oppression and the limitations of our current moment.

What we witness in this video are not scenes of contemporary solidarity but images of antiquated retreat: morose glimpses of conventional feminine activity. Such activity has been a crucial source of support for the proliferation of the nuclear family, not to mention white suburbia. As Hval poses her first few questions ("What are we taking care of?"), we're led into a dimly lit home, a worn-out domestic space: what has been the hidden site of work for many middle class North American women. Here, the role of caregiving demands to be performed: cooking, cleaning, attending to the needs of one's children. In the midst of these archetypes, our guide simply surveys the scene. She appears to be in uniform (a figure who has ostensibly benefitted from first wave feminism) returning from the labour force to that space which was once hers to look after.

The tinted colour palette, along with a cameo from Melissa Auf der Maur, draws parallels to the aesthetics of iconic videos from the mid-90s: videos by Hole, PJ Harvey and others, which, in their own ways, pointed to feminism's unfinished business. Despite the great progress made by women's movements, misogyny and sexism remain all to familiar. The male gaze continues to structure much of our popular culture and these videos, like Hval's, draw the viewer's externality into question. The figures who populate videos like "Violet" and "Down By The Water" are aware that they are being watched; they stare back into the spotlight that exposes them, recognizing the power of spectacle, which has become theirs to subvert. Their performances are parodic, but each one also approaches something emancipatory: an awareness of the deep power that spans across generations of mothers and daughters, a power that surpasses the residues of patriarchy and outshines its spectacles.

The video's director, Zia Anger, also provides some commentary:

I guess it goes back to '96 for me, and the ‘girl power’ mantra I've been repeating since I learned it from the Spice Girls. The female experience is far from singular (and even further from this white, suburban, American-retro dream), yet around every corner there is a common pain, a wisdom of ecstasy, and an obsession with the uncanny that we all share. Collaborating with an entirely female creative team (with the support of a few great gentlemen) gave birth to an exploration of Jenny's song and an inquiry into the sarcasm that pulses through it.

Jenny Hval's Apocalypse, girl arrives this June via Sacred Bones.

 

Andy Shauf - "I'm Not Falling Asleep"

Last night I saw Regina's Andy Shauf perform here in Edmonton. Like the rest of the crowd, I was quietly taken with him and his band. Tender, but drained of any sentimentality, Shauf's presence was commanding, a soft intensity that his band took great care to match.

Shauf's full-length debut, The Bearer of Bad News, arrives February 3, via Tender Loving Empire / Party Damage. The video below features footage from 1920s Saskatchewan Agricultural Archives.

The return of Sleater-Kinney

Last week, Sleater-Kinney announced their reunion and comeback album No Cities To Love, but calling it a "comeback" isn't totally fair. 2005's The Woods saw Sleater-Kinney at the height of their powers, and each member has kept incredibly busy with a range of other worthwhile projects (from Wild Flag and solo albums to Portlandia and the Jicks).  By the time they called it quits in 2006, Sleater-Kinney had successfully transitioned from the riot grrrl movement of the mid-90s through  indie rock's internet-fuelled critical mass.

If their new track "Bury Our Friends" is any indication, Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss haven't lost any jam. Like many who came of age during the late 90s, I was instantly hooked when I heard Sleater-Kinney for the first time. The combination of raw energy and insight in their music was something I'd never heard before. It was heavy, direct and full of political outrage. Just what I was looking for.

A welcome return from an absolutely vital band.

Lost in the Dream

A couple weeks off work gave me the chance to visit my family in Manitoba and see some old, estranged friends. Returning home often leaves me with mixed emotions. There's something mysterious about reassuming the roles and rituals that once seemed to provide structure; at the same time, such familiarity can make the distance between past and presence that much sharper. Sometimes music helps to dull what that awkward pain, that feeling of being disjointed. As is often the case with art, one kind of ambiguity is displaced by another.

On more than one occasion I was asked what I've been listening to lately. In each case, it felt right to mention the new album from The War On Drugs, Lost in the Dream, an album that seemed to evoke the weird feelings I was having in my old surroundings. It's an album that sounds hauntingly familiar, especially for kids who grew up in the late 80s and unwittingly absorbed the better part of their parents' record collections. The nostalgia is impossible to avoid and there's no need to apologize for it. It's inevitable.

The songs on Lost in the Dream stretch out like highways. And for an album this confident in its nostalgia, an album so far removed from the sounds of its contemporaries, you might expect these highways to lead home, to some sentimental destination. But the drive takes over and you realize that, despite all the classic rock tropes, the well-worn themes, and all that sweet emotion, you've arrived somewhere you didn't expect to be.

Chad VanGaalen - "Weighed Sin"

One of my all-time favourite humans, Chad VanGaalen, released Shrink Dust, his fifth full length, at the end of April and I'm ashamed to admit that I've only just begun to really appreciate it. I may have been distracted by all his other endeavours: his work with Viet Cong, his new Instagram account, and Zooosh, his comic series for Chart Attack. Every couple of years, VanGaalen pulls back the curtain and let's us take a look at all the weird stuff he's getting up to. Most of the time, I just sit back in awe.

Shrink Dust is less punchy than some of VanGaalen's previous releases but it moves slow and steady through the same kind of sophisticated songwriting that touches the best tracks of his catalogue. Along with its alt-country vibes, the songs on Shrink Dust have a natural flow about them: a clear contrast to the disjointedness that, for better or worse, has defined VanGaalen's previous full lengths.

Perhaps because of their intended use in an unfinished film project, the songs on Shrink Dust consistently tickle the imagination with bizarre imagery and shifting first-person perspectives. If it weren't for the disturbing confessions of its grotesque, pitiable character, "Monster" might as well be a campfire sing-along for kids. The stoner jam "All Will Combine" shifts between eerie verses and the spacey, organ-fuelled sounds of its celebratory chorus. Other beauties like "Lila," "Hangman's Son" and "Weighed Sin" (see the video above) follow in the tradition of songs like "Molten Light" (from Soft Airplane) and "Sarah" (from Diaper Island), blending VanGaalen's creepy brand of melancholy into the kind of earnest folk ballads that tug on your heartstrings and don't let go.

"Habit" - Ought

Sometimes a song arrives that hits hard and true. Ought's "Habit," from their new album More Than Any Other Day (via Constellation), is one of those songs. To me, it sounds like growing up, or the moment, amidst all the fun, when you realize that growing up means accumulating your own patterns and routines. Perhaps nothing more than a habit forming, as Ought's singer/guitarist Tim Beeler puts it.

It's familiar, musically, conceptually: that's the important part. It sounds like the restless need to believe in something, to create something. Despite that rush of feeling, there's nothing novel about what you're doing and experiencing. Caught in a cycle, feeling, failing. A habit. Repetition, ecstasy. Ecstasy in repetition.

Wild Beasts in the Present Tense

For England's Wild Beasts pop music, class, and gender aren't easily separated. What makes this more than a simple pop cliche is the band's approach to the question of masculinity. The kind of masculinity that appears across their four albums is as diverse as it is arcane; instead  of attempting to embody an abstract ideal or essence, Wild Beasts' approach might better be described as an exploration what it means to be manly at different moments in time. Their latest release announces as much in its title, but, as always with Wild Beasts, what first appears as a naive truism masks a darker story.

Since their 2008 debut, Limbo, Panto, Wild Beasts have walked a compelling balance between hedonism, wit, and musical precision, all the while providing self-conscious caricatures of their own virility. Their fourth album, Present Tense, continues their trend towards more tightly wound pop productions, abandoning the cocksure sounds of other current British rock bands for the delicate textures of 80s pop and R&B; and while it doesn't surpass the high water mark of 2009's Two Dancers, Present Tense is a definite improvement over the spare, fragile Smother. As co-vocalist Hayden Thorpe put it in a recent interview, "there was a real purpose of stepping out of the ruins of Smother, which was a very bruised and defeated record in many ways." Where Limbo, Panto presented a compelling but disorganized tour of young libido, Smother followed the logic to its breaking point, losing listeners (like me) along the way. Unlike its predecessors, Present Tense is, despite its titular pun and garish cover art, a relaxed and spacious pop record that relies more on crystalline synths than the taut strings of a guitar.

Present Tense trades the darkest undertones of the Wild Beats' previous work for a more playful and ambiguous sendup of the present. "Wanderlust," their galloping opener takes its cue from King Lear,  giving the finger to wealth and the class groomed to possess it. "We're decadent beyond our means," taunts Thorpe, "They're solemn in their wealth, we're high in our poverty . . . With us the world feels voluptuous." As with other Wild Beasts records, the interplay between vocalists Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming -- a foppish falsetto and throaty baritone, respectively -- allows for the simultaneous appearance of different thematic registers: Thorpe's vocals prance through the clouds, while Fleming's are rooted to the earth. Along with their first single, "Sweet Spot," the best example of this, Present Tense's brief, glam-pop performance "A Simple Beautiful Truth," transitions perfectly from the album's pensive centrepiece, "Pregnant Pause." By this point, the aura sounds effortless: the R&B of Fleming's fluid bass finds its companion in a glittering 80s synth line, helping make good on the promise of "Sweet Spot," that "godly state," sings Thorpe, "Where the real and the dream may consummate." These fleeting moments appear to suggest the kind of bourgeois acceptance that the Wild Beasts, in until this point, had seemed to parody. But towards the album's end the narrative changes yet again in order to reveal these reproduced moments of pop perfection for the nostalgic constructions they are.

Unlike previous Wild Beasts releases, the romance on Present Tense seems to move beyond satire and jest to what might pass as honest enjoyment. On "Mecca" Thorpe builds on the existential embrace of "Wanderlust," describing history's collapse into a single moment of erotic love: "Cause all we want is to know the vivid moment / Yeah, how we feel now is felt by the Ancients." Similarly, the album closer, "Palace," finds Thorpe arriving again at that romantic moment, unguarded and able to achieve an intimate vantage: "In detail you are even more beautiful than from afar / I could learn you like the blinded would do, feeling their way through the dark." The catch to all this is that this kind of intimacy doesn't come without a lot of historical baggage. On "Past Perfect" Thorpe dismisses the possibility of a "perfect present," instead admitting to a present that is characterized by an irreducible tension. His explanation reads like a moralistic nursery rhyme: "Our hurt is older than our hands / It passed from monkey into man / Now tender hands do heal the hurt / Man did fuck up / and then he learnt." But the learning is not over. For the Wild Beasts of Present Tense, what counts as masculine cannot escape its own historical confusion or triumph over modern disillusionment. Here, in other words, is no simple resolution, but the end of a category that knows its time is up.

"Digital Witness"

A visually stunning video from St. Vincent, whose new self-titled album arrives in late February. I love analogous colour schemes.
 

The Dodos - "Transformer"

I find this video a bit disturbing, not because of how creepy and weird it is, but because of how much I identify with it, especially near the end, when all the umbrella heads are eating the main guy's snotball and dancing with his dead dog around the interior of his lonely shack.

Neko Case: "Night Still Comes"

Neko Case is a hero of mine. Her new album, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, continues her winning streak and amps up the emotion with several real tearjerkers (including a tragic song about some bad parenting witnessed at a bus stop). She's one of the most intelligent singers out there and she's charming as hell. Anyone who can convincingly sing a line like "If I puked up a sonnet, would you call me a miracle?" deserves some serious praise.

Last week she took over NPR's "Theft of the Dial" and brought the rock, as well as a lot of hilarious bleeping. It made me wish she had her own radio show. For now, I guess her Twitter feed will have to do.
 

Some refractions from Arcade Fire's Reflektor

Released with an appropriate amount of fanfare, including a 30 minute special directed by Roman Coppola, Reflektor has been garnering a mixture of apathetic shrugs from the indie kids and hyperbolic acclaim from the many folks (myself included) who still want BIG albums that tackle BIG themes. This is an album for those of us who still care about capital-A albums, but it's also more than that: it's an album that repeatedly calls into question its own legitimacy.

I celebrated Tuesday's release by reading an album review from Rolling Stone for the first time in what's probably been about ten years. It was weirdly satisfying to see David Fricke make overt comparisons to all the baby-boomer greats (U2, The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, The Cure, Neil Young, the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, and so on). The write-up ends by placing Reflektor in the same league as game changing records by Radiohead (Kid A), the Rolling Stones (Exile on Main Street), and U2 (Achtung Baby). Along with Pitchfork, The Quietus made similar comparisons. Perhaps it was in the band's press release. Most of this critical pandering is useless and boring, but it's also somewhat accurate, as it has been for their previous albums. Of course Arcade Fire aren't likely to let go of the Talking Heads, whose influence is obvious on songs like the jittering "Normal People" and the meditative "Afterlife." The U2 comparison isn't that far-off either. On a mid-tempo track like "Porno" Butler's sultry croon is pure Bono, and when you've got lyrics like "there's so little that we know" or "it's the only world we know" shouted into what sounds like empty space, U2's early 90s wanderings certainly come to mind.

Despite its 80 minute running time, Reflektor feels exceptionally well-crafted and well-paced: as it presses on, Arcade Fire manage to earn your trust, despite juggling a variety of things that don't at first glance fit together. You've got the influence of Haitian culture driving the rhythm and the lyrical content of a good portion of the album, a lot of meandering lyrics about the afterlife, the usual adolescent discomfort, a lot of self-referential "reflections" on the nature of art, and some pretentious Greek mythology thrown in just for kicks. And all this comes with several finishing touches from former LCD Soundsystem dude James Murphy, who, by the sounds of it, didn't actually do that much for the songs, but adds even more cultural capital to the whole endeavour.

The themes are BIG but remain rooted in vague specifics. In an interview with Maclean's, Win Butler explains how much of them came from a recent trip to Haiti:

There’s a crazy energy in Port-au-Prince when the sun goes down, because there is no electricity in a lot of the city. A lot of parts of the city are pretty dangerous, and people are rushing around trying to get home. There’s also this nightlife thing that happens, and it’s a combination of really dangerous and fun. Whenever you go to Haiti there are all these packs of missionaries wearing the same T-shirts that say “Jesus loves Haiti” or whatever. You ask them, “What are you guys doing?” And they say, “Oh, we’re going to paint houses.” Well, why don’t you just pay Haitians to paint the houses? I’m sure they’d love to do that. There’s a strange idea of going there to teach people about Jesus, while I’m sure Haitians know more about Jesus than these people do; they’re the most religious people. After the earthquake, people were singing songs of praise in the street. It’s a strange idea that we can teach these people something. The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm and so there’s this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.

I want to think that this has everything to do with why the motif of reflection came to dominate the conceptual structure of the album. Removed from this context, the theme of reflection can be easily glossed over as a way of celebrating art as such. In Lindsay Zoladz's Pitchfork review, for example, Arcade Fire's reflexivity is more or less equivalent to musicians (and critics) giving themselves a pat on the back:

With its clipped snippets of airwave chatter (the BBC's Jonathan Ross makes a cameo), warped VHS hum, and retro-luminosity that nods to a time when synthesizers connoted un-jaded wonder and revelation, Reflektor is designed to be an homage to the many ways music is transmitted, discovered, and incorporated into people's lives.

Ian Cohen tweaks the sentiment a little bit in his earlier review of the band's first single, suggesting that the album's big theme is "the possibility that art isn't a shared, living experience but rather a mirror for our own projections and preconceptions." Well, no shit. I like to think that Arcade Fire have a more nuanced understanding of the work they're producing. Most post-colonial theory begins with the assumption that the Occident has constructed other cultures in way that suits its own purposes (be they economic, symbolic, or political). In Haiti's history, we see reflections of our own violent history, but we also see more. Arcade Fire aren't so naive that they haven't considered the implications of what it means to appropriate other cultural forms, especially when the culture in question bares obvious traces of Western European imperialism of the worst kind. Butler is no post-colonial studies expert, but by drawing out certain elements from his experience in Haiti (most strikingly on "Here Comes the Night Time" ) while employing a self-conscious conceit like the mirror, Butler's lyrics suggest something that usually gets left out of the discussion when privileged white folks use things from other cultures: the appropriated image of another culture isn't simply problematic because of its content but because of its very form. Or, to put it in Arcade Fire's terms, it's not simply the reflection that's at issue but the reflector. In other words, it's important to be conscious not just of what's being represented but how representation itself is a form of cultural production that has a history.  The danger in this kind of thinking is that it can put all the artistic agency in colonial hands, and that's obviously not what's going on here. While this insight isn't made explicit on Reflektor, it's there in the background, and along with it is an assortment of other loose threads that don't necessarily reveal their origin, Occidental or otherwise. Heaven or "Afterlife" is another recurring topic that seems to fit well with a critical view of representation and its use as an colonial weapon for maintaining oppressive power structures.

As has no doubt been said ad nauseum, with Reflektor, Arcade Fire have devised their own hall of mirrors, but what makes this album truly worthwhile is that they've also given us some of the hints we need in order to find a hammer.

New Music: The Dodos - Carrier

Below, you'll see video of the Dodos tearing it up on the Late Show with David Letterman. I've long been a fan of this San Francisco band, and I'm glad to report that their recently released fourth album, Carrier may prove to be their best release. The Dodos have never been a difficult band to like. They're charming and relatively unpretentious; they're solid musicians and they create polished, well-executed indie rock songs. But Carrier finds them at a place very different from where they were a year and a half ago.

In 2012, the Dodos lost their touring guitarist, Chris Reimer (also known for his involvement with Calgary outfit Women). As Dodos frontman Meric Long explained in a recent interview with Andrea Warner on CBC's Radio 3, Carrier is profoundly shaped by Reimer's influence:

Yeah. But with the record especially, the distinction that I want to make is Chris passing away is totally weird and f--ked, but when he was alive — that’s what influenced the record, that’s what made the record. It’s not his death. He was a huge influence on me when he was alive and that’s the part — I didn’t sit down and think, "I gotta write a song about Chris." It doesn’t work that way. Like you said, that’s too much pressure. It’s just not possible. I couldn’t imagine that. So focusing on the thing that he represented to me when he was alive was the inspiration, the thing that kept the songwriting going. I mean, really, there were other things, too. It was a very weird time. Chris passed away and within the span of a month, all of these people dying, family members and stuff — it was a really weird month [laughs].

The band's first single, "Confidence" (see below), starts with a skeletal melody that slowly accelerates into a robust, frenzied chorus. Instead of the campfire acoustics of earlier Dodos releases, you can hear Long using the kind of wiry post-punk guitar work that Reimer brought to the table. The song hits its peak with Logan Kroeber's frantic drumming while Long pushes his instrument to its limit. At just under four minutes, it leaves you feeling like you witnessed an event.

Julian Lynch - "North Line"

I have a radio show and you can listen to it

I've been hosting a college radio show called Dyck's Pycks off and on for over a year now and last week I finally got around to making a website for it. The show is an eclectic mix of (mostly) new independent music with a strong nod to the nineties (no surprise there). I also try to showcase local artists from Edmonton, Winnipeg, and sometimes even from the rest of Canada. I'll be posting a Souncloud file as well as a playlist every week, so if you've ever got a hankering for indie rock, you're in luck. Anyway, here's a link to the site.

I should also mention that I designed the gnarly spaghetti and meatballs themed logo. Not really sure why, but at least it works with the colour scheme. I'm hoping to have another blog up soon to showcase some the art/design stuff that I've been working at over the past year. And so begins the great process of compartmentalization! Soon I'll have three avenues for self-promotion.

A sober take on the National

One of the better music critics around, Carl Wilson, is still struggling with crescendos and populism (now a common pairing that was, arguably, ruined by U2). And, as usual, it makes for great writing.

The National - Sea of Love

Records by The National differ by degree. Matt Berninger's mopey baritone is a constant. You can also usually count on a galloping snare drum and a pair atmospheric guitars. While I haven't yet had a chance to listen through their latest, Trouble Will Find Me (released May 20), this track gives me the same confidence I had when tracks from 2010's High Violet were beginning to surface.