Sled Island recap

I've spent the last five days in Calgary listening to live music, complaining about scenesters, and staying up well past my bedtime. The Sled Island music and arts festival boasts over 200 artists hosted by twenty-odd venues scattered throughout downtown Calgary.

As with most large-scale festivals, scheduling conflicts are inevitable, so you've got to choose your venues carefully. I was sad to miss the lo-fi prestige of Thee Oh Sees and Times New Viking, as well as Kurt Vile's nostagia trip through the sixties, and pretty devastated to miss an unadvertised performance by Purity Ring (a little-known group from Edmonton that has only released two songs, each of which are among my favourite tracks of the year).

For every amazing performance there was a band that turned my stomach. For me, the worst of these were Crocodiles (a band I was excited to see) and the Dandy Warhols (a band I stopped caring about ages ago). The same level of self-aware coolness was common to both. Perhaps I saw Crocodiles at the wrong point in the evening, but for a group of musicians so wholly infatuated with themselves, I expected some musical inventiveness or some acknowledgment of the crowd that was lapping up their lacklustre homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Pretense is a given at festivals like this, but intoxicated crowds aren't going to let you off the hook for merely producing cool-sounding drivel (then again, I can't see how else anyone can enjoy the Dandy Warhols). 

On a different note, here's a sampling of some of the outstanding artists I got to see perform.

Blonde Redhead were hit and miss. I consider myself a relatively devoted fan, but I can't say I was totally impressed with their show. It was clear from the start that they were seasoned professionals with loads of talent, but their setlist kept losing momentum. Their old material shone but their most recent songs, especially from the unsuccessful Penny Sparkle didn't translate well into a live setting. 
"23"


Wild Flag were one of the festival's most pleasant surprises. Despite being comprised of legendary rock 'n roll babes from the nineties (members of Sleater-Kinney, Helium, and the Minders), they played every show like it was their first: unlike dismally trendy hipster acts (Crocodiles, for instance), the girls in Wild Flag had no sense of entitlement. Every song was a struggle to win over the audience.
"Glass Tambourine"


I wasn't sure what to expect with Twin Shadow, but they managed to transform the disco stylings of their studio album into successful arena rock.
"Castles in the Snow"


Parts & Labor, another great band I came into the festival knowing very little about, put on a noisy, high energy show that I had to cut short. Three songs in, I could see they were just getting started and I was sad to go. Scheduling, dammit!
"Fractured Skies"


Chad Vangaalen, as always, did not disappoint. He seemed characteristically awkward and uncomfortable on stage, which I wasn't expecting since he was playing for a hometown audience. Then again, it's that social anxiety that makes his stage banter so entertaining. His set was made up mostly of new material from the reverb-heavy Diaper Island, and I think the songs actually grew on me as I saw them being performed.
"Freedom for a Policeman"


Of Montreal were as advertised. Kevin Barnes doesn't have the class of David Bowie, but he's probably the closest thing our generation has to the thin white duke. I was thankful for a strong showing of material from Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?, which I still consider their best to date. There were about half a dozen extras on stage during a given song, each one dressed like a flamboyant Mexican wrestler; and they provided the crowd with balloons, streamers, and all the libido they could handle.
"Coquet Coquette"

Beirut revisited

Today it was announced that indie pop darlings Beirut (the Eastern-European-gypsy styled project of New Mexico native Zach Condon) will have a new LP on store shelves this August. Beirut emerged in the latter half of the 00s, as I was beginning my first degree; so I have a special attachment to Condon's work--one that I'd forgotten about until today. It's always struck me as rather odd that Beirut could emerge from the annals of indie pop and find such favour among kids who've been conditioned by punchy guitars, new wave synths and driving disco beats. Perhaps what makes Beirut's deeply anachronistic sound so refreshing is the fact that it's defiantly not a trendy revival of, say, eighties synth-pop or sixties psych-rock--instead, we hear a style of music that our generation never had a chance to forget.

One of the remarkable things about Beirut is how little things change from album to album; and how wonderfully simple Condon's songwriting remains throughout his discography. This isn't mere nostalgia: every one of Beirut's releases is irreducibly romantic, sure, but such romance is deeply self-aware. Even Condon's most recent pair of EPs, which are decidedly less straightforward than anything he's ever done (one of them flirts with electronica), hold the clues of a past that we never knew.



I suppose what I'm trying to get across is that describing the music of Beirut as nostalgic, anachronistic, or even romantic (as nearly all music critics do), seems to miss something. I prefer to think of Beirut's music as a utopian form of art, not unrelated to the way in which Victorians like William Morris reproduced medieval legends (or alternate histories) in a context of rapid industrialization and the ongoing erosion of social distinctions. Of course, Condon's music doesn't really lend itself to any real kind of social unification; personally, I find it makes me mopey and introspective, and I imagine that it provokes similar emotions in other listeners. But the utopian impulse is there all the same, and I can't help thinking that Beirut's "no place" of the past supplements my generation's collective hunger for a better history.

On his forthcoming album, The Rip Tide, Condon returns again to the whimsical folk music and the Balkan sound that initially inspired him. Take a listen to the album's debut single "East Harlem."

Beirut - East Harlem by Revolver USA

christian (indie) music: a guide for the perplexed

Just so we're clear, I've always counted myself among the perplexed. Most articles from people like myself (who haven't actively sought out "Christian music" since they were a misguided youth) begin with a narrative or anecdote from personal experience. While I'm certainly not short on those, I'm not going to bother this time. Nor do I intend to give a you a genealogy of Christian rock, create a list of "indie" musicians who self-identify as Christians, sing the praises of Asthmatic Kitty, or discuss the strange (but fitting) history of some of Menomena's members. There are books and magazines that do that (although as far as I know they're still meant for hipsters of the Christian variety). I'm sure that at some point, perhaps in the near future, one of the many critics who grew up in the CCM cloister (apparently there are quite a few of us) will publish a detailed analysis of the Christian pop music phenomenon.

This is all just a roundabout way of introducing a recently published review of Starflyer 59's latest record by cokemachineglow's Chris Molnar. He offers some helpful advice to those of us who simply don't get why this bizarre subgenre should exist, and I think I agree with him.

In his review for 2008’s Dial M, Conrad asserted that “the best move this band can make isn’t stylistic but personal.” In other words, the negative effects of Christianity make Starflyer 59’s persistence within the Christian music industry immoral and inconsistent with their large, quality, and rarely religious body of work. I disagree: for me, as with Conrad, it was the impressive original roster of Tooth & Nail which helped make the bizarre nature of a Christian upbringing bearable. Those bands, including the Danielson Famile, Poor Old Lu, and eventually MewithoutYou, remain common points between me and anyone from a similar background. If I hadn’t heard Pedro the Lion’s Whole EP (1997)—released on Tooth & Nail—in the listening booth at Family Christian Stores, it would’ve taken me that much longer to emerge from the bubble, to grapple with the immateriality of the limits Christian music imposes on itself. Labels like Tooth & Nail seemed to once grapple in secret, hiding bands more ambiguously identified with Christian music behind a brand permissible to religious parents while introducing variety and perspective to music-hungry teenagers allowed precious little. They are, in other words, doing God’s work.

I suppose I was lucky. Much of the pressure to discover my music at the local Christian bookstore was self-generated: when I thought I'd covered the terrain and was still unable to locate an artist that I could honestly like, it was relatively easy to focus my energy on musicians that actually appealed to me. It's a shame I was never introduced to Starflyer 59 or Pedro the Lion. I might have lasted a bit longer.

rant of the day: indie music

Is it fair to say that, in this age of internet domination, viral marketing, and commercial apathy, the term/category/genre/qualifier known as "indie" has entirely lost its cache?

Perhaps this is because the "independent" tag no longer defines the sounds of new hipsterdom; or, perhaps the problem is that the "indie" lable has become synonomous with hipster culture. Perhaps the term is vacuous because most independent artists appear to have little or no problem hawking a song to whatever company is savvy enough to tap into counter-culture, not that I'm accusing them of selling out. I think we're well beyond that. Beginning in the late 70s and 80s as a boldly noncommercial take on popular music, often released on small DIY labels, "indie" has come to represent a variety of things; but more often than not, it refers to guitar/synth pop by image-conscious scenesters.

The ever-insightful British pop historian Simon Reynolds offers some background:

Originally we talked of 'independent' music, meaning music on independent labels, and at that time there was still a shared (if loose) framework of ideology and sonics that traced back to punk . . . . It was an oppositional term: independent music opposed itself to the mainstream rock and pop released on major labels. The idea was that on independent labels you would find more experimental or adventurous music, people exploring esoteric and non-commercial directions, making sounds too abrasive or weird to be on daytime radio. The lyrical content would be radical or challenging, either exploring the dark side of human condition, or being political in various ways, or just very sophisticated, ironic, and so on.

By about 1984/1985, though, 'indie' meant a style of song-oriented, guitar-based music whose opposition to the mainstream took the form of no longer being contemporary – spurning synthesisers and drum machines and sequencers, avoiding the R&B and dance music influences that dominated the pop charts, and instead looking back to rock's archives, principally the 1960s. 'Indie' meant jangly guitar groups. By 1986 'indie' pretty much equated with a refusal of the pop present. Because it now meant a style of music, not a means of production and distribution, it could be uncoupled from the independent label system, and that is what gradually happened. (The Independent, 20 July 2008)

The trend from an ethos to a style seems familiar, though the role and evolution of popular media cannot be underestimated; the rise of indie music in the 00s is not unlike the mainstream co-optation of "alternative" music from the late 80s through the early 90s, but now more than ever it's become apparent that cultural markers like musical taste and critical status depend upon new technology and social networking. In fact, rarely can you get one without the other.

When was the last time you read a review that made a point of a band's "indie" status? Was it right next to a feature on the Black Eyed Peas? Did you find it in Spin or Rolling Stone? (Does anyone read paper magazines anymore, let alone look to these grizzly monoliths for new bands?) Does the ever-growing Pitchfork camp even bother calling something "indie"? Speaking of the Peas, in a recent interview with the Associated Press Fergie explained that her group's new album would take inspiration from various genres and styles, such as "indie." If this isn't proof that the indie ethos is dead, I don't know what is. And what, you ask, was I doing reading an interview with the Black Eyed Peas? I guess I was bored with the rest of the newspaper.

"Indie music" used to suggest a simple dichotomy between fringe recording/production and mainstream polish, the unheard and the oversaturated. As most bands know there is no pure space independent music, nor is there any sense, for critics, in holding the music of one side over and against the other. To name a recent example, the new Gorillaz record deserves just as much (if not more) attention as the new Broken Social Scene record. And it just so happens that Gorillaz's label, Virgin, has handled distribution for some of the "Broken Social Scene presents . . ." albums, so Art & Crafts, like a lot of other big independent labels, have more or less closed the gap on the majors. "Indie music" has become the laziest of catch-all descriptors; it's become redundant, and it's time we moved on.

There will always be lesser-known, more/less innovative artists producing great music that doesn't get heard. For the average middle-class musician it's now easier than ever to offer one's music to the public. Sifting through all the inevitable trash is the job of the record label. Clearly, the process isn't this simple and most of labels haven't been doing a great job. But the job isn't theirs alone.