Faire Beacoup Avec Rien

If you talked to me last week, it would have been hard to convince me that there is anything beyond Air, a few Noir Desir songs, Laetitia Sadier and something like 10 electro tracks worth listening to in recent French pop music. The Rita Mitsouko were never my thing, Daft Punk got old really quickly, Telephone ends up being a family classic (and that just ruins it - plus they've been inactive for at least a decade), and I believe I've made my point.

But this week, my hopes are a bit higher for contemporary French rock music (or just French music in general). That's because of a band called Rien, which means literally nothing (haha - sorry...).

Why do you need to like this band (or at least listen to it)?

Because knowing cool French bands other than Phoenix, Air and Daft Punk will make you successful with the ladies abroad.

More seriously (because it won't), Rien is a band from Grenoble, a medium sized French city like many others near the Mediterranean and the Alps. Useless info, you might say, but I like settings for stories.

In that city of Grenoble is an association called l'Amicale Underground (translatable as Underground Friends Union, or something like that, feel free to suggest better), which also serves as record label for Rien. First reason why you need to take a look at this is the Amicale's website in its lo-fi awesomeness:

The second reason: everything that comes out on the aforementioned label is FREE TO DOWNLOAD. I really appreciate that and I don't see why anyone wouldn't give this a try after such a move.

The third reason: if you buy one of the 500 copies of Rien's EP "3" (for 10 €, shipping included, which is a very fair price compared to what some people do), not only do you get a collectible item, you get A VERY FREAKIN' NICE collectible piece of art you can look at for a while. Designed by fellow Grenoble design firm PNTS, here's a few pictures courtesy of their website:

Seriously worth buying if you like the music (that, again, you can get for free - it's like they guilt trip you in buying the best CD package of the year! And did I mention the CD is the most epic slab of black plastic ever?), PNST also did a flabbergasting packaging for Rien's previous LP, Il Ne Peut Y Avoir De Prédiction Sans Avenir (loving the elongated titles à la Godspeed You! Black Emperor - but IN FRENCH). Pictures still courtesy of the PNTS website - awesome people, I'm telling you!):

Unfortunately, this record is out of print. Still good though, and still freely downloadable on the label's website - consider donating (shameless advertisement for other people, yes - least I can do after getting all their records and borrowing pictures).

The fourth reason, and the most important one: "3" contains pretty damn good sounds. It's not at all your usual post-rock record - these people are willing to experiment with sounds as much as motorik-ly repeating one with minimalist style.  On this EP, Rien plays with layers, which, if they sometimes seem conflicting or clashing with the foundation of the song at first, are completely integrated and natural by the end of it. You will come to damn these people, because this record, at 25 minutes and 18 seconds, is about a third of what it should be. Then you will remember what you read on the label's website: 3 is the first of three records, that will come out until 2014, when the band Rien will end (in Japan, apparently?).

What I'm wondering is: How the hell am I going to wait?

JNCT



...

PS: bonus reason: you can make so many puns with this band's name. It's like the fun never stops.

edit: reading my own post makes me feel like I wrote an ad for that record. I tried changing a few things to make this purely subjective post seem more nuanced, but I did really love "3". Considering you can listen to it for free, you shouldn't read any of my nonsense and go directly to the label's website to make you own opinion.

Another Shoegaze Classic...

(USELESS) STATEMENT OF THE DAY: Loveless is one of the — ten, twenty? — albums that fundamentally defined my music taste.

Pretty commonplace, I know. That album has drastically oriented many, many people's musical inclinations. And you hear the My Bloody Valentine influence literally everywhere these days: No Age, Asobi Seksu, Deerhunter, M83, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, just a few names that immediately come to mind — but the list of heavily indebted bands goes on and on.

I remember finding Loveless in my dad's CD tower, one day (ninth grade?), as I was browsing his collection for some new stuff. I recognized the title from the countless "Greatest Rock Albums" lists I'd read and pretty much learned by heart. At that time, if I remember correctly, Lost in Translation was also set to come out, with a huge buzz surrounding the fact that MBV leader Kevin Shields was recording original material for the soundtrack.

I was a little surprised to find the album there because I had never heard my dad play it. Which meant it was one of those purchases he usually dismissed as mistakes, from bands that he invariably reduced to CRAP. I didn't know what to make of the cover, either: a guitar shrouded in pink haze? Cool, I guess.

I played the album on my stereo. WTF. A drum crash. Abrasive, repetitive riffs that sound kind of like… a buzz-saw concerto recorded in a tin-walled studio? A soft, sleepy voice, drowned in a dense fog of almost tuneless guitars and lethargic, watery backing vocals. All of it so deeply enveloped in haze that every sound, every note, feels unsteady, wavering between pitches and textures. About to collapse into something thick and indistinct. Definitely unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

I won't pretend I liked Loveless from the beginning. In fact, I was sorta disappointed. Or disoriented. But because I rarely admit defeat when it comes to music (and because I wanted to prove my dad wrong), I kept listening to the album pretty regularly in the months that followed.

In the end, I think the melodies did it for me. I found myself whistling a lot of the tunes I had first thought inept, relentless, almost childish. Once these had sunk in, a window opened onto what makes Loveless truly mind-blowing:

GUITARS

With melodies to cling onto, it became easier to take in the inscrutable piles of distortion, the incomprehensible swirls of conflicting sounds. I stopped trying to make sense out of it all; I let the music assume its own shape in my ears and patiently explored it.

What an exploration! Endless. Mystifying. If ever the experience of listening to an album deserved to be compared to deep-sea diving, then Loveless is surely it.

From Loveless I learned

- That the best albums are the ones who compose their own, idiosyncratic universes.

- That original production is absolutely crucial in crafting unique sound textures and sonic identities.

- That some of the most difficult albums can also, over time, become the most cosily inhabitable (make the most intimate nests for your ears).

- That the confrontation between pop and noise is by far the most gratifying, the most glorious, and endlessly fertile in the entire history of popular music.

- That fleeting, whispered and buried melodies are often — always? — the most beautiful and heartbreaking.

Finally, Loveless taught me that I preferred unpolished and aggressive sounds — noise, if you will — to their crisp and clear counterparts.

Take the "other" revolutionary pop masterpiece of the nineties, Radiohead's OK Computer. That album I bought myself and I did try very hard to love it. I'll admit it's a piece of musical genius and all. But so clean and clinical! The feelings that so many people experienced listening to Radiohead never made it through to me, because I immediately found the album overthought, over-controlled, over-exposed. There was just no space in OK Computer for mystery or uncertainty. Everything was there, clearly revealed, even underscored.

Noise — Loveless, however obsessively controlled the recording was for the album — on the other hand, leaves depths to be scanned. Layers to be peeled. A shifting and unsteady landscape that takes on new shapes with every listen. A haven for the imagination. Perhaps most importantly, a receptacle for any kind of emotion.

Ride, To Infinity, and Nowhere!

Ride's Nowhere appears to me as a masterpiece, mingling melody with violence in a glorious crash of cymbals, acoustic guitar strumming, overdrive & reverb drenched electrics and a powerhouse rhythm section. The noise sister to Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and pop brother of Loveless is of course English, and obliterates any recent attempt to make something "in the same style but better". This record is in fact so good I can't write anything more than providing you with means to listen to it and a high-res picture of the cover. Which was rapidly taken by yours truly in blatant disregard for copyright laws but never ending admiration for the artist, unknown to me.

another awesome artwork for another awesome record

blog article + links 

streaming option for the folks who prefer that (deezer) 

Ah, maybe one thing to say before I end this article: If that wave on the cover is the start of a 30 meter high tsunami, then it's a pretty good equivalent to the music that's about to crash in your ears, leaving no survivors when it washes out in a foam of goodness.

JNCT

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Summer Bash #3

Summer is almost over, and as usual, three weeks before the end, I wonder where it's all gone. So many empty hours that I wish I could account for. So many things I would do, or do different, if the clock were kind enough to turn back to May.

But hey, even the weirdest, haziest, most confused and confusing summer has its soundtrack. That's the great thing about music. David Crosby agrees.

So there you have it: weird, hazy, confused and confusing songs, in a mix that makes no sense. Compiling it on a patio in Africa with malarial mosquitos dive-bombing my computer screen was definitely a fun summer memory.

And the more I listen to it, the more I think I'm going to enjoy the few sunny and lazy days I have left. It's like magic!

1. Avi Buffalo - The Truth Sets In (Avi Buffalo, Sub Pop 2010)

2. Candy Claws - Sunbeam Show (Hidden Lands, Twosyllable 2010)

3. Cut Copy - Where I'm Going (upcoming album?)

4. Best Coast - Bratty B (Crazy for You, Mexican Summer 2010)

5. Sunglasses - Whiplash (unknown)

6. El Guincho - Cuerpo sin Alma (Piratas de Sudamérica, vol. 1, Young Turks 2010)

7. Cults - Oh My God (Forest Family Singles, 2010)

8. Tame Impala - Desire Be Desire Go (Innerspeaker, Modular 2010)

9. Keepaway - Yellow Wings (Baby Style EP, Lefse 2010)

10. Pepepiano - No Way (Altered Zones)

11. HEALTH - Before Tigers (CFCF Remix) (DISCO2, Lovepump United/City Slang 2010)

12. Lemonade - Lifted (Le Chev Remix) (Lifted Single, True Panther 2010)

13. Dominant Legs - Clawing Out at the Walls (Altered Zones)

14. Pearl Harbor - Luv Goon (Something about the Chaparrals EP, Mexican Summer 2009)

15. Deerhunter - Primitive 3D (Revival 7", 4AD 2010)

16. Magic Kids - Summer (Memphis, True Panther 2010)

17. David Crosby - Music is Love (If I Could Only Remember my Name, Rhino Atlantic 1971)

... (File Removed WITHOUT REQUEST - Sorry)

FC

There's Something About the Summer

Two albums. That's all it takes to make a summer awesome, really: add a few cool singles, some other minor long-runner crushes for variety, but in the end it's those two favorites that'll be playing, over and over, in your headphones on the street, on your portable stereo at the beach, or in your friends' car on your road-trip to wherever. Personally, my 2010 summer will forever be associated with Best Coast's Crazy for You and ceo's White Magic. What do these two albums have in common? Not much (besides, yes, having received the holy BNM tag from Pitchfork — sue me). They're actually pretty wildly different. But they each capture something about my summer, I guess; why else would they be the only two albums I've been able to listen to all the way through more than once in the past month?

Granted, it could be because they're not very long, hovering around the half-hour mark: ceo's White Magic falls a minute short with its eight songs, and Crazy For You goes barely a minute over with thirteen. It could also be because my summer has been, shall we say, peculiar — weird enough to make lengthy music listening a bit more difficult than usual. But I'll go for a third reason: I've been listening to these two albums a lot (and I mean, a LOT) simply because they're fantastic records.

White Magic is hard to wrap your head around at first. Or perhaps too easy: on first listen, you could dismiss it as a quick swirl of sugary but ultimately insignificant pop music. (Which, actually, you could also reduce Best Coast's music to.) And maybe that's why some people will discuss it as a "mere" summer album — destined to be nothing else, like all those cheesy summer top hits that you have barbecues to and dance to and make out to, only forget about them once the season is gone. But instead of capitalizing on the easy, blissful nostalgia usually associated with such summery melodies (see "chill-wave"), White Magic goes for immediacy, for an urgent rush; instead of evoking lost memories of youth, it fills its pop songs with the exuberant, hyper-active essence of youth.

The melodies are pure, hefty gold: "Illuminata" and its indelible guitar hook, "Love and Do What You Will" and its sly chorus, all the way down to "Come With Me"'s anthemic dance-pop, you won't find a bad song on the album (even the first and last songs, the most forgettable in the batch, are way more than decent). Every track brims with ideas, crammed with shits in tempo and atmosphere, with unpredictable melodic twists and turns. All in around 3 minutes.

But what makes White Magic truly unique, instead of limited to an exercise in genre (the Pet Sounds or Odyssey and Oracle remake), is its jaw-dropping production. Every second on White Magic literally explodes with sonic detail: masterfully arranged strings, acoustic guitars, bongos, muscular house beats, sampled whoops, warbled voices, shouts, knife-sharpening noises, and other seemingly random sounds, all packed into a bewildering storm that evokes, in its maximalist joy, Daft Punk's Discovery or The Avalanches' self-titled album. Like those illustrious predecessors, White Magic is seamless, perfectly controlled, never overblown or annoying. And like them, it offers a perfect blend of synthetic and organic. What all 21st-century pop should be.

Best Coast's music, by comparison, is simplicity incarnate. Not as well-produced as her BF Wavves' latest release, her album isn't quite lo-fi either, but it certainly won't dazzle you with its orchestration or guitar sound. But that doesn't matter. At all. Not just because Best Coast (aka Bethany Cosentino) doesn't seem to give a shit what you think about her record. But because Crazy for You, in its own way, is just as immediate, just as golden, just as melodic as ceo's restless lab-pop.

Crazy for You is a string of neat singles. It's laid-back. It's carried by Cosentino's honeyed, strong, stoned voice. But what makes it exceptional — when it is bound to be compared to fellow West-Coast rockers Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, Lichtenstein, etc. — is Cosentino's spontaneous, unselfconscious delivery. Example: during opening single "Boyfriend," when Cosentino laments the fact that the "other girl" is "prettier and skinnier," her words begin to upset the rhythm, as if she's singing them on the spot, without any prior writing.

And that's the source of Crazy for You's immense charm: by shedding rhythms and rhymes at various moments in her songs (ok, no, ALL the time), Cosentino lets them breathe with lazy spontaneity, allowing her voice to hang on to notes pretty much as it pleases ("That makes me mooooooooooody"…), and making everything sound as though it was recorded in your own living room, almost by chance, by a friend who thought it would be awesome to come hang out and play music.

This spur-of-the-moment quality brings out the emotions in Best Coast's songs. These are pretty simple, straightforward, almost mundane emotions, all relationship-induced, too: love, longing, sadness, disgust. But in Best Coast's world, they're often mingled and hard to differentiate ("Well I don't love you/ But I don't hate you/ I don't know how I feel"). They're ambiguous. But at the same time they're expressed in plain, direct words, in a shining simplicity that makes them utterly relatable ("Pick up the phone/ I wanna talk/ About my day/ It really sucked" — you can't beat that sort of casual universality).

In the end, that's probably why I've been listening to Crazy for You so much this summer: in its straightforwardness and its immediacy, it's an album that makes you feel like you're talking to your best friend, trading heartbreak stories over breakfast beer and stale weed at two PM on a Sunday, while all the normal people are out at the beach.

Beaches, Beaches!

It's not like I've been really active lately, but I'm leaving for a sunnier place (why would ever do that?). Since Flavio's already gone building little boxes, that leaves exactly zero people to write for this blog in the next two weeks. That's unless I miss ESS so much I'll ditch my friends and go to internet cafe. Which could happen.

So long, friendz.


JNCT