Missing the STD Connection Entirely

I am about to bitch about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! I am doing this in 2006, and I realize this is a horrible thing to do. Nevertheless, I feel I am justified and that it will be a somewhat productive exercise. Let me take the first part first and the second part second.

I started this blog in 2003. I picked the name based on the name I had chosen to release music under, which I chose some years prior--2000, I'd say. I had picked this name as a reference to gonorrhea ("Clap is derived from the obsolete French word clapoir meaning sexual sore") but when searching on MP3.com (RIP), I discovered that a Cleveland horror-rock band had already claimed that name. So I added the s. It was a happy coincidence: as the blog started to focus on pop, the name became strikingly apropos.

But then those fuckers came along.

I never really liked them, but it was always more of a focused ambivalence. I certainly was put off by their name (which I can't imagine predates mine), as I am indeed by all the imitators that have sprung up in their wake: Austin's "Clap! Clap!" (whose existence, when I discovered it, sent a shiver of revulsion through my body) and Dublin's "The Clap" who I kind of like given that they have a picture of gay bodybuilding Hitler on their website. (Even though, again, name's taken guys, at least in Ohio, and where else matters?) It annoyed me in that narcissism of small differences way--was I really kin to these fuckers? And should I really be third on the Google page? I was being kinda stupid, you see.

As I said, I never really liked them, but this was really on the basis of one or two songs, which told me, I thought, all I needed to know. But then people I know, people I like, told me they were good, and that I would like them. They said I should listen to them more. I ignored them. Then yesterday, I was searching for the new YYYs album, and I got theirs as well. So I grabbed it, and today I listened to it.

And holy shit.

Thinking about what I'm about to say, I feel a bit weird, because a lot of what I'm about to say is exactly the kind of stuff I've complained about other people saying. I don't like it when people complain about bands being derivative, because that doesn't seem to matter, and I don't like it when people complain about a singer sounding like another singer, because who cares? I don't like it when people complain about bands being popular (or, I guess, indie-popular), because people liking things is nice, and the whole thing just makes me feel like a grumpy old man, which I hope I'm not.

But what I've realized is that all of this stems from one basic fact: not only do I not like this band, I do not understand why anyone would. Maybe this is a failure of imagination, but I honestly cannot hear anything about this band that would seem to inspire affection or joy or passion. And because I can't understand, based on the music, why this band would be so well-liked, I must conclude that there are other, extra-musical reasons. And I must bitch about them. So here I go!

The thing that strikes me about CYHSY is--and this is the narcissism of small differences thing again (hey, might as well abbreviate that: NOSD)--is that they sound remarkably like what a band I was running would sound like if they made all the choices I would consider but then avoid. It feels like they've rummaged through my back catalog and picked all the songs I decided not to pursue, the ones that were too samey, too droney, too default-rock. And then they arranged them like an unsatisfying demo, with unnecessary instruments and rocking-out parts that fail to acheive any feeling of rocking out. The drums do what they're trying to do but no more. They're too quiet, too constant.

I'm personalizing this, but it's not personal. CYHSY are very much of my generation and demographic of musicians, and so a lot of what they're incorporating feels very familiar. It's just that they seem remarkably skilled at taking this set of influences and choosing all the worst ones, or rather, I guess, all the safe ones--all the ones I hear people talking about at a party or in a bar and immediately steer clear. (Here's an example: the production aesthetics of Neutral Milk Hotel rather than the song structures and lyrics and vocals, which seem by far to be the interesting part about that band, but there you go on the CYHSY album: fuzz bass and toy piano. Woot.) And for all the influences that get thrown around, I can probably reduce it to one bon mot: they sound like a bunch of late-period Wilco fans got together and decided to make an album.

And then there's the voice. The voice, no matter how the vocalist arrived at it, sounds like David Byrne. There's simply no way around that basic fact: dude sounds like David Byrne. And this makes me think horrible, horrible things, like: has indie-rock become one giant impersonation contest, one big game of trendspotting where the music nerds become musicians and we worship them as originators? Have we drifted maybe a little too far from our puritanical 90s roots? Or is it just that the cult of low expectations has become a bigger cultural gatekeeper?

But the big worry, the one that keeps me up at night, the reason I bitch about a band having a name similar to that of my blog, stems from the fact that CYHSY and me are clearly both working from a similar set of ideas and aesthetics. They're a poppy, happy band, with disco beats and non-rock instrumentation, so it seems reasonable to assume they have a mistrust of miserbalism and (see above) authenticity, as well as affection for dancing and cheerfulness and all that crap. But the music they make, which presumably is a result of those values, sucks. It sucks monkey brains. Even worse, it's something those values were specifically meant to oppose: it's boring.

This is why CYHSY so repulse me. It's not so much them, it's the fact of their popularity. My peers have voted, and this is what they want. For all the effort made to change indie attitudes, apparently there's so little capacity for ecstacy in that crowd that it ends up in a sort of mown-lawn mush. If they're not moping, they've got nothing, just some rock guitar and pallid beats you can move your feet to and a retro patina that just makes me shudder. If this is where all this is heading, count me out.
posted by Mike B. at 1:02 PM 8 comments

Bryan, who we are playing with tonight, has drawn the band as robots. I am the second from the left--the one that looks like it is about to dismember a minor character while yelling "SMASH!" but in the original picture I was just showing off my shiny new bracelet, I swear. I actually meant to link to subinev yesterday and comment on his shiny new design, nice new posts, and robot drawings, but I got distracted by shiny things that weren't bracelets or subinev. I am still mildly confused why all the robots look vaguely insect-like, but mustn't question the muse.

So yes, we are playing tonight, at the Delancey, and it is the final night of our monthlong residency. You should come out and dance. I won't scare you, I promise. It'll be just like the internet. Man in Gray and the Wowz are also playing, and who doesn't like them? 8 o'clock sharp, and free.

posted by Mike B. at 11:12 AM 3 comments

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Well that was weird.

I was eating lunch in Union Square. As I finished, someone walked up to me and it turned out to be an old college friend, Alec Longstreth. We had a nice chat and then he left.

I then walked back through the park so as to get to the north side, thinking about how funny it was that I had run into Alec, and wondering if there was anyone else I knew in the park. At which point I passed a guy sitting on a park bench, thought he looked familiar, looked a bit closer, and realized it was Matt Friedberger. Eleanor was sitting on the ground in front of him.

I spent a decent bit of the last two days thinking about the Fiery Furnaces, and then all of a sudden there they are, sitting on a park bench. I didn't really know what to do about it ("Hi, my name's Mike, and I was mildly dissappointed with your new album"?), so I went to Barnes & Noble and looked at guidebooks.

So what should I have done?

posted by Mike B. at 1:08 PM 1 comments

Also, Jukebox. Apparently people actually like that Lips song; maybe I should listen to it again. I also am starting to think that British people have been so traumatized by the glut of horrible, wimpy rock bands in their area of the world that they have a lingering resentment toward all rock bands, even ones involving Jack White. This is truly a tragedy.

posted by Mike B. at 11:30 AM 0 comments

After all my bitching, this is a nice thing to see: An exhaustive guide to the proper nouns of Bitter Tea. It does the legwork I have been too uninspired to do and tracks down some of the real-world references thrown out over the course of the album, and, among other things, really illuminates the speak-sing parts in "Bitter Tea" (the song). Go Cleveland! The rest of the blog is great as well, but this in particular really enhances my appreciation of the album.

A few notes on "Oh Sweet Woods" while it's up (definitely one of my favorites from the album, by the way): I will ask old-skool clap clap blog poster Jason about Albertson'ses outside Boise, as this is where he grew up (and I need to write him anyway), but it does seem worth mentioning, somehow, that Lake Tahoe is right by where the Donner Party got trapped in the mountains. Just sayin'.

posted by Mike B. at 10:57 AM 0 comments

Monday, April 24, 2006

They may both pucker, but a whistle ain't a kiss

The mashup of "Kiss" and "The Whistle Song" (and a li'l bit of "A Bizarre Love" I think), which you can hear aroundabout here (it's the first track on the player), is one of those things that are interesting because they don't actually work. That little whistle riff just doesn't quite fit with Prince's funk, even though both are so wide-open that it seems like they could fit with anything, especially since both theoretically spring from the same tradition. But put one on top of the other, they're at odds, and because of this even the vocals don't quite match up, all of which indicates that they are in fundamentally different musical modes.

As I say, this should not be the case. Hip-hop production derived directly from funk, in a quite literal sense, for most of its existence. That it's shifted away from that is undeniable, but I think the thing people focus on is the sonics. Clearly, those have shifted, and this has had an effect on the musical mode: with a greater focus on the low end, basslines have become much less busy, and the high end has become almost a drone at time, with very little of the sharp horn breaks and hi-hat patterns that characterized hip-hop's first decade and a half of productions. I get the sense that all this started with G-funk, as modern hip-hop productions seem to have taken the keyboard lines and ditched everything else, reducing the bass to single-note hits and thus flattening out a lot of the emphasis on a particular key that funk tended to do, ending up with more free-floating lines, untethered to any particular center, which certainly works with the slippery vocal style most modern MCs employ. That's why I think the mashup doesn't work: funk's emphasis on a particular, definite note, and the particular, definite intervals above that doesn't really gel with the darker turn you hear in the production of "Whisper Song."

But what I can't figure out is what exactly that turn is, and how it's acheived. What I'm trying to say with "mode" is: if I had to create a Dipset kinda production with a marching band, how would I do it? I know how I would create a funky backing track: aside from the obvious rhythm requirements, I'd have a bassline that stayed around the tonic but elaborated it with a lot of octaves and 4ths and 5ths in particular places in the pattern, as well as major 7th chords and short bursts of triads that leaned heavily on octaves. But I don't know how to do that with the modern hip-hop production style, because I don't know quite how those lines would be classified. Are they minor? Are they in a particular minor mode? How much do they rely on the note the bass is emphasizing? Does it even matter what note the bass is emphasizing? (My sense is no, but I could be wrong.) Is there any particular relationship, even an accidental one, between the low and the high ends? How do producers think of these things as they're creating them? Not the producers doing more unusual productions, but the run-of-the-mill guys. This is what I wonder about, maybe because I wonder how it could be productively twisted.

posted by Mike B. at 4:36 PM 0 comments

Oh man is Hillary right about the "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)" remix. Oh man oh man oh man. The last thing he says, you see, I think we have all thought that, and it is nice that someone has put it in a song. You should go listen to it.

posted by Mike B. at 4:28 PM 0 comments

You've got the wrong Eleanor Friedberger

People have always accused the Fiery Furances of being obtuse and difficult, but with Bitter Tea, we can say for the first time that they seem to be doing it deliberately. Gallowsbird's Bark didn't seem that odd at first blush. On Blueberry Boat the off-kilter nature of the music fit the songs perfectly, and it's hard to imagine them sounding any other way, even if in the final analysis they could have made three or four songs b-sides or singles. And Rehearsing My Choir, which drew a lot of flack, again made perfect sense, especially once you became familiar with the narrative, even if, again again, there were bits (in this case musical bits) that could have been cut.

Now that we have Bitter Tea, however, it's impossible for me to shake the sense that they are not merely doing what they said about Blueberry Boat: "But in trying to be a decent rock band ourselves, we also have to accomplish progression by regression, and thereby should not only sing about---for instance---failure and incapacity, but embody it as well." They are not merely embracing failure, but actively undermining themselves, embracing one of the worst parts of the indie aesthetic, with Matthew pursuing the new-Dylan thing a little too hard. I guess this sense stems, in part, from the fact that we got to hear some of the Bitter Tea songs, unadorned, before the album came out. Once it did, some of these songs seem to have disappeared behind a wall of fruitless tinkering, and it's easy to draw a line from the production choices made on the songs we heard in their gestational state and what must have been done to the other songs we only got to hear in fully-produced versions.

Though I like the album and the songs, it's hard not to feel frustrated with how they turned out. Lots of people have complained about the sequencing by now, and they're totally right--it's a hard album to sit through, and it didn't have to be. But there also didn't have to be so much there--the album could be shorter by half without losing very much, either by cutting whole songs or sections of songs--and what's there didn't have to be so cluttered. This is frustrating because it seems so obvious, and given both the reliably good ears Matthew Friedberger has, and the inarguable fact that there are good songs buried under all that bullshit, it's hard to come out with any conclusion other than he's intentionally sabotaging his work.

Worse, this trend has carried over to the live shows. It actually began with the Choir tour, in which they played the entire album so fast and so hard that it almost didn't matter what songs they were playing, and it was, to my ears anyway, pretty much a failure, and, again, a frustrating one, like they were preempting criticism of Choir by refusing to present it in a positive light--"Yeah, whatever, it's difficult, people aren't going to like it." But I still think that album wouldn't sound out of place being played as an NPR segment, which I mean as a compliment. And then on their current tour they're doing a "rock band" approach, which sounds accessible, except that the Furnaces' charms don't really come out in a straight rock-combo arrangement, so again, it's a kind of grumpy distancing thing.

But then I started thinking about this, and I realized the seeds of this current disappointment have really been there from the beginning, and indeed are inseparable from the amazing work they've produced thus far ("thus far" being, it seems useful to remind myself, a mere 3 years!). Take their first, and supposedly most user-friendly album, Gallowsbird's Bark. Almost everything that bugs me about Bitter Tea is already in place: illogical noises, off-kilter takes on perfect songs, and general abundance; hell, even on the album's single, "Tropical Ice-Land," there aren't any actual drums, just a bunch of percussion. The thing is that here, all this stuff works: almost none of the songs are extraneous, and almost half come in at under three minutes; the noises get out of the way in time for the choruses, all of which provide solid, clear hooks, and are mixed in such a way that they compliment rather than overwhelm the songs; and the off-kilter takes are different but often better than what a more conventional band would come up with. Live, too, as they say, "The starting point of a rock band thinking about playing a show should be dissatisfaction with their songs," and their 2003-4 live shows, in which they chopped up and rearranged the various sections of their songs into a giant medley, were a big drawing point for new fans, but in the abstract, "let's play our songs really hard and fast" is no different from "let's play all of our songs as one big song"--it's just way less effective.

So in the end, I think the conclusion you have to draw from Bitter Tea isn't that the Furances are going about things in the wrong way. They're going about things the same way they always did. It's just that it isn't working like it used to. Arguably, this is the law of diminishing returns in action. But it's worrisome because, unlike with every other album they've put out, we have no idea where they're going next. There are no unreleased songs they've played live, and they don't seem to have said anything about their future direction as a band, as they always have before. Matthew has two solo albums coming out, but it seems unlikely that taking Eleanor out of the equation will really make things better, and from his descriptions, they don't sound that much different from the Choir/Bitter Tea style. I worry that I sound like just another fanboy when I complain about this sort of thing, but I don't want things to sound like Gallowsbird's again--I just can't shake the feeling that they've played this particular set of instincts as far as they can go, and they really need to try a different tack. Take a break, even. I suppose we'll see.

posted by Mike B. at 12:43 PM 3 comments