Physical Affection

In promotion of their new (and pretty damn great) Cloud Drive streaming media service, Amazon was offering Lady Gaga’s new record Born This Way for just 99 cents. Now, I’ve never been the biggest fan of her music, but I thought I may as well own a complete record to give her a fair chance — you know, seeing as how she’s one of the most popular artists in the world.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t won over by this record. Instead, I found it even more cloyingly campy and difficult to listen to than I anticipated. It seems I’m just not cut out to be one of Gaga’s Little Monsters.

In disproportion to my interest in her actual music, it is telling that I have now written three posts on Gaga. In fact, I have always admired Lady Gaga as an art director and performer. I think that she and her team come up with some of the catchiest, strangest, most referentially brilliant props and performance conceits in modern memory (her meat dress and cigarette sunglasses come to mind). Now, I don’t find the becycled cover of Born This Way to be brilliant, exactly, but I was pleased that it recalled one of my favorite old pinball machines, Centaur. Back when I first saw the straight-out-of-the-80s Centaur machine at a bar in Seattle, I remember thinking the concept of a centaur being half-man and half-motorcycle was funny but strangely compelling. Would this form factor be a gift or a curse? It’s difficult to tell…

…and now I’m thinking the cover just might be kinda brilliant — an aptly odd metaphor for the whole pop-machine Gaga identity whirlwind… Damn! She got me again!

Perhaps the only question that remains is: who wore it better?

Art, Design, Music centaur, game, motorcycle, pinball, video

Director and king of the music video treatment, Patrick Daughters, has always had what you could describe as a cute style. Born out of an era when Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry were king, his music videos became known for their in-camera special effects, single continuous shots, playfulness, and a sort of sublime beauty — oftentimes bathed in slow motion.

After an unexpectedly popular video for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Maps in 2003, a critically acclaimed suite of videos for Feist (including 1,2,3,4 and I Feel It All), and his quick dissemination as the director of choice for indie bands who could afford to pull off his ideas (Death Cab For Cutie, The Shins, Interpol, Grizzly Bear), you would be forgiven for thinking you could pick out a Patrick Daughters video from a lineup.

However, it seems that the moody reverence most of us born before 1980 hold for Depeche Mode was able to turn even a life is beautiful type like Mr. Daughters towards the dark side.

His two videos for the band, the first accompanying the tune Wrong (2009) and a new one for Personal Jesus [Stargate Remix], have no sense of salvation baked in. Gone are the children, bright colors, and paper cutouts of his previous videos, and in their place we are shown a sort of decontextualized paranoia and an almost poetic sense of vengeance. Though both videos have Daughters-isms — Wrong‘s distinct stylistic realism and metaphorical backwards-moving car, Personal Jesus‘ slow-mo glittery explosion of water — both of these videos seem part of a new body of work. It seems like Mr. Daughters is pushing outside of his and his audiences’ comfort zone. It’s an interesting direction, and I’m curious where Patrick will go with this new found thematic freedom. I look forward to his next batch of music videos, and I’m very curious to hear more about his rumored upcoming feature film debut.

Movies, Music depeche mode, directors, music videos, Patrick Daughters

I liked Lady Gaga’s Madonna impression at the end of the video for her very Madonna-esque new single ‘Born This Way’. I’m not sure if we’ve ever had such an openly self-aware and culturally reflexive pop star.

Andy Warhol, perhaps, comes closest in my estimation — however, as is evidenced in the recent Banksy film ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’, Warhol somehow seems to get the credit/blame anytime anything in popular culture eats itself.

I remember having an animated conversation with several of my classmates back in art school about the existence of creative genius. Andy Warhol and Madonna are the two names from that conversation that I remember everyone agreeing on. I am curious to see what Gaga will be able to create as she moves forward with her entourage of art directors and fashion designers, somehow embodying the spirit of both of these bigger-than-life artists in one unlikely package; Sexier than Warhol and artier than Madonna. Maybe this is what post-postmodernism looks like.

Fashion, Music impressions, lady gaga, Madonna, music videos

Do yourself a favor and bliss out to Andrio Abero’s newest mix, the fourth in his excellent Psychometry series. Better yet, subscribe to listen via iTunes or RSS — that way, you’ll get DJ Andrio’s dance parties to go as soon as they’re available.

Music andrio abero, dj, house, podcast

Deerhunter is an interesting band. Their music always seems straightforwardly lovely, but I have a sense of them as a really psychedelic and strange band. Maybe it’s all due to their singer, Bradford Cox, and his on-stage dress-up antics… In any case, stream their new record Halcyon Digest (out as of yesterday on 4AD)in its entirety above. I’ve certainly been enjoying it today, trying to recall the light feeling of long days and bright sun.

Whatever it takes to hang on to whatever traces of summer we’ve got left up here in the Northwest.

Music Deerhunter, Music, records, rock

School of Seven Bells is a rock/psych/electronic/drone band from Brooklyn, NY. They’ve recently released their second full-length record — soberingly titled Disconnect From Desire — on Santa Monica-based label Vagrant Records and Ann Arbor-based Ghostly International.

The record is very good — better than their first, I dare say. The precision melodies of the harmonized female vocals makes me want to compare them to Stereolab, but they’re really much more Kevin Shields-ish. A bed of texturally complex but largely droning electronic and guitars elements lay down a soft bed of noise on which the voices of twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza have ample space to soar.

I have seen an NPR article in which the band claims that the meaning of their name comes from some South American school for pickpockets, but I think this explanation reeks of bullshittery. Instead, I propose a much more likely and much more poetically relevant genesis of the name School of Seven Bells…

Ranna… the first, the smallest bell. Ranna the sleepbringer, the sweet, low sound that brought silence in its wake.

Mosrael was the waker… the bell whose sound was a seesaw, throwing the ringer further into Death, as it brought the listener into Life.

The above quotes are from Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series of fantasy books, and they describes the first two of the seven bells used by necromancers to control the dead. Necromancy is an age-old magical practice where the summoner seeks to summon or control the spirit of a deceased person. In Nix’s books, the necromancer is a practitioner of this magic who use each of the seven bells to do this and that to dead people.

The bells were apparently very difficult to use, causing harm more often than not to the ringer of the bell if rung not-quite-right. Listening to School of Seven Bells new record — to the lyrics of songs like Heart is Strange — this theme seems close to the surface. Throughout, the deceptively simple and beautiful things in life seem to have turned on the song’s authors to reveal themselves as complex, overwhelming, and disappointingly hollow.

I might be way off on this, as art doesn’t necessarily implicate the author, but I sincerely hope that the band manages to find balance and satisfaction with their increasing artistic success and with the traveling musician’s lifestyle that I happen to know isn’t easy to maintain. Also, lord knows — any band with two tiny beautiful women in it must have to put up with more than their fair share of crap out on the road.

Anyway, they’ll be on tour all over North America for the better part of September and October, bringing them most likely to a city near you. Go out, see the show (which is pretty great, from my experience), find the band, and invite them over for a home cooked breakfast to send them on their way to the next gig. Let ‘em know you like their music, and that you appreciate them riding around in a van all over creation to bring it to you.

Music bells, electronic, live music, Music, necromancer, old kingdom, rock, school of seven bells