Gig of the year so far?

Just heard about a gig taking place in Bristol on April 7 at the Arnolfini and Start The Bus. It sounds like the organisers must have sat down, looked through my record collection and said: "Can we get all these guys in the same room at the same time?" Well, judging by the line-up, they have. Performances on the night from King Midas Sound, Oneohtrix Point Never and Games make this one unmissable - although, being in Bristol, I shall very probably miss it. Making up the setlist are Some Truths, who the press details say are "joining the psychedelic dots between John Carpenter soundtracks, Mika Vainio's pioneering early work and Sun Ra's moog space missions." Which makes them sound pretty comprehensive, if nothing else.
So, somebody, get down there and enjoy this night. Please.
Details are available here

Is this decade more 80s than the 1980s?

Is this decade more 80s than the 1980s?

It's an undeveloped thought, but the notion just came to me as I took a look at the new Destroyer album, Kaputt. The LP is leaving the critics foaming at the mouth. Indeed, it sounds like a very decent album of its kind, but all the retro 80s music / video / imagery like it that has been swirling around in the last year or two is starting to seem a little like it's overpowering our culture.

Was the 80s like this? I was there, and I'm not sure it was. The decade seemed less obviously 80s. I don't recall this weird sense of revivalism being so obviously at play in so much popular music at the time. I'm not hailing that era as one that stands out in musical history. But it does strike me as strange that we are now mining it so savagely.

Three concepts - none of which I understand - seem to be behind this 1980s revivalism, or at least attempt to explain it. They will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the discourse of modern popular music criticism. Yawningly familiar.

1. Hypnagogic pop

This one comes from America, I think. Or most of the bands who bear its trademarks are from the US anyway. I think this is people like Toro y Moi, Pocahaunted, Ducktails - that kind of thing. Poppy, but nostalgic, with layers of fuzz / feedback / dreaminess. This one was cooked up by Wire critic David Keenan. On one level, it's a totally legitimate attempt to understand an important musical strand of the present day. On the other, it's a heap of blather-filled pseudo-profundity. I can't quite work out which. In his essay on the topic, which I didn't even notice in Wire when it came out a year or so ago, he talks of this then new musical sound seeming similar to - I'm paraphrasing - the phase between sleeping and waking that we all experience. It has something to do with Don Henley's Boys of Summer as well, I think I remember him saying. Anyway, irregardless of the clarity / credibility of Keenan's theories, it pointed to the fact that this 80s revivalism was live and among us.

2. Hauntology

I believe this was coined some time before Keenan's theory - back in about 2006, perhaps - by Simon Reynolds. I think this is supposed to be more British in sound, and includes bands like Broadcast and the Belbury Poly set. I don't think the principal difference is geographical, but it's the only one I can work out.

3. Chillwave

This is the vulgar younger brother of the other two, a sort of cheap, tabloid stain of a genre invented by those too thick to understand (1) and (2). As far as I can make out, it is a label that can be used with reference to people like Washed Out and Neon Indian, but not serious musicians like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds or anyone like that. They're more hypnagogic - or H pop, as some people have taken to calling it now.

So those are the three strands of musical labelling used in discourse around the topic of 80s revivalism. What few seem to hint at is the possible sterility of this phase we are going through. I love it, and check out the new "H pop" bands hailed by Pitchfork every day. But it does worry me that all this revivalism hints at a larger cultural failure - the failure to conjure up anything new. I don't think it applies more broadly to other sounds - dubstep, for instance, is a fresh, vital force in modern electronic music - but the fetishism of this genre for the past is worrying.

Will it last, or are we in the middle of one of those phases like Brit pop that we all look back on and laugh about years later? I'm not sure. I like all this revivalism stuff. That's the problem. I just wonder what it says about where we are right now that the cultural world I live in is looking more like Miami Vice every day.

Superb new mix for the weekend

Rush straight to the A Strangely Isolated Place website immediately if you have any sense - there's a mix on there that will knock your socks off. The selection is by Mig Dfoe (or is it Defoe?), and features tracks from artists such as Burial, Oneohtrix Point Never, Flying Lotus, Autechre and Zola Jesus. And it is one sweet listen.

Go there now, quickly, before you do ANYTHING else: Click

The 40 best things in music this year - the final five

5. Beach House

Beach House seem to grow with each album, and this year's Teen Dream was a marvel. Lo-fi organ, plucked guitar - the basic elements rarely seem to change very much, but the recipe always seems to work. On one level, it sounds like something from a well-crafted French mixtape. But those fibrous, wire-drawn guitars haunt the ear, with a twang that reminds me of Town and Country. And there is something inescapably dolorous about the voice of Victoria Legrand. Let's see what she can do with a phone book.



4. Flying Lotus

I remember listening to Cosmogramma late at night in the country with the windows down in my car, and thinking - woah, THIS is the album for late-night driving. Which it is. Or one of them, at least. Deeper than Los Angeles and more finely honed, this was an album that seemed to offer more the more you listened. Miracles of purified pop such as MmmHmm sit alongside hushed, half-buried gems like Thom Yorke number And The World Laughs With You - a song that would be the centrepiece of most ordinary albums. There are plenty of broken beats in there too - although perhaps they sound more shattered, fractured or just smashed then anything else.
FlyLo got cross recently when he missed out on a Grammy for this album, but he has nothing to worry about - all the right people knew this was dynamite.



3. Local Natives

Gorilla Manor was for 2010 what the Fleet Foxes debut was for 2008. That this wasn't recognised more openly was one of the great disappointments of the year for me. The album sneaked out late last year, but drew wider attention upon its US release in February. Airplanes was the immediate hook - but tracks such as Cubism Dream and Stranger Things had a bewitching beauty to them that screamed of greatness. Attacked by some for sounding too much like too many other bands, they need to shed their influences - but have already landed one of the year's killer albums.



2. Twin Shadow

If Morrissey started listening to Junior Boys, it's possible this is the sort of record he would produce. Twin Shadow's George Lewis Jr unleashed Forget on the world this year like a man letting off a bomb. And when the bomb went off, it sounded like the 80s. At its best, utterly unbeatable, although the record is one of peaks and troughs. But what a talent - and God only knows what he could go on to achieve.



1. Oneohtrix Point Never

It's not an obvious thought, but it's increasingly becoming clear that Daniel Lopatin is this generation's answer to Aphex Twin. Musically, it's not really a fair comparison, but he is starting to look like the figurehead of modern electronic music - or even perhaps its saviour. When Rifts dropped last year, it was like a new civilisation had been uncovered, and the people in it all listened to Boards of Canada. This year, with Returnal, it felt like we had been given a secret glimpse of what the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey might have listened to when they were off duty. Like so much great music today, it borrows from the past to take us somehow one step closer to the future. Deep, and mouthwateringly brilliant.