Bring on the night

I'm a little confused by the reviews I've read for VHS Or Beta's recent album Bring On The Comets. Almost all of them use the adjective 'disco', which I just don't get at all. Particularly since the rest of those reviews usually run along the lines of 'Cure reference', 'Daft Punk reference', 'Duran Duran reference'... I definitely hear the new wave in VHS Or Beta, and I'm not going to say Comets is a great album. But this type of review makes me wonder at what point these prissy little critics stopped listening and rushed to judgment, reaching for their dismissive derivatives.

VHS Or Beta gave a great show last night, demonstrating that they are a tight unit, even with the recent addition of their fifth member. They play with a confidence that shows they are comfortable in venues much larger than the one where I saw them. Much of their set had an anthemic feel that I could imagine rocking an arena. They seem to have left behind the all-black-extra-zipper new wave image they used for Night On Fire, in favor of more comfortable, less image-conscious clothes (unless they're saving that for the larger venues, too.)

While I am fond of 'Burn it all down', their best song is still 'Alive'. (They seem to have noticed; they made it their first encore and it got the strongest response of everything they played.) That song proves that these guys are more than the sum of their influences; it can't be waved off simply by invoking U2 or Simple Minds. I'm not saying I don't hear the influence of those bands. I just don't like reading reviews that sound like the author's point of view can be summed up with the phrase 'Everything has been done before.' If that's how you feel, go be a hermetic scholar and leave the music for the people who are still capable of enjoying it.

VHS Or Beta official website

Mr. Watson...

A new playlist has debuted on Puck & Baedeker's Live365 radio station. One of the tracks on this playlist will be the subject of Monday's post. Click here to be taken to Puck & Baedeker Radio.

morsel:

Christopher Cross's 'Sailing' reminds him of the odd suspense he experienced during, of all things, a dance performance. Downtown at the Capitol Theatre there was an annual children's performing arts series, to which his mother took him and his sister. Most of the performances have faded from memory; he remembers an instance when one section of a dancing glow worm fell into the pit while dancing to, of course, 'Shine little glow worm, glimmer...' That vignette conveys the quality of entertainment inherent in the performing arts series quite well.

But he remembers a slightly higher-minded modern dance performance to 'Sailing' which involved three women in floor length wrap skirts, and three narrow vertical screens with abstracted sailboats on them, spaced apart across the stage. There may have been similarly abstracted sailboats on the skirts, too. The dance consisted of rather unadventurous movement executed in staggered timing: one woman comes out from behind her screen and starts the phrase, followed shortly by the second woman emerging from behind her flat and doing the same phrase, eventually followed by the third woman... As the phrase ended they would return behind their screens, one after the other, and then start over again on another phrase.

With this clearly established structure, it was easy even for a child to notice aberrations, and halfway through the dance, aberrations started to happen. One of the dancer's skirts was apparently not staying on well; whatever was holding it closed, velcro or button, was failing, and the dancer was increasingly concerned about it falling off. She began cutting her phrases short to retreat behind her screen, presumably to try to fix her skirt before she had to come out again. The whole ABC order of the dancers was disrupted.

It was the most riveting thing he ever saw at the Capitol, because it was completely real; this unctuous song about relaxing had become the soundtrack for the real life drama of a woman fighting to keep her skirt on and go on with the show. He remembers the tension in the audience as they all focused on her, oblivious to the two other women who stuck to the proper choreography. It was hard to know if they hoped she would make it through without the dreaded wardrobe malfunction, or if they were rooting for an early climax to the number. He was drained and relieved when it was finally over, her modesty preserved.

Cover me, quickly

The concept of 'cover' versions of pop songs has changed over the course of the recording era. A long time back, when songwriters were as central as performers, the public would hear dueling versions of the same song released more or less at the same time, somewhat negating the idea that one version was primary and the other a 'cover'. Later in the songwriters' era, hit songs would commonly be recorded by multiple artists, often in different styles. Consider 'Mack the knife', a hit for Bobby Darin and Ella Fitzgerald in 1959/1960, which pulled Louis Armstrong's version from four years prior back onto the charts, too. Technically, all of these are covers, since the original is from 1928.

In the seventies and eighties, as songwriting lost some of its primacy, covers were common, but more likely to be recorded years after the 'original' version had been released. When Naked Eyes covered '(There's) always something there to remind me', their fans had to be told who Dionne Warwick was, much less Sandie Shaw, R.B. Greaves, or Burt Bacharach and Hal David. When Soft Cell tacked their cover of 'Where did our love go' onto their cover of 'Tainted Love', it was an exercise in new wave nostalgia.

The phenomenon of covers as homages during live performances has existed for a long time, too. Artists commonly take the live opportunity to perform a song they admire, by an artist they admire, as a way of paying tribute to their influences, or even just gratifying their impulses.

For the most part, calling something a 'cover' has denigrated it; it implies that it is secondary, unoriginal. Lately, though, the identity of cover versions seems to have shifted again, along the lines of live concert homages. Artists are regularly recording their own versions of originals that are brand new. In some cases, those artists are even invited to do so by the artists who released the 'original' version, and the cover version appears on the same single as the original.

One of the earliest examples that comes to my mind is four years ago, when Postal Service released their single for 'Such great heights'; the CD5 included a version of the song performed by Iron And Wine, and a cover of another Postal Service track, 'We will become silhouettes' by Shins. In both cases the songs are radically reinterpreted by the covering artists, but obviously with the approval of Postal Service. More recently, LCD Soundsystem released their single for 'All my friends', including a cover version of the song by Franz Ferdinand. (That's a particularly interesting case, since the Franz Ferdinand version turns out to be better than LCD Soundsystem's...)

The phenomenon is pervasive in the less-than-official realm; on a weekly basis cover tracks turn up on the blogosphere. This spring Arctic Monkeys did a bang up version of Amy Winehouse's 'You know I'm no good'. Two weeks ago 30 Seconds To Mars recorded possibly their best work to date - official or otherwise - in a rather unexpected gloomy head trip version of Kanye West's 'Stronger', on a live show.

The more common form of covers is alive and well, too; Mark Ronson's Version is an album's worth, and compilations like Nineteeneightyseven and Guilt By Association are devoted to them explicitly. But I am enjoying the phenomenon of the simultaneous tribute. The tone of these covers is somehow noncompetitive. There's a general sense of camaraderie, and artists don't seem to be threatened by them. They contribute to the general climate of cross pollination, as it were, in modern music, which can only be a good thing. And in some cases, they're a real treat.

Sol Lewitt

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Artforum 5, 'Paragraphs On Conceptual Art'

POLYROCK - ROMANTIC ME

The more I learn about the extremely potent time and place in music history that was the late seventies/early eighties in New York City, the more I wish I had been born just a few years earlier. Without being overly romantic about it, there was an amazing density of ideas and influences colliding in the post punk and new wave movements there (among other equally rich genres) and I wish I'd been able to experience it when it was happening. These days many of those ideas and influences are enjoying new resonance, bringing new attention to some artists who didn't even get that much attention back then.

Of the new wave 'art rock' bands in the New York school, Talking Heads are the ones who made it, achieving a level of success no one might have expected for a band that unorthodox. But they didn't work in a vacuum, and Polyrock is a great example of a band who might have gone just as great a distance on the same course, but didn't for one reason or another. 'Romantic me', the first track from their eponymous debut, surely holds its own.

After punk had done its best to obliterate all the ornaments of rock and roll, post punk bands tended to be conscientious in the way they reincorporated those ornaments, and there were quite a few approaches to doing so. For some, it was an intellectual process, and many of these musicians found themselves grouped in the descriptive but nebulous category of 'art rock'. That might be convenient, but it doesn't do justice to the richness of the explorations these musicians made.

Before he formed Polyrock, Billy Robertson had worked with John Cale, and was interested in the way structuralism could inform pop music. For Polyrock, Robertson enlisted the production services of Philip Glass. The process of approaching classical music through its framework had started much earlier, and some of these classical musicians were very interested in rock music, too. Glass felt an affinity to artists who were approaching rock music the way he had been treating classical music.

'Romantic me' shows quite a bit of Glass's influence and/or involvement. Despite the fact that it is based on a two chord progression, it hardly reminds one of a two chord punk song. It employs an organ sound similar to that used frequently in Glass's own works at the time. The traditional rock instruments are present, but they are used as ensemble pieces, with few traces of personal expression. If the track were an instrumental, it could function the same way many Glass tracks have, as a score for modern dance or for an avant garde motion picture.

While the vocal for 'Romantic me' works in striking contrast to the arrangement, it is quite fitting to the art rock manner. Robertson sings in a yelping, affected style similar to David Byrne or Mark Mothersbaugh, and he works up a minimal lyrical string that loops back on itself with variations. Meaning is not as important as form. 'Romantic me' in the first chorus becomes 'romantic dreams' in the second, and 'romantic schemes' in the third, and the two-line verses are there purely to set up those phrases. Symbolist phrases like 'big big clock' and 'swim big fish', chosen specifically for their meter, add to the sense that the lyrics were generated more than they were written, in the way Merce Cunningham generated his dances, or they way some color field painters generated their pieces.

Ultimately, pop music can think all it wants to, but it only succeeds if it affects the listener viscerally, and Polyrock didn't just make good pop music, they made good dance music. 'Romantic me' fits well in a dance floor set with Altered Images, China Crisis and Blancmange. Polyrock's catalog has recently been issued for the first time on compact disc; hopefully more people will take the opportunity to enjoy them.

[At the time of this posting, Polyrock do not have an official website.]