One could be forgiven for thinking, on first being introduced to this little EP, that Harbors hail from good ol’ London town. There’s a real touch of the aesthetic that’s been so ubiquitous here in the last few years; the artless simplicity tinged with just a touch of vocal venom that made the Mystery Jets, Johnny Flynn, et al so popular. The interplay between the drums and acoustic guitars, specifically, gives the impression that the players want us to think they’ve never picked up an instrument before, when in actuality it’s a very controlled, thoroughly thought-out approach.
As it happens, this particular foursome are from farther-flung shores entirely; those of California, in point of fact. One assumes there’s probably something to be said for how the ‘London sound’ of recent times owes it’s origin to musicians who spent far too long listening to acts from across the pond (but who were nonetheless still unable to repress their Englishness entirely), but this comparison doesn’t tell the full story of this EP.
I imagine Habors would most likely be very surprised by the comparison, in fact, and it really is just on first listen that it comes to mind. They themselves cite acts like Bright Eyes, The National, and Arcade Fire amongst their influences, although I wouldn’t say that paints an accurate picture of the band’s sound either. There’s none of the furious energy that marks out those other band’s best work on display here, but rather a more nuanced and, dare I say it, ‘laid back’ process at work. The songs on this EP pull their punches until they feel they can really do some damage; the jaunty nature of the ‘perfect pop’ melodic styling and the cheery organ lines belie a darker underbelly. Harbors are certainly not toothless imitators; there’s a depth to the lyrics that juxtaposes with the aesthetic very nicely indeed, and that makes this EP one that actually improves with repeat listening.
My only real complaint with this band is their name: someone really should tell them that it’s spelt Harbours. But linguistic snobbery aside, there’s really very little to take issue with here. I can’t see Harbors conquering the world in the immediate future, but given some time to develop and tighten up their sound I wouldn’t be surprised if they prove to be quite successful indeed. I, for one, am eager to hear what they’d do with the more meaty canvas of a full-length album.
Bright Eyes‘ career can effectively be summed up as a process of movement and discovery; a movement from low-fi to hi-fi and a gradual discovery of a folk tradition. When discussing the band, the focus is most often on singer-songwriter Conor Oberst – who to many is Bright Eyes – but amidst the every-changing backdrop of bandmates there is one constant feature that has had more of an effect on the band’s sound than he seems to get credit for: Mike Mogis.
Mogis was the one who saw potential in Oberst’s early four-track recordings and kick-started the sessions that led to the first proper Bright Eyes album, 1998’s Letting Off the Happiness. From then on the two worked together, and every album since then shows a steady improvement in terms of recording quality, as they both learned the process together. The upside of this slow improvement was that Oberst’s songwriting and Mogis’ production developed in tandem; the rough and ready songs of Fevers and Mirrors were treated with a rough and ready production, and by the time the songwriting reached its peak in 2005’s dual albums I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, the production values were at the same level.
Aside from the production side of things, Mogis’ influence spread to the sound, too. His experiences with an earlier band, Lullabyes for the Working Class, (the first act to achieve any level of real success from the community that eventually morphed into Saddle Creek records) showed that there was an appetite for what he and Oberst thought of at the time as ‘exotic’ instrumentation. In reality what they had stumbled upon was the rich vein of American traditional music; a seam they mined for the length of their album-recording career. The sporadic, indiscriminate use of mandolins and peddal-steel guitars soon lead to a greater understanding of the source material, and the effect was a steady increase of ‘folk’ influences on Bright Eyes albums. Again, the artistic zenith of this process was I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, heralded by the appearance of americana doyenne Emmylou Harris on several of the album’s tracks, but still the journey continued to the point that 2007’s Cassadaga could be fairly described as an out-and-out country record.
The trouble was that for all Cassadaga was Bright Eyes’ ‘purest’ record from the point of view of genre, it was also their worst creatively. Gone was the steady increase of quality; the best that could be said for it was that it was on the same level as their last album, but many people (including this writer) saw it as a shocking downturn. Coupled with the sudden increase in Oberst’s side project work (an eponymous solo album, his inclusion as a fourth of the Monsters of Folk project, and his many appearances with his Mystic Valley Band) many thought this was the end of the road for Bright Eyes. Viewed in that context, the announcement that this new album, The People’s Key, is to be the last Bright Eyes album comes as no surprise, and one could be forgiven for guessing that Oberst and Mogis wanted to set the record straight one last time.
And thankfully it’s done just that. Gone are the overwrought folk and americana flavours, to be replaced by a return to the band’s old aesthetic; a eclecticism of genre and a taste for vintage synth sounds prevailed in Oberst’s early work, and they make a triumphant reappearance on this new record. This time, however, the songs are treated with all Oberst and Mogis’ hard-earned production chops, which by now are mighty indeed. There’s filthy electric guitars here, too (something I thought we’d seen the last of after the cleanliness of Wide Awake) and, dare I say it, a real ‘rock’ attitude. The songs themselves are perhaps not Oberst’s finest work, but while they can’t hold a candle to the quality of Wide Awake or even those on Lifted, they more than eclipse Cassadaga in terms of punch and weight. All in all, The People’s Key is a welcome return to form for the band, and a suitable last hurrah for a great band that will be sorely missed. We can be sure to hear all those involved in a myriad of future projects, but the Bright Eyes ship has sailed its course and while we’ll be sorry it’s gone, it’s high time it was laid to rest.
When in the company rock musicians it is often hard to avoid thinking of Rob Reiner’s fantastic mockumentary, or ‘Rockumentary’, This is Spinal Tap. The film so accurately parodied the attitude of all those who think they’re rock stars that even now, 26 years later, it’s next to impossible to find a band who haven’t been guilty of at least a few Tapisms. What I should have realised, of course, is that the satire and parody of Spinal Tap is equally applicable to all walks of musical life.
While listening to an interview with William Bennett I was struck by the similarity to the scene in Tap where the lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, played exquisitely by Christopher Guest, is being interviewed while playing a piano piece he had written. The interviewer, played by Reiner himself in the guise of director Marty DiBergi, compliments Tufnel on the beauty of the piece, and the guitarist then extols on how it was written as part of a trilogy of works far loftier in scope and ambition than Tap’s usual fare, and says how he sees himself compositionally as sitting between Bach and Mozart. “What do you call this piece?” asks DiBergi, and without missing a beat, and perfectly deadpan, Tufnel replies, “This piece is called Lick My Love Pump.”
William Bennett is about as far from the image of Nigel Tufnel as it’s possible to get. His band, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is called Whitehouse (I’ll provide a link to his label, Susan Lawley, but be warned; their website doesn’t go in for anything so vulgar as ‘design’) and he pedals what can be best described as, for want of a better word, Noise Music. I’m using the word Noise here in the way The Wire¹ and Paul Hegarty would use it: as an academic concept worthy of scholarly study and much beard scratching. The interview in question was one he did about five years ago with Edinburgh’s student radio station Fresh Air (promoting his album of the time, Asceticists) and in it he talks as great length and with great alacrity about the music he makes. He is clearly an intelligent man, and he makes short work of a poor, under-prepared student interviewer; it seems every question she asks misses the point of his work entirely (in his view), and he calmly and politely corrects her with great aplomb.
The part that had me doubled over with laughter (not something you want to be doing too often when your walls are as thin as mine) was about five-and-a-half minutes in, when after a lengthy explanation of his artistic method and expectations from listeners, he calmly, and without any apparent sense of mockery, introduces one of his tracks as, and I quote, Dumping the Fucking Rubbish.
I’ve included the interview below (with the tracks removed, sadly), so I recommend that you listen to it, and absorb Bennett’s calm, rational, charismatic discourse on his art, then listen to the track in question (also included below). Bennett is, to all outside observers, totally serious, yet I can’t help but wonder if this softly-spoken man has to fight the urge to burst into howls of laughter every time someone else takes it seriously…
In part one of this post, I outlined the beginnings of a formalist method for assessing the value of a record. By examining the form of a piece of music music, so my argument went, it is possible to divine an aesthetic judgement of the work. And provided you could strip away all extraneous factors that might otherwise bias your judgement (personal biography, class origins, previous listening experience, the variables of conditions of reception, and so on and so forth) you could perfectly expect this judgement to be both aesthetic and universal. That post ended with the admission that this approach only takes us part of the way on our quest to judge a record, and the reason for this shortcoming is that our newfound aesthetic judgement can only tell us about the quality of the work rather than it’s value as a whole. That is to say, it can only tell us whether or not the piece in question is well crafted, or, alternatively, well formed.
It’s easy to see how this gets us into trouble: Candle in the Wind, Jesus Christ Superstar, the latest James Blunt album, and the collected works of The Dave Matthews Band could all be said to be ‘well formed’ when in fact they are, as I’m sure you’ll agree, (and here I employ some specialist academic language) ‘bloody awful’. By the same token the voice of Bob Dylan, the ‘lo-fi’, the ‘art brut’, and the entire punk catalogue would be dismissed by a strict formalist as nothing more that amateur tomfoolery, and I’m equally sure we can all agree that they are (to again resort to technical terminology) ‘awesome’. The real question here is one of ‘value’. It’s all well and good assessing whether something is ‘well crafted’ or if it displays ‘technical finesse’, but when we say that we actually like something there’s a whole different process going on; we’re not making an aesthetic judgement, we’re making a value judgement.
Now at this point it seems we’re returning to the ‘personal’ factors I tried so hard to dismiss in the first post, as the assigning of value to a work of music is often cited as the result of individual personal taste. Aesthetic theorist Carl Dahlhaus dismisses this idea of individual taste as “not at all individual but rather a reflex of group norms” and insists that instead of rationality appearing as a secondary factor in a judgement it ought to be the foundation of it. Whilst being keen not to cause offence or seem elitist, he turns to the old topic of ‘listener education’ that I’m sure has hounded any music fan trying to win an argument in a pub:
The factual judgements underlying the “group norms” are not equally founded. A listener capable of doing justice to a Beethoven symphony is generally equipped to cope with the musical issues of a pop tune, but the reverse is not true. Arrogance of the initiated must not be defended, but that nobody has the right to blame musical illiterates for being illiterate does not change the fact that illiteracy provides a weak foundation for aesthetic judgements.
For me personally, this has a ring of truth to it, but the bigger picture is considerably more nuanced. The kind of informed judgement Dahlhaus is championing above is part of but one of the several different approaches to ‘value’: those that can be identified as ‘Functional’, ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Historical’.
Of these three, Functional Value is perhaps the easiest to comprehend. Prior to the latter half of the eighteenth century and the advent of the concert hall, music had various distinct functions in addition to the common one of providing objects for aesthetic contemplation. For this ‘functional music’, the aim was to be the exemplar of a type; “an exemplar which reaches perfection when it projects the marks of the type clearly and purely” (to quote philosophical musicologist Peter Kivy). If one sees a piece of music as functional, then it is a relatively easy step to place a value on that music according to how well it fulfils its function. Take, for instance, the example of dance music: it can be enjoyed and appreciated not merely in terms of its formal properties but also for how well adapted it is for the dances it is meant to accompany. And this is not a concept that died out in the eighteenth century – some could say it is alive and well today. While I meant for the example of dance music given above to be in reference only to the dances of the eighteenth century, the statement could well be applied to the dance music found in clubs today. In fact, I’d argue that such music can only be judged in functional terms, as in my eyes it holds no aesthetic value whatsoever. In real terms, however, I would say that objective functional value has been relegated to the domain of music for films and advertisements, which really are the last bastions of purely functional music in the modern age.
So what, then, of Aesthetic Value? The nineteenth century was the “epoch of aesthetics,” where the factors that rendered music ‘art’ were exactly the opposite of those concerning functional music; individuality and originality. Dahlhaus tells us that aesthetic judgement is “a pronouncement about the participation or non-participation of a musical work in the idea of the beautiful,” but yet again, however, the situation is confused. In this case there are two conflicting approaches to judging the aesthetics – that is to say, the ‘beauty’ – of a piece of music. On one hand we have the conservative Schenker and his search for an Ursatz, and on the other we have the composer Schumann and the ‘dilettante’ school of musical reviewers.
Schenker, who I mentioned briefly in part one, saw himself as the guardian against the disintegrating tendencies of the twentieth century and his approach was to interlace formalist theory and analysis with aesthetic judgements, much as our initial formalist approach taught us. In his eyes, works admired as ‘masterworks’ must contain an Ursatz, (a kind of musical ‘through-line’) and his application of this theory was sweeping and unilateral; if, as in works by Reger and Stravinsky, no Ursatz was to be found then he was quick to issue an aesthetic verdict. The other approach was one that looked contemptuously on ideas of form and technique – the “mechanics of music” as Schumann called them – and felt they should not be displayed but rather concealed.Writers of the time strived to maintain the appearance of ‘dilettantism’; even composers such as Berlioz, Schumann and Hugo Wolf hid their knowledge of music when writing reviews, as if speaking of one’s métier were tactless.
We’ve already seen the flaws with Schenker’s approach when it’s applied to modern pop music, so what then can we take from the dilettantes? Sadly, very little; divorced from any technical or formalist analyses and rational judgement as they are, we find ourselves returning full-circle to the very ideas of ‘personal taste’ that we were railing against not five paragraphs previously.
But there is yet one more facet of value that we have yet to look at; Historical Value. Prevalent in the musical criticism of the twentieth century, historical judgement sees a composition as a document of a stage in the development of compositional methods and musical thought and in contrast to the dilettantes of the previous epoch, aesthetic judgement changed into a technological one. If formal value can be said to be found in the concept of the ‘appropriate’, and aesthetic value in the ‘beautiful’, then historical value is determined by the concept of the ‘attuned’ or the ‘authentic’. A judgement by historical criteria would be a judgement on how fully a particular work is an expression of “what the hour calls for historically and philosophically,” but to apply these sorts of judgements to modern albums sounds very much like relying on that most amorphous and elusive of concepts in popular music discourse: ‘cool’ (if, admittedly, couched in somewhat more grandiose language).
So here, at the last, we find ourselves ultimately – and, alas, perhaps inevitably – railing vainly into the gulf that separates the worlds of ‘classical’ and ‘pop’ music. In a sphere where the currents of fashion and ‘historical appropriateness’ run so shallow and fast, how can one justifiably stand still and judge a piece of pop music? If this is the kind of value judgement we are reduced to – defined by social factors far more than by formal ones – then we hardly needed to have bothered with any analysis in the first place. All we seem to have shown is that these social judgements have a rational foundation – or, at the very least least, a manifestation – in the formal characteristics of musical works. It can, I’m sure, be useful to attempt to apply some sort of formalist analysis of modern albums, but only as a single facet in an approach that includes, and indeed is ultimately reliant on, personal biases and (partly-)irrational opinions. In short, when I review albums in the future you can almost certainly expect to hear the same baseless judgements as I’ve always relied on, but we can rest easy in the knowledge that that is all anyone can hope to offer.
In the liner notes for the first release of Pet Sounds on CD in 1990, Brian Wilson is quoted as saying that “you design the experience to be a record rather than just a song; it’s the record people listen to.” This statement is guaranteed to hit home with anyone who, like myself, views the album as the ultimate artifact of modern popular music. When Wilson uses the word ‘record’, we music-aficionados (or ‘geeks’, if our friends and family are to be believed) instinctively know what he means: we’re not talking here about any mere document or recording or archive; a ‘record’ in musical spheres is a word and a world unto its own.
On these pages I often attempt to pass judgement on records, and find myself again and again resorting to vague, and above all personal reactions to the music. I imagine that many of you will see no problem with this approach, but to me it always feels like cheating. Cheating the process of analysing the work thoroughly, but also cheating you, the reader, out of an assessment of any value. If all my opinions are based on extraneous factors (such as personal biography, class origins, previous listening experience, the variables of conditions of reception, and so on and so forth) then how can my opinion be of use to anybody but myself? It’s a pressing concern for someone who foists their opinions on others, I’m sure you’ll agree, so now it seems the time has come for me to nail my colours to the mast and explain what it is that I look for in an album (when, of course, I can muster the energy to assess an album properly).
The form of an album
When I describe one record as a masterwork and another asa failure I am basing these judgements on something resembling a formalist reading of the works. The success of an album in social fields – either critical or commercial – should really be of no concern; what the argument ought to hinge on is a ‘pure’ judgement of taste. This kind of judgement – one free from personal preconceptions and biases – is not the antithesis of an aesthetic judgement, but rather an aesthetic judgement freed of all the vagaries and uncertainty surrounding the issue of personal taste. Accepting that different individuals can interpret a record in different ways while at the same time accepting that the record itself imposes definite limits on their room to manoeuvre is a useful way of avoiding the two extremes of, on the one hand, an infinite pluralism which allows for as many possible readings as there are readers, each equally legitimate, and on the other, an essentialism which asserts a single ‘true’ meaning. To find the common ground between these two options one must strip away everything but the form of the work, and in doing so one can then make a judgement both aesthetic and, nevertheless, universal.
The main obstacle for this approach is that no-one is quite sure what should actually be examined. When musicologists talk of a work’s form, the general consensus is that all ‘traditional’ musical features – rhythm, harmony, meter, melody – are fair game for inspection. However, finding a Schenkerian ‘Ursatz‘, for example, (a popular technique designed to discover the ‘deeper structure’ of long-form motivic works) is patently ridiculous within the modern popular arena; the melodic and harmonic forms of pop songs are almost by definition far too simplistic to allow for an analysis of any depth, and more importantly, to only look at the ‘notes’ of a work is to miss the point of a modern album entirely. In a classical-romantic work, almost all the events of note can be divined from the score alone. Certainly one’s perception of a piece would be altered if one were to see it performed live, or even to hear it on record, but in essence – provided you have a sound musical knowledge and a familiarity with the repertoire – it is perfectly possible to pass judgement on the technical finesse and craftsmanship of a composition without ever having heard it played. The same can not be said, however, of ‘pop’ music. For starters, one would struggle to find a complete score for any pop record. You might be able to find a ‘lead sheet’ notating some degree of formal design (words, melody, chord changes, etc.) but that wouldn’t provide anything approaching the full picture. Historically, due to the limitations of diastematic notation, performances could never be recorded accurately enough to preserve the idiolect of a particular performer or the exact sonic qualities of an acoustic space, but with the wonders of modern recording such preservation is now an essential part of music consumption, and any aspirant analyst of a pop or rock album needs to pay just as much attention to the (seemingly) extra-musical features as to the notes themselves.
The ‘track’
A useful approach here is to make the distinction between the ‘song’, the ‘arrangement’, and the ‘track’; with the song being that which can be contained in a lead sheet, the arrangement being a particular musical setting of the song, and with the track being the recording itself. The song and the arrangement may well retain an ontological independence through lead sheets, scores, and performances, but it is the track that is the ultimate artifact – and ultimate instance – of a pop song. The key to seeing a modern album as a genuine artistic instance lies in the distinction between what the American philosopher Nelson Goodman called the autographic and the allographic. Autographic refers to works such as paintings, where the work is unique and genuine, whereas allographic refers to works such as books and musical scores, where “all accurate copies are equally genuine instances of the work”, and it is but a small step to extend the concept of the allographic to the musical record as well. An album’s identity lies in its actual sound, and while that may change somewhat from one reproduction system to another – like a painting hung in different kinds of light or space – it is essentially a fixed set of relationships.
In these kinds of discussions it’s hard not to mention Walter Benjamin, who’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction kick-started the debate over the impact of technology on the essence of art forms. He insisted that mechanical reproductions were not genuine works of art in their own right; claiming that the authenticity of an artwork relies on its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” He categorised this unique presence as the work’s aura, and argued that it was only the original work itself that could claim to have one. So to take his point and argue that, owing to the work’s allographical qualities, every reproduction of a popular song is a genuine work with its own ‘aura’ sounds somewhat counterintuitive, but if one accepts that the sounds emanating from a loudspeaker constitute the work’s ‘presence in time and space’ and create an “authentic musical moment”, then the notions of presence, aura, and authenticity must be transferred to the record itself. It is not the presence of a ‘unique instance’ that provides an album’s authenticity, but rather its unique arrangement of elements; “All instances of the work are equally original as far as the audience – from the amateur to the connoisseur – is concerned.”
Trouble?
This approach leaves a would-be analyst (or ‘reviewer’, if you prefer) with a fairly comprehensive method for judging whether an album is any good or not. However, it’s not that easy; the thing to bear in mind is that this judgement is only relevant to a very specific definition of ‘good’. What a formal analysis provides is a judgement on the craft and technique on display in the record; it would view the albums of Jeffrey Lewis or the Clash as being considerably worse than the schmaltz of Andrew Lloyd Webber or Elton John. A lot of music fans would say that’s a fair reading, to be sure, but even a cursory look through my past reviews will show that I clearly think differently. It’s clear there’s something missing from this approach; namely the adoption of ‘historiographic’ considerations in our judgements, as well as a proper assessment of what we mean when we talk about a work’s ‘value’, and rest assured I will attempt to unravel these problems is Part II of this post next week [which can be found here].
[NB: being as this is merely an idle post on a blog, I’ve tried not to be too academic in style. I’ve assimilated the thinking of fair few writers and musicologists in this piece, albeit in my own words wherever possible, and a select bibliography will be attached to the final post in this series.]
One could be forgiven for thinking, on first being introduced to this little EP, that Harbors hail from good ol’ London town. There’s a real touch of the aesthetic that’s been so ubiquitous here in the last few years; the artless simplicity tinged with just a touch of vocal venom that made the Mystery Jets, Johnny Flynn, et al so popular. The interplay between the drums and acoustic guitars, specifically, gives the impression that the players want us to think they’ve never picked up an instrument before, when in actuality it’s a very controlled, thoroughly thought-out approach.
Eaten by Monsters 