As a fan since Sackcloth 'n' Ashes, I've long bristled at the understandable-but-inapt comparisons of Edwards to Cave, which for years prevented me from getting into Cave as deeply as I probably could have. So it will be interesting to watch this shared release date dredge up the comparisons yet again.
The two artists' sonic vocabularies and topical reference points clearly intersect; they share obvious influences (e.g. The Gun Club); and each has worked an intensely performative self-stylization into his musical persona that threatens to outshine the musical intricacies on display. But where Cave's natural theatricality inevitably infuses his work with a sense of detachment, Edwards manages to prioritize *immediacy* above all else. Even when that immediacy (ironically) is used in service of an otherworldly spirituality for which his secular audience (myself included) has no "immediate" personal reference.
That visceral if hard-to-articulate contrast make the two artists' bodies of work, equally brilliant as they may be, feel like polar opposites to me.
Though a lifelong Deftones fan (having seen them for the first time barely a month after Adrenaline came out), I sometimes go years without returning to the debut.
The last couple of times I listened to it, I couldn't help but notice how blatant is Chino's H.R.-from-Bad-Brains homaging throughout the album. Surprising how little mention that influence gets when people retrospectively discuss this band's early evolution.
I've been paying attention to Ms. Banks for a while and have been, admittedly, impressed by both her album and her unflinching rejection of industry-standard image shaping. Here's what I think:
Azealia Banks is possessed of an uncommon level of brilliance. The kind of brilliance that floods the mind with an unsortable deluge of ideas and inspirations and unresolved dissonances, the kind that resists being molded into a digestible, discrete skill/identity "product" of assessable value in a capitalist framework, the kind that renders the bearer -- especially when young -- as impatient with the less synaptically-frantic world around her as she is frustrated with the limits of her own ability to structure her cognition.
In short, the kind of brilliance that comes bundled with mental illness, without exception.
In Ms. Banks' case, it also comes bundled with a very dirty vocabulary and an interest in unfiltered social media, which is the part most likely to get her into trouble in the court of mainstream cultural judgment.
Is she ever going to write something interesting enough to justify her hype?
I understand why people root for her. She has managed at a very young age to become both a conspicuously non-image-processed pop star and an in-demand songwriter-for-hire, and she seems to have done so with a minimum of ego or pretension.
But then you hear the songs. And they're just... so... generic!
It's as if she's beaten the 45-year-old ghostwriters at their cynical broad-appeal game, then squandered the opportunity to personalize the results in any way. When someone like Grimes seems to reinvent the sonic properties of "pop" every time she touches a recording device, the flatness of Charli's emotional timbre and the dullness of her sound just seem even more stark.
Is there something I'm just not hearing here?
5 Point owner Dave Meinert really is a world-class dick who, as it happens, heavily inserted himself in the Seattle 15 Now debate with any number of specious assertions that every small business in this thriving city would go under if he weren't allowed to short-change tipped employees.
So the real question is: What the hell was Morello doing try to eat at Meinert's establishment in the first place? (Did I mention that it's also a shithole?)
I'll be the first to admit Our Love to Admire lacks the immediacy that gave the band its initial power, and that none of its songs reach the dizzying heights of "Length of Love", but I still think it gets a bum rap.
"Pioneer to the Falls" is a great -- and structurally interesting -- opener. "Mammoth" is a certified rager. And "Mind Over Time" has is one of the band's best applications of texture, and easily its best b-side since "Specialist" (without any of the latter's stiltedness). And while the songs in between range in quality and impact, each of them has interesting moments and more varied use of guitar and drums than the prior albums, and none of them is a total disaster like the worst tracks on Antics.
That said, I found the Julian Plenti album infinitely more refreshing.
Can I really be the only one who thinks Antics is Interpol's worst album?
"Next Exit" and "Not Even Jail" are tedium incarnate. "Evil" is so laughably clumsy that I hope never to hear it again as long as I live. "A Time to Be So Small" is basically unchanged from its demo version, released four years earlier by a band not yet fully formed.
Don't get me wrong: "Narc", "Slow Hands", "Public Pervert", and especially "Length of Love" are stunners, and the bass breakdowns in "Take You on a Cruise" justify Carlos D's entire time in the band. But my god, are the bad songs ever bad!
No Interpol record since has operated at such contradictory extremes. And none has contained a song remotely as terrible as "Evil".
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