Sydney band Gang of Youths
have released a new EP, ‘Let Me Be Clear’, which is made up of songs that they
say didn’t
quite fit on their album. “All our friends / Are dead and gone,” are the
cheery opening lines of ‘A Sudden Light’. It definitely has an ‘80s stadium
rock feel to it with its shouted lead vocals, its harmonies and synths, perhaps
something like Springsteen in style and either Bon Jovi or Bono in voice.
Actually a bit more research
revealed to me that the
track is in fact three years old, which sort of blows my chances of a having
a contemporary list of listening this month right off the bat. Fortunately though,
I already planned to depart from being up to date with three out of my next
four choices.
This is a new track, except
for that it sounds a bit like Joy Division. But Creative Adult’s new album has
quite a range of styles so that’s OK.
Creative Adult are actually
playing near me in a couple of weeks in a small club in Collingwood. I
wonder what sort of crowd they will get … ? Is it only people in their thirties
like me that listen to this type of music now, because it reminds them of music
from their past? Are we on to the last generation of twenty-something indie music
lovers? But then again even I’m too young to remember when the bands that
Creative Adult remind me of – Joy Division and New Order, the Smiths, the Cure –
first appeared.
For $15 I’m almost tempted to
find out. Anyway, if you live in Melbourne and don’t have a kid you have to
negotiate over caring for the night that sounds like a bargain price (by
Australian standards) for a band that I reckon would sound pretty good in a
small, dark venue.
I didn’t quite intend to start
listening to Brazilian Tropicalia music before the Rio Olympic Games but it’s
ended up fitting in well with the tone of the month. Caetono Veloso and Gilberto
Gil are both worth a listen and from what I understand probably represent what
this type of music is generally like.
But the stand-out for me is Os
Mutantes. They’re as much psychedelia as Tropicalia, and I think they’re even
one of the better psychedelic bands I’ve heard. Their Portugese lyrics and bossa
nova harmonies make them clearly different from the more typical 1960s West
Coast sound. That is they seem to inhabit a world that is theirs and no-one
else’s (I’m not sure if this is completely true), which is pretty much what all
disciples of the psychedelic aim for.
Judging from the count of
plays on Spotify most people, like me, start with this track and then move on
to some others. I recommend doing that as well. Unless you’ve already been
listening to them for the last ten years, and are currently laughing at my
naivety about music outside of the Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Last week I bought a book
called ‘The Rest is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century’, by ‘The New
Yorker’ music critic Alex Ross, which I had seen recommended in a couple of
places when it came out in 2007. Though it sounded worthwhile I had been
reluctant to read it for several years as I saw that it was not about the types
of music that I listen to – i.e. rock and pop. Indeed rock ‘n’ roll has become
so dominant in popular culture that Ross’ book feels at times like an alternative
history of twentieth century music, with only passing mentions made of the more
significant rock musicians, even though composers like Strauss, Stravinsky,
Gershwin, Cage, and Stockhausen are more what music has traditionally been established
to be.
I actually started my reading
with one of the later chapters, titled ‘Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the
Minimalists’, which seemed like a good entry point for me into the book. That
chapter covers Phillip Glass – who I have a cheap CD of somewhere – as well as
Steve Reich, Morton Feldman, and Terry Riley. Ross is sparing enough in his
praise for works, but so keen and eloquent when he gives it that it led me to
want to listen to the music he was describing as soon as I put down the pages. Although
not quite – it was 11.30pm, and I figured the works were probably more than a
few minutes long so that didn’t happen straightaway, but it did have me
searching around in areas of Spotify that I weren’t even quite sure were there.
On ‘Rothko Chapel’: “Feldman
made his mourning palpable … There are voices but no words. Chords and melodic
fragments float along like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. [T]he
emotional sphere of ‘Rothko’s Chapel’ is too large to be considered a memorial
for any individual … It might be the chant of millions in a single voice.”
On the wonderful ‘In C’: “No
matter what choices are made in performance, the harmony tends to move into E
minor in the middle and into G major (the dominant of C) toward the end … Tying
the whole thing together is a pair of high Cs on the piano, pulsing without
variation from beginning to end.” And a good choice of quote from music critic
Alfred Frankenstein: “Climaxes of great sonority and high complexity appear and
are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never done
anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all
there is or ever will be."
I’ll
never understand music as well as that. Nevertheless I’ll probably be back next
month, perhaps with some more second-hand recommendations from Ross’ opus.
