I Feel Love

I’d hoped this song would come up closer to December. It was easily my favourite song of 2007, but I know everyone was a bit Umbrella (ella ella)-ed out by the end of the year. Still, iTunes tells me I have to write it about it next, so write about it I shall, lest I descend into a vortex of moral chaos by ignoring my own arbitrary rules.

I wanted to pick something very recent as a kind of safeguard against this list claiming any kind of canonicity. It’s not a list of “songs that have stood the test of time”–on the whole I prefer songs that haven’t–and the inclusion of “Umbrella” shouldn’t necessarily be taken to imply that it has some intrinsic excellence that wil still be apparent in a decade’s time. That said, I do in fact think that it has an intrinsic excellence that will still be apparent in a decade’s time.

Despite its ubiquity, I first heard this song when Natalie Gauci performed it on Australian Idol (a measure of how much I dip into and out of pop music). The fact that such a tough, beat-driven ballad can be transformed so convincingly into an Alicia-Keys-esque piano weepie gives a clue about one of the reasons it’s so great: it’s actually got a really good tune. The number of R&B songs released over the past few years that are melodically memorable in their own right, divorced from their production, is amazingly small. Listen to how hopeless any extant cover version of “Cry Me a River” or “Crazy in Love” is and you’ll see what I mean: they are great songs because of their production. The hooks are in the samples, beats, keyboard riffs, etc, not in the melody. There’s nothing wrong with that of course! Obviously you could say the same about an awful lot of my favourite tracks. But there is something refreshing about two previously rather undistinguished composers managing to come up with a vocal line that’s so well-structured and memorable. (Admittedly, the middle 8 is a bit blah.)

So we start with a great melody, but there are also things about this particularly incarnation of it that stand out. One is the aforementioned toughness of the beats, such an interesting counterpoint to the tenderness of the lyrics, and a kind of reinvention of what counts as a ballad (you can see this continuing in something like Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love”). The other astonshing thing is the impossibly portentous bassline in the chorus, a great blast of long notes that always reminds me of a church organ. (This resemblance becomes even more striking in the final chorus where, just like in a hymn, the bassline changes, something I’ve never seen pointed out before, although that may be because I haven’t looked.)

Does being a fan of this song entail being a fan of Rihanna? I’m not sure; it’s funny how despite absolutely loving this song I’ve felt no real interest in hearing more of the singer. I didn’t think much of “Shut Up and Drive” with its rather clumsy use of “Blue Monday”. Admittedly, I do rather love “Don’t Stop the Music”, a track so gay it could have been performed by the Young Divas (or at least Ricki-Lee). But I don’t feel any real need to connect with this artist; I like the rather diffident way she just lets the music do its job.

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Watch (in case you’ve been living in a cave):

Download: iTunes

Is this the nearest thing we have to prog-disco? Consider the evidence: unlike most disco tracks (and unlike most of my Top 52) it’s really best heard in album context, as part of the continuous suite that forms the first side of the LP of the same name. Then there’s the sense of seriousness underlying the whole enterprise; its pleasures are won at the expense of outright “fun”. Related to that is the fact that I feel driven almost against my will to make very pretentious comparisons: for instance, I’m unable to resist saying that if “I Feel Love” is the Tristan und Isolde of Disco, this is the Parsifal. “I Feel Love” is about, or rather just is, a plateau of libidinal excitement; “From Here to Eternity” (as the title suggests) has to do with the indefinite extension of time itself. Stop me before I go on.

(As an aside, “From Here to Eternity” is one of those titles, like “The Power of Love”, that seems irresistible to lyricists: it’s also the title of totally unrelated songs by Frank Sinatra, Michael Peterson and Iron Maiden!)

More mundanely, the past couple of years have been good ones for the sounds inspired by this track. You can feel its influence all over the place. The oddly wrong-sounding drum patterns (like the snare has been pulled too tight or something) are echoed in the ultra-hip Black Devil Disco Club (originally recorded just one year later, in 1978). The vocoder vocals, I don’t really need to elaborate on. And the seriousness, well, it saturates the whole Italo revival with its typical mode of deadpan, anhedonic blank irony (see especially the output of the Italians Do It Better label, the ne plus ultra of glumness being the extraordinary Chromatics album Night Drive. I’m indebted to Tim Finney for his insights about this stuff…unfortunately I can’t give a link because he only blogs on Facebook these days!)

One of the interesting things about Giorgio is that despite what seems to be the direction he’s heading with From Here to Eternity (the album), he doesn’t end up disappearing down a rabbit-hole of abstraction. Instead he spent much of the 80s composing impeccably commercial songs for film soundtracks: “The Neverending Story”, “Together in Electric Dreams”, “Flashdance”, “Take My Breath Away” and so on. Then again his score for Metropolis (which to my shame I’ve never heard) suggests he still held a candle for modernism. Indeed Giorgio just might be the perfect synthesis of the avant-garde and the commercial. Which is one of the reasons this is his second appearance in this list, and I can now exclusively reveal that it won’t be his last.

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Watch:

Download: iTunes (they don’t have the album unforunately, but they do offer the song as part of a compilation that’s not very accurately called True Disco.

Um, I really have nothing to say except the fact–which will be old hat to most of you–that I’m posting this from here. I’ve had my laptop for over a month but bizarrely this is the first time I’ve taken advantage of free wi-fi. It’s nice. I just wish more places had it. (Australia is apparently very primitive in this regard).

Anyway, I’m here until my battery runs out (supposedly I have 35 minutes left) or it just all gets too happy-houry, when I will re-emerge into the stifling embrace of Melbourne’s Indian Summer. So in the unlikely event that anyone (a) is nearby, and (b) reads this in time, come and say hello!

As some of you know, I’m been planning a career change: I’m attempting to do what people rather gruesomely refer to as “monetising my skills” by going into freelance copywriting. A major part of promoting myself as a writer will, naturally enough, be a blog. Not this blog, because this is more of an ideas dump (ie what a blog actually should be) than an advertisement by the pithiness and on-message-ness of my writing. So I’ve started a new blog, called (pithily enough) Textual. Don’t read it if you’re not interested in copywriting (or marketing and language more generally), but well, if you’re interested, it’s there. For obvious reasons I would particularly love some people to leave comments over there, preferably nice ones along the lines of “Hey, what a great post! You must a wonderful copywriter! Can I hire you?” etc. (I’m interested to see that one of my long-time blogging role models, Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger, has also started a blog about his “day job” in a field not far removed from mine…pure coincidence, I promise.)

One more thing, I need some help with my market research: If you’re an Australian small business owner, or know someone who is, I’d be ever so grateful if you or they could answer a brief online questionnaire about marketing. It will take about 5 minutes, it will all be confidential, and I won’t be adding anyone to my mailing list without their permission. I have two questionnaires, one for general small business owners which is here, and one specifically for web designers and developers which is here. I’ll be forever grateful!

Absolutely brilliant storyline on Neighbours at the moment about the mutual emotional dependence between, er, longtime companions Harold and Lou. The subject of their relationship has been broached before, but tonight Karl Kennedy actually referred to Harold as Lou’s “soulmate”! Fascinating stuff.

This might not be my absolute favourite JT song–that would be the magisterial “My Love”–but “Like I Love You” was, not to put too fine a point on it, life-changing. It was hearing this song back on 2002 that renewed my interest in chart pop and more or less set me on the path I’ve been on ever since. Plus, no matter how unfashionable they are now, I had to include a Neptunes track in my top 52 (Timbaland will be otherwise represented, of course).

I’ve probably had more arguments on the internet about this song than any other (including one with a grammar pedant who thought the title should be “As I Love You”; plus ça change…). I wrote a big long thing about it once for some people as a kind of Popism 101 primer. I think I might have even rehearsed the then-popular notion that “chart music was much more avant-garde than [insert whatever indie band would sound most provocative, usually Radiohead].” I can’t seem to find it although I’m sure I posted it somewhere, but the general drift was that it was a brilliant example of the beat-driven aesthetic of early-00s R&B, melodically very sparse and leaving most of the harmonies implied (as opposed to 90 R&B which tended towards harmonic saturation).

Or to put it all another way: “DRUMS”.

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Watch:

Download: iTunes

This is my favourite “indie” song ever. Sonically, there’s nothing very remarkable about it at least as far as instrumentation goes. It’s your stock-standard guitar/bass/drums. The guitars are chimey and sweet, a bit Johnny Marr-ish but with some post-punk angularity as well. What you notice first is of course the “unusual” vocals of Sue Tompkins, and you will know within about half a minute whether or not they’re going to be your cup of tea. The closest thing to Sue’s vocal style in my knowledge of musical history is the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, so 20th century classical buffs should in theory be lapping it up from the saucer. (That’s a clumsy attempt to extend the “cup of tea” conceit, in case you didn’t notice.) The lyrics, though, are like nothing else; they come across as the stream of consciousness of someone with OCD, hammering home the same rather obscure motifs over and over again. It’s good to hear indie music harnessing the power of repetition. One of the fun things you can do is make up your own substitutes for the lyrics, for instance at the beginning I always pretend Sue is singing “Fallujah, Fallujah, Fallujah, Fallujah” instead of “If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya”. There’s another bit which sounds a bit like “MP3, MP3, MP3, MP3 (etc.)”. Both of these substitutions are rather unlikely given that the song came out in 2000, but it seems natural to want to engage with and personalise this music on that kind of dream-logic level.

Some facts. Life Without Buildings were from Scotland, a country which, on a per capita basis, is better at indie music than any other country except New Zealand. They released only one (perfect) album, Any Other City, then they broke up. I think this is fantastic. More bands should follow their example. Last year they posthumously released an album called Live at the Annandale Hotel which as the name suggests was recorded in Sydney. They were harbingers of the post-punk revival, which may or may not be a good thing; in any case I would rather have Any Other City than the entire combined works of Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party etc. What they have in common with best of the original post-punk, and what makes them different from their successors (we are now out of facts and back into opinions), is an absolute confidence in and commitment to their own vision, a complete lack of pandering or ironic/apologetic self-consciousness, and not least, real originality.

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Since Any Other City is currently deleted (boo!), I’ve made both streaming and download versions available. There’s a noticeable blip at one point; apologies for that, this is the only version I have (I confess I don’t actually own a CD copy).

Stream:

Download

You can also listen to some tracks from Live at the Annandale Hotel (including “The Leanover”) here, and download it at eMusic.

Just two quick notes:

1. Some of you may have this blog bookmarked as “[www.]angusgordon.com”. Well, within the next couple of weeks I’m planning to use that domain for something different–something that actually puts the “com” into “dot com”, of which more shortly–so if you can change your bookmark now to “angusg.typepad.com” that will save any confusion. Many thanks.
2. I realised the main blog page was loading very slowly because of all those embedded songs–the standard TypePad solution for streaming music, which if you ask me kind of sucks, being to use QuickTime players that load the whole song as the page loads. As a result I’ve moved to a Flash-based solution hosted elsewhere that seems to work a lot better and also looks prettier, and I’ve updated the existing posts. So I hope none of you have Flash disabled or you will have to live without ever hearing Narcotic Syntax–although I don’t know if you can really call that living.

Yoko, you know I love you–for one thing, you broke up the Beatles, and just think how tiresome it would be if they were still together–but things have come to a pretty pass when you appear to think that someone whose name is Lennon shouldn’t be allowed to record under the name Lennon.

I remember the LRB writer Thomas Jones making the excellent point, when some writer–I think it was Louis de Bernieres–made similar noises about “protecting his brand”, that the best way to disabuse yourself of the precious notion that you own your own name is to have a name like Tom Jones.

Anyway, if Mrs Lennon can sue Lennon, what’s stopping Donna Summer from suing Donna Summer?

[Update: Sorry for doubting you, Yoko.

As many of my readers will know, Perlon is one of the most prominent labels in the broad subgenre of dance music that for a while we were calling “microhouse”, although nowadays everyone calls it “minimal”. That’s just “minimal”, noun, as in “I like minimal”. Still sounds pretty awkward coming out of my mouth at least, but there it is.

People who know about these things think there is an identifiable “Perlon sound”…I’ve even seen MP3s tagged with “Perlon” as their genre. (This is quite different from a bigger, more eclectic label like Kompakt, which puts out everything from hard techno to ambient…arguably all infused with a certain personality, for sure, but nobody would say “I know a Kompakt record when I hear it”.) The “Perlon sound” generally refers either to ultra-choppy, oddly funky techno a la Pantytec, or streamlined minimalism as heard on something like Melchior Productions’ No Disco Future LP, cerebral and introverted but still very much dancefloor-oriented. Both of which styles are absolutely wonderful–indeed Perlon in all its guises might be my favourite label ever–but they can make the label appear to have a chronic case of the self-seriousness and chin-strokingness that infects the minimal scene as a whole. What’s sometimes forgotten is the more whimsical, playful, loose-limbed side of Perlon, as heard in the odd loungey interludes of Markus Nikolai’s Back (the first long-player they ever released) or the Prince inflections of Morane’s Trick EP.

Nikolai is a third of Morane, and has also been involved with Narcotic Syntax, so I guess he might be the magic ingredient in this side of the label. Narcotic Syntax, a collective revolving around James Dean Brown and yapacc, has always been my favourite Perlon “project”. The titles of their releases, like the “Calculated Extravagant Licentiousess” and “Reptile Sweat Accelerator” EPs, and their eagerly awaited (by me at least) debut album “The Creed of the Eternal Narcoverse” (worthy of the KLF that one) make it clear that they’re following their own rather odd path. If you have a taste for that particularly Germanic kind of whimsy, you’ll really go for them. (They’ve never come up with a title quite as brilliant as Pantytec’s “Pony Slaystation”, admittedly…)

Selecting dance tracks for this project was not the easiest thing. Post-1990 dance music in general is underrepresented compared to what I actually listen to, because it’s often an overall sound that I love; picking out particular tracks as “the best” can seem arbitrary. Not this one, though; there was never any question about “Electronic Liquid” making the 52. When I first downloaded it I just couldn’t stop listening. The beats start off simple by Perlon standards, but beautifully balanced. The smooth keyboards puncuated by staccato stabs and little bass farts combine to produce an irresistable mix of slickness and funk. But (rather unusually for a dance track) it’s the lyrics that really make this track addictive for me. I won’t attempt to describe the bizarre stream-of-consciousness spoken-word ramble that lasts virtually the entire seven minutes, except to say that it includes perhaps the best deployment ever of the word “blimey”, and displays a delight in wordplay that is, again, very German (future blog post: a defense of the German sense of humour). And then there’s the fact that, like other Narcotic Syntax tracks, you never quite know where this is going: it’s not one of those dance tracks that establishes a groove and sticks to it; it has U-turns that are unexpected and quite delightful.

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Listen:

This was only ever released on vinyl, and even that is no longer available, so here’s the full 256kbps version for you to download.