Mercury Rev/Flaming Liups are the most 'important' village voice bands of the 00's

Buick6 said:

So I hear this innaresting piece on the public radio, ring the DJ and he tells me it's 'animal Collective'. And just like a sigh out of a Todd Haynes movie comes a MASSIVE HYPE about them in the Village (idiots) Voice!!!

So I check 'em out. Feh! They sound like bloody Mercury Rev...It seems a trend with this 'psych-folk-indy' VillageVoice endorsed 'happy' or 'freak' psych muzak post indy disco neo80s electro-gaycore that the most influential bands out of all this are MERCURY REV ('Boses' esp) and Flaming Lips and anything that Dave Fridmann produces for that matter...

I personally believe Mercury Rev are one of the last truly *great* American bands, especially in 'moderniste' times, Flaming Lips annoy more than inspire..BUT all these shitty, post-shoegazer 'clever' bands with their fuggen 'composed' ultra dense hypertextualised Beach boys inspired 'weirdness' and forced 'genius' just come off so bloody predicatable, or as enlightening or 'new feeling' inducing as following a weblink from NuMu to Pitchforkmedia to the Village Voice to Salon and back again.

Click to expand...

i haven't heard the latest animal collective LP, but (although i bet its excellent) i'll wager "the earlier stuff" (the world groans) is more distinctive...maybe less like Mercury Rev.

i'll admit to being slightly nonplussed when it comes to MR. i have "Deserter Songs" and, i dunno, i guess i found it to be a bit boring

The new Animal Collective album definitely sounds like early Mercury Rev, especially Yourself Is Steam, but that is ok by me. Animal Collective's previous albums don't really sound much like Mercury Rev at all, they are more like some freaked out, folksy drum circle sing-along. I highly recommend Sung Tongs, it is a bit more enjoyable than Feels.

WOEBOT, you may want to check out some of the earlier MR albums like Yourself Is Steam and Boces. They are far more wild and less orchestrated than their more recent releases.

the first three or so mercury rev's are great, and then they get into this blustery vague Americana-amorphous sound that for all the world reminds me a bit of the Waterboys -- a sound with no center to it -- 'deserter's songs' completely bypassed me

buick you're right there's a lot of Brian Wilson-wannabe damage on the us scene kicking in from the mid90s... i saw the reformed Olivia Tremor Control play a few months ago and it was truly befuddling experience, nine or 11 people onstage, a horn section, this teeteringly house-of-cards like arrangements..

and likewise flaming lips who have their moments but it's a bit studio-visionary-moi contrived and overdone.... i think the fact that it's much easier to make those kind of records that it was in the late Sixties...
somehow makes a difference .... people can knock together a Smile like that, with modern technology, you can do something epic and kooky-tastic on a real small budget in your homestudio

Originally Posted by blissblogger
i think the fact that it's much easier to make those kind of records that it was in the late Sixties...
somehow makes a difference .... people can knock together a Smile like that, with modern technology, you can do something epic and kooky-tastic on a real small budget in your homestudio

Click to expand...

That is an interesting thought. Are you saying this is a bad thing? Does the explosion in modern, inexpensive recording gear devalue music by making the process too easy?

i think it does but i would have to think long and hard to explain why

partly it's because it becomes devalued currency maybe, there's loads of these 'visionary', overproduced/overarranged records coming out of the woodwork these days

also i think (mystically maybe?) that the strenousness of the process can somehow be felt

that is why you get a different vibe from the musique concrete that was done with painstaking snipping of tape than people doing something very equivalent in sonic results but done through a much easier digital processes

(or people today doing Beatles-type studio-weirdness cf. the beatles actually doing it)

that's why i think there's more than just a modernist-sentimentalizing thing going on when we hail the pioneers of something as opposed to people who came along later and did something that superficially sounds just as good

cos it was easier for the second-gen people a/ because the gear's improved and b/ they're not heading into the unknown, someone's been there already

roots-era dub versus digi-dub is a good example

and i think it's something palpable, a quality in the actual recording, rather than something we supply with the knowledge we have of the conditions of its making

but that do sound a wee bit mystical

If we are talking about music that merely apes old recordings using a digital medium, then I suppose I agree with you. However, I find myself a bit uncomfortable with your analysis overall.

I can't help but think that the huge advances in recording technology combined with steep decreases in the cost of said technology represent a net gain for music and musicians, and I personally like the fact that so much interesting music is "coming out of the woodwork". For me, this is part of a democratization that is going on throughout the music world. Giving musicians the tools to make their own music helps break the ties with the music corporations and helps them to persue the sounds that interest them without the huge pressures of the market turning them into sterile product. Sure this means fewer "Great Works," but it also means more very good ones.

Of course the flip side of this is the "glut" of music that so many people have been stressing out about lately. New technology could very well be devaluing music in a very literal way. We know that the cost of recording has dropped considerably and we know that there has been a huge multiplication of new albums. Supply far outstrips demand, the logical conclusion of which should be lower prices. Yet prices either stay the same or increase. Would the music feel less devalued if we weren't forced to pay overinflated prices for it?

My apologies if this is way OT.

directly related to this discussion about technology/effort in music are the Walker Brother recordings of the sixties, which attempted to duplicate Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound, but could not use multi-tracking (as I am aware, British musicians unions banned it to protect the livelyhood of session players)...so full-on orchestras were used, multiple drummers, 4 pianists, etc...very much the reverse of what we see now with home studios...certainly the Walker Bros (and Scott's solo stuff) captured the grandiosity/pomposity of the Wall Of Sound but, lacking for reverb, just didn't have that punch...

Woebot you really need to check the first few LPs, they were literally the work of a totally different band.

There were 6 members in the original line up which broke up in the mid 90s - the band was inactive for while, then two of them got back together with another guy which is the band that made deserters songs and everything since.

Yerself Is Steam is one of my all time favorite rock records. There is a story that they were broke in the studio, and had to take it in turns selling their blood to keep the tapes rolling. Dunno if thats true but it certainly sounds like it. Try to get hold of Lego My Ego too which was a free album which came with YIS and is also amazing.

also worth seeking out is the "Car Wash Hair" EP, with that 50-minute hidden track that consists of a noise montage peppered with (I think) samples taken from a hidden mic during the therapy session of one of the band members...(if that's not true, I'd like to believe it is)...

I also enjoyed the Something For Joey EP which featured the wit and wisdom of Porn Legend Ron Jeremy

I am in agreement on the general decline of MR after the first few LPs...I've often wondered how much the departure of resident nutter David Baker had to do with this (and I've also often wondered why didn't he ever hook up with Pavement's resident nutter Gary Young...the train wreck they could have recorded woulda been something)...

having said that, my fave MR moment is that extended ecstatic jam that occurs after "Racing The Tide", on See You On The Other Side...

the MR side project Harmony Rockets seemed pretty promising at the time, though I can't say I've revisited that CD in the last 10 years...

I saw the Flaming Lips at a Big Day Out festival a couple of years ago and they played the best show of the day/night. Mind you it was late in the day by then (they played the last set) and I might have been a little more "receptive" but I think they did a damn good job.

As for tape collage vs hard disk editing, I think the problem might be that because hard disk editing is so easy to keep editing a piece to within an inch of its life and thus draining it of any accidental qualities that may have creeped in.

But I guess one could argue the converse as well in that it's now so easy to improvise and throw any old stuff together without enough prior aforethought to what effects etc one might want to achieve.

I'm most probably talking out of my arse here so I'll leave it at that.

I pretty much agree with original post about these new "experimental" bands being mostly lame stacks of pretention trying to pass off as "weird" or "cutting edge" -- Deerhoof, 6 Organs of Admittance, or what ever other such limp nonsense.

but I saw A.C. play once about 2 years ago (only 2 of the members were present) and it was actually a very real, primitive and energetic and oddly good show. like adolescents bouncing around their messy bedroom, but with a sort of accidental kinetic poetry about it. it never inspired me to buy an album but I was like "that didn't suck"

the real gem in the pile of cow shit though, is Gang Gang Dance. very impressive and orginal debut.

confucius said:

I pretty much agree with original post about these new "experimental" bands being mostly lame stacks of pretention trying to pass off as "weird" or "cutting edge" -- Deerhoof, 6 Organs of Admittance, or what ever other such limp nonsense.

but I saw A.C. play once about 2 years ago (only 2 of the members were present) and it was actually a very real, primitive and energetic and oddly good show. like adolescents bouncing around their messy bedroom, but with a sort of accidental kinetic poetry about it. it never inspired me to buy an album but I was like "that didn't suck"

the real gem in the pile of cow shit though, is Gang Gang Dance. very impressive and orginal debut.

Click to expand...

holy fuck yeah that gang gang dance album is awesome.. although I don't share your hate on for deerhoof etc... they don't seem all that pretentious, nor that cutting edge or "cutting edge", but still pretty awesome.