Kevin Shields bringing back MBV!
- Thread starter Chris
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agree with most of this, and the positive influence of dinosaur jr ('loveless' is so far ahead of anything ever they did, but 'you're living all over me' is arguably ahead of 'isn't anything' and a clear influence)
loveless is as near unimpeacahble as it gets (that is it's hard to construct a rationale around disliking it, clearly there is a high % of dissenters) eg nomadologist complaining about the lack of low end (not entirely true anyway) and then triangulating wrt 'psychocandy'!
the difficulty is that it isn't really trying to be anything, it's so affectless and neutral (this is a good thing)
the multitracked feedback noise-pillow and incoherent blethering/cooing evidently creates an autosuggestion towards gooey carnality and a sort of narcotised false intimacy, which is unfortunate
emetic music is another interesting topic - the only music that has ever made me feel queasy is the quarter tone piano music of ives and wyschnegradsky, complete dissaray where even the 'normal' notes don't sound normal! for some people 'to here knows when' has a similar effect but i can't quite explain it (srsly can someone who knows their stuff explicate further?)
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nomadologist
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I remember liking Glider, dHarry, but it was lost to me when all my CDs were stolen in college and i've never replaced it. I do think Joyce could've edited himself better at times and Van Gogh's painterliness isn't always to amazing ends. See, I think you can like works of art, pieces of music and think they're great even while acknowledging itheir excesses and "flaws" or gaps in formal aesthetic coherence/.
The thing about MBV's "dynamics"--well, their dynamics don't do all that much for me. I don't feel much of anything when I hear them, because I think they're almost too textural with no musical (by this i mean harmonic or melodic) substance behind them. Ambient and textural are different. I like tones, I love experimentation, but just making something sound like a slight electric shock is easy.
I'm sure it must have sounded exciting at the time, especially when fewer people had written formless, amorphous, diaphAnous tone-poetic guitar-based pop music. Do any of you play guitar? The dynamics that carry along the notion that MBV create some sort of soundscape that is on some purer plane of abstraction where it successfully represents emotions as physiological sensations, surges, flows, whatever, seem kind of chintzy to me because they're mostly pedals and textures. Nothing wrong with that, but for me, emotions, were I able to directly transliterate them into music, would have more than a three-note vocal range and some stock indie chord progressions pushed through a memory man and a Gibson-Maestro fuzzbox before the tape echo got to em. You could do so much more on the guitar with the same concept...
If I had to find a feeling MBV capture sonically, especially if it had to be a sexual or erotic one, I'd have to say they sound to me like what it feels like to have sex on hallucinogens. The sort of momentary surges in sensation and stimuli that are drug-induced and make it hard to focus on the sexually charged moment till you end up kind of falling asleep and waking up 12 hours later.
with MBV i think the nauseous feeling it elicits is due to that weird modulation they use on everything where the end of every phrase bends pitch so much it sounds like you're on a tonal rollercoaster. those "surges" are not dynamics, they're just automated modulation.
The thing about MBV's "dynamics"--well, their dynamics don't do all that much for me. I don't feel much of anything when I hear them, because I think they're almost too textural with no musical (by this i mean harmonic or melodic) substance behind them. Ambient and textural are different. I like tones, I love experimentation, but just making something sound like a slight electric shock is easy.
I'm sure it must have sounded exciting at the time, especially when fewer people had written formless, amorphous, diaphAnous tone-poetic guitar-based pop music. Do any of you play guitar? The dynamics that carry along the notion that MBV create some sort of soundscape that is on some purer plane of abstraction where it successfully represents emotions as physiological sensations, surges, flows, whatever, seem kind of chintzy to me because they're mostly pedals and textures. Nothing wrong with that, but for me, emotions, were I able to directly transliterate them into music, would have more than a three-note vocal range and some stock indie chord progressions pushed through a memory man and a Gibson-Maestro fuzzbox before the tape echo got to em. You could do so much more on the guitar with the same concept...
If I had to find a feeling MBV capture sonically, especially if it had to be a sexual or erotic one, I'd have to say they sound to me like what it feels like to have sex on hallucinogens. The sort of momentary surges in sensation and stimuli that are drug-induced and make it hard to focus on the sexually charged moment till you end up kind of falling asleep and waking up 12 hours later.
with MBV i think the nauseous feeling it elicits is due to that weird modulation they use on everything where the end of every phrase bends pitch so much it sounds like you're on a tonal rollercoaster. those "surges" are not dynamics, they're just automated modulation.
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i don't think i've seen a bad word said about talking heads here; maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
what other sacred cows are yet to be tested at the dissensus abattoir? pere ubu? funkadelic? public enemy? lamonte young?
i've enjoyed all this loveless debate btw. it's provoked me into wanting to listen to the whole thing for the first time in ages (usually i'm good with just the eps that preceeded it). but i don't have my copy up here..
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
Oh jesus. Don't even get me started on Talking Fucking Heads. They can just fuck right off.
Well, give us some examples of how you'd have improved on Ulysses
I think excesses and gaps in formal aesthetic coherence are often necessary for formal experimentation.
This from an avowed hip hop lover - and Clipse are full of melodic and harmonic substance?! But you're surely not talking about Feed Me..., You Made Me... and Isn't Anything, with all their breakdowns, hardcore riffola, Keith Moon drum flurries, stop-start-gear change dynamics? Admittedly Loveless is a lot less rock-dynamic than them, but love or hate it, I think the aesthetic development is obvious.
I never mentioned a purer plane of abstraction, quite the opposite actually; I spoke about their materiality, grain, texture, and rhythmic dynamics, and specifically explained what I meant by the embodied-ness of the emotion evoked. So they used pedals and textures (up to 17 graphic equalisers in series on Shields' guitar it was rumoured!)? May as well say Rothko (insert favourite painter here) used paint and painterly effects. These were simply their chosen/available means to pursue an aesthetic that wasn't simply a formal exploration of noise or texture for their own sake, but in the context of rock/pop song structures.
Excellent.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
Sexless freaks.
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nomadologist
Guest
whoa whoa. wait a second here. first: if any of us had to produce some work of our own that was "better" than everything we formally critiqued, most of us would not be able to say anything. do you make music, dHarry?
i never said music HAD to have "harmonic or melodic substance" to be something i would like--i said i don't think loveless is as good as it could be in my estimation because the melodic and harmonic substance below the "experimentation" with texture and effects isn't that compelling--again, in my opinion. of course, it's an opinion. aesthetic valuation is subjective, remember? being that these are all my personal preferences i'm talking about, i can't see why you are bothering to try to object to them from some sort of objective standpoint, if that's what you're doing. i can't quite tell what you're saying.
here's the thing: i don't care much for guitar-based music in the broadest, most general way. when it comes to particular examples, i like some, i don't like some. experimentation is great. i love krautrock. proggy shit. mutant disco. all kinds of stuff. that is between rock and electronic music and some way out-there shit. but i don't think loveless is that amazing nor do i think it breaks some sort of ground experimentally that had gone untouched. conrad schniztler and a million germans had been playing with pedals and melodic pop structures for years. sonic textures + pop song structures is not that mindbending a musical equation for me. rhythmically MBV bore me to tears. don't see anything innovative there.
in order to think that loveless is representational in some way, i.e. that its sonics are meant to replicate the experience of having certain sensations pulsating through your tissues or veins or sex organs or whatever, you are relying on a high order of abstraction formally. don't know what you think "formally" means if you disagree with that statement, but i'd be interested in finding out.
PS Rothko is about the least "painterly" painter there ever was. "Painterly" is a very technical term that means a painting has "visible brush strokes, and/or a rough impasto surface."
i never said music HAD to have "harmonic or melodic substance" to be something i would like--i said i don't think loveless is as good as it could be in my estimation because the melodic and harmonic substance below the "experimentation" with texture and effects isn't that compelling--again, in my opinion. of course, it's an opinion. aesthetic valuation is subjective, remember? being that these are all my personal preferences i'm talking about, i can't see why you are bothering to try to object to them from some sort of objective standpoint, if that's what you're doing. i can't quite tell what you're saying.
here's the thing: i don't care much for guitar-based music in the broadest, most general way. when it comes to particular examples, i like some, i don't like some. experimentation is great. i love krautrock. proggy shit. mutant disco. all kinds of stuff. that is between rock and electronic music and some way out-there shit. but i don't think loveless is that amazing nor do i think it breaks some sort of ground experimentally that had gone untouched. conrad schniztler and a million germans had been playing with pedals and melodic pop structures for years. sonic textures + pop song structures is not that mindbending a musical equation for me. rhythmically MBV bore me to tears. don't see anything innovative there.
in order to think that loveless is representational in some way, i.e. that its sonics are meant to replicate the experience of having certain sensations pulsating through your tissues or veins or sex organs or whatever, you are relying on a high order of abstraction formally. don't know what you think "formally" means if you disagree with that statement, but i'd be interested in finding out.
PS Rothko is about the least "painterly" painter there ever was. "Painterly" is a very technical term that means a painting has "visible brush strokes, and/or a rough impasto surface."
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nomadologist
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oh yeah, and there's nothing more boring to me than the idea that music, or art, or film or whatever, is primarily about "emotions" or "expressing emotions." guh.
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Parson
Guest
like it or not emotions are something music is capable of invoking
some people prefer explicit exploitation of this device
others not so much
doesn't make anybody right
some people prefer explicit exploitation of this device
others not so much
doesn't make anybody right
dHarry: right on, on all counts! Funny you mention Rothko, since I've been on a bit of a Rothko tip after seeing the room at the Tate Modern last summer.
nomadologist: About being too textural and insufficiently harmonic and melodic... you should have gotten beyond track 4! Tracks 5 (when you sleep) and 8 (sometimes)are basically conventional songs in terms of harmony and melody (although you might find them too conventional/boring).
nomadologist: About being too textural and insufficiently harmonic and melodic... you should have gotten beyond track 4! Tracks 5 (when you sleep) and 8 (sometimes)are basically conventional songs in terms of harmony and melody (although you might find them too conventional/boring).
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nomadologist
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Fucking New Order with their total shit lyrics and their bargain basement beats cast-off by American midwestern DJs who wrote them with one hand tied behind their backs and one jerking themselves off while blindfolded in the dark with steel plugs poured and galvanized in their eardrums for the sole purpose of ensuring that said beats would sound bad, just so they could watch Derrick May sweat them five years later and maybe one day hear them on European top 40 radio. they laughed so hard at these rinkydink blue-eyed beats and thought they were so worthless they wouldn't be caught dead trying to pawn them for skag in the USSR in full body armor even at their most bedrock of rockbottom lows. and then there was Blue Monday.
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nomadologist
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i do
and you may agree with dHarry about loveless, but Rothko is NOT painterly. that's a technical term.
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nomadologist
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sure, Parson, but music is about a lot more than just emotions. music i like is, anyway.
The problem with MBV is that the idea of them (as presented in verbalized descriptions of their sound) far outstrips what is presented on record. I love the idea of them, but none of their records especially seems to match up with what I expect, and in itself is rather thin gauzy indie pop. There's not enough texture beyond vaguely pitch bendy guitars, its never extreme enough, or thick enough... not enough feed-backing shimmer, not enough noise, just vaguely bored sounding pop music.
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that all amounts to cavilling......clearly you could take 10% out of 'loveless' or 'ulysses' (and a lot more than that from various other modernists working in terms of durations....feldman?) and probably improve it, at least in the sense of making it less unpalatable to the wider amount of people, but it has no relevance to its determination as a 'great work' or otherwise (teehee)
dharry again very good in restating your case.....i wonder if the joyce comparison was entirely arbitrary, loveless could be read tendentiously in that light, to wit the liminal dream states of the later chapters of ulysses and finnegan's wake and k shields' obsessions with hypnagogia, warping found forms beyond comprehension, the nomadic irish thing (new york-berlin-london for ks, trieste-zurich-paris for jj), the syncretism/hermeticism dialectic, lapsed catholic fixation on tactile surfaces, etc
all of which says more about the infinite system of weak associations that can be made with later joyce, and my adolescent overidentification with later mbv (although i was 6 when it was released, so i don't think of it in the light of 4ad, slowwdive, cocteau twins etc..........'daydream nation' would be the closest reference for me)
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nomadologist
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uck and don't even get me started on Keith Moon. I fucking loathe the Who. gag.
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nomadologist
Guest
it's unbearably cloying to have so many major key chord progressions AND all that midtreble range distortion and "texture"
the carebear/syrup lovemaking session analogy is still the most hilarious thing i've heard anyone say about them
the carebear/syrup lovemaking session analogy is still the most hilarious thing i've heard anyone say about them