Music Diary 2012: The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future

Note: last week I logged the music that I listened to as part of the Music Diary 2012 project. Over the next little while I'm going to try writing about it. Sometimes I may engage the music head-on, other times I'll write about my listening habits, or the importance of context, or whatever. I'm playing this by ear and hoping it works out.

"Monday, on my way to work: 'The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future' by Los Campesinos!"

Los Campesinos! are the band which probably lies nearest to my heart. Mon dieu, do I love this beautiful, brazen band.

What makes LC! so special? At first - in the Sticking Fingers Into Sockets and Hold On Now, Youngster! era, it was because of their maximalist, heart-on-sleeve intensity - a mix of twee earnestness and punk rock fury. They're seven kids playing violins and glockenspiels and...! They all changed their last name to 'Campesinos!'! They have a song called "You! Me! Dancing!"! Exclamation mark! Exclamation mark!

This was all incredibly appealing, and the tunes were killer enough to make Hold On Now, Youngster... a favourite. But once the initial sugar rush subsided, what was left was even more compelling - Gareth's exquisitely detailed, brainy, heartrending lyrics. Our hero presented himself as smart and funny, a music geek like you or I (hear his dismay as he bemoans his girlfriend's lover's "K Records T-shirt"!), a real, honest child of the now ("like a final, fatal LiveJournal entry" goes one simile), heartbroken. It genuinely sounded like LC! had my back, even when no one else did. LC! were a band for sensitive indie kids "hyperintelligent enough to know that holding on won't get any easier", to cite Lord & Saviour Christgau. And surprisingly, smartly, LC! capitalized on this.

In subsequent records, the sweetness turns sour and the warm-bloodedness was increasingly replaced with caustic, over-the-top bile. Most of my friends who loved HONY... because you could put it on loop and dance to in your dorm room for hours no longer find anything appealing in this band, but I've grown more attached to them than ever.

What's changed? For better or for worse, Gareth's gone from a too-clever precocious Young Writer-type with a capital 'W' to more of a self-involved storyteller. So instead of lyrics about a fear of technology and "Ctrl+Alt+Deleting your face!" and a tendency to get carried away by "damn extended metaphors!" on the backs of natural disasters, we get lyrics predominately about Gareth's breakups and heartbreaks and just how fucking badly he takes them.

It sounds trite, but here's the rub: the woe-is-me-ness that inevitably permeates sad songs about girls is always tempered by a self-awareness, a willingness to self-deprecate - to be crass, bitter, pathetic, and miserable all in one go. Which is kind of how heartbreak seems to work (in my head, anyway). "I have broken down into the naked breasts of a newly-ex/No dignity, I can only guess that she thinks about it when she touches herself!" Gareth moans on a song called "Miserabilia" (seriously). On an explosive, visceral song of unrequited love called "I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know" (seriously) he describes himself in the throes of angst "rolling, writhing on the floor/staring daggers pulled from my thoracic wall," apologizing for having put the song's "You" through a "lifetime" of romantic declarations "that you never desired". It's a shitty, desperate position to be in, and about 90% of the appeal (or otherwise) of the modern LC! comes from the tension between that and the self-awareness of this shitty desperation and the self-loathing this self-awareness entails.

But every now and then Gareth and his band seem to nail something even more painful than run-of-the-mill romantic heartbreak (as perfectly as he does that). How to explain...? Something like the feeling of the existential weight of all of humanity, the sheer pain of not one's own life or even lives - but of the very act of living and dying. It sounds overblown and vague and silly, I know. But to me, at least, it seems to transcend navel-gazing, even as the lyrics are about listening to the sound of your own blood course. In "The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future", Gareth tells us that "rhis thing hurts like hell", and then asks himself, "But what did you expect?" What's "this thing" that hurts so bad? If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say he's talking about life itself.

As he's describing the brutal existential dread of feeling time unfolding across the horizon, Gareth paints a haunting picture of a troubled, possibly dead, possibly dead-by-suicide friend of his. What can I tell you about her from this song? She's anorexic, plays a mean video game, speaks French, is untrustworthy, has a fear of abandonment and a fetish for drowning and an addiction for prescription painkillers born out of childhood trauma. She "could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off her tongue". She's too precisely detailed to be just a fictional girl in a song, but also somehow too larger-than-life to live. Gareth's lament is almost mythical and a bit stream of consciousness - there's minimal connectivity between the various anecdotes starring this girl, political ranting, and surreal, vivid imagery.

All this focus on lyrics and I run the risk of snubbing the actual song. LC! is (despite its massive cast of musicians) something of a lyrics-first band, but here especially the arrangement goes a long way to make Gareth's writing reach the tremendous scale that it does. Those screaming string (?) shrieks in the second verse, the FUCKING LOUD chorus, the ebbing and flowing of the violin over the bubbling guitar riff - it's an incredible composition.

I really enjoy Hello Sadness, the most recent Los Campesinos! album. But in a lot of ways it sounds like a retreat from this - where Gareth and his friends finally stood right at the precipice of adulthood, of mortality, of the abyssal fact that being alone is significantly worse than being single, and that - no matter how hard we reach out to each other - in a way we are all alone.

Les Jeux Video Sont Les Belles Fleurs

Similarly, this was in the Garg in late January.

When I was 12, I was convinced that the Playstation game Final Fantasy VII was a storytelling masterpiece, every bit as brilliant as Shakespeare or Milton. I was an idiot, of course, but looking back I can't help but wonder whether the medium was intrinsically limited, or if it was simply the infantile nature of the material itself. Hypothetically, why couldn't a videogame be just as effective or moving as a book or film? Going further, why couldn't interactivity open up new means of expressing, effecting, and commenting upon our humanity?

In mainstream gaming culture, it simply doesn't. Games almost homogeneously concern male power fantasies - blowing shit up, saving the day, getting the babe. The videogame "adaptation" of the Inferno, released next month, turns Dante's sombre meditation on sin into a blood 'n tits-filled exercise in demon-baby impalement. The very existence of the term 'gamer' signifies that you have to be of a certain disposition to put up with this shit. I haven't considered myself a member of this unfortunate legion in several years, but I can't help but be frustrated by the current state of affairs.

Salvation comes in the form of the independent games movement, a diverse collection of game developers and enthusiasts who predominantly congregate and distribute their works online at websites like TIGSource or indiegames.com. Their games range from the hallucinogenic - like cactus' Clean Asia! or messhof's Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist - to the tender and emotional, like Daniel Benmergui's I Wish I Were The Moon, inspired by novelist Paulo Coelho. Some are experimental non-games seeking to explore the limits of the medium, much as the structuralist filmmakers of the 60s did for their own, and others are loving throwbacks to simpler times in gaming - like the stylish, insanely addictive Canabalt. Together, the scene is frothy with a sense of excitement and innovation, desperately seeking an escape from the repetitive, grim unpleasantness of modern mainstream gaming.

It's also slowly breaking through. Take Braid, one of the poster children for independent games. Braid is a self-financed production from a two-man team of programmer Johnathan Blow and artist David Hellman (responsible for the brilliant online comic "A Lesson is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible"). After winning acclaim at various industry events (most notably the 2006 Independent Games Festival) and establishing significant buzz, Microsoft helped distribute the game for the XBox 360, and it's now also available for Playstation 3s, PCs, and Macs. Braid is the story of a man trying to untangle the memories of a love affair destroyed by his own ambition and egotism - it's sort of like the videogame analogue of 500 Days of Summer. The narrative and the actual mechanics dovetail ingeniously - the protagonist can manipulate the flow of time in various ways as he reassembles the past, while the game muses philosophical on the emotional toll time takes on our relationships.

There are dozens of other, lesser-known people and games I could mention: the outspoken "dot-matrix dominatrix" Anna Anthropy, a trans- game maker whose retro-styled works like Mighty Jill Off and Calamity Annie subvert the heteronormative assumptions of gaming culture; or Jesse Venbrux, whose series of Karoshi games (Japanese for "death by overwork") places you in the shoes of a Japanese salaryman seeking to kill himself in dozens of absurd, insane ways; or Jason Rohrer, who makes games about "consciousness and isolation" or "mania, meloncholia, and the creative process", has been featured in Esquire magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and who has reportedly made people cry with his simple little creations.

I've dipped my toes in as well. Last summer, a friend enlisted me in his team for TOJam, The Toronto Independent Games Jam. The premise: sit in a warehouse out on Queen East for a weekend and crank out a game from scratch. The grind was exhausting and the results were raw and unpolished, but the sheer creative experience was joyous. Our game was even featured on the TORONTOTRON arcade machine and installed at the Gladstone Hotel for the Canzine independent arts fair, which was probably the coolest thing I've ever been involved with. Since then, I've also participated in the Ludum Dare 48 hour game making competition, and I'm becoming a true believer in the message of the DIY scene: don't accept the culture force-fed down your throat, make your own. Freed from the design-by-committee approach and worries about profits margins, interactive media can be legitimate art - and really fucking fun, too.

Yo La Tengo 03.10.09

Originally published in The Gargoyle, October 20, 2009. It's not a great write-up, but it's not terrible, and since The Garg doesn't publish online, I figured I'd put it here for posterity's sake.

Yo La Tengo are like indie rock's official journeymen. Guitarist Ira Kaplan, drummer Georgia Hubley - also his wife - and their buddy James McNew have been doing their thing for something like 25 years now, and while they've never been huge, they're dearly beloved by their core contingency of music geeks - if the audience at The Opera House on October 3rd is any indication, there appears to be a correlation between poor eyesight and loving YLT. My guess is that YLT lets us indulge in a sort of fantasy life - Ira's just like you! Awkward, pretty much styleless, and totally obsessed with pop music. Except that he's the world's greatest noise rock guitarist and gets to live a blissful, bohemian life playing in a band with the girl of his dreams. We should all be so lucky.

The truth is, Yo La Tengo have been kind of boring for the past decade; since 2000's romantic And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, their output has mostly been insincere pastiche. Pleasant and likable, but Ira used to wear his heart on his sleeve like no one else. Painful and Electr-O-Pura might have been a bit abrasive, but that noise served to take Ira's awkward-Jewish-nerd emotions and give it muscle and soul. The way that fuzzy noise riff running through "From a Motel 6" pounds at your ears is basically the very feeling of romantic desperation, and "I Heard You Looking" is the sound of longing at its sweetest.

Of course they didn't play either of those songs. Sadly but expectedly, their setlist was too heavily weighted towards recent material. Sure, at this point they've more than earned their creative freedom to do whatever the hell they want, but funky as it was, did anyone really come out to see the band run through "Mr. Tough"? On the other hand, the unquestionable show highlight was from their newest album, Popular Songs: the simultaniously towering and swooning "More Stars Than There Are In Heaven", where Ira mumbles about walking hand in hand as the glittering noise swells and swells for something like fifteen minutes until it envelops everything with love and hearing loss. It was magical.

So there's the dilemma. Endure yet another middling funk imitation like "Periodically Double or Triple" for the sake of a beautiful rendition of "Stockholm Syndrome", complete with un-freakin-believable Ira skronk solo? It's probably worth it. For individuals of the right temperament, Yo La Tengo become a particular way of seeing the world. Sometimes things are dull, sure, and your music is just old stuff on the radio...but then Ira freaks out, does unimaginable things to his guitar with his back to the audience, his heart is broken, the feedback just about reaches the breaking point, and just when it's all about to get unbearable, Georgia slides over to Ira and coos, "You can have it all," and true love is real and there really are happy endings after all. Cynics need not apply, Yo La Tengo are for lovers.

All Your Useless Pretensions

This is kind of old news, but if you haven't seen it it's absolutely genius.



And I mean that in every way. I'm not a huge GB fan, but I love the sound of the song - the thick, chewy guitar texture, in particular. Lyrically, it's just another breakup song, but it's not histrionic - calm and cool, but seething with frustration and bitterness; very honest, but also mature and world-weary. And the video not only adds to the song, but is fascinating in its own right: the lone fencer with no one to fight, his head seemingly locked inside his own helmet, passing the time with distractions as he tries to kick the memories away. The jerky and repetitive stop-motion visuals give it an obsessive, hallucinogenic quality, perfectly in touch with the song's emotional content. The whole thing is just dead-on.