Rat Vs Possum: "I'm OK, you're OK"

It was called a ‘positivity and optimism’ seminar, my friend was telling me between still disbelieving gulps (of a large glass of wine). It was compulsory to attend, and so, one Friday afternoon, she and the other mopey bastards in her university administration office went off to learn some corporate-funded motivation so they’d stop whinging about broken systems and failed managerial strategies and shit co-workers. To learn how to ‘get on with it’, preferably with a smile on their faces so they weren’t tempted to take stress leave or quit (thus costing the university money) or didn’t upset the students (thus costing the university money) or didn’t take a baseball bat to the computer that had been stuck on the coloured spinning beach ball of death for half an hour (thus, etc).

There was a laughter therapy session. My friend and her fellow sad-faced comrades were instructed to lift their arms up in front of themselves and announce, “Ha ha ha ha ha,” then slowly fan their arms back down their sides – and again, “Ha ha ha ha ha.” They were to do this while standing in a circle until eventually they were so drunk on oxygen and forced laughter that they broke down and actually laughed. It didn’t work.

Then came the part they ripped off from Thomas A Harris’s best-selling self-help book from the early ‘70s, I’m OK, You’re OK. (And I know this because there was a time when I decided that the kind of help I needed couldn’t possibly come from a doctor who existed in the current world and would have to come from a decade more open to the idea of insanity – ie. the ‘70s.) The co-workers had to partner off and, pointing to each other as they said it, run through the four “life positions” until they reached the climatic fourth, at which they came upon the epiphany. “I’m not OK, you’re OK”; “I’m not OK, you’re not OK”; “I’m OK, you’re not OK”; “I’m OK, you’re OK.” And all their work problems were solved. Now, whenever the printer would go back to a default A3 setting and only print a quarter of the page, they could stand there calming repeating to the machine, “I’m OK, you’re OK,” and it would stop them from suffocating the nearest first-year with a university-branded enviro bag.

Needless to say the only ‘positivity’ my friend experienced was being positive that the corporation that had employed her – and the corporation entrusted with educating thousands of young people every year – was completely fucked in the head.

If the university had wanted a cheaper and more successful junket, they could have bought a copy of Melbourne jungle-pop outfit Rat Vs Possum’s debut album, Daughter Of Sunshine (out through Sensory Projects), and transmitted it over the loudspeakers. An album of continuously building layers of humming synths, loping guitars and vocal harmonies, there’s a real therapeutic quality to the record. Not in a hippie-remedy-tailored-for-corporate-courses kind of way, mind you, but each of the seven tracks chooses a vocal phrase and runs through various expressions of it – solo, choirs, altos, tenors – until you realise the phrase’s ‘worth’. And it strangely begins to make you feel calmer and somewhat better about your position in the world. (Heavy, I know, but then, I read I’m OK, You’re OK, so I’m allowed.)

Temple opens with five lazy guitar notes played over and over against a whistling wind until a floury drum beat starts up and dual boy-girl vocals commence the mantra: “Me and my baby in the front seat, one hand on the steering wheel.” The track Pills chooses the phrase, “I think I love you but it might just be the pills,” to follow down the hole until it turns from well-meaning drug-fucked uncertainty to a statement about general human connectivity.

I put the album on and my headphones in when I was at the airport waiting for a flight that had been delayed an hour and a half, late at night on the way home from a work trip amidst a battlefield of screaming toddlers, racist old men and women discussing the quality assurance lectures they had to give in the morning. And it was then, with the help of Rat Vs Possum (and a Valium, admittedly) that I stumbled onto the unpublished fifth and possibly best life position: “Fuck you all – I’m OK, I’m OK, I’m OK.”

Thurston, Roky and the Sesame Street avant garde

Leave it to Thurston Moore to have a better idea about how to raise your kids than you. The Sonic Youth guitarist and vocalist earlier this month gave a Sunday-morning dissertation on white noise – to children aged eight to twelve. The lecture was part of the Avant Garde Preschool, a project started up by New York advertising and design mogul Andy Spade that aims to teach children the basics of abstract thinking. Spade gets friends working in various fields with a skew towards creating outside ‘normative’ boundaries to hold short courses in his office space in NYC that parents can take their spawn along to. The opening event was run by stencil artist Karen Kimmel, who held a class for four- to eight-year-olds focusing on “the exploration of colour, shape and form”.

Of course, the whole concept reeks of New York artists whose kids don’t really need the education because they’re going to grow up to be Burberry models or junkies or both anyway, but the Catch-22 remains that if you can imagine convincing your five-year-old to give up a weekend morning of watching Dora The Explorer to go hang out with a strange old man (however eerily youthful looking) who’s going to talk for an hour about a noise signal that has something to do with density and distribution and is really hard to listen to and maybe relates to what music is but sort of not really but maybe, then your work is probably already done.

The Avant Garde Preschool idea does bring up the question of ways in which parents, or society or whatever, can go about introducing young people to abstract concepts about music and art and instil in them the freedom to make their own decisions about where they can take those concepts. On a basic level, which is what is arguably needed for young kids, there are, of course, available forums for introducing music and art outside widely used forms. One of the most obvious is Nickelodeon’s Yo Gabba Gabba!, a stylistically ‘retro’-leaning television and stage show that has incorporated performances by ‘indie’ acts such as Low, Of Montreal and The Clientele (though didn’t choose local acts nearly as interesting when it last toured Australia – it’s touring again soon). Then there was the 2002 album recorded by former Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns, Songs For Dustmites, produced by The Flaming Lips guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, an album only toddlers who forwent afternoon nap time to scour Pitchfork reviews probably heard.

Outside formats marketing themselves as ‘indie kids’ concepts and accidental heroes, though, there are even more – or maybe less, depending how you look at them – obvious examples. How about Ren & Stimpy, an at times visually demanding animation that challenges concepts of ‘children’s humour’ and the simplicity of character relationships in a cartoon format? Or Oscar The Grouch and his Sesame Street song I Love Trash? Placed in the context of popular music in the western world, a scrappy puppet singing in a man’s gravelly voice about how much he loves rubbish could be seen as a pretty good place to introduce ideas of the ‘avant garde’ (without getting into what ‘avant garde’ really means to music or culture in 2010, or ever, or whatever).

But maybe all of this is over-thinking it. There’s a great clip on The 13th Floor Elevators co-founder Roky Erickson’s website in which Okkervil River’s Will Sheff interviews him in relation to the album Erickson and Okkervil River have recorded, True Love Cast Out All Evil (out Friday through Spunk). Sheff has obviously done his research and is interested in the concepts behind the decisions Erickson has made musically and, at one point, about what he thought when he first heard Tommy Hall playing the jug in 13th Floors. Erickson responds: “He just said that’s what he was doing. He said he found this old inebriate bottle and cleaned it all out, got all the spider webs and flies out of it and said, ‘Boy that’s gonna be good for, you know, whistling into it or something’.” Sheff asks, “Did you think, ‘This is going to be really weird,’ or did you just sort of roll with it?” to which Erickson flippantly explains, “No. I thought it could be a good idea.”

Sally Seltmann: musicals and Orange Juice

When I was seven, not long after my family relocated from a beachside nothing-town to the bright lights of the city (or, rather, the dull yellow streetlights of the outer suburbs), my parents went the theatre to see Les Miserables. I had no interest in such things and would continue to kick up tantrums at the suggestion of seeing anything staged between two curtains for quite some time. (I remember a particularly lonely night at home while the rest of my family went to see Jesus Christ Superstar in primary school.)

Shortly after, however, my mother bought the soundtrack on cassette and proceeded to play it on repeat in her car, a place I could be found often, seeing as being seven, socially awkward and not into any form of physical activity lent itself to going many places with my mum: on the way to the shops, on ventures to various house inspections, on a trip to visit my cousins’ farm hours away to fetch one of a litter of pups for our new city life. It wasn’t long before those songs became ingrained in my childhood psyche, and one particularly stood out.

It was a sweet, sweeping tune sung by a melancholic, wise, young girl named, apparently, Cosette, wishing for a better life in which she isn’t mistreated and doesn’t know pain and sorrow. I connected with it well, obviously, but mostly I became completely smitten with the character of Cosette and did what all smitten men do – I named my new dog after her.

From then on, too, I was acquainted with that pop-culture character that has had a huge resurgence in recent times: the intelligent, mostly innocent female protagonist, unworldly yet knowing, partially trapped in her own mind, or by situation, and looking out with the dream of a better life. Perhaps that’s not an entirely fair portrait (though it isn’t intended as criticism), and maybe it isn’t a ‘character’ at all, but they’re certainly characteristics shared by many songwriters currently enjoying notoriety. The songwriters, too, are making the kind of sad, sweeping yet hopeful pop songs Cosette would sing from the speakers of my mother’s Toyota Camry.

In July last year, Scottish novelist Liam McIllvanney wrote in The Guardian on the God Help The Girl album created by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, a ‘concept album’ of sorts employing various singers that Murdoch went on to tell was in fact part of an ongoing film project. The album had a storytelling structure based on the recovery of a college-aged girl who’s suffered a breakdown (or as McIllvanney put it, “exploring the mindsets of damaged young women”), set to the sweet, sweeping pop Belle & Sebastian are known for. Not quite a musical, but not far off. McIllvanney linked the sound back to the old Postcard Records roster of bands, citing Orange Juice particularly as appropriate mothers to B&S’s creed and, hence, the album’s tone.

Orange Juice, B&S and God Help The Girl are all also relevant reference points to Sally Seltmann’s new record, Heart That’s Pounding, released last week through Shock Records. The album plays out like a piece of musical theatre, the story of a young woman – Seltmann – gazing out at the world and dealing with her inner turmoil, set to wonderfully jangly and conversation-paced orchestral indie pop.

The album begins with the line, “Dreams they come and go/This is one that I’ve had forever, I know/Been crossing my fingers and always hoping for it to come true,” and a simple beat opening out with heralding drums and golden rays of keyboard into the track Harmony To My Heartbeat. On The Borderline prances with strings and a ‘60s pop arrangement, Seltmann sweetly singing, “When I wake up in the morning I feel very numb/But I’m gonna get through…” The album goes on through a captivating narrative of Seltmann’s complex view of the world – damaged, hopeful, knowing and somewhat trapped.

Listening to it, I can’t help but remember the girl named Cosette I became smitten with as a child, the girl who could be seen as a blueprint for so many literary and musical characters. And I know that, somewhere, there’s a seven-year-old boy naming his new puppy Sally.

Down Sounds: April 2010

It’s easy to see where the listening time has gone over the last four weeks. Between the debate over whether the new MGMT album is any good (no), the debate over whether Lisa Mitchell had any right to win the AMP (yes) and the debate over whether Tom Hanks should direct the Green Day movie (OK, there was no debate; the answer is lying back and thinking of England), there have been plenty of decent releases to distract from other things like life. I won’t cover them all – if you haven’t heard the new Gonjasufi, Gorillaz or JJ releases, that’s hardly my fault.

One of the most pleasing releases of recent weeks has been the iTunes single release of Sleep by Melbourne new wave rhythm’n’trance woman Romy. Though the song has been kicking around the net longer than that, the release comes with a B-side and two remixes, one by Juan MacLean and the other by The Breakdown’s other obsession, Melbourne kosmische calypso duo Brain Children. The BC remix really is that good, bringing the kind of dance single ‘moments’ long out of fashion but secretly held dear – ie. the ‘nostalgic bass drop’. So good.

Staying in Melbourne, Jarred Brown’s ‘other other’ band Eagle & The Worm, who give ‘60s good-time rock’n’roll a nudge, released their double-A 7”, fittingly titled Futureman/Goodtimes. Bubbling, plinking, warping garage nu-gazers Yolke released their debut EP, Poppy Wash. And supremely excellent ambient slacker-pop outfit Love Connection set off to launch their self-titled album (through Sensory Projects).

In Brisbane, Carry Nation’s Jessie Warren made good on her promise with a debut album, Like A River Does (through El Nino El Nino/Inertia) of the kind of pause-causing, simple folk that acts as a reminder that great, affecting songs can be written and played with only an acoustic guitar and a relatable voice (though Warren does slap some strings and horns on them, too). On the other side of the songwriting saddle, former Sekiden member Seja put her kleptomania to good use by employing nearly 20 synthesisers to record her first solo album of elated, sophisticated and just really-good pop.

Speaking of really-good, I can’t really explain in any words how really-good the new Latin America track from Holy Fuck (pictured) is, mostly because I don’t want to sound like Lester Bangs and get all “chugging trains through the tunnels of my mind”. It’s from their upcoming Latin album, which is out in May through XL (at least it is in the States).

South By Southwest did its thing of acting as the official launch pad of a few bands people were already talking about. While The Middle East and Crayon Fields attracted a slab of attention from US blogs, American bands who got online love included New Jersey’s moody, anthem-writing, country-edged punks-with-violin Titus Andronicus, Austin’s rather amazing distorto-darkwave outfit Psychic Violence, Austin’s more amazing ‘90s-throwback new wave trip-rockers Ringo Deathstarr (who sound strangely like that band from High Fidelity) and LA’s Pearl Harbour, who stick to their regional pop sounds with more of a melancholic, lo-fi reverb bent.

Everyone’s favourite new label to say is their favourite new label, Sensory Projects, gave us the debut album by gruff-fronted Toronto experi-folk cult Bruce Peninsula, A Mountain Is A Mouth, while Remote Control Records handed us the first album since 2006 from Norwegian band Serena Maneesh, led by their pretentious-rock-shtick-clinging frontman Emil Nikolaisen (and not in a bad way; you’ve gotta appreciate an unwarranted and unrewarded ego), No 2: Abyss In B Minor, an album that really pushes their distorted walls of noise to the grainy limits and is their first record for the 4AD label.

Finally, to the category of Acts Who Might Have A Hard Time Getting Much Attention On Australian Radio But Should, Remote Control Records have also just given us the first single from 21-year-old UK ‘soul’ singer Rox, who, like the UK’s Little Jackie, will probably prove to be too far either side of the commercial-alternative divide (but, hey, hopefully not). The song, My Baby Left Me, is a winner; the kind of groove-led, rusty R&B we haven’t heard since Lauryn Hill was, er, really-good.

The penetrating Hole

I was sitting alone in the pub beer garden last night (no, Mum, I was waiting for someone) when the two women at the table next to me started getting heavily into a deep’n’meaningless about their friendship – or, as it turned out by the end of the conversation, their former friendship. One was sipping on soda water and calmly and eloquently relaying her ‘feelings’ about the other’s narcissistic behaviour while the alleged narcissist ploughed her way through a bottle of white wine and interjected every now and then with a bellowing “You’re just making shit up about me now,” and, “Why are you being such a bitch?” At one point the crazy drunk one even managed to work the elephant-in-the-room metaphor into an insult about the weight of the other woman, who, for some reason, was still sitting on the other side of the table.

I’d been sitting there, pretending to send messages on my phone while I listened in, and it was only after ten minutes or so that I realised I could get up and end the misery of being put through this awkward public display of relationship therapy (even though the worst charge against Crazy Drunk seemed to be that she ignored phone calls from her friends when she was depressed, and I had just ignored a phone call from my mother while ordering a pint – hi again, Mum) but I hadn’t and, it struck me, didn’t want to. I was actually enjoying the experience of an irrational, slurring, self-absorbed person antagonise her seemingly normal, slightly needy (that’s normal, right?) semi-intelligent friend in earshot of 30 other people. And it was then that I understood why Courtney Love singing, “People like you fuck people like me fuck people like you” over and over again in one of the new Hole songs sent to media on a five-track sampler of their forthcoming ‘comeback’ album has been so appealing.

It isn’t because, after years of watching people yell out the ‘swear word’ in a hit song at the top of their voice at festivals (eg. “fuck the police”; “fuck you, I won’t do whatcha tell me”; “fuck the pain away”; “so fucking useless”) , I’ve finally succumbed to the thinking that hearing ‘fuck’ recorded over music and played through a speaker is somehow cathartic or relatable. It’s because dropping an illogical, confrontational, foul-mouthed person into a mannered, ordered situation is funny. And Courtney Love is that person.

Since Love put her Hole to bed in 2002 and thus lost her credibility with the rock set (for a reason only psychologists who’ve studied Original Band vs Solo Career Cred would know), her place in the mainstream – particularly Hollywood tabloid – media has remained, where other celebrities from the ‘90s music sales boom (most, in fact – well, those who aren’t dead) have faded into the crack-den shadows. While her outfits, body modifications and paparazzi-courting have something to do with it, the reason for the continued fascination is because, in essence, Love is the same fist-swinging antagonist she always was in Hole, but now she, by choice, swings those fists in a polite, well-dressed, ordered society and makes it entertainment. It also has something to do with the change in the music industry and the fact that, in the current socialist-leaning model, if anyone like Courtney Love was introduced to media, they’d be likely told to go to the back of the queue – and, next audition, maybe hold off on the attitude and give us a bit more humility.

So anyway, other than relaying the revelation that Love is a ‘top bird’, I should also relay that the five-song teaser of Hole’s new album, Nobody’s Daughter (out 30 April through Universal) is actually pretty good. The songwriting is the kind of mid-temp pop rock of Celebrity Skin with a bit of a return to their simple, bashy execution of old – nodding drums, squalling guitars (played by former Larrikin Love guitarist Micko Larkin) and Love not bothering to intonate or hit the notes, as the band’s performances at SXSW, viewable online, displayed. The clips also suggest why Love didn’t get past Hole members back on board, ordering her new, young lackeys around the stage in a manner that probably wouldn’t be stood for by Eric Erlandson or Melissa Auf der Maur, and entertaining the shit out of her audience in the process.