Thursday, May 27, 2010

The '90s are officially back: White Town, Kele and the wet look


It has taken its own sweet time, as these things have a tendency to do, but it’s happened. Sometime between Billy Corgan ducking the backlash over his studio collaborations with Jessica Simpson and convincing a Veronica to reach her skinny arms around his girth, the ‘90s revival we’ve been pledged for years now, the one false-started numerous times over by companies eager to be on the tip of the wave, has happened, and seemingly organically. As with the ‘70s and ‘80s revivals of the past 15 years, it just took for people to dig deeper into the cultural nuances than were immediately presented us, to uncover the – for a time – buried or forgotten gems. To go beyond flannel and Doc Martens and guitar rock or any of the signifiers long taken over and made naff by commerce and seek out the sincerity in, at this point, the wide middle of the decade.

It has happened: the appropriation and subversion of commercial dance sounds by the likes of Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke (pictured) on his solo single Tenderoni, echoing, perhaps, the likes of Faithless. The slide into less flagrantly theatrical sounds by some of the bigger names in rock, the rekindling of good garage sounds and the hint that we’re about to enter a new stage of decent band-pop given by the likes of Cloud Control and Parades. The sense of the imminence of gothic-leaning bubblegum pop singers as the sound moves up from under.

There have been more apparent and backward-looking signs, of course: girls walking around with pale faces and the ‘wet hair’ look; skateboards back under arms, if not on the roads, and the revisitation, perhaps led by magazine editors and DJs who are at the age of having grown up in the ‘90s, of the decade’s acts. At an inner-city club recently, wall to wall with ‘trendy’ types under 20 – meaning they were born after 1990 – one of the biggest dancefloor responses was to White Town’s 1997 hit Your Woman, another to Smashing PumpkinsBullet With Butterfly Wings. (Sure, I was the one inflicting at least one of those songs, but the point remains.)
While last week The New York Times was reporting of the worst week of US album sales since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking in 1991 (the top new album was The National’s High Violet, further suggesting that non-pop acts have big sales potential in poor sales climate due to the dedication of their audiences to buying music – though the top seller was still the Bieber) and Jake Gyllenhaal put himself forward to play Kurt Cobain in an inevitable biopic (hmmm), the NME online was tallying reader votes on the best albums of the ‘90s. The shortlist contained a pretty decent wack of acts, from Ride to Air to REM and The Lemondheads. Lots were missing, passed over in favour of more ‘known’ bands – Arab Strap and Gorky’s Zygotic Munci and Throwing Muses and Placebo (YES, Placebo); the first probably due to some kind of ‘popularity’ criteria, the last because, due to recent crimes against aging, it’s not yet OK to applaud their early work.

Sitting at the top was a fairly obvious but not undeserving bunch: Blur, Oasis, Nirvana and, at #1, Radiohead’s OK Computer, an album that sums up the widely publicised but not altogether incorrect sentiment of the decade’s teenaged generation; the revisited distopian view, which is better than the cynicism of that view that came after and is still held, even though, arguably, Muse will serve the same function to many of the past decade’s teen set.

Unsurprisingly not on the shortlist for obscurity (in the UK at least) reasons were The Paradise Motel (pictured), a band who breathed life into the quiet-loud rural-gazing by Australian bands in the ‘90s and are having a rejuvenation of their own with a new line-up and their first album since disbanding in 2000. The album, Australian Ghost Story (out through Left Over Life To Kill Records on 11 June) is a sepia-toned and engaging telling of the Azaria Chamberlain story, a tale perfectly suited to their dusty, imperfect rock. They also cleverly get away with not being a part of any ‘90s rehash while landing in the middle of it – a record released in 2010 about something that happened in 1980 from a band who weren’t active in the decades following or preceding those dates. Talk about taking their sweet time.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

MIA and red all over


A hairdressing salon is hardly a strange place to overhear discussions on the merits and drawbacks of hair colours, but a trip to get my autumn bev curls shorn off last week at a socially-acceptably-expensive place put me in the middle of yet another conversation about redheads brought on by the web-rousing video clip for MIA’s latest released track, Born Free. The nine-minute film, directed by Romain Gavras – the son of filmmaker Costa Gavras and creator of clips for Justice and The Last Shadow Puppets – features a militant rounding up of redheads in a war-torn city and ends with some pretty graphic executions of young men. It was shocking to some in the salon, offensive to others. Most in the room, as most in the media have, missed the point that MIA seems to be making about acceptable forms of persecution in current society, backed by irony of the Suicide-sampling anger of the song’s production and its title lyric. (The beginning of the clip, in which obese people are hunted down in their apartments and beaten, has also been largely overlooked as a marker of that statement.)

The hairdresser visit (turned out great, thanks) wasn’t the first time I’d been looked at, as a card-carrying member of the ginger race (no, really, I have a card; it was given to me when I was asked to pose for a portrait series on redheads in the US titled A Rare Breed by the photographer Julia Baum) with wide eyes for some kind of comment about someone saying something about people with ginger hair. The last was when the Victorian Government’s road safety campaign in March told us that every time we used a mobile phone while driving, “gingas get fresh with other gingas”.

While it seems to be enjoying a significant revival, the idea of the redhead as ‘other’ is hardly new. The mere fact of the minority status of redheads means we’ve long been variably cast (or outcast) as insane villains (Poison Ivy, Lindsay Lohan), alien high-fashion beauties (models in the last Burberry campaign, Lindsay Lohan), irritating kids who need a slap (Junior in Problem Child, Lohan), female husky-voiced sex-bombs (Rita Hayworth, Gerri Halliwell [miscast]) and slightly off-tap, fantasy-leaning female singers (Tori Amos, Florence Welch). Even when we’re the everywoman (not man), played by either Julia Roberts or pre-crack Lohan, we want to be the centre of attention. We’re the comedic bitch (Shirley MacLaine, Bette Midler) and the dopey, working class grot (Ron Weasley, any film about Ireland).

It’s that last category that is often brought in when talking about the also well-exercised persecution of redheads, particularly in England – the tensions between Celts and Nords ‘settling’ Britain – and the image most often portrayed when ad campaigns prey on redheads for kicks, or shows like South Park or people like MIA and Romain Gavras use such persecution as commentary. Had the military in the Born Free clip shot a bosomy female singer in the head in the middle of a field, her hair colour wouldn’t have been at the centre of the message. Because the truth is, minorities ain’t minorities – and doesn’t popular culture know it.

When redheads are persecuted in popular culture – and, my experience has suggested, in everyday life – it isn’t because of the colour of their hair. It’s because the colour of their hair is a target pinned to other characteristics it’s deemed OK to prey on, all relating back to the big one that isn’t very fashionable right now to talk about: the poor. Red hair is a target on the uneducated: the poor. Red hair is a target on the ‘ugly’: the poor. Red hair is a target on the unclean, the under-confident, the malnourished, those without access to health services, to family planning services, to proper housing: the poor.

With access to those things, redheads can be the good guy or the bad guy, ‘good in bed’, ‘mischievous’, ‘angelic’, ‘psychotic’, ‘Lindsay Lohan’. We can also be none of those things, but it’s likely we’ll always attract some fairly benign stereotypes by virtue of being a minority, and we’re hardly the only minority that can lay claim to that. In the end, the message in MIA’s clip remains relevant: some of us were ‘born free’ more than others.


Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Down Sounds: May 2010


Sydney’s RIP Society Records has already been mentioned a couple of times since The Breakdown began running a monthly music wrap-up at the start of the year, and the tiny label just seems to be gathering pace. Mostly because it has released some of the most interesting and unpretentious new Australian music of the last six months or so, and partly in the last month because of Sydney band Royal Headache (pictured), who seem to have become the next Aus band everyone’s championing for ‘overseas success’ and who released their first 7” through RIP Society at the end of March. (That’s another reason RIP are doing well – the 7” is well and truly ‘back’ and the label has a good handle on making them available, well priced and nicely homemade-looking.)


The Royal Headache 7” has apparently been selling well, even outside of Sydney, where they’re still ‘lesser known’, and for good reason: it’s four great, scrappily laid down garage soul songs, catchy enough not to be too art-space-exclusive, rough enough not to be ‘60s-revival naff. RIP Society also just last week released the debut LP from Sydney’s Dead Farmers, titled Go Home, which excellently captures their garage blues punk ruckus – it’s all drunken yelling and guitar bashing, made somehow more wild by serpentine riffs somewhere off to the side. Good stuff. They’re away from home this month so check out their tour dates.


To other releases, Brooklyn’s The National have finally released a new single, Bloodbuzz Ohio, the first output from their High Violet album, which is out next week through 4AD/Remote Control, and it’s an awesome indication of the weight of the record (promotional copies have been circulating). It’s nothing fans of the band’s Boxer album won’t be familiar with – ominous drums, trembling guitar reverberations, bar-room piano, but Matt Berninger’s voice has been recorded better than it ever has, and the sound is absolutely massive. I can’t decide whether the idea of being “on a bloodbuzz” is disturbing or appealing, though.


Liberation have been the label to pick up Violent Soho’s self-titled album, the record being the Brisbane group’s first longplayer for the US market via Thurston Moore’s Ectstatic Peace! label following their self-released We Don’t Belong Here album in Aus. It’s a large portion of that album with a few song replacements, produced by Gil Norton to become something akin to The Vines’ first record: a slick but wonderfully sharp-sounding and cohesive string of well-written rock songs.


Melbourne’s Sally Seltmann and Rat Vs Possum released very different but similarly oddly-comforting albums, both of which I’ve probably been on about enough so won’t go into. Brisbane’s Disco Nap, led by Ross Hope from Bris heroes Iron On, put out a killer shady indie pop single, The Soft Sell, quickly picking up national radio play and making a trip south to launch it. It’s so good to hear Hope’s voice on record again, and this outfit will hopefully get more people onto his honest, ‘90s-bent tones.


Sydney’s Parades released their debut album, Foreign Tapes, through Dot Dash/Remote Control. It’s been since the tidal wave of the mid-2000s that an ‘indie rock’ sound (in the English sense) found exciting, dynamic songs, and there seems no reason why they shouldn’t become one of the next festival season’s local highlights – their live show more than holds up to the strong production of the record.


Speaking of the UK, Archie Bronson Outfit followed up their brilliant 2006 album Derdang Derdang (you know, it had that song from Skins that everyone was obsessed with for ages on it) with the, for some reason, fairly lightly welcomed Coconut through Domino/EMI. Perhaps four years is too long now to hold off on another record release, but the album is certainly worth a listen, taking them further into hip-swinging Happy Mondays phrasing and tropical percussion. Another act who’ve headed further into mushroom-dancefloor territory are High Places, their latest album High Places Vs Mankind (through Popfrenzy) far more solid and melody-driven than previous output. Domino, though EMI, has also just reissued Galaxie 500’s Today, On Fire and This Is Our Music records with extra discs of live and ‘uncollected’ material – wipe a few days off your calendar for that one.


And the I’m-late-to-the-game band of the month are Cults, whose Go Outside track of hand-holding, sepia-toned field-pop has had a bit of love on the net but who no one seems to know anything about. Check them out for Kool-Aid-swilling goodness.