Justice – Bristol Academy 17/02/08

Seeing two french gentlemen so clearly revered by a distinctly English crowd can’t help but speak volumes for the power of good music.

Saturday 17th saw an array of eagerly awaiting youths (at least two of whom paid too much for their tickets, I can safely assure you) bear witness to the public face of the modern wave of french electro and discotheque in a brief 50 minute sermon, in the chasm of Bristol’s own Carling academy.  Bear Witness is one particular turn of phrase appropriate, if you look at their use of iconic Christian imagery (layman’s terms; “they have a bigglowy cross”), and their repeated biblical references in their work (“They have a song called ‘Genesis’ and a song called ‘Lets There Be Light’ and, if you want to labour things, a song called ‘Phantom’”).  But you’d run the risk of overdressing that most pure and simple quality, talent.

I’ve seen Justice twice, once in the south of France in a lovely little beach club that took total advantage of how far away the nearest license was, and now again at the academy.  The first time was a true experience; I literally bled for the sins of every clubber present, in an effort to hold onto my prime position, but got to watch them work their magic as they blended seemingly every genre of note to me; everything Ed Banger, everything Justice,Kavinsky, even that (surprising, admit it) hit Killing In The Name Of (which, I must note, drove the crowd fucking insane).  I knocked a few years off the ol’ life expectancy for the show, but it was more than worth it.

Of course, I’m not just bragging; there was a different note to the performance on this occasion, and I’m hoping the above points are closely tied.  The Justice (or Just-teese as the hoxton hero I met that night in Bath tried to persuade me; “‘Justice?  Who?’ ‘You know, D.A.N.C.E and all that’ ‘OH, you mean Jus-teese.  They’re french’.  Wanker) I saw in France were DJ’s; good DJ’s, DJ’s with their own material, but DJ’s, pure and simple.  Their mix was eclectic, varied, and skillfully crafted.  Compare this to the academy; I can remember half a song outside their own repertoire being played, and that was a MSTRKRFT remix of D.A.N.C.E.  Not that this impacted quality; undoubtedly this was a great switch up of everything, and brought me to love tracks from the album (‘Cross’, but we’ll avoid that for now) that I’d seen as duds.  And it was wonderful.  And yeah, I wasn’t breathing their C02 as it left their bodies, risking asphyxiation in the process, and that hurt too.  I hardly regret going, and it was probably the best night EVER personally experienced at the Academy.  It was just noticeable that this was a tour to promote an album, and not for the sheer fun of it.  But then that probably was always going to be the case at this stage, so I won’t complain.

Perhaps we could have a new le tricolore.  Liberte, Egalitie, Fraternite and Jus-teece.

MDM-Azing?

A sobering thought.

It’s getting rarer and rarer to find the average clubber and techno-music fan who isn’t faced with drugs.  The chances of hearing an honest, surprised, scared “What the fuck?” when offered MDMA, E and the like, are minimal.  Innocence has long been lost, and we can now swiftly divide the population of the average dance-floor into those who do, and those who haven’t yet.  Not so much peer pressure, but simply embracing the culture itself in all aspects, is rapidly becoming a drive behind club-land drug taking.

The substance will vary from scene to scene.  The drum&bass scene which Bristol has such intimate ties with, tends to lean slightly more in the direction of true amphetamines, such as Speed, Cocaine and Crack.  Conversely,  Hip Hop tends to encourage Cannabis and Barbiturates.  Electro complements Ecstacy and MDMA.  This is far from stereotyping, but rather an observation of how different types of music encourage different narcotic usage.  Yes, there will be a certain drift of product either way, these are in no way, shape or form concrete rules, but this is to find issue with the wrong point.  What strikes me as the terrifying facet of a cemented feature of society, is that each of these scenes is tied so intimately to a drug.

There is so much to be said for Drugs.  In small, irregular quantities, they can be safe, amazing forms of entertainment.  But no one ever enjoys them like this.  A friend of mine, someone I’ve become close to in the last 6 months, roughly proportional to an escalating drug habit, treated himself to 16 pills on New Years Eve.  16 pills; that is to say, 8 times more than most clubbers see as appropriate.  Of course, when I say most clubbers, I actually end up referring to an increasingly smaller percentage, since usage is growing as fast as these extremes, and upper limits of what the body can persevere through are being reached.

It wouldn’t be quite as tragic if the problem only extended to the occasional fool damaging himself like this every once in a while, but seemingly every clubber is feeling the tug of the whirlpool these days.  The Halloween rave I attended could barely be fairly named as such; it was inside a reputable establishment, on the edge of the city centre.  This didn’t stop in turning into the chemical equivalent of the Somme.  Only better soundtracked.  And probably, for a few minutes at least, a hell of a lot happier.

Speaking from that one experience, there’s something fucking disturbing about being in a room with about 100 people, all gleefully proclaiming how they’re shortening their life expectency in (admit it) a damned anti-social way.  It’s like experience land or something.  You look around, and you see eyes vibrating, giggling, shaking, jumping… and suddenly there’s this incredibly real sensation that you’re watching selves be eroded slowly away, leaving these bowling balls of sheer emotion, changing depending on what they hit.

What can you do?  You can’t tell people like this to stop, and why should you?  It’s not an intrinsically evil act itself, it’s just this particular perversion thereof which leaves me feeling slightly ill as I watch.  Irregularity solves everything.  It would stop a tolerance building up as quickly as it does, it would slow the physical damage.  It would make those nights where you indulge something really different from anything else, as well as showing the joys of just drinking and dancing that people can forget.

Just a thought, that’s all.  Makes you think, I suppose.

Recently, in relation to a possible reform of Irish Drug Policy, BBC reporter Diarmaid Fleming referenced the extent to which cocaine abuse has infiltrated all social classes.  There were fears back when 

Tenderoni – MSTRKRFT Remix

Tenderoni  – MSTRKRFT Remix

Three Cheers for MSTRKRFT!  Three cheers for them!  When I find myself literally skipping through the streets to a new track on ‘The Pod’, and I look up the name, only to find that it’s the latest and greatest from the Canadian duo.

Chromeo (in turn another duo from across the pond), gets by decently with its soulful, electrofunky beats anyway.  However, for some, and for dancing, they’re a bit too clean, a bit too unadventurous.  Which is why the drill of a MSTRKRFT grinding beat on top does beautiful, beautiful things for it.  Speed up the pace a little, add a little kick…a consistent tapping of the frequency of that little hollow just behind your heart.

But enough evangelising.  This wasn’t a great dance-hall song before the Masters got their hands on it.  Now it is.  What they bring isn’t inventive to a great extent, doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any particular fashion, but where it succeeds is smoothly changing the genre of a song.  Think of it as a heart transplant.  Only it requires the lightning of pure electro.  And takes place inside the Daft Punk pyramid for added effect.  It’s electronic, it’s punchy, and it’s good.  Give it a listen

Teenagers Scare The Living etc etc.

It would seem that, given how the whole Indie genre has blown up to the point now where you qualify if you’re refusing to actually produce tracks, standing out from the crowd is easier said that done.  Regardless of how you feel about the Teenagers distinctly Parisian whine-rock, having a single with a chorus of ‘I fucked my American cunt’ is moving in the right direction.

Yeah, their solo work will be good no doubt when they pull an album together, and seeing them live at the Unitaur-Tour was great and fun thanks to their lovable French ‘tude.  But what few are praising them for is the seemingly consistently high standard of their remixes.  I wouldn’t even listen to, for example, the original version of Simian’s ‘It’s The Beat’ if I’ve got the tripple speed, whizzed up Teenagers mix on offer – the Teenagers are to Simian what Crystal Castles are to the Klaxons; much, much better.

It’s worth grabbing most of these together into a mix-disc or playlist or such like, just to get a feel for how they do things.  No matter the source, after it’s been teenager-a-fied, there’s this slick air of GLAM! hanging over everything.  Their mcfly-touch makes tracks that wouldn’t seem out of place on a re-release of the Cocktail soundtrack; all high notes and synths pitter-pattering from the speaker.  Think Duran Duran – “Her name was Rio and I fucked that American cunt”, perhaps.

As a rule, all of the below tracks are dancefloor-friendly.  Every possible degree of ‘phat beat’ is here and infectious. Cliche dictates that it wraps its way around your neck like a lover, pulling you into action, but it’d be far easier to say that the magic it holds quite simply affects you on a primal, as well as thoughtful level.  You’ll notice when you hear the Simian rework, or even the normally mellow version of Mer Du Japon.  AND NYPC! AND GOODBOOKS!

I wish I could  hold only praise for them.  There are problems.  For the most part, there’s a highly repetitive element to every track, as much as there is an energy.  Energy and variety are different things; listening to the mixes side by side reveals them to be nowhere near as beautiful as Soulwax, or Justice reworks.  It’s not monotonous, but it’s in the same region as Daft Punk – superb, but not all the way there (you heard me).  As part of a set, in a club though, this won’t be noticed.  Technically, this stands out though.

It may be stating the obvious, but these remixes sound like the Teenagers.  When they touch on indie, like The Illness, Face, City and Had Enough, it becomes the same song, but as if they’d got there first.  And their Air, Simian, Chromeo and NYPC efforts are…well, something different all together.  Worth bearing in mind that Daft Punk themselves began as a humble indie rock band, as did Soulwax – there could well be a future there.  Anyway, the playlist runs as follows;

—

The Illness – Goodbooks
Mer Du Japon – Air
It’s The Beat – Simian Mobile Disco
Face – The Black Ghosts
City – Lo Fi Fink
The Bomb – NYPC
Had Enough – The Enemy
Bonafied Lovin – Chromeo

Napalm in the morning

A little divine intervention (as much as I want to avoid blowing ego’s too far out of proportion) can have great consequences.  I reflect, and I see that most of my knowledge of any of the latest-and-greatest on the interweb can be traced back to when I was hunting vigorously for the sextabulous Placebo cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ (this back when The O.C still had a tight-fisted grasp over the minds of any teenager with a half ounce of cool within them), and found myself on the ludicrously named ‘Good Weather ForAirstrikes ‘.  Still, why not, it was well written, it had free music, and I was looking for something to stuff my Google Reader with, so I added him.

GWFA is run by a cheery American chappy called Deryk Davies, on of them up and coming music journalism types, who I imagine has a decent career somewhere in the Rolling Stone direction lined up for him by the powers that be, if not something similar.  His life, humble as it is is, is the more or less average student routine of drinking, partying, studying, gigging etc, only with a much heavier focus on the latter.  Every so often, fairly regularly, he’ll choose and artist and do a decent sized piece on them, with a few selections of material as evidence, and a verdict.  There are single reviews, there are gig discussions, comments on movements in ‘The Scene’, and, if all else fails, a smattering of who IS big, and who WILL be big.  What he lacks in quantity of post (since fair enough, everyone needs a life, even worn music hacks), he definitely makes up for in quantity, and to be honest he represents  something of a star in a world where most blogs hold 90% of their value in the actual hosting capacity of them.

But while I’m normally uplifted to see a new post from Deryk float to the surface, I give twice the love for one of his compilations.  Consider these as bite-size Zeitgeists of music, shifting in tone, mood and purpose seemingly at will.  Back when I first gave him a try, I found M3 Volume 12 Parts 1 and 2, which were organized along the theme of “the first disc revolving more around dark guitar rock tracks and the second disc focusing more intently on dark pop songs and electronica tracks”.  And there I had my awakenings to the joys like Patrick Wolf, Paul Epworth, Tokyo Police Club, and, most importantly of all, Justice.  Therefore, very influential on me.  M3 Volume 13 would later make a decent going away present as my best friend went off to Uni, and in turn convert his girlfriend to the Electro that we had since found and made our god.  M3 14 (The D.A.N.C.E Edition, appropriately) showed me a sign of how far I’d grown, featuring few songs I hadn’t found around the place already, and even seeming a little thin on the ground to me.  But still, one of the worthiest primers for newcomers to the movement around.  M3 15 – a change in tack that proved GWFA more than a one-horse pony, with a focus on singer/songwriters inspired by a sabbatical in the UK in the name of career advancement.

This leads me to the latest release, M3 Volume 16.  A stroke of genius, the theme is “slammin’ rock and electro tracks that are ideal for driving at absurd speeds on dark highways”.  And indeed they are.  This even does it for me when running too, has a whole vibe about it.  There are no obvious ways out taken here, but every song hits the note required perfectly.  I’d never have considered Bloc party’s new single, or indeed Luno, but it definitely does the job.  It also shows a penchant for fast, nuovo-alternative rock such as The Strokes,  Test Icicles, and Les Savy Fav.  And then there are the relatively unknowns (I think at least) like FORTUNE, These New Puritans, the the Damn Shams, which ensure that this maintains its well established level of respectability.  I’d call volume 16 easily the his best mix thus far, if only for the amping up of some speaker function to 11, for the better.  Electro and Alternative, are together at last, and its working.

It’s not like I can actually finish this with a big gesture of commitment like ‘Buy this record’, or ‘Abolish the monarchy’, or ‘Fuck tha police’, since there’s only so much you can do for Deryk.  Start by visiting his blog though.  That’s not really helping him, more doing ludicrous amounts for you, but it still spreads a little happiness everywhere.  Maybe M3 17 will drop soon, which would be lovely.  Hint Hint.

A Blaaaaaaaaaawg?

Living in the past is for Alzheimer’s patients, and possibly White Supremacists.  Why spend your days reliving old glory at all, whether it be because your addled, stunted mind won’t allow you to see anything new, or if it was the last time YOU happened to latch onto some popularity?  It’s gone!  Let it go!  Did he just compare Retro DJ’s to White Supremacists?  Oh yes I did
Now yes, Music has a quality of all of it’s own that makes you warm to it, and gives you a certain ability to develop  push-button emotions, with happiness, sadness, Ecstasy and heart-break available on demand.  But above those primary qualities, lies a deeper level (above?  Below maybe?  Does depth go up?).  Nothing noble.  Just a wonderfully smug, selfish-bastard sense of self-satisfaction.

Geeks live online, yeah?  But this is true, but so is one other important fact being true; being geeky, and being a techie, are not the same.  You get music geeks who can recite Rolling Stone cover notes in a Pavlovian fashion; you get music geeks who could, given a pen and paper, draw a direct copy of the surface of the D.A.N.C.E 12″ vinyl.   These individuals are not, as I’m sure you can imagine, really very suitable for the stress and weakness-of-moral-fibre of modern society; all the welshers and posers who have the frailty of spirit to LIKE a song and nothing more.  And so they withdraw, and, as they sit, alone, masturbating themselves into a teary fury while tattooing repetitive lyrics into their arm with a spoon and 4 biros, they blog endlessly away, venting their spleens in a torrid of poor grammar, worse spelling, and controversial (read ‘Irritatingly naive’) opinion pieces.

It’s certainly a good world to get into none the less.  I first stumbled upon this kind of distribution when I tried to track down the rather sexual Placebo cover of Running Up That Hill (the Kate Bush classic) that sound tracked an episode of the O.C.  My first port of call that Google threw at me?  Good Weather For Airstrikes (www.goodweatherforairstrikes.com).  The next day brought a ‘Best tracks of 2006′ run down and I never looked back.

How does all this work?  A Blog is an online journal (‘Weblog’ for when you explain it to the aforementioned racists and dependants) where people, in one of the vainer acts of self-indulgence, write something and wait for the world to come knocking.  Typically bloggers have a  vastly inflated sense of self importance (something that only takes me sporadically, hence what I hope are quite irregular updates), and so be prepared to encounter several incredibly assertive and opposing opinions.  Not to mention a desperate need to impress upon you the staunch belief that you are reading the modern equivalent of Christ’s Moleskine, and there are seats at Table 1 in the afterlife if you pass it around enough. Needless to say, the chances are slim that tweedle-dim345@hotmail.com is really SebastiaAn’s personal man servant, but you never know.

I digress (and rant).  So within this swathe of ‘Weblogs’ you get MP3 Blogs, which tend to follow the same format of intro, theme, song-review, song-review, download links, ego-inflation.  Thus a new remix can swiftly spread around the Internet like wildfire.  Some like Good Weather above like to release more sporadically, but offer a greater deal of substance in their text, while others like Put The Needle On The Record (www.puttheneedleontherecord.com – are you getting the hang of this?) do it song-by-song, but more often.  You’ll get a .MP3 link (right-click, save as…if you can’t figure this out then ask a parent or teacher.  Or just fuck off my Internet please), and there you have it.  Musical, delivered, aural stimulation, as and when you like it.

Like all British children should, I watched Art Attack when I was a child.  And I remember being taught to draw a tree by drawing a big line, then a U shape going through it, then another U shape going through each arc of the U, and so on and so forth until infinity and beyond.  In the same way, Blogs look out for each other much like the Irish under pressure, and you’ll find links to often dozens of other treasure troves online to guide you. If you’re a pro, add them to a newsreader (www.google.com/reader gets a British Heart foundation stamp of approval from me), and use Firefox’s Down-Them-All plug in (www.google.com  -not a homepage, but put some effort in please).  With that you can become a truly ruthless music ‘Sampler’ (as you’re known in the legal world, it’s worth bearing in mind), downloading all the songs on a page, and then moving swiftly while the stream is flowing right to your hard drive.

Of course, when you’re looking for a CD in the real world (Remember that?  You should do, unless you are, of course, a blogger), you don’t just ask your mates for advice, and then their mates, and then their mates do you?  What kind of crazy person talks to friends of friends of friends?  You’re not a fucking crazy person are you?  You check a search engine don’t you?  You don’t?  Well catch on sharp (or see the solution two paragraphs up).  The Hype Machine (www.thehypemach- hah, snap, actually it’s at www.hypem.com.  Cocky) offers a run down of the daily tracks found on a frankly ridiculous amount of bloggery across the Interweb, and so helps you even more.

See?  So simple a child can figure it out.  Now go.  Go fill your iPod and hit the bars.  Just don’t ever start writing one of the damn things.  Or even worse, a magazine about them.  There’s a special circle of hell reserved for people like that.  I hear anyway.

www.hypem.com
www.puttheneedleontherecord.com
www.goodweatherforairstrikes.com
http://music.for-robots.com/
http://www.cta-music.com/

Crystal Castles – Unitaur, Clockwork, 07/11/07

Music aficionados and obsessives alway say that they prefer the concert atmosphere of a favorite band, because of how it allows them to get up close and personal with an artist, and see their energy flowing around them properly.  The fact that my personal highlight of seeing Crystal Castles perform live at the Unitaur gig at Bristol’s rising star, Stokes Crofts’ Clockwork, was wrapping my arms around the slender body of Alice as she screamed in my ear, suggests that I definitely got a good impression of the band (Or the groundings of an abuse law-suit – Legal Fuhrer).

A bit of history.  This wasn’t my very first experience with the Castles.  They’ve played Bristol (to my knowledge) once before, at my numero uno electro-boat, The Thekla Social, back in August; the very same den where I heard their now signature party piece, Atlantis To Interzone (crystal castles remix).  Sadly, their set lasted only fifteen minutes.  At first, I thought this was due to their admittedly small repertoire, but it floated down the grape vine later that actually, there was more of a problem at hand.  The stage of the Thekla is a bit too easy for people to leap onto to join the artists, something that tops the list as a pet peeve of the Canadian Duo, so when some girl tried to mimic the Aphrodite of Electro’s gyrations, it was the last straw.  Knowing this, all I can say is damn the bitch for cutting it short.

The Castles , comprised of Ethin Fawn and Alice Glass, originate from Toronto, and were discovered the way all the cool kids of the last century (so it seems), through Myspace.  The token bit of trivia that pops up around them is that their first single, Alice Practice, was actually the microphone test, possessing a raw glory that clearly attracted all the right kinds of attention.  Their rise has been swift, spreading like wildfire across blogs (linked hundreds of times amongst the blogs that call the Hype Machine stable home), and then onto the live scene.  Here in the UK, they’ve played Reading and Leeds (where the NME called them one of the most exciting bands of 2007), supported several bands, and held their own tour.  Vice Magazine, the printed equivalent of that statue of Christ in Brazil, added them to the lineup for their Unitaur Tour, alongside These New Puritans and The Teenagers.  It’s difficult to see these guys as anything other than living, breathing avatars of sheer Amphetamine goodness once you’ve held the pleasure of their company, let’s say that much.

There are several staples of their show that make them stand out.  Almost all of them are the singer Alice.  Beautiful in that sort of unconventional way, she WILL NOT BE IGNORED NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY.  Anyone’s who heard the singles before will know that while, yes, technically there are lyrics somewhere in there, they’re hardly audible, if at all.  In order to translate this to the real world…well, an unnamed associate here at DVNO described it as “her leaping around screaming ‘Rape me, Rape me’ for about half an hour”.  Not quite, but something like that.  To say that as a performer she’s ‘involved’ would be an understatement – I don’t personally know where she goes whens he leaves her body on auto-pilot on stage, but I imagine it’s nice as she just doesn’t come back, regardless of the danger her army of dedicated, testosterone fuelled man-boys can represent.

*awkward pause* I hugged her…

There’s more to Crystal Castles than dirty dancing and live Burlesque – they roll out special brands of their pounding pounding techno music too.  All the tracks have the bass quad-sep-tippled for a start.  Ethin’s mixing and skills are as performance to the success of the show as Alice is to my ability to perform in bed.  Their light-show consists of a Strobe being (I think) abused by Electro-Puck next to him, so there’s a certain degree of freedom, unlike, say, pretty much every other act.    It’s rare that I say this, but I’d probably rather a live EP from Castles than the Daft Punk offering.  Admittedly overplay of the latter has been to the extent that I now blink in time to Robot Rock, but the message stands.  It pulls away from the sense that you’re listening to someone being violated inside a Wii that you get from the lighter, higher-pitched-and-paced download offerings.

Editorial 1 (?)

“You’ll never know until you try” is pretty close to a universal truth, experience shows*. There really is this great divide between Creator and Consumer that can only be grasped by someone that has had to fill both roles.  Take Bristol’s Banksy; with captions like “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit” no doubt doesn’t identify fully with the hordes of wannabe, copy cat stencilists and inkers who only venture away from their Myspace web-shrines to visit one of his own mini-Meccas across the country.  And equally, until very recently I’ve been cheerfully assuming that any organized writing like blogs and magazines just sort of happen.

The path of the modern music lover is somewhat as follows; we’re pretty willing to soak up anything that steers its way towards wrapped up in the deliciously tantalizing shrink-wrap of a dose of hype and spittle, as long as its been given an entry for its ‘Genre’ field that means we won’t be embarrassed to put it on a mix-tape.  And so, we scan blogs, devour magazines, newspapers, and even Wikipedia entries for the latest hint of a slightly relevant reference.  We stream music from the great electronic Ether at a rate of gigabytes per day; this leaves us as one of the first generations to truly, and easily, be able to develop an appreciate and synoptic view of music, rather that a piecemeal look at individual albums.  Even the EP, in today’s download era, has become almost too great a package in favour of a single .MP3.  We analyze, and we dissect, and we shove those malformed opinions into the public domain with terrifying alacrity and freedom, as well as an undeservedly self-righteous snarl rarely seen outside of the Daily Mail forums.

I feel I’m approaching that point where you’ve decidedly shot yourself in your own foot.  The point is, even in Web 2.0, or whatever you call it, where your input is practically begged for by companies left right and center, there’s still this void to be seen between that, and what might be called the science of Journalism.  What I hope goes here, what we all hope goes here (‘We’ at the moment comprises of Myself and 6 others.  The magnificent 7, if you like), is something that will be saved when they’re counting up the bodies,something that might enter an RSS reader or two, or, when the printed edition is born, kept in a cuboard to help you remember.  “We live in interesting time”; and it would be lovely to be able to take some responsibility for that.

Dave McLeod – the one to blame for all this.

*Ba doom Tsch!

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