The Vine album review: Crystal Castles
An album review for The Vine.
Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles (II)
I’ll cut to the chase: though they share the same title, the second Crystal Castles album far outstrips their 2008 debut. Their sound is sharper, more focussed, more engaging. With this release, the Toronto-based duo – producer Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass – confidently lay claim to a significant chunk of real estate between the complementary genres of glitch pop, noise and electronica. Crystal Castles II is a statement of intent, a challenge to their peers. In whole, it’s frighteningly good.
Full review at The Vine.
It’s been too long between album reviews for me. I’ve got to do more, to get better. So here I am.
This is my favourite album of 2010 so far. Listen to some of it via We Are Hunted.
The Vine interview: Deftones
An interview for The Vine.
Sacramento, California hard rock band Deftones have been in the game since 1988. You might know them best through their third full-length, White Pony, which debuted at #2 on the Australian charts upon release in 2000. Widely considered the band’s finest hour, it showcased a more considered, mature songwriting approach that largely favoured a lighter touch over the bludgeoning drums and distorted guitars that had characterised their first two releases. Tool and A Perfect Circle singer Maynard James Keenan also happened to provide guest vocals on a song, which did wonders for the band’s credibility and cross-over appeal.
That was ten years ago. Since then the band released Deftones (2003) andSaturday Night Wrist (2006). The quintet’s sixth album, Diamond Eyes, is due in early May. Four years between albums, their progress has been hampered by a car accident involving bassist/backup vocalist Chi Cheng, who has remained in a minimally conscious state since November 2008. Upon picking up their instruments in the months that followed, the band decided to shelve the album they’d been working on with Cheng (tentatively titled Eros) in favour of writing and recording an entirely different product. We spoke with Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham [above, top right] ahead of the release of Diamond Eyes.
Full interview over at The Vine.
As soon as the call ended, this felt like a horrible interview, through no error or omission on either of our parts. First, we discovered that Abe couldn’t hear me when I used my speakerphone – a tactic which usually works fine – so I had to switch between handset and speakerphone settings the whole time.
Worse, our call dropped out at a crucial moment, when he was discussing the process the band went through following Chi’s accident. I hadn’t intended to directly address this topic – it seemed too obvious to me – but he brought it up voluntarily. Then the call dropped. How unfortunate, how frustrating.
So I was surprised when I read through the transcript and found I still had a bunch of workable, worthwhile stuff. Phew.
The Vine interview: Die! Die! Die!
Technically, this is my first video interview for The Vine. You wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t told you; although it took place via a Skype video call, it’s still published in plain text.
Andrew Wilson of Die! Die! Die!
Indie punk band Die! Die! Die! burst forth from Dunedin, New Zealand in 2005 with a hard-edged debut album that favoured abrasive noise over melody or song longevity. Their second release, 2007’s Promises, Promises doubled that album’s duration to 40 minutes, and saw the band exploring a more restrained style of songwriting without losing their characteristic urgency and impact.
Three years later, their third full-length is due. To whet our appetites, they’ve released a new video [for ‘We Built Our Own Oppressors’, see below] and are touring Australia throughout April. The Vine’s Andrew McMillen video called Die! Die! Die! singer/guitarist Andrew Wilson [pictured left in the above image] in Auckland, to discuss outsider perceptions of New Zealand, supporting Marilyn Manson, history’s great Kiwi bands, and turning down European tours with Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Full interview over at The Vine.
Skype video calls are a wonderful interview tool, though my connection did drop out midway through. We hastily reconnected and pretended that nothing happened. How marvelous that we can speak to one another from our respective bedrooms in Brisbane and Auckland. I should have taken a screenshot. Next time…
Die! Die! Die! are an excellent band and you should give them a try. Thanks to Joe Segreto @ IMC for hooking this up.
The Vine interview: Gareth Liddiard of The Drones
An interview for The Vine.
Gareth Liddiard of The Drones
As frontman of The Drones, Gareth Liddiard has cultivated a reputation that approaches reverence among Australia’s independent music community. His band were winners of the inaugural Australian Music Prize in 2005, were awarded 2009’s ‘Best Live Act’ by Rolling Stone, and Liddiard’s song ‘Shark Fin Blues’ was voted as the ‘greatest Australian song of all time’ in jmag late last year by his peers. The band have managed to drag this local reverence overseas, garnering ciritcal praise from both sides of the Atlantic while being regular visitors to the US and Europe, most notably as a semi-regular fixture at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals.
Between recording and touring with The Drones, Liddiard is set to release his debut solo album later this year. Ahead of a solo tour at three east coast venues in mid-April, Andrew McMillen spoke to Gareth Liddiard at length about the pros and cons of performing acoustically, playing Halo 2 while on the dole, ‘sub-par teen angst’, and reading one’s own reviews.
Full interview – around 6,000 words – over at The Vine.
To my knowledge, this is the most comprehensive interview with Gareth published to date. I researched extensively in preparation, and I think that comes across in both my questioning and his responses. Moreover, because The Drones are my favourite Australian band, it was an absolute pleasure to engage with their key songwriter for most of an hour. It’s one of those occasions where I truly love what I do.
A Conversation With Claes Loberg, CEO of Australian music service Guvera
An interview originally conducted for The Vine that I published in full at Waycooljnr, the Australian music and marketing blog which I recently began editing in place of founder Nick Crocker:
Q+A with Claes Loberg, CEO of Australian music service Guvera
Australia-based online service Guvera (http://guvera.com) has been making waves among the music industry recently. It offers free high quality (256kbps) downloads to consumers, which are paid for by advertisers who can match particular artists to their brand’s ‘personality’. As you can see by the image to the right, Guvera is not particularly subtle when it comes to marketing.
Waycooljnr editor Andrew McMillen spoke with Guvera CEO Claes Loberg a few days ahead of its worldwide public launch on March 30, 2010.
Andrew: Hey Claes. Can you summarise what Guvera’s all about?
Claes: Here’s the gist of it: advertisers paying for downloads. There’s nothing new about the idea of advertisers actually paying for content. That’s how we’ve been receiving TV for free for all these years. What’s wrong with television at the moment, is that advertising is actually starting to lose value year, on year. People have got the power to click past it, sort of get around the advertising. That’s a reflection of all advertising across the board.
Now that the people are in control, Guvera’s business model is a reversal of the advertising process. Instead of advertisers being the annoying thing they used to be years ago, now they can be a channel that people will want to go to, to get content. It’s trying to change the value proposition away from ads-as-disruptors. It actually pays the artists for the content it’s created, and the people still get it for free.
Full interview over at Waycooljnr.
The Vine interview: Massive Attack
An interview with Massive Attack for The Vine ahead of their Australian tour in March 2010.
As chief trip-hop genre-definers, Massive Attack exist in 2010 as production duo Robert del Naja [stage name: 3D] and Grant Marshall [Daddy G], who work alongside co-producers, session musicians, and guest vocalists to skilfully mesh elements of electronica, hip-hop, drum-and-bass and house. Following the February release of their highly anticipated – and frequently postponed – fifth album, Heligoland, Massive Attack are touring Australia for the first time since 2003.
On the eve of their performance at Perth’s Kings Park, Andrew McMillen connected with Daddy G [pictured above left] to discuss controversial artwork, digital downloading, and Massive Attack’s two appearances in Triple J’s Hottest 100 Of All Time.
Full interview at The Vine, published March 18, 2010.
I didn’t realise it until after the fact, but this was my ‘biggest’ interview thus far, when considered in terms of Massive Attack’s widely celebrated career and lasting impact on contemporary music. Thereby pushing Neil Strauss to #2.
The interview was conducted from the back seat of a friend’s car on a sunny Friday afternoon.. only because I couldn’t attain a quiet place to record our conversation elsewhere at the office. The interview had been rescheduled five times in 10 days, and was originally supposed to be with Robert del Naja / 3D. Oh well.
On a personal note, it was rewarding to tip Grant off about Massive Attack’s presence in triple j’s Hottest 100 Of All Time, and how their songs ‘Unfinished Sympathy‘ and ‘Teardrop‘ were the only tracks in the countdown to feature female vocals. The scoop was significant enough to warrant a news story the day before publication. Juicy. Props to my friend Josh Donellan for raising it when I crowdsourced potential interview questions via Facebook in early March.
Anwyn Crawford discusses live music review techniques
Owing to both arrogance and pride, it took me a while to realise that as a music critic, constructive criticism from your peers should be welcomed. I get it now, which is why I was thrilled to receive an email from Anwyn Crawford in response to my Porcupine Tree review earlier in the week.
“I have some thoughts on your recently linked-to live review,” she wrote, “if you’ll permit me to share them with you.”
Of course.
Anwyn is an Australian music critic based in Brooklyn. Her words have appeared in The Age, Loops, The Wire, Mess+Noise and Cyclic Defrost; contributions to the latter two are under the pen name Emmy Hennings. You should read her Overland opinion piece on Nick Cave, entitled ‘The Monarch Of Middlebrow‘.
Anwyn doesn’t consider herself as a freelance writer, because in her own words, ”I probably only publish about three articles a year”. That said: she knows her shit. I’m holding her advice on par with what Andrew Ramadge told me last year.
The topic of discussion – my Porcupine Tree review for The Vine – can be found here. You should read it before reading the below, which is an unedited copy of what was sent to me.
First up, it’s far too long. Unless you’re going to be deliberately discursive, or be pursuing a particular thesis about a cultural event that is significant to a lot of people, for instance Marcus’s review of The Tote’s last evening, then less than half that length is ample. Believe me, readers don’t want or need that much information in a live review format. I’m not saying this because I think it should be a “dumbed down” format or that readers aren’t capable of digesting something more complicated – they are – but it’s important to respect the expectations of the form that you’re working in, whatever that might be, which means that if you break the expectations for a particularly compelling reason, then the results will be more fruitful. Part of the skill of a live review, I think, is try and relay, in a reasonably short numbers of sentences, your experience of the performance to a readership. This means trying to pick representative moments of the performance – or occasionally unrepresentative moments, if these seem to get closer to the truth of the event. A song-by-song catalogue has little narrative interest for a reader.
Secondly, and this is my big beef with so much music writing – PUT YOURSELF IN IT. I know that the first rule of essay writing that we’re all taught at school is never to use the first person pronoun. It’s time to put that rule aside. Reviewing is an inherently subjective act. It’s your opinion, and your experience – own it. This doesn’t mean describe what you had for dinner and how your feet were sore and “Oh, I missed the opening band” (classic street press gaffe), it means: don’t let your writing be bloodless. A reader wants to know why the performance might have mattered (or not mattered) and the only way they’re going to be able to get a handle on that is if you tell them why it mattered to you. It will also, almost inevitably, make your sentences shorter and more energetic, because you can can avoid clunky constructions like “One expects” and its many bet-hedging variants. “I think” “I was ecstatic” “My brain was melting” “This has stayed with me for days” – don’t be afraid to say I.
Thirdly, avoid Latinate constructions and “pretentious diction”. I’m with George Orwell on this one. Translate them back into plain English. “Resultantly” = “As a result”. It doesn’t sound more sophisticated when you write “Resultantly”, it just confuses the meaning. Same goes for words like “emotive” (emotional) “reciprocate” (respond) “regale” (you need “shout” or something similar there, because “regale nonsense” as a clause makes no grammatical sense without a subject who is being regaled). Take a sentence like: “It’s a fittingly exhilarating close to an achingly beautiful song, into which the singer interjects a heartily-applauded full band introduction.” It took me about three runs to actually figure out what that meant. “It’s an exhilarating close to a beautiful song, and when singer XY pauses to introduce the band, he gets hearty applause”, is much clearer.
And lastly, also related to Orwell’s timeless advice, avoid cliches and ready-made phrases. Chords nearly always “flourish”. A band is too often on a “jaunt” when the writer doesn’t want to use the word “tour”. There are millions of basslines that “pulse” and countless pianos that sound “plaintive”. Find a more interesting and a more accurate word, if you can, but bear in the mind the above: don’t let it become pretentious. Verbs are your friend, adjectives are often not.
Just the kind of kick-up-arse I needed. Thanks, Anwyn. Pay attention to her blog.
The Vine review: Porcupine Tree @ The Tivoli, February 2010
Here’s my first review for The Vine, a Fairfax Media-owned youth culture site. It’s of British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree [pictured right] playing The Tivoli on February 5, 2010. You can read it here.
I want to discuss this review from a writing perspective. Some background is required.
If you’ve followed my writing over the years, you might have noticed that this review is a return to the long-form, descriptive style that I became known for when writing for FasterLouder.com.au.
To illustrate: compare my Bloc Party @ Riverstage, November 2008 review for FL to this Robert Forster @ QLD Art Gallery, September 2009 review for Mess+Noise.
With the former, I fell into a style that prized observing facts over engaging with the subject matter on an emotional level. To me, the Forster review reads like it’s written from a calm place more conducive to expressing one’s feelings, than simply listing songs played and key musical moments.
To illustrate, it’s less this:
It seems that foul weather has sidestepped Brisbane’s sore and sorry suburbs this weekend: clear skies greet Bloc Party’s arrival onstage, and an overwhelming sense of unity sweeps across the capacity crowd. [...] Following the guitar freak-out during Positive Tension’s bridge (“so fucking useless!”), Okereke’s closing words tease the crowd: “play it cool”. The searing guitar tone of that track and Helicopter number among the likes of Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out as the most memorable rock sounds to emerge from the United Kingdom this decade. (Bloc Party @ Riverstage, November 2008)
Than this:
For seven songs, Robert Forster is alone, armed only with six-string, voice, wit and stare. [...] There’s no hint of melancholy in Forster’s delivery, nor sense of mourning among the crowd; [songwriting partner Grant McLennan's death] happened three years ago, after all. I feel obscene for writing these words, like I’m prodding at Forster’s bruised heart for mentioning McLennan in this context. But more than the half-dozen times I’ve seen the man perform in the last few years, this stage configuration highlights the emotional distance between us and he. (Robert Forster @ QLD Art Gallery, September 2009)
I mentioned earlier that I ‘fell into’ the descriptive style when writing for FasterLouder and street press because it’s the norm. It’s easy. It’s what the majority of street press writers do, and when I stepped into music writing, I paid a lot of attention to my peers within the local community. (I still do read street press, but now I find it most useful when viewed as a resource that highlights what not to do as a music writer.) [Clarification: I'm referring specifically to street press live reviews in this instance.]
I feel that this style of writing is problematic purely because it is so safe. You can’t be wrong when you’re just listing songs played and key musical moments. I’m not saying that anyone can do that. More accurately, anyone familiar enough with a band and able to write coherently can do that.
And if you can do that, if you want to call yourself a music writer or a music journalist – I alternate the two terms loosely, which may be problematic in itself – then that’s fine. You can get your name crossed off the list at the door and watch the band and write down the setlist in your notepad (or crib it from online forums) and write your little description and send it to your editor (who won’t fuck with your copy because it’s so inoffensive and beige) and get published and show your friends and perpetuate the delusion that you’re a worthwhile music writer just because you get published.
If you’re reading this and getting pissed off, hey – I’ve been there. I was that person for nearly two years until I took this role seriously. (You can read more about that here – but I warn you, it’s reasonably incoherent.) Between July 2007 and May 2009, music ‘journalism’, to me, was putting my hand up to review shows that, 90% of the time, I knew I’d like. I’d show up with a friend and get my free tickets and have some drinks and maybe take some notes and if it was a weekend show, I’d write it up late on Sunday night to meet the Monday morning deadline. (I now write most reviews immediately afterwards.)
If you view it in terms of free entertainment, as I did, there’s no problem. You might even embrace your mediocrity as a writer because hey, it’s a hobby, right? You can impress your friends by getting your named crossed off the guestlist. Seeing bands for free and getting paid (miserably) for it – the dream, right? High fives!
After nearly two years, though, I could embrace my mediocrity no longer. You realise that publicists are quoting your published praise not because it’s good writing, but because your praise is so unashamedly hyperbolic that of course it’ll appear on the press release. Because at the time, as a ‘music writer’, I wasn’t sufficiently self-aware to realise that I was being so fucking immature.
This is not to say that a good writer can’t praise a band. I still nominate to review shows by bands whose music I’m familiar with, and usually fond of. I’m not sure how to define it, but I think that an important self-realisation has to take place before a music writer can put aside the urge to praise and describe, and instead rely on gut instincts and feelings to shape their work. Still the best advice I’ve received is from Andrew Ramadge, who I think of whenever I write about music. The most important question I have to answer: what does it feel like?
Returning to the Porcupine Tree review. It took me three or four hours to write, which is far longer than I’ve spent on any live review for Mess+Noise. In a way it feels like I’ve regressed, purely because of its length and my tendency to rely upon description instead of feel. As I’ve made clear, description without emotional engagement is for losers. There was some exposition about the potential hypocrisy of an internet-successful band disallowing the use of recording equipment, but as my first review for The Vine, I don’t feel that it’s particularly strong, or representative of my evolution as a writer.
Why did I submit it if I wasn’t 100% happy with the outcome? I believe it’s because I was thrown by the show, and didn’t know how to write it any other way. I hadn’t seen a serious rock ‘production’ like that in some time, and while I was clearly impressed by the scope of their performance, I perhaps allowed myself to take the easy way out. I allowed my standards as a writer to drop, and I think it shows.
Maybe I’m being over-cautious. Maybe I spent too long absorbed in a piece of writing that I can no longer tell whether it’s good or bad. (That happens sometimes.) What do you think? If you’ve read this far, I’d love your critical appraisal of my review, whether you’re familiar with Porcupine Tree or not.
