With Fans Like This Who Needs Critics?

Selected quotes from a great thread at I Love Music: “Honestly criticize your favourite bands/artists”

  • Neil Young thinks the answer to everything is dippy environmentalism. Save the planet. Be the rain. Preserve natural beauty, oh Mother Earth.
  • Kool Keith has never been able to repeat anything as brilliant as Dr. Octagon because he’s become obsessed with booty (In reply to this, someone posted “And I suppose that’s a criticism?”)
  • Cezanne snored.
  • hey scott walker! sometimes, when you make music, its fun to release it!
  • Aesop Rock often has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about
  • there are no good jay-z albums.
  • Xiu Xiu — … nah, too easy.
  • Tom Waits should play more gigs. Who is he, the queen of Sheba?
  • Ohh, and in a lot of Bob Dylan songs, it sounds like he goes “Oh yeah, I’m Bob Dylan!” and then plays some harmonica.
  • Iggy Pop should wear at least one layer of upper body clothing at all times.
  • prince: sometimes funk is NOT its own reward.
  • The thematic range of Trina’s lyrics is a lot narrower than her butt.
  • R. Kelly is probably guilty.

[My contribution: “Kim Gordon sounds like when a homeless person comes onto public transport rambling to herself, and everyone else averts their eyes and hopes she doesn’t sit down next to them.” And then I put Sonic Nurse on and within the first 10 seconds of Pattern Recognition (track 1) I was sorry for what I’d said.]

[I have been meaning to get off my lazy music-writing arse and GO WILD about Sonic Nurse here for a very long time now, but every time I put the album on and try to write about it as I listen, its awesomeness takes over and qij;onvau su/ojcfaeuo aow93nksn;ru…]

Gil Shaham: Tchaikovsky/Butterfly Lovers Violin Concertos (Esplanade Concert Hall)

My God. I don’t care what sort of music you like, I dare anyone to suggest a better place (in Singapore) to have been earlier tonight than the Esplanade concert hall listening to Gil Shaham’s Stradivarius sing.

I have a tendency to drift off during classical music performances (including my own, back in the day) but tonight I was transfixed. I have never heard such wonderful sound while sitting in such cheap seats. I have never heard the Singapore Symphony Orchestra sound so good. I have never seen anyone play two violin concertos (Butterfly Lovers, and the Tchaikovsky) in the same concert, or any performance as virtuosic as this was. I’ve never even been in the same concert hall as a Stradivarius, which is a fucking cool first all by itself.

I want to write more, but I honestly can’t describe how amazing it always feels to hear notes I have loved for years, mostly on old Naxos recordings, suddenly reborn in the expanse of this beautiful concert hall, in the capable hands of a master performer.

Over the past year, the Esplanade music venues have basically become my favourite places in Singapore, period. Every event I have attended has delivered top quality music for an affordable price, and more importantly if you know me, every event I have attended has been two or three hours where Singapore is beautiful and I love Singapore. Then, of course, I get horned unnecessarily by some twat while driving out of the Esplanade car park, and I hate this place again. But then I go home and my kitten comes running out mewing and overwhelming my ankles with fuzzy friction until I pick it up. And Alec will be here in a month. And everything is okay and will be okay.

These Are My Friends

I’ve been meaning to write about music for so long, but my listening has been too scattered and unfocused for the writing of reviews per se. Still, it’s been making me very happy.

I got Sonic Nurse and Aw Cmon/No You Cmon a couple of weeks ago. After spending three years on Django Music’s notify list for President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dogs, I finally got my bite at the cherry, and the album arrived today, hooray! Of course, I never only buy one album from Django at a time, so Black Heart Procession’s 2, Low’s Long Division and The Frames’ For The Birds are on their way too.

* * *

Sometimes music on record store sound systems can grip me with an unexpected intensity. I think it’s because my experience of music most of the time is so utterly solitary that hearing something in a setting that isn’t my bedroom feels strangely special, like a sudden realization that yes, this music is real, it exists for other people too, it’s not just some beautiful dream of mine that will fade into oblivion even as I struggle to remember everything.

The last time I was in London, I hit Berwick Street like a commando, determined to get through my favourite shops within the short amount of time I had. As I riffled steely-eyed through huge handfuls of CD sleeves, Will Oldham’s Viva Last Blues on the Reckless Records speakers steadily seeped through every chink in my fierce concentration it could find. Finally, I couldn’t continue with my browsing until I’d found out what it was and how much it would cost me. (A little too much, it turns out. But it’s on my Django notify list now, and as usual my patience will probably be rewarded in time.)

On the second floor of HMV the other day, they were playing Adem’s Homesongs (finally available in Singapore! But, as always, at a price I can’t afford). At some point I decided I’d finished looking at what they had on the floor, and wanted to head to the third level to look in the dance section, but then These Are Your Friends started, and I just couldn’t leave. I was slowly going mad with joy and trying my best to keep looking normal, walking around aimlessly, pawing a CD every now and then but I wasn’t seeing or registering anything. All I knew was that cracked, earnest voice, that querulous guitar, the way everything in the song has fragility and conviction at the same time like the tensile strength of spiders’ silk, and as the song’s mantra “Everybody needs some help sometimes” built and built I felt like bursting into a wild run down the aisles like a kid pretending to be an aeroplane.

Kick The Old School Joint For The True Funk Soldiers

I’ve been neglecting my MTV lately, which is why I only saw Prince’s Musicology video last Friday, by chance. I’d been wondering if the reason I loved it so much was purely due to the atmosphere at the time – cool night, big screen, good friends, apricot hookah – but I just watched it again today and it’s just as great even when viewed by a sweaty tired me on a laptop screen.

It isn’t actually all that profound or groundbreaking as music videos go, but it just takes me to such happy places. Kid with afro dancing in his bedroom using vacuum cleaner as mike stand. Funky-ass gig with everyone in natty retro threads. Men in waistcoats and fedoras tap-dancing. It’s like what Michael Jackson would be making these days if he had a clue left.

Baybeats 2004, Esplanade Riverside, Singapore

The Observatory, complete with great view
The Observatory, complete with great view

The BayBeats festival was a fairly endearing example of the classic Singaporean maxim: If it’s free, they will come. The samfu-clad grandma seemed to have enjoyed The Observatory, but the 50something couple in one of the first few rows left at some point during Force Vomit.

Fleeting thoughts on the bands I saw/heard:

  • Telebury: Quite pleasant. Like the child of The Shins and Coldplay if The Shins were British and Coldplay weren’t shit.
  • The Observatory: This band has an odd tendency to be present at my rare “Actually, Singapore isn’t so bad!” moments, one of which was the first time I saw them, and the second of which was the sun setting on the bay as they sang their very pretty new song Sea Of Doubts. A class act.
  • Surreal: The same And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead song for half an hour.
  • Furniture: The same Mogwai song for half an hour, frequently employing the same chord progressions as in Aereogramme’s The Black Path.
  • Force Vomit: Not really my thing. I like my punk less catchy and more abrasive. Less smiling guys with indie hair and black plastic specs, more bald sweaty guys in huge singlets bawling out rants against corporate oppression. You get my drift. (Please come to Singapore, Fugazi!) But I can still see why this band has such a loyal following here, and why Paul Zach and Chris Ho have championed them so much. They were pretty fun. I’d see them again.
  • Whence He Came: The same bad emo song for half an hour.

[In the not-so-impossible likelihood that a Googling band member comes across these words and feels slighted, these are the (very brief, and admittedly flippant) impressions I formed while listening to half-hour-long sets. I realize your albums may be quite different. If you feel I’ve misrepresented your musical vision, feel free to disagree. For what it’s worth, I actually love Trail Of Dead and Mogwai, although I can’t say I’m much of an emo fan. Also, if I ever give any gigs you will be fully entitled to write “The same complete silence for half an hour” in your review, because I’d chicken out before even going on stage. All power to you, and I hope you had a good time at Baybeats.]

Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow

Benny’s made his first ever mixtape, and it’s good as can be expected from someone with such eclectic tastes and sheer passion for music. It may seem like there’s an unbridgeable chasm between Funkadelic’s spacey gospel chants of “Free your mind and your ass will follow! The kingdom of heaven is within!” and the twisted predatory blues of Velvet Underground’s Venus In Furs four songs later, but it flows just fine in the mix.

This is a link to the 128kbps, 54.1 MB file. If you prefer 192kbps quality, or fancy downloading the Madlib or Four Tet goodies Benny also makes available, they can all be found by clicking on “Aural Prostitution” here.

The Tiger Lillies, Esplanade Recital Studio, Singapore, 12 June 2004

In hindsight, I suppose the best way to persuade people to accompany me to the Tiger Lillies gig was probably not to tell them “This band is so incredibly weird that even I find it weird!” I’d been assuming people would jump at the opportunity to see something so bizarre, but instead they generally smiled politely and invented other plans. But not all was lost; after a brief argument with Ida about who would be weirder, this band or the singer from Uzbekistan performing earlier that night (Ida: But she’s from Uzbekistan, how more fringe can it get?), Ida relented and came along.

I might well be wrong about this, but I believe the first song of the gig was about going down on a diseased whore. This was just to ease us in gently. The band went on to regale us with songs fantasizing about crucifying Christ (Bang In The Nails), wanting a hamster up your rectum (Hamster), and sex with flies (Flies, natch). The lead singer does everything, by the way, in an operatic falsetto, because, well, because he can.

Towards the end of one of the songs, the drummer substituted his drumsticks for two huge inflated plastic mallets and started banging away at his drums with them. This got wilder and wilder until, bit by bit, the entire drum set was collapsing onto the floor under the fury of this onslaught. He then proceeded to play on this drum set, collapsed in disarray onto the floor, until the intermission many songs later.

During a song about suicide, the drummer climbed up onto his stool with a bottle of pills and tipped them all into his mouth. He then started spitting them out rhythmically onto his (reassembled) drum set, thus playing his drum part in the song.

From what I’ve said so far it would be fairly easy to dismiss this band as a one trick pony, but there was actually much more to the gig than its novelty/shock value. The jazz standard Autumn Leaves was delivered completely straight, and although it might be difficult to imagine how a man singing it in an operatic falsetto could still bring out all the longing and pathos of the song, this was certainly achieved.

The same could be said of their encore song, Alone With The Moon, which was, very simply, as lovely and evocative a ballad as I have ever heard anywhere else. Despite the debauched hijinks that took place earlier, I think this song will actually be my abiding memory of the gig – Martyn Jaques in his mime-style make-up, bowler hat, and shirt braces, under a cold smoky spotlight, singing a note so high and clean and true I could have lived in it forever.

I’ve seen a lot of gigs, but I can’t think of any other gig I’ve seen that delivered on so many levels – music, comedy, theatre, pure showmanship – and where the performers were so inimitably unique. Whoever in the Esplanade decided to risk bringing the Tiger Lillies to staid old Singapore, I salute you and thank you from the bottom of my deviant heart.

Respect His Authoritah

I was also intending to write about Peter Kruder at the Heineken Green Room Sessions yesterday, but we got bored when he got a bit too acid-jazzy for our tastes, and went to Phuture instead, where I informed some tall drunk loser who looked all of 17 that if he wanted to use my bum as a grinding surface, he should probably give me some fucking flattery first.

After moving further into the crowd and getting Dom to take her cap off so that the loser couldn’t find us again, I was ambushed by a sudden and unexpected epiphany about Ludacris’s Southern Hospitality: it is the shit.

I’ve always had a thing for authoritative MCing – Chuck D is the obvious example to trot out here, and is probably the reason for this fetish in the first place, given that Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions is the first rap album I ever bought. Other MCs who float my “authoritative” boat are KRS-One and Roots Manuva, but I never really paid much attention to Ludacris. He’s always just been there, another of those people halfway down my “too much music, too little time” list, but when “Cadillac GRI-LLS, Cadillac MI-LLS, check out the oil my Cadillac SPI-LLS” (look, I didn’t say he was a poet, I just said he sounds authoritative when he raps) blasted out of the club speakers, multiple Michelle rap buttons were pushed.

The other thing that really does it for me in this song is the way the last word in each line is (only just) after the beat instead of right smack on it. I can’t quite describe why it makes such a big difference for me, but rapping with words smack on the beat reminds me of the Beastie Boys (eg. “Don’t! You! ask me to SMILE! I’ll stick around and make it worth your WHILE! etc.”), who I (shock! horror!) quite often find boring.

The last thing that really gets my booty shaking in this song (and quite a lot of others) is its extreme misogyny, but I can’t quite explain that in any rational way. I just derive wild joy from yelling “All my women in the house if you chasing cash, and you got some big titties wit a matching ass.” It probably has something to do with feeling empowered in my female sensuality or whatever.

Faye Wong, Singapore Indoor Stadium, 2 June 2004

For the sake of the ang mohs reading this who are even more clueless about Faye Wong than I am, the quick overview is that she’s a hugely famous Chinese singer whose success and popularity is surprising given the relatively adventurous nature of her music (relative to the world of Chinese pop music, that is), but perhaps less surprising given that she is very beautiful and has the voice of an angel. Musically, I’d describe her sound as Dolores O’Riordan meeting Sarah McLachlan at a Teresa Teng concert attended briefly by Bebel Gilberto, but in a good way, apart from when she does the awful Dolores-stylie banshee-keening. I’m sensing disbelief. I’ll move on.

I’ve never heard a fast Chinese pop song that didn’t suck, and unfortunately that trend mostly continued for me during this concert. Her ballads are generally enjoyable because they showcase her exceptional singing ability, but the fast songs sound like I could throw them together in ten minutes with a shitty synthesizer and some bog-standard trance samples. The only exception was a song which is either called Kai Dao Tu Mi or Tian Dao Tu Mi or Kai Dao Tu Ling (look, when you don’t understand what something means, it’s hard to remember exact wordings, okay?) which is very much like Tori Amos when she started experimenting with beats on From The Choirgirl Hotel. Feisty tune, snazzily performed, fun touches like singing through a megaphone so her voice sounds like a raspy vocoder, and interesting, thank God.

But let’s move on to the ballads, because they’re really what get those multi-coloured lightsticks in the audience swaying arrhythmically in the air, and inspire those screams of “WANG FEI! WANG FEI!”

[Why do Chinese audiences shout out the artist’s full name? This is so odd, it’s like going to an English gig and yelling “JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE!” or “WEIRD AL YANKOVIC!” I mean, in other concerts I’ve attended, I certainly never bothered with “Jackson” when I was screaming “I LOVE YOU MICHAEL!”, and my secondary three form teacher didn’t bother to add a “Bon Jovi” when she yelled “FUCK ME JON!” either.]

So anyway, she sang Tian Kong and Dan Yuan Ren Chang Jiu and Wo Yuan Yi and Hong Dou and Xiao Wang Shu and Ren Jian, which was very nice, because they are among the 17 songs of hers that I actually know. She also sang some cover versions with varying success – The Cranberries’ Dreams (fine until the banshee-keening bit, which is dreadful no matter who sings it), The Look Of Love (unexpected, but actually quite nice and Bebel Gilberto-y) and Tori’s Silent All These Years, which seems to be the most successful crossover English song ever in the Chinese pop world, given the number of Chinese pop chicks who keep covering it.

[I asked Terry if they retained the meaning of the Silent All These Years lyrics when they translated it to Chinese. “Of course not,” said Terry, “in Chinese music nothing is about domestic abuse; everything is about breakups.”]

The thing about Faye Wong is that you don’t have to know her songs or understand the lyrics to enjoy her concert, because most of the time, her amazing voice is enough. Depending on the song, she can showcase the rich vibrato of a traditional Chinese chanteuse, she can do the playful delicacy of a funny Broadway number, and she can do the sort of modern balladeering that Sarah McLachlan used to do well and Dido still wishes she could do well. At the end of the day, that voice bridges the gap of my ignorance and my cultural condescension, and is all I ultimately need as explanation of her richly-deserved fame.

Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore, 28 May 2004

I spent Friday night at the most crazy-ass ambitious musical event I have ever witnessed. They’re opening the Singapore Arts Festival with 400 people performing Mahler’s 8th Symphony, and thanks to Debbie, I got to attend the media preview.

I’ve always loved Mahler because he’s such a drama queen, and this symphony didn’t disappoint. By the end of it the audience has been buffetted from side to side like leaves in the wind by superpower choir, mad trombones and walls of orchestra noise. In a good way! I could write more about why I think the performance was musically damn good, but it would almost certainly sound like pretentious bollocks, so all I will say is that everyone involved in this should be bloody proud, and everyone who was lucky enough to get tickets to this before it sold out should be bloody thankful.