Happy Thoughts with Atlas Sound

Around this time last year on a rather bleak autumn night, I was sent along to an unrenovated dance hall above a gently mouldering pub quite close to Kentish Town tube station to check out what was then the latest in the never ending succession of groups to bear the title ‘emerging American rock band’.  The venue was awful, all elbows and spilt Carling; the band was Deerhunter and was sublime.

Since then I’ve had a bit of a fixation on Bradford Cox, the band's inimitable frontman.  On the above mentioned night he was a riveting presence, obsessively fiddling with his amp and telling an amusing story about how he didn’t meet Lou Reed*, in between ripping the utter shit out of his guitar.  It was fun.  Which is what rock music should be.

Not long after that I discovered that Cox had this whole other project happening by the name of Atlas Sound**.  Wistful, ghostly and disaffected electronica-hued pop probably sums it up.  Oh, and deeply catchy, though more in a ‘gets under your skin without you really realising it’ than a ‘I can’t get this freaking song outta my head’ sort of way.

I liked, but wasn’t blown away by Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, his elaborately titled solo debut – it possesses a kind of quiet, rambling, pent-up angst, like a child locked in a large empty house on a rainy day, suggesting a richly detailed but closely guarded interior universe.  It’s a difficult album to love, its insularity acting to repel the casual listener; similarly it’s hard to grow tired of, its many small joys emerging with repeated listens.

So anyway, Atlas Sound has a new album.  It’s called Logos.  Whether this is in ironic reference to the late Jacques Derrida’s rippingly fun demolition of the foundations of western thought is open for debate.  What is certain is that it is something quite special indeed.  It’s a pop record.  While not exactly sunny, it’s certainly more expansive and generous than Cox’s previous effort****, and even includes a couple of collaborative efforts with other nice people.

Anxiety is still the order of the day however, Cox being more interested in creating a certain ambiance and mood than expressing his dissatisfaction more directly.  Take opener The Light That Failed for instance, its gentle murmurings conjuring a golden sunset framing waves lapping at a quiet shore, an image tinged with disquiet.  An Orchid, which immediately follows is a masterful exercise of evocation, Cox’s breathily indistinct vocals echoing blurrily over a whimsical little pop song laced with despondency, a model used on such subsequent tracks as Criminals and My Halo.

It is perhaps unsurprising in this context that the most interesting and invigorating material on the album comes in the form of the two tracks written in partnership with Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear of Animal Collective and Laeticia Sadier of Stereolab, Cox rising to the challenge of working with people intent on dragging him out of himself.

Walkabout, the track with Lennox is a jaunty ditty, the pair’s morning-after blood-shot chant being punctuated by the occasional eruption of kaleidoscopic electric euphoria that is Lennox’ specialty.  In fact, it could almost be called *gasp* optimistic.  Such could also be said of Sheila, which leapfrogs over its burdensome verse (‘no one wants to die alone’) with a heady and insanely catchy chorus (‘we’ll die alone, together’).  Ok, so maybe optimistic is the wrong word.

By contrast Sadier’s contribution, Quick Canal, is a very different beast to the rest, synths tracing lazy arcs over a driving beat that unstoppably propels things forward for nearly nine minutes.  Meanwhile Sadier’s beatific voice issues forth with disappointed reproach against a figure who’s ‘wasting his life’, perhaps pandering to Cox’s self-flagellating, masochistic, confess-uncomfortably-intimate-details-in-public streak, but in context functioning as a breath of fresh, external air.

Which is not to say that Logos is stuffy.  On the contrary, it's the work of an extremely talented individual who is only just beginning to stretch his creative wings.  Who knows, next time he might fly right out the window and take off into the clouds.


Stuff to do when it's raining:  Cox's emaciated frame adorning the cover of the album couldn't help but remind me of Rubber Johnny.  Sorry Brad;  Giggle your way through A Case of Exploding Mangoes;  read things such as this.  I do not envy that nice Mr Obama one little bit.


* he was buying a book about Lou Reed at the time, thus missing his chance to make the acquaintance of the genuine article.  Poor bugger.
** the man’s blog is well worth checking out, his cheerful proclamations on the state of music usually being insightful, controversial and amusing.
*** he regularly make available Atlas Sound singles free to download, also compiling ‘Micromixes’ which are quite wonderfully packaged little mixtapes of eclectic goodies.
**** or at least displays expansive and generous tendencies.

Lunar escapades

It must run in the family.  Astrophilia that is.  As most people who've bothered to google it have by now realised, 'Duncan Jones', although being the gentleman's legal name, is not in fact the one by which he is most well known*.  That of course is Zowie Bowie**.  His dear Papa went through his own star-gazing phase, a period in which he produced what is generally recognised as his strongest and most memorable music, so it's not necessarily any bad thing for the son to have launched himself*** by looking skywards.

Jones' directorial debut is the lo-fi sci-fi slow-burn zinger Moon.  Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole inhabitant of a large lunar base established some years in the future after a powerful fuel is discovered in refined moon rock, thus 'solving' civilisation's addiction to cheap energy.  Hurrah!

As the operation is almost completely mechanised, Bell leads a quiet life, finishing up his three year contract with Lunar Corp tending to his pot plants, whittling wood, watching recorded messages from his wife back on Earth or chatting to the base computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), only occasionally being called upon when there's a hitch with the machinery.  As he enters the final two weeks of his tenure however, poor old Sam begins to feel a bit peculiar and things start to go awry.  Could he be going loony?****

Jones is quite happy to invoke the great cliches of space-bound sci-fi - creepy chicks that may or may not be hallucinations for example, or empty gung-ho rhetoric ('rock 'n roll and God Bless America!'), or an apparently benign omnipresent computer that possibly harbours nefarious directives - only for them to be subverted after the core event of the story occurs and the plot kicks into gear.  For this he should be bought a nice bottle of wine and clapped heartily on the back.

Although the film is hampered by a number of niggling inconsistencies in its premise - that its lunar setting seems to have been chosen for its metaphorical and cultural resonances rather than for its believability for instance - these are minor when balanced against the extent of Jones' achievement.

Like the heavenly body for which it is named, Moon unfolds with unhurried poise, its myriad secrets calmly revealed one by one.  Unlike so many movies that bear the tag 'sci-fi', the film follows its central problem through to its logical conclusion without resorting to fantasy or excessive action sequences to resolve or obscure the knotty questions raised.  Sam Rockwell meanwhile gives a superb performance as the hapless Bell, anchoring the film in his complex emotional reality.  Moon is a fantastic piece of cinema and because of its awesomeness should be seen by everyone.


Things of interest: Toy Story 3 - in JUNE NEXT YEAR!  *sits on hands*; Reading Remembering Babylon for the first time; Baked Greek sausages.  Yum.


* not that he's been particularly well-known up until this point by, well... anyone.
** check out the family resemblance - it's all in the teeth
*** ba dum ching
**** ba dum dum ching

unemployment is capitalism's way of making you plant a garden

I never saw Sicko, Michael Moore’s apparently excoriating piece on the American health care system.  In one sense I haven’t needed to, what with not being a sick American and so forth – it’s not immediately relevant to my life, so who cares*?  I was also tentative because since Bowling for Columbine, I’ve become more and more disenchanted with Moore’s populist style of documentary, with its simplistic glosses and emotionally manipulative sentimentality.

In one sense I can’t really blame him for this – after all he’s actively attempting to influence American political life, and the only way to do that these days it seems (unless you’re Barack Obama of course) is to couch the message in a form that the television addicted masses might understand**.  At the same time I find his condescension grating, his ‘everyman’ persona disingenuous and am irritated by the gaping holes left unacknowledged in his arguments.  He may be diametrically opposed to Rush Limbaugh, but that just makes him sane, not a latter day left-wing prophet.

Don’t tell him that though.  His new film, Capitalism: A Love Story (brilliant title by the way there Mike), sees the erstwhile documentarian taking on the entire American financial establishment and the system which has allowed it to achieve international power***.  His argument is simple: Capitalism has produced in America totalitarian conditions.  Rather than functioning to guarantee individual freedom, it has instead succeeded in oppressing the vast majority of people.

This is hardly a new insight, but the film does provide an extensive catalogue of some of the more grotesque injustices that the American financial system has produced in recent times.  Take a visit with the aptly named Condo Vultures for example, a company that accesses bank databases for lists of foreclosed homes, before buying them up and reselling them at a profit.  As the superbly cynical smooth-talking rep says, ‘it’s all about taking right now.’

Similarly, Moore chats with the families of deceased employees of large companies such as Walmart, who secretly take out life insurance policies – charmingly dubbed ‘Dead Peasant’ policies – on their entire workforce.  The odds are that in any given year a sufficient percentage will cark it, thus guaranteeing a return – the fact that such a scheme is not illegal in a supposedly first world country beggars the mind.

And so it goes, Moore using period ads, movies, public announcements, and news reels to selectively trace the history of American capitalism since the Second World War.  From the birth of the middle class in the neatly ordered consumerism of the 50s, he quickly moves to the alliance between corporate and banking interests, the evangelical right and the conservative political establishment under Reagan.  Ronnie is presented (quite reasonably I might add) as an empty-headed puppet, with the dismantling of American manufacturing and industry undertaken by people such as Don Regan, former CEO of Merrill Lynch and Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, later Chief of Staff, as a means of and maximising profits within the corporate sector by breaking the unions and utilising cheap labour in the developing world.

From here, Moore leap-frogs over Bush I & Clinton, to land slap bang in Dubya’s first term and the ‘greatest wave of white collar crime in American History’ over which he presided, culminating in the sub-prime mortgage bonanza and the Global Financial Crisis of last year.  This is where the meat of the film lies, in the shots of boarded up homes, the tears of those whose houses have been repossessed, the testimony of pilots forced to live off food stamps and credit cards to supplement their meagre salaries, the horror stories of teenagers sentenced en masse to privatised juvenile penitentiaries for minor misdemeanours, the tragedy of several generations of graduates, the nation’s intellectual capital, migrating from the best universities in America to self-consciously destructive professions in the ‘insane casino’ of the financial sector and the corruption of the federal regulatory bodies that made it all possible.

Into this volatile situation the bailout plan for the GFC put forward by Treasury Secretary Paulson (former CEO of banking giant Goldman Sachs) in Moore’s reasoning was little more than an old school grift, a con-job on a scale that lends weight to his description of it as constituting a ‘financial coup d’état.’

Again, this is not revolutionary stuff.  Then again, what is bleedingly obvious to some can be difficult to see for many.  The film’s strength is in Moore’s adeptness at caging his arguments in entertaining and inventive ways, his use of easily relatable references to popular culture, and his ability to elicit undeniably moving stories and statements from his interviewees.

The flipside to this of course is that he often simplifies complex ideas to the extent that it could reasonably be called ‘dumbing down’ while his style of narration and penchant for lingering on tears betrays his distasteful fondness for emotional manipulation and soppiness, as does his insistence on including the occasional rather lame stunt.

The real question is really whether all this makes the film more effective in raising people’s political awareness, or whether Moore is somehow acting in bad faith towards his audience, be it conscious or not.  His ability to produce eminently quotable grand pronouncements – ‘capitalism is an evil and you cannot regulate evil’ – ultimately smacks of impotence, while his uncritical acceptance of Obama – at a time when Obama’s slavish adherence to the principle of bi-partisanship is slowly suffocating the chance for genuine reform of the American health care system – further diminishes his opinion’s currency.

And now that that's out of the way: Go and see Capitalism: A Love Story!!  In spite of its numerous defects, it is a strident indictment of American capitalism and by extension the global financial system – and that effects everyone.

Hip happenings for a Friday Night: the return of the Flaming Lips; Cooper's Red; A walk along the harbour of a warm, windy evening.


* Actually, the state of the American health care system is vastly important to many more lives than those directly affected by it at the moment.  Obama’s ability or otherwise to pass a reform bill with some measure of muscle on it, as he is currently attempting to, will establish the tenor for the rest of his first term and shape his chances of achieving subsequent reforms in other areas of global significance such as Climate Change.  For a fair summation of the stakes involved in the health care debate that is currently raging in the States, check out Keith Olbermann in this episode of Countdown.

** Please note the irony – I think that the American public is far too often measured by its lowest common denominators by people on all sides of politics, both explicitly and by implication.

*** Sorry, ‘hegemony’.

Fun and Games with Esoterica and Funky Gadgets

Fuck Buttons’ peculiarly titled Street Horrrsing was one of my albums of choice last year to accompany afternoons lazily wiled away in the company of a decent book and an ample supply of substances of dubious repute.  This wasn’t due to its surprising freshness nor because of its sophisticated experimentation between the interplay between the duo’s electronic whiz-bangery and the hoots and hollers of Andy Fung nor even because of the mesmerising, seemingly effortless emergence of sloppy supernovas of synthesised ecstasy on tracks such as Sweet Love For Planet Earth.

Actually, it was because of all of these things.  But more to the point, I liked it because for a couple of months there it became very cool to like the Fuck Buttons and when we get right down to it sometimes there’s nothing I like more than to follow the crowd.

So a year and an apparent age of touring, festivals, features, interviews and empty-headed buzz later and the FB’s have coughed up another album.  This second outing may well have pushed through the barrage of hyperbole and the aura of sleek of-the-momentness to enter into some deeper layer of jungle-howling off-the-wallness.  As it were.  However, such was not to be, Tarot Sport being a stronger, more coherent but ultimately far less imageresting* effort.

Things start well with Surf Solar opening with barrages of exploding wind chimes breaking across the ether, a grim beat soon kicking in accompanied by an edgy, chittering motif that badgers at one like a demanding child or some obsequious guest at a party.  And so it goes for the subsequent ten minutes, a synthesized theme suggesting star-bound glory fleshing things out in a manner that makes the ideal soundtrack to accompany digesting anything ever written by Peter F Hamilton.

Rough Steez is a coarser, shaggier, jowly beast – more of a break-dancing orang-utan than a pilgrimage across the stars – while The Lisbon Maru suggests greener climes, pleasant views of rolling green hills being afforded from one’s accelerating vantage point on the motor way.  So far so good, each track having been ground and polished to a fine sheen.  However one might suggest that the choice of stones** exhibits some lapse in ambition.  Perhaps it’s the sheer euphoria of it all, the sense that the darkly unique potential previously exhibited has crumbled into some brightly glowing fantasy, irrevocably severed from anything real, to be forgotten and disposed of afterwards.

The next track, Olympians, forms the album centrepiece and is the case in point.  Fung has said that it was named because ‘we thought it sounds like... the Olympics!’.  This is apt, washes of warm golden consonance tracing a clear take off down an endless runway towards an all-knowing oneness.  That’s the fantasy version.  The hard headed version is that it is Fuck Buttons’ do Vangelis, and have thus provided Sky Sports with the perfect soundtrack to the London games.

After a diversion down into the whirring gears and pistons of Phantom Limb, another climb is sighted, this time up Space Mountain.  It’s a gleeful ascent, a soaring guitar sound questing into the clouds above a dynamic mass of tinkling fairy lights far in the valley below, and makes for probably the most well-sculpted and compelling song on the album.  Then with the Flight of the Feathered Serpent, Tarot Sport concludes on an extended, almost nostalgic drum-machine-fuelled glide into the distance.

It’s difficult not to discuss the album in rather imagistic descriptive terms.  Unlike Street Horrrsing, it is bereft of vocals, a fact which apparently wasn’t originally planned, but which combines with the unrelenting dance-beats to lend the album an air of being mired in the machinery.  I suppose that it's a matter of expectations: if one is content with being treated to invigorating constructions of ecstatic visions, to the point of becoming lost in a greened-out dream-world, then this is it.


Fun ways to wile away the evening hours: Samarkand by Amin Maalouf, looking at disturbingly vivid colour photographs of Nazi Germany, Mr Pickwick's Camera by Cuthbert and the Night Walkers


* imageresting: a slightly pat compound word formed by jamming 'imaginative' and 'interesting' together as hard as possible
** in this metaphor the Fuck Buttons are wizened old gemologists, hunched laboriously over a glittering array of precious stones