Encounterculture

#9: Large



It’s getting to be really difficult to be hardcore these days. More and more, I find myself bitching and moaning about the lack of a soundtrack suitable for my waxing libido (this is why the Strokes exist, kids), and yet I can’t seem to put down Anniemal. It’s just too much damn fun.

“It”, I hasten to add, isn’t so much the songs – I’ve settled nicely into a listening pattern with it where I skip over roughly half the album – but rather the one-two punch of the sweet narcotic rush of unadulterated pop music (one) and the giddy, reckless delight that you only get when you catch yourself enjoying something that you know you shouldn’t (two). And really, if you want to get that even closer to the truth, it’s the second part of that equation that really makes the sale. As long as we’ve had pop music – and I mean pop music in the broad overarching sense of Popular Music, not just in the “Hey, thirteen-year-old girls like music too!” sense – there’s always been that undercurrent of You Should Not Be Here; it just used to be about showing The Man what the back of your middle finger looked like. Now it’s about kicking your friends in the dick when they make fun of you for knowing all the words to “Chewing Gum”.

Well, fuck ‘em. There are few albums this year which offer up as many chances to make a jackass of yourself in front of your friends as Anniemal. It’s not just that it’s an album full of disco whistles and warm synth pads and breathy backing tracks – it’s all that stuff pushed way past the logical conclusion. I still remember being about seven or eight and visiting my cousin who introduced me to Guns ‘n Roses; I think it may have even been the first time I’d ever heard “Sweet Child O’ Mine” when he asked me whether I liked that or the New Kids on the Block with more than a little trepidation. Of course I chose G’n’F’n’R – how could you not? It was just so gigantic that you couldn’t deny it, right? How do you possibly choose thin-ass late 80s pop music over THAT, right?

Okay, try to visualize two things: First, that most of the music on Anniemal is just as gigantic as Appetite – it just gravitates around the precise opposite musical pole. And second, if the New Kids had had music as active and animated as Anniemal does – well, my family might be even more suspicious of me. But god, who am I to argue with Those Drums on “Heartbeat” or all those hilarious disco sirens on “Come Together” or all that ice-cold synth punctuation all over the title track Or Or Or. There’s just stuff going on here; lots of stuff, good stuff, and stuff being put forward within the rubric of pop music (and now I am limiting myself to the thirteen-year-old-girl mode of pop music). This stuff sounds light and unthreatening because dammit, it’s built to sound light and unthreatening.

I suppose it’s worth making the point that it’s totally reasonable to look at Anniemal as an album of substance as well. Death, to take the most obvious example, has a way of showing up on this album, specifically the death of Annie’s deceased friend DJ Erot, who plays the dual roles of guest vocalist on “The Greatest Hit” and subject of “My Best Friend”, the album’s curious closing song. It’s actually a pretty clever trick if you think about it, and more to the point it’s certainly not the kind of trick you’d expect to find attempted on a bid for Britneydom. And yet that almost seems to miss the point. What makes Anniemal a great pop album isn’t that it deals with big things like death; it’s that it’s a monster of a record made compelling by the fact that it’s precisely the kind of thing that you’ve been brought up to write off. Put it this way: I have total confidence that Lester Bangs would have loved it.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog. I figure why not.

Yet Another Goddamn Project

So. End of the year. Time to do lists. As, at the moment, I am staying nearly sober (in preparation for OMG I WON'T TELL), I figured I would fill my time by attempting to write something about each of my ten favorite albums of the year, counting down to #1. As usual with my projects, I would afford this about the survival rate of a poor family on the Titanic, but sobriety can make a man do funny things. Plus you all get to watch as I make futile attempts to wrangle pictures into my blog. I predict comedy. ALLEZ CUISINE.

#10: O SHI

“Ah fuck”, I say to myself; “I may have painted myself into a corner already. The truth of the matter is that I like Let’s Bottle Bohemia simply because it’s full of great songs, and the deeper truth of the matter is that I can’t use the term ‘great’ here without using it exactly like my little sister does when she talks about how the new Weezer album is full of ‘great’ songs. You don’t really want to admit to that level of cerebral lameness on the Intarnets – hell, you REALLY don’t want to do it first thing off the bat, do you?”

Answer: Yes. I really do like this album, and I really do think the songs are great, and I mean that in the most cloyingly moderately-ahead-of-the-curve-cocky-thirteen-year-old-girl sense possible. The songs are just so damned catchy, and the layers of instruments just play so well against each other, and the lyrics are just the right balance of relevant and singalongable, and I keep putting stuff from this album on the endless series of mix CDs that I pass out to my friends with less time and energy to focus on looking for great music, and goddammit this is just a great album. If I kick this off by declaring myself to be a creature of taste, then so be it.

“Taste”, I think, is the operative word here, because if you go off the basis of So Much For The City, the Thrills are absolutely nothing of consequence. The City, or what I managed to endure of it, wasn’t bad, just bland; as a consequence of both living in Southern California and devotedly reading Stylus, I haven’t exactly had much difficulty finding music where bands deal with their problems by way of sunny pop music. Worse yet, right around the time when everybody started asking me if I’d heard The City, I picked up Belle & Sebastian’s world-killing Dear Catastrophe Waitress on a whim (those who want my thoughts on that album can basically multiply the enthusiasm in this piece by nine billion). In addition to monopolizing my car’s CD player for roughly the first half of the year, it also set me down the path of becoming One Of Those Goddamn Belle And Sebastian Fans – buying giant wads of their back catalogue, searching out the singles, you know the drill. The Thrills never really had a chance against that kind of onslaught – YOU go listen to “Big Sur” right after “There’s Too Much Love” and tell me who wins – but seriously, in all honesty, nobody really could have had one.

The irony, however, is that without the B&Splosion earlier in the year, I probably would have just ambled right on past Let’s Bottle Bohemia – I can nearly guarantee you of that. Two things were happening in September when this came out. First, I was right in the midst of a motherfucker of a run of tripping and falling into great/fun/worthwhile CDs seemingly every week. (I seem to remember buying Chain Gang of Love, Hotter than July, Surf’s Up, Absolution, the This Modern Age EP, an ELO Greatest Hits compilation, about four of the albums on this list, and a whole shitload of other stuff in the span of about two and a half weeks, although again, I do smoke a lot of pot.) More importantly for this narrative, however, is the fact that with the purchase of Belle & Sebastian’s Books EP (whichrulesgogetit), my Belle & Sebastian phase came to a graceful close, or at least the part of the addiction fueled by the thrill of discovering new stuff. As anybody who’s ever obsessed over a band to any degree knows – which I presume covers all four of you who read this thing – this is the moment where you find out if things stick around for the long haul (hello Blondie) or if you should just cut and run (hello Hum). It’s just that at that moment, I didn’t feel like I was done with Belle & Sebastian; lord knows I’m enough of a mopey dorky pop music addict that I need all that shit that I can get.

You know where this is going. Someone basically hogtied me into giving Let’s Bottle Bohemia a chance. I listened to like three or four songs and decided not to listen to it again until I had bought it. I bought it and couldn’t shake it from the rotation of CDs that I’d take to my car whenever I’d drive anywhere. It soundtracked some bullshit in my life. I discovered promise and utility in a few other songs on the album. Now, in light of some more recent re/discoveries (Nilsson Schmilsson! Permission to Land! Up the Bracket!), it’s back on the shelf, but hell, I’ve dusted it off recently and it still works just fine thankyouverymuch. Simply because other music offers deeper, less exhaustible, more mature (or, hell, immature) pleasures doesn’t mean that it makes sense to ask for more than what I got from Let’s Bottle Bohemia.

I think there’s always going to be room for albums like this with me – or at least I hope so. Albums like this keep you honest; it’s very very easy to wrap yourself in a shroud of DFA cowbells and MF Doom lyrics and bitch and moan about how nobody else gets it, and I say that with the full authority of experience. In all seriousness, I’m not trying to pull a Hornby here; I have no a priori objection to esoterica, to the point where I’d call Music For Airports one of the better and more interesting and more useful albums that I’ve ever heard. It’s just that there’s a time and a place for it, and if there’s a time and a place for stuff like that, then surely there has to be a time and a place for the bouncy fun stuff like Let’s Bottle Bohemia. And if that time and place is underscored so aptly by a work of music like Let’s Bottle Bohemia, then slotting it out in favor of Max Richter or Oh Montreal in an attempt to curry favor with the cognoscenti just isn’t worth it. Sez me, that’s who.