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Focus on the music
"Focus on the music," I told myself. "You can do it, you can ignore that little expletive." But I can't. So let me get this out of the way: I'm not making an exclamation, Holy Fuck happens to be a band, a very good band, from Toronto Canada. Shame about their choice in names, but I hope you can ignore it.
Now to the music. HF has been described as "a shabbily dressed Kraftwerk" and the allusion to kraut rock is right on. HF create a trance-inducing hybrid of instrumental electronic and rock music. Its approach is minimal and incessant. Songs begin simple with repeating electronic riffs and pounding drums and then grow into dense, noisy monoliths of sound.
Admirably, it's all done without any pre-programming assistance. Human hands are not plinking laptops or twiddling sequencers. Instead, HF's sound is built around thunderous live drumming, live bass guitars, abstract keyboard noises and most curious, a 35mm film to audio synchronizer. How that works into the sound is a mystery to me, but it must be fun to watch live.
HF released its debut, self-titled album, November 1, 2005 on Dependent Music. Listen to tracks from the album here. Also, HF will play the Plug Awards with Beans, in New York on February 2nd.
Even though this year hasn't been the strongest for new music, in my opinion, there have been at least two or three memorable albums that would make my top 10 in any year (except maybe 1991, but that's a story for another day). Perhaps saying I was depressed about this year was an overstatement, considering that every year has its good and bad. When I combine my favorite released in the last 12 months with the older music discovered in 2005, I really can't complain.
One of my recent finds was Belgian punk satirist Plastic Bertrand, aka Roger Jouret. How I came upon Plastic Bertrand is a rather random story. It happened the day after Twitch blew my mind at Don Hill's. This was my first Optimo/Twitch experience and it more than matched up to the praise I've heard from Rajeev. Twitch's genre blender style not only made me dance, it inspired me to deepen my musical knowledge.
I spent the next day reading bios on artists like Arthur Russell, Skatt Brothers, as well as a number of late `70s/early `80s new wave acts including Plastic Bertrand. Then on Amazon I found a clip of "Ca Plane Pour Moi", Plastic Bertrand's hit song from 1977. I was instantly hooked by the song's outrageous mix of doo-wop and punk. All Music pointed me to PB's 1978 debut album, also titled Ca Plane Pour Moi (which roughly translates as All's Well For Me). The song and the album have quickly become a real favorite of mine this year.
The Belgian Pop & Rock Archives has an excellent write-up on Plastic Bertrand. It includes this quote from Rolling Stone magazine's David Fricke: "'ca Plane pour Moi' is truly great dumbness--Bertrand singing verbose, seemingly nonsensical French lyrics over a classic three-chord Ramones roar with Spectorish saxes and a winning falsetto 'oooh-weee-oooh' on the chorus." Not only does Fricke love it, but Rolling Stone named the song as one of the top 100 rock songs.
I asked Pandora why it picked the Graham Parker song. It responded: "We're playing this track because it features mild rhythmic syncopation, extensive vamping, minor key tonality and many other similarities identified in the music genome project." Extensive vamping huh? Sounds sexy.
You can ask Pandora this question for every song it plays, as well as tell it what you like, don't like (and Pandora swears it will never play that song again!), and add tracks to a favorites page. There are also links to buy the songs or albums on Amazon or iTunes.
Licensing issues cause a couple annoyances. While you can skip ahead to new songs, you can't rewind or replay. Skipping is also limited; jump too much and the feature is blocked for an hour. Other than adding songs to your favorites, there's no way to export the playlist.
These minor gripes aside, Pandora is quite a clever music application.