Albums Of The Year 2011

As far as I'm concerned, this year has been a fantastic one for music, and particularly for the kind of music that I love. There have been tremendous sadnesses - the breakups of Thursday and Thrice were perhaps inevitable but nevertheless really crushing for people who got into underground music when I did - but looking across my selections for Albums Of The Year there are a lot of reasons for joy too. To mention but a few: the rebirth of genuinely inventive and progressive hardcore (pioneered by bands like Touche Amore and La Dispute), a resurgence of quality pop-punk (courtesy of The Wonder Years, The Swellers and The Dangerous Summer), some new bands taking steps up with their most recent albums (Polar Bear Club and Twin Atlantic), some veteran acts raising their games in response (Thursday, Thrice and Face To Face) and a wave of hugely inventive and really exciting hip-hop (with Astronautalis and the phenomenal Doomtree collective leading the way). It has also been a year of diverse musical releases, with experimental instrumental music taking its place alongside gauzy pop and relatively unstructured rock.

There has been something else to 2011, though - while I have found the music itself exciting and moving, I have also been genuinely inspired by the way in which bands have gone about defining their identities, releasing their music, and expressing what they stand for. This isn't about capital-p Politics: I don't think any of the albums of my lists, with the possible exception of the Against Me!!! EP, have directly addressed the tumultuous political events of the last year. Instead it's about ethos and approach: so many of the bands on these lists have chosen to advocate for or simply to embody integrity. You could see this in the group of hardcore bands who defined themselves as "The Great Wave" and built a following thanks to their thoughtful, personal lyrics and commitment to rebuilding a vibrant and community-minded scene. You could see it in the way that more bands chose to self-release their material, to really engage with their fans, and to use their platforms to address causes bigger than the traditional drink and drugs rock lifestyle.

And, for me, the best example of what I'm talking about can be found in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The 'Doomtree' rap collective, first and foremost, make great music. Three of my top five rap albums of the year relate to that collective (the Doomtree, Dessa and Sims records) and the no. 1 rap album by my reckoning (the astonishing "This Is Our Science" by Astronautalis) features a number of collaborations with and production work by Doomtree members. They are all great records that would stand out even if you didn't know anything about the people involved or their approach to creation and business. But, for me, there is more to admire there. Doomtree have worked hard to build a fanbase and a business the independent way; they stress fellowship and collectivism both within their group and beyond it in the musical scenes that they inhabit; and they recognise they combine the strengths of a number of people to create art that is greater than the sum of its parts. And their mantra embodies all of this. They chose to call their album "No Kings", to make it clear that they believe that there's no real separation between artist and fan, that the modern world needs fewer hierarchies rather than more of them, and that we need to begin thinking of new ways to lower the barriers between people.

In that spirit, while I have ranked the albums of the year as I always have, it should be noted they are all great works of art, and many of them are created by people who are genuinely seeking to do things the right way. No Kings.

Top 20 Rock Records:

1. No Devolucion by Thursday (Epitaph)

2. Clash, Battle, Guilt, Pride by Polar Bear Club (Bridge 9)

3. !Hey, Hey Pioneers! by Farewell Continental (Paper and Plastick)

4. Elsie by The Horrible Crowes (SideOneDummy)

5. Major/Minor by Thrice (Vagrant)

6. Suburbia, I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing by The Wonder Years (Hopeless)

7. Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me by Touche Amore (Deathwish Inc.)

8. Avalanche United by I Am The Avalanche (I Surrender)

9. War Paint by The Dangerous Summer (Hopeless)

10. People and Things by Jack's Mannequin (Sire)

11. Laugh Now, Laugh Later by Face To Face (Antagonist)

12. Take Care, Take Care, Take Care by Explosions In The Sky (Temporary Residence Inc.)

13. Holy Fuck by Living With Lions (Adeline)

14. Free by Twin Atlantic (Red Bull)

15. Ironiclast by The Damned Things (Mercury)

16. Pedals by Rival Schools (Photo Finish)

17. Hurricane Season by Dan Andriano In The Emergency Room (Asian Man)

18. Good For Me by The Swellers (Fuelled By Ramen)

19. Taking Back Sunday by Taking Back Sunday (Warner Bros)

20. Fake History by Letlive. (Epitaph)

Top 3 EPs:

1. Russian Spies / Occult Enemies by Against Me!!! (Sabot Productions)

2. Crosses EP by Crosses (self-released)

3. The Fire, The Steel, The Tread by Hot Water Music (Rise Records)

Top 5 Rap Records:

1. This Is Our Science by Astronautalis (Fake Four)

2. No Kings by Doomtree (Doomtree)

3. Take Care by Drake (Cash Money)

4. Castor, The Twin by Dessa (Doomtree)

5. Bad Time Zoo by Sims (Doomtree)

Top Live Shows:

- Groezrock 2011 at Meerhout, Belgium (inc. Circa Survive, Twin Atlantic, Millencolin, Every Time I Die, Thursday and NOFX)

- Jimmy Eat World (Clarity and Bleed American show) at the Kentish Town Forum

- La Dispute and Touche Amore at the Camden Underworld

- Face To Face and The Flatliners at the Kingston Peel

- Against Me!!! at the Kingston Peel

A Sketch For Time's Arrow

Author: DC

Date: November 2011

Word count: 1,026

A wise man once said “all good things come to an end” - or at least, Nelly Furtado did. And while Miss Furtado has a sketchy track record when it comes to truth-telling[1] she is absolutely right about this. Sometimes relationships don’t work out, people die, start-up businesses fail, and bands break up. Not only do we understand that these things will happen but we actively expect them to, and in some cases wish that they would sooner[2]. That understanding, however, doesn’t stop us from being sideswiped when something that really matters to us comes to end. While at a rational level we may be prepared for events, we may not be emotionally ready.

I certainly wasn’t ready this week when on consecutive days two of my three favourite bands of all time broke up. To be clear, I’m not saying that band break-ups are as tragic as deaths or relationship breakdowns. While art is a vital element of life, art isn’t equivalent to life or love, and shouldn’t be treated as such. I rationally accept that, but emotionally this week has been a tough one. I have lived with these bands for longer than my longest relationship, for longer than my professional career, and for longer than my time at high school and University put together. While I never expected them to keep recording forever, I still wasn’t ready for them to stop.

One of the bands was the first experimental, heavy, generally weird band that I ever really fell in love with. My early teenage years were soundtracked by US radio rock[3] and some deviations into the back catalogues of the Offspring and other Epitaph / Nitro punk bands. I liked music but I hadn’t yet found the sound that I’d fall in love with, and that would become something that I’ve been obsessed with for the last ten years. And then things changed, in the time that it took someone to burn a CD-R and scribble on it with an off-brand Sharpie that smudged to the point of illegibility before it made its way to me. The someone was my friend Dusty, the CD-R contained Thrice’s “The Illusion of Safety”, and that was that. The record was brave, exciting, technical, like nothing I’d ever heard before, and I loved it. It was difficult too, with its screamed vocals and knotty lyrics, but that didn’t put me off. I wanted to understand it, to be able to decipher the words, to hear the songs that inspired it and those that would be inspired by it.

A little while later I impulse-bought a CD, without knowing very much about the band that had recorded it. I recall thinking that they had an extremely dorky name – who would name their band after a day of the week? Did they not realise how much shit that their fans would get? – but also that their dove-shaped logo was beautiful, and that the album should be good given the positivity of the reviews that I had read. On listening, I quickly found out that this was another difficult record, or at least a record that I didn’t yet have the frame of reference to understand. The guitars screamed, the song structures were unconventional to say the least, and the singer alternated between choirboy sweetness and a scream that sounded like a raccoon caught in a trap. It took me many listens to get into it, but somewhere around spin twelve or thirteen things just clicked. The record was “Full Collapse”, the band was Thursday, and since then they have either been my favourite or second favourite band in the world, depending on mood and quality of most recent album.

This week, both Thursday and Thrice called it quits. In their closing statements, neither band was quite R.E.M.-final in their declarations, as they both stated that they may wish to play together again at some point in the future. But nevertheless, they are dropping out of the album-tour-album cycle, and have acknowledged the possibility that they may never play or record again. They both have perfectly justifiable reasons for doing so: young families, the rigours of the touring grind, the financial challenges of being in a mid-level band on an independent label. Admirably, both bands also say that they want to go out on an artistic high, and the stellar reviews of Thursday’s recent “No Devolucion” and Thrice’s “Major/Minor” allow them to do so.

And this is where it comes back to rationality versus emotion: rationally, I accept that the bands have good reasons for doing what they are doing, and making these choices. If the band members were my friends, I’d probably be telling them that they were making the right decision, that which will make their lives easier and help them to grow as people. But when it comes to these bands, I find that I can’t be rational. It’s emotion all the way. They have brought me so much joy and so much excitement. They have given me some of the best nights out I’ve ever had. And as clichéd as it sounds, they have taught me a lot about life, and about the way that I want to live mine. Thrice’s “The Weight” was the song that made me realise that I was ready to get married, and Thursday’s Geoff Rickley expressed more clearly than anyone else has the core values that I want to live my life by in “Stay True”. So right now it does feel like a breakup, like a little death, as I don’t know how I will replace what they gave me. All good things come to an end, we know that – but that doesn’t stop us wishing that the opposite were true.

---

[1] I’m fairly sure that she’s not actually like a bird, that she has never really eaten a man, and that she’s not promiscuous. Oh no, wait, hold on...

[2] I still have my fingers crossed that the rumours that Nickelback will break up after this album cycle are true.

[3] For the record, I still love Everclear.

Swiss Central Rain

DC

September 2011

1,344 words

I didn’t kick, and I certainly didn’t scream, and I don’t think that I told my parents that I hated them or that they were ruining my life or that I was going to run away and live in a squat in Camden Town. In fact, I remember feeling excited when my mum told me that she had taken a job in Geneva, Switzerland, and that we would be spending our school holidays and summer vacations there for the next few years. I was a teenager who was desperate to see the world and experience new things, and getting to experience life in a European capital ticked all the boxes for someone who was rapidly growing tired of life in a small English town outside London. How could it not be an adventure to explore a new place, and why would I worry about losing touch with my friends when they would all want to come and visit? So no, there was no complaining from me.

As the time of our first trip grew closer, however, I began to worry. Not about the big stuff, about language barriers or loneliness or dislocation. Teenage me instead to chose to fret about music. I had begun to immerse myself in London’s frantic rock scene, going to shows at the Astoria and Barfly and Brixton Academy, and shopping at Tower Records and Rough Trade and the Virgin Megastore. I was fairly sure that the Swiss only listened to folk music and yodelling compilations, and that I’d find it hard to get the American rock records and import issues of Rolling Stone that I was growing to love. The prospect of long summers without new music and anything to read scared the hell out of me, and as for going to concerts… well, it seemed like I could forget it. Geneva was amazing but it was no London, it didn’t feature on the European itineraries of many touring bands, and the only people who lived in Geneva were investment bankers, and let’s face it, they probably didn’t listen to that much Weezer or Bad Religion.

It took about three days for Geneva to allay my fears. As well as being a thoroughly charming and gorgeous little city, it was well-stocked with CD shops and even a rock vinyl store, and every little streetcorner magazine stand had not only all of the American magazines but the British ones too. Yes, you had to sell one of your kidneys to afford the import prices, but that seemed like a minor inconvenience at the time. Live music was more difficult, as there was a local punk rock scene but it was dominated by French-language bands who played in over-18s venues like L’Usine (“The Factory”), which was a rough-looking club near a bridge in the city centre. While I still found enough to keep me going during our first few summers and winters there, it wasn’t quite the same as it had been in England.

As I turned 19, then 20, I continued to spend time in Geneva during the long summer breaks in my university calendar. It slowly dawned on me how much the city had grown on me, how much I had come to love it, the bitter snowy winters as much as the beautiful summers and the cold stony old town as much as the lush lakeside gardens. While it had felt a little cold and distant and overly professional to start with, I had been given enough time to explore the fuzzy corners and frayed seams of the city, to see what it was really like when it wasn’t pretending to be a global banking centre or the headquarters of international politics. What I didn’t have, however, was that one defining memory that would forever come to mind when I would think of Switzerland, the spine-tingling holy fuck experience that transform a trip or a holiday into something transcendent. The sun rising at four in the morning over an Egyptian temple, or seeing Las Vegas rise from the desert for the first time, if you will.

My Geneva moment, when it arrived, didn’t involve a temple or a desert or a casino. It didn’t happen on the banks of Lake Geneva, or on top of a snowy mountain. Instead, it happened on the balcony of a soulless concrete “multipurpose sports and entertainment venue” on the edge of town, on a cold but not pleasant January night in 2005. For Christmas the month before, my ma had bought me tickets to see R.E.M. play the Geneva Arena on their “Around The Sun” world tour. I couldn’t believe that one of my favorite bands, one of the all-time greats, was coming to Geneva or that we’d managed to get tickets. And on the night they didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t the perfect R.E.M. setlist, as it was very heavy on the beautiful but stately and mid-tempo “Around The Sun” and neglected “Life’s Rich Pageant” and “New Adventures in Hi-Fi”, which were then and are now my controversial choices for best R.E.M. records. I have heard them play more complete sets since, in venues with more character than the Arena, but… well, none of them have meant quite as much to me as that night did.

Perhaps because so few bands of R.E.M.’s size and stature played in Geneva, the crowd were perfectly primed for and incredibly stoked on the show. The atmosphere was brilliant, with audience members quite literally hugging strangers when their favorite songs were played, and people reacting to Michael Stipe’s manic conducting by singing and dancing and generally losing their minds. My moment came at about half past ten at night, when the band crept softly into the first verse of “Walk Unafraid”. They played more quietly than you’d think possible in an arena, forcing us all to strain to hear the plaintive singing and tender guitar work. Then as the chorus came around the band dropped out entirely – and after one second of awestruck silence, the audience began to absolutely roar the words back at the band. “I will walk unafraid / I’ll be clumsy instead”. It was perfect, and the rush as the band kicked back in at full volume was undeniable. And, via the giant video projection screens, we saw Peter Buck crack a smile and shake his head, as if to acknowledge that he’d just experienced something that he didn’t expect to on a grim night in a concrete box somewhere a hell of a long way from Athens, Georgia. As sickly as it sounds, that moment made me feel more connected to Geneva and the people who lived there than I ever had before, more connected that I had felt to some of the places that I’d lived in for much longer before.

I had my Geneva moment, and from then on no trip back there has ever seemed complete without listening to some R.E.M. while walking around the old town and along the lake and up towards the monumental towers of the UN district. That band gave me the perfect soundtrack to a place that I love, and a moment that I will never forget. And I think that’s why I feel quite so heartbroken today on hearing that R.E.M. has decided to disband after 31 years, and that in all probability I will never get to see them play live again. While I was lucky enough to see them live quite a few times, and still have all of the albums to listen to, I think that I was hoping for something more. I think that I was hoping to get to see them again in some remote corner of the world – or back in Geneva, who knows – and to experience another moment of magic like the one that I had in 2005. The moment that made you feel like you belonged in a place, and the moment that made you realise just how great the band you were lucky enough to be watching were. Au revoir et bonne chance, R.E.M.

The Fuckup Revival

Author: DC

Word count: 1,572

August 2011

I took on my first proper full-time grown-up scary adult job the year after I graduated from University. I had worked summer jobs before, the usual video store or care home type of things, but nothing more serious or more long-term than that. At the time I remember thinking that it was daunting – no, scratch that, it was terrifying – but that I was ready for it, that I was keen to ‘make a contribution’, and that I was mature enough to handle the responsibility of entering the workforce. Most of all, I was really keen to do well so that I could pay back the people who had taken a chance on hiring me, so that they would feel that their generosity was being rewarded. So I turned up, went through the training that was offered, and was quickly dropped into doing work and reporting to senior people.

And you know what? For the next three years, in spite of my desire to live up to the expectations of the people who hired me, I was mostly a total pain in the ass. I was an underwhelming employee who talked back to people who were older and wiser and worthy of respect, didn’t do work on anything that didn’t interest me or wasn’t aligned with my ambitions or expectations, couldn’t be bothered to dress smartly so came into a suits-and-ties office wearing jeans and t-shirts, and… well, I must have seemed like an ungrateful, stroppy kid. And that was the key point: as grown up as I thought I was, I was still a kid. I was 21-going-on-17, trying to adjust to living in a new city with all the burdens that being fully independent of your parents or your University for the first time placed upon you, struggling to sort out my love life, and generally flailing around to find a path or direction. I went out too much, slept too little, brought some of my baggage to work, and generally failed to live up to the expectations that people had of me.

Thanks to some amazing people, however, I still work in the same place. In fact, I still work with many of the people that I did when I started, who mercifully seem to have decided to forgive or forget some of the shit that I got up to. Those people accepted that I had a lot of growing up to, were patient while I did it, didn’t take my sound and fury too seriously, and were generous enough to take the time to coach me and teach me how better to do things. And now it’s my turn, six years in, to try to look after some of the 21 year olds we have joining us as they go through the same stuff. And it has me thinking about one fundamental question, one for the philosophers, one that none of the great thinkers of the world have yet managed to answer: at what point does a hot mess become simply a mess? Or, to put it another way, at what point does being screwed up and a little all over the place cease to be sort of endearing and forgivable and most of all acceptable, and instead becomes sad and depressing?

The prevailing message being put out there by pop songs at the moment is that dysfunctional is the new way to be, that it's alright to brush your teeth with a bottle of Jack if you can't find any toothpaste, and that both guys and girls would prefer their partner to be an edgy but hopeless rager rather than a calm and sensible paragon of solidity. If you don't believe me, just look up how many people online are holding up Ke$ha as a role model, or who are buying the "pre-ripped, pre-laddered" tights now being sold by a major high street fashion chain. We all know people who have adopted the hot mess approach as a way of living, and who resolutely refuse to 'shape up' even when it would be in their best interests to do so. And don't get me wrong, there is something wonderful and freeing about that way of thinking, and everyone wants to feel that they are at least to some degree a free spirit who isn't overly bound by the constraints of society and responsibility. I know that I do - I may work for a big company, I may be married and the owner of a house, but some part of me would die if I felt that all of the nonconformity and messiness had been beaten out of me.

There is a point, however, at which not having your shit together somehow becomes less funny and less amusing, and when actually being in control and in charge most of the time is no bad thing. I’m not sure that there is an absolute age number we can pin to it, it's not that when everyone hits 30 they must suddenly grow up, but there is a line that we all sense sometimes. It’s the “if you’re still in the bar hitting on twenty-somethings when you are fifty” line, the “if you cry or fall asleep in the office more than once a year” line, the “if you accidentally wear mismatched clothes more than once a week” line. The line does exist, and at some point the vast majority of people feel it approaching and sort themselves out, and then everything flips.

Once you’ve figured out who you are and what you’re supposed to be doing, the danger reverses – rather than being a hot mess, the danger is that you become flat, that you become too good and too responsible too fast. That you forget that letting off steam and being a mess from time to time can keep you sane when the pressures of day to day life mount up on you. We know that lots of us struggle with this, mainly because a lot of you told us so – when the magazine ran the issue asking you what your favorite party songs or fun songs were, we had hundreds of responses that said, in effect, “I can’t answer that question because I can’t really have too much fun anymore”. Some actual replies:

· “Don’t you think that it’s a bit much to be asking us about fun when we’re in a recession, and when a ton of us are trying to make things meet [sic] with families and bills?”

· “I don’t really listen to those kinds of songs anymore, they don’t really fit with where I am now”

· “There isn’t much that I can learn about how to be a wife and mother from songs about bars and clubs”

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: that it’s fucking hard to find the path to being grown-up when you’re not, and that it’s difficult to remember to kick it loose sometimes when your life has become, to some degree at least, pretty uptight. I’ve been through this, we’ve all been through this, and we’ll all continue to wrestle with this until we die or, Buddha be praised, reach a place of enlightened contemplation and peace. And having exchanged emails with some of you on this subject, and spoken to people I know about it, I think we can conclude one further thing: that no-one has any single silver bullet piece of advice that helps. You just have to find the thing that works for you in your particular situation, and that helps you remember where you want to get to or recall where you used to be.

The thing that’s working for me at the moment is a song, written by a band called The Copyrights. On their great new record “North Sentinel Island”, there is a track called “Well-Fed and Warm”, about the journey from being the carefree singer in a punk band to being a married father with a day job. The singer captures the drift towards responsibility perfectly, noting that “we’ve all got our ghosts, our vices and hooks / we buried them all to avoid dirty looks”. He recognises that this isn’t a negative thing, that there is virtue in life being “well-fed and warm, relaxing and clean”, but like some of us he clearly pines for a momentary reminder of what his life was like before. So he proposes a plan, admitting that “I’ve been looking at troubles, and planning an excavation / a fuckup revival, a deadbeat vacation”. What this plan amounts to is asking your friend, your partner, whoever it may be, to join for a memorial go-round – to ask them:

"Can you promise that you won't come through, one more time?

Can you get us in it over our heads, one more time?

Can you leave me hanging out to dry, one more time?

And then come back, like nothing ever happened…"

Whether you’re in over your head and trying to swim out, or you long to drown just one last time, good luck finding what you need. And let me know the songs that helped you get through it. We’ll put those up on here instead of the party songs, and maybe we’ll help each other out. Maybe we won’t. But we’ll end up with a list of great songs about growing up and growing old, and that’s not a bad place to start.

The London Riots - a view from the Underworld

Author: DC

Word count: 724

August 2011

A lot has been written and said about the causes of the riots that have occurred throughout England during the last few days. You can construe them as mindless violence or a mishandled response to oppression, or anything in between. But as someone living in London, the experience of this week boils down to this: for the first time in my lifetime, London has felt like a fucking scary place. Scary because of the violence, scary because of the hate, and scary because of the way it has made everyone look at each other.

The only thing I can compare it to is the period after September 11th in New York, or the July 7th bombings in London. That may be a crass comparison but it feels like the right one, because the manifestation of fear and distrust has been the same - people are looking upon each other with such a profound suspicion that it makes you want to shudder, or scream, or just give up. That feeling has been more acute even than normal if you're one of the tribe who self-identify as punk fans, and accordingly rock the black hoodie and jeans look. The rioters have appropriated our outfit, and as a result the rest of the people - absolutely fairly - are inevitably suspicious of us right now.

Saddest of all is that "community" seems to have become a dirty word. Those on the right are disparagingly using the term to describe the groups and areas who are failing to control or punish the rioters, and the left seem to feel that talking about community spirit and how we rebuild it isn't a suitably decisive and robust response to this awful turn of events. Togetherness and a sense of common purpose has been replaced by disconnection and mistrust. On a personal level, it has been crushing. My wife and I sat watching fires on TV on Monday night, not knowing whether to be distraught that it was happening and that people felt driven to such rage, or terrified that it was creeping closer to our front door.

It's going to take a lot even to get things back to the broken but stable state they seemed to be in a week ago, let alone to somewhere more positive and progressive. On a micro level it will need each individual to heal and to rebuild, and then on a macro level links and bonds have to be reconstructed, and firmer than before. And for me, my micro moment came sooner than I thought it could.

Tonight at the Underworld in Camden, an area that has been targeted - albeit lightly - by rioters, two astonishing young American bands played. Touche Amore from Los Angeles, a town which has seen its fair share of discontent, and La Dispute from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They are bands who write music that is inspiring even devoid of context: Touche Amore play powerful hardcore with a deft melodic touch and a deeply personal lyricism, and La Dispute play more spacey rhythmic rock and are fronted by an extraordinary singer who reels off stories that sound more like English epic poetry than traditional rock lyrics.

But tonight their music, and their honesty, and their ability to unite a crowd of disparate individuals into a keening, desperate, emotional mass, meant more than the sum of its parts. Or it did to me. Music, as it often has done, gave me exactly what I needed. It reminded me that positivity will ultimately always beat hate, that art and creation is so much greater than destruction, and that community can be real and positive and powerful. That it can be a home and a refuge rather than something to mistrust and ruin.

Actually, as is always the case, one line from one of the bands puts it better than five hundred from me can. At a time when the situation requires us all to do our bit to help piece things back together, to create something loud and beautiful to counter the gunfire and explosions, the crowd in the Underworld made a pact to do just that, screaming the following words: "if actions speak louder than words / I'm the most deafening noise you've heard". As loud as the riots have been, we need to be louder. We need to be deafening.

Top Hats and Monocles

DC, July 2011

1,488 words

In London, England there is a colossal modern art gallery housed in a converted power station by the side of the Thames called Tate Modern. The building is a monument to human artifice and maximalism, with every one of its vast external surfaces covered in details and embellishments that you normally wouldn’t find on walls that were built to have very specific, functional purposes: to keep sound and dirt in, to keep foreign objects out, to make sure that the turbines could keep spinning whatever the weather. Before you even get inside to see the art, you can happily spend an hour or two studying the lines and patterns and mouldings and tiling and veneers applied to the brick and stone of the structure. It’s a testament to the fact that many of us, when it comes down to it, really do believe that more is more.

Inside the gallery, however, in its main exhibition space, a very contradictory lesson is being taught. The Tate’s splashy summer exhibition this year is a blockbuster career retrospective of the 20^th century Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miro. The majority of Miro’s work was completed using quite traditional materials – although he made some sculpture, his primary form was the ages-old old on canvas painting - but his progression as an artist tells a fascinating story. He started out painting in a relatively conventional way, completing still life studies and portraits that were quite bright and trippy but otherwise very ‘normal’. He painted objects as they were, so that his depictions of people were clearly people, oranges looked like oranges, the sky was clearly our earthly sky. Soon though he started doing something different with his paintings, attempting to boil things down to their essence rather than depicting them in detail. Miro tried to evoke as much emotion and feeling as he could while presenting as little of an object as possible, reasoning that people can have a more intense, personal reaction to art when being asked to use their imagination to interpret forms than when the artist presents a detailed picture that leaves little room for interpretation.

As a result of this, his paintings became more simple and surreal – for instance, in his paintings of Catalan peasants from the area where he grew up, Miro didn’t paint their faces and clothes and tools. Instead, he portrayed the peasants in shorthand, with four objects representing them: two disc-like eyes, a distinctive red hat, and a wispy beard. Through that simple depiction, he evoked a wealth of feeling, with observers of the art coming away with a sense of the wisdom of the simple man (from the beard), the pride that the peasants took in their local heritage (from the Catalan red hat), the hardness of the peasant existence (from the grey colouring of the wisps of beard), and the constant need of the peasant to observe the world to gauge weather patterns and the state of the soil (from the gazing eyes). Miro realised that he didn’t need to paint any more than that to say what he wanted to say, and that sometimes a simple formula holds true: simplicity plus imagination is greater than detail and overproduction.

That same formula can hold true in the music world too, both when it comes to business and in relation to the creative process. On the business end, the dominant construct at the moment seems to be that the best way to build a stable, successful band is by deploying a huge range of complex tools. You need a 360-degree revenue sharing strategy to leverage your merchandising sales to offset declining income from recorded music. You need a dynamic branding strategy to harness new and old media to turn your band from simply one of thousands of wannabe’s to a viral sensation. You should still sign with a label and a promoter rather than going it alone because that gets you access to chains of corporate-controlled venues that allow for optimal tour routing and cross-promotion opportunities. In short, for all of the stories proclaiming that the “old music industry is dead”, the new model being promoted by a lot of industry experts looks a lot like the old one, just with corporations taking an ever-increasing share of a broader range of spoils. You buy in, because you’re told that it’s still the best way forward…

…or you don’t. You do a Miro, and boil things down to their essence. What are the tenets of how to build a successful career, when you get down to it? What are your equivalents of the beard, the hat and the eyes? Well, you need to create great music. You need to put it out online, and then tour like crazy. And you need to sling some t-shirts to make some money, as you’re not going to do that by selling records. If you do those things well, you might well succeed. If you don’t, then no amount of leveraging your brand synergies to create dynamic co-vending opportunities will bail you out. This is exactly the approach that punk rockers evolved in the 80s and 90s, to the extent of creating their own touring routes by setting up relationships with VFW halls and community venues, and then sharing the details of those locations to other aspirant bands. And it’s exactly the approach being taken now by a range of underground acts, and expressed most articulately by rapper MC Lars, ex Coheed and Cambria drummer turned hip-hop artist Weerd Science, and their acolytes in the independent rap scene.

On his mixtape “Indie Rocket Science” and most recent album “Lars Attacks”, Lars attempted to sketch out the principles of his Miro-esque approach to the business. First, don’t assume you’ll make money by selling records (as expressed articulately by Lars guest rapper MC Frontalot: “you try to sell music, and they’ll look at you funny / it’s not a transaction that necessitates money”). Next, before you do anything, make sure that you have created some art that you’re proud of, and that you’ll feel proud of performing every night. After that, don’t be too proud to try to sell merchandise and related products whenever you can, as that’s the only way that you’re going to make enough to be able to carry on recording and touring. Lars and Frontalot expresses this bluntly using the terminology that other rappers have used when talking about the hustle, albeit with a rather more retro frame of reference than the usual talk of Frank Lucas: Lars notes that “part of the job, I mean the other part from caring / is taking t-shirt money like we’re modern robber barons” while Frontalot puts together what may be the modern thesis on musical money-making:

“We know every fabric weight,
every drop ship price,
every line screened density,
and Designs are precise…

And we savor all your savvy
as it leads you to our wares,
up in the gilded age of geekery
we’re so sneakily prepared.
This fool-proof method -
Making just the shirts you want:
With my top hat and my monocle
and your money I abscond”.

Bands are also realising that mimicking Miro artistically can sometimes pay dividends. Critics have frequently alleged that the beloved punk band Alkaline Trio lost some of their appeal when they moved away from the rawness of their earlier material and began experimenting with glossy production and layered instrumentation. In 2011, however, the band have sought to put the focus back onto their song writing and ability to create dark, sexy, moody music by releasing a record called Damnesia for which they have re-recorded some of their finest songs in a simple, acoustic-led style. Basically, it’s is four object theory in action: strip back the overdubs and layered recordings, and go back to simple drums, acoustic guitar, a touch of piano and some beautifully hoarse vocals. The resulting record works wonderfully, summoning a mood of gloom and smoke but leaving room for your imagination to fill in the gaps around the skeleton sounds.

In the gallery next to the Miro exhibition, there is a show by a New York-based photographer called Taryn Simon. Simon presents her simple portrait-style photos with a huge amount of supporting material, from artist-written explanations of their content to other, related photos to extracts from documents and archive material. For her, this works, as the extra explanation adds richness and insight that the photos on their own cannot offer. But it’s not the only way of doing things, as Miro proves – his work would lose some of its tremendous power and emotional weight if he felt the need to explain each abstraction, to append photos of his source material, to fill in all the blanks for you. And so it is in music, where sometimes detail and front can be the way to go, but at this particular moment in time simplicity and reduction may be even more effective.

Four Scenes of a Pop Song

DC - June 2011

1,425 words

“If you’re listening, woah-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,

Sing it back, woah-oh-oh-oh-oh”

(Opening lines of Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World, from the album Bleed American)

Scene 1:

In the late summer of 2001, I was feeling extremely carsick. I was trying to hang my head out of the window of the rented Buick Regal that my family and I were travelling in, because the cooling sensation of wind rushing past always made me feel less nauseous. Unfortunately this already complicated operation, which was making me consider whether it would be preferable to throw up into a paper bag or be beheaded by a passing Winnebago, was only made more difficult by the fact that my mother was shouting at me to close the window before the rain started coming in. We were in the middle of the desert in Arizona, and about to be treated to the mother of all storms.

The reason why I was enduring sickness, shouting and soaking was that I had spent the previous twenty minutes reading a Rolling Stone magazine review of a record called Bleed American by a ridiculously-named band called Jimmy Eat World. I hadn’t intended to browse through it, as I was fully aware that reading anything at all in the back of a moving car would only result in illness. The review intrigued me, though, with its mentions of spiky guitars and soaring melodies and a song called “Sweetness”. It sounded like something I needed to hear.

A very short time later my dad had to pull the car over to the side of the road, I regretfully closed the window, and we sat for forty minutes as the car was buffeted by winds, bombarded by raindrops that sounded like shotgun buckshot, and shaken by thunderclaps rolling across the plain. While lightening crackled around us, I resolved that I would track down Bleed American when we got to Las Vegas or Los Angeles at the end of our desert drive, and if it wasn’t out there then I would order it when we got back to London. It might not be great – Rolling Stone reviews are always hit-and-miss – but I was willing to take a risk on it.

Scene 2:

A year or so later my brother and I were lounging in the upstairs ‘study’ room of the farmhouse that our family lived in. I say ‘study’ in inverted commas because what had started out as my dad’s office and computer room had slowly been converted into a den for two grumpy, argumentative teenagers who had been drawn there by the appeal of playing video games on the clunky desktop computer and listening to music through the huge speakers that my Mum had owned since the seventies. In fact, just about the only things that stopped Adam and I arguing and fighting were video games and music. The games made us shut up and concentrate on something other than how annoying the other person was, and the music... well, one of the few things that we agreed on was that guitars were awesome, and the louder the better.

While we bought new music as fast as we could save up money for it, we had a rotation of favourite CDs that were never far from the player. Americana by The Offspring. The Blue Album by Weezer. The self-titled album by American Hi-Fi. So Much For The Afterglow by Everclear. And Bleed American, which I had found on our return from Arizona and rapidly and completely fallen in love with. Every song on the record was great but Sweetness, the song namechecked in the review, was the one. We put it on all of our mixtapes, we knew most of the words, and when we were at our most energetic we would listen to it while climbing the worn green corduroy sofas in the study, brandishing our air guitars. And you know what? Every time we did that, it made us wonder whether the other person wasn’t quite as much of a jackass as we thought, that maybe we did have something in common after all.

Scene 3:

2002, 2003, 2004, in fact pretty much every year between Arizona and now. The Scala, the Islington Academy, The Astoria and Brixton Academy and Reading and Leeds and Give It A Name festivals. A revolving combination of our friends Dusty and Shirley and Robyn and Nini and Mike and Johnny. But always Adam and I down at the front, right in the centre until we got too tall and worried about blocking people’s views and stood off to the side, by the front right stage speaker stacks. We loved pretty much the entire catalogue of the band, from the early scratch of Static Prevails to the spacey majesty of Clarity to the dark pop of Futures and the pop gloss of Chase This Light. But still, standing just above all else was Bleed American, and Sweetness was the crown jewel.

We knew every drum hit, every scratchy and discordant guitar part, just how much echo Jim Adkins put on his voice to make the opening “woah-ohs” seem skyscraping. And when the song kicked in, we and the rest of the faithful knew exactly what to do. You sing the first two lines as loud as you can, fingers pointing in the air and ecstatic looks on your faces. Then you brace, and when the guitars kick in you mosh and jostle and dance. Repeat that throughout the first verse, then bend the knees, and when the “I was spinning free” line heralds the start of the chorus you leap into the air, bouncing along. More singing and moshing through the second verse, more jumping in the second chorus, with just a touch of air drumming thrown in, and a yell of the “stumble ‘til you crawl” line. Then heads back and wail like wolves for the “woo-oooh-ooohs” of the bridge, some air keyboard. And finally, the key moment. Everything cuts out except for some twinkling guitars and a quiet drum fill, and that signals preparation time. You have about five seconds to take a deep breath and tense yourself up before absolutely exploding into the repeated “if you’re listening” line, singing it with absolutely everything you’ve got. The most wonderful thing about all of this was that repetition never dulled its impact – it was still as much fun the fifth or tenth or twentieth time as it was the first.

Scene 4:

The lounge of the new apartment that I’ll be living in with my wife now that we’re back from our honeymoon still looks too empty, like it ate all of our furniture and is still hungry. Still, we have a sofa and a TV and, crucially, a record player and some speakers. I say crucially because I have just unwrapped a four-disc vinyl release of Bleed American released to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and it needs to be played. All of the songs still sound magnificent, with the pop perfection of The Middle set against the low-slung violence of Get It Faster and the sheer beauty of Hear You Me. Still though, ten years in, Sweetness remains the most majestic of all, be it the studio version on Side A or the blistering live version on Side [x].

I’m digging into the album again, listening to Sweetness for what must be the thousandth time, for two reasons. On the one hand, the song has been popping into my head with increasing frequency since we played it at our wedding a month ago, when it held its own as one of the few wild card songs in a playlist that was otherwise all wedding singalong classics. And on the other, for what must be the 25^th or 30^th time, I’m getting ready to see a Jimmy Eat World live show in a few days time. This time around Adam is on holiday and Dusty is busy so I’m going with the lady, for what will be her second of their shows, to hear the band other things play Bleed American in its entirety. While I’m sure that the show will be outstanding and that I’ll fall in love with some new songs and be reminded of how good the old ones are, I’d put money on Sweetness being the highlight of the night once again. I still get shivers from hearing it, even after I have been listening to the song and singing it back for then years – and I have a feeling that I will do for many years to come.

Stay True

Author: DC

Date: April 2011

Word count: 1,148

One of the great challenges for individual human beings is growing up. There is no established roadmap for how to develop as a person, and so we’re left scrabbling around for guidance on how to manage it. Typically, it seems that we try to find clues in two ways: by comparing ourselves with other people or by comparing our perceptions of ourselves now with how we felt about ourselves days or months or years before.

The first approach is always challenging for the simple reason that it’s very difficult to actually truly know and understand another person to the extent that you can use their beliefs and actions as an example. The result of this is that we tend to mythologize people that we admire, creating exaggerated standards of behaviour and character that we can never hope to achieve, or we over-stress the character flaws of anyone who appears merely to be a normal person, destroying their value as a role model.

The second approach is even more tricky, as it seems almost impossible for someone to form a genuinely balanced and ‘correct’ perception of what they themselves are like, and whether on balance they have redeeming qualities or not. Do you know anyone who you would say has managed this, without erring towards either unwarranted self-admiration or overly harsh self-criticism? We all tend to have warped views of ourselves, and we all struggle to work out what about our characters we want to hang onto and what we would prefer to throw away or change.

As a result of this uncertainty and lack of clear perspective, people often make two mistakes when it comes to self development. We either plunge ourselves into periodic programmes of total personal reinvention, remodelling ourselves to such an extent that we risk throwing out or deleting the parts of ourselves that may make us better people. Alternatively, we can end up stuck in a rut of recreation, trying to copy someone else or to recapture that lightning in a bottle moment when we thought that we were at our best, or when others have told us that we were. The bottom line is that growth is just difficult. Successful evolution is hard.

As difficult as it is for individuals, it is even harder for bands. After all, bands are collectives of people who are all struggling to grow and develop in terms of personality and taste and desire as individuals – and then on top of that they are being asked to synchronise that growth with that of two, three, four, five other people. It’s like trying to coordinate the most complex of Cirque Du Soleil routines, but with the added pressures of a lifestyle that gives none of the individuals any free time or alone time to think and reflect.

This personal challenge is reflected in the way that bands approach the act of creation. When they are trying to write and record a new album, bands are trying to balance a desire to maintain what was unique or exciting about them in the past, and that in some cases made them successful, with a craving for growth and evolution. As Dan Campbell, singer of the Wonder Years, has said to AbsolutePunk this week when talking about their new record “I remember how shitty it was when your favourite pop punk band went from putting out a record you loved to putting out a weird jazz fusion record. I also remember how shitty it was when your favourite pop punk band released the same record twice in a row”.

The honest answer may be that, unless you are Charlie Sheen, there is no such thing as an absolute win when it comes to growth. You may not be able to recapture who you were or what you created before without risking creating a sense of diminishing returns. And you may not be able to move forward without accepting that the cost of growth may be that you disappoint the friends or audience members or even bandmates who liked you the way you were before, or that you become an acquired taste rather than the best friend of everyone in the bar. We have all seen bands struggle to come to terms with this. How many times, for example, have bands released great early albums and then over the rest of their careers flip-flopped between releasing records that they claim represent ‘artistic growth and challenge’, and others that are ‘a return to what we do best’?

One of the rarest things in music, as in life, is a person or a band that manages to chart a steady evolutionary course, free from grating stylistic lurches or obvious artistic compromise. A band to cherish, who seem to be navigating that course in the most graceful way possible, is Thursday, the second-wave emo pioneers from New Jersey. This week they release their new record No Devolucion. Make no mistake, this record will almost certainly sell fewer copies than any of its scene-defining predecessors. It may well reduce Thursday’s draw as a touring proposition. In spite of or perhaps because of a willingness to embrace that, however, what it may lack in commercial impact it makes up for in integrity and as a statement about growth it is almost flawless.

There is a core to the record that is undeniably and recognisably Thursday, from the guitar tone to the dynamics of the songs to Geoff Rickley’s vocals to the sly nod to much-loved old song Five Stories Falling during new number Sparks Against The Sun. Around that core, however, the band have pushed the boundaries of their art, blending in Explosions In The Sky soundscapes and the windswept dynamics of Envy and the sad sweetness of The Cure. They have moved forwards while not forgetting the greatness that they had to start with. For an undeniable statement of this, listen to the driving, majestic Turnpike Divides, with its frayed screamo heart and graceful melodic carapace.

Indeed, in making No Devolucion, Thursday as a band and Geoff Rickley as a lyricist may also have helped sketch part of the roadmap to growth we’ve been lacking all along. In the epic song Stay True that closes the album, Rickley has proposed a reference for the rest of us. Written primarily for his friends in new band Touche Amore, this advice, first sung in a hushed voice and then proclaimed more stridently, is a simple but wonderful and real guide to growing up:

“Disregard those clapping hands,

They turn to punches when you’re down.

Disregard the critics’ praise,

They’ll be the first to tell the news that you sold your soul.

Disregard those dollar sings,

They’ll buy the biggest house in hell where you’ll live alone.

Just keep your head down,

Just keep your friends close,

Hold fast to your beliefs,

Whatever else you do.

Stay true.

Stay true.

Believe me when I say, it’s the hardest thing to do.”

United By Fate After Ten Years

Author: DC

Date: March 2011

Word count: 1,060

When I go back to my parents’ house to visit, I often end up sleeping in the bedroom that used to be the Hobbit Hole where my little brother could be found. When Adam lived there it had all the signifying marks of the late-teenage bedroom, with its blackout blinds, Rage Against The Machine “burning monk” posters, unwashed clothes on the floor, and an inhabitant who was extremely grumpy to be disturbed any time before three in the afternoon. Now that he has moved out my parents have redecorated the room, with the gloom and disorganisation replaced by Swedish furniture and halogen spotlights. The only real reminder that it used to be Adam’s lair is a single bookshelf which my mother has never tidied.

The shelf contains mementoes and keepsakes that Ad gathered during our formative concert-going years. Many of them evoke strong memories; the signed Taking Back Sunday setlist from the first time that we ever saw the band that went on to become one of our favourites; the Hiding With Girls sticker from the show where we were the only paying customers to turn up; the AFI drumstick that Adam was so thrilled to collect at one of their rare London headline shows. If I could only keep one item, though, it wouldn’t be any of those objects, as fond as I am of the feelings that they bring back. Instead, the thing I would choose is a slightly battered, bent plastic Frisbee, embossed with an instantly familiar logo of a stylised boy and girl running.

We snagged the Frisbee in 2002 at the huge Reading Festival here in the UK, on our second or third trip there. I was 18 and Adam was about 15, and we participated in the full festival experience. We camped on ground that was either rock-hard or sodden and muddy, we drank too much, but most of all we saw as many bands as we could in the three days that the festival lasted. That year we saw Hell Is For Heroes and Biffy Clyro go on early on a tiny stage and blow the crowd away, we saw Finch and Thursday stun with the complexity and energy of their post-hardcore, we saw Jimmy Eat World as their star began to go supernova. The band that left me reeling was another new band, though its members had been around for a while, playing in several influential New York hardcore bands. The weekend of the festival they were celebrating the release of their second single, a driving but uplifting song called “Good Things”, and at the end of their set they threw promotional material into the crowd. Things fluttered down from the stage, a shimmer of stickers and flyers and, yes, white Frisbees.

The set that the band played that day was the perfect blend of harmony and fury, with swathes of slashing guitar and brutal drumming playing against the keening vocals of Walter Schriefels and odd flashes of sweetness in the sound. Even though their album had only been out for a few weeks, and the seminal single “Used For Glue” a few weeks more than that, a dedicated group within the audience knew the songs backwards, and the rest of the crowd were soon engrossed by the heart and energy that the band put into their performance. They made a cavernous tent feel like a small club show, and the 40 minutes that they were allocated by the organisers was over before people were ready for it to be.

The Frisbee has served to remind of two things since that day – first of all, that it is possible for a concert to be cathartic and transcendent even in the most unlikely of circumstances. The setting for the show was relatively inauspicious, with a new melodic hardcore band playing in the middle of the day to a crowd of tired and hung-over people who hadn’t even had time to build up a hair of the dog buzz yet. In spite of all of that, it was at the time and still is one of the best shows that I have ever seen. Secondly, the Frisbee has reminded me that sometimes you only get one shot at things, and after that have to make do with memories and remembrances. Rival Schools never released the second album that they promised in 2005 and 2006, I wasn’t able to see them on their next UK tour, and then they broke up. What I had to remind me of them was a fantastic album, a single brilliant live show, and a white plastic Frisbee.

All of this goes some way to explaining why my reaction to the announcement that a new Rival Schools album was to be released in 2011 wasn’t as joyful as I thought it would be. I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t more excited that one of my favourite bands was coming back, making a record, playing shows. It took me some weeks to figure out that I was worried that it would underwhelm, that it would erode and undermine the memories that I had of the band. That the Frisbee would come to mean less to me than it does at the moment.

I shouldn’t have worried. As the sports commentators say, form is temporary but class is permanent. Rival Schools have come back with a 10-track record called “Pedals” that is different but no less excellent than their debut “United By Fate” album. It is different, to be sure, with songs of a more reflective nature and a greater emphasis on atmosphere rather than angst and anger. But it is another intelligent, wonderful collection of songs that will stay with me. To complete the circle, I am going to see them play live in a month’s time, and I can only hope that they have the same effect on me in 2011 as they did when we were all much younger men in 2002. If they do, it’ll be easy to spot me on the way out of the venue after the show. I’ll be the man looking for a poster, a drumstick, a flyer, a ticket stub, or anything that I can take home and put on the shelf next to the Frisbee. After all, I need something to keep me going for the next ten years.