A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: a medley! Of All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors songs. Mostly it’s just “I Am Where You Were” (one of the band’s most full-throated, krautrockinest (and derivative) shoegazer epics), but in my dreams it turned into half a dozen other songs from ANLLF’s self-titled debut and Flat Blue Line.

I just noticed that the xylophone part in “I Am Where You Were” is highly reminiscent of the intro to Yes’s “Changes” (from 90125), a comparison I highly doubt ever occurred to anyone in All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, or indeed anyone else. Great. Now I have that stuck in my head instead.

Stuck in my head this morning: “The Number Knows Its Name” by All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors and “The Eerie Bliss and Torture (Of Solitude)” by Xasthur (from the flawless Xasthur / Leviathan split – Xasthur’s Keeper of Sharpened Blades (and Ominous Fates) does nauseating things with sound and still leaves me slightly in awe), which is what I get for writing about both of them so much over the last few days. Eccentric electronic pop + relentless anti-life black metal = a mashup way more avant garde than Xenakis or Penderecki.

I made an offhanded comparison yesterday between A Sunny Day in Glasgow and All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, as if it were a ready point of reference that would have you, my reader, going, “Oh, of course! Them!”

I do this. I no longer feel comfortable making assumptions about what random people on the internet will or won’t know about the musicians I mention, offhandedly or otherwise. Sometimes this will lose people, but allmusic.com is only a click away, after all. Or the Google, which will send you to ANLLF’s Epitonic page, which is, in fact, how I originally discovered All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors back around 2000.

But as a result of that mention, I had to ask myself if there was a basis to that comparison, or whether I was going on some tentative, decayed memories, so I tossed the three full-lengths released by All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors (All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, Turning Into Small and Flat Blue Line) onto my iPod for review.

If anything, I’d forgotten how immediate they are. Or how much they do owe to 1993 (Stereolab, the Lilys, all the other bands that tried to sound like My Bloody Valentine but failed). Or just how precociously creative a record Turning Into Small is, and what a departure it is from their debut. Turning Into Small and about half of Straight Blue Line (which is a compilation of singles and compilation tracks) exhibit a prickly, restless intelligence that manifests itself in funny and surprising ways (G-funk synth lines! Dynamics that fake out the listener!), and was what I was thinking of when discussing A Sunny Day in Glasgow, who do the same thing more nimbly.

There’s also a density to the sound that prefigures ANLLF’s connection to heavy-as-frozen-tar hip-hop auteurs Dälek. Oktopus, Dälek’s beatmaker, composer and producer, was also the engineer for All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavor’s albums, and it’s clear that there’s a continuity of sound between both groups, which is interesting because superficially they sound nothing alike. It’s the density of sound and intelligent restlessness in both groups’ work that they share in common.