A Year of Music

Whenever I see Jack Johnson’s name, Pussy Galore’s “Dick Johnson” starts to play in the back of my mind. “Dick Johnson” is sort of, well, the name is as ambitious as the song gets, but I still enjoy it about 50,000 times more than I’ve ever enjoyed anything by Jack Johnson. I honestly lack the capacity to understand how or why people would actively seek out his music.

In other news, Radiohead is coming to town.

Stuck in my head this morning: an indistinct admixture of Thom Yorke’s “Skip Divided” (both the original version from The Eraser and the (superior, bass-heavy) Modeselektor remix) and Torche’s “Fire”. I find myself without a whole lot to say about The Eraser; it’s a solid collection of gloomy post-rock that sounds nice but doesn’t really contribute anything new. It’s the rare album that’s surpassed by its remixes. And Torche make an appearance in my post-sleep haze mostly because I was writing about them right before I went to sleep last night.

Whoever put together those Thom Yorke remix singles had a good ear. Maybe it was Thom, maybe it was longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, maybe it was some anonymous A&R person at XL. Whatever the case, each EP has its own sensibility and stands alone.

(I'm sure the whole set will eventually be released as one of those "remix collections" I always regard with a mild, queasy horror in stores; too much of my impressionable youth was spent listening to crappy industrial and techno remixes to ever fully trust the concept of a remix album. That's too bad, because in this case I think the 3 remix EPs add up to something more interesting than the album being remixed, even though trying to sequence them into a cohesive single-disc collection is going to be challenging.)

Anyway, the EP currently playing features a Four Tet remix of "Atoms for Peace" that contributes to the gradual erosion of my conviction that Four Tet is yet another crappy Kruder & Dorfmeister clone (previous hat tip to Four Tet: including Quickspace Supersport's "Superplus", the best song Stereolab never recorded, on Four Tet's DJ Kicks mix). It's loose-limbed and yearning, and has a considerably lighter tone than the original.

It's coupled with two separate remixes by Cristian Vogel, who can release a new Super_Collider album whenever he and Jamie Liddell feel like it, because Liddell has demonstrated to my satisfaction that his white-boy soul act is not nearly as fun without Vogel's eccentric, rubbery basslines backing him up, and the second Super_Collider album, while not nearly as fun as the first, is way better than no Super_Collider at all. The Vogel remixes here feature two entirely different takes on Yorke's "Black Swan", the former a pensive electronic haze, the latter being more beat-oriented and sketchy. I prefer the first, but the second has those rubbery basslines I love so much.

When I heard Thom Yorke's solo work back to back with Radiohead's Hail to the Thief just now (thanks, iPod!), it really struck me how underrated Hail to the Thief is. Thom's voice is the main constant between the two ventures, and his singing has always been the most distinctive part of Radiohead's sound, but when I hear the full band come in behind him in "2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm)", it becomes self-evident how integral everyone is. There is very little about this album that is anything less than deft and assured. Its problem, as far as I can tell, is that it's too self-effacing and seamless, and given the explicit political context in which it was released, people (including me) were expecting something more balls-out (or political – for all the posturing, this is as inward-looking an album as Radiohead's ever made). Or maybe we were just expecting more of a decisive break after the diptych Kid A and Amnesiac. Either way, there's a lot going on here, most of it interesting.

On a tangent: it always seems to take me a couple years to get into each Radiohead record. First I think it's massively overrated, then I get sort of annoyed with how many avant garde moves Radiohead are stealing from lesser-known, more experimental bands, then I notice all the little details tucked into the corners, then I start waking up with bits of songs stuck in my head, then I find myself just flat-out enjoying the album from start to finish. I have no idea why they're so popular. They're one of the least user-friendly popular bands I've ever heard.

On a whim, I picked up the recent remix releases for Thom Yorke's The Eraser, never having heard the original album. It was mostly on the strength of the remixers, or rather on the strength of Surgeon and Burial's names. I'd already heard the Surgeon remix in one of his semi-legendary DJ sets, which actually works better on its own than in the mix (Thom's singing is too narrative to work in a set of the kind of micro-precise, 1-bar techno / dubstep / electro Surgeon prefers), so mostly I was wondering how the Burial mix turned out. And hey presto, it turns out to be a Burial song. And a Thom Yorke song. The two songs aren't completely immiscible, but there's less meshing than simple mixing. Nevertheless, I love it, because I love how Yorke imparts a contradictory sense of urgency and resignation to the vocals, and I've yet to hear Burial to do his thing in a way that's not almost oppressively lovely. He could very easily run out of gas with this schtick, but he hasn't yet.