- Why aren't more movies shot in sepia? The first scene works so well in it.
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are two pretty wicked names that work brilliantly together. Outlaws never seemed to have problems picking good names though.
- I wish I had Paul Newman's eyes, and every day came with some surprise.
- Half of this movie looks like a Turner painting. The cinematography here is truly astonishing.
- Bandidos Yanquis would be a pretty great bandname.
- Katharine Ross is jawdroppingly beautiful in this.
- I always thought that classic rock band Sir Lord Baltimore was named after some 18th century statesman.
- I wish I had Paul Newman's eyes, that would be nice.
There are two reasons why I wanted to write something about American band volcano! here:
[1] my blog is named after (a pluralized form of) their debut record.
[2] they are (relatively) obscure, perhaps because they are not immediately accessible, but they are well worth the effort of repeated listening.
A second's pondering suggests a myriad of possible metaphorical and symbolical meanings a piñata could stand for. Nevertheless, while the piñata has a rich and pluriformal history, I would say that its current cultural significance does not stretch far beyond a superficial one, a world of parties and candy, of unworriedness and good times. volcano! wanted to make a more danceable, and more easily approachable record, and they succeeded.
That is not to say that this is a pop record. These terms are always relative, and volcano! was always hard-to-get, to the point of extreme frustration, mostly because they were so unneccesarily so. They seemed to be searching for the right formula, striking noise pop gold the one moment and then - deliberately - diving back into unmelodic dissonance. Beautiful Seizure was an appropriate title, therefore, because they did it with uncanny grace, failing in a beautiful manner. It reminds me of André Breton's final statement in Nadja that "beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all". Their sophomore album title Paperwork suggested a more theoretical and calculated approach to their craft, and while somewhat more coherent, still faltered from time to time. It still took the menacing and challenging of their listeners a tad too far. But, in hindsight, when they sang of "poking holes in balloon animals" in Slow Jam, perhaps they were then already thinking of piñatas.
As such, there was always enormous potential in this band, and with Piñata it bursts out with all the colors that its artwork suggests. Not that the claims of danceability will soon be embraced by the large clubbing populace, but there should definitely be quite a considerable leftfield crowd susceptible to this. Especially the first two songs are the most bouncy and fun of their repertoire so far. The penultimate choice Supply and Demand has the same appeal, in its straightforward repeating of its title, with vocalist Aaron With as always bending the words in all possible shapes. He does the same in the chorus of Child Star and its really hard not to be reminded by the finale of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's eponymous debut, where the same words are obsessively repeated by a singer who is at least as weird and offbeat as Aaron. Both stretch the phonemes to their absolute physical and logical extremes. The album closer confirms the trend of the bookended tracks here being the most readily likable: its a circus of quickfire melodic riffs and beats, a rollercoaster of "long gone, gone long". Again, obsessively as always, its played out as far as possible, with every noisy crescendo circling back into its long gone, gone long.
But perhaps the most poignant moment here is when they slow it down on Fighter, the drums are slow and in control for once, while With proclaims that he is a fighter, and wants to turn his hands into knives. This slower, less frenzied version of their sound works wonderfully well, and it makes me wonder what would happen if they'd focus on it more. I believe they could go the same way as Wild Beasts, who have chosen to contain their eccentricities within an ever-tightening set of constraints, applying more abstraction with every record they put out.
Of course there is an equally legible case to make for the kaleidoscopic craziness and fun that is Piñata - and has always been volcano! They seem like a band that, whatever they do next, will always at the very least be interesting.
A few months ago I attended a Billy Bragg gig, or - I should say - a Billy Bragg sermon. Now, I don't agree with everything Bragg preaches about, but there was one particular point he was making that hit home for me. "Our greatest enemy is cynicism. Not the cynicism of our enemies, but our own cynicism". And, according to him, the internet brought forth a surge of cynical assholes, complaining about everything. He is right of course, it is uncool to care about anything, and the Internet has only strengthened that sentiment. David Berman once wrote in a poem: "the pressure to simulate coolness means not asking when you don't know, which is why kids grow ever more stupid." While this concerns knowledge, it applies to fighting for a cause just as well. Or, as Camille de Toledo puts it:
How long do we have to go on apologizing for being romantics? Why not stop right now? Here. Boom! All of a sudden. Let us make the desert green with lyrical trees and mocking jays. Let us abandon irony and the fear of naïveté. The cliché is not kitsch. It's merely pretty. So, what do you think?
And just today, in an interview with Dan Deacon, once again this came up:
I grew up with bands like Beck and Sonic Youth and Nirvana-- it was cool to not care. But we live in a time period where you have to give a fuck. If we just allow the destruction of our lifestyles, our habits, our cultures, our movements, our environments, our relationships to other cultures-- it's going to be a time of dark ages. How are we going to stop that if we shrug our shoulders? That is insane to me.
The fact that I've run into this subject so often recently could be merely a Baader-Meinhof thing, it could also be my specific focus on it (but I don't think De Toledo, Bragg, Berman and Deacon frequently have dinner together). I do not believe this is accidental. Instead, I really want to believe in a new momentum starting, that we will slowly start to believe in the rejection of modern values again. In his Coming of Age at the End of History, De Toledo explains how modern capitalism stifles any attempt at rebellion by means of co-option and assimilation. If you've ever been inside an H&M store and seen the London Calling and Sex Pistols t-shirts on sale there, you'd know this to be true. If the anarchy and complete nihilism of punk can be sold to the masses at the very heart of capitalism, what possible way out is left? Every subculture that blossoms is co-opted, centralized, signed, sealed and delivered to your local stores, thereby defining the culture not as an ideology, or a spirit, but simply as a set of fashion rules - a look and an attitude.
In his song Take Off Your Sunglasses, American singer/songwriter Ezra Furman proclaims his own confusion and insecurities and is not sure whether he wants to see clearly or keep living in a subdued word of anonymity. This can be linked even further, of course, to our Western values of peace and civility being made possible by the constant exploitation of the non-Western world, and in turn leads me to a line from a song by The National: "I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know". Our Raybans are the best possible metaphor for the inability of us twentysomethings to come to terms with our place in history. The question would be whether you want the Raybans or not? I think a lot of us are not quite ready for this yet, Ezra at the very least was not when he wrote his song:
I don't want to think about
things I don't want to think about in the middle of the night
In the middle of the day I don't want to think about
things I don't want to think about in the middle of the night
I don't want to think about it
I don't want to think about it
I don't want to take off my sunglasses
