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There are three records I thought a lot about including in my best of list this year but didn’t make it…. “We Started Nothing” (The Ting Tings) Bright, optimistic, catchy English electro dance pop. The chanteuse sings with a thick, quite hot British accent.  I have no further information about this band and I kind of like it that way, but if I had to give them a one-sentence summation, it would probably be something like: Having nothing to do with the army that fought on behalf of the United Kingdom in WWI and WWII, and neither carrying any formal associations with the other famous BEF, Human Leaguers’ Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh’s early ’80s electronic music outfit British Electronic Foundation that later became Heaven 17, Erased Tapes Records’ The British Expeditionary force are softly tearing the world a fantastic new asshole through which to waft the otherdimensional winds bands like Múm and Schneider TM sailed in on in the early part of this decade…. I wrote a long, confused metaphor a few issues back in Heso about how exciting I thought this record was, a metaphor that involved erotic weather patterns on the isle of Lesbos, but I think I will just say that this record stands out by being really different in its staccato bursts of rhythm from the nu-folk and boojie ivy league naptime garbage that people are shitting themselves for these days (I’m talking about vapid garbage like Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend, maybe even Bon Iver?- full disclosure). The poems are infused with the voice of a Lost Generation poet defeated before he makes his own glory, defeated by the legacy of poetic giants the likes of Eliot and Pound, and by the accelerating disingenuousness and misdirecting insanity of his century- his century that moved from one atrocity to the next in a blind panic to dispose of all unifying narratives, as though in the hope it could rid itself once and for all of the one narrative that fuels the gaining, encroaching accusing blame and recompense the 20th century will demand in unrelenting perpetuity. …As Bolaño wrote of the eye that has tried so hard to forget one thing it has forgotten everything else, as Pynchon rightly wrote of his Lethe-water baptized Americans, Berryman, in monstrous solitude, himself mulled on the century and mulled brightly, flashing and yearning with his own power and worked to admit what people so often do not in order to presume toward a critique. The house didn’t belong to my grandmother, is how I imagined I would start to tell someone as I stood staring at the old, discolored wallpaper, at cracks in old plaster walls in this composite house in my dream, but that was the reason I was there…. It was on an island, and we were, both the family who had been there and who was expected in a few days, going over it to make sure we had saved all those artifacts whose sense memory would link us to our pasts. |
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