Deep Voices #107

A matter of opinion

Deep Voices #107 on Spotify
Deep Voices #107 on Apple Music

For this edition of Deep Voices I looked at something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, which is the value of progress versus the value of perfection. Even when I write about it, it’s difficult for me to find a way to express that a desire for the latter is as noble as for the former; my intellectual bias is for experimentation and breakthrough. But is whittling down an existing sonic idea to its platonic neutral such a bad thing? 

Read on to find out. Or possibly not, I’m just noodling around over here. But first, a few words on subscriptions, shirts, and support. 

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I had the opportunity to review a few records for Pitchfork recently. With each, I was asked to provide a score. I worked at Pitchfork for some time and was involved in conversations around scores frequently, particularly for records from bigger artists, but with these three albums, I was essentially on my own to dictate how they should be ranked. 

If you don’t know, every Pitchfork review is accompanied by a number score of zero to ten, decimal points included. The majority of records score in the sevens, which means, essentially, “this is pretty good.” I think that’s fair. For the first album I reviewed, Naemi’s Dust Devil, I gave it an 8.0 to signify it was above average. For the second, a look back at the 1993 album Morning Dove White by One Dove, I gave it an 8.7, to signify it was quite a bit above average, but not quite a landmark. Time appears to have played a part in the high score, as if the music had ripened over the years; music writer and (Blogspot devotee) Simon Reynolds noted “8.7 is higher than anything it would have received at the time.” 

The third album I reviewed, d’Eon’s Leviathan was the trickiest to score. It’s a good album, one that I imagined would fly under most people’s radar, and I wanted to write about it to bring attention to a piece of music I think is pretty cool. But it had a few things I didn’t love, which I gently pointed out in the review. It doesn’t make the album not worth listening to, it simply feels like moments of experimentation that didn’t quite work out. I always appreciate risk, but I don’t feel beholden to reward it. The album got a 6.9, one point below the crucial barrier of the sevens. Reluctantly scoring that album reminded me of scoring Black Flag’s Damaged, an album about as classic as it gets, but which contains one truly bad song. With that in mind, I gave it a 9.2, which felt sacrilegious, but also correct.

What goes into a score? Gymnastics and diving are scored not just by ability but by degree of difficulty. That rubric doesn’t quite work for music (how technically difficult to perform a song may be bears little weight on how good it is). But the idea of weighing ambition alongside efficiency gives a three-dimensional depth to the awkward, if inarguably useful, task of a scored critical judgment. In my reviews, I’ve tried to consider ambition and freshness when an artist aims at newness but doesn’t quite stick the landing. Should that be more obvious? Perhaps album reviews should not be scored but plotted on an X/Y plane, Approval Matrix style, with good on the north, bad on the south, innovative on the east and derivative on the west. 

But are those the right criteria? I’ve been thinking about this as I review an upcoming album by  [redacted], a band whose music is fantastic, if not wholly original. I thought about this last week while watching DIIV perform. I love them, though their music is really a modern version of the grunge and shoegaze that was spawned in ’80s and ’90s. Does that automatically make them derivative? Or, with their impossible catchiness, after more than a decade of honing their songwriting skills, are they instead iterative, sharpening the spear of precision? I was thinking about this again as I listened to the meticulously crafted album of dub techno by Loidis (aka Huerco S), a genre which is not new, but in which he has essentially matched or bested the originators. With which ruler do you measure that progress? 

For this week’s playlist I’ve mixed together music from two of my imaginary music quadrants: very good without necessarily being original, and then wholly original as well as very good. Not that anyone’s forcing me to choose, but I’m honestly not sure which of these approaches I prefer. I can tell you I’ve listened to more DIIV these past few weeks than anything else. I think I have underrated perfection. 

I wonder if you can tell which song goes in which category. In my head it’s very clear, but perhaps to you it’s not. I suppose that’s why Olympic gymnastics has nine judges. We don’t always all hear the same thing. 

Playlist notes:

• Opening for DIIV was Horse Jumper of Love, and I’ve been listening to them quite a bit, too. Their music is a sort-of slowcore, indebted to bands like Seam, Hum, Codeine. They have a new album coming next week, and I’ve been listening incessantly to the few songs that have already been released. The best of the bunch is probably “Snow Angel,” which makes smart use of acoustic guitar and backing vocals as accent pieces running counterpoint to the buzz of the electric guitar. Singer Dimitri Giannopoulos has a loping voice, more at ease singing than the raspy talk-singers of slowcore’s originators. They’re janglier, too, than some of those bands, with a soupçon of Midwestern emo creeping in. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like there are tons of bands attempting this sound and creating derivative slop where Horse Jumper is making music that feels both catchy and moving. Does its familiarity play into its resonance? I think so. But what’s the special sauce? Should I even care? Is it more about what they do rather than how they do it? Listening to their music, I feel wistful, but powerful, like I’m reaching the end of the longtail of hurt. Like I’m ready to move on. I didn’t invent catharsis, and neither did Horse Jumper of Love, but it’s a worthy pursuit. 
  

• My inclusion of the a capella duo Jud Jud may seem like a joke (maybe it is?) but the idea of taking the tropes of hardcore punk and recreating them using onomatopoetic mouth sounds is seriously genius. That they somehow did this while making actually good songs is baffling. They are perhaps the only group on here that is wholly original through derivation. By the late ’90s, when their album No Tolerance for Instruments, the hardcore sound they are lovingly mocking had not progressed much in a decade (it arguably hasn’t still). So they took the chugging bass sounds and gang vocals and recreated them like they were Michael Winslow from Police Academy. There is plenty of visual art that exists as refracted commentary on visual art that’s achieved great acclaim. The world of hardcore is not as big or renowned as that of art, but consider them that world’s Duchamp. Like him, they were great at taking the piss. 
  

• Finally, speaking of Huerco S, scores (or, more technically, ranking), and Pitchfork, when I was working there we released a list of the best ever ambient albums, in which we included Huerco S’s For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have). It had been released less than a year, and was controversial to elevate over untold classics who didn’t make the list at all. I remember Huerco S himself taking issue. But, eight years later, the album remains a touchstone, regularly cited as the modern pinnacle of the genre. Like One Dove, has time worked in its favor, or was it that good right away? Can both be the answer? 

  
  Stating an opinion is like aiming at a moving target. You fix your judgment to the times, knowing they will keep on going. In the future, someone else with new context and new ideas, will have a different point of view. One we couldn’t imagine in the here and now, one that turns the ideas of the present into the ideas of the past. That’s progress.

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