Introduction

SOMETHING (2012)
1) Sidewalk Safari; 2) Wrong Opinion; 3) I Belong In Your Arms; 4) Take It Out On Me; 5) Ghost Tonight; 6) Cool As A Fire; 7) Amanaemonesia; 8) Met Before; 9) Frigid Spring; 10) Turning; 11) Guilty As Charged.
By the time their second album was released, Chairlift had already reduced themselves to a duo: Aaron Pfenning left in 2010, and now Chairlift consists of precisely what you see on the album cover. Upon first impression, you do not get the feel that this affects the overall accomplished feel of the music — Polachek and Wimberly are perfectly capable to lay on all the layers on their own. However, technically that does transform them into a «pure» synth-pop outfit, as the guitars are reduced to a bare minimum and, for the most part, the atmosphere of the songs now depends on how dark Wimberly makes his basslines and how cluttery Polachek makes her keyboards.
The formal changes in musical textures are, however, not the main reason why I think Something is a step down, not up, from the exciting debut of Does You Inspire You. The main reason is that the album seems to lay down severe restrictions on the eclecticism and ambitions with which they'd started out four years earlier — I am not sure whether this means just how crucial the pre­sence of Pfenning was to their collective ego, or if it is just another case of the same unfortunate tendency to self-pigeonhole that plagues so many artists, but the fact is, Something is just a synth-pop record of the «me and you» variety, with all the songs whirling around the issue of finding a perfect relationship and then trying not to ruin it. Sound familiar?..
In other words, forget about the ambitious mix of personal and collective problems tackled in 2008, and get ready for a much more modest mix of dance grooves and ballads that run the oh so wide gamut from "I belong in your arms" to "Oh god, just let my love survive". Despite some glowing reviews that actually acknowledged this self-yoking as progress (like, the more they stay out of complex Marxist and Freudian territory, the better for these silly idealistic kids), I find it disappointing — like I said, Does You Inspire You gave a cool impression of the world being discovered by a bunch of inexperienced, but aspiringly smart kids, whereas Something is just another boring record that tries to find hidden depths at the bottom of a glass of water.
Not that it is devoid of nice musical ideas and hooks: if anything, it is saved by technical accom­plishments rather than mesmerizing personality. ʽSidewalk Safariʼ, opening the album, is pretty limp if you follow the lyrics and try to convince yourself that Caroline Polachek as a hot female stalker is a credible artistic image... but if you just think of it as a synth-poppified adaptation of some romantic European dance pop groove from around 1968, and pay more attention to the stylish overlays of synthesizers and synth-treated guitars, it becomes nice. Likewise, I care not for the verbal message of ʽWrong Opinionʼ, but I kinda like how the electronic «broken glass effect» holds a dialog of its own with the heavy distorted guitar chords — a good musical allegory of personal paranoia wrestling with the Hand of Doom, if you wish.
However, as a singer, Polacheck only impresses me about twice or thrice on this record. ʽGhost Tonightʼ is a really good one, where you can sense faint echoes of the same dismal doomed des­peration that used to power all those Beth Gibbons classics — and it's only with the little things, like the tension and implied tears in the "whoah-oh-oh"s that follow the "Hollow heavy eyes, follow in your light, I'm a ghost tonight" chorus, that the record is able to transcend from catchy pop to the realm of the genuinely soulful. ʽFrigid Springʼ is another one, a moonlight-on-the-lake dream pop tune, all chimes and echoes, and as they get to the chorus, the lady transforms herself into an aethereal will-o'-wisp and just floats across from speaker to speaker — luvverly. On the other hand, sometimes they overdo this: on ʽTurningʼ, there's too much psychedelic vocalizing and not enough singer presence. This is not Enya, after all.
The first single was the tongue-twistedly-titled ʽAmanaemonesiaʼ, and it is far more typical of this record than ʽBruisesʼ was of the debut: a catchy, but not terribly profound synth-pop groove that tries to convey a sense of bewildered infatuation (or something) with its fast tempo, jerkiness, and chaotic sample attack — sort of like a cross between Depeche Mode and Kate Bush, not as dark as the former and not as artsy as the latter (although the accompanying video, most of it spent on featuring Polachek dancing on top of a giant red tongue, is every bit as artsy as any given Kate Bush video — and as far as my own tastes go, Polachek is almost every bit as terrible a dancer as Kate Bush is). And maybe it's an exciting synthesis, but it also traps the record in a nostalgic vibe from which, I believe, Does You Inspire You was largely free: it sounded highly influenced by a lot of people, but also modern and looking forward, whereas Something is more like a tribute to the past, hardly eligible for the status of a «minor modern classic». That said, I do know for a fact that quite a few people have rated it higher than Does You Inspire You — perhaps they are seeing something here that I am not seeing, or, perhaps, they are not seeing something in DYIY that I am seeing.
Naturally, I'd prefer to vote for the second option, but Something is still well deserving of a thumbs up — on the whole, it is a crea­tive, tasteful, genuinely musical piece of work that just barely misses transcending its own genre limitations, and, like almost everything else done in the sphere of art-pop today, cannot help get sucked back into the same old 20th century.
MOTH (2016)
1) Look Up; 2) Polymorphing; 3) Romeo; 4) Ch-Ching; 5) Crying In Public; 6) Ottawa To Osaka; 7) Moth To The Flame; 8) Show U Off; 9) Unfinished Business; 10) No Such Thing As Illusion.
Well, at least Chairlift will go down in history as one of the few bands of the 21st century to have significantly evolved with each new album — the evolutionary path from Does You Inspire You to Moth is not exactly staggering, but it is very clearly laid out. In between 2012 and 2016, Pola­chek officially began her solo career (under the new moniker «Ramona Lisa»), and Moth, at least judging by the songwriting credits, is basically just another Polachek solo album, with guest musician Patrick Wimberley providing some assistance; both of them understood this, and went on to announce the final breakup of Chairlift by the end of the year.
Moth is a well-produced, intelligent, reasonably complex and multi-layered synth-pop album; unfortunately, it has very little of the charm and personality that made the first years of Chairlift's existence so endearing. It is not a coincidence that a few years before, Caroline contributed ʽNo Angelʼ for Beyoncé's self-titled album — she has clearly become a fan of modern «intellectua­lized» R&B, mixing its plastic funky grooves with the old spirit of the Eighties and depersonali­zing the songs in the process. Fans of electronic effects, autotuning, etc., will appreciate the various tricks she is playing with her voice on most of the tracks: I will not — not after she'd used it so naturally and so seductively on everything in between the twee-pop of ʽBruisesʼ and the Goth-art-pop of ʽTerritoryʼ.
This is not a legitimate «sellout»: the music is too complex, the lyrics too dense, and the hooks generally too inobtrusive for the common ear. But it is clearly a move towards a more mainstream sound; and while I applaud Polachek for doing it the best way possible — groping for interesting sounds and cool grooves rather than going in the direction of sappy adult contemporary — she is not enough of a genius songwriter to compensate for this loss of identity with unforgettable tunes. The result is a record that sounds like a more mature and educated version of Carly Rae Jepsen: indeed, I can very well picture Carly singing "Hey Romeo, put on your running shoes, I'm ready to go", except I'm not sure she knows who would «Romeo» be in the first place.
At least that chorus is catchy, as is the repetitive refrain to the soft techno number ʽMoth To The Flameʼ. Songs like ʽCh-Chingʼ go the harder way, combining tricky signature and tempo changes with an overall attitude of a sweaty-sexy R&B groove — but it's just not the kind of genre that Polachek can turn into her own, because, after all, she is not Beyoncé and she simply does not have it in her blood. As an artistic statement, it is too cluttered with «body-oriented» elements; as a dance groove, it is too damn artsy. The accompanying video, where she dresses up in Eastern fashion and gives us a martial arts demonstration, does not make things any easier — looks like a fairly pointless bit of «cultural appropriation», much as I hate the silly term.
It does look as if her gaze is turning more and more to the East: ʽOttawa To Osakaʼ is a telling title, in particular, and her use of Eastern melismatic techniques that was already evident on ʽAmanaemonesiaʼ, seems to have increased. Which is not a problem by itself: theoretically, a mix of Eighties' synth-pop, modern R&B, Chinese vocalizing, and whatever else you can throw in seems like a realizable proposal. It simply does not feel to me as if it's really been realized. Every now and then, you encounter openly bad songs — like ʽShow U Offʼ, which simply sounds like any mediocre electropop groove ever produced by a mediocre R&B artist. And the only thing that I cannot get out of my head is that goddamn "I can't help it, I'm a moth to the flame" chorus, but heck, when this band started out, it did not build its reputation upon repetitive techno one-liners.
The last and longest song, ʽNo Such Thing As Illusionʼ, is a particularly irksome patience-tryer: seems like she is trying to be Beyoncé and Björk at the same time here, and ends up being neither. Six and a half minutes of quietly rolling synth loops, odd patches of bass notes borrowed from ancient soft jazz fusion, chaotic vocal overdubs, and an overall feel of somebody trying to pro­duce an epic psychological anthem in the bedroom. Not a very respectable way to go.
I do know better than to give the record a thumbs down: who knows, it might grow on me if I ever soften up on this genre of music in general, and even now I am able to recognize the amount of work and the spirit that went into it. I can even understand it when plastic soul is delivered as plastic soul, with an underlying symbolic or ironic message; but this is plastic soul masquerading as genuine soul from somebody who once used to deliver genuine soul without a hitch, and this is irritating. Another case of the music industry eating up a good artist? It is probably too early to say this a fact, but hey, wouldn't be the first time. That's the price you pay for writing songs for Beyoncé.

WHY WRITING ABOUT MUSIC BEATS DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

(A sort of postface-in-progress)

1. Police And Thieves
One of today's trademarks is that many people write about music. No, that didn't sound too convincing. One of the inescapabilities of today is that a hell of a shitload of people write about music. A brief stroll through Amazon.com or RateYourMusic.com will, in fact, create the im­pres­sion that most people write about music, and those few that do not write about music are either tonedeaf or do not have Internet access. And even then, they still talk about the music, which is, come to think of it, hardly different from writing about it. The only difference is in the recipient — somehow, writing about music is supposed to be coming from those who have interesting things to say about it, whereas simply talking about music requires no deep commitment, since it puts no one into a preaching position.
Obviously, all these people write about all this music (or any other art form, for that matter) pri­ma­rily because the modern age has provided them, by means of the Internet, with the golden opportunity of having themselves heard — and even listened to, provided they can capture some­body's interest. In a matter of a few more years, we will quite likely be forgetting that before "Liberation Day", the situation was different: musical criticism was a profes­sion like any other, for which you got paid, but for which you also had to be somehow "qualified" — for instance, have a musical, or at least a journalist, education.
Today, professional musical criticism still exists — and, as long as the critics can still publish their columns in printed periodicals, it is bound to go on; but its special prerogatives are close to evaporating, as their reviews drown further and further in the ocean of amateur criticism that is flooding the Internet. This is a plain fact; it is neither wonderful nor awful in itself, so it is up to all of us to make the best use of it rather than the worst.
Professional criticism has its advantages. People who engage in it are generally expected to write well, in a language that is aesthetically pleasing all by itself, so that one might enjoy a good criti­cal review of something one hasn't even been planning on seeing or hearing, let alone having actually seen or heard. They are expected to be knowledgeable — both on the artists they're wri­ting about and on the basic rules of the game (such as music theory). Finally, although we rarely pronounce it aloud, they're expected to simply be smarter than the average Joe — even in the Gol­den Age of political correctness, no one has put under question the idea that some people are more intelligent than others, and I'd rather read a review from an intelligent critic than a dumbass, and I suppose even a dumbass would back me up here.
On practice, though, it is all but useless to expect that the professional critic will possess all these qualities in abundance. For one thing, the demand for criticism seems to be much higher than the supply — most people want a pool of opinions and judgements to choose from rather than simply expect a single guru to guide them through art. For another, good critics cannot be trained; they got to have a gift, just like the artists they're writing about, and gifts are scarce by definition. And history shows us fairly well that, much too often, "training" and "gift" do not go hand in hand at all: well-trained writers may be boring and irrelevant, and gifted writers may simply not be given a chance to write — or to publish, which, until recently, was pretty much the same thing.
In that respect, the emergence of Internet-based amateur criticism is a terrific opportunity. It does burden the reader with the necessity of sifting through tons of garbage to find that one pearl, but today, this kind of behaviour seems to be the norm of civilized life anyway — in all respects. The garbage will inevitably sink to the bottom eventually, while really talented people like James Be­rardinelli, for the movies, or Mark Prindle, for the music, will live on for at least some time; and wouldn't we be deprived of the pleasure of reading their stuff if it weren't for Web publishing?
However, the main issue here is not exactly what good is Web publishing, but rather why it exists in the first place. What drives people, even those who are not professionally educated musicolo­gists or professionally trained musicians, to opinionate in written form? And — a connected, but different question: what drives other people to read their output?
2. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Obviously, I cannot speak on behalf of anyone but myself, yet I have reasons to believe my an­swer would be typical of many. I have been an avid music listener and lover from early childhood — at first, limited and conservative, later, not so much so, although some musical forms still re­main pretty much inaccessible to my soul — and at some point, my desire to take had somehow morphed into an almost equally strong desire to give, to not let the impressions, feelings, thoughts and conclusions that my listening generates within myself to go to waste, but to be able to show them to anyone who might be interested in looking at them. Who knows, said I, maybe this will be able to do some unknown good, and then my musical immersion would not simply be born and be deceased with my own birth and death, but serve some extra purpose as well. Sort of a "missionary drive", if you like.
Of course, this is presumptuous. Who am I to make my opinions matter? Basically a nobody — not a musician, not a musicologist, not even a superb connoisseur of the pop culture, and not even a native English speaker. There are so many people in the world who are better "qualified" for this line of work than me, it's not even funny. And who am I to give someone something? How have I been authorized? How have I even been able to suppose that someone might want to con­sider taking this bullshit from me?
The answers are simple: you cannot really know until you try. If all of us started operating based on this logic, chances are nobody would ever get nothing done in the world — we'd spend more time doubting our capacity to do something rather than simply trying to do it. For me, the realization that the work I'd done was not entirely useless came in once I started getting — on a regular basis — E-mails of support from people whose knowledge and intellectual power, as it seemed to me, exceeded mine, sometimes vastly. If anything, these letters showed that the "giving" process was at least partially successful, and that kept me going.
There were, and still are, other kinds of letters, of course — ranging from polite disagreements and corrections to violent flames, sometimes deserved in all fairness. But those, too, convinced me that I was moving in the right direction; if, to those people, all that crap I wrote seemed deser­ving of a written answer, then there must have been something to it. The only thing that would have completely discouraged me could have been complete indifference, and people were not in­different, and that was nice to know.
What I discovered was this: there were plenty of interesting people who were quite willing to take from me — and give in return, usually in the form of reader comments, but sometimes even in the form of mailed CDs of music they wanted me to review, some of which, I am ashamed to admit, I have not even had the time to listen to so far. Sometimes I was enriching their experience — by making them look at some piece of music in a new light, or even by making them want to go out and get a new piece of music — and sometimes they were enriching mine in response, in the very same ways. The thing became an endless, but never boring cycle of "showing off" (in the good sense of the expression, if it ever had one) between myself and my readers, and every new loop would usually leave one of us more open-minded than before. The mutual benefits were good.
Then, at one point, the rut set in, and a crisis was imminent. First came the understanding that the process is endless; timeless musical masterpieces may be few, but "good" music stretches out to infinity, in width as well as in depth, and my idealistic "encyclopaedic" dreams of covering eve­ry­thing worth covering were shattered and smashed (especially by the likes of Tangerine Dream and by the fact that, as we progress further in time, the number of musical artists seems to grow on an exponential basis).
Second came the understanding that I had run out of things to say — there's only so many different words in the English language, and far from all of them are easily applicable to a music review, and this brings on the horrible idea that, perhaps, if you catch your­self applying the exact same words to a dozen different albums by different artists in different times, this might mean that the music sounds exactly the same? And if it does not, what good it is to try and capture its essence with such inadequate means? And even if you write in different ways, what does the difference between "this album packs a real wallop of energy" and "this album stomps along like a 4,000-pound black rhino" really imply to your reader? Maybe it means something to you the writer, but what if your readers just don't get it anyway? Or, worse, are animal-haters?..
At a moment like this, the only thing that keeps you going is understanding that, if you just drop it, this means you have wasted an awful amount of time and potential with all your previous writing. There is also the idea of "obligation": people who like to read you expect you to entertain them further, and maybe they have a certain flimsy right to. But going on just for the sake of going on isn't a lot of fun, either. One can slow down, lose whatever quality one possessed before, or simp­ly go off on all kinds of tangents (something akin to what happened to Mark Prindle, who used to match the definition of 'oddbeat music reviewer' but, today, is more of a cross between Lester Bangs and George Carlin — still a great read, but you have to be equipped with a metaphoric magni­fying glass to actually find scraps of music-related text floating on the waves of his endless impressionistic rants about whatever has just wandered into his head).
What I am coming to is this: it's fun to write about music at first, but eventually you start to think that, perhaps, it would be a nice change to dance about architecture instead. This is where the professional critic has you on your knees: he, at least, is getting paid for his work, and money is a big factor here, especially if you don't really know how to do anything else for money. But that doesn't mean that money is a solid guarantee for quality; even the best paid critics rarely go on be­ing interesting for all of their lives. If you need an example, take a look at Robert Christgau. (And let's not even mention Jann Wenner).
3. Baby, What You Want Me To Do
Actually, speaking of Robert Christgau and his ilk, there is at least one major plus about reading his brief, snug, holier-than-Jah snippets: he has been around for so long, and has written about so much different stuff, that he has managed to give his regular readers a near-complete, wholesome picture of the critic as a young, mature, and old man combined. One may not agree with the values of "Pop Music Filtered Through The Bowels Of R. C.", but it is hard to argue that the bowels of R. C. are completely incapable of filtering music, or that they are not, per se, a relative­ly interesting place to visit.
Let us not forget that, although all people are different, this variation is not nearly as high as a hyper-individualistic mind would like to imagine, and quite a few of us have their bowels gene­tically programmed in a way that is very similar, or maybe even complete­ly identical, to that of R. C. For such people, R. C. will hold a particular interest, and, most likely, will display a major predictability force. Others may not share his views completely, but intersect with them in some points. Still others will rather want to align themselves with the likes of Mark Prindle, or Wilson & Alroy from www.warr.org.
The rather obvious trend, as my experience has shown me, is that people usually value musical criticism not so much according to the literary skills or erudition of the writer, but according to how much their opinions on music coincide with those of the writer. This gives even us the illi­terates plenty of hope: we may write like third-graders, but we are still bound to find admiring fans because we think the same thoughts of Led Zeppelin. Or, on the contrary, you may be a rein­carna­tion of Lenny Bruce, Nabokov, and Jean-Paul Sartre combined, but you will still be hailed an incompetent hack by the first reader who takes insult at your sacrilegious treatment of the German industrial scene.
In the end, once you have reached your 1,000th review, you probably will have used up all of your words, idioms, and metaphors, regardless of whether you have the gift of a Shakespeare or of a Dan Quayle. But you are not doing this to be really deep or witty; superficial musical cri­ticism isn't drama of the highest order. You're doing this to show your readers on which shelf of your preferences this or that piece of music is supposed to go, preferably with a bit of explanation (you could just give out ratings and leave it at that, but it's kind of boring and doesn't provide for a good opportunity to kill time, which is the main stimulus for people to read criticism).
For some reason (call it youthful stupidity), it seemed important to me to make each review as long as possible; the usual explanation was something along the lines of "every piece of music, no matter how bad it is, took time and effort to produce, so shouldn't an honest review also take time and effort?", but in reality I was probably just trying to come out "smarter" than the lazy stupid competitors on the market. Some people liked it, most did not. Looking back at some of that stuff, I am amazed at much of the empty, redundant verbosity — it's one thing to write a mini-monograph on something like Blonde On Blonde, which deserves a dozen big monographs by itself, but a five-page review on AC/DC's Ballbreaker? Did I even write that? Geez. That, of course, is also one key factor of why I fell out of the reviewing process: forcing myself to come up with ideas even when the fields lay completely fallow. It all went in the wrong direction.
This, then, is my next and probably last effort to reboot and make some good use of my previous experience. The decision is not to repeat the past mistakes — and write what I think should be written, and not one sentence above that. This does not imply the opposite, namely, that all the reviews will be as laconic as possible; plenty of records inspire plenty of thoughts. But that is much more likely to be expected from the likes of the Beatles or Frank Zappa than the likes of Albert King or J. J. Cale.
One other important decision is that I will not be making much use of my earlier reviews. Rerea­ding some of them, I understand that, regardless of how good or bad they are, most need rewri­ting, and usually it is more difficult and takes more time to rewrite a review than to produce a new one, not just because of the editorial work but also because you are essentially one person in your twenties and a seriously different one in your thirties. I have softened up on some stuff and hardened up on some other, which is, I guess, natural (but, thank Heaven, I still love ABBA and still think that Bob Dylan's Selfportrait is vastly underrated); more importantly, too many of the reviews were too heavily dependent on the «name each song, come up with some observation about it» principle, which I cannot and will not uphold any longer.
So, let us wait and see. To be continued.