REASONS TO LIVE
This week: excellent obscurities exhumed from the stacks.
Die Alten Maschinen, Change (X Production). I still know virtually nothing about half-Czech/half-Canadian roborock warriors Die Alten Maschinen other than that their 2010 album, Songs About
Love and Machines, gave me a great deal of pleasure and that their Canadian half, Leon Stevenson, hails from Toronto, used to play in the Extras and sends me friendly emails and music I rather like from time to time. I do know, however, that Die Alten Maschinen are once again giving me a lot of pleasure with their new LP, Change, and that their damnably catchy, electro-plated, “singularity”-obsessed cyber-silliness probably deserves to fall on a lot more North American ears than it does.
DAM tilts a little bit more toward the “robo” than the “rock” this time around, but even such harder-edged, chilly synthpop outings as “Old Tin Can” or “Girl with the Iron Nose” tend to warm up with likeable hooks by the end.
Think of Die Alten Maschinen as cousins to fellow tongue-in-cheek futurists Devo — whose Gerald Casale has collaborated with DAM mainstays Stevenson and Moimir Papalescu in the past — or Kraftwerk with a goofier (read: “less inscrutably German”) sense of humour. Although, that said, neither of those outfits ever did anything quite as lovably loony as “Freddie’s Always Ready,” which appears to be a song about an overworked, junkie “sex robot, man machine” (“Doesn’t matter what you call ’em ’cause they always make the scene”) “headed for the chop shop.” The singsong stutterpunch of “Spark in the Dark,” meanwhile, might be my new favourite thing.
Les Big Byrd, They Worshipped Cats (A Records). More weirdos, this time from Sweden. Les Big Byrd’s They Worshipped
Cats has been out since last May, but somehow got buried in the piles of CDs that still haunt the corners of my home. And this despite a gaudily ridiculous album cover featuring Jesus Christ shoot-
ing laser beams from his eyes at UFOs.
Les Big Byrd love their Krautrock, sometimes treating it with period-perfect reverence (“White Week,” “1,2,3,4 Morte”) and sometimes gilding its ticktocking analogue-synth burbles with Sonic Youth-ian guitar hardness.
The band has other interests on the go, though: “Vi Borde Prata Men Det. Ar For Sent” is BJM-styled jangle-psych touched with a hint of tinkly Scando-pop melodic delicacy; “Just One Time” is like a Beach House organ elegy that gets hotwired halfway through into Air; “Back to Bagarmossen” reveals what might happen if Interpol suddenly developed an interest in coed garage-rock harmonies from the ’60s. Mad in a good way.
Takako Minekawa and Dustin Wong, Savage Imagination (Thrill Jockey). Another album that’s been knocking around for a few months, Savage Imagination is almost not worth describing because, a) it’s well nigh impossible and, b) describing what Japanese singer/experimentalist Takako Minekawa and loop-mad guitar mutilator Dustin Wong are up to here probably doesn’t make it sound all that appealing, anyway. And, all things considered, to a large segment of the population, it likely isn’t.
Savage Imagination is a squiggly cartoon splatter of diced-up J-pop, effervescent Afrobeat, cartoon Krautrock, dub and glitch-electro that makes almost as little sense as that all sounds when you hear it, but whose whimsical avant-gardism is nevertheless rather engagingly joyful.
“Dioramasaurus” finally drops a tuneful “doo-doo-doo” anchor through the candy-coloured mayhem, “Luminescent Earth Traveler” engages a loping forward thrust reminiscent of Mouse on Mars and “She He See Feel” almost qualifies as a tune, despite sounding like several utterly disparate records being mixed together at 45 r.p.m. with the treble cut completely out. Fun, even though it’ll send a lot of your friends scrambling for the nearest exit.