Don't be a David

Gorillaz, Insomnia, Electronics, and the God of the Internet

I can't read The Sleepers enough, here, 6am, and I wonder if it's more of a sin against the night to not sleep through the night than it is to sleep through the night. and I wonder if failure is the only thing I write poetry about. And I wonder when that came to be, since I remember a time when I wasn't writing about failure. And failing at it. But night, and headphones, are good for music. Quiet, sad music, for not sleeping.

Mini-mix-tape time. I've been far too long in the lo-fi post-folk, let's get some electronics and high production values.


Gorillaz - Hong Kong
His Name Is Alive - Go to Hell Mountain
Momus - Nervous Heartbeat


"Hong Kong" is the prettiest thing I've heard off the indie wire in ages. Damon Albarn sounds old and tired, there's emptiness and claustrophobia and East Asia, it's long and sparse and sad. The chinese harp playing for the whole seven minutes -- quiet, arrhythmic, harsh attack with no sustain -- almost sounds electronic. The aesthetic, that is. Guess everything digital has an organic basis. Also says something how Gorillaz, which isn't even a band at all you know, nevertheless has a sound. This could be an old Blur song, and yet, and yet, there's still that Demon Days feel, over the guitars mostly.

Which plays nicely into the new His Name Is Alive album. Halfway through, "Go to Hell Mountain" breaks into a solo, a strange, fuzzy, processed-to-hell solo. and yet it works so nicely in the song, testament to how good Warren Defever is in making uncomfortable mixes of organics and inorganics. The song, like a lot of Xmmer, goes right to the edge of plausibility, being almost too cute and happy to be a song about heartbreak. But irony has always been a part of the HNIA mix -- not irony like sarcasm, more like going "Oh my god nothing goes right ever" while smiling, looking straight up, closing your eyes and spinning in circles.

And let's end with the lord of irony himself, with the "big ballad" off last years's Ocky Milk -- an operatic and sweet little love song that might be the first use of the Cher-autotuned-vocals that doesn't sound like Cher. How'd he do it? By fucking with it. Momus is fairly much all electronic by this stage in his career, both in terms of music and himself -- a fast-blogging globe-trotter zipping from cultural center to cultural center faster than you can say "gentrification". If there is a god of the internet, I bet it at least looks like him.