so tell me, why is Kaputt better or worse than Let England Shake?

I don't know who/what Destroyer is, so Let England Shake is better

idgaf about any other destroyer album but that didn't stop be from realizing that kaputt was indeed the #1 album of 2011

gr80 you might take a listen to both Thief and Streethawk: A Seduction. They are very fucking good. I do not generally rep for much indie but that dude was on a tear for those two (tho they don't have the chill-vibe synth-wash that I suspect is a big part of kaputt's appeal for you but still I must speak up for those records, they're really good)

Kaputt seems to have begin with a structure & feel idea and put all else afterward.

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 5, 2012 10:27 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is true, but let england shake is similarly defined by a distinctive, unifying texture. hazy, abstract and seductive vs. bright, sharp and ringing. main difference is that PJ harvey pushes so much harder at and farther into the sound she's chosen.

listened to these back to back a couple times this morning, i can't say i don't understand the appeal of kaputt. perhaps as a product of its relatively limited ambition, it provides a very consistent and comfortable listen. it's soothing, quietly sexy and nothing really juts out to wreck the flow. i could see it "working" quite well in a number of contexts. let england shake is quite challenging by comparison and does have its ups and downs. "all and everyone" is a bit dull, for instance, and "england" gets on my nerves. it nevertheless strikes me as a vastly superior piece of work, overall. heartstopping songs, real political & artistic ambition, and a dramatically unusual sound palette (where kaputt mostly sound like bejar hanging out in his bathrobe, taking stoned tips from kurt vile & ariel pink).

i had LES in at #6 on my albums ballot, and in retrospect, i did it a serious injustice.

xpost i checked out Rubies last week and was kinda feeling it-- will get to those two next, thanks for the pr0 tip

oh england oh america

I'm w/ gr80 in that kaputt is pure genius, destroyer's other stuff, eh, seems okay

ok i'll listen to pj harvey as soon as i listen to the gucci tape that just dropped

i guess i mean that PJH takes this core sound/texture and shapes it, pushes at it, makes it do a bunch of different things. bejar is more content to let his sound be, to let it set the terms. neither approach is intrinsically superior, but i get a good deal more out of let england shake.

destroyer, on this thread:

i took a walk and threw up in an english garden

I think Destroyer newcomers who are taken w. the new one should give Your Blues a go next.

why are these two albums being compared?

i wonder

ts: 'the laziest river' by destroyer vs. 'ride across the river' by dire straits

I would like to remind ilm that I made a much better poll kaputt vs. sound of silver

I had some conflicting feelings when listening to Let England Shake. As with Aerial a few years ago, the album felt a little rudderless to me. I think her writing is formally experimental, but experimentalism had previously been grounded in a modernist aesthetic and this is not. I needed to know what it WAS grounded in and what the purpose was of this experimentalism and abandonment of tradition.

I've begun to think of it as some kind of new classical music that succeeds, at least in this case, on the basis of its discipline!

(Just to clarify, by "abandonment of tradition" I mean genre tradition. I don't think her music is very based in genre.)

From the little I've heard the PJH rec dives inside traditionalism to rescue a 'radical' edge that has been seemingly lost, which is a tactic sometimes used by new classical composers, no? xp

I do need to hear this.

i can't say i don't understand the appeal of kaputt. perhaps as a product of its relatively limited ambition, it provides a very consistent and comfortable listen. it's soothing, quietly sexy and nothing really juts out to wreck the flow. i could see it "working" quite well in a number of contexts.

FYI you are working with a really bad definition of "ambition" here.

kmt what definition of ambition could you possibly apply to that limited bitch dan bejar

that limited bitch

dan bejar is a musical genius who has been in a buch of band including destroyer, new pornographers, work with great talent like spancer krug... he has making music since 96. who is pj harvey?

:D

Regardless of what you think of destroyer, equating "smooth and sexy" (which I'm sure lex you would say doesn't apply in any event) with a lack of ambition is wrongheaded IMO.

It's the kind of thing that gets written about Sade:

i can't say i don't understand the appeal of love deluxe. perhaps as a product of its relatively limited ambition, it provides a very consistent and comfortable listen. it's soothing, quietly sexy and nothing really juts out to wreck the flow. i could see it "working" quite well in a number of contexts.

FYI you are working with a really bad definition of "ambition" here.

― Tim F, Sunday, February 5, 2012 2:55 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh, thanks for the tip, tim. you wanna provide a better one? to my mind, kaputt is an album of "relatively limited" artistic ambition. it works within its chosen palette of sounds and what the artist already knows he does well. it does not challenge itself, its aesthetic or its listener to any remarkable degree. this is not a bad thing. to the extent that the album is successful on its own terms, i'd call it a virtue. hence the "consistent and comfortable listen".

OMG you did not compare sade to destroyer

The Spancer Krug? Wow...

tim i think one day you might actually kill me

i cannot breathe right now

Except it doesn't sound at all like any previous Destroyer albums

OMG you did not compare sade to destroyer

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), maandag 6 februari 2012 0:26 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He, indeed, didn't.

Regardless of what you think of destroyer, equating "smooth and sexy" (which I'm sure lex you would say doesn't apply in any event) with a lack of ambition is wrongheaded IMO.

i didn't say that. i didn't directly equate the vibe of kaputt with a lack of ambition. i merely suggested that the former might be a product of the latter. crucial difference. fwiw, i'm equating ambition with artistic experimentation and rigor, self-challenge, and the willingness to push an aesthetic hard enough to see what happens at its outer reaches. but i'm not necessarily making a virtue of that sort of ambition, or a fault of its absence.

fwiw, i think that, in terms of the definition i'm using, the diamond life is a much more ambitious album than kaputt. its synthesis sounded instantaneously familiar, even nostalgic, in its moment, but it wasn't. sade created that sound out of whole cloth, and in terms of pop refinement, pushed the experiment a hell of a lot farther than destroyer. you know, imo...

if only dan bejar had the ambition of paris hilton

if you are releasing music, you have ambitions imo

fwiw, i'm equating ambition with artistic experimentation and rigor, self-challenge, and the willingness to push an aesthetic hard enough to see what happens at its outer reaches.

what would the "outer reaches" of this particular aesthetic look like to you?

yeah! well you've also got "suicide" as merely "stupid pride", a somewhat hardline xtian sentiment which that indeed daring pantheism x astrology "gods are crazy / stars are blind" double whammy immediately vexes. and then yr everyday manichaean "be the devil and angel too" chaser. paris milton more like.

― rtccc (mwah), Sunday, August 27, 2006 1:17 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let me know when bejar comes up with anything a quarter of the worth of this

it's ambitious enough. certainly sounds better made than most indie crud. that's my high praise.

i mean it actually sounds like it took time to make. and there was thought involved. and craftsmanship and all that. i appreciate all that. but yeah the voice ends up distracting me cuz it just reminds me of 15 other voices. this isn't a problem for me when it comes to synthesizers. pj will always sound like pj to me. though people heard siouxsie on this album. i seem to recall that.

what would the "outer reaches" of this particular aesthetic look like to you?

impossible to say until someone gets there, right?

i can only say that, in my entirely subjective estimation, kaputt feels like the product of someone laying back in a comfortable, well-defined place and doing what feels right. let england shake, otoh, feels like the product of someone deliberately stepping out of their comfort zone and pushing through to make sense of unfamiliar territory. neither approach is necessarily any better or worse than the other, but like i said, i get more, personally, out of what PJH came up with in the process. and i'm inclined to describe it as more artistically "ambitious".

xp Yeah, one thing I don't get is where people calling it amateurish are coming from. Reacting more to Bejar's background than anything, I guess. If nothing else, Kaputt sounds really slick and professional to me.

it sounds great. on youtube no less!

i would still rather buy that Studio stuff though. they no longer exist, right? is there like a 2 cd thing i can buy? the complete Studio? now that stuff was ambitious.

that was like the last rilly good tip i got from ilm i think.

at least ldr is out there pushing her boundaries

scott just look for Yearbook 2

my problem with nu-80's type stuff is that i never stopped listening to actual 80's stuff? so there isn't actually a lot of nostalgia involved! does that make any sense at all? i've been listening to bananarama every year of my life since 1982 or whatever. they are still very much current to me. okay, maybe that makes no sense. those sounds are just a part of my life. completely. so in order for me to enjoy new stuff that sounds like old 80's synth/pop/newwave stuff the production OR the songs - and hopefully both - have to be REALLY high quality in order for me to enjoy them. like i said, dance people seem to do this the best. but dance people kinda exist to reference the past and make it new somehow. its like magic. non-dance music people usually aren't so swift. but this guy gets at something interesting. its not a total time-warp. which i appreciate. he's no blue nile, but who is?

yearbook 2, okay, i'll write that down. thanks.

my problem with nu 80s stuff is that ppl romanticizing the 80s are reliving the hideousness of boomers goin nuts about the sixties

like even though there was a lot of great shit that bears reinvestigating/closer readings, the perils of championing an era are so poisonous that it's better to just give all that shit a wide berth

so you think people should never any eras, or particularly the 80's?

should never champion*

I don't think this is 'championing an era'. it's playing w/ many of the sounds and themes of the era but that doesn't necessarily mean it's romanticizing them.