Halfway Across the Atlantic Ocean

My deletion folder is littered with the bones of KRISTEENYOUNG song appreciation posts; I never capture what I love about this elusive band, but here’s another try (this one from Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker).

As the album closer, “Halfway Across The Atlantic Ocean” is first remarkable for its placement – it follows “Protestant,” a mighty song which ends with a long, stately outro; to hear such a definitive album closer as “Protestant” suddenly give way to the much gentler opening chords of “Atlantic” is one sign that this unusual album is not going to die without a struggle. Nor does “Protestant” to “Atlantic” fall into the big-drama-into-cooldown-ballad pattern of record-ending; instead, there is a re-ignition of nervous tension which burns to the end.

The second remarkable thing about “Atlantic Ocean” is that it references “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without irony – which is really the only interesting option these days. I can’t be sure that this was intentional; it’s a half-quote in the opening chords which recalls the song’s wavering bridge, rather than the famous melody, and I might not have sat up quite so suddenly had I not known that Young is a great fan of Garland’s, and has several times lyrically referenced her and Oz. But knowing this, it feels like a personal response to a performance most of us view through a vaguely academic lens -not even a campy lens so much anymore- and that made the original seem suddenly new to me.

Young begins “Atlantic Ocean” in reverie, a soft halting delivery (particularly on the word “clear”) giving way to a more confident, plaintive one: “The day…that it became… clear – was/the first time that I saw you for the hundred-and-fiftieth time – but can you blame me? I was reaching – reaching, halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.” Read the opening lines how you’d like; I think it lends itself to “I was too distracted by my efforts to reach you to notice that you were no longer there” and “can you blame me for wanting more than I’m given?” as well as “I’m trying to do something patently impossible; take a moment, gentlemen of the jury, to acknowledge the scale of my labors.”

But the lyric, while sometimes ambiguous, is not vague. The song has a plot. Love is found in the first verse, lost in the second; Young and her friend are in the water, attempting to cross it at first (it’s uncertain whether they start together or try to meet halfway); in the third, Young winds up diving under the water in an attempt to cross it alone, collapsing in exhaustion (possibly dying; in any case, she comes to rest “eternally reaching”) but in the process ending the built-up tension of the title (which ends each verse) by stretching her hand, finally, “more than halfway across the semantic ocean.”

(Was the ocean in question, therefore, meant to be read as a “sea of words” throughout the song? Or does she triumph -sort of- over the sea of words as consolation for not being able to bridge the Atlantic, whatever odd symbolism the song attaches to that act? Again, there could be a bunch of readings, all of them relatively straightforward and none of them contradictory, which is a mark of good writing.)

There’s also a cutting twist in the sped-up refrain, with the appearance of a second Dorothy -Mrs. Parker- whose most famous title is referenced in a long list of potential methods of suicide – “I have enough rope when you’re gone, gone, gone/the oven’s cozy when you’re gone, gone, gone,” etc. The list is sort of played for laughs, but it’s really a nightmare sequence. These dangerous objects surround the speaker with a friendly, domestic pull (“the traffic’s playful,” “my knives are sharpened,” “prescriptions filled”) and their threat is very active. It reminds me of the Smiths’ “the sea wants to take me/the knife wants to slit me,” but it has an air of desperate energy, rather than the dreamy passivity of “I Know It’s Over.”

Beyond that, I have to praise the song’s phrases and internal rhymes – I especially like “I will swim till my limbs are numb and dim” (which has not only the  -im/-im, but that pair of -mb words). Likewise, I love that each verse begins (and there is enough space separating the verses that this stays subtle) with “the day,” “the place” and “the time” respectively, as if to describe some final appointment either with death or with the lover/addressee. And the stretching-out of words (at the start of the song, she tests the water with her toe, and the word “toe” stretches and twitches, lasting nearly as long as it takes her to be grabbed into the water in the next line) elegantly demonstrates lapses and differences in timing.

But “Atlantic Ocean” doesn’t come down to any of that for me; it comes down to a strange ability to sincerely show a bad mental state to the listener without implicating the listener for being a voyeur. I really don’t feel awkward pointing out the technical achievements of a track about the breakdown of a life, because for me, despite its intense content, it doesn’t feel at all melodramatic (and thus you feel as if you can meet it on its own terms, looking at the emotion straightforwardly, which means seeing the form straightforwardly as well).

Responses to it will vary widely, I know, but as Wilde said, when critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. Except I don’t know of many artists who appear to genuinely enjoy being disagreed over, so maybe he should have put it slightly differently.

(If you are somehow read this whole thing without knowing the album, the blog Nine Bullets just also put up three other tracks from Strippers, with a very nice review.)

Lyrics under the cut.

On the inevitable Tori Amos comparison. (Wrongly unmentioned: G. Kulka.)

I’ve always been annoyed by the critical practice of describing female performers by their relation to, and precise distance from, Tori Amos. Posting on it has been difficult, though. It’s hard to pin down exactly what bothers me about it.

At the most basic level, of course, it bothers me because an Amos comparison turns me right the fuck off. I’ve spent a solid decade in close, regular contact with a wide variety of Tori Amos fans, and as a result I’ve tried very hard to like her. I’ve heard every album. I’ve seen her live (and she was very good). I acknowledge her skill at the piano, her unique songwriting, her strong perspective; I see what the fuss is about, but that doesn’t mean I very often want to hear her. I’m not a fan. As a result, if I’m reading a review that compares someone to Amos at all, I don’t tend to follow up – and this is a shame, because pretty much every warbly female singer-songwriter gets the Amos-as-reference-point at least once.

Then there is the Amosing-as-dismissal. This started as a Kristeen Young thing. It’s strange, but almost inevitably, first-time listeners who like her call her “an angry Kate Bush,” while the ones who dislike her compare her to Amos. I heard it, too, at first. They do share an inborn vocal tone, and they both write unconventional piano parts. But where Young’s playing is loud and discordant, Amos’ is quiet, elegant and restrained; where Amos’ voice is naturally low and takes a complicated breathiness as its trademark, Young’s is piercing and sobbing, and makes frequent leaps from a mid-t0-high, almost falsetto rock belt into an extremely high classical note. Amos’ and Young’s classical training is respectively in piano and in voice, and that makes a vast difference in how they rebel against it.

All this is to say that, while I’m well-used to hearing this particular comparison, and to refuting it instinctively and at length, I also recognize its sway – its appeal to that lineage of female performers, running more or less from Kate Bush in 1980 to Bat for Lashes in 2009, and through Amos and Bjork somewhere in between. This appeal is a powerful method of dismissal: you are a child of this performer, a parent of this; I have now categorized you, and will therefore never see you as exceptional. This is particularly problematic because that lineage is not even real. It is an easy, false perception based on the (relatively) rational assumption, upon being shown the rock canon, that the few confessional women [or male New Wave moaners, or sweet-toned Northern Irish alternacrooners] in it must represent a distinct and specific plotline.

In turn, this type of perception is based on the common belief that artforms are collective – that it is possible for an unusual artist, for example (as I recently read a reputable person saying of Amy Winehouse) to represent “an aberration” against a more unified general narrative of collaborative progress.

I think that this is pure English-department crap, and I think so only because I spent many years fully convinced that I was very clever for thinking something like it.

So – yes; on one level, I’m just perpetually annoyed because a favorite singer sometimes gets a comparison I don’t like; on another level, I’m similarly snitty because I don’t really like Tori Amos, and if I see Hanne Hukkelberg compared to her, than I’m less likely to seek out the interesting work of Ms. Hukkelberg, even though I know better. On yet another level, it bothers me because it exposes my own willingness (as earlier) to believe in ideas, like quantifiable artistic lineages, which I actually think are nonsense. It’s also annoying for much more universal reasons.

This entire post goes double for Bjork and, in fact, triple for Ms. Bush.

Double.

Triple.

I have more bubble puns in me, but why go on?

Previously: Kristeen Young wore a dress of bubbles in 2007. Lady Gaga wore a similar dress of bubbles in 2009. I posted on the strange sadness one feels when someone famous does the same thing as someone you like.

Recently: Another discussion started along Young’s fans, partly because Gaga wore another, much less similar, dress of bubbles. The cruelties of appropriation were discussed. Hussein Chalayan’s similar/earlier creation was cited (again). It was pointed out that nobody outside the room cared. I dug up a New York Times blurb on Gaga’s bubbles, which was annoying on a whole different level -tried to implicate Gaga for copying high fashion; ended up implicating DIY culture- but in the end, was making the same argument as me: no matter where she took it from, she’s famous, she’s comely, it’s hers now, and that chafes.

At this point, Young jumped in via proxy, with a series of remarks which abashed and touched me, and which I’d like to quote:

the NY Times is bashing gaga because they say her dress is a rip off of a Hussein Chalayan (designer) dress. I’ve seen this dress and yes Gaga’s is exactly like it. My dress was inspired by and Abbott and Costello movie, Abbott and Costello go to Mars. I’ll explain if you want. You’ll notice that my dress is an actual dress and Gaga’s and Chalayan’s are bubbles over a leotard. Mine also has an X over the right breast with dots of blood…and a hoop over the right shoulder…..a reference to Amazon warriors who cut off their right breast so they could shoot arrows better.. In the Abbott and Costello movie (a favourite of mine when I was a child)…..Abbott and Costello try to go to Mars but end up on Venus where it is inhabited by Amazon women. They have a truth machine (a lie detector) there where they make men hold a bubble and if the man is lying (when asked a question) the bubble bursts. THIS was the inspiration for my dress. I actually said something about this, on stage, when I started wearing the dress.

Having said this, I think it is perfectly fine for artists (who aren’t clothes designers) to take ideas from clothing designers…..and re-work them. That’s what art and culture is about…..AND clothing designers are putting their designs “out there” to influence how people dress. BUT, I do not think it’s ok for well known artists to copy lesser known artists in their own field. I know there is a vampire tradition in RnR. But, it’s sickening…..and usually leaves the lesser known to have nothing but a heroin problem. If the internet is here for the whole world to know INFORMATION…..fine, let the vampirism live on…..but, just let it be known where they are getting their food.

I know, I know…..it’s JUST a dress. But, it’s not, you see. I spend a lot of time (and what little money I have) making music AND my outfits. It’s part of who I am…..my identity…..my creativity. When someone comes along, and is more known, and claims it as HER identity…..even for the moment……it’s gutting. She has the money and team behind her to consume and consume…and shout it from the mountaintops. I obviously don’t. And NOW, who am I? If I continue in the same vein I have been (for quite some time) will people say I am copying HER and dismiss me? See, it’s much more than a dress. And by the way, I don’t think it’s HER who is copying…..I think it’s stylists searching the internet for ideas…..I’ve encountered this before.

Is there life on Mars?

So. Forgive me for another bubble-post, but that really got to me. Fame tends to reduce us to our position relative to the very famous. We are expected to accept this, and indeed we are often greeted negatively if we don’t, but it’s actually pretty terrible. That’s why, in the end, I have to respect the culture of celebrity mockery which I’ve written against in the past; it’s just a pity that it so often manifests as thinly-disguised mockery of anyone different from ourselves.

(Also, someone I admire and empathize with is unhappy. Making an identity is incredibly hard, and when something takes part of it away, it’s painful. This is the primary reason why I posted today. Don’t let me pretend that all my human responses are in the service of my philosophies. On the contrary, my opinions largely exist so I can pair my human responses with something less obviously vulnerable, and I don’t think I’m alone.)

REVIEW: Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker

KRISTEENYOUNG – Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker (2009)

1. You are either going to love it or hate it. That’s how it is with Young’s voice, so this is not going to be a review so much as notes on a record I’ve loved since 2007, when “Depression Contest,” “Protestant,” “He’s Sickened By My Crude Emotion” and others began to surface in their live set.

2. It’s the album of the decade, though, and I actually mean that. My decade, anyway. Meet Miss Young and Her All Boy Band is a huge young voice learning that it’s capable of anything; The Orphans is a string of great singles-that-never-were mixed with a string of great b-sides-that-never-were, but Music For Strippers is the voice of Kristeen Young’s maturity, God help us all.

3. The sound is…really good. I don’t know how else to put it. They haven’t made a giant stylistic change -Young’s banging, internally warring, multilayered chords, accompanied by Jef White’s inspired drum parts, are always immediately recognizable- but Strippers‘ mixes just seem to have all the right ratios. There’s so much going on below the voice on almost every track, layers of piano and synth; a lot of this could be very interesting as an album of instrumentals.

4. The singing is mutating and alive, and Tony Visconti records the vocals beautifully. The album does not have the vocal variety of some of their prior ones, but we have the prior ones for that, and what it lacks in broad-ranging experimentalism it makes up in wit and complexity of delivery. These vocals seem very fresh; nothing about them is mannered.

5. I do really love the lyrics. They’ve evolved to a point where the mix of very bald and very subtle stuff is incendiary. “Protestant” is a statement of faith (not much of it Protestantism) which makes great use of her never-gimmicky gift for stripping the sensual mystique from sex but lavishing it on everything else; “The Depression Contest” boasts that Young’s tears are “more nuanced -na na- and deeper than yours” and invites you to pity her harder and faster; “Keyboard Like A Gun” mocks narcissistic Internet culture from a position just inside it.

6. [SCENE MISSING; don't want to mess up the order, but I don't like the point I had at #6.]

7. If you are a fan, you can make a solid guess at the identities of a couple of the people she’s singing about.

8. But a biographical reading is even less interesting than usual. This is an elliptical, referential album, whose central metaphor -the business transaction of stripping and watching, as it applies to various characters in various orders- is always present but never explicit.

9. This may make it sound florid and inexact, which it isn’t. The writing is precise and without pretension. But trying to read it biographically will make it seem like a riddle -deliberately obscure- and that’s not the point; it’s actually just deliberately elusive, I think. Which is very different. An obscure thing hides; an elusive thing is always visible, but can’t be caught and dissected.

10. Really good records always humanize the artist rather than the other way around; sometimes (though not with this one) it’s the only way you can actually tell they’re really good. In this case, I really felt as if these shattering troubles didn’t go away after they were made into art, and that’s a surprisingly unique emotion. The temptation to make it all bitterly triumphant seems to have been avoided.

11. This album perfects Young’s aesthetic. It doesn’t cancel out her previous writing, but what’s new is a terrifying consistency and connected feeling and, along the way, it’s very technically exacting. It’s a near-perfect album from a band who’ve already come close to perfection a few times. I hope I don’t turn everyone off with my “album of the decade” talk, but for me, I can’t call it anything else.

Hear samples on MySpace.

Buy the thing on Emusic.

Or buy a hardcopy from her.

Or you could even buy it on .

Bubble bobble

1. Kristeen Young, 2007:

2. Lady Gaga, 2009:

3. Wow.

4. Actually, it’s probably coincidence. Young’s dress got a lot of exposure, comparatively, since she wore it on Letterman with Morrissey as well as on the tour. But they’re probably just both riffing on the same Spring ‘07 Hussein Chalayan creation.

(Update: it turned out Young was not. Maybe Gaga was, though.)

5. And their takes are quite different. DIY vs. sleekness; dress vs. accessory.

6. Still, considering where my admiration lies, seeing paeans go to Gaga is extremely exasperating.

This is how it goes. Your favorite singer is a cult act with a peculiar trash-glamor aesthetic. One of her costumes is particularly definitive; like most of what she makes, it has distorted proportions, original details, and looks like it was made at home with a glue gun over many painstaking hours. She’s obviously proud of it and wears it on television. You get used to describing her style by describing this dress, since it epitomizes both what she’s doing now and her earlier, more punkish phase of decking herself out in discarded bread bags and miscellaneous wires.

Then a star does the same dress. She does it quite differently, and the look reflects her image as a leotard-packing disco queen, but it’s similar enough that, to any neutral parties who see the photo, the idea belongs to her, and all previous uses (Young’s and Chalayan’s both) are re-cast in her light. This is a hazard of the fame system: it re-rewards achievements according to the status of one’s career. What a cult artist wears is always vulnerable. What a star wears is hers.

7.  I’m also annoyed at the general comment-response to posts about Gaga’s attire, though. It’s not that I like the woman; so long as our culture continues to give pretty youths whatever they want, there will be sentences like Gaga’s description of her Warholian Factory: “Everyone is under 26, and we do everything together.”

Under 26! They sound wonderful.

But out on the comment front, the ratio of pleasure to stale negativity (“Desperate to provoke Trying too hard Crazy Silly Doesn’t seem to understand how to be cool” – or, in the best-case scenario, “like Bjork”) was depressing. Sometimes a woman will wear a dress because it suits her aesthetic, not because it was engineered for maximum quiet flattery by two hundred clones of Christian Dior who live in a secret underground base. Especially if she is performing music on stage.

(Photo credits: Kristeen Young shot by Michael Alan Goldberg; Lady Gaga shot by unknown, photo from Flash via Jezebel.)

“Life’s Not Short, It’s Sooo Long.”

Photoshoppe: tallest things

Dramatic pop songwriting

Glasvegas, “Daddy’s Gone” (2008 ) (official video):

It’s astounding how sentimental this song is and how completely the band have got away with it. This is the great loophole of punklike music: put a boy in a motorcycle jacket, and he can be as maudlin as he likes with no public outcry.

I keep trying to call Glasvegas a punk band, not because of the jackets or because they seem particularly to identify as such, but because James Allan has a basic dignified sadness like the very first UK punk frontmen. I always thought Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer were basically sad performers at the start, even though they were also very witty and very aware of what they were up to, and the importance of replicating it exactly each night.

As with Robyn Hitchcock and the Decemberists, I think I will end up treasuring the tremendous liveness of this band a lot more than I treasure their album. It’s not because they lack irony, though.

KRISTEENYOUNG feat. Patrick Stump, “That’s What It Takes, Dear” (2009) (fan YouTubing)

This has been back in my mind because I found the lyrics on a fan board. (They’re down under the cut if you want them.)

I particularly liked the first line of Stump’s part (“Half sound, half drowned/the only movements toward the ground”), whose singsong meter is stretched into an alien shape by the melody. It seems to lurch close to bad drama, but it’s really almost clinical. (If you take the puns one way: “The subject’s living portion was entirely auditory. The subject’s only movements were downward.”) Specificity is so often the difference between good and bad drama – “Life’s been choked, so I broke three thousand throats” might be abstract, but it’s not vague; it’s an explanation of a symptom in a dream.

“I’ll be your statesman, your guru, your mobile home.”

As I mentioned last week, I have synesthesia; sound has inherent color to me, and abstract ideas inherent shapes. I’ve always been this way, and I only recently learned that it’s uncommon. Most people I know, when asked specific things (most often about how they visualize time), seem to reveal a touch of synesthetic thinking, so I think it’s more of a spectrum or style of thought than a distinct thing.

Kristeen Young’s voice is always quite complicated in its shading, and most of the tones are cool. The whole of Enemy is blue and purple. X is ice-blue. The track “Devil Girl” is a rich violet; “This Is the Dawn Of My D-Day” (2008), is pink, red and gold, and has a metallic gleam.

I’m writing about it today for no good reason, except that I love it; she doesn’t write a lot of straightforward love songs, and this one’s soaring giggle is pretty unique. It also has a really good central metaphor. Young has occasionally covered Hazel O’Connor, and I wonder if this song, in addition to love-as-allied-invasion, doesn’t reference O’Connor’s “D Days (Decadent Days);” no relation in tone or subject matter, but the association gives it a sense of outlawry.

The lyric is both strange and strict. It enforces internal rhymes across both verses, periodically dips up into a trilling “like…doo, doo, doo” which euphemizes nothing, and the imagery -mostly of a car/lover, the sequel to the television/lover of “My TV”- seems almost horrific until it snaps together.

Sleeve does what a sleeve should

The album’s hanging on till spring, but the cover is out, and I love it:

It’s a video in one frame. You can read all you’d like into the photo -pin-up coyness, regality, a clogged depression- but it never repeats itself from glance to glance; the classical quietness of the image hushes the heavily armed title, and her gaze meets yours.

And it’s beautiful design. The fonts match well and pick up the lines from the keyboard and sheet, and the touch of ice-blue makes the title rise. The photo layout is perfect, with every vertical and diagonal traveling directly to Young’s face. Her left foot rests firmly on the bottom of the frame; her right trails off into the dark.

And the disc design parodied the Sacajawea dollar.

This is really the first KRISTEENYOUNG sleeve I’ve loved, though The Orphans had an overcrowded, hell-yeah kind of charm which accurately reflects much of the interior.

Previous to that lies the Land of Sleeves Upon Which I Have No Opinion. I’m still trying to grasp Breasticles‘ footlocker theme. But this last one is perfect, looking precisely like the album sounds so far; loaded without being bludgeoning.