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.
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.
Or you could even buy it on 
.
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.
Kristeen Young performing in Detroit
Out of costume, and in a rock venue that’s also a vintage store. The things I miss in life.
Stumph/”I don’t need your hug of war.”
“That’s What It Takes, Dear” by KRISTEENYOUNG and Patrick Stump has a crystalline, strange, attractive shape. Young has sometimes done verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus, but ”That’s What It Takes, Dear” -with its doubled-back structure, long discordant intro and a man calling a woman ”Queen of Shit” in Latin just before they launch into a double-speed argumentative cyclone which takes place in Young’s character’s mind- is toward the other end of her writing.
Her golden, accusatory warble combines a bit strangely with Stump’s warm and almost old-fashioned radio voice, but the contrast between the two is part of what gives the song its sense of inexplicable balance.
5 comments