Heard Here

Autechre
Confield

Somewhere in the diverse and confused world that is Electronica, amidst the heart-grinding pulse of club music and the amphetamine-crazy frenetics of Jungle, lies Autechre, neither brilliant enough to defy Genre nor too generic to be confined by it. There is no House or drum ‘n’ bass and only a few seconds of distorted Hip-hop surface here and there. You might try and tell me that Confield is a prime example of what is pretentiously referred to as Intelligent Dance Music, but then I’d challenge you to try and actually “dance” to it. I tried. It was funny.
Confield is what happens when you take the cheesy songs that come programmed into every Casio starter keyboard, splice them into millions of millisecond-long sound bits and then arrange them so as to balance every track on the tipping point between chaos and order, between song and randomly programmed sound. Indeed, chaos is the name of the game here. While each song is guided by a repetitive beat, the rhythm is all over the place. Explosions of noise are followed by mellow pitter-patters. Often the beat is just dying to stabilize itself into a danceable 4/4 meter. It trembles, quivers, dances around the downbeat, but respite comes to those who favor the more steady rhythms of Daft Punk.
The source of the sounds on this album are equally elusive. Is that a wooden stick sliding along a bike rack you hear, or just the programmed burps of a Korg drum machine? Autechre exceeds at disguising, warping and distorting signals and clips. Confield stands out as a good example of the immense sound-manipulation capabilities at humanity’s disposal these days.
Confield is unusually coherent. In fact, it is difficult to distinguish one song from the next. This kind of music would work well as a soundtrack to a film like Brazil or any movie with “apocalypse” in its title. The album is contemplative at times, angry at others and always dark. Melodies waft in and out, whisper with muted distorted horn breaths, tap our eardrums with their synthesized tinks, bleeps and dings. If melody is defined as something that you can sing along to, it is almost entirely absent here. What one hears is a dark ambience provided by slow synth washes and atonal, a-rhythmic keyboard leads.
There is a resemblance in these tracks to early electronic pioneers like John Cage (who to my knowledge was the first to electronically create random collages of spliced sound), which leaves me wondering what meaning there is in toying with such a style today. The resounding message I get from this music is that this is the future. Only the future could produce this stuff. Confield sounds like the music computers make. It sounds like entropy, techno-waste, futuristic schizophrenia. It sounds like the end of the world.
The result of all this and the biggest problem with Confield is that it isn’t very accessible. It’s as if Autechre has taken their synthesizers and their computers and locked themselves in a room, admitting only cyber-techno-inclined nihilists. They’ve isolated themselves from the rest of us, and frankly, I don’t like it. If you hate the mainstream so much, do what Basement Jaxx has done: join ‘em! Infiltrate their bars and clubs, convince them that your music is just everyday synth pop and then laugh really, really hard.

–Nathan Winkler-Rhoades

Kill Me Tomorrow
Kill Me Tomorrow

Pretty much every week at the Review, we receive free CDs in the mail from record companies who hope that we’ll review the album and give them free press for their (mostly unknown) acts. But rarely do we actually review the CD, since mostly the bands suck.
However, given that the bands are obscure enough that the music nerd staff of the Review has never heard of them, and that they certainly aren’t getting radio play, it does afford an interesting opportunity, that of listening to a CD with absolutely no preconceptions. Other than the sneaking suspicion that it’ll probably be awful.
So that was how I approached reviewing Kill Me Tomorrow’s eponymous album. The album cover is yellow with scrawled hand-drawn art on it, and apparently the band is on Silvergirl Records. That is all I knew when I popped the CD in.
How to describe their sound? Well, there’s lots of synthesizers, drum machines, looped beats and dissonant guitars. Lots of very dissonant guitars. The vocals are mumbled, slurred and screamed with what seems to be an affected British accent. Or maybe he’s making fun of people with severe head trauma, or has severe head trauma himself; tough to tell. Kill Me Tomorrow seems to have a mission to avoid at all costs anything approaching a melody or harmony in their music, a mission at which they succeed with astounding alacrity.
Kill Me Tomorrow is incredibly unsatisfying music. It’s there, but you’d rather have silence. One of the songs — “Traveling Salesman Dilemna (Telefön Remix)” — yeah, there are five songs that are remixes of songs from the same album — has what sounds like a mosquito buzzing in your ear, looped over and again. This is music that makes you anxious, and not in the good I-can’t-wait-to-hear-what’s-next way; more in the eye-twitching, ready to punch the fridge way. Do not buy this album.

–Jacob Kramer-Duffield

The New Kids on the Block
Greatest Hits

To pick just one of the New Kids on the Block’s albums for review would be a travesty. Since this will most likely be the only review of The New Kids in these pages, allow me to turn this review into a retrospective of sorts. To do this, the Greatest Hits album (released in 1999) seems an appropriate vehicle. The Greatest Hits CD has 14 tracks and spans the entire career of this wonderful band. We listen to baby-faced Joey McIntyre, strong and silent Jonathan Knight, willing heartthrob Jordan Knight, Boston thug Donnie Wahlberg (brother of Mark Wahlberg) and hulking Danny Wood grow up. Their voices deepen with every track. Granted, this is slightly disturbing, but what a joyous way to encapsulate the brilliant progression of the best boy band ever.
Here are some things about the New Kids on the Block that you probably don’t know. They were formed in 1985 by a man named Maurice Starr, who later only referred to himself as “The General” and took to wearing Michael Jackson-esque military ensembles. Starr carefully chose each member for their “personalities” and various talents. (For example, Danny Wood may not be able to sing, but he can lift weights, break-dance fairly well and provide deep-voiced sweet talk.)
Starr also produced and arranged all of the New Kids’ music. What this translates into is a sound reminiscent of earlier groups like The Stylistics, who they even cover on their eponymous first album. The New Kids on the Block’s version of the Stylistics’s “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind)” is a testimony to their talent. Sure it’s synthesized Motown. Sure it’s well-traveled terrain. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly beautiful song. This is true for most of their oeuvre.
Another factoid: The New Kids on the Block sing love songs. They sing PG-rated love songs. They sing to each and every one of us, as almost all of the songs are vague enough to be applicable in innumerable situations — remember “You Got It (The Right Stuff)”? What is “it?” What “stuff” are they talking about? Well, you know what? It doesn’t matter. The stuff to which they refer is the stuff that only you possess. They are, as you always secretly believed, singing straight to you. You are the one who Jordan will be loving forever. Joey is pleading for YOU not to go, girl. You can call it what you want, but Donnie calls it love.
Sure, they occasionally wander into the prerequisite God territory. They sing songs “for the children.” But we can forgive them these trespasses. These are “five bad brothers from the Bean Town land.” As proclaimed on their “Hangin’ Tough Live” video, the only fail-safe cure for a bad mood that I know, these were the hardest working boys in show business.
They couldn’t dance, they weren’t sexy and they wore the kind of clothes your mom would buy you at the mall. They were real boys, and an honest-to-goodness phenomenon. The New Kids on the Block sold some 60 million records. That must mean that I’m not the only one still nursing a pretty serious crush.

–Emma Straub