Author"s note: Crap. After spending some time writing a review about Black Dice in the form of a journal entry, I decided to look up some reviews on Black Dice. Apparently, someone went back in time, stole my idea and wrote a review of Broken Ear Record in the form of a series of journal entries! Bastard! However, since I"m a better writer than that guy, I hold passive to negative opinions about Black Dice and I"m also too lazy to write another one, here it is anyway.
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Dear Journal,
Today, I wrote a review about an album called
Beaches and Canyons. It"s by a band called Black Dice. They"re on DFA Records which struck me as at least remotely odd, because opposed to much of DFA"s roster, they are excruciatingly undanceable. I mean, you couldn"t even remix them and dance to them. They would probably be the antithesis to dance music if it weren"t for the fact that we"ve already come to a group consensus that the exact opposite to dance music would probably something like Yanni or Vangelis. In their defense, though, it didn"t seem like Black Dice were hipless wonderbread-crackers or anything.
But I digress, Diary... er... Journal. I really struggled with it at first. What do you do with a band that wants to dig your eardrums out and paradiddle on "em with a rubber shlong? Confrontational, alienating, repulsive and challenging. Black Dice wanted to be all these things, self-consciously so. Sure, as I got acclimated, I thought to myself, "Hey, this really isn"t so bad;" it actually became palatable. But it was so... contrived. There"s really no way to make this kind of music with making it come off as a horribly contrived mess. That seemed to be part of the appeal. And it was rubbing off on me, journal. A thick, sludgy goo of staged pretension.
What does it all mean, Journal? That if you expose yourself to something long enough, you become invulnerable to its charms, idiosyncracies and quirks?
I felt so. After all, when I first strolled through
Beaches and Canyons, my initial reaction was that of utter contempt for every ostentatious nobody who thought that they could be considered a musician because John Cage, Iannis Xenakis or some Fluxus joker created an audience for their inexcusable offal. I"d heard it all before: the shades of ambient music, leanings vaguely electronic enough that they could be excused as ambient music, spastic noise explosions and wandering experimentalism, that, when combined, could roughly be defined as ambient noise. And then the tribal hammering. I can"t recall ever hearing it all at once, sure. But did I really want to?
"Seabird" opened the album up, sounding like a retarded child with rickets playing on pennywhistle. The bleeps twisted about like, hey, guess what? Seabirds! Meanwhile, dissonant electronic squirts passed like gas in the background alongside fairy twinkles and other queer kinds of stuff. And then the rattled percussion came in. It was like someone gave the retarded kid a hammer and a bongo. I cried, Journal. I cried.
The howling "Things"ll Never Be the Same" didn"t help. The band sought to establish the sound as a form of audio-terrorism knowing full and well the consequences, namely, the creation of stuff like "Big Drop." These were wild animals here, I thought to myself. They"re too primitive to know any better. I wanted to bring them to my house, wash them and feed them. Civilize them.
Even so, Journal,
Beaches and Canyons had its moments. Like the second half of "The Dream is Going Down" where the rhythm takes root below the band"s goofy vocalizing and equally cockamamie, yet boffo melodies. The melodies. They ranged from child-like, wandering and stupid to worldly elegiac. I"d be lying if I said I didn"t think the soaring flutes of "Endless Happiness" delivered. In fact, the whole song proved to be a fairly rousing success, even as it seemingly wandered out of its own structure, into a torrent of self-flagellation. Boffo. Boffo, I say.
Really, the one thing I couldn"t deny as I listened to Black Dice, listened again and again, to my own personal horror, were the ideas. A well-spout of ideas these boys were. And I felt like an uneducated yokel, because there I was, shooting volleys knowing full and well that my opinions were a little irrelevant, so late after the fact. I mean, how long ago was this released? Three or four years ago? That"s an eon in our sugar-high liquid squid society.
Another point: Black Dice seemed more notable than the average noise cucumber. I"d been privy to enough noise music to know that Black Dice"s output was more than mere chance. There was serious craft in Beaches and Canyons. But they still faked. I couldn"t help but imagine shitkicker grins on their face that said, "Who, me?" They were genuinely betrayed by their own sweat and workmanship. Is it possible to hate a band for being effortless efficacious? I wanted to say so, Journal.
"Not
my dice, jerkoff," that"s what I said to myself when I first heard about them. It stood true, big J. The music seemed so incredibly pointless in spite of all the unique and wonderful, dare I say, innovations; it would never, could never, be more than a curiosity. It ought be treated as much, I ended up convincing myself. Like an eight-nippled man in a freak show or David Spade, Black Dice ought to be caged up, fed twice and a day and maybe given a show on Comedy Central, allowed to commiserate with Animal Collective some more until Black Dice learn, like the Collective, that utility is a friend.
It seemed like a rude, anti-progressive thought then. It still does.
But I needed a reason to hate. I couldn"t find a real good one, beyond the fact that the music was aligned with the few and not the many. I hate to ask you another question, Journal, but is it fair to hate a band for being inaccessible? On a personal level, I"d think so. But as a reviewer, they told us we had to fake objectivity. We had to fake it, since the closest some stupid music junkie will ever get to objective reviewing of music is an acceptance of the broadest, most generally sanctified truths and opinions. And who the fuck cares about that?
Of course, I gave it four stars. The only time I"ll ever probably listen to it again will be if a take a Robitussin cocktail and totally want to trip out. But I didn't want to have the wrong opinion. That kind of stuff will ruin ya.
I guess that"s it, Journal. I hope the guys don"t read this.
Love,
Bob
