Black ants & space months

I was really big on Stereolab at first: loved the thick keyboard whooshes, the autobahn rhythms, the blend of disparate collector-geek influences into one purposeful sound. Was all over their first few records, saw them live a couple times and dug them, etc. And then I basically lost interest. In their struggle to differentiate one album from the next, they seemed to get lighter & lighter, more abstracted, fussier. (Plus I figured I’d heard enough ba-ba-ba.) There just didn’t seem to be much need to check out Latest Stereolab Album X instead of sticking with the ones I already had.

Recently, though, I watched a documentary about Robert Moog that included some live Stereolab footage, and that revived some of my long-ago excitement. Lately I’ve been digging out some of their more “recent” stuff (by which I mean from over the past decade or so), wondering how much I’ve missed out.

Still listening & still deciding – I think I’m a long way away from being a full-on convert or anything – but a couple tracks that have jumped out so far are the two openers on their 2001 record, Sound-Dust. “Black Ants” is a little snatch of a song, and it could easily & perhaps fairly be dismissed as sci-fi kitsch, but to me it has a genuinely unsettling vibe that you don’t hear much in Stereolab. “Space Moth” is a multiparter: I find the intro spindly & skippable and the middle section solid if unspectacular. But things really get going a little past the five-minute mark, when the bass discovers some swing and the horns chip in with some accents.

• Stereolab, “Black Ants in Sound-Dust” and “Space Moth” (buy Sound-Dust here)

Spill all over you

• The Field, “A Paw in the Face” (buy From Here We Go Sublime here)

I was late getting onto this album by The Field, aka Axel Willner, a man from Sweden. Had I been less late, the record would have been a strong contender for my top-of-the-year list a few weeks back.

Like a lot of electronica, this stuff hypnotizes via pattern repetition. But in this track especially, the patterns vary subtly from bar to bar, and the variations are almost predictable but just off-schedule enough to be tantalizing. Here and throughout the record, rapid successions of discrete notes, from registers higher and lower, blend into a gestalt that’s contemplative, even soothing. More than others of its ilk (said the dilettante), “A Paw in the Face” evokes Reich & Riley and still holds up itself.

• His Name Is Alive, “Write My Name in the Groove” (buy Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth here)

From a 2001 album that I just got into, in which the jazz- and gospel-loving art rockers tackle the contemporary R&B ballad. (Not just with this song – pretty much over the whole album, though there are also a couple of more oldtimey Billie Holiday homages.) I love this song, mostly because that lovely melody in the title lyric calls to mind TLC, which is a shortcut to my heart. The singer sells it well, and that’s some real nice drum work, too.

The album has a few other great things – including a torchy ballad called “Are We Still Married” – but you could argue that overall, it’s a little too dry & reverent for its own good.

Dreiserama

As you read “The Bulwark” (Doubleday), Theodore Dreiser’s posthumous novel, you go through all the familiar experience of first groaning over the commonplace characters and the shoddy clichés of the style, then gradually finding yourself won by the candor and humanity of the author, then finally being moved by a powerful dramatic pathos which Dreiser has somehow built up.

­– Edmund Wilson, as found in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s

I don’t know The Bulwark, but that pretty much captures the Dreiser I have read.

The olfactory sense is the sense that most strongly evokes memories of the past

• Sparks, “Perfume” (buy Hello Young Lovers here)

I don’t know much about Sparks, so when S started playing this one a lot – and as its genius quickly overcame my disinterest in the band – I assumed it was some gem from deep in their back catalogue, the era of “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” or something. Turns out it’s from a 2006 (!) album, but I don’t feel too eggfaced. Lyrically the song has a fashion motif, with brand-name-dropping to boot, but musically it sure doesn’t chase any current vogue. In this age of mountain-man beards or armored glint, Sparks come to the party in black tie.

The song’s cheerfully opportunistic, though – some rawk guitar here, a limpid music-roll piano line there, strings when needed, a spoken-word bridge when needed. (Well, a spoken-word bridge might never be needed, but it’s usually fun.) The disparate elements form a whole that’s perfectly seamless, and that’s because of two things: those impossibly debonair vocals and the simple, insistent forward motion of the rhythm section.

(I was also surprised to learn that the brothers in Sparks were L.A. boys originally, so deeply had I associated them with England. Clearly I have much to learn.)

I drank the wine they had left on my table

• The Saints, “Just Like Fire Would” (buy All Fools Day here)

In which a band previously most noted for punk anthems (and previously discussed in this space by Gary Butler) goes for a slightly more reflective sound. I always imagine Chris Bailey singing this one from the corner of a trashed hotel suite, the air stale & foul, empty bottles clanking as he stirs. As if he’s always wanted to be a classic rock & roller, a god of arenas, a wearer of big scarves & round sunglasses & tight pants, a champion of debauch. His bleary vocals are a little at odds with the arrangement’s more fussy touches, like the strings and the horn line, but still, it all sounds suitably weary & decadent. And yet uplifting, too.

Truth and consequences

Although my own reading tends to favour fiction over non-, one pet peeve I’ve always had is the notion – usually put forth by novelists – that made-up stories offer access to some kind of “greater truth,” one that’s missing from mere reportage. Sure, fiction can be more vivid, more compelling, more satisfying than real life – but to claim some inside track on “the truth” is nothing more than presumptuous self-flattery.

So I was gratified to read Mark Bowden’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on The Wire, the streets-of-Baltimore TV show created by former newspaper reporter David Simon. At one point, Bowden writes:

Every reporter knows the sensation of having a story “ruined” by some new and surprising piece of information. Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out. He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least not a complete one—because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality. As a film producer once told me, “It’s important not to let the facts get in the way of the truth.”

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

This is so well put and convincing that it almost seems as if Bowden is arguing that reading/writing fiction is flat-out morally inferior. I certainly don’t believe that, and I don’t think he’s trying to say it, either. But it is worth keeping in mind that although fiction offers us many wonderful things, it has no monopoly on insight into the world, and that the authority it claims is an illusion.

An illusion we accept willingly and eagerly, of course. I still think The Wire has all kinds of insight into the world and that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on a screen. The fifth and final season, which focuses on the newsroom of a Baltimore newspaper, kicks off tomorrow night, and since I have no cable and will be seeing it at some undefined future point, I’m writhing impatiently.