Day 76: The Heavy – The House That Dirt Built

I have some catching up to do, so I will be doing three days of posts in succession, more brief than usual.

First up is The Heavy. This was a grower, for me, which is to say I initially hated it. The Heavy scrape the claw-marked bottom of the soul/funk/garage-rock revival barrel, leaving it bloody from their frantic grabbing. They do not have anything original to offer, and at least have the dignity to own up to it. Dignity might be the wrong word, rather they are admirably devoted to emulating their musical heroes, and effectively stitch together a patchwork abomination, a simulacrum of a bygone musical era whose corpse is decayed beyond the taste of even the most jaded necrophiliac.

The pieces are all in place: saucy horns, excellently produced drums, a singer who can ape the dilated veins and vocal chords of James Brown. The limbs sway, almost deriding human locomotion. It groans. A Kia Sorrento commercial spontaneously happens. There are obligatory Specials-influened ska/reggae tracks that manage to make the album’s first half look exciting in retrospect.

The end result is perfect music to play in the car while you’re trying to have an important (but not serious) conversation with someone and you need something to talk over. There are two tracks here that are really entertaining, “How You Like Me Now” and “Sixteen“, but they are just barely on the favorable side of forgettable. As far as I’m concerned this album is akin to medium-height people — it exists to establish the average, to define short people and tall people. Without music like this, there’d be nothing for extraordinary music to stand out from. So I’m grateful to it for that.

Day 69: Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control

Once upon a time I got paid to dance around like a kid with a snake in his sneaker while I made pizza for drunks who hated me. In that time I cultivated a taste for dance music, finding it to be music that is quite like, well, pizza, where even the most appalling microwaved K-Mart Food Court personal pan pizza (brandless) is still pizza, and deftly scratches a spot for which only that delectable edible platter of forcemeats, post-lactation, and tomato mash has the fingers for — goddamn I am hungry right now — the point being that in the crummiest example of the medium, unless they are some subversive artsy band who seek the dance of the mind and find beats crass and superfluous, it can still get your stupid hips colliding with objects and people.

Was dancing cool in the 90s? Fuck, I don’t think so. I’m gonna have to fall back on my usual “pre-conscious” excuse, reminding one that my only three really vivid memories of pop culture in the 90s are:

• Watching Ronin Warriors while seeing how fast I could wear out the batteries on the TV remote by pressing “mute” as rapidly as my thumb could manage
• Seeing the “Paranoid Android” video for the first time and my face presumably contorting into a grim rictus of fascination and horror
• That fucking baby

So while I can safely assume that people didn’t just stop dancing for a decade until The Rapture hit the scene, the pandemic spread of three-piece drum kits and dirty tube-driven bass amps that found new popularity in recording studios and led to insecure white kids learning how much fun it was to not be such fucking mopes for a goddamn minute. Good decade, guys. Anyway, the whole stripped-down garage rock aesthetic was a perfect place for this dance revival to take place, as it was just White Stripes enough to trick rhythmically-averse people into nodding in time to it. Gossip do little to expand on that formula (singer, drummer, guitarist, and a metronome somewhere ticking incessantly in the drummer’s worst nightmares) but, fortunately, don’t much have to. Beth Ditto has one of those voices that sounds forever out of place, always bigger than whatever band mates are trying not to ballast it. Across these ten hasty tracks, Ditto threatens to run away with the songs time and time again, and almost derails the whole thing as many times over. Her intense vocal stylings (her stirring gospel caterwauling on “Coal to Diamonds“, her slow-boil on “Listen Up!” and many others) thrill, and steal the show time and time again, for better or worse.

The unfortunate thing is that though her voice can carry the songs to new heights, she doesn’t have anything to offer to it. That is to say her lyrics are utterly hollow, a fact that thankfully her voice is acrobatic enough to disguise. No matter what she is or isn’t saying, though, the band absolutely kicks it out. Almost every song is compellingly danceable, though things do tend to lean more toward the rock side of things. The whole package is almost ashamed of its dance tendencies, not fully committed to the dance. Listening to the way they come out of the bridge in the title track (~3:14) and hearing them just unselfconsciously sweep-kicking the dance floor, I found myself wanting much, much more of this, just this perfect syncopated, joint-jerking dance funk, and much less of Ditto and the awkward attempts at headbanging. Who knows — if only she was less talented, if she had more of a reason to use her voice besides the fact that she has it, this imbalance might not exist.