Saturday, November 13, 2004
 
Teedra Moses – Complex Simplicity
The ever-great Matt Cibula brought up on ILX how odd and cool it was that Teedra’s album had not one but two songs which swiped the theme from Prince’s 1999; odd and cool because celebrating the end of the world is not one of current R&B’s thematic specialties, except perhaps in the most metaphorical sense (and even songs which deny the capacity of existence to continue after relationship breakdown a la “I Have Nothing” or “Without You” are thinner on the ground than they used to be), so Teedra writing two songs on the topic seems significant, like she’s been thinking about this a lot.

You should read Matt on Teedra here because he’s totally spot on. Otherwise, the two main things you need to know about Teedra by way of introduction are that Complex Simplicity is my second favourite album of the year (if you trust my taste) and that she co-wrote Christina Milian’s “Dip It Low” (if you don’t). Had Teedra saved “Dip It Low” for herself she might be huge by now, but surprisingly Complex Simplicity almost entirely avoids that brand of post-Baby Boy blood rush lasciviousness; instead the album mostly harks back to various moments in the past – the frosty funk of late eighties & early nineties R&B, the sweet soul of Mary J Blige-style swingbeat, the luminescent sparkles of Aaliyah’s “One In A Million”.

If there’s a strategy at work here it’s hard to pin down: as per Tweet, I suspect that the general avoidance of booty won’t translate into acceptance within the sniffy, narrowly defined nu-soul cliques, and her evocation of the past is too erratic and subtle to pick up much of a nostalgia-based following. Those looking for dancefloor grooves (or fidgety sci-fi production that sits well next to their indietronica records) will pass on quickly, confused or underwhelmed. Whether this is a tactical error on the part of Teedra and her people remains to be seen; if Complex Simplicity turns out to be a success I might try to retrospectively sneak some line into this piece about how she was carving out some new target market. But you will remember that at the time I genuinely had no clue.

And while I’m puzzling it out, I cue up the title track for the nth time. Not content with mirroring Prince’s subject matter, Teedra and producer Pouli Poul see fit to throw in a resonant echoey snare hit at the end of each bar, just to drive home the point that, yes, this is “1999” redux. That’s about the only fancy production trick here, though: Poul provides a bittersweet arrangement of shimmering chords straight from the early nineties, but you can tell that no-one involved wants to get in the way of Teedra’s vocals. “Everybody’s worried ‘bout tomorrow, will they see tomorrow, I’m just trying to get mine off today. Mama said tomorrow ain’t promised, so I’m trying to live like it’s my very last day.”

It’s difficult to adequately stress just how perfectly Teedra delivers these lines. Her vocals, and those that follow it – like a less ragged, Southern-tinged Amerie – effortlessly convey multiple emotions and evocations at once: confidence, but experience that shadows and endangers it; disappointment, but a slight tinge of self-deprecating, no-nonsense realism that incongruously ends up conveying a sort of joy. “You can’t spend your life being in fear of all that may be. You gotta pass on, you gotta be free, you gotta breathe. Inhale, exhale, c’mon!” And then the most glorious chorus in an age: “Bounce, oh, with me tonight. Get low with me tonight.” The backing music – fanfare midi strings and horns, fireworks of electronic sparkles, wistful synthesisers, rippling glockenspiels somewhere at the back – brutally tearjerking like nothing since Basement Jaxx’s “All I Know”, Teedra the core of solidity that refuses to break down with it, preferring to dance to Lil Jon and neck a glass of champagne.

The creative challenge for any female commercial R&B artist is to carve out a sense of distinctive identity in the arguably anorexic space left once all the formal dictates of the genre have been satisfied. I think most of them succeed with startling ease – I tried to draw up a list of truly generic female R&B vocalists on ILM recently and could only a manage a bare handful – which is testament either to their talent, the deceptively roomy confines of commercial R&B or my own tolerance for endless variations on the template. Some deviate more radically or obviously than others: Fantasia from American Idol 3 tactically deploys a seemingly uncontrolled Macy Gray-style rasp to inject a semblance of hidden meaning and personal resonance into her songs (my love of “I Believe” corresponded exactly to the sense of expansion and depth which Fantasia’s performance achieved relative to the decidedly lesser execution by rival finalist Diana).

Teedra’s vocal tactics are subtler and harder to follow, slipping through the cracks between formula and idiosyncracy, but the end result of her broad-but-delicate, unpretentious-but-poetic Southern singing is a sense of profound generosity. At its best, Complex Simplicity is enveloping and nurturing, a seduction born not of exhibitionism but of an irresistible openness, with songs like heat-seeking missiles lodging themselves in my head as a protective barrier from a life considerably more exciting and emotionally fraught than the one I actually lead. So many songs here provoke with consummate ease this desire to hide from the imagined slings and arrows of the world – the weak-kneed reverie of “Backstroke”, the quiet crystalline strength of “For A Lifetime”; the calm acceptance of “Last Day” (“1999” part three). I chose to talk about the title track in particular because I’ve returned to it so frequently, so needily in the last few weeks. I’m hoping to share its restorative power.



Wednesday, November 10, 2004
 
Streaks - The Feeling (Post Rave Dub)
House is a feeling, but which one? This ace track has a swarm of different divas, male and female, assuring me with drunkenly desirous whispers that “it’s just a feeling”, trying unsuccessfully to contain, limit, laugh away the inescapable plurality of emotions the groove inspires. For such a familiar concoction, “The Feeling (Post Rave Dub)” does a remarkable job at astonishing me with its covalent internal relationships of longing and loss, communion and alienation. To be lost inside a groove is to know intimately a sort of amnesia: remembering nothing, and hence hearing everything for the first time. To be found inside a groove is to experience a bodily premonition, recognising the groove before it emerges from the speakers such that when the beat arrives your feet are already in place, pulsing with the anticipation of coming home. The best dance music is that which evokes both experiences at once: “house is a feeling”, or rather a chain of feelings, of interconnected but never identical sensations we recognise but don’t remember.

Go past this waffly but heartfelt pseudo-poetry and you hear a collection of neat sonic tricks at work. Woozy Isolee chords in a minor key. A perfect, gloriously loose beat swivelling and swishing disturbingly like satin rustling against bare hips. Spare spiderwebs of Chic guitar tracing out narratives of dancefloor romance. And slow, squelchy bass riffs oozing with a delicate lassitude from every corner, such that this sounds much slower than it is, engorged with its own dubbed-out maximalism and light-headed from all that blood. Lifting away this delicious rubble, the track hits the deepest point in its topography, those eerie atmospheric synths again, around and through which a moist garage rhythm is dovetailing voluptuously, the whole track shivering with tentative cracks of the beat from which the entire arrangement recoils.

And out of this no man’s land arrives a surprisingly natural live-sounding funk bassline, tugging you gently back home, and that comforting line again, “It’s just a feeling”. Comfort is the great strength and weakness of deep house, New York garage, all those sophisticated American brands of house that are so easy to dismiss as trad and boring. Comfort becomes a weakness because it so often arrives as a meaningless surplus – exactly what is an album’s worth of opulently reassuring Naked Music tracks saving me from? The secret to this track’s appeal is that it fills in the other half of the equation. Not with danger – we’re hardly talking Green Velvet here – but rather with a profound and slightly unnerving openness, a willingness to look outside its grooves and survey the sonic opportunities, to allow for the possibility that one day we might have soulful mainstream house in which anything might happen.

(if ur interested, you can hear this on Mei Lwun’s Uno Records, which has found itself in the unlikely position of being probably my favourite album of the year)



Tuesday, November 09, 2004
 
Vanessa Carlton – White Houses
I’ve read a couple of people dismiss this as little more than a knock-off of "A Thousand Miles". This is essentially spot-on, although I think such criticisms overlook the fact that "A Thousand Miles" was one of those one in a million pop songs that feels like it’s been beamed in from another dimension, totally distinctive for all its conservative pop classicism. For Vanessa to manage to make something even half as good in the same mould would be quite an achievement. As it is, I possibly enjoy "White Houses" even more than its predecessor (it’s early days though).

It occurred to me that in so many ways this is like the hitherto undiscovered middle ground between "Silent All These Years" and "Summer of ’69". Trebly piano and breathy descending verses meet a stirring rock backbeat and heart-thumpingly huge chorus. A life lived through myths versus the mythic life lived on our behalf. Vanessa synthesises this choice between the warmth of commonality and the allure of solipsism into sweeping every-girl neurosis. Like "Summer of ’69", "White Houses" has just the right amount of specificity to stand in for any sepia-toned tale of adolescence: housesharing with pretty-eyed boys, games of spin the bottle, sleeping on the floor, girls who are less smart but much prettier, losing your virginity on the leather seat of a car – the usual. None of these experiences are universal and yet they have the feel of universality, and "White Houses" pretty openly wants to make a statement about adolescence at large.

Nostalgic pop by definition plays on the attraction of the inaccessible: Bryan is temporally removed from his own former small-scale innocence, Tori emotionally removed from any capacity to accept and live in the here and now. I’m not sure if I can trust Vanessa’s attempt to combine these two types of distance: there’s a sense of both presence and absence to "White Houses", with Vanessa’s character constructed as both participant and observer, an angel perched on her own shoulder calmly recounting, analysing and judging her own actions, and maybe hating herself for doing so, and yet the song still revels in the unmediated experience that Bryan extols.

Of course this has something to do with the subject matter (at heart, "White Houses" is a morality tale, albeit one whose sentiment is familiar and agreeable), but I wonder if it’s now impossible to perform stories of adolescence, in any medium, without this insidious tension present. Films, books and songs no longer merely construct the myths of teenage years, but now are forced to tell the story of that construction, and every character is faced with the task of sifting through the cultural detritus to find a simulacrum they can trust – we might call this Dawson’s Dilemma. What we end up with is a process of selection: Vanessa demolishes one myth (those were the best days of my life) in order to strengthen another (adolescence is painful but also life-changing and character-building). But what is never in dispute is the mystical quality of adolescence, and this process of selection cannot override the inevitability of myth’s reinstatement, the ongoing need to suspend our scepticism and allow the coming of age story to seduce us. Vanessa doesn’t really speak for me, and probably doesn’t speak for you either, but I still want to cheer as she drives off into the sunset, propelled by a cavalcade of strings.



 

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