Satellite of like

I’ve been digging business trips a little more these days now that my company has gone with Avis as its sole rental car provider. You see, Avis puts satellite radio in every car. Even the teeny tiny ones I rent. And while satellite radio is a lot like cable in all its forms – occasional gold buried in mountains of sewage – the sheer number of choices means you are rarely without at least something to listen to, even if it’s the stentorian tones of the BBC World Service. Or this:

to the tune of which I treated Burlington, VT to a stunning display of air guitar mastery while still managing to navigate the Route 2/I-89 interchange.

On my most recent trip, I had to fly into JFK and drive to central Jersey, adding a good 45 minutes to my trip to the office – and a full hour and a half on the way back to the airport. With a little more time to experiment, I ventured outside of the safe news channels to the oft-rocky territory of the music channels. The one I eventually found, predictably, was Sirius XMU, the “college rock” station, and I decided to settle in for a while to try to assess the state of indie rock today, if there is such a thing, as well as the state of satellite radio’s take on said thing. Note that my relative isolation from radio and, well, other humans means I’m likely well behind the popular indie rock curve in calling out these songs. But this is what Sirius/XM corporate behemoths were playing for the kids.

First thing I got was

Short take: “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Fire? Can I call you Amusement? Uh, yeah, Kevin Shields is on line 1. He doesn’t sound happy.”

Longer take: apparently, the basic shoegazer instrumentation/prevailing sound has not changed in 18 years, but vocals have become significantly clearer, more refined, and more processed. Almost as if the singer were not actually gazing at his or her shoes.

And if you peel a layer deeper than the obvious polish on the vocals, I think you find a greater issue in the guitars. Simply put, you can bend tones in one direction all you want and create an echoing, static-ridden mess all you want. But there simply won’t ever be an exact imitation for what My Bloody Valentine accomplished. It wasn’t simply the bending of a note in an upward direction backed up by a miasma of noise that made My Bloody Valentine what it was (and to a lesser extent still is). It was a seeming randomization of the swells and dips, of the thunderous stampede of noise that came with the dissonance that emerged every time the notes veered off course. Every time the chords change on this song

you get between one and two-and-a-half seconds of stability before the guitars seem to have been pushed into the circular saw. Yet they retain the basic harmony that was there before. By simply sliding between tones without disrupting our peaceful listening existence any further, Amusement Parks on Fire fail to deliver on the promise of discomfort delivered back in ’91 by the band this guy so desperately longs to be. I suppose no one else has gotten there either. Still, this is a particularly glaring failure and an inauspicious first track. And wholly inappropriate to listen to while hurtling over the Goethals Bridge. What’s next?

06 South Philadelphia (Drug Days)

So I know nothing – NOTHING – about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah emerged nearly at the same time, I washed my hands of the entire disturbing band-name trend I was seeing. Yet this track really spoke to me.

Yeah, he has an engaging voice, the kind I really actually like to hear. I can’t say I’m a big fan of mere vocal talent. Unique voices, quirky voices, are the ones that win me over in the end. And that’s what Alec Ounsworth has. The jaunt of this song conjures the image of sun-washed vacant lots in the desolate areas by the airport in Philly – the place I usually get lost when trying to find my way to other, more populated and popular places in Philly. And a guy walking those lots with a herky-jerky motion that says “desperate street hustler.”

Yet there’s still a triumphant climax in the last verse after what appears to be a brilliant, meandering, ascending and descending harmonica-vocalization solo. Backed by horns, bare-bones instrumentation, and hardly-in-tune electric guitar interjections, Ounsworth creates a hambone folk anthem worthy of repeated replay and perhaps sing-along if you’re dedicated enough to figure out what he’s actually singing.

So that was better. Then it got a little dense:

This track lacks the warmth Phoenix projected throughout It’s Never Been Like That, and that was a trick I really respected – remarkable attention to arrangement detail with songs that still managed to draw you in with a friendly edge. This song and the album (the name of which, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, is almost as bad as if someone named their band Amusement Parks on Fire) have higher ambitions. Reviews, interviews, articles all mention the classical music (“art music”) theme, but how is that tied into this single or anything else on the album?

I don’t actually know. I think Phoenix has such a meticulous approach that you could say they are more influenced by art music than most bands. But I’m not sure what all that specifically has to do with Liszt or Mozart. In any case, neither the theme nor the song connected with me the way their previous work had.

Then I got this:

and it got me into the groove for a while. I love the imperfection, the wobbly drums in this. Unheard of for a dance track. I’ll note that sloppiness is a common theme running throughout my entries. Still, this track’s imperfections were that much more pronounced and delightful because of the very structured, synthesized harmonies for which they provided the backdrop. Not a stunner but not a bad way to suffer through Route 1. I know this band doesn’t often resemble this sort of pop confectionary, but I think maybe they should more often.

Finally, I got wind of this band

and I can say I feel utterly manipulated by this song. It has everything I would have hoped I’d been over by now. It’s so delicate, with its whistles and glockenspiel parts and Arcade Fire-esque anthemic choruses, and I can’t believe I’m such a sucker. But I loved it. Loved every second. I was powerless at the hands of The Middle East. Again, the imperfections that rattle and roil the edge of this tracks, in this case buffeted by the perfection achieved by an effortless rhythm section foundation, make me swoon.

So what can I say about the state of college radio? And Sirius/XM’s contribution to it? Very little except that I maybe feel a bit caught up. And this station is as mixed a bag as most stations are. I do hope to get a few nuggets I can use here and there from it during the occasional business trip. But I’m still much happier tuning into WMPG locally or KTRU from afar for a taste of true musical enlightenment.