Whoever it was that said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” clearly did not foresee the rise of the music blog, which, personified, would probably take a drag off a cigarette (clove) and drawl: shit, dude, you can write about anything. There are 1000+ word treatises on drone and columns dissecting sub-subgenres of subgenres of subgenres. Nothing’s untouchable. Forget it.

But the thing hardest to reach, from the critic’s perch on a step stool of qualifiers and similes, is that quality of simple goodness, the straight up heat generated by rubbing a few simple sounds together. In “Polka Dots,” RatTail harnesses this simplistic vitality and lets it run around the yard a few times. Neither epic nor over-thought, the track picks the pockets of contemporary trend-makers, pulling only the good stuff. Takes the garage, but leaves behind the gratuitous fuzz. Takes the indie rock hooks, drops the ingratiating need to please. This is what’s good about music, degloved. Bass, drums, and voice, not even a guitar, not even three minutes, but somehow the few elements at play configure themselves into the form of an instant, comfortable classic.

The indispensable element here is singer Jasmyn Burke’s voice, a deep and expressive instrument whose depth is amplified against the bare-bones arrangement. “I don’t love you,” she sings, and it’s nothing so simple as a taunt or lament. It’s a subtle and sardonic joke, embodied in the jerkily and colourfully animated video as a candy heart bearing the aforementioned un-love note. And the candy could represent the band itself – satisfying but not saccharine, simultaneously falling in with and fucking up expectations. Soulful and mocking: who says a song can’t be both?

“Polka Dots” is unreleased, but it’s too good to fall into anonymous irrelevance or released years from now in a collector’s edition “early unreleased material” album. Rumour has it the track will be on the track list of RatTail’s debut LP, coming out in the next year. For now, though, it’s just an untethered nugget of pleasure bobbing in the endless tide of new music being borne up on the shores of Myspace, too stubbornly buoyant to sink.

permanent link ::

⊙ :: Keyword Tags: Rattail

Bgudna means Björgvin Gudnason, who, if you can’t already tell, is from Iceland. He’s also spiritually lost at sea, projecting the gloom of being adrift in a dinghy into Safe Harbor, his debut EP. You’d think it would be easy to find a harbor in Iceland and easier still to not get lost in it: all you need to do is follow the Denmark Straight and aim for the island that looks like 2012. Provided you can live off a diet of phytoplankton and don’t feel the cold too much (or at all), you should make land in under a week. Alternately—and this is the worst case scenario—you don’t make land, float round in circles, and hear bleak things tolling in the fog. This is the Bgudna method of navigation, and one which young Captain Gudnason is remarkably adept at for someone who isn’t an Arctic fisherman.

Concluding his first release with the exact icy trickles that aren’t cooling his country’s volcanoes, “Reunited at Last” is Gudnason’s happy ending, and one whose survival-horror touches lose out to comparative exultation. Opening with the same kind of goblin vibe used by one-off Warp signing Brothomstates, a half-battery keyboard bobs up in the dark, its beat a quarter Phil Collins. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Grey pads undulate as something rolls over in the mist; something dormant but threatening to wake up as soon as that metronome breaks step. Maybe Bgudna’s referring to Iceland’s big volcano Katla, the one residents implored not to build a road round as its thousand-year boom date starts looming. And when this one explodes, it won’t just be ash: we’re talking glacier bursts, coastal bulge, 2012 x 10. If the third world war is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bow and arrow. If the April puffing of Eyjafjallajökull got a Sigur Rós soundtrack, 20120 belongs to Bgudna. Not Beverly Hills. Oh no.

permanent link ::

⊙ :: Keyword Tags: Bgudna, Iceland Volcano Spooky