projects that will have to happen later
I keep thinking about the sound of that Destroyer album we were discussing the other day, its supposed lite-jazz uncoolness. Something else occurs to me: There’s a reason I always wind up using the term new-wave to describe it. There was a period, in the later 80s and the very beginning of the 90s, when a lot of rock, indie, and new-wave types, mostly English ones, had grown up into making breezy, sophisticated pop — albums that would not be afraid of featuring a fretless bass or sax solo. A sort of upscale, blazer-wearing era of college rock, full of the sounds of 80s studio-pop ambition. The era when people like Morrissey, Ian McCulloch, and Peter Murphy started making solo albums. The kind of music Dan Bejar was presumably reading about if he was really flipping through Melody Maker in his late teenage years.
Alt-rock helped kill that stuff in the early 90s — being upscale and elaborate went pretty quickly out of fashion — and these days a lot of it really does sound like a particular dated or “uncool” era. Morrissey’s career is actually an amazing timeline on that front: In 1991, on Kill Uncle, he was singing stuff like this; by the next year, he had a whole muscular rock band behind him.
Kaputt would have fit pretty easily into that context. (It’s a context I liked, too; that’s what certain shows on my local college station sounded like when I was 13. The ones that played Pet Shop Boys a lot.) Hopefully I can steal some time after the holidays to make a mix of the things I’m thinking of. It’s interesting stuff! And it’s funny to me how easily we can slip into looking at 1991 as something like 1977, this big year zero that somehow marks the start of the modern world, with everything prior to that sounding more like bedrock or history.
I mention this mostly so that, if I never get around to making that mix and anyone is particularly interested in hearing it, they can bug me later.
Aztec Camera’s 1987 album, Love, would be a great example.
This is a half-formed thought, but perhaps what’s being discussed is the vector that goes from punk, to post-punk, to new pop, and then ultimately to what, “sophistipop”? Like new pop, but just the surface textures, without any of the ambition, post-modernist theory, or irony. Although I must say, I like a lot of it and it seems attractive now as an antidote to all the lo-fi almost-songs.
