The King is Dead and Wasting Light

Earlier this year, two of my favourite bands released new albums: The Decemberists, everyone’s favourite Oklahoma-based indie-folk band; and The Foo Fighters, Nirvana’s bastard hard rock child. The albums are called The King is Dead and Wasting Light, one is brilliant, the other is uninspiring. Both of them lean quite heavily on the artist’s previous work.

So let’s start with the brilliant one. The King is Dead is The Decemberists’ 6^th album. After the rather disappointingly absurd and over-the-top rock opera/musical sound track that was The Hazards of Love, their lasts album, released in 2009, The Decemberist have gone back to basics and released an album full of fun, folky, indie rock songs. Nothing extravagant, no songs over 6 minutes, just good, clean fun.

And it really is some outstanding fun. The first time I listened to this album, I was singing along, even though I had no idea what half the lyrics were. Fortunately I was alone at the time, so my dignity was left mostly intact. In any case, all ten song on the King is Dead are incredibly catchy and easy to listen to. Rox in the Box, Calamity Song and June Hymn in particular are really catchy.

The sound of the album is very indicative of The Decemberist’s early work. They musical and lyrical style is much more like their first two or three albums that their last two, which tend to have a slightly harder, more rocky sound. The King is Dead is incredibly folky and has the signature Decemberists nautical references. Some songs especially, like Down by the Water and All Rise would be particularly at home on Castaways and Cut-outs or Her Majesty, the Decemberists; the Decemberists’ first two albums.

Not all of the, however, would be at home on earlier albums. The King is Dead might borrow quite heavily from the early stylings of the Decemberists, but it is its own album with its own sound. It adds to what it borrows and develops it in a very natural and interesting way. Songs like Rox in the Box and This is Why we Fight are indicative of the sound of the albums. Lyrically pretty dark and actually quite rebellious, musically folky, but with some of the rock-and-roll feel of later Decemberists.

The Decemberists have clearly gone back to their roots with this album and it is almost the complete opposite of their previous album, which was very poorly received. But they’ve not just gone back to basics and written a rather bland album, they’ve really developed and explored their early sound and created a fantastic album. You all should go out and buy it, right now.

What you should not buy is Wasting Light by the Foo Fighters. Actually, that’s unfair. It’s not that bad, but there are better Foo Fighers’ albums. Wasting Light is their seventh studio album and is not unlike The King is Dead in that it borrow heavily from their previous work. However, while The Decemberists built on their previous work and made an album with its own unique sound, the Foo Fighters just made an album that sounds exactly like their previous work.

To be fair, the Foo Fighters never have been about innovation and exploration of their sound, they’ve always put making good rock songs ahead of making interesting ones and there are some excellent rock songs on this album. Rope and Walk are both fantastic songs and most of the album sounds pretty good. I wouldn’t have a problem with listening to any of the songs on their own, but the album doesn’t really feel like an album. It really feels like a collection of songs that didn’t make the cut for their earlier albums.

I suppose it is slightly unfair to hold the Foo Fighters up to standards to which they don’t really worry too much about. In terms of music, I value albums as works of art, rather than a way of presenting a collection of songs. An album is more than the sum of its parts; it needs to have a definitive sound that runs through the album. There doesn’t need to be a story per se, although the album is a decent story telling medium when used properly, it just need to hang together as a work of art, rather than a collection of works of art thrown together.

The thing is that the Foo Fighters have managed this with all their previous albums, in particular their more recent albums had a very definite sound to them. Wasting Light just feels like they’ve not really tried to create an album at all. It is little more than a collection of songs without anything hanging it together, so it’s not a terribly satisfying listen.

The main problem with the album, however, is not that it’s not really an album so to speak, but that it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. The songs are all most certainly Foo Fighters songs, but they’re nothing different from what we find on all the other Foo Fighters albums. This album doesn’t do anything new with the sound. The Decemberists took inspiration from their previous work and built on that sound to makes something new, The Foo Fighters just took their previous work and remade it.

I said at the start that you shouldn’t buy Wasting Light. That’s a little harsh. If you like Foo Fighters, then it’s a good Foo Fighters’ album. If you not really a fan, or don’t really know them too well, there are far more cohesive Foo Fighters’ albums you can get. There are some fantastic songs on this album, but it’s most certainly not Foos at their best.

So two albums, one that might have jumped into my top ten list (the song Rox in the Box most certainly has) and one that fits nicely into the Foos Discography without really being terribly inspiring. These albums are, in some ways, pretty similar. They both borrow heavily from the back catalogues of both bands (and why not when both back catalogues are so damn good) and both contain some fantastic music. The King is Dead is a much better album for two reasons: firstly it feels like an album, not a collection of songs. It coheres in a way that Wasting Light doesn’t. Secondly, it builds on the Dacemberists’ back catalogue and develops its own unique sound, whereas Wasting Light just repeats everything Foo Fighters have done to date without adding to it. These are, I suppose, the things that differentiate between a very good album and a mediocre one.

Feeling the Music

I mentioned in my review of Locked Out from the Inside and Only Revolutions at the start of the year, that I had been doing some thinking about what I think makes music good. This is linked with my distinct apathy towards the Arcade Fire, which I talked about a bit last June. That apathy has since extended (to varying extents) to Broken Social Scene and Pavement. You would think that, as big fan of indie music who even likes Neutral Milk Hotel, I would love these bands and any more like them that I’ve not discovered yet. I alluded to the reason why in June and I wanted expand on that a little more having given it a bit more thought. Today seemed as good a day as any given that nothing else has happened of note that I want to blog about this week.

The first thing that I feel I need to make clear is that I don’t dislike any of the bands I am going to talk about, or indeed any bands similar to them, in fact I do find their music quite pleasant. I just don’t love them in the same way that people think I should. When I first started listening to the Arcade Fire I thought I was missing something because they simply didn’t stand out in the same way I thought they should. The music didn’t grab me like music from Porcupine Tree or the Flaming Lips does. It took me a while to realise why the music was little more than quite pleasant but nothing special, in fact it took until I listened to You Forget it in People by Broken Social Scene.

One song on that album stood out for me; Anthems for a Seventeen Year-old Girl, the rest was ok, but nothing special. I soon realised that the reason it stood out was because it was packed full of emotion. Perhaps it was technically less interesting than the rest of the album, the lyrics are fairly simplistic and the overall message is pretty obvious, but that didn’t matter. For the first and only time the album made an emotional connection with me. I could feel the sense of loss and of regret, it was heart wrenching and I realised what had been missing from the rest of the album and from most of what I’d listened to from the Arcade Fire. It was what had been there in the Flaming Lips and Porcupine Tree. It’s what made bands like Nine Black Alps and Biffy Clyro stand out to me. Emotion.

Art is all about creating an emotional connection between the audience and the artist through the art. Good art is deeply moving because the emotions that the artist is pouring into the art are effectively expressed. Ultimately this is more important than creating complex, intellectually interesting art; complexity has to be aimed at creating deeper, more complex emotions, it is not an end in itself. A simple painting of a sunset which inspires awe is more effective than a complicated, technically brilliant painting which loses any emotion in the complexity.

This inevitably applies to music; a good song is one which invokes strong feeling in the listener. The purpose of a piece of music is to establish that same link between the artist and the listener through the music, so when I listen to the Arcade Fire and simply shrug apathetically I know that the music has failed. There is no emotional connection, there is no passion, and there is no reason to keep listening. By contrast I can listen to the Decembrists (a band that I have not mentioned yet, but rank alongside Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips as one of my favourite bands) and feeling the emotions that are surging through the songs. I can listen to the Flaming Lips and get feel buoyed by the sheer joy of their music. The more I listen and the more I pay attention to the complexities of the song, the stronger the emotional connection.

When I listen to a new band I look for this emotional connection. I try to experience the emotions of the artists through the music. I don’t look for the technical quality or the lyrical complexity because that’s meaningless without the emotional connection being established. The kind of indie music which the Arcade Fire exemplifies is simply trying too hard. They over-think the music and end up sounding aloof and disconnected. The music might be technically brilliant, but it’s all for nothing because I simply could not care less. No emotional connection has been established, so all the technical brilliance is all for nothing.

Of course some of the song from the Arcade Fire and other such bands do have emotion and I can connect to them, it’s just that for the most part this is severely lacking. I am making very general statements and there are exceptions. It would also be a mistake to say that this lack of emotion makes these bands bad. I don’t dislike them; I just think they slightly miss the point.

Art is an expression of emotion, once you let technicalities get in the way of that expression; you have missed the point of what you are doing. In trying to be all clever and artsy, this particular brand of indie music has forgotten what art is. It doesn’t necessarily make for bad music, but it does make for bad art.