From ethical conundrums to radical synth-punk, MEANS explores exceptional grassroots music and cultural thought.
May is failing, its long days passing into a near endless summer, before immediately contradicting all hopes of heat with a sudden storm. It is a month in which there has finally been time – time for reflection, time for reassessing, and time for re-enlivening the MEANS blog.
Being terrible at structure and easily overwhelmed, I sought out a method by which I could easily support grassroots culture by offering regular writing and reviews, hoping to find a platform for doing so that was easy to use, and to which I could post such things without all of the minor defeats I have faced keeping up something as simple as a WordPress site.
Enter Substack. Having seen a couple of other reviewers using it, I decided to give it a go, and found it to be everything I needed – easy to use, a neat interface, and able to help me easily share articles directly to subscribers. I may have been late to the party, but I found it to be exactly my jam. After setting up a few fledgling posts I proudly shared them on social media – only for someone to immediately point me in the direction of this article.
User friendly as Substack is, Nazi’s and anti-trans rhetoric is decidedly not my jam. On further investigation, the situation is somewhat complex: the owners of Substack have publicly called out such things, and made it obvious they are not cool with it. On the other hand, they have argued that the platform is deliberately open to all types of thought, even if they disagree with it personally. Such openness is, as they see it, a far better way of dispelling factionalism and hate – ‘cancelling’ bad people imbues them with a form of power; letting them speak allows their ridiculous views to be seen for what they really are.
It’s the sort of bullshit argument I normally reject out of hand, but in the context of Substack – which bills itself as a largely curator-less platform where all voices are, in theory, equal – it does make some sense. Should terrible people be prevented from speaking entirely? And if so, who gets to decide what constitutes being terrible? I would vastly prefer it if Graham Linehan shut the fuck up, but do I really want to live in a world where someone actually has the power to make him?
The problem is not the usual faux-drama about being ‘canceled’ – a term usually used to lament some very famous twat who has been cruelly silenced and yet is nonetheless offered the front page of a national newspaper to complain about it. Rather, Substack presents itself as a platform where anyone can say anything – where good ideas can win out not because they come from the loudest or richest voices, but because they make the most sense.
I don’t say this with any certainty. I don’t know if Substack’s position really holds water. But equally, I don’t know if the alternative – a hierarchically imposed dictate on the content of public discourse – holds water either. As a magazine seeking to support grassroots artists – a calling that brings with it no monetary reward, and eats into the already limited time I have – tools like Substack are not just convenient, they are necessary. If it is hard to write and to share posts, the medium risks overtaking the message – that is, the process of publishing ends up taking up the time that was supposed to be for writing.
I don’t claim to have an answer. I don’t know if it is ok to use Substack, and I remain open to being convinced either way. For now, the MEANS Substack lives (alongside this site), a tentative, softly-held tool that enables me to get on with better, more important things. Things like rabbiting on about a bunch of awesome albums I’ve recently stumbled upon…
MEANS recommends
A room full of questions
by Gee Rams Ensemble
A surprisingly playful take on contemporary jazz and minimal classical music, A room full of questions pairs suitably erratic percussion with subtle pianos, distant phantom tones, and the odd rattle and click of some unseen mechanism at the fringes. The Gee Rams Ensemble showcase some wonderful diversity – one minute its all mean jazz drum solo, the next its organic drones, sweltering in ominous labour. Duck-like woodwinds come and go, impermanent traces of some new color that never lasts. Each new texture is defeated by the next, with the final minutes of the title track slipping into a timid, delicate horizon of gentle piano chords.
Where passivity has reigned, Year of the Limbs throws in mechanical percussion, like the repetitive din of a factory floor, a mesmerizing cycle of not-quite looping sounds that eventually falters into some high-pitched, wavering drones, the patter of wind or water or fire decorating its periphery. It’s good, measured stuff, borrowing from a range of compositional approaches without loosing its own unique voice.
Slight Collapse
by Ruheman
An intensely beautiful listen, Slight Collapse drifts lethargically between ambience and minimal classical music, tying together its rich sound world with hauntological hums and soft beds of resonant groans. It succeeds at being both delicate and considered, as if the outcome of a deeply mediative improvisation that nonetheless places every note, every sound, with precision.
Its a short affair, clocking in at only 20 minutes or so, but that’s no bad thing – the compositions are wistful but economic, awash with hazy artifacts that leave the whole affair submerged, a whisper heard from another room. Where early track like Pull Back the Veil offer more straightforward minimal-classical textures, Awake Again Always marries gentle guitars with alienesque, filtered voices – the longest track at 7 minutes, it proceeds at a glacial pace, so fragile it feels like it could break at any moment.
Whilst many albums can effectively wield a delay pedal, the charm here lies in the rather wonderful piano playing that accompanies such processing – the result being a work that stutters endlessly between beauty and decay, form and its inevitable collapse.
Gelap Gempita
by Sukatani
(Dugtrax)
A thousand points for the album cover alone, listening to Gela Gempita is like uncovering some rare gem on the forgotten beach of culture: an album that seems to filter the long-history of synth-rock and spit it back out in confusion. Lo-fi, snotty, and brazen, its runs through three-chord punk patterns with an aesthetic borrowed from Conrad Schnitzler’s more pop inspired works (if you haven’t heard Airport, Taxi, Bar, Hotel you haven’t lived), throwing in a healthy dose of bands like Man or Astroman? or the Polysics along the way.
With many tracks constructed of the most simple materials – descending melodies and riffs passed between the vocals and guitars, supported by classic punk beat – it’s somewhat amazing it manages to sound so distinctive, a feature born, perhaps of repetition. Sukatani seem entirely happy to sit with a single refrain for the majority of a track, allowing their work to just sit in a way that seems almost incongruous with the erraticism of their genre.
Admittedly, the slower, less synth-laden tracks suffer a little, but thankfully they are few and far between: most of the album is defined by driving synth bass and bouncy arpeggios that decorate the almost aggressively naive drum programming. It’s almost like the entire release is a vitriolic ode to the phrase ‘less is more’, undertaking the bare minimum required to forge a perfect synth-punk structure.
Downpour
by Charmer
(Counter Intuitive Records)
Those people not immediately sold on this specific brand of American Emo might not immediately find the gold buried with Charmer’s Downpour – an album that is both very, very EMO, and surprisingly good. I’ll admit to normally being put off by anything that leans too far into the trappings of its genre, but Downpour succeeds both by its strong songwriting and just enough unusual choices to lift it above the admittedly crowded street of its peers.
The vocals are solid, if predictable, but it is the mixture of anthemic guitars, the odd skate-punk drum pattern, and some awesome riffs that really life the proceedings. Drawing influence from the likes of Brand New and The Movielife, and blessed with crystalline production, Charmer live and die by their often inspired guitar-parts – an instrument that jumps between pop-punk and the sort of metal-adjacent punk popularized by Strung Out.
Sure, it’s not fancy and weird, but in its best moments its stellar stuff – from the melodic-hardcore of Linger to the indie-pop of Swords Dance, Downpour is one near-perfect execution after another. And if you’re still not sold, jump straight to the power-pop closer, Galick Gun, which channels a J.Robbins level of greatness.
MEANS 