I had been waiting a while for it to happen, and happen it did last weekend. ‘Turn your music down,’ said my 11-year-old daughter from the next room.
I had been waiting a while for it to happen, and happen it did last weekend. ‘Turn your music down,’ said my 11-year-old daughter from the next room. ‘I’m trying to think.’ At last the generation gap has asserted itself. She does like some of my music, although she increasingly leans towards showtunes and has far more interest in classical music than I had at that age. ‘It’s too loud,’ she clarified.
I was playing the Pet Shop Boys’ latest album Yes (Parlophone), which is rather a dense production, courtesy of the naggingly successful production team Xenomania, the people who brought you Girls Aloud. Listen to their music on headphones and there’s simply too much to take in: trillions of guitars, keyboard lines, percussion, squeaky little noises, extra little tunes squeezed in between all the tunes underlying the main tune. Turn it down and it still sounds too loud, which seems to be the case with a lot of chart music nowadays. But that may just be my inner fogey talking. It occurs to me now that all music you dislike sounds too loud, unless it’s turned off altogether. There may be no silence in the world more pure and blissful than the silence created when someone switches off Radio 1.
But mainstream pop does seem to be going through a dense phase. There’s an awful lot going on in almost every record you hear. This may be a function of the available technology: if you have 72 tracks, or 144, or however many they have now, why not use them all? It may be that denser music sounds stronger on MP3 players, and certainly the fashion is now for music to be mixed ‘louder’ on CD than it was a few years ago. (Remastered versions of old favourite albums inevitably have more ‘oomph’ than earlier versions — and, since you ask, that’s a precisely calibrated technical term.) Maybe it’s just what sells. The Pet Shop Boys’ album, which sounds utterly of now, has been their biggest seller in years. I went back and played Actually and Introspective, and they both sound sparse by comparison. Most old music does. Johnnie Walker played ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’ by The Ramones on Sounds of the Seventies the other day: the first time I had heard it for years. It sounded almost genteel. Music we once thought of as ‘loud’, which offended our parents as our music now offends our children, doesn’t sound loud any longer. Time and familiarity have drawn its teeth.
My daughter was right, though. The density of much current music starts to feel restrictive after a while. We all need room to think and feel and respond to the music in our own way. We start to crave space in music. We return to favourite old records, and we seek out new music that gives us the space we need, for there is new music still doing this, although obviously you will never hear any of it on the radio. I am very taken at the moment by Down the Way (Flock), the new album by an Australian brother-and-sister duo called Angus and Julia Stone, whose slightly unprepossessing voices — he’s a bit of a mumbler, and she has listened to too many Björk records — distract you only briefly from their old-fashioned acoustic tunesmithery, sometimes redolent of Fleet Foxes, sometimes of late-1970s Fleetwood Mac. (‘Yellow Brick Road’ has some lovely pedal steel work and a good long guitar solo, and ‘Draw Your Swords’ a killer chorus.)
But the most spacious record of the summer, for me, has been Melody Gardot’s My One and Only Thrill (Verve). My word, what a grower this is. Gardot is an impossibly young (25) torch singer who started writing songs after a serious car accident that affected her mobility and made her hypersensitive to light and sound. Her music has to be recorded as quietly and sparsely as possible because that’s all she can tolerate. This second album has her glorious, supple voice mixed to the fore, with piano, orchestra and the most diffident rhythm section you have ever heard somewhere over there, a long way away. It’s jazzy, it’s bluesy, it’s even softly Brazilian in places, and it’s all about what’s not played. The title track, in particular, is mesmerising, epic in its quietness, and more powerful than a thousand albums by the Manic Street Preachers. My daughter loves it. Generation gap? What generation gap was that?
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