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When
I first met Jeremy Greenspan in 1995, he was the personification
of a pop cultural crisis. Shaped by Pop right down to the core
of his being, steeped in Pop history, it seemed that there was
only one thing he should be doing: making Pop records. But what
point was there continuing to make Pop music if everything had
already been done?
Jeremy temporarily fled Canada, looking for an escape from the
nostalgic impasse of North American Pop, and he found it, initially,
in the Predator-stalked cityscapes of Jungle, the UK underground's
"Sound of Now" at the time. While he was in the UK,
Jeremy also became acquainted with one of Jungle's distant precursors,
John Foxx's 1980 LP, Metamatic. The debut solo album from the
departed singer of Ultravox felt like a lost future, its sound
evoking not the swamps and deltas of blues and rock, but the
underpasses, high rise apartment blocks and plazas of the contemporary
urban environment.
Then, suddenly, Pop jolted itself out of nostalgic rewind, and
found Now again. In the US, Timbaland's hiccuping hip-hop infected
the mainstream with a cartoon cubism while, in the UK, Speed
Garage had mutated into a bizarrely utopian strain of Pop -
characterized by chirruping pitched-up vocals and deep digital
bass – called 2-step.
All of this filtered into the early recordings Jeremy made back
in Canada (with then-partner Johnny Dark) as Junior Boys. These
songs had the surprise of the inevitable. Who else would have
thought of blending rhythmic psychedelia and glacial Foxxoid
electronics with a late-night voice weakened by vulnerability
and longing? No-one: but the combination made an uncanny kind
of sense. The late Nick Kilroy thought so, and he released Junior
Boys' debut album, Last Exit, on his own label, KIN. By now,
Johnny Dark had left (his brilliant 'nu-step' EP is about to
be released by KIN), and Jeremy was assisted by his long-time
friend, producer Matt Didemus.
The obvious difference between So This is Goodbye and its predecessor
is the absence of the tricksy stop-start stutter beats on the
new record. If Junior Boys' inventiveness is no longer concentrated
on beats, that is a reflection as much of a decline of the surrounding
Pop context as it a sign of their newfound taste for rhythmic
classicism. In the period since the first LP, both hip hop and
British garage have taken a turn for the brutalist and Pop has
consequently been deprived of any modernizing force. Timbaland's
beat surrealism became water-treading repetition years ago,
displaced by the ultra-realist thuggish plod of corporate hip
hop and the ugly carnality of Crunk; 2-Step's 'feminine pressure'
has long since been crushed by the testosterone-saturated bluntness
of Grime. That skunk-fugged heaviness remains the antipodes
of the Junior Boys' cyberian, etherealized, plaintive physicality;
listening to the Junior Boys after hearing Grime or dubstep
is like walking out of a locker room thick with dope smoke out
onto a Caspar David Friedrich mountain: a lung-cleansing experience.
It is significant that those other ultra-heterosexual post-Garage
musics should have bred out the influence of House whereas Junior
Boys return to it so emphatically. House references are everywhere
on So This is Goodbye: the title track is gorgeously, oneirically
poised on a honeyed Mr. Fingers' plateau, and it is not only
the arpeggiated synth which drives many of the tracks that is
reminiscent of Jamie Principle. Yet, the album does not sound
either like House or like most previous attempts to synthesize
Pop with House. So This is Goodbye is like House if it had started
in the wilds of Canada rather the clubs of Chicago.
The removal of rhythmic tricksiness perhaps also indicates something
of the scale of Junior Boys' Pop ambitions, which are best seen
as the pioneering of a New MOR rather than another attempt at
New Pop. Junior Boys' songs have always had more in common with
a certain type of contemporary composer - Hall and Oates, Prefab
Sprout, The Blue Nile, Lindsay Buckingham. Modernist MOR is
the opposite of the discredited strategy of entryism: it doesn't
'conform to deform.' Rather, it locates the alien right in the
heart of the familiar. The problem with current Pop is not the
predominance of MOR, but the fact that MOR has been corrupted
by the wheedling whine of Indie authenticity. In any just world,
Junior Boys, not the drippy moroseness of James Blunt nor the
earthy earnestness of KT Tunstall, would be the globally dominant
MOR brand in 2006.
Ultimately, though, So This is Goodbye sounds more middle of
the tundra than middle of the road. It's as if Junior Boys'
journey into North America Endless has continued beyond the
late-night freeways of Last Exit. It's like the first LP's city
lights and Edward Hopper coffee bars have receded and we're
taken out, beyond even the small towns, into the depopulated
wildernesses of Canada's Northern Territories. Or rather, it's
as if those wildernesses have crept into the very marrow of
the record. In The Idea of North, Glenn Gould suggests that
the North's icy desolation has a special pull on the Canadian
imagination. You hear this on So This is Goodbye not in any
positive content so much as in the music's gaps and absences;
it's those gaps and absences that make the songs what they are.
Those crevices and grottoes seem to multiply as the album progresses.
The second half of the album (what I hear as the 'second side';
one of the most gratifying things about So This is Goodbye is
that it is structured like a classic Pop album, not an extras-clogged
CD) diffuses forward motion into trails of electro-cumulae.
The title track sets stately synths against the anti-climactic
urgency of Acid House's Forever Now: the effect like running
up a down escalator, frozen in an aching moment of transition.
"Like A Child" and "Caught In A Wave" immerse
the agitated drive of the LP's signature arpeggiated synth in
a vapour trail of opiated atmospherics.
The reading of Sinatra's 'When No One Cares' is the knot which
holds together all of So This is Goodbye, a clue to its modernist
MOR intentions (lines from the song - 'count souvenirs', 'like
a child' - provide the titles for other tracks, almost as if
the song is a puzzle the whole album is trying to solve). So
This is Goodbye is like a globalized update of late Sinatra,
its images of 'hotel lobbies,' 'shopping malls we'll never see
again' and 'homes for sale' sketching a world in a state of
permanent impermanence. The songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied
with leave-taking and change, fixated on doing things for the
first or the last time. 'So This is Goodbye' is not the title
track for nothing.
So This is Goodbye's songs bear much the same relation to high-energy
as the late Sinatra's bore to big band jazz: what was once a
communal, dance-oriented music has been hollowed out into a
cavernous, contemplative space for the most solitary of musings.
On Junior Boys' version of "When No One Cares," beats
are abandoned altogether, the track's 'endless night' lit only
by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by-flashlight pulse
of reverbed electronics.
Junior Boys have transformed the song from the lonely-crowd
melancholy of the original - Frank at the bar staring into his
whisky sour, happy couples partying obliviously behind him -
into a lament whispered in the wilderness, icy-breathed into
the black mirror indifference of a Great Lake at midnight. It
is as cosmically desolated as the Young Gods' version of "September
Song," as arctic-white as Miles Davis' Aura. "When
No One Cares" is one of my favourite Sinatra songs and
I must have first heard it twenty years ago, but with the Junior
Boys version - which makes the catatonic stasis of the original's
grief seem positively busy - it is as if I am hearing the words
for the first time.
So This Is Goodbye is a very travel sick record. It expresses
what we might call nomadalgia. Nomadalgia, the sickness of travel,
would be a complement to, not the opposite of, the sickness
for home, nostalgia. The album invokes a globalized world in
which we are all tourists - at home everywhere and nowhere,
constantly connected but always alone. |
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