Free At Last

If I’m bored with music, what should I listen to, silence? Impossible.

I’m bored with my music. There’s a lot in my library, but I can’t just put it on shuffle, because there are 183 T.Rex songs on there, and they are sure to come up. I don’t want that to happen, even though the reason I’ve kept them on there is so that I can eventually listen to them.

What sort of music might I be inclined to listen to? Electronica? Techno? Folk? Indie Pop? Pub Rock? Not Pub Rock. I want to hear beautiful voices, in the vein of Nick Cave, The Dresden Dolls, Sarah Blasko, The Fleet Foxes or Antony And The Johnsons. I got tired of electro because I kept listening to Daft Punk, La Roux or Pnau. There are only so many times you can listen to Grafton Primary, Cut Copy or even Metronomy.

There is of course more to electro than that, but some of the other bands, Fukkk Offf for instance, bore me faster by a factor of 10. Most of Fukkk Offf’s stuff is throwaway, but Bloodfuck is always good. Most of the other songs are ruined because that bitch sings in it. I hate it when some bitch ruins a song. It annoys me though, that the rest of the album is disregarded and one song held up to be good, all their hard work on the other songs just reduced to a singularity.

With techno, it’s not just something to dance to. There are compositions; there is so much to it, but you need an entry point; an Apparat. But you can’t just listen to something that techno-fags can talk about as though it’s a piece of art. I might like how a building looks because it references Russian Constructivism, but you don’t know or care what that is, so that doesn’t make it something good in itself.

I’m interested in anything Karen from the Knife is doing, because hearing her voice always brings me back to electro. The last sound from her was Fever Ray, and that wasn’t even considered good enough for the Hottest 100. On the other hand, the new Vampire Weekend songs were inexplicably considered adequate. The new MGMT is shit, but apparently Vampire Weekend are still good. I have refused to listen to either, for a reason called Autotune. Sorry, but you stop being sweet and innocent when you pull Cher and Kanye on us.

So I will come back to Antony And The Johnsons. One might think that a song called “Free At Last” might sound nice, you know, with freedom being nice. Kind of in the same way that I get good feelings from Cat Power’s song “Free”, from the album “You Are Free,” and the band name has cat in it. Antony’s nasal mistake has tainted my concept of freedom, so I think I’ll stick with silence.