Planningtorock -- 'W' (2011)

Okay so I figured I'd need a new thread at this point. Also because it's a place for Abbott, Telephone Thing, naus and whoever else realizes what is going on to celebrate this, which I'm currently looking forward to more than anything else over the next couple of months when it comes to music. But to make it clear so far:

http://vimeo.com/19714047

http://vimeo.com/23062399

Out in two weeks' time. DJP will yet join us at some point.

Her first album is one of my faves of the past couple years! "The Breaks" sounds a little darker than anything of Have It All (iirc) so naturally that turns my crank.

Like her new look, too – it's so Deep Space Nine.

Haha THAT'S what it was reminding me of.

huh

i am normally on the same page wrt stuff like this and i really like the music but good god that voice is just destroying it for me

i am sure you were all interested in my super important opinions on this matter

The vocals between the two tracks are pretty different; have you heard both yet? (The second one is far more 'normal' sounding.)

i kinda hate the vocals on both. music reminds me of everything i love about electro ulver so i would really like to like this. maybe ill try to find it not on vimeo because my mac and vimeo do not get along, lots of stops and starts annoying me

Odd, runs smoothly on my Mac here. (Am using Chrome, might that be a difference?)

yeah im on ie which is crap 99% of the time so i should prob change that anyway

oh hahaha i mean safari, but same difference really

The Vimeo vids are HD by default, so they may run smoother if you turn that off.

press play, press pause, let the whole song buffer, press play

nah its working fine for me now. sorry dudes, This : me : : placebo : dan

Looks and sounds great

Yeah this is great

Like this as well, hadn't heard it before. Especially like The Breaks, it sounds incredibly spacious.

Can't wait to hear these in the context of the album too.

As much as I enjoy hearing "Changes" as a standalone track, I enjoyed "Have It All" as an album so much more. The lyrics seem fragmented, make up this larger narrative, etc.
What I mean is, I enjoy both these songs (and videos) but I think the album complete is gonna be "it"

Also Janine's voice! She reminds me of Annie Lennox

There's a clear connection to the Knife's output I feel? Both sound/production wise (less glam/orchestral than Have It All, more spacious electronica) as well as visual. Maybe I'm projecting too much cross pollination into the collab on Tomorrow, In a Year though..

My feeling re: "sounds like The Knife" is that The Knife utilize Nord synths so heavily-- and push their limits so well-- that any other electronic musician who uses a Nord will inevitably sound like them.

i thought of the knife too. even though i don't know much knife. still sounded kinda knife-y to me. in a good way. voice reminded me of whatsherface from the glove! on the one track. can't remember the glove woman's name.

(Jeanette) Landray

and not like in a dead ringer way. just reminded me of the glove for a minute. and maybe cindytalk dude too. okay, 80's goth people. i guess. i like both of these tracks though. would definitely like to hear the whole album. and i hate everything new.

she should cover my fave baroque bordello song from 1983. (from the 12 inch produced by LOL! tolhurst)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEA-287tUnA&feature=related

I hear The Glove in it
Love The Glove

I do like this a lot, and it makes me think I should check out "Have It All", which I avoided at the time because, well, I saw her live in the mid 00s and wasn't that impressed - but that could have just been situational because it was an odd night, and also she played with Kevin Blechdom who was so amazing that anyone else who played would have seemed to pale in comparison.

But I did enjoy these two tracks, and will definitely look forward to the album.

But the main reason I'm posting is because of that inevitable "everything sounds like The Knife these days..." criticism which is getting trotted out a lot on ILX these days, about things I like and 140 characters isn't really enough to address this grumble.

I think Owen has a point that certain technology leads to certain sounds (see also the fairly recent glut of Microkorg indie bands) and I conceded that there's a tendency, the moment one hears icy round sine tones, arpeggios and pitch-shifted gender-blurred vocals to just go "ah, The Knife."

Some comparisons are going to be inevitable because, duh, The Knife's last album *sounded* like PTR because they collaborated. (Though these 2 tracks sound more like Fever Ray than The Knife.) But I don't think it's just the technology, I think it's a deliberate mood and atmosphere - that tone of cold, glacial, dark, gothic (but not necessarily Goth) - there's an elegiac, stately atmosphere, a kind of theatricality which is very formal and mannered and controlled - almost the opposite of the "quirky girl" aesthetic which has been so dominant (and irritating) in synth-pop during recent years. There's something operatic and almost Kabuki-esque both in sound and presentation which is intriguing.

Also, the Cardassian chic look = A++

Eurythmics comparisons also seem apt, but now I'm going to have to use up my last hour of Spotify listening to The Glove again because I've no idea where that album got to, I might even have had it on tape originally.

I think "everything sounds like the Knife these days" is a fairly lazy line to take especially given that so much of The Knife's sound is defined by Karin's vocals, rather than any pariticular synth sound. Saying "it sounds like Silent Shout" is a slightly different line to take.

Did a massive eyeroll the other week when someone compared the new Gang Gang Dance to The Knife, although there are a few tracks on the Rainbow Arabia album where the singer really does sound like she's trying to sound as much like Karin as possible.

Really looking forward to hearing this anyway.

New GGD doesn't sound like The Knife, it sounds like BlondeRedhead which makes me even happier.

But I'm thinking more of stuff that does occupy a similar landscape to The Knife, like, I dunno... We Love or something?

It reminds me of, back in the 80s, there was this affected, slightly strained squeaky yelping "blue-eyed soul gone wrong" voice that *everyone* in the early 80s from Paul Weller to OMD to Thompson Twins to even Rick Astley affected for a while. And though the most prominent person I remember doing it was probably Robert Smith (or rather, he did it the *wrongest*) I think it was just something that was floating around and stylist at the time - like I can't accuse any of them of directly ripping off anyone, it was just a thing.

I don't think that people are consciously ripping off Karin's voice, which is quite distinctive, so much as people hear "distinctive, unconventional female vocals" (of a quality that had been quite rare until then) and she is the most prominent example. (OR tt could also just be that Karin has joined the hallowed ranks of "There can be only one female comparison at any given time" that used to be occupied by Kate Bush, Bjork or Tori Amos?)

But this whole discussion is rather moot because it's not PtR's voice that reminds me but rather the atmosphere.

OR tt could also just be that Karin has joined the hallowed ranks of "There can be only one female comparison at any given time" that used to be occupied by Kate Bush, Bjork or Tori Amos?)

Hang on I thought this was supposed to be the year when everyone was being compared to PJ Harvey?

Drowned In Sound were predictably late getting that memo. I mean, seriously, you think I'm kidding? Read this blurb, re: Gang Gang Dance:

http://drownedinsound.com/news/4142572-stream--gang-gang-dances-new-album-eye-contact

It swirls somewhere between Kate Bush/Bjork/The Knife and a synthier M.I.A./J. Dilla/Kanye, rummaging as much in the pastoral wardrobe as it does in the draw full of garish party outfits.

Because they can only name 3 female vocalists?

But, I mean, even PJ has been singing in that high, ethereal vocal range. Is *she* trying to sound like Karin?

(This should really be another thread, eh, because I don't want to get off topic of how much I like these PtR tracks.)

Ha, my first thought when hearing these tracks was "Wow there was way more Planningtorock in TIAY than I realized"

so i guess i should check this out even though pretty much 100% of planningtorock's prior material had left me unmoved?

matt and k8 otm re: lazy knife comparisons - see them so much in so many baffling places

Listen to The Breaks (I think the second vid?) - really comes down to how you felt about the less minimal / more operatic bits of TIAY. Big orchestral stabs and theatrical sweeps, with deep beats in an echo chamber, that kind of thing.

Preview the LP is up - http://hypem.com/#!/artist/Planningtorock

The Breaks shining as the highlight for me.

Wow. If Going Wrong hadn't convinced me, Living It Out pushed me from "do want" to "MUST HAVE WHY ISN'T IT OUT NOW?"

Do wish she'd lay off the saxophones a bit, though. Once in a while they're a good sound, deep tonal blaring, but there's just a few too many of them for my comfort.

listening now, this is excellent three tracks in

streaming the album now and really feeling it. also, love the sax (but i play it so biased).

as far as the knife comparisons go: i feel the knife have become such an ambassador to arty electronic music for people not necessarily interested in similar stuff that it becomes an easy point of reference for critics whose sphere of music is contained in a more popular sphere. the comparison to the knife seems to make sense because of the recent collaboration imo, but i don't think it holds as much here. this sounds much more fever ray as Analords mentioned above.

wrt the "silent shout" sound. i think that a lot of it is karin's vocals, but tbh they used fairly unadulterated 909 sounds throughout the album and the synth sounds are not all that varied. there is a lot of technical cohesion that contributes to a specific sound on that album.

anyway, i'm also feelin a little "Mister Heartbreak" laurie anderson sound

"doorway" and "the breaks" are really the two most Fever Ray-like tracks on this thing, the rest is a whole lot more eclectic than those seemed to indicate on first listen. fantastic album, yes.

The One is nothing short of stunning. This is probably going to be my favourite album of the year.

Favourite of mine is Milky Blau... love her sleepy delivery, the Weill changes

anyone posted this interview yet?

http://www.dummymag.com/features/2011/05/23/planningtorock-interview

Damn good find, thanks!

yup, fantastic interview, really in depth everyone check it out!

I like this quite a bit - it's like a discofied Fever Ray. And yeah, more like Fever Ray than The Knife, it's the vocal effects really.

It's not nearly as *dark* as Fever Ray. Also not nearly as claustrophobic. In fact, really quite expansive in its own lovely strange way.

Fever Ray is the sound of someone not leaving their basement for six months. W goes out at night and wanders through twisted streets by the light of the moon. And sometimes goes into discos and music halls and late night cafes lit in garish post-impressionist colours.

I don't really get "dark" from Fever Ray without taking the videos into account, and even there it's only "If I Had A Heart"

Fever Ray is dark as fuck! But in a "trapped inside your own skull" kind of way rather than a cartoonish gore kind of way.

I'm not saying other people don't react to it that way; just saying I don't. Most of that album hits me as "stately melancholy".

Melancholy isn't dark? I thought melancholy was pretty much the definition of dark. But we might be talking about different senses of the emotion "dark".

Probably. I don't think of melancholy as a particularly intense emotion; if pressed to assign a color value to it, I would think of it as gray.

Melancholy is like a deep, dark, rich plum. Pretty, but still dark.

Anyway, this album isn't that colour. It's more like maybe chartreuse.

Melancholy can be pretty low-key as well, doesn't have to be intense.

This isn't very melancholy at all really, trying to get a grip on it still but its sort of... camp?

These guys have one of those off-putting names that make me want to stay far, far away ("you see, we were planning to rock, but, well, you know, time got away from us... we just never really got around to it") but seeing the enthusiasm by key ilxors makes me second guess that approach.

I fully understand this sentiment. (aka Gang Gang Dance Syndrome)

^ still wondering if Ned ended up liking GGD or not

One day I'll sit down with the album and find out!

Meantime, another interview:

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/blogs/music/2011-05-23/planningtorock-w/

And a new video of sorts, for a Jamroll remix of "Doorway":

http://vimeo.com/23477813

nice thanks!! re: interview

uhhh

really, perpetua?

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15498-w

Most obviously, Rostron and Knife singer Karin Dreijer Andersson share a fascination with inhabiting male characters and exploring masculinity in their songs, to the point of pitching their voices down into a grotesque parody of manliness.

OMG shut UP. I can't read any further than that, TBH. So much wrong-headedness in that statement, I can't even.

Matthew Perpetua in "writing the first thing that comes into his head" shocker.

I mean, way to take something that is truly *interesting* about both artists, that they ask questions like "what is gender, what does it mean, how do we react to voices and read the characters differently if they are pitched 'male' or pitched 'female'?" and play with the fluidity of voice to ask questions about gender (you know, kinda like how some male artists e.g. Prince have played with falsetto while they explore and widen gender roles) - and just reduce that down to a two word dismissal "grotesque parody."

I know. Mine own fault for clicking something with "pitchfork" in the URL, I should just put the Daily Mail kitten block on the entire site, except I like Tom Ewing's columns.

I don't think he's quite being dismissive, it's more a combination of his usual lumpen prose and lack of insight.

Also, eyeroll at the Wilco reference.

"grotesque parody" comes loaded with all sorts of unpleasant associations, but it's a fairly accurate summary of the narrative guise adopted in the knife's "one hit". it's a parody of masculinity in that it's satirical and rather cartoonish, and it's grotesque in that it exaggerates certain ugly aspects (both of its own method and of stereotypical masculinity in general) for effect. unfortunately, yeah, it has nothing to do with planningtorock's "doorway", which strikes me as neither grotesque nor parodic. love it, but only agree with MP in that the songs sounds way, way too much like silent shout for comfort.

while we're making facile comparison, holy shit, does "i am your man" sound like "do the strand" er what?

tbh, i get the feeling that perp's confusing doorway's rather grotesque and (i suppose, arguably) parodic video with the song itself

When was the last time you actually sat down and actually *listened* to Silent Shout?

Because the orchestration, the instrumentation, the arrangements are on W are quite, quite different. If all you can hear is "female vocals, pitch-shifted" then you are really missing so much of the music. Sure, they are in the same genre - you know, like Aphex Twin and Autechre are in the same *genre* - but they really do not sound alike enough for "discomfort" unless you are listening to some incredibly superficial aspects of the music.

I've been spending a lot of time revisiting Silent Shout this past week, and I've been quite surprised to find how little it sounds like those things that people describe as "sounding like the Knife."

Are Janine's pitchshifted vocals *really* grotesque in the same way as, say cookie monster pitchshifted death metal vocals? Is that what's inspiring the "OMG parody of manliness!" reaction?

was thinking about how we identify similarity in sound, the perception of "influence," before i posted. it's not just pitch-shifted female vocals that emulate (and perhaps comment on) masculinity, the singing and vocal production really are remarkably similar. and it's not just that. the musical commonalities are likewise quite strong - not that one is a carbon copy of the other. for the record, i'm comparing "one hit" (and other aspects of silent shout) and "doorway", not the knife and planningtorock...

"doorway" shares with silent shout a gothic, windswept darkness. it's composed largely of simple, stately rhythms over which icy synth stabs hang like icicles, and while the knife rarely settle for simple, the palette of sounds is remarkably familiar. though the planningtorock song is spare in the manner of fever ray and never approaches the knife's twitchy restlessness, it reminds me strongly of tracks like "neverland" and "silent shout". is this simply a product of vocal style and a few easily identifiable touchtones, or are there deeper sympathies? my grasp of music theory is poor, so i can't say with any certainty, but i think i'd be reminded of SS even if the track were instrumental.

Are Janine's pitchshifted vocals *really* grotesque in the same way as, say cookie monster pitchshifted death metal vocals? Is that what's inspiring the "OMG parody of manliness!" reaction?

― Karen D. Tregaskin, Friday, June 3, 2011 2:53 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

my point was that janine's vocals on "doorway" are NOT grotesque at all, nor are they parodic, so far as i can tell. i think perp's completely off the mark there.

this is the most mindboggling part of the review, imo:

In one of her best recordings, a string arrangement of "Think That Thought" from the Have It All Stringed Up EP, she ends up sounding almost exactly like Robert Plant singing over a string quartet.

don't hear this in either version of "think that thought". the stringed up version is a bit bluesier, but not in a way that reminds me of robert plant.

^^ the Plant thing is baffling, yes

also, the Wilco reference in a Planningtorock review is almost, but not *quite*, as challopsy as the Radiohead-ref-in-DJ-Quik-review thing

I've been spending a lot of time revisiting Silent Shout this past week, and I've been quite surprised to find how little it sounds like those things that people describe as "sounding like the Knife."

― Karen D. Tregaskin, Friday, June 3, 2011 5:51 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

I gave it a listen a few months ago and was quite surprised to find that it sounds mostly like Dig Your Own Hole with pitched-down vocals.

You say that like it's a bad thing?

(I don't actually agree, tho - Chems have a very different approach to bass than the Knife.)

This review sucks so bad I can't even

I am pretending this review does not exist. Let's talk about the album some more!

(the thing that amazes me about Silent Shout whenever I go back to it is how consistently massive they can make a bunch of tracks with two synth lines and a drum track sound)

You know what I love? Apparently she's touring with a prosthetic make-up specialist.

I've listened to about 2/3 of this of the weekend. It is fucking great! Love the unapologetic dedication to both the avant garde and classical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14sLvv_ykmE

This is totally perfect match for my inner state.

This album, not that video review.

Oh hey, new video:

http://www.vimeo.com/28655121

my 8 yr old's review of this album:

(*horrified look on her face*) "it sounds like she's....... sucking the guts out of me...."

XD

Somebody cut together a bunch of Kenneth Anger clips into a fan video for "The One" (best track on the album by far, IMO):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOPS3TCKLYM

Most obviously, Rostron and Knife singer Karin Dreijer Andersson share a fascination with inhabiting male characters and exploring masculinity in their songs, to the point of pitching their voices down into a grotesque parody of manliness.

To be fair, I can't really interpret "One Hit" any other way, but it's not really a major part of the Knife's sound and Rostron doesn't do it at all- even on a song called "I'm Yr Man" for fuck's sake.

so did they rock?

I see this thread and think of Michael learns to rock.

http://soundcloud.com/humanlevel/patriarchy-over-out-planningtorock

New track is a bit bonkers but still enjoyable.

oh man that's total Abbott bait

okay I am adoring this

OK if both Abbbotttttt and DJP like this, I don't even need to listen to this to know I like it.

Oh wait, I'm listening now and it's awesome. Yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFlnZ4gJPns

Guest vocal here:

http://www.spin.com/articles/creep-echoes-debut-album-introduction-planningtorock-song-premiere/

Thoughts on Misogyny Drop Dead EP? When I first heard it I was underwhelmed but I revisited tonight & now think it's great, I love how fucked up & druggy & dramatic it sounds. Absolutely adore "Public Love" in particular.