It’s fitting that the first song on Cold Beat’s newest album, Chaos By Invitation, sounds like no other song the band has made before. “In Motion” is a long, spacious synth ballad that has a feeling of infinity to it — listening to it makes me feel like I’m alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean, looking at an endless horizon. There is an ambiguity in the track that has become one of the hallmarks of Cold Beat’s sound. On one hand, it sounds peaceful and relaxing to be in the ocean, but it’s also frightening to be solitary in a vast expanse.
This is only the third album for the Hannah Lew project, but it has already grown and evolved in ways that few artists do in their entire careers. “In Motion” is a strategic choice as the opening track, because it officially signifies the shift hinted at on their previous album, Into the Air, which started out as familiar guitar-driven rock before ascending into synth-pop territory halfway through. Chaos By Invitation focuses heavily on those synths, and it becomes primarily a solo vehicle for Lew, who recorded it with less collaboration than their previous albums.
The more solo nature of the album and the restriction to mostly synths would seem to imply a more narrow and claustrophobic sound. “In Motion” proves that wrong right out of the gate, and the rest of the album continues to showcase Lew’s ability as a diverse and creative songwriter who is emboldened by working with different resources than she has in the past. “Thin Ice” and “Don’t Touch” are more classic Cold Beat tracks with a spikier sound and anxious lyrics, but then there is “62 Moons,” another dreamier track with evocative lyrics about a relationship that ends with a “fade to black.”
With fewer collaborators, Lew’s singing stands out more on this album than it has in the past. She sings in almost a classical or operatic way, but adapts her voice to the different styles on the album. She reaches a more high-pitched coo on “False Alarm,” which sounds vaguely like a Grimes/Simple Minds collaboration, but she sounds more like an android on a dense electronic track like “Black Licorice.” One of the last songs on the album, “Strawberry Moon,” is like a synthed up version of a classic c86 pop song, and Lew’s voice fits snugly into its upbeat dreamy vibe.
What I most appreciate about Cold Beat is what makes them one of the trickier bands to write about: nothing about their music is obvious. The style they play is difficult to describe in buzzy genre words (electronic-synth-goth-punk-pop?) and Lew’s lyrics, while not being completely cryptic, don’t really lend themselves to the type of easy interpretations that are the bread-and-butter of music blogging. The only obvious parts are how the band changes with every release and how much thought is put into every part of the album, from the construction of the songs to the sequencing. Lew’s project is a model for what rock music should be, and the success of Chaos by Invitation reflects her continued growth and evolution as a songwriter.
The suburbs are a recurring theme in pop culture, and media about them usually centers around a familiar trope: the idea that, beneath the well-trimmed lawns and tranquility, there lies a darkness within the people, who are portrayed as unhappy or desperate even in their seemingly wonderful surroundings. My fear was that EMA’s new album, Exile in the Outer Ring, would cover similar thematic territory as lazy satires like American Beauty and center on that dissonance. Instead, she has made an album that is much more nuanced, much more real, and one that accurately cuts to the heart of a specific type of American existence.
That existence is people living in what she dubs “the outer ring,” an idea she explained in a recent interview with Jezebel:
To me it’s kind of like the outskirts of a city and what would have once been thought of as the suburbs. The idea of the suburbs is kind of outdated, that kind of affluent, white, homogeneous area. But now in Portland and I think a lot of European and American cities, the inner city is really where the wealth is concentrated and everyone else is getting pushed out. So I’m seeing these spots that I’m calling the outer ring, which could either be a version of utopia or dystopia.
I thought the concept was rather nebulous when I just read her explaining it, but what makes Exile in the Outer Ring such an effective album is how it comes to life in the music. All you have to do is listen to one of the songs and it’s easy to see what the “outer ring” is and what it’s about. It’s conveyed not just through the lyrics, which are full of specific lyrical details like riding in the back of Camrys or people standing outside of casinos, but through the music itself. The grinding industrial sound and squealing guitars evoke images of worn-down buildings and grimy streets, and EMA’s voice captures a feeling of resentment and despair that could boil over at any moment (on some of the more aggressive tracks, like “33 Nihilistic and Female,” it does).
The other obvious pitfall of an album like this is that it could come off as EMA writing about Those People and the Way They Live, which was a problem I had last year with PJ Harvey’s Hope Six Demolition Project album. She avoids this by inserting herself into the narratives, and using details from her personal life and upbringing in South Dakota that make these songs live and breathe instead of reading like attempts at journalism. I also like that the album isn’t just portraying “the outer ring” simplistically as some nightmarish hellscape. It skews darker overall, but there are also moments of prettiness and humanity amid the ugliness, which makes the album feel very true to life.
This album is also a nice progression for EMA, who blew me away with her debut album, Past Life Martyred Saints, which I loved because it was an album that was unafraid to get ugly and confront the darker side of human nature. This album is reminiscent of that one in its fearlessness, and it also incorporates parts of what she did on her second album, The Future’s Void, which felt more external and political. Exile in the Outer Ring is like a combination of those two: it’s a bracing blend of personal and political songwriting that is provocative and dark, but also full of life.
When I drive, I listen to music from my car’s CD player, which can hold up to six discs at a time. I’m aware that I could easily buy a way to listen to music from a more modern device that could hold a million times more music, but I’m too lazy to get one and part of me likes the old-fashioned CD listening and burning my own discs, which rotate predictably with each trip I make.
With only six slots available, it’s a fierce competition to see which music makes the cut. One of the slots is permanently Loveless, which never gets old and is fun to blare out the windows, but the rest are pretty much up for grabs. Lately, one of my favorite discs has been a collection of my favorite Stereolab songs that I burned a few months ago. I figured Stereolab would make for good “driving music” because of their use of the repetitive motorik beat, which always has the effect of keeping me focused and helps reduce some of the driving anxiety that I still embarrassingly have.
For most of my years as a Stereolab fan, that has been my relationship with their music. Because of the driving beats and lyrics that are often in French, they were my go-to “background” band that I listened to when I needed to get work done and didn’t want to be too distracted by lyrics. Many of my college papers were written to a soundtrack of Emperor Tomato Ketchup,Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements,and Mars Audiac Quintet, but I was usually too focused on the work I was doing to really analyze what the songs meant. I primarily just liked their sound and their style, with the motorik beat, Tim Gane’s noisy guitars and electronics, Laetitia Sadier’s understated singing and the ba-da-ba backing vocals from the late Mary Hansen.
When I’m driving, though, I pay close attention to lyrics, because there isn’t really anything else to distract my brain. And while listening to Stereolab in the car, I started to notice some of the band’s lyrics and they began to really resonate with me, particularly after the election of Trump. I knew the words to some of their songs before, but it took that massive political shitstorm for me to realize that they were much more than some abstract political jargon.
The song that initially sparked this was “Les Yper-Sound,” off Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which had been one of my favorite songs by the band because of its addictive bass groove and its simple lyrics:
You go in that team
I go on this team
Divide everything
A flag or a number
Make ’em opposites
So there’s a reason
Stigmatization
OK now we can fight
Divide everything
Just put it all flat
Justification
OK now you can fight
In the last few months, this has gone from being a song I just enjoyed for its sound to one that I feel describes what is happening on 2017 on a number of levels, despite its being written in 1996. On a macro scale, the song is about pointless nationalism and the way we’ve separated mankind into arbitrary states, countries, etc that are used as reasons to kill each other. But it makes me think a lot about one of my most mulled-over topics, which is the internet’s effect on communication, and how it has resulted in massive tribalism and divisions among people over stuff as stupid as a Ghostbusters movie. This song seems to predict the massive divisiveness that our culture faces now, as well as hinting at a person like Trump being the ultimate benefactor who divides and conquers.
“Ping Pong” is another song that is fun and groovy on the surface, but contains a powerful anti-war message about the costs it has on other cultures while it is used to prop up our economy. At the end, it sarcastically quotes Bobby McFerrin: “Don’t worry, be happy, things will get better naturally. Don’t worry, shut up, sit down, go with it and be happy.” It’s a definitive lyric from the band, because so much of their music is about questioning the status quo, which makes many of their songs feel like anthems for the skeptics and contrarians of the world.
And while a lot of their lyrics could be interpreted as being cynical, there are also songs like “The Noise of Carpet,” which blatantly criticizes “fashionable cynicism” as “the poison they want you to drink.” In tandem with songs like “Ping Pong,” a message emerges in Stereolab’s music: “this world will give you anything,” but it’s also important to be critical and questioning of what other people tell you. I fall back on cynicism a lot, and grumble about how things will never change, so “The Noise of Carpet” is a song that legitimately motivates me to do better. It’s also one of the songs that separates Stereolab from a lot of other politically-minded artists, who are more interested in preaching or pandering to their audience than in actually using their art to help make sense of the world. Even if don’t agree with their politics, the band will make you reconsider ideas that you might have taken for granted.
“Wow and Flutter,” my favorite song by the band, might be the one that feels the most different since the election. Its opening lyrics, “I didn’t question, I didn’t know” capture that level one mindset where you are just accepting what people tell you, especially with regards to the idea of American exceptionalism, which is spoonfed to all of us through various flag-waving rah-rah rituals. Stereolab blow all of that up with three words: “the dinosaur law.” Even the mightiest, who seem “eternal,” eventually will fall. And after the election of Trump, America looks much less mighty than it did before.
The temptation here is to think Stereolab’s music was predictive, much in the way that Radiohead is credited with “predicting” the alienation of the internet generation with OK Computer. The truth is that Stereolab was right the whole time and I just didn’t realize it until I was confronted with it first-hand in the last election, which blew up a lot of what I thought I knew about America and politics. That they resonate now speaks to how smart their lyrics are and, more depressingly, the way history tends to repeat itself as societal problems persist, which can make lyrics written in 1995 feel relevant even 22 years later.
The word, “challenging” is used a lot in music, usually to describe artists who are making aggressively weird sounds that most listeners can’t handle. Stereolab were a challenging band, but in a different way: through their lyrics, they challenged listeners to think harder about the world around them and to question ideas that are deeply ingrained in their culture. That independent spirit was also conveyed with their sound, which embraced peculiarity and was some of the most forward-thinking pop music of its time. It makes them such an enduring band to me, and one that is especially worth revisiting now.
The Noise Made By People 