editors

[rone]

You'll hear grumbling about certain authors growing too big for their britches and essentially doing away with their editors.  You don't hear this about music, though.  The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute strikes me as the sort of album that desperately needs an editor to slice through the fat and wank (The Mars Volta guys seem to be the sort of artists that need a strong hand at the reins, judging by their Web site (Flash)).  Now, some of you might be thinking, "What the fuck, you're a King Crimson fan.  They're, like, the kings of wanky music."  If you are, come here so i can give you a good slap.

Anyway, Frances the Mute has a lot of really good music in it, as well as ornate lyrics that tell an alien story, and it won't sound like anything else you've heard.  The best word to describe it is "frenetic".  But there are stretches where nothing is happening.  Calling it "minimalist" isn't fair to minimalism; it's just minutes of a repeated phrase of music or, worse, noise.  TMV goes out of its way to shun the strictures of pop music in as many ways as it can, including offering an inaccurate track listing; some of the tracks are shown with sub-track listings, but the first four songs are tracked in toto, whereas the final song is cut up into 8 tracks which do not correspond to the sub-track listing.

I guess this goes back to my obsession with objecting to things that aren't exactly tailored to suit my taste and insisting that they be adjusted, instead of taking them as they are.  But i feel that, buried under this merely remarkable album, is a work that could've been truly great, had the artists and producers worked with the music in mind, instead of trying to make the music serve their ego.

Comments

Let's not forget

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Hugh Padgham who became kind of a counterpoint to Lillywhite, Tony Visconti and who I think of as his antithesis, Giorgio Moroder, and performer-cum-producers like Robert Fripp, Ian MacDonald, Ric Ocasek, and Rupert Hine (also none of the Talking Heads are any slouches behind the board). Then there are the great art-rock producers whose names we forget because their touch was so gentle: John Anthony, David Hitchcock, Eddie Offord, Terry Ellis, and I'm sure there must be others I'm forgetting. All these guys definitely got their fingers into the actual arrangements of the songs they produced to some extent, whether horizontally or only vertically.

Also, despite the noisiness that others decry and despite the crappiness of his recent all-digital self-production, I personally like Rundgren's production (even of his own work, before the digital crap) a lot.