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(Click to enlarge:)

How do they do it and still make a profit? Amazing deals this holiday season, y’all.

A friend of mine is an exceptionally talented bass player.  He’s played all over the world with musicians from Michael Brecker to Andy Timmons and he’s also an excellent storyteller.  One day we were hanging out and he started reminiscing about this gig he played during apartheid in South Africa.  He began by saying that he had this six-month contract to play as the house band at a nightclub.

Everybody listening had to stop him before he made it through his first sentence:  A six-month contract to play at a venue?

We were stunned.

“Was that just the way they did it in Africa back then?”

“No, that’s the way everybody used to do it back then.”

Thirty years ago, young local groups were actually contracted to play at a venue for numerous dates at a time.  Allegedly, you could actually make a decent living doing it too.  You’d play a bunch of small gigs and build a local reputation for yourself or open for a bunch of bands as they passed through town and get some exposure to managers and label reps on the way.  

My wheels were spinning from his comment and I missed the rest of the anecdote (fortunately, like all great musicians, he’s prone to repeating his best stories so I got many other opportunities).  This just seemed so crazy in comparison to what is going on in the live music world today.   Another friend of mine, a very talented sax player, just got back from a gig up in New York and told me that insanely talented, well-connected musicians are playing at venues in New York for a free meal…

Look at the picture above from the Cavern Club: “THE BEATLES PLAYED HERE 292 TIMES”… 

The musical landscape has changed dramatically over the past thirty years.  Once upon a time, musicians were able to be musicians and support themselves with their music through a fertile, logical local system.  Now the clubs are gone, the gigs pay so little that they aren’t even worth the gas, radio doesn’t care about the local scene any more, and (as previously discussed) it’s pretty hard to make it big unless you are already big in the first place.

During an interesting segment on NPR’s All Songs Considered, Carrie Brownstein and a panel of music bloggers discussed whether or not labels were useful in discovering new music.  In a brief aside, Carrie mentioned that the label Kill Rock Stars almost passed on her band, electroclash darlings Sleater-Kinney, because they thought it was “just a side project”.

Now in Brownstein’s case, the group was a side project to her other band Excuse 17, but there is a prevailing philosophy among the decision-makers at labels that there should be some considerable measure of success derived specifically from the band in question in order for it to merit consideration.

That’s pretty difficult to do in today’s musical climate.  I’ve always encouraged people to not define themselves by their day job—do enough to pay the bills and support your passions.  The music business is now saying that that’s not enough.  You have to be professional before going pro.

The problem is that we no longer have a system where amateur musicians can cultivate and support themselves in the process of turning professional.  The issue is partly one of supply and demand.  Back in the 60s, venues wanted bands and there simply weren’t that many out there.  It was more difficult to even get an instrument, let alone be good enough at it to play for two hours.

All their success aside, Ringo Star and Mick Fleetwood would each tell you that they are not the most talented drummers (Mac Fleetwood doesn’t even know what 4/4 time is and he labored to explain that fact in Ken Robinson’s The Element).  The fact is that they were the guys in their local area with a drum kit.  Drums at the time were exceptionally expensive and too large for most in urban England to store.  If you had the instrument, you were in a band.  If you were in a band of any caliber, you were likely to land a gig playing at some venue with some regularity.

Every band needs somewhere to play.  Unfortunately, these days venues are so financially strapped that they’d often rather put the iPod on shuffle than hire four teenagers and a sound guy.  Consequently, the venues with live music are overrun with demos of musicians willing to play for peanuts.

In a world where it is virtually impossible to support yourself as an amateur musician, labels are left looking to people who are already famous to fill out their rosters: solo artists from previous hit-making bands like Gavin and Gwen, celebutantes, and contestants from reality TV.

Some amateur bands are lucky enough to catch a label’s attention and they land one of the precious few spots on a national tour playing a hundred dates with one band.  Obviously these gigs are rare, but they also reduce exposure to only the fans of a certain band.

It has been said that all business is local.  In the Digital Age, there is such a focus put on national and global considerations that the local concerns fall by the wayside.  But ultimately, a return to a fertile local music environment is what will repair the music business.  Labels have an interest in seeing musicians cultivated in their home environments, winning over a local demographic, and climbing a logical ladder toward regional and national success.

This was the model that worked thirty years ago and I believe it can still work with some adjustments for the digital age.  In many ways and to their detriment, record labels are stuck in the old ways of conducting business.  In this instance, I fear that they have overlooked a useful lesson from the past.  Emphasizing a fertile local music scene and a logical progression from there toward a national spotlight is what encourages a diverse and creative musical landscape.  There is no one better suited to make this happen than the labels themselves.

IMAGE

I had almost thought about skipping this week’s article because I’m just so damn sick of talking about American Idol.  I think I might have talked more at length about it in the past few blog posts than I have my entire life.  But I just can’t fight the natural progression…

A quick look at the Billboard Pop chart is disturbing.  With Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Keri Hilson, Lady Gaga, and Jordin Sparks making up half the top ten, there is a stern indication that today’s music industry is focused squarely on image either at the expense of or in addition to the music.  Even the #1 hit that at first glance bucks the trend—The Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling”—still features the walking tabloid circus that is Fergie.  Also one of two rock acts in the top ten, Cobra Starship, features Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl in some fabulous TV/Pop Music synergy.  In fact, just looking at the chart in a cover-flow makes me feel more like I’m reading Teen Vogue or Perez Hilton than an industry trade.

In regard to last week’s article, there is indeed an emphasis on star singers as opposed to star musicians or star songwriters.  However, that is nothing new to this industry.  Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elvis, and all kinds of artists throughout pop history have relied on songwriters.  Generally speaking, behind anybody who has a plehtora of hit records and songs is an army of songwriters helping to sustain the artists’ commercial magic.

More unique and insidious than this is American Idol’s emphasis on the look and style of their contestants, which is emblematic of the larger music industry.  Could Kelly Clarkson have won with her current Rubenesque figure that seems to be generating so much negative buzz?  If you take Ruben Studdard off the scales (and many conspiracy theorists would have you replace him with the decidedly more svelte Clay Aiken) it looks like the seven remaining contestants might weigh a thousand pounds, tops. 

It is an indication that the physical attributes of a pop artist are at least as much a part of their celebrity as their music.  I now recognize many artists from television and the trades who I’ve never even heard a song from—instances where the image has both superceded and preceded the music.  Can you believe that there was ever a time when America thought Madonna was African American?  Her first single, 1982’s Everybody, was an R&B hit and the label, Sire Records, left her image off the cover and instead put images of urban minorities playing in the streets so as not to eschew her then-primary demographic.  I can’t even imagine somebody having a #1 hit today without knowing what they look like, let alone their race!

We have grown accustomed to seeing our pop stars in candid environments, fashionable moments, and compromising positions.  Given the headlines that have been generated by the nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Greene, I almost expect new pop stars to have lingerie shoots before ever releasing their first single.

All this is just to say that the music landscape has changed.  It has been said that radio is the theater of the mind because radio engages the imagination in a way that spoonfed images never could.  Instead of a mysterious everyman/everywoman disembodiedly singing a tune that could be about you or me or anybody, we are given very distinct images of who is singing to us and the meaning is colored by our perceptions of that person.  Would Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” have been such a tantalizing pop sensation if a bald and toothless paraplegic sang it instead of some new age sex symbol?

Music has become a footnote to the image, the background music to a film sequence, the atmosphere to a car commercial, and a novel dabbling for celebrity playtime.  The purity of the art form seems to have been lost in the mainstream and that is where the rise of indie labels has taken up the slack.

Maybe on some level, in some small way, the flight toward indie rock has been a means of escaping the mass-market approach to the music business.  In the same way twentysomething hipsters might reject owning a TV, they find solace in the magic of an unknown artist and the possibilities of a song without a face.  I couldn’t buy an Animal Collective poster with the band members on it if I wanted to and I am eternally grateful for that.

The kind of synergy that is currently emphasized in the music business has been a long time coming.  Starting with Billboard and other music rags, expanding to MTV, and finally culminating in the media saturation of pop icons on network television and major media.  This has been good for the music business on some level because it is free marketing and promotion.  The bad thing is that music is no longer its own unique industry with its own idiom and no longer focuses on what it does best. 

Additionally, an image-centric music marketing approach puts the industry in an unsustainable position as artists fade with the passing of a fad.  Then Big Music is stuck scrambling trying to find the next fashion to capitalize on and exploit.  Lady Gaga’s voice and music will forever be married to her image and therefore the timeframe in which she operates.  As such, there isn’t even the slightest chance that her music will live on beyond the prime years of her own life when either she or her demographic grows up.

If the industry could only refocus its efforts on recreating the special environment where music can be appreciated in its own right, without all the hype and celebrity, they’d be well on their way toward a sustainable path.  When is the last time you at home got a record, sat down, and listened to it?  Really listened to it.  Didn’t put it on while you clicked through Facebook or checked the local news.  Just listened?

When more people can say that they honestly sit down and appreciate music for music’s sake, not as an accent or embellishment to something else, that’s when we’ll know that the music business is surefooted once again.

Today the Wizard of Waukesha passed away at the age of 94.  The father of multi-track recording techniques and a pioneer in musical technology, Les Paul was really the start of the modern music industry.  Anyone who has ever plugged a guitar into an amp or put sound on sound owes Mr. Paul a huge debt of gratitude.

I remember my first trip to New York—the first thing I did when I got off the plane was catch a cab to the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway to get a glimpse of the man who started it all.  I had purchased the tickets weeks in advance.  Over the phone, a surly and quick New Yorker told me that he played two sets every Monday and the first one had sold out.  For the next few weeks, I had nightmares in which I stepped off the plane, turned on my phone, and got a message notifying me that Paul had died during his early set. 

Well fortunately for me that didn’t happen and I had the honor of witnessing one of the greatest figures in the history of the music business toward the end of his prodigious life still doing what he loved best.

You can read his awe-inspiring story anywhere:  how he revolutionized the guitar, how he created sound-on-sound, how his experiments with multi-track recording techniques changed the face of popular music.  This post is not meant to be a biography chronicling his achievements in the music world.  Instead, this is a celebration of a man whose relentless pursuit of his own passions allowed him to achieve those innovations and whose spirit, like gravity, drew crowds of professionals and amateurs alike toward him.

Surely if Les Paul had never been born, somebody else would have perfected the electric guitar.  Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher both created and marketed their own solid-body electrics during the 30s.  And surely if Les Paul hadn’t been around, Bing Crosby would’ve found somebody else to tinker with the Nazi tape recorder brought to him from The War. 

But the fact is, Les Paul was around and his enthusiasm for all things musical made him the prime target for anybody with anything music related.  Ultimately, that is how one man could have been at the center for all the activity in the early music technology business—people simply wanted to be around him.  They knew that he was the kind of guy who could and would milk a musical idea for all it was worth.

His early career was a time when you couldn’t go to Guitar Center and get an hecho en Mexico Telecaster for $130.  You had to carve an electric yourself from a plank of wood.  You couldn’t just walk in to Best Buy and get some portable Japanese hard disc recorder.  You had to invent your own recording device from scratch, solder it up, and test it out. 

There were no books on multi-track recording effects, no blogs, and no degrees in audio engineering.  But by the time he was 10 years old, he was already learning about radio electronics at the local radio station.  He first experimented with overdubbing by adding new bumps to his mother’s piano rolls.  He was building crystal radio kits before he learned how to drive.  Despite his life of innovation, Les Paul never even graduated high school.

Les Paul’s story is a great American tale of a man driven by his passions to create, innovate, and perfect.  Even toward the end of his life in that dim club on Broadway, his fervor was palpable.  His set at Iridium was a captivating hour-plus of storytelling and jamming.  Interspersed with music, Paul regaled the audience with brilliant anecdotes of his life in the music business: things he had done or people he had met.  He then invited numerous guest musicians (amateurs and pros alike) onto the stage and played through songs with them, smiling and laughing all along the way.

In 2005 Paul released his first recording since the 1970s.  Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played earned two Grammys and featured guest performances by Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and many more.  Like his sets at Iridium, the record was a testament to a long and fruitful life at the epicenter of modern music.

Surrounded by friends and family, Les Paul died today of complications arising from pneumonia and left behind a long and inspiring legacy not only of accomplishments and innovations, but also proof positive that when talent and passion intersect anything is possible. 

Les, you will be missed.

Discovery

Last week’s post on the word “pitchy” got a little bit of a discussion going on American Idol which was an excellent segue into one of the many topics I had hoped to address in my series on re-thinking record labels.  It’s a little bit out of order from the schedule I had originally planned, but when the public demands something I oblige myself to deliver!

However, despite my original outline it seems more appropriate for this post to lead off our discussion on how record labels have changed in the past few years because today’s topic deals with the discovery of new artists—the very beginning of the whole music business process. 

By “discovering new artists” I mean finding those artists who are worthy to be put in the great music apparatus that, through the alchemy of the industry, churns out radio hits and gold records.  Note:  this is not the process by which the general populace discovers new music for consumption.  That is something I call avataring and I will delve further into that in a later post.

Now, discovering new artists to feed the music machine presents a paradox in our discussion.  Because we are trying to think of how the industry has evolved from the classic paradigm, some may surmise that we don’t need to feed the machine anymore because the machine is dying/dead anyway.  In other words, is it worth discussing how we find new music to put into the industry works if the industry is no longer necessary?  Chicken or egg, etc…

Well, for the time being anyway record labels are still around and for the sake of compartmentalizing this aspect for discussion, let’s assume that there is a machine to feed.

So let’s say I’m a record label executive and I need to find some new talent to make my quota for this quarter.  In the 1970s, I’d have an army of A&R scouts scouring local clubs and local radio nationwide trying to find that one group that had that certain something that might make them a hit.  Maybe they don’t need to produce a hit record right away, but the right chemistry in the band might mean that with some development a hit might be in the future.

Fast-forward to the 2000s.  Record labels are losing money year over year and downsizing considerably.  A&R scouting departments no longer have nearly as many feet on the ground combing nearly as wide of an area looking for the next big thing.  Furthermore, the places where they would go if they had the personnel are disappearing too.  Small local clubs that support local musicians and undiscovered artists are disappearing by the boatload.  Forget about local radio, how many Jack/Bob/other friendly neighborhood syndicated satellite radio programs are there now?  When’s the last time you heard a local act on your radio?  Instead it’s a 40-minute loop of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Kanye.

Also, the record labels are not in the mood to sit and wait for hits to develop.  They need results and they need them fast.  That means that they are looking for pre-packaged artists that come with their own prefab audience.

Enter American Idol, this is the template for how new music has and will come to the great machine of the music business.  Television pseudo-celebrity creates a readymade national market for the consumption of music.  America’s appetite for celebrity is insatiable and everyday we lower our standards for what makes someone a celebrity (when all else fails, lower your standards).  I was watching TV the other night and there is this show called “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.”  They did a run-down of everybody in that show and I turned to my girlfriend and said, “Who the hell are any of those people?”  A celebrity used to have to do something worth celebrating to become a celebrity, not just be a media whore on some ridiculous “reality show” making out with another chick in the hot tub or losing 40 pounds in a week.

But I digress.  If Americans see a celebrity on TV and they have a CD out, by god somebody is going to buy it!  At least the chances are higher that some Suit at a record label will give a talent-less hack a shot over a decently talented band who maybe a hundred people had actually been able to see when they opened for the Bodines at Main Street Days.

That’s why Warner Bros. took a chance on Paris Hilton’s atrocious debut album Paris, Casablanca took a chance on Lindsay Lohan’s equally atrocious debut Speak, and why Koch Entertainment (affiliated with Universal for distribution) took a chance on Idol reject William Hung.  All of these people got airplay on radio stations world-wide because “Hey guys, you saw them on TV last night!  Check out their new single!!”

Television is great because it buys into the cult of celebrity and brings new music passively to record label decision-makers.  They can sit in their office or eat dinner in front of the TV, catch a song or two by some pretty face on Idol and know that if they signed them to a deal, they’d have something that could promote itself.  And that’s the key: these are actions to reduce costs in discovery and promotion.

Of course TV isn’t the only medium where decision-makers can find musicians with built in audiences.  The Internet (did you really think I was going to make an entire article about this without addressing the Internet?) has its own ways of getting music to the powers-that-be with its own specious ways of inferring a built in audience.

The new movie Funny People has this great bit in it where Adam Sandler’s character is doing stand-up at a MySpace convention and says something like “I have 10,000 friends on MySpace…that equates to how many in the real world?”  It couldn’t be more true, just because your site is heavily trafficked and you have thousands of MySpace fans, how many of them actually translate into real ticket-buying, CD-collecting, T-shirt-wearing bona fide fans.  Anybody heard anything from The Arctic Monkeys recently?  Because Billboard surely hasn’t…Still labels have interns who do nothing all day but scour MySpace looking for bands with a decent sound and a good following.

All of these are ways of managing costs:  cutting A&R scouts, reducing national travel and show expenses, minimizing promotion expense, and dismissing development expenses.

Despite all of this, nobody has the ability to discover new music to bring to a national audience like the record labels.  Regardless of how bad they are at their jobs, there are still people being paid to do nothing but “discover” new music.  What we have is a serious misallocation of resources and a steadfast refusal for a dying industry to invest in its own future.  Rather than looking for the next Beatles who can still move records 40 years after they break up or the next Rolling Stones who have spent 40 years performing sold-out tours (and probably will continue for 40 more), the labels are content with forgettable fill-ins plucked straight from Best Week Ever who then fade into afterthoughts with a good night’s sleep.

The technological revolution still has not produced a certified way for anyone to bring great new music to the attention of major labels.  Perhaps that’s due in part to willful ignorance on the part of labels themselves, but labels could still have the market cornered on discovering worthwhile music that will stand the test of time if they’d simply shift their focus away from yesterday’s losses and today’s easy dollars.

Introduction

You don’t have to have a career in the music business to know that the industry climate is changing rapidly and drastically.  The Internet has forever changed the ways in which artists create and disseminate their music.  As a result the business models that held strong for practically all of last century no longer apply.  Not too long ago, the objective of every daydreaming, shaggy-haired garage band was to sign a contract with a record label—my how the times have changed. 

In the days of yore, you’d purchase instruments from the local music shop, gig at local venues, buy time at a recording studio to get a demo recorded, work the local radio ladder to get noticed by the industry, sign a record contract, then get your singles played nationally, and get your album in record stores.

These days the mom and pop music stores are gone, so are most of the locally owned live music venues. You can record in your parents’ basement, and you can post your music on your myspace.  With social networking, bands like the Arctic Monkeys were able to bypass the radio ladder altogether.  You can put your music on iTunes and CD Baby for free and promote it at the grassroots level.  Suddenly a record label’s ability to get your CD into every Wal-mart in America becomes less appealing.  Some artists can have fruitful careers without ever seriously touring or having radio play of any sort.

Every step along the way has changed: from the source of the materials to produce a record to the methods of getting noticed by the industry, from getting the attention of the consumer to the demographics of the consumers themselves.  Along the way, the resources have been democratized to such an extent that in many ways the monolithic labels of old are not necessary to accomplish the task.

These days the vast majority of stories regarding record labels are none too positive.  Labels are portrayed (and many times portray themselves) as obsolete behemoths desperately clinging to a Golden Age ideology that has long since become irrelevant.  They sue their own customers, alienate artists, wage their battles in Washington and in the courts, and despite ever decreasing clout still have the gall to think they own all the cards in the deck. 

However, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Record labels have provided a whole host of services to artists and many of them are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago.  Simply because the average person now has access to some tools and can attempt to make his own career without the help of some larger entity, it doesn’t mean that labels wouldn’t be better suited to do it with their deep(er) pockets and entrenched connections.  Who wouldn’t want the input of an expert who has been around the block a time or two?

In many ways, record labels aren’t as irrelevant as they are popularly depicted.  Perhaps all they need is a little update in their philosophy.  In this series, I hope to enumerate the specific services that record labels provide, the way current technologies have impacted those services, and perhaps find some middle ground for future development in the industry.

If you read music news blogs you know that the music industry is going through an identity crisis trying to find “sustainable models” and other funny business terms. I just came across an online music store which seeks to capitalize on the “I knew about XYZ artist before they got big” phenomenon. Their slogan is catchy–“Popcuts.com: Buy Music. Make Money.”

They sell downloads for independent artists and it works kind of like a legal pyramid scheme with social networking built in. For every person that buys a song after you do, you get a portion of what they paid. My assumption is that they’re banking on the idea that they’ll make it up in volume. In other words, by paying consumers even a nominal amount, so many more people will be buying music from Popcuts and so many more artists will be selling their music through Popcuts that it will more than pay for itself. Will this work in practice? Who knows. Humans are creatures of both habit and trust. They’re targeting serious music fans, most of whom probably already have a routine way of buying music. And frankly the offer seems too good to be true. But they’ve thrown in an added incentive: the bragging rights of being able to verify that you did, in fact, discover an artist before all your friends.*

It’s an interesting concept, but in my view the sink-or-swim question is how much money? The artists get to choose any percentage of their money to give back to the fans, so that answer remains unclear.

One thing I like about Popcuts.com is that they target the consumer. The ad I clicked on featured a collage of childhood photos of music stars and the text read: “You knew about them before they were cool. Show it off.” This provides a stark contrast to the multitude of budding online music retailers who cater exclusively to the artist, which screams, “I know some rich dude who wants to put his name behind the Next Big Thing even though he has no understanding of the music industry whatsoever, which is why I was able to swindle him and his rich pals with this shortsighted idea,” or even, “I heard chicks dig entrepreneurs so I figured I’d give this a shot!”

Popcuts, on the other hand, has attracted some legitimate attention with Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante selling his solo work along with indie rockers Piebald.

UPDATE: Just checked out Popcuts on Twitter (@popcuts) and saw they’re also selling a record Phil and I worked on, Break The Silence by American Idol finalist Jon Peter Lewis.

Buy Break The Silence on Popcuts.com

Will Popcuts become the new CDBaby? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

*Ah, high school.

Artist: Noisettes
Album: What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?
Released: 2007
Sound: Indie Rock
For Fans Of: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Janelle Monae
Recommended Tracks: “Scratch Your Name,” “Don’t Give Up”

To get a feel for Noisettes, you have to start by watching frontwoman Shingai Soniwa’s electrifying performance in their music video for “Scratch Your Name.” This is classic case of a lead vocalist taking an act from good to great.

I saw them play a small Brooklyn night club a few summers ago. The show unexpectedly got combined with Battles at the last minute. (This was right around the time Mirrored came out, one of my favorite albums in the last 5 years.) The energy was unreal throughout the night. Since then, they’ve have toured with Bloc Party, TV on the Radio, and Muse.

While their sound is not “revolutionary” per se, Noisettes doesn’t particularly sound like anyone else. It would be a disservice to compare them to the decidedly darker and grimier Yeah Yeah Yeahs (though Shingai does list Karen O as an influence).

When Janelle Monae came out last year, I immediately thought “hey, she’s ripping off Shingai’s look,” (although she’s equal part Andre 3000). Musically, though, Janelle is a solid Motown-era soul singer while Shingai is an epic, class-of-her-own, wouldn’t-want-to-challenge-her-to-a-thumb-wrestling-match rock vocalist. Her signature is when her voice squeaks in just the right place at exactly the right time. You have to hear it to understand.

“Don’t Upset The Rhythm,” the second single from their yet-to-be-released sophomore album, has reached #2 on the UK Singles chart after being featured in a Mazda commercial. This track, along with the other single released from their upcoming sophomore album, ironically seem to indicate a directional shift for Noisettes towards a more processed, dance-y, Janelle Monae-esque sound. Guess indie rock wasn’t paying the bills. I will reserve judgment, however, until the new album drops.

Wild Young Hearts comes out April 20th on Universal.

Noisettes on Myspace

Sonic Deconstruction is a monthly feature where we spend an entire week analyzing one song from every possible angle: personnel, instrumentation, composition, recording, mixing/mastering, and production. Check back every day this week for the next installment!

Perhaps the joke is on us. According to their interview on caughtinthecrossfire.com, it wasn’t until Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden began writing pop songs as a joke that they started to realize their music-making potential. Writing under the name “The Management,” even their moniker was a part of the gag—a jab at corporate manufactured pop with the end-game to “sell out as quickly as possible.” We’ve all heard that same tired construct a thousand times in half-baked collegiate pseudo-comedy so even though they don’t get points for back-story originality, they do take home the prize for execution as their efforts have snowballed into genuine pop glory. Somewhere along the way the Brooklyn duo, now performing as MGMT, have forgotten the punchline and are enjoying the kind of global success not known to very many indie rock groups, serious or not.

MGMT is a peculiar entity combining an aged sonic sensibility with a somewhat naïve stage presence.

Critics often chide the youngsters for invoking a psychedelic persona that is worn like daddy’s oversized shirts. Even so, the group has certainly left their mark over the past year after earning accolades from Spin.com, Rolling Stone, and the BBC. Oracular Spectacular has been a global hit and was named best album of 2008 by NME. Their simple but infectious hooks have become part of the pop culture collective unconscious after being featured on numerous television shows, movies, and video games. “Electric Feel” comes pre-loaded on iPods and even French president Nicolas Sarkozy realized the inertiatic power of the pop-synth in “Kids.”

In researching their satire, MGMT unwittingly found the formula for crafting a perfect pop tune. Perhaps their greatest discovery is how to not muck-up the mix with unnecessary complications. Their magnum opus, third single “Kids,” is a modern hit in the sense that it hearkens back to presently fashionable periods in music history. Combining the dancey rhythmic simplicity of disco with the melodic simplicity of monophonic-synth driven New Wave, the song earns high marks by resisting the temptation of cluttering the mix with unnecessary production ideas like chords.

You could try playing chords on the MiniMoog, but you would fail...

While the group tours as a five piece, the entire record is presumably the brainchild of the twosome plus indie rock super-producer Dave Fridmann. Fashioned over a period of time at his live-in upstate New York studios, Fridmann’s mature acuity is immediately perceptible. His guidance is especially evident when the album is measured against MGMT’s live show and even their pre-producer EP. His sounds are dense yet spacious and provide gritty credibility to what might be an otherwise adolescent romp.

Given the simplicity of their production implementation, MGMT would seem to be the perfect case study in how anyone can craft a terrific pop tune. I mean, if two stoned college kids (armed with only drum machines and synths) can do it as a joke and get signed to Columbia Records, then what’s stopping you?

Watch out for Part II of the Sonic Deconstruction: MGMT “Kids” saga with tomorrow’s contribution–an in-depth analysis of the song’s compositional elements!!

Artist: Sol Seppy
Album: The Bells of 1 2
Released: 2006
Sound: Dreamy Indie Rock
For Fans Of: Sneaker Pimps, The Cardigans, Radiohead
Recommended Tracks: “Slo Fuzz,” “Enter One”

The Bells of 1 2 is among the greatest indie rock albums you’ve never heard. I have yet to meet a Sol Seppy fan here in the states, though based on her Myspace play count it is safe to say she has a fanbase somewhere out there.

Former Sparklehorse member Sol Seppy (Sophie Michalitsianos) is a classically trained Australian living in the UK who writes, sings and performs all of her own music. To top it off, she recorded her incredible-sounding debut herself in her home studio (though mixing is credited to both Paul Antonel and herself).

I hesitate to call this album “rock” because half the songs feature only piano and vocals. I hesitate to label it “singer/songwriter” because it is so beautifully orchestrated, layered and produced into something enormous. I hesitate to say her slow songs are “ballads” because they come from a completely different emotional space than any ballad I’ve ever heard before.

I hesitate to use these labels because they connote a familiar emotional content, where Sol Seppy’s brilliance lies in her ability to seem at once down-to-earth and other-worldly. While the stripped-down arrangements and soft vocals constitute a very vulnerable and human element, ambient piano and sparse chords, particularly Sus2 and Maj7(no3), make her music seem aloof or foreign: shoegaze for the 21st century.

The album’s mood swings between slow, brooding-yet-hopeful piano and kitschy synth-pop reminiscent of television commercials for compact cars. (The chorus to “Come Running,” for example, calls to mind an Audi being driven on the side of a snow-covered mountain.)

In my personal favorite, “Slo Fuzz,” Sol Seppy takes the most cliché of all the scales, C major, and creates something that is at once beautiful, amazing and tragic, like a lone astronaut projected into the atmosphere.

Only about half of the tracks have drums and they are programmed, though convincingly real at times (particularly the track “Come Running”). On the songs without percussion, she forgoes a click track altogether, using tempo changes as a form of dynamics.

The Bells of 1 2 has received little critical recognition, excepting a 7.1 rating on Pitchfork and her song “Gold” being featured on the CBS series Without a Trace. Sol Seppy has not updated her Myspace page in about six months, so we can only hope her new album will be finished soon.

Buy The Bells 1 2 directly from her independent label, Gronland Records (CD or MP3).

Sol Seppy on Myspace