New Music From Negativland, Sean O'Hagan
Negativland
True False
(Seeland)
The Oxford Dictionary appropriately named “post-truth” the “Word of the Year” in 2016; while personal beliefs and emotions have interfered with facts and rationality for the entirety of human history, this phenomenon has become more magnified in recent years for obvious reasons.
This writer found a recent Politico article about an ethics class at Appalachian State University enlightening, where the majority of the classroom, if forced to choose, would save the life of their mother rather than an entire city of five million innocent people from certain, immediate death.
The group Negativland has had an odd relationship with truth over its 40-year career, creating sound collages that use countless samples, often taken out of context, for satirical works that have tackled subjects where the truth is often questioned, like religion, journalism, and advertising.
On the other hand, the band itself has engaged in deception in cheeky ways; its most prominent examples are creating a fake press release that falsely said a Negativland song had possibly inspired a teen’s murder spree (the subject of the group’s 1989 album Helter Stupid) and releasing an EP entitled U2 with cover art that made it look like a release by the band U2.
Negativland’s new album True False comes at a time when, perhaps, the world has caught up with Negativland, rather than the other way around. Before the prevalence of Internet mash-ups and memes, Negativland was considered a pioneer of “culture jamming”, subverting the methods of mass media as a critique on culture and politics and painstakingly splicing tiny bits of magnetic tape together before digital sampling became easy and affordable.
The album’s title True False reflects the current world of headlines and clickbait which has no patience for nuance and detail and where false dichotomies run rampant. In the track “Discernment”, a need for data is expressed, while there’s a mirroring of the natural melody of spoken words with instruments (a technique used by artists including Steve Reich and Scott Johnson).
Possibly the album’s most amusing track is “Fourth of July”, which features excerpts from a woman’s expletive-filled YouTube rant on election night in 2012 as she realizes that Obama will be reelected. True False finds the group being more melodic than usual, although their collages are still complicated, evoking chaos and confusion among humor, and even a few dance-leaning beats can be heard.
In “This Is Not Normal”, multiple examples of people reciting the titular phrase are used; so what is normal, then? We’re told, smirkingly, that dogs barking with the voices of children pretending to be dogs is normal, before oddly cheerful music with synth washes plays, with the sound of children barking.
In the closing title track, we’re told that “we get into a loop which goes on forever” as history repeats. In the year 2019, True False doesn’t seem as riotous or provocative as it might have sounded a few decades ago, but it is a snapshot of how absurd the world has become. However, it’s easy to forget that things have always been absurd.
Sean O’Hagan
Radum Calls, Radum Calls
(Drag City)
Sean O’Hagan titled his first solo album from 1990 High Llamas, a name which he then adopted for his band that frequently drew comparisons to Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys with meticulously crafted studio albums with lush instrumentation and arrangements—a style much more in common with '60s easy listening music or European soundtracks rather than aloof, low-fidelity '90s indie rock.
After a disappointing response to the last High Llamas album Here Come the Rattling Trees, which tied in with a theater production, O’Hagan decided to put the High Llamas name on the shelf for his next release as a sort of fresh start.
As O’Hagan told musicOMH in a recent interview, his intention was to not make a record “that belongs in another age”; while casual listeners will latch onto his Beach Boys influence (particularly with the frequent use of constant quarter-note piano chords—think “God Only Knows”), his inspirations are more complicated than that; as he states, “I don’t see a demarcation between musical eras.”
So, O’Hagan’s beautiful and charming new pop album Radum Calls, Radum Calls can act as sonic comfort food, with flashes of familiar aural moods and sensations from the mid-20th century, but it’s also more inventive and multi-faceted than apparent.
With this palatial music, it was easy for this writer to let the lyrics fall into the background, and repeated listenings are necessary to unlock the atypical narratives and storytelling going on, including tales of a woman in '70s Iran or a ghost or a cleaner in New York.
O’Hagan is reunited with his old bandmate Cathal Coughlan from the '80s group Microdisney, who sings on a few tracks. Several other tracks use a small chorus of female backing singers, including O’Hagan’s daughter Livvy.
Tweaked to perfection, every supple detail may seem ornamental—pretty for the sake of being pretty—with artificial electronics, strings, fantasy-realm harp runs, and gentle nylon-stringed guitar plucks, but everything fits into place without feeling gratuitous.