"Fashioned with a veneer of innocence yet painfully burdened with knowledge... Giving myself up to it, the way I'd surrender to Dionne Warwick singing Burt Bacharch, is impossible."

That's from a David Toop review of a record by Cornelius (from The Wire, January 2002) that prefigures some of the concerns of Retromania and specifically the chapter on Japanese pop culture and mimesis

 

 

nifty snippet from the new issue of The Wire, #2

"Dirty Projectors are a vanguard case of a development both promising and problematic - the imposition of cursor-dragging collage on the structures of rock songwriting. The sudden transitions, disparate materials and what-the-heck conceptualism of their songs internalises...  the jostling data of the web page...  "

-- Dan Barrow on the DP's newie Swing Lo Magellan

DB concludes, sadly, that "the digital dreamwork of their juxtapositions has turned leaden... where once the proggily spiralling forms of their work suggested an infinite capacity for invention, it now seems like a dismal scramble for shortened-span attentions"  But wait there's worse: "they seem to belong to a moment that's past. Their work's profusion reflected the shadow economy of the web, and the virtual bubble of financialisation that was its partner"

A bad augury for the third album from the similarly located Vampire Weekend, then

But judge for yourself: the first single off Swing Lo:

compare with when-they-were-good

nifty snippet from the new issue of  The Wire, #1

"Unlike the faux soul of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Joss Stone et al, a green eyed soul consumed with envy for another time, there’s nothing stylistically retro about this project...  What it sounds like is right now, not Miami or Memphis in 1965”

David Toop on Bobby Womack's comeback album as produced by Damon Albarn and XL's Richard Russell

well I'm feeling a little green eyed vis-a-vis "green eyed soul consumed with envy for another time" !

Toop concludes however that the contemporarisation of Womack doesn't quite come off right:

“a reckless compulsion to be du jour also combines with an equally modish and somewhat  sentimental dedication to history” that strands Bobby W in some kind of atemporal limbo -- a real Nowhen Man

I saw Womack perform at the Oxford Apollo in... must have been 83, or 84? It was a nostalgia revue already, pretty much, even though half the songs came from the recent Poet albums. The framing by the music papers was "The Last Soul Man". (Title of a great Barney Hoskyns piece in NME if memory serves). The impossible gravitas of a figure from another age. He would only have been 39 or 40 then (a lot younger than me now) but seemed like a venerable elder, craggy with dignity and experience.  That raspy, weathered voice. Being a BH disciple, and something of a (whisper it) soul boy for a moment there, I went along with it wholesale: tracked down many of the 1971-75 albums Toop reveres, bought Poet II...  Then, some years later parted with the lot, without too much pain. 

I think the rep is a bit overblown, to be honest. Still, there's no doubt the man has Presence and Authority and he memorably blew away Albarn's bandmate, spotty Coxon, on  Later With Jools a few years back.

this is a good old one, as first heard by me on the Lost Soul compilations