Charm School – Debt Forever
Protests are going out of fashion, you’d think. But that’s just because no television network will pick up the new season, and the social media channels pick and choose what they want to show. Do this long enough, and who knows what can happen? Everyone will suddenly forget how to be upset and how to complain. People react to what they are told for a long time. Give people no chance to complain. What do you get? A happy labour camp.
But to really make the space livable and save yourself the inevitability of things backfiring, what you also need is hope. Yesterday, I wrote in a cab with a guy who was, to my ear, listening to music from yoga class. Upon further inquiry, he told me that I couldn’t be further from the truth. This was music titled “Unlimited Wealth” and was, in fact, a powerful magnet. I stand corrected.
The members of Charm School are still angry and hungry enough to go write a song about the things that amuse them to fits and bore them to tears. Channelling the great dissonant punk of The Fall, Charm School flips through the local self-improvement books and creates its own two-minute synopsis. The conclusion is that the product and the buyer are the same. It’s you, sucker, and hearing this might wanna make you burn Charm School records just like you did “The Catcher in the Rye” a couple of years ago.
Plattenbau – Held In A Curse
Since the dawn of pop music, there have been people desperate for you to hear the latest single and those desperate to escape it. The methods of the first group have become ever more sophisticated. However, those looking to escape have also improved their methods. This conflict is nothing new, but the stakes are getting higher.
Nowadays, the latest pop single is beamed to you through the speakers in your supermarket, played on television and the radio, and pop stars make appearances at sports events or political fundraisers.
Still, few of the people I know have ever heard a Drake song and knew it. Coincidentally, it’s never been easier to assemble playlists that entirely bypass commercial music and substitute it for alternative sounds. It’s never been easier to cover your ears with noise-blocking headphones. You can always spread your anti-corporate music message through the web.
Plattenbeau’s Berlin musicians sound like alternative music revolutionaries who have fed their fantasy of hatred toward pop music for years. Or, it might all just be a bit of a joke from people who have heard noise-rock and dungeon synth and decided to see what the two would sound like together. Either way, Plattenbeau’s music is grand and terrifying and belongs to the category of things that could only start in Berlin and, inevitably, get spread to the rest of the world.
