Blow creates simple indie minimalism
Published Nov. 8, 2006
Snap music, an ear-shredding genre for some and a guilty pleasure for others, was setting the world on fire about five months ago. It seems that "Laffy Taffy" has been around since the break of the millennium, but that's just because it has evaporated as quickly as it came. "Laffy Taffy" and its leaning-and-rocking ilk obviously had no staying power, but they were at least culturally significant as the apex of rap's subtle minimalist movement.
That minimalist movement was started by the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait (The Whisper Song)," which was an inexplicably huge, STD-riddled beast of a hit, getting play on radio stations frequented by sixth graders. The song itself is genius, if only because it's delivered by two guys who look like characters in Fraggle Rock.
What does this have to do with The Blow, a Portland, Ore., duo that wouldn't be picked as indie hotshots out of a line-up of Starbucks baristas? Well, at around the same time that rap was all snaps, indie's most popular artists were doing so by riding waves of crashing grandiosity.
Sufjan Stevens' orchestral giant Illinois trumpeted its way to the top of most year end lists, and bands like Stars and Broken Social Scene made great albums of instruments normally reserved for a parent's record collection.
So though they cross more than you'd think — Kanye West's Late Registration represented '05 indie way more than '05 rap — there stood a musical divide between the progressive movements of indie and hip-hop.
And if there was ever an album that threw minimalist snap-hop into the same blender as heart-on-your-sleeve indie, The Blow's Paper Television is it.
Paper Television is at times going-out-of-business-sale spare, just jittery keyboards and tripping drum machine cracks behind front woman Khaela Maricich's playful vocals. This might present itself as a bigger problem if it weren't for the fact that Maricich is captivating enough to keep Paper Television from folding all over itself.
She's wry, quirky and at times vulgar — the perfect indie chick — but what carries her is the gently arresting quality of both her voice and lyrics.
On "The Long List of Girls," she doesn't seem pissed about being on "a long list of girls that love the shit" out of some dude; her voice sounds like a restrained Beyoncé, and she borrows Jay-Z's girl's bravado, too. On "Parentheses," Maricich sings with a sneer, promising her boy "if something in the deli aisle makes you cry/ of course I'll put my arms around you and I'll walk you outside."
Where Paper Television ultimately falters though is in that tissue-thin instrumentation. Handled by Jona Bechtolt, the stuttering drum claps rattle like a kid waving poster board to make thunder, and it grows tiresome quickly.
The best moments come when Bechtolt allows his arrangements to sweat. "The Big U" is the snappiest, with Bechtolt employing Mr. Collipark-inspired basslines, synth flares and drum punches that are jacked right out of David Banner's "Play." "Pardon Me" is the album's sexiest moment, a moist and sticky dance affair.
This indie-snap experiment reaches a few moments of equilibrium, but it's too unsubstantial and transparent to demand consistent replay. Paper Television is nice, but some support would've gone a long way.