I don’t know anymore whether it’s OK to like them yet or not, so here’s a 5…
[Video][Website]
[5.60]
Iain Mew: Alt-J made my favourite album of 2012, but I failed at putting my finger on why they stood out. Then I saw them live and something clicked, not from their careful recreation of the album but from a cover of Kylie Minogue’s “Slow”. It clearly wasn’t a novelty cover, not just because it was a meticulous version of a song with relatively low recognition value but because the lines through from “Slow” to their own slow and seductive “Tessellate” became so obvious. I realised that they’re a band who tried to marry together ’00s Kylie and These New Puritans, and from the barely compatible parts somehow fused a looking glass version of mainstream indie, familiar but reinvigorated. “Hunger of the Pine” both offers further evidence for a pop-incorporating approach and stretches it toward the breaking point. Indie dudes using a sample of Miley Cyrus singing “I’m a female rebel” is a big step up from Kylie covers in uncomfortable implications — are they supporting Miley? Mocking? Taking claim? Just using her for clickbait? Is there any good answer? The way they use the sample to add force to the song’s dark slither, though, a hook to poke through like a spikier version of the saxophone blasts elsewhere, is effective.
[7]
Alfred Soto: A minute and a half of Kid A-era keyboards get tiresome. Then the singer gets sensitive over a pulsating backbeat. Imagine an Urban Hang Suite track given the electro-indie treatment — which was what most of UHS prefigured, to be honest.
[5]
Hazel Robinson: I am a thousand years old and get all my new music by looking at what’s trending on Spotify, which is why I thought Alt-J was some sort of young person’s what-young-people-who-aren’t-from-south-London-call-dubstep artist. Not that I’m against that sort of thing. But I wasn’t expecting arboreal, soft lushness; this does actually sound like the muffled noises and creaks of a pine forest. I mean, it’s kind of crappy, I suspect — it’s not trying especially hard to do anything more than create the effect of a pause, and the use of the phrase “female rebel” makes me want to slap them with a dick enough that this isn’t going on any of my ‘interesting enough to merit further investigation’ playlists, BUT if you happen to be stoned out of your tree right now, this is gonna make you feel a lot of weird thrum-y things.
[7]
Brad Shoup: It’s a lovesickness song, so “pine” is only sorta about wood. It’s also about poorly disguising your abstractions. The keyboard layering is fantastic, a vista of awakening. And BOOM comes the Miley swipe, turning this into someone’s first mashup post on Soundcloud. Mind you, if I’d mixed Kid A and Bangerz at 17, I’d still be listening to it, regardless of thematic cohesion or clashing rhythms. But I was mostly worried about melding intros and outros, so I dodged a bullet there.
[5]
Juana Giaimo: “Hunger of the Pine” is a lot more than a Miley Cyrus sample, but it also deeply depends on it. It shows Alt-J exploring new territories. They don’t rely on the bass anymore since Gwil Sainsbury’s departure, but they find its smoothness in the electronics while the lonely saxophone adds a hypnotizing nocturne atmosphere. Still, they knew how to keep their subtle pop essence — and that’s when the Miley sample comes in, her provocative vocals adding a completely different texture. As always, it’s impossible not to pay attention to her.
[9]
Thomas Inskeep: Minor-league, pre-free jazz Radiohead. Subtle and nice and a grower.
[6]
Cédric Le Merrer: Listened to this as well as several other upcoming Jukebox songs on a sleepy train trip, which is probably the best circumstances you can dream up for Alt-J: the sleepiness makes you appreciate the pretty textures, and the relative stillness of the track is given a dramatic dimension when contrasted with the moving scenery. For the first time, I kinda get their appeal as new Radioheads for sleepy people. Which doesn’t mean that their supposedly daring use of vocal samples becomes less jarring, nor that I can tolerate meaningless French gibberish when used in such a serious context.
[4]
Anthony Easton: I was talking to a musician buddy lately about pretty but blank music that was so absent of content, that any sign that one wanted to could slide into it. The classic example ended up being “Holocene,” which I also find quite tender and lovely. The synth break and the hip hop chorus, a kind of chilled out reworking of Avicii’s instincts towards earnestness, would suggest that this was weird enough not to be that blankness. But every time I try to write about this, it kind of melts away from any critical grasp I might have. So maybe it is a good example.
[5]
Megan Harrington: For most of my life I preferred the taste of Coke to any other soft drink. It was luscious, caramelly, and sophisticated in a life where RC Cola was a treat. During college, surrounded by canny subliminal advertisements and Cosmopolitan magazine, I taught myself to prefer the taste of Diet Coke, light, fizzy, and refreshing. Some handful of years removed from that insecurity, I’ve stopped drinking anything manufactured by Coca Cola. Are Alt-J Diet Radiohead? It hardly matters, neither is hydrating or nutritious.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: One of the perks of being a teenager who routinely used Hail To The Thief lyrics as AIM away messages was becoming really good at sniffing out empty comparisons to Radiohead. Rarely were the artists themselves chasing this distinction – as is the case with Alt-J — but rather the media lazily declaring “these guys are the (insert nationality) Radiohead!” Listening to “Hunger of the Pine,” I could at least see where one would get the idea to write that sentence. Beyond lead-singer dude sounding like Thom Yorke, the song is shifty and heady — read: the lyrics were built for message board debate, not like, screaming out a car window. But that’s all it really is — an exercise in “experimental music” that works better as soundtrack than anything else. Let me summon that adolescent me: “Radiohead would totally write a song, man, not peter about.”
[4]