Pop is a parasite

Fantasies, the new Metric album, is just fun. It doesn't recreate music, it has some nice lines but lyrically (Who'd you rather be,the Beatles or the Rolling Stones) but never more insightful or inspiring then any other band. What it has is melody and hooks. That's what pop lives off of. Pop is a parasite. It aims to embed itself into your brain, a memetic virus. They're more like bacteria I guess. Each line sound, or played is a strand of memetic information, and if it's successful it will get inside you and you'll hum it to yourself on the train and thing, yeah, I'll listen to Metric. Or in my case I'll buy it instead of streaming it from Spotify. Replication! Hooray.

Also, I'm mainly writing this because the Pitchfork review of Fantasies is tripe. I'm not going to link it because that's too much effort, but the reviewer spends half of it talking about Metric's back catalogue and showing off about how much he knows about them, even when it's not relevant - Yeah, that's great you know that their second album was really a reworking of their first, unreleased album from before they signed. If you don't then discuss how this album fits into the greater arc of their career it's irrelevant. Then he (or she) says that it's OK but they would make a good ambient band.

While I'm here, Mercury press seems to be all about how rubbish the nominations are this year. The only album that I really like from it is Primary Colours by The Horrors. The Independent, and as far as I can tell everyone else didn't listen to it but saw how they were in the NME and classed them as "land fill indie." Oh NME, your hype machine has become so transparent that it actively harms those it touches. It must be driven off with crosses and fire. Unlike The Horrors because there's this odd goth question mark hanging over them.

THE QUESTION OF THE HORRORS.

Are the Horrors Goths? No, stop saying it. I should not even be entertaining the notion. What The Horrors are is a project band. They're just very heavily conceptual, by which I don't mean in relation to the visual art idea of concept, but The Horrors have a thematic underpinning that is key to the music. They're about discord, disharmony, an element of chaos. The outfits, which aren't matching, they're just similar, are traditionally smart clothes that have that same discordant, slightly off, feeling to them. In the end the album is better becuase it owes debts to more interesting bands then the other nominies. My Bloody Valentine sticks out for me. Synthisis, reproduction, evolution.