-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
ARTIST..: Black Marble
ALBUM...: A Different Arrangement
GENRE...: Electronic
STYLE...: Synthpop, Coldwave, Minimal Synth, Darkwave, Post-Punk
YEAR....: 2012
LABEL...: Hardly Art
COUNTRY.: USA
PLACE...: Los Angeles, CA
FORMED..: March 2011, Brooklyn, NY
ENCODER.: LAME 3.100 -V0
BITRATE.: 268 kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo
ENCODER.: FLAC 1.3.1 -8 -V
BITRATE.: 617 kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / 2 channels
SOURCE..: CD
TRACKS..: 11
SIZE....: 166.90 MB
URL..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Marble
https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/black-marble/a-different-arrangement.p
https://blackmarble.bandcamp.com/album/a-different-arrangement
https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/4jm8wt/black_marble_a_different_arrangement
https://thefirenote.com/reviews/black-marble-a-different-arrangement-album-review
https://musiccritic.com/black-marble/a-different-arrangement
https://mvremix.com/rock_blogs/2012/10/30/black-marble-a-different-arrangement-album-review
https://www.popmatters.com/168077-black-marble-a-different-arrangement-2495780668.html
- TRACKLIST
1 Cruel Summer 3:46
2 MSQ No-Extra 4:18
3 A Great Design 4:32
4 A Different Arrangement 3:28
5 Limitations 3:28
6 UK 3:37
7 Static 2:58
8 Pretender 3:24
9 Last 2:51
10 Safe Minds 2:50
11 Unrelated 1:46
Total Playtime: 36:58
Under The Radar - A Capable full-length debut from the Brooklyn darkwave duo.
[Oct/Nov 2012, p.127]
Strong debut from Brooklyn coldwave/darkwave band Black Marble. Buried
underneath dark synths is a strong pop sensibility. Fully appreciated through
repeat listens. - User Review
Just yesterday I had never heard of Black Marble, but the promise of a group
similar to New Order enticed me enough to give them a try. And I was not
disappointed. The newly released album "A Different Arrangement" impresses
from the very first track. Using a variety of sounds from dark droning vocals
to robotic rhythms, Black Marble has something for all post-punk fans. Be
sure to check out tracks 2 (MSQ No-Extra), 3 (A Great Design), and 8
(Pretender).
*
A Different Arrangement surveys a wide variety of sounds, from the radiant,
bouncing ebullience of "A Great Design" to the haunted playground-bop of
"Limitations" (which juxtaposes sampled rim-drum clacks with layers of
sentimental synth melodies and Stewart's resonant, reverb-smeared baritone).
The warm, Peter Hook-inspired basslines shapeshift across Arrangement's
runtime, and vintage synthesizer arrangements by Kube (formerly of electropop
outfit Team Robespierre) are likewise versatile-airy ("MSQ No Extra"), astral
("UK"), and at times so distinctly manipulated and sculpted as to be
otherworldly ("Last").
The influence of early synth pioneers like Thomas Leer and Robert Rental is
felt across A Different Arrangement's eleven tracks, as are the fingerprints
of the record's hard-line do-it-yourself architects.
"All the music we gravitate towards has that quality where you can imagine
the space it was created in and the people who made it. Not this
handed-down-from-on-high sensibility. A certain handmade feeling is what
we're after," Stewart explains. "The music doesn't have to be complex, but
it's important to carry some residue of the process, especially when working
with what [can sometimes] be construed as cold-sounding electronics. It's
humanizing."
If Weight Against the Door constituted a long, cold night, then A Different
Arrangement heralds the moment when the radiator finally sputters to life,
flooding the room with heat as the sun rises over a horizon of Brutalist
tower blocks. The homemade soundtrack to a still, uncertain dawn, A Different
Arrangement is a striking evolution in Black Marble's sound.
*
The first time you hear Black Marble's debut album A Different Arrangement,
which comes out this week, it sounds both instantly familiar and not quite
like anything else you're listening to. The Brooklyn darkwave duo, made up of
Chris Stewart and Ty Kube, have earned frequent comparisons to the
paradigmatic post-punk band Joy Division due to the ever-present synths, dark
basslines, and general moodiness, all anchored by Stewart's deep, morose
voice-and to be sure, if a vocoder had an Ian-Curtis-underwater-on-codeine
setting, this is what it would sound like. But in Black Marble's hands, those
elements are made smoother and poppier, filtered not through the jagged
screen of punk rock but the softer lens of '80s-era shoegaze and modern
electropop.
The gorgeous "A Great Design" opens with a simple set of repeating,
optimistically rising notes that are buoyed by upbeat drums and eventually
joined by blurred, rippling synths; the nigh-unintelligible chorus is capped
by a stringlike synth swell. Title track "A Different Arrangement" is more
uptempo, with a darkly peppy bassline and intricate synth melody backing
Stewart's drone. The spare rat-a-tat beat of "Limitations" cuts through the
melancholy, bell-like melody as Stewart pensively echoes "There's no need to
hide your/limitations/you're wasting your time"; high, discordant chords
close out the song. "Static" starts with a monotone bassline and windlike
hissing of vibrating synths punctuated by a clanging metallic drumbeat, then
breaks into a brisk beat while rich chords provide a base for the distant
vocals. The final track, "Unrelated," consists of birdlike chirps and single
tones that reverberate through the ether, all anchored by a melody that
builds suspense before gradually fading away.
Most songs have a lot going on: beats that fade in and out; layer atop layer
of synth; grand chords that add crests of drama; single notes that punctuate
phrases momentarily; stylized, echoing drum machines; semi-ambient tones in
the sort-of-background. Yet for all that, these songs never feels cluttered;
Stewart and Kube may use a lot of sounds, but they're incredibly precise, and
the album sounds remarkably clean. So smooth, in fact, that it's easy to lose
track and realize you're halfway through your second listen-and I mean that
as a compliment. Each song stands on its own, and earworms abound, but the
well-paced and sequenced tracks build on each other to create an enveloping
atmosphere. Which is part of what makes A Different Arrangement a remarkably
intimate, surprisingly warm album-Black Marble manages to hit the sweet spot
of heartachingly dark and toe-tappingly catchy in a way that draws you in and
keeps you there. I was hooked after the first song, and I can't stop
listening. But don't take my word for it-check out "A Great Design" for
yourself.
*
There are two basic styles of minimal wave: the kind to do herky-jerky
dancing to, and the kind we have in hand, the kind to mope out in your
bedroom to. But wait: there are no styles of minimal wave. According to Simon
Reynolds, the genre's an invention.
As a critic, originality is an eternal question. It never goes away, but you
keep writing about it. So does everyone else, from Reynolds in Retromania, to
the cod-Fukuyama end-of-music catastrophe pieces that are lobbed into
critical discourse with predictable regularity. So you'll excuse me if I keep
picking over the bones. Call me a broken record.
When dealing with a work that's a clear recreation of a classic sound - in
the case of Black Marble's debut LP, it's the minimal synthesizer music of
the 80s, call it what you will - our hypothetical critic (that's me) gives
the album a spin. If the affective-aesthetic response - a response
minimally-mediated by reason, in a relative sense - is negative, the piece
can be panned for unoriginality. But will the same criticisms obtain when
that response is one of pleasure?
The answer is a provisional no - and to lay my cards on the table, A
Different Arrangement is a deeply pleasurable listening experience - but does
this exercise smack of hypocrisy? And is it possible to extricate oneself
when caught in a triangle formed by:
the aforementioned retro-hating merchants of modernism (often the middlebrow
position)
a popular music industry that is postmodern inasmuch as it sheds no tears for
those who actually know and recognize the original that is being pastiched, a
recognition resulting either from age or music-geekiness (we'll call this the
lowbrow)
the post- or post-post-modern perspective, which rejects out of hand the
concept of originality and authenticity while valorizing recontextualization
(highbrow)?
There is something to be said for the rejection of the idea of progress in
music - let's all refuse to "move forward" - but at the same time, we incur a
serious loss when we abandon the idea that the original is valuable inasmuch
as it's interesting. But this value can't hold universally; after all, there
is the question of craft. Is the critique from originality rendered powerless
in the face of the fact that the affective-aesthetic response is a response
to craft? Or is that 'fact' untrue, and the response really a consequence of
something less effable?
I can't answer these questions. But in facing them, I would like to be
constructive. And in this case it's appropriate, since the synth wave visual
aesthetic (even more so than other post-punk moments) was premised on the
adoption of Constructivist tropes, as well as Deco propaganda and the harder
edge of Futurism. The mention of Constructivism, and of Soviet propaganda,
remind us to ask, with Svetlana Boym: What is the Future of Nostalgia?
This may be it; that is to say, A Different Arrangement is an album that it's
easy to say constructive things about. Speaking of craft, a lot of minimal
wave revival is let down by a lack of it; tinny, atonal and repetitive synth
riffs are seen as the end of the exercise. In contrast, it's in songcraft
that Black Marble shine (though that's not to give the expectation of overt
hookiness, which would miss the point, moodwise). Like much of their source
material, the vocals are reminiscent of a low-key Ian Curtis - a mumbling
baritone with the hint of an English accent - but appropriately, the
prevailing numbness is not broken by any Curtis-esque explosions of passion.
A Different Arrangement develops the sound of their earlier Weight Against
The Door EP with the more overt presence of bass and guitar added to analog
synth, giving a gentleness reminiscent of the underrated Frank (Just Frank),
rather than the more insistent beats of groups like Xeno and Oaklander or
Martial Canterel.
Here, the typically subdued tension between angular synthesizers and human
melancholia is at its zenith. Let's call it "urban pastoral": the view of
Manchester from Sheffield, seen from a bedsit window in a Brutalist
towerblock, and it's raining in both. A space that attempts to transcend
home's absence, a historical emotion. This is the sound of an invented genre,
a note-perfect recreationism precisely premised on that which doesn't exist.
*
Dip a finger into the latest ebbing from the coldwave pool and you'll find
it's surprisingly warm. While Black Marble might fit most comfortably into
the gothic '80s-inspired enclave, they remain severed entirely from the raw
freezer burns of the Soft Moon or the uptempo eruptions of Light Asylum.
Unlike most participants in the contemporary reimagining of darkwave, this
Brooklyn duo keeps their output small, soft, and glowing.
Every object inside Black Marble's debut A Different Arrangement LP seems
swaddled in a thick layer of nicotine-stained gauze. The basslines flex their
muscles inside the dressing, the bioluminescence of the synth leads peeking
through at the seams. Chris Stewart could be singing across a foggy Brooklyn
alley, his voice trailing with detached amusement as he spells out his wry
philosophies. His lyrics come through in fits and starts, but even when
they're intelligible, they're not the point. A Different Arrangement hinges
on melody and the way it wrestles with itself across open space to nestle
into a satisfying whole.
Black Marble's melodic focus pits them across the genre axis from
contemporaries the Soft Moon, whose musical manifesto appears to settle along
the lines of making as much cold noise with as few notes as possible. Black
Marble is all notes, nests and wires of notes, notes in logical progressions
and notes that fall just short of where you expect them to go. The old, warm
melodies of New Wave and the rigid post-punk spines are all there, but
they've been pixelated and slushed around into a new product--a different
arrangement, if you will.
The result is a quietly infectious record, the kind that seeps into your
brainstem and bounces its many charms around without your realizing their
source. So many tracks on A Different Arrangement chirp and squirm with soft
synths and subtle hooks, yet Black Marble offer enough variation in texture
and structure as to keep a uniform aesthetic interesting. They're the chaos
of Former Ghosts honed in to a knife's edge, retaining the raw heat while
relinquishing the forthright emotional barbs. As far as content goes, Black
Marble relish ambiguity, straddling optimism and nihilism, never quite
letting on what they're thinking. But the masks only serve to augment a
record whose textural complexities and depths sink in further, quietly
addictive, play after play.
*
There's being lost in the past and then there's being lost in the past and
that's where Black Marble fit in. These guys are so absorbed and obsessed
with early synthpop that you would swear on your mother's life that their
album A Different Arrangement was recorded in 1982 when the idea of a
sequencer was the most windswept and exotic idea in recorded music history.
As on might expect as a result, Black Marble are a raw, minimal, cold, and
harsh synthpop group who make early recordings by OMD sound like 128 track
digital recordings. They're depressingly impressive and the songs, while
sounding firmly in touch with their inner Teutonic keyboard terrors, are
surprisingly catchy.
Black Marble are so detached and so rooted in analog sounds that I'm very
hesitant in believing that A Different Arrangement was recorded last year.
It's too raw, to unpolished, at times almost more Joy Division than Joy
Division and more synthetic than the Human League could ever hope to be. It's
simply awesome stuff that's a throwback to when sounds like this were new and
unexplored and much of A Different Arrangement feels and sounds like Black
Marble are learning how all this electronic stuff works. In truth it's
probably two dudes on Mac's and Ipad's recording while watching Big Bang
Theory and eating pizza but it certainly feels old. It's funny and impressive
how technology progresses and how someone today can intentionally sound as
bad groups did in 1980. All that being said, and logic aside, I really,
really like A Different Arrangement . It's brokenhearted detachment, it's
sterile, cold, and minimalistic production just doesn't care what it sounds
or feels like and that purity and honesty make A Different Arrangement
awesome.
Synthpop has come a long, long way since the heady days of 1980. Yet, it's
nice to know that despite the progress made technologically that the songs,
albums, and bands from those early days are still held in such high regard.
Black Marble are a living tribute to those times and A Different Arrangement
is truly different today because it's a tarnished look back and not something
sparkly and optimistic. This is a grim and gray record no matter how hard it
tries to be happy and that makes me smile.
-=- SHGZ -=-
-=-=-==-=-=-
Dream Pop
is a subgenre of
alternative rock and neo-psychedelia
that emphasizes atmosphere and sonic texture as much as pop
melody. Common characteristics include breathy vocals, dense productions,
and effects such as reverb, echo, tremolo, and chorus. It often
overlaps with the related genre of shoegaze, and the
two genre terms have at times been
used interchangeably.
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