OH, YOUNG LIONS

hey, here’s something oblique for you.

cokemachineglow:

Album: Icky Mettle (Alias; 1993)

When I think of Zola Jesus, I can’t help but think of Lady Gaga. The two have a fair amount in common, beyond having wonderfully interesting bone structure: they are singers, rather than vocalists, possessing (or possessed by) truly killer pipes; they came to pop music through the unusual conduit of classical forms (Gaga is a classically trained pianist, Zola Jesus a former opera singer); they both enjoy covering themselves in unusual substances. But only one of these women really pushes pop music into strange, often uncomfortable places.

The accepted line on Gaga has become one of Stefanie Germanotta’s role as provocateur, an experimentalist who somehow managed to upset conventions and become a true pop sensation. And I suppose I could accept that as true, if I only paid attention to Gaga’s media presence, the photographic evidence of her predilections toward angular hats on the runway, her appealingly surreal set pieces (she once wrote a thesis on Damien Hirst, after all). But, and the secret’s not really a secret, Gaga’s avant-garde spirit presents itself in her music—where? I suppose the wordless chorus of “Bad Romance” might, unbeknownst to me, have its roots in a little-studied Esperanto dialect, but I doubt it.

And I’m a fan of Mother Monster. In fact, I like her most when she’s at her least contrived. “Just Dance,” her breakout track and one indistinguishable from its brethren in the Euro-pop trend muscling its way across the airwaves these last several years, is still my favorite of her songs. I couldn’t say whether Nika Danilova, when she’s writing as Zola Jesus, thinks of Lady Gaga. If I were her, I’d at least feel a twinge of resentment, mixed with love, like a sister jealous of another sister’s greater success. Gaga, for mainstream audiences, occupies the rightful place of Zola Jesus, the latter a songwriter who actually makes something challenging—but still vital—out of her acquaintance with industrial music and new wave. Pop music doesn’t need to have anything of the avant-garde in it at all, but when it does, it’s pretty damned interesting.

I didn’t feel quite as strongly about this comparison until I finally saw Zola Jesus live this week, at Washington, DC’s wonderfully forward-thinking, electro-minded U Street Music Hall. Onstage, Zola Jesus sounds more human than she does on record, her voice still just as technically impressive but less chilly, less remote. And, you know, she can work the dance floor. This latter talent, something I wasn’t necessarily expecting from Danilova as a live performer, made me finally think of her more as a pop star than some sort of indie chanteuse, recording in her bedroom for a acceptably limited audience. Zola Jesus seems born for a stage as big as they come. Whether or not a mainstream audience will accept angularity in their pop singers when it comes in the form of music rather than headwear is another question, entirely.

Hello Sadness had the misfortune of a release date right in the middle of the internet’s cyclonic Best-of-2011 maelstrom. (At PopMatters, we’d already submitted our ballots by the time the album dropped — the same day, by the way, that Drake’s Take Care saw physical release. So, neither record made the year-end list, which I think is as embarrassing as spraying milk out of your nostrils at the lunch table in 5th grade.) In a backward sort of way, though, that omission makes sense for Los Campesinos!. Not because the band doesn’t deserve the recognition — they’re one of the most consistent acts of the last five years, and Hello Sadness is their best work yet — but because they’re a group of outsiders in the indie scene, anyway.

Other writers have already noted LC!’s guitar-driven, hyper-emotive pop isn’t exactly fashionable in 2012, and I suppose that’s true. I’d be embarrassed to be caught singing a line like, “I christen all the ships that sail / On your little kisses’ saliva trails,” in front of certain friends of mine. But Hello Sadness the record, and its strongest moment, “Hello Sadness” the song, give me the kind of rush that has been increasingly hard to chase down since I was 16. And it doesn’t do so in the kind of purely guilty pleasure, ironic way all those Vagrant Records bands on my iPod do. It’s Gareth Campesinos!’s famously sharp self-deprecation that saves his band from becoming the self-serious, adolescent dreck of the Jared Leto variety. Somebody photoshop Gareth into Fight Club, instead. (No, he doesn’t deserve that. Fight Club is the worst, you guys.)

I’ll admit, The Knife’s Silent Shout flew over my head in 2006. I liked it well enough, but I didn’t have many reference points in my listening habits for the record; so, it slid to the backburner. Purity Ring’s “Belispeak” alone makes a strong enough case for Silent Shout to get some more play. The duo have clearly paid attention to The Knife and Fever Ray, and they’ve diluted Karin Dreijer Andersson’s creepiness to a mid-level unease. In other words, “Belispeak” hits the right notes on the pop song spectrum in a way that The Knife itself hasn’t done since “Heartbeats”. An indian summer jam for creeping out the people in the car next to you.