Contact

I must admit, I have been wondering a bit lately why so much Christian indie of the moment is some kind of variant of emo. Think about it: how many Christian indie bands can you think of right now who aren't playing emo or emo-core? And no, Switchfoot don't count as indie. Exactly. Almost everyone's emo in some form or another.

But listening to the latest album by cult hardcore band As Cities Burn, "Come Now Sleep", has helped me understand why, aside from being very "now", emo should be such a pervasive genre in Christian circles. As the name, an abbreviation of "emotional", makes quite obvious, emo is a very emotional style of music, and, when coming in its more hardcore form, is able to express almost every emotion known to man, usually in the one song.

That's when it's done well, of course. Done badly, emo just sounds whiny and turgid. But As Cities Burn do it very well. They're very much at the hardcore end of the spectrum, but qualify as emo here primarily because of the presence of lyrics like "She's putting cuts on her legs to bleed out the devil". The album also ends with the soaring, heartbreaking 13 minute epic "Timothy", about the recent death of friend of the band members. Yes, this is certainly an emotional album. But it's the breadth of the emotional spectrum that interests me here, and the way that a style of music like (emotional) hardcore can deal with so many emotions that are a fundamental part of the Christian walk, yet are so often neglected in our music.

When he was more folky and less hardcore, David "Pedro the Lion" Bazan wrote a brilliant song called "Secret of the Easy Yoke", that talks about the experience of near-crippling doubt. "If this is a test", he sings, "I hope that I'm passing." I know the feeling. Few Christians would feel free to sing a song about feeling detached from God, feeling like you don't even really love Him. And yet we all feel like that sometimes. So why shouldn't we sing about it?

"Come Now Sleep" has everything in it. Fury, anguish, despair, grief, complacency, righteous indignation. And, most brilliantly I believe, it has doubt and detachment. The first track, "Contact", is the best example of this. Changeable, soaring between majesty, devastation and indifference, the song is just about as accurate a representation as you can get of how it feels to be shut off from God while trying desperately to reconnect. It's an incredible song, and the lyrics play no small part in its brilliance. The album never settles for despair. It ends with hope, in fact. But there's a time for everything, including despair, a feeling that is present everywhere in the Psalms yet absent in most Christian music. It's not absent in this song. "God, does grace reach to this side of madness?" vocalist Cody Bonnette asks. The answer is, of course, but the song doesn't include the answer because you never feel like there's an answer at the time. The conclusion the song comes to is an incorrect one, but very truthful all the same. "God must be asleep," Bonnette sings at the end. "God must be asleep."

We all know that feeling, that point when we can't comprehend how God could possibly be awake and yet leave us in our pain. The Psalmist Asaph took the sentiment a step further in Psalm 77 and asked, "Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful?" (77:8-9a). Of course he hadn't forgotten to be merciful, just as we know, listening to "Contact" that, of course God isn't asleep. God never sleeps, as another Psalm tells us. But the best art shows us life as we know it to be. If the Bible doesn't shirk away from feelings of doubt and despair, why should Christian art?

If it takes a good dose of emoification to make our music that bit more honest, I say, bring it on.

Independent Music Part 2: I Depend on Me

When I was in high school, it was "alternative". Practically everyone listened to alternative music, and the bands that they referred to under that umbrella term would make Thurston Moore turn in his grave, were he dead. There was nothing alternative about Blink 182. How can you be alternative when you sound like everything else? Alternative to what? Beethoven?

So the truly alternative amongst us listened to Beethoven (sometimes; actually not that often, but we liked to say we did), jazz, emo (before it was cool) post and proto punk and Pink Floyd, and bemoaned how banal "alternative" music had become. Then we discovered, in our first few years of Uni (country kids were always a few steps behind everyone else), that Indie was the new alternative. If you wanted to shun mainstream music, you simply looked to the bands that were not signed to majors - which, I guess, excluded Sonic Youth in their days of being signed to Geffen, but musically they never sold out, so we could forgive them.

Now, it seems, Indie really is the new alternative - in the sense that everyone is listening to Indie, and it's hard to know what to believe in any more.

Or is it? Now, maybe I'm just getting soft in my not-so-old age, but I have to admit I like that "Hide and Seek" song by Imogen Heap, and it doesn't fuss me too much that some of my Year 9 students like it too. I'm also not deeply concerned that it was played on "Australian Idol". At least Dicko had never heard of it. And just recently I've started to listen to Deas Vail, the latest Christian Indie thing, and like them, even though there's nothing remotely ground-breaking about their pure and innocuous blend of "Jimmy Eats Death Cabs of Cutie at the Coldplay Symposium". They write great songs, they perform them well, and the sound is familiar and friendly. And, you know, when I want to hear the direction of truly interesting indie, there's always mewithoutyou's latest release, where conventional song-structure and musicianship are considered things of beauty but bores forever.

There's a place for both the cutting edge and the straightforward. We only need to fear what's happening to "indie" if we start to find that there's no place for the cutting edge anymore. If we start to lose any sense of what being "independent" means, and there ceases to be any artistic freedom in the recording industry, then we should worry. But for some artists, being brilliant upholders of the indie genre is all they should be expected to do. They're not selling out. They're just doing what they know best, and doing it well - and I'm not going to stop them from doing that.

Starless and Bible Belt

So yesterday I went on one of my occasional pilgrimages out to Melbourne's Bible Belt to see my wonderful friend Sharon. The occasion yesterday was a fundraiser for the Youth Dimension Coffee Shop she is leading in Millicent, SA. And it was quite a fun afternoon, really. The weather was beautiful, and the main entertainment of the afternoon was the band, San Salvador, playing in what is known as the Factory at Mitcham Baptist Church, a kind of industrial storage space with basketball court and lots of packaging lying around the place. We all sat on couches while San Salvador played, and I was pleased by the generally relaxed, cool vibe of the afternoon. The band were also pretty good. If you've ever thought, as I often do, that there just aren't enough art punk/ska-core songs inspired by "Moby-Dick", well, check out San Salvador's MySpace and you will be pleased to find that there's at least one more now.

There were also a few talks along the lines of "why you should come to Coffee Shop", and I surprised myself by, for the first time in four years, considering potentially going. I was partly excited to hear of the existence of a new shop in Jindabyne, which sounds like a pretty cool place (and I liked the film). And I've also started to remember everything that I liked about the two shops that I did in my first couple of years living in Melbourne. And yet part of me feels quite uncertain about the prospect of going along and being the only Anglican from the Northern Suburbs - in short, feeling even more the odd one out than I felt last time I went.

That being said, I've grown up a lot since my last shop, and am much more secure in myself. Nevertheless, my most recent experience of going to a church in the 'Burbs was surprisingly discouraging - mostly because I was reminded, yet again, of how little I could ever fit into a church where paintball and sport were the two things that brought men together. My memories of shop are of a similar kind of culture, one that I'm a bit scared of, to be honest. Because no-one likes feeling left out, but you get sick of trying your hardest to fit the mould when you suspect most other people there were just born loving paintball and saying "Awesome" lots.

Each shop, I've grown to love everyone on the team, and come to respect them for who they are. And I suspect they've come to feel the same way about me. And yet, five years after I first went on a shop, I now have a grand total of one close friend from either of my two shop teams. The impact that each shop had on me spiritually has gone nowhere. But the community? It still seems to be alive and well. I'm just not in it.

I'll pray about whether to go on shop this year. Maybe it'll be a chance to overcome some of the baggage of the past. Or maybe it'll just remind me that, while the gospel isn't bound by culture, a few too many of its followers are. I really hope it could be the former, not the latter.

Affordable Housing

So apparently the time has passed. I understood that buying property in West Preston would be cheap now and an excellent investment for the future, but a colleague told me at work yesterday that she thought it was already getting expensive. So where does that leave me, if I ever do feel like buying something? Oakhill in Reservoir is apparently affordable, and in these things it doesn't pay to be a snob. In fact, snobbery costs quite a bit of money.

I love the Northern suburbs. I feel like there's a truer cross-section of society here, and community that isn't dependent on having a tennis court and swimming pool for entertaining. And yet it hardly seems worth the price that you would pay currently to live here. My rent is very cheap, I know, but that has less to do with the suburb I live in and more to do with my landlords being the parents of my two housemates. Much as I like Preston, I can't help feeling that, if prices are too high already, the market is clearly growing more rapidly than the suburb. There are very few services in West Preston, aside from the Regent Village shops (not half as quaint or charming as the name implies; there's a Post Office/Newsagent that's mostly used to buy Tattslotto tickets, a Pharmacist, and a few takeaway places) and the Foodworks that just opened down the road. If this suburb is too expensive for me, where would I have to live to get something affordable?

It's all academic, really. Nothing is affordable for me right now, and I'm very happy renting. It's just a bit of a shock to realise that even my humble and moderately dirty suburb is becoming "gentrified" in terms of prices. It's mostly a shock because there's little evidence of this gentrification when you walk down the street. What I see is a humble, quiet, multicultural streetscape, with a reasonable amount of rubbish lying around - and I guess people are willing to pay good money for that, if it means living twenty minutes from the city.

Beyond our galaxy

Alright, because my last post was in part a plug for some awesome music, let me now give a short plug for some truly incredible music.

For the last few years, I've been quite an avid fan of anything that Steve Hindalong or Marc Byrd associate themselves with. It began with Cool Hand Luke, that once hardcore, then shoegazer/art/indie, then hardcore again, band that first revealed to me that, yes, praise the Lord, there is Christian indie music out there. Then I realised that Steve had also been a key member and songwriter in The Choir, who I'd loved when younger, and who, when listening to their 1996 album "Free Flying Soul" in my 20s, now reminded me a bit of a dreamier Sebadoh. Their album from last year, "O How the Mighty Have Fallen", confirmed that they really are awesome, and some of it can be heard on their MySpace (along with the classic, "About Love"). Then there's Hammock, the new collaboration between Marc Byrd and his Common Children collaborator Andrew Thompson. They play magically beautiful music that is somewhere between Sigur Ros and Aphex Twin, and they can be heard on their MySpace.

My latest discovery is Christine Glass, Marc's wife, who provided angelic vocals on both Cool Hand Luke albums, and has sung with Hammock and in a collaboration with Marc, appropriately called Glassbyrd. While trawling the web for Christian music that we could get very excited about, fellow-Christian indie obsessive Lachie and I encountered Christine's MySpace which featured, much to my excitement, a Hammock cover of the Catherine Wheel classic, "Black Metallic" with Christine providing vocals. Now, there are two things I'd like to say about that song. Firstly, it has very similar chords to "God of Wonders" - Marc, were you thinking of that song when you wrote yours? Perhaps? Secondly, however, it's amazing. I mean, really amazing. The original has been a favourite of mine for a while, and I was astonished by how Hammock were actually able to add something to a song that they owe such a clear debt to.

When I get so excited about really good Christian music, I sometimes wonder why. Music doesn't need to be Christian for me to like it, of course, and yet I know that I identify with Christian music in a way that I don't with almost anything else. And yet I'm quite profoundly limited by how damn boring most Christian music is that when I discover something I really like, I like it so much more for the sheer fact that it exists. Finding the Hammock version of "Black Metallic" was particularly special for me because it helped give that much-needed confirmation for me that, yes, there are other Christians who like the same music as me.

A Christian man I have the utmost respect for in most cases once talked about a youth group leader he knew who was really into "alternative" music only to be convicted that he was being a bad example for his youth group kids. I don't know what "alternative" music he was listening to, but, aside from being creative and interesting, there's really very little, if anything, in much indie music that other Christians have reason to be offended by. Besides, in one of those lovely double-standards that I'd let get to me if I wasn't trying to be godly and loving, many Christians are willing to listen to JT singing about sex on, quite literally, every song of his new(ish) album. There's nothing more Christian about mainstream music. It's just that more Christians listen to it. But I go to Hammock's website (www.hammockmusic.com) and see their amazing commitment to art and beauty there, and I can't help but feel that this, so much more than all the crap that gets played on Nova and Mix FM, brings glory to God, because it declares the glory of all that He has created - quite fitting, I guess, from the man who wrote these words:

God of wonders, beyond our galaxy
You are holy, holy
The universe declares your majesty
You are holy, holy.

It shouldn't just be the words that declare God's glory. It should be the music too. Marc, Steve and Christine have that down-pat in their music, and it's for that that I love them.

(And on that note, how awesome are mewithoutyou?)

Merri Vista Social Club

Last night, thanks to these wonderful things called school holidays, I had the rare pleasure of going to a mid-week gig at the Northcote Social Club, the place where trendsters, bogans and everyday guys and gals get together and have a party. Or at least they did last night. And it was beautiful.

The occasion was the first night of Old Man River's Aussie tour. You'll probably know his single. It's the "la la" one. You'd recognise it if you heard it. Anyway - I went along with a group, one friend being a big OMR fan and quite eager to see him. I'd heard the "la la" song (it's actually called "La!") and thought it was pretty good, so I was happy enough to pay $15 to hang out in Northcote, which everyone knows is the new cool place in Melbourne, until that title is finally, rightfully bestowed upon West Preston.

I didn't anticipate what an amazingly awesome night I would get for those mere $15. Let me tell you about just a few things about the night that were particularly awesome.

1. The support act: The Hampdens. I thought I'd heard of them, but I might have just been thinking of the mountain range. I doubt many people had heard of them, but few could go away from the night not recognising what incredible performers they are, even at this early stage in their careers. There were moments when I felt as if seeing them now is a little like it would have been to see the Cocteau Twins in Scotland back in the early 80s. The lead vocalist has the same eerie beauty of a young Elizabeth Frazer, or maybe Beth Gibbons, and the charming, gangly awkwardness of Beth Orton in her early days. You know she could sing beautifully if she wanted to, and at times she does, but most of the time she'd rather be creative and unique, which she does very well. It's impossible to pin-point what her voice sounds like, but you know that it's the last sound you would have expected to hear coming from her mouth when you first saw her. It's a voice that fills your head with comparisons, but none of them quite cut it. It has the same originality that people probably associated with Siouxsie Sioux when she arrived on the scene, or maybe the way I felt about Björk when I first heard her. It soars between deep and frightening, and high and graceful; and all through these changes it's utterly original and compelling.

And, then there was that moment when Jules, the keyboardist, stepped out the front and sang harmonies with the bassist, and you felt that somehow, more than anything you'd heard in a while, this was Music. It was filled with love, originality and amazing skill. I'd tell you to check out thehampdens.com, watch the "Generation Y" video and download the free remix - and indeed I do tell you to do that - but I am also aware that, if you weren't there last night, you probably won't get it fully. Sorry to say it. And if it annoys you that I'm excluding you, let that annoyance compel you to go see them next time they come to your home town - or buy the album when it comes out early next year

2. The second awesome thing about last night? Well, Old Man River, of course, who proved to be so much more than his Jewfro or la-las combined. Indeed, "La!" was the absolute last song they played, after the encore, and, when it came, it was magical. It followed a minimalist version of Rhianna's "Umbrella", performed by the frontman and his stunning keyboardist/backing vocalist, and involved much singing along from the audience, who didn't find the chorus all that hard to remember. But the most awesome part? Hard to say. It might have been the fact that OMR himself (sadly I don't know his name) was happy to banter with the audience, played the beginning of "Stairway to Heaven" when it was asked of him, shared Paw Paw ointment with one very excited girl in the audience and was just generally a damn good sport. Or was it the fact that he got the Hampdens up on stage to sing "La!" with him at the end? Or was it the point where he got a girl who was celebrating her birthday up on the stage, along with her boyfriend, to sing "La!" with him and the Hampdens? Yes, it could very well have been any of those points. Or it might have been - yes, it probably was - the point at the end of "La!" when he asked us all, on the count of four, to start making crazy animal noises along with him. It was a beautiful moment of Northcote nuttiness that none of us will forget. It united us all in the experience of hearing real, and, in the truest sense, live music. At the end of the gig, strangers chatted to each other, and to the band members, and it really did feel, not like an ultra-cool live music venue, but like a social club.

And that was just the first night of their tour.