I'm hardly old, and I can still remember a time when merely getting access to a four-track machine was considered a coup. Even if you managed to score one, no matter what you did with it, rock's nomenclature politely insisted that the best you could hope to make would be "rough demos"-- those were the things that you'd use to convince a proper producer to make you sound good, in a proper studio, this time for real.
Nowadays-- especially in the realm of music that can't be connected to Mutt Lange or David Foster in less than three steps-- the terms "producer" and "musician" mean increasingly little in relation to each other. Pirated software is everywhere, pre-amps are dirt-cheap, and a good mic and your buddy's sampler are only a phone call away. Have laptop, will dabble-- we all do, and we probably all have.
I wonder if there's any connection between this relatively new shift and this decade's obvious affinity for collectives. If a band (in the most traditional sense of the word) has historically been about conveying a unified front, maybe a collective works more like a safety net, something there to frame and contain all of the different music coming out of it, providing all the social support of a band without any of the commitment.
Of course, as we're slowly finding out, collectives have their drawbacks too, among which over-saturation by association ranks near the top of the list. With three of its five members also principle players in !!!, Out Hud's biggest challenge with this, their second record, would have been to shake off dance punk's residual baggage and make something that didn't sound like it was coming from within an echo chamber. On those terms-- and in fact, on pretty much any terms-- Let Us Never Speak of It Again is a huge success, a fresh-sounding record that doesn't feel too obviously indebted to anything that's come before it, much less like anything Out Hud have made before.
A lot of that has to do with the singing of Out Hud's female constituency, drummer Phyllis Forbes and cellist Molly Schnick, whose vocal presence-- their first outside of a few moans into an echo machine on early single "Guilty Party"-- ceases the Kranky band's flirtation with post-rock and moves them into more overtly pop terrain. Just as important to the makeover is Justin Vandervolgen's production, which exchanges the sprawling, jam-based guitar workouts of the band's prior material in favor of a punchier, springier, more electronic sound. In terms of sounds and timbres, a decent analog would be Mu, who riff on disco, dance, haunted house atmospherics, and cheap MIDI patches to similarly great effect.
With its elastic snares, cheap pianos, and fluffy vocals, second track "It's For You" sets the tone for a much leaner album. Although Tyler Pope's distinctively robust guitar sounds creep into the mix every once and a while, Out Hud generally stick to a more plasticky, dance-informed palette; nowhere is that more pronounced than on the album centerpiece, the eight-minute "The Song So Good They Named It Twice". Comprising peeling synth lines, a rumbling bass kick and a flickering clap track, its maximalist builds are loosely informed by LCD Soundsystem's club-oriented tracks, which is no bad thing. Elsewhere, more song-oriented highlights include the lone guitar workout "One Life To Leave" and the wonderful "How Long", which begins on a lumbering cello line before dissolving into a gorgeous slice of digital pop.
But really, the album is so well-paced and smartly assembled that to single out individual tracks feels counterintuitive; as light and as effervescent as anything I've heard this year, Let Us Never Speak of It Again bounds between sounds and styles as freely as the people who made it.
