When Lansing-Dreiden first rose to indie-world notoriety in 2004, few people would have guessed the group was offering a prescient example of how pop music would come to function nearly a decade later. Fewer would have suggested that this was a good thing.
From the start the Miami-born, New York-based group seemed more interested in provoking their audience than turning them into a traditional fan base. Its members were steadfastly anonymous, they never played live, and they only did press via emails that were either blithely pretentious or explicitly designed to be read as such. Their work extended over several forms of media, including a literary journal called Death Notice, and they insisted on referring to the entire project not as a band or a collective but as a “company,” which provoked as much suspicion in the indie scene of the time as their frequent use of drum machines.
In the years since, anonymity has gone from a quirk to a fad to an established PR tactic and artists have become increasingly expected to treat their visuals and internet presence as seriously as their music. That, and ambition-- whether aesthetic or careerist-- has ceased to be anathema to the counterculture. The most polarizing act of the mid-aughts would barely raise an eyebrow in 2013.
The intensely conceptual aspects of Lansing-Dreiden’s mission attracted more attention than the music itself, and they’ve come to make up the greater part of the “company”’s legacy. But revisiting the two albums and one EP that were originally released through Kemado, and have now been reissued on vinyl via Mexican Summer-- with new, tastefully minimalist cover art-- it’s apparent that they were ahead of the game on that level as well.
Their debut LP, The Incomplete Triangle, is the most straightforward of the three, in that some of the songs follow simple, conventional pop structures. For all of its potentially off-putting highbrow affectations, L-D was unabashedly influenced by the Beach Boys’ ornate, gently psychedelic spin on standard pop tropes, and by Nuggets-era garage bands that bashed their way through well-worn blues formulas. Their first album opens with the “boom boom-boom crack” that’s been borrowed from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” several million times, and offers a substantial amount of harmonized vocals and jangly guitars doused in lo-fi overdrive and reverb. Which basically describes the sound their new label was founded on, and has come to define a large chunk of the underground rock that’s been made since then.
“Straightforward” is a relative term here, though. Even from the start, the group enjoyed surprising listeners with abrupt shifts in tone and style. The manic Turtles impression of “An Uncut Diamond” leads directly into the double-time palm-muted electric guitar that lends the postrock-inflected “Advancing Flags” an unexpectedly metal edge. And after a dozen pop songs the album closes with a suite of five ambient electronic tracks, an over-the-top flourish seemingly designed to goad critics into calling them “pretentious.”
Its follow-up, an EP titled A Sectioned Beam, offers less of a challenge. “Locks in Shadows” and “Spectrum of Vapor” are Pet Sounds-y and about as audience-friendly as L-D gets. “A Sectioned Beam” evokes both new wave and the Madchester sound, which at the time struck some critics as outre but after years of chillwave acts doing a similar thing it seems strange to think of as out of the ordinary. If it wasn’t for the 15-minute closing track or the fact that the record was intended as the soundtrack to a video the group made-- described on this site as “stark, picturesque scenes of plant life digitally mirrored to a vaguely hypnotic, kaleidoscopic effect”-- it would hardly even seem artsy these days.
The most fascinating and currently relevant music L-D wrote is on their 2006 LP, The Dividing Island. The impression that the earlier records gave that the group was bent on replicating the contents of an expansive and tastefully curated record collection becomes even stronger here. Their retro pop sensibilities are infused with the sounds and rhythms of slick 80s radio pop, or melt down into krautrock instrumental interludes. Their interest in beats is pushed up front, and expresses itself in homages to an eclectic range of sounds from the agit-disco that the waning dance punk scene had brought back in style to ungainly electro-funk that has remained resolutely unfashionable since the early 80s. Its closing track, “Dethroning the Optimyth”, is a power metal epic topped with psychedelically droning vocals and twinkling New Age chimes, a combination possibly intended to piss off whatever fraction of their audience was left who hadn’t already been offended by the genre miscegenation that preceded it.
The scale of their stylistic boundary blurring could be seen as a refutation of pop’s taxonomical tendencies, the need to name different sounds and thereby divide them, an urge that was exceptionally strong amongst the indie rockers Lansing-Dreiden was playing to. And in the past seven years it’s gone from the fringiest of ideas to one of pop’s guiding notions. Crossing genre lines used to be seen as artistically suspect, and brought into question the authenticity of the musician crossing them. Now pop radio is dominated by dubstep songs by country artists, country songs with rappers on them, and other combinations that would have seemed freakish a decade ago. Kanye West, arguably the most influential pop artist in the world, is a “rapper” who dabbles in industrial music, prog rock, and singer-songwriter balladeering, not to mention multimedia projects like films and fashion lines. Lansing-Dreiden may have been borrowing sounds from the past, but the way they borrowed them and what they did with them seems to have perfectly predicted the future.
