UNDERRATED: on Erasure’s I Say, I Say, I Say, múm’s Finally We Are No One, and the album as a secret garden

I realized after re-reading my last UNDERRATED post that the first two entries have been pretty metaphysically heady, despite my being, in all truth, a simple and silly man. I’ll be offering a correction here, which focuses on two albums that offer purely sensual delights: Erasure’s I Say, I Say, I Say and múm’s Finally We Are No One. But before beginning, I’ll have to address the elephant in the blog — can these records really be called UNDERRATED? While I’ve already established that my mini-essays will range far beyond the topic of under-appreciated music, it does seem a little funny to include an album with a number-one hit and one that is so well known to indie music fans of a certain age beneath the moniker. However, I do feel that — whatever heights of popularity these albums may have reached — both deserve to be held in higher esteem by today’s listeners.

In the case of the Erasure album, we will use the imperfect and controversial metric of Spotify to make our case. While the remarkable single “Always” has close to 29 million plays, the track “So the Story Goes” — an insane piece of operatic pop that sounds like a futuristic vampire flanked by a boy’s choir — has a mere 157,000. This discrepancy highlights the fact that Erasure is often lumped in with the 80s one-hit-wonders, when the entirety of their musical universe is far more interesting and singular. As for múm, my sense is that they certainly hold a reputable place in the opinions of gen x & millennial indie/experimental electronic fans. It would appear that upon the album’s release in 2002, Pitchfork gave Finally We Are No One a “respectable” 7.5 rating, comparing the music — favorably and no — to other twee-leaning IDM artists. But it is really much better than that. My feeling is that the album was so of its time in terms of scope and genre signifiers that it was somehow easy for reviewers to overlook how great it was as an individual statement. Like another masterpiece of that era that also received weirdly lukewarm reviews — Aphex Twin’s Drukqs — critics lost the content forest for the stylistic trees. While FWANO may be remembered fondly, I’d like it to be remembered as more: a classic, essential record of the early aughts.

And so, on to the next question: what is it that prompts me to consider these two very different albums together? The answer to that begins last month, with my reading a tribute to the pioneering electronic artist SOPHIE (who recently died at a tragically young age). The article included this quote of SOPHIE’s from a BOMB magazine interview:

“It would be extremely exciting if music could take you on the same sort of high-thrill three-minute ride as a theme park roller coaster. Where it spins you upside down, dips you in water, flashes strobe lights at you, takes you on a slow incline to the peak, and then drops you vertically down a smokey tunnel, then stops with a jerk, and your hair is all messed up, and some people feel sick, and others are laughing — then you buy a key ring.”

I immediately connected to that quote and the way that it presents a sort of synesthetic allegory for the landscape of a pop song. SOPHIE’s roller coaster analogy meant making music that jerks and jolts the listener around, using slick and synthetic tones that lurch out of nowhere to surprise and thrill. It is remarkable and groundbreaking work, though — like a carnival ride — is something I have to consume in short doses.

SOPHIE’s quote led me to consider that, for as long as I can remember, I have often thought of albums using adjacent metaphors: those of the *playground* and the *garden*. Both in my own music and the songs that inspire me, I’m looking for a feeling of meandering around a dreamy landscape filled with strange objects and unexpected delights around each turn. Musically, that can translate into surprising melodic tangents and chord changes, or unusual arrangements and timbral choices. Mostly, I just want the songs I hear to do something interesting. That might sound strange coming from an avowed fan of drone and minimalist music, but as soon as I’m thrust into the context of a verse-chorus pop song I am immediately waiting to be moved, entertained, or thrown for a loop. My capacity to sit through and enjoy “endurance” pieces (the five hour long La Monte Young performance I once witnessed at the Dream House comes to mind) is strangely mirrored by my tendency to get impatient after less than a minute of listening to a song that isn’t thrilling me.

And so, I’m always in search of playgrounds and gardens, and they have become funny little personal categories and sub-categories I use for some of my favorite records. Brian Eno’s Before and After Science is a great playground album; Another Green World a seminal garden album. Outkast’s Aquemini is a garden, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below a playground. And, two of my ultimate “garden” albums are these Erasure and múm records.

Truly superlative garden albums are often aware of their own essence, and contain some lyrical and thematic reference to the natural world. On I Say, I Say, I Say this happens in the very first track — one of my favorite songs on the record, “Take Me Back.” Vocalist Andy Bell sings about a magical, forgotten place filled with “scarlet poppies,” “butterflies,” “dragonflies,” a “weary willow” and “waterfalls flowing.” The song deals with yearning to return to that landscape — “Take me back to the place / Where I once belonged” — and the impossibility of doing so: “the river flows / I am never gonna get it back again.” The song brings to mind the German word “fernweh,” which can roughly be translated as “farsickness;” nostalgia about someplace you’ve never been before. For an album where the lyrics are, let’s say, not always great, I find this particular track very moving. I’ve always felt a lot of resonance with the myth of the Garden of Eden (despite the Bible not being, overall, my jam)… the sense that we’ve been ejected from a paradise to which we long to return to seems to be embedded in so many of us, and I think there’s something deeply archetypal in that feeling beyond whatever cultural conditioning surrounds it. This song does a beautiful job of getting at that unique brand of melancholy.

I hate to bring up Avatar here because it’s really, really not a good movie. But despite being kind of horrible it succeeded in culturally staking out a pretty unique aesthetic territory, and the computer-generated neon, bioluminescent forest of the Na’vi is roughly what I think of when I listen to this record. As seen in the mosaic image at the top of this piece, the color palate of I Say, I Say, I Say’s cover art (a wooded landscape with a mysterious castle in the background) even matches the Avatar forest. Sonically, the album achieves this imagery through its really wonderful landscape of synth arrangements, which make me feel as though I’m looking through superimposed layers of trees, flowers, and gossamer webs. There are no “natural” sounds on the record (beyond human voices), but as anyone who’s spent time in the rainforest knows, the buzzing, chirps, yelps, hoots, and growls one hears from the trees at night often resemble synth tones far more than they do those of acoustic instruments. I Say, I Say, I Say was released in ’94, and though the songwriting and arrangements are clearly of the 80’s pop vein, influences of 90’s techno and club music can be heard as well — especially in the way that Erasure modulate their sounds through low and hi-pass filters, giving the songs a living, squishy, squelchy, organic quality.

The fact that I Say, I Say, I Say came out in ’94 leads to one last thing I’d like to mention about the record — how incredibly, resolutely uncool it is. I get a lot of joy out of albums that succeed artistically despite being totally out of step with the time in which they were released, and I can’t help but laugh when I think about Andy Bell’s melodramatic, falsetto vocals and bouncy keyboard arrangements being released the same year as Weezer’s Blue album and Green Day’s Dookie (though, as mentioned, Erasure were still able to score a #1 hit with “Always” because the song is just that good). I love artists that are able to follow the logic of a genre past its moment in the zeitgeist, rather than simply trying to awkwardly embrace whatever the “next” sound may be, and on this record Erasure gives us a natural evolution of 80’s synth pop from two unique musical minds.

If I Say, I Say, I Say inhabits the landscape of Avatar, then múm’s Finally We Are No One lives for me among the strange plants and creatures of 70’s French animated feature Fantastic Planet (mixed, perhaps, with the more modern psychedelic landscapes of the show Adventure Time). Again, the cover art reinforces this connection — a storybook with a hole in the center, revealing a geometric humanoid figure. The album’s overall tone is one of dark fairytale magic, the wispy vocals of the Valtýsdóttir sisters both childlike and alien. múm’s lyrics are more impressionistic and sparse than those of Erasure, but through them we get a sense of an adventure happening in a space that is simultaneously large and small — two kids, perhaps, on a vast imaginary journey that actually takes place in their living room and backyard. The first vocal track introduces this inside/outside dichotomy with its visual of a “Green Grass of Tunnel,” offering the surreal image of a spatially inverted landscape; elsewhere, song titles like “We Have a Map of the Piano “ further the sense of a large adventure happening in a small space. In fact, another piece of media that’s worth thinking about in conjunction with the album is Honey, I Shrunk the Kids — that movie’s sense that, as soon as the scale is shifted, a normal suburban backyard can become a landscape of great adventure and danger.

The late 90’s and early 00’s were a special time for a certain kind of expansive indie rock/pop album — I think of them as “ramshackle epics.” Albums that blow apart the song form, with tracks that have the sense of building organically out of nothing. Granddady’s Sophtware Slump, The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2, and Sigur Rós’ Aegis Byrjun are three examples that immediately come to mind. Often, this quality is created by layering hi and lo-fi sounds, electronics with acoustic instruments, and allowing stretches of silence, drone, and musical listlessness into the structures of the songs. The most distilled moment of this vibe I can conjure comes during the Sigur Rós track Starálfur” (which was later to be featured in the soundtrack of The Life Aquatic). A swirling, almost maudlin string arrangement slowly fades out beneath the vocal track, to be replaced by the sound of a clumsily strummed clean electric guitar; the verse ends, and after a moment of silence punctuated by some buzzing amp noise, the strings return, accompanied by electronically manipulated drums.

These records were all trying, in their own ways, to define a space that is musically “grandiose” while still rooting performances and sounds in a human quality; to balance an ambition of scope with a poignant sense of the performer’s frailty and imperfection. Finally We Are No One is an album of this kind — the tracks grow by their own momentum and then dissipate into silence, taking the listener on an unhurried walk through a familiar yet mutated landscape that transforms as you move through the record. Musically, small and unassuming sounds build into mini-orchestral swells. It becomes impossible to tell the difference between acoustic and electronic instruments — it all holds together, yet nothing sounds too perfect or programmed. The album may have been a bit lost in the rich IDM and electroacoustic electronic scene of its time, but I think that the memorable melodies, unique sonic landscape, and overall strong sense of dramatic arc make it one worth remembering.

I invite you to spend a few hours in these two trippy gardens of the mind, and remember how exciting the idea of a secret, hidden, magical world was when you were a kid. Those worlds are still there, if you’re willing to pay attention.