grrrama

Then I read this review. Then I listened to the album again. And I can't help but think that this review is just a mistake.

Leaving aside particular quibbles - especially the non sequitur link between lofi and incoherent track sequencing - I think the central claim ("You’ll end up steadying yourself in the maelstrom until its closing eight-minutes-long garage rock freak out (‘Supermoon’) finally subsides into silence") doesn't reflect my listening experience at all and the failing grade (4/10) seems laughably off the mark, although in some ways a strong rating (even negative) is preferable to a middling 7 for music this visceral.

I thought the comparison with the Beatles was particularly telling of the thought put into this review, as the Beatles divined the central sin New Moon is charged with, producing the original masterpiece of incoherent track sequencing and should-have-been-chopped-into-EPs-ness, the White Album. If incoherence is an inherent vice, which I would dispute, New Moon doesn't even rate on the scale that album set.

I almost thought its senseless dreamlike narrative was a satirical take on the album itself: by disguising itself as the Less Than Zero 1980s, Kaputt is comparing America today to Nazi German decadence and decline, just like Gatsby and Joseph Conrad did or PJ Harvey is doing now to England. 2011 is about pleasure anxiety before the apocalypse and A$AP Rocky, the Weeknd, Girl Talk and now Destroyer are its horsemen.

Saboteurs and Criminals United in Mayhem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWexi-DWFQ

It was actually about political and economic liberalism being the "end of history" in the sense of "the teleological goal of history," a term frequently used by Hegel and Marx but to describe other systems of organisation. Not about the final event of history or that nothing would ever happen again or that we should all pack up and go home.

I can't remember who said it but "Animal Collective covering Ben Folds Five" was too kind a review.