Share
A great big mess of Nat JM
8 Nov 2007, 20:34
A while ago (at least three months now), musician and fellow-penguin-fondler Nat JM asked me to do a review of her then-new single 
Manager. Pretty quickly, I decided I was rubbish at reviewing individual songs, or that any comments I'd make would be superficial if I didn't consider them in the context of the rest of her work. So, I took it upon myself to review her entire back catalogue, which is only about a dozen songs but, unfortunately for me, is increasing at a rate of two a month (which puts me to shame: I'm lucky if I manage to produce two crappy lumps of prose in a month).
It occurred to me yesterday that, since Nat's style of music is pretty unpolished, it makes little sense for a review of her music to consist of endlessly-polished prose. And so I decided to post my notes in their entirety, from which I had (eventually) intended to produce a “proper review” of some sort. There's a fair chance that, if I didn't do it this way, said proper review would become increasingly mythical.
These are completely unedited (apart from adding links to songs and artists where appropriate), so they contain several wanky turns of phrase I would have made less crap. I also didn't write these linearly, which is why “again” appears prematurely.
So, Nat, this is late, incomplete, untidy, ugly, devoid of pithy quotes, rich in unfinished sentences and in many places doesn't actually make any sense; but it's as close as possible to what went on in my brain when I listened to your music (in my mind everything's one giant nested list):
And here's what prose I did manage to come up with:
Once upon a time, a long time ago (now measurable in decent fractions of years), Nat JM asked me to review her then-new single, Manager, likely because I'd recently been caught listening to a lot of The Slits and/or Siouxsie and the Banshees, and she's often been compared to them musically.
I must confess, I'm hardly an expert on this genre of music—my knowledge of the Slits consists of their excellent cover of Grapevine and the songs from Cut, though I think some of those recordings are non-album versions; and my extensive Siouxsie appreciation comprises Happy House, and more recently Into A Swan.
I usually like to become a bit familiar with an artist's other work before examining a particular song; so, I delved into Nat's other work, in search of musical reference points, trends, comparisons and review-juice.
The first thing to note is that Nat's music is raw (I'm going to reserve some synonymous adjectives for use later on). Nat's vocals are rather reminiscent of Ari Up (of the Slits) in that they wander almost atonally around the melody. But they do so very deliberately, kind of like a dry stone wall—each piece is irregular, but the !!!!!finished thing!!!!! is constructed carefully.
Manager. Pretty quickly, I decided I was rubbish at reviewing individual songs, or that any comments I'd make would be superficial if I didn't consider them in the context of the rest of her work. So, I took it upon myself to review her entire back catalogue, which is only about a dozen songs but, unfortunately for me, is increasing at a rate of two a month (which puts me to shame: I'm lucky if I manage to produce two crappy lumps of prose in a month).It occurred to me yesterday that, since Nat's style of music is pretty unpolished, it makes little sense for a review of her music to consist of endlessly-polished prose. And so I decided to post my notes in their entirety, from which I had (eventually) intended to produce a “proper review” of some sort. There's a fair chance that, if I didn't do it this way, said proper review would become increasingly mythical.
These are completely unedited (apart from adding links to songs and artists where appropriate), so they contain several wanky turns of phrase I would have made less crap. I also didn't write these linearly, which is why “again” appears prematurely.
So, Nat, this is late, incomplete, untidy, ugly, devoid of pithy quotes, rich in unfinished sentences and in many places doesn't actually make any sense; but it's as close as possible to what went on in my brain when I listened to your music (in my mind everything's one giant nested list):
- Manager
- Love und Romance
- You Don't Know What Love Is (White Stripes) middle 8
- All change
- flits between a marching 6-beat rhythm and a 7-beat
- bouncy synth stabs
- Mega Bomberman again
- No chains no ties
- this one has a definite verse / chorus / middle 8 structure
- most accessible (!)
- chorus is synth-led, a building riff
- it's still a mess of loads of different copies of her voice
- small-sounding synth chords going off all over the place
- somehow the feeble synths and the tune's righteousness combine to produce grandeur
- You wanna be a man
- frenetic
- 16-bit, synth-led
- Mega Bomberman
- starts with Nat playing a riff that sounds like it was intended to be played on a grunge guitar to a packed arena, on four squelchy synths at the same time, using just two hands
- spends too much effort with her vocals on hitting the right note, and so they lose some guttural strength
- the lyrics tumble out, slurring and (to my ear) mostly indecipherable, mixed in a bundle with their stabbing synth-riff counterparts
- but the song sounds much the same at 2:30 as it did at 0:30
- Balls of fire
- smoulders
- slurred vocals
- The whole way
- (“Is this our future”)
- strong bass
- weird melody on the chorus
- Closer to you
- makes Fall Out Boy look like Stock, Aitken And Waterman
- completely unsanitised
- Liliput!
- not ramshackle
- not unconsidered
- often unmelodic
- dissonant
- voice lacks the outward power of Siouxsie
- passive aggressive (?)
- quietness of voice invites you closer
- dissonance of instruments
- pushes you away
- demonstrates the tumultuousness of herself
- her quiet, reserved voice invites the listener into her world while the dissonant, harsh instruments simultaneously
- make you want to run away
- make that world uninviting
- lays bare the tumultuousness of her world
- what melodies exist
- seem more like the rhythmic marching of demons than an expression of joy
- sound like they're coming from outside her
- I would enjoy these more if she sang more loudly
- at the expense of hitting the right note all the time
- The Slits playing Mega Bomberman
And here's what prose I did manage to come up with:
Once upon a time, a long time ago (now measurable in decent fractions of years), Nat JM asked me to review her then-new single, Manager, likely because I'd recently been caught listening to a lot of The Slits and/or Siouxsie and the Banshees, and she's often been compared to them musically.
I must confess, I'm hardly an expert on this genre of music—my knowledge of the Slits consists of their excellent cover of Grapevine and the songs from Cut, though I think some of those recordings are non-album versions; and my extensive Siouxsie appreciation comprises Happy House, and more recently Into A Swan.
I usually like to become a bit familiar with an artist's other work before examining a particular song; so, I delved into Nat's other work, in search of musical reference points, trends, comparisons and review-juice.
The first thing to note is that Nat's music is raw (I'm going to reserve some synonymous adjectives for use later on). Nat's vocals are rather reminiscent of Ari Up (of the Slits) in that they wander almost atonally around the melody. But they do so very deliberately, kind of like a dry stone wall—each piece is irregular, but the !!!!!finished thing!!!!! is constructed carefully.
