Yesterday, thanks to my ISP's internet radio, I discovered a new music group called Venus Hum. I can't quite pigeonhole their style, since the taxonomy of electronic music is incredibly convoluted. "Electroclash" or "dream-pop" seem to be the music industry's preferred sub-sub-genre categories for this group, but the phrase that comes to my mind is "erumpent electronica."
The lead singer is from Montana, but her song "Montana" could just as easily be about Colorado. The thing is an overflowing encomium to the big beautiful sky of the Rocky Mountain West, and the group's first album "Big Beautiful Sky" takes its name from this song's lyrics. There is a brief mention of going to St. Mary's Lake, and sure enough it looks like all those Colorado mountain lakes that I've spent many a day at, only the Montana mountains are more barren and eroded than their Colorado cousins.
"Hummingbirds" is an enjoyable reflection on color. "Some of my favourite colours in the world/Beat against my eyelids with the blues of green hummingbirds" I don't know why more people haven't related other things to Hummingbirds, which are such beautiful creatures. This song made me realize that I don't know of much recent music about animals and nature. Contemporary music is too often psychological discription of someone's inner problems without much connection to the outside world. There are far too many anthems to alienation floating around in the sickly miasma of drugged-out rock.
Curiously enough, in my ears the electronic instrumentals don't distance the singer from her subject, which also separates this album from those of many other electronic groups.
"Soul Sloshing" is the most erumpent song of the three I'm profiling here. It's a beautiful piece combining lyrical self-mockery with a playfully baroque explosion of sound. The title itself evokes a delightfully disorganized overflow of one's self. A passage I particularly like:
It's subtle--it's creepy knees
It's condescension versus humility
I know you! (I swear I do)
You're just like me-- You're sipping a cup of--pit-y!
Aw!
Humility is a topic even less mentioned in contemporary music than nature is, and the whole song is one big laughing romp. It seems a bit of a dig at the Great Seattle Depression so popular in the nineties, and it makes me wonder if 9/11 highlighted all that music's self-pitying self-absorbed pose. Of course, it might also be that our situation has changed. Negative downer music might play well in times of peace, happy music in times of war. Glen Miller's music was similarly bouncy and quite popular in its time, but both his and Venus Hum's music seems to avoid "bubble gum" happy music, which of course tends to pop.
Since almost all of my favorite music is either instrumental, not in English, or too similar to pre-modernist poetry, my lack of experience makes me mistrust any opinion I venture about the quality of Venus Hum's lyrics. Of course, lyrics in electronica are often very repetitive and almost always of very low quality. Enigma comes to mind as an example of bad song lyrics propped up by good music and voice manipulation, not to mention the very regrettable and poorly-sung lyrical version covering Orbital's glorious instrumental "The Box." And we're simply better off not mentioning the one-hit wonder Babylon Zoo. The wailing diva dominates techno, and she could be used well were she well-integrated into the group. As it is, the music makers pretty much just sample a banshee cry from a bad singer and repeat it over and over and over.
Lots of repetition isn't an entirely bad quality for musical lyrics to have. When done well, the singer's voice is fully integrated into the music becoming an instrument as malleable as the others in the song. My initial impression is that Venus Hum integrates well, since the singer is herself a part of the group and all the music can be composed with her one voice in mind while playing off her own input and musical expertise. The groups' lyrics themselves are sometimes very random, and I fear they at times slip from an admirable and surprising randomness into unlistenable chaos. This fear seems unfounded at the moment, but I'll see how I think about it after further reflection; the quirkiness also might have potential to get on my nerves. The voice of lead singer Annette Strean is very appealing to me right now.
Venus Hum has collaborated with the similarly random Blue Man Group and fronted for some of their shows. Blue Man Group catches my eye and ear, and I'd like to see them live, but I haven't listened to anything of theirs that will by itself make me get out my credit card. I'm pondering paying for Venus Hum's music, which considering my penny-pinching music-purchasing habits, compounded by no immediate prospect of income, is quite revealing of their music's first effects on me.
Electronic music has never been very popular. MTV tried to create a techno trend after the respectable sales of the Mortal Kombat soundtrack indicated a market in the US, but since MTV sucks, it failed miserably. I do hope this group enjoys the enduring success of Depeche Mode, or if that's too much to hope for, the well-deserved appreciation many people have for Tangerine Dream. I think the group's base in the music town of Nashville bodes well for a unique and worthwhile style and could be a check on ego inflation.
The Blue Man Group has a music video of their Venus Hum collaboration on their website, This is a good site linking to a few complete songs in streaming audio, and MSN has two music videos here. Rhapsody radio, to which I get a basic subscribtion through my ISP account, allows a customized Venus Hum channel. (Hopefully I'll get around to praising Netscape Radio's Rennaisance Music channel, which actually carries the music of Provencal troubadours!)
The videos show Annette Strean dressing in her preferred retro fifties(!) style, and she herself is a sweet surprise.
(Also of musical interest: a well-wrought pro-life rap song "Can I Live?" from mainstream artist Nick Cannon has a music video!)
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