Altogether Now / Lose Yourself (An unneccessarily philosophical review of TVMR's 'Factory Fatigue')

It is the fool's errand of the obsessive to try to explain why music matters, what function it fills in our lives. Music is a personal experience, after all, and the human touch of music in the moment depends on … well, the music. And the moment. Possibly in equal measure.

Yet what makes music different from other art is its combination of the personal and the universal, the way it puts each of us in touch with something that we intuitively know we share with others. If you could tour the Louvre on your own, you probably would; yet only petro-despots want a private show from the Rolling Stones. Frustrated fanboys will always claim that Big Star were better than the Beatles, but this is a kind of misanthropy that receives its just punishment in socio-sexual excommunication. Not everything that is good is widely loved, but exclusive fandom will always be less satisfying than broad agreement on brilliance. ‘Hearing the music’ is something we do with others, even when we are alone with our headphones. Maybe especially then.

The best musical experience is a kind of instant communion. Sometimes– gospel, house music, ‘Hey Jude’, etc – this function is explicit in music purpose-built for real-life, physically communal experiences. But most music, and in particular most rock ‘n’ roll music, does not operate on this level. You don’t always need the sing-along or the packed dancefloor to get taken from the personal to the universal; you can come to the same place by a different road. Great rock ‘n’ roll takes us there by removing us from our natural state of self-regard, and loosening the straightjacket of ego. The fundamental nature of rock ’n’ roll music has always been about cool, rather than about guitars or testosterone or leather jackets, and the measure of this cool is exactly how far it is from giving a fuck. Cool dispenses with self-consciousness, gets away with clichés, and makes no attempt to navigate anyone’s expectations, and in so doing frees us from the things that keep us apart. When we wind up to ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ or air guitar to ‘Total Trash’ or slo-mo to ‘Sweet Emotion’ we are forgetting ourselves, and we are becoming each other.

(Cool is sometimes associated with loners – James Dean being the obvious example – but this is a mistake. Those archetypes are not cool because of who they are but because of who they help others not to be: they provide a universal, shared escape route from despairing teenage loneliness. Thus Holden Caufield is cool, but J.D. Salinger is decidedly not; Chan Marshall’s fragile, lonely music became less of a comfort to fans when they were confronted by her crippling stage fright and alcoholism.)

Which is all a very long-winded way of describing what I like about TVMR’s ‘Factory Fatigue’. It is a record with an unrocknroll backstory, made by people who are old enough to know better, but it absolutely refuses to make that mistake. It is sloppy and unafraid, completely unselfconscious and fully vital. The swaggering, half-rapped, half-sung lyrics are dangerously full of familiar phrases and ‘attitude’, but the spectre of cliché recedes behind rhythm and an easy turn of phrase. Like the best lyrics, what’s being said is often not in the content of the words but in their delivery against the music, so that superficially meaningless couplets like ‘Always known but never shown/always dared but never cared’ sit in your stomach and your stride rather than in your consciousness. The music is similarly uncareful – the bubbling bass in particular tramples all over the record, but the impression is one of untethered energy rather than unchecked instrumentation. The tunes are instantly memorable, every element (including voice) works both rhythm and melody, and the dynamics are unfussy and direct. It has the swagger of funk, the edge of post-punk, and the punch of hip-hop. It’s also refreshingly short – the brevity of the album reinforces the idea that these people are expressing something, rather than fulfilling expectations.

‘Bowie’'s unanticipated sizzling electro-funk alienation is a highlight, but it is almost matched on the downbeat side by ‘Never Known’'s defiant street philosophizing. Elsewhere there is distorted kraut/psychedelia (‘Thunder Rise’) that recalls Primal Scream’s early 2000s work; and reminders in ‘Stakked Lightning’ and a ripping furnace blast called ‘Punk Face’ that Kasabian once promised to take people somewhere. Perhaps most disconcerting is ‘Through the Door’, which is pretty much exactly the song you wish Arctic Monkeys would have released this year (instead of this nonsense).

That that group of under-25s now seem completely incapable of shedding their self-awareness and making music with abandon is a great tragedy, and a situation all too common in post-modern rock music. ‘Factory Fatigue’ is a reminder of what rock and roll music can do when its creators forget themselves, and allow us to do the same.