-=- SHGZ -=- * Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal * ARTIST..: Black Marble ALBUM...: A Different Arrangement GENRE...: Electronic STYLE...: Synthpop, Coldwave, Minimal Synth, Darkwave, Post-Punk YEAR....: 2012 LABEL...: Hardly Art COUNTRY.: USA PLACE...: Los Angeles, CA FORMED..: March 2011, Brooklyn, NY ENCODER.: LAME 3.100 -V0 BITRATE.: 268 kbps avg QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo SOURCE..: CD TRACKS..: 11 SIZE....: 71.54 MB URL..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Marble https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/black-marble/a-different-arrangement.p https://blackmarble.bandcamp.com/album/a-different-arrangement https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/4jm8wt/black_marble_a_different_arrangement https://thefirenote.com/reviews/black-marble-a-different-arrangement-album-review https://musiccritic.com/black-marble/a-different-arrangement https://mvremix.com/rock_blogs/2012/10/30/black-marble-a-different-arrangement-album-review https://www.popmatters.com/168077-black-marble-a-different-arrangement-2495780668.html - TRACKLIST 1 Cruel Summer 3:46 2 MSQ No-Extra 4:18 3 A Great Design 4:32 4 A Different Arrangement 3:28 5 Limitations 3:28 6 UK 3:37 7 Static 2:58 8 Pretender 3:25 9 Last 2:51 10 Safe Minds 2:50 11 Unrelated 1:46 Total Playtime: 36:59 Under The Radar - A Capable full-length debut from the Brooklyn darkwave duo. [Oct/Nov 2012, p.127] Strong debut from Brooklyn coldwave/darkwave band Black Marble. Buried underneath dark synths is a strong pop sensibility. Fully appreciated through repeat listens. - User Review Just yesterday I had never heard of Black Marble, but the promise of a group similar to New Order enticed me enough to give them a try. And I was not disappointed. The newly released album "A Different Arrangement" impresses from the very first track. Using a variety of sounds from dark droning vocals to robotic rhythms, Black Marble has something for all post-punk fans. Be sure to check out tracks 2 (MSQ No-Extra), 3 (A Great Design), and 8 (Pretender). * A Different Arrangement surveys a wide variety of sounds, from the radiant, bouncing ebullience of "A Great Design" to the haunted playground-bop of "Limitations" (which juxtaposes sampled rim-drum clacks with layers of sentimental synth melodies and Stewart's resonant, reverb-smeared baritone). The warm, Peter Hook-inspired basslines shapeshift across Arrangement's runtime, and vintage synthesizer arrangements by Kube (formerly of electropop outfit Team Robespierre) are likewise versatile-airy ("MSQ No Extra"), astral ("UK"), and at times so distinctly manipulated and sculpted as to be otherworldly ("Last"). The influence of early synth pioneers like Thomas Leer and Robert Rental is felt across A Different Arrangement's eleven tracks, as are the fingerprints of the record's hard-line do-it-yourself architects. "All the music we gravitate towards has that quality where you can imagine the space it was created in and the people who made it. Not this handed-down-from-on-high sensibility. A certain handmade feeling is what we're after," Stewart explains. "The music doesn't have to be complex, but it's important to carry some residue of the process, especially when working with what [can sometimes] be construed as cold-sounding electronics. It's humanizing." If Weight Against the Door constituted a long, cold night, then A Different Arrangement heralds the moment when the radiator finally sputters to life, flooding the room with heat as the sun rises over a horizon of Brutalist tower blocks. The homemade soundtrack to a still, uncertain dawn, A Different Arrangement is a striking evolution in Black Marble's sound. * The first time you hear Black Marble's debut album A Different Arrangement, which comes out this week, it sounds both instantly familiar and not quite like anything else you're listening to. The Brooklyn darkwave duo, made up of Chris Stewart and Ty Kube, have earned frequent comparisons to the paradigmatic post-punk band Joy Division due to the ever-present synths, dark basslines, and general moodiness, all anchored by Stewart's deep, morose voice-and to be sure, if a vocoder had an Ian-Curtis-underwater-on-codeine setting, this is what it would sound like. But in Black Marble's hands, those elements are made smoother and poppier, filtered not through the jagged screen of punk rock but the softer lens of '80s-era shoegaze and modern electropop. The gorgeous "A Great Design" opens with a simple set of repeating, optimistically rising notes that are buoyed by upbeat drums and eventually joined by blurred, rippling synths; the nigh-unintelligible chorus is capped by a stringlike synth swell. Title track "A Different Arrangement" is more uptempo, with a darkly peppy bassline and intricate synth melody backing Stewart's drone. The spare rat-a-tat beat of "Limitations" cuts through the melancholy, bell-like melody as Stewart pensively echoes "There's no need to hide your/limitations/you're wasting your time"; high, discordant chords close out the song. "Static" starts with a monotone bassline and windlike hissing of vibrating synths punctuated by a clanging metallic drumbeat, then breaks into a brisk beat while rich chords provide a base for the distant vocals. The final track, "Unrelated," consists of birdlike chirps and single tones that reverberate through the ether, all anchored by a melody that builds suspense before gradually fading away. Most songs have a lot going on: beats that fade in and out; layer atop layer of synth; grand chords that add crests of drama; single notes that punctuate phrases momentarily; stylized, echoing drum machines; semi-ambient tones in the sort-of-background. Yet for all that, these songs never feels cluttered; Stewart and Kube may use a lot of sounds, but they're incredibly precise, and the album sounds remarkably clean. So smooth, in fact, that it's easy to lose track and realize you're halfway through your second listen-and I mean that as a compliment. Each song stands on its own, and earworms abound, but the well-paced and sequenced tracks build on each other to create an enveloping atmosphere. Which is part of what makes A Different Arrangement a remarkably intimate, surprisingly warm album-Black Marble manages to hit the sweet spot of heartachingly dark and toe-tappingly catchy in a way that draws you in and keeps you there. I was hooked after the first song, and I can't stop listening. But don't take my word for it-check out "A Great Design" for yourself. * There are two basic styles of minimal wave: the kind to do herky-jerky dancing to, and the kind we have in hand, the kind to mope out in your bedroom to. But wait: there are no styles of minimal wave. According to Simon Reynolds, the genre's an invention. As a critic, originality is an eternal question. It never goes away, but you keep writing about it. So does everyone else, from Reynolds in Retromania, to the cod-Fukuyama end-of-music catastrophe pieces that are lobbed into critical discourse with predictable regularity. So you'll excuse me if I keep picking over the bones. Call me a broken record. When dealing with a work that's a clear recreation of a classic sound - in the case of Black Marble's debut LP, it's the minimal synthesizer music of the 80s, call it what you will - our hypothetical critic (that's me) gives the album a spin. If the affective-aesthetic response - a response minimally-mediated by reason, in a relative sense - is negative, the piece can be panned for unoriginality. But will the same criticisms obtain when that response is one of pleasure? The answer is a provisional no - and to lay my cards on the table, A Different Arrangement is a deeply pleasurable listening experience - but does this exercise smack of hypocrisy? And is it possible to extricate oneself when caught in a triangle formed by: the aforementioned retro-hating merchants of modernism (often the middlebrow position) a popular music industry that is postmodern inasmuch as it sheds no tears for those who actually know and recognize the original that is being pastiched, a recognition resulting either from age or music-geekiness (we'll call this the lowbrow) the post- or post-post-modern perspective, which rejects out of hand the concept of originality and authenticity while valorizing recontextualization (highbrow)? There is something to be said for the rejection of the idea of progress in music - let's all refuse to "move forward" - but at the same time, we incur a serious loss when we abandon the idea that the original is valuable inasmuch as it's interesting. But this value can't hold universally; after all, there is the question of craft. Is the critique from originality rendered powerless in the face of the fact that the affective-aesthetic response is a response to craft? Or is that 'fact' untrue, and the response really a consequence of something less effable? I can't answer these questions. But in facing them, I would like to be constructive. And in this case it's appropriate, since the synth wave visual aesthetic (even more so than other post-punk moments) was premised on the adoption of Constructivist tropes, as well as Deco propaganda and the harder edge of Futurism. The mention of Constructivism, and of Soviet propaganda, remind us to ask, with Svetlana Boym: What is the Future of Nostalgia? This may be it; that is to say, A Different Arrangement is an album that it's easy to say constructive things about. Speaking of craft, a lot of minimal wave revival is let down by a lack of it; tinny, atonal and repetitive synth riffs are seen as the end of the exercise. In contrast, it's in songcraft that Black Marble shine (though that's not to give the expectation of overt hookiness, which would miss the point, moodwise). Like much of their source material, the vocals are reminiscent of a low-key Ian Curtis - a mumbling baritone with the hint of an English accent - but appropriately, the prevailing numbness is not broken by any Curtis-esque explosions of passion. A Different Arrangement develops the sound of their earlier Weight Against The Door EP with the more overt presence of bass and guitar added to analog synth, giving a gentleness reminiscent of the underrated Frank (Just Frank), rather than the more insistent beats of groups like Xeno and Oaklander or Martial Canterel. Here, the typically subdued tension between angular synthesizers and human melancholia is at its zenith. Let's call it "urban pastoral": the view of Manchester from Sheffield, seen from a bedsit window in a Brutalist towerblock, and it's raining in both. A space that attempts to transcend home's absence, a historical emotion. This is the sound of an invented genre, a note-perfect recreationism precisely premised on that which doesn't exist. * Dip a finger into the latest ebbing from the coldwave pool and you'll find it's surprisingly warm. While Black Marble might fit most comfortably into the gothic '80s-inspired enclave, they remain severed entirely from the raw freezer burns of the Soft Moon or the uptempo eruptions of Light Asylum. Unlike most participants in the contemporary reimagining of darkwave, this Brooklyn duo keeps their output small, soft, and glowing. Every object inside Black Marble's debut A Different Arrangement LP seems swaddled in a thick layer of nicotine-stained gauze. The basslines flex their muscles inside the dressing, the bioluminescence of the synth leads peeking through at the seams. Chris Stewart could be singing across a foggy Brooklyn alley, his voice trailing with detached amusement as he spells out his wry philosophies. His lyrics come through in fits and starts, but even when they're intelligible, they're not the point. A Different Arrangement hinges on melody and the way it wrestles with itself across open space to nestle into a satisfying whole. Black Marble's melodic focus pits them across the genre axis from contemporaries the Soft Moon, whose musical manifesto appears to settle along the lines of making as much cold noise with as few notes as possible. Black Marble is all notes, nests and wires of notes, notes in logical progressions and notes that fall just short of where you expect them to go. The old, warm melodies of New Wave and the rigid post-punk spines are all there, but they've been pixelated and slushed around into a new product--a different arrangement, if you will. The result is a quietly infectious record, the kind that seeps into your brainstem and bounces its many charms around without your realizing their source. So many tracks on A Different Arrangement chirp and squirm with soft synths and subtle hooks, yet Black Marble offer enough variation in texture and structure as to keep a uniform aesthetic interesting. They're the chaos of Former Ghosts honed in to a knife's edge, retaining the raw heat while relinquishing the forthright emotional barbs. As far as content goes, Black Marble relish ambiguity, straddling optimism and nihilism, never quite letting on what they're thinking. But the masks only serve to augment a record whose textural complexities and depths sink in further, quietly addictive, play after play. * There's being lost in the past and then there's being lost in the past and that's where Black Marble fit in. These guys are so absorbed and obsessed with early synthpop that you would swear on your mother's life that their album A Different Arrangement was recorded in 1982 when the idea of a sequencer was the most windswept and exotic idea in recorded music history. As on might expect as a result, Black Marble are a raw, minimal, cold, and harsh synthpop group who make early recordings by OMD sound like 128 track digital recordings. They're depressingly impressive and the songs, while sounding firmly in touch with their inner Teutonic keyboard terrors, are surprisingly catchy. Black Marble are so detached and so rooted in analog sounds that I'm very hesitant in believing that A Different Arrangement was recorded last year. It's too raw, to unpolished, at times almost more Joy Division than Joy Division and more synthetic than the Human League could ever hope to be. It's simply awesome stuff that's a throwback to when sounds like this were new and unexplored and much of A Different Arrangement feels and sounds like Black Marble are learning how all this electronic stuff works. In truth it's probably two dudes on Mac's and Ipad's recording while watching Big Bang Theory and eating pizza but it certainly feels old. It's funny and impressive how technology progresses and how someone today can intentionally sound as bad groups did in 1980. All that being said, and logic aside, I really, really like A Different Arrangement . It's brokenhearted detachment, it's sterile, cold, and minimalistic production just doesn't care what it sounds or feels like and that purity and honesty make A Different Arrangement awesome. Synthpop has come a long, long way since the heady days of 1980. Yet, it's nice to know that despite the progress made technologically that the songs, albums, and bands from those early days are still held in such high regard. Black Marble are a living tribute to those times and A Different Arrangement is truly different today because it's a tarnished look back and not something sparkly and optimistic. This is a grim and gray record no matter how hard it tries to be happy and that makes me smile. -=- SHGZ -=- -=-=-==-=-=- Dream Pop is a subgenre of alternative rock and neo-psychedelia that emphasizes atmosphere and sonic texture as much as pop melody. Common characteristics include breathy vocals, dense productions, and effects such as reverb, echo, tremolo, and chorus. It often overlaps with the related genre of shoegaze, and the two genre terms have at times been used interchangeably. ---==--==---