I Walk a Thin Line

Review: Daft Punk - Tron Legacy (2010)/The Knife – Tomorrow in a Year (2010)

Flit gracefully from Pitchfork to Stereogum to NPR. A common thread united the blog reviews for these two totally disparate albums. My intention here is not to be cute in lumping them together. They are radically different works that will likely appeal to few united audiences but me. I mean to point, instead, to a structural problem with rock criticism that hijacked the reviews of both. Each time I read a review for Tron it went something like this: Listening to this album confirms what we already suspected – this isn’t a Daft Punk record but rather the soundtrack for a Disney blockbuster. The value judgment attached to this claim doesn’t matter – some reviewers used a variation of this as praise for Daft Punk’s veriatas and (far more) others as a condemnation. The Knife album in contrast elicited reviews that proclaimed that this was not a Knife album but rather an opera.

To these reviewers I am tempted to say: thank you for letting us know that a movie soundtrack is a movie soundtrack and that an opera recording is not a synth pop album. But that would be to trade snark for truism. A zero sum game if ever one was. Instead, two observations, still banal perhaps but sincere are in order. First, whether Pitchfork, Stereogum or even the Los Angeles Times no one thought to assign a reviewer familiar with opera and movie scores to review these albums. And second, but following on the first, “music criticism” is rock criticism [a fine thing except that 1) there are few rock critics left and these write for the reviled Rolling Stone and 2)that the Black Keys seems to be about as good as rock is capable of right now.]

Daft Punk - Tron Legacy (2010)

So what does all this mean for Tron and Tommorow in a Year? For Tron, it means first and foremost that the lazy jabs at the score’s similarity to the work of Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, and John Williams et al. are completely pointless. They fill a few sentences of a review because rock criticism is, above all, invested in influence. Readers want to know what something they haven’t heard yet sounds like. Often this amounts to little more than the laziest of ekphrastic exercises in which the critic invites us to “imagine that the Flaming Lips and Velvet Underground joined forces, but with Joanna Newsome singing.” This can be a useful technique for rock criticism but it tells us nothing about a movie score. Worse yet, these reviewers are trained to treat “albums” as self-contained entities. On the one hand, its tough to blame them – clearly Disney’s music division wishes this to be the case as well. Yet any review of Tron or Tomorrow in a year can at best signal the absence of the dramatic, visual, and lyric elements of the total production rather than fully grapple with the fact that what we have in both works is, at best, a souvenir of a whole. With Tron, at least, reviewers saw fit to include this qualification. The spectacular nature of opera rather eluded a great many responses to Tomorrow.

The Knife – Tomorrow in a Year (2010)

theknife.net by Rabid Records

How much more dire the fate of the Knife’s opera. In the first place, the casual reviewer can’t even name a contemporary composer of opera, much less tell us which works this recording fits in with. Second, few even bothered to mention that it might help to see, you know, the opera that this is the sonic component of. But even taking the work as a piece of pure sound the reviewers just couldn’t make sense of it. Nearly each review made some kind of remark (again the values attached ranged slightly) about how the listener had to slog through large sections of found sound and rhythmic noise experiments to get to the song cycle at the end of the record. It should be stressed that the disjunction has been exaggerated. But far more importantly, this shows not the slightest understanding of opera. For what we have (albeit in the fractured form of water drops, wind, and insects) is recitative followed by several strong arias. The Knife and their collaborators may hardly rise to the heights of Wagner (or Verdi if you prefer) but they do faithfully adopt the structure out of which such romantic masters emerged, a simulacra that serves its purpose more effectively than the works of many a vaunted avant-garde composer like Solonen.

In the end I recognize that I’ve provided a review of neither work in the conventional sense. Yet there are many of these for the reader’s edification and all by better rock critics than me. I hope, however, that I have instead illuminated both the too obscurant language that grounds such reviews and, more importantly, attended faithfully to the difficult fact that both Tron and Tomorrow in a Year are referential works – they point to an opera and a movie, and their worth can be measured only in concert with these.

- Sean Roberts, January 2011