The Binary Marketing Show- Pattern
July 15, 2009 by Bradley Hartsell
I’m getting pretty conscious about my string of praise towards some of the recent records that I’ve reviewed. It’s like when you take an exam at school, and you circle ‘B’ four straight times; you start questioning your answers based on uncomfortable familiarity. So, I throw on Pattern and, during my time spent with it, I’m actually disappointed how good I think it is! I don’t want to be the guy who claims everything to be great and seem like the easiest to please music writer in the history of man. However, I’ve reconciled this as being fortunate to hear some good records lately, and hell, I’ll circle ‘B’ a 5th time if I believe it’s the right answer! That being said, don’t roll your eyes when I say that The Binary Marketing Show’s Pattern is one of the best releases of the year. No, seriously. Just bare with me, I’ll talk you though it.
The Binary Marketing Show has chose to align itself with the one of the most dominating bands on the music scene, Animal Collective. I don’t know if the members of fans of the Collective, maybe they’ve never heard a song, but if I were a betting man, I’d say they hold a few AC tunes close to the heart. They certainly seem musically inspired by them, as they concoct brilliant, fragmented, and eclectic instrumentation. Synths of all kinds permeate the album; breezy synth, pulsating synth, static synth, you name it. These electronic soundscapes are rich and plentiful on Pattern, and are supplemented with all kinds of glowing instruments. Most often, guitars will noodle simplistic riffs, alongside reliable, steady percussion. Horns, bells, and harmonies also find a home on the album by frequently creating an extra layer of sonic goodness to its accompanying track. The harmonies are the ones that really send the album into gorgeous places. A feminine, angelic voice adds that Panda Bear touch so often used in Animal Collective songs. Sometimes just making sweet noises and not even singing any real lyrics, it adds a lushness that completely reinforces whatever aesthetic TBMS is angling for at any given moment. The lead voice here sounds just like John K. Sampson from The Weakerthans, but he holds his own as the frontman. His melodies bounce off the wildly intricate music with ease, which creates an interesting effect worth noting. The Sampson sound-alike doesn’t really produce one catchy, sing-songy melody on the entire album. Rather, he constructs melodies that delve further into the sonic avenues already laid out by the band’s music. He sometimes rescinds the vocal reigns to the feminine voice who turns songs into almost instrumental pieces, adding another winkle into TBMS’s deep repertoire.
The middle stretch of the album provides the most striking moments on Pattern. “Shut Up…Kathy,” “White Template,” “Fear,” and “Iona” are musically superb, waxing all of the robust traits that make this band refreshingly innovative. While not only being able to seamlessly incorporate synths, guitars, percussion, horns, bells, harmonies, and melodies, TBMS also command their instruments into all sorts of different arrangements and textures. They can be fragmented and up-beat, yet they also can be droning and ethereal. This stretch serves as everything you’d want to hear from the band, as they display all of their qualities over those 4 glorious tracks. It borders on the edge of experimental, but mostly, it’s a full textured take on pop music.
The first and last quarter of the album could stand alone and certainly be really good music, in line with everything I’ve described about the band’s sound. But the core of the album puts it over the top, which makes it one of the best works of 2009. I could go on and on, trying to dissect the aspects that make the music so interesting and compelling, but it just seems a whole lot easier if you get Pattern, and decide for yourself. I do feel very comfortable, despite the recent string of good releases that I’ve heard, this one is truly a triumph.
We'd love to get through this without mentioning Animal Collective, which has become the indie-focused writer's Beatles or Brian Wilson-- a comparison so overused that it's meaningless. But what can you do with a song that sounds like a deliberate effort to record a slender yet vital hidden track for Strawberry Jam? Brooklyn's the Binary Marketing Show display admirable restraint and directness on this song: They could have named it "Phrenology", but went with "Shape of Your Head" to save us a trip to Wikipedia. They could have named the album something pretentious like Forms Repeating Through Time and Space, but they cut the shit and went with the plainly descriptive Pattern.
And they could have piled on effects and bobbins until the core song effectively vanished, but there's no safety net here: "Shape of Your Head" air-walks a single iridescent arch, as taut kick drums and toms goad a shivering digital loop toward an ecstasy of cyclical, chiming runnels. A heavenly monotone whines in the background like God's vacuum cleaner. In the foreground, stuffy-nosed vocal harmonies fall in and out of step, glowing murkily, like neon lights in heavy rain. It seems like such a meticulous diagnostic of the digi-tribal aesthetic that it can be hard to hear it as its own entity. With "Shape of Your Head", the Binary Marketing Show prove they can make an impressive Animal Collective song. Now that they've gotten that out of their systems, they're primed to make an impressive Binary Marketing Show song next.
— Brian Howe, June 23, 2009
Animal Noises track review of "Shape of Your Head"
New Binary Marketing Show, "Shape of Your Head"
I'm going to go ahead and forcefully disagree with Pitchfork on this one. Not only does The Binary Marketing Show's new track, "Shape of Your Head" not sound anything like Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam, but it sounds nothing like Animal Collective. Why make statements like "we'd love to get through this without mentioning Animal Collective... But what can you do with a song that sounds like a deliberate effort to record a slender yet vital track for Strawberry Jam?" when you don't need to? It's a good song- one that I enjoyed, and has allowed me to be intrigued by the band's upcoming effort, Pattern. But if you must draw comparisons, accurate ones need only apply. The Binary Marketing Show, good in their own right, resemble a mix of Dan Deacon and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Much more apt a description. See, it wasn't that hard, Pitchfork. Enjoy the track below.
The interestingly titled The Binary Marketing Show are a experimental noise pop group coming from Brooklyn. Pattern marks the groups third full-length album and it is the first I have heard of the band.
The music can only really be described as revolutionary. Think of bands like Tripping Daisy and Talking Heads, throw in some electronic samples and if the weather is just right you might come up with something resembling The Binary Marketing Show. The band even delves into lo-fi territory at times reminding this reviewer of Guided By Voices ("Tesseract"). And yes, they do run some parallel lines with the mighty Animal Collective although not quite as apparent. At times I hear a heavy blues influence even though it may not be on purpose. More blues type patterns in the song structure but then the layers of static and samples start to mess with it ever so slightly.
There is nothing on the album that is grating, which happens with so many "experimental" bands. Most tracks take a listen or two before you really start to get it. One such song is "Shut Up Kathy". It has a very hypnotic rhythm to it but then starts to unfold the different harmonies and such. Songs start out with very little and then have more and more textures layered into the mix, working up a wonderful archaic fervor.
If you like experimental pop or rock music then take some time to get to know The Binary Marketing Show. There are some very talented and interesting musicians on board that can delight in their delivery. Pattern goes down as one of my favorite "unhyped" albums of the year so far.
The Binary Marketing Show, a group of four musicians originally hailing from the south and partly based out of Bushwick, has released a new CD that evidences some serious effort at an album, and one that really feels like an album all the way through – a soul-searching blistering little thing which they’ve modestly called Pattern. The band has managed to attract a small but dedicated fan base over the years, but with this latest venture the project is starting to move into new territory.
When you first listen to the CD a few obvious references come to mind right away – Animal Collective, Akron/Family and Arcade Fire, to name a few. And while a casual inspection give an impression of a lack of originality, repeated listens show without a doubt that Pattern is a lot more than the sum of its influences.
Take the first track, “Shape of Your Head.” Toward the “climax” – if you could call it that – the band creates vocal textures that straddle the line between the almost-tribal voice approaches of earlier Animal Collective, and the anthemic chords and unisons of Arcade Fire. But beneath the surface, the listener can hear how the harmonies might more evoke strains of a Southern choir, making noise over some baptismal scene.
Songs here never seem to start and stop; they just happen. Listen through “628 Hz,” for example. The song fades in from the last track with a half-sentimental, half-joking trumpet duet, and then falls into place over a wavering accordion texture before the propulsive guitar riff and drums start in. The tension builds while Abram Morphew and Bethany Carder sing the verse twice. And each time, just when the tension reaches a logical release point and you expect some pop chorus payload, the song breaks down completely, Carder’s vocals soaring over the sudden silence like whistling toy rockets.
Then without warning a three-feel comes in and the whole arsenal – guitars, multiple tracks of Carder’s vocals, guitar effects, synth, and electronic clicks – creates a heady new jam with zero reference to any earlier parts of the song. While the recording here doesn’t achieve the kind of hard-hitting effect I think they were going for (the first transition in particular sounding tinny and unconvincing), the listener can at least get an idea of the massive, almost Sigur Ros-like soundscape they had in mind. Conrad Burnham’s guitar riff comes above it all with a throbbing, yearning line that sounds like it’s ready to push off into some totally new sonic realm. Then the whole thing falls apart.
Sometimes it seems the music struggles between clutter as part of the medium, and clutter as a distraction. “Present Day Armor” is a good example – in the first half the weird tenor horn line and the blurry moaning textures on top make it almost impossible to engage with the song without thinking about the band’s intentions. But in the second half of the song, when drummer Jason Meeks settles into a rimshot groove, it delivers one of the best moments of the album. Here the electronic bleeps overtop contribute something like the authentic static of a record player, not the annoying static you get when you’re stealing HBO.
But with Pattern it looks like they might be finally on their way to striking the right balance. It always feels like there’s something huge they’re on the verge of articulating, something in the big reverb push and collapse of each track, something that isn’t gratifying because of some ultimate payoff but the sprawling explosions along the way. For listeners looking for pop hooks this will probably disappoint; for anyone listening closer, the whole album is filled with some quietly unforgettable stuff.
I often wonder at the sheer number and variety of genres and sub-genres. In my more cynical moments I am convinced that obscure genres are the products of a conspiracy between musicians and writers attempting to make unoriginal or unbearable music appealing to college students or habitual myspacers. Admittedly, I fall into both of these categories, but I have never been the type of person who refers to a band with a phrase like “my new favorite post-Marxist-futurepop duo.” When my cynicism temporarily resolves itself, I realize that frenzied sub-genre creation has its roots in unique music: Bands make original and progressive music and listeners try to classify that music with the vocabulary at hand. Self-described as experimental noise pop, Brooklyn’s the binary marketing show seems difficult to place, even with hundreds of sub-genres to choose from.
Their latest album, pattern, opens with “shape of your head,” a piece that adequately demonstrates the major elements of the binary marketing show’s elusive sound. The song begins with a swirling and sweeping soundscape—a mix of electronic drum samples and acoustic percussion, a short, bell-like loop that seems to have escaped from Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, and ethereal choral voices—that gives way into a more driving drum beat and what one later recognizes as their signature guitar sound. This guitar sound, an element in most of the album’s tracks, is especially striking in “la boheme,” where the guitar picking exudes solitude, like a post-modern interpretation of the musical score from an old Western film. The guitar playing is minimalistic, thriving on repetitions of a scant riffs, its clean sound colored by just enough reverb to hint at deliriousness.
In fact, “minimalistic” is an apt adjective for the entirety of pattern. Many of the songs are built around the repetition of a particular loop or musical theme, and the overall arrangements are sparse. Acoustic drums are relegated to simple timekeeping and the use of the snare drum is rare. Minimalism is especially noticeable in “white template,” a song that moves the listener into, out of, and through an unearthly soundscape of tom patterns, electronic noise, and repetitive guitar picking. On this track Bethany Carder’s vocal delivery reminds me of Alanis Morissette, if Alanis were more indie and bothered and had better music to sing over. Some songs, such as “628 hertz,” contain only one lyrical phrase, plaintively repeated throughout the piece. Even the album title itself hints at the band’s affinity for minimalistic compositions.
The band also has an impressive ability to make seemingly incongruous elements hold together, although only barely. It is not uncommon to hear harp loops, harmonica, bells, dub-style horns, and synth drones. “trust and candor” begins with a quick ukelele chord that quickly cuts into a breakneck conga loop layered with bird sounds, mariachi-style trumpets, acoustic drums, and the idiosyncratic vocals of band members Abram Morphew and Carder, whose vocals play share space on nearly every track. My favorite song on the album is “fear,” a folk-pop tune that starts off with a church organ dirge and choral vocal layers. But the song heads up-tempo and its catchy melody is backed by a ukelele sample. The whole piece rises in energy, its zenith a sort of restrained angst.
The precarious arrangements certainly warrant calling the binary marketing show an experimental band. However, they are akin to other great experimenters—Grizzly Bear, Modest Mouse, Talking Heads—in that their eccentricities make them engaging and captivating. It is when the songs are barely holding together that I find myself being held rapt by the songs. The music begs a critical ear while at the same time also rewarding trance-like listening.
So how does one classify the binary marketing show? Indie-Experimental-Electronic-Minimalism? Really-weird-but-endearing-and-sometimes-powerful? Yes, those all work. Although, more simply, how about: “really good”?
In today’s world, everything seems like a get-rich-quick-scheme. Even in the music industry, ardent capitalists are eyeing the seemingly easy buck. Brooklyn band The Binary Marketing Show, however, is the anomaly.
Before they decided to make music together, Arkansas natives and Lake Hamilton High School classmates Abram Morphew and Jason Meeks scarcely interacted, as a result of what Morphew describes as their “anxious and socially awkward” tendencies. The two met when Morphew’s regular waitress at IHOP introduced him to her friends, one of whom was Meeks.
“It was rather humorous when we first met because there was this really familiar, I-already-know-you sort of attitude we had toward one another,” said Morphew. The mundane atmosphere of Fayetteville, AR coupled with the small town’s deep roots in religion and music inspired the pair to collaborate musically.
However, after forgetting parts of songs during a 2002 performance, the two made an unspoken decision never to play in public again. Though they would eventually perform again, Morphew and Meeks wanted time to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses as a musical duo.
“That began this evaluation process as to whether or not we were even capable of playing as a two-piece outside of a recording environment,” said Morphew. “It took us four years to reach a conclusion.”
The Binary Marketing Show’s music doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre, and even Morphew and Meeks struggle to define their music. Said Morphew, “We find ourselves now really being inspired by most any musical work, whether we perceive it in a positive or negative light. Music in general always gives us, by contrast, a deeper understanding of what we do and what we’re trying to express.”
The result is a synthesis of instrumental and electronic accents infused with folk-based vocals, creating a type of originality that is rare and refreshing in a typically monotonous trade. Pure, nonconformist music can only be made if artists, like Morphew and Meeks, are brave enough to shatter boundaries and unleash bold creativity within the songs themselves.
“The records that we release aren’t so much a collection of songs to be released to a faceless public as they are a document of the way we thought, felt, and experienced in that period of time,” said Morphew.
The track “Well Being,” from Destruction of Your Own Creation, questions the implemented hierarchy of life. It begins by sampling an overzealous female voice; the woman rambles about sincerity. The lyrics channel the perspective of a “creature” that begs not to be run over; “aren’t I not just like everyone of you, why do I deserve to die?” Meanwhile, the tempo of the song remains upbeat, emphasizing the urgency and consternation of the “creature’s” perspective.
The Binary Marketing Show is currently working on a new album, to be released in March/April of 2009. They will also be releasing a new track for a compilation album, the third produced by the 8088 Record Collective. Started in 2002 by Morphew and musicians Randy Vaughn and Josh Abbott, the 8088 Record Collective is an attempt to promote and documents Arkansas’ underground music scene.
“Arkansas is a pretty desolate state that doesn’t offer much with the exception of absolute boredom, but there are times when things just coalesce into a vibrant artistic community,” said Morphew. The Collective has grown to include twenty-six bands who share the same desire to share music without compromising any part of it by entering the mainstream industry.
“Having observed this phenomenon of our own isolated music scene, it occurred to us that there might be other as equally isolated pockets of creativity being dwarfed by the industry of music as well,” said Morphew. In an industry clouded by money signs and screaming fans, it’s rejuvenating to find some artists who dare to push boundaries and make music simply because they have a passion for it.
Hello friend! It's been awhile and I wanted to let you know that....
MY DEBUT CD "LIKE I'M BEAUTIFUL" HAS BEEN RELEASED!!!! - It is now available on ITUNES for only $5.94!!!! -Or you can download and/or order a hard copy at cdbaby.com
There are some exciting things on the way so stay tuned to my page OR FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @KELMURRAY as I will be keeping everyone posted!!
Thanks again for supporting my music! I appreciate it more than words can say. Would love to hear from you so feel free to give me a shout!
Be blessed, Kelly Murray
"Learning one day at a time that it's okay to be my vulnerable, imperfect self. Afterall, it's our cracks that allow our light to shine through..."
hey so we're back again with new members and completely new songs. It would be cool if you could check out our page and let us know what you think, even if you don't think anything of it. We have all the info on what's been happening in our new blog. We are playing shows again so come see one and come talk to us. -and again sorry for commenting like this. thanks american art
Online Now!
