Music Moots with sparkling Caleb ("LandmarK" by Maison book girl)

feature image photo credit: Julian Van Der Moere

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask people to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today we have sparkling Caleb! sparkling Caleb is the Massachusetts-based musician Caleb MacKenzie-Margulies. He is a former noise / hardcore practitioner with many previous musical identities (Doctor Strain, Neutral Fixation, and Sniper Culture among them) who has since begun to put poppier tunes in his quiver and LOOSE them onto the world. This year he released two sparkling Caleb albums, The ghost doctor and Third thing; the latter is a curious and lovely exhibition of tangled guitar and sigh-swoony vocals, occasionally jostled by a fine display of slacker-rock guitar heroics...

MacKenzie-Margulies played on the SILLY album I wrote about a while ago, and also wrote the essay that helped elevate it from good old fashioned skate-punk to something more like (shit)postmodernism. This artistic formality seems to be a theme in his work, as witnessed in the text that accompanied Third thing, which describes the music with characteristic specificity: a dry tone, no pitch correction or distortion, and even a house style for grammar, with every album and song title appearing in sentence case.

I dig this rigor! I love a boundary, something to bounce off. There is something comforting about a set of rules—brand guidelines, if you're nasty—containing the uncontainable (art). Maybe it's just the Capricorn placements in my astrological chart. I want someone to tell me what to do and how to do it. I want prescribed hex codes and font families. And if such rigor finds its final form in an ecstatic explosion of guitar after the tender, hushed delivery of the lyric "Last night, I drank a 40 ounce," all the better.

Below is my Music Moots recommendation from sparkling Caleb, "LandmarK" by the Japanese girl group Maison book girl:

"Maison book girl came into my life in 2016, and quickly became and remained the most important contemporary band to me until their disbandment in 2021. In 2016, I was at my closest proximity to relevancy in the world of underground music. The five years that I followed MBG's career soundtracked my own journey—an exodus from the hardcore and noise music scenes towards a place of personal creative freedom. Encountering MBG was like a window opening—I saw in them the proposition of a different path forward in music for me, which took many years to figure out how to articulate and actualize. I wouldn't say the music I make now is similar to MBG on a formal level, but it shares many broad aesthetic conceits and concerns. In many ways, sparkling Caleb has its roots in the revelations I experienced as a fan of MBG.

The tension at the center of both Maison book girl and sparkling Caleb operates on what Ned Paige (the sparkling Caleb house drummer and bassist—check out his solo project Seaman's Log) has defined as a "sunglasses" dichotomy. Music with its "sunglasses on" is cool, chic, sleek, and somewhat austere. "Sunglasses off" music is dramatic and intensely emotional—it makes direct eye contact with the listener. Both projects vacillate between putting sunglasses on and taking sunglasses off. I want to encounter, and produce, works that engage both the heart and the mind of the audience (to the extent that one can draw a boundary between the two).

This brings me to my song choice for Music Moots. LandmarK appears on Maison book girl's 2019 final studio album Umi to Uchu no Kodomotachi and sees producer Sakurai Kenta continuing to iterate on his signature compositional style within a more refined aesthetic palette. LandmarK has none of the dizzying time signature shifting of the majority of the MBG catalog but it's still difficult to imagine writing the frantically panning guitar/keyboard counterpoint in the chorus. Deciphering the arrangement of any MBG song is like staring directly into a prism. The song is a dazzling, delicate tapestry that hits hard, with that oh so hard to define and harder to extrapolate meaning from melancholic beauty, which I think is the ultimate draw of the group for me. Something harmonic about it speaks for itself, appeals directly, and doesn't require interpretation. There are a lot of dizzyingly complex moving parts, but the song still grooves. It's tense and relaxed. It's cerebral but the close lead vocal harmonies are really pretty. It's everything I want a song to be, and continues to be aspirational for my own songwriting and arrangement practice."

Holy moly this song is cool as hell. Staring directly into a prism is right—there's something going on at every possible millisecond of time and space in this song, it's full to the brim. Yet rather than being dense, the overall feeling is light—more of a flaky croissant or fluffy angel food cake rather than an impenetrable loaf of pumpernickel. The complex and clean guitar has a math rock flavor but the beat is almost something you could cha-cha to on a cruise ship. Weird! Delightful!

I almost didn't want to spoil my enjoyment of this song with too much "research" but I did look up Maison book girl and saw they were categorized on Wikipedia as an "alternative idol girl group" under the J-pop umbrella. Alternative idols apparently develop more "unconventional" images and delve into heavier and more adventurous genres of music than traditional idols. Learning about this concept pleased me greatly. My own musical journey curved sharply from manufactured pure pop to much grittier (but still radio-friendly) "alternative" rock during adolescence...would I have appreciated the option to listen to a group that split the difference? Hard to say. I do just love the idea that everything that exists in life will require some sort of alternative. A yin-yang situation. A Mario-Wario situation. "I want something else to get me through this life."

I played "LandmarkK" on repeat while I was decompressing from work by spending time noodling around on Photoshop. The intricacy and detail of the song paired well with clone stamping and free transforming the shit out of some photos of ancient pudding packaging that I found on a subreddit called r/GrandmasPantry. What do you think? The banner kerning is definitely fucked up but hey, I'm self-taught. Oh and please remind me to put a pin in the "sunglasses dichotomy" thing for later blogging. There's something very juicy there.