iLike, Synth Pop, and Why Don't You?

There's currently a playlist at the bottom of this screen now which is the same one I discussed in my "Happy Birthday to Me" post (12/30/08), minus one song. The playlist is my trial run with iLike, the Web's leading social music discovery service and a recent gadget for Blogger. The song that's missing is "Reflections in the Window" by Faith Assemby, an underground synth pop group. The replacement song is "Take a Picture" by Filter, which was released around the same time so it didn't affect my ordering, but I want to go back to the missing song. Why isn't it on iLike? Does that make iLike better or worse than Mixwit, the last social music service I used? And this is probably the answer to my first question, but why is synth pop underground? I have to say, iLike is a much more networked service than Mixwit, and I wasn't entirely surprised that I couldn't find Faith Assembly on it, because I couldn't find them on Mixwit either. I do miss the compact cassette graphics that Mixwit used, with the tape spools that turned when you played music. As for why synth pop is underground, read on.

In the '80s, most music on the radio could have been called synth pop (see my "Insult to Punk" post). Synthesizers were cool at the time and there's been somewhat a revival of that going on for the last few years. The head of Faith Assembly's label is prolific when it comes to networking on Amazon. He's done 29 "Listmania!" lists and ten "So You'd Like To..." guides with titles such "find more music like Pet Shop Boys, or better!" (see some more here). He likes to divide the synthpop genre into "darker, moody sounds" like Depeche Mode and Ministry and "lighter, melodic sounds" like Erasure and OMD. What was called "electronica" (I hate that term) in the late '90s is never included in his definitions (not necessarily a bad thing), because he sticks to the current and '90s "underground." Now retro can be chic, but it hasn't always been and it will never be synonymous with pop. If a current band references the '80s, that seems to be cool right now, but if a current band sounds like it came out in the '80s, that's not so cool. At least, not to radio listeners and the music purchasing public (if such people even exist). So my initial explanation for why strict '80s-sounding synth pop is underground is that it's passé. But I recognize that most current synth pop bands aren't strictly retro.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a sampler CD set called the State of Synthpop 2005 with 90 songs by 90 different bands. Only 20 songs made it to my iTunes library. I noted that there were only two reasons the other 70 weren't deemed worthy also. My first reason for discounting a song has to do with the vocals, not the music style. Electronic music that's not retro just happens to be more popular in Europe than it is in the U.S. so that means most of it features heavy accents. Call me an ignorant American, but I just can't listen to some German, Italian, and Russian singers with English lyrics (I'm all for singing in their native tongues). On the sampler CDs, that took care of the following bands: Edenfeld, Pulcher Femina, NamNamBulu, Code64, Carnival of Dreams, Perfidious Words, Easternize, Syrian, Eight to Infinity, Michigan, Restricted Area, Blank, Motto.Reza, In-A-Sense, Vision System, Massiv in Mensch, and Ultraviolet. My second reason for dismissing a synth pop song is how close it comes to rhythmically simplistic dance music. Even "popular" club hits still aren't played on the radio in the U.S. which doesn't help clubby-sounding synth pop with its "unpopularity.". On the sampler CDs, I skipped the following artists based alone on the BOOOOOORING, kick drum pulse they used: Daybehavior, Cosmicity, Seize, Paradoxx, Moon Rock, The Azoic, System, love/less, Tristraum, Soviet Radio, Attrition, Interface, Internal Dialogue, Monowheel, and Dekoy. That's not to say I hate club music, I just think synthpop remixes should be able to add something rhythmically different from the original versions.

I will admit that even without foreign accents and clubby beats, current synthpop still gets a bum rap for amateurish vocals, but I'm personally okay with that. I realize that most synthpop singers started off making instrumental, electronic music and then tried adding vocals later. That's great, because I care more about the music than lyrics and singing too. I don't think any of these artists would try to win American Idol. Sometimes the untrained voices are sorta punk rock, or just beyond goofy in a new wave/Weird Al kinda way. On the sampler CDs, I thought The Dignity of Labour sounded like Camouflage, Neuropa like Yaz, Rename like Savage Garden, Provision like Information Society, Moulin Noir like Human League. Other groups without a retro comparison that I liked were: Intricated, The Mitgang Audio, Distorted Reality, Ova Looven, Backlash, James D. Stark, Epsilon Minus, Paul Luckey, Children Within, Color Theory, I Synthesist, Croc Shop, Nevarakka, Subimage, Blue October. I also found some comparisons to new groups such as Swerve sounding like Pristina, Ganymede like Fischerspooner, Basic Pleasure Model like BT, Glow like Sarah McLachlan, and Hong Kong Counterfeit like Freezepop. I haven't checked for any of these groups on iLike aside from Faith Assembly, but I already have my doubts. Long live synth pop, with or without mainstream recognition.

OUT TODAY ON DVD: CITY OF EMBER