Tuesday 19th January 2010
PS I LOVE YOU – “FACELOVE”
This isn’t the same PS I Love You that wanted to know where on Earth Kevin Shields was. And this has nothing to do with the film of the same name either, not that I can tell (not that I want to hear).
But that doesn’t make “Facelove” singular or defined. It’s loose, frayed, wobbling through the last ten years of North American music with magpie eyes and sticky fingers, grasping at what it needs, forgetting and dropping and kicking off what it doesn’t want anymore, a petulant Buckaroo. Because PS I Love You show neither allegiance or loyalty. They’re one band, then another, and mainly a lot of other bands all at the same time.
Their kind of deliberate Babelism is logical not only to them being of a 21st Century Canadian indie lineage (and they do at least sound Canadian; yknow, Wolf Parade, not Celine Dion), but also because they’re part of music now, in which there’s everything all of the time always. It seems churlish to pretend that the last 60 years of music can be ignored anyway, let alone the last ten. The art is in what’s chosen, what’s left to rot.
Given the way they borrow like they’ve never heard of a CCJ, you could say “Facelove” is an apt title; all surface, no feeling. But only in music would this kind of expertise be considered insincere. PS I Love You do an admirable job of trotting through Pitchfork -Best-New-Music history like a more on-it VH1, and like their name, it’s in the footnotes where the real story resides.
(Photo: Asia Olar)
