"Paper Television," The Blow

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I can't believe I haven't made a topic about this yet...but now that there's so much hype surrounding The Blow, I figured this would be a good time.

Hold a piece of pop music in your hand. How heavy is it? If you threw it, could you break the window of a passing car? Could you break a tooth? For several years, The Blow have been hard at work developing an essential pop music formula, fashioned, as the best popular music is, with the function of getting under the skin of the people. What that music does once it gets there is what makes The Blow worth thinking about. Fascinated with the physics of pop construction, The Blow makes music that holds a weightless gravity. Their songs are light enough to sail easily through the air, landing simultaneously on the turntable of a London DJ, in your Mom's car stereo, and in the iPod of a middle schooler in study hall. However, they are somehow heavy enough to stick around, laying in your mind long after their new album, Paper Television (KLP177), is over.

The Blow is Jona Bechtolt and Khaela Maricich. The two have been working together as The Blow since 2004 when they recorded a limited edition EP called Poor Aim, Love Songs. It quickly became clear that the results of their combined forces flexed with a muscle that had a range far beyond the limited edition market. United by a shared affection for the sparkling production styles of mainstream radio, and both raised with deep roots in the DIY scenes of the Pacific Northwest, the duo makes fractured pop chart toppers to seduce all manner of hearts out of their cases, onto the floor.

The strength of the Blow is built through juxtaposition. Jona's percussive savvy bumps and trips under Khaela's intimate, insistent vocals. No-wave and glitch-hop, club anthems and doo-wop, all party together in the architecture created by The Blow's sound. Imagine a see-thru space station, floating in the dark, culling out via radio the most delicious flavors of planet earth's pop music production (the Pharells, the Phil Spectors, the Quincy Joneses). In the hovering structure of Paper Television, these sounds bounce around and mingle, try new moves and brave courageous hairstyles, ultimately getting infused (knocked up) with The Blow's vital lyrical content. Packed softly into hearty and buoyant vessels of songs, the words and beats are sent back out into the unknown, a transmission from the humans, for the humans, intended to spell out clearly in the night sky to all who come across them: "H-E-L-L-O! YOU ARE NOT ALONE: WE ARE HERE, AND WE ARE LISTENING.

Paper Television has gotten stellar reviews from Pitchfork (8.3/10..Best New Music tag) and All Music (4/5). If anyone pays attention to popular Indie blogs like Gorillavsbear, FADER, Idolator, Underrated, or Brooklyn Vegan, you've definitely heard about The Blow. The hype began over the summer when Parantheses leaked, and now that the album has been out for a month people are going crazy over it.

I saw The Blow for the first time when Khalea (Jona was in Europe) opened for Architecture in Helsinki September, and was really into Parantheses...By the time I saw (img207.imageshack.us/img207/1535/meandkhaleacq5.jpg) Khaela when she opened for Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley) and The Watson Twins in October, I was pretty familiar with the album. She's really smart and incredibly funny and puts on a great show. Two weeks ago, "True Affection" was ITunes Free singles of the week.

In my opinion, Paper Television is unquestionably the best pop album of 2006. Her voice is very unique with an incredible tone...not to mention her songs are insanely catchy and this sh*t is straight up addictive.

You can listen to four of The Blow's songs - "True Affection" and "Paranthases" from Paper Television, and two more, "Hey Boy" and "Come On Petunia," from a limited edition EP that was released last year on her MySpace (www.myspace.com/theblowus). "Parnatheses" and "True Affection" are excellent, and the album as a whole is really fun and definitely worth buying. "Fists Up" definitely the highlight of the album for me. It has to be one of the catchiest pop tunes released in recent memory. The last minute and a half is a climax of synthy waves and layers of beautiful vocals.
You can stream "Fists Up" here: localcut.wweek.com/?p=819

I don't know if she'll make it to mainstream radio, but with all this crazy hype I wouldn't be surprised...both True Affection and Parantheses are radio ready, and if they do well then Fists Up could also be a single.

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Pitchfork review:

The Blow
Paper Television
[K; 2006]
Rating: 8.3

It's late September, and Khaela Maricich is in New York City, playing the first of two local shows in support of her new record, Paper Television. Maricich is in the middle of "Pardon Me"; she's just sung the part that goes and I lay, before youuu and now entering the speakers is the bridge, what the liner notes call a "melodic interpretation of the first verse"-- a plastic-horn synth line, honking bass, G-Funk winding organ, and handclaps. Maricich is alone onstage-- her bandmate, YACHT's Jona Bechtolt, is on a tour of his own-- and there's no singing during this part, no instruments for her to play. With a visible gulp, she steels herself; and as the bridge hits she takes off across stage, shaking her shoulders, bouncing up and down, four feet up onstage from the crowd and totally by herself. You feel awful for her and touched at the same time.

It wasn't always this way: Prior to Paper Television, the Blow was a solo operation, and Maricich alone could never make tracks like these, crowded with wobbly, stuttering snares and claps, keyboarded flutes, horns, and crowd noise interpolations. Credit for these belongs to Bechtolt-- a cracked-laptop wizard who, as YACHT, has been pulling a similar beats/karaoke/dance routine live for three or four years. His production is a brilliant and versatile grab bag of popular culture, equal parts Missy Elliott-style chart rap and Yaz'n'Soft Cell-like new wave keyboard pop, all shook up and spit out sideways.

Now and then, Maricich and Bechtolt run through public airwaves and pop music like what's there is theirs for the taking. It didn't always feel like they were giving back: They got to be artistes, artists were source material, and we the incidental audience. Not so here: "We have a new record, and we didn't rip anything off to do it-- we swear." This is how Khaela Maricich decides to introduce the one song she didn't really write-- her take on a Police jam-- back in New York.

The communal vibe is heavy in the club, and it's to celebrate Paper Television, a wickedly generous and clever record of not-quite love songs and elaborately metaphored stabs at the rituals of simple human communication. At the show, as on the record, love is compared to gold, consumer goods, god, even the Louvre. Getting busy is a business negotiation or a threesome with a guy and the greater universe. Sometimes lovers are vigilantes and rebels; other times they're lawyers reluctantly hashing out contracts. "You should treat us good," admonishes Maricich. "If you do that then you know we're gonna, unh, unh, unhhh share more of our goods with you." Or on "Parentheses": "Some philosophies fuel a belief in the self/ Constructed to keep one's goods on one's own shelf."

Paper Television wants them off the shelf and shared. "Parentheses" sets love in a supermarket and helps its lovesick protagonist through the store, with a heartbreaking verse: "If something in the deli aisle/ Makes you cry/ You know I'll put my arm around you/ And I'll walk you outside." On "Pardon Me", Maricich plays it cool, asking, "Pardon me, but wasn't that your heart?" before betraying herself and stepping up her vocal one strained register per confessional word: "I believe. A heart. Is made. To feel. The things. That lay in front of it," lashed at the end by a snare snap and that forbidding dance bridge.

Bechtolt can play along, laying back with cowbells and snaps and gauzy synth swells, but he also stretches Maricich in new directions. "The Big U" is remarkably apt Neptunes minimalism, a "Drop It Like It's Hot" for the emo set-- throbbing, whispery bass, clucks and clicks, Maricich muttering and saying "yeah" over the quiet funk. On "The Long List of Girls", Bechtolt breaks out drumline snare rolls and stick clicks-- too ambitiously, as Maricich has to almost rap to keep up-- but it's beyond familiar, and totally unexpected.

The story Maricich is telling-- she's got a heart that doesn't want to go out and get hurt in the world, but she's trying to talk her heart into going out anyway-- is wildly endearing. Her love, on "Fists Up", is both a fortress and a museum (the Louvre, to be exact), and she keeps trying to let it out but her man demands proof, which makes it go hide again; on "Eat Your Heart Up", she asks her reluctant heart "Oh my heart, where would we start? What would we do? And what would people think if they saw me out with you?" We have though, and the pair look just about perfect.

-Zach Baron, October 26, 2006

All Music Review:

4/5

Ever since Khaela Maricich teamed up with Jona Bechtolt for the Poor Aim: Love Songs EP, the Blow's avant-pop leanings have been refined with more structure, more rhythm, and more hooks, resulting in a sound that, interestingly, is more forward-thinking than the group's more concentratedly experimental early work. Paper Television goes even further in this direction, marrying Maricich's charismatic vocals with beats and arrangements inspired by mainstream and urban pop. This bold juxtaposition of sounds pays off more often than not, particularly on Paper Television's first two songs. "Pile of Gold" pairs Maricich's sassy rap-singing with slinky, stuttering rhythms, while "Parentheses" boasts a fantastic chorus and production so bright and immediate that even if the song isn't played on mainstream radio, it certainly could be. However, the daring that makes Paper Television's best moments so unique also leads to some experiments that aren't as successful: "The Long List of Girls" is kinetic, but its beats feel a little contrived and end up stifling Maricich's singing. The glitchy girl-group pop of "Babay (Eat a Critter, Feel Its Wrath)," which likens the end of a bad relationship to being digested and excreted, is original, but also a lot odder than the songs surrounding it, and ends up detracting from Paper Television's flow. Still, the album has more uniquely great moments like the danceable, philosophical breakup song "Fists Up" and witty final ballad "True Affection," than uniquely awkward ones. Even with its subverted mainstream pop productions, the Blow is still very indie pop and very K-sounding; they're just not trapped in any preconceptions of what that means. Paper Television is exciting and accomplished, the album where the Blow goes from being interesting to being addictive.