Celebration - "The Modern Tribe"

Celebration - Pressure (4AD 2007)

Celebration - The Modern Tribe / 4AD

My girlfriend is a fickle character when it comes to music taste. She was cool in the contemporary sense a decade ago, and her tastes went from Belle & Sebastian and The Blood Brothers to The Rapture in the days when they worked with Kid606.

But much like dance music and people's ideas of it (and people, for that matter), my girlfriend has changed. While she's taken that with her, when we went to go see ...Trail of Dead and The Blood Brothers this time last year, she was probably the only person in the audience to have been disappointed that the latter "didn't play any of their This Adultery is Ripe stuff." Celebration was her favorite act of the night. She ran out and bought their self-titled album not long thereafter; I was subjected to it every time we took her car out.

Not that Celebration was bad, but Katrina Ford sounded better to me with TV on the Radio than with her own group. Even still, in anticipation of The Modern Tribe, I gave it a go on a slow day to see if all that time spent with such noisy acts affected their own output. It's subtle, ever so subtle, but The Modern Tribe sounds like a group that has coalesced and come into their own. Maybe that's David Sitek's production talking, but I like this album and I suspect that a lot of other people will too if they could only hear it for themselves.

I could never see my girlfriend going to a Celebration show and declaring that she was disappointed Ford and long-time collaborator Sean Antanaitis "didn't play any of their Jaks stuff," but what was once a cabaret-punk group has now evolved into a full-fledged female-led indie band that discovered the dramatic tension not just in the restrained austerity of their simple line-up but also in the maximal expressionism that guest players can provide. The barebones song structures and essential rhythms are still there, but Sitek touches them up with just enough panache to not spoil the show. Ironically, it's Sitek that's showing restraint this time around.

The NME and I will just have to differ when they say this is "challenging" stuff. In fact, the opposite is true: The Modern Tribe is probably more accessible now that it has recognizable flourishes such as a fuzzy guitar on "Tame the Savage." If they're talking about the tribal percussion or the whirring organs or another instrument Antanaitis is fond of - the guitorgan - then it's probably just that they've been listening to way too much Editors. Still, the NME is among the lesser offenders. I'd take "challenging" over "a female-fronted TV on the Radio" any day.

Everyone seems to be calling them that because Sitek introduced the group to 4AD and because a few members make stops on The Modern Tribe to bulk things up a little bit (including Kyp Malone here on "Pressure"). Unfortunately, that description is incredibly simplistic and insultingly reductive: Celebration are a band in their own right and though they use their Brooklyn contemporaries' talents for garnish, Ford's natural singing talent is just as good on its own as it is with accompaniment from Tunde Adebimpe or Kyp Malone or anyone else from any other band. Nick Zinner included.

It's not just the singing. Celebration thrive on simple melodies delivered with kraut-like repetition (if not the motorik accuracy of every bar). They live for an exploited payoff on repeat. It works because their conviction, their belief in all of the neo-romantic lyrics that Ford croons and roars and their belief in the tambourine and the mellotron and the guitorgan and their belief in themselves is absolute. There is no doubt on this album that Celebration are doing what they want to do and sounding how they want to sound. That makes for compelling listening.

The reactions have been interesting in that very few of the major outlets have harped upon this release. You would think that with all of the TV on the Radio love last year, 4AD would have a shoe-in on its hands. Not so. Instead, The Modern Tribe flies below the radar of oversaturated hype, content to let The Black Kids implode before they've even gotten anywhere. Maybe there's no justice in a world where an average four-song demo gets more attention than a decade-old musical collaboration and evolution, but there's no sense throwing stones at glass houses. While music criticism continues to collapse in a giant mess of direct democracy in action, Celebration ignore the bigger picture to soldier on. So Audiversity follows their lead, ignoring the bigger blogging picture to soldier on championing artists who may or may not benefit from our namedrop. We're honestly trying.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend sleeps in preparation for work, ignorant of the rat race that has claimed so many casualties. Which one is the real modern tribe? My search for answers goes on.