Weekly-Updated Listening Log, Or: Enough Ratings to Make Your Head Spin If That Floats Your Boat2009 EOY AND EOD LISTS
Just gotta beat some peeps to the punch here. You'll notice that I was far too aggravated to actually rank these, so I listed them alphabetically. Using your infallible Venn Diagram reasoning you can probably wean one hierarchal message that I really wanted to communicate for 2009, and if you've talked to me in the past 4 years you'll know the one hierarchal message of the decade has been something of a... erm, fixture.
2009
Amen Dunes - Dia
Antlers - Hospice
Blues Control - Local Flavor
Califone - All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
Circulatory System - Signal Morning
Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Micachu - Jewellery
Mount Eerie - Wind's Poem
Natural Snow Buildings - Shadow Kingdom
OOIOO - Armonico Hewa
Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
Pontiak - Maker
Prefuse 73 - Meditation Upon Meditations
Wussy - Wussy
Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs
Zu - Carboniferous
2000s
Antlers - Hospice
Arcade Fire - Funeral
The Books - The Lemon of Pink
David Thomas Broughton - The Complete Guide to Insufficiency
Califone - Quicksand/Cradlesnakes
_____ - Roots and Crowns
Caribou (f.k.a./r.i.p. Manitoba) - Up In Flames
Department of Eagles - The Whitey on the Moon UK LP
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump
Islaja - Ulual Yyy
Microphones - The Glow Pt. 2
Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica
The National - Alligator
Portishead - Third
Radiohead - Kid A
____ - In Rainbows
Six Organs of Admittance - School of the Flower
Solex - Low Kick and Hard Bop
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Yo La Tengo - And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
New Rating System
As per my essay "Numbness and Numbers," I don't think it's really helpful or even the same category of thought to assign ratings to things that I don't particularly like. So I have an idea about what a 7.5 is: it's good enough that I would be happy if someone put it on. Plenty of super-acclaimed artists make it onto this list if I have some positive reaction to their output; Fleet Foxes is a good example. But anything lower, in the tradition of Robert Christgau, will get adorable little wingdings:
● - (Formerly bomb) For some reason or another it offends me that this album was made.
≠ - (Formerly scissors) As is the case painfully often, the album contains one or two great highlights and is otherwise forgettable.
Ө - (Formerly flat-featured face) No strong response. You can like it a lot and I won't argue with you.
√ - Yep, it exists. Usually differentiated from Ө by sheer review length. I have more of a gestalt with these, they don't blend so easily.
↕ - It's definitely something, never managed enough listens to tell what exactly.
Also: email me at collin.anderson@oberlin.edu because if your response is thought provoking I'll post that too. I prefer this to the standard "look at how few people read this" Comments (0) format.
Algebra Suicide – The Secret Like Crazy (RRRecords, 1987)
10.13.09 Okok, distortion. Okok, Moe Tucker. Of the innumerable foundations the Velvets laid, I think the one most deserving of revival is the capacity to tell a vivid, rhythmically-spoken story over a chugging groove. It takes a toughened cool to do this, to maintain a durable pace of words while the world cycles on unawares. Thankfully, Lydia Tomkiw’s got the personality and twitchy vocabulary to pull it off and even one-up Lou Reed’s unfulfilled potential. Slather some drum machines, guitar loops that oscillate from glitz to grind, and you’ve got, remarkably, a left-field museum piece not unlike the Young Marble Giants: there was no other place nor decade than the 80s underground for this duo to exist. Call it the source: one of the few labeled tracks on about 10 discs of a late-80s radio show called Bad DNA with a penchant for female-led proto-shoegaze and Art Pop like Jane Siberry and the Cocteau Twins. To that end, I want to call Tomkiw a sort of feminist even if she’s closer to being a snotty (albeit college-nerdy) tomboy: either way, her calloused Brooklyn accent brings a certain disillusionment to life while framing those few moments of vulnerability.
And those blissful, blissful grooves, courtesy of minimalist mastermind Don Hedecker represent the people she watches, resents, appreciates, finds, in the end, some sort of beauty in. “(A Proverbial Explanation For) Why No Action Is Taken” is just that: observations, a string of sayings that render humans inert. “Idle hands / are the devil’s playlot / but we fear burning / our candles / at both ends.” More often, just when you think the swirl of words takes her cynicism beyond recognition, the song ends, Tomkiw’s found symmetry and so must we. “I wanna talk … about the invisible bones of the face, about this brain that sits too close to the skin, while I hear you tell me we could be ‘chainsaws under the stars.’” You can practically hear her smirk. “Under what stars?” The testament to the music is that when I listen to it I’m on Tomkiw’s side, and I too feel like I’ve won. Throw in the 1-to-2-minute track times, and anyone as malleable to weirdo cool as I am will have 20 tiny victories coming their way. 8
Aluk Todolo – Finsternis (Utech, 2009)
11.23.09 Anyone else notice those totally hopeless, reliably mishandled bits of hidden metadata a simple right click in iTunes can show you? One of them’s Beats Per Minute, the only devotee of which I can find is Trent Reznor. Bpm referring to the circulatory system and percussive machinery in equal measure, it’s not a surprise. See, metadata can actually say something of import about a group – it’s been said that Label (which has yet to columnate) is more important than artist in electronic music, to say nothing of genre-junkies. So why isn’t bpm programmed into French trio Aluk Todolo’s ID3s? Because, after all, Finsternis is an album with a few massive-seeming struggles, but it would help to see that it’s a fixed match. Would being given a flat “75bpm” ruin the biggest surprise that these five tracks have to offer (“Surprise! There is no surprise.”), accommodate the same peculiar brand of hopelessness that the listener learns to expect by the end? Somehow, this is totally unlike Spirit of Eden’s fusiform undulations: this is a zombie-eyed plod, and it’s antithetical to the sort of frustration that the various feedback storms ought to suggest. And they’re just that: meteorological, and never nearly as frustrated or creative or human as you wish. (The band’s probably great live, but any garage musician knows it can be tough to channel yourself fully into an instrument.) That they divide a singular ebb and flow into five sections only fleetingly maintains the illusion of development, of anything needing the shoulders of what’s come before it. The result is probably the biggest racket that I could ever fall asleep to, cause you know there’s no way the wall’s gonna break down. √
Amen Dunes – Dia (Locust, 2009)
11.30.09 I have a neat little chaos theory when it comes to weirdos with big record collections who eventually try their hands at music. The idea is, inspiration bleeds into imitation, but when you try as hard as you can to imitate an idol in a DIY setting, you’re sure to miss the mark in a way that can actually be even more interesting than what you thought you were trying to do. Make sense? Like, your own uniqueness, even if it’s entirely a manifestation of incompetence, is mapped out in the degrees to which you didn’t (in my own band’s case) actually end up sounding like the fucking Microphones at all. Enter Sun-City-Girls-channeling neophyte Damon McMahon, aka Amen Dunes. You hear a lot of grotesque changelings in this stuff: a friend insists “By the Bridal” is “Bittersweet Symphony,” I recently realized the trebly rush of the band-titled surf-opener reminds me of “Fell in Love With a Girl,” and in the second half there’s a string of four songs that have all the evocative vibes of great folk songs, that whole “have I heard this on AM radio at some point” quality. But grotesque, cause Damon McMahon is an unavoidably weird guy, so he manages to own all of it, even as the album willfully progresses through many stages of awesome. I say Sun City Girls because of its hopscotch effect, but while Sir Richard Bishop is at a sketchy halfway point between legitimate World dissemination and the offensive Cheech/-ong accents of Ween, Amen Dunes never seems to be operating on such big stereotypic models. Sure, who can argue with the surf thing, but its more in the dilapidation, the crooked tumble of “Fleshless Esta Mira, Wife of Space” (to say nothing of its name), the uneasy awe of McMahon’s warbly vocal exorcism in “Breaker.”
But as I say, McMahon’s a little more organized about the whole affair, which behooves him in a breadth-over-depth culture. Like, Sun City Girls were kicking themselves for the neat bundle of Torch of the Mystics, wanted to remain sprawling and culty sans wooping repetitive requests at live shows. It’s possible that some listeners will prefer the dissonant one-two opening (like In Rainbows, always an odd hit-the-ground-running-then-come-down tactic) or the aforementioned stretch of bare-bone acoustic ditties, that they’ll see the droney, multilayered expanses of “In Caroline” and “White Lace” as peaks or valleys of interest (ok, I might ally myself a touch with the former there) but in a weird way, possibly just a product of immersion, the twists and turns seem premeditated such that every song, sans the wry leap of faith off the bat, feels earned by the ones before it. That’s why it’s exciting to find out only at “Patagonian Domes” that McMahon can write a totally blissful and grooving roadtrip song, to find out only at the last track how many different directions he can take his voice simultaneously. He’s impossible to pigeonhole – no matter how much great stuff he’s clearly informed by – but by the end of the album he’s somehow convinced you that he’s a unit. Albeit, I continue to switch hands, a unit with more to say than he already has with this great album. 8.5 And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Worlds Apart (Interscope, 2005)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
There was a time when I was willing to nurse this as standing up, in terms of just songwriting, to its predecessor of bloated acclaim. But you can’t help that aesthetic gestalt, the way you sort through CD’s or mp3’s and for better or worse Source Tags & Codes feels (before I even listen) like a guitar wash while, for this album, all I can think about is the aggravating elements, that mildly grating voice, the song-lengths-for-their-own-sake, (the band-name-length for its own sake), the fucking portent. It’s when they started to blend, for me, into another scene entirely, to which they might not even have the prowess to belong. I need to dig through their early stuff, when they were decidedly part of the emo-before-people-automatically-hated-it scene of the mid nineties. This album, meanwhile, is a reluctant yawn like freshman Physics class, and moreover, a symbol of something like an album per year which I’ve incessantly avoided since.
Ah! To suddenly remember the sketched-out review I was preparing back when I first heard it: as soon as these guys became about the theme, I remember thinking, they were muddled and confused in terms of scale. Meaning, the sound of women crying that you could hear on a radio report after the tsunami segueing into undeniably white teenage angst. It’s a statement, it’s an irony, but it’s also totally unrelatable: anyone who thinks the whole world should be dragged into their personal pain, and can utilize sociological pain as a commodity, to make their point, ought to repel as many as it attracts. I’m thinking of what I said in Portishead about the use of African American spiritual cadences in the landscape of her head, of which I steered clear despite its Sylvia Plath compressive heartplow, but maybe it’s just too overt and hamfisted here for me to go for it. I’m almost thinking, if my 2005 self could have caught it, it must’ve been sluggish, yeah? Some of these relics don’t need to be revisited. √
FTR: Source Tags & Codes (Interscope, 2002) 7.5
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion (Domino, 2009) UPDATED
Here's to the longest review I've written -- it'd "devour the blog whole" as I say. ●
Animal Hospital - Memory (Barge, 2009)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Call it complete submission to random-mixtape theory, but whenever this accidentally comes on I become thankful that my favorite post-rock artists – Sigur Ros, Talk Talk, Slint – aren’t this post-rock. The big argument against this one has been they can’t decide which post-rock frame they want to dip into, so they dip into all of them. My response: I’d love that shit if they dipped into them at any sort of surprising intervals. I didn’t even live through post-rock, I raspberry’d at Lift Your Skinny Fists but was always fond of the premise, I chuckle at neurotic distinctions between “post” and “math.” Point is, I never had a chance to get sick of it, but this album makes me feel like I did anyways. Of course, if I want to believe it could have been done differently, I have to tweeze out the uninspired. Ө
Beak - Beak (Ivanda, 2009)
11.30.09 Bring back the jam! At least I have another month or so before I have to justify why Blues Control’s Local Flavor somehow hits me the right way, as more worthwhile than Geoff Barrow’s side project (referred, by the more accurate and tUnE-yArD-dOoMeD, as “BEAK>”). I toyed with double-reviewing the two, in the New Yorker tradition that’s sadly long since gone stale on the crutch of paragraph breaks and middle-school transition sentences, but in this case it might’ve hurt Local Flavor as much as it helps Beak. I’m willing to call it context, Blues Control sprung on me via CD-R in the car and Beak far less out of the blue, complete with ties to one of the decade’s best artists and an explicit admission of ephemera (strangely similar to Black Mold, you might notice, and had those ended up reviewed together it would surely have harmed Beak by association – you need Beth, you need songs and all that). But it’s not like I didn’t know Geoff was a Krautrock junkie after Third, but I did believe he was a perfectionist, so maybe Beak was recommended by his psychologist, to free up his ideas about music, make it communal and social again. No more locking away.
No surprise, then, that even though this stuff does always have the Kraut backbone, I hear a lot of Canterbury in there (just discovered Gong, the biggest hippies-in-a-ring relic of that time, but Soft Machine’s my main point of reference here). Part of it’s that there are those trapped-in-a-well vocals, hardly prominent and often sounding like they just kinda accidentally drifted through the heavy filter of one of the drum mikes or something, melodically just as dada as anything else. Then take those jazz-roulette fills on “Ham Green,” that witty dexterity that allows some musicians to create geo-something structures out of tiny flashes and hints. Was it Satie who popularized that? In any case, too often the creative energy seems a little more sluggish. “Pill”s chromatic organ jam, the twiddled oscillator in “Iron Action” remind me of the paradox of performance art: you get the same feeling of having actually heard something before when really it’s the extent to which you haven’t that gets to you – I mention the eye-rolling when someone drapes coathangers from all of their arms, or even Natalie Portman’s canonized little onomatopoeia in Garden State. Somehow always comes from a place of exclusion, conservatism, but it’s not like you can help that, right.
More than anything, the Portishead connection is misleading because this is not (excepting my first glimpse, “Barrow Gurney”) noisy, deafening, dark, hopeless stuff. Just the Krautrock foundation guarantees that in a way, a certain meditation. If you’re expecting horror grooves, as I was, the major-chord jam in “Backwell” will almost sound like it’s laughing at you. “Battery Point”s comfort with itself is its selling point – feels like it’s filling the role of the “beautiful part of the album,” like the power-ballad in modern rock. Sometimes in my own notes, I affix a little plus or minus sign to a rating or review just to indicate the direction I think it’s headed in my book, hope or doubt. In any case, this one has a nice uplifting plus, meaning I hope to revisit it once I’ve decided how much or why I like Local Flavor, because this stuff is weirdly Utopian. Geoff needed it to unwind from post-Third pressure, I bet, and I bet too there’ll come a time when I need it just as much as he did. 7.5
Black Mold – Snow Blindness Is Crystal Antz (Flemish Eye, 2009)
11.21.09 I just got done being pissed at a review of Electrelane’s first album that essentially started by criticizing instrumental music as an institution, a really me-in-high-school/Calum Marsh breach of John Updike’s basic rules of criticism, but all that aside, vocals are important. Look at it this way: Black Mold is the first Chad VanGaalen album that isn’t obsessed with death and the afterlife. Maybe that’s unfair when this album is such a communal move, but these sorta base distinctions do inform most people about where the content is. So if VanGaalen really is an analogue to the arc of Cokemachineglow – the sort of “we like it because it reminds us of ourselves” that they retrospectively pinpointed with Subtle – then it doesn’t bode so well for the current state of CMG. That, in other words, they are now a density of fragmented ideas with glimmers of brilliance but a complete lack of self-editing and, crucially, content. I don’t think that’s true of CMG, but if it were, it could easily survive the Internet glut, because people – myself included, too often – really don’t even read the way they used to when they’re looking at a screen. This probably does correspond, in an eerie way, to how people listen to music differently, ever hopscotching, ever sifting. VanGaalen fancies himself a DJ now, a sad misinterpretation of his fans’ excitement about the minute elements he injects into his songs. A sticker slapped on the cellophane informs me of over 100 other Black Mold tracks available for free download somewhere. There’s a morbid irony to the fact that this is one of only a handful of CDs I’ve purchased in the past year, because its too instantly prepared for its era, too buffered against the harsh winds of culture, too insistent that critics continue the not-so-noble tradition of laundry-listing the best tracks on an album. The downside to postmodernism: nothing is ever whole, not least when the tangible has melted away into digital simulacrum. I could give this the little scissors, but I cleave when an album really demands (pardon) cleavage, not by default. So the general problem, then, is that this album feels like behind-the-scenes documentary footage, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart style, the sort of thing that would be totally exciting if I already knew the album he was going to make out of all this. But electronic music, down to the lowliest trance, is almost inherently about tension and release, it’s about playing your cards in the right order. Snow Blindness is matte, it’s stew. It doesn’t matter that a lot of it is kinda interesting because VanGaalen is already on shuffle in anticipation of the listener being on shuffle. It doesn’t matter that some of it sounds like late-90s techno, the sort of real entry-level Songsmith fare that could only be exciting to a gifted-turned-zonked singer-songwriter, because it’s never administered with any precision. Take the track immediately following the misleading opener, Dr. Snouth. Even at barely over a minute it’s too long, because it just can’t get over its own Power-On-android fragment, because it’s unwisely (CMG would say philosophically, ironically) built around that fragment. The easy accusation of VanGaalen’s solo work is that he’s just dressing up his songs like a kid in a sandbox, and this album comes disarmingly close to verifying that. I consider myself forgiven, because after all, he writes beautiful, sad songs about death and the afterlife. Pardon that I don’t want to look at the mess after the spine’s been yanked out. Ө
Brand New – The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (Interscope, 2006)
11.06.09 I’m host to more than one friend who – regretfully or defiantly – cast Brand New’s Deja Entendu as a major musico-emotional centerpiece of their high school days. The album’s immediately recognizable as emo (not to go all Rob Mitchum and wear out the label as a go-to set of conventions to be adjusted and defied; Jesse Lacey’s sub-Kanye rivalry with Taking Back Sunday frontman Adam Lazarra is enough to clump them in a “scene” in the worst way) but for all my inability to go much further than smiling-and-nodding with most of the stuff, I had to confess that Deja was the most fully realized member of the genre. “Member” is key: years ago I wrote a review (also on request) of an Early November side project and mentioned how comfortably Brand New accomplished anything emo ever wanted to in one fell swoop. By contrast, their followup The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (terrible title, terrible cover – no reason at all to have faith in it) might be the only album to which I can refer as “post-emo.” I know, I know – I have a real problem with teleological posts all over the place. Problem is, listeners do without even realizing it, which is to say, Brand New had nowhere else to go after Deja except deeper into self-deconstruction.
Since Deja thrived, though not exclusively, on bitter wordplay ricocheting within standard acoustic song structures, it’s worth mentioning that Devil and God really lays the emotions bare and becomes all about the sound. I was first and longest enchanted by the two-chord architecture of “Jesus,” a restraint I still liken to Pinback in a strange way, but whenever I revisit the album I find myself drawn to subtler touches like the singular, meaty punches at the end of “Sowing Season” long after you think the song has ended and the omnipresent machines start to slow. It really is a beautifully produced album: endless ethereal depth and space, moise with bodily fluids and their mythic interpretations, all of which – and here’s where I think “post” has to rear its ugly head – draw attention to the old tropes of emo that are left standing like Roman pillars. If I’m repelled by those power chords, by those throaty screams, both of which I’d be normally bent on calling automaton, it’s not just cultural or philosophic, it’s because they have all the dynamics of a horror flick. They get you to lean in close and then clock you. And yeah, sometimes it feels a little cheap, god damn it. It’s the sole reason I’ve only listened to the album a handful of times, despite my respect, a sort of synergy of dread and shame.
This doesn’t sound like it bodes well for the album, right, but to be sure, I can see exactly why those who cried over Deja’s major keys and then let themselves be lured into Devil and God might find it exactingly potent. The psyche-plumbing is such that the album’s an entity unto itself that leads the band and the listener to question everything in equal measure. “No matter what they say, I’m still the king” Jesse belts, which sounds like a crumbling allusion to his snarkier “it hurts to be this good” past. And when “Millstone” snaps into an old major-key chorus – “Take me out tonight, woo-ooa-oaah!” – you don’t believe his optimism any more than he believes himself. This is the best way for standard Brand New songs to fit into the mold of this album, for them to fragment a little – otherwise, “The Archers Bows Have Broken” [sic] shows, they actually disrupt the monster of the album itself. That’s why it’s completely forgivable that the songs, to say nothing of the lyrical motifs, seem to be repeating themselves (“Untitled,” “Handcuffs,” and especially “You Won’t Know” all evoke “Jesus” in their own ways). It’s bizarre, when the melodies seem to organically grow out of the album, the sense that they knew exactly what world the songs belonged to before writing them. Logistically, it’s bullshit: they can’t have written all the songs after knowing the space the album would occupy. That’s why things like the sloppy choir of “Degausser,” superficially styled after old songs like “Soco Amaretto Lime”s “you’re just jealous ‘cause we’re young and in love,” feel like they’re being wrung out, like they’re being attacked from all sides. I guess it’s alright that Daisy is an mp3 album, ready for the sieve – that, in other words, they let this one be instead of dangerously building on it or reproducing it. There probably can’t ever be an album genuinely like it again, though we folk who observe emo from afar can hope that there might be some other “post-emo” album someday – an album that can recontextualize everything that makes it emo and somehow become all the more emotional for it. 7.5
FTR: Deja Entendu (Triple Crown, 2003) 7.5; Daisy (Interscope, 2009) ≠ The Bug - London Zoo (Ninja Tune, 2008)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Oh well, my intrigue about this album – partially a product of not reading closely enough – is an interesting phenomenon, even if it ends in a disappointing, smudged-out blech. Something told me it was going to be an incredibly dense noise-hop record, something about the cover, maybe the fact that The Wire was really into it and they stick to their guns about the avant-garde like no other. And to be sure, it’s well-produced for a Dub album, bearing in mind that standard Dub fare is to elongate every element through an echo whose delay is high as its decay is low, but I can’t help my gastric associations I suppose. I want to recommend it to someone who normally likes the stuff, and its acclaim is a testament to the no-holds-barred attitude towards criticism that’s overturning metal’s Sabbath-pelted history. Hell, I was actually rooting for (again, without having heard) the album as P4K’s number one, and even knowing what I do now that would be far, far more adventurous and compelling than the reality, but that’s for another discussion that has less to do with the music itself. Ө
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969)
3.11.09 Give an album a listen and it might satisfy for a day, but teach a man to myth and he'll myth for a lifetime. Which is a veiled admission: I really haven't listened that closely to this, but I finally understand what's going on here, it's actually become an axis that I can refer back to, just like how I unabashedly support the idea of Twin Infinitives despite not listening all that much (it's madd difficult, after all). So don't ask me to ascribe a value to this axiomatic trait, even though I hamfistedly will if you check the bottom of the review. Anyone taking a side on it actually makes me roll my eyes these days ("it's pure trash, there's nothing there, like the emperor's new clothes"; "you have to actually LISTEN to it and give it TIME"; and my favorite, "guys, it's just ALRIGHT, neither a classic NOR terrible").
Point is, the story behind it (this might be accurate or not, but it's good enough for me, probably better) explains why it has this effect on people. Don Van Vliet sat down at a piano for most of these songs and banged out something practically off the top of his would-be brilliant head, which I'm prone to do occasionally. Someone recorded it and transcribed its notation extremely carefully, down to the erratic rhythmic patterns, and this was painstakingly memorized by the Magic Band, who played the different "keys" of the piano in unision. Clarinet, fiddle, stand up bass, trumpet, hihat all at once, with the ultimate effect of spontanaeity despite extreme technical precision. This creates the probably-unmatched sound of the record: no one who believes in this kind of free jazz tonality usually believes in notation and careful practice of the same part over and over. It boils down to Van Vliet (who, by the way, has an awesome enough name to have kept), and whether this one guy's improvisations are worth listening to. What throws us off, and disconcerts us, is that marching-band sound, as if they're going crazy of their own free will.
When I play my atonal guitar gibberish amongst friends, I'm largely irritating. I once actually let slip that I sometimes wish the more harmonically minded people there would make heads or tails of the stuff I was randomly playing but that, I'm convinced, still had musical merit. One friend of mine, a Jazz piano major, grabbed another extremely talented Jazz piano major for a duo concert for this exact purpose. He was into the abstract, clusters, total freeform, and this other guy happened to have a totally brilliant ear. I don't think it was planned this way, but my buddy dominated the concert, while some kind of interesting sense was rendered by the guy he enlisted. Call Captain Beefheart the absolute extreme of this: marionettes, a real Magic Band, perfectly under his command, perfectly strung to the impulses of his own mind. This is fascinating enough to me that I don't care that I don't listen to the album all the time, and there's a tiny element of that in a lot of music I review (I stop listening once I have something more abstract that I can sink my teeth into) but rarely do I, when listening, feel so viscerally divorced from the cerebral, mythical content. This is why whether it's "good" or not is forever a moot point, it depends on how you listen (if that's the right word) to all your music. For myself, as someone who writes about music by instinct, it's worth... um... can't think of a gerund. It's worth mentioning. 8
The Cars - The Cars (Elektra, 1978)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
I guess I take this album as emblematic of our need to consecrate museum pieces, the music critic a more of a cultural documentarian than evaluative listener. I can’t deny my love/hate for “You’re Just What I Needed,” which pretty much encapsulates a certain XC team’s party atmosphere – the closest thing to real “parties” that I ever enjoyed. So yeah, imported nostalgia for when New Wave was a triumphal unifier, but I’m so bothered that this kind of uniform mediocrity can outlast the inventive ones, your This Heats and Pere Ubus. I declare myself unimpressed, and have for awhile been using this album as the need to put the “era-defining” nature of music above all else, the depressing notion that, oh I don’t know, Mariah Carey will someday be seen on lists that ought to excavate instead of glance. ≠“You’re Just What I Needed”
Clinic - Do It (Domino, 2008)
(First Published in The Grape)
Clinic’s 2001 debut Internal Wrangler rendered the pejorative “style over substance” an anachronism, one of the only convincing incarnations of the head-scratching phrase “art-punk” this millennium’s had to offer. Songwriting didn’t matter nearly as much as the sheer aesthetic of the whole outfit. We needed a band that sounded like them more than we needed a new chord progression. It was the sound of energy being condensed and forced through small openings: wheezing melodicas, cholesterol-clogged basslines, Ade Blackburn’s vocals gathering spittle behind clamped teeth and a surgical mask (seriously), massive guitar and organ blasts wrung through cheap amps.
Thing is, Ade’s still wearing that surgical mask. Which is to say, Clinic stick to their fucking guns, and it’s long since been agreed that this could be a fatal flaw for them, overtaking any sense of immediacy in even their best work. That would be true, if their sound were any less thrilling, or any less theirs. Do It! is Clinic’s fifth album in eight years, and like many of their recent albums, you can taste the ambivalence right from the start: “Memories” interlocks a classic stomp with what sounds like Blackburn’s best croon (that is, an unconvincing one).
They’ve been trying semi-persistently – since “Distortions” broke everyone’s heart – to create something heartfelt and spacious, and have been steadily peppering their albums with more and more chimes, harps and jingle bells – instruments that are still idiosyncratic, but awkward more often than not. Closing track “Coda” exemplifies this awkwardness, a would-be lilting torrent of trademark instruments with a bored voice-over about the Bristol Charter. Suffice to say it doesn’t clinch the album too well. Other medium-rare subduers like “Free Not Free” and “Emotions” blend a little better, but the only time Clinic sound like they’re interested in being themselves is on “Mary and Eddie” a gentle ballad that gets a spine-tingling foghorn sloshed over the first chorus. It’s the kind of small surprise many of us don’t expect anymore from these guys.
And ultimately, that’s what makes Do It! worth doing: the moments when they’re economical with their choices. The exception is “Tomorrow,” a fierce, steel-plucked jig that sustains a sort of tense festivity for its duration. The song works because it’s constructed around its unusual mood, rather than lazily letting the instrumentation drag in the exhausted “Sister Ray” and Modern Lovers associations. But, I mean, “exhausted” is relative: there’s still a certain glee to the fuzzed-out paint-by-numbers pogo sticks that fill the cracks of most of their albums. Clinic knew they had a good thing as well as their listeners did, and even more than most high-profile indie bands, they noticeably can’t decide if stopping and thinking about it will help at all. √
FTR: Internal Wrangler (2001) 9; Winchester Cathedral (2004) 7.5
Cluster - Zuckerzeit (Brain, 1974)
1.9.09 The terrifying thing about getting into Krautrock for me is that I'll become one of those almost mindless music listeners stuck on the same note for the rest of eternity, or that I'll submit to the laziest automatic sequencers to attain the randomized harmonic complexity I need. Kraftwerk makes a convincing case, at least, for this: we are all cyborgs, accept computers as appendages, but certainly don't be afraid. Worst that can happen is a world where everyone does the robot perfectly. I was afraid that mythology would be the only thing separating Cluster – the "true" inventers of sequenced electronic music, Eno's biggest influence for Another Green World, blah blah blah – from your run of the mill basement nosepicker racking up 9.1's from the people who think albums that can be made in one night are worth it. Maybe I was on, but also maybe mythology can totally take over for me, because every move played on Zuckerzeit felt like a chess game against time and culture – almost tongue-in-cheek in its audacity (the final track, "Heiße Lippen," cuts off almost the instant the album's first indistinct vocals come in). With one listen, I can't make any judgments for sure, but the song's identities seemed to be in place as one might expect on a so-called "classic," and of course I got chills whenever I heard that amazing yuppie bossanova drone that I tended to think only Eno could ever manage. No wonder they ended up working together! In short, more listens necessary: I don't think this is a "me first" game, but you might say they weren't sloughing off the subtleties back before sequencing was so prevalent as to worm into the work of a group that once named themselves "animal." 8
Ned Collette – Jokes and Trials (Dot Dash, 2006)
11.29.09 Was about forty seconds into “Come Clean” from his new album with Wirewalker that I started to feel nostalgic for a Ned Collette that I hardly knew. I’ve lived with “The Laughter Across the Street” for three years, and it’s picking me up now. And yeah, “Come Clean” is laden with RIYL baggage, more a Krautrock-Spoon capillary than anything single unto itself. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy who seemed too young to dip into those “Walk on the Wild Side” smooth gospel vox in “Laughter”s outro, more reminiscent of late Leonard Cohen than Songs. But that’s the thing: if we actually believe that the best of the “standard songwriter” template – Dylan, Drake, um, Donovan – actually speak adequately for themselves, we’d stop incessantly comparing new songwriters to them. Meaning there’s always less of an RIYL with these guys, the sonic tethers of the critical community just don’t gut you the same way. I’ll always be guilty for believing, and even suggesting aloud, that Ned Collette’s format of swirling acoustic figures and tufty words recalls early Cohen, but he has his own story to tell. Which may explain how the tiniest touches, the Jew’s Harp in “Boulder,” the slide guitar in “A Plea From You to Me,” that aforementioned outro iced with the most effective phasing squelch since “Sleep the Clock Around”, all these contradictions stay ensnared in a world of dangling phraseology.
Maybe that’s what makes “Laughter Across the Street” remain the album’s centerpiece, the fact that he lets his words pile on top of each other just enough to create an epiphany without toppling the structure. “The laughter across the street is picking me up now and making me think that life beyond your shadow can exist / How do people do it, though? I guess they drop the bat and run and don’t look back until the pain has disappeared into the mist.” These wind through the nylon overtones, and listening you think his point and maybe sentence is complete long before it is, that the rest is that trail-off-to-a-mumble-when-other-people-interrupt neurosis we’ve actually somehow become painfully acquainted with in culture. “Mist” is the lowest note of the phrase, its foam-board landing doesn’t lock into the same metric space occupied by the perched “exist,” so it scarcely functions as a traditional rhyme, more of a distant evocation. But the end of the phrase still feels like a mystery, and there’s no release in the word “mist,” it almost sounds like it stopped mattering before then. That’s Ned Collette: the Antipunchline, examining the rise and fall of inspiration without mercy. Later: “Laughter across the street is the only thing that comes in this life without hitches,” even as the smooth curtain-closing vibe of his words keep getting “hitched” on… what? Grammar? “Blame” takes a different magnifying glass to this by effectively circling continually back through the sort of melody that might signal a key shift in another song. It’s like a looped video of a plastic bag in a parking lot (American Beauty inspiration duly acknowledged) – always familiar, from the start, but never, somehow, perfectly predictable. The contours just don’t unfold. Repetition is a form of change and all that.
But the song cracks apart under Collette’s sudden earnestness, the sort of eruption that makes you question his cloudy wordplay just about everywhere else. “And I want to blame you,” is simple, direct, and loud, as if he’s drowning out that eerie pattern, and curiously enough, the album ends on a juvenile “la la la” outro which sounds, in both basic tune and unstable pitch, like he’s slapped his hands over his ears and tried in the middle of a panic attack to reproduce the smooth wordless clinch of “Laughter.” Again, when he’s earnest and loud, the rest of the album seems pretty, but meditative, harmless, which is why “Heaven’s the Key” is just absolutely the most wrenching thing here – paradoxically pegged by dead-eyed scrollers as the most imported RIYL-y piece. Well, yeah, it’s droney as hell, which is probably part of the reason I like it, but Ian Curtis? Gave Joy Division a listen the other day just to double check, and no, Ian Curtis still doesn’t sound like every baritone of the past ten years. Furthermore, “Heaven’s the Key” earns its numb observations by constantly taking flight from them, every time hitting the same molten doo-wop ceiling: “I don’t know how I feel.” And he returns to what he knows, he returns to the facts for the final line of each stanza. Somehow the sparse lyrics beget the greatest emotional swathes on the album: “We will walk by the lake/Do we make a mistake?”; “Petrol leaking from mines/It’s just one of those times.” And always, always, “I don’t know how I feel” conveys the most about how he feels.
The songwriting is strong throughout, but production seem to shift, generally, from Dad-rock territory to greater sonic inventiveness (my bias, correction: the touches are more visceral than cultural) in the second half – say, a song like “Don’t Talk,” built on what seems to be a scintillating EKG, would’ve been unheard of in the first half of the album. It feels weird to say this about an album that I’ve pretty much binged on for about a week, but there’s definitely something cumulative about Ned Collette, it’s just pleasant to find out how he fleshes his world out from the skeletal foundation “Song for Louis.” This is why I absolutely had to stop listening to “Come Clean.” It’s nothing intrinsic, I just was wearing blogger goggles and I knew that the people who would be most thrilled by it would be prepared by his slow ascent, they’d know that Ned Collette doesn’t know how he feels, his confidence would be a huzzah not a bore. I don’t know what it is about “standard songwriters” that makes them, for me, best obsessed over one line at a time, why Dylan’s “You try so hard but you just don’t understand” snicker actually subsumes his drawl, his meme. So much for ’09, but I need to take my time with Ned. 8.5 Congos –Heart of the Congos (Black Art, 1977)
10.13.09 The pulse of reggae and dub has throbbed like a headache throughout this past summer for me, so it’s with some relief that I can declare a reggae album – from the heart of the movement, no less! – that I not only appreciate, but also consider pretty under-appreciated in all sects. Pinpointing exactly what it is about the album that grabs me is a little tougher. Probably comes down to its anachronism, as usual; that Os Mutantes vibe of a depth of sound that seems influenced by “freak folk” (I don’t know what to call Sung Tongs any more) even though it precedes the movement by decades. The paradox of improvised jubilance and meticulous attention to detail, especially in vocals. Being no reggae aficionado, my touchstones are pretty meager. The falsetto sighs evoke Damon Albarn, probably only because my first exposure to dub was the throwaway Gorillaz remix album Laika Come Home. All else evokes a Marley less interested in ego than the delicate balance of fiery words and uplifting chords. The most chilling example probably being the prolonged Genesis reference “Sodom and Gomorrow,” six minutes of “Sodom and Gomorrow were destroyed by fire/ It keep on Burning / Burning / Burning.” The idea that these are sung as a gleeful paean comes off conceptually as, what, demonic? But that’s the grace of this group, that the more you hear that word the more convinced you are that Biblical metaphors course through us in antiparallels, and that this 30-year-old album captured the Rapture in Technicolor. Those vocals are too weightless to burn, and the group gives us vantage from on high to see the eschatology that, arguably, never really came. 7.5
Dadamah - This Is Not a Dream (Majora, 1992)
1.4.08 I'm thrilled to know that there are still bands like this that exist, waiting to be discovered – in this case they emerged while I was listlessly investigating the bands most frequently tagged as "drone pop" on last.fm – and if my roommate's obsession is any indication, there's a density of sorts in New Zealand. Roy Montgomery is apparently so prolific that he's hard to keep track of, so I'm glad to be taking it slow here, but what I really like about this album is how the band takes certain assumptions that most musicians (and listeners) wouldn't have to the nth degree and forces them to coexist. A bit like a less measured and extreme TV on the Radio, who I always said worked for slapping together an instinctual impulse to soul and R&B with that electro-shoegaze washwall. With Dadamah, on the other hand, it's totally apparent how they work as a band, with tolerance and probably respect for one another, but don't take that to mean that their contributions are with respect to one another. The organs simply are; they take off when the impulse strikes, with sloppy spidery glee ("Papa Doc"), Roy loves letting guitar overtones get tangled in emptiness, but should have left vocal duties (his a worn Ian Curtis pump) to Kim Pieters, who's so undermixed at times that she sounds like she's crying for help under the noise, yet at the same time when she rises up she inflects her belt with so many empowering tropes that the drone is just backdrop to some ominous congealing Gothic narrative, too personalized to be a nightmare. Her instincts (if not an appropriate term here then never) are on par with Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser at her darkest – or, I don't know, Jane Siberry? This music is a stew; cheaply produced but I wouldn't have it any other way, shoegaze never got a chance to jab a coffin, to fight anything, it was up in the clouds practically from the getgo. 8.5
Dandy Warhols - Earth to the Dandy Warhols (Beat the World, 2008)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Look… shit. I didn’t want them to come up like this. I’d rather do a column called “in defense of Dandies” because I kinda liked Odditorium, handful of missteps as it had. I wanted to say that Dig! did them in, and no one wanted to think of them as anything more than a groove-churning corporate machine anymore, but this album really does suck. It culls the poor taste of a few of Odditorium’s weaker tracks and the endless soullessness of Monkey House which left me totally cold, and none of that amazing (sure, autopilot) drone that anchored Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia in bliss. I don’t remember specific moments, and neither does the band. Nihilism can be a basis for art, and it has been at the Dandies most successful, the sort of nihilism I can chew on as easily as Faust’s maligned IV opener “Krautrock.” Here, the Dandies want more than anything to be a cog, and I grimace-smile that the cog ends up grinding the critical and popular and even hipster apparatus more than anything else. I’ll get to their self-conscious quadruple-irony hipsterdom shtick of yore later on. ●
FTR: Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia (Capitol, 2000) 8; Welcome to the Monkey House (Capitol, 2003) Ө; Odditorium of Warlords of Mars (Capitol, 2005) 7.5
Dan Deacon – Bromst (Carpark, 2009)
11.03.09 For some reason I got really excited to hear this when I found out how much better everyone thought it was than his other stuff. Now I’m savvy enough to know that about a third of the time that just means it sounds like MPP. To me, Dan Deacon entering that realm from the electronic wormhole only validates the more-complete-review-yet-to-come that we aren’t even aware of how techno beats and even techno song construction inform music we might never call techno. This is anxious, anxious stuff, something other people don’t smell probably because of the guise of populism – first time I really saw him was in the Baltimore Round Robin, a compressed study in terror and judgment to begin with, and his music locked into that vibe perfectly. He’s certainly talented live, but he relies on a certain immediacy, which in album terms amounts to goldfish memory. Meaning it’s got its quips, but when over half the album’s 6-9 minute tracks I end up with a would-be-DJ envy that I don’t get access to every layer separately. But I’m not surprised it’s well-received. Fuck the doodles, his early stuff at least had a bit of a niche, a grating sense of humor at worst, an awesome contemporary lens on Bruce Haack’s proto-electronic goofcore at best. I couldn’t listen to it forever, but what terrifies me about the new one is that I feel like I’ve already been listening to it forever. Ө
11.30.09 Christ! OK, fine, I don't want to like it because of the MPP association I made, which was exactly my problem with Grizzly Bear. I've twisted free: he's irritating but he knows how to make a strong record. >> 7.5
Delgados – Hate (Mantra, 2002)
12.10.09 Someday this will all be nostalgia. I observe this so readily that I need to not have any problem accepting this. “Long after the thrill” and whatnot. I’m also coming to grips with the fact that there is a science to saving young lives, splayed as my idealism of artistry was, and that the precision of that science can in itself be beautiful, can even evoke something like a wistful aesthetic response. All will be nostalgia. So if I want to puff myself up to an entity, post-threshold, I’d decree that I might have either of two responses to willfully “teenage” music: these artists are too old to have these concerns, or they’re doing a sort of community service. They’re in the business of saving young lives. Why this comes to a head with Delgados is another question – I think it’s probably because it sounds so 1997 (peaking drum-marches, strings threaded throughin, in-key twinkles, sighing choruses, “Bittersweet Symphony,” etc. etc. etc.) that it’s just gotta be a sort of exercise in preemptive nostalgia for the members too. “When things that once were beautiful are bland,” they conveniently quote separately in the liner notes like a fucking waiting-room column, baiting me, just daring me to turn on my past. What can I say, I didn’t grow up with this, but there’s such craft here that I can see why it got what from a certain angle looks like “critical acclaim” Erin and Kyle told me that the worst thing about writing music reviews professionally was having to muster enthusiasm for something that you didn’t particularly care about. And for all my promo-bin talk, I never saw it that way, as a kind of duty to the consumer, a duty to the version of myself it might save. So I’m egging their breaks and flourishes the way I picture I’ll applaud a good 10th grade Macbeth paper, the way I’ll nod at Meno-style stumbles over age-old binaries, and maybe I’ll toss someone a copy of this album just because I know it adheres. I’m not throwing up my hands yet, but someday it will all be nostalgia, and when I purge my inner curmudgeon it can be fucking delightful to actually be so far from being swept away. 7.5
Dinowalrus - % (Kanine, 2010
3.31.10 Tiny Mix Tapes review. 8.5
The Dirty Projectors – New Attitude EP (Marriage, 2006)
10.25.09 Not to say I’m not thrilled to hear a few bloops here and there, which I’ve awaited since hearing The Getty Address marketed as a “glitch opera,” but especially in such a short unit this release falls prey to incoherence. It feels exactly like a handful of B-sides, right down to Glad Fact repreises with a low string droning in the background – realized, you could say, after the fact. Even Haley Dekle’s debut as female-Longstreth-counterpart isn’t as monumental as it sounds on paper, muddled and buried as it is. There’s got to be a contract with a band that has so many conflicting artistic impulses: go with it continually “Oh Comely”-style (The Glad Fact), nail it together with a concept (Rise Above) or sculpt it (Bitte Orca); I needed that minute survey to justify this being my first post about a group that I actually love a good bit. But without a contract, we get a little pile of shreds, historian’s curiosities to allot in their own iTunes chronology as necessary. √
FTR: The Glad Fact (Western Vinyl, 2003) 8.5; Rise Above (Dead Oceans, 2007) 8; Bitte Orca (Domino, 2009) 8
Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark (New West, 2008)
5.01.08 I think it was when I described both the Dandy's "Bohemian Like You" riff and Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” as "Stonesy" on the same day that I realized I like the Stones best when I'm not actually listening to them. It's a backhanded adage, but I do think they're madd overrated – not album-centric enough for me, expect maybe Exile – but it follows that their influence demonstrates itself best in song-length fragments. Case in point, Drive-By Trucker's "3 Dimes Down" is becoming one of my '08 anthems partially because it's so out of place on Brighter. "Come back baby, rock and roll never forgets" sings Cooley, and fuck cliche-begging, I believe him.
Most of the album uses good ol' slide guitars... tones that move like gases, slowly rising, tones that demonstrate space by filling it – I mean, this is why we either think of a vast southern expanse under a starry night or actually drift off into the starry night itself (Pink Floyd) when we hear them. There's a lot of space on this album, and if reaction to A Blessing and a Curse was any indicator, people don't want these guys tightening up. I prefer these places where the album dips into double-album tropes as much as southern ones: it's nice that something so uselessly pigeonholed as Lynyrd Skynyrd-aping (fuck "Free Bird" and call it love if necessary, but they are not a great band – I'm inclined to recall Scott Plagenhoef's lubricant/balm binary – I have no doubt the DBTs trancend their accomplishments as much as they draw upon them) can show we ignorant northerners that there's some variation and quality left in the shackles of country. Shonna Tucker, therefore, is of no use to me as a vocalist; she feels imported, like any other element of variety, but it makes all the reasons I originally thought I'd find this disaffecting feel soggy.
Not that I needed convincing, given my recent foray into Califone in particular. I think I need it to be dirty, though; call it me rebelling against soapy skin with a blunt stereotype, or mythologizing southern lifestyle to avoid less flattering stereotypes, but "The Man I Shot" is great for filling the space with something thick rather than something thin. A little more along the lines of some Califone-predecessing Red Red Meat stuff (at least their first album), where we're physically blinded by blood and neurologically blinded by adrenaline and other chemicals, and everything starts to break down, the elements that seemed nostalgia-inducing get a nasty, scabby halo around them.
Unlike "3 Dimes Down" it really works in the context of the album, as a centerpiece, because it's angrily taking a pair of pliers to anything we might have settled into, and we're left to try and settle into a grotesque version of life thereafter – songs are instilled with more bitterness, more of that damp hangover inertia, happyness and momentum as a concerted effort to return to living. It's at least implicit in most cases, but "You and Your Crystal Meth" couldn't belong in the first half of such an opus – if you've gotten that far there's plenty of reason to lose hope the way that song does, where every piece of vision, every sound and every word pounds with the reverb of a heartbeat, where the guitars screech like voices or ringing in the ears. Ө
Elephant Micah and the Loud Guitars (Time-Lag, 2004)
4.29.09 Oh wait, pretend you haven't read the Red House Painters review yet, and then proceed to copy and paste, cause this takes the same cake with better icing: Elephant Micah's the best band that basically no one has heard about I can think of at the time. These are circumstantial apparitions: Hotel Alexis wouldn't have blessed my ears without the brief slosh of largely-skimmed promos when I pretended to write for LostAtSea (WHY didn't I review it when I still had access? Because bloody Uncut was first in line?). But this really ought to be the function of a scattershot blog like this: I'm always thrilled to see blogs that are out to expose those that no one might notice otherwise. I'm inclined to cast my votes on standards so you know you can trust me, see what I really wet myself over, but this is the sort of review that matters – largely because I'm pretty much wetting myself over it anyway. So, style, etc.? Call it the key of honesty. The circumstance of this apparition fits within Six Degrees: college-friend-of-older-brother-of-current-roommate. Maybe that's why I get such a nice proximal twentysomething resonance from Joe O'Connell's voice, muffled around the edges with lo-fi-filtration. Maybe it's hearing the right highlights first: the centerpiece, song-of-"my"-year (a list I ought to be making annually) epic "Nobody Knows, Rosie," or the D.Jr. fuzz-rock of "People Behind You"? If folkish delicacy is O'Connell's vice (see last year's Exiled Magicians), it's also where he can really tear me up (leave the homonym; I like it). Apparently the trio of "and the..." albums were culled from the same explosive sessions, which along with the title makes me wonder about Orphans style click-drag divvy, but nevertheless this album flows, it's got something other than loud guitars coursing through it. I'm not tooting my own horn as usual here: this is a bona fide recommendation. If you can somehow get your hands on this (I've moved on to Google Blogs as the deepest wellspring thus far, I also recommend that) you might, like I did, find a shrard of yourself that the mechanisms of day-to-day life, suddenly, seem to have concealed for as long as you can remember. Loving/hating the second person generalized anecdote; just loving Elephant Micah. 8.5
FTR: Exiled Magicians (Third Uncle, 2008) Ө
Felix – You Are the One I Pick (Kranky, 2009)
11.30.09 Don’t so much have time for this. Which isn’t to say that I’m not unemployed, with plenty of free time (check this massive November update! …eh?? …eh?! Am I right!?) but, I mean, why “drone” would be batted around in regards to this record other than in reference to monochromatic songwriting is beyond me, to say nothing of the whole “unclassifiable” spiel. The first being symptomatic of research bloat (Stars of the Lid side project, already a group that, at least on ATROTD, confounds our former ideas of drone and post-rock and whatnot with an overtly Modern-Classical-whatever-the-fuck-that-means nod), the second being symptomatic of, what, sheer laziness? Boredom with the RIYL palate? (Something of a recent obsession of mine, you might notice). A desperate cry for constructive help? I mean, I don’t have time for this, even if in an almost Beckett fashion the sheer negative space of this album creates a stark contrast of contextual neuroses. I think it’s that neurosis that drew me in, and of course I can respond in turn with an equally itchy review, but don’t think the music correlates. It’s a nice album – I’m on the verge of actually going out of my way to recommend it to everyone I know who likes Regina and The Greatest, just to make something of it – but, and I’m being nothing if not the fucking zeitgeist itself here, I don’t have time for it. Sry. Ө
Fiery Furnaces - Gallowsbird's Bark (Rough Trade, 2003)
2.27.09 It's easy to get all nostalgic and bitter about the fact that this sort of debut gets swept under the rug by "the community" at large when you were there, man. But Christ, this album's ever the more blistering and consistent since they've galloped full-speed down the asymptote of playdough prog they currently monopolize. Bitter Tea pulled it off, if only for circumstance, but I could not be less interested in giving Widow City another try. They're mucking about in their own contradictions now, fancy themselves a Magic Band, and getting splashed by a group I used to consider saviors (I won't overstate it: Blueberry Boat made me believe progressive music could work again, a spectacularly postmodern opus where electronics climbed the rungs of the fretboard and I scratched my head on how they wove a whistle-for-sailing trope I didn't know existed straight into their narratives), well, it makes me frustratedly return to the souce as gospel.
To say this Gallowsbird's Bark is bursting at the seams with ideas really gives new life to the figure of speech. You can feel the minute elasticity of the seams here, the way Matt wedges dissonance into the cracks between chords on "We Got Back the Plague," but getting reeled back into its plod. For some people, Blues is like gravity; I jam with one friend and he hops through various ideas but is ever falling down into that nasty twelve-bar core. This is why their siblings-cranking-blues gimmick evoked the White Stripes on release, an anachronistic snippet of gossipy hype that's probably been forgotten by most people. Someone said they were more Stones than themselves on this album, and the area-mic'd "Two Fat Feet" sure stands out as such (I remind myself, Stonsey is always better than Stones for me) but check the piano sprinkle flecked so incessently on the chords; it's nice to be able to pay attention to their touches without them scampering off to something new. This is what makes debuts qualitatively different, right? Self-esteem springs eternal.
But there's plenty of different ways to look at how limitation worked for these guys. They limited themselves to instruments people would recognize and nod approval at – I remember that barely-hear-it awe when a friend put it on at a party and I heard that tumbling piano scale opening the album – instruments always separate from each other. The only prominent synths they indulge in are these great elbow-on-the-keyboard drones like "Leaky Tunnel" and "Don't Dance Her Down" which they never really returned to since. But length is a big issue too; even though Blueberry Boat is probably still the better album, it's got the halo of the wtf last 25 minutes because they probably needed it to be seen as an opus. Gallowsbird's clocks in at 47, only two songs more than 4 minutes, and unusual not only for them but for any band the album actually gets better as it goes. I always forget about "Rub-Alcohol Blues," an amazing segue between the less-regarded-than-single-version "Tropical Ice-Land" and aforementioned anti-Bush all-time-fave closer "We Got Back the Plague." But in "Rub" we get two minutes of stillness: "With nothing but old ragged clothes my heart strings broke to shreds/ Blues creeping over my body, queer notions flying in my head/ The easiest thing I ever done was loving and drinking wine." In the the piano/controlled-feedback pair eventually lifts off leaving a goregous arpeggio and a music-box-keyboard for only a few seconds. With most of the album behind the outro is the sort of thing you cherish as soon as it disappears. When the album's done I look at how preemptively frantic I need to be to cherish moments in their newest material, and how surprising it is every time when Gallowsbird's Bark earns it. 8.5
FTR: Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade, 2004) 9; EP (Rough Trade, 2005) 8; Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade, 2005) ↕ ; Matthew Friedberger - Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School (859, 2006) Ө; Bitter Tea (Fat Possum, 2006) 8; Widow City (Thrill Jockey, 2007) Ө; Remember (Thrill Jockey, 2008) ●
The Flaming Lips – Embryonic (Warner Bros, 2009)
10.24.09 I’m pretty surprised by the strong positive response to this album, but I’m about as surprised as I would have been to a strong negative response. Wasn’t sure, when I first heard it, which I’d need the vocabulary to challenge. It think it’s a classic case of exactly the sort of cultural injection I was talking about in “Numbness and Numbers” – the first 9.0 plopped on Embryonic literally instilled value to the smallest throwaway squiggles that really constitute the album. The Flaming Lips aren’t perfect by a long stretch, and occasionally even seem to be floundering with all the instantaneous choices and potential directions they can take a solo, a song, the album itself, and yet I firmly support Embryonic’s existence, its volition or lack thereof. It’s also an easy album to write about, from, right off the bat, the OK-Kraftwerk vocals of “Convinced of the Hex” to the Joy-Division-oh-wait-Native-American-when-he-says-“eagle”-ha-ha-what? of “Sagittarius Silver Announcement” – both categories of monotone, anything but the emphatic Coyne of yore – to say nothing of lyrical themes. (“People are evil,” he shrugs without a struggle on “If,” to give you an idea).
The question becomes, if we’re going to address the album as a statement, how well the Flaming Lips can manage pessimism, negativity, doom. Unsurprisingly, it’s a pessimism almost as campy as their paragonal optimism that practically drowned in Fridmann’s syrupy 2006 solo album At War With the Mystics. Speaking of whom, kudos on the what-seemed-impossible 180° production shift. This is noisy, and I don’t mean smoothable distortion, I’m talking about cluttered, hard-to-swallow Os Mutantes styled racket. It’s the studio equivalent of smashing guitars, compressed frustration, when their old reliable harp is abused into a force of chaos with constantly-peaking cymbals for the aptly named “Aquarius Sabotage” (I’ll avoid too close a reading of the astrological series, for pity’s sake). There’s more to say – the nice thing about this album is that there always will be, if you want it – even as you can just as easily write it all off as the story of a group sick of their niche with plenty of imported ideas about where they could go next. It adds up to a lot, even if it’s oddly static, appropriate for a double album even at only 70 minutes: a song repeating “Look at the trees/ they’re dying again” ad infinatum. At best, the album’s a new facet to a more complete band, like they’ve wanted to write songs like this for so long that an antiMystic exploded out of them. At no point does it feel like it needs to be progressive, which is why they’re almost more measured than Radiohead, incredibly. It’s more of an admission, an apology, but especially a density of the crummy and crumbly flotsam they’ve been skimming for the past decade. 7.5
11.22.09 A grower, though more as the philosophical monster gained a footing in my brain than through excessive repeat listens. I still have the same spiel when I’m talking to Flaming Lips fans about it – i.e. you probably won’t like it, you certainly didn’t expect it, etc. But Christ, listening to the statement of purpose “Evil” – this is some incredibly sad shit. The song is molten, a pop song’s throwaway ascending synth line slowed down so much (almost sounds like it has that slow-mo buzz, like Big Dog’s balancing act) that we can examine every facet of what drove the songwriting. This is what I was trying to say about “they’re dying again” – the emotions end up feeling relentlessly static to those of us that like to contort our emotions like balloon-animals as we try to observe them. “I wish I could go back/go back in time.” You figure, Wayne Coyne is so unflagging in his optimism on so many other albums, it makes sense that his doubt would be this sort of unending dry spell, on the edge of writer’s block. What the sentiment has to do with “evil” isn’t an argument that the song makes sequentially, or rationally; it just falls straight in. “I would have warned you/those people are evil/and it’s hard to understand…/I’ll never understand.” But in a weird way, the listener understands – the connections between these persistent, single-word themes: Evil isn’t inherent; Time creates it. The “plot” of the song, which we don’t even really have to fill in anymore, doesn’t really depend on anything more than that observation. “Never understand” is the only hope for escape that Wayne really has. This all goes to say something about how the album weaves in and out of the different facets of Evil, the different things that create it: retrospect, the ubiquitous “machine,” impulse, “only nature,” “believing in nothing” – like the broken mirror to the Lips’ bountiful inspiration, I repeat, a compilation of doubts. Maybe the scariest thing is, just by virtue of its self-negation, how fucking awesome that doubt it when it’s translated sonically. >> 8
FTR: Transmissions From the Satellite Heart (Warner Bros, 1993) 8; Zaireeka (Warner Bros, 1997) ↕; The Soft Bulletin (Warner Bros, 1999) 9; Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros, 2002) 8.5; At War With the Mystics (Warner Bros, 2006) √
Flying - Faces of the Night (Menlo Park, 2008)
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(First Published in The Grape)
My first experience with Flying involved finding a hand-watercolored gem in a bin of rough promos and three-track demos during an internship in 2006. So I’ll admit it up front: I have a little enthusiasm for the underdog in me, and that their debut later that year never really “broke out” stood as a testament to the arbitrary nature of the hype machine. Sara Magenheimer and Eliot Krimsky have the sort of honest-to-goodness people voices the elderly detest but we’re probably used to on some level. And their debut was recorded everywhere but the studio – you can hear the wind fogging up the mikes on most of the songs. So we’re talking madd DIY aesthetic.
Given this, and given their small degree of exposure, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Flying to bring on the swank for their follow up, Faces of the Night. But generally, this seems to be the direction, and the result is an even less predictable batch than what I consider a genre-hopping debut. Particularly, this album’s rhythm is oriented less around makeshift whirligig percussion and more on looped basslines. In fact, a hobbling octave alternation kicks off the record in “One-Eyed Son,” and is soon joined by shards of fractured guitar. The groove keeps the song afloat, even as Krimsky’s wavering words threaten to sink it. The cleverly placed second track, “A Cloud in Doubt,” is radically different from the sublunary opener: its wispy harmonies and careful keys suggest both the variety to come and their newfound use of the power outlet.
Many of the kooky elements from the first album are sanded down and employed sparingly here. Flutes, harmonicae, tambourines, cellos and acoustic guitar serve to flesh out and elongate rather than chop up the experience of songs, a particularly welcome tactic in “Fear of Flying” and the velveteen stunner “Poor Simone.” These songs may be particularly chilling as relief from the goofy and often confused moments – none so much so as the wah-wiggling “Stains” – but on a short (35 minute) album a little too much time is spent on the latter.
What surprises me more than the poorly modeled gloop, however, is how immediately affecting the ballads are. I tend to have a soft spot for witty production, and their debut’s bare-boners took awhile to get under my skin, so it feels weird to trust so quickly every word when Magenheimer sings “no pain is as great/ as this one” on “Draw It In The Dark.” They’re immensely talented melody writers with lots of ideas and, seemingly, lots of different expectations for themselves. As a consequence, they loosen their hold on as many elements as they tighten on Faces of the Night. But, more crucially, they’re keeping listeners on their toes, and it’s worth trusting them. 7.5
FTR: Just-One-Second-Ago-Broken-Eggshell (Mill Pond, 2006) 8
Dan Friel - Ghost Town (Important, 2008)
2.7.09 When you're dealing with practically instrumental music, the tiniest things can make all the difference – that ( ) had vocals at all, or that Hopelandic sounds like the sort of sad words we might picture him meaning ("you sigh along," whatever that means) – and so I don't feel like it's a whatever-the-fuck-difference-it-makes argument to talk about the song titles and their sequence on this terse album. After all: "Ghost Town Pt. 1"; "Desert Song"; "One Legged Cowboy"; "Appliances of Bremen" (actually don't ask me about that one); "Buzzards"; "Ghost Town Pt. 2"; "Singing Sand"; "Horse Heaven." Cute little expository arc, that. Because after all this is a wildly creative spin on what we might call "Spaghetti Western Music," enough to evoke those images, with the help of those titles, in the mind of anyone for whom the aesthetic isn't annoying. To my ears, it's almost too orgasmic to want to notice the songwriting variations; I'll probably make this argument in a billion forms on this blog, but it comes up time and time again: the best sounds are those that weren't influential but should have been. Listening to "Sister Ray" for realistically probably only the sixth or seventh time ever during an A.P. the other day I realized that organs so distorted as to crumble ("Singing Sand" is right) never really caught on despite the infinite scattered harmonic variety they offer. So that sound being the best part of Parts and Labor (it's why "Nowheres Nigh" is Moby if he could richochet so sprightly, a whole album of it is pretty damn successful if only for its complete freshness. It's almost the music equivalent of a think piece, a neat little what-if in the same way Return to Cookie Mountain was, but there are only so many places you can go with it. All roads lead to Ghost Town. 8
FTR: [see PARTS & LABOR AT THE SCO]
Handsome Furs – Face Control (Sub Pop, 2009)
12.21.09 Sometimes it seems like the talents of Krug and Boeckner were such that they could really only have exactly 15 minutes of fame, give or take a nice “omg” moment when they struck out on their own. Like any winning duo, the expansive force feels a lot mightier when “released” than the constrictive force, and I have the sort of no-duh appreciation for Sunset Rubdown that I have for Lennon’s solo stuff, but their frequencies were always tuned to the poles of indie fandom, the warbly intellectual (Krug) and the hoarse populist (Boeckner). That’s why Apologies was such a compelling swathe: it stabilized, even codified, all of the various elements of what people loved about this stuff. A lot of people didn’t even know there were two singers; the common social response was, “this sounds like Modest Mouse”; Krug would never pound just two alternating chords on his keyboard again; Boeckner’s “waiting for something that will never arrive” was a self-fulfilling prophecy as his own soapbox receded into the past. They scraped it all together into a muddy, drawn-out aesthetic that really only Built to Spill have been able to conquer for their second album, but when I saw them live the differences between them artistically were clear. Krug’s churning fever-dreams felt like the audience was actually inside his skull with all the psychedelic colors sucked away, and Boeckner was on the stage addressing us. Krug sang in singular pronouns (“I”/”you”), Boeckner plurals (“we”/”they”). The unique whole they’d combined to make this time was far from pretty, albeit a statement in its own way.
But Boeckner’s voice is drab, drab, drab, worn and unsightly like the clothes you’d choose to paint in, even when (or possibly because) it’s so much more excitable than Krug’s. It never feels theatrical, so the listener is infinitely more connected to his day-to-day experience of being in a band, working with that corner-crawling genius. Liking Plague Park, which came out the same year as Random Spirit Lover, was more a form of self-description, musical philosophy, than a product of the album itself. Does the world, in other words, need more solid indie pop records? Or should it plunder the consciousness and harmonic crags in equal measure? For anyone who like Apologies, the answer is neither, but Handsome Furs are running with the support they have, into what looks like willful irrelevancy. Face Control, for a few reasons, could never be as perfectly fun as its premise suggests. The main one is that Boeckner’s scooped out a place for himself as prototypical disillusioned post-slacker pop musician, which is really as far back as his listeners’ nostalgia can follow him. Ultimately the album can’t help but sound like a pretty fun party where a few ramshackle garage musicians rocked out to their shared love of New Order – a combination that ends up being weird enough – the voice, remember, amelodic and persistent – to turn some heads in a “wtf who is this” sort of way (like, I’m close to scissoring a standard choice like “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything,” just to pelt someone with its weirdness), but just obviously doesn’t have the heft to support a full record. Like, not to hold them up to New Order’s standards, but the bland keyboards are certainly never economical and “Everything” thinks about New Order songs that already exist more than what the song at hand actually wants. Problem is, the songs at hand scarcely want anything at all, which is probably why they’re just categorically difficult to deliberately return to. Ө
Here We Go Magic – Here We Go Magic (Western Vinyl, 2009)
11.22.09 First things first: “Tunnelvision” is conspicuously good, especially paired with its music video (even as I’m thinking: in this age we can read into the tiniest snippets of footage kneaded together, we only request that it be too blurry or zoomed in to tell what ‘s going on most of the time, so we can feel a rush noticing that the fly on the windshield turns into an Eagle or whatnot), enough that it beckoned scissors, the closest thing to a song-length frame I have, the song sent me poring over 2009 again to see if I could, after Pogo’s “Alice,” scrape together eight other conspicuous standout songs. But then, “Tunnelvision” fits into the Spirals of White model anyway, being anything but about its beginning and end (“people live and then they die” has never sounded so continuous) and all of a sudden the whole album wound together for me. In a perfect world, every song on the album might have the same effect, having that horizontal, minimalist thread clotheslining Luke Temple’s absence of unified identity – Paul Simon on “Only Pieces,” Randy Newman on “Everything’s Big,” these being the laziest answers to an ever-elusive critical question – only it seems to me he doesn’t know just how much of a beating heart he instills those Sufjan droplets when he rises out of “I Just Want to See You Underwater,” the album’s nicest surprise. Otherwise it’d be harder to write off those ambient interludes as fodder. It’s just amazing how the parts with vocals, especially “Fangela,” are able to pull that trick of convincing you that they’re really songs. It’s only when they make it onto a radio show or a mixtape that their ambiance makes you wistful for the rest of the album. 7.5 Iran - Dissolver (Narnack, 2009)
2.23.09 Man, fuck you guys. I was gonna blow people's heads off with this obscurant hype-machine-malfunction relic from 2003 gone-pop, but I wasn't expecting you to go frat on me! Okay, Aaron's always sounded like a bit of a douche bag even when he was doing nonsensical lullaby noodles, so I guess he's almost in his element here. Cf. cokemachineglow's review, though the obnoxiousness weighs heavy; I was thinking about doing the "change scale per review" method just so I could give this two-and-a-half PBR cans. But Christ, what timing! Right when I was starting to think The Moon Boys is maybe a brilliant album bought too soon – it's not "noise pop" like any of us know it, closer to good ol' make-it-work through overlap/repetition Royal Trux – and right when I was starting to think words written in anger about a band no one's heard of aren't worth the breath to speak, the frigid juvenile onset arthritis to type. Make me a nihilist, why don't you, let my own words eat themselves. This is just so any reader knows I have a bar. Fuck you guys. ●
FTR: The Moon Boys (tUMULt, 2002) 8.5
Japandroids – Post-Nothing (Unfamiliar, 2009)
11.03.09 I was all askew over this one and ready to call it album-of-the-year-by-default before I got more of a flux of quality and mind=changing at some point this past summer. A lazy toss that I dip into ad nauseum, probably because it’s language that others maybe actually can understand, is “emo used to be good.” Don’t test the depth of this comment, because it doesn’t hold much water. Fact is, when I listen to, say, the Wrens’ Secaucus, or even There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, I have a damn knotty time untangling the assets of the music from those tics that I know I shouldn’t like and historically haven’t in the Hidden in Plain view massacre of ’05. But it was, Christ, I don’t know, more earnest back in the 90’s? (Take a gander at the Sunny-Day-adorned 90’s list from 1999 and call it nostalgia by proxy.) At least a different look, closer to the Weezer school of hipster (back when hipsters were more earnest! – and the discussion is rightly disqualified) than the post-goth AP covers we now call “emo.” Suffice to say, like most things in their youth, emo started out undifferentiated from a lot of things – lo-fi, punk, power pop, fledgling indie rock before it ballooned grotesquely – and therefore more of a spontaneous act of creation than a commodity. I don’t know.
The already-circular and self-contradicting argument gets much gristlier, even as my devotion gets fiercer, when I find a spanking new group that manages to evoke the old school of emo, like they’re somehow in it for the right reasons and that comes out in the music. There are at least two concrete elements that I can hold onto, and repeatedly tell myself constitute a majority of the picture (up to a 7.5, at least) but neither of which I’ve actually observed in the Wrens or myriad others. The first is that the vocals, though classically anguished, cluttery-double-tracked and lyrically questionable (“so we can French kiss some French girls”?) are defiantly low in the mix, so that Brian King ends up sounding more like a fuzzy singer for a live basement-band. Can’t even hold the microphone correctly, right. And as a yang to the vocals’ ying, the guitars are huge, noisy and absolutely gorgeous, full of sustained SY-dissonances and blissful major-7 chords, so consistently flooding the songs that the album’s best moment is closer “I Quit Girls,” which alternates in a cycle between mutechopped tones and stretched epiphany, always seeming closer to completion with each revolution. And it breathes life into Pabsty bro-wisdom like “if you’re lucky/on the seventh day/she’ll wear nothing,” partly because the words sigh in and out of the entire song instead of going for punchline, but also because the words are always on the cusp of being totally lost under those guitars, like the guitars could speak the sentiment better than a human voice.
It’s easy to flop out a spongy binary to describe the tension in the music, but Japandroids are actually straddling a very difficult other line here: between the latent fear of “too emo” that can shut down creator and listener alike, and, on the other end, acknowledging and working within the decade-long post-Blink tidal wave. Post-nothing indeed: even the guitars never feel like an end in themselves, they always come off as subsidiary to their project of rocking out, more Siamese Dream than Loveless, more D.Jr than SY, what have you. (No surprise that “I Quit Girls” feels like a second cousin of “Mayonaise.”) That it hits so many pleasure centers in the end feels almost like an accident, albeit the sort of accident that only comes from true “post-nothing,” true blindness, true youth. Call me sociologist or weepy nostalgic that after a certain point, it doesn’t even matter who they are or what they’re singing about. 8.5 Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound, 2008)
5.14.09 Fucking furniture music. I guess I'm relieved... see Cluster. It just feels like there's something amiss in the critical apparatus for electronic music, they're letting it become this asymptote. I practically decided I needed the blank-faced emoticon just for the sake of weeding out electronic music. I like the premise of the Buddha Machine because I can liken these guys to the fan that some people need to have on to sleep. Lemme see... I have Murcof, who Porcys really likes, their gimmick is the letter "M"... Squarepusher, who I guess I felt took Aphex Twin's spazz to a new height, but I might be wrong there... Prefuse 73 Oh Wait Maybe It Was Them I Was Thinking Of... Mokira, who Murcof's gimmick really curses... my eyes blur on the patterned lines of iTunes. I do declare! At some point someone I read or met convinced me these were all worth it. With this one I think it might've been the telltale mention of Krautrock, but much as Krautrock's in all electronic music nowadays, I don't really hear it. To discuss the music more readily, well, it's breezy, more like curtain music than furniture music, but I get the whiff of little cheezy 80s throwback elements rising in and out, synth with all its cheezy, sibilant evocations, flangers like Ween except here my irony abacus is too gelatinous to use. If it were M83, I'd feel like something were being presented to me, instead he starts off with a fucking 29 minute track that doesn't even believe in earning a timestamp. It doesn't have the backbone I need to assess it, it's an emblem of the way some people listen to music. Don't think I'd hold it against them, but don't think they'd ever read this many words about Lindstrom either. Ө
Loose Fur - Loose Fur (Drag City, 2003)
4.3.09 I liken this to Ugly Casanova's Sharpen Your Teeth, not only because I briefly and lazily referred to Califone as Yo La Wilco (Tim Rutili plays guitar on SYT) but mostly because it's the swept-under-the-rug collaborative side project whose sheer propinquity to the band's decade-defining opus (YHF, M&A if you couldn't guess) renders it ambiguously tossed-off scrapings of the most serendipitously inspired parts of Tweedy and Brock's careers. Weird to qualify it that way when I'd say I "like" both the bands, but they each also made one album for which, it seems to me, the stars aligned. So Loose Fur is more elongated and jammy, sure, but O'Rourke and Tweedy both had enough interesting ideas at the time to sustain the album. Something like "So Long" may evoke the misunderstood noise of A Ghost is Born, but when those strangely resolute O'Rourke vocals click on like a hum it makes for an interesting point about elements of a song being indifferent to one another – moreso with "Carnival Knowledge," which almost predicts "Spiders/Kidsmoke." The album barely avoids wearing out its own smooth redemption: the songs' beginnings scrape together the remnants of the previous song's climactic dissonance, channel them carefully (as much so, in Tweedy's three blissful moments, as the standard YHF drone-ballad). Especially for someone who puts stock in names – Last.fm's done it to me – this is one to indulge in, and, from everything I've heard, nary associate with its Dad-rock followup. 8
LSD March - Totsuzen Honoo No Gotoku (White Elephant, 2002)
3.3.09 Neat-o find. There's a certain thrill of indeterminacy when, say, CMG gives its all to breaking out a group and when I scout out Sordo (Google it, the page called quack, and that'll be my buried hot tip of the year – though don't blame me if you sink into an abyss of diminishing marginal returns) they've got something crazy early by the group posted up. In this case, though records are hazy, it looks like the first LP proper for this Japanese band, and I love how even something as captivating as "dreary psych" really doesn't hold up to the product. It's the little motifs I thought I'd forgotten: the Moe-Tucker plod of "Kurai Hanataba," where the space of the recording makes the groove almost implicit, a product of our subconscious knowledge of Physics. Call the Dungen-styled opener misleading and call the title track "too far," if you must (you hear those elements smashed together despite sounding so individually deliberate and you realize how mercifully monochromatic most noise rock is) but I don't think that whole unified aesthetic thing is their bag. Thing is, they have one, just by virtue of being this melting pot of garage, psychedelic, noise and something else, a uniquely Japanese element of quirk. They shift their weight on just about every song, but I'd probably be bored if I heard their prolific output extensively – this is, in other words, exactly the amount that I want from this album. Except the last track. I want that last track. 8
4.29.09 Really, it's that tricky balance between being "in the mood" for the band, feeling like it has a "sound," and acknowleging that I'd put a different song on a mixtape depending on who I'm giving it to. Call the confusion a subjective warp; I still recommend it. >>7.5
Pinkie Maclure – Favourite (Placebo, 1995)
11.12.09 There’s a year-end (and decade-end) list compilation theory that I tend to ignore: if there’s a tie somewhere, go for obscurities. The idea is you’re more personally inscribed in the artists of whose fanbase you make up the greater percentage – or vice versa. Plus, the list is more interesting to read. Hence my angst at compiling my 2000s list, uncommitted as I am to much beyond your Arcade Fires and YHFs. Soon enough you’ll see the boring list for yourself; maybe that’s the best vouch to be made that I don’t award bonus “obscurity points.” I just root for the little guys, cross my fingers every day that I’ll find a Pinkie Maclure.
It’s only when backstory’s hard to find that I really get etiological. There isn’t a complete summary of her career that I can find; the phrase “active since the 80’s” is batted about while even her scattered Venn-intersection discography is mostly 90’s output. Just finding out that she was Scottish felt crucial, like some free-associative blend of Irish/Cranberries styled yodeling and the folk tones of her recent work with former drummer for Loop in the scarcely-less obscure Pumajaw. (I would also have said Irish there.) It’s probably just looking for a reason no one knows her, despite the fact that she was encapsulatory of the best music of her time. But when I pop in Favourite, an album I’ve positively binged on for almost two weeks, it all dissolves into the visceral: even her obscurity becomes clutter, the need for an origin myth a misguided journalistic rigamarole.
So too late, then, to the actual music. “Hedonistic” spirals through twelve measures of underwater loop before Maclure’s not-so-secret weapon, her impossible voice, hatches. No holds barred, it feels like everything she ever wants to say all at once: the elongated accordion acting the organ, unstable yet unfailing, the rattling percussion, and a cumulonimbal wordless howl. An interesting thing happens in both “Hedonistic” and the second track, “The Rain Is Out.” Both hit you with the chorus right off the bat, amidst any number of other loops, which makes me think of a friend who said Elizabeth Fraser “speaks in tongues.” The choruses feel ceremonial, ritualistic, omnipotent, but they never attain the same force again – the somersaulting phrases in between actually compromise them. I’ve hit the rewind key to see if the second chorus of “Hedonistic,” which rides the potential energy of a suspended dominant chord, actually has some sort of emptiness to it compared to the first, a humanity, a confusion, but the technical differences are negligible. This is all the more remarkable to me – Maclure conjured enough ambiguity in between to internalize the loops and drones, to turn the ritualism inside-out, to see it refracted through doubt instead of, I don’t know, exoticism. In a sense, it’s the same move again with that strangled birdcall towards the beginning and end of “The Rain Is Out”; the first one’s a distant sound in the lush night, the second is a strangely familiar catharsis after a brow-moppingly concerted repetition.
All of which ends up being Pinkie Maclure’s unique power and majesty. It seems quick and easy to compare her to the most prominent avant-garde singer of the nineties, Bjork, but Bjork always sounds exactly and inimitably like herself. Pinkie Maclure, with an octave range that sent me poring through accounts about whether “Pinkie Maclure” was a person or a multi-vocalist band, is a queen of dialogism. Because I’ve never heard anyone whose music reminds me instantly of so many others without ever compromising her uniqueness. Her ability to slip in and out of old-school jazz in “Garden of Delights” – “you’ll never regret a cloudy day” – evokes Beth Gibbons on “Glory Box,” if only for a moment. Sometimes she strangles her own voice until barely anything comes out of it (the anticlimax of “Heartsease”), like any avant-garde brass instrument, but she never submits. It’s as theatrical as the album cover suggests, though far more Lynchian, the way these different characters gurgle out of her, spar and settle.
And when she’s not unraveling her own lexicon, it’s impossible to know whom she’s talking to – certainly not the listener. Her lengthy vendetta against “Heartsease” (I’m thinking: Hartsy’s as in Thai Food? Heart seize? Heart’s ease?) treats the namesake like a character more than an abstraction. The accordion – finally acting the way an accordion is meant to – is swaying through scales like it would in any Decemberists song, and it’s eventually swapped with, holy shit, a fucking harmonica. Instruments of nostalgia, these, and somehow despite their almost insolent simplicity more elusive, more worthy of Maclure’s pleas, than the rigid percussive loops we’ve come to expect. Since most of the backdrop evokes a careful setting into perpetual motion of cogs and cords, only the tiniest things beyond Maclure herself create tension in the system. After the “Hedonistic” chorus, a fretful guitar struggles to its feet and is immediately knocked over sideways by the pendulum of the chord change. “It’s a maze down here,” she supplicates in “Garden of Delights,” which her writhing vocals suggest, if not the most entrenched drone of the record. When the momentum of the album lets up (it’s a taut 34 minutes) on the curious, loping closer, “Rose Flavour Talc,” Pinkie Maclure, for all her struggle, evaporates. If you’ve got one of those repeating CD players, you’re totally prepared to hear the ritualism of “Hedonistic” again, somehow always impressively otherworldly no matter how many times you’ve heard it. 9 Magnetic Fields - Distortion (Nonesuch, 2008)
1.9.09 I listen to this and wonder why I brushed it away in making my year-end list, and why, apparently, so did many others. It fades, to some extent, when you aren't listening, but I just can't bring myself to say anything bad about an album that was made in such remarkably good taste. That would be, taking the "highlight" (if we're to nitpick the vast with such an idea) of their opus 69 Love Songs, which for my money was the JAMC-lo-fi-wash of "Yeah! Oh, Yeah!", and base an entire album on its production values. Lo-fi shoegaze never took off except out of necessity (we're young, we're creative, we're stoned, we have no money), it seems; maybe the term is too inherently antithetical or something when the genre's forever dominated by an album so immaculately three-dimensional as Loveless. Even JAMC went straight-up pleasant as soon as they could. But the way it operates on this album is, to me, a strong defense for its remergence, not a lame mixing gimmick like Times New Viking's peak-a-boo. Vocal harmonies in particular sound almost like incidentally charming amp-weep at first, and a band so well known for microscopic hooks does well to make them a little hard to find sometimes. That is, in fact, why the album works: we know the Magnetic Fields are just unbearably catchy so we're ready to pick out melodies on faith even when, admittedly, each song sounds at first like a blurry mess. It's a better move than naming every song with the letter I (equally great and exhausting for taking us up to 82 Love Songs) though I guess this album's reception has been a similar response to anything put out a band that made absolutely sure in one fell swoop that they would become a meme. This lets us forget everything that was charming about that meme in the first place: especially undercut, I think, are the opinionated, cynical and completely biting lyrics across the board: "California Girls" "breathe coke and have affairs"; "Old fools who believe / that they can dance and sing / and fall... in love"; "I want to be a topless waitress / I want mother to shed one tear." If you hate everybody including yourself with a smile on your face, they're absolutely charming to listen to. What to do with the more assertive reactions to the sound – "Till the Bitter End" remains one of their most elusive efforts for its swirling billow: I'm thinking, you can't recede, you can't betray your meme, guys – is another question, and while it points maybe to interesting directions in the future, they'd be hard pressed to make an album so bloody appropriate for their abilities. 8
FTR: 69 Love Songs (Merge, 1999) 8; i (Nonesuch, 2004) 7.5
Matmos - The Civil War (Matador, 2003)
4.29.09 2003 is going to have my decade-end list clutched in its jaws. That's not a vow for this album; I just can't get enough of the fucking acoustic pastiche. Matmos wins the award for most albums perused exclusively on my radio show before fusing into a gestalt – which is still antsy. Maybe The Rose Has Teeth In the Mouth of a Beast is the most "them" record, in that their foundsound schtick reaches the free-floating conceptual plane at which semen may or may not be the auditory centerpiece of one song (apologies to my brother-in-law for that poorly-considered christmas gift! not that you'd know it without the critical institution; maybe that album's a bit of a thank-you card). Then their most recent one is classic Cluster & Eno (as all critics are wont to mention... another thank you card? Maybe they weren't being as ironic as they seemed in the opening paragraphs of "numbness and numbers") multilayered minimalist synth lines. So I don't want to relegate The Civil War to just another trendgobbler, but just listening to it I have a bit of trouble denying that sacred completion, that beautiful Euclidean record that it seemed for a moment electronic musicians could conjure. No shit I "lump": SF Sorrow and Notorious Byrd Brothers are delegates and all that. But it'll be awhile before this clump, The Lemon of Pink, Up In Flames, Rounds, Neon Golden, and finally The Civil War becomes something I'll need delegates from. I only really feel that way listening to Bibio, maybe, but even then I've never had such plentious spring adhesive. 8
Meat Puppets - II (SST, 1984)
1.1.09 Okokok it took me awhile to start to really respect this beyond "Plateau" which has only become more of a beautiful monument to transcendental slackerdom as I've heard it more, because at the level of gimmick I just can't appreciate this the same way I can't appreciate certain Ween. It's easy to clump the two together, but it also prevents a certain enjoyment because especially post-Guava you get to a point where modes start giving orders, the confusion is lost. Pull the fibres of this music apart and you don't have a cohesive chunk of cowpunk anymore; you have proficient locked-in ABA instrumentals, some super-ahead-of-its-time noise pop and even JAMC-style shoegaze, post-Chilton-proto-Tweedy vocals that harmlessly stumble into walls and cabinets, surprises, really, around every corner... one starts to see where this becomes the Holy Bible for the early-mid nineties whoevers, your Archers of Loaf, your Silkworms. But the best thing about not seeing it (or even its individual songs) as a statement is that I'm suddenly ready to delve right in and I practically get chills imagining just the sort of thing waiting for me. 9
Memory Tapes – Seek Magic (SIC, 2009)
11.22.09 Hot Chip didn’t “spearhead” a damn thing. Whatever it was about The Warning that made it such a crossover success – like, as people are wont to jump to, the soaring and heartbreaking coda of “And I Was a Boy From School,” hatched, as it were, from the beat – it wasn’t generalizable, though apparently skinny-pale-geek camaraderie beckoned that meek vocals emancipated genre experiments like no other (Phil Elvrum may have succeeded in his Black Metal Valentine Wind’s Poem, but disco’s ubiquity is a different matter, dogma being what separates metalheads from indie kids and nothing but folds of irony when we’re dealing in camp.) I know as well as anyone that strange sensation of actually enjoying something ironically. It took me the longest time convincing a few friends to watch Serenity the other night that I didn’t just find the terrible dialogue and shameless cliffhanger transitions funny, I thought they were genuinely awesome for their audacity. So that, say, this is the perfect time for someone to release a flat, talentless disco record is not a totally foreign idea to me, but it works best when I feel like I’d jumped to conclusions at some point, that I’m better able to appreciate the perfect anachronism from my current position than ever before. ‘Cause, like, Serenity actually got a strangely layered, nuanced plot going from piling on the clichés to that extent. The characters actually developed really splendidly. But besides a few shards of different Garageband settings that I’m fond of – say, the “Cocteau Twins” guitar setting on “Swimming Field,” none the more run-with beyond that – this release relegates itself too quickly to Mall-muzak in your own home to be inviting to my likes. Ө Memphis Khan - The Merchant EP (Reverb Worship, 2009)
7.29.09 Shout out to Memphis Khan, who nailed their particular aesthetic – which just happens to hit all my personal pleasure points – on the head, to the extent that their "Beat It" cover works entirely by virtue of its existence. It's not the EP's strongest song, but its creeping realization does what a great cover ought to do: make the original seem a little under-realized, perhaps, or bound by its performer's ego/consistency. Moreover, it makes you hear the original differently, if you're like me and you don't tend to think someone like 80s Michael Jackson had much brewing under the surface of his songs. But Memphis Khan's real success is they feel, if not completely original, somehow necessary. I want music to have this sound, and it's a direction I've always been facing without having so many canonical groups pointing the way. It's Tennessean without the cultural vices, or the cultural vices seem to pale in comparison to the sheer space, just humming, feedback, organs, silence that isn't silent. Read a 1962 Hunter S. Thompson piece on how dry and early-to-bed they really are where they actually play bluegrass music (in the wake of its faddism), the party ends at 9:30. Makes you think about forgetting politics for a second and thinking about just how alone you are far from the city, and how that loneliness extracts the marrow of nature, undoes itself in the face of one moist bag of juice. 7.5
Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2 (K, 2001)
4.13.09 Lo-fi, sure. What people forget is that Phil Elverum is a producer at heart, that he didn't approach this album all 4-track-Robert Pollard style though that incessant foghorn would beg to differ. It's his arrangements, the way guitars slip in and out of sync, the way the epic opening pair of tracks strangle and then open up, the way most of the album rises out of insurmountable emptiness, the way we just have faith that there's a heartbeat always ahead of reality like those psychology tests where subjects' skin became conductive before they consciously saw horrifying photos. "Samurai Sword" is the only moment of unwarranted despair, the familiar chunky distortion positively painful on the heels of Elverum's least cynical moment, "I Felt Your Shape." He was wrong. Need to scrounge up something older from this group, though I don't think they ever scraped together such a bleak, integrated opus before. One that does convince you it's "lo-fi," that it's a snapshot, despite its fever-dream depth; one in where you either wait in cold sweat for "Map" to cut through the album or you'll get cut yourself. 9
FTR: It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water (K, 2000) 8.5; Mount Eerie (K, 2003) 7.5
Mission of Burma - ONoffON (Matador, 2004)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Obscurant as late Nick Cave albums, I need to realize that Vs. can’t be tossed aside quite so easily, despite everyone’s momentary enthusiasm for this. Ө
Juana Molina - Un Dia (Domino, 2008)
12.31.08 This was a pretty sure bet for me, loopy as it is. The construction reminds me a bit of El Guincho, but Molina is really only here for the X party for the first track, and the different melodies she applies are more subtle tweaks than jubilant basks. Makes me think about how you can take a super-basic chord structure and create a clutter of arrangements that twist it from it's bare Western-tonal charm through different histories, dispensed in appropriate portions like po-mo soft-serve. Which isn't an attack; the linear development is measured, but take a given moment, or a given shift, and it'll be an epiphany along the axis of the guitar in The Beta Band's "Push It Out." I hold that this is a cerebral tactic, even if it's most common in electronic music, because it's of interest to people who want to see mapped out how the sounds they're hearing are constructed – and made by musicians who have enough confidence not to feel like they're showing their hand. 8
Roy Montgomery – The Allegory of Hearing (Drunken Fish, 2000)
01.04.10 My old roommate Liz had a semester-long radio show that was devoted exclusively to the New Zealand independent scene of the past quarter-decade – not the unnerving Semester-Abroad expertise that constitutes many of WOBC’s World shows, but an actual excavation of a strangely vibrant and cross-cultural (flat-out Western, even) experimental pop scene. The stuff is, arguably, consistently better and more interesting when drawn from a hat than any other single country’s, you know, entire musical oeuvre. It’s probably the drone/shoegaze element that entices me the most: one of Stereolab’s huge early influences, Snapper, were amongst the founders of the relentless two-chord buzzsaw organ, albeit because they stuck to the formula so relentlessly (whatever works, right?) But the dirty secret behind the impressive across-the-board quality of New Zealand is that Roy Montgomery was a member of about 50 of the groups, or so I’m told (see Dadamah – New Zealanders are in the habit of renaming every new combination of the same musicians, which looks impressive on a DJ playlist). I wish this would-be defining statement defended Montgomery’s reputation a little better. To both his credit and his detriment, it sure does sound like an actual solo album, meaning the songs, when more than a single guitar, at least emanate from one source bookended by unobtrusive accompaniments of bass, etc (never drums, never vocals). Protracted fades (-out and sometimes -in) do the album in the same way cross-fades did in Faust’s late-career Ravvivando, which was also ostensibly a collection of sound experiments. Ravvivando at least emphasized the differences between the tracks; Montgomery seems to rely on the silence itself to be different enough to wade straight back in. Evoking Snapper’s persistence, Roy succeeds in creating a defining sound, which ends up essentially being a Cocteau Twins or Cure guitar track singled out – a recognizable, pleasurable and surfeited effect that everyone with a Mac now has easy access to via Garageband. My problem is this: if we are to adopt one of distorted drone pop’s foundational tenets, that the chords do not matter, that all is sculpted, chiseled, cheated away by sound, then what gives? It’s almost like Montgomery wants us to turn our attention back to his twiddling progressions, or just put his songs on mixtapes where they’ll contrast nicely. Whether “Resolution Island Suite” is better simply by virtue of its 17-minute length is an interesting but ultimately useless thought experiment: Montgomery doesn’t need that much time to unfurl some interesting development in his songs, though it’s apropros that he thinks he does: that sick organ break at 7:30 didn’t need to be earned, but it wouldn’t have been a standout track on its own, and the remaining half an hour of finger-drumming gumdrops confound more for “Resolution”’s, well, resolution. √
The National - Alligator (Beggars Banquet, 2005)
1.9.09 Ah – the cycle is complete. The first National song that I appreciated was "Looking for Astronauts" and the last was "Mr. November." The former appeared on a compilation of child-worthy indie music (well done, guys, Berninger sings "don't wear the watch / when you're out with the cunts") and I had heard many a tale of gruesome heart wrench about the latter long after I had decided it was a little to, I don't know, hostile for me. I like the idea that this album goes down in the records as the definition of a "grower": I've devoted a month or two to each of my favorite cuts on this album, and now that I've had my "Mr. November" moment I'm afraid to actually offer myself to it in the same way that seemed so natural for, say, "Daughters of the Soho Riots," which made it onto a Mom mix before I realized it wasn't just "pleasant," or "Karen" with its artful trifecta – how they manage to so gracefully encompass both the swooning strings of "I wouldn't go out alone into America" with the head-pounding rationality of "It's a common fetish for a doting man / to ballerina on the coffe table, cock in hand" and, holy guacamole, one of rock's most cinematic nadirs:
Without warm water in my head, all I see is black and white and red
I feel mechanical and thin, hear me play my violin again
I'm living in the target's shoes. All I see is black and white and blue
Idle, idle, idle, idle-
Protect the nest, Protect the title...
So in case they don't stand up quite so well on my paper, sweet baby jesus what a lyricist. I like to see this album's incandescent guitar lines as the blurry brain-basement halo to the more prominent piano on Boxer. This is an album of endless self-contradiction, self-doubt, self-denial, whereas I think there's something to be said for how Boxer really swept people off their feet for its more public context to the lost. Maybe this is the voice of our generation, though we're scared to really call it that: "We're half awake in a fake empire." Everything thunders and rolls around Berninger's doubt on Boxer, whereas the world doesn't follow rules in Alligator. I used to say there are ideas that feel somehow instinctual but are clumsily enacted, like the yelp-chant in the background at the end of "Secret Meeting." After hearing Boxer's smooth U2 landscapes I found myself wishing for blemishes, wishing for an album where he might let "Say something pretty, something I can steal" collapse into an endless spiral: "I'm so sorry for everything." This is where Mr. November comes in, a song of such woundedness that it can be hard to swallow whole. But when you get to know the guy, you never want to believe, want him to believe, anything he says as much as "I won't fuck us over." 8.5
11.30.09 I mean, just for accuracy's sake, I had a lot of trouble not putting this on my albums of the decade list. Usually there's gestation, a steady climb, but this one shot up very quickly in the past year for me. It's been a long time since I've needed an album like this before, since I've felt my own impulsive garbly thoughts chanelled into such perfect units and then emitted from my own speakers. I want to say you can't analyze it, even though I always want to, but the one thing that's for sure is you can't fake it. 9
FTR: Boxer (Beggars Banquet, 2007) 8
Natural Snow Buildings – Shadow Kingdom (Blackest Rainbow, 2009)
11.06.09 If I weren’t such a Venus-in-Sagittarious junkie for consuming sound waves and fossil fuels simultaneously, I’d never get the chance to fall completely in love with drone-folk opuses like this. Because, shit, first order to business: a double album to the brim, nigh-on 160 minutes of songs ranging from 2 to 25 minutes. I like lots of the gradual stuff, like how “Porridge Stick Into the Fire and Dust in the Direction of the Sun” manages to shift from the most atonal, key-free stretch on the album, the hollow branch-bending static electricity before a storm, to almost soothing enormity. You hold down fast forward and you can’t believe how much some of these songs change – you’d swear the change was internal, like you’d been convinced – meaning time is as effective an instrument as any sympathetic sitar. But it’s the “one-two punch” of “The Fall of the Shadow Kingdom” and “Gorgon” that lay out the album’s project. “The Fall,” like any other “long first trick,” overwhelms me with its hyperthetical everythingness before I even have the earliest analytical capability, before I’m beyond the blurry-eyed infant stage in the shadow kingdom. It’s not just horizontal tones, see: I hear effort and arpeggiation, I hear illegible voices and detaxonomized wails, none of which can crack out of the song itself. The implication is that everything that succeeds it is sculpted from the comet tail of its lingering overtones. This stuff can’t be wedged into real memory. So “Gorgon,” of course, is its perfect Kameraform foil, nearly as different in length as it can possibly be and as stripped and bare as “The Fall” is plenary. Solange Gularte’s voice is completely gorgeous, as is her acoustic guitar – and by some accounts this is still drone here, the phrase jumping the octave midway without foil, over and over sans discrete chorus – and they’re isolated only very rarely throughout the rest of the album. But it always seems like passing through a door into volition, like everything else is just feedback, a version of what’s already been. Her tragedy is her brevity, her tendency to fade back so easily into everything else. I want to say that I wish I could hear more of her, but that’s selfish, to demand a symmetrical infrastructure, to demand Another Green World which for all its insistent atmospherics doesn’t take the theory so far. Point is, life behaves this way, we’re piqued by chaos and unity and universality and when we get clarity it doesn’t matter how spare or ephemeral, it’s enough to lift the dense, infinite weight of everything else. That’s the key here: it’s not just about human vs. environment, it’s about how the most unexpected things can balance the meaning of surfeit: absence, discreteness. That’s why the philosophy of this album merits its length (there’s an even-more-appreciated triple disker bounding around out there, but it feels weird to get proportional) and why the notions of balance and completion have to act as its precedent, not its resultant. It could swallow my end-of-year list whole, but its scope deserves everything anyone could sacrifice and then some. Hence starting with “The Fall,” the failing, the bounded 25-minuteness; only real experience of the world can make sense of its shadow. Very “Allegory of the Cave,” yes? 8.5
Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Merge, 1998)
1.14.09 Oh Christ, is it down to me then?
I'm not sure I've read any truly remarkable writing about this album, any writing that actually adopts the album's disposition toward the very function of words before its first line is written.
I'm not going to write that review yet, though part of what I love about this album is that I know I can, I could any time, like my three-time poetry professor can blow through one of his favorite poems and analytically shred it into some sort of explosive intellectual confetti.
The other day it was the "holy shit no one's played this yet" album project, and I mentioned that the song that gained the most from it was "Oh Comely," originally too circular, too spare, too reliant on the assumption that it could exist in its existing, too much goddamn faith in it to be anything but a roadblock to my complete enjoyment of the album as a string of moments. It devours the album whole: time is no longer an issue within it, just that tidal rise and fall of its neverending strum. "Dee dee dee" being the point that I almost broke into tears even though I knew it was coming like a sigh, a song so filled with words that it has to eventually lose faith in them (Destroyer's lalalas are fascinating for this exact reason: the absence of words for the linguistically inclined is spiritual, not a submission to a pop motif though that may be part of how they want to communicate what they're communicating). I tell the others that the lyrics are free-associative, and someone says, "well, no, I think they mean something." Sometimes it feels like nothing means more than free association, nothing maps out our intricacies more, our "Cobweb – wove in Adamant – / [our] Battlement – of Straw –" as Dickinson said in "I had not minded – Walls."
Language, says a friend of mine who's madd subsumed in this shit, is the intersection of habit and impulse.
Lester Bangs wrote his Astral Weeks manifesto a decade after it came out, and Neutral Milk Hotel arrives thirty years after that album and our generation's manifesto is already too late. Part of it is format: if I were to write I'd need to be thorough even when the album, that "beautriful dream / that could flash on the screen / in the blink of an eye and be gone," is tangled up in the satisfactions and dissonance of brevity; one cannot acknowledge its problem by solving it. I'd need to columnate to pick apart moment-by-moment all the different images and emotions conjured by its linear descent "plus or" ascent:
Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park. Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums, the music and medicine you needed for comforting, so make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving and pluck all your silly strings, bend all your notes for me. Soft silly music is meaningful/magical: the movements were beautiful, all in your ovaries, all of them milking with green fleshy flowers while powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines. Smelling of semen all under the garden was all you were needing when you still believed in me.
In some ways Robert Schnieder's ejaculation is the only review that we need.
As my recent casual interest in astrology indicates, Capricorn's interests are not in the Social or the Personal but in the Universal, so what just tears me to pieces about this album – besides the fact that I somehow shrugged off Mangum's wail initially – is that it's managed to mean so much to so many people on something other than a technical, piece-by-piece basis. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot makes sense, sonically dense and varied as it is, but seems sometimes like everyone's managed to live inside Mangum's head for those not-even-forty minutes and believed in it. That's what Lester Bangs needed to instill with Astral Weeks: he didn't pick apart every single moment on the album, he just told me to believe in it and I did and all of a sudden Morrison's voice wasn't a peripheral gnaw, but something that completely filled me and threatens at all times to leak out. Nothing can affect me this much without stirring my creativity, leading me to need to wrench more out of it in my own artistic splurge.
This is not it.
A friend of mine said that the whole basis of Mangum's quit-while-ahead recoil was never a calculated Bill Waterson self-consecration, an act of economics: Mangum said that he stopped believing that music could heal. But an ever-expanding circle do, and though I'm ashamed of an instinctually reductionistic past, and often too possesive to make this sort of declaration, I have to join it in blood. I'm, in some sense, "all in."
Whether his faith is still alive, only Mangum can explain his own myth, I sometimes feel. The religion is never Christianity, but maybe that goes without saying. He's created something that perfectly fits into the paradigm of the revisitable art piece, a spiral of white ever the contradiction that is life, ever the intersection of instinct and habit, ever the centrifugal meeting the centripetal: "God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life." 10
Odawas - The Blue Depths (Jagjaguwar, 2009)
(First Published in The Grape)
3.15.09 A timely soundtrack for the great Midwestern thaw, this one, pairing a Jim James croon with an unflinching plunder of the synth-set-on-strings New Age aesthetic no one seemed to mind when Cluster did it. Which is to say, I can’t necessarily or sufficiently delineate Odawas’ third album and Enya except to say that people are more likely to approach this one from the Fleet Foxes/Z-era MMJ/Band of Horses cult than any other. (That and I have a moot hunch there’s a demi-ironic commentary somewhere in here).
Those groups all made music that was pleasant and consistent – to a fault, for some listeners. Odawas takes those adjectives to a certain extreme, to a point where, for better or worse, you notice them again. So color me a lazy reviewer, but these eight medium length tracks aren’t to be reductively chopped – better to wait for the little surprises, like how naturally a fusiform harmonica can rise out of the synth soup, or how the cheeseball-doom Orc-soundtrack chasms can come off tugging, ambiguous when paired with Michael Tapscott’s tearjerking voice.
Those vocals: you realize people only think Neil Young’s a meme (Wayne Coyne, Jason Lytle, Doug Martsch, c’mon guys, Venn Diagram that) even though, when you listen to these guys, comparison’s the last thing you want to hitch them to. But the songs wouldn’t be the same if they were bare-bones, and the production is firmly grounded in a sort of slow-mo nostalgia; you will like this album more if you’ve been obsessed with Twin Peaks before. In an age when plenty of bands write pop songs and proceed to forearm the masterfade into the red, Odawas quietly explains why cheese took off in the first place. 7.5Odd Nosdam – Burner (Anticon, 2005)
10.23.09 Ah, the audacity of drone. Cultural psychologists, in their tightly-wound, ineluctable binary, might attribute the roots of drone in East Asian folk music to that region’s “collectivistic” beliefs about how society functions. True-blooded drone music has a multitude of elements that are impossible to separate with your ear, and is even harder to analytically peel apart from its genre. This might be why I don’t find the Alash Ensemble, for all their visceral plateaus, on pasty Van-Halen-adorned “Greatest Albums of All Time” lists. Nor does it seem right to wad them in amongst my own pasty counterparts. The Guitar Hero generation steps forward at their designated coda to prove their worth, they were made to be ranked. But you can’t rank a genre, you can’t rank a culture, man. Which is why these things make so much more sense when you drop non-canonical reggae and non-canonical death metal. And, to be sure, the non-canonical Eastern drone that Johns Cage and Cale tapped for interstitial philosophy, and for which, in the greatest of ironies, they received fistfuls of Western confetti. Then I go to the Stars of the Lid and have to yawn adamantly, because Christ, my music is prescriptive and not descriptive; I want consumption; I want balm or burn.
Thus, we get the ever-straddled hyphen-pop, which in the case of drone can go by at least one bland qualifier: there’s pattern, there’s change. More simply, Odd “burns” accurately because when the oscillators cut through the air with an octave or triad, we eventually have blind faith that the chord will ratchet, most often in the eternally rewarding pair of half steps up or down. I eat up two-chord songs like I chow binaries, and unlike cultural psych’s individualism-collectivism/Weest-East, I almost never think they overstay their welcome. If people don’t think Burner’s fully realized, it’s because the tendons of fibrous samples, beats and clots of noise that crosscross the album, all those things that ground it in the Anticon collective’s aural hub of alt-nerd-additive-hip-chop, seem utterly at the mercy of those huge and perfectly proportioned tones. The agency of the album, Odd himself, is drowned out by whatever God you have, be it celestial, extraterrestrial, natural. Cue the space-age slice three minutes into “Untitled Two,” context-coloring indistinct chatter with mottled impulses, fear, thrill, shaker-style paroxysm. Or the army of seraphim straight from the tripgaze vortex of the 90’s calling out from halo’d nimbi in “Untitled Three.” If people don’t think Burner’s fully realized, it’s because Odd’s intricacies are on the foothills of, essentially, a few alternating white-key patterns, a distortion knob, a gloriously well-chosen instrument setting. If these are bigger than anything in our lives, if these seem to channel the vast movements of people, cultures and time into the most tempting symmetries, then it demands deconstructive thoughts unravel themselves sooner than the burn – the chemical reaction itself, the final carbon of all things. Ashes to ashes. It’s beyond collectivism, beyond blur; it’s about desire, inevitability, cessation of moments. Call it easy, but nothing could be more whole.
There’s a litmus test in here: either you find those “mad M83” towers of crackle and fuzz beautiful or you don’t and it’s with full faith in the former that Odd unflinchingly steamrolls his album with them time and time again. It feels familiar before the album even ends, before even the first track ends, yet distant enough that the album can close with a qualmless eight minutes of it. Which is probably why it feels more like a tap than a bounded entity: “Upsetter” clutters/sputters into and out of existence so quickly that there’s no doubt it’s just being obstructed by overlarge bookends. So, too, for the silence in Burner’s wake. 8.5
Okkervil River - The Stage Names (Jagjaguwar, 2007)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Black Sheep Boy was a grower, but that logic can’t sell me on Sheff’s albums since, wherein the best tracks are, more proportionally, simply the ones he pours the most into. The analysis isn’t as tough here: I love the first and last tracks, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t “A Stone” on here, no song beckons a swoon from across an emotional tundra, the contents just feel like lesser imitations of the peaks. ≠ “Our Life is Not a Movie Or Maybe”; “John Allyn Smith Sails”
FTR: Black Sheep Boy (Jagjaguwar, 2005) 8
Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor (Drag City, 2009)
12.10.09 Christ, reading (skimming, I should say if I’m honest, but Kindle Kulture would never miss a beat) music reviews has my psychology zonked in ways that I can only understand when I’m not doing it. One is these sort of Pavlovian reactions to, like, the very image of words and names. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets this with Jim O’Rourke’s name, far less questioningly than the now-entangled history of, say, Dave Fridmann. Thing is, I think O’Rourke’s legacy, as it prefers to be known, might be a false one. I end up actually thanking Jay Bennett, God Rest his OCD arrangements, for the perfectly channeled avant-garde of my current album of the decade, after seeing I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (I think you get a glimpse of O’Rouke smoking a cigarette passively, maybe, at one point) and its post-Bennett followup lacked an edge: some glisteningly off-the-press experiments and a whole lot of strangely dainty and/or jaunty (common ground being Low Stakes I suppose) piano-based pieces. Getting into the lauded Insignificance yielded similar incredulity: sure, I guess there are songs, but really, what the fuck is going on here? Why does he just say outright, “It’s not like I want to be gay/But I can’t help myself/It’s just that I am”? My subversive-hipster-irony radar is overloaded with this guy, so I have to return to what I know. Jim O’Rourke makes really pleasant music, full of nods to relatively obvious classic rock and classical sources, none of which seem either gimmicky nor seamlessly integrated. There’s just not enough force to that (here we go again) jaunty banjo break, like, we’re not listening to Beck here. He pops into the major-third slide guitar that the Allman Brothers sapped so long ago twice, but doesn’t commit himself. Dude doesn’t commit himself! None of this comes down to a criticism, or even one of those backhanded “it’s pleasant” reviews, because the album’s clearly quite labored over, and for what it’s worth he’s got we writers in a pickle, especially those who want to talk about “scenes” as if they spell themselves out by their contents. I submit that that’s the only reason he decided to make The Visitor a single track, to jam critical gears, make this music somehow harder to talk about than it already is (we can always jot down timestamps, come now). Everything I really like about it is sly as can be, like how at 15:00 I believe that’s the first true sign of dissonance, like how I’m still thinking I could give this to a parent for Christmas at 25:00 without realizing that it’s somehow innocuously gotten into some sort of a minimalist-free-jazz knot. That it’s so very complete is a gimmick and a test of how reliant we are on track volume in iTunes, but it’s still a meticulously crafted and deceptively (Strunk and White say that word’s a danger zone, and I will choose to leave it undifferentiated) “low stakes.” 7.5
FTR: I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 (Mego, 2001) 8.5; Insignificance (Domino, 2001) 8
Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Pains of Being Pure at Heart (Slumberland, 2009)
11.06.09 It’s probably worth starting this off by talking about everything in the 80’s and 90’s that this album rose directly out of. This shit is mad ubiquitous, if you know where to look. For me, it was my first second radio show senior year of college, which became in my mind a sort of diametric opposition to the black hole of noise and formlessness and loops that my other radio show was starting to become. Freed from the presumption of originality, I started to scour the WOBC 7” vaults, filing cabinets jammed with vinyl that no one, near as I could tell, bothered to look in anymore. (They’re digitizing their entire CD library now, like a lot of stations, so who knows if browsing and DJing will have the same crossover again?) The vault itself constructed the station’s halcyon days in my mind: early-80s to mid-90s, the assurance that even complete unknowns were going to take only three simple minutes to please whoever listens, that teetering mid fidelity spit-shining the jangle and fuzz without enveloping anything, the physicality of juggling black discs between songs, the sort of uncategorizable, all-enveloping joy of the culture that totally overtook the individual joys of songs. I’m not like this, but I can’t resist it. Unsurprisingly, caricatures were all that remained in the canon – the Replacements and, especially, the Smiths stick around as vocal phenomena, the most idiosyncratic and anguished voice-of-generation versions of stuff that, otherwise, a hell of a lot of others were doing. So level anachronism at Pains, but don’t call it samey, because for anyone who dug up/out the Go-Betweens or the Bats there’s a more elastic mindset. Like, defy economics why don’t you, diminishing marginal returns has no say with this stuff. I stumbled upon three songs in one semester – “Train From Kansas City” by Shop Assistants, “Secret For Julie” by Eric’s Trip, “An Old Man’s Dream” by Red Crayola with Art & Language – that had such a similar vocal melody that I pretty much wrapped them in the same heartstrings. Talking about a lot of RIYLs, I know; that’s because Pains is a welcome refresher course on what we missed when radio was still alive. Yeah, “The Tenure Itch” is my jam, but that pretty much boils down to arbitrary heard-it-first point-and-play. There’s not a dud in the batch, making the only topic for discussion the sheen degree: the elements are so loud and distinct, as per the times, that sometimes this feels more like a dissection of the past than memory lane. The type to tweeze stuff anyway, I can’t say I mind. But surely lo-fi only through association, right? All I know is that as someone who just totally devours this stuff, and who thought college radio had dragged it along to the bottom of the ocean, it’s nice to hear it alive-if-not-kicking alongside its more sonically anxious contemporaries. 8
Pavement - Wowee Zowee (Matador, 1995)
11.22.07 It's really amazing that Pavement've become the gods of self-serious hipsters, because speaking as someone who at the very least is cripplingly self-serious when it comes to music tastes, it seems perfectly natural to consider them overrated. I read somewhere that Pavement was in many ways the end of the rock-God myth; the first time listeners got that modern indie sense of unity with the artist, liek they were just a bunch of guys who decided to pick up guitars. Thing is, Pavement weren't, as my theory-conscious friends remind me. It takes lots of work to persistently maintain that middle ground between power-pop and complete dilapidation. "Oh, shit, I'm not tuned right... not that any of you would notice" Malkmus jabbed at p4kfest, I guess aware that so much of their stuff, esp. on the first two albums, doesn't feel like it's locked into a grid at all, you could give or take a few milliseconds on the notes and it would retain its charm. Phil Elvrum is the king of that, but really the only argument I can make is circular: surely it wouldn't sound good if it really were full of sloppy human error.
The point being, Pavement's music came closest to feeling "godly" in their latter years when they tightened and crispened up. THeir legacy, however, is an utter lack of tautness. The vocals, the drums, the chords, all feel rubbery, elastic and sagging. I found this neat and satisfyingly pulled-off (if perhaps simply too integrated into indie culture to seem novel anymore) on the fuzzed-out Slanted and Enchanted, but my first Pavement album, the lauded Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, remains my least favorite because its sharp and carefully delineated parts and sections spelled pop purport. When I listen to it, my mind aches for everything to be shifted just a few degrees (and thus Weezer), and I find the most solace in it when my mind works the malleable sounds and structures to its own ends. I'm literally picking up the imaginary slack, and after a few songs that slack starts to seem not only exhausting but somehow predictable because each song has its own little twists and turns that I'm treating identically. It's work even though I'm not substantially paying attention to it; these should by campfire singalongs, nostalgic anthems like "Two-Headed Boy" for people pretending to be old enough to have enjoyed this when it came out, but I don't have that shit memorized (red in the face anytime I hear a friend play a tipsy guitar line and can only identify the band) and thus I'll need a handful more close listens – overcoming a certain inevitable emotional barrier at this point – before it can sit still in the background for me.
So yeah, I'm told that anyone who doesn't flat-out worship Pavement will inevitably like Wowee Zowee the best. Lord knows I get a decidedly non-Pavement rush from the two-note guitar line and Gen-X ooohs of drone anthem "Kennel District," but I can appreciate it cerebrally more than their other albums, because it feels like an important and definitive statement – rather, Antistatement. CRCR was twelve tracks with only calculated song variations; if I were sold on it, it would have that kind of economical Kid A/YHF power to it, but if Pavement's songs are mottled, give the brain tiny tugs in different directions, so too should be their albums. People can jabber about how this is their White Album all they want, but I don't buy it. This wasn't a careful study in self-imposed boundaries, establishing archetypes and banging the shit out of the walls (if never breaking them down), it was sheer brain puke all the way from a bunch of musicians who obviously had a huge number of ideas. Genres are incidental, scraps of musical passions past from each of the members (of course country is an uncharacteristically prevalent one). I can get lost in this album the way Pavement's best songs beg to get lost in (note well, this is also the only album that doesn't feature one of their best songs first, by my standards – a good thing, because that amounts to an "it's all downhill from here" attitude with many of their other albums). And the ideas are out there enough to be appreciably head-turning. Any ten-plus-minute stretch can be used as an example: "Half a Canyon" has that blast of static that turns out to be Malkmus deep-throating the mike in uncharacteristic catharsis, and minor key organs are always a knee jerk love of mine. End on an example? Insert conclusive generalization here! Maybe I will, though it's uncharacteristic of Pavement and this review as a whole to do so. And there you have it. 8.5
FTR: Slanted and Enchanted (Matador, 1992) 8.5; Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (Matador, 1994) 7.5; Brighten the Corners (Matador, 1997) 7.5 Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville (Matador, 1993)
1.1.09 To me it seems absurd for the sprawling, approach-to-making-music 18-track lo-fi opus type and the every-song-on-this-album-represents-an-axis-of-my-life type to converge, but it's that sneaking suspicion that makes this album so remarkable to me. My latest is "Shatter," a nice deservedly long piece that dabbles in 90's-giveaway-reverb and the sort of ambient noise like distant traffic that Yo La Tengo mastered for, like, two and a half minutes before she starts singing. Most of the album she doesn't feel like she has the space to breathe like there, but my god the B-side "Ant in Alaska" which gets up towards six minutes could've been the album's centerpiece if it had been originally included. Of course it has its highlights – "6'1," "Explain It To Me," "Never Said," "Strange Loop," "Fuck and Run" – not so many that it doesn't feel stylistically bound together and not so few that it ever really feels like a GBV pummel. 9
The Phantom Band – Checkmate Savage (Chemikal Underground, 2009)
(First Published in The Grape)
2.20.09 Let’s be clear here (ok, as usual, I won’t); even though the term “Krautrock” is a lazy, meaningless – and, as illustrated by my emigrant grandparents around Christmas, still pretty offensive – term for a manifold scene in 1970’s Germany, you can’t help that people are evermore fascinated by it. Chalk it up to Kraftwerk’s eerie prophecy, I suppose, 808s and Heartbreak as the best-programmed “soul” on the digital market, but we’d be blessed if we actually got a full-blown Krautrock revival. Partially because it wouldn’t cohere in the slightest.
So you’ve got your “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” public-domain skinny dips (devil’s advocate; I love that song) and, less often, a group that internalizes it as a means. Enter Checkmate Savage, the debut from Glasgow’s The Phantom Band. They can muck around in washboards and sequencers in equal measure, because they’ve got that pulse going. “Folk Song Oblivion” and “Halfhound” are both encrusted with Black-Keys-style blues riffage, and both have down-home-redemptive major key choruses. But they rarely change their minds midway: “Left Hand Wave” is all the better for riding its split-level drone through the end.
It’s refreshing not have to qualify this stuff with “samey to some,” even if their sound experiments don’t always gel. The exception might be Richard Anthony’s vocals, which, though Scottish, sometimes veer a little too far into alt-rock-90’s territory for me. On closer “The Whole Is On My Side” he croons over some nice extemporaneous arpeggios, “I know I have been foolish/ we were only trying to behave like humans.” Forgiven by default, I say. 8
Pontiak - Maker (Thrill Jockey, 2009)
5.14.09 Would a simple "fuck yes" suffice? Well I want people to know how this really hits the pleasure centers for me – see, P4K's not totally useless, you just have to look at their 7-range ratings instead of BNM (I think I got confused when someone said that once but it's starting to make sense). Meanwhile, some of my favorite albums this year are relatively shat upon by groupthink nexus RYM: The Phantom Band and Micachu (review to come! I need to review 2009 albums more, eh) both included. Perhaps to "situate" in a nice RIYL cobweb: less polished than Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, more consistent than Red Red Meat ("Sister Flossy" still their "Sister Ray"), less Dad than Drive-By Truckers. Avant-garde's misleading unless being really ruminant about the cud a turned-up amp can spit out counts. Hell, I'm not doing this justice... just, you know. For the record (what else is this blog?): Fuck yes. 8
Portishead - Third (Island, 2008)
Review in Pleogasm Magazine 9.5
FTR: Dummy (Go! Beat, 1994) 9; Portishead (Go! Beat, 1997) 8
Quasi – When the Going Gets Dark (Touch and Go, 2006)
11.03.09 This one was clogged in the contextual clot of too many promos during an internship, and I kept it because I had a glimmer that certain pieces of it that I might otherwise cherish were getting preemptive eye-roll treatment. I did pick the title track as a standout for its eerie wail of a chorus – if reluctantly for its verse’s gin-soaked ramble, “And they’ll tell ya… sign up for the winning team… or get out!” – but it’s a moment of organization and clarity that they willfully neglect for most of the album, right down to three tracks of straight instrumentation in the middle. I’ve heard better things about their earlier work, but on this album they sound desperate for a new direction, a band unaccustomed to racket trying to make one. (Like, how many piano clusters can you cram in before it becomes macro-percussion, a punctuated-nay-punctual theme?) When they take actual influences, they’re respectable but misshapen, some gritty Perfect From Now On sprawl on the opener, a dash of soured Flaming Lips. But when they try to craft a dense and experimental album, they don’t know more than a common-sense handful of ways to actually execute that. Classic “try it if you’re a fan,” not simply because it’s lower-grade than their other stuff, but because it genuinely might excite me if it had some substrate it was actually stirring up. Ө
Red House Painters - Songs for a Blue Guitar (Supreme, 1996)
2.25.09 One of the simplest snippets of journalistic brilliance to stick with me has been Deusner's "this is Kozelek time" in reference to the 20 minutes enveloped by the first two tracks of April – like there's a fucking coefficient out there somewhere. Actually, that doesn't sound too bad. Nice to have a cathartic gateway into the album almostcool would call Kozelek's apex like "Have You Forgotten," to which I guess I as good as tore myself open and offered myself. It's a fine line, but April didn't quite earn its space as far more than background music; more than 10 years ago the songs had enough intractable stuffs in them to become cumulative rather than flat. I'm glad "Have You Forgotten" wasn't watered down by dmu – & it's worth mentioning that these ostensibly "genius" but unassertive types are one of the great darn-it hurdles left for me that I'm aware of, Cf. Bonnie "Prince" Billy – because "Make Like Paper" takes the cake for this tidal quality. Plus I was already in spasms that the album wasn't mostly acoustic like Sun Kil Moon, it had plenty of that sublunary "Cowgirl in the Sand" thickness peppered throughout. Always welcome, but moreso is the end of "Trailways" which I thought only YLT had really mastered. When you've arrived at feedback, when you're lassoing overtones, you've usually given up beauty to chaos – despite the perfect science of the thing. It's not a comparison many would make, of course (mostly I get moans of "it's too DEPRESSING to listen to right now") and I was colored by the beautiful-if-the-original-were-unknown- much-less-if-it-were-once-your-favorite-MM-song "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" (for some nice elementary-school schema see cokemachineglow's Venn Diagram). Actually, I was just listening to "Silly Love Songs" and I had a miniscule epiphany. Brow furrowed, I counted the single repeated notes towards the beginning and got 12, over the length of a /UU/UU/U beat. But the mathematics, as always, dissolved completely: not only do I like that he stuck with that one fucking note for so long, I like that he didn't sound quite locked in – it's redemptive when this independent, perseverent streak that seems to shoot off into the stratosphere falls into the cycle once again. Steve Reich took this to its logical extreme, but when these structures aren't tatooed, logic has nothing to do with it. 8.5
Rubik – Dada Bandits (Fullsteam, 2009)
12.18.09 Man… fuck me. this is exactly what I mean when I say that that flat affectless facial icon is only “negative” in the sense that it represents a certain frustration with review writing. Words have the evolutionary function of solving problems, and it’s identifying that before/after “what’s gained” mentality that makes me wish I didn’t spew air about how I’m not proud of the air I’m spewing. It’s not like I didn’t nod my head with the beat/idea a handful of times in this record, which means the nonanalytic contemporary listener would probably be thrilled to hell by it, but guys, I can’t support such a RIYL fuckfest. Cultural bodily fluids everywhere. “Fire Age” stuck out to me as the most painfully familiar, and I couldn’t even tell if it was the tune or the whispery disco-glam vocals or, God forbid, both. I ended up deciding, with a sort of unsatisfying splat, that it was the occasionally fist-pumping but usually just annoying MGMT that it was seeming to remind me of directly. But there’s everything, it’s like a 2000’s Best of Indie Pop: kitschy synths, wispy falsetto vocals, arpeggiating keyboards, even the odd throwback to cymbal-fizz-heavy BSS drums. Am I being a cerebral prick or narcissistic to say that this stuff functions in too small units for me to care anymore? I’m saying ,“hold on to that feedback at the beginning of ‘Richard Branson’s Crash Landing’” but of course it’s clipped with arbitrary precision. The omnivore’s dilemma. Maybe I need to give in and just get out rubber stamps for the four or five major categories of contemporary sound – that is, switch to RIYL form, at least for the blank stare – and call it a day, because the more I write the more depressed I get about this stuff, about how I’d so easily be able to qualify a calculated Best New Music if I had any accountability, about how infinite variety somehow comes full circle and nestles itself into the words on iTunes as a sort of monochrome. Like, how many reviews like this can I write? Highly recommended for anyone but me, I guess. You have your whole lives ahead of you. Ө
Screaming Trees - Sweet Oblivion (Epic, 1992)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Some Gutter Twins reviews said something like “we wouldn’t expect members of old failed grunge acts like Afghan Whigs and Screaming Trees to resurface with something like this” but I figure, that’s a pretty oversimplified assessment of at least the Whigs’ unique intersection of soul, sublunary swagger and 90s sludge guitar, so I give this a listen. Lanegan’s voice isn’t even all that low, which is a shame, and in almost every other way the oversimplified assessment takes off with this album. Grunge being one of my less favored generation-definers, that equates to just plain awful for me. Even “Nearly Lost You” doesn’t hit any pleasure centers for me. Glad Lanegan found the blues, and has since become a sort of rusty-voiced standard that I’d felt I’d heard long before I did, but he’s got a few points on his license too. people listen to music. Don't think I'd hold it against them, but don't think they'd ever read this many words about Lindstrom either. people listen to music. Don't think I'd hold it against them, but don't think they'd ever read this many words about Lindstrom either. Ө
Six Organs of Admittance – RTZ (Drag City, 2009)
(First Published in The Grape)
2.20.09 Anyone else catch the latent ethnocentrism when people oscillate between describing music as “otherworldly” and qualifying it as “Eastern”? I’m not jabbing fingers here; thing is, Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny seems fascinated that different tonal systems can be familiar by sheer immersion. Take the space between the opening strums on RTZ’s highlight, “You Can Always See the Sun”; if you know what you’re in for, the minutest shifts in phrasing can put you at the edge of your seat.
I read somewhere that the popularity of 12” vinyl sparked a major structural revolution in free jazz, because the length of recorded output became limited to the 20-ish-minute “side.” The arc wasn’t forced, it was just internalized. I don’t know if it’s serendipity or causality that 20 minutes is my own musical attention span – suffice to say this nearly 2-hour opus isn’t to be swallowed whole. It’s best seen as a bundle of distinct pieces chosen for a theme: that freeform works best when it marries immersion (they exist best on their own terms) and limitation (they’re still twenty minutes each).
Given this, that the third LP serves essentially as a rerelease of his 2000 album Nightly Trembling seems lazy next to the far more essential previously-unreleased “Punish the Chasm with Wings” – one of the loneliest songs Chasny’s recorded for its piano subsumed in sirenoid white noise, its Yiddish violin loop curdling into electronic gobbets. Maybe Chasny’s more recently become bored with his own instincts as a long form guitarist, but this compilation feels like an artifact of a time when he was determined to treat anyone else’s tool as habitat. 8
FTR: School of the Flower (Drag City, 2005) 9; Shelter From the Ash (Drag City, 2007) 7.5
Solex - Low Kick and Hard Bop (Matador, 2001)
3.15.09 Some bands I listen to a handful of songs and scamper off to write about them, to weave them into my discourse or whatever. So credit Solex, my favorite recent epiphany, with making music that I just want to sit and repeatedly enjoy all the fucking time, to the point that I'm really just writing in my blog to say so. It's a pop masterwork, and I'm not talking about no "it's just a rock record" Is This It (I rag on that album a lot; truth is I like it even when what it means I don't) deal. It's not barebones, it's kitchen sink music. But since it's too easy to just slap any interesting music with the "genre-hopping" tag, I'll be a little more specific: the biggest genres it dips into are country and jazz, but it never lives in them. Which is to say, stand-up bass clutches the music but doesn't control it; slide guitar/harmonia snippets roller skate over the surface. Because her biggest advantage is a nice Tom-Waits-sans-the-dead-bodies groove, which makes the album feel like some rapid punching of those orgasm buttons psychologists give to rats. Her voice more noticeably ties it all together even though she does have a "sound," partially because we don't expect music this carefully put together to tickle the girl-pop paradigm. It makes for an easy barometer of who's opinions on music are knee-jerk, and who's are gutteral; it's nice to think that I can sometimes fall into the latter. Can't go far enough to justify this as a "classic," but it reinforces an idea that a lot of us have to believe to criticize most of the shit out there, that if you're actually brilliant enough this shit can dazzle. 9
Sparks - Exotic Creatures of the Deep (L'il Beethoven, 2008)
2.27.09 I guess I'm glad to have missed these guys' allegedly shitty, saggy mid-career, because knowing only this album and Kimono, really, I can at least subconsciously admire them for keeping it together. They're one of the great older discoveries of my past year; Todd Rundgren found the sound-alikes but unlike his catalogue they stuck to the weird Queen-on-speed thing instead of descending into used-vinyl-stack Mom music. It's hard to introduce them to anyone who hasn't, as Nick Sylvester told me, "give[n] up on the idea of 'serious' music." The fact that most people hasn't means that there really isn't a lot to compare them too besides Rundgren's short stint. Some might lump them with Ween or something but mostly Ween hasn't gotten 2 close except on "(My Fantasy)." It's strange how paradoxical complaints can be: are they repetitive or spazzy, for example? Are their synth lines cheezy or jarring? Is Russell's voice too dynamic or too uniform? In other words, you have to appreciate it before all these distinctions are pleasurably dissolved. I can see this album maybe has fewer ideas than, to be sure, Kimono, but I can't help that I support the idea of Sparks as a band, and their song titles are hilarious (even if I wish they didn't actually sing the title in "I Can't Believe You Would Fall For All the Crap In This Song"). It stands as the sort of inductive hipster fare that I'm proud to like: you can put it on and drunk people will dance to it while the manifold ironies paralyze others' smirks, and people with generally "decent" tastes in music will want it out of their ears or out of their brains for one reason or another. 7.5
FTR: Kimono My House (Island, 1974) 8.5
Spiritualized - Lazer Guided Melodies (Dedicated, 1992)
1.4.09 A word about 9.5's, if I may bore some of you out there. It's not exclusive, but I tend to see that as the echelon of submission, at which I'm so glad that the album was made, its philosophy is such an important part of my particular taste in music, the way it affects me, that I stop being so damned reductionistic. Some say this happens in all criticism, but with these albums in particular I'm really just leaping off the way it's bound to make me feel, and giving it a free pass for whatever else it wants – the appreciation precedes the investigation altogether. I'll defend it like a loved one, defend it like a moment. Other examples are the inevitable I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One and another stellar find this year, Stereolab's Transient Random Noise-Bursts With Announcements. If I wanted to be more calculating, perhaps Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space would be my Spiritualized album of choice, having more variation and surprise, perhaps, but Lazer Guided Melodies is Spacemen 3 sans the urgency of innovation (proto-shoegaze as inherently punk, see JAMC), given room to breathe and exist as an entity. Maybe, in the end, just given the production value to have differentiating dimension between the songs, so we need not bite our nails over the two-to-three-chord patterns – not that I do when connies aren't around anyway, I like to think. This album came at the right moment for J. Spaceman, I can tell, before death and propulsion set in, and it came at the right moment for me to take death and propulsion away, one last time. 9.5
FTR: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (Arista, 1997) 8; Songs in A&E (Fontana Int, 2008) Ө
Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge, 2007)
12.28.07 When I was reading praise two years ago for Spoon's Gimme Fiction, it was nigh-on impossible to figure out, from the few details about the actual sound that weren't contextual to the rest of Spoon's career, just what these guys sounded like. "Rock" seemed like the only thing anyone could agree on, but no one went to any great lengths to discuss how much Spoon rocked out. They were no Hold Steady, certainly no White Stripes. But the way reviewers seemed to be mapping out every tiny decision that distinguished each song and that album as a whole from "other" Spoon fare suggested only to me that there was something about these guys that, despite apparent pop proclivities, the music hispter elite really respected. It seemed to need a listen just to understand, but Gimme Fiction was decidedly not the place to start with them.
It's not that these awe-wreathed reviews were misleading; the first thing, I declare, that anyone needs to know about Spoon is that they are one of the coolest fucking bands making music today. And it all boils down to the little things that seemed to frustrate reviewers so. Who can convincingly gush over a single two-note stacatto trumpet line that comes in for four bars a minute in? They're cool because of their blue-balling restraint, because in a signature Spoon song every minute element is necessary and sufficient. Again, not so much true with Gimme Fiction as with their "masterpiece" – I've yet to really marinate in the purported slack sleeper A Series of Sneaks – Kill the Moonlight, one of the best albums of the decade for sure. Britt Daniel's vocals are the sound of youth, energy and libido caked with the immutable rasp of reality, be that hours of shredding his speaking voice over bar music or the nicotene that lines his throat. Every one of these barnacles of experience he carries are key to the theme of Spoon's music; they capture entire fuck-all generations at a time with present-tense lyrics about circadian lifestyles: "We get high in back seats of cars"; "All the pretty girls go to the city"; "Small stakes will kill time/when you're stuck in the back of the line/ it feels alright friday night to sunday/ aw, it feels alright, keeps your mind on the page." When he says "son you must go/ back to the life," there's no question for Britt that the word "the" belongs there.
"Back to the Life" is an interesting song to look at a bit closer, because like so many other Spoon songs it can be mistaken for an utter mixtape classic. For starters, there's that fucking amazing strum 'n' percussion line that sounds like it has gunshots going off, bookshelves collapsing, everything in the world falling apart and reverting over and over again. I'm glad as all hell that Stylus' (R.I.P) 50 Greatest Rock Drummers article took so many liberties with the definition of great and bombarded us not with fifty masturbatory virtuosos but with Steve Shelleys and Ringo Starrs, even sneaking the spectacularly unusual Moe Tucker into the top 10. And, of course, Jim Eno who Andrew Iliff tackles beautifully: "His absences constrict the songs to their constituent elements, giving sound nowhere to hide." Spoon's sounds don't hide, which is why I'm surprised people still talk about how they're only indie by association, a flub in the market, "gloriously commercial" as Rolling Stone puts it. "Back to the Life" has only a few elements to it, and one is that weird, slightly haunting synth-string note being held out, dipping and rising like a roller coaster built to nauseate. Call the immediate grab of the song its fist-pumping momentum, call that string line the doubt that grows beneath it.
It sounds like I'm saying something absurd, like that Spoon isn't as instantly likeable as people say, and that may be it to some extent. Their charisma is flat-out magnetic, yeah, but the more they strip things down the more scrutiny each of their decisions bears. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga beats around the bush less than any of their previous albums, and yeah, it's a "return to form" after Gimme Fiction, maybe even more "their" album than Kill the Moonlight which still seemed like it was just trying to one-up the Strokes on occasion. But check out what's plopped on the listener right off the bat in Ga's second track: "The Ghost of You Lingers" is one of the most tense things they've created. It's not a buried "weird" track in the second half, it's a statement of purpose, and it all comes back to that whole idea of what stripping away the flesh of pop leaves behind (in this case, Ghosts). It's an ever-winding spiral of suspended and diminished chords banged out furiously and unceasingly on a piano, while Britt's reverbed-to-infinity vocals mumble falsetto nothings in the background. We want drums after two bars like a good little pop song, but the fuckers don't give it to us, and we're left to stare at the stains on the walls of a mostly-empty room. I'm not saying Ga's all about tantalizing the popster's addiction and then weirding him out; I'm just saying that finally there seems to be no mistake that they intend to put everything out there and let the contradictions wrestle with each other.
So irony, if you want to call it that, looms larger on this album than perhaps any before. Call it the band's remarkably hipster appeal, almost to the point of repelling me with its straight-faced "I promise this is coherent" incoherence. This band has the resources to do whatever it wants, the good sense to funnel that "whatever" into small doses, and the audacity to offset it, to italicize the last two syllables of that word. Vocal snippets abound on this album, and yet there's only a hazy sense of location; some drumstick clicks have echoes of warehouse proportions, some basslines wriggle up and down your earlobe. I've always been inclined to call Spoon pop geniuses, geniuses of the people, before I'd call them mad scientists. They've always seemed to be on our side, but a good pair of reflective sunglasses ought to keep everyone scratching their heads. And if that doesn't sound like a good sell, keep in mind that the band's already proven its capabilities to create perfect pop moments, and they continue to do so. But they're pulling plugs, as we watch ourselves, our lives, swirling and spinning so rhythmically, simultaneously we catch a glimpse of the drain, all darkness and plummett, our final destination. Yet round and round, for now it's a hell of a fun ride anyway. 8
FTR: A Series of Sneaks (1998) 8.5; Kill the Moonlight (2002) 8.5; Gimme Fiction (2005) 7.5Richard Swift – Dressed Up for the Letdown (Secretly Canadian, 2007)
11.24.09 There’s got to be a “meh” threshold where it becomes “bleah,” but that’s the only way I could hope to quantify this. It would give me a war to wage. The “context is all” argument yields a few compelling directions – for example, that Eluvium and Enya are separated by camp not quality (strong inspiration for the latter’s drop in my Odawas review). That ended up being expansive: I recently bought and thoroughly enjoyed an Enya Best-Of, I have no shame. But you’ve got this reciprocal, too, this contractive derision. Like, what the hell am I supposed to do with Richard Swift, who comes off as the sort of bland superlative that conquered the nineties? Give it to my mom? Review it? Even finding out that good friends with great taste used to like Counting Crows inscribes a certain mark on that music. This is sorta the groupthink equivalent, which actually gave me a solipsistic crisis listening to Clearlake’s cedars in a dark room alone, simply believing that the music alone had the capacity to save someone. I’m starting to get used to it, but critical listening has me jotting down in a bloody Excel box that I like the bass break in “Buildings in America.” But fuuck. Who cares? Most of the album doesn’t even sound like it was arranged by Swift himself, the abyss of limited-liability studio musicianship. Like, Mountain Goats had to earn their polish, Darnielle needed to know his voice (literal/figurative) alone was DIY enough to remain relatable and interesting; entering Swift’s discography at the wrong point comes dangerously close to confirming personal fears that the fuzzy DIY aesthetic is all some of these guys have, and if they don’t hold onto it, if they actually wish they “sounded better,” its their past alone that tethers them to a scene. Strange to feel so unprepared for so little, strange to have Swift’s couch potato lyrics say it best: “I wish I was dead most of the time, but I don’t really mean it.” I need a tooth-grinder, whether anyone cares or not, so yeah: ●
10,000 Maniacs – Our Time in Eden (Elektra, 1992)
10.25.09 Wish I could isolate the moment at which I thought there was something really worth delving in this group – or at least a 90s synergy that was relegated to the corners of the decade, a la Cranberries. As it stands, the revelation of the moment is that this is the origin of Natalie Merchant, the unresearched associations and connotations of whom come a lot closer to mapping out the best and worst this album has to offer. Which isn’t much either way – just Pandora silage, which has to do with whether the ear listens through separation or integration. Ө Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses (4AD, 1986)
1.9.09 You can call this prototypical riot grrl music if you want, but to me it sounds like they're questioning themselves from the start. The album's restless, and its themes match that: "I could be a smack freak and hate society / I could hate God and blame Dad / I might be in a holocaust, hate Hitler / Might not have a child, and hate school / I could be a sad lover and hate death / I could be a neuro and hate sweat / No... I hate my way" and the angry thump turns into a delicate arpeggio. It's the sort of gear-shift that litters the album, to the extent that it might feel proggy if its narrative weren't so personally convincing. Kristin Hersh is trying to map out her life, and though she's got her share of hate it's not going to be straight up bra-burning rrrock. If it weren't so hackneyed, I'd reiterate Alan Light's Guyville liner notes, where he talks about the tendency to place Phair in an angry feminist tradition that she actually transcended. My response: no shit. Yes, it's bizarre that Vivian Girls sound more rooted than even the seminal debut of their archetype but maybe that's why Throwing Muses never turned heads the way it seemed like they should. Leave it to Sleater-Kinney, I suppose, whose fire consumed their doubt: "I shouldn't be smoking / this last cigarette / I feel sick / now there are words in my head." 8.5
Times New Viking - Rip It Off (Matador, 2008)
(Originally written for Writing About the Arts with Anne Trubek)
03.01.08 When I saw Yo La Tengo on tour last spring, a sprightly little trio opened for them and primed the audience’s eardrums – at least, to some extent – for the shoegazey onslaught that was to dominate the show. On the surface, the two bands seemed like they ought to be coupled: a genre obsessive would readily refer to each as “noise pop,” because both used a hell of a lot of distortion without abandoning a penchant for “hooks.” But such labels are misleading: the opener neither shared Yo La Tengo’s subtly dynamic sliding scales, nor their belief that noise should lead to new ways of writing melodies. Fun as Times New Viking’s Matador debut Rip It Off can be, its appeal remains head-scratching, a reminder that when we talk about the pop songs “buried” beneath the noise, we usually aren’t speaking literally.
Which is to say that they’d more accurately be classified as “noise/pop”; the two are simultaneous but independent entities, each taken to its simplest extreme and picking up the slack for the other’s deficiencies. This noise isn’t a “wash” in the soothing and sometimes gloppy early-nineties sense. It’s a pure teenagers-practicing-in-the-garage-next-door tantrum, with apparently little attention to level or balance. Live everything felt like a flood, but on record it becomes abundantly clear that they want to convey a sound so much bigger than their equipment that it can only come through in decomposed chunks. And that’s their aesthetic, insular as it may be; they don’t mess with it or aim to trip over sounds no one’s heard before.
The relentless noise could easily be upsetting if it weren’t for its compatriot. Melody varies a tad more – mostly because the singers are flat enough to obfuscate the line between tune and yelp – but for better or worse the songs rarely outlast themselves. When a guitar’s tone is discrete enough to stand out of the visceral mass, it inevitably loops some brief jubilant sequence of two or three notes for the entirety of a song. The music isn’t doomed for the seemingly straightforward songwriting or production; diametrically opposed in spirit as they are, boredom with one is immediately alleviated by an affinity for the other. And it sure helps that 10 out of 16 tracks don’t even exceed two minutes.
The best tracks really let the benefits of pop crush the competing noise (“Another Day”) or vice versa (“Relevant: Now”). But “competing” isn’t a tough way to see these two sides to Rip It Off, especially since the band tempers either of them so rarely. It’s occasionally hard to understand if this album is much more than a straightforward juxtaposition of two words in a genre many accuse of being inherently paradoxical. In this way, the “idea” of the band is both obvious and ballsy. On top of that, the songs manage to be the most engaging within their own microcosm – most of them would be totally jarring if they came up on shuffle or were played on a radio station. Having a characteristic sound too often involves an anal balancing of miniscule elements; since Times New Viking don’t have to worry about any of that, they’re ultimately the bigger blast. √
Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances (Troubleman, 2008)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
This was one of the ones that I ended up, in my short-lived postmodern experiment for Contemporary Literary Theory, rolling a dice and then reviewing it based on the score. It was surprisingly easy to conjure hate for it, as it was when I glanced in the window of my school’s venue when they came to play. Not a Springsteen man myself, though able to recognize his value as a cultural trend (reemerging, I once wrote in a trend piece, for the working class man who wanted to believe in someone other than Bush – Reagan back in the day) I just can’t see how the juxtaposition with Conor Oberst style angst gets them anywhere. It’s emotionally confusing, and definitely not subtle enough to earn itself anything. TV on the Radio worked, at one point, because shoegaze needed an R&B undertone to universalize its big heart. Oberst and Springsteen don’t need each other, they don’t even understand each other. Maybe this is where dialogic cognitive dissonance comes in, who knows, I see it as self-cancelling. √
Untied States - Insant Everything, Constant Nothing (Distile, 2010)
3.31.10 Tiny Mix Tapes Review. 7.5
Chad VanGaalen - Soft Airplane (Sub Pop, 2008)
12.16.08 (References to “below” occur because this was extracted from my 2008 EOY) There's talk about the inevitability of human progress, how throughout history major discoveries have sometimes occured almost simultaneously across the globe without reference to one another. The idea of Genres isn't as big, or teleological, of course, but I do tend to clump them based on eras. Folktronica, for example, reached its peak around 2002-2003, one of the highlight moments of the decade -- it's getting some recognition now that the Notwist refused to update their sound in 6 years. "If you want to see how much you've changed, return to a band that hasn't changed at all." It gets a little more tongue-in-cheek with Chinese Democracy, but the fact remains that at one point people were excited by folktronica. Critics aren't as interested in labelling genres as they once were, which means my verbal palate is limited, but apart from New-New-Wave, or Post-Punk revival (The Strokes starting -- and I'm still convinced of this -- a sort of chain reaction wherein new bands took on the identities of the old; Franz Ferdinand a saucier Gang of Four, Interpol a more mechanical Joy Division) there's definitely a new major genre out there that really defines this decade which I sometimes call "freak-folk" even though it's more of an offshoot. Animal Collective, Yeasayer, newer Akron/Family, certainly the Dodos album listed below, etc. define it. Best I can tap into is the inside joke "Blyaah! We've discovered the meaning of LIFE!" but there's also a lot of psychedelia and compression there. Chad VanGaalen represents the pinnacle of a sort of "genre" I personally noticed a bulge in this year, maybe because I discovered them almost all in the same month. It's condensed, intricate, sometimes even proggy but always "cutesy" pop music (cute prog-pop in a way Deerhoof could only pull off as gimmick). Some of it veers off on the utterly insane or harmonically jagged side (Dominique Leone, Max Tundra, Simon Bookish), some of it has a sound we're too familliar with as distinct to actually associate it (Stereolab, Vampire Weekend), some of it gets clumped as a sweetening of other genres (Why, MGMT) but Chad, and below, Shugo, both represented to me how these high-voiced musicians could balance a density of sounds, relatable emotional frequency, and sheer songwriting craft. (Interestingly, this also largely describes two of my major discoveries this year, also listed below, Todd Rundgren and Sparks). I find myself going back to the high-modernist bent I had on Sufjan -- it's just too well-constructed to possibily deny -- but this year there's a twist of anger that he is somehow deniable, or at the very least ignorable. Anyone who isn't, I don't know, totally annoyed by falsetto, would do themselves a favor to check out this great work. 8.5
Kurt Vile - Constant Hitmaker (Gulcher, 2008)
4.29.09 "So what have you been listening to?" "Um... the first three tracks off Kurt Vile." I get angry when an album isn't an album, still a twinge of offense at that answer, but I'm not going to deny the effects of marketing. Fact is, the vast majority of this album is in interlude mode, and it sometimes makes you think "Don't Get Cute," or the overlong "Deep Sea" are tightly-written gems. But hold those up to the first two tracks, Christ. "Freeway" is the sort of euphoric, rambling, down-home noise pop that's only really been attained by, um, War on Drugs' Wagonwheel Blues (Kurt Vile's the guitarist) and I can only think they didn't include it on that album because it'd be at odds with "Arms Like Boulders" (not that songs on that album are really ever at odds with one another, like they sometimes seem here). I don't want this to be a negative review of the album so much as a hoot for "Freeway" and the submerged Manu Chao vibe of "Breathin Out." That what I designed the little scissors for! (it's also just to give me a mechanism for actually deleting stuff from my computer, filing away awesome mixtape songs) I dunno how many reviews of this type I'll have, but here's your textbook example if you will. ≠ "Freeway"; "Breathin Out"
Ween - La Cucaracha (Rounder, 2007)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Again (see Dandy Warhols), the wrong way for a great (er) band to come up, perhaps, but I can’t keep this album on my computer. When they turned a certain corner on the awesome Chocolate and Cheese their humor, for better or worse, became derived from imitation more than creation. This album represents, sadly, the most profoundly burned-out failure of that imitation to actually entertain, from the public domain “Fiesta” to the ersatz-prog “Woman and Man.” It’s never terrible, but in a larger context one can’t really help but cringe. Worth mentioning that this band, in the post-C&C era, lends itself to “snip” albums. ≠ “Blue Balloon”; “Object”
FTR: GodWeenSatan: The Oneness (Twin/Tone, 1990) 8; The Pod (Shimmy-Disc, 1991) 8.5; Pure Guava (Elektra, 1992) 9; Chocolate and Cheese (Flying Nun, 1994) 8.5; 12 Golden Country Greats (Flying Nun, 1996) 7.5; The Mollusk (Elektra, 1997) 8; White Pepper (Mushroom, 2000) Ө; Quebec (Sanctuary, 2003) 7.5
Woods - Some Shame (S/R, 2008)
5.14.09 The politics of Me First presents a dilemma: should I tout the virtues of this tour-only cassette (of course I don't have it on cassette! WHY DO WE USE THE WORD CASSETTE?), even though eight of its ten songs are by most accounts the same on Songs of Shame? I say consider this a review of either release. I can't tell you whether "September With Pete" bogs the flow of the other release, I can only counter by saying that the remarkable cut-and-pasted second side of this record is a finely-executed deconstruction of themselves (apparently the closely-tied Woods Family Creeps errs more on this side). But the songs that really matter are still here: it still opens with "To Clean," just a flat-out paralyzingly beautiful campfire singalong, you immediately forgive the falsetto because he layers it communally and reaches sublime heights. "Military Madness," which is so integrated that I thought it was just a highlight not a cover, and of course, "Rain On" which pairs resiliently detuned and continual distorted guitars with cullinary melodic morsels. Any time I want to compare them, I listen to the "originator" and it occurs to me that I was totally off. Neither lo-fi nor freak folk except in my wildest hopes, not so much like Daniel Johnston, the closest I've come is Ariel Pink. But stranded in nature, but the editor he's always needed (Woods have now proven overtly that they have one). Consider this a contender for retrospective favorite of 2008; or, (oh please oh please) someone bless me to put this in my 2009 list – that's where Songs of Shame will inevitably land – without losing the credibility of (not) having the cassette? I mean, fuck all that, naturally; I really cling to this because pre-hype they were another revelation of what a few brilliant lads can do with a tape recorder in their lap, and post-hype I want to be happy for them. Sort of like my friend and Fall Out Boy, except good music. 8.5
Yes - Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972)
6.01.09 "The Great Comb" reviews were a product of transferring all of my music onto my girlfriend's computer. In some cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, which necessitates a sub-7.5 score. This is one of those albums.
Hate to use my pinky to flick an opus, but my earliest impressions of Yes fans is they like to chit chat about which of the songs is longest, not how it’s earned, or what you might gain for getting to the fifteen minute mark instead of the ten minute mark. And you know, it hasn’t changed much. Prog’s too easy a target, so I’ll keep this short. I’ve been bewitched by similar techniques before, but as long as Yes is an anachronism, I feel safe. Ө
One oversimplification of music that seemed particularly to hit one nail on its head, and actually gave me chills the way gross generalizations typically don?t anymore for me, arose while a friend was ranting about the innovations of Hendrix (I know a lot of people that scoff, sarcastically chortle, ?yep, those Beatles were pretty good!? but if the most foundational acts of all time aren?t worth ours, then music criticism is just skipping stones). This friend was saying that few technological advances in music will ever measure up to the jump from mono to stereo, and how Hendrix immediately saw the implications and created music that literally existed in space; it was no longer a drug-induced pseudo-synaesthesiac analogy to describe psychedelic guitar lines as ?weaving,? for example. I personally imagine the arrival of stereo felt something like a second eye for Cyclops ? sudden depth perception, conflicting patterns the brain needing to work to unify, a whole new goddamn dimension. And with this sudden spatial component to music, an inevitable binary arose that still exists today, between so-called ?headphone music? and the implicit counterpart ?stereo music.? I feel a bit like an introductory physics teacher, trying to redefine words with which everyone?s already familiar, but I?m entirely comfortable equating these with, respectively, psychedelic music and punk. The words themselves border on the arbitrary, but they?re functional. Bear with me (though I can promise it?ll be worth it only insofar I can promise the album is, which is to say, I can?t).
Seems this review can hardly stand as much more than a verdict of a binary question: which conclusion will I spout? “For every step backward there’s a step forward” or “for every step forward there’s a step backward”? Like any partner to the age-old “glass of water” metaphor, it’s an empty question, impossible to address either objectively or informatively. I’ll say this about Decemberunderground, however. Its steps are larger, nay, more consequential than those taken on 2003’s (rather impulsively, in my opinion) “classic”-tagged Sing the Sorrow. That album, with a handful of singles and critical acclaim, was seen as a totally premeditated stylistic leap, and is remembered to this day for overcoming the necessarily petty doom ‘n’ gloom of their hardcore goth roots. Some fans were disappointed, but the album was no more “poppy” than it was happy. At its best, it simply sounded vital, a godsend for any band singing about sins and blood.
“We aren’t gods here, only humans with a lot of opinions,” snarls Benjamin Eizinger on “Face the Day.” It’s one of the clumsier lyrics on Agent Sparks’ debut LP, Red Rover, but it’s apropos: while routinely sifting through archived reviews I discovered a negative review, by UpBeetMusic’s former-more-or-less-Head-Editor Andres Carrera, of Agent Sparks’ Not So Merry EP from last year. Now, obviously e-zines would be useless if they were merely conglomerates of random preferences, but still it irritates me to no end what fluff reviewers on other sites are expected to add to preserve a sense of coherent taste. Or worse, a reviewer won’t acknowledge a fissure at all. And by gum, you’ll see no such combover with this review! So at the risk of salivating on the glue that holds this site together, Red Rover is an album of unique vision, stable character and conscientious execution. It’s the sound of a band that knows and plays to its strengths, and it’s a strong debut.
At this point, it basically goes without saying that the Fiery Furnaces are not for everyone. Last year they felt obligated to push their reputation from “yet another recent eccentric indie band” to “the quintessential recent eccentric indie band” with Rehearsing My Choir, an instant slam dunk into the vault of conceptually fascinating records that are referenced more than they’re actually played – right alongside the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka, Dylan’s Self Portrait and, dare I recall it, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Even when irritating or unbearable to listen to, these were the sorts of albums over which hardcore music buffs and critics (especially the late, great Lester Bangs) absolutely loved to chit-chat, argue and wage war. The Friedberger siblings’ newest creation, Bitter Tea, is neither as alienating as Rehearsing My Choir nor as delectably poppy as their gem-stuffed EP from earlier that same year. It also isn’t as deliberate or definitive as their magnum opus, Blueberry Boat (and we really should be glad for that – reproducing that monster would border on self-parody). Instead, it’s the first record of theirs that exists comfortably in the context of their prolificacy: jammed with ideas and tricks, easily recognizable in tonality and mood, arguably genius without being undeniably solid.
Owen Pallett’s resume is enough to make any spendthrift upper-middle class indie nut’s mouth water, his schtick even more so if possible. The second album for the touring member of the Arcade Fire and Hidden Cameras is in fact ten tracks arranged for a classically trained chamber music ensemble. If you’re waiting for a charmed chortle at the irony of this album’s juvenile title and track names, see: the three hundred other e-zines that got their hands on it. Unfortunately, I can’t be so hasty to declare this album unmistakably more cultivated than its title. He Poos Clouds is at best endearingly labyrinthine, a complex and meticulously pieced-together album that’s ultimately too tortuous and too ambivalent to really intrigue.
I never anticipated it. The Xerox paper envelope containing a CD-R had three watercolor stripes across the front – hand-painted – and the three track names in sharp pen. My task for the internship was to pick a measly ten good tracks from about sixty mostly-independent discs like this. If I tell you it was no mean feat, it should indicate the general quality of music I was dealing with. So to pop in Flying’s sampler and hear the distant hollow piano at the beginning of “Last Trick” like raindrops off the edge of a haunted house, and subsequently a song that coolly bounced from a Colin Meloy character’s ascension of the gallows to the xylophone-backed naivete of his thin-voiced lover – without once sounding presumptuous or proggy – told me instantly that Flying had long since climbed the fences near which even the most obscure contemporary musicians only dared tiptoe. I did what I could to obtain a promo of their (then) upcoming album, expecting a disappointment with maybe a few quality tracks. At this point it should be obvious that the band caught me off guard yet again. 
Three albums in, the Washington, D.C. trio that is Gist sounds resolute, comfortable with its own sound, and determined to create an album of towering emotions without sacrificing its scope or sense of integrity. Unfortunately, Gist is also awful. Diesel City represents, melodramatically speaking, the cholesterol that clogs the heart of the music industry, and it is not only utterly dispensable but insistently so. They write hook-oriented songs with no hooks and cheerfully leave plenty of room to expand on ideas that aren’t there in the first place. Their goals are such that subdued mediocrity is not an option. This poor band doesn’t have a clue.
One should always be careful about letting an inordinate degree of novelty affect their appreciation of art, but music by the young seems to be a particular Achilles Heel for critics and fans alike. Conor Oberst leaps to mind, having released his official debut, Letting Off the Happiness at the age of 18, but standards really drop like anvils with acts like Smoosh. Don’t color me curmudgeonly – youth talents get a high five from me. No exception for the 16-to-20-year-olds in Jet Lag Gemini, but ideally I’d give the same response to, you know, the music, no matter what age they were. Sans context, critic reaction to the Business EP should be pretty uniform: these guys have a few things going for them, but they’re a few burnt neurons short of an epiphany.
The Mates of State’s fourth album, Bring it Back, is one of calculated endearment. The constituent husband-wife duo (Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel) has meticulously crafted a straightforward album of wholesome, almost exclusively drum-and-keyboard 80’s-revival ditties. There’s a slight variety of different sounds on the album, but they’re generally just synthesizers thinly veiled as instruments. Such cheeseball routines usually irritate my intestinal tract too much to invoke any real emotion, so credit the sporadic euphoria of this album to suspension of disbelief. Lasting suspension of disbelief.
Yet another band hailing from the indie Holy Land of Montreal, Pony Up! is an all-female group that meets the pressure to produce a worthy debut with a degree of modesty and five level heads. They demonstrate right off the bat what eventually feels like an inevitable pop songwriting sensibility. As the cliche goes, first impressions will stick, and for Pony Up! the foremost distinction is the slick, borderline-adult-contemporary production that comfortably plops acoustic guitars and pianos into every track. But these instruments hardly wander, though they twinkle: if anything, the clever manipulation of keyboard timbre and use of guitar pedals (for short, repeated hooks) more strongly associates them with the likes of indie-pop acts like the Magnetic Fields or early New Pornographers. It’s an irrevocably cute and popular technique for cementing a song’s identity without bizarre shenanigans or a bias in the eternal struggle of production versus songwriting. 
There’s a t-shirt for the upstate New York quartet Seth Feldman (none of whom are named Seth Feldman) that reads “Old People Listen To Us!” Obviously, it’s just self-deprecating hyperbole, but the premise is clear: in a country overrun by ambitious, “hardcore,” overindulgent and negligibly talented youth, one might not expect teenagers to make music that’s so, well, universally likable. It’s also safe to use the word “prolific”, being that they’ve now released two albums and an EP in about 20 months, simultaneous with their last two years of high school. One might expect The Equistonaut EP’s songwriting to feel like shavings, especially after two fine albums, but for Seth Feldman the name of the game has always been consistency. The EP, quite simply, pushes them over the 100-recorded-minutes mark with nary a misstep to date, and the five-track palette is arguably an even better format for such a single-minded group.
The word-of-mouth element most likely to perk up the ears of any indie fan with Spanish for 100’s second release, the Metric EP, is that it was produced by the illustrious Phil Ek. Ek’s work (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse) has been key in the movement to augment controlled grit atmospherics and, more importantly, incorporate elements of country into indie music without people fleeing with their hands over their ears. That being said, emo-doing-country band Spanish for 100 might have nearly as integrated a variety of elements as Ek’s most successful clients, but the elements themselves lack much sense of adventurousness. Overlong and repetitive jams (“Jungle With Lions”, “See Now”) feel particularly uninspired next to their tighter melodies (“Go Away, Come Home”, “Fell a Bird”), especially for the latter’s utilization of Corey Passons’ feathery, high vocal range. The EP has moments of great clarity, beauty and urgency, but on the whole (and especially being an EP) it doesn’t satiate the promise of channeled talent implicit in Ek’s reputation.
It’s hard to listen critically to genres like ska, whose defining traits render the most successful outputs not expansions so much as outright betrayals of the form. I don’t say this out of spite, I say it based on observation: in any branch of music, strict adherence to the tenets of a genre will inevitably limit the songwriting potential, and ska’s limitations are significant but easily explained. After all, it’s to be anticipated that combining elements as disparate as reggae and punk and retaining a coherent culture (which it does, I’m reminded shockingly often by the wealth of rag-doll Charlseton devotees at my school alone) will nevertheless yield a narrow crossing region. So from whence comes the brilliance of arguably the genre’s biggest household name, the Clash, and their 1979 magnum opus London Calling? Well, a willingness to explore the full spectrum between fiery, politically charged punk and liquid chill-out reggae, for starters. That the Clash and other successful acts like Sublime were able to see that ska itself was somewhat homogenous by nature allowed them to produce immediate and listenable albums (and provoke half a dozen Reel Big Fish fans to write me about how “not ska” those bands are, I have no doubt... no pun intended?). 
Brian Eno - Another Green World (Astralwerks, 1975)
Caribou - Up In Flames (Domino, 2003)
Os Mutantes - Os Mutantes (Omplatten, 1968)
