General Ratings:Music: 7
Lyrics: 8
Scope: 7
Consistency: 5
RIYL: Animal Collective, They Might Be Giants, Mid-period Kinks
Further Listening: Slow Club, The Dodos, The 1900s
Place of Origin: Durham, NC
Instrument/Sounds List: Multi-Tracked Vocal Harmonies, Piano, Electric Piano, Acoustic Guitar, Drums, Alternative Percussion (Hand Claps, Foot Stomps, Shaker, Tambourine & Cowbell), Electric Guitar, Acoustic Bass, (bowed) Upright Bass, Banjo, Mandolin, Violin, Cello, Saxophone, Clarinet, Organ/Keyboard, Mandolin, Charango, Recorder, Zampona, Dulcimer, Glockenspiel, Xylophone, Whistling, Ambient Sounds.
Mood Tones:
Season: Spring
Weather: Partly Cloudy
Time of Day: Afternoon
Song Highlights: So Many Ways to Die, Matthew, Honeymoon
Favorite Lyrics:
"So many ways to think,/
How differently we interpret the brink/
Between the side of life worth living/
And the point at which you're better off to sink.
So many ways to laugh:/
Chortle, chuckle, giggle, cachinnate,/
Guffaw like William Howard Taft,/
Science has proven it's correlated /
With the number of days your life will pass.
...
So many ways to dance,/
So many different meanings for a glance,/
But you only get a few;/
If you keep staring at your shoes,/
You will lose every single chance."
(from "So Many Ways to Die")
"Sew the ribbon round your throat/
And coat your mouth with honey./
Your life is books you never wrote,/
And tote only for money."
(from "Honeymoon")
"Always kind of an ass, always making us laugh,/
I used to like looking into the past/
Now you're out of line, now you're out of time/
Forever, Asshole./
Did you really think you had the worst of it all?/
You had: everything that you ever needed,/
Except another head, a little less conceited,/
Forget about the ones that once you needed."
(from "Matthew")
Other Thoughts:
Have you ever had a friend that was too smart for their own good? Too ready to pun, too often making overly-complex comments that take longer to parse out than the average conversant has attention span for? This record is a love letter to them, many of my best friends counted among their number. It's nothing new to suggest that every group of friends is anchored around one or more foci of personality and appearance; the pretty people tend to be friends with pretty people, the smart people other smart people, etc. etc. All this seems to be saying is that we like to be appreciated for our nuance, and that it's more likely for that to happen when we are surrounded by other people who are about at our level of sophistication. Even so, it often seems to me like a rift runs down the center of my group of friends (whose primary unifying trait I like to think is intelligence), separating those of us who strive to be "cool" from those of us who strive to not be (apologies to all for whom these rather petty terms conjure painful memories of adolescence, but to get at the point I'm trying to make, I think it's necessary). So far as I can tell, the root of our differences lies in self-awareness; some of us were picked on more mercilessly than others at our most formative moments, behooving us to become utterly aware of the appearances and implications of everything we said and didn't say, did and didn't do. This leads to a shift in focus of action; understanding how those around us are likely to respond to particular things we might say or do, we choose among our options to elicit the responses we are looking for. The main consideration becomes how something is received, not how it's sent.
On the one hand, the more you or the people you know participate in this kind of filtering, the less you have to worry about how you come across to people who don't know you, who don't trust your intentions. On the other hand, this line of thinking, probably appropriately, has a reek of sophistry about it; now that we have put the pains of the playground behind us, should we not be free to express ourselves the way we want, and to hell with everyone who has a problem with that? I will posit that with a few exceptions, most of the smartest people I know have either liberated themselves of these preoccupations or never had them in the first place (or perhaps there is a bit of tautology here, as to not have done so (as I confess, I have not, at least completely) by one's late 20's or early 30's seems, well, stupid). To stretch this metaphor perhaps a bit too far, we can imagine our brains as CPUs, slowing down and chewing up a certain amount of RAM in constantly processing a filter, or running more swiftly, free from such encumbrances.
At the same time, it seems obvious that anything that comes to you raw will require a certain amount of processing on your part, and herein lies the rub with Tarpits and Canyonlands: while most of it is glorious and reaches heights that cannot be matched by anything reserved or overly self-conscious, there are bound to be parts of this record that annoy you. Maybe it will be the Anglophilic whimsy of "Oto the Bear," reminiscent of the Ringo Starred Beatles tunes, the first half of "Kuala Lumpur," which cribs from Bolivian folk music (Bryan Rahija and Daniel Michalak founded the band on their semesters abroad and regularly perform dressed as elderly Bolivian men) or the Revolutionary War stylings of "25 Daniels," which keeps the rigid snaredrum marching beats but swaps the bagpipes for saxophones. I was convinced for a while that "25 Daniels" was actually about a game of Stratego, as along with maintenance of setting, each 4x8 side of the board would yield 32 pieces, 25 character pieces, 6 bombs and 1 flag. They would all be Daniels as they were all incarnations of the player manipulating them (presumably named Daniel). The one Daniel "who had thrown off his coat of blue" could be the Spy, the only non-uniformed character piece and the "muddied waters" could be the squares in the middle of the board that represent lakes and cannot be occupied. Even the song itself seems to be inviting interpretation, extraneously placing the setting of the song in the winter of 1972. But as with most over-interpretations, my bubble was burst when it was brought to my attention that a Stratego board has 4x10 sides, not 4x8, completely killing any chance I was right. But isn't there a certain amount of pleasure to be had in this kind of admittedly incorrect rumination? Without going off too far in a kind of Mort de l'Auteur argument, it does seems that the recognition of intelligence and layering in any art one chooses to consume grants one the liberty of a robustness of interpretation that might otherwise feel foolish and strained.
Still, I think it would be wrong to try to argue that the band isn't making these references intentionally (or "knowingly," as my esteemed colleague would phrase it). Perhaps what I like best about this album is that it seems to straddle the divide between the self-conscious and self-confident (how appropriate then that the band is named after the only character in "the Lord of the Rings" that is unaffected by the power of Sauron's ring...but I digress). No matter how righteous a guitar lick, no song will ever get me misty if it doesn't reveal an honesty of sentiment, reflecting an emotion that I believe to be well-placed and genuine, and you'll find no shortness of supply of this kind of revelation on TAC. The most obvious example is "Matthew," which chronicles the lead-up to and fallout from a close friend's suicide (the line "Always kind of an ass, always making us laugh,/ I used to like looking into the past" is devastating), but there are plenty of others (e.g. "Reasons" & "Marriage"). Constant variance between whimsy and heartbreak is a difficult balance to pull off, creating and relieving opposing tensions, but they nail it to the wall here (with a deftness not seen since the passing of the late, great Spalding Gray), the presence of each aspect directly strengthening the impact of the other.
So much talking and we haven't even touched on what the record sounds like. The melodies of most of the songs are pretty immediate, with strong harmonies that underpin them and suggest that one or both of the songwriters may have been classically trained. It seems a rarity anymore when there is more than one songwriter in a band for the tracklist to not break down into a Songwriter A vs. Songwriter B dichotomy, to have anything approaching a unity of sound and theme, but I think they've achieved it here (I tried for a half hour to determine which of them writes their songs on a piano and which on a guitar, but so far as I can tell they're trading vocals enough that any projection on my part would be inferential). Also, as one might expect of a band writing half of their songs on one, the piano figures quite prominently, more so than in most contemporary indie rock. This lends the proceedings an old-fashioned, theatrical quality that's as quaint as it is anachronistic, reminding me at times of the Ballad of The Sneak. For the production wonks among us, there's some really excellent layering, of kitchen sink instrumentation, alternative percussion mixed with bass/tom tribal drumming and multiple-part vocal harmonies that evoke in equal parts the tonal side of mid-period Animal Collective and the singalongs of first-wave punk rock. The commonality between all of these disparate points being a kind of unbridled elan, rousing and infectious, and I dare any Doubting Thomas to make it all the way through Tarpits and Canyonlands without once wanting to sing along. Harmonizers, as always, are welcome.
The Downside:
Besides the band's aforementioned geekiness, there are a couple of inherent problems with the dynamic they've chosen here. First, even when you can't explicitly pin down every individual song to one member of a songwriting team, there will invariably be one source that you prefer to the other, making it more likely that you'll have mixed feelings about the album as whole. In truth, what I personally find most exciting about the sounds on TAC is born of the shotgun marriage of certain indie rock hallmarks to some of the less contemporarily appreciated genres like world music, Broadway and historical folk balladry (even the mention of which is likely to turn some people off). Then again, switch styles too frequently and you run the risk of sounding imitative rather than incorporative, or at the very least diffuse and without central aesthetic. With regards to the actual sounds on the record, one wonders why they chose so often to use an electric piano when, at least on a few songs, it sounds as though a real one was available. They also seem to pass in and out of accents, which can be distracting and seems mostly in service of quirk (although to be fair, I'm not completely convinced that one of them isn't from one of those islands on the far side of the Pond). Conversely, on "Laurita," the only track not sung in English, the vocalist's Spanish is both basic enough that I can understand it and horribly chopped and mispronounced (they don't don't even go full-missionary and pronounce the word "ella" as "el-la," instead finding an awkward middle ground with "el-ya"). Finally, there's a bafflingly casual reference to domestic violence that makes no sense what-so-ever in the context of the song (the line 'Belt your wife for smiling' appears in the middle of the second verse of "Honeymoon"). Reaching Tweedy-esque levels of non sequitur, I'm not really sure what to make of it, but that kind of thing fluoresces and bears noting, even if just in a What-the-Frack kind of a way.
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