dylaraddict

Any Thin and Sober Man

2009-10-06T22:14:00.017-04:00

(For those that missed it on first blush)

1. Saturday Looks Good to Me - When the Party Ends
2. Slow Club - Giving Up on Love
3. A.C. Newman - Miracle Drug
4. Asobi Seksu - Me & Mary
5. Throw Me the Statue - About to Walk
6. ARMS - Gunsmoke Legend
7. The Submarines - You, Me & the Bourgeoisie
8. Say Hi - Hallie & Henry
9. The Starlets - Radio Friendly
10. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Higher Than the Stars
11. Florence & the Machine - Between 2 Lungs
12. Ohbijou - New Years
13. Au Revoir Simone - Shadows
14. Beach House - Heart of Chambers
15. Sad Day for Puppets - Lay Your Burden on Me
16. Grand Archives - Oslo Novelist
17. The Walkmen - Red Moon
18. The Low Lows - Raining in Eva
19. Mum - If I were a Fish

you think it's all for fun

2009-10-06T13:26:00.004-04:00

1 - now we can see - the thermals
2 - abandon - the french kicks
3 - talking hotel arbat blues - handsome furs
4 - martha ann - david karsten daniels
5 - oh my god - ida maria
6 - dig that crazy grave - grand archives
7 - while you wait for the others - grizzly bear
8 - no you girls - franz ferdinand
9 - ashamed of the story i told - the national
10 - northern lights - bowerbirds
11 - things fall apart - built to spill

The Theory and Practice of Motion

2009-10-04T11:40:00.006-04:00

Here

1. Thom Yorke - All for the Best (Miracle Legion cover)
2. Blonde Redhead - 23
3. Passion Pit - Moth’s Wings
4. The Love Language - Sparxxx
5. Julian Plenti - Unwind
6. The Jealous Girlfriends - I Quit
7. Islands - Tender Torture
8. Emperor X - Sfearion
9. Dirty on Purpose - All New Friends
10. Metric - Dead Disco
11. Handsome Furs - Evangeline
12. Iggy Pop - The Passenger
13. White Rabbits - Percussion Gun
14. Longwave - Everywhere You Turn
15. The Temper Trap - Sweet Disposition

Feliz cumpleaños

2009-10-01T19:43:00.009-04:00

stay calm / keep warm

1.) the good that won't come out / rilo kiley
2.) roll up your sleeves / we were promised jetpacks
3.) shampoo / elvis perkins in dearland
4.) don't let it get you down / spoon
5.) coffee / motel motel
6.) the next time you say "forever" / neko case
7.) for real / okkervil river
8.) i believe in symmetry / bright eyes
9.) eyeball kid / tom waits
10.) where i end and you begin / radiohead
11.) pretty good year / tori amos
12.) beginner's luck / eels
13.) less of me / bonnie "prince" billy

Happy Birthday Mr. Dylaraddict!

We don't own nothing

2009-09-03T14:09:00.009-04:00

The Latin word aspera roughly translates to “adversity”; however, when you drop the “a,” getting spera, it means “hope.”

The phrase ad astra per aspera — translated as “a rough road leads to the stars” — is inscribed on a plaque at Cape Canaveral in memory of the three Apollo 1 astronauts who died on the launch pad in 1967, trapped in their burning spacecraft during a routine training mission.

These are sober themes for Mirah to be introducing before we’ve heard note one of her newest album, (a)spera. Yet they set the appropriate tone for what is, when taken as a whole, an exploration of the idea of loss through one of my favorite vehicles: the break-up album.

Initially I was dismayed to hear a friend of mine brush the whole thing off by saying that this was “just another break-up album.” Melodramatic songs to/about lost love are nothing new — the old “do I listen to pop music because I am miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music” holds true — but I hardly think it fair to give an artist a limit of the number of times she is allowed to have her heart broken. If only we were all so lucky.

Yet with people clamoring to declare that downloading music has killed the “album” as a unit, the “break-up album” shows us something more than just a collection of tracks. Because the break-up album is, as breed of concept album, focused not just on the pain of having lost love but also the process of grieving for a specific individual. The album is the yellow brick road from aspera to spera. You have to actually travel the road to get to the end; you wouldn’t have believed the end of someone simply told you at the beginning.

My touchstone for the (arguably) perfectly constructed break-up album is Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. The album can take a while to get a grasp on because there isn’t really one hot track; you take none of it, or you take it as a whole. You don’t get “Hey Jupiter” without “Blood Roses.” And while I suppose that the rest of my opinions on this will have to wait for the “reviews from the way-back machine” series, suffice to say that (a)spera works along similar lines — we get to hear Mirah actively working her way through the different stages of loss. It’s the only way to get to the stars.

The first track, “Generosity,” opens big and orchestral. It sometimes takes that many strings to get through the first, incredulous stages of the break-up — you haven’t even grasped what’s happening yet. She sings, “I am empty / I won’t give more.” Yet, really, if you are “empty” it’s not much of a choice whether or not to give more. It’s more of an issue of “can’t” than “won’t.”

The winding path through break-up-ville continues through subsequent tracks: the feeling that outside forces — in this case, the sea, the wind — are responsible for the destruction of the relationship (“Hear the briny call, the ocean’s gusty gnashing of her teeth / Breaking up the pretty cups and taking what she needs”); the realization that half the pain is being forced to realize your own naiveté, your own complicity in the downfall (“And we were just a child with the mess that children make / And we were running wild, no thoughts for what we'd break”); and now that this knowledge has been gained, you can never go back (“. . . When we return, we’d find all the leaves have died”). This again is another feature of the break-up album — these aren’t unique feelings. Everyone, at some point, will have their heart broken. Yet the actual experience is itself isolating, because it is based around loss. So, in effect, the successful break-up album is able to universalize the experience of feeling isolated.

This is a rather delicate and quietly sexy album, as one would expect from Mirah at first glance. “Country of the Future,” and the horns and marching drums at the end of “The Forest,” are about as rambunctious as we get — there isn’t a “Cold, Cold Water” on this one. Yet comparing their love to “a deer running free / ‘Til its last breath found your window,” then calming singing that “We killed and drove on indecently / Oh how you screamed” betrays the violence running under the surface.

But while all of this knows both the beauty and pain of loss, it is mostly a form of dancing around the heart of the matter, slowing spiraling down to the center. That honest piece is so difficult to get to, so difficult to admit, that it would lose it’s power to just saying it by itself. It’s like most clichés we hear. It is not the knowledge that is powerful, but the process of gaining that knowledge. For example, it is kind of trite and boring to say that lying is bad. Sure, people will agree, but quickly move past that. Until, of course, someone important to you, someone you trust, lies to you. At that moment you feel the depth of a concept like “lying is bad” in a way that you could not have in keeping it as a separate thought.

The inner piece of wisdom in (a)spera is “The River,” a song that doesn’t quite fit outside of the album as a whole. It is so direct, and heartbroken yet accepting, that on it’s own it can come across as trite and not a little embarrassing. It doesn’t help that at first listen the song itself seems quite simple, a little guitar, some background vocals. One wants to cringe as she sings “And you don’t want to hurt me / But you don’t want to need me.”

But the simplicity of this is deceiving. There is a lot more going on musically, lyrically, and emotionally in this song, but you have to go through the process of peeling back the other things before you can hear it. You don’t get to start with “I want you / and I let you go.” You have to earn that.

Once through “The River,” though, we are finally on the other side — we even have a chalk “borderline to not cross / mind out manners, keep in place.” We have to get here before we can look back, “at least enough to recognize the storm is just a storm.” The final track, “While We Have the Sun,” pulls it all together — it’s the bright dawn burning off the fog. But again, we couldn’t have started at this point. “Live your life with a compassion you can be proud of,” set to lightly layered vocals, xylophone, harp? You’d think that little animated bluebirds were about to fly out and help her sew a dress for the ball. Until you realize the rough road she had to take to get there.

Such Flagrant Fun

2009-08-01T11:07:00.006-04:00

The eyes in his head see the world spinning round.

1. Mirah - Location Temporary
2. Florence & the Machine - Dog Days are Over
3. The Little Ones - Forgive Yourself
4. Suburban Kids with Biblical Names - Rent-a-Wreck
5. The New Pornographers - Graceland
6. Pete & the Pirates - Jennifer
7. Slow Club - It Doesn't Have to be Beautiful
8. ARMS - Neighbors
9. Asobi Seksu - Goodbye
10. My Little Airport - When I Listen to the Field Mice
11. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Young Adult Friction
12. Ra Ra Riot - Dying is Fine
13. Throw Me the Statue - Ancestors
14. Say Hi - Shakes Her Shoulders
15. We Were Promised Jetpacks - It's Thunder and it's Lightning

Bombadil - Tarpits and Canyonlands

2009-06-24T14:03:00.041-04:00

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.

"Listless Intellectual, In Her Prime"

2009-06-23T17:56:00.012-04:00

Here

1. My Sad Captains - You Talk All Night
2. Au Revoir Simone - Sad Song
3. Sunset Rubdown - You Go on Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)
4. Dirty on Purpose - Light Pollution
5. The Jealous Girlfriends - Roboxulla
6. Patients - Mind Ur Manners
7. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Roberta C.
8. CocoRosie - Happy Eyez
9. Bound Stems - Wake Up, Ma and Pa Are Gone
10. Lilys - High Writer at Home
11. Broken Social Scene - Backyards
12. Asobi Seksu - Lions & Tigers
13. St. Vincent - Actor Out of Work
14. My Latest Novel - I Declare a Ceasefire
15. Joanna Newsom - Peach, Plum, Pear

Dirty on Purpose - Hallelujah Sirens

2009-06-19T19:01:00.010-04:00

General Ratings:

Rating: 8
Breadth of Appeal: 5
Consistency of Quality: 7

RIYL: Broken Social Scene, Yo La Tengo, The Moon and Antarctica-era Modest Mouse

Further Listening: The Jealous Girlfriends, Lilys’ Eccsame the Photon Band, Venice is Sinking

Place of Origin: Brooklyn, NY

Sound/Instrument List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Male and Female Lead Vocals, Male and Female Backup Vocals, Keyboard, Trumpet, Strings

Mood Tones: This is a long drive for someone with everything to think about. Late night driving, but lonelier than this.

Song Highlights: Light Pollution, Car No-Driver, Your Summer Dress

Favorite Lyrics:

“The lake effect kept us in bed. /
The lake effect left us with cigarette sores, /
bruises and scars up my back and arms, /
and coughs that don’t quit.” (from “Lake Effect”)

“My ears are microphones, /
my eyes, they are cameras.” (from “Car No-Driver”)

“We’re all trying to score, /
but not trying too hard.” (from “Fake Lakes”)

Further Thoughts:

Brooklyn four-piece Dirty on Purpose came together from 2002 to 2008 for three EPs and one full length. The excellent Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow came before the album, the still strong Like Bees and weaker, digital only (still available for free here) Dead Volcanoes after. (I think there was also an initial self-titled, self-released EP, but if so, it’s none-too-easy to find.) Though not as obviously as with Broken Social Scene, the clearest touchstone, or The Jealous Girlfriends, Dirty on Purpose feels like a collective, sharing vocal duties and emphasizing each member’s playing in turn through the dense production and careful mixing of the songs.

Production is much of the story here. If you worship at the altars of Loveless, OK Computer, and You Forgot It in People, then you know the pleasures of production: perfectly controlled reverb, expert fading, attention to the left and right channel, levels carefully altered for fills and breaks when the spotlight shifts. A wall of sound to be sure, but a wall that only reveals itself more and more as carefully crafted as it’s studied and scrutinized, especially through the lens of headphones (to mix a metaphor). Which isn’t to say it’s just a matter of production and mixing. As is often the case, such boardwork comes hand in hand with a certain kind of songwriting, where the traditional verse-chorus structure gives way to extended intros and outros, long fills and breaks (not to be confused with solos), multiple bridges, instrumentals, dirge, vamping, headnodding, shoegazing, emotional arcing ... you get the idea. But, as with Radiohead and Nigel Goodrich or Broken Social Scene and Dave Newfeld, Dirty on Purpose is the kind of band, if they had gotten bigger and lasted longer, that one imagines could have seriously and unsentimentally said things about their producer being a de facto fifth member.

Opener “No Radio” gives a nod to Stereolab, “Summer Dress” Yo La Tengo, “Lake Effect” Low perhaps, others Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse. The album is neatly cut in half by the extended intro (separately tracked, but not titled) for “Always Looking,” a moment of lovely, quiet guitar work that reminds me of Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, bittersweet music if ever there was. None of the influences are mimicked or too transparent, though. Rather, one can see much of the best music of the last decades understood, ingested, metabolized, and then recreated by Dirty on Purpose as all their own, guitars churning, heads nodding, feet tapping, things-in-chest soaring.

Notably, there’s a sustained interplay of male and female vocals, both lead and background in turn, in their sound. By the time of Hallelujah Sirens, there wasn’t a regular female group member, though. Founding member Erika Forster features prominently (and excellently) on Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow, but left the band, and the album relies instead on guests Holly Miranda and anti-folker Jaymay. (The otherwise unremarkable video for "Light Pollution" features a charming pan up to Jaymay, sitting in the rafters and swinging her feet, for her guest vocal part.) Anyway, both hold their own, but Forster was better, one has to admit, on that first EP (check out especially “All New Friends,” where she’s quite Emily Haines-ish). She’s now part of the the winningly (is this where people use the word "fetchingly"?) cute Au Revoir Simone.

Lyrically, there’s not all that much that’s memorable here, but that’s only fitting. Indie pop needs its colorful characters and cute stories, art prog. its abstract but memorable images, and so forth, but the post-shoegaze niche Dirty on Purpose works in has always been about mapping out a certain landscape of mood. The vocals are pretty low in the mix and uncrisply half-swallowed/mumbled, serving more as another instrument than carriers of meaning--one obviously capable of the subtle changes in, well, voicing, that trace mood above all else. As often as not, the melody is carried by the guitars or bass, or each in turn as they're pulled to the fore of the mix, then faded back in. So the words here are what one would expect--invocations of technology and geography, weather as fortune telling, quasi-anthemic sloganeering--but one should emphasize exactly that those expectations are satisfied, not disappointed. Everything in its right place, as someone once said.

2009-06-11T13:34:00.002-04:00

St. Vincent - Actor Out of Work

Pete & the Pirates - Little Death

2009-06-07T21:01:00.013-04:00

General Ratings:

Rating: 8
Breadth of Appeal: 7
Consistency of Quality: 8

RIYL: The Futureheads, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers

Further Listening: Tap Tap, Ra Ra Riot, Foreign Born

Place of Origin: Reading, England

Sound/Instrument List: Electric Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocals, Backup Vocals, Handclaps, Tambourine

Mood Tones: Inspiring of loyalty to a country or creed that isn’t yours.

Song Highlights: Knots, Moving, Bears

Favorite Lyrics:

“Hey now, what’s the big idea? /
Don’t bring those good looks ‘round here.” (from “Eyes Like Tar”)

“You and me trying hard to remember /
how we ever started out with our sights so high.” (from “Mr. Understanding”)

“We take every chance, /
and I’ll take you to France.” (from “Moving”)

Further Thoughts:

I once stood in a field with several thousand people as we chanted “We hope that you choke” over and over at the top of our lungs. That’s perhaps one of the stranger anthemic lyrics to be found, and probably few bands but Radiohead could pull it off. Truly hooking hooks are usually forged of fairly plain lyrics, and perhaps necessarily so. Thus the charge of cliché and bad or throwaway lyricism often seemed misplaced when leveled against a certain kind of band. Some of my favorite lyrics, ever:

“And all of the time you thought I was sad, /
I was trying to remember your name.” (from Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead”)

“The Yukon keeps me up all night.” (from Broken Social Scene’s “Almost Crimes”)

“You’re the one who’s riding around on a leopard. /
You’re the one who’s throwing dead birds in the air.” (from Sunset Rubdown’s “Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days”)

“I’ve read the right book /
to interpret your look. /
You were knocking me down /
with the palm of your eye.” (from Joanna Newsom’s “Peach, Plum, Pear”)

These aren’t the sorts of lines that casually pack in a stadium-sized crowd or are ever going to flood the airwaves, and there’s nothing at all contingent about that, it seems to me. Once you rehearse the tired arguments about people’s lack of taste, you have to admit how strange such lyrics are and that they're probably working, if they work for you, on a rather strange part of your sensibility. “I can’t get no ... satisfaction,” “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled,” even “Hey, roll over DJ / You’re spinning away / all my time”: for better or worse, this is necessarily the stuff of most hooks.

Thomas Sanders of Pete & the Pirates seems to spend about a third or so of his life singing about getting into and out of bed:

“I’m too tired to go to bed. /
We can stay awake all night. /
And when people get up to go to work, /
we’ll be holding each other tight.

Turn off all the lights. /
Come hibernate with me. /
Oh, mommy bear and daddy bear, /
as angry as can be.” (from “Bears”)

“Time for bed. /
Find a girl and go to bed. /
Close your eyes. /
Stars are falling from the sky.” (from “Dry Wings”)

“Get out of bed--it’s the wrong one. /
Made out of lead, get dressed instead. /
Hit your head and get your shoes on. /
Get out of bed and get your socks on.” (from “Knots”)

“It’s so cold this morning /
my breath comes out like steam. /
I got up in such a hurry /
I’m still stuck inside my dream.” (from “She Doesn’t Belong to Me”)

It’d be easy enough to put this down on the page as bad poetry and make fun of it. That would completely miss the point that they’re hugely affecting, sung the way the are. It’s not just that the melodies are good--that’s true of Broken Social Scene, Sunset Rubdown, et. al. as well. This is full-throated pop, whatever the style of the guitar work underneath. In a hipster Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise (now Joseph Gordon-Levitt?) would scan right past Broken Social Scene and the rest and settle on “Dry Wings” in place of “Free Fallin’” and scream along in the car.

Hence my hesitancy to rate lyrics apart from their music. Lyrics are lyrics, not poetry, and they’re encountered always and only over music. Saunders’ lyrics would probably be terrible over Iron & Wine’s or Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s music, but they’re exactly right found where they are. Of course no one much hesitates to criticize a singer’s voice, or the guitar work on an album, or its production, and those things are always and only encountered where they are as well. The lyrics/music split seems rather different to me as it’s the obvious split of popular music, and speaking of each in isolation isn’t as obviously artificial or momentary as criticizing someone’s tenor. Thus it reinforces the mistaken idea that pop music just is music plus poetry.

There’s something of the revivalists in Pete & the Pirates, but they’re finally too fun, too, well, joyous for that. Remember “Take Me Out,” Franz Ferdinand’s first big single, which came out during The Strokes’ brief period of world domination? The first minute or so of that song sounds exactly like The Strokes and their careful posturing. Then, right at the 55 second mark there’s a hit and the song switches to a 2/2 disco beat, saying (approximately): “Fuck this, let’s give them something to dance to.” This is the mold Pete & the Pirates are working in. I imagine they know their Gang of Four just as forwards and backwards as straight-up revivalists such as Young Knives, but they’re willing to drop their cool and admit that angular downstabs, even at their best, finally get a bit boring (isn’t this the problem with Gang of Four: finally they’re too cool?). Further, they don’t clearly sit as part of the specifically post-punk revival. There’s a bit of punk, new wave, and garage to be had as well. And so the mix is finally much more intriguing than The Hives or The Strokes or The Rapture ever were (I suppose all these bands still exist, but no one cares, right?).

Electric Guitar, Bass, Drums: that’s it. Pete & the Pirates make use of only the rock band starter kit and Little Death puts forward a full range of songs. Its anthems--“Bears,” “Dry Wings,” “Ill Love,” “Knots,” "Come On Feet" and more--are its defining feature, but there are fully-developed, slower brooders as well--“Moving” being the standout--and harder punk numbers (“Bright Lights,” “Lost in the Woods”). “Mr. Understanding” features a great Cardigans-esque lead guitar line. The backup vocals fill out the sound and there are handclaps and nonverbal lyrics galore.

The couple songs they’ve put out post-Little Death--the single “Jennifer” and b-sides “Blood Gets Thin” and “Knife” have all been excellent as well, so one has high hopes for Pete & the Pirates. Sanders’ other band, Tap Tap, is very much worth checking out as well (though one wishes their album, Lanzafame, didn’t have quite such a demo feel to it).

[Update: So I was listening to this album completely out of order (simply in alphabetical order by title). I wholeheartedly approve of the way it actually opens: "I'm not scared of you, darling! / I'm in love with you, darling!" ("Ill Love").]

2009-06-06T23:30:00.005-04:00

Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning - Churches Under The Stairs

Laura Gibson - Beasts of Seasons

2009-06-03T14:27:00.022-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 7
Scope: 4
Consistency: 7

RIYL: Jolie Holland, 7 Swans-era Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine

Further Listening: Essie Jain, Marianne Dissard, Jenny Scheinman

Place of Origin: Coquille, OR

Instrument/Sounds List: Piano, Acoustic Guitar, Multi-Tracked Vocals, Upright (sometimes bowed) Bass, Drums, Electric Guitar, Violin, Viola, Cello, Banjo, Dulcimer, Pedal Steel, Singing Saw, Trumpet, Trombone, Clarinet, Oboe, Organ, Keyboard/Synthsizer, Theremin, Timpani, Vibraphone, Alternative Percussion (Jingle Bells, Junk Bag & Tambourine), Tape/Pedal Manipulation, Ambient Sounds.

Mood Tones:

Season: Autumn
Weather: Rainy
Time of Day: Dusk

Song Highlights: Funeral Song, Sleeper, Shadows on Parade

Favorite Lyrics:

"I remember my mother's hands,/
Laced in prayer,/
Frail as birds,/
Faith she carried like/
A terrible, terrible ache."
(from "Glory")

"With no sorrow,/
Ask no greater pardon/
Than the pattern Time/
Is carving in your skin."
(from "Funeral Song")

"To let you go/
Is to lose my balance,/
Is to fall in silence/
Is to wait, wait, wait.

For I was born/
In a colder time,/
And we made our vows/
In ice and steel."
(from "Sleeper")

Other Thoughts:

To really get at what's great about this record (and the rest of Laura Gibson's catalogue), allow me to talk for a moment about ice cream. Ever since I was a small child, it's dumbfounded me that vanilla ice cream was as ubiquitous as it was. There just wasn't any "there" there, its flavor generally lacking complex descriptor, its primary asset seeming to be that in being non-descript, it was easy to pair with other, more delineated toppings or dessert items. My tastes in ice cream (as in music and most things in life), have always tended to the unique and singular; I'll take chocolate over vanilla, mint Oreo over chocolate, etc. etc. But sooner or later, as with most preconceptions, you run into the exception that proves what is possible when a component of your underlying assumptions is wrong and at the same time seems to vindicate your conclusions in the over-whelming majority of cases. For me and vanilla ice cream, this fateful tete a tete came when late in college I was over at a professor's house for an end of the year dinner, and for dessert he served pecan pie with home-made Mexican vanilla ice cream. Rather than simply tasting sweet, there was a strong, insistent flavor that was at once reminiscent of the extract that my mother used to make Toll House cookies and at the same time fairly unique (like the difference between Thai and Italian basil). Eating this vanilla ice cream made me want to eat vanilla ice cream, but equally importantly, it reaffirmed to me that what I'd always held to be true about most of the store-bought variants (that, with the possible exception of Haagen Daz, they were mostly dreck) was correct.

This is perhaps an overwrought metaphor meant in service of the idea that Beasts of Seasons is the homemade Mexican vanilla masterpiece to the mediocre pre-packaged sweet cream of the Starbucks class of acoustic female balladeers. On the one hand, it would be misleading to suggest that you're going to get anything other than quiet, well-orchestrated, rainy day folk tunes from any of the records Ms. Gibson has released (although to be fair, I've never been able to track down Amends, her self-released freshman effort). On the other hand, I almost shudder to locate LG within the same sentence as the rest of that crowd, not only because she makes music of a higher caliber, but ultimately I think because it would be easy for someone who wasn't paying enough attention to not hear the difference(s) between them. Even to make my opening analogy may do this record a disservice, as for the very gambit stated, vanilla has come to be a negative descriptor indicating pleasant mediocrity, something this record never even nears.

So we're dealing with subtleties here. I'll go one step further and say that we're dealing with Minimalism, a strange claim to make of a record whose instrument list is as robust as this. The way I would describe this phenomenom is that it's as if she's surrounded by a full orchestra where every musician has the sheet music to the entire record, but during each song she selects two or three instruments that she feels best evoke the tone she's looking to elicit, points to those players and they're the only ones allowed to play along. The larger effect that this has is that you don't really notice the accompaniment the first couple times you listen to the record; the primary melodies are carried by Ms. Gibson, either with a piano or acoustic guitar, and it's not difficult to imagine each one faithfully rendered in a coffeehouse-like setting, one amp and one microphone. The lyrics probably also lie within the penumbra of minimalism, matching the emotional directness of Cat Power and the mantra-like progressions of M. Ward (a fellow Portland resident) with a grace born of a stricter sense of meter and a romantic's preoccupation with nature and the body.

Sealing the deal is Ms. Gibson's voice which I would describe as a husky mezzo-soprano (strange as that may sound) and perhaps the most singular aspect of the album. It would be wrong to say that it isn't pretty, it is, but it's also stronger and oddly cadenced. You'll more easily notice the meter of the songs' lyrics because of the way she inverts the inflections of many of her words (putting em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble), often over-enunciating them as well. This grants an extra layer of rhythm to songs that otherwise might feel a bit wispy, but it also occasionally makes the content of the lyrics harder to focus on. When I sat down with the lyrics, I was first surprised to realize that a majority of the songs were not about what I had thought they were about, then interested to re-hear each knowing its content and context, and finally pleased to note that despite their simplicity, that they translated well beyond the confines of each song.

I'd also be remiss not to talk for a second about the Portland scene, that counts Ms. Gibson a member and its main locus at Hush Records (which has released her last two records). After Grunge died out, it's almost as if America grew out of the habit of having scenes (e.g. Minneapolis in the mid-80s, NY or LA in the late 70s, Detroit in the 60s and early 70s, etc.), and the closest thing we've had since is the growing collective of bands that move to Brooklyn and sit in on each others' records. This isn't really the same thing though, as its preoccupations are more pragmatic than aesthetic, it's made up mostly of transplants and finds its function more as a minor league launching pad than as an end unto itself. In contrast to all this, the scene that's been building in Portland over the last 5 or 6 years does seem organic and unified; most of the bands are homegrown and make music that takes the folk and folk-rock records of the late 60s as its primary influence (for instance, I'd be really surprised if LG doesn't have every note of the first 4 Leonard Cohen records memorized), as seen through the prism of the similarly prepossessed, similarly local Elliott Smith (whom Hush compiled a tribute record for). You're probably familiar with the bigger names, like The Decemberists and M. Ward, but the scene is pretty deep, and if you like this sort of music, you might do yourself a favor and spend some time with the Hush catalogue (I'd recommend starting with either Parks and Recreation or Norfolk and Western (whose Adam Selzer appears on Beasts of Seasons, and owns and runs the recording studio that half the scene uses).

The Downside:

A record this short (9 songs, under 40 minutes) should have eliminated all filler, but there are still a couple of songs without strong melody or redemptive lyric that service only the running length itself, which I could do without. There's also not a whole lot of variation here, be it of tone or of musical key. Given that this record could easily and aptly be described as sad-bastard music, dark and depressive (if not always depressing), you may reach the end of it feeling a bit wrung out, a bit beaten back by life. It can also at times be mesmerizing and soporific. I wouldn't have originally said that it was exacting, but looking over these descriptions, I think when it is given the proper amount of attention, that adjective is apt.

2009-06-02T13:37:00.003-04:00

Simon Reynolds (of Rip It Up and Start Again) on Vampire Weekend and why, perhaps, so many people hate them, a phenomenon I’ve never understood:

“So the vibe was completely un-rock'n'roll. And thus perfect for Vampire Weekend, who 'oppose all rock'n'roll' to the point of drawing up a charter of principles when they were forming that included the decree that no member would ever be seen onstage or in a publicity photograph wearing a T-shirt or jeans. One reason they're such a polarising group, loathed as often as loved, is that they've outed the secret truth of indie-rock as the music of the upper middle-class.” [read on]

Venice is Sinking - AZAR

2009-05-29T11:09:00.025-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 4
Scope: 5
Consistency: 7

RIYL: Low, Andrew Bird, ATNTIIO-era Yo La Tengo

Further Listening: Dirty on Purpose, Mus, Do Make Say Think

Place of Origin: Athens, GA

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Keyboard/Synthesizer, Bass, Drums, Male/Female Multi-Tracked Vocals, Tape/Pedal Manipulation, Viola, Violin, Cello, Trumpet, Flute, Organ, Piano, Xylophone, Glockenspiel, Vibraphone, Drum Machine, Tambourine, Ambient Sounds.

Mood Tones:

Season: Autumn
Weather: Overcast
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: Wetlands Dancehall, Young Master Sunshine, Okay

Favorite Lyrics:

"It's been a long night, but/
The length doesn't matter as much as it might."
(from "Young Master Sunshine")

"There's always more to say/
Some lovely shade of gray."
(from "Okay")

"Call us both to arms,/
Coded but thin,/
Our collisions leave their marks."
(from "Charm City")

Other Thoughts:

It seems that AZAR was meant to be a break-up record. Not the kind that you record when a romantic relationship ends; that was Sorry About the Flowers, Venice is Sinking's first full-length, whose birthing pains apparently proved too much for Daniel Lawson and Karolyn Troupe, the former couple at the core of the band's songwriting process. Instead, the elegiac tone struck on AZAR seems to have been intended for the band itself, as several members have since conceded that their impression upon entering the studio was that it was for the last time. How strange then, that in making a record that is obviously a swan song, they emerged re-focused, and have already recorded AZAR's follow-up(s).

It wasn't until around my 10th listen that I realized what a weird record this is. There is a spacy, almost science-fictiony atmosphere, constructed by layering synthesizers, tape manipulation, tonal percussion instruments and the occaisional drum machine, that pervades most of the record. But if this veneer is removed, and each song is investigated for its basic component pieces, the genre it seems to be drawing on most is Alternative Country: slowly strummed acoustic guitar? Check. Fiddle-style string instruments? Check. Male/female vocal harmonies? Check. Minor key noir? You get the idea. In between these two poles there is a fullness of orchestration that I find damn-near irresistible, harkening at times to Andrew Bird's studio confections and the quieter moments of Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy. This persistent melding of organic and inorganic sound will leave the smack of post-Apocalypse on your lips (when listening, I imagine the over-grown parking lots of "Nothing But Flowers" and the crumbling financial institutions of "Tables and Chairs"), even if the album's somewhat vague lyrical content never concretely underscores it.

The tracks are broken up into 3 suites, each beginning with an iteration of the title theme which leads into a pair of sister songs that mirror the tone established in the theme (The first grouping is composed of up-tempo pop songs, the 2nd quieter ballads and the 3rd somewhere inbetween). After the last one, there is a final iteration of the theme and then the song "Charm City," whose main melody is cobbled together from the 4 title tracks. This partitioning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it grants a sense of deliberation to the the album's sequencing and makes it play more like movements of a single, sustained piece than like individual songs bundled together. On the other hand, the tonal shifts in transitioning from one suite to the next can be jarring and at times a bit forced. I'm also curious about the choice of suite sequencing, as the 2nd and 3rd seem inverted to me, the 3rd suite an obvious bridge between the others, "Wetlands Dancehall" and "Young Master Sunshine" being more of a piece with "Charm City" than "Sun Belt" and "Iron Range".

The Downside:

This record is a slow burner, and it might not leave much of an impression after the first couple of listens. I might even go so far as to call it difficult, but mostly because of the way each song is informed and contextualized by its placement within the larger framework of the record, not because any individual song is dissonant or peculiarly structured. Both Lawson and Troupe have a tendency to swallow their words, and I had to sit down with headphones and stop and start to get an approximation of the lyrics, which themselves weren't really worth the trouble, and rank as the album's most obvious flaw (although they're really more of a missed opportunity than anything; if you can't understand the lyrics, it's unlikely that a bad one will kill your buzz). While the tempos pick up here and there, for the most part AZAR has all the drive of a slowcore record, and should not be listened to while operating heavy machinery.

Black Before Red - Belgrave to Kings Circle

2009-05-21T13:29:00.013-04:00

General Ratings:

Rating: 7
Breadth of Appeal: 6
Consistency of Quality: 6

RIYL: The Shins, Beulah, The Sea and Cake

Further Listening: Blind Pilot, Elf Power, Earlimart

Place of Origin: Austin, TX

Sound/Instrument List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Piano, Synths, Drums, Multitracked Vocals, Trumpet, Slide Guitar, Handclaps, Shaker, Wood Block, Harmonica

Mood Tones: Western, not country. The Route 66 road trip.

Song Highlights: Underneath Gold, Matagorda, Halliberlin Petroleum

Favorite Lyrics:

“There’s girls here in summer clothes.” (from "Underneath Gold")

“Pay no mind at all, /
put your faith in common things: /
security halls, antique malls, /
and the skirt that makes you thin.” (from "Spilt Milk Mistake")

“We are just what you think we are. /
We are what you think we are.” (from "Teenage America")

Further Thoughts:

There was a while there where great indie bands seemed to spring, fully formed, from Zeus’s head. The Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People, Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s S/T (Zeus’s head = Canada, apparently): here were stunningly mature albums from young bands who had already mastered a certain niche in the sonic terrain (in a more mainstream mold, think Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights and The Strokes’ Is This It?). In fact, many of these bands had earlier efforts, EPs and self-released debuts and the such, but it was easier to pretend that these missteps didn’t exist. And so we, or at least I, have come to expect near-perfection from new bands: give me Reservoir right off the bat, or keep it in the garage until you can.

This is completely unreasonable, of course, and it’s also robbed us (that is, me) of the pleasure of tracking the promise of up and comers. No one knew who the Arcade Fire were, then overnight everyone did, and they were anointed saviors of rock ‘n roll. And so the career arc available to the above sort of bands is still unclear. All of them put out disappointing sophomore efforts, and we’re still waiting to see if they can huddle up and find direction with their thirds. The coherence of a Funeral or Your Forgot It In People is impossible to follow. You can’t just put out a sequel, because one Funeral is a masterpiece, but two in a row reveals you to be a one-trick pony. So these bands put out second albums where it’s impossible not to imagine them sitting down and saying: well, let’s write a Springsteen song here and a Pavement song there, a Do-Wop number for this one, then The Cars, and rip off Stereolab for that one.* Now it’s bands’ second albums that wear their influences on their sleeves. The sensibility that had come together perfectly on their debuts gets fractured as they push their sound through a number of different holes in an attempt at progress.

Remember when bands had normal career arcs? Take Wilco, say, or The National: a shitty first album that’s a victim of the times (*cough* alt-country *cough*), an uneven second where things start to come together, a grower of a third that puts the world on notice, and then, only then, four albums in, a perfect album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Boxer). (Then you kick Jay Bennett out and start putting out uninteresting classic rock wankery or you let Sufjan Stevens unofficially join your band and who knows?). When you don’t hit your stride until your third or fourth album, you might actually be a mature band instead of simply sounding like one. And so you can weather the critical nonsense, some bad reviews, some Radiohead comparisons, and you’ve got a deep enough bag of tricks and sounds and songs to know how to move forward with staying power.

Black Before Red are a band that could find that arc, I think. Listening to their debut over the last few months, it strikes me as a bit of an emotional cypher: When I’m depressed it sounds depressing, when I’m happy it sounds happy. Really all that’s going on is that it’s a more traditionally assembled album. They don’t have a singular, niche-filling sound--they have range and probably less than a perfect idea of what they’re after. So on one listen the peppy “Halliberlin Petroleum” and “Teenage America” stand out (I guarantee I could pass off the former as a Shins’ b-side on unsuspecting tourists), on another the brooding bassline of “Underneath Gold” and piano outro of “Matagorda.” It’s not a great album, but it’s a good one, and it’s easy to see the promise of future albums and a fuller development to come. (I’d put it between Being There and Summerteeth, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers and Alligator in the above matrix.) Listening to it isn’t an immediate, revelatory, religious experience, but thank god. I need less albums that inspire a month of discipleship of me and more that can sit on the stereo for a solid year, accompanying dinner or morning coffee once or twice a week without exhausting themselves. Which is perhaps to say that this album is a grower, but also that I think it might be a stayer which finds a spot in the rotation.

The Downside:

For a poppy album, the hooks--and melodies generally--aren’t quite strong enough here. There are also a few duds in the middle of the album which lessen its momentum.

*Bonus Points: name the five exact songs I'm thinking of, all from bands in the first paragraph.

So Good, You Won't Ever Know

2009-05-13T16:36:00.006-04:00

Reading through the posts here, I admit I struggle. It’s not a struggle with this particular blog, or these bands, or these recommendations, all of which are excellent. Categorically, honestly. The struggle is this: I find music reviews on the whole to have pretty much nothing to do with my affective experience of listening to music.

This is due, in most part, to the polarization of reviews along a single line of consideration. Music reviews are obsessed with the single question of whether the music is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ By that the reviewer means something that be glossed as 'did I enjoy it?' Sometimes there is a sense of subtlety to the review – this album is average (and by that the reviewer usually means ‘bad’), or half of the album is good, and the other half is bad. The reviews at Dylaraddict are great – subtle and thoughtful. But no matter how well-considered or well-written, the vast majority of music reviews flatten towards a single good-vs-bad critical axis. But is that how we experience music? Is that the emotional response that we have? Again and again I find that an appraisal of whether a piece of music is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is one of the least interesting things one could say about it.

Maybe I just want too much from music reviews. Maybe it’s a form that promises ultimately one thing: to tell me whether something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Maybe what I'm saying is I want is a way of talking about music that’s supplemental to a review, something more descriptive and less evaluative.

In general, art gets the benefit of the doubt from me. By ‘art’ I mean a wide range of cultural ‘stuff’ both high and low – movies, art exhibits, indie rock albums, tv shows, novels, etc. There is good art and bad art, but the best art provokes not just a single static reaction, but a complex and dynamic variety of reactions. The best art challenges us and challenges our assumptions, attitudes, and approaches to the world. And one of the strategies art has available to it is to defy us: to deliberately annoy, irritate, bore, confuse, confound, and displease. This last bit seems key to me: art shouldn’t strive to merely give pleasure, but to also provide alternatives to pleasure.

Different artforms are more or less suited to this type of work, but all artforms have the power to productively displease, including (especially) pop music. My favorite example of the affective range of pop music is the conclusion of Wilco’s A Ghost is Born: the two song sequence of Less Than You Think and The Late Greats. Ignore whether we think these tracks are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ How do we experience the sequence of these songs?

In any view it’s a strange sequence. Less Than You Think is a down-tempo piano ballad followed by 8.5 minutes of static and feedback. The Late Greats is an upbeat, hooky, catchy pop song. They are utterly bizarre songs to sequence next to each other, let alone to conclude an album with. Each seems to confound the other. Jeff Tweedy has said that that the squall at the end of LTYT is the aural equivalent of a migraine, a debilitating sound flooding of the sound spectrum. Listening to it is a singularly unpleasant experience, frustrating, boring, and all the more so because we know that on the other side of the experience the gleeful pop rush of The Late Greats is waiting for us. LTYT’s outro seems to unbalance and sabotage the entire album.

And yet I think the opposite is true: LTYT’s climax is the ugly heart of the whole album, because it forces us to feel, and feel strongly. If we simply skip past it, in annoyance or irritation, the track is forcing us to action, not just passive reception. This in turn draws attention to the difference between our song-centric present (CDs and MP3 players make it so easy to skip tracks, to re-edit albums) and an album-centric past (it’s much harder to just skip tracks on an LP or, egads, a cassette). That is it’s own set of problems and meanings, especially as Tweedy is such a vocal proponent of ‘the album’ as a unified aesthetic unit.

But our affective reaction is even more significant, because it folds back into the themes of the album itself. Like the most difficult moments of any relationship, Less Than You Think dares us to give up, walk out. It’s like being trapped in an aural purgatory. Then, without warning, we are sent to our reward, paid off, flooded with the dopamine of ‘Late Greats.’ The music tests, punishes, and compensates. Whatever our affective response to this sequence, it’s central to the meaning of, and circumscribed by, the music. And to skip it because we don’t ‘enjoy’ it is to opt out of some of the album’s most complicated emotional effects. It’s a refusal to engage on the artist’s terms. It makes the art beholden to us, and not the other way around.

We may find it a song bad, a melody boring, a lyric embarrassing, an arrangement overwrought, a vocal timbre not to our liking, an album too long, a career trajectory unfortunate. That is all part of our experience of the art, and as such, should be part of the discussion. But the discussion shouldn’t stop with such things. Art and artists should test us, and displease us, and disappoint. It should push us past good and bad, even render such categories irrelevant. That seems a far more productive outcome than art merely saying things we want said, and in ways we approve of.

Saturday Looks Good To Me - Every Night

2009-04-29T10:45:00.034-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 8
Lyrics: 7
Scope: 6
Consistency: 6

RIYL: Phil Spector, Camera Obscura, Big Star

Further Listening: This is Ivy League, Acid House Kings, God Help the Girl

Siblings: Fred Thomas, Lovesick, Flashpapr, Everyone, City Center

Place of Origin: Ann Arbor, MI

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Alternative Percussion (Tambourine, Shaker, Hand Claps, Jingle Bells), Multi-tracked Boy/Girl Vocals, Echo Chamber, Keyboard/Synthesizer, Piano, Organ, Violin, Viola, Cello, Saxophone, Trumpet, Trombone, Glockenspiel, Xylophone, Accordion, Harp, Pedal/Tape Manipulation, Ambient Sounds.

Mood Tones:

Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: When the Party Ends, Until the World Stops Spinning, Since You Stole My Heart

Favorite Lyrics:

"We can go to all the places where the money's spent/
And buy whatever new distractions that the suits invent;/
They know the demographics that we represent/
Because they heard all of our secrets through the heating vent,/
So write another song about your discontent/
And wax ecstatic for a time less turbulent/
With metaphors like closet doors that won't open,/
And you can use your list of words that rhyme with 'opulent.'/
Now someone said that you should throw in 'malcontent,'/
Maybe somebody can tell us where the liquor went/
And we can raise our glasses while they raise our rent/
And search for a solution that's more permanent./
But there isn't any doctor or a medicine/
That's gonna make you feel less insignificant;/
Another bunch of words that you can soon forget,/
Another bunch of crooks disguised as gentlemen./
Now you wonder why your notes are always bruised and bent,/
You think that it's your song when it's your instrument;/
You wanna turn invisible and try again,/
I'll kiss you in the kitchen and I'll count to ten." (from "When the Party Ends")

"I smelled summer in those letters/
That you sprayed with your perfume,/
I breathed your breath and was left swaying/
With the curtains in your room,/
In the knowledge you would leave me/
Beneath the angry April moon/
Where you first found me." (from "Dialtone")

"You spent all your money,/
You got brainwashed like before/
And you get so tired of sleeping/
On the filthy kitchen floor./
You think you're something special,/
But the girls know you're a joke,/
With your jacket from the thrift store/
And your little rum and Coke." (from "Until the World Stops Spinning")

Other Thoughts:

Here would be one of the few exceptions to the Avoid-Any-Band-Whose-Name-Is-A-Phrase rule. I want to start by talking about the difference between influence and imitation, as Saturday Looks Good To Me began as an exercise in the latter and, over the course of two albums and countless singles, arrived at the former, much better for the transition. They are certainly not the first band to wear their love of 60s pop and Motown like a badge on a punker's jean jacket, and a quick rummage through their back catalog, which mostly consists of short genre exercizes, can underscore how quaint but unsatisfying purist tribute can be. Fred Thomas, for his part, seems to be a Jack-of-all-genres, having been a primary player in Lovesick (a punk band that more closely resembled the Exploding Hearts than NOFX or Greenday), Flashpapr (a moody post-rock band), the anti-folk records he releases under his own name, and most recently the Arthur Russellesque avant pop of City Center, as well as sitting for spells with His Name is Alive and Ida. One imagines that his record collection has reached T-Bone Burnett-like proportions and that he could talk at length about any LP pulled from it at random. But the great thing about Every Night is that Thomas is finally synthesizing all of his influences and coming up with a pretty savory gumbo. Warn Defever's production is OCD clean and you can hear every little part, which sets this recording apart from all of its predecessors (which bore the kiss of some pretty muddy analog), and the chiming major chords that you expect from a SLGTM record compete with distorted guitar, string quartets, dueling organs; disparate points that all nod in different directions, whose central locus is set firmly in the present.

Speaking of which, this is most certainly a record meant for headphones. You'll notice after close listening that some sounds that are difficult to place at first are actually multiple instruments (sometimes the same type of instrument, distorted or pedal manipulated in one feed, laid cleanly in the other) playing the same part, note for note, precisely recorded and layered (with headphones, the stereo split makes this easier to pick up on). There are a lot of other neat production tricks like looping vocals at the end of choruses to make a slowly diminishing echo, and starting the feed of ambient noise from a live track near the end of the previous cut so that the transition is seamless (to name a few of many).

Anyone who wants to go an extra step can track down the vinyl issue which, while running the same tracklist, includes different takes of almost every song. Some of the differences are minute: Some of the songs that run together in the CD version are remixed to have definite endings to manage the physical reality of track spacings on an LP. There's an extended spoken-word introduction on "Dial Tone," and Thomas subs his own voice in for Betty Marie Barnes' on "Since You Stole My Heart." Perhaps the largest difference can be heard on "When the Party Ends," before an acoustic anthem more akin to Thomas' solo efforts than most of SLGTM's catalog, on vinyl remade as a fuzzed up freak out, providing a re-recording differential that would make Ira Kaplan proud. There are also alternate singles versions of three album cuts ("Until the World Stops Spinning," "The Girl's Distracted" and "Lift Me Up"), all of which are collected on the Sound On Sound compilation. Thomas has gone on the record stating that the LP version's takes were meant to be a bit rawer to appeal to the DIY sensibility of the average LP listener. It's a bit paradoxical, but probably plays to the nihilistic tendencies of most punk rockers that the audio format that's generally agreed to be of the highest quality is most often used to release lo-fi singles by noisy bands. Alas. It probably bears noting that most of the re-recordings are interesting more for the relief they grant to the originals than as stand-alone cuts.

I also want to talk for a second about tracklists and album flow. So far as I can tell, most of the major labels have given up on trying to construct coherent albums out of what are basically collections of singles. They seem to get that the songs you expect to be the biggest charters should be at the front of the record so that nearly everyone who puts it on will hear them, but all other nuance of sequence and sentiment seems to have been lost. I mention this because Every Night (with the possible exception of the late placement of the peppy "Lift Me Up") feels properly sequenced to me, each track flowing well into the next, the album as a whole tracing a pair of arcs, rising as each side begins and falling as it ends. It's easy to miss this at first, as we're far enough into the CD era to have almost come out the other end, and we're well used to thinking about an album as a single, uninterrupted playlist; the jump between "If You Ask" and "Empty Room" in conjunction with the late arrival of LMU, when played from beginning to end on an ipod or CD player effectively obscures the album's shape. But to truly appreciate the main conceit behind SLGTM, I think you have to allow that Thomas is constructing Every Night to play as an LP, a nod to the 60s and 70s classics that are its most obvious influence. It's no coincidence then that IYA, the darkest song on the album, concludes the first side and is followed by the bushy-tailed ER; in contrast, "When You Got to New York," the album's closer, carries a similar downbeat but recasts IYA's sense of foreboding with nostalgia and regret. It's probably pretentious to suggest actually doing this, but one imagines the best way to really "get" this point is to stop the album after IYA for a minute, or however long it would take you to flip an LP over, long enough for ambient noise to cleanse your aural palate.

The Downside:

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback here is Thomas' voice, which is thin to begin with and often pushed past its already-limited boundaries. This flaw is felt doubly for being set in such stark and immediate comparison with the all of the female vocalists, many of whom have strong, conventionally pretty voices. A couple of times the band seems to think it can substitue strong tempos for melodic leads, another mistake that is more persistently notable due to internal comparison. The fine line Thomas walks between throwback and singer-songwriter means that sometimes you get traditional (perhaps cliched) heartsick balladry and sometimes fresh, intelligent wordsmithing. Neither of these is necessarily better than the other given the tone the album intends to strike, but the vacillation back and forth can be off-putting.

Schlitz & Mickey Mouse

2009-04-18T16:34:00.007-04:00

(A Romance)

1. The Shout Out Louds - Tonight I Have to Leave It

2. This is Ivy League - The Richest Kids in Town

3. Belle & Sebastian - Another Sunny Day

4. Headlights - On April 2

5. Pelle Carlberg - I Love You, You Imbecile

6. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Optimist vs. the Silent Alarm

7. The Shins - Plenty is Never Enough

8. The Twin Atlas - The Game is Fixed

9. Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele - When You Were Mine

10. Sambassadeur - Kate

11. The Submarines - Swimming Pool

12. Keren Ann - Lay Your Head Down

13. The National & St. Vincent - Sleep All Summer

14. Lucky Soul - Baby I'm Broke

15. Camera Obscura - You Told a Lie

16. Saturday Looks Good to Me - Typing

17. Asobi Seksu - Thursday

18. Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth

Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s - Animal!/Not Animal [rethought]

2009-04-16T17:38:00.013-04:00

Animal?

1. A Children’s Crusade on Acid
2. Broadripple Is Burning
3. As Tall as Cliffs
4. My Baby (Shoots Her Mind Off)
5. Cold, Kind, and Lemon Eyes
6. Hip Hip Hooray
7. Love Song for a Schubas
Bartender
8. Holy Cow!
9. The Ocean (Is Bleeding Salt)
10. Hello Vagina
11. There’s Talk of Mine Shafts
12. Pages Written on a Wall

Here.

General Ratings:

Rating: 6*
Breadth of Appeal: 6
Consistency of Quality: 6

*by comparison, I’d probably give Animal! a 3 or 4, Not Animal a 5.

RIYL: Bright Eyes, Aimee Mann, Ryan Adams

Further Listening: Neva Dinova (especially the split Bright Eyes EP), Songs: Ohia/Jason Molina/Magnolia Electric Co., Josh Ritter

Siblings: Archer Avenue, Panic Attacks!, Pravada

Place of Origin: Indianapolis, IN

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic and Electric Guitars, Bass, Piano, Keyboard, Synths, Drums, Multi-tracked Vocals, Female Backup Vocals, Lap Steel, Violin, Cello, Trumpet, Harmonica, Toy Piano, Sleigh Bells

Mood Tones: Late night and lonely whiskey drinking.

Song Highlights: As Tall as Cliffs, There’s Talk of Mine Shafts, Broadripple Is Burning

Favorite Lyrics:

“If my woman was a fire, /
she’d burn out before I’d wake /
and be replaced by pints of whiskey, /
cigarettes, and outer space.” (from "Broadripple Is Burning")

“Oh god, deliver me /
from my enemies: /
these women in /
green winter coats, /
working for a tip /
don’t paint your lips.” (from "Cold, Kind, and Lemon Eyes")

“But the children lose their minds /
in such uncertain times.” (from "A Children’s Crusade on Acid")

Further Toughts:

Richard Edwards used to be in a band called Archer Avenue and named Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s after Gweneth Paltrow’s Margot “this is my adopted daughter” Tenenbaum (and supposedly George W. Bush’s pronunciation of “nuclear”). I love The Royal Tenenbaums as much as anyone, but come on. Not surprisingly then, MatNSaS’s are plagued by their own pretensions (and a grammatically inexplicable apostrophe). After stirring up some excitement with their 2006 debut The Dust of Retreat they signed with Epic and put out two versions of their 2008 album: Animal!, the band’s version, on vinyl and Not Animal, the label’s more listener-friendly one, on cd. Neither is particularly good, though there is a pretty good album lurking between them. The band's favored version of the album is pretty well unlistenable, mired in self-importance, navel-gazing, and performed despair, its best moments brief and buried in dirge. Epic did them a huge favor by saving them from their worst faults and assembling a much less impenetrable version of the album for the cd-purchasing public, but even they didn't quite hit the mark. So, a rethinking here: four of the five songs that made it onto both versions (leaving off “German Motor Car”), five from the label’s Not Animal, and three from the band’s Animal!.

Edwards et. al. (there are eight members in all) start from a folk-rock/alt-country base, but there are layers and layers of instrumentation over most of the songs. "Broadripple Is Burning" is the sparsest, mostly just Edwards and an acoustic guitar, but it's well-supplemented with background moans, simple percussion, a piano arpeggio, and some atmospheric reverb. At the other end of the spectrum, songs like "The Ocean (Is Bleeding Salt)" and especially "Pages Written on a Wall" work themselves into a full ruckus. In between there are piano-, synth-, and bassline-driven numbers. "A Children's Crusade on Acid" is strung out over an edgy beat, "Hip Hip Hooray" features a nice Ba Ba section, and there are a couple stretches of surpassing beauty: the lovely two-minuter "There's Talk of Mineshafts," and the chorus and strings bridge of "Cold, Kind, and Lemon Eyes," especially. "As Tall as Cliffs" is the real centerpiece, though, a cheerful, bouncy number that makes use of the band's full trunk of tricks and instruments, building to full cymbal-crashing catharsis. Already, they have a mature sound that's carefully produced and mixed, and they know how to make use of both minimal and full arrangements. Edwards clearly has some songwriting chops as well, one just hopes that he and the band will work through their more solipsistic ambitions and let the audience in.

The Downside:

Obviously, I’ve done away with most of it, at least as far as I’m concerned. MatNSaS’s, especially on Animal, are frequently pretentious and somber to unbearable excess. Even here, “As Tall as Cliffs” and “Holy Cow!” are the only really, well, happy numbers, and one wishes for a couple more.

Since I’m on record arguing against dylaraddict’s first rethinking, I suppose I should explain. As in most things, I’m here a particularist, wary of the general rule. Okkervil River is a good enough band that it seems to me we should simply want as much as they can give us. Most of the charm of The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs is the sheer excess of it. Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s aren’t in that same league. I would never put on Animal, and probably rarely play Not Animal, but this rethinking kicks them up a notch, producing an album I’m quite fond of.

Asobi Seksu - Acoustic at Olympic Studios

2009-04-14T14:41:00.021-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 6
Scope: 4
Consistency: 8

RIYL: Cat Power, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out era Yo La Tengo, Yann Tiersen

Further Listening: Tenniscoats, Adem, Lady & Bird

Place of Origin: New York City, NY

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic Guitars, Piano, Multi-tracked Vocals, Alternative Percussion (Tambourine, Shaker, Woodblock), Glockenspiel, Synthesizers, Organ,Toy Piano.

Mood Tones:

Season: Late Summer
Weather: Rainy
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: Thursday, Breathe Into Glass, New Years

Favorite Lyrics:

"There's pills, straws and bottles/
For all our hurt feelings/
They mix well in person,/
But sting when they're leaving." (from "Familiar Light")

"You're never as sad as you're acting/
And my attention's never far/
Let the ocean kiss your raincoat/
And save the doubts for after dark." (from "Blind Little Rain")

"Feel the air come closing in/
Before the hurricanes begin/
Strands of warmth come whispering/
And you can ask me anything." (from "Breathe Into Glass")

Other Thoughts:

There is a good possibility that most of Asobi Seksu's fans won't even bother tracking this record down, as nearly all of the things you associate with the band (e.g. intensely layered production, heavily distorted guitars, driving rhythms) are clearly not going to be focal to an album with the word acoustic in the title. Perhaps this record isn't for them anyway, as it shares much more in common with the self-produced bedroom pop of an artist like Adem than it does with My Bloody Valentine. It may also prove to be too much too soon, as it comes directly at the heels of Hush, the band's 3rd studio album, released in late February. Indeed, the band itself seems rather preoccupied, as 4 of the ten tracks originally appear on Hush, double that of any of their other records (2 cuts, "Thursday" and "New Years" are off Citrus, "Walk on the Moon" comes off the self-titled album, "Breathe Into Glass" was the b-side from the "Me and Mary" single, and two of the songs, "Suzanne" and "Urusai Tori," I haven't been able to place).

Acoustic albums are almost always disappointing, which is too bad given the potential that the concept holds. Instead of piecing apart a handful of classic cuts and stitching them back together in new and interesting ways, most of the acoustic records of recent memory have had a tossed off quality to them; gone are all but lead and rhythm guitar parts and maybe a drum track, simplicity becoming monotony before you'd even have to flip the long player over. Thus, heading into my first listen, I was pretty content with the idea that Acoustic at Olympic Studios would be disposable -- even the title suggests that it was thrown together as an after-thought while they were laying Hush down. How pleasant my surprise then that AAOS is every bit as considered and almost as nuanced as the rest of Asobi Seksu's catalog. One listen to the way they pair the sung chorus on "Thursday" with its spoken equivalent in French and not only have we arrived at something more interesting than 90% of the acoustic dregs out there, but they're doing exactly the opposite of what tradition dictates you do on this type of record: they're adding new parts.

And yet the best aspect of this album, especially considering the band making it and their particular proclivities, is how clean and focused the production is. The cuts aren't completely devoid of layering, per se, but things have definitely been boiled down a bit. In a way, it's reminiscent of watching Joanna Newsom perform Ys with her traveling band, six people doing the work of an entire orchestra. The strongest lines are brought front and center to play with one another, and without all of the other pieces that were thrown in to make the song sound full, all you hear is what the band takes to be the heart of each song, which in turn can influence the way you listen to the originals (this has definitely happened for me with "Thursday," which I had always thought was one of Citrus's lesser cuts--not anymore). This may be especially relevant to the Asobi Seksu fans who were underwhelmed by Hush, as not only do each of its revisited songs sound more focused, but their lyrics are also more easily discernable, and prove to be the best that they've laid to paper.

Other than the occasional dalliance (e.g. the samba-inspired "Urusai Tori" or the piano balladry of "Blind Little Rain") the album's songs are mostly of a piece, sustaining a mood of rainy day melancholy from beginning to end. It's probably a bit obvious, but I'd feel remiss without noting the utter loveliness of Yuki Chikudate's voice; its innate sweetness coupled with the simplicity of production and the use of glockenspiel and toy piano makes most of AAOS feel like a lullaby, and it's hard to think of another record that I'd rather be ferried off to dreamland by.

The Downside:

You will know pretty quickly if this record is going to interest you, and if it doesn't grab with the first couple of songs, there's not much reason to try to soldier through the rest. A couple cuts are simplified too much and fall prey to the aforementioned monotony that bathes most acoustic re-recordings. The band is working almost entirely within the downbeat sections of its catalog, probably assuming that songs like "Lions & Tigers" and "Goodbye" wouldn't translate as well, which means that some of their best original material is omitted here. If we want to get technical, the use of synthesizers makes this album less than 100% acoustic.

"If I stay here in this room, they'll remember me for my youth."

2009-04-10T18:28:00.006-04:00

1. Pete & the Pirates - Moving
2. Bound Stems - Taking Tips from the Gallery Gang
3. The Corto Maltese - Providence
4. Realpeople (Beirut) - My Night with the Prostitute from Marseille
5. Fanfarlo - I'm a Pilot
6. Aidan Smith - Drapes of Black
7. Emperor X - Laminate Factory
8. Margot & the Nuclear So and So's - As Tall as Cliffs
9. Sin Fang Bous - We Belong
10. Yeasayer - Tightrope
11. Black Before Red - Underneath Gold
12. Oxford Collapse - Boys Go Home
13. Doves - Sky Starts Falling
14. Matt & Kim - I'll Take You Home
15. Cloud Cult - Everybody Here Is a Cloud

Here.

Headless Heroes - The Silence of Love

2009-04-08T11:27:00.044-04:00

Tracklist:

1. True Love Will Find You in the End (Daniel Johnston)
2. Just One Time (Juicy Lucy)
3. Here Before (Vashti Bunyan)
4. Just Like Honey (The Jesus & Mary Chain)
5. To You (I am Kloot)
6. Blues Run the Game (Jackson C. Frank)
7. Hey, Who Really Cares? (Linda Perhacs)
8. Nobody's Baby Now (Nick Cave)
9. The North Wind Blew South (Philamore Lincoln)
10. See My Love (The Gentle Soul)

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Scope: 4
Consistency: 7

RIYL: Neko Case, The Handsome Family, mid-period Cat Power

Further Listening: Alela Diane, Kelly Hogan, Tarnation

Place of Origin: New York City, NY

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric & Acoustic Guitars, Electric & Upright Bass, Drums, Keyboard/Synthesizer, Piano, Strings, Pedal/Tape Manipulation, Multi-tracked Vocals, Xylophone/Glockenspiel, Trumpet, Harp, Zither, Organ.

Mood Tones:

Season: Fall
Weather: Overcast
Time of Day: Dusk

Song Highlights: To You, Just One Time, True Love Will Find You in the End

Other Thoughts:

Before I get into album specifics, I'd like to start by talking about a larger trend that I see emerging in indie music over the last 5 years or so that this album contributes to, namely, the growing popularity of the deconstructive cover album. The notion that a song belongs to its author, and that their initial performance of it is the bar that all subsequent performances should be measured against probably dates to the mid-60's when the idea of pop music as a legitimate artistic endeavor was first gaining traction. It can be instructional to go back and listen to some of the records released in the 40's and 50's when most (if not all) of the songs on any given album were standards written by professional songwriters who mostly labored in quiet obscurity in places like the Brill Building. The performer's job, it seems, was to take the songwriter's raw material and bend it to their style of delivery and emotive prowess, and that it was this act of interpretation that was the real product being sold.

But when the focus shifted, and the product that a band was selling became more unified (i.e. the authoritative performance of a song that they themselves have written and arranged), the idea of the standard gave way to the cover. When the Byrds covered Bob Dylan, most of their audience's concept of the songs they were singing were inseperable from the initial recording that Dylan had made of each song. It made the act of performing someone else's material an act of reference rather than an act of appropriation, and while we can all think of some notable exceptions (Hendrix's cover of "All Along the Watchtower" and Jeff Buckley's take on "Hallelujah" spring to mind), the consequence was that the overwhelming majority of covers came to be tributary; they were played in the same style as the original, often with the same instruments and the same solos. A band would acknowledge their debt to an influential forebearer by trying (and often failing) to beat their idols at their own game, banking on the belief that each successive rendition only added to the renown of the first.

However, the pendulum has taken a sharp swing back this past decade, perhaps in part due to the fanboyishness of certain famous performers (e.g. Kurt Cobain, Bono, etc.), but also, I would argue, due to the singular influence of Cat Power's The Covers Record. Here was a collection of songs from fairly disparate sources, that were mostly familiar to Ms. Marshall's target audience, but at the same time almost unrecognizable from their source material (I've played her cover of "Satisfaction," probably the most well-known original of the group, for dozens of people, and almost none of them have been able to identify it). Choruses were torn off, verses were looped, songs came to abrupt ends. She had a very clear idea not only about which songs she wanted to use, but also of the specific parts of each song and how she would remake them in her own image to convey only what she wanted. The finished product bore at least as much of her stamp as it did its previous owner's, and the strongest impression that you were left with when you finished listening to the album was that it sounded just like the rest of her records. It was an autobiographical collage more than anything else.

So here we are in the present day (finally) with The Silence of Love. On the one hand, like many of its contemporaries (e.g. Melody Mountain by Susanna & the Magical Orchestra) the debt that it owes to The Covers Record is undeniable, as it adopts a similar tone and draws from the same pool of 60's and 70's folk rock and 80's and 90's alternative music (with the notable exception of I Am Kloot's "To You"). More importantly, it also establishes and maintains its own sonic fingerprint, twisting the music to itself rather than vice versa, each song easily flowing into the next, dancing around similar themes of isolation and disappointment. On the other hand, one does get the sense that the album intends a healthy amount of tribute; The band's name refers to a Eugene McDaniels album, the album title to either a poem by Oscar Wilde, one by A.E. or perhaps a Luiz Bonfa song...who knows? Two-thirds of the songs are obscure enough that even most music lovers won't have heard of them (I'll admit I only caught 4: "True Love," "Here Before," "Just Like Honey" and "Nobody's Baby Now"), so it would seem that part of the point is nodding to the Obscure Objects of an audiophile's Desire. Although this may strip TSOL of some of the pleasures common to a covers record (e.g. comparing the new recordings to their source material to see where convention is subverted and where it's maintained), it also keeps them from retreading songs that have been done over and over, rubbed down to shiny cliche (cf. "Hallelujah," half of the Beatles catalog). In fact, if the concept doesn't interest you, it's not that hard to disregard the fact that this album is a covers record entirely.

Although she isn't the primary mover behind Headless Heroes (which would be Eddie Bezalel), the first thing you're likely to notice when you put the album on is Alela Diane's voice, which is atypically robust and pretty for an indie record. Ms. Diane has made a name for herself as a solo artist, having released two albums and toured with the likes of Joanna Newsom (a fellow Nevada City native) and Vashti Bunyan (whose "Here Before" is one of the tracks covered here). While Ms. Diane's voice is certainly pleasing and her delivery well-nuanced, you never get the sense that she's especially invested in the material, except perhaps on "To You" and "Just One Time," and it's the resentment and desperation that she lets seep into her voice on those two cuts that makes them the best on the record.

Musically speaking, The Silence of Love falls somewhere between the folk rock of the artists whose catalogs it draws upon and the nocturnal spookiness of some contemporary alt country acts like the Handsome Family. On most of the songs there is an interesting interplay between two electric guitars (one on each side of the mix) and the bass, each taking turns at the lead within a song, often finishing each others sentences. They're also selective in their arrangements, choosing at times to keep things simple with just an acoustic guitar (cf. "Blues Run the Game"), at others employing over a dozen different instruments to fill out the soundscape (cf. "See My Love" and "Just One Time"). To my ear, the fuller sound heard on the first and last thirds of the record are not only more interesting, but more convincing, sadder and creepier. When it draws from its fullest pallette, this is a record best listened to alone with the lights out, in a mood that's closer to gray than blue. Let's not miss the forest for the trees.

The Downside:

At first, the air of aloofness that Ms. Diane sometimes displays seems nothing more than a missed opportunity, not a strength and not a detriment, but upon repeat listens it can come to feel like a hole at the center of the record, leaving the worst offenders feeling a bit ephemeral, a bit under-cooked. The band is chiefly concerned with the establishment and maintenence of atmosphere, sometimes at the expense of the central melodies of a song, a good or bad thing depending on your personal predilections. More importantly, they never really do anything to try to transcend the genres that they've chosen to work within, but then again, when as much thought has gone into the selection process as obviously has here, perhaps drawing inside the lines is the better part of the point anyways.

The Sunsets Quick - The Sunsets Quick

2009-04-06T20:45:00.004-04:00

I admit I don't know much about the local music scene here in Boston. I tend to wander into shows at the Middle East and TT the Bear's when the openers are finishing up, if only to avoid getting in too intimate of touch with my feet in lower back, and usually I'm none too impressed by the little I hear. But here's a band to watch: The Sunsets Quick, a quartet featuring Matt Roselli on vocals and guitar (and songwriting), Chase Livingston on guitar, keyboard, and backing vocals, Ashton Jones on bass, and Liz Maynes-Aminzade on drums. They formed in the winter of 2007 and released their self-titled debut last fall (further contributions by Martin H. Gonzalez and Simon Pongratz, truly excellent cover art by Molly Butterfoss).

They play a catchy, breezy indie rock reminiscent of Weezer, Pavement, The Strokes, and Bishop Allen. Most are mid-to-up tempo numbers, but a few shouters, the contemplative "Sorry," and the more country-stylings of "Pave the Streets" round things out. Roselli moves ably from a carefully enunciated delivery to hearty bark, and he's already learned to make his falsetto crack at the opportune moment ("What You Want to Hear"). At times he's a little too eager to bite his syllables off, searching like every young frontman for his style. When he settles into his own songs and natural vocal style, he's at his best, I think (on the latter half of the couplets of "Deaf Dumb," he sounds downright Rivers Coumo-ish). Livingston adds catchy and clean fills and solos (no wankery here)--his work on "The Hook" and "Piece" especially stands out, as does the synth/keyboard behind "Straight Line". There are a number of great great intros on the record ("What You Want to Hear," "Down," "The Hook") that one wishes the band let further into the songs--usually they drop out to a sparser sound for the verses. Jones and Maynes-Aminzade keep everything nodding and the tempo-changes exact and are showcased particularly on the stop/start action of "Samsara." The best tracks here--"What You Want to Hear," "The Hook," "Straight Line," and "Piece"--are fully-formed, potential already actualized, making this a band to root for.

Give them a listen on myspace and their website and pick up the album on Itunes.

You can check them out in person this Thursday, April 9th, at the Cantab Lounge (Central Sq., Cambridge) at 9 pm. I'll be there.

Grand Archives - Grand Archives

2009-04-01T12:58:00.017-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 8
Lyrics: 6
Scope: 7
Consistency:4

RIYL: Band of Horses, Gram Parsons, Summerteeth-era Wilco

Further Listening: Sera Cahoone, Carissa's Wierd, The Twin Atlas

Place of Origin: Seattle, WA

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Multi-tracked Vocals & Harmonies, Keyboard/Synthesizer, Piano, Effects Pedals/Tape Manipulation, Harmonica, Alternative Percussion (shaker, tambourine, woodblock, jingle bells, chopsticks), Whistling, Pedal Steel, Banjo, Trombone, Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Violin, Cello, Glockenspiel, Melodica, Hammered Dulcimer, Mandolin, Ukulele, French Horn, Organ, Field Recordings.

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Overcast
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: The Crime Window, Torn Blue Foam Couch, Swan Matches

Favorite Lyrics:

"Bag of bones, cursing at the spit he spat,/
He was creep creep creeping up the railroad track./
Tell his Mrs. that Mr.'s fine,/
Keep her fingers crossed and her split tongue tied."
(from "The Crime Window")

"We were all blue,/
Disguised in black,/
Bad news travels fast."
(from "Index Moon")

"It's nearly dawn, your motel home,/
The shades were drawn to hide the storm/
Without a sound, the TV glows,/
The blankets tied around our throats."
(from "Sleepdriving")

Other Thoughts:

It's always made me sad that this album got mostly over-shadowed by the fallout of Mat Brooke's decision to leave Band of Horses. If anything, a side-by-side comparison of Grand Archives and Cease To Begin underscores to me that the elements of Everything All the Time that I enjoyed the most were probably Brooke's contributions; while CTB is easily classifiable as a vanilla guitar rock album with sub-par lyrics, Grand Archives runs the gamut from punkish sing-a-long ("The Crime Window") to coffeehouse folk ("George Kaminski") to indie pop ("Miniature Birds") to gypsy dub ("Breezy No Breezy"). Don't get me wrong, the blueprint for this record is mostly recognizable in its forebearer, but it's surprising how cleanly Brooke and Ben Bridwell fit into the Jekyll and Hyde roles (musically speaking) when comparing their follow-up efforts. I would go so far as to claim that there is nothing that Bridwell does on Cease To Begin that isn't one-upped somewhere on Grand Archives, and, that the inverse of this sentiment has been almost uniformly regurgitated by the reviews that I've read of GA has left me wondering if we're even listening to the same album.

So there are all the pieces of an early 70s classic rock record here, major 7 chords, vocal harmonies, a crisscrossing of the folk/rock divide. Seems straightforward enough, no? But the deeper you get into Grand Archives, the more you begin to notice and appreciate the energy and deliberation that went into crafting all of its inter-locking pieces. On one track, a plucked cello substitutes in for an electric bass, on another, a banjo is played with a slide, smoothing out its rough edges so that it will blend better with the vocals. I've listened to this album over 30 times and there are still sounds that I can't place with certainty, as well as a slew of others that I only know about from reading interviews with the band. Headphones are probably a good idea here, if only to pick up on some of the nifty production tricks they pull, like alternating the sides of vocal leads, and crossfading at the end of a couple songs. This seems especially worth noting given how easy it is to miss all of the precision by simply getting caught up in how pleasant sounding it all is. There are maybe two or three songs where the lead melody isn't immediately memorable, and while Brooke's voice may sound a bit airy at times, he gets around this problem by constructing elaborate multiple-part harmonies, sometimes layering his own voice, sometimes juxtaposing his against a cadre of back-up vocalists (never to better effect than in his duet with Sera Cahoone on "Swan Matches"). It also bears noting that his voice, if a bit non-descript, is exceedingly easy on the ears, a refreshing alternative to the John Darnielles and Stephen Malkmuses that seem to have taken over indie music (not that I don't love them both).

The Downside:

This album was cut in piece-meal seesions at three different studios, and the more you listen to it, the more the subtle recording and mixing differences between tracks can start to affect the flow. Equally important is the fact that the range of styles and the sequencing's penchant for somewhat abrupt shifts in tone, while never reaching Beck-like proportions, could make this an album of hits and skips, or at least something you might be tempted to re-sequence. The lyrics never take away from a song, but they rarely add to it as well, which gives them an ephemeral quality and makes them one of the album's few missed opportunities.

Bound Stems - The Family Afloat

2009-03-27T20:44:00.006-04:00

General Ratings:

Rating: 8
Breadth of Appeal: 6
Consistency of Quality: 7

RIYL: Tapes ‘n Tapes, Broken Social Scene, Cursive

Further Listening: Oxford Collapse, Desaparecidos, Kevin Drew

Place of Origin: Chicago, IL

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keyboards, Vocals, Female Backup Vocals, Acoustic Guitar, Banjo, Shaker, Handclaps, Tambourine, Whistling, Typewriter

Mood Tones: Walking through the city to a party of yet unknown quality.

Song Highlights: Taking Tips from the Gallery Gang, Winston, Happens to Us All Otherwise

Favorite Lyrics:

“On a lucky afternoon, /
I pull the blankets to my chin. /
You sing about your little town. /
I fall in love with you again.” (from Clear Water and Concrete)

“Heard you called it quits /
and spelled it out the day we met. /
You said ‘We’re not gonna take this lying down /
We’re not gonna take this lying down.’ /
The evening was clear and brief, /
walked several blocks of empty streets. /
There’s a shadow world hangin’ over our heads. /
There’s a shadow world hangin’ over our heads.

The clever kids are buying drinks, /
and we can’t make much sense of it. /
At the end of the evening it’s time, /
and it’s the end of the evening (it’s time).” (from Cloak of Blue Sky)

“On the evening radio, /
with his hand to god /
he said, ‘I knew it all along.’ /
Though when he and I talked /
he said, ‘Tell me what you think of the world, would you now?’” (from Winston)

Further Thoughts:

Bound Stems existed from 2002-2008, never seemed to get much attention, and sadly put out only two LPs (as well as one EP in their final lineup and a smattering of earlier EPs). Their first album, “Appreciation Night,” has some gems but is uneven--Bobby Gallivan seems unsure what sort of vocal delivery he’s after, and the band as a whole seems unwilling to embrace their hooks.

“A Family Float” exhibits a willful (and welcome) move toward accessibility--the melodies are clearer and stronger and the arrangements somewhat streamlined. Only somewhat, though. There are still unusual time signatures, structurally complicated songs, and impressive musicianship here. Opener “Taking Tips from the Gallery Gang” is representative, moving through three distinct sections: a normal guitar and bass indie number develops into a wall of sound only to give way to a minimal section of synths and kickdrum, but then a crunchier guitar returns to lead the song into a final group singalong. There aren’t really any straightforward verse/chorus constructions to be had here.

What’s remarkable is how catchy the album then manages to be. A chorus is training for its latter instantiations, and rare is the songwriter who makes the first chorus already familiar without resorting to cliché. Rarer still is the songwriter who then resists bringing such a turn back, but labors in the creation of a new one instead. This lends the album a resiliency if not consistency. Given the ambition, it’s easy enough to point to less interesting sections in any song. But these are now tension building, put in service of larger deferral and payoff structures. Not that there aren’t a few changeups thrown in as well: a lovely keyboard loop on “Clear Water and Concrete,” a Shins-esque falsetto “La La La” set on “Cloak of Blue Sky,” and especially the more meditative acoustic guitar and banjo-driven “Winston.”

The album’s defining feature is Gallivan’s delivery, though. He ranges from speak sing to a “Saddlecreek warble” (Spin) to a barroom singalong leader. And he almost never sings in a regular meter, finding a new pattern or rhythm every few lines. Usually such a method is awkward and stilted, but Gallivan’s missteps are few, no doubt because of the careful crafting of the changes and syncing with his backers. All this does, not surprisingly, make the album a classic grower, however, whose charms might not be immediately obvious or accessible in their full force.

The Downside:

Gallivan’s voice isn’t for everyone. He reminds me most directly of Cursive’s Tim Kasher (without the extremes of shouting and hardcore posturing) and of Conor Oberst (without the extremes of emo and fragility posturing)--both far from univerally beloved frontmen--and there are also a few moments where his speak sing mode verges a little too close to something like Dispatch.

M'arrêter

2009-03-26T22:19:00.004-04:00

The first of many.

Fanfarlo - Reservoir

2009-03-25T12:09:00.009-04:00

[The idea was that David and I would both review this without having discussed the band too extensively to see how similar our reviews came out.]

General Ratings:

Rating: 9
Breadth of Appeal: 8
Consistency of Quality: 9

RIYL: the Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Beirut

Further Listening: Corto Maltese, Speedmarket Avenue, Mazarin

Place of Origin: London, England

Mood Tones: An unexpectedly temperate winter day in which the sky is compared to a dome.

Song Highlights: I’m a Pilot, Drowning Men, Harold T. Wilkins or How to Wait for a Very Long Time

Favorite Lyrics:

“If I stay in this room, /
they’ll remember me for my youth.” (from I’m a Pilot)

“We can still afford to not make sense at all.” (from Drowning Men)

“For atoms have gone /
as far as atoms will go. /
Your books write themselves, /
they line up row after row.” (from The Walls Are Coming Down)

Further Thoughts:

I’ve been listening to it regularly for a month now, and I’m increasingly convinced that “Reservoir” is the equal of the Arcade Fire’s “Funeral,” the album it’s most obviously indebted to. There are no heights the height of “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” or “Rebellion (Lies)” here, but there also aren’t the lows of “In the Backseat” or stretches of “Neighborhood #4 (Kettles)” or some of the other slower songs. My choice of song highlights is close to arbitrary, so consistent is the quality of the album. There’s nothing here resembling a bad song, and I would go so far as to venture that there aren’t even any bad moments. I credit no small measure of this to Peter Katis’s production--the man behind the boards on “Boxer,” “Turn on the Bright Lights,” and “Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters,” three of the best-sounding records in recent memory. Those are all rather paranoid, claustrophobic records, though, whereas "Reservoir" is open, generous, and anthemic. This is my favorite record since The National’s “Boxer,” and that’s probably one of my five favorite records of all time.

Fanfarlo played SXSW this weekend, and one hopes that at the very least they’ll come away with some well-placed reviews (In the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, and Tapes ‘n Tapes mold, it’s pretty easy to imagine Pitchfork exploding this band, though, sadly, I can also imagine some asshole reviewer giving it a cursory listen, accusing them of ripping off the RIYL touchstones and moving on). Unless they’re purposely CYHSY-ing it (“Reservoir” is self-released, available on their website and (recently) now Itunes) it’s not hard to imagine those shows and the sheer strength of the album spawning a record or distribution deal, either.

The Downside:

This band has only two flaws so far as I’m concerned. First, their mediocre name, which seems at first goofy, but turns out to be pretentious (it’s a Baudelaire reference). More importantly, Balthazar’s voice is a bit too unflappable. Unlike CYHSY’s Alec Ounsworth (who he most resembles, without the extremes of whining), Win Butler, and Zach Condon, Balthazar doesn’t seem to have a second level to take his voice to, and so he can’t quite sell his choruses the way he should given Fanfarlo’s anthemic sound.

It’s probably worth mentioning too that guitarist Mark West left the band after the album was recorded (none of his other projects seem interesting on brief perusal). Most of Fanfarlo’s songs are built up in many layers on a foundation of simple chord changes, so it’s hard to imagine this having a huge effect on their sound.

Fanfarlo - Reservoir

2009-03-24T19:53:00.029-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 8
Lyrics: 7
Scope: 7
Consistency: 8

RIYL: The Arcade Fire, Black-Sheep-Boy-era Okkervil River, Beirut

Further Listening: Mixed Cases, Ra Ra Riot, Ohbijou

Place of Origin: London, UK

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric & Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Keyboard/Synthesizer, Piano, Trumpet, Strings, Accordion, Glockenspiel, Mandolin, Alternative Percussion (hand claps, foot stomps, junk bag, shaker), Multi-Tracked Vocals, Singing Saw, Clarinet, Banjo, Melodica, Whistling, Tape/Pedal Manipulation.

Mood Tones:

Season: Fall
Weather: Windy
Time of Day: Dusk

Song Highlights: The Walls Are Coming Down, I'm a Pilot, Luna

Favorite Lyrics:

"You had the driver sign your arm/
My hospitals will welcome you home/
Like a truth, with Godmothers aching/
To look at your grace and believe what you say/
But kid, I'm a pilot: it's all I believe in/
It's all I believe in, you can ride on my back." (from "I'm a Pilot")

"Cry murder, cry what you like,/
Just like the comet, lead the way/
We'll tear it down, we'll hold the truth/
By the neck, by the neck/
Kick in the doors and burn the books/
Try to forget, try to forget." (from "Comets")

"Atoms have gone as/
Far as atoms will go/
Your books write themselves, they/
Line up in row after row." (from "The Walls Are Coming Down")

Other Thoughts:

Fanfarlo may just be the best new band you've never heard of. Now a quintet, following the departure of their guitar player, they're a London-based band formed around Simon Balthazar, who originally hails from Gothenburg, Sweden. They've quietly released a smattering of singles, mostly on local indie labels (including the upcoming "Drowning Men," out soon on Moshi Moshi, which itself is proving to be a label to watch out for), but make their great leap forward with Reservoir, one of the best albums I've heard in a good long while. True, it may only be March, but if another record comes along this year that's both as instantly enjoyable and sustainable as this, 2009 will be a gifted year indeed. I can't stress strongly enough how much you really need to hear this record.

Why? The first thing you notice, probably the first thing you notice about any good record, is the strength of the leads, most of which are almost immediately remarkable. Mr. Balthazar is graced not only with a keen ear for melodies, but also a strong tenor with which to annunciate them, his voice falling somewhere between Zach Condon and David Byrne (at his more subdued moments). Next you hear how thoroughly orchestrated the album is, how tightly violins and trumpets and synthesizers (along with a host of other instruments, see the list for more details) fit together over the basic trinity of guitar, bass and drums. Speaking of the bass and drums, it wasn't until the fourth or fifth listen that I realized how solid the rhythm section is: the word anthemic gets tossed around a lot these days, but is apt for a majority of the cuts here, and is a testament mostly to driving beats and acrobatic basslines that Amos Memon and Justin Finch concoct, which serve as the backbone that supports all of the band's loftier impulses. Delving deeper into Reservoir, it reveals a level of nuance that is truly rare from a self-financed, freshman effort. Note the way the backing vocals are layered on top of each other on "Ghosts" (a song about a town whose living population has mostly fled the meteorological impingements of their ethereal counterparts); they sound, well, ghostlike. Note the whistling coda on "Fire Escape" that puts the final spin on the nocturnal swirl begun by the keyboards. All of the choices feel considered and add synergistically in a full and vibrant rendering.

Am I gushing? On more recent listens, I've been struck by how consistent the material is. It's perhaps no surprise that this is one of the most balanced records I've reviewed (a fact reflected in the ratings). What is a surprise is that there aren't any tracks that I skip, something I can't even say for some of my favorite records. I mean not to imply that some tracks aren't better than others, but rather that there are no place holders, no filler; every song has some line or part that jumps out and grabs your attention, even the instrumental closer. Also, as I've mentioned before, I think it's truly difficult for a record to have both a strong consistency of tone and good breadth of appeal. Here is that album.

Also, what kind of ridiculous hot streak is Peter Katis on? Better known to the music world as the knob-twirler behind Tarquin studios (the Bridgeport, CT recording hole that gave us Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights, The National's Alligator and Boxer, Frightened Rabbit's Midnight Organ Fight and The Twilight Sad's 14 Autumns & 15 Winters), Katis makes good on the idea that, when done properly, production can add as much to a song as a lead instrument. To fully appreciate his contribution to this album, track down some of the band's early singles and compare them to the cuts on Reservoir. Certainly it's the same band, same breathy vocals, same kitchen sink instrumentation, same vivaciousness, but even the best of them are missing the polish and grace that each of the tracks on Reservoir is wrapped in. When you first hear "The Walls Are Coming Down" you're tempted to think they're talking about the Wall of Sound, the big tsunami of beautiful music that's spilling out of your speakers. But put on your headphones, pay a little more attention and don't be surprised to hear all of the pieces slip apart independently from each other; lead vocal - backing vocals - acoustic guitar - mandolin (or possibly ukulele?) - bass - drums - trumpet - violin - glockenspiel, sometimes up to nine or ten distinct parts at once. Try this same thing with the earlier songs and you'll drive yourself mad; the leads are distinct, but the rest of the parts pack together in polymorphic analogue.

As of this review, Reservoir is only available through the band's website, as for some crazy reason, no label has picked this up yet (or perhaps because, as Ben is likely to suggest, they're pulling a Clap-Your-Hands-Say-Yeah maneuver). Either way, take my word that tracking it down is well worth whatever time and money it takes.

The Downside:

The only real beef I have with this record is that occasionally its influences border on source material. The best example of this is "Drowning Men," whose piano/bass combo is instantly reminiscent of the Arcade Fire song "Rebellion (Lies)." But even this is forgivable, given the fact that this is their first album. Here's to hoping there are many more where this came from.

Sambassadeur - Migration

2009-03-11T13:21:00.006-04:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 5
Scope: 4
Consistency: 7

RIYL: The Go Betweens, The Lightning Seeds, The Magnetic Fields

Further Listening: The Labrador Records stable, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Fireflies

Place of Origin: Gothenburg, Sweden

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic & Electric Guitars, Keyboards/Synthesizers, Bass, Drums, Drum Machine, Female/Male Vocals, Piano, Violin, Saxophone, Trumpet, Autoharp, Tambourine, Foot Stomps, Droning Backing Vocals.

Mood Tones:

Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: The Park, Something to Keep, Migration

Favorite Lyrics:

"There's no time for disagreeing/
When the scene is so deceiving." (from "Final Say")

"The falling of stars/
Will come back in fashion again/
On nights when/
You were happening." (from "Subtle Changes")

"Now that I've turned/
Every conceivable cheek/
Do I have to admit/
It makes me sore and weak?" (from "Someday We're Through")

Other Thoughts:

Pelle Almqvist (of all people) once made a comment about Swedes having to re-invent all of the types of music that they heard on TV growing up, because the albums were never locally available to them. This idea gains traction when one considers the breadth of sounds coming out of Sweden in recent years against it's population size (about 9.2 million people, roughly the same as the state of North Carolina) and homogeneity of demographic (84% of the country identify as ethnic Swedes). I mention this because to my ear, Sambassadeur sounds unmistakably Swedish, fitting easily into a constellation including ABBA, The Cardigans and Jens Lekman. If one were to tug on the roots a little harder, I think they could be traced back in equal parts to the New Romantic acts coming out of Britain in the 1980s and the American AM radio hits of the 1970s. So I suppose you could argue that a band like Sambassadeur is one generation removed from the sonic integration that Almqvist was talking about, now swinging the pendulum back in the direction of unification of sound and aesthetic.

But this parsing itself misses one of the most unifying aspects of modern Swedish music, namely its penchant for pairing sunny melodies with utterly depressing lyrics, of which Sambassadeur are guilty as charged. One imagines this as a response to the epidemic of Seasonal Affective Disorder that descends upon Sweden from September to May, with the music being written as a bulwark and the lyrics as an exorcism. As one might guess from glancing at that section of the review, Migration isn't exactly lyrically robust. The lyrics are, however, quite intimate and romantic, easily read as slightly embellished journal entries. Taken separately they may seem trifling, but in aggregate they display equal amounts of a longing for human contact and a sense of hopelessness regarding the prospects that any meaningful interaction might occur.

As mentioned before, this depressing sentiment is counterbalanced by the music, which is continuously cheerful and up tempo. By my count, there are at least 4 different types of synthesizer employed, which establishes the primary sonic commonality between Migration and it's New Wave forebearers (even some of the acoustic instruments sound digitally stretched and processed). All of this is laid over a bed of intensely melodic, interweaving acoustic and electric guitars that are the album's bedrock. We hear more of Anna Persson and less of Daniel Permbo than on the eponymous debut, which is probably preferable, as Permbo's voice is rather thin and frequently pushed beyond the boundaries it was intended to remain within.

Finally, to those who seek out and enjoy this record, I can't suggest strongly enough that you spend some time plumbing the depths of the Labrador Records catalogue. From the sampler box alone, I've found 5 artists that I love (The Radio Dept., Suburban Kids with Biblical Names, Club 8 and Pelle Carlberg, along with Sambassadeur), and a good number of others that I enjoy in smaller doses. I can't think of any other label currently operating whose batting average is higher.

The Downside:

As mentioned before, the lyrics can be rather simple, and to an indisposed ear, a bit over-wrought. The melodies are syrupy and could come to be too much for those lacking the appropriate dentum. The strong, mechanical beats may feel a bit dated, and/or cause one to flash back to a more awkward and hormonal time in one's life. If listened to with headphones, this record may incite spontaneous bottom shaking, which depending on location and company could be a very good or very bad thing. Handle with caution and optimism, preferably in appropriate levels of daylight.

23 of 69 Love Songs [rethought]

2009-02-23T22:28:00.009-05:00

A little data-gathering operation, which will perhaps be relevant to the conversation below.

(Left in order for ease of comparison)

1. Absolutely Cuckoo
2. All My Little Words
3. I Don't Want to Get Over You
4. The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side
5. I Think I Need a New Heart
6. The One You Really Love
7. A Pretty Girl Is Like...
8. (Crazy for You But) Not that Crazy
9. Washington, D.C.
10. Long-Forgotten Fairytale
11. Papa Was a Rodeo
12. Underwear
13. It's a Crime
14. I'm Sorry I Love You
15. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure
16. Bitter Tears
17. Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget
18. Meaningless
19. Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin
20. Queen of the Savages
21. I Can't Touch You Anymore
22. Two Kinds of People
23. How to Say Goodbye

Alternate takes invited.

The Stage Names/Stand Ins [rethought]

2009-02-22T19:56:00.010-05:00

I'm gonna try something a little different here.

I often find myself second-guessing even my favorite artists. Frustrated by songs that shouldn't have made the cut (or B-sides that should have), collaborations that (while well-intentioned) never should have seen the light of day (e.g. the Tom Waits/Bette Middler duet on "I Never Talk To Strangers"), horrendous album art (the original cover of You Forgot It In People, anyone?), even simple sequencing problems. The number of records that I listen to without skipping any songs can be counted on my left hand. And nowhere is this more true than with double albums.

Rare is the book longer than 500 pages that wouldn't have benefitted from being edited down, and doubly rare is the double album that shouldn't have been a single, stream-lined, 12-track massacre. The classic thought experiment in this vein (which we can get to eventually, if there's any interest) is to try to whittle the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs down to 23 Love Songs (the length of each of the original 3 volumes), or else however many you can fit onto a single 80-minute CD. No more "Punk Rock Love" throwaways, no more "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget" nonsense, just your absolute favorite cuts lined up end to end. While it may be impossible to find any song that an absolute consensus could agree to ditch, I think a strong two-thirds majority wouldn't be that hard to reach.

Enter Okkervil River.

Mr. Sheff mostly brings this on himself, as he was fond of regaling interviewers with his distaste for double albums when discussing OR's Stage Names/Stand Ins project, basically a double album with the first disc concerning the pitfalls of fame, the second, in negative, looking at the liminal space that surrounds fame, the groupies, ex-boyfriends, has-beens, etc. First, there's no small amount of hubris to posturing in opposition to the form you've chosen to work within. It's almost as if he's saying "double albums have never worked before because I've never made one" (the flip side of this notion is that he took his own distaste as a challenge, a nicer way to phrase things and a notion that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to, but ultimately just the other side of the same coin). Second, academically speaking, the line drawn between these two groups of muses seems artificial to me, specifically the idea that there would be anything so fundamentally different between them that they couldn't cohabitate on a single disc just seems wrong to me. Third, and perhaps most apropos, the bulk of the Stand Ins feels like filler, and even it's best moments seem to reflect even better ones on the Stage Names (cf. "Pop Lie" vs. "Unless It's Kicks," "Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979" vs. "John Allyn Smith Sails"). While this may underscore his conceit nicely, it doesn't make the slow moments on the Stand Ins any easier to swallow.

Therefore, in service of a more personal hubris, I have merged the two albums, cut the filler, resequenced and compiled the album that Okkervil River should have put out. I give you:

The Stage Names/Stand Ins [rethought]

1. Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe

2. Pop Lie

3. Unless It's Kicks

4. A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene

5. You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man

6. Lost Coastlines

7. Calling and Not Calling My Ex

8. Love to a Monster

9. Plus Ones

10. John Allyn Smith Sails

11. Title Track

12. Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979

Peter and the Wolf - Lightness

2009-02-17T21:49:00.016-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 6
Scope: 5
Consistency: 7

RIYL: Seven Swans era Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Further Listening: Deer Tick, Laura Gibson, Lewis and Clark

Place of Origin: Austin, TX

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic Guitar, Male/Female Vocal Harmonies, Electric Guitar, Drums, Alternative Percussion (congas, shaker, foot stomps), Ukulele, Piano, Trumpet, Ambient Sounds, Whistling.

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Cool & Clear
Time of Day: Dusk

Song Highlights: Safe Travels, The Bonsai Tree, The Highway

Favorite Lyrics:

"God, I'm glad I met you/
Life was getting old/
But you like me,/
And my dark poetry/
And you're happy when it's cold." (from Holy Water)

"We wander through your city,/
We've traveled very far,/
We spend our hard-earned money at the bar./
We can't afford a taxi,/
We shouldn't drive a car,/
And tomorrow we return to the sea." (from Dear Old Robyn)

"How lucky to be/
So unusually free:/
You and me,/
Under the apple tree." (from The Apple Tree)

Other Thoughts:

For the most part, Peter & the Wolf is Red Hunter, a semi-nomadic Texan troubadour who made a name for himself in the Austin scene by playing shows in unconventional venues, like cemetaries and rooftops. And without reading too much into what's clearly an intentional, self-made mystique, there is an air of authenticity to P&tW's recordings that is absent from most of the fruit of the mid-oughts indie folk revival. Many of the songs appearing on Lightness are re-recordings, the originals appearing either on the band's first two CDRs (Peter & the Wolf and Experiments in Junk) or Alien Sun, the last record Mr. Hunter released under his given name. This stones-in-a-river technique was the bread and butter of most folk musicians before the advent of recording began casting the concept of any song's performance in stone, and coupled with the simplicity of arrangement, cleanliness of production and Red's well-chronicled itchy feet, it makes the record seem more like a road diary than the sequential capturing of performative pinnacles that most albums generally strive to be.

It's no coincidence then that the main subject matter of the album is movement, primarily across space, and that most of the songs feel like postcards ("Grey Overcoat" even ends with the phrase "You'd love it here/ I visit, but I can't stay"). I've often thought that the best way to listen to this album would be on a long train ride, looking out the windows as the towns roll by, or barring that, in the central leg of a roadtrip. This serial quality slices both ways, establishing a firm consistency of tone but undercutting the idea that any particular person, location or event in each song might have any special significance. To put it another way, we know that Red likes out-of-the-way, exotic places, but are left with the sense that all in all, one is as good as the next.

Also worth mentioning is the sheer tunefulness of most of the songs on Lightness. Gentle acoustic strums in minor keys are almost always accompanied by lush vocal harmonies, simple percussion and occasional, assiduous additional instrumentaion. While it's easy to get caught up in discussing the larger ideas of a record, here more than in most contemporary recordings, it's the basic melodies, not the production's smoke and mirrors, that will keep you coming back for more. Also, the spare way in which he chooses to orchestrate the songs lends each extra piece an air of intentionality and indelibility (cf. the trumpet on "Safe Travels" or the piano on "The Highway"), which is difficult to match when when blending more than three or four tonal parts.

The Downside:

None of the songs break the 4 minute mark, and many of them barely breach the 2. Taken as an album, this is practically meaningless, but in isolation, individual songs can feel insubstantial. This isn't aided by the fact that P&tW's formula is, as mentioned above, fairly simple and seldom strayed from. In the one instance when it is, the one-two punch of "Captain Dan" and "Black Saltwater," surprisingly agressive (and in the case of "Black Saltwater," nearly melody-less) cuts. They're placed toward the end of the album, after mood and tone have been clearly established and sustained, very nearly breaking the flow of the entire record, and I'm not really sure what Mr. Hunter is playing after by including them, as neither is particularly noteworthy. I almost always end up skipping them. On the other hand, what one person sees as maintenance of tone, another will see as a lack of ideas, and if you're the sort of person who highly values variation within a record, Lightness may bore you. For my part, I'm not sure how many listens it will take for something this pretty to seem pedestrian, but it's definitely a good deal more than I've given it.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Etiquette

2009-02-17T21:15:00.012-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 6
Lyrics: 8
Scope: 3
Consistency: 7

RIYL: The Magnetic Fields, The Smiths, The Postal Service

Further Listening: Sambassadeur, Future Bible Heroes, My Little Airport

Place of Origin: Chicago, IL

Instrument/Sounds List: Keyboard/Synthesizer, Drum Machine, Piano, Bass, Drums, Flute.

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Rainy
Time of Day: Evening

Song Highlights: I Love Creedence, Scattered Pearls, Holly Hobby (version)

Favorite Lyrics:

"We Drink too much and fuck too soon/
Smoke cigarettes in rented rooms/
We quit our jobs & shoot the moon/
& cut our wrists & sleep til noon." (from Young Shields)

"We laughed like we were queens/
& split our ballgowns at the seams/
& every single time I'd dream/
It was only El & me/
But then she slipped away from me/
She met a boy from New Jersey/
And they fell fast in love, of course/
I swear it felt like a divorce." (from I Love Creedence)

"Cap & gown, in purple & gold/
You're 22 years old/
& a woman now, you're told./
Aunt Beth & Charlie cut a check/
For their graduating niece,/
& you marked your independence/
With a signature on a lease." (from Cold White Christmas)

Other Thoughts:

This feels like a coming-of-age record to me, not in the sense that the songs describe that awkward time, but rather that Owen Ashworth seems to finally grasp the full range of possibilities that are available to him. Starting strictly as a home recording project (their first album was called Answering Machine Music with good reason), CFTPA has become something grander, if not necessarily bigger. Growth is a concept that gets batted around a lot in music criticism, often to prop up a vague distaste for the new material of a once-cherished band (e.g. "[artist] seems to be just treading water here; the same sounds and themes that made [previous record] seem like a revelation make [new record] feel tired"), but the extra inches here are undeniable and suggest that Ashworth is a record or two away from something classic. The beats and synthesizers that are CFTPA's calling card are still here, to be sure, but there are also a number of acoustic instruments (even a flute) intermeshed in the fabric, and generally higher-quality production values. To understand the impact that this makes, take a second to track down the two versions of the song Roberta C. that are out there (the first is on Twinkle Echo and the second is on the Young Shields EP, the first single from Etiquette). The lyrics and melody are exactly the same, but I wouldn't blame you for not batting an eyelash at the first, whose production sounds light and thin. The second version kills, in part because of the added background strings that come in at just the right time, but also because the cleaner production and surer-footed vocal performance make you really pay attention to the story, which is heart-breaking. It's not fair to call this album a quantum leap, as Casiotone's greatest strengths have always been Ashworth's genius with narrative and keen eye for detail, but it wouldn't be that far off from the truth.

Speaking of the narratives, good lord, they're here. The only album I've reviewed so far that approximately equaled Etiquette for wealth of options in the Lyrics department was Shallow Grave. There's basically a short story collection here, as the scenarios in no less than 7 of these songs are fully realized enough to be source material. My favorite is probably "Scattered Pearls," in which the narrator tries to console her mother over the loss of an heirloom pearl necklace that is broken at a bar by a drunk third party who is trying to pick up the narrator's sister, only 7 of the pearls having been recovered. I think you get the idea. As I mentioned in the Dent May review, Mr. Ashworth ranks close to the top of my list of writers who implicitly understand my particular subset of Generation Y (cf. the quote from Young Shields in the Lyrics section). He certainly doesn't disappoint on Etiquette, and if anything, he's probably getting better, as he seems to have moved from trying to enunciate idiosyncratic emotions to constructing well-defined characters.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the beats, which are strong, if a bit conventional. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's just using the demo beats that come with his various keyboards, so they're simple, familiar and mostly in 4/4 time. The further into the record you get, the less prevalent they become, and I could understand some of the apprehension that sprouted among the small-but-vocal fan base that he was tracing the same sanitizing arc as Stephin Merritt. Personally, I'm not bothered, as the songs are all top notch, and the beats were never much of a draw for me in the first place. Still, if they were a draw for you before, or you got sucked in by "Nashville Parthenon" or the Lightning Seedsesque fills in "Scattered Pearls," fret not; if the Town Topic EP (the stop-gap movie soundtrack released a few months ago) is any indication, Owen's still got some dancing left in him.

The Downside:

While Mr. Ashworth's voice is unquestionably deep, it's not what I'd call robust, and there are multiple instances where his performance borders on sing-talk (not to Lou Reed levels, but regrettable none the less). The strange blend of club rhythms and introspective confessional is refreshingly off-beat, but also jarring and dissociative at times, so regressive listeners need not apply. The album is a bit front-loaded, and I usually only make it to the end every other listen (the later songs aren't bad, per se, but less instantly appealing, less caffeinated). Also, as is probably deducible from the band's name, there's a strong streak of melancholy that pervades every cranny of this album, so if you're feeling faint of spirit, best to take it in small doses, in brightly lit rooms.

Emperor X - Central Hug / Friendarmy / Fractal Dunes (And the Dreams that Resulted)

2009-02-15T17:05:00.008-05:00

General Ratings:

Rating: 7
Breadth of Appeal: 4
Consistency of Quality: 6

RIYL: early Modest Mouse, The Dismemberment Plan, The Microphones

Further Listening: Electric President, The Cadets, Tres Camisados

Place of Origin: Jacksonville, FL

Instrument/Sounds List: electric and acoustic guitar, synthesizers, drums, drum machine, multi-tracked vocals, bass, hand claps, jingling keys, whistling, laptop blips, found recordings, (a probably synthesized) harpsichord

Mood Tones: Sunrise approaches and you’ve allowed your bedtime to slip later and later and you’re considering staying up all day in order to reset.

Song Highlights: Raytrancer, Edgeless, Right to the Rails

Favorite Lyrics:

“That’s fine, I’m going home to fail.” (from Raytrancer)

“And all five hundred thousand citizens of Wichita /
tried to get a piece of your beautiful face, /
drooling on themselves in the Methodist parking lots. /
Throw your shoes in the Arkansas and watch ‘em get erased."

and

"Is there no community college in your county?” (from The Citizens of Wichita)

Other Thoughts:

Chad Matheny has been involved with The Cadets, Tres Camisados, Thee Harmonious Fists, Beatcancel, and Neosporin (though the latter three don’t have much of an internet presence). His solo project, Emperor X, is by far the most interesting (and widely known) of these. It’s clear that he knows his way around a four/eight-track, but one imagines too that he’s the sort of musician that could fall into a two-hour conversation about his bag of effects pedals. In combination, these characteristics lead to a surprising complexity and depth of sound for a (non-Pro-Tools) homemade recording. The album has a steady aesthetic conjoining lo-fi with high-tech, but throws all kinds of songs at you (despite the title, it is an album, not a collection of EPs). There are punkers in “Shut Shut Up” and “Right to the Rails,” which ends with Matheny shouting “go” over a hundred times in forty seconds. “Sfearion” is a song to either drive or advertise cars to (let’s not talk here about whether these feelings are distinguishable). And “Raytrancer,” “The Citizens of Wichita,” and “Ainseley” are really just sweet little ballads dressed up in more or less electronic gadgetry.

The Downside:

If you find Isaac Brock’s less polished moments, Travis Morrison’s use of a-melodic verses to sell his choruses, or Phil Elvrum’s fascination with manipulating stretches of static off-putting, this probably isn’t for you. Matheny’s voice is both nasal and cutting, and he revels in it, pushing it to the breaking point in the “go”s and “shut shut up”s of the opening tracks and into a caustic screech on “Use Your Hands.” But there’s something fascinating in his multi-tracking of his own bad voice, a production tactic usually reserved for the Chan Marshalls of the world.

[Bonus points: On The Cadets’ “Gville as Rare Factions,” is that Bill Callahan singing?]

Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele - The Good Feeling Music Of

2009-02-11T13:20:00.013-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 6
Lyrics: 7
Scope: 2
Consistency: 8

RIYL: Burt Bacharach, The Magnetic Fields, Jonathan Richman

Further Listening: Petty & Booka, Herman Dune, Milo Jones

Place of Origin: Taylor, MS

Instrument/Sounds List: Ukulele (of course), multi-tracked vocals, bass, drums, alternative percussion (tambourine, junk bag, finger snaps), lap steel, trumpet, trombone, tuba, violin, electric & acoustic guitar .

Mood Tones:

Season: Summer
Weather: Hot & Humid
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: God Loves You Michael Chang, You Can't Force a Dance Party, College Town Boy

Favorite Lyrics:

"All the way from Brooklyn, Sally came to see me/
'I'll throw you a party,' I gave my guarantee,/
But Michael's far too drunk, he's watching YouTube videos,/
And I'll be in the corner, reading poetry and prose."

(from You Can't Force a Dance Party)

"Since Graduation Day he feels like a fraud/
He still regrets he never studied abroad/
He's never been to Paris, never to Prague/
Oh my God!"

(from College Town Boy)

" 'No, I'm only hanging here/
Until Grad School,' he swore/
Oh, he's lived all over this town/
He's worked in every store.
There must be something in the water here/
There must be something in the beer."

(from College Town Boy)

Other Thoughts:

This record is a bit of a Bon Bon. The picture of Dent May on the cover of The Good Feeling Music Of makes him look like Neil Hamburger's younger, slightly better looking cousin, and that sentiment may not be entirely out of place. There is a nigh-unimpregnable veneer of irony that coats pretty much every song on TGFMO, and depending on how its distinct blend of sarcasm and schmaltz hits you, you'll either love or hate this album (my guess is that 7 out of 10 people who hear the first song won't make it to the second). Mr. May is mostly a first-person narrator, regaling us with stories of downtrodden commiserants (cf. Howard, College Town Boy, God Loves you Michael Chang) and personal shortcomings (cf. Girls on the Square, You Can't Force a Dance Party, I'm an Alcoholic) that are both blunt and (to my taste) hilarious. Perhaps more aptly put: if the fact that you can't incite drunken Southerners to dance on cue doesn't strike you as funny, true or songworthy, you might as well stop reading this review now.

With regards to the music, for an album that at first blush sounds as exotic as this, the recipe is surprisingly simple. The only instruments on every track are the ukulele, bass and drums. The interplay between the ukulele and the bass in particular is what really sells the tropical mood, and I was amazed to realize that he only uses a guitar twice, once an electric, once an acoustic. The lap steel makes several appearances, reminding you that it was originally a Hawaiian instrument before it was co-opted by Nashville, and the few other instruments you'll hear are used mostly for backdrop. Simple instrumentation doesn't necessarily mean boring songs though, and I'd wager you'd be surprised how many of the melodies you could recall after your first listen.

There are a handful of musicians making music today (like Owen Ashworth and John Darnielle to name two) that seem to have a lock on my particular subset of the population, namely over-educated, under-employed 20-something slackers, and one of the biggest impressions that this record leaves is that Mr. May knows this demographic and its excentricities very well. By most accounts, I am the eponymous College Town Boy. The Girls on the Square do make me blue. A guy I ride the train with every day may actually be Howard. However outlandish his humor, Mr. May always takes care to ground his narratives with well-drawn, accurate details, and it's probably these tiny moments of recognition, strewn throughout the album, that grant it whatever substance it has.

The Downside:

If you've just about had it up to here with irony for irony's sake (and I wouldn't blame you), this record is not for you. If you are not feeling particularly indulgent, this record is not for you. If multiple layers of falsetto backing vocals sound like so many nails on a chalkboard to you, guess what?

Being that this record practically screams to not be taken seriously, the two or three cuts that approximate love songs feel pretty vacant, excepting for the melody on 26 Miles, which is top notch. What I said about repeat listens in the Headlights review, take that and double it for TGFMO. Be sure to have your pet spayed or neutered. Goodnight, America.

Headlights - Some Racing, Some Stopping

2009-02-07T14:48:00.021-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 6
Lyrics: 5
Scope: 4
Consistency: 6

RIYL: Camera Obscura, The Concretes, Figure 8 era Elliott Smith

Further Listening: The Sarah Records Catalogue, Pelle Carlberg, The Dimes

Place of Origin: Champaign, IL

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric guitar, keyboard/organ, bass, drums, glockenspiel, male/female vocals, acoustic guitar, background strings and horns, singing saw, accordion, hand claps, tambourine, jingle bells.

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Sunny
Time of Day: Late Afternoon

Song Highlights: Cherry Tulips, On April 2, Get Your Head Around It

Favorite Lyrics:

"The window sills, they frame your view /
And your friends have their opinions too, /
I'm sure they'll pass them on to you /
For good measure." (from On April 2)

"The salt on your cheek /
Is just like the sea /
But not as deep." (from Catch Them All)

"Those soft little tunes you sung, /
Come back sometimes in your native tongue. /
September came around again, /
A year older at Summer's end." (from January)

Other Thoughts:

What exactly does the adjective "sunny" mean when applied to pop music? For starters, probably clean production, especially when it comes to guitar and vocal filters. If your singer is a man, hopefully he's a tenor, if she's a woman, hopefully she's an alto, and you get bonus points if you've got one of each. A Keyboard or two won't hurt, provided that we can get specific about them being of light tonality (e.g. the addition of Farfisa or Wurlitzer to a song does nothing to lighten its tone), let's say a Hammond or a Casiotone (with an appropriate setting of course). The drums should probably keep simple, marching beats and the bass should be played more up tempo, preferably on the smaller strings. The melodies must be kept in major keys and hopefully come with harmonies on fifth notes. Throw in some hand claps, tambourine and glockenspiel to round out the effort, et voila, "sunny" is what you have.

And don't be surprised if what you've put together at home sounds a lot like Headlights, as all of the descriptors above apply. Probing a bit deeper, there's an interesting undercurrent of surf music, most notable when an appropriately pedaled guitar shares the melody with the keyboard, and the backing vocals are processed with an echo chamber-like effect. They seem to be well aware of this, and often pair the aforementioned effect with references to water (cf. in the choruses to Cherry Tulips ("I want the sea") and Catch Them All ("Don't swim in that water tonight")). But this is an undertone, and only one of the tricks in their production bag, which also boasts excellent interplay between Erin Fein and Tristan Wraight, the band's two vocalists, the use of glockenspiel as an actual carrier of melody (instead of as an accent or part of a backdrop), pitch-shifting violin and (from what I can tell) singing saw.

It also bears noting, in the interest of full disclosure, that there are a handful of moments on this record that buck the general trend. The most noteworthy among these being the last song, January, which is the only truly melancholy piece in the entire album. The title track is perhaps too slow and quiet to be considered summer-like, and the opener "Get Your Head Around It" eventually builds itself into the aforementioned mold, starting originally in a minor key with a simple guitar line. These exceptions aside, my suggestion to the more Seasonally Affected among us is this: put Some Racing, Some Stopping in between Camera Obscura's Let's Get Out of This Country and Saturday Looks Good To Me's All Your Summer Songs in the CD changer and think your way to May.

The Downside:

Music this easy to enjoy often can feel syrupy when taken in too large a dose, and while the album only plays for a little over half an hour, I wouldn't advise listening to it multiple times on end. The simplicity that begets the music's catchiness also extends to the lyrics, which while never embarassing, don't offer much to close reading. Tristan Wraight, the male vocalist, sounds an awful lot like a young Elliott Smith, meaning his voice will evoke nostalgia to those weaned on XO and Figure 8, and probably sound a bit thin to those who weren't.

Radical Face - Ghost

2009-02-06T14:41:00.012-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 6
Scope: 5
Consistency: 7

RIYL: Sparklehorse, The Microphones, recent Sigur Rós

Further Listening: Electric President, Castanets, Okay

Place of Origin: Jacksonville, FL

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic & electric guitar, piano (prepared & plucked), multi-tracked vocals, alternative percussion (hand claps & foot stomps), ambient sounds, synthesizer/keyboard, banjo, accordion, chimes, vibraphone, violin, harmonium, bass, whistling, effects/tape manipulation.

Mood Tones:

Season: Winter
Weather: Windy
Time of Day: Night

Song Highlights: Welcome Home Son, Glory, Homesick

Favorite Lyrics:

"I sank into the sea/
Wrapped in piano strings./
Few words could open me,/
But you knew them all." (from Wrapped in Piano Strings)

"If blood is thicker than water/
Then let the river in,/
We might drift away,/
But we've got thick skin." (from Let the River In)

"You wear the moon like a halo/
You wear the night like it's your coat." (from Haunted)

Other Thoughts:

Ben Cooper sure likes to keep himself busy. Besides being all aspects of Radical Face, he is 1/2 of the bands Electric President, Iron Orchestra, Mother's Basement & Clone (although only the first 2 have released proper albums). He also appears to be a proficient graphic designer, as all of these groups have well-designed if sporadically-maintained websites (accessible from the main Radical Face page that you can get to by clicking the post title). With such an eye for aesthtics and attention to detail, it should come as no surprise how deeply you can delve into Ghost on repeat listens.

A word about production and its interplay with theme. According to a secondhand source, Ghost is a concept album about spending a year living inside a haunted house. While there's nothing explicitly linking the songs together (other than the eerie mood that nearly all of them evoke), once the idea has been put in your ear, it becomes difficult not to hear it everywhere. He samples field recordings quite liberally and I'm pressed to think of any song on the album that doesn't see the benefit of found sounds. Floorboards creak, children laugh, wind chimes sway; each one an effective atmospheric, if not particularly original. What is original is the way he manipulates his recordings of prepared piano and pairs the manipulations with high-pitched string synthesizers to give the music a dream-like, almost aquatic tone, often mirrored by the presence of bodies of water in the lyrics (c.f Let the River In, Along the Road). Also, the almost entirely corporeal percussion on this album, cutting in and out for punctuation, draws attention to a hollow quality in the production that really sells the conceit nicely.

The Downside:

Mr. Cooper's voice is a high tenor and rather nasal, much in keeping with a trend in indie folk music (e.g. Ray Raposa, Phil Elv(e)rum, John Darnielle, etc.), but perhaps a deal breaker if that sort of thing bothers you. Depending on how the idea of concept albums in general and one whose subject is a haunted house in specific hit you, the near uniformity of mood and subject matter may make this a love-it-or-hate-it kind of an album. The lyrics, while mostly pretty good, don't have many hard lines and seem to find their purpose mostly in reflecting the content of the music. To a less-charitable listener, this may seem ephemeral. But before anyone judges this record too harshly, my suggestion would be to put it on, turn out the lights, wrap yourself up in a blanket and see where it doesn't take you.

Seabear - The Ghost That Carried Us Away

2009-02-05T11:39:00.023-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 4
Scope: 5
Consistency: 5

RIYL: Sufjan Stevens, Belle & Sebastian, recent Iron & Wine

Further Listening: Sin Fang Bous, The Twin Atlas, Amiina

Place of Origin: Reykjavik, Iceland

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic guitar, piano, multi-tracked vocals, violin/fiddle, harmonica, banjo, lap steel, upright bass, drums, electric guitar, trombone, tambourine, organ, flugelhorn, synthesizer, ukulele, glockenspiel, vibraphone, tape manipulation, ambient sounds (including owl hoots and fireworks).

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Sunny
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: I Sing I Swim, Owl Waltz, Arms

Favorite Lyrics:

"Some Nights I swore/
Your mouth/
Was a trap door." (from Owl Waltz)

"Shake my arms, shake my head/
I fell asleep in your cobweb." (from Arms)

"I love the way you say my name/
It sounds different every day." (from Lost Watch)

Other Thoughts:

Seabear began as the home recordings of Sindri Már Sigfússon, who released several records (c.f. I'm Me on Sundays, The Singing Arc EP) before expanding Seabear into a collective (8 people strong as of the writing of this review) and shifting its focus from bare bones, lo-fi recordings to polished, orchestral pop music (and having done so, now has taken the moniker Sin Fang Bous for his solo output, which has come to resemble the poppier side of Animal Collective). One gets the sense that every instrument in their studio space is on the record at least once, and as is probably implied by the swollen instrument list, there's a layering and a fullness of production to nearly every track on the album. In fact, it's in the piecing apart of each melody into its composite parts that the greatest pleasures of this record reside.

Also, here finally is an Icelandic band that can't be described as "glacial." On the contrary, nearly ever song on TGTCUA is sunny and upbeat if not necessarily up tempo. Wistful tones abound. Pretty melodies come cheap. This record, like Virginia, is for lovers. Underneath this veneer though, there's an interesting war being fought between SS's blossoming inner folkie (best exemplified in the song Arms, slightly less so in Seashell) and the weirder, deconstructive impulses that his songwriting was birthed with. Most of the latter is buried toward the end of the album, and approximates a kind of gradual shift in mood that the romantic in me would liken to the setting of the sun.

The Downside:

As is the case with any album that finds its purpose in baroque layering, the simpler, sparser cuts (like Summer Bird Diamond) tend to come off as half-baked. The instrumental first track feels perfunctory (and I'm a sucker for intrumental openers and closers), especially considering how nice an opener Cat Piano would have been. The lyrics frequently rely on stock images of wild animals and oft-used emotional phrases, but as the record definitely evokes the pastoral, and English isn't Mr. Sigfússon's first language, I'm inclined to let that particular peccadillo slide.

Parker & Lily - The Low Lows

2009-01-26T13:00:00.014-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 4
Scope: 4
Consistency: 7

RIYL: Galaxie 500, Yo La Tengo, My Morning Jacket

Further Listening: The Low Lows, Valentine 6, Beach House

Place of Origin: New York City, NY

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric Guitar, Keyboard/Organ, Drums, Drum Machine, Bass, Reverb, Vibraphone, Acoustic Guitar, Lap Steel, Moog, Glockenspiel, Background Horns & Strings, Ambient Sounds

Mood Tones:

Season: Winter
Weather: Clear
Time of Day: Evening

Song Highlights: June Gloom, Suit of Fire, The Low Lows

Favorite Lyrics:

"Candy's Kiss is a red weal/
Slow slip & sweet spill." (from Candy's Last Day)

"Bar light, bar bright,/
First bar I see tonight,/
Wish I might sleep tight." (from June Gloom)

"This suit of fire/
Is cut entirely/
From my desire." (from Suit of Fire)

Other Thoughts:

First, some background information: Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe met each other playing in the band Valentine 6, recorded one album, got married, moved to New York, cut three albums under the name Parker & Lily (the last of which being The Low Lows) and got divorced. Parker has continued to record with the rest of the backing band from their last sessions as The Low Lows, and has released two albums to date (the better of the 2, Shining Violence, should be the next stopping point for anyone who enjoys this record). By most accounts, it was the recording of this album that was the straw that broke the marriage's back.

For being a break-up record, excepting the occasional dig, there isn't as much anger here as one would expect. Instead, most of the album feels meticulously balanced; the guitars clang and distort but the organs smooth over the rough edges and with run-times mostly between 4 and 5 minutes, the songs never seem hurried or agitated. While I wouldn't call this a concept record, it regularly evokes a singular mood, namely cool resignation, and it would fit nicely in the CD changer between Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out and Beach House's Devotion.

The Downside:

The lyrics, while nothing special, look a lot worse in print than they sound when sung, and I was surprised when going over them for this review how unimpressive they read vs. the vague but more favorable impression I had from passive listening. Mr. Noon's voice has a nasal quality, which has never bothered me, but I could see being a bigger deal to people more accustomed to traditionally pretty vocals. Also, especially when played at low volumes, the record has a somnolescence that to a less energetic listener may prove contagious. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, is it?

Cocoanut Groove - Madeleine Street

2009-01-25T17:13:00.010-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 6
Lyrics: 5
Scope: 4
Consistency: 7

RIYL: The Zombies, The Kinks, Belle & Sebastian

Further Listening: Cocoon, Club 8, This is Ivy League

Place of Origin: Umea, Sweden

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic & Electric Guitars, Bass, Drums, Vocal Reverb, Piano, Harpsichord, Organ, Mandolin, Trumpet/Flugelhorn, Violin, Flute, Alternative Percussion (tambourine, claves, woodblock, guiro), Ambient Sounds

Mood Tones:

Season: Fall
Weather: Clear and Windy
Time of Day: Dusk

Song Highlights: The Looking Glass, The End of the Summer on Bookbinder Road, A Dream of Two Summers

Favorite Lyrics:

"The wind is in the birches/
On an empty afternoon/
And it feels as if I'm fading/
Into the colors of the room." (from "Hummin")

"But let us now move from the sweet taste
of a long summer's air/
Through Autumn's gentle unease
and winter's despair." (from "The Looking Glass")

"Where do I continue?/
With the fullness of the moon?/
Or the air that smelled of apples/
And September coming soon?" (from "The End of the Summer on Bookbinder Road")

Other Thoughts:

If you had told me before I listened to this album that it was released in 1967, that Cocoanut Groove had had a couple of low-charting singles and gone on tour with the Mamas and the Papas before dropping into relative obscurity, I'd have bought it hook, line and sinker. While there are a lot of contemporary bands that endeavor to recreate the lush melodies and production values of the late 60s, most wind up somewhere between posture and homage. While I haven't been able to track down much about CG's recording process, there is an air of authenticity that permeates pretty much every cut here, from the vague and romantic lyrics to the organ and harpsichord backdrops, to the clip clop woodblock percussion. Perhaps the only things that gives away the record's true birthdate is the overly crisp production, noticeable only in direct comparison to vintage cuts (which tend to sound a bit muddy even when remastered well), but even here the use of echo chamber (0r some analogous effect) nearly masks things.

These songs are all of a piece, and to score any higher on the consistency scale they'd need to limit their instruments and stop switching rhythms. One almost imagines them all being written in a short, productive burst, the entire record going from neuron to mylar in a matter of days. The thing about these recordings, about any retro-pop really, is that they remind you how nice a strong, simple melody can be. There can be so much artifice to cut through in contemporary production (often that seems to be the point) that upon making the effort to get a song undressed, one is often disappointed with what one finds.

The lyrics, while certainly being in line with average British Invasion fare, paint with all the same colors, which is both unifying and at times less exciting than it could be. Still, their consistency goes a long way toward sustaining the mood of quiet melancholy that is this album's signature. And honestly, why nitpick when an album is this forthright and easy on the ears?

The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave

2009-01-23T13:36:00.009-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 6
Lyrics: 8
Scope: 3
Consistency: 9

RIYL: early Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Devendra Banhart

Further Listening: Deer Tick, Peter & the Wolf, Castanets

Place of Origin: Dalarna, Sweden

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic Guitar, Banjo, Ambient Sounds

Mood Tones:

Season: Fall
Weather: Overcast
Time of Day: Late Afternoon

Song Highlights: The Gardener, The Blizzard's Never Seen the Desert Sands, This Wind

Favorite Lyrics:

"Deep in the dust, forgotten, gathered/
I grow a diamond in my chest/
I make reflections as the moon shines/
Turn to a villain as I rest." (from I Won't Be Found)

"As we cease to know where our fates will go/
We wont see the rivers high up in the vines/
Branches will untie every mumbling lie/
Every frayed word in your lullaby is heard." (from Honey, Won't You Let Me In)

"I sense a spy up in the chimney/
From all the evidence I've burned/
I guess he'll read it in the smoke now/
And soon to ashes I'll return." (from The Gardener)

Other Thoughts:

I can't stress enough how much this album sounds like early period Bob Dylan, from the cleanliness of the production to the austerity in instrumentation, to the nasal twang in Kristian Matsson's voice. The biggest difference between them is probably lyrical content - while Dylan concerned himself more with conventional storytelling and political diatribe, Matsson prefers metaphysical musings and Surrealist imagery. And the lyrics really are this album's bread and butter. It makes me as impressed as envious that he can write this well within neatly metered lines in his second language. Picking favorite lyrics was especially difficult because really, they're all good (which accounts for part of the high rating for consistency).

The melodies, finger-picked on a lone acoustic guitar or banjo, are all pretty consistently good too, although only a couple are indelibly recallable after the album's stopped playing. Herein lies the rub with this record: it's hardcore, no-frills folk music, and if that's not your thing, nothing you'll find here will win you over. Of course simplicity is a double-edged sword, and what one person finds boring, another will find practical. This is the antithesis of a headphones record, as there are almost always only two components to any song, the vocals and the guitar or banjo, and to miss either of them you'd have to be asleep. Because of this, people who will enjoy this record on repeat listens will probably do so on the first one too, as it comes to feel familiar alarmingly quickly. Depending on your perspective, that's either a comfort or a disappointment. For my part, I feel almost wholly the former.

ARMS - Kids Aflame

2009-01-22T16:19:00.012-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 8
Lyrics: 7
Scope: 7
Consistency: 6

RIYL: Mirah, Badly Drawn Boy, The National, The Walkmen

Further Listening: The Sea & The Gulls, The Harlem Shakes, The Low Lows

Place of Origin: Brooklyn, NY

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Alternative Percussion (tambourine, jingle bells, shaker, hand claps/foot stomps/snaps), Synthesizers, Double-tracked Vocals, Ukulele, Harmonium or Organ of some kind, Saxophone, Mandolin, Whistling.

Mood Tones:

Season: Fall
Weather: Overcast
Time of Day: Evening

Song Highlights: Shitty Little Disco, Whirring, Pocket

Favorite Lyrics:

"Days alone are the days you dread the most/ Counting down the hours in caffeine and morning shows" (from Sad, Sad, Sad)

"Found you huddled in the corner, still/ We talked in the dust about who we killed." (from Kids Aflame)

"When I remember my dreams, they're always with you/ I crack those orbs at the seams and suck out the juice." (from Eyeball)

Other Thoughts:

God bless Protools, or whatever software TG is using to throw all of this together, for its liberation of the modern musician. It's a bit paradoxical, but you hardly ever come across an album recorded in a professional studio that is as studied and peculiar as those being made in the bedrooms of kids with enough money to afford nice equipment and enough freetime to make use of it. And for shut-in recordings made by a guy whose day job is playing guitar for the Harlem Shakes, it's a little surprising how much thought is put into the percussion here. There's that reliable 8 or 9 piece drum set on almost every song, for sure, but it almost always comes augmented by some relic of 3rd grade music class (I didn't add it to the instruments list because I couldn't say for absolute certain that it was there, but in a couple songs I could swear that he's using a triangle). The double-tracking of the lead vocal parts is another touch that mostly keeps to itself, gliding to the foreground of a song every once in a while to keep the chorus sounding fresh. And let me not imply that the guitars aren't easily accounted for - they are - but even some of the neater tricks he pulls with intermingling electrics and acoustics are easily glossed over in early listens by strong, well-produced melodies. This is almost the definition of a headphones album, brimming with bits of filligree to be found by the more attentive listener. Even so, there's plenty to like in the broader brush strokes, with crisp central melodies and driving rhythms easily audible no matter what format you're listening in. There's nothing quite as nice as a record that rewards whatever amount of attention you have to pay it.

As such, it's the nuance that got me on repeated listens. There's no part of this record that isn't considered. It kills me that I can only pick 3 songs as favorites, because while the ones I chose are probably the "best," they're also the most traditional sounding, and part of what sets this record apart is that the less-conventional material works almost equally as well as the cut-and-dried pop songs. "Jon the Escalator" nearly made both the song highlights and favorite lyrics categories ("Took every test/ Passed them all/ Passed them to your left"). "Eyeball" is equally easy to miss coming right before "Pocket"s big chords and brass, but keeps bubbling up from my sub-conscious, slipping out in repeated lines sung under my breath to no one in particular.

What are the drawbacks? There are some songs that I'd call difficult, along the lines of Sunset Rubdown or Andrew Bird, in that they are unconventionally structured and fragmented, though never atonal. In extremis, this can make a song seem unfinished, more like a sketch (c.f. the Frozen Lake). The lyrics, while never bad, at times seem a bit abstract, which is pleasant in small doses but can start to feel insubstantial when we're talking about the entire record. Also, most of the material here has been released in some other format (e.g. the Shitty Little Disco EP or the Whirring single). While I can't say that I blame him for wanting them all together in one album, as they definitely sound of a piece, I'm also wary of the Morrissey syndrome of constantly repackaging the same material. One also wonders why the song "Neighbors" from the Shitty Little Disco EP was left off the album, as it stands alongside ARMS' best work, and would fit nicely in the middle of the album to anchor some of the more experimental impulses.

Quibbles aside, this is one of the best albums I heard in 2008.

A Note About Scope (and Consistency)

2009-01-21T11:07:00.007-05:00

My friend Ben has suggested to me that I should better annunciate what exactly I mean by "scope" in the general ratings section of the review template. Here goes:

I have no easy definitition. Part of it is about demographics, specifically, how many different types of people a particular record will appeal to. You could frame things in terms of a record's gender or ethnicity, but I find it more interesting to talk about less obvious, equally powerful classifications, like optimistic vs. pessimistic, whimsical vs. staid, etc. etc. The general vibe of the album I mean to be described by the mood tones and other stuff sections, but what is missing from those depictions is how capable a record is of transcending its origins.

An example for the sake of elucidation: The 3 proper albums cut by the Jimi Hendrix Experience are among the most beloved in the rock canon, and have now influenced several generations of aspiring musicians to think in bigger and broader circles about their creations. If those albums came out today, attributed to an artist nobody had ever heard of, and I were to simply list the pieces that went into making the records, it would be easy for them to be categorized as records for guitar purists, or hippies, or pick your favorite over-generalization. It seemed important to me that I include some kind of gauge that would indicate what kind of return on investment of time and energy an average listener would receive for tracking down an album that on first blush didn't sound like it was up their alley.

Also tied into my own concept of scope is the question of how large the goals that the musician set out to accomplish with a particular record were. Two of my favorite records are Rain Dogs by Tom Waits and The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron & Wine. Rain Dogs would rate very high for scope, as it tackles many different genres of music, uses many different instruments to do so, and adopts many different perspectives in the telling of its narratives. Conversely, The Creek Drank the Cradle would rate very low for scope, as every song was recorded on a four-track with just voice and guitar (or voice and banjo), and if there is any character play at all, its narrators are all similar enough to come across as cyphers for the author.

This brings me to an important point about scope, which also holds true to a lesser extent for the consistency rating that comes after it: a low score isn't necessarily a negative thing. I don't love the early Iron and Wine records less for being simpler (in fact at times, I think I prefer them for that very reason), but I do find them easier to categorize appropriately, in a way that would be difficult to misinterpret. It is likely that there will be a relatively strong inverse relationship between a record's ratings for scope and consistency, as in my opinion it's difficult to serve one without undercutting the other (a feat that, for the most part, only truly great records accomplish). It also bears noting that with regards to consistency, a high rating isn't always a good thing. Think about it this way: the most consistent album imaginable (i.e. one where the tone and quality of one song closely mirrored those of the rest) would be one where all of its tracks were the same recording of the same song, played one after the other. Doesn't sound very appealing, does it? Moreover, it's not hard to think of a less extreme circumstance where a similar dynamic would be established. Take that Iron & Wine record for instance. As most of the songs are recorded in the same way, featuring the same musician and similar chord progressions and quality of lyrics, it's difficult to think of many people who would absolutely love one song but feel indifferently towards or hate the rest. It seems reasonable to suggest that a high consistency rating leads to a love-it-or-hate-it dynamic for most listeners.

Hope that clears things up, Ben. I'll try to have another review posted before the end of the evening.

Slow Club - Early Works

2009-01-16T11:14:00.017-05:00

General Ratings:

Music: 7
Lyrics: 6
Scope: 4
Consistency: 7

RIYL: The Decemberists, Bishop Allen, Architecture in Helsinki

Further Listening: Adem, Peter & the Wolf, She & Him

Place of Origin: Sheffield, England

Instrument/Sounds List: Acoustic and Electric Guitars, Multi-tracked vocal harmonies, Hand claps/foot stomps and other alternative percussion, Glockenspiel, Singing saw, Trumpet, Autoharp, Keyboard, Background strings

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Partly Cloudy
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: Christmas TV, Come on Youth, When You Go

Favorite Lyrics:

"Charles, you've killed the choir/ The boy set himself on fire." (from Come on Youth)

"Like a field of rice, I've grown out of view/ An Olympian came to fill the shoes you knew/ Oh, he could reach the sockets that I could never twist/ So now you can cross me off that God-damned list" (from Dance to the Morning Light)

"I like the way that our arguments stop when we fall asleep/ And the way that your body feels when it's wrapped around me." (from Christmas TV)

Other Thoughts:

These recordings have a bit of a schizophrenic quality to them, as half of them are sunny, upbeat, sing-alongs and the other half are soft, simple ballads. The he-said-she-said vocal harmonies used throughout are the most distinctive aspect of these songs, and are often crisp and thematically relevant. The lyrics are always thoughtful and frequently good, though a strict adherence to meter sometimes reveals the limits of their dexterity. They also seem prone to mantra-like repetition, which is used to nice effect at the end of Christmas TV, but sounds forced in other places. So far as I can tell, "Dance to the Morning Light" and "When I Go" are musically almost exactly the same ("When I Go" has a glockenspiel part that "Dance to the Morning Light" lacks), which is unfortunate as both of the songs' conceits are among Slow Club's best, and deserving of more variation. It bears mentioning that I'm generally not very fond of contemporary English music, as much of it strikes me as either derivative or cold, but these recordings are neither, and as such, a welcome reprieve. While not exactly twee per se, there is a certain amount of preciousness to these songs that may turn you off if you're not feeling indulgent.

(This review is meant to encompass both the "Let's Fall Back in Love" EP and the singles "Slow Club," "Me and You" "When I Go" and "Christmas TV")

A Reviewing Template

2009-01-16T10:50:00.005-05:00

Here's what a regular review is going to look like:

Artist Name - Album Title

General Ratings:

Music:
Lyrics:
Scope:
Consistency:

(all of these rating will be on a scale from 0 - 10)

RIYL (Recommended If You Like) : The top 3 influences and confluences of this particular record. These will usually be more famous, easily encapsulated albums to give you a quick constellation of what to expect from each album

Further Listening: The top 3 records to seek out if this particular record appeals to you. These will generally be less well known than the record being reviewed, and will sometimes be other albums by the same artist. Consider this an analogue to the optional reading section of a class book list.

Instrument List: Exactly what it sounds like.

Mood Tones:

Season:
Weather:
Time of Day:

I may throw other things in this category to, as they occur to me. This will almost certainly be the most subjective part of any review (a generally subjective endeavor), and it won't hurt my feelings if you skip over it. I include it mostly because some of the records that have gone on to be well-worn favorites initially didn't catch my ear because I listened to them in the wrong context. I mean for these contextual clues to help augment the whole listening experience (sorry if that sounds pretentious).

Song Highlights: My 3 favorite songs on the album with brief explanations of what stands out to me about them.

Favorite Lyrics: Pretty much what it sounds like.

Other Stuff: A catch-all for anything else that I might have to say. Among the things to expect from this section are factoids about the band, the recording session for the album, comparisons between this and other related albums, etc.

That about does it. Wraps 'er all up. Let's give this model a test-spin and see how it handles.

A Statement of Purpose

2009-01-11T10:49:00.006-05:00

Greetings and Salutations,

My name is David and I have an addiction. That's how it's supposed to start, right? Admitting you have a problem? Perhaps I could more correctly claim to have something that approaches a problem, outlines obsession, flits about fixation, makes my pulse quicken and my palms sweaty. I guess I'm in love.

The path leading in this direction was a reasonably straight-forward one. The kids on the playground were all talking about something I'd never heard of, taking turns grasping a small 2" x 3" box. It's specific contents are less important (and more embarrassing) than the eventuality they led to; another box, sitting in the middle of the living room of my childhood home, connected by thin copper wires to two larger boxes covered in mesh, one on each side. Turn it on, turn the dial and the world is yours. The radio. There must have been some magic in that old dark box he found, for when he heard its golden sounds he began to jump around. The radio led to over-full containers of cassettes which morphed over time into thin silver circles sitting orderly, alphabetical in the pages of a Case Logic binder. There was something in there for every occasion - big pop songs to sing along with in the car, quiet instrumentals to study to, aggressive shouters to turn up to eleven when I was angry or upset, and love songs, earnest and intimate to be played behind locked doors with the lights out.

Perhaps enough with the biography. What are we doing here? [insert Stockdalian expression of confusion/horror]. I intend for this blog to serve 3 functions. The first and least personal is to act as an outlet for me to talk to whoever feels like listening about the records, both new and new to me, that are lighting up my temporal lobe. The second and most ambitious is to aggregate reviews of my 100 favorite records, in an attempt to articulate and formalize my specific fixations with them (note: I mean to be explicit about the difference between the words "greatest" and "favorite" - one has aspirations to objectivity and the other does not. While I'm certainly not averse to discussing the presence or absence of greatness within a record, that's not really what this project is about, so please don't mistake me). The final and least regular will be the transmission and critique of mixtapes of my own construction, which will serve as the only music publicly available for download from this site. Probably implicit in all of this is the fact that I'll only be writing about records I like, so don't expect many diatribes about how terrible 90% of the music being made right now is. I intend, instead, to be a font of positivity, to say as many good things as I can about the songs that impress me and to let all else reap its own reward in silence. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

In my next post, I'll outline what a basic entry in my 100 favorite records series will look like, specific elements that I'll be highlighting and the tools that I'll use in doing so, in the hope that we might avoid the kind of congratulatory, circle jerk aesthetic that accompanies most music criticism.

Until we meet again, don't know where, don't know when.