Pretty Goes with Pretty

pgwp's Year in Music: New Shit '06

By now you’re probably so inundated with top ten lists that any more would just be white noise. So I’ll skip a full-on list—to be honest, I just didn’t hear enough worthy albums to make a top five, let alone a top ten. Yet it wouldn’t be December without some sort of year in review, so here begins the first of a short series of year-end posts before I take off for the holidays.

If you’ve been a regular reader of pgwp, you know that I spent most of 2006 looking forward to new releases and subsequently being let down by nearly all of them. New albums from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Futureheads, Built to Spill, the Album Leaf, and the Pernice Brothers were all okay, but nothing special. I don’t think I spent more than a week with any of them. Lack of funds kept me from picking up the Flaming Lips, Walkmen, Sean Lennon, and a host of others I was eager to hear—but from all I’ve read and what few songs I’ve heard, none of those artists turned out career-toppers, either. For the most part it’s been a pretty ambivalent year for music, I’d say.

The highest profile disappointments of the year, for me, were Gnarls Barkley and TV on the Radio. I was floored by a couple Gnarls tracks I heard on the web right when the album released, so I jumped over to the record store right away and picked it up. But somewhere between the oversaturation of “Crazy,” the unforgivably irrelevant cover of the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” and the increasingly grating second half of their album, St. Elsewhere quickly found itself ejected from my stereo and deleted from my hard drive. And TV on the Radio? I’m still trying to figure out what people are seeing in this album. There are some good songs here and there, but more often than not the album is a directionless muddle. I’m pleased to see it isn’t topping everyone’s end-of-year lists, though I’m still perplexed to see it showing up on lists at all.

Meanwhile, the band that deserved all the hype given to TVotR but was instead met with mildly negative reviews at every turn was the Secret Machines, whose album Ten Silver Drops would be number one if I were doing a ranked list. Again, I don’t know why I seem to be on a completely different page than everyone else. Even my brilliant wife thinks I’m crazy for liking this album so much. A few months ago I took a friend, unversed in the Secret Machines, to see them live, and he too came away only mildly impressed. So perhaps my tastes are maladjusted this year. At any rate, I stand firm that Ten Silver Drops is the record of the year…

…followed by Belle & Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit. This is the album that cemented my previously give-or-take relationship with the group. As I said in my review of the record, between this and Dear Catastrophe Waitress, B&S have proven that they are capable of evolving as a band and staying relevant, whereas everything previous to DCW sounded more like an attempt at doing If You’re Feeling Sinister over again, with varying degrees of failure.

And here you can see why a top ten list would become silly. Aside from these two albums, I didn’t hear anything else released this year that really deserved the kudos. Destroyer and Neko Case both put out pretty good albums, but if they were nos. three and four on my list, it would be misleading. If their albums came out in 2005, they’d be somewhere in the lower half of my top twenty. Meanwhile, I’ve only just picked up albums by Midlake and the Little Ones, both of which seem pretty wonderful based on a day’s worth of listening. But it’s unfair to call them the best of the year when I’ve had less than 48 hours to digest these compared to ten months for Destroyer. Otherwise, I still have records by Peter Bjorn & John, Grizzly Bear, and maybe a couple others to purchase, which won’t happen until sometime in the new year. So, my best-of list is all fucked up and askew.

At any rate, this sums up my own perspective on the indie rock of ’06. Coming up later this week, a post on musical blindspots filled in this year; my year in reading, and maybe a couple other things too, time permitting.

What were your highlights of the year? Email me or leave a comment below. I’m still convinced I’m missing something huge. I need your help!

Belle & Sebastian and the LA Philharmonic, w/ the Shins

Last night was a big show at the Hollywood Bowl, as Belle & Sebastian played to a sold-out crowd of 18,000, backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for one show only. My wife and I packed some sandwiches and a nice bottle of wine and headed up the hill to the Bowl. We got to our seats just as the Shins began their first song.

We bought these tickets back when only Belle & Sebastian were announced—so we were doubly stoked to find that the Shins were also on the bill. We saw them a year or two ago at the Bowery Ballroom in New York and had a great time. This time around it wasn’t quite the same experience. Blame the fact that they were the opening band, and for most of their set it was still daylight and the Bowl was still filling up; blame the fact that half their songs were brand new, so the familiarity factor was low; blame the fact that, good as the Shins are, they do just kind of stand there when they play. Their live show just isn’t that conducive to a large-scale show, unfortunately. But on a positive note their new songs sound great, and it doesn’t look like their third album will be deviating too far from their last. Depending on your perspective, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Me, I’m excited for the new album.

For whatever enthusiasm the Shins failed to deliver, Belle & Sebastian made up for in spades. They opened with “I Fought in a War,” which seems the obvious choice for an opener when you have an 80-piece orchestra behind you. The rest of the set highlighted material from across their career, though leaning toward their most recent couple of albums (and just one song from If You’re Feeling Sinister). In large part the orchestra unfortunately served as shtick more than anything else (but as an aside; B&S’s fulltime cellist must have felt terribly irrelevant, don’t you think?). Maybe it’s because there are strings on the proper albums, so hearing the songs with strings live doesn’t actually sound new—it just sounds like their albums. That said, “Lord Anthony” and “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” played back to back at the midway point of the set, really soared thanks to the strings. Stuart Murdoch's entertaining antics throughout the show aside, this pair of songs was the highlight of the night.

Speaking of Murdoch's antics: not despite nor because of the Philharmonic was this a wonderful show; Belle & Sebastian handled the crowd marvelously all on their own. Murdoch repeatedly ran out into the crowd, and at one point brought a woman up from the audience to dance while Stevie Jackson took the lead on “Jonathan David.” Murdoch had such a connection with the audience that by the shows closing number, “The Boy with the Arab Strap,” the crowd rushed the stage to dance amongst the band. It was a bit surreal to see; in my experience that sort of thing happens at aggressive rock shows, as stoner dudes get up to stage dive. But here the crowd members, well, they just wanted to dance with their friends! In fact, once so many people got on stage, it was tough to tell them apart from the actual band. Such is the community spirit Belle & Sebastian evoke.

[related: a meditation on B&S mixed up in my review of The Life Pursuit.]

Belle & Sebastian: The Life Pursuit

There is a lot of hype surrounding Belle & Sebastian’s newest, The Life Pursuit. It’s the New and Improved Belle & Sebastian! They’re a whole new band! They’ve really turned a corner! While I won't argue with claims that this is a fantastic album—it is; go buy it—there is an underlying, perhaps unconscious negativity to these many reviews, and it has everything to do with their critically impervious album, If You’re Feeling Sinister.

David M. Goldstein at Coke Machine Glow spells it out explicitly when he diagnoses B&S with having Violent Femmes Syndrome. “Stuart Murdoch need only ask the likes of Gordon Gano,” he says; “achieving perfection on your first go-round is a special kind of hell.” Murdoch & Co. are at the mercy of the critics: they will never escape the shadow of their breakout album. And that’s too bad, because The Life Pursuit is stellar. On that, it seems most critics can agree. “It’s their best album since Sinister!” But there I must part ways: The Life Pursuit is their best album since their last one, Dear Catastrophe Waitress. While I nearly weep at the idea of Gordon Gano’s Sisyphean battle to pop his sun-obliterating blister, I take umbrage at the easy impulse to lump B&S into the same funk.

The standard take on Belle & Sebastian, as you will no doubt read in every single review of this album, the last album, and every album to come, is that they were brilliant out of the docks, sank to progressively unsalvageable depths with their three subsequent releases, and have lately managed to cork the leak and keep whoever was left—fans and bandmembers alike—inside the boat. Somehow their two most recent albums are great—but with the caveat that you must already be a fan to appreciate them correctly. Woe to the youngster who mistakenly starts with The Life Pursuit: you just won’t get it. You’ll hear this polished, erudite, eminently hummable pop, and you just won’t understand. All those references to twee, all those remarks on Murdoch’s wit—right over your head, sorry.

Two years ago I would have agreed with Goldstein tagging B&S as a latter-day Violent Femmes. I had completely written them off, and took all those reviews of DCW—“their best album since Sinister!”—with a shaker of salt. But when I finally heard it, it captivated me. Two years later and I still listen to it all the time. There’s not a bad song on the disk. Unlike The Boy with the Arab Strap, which was a flawed carbon copy of Sinister, and Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, which sounds like a bunch of kids fantastically bored with themselves, the band that showed up to record Dear Catastrophe Waitress was reinvigorated and ready to pop. It was unmistakably Belle & Sebastian, but it didn’t sound like it owed anything to Sinister. They’d grown.

The album was rightly hailed as a comeback. Yet on the occasion of The Life Pursuit, both Pitchfork and Coke Machine Glow retroactively invoke the “transitional” damnation to DCW: “As enjoyable as much of Dear Catastrophe Waitress was, it suffered from having the distinct feeling of a transitional record,” says Golstein; “The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional,” says Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see nearly identical critiques—especially when they’re wrong—my PR-radar goes way up. Where’s the press release for this album?

[Here it is, from Matador’s website: “The decision to partner up with producer Trevor Horn for the last record (Dear Catastrophe Waitress) was a clear statement of intent—‘Think we’re lo-fi underachievers? Think again—we’re working with the guy who does Tatu.’ What is now clear—with producer Tony Hoffer back at the helm—is that DCW was but a stop on the way. And what that album started, The Life Pursuit delivers in spades.”]

When DCW came out two years ago, it was roundly hailed as their best work since Sinister. Now, what do you know—hand me that ad copy, please—The Life Pursuit is their best since Sinister! I can’t begrudge anyone for liking The Life Pursuit more than DCW—it is a great album, by all means—but it shouldn’t necessarily mean that DCW somehow loses its own luster as a result. Where is it written that Belle & Sebastian may only have two good albums at a time?

And so we return to the Violent Femmes Syndrome. Goldstein makes the explicit connection, but I would argue that nearly every other critic, consciously or not, is implicitly agreeing by treating Belle & Sebastian not as skilled songwriters with a sound unmistakably their own, but as a group in a constant scramble to match their moment of fluke genius seven years back.

Nothing wrong with loving Sinister the most, of course, nor with hoping that this or the next one will be the best period, not the best since. But I think it’s unfair to hold them so rigidly against that album. Elliott Smith’s second, self-titled album was his best, but that album wasn’t invoked as the barometer of any that followed. He made enough strong showings to be respected as an artist, not a one-trick pony. All the idolatry of Sinister would have you believe that there’s only one way to enter Belle & Sebastian, but this simply isn’t true. The uninitiated could surely appreciate the group if they discovered them through their newest or through DCW. In other words, this is a band that remains relevant, one that you shouldn’t feel like you missed the boat on, shouldn’t feel guilty about returning to, shouldn’t be intimidated by the mythology bestowed on Sinister.

If The Life Pursuit proves anything, it’s that Belle & Sebastian can make two great records in a row and can evolve at the same time—something they’ve never proven before. In a just world, it should be enough to toss out the Violent Femmes references altogether and start treating their entire oeuvre with more admiration. If they keep it up, If You’re Feeling Sinister won’t seem like the legendary acme; Fold Your Hands and Storytelling will be the legendary depths. This is a band that has had a few missteps, but they’ve certainly found their footing and are cutting a path worth following.