Pretty Goes with Pretty

My listening Hours: The Rest of July–September

So we come to "the rest." These are albums that aren't bad; in fact many of them are quite good. They just, for whatever reason, didn't force their way into that part of my brain that compelled me play them over and over and over. Nevertheless I still recommend everything here. Sometimes the albums in this category are slow burners, either melting into a bunch of my playlists or just consistently sneaking their way into rotation.

The Flatlanders, More a Legend Than a Band
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, 100 Days, 100 Nights
Perfect example of albums that I don't really crave in full but am still ingesting song by song through playlists and shuffles: the Flatlanders and Sharon Jones. Back in July I placed both in the "best" category; I haven't changed my feeling on the quality of the albums, but I will admit that their sameness makes me less inclined to keep putting them on. Each album contains maybe four songs that are really, utterly fantastic, and a lot of other songs that are good, solid, but less identifiable.

• The Flatlanders, Keeper of the Mountain
• Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, When the Other Foot Drops, Uncle

R.E.M., Reckoning
Neil Young, Rust Never Sleeps
Likewise, here are two records that are great, but I find myself listening to them more when I just put on my "Everything by R.E.M." or "Everything by Neil Young" mixes. Until July, Reckoning had the distinction of being the only R.E.M. album I'd yet to hear in full, from beginning to end, despite knowing most of the songs from isolated circumstances and despite R.E.M. being among my favorite bands of all time. I have to admit that I had assumptions about how I'd feel about the record, based in part on how I felt about Murmur and Fables of the Reconstruction; that is, I'm less of a fan of the early stuff, mostly due to how it's produced and how willfully muddled the records are. (That's not to say I don't like it... I just have a pretty firm personal perspective on the band.)

Rust Never Sleeps also boasts/suffers from intentionally poor production: it was recorded as a live album, with the audience subsequently pulled out of the mix. Additionally, the first half of the record is Neil and his acoustic guitar, and the second half Neil and Crazy Horse rocking out. The first half fares a lot better; not only are the songs better, but they handle the production limitations better too. The rockers just aren't that enjoyable to listen to, especially in comparison with the clarity of the epic jams of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, which I can't help but compare it to since I bought that one fairly recently too.

• R.E.M., (Don't Go Back to) Rockville
• Neil Young, Pocahontas

Amon Düül II, Yeti
Neu!, s/t
Like I said on Monday, I'm having a krautrock moment. And I think I'm especially having a krautrock moment because Amon Düül II was so unlike what I expected. There's nothing "motorik" about them; I don't think it would even occur to me to put them in the same genre as Neu! or Can if I were taking the Pepsi Challenge. While not entirely without structure, Yeti is very freeform, and not really influenced by minimalism at all, in the way those other bands are. It's much closer in spirit to psychedelia than what I previously understood krautrock to be. And that's a good thing: it makes me want to seek out more of their records, to hear a few more Can records which I've never gotten to, to finally pick up some Faust (which I just did, yesterday), La Dusseldorf, Harmonia, Cluster, and others. That's not to say that Yeti is a perfect album, though. At nearly seventy minutes, it loses all focus in the last third, mostly due to the eighteen-minute title track, an improvised jam with occasional howling vocals. Like any improvised exercise by any band with aspirations toward the epic, the song flits between genius and tedium. More reined-in songs, like "Eye Shaking King," are wonderful, though.

Neu!, meanwhile, are the other end of the spectrum. Crisp, spacious, repetitive. I bought Neu! 75 a few months ago—and I liked it—but I like this more. I long had an impression of what Neu! was supposed to sound like, and Neu! 75 wasn't really it; this is. Neu! 2 is on my immediate horizon.

• Amon Düül II, Eye Shaking King
• Neu!, Weissensee

Okkervil River, Black Sheep Boy
By now, I've exhausted myself as far as writing about Okkervil River goes. Newsflash: I like this band. Double-newsflash: I like the slow songs less than the fast songs. News analysis: The ratio of slow songs to fast songs on Black Sheep Boy (and the Appendix) is lower than on the later two albums, therefore I enjoy this one somewhat less. That said, "Black" may be the best song the band has ever done. Top two or three, at least.

• Okkervil River, Black

Spoon, Girls Can Tell
Girls Can Tell was one of two Spoon albums I'd yet to pick up (the other is the recent Telephono reissue). I've heard others describe this as the acme of the band's output. It's a great record, but either it hasn't sunk in enough with me or I've just heard too many other Spoon albums prior to this one for it to feel revelatory. Me, I'll take Kill the Moonlight and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga before this one. Of course, when you're talking Spoon, "better" and "worse" is all a matter of degree. These guys are like peanut butter to me—I'll take 'em any way you wanna give 'em to me; I know they'll be good.

• Spoon, The Fitted Shirt

Air France, On Trade Winds
Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, Nancy & Lee
Both of these albums, while good, pretty much slipped right past me. I devoted very little time to listening to them, though when I did put them on I enjoyed them. Hey, you pick up the equivalent of a new album every three days, some of those albums are going to get lost in the shuffle. On Trade Winds is just four songs, adding up to less than half an hour; every time I put it on it was over before I started paying attention. I had a few songs from Nancy & Lee via Nancy's greatest hits album and a few stray downloads; from those I was expecting something a little darker—"Some Velvet Morning," for instance, is so creepy good—but a lot of the record is kinda goofy. That's not a bad thing, just not what I was expecting. I think the fact that it didn't match up to what I was expecting explains at least in part why I was less inclined to put it on. It is a good album, though, for what it is.

• Air France, Beach Party
• Nancy & Lee, Some Velvet Morning

Later today: the disappointments.

My Listening Month: July

For the last couple years I've been doing these My Listening Hours posts every three months, which seemed like a good amount of time to let albums fully digest. But the last round, with twentysomething albums to go over, was far too time-consuming a post. When I saw I'd already picked up nine albums this month—and I subscribed to eMusic, so that number is going to stay consistently high—I decided to try doing this monthly instead. I may still do a quarterly report as well, as some albums may rise or lower in my esteem with time. Usually I break these posts into a week's worth of posts, but let's just get right to it.

(Don't forget that you can use the media player down in the lower left corner—just press play once and all the mp3s on this blog will automatically start playing in a row, like a mixtape.)

In the first six months of the year I only picked up a handful of actual 2008 releases; I think that trend is going to change going forward, if only because it seems like a lot of great albums are slated to come once the fall rolls around. This month, five of my nine purchases were 2008 releases; one from 2007; two from the last few years; and one from 1972 (though not released until the '90s). Here's how things broke down:

The Best

Fleet Foxes, s/t
This is definitely the highlight of the month, and as I said before, one of the best of the year. A few songs have diminished slightly since my original review—behind the lush harmonies, “Quiet Houses” lacks substance—but the strong songs are only burrowing further into my brain.

• Fleet Foxes, Ragged Wood

The Flatlanders, More a Legend Than a Band
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, 100 Days, 100 Nights
Both of these albums simultaneously thrive and suffer for the same reason: beginning to end, they’re just about perfectly executed, if wed to a template. For the Flatlanders, it’s rootsy acoustic numbers with Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s near-warbly vocals and Butch Hancock’s lovely harmonies, and a little singing saw thrown in for good measure; for Jones, it’s classic, throwback soul, with kicking horns, a fantastic rhythm section, and Jones pushing and pulling the Dap-Kings in every direction as a commanding frontwoman should. In both cases, the quality of each individual song is way up there, though they begin to blend together by the middle of the records. A few songs rise above the others as truly outstanding, while the rest are merely… really fucking good.

• The Flatlanders, Keeper of the Mountain
• Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, When the Other Foot Drops, Uncle

MGMT, Oracular Spectacular
As is pretty obvious to anyone who reads this blog regularly, in the  last couple years my head has been drawn mostly to country, 60s and 70s rock, and new stuff that... sounds like country or 60s and 70s rock. But my brilliant wife isn't exactly traveling down that road with me. She keeps buying/downloading this... what is called, dance music? "Blog house," I heard someone call it recently? Tough Alliance, Hot Chip, Crystal Castles, Air France... it's all pretty good but just not what I'm digging right now. So then MGMT comes along. "Time to Pretend" and "Kids" have been all over the blogs and local radio; I like them both a lot—I think the lyrics to "Time to Pretend" are hilarious and genius (favorite line: "The models will have babies / we'll get a divorce / find some more models / everything must run its course"). But I was really expecting the rest of the album to lag well behind the singles. To my delight, the album is more varied and more interesting than I'd imagined. It's part Bowie, part Flaming Lips; and the ratio of dance beats to rock instrumentation is well balanced. I was surprised to see just how often I wanted to put this album on.

• MGMT, Weekend Wars

Okkervil River, Black Sheep Boy
It took me a long time to get my engine started with Okkervil River. When Black Sheep Boy came out in 2005 it got nothing but raves, but whenever I heard a track from it I thought it was good but not mindblowing. So I never bought the album. After falling in sloppy love with The Stage Names, though, I went back to Black Sheep Boy. Listening to this album has made me realize how much more I like Will Sheff's songs when he goes for the upbeat tracks—"Unless it's Kicks" and "The Plus Ones" from The Stage Names, "The Latest Toughs" and especially "Black" on this album. When Sheff picks up the pace, his songs get into this real driving, full-momentum rhythm. I told my wife I needed to compile an Okkervil River workout mix, which she thought sounded like the most hilarious thing ever—but I made it and it works! Sheff's high-energy songs don't depend on their chorus the way a typical pop song does; they thrive on the lyrics cascading out of his mouth, and that makes for a real ride. As for his slower songs, they're not bad and are often outstanding, but there's something more predictable about the ballads; the rockers feel like rarer animals.

...Or I’d call, some black midnight,
fuck up his new life where they don’t know what he did,
tell his brand-new wife and his second kid.
And I tell you, like before,
You should wreck his life the way that he wrecked yours
You want no part of his life anymore.

Heavy!

• Okkervil River, Black

The Rest

Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s, The Dust of Retreat
After putting off purchase of this album for two years, I finally decided to pick it up, partly in anticipation of the new Margot album coming out later this year. I downloaded "Skeleton Key" back when this album first came out and was mildly put off by it because of a Gin Blossomy undercurrent to the sound. But two years later I still play that song all the time. Hearing the whole album, my suspicions turned out to be correct: The Dust of Retreat is chock-a-block with mid/late-90s radio rockisms. There are bright spots, but mostly the album is indie MOR; I can see why they got picked up by a major for the next album. I like a lot of the arrangements and melodies here, but Richard Edwards's delivery is all earnestness, no authenticity. Overall this is an album that has 99% of the ingredients I like in a good songwriter-pop record, but it's missing that rare, magical 1% that would really thrill me. I like this enough that I'm curious to hear the new one—and I'll listen to it this year, even!—but I don't feel the urge to return to Dust.

• Margot & the Nuclear So & So's, Talking in Code

Air France, On Trade Winds
At three songs plus an introduction, On Trade Winds barely counts as a release; it’s less an EP than a maxi-single. The four track pass you right by before you realize you put it on. It’s airy electronica, vaguely (sometimes shamefully) reminding me of my raver moment somewhere around 1996. Anyway, it’s okay. Recommended if you like fellow Swedes the Tough Alliance, whom I was similarly ambivalent about.

• Air France, Beach Party

Beck, Modern Guilt
My opinion of this album hasn’t really changed since my review. I don’t think poorly of the album, nor do I feel compelled to continue listening to it.

• Beck, Modern Guilt

My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges
I have a My Morning Jacket playlist set up in iTunes that collects all my four- and five-star favorites from each of their five albums. Six of the thirteen tracks from Evil Urges made their way into that playlist, which pretty much sums up how I feel about the album. While there are a few really strong points, the overall album becomes a less and less pleasurable listening experience as time goes on.

• My Morning Jacket, Touch Me, I'm Going to Scream pt. 1

And that's my month in albums. Come back tomorrow and I'll have ten of my favorite finds on the blogs in the last month.