Pretty Goes with Pretty

Listening in Color

I’m reading Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars right now, and the first chapter is about a painter who, after an accident, suddenly goes 100% color blind. He sees the entire world in a muddy, dingy black and white. He dreams in black and white. His memories are now in black and white. It’s a terrifying condition, all the more so for this man for whom color was an intrinsic part of his identity.

Then, this passage jumped out at me:

Music, curiously, was impaired for him too, because he had previously had an extremely intense synesthesia, so that different tones had immediately been translated into color, and he experienced all music simultaneously as a rich tumult of inner colors. With the loss of his ability to generate colors, he lost this ability as well—his internal “color-organ” was out of action, and now he heard music with no visual accompaniment; this, for him, was music with its essential chromatic counterpart missing, music now radically impoverished.

My brilliant wife was nearby when I came to the passage and I wanted to read it aloud to her. “You know how you can sometimes see colors when you listen to music?” I prefaced. But she looked at me with a curious look and said, a little baffled, “No.”

It never occurred to me that perhaps not everyone shares this experience. There are certain bands, albums, and songs that always put a color or group of colors in my mind. Low does this to me, for instance. When I hear their early albums I inevitably see a deep burgundy, silver gray, and black. When I hear their later albums (everything after The Curtain Hits the Cast), I see washed out whites and blues with sharp punctuations of black and blood red.

I happen to be listening to Iron & Wine as I write this: right, brownish gold, like a wheat field at sunset, with stripes of a dull, flat green.

My wife asked me who else. Thinking clearly about it, I found that if I tried to call a band to my mind I’d simply see the colors of their album covers. The more conscious I was of it, the more literal I was, the more influenced I was. Later that night, as I lay in bed, I tried a psychological test on myself, which was to think of the color first and see which band or song came to mind. Some colors had immediate mental associations. Yellow: Jonathan Richman. Orange, for some strange reason, makes me think of Death Cab for Cutie (I don’t even own anything by them). Sometimes I would give myself a color, then a band would spring to mind, then the color would start to change. Ash gray made me think of Sigur Ros, and then the gray slate in my mind was dappled with specks of pure white and darker shades of black, and finally a faint blue hue would radiate from the center. 

Have you ever thought about listening in these terms? Do you see colors when you listen to some songs? How conscious of it are you? Do you have to “catch” yourself seeing things when you’re listening to music? Do you see abstract images? Is it a pattern? Does it move or morph? Or does music paint actual scenes in your mind, like memories or fantasies?

[An Anthropologist on Mars was written in 1996 and draws seven portraits of people who have rare brain disorders. Sacks is also author of the recently published Musicophilia, which I posted about once before. That book is structured similarly but connects each case study directly to some relationship with music. I haven't read it, but intend to as soon as it comes out in paperback and, I hope to god, has a new cover that I can stomach having on my shelf.]

My Listening Year: The Best of 2007 (New Release Edition)

1. Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha [mp3: "Fiery Crash"]
Other albums released this year might have been more ambitious, more audacious, more immediate, more dramatic. But the simple fact is this: no other album occupied my time more than this one. It's musically and lyrically sophisticated, not without humor or irony but never self-conscious either. And it's the best kind of album, where every single song, at one point or another, is your favorite.
Previously: my review of the album

2. Peter Bjorn & John, Writer's Block [mp3: "Paris 2004"]
I never got obsessively into Writer's Block the way I did with Armchair Apochrypha, but like a faithful dog, this album has never been far from my iPod. There ain't a single bad song here, and best of all there is a lot that is different from "Young Folks," lest you form your opinion based on that one overplayed track. (I gave you "Paris 2004" here; I love the unexpected timing of the chorus.) I played the hell out of Writer's Block for the first part of the year, and I've consistently returned to it after the honeymoon, still loving each and every track from first to last.

3. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga [mp3: "Eddie's Ragga"]
Easily the best-produced album this year. I knew I liked this album for its songs, but once I started listening to it on headphones and started noticing all the little details, it got even better. Radiohead could take a few lessons from Spoon in terms of using the studio as an instrument. As if everything else Spoon does, they know when to use it and when not to use it. "Eddie's Ragga" is a good example: listen to it on headphones and hone in on that guitar. It's basically one chord for the entire song but the sound of the subtly guitar changes throughout.

4. Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala [mp3: "Shirin"]
Easily three or four of my favorite songs of the year are courtesy Night Falls Over Kortedala. The album drags a little in the middle—one too many songs with that syrupy layer of strings—but as time goes on even the songs I liked less on first listens have been growing on me. I can tell that I'm not done with this album yet.

5. Radiohead, In Rainbows
Last week I mentioned that after listening to In Rainbows, I stopped abruptly and haven't felt the need to go back. That's still true, but in anticipation of this post I did put it on once more, and darn it but I can't deny that it's a cohesive, well-thought-out, engaging album. My feelings on my personal relationship to Radiohead aside, this is an album with few faults.
Previously: my review of the album; Radiohead teams up with the Eagles to fuck record stores; and of course, "All I Need" rendered as lolcats.

6. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
This album is getting a lot of love right now, showing up at or near the top of many other best-of-the-year lists. For me, seven of this album's nine tracks are fantastic, which is enough to get it on my list; I just wish it didn't totally crap out on the last two.
Previously: my thoughts on "Us v. Them"

7. New Pornographers, Challengers
I got into the New Pornographers late, and hence picked up their other three albums all at once. I wound up processing all those albums as one large body of work. Challengers, therefore, is the first New Pornographers effort I've taken on its own terms. That might be why I appreciated this album's layers more than others did. I'm not sure what I would have thought if the band had done Electric Version 2.0—would I have embraced a dozen more super-charged anthems or would I have felt like they were spinning their wheels? Who knows. The bottom line is that Challengers is different, but not too different. I appreciate that. I've said this before, but: I never would have thought my favorite tracks on a NP album would be the slow songs, but that's what happened. For an album I'd been anticipating all year, Challengers somehow managed to be a pleasant surprise.

8. Feist, The Reminder
Heading into 2007, this was my most-anticipated album. So of course it disappointed a little. And by now I'm all Feisted out for a while, what with the ubiquity of "1234" making discussion of Feist too polarizing to be interesting (come on, just listen to this music—there's nothing polarizing about it; you either love it or you're ambivalent about it). At any rate, The Reminder succeeded for me as a collection of ten or twelve great Feist songs, though it failed as an album. It didn't quite cohere, though most of these songs will continue to pop up on various iTunes playlists, guaranteeing consistent rotation around this house.
Previously: my review of the album; my suggested resequencing of the track list; and my post on "Adult Alternative"

My Listening Hours: The Rest of October–November

The Byrds, Fifth Dimension
I'm not sure why it took me so long to pick up Fifth Dimension. Back when I first realized how much I liked the Byrds I went on a downloading spree, and everything I picked up from this album was excellent—"Mr. Spaceman," "5D," "Hey Joe," and of course "Eight Miles High," arguably (and a great argument it'd be) the best song the band ever did. Unfortunately my expectations were dashed when I finally picked up the album. Turns out this is the most inconsistent of the Byrds albums I've heard (i.e., all the albums prior to Roger McGuinn taking sole ownership of the band). There were a couple of great tracks to be had in addition to those I already owned, especially David Crosby's songwriting debut, "What's Happening," but otherwise Fifth Dimension probably has the largest quantity of questionable tunes—particularly the ghost-of-Hiroshima-narrated "I Stand at Every Door" and the nosediving trio of tunes closing out the album, "Captain Soul," "John Riley," and "The Lear Jet Song."

That this album could have some of the band's best work as well as some its worst is interesting to me. This is the first album without Gene Clark, who was the primary songwriter on the first two releases. For most bands this would have been a bigger blow, but the Byrds' overall sound was too strong.  This goes back to my post from last month, "the song vs. the sound." I was watching a documentary about 60s bands on VH1 Classics the other day and McGuinn explained the Byrds' vocal sound on the first two records: although Clark wrote most of the originals, he and McGuinn would double the lead vocal. Crosby was the only one singing harmony, but he did so in a way that he floated between thirds and fifths, not sticking to one harmonic area as, say, a Beach Boy would. Thus what was essentially a two-part harmony sounded much fuller. It makes sense then that Clark's absence, sonically, is barely noticable on Fifth Dimension, but that 5D is also the weakest of the Byrds albums in terms of songwriting (it's worth noting that "Eight Miles High" is chiefly Clark's song, too—though it's McGuinn who's playing that brilliant guitar solo, which sounds like the aural equivalent of scribbling crayons). On the other hand, since the Byrds had always loaded their albums with covers, most of which were interpreted by McGuinn, they ultimately survived Clark's departure, apparently, without too much trouble. (And on their next album, Younger Than Yesterday, bassist Chris Hillman, who'd been there all along, suddenly blossomed into the best songwriter of the bunch!)

Gene Clark, No Other
As Gene Clark was the first Byrd to go solo, it seems right that his should be the first solo album I check out. Based on a lot of good things said at ILM, I assumed No Other was the place to start. Settling in to hear some post-Byrds folk rock, I was surprised to find that this was more along the lines of bloated 70s MOR rock—full band replete with a bevy of backup singers, meandering seven-minute epics mostly concerned with rivers and ravens; even a near-Vangelis closer. There are a few songs I like—the opener, "Life's Greatest Fool," for instance (the end kinda reminds me of Bowie's backup vocals on Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love")—though most of the album is just average. My error was assuming that this was an early Clark album. In fact he'd done four albums prior to this one—two folky solo albums and two country-influenced albums with Doug Dillard. Based on the strength of his contributions to the Byrds, I'm not done with Clark; I just need start over, in chronological order.

Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue
Speaking of 70s MOR... I had a twofer this month. I had a few songs from Dennis Wilson's out-of-print Pacific Ocean Blue lying around my iTunes, but after reading this Popmatters article I sought out the rest. Don't believe the hype: this album isn't bad, but it hardly deserves to be mythologized. It's ambitious, it's not commercially viable, it's by a troubled Wilson lad—the one who died, no less—but it's just not that good. There are some serious bright spots—"River Song" for instance—but POB also suffers from too much navel-gazing, no real hooks, and Wilson's gravelly, often downright shitty voice. It's actually hard to believe that this voice belongs to a Beach Boy. I'm glad I heard the entire album, especially because I do like a handful of the tracks, but there's nothing truly illuminating here.

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
What does it say about me that I'm a huge Byrds fan yet I’ve never found my way into Dylan? Something about him—maybe it's his voice, maybe his delivery, maybe the way his cultural importance has been forced on me since I was a child—has kept me from enjoying his work. A few years ago my wife bought Blonde on Blonde and I just couldn’t feel it. Thinking it was time to try again, I picked up Blood on the Tracks. For a few minutes there—“Tangled Up in Blue”! “Idiot Wind”!—I thought I might have finally found my point of entry. Alas, after a few days the urgency calmed down and I haven’t really gone back to digest this album any further. It made a dent—I don’t dislike Dylan—but I’m still not crazy for him.

Fleetwood Mac, Rumors
I want to like Rumors more, but the fact is many of the songs here simply don’t belong to me. “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way”: these belong to my parents and their generation. They belong to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. They belong to a bunch of assholes who think they don’t make music like they used to, cluelessly not understanding that a lot of their music sucks. What gets me about Fleetwood Mac though is that they do just enough songs that I like—usually thanks to Lindsey Buckingham. Buckingham is really the saving grace of this band; songs like "Second Hand News" and "Never Going Back Again" are interestingly crafted pop songs. I’m curious to hear the Buckingham/Nicks album that preceded their joining FM, though it’s out of print. And in the comments to yesterday's post I'm told by blckdgrd that Buckingham's post-Mac albums are also worth checking out.

Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, s/t
Spiritualized, Lazer Guided Melodies
Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
I can say the same thing about all three of these albums: they're all great, each in their own way. I know that I will go back to each of these albums continually. They're the kind of records I'll just keep putting on when I'm not in the mood for my personally more obvious choices. But in the meantime—maybe because I just had too much other stuff to listen to—these ultimately didn't stick to my iPod as much as I'd expect. I recognize that I like them but I'm not running out the door to tell my friends about them (anyway, my friends already know about them). I do intend to pick up more albums by each band, though (not Pink Floyd, but Syd Barrett).

Big Star, Radio City
Sorry Radio City, I just couldn’t stop listening to #1 Record long enough to give you a chance. And when I tried, I spent most my time wishing you were as good as #1 Record.

R.E.M., Around the Sun
I am a fan of post-Berry R.E.M. albums, honest. I think Reveal is vastly underrated and Up gets a little draggy toward the end but is still a worthwhile album. Thus I didn’t approach Around the Sun with the assumption that it would be total crap, as most mentions of this album would have me believe. In fact this album does have some very nice moments; it starts strong and has a compelling final third ("The Ascent of Man" plods a little but I like it anyway), but the middle of this album… ugh, it really does hit some of the lowest points in R.E.M.’s history. “The Outsiders,” with special has-been Q-Tip, has got to be the most misguided songs—certainly the laziest—in the band’s discography. It’s almost bad enough to ruin the entire album. As a completist, I’m glad to finally get this album, though I don’t feel bad for taking two years to pick it up. It is easily their worst album. Unlike a lot of other naysayers, however, I feel like this is an aberration in an otherwise strong catalogue, not further evidence of a steady decline. I remain optimistic for the next one.

Beirut, The Flying Cup Club
Despite my first impression, The Flying Cup Club turned out to be a fine album. It is certainly the best thing Beirut has done thus far in his brief career, and I remain optimistic for his next album, provided he heeds my advice.

Radiohead, In Rainbows
Here’s something weird. I listened to In Rainbows pretty much nonstop for two weeks straight. And then one day, I stopped. And I don’t feel the need to listen to it again. And I don’t foresee myself needing to listen to it again in the future, either. [previously: my full review]

Iron & Wine, The Shepherd's Dog
I have little to say about this one right now, as I just picked it up a day ago and haven't really digested it yet. I will say that it's immediately obvious that this is Iron & Wine's best album, and that it will likely make my end of the year list.

My Listening Hours: The Rest of July–September

Blonde Redhead, 23
Without trying, every single Blonde Redhead album has come into my possession at one point or another. I’ve managed to follow and assess their career with each release, though I haven’t truly felt compelled to do so since somewhere around their fourth album. That’s not to say I don’t like them, however—just ambivalent. At any rate, Blonde Redhead have been continually refining their sound with each subsequent album, shaving off their ragged edges long ago in favor of something more atmospheric and moody. 23 picks up where Misery of a Butterfly left off, getting even more atmospheric and moody. The album is good but not perfect. It’s biggest fault is its sequencing—three similar-sounding Kazu Makino-fronted songs lead off the album before Amedeo Pace’s voice finally makes an appearance. The interplay between the two voices is a major part of what makes Blonde Redhead so enjoyable to listen to; when one overtakes the other, the album suffers. Not to mention, Pace’s songs are the better songs this time around.  Aside from sequencing, Blonde Redhead have by now refined their sound so much that it’s become predictable: propulsive drums, minor-key arpeggios, blurry soundscapes filling in the white space. All that really sets one song apart from the other is who’s singing (best is when they both sing, as on "Publisher"). Ultimately the band has settled into a sound that has become inessential unless you’re their biggest fan, blind to their imperfections, or you’re a casual fan looking to be sated by one Blonde Redhead and one album only.

Elvis Costello, This Year’s Model
Picking up from yesterday’s post on Imperial Bedroom… once I went back to This Year’s Model after falling in love with the later album, it seemed, well, obviously good. Whatever it was about Costello that I was having trouble getting past had all but evaporated. Suddenly every track here was better; nothing was blending together as it had before. Everything from “No Action” to "Night Rally" was rocking my socks off. The only reason the album finds itself in with “the rest” is that, frankly, when I put this album on a part of me wonders why I’m not listening to the other album.

Buffalo Springfield, s/t
My Byrds obsession is spiraling out of control. Keeping up with the many lineups of the band, who came from where and went on to do what, requires some serious research. Mostly that’s been done by wasting countless hours on wikipedia and searching old threads at I Love Music. Now the universe of Southern California bands from the 60s and 70s has opened up to me. Previously I’d never really associated Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, et al. with any one location or era. Hence a number of the albums being outlined in this post all come from a certain time and place: thus we come to Buffalo Springfield’s first album. It’s good but not essential. Their biggest hit, “For What it’s Worth,” leads off the album and feels completely separate from the rest of the record. Its production values are different, its lyrics more direct, and everything about it feels more sophisticated than the other ten tracks. The rest of the album feels like solid but run-of-the-mill 60s rock. It is kinda fun, though, to hear lil’ Neil Young singing utterly straightforward 60s pop tunes. His "Out of My Mind" is the highlight of the album.

Emmylou Harris, Elite Hotel
I bought this the same day I bought Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and that may have been this album’s downfall for me. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but my tolerance for the lap-steel was tested between the two albums. It was simply too much of the same instrument, played the same way and used to the same effect, in the span of one period of time spent listening to albums. I began unfairly comparing the two albums, and as far as my personal tastes go, when I’m forced to compare something to the Byrds, it’s an easy bet where I’m going to place my affection.

All that is to say that this album did not ultimately take up a great deal of my listening hours. The association with the Byrds album will fade in time, and I’ll begin to hear this album in its own context. My impressions thus far: it flips back and forth between yearning ballads and bluegrass stompers, with not a lot of nuance in between. I find that I like both categories (including her cover of “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and the raucous fun of "Feelin' Single, Seein' Double"), but no one song has fully embraced me.

Joni Mitchell, Blue
If you’d have asked me six months ago what I thought of Joni Mitchell, I’d have told you I could take or leave her, more likely leave her. But my wife became enamored with her and picked up Court and Spark. I was blindsided! I liked it way more than I expected to, and I went on about it in the last MLH roundup. Then a few weeks ago, wandering Amoeba all by my lonesome, ostensibly to buy the New Pornographers album, by golly I found myself leafing through the Mitchell bins and there was Blue, supposedly her best album, used for $7. I couldn’t pass it up.

I like the album but it hasn’t grabbed me the way Court and Spark did. It has a lot of the same elements as that album, minus one thing—all those great harmonies (though I do like "This Flight Tonight"—that little production hiccup partway through is wonderful). Blue feels much more like a “solo” album—it’s mostly just Joni and her guitar. Whereas my favorite tracks from C&S were those that had more of a full band sound. (Anyone reading this a Joni fan? Is there an album by Mitchell that picks up where “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris” left off?)

Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Crooked Rain has had a weird effect on me. This album came out when I was in high school; I’ve had a casual familiarity with it in the last fifteen years from its airplay on Alternative Nation and the love my college roommate showered on all of Pavement’s albums (early stuff more than this one, though). Yet I can’t say I’ve ever spent alone-time with it, which for me is essential if I ever want to claim that I’ve “heard” a record. All that said, when I listen to Crooked Rain, I immediately become nostalgic for high school. I think of off-campus lunches, classmates with colored sunglasses and doc martins, driving my crappy 1976 Toyota Celica to my local Tower Records. Yet Crooked Rain was the soundtrack to none of that. Somehow it has insinuated itself into my memories, as if I bought it the same day I picked up Automatic for the People or the first Weezer album. That’s not to say I have negative associations with that era of my life, but I’m finding it difficult to simply enjoy this album on its own merits. All of my mental associations—fuck dude, I went to a renaissance fair in Tulare one weekend in 1994; why am I thinking about that?—are destroying my honest experience of this album.

Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days
I bought Sam Beam’s first album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, when it was first released. I liked it but felt sated—I felt no real need to continue following his work.  Then the mp3s for his new album, The Shepherd’s Dog, started floating around and I thought they were fantastic—particularly “The Boy with the Coin.” In anticipation of that album, I went for this one. It’s pleasant. I put it on when I want something mellow and nice and... pleasant. I can’t say it knocks me out. Part of that might be because this album, unlike most albums by most artists, takes a long time—half the record—to really get good. Beginning with "Each Coming Night," Our Endless Numbered Days is pretty outstanding. But there are seven tracks prior to that that float right by. There’s enough to keep me coming back to the album, though I’m not moved by it. That said, I can still hear growth from the first album to the second, and I remain optimistic about the third.

Iggy Pop, Lust for Life
Lust for Life has the opposite problem of Our Endless Numbered Days; that is, it's got an outstanding first half and then loses the plot at the midpoint. Each song here is really a vamp on one idea, so their success hinges on whether that idea is sustainable for more than a minute or two. You already know which songs do it well—they're the ones that have been used for Cialis commercials. But somewhere around the last few minutes of "Here Comes Success," the vamping gets tiresome. The last three tracks on this album are bluesy jams, each with nice moments here or there, but all ultimately lacking the inspiration of the first half of the record.

Velvet Underground, Loaded
Loaded is probably the spottiest of the Velvet Underground's four albums, though it does contain one of my favorite VU songs, "I Found a Reason." Personally, my favorite VU songs are the more somber ones; Loaded has its share, but it also has some questionable rockers ("Head Held High," in particular). There's some great stuff here, but when I'm in the mood for the Velvets—my Velvets—I'll probably choose their third, self-titled album over this one.