Pretty Goes with Pretty

PGWP's Greatest Guitar Songs (That I Can Think of at the Moment)

Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time captures the typical idea of a great "guitar"—for the most part thick, chunky, riffs and howling, blues-jam solos. But what I think of as excellent guitarwork has little to do with anything the likes of Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn have ever done. The best guitar songs to me are muddy, textural, more concerned with atmosphere and aesthetic than with technical proficiency. No, I don't mean punk—in fact sometimes it still means a jamming solo. Other times it means a simple chord or progression, played to fragile perfection. Here's a dozen tracks (in almost chronological order) that, on a cursory look through my collection, totally kill me from a guitar-playing perspective (including some overlap with RS's list).

• The Byrds, Eight Miles High (1966)

The genius of this song, beyond the Coltrane and raga influences, is the way Roger McGuinn took the quintessential Byrds instrument—the twelve-string—and applied it in a wholly different way. This isn't the ringing arpeggios of "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Turn! Turn! Turn!"; this is the lead. Despite having the exact same instrumentation as any other Byrds song, "Eight Miles High" sounds unlike the rest of their material, and it's all due to that twelve-string lead, which sounds like the aural equivalent of a scribbling crayon.

• 13th Floor Elevators, Slip Inside This House (1967)

This epic track is hardly stunning for its guitar solo, which lasts less than thirty seconds near the end of the eight-minute track and is comprised of all of five notes. Yet this song, to me, is all about the guitar. The tone of the guitar is just fantastic—not much treble, and the distortion sounds like there is literally just a tear in the amp’s speaker. Then there’s the riff that carries the song, that propulsive slide up the neck over John Ike Walton’s marching beat. The song is ominous in its repetition.

• The Electric Prunes, General Confessional (1968)

This is probably my favorite Electric Prunes song, and it would be unfair to say it succeeds purely because of the guitar. Every component of this near-instrumental is flawless: the organ, the drums—the drums!—the strings, and the guitars. As far as that guitar goes, again like the Elevators I just love the tone, which sounds as if it were made of glass during the rhythm portions and then becomes a sharp, tinny spike during the solo. Interestingly, looking at the wikipedia page for this album, it’s no wonder every player on this track kills it—they were apparently all session musicians and not actually the Prunes themselves!

• Fairport Convention, A Sailor's Life (1969)
• Neil Young, Down by the River (1969)

Both of these tracks (and the albums they come from) are fairly new to me—purchased within the last three months or so. Listening to them at different times, I had the same thought pass through my head: “I bet this blew young Tom Verlaine’s mind when this came out.” Both albums were released in 1969, when Verlaine was 20. He’d go on to throw down the gauntlet eight years later with his own guitar classic, “Marquee Moon.”

• Television, Marquee Moon (1977)
• Drive Like Jehu, Luau (1994)

Likewise, hearing “Marquee Moon” for the first time only about two years ago, I had the immediate understanding of what made John Reis’s mind tick when it came to Drive Like Jehu (who I've gone on about before—including more about this song in particular). Sure, Jehu was a lot noisier and more chaotic, but the germ for their aesthetic is there.

• My Bloody Valentine, To Here Knows When (1992)

Any song from Loveless belongs on this kind of list (Rolling Stone picked the opener, “Only Shallow”). Without understating the impact of the entirety of the album, I picked “To Here Knows When”—the song in which the guitars are at their most abstracted. The whammy-effected warping is there, but the whole notion of hitting a string with your pick seems to be absent. The guitar sound is totally effaced; it could very well be all synthesizers or samples. The song is MBV at its least rocking, least melodic, most blurred, most lush.

• The Dirty Three, Distant Shore (1998)

Like the MBV pick this is one song to illustrate the overall greatness of Mick Turner. His delicate chords are the heart of the Dirty Three’s sound—he keeps each song grounded while Warren Ellis’s violin takes center stage. But listen to those chords! Turner’s fingers sound as if they can barley stay on the fretboard long enough to let the notes ring out. Stray notes sneak into every Dirty Three song and they’re all the more beautiful for it. It’s an extremely subtle playing style but he absolutely raises the level of every song he’s on. I’ve said this before, but Turner is precisely the reason why Cat Power’s Moon Pix is her best album. Listen to any of the songs from that record—take American Flag, for instance—and listen to the guitarwork, how fragile it is. That’s not Chan Marshall playing guitar. That’s Mick Turner.

• Low, Born by the Wires (1998)

I’ve written about this song before, so you may know my feelings already. Suffice to say I could listen to that single, beautifully moody chord for hours. At their best, Low make you listen; they make you appreciate the smallest changes. I like to play this song loud, and one of my favorite parts comes in the last minute of the song when Alan Sparhawk has stopped playing the chord, instead letting a low, humming feedback build—and he just touches a string. It’s a short, taut sound and it makes my ears twitch every time I hear it. To me that one moment is the whole point of the song, and it’s a guitar lesson in and of itself.

• Sigur Rós, Svefn-G-Englar (1999)

The breakout track on Sigur Rós’s breakout album has never been topped by the band. It is pure transcendence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a track that evokes the feeling of floating quite so perfectly as this. Not to mention that sudden, brief chord change midway through. This song is a lesson in dynamics, in tension and release—put to use in toward beauty, which is not often the intent for post-rock bands—that I think not even Sigur Rós has quite grasped ever since.

What do you think? What are some of your personal favorite guitar songs, or guitar moments?

Life-changing Albums: Low's Songs for a Dead Pilot

A while back I promised a post on Low—the third in my series of “life-changing albums” (part one, part two). I fumbled on the post because, among other excuses, I couldn’t figure out which Low album to talk about. Everything from I Could Live in Hope to Secret Name—four albums, two EPs, innumerable 7”s and compilation appearances—might be worth calling life-changing.”

Then the topic of Low’s best album came up elseweb. I picked The Curtain Hits the Cast and immediately regretted my choice, realizing in a moment of epiphany that my favorite Low album, all along, has been their EP Songs for a Dead Pilot. That was the album that proved Low had more gas in the tank than expected, and that they truly had made an aesthetic leap. No other band, and no other album, better illustrated the idea of setting up parameters as a special kind of freedom.

I discovered Low by chance. I picked up their first album solely because I liked its cover. This was some time in 1994 or 1995, when I was getting out of my metal years and looking for something else. Coming from metal, it doesn’t get much more “something else” than the eleven lullabies that are I Could Live in Hope. It was a beautiful record—probably the first album I’ve ever owned that could be described as such. I listened to it unendingly and really felt a kind of ache in songs like “Words” or “Lazy.”

In a way my embrace of Low could be seen as a direct reaction to my love of Drive Like Jehu. As I said about that band, who I also consider life-changing, they killed rock music for me. They executed my idea of rock music so perfectly that I simply had no need for other bands treading in loud/fast territory. Where else to go but Low? Over the next three years the band perfected their approach to their sound, with the colder, darker Long Division and their masterpiece, The Curtain Hits the Cast, in which the band’s lyrics gained added dimension and their musical continuum seemed to reach its plateau in the somnambulant epic “Do You Know How to Waltz?”.

As good as Low was—and despite their steady perfection of their sound—it was becoming difficult to imagine remaining a fan beyond that album. Reviews, even the good ones, were routinely dismissive—“Low is really slow!”—as if nothing more needed to be said. Lines like that got my dander up but at the same time, how many more Curtains did the band really have left before the whole thing became redundant?

And so we come to Songs for a Dead Pilot, a statement of intent if ever I’ve heard one. By ditching their producer (Kramer), the band eliminated the pristine sheen that was draped across each of their other albums. Staying true to their explicitly stated parameters—play slow—Songs for a Dead Pilot nevertheless broke the band into new emotional territory: tension, anger, disappointment, resentment. These feelings lurked under their previous songs (such as “Mom Said” from Curtain), but they were hidden beneath that sheen of perfection. Perfect harmonies, delicate musicianship. Maybe it's a subtle shift, but Songs moved from delicate to fragile.

Beginning with Songs, the band chose to expose their flaws. Mimi stopped double-tracking her vocals, making her voice sound more human, less angelic. Alan stretched his vocals further (“Landlord”), practically flaunting the fact that he is hardly as good a vocalist as his wife. You can also hear the band paying closer attention to every small sound their instruments make. Listen to "Born by the Wires," and how Alan plays that one chord over and over for nearly ten minutes. Every strum of that muddy chord is just a little different, calling attention to each individual note and the way his pick hits the strings. No song better illustrates the band's progression. They made a conscious decision to become more raw and more explicitly minimalist, as opposed to merely minimal, as their prior albums could be described.

Perhaps this was always the band’s intent. But it was Songs that allowed me my personal epiphany. Low’s approach to music is like Zeno’s paradox: no matter how small the space, there is always further to go. They’re not interested, like Slint for instance, in expressing themselves through dramatic dynamics. This becomes a kind of limitation that sets Low free. In a sense they're like a musical embodiment of Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was damned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom each time he reached the top, for eternity. Where one might view that as a kind of hell, Camus made it a metaphor for the aburdity of life; accepting his fate, Sisyphus eventually would have no expectation that his boulder would do anything other than fall down that hill. Locked into his routine, he certainly must have come to know any variety of emotions beyond despair. As Camus wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Songs for a Dead Pilot, while certainly not a happy record, nevertheless finds Low embracing a similar philosophy. Knowing that their sound is limited to certain rules, they must now find aesthetic fulfillment within those parameters. Songs for a Dead Pilot took a slight left turn from the trajectory Low had been on; just enough to show that they could go anywhere they pleased.

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.]

Albums of My Life

Last week I referred to Paul Simon’s Graceland as an “album of my life.” Coincidentally, this thread at Last Plane to Jakarta took a brief tangent into what constitutes a “life-changing album.” Two different concepts, and I’ve had both on my mind in the last few days. The first is a lot easier to find examples of: albums that I played intensely during some period of my life, to the point of becoming something other than good or great albums; rather, they're the soundtrack to memories. The second category, life-changing albums, is harder to figure out. Before I try to sort that one out, I want to think about the other.

Albums of my life. Going back as far as I can, my childhood was filled with Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, Ry Cooder. I have strong mental associations with all those artists, and in retrospect they all must have set some kind of foundation for what I’ve come to like today.

George Michael’s Faith might have been the very first album I ever viewed as wholly mine: an cassette I kept in my own room, played on my own walkman. INXS’s Kick and Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, too. In elementary school I would walk laps around the track during recess with Danny Casares as we tried to piece together the lyrics to “You Be Illin’ from memory. By sixth grade I was transfixed by Appetite for Destruction—probably the first album I’d ever associated with danger. This led to junior high and high school, where Master of Puppets, Rust in Peace, and Persistence of Time set the template for my taste in metal. By my junior or senior year I was transitioning out of metal and into something else: Rollins Band (particularly the early stuff), Tool, and a band I’d discovered through a blind purchase at Tower Records, Craw, all made music that was heavy but was more dynamic musically and more sophisticated lyrically and emotionally.

Somehow from there I stumbled into indie rock without any real guidance (which I’ve written about before). By then I’d lost interest in heaviness but was actively looking for music that shifted dynamically. Slint, Fugazi, Rodan, Codeine. I vividly recall moving to college and trying to describe the kind of music I liked to a kid I’d met in the dorms. “It can be really loud and really screamy, but it can also get really quiet, and it’s not heavy like metal.” He just looked at me and said “what, you mean emo?”

Another dormmate gave me a dubbed cassette full of songs by what I thought was some friend of hers; the recording quality was exceptionally poor and all the label said was “Elliott Smith.” I played the hell out of the tape but was embarrassed to tell the girl I dug it so much because it seemed a little weird to be really into her random friend’s music. Six months later I was in a record store and saw the album in the bin—a real record by a real guy on a real label, and best of all that was another album (Roman Candle) in the bins as well!

The rest of college was Tortoise, June of 44, Blonde Redhead, Unwound, Superchunk, the Pernice Brothers. After college, when I met my wife: My Morning Jacket’s The Tennessee Fire, Cat Power’s Moon Pix, Rufus Wainwright’s first album, Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker.

We got married in September 2001: she walked down the aisle to Sigur Ros’ “Sven-g-Englar” and we danced to Low’s “Two Step.” We moved to New York not long after. If you asked me to soundtrack the winter of 2002, when we lived in a spacious but empty loft above a functioning sweatshop in a shitty part of Williamsburg, I’d have to hand you Pete Yorn’s Music for the Morning After. When we moved to Boerum Hill it was Chutes too Narrow, Michigan, and Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters. We bought Feist’s Let it Die in Paris in 2004. We moved to L.A. in 2005 and in the last two or three years it’s been Funeral, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina, Midlake, and most recently Andrew Bird.

These are albums of my life. And really I’m just scratching the surface—this is what I can come up with just thinking about it in the time it takes to write these words. Were I to focus on one period of my life, other albums would come into view, sort of like staring at the night sky and seeing the stars reveal themselves the longer you look.

But not all of these albums are my all-time favorites, necessarily. Some I haven’t listened to in years, either because my tastes have changed drastically (everything pre-Spiderland), because I associate them too strongly with my memories (Moon Pix), because they’ve just not aged well (sadly, Spiderland), or because they’re frankly not that good (Music for the Morning After).

Thus we come to the difference between an album of my life and an album that changed my life. More on that later this week.

The New Low (Yes, That's a Pun)

I was an obsessive Low fan from the moment I accidentally bought I Could Live in Hope back in 1995. From that point on I bought every album, every EP, every 7”, and got my hands on every compilation appearance. That said, Things We Lost in the Fire was the last album I bought by them. It was good, but I guess I’d finally hit my limit—the band started to resemble a past me. It wasn’t so much the band’s fault as my own personal growth. Certain songs, albums, or bands are indelibly tied to an era in one’s life. Such was Low for me.

I’ve kept up with the band from afar, sort of the way you might google an ex-girlfriend every once in a while. I listened to a few songs from Trust and thought it sounded great—I just couldn’t go there. Then I heard most of The Great Destroyer, which was okay but not great. Now we come to Drums and Guns. The AV Club posted the video for “Breaker,” and Silence is a Rhythm Too has two other mp3s, “Always Fade” and “Hatchet.”

And what the fuck? All three of these songs are terrible. Terrible! I mean, I’m shocked that a band I once loved so much is capable of such awful stuff. It’s not just the drum machine—in fact that might be the least of it. Sparhawk’s vocals are overbearing, particularly on “Breaker.” And the lyrics to “Hatchet” render it unlistenable for me. Ugh, the whole thing is a trainwreck. I’ve been seeing decent reviews for this album; am I missing something?