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Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
My Morning Jacket: Circuital
Wild Beasts: Smother (4)
Talk Talk: Laughing Stock (2)
Beach Boys: Greatest Hits
Tim Hecker: An Imaginary Country
Neko Case: Middle Cyclone (2)
Talk Talk: Laughing Stock (3)
Wild Beasts: Smother (2)
Okkervil River: I Am Very Far
My Morning Jacket: Circuital (3) and Does Xmas Fiasco Style
Dusty Springfield: Dusty in Memphis
Harry Belafonte: Calypso
Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues
Belle and Sebastian: If You're Feeling Sinister
Low: C'mon
The Flatlanders: More a Legend Than a Band
Fleet Foxes: s/t and Helplessness Blues (5)
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours and Tusk
Scratch Acid: Just Keep Eating
Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence and Quiet is the New Loud
Cass McCombs: Wit's End
My Morning Jacket: Circuital (3)
Gang Gang Dance: Eye Contact
Wild Beasts: Smother
This was my week, more or less:
Sunday: a low-effort alphabetical run through a portion of the Fs
Monday: blasted a Scratch Acid album I haven't heard in probably 15 years
Tuesday: Lovely and soft Kings of Convenience soundtrack for the morning routine
Wednesday: Forgot that I got the Cass McCombs album a week ago, so put it on again. Realized I don't like it much
Thursday: Listened to this Rockets and Rayguns mix
Friday: new stuff: My Morning Jacket over and over, Gang Gang Dance, Wild Beasts.
Before sitting down to write about Wit's End, an album I don't much like, I went back to read what I wrote about Cass McCombs' last album, Catacombs—an album I like quite a lot. There I wrote that its opener, "Dreams Come True Girl," is slightly alien to the songs that follow in that it's a more sophisticatedly assembled song than the others. In some way Wit's End's opener, "County Line," is also alien to the rest of its album. Not because it's got an inventive structure like "Dreams Come True Girl" but because of its feel—"Country Line" is warm, it aches. It's one of the best songs McCombs has ever written. It's a contrast to the rest of the album, which feels numb and turgid.
I went on in my Catacombs review to describe the record like this:
the rest of the album feels more of a piece, as Cass McCombs approaches the remaining ten songs in a similar fashion. The music is simple—each song built on just a few chords and sparse arrangements, their length determined more by the story McCombs wants to tell than by a typical verse-chorus-bridge pop structure. "Prima Donna," for instance, is built around a simple two-chord progression and is all verses, colored only by a little trumpet vamp toward the end. "Don't Vote" feels much longer than its five and a half minutes, whereas "The Executioner's Song" seems to pass right by because your mind and ears have by now become so inured to McCombs's clinically depressed Big Bird vocal style and dank, echoey production.
That description could work pretty well for Wit's End, too. Each of the eight songs are minimally arranged and last anywhere from four to nine minutes, McCombs clearly enamored of his verses at the expense of a decent chorus or, often, a worthwhile melody. The difference between Wit's End and Catacombs, however, is that Catacombs takes a turn at the midpoint and becomes, for McCombs at least, a much more lively album. There is a rhythm section, there's a change in pacing. In short, there's variety. Wit's End has almost none of those elements. A song that is built around its lyrics and lopes along as long as the narrative requires is not de facto a bad thing (see: most of Leonard Cohen's oeuvre), but the deadly dull pace of Wit's End's forty-seven minutes saps the record of its elegance.
Okkervil River: I Am Very Far (4)
Low: C'mon
Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (5)
Cass McCombs: Wit's End (2)
Klaus Schulze: Dune
Neil Young: After the Gold Rush
I basically spent the whole week listening to new purchases (all the new releases plus the the Shulze). Still forming my opinion of them...
A little bit late, but here's a quick rundown of every new-to-me album I picked up in April, in the order I acquired them.
Low: Drums and Guns
Continuing the rehabilitation of my opinion of Low's output of the last ten years, I've come to the realization that, in fact, the band has never made a bad album. My bad for ever assuming that they had. Unfortunately when Drums and Guns originally came out the only songs I heard from it were "Pretty People," "Breaker," and "Hatchet"; I didn't particularly like the first and third of those tracks, and the video for the second kinda annoyed me. Since I'd already (mistakenly!) written them off after The Great Destroyer, it was easy to pass this over. Forgive me for my errors! Though it's not my favorite album by Low, it's still quite good, and it stands apart from the rest of their output for its anger and dread. It's final third in particular is really magical.
Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony
Hell is another entrant in the quickly filling "nu-kosmiche" genre of Krautrock-influenced synth/ambient (see also Oneohtrixpoint Never, Emeralds, and Arp, among others). The Terminal Symphony is Hell's second full length and is quite good. Like Arp's The Soft Wave (my favorite album of last year), it does a good job of mixing textures, melodies, and dynamics, making something that is easy to get lost in but providing enough hooks to climb your way out.
Cluster: Zuckerzeit
Harmonia: Musik von Harmonia
Speaking of, here are the two biggest culprits inspiring the wave of acts like Rene Hell et al. I own and love other albums by both of these groups (well, technically it's the same group in both cases—Harmonia is just Cluster+Michael Rother), and have been meaning to get these albums for at least a year. After watching the excellent BBC documentary about Krautrock, I was inspired to download both posthaste. I've been listening to both ever since, often one after the other, to the point that I don't totally know where one ends and the other begins. They're both excellent.
Caetano Veloso & Gal Costa: Domingo
I had no idea this record even existed until I happened across a link to it earlier this month. Apparently the album was made prior to either Veloso or Costa's solo debuts; it's basically a samba record not too far off from the sound of, say, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina's Tom & Elis (one of my favorite records of all time). This isn't as good as that, but then again that's a pretty high bar. This is still quite nice.
Low: C'mon
I promise everything I said about Low above is true, but nevertheless—like I said yesterday—C'mon is their best album in ten years, and is so far in the running for my favorite album of the year.
2007's Drums and Guns was certainly the most tortured album in Low's seventeen-year discography. After watching the documentary made around that time, You May Need a Murderer, I'd frankly be worried for the band if five years later Low were still pushing to the outer waters. Drums and Guns was more than mere artistic statement—it was a difficult snapshot of a man who was trying to hang on. The documentary portrays Alan Sparhawk as someone who is deeply troubled by personal demons as well as the ills of the world. War, economic downturn, and psychologic ills aside, Sparhawk was literally ready for the rapture to begin. He was on the other side of a nervous breakdown and was clearly still wrestling with himself—all while his wife and two children joined him in the van on the road to the next stop on tour. It's a dark and difficult documentary to watch, especially for fans who have spent nearly twenty years holding on both to the music and to the idea(l) that Low are more than a band, they're a family. No one wants Low to suffer.
Listening to C'mon, the newest album, I'd rather not say it's a retreat from where Low were going on their last album, sonically speaking, but rather a return to a healthier form. (I hope, at least; I've nothing to go on but the sound of the music).
Retreat, return… on the other hand I hate to use either word. It's either to Low's eternal credit or eternal detriment that, to some ears, they'll always more or less sound the same, while to others each album represents a dramatic progression or regression in their sound. Though it's true that Drums and Guns is their angriest record, and before that The Great Destroyer was their loudest, those are still relative terms. For all their differences, neither are immeasurable steps away from the simmering restraint of Trust, the experimentation of Songs for a Dead Pilot, or the dynamism of Secret Name (which includes some of Low's sunniest and darkest material). Few bands, now or ever, have been as consistently brilliant as Low for as long a period of time. So let's not get caught up in talking about similarities and differences, but rather measure the overall quality: C'mon is a gorgeous and near-perfect album, easily their best since Things We Lost in the Fire, released a decade ago.
C'mon is bookended by "Try to Sleep" and "Something's Turning Over," both terrific additions to the pantheon of Low's poppier, peppier material (think "Starfire," "Venus," "Dinosaur Act," etc.). Together they contain the mood of the record, keeping C'mon hopeful even amid darker tracks like "$20," which hearkens back to the band's Vernon Yard era, where songs possessed the minimum of words and song structure. It and the slow-building "Magic/Majesty" are like true old-school slowcore songs, throwbacks to a time when that subgenre had more traction.
Not to say they've abandoned the sound of some of their more recent material. Sparhawk's distortion pedal still makes its share of appearances, as on the cheekily sinister "Witches." Lyrically the song seems to point to some of the themes of You May Need a Murderer—delusions, rapture—but made light. When the narrator of the song tells his father that there are witches in his room, his father gives him a baseball bat to beat the hags into submission. The whole song is about being quote-unquote tough, but it's those quotation marks that reveal its weakness.
That's where Mimi Parker comes in: she is the strength of this album, and I mean that in every positive sense of the word. (Fitting, perhaps, that it's her silhouette on the album's cover.) As on every Low album Parker's presence is the anchor to each song, though she only sings lead here and there. In some ways that's where the sometimes great but inconsistent Drums and Guns faltered. Aside from one song at its midpoint, that album feels very much dominated by Sparhawk and his demons. C'mon, by contrast, is more tempered. Parker makes her presence known by the second track, "You See Everything," and again a few tracks later on "Especially Me"—perhaps the best Parker-sung track in ten years. There is a motherly quality to her voice; she is reassuring no matter the content of the lyrics or the ominous quality of the music. Her voice is the foundation of the band's sound—the rock. When Low get dark, her voice is a light. Though it was not absent from Drums and Guns, it felt suppressed. Here, even when she isn't singing lead, she retains a softness that counters Sparhawk's fragility.
This is perhaps best exemplified on the album's climax, the eight-minute powerhouse that is "Nothing But Heart." The song starts slow as Sparhawk sings a short verse followed by the line "I'm nothing but heart" repeated over and over. Those last four words could have come straight from Sparhawk's mouth in that documentary: the guy, at what looked to be just above his lowest point, was nothing if not raw and confessional and putting it all out there in his songs. "I'm nothing but heart"—full of emotion and easy to break. Sparhawk latches onto that line like a terrier and never lets go of it as the song builds and builds and builds—it's a lighters-in-the-air anthem like they've never done before. But it's not the dynamic build to crescendo or the electrifying guitar solo that knocks this song up to the next level—it's Parker's soothing voice, which comes in around the six minute mark singing her own set of lyrics in counter to Sparhawk's. Her words are slightly unintelligible amid the din—light in a fog, perhaps—but snatches here and there seem to respond to Sparhawk. Though I can't make it all out, one line sticks out at me: "as we stumble to the shore, as we walk into the night." It's that we that gets me. It seems almost to be a corrective to the masterful "Done," from earlier in the album. In that song Sparhawk sings "I'm weary and stumbling in the desert heat"; later he sings "If you see my love, tell her I'm done." When Parker comes in at the record's climactic moment, singing of stumbling together, not alone, you get the feeling that she's not done. It's as if she is the one holding out her hand, saying c'mon.
Low: C'mon (4) and Things We Lost in the Fire
Gal Costa & Caetano Veloso: Domingo (2)
Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony
Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues
The Antlers: Burst Apart
Midlake: The Trials of Van Occupanther
Posting this a little late due to being out of town for the last five days (and, weirdly, not listening to any music while I was gone. I can't remember the last time I went five days without listening to any music).