Pretty Goes with Pretty

This Week's Soundtrack

My Morning Jacket: Circuital
Little Scream: The Golden Record (3)
A Tribe Called Quest: Midnight Marauders and The Low End Theory
Digable Planets: Blowout Comb
De La Soul: Buhloone Mindstate (2)
Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer (2)
Wooden Shjips: Dos
Little Joy: s/t
The Little Ones: Terry Tales and Fallen Gates
Neko Case: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Sam Prekop: s/t

• The Little Ones: Unlock The Door!

Hip Hop Moment

I had a little Tribe Called Quest moment this week, seeing the trailer for the new documentary, watching this video of Q-Tip and Kanye West doing "Award Tour" in Brooklyn, and then hearing Midnight Marauders when my brilliant wife happened to put it on. I don't really listen to hip hop that often, but this three-fer sent me down a little rabbit hole of nostalgia for some of my favorite hip hop albums of that era. Join me in the rabbit hole, won't you?

• A Tribe Called Quest: Excursions
• Camp Lo: Luchini
• The Pharcyde: Ya Mama
• Digable Planets: Dial 7 (Axion of Creamy Spies)/NY 21 Theme (Feat. Sarah Anne Webb)
• The Beastie Boys: Pass the Mic
• Fugees: Zealots
• Latyrx: Say That
• De La Soul: I Am I Be

Eleanor Friedberger is the Christopher Walken of Rock and Roll

 
What should one expect from a solo album by one of the Friedberger siblings (aka the Fiery Furnaces)? They are a band that is rarely predictable and often walks a tightrope between being totally irritating and utterly compelling. And strangely enough, when they opt to play it more or less straight, the results are not always great—take their last album, the piano-based and mostly inert I'm Going Away, for example. The group is so prolific and seems to take so much glee in flummoxing its fans in one way or another that I no longer approach their releases with any expectations whatsoever—it's just as possible that it will be brilliant as it will be stupid. Happily, Eleanor Friedberger's solo debut is brilliant—one of my favorite new albums of the year so far. Hovering around 40 minutes and made up of ten unique earworms, Last Summer retains all of the vocal and lyrical quirks Friedberger displays in her full-time gig as it luxuriates in straightforward song structures. Even the saxophones in "My Mistakes" and "Owl's Head Park" don't bother me—an exception to the rule in this year of the saxophone's indie rock invasion.

 

There's something about Friedberger's persona that is endlessly fascinating, despite sometimes feeling repetitive. As a singer she doesn't have a terribly broad range, and two-thirds of the time she is actually doing more of a staccato monologue than singing. Her lyrics rhyme as often as they don't; she seems to be reading straight out of a journal—half diary entries, half stabs at short stories. I've started to regard her as the Christopher Walken of rock and roll—just give her the script, remove all the punctuation marks, and let her speak the words in her own strange and rhythmic cadence, which seems to adhere to rules of orating that the rest of us are not privy to. If I showed you the lyrics to one of the verses of "The Inn of the Seventh Ray," could you intuitively tell me where she's breaking the lines?

If Highland Park isn't close enough there's that place on the way to the Inn of the Seventh Ray. Take a lecture in stereoscopics to show us the way to see with one eye open and one eye closed. You keep one eye open and one eye closed on the rest of the 1, I don't think so.

The words barely even make a lick of sense printed on the page, but somehow Friedberger evokes the images just right—the song seems to be about old friends reuniting as they try to find their way from East Los Angeles to a restaurant in Topanga Canyon (about an hour's drive, for the record). Some of the lyrics she tosses in are poetic at best, nonsensical at worst ("Climb upand down to the car in the commercial that pays for us to eat at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, but since the handle is broken, I can't get out," she sings later), but it hardly seems to matter when Friedberger sings/speaks them in her carefully plotted style.

This is clearly the key element to Friedberger that one must lock into in order to enjoy her music; if ever I hear a criticism of her singing style (including with the Fiery Furnaces), it is that she is "overly mannered" in her delivery. Yeah, she is—so what? The joy of her songs, aside from the way their melodies seem to burrow into your head even when she's not fully singing, is in listening to her lyrics. If you tune out the words and only listen to the vocal, she can start seem more of a one-note singer. That's partly why only one song on album, "Glitter Gold Year," falls flat for me. That page of Friedberger's journal seems only to have had a couple of lines scratched out on them, and she's committed to stretching them out over almost three minutes, hence the repetition of "2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-0-0-0-0-0-1-0." Compared to the nine other tracks on the album, this is the one time it sounds like Friedberger is passing time, waiting for inspiration to hit.

Of course, in true Fiery Furnaces fashion, that's also the song that worms its way into my brain more than any of the others. Say what you want about either of the Friedbergers, but they certainly know how make hooks—whether you like the feeling of those hooks in your brain is another question. As far as Last Summer goes, they're sinking in deeper and deeper with every listen and that's just how I want it.

• Eleanor Friedberger: Inn of the Seventh Ray

This Week's Soundtrack

Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer (6)
Astrud Gilberto: Verve Jazz Masters 9
Caetano Veloso: A Bossa de Caetano
Disappears: Lux and Guider
Wooden Shjips: Dos (2)
The Fall: Hex Enduction Hour
Flying Saucer Attack: Distance
The Jesus Lizard: Liar
Dr. Dog: Fate
Karp: Self-Titled LP
Mountains: Air Museum
Dusty Springfield: Dusty in Memphis
Etta James: Her Best
Feist: The Reminder
Loscil: Submers
Harry Nilsson: All Time Greatest Hits
Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony
The Beatles: Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
Desmond Dekker: Rockin' Steady: The Best of Desmond Dekker

From the looks of this list, compared to other weeks, you'd think I was listening to albums nonstop all week. I kinda was, but in truth I was mostly playing the Eleanor Friedberger album over and over. In fact, the majority of these albums—everything from Lux through Air Museum—were played last Saturday, when I stole away to a coffeeshop for six hours or so to do a freelance job. I vacillated between ambient albums and rock albums in which the vocals are blurred, suppressed, or otherwise mostly indesipherable (bonus points also for when the songs are super repetitive).

• Flying Saucer Attack: Standing Stone

Good Morning, Zelda

 

I can't not share this, via the Decibel Tolls.

This Week's Soundtrack

Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer (4)
Les Paul & Mary Ford: Best of the Capitol Masters
Wooden Shjips: Dos (3)
The Byrds: Mr. Tambourine Man
Etta James: Her Best
Loscil: Submers
The Flatlanders: More a Legend Than a Band
Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues and s/t
The Lovin' Spoonful: Anthology
Pernice Brothers: Yours, Mine & Ours

I'm not sure what possessed me to put on the Pernice Brothers, a band I once loved more than any other. Nor am I sure why I chose Yours, Mine & Ours, an album with a couple of classics but otherwise sits squarely in the middle of my list, were I to rank them all. At any rate it made for pleasant evening listening last night.

• Pernice Brothers: Water Ban
  

This Week's Soundtrack

Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
Harmonia: Deluxe
Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina: Elis & Tom
Loscil: Submers (4)
Antonio Carlos Jobim: Stone Flower
Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer
Neko Case: Furnace Room Lullaby and Middle Cyclone

The majority of this week was spent switching between the Loscil album and Dave Rawkblog's mix of favorite songs from the year so far, nearly all of which were new to me. I've whittled off a few that don't do much for me (Junior Boys, the Minks), but there are a few tracks here that are really outstanding. Little Scream's "The Heron and the Fox" has probably jumped out the most. It's been a while since I've heard something so simply played yet so pretty and heartfelt.

• Little Scream: The Heron and the Fox

 

Maurice (Pre-Slint) Demos Now Available

If you've read my book on Spiderland, you know that one of my main arguments in the opening chapter is that the significance of Squirrel Bait in the pre-Slint soup is somewhat overstated, considering David Grubbs wrote the majority of that band's music and lyrics and that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford were not really in the band at the same time. But there's a recorded documentation of Squirrel Bait and all those names are in the liner notes, so there you go. Rather, in my interviews for the book, it was made pretty clear to me that another band had a much more direct tie to Slint: Maurice.

Maurice was a heavy, aggressive metal band originally started by Britt Walford, Brian McMahan, and Ned Oldham and featuring Sean "Rat" Garrison on lead vocals. That early incarnation lasted not very long—Oldham was replaced by a guy named Mike Bucayu (who along with Rat would later form Kinghorse), and McMahan was replaced by David Pajo. I've written a little about this on the blog before, and you can still read an excerpt from the book detailing the earliest period in Slint's history at the 33 1/3 blog.

The thing about Maurice, though, is that they never did any proper recordings, so their place in Slint's history is easy to overlook. That's why I'm happy to report that David Pajo has recently made their one and only demo—recorded on a boombox at the specific request of one Glenn Danzig—available  to all.

As with most things Slint-related, you should prepare yourself for something that sounds nothing like Slint whatsoever. Maurice was a metal band. The songs on the demo hardly hint at the Slint you most wish you could have more of (ie, Spiderland). Here and there, like toward the end of "The Struggle," you can hear small hints of things to come on Tweez—Walford's insane drumming and Pajo's compulsive need to play as many artificial harmonics as possible—but even so it's not made transparant that this band might turn into Slint. (It is a fact, however, that the final song Maurice wrote became the first Slint song, "Pat," but this demo predates that song. To my knowledge, the Maurice version of that song was never recorded.) It is worth keeping in mind, though, that everyone playing on this demo was about fifteen years old at the time.

Not to be a shill (okay, a little bit to be a shill), but there are a lot of great stories about Maurice in the book, if you haven't read it, including their brief tour with Samhain, with Will Oldham in tow. (Oldham came close to joining Slint right after the group splintered off from Maurice—can you imagine?) So, you know, go buy the book. And buy the Maurice demo here.

The Soft Synth, Softly Synthesizing

Andy Beta’s recent article for the Los Angeles Times, “A New Age for New Age Music,”  starts off as a trend piece—New Age is back! It’s cool!—identifying Animal Collective’s sampling of Zamphir, Jimmy Tamborello’s remixes of Enya, Beck’s cover of Yanni’s Live at the Acropolis, and other examples as a sign that the maligned genre is being rehabilitated. Clearly there’s truth to that (ironic or otherwise), but by the article’s midpoint Beta also exposes just how messy concepts like genre or influence can be.

[T]he tag New Age is rather broad. It encompasses the electronic soundscapes of Michael Stearns and Steve Roach as well as the gentle acoustic albums that Windham Hill made ubiquitous. It has roots in American composers like Terry Riley as well as Indian classical music. New Age founding fathers Paul Horn and Steven Halpern come from the 1960s jazz tradition, and yet it also contains Native American and Sanskrit chants. It's also influenced by the series of ambient albums made by Eno in the mid-'70s as well as the adventurous German music of Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching, Deuter and Vangelis, not to mention the synth pop made in Japan by Kitaro. And then there were the California communes that gave rise to artists like Peter Davison and Iasos.

In this paragraph alone Beta has cited a dozen different New Age roots, each of which has branched into a myriad different subgenres which may or may not have anything in common with each other. It’s a fool’s errand to try and pin down all the ways in which this once-cheesy genre has wormed its way into contemporary music—as I learned when I attempted to do the same with soft rock, also enjoying a parallel resurgence in 2011 (though I use the term “enjoying” loosely).

That post on soft rock generated a fair amount of response, much of it taking me to task for presuming the artists’ motivations or just being kinda pissed that I hate the new Destroyer record. The thing that disappointed me about that response was that I realized, in retrospect, that I had framed my opinions as a "problem with music"—like, it was the musicians who were failing me. In truth I was more concerned, as I always am on this blog, with my own tastes and peccadillos. I was trying to identify the line between so-called soft acts who I really liked (Feist, Fleet Foxes, Midlake, etc.) and those I really loathed (Destroyer’s Kaputt, Gayngs, and now add the Weeknd too). Clearly there is a line—since that post the term “PBR&B” has become a thing, and those bands I loathe fall into that category while those I like do not, and yet all of these acts have something soft or hokey in their music. Different reference points, but soft in any case.

That’s where Beta’s paragraph, quoted above, resonates. He’s talking about a parallel trend happening in on the electronic side of music right now, citing acts like Gang Gang Dance, Emeralds, and Blues Control, and he quotes, among others, members of Animal Collective and Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never/Ford & Lopatin. All of these acts are drawing from disparate roots—krautrock, jazz, Eno, synth pop, etc.—but are, according to Beta, winding up somewhere approximating New Age (Nu-Age? Neu Age?).

 

There’s a lot to unpack in all of this, not least is what constitutes New Age in the first place and whether or not an act like Emeralds is remotely close to that definition (I’m not sure they are). They are clearly influenced by Klaus Schulze, but then again Schulze has released 60+ albums over more than forty years, some of which are drone, some are trance, some could be considered New Age, and so on. Looking solely at krautrock for a minute, as a genre it enjoyed at least a decade (roughly 1969–1979) of wild experimentation and improvisation before many of its most esteemed practitioners either slowed their output or evolved into something more peaceful and serene (and cheesy). Tangerine Dream, Michael Rother, and others released some serious dreck in the 80s, and those are the albums where the genre known as krautrock (kosmiche!) begins to be identified with New Age. Ambient music, too, started from a place of extreme minimalism and ideas formulated by the likes of Alvin Lucier or John Cage, among others. But in time melody and structure—and synthesizers—crept into the genre and thus an entire strain of that style also fell into the New Age ghetto.

I don’t think Emeralds or Gang Gang Dance or Lopatin or some of the others referenced in Beta’s article have taken up with New Age in such an extreme fashion—I mean, I hardly want to get out my crystals and celebrate the solstice when I listen to Returnal. But Beta does point to a similar arc happening within these artists’ own evolution, noting that the group Blues Control was originally interested in noise but lost interest in that form, so they “started exploring different types of psychedelic music like New Age.” A year or two back I read an interview with Lopatin where he said essentially the same thing—that he came from noise but pivoted to ambient (or whatever you want to call his genre) because he was looking for something more challenging to his sensibilities. There is still clearly an edge to his Returnal album (it starts with a noise track, after all), and it would be difficult to confuse any of these acts with Yanni, but if we’re looking at the trajectory of noise artists, then yeah, they’ve gone pretty soft.

 

Whether you think this trend is worrisome or not probably depends on your own musical allergies. I, for instance, am clearly allergic to the saxophone, as my soft rock post and any number of tweets and other stray comments might make clear. But I’m not allergic to that retro synth sound that seems to be creeping into a lot of ambient/nu-kosmiche acts. Just give a listen the Steve Moore track (from 2007) or the Harald Grosskopf track (from 1980) I included in the mix I posted on Monday, or the synth-heavy tracks on the new Mountains album which I’ve named one of my favorites of the year so far. And yet I could fully appreciate someone wanting to turn these tracks off within fifteen seconds, so painful to the ears they might sound if one has nasty musical memories of the last time this synth sound was in vogue.

And even that’s not to say one’s enjoyment of a song begins and ends with the instruments being played, or their exact tone. All of these acts still have it in their power to create or destroy a pleasurable listening experience. This whole idea of tying an assortment of acts to one (awful) retro genre misses the mark—an argument I realize can and should be levied against my soft rock stance. As Bruce Levenstein, who has a great blog called Rockets and Rayguns and tweets as @compactrobot, said yesterday:  “No, there’s a stigma attached to New Age music because a lot of it is/was incredibly shitty. Those New Age textures didn’t ‘signal’ something cheesy, they were cheesy. And Mr. Lopatin finding it 'amusing' doesn’t make it any better.”

 

This all loops back around to those concepts of genre and influence, of presuming an artist's motivations, and ultimately of how much stock you can put in identifying trends or viewing a trend's trajectory as a personal affront. As a fan of a certain genre, or of specific musicians, it can feel like a betrayal when the music heads down a path you don't want to go down. Of course that's not the musician's fault; what's really happening is you're seeing a schism between larger musical trends and your own listening trends--two totally different things. A couple years back I wrote a post called "Do I Want to Go There?", in which I tried to take a step back from my infatuation with music from Laurel Canyon to see where I'd wind up if I chose to go in deep with the genre. The answer was no. Frankly, whatever the genre, the answer is almost always no! If you go in deep with krautrock you wind up with a ton of shitty Tangerine Dream albums; if you go in deep with Laurel Canyon you wind up with the Eagles; if you go in deep the current nu-kosmiche, retro-synth trend, you're probably going to wind up with some hokey Enya-referencing ironic spiritualist; if you like PBR&B, god help you, you're already too far gone.

The experience of music is, at all times, a play on the tension between the evolution of an artist's creative arc and that of a listener's personal  tastes. They mesh or clash every time you press play, leading at the best of times to epiphany, at the worst of times to a sense of betrayal. It's a relationship; both parties are free to make it work or screw it up.

 

Favorite Downloads: June

Despite last month's paltry mix and last week's confession re my lack of listening, I've somehow managed to come up with eight new-to-me tracks in the last month, crafted into a tidy mix for your listening pleasure. In truth this collection came more or less from just three sources: apologies/props to my friends at the Cargo Culte, from whom I pilfer many tracks every month (this month, Steve Moore and Harald Grosskopf); shout-out to Swan Fungus, whose top ten of the year so far clued me in to the Tape track; and a special nod to Miles at The Notes for his mix of favorites of the year so far, which yielded the opening and closing ambient tracks, the PJ Harvey (which technically I heard before but I didn't hear it) and the Dirty Beaches ditty (though its best quality, as my brillant wife pointed out, is the Francios Hardy track it samples); the Bjork track, I saw in about forty-two different places.

• Kyle Bobby Dunn: Dropping Sandwiches in Chester Lake
• Bjork: Crystalline
• Steve Moore: Infinite Resignation
• Harald Grosskopf: Transcendental Overdrive
• Dirty Beaches: Lord Knows Best
• PJ Harvey: Hanging in the Wire
• Tape: Hotels
• Loscil: Stave Peak

This Week's Soundtrack

St. Vincent: Actor
The Sea & Cake: The Fawn
Mountains: Air Museum (2)
Gillian Welch (2)
Washed Out: Within and Without
Low: C'mon
Fugazi: Steady Diet of Nothing

• Washed Out: Amor Fati