Pretty Goes with Pretty

In This Analogy Chocolate is Good Songwriting and Peanut Butter is Droning Synths

Every instrument in the War on Drugs’ music has its assignment, no matter the song. (Though, interestingly, no member of the band is resigned to a specific instrument.) The drums are metronomic—no frills, no fills. The keyboards drone. The “No Rain”-inspired lead guitar solos and solos and solos. Despite (or because of) their rigidly defined roles, none of these elements are at the forefront of Slave Ambient. Rather, it's the rootsy presence of leader Adam Granduciel, whose Americana attitude meshes with the lite psyche of the rest of the band way more seamlessly than it has any right to. This whole record is pure chocolate and peanut butter—too down home to be Talk Talk, too monochromatic to be Wilco.

The whole record is equal parts familiar and inspired. In this age of washed out indie-ambient acts, it’s a wonder that the band is able to balance the two elements of its sound so deftly. Granduciel’s voice is high in the mix, not doused in (too much) reverb; his words are intelligible, his personality is anything but effaced. I’m reminded more of Tom Petty or Mark Knopfler than Kevin Shields or Panda Bear. (That I find this refreshing is, I think, an indictment of rock music in 2011/12.)

No, seriously, enough with all the comparisons to other bands. Slave Ambient is a good record. I was unmoved by it on the first few listens but have nevertheless been induced to return to it over and over. It's a repetitive listen—the rhythms are steady within the space of each track, there are few choruses, no breakdowns. The songs become part of a larger tapestry; the dynamics are found not from verse to verse but song to song. 

The reckoning point of the album comes at the middle. This is where you know whether or not you’re on board with the War on Drugs or not. It starts with the locomotive “Your Love is Calling My Name,” which melts into the languid instrumental “The Animator” and then ascends to the almost-anthemic “Come to the City,” finally ending with the brief comedown of “Come for It.” The string of songs boosts Slave Ambient to another plane. I hesitate to say it’s epic—so much about this record is level, not grand; numb, not raw—but it belies a sense of purpose to these songs. Granduciel is not just enshrouding himself in mood and calling it art. He’s making music.

The War on Drugs: Your Love Is Calling My Name

Feist: Metals

When I think of artists who have been the soundtrack to the last decade of my life—a pretty significant decade filled with marriage, dues-paying, success, death, and birth—Feist is one of the first who comes to mind. Both Let It Die and The Reminder latched onto me and wouldn't let go, seeing me through my share of highs and lows.

That’s not to say I found either album to be perfect. In fact, both are patchy efforts to my ears, each containing highs so high that I eventually forgive the lows. By now I’ve listened to both so many times that the songs that originally bothered me are now beloved like family (second cousins, maybe, rather than brothers or sisters, but family). When Feist's songs hit me—“Mushaboom,” “Let It Die,” “So Sorry,” “1234,” and so on—they hit me hard. They feel like perfection. They’re perfectly sweet, perfectly buoyant, perfectly regretful, perfectly yearning. Yet just as often her songs don’t nail my bull’s eye. Their softness nags at me, their sultriness irks me; they set off irony alarms inside of me that I’m never truly certain they intend to set off. For an artist I profess to love, Feist sure does make me wrestle with her music, and with myself. How someone whose specialty seems to be making comfortable music can make me feel so uncomfortable, is a conundrum. But here’s the thing: Feist’s albums are worth wrestling with.

But let's not dwell on past records. Metals, Feist’s newest, is her best. It’s one of those deceptively wonderful albums that doesn’t really announce itself on first listen, yet over time sinks its hooks into you. On first listen I felt like a lot of the songs bled into each other, aside from a few noticeable spikes like the climax of “Graveyard.” I couldn’t fully pay attention to the record and lost track of how long I’d been listening to it. I kept thinking “this must be the last song,” and then another song would come on and I’d think it again. I didn’t hear anything as immediate as “1234” or “I Feel It All” or “My Moon My Man.” That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just meant that Metals wasn't easy to latch onto.

Then I listened to it a few more times and developed a more measured response: Metals is Feist’s most cohesive album, consistently good from front to back. Another way of saying that, I thought, was that the lows were higher but the highs were lower. Fewer homeruns but fewer strikeouts, too.

Then I listened to it again, and again, and again. And now I feel fully immersed in Metals, in sync (I think) with what Feist is trying to accomplish with the record. One thing she’s not trying to do is repeat the lightning-in-a-bottle success of her The Reminder. (Could she, even if she tried?) Metals is a pure, beginning-to-end listening experience, its peaks and valleys drawing on each other for their impact. It’s not a casual collection of songs like Let It Die or a patchwork of different, sometimes conflicting moods as on The Reminder. Metals is moody without being dark, by turns beautifully intimate and passionately boisterous.

There’s a certain kind of song that Feist has always been good at writing: the simple, hushed numbers like “Gatekeeper” or “So Sorry.” That kind of song is here too, in the form of “How Come You Never Go There” or “Cicadas and Gulls.” But she’s found a new way to contrast those tracks; instead of the upbeat pop numbers of The Reminder or the soft-rockisms of Let It Die, she’s invited a troupe of backup singers to boost her aches and yearnings to new heights. “The Bad in Each Other,” “Graveyard,” “A Commotion,” “The Circle Married the Line,” “Bittersweet Melodies,” “Undiscovered First,” “Comfort Me”—all feature a phalanx of voices, a heavily emphasized rhythm section, and/or a buoying string section to amplify her songs without overpowering them. Over the course of a dozen tracks, Feist manages to color Metals with a variety of tones and emotions without ever deviating from the overarching mood of the record. This is something she’s never managed before. Metals is by far her most mature, most assured effort.

• Feist: Graveyard

 

Mates of State: Mountaintops

The new Mates of State album is exactly what you'd expect it to be—sugar-high indie pop powered by Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel's constant harmonies and all-earworms-all-the-time melodies. Much like the New Pornographers (though a little more emo), they make their craft seem so easy it might be mistaken for uninspired and boring.

It's most definitely not boring—every song, just like on their other records, begs to be sung along or danced to. Nevertheless I stress "just like on their other records." Again like the New Pornos (and a ton of other bands, to be fair), the question for you is whether or not you need more of the same in your life. Some do, some don't.

Based on only a few listens so far,  I can tell what kind of record Mountaintops will be for me: I'll rate nearly every song four stars (read: no classics, no duds), will listen to it for a week or two, and then it will bleed into the fabric of my iTunes library for the rest of my life. Its songs will pop up on shuffle in all the appropriate smart playlists, or when I'm in the mood I'll put all my Mates of State albums on random. In any case Mountaintops will soon cease to function as a discrete collection of ten songs.

Don't get me wrong: that's not a bad fate for an album. There's lots of outcomes for albums' long-term consumption in the iTunes age. I could delete them all together (hello/goodbye Gayngs and Mi Ami), I could keep them in my sprawling library but never find my way back to them (long time no see Wolf Parade and Wye Oak), or I could cling to the record as most artists hope their works are clung to (it's like you never left, Andrew Bird and Radio Dept.). Mountaintops, and the Mates of State in general, falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and so do a lot of albums by consistently solid and pleasurable bands (please make room, Pernice Brothers, Kings of Convenience, and Beach House).

• Mates of State: Changes
  

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

Sondre Lerche: s/t

Sondre Lerche is an artist who I followed early on—I loved his first two albums, appreciated The Duper Sessions, and have not really kept up with since then. At my brilliant wife's urging we decided to check in and see how he sounds these days. The answer is, not all that different from how he sounded in the early aughts. That's fine with me, though this album only sticks with me here and there. I really like the first two tracks, especially the opener, "Ricochet." It starts quietly, highlighting Lerche's jazz-influenced penchant for melody, then is lifted by a soft rhythm section before escalating again by the final third. If nothing else it proves how adept Lerche is at constructing a song. That doesn't mean, however, that the blood flows through every single song here.

While Lerche's craftsmanship rarely wanes, much of this record lacks the special ingredient—call it heart—that compells repeated listening. Things start to get patchy with the third and fourth tracks—and, as my brilliant wife said, "if you can't get it right in the first four tracks, you're dead to me." It picks up again with "Coliseum Town," which features a lovely, not-overpowering string arrangement, but after that I feel lost. After repeated listens in the last ten days or so, I still couldn't hum you a melody from the second half the record. Nothing rubs me wrong, but the songs just fade into the background: there's Lerche's distinctive voice, doing a variation on the "Sondre Lerche Melody"^TM. No surprises. Not a bad record, but no surprises.

• Sondre Lerche: Ricochet

Cass McCombs: Wit's End

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.

• Cass McCombs: County Line

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.

Low: C'mon

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.

• Low: Especially Me

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.

Disappears: Guider

Disappears appeared last year with their debut, Lux, and have already turned in a followup, Guider. The speed and efficiency with which they operate matches their aesthetic: of the sixteen total songs they've released, fifteen are short and sweet psyche rock attacks. Disappears' music is loud but focused, walking a line between chaos and control like an expert acrobat. "Superstision," the lead track from Guider, gives a good indication of their formula. The tightly wound rhythm section pushes each song forward as the guitars descend like a thundercloud, all distortion and delay and wah-wah and feedback, while the singer shouts curt monotone phrases over top.

• Disappears: Superstition

Disappears are a bizarro respite from a lot of the other new music I'm hearing lately. They are primal, noisy, edgy—a perfectly rigid line amidst a lot of soft noodles. Not to say they exist in a vacuum; they share a love of acid rock, pigfuck, and krautrock right along with peers like Wooden Shjips, Psychic Paramount, Earthless, and others. Among them all, Disappears remains unique if only for their succinctness.

Not counting the one song in their catalogue that is unlike the rest, that is: Guider's closing track, "Revisiting." It's a monster fifteen-minute vamp that is totally hypnotic and enveloping. The song just keeps going until you almost forget you're listening to it.  More than once I've had the experience of being jolted right around the eleven-minute mark, realizing that the train is still chugging along. That moment also happens to coincide with when I realize how awesome it is.

Although all of Guider is great, "Revisiting" is really its saving grace. Up to that point, all of Disappears' songs have been almost militantly interchangeable. As much as I like Lux and Guider, the question inevitably comes up: how much more Disappears does a guy need? "Revisiting" at the very least portends that the band has more tricks up their sleeve.

 

John Vanderslice: White Wilderness

John Vanderslice is one of the most dependably enjoyable songwriters working today, if not always the most distinctive. His vocal range is limited, his melodies don't vary much from song to song, his pacing is usually slow or midtempo. At the same time, his formula usually yields nice results—I could play his songs all day long and not ever get tired of them.

In fact, that's what I did the day I got White Wilderness—loaded it up and put it on repeat. (It was especially easy since the album is a quick thirty-one minutes.) I must have listened to it four or five times in a row. And I have to say it benefitted from that immersive listening, because it mostly failed to make much of a first impression. It was nice but it passed me by, other than a few tracks here and there. Yet as soon as I'd finished listen #2 I had already begun to claim a few tracks as new favorites.

Vanderslice actually shares the billing on White Wilderness; the album is a collaboration with the Magik*Magik Orchestra. And it's the songs that feel the most collaborative that are also, not coincidentally, the best. Whereas tracks like "Sea Salt" or "20k" simply sound like Vanderslice's ballads with strings, songs like "The Piano Lesson" and "Overcoat" clearly show off the orchestra's virtuosity. The songs are busy and surprising and thrilling. They bring a dynamism to the record that doesn't seem like it would be there if Vanderslice were going it alone. These tracks come in the middle of White Wilderness; not only are they the album's highlights, they make some the other songs better by juxtaposition. "After It Ends," stripped down and orchestra-free, practically glows.

Unfortunately the twists and turns that make the middle of the album so engaging aren't sustained over the course of all nine songs. The rest is more typical Vanderslice; I can't say they're bad songs—they're good!—but they feel workmanlike. The end result is that, overall, White Wilderness feels neither disappointing nor essential.

• John Vanderslice: The Piano Lesson

Radio Dept.: Passive Aggressive—Singles 2002–2010

I've been a fan of the Radio Dept. since 2003, when I heard their debut, Lesser Matters, by chance. That album ranks among my favorites of the last ten years (if it doesn't top the list altogether), so I'm glad to see, seven years later, that the band seems to have finally gained the notoriety they deserve with last year's acclaimed Clinging to a Scheme. Scheme is the band's third full-length in all (Pet Grief, from 2006, being the one in between), and the rap on that record was that it took the Radio Dept. just shy of forever to make it.

That doesn't mean the band's discography is paltry, as this new compilation attests. The collection gathers some (not all) of their myriad non-album tracks along with a small primer on their full-lengths. It's a nice overview of the Radio Dept.'s aesthetic—straddling the borders of shoegaze, twee, and synth pop. Outside of true-blue fans who already have every EP, every single, every compilation appearance, Passive Aggressive probably contains enough material to be worth picking up.

Still, like any compilation album, it doesn't feel perfect. Its two discs are split by the somewhat arbitrary division of "a-sides" and "b-sides"—though outside of their home country of Sweden one would be hard pressed to name the "singles" from their albums. The band is too under the radar, possessing too few albums, to warrant anything resembling a greatest hits collection. Yet six of the first disc's thirteen tracks are album cuts. If you're new to Radio Dept., or if you only own Clinging to a Scheme, you'd be better served getting their full lengths than this. There are too many great songs on those records (especially Lesser Matters) to think that Passive Aggressive could be a satisfactory substitute.

Because of the way the album is organized, it presents two separate (roughly) chronologic discs, which rubbed me as arbitrarily strange at first. Why take me across the decade twice? Why not just arrange the whole thing chronologically and let the a-sides and b-sides fall where they may? Going by their albums, after all, you can detect a maturation of the band's sound. The Radio Dept. has never had a live drummer, yet Lesser Matters feels like a more rock-oriented album; the guitars are very present. Songs like "Where the Damage Isn't Already Done" (also in this collection) are totally guitar-oriented shoegazey jams.

• The Radio Dept.: Where Damage Isn't Already Done

Pet Grief, however, was a much more atmospheric record. Synths came up in the mix, guitars were less riff-oriented, and the drum programming, while still rudimentary, felt more influenced by electronica (that album is represented by just one track, the excellent "The Worst Taste in Music"). Clinging to a Scheme was like a synthesis of both those earlier records—the aura of Pet Grief without sacrificing the tunes of Lesser Matters.

With that development in mind, I found it awkward to sequence the discs of Passive Aggressive like two laps around the same track. So, in an act of twenty-first-century rebellion, I sorted the double-album by release date instead, listening for the maturation and hoping I'd hear something in these rarities that shined a new light on the ideas running through the Radio Dept.'s heads in the last decade (the way, for instance, Low seems to experiment with their own sound on their various EPs).

• The Radio Dept.: This Past Week

What I learned in this listening experiment surprised me. All the elements I thought the Radio Dept. grew into over time were more or less present from the start. Or, maybe more accurately, the band has only stretched by skips and steps, not leaps and bounds, over the years. Being one of my favorite bands, that's only a mild knock against them. Much like the Kings of Convenience, who also only manage to release a new full-length every three or four years, their output is so sporadic that by the time something new comes along I'm more than fine with it being a minor variation on whatever they've done before. That means Passive Aggressive isn't much of a revelation, but it is a bunch of new Radio Dept. songs that I'm glad to have. 

If you're like me and you have all of the band's full-lengths but little else, Passive Aggressive is a worthy addition to the iTunes library—even if it's still not complete. In addition to their three albums, for instance, the band has also released three EPs in the last eight years, and only the title tracks from those EPs are represented here. Instead the set is mostly filled out by b-sides from their singles—worthy songs, sure. Passive Aggressive collects the hardest of the hard-to-find material, just not all of it.

But whatever. I just got a little over a disc's worth of new-to-me Radio Dept. songs, so I'm stoked.

• The Radio Dept.: The New Improved Hypocrisy

Tennis: Cape Dory

I must have listened to Cape Dory eight times in one or two days. Not because it was totally engrossing, but because it kept ending just as it got going. At ten songs, Cape Dory might be considered a full-length but its slight twenty-eight minutes registers more as a simple snapshot. In a lot of ways, that's exactly what the album is: it's based around the married duo's sailing trip up the East Coast. With titles like "Bimini Bay," "South Carolina" and "Baltimore," Cape Dory is like the audio equivalent of a vacation photo album.

The album is also a snapshot of a band still in its infancy. Tennis has good ingredients—Alaina Moore has a lovely voice, her tone (if not her pipes) approximating that of Neko Case or Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino; production-wise the music of Cape Dory resembles the hollow, roomy sound of the Walkmen (where the Walkmen's sound recalls wintry desolation, Tennis evoke an early spring thaw). Ultimately where Tennis fall short is the songs themselves. The whole of Cape Dory is pleasant but the melodies aren't always there, the heart not quite beating.

With each listen Cape Dory gets a little better, especially in the album's second half, where the string of "South Carolina," "Pigeon," and "Seafarer" lift things to another, more memorable level. Here the vocal melodies are just a little more ambitious and interesting, the ache in Moore's voice more apparent. Elsewhere the simplicities of the songwriting, as on the yawn-worthy verses of "Baltimore" or the boring phrase-plus-ooohing chorus of "Take Me Somewhere,"  drag Tennis down to a plain-Jane level that reminds me of the landslide of sad-girl songwriters who populated the Pacific Northwest in the 90s, all of whom were influenced by pioneering acts like Tiger Trap or Lois.

 

Whatever my complaints, I still keep starting Cape Dory over as soon it's done—surely a sign of its quality, or its status as a grower. I like playing this record, even if much of it passes me by. Tennis has a possibly great album on their horizon. It's already clear they like traveling; I'd like to hear them again after they've taken their show on the road, hopefully in search of that horizon.

• Tennis: Pigeon

Three Tiny Reviews: Wire, Decemberists, Destroyer

I listened to a few new/upcoming releases this week via NPR and, uh, other sources. Here are three quick takes:

Wire: Red Barked Tree
I'm far from schooled in Wire's ouevre—I have Pink Flag and two compilations covering 1977–79 and 1985–90, but no other full-lengths. That said, I'm not feeling the new record. It seems to shift between sounding retro and dated, but rarely fresh. It's not a bad album, and if you're a true-blue fan you'll probably overlook its flaws. I do like "Bad Worn Thing," though the rest of the record passes me by.

The Decemberists: The King is Dead
It's been a while, probably two or three albums, since I last checked in with the Decemberists. In that time they don't seem to have changed things up too much (though thankfully the pirate songs seem to be excised). The King is Dead is a perfectly pleasant album if never terribly gripping. Peter Buck guests on a track or two, I'm told. Not coincidentally a couple tracks here sound indebted not just to R.E.M. but to very specific R.E.M. songs (the guitar line from "The One I Love" crops up in "Down by the Water," and "Calamity Song" lifts its rhythm from "Me in Honey" and its melody from "Wendell Gee").

Destroyer: Kaputt
My favorite part of this record is when Ashton Kutcher bursts into my home at the conclusion and is all HA HA HA DUDE YOU'VE BEEN PRANKED. Anyone calling this Destoryer's best album—or even a good album by any standard—is on meds (probably the same meds Bejar is on). Longer screed to come, if I can stomach listening to this again.

Sam Prekop: Old Punch Card

I've loved Sam Prekop since his days with Shrimp Boat, though I've felt things were beginning to get stale as of the last couple of Sea & Cake records. His vocal delivery had become rote and his songs too often evoking the same relaxed mood over and over. So I was both relieved and curious to hear he'd thrown a huge curveball with his third solo album by doing an all-synth, all-instrumental record. Seeing as I'm actually more into all-synth, all-instrumental records these days than I am songwriters, I was maybe even more curious than you might think.

In all Prekop acquits himself well in this new style, though the record nevertheless lacks that something special. The album skips between nice melodies and more abstract, atonal sections—usually in the space of one song. I was drawn more to the former than the latter, so Old Punch Card became a frustrating listen—I couldn't skip tracks to get to the ones I liked. Obviously Prekop intended it that way; if he wanted to make a straight-up melodic instrumental album, he would have done so. The more abstract parts are a necessary part of his vision. But if you keep up with the other releases on Thrill Jockey, you've probably heard other artists who do this sort of thing just as well, or better. Ultimately this is a record I'll file into my "writing" playlist (all instrumental tracks), where I won't skip it if it shuffles on; but neither will I feel an urge to single this record out among the rest of my iTunes library.

• Sam Prekop: A Places

Actress: Splazsh

I'm a picky eater when it comes to consuming electronica. It can't be too danceable, can't be too noisy, can't be too cheesy. It probably shouldn't have vocals and especially shouldn't have anything resembling diva vocals. That house beat, ugsh ugsh ugsh ugsh, is usually a turnoff. The quieter my electronica is, the more I probably like it. The more "intelligent" it is, the better its odds of making it into heavy rotation. Quite frankly, the closer to ambient it is, the better. There's exceptions to every rule, but nevertheless there you go.

This is a preamble and/or excuse for my mixed feelings about Actress's Splazsh. I'd never heard of Actress (aka London-based DJ Darren Cunningham) until a couple of weeks ago, when I saw that the album had topped the Wire's best of 2010 list. To top such a list I knew Actress had to be abstract enough to be interesting without being so inaccessible as to alienate at least some of the critics voting in the poll. I took a gamble and picked up the record.

That balance between head and hips is about right for describing Actress. Splazsh is basically a dance record, only winnowed down to the most minimal of elements. There are a lot of elements to it that draw on all the things I, personally, don't like about dance music, which keeps me from fully embracing the record; but Cunningham also fucks with these elements in such a way as to remain interesting anyway. "Lost" is probably the best example of this (and also my favorite track on the record). It begins as a kind of minimal house track, but then Cunningham attacks his own rhythm with a cut-up version of the same rhythm—it sounds almost like parasite latching onto its host. The effect is so oddly compelling to me that I'm won over by the whole track, even when it eventually gets going and the vocals become a stronger element—a style of vocals that turn me off nine times out of ten.

So, Splazsh has been kind of an itch and a scratch for me—irritating and compelling, sometimes simultaneously. It attracts me just enough that I've continued to listen to it in spite of the parts that clash with my typical tastes, and for that reason the whole album has grown on me. I like it more today than when I picked it up two weeks ago. Whether I'll think it's a masterpiece or a flash in the pan a few months down the road, I don't know.

• Actress: Lost

The Third Eye Foundation: The Dark

The last time Matt Elliott released something under his Third Eye Foundation moniker it was 2001. Since then he’d abandoned both the name and the sound—a terror-filled brand of electronica—opting to do a more guitar/vocal-oriented style of music under his given name.

I was a big fan of the Third Eye Foundation, not so much of Matt Elliott. So it’s great news that he’s resurrected his old identity for a new album, The Dark, released back in November. I wish I hadn’t slept on picking this up—The Dark belongs in my upper echelon of albums released this year. It’s also in the upper tier of Third Eye Foundation albums overall. The aptly named album is a forty-minute nightmare of orchestral drum-n-bass.

According to the track list, The Dark contains five songs. You wouldn’t know it from listening, however. The transitions from one track to the next are nearly invisible, especially between “Anhedonia” and “Standard Deviation,” the opening pair of ten-plus-minute tracks. Together they form a slowly evolving, unrelenting envelope of sound as Elliott adds on and peels back various layers. “Anhedonia” starts quietly—a delicately plucked piano is joined by samples that sound like moaning ghosts, propelled by a stuttering echo of a beat. The atmosphere of the song is heavy and mournful; it puts you in a mental funk before you know it. By the time it’s melted into the second track, Elliott has dragged you down to his lair. More and more instruments  pile on—somber horns and strings—drenched in a cavernous echo that starts to overwhelm with its cacophony.

For a record that is rarely without beats, The Dark somehow manages to keep heavy on the atmosphere. It’s everything that swirls around Elliott’s programming that makes the album so gripping. The dense morass of chants and samples and strings can feel directionless at time—that is, as a listener you feel lost inside the record. There is no song structure to guide you out, and rarely even a breakdown to let you catch your breath. In some ways it resembles the massive improvisational jams of Amon Düül II, only less rocking and way more dangerous.

Only at the album's midpoint, "Pareidolia," does Elliott let on there really is a structure to his horror show. The track begins with a breakdown, finally relenting after the first twenty minutes, though it doesn't last. Elliott switches up the pitch of the track midway through, increasing the speed and bringing everything to a frenetic climax before again easing the listener back down with "Closure," the most melodic of the bunch, though no less menacing. Though it's not the final track on the album, "Closure" feels like the true endpoint of the record (the last track, "If You Treat Us Like Terrorists We Will Act Like Terrorists," is the shortest of the bunch, and also the only track to feel clearly separated from the rest). Its melody is never swallowed by the dense array of sounds clutching at it; like any good horror story, there is a survivor amongst the wreckage.

• The Third Eye Foundation: Pareidolia

Duet for Voice and Guitar: On the Walkmen

Any opinion, observation, conversation, or description of the Walkmen must begin with the band's singer, Hamilton Leithauser. His is one of the most identifiable voices in contemporary indie rock, alongside the likes of Britt Daniel, Matt Berninger, Will Sheff, and Craig Finn. Compelling frontmen with strong voices and a grasp of emotional and lyrical nuance are a rare breed in indie rock, a genre that has typically favored effacing the lead vocal through reverb, distortion, a low mix, nonsensical lyrics, or an enigmatic personality for the better part of twenty-five or thirty years. (Aside: is that the legacy of the Jesus and Mary Chain or does it go back further?)

When a strong persona does emerge within the genre, it's worth noting. Leithauser's Rod Stewart-like rasp is a morass of dejection, melancholy, regret, and, occasionally, fury. But the Walkmen aren't compelling solely because of Leithauser. The other day Nick Sylvester interviewed the Walkmen's producer, Chris Zane, and it was illuminating precisely because it wasn't about Leithauser, but everything else that goes into the Walkmen's sound—the recording process and, more specifically, the sound of Paul Maroon's guitar.

The "Walkmen sound" is something the band has been honing for five albums now, to the point that there is definitely a template for how their songs are designed. I'd never heard it confirmed prior to reading the Zane interview, but the roomy sound of the drums and the almost merciless absence of low end in the mix certainly points to a raw recording process. (Read the interview, but the basic gist is that they record everything live in one room with only a modicum of microphones, none of which are close to any one instrument, so everything sort of bleeds into everything else. Only Leithauser is isolated in a booth, though he's still singing live with the band.) This all adds up to a clattering mess of tones in the mid and high range; the lack of low frequencies makes for an agitated, nervy sound—the perfect accompaniment for Leithauser's agitated, nervy voice. It feels like the Walkmen are all half-drunk, threatening to fall apart at any moment.

Though it's been present from the start of their career, with Lisbon I find myself keying in on just how important Maroon's guitar is to the band. It's almost all treble—if you told me he didn't even bother stringing up the low E, I'd believe you. Maroon's playing is terrifically melodic, but his tone is often harsh or washed out. Maybe it's because of the way the band records, so the rhythm section doesn't feel as in your face as a close-mic'd prodcution would manage, but Maroon's guitar is really the counterpart to Leithauser's isolated voice. For everything else being recorded in that room, it's his guitar that cuts through it all. The more I listen to Lisbon, the more each song feels like a duet between Leithauser and Maroon—the guitar itches, the voice scratches.

• The Walkmen: Woe Is Me

Deep Listening

Of all the albums I acquired a few weeks ago—nearly 20!—I'm a little surprised to find that the one that has endeared itself to me the most, so far, is Pauline Oliveros/Stuart Dempster/Panaiotis's Deep Listening, from 1989. I had no idea what to expect when I picked this up. The album was filed in the "Techno" section, though I had some feeling that would prove to be misleading. It is. Deep Listening is four lengthy improvisational pieces, mostly comprised of Oliveros on accordion, Dempster on trombone or didgeridoo, and Panaiotis's voice. Yet even that description is misleading. Each track is a long, drawn out, meditative drone. (I've certainly never heard an accordion played like this!) The album was recorded at the bottom of a large cistern somewhere in Washington state—the liner notes describe how they lowered themselves, their instruments, and the mics and cables into the cistern while producer Foster Reed used his van as a makeshift recording booth. The environment in which they recorded thus becomes another instrument, adding natural reverb and, according to the artists, a 45-second delay on every note they played.

The result is a glacial yet gorgeous sound. The tones of each instrument are warm and pure and full. There were a few instances where I had to turn the album off before I could finish listening and it actually hurt me to cut off something unfolding so delicately.

Oliveros apparently coined the phrase "deep listening" in opposition to "ambient." The latter was described by Brian Eno as music that could fold into the noise of the everyday—it intentionally evades focused attention. The Deep Listening Band (as they called themselves on subsequent releases), on the other hand, makes music that is minimal, that drones, that stretches into vastness—yet still commands you to hear it. 

• Oliveros/Dempster/Panaiotis: Suiren

Richard Catwrangleur

 

Richard is a friend of mine—we used to be in a band together—so I feel I should exempt myself from "reviewing" his album, House of the Spirit-Wrestler!. But I also can't not recommend it—it's really good! 

Richard lives in Vancouver. He doesn't tour. I don't even know if he plays out. So it's more than likely you've never heard of him and never will hear of him unless you listen to the song below or download the whole album for free.

Since our band broke up way back in 2000, I've watched Richard write song after excellent song. He periodically sends me song or an album he's done. One, back in '04 or so, was pretty slick indie pop and is something I listen to, still, all the time. Once he sent me a couple of pure electronica tracks and those were pretty amazing too.

Now he's onto lo-fi garage. Not to make it sound like he's a dilettante—knowing him for many years I know that he's always been into this stuff; and at their core his songs are pop, regardless of the production. Richard's songwriting is so assured that dressing it in lo-fi doesn't feel like affectation (unlike, say, Wavves). Maybe it's the fact that as a songwriter his points of reference—Jonathan Richman and the Sonics, for two examples among others—stretch further back than the 90s (unlike, say, Wavves). He's not encumbered by his production; the strength of his songs set him free.

• Richard Catwrangleur: Little Witch

Oneohtrix Point Never: Returnal

To get into Returnal you must first pass through the portal of "Nil Admirari," the opening track. It's a five-minute barrage of aggressive static, buzzing moans, and alarming whirs. The song is like an arduous test one must withstand so as to be granted entry to the rest of the album. My first inclination was to skip it and just get to the good (not harsh) stuff, but on further listens I've come to regard "Nil Admirari" as an essential track. It grounds the record; the following seven tracks exist in its wake and are enhanced by that context.

Many ambient or drone albums aren't exactly composed as a concisely focused arrangement of eight short tracks. Usually they're either a couple or few extremely long tracks and/or a series of improvisations, either of which can feel wondrous as often as they feel aimless. Returnal, by contrast, clocks in at around forty minutes, it's longest track just over seven minutes, each piece exploring a mood slightly different from the one before. 

Comparisons have and will be made to Emeralds' latest, Does It Look Like I'm Here—the two acts are friends, both explore similar tones and textures, and their albums are similarly comprised of a series of short, more or less accessible tracks. For my money Returnal is the more successful of the two. Where Emeralds made a series of discrete tracks, each with their pleasures (and occasional annoyances), Oneohtrix Point Never manages to retain variation from song to song—not really a characteristic of most ambient records!—yet also add up to a greater, more cohesive whole. The escalating cacophony of "Nil Admirari" melts into "Describing Bodies," the album's most serene track, which morphs into the slightly more rhythmic "Stress Waves," then followed by the excellent title track, whose atmosphere is created through bubbling synth and surreal harmonized vocals. "Pelham Island Road" and "Where Does Time Go" both work out looping, dizzying arpeggios. "Ouroboros" is a short but sweet two-minute wave of lush synth drones, a prelude the final track, "Preyouandi," a clattering and dreamlike track that links back to the title track and brings the album full circle.

It's this attention to the ebb and flow of the album, to each track's details and the way they cohere into a larger work, that makes Returnal such a gratifying listen. Most ambient records are by design intended to envelop you, to allow you to drift and get lost in their spaciousness. Returnal somehow manages to do that and hold you at rapt attention. 

• Oneohtrix Point Never: Returnal

School of Seven Bells: Disconnect from Desire

I come to School of Seven Bells (or SVIIB, as they like to be abbreviated) as a fan of Benjamin Curtis, formerly of Secret Machines, a band that went downhill after his departure. I'm less familiar with the work of sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, who make up the other two-thirds of the band (they're formerly of On!Air!Library!, a band I've not heard). Perhaps that's why I'm somewhat disappointed in Disconnect from Desire: Curtis's presence—or what I expect Curtis's presence to entail—feels suppressed.

  

Curtis is a interesting and multi-faceted guitarist, as able to chomp down into muscular riffing as he is to rile up walls of texture and atmosphere. The best songs by his old band stretched into an epic, repetitive, monstrous combination of modern-meets-kraut rock.I don't expect his new trio to be an outgrowth of his old trio—it clearly isn't—but I do hope to see his abilities given the spotlight here and there.

  

Rather, the songs of Disconnect from Desire choose to emphasize the twin vocals of the Deheza sisters. Their voices are clean, smooth, and pretty; they are often emotionless yet not robotic or abstract as, say, acts like Ms. John Soda or Stereolab can be (two bands who share sonic similarities with SVIIB). Underneath them Curtis wields his guitar and manipulates electronics while the rhythms are supplied via drum machine. The music has a spacious is upbeat pulse, more New Order than Neu!. Buried in there somewhere are some interesting atmospherics recalling My Bloody Valentine or Philip Glass, but they’re pushed far down in the mix. What should be in your face is instead treated like a mere nuance.

  

It's the production that ultimately neuters the album for me. The band's ingredients have the potential to add up to something really great—the twin vocals, the electro rhythms, the atmospheric guitar playing—but the guitars aren’t atmospheric enough; the repetition isn’t pronounced; all the texture is suppressed in favor of the vocal melodies, which start to blend into each other by album's end. The vocals are high up in the mix on every song like a calling card—as if that’s the only great thing SVIIB has going for them. Everything else is pushed back in the mix. The result is a sleek sound that’ll probably find play on commercials or prime-time teen dramas, but as a work unto itself Disconnect from Desire never quite lifts off.

• School of Seven Bells: Babelonia
  

Hung Up on a Teen Dream

After six months on my to-buy list, I've finally managed to scratch off Beach House's Teen Dream. Finally indeed—this is a great record.

What a difference a little variety makes, huh? I liked their last, Devotion, a lot, but it felt formulaic after eleven songs and I haven't found myself going back to it much in the last couple of years. A song here and there, maybe half the album, but I find the album starts to feel static by side 2.

Not so for Teen Dream. With the addition of a live drummer on many tracks, plus a few more instruments and backing vocals delicately placed throughout, makes Teen Dream much more alive without damaging the band's overall aesthetic. Victoria LeGrand's voice commands every song buoyed by Alex Scally's ringing guitar. Both his playing and her presence feel even stronger than before, and their overall skill as songwriters is much more developed. In the running for one of my favorites of the year.

• Beach House: Silver Soul

 

Turns Out It Was a Joke All Along

I just wasn't in on it. Gayngs, I mean. The joke band called Gayngs. As of Monday night I'd never heard of them, but perusing the Quietus' top 30 albums of the year so far, where Gayngs' Relayted places second—second!—I played the video for "Cry" and was actually moved by the song. I thought, this might be a band I really need to investigate. I was getting that sensation of having heard something really special. Here's the song:

• Gayngs: Cry

It's a beautiful song. But it's a joke. They're a joke. I mean, it doesn't really sound like a joke, right? The video, too, seems serious, even if visually it's basically a cross between Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" and Michael Jackson's "Black or White." It's still a stark and dark video.

Here is the blurb that accompanied the Quietus ranking:

Relayted is an epic procession that hoves in and hoves out like a heavenly weatherfront, morphing from one track to another, never falling silent, never touching down, never deviating from around the 69 bpm mark.

Based on that description and the sound of that song, I was compelled to download the album right away.

Maybe you're picking up on my ultimate disappointment, "Cry" aside. It's true: Relayted is a shit album. I mean, it's a frustrating bag of shit.

It's the saxophone. Mostly, it's the saxophone. We're talking Kenny G levels of saxophone here. Kenny Gayngs? Also it's the occasional soul grunts from one of the singers, and the vocoder in one spot, and the rapping that approximates one of the Bone Thugs N Harmony guys doing a sex jam rap. In other words this is basically a soft rock album, usually a very 80s-ish soft rock album. Like, I guess all those references to "yacht rock" I saw on blogs a year or two back were describing something real? I never clicked the links. But so, people are actually aping the music tailor-made for dentists' offices? Fr'real? If someone comes along and starts citing Bruce Hornsby as an influence I'm going to shank him.

Worst of all though is that Relayted didn't have to be a shit album. Actually a lot of the album is close to being really good. It's got this twenty-first-century slow-core thing happening. It reminds me of Brightblack Morning Light but more melodic and slightly more dynamic. Every track on Relayted oozes at the same slow pace—let's say it actually is 69 bpm, since that probably came from a press release—and many songs flow into one another, so the album feels very much of a piece. It's one big monolith of a song, almost.

But in a gruesome act, Gayngs seem to have willfully murdered their possibly good or great album. The saxophone is like a hunter's knife stabbing away at this noble effort, killing it dead and disfiguring it to boot. Right away the opening song, "The Gaudy Side of Town," announces that Relayted promises to be horrendous. It's the silky sax, a sound so reprehensible that the album could hardly be expected to recover. But there are a few songs that get deep into a mood, much like "Cry," and I think maybe Gayngs could redeem themselves after all. And then the sax comes in, laying the track to the ground, lifeless and grotesque.

But it was a joke all along, see. It's my fault for bearing the pain of hearing this album. I complained about it on twitter and my friend Katie, who apparently knows the people in the band personally, responded, "you know they just got high and messed around and recorded that, right?" No, I didn't know this. Was I supposed to know this?

Later I learned that Bon Iver was in the band. Bon Iver, a songwriter whom I can't stand. That opinion is neither here nor there but I bring him up to point out that, with his presence, yeah, maybe I was supposed to know this. Maybe people have been aware of Gayngs all this time and knew it was a funny band that was doing beardo soft rock. Probably there was a youtube of a live show and probably there was an advance mp3 that wasn't "Cry" and probably some bloggers were hyping how rad the Gayngs concert was and, hey,  Michael McDonald amiright? Eric Carmen! I'm funny for saying the words Eric Carmen! Hey everyone, "Theme from Arthur!"

Finally I fully realized that it's all on me. I'm the sucker. I saw a video of a recent live show—very well produced, documenting a very well-attended show. The video's very existence was a news item on... that website I asked us all not to talk about. So yeah, I'm last to know. Jokes on me. These guys are clearly having a laugh. It's a fluke I like "Cry." I should find some consolation that they didn't earnestly think they were making good decisions. Rather they are slathered in irony. That's consoling, right?

Live-blogging Wavves' King of the Beach, First Listen

Listening to King of the Beach.

Sounds like the 90s.

At least it’s produced better than the last one. Lo-fi as an aesthetic choice, today, feels inauthentic. (Boy, that’s murky territory to get into. I better scratch that argument.) At any rate the songs are placed above the sound.

I want to listen to Superchunk—no! Early Built to Spill. Not because Wavves sounds just like that or exactly redundant, but because I like those bands more.

Am I fighting myself on this? Am I being contrarian for the sake of going against popular sentiment?

I wasn’t always a 90s crank. Didn’t always have a default “it was better in my day” button. I blame my re-immersion on the Slint book, which is now more or less done so perhaps I’ll begin to come out of the 90s fog soon.

Will I like Wavves more when I come out of that fog? Probably not. Saw two things on tumblr today worth noting: The Rich Girls are Weeping’s comment— 

—wait, “When Will You Come” = Jesus and Mary Chain. Now veering into a trippy 60s vibe. Not the Beach Boys, but the also-rans who existed in the Beach Boys’ shadow, as filtered through a psyche haze. Oh, song’s over. Didn’t take it as far as I wanted it to go.

—anyway, Rich Girls’ comment: "whatever you were listening to when you were in the place Nathan Williams is now — that is what you hear."

I kinda liked the last Wavves record but I cooled on it. This album is actually better than that one. Like, way better than that one. Though I still feel cool.

The other tumblr thing, Nitsuh Abebe’s takedown of the whole argument that this is inferior to music made in the 90s because those of us who are old enough to remember the 90s expect young acts to match our matured tastes. Basically Rich Girls made the same point in a few sentences but Nitsuh’s post is worth the read, especially for entertainment value.

A little more than midway through and I’m starting to get a little bored. I can totally see a lot of people loving this record, even if I’m mostly ambivalent.

Tangent: earlier this week Shiny Grey Monotone posted an album from 94, Morsel’s Noise Floor, which I fucking loved at the time but have not heard in probably ten or twelve years. During my year-long bout of 90s re-immersion I went looking for Noise Floor on the web but couldn’t find it—neither the album nor the band were terribly well-known back then—so I was pretty stoked to find it this week. I listened to it twice yesterday and had all kinds of reactions to it, including but not limited to: a) this is not as good as I remember it being; b) this is rad; c) oh yeah, Avey Tare didn’t invent weird vocal effects; d) this sounds a little dated but I feel like in one or two years there will be a lot of bands who happen to sound a lot like this.

In other words my enjoyment of Noise Floor is basically Nitsuh’s point made real. I think there’s some value in Noise Floor but I also wouldn’t expect people coming to it cold in 2010 to regard it as a lost classic. I'll always find pleasure in it, though.

This Wavves album is still playing but I’ve kinda stopped paying attention to it. The simple chord progressions and the “oooh-oooh-oooh” choruses are starting to blend. He did that on the last record too.

Josh Ritter: So Runs the World Away

I think it helped that I didn't know Josh Ritter's newest, So Runs the World Away, was coming out until the day it arrived, so I had no expectations whatsoever. Even if I did know I'm not sure how high my anticipation would have been. Ritter has only gotten better with each release, but he's yet to make a perfect album. His pre-Animal Years releases are mostly average with a few bright spots. Starting with that 2006 album you could begin to see the potential Ritter held. He was firmly rooted in a folk lineage (via contemporary alt country) but was also willing to stretch beyond it, as with the epic "Thin Blue Flame." Then there was the following year's Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, which saw him energized with hooks and power. At first it rubbed me a little wrong—it felt a little too blatantly crossover—but in time I was totally won over. The first half of that album is a total joy with bright spot after bright spot. Somewhere in the middle it starts to get a little less consistent, trading back and forth between winners ("Wait for Love," "Next to the Last Romantic," "Empty Heart") and respectably average material.

The new one, by contrast, is Ritter's most consistently great album from beginning to end. It's more relaxed than Historical Conquests, never picking up to a pace like "To the Dogs or Whoever" or "Right Moves," but in the end I think it's better for it. Ritter has always been a confident songwriter, but on this album he seems more so than ever, as if acknowledging not only that he's great but that he belongs to a tradition. "Folk Bloodbath" is a terrific send-up of traditional murder ballads, while "The Curse" plays like a classic all-verses-no-chorus folk epic.

"The Curse," by the way, is probably my favorite song of the year by any artist. Maybe it's just all the Slint I've been listening to, with their songs about vampires and shipwrecks, but I find Ritter's song about a mummy awakened by a woman after 1,000 years of sleep to be the most heartbreaking and romantic songs I've heard in a long time. Ritter tells the story with remarkable detail as the woman brings the mummy from Egypt to New York, where he becomes a museum attraction and the source of her fame as a scholar. Over the rest of her life their relationship evolves; each time Ritter sings the refrain—"She asked, 'Are you cursed? / I said 'I think that I'm cured'"—he touches on the mixture of happiness and doom that is wrapped up in any tale of real love. Every verse is touching and funny and melancholy at once.

It's the high point of the album and among the high points of Ritter's oeuvre. The rest of the album rises pretty high too—"Change of Time," "Lock," "See How Man was Made"—though maybe not, overall, as high as Historical Conquests' highest points. At the same time it never sinks, ever, to average or below. ("Lantern" is probably the closest it comes to a low point—a little too cheesy but still a good song.) For that reason So Runs the World Away becomes the most consistently pleasurable album Ritter has done so far.

• Josh Ritter: The Curse

The Time it Was Ahead of is Behind Us Now

 
 

Listening to Zero Set, a collaboration between Dieter Moebius (Cluster), Conny Plank, and Mani Neumeier (Guru Guru), I have the strange but simultaneous sense that it's both dated and ahead of its time. On the one hand, something about fits right in with the kind of stuff I was listening to around 1995–97, like the Macro Dub Infection compilation or any number of rhythm-forward bands who got some notice in the confluence of Tortoise/trip hop/Warp/industrial/etc. But then again that does mean it was ahead of its time, because Zero Set was recorded in 1982. 1982! This does not sound like it came from that decade.

Two reasons why this is so: first, no cheese synths wafting or plinking at the heart of these songs. (How did krautrock so easily melt into new age by the early/mid-80s?). Second, and more notably: those drums! Mani Neumeier is a monster behind the kit on this record. What gets me even more is the production of his drums. Can someone point me to a album made in 1982 or earlier that had drum sound as beautifully crisp and full as on "Speed Display"?

• Moebius Plank Neumeier: Speed Display

 

Dr. Dog: Shame, Shame

2010 seems inordinately jam-packed with new albums from bands I'm already pretty fond of. See also Vampire Weekend, Spoon, Four Tet, the Ruby Suns, and Midlake—not to mention upcoming albums from LCD Soundsystem, the Radio Dept.,  and the New Pornographers, among others I'm probably forgetting.

Dr. Dog, too. I'm not sure it was the album I was most looking forward to, but it was up there. (For the record, Midlake was probably the one I was most eager to hear; it's also the most disappointing by a wide margin.) Fate, their album from 2008, has in hindsight turned out to be my favorite album of that year. The band's unabashed love of rock and roll—not merely "classic rock," as they so often get pigeonholed, but catchy, fun, inventive, not-too-serious, not-too-effervescent rock. Harmonies. Great choruses. Guitar solos. Also smart lyrics and just enough subversion to keep things interesting.

Like so many awesome bands in rock history, from the Beatles to Big Star to Sonic Youth to Fugazi to the New Pornographers and a million bands in between, Dr. Dog benefits from having two lead singer/songwriters. Fate was especially successful because it was set up like a conversation between Toby  Leaman and Scott McMicken, each song loosely revolving around the title theme. It made the every-other-song-is-by-the-other-guy nature of the album compelling, like each song was a response to the last one.

Shame, Shame, the new one, is structured more or less the same way—a back and forth between the two songwriters. It also sounds a helluva lot like Fate. The new album was produced by Rob Schnapf, and the band's publicists are making a point to note that this is the band's first time letting an outside producer in. If Fate was self-produced, then Schnapf wisely seems to have stayed out of the band's way in the studio. The overall sound, and the vibe of the songs, is right in line with where the band has already been.

On first listen this was kinda deflating, kinda fine by me. There's an old saying about not fixing un-broke things, so in a way I can't complain. (After all, I just happily bought my sixth Spoon album.) But at the same time Shame, Shame can't help but feel less fresh. (I haven't heard the band's pre-Fate stuff; if I had, would I have felt that way about that album?) Too, the album doesn't seem to hold together thematically the way the last one did, so the back and forth between Leaman and McMicken seems less essential, like the pacing of the record didn't really matter as much as the democracy of their songwriting partnership.

So, let me just emphasize that all of those thoughts occurred to me on first listen. That was, like, five days ago. Some things have changed.

For one, pretty much all these songs are just as good as anything else I've ever heard them do! Can't really knock a band that consistently writes excellent songs. And really that's the bottom line. All that really matters is that I've been listening to this album two, three times a day every day since I bought it, and I don't really see things slowing down. Take another look at that list of albums I was looking forward to in the first paragraph for some perspective: the Spoon and Vampire Weekend albums are pretty good (and also fall into the "pleasantly more of the same" category), but their time in my headphones has fallen off; the Four Tet and Ruby Suns albums kinda floated right past me, and the Midlake is a dog. So what do you know: Dr. Dog, so far, has made my favorite album of the year.

• Dr. Dog: Where'd All the Time Go?

What is Happening in the Back Seat

—"I like this but I wish I was hearing it as a sixteen year old."

—"You think you can't like this and be an adult?"

—"I just want to be in a car filled with my friends and we're all singing along to every word at the top of our lungs."

—"We can sing along to it now."

—"But the back seat should be full of our friends. Three friends on the seat and at least one more sitting on someone's lap."

—"We have friends who would sing along with us."

—"It needs to be 3:30 in the afternoon and we need to be on the way to a McDonalds or someone's house to watch MTV."

—"You want to go home and watch Parental Control?"

—"I want to be a teenager while this song is playing."

—"Let's sing along."

—"No."

—"It's a shame you don't know how to enjoy some things."

—"In four months there'll be a car seat back there."

—"And in sixteen years he'll borrow the car so he and his friends can drive around and sing along to a song just like this one at the top of their lungs."

• Ida Maria: Oh My God

Wye Oak: The Knot

Things start promisingly on Wye Oak's The Knot, with the slow thud of "Milk and Honey" and the simple but strong "For Prayer"—the latter of which could be regarded as a kind of template for most of the record. It's got everything that seems to define Wye Oak's sound: Jenn Wasner's voice up front on a quiet, sparse, almost folky verse; the slide guitar tucked into the mix to give it a subtle country undertone; the 90s-style guitar uproar juxtaposed against the quieter moments.

"For Prayer" is a great song, but as The Knot wears on, the pattern starts to feel tired. Maybe it's just because I've been mired in 90s indie/slowcore/post-rock lately, but Wye Oak's quiet/loud dynamic feels almost retro. Wasner and drummer Andy Stack seem like good students of indie rock's recent history—I hear a little early Breeders, some Helium, My Bloody Valentine, a lot of Rex, and other, more nebulous sounds of ten or fifteen years' past. But I get the sense that they haven't progressed beyond an undergrad's comprehension—they have a lot of tools but not enough imagination to make it seem new.

That makes me seem like an old curmudgeon. But seriously: don't you feel like a least a little bit of a fraud when you try to push the Apples in Stereo on your dad who grew up on the Beatles or the Beach Boys? Don't you feel just a little bit like a poseur when you play Bright Eyes for your Aunt who was there when Dylan burst on the scene? Isn't it a little presumptuous to play early Neko Case albums for your grandmother who has such fond memories of hearing Patsy Cline on the radio?

Don't misread: I'm not saying the more contemporary bands aren't worthwhile in their own right, or even possibly new classics. This isn't a case of "it's been done, why do it again?". But there is a specific kind of crankiness that comes with hearing new bands making music that fits maybe a little too snugly into the sound of the music you remember most fondly from the days when music became yours. Such is Wye Oak's effect on me, the thirtysomething blogger with a kid on the way—my days of being fazed by a dramatic guitar band blowing up my buddy's living room well behind me. Had I seen Wye Oak back then, I'd have descended upon their merch table as soon as I could tear myself away from nodding along in the front row.

That is to say, it might not be them; it's surely me. Someone with less baggage from the 90s might fall hard for The Knot. It's proving difficult for me (other than the brilliant standout track, "Tattoo"). I can't go so far as to say that Wye Oak sounds identical to some other overlooked band (though the country-meets-slowcore thing makes me crave Rex, a sadly forgotten and un-googleable band), but I also can't escape the feeling that it should have come from another era. The fact it didn't is what keeps me from embracing it. Aside from a few tracks, listening to The Knot just makes me wish I were listening to other records.

• Wye Oak: For Prayer

Cass McCombs: Catacombs

Catacombs begins with its most ambitious track, "Dreams Come True Girl." It's really one song nestled within another, beginning simply with a sparsely arranged but bouncy chorus, verse, and chorus. Then it segues into what at first feels like a bridge but is actually a series of new verses (with new melodies, in a new key) trading off with brief guitar flourishes rather than that original chorus. When that chorus does finally return, it's sung simultaneously with the original verse, now given voice with new accent by Karen Black, who closes the song out with some humorous moans and lyrical riffing. It's a strange, inventive, and pretty rewarding song once you sink into it (though it took me a few listens before I was able to).

The rest of Catacombs is not as complicated; in fact, the more I listen to it, the more alien that first track starts to feel from the rest of the record. That's not a good or bad thing—Catacombs is plenty compelling for many reasons beyond its opener. At any rate 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 enured to McCombs's clinically depressed Big Bird vocal style and dank, echoey production.

Then, at the record's midpoint, McCombs's approach suddenly clicks, and Catacombs elevates into one of the most starkly wonderful albums I've heard all year.

It's "Harmonia," the longest track on the album, that turns everything around. The song is buoyed by some stunningly gorgeous lapsteel which has the effect of coloring McCombs's dim cave into a homey, firelit living room. The rhythm section, too, seems to have finally shown up, propelling the song (gently) in a way such as to subtly pick up the pace of the dragging album. That rhythm section is also responsible for another of the album's highlights, "Lionkiller Got Married"—a gritty, tough number pushed along by a pulsing clap-along beat.

Really, the whole last half of this album is fantastic—the uncomfortable "My Sister, My Spouse," the jaunty "One Way to Go," the easygoing "Jonesy Boy." None are too far removed the tack McCombs takes on the first half of the record, but they feel discernable from each other, and their music and lyrics simply seem to lock in better. The consistently high quality of these last five or six songs impel you to return to the first half of the record to give it another chance. And indeed, "Prima Donna" and "You Saved My Life" seem to become stronger with repeated listens. They start to feel more human, less like formal exercises. I've had Catacombs for two or three weeks and it continues to get better and better each time I put it on.

• Cass McCombs: Dreams Come True Girl
• Cass McCombs: Harmonia

The Byrds: Ballad of Easy Rider

Ballad of Easy Rider was the Byrds’ eighth album, though released only four years after their first. It's shocking to really grasp how far they’d traveled in just four years! Not only was the band onto its fifth lineup iteration—Roger McGuinn being the sole original member—they had also progressed through nearly as many genres: folk rock, psychedelia, country.

Easy Rider was the second album in the Byrds’ “late” period, in which the band was made up of McGuinn, Clarence White, Gene Parsons, and John York. Their first foray was the (self-admitted) uneven Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, which was hurriedly put together and saw the band aiming in too many musical directions—an especially interesting thing to note considering McGuinn wrote, co-wrote, or arranged seven of Dr. Byrds’ ten songs and was the sole lead singer (unlike every other Byrds album).

Easy Rider is a far superior record, perhaps due to the band’s return to the fundamentals of how the old Byrds functioned: everybody wrote, everybody sang, and Bob Dylan’s name pops up in the songwriting credits a couple times. Though McGuinn took lead vocals on many of the tracks, he only wrote one song (with a little help from Dylan)—the stellar title track. And while none of the new Byrds were as distinct songwriters as Gene Clark, David Crosby, or Chris Hillman—nor as extraordinary at harmonizing as Crosby or Hillman—they still brought strong material. The album’s second half turns into a straight-up country record highlighted by a string of great tunes: “There Must Be Someone I Can Turn To,” “Gunga Din”—both featuring drummer Gene Parsons’s smooth tenor up front—and McGuinn’s other standout track, a cover of Woody Guthrie's “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”

It’s these two Parsons tracks that really announce that this is a “new” Byrds—not a bunch of charlatans merely trying to cash in on other people's legacy. Much the same as when Gram Parsons (no relation) joined for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Gene's is a voice that does not sound like “the Byrds.” It’s too deep, too smooth, too serene. The Byrdsian harmonies are not there to cushion it; you wouldn’t know it was the Byrds if I didn’t tell you. When Gram joined up for Sweetheart, the resulting sound rubbed me the wrong way. Though I love the record, it doesn’t feel like a “Byrds” album to me. The country sound there feels more like a costume—“We’re country!”—rather than an influence they absorbed into their own aesthetic, as on the more subtly layered Notorious Byrd Brothers or some of Hillman’s contributions to Younger than Yesterday. Yet when Gene takes the lead on Easy Rider, it doesn’t bother me the same way. Perhaps it’s simply due to the fact that by now I’m used to the idea of someone coming into the band and making them sound entirely different.

Of course, with Hillman now out of the band and McGuinn the only original member left, there’s nothing to do but expect something entirely different! I wonder how this lineup’s critical legacy would have been received if they had shed the Byrds moniker and branded themselves something else. While you can hear a few connections to the Byrds of the past—it feels like a more natural follow up to The Notorious Byrd Brothers than the two records in between—they really are a whole other beast. The twelve-string is by now long absent, the harmonies are still there but they’re no longer the defining element, and Clarence White’s clean country picking is all over the record, shifting a dynamic of the band’s sound to a totally different place. It's funny to think that this album outsold both Notorious and Sweetheart, yet today gets lumped in with the "late, no good stuff" that anyone other than hardcore fans pass right over. It's actually a pretty terrific album.

It’s worth noting, too, that the bonus tracks on the reissue make it even better. I’m usually not a big fan of extras like live cuts, studio outtakes, etc. I like processing a record for what it was, for what the band wanted you to hear. Most bonus tracks are at best interesting to hear a couple times, at worst a lot of clutter that muddles an album’s greatness. On Easy Rider, though, I’m glad to have the alternate takes. The non-album versions of “Oil in My Lamp” and “Tulsa County” are both better than the versions that wound up on the official release. Had these versions gotten in, Easy Rider would have been a far more “country” album—and an excellent one at that!—which would have made the transition into the album’s second half, when Parsons makes his appearance, slightly less jarring. Also included is a great Jackson Browne cover, “Mae Jean Goes to Hollywood,” an instrumental that really shows off White’s virtuosic playing, and the country jam “Way Behind the Sun.” Had any of these tracks made it on instead of the cloying sea shanty “Jack Tarr the Sailor” or the Fifth Dimension-y “Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins” that awkwardly closes the album, Easy Rider might have been regarded as one of the all-time great Byrds albums, if not all-time great country albums.

• The Byrds: Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

A couple related posts: the Rising Storm just did its own Easy Rider post not too long ago, and here's the Easy Rider-era post from the Adios Lounge's exhaustive multi-part look at the career of Clarence White.

Andrew Bird: Noble Beast

Eight albums into his career, it’s probably no surprise that Andrew Bird has settled into his sound. If you’ve heard anything he’s done in the last five or six years, you ought to know what to expect: the whistling and looping violin underlie Bird’s relaxed Midwestern voice as he eases Roget-required word games out of his mouth. Noble Beast has it all. Though not as upbeat as his last, Armchair Apocrypha, nor as focused (or as flawless) as 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Noble Beast is still a wonderful album. 

Bird’s albums reward repeated plays. I’ve had the same getting-to-know-you period for three albums running—on the first few listens they feel impossibly long. The first two or three times through Noble Beast, I consistently looked at the track list around the time of “Tenuousness,” expecting to find I was near the end of the record. “Tenuousness” is track five of fourteen. The first time my brilliant wife listened to it, I watched her do the exact same thing on the exact same song.

That feeling went away; I was familiar enough with Bird to know it would. The many melodies clarify themselves; the complicated lyrics, which at first sound like equal parts foreign language, tongue-twister, and textbook jargon, soon become intelligible, even fun. The album comes into focus—though not as focused as Bird’s last two records. Noble Beast is a more relaxed, more inward-looking affair. For better and for worse the album sounds like it was made by a man who has listened to no one but himself for the last few years. This is best illustrated by the second track, “Masterswarm,” one of three six-minute-plus tracks sprinkled across the album. Sandwiched between the breezy opener “Oh No” and the ready-for-its-close-up “Fitz and the Dizzyspells,” each of which recall Armchair Apocrypha’s exuberant first half, “Masterswarm” is a near-linear assemblage of movements—a preamble, a verse, a bridge, a violin interlude, another verse, a whistle solo, an outro. It’s a song you can lose yourself in, but it also drags the first half of the album down to a pace that the effervescent “Fitz” can’t overcome.

Bird fares better with his other epics, the outstanding “Anonanimal” and aching album-closer “Souverian,” each of which similarly glide from movement to movement but feel to be drawn with harder edges. “Anonanimal” is like the whole of Noble Beast writ small: a puzzle-like musical arrangement and a mazelike lyrical compendium of tongue-twisters (e.g., “See a sea anemone / the enemy / see a sea anemone / that’ll be the end of me / that’ll be the end of me”). It meanders musically as much if not more so than “Masterswarm,” but where that song is a patchwork of near-misses, this is a series of bull’s eyes.

“Masterswarm” isn’t the only drag on the record. “Not a Robot, But a Ghost,” placed in the center of the album right between two mini-instrumentals, is probably intended to lift the album out of a string of relaxed acoustic numbers. In fact, it has the reverse effect: I’d rather hear more like “Nomenclature,” “Tenuousness,” and the gorgeous "Privateer," all throwbacks to Mysterious Production-era Bird. Instead we have a track that, like “Simple X” from Armchair Apocrypha, features Bird collaborating with electonica artist Dosh. The beats just don't suit Bird as well as when he is the sole maestro. His songs work best when they center on his complex violin arrangements and language gumbo.

About that language gumbo: Bird's wordplay has long been a part of what makes his songs so enjoyable. The same is true on this album, though the flash and dazzle of his words and their sounds seem to trump meaning more often than before. I don’t really mind that. “Tenuousness” is the song most other reviews have pointed to as the best example of Noble Beast's pleasures—or annoyances, depending on your perspective. The line about “proto-Sanskrit Minoans or porto-centric Lisboans” makes either point. Really the whole album is chock-full of such wordplay. Bird seems equally fascinated by the idea that the sound of a word lends itself toward its definition just as the sequence of certain notes in a melody signify definitive emotions. His songs take on a larger meaning even if you’re unsure of what he’s really saying. Some might find Bird’s acrobatic wordplay pretentious or overwrought, but I find it fascinating, the way he’s able to eke meaning out of invented words or strange combinations of the scientific and mundane. “Nomenclature is washing away,” he sings in one song. It could be the theme of the record. His songs are a maze of language: parsing each line could as easily lead to a dead end as to an epiphany, but most often it is the pleasure of mouthing the words in song that is the thing. If in some songs there is no real meaning, there is an approximation of meaning. It’s the approximation that seems to be the point.

• Andrew Bird: Tenuousness

Neu! 2

 
The feeling didn't last, but three tracks into Neu! 2, I was all set to declare it the duo’s best album. It felt like a mature evolution from the debut, and more cohesive than the split-personality third album. Opener “Für Immer” might be the best encapsulation of what people think of when they say something “sounds like Neu”: the hypnotic beat, the droning guitars, the crisp production. I halfway expected Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadler to start chanting along midway through. The song segues into “Spitzenqualitat,” with Klaus Dinger’s signature drum beat covered in echo as if it were the Jesus & Mary Chain remix. The beat gradually slows down; you get the feeling that the word “motorik” might have been coined during this very track, as it sounds literally as if the beat is powering down into sleep mode.

Speed, in the sense of revolutions per minute, seems to be the primary theme of Neu! 2. The album is most famous for its filler: the story goes that Dinger and Michael Rother had run out of money during their session, so they simply filled with second half of their album with versions of “Super” and “Neuschnee” played at various speeds. Essentially the same thing as putting a 33 record on 78, or simultaneously holding down the fast-forward and play buttons on your tape deck. The story sounds suspicious to me; after all, Neu! and Neu! 75 are each just six songs long. Why did Neu! 2 need to be twice that? Dinger and Rother must have had a better reason for the songs’ inclusion than a need for padding. Was it merely a joke on their fans? Did such manipulations feel experimental circa 1973? (They weren’t terribly: Les Paul was doing more interesting innovations with tape speeds back in the 1940s.)

This extended RPM-fiddling ultimately keeps Neu! 2 from being a wholly satisfying record. But I will grant that there is something interesting going on here. The arc of “Neuschnee 78”–“Super 16”–“Neuschnee” (the numerals indicate the RPM speed; no numeral means it’s regular speed) accomplishes with speed what Josef Albers does with color—you start to lose sense of what’s too fast, what’s too slow, and what’s normal, the same way Albers can make you think you’re looking at two different shades of red just by pairing the color with contrasting or complementary hues. The cartoonishly fast “Neuschnee 78” and the agonizingly slow “Super 16” knock your ears out of whack; when the unmanipulated “Neuschnee” begins, it too sounds “wrong.” Your perception of standard speed becomes so warped that everything feels off. The same happens again with “Casetto,” which sounds like a warped record dialed down to 16 RPMs, punctuated with sudden stops and restarts before jumping at last into the hyperspeed “Super 78” and slowing down again with “Hallo Excentrico.” By the time of album closer “Super”—a track you’ve already heard twice by now, once too fast and once too slow—it just sounds… weird.

So it’s an interesting experiment. But it’s not very fun to listen to straight through more than once or twice. Better to trim it to seven tracks (I admit I like the strange “Cassetto,” speed be damned):

• Für Immer
• Spitzenqualitat
• Gedenkminute
• Lila Engel
• Neuschnee
• Cassetto
• Super

Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei

One thing about krautrock: so many of these bands were dark, hypnotic, experimental, epic—and also full of humor. Faust, Neu!, and Amon Düül II all regularly featured total goofball vocals or musical interludes. The unfortunate thing is that really Faust was the only band that could pull it off consistently. Neu! was successful about half the time, and Amon Düül II essentially ruined every single song in which they tried to inject anything resembling levity. That was my main complaint when I first heard them last year, picking up their second album, Yeti. That album had enough mindblowing moments—“Burning Sister,” “Eye Shaking King,” among others—that further investigation into the band’s discography felt necessary, despite the faux-operatic vocals sullying tracks like “Gulp a Sonata.” So a month or two back I picked up their 1969 debut (not counting the original Amon Düül material), Phallus Dei.

Unfortunately the record suffers from the same inconsistency as Yeti, only even more so.
When ADII stays dark—and instrumental—they often touch brilliance (like on opener “Kanaan”). Add vocals, though, and ADII quickly becomes a nearly unlistenable joke (like on track two, “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren,” in which the vocalist alternates between feigning like a frightened old woman and a scarrrrrry vampire). The third track, “Luzifers Ghilom,” as well as the epic title track, come close to letting the genius instrumental jams transcend the occasional vocal intrusions.

Yeti, though not perfect, is a more satisfying album. Of the five songs on Phallus Dei, only the odd-numbered tracks are really worthwhile. (And what’s with the two bonus tracks that accompany the 2006 reissue of this album? They don’t even sound like they were recorded in the same decade, in the same country, or by the same band. Truly awful.) Someone out there clue me in: should I keep pursuing more ADII material? Tanz der Lemminge? Carnival in Babylon? Wolf City?

• Amon Düül II: Luzifers Ghilom

My Actual Favorite Record of the Year

I knew when I discovered Armchair Apocrypha last year that I’d found something special in Andrew Bird. This was an artist I wanted to savor. So I let my obsession with that album play out before I sought out another one of his records. It took about a year. By March of this year I felt I was ready to dive into another: Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs, from 2005. Like Armchair, it went on to become my most listened-to album of the year. Not only that, I was astonished to find a Bird album that was better than Armchair. Eggs is a masterpiece.

It’s a more melancholy album than Armchair. Although it has its moments of humor, it rarely gets as upbeat as the first half of that album. That turned out to be just fine for me: 2008 turned out to be melancholy year, to understate.

Part of why Eggs became so important to me, besides its more tangible qualities—great songs, stellar musicianship, etc.—is that it happened to enter my life just when I needed it to. I owned it for maybe one or two weeks before I was called to my childhood home to be with my dad for the last few weeks of his life. It was an ordeal, to say the least. a time of communal grief shared with aunts, uncles, sister, brother, wife, stepmother, mixed with a kind of simultaneous loneliness and introversion that can’t be articulated. Music, as with any other event in life, is there to be one’s psychological wallpaper. I’ve written about that already, the music I went to before, during, and after.

Eggs held a unique place at that time because it was mine. It wasn’t an album my entire family could find comfort in, like Graceland; it wasn’t identifiably my dad’s, like the O Brother soundtrack or Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. It wasn’t even an album to be shared with my wife, despite the amount of time we’d later spend listening to Eggs for the rest of the year. At that point, only I knew the record. I would eject myself from the house occasionally, off on a walk through my old neighborhood, sometimes venturing further from home than I’d intended. It was me, my headphones, and Andrew Bird. Because of Armchair, Eggs was familiar enough to embrace—to be embraced by—without reservation, yet strange enough that it gave my mind something to focus on. I had a conversation with Eggs for two or three weeks straight. We still talk sometimes.

Bird’s lyrics can be like a game, as you listen to how the sounds of the words melt into each other. “You took my hand and led me down to watch a papillon parade / and we let the kittens lick our hair and drink our chalky lemonade”—the words beg to be mouthed. The more familiar the songs become, the more meaning reveals itself—Bird is a wordsmith, not a gibberish peddler. In those early, difficult weeks of listening to the album, those meanings had yet to come through to me. Stray lines from each song wafted through my head, crystallizing into something that, combined with the wistful tone of so many of the songs, felt custom designed to my situation. “I was getting ready to be a threat,” Bird sings in the opening track, “Sovay”—as if to say that something had been cut short. The next song begins with a question posed to a panel of experts: “'Why are we alive?' / Here was their reply: / 'You’re what happens when two substances collide / When by all accounts you really should have died.'” That existential wonder manifests again in the gorgeous “Masterfade” as a child gazes into the sky “full of zeros and ones” before “you took my hand and said I shouldn’t be afraid.” The next song, “Opposite Day,” cries over and over, “Today was supposed to be just another day”—a cry I repeated to myself, attaching my own moribund meaning, over and over. Throughout the album there was a lyric or musical motif (“Sovay,” “Measuring Cups,” “The Naming of Things”) that seemed to comfort or commiserate.

Of course, the album in fact was not that literal. If anything it is an album about adolescence, not death. For a son watching is father die over a period of a few weeks, an album about adolescence presses the emotional buttons better than anything else. At any rate Eggs is not that sad of a record. It’s certainly not a stereotypical wallowing record. And that’s just it: Eggs helped me not wallow (not too deeply, at least). As melancholy as it could be in some places, it was also quite optimistic in others, if not downright humorous. That might be why it has managed to become more than just the soundtrack to one of my life’s lowest points. My personal story aside, it is an undeniably outstanding album, perfect from beginning to end. In Pitchfork parlance, this is a 10.0.

As I’ve been saying in a few posts here and there, I think 2008 turned out to be noteworthy for a lot of albums—sure, they’re good—that sit pretty comfortably inside larger trends of the last few years. I’m thankful for Andrew Bird, whether last year, 2005, this year, or next (Noble Beast comes out in a matter of weeks), because he is truly an individual voice in music right now. His strengths—lyricism, composition, musicianship, whistling!—are singularly his own. He’s got at least two stellar records to his name already (I’ll let you know when I get to the rest), and likely one more to come in less than a month. Happily, almost a year since I bought Eggs. I think I’m ready for it.

• Andrew Bird, Masterfade

 

My Listening Year: Blind Spot Edition

In 2007 my blind spot interests were fairly monogamous: my love of the Byrds morphed into a fascination with the Laurel Canyon scene, opening basically into a lot of 60s and 70s folk and rock. (Also, Elvis Costello.) That interest continued in 2008, though moving into a more country-rock direction—the Lovin' Spoonful's Anthology, for instance, was on of my favorite records of the year. I didn't listen to it a lot on its own, but nearly every track made its way into one iTunes playlist or another. I need to start picking up their proper full lengths.

• The Lovin' Spoonful: Me About You

Unlike last year, however, my interests diverged in a few directions in 2008. I started moving toward more experimental and/or less pop music: I resparked my interest in krautrock, finallybegan dipping my toes into contemporary composers, and enjoyed one or two more psychedelic albums. Toward the end of the year, mostly inspired by Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life, I also filled in a few blanks from punk and early indie bands. (Also, Elvis Costello.)

I didn't have any major obsession-sparking experiences with my purchases this year, the way I did with Big Star's #1 Record and Elvis's Imperial Bedroom. Still, there were pleny of great finds. I finally filled in the gaping blind spot that was Brian Eno. Another Green World was partly what I expected and partly a total surprise--highlighting, if nothing else, how clueless I actually was about why Eno is so great. I knew he was an ambient pioneer, but I sorely underestimated him as a pop auteur. This was reinforced when I picked up Before and After Science, which sounds like a proto-Talking Heads record.

• Brian Eno: I'll Come Running (from Another Green World)

My understanding of krautrock, previously defined mostly by Can, one or two Neu! songs, and the vague "motorik" sense of the word as it applies to bands of the last decade, also came in for reconsideration. Neu!'s warm but desolate electronics, Amon Duul II's ramshod improv, and—best of all—Faust's brilliant deconstruction of rock have me eager to find more, to really get deeper inside this genre.

• Faust: It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl (from So Far)

Part of that journey through krautrock led me to the Monks, who really aren't remotely kraut; they're garage, or proto-punk. Black Monk Time easily ranks as one of my favorite purchases of the year.

• Monks: Complications

One of my prized acquisitions of the year the United States of America's sole album, from 1968—an early example of rock incorporating electronica elements such as tape splicing and other studio-as-instrument techniques. Absolutely worth seeking out.

• The United States of America: The American Metaphysical Circus

It wasn't all experimental shit for me in 08, though. Les Paul & Mary Ford's Best of the Capitol Masters has fully ingratiated itself into numerous playlists in my iTunes. I have a soft spot for music from the 40s and 50s that evokes a real sense of G-rated optimism; Les Paul & Mary Ford fit right in alongside my Doris Day and Fred Astaire albums.

• Les Paul & Mary Ford: The World is Waiting for the Sunrise

I also continued to fill in holes for artists I've been developing a listening relationship with over the last couple of years: two albums each by Elvis Costello (Armed Forces and Get Happy!!), Neil Young (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Rust Never Sleeps), and David Bowie. The Bowies I picked up weren't too hot (the dreadful Young Americans and the good but not mindblowing Station to Station), but Costello and Young both were predictably terrific. 2009 will likely see more purchases of albums by all three of these guys, including albums that I know are among their best but which I've still never heard.

• Elvis Costello: Oliver's Army (from Armed Forces)

At the tail end of the year I went headlong into a punk and classic indie rock spell, picking up a bunch of never-heards by the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, and Buzzcocks along with a bunch of re-buys, returning to albums I sold many years ago on some destitute afternoon trying to pay rent and eat a burrito while I was in college. Mission of Burma is great—I've got Vs. on hold for a future eMusic purchase. And the Buzzcocks—one of those bands, like the Lovin' Spoonful, who I realize I've heard many times over the course of my life but never understood "this is the Buzzcocks." I was expecting something a little more snarly, a little more Sex Pistolsy, but I was pleased to find an album full of pop songs about love (okay, and also orgasms).

• Buzzcocks: Ever Fallen In Love?

Later today, my real favorite album of the year. Tomorrow, my official "top ten new-to-me albums discovered in 2008"—which will somehow manage to include still more albums I haven't even touched on this week so far.

My Listening Year: The Ruby Suns, Sea Lion

 
Using different criteria, you could as easily call the Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion my top album of 2008 as Fleet Foxes. I questioned in my Fleet Foxes post whether that album had actually broken into that nebulous group of permanent collection albums that are always on hand. Elis & Tom, Air’s first two albums, the Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters, Tied & Tickled Trio’s Observing Systems—these are albums that, years after buying them, have yet to wear out their welcome. These are the albums you want to play when you’re getting ready to go out, when you’re tired from being out, when you’re writing or cooking or driving or working or just being.

Sea Lion, I already know, has made it into this category. Though the album never had the play-it-’til-you-puke period that Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend enjoyed, it’s nevertheless remained in consistent rotation for the last nine months. All these spins later, I still don’t feel like I’ve fully discovered everything it has to offer.

The best quality of Sea Lion is that it’s varied without sounding unnecessarily eclectic, Ryan McPhun has crafted ten songs that blend contemporary indie rock—yes, reverbed vocals and space-out ambient rock—with a dash of 80s new wave, 60s surf pop, tropicalia, and African rhythms. The end result is something not too dissimilar from, yet far more unique than, a lot of other indie du jour records out there right now. You guys can keep Deerhunter; I'll take the Ruby Suns.

It’s an atmospheric record, filled with dreamy vocal harmonies and sound effects that filter in and out of each track. But unlike, say, Person Pitch, Sea Lion isn’t content to sit in one place for too long. Just look at the first half of the record: opener “Blue Penguin” is a laconic song, moving at a turtle’s pace, followed by the Latin-influenced (with a tinge of Avery Island-era Neutral Milk Hotel) quick-strummed “Oh Mojave.” From there, “Tane Mahuta” gets fully into a Os Mutantes-like jam before segueing into the 80s-esque “There Are Birds” and finally falling into the structureless “It's Mwangi in Front of Me.” Yet the whole thing coheres. Vocal melodies in one song show up as musical motifs in another; songs melt into each other track by track. Sea Lion is a journey. It's easily the most underrated record of the year.

• The Ruby Suns: Kenya Dig It

My Listening Year: Fleet Foxes

Until this weekend, when I set out to remind myself of some of my favorite new releases of the year, I hadn't listened to Fleet Foxes for a while. I'd burned out. But that's because I listened to their debut intensely for about three months out of the year. I wonder—I can't guess—if I'll return to this album again and again in the future or if it will forever and always just remind me of 2008—that era of my life when my brilliant wife and I lived in West Hollywood, when we didn't have kids yet, back when I worked for a museum, that year we vacationed in Hawaii, the same year my dad passed away.

Did Fleet Foxes crack that permanent rotation barrier the way 07 picks like Andrew Bird's Armchair Apocrypha or Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala did? Hard to say just yet. But even if it doesn't, that doesn't take anything away from the band or the record. It's a powerful album that managed to wrap itself around my life like a blanket. What better purpose should music serve?

And it is a powerful record. The big knock from its dissenters—and there are many, including pretty much every single one of my favorite fellow bloggers—is that it is somehow free of substance. Assuming you first discount the fact that this band is incredibly skilled—those harmonies ain't easy, buddy—the critique still only carries any weight with two tracks. My suggestion to the detractors is to try playing the record straight through, without the instrumental "Heard them Stirring" (which sounds too similar to Pet Sounds' instrumental title track) or the mantra-like "Quiet Houses."

Fleet Foxes has an aesthetic that is hard to get past, like a woman wearing too much perfume. You have to at least like the scent—er, sound—before you'll consider getting closer. If you don't like the current trend in indie rock of 70s-influenced folk rock (see also: Midlake, Feist), or if you don't like the current trend of lead singers obscuring their voices with some effect (reverb, fuzz, autotune, whatever), then your patience is going to run out with Fleet Foxes, and fast. Let's face it: the band breaks no new ground, sonically speaking. You have to find their ingredients compelling—the influences the band wears on its sleeve have to be pleasing and not irritating—before you can spend the time enjoying the album's finer points. For many, the journey with Fleet Foxes ends here.

For those of us that are beguiled by the sound, we get the added bonus of discovering the record's more subtle charms. Robin Pecknold is, in fact, a great songwriter: you can hear it in the details. I love the way "Sun it Rises" and "Ragged Wood" are held together by a thin thread of song structure. I love the way Pecknold breaks his phrasing in "Your Protector":

Tell your bro-
ther to be good
Tell your sis-
ter not to go
Tell your mo-
ther not to wait
Tell your fa-
ther I was good

I love the imagery of "White Winter Hymnal," which feels like a nursery rhyme. The nostalgic lyrics are about nothing so innocent as children walking in winter. But like any good nursery rhyme, the song is deceptively violent—the sole verse ends with a child bleeding in the snow, turning it "red like strawberries in the summertime."  That last line makes the song borderline psychopathic: the narrator is an adult, watching over the children to ensure they don't hurt themselves. When one child does, the injury reminds the adult of another, faraway innocent season. Hey asshole—call 911! It reminds me of the "oh well" tone of the last line of "Rock-a-bye Baby."

I love the structure of the album's closer, "Oliver James": the first verse is a capella; the second finds Pecknold's acoustic guitar harmonizing with his vocal melody; then the final chorus returns to a capella. I know it's a small detail, but I love that the guitar is playing a harmony to the vocal rather than simply doubling the melody as so many indie guitarists do (off the top of my head: Elliott Smith, Death Cab, the Shins, Deerhunter, Nirvana).

I could go on. Fleet Foxes, if you let it, is full of small, well-thought details. For that reason—added of course to the band simply sounding beautiful—it is an outstanding album. Add to that their phenomenal live show—even better than the album—which says to me that this is a band that can and will top itself. What a start, though.

• Fleet Foxes: Your Protector

Tomorrow, my #2 pick as well as the rest of my 08 favorites.

I Didn't Leave the Secret Machines; the Secret Machines Left Me

News that guitarist Benjamin Curtis left the Secret Machines made me approach their new album with caution, not so much because he was the heart of the band (he wasn't), but because it signaled that something was going to change for this band, which to my ears was batting a thousand so far. Something did change. I can't say it wasn't inevitable. Over an EP and three albums, I've watched the Secret Machines morph from an indie rock band with a serious knack for muscular epics that toyed with pop structures yet never eschewed great hooks into something altogether heavier, lyrically dopier, and musically more conservative. That's not to say that the new album has abandoned the band's experimental streak altogether; but boy do they take their time getting on with it.

One of the things I've always liked about the Secret Machines was that they were a band that simultaneously put its musical chops up front yet never put a spotlight on any one musician. If anything it's been the rhythm section of Josh Garza (drums) and Brandon Curtis (keyboards or bass) that has propelled every song, with Benjamin's guitars and Brandon's keyboards (again) adding additional textures. The result was something propulsive and atmospheric at the same time. Particularly on September 000 and Now Here is Nowhere, Brandon's vocals and lyrics seemed to come in as a way of progressing the story that the music was telling, rather than the vice versa approach from a more traditional pop playbook.

With Secret Machines, Garza and Brandon Curtis' rhythm section still holds down most of the songs. New guitarist Phil Karnats does a good job of operating more or less in the same territory as Benjamin Curtis once occupied—in fact, Karnats is probably the best thing about the two best songs on the album, "The Walls are Starting to Crack" and "The Fire is Waiting."

So it's not the new guy. The problem, rather, is that the Secret Machines seem to be turning into the Brandon Curtis Show. Starting with 2006's Ten Silver Drops, Curtis has stepped forward as a bona fide front man, putting his vocals higher in the mix, making his lyrics the centerpiece of most the songs, and structuring more and more songs around the chorus. This is a bad thing. All you need to do is listen to the album's single, "Atomic Heels," to know that. Vocal hooks have always been a part of the Secret Machines' arsenal, but they were mostly effective because they were deployed with a refreshing discipline, dropping into and enhancing a song that could just as well succeed as an instrumental ("Marconi's Radio," "First Wave Intact," "Nowhere Again").

"Atomic Heels" opens the album. It is also the worst song on the album (and worst song of the band's career). But to call it the worst is to praise with faint insult most the rest of this record. The entire first half treads similar ground as the opener, chugging through rote structures and mediocre choruses. "Have I Run Out" is the first song to attempt to stretch out musically but doesn't really go anywhere other than sounding like a plodding retread of Ten Silver Drops' low point, "Daddy's in the Doldrums."

But just when I was ready to throw in the towel with this album, the band goes and flips the switch in the last third. "The Walls are Starting to Crack" spends its first half meditating at mid-tempo before unexpectedly dropping into an abstract musical crevice, then suddenly reemerging with a burst of David Gilmour-like wailing guitars. It's not the cleanest left turn the band has ever taken, but it's surprising, and the first time on the record the band comes even close to feeling compelling. The track is followed by the drumless "I Never Thought to Ask," which juxtaposes itself to the monstrous closer "The Fire is Waiting"—an eleven-minute wall of sludgy riffs, bordering on out-and-out metal. It's the second time on the album that the Secret Machines feel unpredictable—which once upon a time was the whole fucking point.

I'll admit to being too hard on this album. It's not bad, just mediocre with two spikes of greatness near the end. Ultimately it just isn't that essential. Even if you prefer Secret Machines with more verse-chorus-verse structures and less instrumental jams, you'd still be better served to go for Ten Silver Drops, which has the breathtaking "All at Once" and "1,000 Seconds," two of my all-time favorite songs by the band, even if they are fairly straightforward. Most of the songs on Secret Machines could (and should) play well to the KROQ crowd—I'm just not part of that crowd.

• Secret Machines: Atomic Heels

The Monks: Black Monk Time

I'd never heard of the Monks until earlier this year, when I came across their song "Monk Time." The track is immediately visceral, as singer Gary Burger shouts "You know we don't like the army. What army? Who cares what army? Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam? Mad Viet Cong. My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond, who was he?" It's part stream-of-conscious spew, part protest, part undirected rage. When the rest of the band attempts to chime in with a discordant volume swell, Burger says to them "Stop it! Stop it! I don't like it!"—as if he truly were a man on the edge of cracking; even his own band might break him. The song stinks of paranoia and distrust.

That feeling permeates all of Black Monk Time, the Monks' 1966 debut, for which "Monk Time" is the opener. Unlike so many other U.S. bands of the era, protesting the war and the administration from Laurel Canyon, Greenwhich Village, or Haight Ashbury, the  Monks weren't hippies: they were vets. The band came together while they were were GIs stationed in Germany. Many of the songs on the album are full of barely articulated rage and conflicted interests ("Do you know why I hate you baby? Because you make me hate you, baby! But call me.") Most songs are made up of a single verse at most, if not just a few words, yet you can feel the swirl of conflicted thoughts running through them. "Complications," in all its brevity, points to the band's unique perspective on the country's protests of U.S. military action:

People cry,
People die for you.
People kill,
People will for you.
People run,
Ain't it fun for you.
People go
To their deaths for you.
Complications!

The song seems to be pointed directly at the hippies, despite the Monks' "dislike" of the Vietnam War itself. None of the songs on Black Monk Time arrive at any kind of clear statement, but in a way that makes them feel more genuine than, say, Joan Baez or the Byrds righteously tolling the chimes of freedom. Complications!

The second time I heard about the Monks was about a month ago, in a thread on ILM about the origins of krautrock. Apparently the Monks factor into the birth of that genre. On paper, it seems plausible: nearly the full extent of the Monks' success in their day was in Germany, the only country in the world where Black Monk Time was released at the time. The band toured all over that country, and in a German documentary about the band, called Transatlantic Feedback, Faust's Hans Joachim Irmler apparently describes seeing the band at a local club, where he had a musical epiphany—maybe it's no accident that the cover of Faust So Far is so similar to Black Monk Time. (I haven't seen the documentary—anyone know where I can find it? I heard about Irmler's comment from yet another thread at ILM.) Julian Cope's book Krautrocksampler makes a similar claim, I'm told. (Ditto the book—I can't find a copy.) On record, though, I'm not hearing it. The Monks clearly come from garage rock roots, and certainly are part of punk's foundation. If someone can better elucidate the kraut connection, please shine a light! 

• The Monks: Monk Time
• The Monks: Complications

Faust: Faust and Faust So Far

My journey deeper into krautrock continues, after recent purchases by Neu! and Amon Düül II, with the first two Faust albums. I've had them for a few weeks now and have been listening to both pretty religiously; in fact, I'd say these are my favorite kraut acquisitions of the year by far—not as cold as Neu!, not as aimless as ADII.

For the longest time I was put off by Faust, mostly because of their album covers and their band name, both of which radiate a kind of proto-goth/industrial vibe. Once again I was guilty of imagining what a band must sound like, only to find I was completely wrong. The music on these two records blends psychedelia, kraut, avant-garde tape-splicing, even hints of proto-punk at times. The tone of the records also slides from dark atmospherics to outright humor, each balancing out the other so as never to go over either edge.

In my Amon Düül post linked above I wondered how ADII could even be considered to be part of the same genre as a band like Can: Faust is the bridge. Just play Faust and So Far back to back and hear the former's closer, the sprawling spaceout "Miss Fortune," segue into the stripped-bare propulsion of "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl." The evolution of Faust's sound from one record to the next might be seen as a microcosm of how at least some of their peers related to each other.

Faust is comprised of just three tracks (nine minutes, eight minutes, and sixteen minutes in length), each an amalgamation of many other fragments spliced together. The effect is something abstract, freeform, yet never without intent—there is an underlying compositional structure to the whole record (unlike ADII's improvisations). Opener "Why Don't You Eat Carrots" is abstract with elements of humor—some of the circuslike sounds remind me of the United States of America's self-titled album, released a couple years earlier. Elsewhere, the harmonized spoken/shouted lyrics at the core of "Meadow Meal," and the short, politically charged spoken outro of "Miss Fortune" remind me of Gang of Four's vocal approach in their classic "Anthrax." "Meadow Meal" is the real highlight of the first record. I was listening to both albums on shuffle along with a few other albums I'm into right now, and the song came on just after something from the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat. I felt the ancestral roots linking the two bands in their stitched-together aesthetics (though the Fiery Furnaces also have a maximalist math-rock thing going on as well... not Faustian).

It says something—about Faust or about my own taste, I don't know—that the vocal section of "Meadow Meal" is the best part of the record. It's the most structured section of the entire album, holding down what could otherwise feel meandering. With So Far, the band seemed to have learned that lesson and presented a batch of songs far more balanced. "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl" is practically a pop song compared to everything they'd done prior—but it's also a kind of commentary on pop music of the era. The singers, in a loose harmony, intone the title lyric, an overtly cliche 60s pop image, juxtaposed with an otherwise anti-pop structure. The song is built around a simple 4/4 tom beat, joined incrementally by piano and guitar, each pounding out just a single chord. The song marches linearly—no chorus, no ringing guitars, no layered SoCal  harmonies—until a wonderful sax solo hooks the ear right at the end, before the whole thing fades out.

The whole album is an exercise in balancing pop with anti-pop, structure with atmospherics. The ten-minute "No Harm" is all meandering atmosphere before coalescing into a barely contained nonsensical rocker—"Daddy! Take the banana! Tomorrow is Sunday!" The title track is a tightly wound, conservative-by-comparison instrumental, prodded along by a clockwork two-note horn riff, followed by the heady "Mamie is Blue," with its cult-like chants. "I've Got My Car and My TV" is almost like two or three Saturday morning cartoon theme songs spliced together; the bouncy, hypnotic riff taking up the second half of the song is the biggest earworm of the record.

• Faust: Meadow Meal (from Faust)
• Faust: It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl (from So Far)

Pas/Cal: I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke and Laura

Where do I even begin with this one... how about my expectations? They were high. I loved Pas/Cal's debut EP, The Handbag Memoirs, and have waited ever since for the band to get its shit together for a proper full-length debut. My expectations only went up when I heard "You Were Too Old for Me" a couple months in advance of the album. It was sprawling, epic pop, like two or three Kinksy songs jammed together into one monstrous stream-of-conscious monologue. I imagined the track to be a kind of tentpole among other more streamlined exercises in twee (more akin to their earlier material). "You Were Too Old for Me" is a risky song, and I appreciated that Pas/Cal was a band that could pull off those kinds of risks.

Well, expectations and imaginings aren't reality, so all that goes out the window when trying to assess what I Was Raised actually is. "You Were Too Old for Me" turns out to be less of standapart track than I'd anticipated, in that nearly every song on the album follows the same pattern: half the tracks here are longer than five minutes (and the three tracks making up the "Cherry Suite" total 8+), and all of the songs (regardless of length) employ Casimer Pascal's linear flow of lyrics. Add to that shifting tempos and song structures, few bona fide choruses or refrains, and the constant racket of bandmembers that don't know when to not play, when not to sing backup, and I Was Raised just comes out like one big hot mess. There are so many hooks in each song that I never do find one to hang my hat on. And that's really the album's biggest sin—how can it sound like pure pop yet shake off all the pleasure like water from a dog's back?

To attempt fairness to the band—they are, after all, good musicians and Pascal himself an entertaining singer and lyricist—this had to be their intention. Whereas their earlier EPs garnered comparisons to Belle & Sebastian and other sweater-wearing twee pop acts, I Was Raised seems to be anti-twee. It takes all the ingredients of the genre—coy lyrics, lots la la las, sugary harmonies—and cooks them into something a lot more difficult to consume. In some of these songs, you can hear the moment when someone in the band must have said Okay, let's stop here, and Pascal responded No, let's go further. It's a noble ambition.

Maximalist pop can work; Of Montreal, Fiery Furnaces, and (fifteen years ago) Heavy Vegetable all more or less succeed at it, each in different ways. But none of those bands abandon repetition altogether, nor a central melody that serves as the anchor to a song that might still sprawl in other directions. Neither do they forego simplicity, at least in spots, to give the listener a chance to pause and get their bearings. A lot of the songs on I Was Raised work really well all by themselves, but the record as a whole inures you to its charms.

• Pas/Cal: You Were Too Old for Me
• Pas/Cal: We Made Our Way, We Amtrakked

Fleet Foxes: s/t

I had one of those moments with Fleet Foxes: the ideal first impression. The last time I had one of those was hearing Midlake’s “Roscoe” back in late 2006. It’s a moment where you hear a band for the first time and within the first minute of that song you say to yourself I need this. I listened to “White Winter Hymnal” on a Thursday morning and spent the rest of the day at work just buzzing around at my desk, staring at the clock like a schoolboy, waiting to leave so I could go directly to the record store and buy the album.

I don’t know that Fleet Foxes is quite up to par with Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther, which I listened to religiously for most of last year and is easily one of my favorite albums of the last five years, but it’s damn good. It’s easily secured a spot as one of my favorite albums of 2008.

To the last, each song on this album is cast in pastoral light, with luminous harmonies throughout, Robin Pecknold’s robust voice coated in reverb, and the roomy sound of the drums and guitars.

Still, it’s not a perfect album, if only for the fact that the band shares a glaring surface similarity with My Morning Jacket. Pecknold’s voice occupies an identical range and tone as Jim James; that alone is no fault—hey, you sound how you sound—but Fleet Foxes’ additional aesthetic choice of adding all that reverb, thereby making the sound all the more similar to early MMJ, deserves at least some penalty. As I said to my brilliant wife, you can have the same eyes and nose as Jennifer Aniston, but why then would you make a point to get her haircut? My wife, herself not a big fan of later-period My Morning Jacket, welcomed the sound, making the point that Fleet Foxes sounds like the album MMJ might have made after The Tennessee Fire had they followed that album’s folk influences rather than going the southern rock route.

Fleet Foxes is, after all, a more sophisticated album than a My Morning Jacket comparison might lead one to believe. The harmonies, upon which nearly every song here seems to effortlessly float, owe more to choir practice than to 70s rock; the songwriting is sparse, letting the voices fill the air instead, and the song structures are often more complex than typical pop. Take album highlight “Ragged Wood,” which is essentially two songs conjoined at the middle, or opener “Sun it Rises,” which is bookended by a self-contained a capella intro and a simple solo guitar and soft-voiced finale.

Ultimately Fleet Foxes shakes off all comparisons to other bands, contemporary or otherwise, with repeated listens. Pecknold’s lyrics evoke a lived-in, authentic topography—both geographic and psychological—against a cohesive sonic backdrop and simple, old-fashioned songcraft. Highly recommended.

• Fleet Foxes, White Winter Hymnal
• Fleet Foxes, Ragged Wood

My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges

Z was a polarizing album for My Morning Jacket fans. A left turn from the expansive and indulgent It Still Moves, Z was concise, accessible, largely free of noodling, and more playful—not to mention the reggae influence. It seemed to baffle and irritate a segment of the band’s jammier fans. Me? I thought it sounded like a rebirth. It reconfirmed my faith in a band I was ready to write off once it seemed like they were content to be a jam-rock band. (Sorry, I think It Still Moves is a chore.) Z’s risk-taking paid off, and My Morning Jacket surprised me by making the best album of their career thus far.

Enter Evil Urges. Again the polarizing reviews. Again the baffled fans. All of it had me excited all over again. If Z was a reboot, then my anticipation for Evil Urges mirrored the way I looked forward to At Dawn after the outstanding debut, The Tennessee Fire. And like my reception to At Dawn, I feel with Evil Urges like I’m listening to a band that is growing, is enjoying their growth—but is also stumbling along the way.

The album gets off to a fantastic start. Both the title track and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, Part I” continue the trend of the band pushing its own envelope. The opener is all falsetto vocals over rhythms that again have a vague island feel, before breaking into a guitar freakout in the last third. The gorgeous “Touch Me” follows with propulsive, dancelike rhythms—“part II,” which closes the album, is an outright dance track—belying MMJ’s ongoing ambition to transcend whatever category you might think to put them in. It might be the highlight of the album. Two tracks in, Evil Urges is shaping up to be the best album MMJ has ever done.

Then “Highly Suspicious” comes in and fucks everything up.

Like a bad Faith No More parody, “Highly Suspicious” sounds like a novelty song that might’ve been funny if I were listening to Green Jello or, for that matter, Faith No More. But the electro rhythm section, the clownish falsettos—it’s an insult to Prince to say Jim James is aping Prince; and it’s an insult to the quality of the vocals on “Evil Urges,” too—not to mention the unforgivable lame chorus, make this the worst song MMJ have ever put to tape. It nearly derails the entire album.

Thank god we live in the age of iTunes, where fixing this album is as simple as deleting the track from the library, so that the lush “Touch Me” segues perfectly into the perfectly crafted “I’m Amazed,” with its sing-along verses, guitar hooks, and bluesy solo. For fans that like MMJ most when they embrace their southern rock roots, this is the jam of the year.

The song feels like a single, like a real attempt to capture an even bigger fanbase than they’ve already got. Nothing wrong with that—but from here on Evil Urges starts to feel like every song is making the same grab. The treacly “Thank You Too!” is a sap-filled attempt to get on every wedding DJ’s permanent playlist; “Sec Walkin’” has a nice pedal steel but is sabotaged by its early-90s keyboards and syrupy strings, while it and “Two  Halves” both feature garish backing vocals. For pretty much the whole second half of the record, James seems to lose the plot altogether as he gets muddled up with hack pop structures and clumsy lyrics (did he really say "interweb" and “Karen of the Carpenters” in “The Librarian”?).

Most criticisms I see of this album seem to fault the band for all its left turns—the falsetto, the less–southern rockin’ moments. That’s really a critique of the first few songs (and the closer), ignoring the rest. (What fan of MMJ’s more traditional sound isn’t happy with the heartfelt ballad “Look at You,” one of the few high points of the album’s second half?). My problem with this album has a lot more to do with the risks they don’t take. James is at his best when he pushes the boundaries of his songcraft—“Wordless Chorus” and “Off the Record” on Z, the first few tracks here—or when he pours his aching heart into his lyrics and delivery—all of The Tennessee Fire and the best bits of At Dawn and It Still Moves. But for most Evil Urges, MMJ seem to be making an anachronistic radio-ready record. All clearly telegraphed verses, choruses, breakdowns, and neatly fitted guitar solos. If only radio mattered any more, and if only there were a station that actually wanted contemporary southern rock, My Morning Jacket would be ready for their close-up. It’s strange that this album is getting slagged in some quarters for sounding so different, when in fact only four of the thirteen tracks really push any boundaries. The rest is sadly generic and ultimately disappointing after such a strong start. There’s enough here—about half the tracks—to make the album worthwhile for most fans, and I still feel optimistic about MMJ’s overall trajectory. They are still capable of surprising me, and I make no guesses about there they’ll go next.

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

Beck: Modern Guilt

 
I would call myself a casual Beck fan at best: Sea Change is the only album of his I’ve ever fully embraced; everything prior felt like schtick to me. Post-Sea Change, Guero found its way into my collection though I never got into it, and I haven’t heard a single song from The Information. So I’ve got nothing at stake as a listener or fan when it comes to Modern Guilt. That might explain my ambivalence to the album.

There are no bad songs here; nor are there any songs that jump out and shout classic. I keep coming back to the album with the suspicion that it might be a grower, but instead it just sort of passes by me. At a little over thirty minutes, it comes and goes quickly; within that span of time, the ten tracks all run at relatively the same pace and tone: upbeat but not busy, fun but without punch. The album was produced by Danger Mouse, who I suspect is getting more overrated by the album. Some of the tracks here—“Gamma Ray” in particular—sound like cast-offs from a Gnarls Barkley session. The beats shuffle rather than kick and the bass lines have more indebted to pickers like Paul McCartney or Brian Ritchie than the kind of rhythmic funk that has held down previous Beck albums.

I’ve got tickets to see Beck in a couple of months at Hollywood Bowl, with Spoon in tow. The pairing is apparently no accident, as the title track makes it obvious that Beck is a Spoon fan. If only Mike McCarthy and the band got behind Beck in the studio rather than Danger Mouse, Modern Guilt might have been a more sonically interesting record. (Seriously: if you haven't noticed how flawlessly produced Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, you're missing out on that record.)

Not to lay an unfair amount of blame at Danger Mouse’s doorstep. Production and songwriting are really trotting hand-in-hand down the middle of the road. The album sounds good, and the songs themselves are good too—but that’s kind of it: they’re good. Not great, not unpredictable, not essential. Modern Guilt never sinks below whatever bar Beck has set for himself, but it never really rises above it either. What we’re left with is a “pretty good” record that never disappoints nor thrills; ten albums and fifteen years into an artist’s career, maybe that’s not so bad. I’ll leave it to bigger Beck fans than I as to whether they think merely good is forgivable or not.

• Beck, Modern Guilt

Peter Morén: The Last Tycoon

Peter Bjorn & John's Writer's Block was easily one of my favorite albums of last year. Those of you who never heard anything beyond "Young Folks" missed out on an album that was layered, varied, and at times surprising (in addition to being packed with earworms). So count me among the fans looking forward to Peter's solo outing, The Last Tycoon. Also, count me among the disappointed.

It is apt, perhaps, that the album is named for F. Scott Fitzgerald's final novel—which was published despite the fact that Fitzgerald died before completing it—because Morén's album feels similarly unfinished. The Last Tycoon sounds like a "solo album" in the truest sense of the phrase: it literally sounds like Morén wanted to make an album free of his rhythm section and co-singers. Missing from the album is any bounce whatsoever, nor harmonies, nor variation of song style—not to mention Bjorn Yttling's production abilities. Way up front in the mix, instead, are Morén's guitar and voice.

The album is driven almost entirely by its lyrical content rather than its melodies. Listening to "This is What I Came For" or "I Don't Gaze at the Sky for Long," you can envision that Morén  penned the lines well before picking up his guitar. That process isn't necessarily a recipe for disaster—just ask Leonard Cohen—and the lyrics to The Last Tycoon are noticeably more sophisticated than anything on Writer's Block. But rarely have I ever loved an album based only on its lyrics. Meanwhile, The Last Tycoon's melodies and arrangements just aren't that compelling. 

Often Morén's musicianship is top-notch—the guitarwork on "Missing Link" is reminiscent of Elliott Smith's gently fluid finger-picking—but without anyone in the room to tell Morén to get his nose out of his journals, the album never once picks up any kind of momentum. Each of the ten songs feel inert, leaden, self-obsessed. Taken individually, each song is perfectly fine, though rarely much more than that; in a row, The Last Tycoon becomes a chore to get through.

The Little Ones: Terry Tales & Fallen Gates

“Sometimes being happy means being corny.”
                                                        —my brilliant wife

It’s nice to hear from the Little Ones again. Their debut EP, Sing Song, came out in 2006 and seemed to be re-released two or three times over. When I picked it up at the time, I said it was great, straightforward indie pop, if nothing groundbreaking. A year and a half later, it turns out I still put Sing Song on pretty regularly. Last week my wife and I tooled along the PCH from Malibu to Manhattan Beach blaring the six songs out our open windows, car-dancing the whole way. You just can’t help but clap in time to every breakdown and chant along with every Oh, La, and Hey. [Actually, looking at what I wrote about Sing Song back in early 07, you'd think all we ever did was listen to the Little Ones while driving up the coast. Pure coincidence.]

The Little Ones have a full-length slated for release this summer (care to place your bets on who’s gonna have the indie rock summer jam?), but in the meantime they’re serving up one more EP. My first impression was similar to my first impression of their debut—sounds like pretty straightforward indie pop. The real question is whether Terry Tales lodges itself in my pleasure centers as comfortably as Sing Song.

In other words, this time around I’ve got higher expectations, and the first few listens forced comparisons to the debut. Terry Tales is still high-energy, though all those fun-filled breakdowns are gone. No handclaps! No chanting! No—wait a second: was that a steel drum?

I listened to Terry Tales at home on my computer, not totally feeling it. I listened to it on my iPod while taking the bus to work in the morning—again not feeling it, to the point that I started creating negative associations. My wife accuses me of lapsing into negativity with nearly everything I listen to; nevertheless I started envisioning Terry Tales as the soundtrack to some kind of ABC Family made-for-TV movie. "Boracay"—yes, with its steel drum (!)—or the similarly tropically inclined “Unlock the Door!” could play over a montage of Zack and Cody living up the suite life while on a Hawaiian vacation.

And then I listened to it again, this time—where else?—in the car, with my brilliant wife, windows down, tooling along the PCH. Suddenly Terry Tales was the funnest album in the world. My wife shouted over the music—completely free of cynicism—“It’s like Radio Disney!” I said to her how the album was having a completely different effect on me here in the car, with her, car-dancing down the coast. “Of course!” she said. “The Little Ones are like the soundtrack to total happiness!”

In other words, she had the same reaction as I did—family friendly, perfect for montages—only she embraced it on first listen and it took me four or five spins to warm up. “But the steel drum is pretty corny, right?” I said. To which she replied—well, you know what she said. It is kind of missing the point to critique the Little Ones for appealing to the most childlike pleasures—it’s right there in their band name, on their album covers, in their gleefully wide-eyed stage show.

In the end, Terry Tales has completely worn down my cynical side and won me over. We’ve learned the lyrics, we're singing along. The windows are down, the PCH is jammed, and the lady in the car next to us is wondering what the hell has got my wife and I bouncing around like teenagers.

Beach House: Devotion

Beach House could be the quintessential example of my song vs. sound post from a few months back. The duo have set up a kind of sonic template for each of the eleven songs on Devotion: drums (or programmed beats) serve only to keep time, while Alex Scally plays minimal leads on his clean-toned guitar and Victoria Legrand holds down the song with her organs and plaintive vocals (covered in the requisite amount of reverb). As premeditated as Beach House's sound is, though, they are paying equal attention to song structure, vocal melodies, instrumental hooks, lyrical substance. Unlike, say, Sigur Rós, who are one or two notches up on the ethereal dreaminess scale, Beach House are still operating in the realm of the song.

Okay, sure, it's more or less the same song eleven times over. Fair enough. It's always a risk for a band to stay, uh, devoted to their template, whether it's Sigur Rós, Bedhead, or Iron & Wine (particularly The Creek Drank the Cradle). Creating an entire album out of one kind of song puts a special kind of pressure on that song—it's gotta be fucking good. Lucky for Beach House, it is. Check "Gila" for one of its best instances. The song succeeds because it has all the requisite pop requirements—great guitar hook, catchy melody, earworm-quality chorus ("Giiiiiii-la-ah-ah-ah-ah"—it's the sequel to "Umbrella"!)—all wrapped up in reverb and a moody aura.

Somewhere just beyond the album's midpoint that moody aura starts to give the feeling of being lost in a haze. Not every track has melodies on par with "Gila," though just enough do to serve as beacons, drawing you further and further in. Even when things do start to feel a little samey, the gauzy sound envelopes you in a luxurious kind of tedium.

Yeah, it does get a little tedious, despite how in love I am with most of the songs. For a band that so naturally warrants descriptors like "dreamy" and "autumnal,"  I do wish that they'd have included one song that really stretches out a little—something longer than "Astronaut"'s five minutes. Whether epically dramatic or minimally ambient, it might have been a nice touch of variety without sacrificing what they're best at. In the album's favor, however, I'll say this: my desire for that epic, and/or for a smidgen more variety, has diminished each time I've put it on. Devotion rewards repeated listens. Sort of like Low, the more you spend time with Beach House, the more you get the sense that their boundaries are a special kind of freedom. I don't know that Devotion is as good as any of Low's best (i.e., early) albums, but I do get the sense that the group is capable of similar aesthetic explorations within the parameters they've set up for themselves. Devotion is worth seeking out, and Beach House is worth keeping an eye on.

The Mae Shi: Hlllyh

The Mae Shi find themselves in the same lineage that might have begun with the Birthday Party in the ’80s and continued through the likes of Crainium or Arab on Radar in the ’90s. That is: quick and spazzy. It’s a variety of music that thrilled me back when I was in college—caught up in house parties and DIY punk spaces—though I can’t say I spend a lot of time with it anymore (probably why I can’t think of any other acts more recent than Arab on Radar). Like those bands, it’s easy to tell from Hlllyh that the Mae Shi would similarly thrive and impress in a live setting—just listen to "Boys in the Attic." Most of their songs get in and get out quick, progressing linearly rather than verse-chorus-verse. And nearly everything is moving at a breakneck pace—no time for repetition! You’re a good six tracks in before you get an honest chance to catch your breath on “Leech and Locust.”

The spazziness is largely successful and usually interestingly done, although sometimes the singer’s high-pitched, almost pre-pubescent voice gets annoying. But after seven songs—about seventeen minutes—it starts to wear. The band themselves seem to be aware of that, because that’s when the gorilla instrumental “Kingdom Come” drops in. At nearly twelve minutes long, it makes up about a third of the entire album. Essentially a dance track—it alternates between something Morr Music might put out and a straight-up raver—the song happens to be the best track on the album, partly due to the fact that it is so unlike the rest. Yet it’s also the reason Hlllyh doesn’t succeed as an album—because it is so unlike the rest. Midway through the track, you sort of forget what you’re listening to as you just let the track carry you on. It segues perfectly into the mid-tempo “I Get Almost Everything,” another high point; and it is at this point that I think the Mae Shi might really be something great. To begin with frenetic punk but to move into more expansive territory is dramatic and exhilarating—but then things crash into “Party Politics,” back to the spazz. The last four songs basically return to the playbook of the first half of the record.

Ultimately Hlllyh is, to these ears, a bit disappointing. But there is enough going on to display the Mae Shi’s potential. I wish the bag of tricks used on “Kingdom Come” could be better integrated into the other songs, rather than sounding like an intermission in an otherwise samey album. Each song on Hlllyh, taken on its own, is unpredictable and explosive, but hearing them in succession, a pattern develops—angular guitar lines, punchy synths, instruments drop out at some point (usually the end) for a big group vocal—thus sabotaging the unpredictability that should be the band's greatest strength. Knowing that they have the ability to introduce a whole other layer of sounds, tempos, and atmospherics as they do in the middle of the record, highlights the limits of Hlllyh and the potential for limitlessness of the Mae Shi.

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.

Life-changing Albums: Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime

One of my criteria for a “life-changing album,” as I outlined on Monday, was that the album permanently alters the course of everything you seek out going forward. In other words the albums of your life are necessarily shaped by your life-changing albums because the latter influence your overall taste directly. Talk about altering the course of my tastes: Drive Like Jehu destroyed rock music for me.

I heard both Jehu albums around the same time, must have been 1994 or 1995. And to my mind they had perfected rock music. Post-Jehu, whenever I heard a new band that was trying to play fast and/or loud, it felt limp. I just turned it off and put on Jehu. For about a decade—literally!—I never once felt the need to purchase albums by rock bands (particularly new ones). Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the most typical brand of indie rock during those ten years was the nascent genre of emo, which was ridiculously in debt to Jehu, among other bands (too, all those spazzcore bands, largely hailing from San Diego, who also owed much to Jehu). Lots of people credit Rites of Spring as being the original emo band, and I won’t argue against their influence; but Jehu had a significant impact as well, in the form of the octave chord.

Much like Slint inspiring a myriad sub-par post-rock acts to abandon upstrokes, Drive Like Jehu neutered the power chord. The crunch of the power chord felt almost amateur compared to the sharp-edged attack of the octave. The worst (and most prevalent) emo bands took as their template the inward-looking lyrics of Rites of Spring, the song structures of Orange County pop punk, and the octave chord of Drive Like Jehu.* You might see, then, why I felt this music paled in comparison to Yank Crime. These bands missed everything else.

And it’s the everything else that made this album so important to me. Like Spiderland, Yank Crime’s brilliance did not dawn on me immediately. I had a nearly identical experience with “Luau” as I did with “Washer.” I owned the album for more than a year already. I knew that I loved it—its pure adrenaline was undeniable—but one day I was on a long drive, alone, listening to “Luau” for the umpteenth time when I noticed that, hang on a second, this song has a guitar solo! It kicks in at the 7:35 mark and it is 90% feedback. In the 1960s I guess Hendrix was giving people the same epiphany, and in the 80s (and 90s) I’d guess Thurston Moore was doing the same, but it was John Reis’s solo in “Luau” that blew my mind, and I can pinpoint that revelation as the exact moment I figured out what kind of guitar player I wanted to be. The epiphany was two-fold: 1) that noise can be manipulated into melody, and vice versa; and 2) that making music is a lot more primitive than I’d ever truly grasped. Technique, in the traditional sense of the word, doesn't mean much. Scales, speed, dexterity—it's irrelevant. That's not to say that a Ramones-like approach to punk is  some kind of ideal. What Jehu taught me is less naive, more intuitive. The great guitar players in my book concern themselves with the sound that comes from their instrument, and the emotion evoked by that sound. To try and parse that concept any further is to undermine what the instrument is capable of. If you're Drive Like Jehu, you can do a guitar solo that is nearly all feedback and sounds like gamma rays from a 1950s sci-fi flick. If you're U.S. Maple, you can detune your guitar and play whatever fucked chords you want. If you're Mick Turner of the Dirty Three you can leave the flash to your violinist and set the tone of each song through your fragile, muddy chords. (For further proof of Turner's brilliance, listen to Cat Power's Moon Pix and ask yourself why that album is still her best: it's those fragile chords, and it's Turner, not Marshall, playing them.) These are some of my all-time favorite guitarists, and to my ears what they all have in common is an approach to the guitar that respects the sounds it is capable of creating, rather than any kind of presumptions about their technical skills as guitarists.

Slint taught me something sophisticated about songwriting—how to apply sound to song in a meaningful way. Drive Like Jehu taught me something much more primal but no less significant: how to relate to one’s instrument; how to extract sound from an instrument rather than simply “play” it.

Next up: Low.

[*Caveat: I know Jehu didn’t invent the octave chord. In fact the template for the entirety of Jehu’s sound seems to have been set by a 30-second snippet of Television’s “Marquee Moon”—tune into that song at 8:10 through 8:40. But Jehu took that single moment and turned it into their driving aesthetic; and it’s that aesthetic that influenced everyone post-Jehu.]