Thanks to StanM at ILM for giving me a heads up to this: an hour-long set from Low. Sounds great, well shot, and they open with my favorite song from C'mon (fyi, arguably my favorite album of the year so far). The rest of the set is almost entirely from their last three albums:
Nothing But Heart Nightingale You See Everything Monkey Silver Rider Especially Me Sunflower Try To Sleep Canada Violent Past Last Snowstorm of the Year Murderer
On the spur of the moment I threw down this list on my tumblr earlier today, so I thought I'd re-post here, since I have the freedom to make a little mini-mix for you (re-ordered for better flow).
It’s a short list (with the caveat that I heard a lot of albums that were good, but you all want something better than good, right?):
Low: C’mon
Mountains: Air Museum
Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972
A good indicator of where my head is at, since all the rock/songwriter records I’ve heard fall into that “good” category, seemingly incapable of rising to the next echelon. I guess this means if all you chillwave acts would just drop the vocals altogether and maybe turn the synths up in the mix, I’ll like your records more.
As the rest of 2011 wears on and we go through the glut of fall releases and the scrambling to hear everything possibly missed before making our year-end proclamations, I’m sure this list will morph. I can tell you this: C’mon will still be at or very near the top of the list. It’s beautiful.
A little bit late, but here's a quick rundown of every new-to-me album I picked up in April, in the order I acquired them.
Low: Drums and Guns Continuing the rehabilitation of my opinion of Low's output of the last ten years, I've come to the realization that, in fact, the band has never made a bad album. My bad for ever assuming that they had. Unfortunately when Drums and Guns originally came out the only songs I heard from it were "Pretty People," "Breaker," and "Hatchet"; I didn't particularly like the first and third of those tracks, and the video for the second kinda annoyed me. Since I'd already (mistakenly!) written them off after The Great Destroyer, it was easy to pass this over. Forgive me for my errors! Though it's not my favorite album by Low, it's still quite good, and it stands apart from the rest of their output for its anger and dread. It's final third in particular is really magical.
Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony Hell is another entrant in the quickly filling "nu-kosmiche" genre of Krautrock-influenced synth/ambient (see also Oneohtrixpoint Never, Emeralds, and Arp, among others). The Terminal Symphony is Hell's second full length and is quite good. Like Arp's The Soft Wave (my favorite album of last year), it does a good job of mixing textures, melodies, and dynamics, making something that is easy to get lost in but providing enough hooks to climb your way out.
Cluster: Zuckerzeit Harmonia: Musik von Harmonia Speaking of, here are the two biggest culprits inspiring the wave of acts like Rene Hell et al. I own and love other albums by both of these groups (well, technically it's the same group in both cases—Harmonia is just Cluster+Michael Rother), and have been meaning to get these albums for at least a year. After watching the excellent BBC documentary about Krautrock, I was inspired to download both posthaste. I've been listening to both ever since, often one after the other, to the point that I don't totally know where one ends and the other begins. They're both excellent.
Caetano Veloso & Gal Costa: Domingo I had no idea this record even existed until I happened across a link to it earlier this month. Apparently the album was made prior to either Veloso or Costa's solo debuts; it's basically a samba record not too far off from the sound of, say, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina's Tom & Elis (one of my favorite records of all time). This isn't as good as that, but then again that's a pretty high bar. This is still quite nice.
Low: C'mon I promise everything I said about Low above is true, but nevertheless—like I said yesterday—C'mon is their best album in ten years, and is so far in the running for my favorite album of the year.
2007's Drums and Guns was certainly the most tortured album in Low's seventeen-year discography. After watching the documentary made around that time, You May Need a Murderer, I'd frankly be worried for the band if five years later Low were still pushing to the outer waters. Drums and Guns was more than mere artistic statement—it was a difficult snapshot of a man who was trying to hang on. The documentary portrays Alan Sparhawk as someone who is deeply troubled by personal demons as well as the ills of the world. War, economic downturn, and psychologic ills aside, Sparhawk was literally ready for the rapture to begin. He was on the other side of a nervous breakdown and was clearly still wrestling with himself—all while his wife and two children joined him in the van on the road to the next stop on tour. It's a dark and difficult documentary to watch, especially for fans who have spent nearly twenty years holding on both to the music and to the idea(l) that Low are more than a band, they're a family. No one wants Low to suffer.
Listening to C'mon, the newest album, I'd rather not say it's a retreat from where Low were going on their last album, sonically speaking, but rather a return to a healthier form. (I hope, at least; I've nothing to go on but the sound of the music).
Retreat, return… on the other hand I hate to use either word. It's either to Low's eternal credit or eternal detriment that, to some ears, they'll always more or less sound the same, while to others each album represents a dramatic progression or regression in their sound. Though it's true that Drums and Guns is their angriest record, and before that The Great Destroyer was their loudest, those are still relative terms. For all their differences, neither are immeasurable steps away from the simmering restraint of Trust, the experimentation of Songs for a Dead Pilot, or the dynamism of Secret Name (which includes some of Low's sunniest and darkest material). Few bands, now or ever, have been as consistently brilliant as Low for as long a period of time. So let's not get caught up in talking about similarities and differences, but rather measure the overall quality: C'mon is a gorgeous and near-perfect album, easily their best since Things We Lost in the Fire, released a decade ago.
C'mon is bookended by "Try to Sleep" and "Something's Turning Over," both terrific additions to the pantheon of Low's poppier, peppier material (think "Starfire," "Venus," "Dinosaur Act," etc.). Together they contain the mood of the record, keeping C'mon hopeful even amid darker tracks like "$20," which hearkens back to the band's Vernon Yard era, where songs possessed the minimum of words and song structure. It and the slow-building "Magic/Majesty" are like true old-school slowcore songs, throwbacks to a time when that subgenre had more traction.
Not to say they've abandoned the sound of some of their more recent material. Sparhawk's distortion pedal still makes its share of appearances, as on the cheekily sinister "Witches." Lyrically the song seems to point to some of the themes of You May Need a Murderer—delusions, rapture—but made light. When the narrator of the song tells his father that there are witches in his room, his father gives him a baseball bat to beat the hags into submission. The whole song is about being quote-unquote tough, but it's those quotation marks that reveal its weakness.
That's where Mimi Parker comes in: she is the strength of this album, and I mean that in every positive sense of the word. (Fitting, perhaps, that it's her silhouette on the album's cover.) As on every Low album Parker's presence is the anchor to each song, though she only sings lead here and there. In some ways that's where the sometimes great but inconsistent Drums and Guns faltered. Aside from one song at its midpoint, that album feels very much dominated by Sparhawk and his demons. C'mon, by contrast, is more tempered. Parker makes her presence known by the second track, "You See Everything," and again a few tracks later on "Especially Me"—perhaps the best Parker-sung track in ten years. There is a motherly quality to her voice; she is reassuring no matter the content of the lyrics or the ominous quality of the music. Her voice is the foundation of the band's sound—the rock. When Low get dark, her voice is a light. Though it was not absent from Drums and Guns, it felt suppressed. Here, even when she isn't singing lead, she retains a softness that counters Sparhawk's fragility.
This is perhaps best exemplified on the album's climax, the eight-minute powerhouse that is "Nothing But Heart." The song starts slow as Sparhawk sings a short verse followed by the line "I'm nothing but heart" repeated over and over. Those last four words could have come straight from Sparhawk's mouth in that documentary: the guy, at what looked to be just above his lowest point, was nothing if not raw and confessional and putting it all out there in his songs. "I'm nothing but heart"—full of emotion and easy to break. Sparhawk latches onto that line like a terrier and never lets go of it as the song builds and builds and builds—it's a lighters-in-the-air anthem like they've never done before. But it's not the dynamic build to crescendo or the electrifying guitar solo that knocks this song up to the next level—it's Parker's soothing voice, which comes in around the six minute mark singing her own set of lyrics in counter to Sparhawk's. Her words are slightly unintelligible amid the din—light in a fog, perhaps—but snatches here and there seem to respond to Sparhawk. Though I can't make it all out, one line sticks out at me: "as we stumble to the shore, as we walk into the night." It's that we that gets me. It seems almost to be a corrective to the masterful "Done," from earlier in the album. In that song Sparhawk sings "I'm weary and stumbling in the desert heat"; later he sings "If you see my love, tell her I'm done." When Parker comes in at the record's climactic moment, singing of stumbling together, not alone, you get the feeling that she's not done. It's as if she is the one holding out her hand, saying c'mon.
You can get a fuller rundown of everything I acquired in January, February, and March, but today I'm just giving you a mix of my favorite new-to-me acquisitions of the year so far.
Disappears: Lux I bought both Disappears albums within a few weeks of each other, so in some ways they both blend together. Despite the wondrousness that is Guider's closer, "Revisiting," it's last year's Lux that is the overall better record. You can't really go wrong with either but Lux is just a bit more satisfying.
The Radio Dept.: Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002–2010 I picked a few nits in my review of this collection, but the truth is anything by the Radio Dept. gets played in this household. My brilliant wife or I routinely go to the first Radio Dept. song in our iTunes library, press play, and don't look back for however many hours it lasts. This collection, happily, makes it last even longer. I still recommend just going for the band's full-lengths first, if you haven't already; but this is an excellent addition to the discography.
Radiohead: The King of Limbs I'm having the same reaction to The King of Limbs that I had to In Rainbows—and, well, I guess every Radiohead album. My craving for it has dwindled, but when I do put it on, I really like it.
Harry Belafonte: Calypso Calypso is clearly the oddest duck of the mix, but in truth it will probably the album I go back to most consistently for years to come. It's really a fun album. It probably wins extra points for being fun to play with my kid.
The Third Eye Foundation: The Dark The Third Eye Foundation is like the opposite of how I feel about the Radio Dept.: this is not music you just put on whenever and let play. This is some serious shit with an album title not to be taken lightly. I'm not going to play The Dark regularly, but it is an intense experience and a welcome return to form for Matt Elliott, who has been away from his TEF guise for too long. Review.
As this morning's post makes clear, I can get pretty anal about tracking what I listen to. Coincidentally, Nick Southall has appealed to anyone who'll participate to spend this week keeping a music diary. So of course I'm in. For this week only, I'm going to get even more detailed about my daily listening habits. If anything, it will show just how skewed my weekly Soundtrack posts are (since they only track albums I listen to from beginning to end). Here's how Monday shaped up:
6:35 am: I'm up when my alarm clock, aka Cooper, says it's time to get up. Knowing that the new Paul Simon, Low, and Panda Bear are all streaming on NPR this week, I head over and choose Simon's So Beautiful or So What to soundtrack breakfast and a little post-meal playing.
8:40 am: Running a little late for work I come out of the shower and hear snippets of Low's C'mon, also streaming from NPR, which my wife put on. I've been looking forward to hearing this and was l looking forward to hearing it in full once I got settled into work. Hearing snippets of a couple tracks feels slightly like I'm spoiling the record.
8:48 am: I'm out the door, iPod on, walking to work: Low, Drums and Guns. I'd already had it in my head that I'd listen to this on my walk, in anticipation of hearing the new one. I arrive to work at track 10, "Your Poison." After ten minutes of getting settled in, I put the headphones back in and finish the last three songs while catching up on email and work twitter in my office. The last three tracks are, after all, the best three tracks.
10:20 am: Low, C'mon, while working. I make it through five songs before being interrupted—I'm getting a new computer at work. Once it's all set up—it takes about 30 minutes—I head back to NPR, plug in my headphones, and start the album over again. Only the sound is blaring out of the computer speakers as if my headphones aren't plugged in. This won't do; my plans for listening to Low and Panda Bear all day are foiled. I go music-less for a bit.
12:10 pm: Over the weekend I'd downloaded a couple of playlists from Singing the Wire, plus a few Merle Haggard tracks from the Adios Lounge. I dumped them all into one playlist and hit play. I make it through Sir Douglas Quintet's "Texas Me," Billy Joe Shaver's "Honky Tonk Heroes," Jerry Jeff Walker's "Sangria Wine," Kris Kristofferson's "From the Bottle to the Bottom," and Ray Wylie Hubbard's "(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother" before being interrupted.
1:14 pm: I need to write, so I put on my "Writing" playlist—all instrumental, mostly ambient/electronic/krautrock—and hit shuffle: Icebreaker International's "Phillipine Sea," Chopin's "Nocture #4 in F," Holy Fuck's "1MD," Neu!'s "Hallogallo," Brise-Glace's "Stump of a Downer," Cluster's "Umleitung," and Manuel Göttsching's epic "Echo Waves."
2:22 pm: When Tortoise's "The Lithium Stiffs" comes on, I decide to listen to It's All Around You in full. I'm about to segue into Beacons of Ancestorship but I only make it through "High Class Slim Came Floating In" before being interrupted.
4:48 pm: Looking for nothing special while I do some near-the-end-of-day emailing, I set my "Top Rated" playlist to shuffle: The Shins' "Gone for Good," Neil Young's "Birds," Sufjan Stevens' "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" and the Futureheads' "The Return of the Berserker." Interrupted.
5:28 pm: Heading home, this time on the bus instead of walking. I return to my country playlist. "Sangria Wine," "(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother" and "Texas Me" all repeat, along with Great Speckled Bird's "Calgary," the Monkees' "Sunny Girlfriend," Merle Haggard's "I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can," and Little Feat's "Willin'."
5:55 pm: I walk in the front door just as Sam Prekop's "So Shy" comes on. My brilliant wife and I start dancing and singing along with Prekop's "Hey / Ba-da-ba-pa," trying to get Cooper to dance too. He didn't dance but it was fun anyway. "So Shy" is the last song on Prekop's self-titled album so the iTunes library flowed right into Who's Your New Professor as we went through the evening routine of detoxing from a long day, giving Coop a bath, and getting him ready for bed. Eventually the iTunes library keeps chugging along: more country with Sammi Smith ("Help Me Make it Through the Night," "Today I Started Loving You Again," "Kentucky"), reggae with Sammy Dread ("Road Block"), and an awful cover of "Louie Louie" by the Sandpipers.
7:25 pm: Back to NPR, I finally put on the new Panda Bear album. But I only make it through two songs before we decide to make dinner instead. The rest of the night carries on without returning to the play button.
After spending January and February trying really hard to keep up with all the new releases and the surrounding conversation, I apparently rejected that approach in March, with exactly zero 2011 releases acquired this month. It's actually been a nice palate cleanser, for the most part. Here's a recap of what I picked up, in chronological order. Next week I'll have a quarterly roundup highlighting, specifically, my favorite acquisitions (new and old) of the last three months.
Harry Belafonte: Calypso Possibly my favorite acquisition of the year so far. This is one of those records, like Les Paul & Mary Ford's Best of the Capitol Masters or Doris Day's greatest hits or Sam Cooke's greatest hits, that will likely be in perpetual play around the house. What I possibly like most about it is that it's not as raucous as you might think it is, assuming like me you only know "Day-O" or "Jump in the Line." Most the songs here are quite stripped down and lovely—sometimes heartbreaking.
Crosby, Stills & Nash: s/t After years of getting in deep with the Byrds, I figured it was finally time for me to give CSN an honest chance and listen to one of their records all the way through. Well, the opinions I'd previously held based on their hits remains unchanged. For the most part CSN is just too pristine. I am an avowed fan of great harmonies but CSN for whatever reason leaves me cold. They're all harmony, no heart. I do really like "Lady of the Island," though. Other than that, I'm ambivalent to this record.
Fugiya & Miyagi: Lightbulbs "Knickerbocker Glory" was one of my favorite songs of 2008, though I never got around to picking up the album from which it came. Three years later I came across it on a whim and brought it home. "Knickerbocker" kicks things off and frankly the rest of the record, though following the same basic formula, is rarely as good as that song. A few songs get close—"Uh," "Pickpocket," "Pussyfooting"—but for the most part Lightbulbs is a pleasant if not exhilerating lazy disco album for stoners. There are worse things to be than lazy disco for stoners, of course.
Can: Unlimited Edition This is a b-sides and outtakes collection that spans 1968 to 1975 and includes material from various lineup iterations of the band. It is almost totally worthless. Most of the nineteen tracks are aimless and kinda stupid. Some are fine but not special, and a small number rise to above average.
Low: The Great Destroyer I feel like a fool. Low, can you ever forgive me for writing off The Great Destroyer based on a couple of listening station samples and a stray mp3 all those years ago? I should have had more faith in you, shouldn't have trusted the middling-to-poor reviews. Who were those reviewers, anyway? I didn't know them—not like I knew you. And yet I let six years go by before I listened to The Great Destroyer all the way through. Low, will you take me back? It's is not a perfect album, but it is a fulfilling album. Where it felt disappointing back in 2005, now it feels refreshing. The great strength of Low is that, even within the confines of their overall aesthetic, they always find ways to push their own envelope. Trust didn't push too hard, while The Great Destroyer pushes harder than anything they'd done before. With this album, Low are clearly trying to break their own mold. Whether you want that mold broken or not will dictate how you feel about the record.
Deutsche Wertarbeit: s/t Over at ILM there is a "Krautrock Listening Klub" thread that has supplied me with inumerable new-to-me jams. The thread went dormant a few months ago but was recently revived, starting with Deutsche Wertarbeit's self-titled debut and Earthstar's French Skyline. I've never heard of either of these groups before, despite my love of the genre. Both of these albums are great, the Deutsche Wertarbeit record in particular. It falls on the more electronic side of krautrock—think Cluster or Harmonia—though comes a little late in the game, 1981. A lot of krautrock acts segued from pioneering electronica in the 70s to cheesy new age in the 80s. Deutsche Waterbeit is a good milemarker on that trajectory. The music is clearly indebted to Cluster or Harmonia's—"Deutsher Wald" feels ripped from Deluxe—but it's also made on synthesizers that sound like harbingers of Tangerine Dream's awful mid-80s work. (Confession: I also acquired Tangerine Dream's Le Parc this month but deleted it from my hard drive after two listens. Dreck.) It's a strange pivot point in the evolution of some krautrock bands, where the aesthetic sensibility is still at a high level but the technology is evolving into something that, to these ears at least, is a bit silly. Don't take that comment too much to heart, however: I really like this album. It's one of my favorite acquisitions of the month, especially for the gorgeously sedate closer, "Der Grosse Atem."
Earthstar: French Skyline I've spent less time with this album but it too is pretty great. Interstingly Earthstar is actually an Americna band, from Utica, New York, who were so enamoured with the music happening in Germany at the time that they moved there. Recorded by none other than Klause Schulze, French Skyline was Earthstar's second album, and first to be released on the German label Sky records (home of Cluster, Michael Rother, and others). It's some epic drone with occasional guitar solos. Actually it feels like a precursor to what Emeralds are doing thirty years later.
And now a playlist of my favorite random new-to-me tracks I downloaded in the last month. Most are from new releases or yet-to-be-released albums, with a couple classics tossed in for good measure. Shout out to the Cargo Culte for hipping me to three of these tracks (Fugiya & Miyagi, Hawkwind, and Spacemen 3). Also, the Atlas Sound track came from a great mix by Kenny Bloggins at the Decibel Tolls. (I've been remiss on checking out much Atlas Sound due to being only lukewarm on Deerhunter, but "Quick Canal" has me reassessing that omission.) The rest came either from a zillion other blogs or via Altered Zones.
Unlike yesterday's sampling, this playlist was assembled with the intention of working like a playlist, so I encourage you to press play on the first track and let it cycle through. You can hear the January mix here.
Herein lies a rundown of all the new-to-me albums acquired in February, listed in the order I heard them. Happily, no disappointments this month!
Low: Trust (2002) I mentioned earlier this month that I'd picked up Trust because I wanted to get back on board with Low, starting with where I left off. I'd heard a few songs from Trust when it first came out and didn't feel moved to get it—my impression was that it was, finally and inevitably, "just another Low album." Hearing it in full all these years later, that feeling is in some ways confirmed and in others repudiated. In fact it doesn't sound just like any of the albums that came before it. Whereas on prior albums they loaded their albums with beautiful songs and just a couple containing a dash of anger—think "Don't Understand" from Secret Name—here they piled on the edgy songs so the ratio is more 50/50. Not to say I don't like Low when they get this way—Songs for a Dead Pilotis among my favorites in their discography—but that's where the confirmation comes. They have done these kinds of songs before, here and there since at least The Curtain Hits the Cast. Thus nothing here feels surprising or fresh. It's not a bad album by any stretch; I'm glad I finally got around to getting it. It's just not the one I'd recommend to new fans. Previously.
Disappears: Guider (2011) I really like Disappears but I also want them to add to their palate. "Revisiting" indicates they can do it—will they? Review (including a youtube of "Revisiting," which is too long a song to include here).
Seefeel: Succour (1995) Until last year, Seefeel was a 90s act that I mostly missed the boat on. I bought Quique, the canonized masterpiece, and then I more or less stopped there. Everything I read said the group never recaptured the glory of that album. Hearing Succour, their followup to Quique, I now feel like a sucker (sucker/succour ha ha). This album is lovely! In fact I think I like it more.
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 (2011) This doesn't happen often, but I feel I have the least to say about the album I might like the most of this bunch. Ravedeath, 1972 is a beautiful and edgy ambient record. It starts with typical instruments—piano, organ, guitar—and subjects them to so much decay that the whole experience is rendered abstract. I really enjoy this album though I feel like I'm still ten or twelve listens away from fully understanding why I enjoy it.
Radiohead: King of Limbs (2011) So Radiohead have turned in an album that does not measure up to its others—an insane level of expectation, even for Radiohead. It's true that The King of Limbs is battling Hail to the Thief for the honor of sixth or seventh best Radiohead album, but that's not the same as saying it's bad. Many other reviews have noted that The King of Limbs feels less like an album and more like two EPs. Radiohead seem to have made this split quite intentionally; the vinyl version of the album is packaged as two 10" discs. From there you can break it down even further—not two halves but four sides, each side a pair of tracks. In other words it seems The King of Limbs is meant to be consumed in small doses, just a couple tracks at a time with a pause in between, long enough to flip sides. Thinking of the album this way helps explain why it doesn't hang together very well as an "album experience," the way so many Radiohead albums do (OK Computer is downright cinematic, for instance). It also illuminates why, given time and repeated listens, it becomes more compelling. The parts are better than the whole.
A confluence of Low references on various message boards, twitter feeds, blogs, and actual conversations has got me thinking about the band again. After going back and re-reading what I wrote about all their albums and EPs released between 1994 and 2001, I started to feel winsome—the way you feel when you start thinking about someone who used to be your best friend but for some reason, no real reason, you lost touch.
So I've been attempting to get back in touch with the band. I downloaded Trust, which is the first Low album I didn't pay attention to upon release. It's a good album, not deserving of my ignorance. I'd always thought of it as being the first Low album that just kinda sounded like other Low albums, but I realize now that's not the case. It's a tense record. It's the first one they'd done where they let multiple songs stretch to great lengths. It broods like other Low songs brood, but it broods a lot. There are a few light moments, relatively speaking—"La La La Song," for instance—but for the most part Trust strikes me as a spacious and dark album.
I don't know the record that well yet, to be honest. I still feel like we're trying to reconnect with each other. We've both grown, we're different people. Did we have differences before? Was that why we lost touch? Or did I just move away? I have The Great Destroyer and Drums and Guns on my eventual to-buy list too. I've heard select tracks from each and had previously thought they were okay, or bad. But for some reason I feel I want to try again. Oh, also, the new album. C'mon. They just dropped a track from that record, "Try to Sleep," which is lovely.
Coincidentally I had my iTunes library on shuffle the other day and "Venus" came on, which was originally a 7" single from 1997 and is now found on the Lifetime of Temporary Relief set. I hadn't heard it in a long time but it's really just a great little pop song. Which got me thinking about all the other great little pop songs they've done. So perhaps in response to the edginess of Trust, or because of hearing "Venus," or due to my enjoyment of "Try to Sleep," or simply of the spirit of trying to reignite an old friendship, I made a playlist of a bunch of my favorite "poppy" Low songs.
Tucked into yesterday's post you might have noticed a little announcement: the pgwp household is expanding. Starting in late January my listening hours are going to shift from krautrock to Kidz Bop.
So if you're keeping score at home, that means I need to finish writing a book (including, hopefully, a trip to Louisville), move into a new place, and otherwise prepare for a kid, all in the next six months or so (oh yeah, and work that pesky full-time job). Stressed? Me? Nah...
Well, seriously, okay, a little. But more so I'm just excited. Bearing in mind that my prior experience in handling infants is 100% theoretical (I did hold one once... once), I have a lot of visions of the days following baby pgwp's arrival. Nearly all of them involve me singing my favorite songs to it. (Optimistically, none of my visions feature tantrums or foul odors.)
Since learning of the impending event, I've had a little checkbox in the back of my mind every time a song comes on—could this work as a lullabye if I sang it softly enough? I mean, I can't drive myself crazy singing "Rock-a-bye Baby" to a tiny being who doesn't understand what I'm talking about anyway, right? The only question, it seems to me, is whether the melody has the right effect. Music-obsessive parents in the audience, feel free to share your wisdom on this front. What are/were some of your favorite non-nursery-rhyme lullabys? I'm forming an untenably long list in my head (and in an iTunes playlist, of course) of any and all contenders. Here's the tip of the iceberg:
Low Week at Do You Compute has ended. As I re-posted the first entry here, so I'll re-post the conclusion as well. I really enjoyed going deep into these records this week and I hope you followed along. Here's a quick rundown of everything that went up:
It’s 1997. Low is on tour, playing Tempe for the second time in less than a year. The first time was the very same week Transmission was released; they opened for Soul Coughing and were roundly booed throughout their set. This time—right around when The Curtain Hits the Cast came out—the setting is more appropriate. Low are the headliners, playing a record store packed with about 100 devoted (and silent) fans. It’s an amazing show. Among other things, Sparhawk—wearing a GodheadSilo t-shirt, by the way—reveals that the album version of “Words” is actually “the fast version.”
When the show is over I head for the stage, where their merchandise is scattered on the ground. No new music—I’ve already got all the LPs, EPs, and 7”s they’re hawking. I do notice a bright, sea-blue t-shirt lampooning the poster for the movie Jaws: the great white lunges ferociously up from the ocean with the word “LOW” written above in bright orange all-caps lettering. It’s sort of a genius t-shirt, if a little ugly. I don’t buy it.
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It’s 1999 and I’ve met a brilliant girl. Among other ways we discover we’re meant for each other, there is an exchange of music and musical ideas. She introduces me to Rufus Wainwright, Jeff Buckley, and Fred Astaire; I introduce her to Cat Power, Ida, and Low. I had a cassette at the time that I kept in my car—it was all of Low’s 7”s and b-sides collected together. “I Started a Joke,” “Venus,” “No Need,” “Lord, Can You Hear Me?”. One of their earliest b-sides was from a food-themed compilation released around the time of their first album; the song was called “Peanut Butter Toast and American Bandstand.” We’d sing that one together.
It’s strange to think that I’ve fallen out of love with Low. Or, more accurately, that I’ve stopped keeping up. Maybe it was inevitable: three of my posts this week implied that I was anticipating the moment Low would become predictable. What made Low one of the seminal indie bands of the 90s was that they triumphed in the face of that anticipation so many times. Perhaps that’s why Things We Lost in the Fire, from 2001, was ultimately the last Low album I was to buy. It wasn’t a bad record by any means—I’ve heard some say it’s among their best—but for me, who’d been on board with everything they did for seven years running, it was the first release that sounded… like Low. It was good, but it wasn’t a revelation.
*
It’s Christmas of 1999 and we’ve been together for all of six months. Low release their Christmas EP and my brilliant girlfriend brings it over. The first song, “Just Like Christmas,” is unlike anything the group had ever done before! For one thing, someone is playing a full drum set. Better yet, it sets my brilliant girlfriend off on a tear of Christmas joy. She dances around the apartment and plays the song over and over.
I just listened to Things We Lost in the Fire for the first time in at least six years, maybe longer. It really is a fine album. It’s almost cruel of me to say it had to be “a revelation” in order for me to stick with them. But that’s the bar they’d set. The album was again produced by Steve Albini, and it’s clear the group had reached a level of comfort with the sound they’d begun honing three years earlier on Songs for a Dead Pilot. The biggest difference on this album was the addition of Mimi Parker’s sister, who had previously added her voice to “Long Way Around the Sea” from their Christmas EP. The harmonies throughout Fire are therefore much sweeter, hewing closer to the vibe of frequent tourmates Ida. It’s a nice effect, and its sweetness juxtaposes against the fact that this album might be the darkest record Low had made to date. Tracks like “Whore” and “Embrace” and “Kind of Girl” feel like Low are walking a line right at the edge of darkness.
It’s 2000 and my brilliant girlfriend has a present for me. It’s a t-shirt I once saw at a Low concert three years earlier. Apparently earlier that year, when Low were in town touring on Secret Name, she approached Alan Sparhawk and described the shirt to him. He told her they still had some back home, gave her his phone number, and told her to call him once they finished their tour. She called him a few months later and he sent the shirt.
*
I have a hard time listening to Cat Power. Old Cat Power, new Cat Power, whatever. Everything about Cat Power just reminds me of a down time in my life and it’s simply no fun to listen to her. I can recognize the genius that is Moon Pix, but I can’t bear to hear more than one song at a time.
I don’t have the same issue with Low, though I listened to their music at the same time (longer, actually, which might be the reason they’re still okay). Still, the period in which I stopped listening to new Low albums happens to coincide with the period in which I became much happier. I stopped listening to Cat Power around the same time. Writing these posts this week it occurs to me that my love of Low happens to coincide with the period in my life in which I went from my first girlfriend to getting married, and whatever transpired in between. Is that a coincidence? Did I lose interest in Low because they had become predictable, or because I had overcome a kind of sadness I wasn’t ever fully aware of?
*
It’s late September 2001. Our families have stepped onto airplanes—a brave and awkward thing to do that month, that year—in order to come to Tempe to see us married. We were three weeks removed from a world-changing tragedy in New York, one month shy of our own life-changing move to New York, and smack in the middle of the most important day of our lives. We were married. We kept the wedding small and intimate: at our house, with our friends and family taking care of the food and the music and photography and decor. It was in many ways a very simple event—the ceremony itself took, I think, about ten minutes—but of course also very profound. This year will be our eighth anniversary. Next month, in about three weeks actually, we will have known each other for ten years—approximately a third of our lifetimes. We still sing “Peanut Butter Toast and American Bandstand.”
At the reception we did our first dance to “Two-Step,” by Low. It was the start of a new chapter.
This week at Do You Compute is dedicated to Low. Each day will be focused on one of their first six releases—I Could Live in Hope, Long Division, Transmission, The Curtain Hits the Cast, Songs for a Dead Pilot, and Secret Name. I'm re-posting yesterday's posts here, combined into one. Head over there today for more on I Could Live in Hope and Long Division, and more posts on the group through Friday.
It’s 1994 and I’m still stumbling through the bins at Tower Records in Fresno, California, still fumbling my way away from metal and toward indie and punk. By now I’ve found heavy bands like Craw or Dazzling Killmen that aren’t stereotypical metal, and I’ve found labels like Dischord (Fugazi, Hoover, Nation of Ulysses) and Touch and Go (Slint, Shellac). But still I don’t have a real road map of where to go next, what key bands I’m missing. So I scour the bins at Tower looking for album covers that jump out at me. That’s how I found Low.
What was it about the cover for I Could Live in Hope? Its brown tone, the simple type treatment, the photograph of the child at his desk blurring into the single-color background, It wasn’t the cartoonishly violent imagery of metal nor the crisply designed sleeves of Dischord albums. I had no idea what this band Low sounded like, but the cover was quiet. The band’s name was an adjective, an emotion, a tone, all summed up in three letters. The album title was a strange mixture of optimism and despair—I could live in hope. It was also an evocative image—to exist inside of, be enveloped by, a single feeling. I turned the CD over and read the track list—eleven one-word titles that was like a grocery list of permanent immersion into some kind of oblivion:
Words Fear Cut Slide Lazy Lullaby Sea Down Drag Rope Sunshine
Yet, simply by looking at the front and back cover, it didn’t seem like a record filled with darkness. The cover’s first impression isn’t that it will be a bleak experience. Imagine if the overriding color was black, not brown, and everything else—the band name, the album title, the track list—remained. The whole record would feel like a suicide note. “Cut,” “Fear,” “Rope”—it’s all a signifier for deep depression. But instead, thanks to that light brown color, the record seems more closely tethered to the few bright words—“Hope,” “Lullaby,” “Sunshine.”
I had to buy the record. It begged to be heard, to be understood. When I put it on that evening, I was surprised to find that it was beautiful.
I Could Live in Hope could not have felt more different from everything I’d ever heard up to that point. It was never loud, never fast, never distorted, barely dynamic in that loud/quiet Slint sense (save perhaps “Lullaby,” which builds over ten minutes from a halting six-note arpeggio to an almost boisterous guitar solo). The vocals, unlike so many other indie bands of the era, were clean and up front in the mix, unadorned except for a shimmering layer of reverb. Yet it was more than a simple “quiet” record. Its tone and structure were different from the folk records I’d grown up on or the somber moments on albums like Ten or Automatic for the People. Though I know now that Low had a few precedents—Galaxie 500 and Red House Painters must factor into the conversation, surely—I Could Live in Hope felt entirely unique to me; I was compelled to listen to it religiously for the better part of my senior year in high school.
This record was my sea change. This was the album that attuned my ears to smaller details in songs, to a depth of emotion and thought that was largely lost in the loud and aggressive music of my past. I already owned records by the likes of Slint and Codeine, both of which were also seminal records for me, but I Could Live in Hope keyed into something different.
*
Low: Words
Everything seems louder at night, when all the ambient noise in your life seems to go away—traffic dies down, birds stop singing, dogs stop barking, sprinklers stop running, TVs and radios are off, every door in your house is closed. When you play your stereo in the day you put the volume at six or seven so it feels comfortable to your ears. At night, six or seven is positively cacophonous. Two or three feels more than appropriate.
I’d owned I Could Live in Hope for a couple of months by now. I played it every night as I lay down to go to sleep: a quiet record, played quietly, at the quietest time of the day. It was one of these nights where I noticed for the first time, laying there in the darkness, that I couldn’t hear the kick drum. I listened intently for it over the course of three or four songs in a row—I just couldn’t hear it.
I got up. I turned on a light—light allows you to be louder—and I turned the stereo up. Still there was no kick drum, nor any toms, nor high hat. Eleven songs, each propelled by snare and ride cymbal, nothing more.
Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time captures the typical idea of a great "guitar"—for the most part thick, chunky, riffs and howling, blues-jam solos. But what I think of as excellent guitarwork has little to do with anything the likes of Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn have ever done. The best guitar songs to me are muddy, textural, more concerned with atmosphere and aesthetic than with technical proficiency. No, I don't mean punk—in fact sometimes it still means a jamming solo. Other times it means a simple chord or progression, played to fragile perfection. Here's a dozen tracks (in almost chronological order) that, on a cursory look through my collection, totally kill me from a guitar-playing perspective (including some overlap with RS's list).
The genius of this song, beyond the Coltrane and raga influences, is the way Roger McGuinn took the quintessential Byrds instrument—the twelve-string—and applied it in a wholly different way. This isn't the ringing arpeggios of "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Turn! Turn! Turn!"; this is the lead. Despite having the exact same instrumentation as any other Byrds song, "Eight Miles High" sounds unlike the rest of their material, and it's all due to that twelve-string lead, which sounds like the aural equivalent of a scribbling crayon.
This epic track is hardly stunning for its guitar solo, which lasts less than thirty seconds near the end of the eight-minute track and is comprised of all of five notes. Yet this song, to me, is all about the guitar. The tone of the guitar is just fantastic—not much treble, and the distortion sounds like there is literally just a tear in the amp’s speaker. Then there’s the riff that carries the song, that propulsive slide up the neck over John Ike Walton’s marching beat. The song is ominous in its repetition.
This is probably my favorite Electric Prunes song, and it would be unfair to say it succeeds purely because of the guitar. Every component of this near-instrumental is flawless: the organ, the drums—the drums!—the strings, and the guitars. As far as that guitar goes, again like the Elevators I just love the tone, which sounds as if it were made of glass during the rhythm portions and then becomes a sharp, tinny spike during the solo. Interestingly, looking at the wikipedia page for this album, it’s no wonder every player on this track kills it—they were apparently all session musicians and not actually the Prunes themselves!
Both of these tracks (and the albums they come from) are fairly new to me—purchased within the last three months or so. Listening to them at different times, I had the same thought pass through my head: “I bet this blew young Tom Verlaine’s mind when this came out.” Both albums were released in 1969, when Verlaine was 20. He’d go on to throw down the gauntlet eight years later with his own guitar classic, “Marquee Moon.”
Likewise, hearing “Marquee Moon” for the first time only about two years ago, I had the immediate understanding of what made John Reis’s mind tick when it came to Drive Like Jehu (who I've gone on about before—including more about this song in particular). Sure, Jehu was a lot noisier and more chaotic, but the germ for their aesthetic is there.
Any song from Loveless belongs on this kind of list (Rolling Stone picked the opener, “Only Shallow”). Without understating the impact of the entirety of the album, I picked “To Here Knows When”—the song in which the guitars are at their most abstracted. The whammy-effected warping is there, but the whole notion of hitting a string with your pick seems to be absent. The guitar sound is totally effaced; it could very well be all synthesizers or samples. The song is MBV at its least rocking, least melodic, most blurred, most lush.
Like the MBV pick this is one song to illustrate the overall greatness of Mick Turner. His delicate chords are the heart of the Dirty Three’s sound—he keeps each song grounded while Warren Ellis’s violin takes center stage. But listen to those chords! Turner’s fingers sound as if they can barley stay on the fretboard long enough to let the notes ring out. Stray notes sneak into every Dirty Three song and they’re all the more beautiful for it. It’s an extremely subtle playing style but he absolutely raises the level of every song he’s on. I’ve said this before, but Turner is precisely the reason why Cat Power’s Moon Pix is her best album. Listen to any of the songs from that record—take American Flag, for instance—and listen to the guitarwork, how fragile it is. That’s not Chan Marshall playing guitar. That’s Mick Turner.
I’ve written about this song before, so you may know my feelings already. Suffice to say I could listen to that single, beautifully moody chord for hours. At their best, Low make you listen; they make you appreciate the smallest changes. I like to play this song loud, and one of my favorite parts comes in the last minute of the song when Alan Sparhawk has stopped playing the chord, instead letting a low, humming feedback build—and he just touches a string. It’s a short, taut sound and it makes my ears twitch every time I hear it. To me that one moment is the whole point of the song, and it’s a guitar lesson in and of itself.
The breakout track on Sigur Rós’s breakout album has never been topped by the band. It is pure transcendence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a track that evokes the feeling of floating quite so perfectly as this. Not to mention that sudden, brief chord change midway through. This song is a lesson in dynamics, in tension and release—put to use in toward beauty, which is not often the intent for post-rock bands—that I think not even Sigur Rós has quite grasped ever since.
What do you think? What are some of your personal favorite guitar songs, or guitar moments?
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.
I’m reading Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars right now, and the first chapter is about a painter who, after an accident, suddenly goes 100% color blind. He sees the entire world in a muddy, dingy black and white. He dreams in black and white. His memories are now in black and white. It’s a terrifying condition, all the more so for this man for whom color was an intrinsic part of his identity.
Then, this passage jumped out at me:
Music, curiously, was impaired for him too, because he had previously had an extremely intense synesthesia, so that different tones had immediately been translated into color, and he experienced all music simultaneously as a rich tumult of inner colors. With the loss of his ability to generate colors, he lost this ability as well—his internal “color-organ” was out of action, and now he heard music with no visual accompaniment; this, for him, was music with its essential chromatic counterpart missing, music now radically impoverished.
My brilliant wife was nearby when I came to the passage and I wanted to read it aloud to her. “You know how you can sometimes see colors when you listen to music?” I prefaced. But she looked at me with a curious look and said, a little baffled, “No.”
It never occurred to me that perhaps not everyone shares this experience. There are certain bands, albums, and songs that always put a color or group of colors in my mind. Low does this to me, for instance. When I hear their early albums I inevitably see a deep burgundy, silver gray, and black. When I hear their later albums (everything after The Curtain Hits the Cast), I see washed out whites and blues with sharp punctuations of black and blood red.
I happen to be listening to Iron & Wine as I write this: right, brownish gold, like a wheat field at sunset, with stripes of a dull, flat green.
My wife asked me who else. Thinking clearly about it, I found that if I tried to call a band to my mind I’d simply see the colors of their album covers. The more conscious I was of it, the more literal I was, the more influenced I was. Later that night, as I lay in bed, I tried a psychological test on myself, which was to think of the color first and see which band or song came to mind. Some colors had immediate mental associations. Yellow: Jonathan Richman. Orange, for some strange reason, makes me think of Death Cab for Cutie (I don’t even own anything by them). Sometimes I would give myself a color, then a band would spring to mind, then the color would start to change. Ash gray made me think of Sigur Ros, and then the gray slate in my mind was dappled with specks of pure white and darker shades of black, and finally a faint blue hue would radiate from the center.
Have you ever thought about listening in these terms? Do you see colors when you listen to some songs? How conscious of it are you? Do you have to “catch” yourself seeing things when you’re listening to music? Do you see abstract images? Is it a pattern? Does it move or morph? Or does music paint actual scenes in your mind, like memories or fantasies? [An Anthropologist on Mars was written in 1996 and draws seven portraits of people who have rare brain disorders. Sacks is also author of the recently published Musicophilia, which I posted about once before. That book is structured similarly but connects each case study directly to some relationship with music. I haven't read it, but intend to as soon as it comes out in paperback and, I hope to god, has a new cover that I can stomach having on my shelf.]
Last week I referred to Paul Simon’s Graceland as an “album of my life.” Coincidentally, this thread at Last Plane to Jakarta took a brief tangent into what constitutes a “life-changing album.” Two different concepts, and I’ve had both on my mind in the last few days. The first is a lot easier to find examples of: albums that I played intensely during some period of my life, to the point of becoming something other than good or great albums; rather, they're the soundtrack to memories. The second category, life-changing albums, is harder to figure out. Before I try to sort that one out, I want to think about the other.
Albums of my life. Going back as far as I can, my childhood was filled with Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, Ry Cooder. I have strong mental associations with all those artists, and in retrospect they all must have set some kind of foundation for what I’ve come to like today.
George Michael’s Faith might have been the very first album I ever viewed as wholly mine: an cassette I kept in my own room, played on my own walkman. INXS’s Kick and Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, too. In elementary school I would walk laps around the track during recess with Danny Casares as we tried to piece together the lyrics to “You Be Illin’ from memory. By sixth grade I was transfixed by Appetite for Destruction—probably the first album I’d ever associated with danger. This led to junior high and high school, where Master of Puppets, Rust in Peace, and Persistence of Timeset the template for my taste in metal. By my junior or senior year I was transitioning out of metal and into something else: Rollins Band (particularly the early stuff), Tool, and a band I’d discovered through a blind purchase at Tower Records, Craw, all made music that was heavy but was more dynamic musically and more sophisticated lyrically and emotionally.
Somehow from there I stumbled into indie rock without any real guidance (which I’ve written about before). By then I’d lost interest in heaviness but was actively looking for music that shifted dynamically. Slint, Fugazi, Rodan, Codeine. I vividly recall moving to college and trying to describe the kind of music I liked to a kid I’d met in the dorms. “It can be really loud and really screamy, but it can also get really quiet, and it’s not heavy like metal.” He just looked at me and said “what, you mean emo?”
Another dormmate gave me a dubbed cassette full of songs by what I thought was some friend of hers; the recording quality was exceptionally poor and all the label said was “Elliott Smith.” I played the hell out of the tape but was embarrassed to tell the girl I dug it so much because it seemed a little weird to be really into her random friend’s music. Six months later I was in a record store and saw the album in the bin—a real record by a real guy on a real label, and best of all that was another album (Roman Candle) in the bins as well!
The rest of college was Tortoise, June of 44, Blonde Redhead, Unwound, Superchunk, the Pernice Brothers. After college, when I met my wife: My Morning Jacket’s The Tennessee Fire, Cat Power’s Moon Pix, Rufus Wainwright’s first album, Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker.
We got married in September 2001: she walked down the aisle to Sigur Ros’ “Sven-g-Englar” and we danced to Low’s “Two Step.” We moved to New York not long after. If you asked me to soundtrack the winter of 2002, when we lived in a spacious but empty loft above a functioning sweatshop in a shitty part of Williamsburg, I’d have to hand you Pete Yorn’s Music for the Morning After. When we moved to Boerum Hill it was Chutes too Narrow, Michigan, and Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters. We bought Feist’s Let it Die in Paris in 2004. We moved to L.A. in 2005 and in the last two or three years it’s been Funeral, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina, Midlake, and most recently Andrew Bird.
These are albums of my life. And really I’m just scratching the surface—this is what I can come up with just thinking about it in the time it takes to write these words. Were I to focus on one period of my life, other albums would come into view, sort of like staring at the night sky and seeing the stars reveal themselves the longer you look.
But not all of these albums are my all-time favorites, necessarily. Some I haven’t listened to in years, either because my tastes have changed drastically (everything pre-Spiderland), because I associate them too strongly with my memories (Moon Pix), because they’ve just not aged well (sadly, Spiderland), or because they’re frankly not that good (Music for the Morning After).
Thus we come to the difference between an album of my life and an album that changed my life. More on that later this week.
I was an obsessive Low fan from the moment I accidentally bought I Could Live in Hope back in 1995. From that point on I bought every album, every EP, every 7”, and got my hands on every compilation appearance. That said, Things We Lost in the Fire was the last album I bought by them. It was good, but I guess I’d finally hit my limit—the band started to resemble a past me. It wasn’t so much the band’s fault as my own personal growth. Certain songs, albums, or bands are indelibly tied to an era in one’s life. Such was Low for me.
I’ve kept up with the band from afar, sort of the way you might google an ex-girlfriend every once in a while. I listened to a few songs from Trust and thought it sounded great—I just couldn’t go there. Then I heard most of The Great Destroyer, which was okay but not great. Now we come to Drums and Guns. The AV Club posted the video for “Breaker,” and Silence is a Rhythm Too has two other mp3s, “Always Fade” and “Hatchet.”
And what the fuck? All three of these songs are terrible. Terrible! I mean, I’m shocked that a band I once loved so much is capable of such awful stuff. It’s not just the drum machine—in fact that might be the least of it. Sparhawk’s vocals are overbearing, particularly on “Breaker.” And the lyrics to “Hatchet” render it unlistenable for me. Ugh, the whole thing is a trainwreck. I’ve been seeing decent reviews for this album; am I missing something?