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?):
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.
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972
The ambient/drone genre is positively thriving right now, and Hecker is squarely in its upper echelon.
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.
Low: The Great Destroyer
As mentioned last week, I've done a total 180 on this album. It's fantastic.
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.
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.
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 Pilot is 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.
John Vanderslice: White Wilderness (2011)
Solid from beginning to end, but only really great for a few tracks in the middle. Review.
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.
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:
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.
Much more on Low all week at DYC, so stop in if you're interested.
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.
Last week I referred to Paul Simon’s Graceland as an “album of my life.” Coincidentally, this thread at Last Plane to Jakarta took a brief tangent into what constitutes a “life-changing album.” Two different concepts, and I’ve had both on my mind in the last few days. The first is a lot easier to find examples of: albums that I played intensely during some period of my life, to the point of becoming something other than good or great albums; rather, they're the soundtrack to memories. The second category, life-changing albums, is harder to figure out. Before I try to sort that one out, I want to think about the other.
Albums of my life. Going back as far as I can, my childhood was filled with Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, Ry Cooder. I have strong mental associations with all those artists, and in retrospect they all must have set some kind of foundation for what I’ve come to like today.
George Michael’s Faith might have been the very first album I ever viewed as wholly mine: an cassette I kept in my own room, played on my own walkman. INXS’s Kick and Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, too. In elementary school I would walk laps around the track during recess with Danny Casares as we tried to piece together the lyrics to “You Be Illin’ from memory. By sixth grade I was transfixed by Appetite for Destruction—probably the first album I’d ever associated with danger. This led to junior high and high school, where Master of Puppets, Rust in Peace, and Persistence of Time set the template for my taste in metal. By my junior or senior year I was transitioning out of metal and into something else: Rollins Band (particularly the early stuff), Tool, and a band I’d discovered through a blind purchase at Tower Records, Craw, all made music that was heavy but was more dynamic musically and more sophisticated lyrically and emotionally.
Somehow from there I stumbled into indie rock without any real guidance (which I’ve written about before). By then I’d lost interest in heaviness but was actively looking for music that shifted dynamically. Slint, Fugazi, Rodan, Codeine. I vividly recall moving to college and trying to describe the kind of music I liked to a kid I’d met in the dorms. “It can be really loud and really screamy, but it can also get really quiet, and it’s not heavy like metal.” He just looked at me and said “what, you mean emo?”
Another dormmate gave me a dubbed cassette full of songs by what I thought was some friend of hers; the recording quality was exceptionally poor and all the label said was “Elliott Smith.” I played the hell out of the tape but was embarrassed to tell the girl I dug it so much because it seemed a little weird to be really into her random friend’s music. Six months later I was in a record store and saw the album in the bin—a real record by a real guy on a real label, and best of all that was another album (Roman Candle) in the bins as well!
The rest of college was Tortoise, June of 44, Blonde Redhead, Unwound, Superchunk, the Pernice Brothers. After college, when I met my wife: My Morning Jacket’s The Tennessee Fire, Cat Power’s Moon Pix, Rufus Wainwright’s first album, Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker.
We got married in September 2001: she walked down the aisle to Sigur Ros’ “Sven-g-Englar” and we danced to Low’s “Two Step.” We moved to New York not long after. If you asked me to soundtrack the winter of 2002, when we lived in a spacious but empty loft above a functioning sweatshop in a shitty part of Williamsburg, I’d have to hand you Pete Yorn’s Music for the Morning After. When we moved to Boerum Hill it was Chutes too Narrow, Michigan, and Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters. We bought Feist’s Let it Die in Paris in 2004. We moved to L.A. in 2005 and in the last two or three years it’s been Funeral, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina, Midlake, and most recently Andrew Bird.
These are albums of my life. And really I’m just scratching the surface—this is what I can come up with just thinking about it in the time it takes to write these words. Were I to focus on one period of my life, other albums would come into view, sort of like staring at the night sky and seeing the stars reveal themselves the longer you look.
But not all of these albums are my all-time favorites, necessarily. Some I haven’t listened to in years, either because my tastes have changed drastically (everything pre-Spiderland), because I associate them too strongly with my memories (Moon Pix), because they’ve just not aged well (sadly, Spiderland), or because they’re frankly not that good (Music for the Morning After).
Thus we come to the difference between an album of my life and an album that changed my life. More on that later this week.