Saturday, December 18, 2010

The End of the Neon Meate Dream

Whatever you may think about SPIN Magazine, a little over a decade ago it was solely responsible for introducing me to Captain Beefheart.

Back when most websites had MIDI soundtracks and ugly wallpaper best viewed with Netscape Navigator, the blog culture hadn't yet developed and magazines were basically the best way to keep up with the culture of music. Or at least, they were the best way for young turks like me, voracious readers and anxious learners just discovering the world of music beyond the mainstream.

One month, nestled between articles on the new exploits of Christina Aguilera and the Beastie Boys and whoever else was a curious piece on a man who hadn't released a record in nearly twenty years. His name was Captain Beefheart. He looked nothing like anyone else in the magazine, and the article went to great lengths to explain how his music sounded like nobody else's, either. It explored the early years of his career, his spark of popularity, and then his retreat into the California desert, severing all ties with the music industry. Though he had spent nearly two decades as a recluse and many of his albums were difficult to find, his wildly experimental concoction of blues, folk and rock continued to inspire artists to that day. And the album widely regraded to be his masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, had just been re-released.

For a culturally suffocated midwestern teenager like me, looking for anything at all to help separate myself from the Abercrombie-clad high school herd, desperately if need be, this was like discovering the holy grail. I found a copy of Replica and purchased it sight unseen (no small feat for me; in those poor days, I would heavily vet every album at Streetside Records' listening station before purchase). I took it home and put it on, listening with a half-frown because parts of it were so jarring, but also with a half-smile because I was prepared. This was an album I knew I would not love on first listen; it would require some effort from me, but it would be worth it in the end. I reminded myself that, according to the article, this was the all-time favorite album of Matt Groening, of all people.

I listened to it over and over again. I played it for my friends, and I even played it for my parents. I wrote a five-star review of the album in my high-school newspaper. I don't remember specifically how I described his sound, but I'm pretty sure I quoted "Fast and bulbous!" somewhere in there. And I took immense pleasure in playing the album for the rest of the newspaper staff, a grin both wicked and smug plastered to my face when my fellow teenagers cringed or yelled "turn it off!" or "this is terrible!" or just left the room.

I rarely made it all the way to the end of the album. 28 tracks of Captain Beefheart was a little much even for me, but that didn't really matter. I considered picking up other albums like Safe as Milk, but still being a neophyte (and, frankly, an idiot kid) when it came to music, I had figured everything else could only be a diluted form of Replica, so I passed. At that time, though, those were only details. I had found a brash badge of individuality and I did not hesitate to show it off. And I was beginning to realize, too, that you could appreciate music without always wanting to listen to it: this music, so intensely honest and unflinchingly enthusiastic, most definitely had its time and place.

I was also really proud when one of my friends purchased The Spotlight Kid of his own volition. To me, still, there are few better things in life than knowing you've helped someone discover a new favorite artist.

I went off to college and began working as a DJ at the radio station, quickly finding myself surrounded by like-minded individuals who were far more versed in indie rock than I. And anyone can tell you that a group of liberal art school hipsters can get pretty insufferable: their codes of necessary knowledge and aloofness are as strict as anything they loudly rebel against. So while I came in not knowing Merge from Matador or Ian Curtis from Ian MacKaye, I did possess one unshakable piece of indie capital in the form of Mr. Beefheart. Our fiercely underground library included most of his albums - all on vinyl, of course - so I played him on my show whenever I could.

Eventually I realized that my show needed a name, and I settled on "Captain Beefheart Rides Again". That meant (to me, a least) that I had to play at least one Beefheart song per show. It was a shtick, but one I was more than happy to repeat. Usually I played songs I knew from Replica, but I would branch out every now and then, too. One day I finally dug out the vinyl copy of Ice Cream for Crow, Beefheart's final studio album, and played the title track. It was my virgin listen, and I was as curious and confused by it as the first time I had heard any other Beefheart song. It was ramshackle crazy, its blind enthusiasm unspooling at speeds almost impossible to conceive. Even his voice sounded more surreal than usual. But this is what I should have expected from the man, I thought: the unexpected. Always.

Then the phone rang. I picked it up; it was a listener.

"Slow it down, man!" He bellowed.

"Uh, what?" I thought for a moment that this was his way of saying I was playing so much great music that he could barely handle it.

"The record, man!" He said. "You're playing it too fast!"

I looked at the record player: it was at 45 RPM. I switched it to 33 RPM, and the hyper jamming slowed to a dirty, bluesy stomp, Beefheart's signature howl now as deep as I remembered it.

"Oh shit," I said, and thanked the listener.

But I regretted fixing the RPM in the middle of the song. In some ways, it felt like it would have been more appropriate to let it run at the same crazy speed. For Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, there almost seemed to be no one right way to play a song, or sing, or even maintain a rhythm. Theirs was the sound of ultimate musical freedom, with all the highs and lows and rushes of inspiration and quagmires of confusion that come with it.

After college, I listened to Captain Beefheart less and less frequently, and eventually stopped altogether. Too much time spent keeping up with the music culture and its symbiotic relationship with the blogosphere. SPIN magazine continues to this day, though I haven't read it in years. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to get an editor to sign off on a Captain Beefheart article back in the late 90s, but I hope they're continuing to take those risks. It's one of the only articles I still remember from that era.

Captain Beefheart's real name was Don Van Vliet. He passed away yesterday, at the age of 69.

The more I think back on my minor obsession with the man's music, the more I realize I didn't really understand much of it at all. But that's partly the point, I think. With that unique authorial voice, that singular outlook which inspired such a daring and unforgettable body of work, any of us would be hard-pressed to say that we truly understood a man who began his career with Frank Zappa and ended it in the desolation of the Mojave.

My familiarity with his work didn't end up being as encyclopedic or everlasting as I thought it would, but Van Vliet still had an undeniable effect on my musical tastes, strengthened my appetite for experimental art, and helped show me the endless possibilities that creativity can offer beyond the measured pleasures and well-trod roads of most other artists.

If I had ever been able to meet the man, I would have liked to thank him for that.

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Monday, December 13, 2010

This Fall (but without The Fall)

"I'll Sleep When I'm Rich" - Fall 2010

1. Pavement - Box Elder
2. Crystal Stilts - Shake the Shackles
3. Kanye West - Power
4. Shit Robot - Take 'em Up
5. Of Montreal - Enemy Gene
6. Sufjan Stevens - Get Real Get Right
7. Sleigh Bells - Straight A's
8. Hot Chip - Hand Me Down Your Love
9. LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean
10. Klaxons - Echoes
11. No Age - Glitter
12. Tokyo Police Club - Bambi
13. Caribou (Manitoba technically) - Skunks
14. Land of Talk - Goaltime Exposure
15. Les Savy Fav - Yawn, Yawn, Yawn
16. The New Pornographers - Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk
17. Los Campesinos! - You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing
18. Arcade Fire - Suburban War

For lack of time and interest in discussing every single song, select annotations below!


-A few years back, I would have killed to see Pavement in concert. And now I've seen them twice in one year, which feels weird, in retrospect. Partly because I was a little underwhelmed the first time I saw them, and kind of apathetic about the second show. Not that they sounded bad; just very ramshackle and lo-fi, which is really how they should sound live, I guess. Both venues I saw them at (Coachella main stage and, worse, the Hollywood Bowl) were way too big for their "just a bunch of dudes" charm - something like the Henry Fonda or (yeah, right) The Echoplex would have been perfect. But I end up feeling like that about most indie rock acts I see at the Bowl, so...who knows. At any rate, "Box Elder" was not a song they played, but is one that I really hoped they would play, so here it is.

-Again on the concert train, I have an Of Montreal song up partially for the Halloween show I attended (and partially because its themes are similar to a script I'm working on right now), but just realized I forgot to include a Janelle Monae song, too. Whoops. Maybe that'll go on the deluxe re-issue 10 years from now. At least this one half-counts.

-Sufjan Stevens is an interesting case. I wasn't really a fan of his, I guess, "singery-songwritery pleasantness" on previous albums (whether that was true or just my perception of him), but his new work, at least since his Dark Was the Night offering "You Are the Blood", has gotten pretty nuts, and "Get Real Get Right" is a pretty perfect example, overstuffed with nervous strings, impending-doom horns and dizzying vocal acrobatics that grab you by the ears and demand your attention. I also realized after maybe a dozen listens that the song has a Christian overtone that's pretty blatant once it's uncovered, but - I can relate to the idea of needing to get your shit together for whatever reason, religious or otherwise. So, many reasons to include it here.

-The Sleigh Bells/Hot Chip/LCD progression is a pretty blatant chronological snapshot of their awesome Hollywood Bowl show a few months back - one of my favorite concerts in recent memory (and maybe of all time). "Straight A's" as a song is about as loud and brief an encapsulation of Sleigh Bells' set as possible, and "Hand Me Down Your Love" is, well, one of the few Hot Chip songs I haven't put on a mix yet. "Dance Yrself Clean" was the first song LCD played, and it immediately knocked me for a loop: I never expected them to play that song, and it signaled the beginning of a show full of awesome surprises, focusing on the best parts of This is Happening with some welcome throwbacks to the band's first singles. And unlike bands I mentioned earlier, LCD is completely wired to play gigantic venues; they play with such force and enthusiasm that they can't help but envelop even the sprawling Hollywood Bowl. Did I mention I was in the fourth row? Yeah, it was a great concert.

-I've been listening to a lot of Caribou lately, but honestly had no clear frontrunner to symbolize this. I feel like a lot of his music works better in album form than individual tracks - I've had Swim on heavy rotation for months, but I'd be hard-pressed to list my three favorite tracks from it. But I've really appreciated "Skunks" for a long time, all the way back to 2003 when Caribou was Manitoba, so it felt as appropriate as anything else.

-Another one of my favorite albums from this year, still, is Romance is Boring, but the Los Campesinos! track this season is from 2008's We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, a strange 2008 release following the band's smash debut album earlier that year. It really is LC!'s Amnesiac, overall not as strong as the album released months prior, but it does feature some of the band's best tracks, from "Ways to Make it Through the Wall" to the title track to the one on this very mix, "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing". One of the few LC! songs that's a definite grower, this one is less about Gareth's tragicomic character sketches and sugary mixed-gender shoutalongs than it is about the band's secret weapon, multi-instrumentalist Tom Campesinos!, whose melodies keep the songs together when all else seems seconds from bursting at the seams. Even if the song wavers into melodrama occasionally, it's an easy flaw to forgive every time that soaring guitar chorus washes everything else away.

-The Arcade Fire track here was very nearly "We Used to Wait" - and it's tough, when I'm considering a track that got really big and popular and possibly over-played during that season. The hipster part of me says "fuck it, dude, you missed the boat, now it's cliche and you won't even want to hear it again for a long time", while the realist part says "fuck you, dude, you can't pretend you don't sometimes discover a song at the same time as everyone else." And then they fight for a while, until a third part of me shows up and says "uh, dude, it's all about what the song says to you, not anyone else." And this third part is always right. So, whether I missed the boat on "We Used to Wait" or not, here's "Suburban War", another in a long line of Arcade Fire tracks that seems permanently relevant to me and, I'm sure, to a lot of you.

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Monday, October 4, 2010

Based on a true story.

When you cook before you shower, you've got to be feeling it.


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Friday, September 17, 2010

At least the music never stops.

Been way too long since I've posted anything...since I've written anything. That's something I need to rectify. In the meantime, here's my summer mix, finished early but titled late.

"Too Many One-Way Streets": Summer 2010

1. White Rabbits - Percussion Gun
2. Arcade Fire - Month of May
3. The New Pornographers - Crash Years
4. Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars
5. School of Seven Bells - Babelonia
6. Janelle Monae - Tightrope
7. The National - Conversation 16
8. Band of Horses - NW Apt.
9. Midlake - Rulers, Ruling All Things
10. Four Tet - And then Patterns
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Bottled in Cork
12. Wolf Parade - What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go this Way)
13. Vampire Weekend - Taxi Cab
14. Big Boi - You Ain't No DJ
15. Caribou - Hannibal
16. Broken Bells - Mongrel Heart
17. Tokyo Police Club - Not Sick
18. LCD Soundsystem - Home


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Monday, May 31, 2010

It's that time again.

This was at first really easy and then really hard to sequence. Eventually decided, fuck it, the nine-minute track goes first. Most of these are Coachella bands/songs, though the songs chosen aren't always "oh yeah they played that one well".

"Spring 2010: 7 of Out of 10"

1. LCD Soundsystem - You Wanted a Hit
2. Sleigh Bells - Rill Rill (Ring Ring?)
3. Broken Social Scene - Forced to Love
4. Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside
5. MGMT - Flash Delirium
6. Gorillaz - Empire Ants
7. Vampire Weekend - Giving Up the Gun
8. MUTEMATH - Armistice
9. Pavement - Trigger Cut
10. Dirty Projectors - Knotty Pine
11. Hot Chip - We Have Love
12. Julian Casablancas - 11th Dimension
13. Public Image, Ltd. - Careering
14. The Besnard Lakes - And This is What We Call Progress
15. The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
16. Spoon - Out Go the Lights
17. Los Campesinos! - This is a Flag. There is No Wind.
18. Working for a Nuclear Free City - The Tree

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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

2010 Tunes: a Campesinos for All Seasons


Of all the bands I’ve come to truly love over the last few years, Los Campesinos! has been one of the most problematic to recommend to friends. Their 2008 debut album, Hold on Now, Youngster… hit a very specific wavelength of shout-along post-twee anthemic indie rock so confidently and completely that – well – it became difficult to recommend the album to anyone who wasn’t looking for exactly that sound. And is it the kind of thing you’d even know you were looking for until you heard it, anyway? At times overcaffeinated and bouncing off the walls, at others deceptively maudlin and veering close to over-smart, it was nevertheless a record that always gave 110%, a breakneck ride through the weird wonderful world of seven barely-adults from Cardiff that, OK, you kind of have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. And don’t get me wrong: I am there, often, and when I am the music is fucking great. I’ve just found that this isn’t the same for everyone.

But, good news: my friends won’t be able to use that excuse much longer.


The band’s “proper” sophomore album, Romance is Boring, has just been released and I’m honestly surprised how spectacularly these guys have managed to balance their sound. The album as a whole sounds a little more centrist, but it’s barely at the expense of losing anything that makes their sound so unique. If anything, they’re just growing up and branching out, but staying true to themselves all the while.

It’s there even in the first few notes of the album, a slight variation on what I call the LC Riff. If you know the band well, you have heard the LC Riff. It’s a fairly simple but memorable melody – usually played on violin but sometimes synths or otherwise – that appears in many variations across the band’s work. It only shows up at the end of Hold on Now, but pops in and out of a good chunk of odds-n-sods collection We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, often late in the song – check out 3:00 into “Ways to Make it Though the Wall” – always slightly different but an unmistakable callback, a motif, a wink to the fans, whatever. It’s here in full force from second one on Romance, immediately welcoming you to familiar territory. But 30 seconds in it takes a turn into new territory, measuring its time and building up to the big release, with Gareth Campesinos! welcoming you to the album with a phrase you never thought you’d hear him say: “Let’s talk about you for a minute”.

Already in this first minute, they’ve spelled out their mission statement. And, OK, Gareth does spend only a literal minute in second-person before returning to his hilariously pessimistic autobiographical sketches, but hey, baby steps. The song soon submerges into feedback, glides around in it for a minute, seems to meander. And you start to wonder if maybe these guys are losing their way already. But then it roars back to life, so goddamned triumphant that it brings along a whole horn section (pay attention to these horns; they’ll be back), one more killer verse from Gareth, and then, yes, a short spoken-word outro, because this is still Los Campesinos, right – and it’s done. As far as opening tracks go, it’s not a barn-burner in the vein of “Death to Los Campesinos!”, but it does set the tone for the rest of the album pretty perfectly.

The next two tracks are the album’s lead singles, and while I’m not sure I would have chosen the same ones (probably because most of my favorite parts of the album hinge on the word “fuck”), they’re more than worthy as catchy gateway drugs for new listeners. The title track in particular has a great dirty southern rock feel to it, another new direction for them. There are actually a lot of neat new flourishes all over the album, no doubt thanks to musical mastermind Tom Campesinos!. There’s the aforementioned horns, the stringy guitar scraps winding under “We’ve Got Your Back”, the blown-out punk fuzz of “Plan A”. Weirdest and most interesting is “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know” (title aside), a detuned inversion of that LC Riff getting ground around in a thick hyperspeed mash. It’s thrilling stuff. Dunno how they’ll replicate it on stage, but still, thrilling.

It’s great to see how everyone’s stepped up their game here, from Harriet’s violins to Ollie’s drums. Aleks’s presence isn’t as widespread as it used to be - which makes sense given that she’s on her way out of the band - but her contributions are more varied and vital than ever, maybe because of their infrequency. At once sarcastic ice queen on “I Warned You, Do Not Make an Enemy of Me”, judgmental conscience on “A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State” and needling huckster on “Plan A”, she’s become far more than an easy vocal counterpoint, and her presence will be missed.

(Side note: is anyone else really wary of the new lineup? Not that it has anything to do with my hopeless crush on Aleks (well, maybe a bit) or new acquisition Kim Campesinos! personally, but the fact that Gareth’s new vocal counterpart will be his sister places the band dynamic in a fundamentally different light. Like any band with mixed genders and intensely personal lyrics - The Smashing Pumpkins, The xx, hell, Fleetwood Mac - a lot of the fans’ morbid fun comes from speculating on the romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, between the band members, and how those inform our listening experiences. The listener who thinks they must have hooked up has a different experience from the one who thinks he must have a huge crush on her and the one who thinks she must think he has a crush on her and so on. But when you’re talking about two siblings, all this speculation falls away - unless you have a really twisted view of them, which I don’t. Still hoping for the best with Kim, but there’s no denying that the Los Campesinos! of 2011 will be a very different beast.)

But this is also an intensely personal album for Gareth. The word is that most of his lyrical illustrations are only barely fictional, and I don’t think he’s even changed the names of old flames (I can’t believe that the Charlotte to whom he writes letters on “Heat Rash” isn’t the same Charlotte he thanked in the liner notes of We Are Beautiful), yet he doesn’t shy away from details whether hilarious or depressing. Only on “Who Fell Asleep In” does it become a little too much, a slow confessional dirge that’s missing most of the trademark Campesinos humor and vitality. And it’s not a matter of just being slow; by contrast, late-album track “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future” is hardly fast, but carries such epic weight and emotion (and plenty of Gareth’s trademark oddball character sketches) that it easily becomes one of the band’s best tracks.

In fact, Romance is Boring has one of the best late-album sequences I’ve heard in a good long while. From the off-kilter “I Warned You” to “Heat Rash”, a steel-eyed regret that swells into a towering anthem with the return of those fucking horns, through “The Sea is a Good Place” to proper album climax “This is a Flag. There is No Wind”, a vitriolic shout-along that doubles back to familiar territory without once forgetting all the new ground they’ve tread. Here, after the shouts and the choruses and crescendos, the LC Riff comes rolling back in, ready to send the album out on the same note that ended Hold on Now, Youngster. But then it magnifies and bottoms out, and the band comes roaring back in - “Our friends have put the two of us on suicide watch!” - and our expectations are gloriously upended once again. This shit is exhilarating.

It’s a perfect end to the album, though it is followed by one more track: the fittingly-named “Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State”, which is just Gareth, his glockenspiel and a gloom of guitar feedback. It’s a hugely abrupt comedown from the previous song, but in context it feels important, a lament of personal failure aimed at… maybe one of the girls named on the album, maybe the departing Aleks, maybe all, maybe none (see? It’s fun to theorize). It’s such a downer that I usually want to skip the track - though that just starts the album over again. And I am always fine with that.

So, yes, it gives me great pleasure to say that this is my favorite album of theirs, and so far my favorite album of 2010 - which, in a year already filled with new releases by Spoon, Hot Chip, Gorillaz and Massive Attack, is really saying something. It’s exciting to hear and watch one of your favorite bands really maturing and improving, especially when they produce the kind of sound that speaks to a wider audience - without selling themselves or their fans short. It’s a rare triumph of a (technically) sophomore album, and hopefully just one more step in a long and successful career.

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Thursday, April 1, 2010

2010 Tunes: More Quickies

Some more quick reviews! Hooray!:

Vampire Weekend - Contra
Much as I’m not a fan of their whole Ivy League aesthetic, I’ve still found plenty to like on Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album. Songs like “Cousins” find the band at their most energetic heights yet, while others like “White Sky” further refine the kinds of breezy tropical horizons the band hinted at two years ago. Ezra Koenig seems to have really benefited from his horizon-broadening side projects with The Very Best and the like, even if his love of over-enunciating exotic words causes songs like “Horchata” and “California English” to veer into over-precious nursery rhyme territory. And then there’s “Giving Up the Gun”, an instant classic that’s an unabashed stab at radio play while still feeling like a fresh direction for these guys. It’s just another one of the contradictions that make Vampire Weekend such an interesting band, even if not every hat they wear is to your liking.


These New Puritans – Hidden
I was a big fan of these guys’ labyrinthine debut album, Beat Pyramid, which was awesome in part because it was so obtuse, providing a listening experience that felt like an excavation. Their follow-up retains a lot of TNP’s flavor, echoed horn loops and all, but also feels more straightforward, ironically enough. I don’t doubt that there’s a lot to mine here, but it seems that even the puzzles themselves are too well hidden on this album to really excite the hunt for meaning. Sure, there are songs on here that can stand on their own (“Hologram”, “Attack Music”), but as a whole the album does seems to have too much, well, Hidden for its own good.

Turzi – B
When I first heard “Baltimore” on the radio, my immediate reaction was disbelief that Primal Scream had a new album out already. OK, sure, partly because of Bobby Gillespie’s guest vocals, but there’s no denying that Turzi’s darkly urban electro-rock gives the song a distinct feeling that it could be called “Exterminator 2.0”. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either, especially when the music on most of the rest of the album speaks for itself. A lot of “political” artists lean on either long-winded manifestos or cheesy sloganeering to get their point across, so it’s really refreshing to hear a set of (mostly) instrumentals that just feel like protest music. And, true, without a specific target or worldview, you could argue that it’s not a real political statement; I’d argue back that it least this won’t go stale after six months.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Gorillaz was originally conceived as an anti-band; four cartoon avatars who provided the surreal facade of a faceless and numberless band. That was almost immediately undone when fans found out who was involved (“omigod! Damon Albarn and Del tha Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator!?!”). Then came Demon Days, probably my favorite Gorillaz album because it’s the least Gorillaz-like, basically an Albarn/Danger Mouse vanity project first and some vague attempt at “anonymity” a distant second or fifth. Plastic Beach, now, feels like a serious attempt to get back to that anonymity through such sheer volume of guest singers, musicians and producers that only the vague notion of this as a “concept album” can really keep all this together as any kind of unified piece. That’s not really my bag, but in the age of mp3 downloads and iTunes singles and “the death of the album” (whatever that means), it’s probably exactly what they’re going for. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by a guest list that includes Mos Def, Gruff Rhys, Lou Reed, De La Soul, Mick Jones, Joe Simonon, fucking Mark E. Smith and, uh, Snoop Dogg. The more I look at this as less of an artistic statement and more of a big fat crazy party where each rock luminary gets a turn at the mic, the more it works for me. Is it in too poor taste to end with “Everyone gets a turn with the Plastic Beach”?

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Mix well and serve

My seasonal mix-making continues. Tracklist posted without commentary this time, since I've been doing a lot of music writing lately as it is (more short reviews tomorrow and then another nice long one on Friday).

"Live Hard" - Winter 2009/2010

1. Vampire Weekend - Cousins
2. Phoenix - Courtesy Laughs
3. Beach House - Silver Soul
4. Spoon - Mystery Zone
5. Yeasayer - ONE
6. Atlas Sound - Quick Canal
7. Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
8. Hot Chip - One Life Stand
9. Four Tet - She Just Likes to Fight
10. The Twilight Sad - Cold Days from the Birdhouse
11. Bear in Heaven - You Do You
12. These New Puritans - Hologram
13. Neon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid with You
14. Massive Attack - Paradise Circus
15. Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State, or: Letters from Me to Charlotte
16. Wilco - Everlasting
17. Girls - Lauren Marie


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Thursday, March 25, 2010

2010 Tunes: Transfer Pending

Spoon - Transference

Transference has a couple different meanings. A quick internet search reveals that it means, uh, “the process of being transferred” (thanks, dictionary.com!), but also that it’s a psychoanalytic term for taking your feelings for a certain thing and tying them to a new (and often unrelated) thing. Like if you spend your life scared of clowns because one murdered your parents, transference occurs when you begin to fear your roommate because you catch the dude trying on face paint.

So if someone (let’s say a band named “Spoon”) decides to name their new album Transference, is it because they think it illustrates this curious and not-exactly-desirable process? Or causes it? Or is it because Britt Daniel “just thought the word was really pretty”?

Well, shit.



Spoon is one of those bands whose popularity only grows faster the harder they try to dodge labels and meanings. But that hasn’t stopped critics from trying, and with every new album come a flurry of descriptors ever harder and faster and wronger. (Yes, “wronger”. That’s how wrong.)


I have a theory on this and it’s completely self-serving, but oh well: I think their best album is Gimme Fiction. That album found a great balance between the band’s fun-loving and cerebral tendencies, really unequaled before or since. And this was the album when Spoon really started to blow up, but nobody called it at first. Critics thought the album was pretty good, fans wanted more “Stay Don’t Go”, etc. And suddenly: commercials. Bigger shows. Stephen King calls “I Summon You” his song of the year. Near-stupid levels of popularity. And then everyone realizes: oh shit. This album was actually really good.

Fast-forward two years: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga drops and critics fall all over each other trying to be The First to declare this album An Instant Classic. But, really? It’s just another good Spoon album, with the requisite broad hits (“The Underdog”), textural experiments (“The Ghost of You Lingers”) and late-album filler (“My Little Japanese Cigarette Case”) intact. It opened the floodgates to bigger concert venues and a critical jizz-fest, sure, but suggesting that this is their best album is basically a slap in the face to Fiction, Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell.

And here we are again in 2010 with Transference, which finds our boys keepin’ on keepin’ on, and the Quest For New Superlatives is back in full force. These guys are “brilliant innovators”, “scientists of the studio”, “uncompromising visionaries”, etc. And, guys, I know we have to flex our vocabulary muscles and all that, but let’s take a step back for a minute.

One of the few negative – if funny and a little unfair – criticisms of the album I’ve heard is that it’s “a perfectly good collection of b-sides”. I can see where this comes from: a lot of the album is sparse, and some tracks sound like they could be demos – because, actually, some of the tracks are the demo versions, which the band reverted to after tossing out slicker versions. Using demos on your proper album is a ballsy move – so credit for taking the risk, at least – but there’s a reason for this: it’s because demos typically sound pretty janky. And these demos are no different; they don’t get a pass just because they come from Spoon. I love the exaltation that songs like “Trouble” contain “the gritty promise of demos”, as if they’re exciting because they point to the possibility that they might one day become better or, at least, more. But, guys, this is the album! If there’s any “more” it’ll be a Neon Indian remix or an alternate take on disc 2 of the tenth anniversary re-release!

Which raises the question: is a demo still a demo if it ends up on the album? Is a b-side still a b-side if it’s “Yellow Ledbetter”? This album’s layers and juxtapositions might bring about a lot of beard-scratching discussion and postulation, which is fine, but it seems to come at the expense of a lot of fun. It’s a shame, because there is fun to be had here, like in the mish-mash enthusiasm of “Nobody Gets Me But You” and the groovy outro of “I Saw the Light” that grows into its whole own Thing. But there are also attempts at levity - like that “Whoo!” tacked into the coda of “Written in Reverse” whose enthusiasm I just don’t buy.

But this might be unfair. Spoon are allowed to go in different directions (isn’t that what we should want from our favorite bands?), and it’s ridiculous to get upset when they don’t just record Kill the Moonlight Pt 2. But it’s hard to ignore the first thing that makes Transference stand out: its jarring transitions. Second track “Is Love Forever?” bottoms out under its own strain barely two minutes in; “Mystery Zone” sounds so good on the radio until it cuts out, mid-word, rather than hitting what would assumedly have been a peak of ascending notes and sharper strings. How many are really happy to be dropped from these heights straight into the muted, wobbly tones of “Who Makes Your Money”? Probably not a lot. Look, these guys are trying to tell us something with this. This is not the sound of them fucking up; it the sound of them trying to teach.

OK, but what? On further listens you realize there’s actually a lot of stopping and starting on “Mystery Zone”, musically and lyrically. At times Daniel seems to be having trouble forming coherent thoughts. Later, “Out Go the Lights” sends him in a couple narrative directions without settling on a single one. Gradually, it becomes clearer that if these guys are trying to say something, it’s that they don’t know what to say. A quick googling of Transference criticism comes up with telling adjectives: “discombobulated”; “fumbling”; “transitory”. If I wanted to be a total dick, I’d ask: if you don’t know what you’re trying to say, why are you saying anything? (The fact that I didn’t delete this question after typing it out, though, means I’m at least half a dick. Maybe three-quarters.) If this is them being off-the-cuff and uninhibited, why does this all feel like such a carefully crafted experiment?

But, again, I have to back off, because this is assuming a lot. Playing a set for KCRW a few weeks back, they were asked why they included some of the controversial cuts and halts on the album, to which they responded [something to the effect of] “We just felt like it”. The whole interview was a little awkward – the band seemed less interested in explaining their music than just playing it – and it could have been an easy dodge, but you know, why not give these seven-album-deep indie pros the benefit of the doubt?

For me, it’s mostly that there’s a lot to love on Transference, but the roughest parts of the album really subtract from the whole (that smash-cut ending to “Is Love Forever”? It’s just sloppy, with the vocal echoes cut a fraction of a second after the rest of the song), and the closest possibility to a method behind the madness – that the band is just, you know, saying whatever – isn’t nearly a compelling enough reason to appreciate that. It’s not really that postmodern or daring; it just seems half-baked. It’s a shame, because that effort to teach sullies a lot of what could have been another classic from these guys - if that’s what they even wanted in the first place.


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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

2010 Tunes: Quick Hits

Dudes, I said this earlier but I still really mean it: so far 2010 has been a pretty crazy year for music, and it's only March. May in particular is gonna be extra special, with new releases from Broken Social Scene, The National and LCD Soundsystem! And there's another 7 months of the year after that.

But there's already been several noteworthy releases this year, and I felt like writing about a bunch of them. So over the next few days I have a bunch of quick reviews and two longer ones coming up, check them out if you're curious to know what I think about certain things. Oh, and if you're curious, samples from most of these bands should be available over on ye olde playlist -->

So here's what I've been listening to...


Massive Attack - Heligoland

Always glad to see these guys back, even if it takes 5+ years between albums. So far I’ve found this album much more interesting than 100th Window - either because they’ve included more guest stars or do more with them this time around. It’s weird to hear Elbow’s Guy Harvey make a guest appearance, and weirder still to hear Damon Albarn on here (I feel like his appearance automatically makes “Saturday Come Slow” a Gorillaz song), but overall most of it works. For the purists, too, “Girl I Love You” is a great Horace Andy track while “Rush Minute” evokes the tense, shadowy 3D tracks of old. All in all, a good collection, and hopefully a sign of more frequent output from these guys in the near future.

Four Tet - There is Love in You

I hadn’t listened to these guys for years - not since my college disc-jockey days of playing as many 6-minute songs as I could find to make the job easier - and I’m starting to regret that. There is Love in You is a great collection of spacey electronic beats, at times soothing and at others thumping. Lead single “Love Cry” has built up a lot of excitement on the blogosphere - pretty impressive considering the thing is nine minutes long and the first half of it is build-up! So, great, now I have another artist’s back catalog to go through. Thanks a lot for being so good, Kieran Hebden!


Hot Chip - One Life Stand

Maybe my standards were too high for a follow-up to my #1 album of 2008, but I’ve found most of this album pretty underwhelming. Maybe also because, of their fairly bifurcated tendencies, I’ve always been much more in favor of the monster jamzzz while One Life Stand falls more heavily in line with their tender side. There are a couple worthy barnburners in “Thieves in the Night”, “We Have Love” and the title track, though they can’t quite reach the apex seen on previous albums. “Alley Cats” is probably the finest song on the album while also serving as its clearest microcosm: A little dancey, a little sentimental, it rattles a bit in the middle when Joe Goddard’s sleepy vocals threaten to derail the entire rhythm (I don’t know what Goddard’s deal is on this album; his papa-bear vocals are usually a welcome contrast to Alexis Taylor’s, but here he sounds either too slow or too doped-up or, Christ, even too auto-tuned to really enjoy. Sad, because I like the guy!), but then Taylor’s sublime vocals roll in, lifting all of us up; “you painted a song”, says he, and suddenly all is right with the world. Maybe I’m being too hard on these guys… sure, there are a few missteps (don’t get me started on “Slush”), but at least these guys are still trying new things, and I’m sure a lot of this will grow on me more over the coming months.

More tomorrow!

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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Would Recommend: Action Button

I remember a year or so ago reading frustration - from, oddly, several unconnected places around the internet, as if part of some miniature unconscious zeitgeist - that video games, despite having become a huge cultural and commercial force of entertainment, didn't have much in the way of real criticism. In other words, lots of publications telling you how a game does x well and y not-so-well, but very few sources really trying to beyond and find something deeper. Which, I had wondered, might have had something to do with the inherently interactive nature of the medium itself, since "art" and "statements" and all that would seem to take a backseat to the bigger question of "can player 1 jump over this pit".

But, I have been proven wrong, at least by one website. Action Button Dot Net so far seems to be doing a great job of providing the kind of deeper insight I never knew I needed about my once-favorite mode of entertainment (now probably my third, but who's counting). The site design may strike you as off-putting as some review lengths (seriously, you think my writing is long-winded, check out more on FF XIII than you may ever want to read), but what's here is really good, insightful and unapologetic, and has made me rethink some of my own gaming opinions one way or another (though I still love Mario Galaxy).

Of particular note are the reviews of their 33 favorite games of all time. Check out their review of my number one and their number two, Super Mario Bros. 3, fascinating (the review) and enlightening despite taking 10 minutes of reading time to actually begin discussing the game in question. There's a particular bit that especially spoke to me, which I'll quote here - but behind the cut, since it works better in context of the review, so go read that first, seriously, I'll wait, my blog's got time--

--and so in talking about how part of the game's magic is inextricably linked to the times before Gamefaqs when gameplay was about discovery and trading secrets with friends and how often half the fun just came in running the little plumber around and trying shit and playing not to see how the story ended or to get all 101% of the hidden secrets but just to play the fucking thing, Tim Rogers asks:

"Did all this psychological kleptomania really spew from Super Mario Bros. 3, a game we played so much that it became literally incorrect to not crouch before jumping to catch the falling magic wand at the end of the airship boss battles? (The only true way for Mario to be victorious is for him to split-second-snap out of flying crouch and into triumphant standing, wand upraised.)"

...I mean... yeah, that-- that was me, in a nutshell, really. Me and my friends, growing up and playing this game. This paragraph is actual truth, what you might call Earned Resonance. And part of it's nostalgia, sure, but not at all the same kind you get from discussing, say, or The Goonies or Saved by the Bell. It's almost like the Internet isn't making the world a smaller place, just showing us how small it's always been.

Anyway: thumbs up. Would Recommend. Check it out if you like reading extensive, thoughtful essays on video games, and especially if you believe the medium's about more than just pressing buttons for a few hours. Which, if you're a real gamer, you should anyway, right?

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

2009: The Year Freak Broke

It’s weird to me that my main motivation for finishing this list was to want to move on and start talking about the music of 2010. The new year is looking great already! Not that 2009 wasn’t also excellent. There was a lot of great stuff, most notably from established artists who found serious success in evolving their sound (they make up half of this list). Some exciting newcomers in here too, though; I’m excited to see where all of these guys go from here, whether we hear from them next in 2010 or 2020. At any rate, here they are: my Top 10 Albums of 2009.


10. Bear in Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Something about Bear in Heaven feels weirdly out of time. There’s something very familiar about this sound - maybe even retro - it remains hard to categorize. “Shoegaze without the gazing” might get you almost halfway. It’s a swirl of sound and texture - at times hazy and at others energizing - that still manages to pack in more poppy hooks that most actual “pop” albums this year. Weirdly against the grain of a year that itself felt against the grain, Beast Rest Forth Mouth didn’t need any tricks or gimmicks to stand out on its own merits.



9. Atlas Sound - Logos
Bradford Cox’s “solo” work can be pretty fucking contradictory, but that’s absolutely its intention. Just look at the album cover: that’s Cox himself up there, but with his face blurred out and a big hole where his heart should be. It’s a fitting illustration of an outfit that is primarily Cox’s, but easily shifts and grows to fit the ideas and abilities of his guest performers. It’s unfortunate that the tracks without guests comparatively suffer a little, but Logos still has “Walkabout”, the great Panda Bear song that could have been, and “Quick Canal”, the best Stereolab song never written. And that’s high praise indeed.



8. Mew - No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away
Mew’s angular nĂ¼-prog sound is, in some ways, as obtuse and uncool as the frustrating title of their new album. But there’s something to be said for letting go occasionally; OK, not just letting go, but really pushing everything to 11, as they do time and again on “Repeaterbeater”, “Hawaii” and “Vaccine”. Though not as immediate as some of their earlier albums, No More Stories finds them pushing in new directions; check out the fractured breakbeats on “Introducing Palace Players” and the unexpectedly uplifting piano riffs on “Sometimes Life isn’t Easy”. The album begins, fittingly enough, with a timeshifting haze of a track that makes as much sense played backwards as forwards. Its title? “New Terrain”, of course.


7. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
The entire industry of musical criticism fell all over themselves this year in praise of Animal Collective’s eighth album, and while I don’t think it’s the end-all of Indie Rock in 2009, it’s impossible not to recognize the genius and musicianship that created some of the year’s strangest hits. From the woozy gallop of “Summertime Clothes” to the near-goofy exuberance of “Brothersport” and, oh yeah, the completely inescapable “My Girls”, there’s no question that without Animal Collective, 2009 would have been a far more somber and less interesting year.


6. Dan Deacon - Bromst
Bromst found tireless party boy Deacon growing up and growing out, giving out without giving up. Using his classical training to create a dense album as thoughtful and adventurous as it is boisterous and party-ready. Nowhere was this evolution more apparent than at his live shows, where a 13-piece backing band did justice to every diverse melody and instrument used on the album, while Deacon himself still bopped over his turntables in the thick of the crowd, never once forgetting that even a thinking man’s party is still a fucking party.


5. Yacht - See Mystery Lights
On his own, Jonah Bechtolt provided a fun and optimistic - if somewhat gimmicky - counterpoint to a lot of the dour, over-thinking indie dance scenesters of the last few years. But the addition of Claire Evans with See Mystery Lights evolved the band from what could have become a novelty act into a full-blown musical force. They’ve gone from appropriating DFA to becoming one of its tentpoles; and if, with LCD Soundsystem increasingly silent and The Rapture unraveling, the movement’s old guard is beginning to fade, at least it’s in the hands of these two promising youngsters.


4. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
For my money, “1901” is the song that ate the world this year; you’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfectly-formed 3 minutes of pop-rock anywhere else in 2009 or even the last several years. Lucky for us, Phoenix didn’t stop there, rounding out the rest of the album with so many other high-energy jams that you might confuse these elder statesmen of indie for the scrappy new kids on the block.





3. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Worst initial reaction I heard to “Stillness is the Move”: “Who the fuck is this, Mariah Carey?” It was as easy to hate on the Dirty Projectors as it was to love them in 2009, which I guess just comes along with sudden explosions in popularity. True, their howling, staccato tendencies aren’t for everyone, but those with an open mind will quickly discover that this twisted variant of pop has an intensity and addictiveness all its own. You’ll find it in “Stillness” and “Cannibal Resource” among others, but it’s Bitte Orca’s arguable centerpiece - the two-pronged rafter-shaking primal scream from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian 3 minutes into “Useful Chamber” - that blows out the doors and really shows the heights that can be reached when you start looking in new directions.


2. Passion Pit - Manners
The common description of this album has been “like MGMT but the other half of the album is good too”. And… OK, it’s not entirely inaccurate. The latest Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere, Passion Pit offered up a serious collection of jams this year, and while this kind of music can have a short shelf life (see: The Go! Team; MGMT, again), Passion Pit has actually been able to overcome this with daring, thoughtful composition and, seriously, that back-end of the album doesn’t hurt (Why “Let Your Love Grow Tall” hasn’t been made a single, I will never understand). There will of course be a new Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere in 2010, but the question isn’t “who will it be”; the question is “can they outdo Manners?”


1. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
How much of our listening experiences do we owe to ourselves? Listening isn’t just a passive activity: every time we press Play, we’re also bringing our thoughts and desires and wants and preconceptions to the table. And everything we feel or know or think we know colors what we hear, which is why the same source material can give two people radically different listening experiences. So how much of my enjoyment of Veckatimest comes from my knowledge of the sheer amount of attention-to-detail work that Grizzly Bear put into their new album? How fair is it that our shared appreciation for Albums Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts helped them secure a spot on this list above other albums I’ve listened to - and maybe even enjoyed - more this year? I couldn’t tell you. But any kind of intellectual second-guessing does a disservice to the masterpiece that Veckatimest is, from the opening thunder of “Southern Point” through the ethereal “Two Weeks”, the rollicking swell of “About Face” and the hard-won triumph of “While You Wait for the Others” all the way through to the measured, delicate end of “Foreground”. Sure, the listener will always bring their own opinions, but they’d be hard-pressed to argue with an album of this exceptional caliber.


Honorable Mentions

Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There Are Mountains
Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There are Mountains
Franz Ferdinand - Tonight Franz Ferdinand - Tonight
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Metric - Fantasies Metric - Fantasies
Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

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