Avoiding listening to anything else but this album has been one of the more fun/kinda silly conventions I’ve set up for this week.
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SOME BULLETS IN WHICH I FIRE OFF SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS HERE THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME BUSINESS
Bill Callahan’s “Sycamore” exemplifies the kind of song that completely derails your intention to listen to a full album. I swear, I still fully believe that Woke On A Whaleheart is a brilliant album, but when you put “Sycamore” fourth (right after the stellar “Diamond Dancer,” too) on it, you’re basically asking a listener raised on CD’s to listen to the first four songs on the album over and over.
The song starts out with the looping, swirling, complicated-but-not guitar lick that Callahan comes back to again and again, and then straight into the lyrics:
There’s sap in the trees if you tap ‘em
There’s blood on the seas–if you map ‘em
Christian, if you see your papa–tell ‘im I love ‘im
And he goes from there, short pithy sayings that make you feel so much like he owns his lyrics, like he can pull them off and make them amazing and no one else could. He’s like a one man mythos every time out, and “Sycamore” is no exception.
Other than that, you’ve got the basic drumbeat, understated gospel backing vocals (how often can someone say that?), and lyrics that just continue to somehow be killer and yet not wordy at all. Callahan doing “basic” equals simple that defies you to write something so great. He’s also got the guitar solo that fits somewhere between caffeinated country and the cherry music from Mr. Do!, a man playing guitar that sounds like 8-bit video games…and also, aw hell. Eff the critic-speak.
You know what? It’s just a damn good song. A great song. The one song that I remembered from the time I saw him open for Joanna Newsom to the time the album came out.
Simple, complex, catchy, twangy, clean.
It’s perfect.
***
I’ve got about 10000 songs in iTunes, and about ten of them have made the “Perfect” playlist. This is one of them.
This year’s year end list posed a problem that seems to be happening more an more in music writing-dom: with a few exceptions, I just don’t feel like I listened to full albums this year. The singles list (that I hope to write soon) will probably feel more comprehensive and emblematic of 2008 as a result, but that’s how it goes, I suppose.
In a year when two of my favorite bands (The Mountain Goats and the Hold Steady) put out new albums, I am certainly shocked that neither album tops the list, and only one of them cracked the top five. And a hip hop group I never listened to before 2008 leapt them both? So it goes with expectations.
Here it is, in particular order!
#10: Deastro, Keeper’s
An 8-bit sneaky dark horse that I’m just getting to know, Deastro fills the “dancey background for walking” niche quite well–well enough that it can made the list. The second track on the album, “the Shaded Forests,” feels quite 80’s synthpop with its stuttering lyrics and quasi-overly-fake-British enunciation; when the blown-speaker guitar jumps in, it becomes even more endearing. I want to hear this one in a club, lights blinking, music up, dancing the night to oblivion.
#9: TV on the Radio, Dear Science,
It’s got the “We Didn’t Start the Fire/End of the World as We Know It” track, the Flaming Lips-esque track, a dangling comma in the title, and some of the biggest hype of the year. But more importantly to me, It’s got a kick-ass opening track that I can put on when I need to fucking GET A MOVE ON, and “Stork and Owl” has an indie sparse-click that sounds like this year’s version of The Shins’ “Red Rabbits.” I don’t know how long this album will stick with me, but it certainly merits mentioning.
#8: M83, Saturdays = Youth
Can you put an album on a year-end top ten based on the strength of one perfect song and the promise that you hear in the surrounding tracks? When the song in question is M83’s “graveyard Girl,” you bet you can. It feels like a sequel to “just Like Honey,” and it pulls out all the tricks of an epic song: the sorta kid-like background vocals, the curve-ball spoken speech in the middle, the stadium-ready keyboard that brings it back, and most of all, the feeling that nothing matters but this song right now. I can’t wait to hear more and more from this album and this band.
#7: The Hold Steady, Stay Positive
I feel like the boys ran out of steam with this one, like they’ve gotten so good at dishing up lyrics that they know their audience will like (”Get hammered!”) that they somehow strayed from the dense, moving tales that we are used to from one of America’s best live bands. They did write one fantastic Hold Steady ramble-banger and smartly named the album after it, but so much of this album lacks the storytelling and meticulousness that made their last two albums great.
#6: Matmos, Supreme Balloon
Admittedly, I’ve got this on here to fill the token “weird-ass electronic noise thingie” slot. On Supreme Balloon, Matmos gets playful with their bleeps and whirs, creating wisdom through repetition and layers like any good experimental, dancey, electronic music will, all the while filling up your head with their version of a 2008 Yellow Submarine soundtrack.
#5: Dr. Dog, Fate
Dr. Dog plays music that excites me in the way a good, straight up porter does–you’ve had porter before, but the differences in this one are what make it great. The brew they pour is the kind of classic-rock tinged full bandstravganza that makes you wonder why so many bands are duos or trios as we close out the aughts. “The Rabbit, the Bat & The Reindeer” anchors the album, ambulating forward with the simple message that “man you ain’t like anybody else,” while asking “Are you my curse/are you my friend?” The song is the sound of a band taking every great rock trick that they know and combining them into greatness.
#4: The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
“I am coming home to you–with my own blood in my mouth,” the Mountain Goats’ lead singer, John Darnielle, fires off in the first chorus of the opening track. “I am coming home to you–if it’s the last thing that I do!” and once again, Darnielle explores the muck between threats and love, making anyone who will listen have to decide if they can tolerate–or at least take a stab at unpacking–the violence therein. God, unfit relationships, longing–these are the ingredients in any soup Darnielle stirs, and they are all here, again, and it’s tasty. And then there’s the title track–wow the title track–one of the best songs all year, full of fire and a martyr and, yes, misguided pride–I wonder if Darnielle knew how much that would feel like 2008?
#3: Plants and Animals, Parc Avenue
The story behind this album made me check it out originally–this is a band that made an album the old way, taking two plus years and a 24-track to create their masterpiece. It turns out that it also has two of the most perfect moments in song from the year. The first comes a particularly quiet moment of “Good Friend” when, out of nowhere, we are admonished that “it takes a good friend ot say ‘you got your head up your ass.’”It’s a hilarious line delivered with the utmost importance. The other perfect moment comes during the next track, “Faerie Dance,” a track that sprals and meanders as a sort of microcosm of the album as a whole. Just when you are jamming along to a particularly banging, noisy breakdown, everything drops out, comes back piece by piece, and you get smacked by an amazing drumbeat that ties the song together while it takes you to another world entirely. Bands wait an entire career for this kind of moment, and this year, it belongs to Plants and Animals.
#2: Atmosphere, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold
This is an album that’s angry, and it’s hard, and it give me the chills every time I focus on it, every time I really listen to Atmosphere’s stories of good intentions that never really pan out. And it begs for close listening–you have to listen in the same way that you have to examine the car wreck you pass, or keep reading that awful breakup note over and over again . “Dreamer,” one of the album’s best, talks about the choices a single mom needs to make as she decides to “do what you need to do to cope.” “Go ahead and hate the world girl, you earned the right,” Atmosphere’s omniscient narrator yells during another especially powerful stretch. This is not background music–it’s a singular event, a meditation on life you have to center your mind on, and that makes it hard to take sometimes. It’ s also one of the best albums of the year. You won’t listen to it constantly, but you’ll always respect its ability to draw you in.
#1: Vampire Weekend, s/t
It doesn’t feel real to write about this album, now, because there seemingly has never been a time when I couldn’t walk over to the record player, start this record, hear, “I see a Mansard Roof through the trees!” and make home feel happier, more upbeat, and, somehow, in love. Most of the album still feels so fresh–though I have almost reached saturation with “A-Punk”–and the future just looks up and up with these boys. Any album that owns my consciousness this much cannot be anything but number one.
I am sure that, had I listened to thejm more, the albums by Of Montreal, Mercury Rev, The Airborne Toxic Event, and many others could have made the list. But then, what stopped me from listening to those more? Hope you liked the list–I’d love to hear any arguments in the comments (adnd I’ll try to post sample tracks soon).
You guys, I am seriously in one of those music-devouring phases again (yes know, hard to believe, but they really are phases, it’s not a constant thing) and the devouring has come from two sources, one of them fairly unlikely.
The real source was a recent Sound Opinions episode, during which they covered their Best of 2008 (so far). This kind of thing always charges me up, and I love listening to Kot and Dero because I typically get turned on to a few things that I want to check out (and also vehemently disagree with them on a few things).
Well, this time around, Dero decided to defend the Red Album.
Yes, that Red Album.
Weezer seemed to have gone from brilliant to totally gone to exciting to bleh, earning themselves one of my favorite music reviews of all time in the process. I had given up on them doing anything worth hearing based on second-hand snobbery from that review (and I will now come clean: I do actually like that “Beverly Hills Song)(though seriously, “We Are All On Drugs?” I am pretty sure that Cuomo singing one of his Harvard papers would have been more interesting), and so it was weird to hear Derogatis gushing about Weezer. Prog-rock and Rush-leanings aside, Dero rarely gushes about stuff that isn’t worth at least checking out.
He started to talk about a song called “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)” and I thought, “oh here we go, pretension disguised as fun, please,” but then he played it and I was like, “who the hell is this?” It starts off sounding like a Modest Mouse song and then goes through about four different versions of the song, including an intro that has about 9 different power chords palm muted in a seemingly random way and a Beach Boys style a capella section and…well, as Dero pointed out, this was a band that used to make complicated songs out of disparate parts, and here they were doing it again.
It’s fucking great.
Another song that he mentioned is called “Heartsongs,” and although that one has one verse too many (the last verse is a bit TOO much), it’s an ode to music that they love that will probably inspire another post ’round these parts. Oh, and did I mention that it sticks in your brain? Seriously, I would have to start another twitter feed called “Weezer earworms” for this one.
Is the whole album great? It seems like maybe not, though actually, I don’t know. It seems like there are some standouts, definitely, but the thing is, those songs are so great that I haven’t really delved into the rest of the album much.
I’m really happy to know that I don’t need to write them off any more though. I always sort of forget about Weezer, but you better believe that nearly every time I spot the Blue Album on a jukebox, I play “In the Garage” or “Surf Wax America.”
Enjoy my first nomination for song of the summer.
****
“The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn),” Weezer
I’m not so great with memorizing things, but somehow music makes such an impression on me that I’ve got a nearly savant-like ability to remember the dates when albums were released. It makes sense I suppose: I’m a musical learner after all, and so it checks that I could remember that that STP album was 1993 and that Soul Asylum one was 1992 and that Flaming Lips album was 2002.
This carries over to mean that I have to filter through what music was playing at the time in order to remember personal dates. So, I know that we were living in the house we built in Marengo because of the fact that I can remember listening to “Black Gold” while cleaning the garage. I know that 8th grade was 1991 because, hello Nirvana (plus Nate listening to Nine Inch Nails from the year before).
So, that means that songs get tied to relationships, of course, of course. There are albums or songs that just naturally end up solidly meaning that person at that time in that place, and there’s nothing I can do about that (nor would I want to, even). I remember how appalled I was when a friend said to me, “you can’t do that you know.” I can’t not do that — I can’t fathom memories not filtered in this way. Maybe that’s another reason why music just means so much.
I’m a veteran of a few long-distance relationships, too, and those songs mailed off to each other, postage to other countries or continents? Even more weight.
This also means, as you might imagine, when a relationship goes south, and stays there, whole albums or songs have to get deleted from the hard drive, figuratively and literally. This doesn’t happen often, though it can be pretty significant.
The Streets’ “Dry Your Eyes” loosely fits in this category.
If you spend a lot of time reviewing local music, you hear a lot of the Chris Cornell guy singing over a “dunh dunh dunh!” guitar line, or those screamer-Kinney female vocalist clones, or the keyboard duos that Just! Want! Dancing!
As such, when something different comes along, it merits a further look.
So, what exactly is this warbling-but-better-than-that beautiful thing that has landed in my mailbox today?
Why, it’s Rachel Taylor Brown’s new album, Half Hours With the Lower Creatures
It all starts off with with a sound collage full of clanks and bells, Brown’s wordless singing setting the atmosphere before she pounds away singing about maniacs and radios in the third track, “Stagg Field.” The vampy piano, quiet-loud dynamics, and bass instrumentation on recalls Ben Folds Five, especially in the beginning and ending sections of “Mette in Madagascar,” when the band bounces along, propelling the song.
The layers of background vocals peppered throughout definitely continue the BF5 comparison, but where he often offered slices of life and tales full of characters, Brown dabbles throughout her album in religious imagery. It slows her down a bit, in that you start to wonder if she’s a one-subject pony–though this album talks about God in Tori Amos way, not a god rock way.
All in all, I have to admit, Half Hours has got a bit of the same-y-itis, but I don’t see that as a sign of weakness–I see it as a decent album from someone who has potential to make some great stuff happen on future releases. I bet her music will fill the room at Mississippi Studios, and I hope I can make it out.
Rachel Taylor Brown plays that official CD Release party on April 5th.
“Mette in Madagascar,” from Half Hours With the Lower Creatures
How can I explain away
Something that I haven’t done
And if you can’t trust me now
You’ll never trust in anyone
–Sugar, “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”
Typical review: witty summary, narrow it down, pick out a few songs, wrap it up in a nice bow.
Not this time. This time, the lyrics first. The above lyrics occur at a point in the song when you’d guess maybe Mould will drop the chorus another time, maybe repeat a verse or some other time-honored/slightly lazy trick, it’ll end, and it’ll be pretty good. But then! A curve ball near-ending–a verse that comes in at a time when you’re like, “man, how could any song be this great?”–and we’re off.
“How can I explain away/Something that I haven’t done?” Chills.
“And if you can’t trust me now/You’ll never trust in anyone.”
Does he have you yet?
There’s a point in every (failed?) relationship when things have been said that you didn’t want to say, or things have been done you’ve moved beyond regretting–things you wish you wouldn’t have had the capacity to do. So often in rock songwriting, we get the perspective of the jilted whatever, or the angry ex, or the “take me back/please come back” plea.
But how often is there complication? How often do we see “With all the crazy doubts you’ve got/I love you even still?” This song is chilling partly because it’s unique. It takes the specificity of “you will find a different person if you change your mind,” throws that awesome 90’s Moüld guitar sound behind it, and builds the perfect three minute pop song.
If I can’t change your mind then no one will.
The Video, on Youtube
Bob Mould
Sugar, on Wikipedia
Sugar – If I Can’t Change Your Mind
****
I’ve got about 9000 songs in iTunes, and about ten of them have made the “Perfect” playlist.
This is one of them.
The new Mountain Goats album, Heretic Pride, drops (as the kids say)(if their slang lags behind) shortly after my thirtieth birthday, and right after that the boys will be playing two shows at the best venue in the world.
If “Sax Rohmer #1,” the leadoff single that the Goats made available for download recently, indicates anything (and let’s face it–of course it does; main Goat Darnielle’s own music fan/thinker status doesn’t make me feel like he’s the kind of guy to decide such a thing lightly), this album will be exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
As albums go, 2006’s Get Lonely was a red wine-buzz of a good one: creeping up, spreading fuzzily, a bit warm and with a little bit of “what did I do to myself?” later on. It wasn’t–and isn’t–an easy listen, quiet where we were used to Darnielle roaring. Perhaps that was the biggest strength of an album made up of things left unsaid.
This new track, though, seems likely to break at any moment into the “hungry for love–ready to drown” chorus from “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent” off of We Shall All Be Healed. It’s similar in cadence, and his “shouty” register has returned. More than that, you can visualize the visceral Darnielle honing in here, stomping around, ranting these lyrics, playing his demons to the crowd (though I imagine he’d bristle at the assumptive narrator/performer conflation I did there), and truly fucking bringing it.
And that’s what we want our music to do, isn’t it? Don’t just amuse me, don’t confuse me, don’t berate me, don’t show off your wizardry or vocabulary–or at least, if you are doing these things, you better be sure you’re fucking bringing it, too. It’s a fine line, and a powerful one, because your audience will love you forever if you succeed–and that’s why this band deserves attention.
What an amazing birthday present this album, and tour, will be.
(audio included because this track is already freely available)
****
Mountain Goats Tour Dates
4AD’s Heretic Pride page: February 18th release
My Mountain Goats Feature, March 2007, Portland Mercury
themountaingoats.net
