marathonpacks 2007 Year-End Lengthy Writeups
Not so much a ranked list this year as a series of written things about a few of the records I liked. These are in no particular order, really; well, I guess the last pair is last for a reason. Oh yeah, I paired some of these up, you know, to keep things a bit more interesting. Sort of like an artificial limit I put on myself, to see what happens and allow me to, you know, get it written eventually. My iambic pentameter; for certain of you, perhaps, my "is." I started writing things about other albums, but either because they sucked or I just wanted to leave the house for a bit, I cut out. So, no Jay-Z, 1990s, Yelle, M.I.A., Super Furry Animals, Lil' Wayne. But 13 others, at least. There was a bit of hack and slash going on here, and little clean-up afterwards, so don't let the length fool you: there might be a bit of grammatical gum in the hair here. Last year's list (actually a list) is linked to the right.
Finally, this is out of the way, and I can start posting lists from my friends, starting Friday. Here's where you can start with mine, though:
Field Music Tones of Town (Memphis Industries)
If you’ve never seen it, Walter Ruttman’s “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” is a fantastic documentary. A relic of the time when the format was predominantly being used for state-building rhetorical purposes, the silent film uses the motions and shapes of Berlin—its shops, its people, its factories—to create a gorgeous visual lyricism, tracing a day in the city from morning to night. Sunderland, UK’s Field Music doesn’t have anything to do with Berlin, as far as I can tell, but Tones of Town pulls apart the taken-for-granted parts of everyday public and private life, with an eye for social geometries and all forms of movement.
The curtain rises with the chatter of the cafeteria scene from the album cover, and the clanking of silverware and glasses is slowly taken over by a pristine rotary cling that sounds like someone slipped Steve Reich into the jukebox. “Give It Lose It Take It” takes shape from here, a modernist assemblage of small, jagged guitar notes doubled by the bass, through which a punch drunk drum rhythm staggers and under which a clockwork piano plink keeps time. Like Devo, Field Music is confrontational in a cerebral way, consistently questioning the imperatives of the people that surround them; “Give It”s lyrics read like life-coaching through a similarly minimalist regimen: “What’s given away can always be found,” “All that you have is all that you need to be.”
Tones is a city symphony, sure enough, but one that transposes the unnoticed patterns of everyday life into melodic form, like a physicist composer rationalizing the ways in which humans operate amongst one another. A miniature string section peeks out occasionally, but only to give the slightest motions added weight—the quick dart of an eye across a room and back, the elegant, hidden light show of a closed copy machine. Emotionally, moments of sheer frustration, like the domestic squabble-as-vacuum-sealed pop operetta “Sit Tight,” and “Working to Work”s cycles of employment embitterment, give way to brief, bright windows of revelation— you can hear a sigh of relief when Brewis sings near the close of the album, “At last a gap has appeared, a space in which to move.” Tones of Town is a narrative with time and space as its lead characters, and there’s not an album this year that more fluidly merges its concepts and music, as if a singular equation scribbled on a restaurant napkin one afternoon gave birth to both. What passes for the chorus of the title track the band takes as its own duty now for the future: “You should admit/ The simple things you get/ Are complicated/ You can’t explain it.”
Yeasayer All Hour Drums (We Are Free)/ Celebration The Modern Tribe (4AD)
I saw both of these bands live this year, at the same venue—Yeasayer on my birthday in September, and Celebration playing after Vampire Weekend on a cold early winter night, when the city was mostly empty because the students hadn’t yet returned from Thanksgiving break. Both sets were less than stunning in a strictly musical sense, but the technical problems that marred each lent a strange, eerie air to the performances that nonetheless made them memorable. I’ll get to this in a second.
First: I distantly invoked Shelly Errington’s concept of artistic “primitivism” coined in her very entertaining book “The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress” in my Yeasayer review, invoking Celebration (and others) in the process. Errington unpacks the loaded terms “primitive” and “authentic” as they relate to ethnic art, and finds them to be creations of early 20th century colonialist curatorships; rich Orientalists documenting their world travels by lending various forms of non-Western artisanry the essentializing aura of the museum, and ascribing Western ideals of proper art recognition to ancient artisans in a strangely colonialist attempt to “affirm” their legitimacy.
Though globalization and increased cultural awareness have squashed the legitimacy of these practices, the artistic commodification of primitivism still rears its head in four ways for Errington, two of which pertain to the current discussion. Quick quotes:
I called All Hour Cymbals “indie rock world music” with all due emphasis implied on the term’s vagueness and ethnocentrism (like Errington does with the word “primitive”). But Cymbals, as well as Celebration’s appropriately-named The Modern Tribe (does it get more obvious than that?), wades knee-deep in something more specific, what Errington refers to as “New-Age Primitivism.” She writes:
The Field From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt)/ Caribou Andorra (Merge)
Even after luxuriating in his album for the majority of this year, the enduring image I have of Axel Willner, who records as the Field, is of his live set at the Pitchfork Festival this past summer. Pale and emotionless, gulping down cup after cup of Goose Island beer, and sporting a lengthy new-wave wethead combover, Willner patiently sent the crowd into a frenzy. When I wasn’t getting bruised by the kid’s backpack in front of me (which was poking me with rolled-up posters like a field creature defending itself) or jumping up and down awkwardly, I kept glancing up at him, hoping he’d start bobbing his head, or maybe crack a smile. Nothing, of course; nothing but the music that sounded just as good coming from a wall of speakers on a hot day as it does right now on headphones as I sit in front of a space heater in my apartment.
The Field was undoubtedly this year’s Aphex Twin, or Orb, or Fennesz, or Boards of Canada. This is not to say that Willner’s music sounds anything like these predecessors (it doesn’t), but instead that it held within itself the appropriate combination of rhythm, structure, release and suggestion that allowed it to crossover to non-heads. Sure, the Flamingos and Lionel Richie samples helped, but what got me was how Willner was able to combine simple house-derived rhythms and microscopically-diced and reorganized samples with an implacable sense of drama, atmosphere and scope to create music that sounds simultaneously soft and loud, warm and chilly, touretically fast and glacially slow.
Sort of like the way that Caribou’s “She’s the One” opens. Particularly, the looped “doo-doo-doo”s that sound like a children’s choir busy-signal. Some of the most winsome sentiments of the year came on Andorra, in the midst of the towering ice-castle soundscapes engineered by Dan Snaith, the PhD in mathematics and crate-digging pop geek. Of course I like Andorra because Snaith used the timeless Odessey & Oracle (and to a lesser extent, the less-timeless Left Banke) as a truss for his first full-fledged trip into songwriting territory (where Matthew Dear confidently stepped this year, but which engulfed poor RJD2), and he did it exceedingly well. I mean, that’s the main reason everyone who liked it liked it, right? “Well not quite,” says everyone: it’s that Andorra feels like Odessey with the Zombies’ patented sense of boyish naivete and eerie unsureness turned up to 11. More than anything, what I love about this record is that Snaith’s particular sonic stamp is all over it—that feeling his music so often evokes of peering through an iced-over windshield on a frigid early morning, as the sun rises and glares through the one slight crack it made with its heat.
I liked Andorra a lot from the start, just as I instantly liked The Milk of Human Kindness and Start Breaking My Heart before it, but my affection was ratcheted to new heights after watching this video clip, some sort of BBC report. It shows Snaith not as some pasty Canadian Anglophile in an Angus Young schoolsuit, but as a total loner nerd who wears totally nerdy glasses, and seemingly lives (lives) to locate the ideal pop noise.
Wilco Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)
I’ve got some theories about those who dismissed Sky Blue Sky out of hand after hearing it once for being too “light,” or god forbid, fucking “dad rock.” Of course, it’s easiest to say that these people either not real Wilco fans, or maybe just the fairweather sort. But that’s not getting the full picutre.
At worst, I don’t think these people know how to approach this album, or music that subverts their expectations more generally. People still expect another another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which, face it, we’re not going to get. Jeff Tweedy is a human being, and, well, let’s just remember the disarray that came after YHF. So stop it, okay? Stop projecting. It’s unseemly. To mangle a phrase from Sky’s “Walken,” “the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it’s you.” At best, these people have never experienced the sort of drug-induced regal bout of selfishness that Tweedy has, and more importantly, then come to realize the ramifications it had on those closest to them. Not that I’m saying anyone should go through this sort of thing—when I look back on my own time, it’s really terrifying—or that we need to have experiences identical to our artists in order to identify with their art. I am saying that sympathy should play a role in one’s appreciation of a work like Sky Blue Sky, and that, at the risk of sounding haughty, I sincerely feel sorry for those who either don’t have, or don’t wish to acknowledge, that capacity.
Put simply, Sky is gorgeous album, and all the more heartbreaking for its simplicity and elegance. It’s easily the most sincere and deeply personal music Tweedy has ever recorded, but it’s also a testament to his skills that it feels universal at the same time. I mean, even the title itself speaks to a most basic feeling of bewilderment—why in the world isn’t the sky the sky blue color it’s supposed to be? What’s the point of the term “sky blue,” then? That’s where Tweedy’s at on this album; striving for the most basic levels of comprehension. No surrealistic lyrical imagery, no inpenetrable sonic gauze, just old-fashioned crystal clear songs. Just songs. And “Sky Blue Sky” is a song about a parade on a rainy day, and Tweedy sitting at an intersection with no choice but to watch it go by. And he realizes that there is so much imbedded kinetic energy within the idea of a parade, but this one in particular was just sad. There’s a poetic element here: you can look happiness right in the face, you can see it right in front of you, literally marching down the street, but for complicated reasons, you can’t seem to feel it.
A few times, like on “Walken” and “Shake it Off,” a sense of humor bleeds through, which of course is necessary. Without at least a bit of self-deprecation, it’s easy to lapse into utter self-loathing, which is what got him in this place to begin with, right? But as someone who knows what it’s like to tell himself to shake it off, who's tried to convince himself that beating self-defeating is as simple as a dog drying himself after running out of a lake, I know it’s just silly.
The best moment on the record, and one the best in Wilco’s catalog thus far, is the sublime “Impossible Germany,” which contextualizes the seemingly insurmountable obstacles we face in terms of antebellum rebuilding efforts. This is some of Tweedy’s most pitch-perfect lyricism, too; especially “But this is what love is for/ To be out of place/ Gorgeous and alone/ Face to face,” which again hits that in-it-but-not-of-it dislocation that permeates the record. Of course, it’s also where Nels Cline (the other technical virtuoso, with drummer Glenn Kotche, who subsumes his wankery to the good of the whole) goes nuts on the solo and the band briefly turns into the Allman Brothers, making the sun rise with a fiery three-guitar coda.
White Williams Smoke (Tigerbeat6)/ Kanye West Graduation (Def Jam)
Glittering wish fulfillment narratives, the lows and highs of glamourous lives within and without The Club, darkly rendered synth-pop and penchants for eyewear, coming from opposite ends of popular and emotional spectrums. Joe Williams (black Ray-Bans), a NYC transplant from Cleveland is enamored with the outre—scenester social machinations, glam records, and garish displays of status and taste—but only coyly murmurs his songs. Kanye (oversized Venetian shades) can’t keep his mouth shut, and Mbutu pygmy children from central Africa know how pissed off he was after the MTV Awards. From “Good Morning” to “Good Life,” Graduation is self-celebratory, but between the frozen petulance of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and the dizzy “Flashing Lights,” the tone turns darker, as West confronts the ramifications of his own iconography face-to-face. Perhaps this comparision can get us going: what for Kanye emerges as the sour, dreary groupie lament “Drunk and Hot Girls” is for Williams, well, Smoke’s cover photograph.
Or maybe this cover image is the connection between the two. We could go on. Either way, at some point a few months ago I realized that Smoke, in all of its humbleness and introversion, is a distant echo of Graduation’s high-fashion, global-scale Euro-chic jetsetting. The difference between a moleskine fiction and a best-selling autobiography, maybe. “Headlines” is Williams’ private press account of a non-stop celebrity cycle, replete with famous babies, rotten ladies, dancing mayors, singing policemen and the shadowy stalkers who document it all. Move from the Google Maps city view to a MCU of West in a Miami beachfront condo, and we get “Flashing Lights,” in which paparazzi-induced vertigo keeps interrupting his attempts to get Mona Lisa to come back to her Caesar. Or, Gina to come back to her Martin.
Just because Smoke takes place on a much smaller scale doesn’t mean the same rules don’t apply, though. It’s become impossible to talk about Graduation, and West’s public image in general, without at least thinking about the very public tragedy that befell his mother this year. The grim irony of the exploitative manner in which West refers to seemingly every woman except his mother was written on her own body, which couldn’t take the trauma of her chosen method of enhancement. Smoke deals with beauty and grotesquerie in its own distant, chromatically aestheticized way, as in how the LaChapellian wax tears of the cover models reproduce the opening couplet from “The Shadow”: “We cannot swim/ In tears of crying eyes again/ It was all gore/ To see the sore insides of them.”
The central differences (aside from, you know, race) are clear, but the contrasts only make the similarities more interesting. Williams’ stakes and star aren’t nearly as high as West’s—hip-hop’s Barry Bonds—which disallows Smoke the sort of nostalgic coda like Graduation’s last third, from “Everything I Am” to “Big Brother.” Instead, Williams works in a register of emotional remove, eyeing girls from across the club, writing songs like “Going Down,” “Danger,” and “New Violence.” At first, I read the latter two titles in the same way I’d approach someone trying to coin the name of a new art movement, but it doesn’t take much of a logic leap to understand the partially-repressed fears that underscore them, obscured by layers of aloofness that would fit West about as well as a pair of pleat-front Haggar khakis. And then, although I shouldn’t, I go back to the start of Graduation, and the “Kid Charlemagne” sample that makes up the otherwise celebratory “Champion,” and extrapolate the chilly feeling of former glory that the original song packed into the couplet. And then I think about the paranoia with which Donald Fagen ended that song—“I think the people down the hall know who you are”—West doesn’t know from halls, but to Williams, that idea could be both intriguing and terrifying.
A Sunny Day in Glasgow Scribble Mural Comic Journal (Notenuf)/ Deerhunter Cryptograms & Fluorescent Grey EP (Kranky)
Scribble Mural Comic Journal evokes a indecipherable, private collection of what I read as a teenager’s life; the fact that Ben’s sisters provide the vocals—like on the wonderful “5:15 Train”—lends the music a touching air of private, parentless living room productions. The first three words of the title—scribble, mural, comic—represent three disparate forms of artistry: one is slapdashed and done while listening to someone else drone on the other end of a phone call, another is wall-sized and impossible to ignore, another relies on the reader making connections between an ordered series of panels. Parts of all three are present here, and the record feels like a journal of distant recollections rendered variously huge, flighty, and ordered—sometimes simultaneously (like “The Best Summer Ever” and "C'mon"). It’s the overwhelming feeling that everything is happening at once, all on top of itself, that draws me to this record over and over. It’s no coincidence, of course that the album contains a song called “Panic Attacks are What Make Me Me.”* The music is rendered in the gray shades of anorak indie pop, Creation Records shoegaze, and the sort of electronic flourishes best heard on headphones—all filtered through an obscurantism that shows itself on the musical end, not just the emotional quadrant of its twee-pop predecessors. It’s the sort of thing that I can’t get enough of when I hear it, and that just seems like it has to be raved about to you by someone whose tastes you trust. It has the unique personal status of being 100% recommended to me by other people (most often: Skatterbrain).
Cryptograms are those puzzles in the newspaper that use a basic form of letter substitution to encode phrases that look like gibberish. Cox, as anyone who read Pitchfork’s news section this year is well-aware, had a traumatic childhood, triggered and exacerbated by Marfan’s Syndrome, which rendered his body into a form at which teenage kids can’t wait to secretly recoil. The album has Cox attempting to get in touch with that time of his life from a critical/artistic distance, and sort out the confusing dream logic that came about from a terrifying admixture of social isolation, repressed teenage lust, sickness and therapy. As Cox sings, the record is essentially the fraught process of sorting out his life: “My greatest fear/ I can’t decode.”
The music and lyrics on Cryptograms aren’t nearly as obfuscated as ASDiG’s, and Cox is actually more than happy to explain what he meant to express with each song, here. The simple, droning and dark arrangements and occasionally awkward poetry doesn’t detract from the music’s potency a bit, though; they only underscore the grotesquerie on full display. “Lake Somerset,” “Hazel St.” and “Heatherwood” are Cox’s attempts to reframe a suburban childhood through, respectively, a place of escape, an imagined ideal of a perfect neighborhood, and the actual home in which he was born, and to which he imagines himself eventually returning to disappear. I spent most of the year listening to Cryptograms coupled with the Fluorescent Grey EP on my iPod; the latter collection of four songs an incredible increase in nuance, theme and form over their predecessors, which sound like practice in comparison. The stunning title track, which Cox remarks is “about panic attacks, lust, and existential dread,” builds (patiently) toward a climax that spirals endlessly and softly as Cox whispers to himself the futility of other kids ever understanding anything.
*It really can’t go without mention that for a good part of my junior high/high school/undergrad years, I experienced a dozen or so panic attacks, which usually resulted in me passing out in public and scaring the shit out of whoever was around. In high school, as could probably be imagined, this tendency became part of my identity, something which I was forced to embrace, awkwardly.
Blonde Redhead 23 (4AD)
The opening line of Liz Colville’s Stylus review of 23 explains my feelings about where the band’s muse has taken them better than I ever could: “Eight years ago Blonde Redhead wrote ‘In Particular,’ a song they will never write again, because, 23 says blithely, they don’t have to. “In Particular” is a wonderful song, that’s obvious: Kazu Mikino’s icy gleam of a voice gliding atop a rhythm bed that predicted Kid A by a few months in 2000. And large elements of “In Particular” are present on 23—the sleek precision, Mikino’s chilly wistfulness and not-so-little-girl-lost act—but they’re not doing the same thing. No, in a lot of ways, this is better.
Those who hated on 23 seemed to do so for the same reasons many others seemed to do with Sky Blue Sky. Mikino gets ‘em right before the awesome chorus of “The Dress” hits: “People hate you when you’re changing.” Like Wilco, Blonde Redhead is older, they’ve gone through some shit, and they’re not going to release music that sounds like the stuff they did when they were young and innocent in the same way that I’m not going to drive on acid again. Or, okay, do acid again. Taking 23 on its own terms, however, can be a rewarding experience, just like Sky. It’s my favorite pure dream-pop record since hell, I don’t know, Heaven or Las Vegas; just as obscured by clouds, occasionally inscrutable, shot through with a gossamer attractiveness precious enough to make certain cheeks pucker. That’s totally fine; I won’t hate on anyone who can’t handle too much sweetness and sincerity. And there’s plenty of that here, predominantly on “Silently,” with an indelible lavender-lilted melody seemingly drawn from a long-lost children’s fantasy, and a rising section that starts the second verse that just melts me every time I hear it, because I forget it’s coming. The withering, slowly dying vocodered double on “Heroine”: I’m not made of stone, here.
It’s not just that, though: 23 is an Alan Moulder record as much as it’s a Blonde Redhead record, and the Amadeo-led songs trend toward a more pounding, slickly galvanized sound. “Spring and By Summer Fall” and (after the 1:37 point) “Publisher” ratchet up the dissonance and increase the contrast between the dynamic shifts the band’s so good at maximixing. The insistent, gothic “SW” edges them both out, however, by virtue of its resemblance to psych-era Beatles: the lyrics are simple psychedelic life lessons like Paul ended Abbey Road with: “It's not, it's not what you give but it's what you kept.” The chorus’ references to lying in bed, and the idea that a dormant state is where the idea came from seems pure “I’m Only Sleeping,” and the jaunty brass break at 1:55 is a wonderful little callback to Magical Mystery Tour.
I haven’t even mentioned the Mike Mills-commissioned videos for the album: Melody McDaniel's piece for “23” is fine, but Mills' concept pieces are wonderful. Like a meaningful ending sequence to Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” (the face morphing thing), the clip for “The Dress” just confronts you head-on with sadness, but forces you to recognize its weirdness at the same time, and “Top Ranking” does the same with the latter and replaces the “sadness” with “gesture,” in the form of artist Miranda July’s series of poses. Like a great music video director, Mills does more than just make visual accompaniment for the sounds; he adds something to them of his own. Like when July’s frozen façade is broken by a blink, or a slight budge, Mills adds a visceral touch of the creepy slippage between motion and stock-stillness that the music already carries in bunches. And watching what happens slowly during “My Impure Hair,” and knowing pretty well what’s going on but sticking with it regardless, pays off visually in a way that perfectly reflects the music.
Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)/ LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver (DFA/EMI)
Either early this year or late last year, I can’t quite remember, when I was sitting with a bunch of people at a bar, the topic of which famous people we all looked like came up. I’ve never looked like anyone famous, not even slightly, but that didn’t stop a guy from saying Britt Daniel, which I’d gotten before (but with the caveat “Britt Daniel looks like you and Gary Busey had a kid”). Obviously, it’s the tall gawky blond guy thing (not, I tell you, not, the Stereogum indie rock hottie business), but I never really resist a comparison to that guy. I mean, talented songwriter and all, whatever (and yeah, I got about 250 emails after the Pitchfork review ran asking “uh did the keyboard player write the Spoon review?”), but, well, let’s explain it this way: about 6 or 7 years ago, a friend of mine (a girl) who was equally enamored with the band, said something to the effect of “you know why I like Spoon so much? Because it feels like he’s on my side.”
I only know him through his music, but I feel like Daniel is on my side as well. Like me, he takes small things incredibly seriously, dwells on slights forever, but worries about losing face by freaking out. A lot of people might see this as forcible cool or something equally not-great, which is fine. Personally, I see it as a particularly affable defense mechanism. I’m not afraid to say that I hear a lot of my oversensitivity reflected in Spoon’s music, a lot of my shy, distant pining and put-on, gangly hipness. Okay, dorkiness. I mean, I guess people think Daniel is an incredibly hot rockstar or whatever, but I look at him, and listen to his music, and see and hear barely contained nebbishness, hypersensitivity, and teenage weirdness held at bay. It’s probably just me, sure. But it’s too close to ignore.
“Don’t You Evah” isn’t even a Daniel composition, but it’s clear why he chose to record it. It’s about barely keeping your shit together, and not showing signs of weakness for fear of attracting the wrong people, like moths to a porch-light. “The Underdog” might be “Only the Good Die Young,” but “The Ghost of You Lingers” is the post-mortem. It’s on some Edgar Allan Poe shit re: tell-tale heart haunting, and “Japanese Cigarette Case” is about taking the easy way out, via le cheval blanc: “Bring a mirror to my face/ Let all my memories be gone.” It’s a tempting quick-fix, but it’s still a cop-out, and that’s why it sits right before the last two tracks, which deal with pining in much more complicated (not necessarily effective, mind you).
Okay, so more personal anecdote time. You’ve come this far, so stick with me for a bit—we’ve still got Sound of Silver, then you can go. I remember sitting in Phoenix, at my girlfriend’s house, this summer—she was painting in her studio, I was tapping away on the Ga Ga review for Pitchfork—and that moment came when I realized how crucial those last two songs were. I had headphones on, and there was no risk of anyone seeing me, so I just fucking rocked them out. And they’re two really easy songs to rock out, too: “Finer Feelings” lets me strut a little during the verse, and then on the second chorus, those huge chords come in. “Black Like Me” I can do either the piano or hollow-box, but either way, it’s pure power-ballad territory. And the thing was, what I didn’t realize at the time (and how could I have known, at all), was that I loved these songs for purely visceral, musicological reasons. Jams qua jams, as it were.
Then, well, we broke up, about 2 months later. Over the phone. More like broke in half. Like a twig, or a #2 pencil bridged between the index and pinky fingers when stress just suddenly overwhelms you. Crack. I won’t bore you with the details—it didn’t help that we lived a whole country apart, or that…okay, I’ll stop. And of course, there was the requisite week and a half of rolling around in my own misery, with my dog cocking his head to one side, then coming over and instinctively laying his head in my lap (if you don’t have a dog, get one). See, we were supposed to get married, we’d talked about children, I was going to write my dissertation luxuriating in Phoenix’s dry heat. And then, just fucking snap. Like how “Black Like Me” ends Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga: a swelling of sensations and emotions, higher and higher, and then just fucking snap, into silence out of nowhere, leaving me in a suspended state of emotional purgatory that I didn’t ever think I’d recover from. Something that had previously been very much alive was now dead, just like that.
I thought I’d found a love, someone who would change my heart. But no, of course not. What was I thinking? Also: what the fuck. But after a few weeks, everything started changing: I realized I’d stumbled into a new freedom, one that I not only had forgotten existed, but which I’d forgotten that I love. You know: that liminal state when someone’s in your sights, and you haven’t ruined anything yet by learning much about them—they'd just seen your picture on a friend’s digital camera and asked about you. That friend then texted you the next day because she's a great friend. It’s the sort of not serious, all-pheromone giddiness that’s resulted in about 1/3 of all pop songs being written, including “Finer Feelings.” It’s pure optimism, like you’re living a Mentos commercial, and everyone you see might just be (probably is) perfect: “Always out on some witch’s hunt/ For the one who never lets me want.” Here again, Spoon: wholly on my side.
Let’s backtrack a bit, though. Back to that fateful morning (you probably see where I’m going here). That phonecall woke me up, which was weird, because she’s three hours earlier than me. And about 10 minutes after answering it, no coffee or anything, everything was drastically different. A few months earlier, on the way out somewhere at night for some reason, I’d cued up LCD Soundsystem's “Someone Great” on my iPod in the car—the sort of appointment listening I know so many of us do—and just like the Spoon occasion from this summer, I marveled at the song like a curio. It was such an affecting presence at that point—the way that hazy siren sound recalled an alarm clock filtering through a lucid dream, that tapped-out digi-melody the most sentimental-sounding built-in ringtone—I’d already come to terms with the fact that Silver was James Murphy’s best work yet, by a considerable margin, but something about that song—the way the coldness and snotty mimickry had dropped out of his voice, leaving him sounding like a little boy—just fucking terrified me. I know it sounds like too perfect of a story, but it’s absolutely true. A life packed with AM radio feeding me the same sorts of stories for 30 years, and “Someone Great” finally clicked in my head: god forbid I ever feel like that. The relationship I was in at the time was my first even close to serious one, and it was very serious.
And then, of course, I lived the song. Like, eerily close to the actual lyrics. I remember the day after everything went down, I somehow made the connection in my mind with the song, and although I knew it would be too painful to listen to, I couldn’t get it out of my head with a crowbar if I tried. I know everyone in the world has been through the exact same situation, maybe more than once, but this was the first for me, and man was it fucking awful. Put the song on now, and just imagine that initial oscillation ringing in your ears for a week.
Sound of Silver is the point at which Murphy, more or less, embraced his inner Britt Daniel. He’s even in touch with the awkwardness, too. The title track might be the worst song on the record, but it’s also got one of the most touching lyrics: “makes you want to feel like a teenager/ Until you remember the feelings of/ A real-life emotional teenager/ Then you think again.” Murphy’s learned that it’s okay to grow up, and we’re the better for it.
For the Pitchfork year-end blurb I wrote about Murphy’s artistic M.O. that “it no longer seemed enough to coolly dissect how sensations form scenes; it became time to consider the fragile emotions of the people within them,” and I think that gets at what I really love about the album so much. There wasn’t much on the debut that I could really chew on, aside from a generalized, very dude-ish connection to how amazing music made me feel. Silver, though: yeah. The consensus on the best song seems to be “All My Friends,” which I’m fine with: I wrote about it earlier the same way that so many other Internet-types have, because it strikes at the core of those of us between, I’ll say, 25 and 40 who are forced to choose the straight world over the fun world like they’re forced into military service. I didn’t type then that the song reminds me of the first verse from R.E.M.’s “So Fast, So Numb,” but it does:
More than anything, I love Murphy’s language choices on the record. He refers to a specific youthful American demographic in continent-speak: “North American Scum” of course a play on “Eurotrash.” But “Scum,” like Matthew mentions, should be taken as a term of endearment, and not just for New Yorkers. Despite living in a country tons larger than continental Europe—which Michael references—and being without the echo-chamber industry rags, North Americans have still managed to wrangle technology in such a way that geographic-specific subcultures can be, well, “normalized,” or transported and reimagined in, I don’t know, Bloomington, Indiana. I know that when Murphy says “Let’s go, North Americans,” he’s most likely referring to his people, where he’s from, but I prefer to think he’s including all of us. Us and them, if you will (oh, you will? Thanks!). We can all throw parties and get busted by the cops; fuck you, Europe!
Murphy hasn’t yet enamored himself to me in the way that Daniel has, nor would that necessarily dovetail with his chosen project. And, as someone who’s spent a grand total (so far) of about 96 hours in New York City, I find myself enjoying much of Silver at a bit of distance, appreciating the ease with which he slips into and out of rhythms, musical ideas, and character sketches. Man, and you know what? With what “Someone Great” did to me in early August, that’s totally, totally fine.
Finally, this is out of the way, and I can start posting lists from my friends, starting Friday. Here's where you can start with mine, though:
Field Music Tones of Town (Memphis Industries)
If you’ve never seen it, Walter Ruttman’s “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” is a fantastic documentary. A relic of the time when the format was predominantly being used for state-building rhetorical purposes, the silent film uses the motions and shapes of Berlin—its shops, its people, its factories—to create a gorgeous visual lyricism, tracing a day in the city from morning to night. Sunderland, UK’s Field Music doesn’t have anything to do with Berlin, as far as I can tell, but Tones of Town pulls apart the taken-for-granted parts of everyday public and private life, with an eye for social geometries and all forms of movement.
The curtain rises with the chatter of the cafeteria scene from the album cover, and the clanking of silverware and glasses is slowly taken over by a pristine rotary cling that sounds like someone slipped Steve Reich into the jukebox. “Give It Lose It Take It” takes shape from here, a modernist assemblage of small, jagged guitar notes doubled by the bass, through which a punch drunk drum rhythm staggers and under which a clockwork piano plink keeps time. Like Devo, Field Music is confrontational in a cerebral way, consistently questioning the imperatives of the people that surround them; “Give It”s lyrics read like life-coaching through a similarly minimalist regimen: “What’s given away can always be found,” “All that you have is all that you need to be.”
Tones is a city symphony, sure enough, but one that transposes the unnoticed patterns of everyday life into melodic form, like a physicist composer rationalizing the ways in which humans operate amongst one another. A miniature string section peeks out occasionally, but only to give the slightest motions added weight—the quick dart of an eye across a room and back, the elegant, hidden light show of a closed copy machine. Emotionally, moments of sheer frustration, like the domestic squabble-as-vacuum-sealed pop operetta “Sit Tight,” and “Working to Work”s cycles of employment embitterment, give way to brief, bright windows of revelation— you can hear a sigh of relief when Brewis sings near the close of the album, “At last a gap has appeared, a space in which to move.” Tones of Town is a narrative with time and space as its lead characters, and there’s not an album this year that more fluidly merges its concepts and music, as if a singular equation scribbled on a restaurant napkin one afternoon gave birth to both. What passes for the chorus of the title track the band takes as its own duty now for the future: “You should admit/ The simple things you get/ Are complicated/ You can’t explain it.”
Yeasayer All Hour Drums (We Are Free)/ Celebration The Modern Tribe (4AD)
I saw both of these bands live this year, at the same venue—Yeasayer on my birthday in September, and Celebration playing after Vampire Weekend on a cold early winter night, when the city was mostly empty because the students hadn’t yet returned from Thanksgiving break. Both sets were less than stunning in a strictly musical sense, but the technical problems that marred each lent a strange, eerie air to the performances that nonetheless made them memorable. I’ll get to this in a second.
First: I distantly invoked Shelly Errington’s concept of artistic “primitivism” coined in her very entertaining book “The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress” in my Yeasayer review, invoking Celebration (and others) in the process. Errington unpacks the loaded terms “primitive” and “authentic” as they relate to ethnic art, and finds them to be creations of early 20th century colonialist curatorships; rich Orientalists documenting their world travels by lending various forms of non-Western artisanry the essentializing aura of the museum, and ascribing Western ideals of proper art recognition to ancient artisans in a strangely colonialist attempt to “affirm” their legitimacy.
Though globalization and increased cultural awareness have squashed the legitimacy of these practices, the artistic commodification of primitivism still rears its head in four ways for Errington, two of which pertain to the current discussion. Quick quotes:
“evoking the primitive and authentic…by transforming ephemeral ritual media into durable forms that can be sold…designs usually or formerly used in ritual performances and destroyed in the course of the ceremony…(are) modified and applied on durable materials, thus allowing their commodification.”In the review, I named a few bands who in various ways, bring these sorts of aesthetic notions into the realm of rock music; mostly indie rock, with the Byrne/Eno classics Remain in Light and Bush of Ghosts as recognizable foundational texts. Much can be found in the current Anglo-ethnic “revival” (pardon the pun, but it’s appropriate, right?) which includes the white-church-derived revelry of Arcade Fire (who hold concerts in churches), Danielson and Sufjan Stevens (Sunday-school indie), the Annuals’ wild-eyed meth-lab classisicm/paranoid hollerin’, and Bodies of Water’s lost SoCal cult vibe. There’s also the druidic revelry of Animal Collective, and the gospel-washed (and oft-animalistic—“Wolf Like Me”) TV on the Radio. And of course, Yeasayer and Celebration.
“a fourth way is for the artist to evoke or refer to the natural, the primordial, the pure, and the mythical and link this with an ethnic group, sometimes his or her own.”
I called All Hour Cymbals “indie rock world music” with all due emphasis implied on the term’s vagueness and ethnocentrism (like Errington does with the word “primitive”). But Cymbals, as well as Celebration’s appropriately-named The Modern Tribe (does it get more obvious than that?), wades knee-deep in something more specific, what Errington refers to as “New-Age Primitivism.” She writes:
“this yearning has produced a pervasive, sincere, ambivalent…generalized nostalgia for a harmonious primitive world,” and then, “around the central person or item float symbols, fraught with an undefined but heavy significance, that seem to straddle the Here and the Beyond.”Cymbals is shot throught with fears of modernity (especially “Germs”) and a desire to merge with an nebulous, simple (one might say “primitive”) past. I’ve already blathered on enough about this, so a quick snip from “2080”s chorus to illustrate where I’m going:
“Yeah Yeah we can all grab at the chance and be handsome farmers,Seeing Celebration live last November—Katrina Ford shaking and jumping, banging on drums and rattlling tambourines, the Wurlitzer weaving in and out of the polyrhythms lending a rustic church-revival austerity—led me to mention Dan Graham’s documentary Rock My Religion to someone I was with. It’s a bit of a slog, but it draws interesting parallels between Shaker rituals and the music of Patti Smith and Sonic Youth, moving toward an idea that art punk is reaching toward some sort of organic consensus within an increasingly atomized existence. With all the talk this year about the balkanization of music niches and fan-based class fragmentation, there just might be something here (in the whole “revival”—maybe the “revival revival”?) to look into more closely; for now, though, I’m satisfied with this lyric from Celebration’s “Pressure”:
Yeah you can have twenty one sons and be blood when they marry my daughters,
And the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us.
We can pickle the pain into blue ribbon winners at county contests.”
"What is the fate of this world?Back to those two shows; more specifically, the problems with them. About 2/3 of the way through Yeasayer’s set, in the break between songs, an eerie, partially-recognizable murmur started echoing throughout the room—a small black-box theatre—which the bassist found emanating from his amp. The theatre sits atop Bloomington’s low-power FM station WFHB, and whatever broadcast was on at that point was haunting the room. Maybe it was also responsible for Anand Wilder’s synth-malfunction, which required him to recreate the sounds on his guitar. As Celebration was setting up, a similar thing happened. Katrina came to the mic and informed the crowd that the band’s uninsulated Wurlitzer was having quite the mojo worked on it by the FM frequency buzzing throughout the room, making the organ’s tones sound sour, like dying music. After floating and quickly killing the idea of moving the whole show to a new venue, the band performed an abbreviated set in earnest, yellow organ notes and all. As I mentioned above, both sets were less than stellar as music, but both became very memorable for the (thematically appropriate) interventions of the ether through which the music traveled.
Or is it time to end it all?
We must remember, we’re all dancers!"
The Field From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt)/ Caribou Andorra (Merge)
Even after luxuriating in his album for the majority of this year, the enduring image I have of Axel Willner, who records as the Field, is of his live set at the Pitchfork Festival this past summer. Pale and emotionless, gulping down cup after cup of Goose Island beer, and sporting a lengthy new-wave wethead combover, Willner patiently sent the crowd into a frenzy. When I wasn’t getting bruised by the kid’s backpack in front of me (which was poking me with rolled-up posters like a field creature defending itself) or jumping up and down awkwardly, I kept glancing up at him, hoping he’d start bobbing his head, or maybe crack a smile. Nothing, of course; nothing but the music that sounded just as good coming from a wall of speakers on a hot day as it does right now on headphones as I sit in front of a space heater in my apartment.
The Field was undoubtedly this year’s Aphex Twin, or Orb, or Fennesz, or Boards of Canada. This is not to say that Willner’s music sounds anything like these predecessors (it doesn’t), but instead that it held within itself the appropriate combination of rhythm, structure, release and suggestion that allowed it to crossover to non-heads. Sure, the Flamingos and Lionel Richie samples helped, but what got me was how Willner was able to combine simple house-derived rhythms and microscopically-diced and reorganized samples with an implacable sense of drama, atmosphere and scope to create music that sounds simultaneously soft and loud, warm and chilly, touretically fast and glacially slow.
Sort of like the way that Caribou’s “She’s the One” opens. Particularly, the looped “doo-doo-doo”s that sound like a children’s choir busy-signal. Some of the most winsome sentiments of the year came on Andorra, in the midst of the towering ice-castle soundscapes engineered by Dan Snaith, the PhD in mathematics and crate-digging pop geek. Of course I like Andorra because Snaith used the timeless Odessey & Oracle (and to a lesser extent, the less-timeless Left Banke) as a truss for his first full-fledged trip into songwriting territory (where Matthew Dear confidently stepped this year, but which engulfed poor RJD2), and he did it exceedingly well. I mean, that’s the main reason everyone who liked it liked it, right? “Well not quite,” says everyone: it’s that Andorra feels like Odessey with the Zombies’ patented sense of boyish naivete and eerie unsureness turned up to 11. More than anything, what I love about this record is that Snaith’s particular sonic stamp is all over it—that feeling his music so often evokes of peering through an iced-over windshield on a frigid early morning, as the sun rises and glares through the one slight crack it made with its heat.
I liked Andorra a lot from the start, just as I instantly liked The Milk of Human Kindness and Start Breaking My Heart before it, but my affection was ratcheted to new heights after watching this video clip, some sort of BBC report. It shows Snaith not as some pasty Canadian Anglophile in an Angus Young schoolsuit, but as a total loner nerd who wears totally nerdy glasses, and seemingly lives (lives) to locate the ideal pop noise.
Wilco Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)
I’ve got some theories about those who dismissed Sky Blue Sky out of hand after hearing it once for being too “light,” or god forbid, fucking “dad rock.” Of course, it’s easiest to say that these people either not real Wilco fans, or maybe just the fairweather sort. But that’s not getting the full picutre.
At worst, I don’t think these people know how to approach this album, or music that subverts their expectations more generally. People still expect another another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which, face it, we’re not going to get. Jeff Tweedy is a human being, and, well, let’s just remember the disarray that came after YHF. So stop it, okay? Stop projecting. It’s unseemly. To mangle a phrase from Sky’s “Walken,” “the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it’s you.” At best, these people have never experienced the sort of drug-induced regal bout of selfishness that Tweedy has, and more importantly, then come to realize the ramifications it had on those closest to them. Not that I’m saying anyone should go through this sort of thing—when I look back on my own time, it’s really terrifying—or that we need to have experiences identical to our artists in order to identify with their art. I am saying that sympathy should play a role in one’s appreciation of a work like Sky Blue Sky, and that, at the risk of sounding haughty, I sincerely feel sorry for those who either don’t have, or don’t wish to acknowledge, that capacity.
Put simply, Sky is gorgeous album, and all the more heartbreaking for its simplicity and elegance. It’s easily the most sincere and deeply personal music Tweedy has ever recorded, but it’s also a testament to his skills that it feels universal at the same time. I mean, even the title itself speaks to a most basic feeling of bewilderment—why in the world isn’t the sky the sky blue color it’s supposed to be? What’s the point of the term “sky blue,” then? That’s where Tweedy’s at on this album; striving for the most basic levels of comprehension. No surrealistic lyrical imagery, no inpenetrable sonic gauze, just old-fashioned crystal clear songs. Just songs. And “Sky Blue Sky” is a song about a parade on a rainy day, and Tweedy sitting at an intersection with no choice but to watch it go by. And he realizes that there is so much imbedded kinetic energy within the idea of a parade, but this one in particular was just sad. There’s a poetic element here: you can look happiness right in the face, you can see it right in front of you, literally marching down the street, but for complicated reasons, you can’t seem to feel it.
A few times, like on “Walken” and “Shake it Off,” a sense of humor bleeds through, which of course is necessary. Without at least a bit of self-deprecation, it’s easy to lapse into utter self-loathing, which is what got him in this place to begin with, right? But as someone who knows what it’s like to tell himself to shake it off, who's tried to convince himself that beating self-defeating is as simple as a dog drying himself after running out of a lake, I know it’s just silly.
The best moment on the record, and one the best in Wilco’s catalog thus far, is the sublime “Impossible Germany,” which contextualizes the seemingly insurmountable obstacles we face in terms of antebellum rebuilding efforts. This is some of Tweedy’s most pitch-perfect lyricism, too; especially “But this is what love is for/ To be out of place/ Gorgeous and alone/ Face to face,” which again hits that in-it-but-not-of-it dislocation that permeates the record. Of course, it’s also where Nels Cline (the other technical virtuoso, with drummer Glenn Kotche, who subsumes his wankery to the good of the whole) goes nuts on the solo and the band briefly turns into the Allman Brothers, making the sun rise with a fiery three-guitar coda.
White Williams Smoke (Tigerbeat6)/ Kanye West Graduation (Def Jam)
Glittering wish fulfillment narratives, the lows and highs of glamourous lives within and without The Club, darkly rendered synth-pop and penchants for eyewear, coming from opposite ends of popular and emotional spectrums. Joe Williams (black Ray-Bans), a NYC transplant from Cleveland is enamored with the outre—scenester social machinations, glam records, and garish displays of status and taste—but only coyly murmurs his songs. Kanye (oversized Venetian shades) can’t keep his mouth shut, and Mbutu pygmy children from central Africa know how pissed off he was after the MTV Awards. From “Good Morning” to “Good Life,” Graduation is self-celebratory, but between the frozen petulance of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and the dizzy “Flashing Lights,” the tone turns darker, as West confronts the ramifications of his own iconography face-to-face. Perhaps this comparision can get us going: what for Kanye emerges as the sour, dreary groupie lament “Drunk and Hot Girls” is for Williams, well, Smoke’s cover photograph.
Or maybe this cover image is the connection between the two. We could go on. Either way, at some point a few months ago I realized that Smoke, in all of its humbleness and introversion, is a distant echo of Graduation’s high-fashion, global-scale Euro-chic jetsetting. The difference between a moleskine fiction and a best-selling autobiography, maybe. “Headlines” is Williams’ private press account of a non-stop celebrity cycle, replete with famous babies, rotten ladies, dancing mayors, singing policemen and the shadowy stalkers who document it all. Move from the Google Maps city view to a MCU of West in a Miami beachfront condo, and we get “Flashing Lights,” in which paparazzi-induced vertigo keeps interrupting his attempts to get Mona Lisa to come back to her Caesar. Or, Gina to come back to her Martin.
Just because Smoke takes place on a much smaller scale doesn’t mean the same rules don’t apply, though. It’s become impossible to talk about Graduation, and West’s public image in general, without at least thinking about the very public tragedy that befell his mother this year. The grim irony of the exploitative manner in which West refers to seemingly every woman except his mother was written on her own body, which couldn’t take the trauma of her chosen method of enhancement. Smoke deals with beauty and grotesquerie in its own distant, chromatically aestheticized way, as in how the LaChapellian wax tears of the cover models reproduce the opening couplet from “The Shadow”: “We cannot swim/ In tears of crying eyes again/ It was all gore/ To see the sore insides of them.”
The central differences (aside from, you know, race) are clear, but the contrasts only make the similarities more interesting. Williams’ stakes and star aren’t nearly as high as West’s—hip-hop’s Barry Bonds—which disallows Smoke the sort of nostalgic coda like Graduation’s last third, from “Everything I Am” to “Big Brother.” Instead, Williams works in a register of emotional remove, eyeing girls from across the club, writing songs like “Going Down,” “Danger,” and “New Violence.” At first, I read the latter two titles in the same way I’d approach someone trying to coin the name of a new art movement, but it doesn’t take much of a logic leap to understand the partially-repressed fears that underscore them, obscured by layers of aloofness that would fit West about as well as a pair of pleat-front Haggar khakis. And then, although I shouldn’t, I go back to the start of Graduation, and the “Kid Charlemagne” sample that makes up the otherwise celebratory “Champion,” and extrapolate the chilly feeling of former glory that the original song packed into the couplet. And then I think about the paranoia with which Donald Fagen ended that song—“I think the people down the hall know who you are”—West doesn’t know from halls, but to Williams, that idea could be both intriguing and terrifying.
A Sunny Day in Glasgow Scribble Mural Comic Journal (Notenuf)/ Deerhunter Cryptograms & Fluorescent Grey EP (Kranky)
Scribble Mural Comic Journal evokes a indecipherable, private collection of what I read as a teenager’s life; the fact that Ben’s sisters provide the vocals—like on the wonderful “5:15 Train”—lends the music a touching air of private, parentless living room productions. The first three words of the title—scribble, mural, comic—represent three disparate forms of artistry: one is slapdashed and done while listening to someone else drone on the other end of a phone call, another is wall-sized and impossible to ignore, another relies on the reader making connections between an ordered series of panels. Parts of all three are present here, and the record feels like a journal of distant recollections rendered variously huge, flighty, and ordered—sometimes simultaneously (like “The Best Summer Ever” and "C'mon"). It’s the overwhelming feeling that everything is happening at once, all on top of itself, that draws me to this record over and over. It’s no coincidence, of course that the album contains a song called “Panic Attacks are What Make Me Me.”* The music is rendered in the gray shades of anorak indie pop, Creation Records shoegaze, and the sort of electronic flourishes best heard on headphones—all filtered through an obscurantism that shows itself on the musical end, not just the emotional quadrant of its twee-pop predecessors. It’s the sort of thing that I can’t get enough of when I hear it, and that just seems like it has to be raved about to you by someone whose tastes you trust. It has the unique personal status of being 100% recommended to me by other people (most often: Skatterbrain).
Cryptograms are those puzzles in the newspaper that use a basic form of letter substitution to encode phrases that look like gibberish. Cox, as anyone who read Pitchfork’s news section this year is well-aware, had a traumatic childhood, triggered and exacerbated by Marfan’s Syndrome, which rendered his body into a form at which teenage kids can’t wait to secretly recoil. The album has Cox attempting to get in touch with that time of his life from a critical/artistic distance, and sort out the confusing dream logic that came about from a terrifying admixture of social isolation, repressed teenage lust, sickness and therapy. As Cox sings, the record is essentially the fraught process of sorting out his life: “My greatest fear/ I can’t decode.”
The music and lyrics on Cryptograms aren’t nearly as obfuscated as ASDiG’s, and Cox is actually more than happy to explain what he meant to express with each song, here. The simple, droning and dark arrangements and occasionally awkward poetry doesn’t detract from the music’s potency a bit, though; they only underscore the grotesquerie on full display. “Lake Somerset,” “Hazel St.” and “Heatherwood” are Cox’s attempts to reframe a suburban childhood through, respectively, a place of escape, an imagined ideal of a perfect neighborhood, and the actual home in which he was born, and to which he imagines himself eventually returning to disappear. I spent most of the year listening to Cryptograms coupled with the Fluorescent Grey EP on my iPod; the latter collection of four songs an incredible increase in nuance, theme and form over their predecessors, which sound like practice in comparison. The stunning title track, which Cox remarks is “about panic attacks, lust, and existential dread,” builds (patiently) toward a climax that spirals endlessly and softly as Cox whispers to himself the futility of other kids ever understanding anything.
*It really can’t go without mention that for a good part of my junior high/high school/undergrad years, I experienced a dozen or so panic attacks, which usually resulted in me passing out in public and scaring the shit out of whoever was around. In high school, as could probably be imagined, this tendency became part of my identity, something which I was forced to embrace, awkwardly.
Blonde Redhead 23 (4AD)
The opening line of Liz Colville’s Stylus review of 23 explains my feelings about where the band’s muse has taken them better than I ever could: “Eight years ago Blonde Redhead wrote ‘In Particular,’ a song they will never write again, because, 23 says blithely, they don’t have to. “In Particular” is a wonderful song, that’s obvious: Kazu Mikino’s icy gleam of a voice gliding atop a rhythm bed that predicted Kid A by a few months in 2000. And large elements of “In Particular” are present on 23—the sleek precision, Mikino’s chilly wistfulness and not-so-little-girl-lost act—but they’re not doing the same thing. No, in a lot of ways, this is better.
Those who hated on 23 seemed to do so for the same reasons many others seemed to do with Sky Blue Sky. Mikino gets ‘em right before the awesome chorus of “The Dress” hits: “People hate you when you’re changing.” Like Wilco, Blonde Redhead is older, they’ve gone through some shit, and they’re not going to release music that sounds like the stuff they did when they were young and innocent in the same way that I’m not going to drive on acid again. Or, okay, do acid again. Taking 23 on its own terms, however, can be a rewarding experience, just like Sky. It’s my favorite pure dream-pop record since hell, I don’t know, Heaven or Las Vegas; just as obscured by clouds, occasionally inscrutable, shot through with a gossamer attractiveness precious enough to make certain cheeks pucker. That’s totally fine; I won’t hate on anyone who can’t handle too much sweetness and sincerity. And there’s plenty of that here, predominantly on “Silently,” with an indelible lavender-lilted melody seemingly drawn from a long-lost children’s fantasy, and a rising section that starts the second verse that just melts me every time I hear it, because I forget it’s coming. The withering, slowly dying vocodered double on “Heroine”: I’m not made of stone, here.
It’s not just that, though: 23 is an Alan Moulder record as much as it’s a Blonde Redhead record, and the Amadeo-led songs trend toward a more pounding, slickly galvanized sound. “Spring and By Summer Fall” and (after the 1:37 point) “Publisher” ratchet up the dissonance and increase the contrast between the dynamic shifts the band’s so good at maximixing. The insistent, gothic “SW” edges them both out, however, by virtue of its resemblance to psych-era Beatles: the lyrics are simple psychedelic life lessons like Paul ended Abbey Road with: “It's not, it's not what you give but it's what you kept.” The chorus’ references to lying in bed, and the idea that a dormant state is where the idea came from seems pure “I’m Only Sleeping,” and the jaunty brass break at 1:55 is a wonderful little callback to Magical Mystery Tour.
I haven’t even mentioned the Mike Mills-commissioned videos for the album: Melody McDaniel's piece for “23” is fine, but Mills' concept pieces are wonderful. Like a meaningful ending sequence to Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” (the face morphing thing), the clip for “The Dress” just confronts you head-on with sadness, but forces you to recognize its weirdness at the same time, and “Top Ranking” does the same with the latter and replaces the “sadness” with “gesture,” in the form of artist Miranda July’s series of poses. Like a great music video director, Mills does more than just make visual accompaniment for the sounds; he adds something to them of his own. Like when July’s frozen façade is broken by a blink, or a slight budge, Mills adds a visceral touch of the creepy slippage between motion and stock-stillness that the music already carries in bunches. And watching what happens slowly during “My Impure Hair,” and knowing pretty well what’s going on but sticking with it regardless, pays off visually in a way that perfectly reflects the music.
Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)/ LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver (DFA/EMI)
Either early this year or late last year, I can’t quite remember, when I was sitting with a bunch of people at a bar, the topic of which famous people we all looked like came up. I’ve never looked like anyone famous, not even slightly, but that didn’t stop a guy from saying Britt Daniel, which I’d gotten before (but with the caveat “Britt Daniel looks like you and Gary Busey had a kid”). Obviously, it’s the tall gawky blond guy thing (not, I tell you, not, the Stereogum indie rock hottie business), but I never really resist a comparison to that guy. I mean, talented songwriter and all, whatever (and yeah, I got about 250 emails after the Pitchfork review ran asking “uh did the keyboard player write the Spoon review?”), but, well, let’s explain it this way: about 6 or 7 years ago, a friend of mine (a girl) who was equally enamored with the band, said something to the effect of “you know why I like Spoon so much? Because it feels like he’s on my side.”
I only know him through his music, but I feel like Daniel is on my side as well. Like me, he takes small things incredibly seriously, dwells on slights forever, but worries about losing face by freaking out. A lot of people might see this as forcible cool or something equally not-great, which is fine. Personally, I see it as a particularly affable defense mechanism. I’m not afraid to say that I hear a lot of my oversensitivity reflected in Spoon’s music, a lot of my shy, distant pining and put-on, gangly hipness. Okay, dorkiness. I mean, I guess people think Daniel is an incredibly hot rockstar or whatever, but I look at him, and listen to his music, and see and hear barely contained nebbishness, hypersensitivity, and teenage weirdness held at bay. It’s probably just me, sure. But it’s too close to ignore.
“Don’t You Evah” isn’t even a Daniel composition, but it’s clear why he chose to record it. It’s about barely keeping your shit together, and not showing signs of weakness for fear of attracting the wrong people, like moths to a porch-light. “The Underdog” might be “Only the Good Die Young,” but “The Ghost of You Lingers” is the post-mortem. It’s on some Edgar Allan Poe shit re: tell-tale heart haunting, and “Japanese Cigarette Case” is about taking the easy way out, via le cheval blanc: “Bring a mirror to my face/ Let all my memories be gone.” It’s a tempting quick-fix, but it’s still a cop-out, and that’s why it sits right before the last two tracks, which deal with pining in much more complicated (not necessarily effective, mind you).
Okay, so more personal anecdote time. You’ve come this far, so stick with me for a bit—we’ve still got Sound of Silver, then you can go. I remember sitting in Phoenix, at my girlfriend’s house, this summer—she was painting in her studio, I was tapping away on the Ga Ga review for Pitchfork—and that moment came when I realized how crucial those last two songs were. I had headphones on, and there was no risk of anyone seeing me, so I just fucking rocked them out. And they’re two really easy songs to rock out, too: “Finer Feelings” lets me strut a little during the verse, and then on the second chorus, those huge chords come in. “Black Like Me” I can do either the piano or hollow-box, but either way, it’s pure power-ballad territory. And the thing was, what I didn’t realize at the time (and how could I have known, at all), was that I loved these songs for purely visceral, musicological reasons. Jams qua jams, as it were.
Then, well, we broke up, about 2 months later. Over the phone. More like broke in half. Like a twig, or a #2 pencil bridged between the index and pinky fingers when stress just suddenly overwhelms you. Crack. I won’t bore you with the details—it didn’t help that we lived a whole country apart, or that…okay, I’ll stop. And of course, there was the requisite week and a half of rolling around in my own misery, with my dog cocking his head to one side, then coming over and instinctively laying his head in my lap (if you don’t have a dog, get one). See, we were supposed to get married, we’d talked about children, I was going to write my dissertation luxuriating in Phoenix’s dry heat. And then, just fucking snap. Like how “Black Like Me” ends Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga: a swelling of sensations and emotions, higher and higher, and then just fucking snap, into silence out of nowhere, leaving me in a suspended state of emotional purgatory that I didn’t ever think I’d recover from. Something that had previously been very much alive was now dead, just like that.
I thought I’d found a love, someone who would change my heart. But no, of course not. What was I thinking? Also: what the fuck. But after a few weeks, everything started changing: I realized I’d stumbled into a new freedom, one that I not only had forgotten existed, but which I’d forgotten that I love. You know: that liminal state when someone’s in your sights, and you haven’t ruined anything yet by learning much about them—they'd just seen your picture on a friend’s digital camera and asked about you. That friend then texted you the next day because she's a great friend. It’s the sort of not serious, all-pheromone giddiness that’s resulted in about 1/3 of all pop songs being written, including “Finer Feelings.” It’s pure optimism, like you’re living a Mentos commercial, and everyone you see might just be (probably is) perfect: “Always out on some witch’s hunt/ For the one who never lets me want.” Here again, Spoon: wholly on my side.
Let’s backtrack a bit, though. Back to that fateful morning (you probably see where I’m going here). That phonecall woke me up, which was weird, because she’s three hours earlier than me. And about 10 minutes after answering it, no coffee or anything, everything was drastically different. A few months earlier, on the way out somewhere at night for some reason, I’d cued up LCD Soundsystem's “Someone Great” on my iPod in the car—the sort of appointment listening I know so many of us do—and just like the Spoon occasion from this summer, I marveled at the song like a curio. It was such an affecting presence at that point—the way that hazy siren sound recalled an alarm clock filtering through a lucid dream, that tapped-out digi-melody the most sentimental-sounding built-in ringtone—I’d already come to terms with the fact that Silver was James Murphy’s best work yet, by a considerable margin, but something about that song—the way the coldness and snotty mimickry had dropped out of his voice, leaving him sounding like a little boy—just fucking terrified me. I know it sounds like too perfect of a story, but it’s absolutely true. A life packed with AM radio feeding me the same sorts of stories for 30 years, and “Someone Great” finally clicked in my head: god forbid I ever feel like that. The relationship I was in at the time was my first even close to serious one, and it was very serious.
And then, of course, I lived the song. Like, eerily close to the actual lyrics. I remember the day after everything went down, I somehow made the connection in my mind with the song, and although I knew it would be too painful to listen to, I couldn’t get it out of my head with a crowbar if I tried. I know everyone in the world has been through the exact same situation, maybe more than once, but this was the first for me, and man was it fucking awful. Put the song on now, and just imagine that initial oscillation ringing in your ears for a week.
Sound of Silver is the point at which Murphy, more or less, embraced his inner Britt Daniel. He’s even in touch with the awkwardness, too. The title track might be the worst song on the record, but it’s also got one of the most touching lyrics: “makes you want to feel like a teenager/ Until you remember the feelings of/ A real-life emotional teenager/ Then you think again.” Murphy’s learned that it’s okay to grow up, and we’re the better for it.
For the Pitchfork year-end blurb I wrote about Murphy’s artistic M.O. that “it no longer seemed enough to coolly dissect how sensations form scenes; it became time to consider the fragile emotions of the people within them,” and I think that gets at what I really love about the album so much. There wasn’t much on the debut that I could really chew on, aside from a generalized, very dude-ish connection to how amazing music made me feel. Silver, though: yeah. The consensus on the best song seems to be “All My Friends,” which I’m fine with: I wrote about it earlier the same way that so many other Internet-types have, because it strikes at the core of those of us between, I’ll say, 25 and 40 who are forced to choose the straight world over the fun world like they’re forced into military service. I didn’t type then that the song reminds me of the first verse from R.E.M.’s “So Fast, So Numb,” but it does:
"Movin’ through rough waters motel boy,(Compared to this lyric from “Friends”)
And swimming in your sleep.
How could I be so blind, mis-sighted,
Not to see there’s something wounded deep"
"When you’re blowing 85 days in the middle of FranceEven the opening track, which lets Murphy let out some more of his Bowie/Eno fetish for a bit, deals with the idea that there comes a time when we realize that it’s not only okay to settle down—to “normalize,” it can be made hip, as well. I mean, the song could just have easily have been called “Do the Innocuous,” right? Even though he’s speaking a slightly different language, the line “played and plagued by the tourists again” that closes the first verse makes me think of Radiohead’s song that closes OK Computer, also about stopping amidst the non-stop and taking a deep breath:
Yeah, I know it gets tired
Only where are your friends tonight?"
"Sometimes I get over-charged, that’s when you see sparksAs about everyone with an Internet connection wrote this year, Silver is about growing up and settling down, but it’s a bit more than that, of course. It’s about coming to terms with one's place within a series of concentric scenes, which widen differently according to trajectrory: professional, geographic, etc. Matthew and Michael wrote typically thoughtful things about their favorite Silver track, “North American Scum.” I think Michael might be reading Murphy’s intention in the first verse (“establishing his credentials”) a bit too literally, maybe. In other words, I don't think Murphy’s disputing the received wisdom of Europeans through a “reasoned and informed decision” as much as he’s just being a total wise-ass faux-rube character: “yeah, we’ve seen old buildings and been on those fancy aircraft, too!” A small quibble on my part, sure.
They ask where the hell I’m going at 1000 feet per second
Hey man, slow down
Idiot, slow down"
More than anything, I love Murphy’s language choices on the record. He refers to a specific youthful American demographic in continent-speak: “North American Scum” of course a play on “Eurotrash.” But “Scum,” like Matthew mentions, should be taken as a term of endearment, and not just for New Yorkers. Despite living in a country tons larger than continental Europe—which Michael references—and being without the echo-chamber industry rags, North Americans have still managed to wrangle technology in such a way that geographic-specific subcultures can be, well, “normalized,” or transported and reimagined in, I don’t know, Bloomington, Indiana. I know that when Murphy says “Let’s go, North Americans,” he’s most likely referring to his people, where he’s from, but I prefer to think he’s including all of us. Us and them, if you will (oh, you will? Thanks!). We can all throw parties and get busted by the cops; fuck you, Europe!
Murphy hasn’t yet enamored himself to me in the way that Daniel has, nor would that necessarily dovetail with his chosen project. And, as someone who’s spent a grand total (so far) of about 96 hours in New York City, I find myself enjoying much of Silver at a bit of distance, appreciating the ease with which he slips into and out of rhythms, musical ideas, and character sketches. Man, and you know what? With what “Someone Great” did to me in early August, that’s totally, totally fine.
posted by marathonpacks at 1:06 AM
6 Comments:
Any plans to write up the year's biggest musical disappointments? I've started a piece like that twice, only to find myself rambling away because there were so many -- by bands I really like!
Yes, how about an 80,000 word treatise on the Arcade Fire relating them to Proust's "Plaisirs Et Les Jours," Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis," Fassbinder's "Marriage of Maria Braun," and some obscure 1940s Congolese pop B-side
hmmm...i'd have to think about what came out this year that really disappointed me. like, what i had high expectations for in the first place. arcade fire definitely ranks up there. what are yours? I'd like to read your piece!
Just scraping the surface with two bands that would normally vie for my #1 album spot: Fiery Furnaces and Liars. I expected both to rein in their more outre impulses, but not so much that the experimentalism disappeared altogether.
The Waldon Arts Center sits atop WFHB, not WIUX. Also, the Yeasayer album was put out on a new label called We Are Free and not Monitor, though WAF is owned by one of the Monitor partners. Also, come to our new years party!!!
I think you're being overly dismissive of the critics/fans who are dismissive of "Sky Blue Sky" (I know: bear with me). From a personal standpoint, not much of what Tweedy has done since the early days of Wilco has clicked with me. I think since "Being There" Tweedy has too often sacrificed songs for the sake of dense lyrics and arrangements (see: "YHF" & "Summerteeth"). To a lesser degree "Sky Blue Sky" suffers from those same problems: a lot of metaphors deadening the raw emotional impact of the material, and overly long noodling solos that don't serve the songs. I think the direct, more traditional songwriting of Tweedy's Uncle Tupelo & early Wilco material serve his artistic voice much better, and when he remembers that the best material on SBS shines through: "Hate It Here," "Either Way," "What Light." Plus, the subject matter has been done to death: writing an album about one's drug dependencies & personal problems that result thereof is strictly old hat. The fact that the vast majority of the songs are mid-tempo, sleepy numbers makes listening a little difficult, as well. A case could probably be made that since firing Jay Bennett, Tweedy doesn't have a legitimate foil in the band that artistically challenges him, which makes Wilco far less interesting, but that's probably a different discussion entirely.
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