Pretty Goes with Pretty

This Week's Soundtrack

2012-01-21T09:01:00-08:00

Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala
Les Paul and Mary Ford: Best of the Capitol Masters
Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
The War on Drugs: Slave Ambient
Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My Halo (2)
Sharon Van Etten: Epic
V/A: Play Music (Orange Sessions 2)
Feist: Let It Die, Metals, and The Reminder
Junip: Fields
The Radio Dept.: Clinging to a Scheme (2)
Pernice Brothers: Overcome by Happiness (2) and The World Won't End

If you've been reading the blog all week you could predict what I've been listening to: Kurt Vile, the War on Drugs, and the Pernice Brothers. Toss in a kids' album and some of this family's "comfort food" music (Les Paul, Feist, Radio Dept.), and you've sewn up the week. I've been in a very "indie rock" sort of mood lately—not a lot of the ambient and electronica that I was gorging on toward the end of the year. I'm sure the pendulum will swing back in the other direction soon. Since I'm still on a Pernice Brothers kick, here's another one:

Pernice Brothers: 7:30

I Want to Be with You So Bad

2012-01-19T20:12:59-08:00

I've been listening to so many sandy voiced songwriters doused in a morass of atmosphere that when the Pernice Brothers' "Wait to Stop" came up on shuffle the other day, the clarity of Pernice's creamy voice, perfect melody, and lush strings knocked me over as if I were hearing it for the first time.

Of course it wasn't my first time. The album from which it came, 1998's Overcome By Happiness, is among my all-time favorites. Though I don't listen to it with as much frequency these days, I must have played it monthly, weekly, daily (along with Joe Pernice's prior effort, the Scud Mountain Boys' Massachussetts) for about five years straight. Massachussetts seems to have retained a touch more glow of acclaim all these years later, but Overcome By Happiness is a pop masterpiece.

I've been singing "Wait to Stop" to myself ever since hearing it this week. My wife noticed me singing it while I was doing the dishes last night and she asked, "Why don't you listen to this kind of music anymore?" It's a good question! My answer being... I don't know, is anyone making great yet simple pop as good as this right now? Overcome by Happiness is like a perfect soufflé—its ingredients are no mystery, but the execution is unparalleled.

Pernice Brothers: Wait To Stop

Monkey Song aka Cattle Call

2012-01-18T06:04:00-08:00

A couple of vintage Eddy Arnold tracks appear on the playlist my wife and I have devised for Cooper (i.e. mostly oldies that may as well be made for kids). He hadn't really acknowledged them before, until last week when I discerned that his request for "monkey song" was actually Arnold's "The Cattle Call."

Eddy Arnold: The Cattle Call

Here's a clip of Arnold performing the song for a television show back in 1956, followed by a few bonus clips just for the hell of it.

Sing to Me Without Opening Your Mouth All That Much

2012-01-17T06:04:00-08:00

Prior to hearing Smoke Ring for My Halo in full, the two Kurt Vile songs I came across via numerous blogs were “In My Time” and “Jesus Freaks.” Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the two most upbeat tracks on the album, and the two most focused. The majority of the rest of Smoke Ring depicts Vile as a smart but apathetic songwriter. Writing for Coke Machine Glow, Christopher Alexander said “Kurt Vile’s music sounds like it was made entirely from bed on Sunday mornings,” which I think is a pretty vivid portrayal of the mood of this record.

I picked up Smoke Ring for My Halo three or four weeks ago now, but put off spending a lot of time with it because I got the War on Drugs’ Slave Ambient at the same time; since the two records share a certain degree of aesthetic similarities, I wanted to take them in one at a time and not confuse or bias my ears. Vile is a former member of the War on Drugs, a fact that is coincidental to my getting both records at the same time. That band’s singer, Adam Granduciel, has certain similarities to Vile—they both follow in a vocal lineage that descends from Bob Dylan and passes through Bruce Springsteen, among others. The War on Drugs have a bigger sound (chalk it up to being a full band and not a solo artist?), but there is still an element of numbness in both artists’ music.

A better contemporary comparison for Vile might be Cass McCombs. Many of Vile's songs are repetitive, a little strange, and morose, not unlike McCombs' pitch-dark songs (McCombs would win a competition for those descriptors, however). All of these songwriters, each in their own way, proffer a kind of detachment in their songs.

Is this a full-blown trend among contemporary (male) songwriters? Dylan's delivery by way of a Gen X slacker attitude, filtered through a 21st century glaze? (And it does seem to be a guy thing; some of the best or most renowned female songwriters of recent note—St. Vincent, Feist, Sharon Van Etten—are all writing much more direct, powerful, often virtuosic material. It's a flip from the past clichés of the tortured man and the forlorn girl.)

Vile, McCombs, and Granduciel are all part of a traditional songwriters' lineage. It's easy to hear varying degrees of Dylan, Cohen, Springsteen, (early) R.E.M., and (early) Elliott Smith, among others, in their songs. But the new wrinkle for this group of contemporary songwriters is that they seem to reflexively put the listener at arm's length—obscuring songs through production techniques, drowsy vocals, obtuse (post-Stipe?) lyrics. We've moved past the protests of the 60s (Dylan, Ochs), the blown-up drama of the 70s (John, Joel), the middle-class solidarity of the 80s (Springsteen, Mellencamp), the disillusionment and personal struggles of the 90s (Cobain, Smith), into the Age of Terror and information overload of the new century, where a popular response to The Way We Live Now is introversion, or at best an avoidance of speaking for anyone but oneself. There are few, if any, bold statements through song anymore. (Alternatively, you could call this a subset of a larger trend in [indie?] music that goes beyond guy-with-guitar songwriters and also includes a great deal of shoegaze-influenced atmosphere-rock of the last few years.)

Which is not to say there is necessarily some essential thing missing from Vile and McCombs' songs. (It's worth noting that McCombs, Vile, and the War on Drugs all made songs that appeared on my list of favorite tracks of 2011; McCombs' "County Line" is probably among my top three favorites, though I didn't care much for the rest of the album from which it came.) McCombs and Vile are both smart, literate songwriters, even if their songs rarely reveal true passion—that is, some kind of emotion or sense of urgency that, borrowing from Alexander's line above, would require them to get out of bed. That seems to be intentional on their part: it's not that they lack passion, but rather that the suppression of passion is part of their MO. Take Vile's "Society is My Friend," at the center of Smoke Ring—also the song that most reminded me of McCombs and kicked off this whole train of thought. Like a lot of McCombs' songs, it is long, repetitive, and filled with vivid if strange imagery ("Society is my friend / he makes me lie down in a cool bloodbath"). Vile tells of how his "friend" took his woman from him—"He stole my old lady, saying... kiss me with your mouth without closing it all that much." Society is an entity that is beautiful and dangerous and impossible to fight:

Society is all around
Aw, hear the beautiful sound
Of all the high-pitched squeals
Ecstatic brilliance at its finest
That's my friend
Society is all around
It takes me down

Over five and a half minutes Vile oozes his lyrics amid a swirl of music that nearly consumes him. He's not fighting something, he's allowing it happen around him. Life can be hard, think I'll stay in bed.

Kurt Vile: Society Is My Friend

Train Your Ears in This Direction

2012-01-16T06:05:00-08:00

There are a lot of reasons to like the Dirty Three—the evocative mood their songs call up, the grandeur of their crescendos, Warren Ellis's rustic and beautiful violin. I like them for all those reasons too; those are the things I enjoy about the trio when I'm not thinking too hard on it, just letting their songs fill the air around me.

I like them for a different reason when I take the time to concentrate on their music. And that reason is Mick Turner. Turner is an unassuming player and most definitely not the member of the Dirty Three who is in the spotlight. But train your ears on his playing and you'll hear a style that describes few others.

Their latest track, "Rising Below," from the forthcoming Toward the Low Sun, is a good example. It hardly features Turner, but that's why it's such a good illustration of Turner's role in the group. It's easy to be taken with Ellis's overlapping violin lines or Jim White's shuffling, spirited drumming. But underneath it all is Turner. The sound of the group is all the more unique for Turner's taking on a role that might otherwise be held by a bassist, establishing a bridge between the drummer and the soloist and giving them both something to latch onto. Unlike a bass player locking into a drummer's kick, though, Turner's fragile, erratic playing mirrors White's skittering snare.

More wonderous to me are the actual notes Turner sprinkles out. He plays as if his fingers refuse to actually stay on the fretboard for more than a second at a time. He doesn't strum or pick his strings so much as let stray notes spill out of his guitar. The order in which the sounds come out of his guitar seems incidental but not accidental. Every note fits, no matter how he places them.

The Dirty Three: Rising Below

This Week's Soundtrack

2012-01-14T09:54:00-08:00

Belle & Sebastian: The Life Pursuit
The Radio Dept.: Clinging to a Scheme (2) and Lesser Matters
Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets
V/A: Play Music (Orange Session 2)
Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for my Halo (5)
Julia Holter: Tragedy
Vampire Weekend: Contra
The Shins: Wincing the Night Away and Oh, Inverted World
The War on Drugs: Slave Ambient
V/A: Rushmore OST
Nick Drake: Pink Moon

Obviously a lot of time spent listening to Kurt Vile this week—another newish discovery for me, via various end of year lists last month. I'll have more on that album next week. The new Shins song got me listening to old Shins songs (as you might have surmised from yesterday's post), and the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie got me and some friends talking about the soundtracks to his films—always uniformly excellent soundtracks, but I think Rushmore's is my favorite.

Chad & Jeremy: A Summer Song

I Thought It Was Called "Similar Song" but It's "Simple Song"

2012-01-13T06:10:00-08:00

Isn't it nice to have a new Shins song in the world? They've been gone so long I think they may have even lost the sting of being an indie rock punchline (they never deserved it). That is, he, not they. James Mercer is the only original member left. If there was any question as to how the drastic lineup change would affect the group's sound, "Simple Song" answers with a resounding "not really." The only real difference I can discern is in the drumming—Janet Weiss, who sits in for this track, is a more forceful player than Jesse Sandoval, and production-wise her drums simply sound better.

But those are minor differences, really. This is a Shins song, just like all the others. Mercer is a consistently compelling songwriter, which is a positive way of saying he is predictable. He falls into a similar category as Rufus Wainwright, Bjork, and Britt Daniel of Spoon, among many others: his menu of rhythms and melodies is limited, but something about the quality of his voice and the effortlessness of his playing keeps that from mattering. "Simple Song" is like a Frankenstein's monster of past Shins songs: the melody of the chorus is an echo of the chorus from "Gone for Good" (itself a peppier, higher octave mold of the melody from the bridge to "Young Pilgrims"), and the girl-group rhythm was done before on "Turn on Me" and "Phantom Limb."

Here's the thing though: to say Mercer has done it before is not (necessarily) to say he's done it better. Or worse! Is it possible to find someone who has never heard the Shins before and do a Pepsi Challenge? It's just as likely that they'd say "Simple Song" is their favorite as "Turn on Me" or "Gone for Good." And why not? It's a similar song, but it's great song. Actually, it's a terrific song.

Simple Song by The Shins

Song in the Form of a Cloud

2012-01-12T06:02:00-08:00

"Marienbad," from Julia Holter's upcoming album Ekstasis, picks up where "Goddess Eyes," from 2011's Tragedy, left off. On Tragedy, "Goddess Eyes" is an accessible oasis on an otherwise pretty abstract record. "Marienbad" employs a similar accessibility—Holter's voice is the anchor to the track, overlaid on itself innumerable times. Of course "accessible" should be taken with a grain of salt. The song evolves as it goes, adding counter-melodies, percussion, and more as it travels over its 5:40 running time. For all its added density it never scales to epic heights; it's more amorphous than that. The song is a shape-shifter, full of lovely melodies that seem just slightly obscured in a mist, just hard enough to decipher that you can't quite sing along. By the end of the track you feel as if it's pulled you somewhere new, without ever having touched you.

Julia Holter - Marienbad by RVNG Intl.

Incidentally, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the video for "Marienbad" was created by artist Rick Bahto, someone I knew back in my Arizona days (read: over a decade ago) and who has come a long way since then. (I don't think he was even of drinking age back then... he used to come into the artspace/punk club I ran.) The footage in the video is multiple projections running over each other, with no edits or manipulations.

Seriously, the War on Drugs are Only a Few Hooks Shy, If They Want It

2012-01-10T07:59:00-08:00

It's easy to hear some immediate surface similarties between War on Drugs singer Adam Granduciel's voice and that of Tom Petty or Bob Dylan, but for me that resonance has since evolved into a weird personal nostalgia for Dire Straits. My dad loved Dire Straits, and especially Brothers in Arms, so this is a welcome reference point for me (as opposed to, say, all the Steely Danisms happening elsewhere in the indie scene). Anyway, it's not just a personal thing. I mean, really, they're not that far away from the next "Walk of Life," are they?

In This Analogy Chocolate is Good Songwriting and Peanut Butter is Droning Synths

2012-01-09T06:34:00-08:00

Every instrument in the War on Drugs’ music has its assignment, no matter the song. (Though, interestingly, no member of the band is resigned to a specific instrument.) The drums are metronomic—no frills, no fills. The keyboards drone. The “No Rain”-inspired lead guitar solos and solos and solos. Despite (or because of) their rigidly defined roles, none of these elements are at the forefront of Slave Ambient. Rather, it's the rootsy presence of leader Adam Granduciel, whose Americana attitude meshes with the lite psyche of the rest of the band way more seamlessly than it has any right to. This whole record is pure chocolate and peanut butter—too down home to be Talk Talk, too monochromatic to be Wilco.

The whole record is equal parts familiar and inspired. In this age of washed out indie-ambient acts, it’s a wonder that the band is able to balance the two elements of its sound so deftly. Granduciel’s voice is high in the mix, not doused in (too much) reverb; his words are intelligible, his personality is anything but effaced. I’m reminded more of Tom Petty or Mark Knopfler than Kevin Shields or Panda Bear. (That I find this refreshing is, I think, an indictment of rock music in 2011/12.)

No, seriously, enough with all the comparisons to other bands. Slave Ambient is a good record. I was unmoved by it on the first few listens but have nevertheless been induced to return to it over and over. It's a repetitive listen—the rhythms are steady within the space of each track, there are few choruses, no breakdowns. The songs become part of a larger tapestry; the dynamics are found not from verse to verse but song to song.

The reckoning point of the album comes at the middle. This is where you know whether or not you’re on board with the War on Drugs or not. It starts with the locomotive “Your Love is Calling My Name,” which melts into the languid instrumental “The Animator” and then ascends to the almost-anthemic “Come to the City,” finally ending with the brief comedown of “Come for It.” The string of songs boosts Slave Ambient to another plane. I hesitate to say it’s epic—so much about this record is level, not grand; numb, not raw—but it belies a sense of purpose to these songs. Granduciel is not just enshrouding himself in mood and calling it art. He’s making music.

The War on Drugs: Your Love Is Calling My Name