EDITOR'S NOTE

Dear Reader,

Please forgive my laziness since Thanksgiving. My band Spencer McGillicutty is wrapping up the mixing on our forthcoming debut album and we are designing and packaging it ourselves, which has required more or less all of my time and focus. It seems that my mind cannot simultaneously function creatively and critically. Hopefully I will regain my listening abilities soon, so please do keep checking back if you feel so inclined.

Thanks,
Ryan

Portrait of the Artist

Animal Collective

For some reason, my brother and I have a strange fixation with the concept of "flipping out." I think it's just that the sudden transition from a becalmed, neutral state to hyperactive agitation strikes us as utterly hilarious.
Perhaps the best musical embodiment of our platonic ideal of flipping out is NYC's Animal Collective. Sure, there are other bands that spend more time being angular and spastic. But Animal Collective split their time between frenetic high-energy outbursts and calm, pastoral fireside jams. The key is the contrast - a sudden burst of energy is all the more thrilling if the listener has just been lulled into a blissful calm.
They've been around for the better part of the decade and have put out nary a dull release, but they've really come into their own with their last two albums - Sung Tongs and Feels. 2003's Here Comes the Indian is also highly rewarding - but the brush is much thicker and the melodies better hidden. Sung Tongs was a watershed because it packed the explosive moments into much more compact canisters and brought their uncanny knack for bizarrely catchy melodies to the fore. "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "We Tigers" are absolutely frothing with energy and mind-numbing catchiness, while still committed to restless experimentation and tribal drum-circle work-outs. Longer tunes like "Winter's Love" and "Visiting Friends" take the same experimental nerve and understate and extend it, providing the album with texture and the listener with a much needed breather.
Last year's Feels wove the strangeness and the understatement back together into a more seamless whole. Opener "Did You See the Words" contains one of their most absurdly catchy hooks, but unfolds slowly with a constant rhythm. "Banshee Beat" builds so kinetically that they are able to make the pay-off feel ten times bigger than the same climax would in any other song.
When I saw them live, they were a different animal (collectively), emphasizing the noisier and harsher aspects of their work. Though I was disappointed not to hear the short outburst of "Who Could Win A Rabbit," their rabid tenacity won me over, and I became all the more excited to see where their wandering muses would lead them next.

MP3: Who Could Win A Rabbit

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Buy Sung Tongs

Album Review

Joanna Newsom
Ys
Drag City, 2006

Usually, the use of the word "poetic" in a music review is lazy and erroneous; it's often tossed haphazardly at some rhymed philosophizing that might sound fine sung, but wouldn't even make it into a college lit journal as a poem. Songs carry different expectations than poems, and they communicate on an entirely different level, utilizing a unique vocabulary. For that reason, even some great lyrics would make lousy poems, and an effort to equate the two art forms is usually just a misconceived attempt to say that the lyrics are good.
Delightfully, folk harpist Joanna Newsom has provided critics with a remarkable exception to this rule. In the context of her new album Ys (as well as her debut The Milk-Eyed Mender), "poetic" is not only an acceptable but a necessary term. Her lyrics are stunning, and the liner notes to the new album make for an enjoyable read on their own merit. Ys (pronounced "ease") is a dazzlingly ambitious five-song, fifty-five minute tour de force. Though some fans of The Milk-Eyed Mender might initially be disappointed that there aren't any short, compact songs in the style of the debut, Ys' imagination, breadth, emotional depth, and craftsmanship are absolutely staggering. Newsom's panoramic scope on the opener "Emily" and the nearly seventeen minute long "Only Skin" give the impression that everything is happening at once, but she still manages to put enough focus on minute details to draw the listener directly into the fascinating world of the songs. She wastes little time unleashing her poetic proclivity, setting the scene in "Emily" with vivid language:

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight

Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow
Down into the bones of the birches
And the spires of the churches
Jutting out from the shadows

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These sort of visceral nature images recur frequently throughout the album, and serve to create its landscape. Thematically, Newsom seems preoccupied with death and wonder in equal measure. Sometimes she addresses both at once, such as in "Emily" when she refers to "joy landlocked in bodies that don't keep" or in "Only Skin" when she observes that "Life is thundering blissful towards death/ In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness." But equally important to the thematic content of her verses is the beautiful sound of the words, which often seem to spill out of her mouth of their own inertia. She is often very direct, but she is not afraid to use uncommon or archaic words (inchoate, hydrocephalitic, balletial) or make mythological references ("scrap of sassafras, eh Sysyphus?"). But whereas this can make some songwriters (say, Colin Meloy) sound belabored or stodgy, it positively works to Newsom's advantage because of the pure aural stimulation that the words instigate. Her verses ebb and flow, often seeming to follow the pace set by her harp playing. When her plucking becomes more urgent, the lyrics follow suit - the rhymes become more frequent and energetic and the imagery becomes more playful and abstract. Then suddenly, after pulling you in with enchanting imagery and playful word-weaving, she will suddenly pull back and lay bare some simple, honest emotion that will hit you with overwhelming force.
And, most remarkably of all, these songs are not just poems set to music, but fully function as songs as well. Newsom's voice, while the biggest point of contention among her detractors, is extremely expressive and entirely unique. It squeaks and breaks much less frequently here than it did on The Milk-Eyed Mender, but it is still an acquired taste. Sometimes described as sounding like a cross between an old woman and a young child, it could pass for an oddity from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music; it is hard to believe that it actually comes from the throat of a fully adorable 24 year-old woman. For many people this aspect feels alienating, but repeated listens reveal it's hidden beauty. The fact that Newsom's stunning poetry sounds like it's coming from a toothless Appalachian folksinger makes it all the more stunning and strange. It also gives the album a timeless quality - if I had never heard of Joanna Newsom I could have believed that it was a lost classic from the 1960s British folk revival. What's more, it would have been better than any of the great albums that actually did belong to that movement.

Though the songs are incredible by themselves, it certainly doesn't hurt that Newsom enlisted a versatile all-star production cast for the project. The songs were recorded by Steve Albini, mixed by Jim O'Rourke, and produced by Van Dyke Parks. Parks also wrote some fantastic orchestral arrangements, which are featured on every song except for "Sawdust and Diamonds." The strings deftly follow Newsom's wandering muse through her shape-shifting compositions, swooping like birds from the branches and steeples one moment and then swelling dramatically the next. This is a dramatic shift from the almost entirely solo performance of her debut, but it suits this new batch of songs perfectly. It does mean, however, that there is a lot going on at any given moment, and it does take several listens to begin to become accustomed to the winding, thorny paths the songs lead you down. It's a magical journey, though, and it only becomes more bounteous and rewarding the more you explore it.

In these fast-paced days of blogs and blurbs, some of the music that I am initially excited about can become stale surprisingly quickly. This makes an album like Ys feel like a small miracle - exquisitely crafted, passionately performed, and lovingly perfected - it is a timeless work, built to last. This is an album that I know will come to rest in my "special occasion" bin along with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I See A Darkness, and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, nestled lovingly there until some night when, once again, I am ready to experience something remarkable.

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Rating : Awesome (10)

MP3: Emily

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Buy Ys

Excellent Fansite With Lyrics

From The Vaults

You Can't Hide Your Love Forever
Orange Juice
Polydor, 1982

Joe Strummer once said that his band's role was to rebuild everything that the Sex Pistols tore down. The Clash certainly did this admirably, but they were not the only band who undertook the endeavor. The late 70s and early 80s found a whole slew of bands taking the punk aesthetic in different directions.
One of the most engaging (and obscure) of these acts was Glasgow's Orange Juice. As the title of their debut album You Can't Hide Your Love Forever clearly implied, they were interested in stripping punk of it's nihilistic edge and injecting it with a dose of human vulnerability and emotion. Since, at his heart, punk was always actually more about "outsiderness" than toughness, this worked remarkably well. It's a formula that has been reapplied several times, perhaps most notably by Glasgow's current reigning kings and queens of melancholy - Belle and Sebastian. B&S's Stuart Murdoch cited this Orange Juice effort among his top 10 favorite albums, and his band's single "Legal Man" directly name check's the OJ tune "L.O.V.E. Love."
But indie cred aside, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever is a thoroughly enjoyable listen top to bottom. It pits shambling (and very white) R&B and Soul rhythms against Edwynn Collins' inimitable warble of a voice. The sound is very much like New Wave, but without all of the icy remove and with a cheeky sense of humor. The second track, "Untitled Melody," slyly references the Righteous Brothers classic ("Unchained Melody") and features the adorably clever turn of a phrase, "I need you more or less/You need me more and more."
The highlight for me, though, is the bouncy, almost bluesy "Consolation Prize." You can almost hear Collins smiling to himself as he sings "I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn's/I wore it hoping to impress/So frightfully camp, it made you laugh/Tomorrow I'll buy myself a dress." But the self-deprecation goes from charming to poignant when he lays bare the heart of the matter, repeating "I'll never be man enough for you" over a closing guitar jam that would be copped countless times by indie rockers over the years. But they can't hide their influences forever - if this album ever gets a damn reissue in this country, indie kids far and wide are sure to pick up on Orange Juice.

MP3: Consolation Prize

Portrait of the Artist

Pavement

It was inevitable. Sooner or later, I was going to have to get around to writing about my personal favorite band of all time. And, hot off last week's excellent Wowee Zowee reissue, now seems as good a time as any.
As is usually the case with personal favorites, a major component of my love for Pavement is nostalgic. Their fantastic sophomore full-length Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the first indie album I ever bought. I looked into it on the recommendation of Trey Ansastasio of Phish, of all people (in a magazine interview, not in person). But really, that fact traces my evolution from jam fan to indie kid pretty well. Crooked Rain opened my eyes to a brave new world of music, and it remains one of my absolute favorites to this day - like, top three material, seriously.
From the messy opening crash of "Silent Kid," I knew I was in for something different, but what kept me coming back to the album was how goll-darn fun it is. It's as catchy as anything in the annals of the indie oeuvre, and it rocks with a loose abandon that is positively addicting. I spent several evenings of my post-high school, pre-college life (about three months) jumping around my room to "Unfair" - perhaps the earliest documented instance of me totally rocking out. When I read that "Stop Breathing" was “about tennis, in a way, like imagining tennis as an emotional battleground,” I realized that Stephen Malkmus' cryptic lyrics had some real thought behind them, and were not just clever wordplay and oblique references.
And best of all, I soon discovered that Pavement had four other great albums, and plenty of brilliant non-LP material to boot! Slanted and Enchanted, their first full-length, is the classic watershed album and shows them at their most gloriously stripped-down and lo-fi.
Their third album Wowee Zowee (recently reissued with a mess of bonus tracks and extras) was their White Album - a glorious mess of an LP that threw goofy genre-experiments and filler together with some of their all-time best A-side material. For a band whose shortcomings were always an essential part of their charm, this approach proved surprisingly effective, and Wowee has become many fans' favorite Pavement disc. It's highlight is the elegant "Grounded," on which Malkmus lets his intuitive melodic sense leak into his guitar and offers some of his most engaging wordplay. In the first verse he sings, "And in the parking lot/Is the sedan he bought/He never, never complains when it's hot." The way Malkmus slurs the words "sedan-he-bought-he" makes it sound like he's saying "anybody" - just one example of him obscuring lyrical signifiers by playing with the listener's auditory perceptions.
The band's last two albums, Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight have been rightfully designated "not quite as good as the first three" - they admittedly don't have quite the same adventurous spirit. But they are still brilliant works of intelligent indie rock, and only suffer slightly in comparison to the band's epochal masterpieces.
Perhaps their most underrated disc is Westing (By Musket and Sextant), a collection of recordings by Malkmus and Spiral Stairs (other guitarist/vocalist Scott Kannberg) that predate Slanted and Enchanted. This compilation finds Pavement at their roughest, rawest, and most unhinged, which is an absolute delight for fans. It not only shows their incredible potential, but also shows Pavement creating uncompromisingly great music on their own terms, even at the larval stage.
Luckily for fans, Pavement's label, Matador, is in the process of re-issuing all of their albums in extensive double-CD packages that collect b-sides, outtakes, radio sessions, and live recordings from each album's respective era. The breadth and depth of the material is staggering , and the incredible quality of the previously unreleased songs handily refutes the misconception that they were lazy slackers that just lucky. The fact that the best and most consistent band of the nineties was one that was notorious for almost never practicing is one of the great incongruencies of the decade. I mean, damn. That is so indie.

MP3: Grounded

Buy Wowie Zowie: Sordid Sentinel Edition

Buy Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins

Public Image

Finding Favorite Songs in the Strangest Places

I spend most of my work days trolling the internet, scavenging for new music to love. Between allmusic.com, Pitchfork Media, and the hundreds of blogs floating around out there, I find plenty of sources to keep me busy for the better part of an 8 hour day (ahem). But no matter how much time I spend seeking, there are always songs that manage to catch me by surprise when my guard is down. This rarely happens on the radio these days (with the exception of 89.3 The Current or the oldies station), but there are many other pop cultural nooks and crannies in which that New Favorite Song can hide.
This weekend I saw Steve Martin's classic comedy The Jerk for the first time. I had heard great things about it, of course, but I was still amazed by how laugh-out-loud hilarious it actually was. But the best part of all was that, in the midst of all the spastic slapstick and so-dumb-it's-funny dialogue, there was a very sweet, almost-earnest Love-Song-On-The-Beach scene. Had it been hammed up it could have just been throwaway camp, but Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters played it straight and it was as lovely as it was funny. The song is Billy Rose and Lee David's "Tonight You Belong To Me," and I can't imagine hearing another version of it that I like more. Steve Martin proves to be a proficient ukulele player, and the hushed, tender harmonizing between the two actors is downright twee. If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil the ending (check the You Tube link below), but it is hilarious in the very sweetest of ways. I've re-watched this scene several times, and it is a revelation that you don't have to watch an "art comedy" to find a beautiful moment that can make you laugh.

MP3: Tonight You Belong To Me

You Tube: Scene From the Jerk

Song of the Week

"Waterloo Sunset"
The Kinks

The Kinks were the archetypal "Excellent British Band That Was Too Bloody British To Make It In America." Their ruminations on British life and culture at once criticized and glorified the culture they lived in, and they set the stage for such great bands as The Jam, The Smiths, and Blur. Their peak period from 1966-1970 was almost as impressive as the golden years of The Rolling Stones or The Beach Boys, and "Waterloo Sunset" was the crown jewel. It is one of the most unabashedly gorgeous pop songs ever recorded, and it is also Ray Davies' most effective lyrical portrait. It depicts a lonely introvert overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of London and the prospect of making friends who only makes things worse for himself by staying in every night. However, he is comforted by gazing out his window at the sunset over Waterloo Bridge (which, incidentally, was all the beauty Monet needed for awhile as well). The song is never condescending, and the bleary-eyed melancholy of the melody and the backing vocals is every bit as beautiful as the sunset itself. After Christmas, I'm moving to London to work abroad for 6 months, and I will only know two people in the entire country. Naturally, this will be my anthem.

MP3: Waterloo Sunset

Buy Something Else by The Kinks

From The Vaults

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Neutral Milk Hotel
Merge, 1998

If you'll excuse me for a moment, I am going to set aside all journalistic integrity and level-mindedness and reduce myself to a puddle of unabashed praise:
This is my favorite album of all time.
Sure, if I am listening to Blonde on Blonde, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, or I See a Darkness, I might be temporarily convinced otherwise. But it's a trick. It's Aeroplane every time.
This should come as no surprise to other indie fanatics - Jeff Mangum's masterpiece is one of the most beloved indie records of all time, and it gains new followers every year. It has its detractors, but they seem limited to those who don't care for Mangum's singing voice and limited vocal capabilities. It hardly seems necessary to point out the fact that he is clearly choosing to sing out of his range and that the results are uniquely affecting, or that this dude named Bob Dylan abolished the necessity of polished vocals back in the 60s.
But before I get carried away about Mangum's performance and songwriting, let me mention the rest of the band (who are, sadly, usually ignored). Jeremy Barnes' impassioned drumming makes uptempo numbers like "King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. 2 & 3," "Holland, 1945," and "Ghost" surge with an overwhelming punk-like energy. Scott Spillane's horn arrangements and the brass section's woozy, half-polished contributions add a surreal marching-band flair that elevates the album's emotional content to surprising heights whenever Mangum's taken a song as far as he could with words. The ghostly wails of Julian Koster's singing saw lend a singular spectral beauty to the vaguely Irish folk-like "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea."
Countless other inventive instrumental touches also add depth and texture to Mangum's songs, which are surreal, disturbing, breathtakingly beautiful, and hauntingly sad. He sings his impressionistic lyrics like someone in a fevered dream, and the burning passion in his voice adds emotional heft to the most unlikely of lyrical phrases. Perhaps what elevates this album above the others of its decade (and, for me, of all time) is the palpable inspiration and desperation behind it - no matter what Mangum is saying, it feels like his words are on fire and he can't get them out of his mouth fast enough.
I don't want too say to much about his lyrics, because I think they are best interpreted individually, but I found it helpful to learn that the album was inspired in part by The Diary of Anne Frank. It never addresses the subject directly, but rather creates its own unique world in which boundaries of time and place are blurred. Mangum takes the idea of living in a world where atrocities can happen and uses it to create a singular, twisted, frightening, and beautiful new reality. In a way, approaching In the Aeroplane Over the Sea reminds me of childhood. It is like discovering the strangeness of the world for the first time - sex is bizarre and disturbing, death is unbelievable and inescapable, and life and love feel so undeniably, overwhelmingly real that you could burst at any moment.
And though the lyrics are largely impressionistic and surreal, it would be misleading to suggest that they are completely obtuse. The album's closer "Two Headed Boy, Pt. 2" is gut-wrenchingly sad, and not just because of the way it sounds. Mangum concludes the album on a particularly direct note, singing:

Two Headed Boy,
She is all you could need
She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires
And retire to sheets warm and clean
But don't hate her when she gets up to leave.

I find myself completely relating to him, and suddenly the strange and terrifying world that Mangum has created has become my own. If you ever get to this point with the album, you will never be able to turn back.
After Mangum delivers that final line, you can hear him set down his guitar and walk away from the microphone. The fact that he has never recorded or performed another song since has added a symbolic weight to this final gesture; it seems that perhaps Mangum has truly said all that he has to say. Normally I would be upset about this - a favorite band calling it quits. But I hardly even consider Neutral Milk Hotel a band anymore. They're more than that. They're something else.

MP3: Holland, 1945

Buy In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Artist Website

Public Image

VOTE

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

MP3: Radiohead - Electioneering

Buy OK Computer

Artist Website

Song of the Week

"New Partner"
Palace Music

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Congratulations to Will Oldham, who has now become the first artist I have blogged about more than once. This track, however, is from his pre-Bonnie "Prince" Billy days, when he was still calling himself Palace Music. "New Partner" reminds me why Oldham is probably my favorite songwriter going. He takes a spare, bare-bones lyrical and musical structure and then imbues it with ineffable emotion. He harmonizes roughly on the chorus, his wooly voice breaking gently at the top of his range. For some reason this song reminds me of Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" (the short story...I haven't seen the film yet). Maybe it's the combination of tenderness and roughness, the guilt and atonement alluded to in the lyrics, and the bittersweet feeling Oldham seems to express over having a "new partner." But like a great short story writer, Oldham creates an emotional experience that cannot be described with other words. You have to hear it.

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MP3: New Partner

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Buy Viva Last Blues

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Artist Website

Album Review

Peter Bjorn and John
Writer's Block
Wichita, 2006

It seems that Sweden is becoming the new Glasgow in terms of cranking out endearing indie pop - just within the last two years we have seen some extremely fun and promising records from the likes of Jens Lekman, I'm From Barcelona (it's a lie - they're Swedish), and El Perro Del Mar. To this prominent list of bands that are expanding their homeland's musical legacy beyond ABBA, Ace of Base, and Yngwie Malmsteen, please welcome Peter Bjorn and John! Actually, Writer's Block is the trio's third album, but it's got all of the freshness and charm of an exciting debut. However, repeated listening reveals a level of craftsmanship and attention to detail that betrays the band's more veteran status.
The group's greatest achievement, though, is their ability to walk the tightrope between coolness and sincerity. The superb single "Young Folks" illustrates this perfectly - it's an innocent song about being enthralled in conversation with a promising member of the opposite sex. Riding a sleek bass line and a tight drumbeat, the tune holds its sentiment at enough of a distance to keep it from getting cloying, but it never feels ironic or insincere either. A prominent whistling hook seals the deal, sounding like Peter (or Bjorn or John) whistling to himself on his way home, almost carefree after the exciting encounter, but with just a hint of the trepidation and melancholy that accompanies the possibility of new commitment. By the time he gets home, he's got one of the year's best pop songs on his hands.
At first, some of the other material seems to pale in comparison to this gem, but it really just takes a little more patience. After a few listens, you're just as likely to find the hook from one of the other songs rattling around inside your head. "Objects Of My Affection" kicks off the album (after the introductory non-song track "Writer's Block") with sweeping confidence. It's driven by persistent, rapidly strummed guitars, and its constant inertia builds up tension before dropping into the effortless coolness of "Young Folks." "Amsterdam" also features a prominent whistling hook (odd that they sequenced both whistling tunes right in a row), but is more of a synth-driven, eighties-inspired tune. "Paris 2004" is a slice of sparkling folk pop that gives the album's sound some nice variety. "Let's Call It Off" could be early Beatles in terms of songcraft, but it is filtered through the rich reverb-heavy sound that Peter Bjorn and John have mastered with this album.
The trio's only misstep, unfortunately, comes at the very end - it seems like they couldn't quite decide on a closer. Individually, either the appropriately cinematic grandeur of "Roll The Credits" or the droning acoustic guitar ballad "Poor Cow" would have made for a fine last chapter of Writer's Block. But back-to-back, the repetitive melodies of the songs and the lack of hook power become underwhelming. Still, this little sequencing problem is only a minor blemish on the face of this beautifully crafted pop album. And if Peter Bjorn and John have more where this came from (and don't actually suffer from writer's block), they are definitely a group worth keeping close tabs on.

Rating: Excellent (8)

MP3: Young Folks

Buy Writer's Block

Artist Website

Live Awesomeness

Islands
October 28, 2006
First Avenue, Minneapolis

Islands made their second trip to First Ave. within a few months Saturday night, and I was glad to catch them again. They are a fun band to see live and their debut Return to the Sea just may be the indie pop album of the year. We were treated to a smattering of promising new songs and a nice cover of The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," but they didn't play "Humans!" What the hell?
Oh, well. It was a solid show. Here's my full review for howwastheshow.com.

MP3: Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby

Buy Return to the Sea

Artist Website