Swans – White Light From the Mouth of Infinity (1991)

1. Better Than You
2. Power and Sacrifice
3. You Know Nothing
4. Song for Dead Time
5. Will We Survive
6. Love Will Save You
7. Failure
8. Song for the Sun
9. Miracle of Love
10. When She Breathes
11. Why Are We Alive?
12. The Most Unfortunate Lie

I don’t know where to even start about Swans, except to say that this album is the third time that Michael Gira’s music proved to be exactly what I needed and didn’t even realize I was looking for. The first time was when I discovered his project Angels Of Light, which is basically Swans following along a more folk/acoustic trajectory, and the second time around was when I discovered his earlier work with Swans (which is quite a bit different from this, or anything for that matter), which is loud, repetitive, abrasive, hateful, cathartic, and more or less defies you to enjoy it. I’m not going to go into that music in too much detail, except to say, well, just watch it. Gira is one of the most passionate artists I’ve ever encountered, and even if you can’t stomach his droning, atonal, rhythmic nihilism, you have to appreciate how genuine he is. His music really does feel like an extension of himself, for better or for worse.

And, as he’s aged (he was in his twenties when he started, he’s pushing 40 here, and he hasn’t slowed down much since) his music has evolved from sheer catharsis to something much more introspective, contemplative, and meditative, without forgetting his No Wave roots (No Wave being a mid-70s – early 80s experimental art movement in New York that also spawned Sonic Youth), and expanding on – rather than abandoning – his signature approach to songwriting.

With 1986′s Children of God he found himself exploring gentle synths and actual melodies – a far cry from the jarring rhythmic bass/drum/guitar unison of his earlier work, though that was still present. Another important change was the addition of Jarboe as a full-fledged member (she appeared previously on the Greed/Holy Money EP), whose soothing feminine vocals came in sharp contrast to Gira’s still very much antagonistic, brooding delivery.

But I could write pages on any Swans release, so I’ll cut straight to this one. I mentioned earlier that Gira’s progression has been one from nihilistic anger to meditative peace, and that’s definitely true in this case. What hasn’t been lost at all along the way is the honesty. The lyrics are straightforward and personal, the tone ambivalent but not uninvolved. You get the sense that Gira’s come a long way, philosophically, from his younger days, while still keeping some of the same traits intact. I’ll expand on that in a bit, but to demonstrate, take the following lyrics, the first from Holy Money, the second from this album:

A Screw:

cry, cry, cry
this feels good
here is your money
this is love

Why Are We Alive?:

Now I’m not a man
and I don’t feel love
and I don’t see anything coming down from above
but this world spins slowly
and I see a light
rising up from behind the horizon
up into the clear black sky
but I don’t see you in my line of sight
in fact I can’t remember why we are alive

Both have the same sort of blatant and dispassionate delivery, but they yield different results. Also, both would seem excruciatingly bad in the hands of an artist who didn’t feel sincerely attached to his music, but that’s a lot harder to really qualify.

A Screw is intensely delivered, unattached, and monotone. I’m not going to pretend there’s anything particularly deep or difficult to pick up in this, it’s pretty obviously a sardonic look at the modern conflation of love with sex, and the view of sex as a commodity. It’s a sort of presentation that’s been done to death by industrial bands since (though I don’t think any can come close to the sheer emotional intensity of Swans), but at its core is a sort of nihilistic anguish. An intentional wall of separation between the self and society, a lyrical disconnect with a contradictory, extremely emotional delivery that, in its monotone and lack of dynamics, defies the emotions behind it by making them into some unmarked default. It’s the fundamental contradiction of so much nihilism, as it actually occurs in practice: an intellectual denial of meaning and importance that cannot overcome the basic emotional response of the agent. Nihilism that bemoans the absence of meaning is not, strictly speaking, nihilism, since it treats meaning as something that is lost and desirable, whereas a purely nihilistic stance wouldn’t apply any meaning or value to the acquisition or retention of meaning. So the nihilist is left anguished by nihilism, but in order to remain intellectually honest must view that anger as though it, itself, is meaningless. It becomes a quest to view the self from some objective outside perspective, which is impossible because the self is implicit in any observation. This futility leads to further frustration, and so the cycle continues. It’s no surprise that the most Gira can do is scream each word with everything within himself.

But on to Why Are We Alive?. Here we have a more matured Gira, still detached in delivery, gravitating away from the anger of nihilism and towards a more peaceful sort of existentialism. He still can’t fathom his place in the world, but the anger has been replaced with serenity and hope. He can’t qualify it, pinpoint it, or explain it, and when he really thinks about it, none of his questions have been answered at all. The world is still distant and impossible to connect to, but there’s a light, somewhere. Against all reason, there’s this self-persisting and self-evident serenity that he can always fall back on. The disconnect has turned from a curse to a blessing – rather than a source of angst, it’s a source of bliss. Instead of raging about his alienation from the world, he’s taking comfort in his insulation from it.

It’s deep, honest, and personal. And, in the wake of so much music capitalizing on the power of personal introspection, it can come across as trite. It’s ironic that a vocalist can fake emotional involvement but betray ambivalence and therefore lose the power of their music, yet by making ambivalence the hallmark of his vocal delivery, Gira can give a performance that’s uniquely gripping, emotionally. Because emotional disconnection can, itself, be a remarkably emotional statement, it’s just that it’s a nuance that few artists can actually get right.

If this review is a bit shorter than usual, it’s not because I ran out of things to say, it’s because I have so many things to say that I still don’t really even know where to begin. It’s better to just listen and decide for yourself.

I’ll upload Why Are We Alive? later, when I’m not on a school computer.

Low – Songs For A Dead Pilot (1997)

1. Will The Night
2. Condescend
3. Born By  The Wires
4. Be There
5. Landlord
6. Hey Chicago

Low’s I Could Live In Hope is one of my perrenial favorites, an album I tend to forget even exists until something reminds me of it, at which point I’ll spend a few days absolutely devouring it. They’re like a gloomier, more sparse Red House Painters. Like Slint, they showcase the emotional depth minimalism and sparse, calculated notes can have. Unlike Slint, they rely on strong vocal melodies and harmonies instead of mostly amelodic spoken word.

There’s a pretty strong difference between the sort of emotional punch these different styles of delivery offer. With spoken word, there’s no necessary continuity, no guarantee or expectation. Every syllable feels calculated and deliberate. Once you add a strong vocal melody, the vocals themselves become necessary and expected, and can much more easily fade into the background. What they lack in de-facto emotional presence, they need to make up in melody. And Low has proven to master the art of somber, emotionally stirring, simple melodies.

I’ve always drawn association in my mind between slowcore – the semi-joke genre that artists like Red House Painters and Low fall into – and shoegaze. They seem to me to be two opposite approaches to the same fundamental idea. Shoegaze artists like My Bloody Valentine inundate the listener with walls and waves of heavy, simplistically melodic texture. Slowcore artists replace the lush textures with oppressive silence, while relying on the same sort of simplistic melodies. Both have a deliberately lo-fi approach to music that treats the texture of the sound as an important element of the music itself.

My one complaint with Low’s recordings, then, in general, is that unlike shoegaze, they don’t usually leave enough space for the listener to appreciate the subtleties of the sound. While shoegaze fills its gaps with swirling textures, slowcore is left with silence and softly decaying notes. Which is nice, but few albums are adventurous enough to explore this to its full potential, and I Could Live In Hope is no exception. Many of the songs feel slightly constrained, like they aren’t really given quite enough room to breathe. Their slow tempo gives them more than most, but there’s an potential for the abstract that’s lost in the pop sensibilities, and it begs to be explored.

Enter Songs For A Dead Pilot. This is the first Low release on Kranky, who list among their catalog several Stars of the Lid albums and Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s breathtaking F#A#∞, and who tend to specialize in experimental and ambient music.

A good EP makes me ecstatic. To me, the best EPs are cohesive experiments in style that would possibly be too tiresome for an entire CD. An album length Songs For A Dead Pilot would be tedious to get through. But at around 35 minutes, it doesn’t get old or monotonous in a single sitting. The songs explore various levels of ambience, from the intense glowing cathedral reverb of Will the Night to breathtaking, droning Born By The Wires, more soundscape than song, dominated by tension and the visceral beauty of chords freely fading into silence, invigorating the more standard but still particularly ambient pieces the follow.

But if you’re like me, you don’t need or really want too much description. It’s Low being Low and also exploring more experimental forms, which was enough to get me hooked, and from that perspective it doesn’t disappoint. If you’re looking for something light and catchy you’re looking in the wrong place. At the same time, the darkness of Low’s music isn’t so much hopeless and depressive as it is melancholic and nostalgic. It’s quiet and pensive music, but it isn’t despairing.

But I’d like to take a minute to explore Born By The Wires, which is clearly the centerpiece of this album, in a bit more detail. The song begins with some semblence of standard melody, albeit in eerie unstable falsetto, sparse tension brimming just below the surface in the jarring, slightly discordant guitar strums, almost inaudible drum beats beneath. The result is unsettling and unsatisfactory, clearly going somewhere but defying any sort of satisfactory resolve, seeming to progress yet returning to the same place it was before, but with more gusto. It stays at this point, straddling the line between comfortable familiarity and uncomfortable uncertainty, for about six minutes, before dissolving into a sequence of powerful emotive strums that decay, slowly, into silence. Expressions that, despite their initial intensity, eventually subside.

The artist is working towards something concrete, but it refuses to be fully realized. The tension of the artist’s frustration swells below the surface until, finally, in a fit of resolve, the artist focuses his attention on just a single chord. Yet even that, despite the emotion and deliberation behind it, refuses to subsist and inevitably subsides. So he continues, with varying degrees of desperation, but the result is the same. When it finally holds, it’s a slow and resonant drone, capturing only the darkness of the artist’s frustration and none of the beauty of his original expression. This gives way, abruptly, to the nearly inaudible chiming of a music box. A simple, primitive melody, arising wholly disconnected from the fury that preceded it. The artist’s conscious intentions are futile in comparison to simple, uninvited inspiration. Or maybe the catharsis of the track itself gives way to peaceful serenity. Interpret it however you like, or just bask in its somber reverbations.

I feel guilty linking to any tracks here since Kranky already provides three of them on their website. The three tracks posted – Will The Night, Condescend, and Be There – are a good representation of the album as a whole. Also, a quick search tells me that Born by the Wires is streaming in full over on last.fm, so you can check that out as well.

Maybe next time I’ll finally get to Swans. Maybe.

Slint – Spiderland (1991)

1. Breadcrumb Trail
2. Nosferatu Man
3. Don, Aman
4. Washer
5. For Dinner…
6. Good Morning, Captain

First of all, I haven’t written anything on here for a while, and I’m not really sure why. Lack of inspiration, I guess. But I’ve got a few hours to kill before class so I figured, why not.

Second of all, I was positive I had already written about this album. Like, I could almost remember what I had written, which song I had uploaded, all that. But it looks like I never did, not here or anywhere else, which is kind of bizarre. It’s good, though, because I really wanted to, and if I already had that would be kind of redundant.

Just to get it out of the way, this is one of my favorite albums ever. I feel like I always end up writing about those, which I’m worried will make this blog a bit one-sided (though I did write about that Cursive album I disliked, so I may have thrown the curve a bit, and I can’t say that Black Angels album or even that Six Organs of Admittance album are really among my favorites either), but I feel like this album is probably an exception.

See, a lot of times I’ll throw this on and wonder what I was thinking loving it so much. It will feel cold and stale and repetetive and boring, and I’ll turn it off before it’s finished, or else just skip through to the last track and mentally file it away under “albums that are good that I’ll say are good but that I don’t really care to listen to much anymore” along with, say, the majority of Isis’ catalog, or Opeth’s catalog, or Black Sheep Boy, or In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, or De-Loused in the Comatorium. It’s either good but I’ve listened to it too much to still get anything out of it more than once or twice a year, or else I don’t really like it anymore, but I have a nostalgic attachment to it and I’m not willing to let it go. I’d rather have enjoyed it, leave it in the past tense and let it linger into the present, than listen to it and decide I don’t really like it. Because I love music, and I love loving music. Something has to be almost offensively bad to me and have a fan base I want to actively distance myself from, like Dream Theater, before I’m actually willing to admit that my opinion has changed and that I dislike it.

And, with Dream Theater, even after I decided I didn’t like them, I still had it in the back of my mind that Scenes from a Memory and Images and Words were good albums. It took me forever to actually re-evaluate them and change my mind, and even then I was full of excuses for them. Why? Because it’s hard to admit that I had bad taste. Because it means maybe in the future I’ll look back at myself and think the same thing. And nobody wants to think their taste is anything less that perfect.

Which is stupid, because taste is completely subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with liking bands I don’t like now, even Dream Theater. I can base my taste on objective things, but whether or not those things are important is entirely subjective. Maybe you think the most important criteria of good music is how technically impressive it is. In that case, Dream Theater is awesome! The frustrating thing is deluding yourself into believing that music fits your criteria when it clearly does not. Then it becomes a guilty pleasure, which is another way of saying a contradiction, and I don’t know about you, but contradictions are not satisfying to me. To me, having a guilty pleasure means you like a certain style of music but, for whatever reason, you’re loathe to admit it, and you’re even willing to pretend you don’t like other music in the same style just to fit in with some preconceived notions you have of what “good taste” is, or to try to stay on top of whatever it’s fashionable to like and dislike.

Anyway, huge tangent there. To bring it back, yeah, sometimes this album does nothing for me.

But other times…other times it pulls me in from the beginning and captivates me through the whole thing. Other times it’s such an emotional rush that by the time it’s finished I’m out of breath. Other times it’s like I’m listening to it for the first time, when it was everything I ever wanted music to be but couldn’t articulate (I’m experiencing this right now with a different band, maybe I’ll write about them soon). Other times it’s like every single note, every second, every moment of silence (and there is a lot of silence here) is a work of art.

This is simultaneously the heaviest and also the quietest album you’ll ever listen to. The guitars are rarely distorted, the singer’s voice, the majority of the time, has a talking-quietly-during-dinner-in-a-restaurant sort of tone to it. Everything is enveloped by a stifling atmosphere of silence. Consequently, there’s power and deliberation and unbelievable tension behind every moment of sound. The emotion, when it comes, is in contrast, not to some base level of normality and contentment, but to blank emptiness. If emotion is defined by contrast, say, E=x/y, where x is the present state and y is the default state, then as y approaches zero, E approaches infinity. Everything is crucial beyond words.

It’s the opposite of the existential nightmare of insignificance. The realization that, in the midst of ceaseless oblivion, the actions of all of mankind even out to zero. The big picture is inconceivably bleak. But on the smaller scale? We may just be blips in the graph, but we’re blips that stretch upwards towards infinity. Our very existence is a two-dimensional anomaly in a one dimensional universe. In a world of ceaseless darkness, how significant would a single, all-illuminating flash of lightning be? We would lack the vocabulary to even begin to understand it.

The lyrics mirror these existential themes. The songs are stories that lead nowhere, or else they’re static moments in time devoid of content. They lead you along with slow precision to enjoy each second as a single, fleeting, sublime, impossible moment in time, disappearing into oblivion as soon as it’s come. And when it does break out into something more stable and melodic with a bit more presence, it’s heavenly.

Maybe if I was willing to appreciate all the music I used to like as single points in the past that moved me once in an incomparable way, maybe I’ll stop being so loathe to admit they do nothing for me now. Maybe I should be more content with what they offered, and not so concerned with what they continue to offer.

If all this sounds far too abstract for you, don’t worry. As much as I romanticize it, it’s music, and it makes sense as music. It has melody and structure. It has punk influences and post-punk influences and hardcore influences and no-wave influences and noise-rock influences and grunge influences (as a contemporary, not as a successor), though it isn’t recognizable as any of those. It had an undeniable influence on post-rock and post-hardcore, though it isn’t recognizable as any of those either. It’s an anamoly, something that screams early 90s without actually sounding like anything that came before or after it. But it’s still music, it isn’t so artsy that it isn’t easy to listen to and understand.

I’m going to post two tracks from this album, like last time, because it can’t really be summed up in just one. The first, Washer, is probably the most accessible and melodic track on the album. But for all its beauty, it’s pretty different than the rest in a lot of ways and if you were to buy this album based on that track alone, you might very well be disappointed. So I’ll also upload Good Morning, Captain, which is the final and probably most powerful track on the album, while staying closer to the feel of the album as a whole.

I’ll edit this later and add them in, since I’m on a lab computer right now that, obviously, doesn’t have them, and would rather not run the risks associated with downloading music on a public machine over a monitored connection.

Washer

Good Morning, Captain

Thanks for reading, I’ll probably talk about Swans next time (and I promise it won’t take as long as this one did!)

Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West (1997)

1. Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine
2. Heart Cooks Brain
3. Convenient Parking
4. Lounge (Closing Time)
5. Jesus Christ Was An Only Child
6. Doin’ the Cockroach
7. Cowboy Dan
8. Trailer Trash
9. Out of Gas
10. Long Distance Drunk
11. Shit Luck
12. Trucker’s Atlas
13. Polar Opposites
14. Bankrupt on Selling
15. Styrofoam Boots / It’s All Nice on Ice, Alright

I figured it was about time I reviewed an artist that almost everyone was familiar with. I mean, I’m sure there are at least some people out there who have never heard of Modest Mouse before, but given that they’ve basically exploded in the past few years with their last two albums I’m willing to bet there are very few people out there who don’t at least recognize their name. I mean, I suppose Jay-Z is the same way, but I’m guessing that the number of people in my social circle who’ve actually listened to his work as a rapper is fairly low.

I’ve had this album for years. I can’t remember when I got it, except that it was for my birthday I think, when I was still in high school. I remember listening to it and liking it, but finding a lot of the songs difficult to really grasp, like there was something up with them that I wasn’t quite getting. It was different than The Moon and Antarctica, and definitely different than Good News For People Who Love Bad News. It sort of slipped into (relative) obscurity for me, and I didn’t listen to it much.

Cut to a couple weeks ago when I came across an internet discussion on whether or not Good News For People Who Love Bad News or We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank was Modest Mouse’s best album. The argument seemed silly to me, since both albums represent a huge stylistic shift for Modest Mouse that I really don’t like. I thought about their older albums and, a bit cynically, decided that they weren’t that great either, and that if I listened to them again I probably wouldn’t have many positive things to say about them. I listened to The Moon and Antarctica and sort of agreed with that assessment: it isn’t a bad album, but it can get pretty boring. Then I threw in this one, expecting to be similarly disappointed, and I was blown away.

It’s probably worth noting that, between my last listen and that point, I had become a huge fan of 90s and early 00s hardcore and screamo and had a few months where I listened almost exclusively to it. There’s a HUGE hardcore influence on this album that I never noticed before. It’s indie rock, to be sure, and it has a noticeable Pixies influence as far as the vocals and manic pace are concerned, but the instrumentation is basically hardcore adapted to a less abrasive form. You can hear it in the bass, especially, in the way the guitar parts are written and arranged, in the crescendos and breakdowns. Yeah, there are breakdowns here. Isaac Brock’s vocals take on a new light when you think of them as a replacement for hardcore vocals, rather than as a Black Francis wannabe.

Anyway, I listened to this album and I was floored. Suddenly it all made sense, the chaos seemed a lot more controlled, and – most importantly – many of the aesthetics that I loved about hardcore music survived the transition. I often get annoyed about bands like present-day Modest Mouse, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At The Disco getting labeled as emo, since they’re so incredibly different from what the term originally meant. I wrote all about this on my Sunny Day Real Estate review. But listening to this, I realized that, for Modest Mouse, the label isn’t so much misapplied as it is applied to the wrong album. This is, in many regards, similar to SDRE. The music is pretty different, but the whole idea of bringing the aesthetics and structures of hardcore music into a different genre remains. If you don’t believe me, just listen to Doin’ the Cockroach.

And it works, beautifully. There isn’t a dull track on this album, which is more than I can say for The Moon and Antarctica, and FAR more than I can say for the decent-at-best recent Modest Mouse output. There’s an raw intensity here that I don’t hear on many albums, period. It’s what I love about hardcore, but hearing it in a different setting almost makes it better and more poignant. “Trailer Trash” is a pretty mellow song, all things considered, until you realize just how much the drums are absolutely POUNDING and just how much tension is brewing just below the surface. The entire song is just waiting to explode, which is pretty common in today’s post-post-rock age, but this was an indie rock song with pop sensibilities written in 1997 doing something that hadn’t really been done well since Sonic Youth (for whom being melodic was never really much of a concern).

Pretty much every song hear gets to me in a personal way. It’s hard for me to find a favorite, or even a top three, and that’s incredibly rare. I think a lot of it is in the honest white trash lyricism. Despite the artistic aspirations and complex songwriting, this is music that empathized, lyrically, with the lowest common denominator. It’s a bit of a post-attribution since I never listened to this much when I was in high school, but I feel like a lot of it perfectly expresses my own adolescent angst in a way that doesn’t trivialize it or make it out to be anything other than angst. And a lot of it is just blue collar angst in general. Take, for example, the following lyrics to Cowboy Dan:

Well, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene
He goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean
He’s gonna start a war
He hops in his pickup puts the pedal to the floor
And says “I got mine but I want more”

Because, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene
He goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean
He goes to the desert, fires his rifle in the sky
And says, “God if I have to die you will have to die”

Because, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene
I didn’t move to the city, the city moved to me
And I want out desperately

When I first heard this it sounded pretty nonsensical. But what you have here is a person set in his ways, wanting to live the classic rural modern cowboy life of pickup trucks and alcohol. Instead, he’s faced with the existential reality of his own mortality and the ever-growing urbanization of the American Midwest. It’s philosophical in plain speech, it doesn’t have to address the specifics of exactly WHY the title character feels this way, it just explains the feelings themselves in their own words, with their implications left to the reader.

The same goes for all the lyrics on the album. Brock has a way of writing lyrics that sound simple and banal, but which are, on further inspection, introspective and philosophical. And the chaos of the music adds to the sense of nihilism, of discontent with life and the world, of all the little elements in life that add together to make it chaotic and nonsensical. But, every now and then, the music slows down, everything becomes more atmospheric and calm. When Cowboy Dan does this, the lyrics are as follows:

Standing in the tall grass
thinking nothing
You know we need oxygen to breathe

The chaos melts away and we’re left with a content with simply living. With grass and oxygen and an empty mind. No analysis, no deliberation, just simply being. Some of the tracks let themselves go into long, almost hypnotic, very-borderling-psychedelic instrumental sequences. No thinking, no doing, nothing complicated, just simply being and enjoying that. From that perspective, the blue collar focus of the lyrics starts making perfect sense – no need to focus on the beauty of high art, there’s plenty of pleasure to be found in simplicity.

Beyond all that, it’s a fun album. There’s some catharsis, some philosophical lines of thought, but most of it is just a joy to listen to. It transitions well between the melodic and the chaotic, and it’s fun to hear where the songs are going. It never loses steam, either. The second half is certainly less intense than the first, but the songs are just as good. If this review seems a bit disjointed, it’s because there’s just so much variety on the album. It’s hard to summarize it in a succinct way. Yet, despite the variation between songs, it still comes across as a cohesive thematic whole. The songs here all belong together.

If you like what Modest Mouse is doing now, I suggest you give this a listen. If you don’t (like me), I still suggest you give it a try. For better or worse, this is entirely different than anything they’ve done since. I had a lot of trouble deciding what song to put here. Like I said, there’s so much variety on the album, it’s hard to find a standout track. I’m going to do something a bit unusual and upload two tracks. Doin’ the Cockroach, because it’s the clearest example of the hardcore influences on the album and may help you notice them when they appear elsewhere, and Cowboy Dan, because I spent more time talking about it than any other tracks, and since it’s very very different than Doin’ the Cockroach. Even if you don’t particularly care for these songs, you may still like others on the album. When I first listened, there were some tracks I loved and some I hated, and while I still don’t love every track on it, I’ve probably loved each individually at some point in time..

Doin’ the Cockroach
Cowboy Dan

(the hard drive I keep my music on wasn’t connected to my computer when I wrote this. Rather than retrieve it, I downloaded the album off the internet, so I could upload the tracks. Just thought you might want to know how lazy the internet has made me)

Jay-Z – Reasonable Doubt (1996)

1. Can’t Knock the Hustle (feat. Mary J. Blige)
2. Politics as Usual
3.  Brooklyn’s Finest (feat. The Notorious B.I.G.)
4. Dead Presidents II
5. Feelin’ It (feat. Mecca)
6.  D’Evils
7. 22 Two’s
8. Can I Live
9. Ain’t No Nigga (feat. Foxy Brown)
10. Friend or Foe
11. Coming of Age (feat.  Memphis Bleek)
12. Cashmere Thoughts
13. Bring it On (feat. Big Jaz and Sauce Money)
14. Regrets
15. Can I Live II (feat. Memphis Bleek)
16. Can’t Knock the Hustle (Fool’s Paradise Remix)

Surprise, surprise, I’m reviewing a rap album. This may not come as a surprise to those of you who know my listening habits well, but to others it may. I won’t lie: it isn’t a guilty pleasure, I legitimately enjoy rap music. This is in sharp contrast to my rap-hating self of the past. I was hung up on the fact that it used sampling, the fact that it “all sounds the same” (true fact: everyone says that about any music they aren’t familiar with, and it’s just as hilarious when applied to rap as when it is to, say, rock), and all sorts of things about it that I found talentless.

I could have picked Illmatic by Nas or Enter the 36 Chambers by the Wu-Tang Clan, but those are easy targets. Nas has unusually intelligent lyrics, Wu-Tang is over the top and far too much fun, but Jay-Z doesn’t have any gimmicks going for him. He’s just a good rapper, and probably the best example of East Coast Hip Hop.

I can’t say that I’m too knowledgeable on rap as a whole, especially compared to other areas of music. My grossly over-simplified introduction is that you have East Coast, West Coast, and Southern Hip Hop. Generally speaking, East Coast is more serious and tends to use jazzier samples, while West Coast is more fun and over the top and relies on funkier beats. Southern Hip Hop is like a more crass version of West Coast Hip Hop, both in style and in substance. There are plenty of exceptions to this and, like I said, I’m probably embarrassingly oversimplifying things. I just want to make it clear that rap is not at all lacking in variety.

Also, I’m sure you know that most rock played on the radio is pretty bad. The same goes for rap. You can’t judge it based on what you here changing stations in your car, or at dance parties, than you can judge rock music by the pop-rock that the world is saturated and infatuated with. The good stuff is hardly underground, but it isn’t right at the forefront either. A lot of artists that have gone downhill (Outkast, for example) started out much better. Rap artists are subject to turning pop just as much as rock bands are.

Jay-Z is a strange artist, for me, because a lot of stuff he’s done and produced hasn’t been very good. But going back to this, his debut LP, you get to see him before he became a superstar. I always think early albums are a good place to start because they let you see the artist before they hit it big, and you get to see those elements that made them big. This album is no different. Jay-Z is a talented pop producer, you can’t deny that, but here he shines both in flow and in his choice and arrangement of beats.

Flow. Beats. Those are two words you’ll hear a lot when you’re reading about rap music. Simplified, the flow is the lyrics, the beats are the music. Let me elaborate.

Flow is more than just the lyrics, it’s the way the lyrics…well…flow together. Rap music – and this is, I think, the biggest thing that keeps people who aren’t initiated with it from getting into it – isn’t about the words themselves nearly as much as it is about how the words flow into one another. There’s meaning to the songs, and that’s important, but when it comes to specific phrases in the song, it’s less about getting the most poetically beautiful phrasing and more about getting the most aesthetically pleasing phrasing. This is what I find really fascinating about rap, and where a lot of the talent lies, and where a lot of people don’t bother to look. It isn’t just about stringing together rhyming lyrics, it’s about looking at language almost as if it were devoid of meaning and judging it purely by the shape and the sounds of the words. About selecting them carefully so it comes out fast and smoothly and carries the rhythm and aesthetic feel that you’re trying to go for. I think the main reason that a lot of radio rap is so terrible is because the artists don’t really pay attention to this. When you hear a phrase that really flows well, it almost gives you chills. It’s turning the tuneless sound of speech into something that is, in and of itself, musical. Meaning is a different second.

This also means that the music tends to include a lot of profanity. When you’re trying to construct music that flows well and still carries some meaning, you need as big of a palette as you can get, and given that profanity largely consists of words that are short and snappy and that can fit in almost any circumstances, it gets used a lot. Like filler, or glue, if you will.

Just keep in mind, at all times: the literal meaning of the lyrics is not the most important part. The overall message of the song may be important, but how it’s conveyed, not so much.

Next are the beats, which are basically pieces of music sampled from other songs and reorganized to provide a good backing track to rap over. I can’t really say much about them without sounding woefully uninformed (and the fact that I’m a white 20 year old computer science major living at home pretty much shoots down any credibility I may have to be talking about any of this), except to say that there is talent to it. There are good beats, great beats, and bad beats. You want to music to be constant and rhythmic but not annoying. The best songs (in my opinion) use the backing music to heighten the emotion of the song, with the rap often following it, somewhat, melodically. Just because it isn’t singing in the traditional sense doesn’t mean it has no sense of melody to it.

How this relates to the album I’m reviewing: Jay-Z has phenomenal flow. His lyrics aren’t as complex or impressive as Nas, conceptually, but they more than make up for it in flow. It isn’t the sort of thing I can describe, you just need to listen to it. The craftsmanship is obvious. The beats are expertly chosen and edited, the best tracks (in my opinion) being mostly softer jazzy piano. The tone on the album is fairly dark, full of dead friends and guilt. The songs, like a lot of rap, are about illegal activity. But while it features the standard machismo, there’s a tone of regret. It’s more realism than glorification, which is shown especially in songs like D’Evils. It’s light on excuses and heavy on personal blame. I’ll leave it to the scientists to decide if rap music encourages gang activity, but I’ll note that the majority of the market for rap music is not made up gang members. And, yeah, I think the lyrics are problematic, for the violence and the drugs and the misogyny and the homophobia etc. But despite the fact that rap is almost all spoken word, I find that it’s easier to distance the meaning from the music than it is with rock music.

The production is amazing. If you’ve read any of this blog, you know that I’m a sucker for good texture, and it’s abundant here. It’s clearly inspired by the warm and unpredictable sound of aging vinyl, and the older jazzy samples help improve that mood.

I’m going to upload the track D’Evils, since it’s a good example of both the phenomenal beats and flow on the album. It contains profanity, but not much more than most rock music, probably less than most actual language. Rhyme is a part of it, smooth transitions are another. If it helps, pretend it isn’t in English, just another percussion instrument. That’s all I can really say except that I hope you keep an open mind and manage to enjoy it despite the controversial lyrics themselves.

D’Evils

Next time I plan on writing about a Modest Mouse album that is, unlike their last few releases, actually good.

Godspeed You Black Emperor! – F♯A♯∞ (1997/1998)

1. The Dead Flag Blues
2. East Hastings
3. Providence

NOTE: F♯A♯∞ was originally released on vinyl in 1997, and was (to my knowledge) completely rerecorded for CD in 1998, with new content added and several segments reordered. The vinyl release had two sides, “Nervous, Sad, Poor…” on side A and “Bleak, Uncertain, Beautiful…” on side B. On the CD release, “The Dead Flag Blues” is roughly identical to side A, with the exception of a movement that was removed and added to the song “East Hastings,” which includes the first half of side B, expanded and with new material added. “Providence” begins with entirely new material and includes the second half of side B, concluding with original material. I own both formats, but unless otherwise noted, I’m referring to the CD release, which I heard first.

I’m going to do something a little different with this review. Godspeed You Black Emperor! (changed to Godspeed You! Black Emperor on their final release, Yanqui U.X.O.) are a post-rock band. I hate writing directly about post-rock, even music of this calibre, because it almost necessarily devolves into hyperbole and tired cliché, as I mentioned in my Gregor Samsa review.

So I’m not going to talk about the music. Not directly, anyway. I’m going to tell a story. It’s a true story, as much as autobiography can ever really be true. Memory is faulty, especially in regards to emotions and thought-processes from long ago. It’s the kind of clichéd story a thousand people have written, the sort of story I’m almost ashamed to write, though it just so happens to be a very fitting time to do so.

It isn’t about politics or patriotism. It isn’t rational. It’s about fear and insecurity, about catastrophe as filtered through the eyes of a child who had never before seen true catastrophe unfold, a child who was still in many respects numb and coping from a suicide that had occurred only several months prior.

I’m an optimist and I’m not an anarchist. I don’t believe I’ll ever see civilization crumble. I believe there’s a decline coming eventually but that we’re still working our way up, that things will get a lot better before they start getting worse, that people who believe we’re at the critical peak of human history suffer the same delusion as every other time period.

But to a 12 year old child whose scope of the world was almost preciously small, 9/11 was the beginning of the end. It was life being pushed to the tipping point on the edge of any false sense of security I may have had, tumbling headfirst into the abyss of uncertainty. Life could end, even for people you cared about. I had learned that recently. America is not invincible. That was a new one.

“They’re bombing the east coast.” That was the misinformed hyperbole that first introduced me to the situation. That was the sound of my safety net snapping. You can’t really blame them for the error. Everyone was in a frenzied shock, nobody knew what was really going on. The drive home from school at 8AM was eerie and unreal. We didn’t speak. The radio was chaotic. The sky seemed empty. I don’t remember if it was gray or blue, cloudy or cloudless, but it was empty and infinite.

I got home and sat glued to the television. What happened had already happened, but I watched the planes strike and the buildings fall over and over again. New angles, new footage, a news ticker that still didn’t know anything. I watched people jump to their deaths. The concept of jumping from buildings was still fresh in my mind. I had imagined it in detail during many sleepless nights. It haunted my dreams. And here it was on camera, faces just too far to make out. It wasn’t suicide, it was decision making. It was a choice: fall or burn. Some people chose to fall.

And my world was spinning. I wouldn’t even call it fear, it was deeper than that. It was dread. It was horror. As far as I knew, I was watching the world end. I didn’t know who or why, but New York City, the iconic emblem of America, was burning. If they couldn’t protect that, they couldn’t protect me. I couldn’t imagine living a normal life afterwards. I wasn’t even sure if I would live. I remember thinking of events I had planned in the near future and wondering if they would ever actually even happen, if I would make it that far. I couldn’t think of what would kill me, or how, or any of that. I wasn’t reasonable. I was young and I was scared. I remember standing in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and being terrified of how small and windowless the room was and how vulnerable that made me feel. The rest of the house didn’t make me feel better. I went outside and the sky wasn’t an empty and infinite expanse anymore, it was a point of attack. I imagined the sounds of jets flying overhead. Explosions. I had no appetite. I couldn’t think straight. I went to the supermarket with my mom and just sort of drifted through the aisles in a daze. Nothing felt real. Everything felt infuriatingly irreversible. I had felt that several months prior. It was denial in the face of tragedy, and I knew it well.

I don’t remember anything else about that day. A few brief moments of time, and that’s it. All I can remember are the emotions, the irrepressible, absolute sense that I can hardly even call a sense and which, at the time, felt more like knowledge, the knowledge that the world was crumbling and that civilization was broken and that the future was dead. It was immense and powerful and unshakable. It resounded in the core of my being to the point where I didn’t even need to think it, I could only feel it as a single, all encompassing darkness and emptiness.

I can look back on it now and call it naivety, but it was that vision of destruction and apocalypse that catapulted me into adulthood. The lack of a safety net, the knowledge that the unthinkable was possible, the insecurity of having to depend on myself more than anyone else. I didn’t experience it personally, but I experienced it vicariously through television and dreams, I experienced a taste of what was possible and from there my imagination went wild. Things calmed down and life resumed as normal, but the possibility never left. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was the end of mine, at the time. I was right in my assessment that things would never be the same, even if my scope was far more apocalyptic than the inevitable transition from childhood to adolescence that it actually entailed.

A part of me died that day. And parts of me have died since. But that isn’t a bad thing, and it didn’t leave any emptiness when it passed. The void was filled with a newer, more mature self. It’s change, and everyone goes through it, even if they don’t think of it in such a morbid way. I’m not the person I was then. Neither are you, probably. The apocalyptic end of my childhood just happened to have been catalyzed by catastrophe. Makes for a more gripping story, I guess.

But it’s no wonder I was preoccupied with such apocalyptic thoughts. Everyone is fascinated with the apocalypse, and it isn’t about death, it’s about change. People picture the apocalyptic future that they, should they die, would never see. Nobody pictures the experience of dying during the apocalypse, they picture the aftermath. Change. The crumbled buildings, the lifeless roads, the empty homes, the gray and smoke-filled sky, the ashes falling, the forests burnt to nothing. Kitchens with the tables half-set, unused playground equipment. A world without people. A desolate wasteland. Change. Our fear of death, if we have it, isn’t a fear of the act of dying. It’s a fear of whatever comes after. Even if we believe that nothing follows it, we picture our conscious selves experiencing that nothingness. Death itself can only be understood as change, because we cannot fathom anything other than eternity.

It isn’t the death of our civilization that intrigues us, it’s the persistence of its corpse.

This album, to me, is about the end and what comes after. It’s about the overlap between bleak desolation and gentle calm, and the unfathomable beauty that perseveres through even the darkest of situations.

The Dead Flag Blues

Wolves in the Throne Room – Two Hunters (2007)

1. Dea Artio
2. Vastness and Sorrow
3. Cleansing
4. I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and the Roots

I wanted to write about something that was, more or less, the opposite of Joanna Newsom.

Originally I was going to write this post on Burzum. I had about two paragraphs of the review written before I realized that it’s impossible to write about Burzum without giving a complete overview of early black metal, and that you can’t really understand the mindsets of the people involved without listening to their music, and that listening to the music without some sort of introduction would be pretty difficult for those uninitiated with it to begin with, so I was stuck in a circular loop of having a million things I wanted to say and no way to start. For now I figured I might was well write about black metal that doesn’t have such a convoluted history to it and that wasn’t made by a misanthropic, outspokenly racist and nationalist-socialist, Tolkein and Dungeons and Dragons obsessed 20 year old who was, by age 21, a convicted murderer and arsonist. I’ll save that for another time.

Wolves in the Throne Room are an important band for me, personally. Their first album, Diadem of 12 Stars (which is, quite frankly, too good for me to write about right now other than a recommendation that you listen to it as soon as possible), was the first black metal album I ever really listened to. You may say “so what,” you may have an impression of black metal as terrible music that’s laughably over-the-top, you may not even know what black metal is. I’ll gear this towards the less informed camp. Black metal is, more or less, as the name implies, a darker, heavier (and, simultaneously, more ambient), more brooding variety of metal, more focused on atmosphere and emotion than on speed and technical prowess. It’s also responsible for expanding my musical horizons beyond metal.

In high school, the first half especially, I listened almost exclusively to metal. It was definitely my favorite genre of music, and I was fairly indiscriminate. If it was “real metal,” I liked it. I had the usual disdain for metalcore that most metal purists get. I went to the first two Gigantours. I loved progressive metal, power metal, thrash metal, death metal, etc. If anyone mentioned they liked metal, I would get almost aggressive with them, trying to see if they were a “true” fan or if they just liked a couple odd bands or, heaven forbid, something like Slipknot. I was an elitist, in most senses of the word.

I found out about Wolves in the Throne Room on a Southern Lord sampler CD I got with a SunnO))) album (a band that I didn’t really even begin to appreciate until well past that point). I was blown away by what was, at the time, something I had never heard anything like before. I was fine with heavy guitars, but the droning wall-of-sound quality was something I’d only ever really encountered before on the SunnO))) album that I didn’t really even enjoy so much as purchase for the novelty of having something so heavy and inaccessible. Yet here was that same tone, perhaps with a muddier distortion on it, playing something that was actually melodic. Buried beneath the static, there was something almost elegant and beautiful about it, in a way that I didn’t expect music that heavy to be.

From there I got on a serious black metal kick and explored all sorts of different bands in the genre. From that short transitionary period, I branched out to music that followed what I saw as the spirit of what I liked in black metal, but in a variety of different genres, thus ending my years of metal elitism.

So there’s my personal backstory to all this. Needless to say, I bought this album the week it was released. What surprised me about it immediately was the notable post-rock influence, starting with the beginning track which is all synth pads and ethereal female vocals. There’s definitely a much more atmospheric touch to this album and to the structure of the songs in general than on their previous release. This isn’t a new things in the genre by any means, atmospheric black metal is a well-established sub-genre, but this went even beyond the glowing ambient wall of sound guitars of the first Wolves in the Throne Room album (and bands like Weakling that heavily influenced their sound) and bordered at times on a style that was decidedly not metal at all. That wasn’t much of a surprise to me either, since by this time I had collected almost the entire Opeth discography and was used to music that merged metal with softer passages, but this (to me) was the closest thing to a missing link you could get between metal and shoegaze. The melody is slow and beautiful and entrancing, the details in the texture. The texture here was a bit harsher, for the most part, than shoegaze, but the artistic philosophy behind it was still there.

It’s crushing, immense, and all-encompassing. It improves with volume in a way that most music doesn’t, bringing out the intricacies of the texture itself and improving the hypnotic quality of the music until it surrounds you and you can’t help but be moved by it. It’s a monolith of sound that engulfs you, building slowly but still demanding attention.

If you’ve read my review of RTZ, this isn’t like that. It evokes a lot of the same emotions, but you don’t need to invest yourself in the music to enjoy it, or listen to it in a fundamentally different way. You just need to let go and let it overtake you.

Which might be hard, because it’s rather abrasive at first blush. Like I said, the music is heavy and dark. The vocals aren’t particularly prominent in the mix, and they’re pretty sparse here, but they’re mostly shrieks and yelps. If you’re not particularly fond of that sort of thing, and you aren’t curious enough to see how it can be in any way ambient or emotionally investing, this probably isn’t for you. I would say you’re missing out on some great music, but if you can’t appreciate it, you can’t.

But if you are curious (and I’m sure that you are), it’s worth a shot. The lyrics are all but unintelligible unless you listen to this kind of music a lot, but there’s a surprising amount of emotional depth behind them. The finale of the album, the end of I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots, is so powerful that I almost get weak-kneed listening to it. A lot of it is the music and the crescendo of the song as a whole, but the emotional energy is unbelievable. It’s a cathartic, almost primal thing to hear such raw emotion play out in such a beautiful way.

If you already like metal, sorry for not addressing you. It’s just that I don’t really need to sell it to you to get you to listen.

I can’t think of any ways to describe it that won’t end in cliches. All I can do is offer that, even if you don’t like metal, even if you don’t like harsh vocals, you could still like this. Because the appeal in it isn’t speed or monstrous riffs or anything like that, it’s in a simplistic beauty, strongly expressed. The delivery may be a bit unconventional by some standards (though certainly not particularly unusual by black metal standards), but the result is something that – at times – is incredibly emotionally gripping.

I say at times because this is not a flawless album. The lighter synth sections seem to go on a bit too long, and despite the album’s length, there isn’t really a whole lot of meat to it. The songs aren’t particularly complex, and while they do have a hypnotic element to them, it would be nice to hear something a bit more dynamic. What you basically have here is three introductory tracks leading up to the far-and-away superior final track, which combines elements of all three quite nicely into one refreshingly dynamic song.

This album’s relative accessibility has also led to quite a few unnecessarily rave reviews of it by people who aren’t at all familiar with black metal. It’s good, but it isn’t particularly original, and the influences of other bands are clear. This album is a bit of a darling to the “indie” crowd, being another genre they can cross off on their list of music they enjoy in their quest of having the most diverse musical tastes as possible.

But what other people say about it doesn’t change its quality. Neither does my praise. You just need to listen to it and see for yourself. I’m uploading the final track because, as I said, it’s a good summary of the rest of the album, and it’s the best and most dynamic song on it. It’s a bit of a long listen, just past 18 minutes, but the finale of it is, as I said before, absolutely amazing, as long as you let yourself get absorbed by it. It’s the sort of moment in music I crave and can rarely find. It is absolutely crucial that you wear headphones for this.

I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots

Joanna Newsom – Ys (2006)

1. Emily
2. Monkey and Bear
3. Sawdust and Diamonds
4. Only Skin
5. Cosmia

Since my last review was of a band that is notably lyrically deficient, I figured I would follow it up with something lyrically outstanding. I had a lot of trouble choosing between this one and Milk-Eyed Mender, but while I feel that album has better songwriting, this one has better lyrics, at least lyrics that are easier to write about. And since the lyrics are what I wanted to focus on, this is the one I ended up with.

It’s a rather different album than her first. Milk-Eyed Mender was released in 2004, most of the songs on it having been previously released on a limited-release 2002 EP. They’re simple, fairly short songs, most accompanied only by Newsom’s harp. The lyrics are strong and well written but more whimsical than profound. Keep in mind that, upon first recording these songs, Newsom was only 20, and had (I’m assuming here) probably written them at various points in time prior to that, rather than immediately prior to recording them. The songs were written when she was young and unknown, and they have a sort of youthful charm to them.

Ys, on the other hand, was written after she had already toured with Will Oldham and Devendra Banhart and become a notable member of the Drag City label and the new folk movement. The songs are written by a more experienced artist, and it shows. Rather than the sparse instrumentation of her previous release, Ys features lush string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks (60s baroque-psychedelic-pop artist and composer, strong collaborator on Brian Wilson’s ex-failed-Beach-Boys-project SMiLE) and songs that hover around and exceed the 10-minute mark (with Only Skin at nearly 17). The songs aren’t mainly instrumental, either; a few instrumental breaks show up here and there, but Newsom is more or less singing throughout. And since she rarely falls into the verse-chorus pattern (though several of the songs do feature refrains of one type or another), this means the lyrics are long and dense.

But before I get there, I just have to get it out of the way that, yes, her voice is a bit unusual. I personally find it perfectly acceptable and almost endearing (and find that she’s improved at singing quite a bit since her first album), but some people just cannot get past it and find it irreconcilably irritating. If you like other Drag City artists (Will Oldham/Bonnie Prince Billy, Devendra Banhart) you probably won’t have a problem with the fact that she sounds a bit unconventional. Personally, I think her songs would only suffer being sung by a different voice, hers has an emotive power to it that fits the lyrics well.

The lyrics themselves cover a wide range of topics that it would be difficult to fit in one review, so I’m only going to focus on the themes that influence me most: consciousness, mortality, and infinity. There’s an existential undercurrent to the entire album that stays, for the most part, optimistic. Take, for example, a line from the opening track, Emily:

We could stand for a century
Staring
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don’t keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don’t be

The idea here is one of joy, one which stems from the appreciation of beauty, both of the external world, of the company of others, of positive emotions, a joy that persists even as we are consciously trapped in mortal bodies. The final statement is a powerful one: rather than be depressed by the impermanence of those things that surround us and of ourselves, rather than letting oneself get depressed about the absurdity of a mortal and fragile existence, she suggests a state of being “dumbstruck,” filled with an incurable awe at the beauty inherent in the very concept of existing as a conscious entity. Despair doesn’t come into the picture, rather, existence is savored for as long as it is present. It’s a Zen-like (or, given that she’s on Drag City, borderline psychedelic) mindset that seems, in the context of her music, natural and realistic.

Sawdust and Diamonds is a bit more sobering in its assessment, the title itself seemingly an allusion to mind-body dualism. The song talks about the construction of a dove made with “glue, and a glove, and some pliers” and continues on until the moment of its completion:

Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue you make your first incision
And in a moment of almost-unbearable vision
Doubled over with the hunger of lions
‘Hold me close’, cooed the dove
Who was stuffed, now, with sawdust and diamonds

The work on the dove which has, up until now, been an inanimate object, is completed with the stuffing of sawdust and diamonds – a mundane physical weight with a sparkling and glorious hint of consciousness, or a soul. The dove, rather than being enamored with the gift of life, is terrified. Taken along with Emily, consciousness can lead to profound beauty, but also to profound terror. The dove is overwhelmed by its physical needs and some sort of unbearable vision, which could be of its mortality, its fragility, or the mere fact that it is now an intelligent agent whose being is connected irreversibly with matter. Like Emily, there’s a focus on the nature of being itself, rather than taking it for granted as the default upon which everything else is built. The song continues:

I wanted to say: why the long face?
Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face
Burro, buck and bray songs of long face!
Sing: I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
Just to lift your long face

And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious longface
And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate
- why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil
- why the long face?

Yes, we are mortal and fragile, and the thing we fear most is the death that inevitably awaits everyone. The dove has every right to ask, in its first breath, for comfort, because the reality of life is frightening. Newsom acknowledges the uncomfortable truth, but asks: so what? Why the long face? Again, there’s the insistence that life is something that should be cherished and enjoyed in the present, rather than preoccupied with and despairing about its eventual end.

There’s a lot more I could say about the lyrics here, and I haven’t even gotten to Only Skin, which is an emotional and engrossing monstrosity of a song that needs to be heard to be believed, and I’m sure there are allusions all over the place I haven’t even begun to recognize, but my point was just to give a taste of the sort of lyricism to be found here, which shares less in common with most songwriters and more in common, both in execution and themes, with modern poetry. There’s a literary quality here that you rarely come across in music.

Musically, as I said, it doesn’t really follow verse-chorus, the music just sort of flows from section to section. Melodically, it doesn’t really get boring, and it’s full of catchy hooks and motifs that the songs touch down on from time to time. If this doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you have patience for, you’d be better off with the shorter, more conventional songs on Milk-Eyed Mender.

It takes a few listens to really get into, especially considering the sprawling, stream-of-consciousness structure of most of the songs. There’s a good chance you’ll listen to it once and not really see it. Listen to it twice, it will start to kick in. But there’s a point, I don’t know which listen, where it all clicks together and the songs leave you breathless.

It isn’t perfect, though. Don’t think I’m without complaints. While Van Dyke Park’s arrangements work wonderfully, I feel like they could be toned down a bit. Joanna Newsom’s harp playing is gorgeous and intricate, and on Milk-Eyed Mender you can really appreciate that, but here it tends to be drowned out a bit by the swells of violins. They lend the music a sort of theatrical flair which I really like sometimes, but other times I wish it could be more stripped-down. Sawdust and Diamonds seems to be almost entirely harp-only, and consequently is one of my favorites on the album, so it still definitely works with songs of this length.

I had a hard time deciding which song to upload, but I figure I’ll do Only Skin, since I really like it and didn’t have much to say about it. It’s a long song, so the file is going to be pretty big, comparatively.

Only Skin

Enjoy.

Interpol – Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)

1. Untitled
2. Obstacle 1
3. NYC
4. PDA
5. Say Hello To Angels
6. Hands Away
7. Obstacle 2
8. Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down
9. Roland
10. The New
11. Lief Erikson

This is me making good on my attempts to start updating this thing a bit more frequently. It’s also, like before, due to inspiration rather than persistence, so it isn’t really indicative of me trying any harder. This also isn’t even an album that really crossed my mind when I was trying to decide what to write about next. Rather, I read a disparaging comment about Interpol on a message board and responded to it, which made me decide to listen to this album, which reminded me just how much I enjoy it.

It isn’t flawless and there are some things about it that I think are downright bad. But it’s one of those few albums I can listen to regularly and never get tired of (though iTunes tells me it’s been a year since I have). It rarely stands out as incredible to me, but it’s consistent in being above average, in most respects.

I’ll say right now that I didn’t care much for Antics and I never even listened to all of Our Love To Admire, being pretty turned off by the radio singles which demonstrated to me that they were continuing on the downward trend that Antics had started. I’m predicting a fourth album that is a return to form, sans the passion that made this one worthwhile.

I am, however, a big fan of Joy Division. I say this because a lot of people who hate Interpol say “Joy Division did it better,” as if Interpol were a straight rip-off band without any new ideas that nobody familiar with Joy Division and their masterful execution of the post-punk genre would deem to be worth their time. And there are definitely Joy Division influences here, in the melodies and especially in the vocals. Paul Banks’ flat, semi-monotone, droning delivery clearly draws a lot from Ian Curtis.

The similarity ends there. Joy Division were dark, depressive, murky, and sparse. Their songs were bass-driven and minimalist, sinister and borderline-psychotic, like dance music with the joy sucked out of it, a meditation on bleakly sardonic existential dreariness. And they released some phenomenal albums in their short run that preceded Curtis’s suicide. The point is, without much by way of atmosphere or distortion, Joy Division’s music was pitch-black and soul draining in a way that the darkest music now only wishes it could be.

Interpol is not. Their music may not be happy or upbeat, but it isn’t dark. It’s guitar-driven, not bass-driven. The riffs might be more minimalist than most, but not nearly to the point of Joy Division’s death jams. And while Joy Division strove for an atmosphere defined by emptiness, Joy Division’s atmosphere is positively lush at every opportunity. Just listen to tracks like Hands Away and The New and you can see an almost shoegaze-y devotion to atmosphere which is the polar opposite of what Joy Division was doing. Maybe if you played their music (and Banks’ voice) an octave lower, took out half the instruments, and boosted the bass, they would sound like a happier Joy Division, but by that point you’re adding almost all the defining aspects of Joy Division to begin with. The point is, the similarities are there only in the most superficial aspects. Clearly an influence, hardly a sole influence, definitely not enough to make Interpol somehow redundant.

As far as what this album is, as opposed to what it’s not, that’s a bit harder to characterize. But the atmosphere is important, and I think it’s what a lot of people miss when they don’t get it, and it’s what I think their new albums were really lacking on. Like I said, there’s an understated but still heavily present shoegaze influence here, not just in the atmosphere but in the song structure. There’s also a debt owed to bands like Low (who I always, oddly enough, sort of associate with shoegaze even though the wall-of-sound aspects of shoegaze are almost entirely absent) that I can’t quite put my finger on. I feel like I’m going to finish this review without actually saying much about the album itself, just touching on things that surround it. It’s hard to say something too substantial about the music itself. It’s emotional, but not overtly so. It’s kind of slow, tempo and progression-wise, but nothing to write home about. It’s fairly unique, but you can see touches of different influences all over the place.

The one really definite thing I can say about it is negative, and I don’t want to give off the impression that this isn’t a good album. But, still, the strongest distinct impression I have about it is that the lyrics are really, really bad. Inane. Ridiculous. Meaningless and not particularly aesthetically pleasing even then. A few examples:

Well she can read, she can read, she can read, she can read, she’s bad

Her stories are boring and stuff
She’s always calling my bluff”

Sleep tight, grim rite, we have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight

My friend is a butcher, he has sixty knives
He carries them all over the town, at least he tries
Oh look, it stopped snowing.

It’s like they don’t even try. And I don’t particularly care, because the lyrics are clearly not the centerpiece of the album, which is built much more on the repetition of the elements of the songs themselves until, eventually, they lock into a sort of groove. The lyrics might be a part of that groove, they may not, but they provide a vocal aesthetic that’s good enough. They’re just meaningless and not even poetically pleasing, the majority of the time.

Apart from that? It’s good music, it’s fun music, it’s occasionally poignant music, and it’s addicting music. It’s definitely a grower of an album, most of the middle tracks didn’t appeal to me much at all when I first listening to it. It isn’t that the music is boring, but like I said, the songs tend to build and then they lock into a groove, and if you aren’t anticipating that or used to music that doesn’t follow a straightforward verse-chorus structure (these do, they just tend to abandon it halfway through about the time the bridge would kick in) you might be disappointed. But if you pay attention to the atmosphere, zone out a bit, and let the music be a bit more encompassing, it works out well, and the repetitive, heavily rhythmic nature of most of the songs ceases to be a turn off.

I guess that’s all I really have to say, which means this review is coming up a bit short. That’s ok, the last came out a bit long, so it all evens out. I’m going to upload The New, since it’s far and away my favorite track off the album, and a good example of the importance of atmosphere in their music.

The New

That’s it for now. As always, comments are welcome (and, as of yet, I haven’t received any on anything, so I would like some affirmation besides wordpress traffic reports and mediafire download stats that someone out there actually reads this thing).

Sunny Day Real Estate – Diary (1994)

1. Seven
2. In Circles
3. About An Angel
4. Round
5. 47
6. The Blankets Were Stairs
7. Phuerto Skuerto
8. Shadows
9.  48
10. Grendel
11. Sometimes

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this. I expected as much when I started this blog. Even though I have hundreds of albums I could, potentially, write about, it’s hard to actually find something constructive to say about most of them. It is, on the other hand, incredibly easy to be incredibly lazy and write nothing. I spend most of my time not writing, it isn’t hard to spend a bit more.

But, it’s 3AM (well, upon finishing and proofreading, 4:30AM) and I’m not sleeping, and once I finish writing this I’ll probably read Infinite Jest for a while in the vain hopes of actually finishing it sometime this year (I bought it in high school so tough chances there), so it’s as good a time as any to write, especially since I’ve been struck by inspiration. Not that I haven’t before, I’ve spent a few days considering writing about the new Six Organs of Admittance album since it’s absolutely incredible and since I saw them (well, him, but with revolving backing musicians) play in LA a week ago, but since this blog is named after one of their albums and since I’ve already reviewed one of their albums already, it felt like overkill. Maybe I’ll do a concert/album review in the near future. Maybe not.

Anyway, I decided to write about this album because I was reading the tracklisting for Guitar Hero V and saw that the song Seven. It was the only song, other than Deadbolt by Thrice (and that’s purely nostalgia, since The Illusion of Safety was one of the first albums I owned and I listened to it probably close to 100 times), that stood out to me as something I liked enough to be at all interested in seeing in the game. So, I decided I might as well listen to it, since it’s been about half a year (according to iTunes) since I’ve listened to this.

Seven is the first track on the album. Once I listened to it I was struck by just how much I’ve been missing by not listening to this album, along with nostalgia I can’t quite explain since I didn’t even get this album until December of 2007 (I didn’t remember that off the top of my head, unlike some people I know with an impeccable memory for that sort of thing, I checked when it was added to my iTunes library), maybe it’s nostalgia for the beginning of college, I don’t know, but that doesn’t really fit with the sort of adolescent nostalgia this album wrought. Anyway, the point is, I absolutely had to listen to the whole thing. And, generally speaking, if an album is over, say, 40 minutes long and it isn’t in my top tier, I’ll probably get sick of it and stop listening unless I have extraordinary patience, especially if it’s one I’ve listened to many times before. This isn’t the case. I actually stopped it to go read, then came back because I had to finish it.

I usually expect the second half of an album to be sort of dull, or at least not instantly accessible. Even albums I love, it usually takes me a few listens to really get into the second half. Usually one or two of those songs turns out to be my favorite, but regardless, artists tend to reserve the second half of an album for the songs that aren’t as grabbing. This makes sense, once you’re hooked and convinced that an artist knows what they’re doing, you’re more likely to listen to stuff that doesn’t immediately grab you in hopes that you’ll end up loving it. Then they’ll reward you with a final track that’s a bit longer or more poignant and emotional, or somehow different from the rest.

This album delivers on the final track, but gives a solid string of tracks before it to. There are no dull B-sides here, and while the entire album certainly grows on you, it’s also great at first listen. It’s unusual to find an album that has both the depth to age well and the immediacy to become an instant favorite. This happens, I suppose, with newer albums from bands you already love, but there it’s mostly expectations. This was a debut album, and the first Sunny Day Real Estate album I ever heard regardless, one I approached with no real expectations musically expect that I’d heard it was pretty good, and I was hooked from day one.

So where to begin? I’ve already kind of begun, I suppose, but I haven’t really said a whole lot about the music other than extolling its strengths. Which will probably alienate anyone who listened to it and didn’t think it’s that great, so there go my pretenses of writing in a way that’s in any way unbiased. Oh well.

First of all, this is a very influential album, though probably not in a good way. Which sounds weird when I’m talking about an album I love. Thing is, this is the album (well, one of the albums) that’s responsible for not only music like Dashboard Confessional (and the more modern examples of emotion-infused indie rock) but also the misapplication of the term “emo” to that sort of music, as opposed to the hardcore punk it was originally associated with (bands like Rite of Spring and, later, Indian Summer), which annoys those of us who love punk in its original sense but loathe what it’s become (which bears almost no resemblance, musically, to its original meaning). A lot of people blame Jimmy Eat World for this, since they released an album (static prevails) that also mixed pop-punkish indie with traces of traditional emo. That was 1996. This was 1994, and its follow-up (self-titled) album was in 1995. By 1996, these albums had been released and already become some of the best selling albums on Sub Pop, and the band Mineral (who are also quite good, though not quite as inspired) had already started making music heavily influenced by Sunny Day Real Estate, who by then had already broken up for the first time.

Anyway, Sunny Day Real Estate was probably the first hugely successful band to blend emotive hardcore music with indie rock. A lot of fans will tell you that their music was nothing like the later bands, such as Dashboard Confessional, who donned the same genre title. This is because a lot of fans, myself included, cannot stand bands like Dashboard Confessional. However, while it might be nice to pretend the music shares no similarities, that’s a lie. Now, bands like Rite of Spring, they’re in no way similar, or at least only in the most superficial and general aspects. Sunny Day Real Estate, on the other hand, are. DC took away the hardcore influences for the most part (most notable, the vocals at their most intense) but kept the basic feel (as well as some of the song structure and guitar style, which was heavily based on – though mellowed down from – the original “emo” music) and the emotive characteristics, both in lyrics and delivery. The result is music that, I’ll admit, does sound similar. And some people, like I said, would strongly disagree with me here.

But be honest. Music doesn’t have to be objectively good or quantifiably different in order to be vastly different in quality. Both Isis and Cult of Luna play sludge metal, and it’d be a blatant lie to say they weren’t similar, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love the former while I’m mostly indifferent to the latter. Sunny Day Real Estate is (in my opinion) good, captivating, memorable music. Dashboard Confessional (in my opinion) is not. There doesn’t need to be a hard line drawn between the two in order to make that judgement.

On the other hand, while it’s possible to hate modern emo (well, semi-modern I guess, I’m not talking about the recent inclusion of bands like Fall Out Boy which are pretty different though still slightly related stylistically) and still like this album, like I do, it may make you less likely to. I guess it depends on why you hate it. If you hate it for the fact that it’s emotional and introspective, there’s a chance you’ll hate this for the same reasons. If you hate it for its trite and emotionally exploitative songwriting, this doesn’t have that problem.

But there are legitimate reasons to not like this, or even find it annoying. The vocals here, for example, are undeniably whiny. I happen to love Jeremy Enigk’s vocals, and find them quite endearing and sincere, but I can see how one may not. The lyrics themselves can be a bit too sentimental for their own good, though you can keep in mind that they were written before the rush of soft emo music flooded the market. Even if some of the things here have become in some ways trite, they were original for their time, and that’s worth something.

The music here is poppy indie-rock with a strong emotional edge to it. The vocals sometimes devolve into screams, though more of the fragile than aggressive variety. For the most part, though, it’s melodically strong and catchy. There’s an instant hook here, a clear sense of pop sensibilities which (for better or for worse) was lacking in a lot of the hardcore-punk-variety emo that can before it (though Rite of Spring can be pretty catchy in their own way, if you’re into that sort of thing). The music has emotional hooks and passages but it doesn’t rely on them too much. Too much “emotional” music sacrifices songwriting for one particularly good hook that tugs at you deep and keeps you listening. This doesn’t do that, mostly. The songs are well constructed and worth listening to all the way through, in a variety of moods, without waiting for that one part that makes you shiver. Which isn’t to say that doesn’t still happen from time to time, it just doesn’t depend on it in the way that, say, Explosions in the Sky depends on crescendoes. Too much emotional music is an all or nothing affair where, if it doesn’t touch you deeply, it bores you to death. Even if this music doesn’t always get you on a deep emotional level, it’s still good music with catchy melodies that’s worth listening to anyway.

And that’s why this is one of my favorite albums, and why it blows me away so many times, no matter how familiar I am with it. Because the music, first and foremost, is catchy and very well written, and second, almost as a bonus that surprises me now and then, has emotional hooks that occasionally pull me in and make me connect with it on a more personal level without seeming like they’re all it’s got going. It’s rare and surprising to find such a combination. Every time I listen I half-expect to dislike it and find faults I overlooked before, but I don’t. It isn’t flawless, and not all the songs are equally good (Phuerto Skuerto, for example, I’m not overly fond of) but it’s still well worth listening and coming back to.

I’m uploading the track Seven. Again, it’s the first song on the album, but it’s probably also the most immediately catchy, and it’s a good representation of the band’s combination of pop sensibilities and emotional depth, along with a hint of their hardcore-punk influences in the guitar riffing itself. It also has most of the attributes someone may dislike about them, which means it’s a good metric for whether or not you’ll like the rest.

Seven

Hopefully I’ll post something again by the end of the week. Thanks for reading.