Nothing says America like home shopping, rock and roll with proud country roots, and breaking shit for no reason. As you embark on your Thanksgiving plans, whether they involve Tofurkey, bitter arguments fueled by red wine, or camping out at the mall at midnight, be sure to take a break and check out the Avett Brothers’ video for “Slight Figure of Speech” from their recent full-length, I and Love and You. This has been a breakthrough year for the boys from North Carolina. The band transitioned to American Recordings for their latest record, and with that step took on the masterful ear of producer, Rick Rubin. I and Love and You highlights the band’s skill and comfort with discussing love in its myriad shapes, from its abashed and slippery expression in the opening track, which shares its name with the album, to its wide-eyed, bare-boned declaration in “Kick Drum.”
But sometimes, all that waxing poetic on the subjects of desire and devotion can be a little much. The video proves that even though the Avett Brothers have made it to the big-time, they can still cut back and have the same hootin’ and hollerin’ fun they’ve had in their nine years of tireless touring and numerous releases on the Ramseur label. Although the music takes a while to start (roughly two minutes into the video), the result is the opposite of tryptophan.
“Slight Figure of Speech” ~ Avett Brothers ~ I and Love and You ~ American Recordings
Lately, every music writer from scoresofmediasources has been talking until they’re breathless about four small words that take on stratospheric proportions in some peoples’ minds: Best. Of. The. Decade. And it would be very easy, rather enticingly so, to peruse through my iTunes library, pick out my favorite albums, and chime in from my tiny soapbox.
Some music outlets have presented trends of the past decade, like technologies that have revolutionized the way casual and devout fans attach themselves to artists. There’s a lot to discuss in that arena. That’s evidenced in the fact that I couldn’t get through my first paragraph without mentioning iTunes.
Frankly, I don’t have the time to offer a thoughtful essay on every topic pertinent to musical sounds and shifts of the decade even though I could, as could many other scholars and shills, some in much better form than me. For that reason, a list seems to be an easy format. Bullet points without the jumbled snarl of footnotes and rebuttals to encumber them would certainly cater to my already hectic holiday schedule. Basketball and football, in the same months! It’s madness! But another unexpected hurtle that I came across as I started to explore this buzzing, rich area of discourse is that there’s truly so much to say about music from this decade. You could jot down a handful of items, but if you’re paying any attention at all, you’ll probably have way more to add. Then by the time you get up to help yourself to a beer, you’ve composed something that looks like your notes from your ancient Chinese history lecture.
I don’t want to subject anyone to my horrendous written take on Lao Tzu and the Bronze Age. Instead of an outline, I’ll offer some thoughts on certain ideas that got a lot of mileage in the aughts, if only because of their absence. Plus, I still plan to pay some respect to a few of my favorite songs and artists from the last nine years. This is a music blog, after all.
Where Have All the Labels Gone?
When I saw Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the Great American Music Hall, they headlined at a Lookout Records showcase. It was, to use the parlance of the time, the shit. Representatives from the label passed out bright yellow bags full of bumper stickers, fliers, a still-handy tape cutter for CDs, and two compilation albums on which to test the handy cutter. One woman working a booth sized me up, proclaimed “You look like a teacher,” and gave me a shirt that bore the assertion that Corporate Radio Still Sucks. The label celebrated the people at the concert as much as everyone in the audience cheered in response to the bands. I proudly pulled my new shirt over the dress I was wearing and moved right to the foot of the stage. I never do that, even though it’s just about impossible for me to see anything if I don’t position myself there.
It helped that the main act’s set was one of the most exciting concerts at which I had ever been present. Bay Area bands such as the Oranges Band and Communiqué opened with gusto. Then Ted Leo proved why critics refer to him as the hardest working man in indie rock. He beat the top of his skull with a tambourine during “The Ballad of the Sin Eater.” He erupted into falsetto as exuberantly as most people tear into bags of Doritos. He made the music hall full of calculatingly decorated San Francisco cool kids shake it like preschoolers.
Some things haven’t changed since that 2003 show. Corporate radio is still alive, albeit barely, and sucking just as much as ever. Ted Leo tours as rigorously as he did at the start of the aughts. This December, he’ll follow a sold-out show at the Bowery in New York City with stops in Spain and the UK.
But time hasn’t been as benevolent towards other things from that night. That T-shirt is long gone, probably a casualty of a hasty trip to Goodwill or car theft. Sadly, Lookout Records hasn’t weathered the decade well either. Last April, the head of Little Type Mailorder, the label’s online sales distributor, passed away. All sales through the Lookout website have ceased. But that was the most recent episode in a series of bad luck. There was the notorious reverse-no-backsies move by Green Day in 2005 when the band pulled their EPs and two full-length albums off the Lookout catalog. Operation Ivy did the same in 2006.
While those losses took place, the role and relevance of all record labels were put into a tailspin as file-sharing made it easy for listeners to discard careful studies of a label’s offerings in favor of cherry-picking singles. It’s tempting to latch onto the image of some tightly-suited fat cat in a corporate high-rise office pounding a meaty fist onto his desk as he curses all the kids with their computers and decides which person’s dream to exploit next. It’s difficult to remember the point when a record label served as a base, how the label helped navigate listeners through various artists’ work before Amazon or Pandora or iLike took the reins. No one should forget the contributions to modern music culture of such labels as Kill Rock Stars, Matador, Merge, and the recently beleaguered Touch and Go, who released Ted Leo’s last record.
You can’t disparage the ease of access not only to music, but to information about the music that interests you. Maybe it’s in that electrically charged space that ushers interest into the world, the distance between the short girl in the front row and the band on the stage making her dance, where both big and small labels should be paying the most attention.
“Timorous Me” ~ Ted Leo and the Pharmacists ~ The Tyranny of Distance ~ Lookout
Apologies for the darkness in this pic, but at least it's appropriate.
A pattern seems to emerge every time I attend a concert at the Wonder Ballroom and attempt to review it here. Step One: Drink red wine. Step Two: Promptly forget to take notes. Step Three: Wake up too late to shower. Step four: Curse pattern. So forgive me as I try to piece together the details from the Mountain Goats and Final Fantasy show last night. At least, I think it was last night. It feels like eons ago.
Some (hazy) observations:
Owen Pallett is dreamy! To bring the subject back to the music, his live act is a lot like Andrew Bird’s but without the whistling. And both men are dreamy!
John Darnielle brought up the brief period of time he lived in Portland, as he references in “Genesis 3:23.” During one of the numerous anecdotes to the audience, he mentioned a storage unit on NE Broadway. Later, he performed a song with Owen Pallett on the violin that name-drops the Burnside Bridge. As evidenced by the fact that Darnielle no longer lives here, his time in the city was not spent happily. The “Genesis” song describes a point when the songwriter was “doing the things that train wrecks do—crashing into things.”
Selections from The Life of the World to Come were heavily represented. Since Darnielle and the band are touring in support of the album, that makes sense. The album’s Biblical cues have been discussed at length, and like much of Darnielle’s work, a lot of the verses pack tightly-wound punches. All the same, I’m not connecting with the newest addition to the Mountain Goats’ canon as readily as I did with Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree. It may simply require a quiet hour and attentive ear. But I kept wanting to blurt out “No Children!” and “Dance Music!” between songs. Fortunately for everyone around, I exercised restraint (mostly – at least one of those titles slipped out once). Another stroke of luck – the Mountain Goats finished the regular set with “This Year” and concluded the encore with an unembellished rendition of “Love Love Love.” Needless to say, I loved it.
“Isaiah 45:23″ ~ Mountain Goats ~ The Life of the World to Come ~ 4AD
If you’ve used the Google homepage any time during the past week, you probably already know. But in case you’re not sure what it all means, let me assure you that the meaning is brought to you by the letters H, U, G, and E. Sesame Street aired its first episode forty years ago. A lot of kidlets learned valuable lessons from the show, including but not limited to useful Spanish words, numbers, and when to put down the duckie. Then, perhaps inevitably, many of us grew up to be Grouches, Cookie Monsters, and Super Grovers.
Alongside the lovable cast of Muppets, there were humans who smiled and sang and treated all the human children with care and respect. Though I don’t watch the show anymore, it makes me truly happy to know that Bob, Susan, Gordon, Maria, Luis, and Linda are still hard at work, enriching the soft skull years for the current generation of kidlets. I don’t want to consider the thought of children’s television without them. I won’t even get into the day that Mr. Hooper stopped coming to work at his store.
Beyond fondness for the artifacts of one’s youth and gratitude for extra help with the alphabet, I think everyone who watched Sesame Street can agree on the intangible, emotional pull the show had on our hearts then and still holds today. Maybe it’s a hackneyed observation, but Big Bird and Snuffy and the monsters and even that megalomaniac, Elmo, all had characteristics that a viewer could see in herself or aspire to be. Sesame Street is more than a televised school day because it makes you feel the pride of the characters’ accomplishments, the apprehension they experience as events change their neighborhood, and the affection they have for each other. When does art end and life begin? What kind of a person did Sesame Street make me want to be? What kind of life would I have wanted without Sesame Street?
As it turns out, the show even possesses prescient powers. When I was a kid, I always loved the pleasing melody of Ernie’s lullaby, “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon.” It’s a surprisingly sophisticated song, as Ernie weighs the desire for adventure and imaginative travels with the comforts and joys of home. Since more than a few adults struggle to find a balance between the two, I think this song is brilliant. Plus, any writer, artist, or chronic daydreamer probably understands why I have an affinity for a chorus that starts with “Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above, I would miss all the places and people I love.”
“Are you feeling heartbroken ’cause you’ll never be mistaken for a good looking man about town?”
Oh, Morrissey. How does one manage to be so simultaneously droll and sympathetic? How can I master this skill that you have in spades? For all of Steven Patrick Morrissey’s flaws, his sense of humor in his work has always been bitingly, lovingly unsinkable. So after his highly publicized onstage collapse, the singer cracked wise with the audience at his return concert in London and informed them how, “The doctor said I shouldn’t smile. I told him, ‘I don’t.’”
Morrissey is currently on the road to promote his full-length from earlier this year, Years of Refusal, as well as a collection of B-sides from his last three albums entitled Swords. There’s even a live David Bowie cover tossed in. Unlike Bowie’s ill-fated Ziggy Stardust, here’s wishing one of pop music’s greatest fussbudgets a continued productive career, good health for the rest of the tour, et cetera, et cetera.
Morrissey will play at the Roseland on Monday, November 30.
“Good Looking Man about Town” ~ Morrissey ~ Swords ~ Polydor
Finally, one of the precious few nights of the year when tough guys can wear diapers, women can don beards, and everyone under the age of 10 and over the age of 18 trails glitter wherever they go. It’s hard not to love Halloween. I know that I personally cannot wait to slip into the scandalous version of a vampire schoolgirl from the 70s.
Except I won’t, because I am practical. It has been wet and not a beat over 60 degrees outside this whole week. Also, I do not need to help history repeat itself. If you ever buy me a glass or two of some crisp Pinot, I might tell you the story about how my perpetually broke college self needed something to wear for Halloween and found a Little Red Riding Hood costume . . . in the children’s section. I’m small and ate pretty sparingly, but despite those dubious advantages, I still ended up squeezing into a tiny red and white sheath that barely covered my ass and left ultra-sexy elastic welts all over my limbs. From that year on, I determined that the sexy was better left to different occasions, like Thanksgiving.
But whether you dress like a nun or a nutjob this Halloween, that shouldn’t stop you from setting the mood with music that celebrates the supernatural. You can start with a classic. For me, no Halloween is complete until I’ve ripped a satisfying “Dooooon’t run away, it’s only me,” from my throat. This is the full version, so it’s long. Needless to say, every second of it is awesome.
“Dead Man’s Party” ~ Oingo Boingo ~ Dead Man’s Party ~ MCA
But what kind of guests should you expect at such a party? Do you chit chat about sports? The weather? The rush of wind and screams of the damned that occur as you sink your teeth into your victim? Christopher Owens, Chan Marshall, and Elvis Perkins (and how amazing would that guest list be) have some topical suggestions.
“Ghost Mouth” ~ Girls ~ Album ~ True Panther Sounds
“Werewolf” ~ Cat Power ~ You Are Free ~ Matador
“Stay Zombie Stay” ~ Elvis Perkins in Dearland ~ The Doomsday EP ~ XL
But don’t fear the undead. They’re no more decrepit than your garden variety post rocker. And in the spirit (some pun intended) of celebrating all things that go bump in the night, the sensual sounds found below should warm even the barest of asses on this All Hallow’s Eve.
If you ever want a fool-proof way to make me shout, “Aughaughaughhh,” in a positive manner, tell me about one of my all-time favorite bands having their somewhat obscure songs shown some love by a current favorite band. I nearly bawled fat tears of joy when Glen Hansard of the Swell Season made it clear that he’s a fan of the Pixies. In the Swell Season’s show in Eugene, OR last year, Hansard and bandmate Markéta Irglová took a break from their collaboration’s characteristically yearning ballads and paid their respects to the former-ish band of Eugene resident, Frank Black. I especially like the part when Hansard digresses to talk about Finding Nemo and manages to logically tie a movie about fish to the end of the Come On Pilgrim track. It’s an inspired combination of images that Black would surely enjoy.
Less recently and less locally, the Swell Season also tried out “Cactus” from the Surfer Rosa album. Hansard breaks a string but smoothly gets his guitar replaced without interrupting the flow of the song too drastically. Irglová’s soft voice gets more volume, too. And while it’s impossible to really capture the tension and bare-faced desire of the original, particularly at Coachella as the audience members clap their hands and grow increasingly more delirious with every passing sleepless hour, the song is still a pretty apt selection for a Swell Season cover. Only time will tell if the Breeders or Frank Black’s solo work (or, less likely, the short-lived project of Joey Santiago and David Lovering, the Martinis) get the Hansard/Irglová treatment at a future show.
The Swell Season will play at the Crystal Ballroom on Tuesday, November 24. Doveman will also play.
As much as I mourn the end of summer, fall has its perks. Just ask any Halloween, football, leaf-color-changing, or hot beverage fan. Or you could just continue to read my entry, as I am a fan of all those things. You might expect that I am also a fan of fall. Maybe I secretly am, but the transition out of summer always feels so abrupt and uncomfortable, much like the first jump into the water during the departed warmer months. One day, when you head out in the morning, you flippantly slip on sandals before you reach your car, which has a minimum of two of its windows cracked open an inch or more. The next day, your routine requires an extra few minutes because you need to tug on your boots and shiver on the icy driver’s seat while waiting for the car’s heat to kick in. And if you’ve left your windows open during a rain attack, you get to add overall pissiness to your seasonal disorientation.
But this morning, I woke to the sound of water getting jostled around in the rain gutters next to my bedroom. It was too dark to get dressed without cracking the blinds open. I drove to work with the windshield wipers rocking up and down the whole way, and swerved past countless piles of wet leaves. I had the new A Place to Bury Strangers album on at a low, ominous volume. And for the first time, the morning didn’t just feel like fall or remind me that summer was over. It was fall. It is fall. You could discuss the weather and climate in relation to the types that preceded it, but they were part of a time that feels so long ago you might as well discuss who your favorite Power Ranger is.
Good thing A Place to Bury Strangers not only has one of my favorite band names of the minute, but also puts out some loud, moody music with which to mope and thrash around. The group’s influences are worn prominently on their sleeves, as lead singer Oliver Ackermann channels Ian Curtis on ”Keep Slipping Away” and “Lost Feeling” sounds almost like a cut track from Power, Corruption, and Lies. Post punk conventions reign supreme on Exploding Head (even the album name sounds like an homage to David Lynch or some other auteur’s dark 1980s imagination), with furious beats that match alternately agitated and trance-like guitars. Plus, the vocals have that echoing effect of being sung deep within a cavern.
But, in spite of no new ground to traverse, A Place to Bury Strangers sounds fresh and impassioned. Maybe it’s just because the last New Order album sounded so toothless compared to their earlier work. It probably speaks to the effects of time as well. Had Exploding Head arrived sometime in the 80s, the band might have gotten lost among the other dark-wave brooders of the era. However, on a gloomy autumn day in the late aughts, it is jarring and emotional in just the right ways. It just doesn’t pair very well with football.
In rare instances, a small dog may fend off a Grizzly Bear.
Remember that pesky strain of flu that got everyone so hot and bothered a few months back? And remember how one of my favorites underwent the trials of said flu? Once you’ve had a sufficient amount of time to recollect, any guesses as to what I’ve been up to this past week? I’ll give you a hint – health care providers in the Pacific Northwest (which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, in this case – sorry Humboldt) have reported a huge spike in consultations with patients who exhibit influenza-like symptoms. Oink, oink.
The worst thing about having swine flu isn’t the physical manifestations of the flu. That’s not to say that having swine flu is a party, unless you prefer your parties to include fevers, full body aches, lack of appetite, and the need to sleep for almost 12 hours a day. But once those symptoms pass and your body begins to feel better, you’re still under quarantine. Doctors advise that a swine flu victim remain away from his or her regular daily endeavors for 24 hours after a normal body temperature has been reached, but some professionals recommend that you stay home-bound for at least three days after your fever has disappeared.
That is when the most aggravating part about swine flu makes itself known. It is as boring as the night is long. You’re stuck indoors. You can’t be around other people. For the first few days, you barely have enough energy to use the bathroom, let alone do anything productive. And even though the forced exile allows you to do all the lazy blob-like activities you never find time to accomplish, such as viewing all the DVR’ed Discovery Channel programs that have been waiting in your queue for months, the novelty of all that TV starts to wear after a while.
Here are some more side effects of the swine flu that you probably won’t hear about from the CDC:
1) Although anti-viral medications to combat and prevent against the virus exist, you need a prescription from a doctor. And unless you have a regular physician, you might not get one in time for the medicine to work. Urgent care services in Portland, which are probably stretched pretty thin, were told not to offer Tamiflu to people other than the elderly, the expectant mothers, and the already infirm. Bet you thought their mission was to keep everyone healthy. Me, too.
2) I’m sure I’m in the minority, but I’m still on the fence on how much I like Glee. The students sounded like they were squeaking in their version of that Nelly song. It was like being back in the 80s and having to watch those Kidsongs on VHS while I was baby-sitting. Granted, I was totally jealous of all the Kidsongs kids at that point and memorized all their songs out of spite. Maybe I’m a little jealous of the exuberant choir antics, or maybe my old fussbudget self can’t recognize any of the damn music they do. I blame the flu.
3) Even a sick person starts to get pretty squeamish about the state of her bedsheets after a week of the flu.
4) Eventually, curiosity/boredom won and I obtained a copy of the soundtrack to New Moon. The compilation is being touted as the indie album of the year. The perplexing part is that the soundtrack is being distributed by Atlantic, which is not an independent label. The film itself is expected to rake in several millions at the box office, which hardly means that New Moon is being limited to art house theaters. And most of the performers on the soundtrack, such as Death Cab for Cutie and the Killers, are on major labels.
I don’t have a problem with any of these factors, other than the packaging. This is not an indie album. I don’t care if it includes Bon Iver, it’s still not an indie album. It is, however, a slickly produced and star-studded compilation album that shows off the talents of some of the most contemporary names just on the brink of unadulterated mainstream success. And as you might expect from a movie about a lovesick teenage girl who lives in the Pacific Northwest, the soundtrack is best heard when the weather is dank and the preferred action of the day is brood. Of course, a band like Grizzly Bear has been chased by the phrase “quietly haunting” since its first album, so they fittingly appear in the mix, with vocals from Victoria Legrand of Beach House. The track, “Slow Life,” should wistfully reel in fans both new and old. It won’t happen a moment too soon for Grizzly Bear. Their Thursday Portland appearance had at least one fewer attendee due to swine flu. The capacity of this illness reaches everyone.
Grizzly Bear with Victoria Legrand ~ New Moon: Original Soundtrack ~ Atlantic
One of these is a Mountain Goat. The other is not.
In honor of today’s release, The Life of the World to Come, I thought we should delve into the exhaustive catalog of songs John Darnielle has written as part of the Mountain Goats. If you’re in a bad and verbose kind of mood, perhaps you have already participated in such an undertaking. Or if you’re like me, you’re just enamored and maybe a little intimidated by Darnielle’s productive output, which is chock-full of instances of his descriptive, caustic wit.
If the latter is the case, then you probably already know that the Mountain Goats’ latest album has track titles that were all named after books of the Bible. Darnielle has explored Christian themes before. The conflicts between pleasure and guilt, faith and doubt, and salvation and despair come up in several forms throughout the Mountain Goats’ discography. But which of the songs best exemplify the part of the Bible that everyone under the sun is familiar with – the seven deadly sins? Here are my candidates, and no, they are not all related to anger.
If you tried to travel with as much alcohol in your system as this person, you’d probably have other concerns than worrying that you might be getting fat.
There’s not a whole lot of overtly sexual imagery in the Mountain Goats’ arsenal, or maybe there is but I’m too blown away by the stark, evocative quality of the lyrics for the sexy to register. In “Your Belgian Things,” you might think of a transgressive woman – either by her own or society’s design – waiting for “the men” to take away everything she’s worked for. “I saw the mess you left in the east bedroom,” Darnielle admits, just before the chorus explains how, “I can see you in my sleep, playing the points for all you’re worth/Walking gingerly across the bruised earth.” Or maybe it’s about death. But nobody ever lost money equating sex with death.
I picked this for the lyric, “You and me lying on the tile floor/Trying to keep cool.” You know a showdown of biblical magnitude is waiting to happen, but neither person in the song can summon up the strength to take the first shot.
It doesn’t get any more angry than “No Children.” The narrator of this eloquent and utterly bitter ode to the necessity of divorce aims his fire at his friends, his city, and his razor. But he saves his most savory insults for his lover-turned-worst-enemy, who could very well be himself.
This song has always been particularly fascinating to me, with its literary and pop culture allusions and the calm atmosphere it exudes. However, on the surface, all of the examples that are mentioned in this song have nothing to do with any notion of love. But Darnielle mentioned in a 2005 NPR interview how most people have been taught only one concept of love. Popular wisdom explains the idea as one made of hope and rainbows that is best expressed in good actions, but in this song, love can be just as destructive and misguided as hate. But any kind of love, even in its most perverse form, has its roots in pride. Right? Whatever, this song is amazing.
In another interview, Darnielle revealed that the song is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s account of his time as a NYC resident. Lovecraft started off with all the love in the world for the city, but the cost of living eventually drove his wife to move to another state for work and left Lovecraft destitute and wary of the metropolis he had sought.
