Pretty Goes with Pretty

My Listening Hours: The State of 2007 So Far

No, the albums here are not my tops of the year; they're just what I have to choose from. These are the nine albums made in 2007 that I've so far purchased or acquired, and/or completely processed as albums.

If I were pressed to make a top ten list, I'd stall at four. Here's my ranking:

1. Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
This one leads the pack, easily, as the most rewarding album of the year.

2. Peter Bjorn & John, Writer's Block
This album has remained in my iPod for a surprisingly long time. When I got a little burned on the record as a whole, the songs kept popping up on random plays and I never skipped 'em. Lately I've come back around to playing the record straight through again and I'm reminded of how layered and thought-out the album  is.

3. Feist, The Reminder
For now this occupies the number three spot. By the end of the year there's a good chance it will still be in the top ten, but I don't know how high. I'm just beginning to burn out the record and am ready to put it aside for awhile. The question by the end of the year will be whether it ever makes its way back into my rotation. Sometimes albums have a way of surprising you the second time around and all the nagging feelings you had just evaporate.

4. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
As I said earlier this week, this is an album that I'm only now realizing is better than I first gave it credit for. As with Feist I don't really know how I'll feel about six months from now. I don't really know how I'll feel about it six weeks from now! Sometimes I embrace the record, sometimes I'm exhausted by it.

The rest? None are truly bad but none are essential, either. The Sea & Cake committs the worst sin - it's boring. While the Shins, Arcade Fire, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah all have their strong points but honestly I haven't consciously chosen to put them on since the last time I wrote about them - a good three months ago.

There are a few albums out now that I still intend to pick up--Battles and Rufus Wainwright, in particular. What about you? What's on your best-so-far list? Have I missed anything totally worthwhile? There was a lot of buzz around Panda Bear and the National, among others, in the last few months. Did you pick them up? Have they remained in your rotation? What has occupied your listening hours? Let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile I'll be looking ahead to the next three months of releases for albums I'm looking forward to. Check back here later today.

My Listening Hours: The Spring's Rest

(If you missed yesterday’s posts, you may want to start here, then here.)

The Shins: Wincing the Night Away
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder
Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
These were the three heavily anticipated albums of the season, wouldn’t you say? (Maybe some of you would include Modest Mouse in there too… not me.) They all more or less fared the same as far as I was concerned, each succeeding and failing in their own ways. I gave CYHSY and Arcade Fire their own lengthy reviews, so won’t really go into more depth again. I’d meant to write a longer piece on the Shins too but just never got around to it. You might say that sums up my feelings on the record. It’s good but I don’t really know that it’s worth talking about. It didn’t help that I bought Peter Bjorn & John on the same day and that album pretty much shoved everything else out its way.

As with Arcade Fire and CYHSY, I kept listening to Wincing, trying to force myself to love it, or at least give it the fairest shake I could considering how much I liked their earlier stuff. At worst, there are tracks that are severe misfires. “Sea Legs” sounds like Morrissey trying to cash in on early-’90s trip hop—that first impression could be overcome, except that the band then carries the song out with two minutes of the limpest jam I’ve heard in years. Other songs, like “Phantom Limb” or “Girl Sailor,” are solid Shins songs; they’re easily as good as the best stuff from their other records—my complaint is that they’re not better. On the flipside of that coin, I do enjoy most of the Wincing songs whenever they come up on shuffle, now that the burden of expectation has worn off. As time goes by I think I’ll come to appreciate these songs the same way I appreciate many of their others, as a testament to James Mercer’s craft, even if I can’t ever claim to love the album as a whole.

Mates of State: Bring it Back
This album found its way to our stereo via a co-worker of my wife’s who burned a copy for us. It didn’t stick with us right away—my wife thought the woman’s voice was a little too Plain-Jane, a common malady for indie rock girls; I didn’t mind it so much, but whenever the husband-and-wife duo sang the same notes together I thought, in the immortal words of Descarte—or was it Stalin?—“gettin’ a little pitchy, dawg.” Nevertheless, like the Little Ones, the melodies and harmonies sunk their teeth in and I kept listening. One thing that really struck me was how ballsy their opener was. It was so much longer than the rest of the album’s tracks, and it had this really sort of epic outro (“I’m tired of singing,” over and over). I appreciated that they’d open with that when the rest of the record is pretty immediate pop tunes (my current favorite is “So Many Ways”). When I started writing this post and I went over to Amazon to get the cover art, however, I discovered that our copy of the album was burned in reverse order! So it was the closer, it wasn’t as ballsy as I thought, and now I’m not sure how I feel about the record. I plan to try it over again. Last year I had the Zutons’ first album and thought it was really inconsistent and only good in spots, until I discovered that it was out of sequence on my iTunes and when I ordered it correctly the whole album got way better. Here’s hoping for the Mates.

Beirut: Gulag Orkestra
Again, had to turn the Cynic Switch off before I could pull the trigger on this album. Too many people were a) heaping ridiculous love on them and b) comparing them to Neutral Milk Hotel. The combination set off major warning sirens in my head—false idols, and all that. Turns out that Beirut is good but hardly deserving the amount of hype given or the NMH comparisons. There are some bright spots on this album—I really love “Scenic World” and “After the Curtain”—but the whole thing gets a little too overblown after a while. The singer’s delivery doesn’t really vary that much, and by the end of the album the whole thing starts to feel really bloated. But he’s got his own vision happening, and he’s young. He’s got a lot of potential and I’ll be keeping an eye on what he does next. I think if he can rein himself in a little he might produce a really focused, possibly perfect album. Or, he could make a sprawling mess. Time—or the record he put out this year that I haven't heard yet—will tell.

Lou Reed: Transformer
My sole blind spot purchase of the year so far. Last year I was acquiring older albums at a far greater rate than this year—not coincidentally, I had a job that placed me in the library on a regular basis. Guess I need to skip over to the library if I want to continue filling in my gaps. Transformer’s been on my list for a while now, ever since I bought the third VU album and fell in love with Reed all over again, plus the local radio station had put “Satellite of Love” in rotation and it was making me so happy every time it came on. I like most of this record but I have to admit I still haven’t really sat down seriously with it. It’s one of those albums where I realize that I know probably half the songs (“Perfect Day” and “Wild Side,” among others, are both here too), just never listened to them in the original sequence before. Truth be told, I really just listen to “Satellite of Love” over and over again. Ba ba ba.

Tomorrow, a look forward to the summer releases keeping me hot with anticipation.

Simple Pleasures: Melody and Harmony, Hiss and Hum

A month or two back a friend of mine, who I’ve known since college, read my year-end post on the musical blind spots I filled in during 2006. “Your blind spots are like my top ten of all time,” he said. Not that it was his intention, but I knew when I made that post that I’d be subject to some degree of shame—how can I be thirty years old and consider myself a music nerd and not know Marquee Moon? I worked in a record store the entire time I was in college, ferchrissakes!

His email made me reconsider—what the hell was I listening to back then, when I wasn’t discovering Television, wasn’t listening to the Byrds, Big Star, the Kinks? I was busy buying up Fat Cat 12”s, clicky electronica, and krautrock. When I worked in that record store a co-worker and I would have “space rock Fridays,” where we would just listen to stuff distributed by Forced Exposure—records full of tones and buzzes. We’d scour the promo racks for anything that looked vaguely experimental and if it turned out to have—gasp!—song structure, we’d fall over each other on the way to the eject button as if a seven-year-old had just walked in while Wu-tang was on. Verse-chorus-verse, harmony, melody—it was anathema. Give us sound, no more.

Jump ahead ten or twelve years and, while I can still appreciate and adore a great ambient record, true joy at the record store comes when I pick up an album, new or old, that I can sing along to. It's not sudden; I've been singing along for years.  But lately I'm particularly aware of the simple pleasures to be found in simple tunes. I'm not rejecting the wish—need, in the best cases— to experiment with form or sound, but right now I find the most enjoyment in songwriters that possess the confidence to not use deconstruction or abstraction to make some larger statement, particularly if the songwriter in question has the talent or ability to do so. Employing the right flourish at the right time, in a way that enhances the song but doesn’t draw attention to itself, that’s craft. This is the element that’s been missing, in one way or another, from a lot of new records I’ve been buying lately, for instance Clap Your Hands, Arcade Fire, or in a smaller way the Shins. Each album seems burdened by overcompensation, a misguided lack of confidence or an irrational need to self-rebel.

I'm getting a little bit off track. I didn’t begin this post with the intention of figuring out what’s “wrong” with these bands. Frankly they may not think anything is wrong, other than with me. And in fact that’s closer to what I’m trying to ascertain. The emails my friend and I exchanged about blind spots was just one of many conversations I’ve had with him, with my wife, and with other friends, all about different things but all adding up to my own perception of how my relationship with music, indeed with other artforms as well, has changed in the last ten years. I’m fumbling around a point here; more tomorrow [here].

Further on the New Arcade Fire

Little babies? Let’s go!

Women and Children? Let’s go!

Old folks? Let’s go!

I don’t know where we're going!

I listened to the whole thing straight through this morning as I walked to work (it’s a long walk). I think I can narrow my beef with this album down to the string of songs toward the end, “Antichrist Television Blues,” “Windowsill,” and “No Cars Go.” I think the fact that they come in succession, severely weighing down the whole second half of the record, is what bothers me about the album as a whole. It gives the impression that the whole album is more flawed than it actually is. As I walked I was making a little checklist in my mind: “I like this song, I like this song, this song’s okay, this song’s growing on me,” etc. Not until “Antichrist...” did I really start lamenting the lyrics, not to mention I was starting to feel bogged down by the overall sound of the record. By the time I got to “My Body is a Cage,” which has fast become my favorite on the disc, I almost feel sorry for it, since it has to follow the dregs.

Arcade Fire: Neon Bible

I was all set to write my own review of the new Arcade Fire, but David M. Goldstein over at Coke Machine Glow pretty much hit every point I wanted to make. So I encourage you to read his review instead and just know that I agree with nearly everything he says. By the way, it’s funny that he should start his review off recollecting when he last namechecked the Violent Femmes in a review; coincidentally, the last (and only) time I used a Coke Machine Glow review as a jumping-off point for my own was when I went on about Belle & Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit. Go figure, that was Goldstein talking about the Violent Femmes curse.

The only point on which I’d quibble is that “No Cars Go” is not even close to a career highlight; I actually find it to be one of the more laughable portions of the album. First verse: “I know a place where no cars go, I know a place where no planes go”; second verse: “I know a place where no spaceships go, I know a place where no subs go.” What is this, kindergarten? Do you know a place where no helicopters go? How about catamarans? Then, to top it all off, the last line of the song is “I don’t know where we’re going!” Meanwhile, again contrary to Goldstein, I think the album closer, "My Body is a Cage," is the most arresting song on the album.

But otherwise, like I said, Goldstein’s got it pretty much spot on. Funeral was a nearly perfect record and in retrospect it had a lot to do with the play between personal despair and rallying optimism. It’s apt that the first half of that album was about “neighborhoods.” Win Butler and co. did a great job of making a record that roused the community. But Neon Bible is the equivalent of the City Councilman making a bid for the  presidency. Awkwardly, though, it’s a Councilman from Montreal running for President of the United States.

The paranoia and anxiety running through this War on Terror–obsessed album fits Butler like a thrift-store suit. He can almost make it work but it doesn’t quite fit. When Butler laments in “Windowsill” that he “don’t wanna live in America no more,” I want to remind him that he never lived here in the first place. (Incidentally, there are a lot of things Butler “don’t wanna” do on this album, to the extent that his list of things he don’t wanna do annoyingly carries from one song to the very next.) That's not to say you have to be an American to criticize America, but nevertheless when Butler says he doesn't want to live here "anymore," or later that he "don't wanna work in a building downtown" because "the planes keep crashing always two by two," it sounds like dress-up. He's not taking on American policy from a perspective he can truly own. [Update: my brilliant wife has schooled me. Apparently Butler is originally from the U.S.; so in fact he's walkin' his talk!]

At any rate, like Goldstein I find myself only capable of writing a lopsided review; it’s easier to find the faults than to highlight the great moments, perhaps because when they are good, it’s the same way they were good before, and it feels redundant to praise those aspects over again. If I handed out grades with my album reviews, I'd probbly give Neon Bible a B, B-. Arcade Fire are nothing if not rousing. And while I personally might find some of the lyrical content here a little heavy handed, there’s a sixteen-year-old out there who may not know just how to articulate his or her feelings about the state of the world and their place within it, and maybe this is the album they’ll blare out of their boom boxes—er, cell phone ring tones—the same way I got off on the righteousness of Rage Against the Machine or the paranoia of Radiohead. To that end this album may yet be a classic for a generation. Just not my generation.