Pretty Goes with Pretty

My Listening Hours: The Best of April–June

Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
Earlier this year I did a couple of posts concerning my pet peeve about most mp3 blogs. It generated a little discussion and I think brought a lot of new readers here. I still stand by all I said—basically that most mp3 blogs spend too much time hyping, not enough time talking about music—but on the other hand, you've got Andrew Bird's latest album. I absolutely would not have picked up this album if it weren't for the mp3 blogs. Bird has been on my radar for a while but I've just never had the incentive to pick up one of his many records. Then "Heretics" started showing up on every last blog I read and that was the end of it. So, chalk one up for the mp3 bloggers: this is my favorite record of the year by a mile.

I wrote a pretty lengthy review of the album not long after I picked it up (where I too included "Heretics," if you're interested). I won't go on about it again, other than to reiterate that Armchair Apocrypha is the best kind of album: it's a grower. My review went on about that facet but here I am two months later and it is still growing on me. I've declared about eight or nine of the twelve tracks to be my absolute very favoritest in that span of time—curently it's "Scythian Empires."

Feist, The Reminder
Maybe it seems a little funny that I'd chalk this one up as one of my favorites, given my nit-picky review, my suggested re-sequencing, and my malaise concerning the very idea of something called Adult Alternative, but the fact is I've devoted so many posts to this record because I've devoted so many listening hours to it.

Of all the albums slated to come out this year, this was the one that I had probably highest expectactions for—higher than the Shins, higher than Arcade Fire, higher than the New Pornographers, higher than everything. So to that end it is, yes, a little disappointing. But it's worst fault is really that it is merely great rather than perfect. I'm to a point now where I think I've finally played it too many times—maybe. I'm tired of many of the more upbeat songs; but now some of the quieter tracks are beginning to reveal themselves to me, in particular "So Sorry," "Honey Honey," and "The Park." It just goes to show that I was right in my first impression that this is a record full of individually strong songs, even if the album as a whole still doesn't quite cohere for me.

Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark
I was a Joni Mitchell virgin. I thought I knew what to expect—that voice, going up high when you kinda wish she wouldn't, at least not so often. And yes, she does that. And yes, she squeezes lyrics in where the meter shouldn't allow it. And no, it doesn't always work. But I'll tell you, I really wasn't prepared for Mitchell's excellent guitar skills. She takes her playing to Nick Drake levels—beyond mere folkiness and into true, subtle musicianship. Not to mention the harmonies, the lyrics (some feel dated, others still sharp). It doesn't always work—some of the later songs get a little too loose, a little too jazzy—but when this album is on, as in the case of "Help Me" or "Free Man in Paris," wow, it's on.

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
I bought this album back in April and, like their last album, I enjoyed some of the songs but not all. It felt weirdly not for me—I don't dance, I don't work out, I don't really do anything that is best-suited to repetitive booty-shakin' beats. Not to mention another part of me wondered: if I'm going to own a dance record, should it be this one? This seems kid tested and hipster approved—in other words, a little fakey.

But I kept listening to it, mostly on random amongst numerous other albums and rarely straight through—a task I found a little too overwhelming. And while some songs have by now died painful deaths as far as my hard drive goes—the title track and the unfortunate "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down"—the rest of the album has burrowed its way in. The opener is brilliant, and it took me about a month of listening before I realized that three of my favorite songs were actually all parts of the same track, "Us v Them" (I blame my slowness on the fact that all this record's repetition begs you to zone out while you're jamming to it). All the way up until this weekend, as I prepared to write this series of posts, I was expecting to put this album in with the "the rest" (come back tomorrow for those), but on one more casual listen as I sat on the 405, I realized that I have a helluva lot more fun with this album than I ever gave it credit for.

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].

Musical Blind Spots 2006

Looking back on 2006, I realize I bought a ton of albums that I consider "blind spots"—classic and/or essential albums that I had never "officially" sat down and listened to from beginning to end in one sitting. Sure, I've heard a ton of songs from Abbey Road and Document, thanks to mixtapes, the radio, department stores, etc., but I'd never consciously absorbed the full albums until this year. Since we're all worn out on what the best new shit is this year, I thought this might actually be a more interesting list—if nothing else, this list is a document of what actually took up most my listening hours this year.

The Beatles, Abbey Road, Let it Be , and Beatles For Sale 
Big Star, Third/Sister Lovers
The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man  
Leonard Cohen, Songs of Love and Hate
Antonio Carlos Joabim & Ellis Regina, Ellis and Tom  
Kinks, Village Green and Something Else
REM, Document and Lifes Rich Pageant
Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis
Television, Marquee Moon
Velvet Underground, s/t (third album)
The Who, Sings My Generation

Of these, the Kinks and Big Star turned out to be less perfect than I was expecting. I enjoy the albums but they're all flawed; the Kinks get a bit too silly at times, and Big Star often feels too addled. The Beatles & REM were great but I realized I knew about 80-90% of those records, I just never heard them in order before. It's like I'd been admiring really beautiful puzzle pieces all my life and just figured out this year how to assemble them. They have spurred me to possess their complete back catalogs, sooner rather than later (probably about four or or five albums left to purchase for both bands). Ditto the Byrds. Mr. Tambourine Man was the third Byrds album I've acquired in the last couple years, and the most exciting thing for me is that I think their best albums are still waiting for me at the record store.

The real treasures for me were Television, Ellis & Tom, and that VU album. I'd always heard people blabbering on about VU's first album (which I own and love), and their later, more rocking stuff didn't really move me when I heard it years ago in hazy dormrooms (though I think that wouldn't hold true today). But somehow I never heard (or heard about) this one, which is mostly quiet and totally beautiful. I knew "Pale Blue Eyes" from their greatest hits, but "Jesus" was the revelation.

Meanwhile, of all these albums, I now feel most embarrassed that I never knew Marquee Moon earlier, other than a lonely download of "Guiding Light," which on its own wasn't enough to spur me to the album purchase. Thank god Tower Records is closing—if it hadn't been for their liquidation prices, who knows when I would have picked it up? If you read my post about Tower earlier this year, you might agree that it's fitting that this is how I finally discovered this album: the title track alone would have changed my life if I had heard it in high school or college.

As I was mulling over this post last night, I re-read an older post of mine when I decided to really make an effort to fill in some of these blinds spots earlier this year—inspired (but not dictated) by the book 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The list of 1,001 (actually, it's curiously grown to 1,002) is up at Lists of Bests—possibly the biggest time-wasting website out there. When I first checked off the  list, I'd heard consciously from beginning to end just 20%. So I revisted the list last night to see how much I could fill in. Despite checking off a bunch of new records, my stat only bumped up to a measly 21%. I'm taking a deep breath: bring it on, 2007.

200 Down, 801 to Go...

Given my current disappointment with most new indie rock, perhaps now is a good time for me to return to filling in any gaps in my musical knowledge. I’ve been filling in my Beatles collection slowly but surely over the last year or two (speaking of, this site has album-by-album, track-by-track back story, and is really fascinating), and my wife and I have both been exploring as much stuff from the 50s, 60s, and 70s as we can. Lately I’ve really been enamored with the Byrds, who get short shrift when it comes to celebrating other musical icons of the era. There is a lot more to them than “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Along with Pink Floyd, they are probably the only group I can think of that suffered drastic lineup changes but kept bringing in brilliant songwriters for every go-around. Gram Parsons, David Crosby, and Roger McGuinn all had a hand in making classic albums, and it makes for a diverse and layered back catalog.

Meanwhile we’ve been delving into some lesser-known psychedelic acts from the era as well, such as the 13th Floor Elevators, Electric Prunes, and a handful of acts from the various Nuggets compilations. I haven’t found the one group or album that really nails me against the wall—most of the groups have inspired moments of absurdity, but just as often are merely silly. Elsewhere, I’ve been hoping to find more great Tropicalia records. I love Caetano Veloso and Os Mutantes (who re-formed this year and will be appearing the Flaming Lips at the Hollywood Bowl in July!) and what I’ve heard of Tom Zé. I’d like to get my hands on more Zé, as well as Gal Costa.

The other day I was at the bookstore and thumbed through 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Usually I scoff at “list”  books because they inevitably leave obvious things off and include utterly ridiculous items. And while this book doesn’t quite escape that—some of their inclusions from recent years already seem out of touch (Madonna’s Music? Really? I must hear it before I die?)—it does a good job of explaining the reasoning behind each choice. All 1,001 albums get a few paragraphs detailing what’s so wonderful about them, which is helpful, especially when it comes to groups I’d never heard of before. For instance I’ve now got Fred Neil on my radar; he was a folkie from the New York scene in the 60s, and is the man behind “Everybody’s Talkin’,” one of my favorite Harry Nilsson tracks.

As I didn’t have the $40 to drop on this brick of a book, I left the bookstore empty-handed. Lucky for me the totally addictive (and recently revamped) site Lists of Bests had the entire list posted. So I could scroll down the list and check off everything I’ve heard.

Checking off the list, it really hits home how much music is out there and how little I’ve heard. Of 1,001 albums, I’ve heard around 200 of them in full. My criteria for checking an album off was that I had to have actually heard the entire thing from beginning to end at least once in my life. You’d be surprised at how many albums that removes from the list! I feel like a caveman! For instance I think I’ve heard every song by the Doors at one time in my life or another (mostly in my college dorm, as it was apparently a prerequisite for many to get in), but I don’t think I’ve ever consciously sat down and understood that I was hearing Morrison Hotel from beginning to end. Same goes for anything by Jimi  Hendrix, the Who, and even many Rolling Stones albums! If you remove all you’ve ever heard on the radio or emanating from your older brother’s bedroom, it really steals the rug out from under you.

Needless to say I’ve got a long way to go. I’m going to start with the Kinks, which is probably one of my most embarrassing blind spots as an indie snob. Shh…