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 Best

Midlake: The Trials of Van Occupanther and Bamnan & Silvercork
I bought The Trials of Van Occupanther in December after seeing it on other people’s top ten lists and hearing the absolutely fantastic opener, “Roscoe.” When the time came for me to make my own best-of-’06 list I mentioned Trials but was hesitant to show it much love since I hadn’t really had time to digest it. Three months later, this album has not left my hard drive, my iPod, my car stereo, my dreams, my waking hours. It easily would have been my #1 of last year had I heard it in time. “Roscoe” is the song that sucks you in, and on first listens it seems to sit head and shoulders above the rest of the album. But this is one of those albums—the best kind—where the more you listen to it, each individual track at one point becomes your favorite. The first time I mentioned Midlake I provided an mp3 to “Roscoe.” This time I’ll give you “We Gathered in Spring.“

I listened to a few tracks from their first album, Bamnan & Silvercork, at the time, and I liked them but was too immersed in Trials to be distracted. What I’d read on the internet also kept mentioning that the album was heavily indebted to the Flaming Lips. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but it sounded like code for “this band has not found their way.” When I bought tickets to see them at the Troubador last month, I picked up B&S just so I’d be familiar with the songs. It’s true that the album is not as fully formed as Trials, and there are a few Lipsy elements—the keyboards and the distorted drums, in particular—but nevertheless B&S surprisingly sunk in and gripped me. The record really has its own charms, very distinct from Trials. “The Balloon Maker,” for instance, has become inescapable for me. My experience of Midlake reminds me of the way I reacted to the Scud Mountain Boys seven or eight years ago. I bought Massachusetts and was possessed by it for many months, then made my way to the supposedly lesser Early Year; it was lesser, but it was quite different and wonderfully in its own way.

What I’m saying is: I can’t recommend Midlake enough.

Peter Bjorn & John: Writer’s Block
Sometimes you just have to turn the Cynic Switch off. This trio was popping up on the internet friggin’ constantly for much of last year. I don’t know about you, but I’m largely to the point where when Pitchfork leads the charge, I run the other way. Then “Young Folks” started getting rotation on my local radio station. I didn’t know it was PB&J at first; I thought it was a good song, catchy, nothing life-changing. But then my brilliant wife started getting into it and we went to Amoeba and picked it up. And wouldn’t you know it but this is a really great album. It’s much more layered than I would have thought based on the single. Parts of it make me think of the Kinks if Kevin Shields were the guitar player.

I touched on the trio in this post, if you can wade through the parts about book-lookin’. That post includes an mp3 for my personal favorite, “Roll the Credits,” so here I’ll give you “Let's Call it Off.”

The Little Ones: Sing Song EP
Like Midlake, this was another one I bought in December but too late to digest before making a year-end list. I have disclaimers about this band—it’s that Cynic Switch; sometimes it turns itself on automatically—but first let me get the main point out of the way: this is a great little batch of songs. There’s really not a dud in the bunch. Now, here are the caveats: these guys really don’t bring much new to the table. Their album cover is disturbingly close to the Shins’ Chutes too Narrow, and for that matter their sound is not that far off. The singer reminds me of the days when Ben Gibbard was not quite so cloying and over-earnest—there was too a time! In other words every influence I hear in the Little Ones is a band that is probably the same age as them. But so what? All I really know is I’ve been playing this album over and over. My wife and I blare it out of our car windows as we drive up the PCH to Malibu on the weekends. Try out “Lovers Who Uncover” and see what you think.

Tomorrow, a few words on those albums I purchased, liked well enough, but didn't stick.

Simple Pleasures: Plot and Character, Prose and Structure

Maybe the previous post is being too reductive. Probably is. But what spurred me to post, in addition to the correspondence I mentioned there, was a second correspondence I was having with another friend, on a different subject entirely. We were talking books and I mentioned my current obsession with Graham Greene. I mean it: I am obsessed with the guy. After reading two books in the last six months I’ve become addicted to his books like they’re Girl Scout cookies. A couple chapters into re-reading The Power and the Glory, I put it down and decided to do this obsession right. I’m starting from the beginning and reading through his entire oeuvre. I may even read his three-volume biography concurrently. What I mean is, I’m obsessed.

The last time I was this obsessed with an author, I was in college and the author was Donald Barthelme. To this day it’s difficult for guests to be in my living room and not comment on the number of Barthelme books around. But how did I get from Barthelme, where concept, language, and a collagist approach to prose squash such traditional notions as plot and character, to Greene—who is known for nothing if not taut plots and the inner turmoil of his characters? I read The Power and the Glory as a freshman in college and enjoyed it, but at the time it struck me as solid but nothing special. “Special” was something like the chronologically fluid Catch-22 or Barthelme’s absurd and abstract treatment of Snow White.

There’s a parallel there with my taste in music then and now. While I was so in love with Can or even Low—groups that in their own way were deconstructing the song to reveal certain elements buried under the more obvious, more tangible ones—I was also reveling in Barthelme, the Fiction Collective, Pynchon, Sorrentino. The mechanics of writing were the thing—the means, not the ends. Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues had not a single dot of punctuation; Mark Amerika’s Kafka Chronicles was a stream-of-consciousness hail of noise. Now, whenever I pick up a novel that seems more pleased with its structure than with its story, I toss it aside. Mark Danielewski is the heir to the tradition right now. Some are touting him as a genius but I just want to throw his books across the room. It’s too labored. At least Mark Amerika realized (rightly) that his vision belonged on the web. It’s beyond print; why try to constrain your vision, so driven by typographic dances and a hyper-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure, to a book format?

Yes, it makes me cranky. The same way Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new record made me cranky for its faux-experimentation. But like I said yesterday, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate it when it’s done right. Look at an author like David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is a technically exhilarating novel, but all the bravura Mitchell displays in the actual writing is in support of a plot, of characters, of a larger theme—in other words, of telling an absorbing story. Musically you need look no further than Bjork to see someone go about as far out there as you can get yet still retain emotion, never mind a melody.

A far less extreme but much more unlikely example is the newest hot shit, Peter Bjorn & John. Who would think that a band responsible for the earworm of the year, “Young Folks,” would effortlessly drop in more cerebral tracks like “Poor Cow,” “Start to Melt,” or the album highlight “Roll the Credits” ? These guys ably demonstrate that it’s easy to have a handle on your mechanics without sacrificing heart. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but that’s the point: you don’t have to try so hard!

Which brings me back to Graham Greene. If ever there was an author who had such complete control over his mechanics, put to perfect use in support of the story he wants to tell, it’s Greene. No element overpowers the other. One of the books I read last year that has spurred me on this kick, The End of the Affair, is the perfect example. After setting up all three sides of a triangle, giving us tantalizing scenes and memorable supporting characters, Greene flips it two-thirds in and gives us a brand-new narrator. In lesser hands it would feel forced, artificial. Take for instance Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a perfectly excellent novel that nearly derails at the two-thirds mark when it shifts from third to first person. But Greene pulls it off, leading to great emotional payoff. Thus far the books I’ve read by Greene don’t feel Big and Important—there’s no aspiration to Nobel here—but when I’m finished with the book all I want to do is go back to page one and start over. What more should a book, or a record, wish to accomplish?