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.

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].

The Dead of Winter is the New Fall

Moments after putting up yesterday's post, I hopped over to Pitchfork to find that Clinic has a new album coming out. I was about to leap back here to revise my post and add Clinic to my "tentatively curious/excited" list, but it turns out the October release date is for Europe only. The geniuses at Domino prefer to let it leak illegally in the US for three months and then release it to lackluster legitimate sales in January.

Since when do record labels even release anything in January? It is notoriously the worst month of the year to release anything, anything at all, as retail stores across the nation are busy returning their unsold Xmas stock and bringing their inventory levels as low as possible in anticipation of tax season. But now we have both Clinic and the Shins to look forward to in that dreary month. Why the delay, if both albums are ready now? Especially since, as I made plain yesterday, the season looks so pathetic? (It's doubly curious as to why Sub Pop would choose to skip over Christmas for the Shins, or why, assuming that was unavoidable, they choose to dump it in such a low-profile month.)

Meanwhile, back to Clinic: P'fork has an "exclusive" video for Clinic's first single, "Harvest (within You)"—though I don't quite get how it's exclusive, what with that big YouTube logo in the lower-right corner. Anyway, the song is good, and video is kooky. Production values aside, it looks straight out of the early '80—all high-concept/no-logic. It's totally absurd, and sort of made me want to watch a Men Without Hats video.

Belle & Sebastian and the LA Philharmonic, w/ the Shins

Last night was a big show at the Hollywood Bowl, as Belle & Sebastian played to a sold-out crowd of 18,000, backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for one show only. My wife and I packed some sandwiches and a nice bottle of wine and headed up the hill to the Bowl. We got to our seats just as the Shins began their first song.

We bought these tickets back when only Belle & Sebastian were announced—so we were doubly stoked to find that the Shins were also on the bill. We saw them a year or two ago at the Bowery Ballroom in New York and had a great time. This time around it wasn’t quite the same experience. Blame the fact that they were the opening band, and for most of their set it was still daylight and the Bowl was still filling up; blame the fact that half their songs were brand new, so the familiarity factor was low; blame the fact that, good as the Shins are, they do just kind of stand there when they play. Their live show just isn’t that conducive to a large-scale show, unfortunately. But on a positive note their new songs sound great, and it doesn’t look like their third album will be deviating too far from their last. Depending on your perspective, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Me, I’m excited for the new album.

For whatever enthusiasm the Shins failed to deliver, Belle & Sebastian made up for in spades. They opened with “I Fought in a War,” which seems the obvious choice for an opener when you have an 80-piece orchestra behind you. The rest of the set highlighted material from across their career, though leaning toward their most recent couple of albums (and just one song from If You’re Feeling Sinister). In large part the orchestra unfortunately served as shtick more than anything else (but as an aside; B&S’s fulltime cellist must have felt terribly irrelevant, don’t you think?). Maybe it’s because there are strings on the proper albums, so hearing the songs with strings live doesn’t actually sound new—it just sounds like their albums. That said, “Lord Anthony” and “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” played back to back at the midway point of the set, really soared thanks to the strings. Stuart Murdoch's entertaining antics throughout the show aside, this pair of songs was the highlight of the night.

Speaking of Murdoch's antics: not despite nor because of the Philharmonic was this a wonderful show; Belle & Sebastian handled the crowd marvelously all on their own. Murdoch repeatedly ran out into the crowd, and at one point brought a woman up from the audience to dance while Stevie Jackson took the lead on “Jonathan David.” Murdoch had such a connection with the audience that by the shows closing number, “The Boy with the Arab Strap,” the crowd rushed the stage to dance amongst the band. It was a bit surreal to see; in my experience that sort of thing happens at aggressive rock shows, as stoner dudes get up to stage dive. But here the crowd members, well, they just wanted to dance with their friends! In fact, once so many people got on stage, it was tough to tell them apart from the actual band. Such is the community spirit Belle & Sebastian evoke.

[related: a meditation on B&S mixed up in my review of The Life Pursuit.]