Pretty Goes with Pretty

Ringa Dem Bells...

I’m taking the rest of the year off. Following up on my year-in-review posts (here and here), I thought I’d re-run my reviews of my two favorite albums of the year, The Secret Machines’ Ten Silver Drops and Belle & Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit. Scroll on down and have a read.

The Secret Machines: Ten Silver Drops

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Ten Silver Drops came out back in April, which I mentioned at the time, but I shamefully admit to not actually purchasing it until just last month since it’s been streaming on the Secret Machines' website all this time. Finally I dropped actual cash for the real thing, and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since.

Why was everyone so down on this album? Was it residual disappointment from all the other tepid releases by noteworthy bands? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Flaming Lips, Built to Spill, and the Walkmen (among others) all put out fairly boring albums within two months of each other. Perhaps the prevailing mood among music critics caused them to chuck the Secret Machines in with the rest. This should be rectified: Ten Silver Drops will easily be in my top five of the year come December.

Back in 2004, when their debut full-length Now Here is Nowhere came out, there was an avalanche of hype courtesy their label, Reprise (previously they’d released just an EP, September 000, on the indie Ace Fu). The album was well-received but at the time I was suspicious and dismissive. 2002–04 marked the period when “indie” was aggressively co-opted by the majors and lines were really beginning to blur concerning what that term even meant. As the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol were jumping from indies to the majors and many other bands that might have felt at home on Saddle Creek or Touch & Go were bypassing the indie route altogether, I found myself second-guessing everything—residue from my high school and college days when “sellout” still meant something and corporate record labels were still synonymous with evil. Apparently in the twenty-first century “necessary” attached itself to that evil, as bands like the Strokes and Jimmy Eat World proved that you could get in bed with the suits and still come out in the morning with your soul (and bank account) intact. More and more bands followed suit, and I admit I was slow to believe it could be true; anything that was hyped at that time I pretty much rejected out of hand. Hence, I missed the boat on the Secret Machines.

A year later, amid a cross-country move from New York to Los Angeles, my brilliant wife convinced me that the Secret Machines deserved a listen. She picked up September 000 just before our trip because she had been blown away by the opening track, “Marconi’s Radio.” Somewhere on the highway between West Virginia and Tennessee my love for the Secret Machines was born. The song begins with a patient four and half minutes of a simple five-note piano melody repeated over and over until the guitars finally come crashing in for one bar, then Brandon Curtis’s vocals finally start the song proper (with backing harmonies that seem better placed in a Beatles song than a minimalist rock epic). What is so brilliant about this song is that, at nearly eight minutes in length, the only burst of energy comes halfway through, and briefly; the rest of the song, before and after that moment, is rising action. It’s a bold song choice for the first track on the first release, and is the perfect indicator of things to come, both on this EP and from the band in general.

On the surface the Secret Machines do not seem groundbreaking in the way that, say, Radiohead so obviously is in its marriage of pop, electronica, and high-falutin’ concepts. But at the same time there are few bands really operating in the exact same territory as the Secret Machines: musically they are loud, they eschew simple pop structures, they stretch out rather than keep things accessibly concise—but they diverge from their peers by relying just as strongly on melodies and vocal hooks. Whereas Radiohead began as a guitar pop band that subverted that genre with each album, the Secret Machines seem to be doing the inverse: they’re epic indie/prog on the surface but they chip away at the genre's underbelly with pop ingredients—melody and harmony, verse and chorus.

The adverse reaction to Ten Silver Drops is, I think, a result of two forms of backlash related to all of this. First, the inevitable hipster backlash against anything that was overhyped the first time around. People that didn’t think the Secret Machines were all that in the first place are now piping up. Second, the definitive difference between Ten Silver Drops and Now Here is Nowhere is the ratio of instrumental muscle-flexing to Curtis’s vocal presence. In other words, the pop elements, while far from taking over completely, have risen closer to the surface. Only the tail-end of “I Hate Pretending” has a noisy, free-form instrumental section, and even that is tempered by the first half’s story-lyrics describing a drug bust, which many critics have expressed annoyance with. (Personally they don’t bother me; story-lyrics are nothing new in pop music.)

So how could the Secret Machines win? In one corner there are those who either didn’t like them in the first place or, like me two years ago, are dismissive of them simply because hype engenders suspicion; and in the other there seem to be people that are really repulsed by the ways in which Ten Silver Drops differs from its predecessor—less instrumental sections, more lyrics. Neither party seems willing to listen to the album on its own terms.

On its own terms: Ten Silver Drops begins with a string of arguably the three best songs the Secret Machines have ever written. The opener, “Alone, Jealous and Stoned,” applies similar motives as “Marconi’s Radio” did on September 000—it is a melancholy, nearly seven-minute song that never really rocks the way Now Here’s propulsive opener “First Wave Intact” does so commandingly. For a band often given the faint praise that they should be playing in arenas, it is perhaps a surprising choice for an album opener. But the song segues into the best track of the album, “All at Once (It’s Not Important),” which introduces one of the album’s signature sounds, Ben Curtis’s soaring guitar melodies. Here and in a handful of other tracks, the guitar lines seem more interested in floating over the top of the songs rather than riffing as in previous releases; the heavy lifting for each track is shifted instead to Brandon Curtis’s vocals and Josh Garza’s drumming—which somehow call to mind simultaneously John Bonham and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger. His motorik-meets-arena-rock drumming is the heart of much of the album, especially the third track, “Lightning Blue Eyes.”

The album’s sole dip is the middle track, “Daddy’s in the Doldrums,” which is anchored by a monotonous, sludgy riff and rock-posturing lyrics. Even so the song is not so bad as to sink the entire album, and the group quickly rebounds with the second half of the record, culminating in the outstanding closer, “1,000 Seconds,” again one of the best numbers the band has released to date.

So if four of Ten Silver Drops’ eight tracks are among the best the group has ever done, then surely this album deserves a second look. (Happily, I’m not the first to think so: Chromewaves woke up the Secret Machines a couple of weeks ago.) Cries that the band has somehow fallen off are greatly exaggerated. Yes, I miss some of the instrumental stretches that really identified Now Here is Nowhere, but to claim that Ten Silver Drops has moved too far in the other direction is false. Their pop sensibilities are more apparent here than their previous releases, but at the same time the songs still lean to the long side and are structured in such a way as to keep them well off the radio. There is a sophistication at work beneath all of these songs that should be acknowledged. The entire album (as well as Now Here is Nowhere) is streaming from the band’s website, so I encourage you to check it out for yourself, and stop listening to the haters.

Belle & Sebastian: The Life Pursuit

There is a lot of hype surrounding Belle & Sebastian’s newest, The Life Pursuit. It’s the New and Improved Belle & Sebastian! They’re a whole new band! They’ve really turned a corner! While I won't argue with claims that this is a fantastic album—it is; go buy it—there is an underlying, perhaps unconscious negativity to these many reviews, and it has everything to do with their critically impervious album, If You’re Feeling Sinister.

David M. Goldstein at Coke Machine Glow spells it out explicitly when he diagnoses B&S with having Violent Femmes Syndrome. “Stuart Murdoch need only ask the likes of Gordon Gano,” he says; “achieving perfection on your first go-round is a special kind of hell.” Murdoch & Co. are at the mercy of the critics: they will never escape the shadow of their breakout album. And that’s too bad, because The Life Pursuit is stellar. On that, it seems most critics can agree. “It’s their best album since Sinister!” But there I must part ways: The Life Pursuit is their best album since their last one, Dear Catastrophe Waitress. While I nearly weep at the idea of Gordon Gano’s Sisyphean battle to pop his sun-obliterating blister, I take umbrage at the easy impulse to lump B&S into the same funk.

The standard take on Belle & Sebastian, as you will no doubt read in every single review of this album, the last album, and every album to come, is that they were brilliant out of the docks, sank to progressively unsalvageable depths with their three subsequent releases, and have lately managed to cork the leak and keep whoever was left—fans and bandmembers alike—inside the boat. Somehow their two most recent albums are great—but with the caveat that you must already be a fan to appreciate them correctly. Woe to the youngster who mistakenly starts with The Life Pursuit: you just won’t get it. You’ll hear this polished, erudite, eminently hummable pop, and you just won’t understand. All those references to twee, all those remarks on Murdoch’s wit—right over your head, sorry.

Two years ago I would have agreed with Goldstein tagging B&S as a latter-day Violent Femmes. I had completely written them off, and took all those reviews of DCW—“their best album since Sinister!”—with a shaker of salt. But when I finally heard it, it captivated me. Two years later and I still listen to it all the time. There’s not a bad song on the disk. Unlike The Boy with the Arab Strap, which was a flawed carbon copy of Sinister, and Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, which sounds like a bunch of kids fantastically bored with themselves, the band that showed up to record Dear Catastrophe Waitress was reinvigorated and ready to pop. It was unmistakably Belle & Sebastian, but it didn’t sound like it owed anything to Sinister. They’d grown.

The album was rightly hailed as a comeback. Yet on the occasion of The Life Pursuit, both Pitchfork and Coke Machine Glow retroactively invoke the “transitional” damnation to DCW: “As enjoyable as much of Dear Catastrophe Waitress was, it suffered from having the distinct feeling of a transitional record,” says Golstein; “The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional,” says Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see nearly identical critiques—especially when they’re wrong—my PR-radar goes way up. Where’s the press release for this album?

[Here it is, from Matador’s website: “The decision to partner up with producer Trevor Horn for the last record (Dear Catastrophe Waitress) was a clear statement of intent—‘Think we’re lo-fi underachievers? Think again—we’re working with the guy who does Tatu.’ What is now clear—with producer Tony Hoffer back at the helm—is that DCW was but a stop on the way. And what that album started, The Life Pursuit delivers in spades.”]

When DCW came out two years ago, it was roundly hailed as their best work since Sinister. Now, what do you know—hand me that ad copy, please—The Life Pursuit is their best since Sinister! I can’t begrudge anyone for liking The Life Pursuit more than DCW—it is a great album, by all means—but it shouldn’t necessarily mean that DCW somehow loses its own luster as a result. Where is it written that Belle & Sebastian may only have two good albums at a time?

And so we return to the Violent Femmes Syndrome. Goldstein makes the explicit connection, but I would argue that nearly every other critic, consciously or not, is implicitly agreeing by treating Belle & Sebastian not as skilled songwriters with a sound unmistakably their own, but as a group in a constant scramble to match their moment of fluke genius seven years back.

Nothing wrong with loving Sinister the most, of course, nor with hoping that this or the next one will be the best period, not the best since. But I think it’s unfair to hold them so rigidly against that album. Elliott Smith’s second, self-titled album was his best, but that album wasn’t invoked as the barometer of any that followed. He made enough strong showings to be respected as an artist, not a one-trick pony. All the idolatry of Sinister would have you believe that there’s only one way to enter Belle & Sebastian, but this simply isn’t true. The uninitiated could surely appreciate the group if they discovered them through their newest or through DCW. In other words, this is a band that remains relevant, one that you shouldn’t feel like you missed the boat on, shouldn’t feel guilty about returning to, shouldn’t be intimidated by the mythology bestowed on Sinister.

If The Life Pursuit proves anything, it’s that Belle & Sebastian can make two great records in a row and can evolve at the same time—something they’ve never proven before. In a just world, it should be enough to toss out the Violent Femmes references altogether and start treating their entire oeuvre with more admiration. If they keep it up, If You’re Feeling Sinister won’t seem like the legendary acme; Fold Your Hands and Storytelling will be the legendary depths. This is a band that has had a few missteps, but they’ve certainly found their footing and are cutting a path worth following.

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.

pgwp's Year in Music: New Shit '06

By now you’re probably so inundated with top ten lists that any more would just be white noise. So I’ll skip a full-on list—to be honest, I just didn’t hear enough worthy albums to make a top five, let alone a top ten. Yet it wouldn’t be December without some sort of year in review, so here begins the first of a short series of year-end posts before I take off for the holidays.

If you’ve been a regular reader of pgwp, you know that I spent most of 2006 looking forward to new releases and subsequently being let down by nearly all of them. New albums from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Futureheads, Built to Spill, the Album Leaf, and the Pernice Brothers were all okay, but nothing special. I don’t think I spent more than a week with any of them. Lack of funds kept me from picking up the Flaming Lips, Walkmen, Sean Lennon, and a host of others I was eager to hear—but from all I’ve read and what few songs I’ve heard, none of those artists turned out career-toppers, either. For the most part it’s been a pretty ambivalent year for music, I’d say.

The highest profile disappointments of the year, for me, were Gnarls Barkley and TV on the Radio. I was floored by a couple Gnarls tracks I heard on the web right when the album released, so I jumped over to the record store right away and picked it up. But somewhere between the oversaturation of “Crazy,” the unforgivably irrelevant cover of the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” and the increasingly grating second half of their album, St. Elsewhere quickly found itself ejected from my stereo and deleted from my hard drive. And TV on the Radio? I’m still trying to figure out what people are seeing in this album. There are some good songs here and there, but more often than not the album is a directionless muddle. I’m pleased to see it isn’t topping everyone’s end-of-year lists, though I’m still perplexed to see it showing up on lists at all.

Meanwhile, the band that deserved all the hype given to TVotR but was instead met with mildly negative reviews at every turn was the Secret Machines, whose album Ten Silver Drops would be number one if I were doing a ranked list. Again, I don’t know why I seem to be on a completely different page than everyone else. Even my brilliant wife thinks I’m crazy for liking this album so much. A few months ago I took a friend, unversed in the Secret Machines, to see them live, and he too came away only mildly impressed. So perhaps my tastes are maladjusted this year. At any rate, I stand firm that Ten Silver Drops is the record of the year…

…followed by Belle & Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit. This is the album that cemented my previously give-or-take relationship with the group. As I said in my review of the record, between this and Dear Catastrophe Waitress, B&S have proven that they are capable of evolving as a band and staying relevant, whereas everything previous to DCW sounded more like an attempt at doing If You’re Feeling Sinister over again, with varying degrees of failure.

And here you can see why a top ten list would become silly. Aside from these two albums, I didn’t hear anything else released this year that really deserved the kudos. Destroyer and Neko Case both put out pretty good albums, but if they were nos. three and four on my list, it would be misleading. If their albums came out in 2005, they’d be somewhere in the lower half of my top twenty. Meanwhile, I’ve only just picked up albums by Midlake and the Little Ones, both of which seem pretty wonderful based on a day’s worth of listening. But it’s unfair to call them the best of the year when I’ve had less than 48 hours to digest these compared to ten months for Destroyer. Otherwise, I still have records by Peter Bjorn & John, Grizzly Bear, and maybe a couple others to purchase, which won’t happen until sometime in the new year. So, my best-of list is all fucked up and askew.

At any rate, this sums up my own perspective on the indie rock of ’06. Coming up later this week, a post on musical blindspots filled in this year; my year in reading, and maybe a couple other things too, time permitting.

What were your highlights of the year? Email me or leave a comment below. I’m still convinced I’m missing something huge. I need your help!

No One Ever Talks about the Real Heroes

Maybe you heard about this bizarre story: two dolphins at a theme park in China were choking on some plastic, and vets at the aquarium did not have a way of reaching far enough into their gullets to get the plastic out. So, they called the world's tallest man, because his arms were long enough to reach inside the dolphins and pull the plastic out.

A completely ridiculous story—perhaps, some might say, ridonculous. Yet while the "mainstream press" can only focus on the tall dude, leave it to my brilliant wife to look for the real story.  "What I really want to know," she said,  "is who the troubleshooter at the aquarium was that said, There's nothing we can do. Unless... unless! Sally! Get me the yellow pages... we need to find the tallest man in the world. Because that's the kind out-of-the-box thinking that deserves some props. Someone get that guy a raise."

Sundown on Mars

One more Mars post, thanks to Centripetal Notion. This is the sunset on Mars, as recorded by the Spirit rover. According to NASA:

On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view of the Sun sinking below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset.... The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop “Jibsheet”, a feature that Spirit has been investigating for several weeks. The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 kilometers (50 miles) in the distance.

Midlake

Despite talking music more than anything else here, I have for the most part refrained from attempting to appear as an mp3 blog. Mostly this is because I think it is a difficult thing to do well. Amazing obscure bands cannot be broken on a daily basis, meaning that's a lot of mediocrity to host on your blog, and a lot hyperbole covering up for the pressure to supply daily content. It is for this reason that I tend to read a lot of mp3 blogs, yet I frequently distrust them—and I usually don't have the time to actually listen to everything they'd have me digest. If a certain group comes up enough times on different blogs, maybe I'll click that link—though invariably even then I'm still not phased (see Grizzly Bear, Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, and Joanna Newsome for recent examples).

Meanwhile, 2006 has been a shit year for music. Is this related to the glut of mp3 blogs and myspace pages? Could very well be, though the established acts like the Flaming Lips, Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and others have left me cold as well, and they shouldn't need the blogs to aid in their hype. Nevertheless I find myself in this month of December looking at more mp3 and music blogs than usual, hoping that the filter of the "Top 10 of the Year" will weed out the mediocrity and something I might have missed will rise to the top.

And it looks like that has happened. Things I'd Rather Be Doing posted their favorites of the year, and one that I hadn't heard of at all was Midlake. Most of the others on TIRBD's list (and the lists of other blogs & magazines that have posted so far) have been at least familiar to me. And guess what? They're fantastic! Very 1970s, very America (the band). But somehow that sounds fresh to me. There are a handful of tracks streaming at their website (click on "media"), but my favorite so far is the one TIRBD supplied, "Roscoe." I love the harmonies, and I love the way the lines get longer as the song goes on. I haven't had the opportunity to buy the album yet, but I expect to do so soon, and that it will wind up on my best of the year list as well, as long as the rest of the album is this good.

Will Will Self's Self-Willed Walks Sell Will Self?

I've never read anything by Will Self, though I've seen his latest, Book of Dave, all over the local bookstores lately. Last week he caught my eye when I saw photos of his writing room—he apparently writes his novels on post-it notes (and by the way, did you follow the link from that post? There are a ton more photos of the room besides the one I lifted). Now I learn he's quite the marathon walker: he walked from his house to Heathrow Airport (26 miles), flew to JFK, walked to Crown Heights, then the next day walked to Manhattan. It's a little ridiculous. But yesterday's New York Times article has me curious about Mr. Self.

...Mr. Self, who is unusually tall and very thin and has a long, melancholy face that he once described as looking “like a bag full of genitals,” packed his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and, puffing from a Hunter Thompson-style cigarette holder, set off on foot for Manhattan.

Smoking is Mr. Self’s only remaining vice. He used to be a prodigious drinker and drug-taker, famous for late-night altercations, not always coherent public appearances and marathon hours at trendy spots like the Groucho Club. During Britain’s general election of 1997, he set a new standard for journalistic infamy by getting himself bounced off John Major’s campaign plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom.

I love that he's a smoker.

I don't know if any of this means he's a great writer (to be honest, the plot summary of Book of Dave doesn't really interest me—religious satire just seems so tired, generally speaking), but something about this guy's obsessive personality makes me want to check into his backlist.

Red Planet is a Little Wet

Have I been living under a rock all my life, or did science just become really fascinating this year? (Probably the latter, but the results are not yet in.) From today's LA Times:

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that they have found evidence that water still flows on the surface of Mars in the form of sporadic gushers that increase the possibility that the Red Planet harbors some form of life.

While the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been roaming the ground and looking at rocks, finding evidence that water may have covered large expanses of the planet billions of years ago, it was the Mars Global Surveryor spacecraft, originally launched ten years ago, that found evidence of water on the planet now, when it photographed a crater that it had also observed in 2001. Comparing the two photographs, you can see that something in the topography has changed, and scientists believe that it is consistent with the effect of water flowing over the area. Poetically, the Surveyor, which was only expected to function for two years, not ten, went silent not long after making this discovery.

So, if there's water, there could be life. That makes two possible locations of life in our solar system discovered this year—one of Saturn's moons may, too. The rovers are at least a few hundred miles away from the area in question, so it will be a while before we can investigate further.