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].

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder

Right out of the gate, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has been a love-them-or-hate-them band. Either you like Alex Ounsworth's yelpy David Byrnisms or you don't. With their second album, Some Loud Thunder, little has changed on that front. Well, one thing has changed: it's less fun to debate whether they're worth loving or hating. Their first, self-titled album was packed with hooks—that guitar line from "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth," the chorus from "Is This Love?"€, the whole of "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood"€; if your buddy told you he hated that voice, you could at least counter that the record was chock full of earworms. It was spare, brief, memorable. The band sounded unlike anyone else and didn't make a big stink about it. Sure, they had a lot of personality quirks, but not a lot of pretension.

The frustrating thing about Some Loud Thunder is that the quirks have been pushed further to the fore, putting the band dangerously on the line of pretense. The melodies are still there, but they seem to be intentionally suppressed beneath poor production or arrangements that seem unnecessarily tricky—not complex, not particularly interesting, just tricky. "Emily Jean Stock"€ is a good example€—the vocal melodies and multitracked backing harmonies are present from beginning to end but the rest of the instrumentation enters and exits throughout, never allowing the track to cohere into a song. The best compliment the song warrants is "interesting."€ It has the potential to be compelling, but it never actually is. More aggravating is that the album seems willfully underproduced. I have no problem with lo-fi—some of my favorite albums were recorded on 4-tracks—but Some Loud Thunder often sounds like the band went into a real studio and then purposely made it sound like shit. The most blatant offender is the first, title track, which sounds a notch above Real Audio quality.

None of this is to say that the album is a complete failure. "Goodbye to the Mother and the Cover," with its revolving arpeggios and sliding guitar lines, is one of the few songs to let the instruments offer something memorable beyond Ounsworth's vocal idiosyncrasies. The brief "Arm and Hammer"€ starts aimlessly before morphing into a sort of punk-acoustic mantra. And "Yankee Go Home"€ is the closest to the sound of the first album: the band is wholly present, the vocals aren't distorted, and the melody, with its one short falsetto note, is great. It feels natural; you can picture the whole band in a room enjoying themselves.

The same can't be said for the rest of the album. It's curious: I'm attracted to it, I do keep putting it on, but I never just sit back and enjoy it. It's like I'm listening to it just to figure it out. And I'm not quite certain that CYHSY have enough depth to really warrant being figured out. The last album I bought that seemed to beg to be analyzed—yet still pretended to have some kind of aspiration to pop accessibility—was TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain. The more I listened to it, trying to understand why it was so dense, why they insisted on piling on the vocal tracks and ambient sound, the more I resented it. It is possible, of course, to make an album that subverts or explodes pop tropes, that aims for texture as much as melody. Hell, the world would have stopped talking about Radiohead a decade ago if it wasn't. But CYHSY (and TVotR, for that matter), don't seem to have really thought it through. Distorting the vocals and allowing the drum tracks to fall in and out is not really subversive; it's sabotage.

All this sounds curmudgeonly, I know. I'm not really asking CYHSY to make their first album over again, nor to restrict themselves to a verse-chorus-verse structure. But Some Loud Thunder is nevertheless frustrating because a terrific album is in there—I can hear it, buried underneath the production. It's as if they made a great record and then, in a self-conscious moment of doubt, slabbed dirt all over it and half-obliterated the songs. What you're left with is something not very experimental and not very accessible. It's the worst of both worlds.

New Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's debut was one of my favorite records of last year, and I've been looking forward to their followup, Some Loud Thunder, to be released January 30th. But why wait? Stereogum has two new tracks available right now: "Love Song no. 7" and "Underwater (You and Me)." (One more song, "Satan Said Dance," is available at their myspace page.)

I've listened to each track just a couple times. My first impression is that they're not terribly different from the previous stuff—which is okay by me, as I haven't tired of them yet. Between this and the Shins, the month of January could wind up better than the whole of 2006! (more on that in the coming weeks.)