Avalanches - Ray of Zdarlight

A song I've listened to perhaps 200+ times in the few years since the Avalanches posted it on their website. I know it takes a while to clear samples, etc., and I'm surely no expert on intellectual property law and copyrights, but really, you'd think the modern process wheels could be greased by record company money. Been almost nine years since Since I Left You. Even Daft Punk's quicker.

I don't know how this record didn't become more popular. What a great title!: I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura. What tremendously catchy songs! This album is like an indie pop Ulysses--the band hops from style to style, and all the sounds are so painstakingly rendered and recorded. It's pleasing and rich. Casimer's lyrics are both clever and funny. I will never not love this song, which is pretty close to being flawless, I think. Reminds me in a weird way (via its tiny perfection) of the Joseph Brodsky poem, A Polar Explorer:

All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
left in the diary, And the beads of quick
words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.

Buy "I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura"

Buy Joseph Brodsky's "To Urania"

Not to cast aspersions on this young Minnesotan's artistic efforts, but, wow, is it just me or do these lyrics seem manufactured out of the tossed-off lines and unmetered verse of the past decade's most maudlin emo/meaningfulcore/turbo-earnest songs? To me, it's as if this dude behind Owl City spent a whole lot of time studying and analyzing Hallmark greeting cards, Chicken Soup for the Soul books, Dashboard Confessional albums, and Ben Gibbard's lyrical and vocal 'style,' then wrote some shit down in his Moleskine notebook, recorded some bloops and bleeps, and sang, and whispered, and sang. The first time I heard this, I wondered whether or not this song even meant anything to the guy who wrote it--the lyrics are so nothing, so impersonal and devoid of personality, it's almost as if he were using the cut-up technique of Burroughs or trying to make a lyrical collage, etc. Maybe that is the case and I'm not giving the song enough credit. It's more likely that he's just imitating his favorite artists in the course of trying to find his own songwriting voice, and probably every young artist has to struggle with that.

The more interesting question, to me, is one of substitution. This band's music, right now, seems like it could serve as substitute music for the fans of Postal Service who, by all accounts, will be waiting a long time for another P.S. album. And there are many other bands like this, surely--I remember Muse initially being hyped as a perfect stop-gap for Radiohead fans when that band was in its pre-Kid A cocoon. The Swedish band Starlet was supposed to be a nice Belle & Sebastian replacement. If I remember right, Kingsbury Manx was oddly compared to Elliott Smith (they toured together, but still). Some of these bands (Kingsbury Manx, Muse) have grown out of that pigeonholing, and some have not (Starlet? I don't even know if they still exist). It'll be interesting to see whether Owl City becomes its own thing or just stays on this Gibbard-biting trajectory.

Buy?

Black Dice - Cloud Pleaser

Beulah - The Battle Cry of the West

Hockey Night - Get Real

Many are probably familiar with that first track, Dream City, which bites just a tiny bit on T. Rex to my mind (esp. the beginning), but probably not with the second (and arguably better) track, Get Real. That Hockey Night album, Keep Guessin (on Lookout Records, I think), is a total gem. Although when I first heard it (after hearing the Free Energy track in May), I thought, wow, sounds like the singer really loves Malkmus a whole lot. But he doesn't sing like that in Free Energy now, at least not in the three tracks of theirs I've heard. What happened? I'd like to know. Perhaps Paul Sprangers grew supremely tired of being hit with the Malkmus tag and decided to sing in a totally different way. I've been thinking about this a little bit lately--the effect of criticism on an artist's development (mostly b/c of something John Banville said in this cool interview he gave for the Paris Review)--and the emergence of Free Energy as a bizarro classic rock band after the break-up of Hockey Night might be a good example of an artist's aesthetic trajectory being altered severely by the feedback he (they?) receives. I suspect, for no justifiable reason, that that third, unreleased Hockey Night album might've shown some more weirdness/individuality than is evident in the stuff that's being released in the lead-up to Free Energy's Stuck on Nothin' (or maybe not).

You can download Hockey Night's Keep Guessin here.

This feels like something the Green Knight would have listened to in order to get pumped up for an elective beheading. On his (green) in-helmet mp3 player. I suspect you'd have to choose your pre-decapitation music very carefully, since you'd want to get yourself psyched, but you wouldn't want to be so pumped up that you get wild and preemptively chop off the other person's noggin. Does it even matter though, if you're a magical knight and can just pick your shit up from the ground, dust it off, and ride away? This is the kind of thing I think about when I go for a long run, in a sort of exhaustion-delusion state.

[BUY]

]]> Kevin 2009-07-19T20:36:50-05:00 http://www.greenideasblog.com/molars/archives/2009/05/the_steeliest_o_1.html Junior Boys - Dull to Pause

I can't remember when I heard this track for the first time (maybe near the end of January), but it has stuck with me for five months, and there is almost nothing that sticks with me for that long any more, that demands so much attention. I don't think a week has gone by when I haven't listened to this album (Begone Dull Care) or this track. It's hard for me to pin down exactly why that is though--it's surely superficially catchy (viz. the music-box tones that oscillate throughout the track; that deep, systolic percussion), but it's also intensely thick (there have got to be like sixty fucking instrumental tracks on this thing, the way the loops interact with each other is unbelievable--they're like those submarine rivers that run along the bottom 90% of the ocean: dense, powerful, circulative). A lot of my affection for this song centers on that gut-punch at 2:43, when Greenspan sings "Don't say goodnight/No/don't say goodnight" and that lovesick bass rolls into the foreground. The two halves of this song are like two different versions of the protagonist in transformative teen movies, e.g. that first part = good, but shy and unsure, then second half = showing up at the prom with sweet, cosmopolitan hair, total fuck-what-everyone-else-thinks-I'm-amazing confidence, and improbably hot dance moves. This song almost makes me long for the whole family of burning-heart sensations that accompany long-term, seriously nourished crushes (e.g. the kind that turn you into an augur of small omens and prompt earnest thoughts like, "holy shit, her last name ends in the letter Y and my middle name has a Y in it, jesus we are meant to be together forever." etc.)

The only other album that's held my attention like Begone Dull Care is the Phoenix album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which I cannot get enough of, for different reasons. But definitely buy or somehow obtain Begone Dull Care, because this album rewards any effort you put into it. I know I'm most likely in the minority here, but I think it's the best thing Junior Boys have done--it's both comforting and sexy, and I don't think many albums can deliver that combo.

I'd like to get back into writing about music, since I suspect that doing this blog was one of the things that actually made me a better writer (not that this sentence really shows that, yikes).

Roxy Music - Pyjamarama

I've been on a kick of listening to this song, which came to me via Phoenix's great Kitsune mix. Doesn't that beginning purify you for the rest of the song? Those quick strums? This song is haunted by the specter of that saxophone jag (which the guitar tries to echo but, alas, cannot). Would you feel a greater or lesser affinity for this song if the title were spelled 'Pajamarama' (that's five As)? The Roxy Music orthography feels somehow more exotic, more in keeping with the origins of the clothing. The title alone suggests all sorts of cool shit (a sleep-over festival; bedspread dances; nighttime excursions). Is there a section of the Ramayana that discusses sleepwear?

Parenthetical Girls - A Song For Ellie Greenwich

This just feels right:

Mount Eerie - Live in Copenhagen - Cold Mountain

Nice nice. Still one of my faves.

When they were done with dinner, when they'd all eaten what they could, nobody moved to get up. Nobody had to be anywhere, or if they did, they didn't say. They were full, yes, but also satisfied. There was a spell on the table, a blessing. How else to account for their joy? They all could sense it, even the father. They were full. They were satisfied. They wanted to remain there forever if they could.

The older brother made promises he knew he probably wouldn't keep, vows so crazy they could only be thought. We'll eat every meal together, as a family. As a unit. We could grow old. We could all become fat and frail and tell ourselves, This is life. This is love. These are our bodies. This is our love. The older brother filled so with happiness that he felt his chest might split open. His eyes teared up and then he laughed, just to let the pressure off. Nobody asked what in the world he was laughing at, and nobody looked confused. Everyone knew.

From the story "Prayer for the Long Life of Certain Inanimate Objects", by Paul Maliszewski, published by the excellent journal One Story, and available here. Possibly one of the single best stories I've read in the past three years. If you like this, Maliszewski also has a story in the current issue of Fence, called "Prayer for an Answer When an Answer Eludes", and it is part (as you can guess) of his ongoing 'prayer' series, which should (I hope) be collected someday soon.

Mount Eerie/Phil Elverum has been quite active lately, with the reissue of "The Glow pt. 2" out this month, and a new EP out soon, "Black Wooden Ceiling Opening". 'Woolly Mammoth's Absence', perhaps the most heartbreaking song Phil has recorded, was released on the "Seven New Songs" tour EP, which you can download for free here.

Every afternoon, I walked the girl to the center of town. There were eight streets that led to it, and for each approach to the two blocks of shops and vaguely public-looking buildings, I assigned the town a different name: Townville, Cityton, Burgborough, Townburgh, Boroville, Cityboro, Burghton, and Town City.

"Not even close," I would have to tell her.

From the story "Education", by Gary Lutz, in his short story collection "Stories in the Worst Way" [a book which features some of the best sentences I've ever read]. Buy it here, before it goes out of print again.

***Parenthetical Girls have finished "Entanglements", their follow-up to the gorgeous and (lyrically) haunting "Safe as Houses". Can't wait.

PAS/CAL - I Wanna Take You Out In Your Holiday Sweater

Instead, I saw something suave, delicate, raffinee, blonde sure enough but not a girl who reminded me of stone fireplaces and tobogganing, rather a clutch of names I knew but had never experienced, such as Biedermeyer, Chateau La Tour Blanche, and Proust. She was dancing. I watched her. She was not talking to her partner. She was not wearing an evening dress, which suggests a garment with ruffles run up over a Bertha at home, but an evening gown bought for the occasion. Her shape was not striking but insidious. I kept watching it. McGinty was right, she wasn't so pretty for nice but she was hell for stuff.

I had come to the dance bursting with condescension but, watching her, it leaked away. She had a longish lock of blonde hair hanging beside her cheek and occasionally she threw her head back a little to move it. (Later I touched a match to that lock as she bent forward to light a cigarette. Later that year.) However, I was paralyzed.

From the story "Dear Old Shrine", by Allan Seager, in his 'memoirs as fiction' book, "A Frieze of Girls". Seager was another impressive sentence writer, and besides that, he was astoundingly funny and self-deprecating. "A Frieze of Girls" was semi-recently reprinted, and you can find it here.

***PAS/CAL have (finally!!) finished their debut album, "I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura" (great title). The long-awaited LP will be released on April 29th. But you can pre-order it from Darla right now. This spring is going to be full of good records.

DFA 1979: much-loved, very much broken-up. A lot of people made noise about MSTRKRFT (Keeler's first-strike, pre-Justice blog house act?) when they came out with their record, but I think perhaps that it's Sebastien Grainger that everyone should be paying their hectic attention to- not only did he release a blistering little split 7" last year under his given name (the song, "When You Go Out", was one of the things I listened to incessantly while writing, and it's beat-beam architecture, coupled with Sebastien's vigorously pretty falsetto, make it an almost perfect song to listen to when you want to get into a nice nostalgic/pensive funk), but he's now recording and releasing songs with his new backing band (the Mountains) and under his 'party alias', The Rhythm Method. Grainger can seemingly do pretty much whatever he wants to, and well (check out the range of some of the tracks he's got up on his website, c.f. specifically 'I'm All Rage' and 'Young Mothers').

'American Names', which is one of the first tracks I heard from his new project with the Mountains, has a special gravity to it (is it the organ-y/feedback prelude, the slick tattoo of the drums, or the cavilling guitars?), leavened both by Sebastien's full-hearted vocals (gorgeously doubled at points) and a sweetly semi-paternalistic chorus ("If you're always on/your way out the door/you'll never have/a place to call home"). Some of the lyrics in this song are difficult to discern, but the bits and pieces that are clear align with my own recent thoughts about absence, escape, wanderlust, etc.- not so much a grass-is-always-greener situation, but more of a general need for a change of scenery (if that makes sense). Although I don't own a car anymore, I know that this is exactly the kind of song that begs for a late night, windows-down, highway-driven listen; I suspect that that's the right space for it (much in the same way that certain paintings demand to be hung precisely on the wall in a gallery for maximum effect, some songs seem to deserve the same level of curation). To be more clear-cut about it: the song is just really goddamn good.

Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains will release their first single ('American Names/'Ways to Come Home') soon, on Rectangle Records (buy it when it comes out!), with a full-length (on an undetermined label) some time in the near-ish future. Also, the Rhythm Method will have a 7" release of 'Renegade Silence/'When You Go Out' on Alakazm records soon- not many details about that one, although the cover art looks ridiculously cool (scroll to the bottom).