A.C. Newman and Neko Case, or, the ironist and the tornado

Get Guilty, the second solo album from head New Pornographer A.C. (aka Carl) Newman, out this past January, opens with mock-grandiose percussion and guitar, undercutting an arena-scale sound with undercurrents of knowing goofiness. “Of course I’m only kidding,” the big rhythm and plodding chords say. “I’m far too sophisticated to be able to record an arrangement like this in earnest.” When the vocals of come in, the lyrics preemptively deconstruct any meaning that the song (called “There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve”) might have subsequently developed: “There are maybe ten or twelve things that I can teach you,” Newman sings. “After that, well, I think you’re on your own / And that wasn’t the opening line, that was the tenth or twelfth / Make of that what you will.” In other words: I don’t know much, and even if I did know anything, I’m certainly not going bother trying to put it in a song.

As far as Newman’s lyrics go, these lines are relatively transparent and substantive—more often, he takes an approach that doesn’t even admit the possibility of literal meaning or sense. Words seem to be chosen for their sound, and more importantly, for the mood they create. As a songwriter, Newman has neither a confessional impulse nor any message he intends to convey. Instead, his songs and arrangements strive to tap into the wordless, meaningless heart of pop music. He wants to give listeners an unadulterated fix of pop’s tuneful sugar and aching teenage longing. He wants to return us all to age fourteen, lying on the bedroom floor with headphones on, when we could still listen to a record with fresh, inexperienced, mostly innocent ears, admitting rhythms and melodies deep inside our awkward bodies while being deeply, uncomprehendingly moved by the expression of desires and needs we were only beginning to understand. In pop music, the words are never really the point—even for the very best lyricists, they’re rarely more than icing on the cake.

Newman possesses extraordinary gifts as a tunesmith, and has a very keen ear for how to wring emotional responses by making reference to past styles and genres at just the right moments in the arrangements of his songs. When he brings the full force of his craft to bear—as he does on several of the tunes on Get Guilty, like “Prophets,” with its aching, tuneful chorus, and “The Collected Works,” which successfully taps into some kind of primal head-nodding, fist-pumping impulse deep inside us all—the results are both engaging and very fun.

But just as often, Newman loses me—and it’s almost always because of things like the self-conscious ironies in the album’s opening tune. They’re like bites of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: if you gobble them up, you’ll be wiser and know the truth, but you will no longer be able to receive pop music with the same kind of wide-open, unquestioning, unthinking joy. I’m sure for many listeners, it’s exactly this knowing self-consciousness that makes Newman’s tunes approachable—they like having their sophistication complimented, and enjoy feeling like they’re in on the joke. They understand that pop music is full of lies. Now that they’re a little older and have seen a thing or two, they know better than to trust pop’s adolescent dreaminess. Songs that go after that teenage feeling in earnest are embarrassing, a bit hard to approach. They come a bit too close to actually capturing what it feels like to be a teenager—and nobody would want that, right?

Incidentally, “That Teenage Feeling” happens to be the title of a song by Newman’s fellow New Pornographer Neko Case. Case’s lyrics are often slippery, too, but unlike Newman, she does not indulge in irony for the sake of creating studied, self-conscious emotional distance. This particular song (from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood), has an unabashed, unconcealed emotionalism. It is in no way naive, but at the same time it hungers to capture the all-encompassing power of teenage emotion. Case does not nod and wink at us; instead, her big voice soars over the chorus. And though the stuttering rhythm guitar incorporates the old-fashioned pulse of a teenybopper ballad from the fifties, this is not an ironic gesture: she really means it, and she’s not afraid to admit it.

This is, in a nutshell, why I think Case is a vastly more compelling songwriter and performer than Newman. Newman wants us to laugh a little at the silliness and artificiality of popular music, while also indulging our emotional response to the pop song form. Ultimately, though, he doesn’t want us to feel anything in earnest; earnestness is always suspect for him, and must be undermined. Case, on the other hand, wants to use all the tools of a knowing, self-conscious adult musician to communicate ideas and emotions with her songs. She wants to move her listeners without condescending or making a joke of it.

On her new album Middle Cyclone, Case again brings her tremendously powerful voice to bear on a collection of structurally adroit songs thrumming with mystery and myth. Her opening move blows Newman’s away. In “This Tornado Loves You,” she takes the voice of a tornado to express the frustrations of a hurt and angry but devoted lover: “My love I am the speed of sound / I left them motherless, fatherless / Their souls dangling inside out from their mouths / But it’s never enough / I want you.” This is an audacious move for a songwriter, casting her love as having the force of a natural disaster—audacious, because it’s an open admission of real feeling, and though there’s some humor to it, the intent is deadly serious. She leaves no shelter of insincerity for herself to take cover in; as an artist, she puts herself right out there, undefended before her listeners. She goes on: “Carved your name across three counties / Grounded in with bloody hides / Their broken necks will lie in the ditch until you stop it, stop this madness / I want you.” A minute in, Case has already treated us to an inventive, appealing premise executed with uncommonly rich and vivid imagery. But when the bridge comes, the song becomes more complicated, taking on an unambiguous, open sadness. “I miss, I miss, I miss,” Case repeats, as if she’s stuck on the word or the feeling, unable to get past. “I miss how you sigh yourself to sleep / When I bring the springtime across your sheets.” You can feel the strength of her speaker’s love and longing; Case makes you believe that these emotions contain the force of a tornado, and will not be contained.

The rest of Middle Cyclone is similarly successful: Case draws on imagery of weather, nature, and animals to spin out moving, wise, and enthralling songs about human relationships, and the relationships between humans and the natural world. Her voice is an astounding instrument, and it dominates the whole of the record. Case puts most singers to shame with both the raw power and the nuanced subtlety of her performances.

Neko Case writes songs for adults. It’s not that she fails to understand the artificiality and manipulations and falsehoods of pop songs; rather, she recognizes that perpetually pointing out this fact (as Newman does) will only take your art so far. Ultimately, Newman’s brand of knowingness strikes me as deeply cynical: it’s a rejection of the idea that popular music has the capacity to genuinely move a sophisticated listener with the same kind of immediacy and force with which a pop song moves a teenager. For me, performers like Case make an extremely powerful argument to the contrary. Her music is both sophisticated and sincere, and goes right for the heart without feeling the need to resort to any distancing poses.

Listening to Case sing on New Pornographers songs (written by Newman, not Case) is a fascinating experience: she belts Newman’s lyrics out impressively enough, but rarely achieves anything resembling the emotional power of her vocals on her own records. Their collaboration is at its best on Mass Romantic, where the rough-and-ready arrangements offer less space for irony and allusion. Songs like “Letter to an Occupant” or “Mass Romantic” create a happy medium between Newman’s aesthetic and Case’s: there’s still little effort to make the songs mean much of anything, but they’re at the same time full of straightforward power pop life. Newman’s very best tune, however, is probably “The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism,” which doesn’t feature Case, and is still played for a joke, but also contains a buoyant sense of boozy joy and a sharp edge of bitterness. In other words: “Descent” actually has subject matter, and Newman more or less treats that subject matter as if it might have some genuine meaning and emotional resonance. I wish Newman would put his considerable skills as a craftsman of melodies and arrangements to this kind of use more often. I like his records well enough, but they very rarely move me.

A duet between John Darnielle and Tobias Wolff

Via GalleyCat, here’s video of John Darnielle singing a song from Get Lonely with Tobias Wolff (who has just been awarded the Story Prize, and $20,000, for his collection Our Story Begins) providing backing vocals on the choruses. I don’t know if Wolff is likely to be joining the Mountain Goats on tour anytime soon, but this is beautiful little performance all the same.

Not into Merriweather

Animal Collective albums tend to be growers—a bit difficult to approach at first, sometimes even outright baffling, but extremely rewarding on repeated listens. But now that I’ve had a few weeks to settle into their new (and widely-acclaimed) record Merriweather Post Pavilion, I have to admit that it hasn’t yet wowed me. I’m not saying it’s bad—far from it—but in recent years, Animal Collective has set the bar so high that anything less than a flat-out great record comes as a disappointment.

I find their previous full-length, Strawberry Jam, so deeply compelling that, even after dozens and dozens of listens, it continues to arrest my attention completely every time I hear it. Merriweather is sonically adventurous and sometimes quite beautiful, but to my ear it lacks the rough-edged, emotionally-rich tension between avant-strangeness and pop sweetness that makes Strawberry Jam so wonderful. Or, put another way: Merriweather Post Pavilion indulges more frequently in pleasantness and less frequently in moments when a howl or a shout cuts through the tunefulness (as in the magnificent “For Reverend Green”) or when a haunting (but also pretty) melody rises up surprisingly from from a fractured and wildly unconventional arrangement (as in “Cuckoo Cuckoo”). Instead, Merriweather Post Pavilion presents gentle melodies awash in squishy, burbling electronics. It’s a worthy record—hummable, and full of marvelous, inventive sounds. But I don’t find it gripping or involving. It has never once made me want to drop everything else just to listen to it.

Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective

It’s not that Merriweather doesn’t have its moments: “Guys Eyes” uses a stuttering rhythm and Beach Boys harmonies (always a potent weapon in the Animal Collective musical arsenal) to set up a dizzying climax that then sails just as smoothly back into a verse; and “Lion in a Coma” catapults from a gentle start into grand sonic spaces. But even the latter track throws me sometimes, in part because of the dumb pun in its title, and also because of its extensive use of a didgeridoo—which sounds great, anchoring the tune with a rich and satisfying drone, but at the same time seems an over-obvious move for the band that is responsible for having made tribal percussion and hippie-ish mysticism suddenly very popular in indie rock. Perhaps it’s a willful provocation aimed at critics and fans who would like to box their music into narrow categories, a nervy move meant to demonstrate that they’re not in the least bit worried about the small-minded “freak folk” label that continues to be applied to them despite all sonic indications to the contrary. Even so, it’s distracting.

In any case: I stand by my previous statement that Animal Collective is one of the best bands around these days, and just about the only one in indie rock that actually seems important. But I’m just not into Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Andrew Bird reimagines a song from World War I

The typical rock cover tune takes the form of faithful homage: a loving tribute to a favorite songwriter or an important influence. At best, this kind of cover opens a window into an artist’s formative aesthetics, and draws a through line between a contemporary and his or her predecessors; at worst, it’s plodding, dull, and unimaginative, too caught up in being respectful to be interesting. Then there’s the novelty cover, in which a band takes an ironic crack at an uncool or highly unexpected source: a punk version of a Barry Manilow tune, or a bluegrass take on the Ramones. This kind of cover rarely rises above the level of a wisecrack: it’s kind of funny in passing, but also predictable and usually entirely forgettable.

A better approach to the cover tune is to avoid the dual traps of over-easy irony and over-earnest tribute by aiming instead at reinterpretation. One of the best reinterpretive covers I’ve heard recently is Andrew Bird’s version of the 1918 pop hit “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm,” which he released, slightly retitled as “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm,” on his 2008 EP Soldier On. The original version, with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, and music by Walter Donaldson, was recorded by a number of popular performers in the years immediately following World War I. You can hear a version recorded by Harry Fay in 1918 here, via firstworldwar.com. You can read the lyrics on the same site, and also at Time Portal To Old St. Louis, which puts the song’s publication date at 1919 rather than 1918.

In the song, a couple argue with one another about whether their sons will return home to the farm now that World War I has come to an end. When the wife expresses her happiness at the thought of her boys coming home, her husband, Reuben, replies, “How ’ya gonna keep ’em, down on the farm / After they’ve seen Pa-ree?” He suggests that “They’ll never want to see a rake or plow,” and (amusingly and absurdly) asks her, “And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?” The wife’s reply is that you can take the boy from the farm, but you can’t take the farm from the boy: “Once a farmer, always a jay /And farmers always stick to the hay.”

Fay’s 1919 version of the tune bounces along amiably, treating the lyric (which is sometimes quite silly) as a lighthearted joke. His performance is all humor and showmanship, without a trace of either sentimentality or seriousness. Bird, on the other hand, decides to take the lyrics fully in earnest, and transforms the song into a slow and mournful folk ballad. Though he follows the original lyric closely, he reworks the melody dramatically, and both his vocal performance and arrangement come off as utterly sincere. As a result, the humorous novelty pop hit becomes something much sweeter, sadder, and richer. Bird’s vocal poignantly captures the sadness of a parent who recognizes that her grown-up children won’t be coming home again, and her fear for their well-being and safety now that they’re beyond her protection (“How ya gonna keep ‘em away from harm,” Bird sings in the chorus, with both nervousness and world-wise resignation). At the same time, you can hear a parent’s pride and joy in her sons’ independence, and the understanding that it’s time to let go.

Released in 2008, Bird’s version also taps into the ninety years of American history that has elapsed since “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm” was originally published. In Bird’s hands, the song also becomes a lament for the slow death of American rural culture. We now know that the husband in the song is absolutely right: over the course of the 20th century, almost every farmer’s son and daughter did indeed leave the farm, and resettled in the cities and the suburbs. Part of what’s great about Bird’s rendition is that it doesn’t display much nostalgia: his vocal delivery treats the lure of the city seriously, and admits both the pleasures of modern life and the sadness of the increasingly few people who’ve stayed behind and remained a part of rural culture. Bird (who lives in both Chicago and rural Illinois) doesn’t judge the parents for staying or the children for leaving; instead, he goes after the idea of what it feels like as the world changes around you, becoming a different place (for better or worse) than the one you’ve loved.

The bear plays the saxophone (or, a bear who wants to be Bird)

The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor

Your eyes are not deceiving you: on the book cover above, that really is a bear playing the saxophone. Rather improbably, Rafi Zabor’s first novel The Bear Comes Home received the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award—and I say improbably not because it’s a bad book (actually, it’s terrific), and not even because of its oddball premise (involving a bear living in New York and trying to make it in the jazz world), but rather because so many of the novel’s passages portray the process of jazz improvisation at great length and in great detail. The book’s central storyline traces the Bear’s creative development as a band leader and alto saxophone improviser, and readers without a solid background knowledge of jazz will probably have a hard time following exactly what’s going on during Zabor’s extended descriptions of Bear’s solos. Zabor frequently uses the characteristic styles of significant jazz players as points of reference for Bear’s playing, and sometimes even includes transcriptions of melodies and chord progressions. But, as the friend who lent me a copy of the book pointed out, The Bear Comes Home is at its core not only a novel about jazz, but also about the creative process. As the Bear wrestles with his influences, practices his technique, negotiates thorny aesthetic questions, and attempts to find his voice, he’s struggling with the same problems that all artists must work through.

Another broader theme of The Bear Comes Home is the idea of artist as an outsider—as someone who is drawn to the human world, but by nature always remains on its fringes, uncomfortable with mainstream society and the ways in which most people live their lives. And the book is also a love story—albeit one involving lots of bear-on-woman sex. Though the abundance of interspecies action is without doubt the strangest aspect of Zabor’s altogether very odd novel, it’s also a vehicle for exploring some very conventional themes, such as communication problems between men and women and male struggles with emotional maturity. In fact, the plotline involving the Bear’s love life eventually becomes a little tedious—it takes him a terribly long time to figure out how to negotiate an adult romantic relationship. (Admittedly, he’s at something of a disadvantage, being a bear and all, but as the novel went on, I did grow increasingly impatient with his consistent inability to act like an adult.) Be warned: there are a number of very sexually explicit passages in the novel involving the Bear’s intimate relations with his human lover. But for the most part they’re written with a geeky technicality that helps reduce the queasiness factor; Zabor often seems preoccupied with exactly how interspecies sex might work, much in the same way he’s fascinated by what a bear would need to do physically in order to be able to play the saxophone. Also, Zabor’s very insistent throughout on not treating their relationship as a freakshow. You never forget that the Bear is a Bear, but Zabor all the same is only moderately interested in novelty and titillation. Aside from the obvious, there’s nothing Zabor’s portrayal of the Bear’s love life that wouldn’t seem at home in a mainstream romantic comedy.

For those of you out there who (like me) do love jazz, The Bear Comes Home is a real treat. Numerous real jazz players (ranging from Charlie Haden to Roscoe Mitchell) make cameos, and there’s even a scene in which members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago dress up as hospital personnel in order to rescue the Bear from captivity. (There’s also a scene in which the Bear joins the Art Ensemble onstage, and no one really pays much attention, assuming he’s in costume just like they are.) In-jokes abound, including some very funny passages about the rise of Wynton Marsalis and the marginalization of the avant-garde. And though the jazz-related humor is rich, Zabor’s serious treatment of improvisation, aesthetics, and creative development in jazz is far richer. In his lengthy accounts of the Bear’s solos, Zabor fully captures the fear, joy, and wonder of artistic creation, and in the process offers an intelligent and coherent portrait of the artistic growth and aesthetic personality of a jazz saxophonist. Zabor writes about the Bear’s playing with both the passion of an artist and the keen intellectual eye of a superb critic, and as a result The Bear Comes Home contains some of the finest and most insightful writing about jazz I’ve ever encountered.

Best new music 2008

For several Christmases running, I’ve offered a compilation of my favorite songs of the year as a gift to friends and family. The lengthy post below accompanies Ryan’s Holiday Mix 2008, and offers brief notes on each of the tracks I’ve selected this year (plus links to previous blog posts where applicable). For those of you who will be in the Twin Cities, Chicago, Denver, Decatur, or Chatham this year: you’ll get your copies soon, either in person or in the mail.

For anyone else who might be reading this: the list of songs below is thoroughly idiosyncratic, and I make no claim for it being some kind of definitive critical best-of for 2008. That said, I really enjoyed all these tunes, and maybe you will, too.

The only definitive critical pronouncement that I will make: record of the year goes to the Fleet Foxes, hands down, not the slightest doubt about it.

Ryan’s Holiday Mix 2008, Disc 1

1. Ponytail, “Beg Waves”
A jolt of twee-punk energy from a band that’s both sweeter and more unhinged than obvious influence Deerhoof. Their debut record Ice Cream Spiritual has a wonderful title and abounds with joyous caterwauling. It’s an absolute blast to listen to, especially in small doses—like a sugared-up toddler, Ponytail will wear you out fast.

2. The B-52′s, “Deviant Ingredient”
Two bands of a certain vintage from Athens, Georgia released what were alleged to be comeback albums this year, and despite my deep and abiding love for R.E.M., I have to give credit to the B-52’s for putting out the much better record in 2008. Funplex offers no surprises or stylistic leaps forward—they’re just here to party, and that’s more than fine by me. My Holiday Mix 2008 selection, “Deviant Ingredient,” is hilarious, tuneful, danceable, and thoroughly off the wall. Fred Schneider has some particularly choice lines, such the deeply profound, “It’s the yin and yang shang-a-lang / It’s the slow boogaloo, it’s what they do.” Amen.

3. Wolf Parade, “The Grey Estates”
A fine pop song about good old fashioned suburban ennui. Wolf Parade’s 2008 release At Mount Zoomer (the cover of which Pitchfork correctly identified as among the year’s worst) is disappointingly inconsistent for a band with such great talent and potential, but I’ve had the “Grey Estates” stuck in my head for most of the year. For a detailed analysis of “The Grey Estates” and a review of At Mount Zoomer, see my earlier blog post.

4. Erik Friedlander, “Big Shoes”
Cellist Friedlander first caught my attention with Block Ice and Propane, a warm and dazzling solo concept record about the American family road trip. I’m also a fan of some of his more avant-garde work—see my earlier post on his collaboration with Teho Teardo for more on this. My Holiday Mix selection “Big Shoes” operates in a relatively straight-ahead trio jazz mode, albeit in the unusual configuration of cello-bass-drums. Friedlander pulls most of the melodic weight, and the result is low-key swing that isn’t boring: stuff you can put on at a dinner party or on Sunday morning, but which also rewards close listening.

5. Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal”
“White Winter Hymnal” is a showstopper, an attention-getting shot across the bow from Fleet Foxes’ superb self-titled debut. The band wraps a simple, timeless melody in gorgeous vocal harmonies, and then hits you with a blast of dreamy, surf-meets-Tortoise guitar. Beautiful and engrossing music from one of the better records of the past decade. (For previous posts on the Fleet Foxes, see here and here.)

6. Al Green, “Lay It Down”
Veteran hip-hop act the Roots helmed the production on Al Green’s new record, and they did a bang-up job: the sound is studiously old-school, and Reverend Green sounds at home. What’s more, Green is still a top-notch songwriter decades into his career: there are a handful of tracks on Lay It Down that compare favorably to Green’s classic work from the seventies. For more about Lay It Down, see my earlier post.

7. Stereolab, “Daisy Click Clack”
Those familiar with Stereolab’s oeuvre will find few surprises on Chemical Chords: this time out it’s the same arty francophile bounce as it ever was. But they’re so good at what they do that I don’t care if they haven’t had a fresh idea in a decade.

8. Matana Roberts, “Thrills”
New York-based alto saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Roberts cut this record in Chicago, with the help of some great local players: most notably the legendary Fred Anderson, who duets with Roberts on several tracks. Anderson doesn’t play on “Thrills,” but I think it’s a cleverly adventurous composition, and it features terrific playing from both Roberts and Chicago’s Jeff Parker (best known for his work in Tortoise, and if you ask me, one of the best guitarists around).

9. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”
A seething, sneering, raucous, rapier-witted and lyrical poetic declamation from the veteran Cave, accompanied by a rejuvenated, loose, and energetic incarnation of the Bad Seeds. Decades into his career, Nick Cave shows the kids how it’s done. (For more, see my earlier post on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!).

10. Erykah Badu, “The Cell”
Perhaps the most underappreciated album of 2008 is Badu’s New Amerykah Part I, the first installment in a planned trilogy of sonically and thematically adventurous concept records. The album is coherent and insular in a way that defies easy excerpting, but “The Cell” will give you a fair taste.

11. Antony and the Johnsons, “Shake that Devil”
2008′s Another World EP is a teaser for next year’s Antony and the Johnsons full-length, and most of the EP has a complacent, B-side feel about it. But then there’s “Shake that Devil,” a bold, wild, unpredictable and utterly unexpected tune, quite unlike anything else on the EP, and miles away from Antony’s typical maudlin piano ballad mode. Truth is, Antony could could weep the phone book over a few miserable piano chords till kingdom come for all I care; he’s one of the most compelling singers around. But “Shake That Devil” hints that the new record may have some surprises in store, and I’m looking forward to it.

12. Bon Iver, “For Emma”
Surely just about the last thing the world needs is another navel-gazing indie rocker mumbling over an acoustic guitar, but the indelible melodies coming through the warble of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago bowled over my resistance. Emotionally honest and improbably haunting stuff.

13. The Walkmen, “In the New Year”
A big bravura tune in the midst of a slow-burning record full of passionate adult love songs. On first listen, Walkmen records are a little impenetrable, but stick with them, and rewards are substantial. One of the richest and most deeply moving records of 2008.

13. Lackthereof, “The Columbia”
The guy-in-a-bedroom-with-a-fourtrack vibe of Lackthereof’s My Haunted sometimes wears a bit thin, but “The Columbia” is an excellent tune, and one very well-suited to its lo-fi setting.

14. The Hold Steady, “Sequestered in Memphis”
I had mixed feelings about this year’s Hold Steady record—I’m beginning to wonder if songwriter Craig Finn has by this point spun everything he can out of his distinctive rockers, junkies, and Jesus milieu. (For an extended take on this topic, see my earlier post about the in some ways troubling content of Finn’s lyrics.) But Finn can certainly still write a hell of a good pop hook, and his band is more muscular and fun than ever—they’re probably only group in indie rock that dares to pull out Cheap Trick or E-Street Band moves (nonetheless simultaneously, and with Black Flag thrown in for good measure).

15. The Magnetic Fields, “The Nun’s Litany”
This band hit a dead end after the popularity of 69 Love Songs; when I saw them touring for the mediocre i, they seemed have trouble finding any meaningful connection to their chamber-folk arrangements at all. 2008′s Distortion is refreshing: Merritt isn’t breaking any new ground with his songwriting here, but this time out the melodies are better than solid, and the loud, hyper-distorted arrangements are a breath of fresh air (while at the same time recalling the lo-fi vibe of the early Magnetic Fields records). “The Nun’s Litany” made me laugh aloud: it’s both playful and razor-sharp.

16. Andrew Bird, “How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm”
A flat-out beautiful recording of a cover tune from the always-excellent Bird. I’m very much looking forward to his new album next year.

17. William Parker Quartet, “Malachi’s Mode”
Solid stuff from Parker’s quartet in a relatively straight-ahead post-bob mode. But my favorite Parker recordings from 2008 aren’t represented here, due to great their length: I’m actually partial to Double Sunrise Over Neptune, with its title reminiscent of Sun Ra, its big band, big palette and crosscultural borrowings.

18. Fleet Foxes, “Oliver James”
One of the first things you notice about the Fleet Foxes are their distinctive and immensely appealing vocal harmonies—but the spare and beautiful “Oliver James” leaves no doubt that they have plenty of other tricks up their collective sleeve. Again: Fleet Foxes is the best record of 2008.

Ryan’s Holiday Mix 2008, Disc 2

1. Wye Oak, “I Don’t Feel Young”
On this record, Wye Oak cribs more or less everything from Yo La Tengo, but they do such a good job that I didn’t mind too much. A couple of albums down the road they may find a voice and sound of their own, but for now “I Don’t Feel Young,” however derivative, does offer considerable noisy melancholy pleasures.

2. High Places, “Jump In (For Gilkey Elementary School) “
Most pop electronic acts tend to lean heavily on dance styles or 80s new wave, but the High Places take a fresh approach: as the song’s subtitle would suggest, there’s something childlike about their sound, and this particular track also has a warm, nostalgic feel. Definitely one of the most promising new acts of 2008.

3. Titus Andronicus, “My Time Outside the Womb”
Raw, rambunctious, and fun punk rock from new band Titus Andronicus. Their debut record (which I praised effusively here) is a blast, but after catching the latter half of their starry-eyed and ragged set at Pitchfork, I’m not sure if they’re going to be able to channel their considerable energy into a sustainable, grown-up sound in the future. But: maybe they’ll surprise me, and at the very least, we can enjoy them while they’re still punk kids who just go out there and unselfconsciously rock.

4. Deerhunter, “Nothing Ever Happened”
With the success of their much-anticipated second album, Microcastle, Deerhunter is beginning to take on the mantle of a critical favorite. I’m not convinced that they’re going to change the face of rock and roll, but this record does do an excellent job of distilling obvious influences into compelling, driving, slightly off-kilter rock, and I suspect we’ll probably continue to have solid (or better) albums from Deerhunter in the future. And check out that guitar solo on “Nothing Ever Happened”—inventive, lengthy, and all around terrific in my book.

5. Nomo, “My Dear”
With Ghost Rock, Nomo grows up: they’re no longer merely aping Afropop pioneers like Fela Kuti, and instead broaden their palette to draw on a wider range of sounds and styles. The infectious horn hook on “My Dear” would have done Fela proud, and here it’s locked into place by a relentless bass groove and some fine hand-drumming funk. The soloists just blow the hell out of it, and it all sounds great.

6. Juana Molina, “Un Dia”
This time out, Argentinian singer Molina cuts, slices, and samples her voice in order to treat it much like an instrument, and the resulting arrangements are inventive and fascinating. The most obvious point of reference here is Bjork, but the Molina has her own distinct sound and approach, and plenty of ideas of her own. An unabashed experiment that’s also warm, inviting, and fun to listen to, and one of the best records of the year.

7. Fleet Foxes, “He Doesn’t Know Why”
Here’s another great tune from Fleet Foxes, and one that displays their ambition and reach in ways that might not be obvious in “White Winter Hymnal” or “Oliver James.” These guys are the real thing.

8. Mountain Goats, “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident.”
After a string of flat-out great records capped by Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree, John Darnielle’s last couple of Mountain Goats albums have been slightly disappointing. The songwriting’s still top-notch, and there’s still some novelty to hearing him find his way around the studio after years of ultra lo-fi recordings, but Heretic Pride lacks some of the passion, energy, and coherence of the best Mountain Goats records. That said, I still swooned over the gorgeous chorus in “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident,” and Darnielle can still out-write almost any indie rock songwriter around.

9. Jamie Lidell, “Another Day”
I raved about this one in some detail here at Good Readings earlier this year: an improbably great soul tune from English oddball Lidell.

10. Lambchop, “Slipped, Dissolved, and Loosed”
Another gorgeous, brainy, quietly moving song from Lambchop, one of the best and most underappreciated bands around. I suppose I understand why their literate, allusive country-lounge-soul fails to catch the attention of trendsetting hipsters: Lambchop’s sound is unabashedly adult, genuinely subtle, and in no way trendy. Instead, the music is beautiful, heartfelt, and wry, and anchored in the stellar songwriting of bandleader Kurt Wagner. 2008′s OH (Ohio) doesn’t have quite the emotional impact of 2006′s Damaged, which is perhaps Lambchop’s finest album, nor is it as flashy as their minor (and now largely forgotten) critical and commercial breakthrough Nixon (2000). But I sincerely love this band, and it broke my heart a little when I saw them give a fantastic show to a mostly-empty theater in Chicago a couple of years back, even if I do understand why they might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

11. Marnie Stern, “Ruler”
Stern is a ferocious talent, and here she shreds the hell out of a structurally inventive tune. See my previous post on Stern for more (as well as an extended discussion of the relationship between age and the creative process).

12. Aluminum Group, “Headphones”
More appealing indie-electro-lounge pop from Chicago’s Navin brothers. Much like Stereolab, they’re a thoroughly predictable and reliable act: pick up almost any album in their catalog, and the experience is much the same. Still, their tunes and arrangements remain a pleasure.

13. Vampire Weekend, “The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance”
Vampire Weekend were 2008′s biggest indie buzz band by far, and perhaps because they hold up a tuneful mirror to the privileged young aesthetes who make up a core component of indie rock’s hipster fanbase. The critics made a big deal about their borrowings from African pop music, but I can’t say I found that aspect of their sound particularly interesting or surprising—after years of African music boosterism from critic Joe Tangari in the pages of Pitchfork, it was only a matter of time before an indie rock band took the message to heart. (And Vampire Weekend has its predecessors even here: Extra Golden, for example, which actually has both American and African members, and offers a more compelling, if less tuneful, synthesis of African and indie rock sounds; or the aforementioned Nomo.) And of course Vampire Weekend’s points of reference are more generally Western borrowers of African sounds than African music directly: it’s all Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, a fact of which the band is acutely aware (see their much-discussed song “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”). The band’s self-consciousness is laudable to a degree, but it’s also a problem: pointing out the irony of your own privileged position doesn’t mean that you’re actually moving beyond it. Further, their set at Pitchfork was uninspiring: rote, bland, suggesting that there’s really not much to this band except their tunes. Oh, but those tunes! I have about a million reasons to reject Vampire Weekend, but the songwriting is so good that I had to let it all go. If these guys can drop some of the irony and hip self-reflection and get down to business, they probably have some very good records ahead of them. More likely they’ll put out a thoroughly boring second record and everyone will forget about them completely. All the same, “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” is a great tune.

14. David Byrne and Brian Eno, “One Fine Day”
An unexpected, slightly loopy, thoroughly enjoyable collaboration between Byrne and Eno. Somewhat surprisingly, this time out they’re into pop tunes, and quite a few of them are better than decent. Eno is without doubt one of the most extraordinary producers of his generation, and his ambient work is absolutely definitive of the genre—but his own rock-oriented material more often than not leaves me cold. Daid Byrne remains an excellent musical partner for Eno, as he’s no less arty or intellectual in his approach, but also has an ability to sing with deeply appealing honesty and directness. Byrne’s post-Talking Heads output has definitely been hit and miss, but he remains a brilliant guy and one of my artistic heroes. He also writes a fascinating blog.

15. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, “Out of Reaches”
King of indie irony Malkmus has a secret weapon in his arsenal: he can write involving, affecting, even sincere songs when he sets his mind to it. Far too few of Pavement’s legion imitators have understood that Malkmus’s archness and playfulness has always only thinly concealed an emotionally earnest core. Just because Malkmus’s sentiments aren’t straightforward doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe in anything he’s singing about; his ironies are multifaceted and complicated, but they can rarely be reduced to a mere joke. The current incarnation of Malkmus’s post-Pavement outfit the Jicks is crackerjack, and has benefited tremendously from the addition of Sleater-Kinney’s incomparable Janet Weiss on the drums. The long guitar solos, adventurous song structures, and Weiss’s hyper-proficient playing on Real Emotional Trash add up to a thoroughly enjoyable record, the best by far from Malkmus since the storied days of Pavement. Sometimes Malkmus’s verbal play gets the best of him, but “Out of Reaches” stays focused and hits home.

16. The Breeders, “It’s The Love”
Some critics complained that this sounded a bit too much like an outtake from the early 90s alt-rock heyday, of which the Breeders were certainly one of the leading lights. It’s a fair criticism, but if you can get past its familiarity, it’s a very pleasurable tune. Most of Mountain Battles goes for quieter, subtler pleasures—it was largely dismissed by critics, but I suspect many of them just might not have been paying very much attention. Mountain Battles is well worth a serious listen.

17. American Music Club, “The Decibels and the Little Pills.”
See my previous post about The Golden Age for more on this one. Way back in the mid-nineties, some critics were hailing Mark Eitzel as one of the best songwriters of his generation; now nobody pays his work (either as a solo artist or with American Music Club) the slightest bit of attention. Eitzel has always been relentlessly gloomy and brainy; I sometimes doubt that I would like his songs nearly as much as I do if I hadn’t first stumbled across them when I was a brooding teenager. Still, Eitzel remains a very fine lyricist and tunesmith, so much so that I can still put up with his sad sack ways.

18. Department of Eagles, “No One Does It Like You”
Drawing heavily on the musical (and sartorial) styles of the eighties has been all the rage in recent years, but Department of Eagles have set the retro clock back a couple of decades on In Ear Park: the sound is mostly derived from David Bowie and the Beatles, with little hints of Led Zeppelin’s mystic-folk mode here and there, too. It’s a record with moderate ambitions, but the tunes are excellent, and despite the heavy debt owed to very familiar bands of ages past, In Ear Park manages to transform its influences into a distinct and compelling sound. “No One Does It Like You” also has the virtue of being insanely catchy; it’s one of the more straightforward tunes on a record that has far more twists, turns, subtleties, and depths than you’re likely to detect on a casual first listen.

19. Breathe Owl Breathe, “Tobaggan”
A beautiful song from a small, odd, and lovely EP from a band that seems to have received absolutely no attention at all. According to their MySpace page, they’re from Michigan; that’s just about all I know about them.

GOTV

You should stop reading my blog and go vote (or even better, volunteer) for Barack Obama.

(There won’t be any new posts for a few days anyway, as I’ll be out knocking on doors.)

Age, genius, and great art

Since the days of the Romantics, youthful inspiration has long been associated with artistic genius and the production of great work. Talented young artists are seen as iconoclasts rebelling against the idols of generations past, and are expected to produce their greatest and most significant work early in their careers. Older artists seen as wedded to the ideas and aesthetics of generations past, and it is often assumed that their best work is behind them.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell draws on the work of the University of Chicago economist David Galenson on the question of the relationship between age and the production of great artistic work. In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, Galenson offers a comparative discussion of Picasso (an early bloomer) and Cezanne (whose artistic success only came much later in life), and concludes that Picasso’s path to greatness is by no means the only way for an artist to get there.

Cezanne, "Self-Portrait with Rose Background" c. 1875

With Gladwell’s article in mind, I was also struck by a recent Pitchfork interviewwith the guitarist and songwriter Marnie Stern, in which she discusses the significance of the fact that she didn’t put out a debut album until after the age of thirty. In the world of popular music, that’s nearly a decade behind schedule for a recording debut—most musicians and bands get their start by their early twenties at the latest. Even more than in most fields, there’s a very strong expectation in popular music that only the young will produce great work, and that aging only reduces the power and relevance of a musician’s output. Young bands have the greatest energy and freshest ideas, and tend to create their masterworks only three or four albums into their careers (if not sooner). After that, many musicians settle in for years or even decades of comfortably retreading the same ground, never again recapturing the fire of their earlier innovations and accomplishments.

The case of Marnie Stern, then, is certainly unusual in popular music—especially given that her new sophomore release, the verbosely titled This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, only confirms her status as a unique and dazzling talent. Her first album, 2007′s In Advance of the Broken Arm, succeeds largely on the strength of Stern’s idiosyncratic and head-spinning fretwork: on song after song, she unleashes avalanches of notes, while all the same sounding very little like guitar gods past. On This Is It…., the adventurous guitar playing, harsh sonics, and rhythmic complexity of her previous album remain, but this time she adds a healthy dose of tunefulness to the mix. Stern has arrived on the indie rock scene as a fully-formed talent with a unique and compelling vision—an achievement that, by her own account, she simply could not have managed when she was younger.

When asked by the Pitchfork interviewer if she felt “there was an advantage to having your first record come that late,” Stern answered:

Of course. I don’t know about for other people, but I know for me, I mean, I had material for all those years and certainly wasn’t anywhere near up to par. I think it takes a long time to find your voice. A really long fucking time to figure it out. And plus, I don’t know, I guess it’s different for everyone, but it’d be hard to tap into a really honest place when you’re really young….And how brave you are. Because that’s the other thing. The only things I like to listen to are things where risks are being taken. I think that’s the only thing that pushes you to the next place, when you do things that are out of your comfort zone.

Stern didn’t emerge out of nowhere at the age of 30; instead, she devoted countless hours over a period of years to an intense and serious exploration of who she was as a guitarist, songwriter, and creative person. She was unsatisfied with the the work she was producing when she was younger, and also felt that she hadn’t yet “found her voice.” If she’d attempted to make a go at a music career in her early twenties, she would have lacked both the self-knowledge and the technical skill that play significant roles in making her music so successful now that she’s in her thirties.

Marnie Stern, "This Is It...."

In popular music, the norm is for an artist to follow a pattern of development that matches David Galenson’s description of a “Young Genius”—someone who, like Picasso, bursts onto the scene early in their 20s, and produces their greatest and most significant work in the years immediately following. Marnie Stern, on the other hand, would seem to be a closer match for Galenson’s “Old Master” category: artists who labor for years or decades to find their voices, and rarely enjoy their greatest accomplishments until much later in life.

For Galenson and Gladwell, it’s not just that “Old Masters” bloom later; rather, their entire approach to creativity is fundamentally different. In his New Yorker article, Gladwell establishes a contrast between the fiction writers Jonathan Safran Foer—who wrote his highly successful first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, at the age of 19—and Ben Fountain, whose debut story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published when he was 48. According to Gladwell, Foer writes quickly and passionately when inspiration takes him, and finds it difficult to comprehend how a writer could work doggedly at researching and re-working a piece of writing over a long period of time. Fountain, on the other hand, worked on his fiction for 18 years before he saw publication and success, and sees writing as a slow and laborious process of careful thought and self-discovery. Fountain, in fact, will sometimes write as much as 500 pages of drafts in order to produce a single short-story. Much like Stern, Fountain’s success did not depend on a burst of youthful energy, but instead on many years of devoted research, reading, exploration, and hard work.

Quoted in Gladwell, Galenson notes that, for artists like Cezanne (or Fountain, or Stern), creativity takes a very different form than it does for a Picasso:

They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings.

On a personal level, I find it much easier to identify with Fountain, Stern, and Cezanne than with Picasso or Safran Foer. When I read about Fountain’s 500 pages of work for a single short story, I sighed in recognition: I tend to write at least ten or fifteen thousand words for every thousand that actually make it into a completed draft of a short story. Also like Cezanne or Fountain (and perhaps like Stern), I don’t tend to view my creative work in conceptual terms—my creative energy instead comes from the process of exploring themes, language, and characters in the hope of coming to some kind of greater understanding of the world and of fiction itself.

That said, Galenson’s categories do seem like something of an oversimplification. No doubt there are many artists who fail to fit into either the “Young Genius” or “Old Master” mold. One example that comes immediately to mind is Philip Roth: his debut short story collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959) earned him widespread critical acclaim, and positioned him as a young rising literary star. But his next few novels were far less successful, and he seemed to struggle to find his voice until the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). And Roth wouldn’t write several of his best novels until the 1990s. The pattern of his career doesn’t match either of Galenson’s categories. (Though he is a good fit for one of the Galenson’s characteristics of an “Old Master”: Roth has consistently, even obsessively, revisited similar themes, ideas, settings, and characters throughout his career.)

Gladwell’s article also alludes to another factor in artistic development without fully engaging it: questions of class and financial support. While Ben Fountain struggled for the better part of two decades to produce his first good fiction, his wife, a successful lawyer, offered him both financial and moral support. And as Gladwell does point out, Cezanne had a string of famous patrons during his very long artistic apprenticeship. Not all artists are nearly so fortunate: in fact, it would seem likely that many people who might have one day created great works instead end up unable to practice their art in any kind of sustained manner because they simply don’t have the kind of support that would free them to devote the necessary time and energy. It’s hard to labor through years and years of disappointment when you have to pay the bills, take care of the kids, mow the lawn, and put dinner on the table every night. Very few artists will be so lucky as to find themselves a good patron.

Gladwell didn’t address the class and gender issues underlying the economic realities of artistic production. In music, for example, no doubt part of why the “Young Genius” model has taken such hold is because the demands of establishing a music career are easiest for young men of a middle-class (or better) background to manage. It’s hard to (for example) raise a family while you’re broke all the time and need to devote your time to the exhausting grind of touring, as well as to the late-night partying and socializing that’s necessary for networking your way into the music scene. Older musicians are bound to have a harder time living up to these kinds of expectations. And it’s far easier to choose to place yourself into poverty for a few years if you know that you can always get a “real” job someday (thanks to your college degree), and that if you really get in trouble, your middle-class (or richer) parents will always be there to bale you out.

Jeff Mangum emerges at E6 show in New York

Pitchfork has video of Neutral Milk Hotel’s reclusive Jeff Mangum joining numerous other Elephant 6 collective members onstage for a ragged and endearing rendition of Olivia Tremor Control’s “The Opera House.” The video is decidedly lo-fi, and Mangum mostly just shouts along, but all the same it’s exciting to see him performing in public again.

In a related news story, Pitchfork is also reporting that Mangum is planning to join the Elephant 6 crew when they stop in Chicago later this month. Yet another reason for me to miss Chicago….

Fleet Foxes, Lou Reed, Dylan, and indie rock singing

Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson has used his Resonant Frequency column this month to reexamine one of indie rock’s core assumptions. He discusses how hearing the technical facility and sheer beauty of the voices of the members of Fleet Foxes (who I also blogged about a couple days ago) caused him to think about the ways in which singers who can’t sing very well have become so common in indie rock that no one ever gives it the slightest bit of consideration. He discusses his mixed feelings on the matter, noting that he certainly does still like the music of many bands that employ singers who lack anything resembling conventionally “good” singing voices, but that it all the same felt refreshing to for once hear a new band who can demonstrate some real vocal abilities.

Richardson (accurately) points to the source of this long-running aesthetic: Lou Reed, whose no-range, half-spoken vocals with the Velvet Underground set the template for generations of independent-minded singer-songwriters to come. Reed, as Richardson points out, was an incredibly gifted songwriter, and also possessed an indelible cool in the 1960s. Combine that with the band’s rather astounding record as stylistic innovators, and it’s no wonder that many sonically adventurous bands in the years since have taken Reed’s so-so vocals as permission to sing in a similar way. Nearly every aspect of indie rock’s aesthetics can be found in those four Velvet Underground records—their influence runs so deeply in all areas (including vocal styles) that it now often goes completely unobserved.

In addition to the historical and aesthetic reasons for this, I think there’s also an important philosophical one. Indie rock tends to value ideas and expression over performance. High levels of technical achievement are respected only when coupled with high-quality songwriting, inventive studio craft and/or involving performances. Underlying all of this is the idea that anyone can make great music. For some in indie rock (like Half Japanese or the Beat Happening), this idea is taken very seriously: amateurism is prized, and it’s considered a virtue to warble off-key or neglect to tune up before playing a song. There’s an alignment with the values of folk music here, and also with the DYI ethos of punk and 1960s garage rock. For most, though, amateurism is valued only so far. Technique is devalued, but deep-running knowledge of popular music styles and history is seen as extremely important. If a band demonstrates the ability to reference and coherently incorporate the ideas of both well-known and obscure musicians from years past in a self-aware and stylish manner, they’ll meet the approval of their peers. Whether the singer can sing or not is seen as being beside the point.

Another thread worth teasing out here is the influence of Bob Dylan—a man with a very weak singing voice, but who (as Richardson points out) is a wonderfully expressive and moving singer. Of course, Dylan also reinvented popular music in his image as a songwriter, and in the process created a space in which his work as a singer could be appreciated. I think understanding Dylan’s success is key to recognizing which indie rock singers with conventionally weak voices are more likely to succeed as singers. Singers who take their cues from Dylan, and actually strive to sing well, tend to do better than those who more closely follow the example of Reed, and sort of shrug off the question and focus on other things entirely. Perhaps why many indie rock singers working right now fail to be compelling is that they’ve assumed that Reed’s example is all the need to know. Their problem isn’t the inherent weakness of their voices so much as the fact that they haven’t thought about their singing enough, and haven’t worked hard enough to develop their vocal style in a way that suits their songwriting and music.

I also think it’s interesting that in recent years indie rock’s suspicion of virtuosity seems to have eroded a little bit. Strong singers like Neko Case and the members of the Fleet Foxes are widely admired, and new performers like Marnie Stern (who it seems could outshred just about anybody on her guitar) are also attracting at least a little bit of positive notice. Even Stephen Malkamus—the king of the mumble-mouthed ironic delivery as the former frontman of Pavement, whose earliest work was famed in large part for its rough-edged, freewheeling, borderline-incompetent imaginativeness—has now drafted a crackerjack band, and his most recent record, Real Emotional Trash, features a number of lengthy guitar solos and elaborate arrangements requiring high degrees of technical proficiency. I welcome this trend—better chops are a good thing for indie rock, just so long as the musicians don’t forget that technical proficiency alone is never sufficient for the creation of great music. But there’s no reason why a band can’t adopt the core aesthetic values of the Velvet Underground—strong songwriting and sonic adventurousness—without also learning how to sing and play their instruments.

Wilco and Fleet Foxes do Dylan

Via Pitchfork, here’s a video of the Fleet Foxes joining Wilco on stage to cover Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” At one point, Tweedy breaks out his inimitable falsetto (and this time, at least, to great effect), and Fleet Foxes provide gorgeous harmonies on the choruses throughout the performance. Everyone on stage appears to be enjoying themselves a great deal.

Incidentally, I’ve been meaning to write about Fleet Foxes here for quite some time—their self-titled debut has demanded more of my listening attention this year than any other album. During the weeks of packing up our Chicago apartment and moving and unpacking here in St. Paul, Fleet Foxes was the record that my wife and I would put on to listen to in the background nine times out of ten. By now we’ve both heard it dozens and dozens of times, but neither of us have grown tired of it in the least: from the very first time I put it on, Fleet Foxes felt a part of me, as if it were not a new record from a young band, but instead some well-worn classic that I’d been listening to my whole life.

No doubt that feeling of deep familiarity is in part due to Fleet Foxes’ sound—they’re awash in rock of the late 60s and early 70s, and it’s in no way difficult to pick out the influence of CSN&Y, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and so on. That said, their arrangements are far from purely derivative. Instead, the typical Fleet Foxes song takes a rootsy folk-rock core and infuses it with a very modern-sounding spaciness; a warm, comfortable acoustic strum might quickly transform into an adventursome electric passage that takes its cues from Tortoise as much as from the Band.

Fleet Foxes also go a long way on the sheer beauty of singer Robin Pecknold’s voice—though his bandmates often do provide him with rich and complex harmonies, he also sounds breathtakingly lovely all by himself (and most notably on the soaring and gorgeous album closer “Oliver James”). The opening harmonies of standout track “White Winter Hymnal” sound decidedly old-timey, but then they open up into an arrangement that sounds simultaneously fireside-cozy and cavernously grand, and seems to be taking its cues from field recordings, the Beach Boys, Echo & the Bunnymen, and CNS&Y all at once. Many of Pecknold’s songs are similarly remarkable: he seems to be striving to achieve a kind of timelessness in both his lyrics and song structures, and in the process, he reaches back not only to the band’s obvious stylistic touchstones, but also to the older forms and themes at rock’s roots. Pecknold’s tune regularly evoke mountains, woods, streams, young love, spring and the Devil, but none of it comes off as affectation. Instead, Pecknold plumbs the depths of folk forms in order to bring out sounds and ideas that resonate as well today as they might have a couple hundred years ago.

Randy Newman and Barack Obama

Pop Feminist has an insightful and fascinating post that uses Randy Newman’s “Sail Away” to help unlock the great political, historical, and emotional significance of Barack Obama’s nomination for president. The post explicates Newman’s song (an immensely powerful satirical ballad told from the perspective of a slave ship owner speaking to slaves about the virtues of America) in the context of Obama’s victory, and helps bring home the event’s deep cultural significance.

Of “Sail Away,” Pop Feminist writes, “The song depicts a faith in the idea of America so strong that even the violence on which it is founded comes to seem beautiful.” The hope that Barack Obama’s nomination inspires is inextricably linked to all the wonder, beauty, and horror of American history, just as the blues and gospel underpinnings of Newman’s song quietly and forcefully evoke both the atrocities of slavery and the strength and power of the African-American cultures that would one day become the lifeblood of American culture as a whole.

The post also brings to mind another Randy Newman song that’s all-too-relevant to today’s America: “Political Science,” also from 1972′s Sail Away. The song’s narrator offers the satirical suggestion that, since everybody hates America anyway, we might as well just nuke them all:

Asia’s crowded and Europe’s too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada’s too cold
And South America stole our name
Let’s drop the big one
There’ll be no one left to blame us

This strikes me as distressingly close to the logic and depth of thought that apparently went into some major foreign policy decisions over the past seven years or so. Anyway: both the Randy Newman album and the Pop Feminist posts are well worth your attention.

Wolf Parade’s passion, pop, and pretension

Wolf Parade’s debut record, Apologies to the Queen Mary, is a scrappy, tuneful, passionate affair: despite the band’s obvious Bowie-isms and more-or-less standard indie rock instrumentation and aims, they caught my attention and held it through their strong songcraft and obvious commitment to their material. This year’s follow-up has an embarrassing, wince-inducing title, At Mount Zoomer, and is at every moment an achingly self-conscious attempt to take the band’s music up a notch: this time they’ve clearly set out with old-fashioned rock album greatness in mind. This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy these days, when so many indie rock buzz bands end up fading or flaming out more or less as soon as the blog chatter is over—it might well take a bold move and baldfaced ambition for a band like Wolf Parade to continue to command anyone’s attention.

Wolf Parade, "At Mount Zoomer"

At Mount Zoomer‘s high ambitions bring decidedly mixed results. Epic closer “Kissing the Beehive” rides its pretension and bombast to nowhere, and gets there very very slowly. “Call It a Ritual” begins with a gloomy, ominous bounce that fails to embody any real emotion; calculated bursts of noise fail to prevent the song from feeling limp and rote. “California Dreamer” employs goofy, mock-spooky organ and basslines that undercut the ambition in song’s spaciousness and sprawl, before the song bizarrely degenerates into a brief Doors-like freak-out. This is no better of an idea here than it was when the Doors did it—though at least Wolf Parade’s noodling doesn’t last for minutes on end.

On the other hand, album opener “Soldier’s Grin” achieves its appealing grandeur by alternating passages of tight and tense rhythmic guitar riffing with with huge, soaring verses. If the whole record had maintained both the big sound and emotive energy that are in full effect here at its start, At Mount Zoomer might have been a great deal more successful. “Language City” brings the pop song power to the fore—the song opens with a vibe that’s no less ominous than that of “Call It a Ritual,” but then smartly locks it in with a memorable vocal hook. Synthesizers snake around the song’s closing bridge and coda, building just the right atmosphere and tension to take the repeated vocals home.

But the song that really keeps me coming back to At Mount Zoomer, and which reaffirms my belief that Wolf Parade remains a band with a bright future, is “The Grey Estates,” the melody of which has been haunting me for weeks. The song tunefully expresses a simple-but-deep longing to abandon the status quo and hit the road for somewhere new—but complicates this idea with sad knowledge of the fact that the new place is likely to leave you feeling just as unsatisfied and restless as the old one. “So let the needle on the compass swing,” the speaker implores, “Let the iron in your heart’s blood ring.” Restlessness and longing are facts of human nature, built into our very hearts—but maybe there’s no time we’re happier than when we’re on the road with the wind in our hair and with our old homes receding behind us into the distance.

Bjork on music press sexism

Pitchfork has a report on recent comments from Bjork about the music press’s frequent failures to give women artists full credit for their work. She talks about how men involved with the technical end of her record Vespertine have often mistakenly been given credit for more substantial creative work like production and arranging, and also about how the music press has similarly inflated the importance of Diplo’s work with M.I.A. The undercurrent here is that the press often assumes lesser creative roles for women who in truth do a great deal of their own production and arranging work. Women are understood to be singers, and little more; for everything else, the press figures there’s bound to be a man tending to things somewhere in the background.

Pitchfork’s news story is half-apologetic, half-defensive—but I’d say that even quite apart from this particular situation, they often fall very far short in terms of their treatment of women artists. For example: take a look at the lineups for the Pitchfork Music Festival these past four years, and you’ll see very few female artists and female-led bands. This year, for example, they might easily have booked any number of female artists who are presently doing substantial and interesting work in the indie rock mode—why not St. Vincent, or Nina Nastasia, or Marnie Stern? Pitchfork also very rarely gives women artists a heavily favorable lead review, or does much to promote them into band-of-the-moment status. St. Vincent did get that kind of momentary buzz-band boost, but then come the end of 2007, her very fine record Marry Me didn’t even make the cut for their annual Top 50 list. Or, take the way that women artists are often taken to task in reviews for failing to meet preconceived ideas about what a female performer ought to be doing:

Case’s lungs-for-days Dollywood boom may be as direct an emotional instrument as there is in contemporary music, but her increasingly prominent songwriting skills tend to eschew visceral connections for intellectual intrigue and poetic mystery– and Flood features Case’s most cryptic lyrics to date. The odd disconnect here between singer and songwriter is absorbing: Though shaded by finely-tuned, country-noir twang, the rapturous belter’s high-minded lyrical aspirations often undermine her throat’s unhindered veracity….As a refined version of Blacklisted, Flood provides alluring riddles and obsessive desolation, Case subverting her easy-access vocals with difficult abstractions and heady projections. Yet, after fishing through Flood’s 12 intricate tracks, a plainspoken love song delivered in that voice would not be unwelcome.

That’s from the Pitchfork review of Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, in which critic Ryan Dombal expresses a wish that Case would just quit it with all this complex poetic songwriting business and get back to singing “plainspoken love song[s]” like a good, simple woman singer should. What really gets me here is that Dombal even seems to think that Case’s “difficult abstractions and heady projections” do make for good songs—but he would seem to prefer it if she’d stick to a more conventionally-accepted role for a female performer, that of the big-voiced country chanteuse.

In any case: kudos to Pitchfork for at least mentioning the issue. If Bjork’s comments lead to any more self-examination around their offices, it’s bound to be a good thing. But meanwhile I’m not holding my breath for more substantial coverage of women artists in the music press.

Second Graders Love John Coltrane

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (registration required) ran a charming piece by Nat Hentoff about a class of second graders in Queens who’ve become such passionate fans of John Coltrane that they’ve begun holding “raffles, cake sales, and books sales” in order to save his Long Island home from being torn down by a developer. (It’s now looking likely that the house will, indeed, be preserved.)

Coltrane lived on Long Island during the last years of his life—the house was where he composed A Love Supreme and all his other late, great works. The students were introduced to Coltrane by their teacher, Christine Passarella, who discovered that her students responded enthusiastically, even passionately, to Coltrane’s music when she played it in the classroom. According to Hentoff:

John Coltrane, "Interstellar Space"

Ms. Passarella’s second-grade students, she says, would have told him how moved they were by not only the ballads “but the more avant-garde recordings, such as ‘Interstellar Space.’” She notes that, through her teaching, “I have discovered that young children have open, welcoming minds, and the more pure and emotional the music, the more they connect. Soon they were hooked on John Coltrane’s music.”

Many jazz fans and critics hate Coltrane’s “late period” work, put off by its perceived harshness and difficulty. But I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten myself thoroughly lost in late records like Meditations or Ascension, which I’d argue are among the most beautiful in Coltrane’s catalog. I’m sure it would have made Coltrane very happy to know that these children are able to connect to his music so directly—he’d be pleased to hear that people who aren’t burdened by lots of musical expectations and experience are able to get right to the heart of his expression. Folks who get caught up in one narrow idea or another about what jazz or music ought to sound like would do well to pay attention to the way these kids are approaching Coltrane’s late-period, avant-garde work: with open minds and open hearts. It’s music that you can understand intellectually, and place in historical and musical context—but that’s not at all where its power can be found. With records like Meditations or Interstellar Space, it’s far better to close your eyes, open your heart, and just give yourself over to the music, while maintaining as much of a child’s openness and innocence as you can manage.

Hip-hop scholarship

Pitchfork TV has produced an excellent new documentary on Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, complete with new interviews with Chuck D and the Bomb Squad (among others). The full documentary (presently available as a special presentation on the Pitchfork site) has three parts, and all are well worth watching, but I was most fascinated by the second (which unfortunately I cannot embed below, due to restrictions on the use of Flash video put in place by WordPress).

In the second part of the documentary, the members of Public Enemy discuss the expert knowledge and painstaking labor that went into crafting the music on It Takes a Nation, describing how their intimate familiarity with thousands of records gave them the ability to choose the perfect samples and sounds to use in order to achieve their musical and thematic objectives. Crate-digging on this level is not only an art, but also a kind of scholarship: it’s a matter of sifting through countless hours of material from the past, building on what came before in order to infuse new work with a greater depth of cultural meaning.

Struggling to stay positive

The Hold Steady, "Stay Positive," Vagrant Records, 2008

At this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, the Hold Steady tore through a loud and rambunctious set of balls-out rock with evident passion and glee. Frontman Craig Finn egged the crowd on with irrepressible energy—throwing his hands in the air, running up right to the edge of the stage and leaning over, as if he might transmit some of his overflowing happiness directly to the fans if he could only get a little bit closer. On stage, the Hold Steady are infectiously engaged performers; their wide eyes, big dumb riffs, and two-necked guitar solos have renewed my faith in good old rock and roll’s continued power to create experiences of cathartic fist-pumping joy.

Stay Positive, the new Hold Steady record, is (for better or worse) a much less joyous affair than the band’s live performances. If 2006′s Boys and Girls in America was a boozy, rollicking party staggering toward dawn, Stay Positive is the depressing hangover lingering well into the next afternoon. As on the three previous Hold Steady albums, Finn spins engrossing poetry about parties, drugs, groupies, and God, all channeled through the persona of a jaded, aging scenester. But while the previous records tended to feature both the giddy, excited rush of high times and also the sometimes unpleasant consequences, on Stay Positive, Finn narrows his attention to focus primarily on what (and who) gets lost, battered, and broken by the time the wild night drags to its druggy, thoroughly messed-up close.

“Sequestered in Memphis” at first seems little more than another wry and catchy Craig Finn tune about a party gone awry—this time the characters end up in court, but otherwise it’s basically the same old story. But here Finn is also using the song as a frame in order to hint at some meta-frustrations: “I guess I’ll tell this story again,” he says, heavily self-conscious that he’s re-working the same lyrical territory yet again. It’s a hint of a confession—one which the album’s closer, “Slapped Actress,” completes with thorough, uncomfortable, and surprising honesty. With “Sequestered,” Finn sets us up for what would seem to be an ironic nod-and-wink between performer and audience, a tip of his hand, a peek into his bag of songwriting tricks—but then with “Slapped Actress,” he quite unexpectedly goes for the throat (his and ours both). After describing fans at a show “pushing to get closer / looking upwards with wonder,” Finn switches to a film metaphor, putting himself in the role of John Cassavetes directing an actor to give Gena Rowlands a real slap in the face. “Our hands will hold steady,” he sings, self-conscious and self-lacerating. “Let me know when you’re ready.” When art stays true to the pain at its source, Finn seems to be saying, both the performer and the audience become complicit in that pain. “Sometimes actresses get slapped,” he sings. “Some nights, making it look real might end up with someone getting hurt.” It’s not just Finn’s drug dealers and crooked scenesters who act to exploit the fresh-faced kids on the scene; it’s also the performers and the audience.

This song’s self-consciousness casts a very dark shadow over the whole of the album, and particularly the several songs (“Lord, I’m Discouraged,” “Yeah Sapphire,” “Magazines,” “Joke About Jamaica,” “Sequestered in Memphis”) which focus on young, adventurous, and somewhat naive women getting into serious trouble, and also on the scenester men who sometimes love them, but invariably end up exploiting them. On Stay Positive the scenesters are “vampires” who use up women, discard them, and then write empty, emotionally dead songs about it. With “Slapped Actress,” Finn obliterates the safe distance between his persona and the genuine grimness and pain in the stories he tells. He steps down from the director’s chair and turns the camera on himself, and sees his hand raised to do violence, and the audience cheering all the while.

I’ve found it hard to decide how I ultimately feel about this—Finn’s honesty is admirable, but at the same time it leaves a distinctly bitter taste in my mouth. And then there’s also the question of where exactly this leaves Finn as a lyricist. Now that he’s put all his cards on the table, and fully deconstructed his persona, what comes next? And what does all the raucous, cathartic joy of the band’s Pitchfork performance mean, exactly, if it’s self-consciously laced not only with the acknowledgment of pain, but also of exploitation?

One possible answer to this question might be found in thinking about Truman Capote, who could never really write again after he came to realize the degree to which he played the role of exploiter when crafting his masterwork In Cold Blood. If great art must channel real suffering, how can any artist avoid exploitation? Perhaps it’s impossible—and perhaps Finn’s self-conscious, self-lacerating admission of this fact in song is better than Capote’s descent into silence and despair.

Temporary hiatus

Good Readings is on temporary hiatus. Between an out-of-state move, a job hunt, and a wedding, I’ve been short on time lately.

I intend to return to posting regularly early in August.

Lay It Down

It’s easy to dismiss the efforts of older musicians to make new records in the style of their classics—the resulting music all is all too often nostalgia-drenched and artistically desperate. On the other hand, many other musicians stumble when trying to avoid a return to form: by self-consciously adopting more contemporary styles and sounds, old hands often come off as pandering and insincere, flailing about cluelessly in an attempt to recapture the vanished energy and cultural relevance of their musical youth.

With Lay It Down, soul great Al Green has chosen the former path: under the able direction of producers Amir “?uestlove” Thompson and James Poyser (of the Roots; they’re aided here by the horn section from the fabulous soul revivalists the Dap-Kings), Lay It Down captures the feel of early seventies Green masterpieces (like Let’s Stay Together and I’m Still In Love with You) without descending into one-dimensional imitation. And it works beautifully—Green’s voice has aged, but he can still break into his familiar falsetto with feeling, and he remains a deft and compelling songwriter.

The album opens with its title track, which effectively sets the tone: there’s a simple guitar riff, tight but minimal percussion, melodic bass, and a soft, gorgeous organ to fill out the arrangement, and then over all of it Green huskily calls for his lover to lay down for him. And there’s never any doubt that she’ll agree: Green’s songs often invoke desire, but they also typically deliver fulfillment and satisfaction. Even back in the early 70s, Green’s tunes relied neither the adolescent swagger and aggression of rock nor the pining, unfulfilled longing of soul balladry: instead, Green’s great theme is the joy of grown-up love and sex. His classic tunes are along the lines of “Let’s Stay Together” and “I’m Still in Love With You,” celebrations of the deep-running pleasure of faithfulness, commitment, and mutual satisfaction. It’s little wonder, then, that a return-to-form record like Lay It Down succeeds: there’s nothing shameful or out of place about an Al Green singing with adult satisfaction and happiness today, even if the same feelings also animated his music when he was thirty-five years younger.

David Byrne plays the building

The New York Times has video and audio of David Byrne’s new “Playing the Building” art installation, for which he has transformed an unused ferry terminal into a giant musical instrument. Those who are fortunate enough to be able to visit the installation (in Manhattan) will be able to sit at an organ and control the sounds made by air moving through hoses and mallets striking steal beams throughout the building.

Bryrne has also written about the project on his website.