Christmas is a holiday of waste. Of the estimated $507 the average American spends on gifts every year, over a hundred dollars would just as well have been tossed in the bin, about $13 billion in waste nation-wide.
Unfortunately the music released tends to be junk in even greater proportions. Bands go through the motions of putting out cheap stocking stuffers of songs, which while appropriate in celebrating a holiday of absurdity and bric-a-brac with absurdity and bric-a-brac (self-consciously and not), rarely resonate. Meanwhile the classics pale and yellow, more and more alienated from our experience every year.
So if most Christmas music is about junk and antiquated clichés, most of this music does it’s best to take that on. ”Come on! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” mixes irony with sincerity and precious details at just the right ratio, while in “Just Like Christmas” Low confronts what meaning is and isn’t left in Christmas.
Maybe trying to piece together a Christmas album is a doomed enterprise from the setting out. But for better and worse we’ll always be stuck with Christmas and Christmas music. Nothing left to do butto wade through the kitsch and old hats and make the best we can of all of it.
40) Bell Orchestre – As Seen Through Windows 39) Rain Machine - Rain Machine 38) Antony & the Johnsons - The Crying Light 37) Fever Ray - Fever Ray 36) The ‘Chillwave’ Genre
A-r-t is a word whose meaning we control, and all we have to concern ourselves with is keeping it a useful word. Most arguments over whether something is art are really about how valuable that thing is. Good question.
Portland has more life in it yet. Why-haven’t-they-crossed-over-yet Menomena’s Brent Knopf has an album coming out one week from today. It’s called Intuit and represents the debut of his “solo” project, Ramona Falls.
Solo project, except that it hardly sounds like it’s from one dude. You might wonder whether it sounds light without fellow Menomena members Danny Seim and Justin Harris, but, while their essentialness to Menomena’s sound is not to be disputed, Knopf is plenty proficient helming this thing himself. It’s perhaps disappointing that it doesn’t sound more different from Menomena’s distinctive (but varied) sound, but it’s also hard to complain.
What has set Menomena apart has been being one of those rare bands that can craft songs that manage to be not only dense, well-orchestrated and unconventional in structure, but also immediately accessible (so much so that sometimes even Parisian toddlers can’t help but dance). The rhythm section here might not be as burly, but Knopf still has no problem pulling off this rare combination on his own.
In the end if you liked Knopf-heavy Menomena songs like the aforealluded “Wet and Rusting”, and I can’t think of any good reason why you wouldn’t, you should check this out immediately. Now’s when I should probably admit that I’ve only listened to the whole thing through once, but the fact that I liked it on first listen is kind of the point. Debate over Intuit’s merits as compared to those of Friend and Foe can come later; I’m just hitting repeat.
Disclaimer: These songs are up for listening purposes only for a short time. If you’re an artist or label who wants the song taken down, please write me.
San Francisco duo turned trio The Dodos’ third albumTime to Die (out digitally July 28 and physically September 15) is not a departure from the course set by their previous two,and this is mostly a good thing. The crew chooses to keep the guitar and drums largely acoustic, there’s still hardly any (noticeable) bass, and there may be even fewer effects on the vocals and guitars. Still, this is a logical if small step forward from an already great band.
You might wonder how much interesting music a band can make with basically just an acoustic guitar, vocals and some drums, but the songs are nearly always strong and their music is subtly diverse. Song structures are generally unpredictable and each of the two primary members incorporates blues, folk and african polyrhythms into his playing. Even with such limited instrumentation, if you really pay attention, by the time you get to the last strums of the title track you’ll still get that feeling that you went somewhere.
Besides, dudes can play. He may look like a boy, but when I say Meric Long’s a rhythm guitarist I mean Meric Long is a rhythm guitarist, (in this case finger style) and one of the finest in indie rock. Similarly, Logan Kroeber plays drums of all kinds with a pretty uncommon ferocity that you’re not likely to appreciate unless you’ve seen them live. As the band’s newest member Keaton Snyder is, well, just fine. His vibraphone makes a nice-enough ornament.
The dominant lyrical theme seems to be the corporatization of modern society, but, really, don’t focus on the lyrics. I think it was Jeff Tweedy who suggested that the best pop music comes when you write and sing what you feel not what you think (which is also why I think love songs tend to make the best songs, because they get at what our emotions are really obsessing over down there, but ANYWAYS), and certainly with some lyrics here, such as on “This is a Business”, “The Strums” and “Longform”, The Dodos once again fall into a trap of over-intellectualizing (remember “God?”).
Perhaps this is why the best and most accessible songs on here tend to be the ones in which the lyrics don’t seem to make any coherent sense at all: in particular, “Two Medicines” and “Fables.” Still, when the melodies are profound and nicely framed, the lyrics can feel profound too (ever notice how teens like to quote nonsense as long as it’s from a nice Coldplay song?), which is really much more important.
In the end the biggest improvement comes from veteran indie-pop producer Phil Ek (Built to Spill, The Shins, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes), who polishes and balances the mix nicely and adds a few more tracks on the vocal harmonies. I’m still curious to hear if it’d work for them to turn up the drums, but maybe that’s something that only works for them live.
We all know that even when it ain’t broke it’s more exciting to hear something new. That said, this ain’t broke.
Disclaimer: These songs are up for listening purposes only for a short time. If you’re an artist or label who wants the song taken down, please write me.
Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”:
Taken by an Attack
Back to the wall since 1893,
My palms fastened against my oblong cheeks,
I watch you stare and question, ponder why.
You question: “hmm, now what’s all this about?
What does this mess of noise and color mean?
Perhaps he is insane, and screams at his
Reality that is distorted by
His own perception, which mirrors his form
In all its bends and swirls of darkened paint?
Or does he represent one’s naked, bald
Humanity, while others hide in shade
Of soothing hats, afraid of the bare truth?
Maybe the answer’s simple, not abstract:
It’s just he has agoraphobia
Or acrophobia and fears of fall-
Ing off the cliff, or fears the vast expanse?
Is it his pondering that drives him mad,
Or does there lurk a real danger, one off
The canvas, one that will tear him apart?”
You ask me whom I’m screaming at and what,
If anything, I’m saying. Well, here goes:
I scream at you, and what I scream is “Stop!”
Yeasayer was one of the most buzzed bands of 2007, and, as with all much-blogged bands these days, critics also wondered whether they’d just end up another footnote, flavor of the month. Well, they almost were in 2008. All Hours Cymbals had a great set of songs, but it wasn’t a great record. Mostly because the mix was muddy, so muddy that they didn’t win me until I saw their Take-Away-Show and became convinced that those tipsy, spoons-on-beers versions of the songs were the best they’d done.
Of course since then we’ve gotten “Tightrope” on the Dark Was the Night comp and an increasingly infectiouslive show that they’ve been touring up with their new lineup through their festival highlights at Bonnaroo and on Pitchfork on Saturday. At these shows they’ve played at least three songs from the album–”Ambling Alp”, “Lovely Girl” and another below–and these new songs’ve already been some of my favorites at each show. They seem to have further centralized the vocals around Chris Keating, brought up the beats and generally recognized that a little less could be a lot more.
So it looks like the next album could represent the realization of that huge potential, but how much do we really know about the release? Not so much. No title, no tracklisting, no release date.* They went to Woodstock to start recording way back in January, but the most we really know comes from an update on their Last.fm two weeks ago: “expect flash bangs in October followed up by a bigger explosion in January 2010.” So singles, leak or EP October, LP January? Mark your calendars.
*Note: Today they announced that the record will be coming out January 19.
Disclaimer: These songs are up for listening purposes only for a short time. If you’re an artist or label who wants the song taken down, please write me.
Wilco’s “Unlikely Japan”, an earlier version of what became Sky Blue Sky’s “Impossible Germany”, is kindabatshit. It starts modestly with just piano, vocal and a steadily-strummed acoustic guitar, and then in a couple minutes ye olde Wilco static invades. And then there’s the synth, electronic beats and vocoder (vocoder?! JEFF NOT YOU TOO!).
My jury’s still out on exactly how much I like this, but even a trainwreck (the last 1:30?) has its appeal. I just can’t look away.
Disclaimer: These songs are up for listening purposes only for a short time. If you’re an artist or label who wants the song taken down, please write me.
“You've heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well?
It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, ‘Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.’
Call in well.”
(via Tom Robbins)
