the rabbits declare a mistrial.

“Chapel Song“  is from We Are Augstines’ album Rise Ye Sunken Ships.  (Via blisslist)

We Are Augustines are simple and they’re not.

This is a song of Centrifugal Force (the tension of pushing away that keeps something in orbit.  That’s the thing about Planets and Blog Rock [songs that are easy to  enjoy and are as fun to pass along as Upper Deck Double-Thick Championship Cards] and Love- people assume orbiting is automatic, that making something hover just happens.  They forget that it involves standing in-between two forces, each unyielding as the big bang and, between all that pressure, making something work).   It’s the pressure that makes the song easy to hold but impossible to get to stay still (That drum beat starts a full-body thresher, but halves itself to auto-stapler speed when the keyboards come in.  You don’t expect a compelling song to halve its tempo.).  So the song is Centrifugal Force and a Grasshopper in your hands.  Now we need to take a step back and explain.

Billy McCarthy is the man singing and playing guitar on this song.  Billy had a brother, James.  James was Schizophrenic.  So was Billy’s mother.  In the time when this album was being recording, James, serving prison time, killed himself after a 5-year stint in administrative segregation.   Administrative Segregation, at least in Michigan, where I worked with inmates housed there, meant being in a cell about two body-widths wide by two bodywidths long for 23 hours a day.  You spoke to people through plastic almost exclusively. If a person was already mental ill, this made it worse.  If they were not, it made them.  Years before his brother had killed himself, Billy’s mother had killed herself.    These are the facts that, according to McCarthy were the backdrop, the vocabulary for this album.  This is as straightforward a way I can think to say this.  There is nothing artful that I can say, that anyone can say about such events.  The art comes in the reaction.  You close your eyes so until something appears.

Does that lend the song’s coda “Tear up the photograph/’cause it’s a bright blue sky” an imprint it might not have without the story?   Sure.  Is it an interesting line on it’s own, being the last line in the song, being as open ended as it is-  you tear up the photography, it’s phony, it’s almost caustic in its insistence on optimism, but then, the question is, what do you look at if not the photograph?

“Chapel Song”  is Centrifugal Force, a Grasshopper in your hands, your Eyes Closed so much that they hurt, and it’s something else.  This has been a hard month, and this song, its weirdly sung words, the unfurling horns, that slapping tambourine, has been the kind of base that, at least, is a start.  It’s not not a full on cheering squad, but it’s something a bit more than restless leg syndrome.   On days as bewildering spare as these have been, having something pushing you forward helps.

I’ve got news about my 3rd favorite Dischord band coming up soon.  maybe tomorrow.

turn it towards god, then forget about it.

A few figments for my first entry of the year.  I just realized how great the word figment is, so even though it is not terribly appropriate, there it sits.

1- A song about snow. Because it snowed.

What I love about the Galaxy 500 song “Snowstorm” is how adult it tries to be. There’s this great interplay between Dean Wareham’s nunpulsed lyrics- everyone else gives a shit about the snow, to him it’s just an excuse to get out of work a few hours early- and the music of the song, specifically Wareham’s own counterpoint, that pigeon-flight guitar, and at the same time, those windy, wordless vocals, which betray the wonder Wareham can’t come out and admit straight up.

“Snowstorm” is from the Galaxie 500 album On Fire.

2- A song about the new year. Because it’s a new year.

I think there are probably 250 people in America who, at some point in their life, defined themselves as fans of the band Longwave. Probably, of those, there are 50 holdouts who have followed vocalist Steve Schiltz to his new(-ish) project Huricane Bells. Then there are probably several hundred thousand who discovered Hurricane Bells another way, from their inclusion on the soundtrack to the most recent Twilight movie. Whichever way, Hurricane Bells are the kind of band who might be easy to pay no heed to. And yet there is something about them, like there was about Longwave, that makes fans bend over backwards to explain why they’re worth your time. For example-

“This Year” is a break-up song without the break-up. There is a “you,” a goddamned you who appears, who incises a presence at points throughout the song.  The song is trying not be about “you.”  It’s trying to be about a new start. The song beging lonely. It starts off with a letter, written in india ink. But line two’s like a whole new start, Schiltz moping “I don’t know where you’re going.”

The second verse is an already-failed resolution- this ongoing image of a great escape on an hypothetical boat that you know Schiltz will never own. He’ll go to Mexico, or not-  “when the currents changed/I’d get swept away…” Even the plan, this life-changing impossible, is only inches away from melancholy. Schiltz can’t even keep it up, can’t keep “you” out of the fantasy, in the whole wide ocean “you” is there, right next to you. “…on the back of your wave/smashing all to pieces/when it breaks on another day.” The image doesn’t work. “Your wave” isn’t evocative of anything, it doesn’t conjure up anything except, once again, “you.” Though that’s exactly the point. He can’t even build a dream without “you” yet. It’s why you can sense agony as the music mounts and Schiltz tries to rally.

“This year is THE year! It’s gonna be really something” Schiltz commands, but a mere two lines later he’s a drunk partygoer shouting across a room, “You can always walk away if you see me coming/I don’t think about you. I don’t think about you.” It’s the kind of grand lie that you can’t even look at or you’ll see how much it’s teetering, how close it is to collapse.

“This Year” is from Hurricane Bells’ album Tonight Is the Ghost.

and one more.

“Before I’m Gone“  is from Hurricane Bells’ album Tides and Tales.

3- Being pissed at Christopher Weingarten.  (And not being pissed at Margaret Wappler.)

Oh Christopher. You went from being one of the pivotal reasons that one one of my favorite albums of the first ten years of the 2000s was as good as it was (he’s the chrome dome behind the kit) to writing some of the most prescient ‘merican music criticsm out there for the Village Voice to …declaring that Spin magazine will primarily publish new album reviews through twitter.

What’s that, you say?  Old-whiny Weingarten has been tweeting music reviews for years? Look at the date that video was posted. While I agree with a lot of the points he’s making, it’s pretty clear that Weingarten was in panic mode in mid-2009. This was the time when downloading albums and leaked albums was a big deal because it was a new thing. Fast internet was affordable! Downloading albums was easy, and, more than that, novel! Twitter was new and it was a really good way to tell people what you had for lunch!

Christopher Weingarten was panicked that his job, and the publications, internet and print which published him would be gone a year later. Guess what, dude? You’re the editor of Spin now. Magnet is running a print edition again. Pitchfork still gets a shit-ton of readers. Natural selection took care of a lot of music blogs, and those that still exist, exist as passion-projects for their creators, not the soulless tastemakers you were so worried they would be forever and ever.

Since 2009, exciting things happened in the music industry.  Album leaks haven’t happened as often, and when they have happened, they haven’t been that big of a deal. People started paying for music (at least, again, independent music, the unacknowledged niche which Weingarten builds his argument around and I traffic in on this blog), and even buying records again. The panicky element of speed, the feeling that you have to say something before anyone else can which Wiengarten spoke of as being a result of blogs, twitter, and album leaks, really isn’t that big of a deal any more.

So why then would Weingarten, given the reigns at Spin magazine, pursue a strategy which he initially pursued out of a very timely sense of panic? I don’t know. What worries me so much isn’t that he’s doing it, and using a fairly popular sinking ship music magazine to do it. Well, that’s part of it. The truth is, Weingarten himself is terse enough that he can pull off a twitter-review. The reviewers they’ve got tweeting right now cannot. Their reviews are snarky and formulaic, or stupidly nonsensical, or (surprise, surprise) sexist. If you have 14 words to describe an album, you’ve gotta chose them well.  Why not make sure your reviewers got that before the project started?

Here’s the really sad thing about Spin’s poor decision to tweet reviews. It brings us closer to a role reversal for print music journalism and their online counterparts. Spin is retreating to the insubstantial snark of twitter, while Stereogum, a behemoth among music blogs, is bringing back longer-form articles and essays, even on albums that aren’t especially “cool.”   The kind of thing that spin used to have! The kind of thing I would read voraciously sitting in between magazine racks at Tower Records.

Egg on your face, Chris. Three years ago you jokingly talked about not have a job by 2010. Crap like this will and you won’t have one by 2013.

OK- next up, mixed feelings about the newst Wild Beats and Moonface albums!

 

Also, hey chicago- shows!

• Tortoise at the Empty Bottle on the 24th
• Los Campesinos and Parenthetical Girls at the Metro on the 27th
• The Heartless Bastards at Lincoln Hall on Valentines Day.

The Other Half of the Answer (Gabe talks about what music he loved this year, part 3)

Here you go. The albums which helped this year.

10-
This is a no-nonsense album, so I’ll give it a no-nonsense write-up. This album is ten tracks long. Eight of those tracks are as great as you might’ve hoped, were someone to say Helium and Sleater Kinney (and, fine, the Minders, but I’ve never met anyone not from Portland who listened to the Minders) and ROCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCK. These songs will get you drunk and jumpy, they will make you dance or imagine yourself punching stupid marble busts of old businessmen and having them disintegrate into a cloud of middling dust. There are eight sensational tracks on this album. Two of the songs on this album, are, to my ears terrible. “Electric Band” stirs up thoughts of Jefferson Starship (no, not airplane, starship.) and “Glass Tambourine” of the Doors. Skip over them and you’ve got something potent and rigorous. Which is a pretty excellent start.

“Short Version” and “Future Crimes” are from Wild Flag’s self-titled album.

9-
There are two dueling trains of thought on Constant Future. One is reflected by the album’s title, easily read as a condemnation of a flaky, irrelevant arts community, as well as in lyrics like album-closer “Never Changer’s” depressing, defeatist coda, “Another century is over/Another generation like the one before.” This, it should be noted, is Parts & Labor’s last album. The group broke up this fall, after a few less than 10 years together as one of the most vital bands. Period. So that’s argument one- we tried, we gave it all we could, we evolved and never compromised, and after all is said and done, nothing changed, not many cared. Argument two is the opposite. It’s the hope of album opener “Fake Names,” where BJ Warshaw barks “If we leave today, no vacant age will follow.” The argument finds it root in the music of Constant Future, where Parts & Labor further refine what they do with noise, how to make noise into the kind of paper you reserve for prayer books (“Rest”), how to turn noise into a grimy calcite (“skin and bones”) or how to let noise chase you like a dog you’re not sure whether to be scared of or not (“Fake Name”). I don’t think Parts & Labor were ever about giving you a definite answer, despite all their shouting. For me, though, I’d have fallen into the former camp if they had half-assed this album even a little bit. I just can’t believe a group that would put this much into saying goodbye has lost hope.

“Fake Names” and “Without a Seed” are from Parts and Labor’s album Constant Future.

8-
Maybe it’s an obvious connection to most people, but listening to Take Care, Take Care, Take Care one final time before I wrote up this review, I realized that the reference point one needs to use for Explosions in the Sky is not other post-rock bands; it’s classical music. While I’ll readily admit to having almost no understanding or knowledge of classical music, Explosions in the Sky use the ingredients of rock songs, that is guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, to create music which is much closer to classical traditions. The songs on Take Care (X3) do not present a pop-music structure, one that gives the listener clues- here’s the chorus, here’s what we’re going for here, here’s how to feel. Instead, they blossom or burst into noise or shrink back into silence, and then move on. There are two minutes of near-silence in “Human Qualities” and, to these ears, they feel entirely appropriate. Classical music has movements; thats one of a few things I can say for sure about it. Movement is what makes Take Care, Take Care, Take Care.

“Human Qualities” is from Explosions in the Sky’s album Take Care, Take Care, Take Care.

7-
There’s a make-or-break moment on “Never Heal Myself,” a song on Cults’ self titled album. Halfway through, right after the chorus, the drums drop out and this dutifully-strummed guitar carries the song for a moment- just a guitar and that wingwalker voice. It’s such a cliché, and I’m sure it’s one you’ve heard before. It’s the band saying, “here’s the moment where we need you close. Here’s the first time we’ve told the truth! Hey guys! It’s right here!” It’s not an original gesture, but it’s one that I love and treasure deeply. On first glance, there’s nothing at all original about Cults, fancy haircuts, Brooklyn, music that’d sound great in ads for top-shelf rum, art school background, and a cool-factor upped by a quite-boring “mysteriousness” about the band members themselves and their obsession with the Jonestown Massacre. But here’s the thing- they pull off the drums-falling-off moment, they do it really, really well, and then they do the same with the rest of the album. What seems to be both an exploitative and nonsense notion which guides this album- that falling in love is similar to surrendering yourself to a cult, is treated with utmost seriousness and, despite the description above, austerity. Cults succeed because they repeat a line like “He broke my heart because I really loved him/He took it all away and left me to bleed out, bleed out” and make listeners focus on the dissonance of the first line rather than the gushing of the second line. But even that second line, that ultimate cliché on an album largely built upon cliches buttoned together tight, the way Madeline Follin sings it, you’ll believe that, too.

“Abducted” and “Never Heal Myself” are from Cults’ self-titled album.

6-
Here’s what the Dodos didn’t want- to rock. When I saw them live, their drummer, half of the band, beat the shit out of a trash can. That was most of his drum kit. That was where half the band’s sound came from. They were loud, they had a current, but they did not want to be a band on an afternoon playlist of a classic rock radio station twenty years in the future. They were scared of being Chicago, Boston, Soul Asylum, Bon Jovi. So they ran so far in the other direction that their songs fell into ditches of artsyness. Here’s what the Dodos have allowed themselves to do here- rock. They took everything that made them an exceptional group in the first place and made those things walk, not run, walk their way through a labyrinth. The Dodos put walls on their songs here. Nothing neutered, nothing hushed or streamlined, just songs with walls. They sound so much better for it.

“Don’t Try and Hide it” and “When Will You Go?” are from The Dodos’ album No Color.

5-
There’s a much more important shift happening on Let England Shake than reviewers oft-mentioned change of PJ Harvey’s subject matter. It’s the shift which makes this album extraordinary, even within the catalog an already extraordinary artist. This is the first time that Polly Jean Harvey has written songs outside of herself and then sung them as if she cared. What was so rare about PJ Harvey was how explicitly she sang about herself, her body, her love and hatred. She was good enough at it that people could take the songs as their own. But here, Harvey’s writing does not start with an “I,” normally the source of her creativity and passion. In fact, quite the opposite, the songs on Let England Shake are based around something arguably quite esoteric- war and death. But the album never falters, never, to these ears, feel overwrought. And this is because PJ Harvey will always be PJ Harvey, a songwriter who chooses the fewest and most precise words she can for every line, who sings in a voice emphatic and rooted. Let England Shake is both a radically different album than Harvey has previously released, and also a churning reminder of the characteristics which make PJ Harvey so compelling.

“In The Dark Places” and “Bitter Branches” are from PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake.

4-
Bill Callahan has a cold. It makes sense that it would take him this many years, with output from the sweet but never tooth-rotting New Pornographers, the Judy-Jetson-Nightmare-Coma of Swan Lake, and of course scarf-wearing, microphone-seducing, Christine-bemoaning, Derrida-intoning music he’s recorded under Destroyer for him to admit as much. Callahan, up until now has kept his guard up; his previous band Smog had all the ingredients for music that pierced needle-thick, but that never happened. It could have been because of his deadpan delivery, or the layers of artifice he put between his lyrics and the way the listener was delivered those lyrics, but Bejar always held us at five or six arms length- we could see the plastic shopping bags under his eyes, and the beard we both know he should have shaved, but we were never close enough to whisper “is everything OK?” Well, Apocalypse brings us closer than ever before; “Riding for the Feeling” shows us the process, which is in itself a joy- about three quarters of the way through, Callahan sings “I realized I had said very little about ways or wheels/Or riding for the feeling.” And so then he tells us “Riding for the feeling/Is the fastest way to reach the shore.” From someone as esoteric as Dan Bejar, lines like the frankness of “Poor in Love’s” self criticism, “All you’ve got is style/I can see it from a mile away” are a revaluation and a revelation, especially when coupled with the titular chorus- I Was Poor in Love. The self reflection on this record, the exhaustion present when Callahan can think no way to end his album except by mumbling the Drag City catalog number. It’s almost as if Bejar just couldn’t maintain the distance any more, and so all that was left is what you see on the album cover- him sitting alone on a curb. It’s the first time he’s ever appeared in his album artwork, and for all the exclusivity and academic discourse and key bumps that his previous albums suggested, this is all it left him, mustered posture and a view he doesn’t want to look at.

“Drover” and “Riding for the Feeling” are from Bill Callahan’s album Apocalypse.
“Blue Eyes” and “Poor in Love” are from Destroyer’s album Kaputt.

3-
Merrill Garbus’ first album as tUnE YaRdS, Bird Brains, was a heart composed out of kitsch. Drum loops that were tossed in the a dumpster behind studios recording late 90s hip hop albums, uninteresting audio recordings of a young boy’s childhood, a bunch of hastily stitched lines about love. She built something out of that. Her new album tears it apart. This is an ugly album, filled with pasted-together ideas we don’t want to talk about because the conversations get quiet really quick. These are the kinds of things smart, liberal people don’t want to talk about because they spend more time than they’d admit banging their heads against a wall trying to get these things out- the reality of gentrification, positions of privilege, the idea of patriotism, of America, of gender roles when you are convinced the last thing you want to talk about is gender roles. This is a messy album, but god, I give Garbus credit for shouting everything. She gets it wrong (“Doorstep” is the worst offender), but she probably knows that, and she does it because, just as these songs, her thoughts are still evolving, adding on noise, taking out the center. And, much much more than she gets it wrong, she gets it right. And even if she doesn’t, at least you’ll have something to say about it. W H O K I L L is an argumentative album- You cannot just listen to it, there is a demand for you to think about it, too.

“Es-so” and “Powa” are from tUnE YaRdS’ album W H O K I L L.

2-
Who says prosthetics never fail? That because a hero (or not) had a leg ripped from their life, that the replacement will hold? Who says hibernating bears don’t starve, that they’ve planned far enough ahead and they’ll be ok. Who say’s that the time is right? Maybe you just look at the clock twice a day at 8:12, earlier than you’d like to be dressed and heading out the door, and then at 8:12, later than you’d like to be moving dishes from a gunky drying rack to a dusty cabinet. Who says that smoke detectors know every kind of smoke, that you can sleep beneath one and not worry? Who says that time’s so straight? If that’s so, why don’t we make our clocks long lines which spread across every door, every inch of our oft-abused mattress, every hundredth of a mile on the odometer? Who say’s that real love lasts?

“Everything (Overture)” and “In The City” are from Chris Bathgate’s album Salt Year.

1-
This is an album summarized by a moment. The penultimate track on Civilian is called “We Were Wealth.” It starts off, like about half the other songs on this album, as a dirge- slow, syrupy and arid. But something happens at 2:43. The song awakens, it realizes a purpose. It gets louder, more sudden, and promises less and less and less. You’re left wondering how long Wye Oak can or will keep it going, what singer is Jenn Wasner saying, why this happened? The first time you listen to it, it is a startling moment. And this is an album I can not make broad comments about, except to say that there are dozens of such moments, where you think you know where a song is going, how a line is going to finish, and then it doesn’t and you’re left gaping. The two members of Wye Oak have crafted brilliant songs in the past, but Civilian is something different. It is unsettling throughout, it is an ambush at first, and, by its end, it is heartbreaking. Before I say the best description I can think up for Civilian, I want you to focus on Merriam Webster’s definition for the word- a supreme intellectual or artistic achievement. Don’t think I’m tossing around the word lightly. Civilian is a masterpiece.

“Civilian” and “We Were Wealth” are from Wye Oak’s album Civilian.

Happy 2012, y’all. See you in a bit.

The time once the timelog broke (Gabe talks about what music he loved this year, part 2.)

First, John K Samson is releasing a solo album on January 24th.

Second, The Quietus just posted their end of year list. Most of these lists are the same things in a different order. Regardless of if you agree with the choices on this list, many of them will be new to you. Kudos to them for that

Third, The music I loved and discovered this year which did not come out this year.

Maritime- Heresy and the Hotel Choir (Flameshovel)
Despite what today’s weather would tell you, Chicago’s in its gray stage, which will stretch, more or less, from now until mid-to-late-march. Some other cities have active grays, grays which produce snow or rain. Chicago gets its fair amount of snow, no doubt, but mostly, the gray just becomes a backdrop. Every conversation is layered on top of it; when you drive to the grocery store, you’re driving through it; when you file a police report for your stolen bicycle, you’re writing on top of it. Maritime are from Milwaukee, so they’re privy to about the same thing. So when I tell you that Heresy and the Hotel Choir is something unusual, what I mean is it leaves the gray out of the picture. This is an album of about the most downhill, enormous music I can imagine. Nothing toned down, nothing “enjoy it while it lasts,” nothing like that. Here’s something joyous.

“For Science Fiction” is from Maritime’s album Heresy and the Hotel Choir.

Califone- All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans)
Califone are the best kind of legitimately crazy scientists. They’re the kind crazy enough to actually come out of the laboratory. They start an album with a song which has a bassline which reads like a seismograph teetering on a cliff over a fault line, and then a few tracks later they give the listening public the closest thing to a single
track with adhesive and the looks of a nametag, the kind you stick in a pocket to show to a friend who is, for the first time, taking off the outer layer of gauze following a two year recovery from something that happened a year before you met him, and that single
track has the refrain, repeated, over and over, “All my friends are funeral singers
funeral singers
funeral singers.” This is something produced from test tubes used maliciously in a past life. Something a scientist concocts when they still remember the chemistry but not how to say hello quite right.

“Giving Away The Bride” and “Funeral Singers” are from the Califone album All My Friends are Funeral Singers.

Richard and Linda Thompson- Shoot Out The Lights (Rhino)
Here’s one where they couldn’t even convince the acoustic guitars to stay quiet. It’s hard to think of Shoot out the Lights as a break-up album, because that seems so trite, and this record is so goddamn apocalyptic. Both Linda and Richard’s vocals heave themselves into your ears, and every note stings like blisters popping. This is bitter, hazy, terrible stuff. Sadly enough, it also happens to be great.

“Walking on a Wire” and “Shoot out the Lights” are from Richard and Linda Thompson’s album Shoot Out The Lights.

Marnie Stern- Marnie Stern (Kill Rock Stars)
So there’s a reason, when Brandon bought this one last year and told me it was as great as, it turns out, it is, that I didn’t buy it. While the songs on Marnie Stern are catchier than on either of her previous albums, they’re less grabby; they don’t have the HEY LOOK I’M SHOUTING IN YOUR FACE AND YOU’RE STILL THERE SO MAYBE I HAVE TO DO MORE THAN SHOUT of some of her previous material. It was said when the album came out, but it bears repeating for those who haven’t heard about Stern or may need reacquainting; where previously, she intoned, toothily and plugged in, on this album, Marnie Stern sings. She doesn’t have a great singing voice, but it’s perfect for these songs, these sad songs, these songs so clearly about their creator, the character of their album’s title. This is the time when Marnie Stern takes her own vocabulary and puts in heartbreak, self-doubt, a flushed-out feeling. Previous Marnie Stern album left listeners breathlessly asking, “who IS this?” Here’s your answer.

“Transparency is the New Mystery” and “Cinco De Mayo” are from Marnie Stern’s Self Titled Album.

The Black Heart Procession- The Spell (Touch and Go)
These guys, like The pAper chAse, should be easy to dismiss. Not only are they gothy, but they are gothy and orchestral, and they call themselves The Black Heart Procession. Really? What allows The Spell to be a moving, timeless, and disquieting album is exactly how seriously they take what they are doing. Like the best purveyors of genre-fiction, these guys work within tropes and formulas (one part supernatural to two parts angst, with one sprig of cello to make the whole thing sounds 80 years older than it is), but do them extremely well. While a band like Cold Cave come off to me as phony, The Black Heart Procession are brilliantly macabre. Sure, it’s not easy to relate to, but the band occupies a world so meticulously constructed that disbelief becomes a non-issue.

“The Waiter #5” and “The Spell” are from The Black Heart Procession album The Spell.

Mercury Rev- Deserter’s Songs (V2)
This is one I have trouble explaining, because this album is so cheesily orchestral that I’m embarrassed to play it around friends. Its lyrics are so bad that it is approaches a low-key self-flagellation to listen too closely. On Deserter’s Songs, the band lays it on so thick listeners practically suffocate. This is all criticism. But it is also what makes this album so appealing. Does one have to chose between “bold” and “stupid” when describing the 80′s sounding sax solo at the beginning of the otherwise hushed “Hudson Line?” Can’t “Opus 40,” a song with enough orchestration to fill Carnegie Hall fifteen times over, be garish, sickening, and also very, very endearing? Can’t sometimes things which make you cringe because they’re trying so hard also be wonderful because you know so few others would bother to go as far? For me, in this case, yes, absolutely.

“Opus 40” is from Mercury Rev’s album Deserter’s Songs.

Next up is the best of the year. Stay tuned, friends.

A four-letter word for intentions (Gabe talks about what music he loved this year, part 1)

Last year I didn’t write a “most disappointing” albums list because I was happy and didn’t want to be spiteful towards anyone. Fuck 2011. here are the album which didn’t make this shitty year any better.

Fleet Foxes “Helplessness Blues”

It is only partially Fleet Foxes’ fault that I dislike them. They are an especially generic folk rock band, and I could simply ignore them if only people would stop telling me how sensational, how important their music is. There are so many groups that are great that are making wonderful, bloodrushing music or even comfortable, permanent-address music, but Fleet Foxes do not do either, in my ears. Their lead singer graduated from the obnoxious Paul Simon school of enunciation that makes it seem like he took a pristine sip of fair-trade Darjeeling and undid his neckercheif so he could reach the higher register. His lyrics are full of non-profundities presented as their opposite, and the band themselves wouldn’t know passion if someone had just power-sawed off a vital organ. This is, at its best, supremely boring music. So what’s so disappointing? That there are a million groups better suited for the attention, and somehow these guys got it instead.

“Helplessness Blues“  is from Fleet Foxes’ album Helplessness Blues.

The Ex- Catch My Shoe

The great thing about The Ex was that they were punk for a reason. Their songs were a chain link fence that your face was being ground into because the vicissitude and burning of what they sung about demanded as much.The history lesson goes like this.  Their last album prior to Catch My Shoe, the epic, 2-disc Turn was a global album which reflected on the complexity of cultural exchange  and commodification in our western world.  If this sounds like a school lesson or a New Yorker article, it was so much better than that.    Then their lead singer quit. Then 7 years past. Then they wrote a new album with a singer who wants nothing more than to be original vocalist G.W. Sok. Then they confused engaging with non-western music (incorporating drones, chants, revolutionary folk songs into their music), with shoving non-western elements into songs which count down the seconds until they you stop listening to them.   Then they recorded this new album with Steve Albini, who managed to neuter whatever energy was left. Then they named the thing after that one time an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at former-President Bush. For a band whose entire career has been built on timeliness and relevance, this is about as low as they could have gotten. A revolution, by definition, cannot grow up.  So here you go.

“Maybe I Was The Pilot“  is from The Ex’s album Catch My Shoe.

Low- C’mon

Low’s previous albums take time. They take time to listen to, time to think about, and then time to listen to again. They open up to you like abstract expressionist art. C’mon is surface level, short, dull. I wouldn’t ask anyone to listen to this album twice. I won’t ask anyone to listen to album once.

“Majesty/Magic” is from Low’s album C’mon.

The Get Up Kids- There are Rules

I’m not entirely sure why they decided this would be a good idea. The Get-Up Kids, along with Sunny Day Real Estate and a few others, were the few bands whose material weathered the great emo backlash of the mid-aughts.   Part of what had made the band work was their very organic-seeming musical arc, from the amazing and incurable energy of the band’s early EPs to the measured melancholy of On A Wire and Guilt Show. And just at the time when emo was becoming a caricature of itself, the band broke up. There are Rules is the band’s first album in six years, and, if nothing else, it surely has the band attempting a bold statement. And failing. Here, the band tries to come out swinging, only to see some hooligan looking kids staring at them from out in the street, then beating a retreat to a second-floor bedroom and writing music, which is only disgruntled and reactionary.  Nothing else. Every song on here has the same tempo (awkwardly sped up), a mood (they’re going for pissed, but can only muster incontinent), and a somewhat bewildered sounding Matt Pryor, screaming his vocals behind, for some reason, an 18 wheeler fulla reverb. The band was smart enough to know this was their’s to lose. So why couldn’t they stop themselves?

“Shatter Your Lungs” is from The Get Up Kids’ album There Are Rules.

The Mountain Goats- All Eternals Decks

This list isn’t about quality, it is about disappointments. The new Mountain Goats album isn’t terrible. It is mediocre. It is, however, terribly, terribly disappointing. John Darnielle’s last album was career highlight The Life of the World to Come, which was the kind of album which grabbed awkward words like aloof by the taught skin of their necks and shook them into the words they were trying to disguise themselves from– fool (and maybe loaf, too). That album had the feel of a novel. All Eternals Decks has the feeling of a first collection of short stories by a young writer. There’s skill, but there’s also a lot of hackneyed attempts at being “edgy,” a reduction of complex feelings to impassioned but dumb emotional banners, and, dropping that analogy, the most ill-fitting musical accompaniment that Darnielle has ever had. Everything about this album feels like posturing; something I would have never expected from John Darnielle, who has made a very successful music career out of pointedly not giving a shit about expectations. His release rate is about one album a year, so hopefully this one’ll get swept away by something better soon.

“Estate Sale Sign” is from The Mountain Goats’ album All Eternals Deck.

The Strokes- Angles

Ninety-Nine percent of people without hearing impairments would’ve told me this album was going to be lackluster. Even The band called it a mess before it was even out.  The reason it is on a list of disappointments is “Under Cover of Darkness.” This song is four minutes which capture what made people so interested in the group initially; these emphatic sheets of guitars and this voice that is doing everything right but couldn’t care if it wasn’t. This is a song which is trying hard not to get ahead of itself.  That’s part of the thrill.  If they would’ve chosen any other track as the album’s first single, this song would’ve gotten burried and I almost certainly would not have listened to this album. But, of course, they couldn’t do that. As much as it is The Strokes’ MO to play it cool, you know it breaks these guys’ hearts that they got everything right just once, and then had half an hour of tape left to fill.

“Under Cover of Darkness” is from The Strokes’ album Angles.

Next up are my favorite albums from previous years which I discovered this year, and then my favorite albums of 2011.  Happy Cyber-Monday everyone!

never mind, don’t lock horns about it.

Some thoughts half of the way through 1Q84-

With a writer like Murakami, you have to adjust your standards, and, not only that, but your definition of standards. You must understand that symbolism will set heavier than gravity on one particular scene, two characters holding hands and looking exactly into each others’ eyes, while whole swaths of text filled with they’ve-just-got-to-be symbols (the presence of a second moon in the night sky, a recurring musical piece, the murder of a trusted dog) are not. Simply, are not. You must also allow that characters will speak their emotions (“I am surprised,”) rather than feel them. Murakami has a brilliant way of making all of his characters, across all of his books, robots half-disguised as people. They are rational to a point of absurdity, and use memory in the same way a computer would; as storage. Occasionally, characters in Murakami’s work will say (or have grafted onto them) they are haunted by the past. However, you get the sense that it is meant in a very literal way; past events will spring to mind more often than the character would like (extending the robot/computer analogy, perhaps these robot/computers are so compelling because they are broken, have viruses, are somewhat out of date), but these events, aside from appearing in the characters mind, do not have much of an impact. They are mosquito buzzing around an unlit room.

And don’t even get critics/haters started on, as mentioned in the NY Times review of 1Q84, Murakami’s compulsion for describing intense detail of ordinary things- every item of food eaten for a meal (complete with spice and temperature), every article of clothing adorning a person, every single piece of accoutrements on a wall in a room mentioned once and never to be thought of again. This annoys the hell out of a lot of readers of Murakami, and goes hand in hand with the argument about symbolism. When intelligent writers spend real periods of time on a topic, the idea is they are doing it for a reason. It is also, in relation to 1Q84 what have lead many critics to call the work inherently sexist. The book contains innumerable instances of sexual violence against women, yet these instances take up less space than Murakami’s descriptions of what his female characters wear on dates. In addition, whenever a male character meets a female character in 1Q84, her breasts will be described, reviewed even, within a page.  The book has more than a male gaze; at its worst, it has a male leer.

Likewise Murakami’s books, as tightly controlled as they are, have a shockingly quiet and shallow moral compass. Murakami would agree that our society is sexist, he would agree that sexual assault is horrific, but he doesn’t quite know what to do with these ideas, other than to have characters think them after they witness acts of sexism and/or sexual assault. It is true that almost every act of sexual violence leads to an act of vengeance against the perpetrator, but it seems, then, that these instances of rape and sexual abuse are merely in the text to show how evil the evil characters are. The sexual assaults are, in general, made reference to more in terms of the perpetrator and how they’ll get theirs in the end, than about the victim (and you can be certain, in Murakami’s world, they are victims, not survivors). If one can, momentarily, ignore the fact that sexual assault should never be used as a literary device (I state that as a general rule; the people who are good enough writers to pull it off are the type to specifically break such roles), that person are still left asking, well, what kind of device? What purpose does it serve? Could this story be the same story without these elements? This is problematic stuff.

If you can accept Murakami’s characters as semi-sentient being, his use of symbolism as consistent as a drunk driver’s use of lane dividers, and the ambiguity of his moral compass, there are remarkably invigorating trains of thought that can come out of his books. There must be one more caveat, but it is, in addition to a warning, also something to be celebrated. Murakami can be a fucking terrible writer. He really can. “After distorting her face for a while, Aomame made an effort to relax each of her facial muscles until she had resumed a normal expression.” (105) “When he woke up at eight o’clock the next morning, Tengo realized that he was a brand new person.” (426) “She wore a thin crew-neck sweater of pale green and white jeans, with no jewlery or makeup, but still she stood out.” (45) These are egregious, and most of the book is not. But with instances like this, his writing can be so bad that it turns back around to being good. Maybe that’s a poor excuse, and one that won’t work for most people, but it sure keeps me reading.

What ALL of this doesn’t take into account, though, is that this is the authors voice. Asking Murakami to write less stilted dialog, less-meticulous descriptions, deeper female characters or more emotional protagonists is something he will never be able to do. Maybe it’s a thing about Japanese novelists (Kazuo Ishiguro and Kenzaburo Oe are very much the same), but these are books which demand to be met on their own terms.

So then, if one can’t look to Murakami’s books as a source of compelling characters, or brilliant writing (and I will revise my point as I’m making it; just as Murakami can writer stinkers, he can also absolutely write beautiful passages, even in the increasingly critically- maligned 1Q84), why the hell are people still reading this guy? The answer, my answer, is twofold. First, the boring part, which I will say briefly because it is non-controversial and doesn’t need to be expounded upon- Murakami is a great storyteller. The plots of his books hold readers like that thin white string hold the yoyo. You will not leave.

The more interesting reason for why people read Murakami is that he complicates things. He is pushing buttons. The things we hate about him are intentional. We have trouble settling into his books because we cannot relate to his characters, cannot subscribe to his moral vision, but that doesn’t matter; off we go. And the truth is, every single Murakami novel will devolve from the world it initially inhabits into something fuzzy, something less real (the white room of After Dark, the Well of the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, The underground world of Hard Boiled Wonderland). And perhaps those two worlds will collide or intersect, or perhaps they will not. And perhaps readers can guess why characters drop or rise from one world into another, or perhaps they simply follow this change as though a character went from a dining room to a kitchen to get more salt. One thing Murakami’s books are not, at all, is self reflective. There is no point where Murakami will say “how crazy is this?” or “What I’m trying to get at here…” or “why don’t you compare this to my life story?” For him, the story begins at page one and ends on the last page.

But this stuff it too weird to leave at that; readers go back and struggle, they go back and look for things which aren’t there. They go back to the problematic elements and try to see what he’s done with them, and the answer is probably nothing. Here’s the point, and it is one you simply must accept in order to enjoy, or, better, to understand why you enjoy Murakami’s books- they are out of this world. His stories have elements of Japanese culture, they have a fetishisation of American Culture (find me a Murakami protagonist who doesn’t put on Coltrane/Dylan/Cole Porter records and drink single malt scotch/whiskey/gin), but they inhabit neither of these worlds. Even before Murakami introduces the otherworldly element into any of his stories, they are not set in a world we can understand or live it. This is tricky, because we almost can, we almost can say “this character is in mourning” or “this character is in love,” but Murakami’s characters never experience love, mourning, or anything else in a way that is supposed to correlate to how people in our world would react. These books are science fiction because these characters are All. Fucking. Aliens. So, although Murakami’s books are set in places we could go visit, people go back to Murakami, people love him, because they’re not our world, exactly. Murakami books, they’re half a mirror.

The truth is, this is exactly, to a T, how I feel about St Vincent. Nothing feels real, but everything is a catalyst. Strange Mercies is an exceptional album that you will have an infinitely hard time coming to terms with.

“Champagne Year” and “Cruel” are from St Vincent’s new album Strange Mercy.

Also, last night was so cold and dark that, before I could do anything else, I had to get drunk to Dwight Yoakam. On Repeat.

“A Long Way Home“  is from the Dwight Yoakam live album Dwightyoakamacoustic.net

Also Also, The Evens are releasing a new album!

Also Also Also, it is mid-November. That scares the color out of me.  I promise one more post, at least, before my faves of the year.

there’s a speed for moving up and a speed for falling down

I’m going to try to do this in as straightforward a way as I can. Although, honestly, when somebody needs to begin that way, it will never be as straightforward as it could be.

This morning, Punknews, a website I check more regularly than someone in my age bracket should readily admit to, posted a stream of a new album by a band from Michigan, Flint more specifically, named Empty Orchestra. I’m a sucker for melodramatic band names and things from the midwest (especially Michigan), and so I listened to it all the way through.

The thing about art is (ok. I’m sorry. But still. The thing about art is) that there are two extremes one can take it to, and then an infinite number of permutations within the spectrum. But people who look at, create, think about art tend to be pretty emotional people, the type, in general for grand gestures, bold statements. So a lot of them would make one of two arguments.

Art is there as an answer; songs get closer to expressing things that speech cannot, and even the most straightforward-seeming picture is saying something more than just, “here’s a barn.” Art uses a vocabulary we understand. Even abstract art is still trying to give us something to latch onto. Even the dadaists, who thought that art had no meaning, honestly, that nothing had meaning, ended up falling into a historical context which helped people look at and understand and put themselves into their creations. Art is there to help, this argument says. In many ways, art is your friend.

or

Art is not beholden to you in any way. If you’re making art for people to latch onto, then you’re making shit, you’re wasting your time, you’re doing the work of the machine which paints pictures of barns which hang on the walls of Comfort Inns off every exit of I-80. Art should ask questions, it should push us, it should spit in the face of understanding, structure, or ease. Art is not your friend; art is complicated. Art is a teacher you hate to the core while you’re taking his or her course, but whose lessons you will think back to for the rest of your life.

I like the new PJ Harvey album because it is the latter. With rare exceptions (the airless and ardent “The Last Living Rose”), it is an incredibly different listen, even more so than her louder, more abrasive, earlier albums. It is so difficult and simultaneously so rewarding because it has an anger which refuses to give you an origin. Its songs exist not because of momentum, melody, lyrics, or, for what I would argue is the first time in her career, Harvey’s beautiful voice. They exist because, and for the purpose of getting at a mood. It’s the latter group to the core; while the album title, song titles, and advanced press would have you believe the album is PJ Harvey grappling with the legacy of her home country, it really isn’t that, outside of the surface level stuff like song titles. It’s a complex album, not at all easy to listen to, but one which rewards those who come back again and again to it. If you listen to Let England Shake once, you will probably not like it. If you think the purpose of art is not to give you an easy answer or provide a soundtrack to life, you will probably love it.

“The Last Living Rose” and “Bitter Branches” are from the PJ Harvey album Let England Shake.

Getting back to the argument about art, I think my favorite artists in any medium are those that work with the concept of the latter (art is complex) within the architecture of the former (art can help you) One example of many- Kazuo Ishiguro’s books have an easily identifiable eeriness, and they make readers wrestle with issues of cultural identity and colonialism, and refuse to allow any easy conclusions. But the books do that without screaming at the top of their lungs THE NOVEL IS DEAD, NARRATIVES MUST BE FRACTURED IN ORDER TO TELL A TRUTH, THAT LAST STATEMENT IS A LIE BECAUSE THERE IS NO TRUTH, THAT LAST STATEMET IS ALSO A LIE BECAUSE WITHOUT TRUTH THERE CAN BE NO LIES@#!@#!@#!@#. They make their points within the framework of a detective story, science fiction, faux-memoir. So there are things that can split the difference, which is my favorite way of doing things, but is by no means “better” than either of the extremes I talk about, just the one I gravitate towards.

Put another way; art that does nothing but challenge someone who comes upon it will certainly provoke thought, but it will not necessarily be easy to enjoy. I could probably write an essay about the most recent Brian Eno album, but the truth is, in the almost-12 months i’ve owned it, I’ve only listened to the thing twice, and don’t plan on adding to that total at any point soon.

Getting back to what I was talking about before the argument about art, there’s this band from Flint, Michigan called Empty Orchestra. They are, to put it in the worst, most offensively generic terms that I can, a band who work with varying elements of country, punk, and folk music in their songs. I have listened to their album three times through since downloading it this morning. What I want to do now is tell you that you’ve probably heard an album similar to this, then tell you that just because an album isn’t breaking boundaries doesn’t mean it’s not also very, very good, then tell you that “One More Time, All Together Now,” the new album by Empty Orchestra, is familiar down to its both wonderful and also wince-worthy title, and that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable, or any less of a cohesive, compelling album.

Except, of course, when I’m dead wrong. Empty Orchestra are smarter and deeper than the blanket label of “accessibility” gives them credit for. I’ll give two examples. “No Such Place” is about as good a summation of the current predicament of the Midwest, specifically Michigan, as I’ve ever heard. It is a song of push and pull; the enemy of this song is leaving. Leaving Michigan, in the case of this song, means giving up, abandonment. It does not mean progress nor does it mean “moving on.” Yet there is so much understanding and sympathy for those who leave. It’s a song which starts out of anger and self righteousness and ends just sad. It’s a song that looks around as it sings and gets emptier and emptier as it sees more driveways clearing out for good. It ends with just that drumbeat. Mid tempo. Still going, until it cannot.

“Echo’s Bones” is a song which doesn’t just let its pretty words sit there.”We view history/We view history/Like an endless stream of tiny Christmas lights.” OK. Fine. that’s a hook. It’s an image you can picture. It could be a poem, and a fine one. But I love how the song continues-

They provide no hope for illumination,
They don’t do anything to hold back the night
They’re really more for decoration
‘Cause we’re alone in this life.

They put the words there for a reason. Even if you don’t agree, you have to at least admit they’ve, in a poignant way, made an argument. They’re saying something. They’re not accoutrements. I’ll end this with one more set of lyrics from “Black and Blue”

There’s no need to shout.
We know the danger’s all around us.
We are safe as houses,
which aren’t really that safe;
It turns out locks can fail
And the place can burn down.
But, hey, will still need a place to stay.

Here’s the kicker- at least for now, they’re giving away their album. Absolutely free. You can download it here. At some point it will have a physical release on Paper and Plastik, who, if they keep up signings like this are looking to occupy a role as good as Thick Records, Revelation, or Jade Tree did in the late 90s, early 2000s.

“No Such Place” “Echo’s Bones” and “Black and Blue” are from Empty Orchestra’s album One More Time, All Together Now.

Also, if you’re in chicago and want to see good music,

• Crooked Fingers
• Joan of Arc
• Office of Future Plans

you didn’t want to tell me our fathers’ name.

This is just to say
I’ve gotten the new A A Bondy album, but
I’m still listening to it too much
and thinking about it too much
to write about it.

Also this is to tell you how surprised and impressed I am by the new Explosions in the Sky album.   Explosions in the Sky were always pretty low on the post-rock totem poll for me because they had one gimick that stormed through their albums- songs that started quiet and built to peaks that made texas football highschoolers rush the extra 10,000 yards or something like that (actually, I’m kidding.  I’ve started watching Friday Night Lights and it is great).   They were inspirational, but somewhat one dimensional, because they were always a more sophisticated and touching version of a successories poster.  Explosions in the Sky wrote songs that told you “You Can Do It!”  They didn’t tell you much else.

Except that, now, they do.  What the band has managed to do on Take Care, Take Care, Take Care is add a tangible sense of unease to their hasting, pressing, amildering songs.  They’ve left the expanse, the build, the payoff, but they’ve added something which suggests doubt.   In “Human Qualities”  it is the twitching, never-steady drum machine pattern.  In “Be Comfortable, Creature” they loop half a moment of guitar breath.  It’s the same as a smudge on your contact, a missing page from a short story.   In “Trembling Hands,”  the band actually utilizes the human voice for the first time as far as I know, one cut up syllable, the first note of a line of a sentence, just long enough so you can tell it’s really a voice. Each of these songs have their subtle counterarguments, and those are the aspects which make these songs warrant listen after listen after listen.  This has become one of my favorites of this year.

“Postcard from 1952”  is from Explosions in the Sky’s album Take Care, Take Care, Take Care.

And this doesn’t relate to music, but for my job at the moment, I’m doing extensive research of non-Western poetry traditions.  What would you say if I told you one of the most popular shows in the Arab world was Saudi Arabia’s Million’s Poet, American Idol, but with competing verse poets instead of ham-fisted singers.   A show progressive and subversive enough to give voice to a Saudi housewife who used her time in front of 12 million television screens to rail against conservative Islamic clerics.  I mean, despite all of our own personal shit which tethers us to the thermometer’s mercury, this world can be a pretty amazing place.

May this city’s traffic cameras turn on one another.

“We All Make The Flowers Grow” is from the Lee Hazelwood album Trouble is a Lonesome Town.

How do you find something that was ok with never being found? I mean, you’re likely to find the thing that you were looking for, the thing that shouted its own name until someone heard and wrote it down and showed the thing its name written down just so it would shut up. I mean, there will be a reason that Ayn Rand books, whatever you think of them, will never be out of print. You’re also likely to find the thing that did everything it could to stop itself from being found, which destroyed the masters, which caused its creator to get a job they hated just to make sure they wouldn’t mention the thing when people asked them what they had been up to. Kafka, Plath, (inevitably) Salinger. The extremes, as per usual, get the attention.

Which leaves Lee Hazlewood stuck. Hazlewood was always more famous as a songwriter than he was as a song-singer. He got paid enough money to do one or the other, and when his American record label put too many restrictions on what they would release by him, he moved to Sweden, became somewhat of a superstar there, and then came back once his records had found a niche again. Hazlewood isn’t the type for the grand artistic gesture, he introduces these songs like he’s the pipe-and-sunday-paper-type, the ass-in-the-blue-lay-z-boy type, the grand kids listen because they know grandpa gives out two dollar bills at the end of each visit type. He’s not that, but that’s how he’s choosing to portray himself, and so that’s what we’re left with. Anyone who wouldn’t, by pure chance, listen closer to these songs (and, really, by that I mean most everyone) would think of him as a man who must never look in a mirror or else he’d shave that godawful mustache, and a man who wrote some songs.

The more I think about it, fuck artists like that. Why would you undersell yourself like that? Take the easy way out and not have to deal with people. Lee Hazlewood had a way with words that makes you want to write his words down just so you can read them.  Lee Hazlewood had a voice that calmed you like finding a doorknob or a recognized body in the dark.   He was more than he would let you think of him.  I’m doing his grunt work for him, but he’s good enough that he deserves it. Bastard.

“You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” is from Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s album Nancy and Lee.

“Won’t You Tell Your Dreams?” and “I’ll Live Yesterdays” are from Lee Hazlewood’s album Requiem For an Almost Lady.  This is a great break-up album. Just saying.

If that’s not enough to hook you,  look at his odd, compelling, yet never quite appropriate-seeming  60s music videos

Also, I downloaded this band because they were playing shows with Yo La Tengo, had a great band name, and wrote a song called Werner Herzog get shot.  But after all that pretense, Get Well Soon are just a really good, moody, shelf-clearing german rock band.

“5 Steps/7 Swords” are “Werner Herzon Gets Shot” are from Get Well Soon’s free live EP Live At the Konzerthaus Dortmund.

Also, Jerry Brown- pretty great.

Also, coming up Chicagonians, you should go see

• The Mekons
• Wild Flag
• A.A Bondy

Today, it hurts. Tomorrow, I leave.

Sometimes I forget why you go to a concert.  Sometimes it feels like something you just do, something done to fill up an evening which couldn’t be filled by a movie because there’s nothing out, or a conversation, because sometimes there’s nothing new to say.   But that’s not why you go to a concert.  You go because so much of the time, you don’t focus on the music.  You can be a fan of the songs, you can be a devoted listener.   You can be the dude who is playing bass on the songs, and still you’re not focused on what’s going on.  You’re walking, looking around, reading, coughing, eating, breathing.

People, mostly, don’t listen to records, the one format where you are REQUIRED to sit down and listen, and the people I know who do listen to records are the same people who smoke a lot of weed, so they’re not listening to the music, really.  You go to see live music because when you see a concert it is put in front of you, the sound and the people producing it.  They demand everything.  You think your ticket is just a bill of sale?  It is a contract.  It says you are there to rip your laundry thoughts, your to-do thoughts, your chap lips or text message thoughts out of your skull and stick them down in your shoes.  If you don’t sign that contract, if you talk in the back or sip your beer waiting for a friend to show up, you’re fine, you ok by me, you’ve just got to realize that you’re not actually at the concert.

Bill Callahan went ape-crazy a few times on Friday night when he played a circus tent in a park next to I-94 in Chicago (My thoughts on the whole thing?  I wonder whether hipsters have fun ruining things like carnivals for everyone else.).  Those moments were wonderful, but the one for me was that I had NEVER really listened to “Our Anniversary”  before then.   The ambivalence, the idea that the song is barely a celebration at all, that the two have to trap eachother at home.   “It’s our anniversary/I leave it ajar”  But that ending, man, is hard-earned and perfect.

At least for those few minutes, I was at a concert.

“Our Anniversary (Live)”  is from the Bill Callahan live album Rough Travel for a Rare Thing.

Here are two sad ones.  It rained all day and I had a tough time making it back from the grocery store.  That was a few minutes after I woke up.  That was before breakfast.

“Trouble” is from the Isobel Campbel/Mark Lannegan album Sunday at Devil Dirt.

“Boy With (100) Hands” is from the Crooked Fingers album Red Devil Dawn.

Here’s a happy-ish one, because Jenny and Josh came all the way from Michigan this weekend.  We made breakfast today.   It’s twelve hours later and I’m still awake and in one piece.

“Hearing Things” is a Disappears song from the Needs 7“.  Disappears is the new band from Brian Case who was great in the Ponys and Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth and a few other people who, for better than this, I cannot name drop.

Also, whatever you think about Pearl Jam, this clip of David Lynch interviewing Eddie Vedder is great.  Who is more uncomfortable? Who looks more like a deer on the freeway?

Speaking of live music,

• Marnie Stern and No Joy on Friday (a hell of a lot better than the weak-ass Hideout Block Party Lineup),
• Califone soon, too.
•  Wise Blood, a bit after that.