AROUND AN EMPTY GRAVE, WHAT STORY DOWN THERE AWAITS?

So, first things first, listen to this song.

“Bats over the Pacific Ocean” is from Jaguar Love’s album Take Me To The Sea.

Eat This City reminded me of these guys, and after buying and listening to their album, I’m pretty shocked. Shocked because it got slept on by just about everyone including myself, shocked because it goes from coked up travel narrative (the track I gave you) to sleazy rabid Slow Jam (the awesomely named“Bonetrees and a Broken Heart”) to a few tracks which have the feeling of classic rock radio heard through a wind farm, shocked because despite not holding together in the slightest, i’d still absolutely recommend it.

Also I saw Chris Bathgate perform with a buncha other local bands at this weird fair in Ypsi last week (“how weird,” you might ask? “weird enough that there was a petting zoo with, in one giant pen, a tortoise, 6 chickens, an alpaca, baby goats that kept escaping, a few sheep that were losing fur, a cow, and in the middle in a cage so small they couldn’t move, two rabbits so big they looked stuffed. It was called the lakeshore festival, but I couldn’t find a lake anywhere.”), and it made me realize that, shit, i’ve never written about Chris Bathgate.

Chris Bathgate’s a season: There is something wintry about the man. His songs breath cold, they walk carefully because of the sleet beneath their feet, and then warm themselves up to stay alive. Even seeing him on a muggy summer day last week felt wintry to me. Maybe it’s because everything seems quiet and dead on winter mornings, and that how a lot of Bathgate’s song’s start.

“Madison House” is from Chris Bathgate’s album a cork tale wake.

Maybe better, he’s Roanoke, his songs are CROATON carved thick into that tree, they’re both the desire to leave a message, and also the stubbornness to leave that message as ambiguously as is possible.

“Yes, I’m Cold” is from Chris Bathgate’s EP Wait, Skeleton.

Probably best, he’s southeast Michigan. These songs are rooted here like the trees or the highways. Bathgate’s every car stuck under an ugly underpass on 94. He’s the gold on the frame of the plaque celebrating the 1,000,000 box of Jiffy Cornbread Mix sold in their factory in Chelsea. He’s the rumbling of the steam-powered distillery of someone who insists on making their own booze which they sell under the table at the farmer’s market. He’s Ypsi, alright, and he’s Ann Arbor, and he’s Dearborn and Detroit, too. He’ll surely, absolutely, and totally be the soundtrack to my memories of this place when I take off in a few weeks. For that, among the many, many other reasons, I suggest we band together to make this man at least half as popular as these songs demand to be.

“The Last Parade on Ann Street” is from a cork tale wake.

He’s somebody I’d love to interview, and, keep in mind, I hate interviewing people.   Chris, if you’re reading this, I’d ask good questions, I promise.

And also, you can listen to some of the new Reigning Sound album at their myspace or here. Goddamn.

Finally, techno covers of Springsteen.   This here shows the mutability of youthful restlessness (Springsteen), the pure joy that well utilized electronic can provoke, and that good enough backing music can distract you from a singer who, honestly, can’t sing that well.  Remember when Primal Scream tried to do blues?  and sucked?  These guys are a whole lot better than that.   Certainly some of the most fun techno i’ve heard in a while.

http://www.datawaslost.net/disco/048/

No, it’s ok, just don’t. Don’t look at it again.

The last woman working at the Northwest Airlines ticket counter at Detroit Metro on the night my grandfather died was the only one to see me wrung inside out. I screamed when I couldn’t get on the last flight out that night. She couldn’t do anything, and so I screamed at her, not because she couldn’t let me on that flight, but because she couldn’t bring my 86 year old grandfather, who had spent the last year suffering, back to life.

My grandfather fell down in yom kipur services last year, and blinded himself. It was his time to go. My grandfather, who loved life more than anyone, had lived enough at 86. Enough, they say, is enough.

I didn’t cry giving the eulogy at his funeral. I wanted to cry and I cringed after beating the shit of my mattress which I had inexplicably shoved up against my wall looking for my passport which I didn’t need anyway, but I didn’t cry then. I cried when I listened to the first song I listened to in 6 days, 6 days after my grandfather’s funeral. I had a Wallflowers song stuck in my head all of last sunday, and so while I was cooking myself dinner, I put on “One Headlight.”

There are some things, aging, sickness and death, that, no matter how much you talk about them, no matter how much art is made about them, they’re things we don’t comprehend until we absolutely have to. We pull over for funeral procession, we pull over for ambulances. We do it for sympathy, do it because of traffic regulations, but we probably aren’t thinking as we do it, pull awkwardly into the left part of an intersection just as the light is turning, we probably aren’t thinking “that might be me next.” a life can’t be lived that way. I don’t think so.

Like I said, though, death is a personal thing, but sometimes someones says something that ties you right up because it is so entirely accurate. Says something or sings something.

Mac McCaughan is one of my favorite songwriters, label owners, and, as I recently discovered, bloggers, as well. As the songwriter for Superchunk he has written some of the most superbly joyous music i’ve ever heard. As the songwriter for Portastatic, he’s pushed himself a million different ways, including the gargantuan task of writing an album about September 11th. See, there’s the connection; My grandfather just died, Mac Mcaughan wrote an album that tries to come to terms with the nearly instantaneously death of well over 2900 innocent people. A lot of the art that has come out of the attack, a lot of it feels like it’s malingering. The Summer of The Shark feels genuinely wounded, genuinely sideswiped.

Here’s why the album worked when so much art about the 2900+ deaths of the september 11th attacks has failed: because The Summer of the Shark is not overarching. It is anti-overarching. . Everyone in the US was sent into a state of shock on september 11th, 2001, but this album isn’t about that. It is an audio recording of the emotions welling up inside one man in response to so much death. The album opens with a song about feeling terribly isolated and afraid. McCaughan sings, with utter tenderness on “Oh Come Down,”

every night I sing, my face lit up by
little blinking lights and time it just flies
filling reels of tape with lies and secrets
it’s getting to the point where I can’t take it.

The song could end right there and still be a perfect statement, but McCaughan won’t let it. He can’t let that disconnection, that dishonesty and unease sit.. The song changes 2/3’s of the way through from strung-together delicate acoustics to a rock song. And the message changes. Suddenly there is a need, immediate and unquenchable to be with people. “If you see a light under the door,” McCaughan commands “Kick it down.” The way the song wavers from solitude and dissonance to this feirce desire for connection resonates with me. It feels more human than most songs I listen to on a daily basis, because it feels so thoroughly loaded with emotion. “Oh come down, please come down to where i’ve got myself dug in.” That push and pull: I’ve dug myself in, but now that I’m here, please, please come be with me.

The album runs the gamut of emotion that come out of loss, from utter devastation to bleeding anger to,and this I think is totally appropriate, a surreal sense of humor : The title of the album “Summer of the Shark” refers to the cover story of Time Magazine on September 4th, 2001. At that point, we were worried, we really were, about vicious sharks eating our children. That was front page news.

I believe the entire album is excellent, without exception, and the sequencing is especially well done (the heartrendingly simple and direct “Don’t Disappear” is followed by, seemingly, the person disappearing, which leads to the devastating underwater funeral song, “Swimming Through Tires” which is followed by the restless, journal page excerpt, “Chesapeake.”). But I’m going to focus on three tracks near the end of the album.

Clay Cakes

Clay Cakes takes the form of a letter. Like much else on the album, this isn’t explicitly stated out front, there’s no “Dear John” at the start, no typewriter sample or clue from the title. The song’s lyrics, filled with the kind of tiny details that only the best songwriters would think to include, start off broad, about someone wishing someone else would come home. In the same way this song never mentions 9/11 (though it’s line “I have seen your city dreams pour out like sugar in a bowl” suggests it), it never establishes the relationship between the narrator and the person the song is intended for. The tenderness, both of the lyrics, and of the music (the piano line is so beautiful, the group right decided to reprise it for a brief hidden track) to me suggests a parent writing to a child. That’s my guess though.

There’s a moment near the end of the song where Mac goes through the chorus the last time, and then immediately sings, “that’s what this letter is for” that always gets to me, because it maintains the ambiguity while also being a really touching line. Why a letter, I’m left asking, why not a phone call, or a visit from the narrator to the person being spoken to. There is a possibility that the narrator doesn’t actually want the connection to happen; that they’re sending a letter because then the don’t have to hear an immediate response or even the person’s voice. I don’t think that’s it; I think its actually quite the opposite; the fact that it’s a letter being written shows exactly how important the narrator’s request is; it can’t be casual like a phone call could. This plea has weight. The dots on on the lowercase i’s matter.

Drill Me

The most jarring and also effective transition of the album takes us from “Clay Cakes” to “Drill Me.” From the clang of the very first chord of “Drill Me,” we’ve been dropped from longing into fury. Certainly the most vitriolic song on the album, it is also, lyrically, one of the best songs McCaughan has ever penned. The song is struggling to find its way out of a paradox. It’s first lines lay out the problem: “We sit around with alligator clips on our eyes, and it’s a right spectacular view.” The view may be specular, but the agitated music, and the way those lines are delivered let you know that the blindness is and can only be temporary. This desire for a rewind to the days before the catastrophe, before all the complexity, is of course impossible. Tom Woolfe said, it, our former president paraphrased: You can’t go home again.

The song’s chorus rife with sarcasm, has McCaughan singing “Drill me, until i’m hollowed out. Fill me, as ever up with doubt. Oh Honey, isn’t there a better world?”

Recently, I’ve been stuck with pretty bad insomnia, and one of the must frustrating elements of it is the unwavering desire I have to fall asleep once I lie down. I lie there, trying not to think about stuff, and after about 40 minutes of tossing and turning, I realize that I’m more awake then when I started. You think so hard about trying to go to sleep that you actually wake yourself up. “Drill Me” struggles with that for much of its length; this desire for calm simplicity is made all the more absurd by the anger and frustration behind the desire. Mac realizes this, and directs some of the anger back at himself, singing “If you’re listening, would you sing a song for all the suckers, too?”

Paratrooper

Paratrooper, The last track I’m going to focus on, the track that directly proceeds Drill Me, is all aftermath. The song’s title would suggest raw anger, a battlefield, blood and wailing. As per the rest of the album, the song is the inverse of its title. It starts off with fuzzy, industrial noise and a quiet melody that, at least to me, seems to draw directly back to “Clay Cakes.” The song certainly could be seen as a companion to the earlier track, starting off with the words, “your’s was not a faithful correspondence,” and continuing with a list of similar denials, “yours was not a promise of the good life to come,” “yours was not a lie about the person you’ve become.” So part one has the narrator of this song getting the letter. Part two describes the narrator leaving, who they left, why they left. Again, the details are spot on.

If one needed proof of McCaughan’s songwriting mastery, they need only look at the third verse of Paratrooper. I’m just going to print the lyrics here, not explain, analysis or comment beyond the simple remark that the way each line of this verse is sparser and more literal than the one before it cuts right through me.

And here I am with no illusions of our love
and here I am with no illusions
and here I am out in the street
and here I am on your doorstep

What is so moving about the song is that it’s not about two people rediscovering their love for one another, putting aside all differences and embracing each other in the time immediately after a world shaking catastrophe. All we get to see is the most basic and simple of human contact, and then the song cuts out. The title plays in here; in some ways, this reunion is an invasion, it perhaps unwelcome, but it is necessary. “I just dropped in,” Mac sings before sinking the casual sentiment, “like a paratrooper.”

Paratrooper won’t give us the gratification of a happy ending or a complete ending. It gives us what is real, people seeking each other out, the need to reaffirm something you can’t quite define after a rupture in our lives.

In the wake of tragedy of any scale, priorities shift. There is anger, there is terrible sadness that words can’t get at, there is detachment, that simultaneous detachment and desire to be as close as you can with almost anyone because you feel almost like you’re submerged in pavement, and can’t quite look at people as eye level. I’m not saying McCaughan’s record will have the same effect on you that it did for me. I’m not saying I listened to it hundred of time in the days after the funeral. I’m saying siting down with this record, for me, was sitting down with someone who really gets it. And that really helped.

“Clay Cakes“  “Drill Me” and “Paratrooper” are from Portastatic’s 2003 album The Summer of the Shark.

hey all,
there isn’t going to be a post on here for some time. my grandfather, whom i was quite close to, passed away on friday, and i’ve been shuffling things around and eating stale funeral bagles in jersey for the past few days. part of the jewish tradition of sitting shiva (a 7 day period following burial which is part of an 11 month mourning cycle) involves not doing work. while i can’t exactly do that; i head back to Michigan and to my job on thursday, i can cut certain things out of my life for a while; sex, drugs, and, in this case, rock and roll. Because music is such a key part of my every day life, and my grandfather’s death is a continent sized rift in my every day life, i’m not going to be listening to music, talking about it, going to see it live, or writing about it for some time. how long? sorry to leave it ambiguous, but until it feels right to start regular life again.
-gabe

we’ve forgotten all genealogy

Well, that’s it. I’ve found my summer jam 2009.

This song is exceptional because I’ve listened to it at least 5 times today (epic for me, I normally get antsy after i listen to a song twice in a row), and I can’t tell you a single line of those damned words except where she says “happiness” and then when she says “dog. days. are OVER.” The words escape me because the music distracts me, and the music distracts me because it’s like somebody took all the energy of Jock Jams and put it into something you’d actually want to listen to. I love that I forget about this song’s TWO false endings and then am immediately thrilled that I’ve got more song before it ends. I love that this song starts out on tip toes and then starts foxtrotting.

“Dog Days are Over” is from Florence and the Machine’s unbelievably well titled EP A lot of Love, A Lot of Blood. I found out about it, btw, on this post on Blisslist.

And because something that cheery needs a come-down, here’s Vic Chesnutt and Elf Power’s recent Daytrotter session. Beautiful, every second of it.

And a few more things; one, sometimes you just stumble on a crack in the sidewalk and think it’s a crack in the sidewalk. and sometimes you stumble upon a crack and, for some reason, are compelled to go horizontal, to look inside and see that crack in 400 feet deep, has a museum to everyone that has ever tripped over it in its 18 years 5 months of existence, has a family history of the worms that has wriggled through that crack, portraiture of the flowers that sprouted up out of it, a soundtrack even, of the rain falling it, a case to hold in the battery acid from the dead Duracell that rolled inside. I stumbled upon this blog because it had posted a Springsteen song I wanted to listen to at work. I’m not one for curtness, but here it goes. Read This. Now.

I mean, it’s definitely salad season.

Seems like every place in the Midwest is about 4 hours from Chicago, and the only problem with that is, come august, I’m moving 10 hours from the midwest. So I’m sad to report that I might have just gotten back from Chicago for the last time in a while. In most ways (except for the important fact that i’m from the new york metro area), I even like Chicago better than New York. It’s got green space, an amazing skyline, friendly bikers, a wonderfully rickety transit system, and the scraggly optimism that comes from long grey winters. And it’s got music, a diverse but supportive and cozy music scene. Most of this is from Chicago, some of it just screams Chicago. A memory with each song

The snow on the Sears Tower, and then the snow being sifted by the blue line.
“TNT” is the title track from Tortoise’s 1998 album TNT.

A backyard, last weekend, loud, with free beer, where people do a choreographed dance for someone’s bithday I don’t know
“Hard To Be Human Again” and “Wild and Blue” are live Mekons tracks which originally appeared on Fear and Whiskey and Curse of the Mekons, respectively.

The skyway, late, with 4 hours back to sleep in Indiana.
“Didn’t it Rain” is from Songs:Ohia’s album Didn’t it Rain.

A political protest so cold we almost forgot what we were protesting, the crowded room afterwards.
“The Operative” and “His Mark Replies” are from Silkworm’s 2002 album It’ll Be Cool.

The fern room of the Garfield Conservatory with rain leaking from 80 year old cracks in the ceiling.
“We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers” is from Chin Up Chin Up’s album of the same name.

And hey detroit, looks like PJ’s Lager House is doing something worth paying attention to every Thursday in June.

PS: sorry the server was down for so long at the end of last month; that might happen at the end of every month- i don’t have the money to pay for more bandwidth; anyone who knows anything about this who might know a solution, it’d be much appreciated.

UPDATE: Um. False alarm about that “not going to make it out to chicago before I move back east” thing. Clearly, I’m going back to see two of the artists from this post perform at one of my favorite venues in the city.

It’s you day to drive the government to the bank.

so here’s a gripe that would be ringing in my ears if I hadn’t just played drums for half an hour without earplugs; why do we require constant reassurance of greatness from creators of great things. Let me explain: One of the best writers I can think of, off the top of my head, is J.M Coetzee. He’s treats words like they’re seeds to sprout, and I almost always love reading his books. Now, his last few books have sucked, one so totally disastrous that it provoked laughter. But I would never stop saying that he is a great writer. He could write crappy books for the rest of his life and he’d still be a great writer. Even if he had only written 1 great page in an otherwise crappy book in an otherwise undistinguished career, he’d still be a great writer in my mind.

I mean, of course, I get why we react so vicously when people who are capable of greatness don’t produce it, whenver Iggy Pop releases a new album or when Dustin Hoffman politely smiles his way through another romantic comedy. We react like the parents of children who know our kids can get A’s on their math tests, but for some reason, they get c+’s. It offends us because we’ve seen them do better. But I don’t think slip-ups can change the original label of greatness, they may tarnish it or add addendums to it, but the original artist still has value, for, at one point, creating something great.

This is all a longwinded way of telling you to give The (International) Noise Conspiracy their due, at least for 6 track. The band has lot to make fun of; matching outfits, tired Marxist sloganeering, an album called “Armed Love,” having one of their biggest singles have the absolutely unforgivably bad title “capitalism stole my virginity,” and, um, also the fact that they haven’t written a good song in 8 years (full disclosure: I haven’t heard all of their new album, The Cross of My Calling, but what I heard didn’t make me want to listen onward).

STILL, in 2002, the band released an ep like a helicopter drops bowling balls on a traffic stopped freeway. The “Bigger Cages, Longer Chains” EP is political, loud, raucous and so totally well done i get all giddy-teenager when i listen to it. These guys mean business. The title track starts off like a 70s talkshow, all horns and punctuation and flashy suits. But the impact comes from those words, each like is like a yardstick of ice being chucked at your ears, and what those words say. Man, I don’t even agree with the politics of this song, but they way Dennis Lyxzen sings them, I want to believe. The song is about not settling for incremental change; its chorus mockingly cheers on those who look for “bigger cages, longer chains” as opposed to bigger social change. Right now, the work I do, prisoner’s rights activism, is based entirely around such incremental change, but Lyxzen here, he makes me want to take a jackhammer to prison walls. It is everything that a political song should be, commanding, loud, snarky, and just the littlest bit mean spirited towards those who disagree with it.

And “When Words Are Not Working,” the album’s last track, is equally brilliant, exploring the politics of language. It rallies against the same kind of mediocrity as “Bigger Cages, Longer Chains,” but here the politics are personal and literary. While the song thows its thickest poison against our use of language (“what do you know about boredom, baby? It’s just another word stolen out of a dictionary”) it carries just as much rancor towards the language itself: “words and structures put us into bleeding. There is nothing that doesn’t seem corrupt.” It’s a song about creativity in the face of overwhelming colonialism, when our language has conquered too much and is now a bloated king, unable to move, smile, or even breath right; all it can do is belch and turn over. This song stabs right at it. It’s raging in the dark, and it’s raging within the system it seeks to destroy. All the same, you can’t deny that it’s raging.

“Bigger Cages, Longer Chains” and “When Words are not Working” are From The (International) Noise Conspiracy’s 2002 EP Bigger Cages, Longer Chains.

Anni Rossi’s new album Rockwell teeters. It’s an egg teetering on the point of a sharpened pencil. It’s a word left teetering on our spit covered larynx at the end of the evening. It teeters. The interesting and arresting thing about her Viola playing is how often it sounds like she’s messing up, hiting wrong notes momentarily, and how well these “mistakes” blend into and increase the fragility and lighter-flame-thin tension that these songs posses. Her lyrics are unusual, in a good way, but she sings them as though they will break your heart.

“Machine” and “Glacier” are from Anni Rossi’s recently released album Rockwell.

And, you’ve got to hand it Al Green. I mean, you’ve got to hand it to him for a lot of reasons, but dude took a song about holding hands and made it sounds like a whole lot more than hand holding.

“I Want To Hold Your Hand” is a Beatles cover by Al Green. I don’t know where its from, besides from this blog, which, apparently, is great.

And, one more. Looks like everyone’s favorite garbage pail punks, Tyvek (or is that Tijvek? Make up your mind, guys) have an album coming out real soon (um, maybe right now) on Siltbreeze records. In highschool did you ever have any house parties when your family was out of town? Ever wake up real early from those parties to gather up beer bottles and cigarette butts and all the other signs of that party so your parents wouldn’t find out? Ever pat yourself on the back for doing such a good job cleaning up, then go mow the lawn, and roll right over a patch of vomit which then splatters all over your legs? That, That’s Tyvek. In a good way, of course.

“Building Burning (Re- Ed)” is from Tyvek’s recently released self titled album.

we have no bumper

So this is when the wind blows steady like blood circulation, the kind where you can’t feel it on arm hair, but you you can hear it in the trees, and it tells you stories of well made connections, bottle openers on ridges of bottlecaps, nails just long enough to be considered nails digging into rotted wood to pull out nails rusted to death but together enough to be considered nails right from their heads. This is wrinkle falling asleep inside wrinkle. Like one phrase repeated over and over without becoming redundant, picking up steam like a circular prayer, and so even if someone was walking behind you and heard you say “you should come over” 8 times, it would make sense to them. This is unsynchronized streetlights and the ongoing gas-break through a strip out on the edge of town made lovely by a passenger in the passenger seat.

“Bricks” is from Hurray For The Riff Raff’s recently released album It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You.

And this is that, but this time the traffic light malfunctions.

“Abegail Anne” is from Jeremy Enigk’s album Return of the Frog Queen.

speaking of which, i’m pretty happy that this works.

What We Were Talking About While We Were Waiting for The Bombs To Explode

You know what, this makes sense to me. Watch the video I just linked to and then read this. This post is intended to be accompanied by that video.

It’s weird to say I love Doves, because it’s like saying you fell madly, madly, madly in love on a casual first date. Doves are, to paraphrase an Adam Sandler movie ever-so-briefly, they are 50 first dates. For Example, you can learn certain things about their past, told in specific ways. All three members of the band were part of an electro-pop act called Sub Sub who had some club success in the mid 90s. On the Andy (drums, vocals) and Jez’s (Vocals, guitar) birthday (they’re twins, they’d let slip after appetizer arrived), their studio burnt down, and they took it as a sign they should abandon electronica for live instrumentation. This is how they started a real live band. The fire, coming from any other band, would be a huge deal, you would feel the scorch on your eyes as the band tried to save their master tapes, tried to rip off baby pictures. With Doves, you picture they breaking off a bread stick, pouring quite a bit of pepper on it, taking a bite and saying, “No, it just burnt down and we couldn’t go back, and that was it.” Doves don’t let you in through words.

Through words, Doves songs speak in the universal. They wrote a beautiful love song called “NY”, but it could be about any city, anywhere. It just speaks of bluster and headshock and slurred sound. They wrote a song called “There Goes The Fear,” probably one their most famous and one of the best, but the fear in the title never materializes. I’d guess (and, at this time, you’d be halfway through your entree, checking your watch to make sure you’re still going to make it to the movie in time) the band came up with the title first, and then added in lines like “You turn around and life’s passed you by,” because that is what perhaps the world’s greatest fear is, isn’t it, but not because it’s something they’ve felt. Doves are fine lyricists, sometimes they write a line that is downright poignant , but they almost never write words I find myself singing, or saying “yeah, that’s it. They got it.” What Doves do, (and what they do better than, quite honestly, any other band I regularly listen to,) is make beautiful, meticulously beautiful, seismically beautiful music. Now back to the video.

I have this feeling that, although they would never admit it, the three men who make up Doves (that’s Andy and Jez Williams, and Jimi Goodwin) are absolute perfectionists (on the date, just to give some closure to that metaphor, they drain every ounce of their wine glass, and only kiss you a quarter of a mile walk away from the traffic when you’re walking along the river). The beginning of the video I linked to above has something that black cab sessions almost never have, a band tuning, making sure everything is plugged in and such. These sessions are designed to be off the cusp, quick, but I get this feeling Doves don’t really do off the cusp, and the producers wanted to show that. In fact, Doves crowded the little cab so full of instruments (two guitars and keyboards), that the camera can barely focus!

Dove’s first album, Lost Souls is a frigid, glassy affair, bleak to the point of almost being overwhelming (but, like I said, those lyrics don’t quite rip out your guts, so it stays just on the “whelming” side of overwhelming), but as an introduction to the point I’m trying to make, it works quite well. What Doves do, on every song they record, quiet, loud, fast slow, angry sad, is focus their energy on making every sound coming out of the speakers sounds just the way they’d like it to. Nothing is neglected. Listen to the title track from Lost Souls and see what I’m talking about. The guitar sounds less like what you picture a guitar sounding like, and more like 6 taught strings attached to a precisely carved piece of wood, hollow. The drums are rain falling in perfect 4:4 time (the drums are not in 4:4 time, but the rainfall is, and the drops don’t splatter when they hit the pavement, they immediately dissolve), the bass feels like an elevator, and, my god, even that tamborine that makes itself known around the 3 minute mark sounds immense. Go back to the video, really quickly, and go to the 2:41 mark. In an interesting move, the camera people focus on the two guitars being played, the strums of both hands perfectly matched up. This probably happens in most songs, but it is so important to what Doves are (or, at least, what I’m making them out to be).

“Lost Souls” is from Doves’ 2000 album Lost Souls.

But it’s easy to make a slow song with a big buildup sound great. That’s what Slint did. Doves give just as much care to their rock songs. And their next album, The Last Broadcast, was where Doves became a rock band. I’m not going to give you “There Goes The Fear,” their big single from this album, the one I mention above, because it doesn’t prove my point as well as the song I do provide links to. You need to go listen to that song. It gives you reverie like a break in the clouds. If nothing else, here’s a video of it. Pounding is a rock song, not rock and roll, but volcanic rock. Its drum beat is probably one that anyone could learn within five minutes of picking up drumsticks, and the whole song follows suit with that. Every beat is sound and then the space between then are impact craters. That guitar solo just fucking shreds. It’s simple, right down to the title, but sonically, it is just as crafted as any other Doves song. And one more, my favorite song from that album “The Sulfur Man,” starts at a god-level height. Falls back to the lower atmosphere, and then swells up, resting on CO2 and waiting for itself to explode.

“Pounding” and “The Sulfur Man” are from Doves’ 2002 album The Last Broadcast.

The band’s next album contained none of the evolutionary leaps that occurred between their first and second albums, but it did have a strengthening of their sound, due to their constant refinement of how make a song fit together. On Some Cities, their third album, we’re almost on the Molecular Level. Here are two tracks that show you how, differently. “Almost Forgot Myself” is a song, like Leonard Cohen or the National that is built for rainy days under big buildings. I just want to point out two reasons this song works so fell: It’s drums are essential, they are its balance, and so, they and are placed right up front, right next to the vocals. And how the bass and guitar lines continually glue themselves together and then carefully peel themselves apart. Sky Starts Falling creates such a perfect sound (it has a wall of sound, an impenetrable wall) that I want it played at my funeral.

“Almost Forgot Myself” and “Sky Starts Falling” are from Doves’ 2005 album Some Cities.

I haven’t heard the band’s new album, Kingdom of Rust, which came out just a few weeks ago, yet. I can assure you without even hearing it, that, on one level, it will be perfect. Doves albums always are.

And the video, the most perfect, structured live performance that will ever take place in the back of a London cab, the video ends with the band laughing a bit and singer Jimi saying, fittingly “This is very novel. Good fun. Sounded tight, didn’t it?”

(and while we’re talking about black cab sessions, man, i love Richard Thompson)

PS: Anyone wanna justify Titus Andronicus to me? I’m from Jersey, hell, I’m from Bergen County, and the whole thing still sounds like a basement punk band (who may have read some faulkner) stuck in a mousetrap.

a skeptic in the septic

these posts just keep getting shorter. as job apps slowly take over my life, i find myself just having less time to ramble here. well, short and sweet, this is just all sorts of wonderful (i mean, at least two sorts, visual and audio) X on Letterman.

and one more, from an album i already gushed about.

PS- expect a full report on the new Anni Rossi, Superchunk, Death, and Comet Gain albums at some point between now and next tax season.

didn’t we used to know someone like you? or was that sombody else?

A few short ones:

What about unintentional onamonapiea? The kind of words that were probably invented before we knew what kinds of sound they’d make. Things like thresher, pump, nasal spray, elastic. Some songs you know what the last chord is from the title.

“Gillian Was A Horse” is from Damien Jurado’s 2008 album Caught in the Trees.

It took me a while, but I finally got into the newish Marnie Stern album, which, quite honestly I disliked so much the first few time I heard it that I didn’t even bother until one epic walk home last week. She’s still shredding but now she’s also chopping and dicing, blending, pureeing. It’s like she wrote all her song parts on the side of shatterproof glass and then jumped up and down on them until they shattered.

“Vault” is from Marnie Stern’s 2008 album This Is It and I am It and You are It and He is it and She is it and it is it and that it that.

The New Harlem Shakes Album is, after 5 or so complete listens, admirable because it is honest. It’s also bourgiee as fuck; these are songs about the pressures of being young and rich in new york city (and of escape those pressures to, where else, “my best friends’ farm”). They’re songs about selling stuff online, not understanding clever t-shirts shopping at farmer’s markets and something called “the game.” It’s as if the narrators of Vampire Weekend songs dropped out of school and decided they were going to do Americorp in upstate new york. Musically, the songs are often great, and the lyrics are insightful, descriptive and not half as vapid as i’m making them out to be. The only thing is, the scope is unbelievably narrow. Either you know exactly what these guys are feeling, or you don’t and might never. They used to specialize in brash self effacement like “i’d say it so loud if I knew what I ought to say” or the bored jumpstarts like “if there’s a bomb in your hand just throw it. If the guns too hot, just run. This place is filled with sickos.” And now we get “zima saturday sunsets” and “we’d forage at the farmer’s market/and dine on dirty fruit.” again, it’s not bad per-se, it’s just a world away from where I am right now, and so for me, it just doesn’t resonate as much. Some of these songs do nothing, but here’s one that I would pocket at a wedding reception because they stopped handing out champagne, find a few months later when I wore the suit coat and be happy I had held on to.

“Winter Weather” is from The Harlem Shakes’ 2009 album Technicolor Health.

and hey, Mice Parade, Ponytail, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Bonnie prince Billy (all on seperate bills, unfortunately) are gonna be at The Crofoot soon. and Dillinger Four are at the Magic Stick in June. I’m gonna go and request that they play everything they’ve written except the 13 songs on their crappy new album.

and, oh man, idolator, for once. and only once, you wrote something i’m not linking out of pure blinding rage: On Pearl Jam’s “Ten” and 90’s revisionism.

and
this is the last call at a bottle service rooftop bar would never let you in, anyway. As someone who loves skyscrapers but hates ugly, ugly skyscrapers, I’m not too disappointed to see this bubble burst.