That’s not an answer.

Anthony slipped off the Pointer Sisters 45 we had been playing at 33 and said “I don’t know.” His basement smelled like slept in sheets sitting next to the hamper and I felt like we were in highschool, sneaking Narragansett tallboys because his father did not approve of beer in the house. When he came down stairs, I hid mine behind the subwoofer; Anthony just kept his in his hand; nobody said anything, and then, after pulling something out of a file cabinet, his father left.

Anthony said “I don’t know,” agreeing with me about the Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson album The Summer of Fear.

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson (from this point forward MBAR) had released a debut album in the year 2008 which bruised the moment it landed. That self titled album sounded like the kind of hallucination you have before you die from chugging varnish. I misheard nearly every lyric on that album, thought good luck was stabbing you in the face when it was actually just staring, thought “goddamn I’m tired of being bled” was about exhaustion with whatever pressure comes from being one of exactly 5 black dudes in indie rock today. The reason for these misunderstandings was because Robinson’s first album bleeds your ears, and also because the album throws its voice around. The album was produced by Chris from Grizzly Bear, and one of the most notable production touches comes in the vocals. Multiples of Robinson’s voice stream through those songs, which has an effect simultaneously comforting (because it makes the whole thing feel like a band effort, which, to be honest, is all smoke and mirrors), and also disorienting.

I had said, “I mean, I want to like it, but every song sounds the same, and to be honest, there are just too many of them.” refering to The Summer of Fear, MBAR’s second album, and Anthony said “I don’t know,” maybe agreeing with me, maybe subtly disagreeing but too tired to argue. We had trouble starting the fire, and we had both forgotten about our room temp beers and also about switching the records, as talk turned from the time we had lived since graduating college to the music we had listened to in that time.

The next morning I had a terrible stomach ache as the train sped me across Connecticut back to new york. I can’t quite say why, maybe because of the way Anthony had said “I don’t know,” but I decided to relisten to The Summer of Fear. And here’s the thing, this is a great album, in some ways possibly more emotionally scraping than MBAR’s debut, due to a stripping away of all excess sound. The first time I listened to The Summer of Fear, my thought was that those extra vocal tracks on his previous album had, in many ways, covered up what a terrible vocalist Robinson was. The Summer of Fear put Robinson’s voice right up front, with all of it’s cracking and tightness and stretching and breaking. The man has a voice that is intentionally loud and blunt, it hits you in the same way Daniel Johnston, Blake Schwarzenbach, or PJ Harvey do.

The other problem I had originally had with The Summer of Fear was that it was just too much; 13 track, two of those parts 1 and 2 of a suite, another 12 minutes long. Not only that, but repeated melodies, and the fact that there are only so many major chord combinations made a lot of the songs on this album initially bleed into one another. On my most recent listen, highlights leapt out at me, from the smirking “Always an Anchor,” to the devastating slow melting of “More Than A Mess.”

And now I’m going to revise what I just wrote, because all of these songs actually do feel the same, but in a way that is unrelenting and not at all monotonous. Robinson’s drug use and the isolation that both caused and was caused by those drugs is all that these songs are about. Despite The Summer of Fear’s warmer melodies and more upfront production, being able to easily decipher the lyrics of these songs means you instantly realize how trying and desperate they are. Here’s an example:

Somewhere back in my old hometown
there’s an alright kid dragging an anchor around.
It looks a lot like a frown.
Goddamn it’s hard to turn an anchor upside down
When smile ain’t a smile, just some teeth messing with your mind.

Here’s another:

In the middle of the night
she calls up to say that she’s alright
Well, alright.

Something breaks inside me every time I breathe
longing to laugh about it, but instead I grieve.

Anthony stared off into space, probably too tired to actively defend his reluctance towards my cheap shots about an album he may have likes , but I’m happy he did, in a small way. It took me a while, but as of right now I can’t recommend The Summer of Fear enough.

“Always An Anchor” “The 100th of March” and “Hard Row” are from Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson’s album The Summer of Fear.

Maybe it’s cuz these guys are from New Jersey, or because their music video is more fun than cheesecake, but I’m really, really liking Ben and Vesper these days.

ot’s a taste if wime.

Autopilot never stays auto forever. You get up every morning and put up water for coffee and get dressed and get on the train/in the car and get to work and then sometimes around 9:45, one of you coworkers says “tough night last night?” and you realize you never buttoned the top three buttons of your shirt, or one one your coworkers says “hey, nice pants” and you realize, shit, you did put on pants today, and a nice pair at that.

Likewise with music, there are certain things we will not realize exist until they are shoved in our face. Like this handy fact: Did you know that, just like the rest of people living on this planet, that singers breath? Oftentimes, as they’re channeling sounds we don’t normally associate with speech, we forget that singers have to breath just as often, if not more so than the rest of us do when we speak. Normally, a good mixing job will eliminate breathing, and if not that, the other instruments on a track cover it up nicely for most listeners.

But there are some bands and artists who utilize this inherently human and necessary function for their songs. They take the sound of an exhale and make it something important to their songs. In some cases, they use it to emphasize urgency. Before Muse’s ambition lead them to be a second-rate-whatever-it-is-they’re trying these days, they were about the most furious, Anafliactic band who ever venture into Prog territory, and Matthew Belamy’s life or death vocals sold the whole thing. In other cases, singers used them as the ultimate letdown. The breath that Steve Mason from the Beta Band takes in the first seconds of “Simple” is loaded and heavy, the kind of inhale that predates a break-up speach.

Field Music (who, for the sake of brevity, were gold medalists at the Bell House on Saturday Night), in typical Field Music fashion, manage to afford breathing an entirely different but equally interesting role. Listen to the last 49 seconds of “Sit Tight” and tell me that saw that coming, or that it acts as anything less than a centerpiece.

“New Born” is from Muse’s album The Origin of Symmetry.

“I Luv The Valley Oh!” is from Xiu Xiu’s album Fabulous Muscles.

“Don’t Leave The Light On, Baby” is from Belle and Sebastian’s album Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant.

“Simple” is from The Beta Band’s album Heroes to Zeros.

“Sit Tight” is from Field Music’s album The Tones of Town.

Any other suggestions of songs where breathing plays a role?

the next day, the attrition rate walked in.

One thing I was hoping in regard to The Conformist, the new Doveman album, was that I wouldn’t love it all at first. Doveman (Pianist/Singer Thomas Bartlett + other musicians)’s first two albums were not immediately gratifying. There was something ethereal and hard edged about Bartlett’s songwriting; a guardedness and really subtle spite in his lyrics and a hesitation in the melodies he wrote. The songs weren’t ugly, but they weren’t easy, either. They were distant galaxies, to most people, most of the time, a few pinpricks fuzzed out by light pollution. If you can figure a way to get closer, if you remember their name and the place you found them last night, and look again, and look even closer this time. If you squint ’till you’re sure you’re hurting your retinas, there’s something beautiful and distinctly not of this world you’ll get to witness. I linked to it before, but once again, here’s Doveman with his friend Sam Amidon performing Walk On from his first album. It’s a halting performance.

Luckily, I got my wish with Doveman’s new album. Most of the album’s songs will take time. In six months I may know whether I love them or not, but probably not much before them. The one exception, and it is a notable one, is opener Breathing Out. While comprised of the same type of snowy melody that Bartlett specializes in, it’s a warmer, sadder, and more open than anything else I’ve heard by him. I’ll get back to you in a few months, but for now, here’s an easy favorite.

“Breathing Out” is from Doveman’s album The Conformist.

We jump from the ethereal to the thereal. There is nothing that is not grounded about Let’s Wrestle. They are a british pop band who just signed to Merge. They have a great sense of humor, and a Their videos were probably made on the cheap and on the bottle. Here’s a headrush.

“We Are The Men You’ll Grow To Love Soon” is from Let’s Wrestle’s forthcoming album In the Court of the Wrestling Let’s.

think of it as a pill that’s too big.

Despite the fact that a fair amount of new albums recently came out which I’ve wanted to hear (the new Doveman, the new Spoon, the new Owen Pallett) I haven’t been listening to any of them. Instead, I’ve been catching up on other people’s end of year list, (including and especially this list from The Quietus, which manages to be smart and compelling without verging into non-descriptive hoo-haa.) and listening to the loudest music I own.

In a pretty broad post on this site near the end of last winter, I spoke about what kind of music helps you transition from thin, high-tension winter back into muddy, windy spring. Now here I’ll tell you what defrosts my ears when I’m stuck in the thick of winter (despite the fact that’s its been a timid, third string winter here in Brooklyn; more rain than snow, more hands in pockets than hands in gloves). It’s the loud stuff, so today, I tell you, who probably already know about both Parts &nLabor and Isis, about both Parts & Labor and Isis.

What’s funny about these groups is how they approach making loud music so entirely different. Parts & Labor are frenzied, short circuited and urgent; if they were even a bit worse instrumentalists their songs would be second rate noise punk snotrockets, but those drums never falter and those keyboards/samplers never jump, they just explode like well placed firecrackers. Isis are slow, 15 miles per gallon big, and solar eclipse dark. If they were any worse instrumentalists, their songs would sound like stoned metalheads who are all waiting for each other to stop playing, but those guitars never quiver, and singer Aaron Turner never sounds anything but intentional.

“Probably Feeling Better Already” is from Parts & Labor’s split with Tyondai Braxton, Rise Rise Rise.

“Fractured Skies” and “Ghosts Will Burn” are from Parts & Labor’s album Mapmaker.

“Altered Course” is from Isis’ album Panopticon.

“Hall of the Dead” is from Isis’ album Wavering Radiant.

Why do people rewatch movies or TV shows? Seriously. Why buy something on DVD? Why fill a Saturday night with an ending you already see coming? Why does my mom re-watch episodes of the West Wing when she’s feeling stressed, and why do I rewatch episodes of the simpsons I can practically recite line-by-line at this point when I’m feeling blue? I think it’s got something to do with an invented nostalgia, or something that resembles the feeling of nostalgia, but not for places that we went or conversations we had or touches we felt, but for characters we pretend that we know. At least for that hour or two, the pretending works. Think back to your favorite scene in your favorite movie, and then think back to a real memory, something tangible, a really good one. Now ignore the voice in your head telling you you should privilege the real over the movie, and, at least allow yourself the possibility that the feeling you have for both is the same. I don’t think I’m getting this across very well. Put simply: I’ve heard this song before, and will hear it again after Shrag does it, but that doesn’t diminish the precocious joy I get every time i listen to it.

“Rabbit Kids” is from the Rabbit Kids 7″ inch by Shrag.
Check out their label, Where It’s At is Where You Are if you like music that in a world run by kinder people would be immensely popular.

Next post’ll probably focus on how good the Doveman album is, and how Cheap Girls are basically the best punk Big Star I’ve ever heard.

slammed the door on my bible salesman heart.

Lucero are a cult band. Their following is a bunch of 20 somethings who grew up in small towns with broken down cars. They learned to jimmy liquor cabinets before they knew what to do with what they found inside. They quit their punk bands when it became clear that the chance was slipping that they were even going to make it out of their hometown. Lucero’s fan base make sense because the youth (mostly young men) who make up Lucero’s audience are the characters who make up their songs. They’re drunk, a little gawky, and don’t quite know what to do about hope. They don’t have a motorcycle or a gun. They have a jean jacket they wear like a shell, and get more offended than you think when you tell them Springsteen wants his clothes back. Lucero’s songs follow a template: Tonight + (Guy * (Booze(A Fight(A Girl)) +/- Getting outta here)). If it sounds like a cliché, I’d argue clichés are only labeled as such because people toss them off, don’t give them the attention it would take to make something new out of something old.

And for one album (so far) Lucero did just that, starting with what hundreds of writers and songwriters and poets and painters and just about every teenager in the whole world has gone through: that restlessness which comes with wanting to leave even if you don’t know where you’d go. Lucero took something infinitely familiar and seemingly played out, and turned it into their own creation.

Here’s something interesting: Lucero are a rock band. I’m sure they would identify themselves as such. Yet That Much Further West, for most of its length, doesn’t rock at all. It’s tempo is sluggish, its songs are defeatist anti-anthems, slowly coalescing and then lingering around in hot summer air. When it does rock, in the late album combo of “Tonight Ain’t Gonna Be Good” and “Tears Don’t Matter Much” it is a welcome shift in tone for the album, but it also feels somehow hollow, like the songs are betraying the quiescent solitude the group has spent the rest of the album building up. The album could be compared to Wilder’s “Our Town,” with the band visiting bars, highschools, parking lots, rivers, rock clubs, and the roads of a small southern town. Lucero act as narrators with poorly disguised subjectivity, they can’t pretend to love this place they so desperately want to get out of. The drums on That Much Further West either tick away seconds or they’re breaking bottles out back.

The band itself deserves credit for their creation, but Ben Nichols voice must be given its fair time. Every word that comes out of Nichols’ mouth just feels unraveled. Nichols’ delivery strikes an amazing balance between resignation and being amped up. The way he mumbles “well, alright” in the chorus of “Across The River,” or his delivery throughout the brief but perfect “Joined the Army,” are two examples of the poignancy and depth that Nichols brings to Lucero.

I don’t know whether Lucero will ever release another album that will resonate for me the way That Much Further West does. As they pile on more and more production and more and more instruments (they now feature a full-time keyboardist, and their last album feature a horn section prominently), they get further from the spark which lit the fuse which made this album such a rooted, epochal work. That Much Further West just fits Lucero so well, the band of lovable, smart, decent looking fuck-ups who are on the cusp. Seeing them succeed, while gratifying, also didn’t fit for me. The truth is, asking Lucero to strip back down to the style they had on this album might produce something stilted and phony, and that would be worse than their natural expansion. The long and short is, I’ve had this album for year, and I’ve played it more times than I can say, and i’m still not sick of it. I don’t think I need anything else.

“Across The River” “Joining The Army” and “Tonight Ain’t Gonna Be Good” are from Lucero’s album That Much Further West.

This one’s for the G Train. The J train has the new R160 cars, airbag suspension, doors that close all the way, and automated, mitigated station announcements. The G Train has four cars that get you from point a to point b just fine, even if you take each trip inside of a snare drum.

I hadn’t listened to Turn, The Ex’s most recent album, in ages, despite the fact that I think they’re one of the most interesting, listenable, danceable and forceful punk bands around (that is, if they are still around). Their songs remind me of the clanging of my train, and their words remind me of the bits of plastic scraped away from windows where one boy carves his name, another, below it, fuck this shit.

“Sister” and “Theme From Konono” are from The Ex’s album Turn.

Also two new ones, from albums I didn’t realize were coming out this year, but am now pumped for. Both are courtesy of Captains Dead.

“Hide It” is from Retribution Gospel Choir’s upcoming album 2.

“Repulsion” is from Quasi’s upcoming album American Gong.

He left/He left his coat.

I don’t  think it’s set in on a real level yet, but I just found out that Vic Chesnutt, surely one of the most creative, startlingly honest, human songwriters, had died yesterday from an overdose of muscle relaxers. Chessnutt killed himself at the age of 45; put himself into a coma two days before Christmas, and died yesterday.

Surely, there are better people to be giving Chesnutt the eulogies and elegies he so desperately deserves, but my two cents are as follows.

Chesnutt was careless in a way that suited him well. About a third of the way through his recording career, he closed an album singing “I was never much one for the niceties,” and that’s fitting. Chesnutt’s words were only rarely beautiful, they were only occasionally blossoming or splendid. They were, instead, dirty and mangled, and bruised. I hesitate to use words like “bruised” because they hint at Chesnutt’s physical disability, and without meaning to, suggest that Chesnutt’s entire life, or at least his reason for creating art revolved around a car accident when he was 16 that left him paralyzed from the waist down. I have no doubt that the accident changed Chesnutt’s life entirely, but it was Chenutt’s mind that conjured up stories and images and songs as enrapturing as Chesnutt did, not his motionless limbs.

There are a few things that must be said about Chesnutt if you’re new to the game. First, dude was mutable and eclectic. He had albums of stripped down folk that put his monotone, soothing, grandfatherly, wise (I said it before and I’ll state it in capitals now, VIC CHESNUTT WAS ABOVE ALL ELSE, WISE.) voice upfront. He created fishtank-dunked soap operas with the backing band Lambchop on his album “The Salesman and Bernadette”. He recorded raucious southern rock with the jamband Widespread Panic under the name brute. He recorded playful psychedelic pop with the band Elf Power on last year’s Dark Developments. He recorded somber albums filled with negative space on his recent collaboration with Jonathan Richman, Skitter on the Take-Off. And, in perhaps the biggest sonic shift of his almost manically eclectic career, he recorded two album backed by members of Godspeed You Black Emperor, Fugazi, and A Silver Mount Zion, which shot his voice through a pinball machine that was as big as a catherdral. He could, and would work with anyone. And, in case it somehow doesn’t go without saying, he always made it work.

Second, Chesnutt could be gloomy. The isolation he captures on some of his songs is, to my mind, terrifying, because it has such truth and such anger behind it.

Third, Chesnutt could be joyous. You can’t say that he didn’t have one of the best, deepest, most goosebumpy senses of humor in rock and roll.

Fourth, I took Vic Chesnutt, and all his bear hugging beer drunking eye rubbing gut clenching songs for granted. Fuck if I didn’t think that he would be around forever. It kind slaps me across the face the degree to which I was able to divorce what I’m sure was a difficult struggle of a life from Chesnutt’s songs which talked about a difficult struggle of a life.

It goes without saying that I will miss all the art that Vic Chesnutt has created, and for allthe art he had left to make. What we must remember is exactly how much wonder Chesnutt injected into the shit and dust and pain of life-  his, mine, ours.

“Bernadette and Her Crowd” and “Mysterious Tunnel” are from Vic Chesnutt’s album with Lambchop, The Salesman and Bernadette.

“And How” and “Little Fucker” are from Chesnutt’s album with Elf Power, Dark Developments.

“Flirted With You All My Life“  is from Vic Chenutt’s album At The Cut. 

“See You Around” is from Vic Chesnutt’s album About To Choke.

Weren’t we fine tonight? (Gabe talks about what music he loved this year, part 3.)

Note: Discerning readers will notice I skipped “Part 2″ of my best of the year extravaganza. The reason for this is because I wanted to get my best of done in time to submit it to the Hype Machine list feature. The reason I do this site is because I love the music I’m writing about, and if, by submitting my list, I happened to allow a few more people to listen to and perhaps purchase the music that moved me this year, that’d just be swell.

Verbatim from last year: Everyone can do year end blurbs. Blurbs are, frankly, dime a dozen, and quite honestly, who needs ‘em- you can listen to the songs and get all the stuff. Here’s some writing about some music that I loved this year.

14.
It’s hard to add an exclamation point to “malaise,” but I’m starting to think there’s little Thao Nguyen and her band The Get Down Stay Down can’t add her clanky rhythms and smokey voice (a vertiable exclamation point) to.  While her first album tackled the blunt stuff: heartbreak, joy, childhood, Know Better Learn Faster is a little more complex.  Its topics are listed, on an old boring magnet on your half broken fridge: having responsibilities, slowly growing out of love, the terrible aftertaste and terrible view from the top of a one night stand. The music, likewise, isn’t sugar coated. It satisfies like bakers chocolate- the longer it sits and the more time you spend the sweeter it gets. This is the group’s second album in 2 years and their second time appearing on my best of list. I can see no reason that either of these things should stop at any point soon.
 
“Know Better Learn Faster“  and “But What of the Strangers” are from Thao and the Get Down Stay Down’s album Know Better Learn Faster.

13.
I don’t care about what the cool kids did or did not say in this case.  My real question: why weren’t Florence and the Machine all over Z100 this year? In a year when pop got weird, I’m shocked there wasn’t room at our country’s microphone for Florence Welch, whose voice is a drink, not even a cheap drink or a first drink, thrown across the room in one of those slow motion Matrix sequences, and the Machine, who back Miss Welch with all the abandon of a careening Kia with occupied baby seat in the back.  This is passion somehow being wrapped up by composure. This album is built upon a synthetic approximation of a beating heart. (I’m writing about the EP because I don’t have the full length.  I can only assume it’s as good as this EP.)
 
“Dog Days are Over” and “You’ve Got The Love” are from Florence and the Machine’s EP A Lot of Love, A Lot of Blood. 

12.
Consider Kurt Vonnegut and Berkley Breathed. Two people who saw the world and thought to hold up a mirror to it. We were shocked and thought, “they must be using one of those carnival fun house mirrors” and laughed and said “Oh, I read there stuff when i was in high school.” Years of being trivialized or ignored took their tolls on the beautifully surreal visions of these two men, causing both to become cranky, topical, and, worst of all, irrelevant. Consider Robyn Hitchcock, whose been holding up that very same mirror for years, and has never faltered, watered down or compromised. He’s asked us in once again for tea to have a look at it. It would do us a lot of good to listen to him.

“What You Is” and “Up To Our Nex” are from Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus Three’s album Goodnight Oslo.

11.
Scientists can (and, if there are any who read this site, will) prove me wrong about this one, but over the lifespan of our human lives, the mountains we see will not change.  They will simply amass all the combined footwork that walks across their paths and look majestic for photos for calendars put up in office break rooms to remind employees on their worst days that, even if god’s not in the picture, there is something bigger, much bigger than us.  And, because mountains will not change, there are plenty of people who feel they don’t need to visit a mountain twice.  These people think that they’ve seen it once already, and there are roller coasters they haven’t been strapped into yet.  But here’s the thing about unchanging beauty; if you give it a second or third visit, use it’s postcards as bookmarks and stare at a different part every time, new things will emerge  A mountain is too big to give it all away at first, and you are too small to catalog everything at first.  This is my argument:  Let us revisit our mountains.

“Heartbreak at 10 Paces“  “Hope Dies Last” and “Whip-Poor-Will” are from Magnolia Electric Company’s album Josephine.
 
10.
Debate Topic: The Human Voice.  Go.

“OK. well, obviously there are mutes and people who disprove what I’m about to say, but in general, the voice is how we communicate things.  The way we speak, the way vowels come out differently, it’s just as much a part of who we are as, I don’t know, our eyebrows or our temper. Sometimes our voices matter just as much as what they’re saying.”

“My opponent argues that there is truth in the voice; that despite not being able to speak a common language, speech binds us altogether.  I won’t disagree with that, but I think it binds us all together in failure.  There’s such a limit to what the voice can express, and I think my opponent inherently denies the perversion that occurs when we put thoughts into language.  The amount of stuff that’s lost is a pretty big roadblock to any true understanding of what anyone’s talking about ever.”

“Well, I think I pretty well understand what you’re saying when you say that, but I think that in itself proves my point.  You said something, you used your voice, and I understood it.”

“I don’t think you got the half of it.”

“Ship” and “Calculator” are from Micachu and the Shapes’ album Jewelery.

“Almost Let You In” and “What You Reckon, What You Breathe” are from Molina and Johnson’s self titled album.

9.  
“Philip, Philbert, come over hear.  Your mother and I have been talking…Philbert, stop cleaning the window….I don’t care if the queen herself was looking at it, I’m trying to speak to you…Phillip, take your finger out of your ear…both of you, just sit down and listen.  Now perhaps your mother and I bare some of the blame for the way you turned out; it probably wasn’t a great idea to name identical twins Philip and Philbert, and we probably should have realized it wasn’t a good idea to dress you two the same until you were seven, but god, to think you would turn out to be such polar opposites, we couldn’t have possible known that. Now tomorrow is your first day of high school, and you’re both enrolled in the same classes, so I wanted to give you the best advice iI could think of.   Philbert, you’re three minutes older so you first. 

Ok, put away the Purell.   Now I appreciate how clean and organized you are, but you’ve.  Well, son, some people would say you’re no fun.  An example? Well, how long did you spend parting your hair today?   Ok, well a lot of kids your age could have spent those 45 minutes playing guitar or playing catch with their old man…No, it looks very nice.  I’m sure it is even.   I’m not doubting you.  I’m just saying, as much as you can, try to loosen up. Maybe you could take up the trumpet, or take up smoking, or think up a cool nickname for yourself like “the razzmaster.” It was just a suggestion.

Philip, my advice to you…are you wearing a potato sack?  There are better places to put your lunch than…ok, just listen to me for a minute or two.  Your mother are concerned that you’re having a bit too much fun.  Remember when you rode the neighbor’s Saint Bernard to Dairy Queen last summer?  Well, yes, no one is doubting that it could support your weight.  The problem is the fleas.  No, they’re not your friends.  No, they’re not. Philip, my advice to you is to clean up a bit, maybe have just one or two shirts without lucky food stains on them.
 
I’m not saying both of you should lose who you are.  That’s what makes you special.  But if both of you, just a bit, tried to even out, find an in-between I think it might be interesting to see what might happen.”  

“Gigantes” “Northern Something” and “de Chelly” are from Tortoise’s album Beacons of Ancestorship.

“Patterns” and “Ma” are from Nomo’s album Invisible Cities.  

8.
Charlie Dreams of Colors
Sinning.  Yellow drips its way
into someone’s bloodstream and makes them
rip up their child’s artwork and Yellow makes them
go into their child’s room and Yellow makes them
tell them their pictures are terrible, that they can’t draw life, still
or otherwise.  Blue pushes a bottle off the shelf
into waiting hands, while red locks the door.  Purple
cut the phone lines and closed the curtains. White
took out the sky and Black pinched up all the water.  
Greens the one who has to explain everything to the passersby
Charlie looks at Green in horror and pain,
but Gray’s beat him to the punch,
stole all the words.

(a brief moment of levity:  The shift in tone, style, production, in general the sheer amount of progress Scott Bondy made between last year’s American Hearts  and this album knocks the blood out of my head.  It took him a year to produce this.  I have no concept of where he will go from here, but I’m excited to find out.)

“A Slow Parade“  and “The Coal Hits The Fire” are from A.A. Bondy’s album When The Devil’s Lose.

7.
I think I got it right the first time with this one. “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 “Glaciers“  are from Anni Rossi’s album Rockwell.
 
6.
Sometimes you worry a little bit after the debut.  A band or an artists releases an overwhelming, emotionally saturated album, and you think, “how can they top this?”  The problem is exacerbated if there’s a back story tied to the initial album, a story of life that pointedly provoked the album you’re listening to.  So maybe it makes sense that on his second album, Elvis Perkins retreats away from his spotlight, sharing the billing with his band In Dearland.  That’s not to say Perkins’ urgent, precise voice and nonlinear, poetic lyrics aren’t still present on his album.  It’s just to say he’s got bassist and a guitarist and, man, what a drummer, who’s sometimes just playing one of those big drums your marching band plays.  Rather than having everything fall on a concept or a story or emotional barbells, Elvis Perkins’ second album, and the debut by Elvis Perkins in Dearland stands high as a basketfull of creative, intelligent, folk and rock songs. Some of these songs sit fall alseep on the back row of the bus, some of which run 10 blocks in wooden clogs to catch that very same bus, and, even then, when it won’t stop, they just grab hold to a piece of jutting metal on the door and go flying. 
 
“Hey“  and “1 2 3 Goodbye“  are from Elvis Perkins in Dearland’s self titled album.

5.
Hearing the first version of “Learned To Surf” made me feel like my life was a hit movie, a movie some critics would call saccharine, but which, those critics would acknowledge, was based on a true story.   Hearing the second version of “Learned To Surf” made me feel 5 years old again- sing me a song and then I promise I’ll go to bed.  I promise.  Everything in between covers the space between those two things.

“Learned to Surf” and “Learned to Surf” are from Superchunk’s EP Leaves in the Gutter.

4.
Want to know what’s infuriating to me?  If The Reigning Sound’s last album hadn’t been the volcanic Too Much Guitar, this might have very well been my favorite album of the year.  That album sweated and screamed and stuck its junk right in your face, and you liked it.  Love and Curses, the band’s new album still rocks, it screams sometimes, but it doesn’t jump off the stage in a flying karate kick.   But that’s the last time I’ll make that comparison, because Love and Curses is still my favorite rock and roll album from this year.  Greg Cartwright and company are clearly having fun doing something they’re very good at, and the results sound confident, brash, lovelorn, and, at times, fucking loud.   “Dangerous Game”  forces the listener to play follow the melody for all minute thirty six of its length.  “Break it” and “Debris”  are wounded as much as they are taut.  While the title of the album hint’s at its disposition and its conclusion, the groups loss and frustration and hindsight get all revved up in the music.   Somehow this group manages to make resignation sound like proud defiance. 

“Debris“  and “Stick Up for Me“  are from The Reigning Sound’s album Love and Curses.

3.
The worst thing about Neko Case up until Middle Cyclone was that the best of her songs were some of the best, deepest, most stirring songs. Period, no qualifier needed after the word “songs.”   “Star Witness,” five minutes and 17 seconds long from her last album, has inspired well thought out academic papers, for example, and could inspire full length films, paintings, novels, or bloodshot drives towards a compas point.  She wrote some of the finest songs, but couldn’t write an album of them.  The best thing about Middle Cyclone is that she actually did it with no qualifiers, ifs, ands or buts.   Thematically unified, Middle Cyclone is the most consistent, accessible, fierce, evocative album Case has created so far in her career.  This album feels gigantic.  Case’s voice has never sounded better, and her songwriting has never been stronger.  “It’s a dirty fallow feeling to be the dangling ceiling from when the roof came crashing down” Case sings on one song. “Can’t scrape together quite enough to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love.” She sings on another.  These are the lines of a wordsmith, and Case stretches her voice around them wholly.  This is an epic, beautiful, sometimes terrifying, always engaging album.  Just spectacular.

“Middle Cyclone” and “Red Tide“  are from Neko Case’s album Middle Cyclone.
 
2.
At the beginning of one of my favorite books, Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, there’s an introduction which describes a cranky, lonely old author who is looking for someone to talk to, and a carpenter who builds the writer a bed.  As the carpenter builds, the writer tells him his thoughts on life.  He believes that, at one point, there were truths in the world, the truth of beauty, the truth of honesty, the truth of forgiveness, but that people took up these truths like they were animals to be domesticated, and as people claimed these truths as their own, they became grotesques.  Anderson remarks, of the writer, “it was the young thing inside him which saved him” from becoming a grotesque himself. 

At the beginning of Comet Gain’s new album, Broken Records Prayers, they tell you, “We have torn ideals.  Comet Gain have torn ideals.”  That’s what they tell you on track one. I cannot think of one other rock band who would claim to have ideals, much less the beauty of realizing how torn those ideals must be.   Not a single other band.

“Jack Nance Hair” “Young Lions” and “Emotion Pictures” are from Comet Gain’s album Broken Record Prayers.

1.  
I’d say there’s a fourty percent chance that Catfish isn’t alive today. 

Nearly a year ago to the day, I was on an Amtrak heading down to New Orleans to visit some friends and get away from the life-shaped straight jacket that I woke up in most every single day in Michigan.  It was a wonderful, memoried trip, but New Year’s Eve sticks out and almost feels separate from the whole experience.   The friends I was visiting and I walked from the bywater, (where they were renting a small house as they waited for other plans to ring the doorbell or arrive via airmail), to downtown where we watched whatever object it is that the people of New Orleans watch drop from a tall building.   The crowd mulled and danced afterward, and two of my friends got handed a dimebag by a guy who called himself Catfish.   We were drunk, all of us, and so following Catfish around New Orleans for hours to bars and liquor stores and through streets that grew increasingly less crowded as the hours mounted seemed good and it seemed right.  At one point, when we must have been halfway across the city and halfway towards sobriety, Catfish said to us “I’ll take you to where I live,”  which only seemed only half right and half good, but we went anyway.  Ended up back at the big park right downtown, right by the Mississippi, where we had started.  sitting there, now almost too exhausted to be angry or scared or happy, Catfish said at one point “I had a gun this morning.  I was going to kill myself today, but then I met you guys.”  Soon after that, we started walking home.  The next day was quiet, we went to a dog park and ate once or twice, but mostly it was quiet.  

I tell the story because Hurray for the Riff Raff are from New Orleans, I found out about them from some over-inked music zine they give out in coffee shops down there, but also because the wonder and sadness of the story is what the band specialize. The wonder of pure human connection and the sadness of the static that interrupts those connections are the songs on It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You, Hurray For the Riff Raff’s first albums.  Oftentimes there’s overlap; “Baby Blue” starts off like a spool of wire unwinding in the dark, and builds to two people so close they can’t even see each other clearly, before it breaks apart again.  “Amelia’s Song,” likewise is made of words celebratory and mournful “you’re not made of stone, you’re made of honey.  and you can’t be consumed by my life.”  The honesty in that letting go is heart-rending.  

The songs tell stories, but the music makes those stories vivid, and I can’t think of an album that is better composed, played, produced, mixed, or mastered (i can never really tell you the difference between those last three) this year.  Everything is where it should be here, sounding crisp but also casual.  There are no flourishes because nothing on this album happens suddenly.   Things ebb in and temper out like it’s the most natural thing in the world.   If it wasn’t such a weighty album I’d say it sounds like it was recorded live on a porch in back of an engagement party.

I can’t think back to Catfish too much at this point or I go too deep in and want to buy a plane ticket back down to Nola and find him to make sure he never followed through with his new years eve plan.   I hope that, at some point this year, he heard this album playing out a window or from an open car door or an overhead speaker somewhere.  I think it might touch him, too.
 
“Fly Away“  and “Bricks” are from Hurray For The Riff Raff’s album It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You. 

A magician under magnification/Gabe talks about what music he loved this year, part 1.

These concerts are from street fairs in Michigan and bookstores in New York City, porches overlooking downtown Detroit, and shanty-stages in Chicago. They’re from old firebrands playing what might have been their last tour, and bands who nearly imploded halfway through their set and broke up on the spot. They’re from earstraining quiet and earbusting noise.

Vic Chesnutt (featuring Guy Picotto, A Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed) (October 27th @ Music Hall Of Williamsburg)
Vic Chesnutt feels wise. The guy is a smart ass, lewd, and pessimistic, but the feeling he emanates is wisdom. So to say Chesnutt played the show he played to a half full crowd in Brooklyn like a baby might seem an insult to him. Quite the opposite; when someone has the lyrical brilliance and musical versatility of Chesnutt, the worst thing that could happen is that the lyrics are great, the songs are great, and the whole thing sounds glazed over. Chesnutt’s set that night tantrumed and bubbled and then got so quiet it seemed to be content whispering syllables to the ceiling. 20+ years into his career Chesnutt is still playing to extremes. Thank god for that.

X (June 17th @ Magic Stick, Detroit)
A day or two before this show, Exene Cervenka announced to the world that she had Multiple Sclerosis. This was X’s 30th anniversary tour; each member of the band is an essential element, and one of the four members announced she had a pretty extreme debillitating illness. And then, Cervenka came on stage and blew every fear and every expectation and every offered hand or look of sympathy away. She was clearly in pain for much of this show, but she barreled on, voice sounding just as good and just as wrecked as I’m sure it did in ‘79. The other members of the band played deserve credit too. Billy Zoom balanced super sonic guitar playing with flirting with the rockabilly girls who kept taking his picture. John Doe’s sung steadily and playing the shit out of the same bass he’s used since Adult Books, and DJ Bonebreak still stands as one of my favorite drummers ever. Still, this was Exene’s night. This was so much more than soldering on; this was furiously ricocheting off the stage lights.

Chris Bathgate/ Lightning Love/Frontier Ruckus (October 22nd @ Spike Hill, Brooklyn)
I thought that seeing Chris Bathgate perform outside of the great state of Michigan would be akin to reading a Faulkner novel set in Connecticut. As I’ve said on this site before, the man is so connected to that place for me, and not being able to see him live once or so a month in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti or Detroit is one of the things I miss most about not living in Michigan any more. When Bathgate came to Brooklyn to play a CMJ set, he did something different than the myriad of times I had seen him in Michigan, he played almost entirely new material, with nothing from his 2007 album A Cork Tale Wake or his ‘08 EP Wait, Skeleton. The new songs, play with a bagillion part band, were loud and confident, like finally making it through the winter straightjacket that Bathgate’s last two albums so beautifully described. Perhaps because free of all the expectations and weight of a hometown show, Bathgate tried something new. Nostalgia bloomed fresh with every new song.

Nomo (June 16th @ Top of the Park, Ann Arbor)
Even though Nomo no longer call Ann Arbor home, their concert opening up the wonderful Top Of The Park series of free summer events in the city has become a yearly tradition. A huge energetic tournout mirrored the energy pouring off the state. Whether they played this well because it feels like a homecoming show for the band, or whether it was the confidence that comes from releasing a great new album, the show was brassy, beat heavy, and one of the biggest dance parties i went to this year. The band’s set would have blown the ceiling off any venue that could have held them.
See: Here.

Frightened Rabbit (January 25th @ Blind Pig, Ann Arbor)
This show thawed me when I was neck-deep in Michigan winter. Sometimes it’s nice to see a young passionate band play no-nonsense rock songs to a sweaty beer-y packed crowd. This was one of those.

Mice Parade (May 3rd @ Pike Room, Pontiac)
There were so many reasons this show could have been terrible. Mice Parade played with a mediocre local band supporting them. The room was packed for the openers, and empty by the time Mice Parade started. This would have been demoralizing enough, but the band was also missing their drummer. A perfect recipe for a disastrous show, a good excuse to half ass it and blame it on mitigating circumstances. But from the moment they came on, the band the band were all smiles, almost treating the evening like a joke they were in on. When an audience member shouted “get behind the drum kit” to lead singer Adam Pierce, he obliged. When the band announced they were going to play one more song and I had really gone there to hear them play “The Last Ten Homes,” and so I shouted out “play ‘The Last Ten Homes,’” of course they did. I’ve said it before, post rock, music this delicate, intelligent, and technically brilliant, is not supposed to be fun. I’m happy to report that Mice Parade continue to buck that trend.

Greg Cartwright (June 28th @ Alley Deck, Detroit)
Talk about the perfect hangover cure. The Alley Deck, the porch on the side of the Magic stick was transformed into an outdoor venue, bar and sightseeing booth sundays this summer. The audience for Cartwright’s rare solo appearence felt as light as the breeze, slowly roasting in the Michigan summer. And, despite warning that his voice was worn out from the previous night’s Oblivians reunion show, Cartwright sounded great, playing two varied sets like he was sitting on a porch in the company of close friends. Which, I suppose, he was.

Magnolia Electric Company/Sally Timms/Elephant Micah (July 12th @ The Hideout, Chicago)
Jason Molina’s not a talker. He probably spoke 10 words over the course of Magnolia Electric Company’s set at the hideout. I don’t think this is due to stage fright, as much as a firm desire to let the music speak for itself. Which is bullshit, if you ask me. Molina has a strong, recognizable voice and personality. His lyrical conceits are original this side of 1940s Oklahoma or Nashville, and to say you’re just a vessel for the music or something seems pretty much like nonsense to me. But maybe it wasn’t that, it was that he didn’t want to take away from what, at this point has become a very solid and very democratic band. Guitar player Jason Groth and drummer Mark Rice both fleshed out every song and were able to make their presences known when the occasion called for it. Upon second thought, maybe Molina’s lack of stage banter was appropriate and better fitted the band than a thousand bad jokes and boring stories would have.

Elvis Perkins (September 2nd @ Housingworks, New York)

Roadside Graves/Parson Redheads (October 10th @ Lit Lounge, New York)
Two young bands start sprinting from the same starting line labeled “country.” The Parson Red Heads head off towards the driving kind, with voices spreading out like lane dividers and melodies blurring together like nighttime scenery. The Roadside Graves head towards the kitchen and start throwing things in a pot, then start throwing things on the floor just to hear the sounds they’ll make. Their common ground came in their half cocky excitement. Both bands played like they had something to prove to the tiny space they were filling that night. Both bands proved it.

Yo La Tengo (September 25th @ Roseland, New York)
It would be easy for a band like Yo La Tengo to get too humble, to get too used to playing a few nights at Maxwell’s and the occasional big free summer show. Sometimes both to reassure and to push themselves, they’ve got to try something big. Seeing Yo La Tengo at Roseland, probably one of the biggest non-free concerts they’ve ever played in New York, felt validating and important. Through a magical light show, a shockingly long and energetic set, and a touching romantic skeletal encore (including one of my favorite of their songs, “The Whole of the Law”) they showed they were as good as every member of the sold out crowd showed them they were. Whether they were proving it to themselves, to the critics or to their fans doesn’t matter, what matters is how seamlessly and entirely they proved it.

History’s Great Catchments.

So after this very post, I’m going to hunker down (read: go to work, go out with friends, and not hunker down in any literal sense) and think up my end of year stuff for this site. I usually try to do best concerts, best discoveries that were released pre-2009, and then the best albums of the year. Sometimes I make a “most disappointing albums of the year” list, but really, shit talking on here just doesn’t seem all that necessary. I’ll try to finish it by the 31st, but don’t hold your breath or synchronize your watches or anything

When I have bad days, these days, it’s not because things are happening specifically to me. It’s that things are happening at my job which I can’t make sense of. If there’s one skill I might never master, which will make my current job twice as difficult as it should be, that skill is being able to leave work at work. There’s too much to even report here, but here’s one thing that I still can’t believe happened five days ago. Here are four bad day songs. You can guess how my day went.

1. I tried to rise, I did.

There was a post on Said The Gramophone a whiles back about how Greetings From Asbury Park was a cover to cover brilliant album and a much more assuming debut for Bruce Springsteen than people give it credit for. The exception, this post argued, was The Angel, which it claimed was melodramatic tripe. It is. This song is unwanted meat reflecting moonlight from a landfill. It is that or it is the five sad bites of the burger left on the rumble strips of the turnpike, so sad because no animal will risk the highway to finish it off, so sad because it cannot rot into soil if there’s pavement in the way. If you were food, your sole purpose to be eaten, and you can’t even manage that, you might feel a little melodramatic too.

The words Springsteen is singing are hastily pasted together, but I love the way he drags his voice behind him like a security blanket or a parole officer. I love that, and I love that the song doesn’t feel claustrophobic or stuffed to the ceiling. It’s just that voice, piano, and a flatlining violin.

“The Angel” is from Bruce Springsteen’s album Greetings from Asbury Park.

2. 12 Missed Calls

Royal City are a wonderful band who could have given me 30 different songs for this post. I’m choosing this one because you can tell it is angry with itself.

“Jerusalem” is from Royal City’s album Little Heart’s Ease.

3. Pour that one out; don’t drink it.

This one’s on here because it’s about the best form follow function song I can think of for days when you just feel miscommunicated. This song is shouting at you and knows you will not understand it. That’s why it put the static and the drums where it did.

“Brighter Days” is from Parts and Labor’s album Mapmaker.

4. Pins and Pins and Pins and Needles

This one’s an insult that slices right through you. It’s an intelligent, reasonable person saying the most calculated mean thing with no noticeable spit nor stutter. The fact that it was delivered with such dispassionate poise sinks it twice as deep; let’s you know this was premeditated. “If now I love the human race, it’s because we wrote amazing grace.” This song sharpens a butter knife until it can cut you apart, inch by inch.

“Cities” is from Doveman’s album The Acrobat.

A price we put on display

You build yourself a house.

It happens at some point in your late 20s that you’ve saved up enough money to either pay back college loans or buy some small property outside of Dallas, and that seems less reasonable but more productive, so you fake your own death and get down to Dallas in a surprisingly hot late November. You get a taxi from Dallas/Fort Worth to your empty lot at the end of street they were too lazy to make a cul-de-sac, and you sit down on the curb. “Shit,” you think “I should’ve bought some lumber.” Next day you walk down the road ’till you get to a strip mall where, in a pet shop, you post, next to the fliers for missing dogs and such, a notice that says, “help needed to build a house. Must supply own lumber, hammers, nails, caulk, and design plans.” You intend it as a joke, probably to be picked up by some indie kid looking for some found art to put on the back of the new issue of his zine. Four days later, you do get a call. “Hi, my name’s Josh” the voice on the other end says, and you immediately know, after those 4 words, that this is not a scam.

Josh arrives at your lot the next day in a blue Toyota Tundra and unloads some lumber. He asks you if you’ve ever built anything before, and he doesn’t laugh when you say “well, a bird house or two.” He says, “There’s a first time for everything.” By the end of that day, he has a frame put up, and when, at the end of that day, he realizes that neither of you built a foundation, he curses a bit under his breath, and say’s he’ll be back the next day. He doesn’t ask you where your sleeping that night, and you don’t want to tell him it’s going to be in a hole 50 feet away. The next day, he brings his shovel and starts digging. It goes from there, and the long and short is, Josh does a damn adequate job at building a house. He puts in plumbing, a sunken window, a winding staircase, all that stuff. After he’s done building, he asks whether you want it painted. By now, he’s bringing lunch for the two of you, and he says, in between bites of dry cornbread “do you know what colors you want to paint it?” That afternoon, he drives you to Menards and lets you pick out paint. The next day you sit down to paint; you start at one ends of the house and he starts at the other.

You’re most of the way done with your rooms when you walk in to see what he’s done, and suddenly it feels like you’ve just met Josh. That every moment up until now, the moment his dirty sneaker appeared from his truck, the way he struggled with the sink and almost dropped it before he asked for help, has been blown into nuclear bits, and that right now is the first moment that Josh is there. The way he holds the roller, it’s like he’s holding an ice cream cone by the very bottom, passing it from truck window to tiny eager hands, and he moves it as evenly as a zen master would. The walls you’ve painted look alright; they look painted. The walls he’s painted look clothed…no, they look blanketed…no, they look lit up. He makes you wonder whether anything actually existed beneath the paint before this morning. Of course, you know better, but the way he does it is so overwhelmingly seamless that you want to get swept up in the illusion.

“The Bad Actress” is from Josh Ritter’s album Hello Starling.

“The Temptation of Adam” and “Still Beating” are from Josh Ritter’s album The Historical Conquest of Josh Ritter.

Josh leaves, and it’s late and you two had just split a bottle of wine, one of those big cheap bottles they sell at the supermarket that’s either labeled “red” or “white,” and so you go upstairs to go to sleep. Very quickly, you doze off, and at 2:34 (you don’t have a clock, but somehow you know it is exactly 2:34), you wake up to nervous skittering in your kitchen. Your thoughts immediately go to mice, and you think of how tough it was to get rid of the two thumb sized rodents that lived in your hole-filled apartment in New York City. You groan and slowly walk downstairs with a hammer you found, unsure exactly what you’re going to do with it should you find two mice sitting on your floor. You walk into the threshold and see three giant red spiders staring at you with their 24 combined eyes. They don’t move and you don’t move. You swear these spiders are glowing. You start to wonder what kind of burial ground this house was built on. You start to wonder how you’ve gone so long in life without taking any course or reading any book that would help you identify poisonous spiders. You think back to pictures of Brown Recluse bites and Malaria and West Nile, but then you remember that’s mosquitoes. The spiders haven’t moved. You have the feeling they’re waiting for you to make the first move. You go back up stairs and try to go to sleep. You don’t see them the next day, but that night, you hear them again. This time you don’t go downstairs. It takes about two weeks, but on New Years Eve, you fall asleep early to the sound of skittering legs on fresh wood floor. You wonder, right before you doze off, if you will ever be able to sleep without the sound from this point forward.

“Congoman” and “Fisherman” are from The Congos’ album Heart of the Congos.

Hey NYers, Field Music play the Bell House Thursday night with Wye Oak, and next week, Parts and Labor play the Brooklyn Bowl! For free!