No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

If you’re here for the music, there are some songs at the end. They’re Blood Brothers songs. Feel free to skip this.

So I’ve danced around it before, and will, out of respect for the clients I’m working with, never go into extreme detail, but as of the beginning of October, I work with kids.

Last year, I worked with incarcerated men and women, but mostly men, in the state of Michigan. One of the reasons I did the work was that beyond whatever mistakes or mental instability or unrepentant rage these men and women had and had made, they were people; they had been born to mothers in hospital rooms, had eaten a birthday cake on their third birthdays, and had a favorite song that they always made them smile when they heard it. They were people and deserved the same dignity, respect and basic level of treatment that people must give each other. What this lead to, for the most part, was me divorcing the guys I was working with from their crimes, unless it was absolutely necessary for the advocacy (EG: Someone was a sex offender, so they needed specialized therapy). For the most part, I was able to work with murderers, arsonists, people who had abused or beat their children, and I was able to try to help them get the medical and mental health treatment that they needed. Criminals, it must be said, are so much more than the crimes they commit.

The transition from working with currently incarcerated adults In Michigan (with a few terribly sad cases of kids charged as adults and in adult facilities) to working in Brooklyn with kids at a court that emphasizes alternatives to incarceration was a big one. When I do this work, it isn’t the idea of the inherent right to dignity and humane treatment that motivates me (although juvenile facilities certainly try their hardest to strip the kids of those things), it’s perhaps an even more broad and even more cliched right: that every child has the right to grow, dream, and succeed. If these kids committed the crimes they’re committing (mostly pretty minor stuff; at worst things like assault, but more common drugs, graffiti, robbery, things like that) in any other district in New York, they’d go to trial and either get let go with a warning or remanded to a juvenile facility for some period, and then let go. In most courts, there’s little attention given to what might be causing kids to skip school, act out, commit crimes. That’s why I’m proud to work where I do. But even though the circumstances are different, my reaction to working with criminals is the same: I look at them as human beings, not a walking section of the penal code. When drug treatment counselors, therapists, school guidance counselors want to know what crimes my clients committed, in most cases I honestly answer them that I just don’t know. Where I work, it’s less important what a person has done, more important what they are (or are not) doing now.

Two quick stories from Detroit:

1) I was leaving a show early at the UFO Factory, the venue near the Eastern Market run by Warn from His Name is Alive. I was the only one in the alley where you enter and leave the space. Suddenly I hear a voice shout “hey.” I turn around to see if i recognize the guy, I do not. The guy shouts again, directly at me, “Come over here. I wanna ask you something.” I, as most people probably would quicken my pace. I hear the guy walking faster. There is no one else around. If you’ve ever been to detroit, you know that no one walks anywhere. The streets, even at noon on a Saturday, are usually empty. I hear the guy getting closer to me, and I think he tries to grab my bag. I take off running and the guy runs to the end of the alley, where, thank god, there’s a semi driver trying to park on the street, and then turns around as if nothing happened.

2) I was leaving a movie at the Detroit Film Theater, a giant movie theater attached to the DIA that’s located in New Center, one of the more developed areas of Detroit. I get stopped at a red light on Woodward, the main street that runs from downtown out to the suburbs, and suddenly I hear a sound like a really bad football tackle happening two feet from my head. I look out the drivers-side window to see two gloved fists drawn about a foot back from the pain of glass. I’m frozen, wondering what the fuck is going on. This time, the owner of those two hands decided my roof would be a better target, and starts banging as hard as he can on the roof of my car. I accelerate as fast as I can though the red light. If there had been any cross traffic, I would have surely crashed. I do not know what would have happened after that.

So it was a long day today. I waited for two of my clients to show up for meetings, one about transferring out of his current school where he doesn’t feel safe, and another about transferring out of his school because it might just be that school isn’t this kid’s thing. Neither of them show up. I leave work a little down, but decide that it’s friday night, and after I eat a quick dinner, I’m going to go play punk bingo at ABC no Rio, which I haven’t been to since I was 15. It’s going to be a fun night. I put on Superchunk, my go-to pump up music. Soon the thoughts of my day at work are gone, replaced with chunky guitars and Mac MacCaughan’s chanted vocals. I work firmly in Red Hook, and so the walk from my office to the Smith and 9 Subway station is about a mile each way. I’m two blocks from the subway station on 9th street, one block away from the BQE viaduct, when a group of probably 8 kids approach me. You can see where this is going.

I pass about halfway through the group when one of the kids, can’t be more than 18, grabs me by the throat and puts me in a choke hold. “Clean his pockets.” I’ve got my ipod in my hoodie pocket, a cellphone in my coat pocket, a wallet in a pocket somewhere. I play my part as the paralyzed “no, seriously, is this actually happening?” white dude. The kid is laughing. His friends are laughing. He says it again, “clean his pockets.” After a second or two he lets go. I can’t think of anything to shout and so I say, about as clever as I can be after this terrifying ten seconds or so, “Thanks, man, that’s what I needed at the end of a work week.” I do not scream, chase after him, or break down in tears. I have no idea why I do not do any of those things. Somehow I keep walking, get on a train, and make it back to my apartment, where I subsequently finish a (small) bottle of Jim Bean and write this.

This kid, so easily, could have been one of the kids I work with. If he was, I would have forgotten his crime (“mugging?” i might say with hesitation when pressed by an intake person at a counseling center) like I do with every case I have.

This experience, at least not two hours later, hasn’t changed the way I think about my job. There’s a part of me that is furious at the kid because of course he’s culpable for his own actions, and a part of me that is furious that this kid is so desperate for power, that he has been so fucking marginalized and discounted, that stealing ipods is a way to prove worth. It hasn’t made me afraid to go back to work (although there is no way in hell i’m walking to the subway alone anymore). It was rattling, and still is. After that, Superchunk didn’t make any sense, so I put on the Blood Brothers.

“Guitarmy” and “Fucking’s Greatest Hits” are from The Blood Brothers’ album Burn Piano Island, Burn

global politics climb the hill in your backyard

So I was so bloodpumped about the new John K Samson EP, City Route 85, that I couldn’t help but expect to be let down when I heard it in it’s entirety. And, I’m not even going to preface this with a letdown, this is a great little album. There is no better proof of Samson’s growth as a songwriter than the album’s final track, “Cruise Night.” While the first two tracks largely seem to be from Samson’s own viewpoint, which is fine, poetic and precise, the last track shows Samson’s most well rounded and believable character study yet. While I like the ongoing tales of Virtute the Cat, and could feel the deafness of Elsabet, there were many examples- I’m thinking of the stockbroker in “Relative Surplus Value,” or the writer in “Uncorrected Proofs,” where the characters of Samsons songs were undeveloped and ended up sound like Samson in costume.

Part of this was Samson’s inability to ditch his own poetic lyricism. This makes sense: If you’re a writer who can write well, and, even better, one who has developed a recognizable prose style, it’s difficult to imagine tinkering with that. But that is exactly what makes “Cruise Night” such a delight; the extent to which Samson ditches all flourish and emerges himself in the goal of this song. As someone who used to get the same inexplicable pleasure from driving around, for hours, just listening to music and wasting gas, a song that celebrates such activity is bound to resonate. But even if you’ve never done this, Samson’s narrator will have you wishing you could. The excitement when Samson sings “Dude, just make it happen,” and the adrenaline when he claims “I want to rock the RPMs between the reds and greens,” make me smile but also make me believe every word he’s singing. Samson just invests so much in the kids who inhabit this song.

Even the song’s last line, “We’ll drive a while in one direction, then we’ll turn around” which could be patronizing coming from anyone but Samson here sounds like simple fact, delivered with warmth and premature nostalgia. That’s just what cruise night is.

I can’t wait for volumes 2 through six hundred and twelve.

“Cruise Night” is from John K Samson’s recently released 7 inch City Route 85.

you’ve got that feeling, now lose it fast.

Three years ago last night, I was James K Polk. Preparation for that night was snorting, smoking and swigging (which, probably quickly devolved into slurping and from there further into supping, then slipping, then, somehow, scabies.). It lead to some questionable decisions but from what I recall, it was a pretty fun night and, miraculously, somehow also a manageable next day. Last night, I was a C.H.U.D, and I poured a few more than a few drinks down the pipes and today I could barely get out of bed. Three years difference. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir know what I’m talking about.

“Aspidistra” is from The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir’s self titled album.

And I was going to do a post on songs that use interesting alternatives to standard drumset percussion, but I realize that, while I had a lot of those, the whole post would really be an excuse to talk about how much I’ve recently stumbled into love with Tunng. There’s so much to say about this band that I don’t even know where to start.

Tunng are a band weighed down with whimsy. The words they sing are violent, detailed and quite strange, obsessed with the body, physical injury, and death. Yet, in a way I can only think of comparing to Monty Python, the product of such dire and cutting thoughts never feels belabored or even especially sad- there’s a sense of humor and levity that floats through singer Mike Lindsay telling you, in his pleasant deadpan about stars getting stuck in his swollen throat, or the way he catches bullets in his teeth, back, and head, or the way he would cut off his own fingers, and his reasoning for the severing.

The other fascinating thing about many of Tunng’s songs is how cutting edge they are in a wonderfully subtle way. It’s easy to point to music that is on the fringes of listenable and call it cutting edge. There is no question that groups like Black Dice, Dalek, Liars, Grouper and Zu are making sounds that almost noone else is, and that almost noone else wants to listen to. These groups are so intent on breaking through an established limit, either of structure, volume, or length, that they often have to disregard any semblance of accessibility, at least to all but an openminded listener (Full Disclosure: I like all the groups/artists I listed above a lot, so they obviously are having some kind of impact).

There is another way of working to dismantle those same structures, and this way is more subtle, and, on a certain level more subversive. Tunng don’t destroy melodies, or rip up verse chorus verse, and they certainly don’t overstay their welcome just for the sake of overstaying. What the group does is tweak the elements, synthesizing organic instruments with ramshackle percussion and skittery electronic manipulation. Listen to what happens to the guitar part of “Arms” over the course of the song, or the way the moaning vocal sample works it way into “Bullets”. By simply rearranging things, messing with them a little bit, Tunng are able to maintain the coherence and listenability of their pop brethren while also drawing attention to the structures they must operate within, and the limitation of those structures.

“Bullets” and “Arms” are from Tunng’s album Good Arrows.

See also: the video for bullets.

Also, I saw Vic Chesnutt with his 9 piece backing band a little whiles back (with Guy from Fugazi and a buncha people from Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion), and was awestruck. I mean, it was a shattering experience, uncomfortable at moments, but also extremely moving from begining to end.

don’t even get me STARTED on the applesauce problem.

not much new music in my pipeline at the moment outside of the Edward Sharpe album and the anticipation of the new Thao, Miles Benjamin, and John K Samson albums, but I’ve been rediscovering stuff up the wazoo. Maybe it was seeing a phenomenal Roadside Graves show a week or so back, but I got the urge to dig out anything and everything I owned that had two drummers on it. And one of the best examples I can think of is The Argument, Fugazi’s last album (to quote one Seymore Skinner for a moment, “prove me wrong, kids, prove me wrong”) from a few years back.

The thing about Fugazi as a punk band is that they were already less melody based and more rhythmic than than most of their peers (save for the other few other Dischord bands that evolved alongside them, notably anything J Robbins was involved in). I think this is partially a result of the band haven been spat out from Minor Threat, a band much more well versed in hardcore than in punk. I think it’s also a result of the true democracy of this band, the idea of them functioning as a collective unit, and if not that, at least a band where everyone gets some real time in the spotlight. I think it’s, finally, a result of the fact that Brendan Canty, the band’s drummer might have been their most technically accomplished instrumentalist, and so the fact that he was bringing complex ideas to the table including time signatures besides 2:4 and 4:4, meant that songs got based around them.

What it lead to was Fugazi being a band built upon rhythms. But when they added second drummer Jerry Busher for The Argument, something special happened. Oftentimes when a band has two drummers, they feel the need to make two divergent drum parts for each to play. The great thing about fugazi is how through overlapping and moments of singularity, the rhythm often peels and pushes. These drums feel fluid and feverish, but never overwrought.

“Cashout” and “Oh” are from Fugazi’s album The Argument.

and Hurray for the Riff Raff, who released what I can almost certainly say will be my favorite album of the year, just recorded a Daytrotter session. I haven’t listened, but, like Mallomars or Steve Buscemi cameos, there are something you can just tell are going to work out well.

the flowers at the landfill

So The Reigning Sound and Molina and Johnson. Molina and Johnson first.

This is one I’m frothing for, which is dumb. Jason Molina is the singer/guitarist/songwriter for The Magnolia Electric Company and Songs: Ohia, and Will Johnson is the singer/guitarist/songwriter for Centro-Matic (one of my favorite bands) and South San Gabriel (one of my favorite side projects). It’s dumb to get excited about this, because everything about it screams casual. The press release Secretly Canadian has given did all but tell you “seriously guys, don’t get too hopped up about this one. It was just 10 days, really, and all the guys did was jam.” The first MP3 that’s been given out “Twenty Circles to the Ground” follow’s through with the press releases prediction, windshield wiper drummer and low gas flame guitar plus Molina’s gravelin gravedigger singing open mic at a bar in west Texas voice. It’s a great song, but it’s about as inauspicious as they could’ve gone, both as an initial public offering from their label and as the leadoff track on the album. Getting too excited for this is forcing yourself to drink three cans of sparks even though you hate the stuff and ride a tandem bike (solo) across town to what you think is going to be the rager of the year, only to find two close friends sitting under christmas lights shooting the shit and the two of them just can’t stop laughing. Still, despite the potential health risk involved, I’m standing firm, and getting more hyped than the hype machine about this one. It comes out on election day on Secretly Canadian.

“Twenty Circles To The Ground” is from Molina and Johnson’s self titled album.

I wonder if there are scientists obsessed with vocal chords of singers; whether some maniac in a lab coat exhumed Patsy Cline to see what makes a singer sing heartbreak or x-rayed Elliott Smith to see how every word he sings sounds more passive aggressive than the last. Because anyone can sing anything, but there’s something, and I’ll leave it to the scientists to figure out what, that makes a singer just sell a song. Garage rock’s a genre where more than most, there’s a lot resting on the singer, because the music of most garage rock bands is interchangeable, punk meets blues in the break room of a steel fabrication shop and the two throw down their coffee cups and start tearing at eachother’s guts. You need something to steer the music, to shape it. Greg Cartwright, more than any other singer in the genre that I know of, makes you feel the words. His voice tears itself out for some of these songs. Greg’s voice can be defiant, angry, wounded, and, on the rarest of occasions, something approaching alright. Greg’s current band, The Reigning Sound just released a new album this year, and while it won’t quite submerge you like their last, Too Much Guitar, the nuances gives it a greater range.

“Debris” and “Stick Up For Me” are from The Reigning Sound’s recently released album Love and Curses.

“Funny Thing” is from the Reigning sound’s 2004 album Too Much Guitar.

Put another way: here’s greg’s live take (and then, the full band version) on his song “Stop and Think It Over.” Here’s The Hives performing the same song in front of, probably 20,000 fans. Just look at what the vocals do her

the modern exploits of our caged, horned, beasts.

transplanting life is never that simple. you can try to sever everything, blindfold it all up and drive it in circles ’till it loses directions, but somehow things manage to leave a breadcrumb trail. I said goodbye to jersey on saturday morning and fall asleep to Jay Z oscillating in different tones from cars speeding up and passing by my window at 1 am. But some things, like I said, stay the same. Right now there’s too much change for new music.

Monday, The first day I walked from the subway to my job, I put on a Mountain Goats song. It’s one of the few times I’ve done so since the absolutely painful Mountain Goats concert at my alma matter this past spring, where John Darnielle spent most of the show chastising the audience and trying to turn us against each other. I loved and deeply respected The Mountain Goats prior to the show, and was in the truest sense of the word, giddy with excitement about the concert. It was a letdown by the person you least suspect, and it hurt, and so I swore off the Mountain Goats for a while. But I was walking to work, and for some reason, I thought to myself, this is a Mountain Goats moment. And so I put on “Ethiopians.” The song is pretty typical for the ‘Goats, incisive, detailed verses, and a big, chant along chorus. only the chorus to this song is THE GOOD THINGS NEVER LAST. THE BAD THINGS NEVER DIE. It’s not that those are an especially weird Mountain Goats lyric or sentiment, but that the last thing I did before I started a new job, one where I’m going to be trying to turn around the lives of youth who for one reason or another, fell into a pretty nasty trap they’re now stuck it, was put on about the most pessimistic, hopeless song I could have.

“Ethiopians” is a Mountain Goats B-Side, available free on their Daytrotter sessions page.

Tuesday, the second time I walked from the subway to my job, I played Mice Parade, whose self titled album I’ve written about pretty extensively in the past on this site. It’s one of the albums I listen to most often, as I think it is one of the most beautiful albums I own, like putting together puzzle pieces which fit, but whose images don’t seem to line up with one another. The songs themselves and the album as a whole may or may not function as a coherent unit (more on that in a sec.) but the individual elements are beautiful enough that they cary everything. The songs that are most accessible are, obviously, the poppier, more upbeat ones, the one’s with bandleader Adam Peirce’s comforting monotone vocals, but I’ve been stopping myself from just skipping over to them, and instead listening to the album as a whole. And, for an album which in the past I’ve loved principally for musical reasons, I discovered some pretty interesting lyrical themes running through.

The album itself is concerned with storytelling and memory. You can see it in “Satchelaise,” which begins a simple fairytale that, but ultimately spirals out of it’s tightly wound as the details of the story change. It’s there in the evocatively titled “Tales of Las Negras” where two minutes of wintry, steam pipe atmosphere and dueling vocals from Peirce and Laetitia Sadier from Stereolab lead to pierce forlorn questioning; “And if the myths have gone away, will the stories ever stay?” It’s a line that might at first seem obvious, but I think it’s getting at an important distinction and a sad truth about both individual and collective memory. When something loses it’s mythlike status, the first mixtape from your second girlfriend discovered in a dresser drawer 5 years after the fact, will it even stay with you that much longer or will it simply fade. It’s there in the most immediate song on the album, “The Last Ten Homes” which has a unique plot of its own (I won’t give it away, just listen and see), but struggles when it’s actor “looks around, hoping to tell/his whole story beginning to end,” and finds that noone wants to hear. I would assume if I could understand what the lead singer of Mum was saying on “Double Dolphins on the Nickel,” that that would be about storytelling as well The ideas of these songs; of lost stories, or stories that have lost their luster, or stories we think we know, but we know them wrong, are just as compelling to me at this point as the beautiful music. You get two “difficult tracks” and one of the accessible ones. Listen to all three then go buy the album.

“Tales of Las Negras” “Double Dolphins on the Nickel” and “The Last Ten Homes” are from Mice Parade’s 2007 Self Titled album.

The band’s myspace say’s they’ve got a new album in the works which should be out early next year. That’s something to look forward to.

And hey Weakerthans fans (weakerfans?), here’s something to help stoke the anticipation for John’s soon to be released series of solo EPs; a really, really early version of Fallow’s “Letter of Resignation” complete with a poem crammed right in near the end.

take a number and call it your own.

Yo La Tengo were exceptional when I saw them at Roseland last Friday night. Roseland is a tough venue to play, because it’s just so big (maximum occupancy somewhere in the range of 3500). That hugeness has ruined shows by punk bands who couldn’t command the cavernous ballroom, and has been wonderful when I went to see arena rock bands like Kings of Leon, who found the coziest arena they could.

But Yo La Tengo, neither punk nor arena rock, filled the space. They played it like a spectacle, with a lineup stuffed with band favorites (openers Susquehana Tool and Die), young rapscallions (The Black Lips) and mostly-famous comedians (John Oliver. You know, the British guy from the Daily Show), not to mention one of the most beautiful and appropriate visual shows I could’ve imagined. There was always a disconnect between the grandness of Yo La Tengo’s more epic music and the small spaces they played and light, crisp production on their albums. But seeing them, up on a big stage, with a wonderful sound system, surrounded by thousands of people, it felt good and, somehow, it felt validating.

As far as I see it, two kinds of noise groups came outta 80’s indie rock, those who wanted to have fun, and those who wanted to stab fun squarely in the throat. The latter group included Mission of Burma, The Jesus Lizard, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Fugazi, and Jawbox. I like those bands and some of them are really important to me. The former group, the ones who, as far as I can tell, had a sense of humor about the whole thing were bands like The Replacements, Superchunk, Drive Like Jehu (more so in spirit than in music), The Pixies, and Yo La Tengo. I love those bands. I think that’s because the noise was put to a different purpose in the groups who were having fun versus those who weren’t; the group who were having fun were using it to show us joy, excitement, and youth that the lyrics couldn’t; the group who were not having fun used the noise to take a nihilist axe to pop music; they were deconstructing, whereas the first group was building.

So you’ve got a whole section of loud groups who wanted to have fun, all of whom (at least the ones I listed up there) I love, but Yo La Tengo are different, because they’re the only one’s who are, well, in love. It helps that two of the band members, Ira Kaplan who sings sometimes and coaxes pterodactyl sounds out of his guitar, and Georgia Hubley who sings sometimes and plays the drums much better than I do, are married and have been for most of the band’s existence. James Mcnew, who also sings sometimes and plays bass and keyboards, I picture, as the couple’s best friend.

Yo La Tengo use the first person plural a whole lot in their lyrics. Whether the “we” and the “us” refer to the Ira and Georgia, or the band, or just young/eventually not so young people, its an effective lyrical turn. And their lyrics are simple but sweet, well thought out and genuine; cautiously excited. The band’s music brims over, while the three voices singing it hold back a bit.

The three tracks I’m giving you are, I think, a pretty good summary/ mission statement for the band.

“Big Day Coming” appears twice on the band’s 1992 album Painful. The version I’m giving you is the album’s first track, and the way it’s simple, slow ingredients (a repeated organ riff, a distorted guitar, and a voice) build to the anticipation of the title is extraordinary. There’s words of the song’s second verse, where Ira sings “Let’s wake up the neighbors, Let’s turn up our amps” and then “We can play a Stones song, “Sittin’ on a Fence”/and it’ll sound pretty good/’till I forget how it ends,” are both self effacing and exuberant. The song’s last image has two people walking down the street before sunrise, not talking, just holding hands, as the distortion slowly ivy’s out. The second version, louder and faster, suggests the day is closer than ever. I like the first version better, though, so you get that.

“Big Day Coming” is from Yo La Tengo’s album Painful.

“Deeper Into Movies” is from the band’s best know, and possibly best album, I can Hear The Heart Beating As One. It’s the perfect example of Yo La Tengo use of noise, largely atonal guitar skronking, to create a feeling of beauty and closeness.

“Deeper Into Movies” is from Yo La Tengo’s album I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One.

and “The Story of Yo La Tango” off their second-most recent album, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Kick Your Ass is 11 minutes of pure payoff. The song is one of the band’s most coherent songs, despite it’s massive length. When Ira sings “We tried with all our might,” the word’s don’t sounds apologetic, they sound triumphant.

“The Story of Yo La Tango” is from Yo La Tengo’s album I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Kick You Ass.

And hey, everyone, this is my 100 post on this thing. I know I’m not mr. consistency by way of updating in a timely manner (or even when I promise I’m going to), and I know I’m CERTAINLY not mr. consistency by way of spell-checking/grammar checking my posts. But yesterday, about half of the view to this site were not from links or redirects. That means at least a few of you are actually checking the blog, without the help of the hype machine or skeemr or anything like that. As a person who spends a lot of time writing this thing, that means a lot. So thanks to anyone who’s read or commented on a post, who’s gone out and bought an album they heard a song or two from on the site, or who’s doing the same thing as me on their own site. Hopefully, at 250 posts, i’ll be rich enough to buy you all cupcakes and basset hounds in celebration.

Oh yeah, and tomorrow I both start my new job and move to Brooklyn so…probably no updates ’till this weekend.

a downpour with something to hide

How does stuff like this happen? It’s been months since the newest Magnolia Electric Company album came out, and somehow I wrote lukewarm things about at least a few other albums before even mentioning this one?

I think at this point, everyone’s got their favorite Magnolia Electric Company album (ok, every Magnolia Electric Company fan has their favorite), and before the release of Josephine, mine was the group’s second album, What Comes After The Blues. While their debut, the blistering live album Trials and Errors, was a more potent and forceful album, What Comes After The Blues felt ethereal. It was a worn down album, one which strove to answer the question of its title, but could only come up with dust and steel girders roasting in the sun and remnants. It’s a quiet album that captures the same kind of timeless skeletal beauty as Calexico. I didn’t dislike Fading Trails or the massive Soujourner box set, but they didn’t resonate the same way Blues did.

Just like Magnolia Electric Company was a radically different beast than Songs: Ohia, songwriter/singer Jason Molina’s prior group, each Magnolia Electric Company album has been a pretty radical shift from the one before it. And the group’s newest album, Josephine, is as immediate and pop focused as any Molina has put his name to. The songs hear emanate both warmth and immediacy; but even while these songs are straightforward and, dare I say, poppy, they still posses that ghostly nature that makes Molina such an intriguing songwriter and vocalist. I still love …Blues, and at 15 tracks, Josephine has a bit of fat that could’ve been trimmed, but I think got a new fav. Electric Co. album.

I just picture Molina, the whole group actually, as cowboys out of time and place, staring off towards silent soybean fields from the back window of a rusted econoline. It’s nice to get something so instantly gratifying that also has enough to it to warrant repeat listens. Here’s the scope of this album:

“Heartbreak at 10 Paces” “Hope Dies Last” and “Whip-Poor-Will” are from Magnolia Electric Co’s album Josephine.

It’s video’s like this that make me go back and reevaluate albums I had dismissed: a teenage orchestra covering a song from Centro-Matic’s last album.

Tomorrow (well, post-sundown tomorrow) a bit of gushing about Yo La Tengo, post amazing Roseland concert.

Break the stereo if it’s not broken yet.

When a band get overly hyped, hyped to the point of near-ubiquity (Radiohead, Animal Collective, Dan Deacon, No Age, Wavves, etc.) I tend to swing back in the other direction and be absolutely and totally dismissive. “Dan Deacon, more like Crap Crapcon!” This is unfair to those bands, but it is my standard reaction, plain and simple. So I want really hard to say something like “WHO THE FUCK CARES ABOUT PAVEMENT REUNITING?” but I can’t, except in that hypothetical, not-followed-through-with quotation. Which, to be honest, was a pretty good way to let off some steam.

Because I don’t hate Pavement, and actually, I like Pavement. I think Brighten The Corners and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain are a wonderful, sloppy albums, and I like the stoic finality of Terror Twilight. And I’ll even admit that Pavement were an important band.

Moreso than any other band in the Early 90’s, Pavement brought a fun and looseness back to alternative rock music. I grew up listening to grunge, and I like a lot of grunge, but you have to admit that Grunge is pretty dismal. Pavement were cheery and breezy and not all that concerned with making a point or bringing their audience to tears. You get the feeling, at least for their first four full lengths, that Pavement were about having fun, and making their listeners have fun. This has real value; Pavement were a catalyst of pretty huge proportions in their time and day, and I don’t think our indie rock landscape would be anywhere near the same without them.

But still. People foaming at the mouth and buying tickets a year in advance for a band who wrote Stone Temple Pilots diss tracks, songs about haircuts, love in the summer, dates with (not at, with) Ikea. They’re not bad songs; they’re catchy and all. But oh boy are they they’re insubstantial. And, in the fallout of the drama over “Range Life,” Stephen Malkmus’ only response seemed to be “you’re taking this too seriously.” Fair enough, but if we can’t look to Pavement for sincerity, or it’s meaner twin irony, well, what are we left with? CUE THE STRING OF NONSENSICAL PAVEMENT LYRIC PULL QUOTES!

“I’ve got a secret for you, I cut your angel in two
I left her bleeding and soaked it with a dry sponge”
-No Life Singed Her, Slanted and Enchanted

“Blind date with the chancer
We had oysters and dry lancers
When the check arrived we went dutch, dutch, dutch, dutch”
- Shady Lane, Brighten The Corners

“Two states!
We want two states
North and south
Two, two states
40 million daggers!”
-Two States, Slanted and Enchanted

“Amateur seasalt gatherers colonized
They’re good enough for Conrad Hilton, not good enough for my eyes.”
-Fin, Brighten The Corners

“Hey little boy, would you like to know
what’s in my pocket or not
It’s no ploy, it’s no gimmick,
It’s the chance of a lifetime to see
something that’s never seen by mere mortals
(except me!)”
-Carrot Rope, Terror Twilight

Well then.

Not-great lyrics don’t mean a not great band/album. I bet if anyone were to that closely at Rain Dogs, they’d see a whole buncha posturing and second rate crime stories. (I’m too scared to do it, because I love Rain Dogs). But that album works because Tom Waits has a voice that could sell ice to an eskimo, and wrote an album full of songs which are actually menacing, deep breathing creatures that just crawled outta the dark. And the Pixies do it to (Everyone chant it with me: “ANDULUCIA!”), but, again, musically they had urgency, and Frank Blacks vocals which sold the whole thing. Pavement have breezy melodies and Stephen Malkmus’ pretty awful singing voice. That’s it.

I think Terror Twilight, the band’s last album contained some really genuine songs, but I think that’s about the extent of it in the Pavement catalog. Again, I don’t hate Pavement. I like Pavement. But I don’t care about Pavement. Does anyone else think that, at this point, we’re giving a hero’s welcome to a bunch of lazy nonsense-spewing stoners who played some decent melodies with a big shit-eating gin on their faces? Here’s one fun but kinda “wait…what?” song, and one of the few tear-jerkers the band ever wrote. In other words, the first one’s silly, the other ones serious.

“Unfair” is from Pavement’s album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

“Major Leagues” is from Pavement’s album Terror Twilight.

And two of my favorite new acts of last year are both outdoing themselves and releasing a new album THIS year. Here are two good songs from sophomore releases which I can only assume will be as good as these tracks.

“The Sound” is from Miles Benjamin Anthony Robison’s upcoming album The Summer of Fear.

“Know Better Learn Faster” is the title track from the upcoming Thao and the Get Down Stay Down album Know Better Learn Faster.

leap before you linger

Today I was going to do a post about the Muse album “The Origin of Symmetry,” in my opinion the last good thing they released, but now I’ve got a headache, so here’s a quiet song about a man’s love for his cat.

There’s something that shouldn’t work about Mark Kozelek and the various bands he’s part of (Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters). If “slowcore” was ever a legitimate genre, then Kozelek was one of it’s only adherents. His songs are long stretches of road, flat and never changing. 15 minutes can go by with the same melody, the same ambling tempo, the same sorta-lovelorn-but-mostly-abstract lyrics. And Kozelek is doing nothing to sell it to you or make it more digestible; his voice is nice, but indistinct. He’s not trying to make things difficult, but he is making music squarely on his own terms. Somehow despite all that I’ve described, Kozelek’s song’s often work; they are affecting and listenable. I’m giving you probably the most accessible thing he’s written. And I love that one of his most genuine love songs was written about his cat.

“Wop-A-Din-Din” is from The Red House Painter’s last album Old Ramon.