A Catalog of Heroic but Thoroughly Unpronounceable Hessian Names.

First off, a literature-related note.  I had one favorite author brought down by going to the Newberry Library and leafing through his private correspondence (Sherwood Anderson? Turns out, dude was pretty racist and insecure.) and while another was elevated to an even high pedestal. I just got back from hearing Michael Ondaatje read at the University of Chicago (Sidenote- if you’re looking for an example of how to design a room that will maximize people’s enjoyment of the reading, go visit the Performance Penthouse at the U of C’s brand new Logan Center [Sidenote within a sidenote- OK Miss fancy-pants arts chairperson, I know that the big donors are sitting in the front row, but don't you think it's probably more important to talk about the author you're introducing that saying the names of a family who have a lot of money twenty or so times?]) and he was extraordinary, insightful, just the right amount self-deprecating, and, as a writer and a poet, inspiring. If you ever have the chance to hear him read, go do it.

Second, today I found out through Pitchfork that The Cribs have a new album out. I haven’t heard it, so won’t talk about it, and will instead talk about the song I most clearly associate with the Jarman family band (two twins and a younger brother).

“Our Bovine Public” is either really, really smart or really, really dumb, but, either way, it is really, really, really catchy. There are plenty of songs which bite the hand that feeds them, but usually that hand belongs to some unspecific power which is killing “pure” entertainment- homogenous record labels, unadventurous radio stations, snooty critics. But I can’t think of a single other band who wrote a song which eviscerates its listeners. Guess what, guys? We’re the bovine public! We’d never exist without badass rockstars like The Cribs! We say nothing of worth, so we mean nothing to badass rockstars like The Cribs!

I don’t take offense to the song.  Quite the opposite, I’ll actually defend its baiting lyrics. Sure, the band is taking aim at the head between the earbuds that are blasting the song it (at least, hypothetically) gave money to the band to listen to. But The Cribs aren’t doing it to no end.  They’re doing it as a rousing call. The Cribs are calling you out on your shit for not wanting something more challenging.  For settling for this. “Our Bovine Public” is about as sugary and punchy and perfectly radio ready a song I can imagine; every element is in it’s right place.   And the band can’t help it- these are just the songs that the Jarmans had in them when they were writing this album: catchy, fun songs. But just because there’s catchy stuff right here doesn’t mean there’s not an ocean of more compelling, less easy-to-digest music in the next rack of the record store. There’s nothing quite wrong with wanting pop, but I think the song is saying don’t only want pop.  Don’t stop there.

There is just as valid an argument that the song is stupid, that’s it’s lightweight punk from a band who don’t want to engage with politics (which, actually, they do in other songs, but still, I’ll let the argument stand), but even these people must concede one point. Even for those who believe that The Cribs are doing something stupid with “Our Bovine Public,” they have to admit that, at the same time, the band is also doing something pretty unheard of. There’s value in that, as well.

“Our Bovine Public” is from The Cribs’ (terribly titled) album Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever.

I hope their new album’s good. I’ll try to get back to you within the next month or so about that.

Also, Watch out!

Who’s next to be hornswaggled?

In their seminal works, both Sherwood Anderson and Italo Calvino practice the delicate art of circumnavigation. There are themes at the center of Winesburg, Ohio and Invisible Cities, but the books don’t so much engage with those themes as much they do, bit by bit, cut out everything except for them. Anderson’s book is a collection of short stories, linked together to create a portrait of not only the titular town but also the stifling interpersonal barricades that the interwar period ushered in across the country. Calvino’s book isn’t a treatise on how urban planning leads to class inequality; it’s a book-length reverie where Marco Polo describes his fantastical travels to a myriad of different cities to a dying Kubla Kahn, despite the fact that the two do not share a language. Still, the cumulative effect of reading about so many cities which, despite their wondrous characteristics, have citizens who are barred off from one another in one way or another, stirs up thoughts of inequality. Neither Winesburg, Ohio or Invisible Cities are overtly political works or even remotely allegorical, but the politics are there, right at the unspoken center.

I don’t know if the Weakerthans are still my favorite band. It’s been nearly 6 years (!@!@) since they recorded a new song, and close to a decade since they recorded an album of songs that I loved end to end. Despite the fact that they’ve made some intensely moving, life-saving music, their slow-loris pace and the mediocre quality of their last album makes it hard to justify the number one spot. The problem I had with Reunion Tour, The Weakerthans’ early 2007 album, was that principal songwriter John K Samson was trying to tell us stories and he almost did it right. Samson has a background in poetry as much as he has a background in punk, so the words themselves were never the issue, nor was his conviction. The problem was closer to (one of the hundreds of huge) problems I have with the writer Jonathan Franzen. In Franzen’s work, all the characters talk and act like Jonathan Franzen, and if they don’t…honestly, I can’t finish that thought because I can’t think of an exception to the rule. The character sketches on Reunion Tour were all in Samson’s voice, which worked fine for the songs which embodied buildings or ghosts, but worked poorly for the songs about the Dot Com CEO, the guy who claims to have seen Bigfoot, the sad curling player, the man whose botched infant circumcision destroyed his penis and so was raised as a girl. These characters, all interesting and deserving of songs by a careful, empathetic writer like Samson, do not deserve songs where they come off like variations on John K Samson. Reunion Tour has some strikingly good and memorable songs, but a lot of it feels awkward. This is a long way of saying that I didn’t know what to expect when listening to John K Samson’s recently released solo album, Provincial.

I am happy, I am ecstatic, and with a few months of listening to it, I am absolutely certain I’m not saying this as an apologetic Weakerthans fan trying to introduce people to the group, to report that Provincial is a great album. First off, it is a radically different album than those by the Weakerthans. It is generally quieter than the band’s efforts, and its louder moments are blunter and less glassy. But more important than its beautiful music (and it is beautiful music, featuring members of the Constantines, Fembots, and Samson’s wife and fellow singer songwriter Christine Fellows) is that Samson’s stories are varied, and their voices spot-on. Here we get the heartbreak of the middle school teacher in love with her principal (I mean, just reading lines like “The Last And”’s “But I know from how you worry at your wedding band/That I’m just your little ampersand” almost makes me well up. So many songwriters would have overdone this, but not Samson. He keeps it quiet).  We get the jitters of the latent manchild academic (“When I Write My Masters Thesis”’s hilariously heroic refrain “It’s all gonna change when I write my master’s thesis”).  We get the 17 year old kid who desperately wants to borrow his parents car for the old Winnipeg tradition of Cruise Night (“Dude, just make it happen. I can’t take another week/of feeling lame with the same old tin can on my ten speed”). Just as importantly, we get a Winnipeg, the city which these people inhabit, more vivid and intimate than Samson was previously willing to show us. It’s a place of “crumpled dark” (“Heart of the Continent”) where “the Atlantic and Pacific are the very same far away”. (“Longitudinal Center”) It’s a place where the GPS fails- “some sarcastic sarcastic satellite say’s I’m not anywhere”, (“Highway 1 East”) and where the radio stations offer “tumors of evangelists and ads for vinyl siding“. (“Highway 1 West”)  The Winnipeg of Provincial is not an overwhelmingly depressing place, but it is one which sometimes lacks the T-Cells needed to fix certain kinds of wounds.

Like Calvino, Like Anderson, Like Winnipeg’s other great contemporary artist export Guy Maddin, Samson’s Provincial feels honest and genuine because it goes to such lengths to avoid a singular point or point of view. And, I would argue, the politics present in Provincial pass my muster more easily than the vitriolic rants of Samson’s old punk band Propagandhi. Ironically, the more Samson looses himself in these songs, the more sincere and truthful they become. Honest is perhaps the highest praise I can give to Provincial. Something tells me Samson would be happy to hear it.

“When I Write My Master’s Thesis” “The Last And” and “Highway 1 West” are from John K Samson’s album Provincial.

Also, this is the time of year or, maybe more generally, the time for almost-anthems. Here you go.

“Second Song” is from TV on the Radio’s album Nine Types of Light.

“Burn to Ash” is from Chad VanGaalen’s album Skelliconection.

“Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)” is a Broken Social Scene track recorded on KCRW.

“Poor Animal” is from the Zola Jesus EP Valusia.

this meant war.

So Youth Lagoon gets a B Plus.

In addition to all the other life drags and piss reservoirs that I’ve been suffering through recently (see:  two posts ago), today a poem I spent, legit, months writing, rewriting, wrestling with and finally getting to a point I was happy with got rejected from the only place I had submitted it thus far. Mostly at this point, rejections of my work don’t phase me- they’re just a part of the process. But this one stung because I had put so much into this poem and was working through some pretty intense emotional stuff in it. But the poem was rejected and the editors’ comments said that they felt lost, and that the writer (this guy) was trying to say something, but what exactly that thing was, wasn’t yet clear.

They called the title a missed opportunity, and my initial reaction was to submit the work to other literary journals with the title “I’m really fucking sick of having people tell me they don’t know what is going on in my poetry, so here’s a poem about a physical and emotional breakdown I had in an alley behind Fullerton Avenue spurred on by a month-long-lapse in prescription anti-depressants and about everything I had put stock in, in my life, falling apart or walking away from me.” I didn’t do that, and, you know what? With a few hours distance and a few listen-throughs of The Year of Hibernation, Youth Lagoon’s debut album, I can see that their comments are entirely right.

Youth Lagoon is the fuzzy project of Trevor Powers, a young guy from Boise, Idaho. His music has a post-rock vibe, which is to say, the audio equivalent of watching bison stirring slowly beneath fourth of july fireworks from the backbed of a pickup trucks speeding away as your brother swats away horseflys. But there are vocals here, and that’s where things get very tricky.

Youth Lagoon do something very unusual with the vocals in their song. They push them right up front, in front of the drum machines, stepping keyboards, the cradling bass. But despite being right up there, listeners have absolutely no idea of what Youth Lagoon mastermind Trevor Powers is singing. His voice is so fuzzed up that you can’t decipher a syllable. And that is dumb.

There are plenty of post-rock bands who use vocals in almost the same way. Mogwai does it, but when they do, the vocals are further down in the mix, almost there as a percussion instrument. Wu Lyf and Sigur Ros have vocals you can decipher, but Sigur Ros invented their own language and Wu Lyf mumble right up until they shout exactly the words they want you to remember.

But Youth Lagoon, it would appear, is singing in English. And the melodies to these songs seem emotional enough that you have to assume the songs mean something to Powers. But listeners, at least those not willing to use a lyric website as a loose guide to what those syllables might be, will never know. And this is obnoxious. Everything else on this album is really compelling- the music itself arches brilliantly and each song has an apex that’s fresh and surging. But those vocals, those muffled vocals, half-ruin this for me.

Maybe Powers is just especially ashamed of his lyrics. That’s fine; I’m a writer and I’m ashamed of about 75 percent of the poetry I write. But then don’t put the vocals there, and if you simply must put them there, don’t put them right in listeners face so they can ALMOST know what is going on. Doing so is a tease, and, chances are, the mystery won’t be nearly as compelling to any of your audience as it seems to you. (excepting, of course, these guys, but god, I wish they would take a cue from Youth Lagoon sometimes).  After all is said and done, no matter how much time I spent on that poem, and no matter how good I think it is, if people can’t understand what I’m saying, the thing needs to be clearer.

“July“  is from Youth Lagoon’s album The Year of Hibernation.

“Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home” is from Mogwai’s album Young Team.

“Concrete Gold“  is from Wu Lyf’s album Go Tell Fire to the Mountain.

following forget

I don’t think it’s that Beth Orton dropped off the radar as much as the radar dropped off on Orton. What should have been an amazing collaboration with Jim O’Rourke, 2006′s The Comfort of Strangers was ignored by the press and it’s been 6 years since then, where Orton’s name only materialized in vague promises of a new album that may someday appear on Anti- Records. It’s a shame, because Beth Orton in a really subtle way, is engaging with the same kind of stuff, sonically and politically, that people like MIA are on a maximalist level, and yet she’s been relegated to, legit, adult contemporary status!  Here’s someone we should be paying attention to who the indie consciousness has knocked down to playing 2nd or 3rd billing at folk festivals!  This makes my head spin.

What she’s doing in “God Song” is taking the blues and shifting it. It’s a song about straying, but it complicates the fear and the transgression.  “He’s my man and I’ve been doing him wrong” she says about 30 times in the song, because, like blues songs do, you take a point and hammer it in until the listener realizes it’s not that simple. The man is god, but the home they share is always ablaze somewhere. There’s something really pricking and human about how Orton undermines the religious fervor she’s claiming in the song– “I’m praying for the strength not to carry on.”  I mean, yes, carry on with bad behavior is what the line intends, but she could have said, “the strength to carry on” and had it mean the same thing.  Orton wants faith, it seems, even as she knows it will do nothing but bind her tighter- “I’ve watched and learned to lead a decent life/But meanwhile I’m dying inside.”   Words complicate this song, as they do most things.

Which is why it’s so interesting she ends “God Song” the way that she does, with a minute of wordless voices, just reaching high. Despite a song which messes up its own intentions, this ending feels genuine.  t feels like fervor, it feels like a god song, and, most importantly it feels set free.

“God Song“  is from Beth Orton’s album Daybreaker.

And also, Junip are stupid good.  Like, Jose Gonzales decided he wanted to make an album of song that sex would have sex to. Junip’s songs are playing in the bordellos that widowed poets dream up, populated with 50 years of their buried love.   There’s just nothing to do to these songs except be very, very close to someone or deluge on stuffy Blue Line air as your train sticks between Monroe and Washington.  Take your pick.

“Howl“  and “Without You“  are from Junip’s album Fields

Speaking of Mute Records.  By the time this album comes out, you will be talking about how excited you are to finally listen to the Cold Specks album. I never do this on this blog because I’m too crotchety to feel like part of a PR machine. But I’m going to tell you that Cold Specks have posted three very beautiful songs on their soundcloud.  These are songs you want to wear like a medical alert bracelet or a locket with a picture of a boy at war which knocks your chest every step. These are songs you want with you, you want not just in your mind but also strapped to your wrist or slinging near your ribcage. If that sounds oblique, then just go and listen. And, come on, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion is the best album name you will hear in the next long while. And, come on, this is one of the best music videos you will see in the next long while

These three songs are from Cold Specks’ forthcoming (May 22nd, to be exact) album I Predict a Graceful Expulsion.

How to not hold it together on Delta Shuttle flight 5936 ORD to LGA

wake up an hour earlier than you need to, stare at the desert of non-fitted sheets.  Take somebody’s seat on the blue line to o’hare.  Drink the free steaming coffee-colored water in the plastic cups meant for juice so you’ll be able to tell yourself that your stomach is churning from digesting melted plastic and not from anything else. Regret almost every decision you’ve made for the past two years. Cut off the man walking slow with the baby so you can cry in the bathroom. Try to sync your tears to the sound of automatic toilets but give up very quickly, because it’s 7:30 in the morning and there aren’t that many people in the O’hare Terminal 2 bathroom and the toilets don’t flush themselves like they do in newark international (you discovered that in the midst of bad decisions of the past two years). Use the free wifi, reopen your gmail account 30 times in 90 seconds. See if you can beat that speed. See if you can break your computer reloading endlessly. Get on the flight next to a well-dressed Haitian man. For no other reason than the reason for your trip and the reason of the past two years, communicate through the language barrier that you have the window seat he is sitting in, even though your row doesn’t actually have a window. Use the free wifi on the plane, discover more things you wish you hadn’t. Consider throwing your laptop a distance spiteful enough to stop all this. After the Haitian man has gotten his drink and is comfortable, make him stand up because you can’t maintain what the button-down shirt purchased at some point in the two years of bad decision making would suggest. Go to the bathroom. Cry harder. Close your eyes until the tears can’t come out and they just sting in place. Allow your tears to become liquid hornets. Do not worry if the flight attendants hear you, if they suspect anything or suspect you as a suspect of suspicious etc. Cry until the seatbelt light goes on and you have to return to your seat. Go back to your seat. Continue to cry, and realize there is exactly one thing which might mollify, which might assuage, which might do what synonyms of the world “help” would do without actually being the word help and all that the word “help” means.

“Xian Undertaker” is from the Silkworm album It’ll Be Cool.

Play the song again and again, even if you cannot stop crying and even if you do manage to stop crying. Play it at volumes that hurt your ears which already hurt from the amount your grind and misplace and mistreat your jaw on a daily basis due not exclusively, but to a large part, to 2 years of bad decision making. Listen to the song so loud that even if the Haitain man to your right doesn’t know why you’re crying, he has a vague sense of what is causing you to stop crying.

“Xian Undertaker” is from the Silkworm album It’ll Be Cool.

See that the flight just crossed the Delaware. You’ll be landing soon. When you land and turn on your phone, find out that you were rejected from the last writing program you were waiting to hear back from this year. Take the M60 to the A train. Question whether you want to go anywhere in this city or whether it feels too much like a maze from the book the little child across from the Haitian man was scrawling dull pencils circles all over, ignoing the exact purpose of a maze, but assume that’s just what kids do. Ignore the fact that that was a terrible metaphor and the exact fucking reason you got rejected from nearly every writing program you applied to this year. You are now in New York City, so don’t cry. Take the train uptown to 168^th St where you will not want to answer any questions your mother asks when you arrive at her office. Do not take off your headphones and do not stop listening to the song over and over, even if she asks you to and social logic would dictate that you should.

“Xian Undertaker” is from the Silkworm album It’ll Be Cool.

That’s the key. Do not stop listening to the song until you change your mind about something you’ve written here or at least until you’ve scrubbed your face of anything resembling non-rain related moisture. Wonder whether this record is necessary. Wonder whether sharing this is just one more poorly chosen option. Wonder what happened to the woman who killed this band’s drummer when she ran him over, driving recklessly in an attempt at vehicular suicide. She survived it, you know, so wonder how she wakes up these days. Listen to the song again. Listen to the song again. Go for a walk through the suburbs feeling like you probably felt when you were 14 years old. You are now in New Jersey, so cry.  Cry when you get back to your block in front of the orthodox jewish children returning for yeshiva, who look at you and move away.  Listen to the song again, and realize how much the song, yes, you can say it now, helped.   Realize that today and probably a lot longer than today you’ve been as fragile and inconsistent and petulant as 14 year old child.  You couldn’t help yourself today, so the song did.  Listen to song again.

“Xian Undertaker” is from the Silkworm album It’ll Be Cool.

Know how good this song is.  Know that when this passes, you will never be able to listen to this song again.  You’ve got probably a half dozen other songs like that from various points in your life, that you can’t even let yourself name, much less listen to.   Listen to the song again.

“Xian Undertaker” is from the Silkworm album It’ll Be Cool.

swallowing knives before you know how

First, some great stuff.

The new Field Music- Great!

“A New Town” is from the new Field Music album Plumb.

The Callers/Delicate Steve 7 inch- Great!

Next, a caveat. Writing political music is hard. On the same day that The Quietus gave a overwhlemingly negative review to a recent collection by neo-Billy Bragg songwriter Frank Turner, criticizing not his music nor his lyrics but the sheer audacity he has to sing about politics when his politics don’t always stand up to microscopic scrutiny, they praised the new album by loud, dumb dance-rockers The Maccabees for being, well, loud and dumb. Dylan gave it up, MIA got her ass handed to her by a well written NY Times article, Common became irrelevant, the fact that Bad Religion still exist scares the daylight out of me, etc. Politics in music is really, really hard.

And Against Me! are a hard band, even within the realm of groups who engage with politics. Yep, this is a long post about my wrestling with Against Me! wrestling with themselves.

Against Me! started easily, though.  They were a way for a young, snotty, donkey-voiced punk named Tom Gabel to make fun of the rigid limitations of the punk scene. The band’s early EPs and their first full length album, Reinventing Axel Rose are filled with mostly acoustic songs making fun of crust punks and talking about drinking.  Issues of politics were irrelevant at this point; asking 2001-era- Tom Gabel to write a song about globalization would be akin to asking Jon Stewart to do a passionate issue-based report on the perceived role of faith in red state-blue state divide.  Both could happen, but both would be beside the point.

The band’s second album was already heralded drastic changes, and the backlash against such change had already begun. With the move from the tiny, not-so-well distributed No Idea records to Fat Wreck Chords, one of two punk label behemoths, the band ratcheted expectations way up. They also pissed off a lot of the purists that the band spent most of their time making fun of, anyway. It was all good fun for anyone with a triple-digit IQ.   In general, aside from a slightly more fleshed-out sound, the band’s second full length didn’t change the groups modus operandi that much.   As The Eternal Cowboy’s first track, “TSR” sets the tone for the bulk of  the album, taking digs at the punk scene, focusing on a party filled with  “resonation, laughter, and conversation”  and still concluding “It was fun while it lasted, but now we should be going.”   “Rice and Bread” bemoans the ascetic lifestyle of the squat house and the insular nature of their politics  “Surviving just by questioning/Well, can you imagine if we all started demanding?”  For the most part, the same question could be turned back at the band.  And maybe that was Gabel’s point.

One thing that Against Me!  has repeatedly done over the course of their career is drop hints of where they’re going before they go there.  The hint on …As The Eternal Cowboy is the penultimate track, “Turn Those Clapping Hands into Angry Balled Fists.”    Gabel’s first line, “Sleep on pillows made in Singapore” hints at a tension previously absent in Against Me! songs.  This is the first time we’re not laughing with him, and he might not be laughing at all.  The song focuses being young, poor, and educated, and the list of inanities he runs through (“drink your coffee in the morning”  “your doors are locked in safety”) suggest a kind of neutered or, at least blind anger. About a minute before it ends, there is, on the surface a release of tension.  The the guitarist shreds, the drummer fists his sticks into that snare, and Gabel’s voice rises from lament to protest.  It would seem like something’s gonna break.  I mean, Gabel sings “If something doesn’t break/I’m just going to go, go fucking insane.”   But nothing really comes of it.   Leaves you thinking.

The song comes out of nowhere. It seems to negate much of the lighthearted prodding, the irony-cemented anti-mantras which Against Me!  had written up to this point.  And it get’s confusing.  What to make of Gabel when he rants

I hate these songs
I hate the words
that the singer is singing to me
I hate this melody
I hate this stupid fucking drum beat

As obvious and straightforward as these lines seem, they are simultaneously really vague.  Whose song?   Whose words?  Gabel’s?  Why keep going if you hate it so much? Gabel isn’t out to provide an answer which makes the song both compelling emotionally and unfulfulling intellectually.  He ends the song shouting the self aware-falsity, “everything’s gonna be alright.”    So the song doesn’t make sense, but emotion comes though.  After that, there’s a love song and the album ends.

“TSR” and “Turn Those Clapping Hands into Angry Balled Fists” are from Against Me!’s album As The Eternal Cowboy.

Again, between albums 2 and 3, there band’s profile increased.  They were written up in Rolling Stone, got to hire one of punk rock’s most famous and well-respected producers (J. Robbins)  and were given actual time in an actual recording studio to make the album.   Unlike their previous albums, there were people waiting for Searching For a Former Clarity.

Then that album dropped. And it was/is an even split- a  third masterpiece, a third disaster and a third forgettable. From the title of the album, this was a band taking themselves more seriously. Gone was the humor and faux-bombast of Reinventing Axl Rose and  …As the Eternal Cowboy. Searching for a Former Clarity conjures up serious thoughts. Honesty, to me it conjures up art, a label I don’t think the band would’ve been comfortable with up to that point. When the album works, it stays abstract. The more specific, the worse.

Opener “Miami” shit-talks the city to no end, but just sounds crotchety doing it. “Justin” calls out Yahoo e-mail for not letting a dead soldier’s family read his e-mails, which admittedly is terrible, but does so through lines as clunky as, “You know Justin? Well, Justin’s dead/And Yahoo won’t let his family have access to his e-mail account.” Seriously. That second line is how they chose to present that story. There’s the stupid song about Condoleezza Rice “The Mover,” and the terrible song about how terrible this band your listening to is, “Holy Shit,” which, holy shit, guys, if you think this is so totally pointless, then stop doing it. That’s the album up through the last four tracks.

Somehow, something happens in the last stretch of Searching… which is utterly surprising in the face of the largely trite, far-too-timely album that listeners have heard up to this point. On these last four tracks, Against Me! Get great. Better than that, they get important. “Even At Our Worst We’re Still Better Than Most (The Roller)” is another song about Against Me!, another self criticism, but it’s a great song, more energetic and melodic, more pumped up than anything which has preceded it. The song’s coda is “they’re just waiting to tear us apart,” which, given the song in question, no we’re not, because this one’s pretty good.

“Problems” takes a different tactic than past songs.  As I said prior, the best of Against Me!’s political songs are not those that are specific, they are those that get at larger issues or emotions.   Problems is one such song.  Starting with a scene of impending disaster, of stockpiling goods and of people taking precautionary measures, by the end of the first verse, we realize the disaster is Gabel.   He see’s himself “losing semblance of coherence to a former self”  and he lowers his voice just a little bit when he sings, “You know I am becoming the choices we’re making.”   The metaphor works well, relating the changing of a rock solid ideology to the preparations for- and rebuilding after a natural disaster.  It’s another song which is open-ended, not proposing a solution to the dread that comes from realizing your ideas are fading.  Much moreso than in the songs where Tom Gabel just shit-talks his own band, the struggle in “Problems” feels empathetic.

The penultimate song is Tom Gabel’s last sermon to the punk world.  It’s another one of those “this is where we’re going” songs. Understandably, Gabel realized his ambitions were getting to big for the reactionary, insular, only vaguely-political scene that had previously been his muse and base.  “Don’t Lose Touch” is how the smartest punk would say goodbye.   It’s worth looking at that the song in the context of its music video, which is just as good as the song itself, though far more subtle.  So watch that, and then read this.

There are exactly 2 things in the music video which are worth noting, beyond Gabel’s awesome facial expressions.  The first is, well, Gabel’s awesome facial expression at the moment when he sings the line “maybe there’s something wrong with the audience.”  There is no doubt in his mind, and he wants to make it perfectly clear, that while the songs themselves do hold some of the blame for preaching to a choir, he holds the choir in absolutely contempt.

The other thing to make note of in this video is that it might very well have been shot backwards.  At :32, the camera focuses on a broken beer bottle and rorschach looking splat on the floor.   At 2:40, we see that beer bottle materialize from it’s shards and prop itself back onto an amp.   It is the only stylistic choice in the whole video, the only thing that is amiss.   Careful observers (probably me, a stoned teenager in Florida, and somebody who still puts on their resume that they wrote reviews for Buddyhead) have gotta wonder about this.  I’d offer this interpretation of it-  it doesn’t matter whether the video was shot in reverse or not, and it would be impossible to know because of the quick camera movement (despite it being a fairly conventional music video of a band playing in a practice space, the camera never stays on any shot for more than a second or two).  And I think that’s the larger metaphor-  there’s something going on you can’t quite be certain of, but you’re too easily distracted to really do anything about it.  It’s a song about the punk scene Against Me! were leaving, it’s a song about Against Me! themselves, and it’s a song about the precarious niche that Against Me!  were moving into with this album  (the lyric is “manipulation in rock music/fucking nausea” not ” manipulation in punk music”).

Which brings us to the album’s final song, the absolute best one that Against Me! have written thus far in their career.  The title track to their third album is such a commandingly good song because it attempts something the band has run away from in the past-  earnestness.   The reason Against Me!  were so reluctant to genuinely protest things, to write songs about specific causes and urge people to act is that they see how quickly that can devolve into dogmatic sloganeering.  This is a band too smart for stump speeches.  On “Searching For a Former Clarity” (the song) they risk exactly that.   The song begins with a quiet drumbeat and Gabel singing the phrase “No the doctors didn’t tell you/that you were dying.”

The brilliance of the song comes from it’s naturalistic narrative.  There are no poetic flourishes nor moments when Gabel creates distance between his own words/thoughts and the subject of the song.  And so when Gabel sings, “Despite everyone you ever meet or ever love/In the end, will you be all alone?”, there’s more fear of that than there is of the police state, of nuclear holocaust, of our terribly patriarchal society.

We follow the patient from lucid to near-comatose, hear them get worse, thinner, with discolored skin and blackened teeth.  And yet they remain defiant and alive, hoping to keep thinking until they pass, a goal Gable respects and tries to document.   It’s that closing which floors me though, that last verse, eulogistic and breif, the calm which ends the song.   We do not see the song’s subject’s death.  We end with the subject’s last thought, a sense of finality which had been previously resisted but which now enters into the dying’s mind.

Let this be the end
Let this be the last song
Let this be the end
Let all be forgiven

The politics in this song are fiercely personal.  There is no question in my mind this song was written for and about one person.  It’s strength lies in the band’s presentation, which demands full attention, offers no dogma and ends the only way it could- with a lapse.

“Don’t Lose Touch“  and “Searching For a Former Clarity” are from Against Me!’s album Searching for a Former Clarity.

I don’t want to write about the band’s major label debut, New Wave,  because it is terrible.  But, I guess, to explain what comes afterwards, I have to.  New Wave is an album that makes me uncomfortable. This is partially because it sounds terrible, splitting the difference between a bad Foo Fighters records and that film that gets left on your teeth after you eat too much movie theater popcorn.  Butch Vig, alt-rock juggernaut, makes the record sound big.  Far too big, overinflated to the point where it looks misshapen and is moments away from bursting.  If “Don’t Lose Touch” was a classy and intelligent goodbye to the punk scene, this was the band getting drunk at the punk scenes marriage to that cute record store girl and flipping over tables and shouting profanities over the vows.

But it’s more than the sounds that make New Wave terrible because, with no offense meant to the band themselves, it was always what came out of Tom Gabel’s mouth which made Against Me!  work.  And here, nothing does.   He kinda says fuck-you to major labels in “Stop!”  but keeps it vague enough that it doesn’t register.  He kinda tries the storytelling thing on “Thrash Unreal,” but isn’t a good enough songwriter to muster anything more than “No mother ever dreams that her daughters gonna grow up to be a junkie.”  There’s none of the detail or kindness or care which made a song like “Searching for a Former Clarity” so great.   I could continue to go through, track by track, but the truth is, to my ears, there’s no track on this album which says a damn thing.

“Thrash Unreal” is from Against Me!’s album New Wave.

I gave up on the band, until I saw the video for “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” from their most recent album, White Crosses.   Both the song and the video perplex and depress me.  You can tell what it’s about from the title-  Gabel waxing nostalgic (or not)  about his former radical affiliations. Here he looks back at the scene in a surprisingly rigid and conservative manner.  Whereas Gabel’s past critiques of the punk scene concerned the scene itself, the half-formed politics, the us vs. them mentality, the conforming-against-conformity part of it, here Gabel equates the whole radical-left belief-structure with this juvenile punk scene.  In this song, there is no difference between the punks who confuse the A-team logo for the Anarchy symbol (and, hey, I’m not saying I didn’t get them mixed up back in the day) and anarchism as a belief system.

I mean, the last non-chorus lyrics of the song is “I was a teenage anarchist/The revolution was a lie.”

Now, I’m not an anarchist, and don’t really mind if Gabel knocks the whole movement.  My problem here is ideological.   Gabel tears down, but for the first time, he’s not building anything.  The irony here is that, while I was never one for the specificity of Against Me!’s timely political songs, I vastly prefer them to White Crosses’ pronouncements of the death of ideals.  The reason for this is if you’ve got ideals, even if they’re flawed, then you’ve got something to go on.  If all you’ve got is a dearth of ideals, a black hole of a future, then, well, what’s next?

And the video?  It shows police chasing then beating up a crust punk for three minutes.   It’ll be three minutes where you’re expecting something else to happen, and nothing does.  Up through White Crosses, Against Me! made it pretty clear where they were going.  “I Was a Teenage Anarchist”  leaves the impression that the band has no idea what follows.

“I Was a Teenage Anarchist“  is from Against Me!’s album White Crosses.

CRUMMY FLEMISH

So I don’t especially care for this american life because I find a lot of the stories, well, not all that compelling and kinda condescending.   I do listen to (and love) 99 % Invisible because I secretly wish I wasn’t so terrible at math and navigating my body in space so I could’ve become an architect or urban planner or something relating to city skylines or subway systems.   The show’s title is 100 percent apt- the show is about the things we take for granted every day and how wonderful or terrible or compelling they are.  There’s an episode about the avant-garde jazz produced by the Washington DC Metro Escalators.  There’s an episode, a great one, about the uber-modern and really beautiful prison hidden in plain site in the loop in Chicago.  There’s an episode about the origin of the Teddy Bear, and one about how Cul-De-Sacs have changed how neighborhoods are built.

And then last week, they did one on the Beauty Pill.  What, you might ask, would a Dischord punk-dance-gang have to do with a radio show about design?   If you consider yourself a Beauty Pill fan (and if you do, then you are/you’d surely be a friend of mine), you can thank design and architecture for the existence of a forthcoming album from the band, the first new music they’ve released since 2004(!)   The episode says it, but if for some reason you’re scared of podcasts or NPR, here’s the gist- The Beauty Pill singer/lyricist Chad Clark almost died a few years back.  After that, fronting a punk act seemed pretty low on his list of things he wanted to do.  He spent some time working on other people’s albums, but his own musical output became, well, not the point exactly.

And then a DC-area gallery asked Clark to set up shop in their space.  He accepted, not at all sure what kind of music or, even, sounds, would come out.  Quickly, he started writing  and performing and part of what inspired him was a huge glass window in the gallery which piqued the interest of passersby.   The window invited people in, and, once they were in, Chad invited them to play.  It’s unclear how many people will end up on the recordings that will be on the new album, whenever it is released, but probably, it will be a lot.  It’s an odd thought- this will be an album filled with strangers.

On my second or third post on this blog, 5 years ago, I talked about how The Beauty Pill felt more like a collective than a band.   This looks to be more collaborative, more democratic, more like a crucible than even the band’s past work.   This is exciting stuff, and the new song is just as unforgiving and provoking as you’d hope from this band.  Listen to it again and again,  you can stop when you think you might need stitches.

“Prison Song“  and “Terrible Things“  are from The Beauty Pill album The Unsustainable Lifestyle.

the rabbits declare a mistrial.

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

We Are Augustines are simple and they’re not.

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

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

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

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

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

turn it towards god, then forget about it.

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

1- A song about snow. Because it snowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and one more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Also, hey chicago- shows!

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

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

Here you go. The albums which helped this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy 2012, y’all. See you in a bit.