After the war

Yesterday saw the release of Post-War by M. Ward, an album which I've been fortunate enough to get to soak in for the past several weeks already. At this point, it'd probably be a good idea to point out that I had little experience (aside from a few spins through Transistor Radio) with Ward's music before getting my hands on this disc, although I've heard nothing but raves. Post-War gives me little reason to think these people were high. The music on this disc has all the broken-in warmth of a ratty couch in a darkened living room, probably one with fake wood paneling from the mid-'70s. Ward shows a stunning ability to draw from myriad sources (the gritty Delta blues of Son House on "Requiem," Billie Holiday torch ballads on "Poison Cup," the sultry and smoky R&B of, seriously, Sade on "Post-War") and tie them together with his gently raspy voice and spare instrumentation. All of Ward's compositions begin their life on a four-track, and those humble beginnings show through again and again on the record, but his and his engineers' enthusiasm for expanding their sonic vocabulary is admirable, and much like Wilco's pushing of the traditional songwriting envelope on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Post-War shows how it's possible to retain the simplicity of a great melody while spiking it with enough texture to make it new again. I had wanted to get a full-length article into the print edition this week, but forces conspired to keep it out of there. Instead, you're getting the raw interview right here for your enjoyment.

How did your appearance on the Late Show go?

it was a blast--we met dave letterman and the dog from "sex and the city"....

Is touring something you look forward to?

yeah--when i get a nice break in between to sleep and recharge--this tour is especially great because i took a year off from travelling to catch my breath and for the first time i get to tour with the people i recorded the record with--so , im feeling good.

There are a lot of unique vocal treatments on the disc. Is that something you look to replicate when you play live, or do you treat them as distinct arenas when it comes to sound treatment?

the best vocals ever recorded came out of Sun Studios--those are the vocal sounds we were shooting for on this record but crossed with other ideas as it pertained to the song/lyric.

What's your songwriting process like? Do you write pieces and then put them together, or do you write whole songs at once or do you do something else?

there's never been a formula really--the only somewhat constant is that all the songs begin alone and with the 4-track that i've been using since i was in high school--one of the tracks is broken now so its sort of become a three-track now--the only one i know of in existence actually ...

Transistor Radio was a kind of homage to a bygone era in radio--does Post-War come out of any similar overlying concept? It seems like it's consciously divided up into movements or sections.

well the "transistor" record was more of an attempt to create something tangible out of memories of the times when i was a kid and first discovering music/radio--i wanted the new record to sonically go against that sentimentality and try something bolder.

Post-War seems to really reward close listening, i.e. with headphones or loudly in a living room. Was that a natural outgrowth of the recording process, or was it a quality you went in wanting to capture?

every record i've ever made has been an attempt to invent a hybrid between the old 4-track sounds that i grew up recording with and the newer experiences of discovering strange machines and experimenting with weird microphones whose names i cant spell here--a lot of credit is due to my engineers Mike Coykendall and Adam Selzer whose knowledge of the medium can best be described as very, very, very vast.

I read in your bio that you're a fan of David Lynch's films. Me too. His intuitive approach to imagery (meaning not overthinking what an image represents, but rather relying on unconscious associations) is something that I've found equally compelling when applied to lyrical (say, Jeff Tweedy's experiments with cut and paste techniques) or musical (I'm thinking DJ Shadow's Endtroducing) compositions. What kind of influence have his or other filmmakers' work had on you?

there's a ton of free association involved in the process--a melody you stumble on the guitar will remind you of a song from whenever and so you might borrow the tempo or a chord change--and then once the song starts going and it seems to be working you take it to the studio and every once in awhile, usually in the middle of producing a song, the production or chord changes or a lyric will remind you of something you may have seen in a film, or a story you heard when you were a kid--most films go in one ear/eye and out the other but the scenes that a bunch of people like kubrick, lynch, rohmer, almodovar, fellini and mike leigh have made stick around in my head for probably longer than they should and end up coming out in unconscious ways in the recording process ... weird, i know ...

You also talked about some older jazz influences like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong in your bio. It seems like a lot of current music doesn't like to look back further than the late '60s for inspiration, but there's so much great stuff out there to draw on. Do you feel that
musicians--especially young musicians--aren't getting enough exposure to things like Duke Ellington or even Bach or Beethoven?

what you have here is a good question and one that i honestly dont know the answer to--i still believe that there are millions of Americans who still listen to ellington and bach but most of them have either moved to europe or just don't seem to get around much anymore.


M. Ward plays the Varsity Theater on Tue., Sept. 3 with Shelley Short. 8 p.m. $13/$14 18+. 1308 4th St. SE., Mpls. 612-604-0222.

the thrilling of claire fisher?

so i woke up with "the thrilling of claire" by the national stuck in my head. it's on the bonus disc that comes with the re-issued version of alligator, which, by the way, should have been number 1 or 2 on my top ten CDs of 2006, but i hadn't gotten into it yet. And darnit, I forgot about sentence case again. But anyways, I've been wondering if the song's about Claire Fisher from the show "Six Feet Under." Unsurprisingly for the National, it's about some seriously dark stuff, as is that show, so that's kind of a wash. But at just the point when I stopped watching SFU, there was a scene where Claire is talking to two of her girlfriends about sex and they decide that she's never had the big O, and they're going to do something about that. OK, I know you're thinking, 'Steve, how could you have stopped watching at that point?' But I did. It's a long story.

Anywho, there's a line in the National song that goes, "The aftereffects of three girls on two girls / I'll just help you finish off." Hmmm ... anybody care to back this theory up or put it to rest?

kitchen sink music

isn't there a saying about good things coming in threes? i was commenting to my friend martine last night at big trouble's weekly show at the kitty cat klub (plug! come next week when we play for free and with rob skoro on a handful of killer cover!) that i seem to latch onto three records at a time. for a while, i was all about band of horses, crystal skulls and the national. then it was small sins, phoenix and midlake. and now i've recently been getting into this collection of bands that grab things from all over the map and throw them all at some analog tape or a disk drive, hoping something will stick.

i was compelled to check out danielson's ships after watching the danielson family movie, which will be showing here in mpls during the sound unseen festival. long story short, daniel smith started a family band in 1995 for his senior music thesis project at rutgers, and here we are ten years (okay eleven) witnessing the collective fruits of his labors. ships draws together everyone who's been involved with smith's particular vision of music since he began the project and it's stunningly bombastic, but not in an over-the-top, giant distorted guitar kind of way. like sufjan stevens, smith is very upfront about his faith--probably even moreso than stevens--but, like stevens, this doesn't mean his music offers easy answers or bland restatements of christian doctrine. you could probably listen to this disc for months or years and never pick up a distinctly religious overtone. forgive me, steve marsh, but i'm going to lean on an old crutch here and tell you that it comes off like modest mouse crossed with sufjan stevens. seriously. and i feel justified in saying that here, because if you like either of those bands, this one is worth checking out, but if you aren't familiar with stevens or modest mouse, you should probably go to them first before you hit up danielson.

And I just realized that I'm still typing in all lowercase letters, but I'm trying to type in sentence case on the blog from now on.

The second of the troika is Return to the Sea by Islands. Cats love this record, but I had a bit of a hard time getting into it at first, what with the 7+ minute opener, but it's hard to deny an album with track titles like "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby" and "Jogging Gorgeous Summer." The key for me was "Rough Gem," though, whose skewered bubblegum groove is as off-kilter as the rest of the disc, but warm enough to provide easy entrance into their stuff. You can check that track out and the rest of them for yourself at their MySpace page. I'm not ready to discuss it too much more yet, as I've just gotten into it.

And then in the mail today, I got the new disc from Dosh, The Lost Take. I've only been through it once, but it should come as no surprise that it's like a fun toybox of musical snippets and melodies. Marty makes it sound like he's just playing with the stuff, and yet I know from messing around with some of this kind of stuff myself, it's not easy to do well. And I'm not calling Dosh out for this, more his publicity, but was Eric Applewick a member of Tapes 'n' Tapes when they recorded this stuff? I mean, I'd do the exact same thing: If somebody I was working with was suddenly a member of a suddenly high-profile band, you better believe I'm putting that on my one-sheet. It doesn't matter one bit as far as the music's concerned, but it's just something that stuck out to me.

joga bonita

My dad sent me a link to this article by a professor of economics at the University of Chicago about his experience watching the World Cup Final about a month ago:

Bend It Like (Yogi) Berra

It's an interesting piece, not to mention funny, and, in a lot of ways, spot on. There's little doubt that they've got to come up with a better way to decide the World Cup Final than a penalty shootout. But it made me think of two things: A qualification and a re-framing of the argument (and I swear this is going to come around to music in its own way).

Firstly, judging the sport of soccer based mostly on that game isn't really fair--it's a little bit like judging the sport of football on the Bucaneers/Raiders Super Bowl from 2003. That was a blowout that the Raiders were never really in, and say what you want about soccer, there are rarely blowouts, and when there are, they're way more entertaining than in any other sport I can think of. Argentina's 6-0 drubbing of Serbia was one of the better games of this World Cup, featuring the probably the tournament's best goal in Maxi Rodriguez's stunning volley.

And while watching the Red Sox sweep the Cards out of the World Series in 2004 was fun for me as a Red Sox fan, it probably wasn't much fun for anyone unfamiliar with the history there or the game of baseball in general. Point being, there are good and bad championships in every sport and this year's World Cup Final was quite a letdown.

But there's a bigger issue this made me think of, and that's asking just what the point of sport is. No one would deny that the goal of playing a game is winning, but that's a little like saying the point of having a job is making money, the point of playing is music is being techincally facile, the point of living is having kids. It's a question of focus, I think, so when Sanderson says, "In the United States we structure most competitive contests to ensure that talent and performance are the main determinants of outcomes," he's completely correct. But that very emphasis on performance is what leads to athletes like Barry Bonds, athletes who in all probability are using performance enhancing drugs to ensure their place in the record books, with or without asterisks.

Sanderson talks about how sports have historically adopted and changed to bring in new audiences, and this has certainly been the case with the NHL, which has looked way better recently than it did before the strike thanks to rule changes. But changes in baseball have brought batters who wear armor and juiced balls. You might denigrate soccer for not changing with the times, but I think there's something to be said for the way it's basically stayed unchanged.

But whatever: here's what I'm on about. John Lennon said that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, and I think that what you get from sports is what happens while you're busy trying to win.

The notion of fair play is at heart a romantic notion--it's the idea that equality across the board can be ensured, when in reality this doesn't happen. And when you start talking about romance, ideas about nostalgia, the past and memory come into play, and this is, to me, the essential crux of the debate over everything from lists of the 100 Best Albums of All Time to the All-Time Home Run Leaders. How many of the albums that have made my Top Ten Lists for the past couple years will end up being in my Top Twenty or even Top Fifty of All Time? Time keeps restlessly moving on, sweeping the past under the rug even as we seek to codify it and give it meaning that endures.

And therein lies an essential difference between music and sports. Sports are measured with yardsticks and statistics, making them subject to changes in the way the games are played or in the way statistics are kept. Music, and for our purposes that essentially means recorded music, is subject to technological changes, but we don't measure the worth of an album on its technical perfection. Sure, sound quality is a part of the equation, but there are plenty of albums that are fantastic, despite not measuring up sonically. It's an art, obviously, and what sportswriters are appealing to when they talk about someone being better than their numbers is the artistry of sport. That's what makes sports so darn fascinating, at least to me: moment-to-moment, your witnessing creativity within a predefined space, aka art. But as we look back, we can measure performances with numbers, aka science. Weird, huh?

It seems to me like we need a kind of particle-wave theory of sports. Measuring the stats makes sport look like a conglomeration of particles--I mean, how can you have .2 of a rebound? You take a book like The Wages of Wins, which basically applies Freakonmics to sports, and you learn that if you take all these numbers from the 2003 season for indivudal players and evaluate them with these regression algorithms or whatever (sorry, not an economist), you can see that the number of wins a team had is predicted by the individual players' stats. Crazy, huh? So how many games are they going to win next year? Sadly, the book doesn't really seem to be able to tell you that any better than most sportswriters because who knows?

That's up to the artists out on the court or the field or the diamond. Or the pitch.

she had lost with the bully conscience

So I'm bumping this disc by Margot and the Nuclear So and So's because I read on Salon's Audiofile about how the Margot in the band's name is Margot Tennenbaum from "The Royal Tennenbaums." And I'm a sucker for all things Wes Anderson. I'm thinking maybe for my birthday I'll organize a party wherein I show all of Wes Anderson's movies ("Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," "The Royal Tennenbaums," and "Life Aquatic," for those of you scoring at home) and have some bands play. Don't even know how I would handle the logistics of that.

But about this band: I don't know who the Nuclear So and So's are or what relationship they have to the object of Richie's affection. This album doesn't sound very much like music that would appear in an Anderson film, which, of course, is not its duty, but the music doesn't seem unrelated to their vibe, as Thomas Bartlett at Salon noted. So far, I'm having a hard time thinking anything except softly brushed indie rock here. Of course, I could have said largely the same thing about Midlake, and their disc has gradually turned into one of my favorite of the year. So far, so hookless, though. I may just rewind back to the second track, "Skeleton Key," which Bartlett talked about.

sunny day real estate - how it feels to be something on

buy HIFTBSO from amazon.com

Late last week, I got the chance to interview Jeremy Enigk, he of Sunny Day Real Estate, The Fire Theft and two solo albums. Then, per usual, I wrote an article for the Pulse in which I felt obliged to keep the focus as squarely as possible on his new disc, World Waits, along with some more general history, but now I'm taking the opportunity to say what I really think is important about Jeremy Enigk.

If you buy one album this week, buy How It Feels to Be Something On.

I came to SDRE, like most people, via their debut album, Diary. Once I'd absorbed that, I bought How It Feels, since it had just come out (this was back in '98), but then I ignored it for close to six months in favor of delving into their second album, which is either called LP2 or The Pink Album.

Once I discovered the song "Every Shining Time You Arrive" on How It Feels, though, I was hooked. How It Feels was SDRE's return album, made after the band's breakup, which was due at least in part to Enigk's conversion to Christianity. Not that that solved his problems; How It Feels is one of the most deeply conflicted albums ever made, teetering on the knife edge between corporeal love and spiritual love and in the process addressing things like capitalism, infidelity, transcendence and utopia.

The tone is set by one of the best album opening songs ever, "Pillars." William Goldsmith is at least as essential to SDRE's sound as Jimmy Chamberlain was to Smashing Pumpkins', and the straightforward tattoo he lays down opens up for Enigk's almost subliminally whispered, "Help," which rises as if from the bottom of a deep well, eliding neatly into the tone setting couplet, "But you were always one to stay the same/ girl, I know you want to be the rain." "Rain" is one of those words that creeps up continually throughout Enigk's lyrics, standing in for change or cleansing, usually, as it does here.

The track is claustrophobic and ominous in a way that SDRE never really were before. Sure, they were big, and they were depressed, but the weight of the music, combined with lyrics that hint at attempts to convert the infidels ("We'll wait for time to turn around your faith," and, chillingly, "The world we sold; there was a choir there/ there's a place for you."), sets the pace for an album that will hit both harder and softer, but invariably go for the gut.

Musical motifs crop up here that will return throughout the album, including the doubling of the vocal melody on guitar or bass. It seems like a simple idea, but it's not something you hear very much of, although the most recent Wolf Parade album puts a spin on this by prefacing bridges and codas with mirrored guitar lines in the choruses and verses. Enigk's multi-layered vocals during the bridge here are used to stunning effect, and again, we'll see this again later in the album.

The next track, "Roses in Water," centers around a loping melodic minor (read: Middle Eastern-sounding) guitar riff in, of all things, 9/4 time. Plenty of bands use odd time signatures, but SDRE seems to have a special facility, and Goldsmith in particular, for making them sound natural. The lyrics here reflect the quasi-mysticism that runs through Enigk's output, but here, he's particularly adept at spinning out evocative imagery ("Roses in water/ Wise men see/ Move around me for/ centuries") without assigning a personal meaning to it. Despite the agitated and ever-shifting musical ground of the song, it's one of How It Feels most assured moments, not to mention a relatively light palette cleanser between "Pillars" and "Every Shining Time You Arrive."

As I said before, "ESTYA" was the song that really stuck with me when I first got into this album. On a purely sonic level, it's brilliant. The acoustic guitar tone was achieved, as best I can guess, by micing not just the guitar in the traditional fashion, but also with a contact mike on the inside of the guitar's body. The result is a piano-like tone which is one of the more unique guitar treatments. As much as I like it, Enigk's soon-to-be-released solo album World Waits could have done with more of this.

Note the brilliantly unexpected and semi-walking bassline in the chorus. It's one of the last things I really picked up on, and it's a completely out-of-the-blue sonic treat on an album full of such moments.

The lyrics revisit the themes from "Pillars," but with a note of conflict. The protagonist is searching for meaning, turning outwards towards those around him ("I want to change everything/ I want to blame everything on ...") and struggling for clarity ("So the story's told beyond our grasp/ We were climbing forever, an infinite task ... Oh and all these seed will grow anyway/ Even though the outcome, we cannot say."). The turn comes in the the bridge, when his desire for spiritual purity and relief from the every day whim of fate is broken by the simple presence of someone he cares deeply for: "In the depths of my gloom/ I crawl out for you/ From the peaks of my joy/ I crawl back into/ Tearing me down every time you smile/ Every shining time you arrive." Whether you take the song to be entirely addressed to a lover, a friend or a divine presence, or some combination thereof, it's a beautiful limning of the twin desires for salvation and independence.

"Two Promises" shows the considerable influence of the Beatles on SDRE's songwriting, an influence already in evidence with their dalliance with Middle Eastern tonalities on "Roses in Water." If the previous song was about standing on the precipice between spiritual and physical love, this one has pitched headlong into the disappointment and regreat that comes with any kind of relationship. It's a crushing song, with Enigk giving it his vocal all. It's tempting to label it anti-woman, and in fact, that would be an easy charge to make against this album as a whole, but things aren't so simple as that. The song also functions as a condemnation of man's earthly desire, in much the same way as "Butterfly" by Weezer. As a whole, the record is basically anti-flesh, anti-fleeting. It's searching for something that will last. In this way, it's quintessentially Buddhist, really, at least in as much as someone going down the first steps of the eight-fold path will rail against the world's impermanence before accepting it.

The album shifts gears in terms of song structure here at the near halfway point. "100 Million" takes a stab at capitalism and greed, lamenting our desire to own everything we see, and even things we can't see ("Pay for the hole in the ground to place your bones ... Pay for the simplest things"). I'm going to take a pass on analzying the lyrics with a microscope so I can focuse on the geekiest musical thing I can imagine. If you're not into time signatures and in-depth musical analysis, feel free to skip way ahead.

In what amounts to the chorus (in that it contains the song's title and is a different part following two verses and pre-choruses), SDRE pull of a neat trick. A lone guitar is introduced, playing a simple waltz-time figure: one bass note followed by a simple chiming figure over two different chords. It's four measures of 6/8, for those of you sight-reading along at home. The bassist (Jeff Palmer of the Mommyheads, filling in ably for absent founding member Nate Mendel--more on him later), though, plays a figure which breaks down into a measure of 6/8, a measure of 7/8, a measure of 6/8 and a measure of 5/8. Goldsmith, on the drums, kind of splits the difference, accenting the first beat of Palmer's third measure with a cymbal hit, but then hitting the snare on the guitarist's backbeat. The net effect is that the bass note followed by high figure pattern of the guitar is switched around, resulting in a chiming figure followed by a bass note. What's ill is how they pull it off so casually. It's really the thing that keeps the song pulling itself forward up the hill of the album as a whole, leading to a kind of plateau where the title track looks out over the whole affair from the midway point.

"How It Feels to Be Something On" is the dark heart of the record, possessing a mournful quality about wasted days intercut with moments of clarity and light. After intoning, "We're going nowhere," Enigk sings, "Don't tell me now, the days I've had/ To fill it up but spill instead." A list of empty objects follows into the chorus, which ends with the very slightly life-affirming: "All these things. I've seen/ How it feels to be something on," a line which Enigk sings with a combination of resignation and relief. His intimate relationship with his faith is shown when in the second pre-chours he switches the line to "Don't tell me God, the days I've had ..." He's practically begging/ordering God to not make him face his wasted life. He owns up to it, though, holding desperately to those few moments when he's been at peace. It's a kind of grace note of hope in an otherwise deeply dark album, and it leads nicely into the album's emotional highpoint, "The Prophet."

"The Prophet" is a song that I didn't care for for a long time, but once I could appreciate it in the scheme of the entire album, it grew in my estimation. Again, moments of light and hope are precious commodities on this album, and Enigk's entreaty, "Will you carry me cross the sea? Will you carry me?" has an innocence that's hard to resist. It serves as an answer to some of the concerns of other voices on the album. The walls that the protagonist kept trying to build in "Two Promises" here fall down, allowing "hearts to pour out/ when the frozen ground/ comes alive around us." The song stands at a turn in the road from weakness and depseration to strength, as indicated by the hopeful journey to the end of the album that begins in the next song.

Aside from having one of the great song title of all time, "Guitar and Video Games" is a heroic call to arms, throwing off the trappings of weak-willed human desire for something better and stronger. "All this time looking for love/ and you want to find peace but you find ... me," sings Enigk, drawing out that last pause to show just how disappointing people can be. Somehow, though, in some way, "we find the true story/ a tale/ writing itself as we sail/ a story/ a tale/ writing itself as we wail." The album's hero has grasped a thread running through, and he's prepared to hang on and ride it out to the end, saving just one last volley for those left behind.

In our interview, Enigk indicated that he was through pointing fingers because it was just too hypocritical, so I'm glad he managed to get "The Shark's Own Private Fuck" out of his system before he became the bigger man. Rumor has it that the song is directed specifically at bassist Nate Mendel, who decided to stay with the Foo Fighters rather than return to record the third Sunny Day album, but personally I think Enigk just took the kernel of his anger over that situation as the jumping off point for this harsh screed against materialism. "You talk to yourself/ Believing the fear that drives your greed/ When you discover the empty place/ A hollow world of instant pleasures," sings Enigk, condemning those who would cling to material pleasures, to the fruits of their labors: Things, and nothing but. It's a brilliantly bilious screed, but it doesn't hold out much to replace greed with. That's what the closing song is for.

"Days Were Golden" finishes the album on an up note, the protagonist waving goodbye to a place that promises only "a dying cold world but gold, shimmering gold" and onto a place of better things. The song's chorus neatly packages up the message of the album as a whole: "Come momma now, tell me a story/ Only laughing/ About our gilded wasteland/ Devoured, torn into pieces/ Come now we shine/ Small things ever calling out your name/ you hear some other time unchained, alive/ a world undefined."

The thing that makes this album outstanding is its cohesiveness. It's not simply a collection of woe-is-me whining and victimhood. It's not a parrotting of the words of the faithful simply entreating you to take their path to make everything better. It's a complex, nuanced look into the conflicts and desires that bind us to this world even as we strive to break them. And, in the end, it's a promise that there's a way forward.