The 20 '06 Appendix

In case you didn't get here from there, here's a link to my article about my 20 '06 mix, 20 songs from my 20 favorite albums, local and national, of '06. This here's the appendix, and some fancily pantsed stuff that links you to the mix, I hope:

Here are the lists, in ranked order, which I actually put some thought into.

Top Ten National Records of 2006

1. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
2. Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther
3. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
4. Crystal Skulls, Outgoing Behavior
5. The Knife, Silent Shout
6. Band of Horses, Everything All the Time
7. Boris, Pink
8. Islands, Return to the Sea
9. Snowden, Anti-Anti
10. Small Sins, Small Sins

Top Ten Local Records of 2006

1. P.O.S., Audition
2. Mouthful of Bees, The End
3. Kill the Vultures, Careless Flame
4. Haley Bonar, Lure the Fox
5. The Plastic Constellations, Crusades
6. Jeremy Messersmith, The Alcatraz Kid
7. The Danforths, Look Out for Wolves
8. Dosh, The Lost Take
9. One for the Team, Good Boys Don't Make Noise
10. Awesome Snakes, Venom

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Subtle, For Hero: For Fool :: The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America :: Phoenix, It's Never Been Like That :: Lupe Fiasco, Food and Liquor :: Jeremy Enigk, World Waits :: Destroyer, Destroyer's Rubies :: Duplomacy, All These Long Drives :: Adam Arcuragi, Adam Arcuragi :: Rhymefest, Blue Collar :: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Broom :: TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain :: M. Ward, Post-War :: The Alarmists, A Detail of Soldiers :: Jelloslave, Touch It

And you know what? I'm probably forgetting some local releases in the honorable mentions, so I'll come back and fix that up, too.

Happy 2006.

"One with the freaks"

Recently I've been combing through my iTunes library and finding and/or re-finding all kinds of great stuff I had forgotten about. I made a killer powerpop mix (Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, A.C. Newman, all the greats) and I also put The Notwist's amazing album Neon Golden back up on my iPod.

The song that really grabbed me this time around is "One With the Freaks," which you can listen to on their MySpace page here. I suggest you go there now and listen to it. I'll wait.

Neon Golden spent about three months as my favorite album back in the spring of '04, and my favorite song ping-ponged back and forth between "One With the Freaks" and "Consequence." What's all the more unbelievable is that these guys used to be a serious German punk band. I went back and got 12, which was their first record to dabble in electronics, but man, it's still got nothing on this one. I'm listening to "One With the Freaks" again. When it kicks in at the close of the first chorus, there can't be anything better than that sound. Plus, there's something extra-touching about Markus Acher's German accent: "Have you ever / Have you ever / Been all messed up?" I interviewed him via e-mail when 13&God came to play the Walker and I asked him about writing in a foreign language.

“[I]t’s difficult and strange,” he said of writing songs in a non-native language, “but I grew up with music with English lyrics, so I never thought about it when I wrote my first song. It was the language of pop music for me. Now I’ve thought a lot about it and I think it makes me very limited, but it also offers me possibilities of using language different[ly] than native speakers do, which is a special, more unconscious way to poetry. I don’t try to sound like a native speaker; I want to stumble through the English language and maybe find some truth by saying it differently.”

And I think he does, you know? He uses some weird syntax and vocab, and it has this strangely sweet aspect to it. Like in "Consequence": "You're the color / you're the movement and the spin / Never / couldn't stay with me the whole day long / Fail with consequence / lose with eloquence / and smile / I'm not in this movie / I'm not in this song / Never / leave me paralyzed, love."

Damn. You can listen to "Consequence" on their MySpace page, too. I should probably start keeping that best of the '00s list right now, because Neon Golden needs to be on it.

Also? I had a dream I was playing on the Nuggets with Allen Iverson. Seemed like a cool guy, but man, that new ball does suck. When I was coming up for the court for a layup, it was squeaking or something really weird.

Mythbusters

Did anybody else watch any of the Mythbusters marathon on the Discovery Channel yesterday? What a great show; I had no idea. The idea for having a show in which urban legends and other bits of apocrypha are put to the test scientifically is brilliant enough, but splitting the show between two separate teams (stunt coordinators Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are one team--the more technically daring team--and Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Scottie Chapman make up the other, more J.V. team--they're relegated to tasks like tracking how well Christmas trees respond to different mixtures for food or determining if you can really shoot a hole in a silver dollar with a Colt Peacemaker) is the really genius thing. It keeps you interested the whole time, and from episode to episode, as my fiancee can attest, much to her chagrin.

The highpoint of the episodes I saw yesterday was when they tried to cut a pig carcass in half by snapping a high tension line. They couldn't do it, no matter what gauge of metal wire they used, including some seriously heavy duty stuff. Their conclusion? It might kill you, but you won't be cut in half by a snapping wire, even if it has 40,000 lbs of pressure on it. But then Adam Savage got frustrated with their inability to cut the pig in half, so he looped the heavy gauge wire around Mr. Oinkers, tied the other end to an industrial forklift and hit the gas. Result? "Pork salad," in the words of Hyneman.

The show's pure gold.

Deftones at First Ave

Wow. Just wow. If you ever have a chance to catch a band that's used to playing in arenas and at outdoor festivals in a venue the size of First Ave, I heartily recommend doing it. I've never heard a heavy, incredibly loud band sound so GOOD. I saw Soundgarden three or four times in their heyday, and let me tell you, they sucked live. I remember Metallica being impressive, but it was at Lollapalooza, so it's pretty hard to judge sound. I distinctly remember disliking Ministry live.

But Deftones were so self-assured and solid. I had heard mixed things about them live, but I thought Chino Moreno was in great voice, hitting all the high notes, even on throat-wreckers like "Digital Bath" from White Pony. They covered a lot of ground, playing songs from every album they've released (I'm pretty sure--I'm not too familiar with Adrenaline), although the highlights were "My Own Summer (Shove It)," "Knife Prty," and "Xerces."

Here's where I get all meta on your ass: Even if you're not a fan of loud, heavy, aggressive music, I think checking out Deftones, especially live, is worth your time. I think that seeing anyone who's really good at something do it in person is worth your time: a deft surgeon in the operating room, a tennis player like Roger Federer playing in a final, a classical pianist performing Bach's "Well-Tempered Klavier," Defontes absolutely destroying the mainroom at First Ave. Because here's the thing: seeing people who have mastered a discipline, performing at the height of their abilities, is just about the most beautiful thing I can imagine, not to mention just about the only thing worth something in this here life.

I'm not a believer in the afterlife, so I think we need to make the most of what we've got right now.

This is something Kevin McHale and the rest of the Timberwolves management should keep in mind in the future. Goddamnit. I can't believe we didn't get Iverson.

I mean, actually, I can, which is what makes it all the worse. I'd been trying to come up with the right real world analogy for how it made me feel when I read the news that A.I. had gone to Denver, and I finally came up with it last night.

You're in a relationship, and it was good for a while, but now it's getting on six months or so and things aren't going great. You have moments where you think you've got to get out and then moments when you think it might work out. So you plan a vacation with your S.O., but you're not kidding yourself--you know it probably won't fix anything deep down, but it's going to be fun and maybe you can forget about the problems for a while. But then in the lead-up to the vacation you begin to invest it with way more significance than it should have, maybe just subconsciously. And then two days before you're supposed to go, you have to cancel because of some entirely stupid extenuating circumstances. But now you suddenly feel EVEN WORSE than you did before you planned the vacation because the failure of the vacation to come to fruition is just another example of what an abject failure the entire relationship is, and, as a matter of fact, the vacation's cancellation comes to represent the entire endeavor's absolute crappiness.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2006-07 Minnesota Timberwolves. Kevin: please, just go. I'll hold the door.

A.I. Trade Watch 2006

All right, it's officially on. After moving from denial into acceptance in a hot ticket a couple weeks back, I'm firmly back at the top of the cycle with rumors of Allen Iverson being traded to the T'wolves. Apparently he's ain't going to the Bobcats, and some other teams have already bowed out of the running. Put me down as being for it, damnit. Back when I first got into basketball (oh, around '99) Iverson was one of my favorite players, and I'm sure he'd make a great, gutsy addition. It's clear Garnett is itching to have a real player alongside him.

Can I sign up for some kind of e-mail notification?

Dream, brother

Mouthful of Bees' singer Chris Farstad's quavering alto¹ has gotten me back on a mini-Jeff Buckley kick this morning. Also, local label Sugarfoot Music has just put out a compilation called For New Orleans whose real standout track is a recording of Jeff Buckley singing "I Shall Be Released" over the phone on a radio show from Jersey with a band of on-air musicians that includes cellist Michelle Kinney from Jelloslave. That was a complicated sentence. It's a striking performance for the ridiculous clarity of the sound of the band² as opposed to the ragged phone-compressed sound of Buckley's voice. The full story of the recording is included in the extensive booklet that comes with the disc. Anywho, the release party for the disc is this Sunday, and you can get more info on the Pulse website here.

So anyways, this Jeff Buckley kick is reminding of the story about how they made Grace at a studio in upstate New York³. Apparently they had three completely different setups for recording the tunes: one was a regular studio setup for the full band, one was a live setup on a stage and one was for more intimate, smaller and/or acoustic setups. And they had amps set up with mics and everything all the time, just ready to go. To me, that seems like just a fantastic way to make an album. I remember when I used to work on recordings in my apartment in Connecticut with my bandmate Todd and we had to set up and break down all the stuff every time⁴.

I also just recently made the connection between Mouthful of Bees' lo-fi fuzzy glory and Chris Lee's soul-infused indie rock. The connection mostly hooks up at the Jeff Buckley comparison, but what I really dug about Lee's first disc was how it sounded like a gutter-version of Buckley, and Mouthful of Bees has that same vibe--the feeling that you've walked into a rehearsal space and caught them in mid-tune, the high end pushing into the red just a bit.

¹ Maybe? I'm not completely clear on the demarcation of voice ranges, but it seems higher than tenor. Perhaps tenor with a kick-ass falsetto?

² So clear you can even hear the crickets outside the studio on the recording.

³ Bearsville, I think.

⁴ Well, either that or live in a forest of microphone stands in the living room. Which we did, sometimes.

Grammy nominees

Sigh.

Nominations for the 40-somethingth Annual Grammy Awards are available online here.

Once again, a baffling mix of far left field choices and down-the-pipe mediocrity. Why, for the love of god, would you nominate Death Cab's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" from an album that has "What Sarah Said" and "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" on it? Not that "I Will ..." is a bad song, but I don't think it's half the song of either of those other two.

In good news, Lupe Fiasco's "Kick, Push" was nominated for best rap song (and also possibly track--any kind of categorization that has to make clear that the best rap album must be an album on which at least 51% of the content is people rapping is clearly indicative of a necrotic system). He deserves to win. But he won't.

Snowden at the Triple Rock

Snowden's full-length debut, Anti-Anti, really took me by surprise. At first I thought it had a couple cool songs ("Counterfeit Rules" and the title track) but then I realized that "My Murmuring Darling" is also great. And "Black Eyes." And "Innocent Heathen." And pretty much every other track on this disc. The tools they use are deceptively simple: muscular basslines, delay-laden guitar parts, and singer Jordan Jeffares' laconic delivery. On record, it's a humble mix of Interpol's darkness and Bloc Party's danceness, but live, the parts make up a considerably greater sum. They didn't play "Counterfeit Rules," which disappointed me a bit, but everything they did play felt confident and solid. The switch from distorted keyboard bass to real live four-string bass on "Black Eyes" came off as particularly forceful. Here are some photos I took, plus, here's the link to their MySpace page, where you can check out a handful of tracks. Who knew Atlanta could brew this up?

Snowden on MySpace

The Current's Top 89 of 2006

Why 89? Oh, I just figured that out. Anyways, if you're like me, you probably enjoy making lists of favorite things, and this has been a banner year for killer albums. It's going to be hard to write up a year-end article with only ten slots, but I'm going to try to keep it to that. Anywho: vote early and often.

You heard it here first

Shellac shows up to play the STNNNG/Signal to Trust lunch show

That's all I'm saying.

Oranges Band transcript

So, as I was working on my article for this week, which is about The Oranges Band, who are absolutely one of the best bands out there these days, I began to realize that singer/guitarist Roman Kuebler and I had had a really kick-ass interview but that I didn't have room to really get to everything, so here's the transcription of the interview I did. It's not absolutely everything, and you don't get to see my questions, because I usually don't transcribe those, but I've subdivided it into sections. Anyways, Roman's super-cool and so is his band, so you should probably go check them out on Sun., Nov. 26 at the Triple Rock. You better believe I'm going.

Roman Kuebler (Oranges Band) Transcript

The last year

Hmm ... that was November ... what have I done with my life? That was our tour for our album that came out in June, 2005, and you know
our label kind of had some problems. So after our album came out, like 2 months afterwards, is when they kind of let go of all the bands and all the staff. And we went out on that tour and it was pretty obvious that support for the album was dwindling to a point where we couldn't push it all that much. We also had to get back to working. Spring is a busy time for me personally, so we did that instead of doing our usual trip to SXSW. We just thought we'd concentrate on our personal lives and focus on what we were going to do next. Which is what I did over the summer, after working pretty intensely over the spring, which is what allowed me to work on music almost exclusively and I worked on a lot of demos and I also worked producing a couple other bands. Which I'm still doing: it kind of takes forever when you don't have time or money.

The band wasn't all that active-- that's kind of the way we do stuff: I'll work on stuff and then we get back together and work on combing through stuff. We've been playing a lot of shows this fall.

It's kind of taken the whole year. It's kind of odd that it takes that long, but I guess I don't mind that, since it's given us the time to reflect on it in a way that is comfortable to us. In the past, I've always felt pressured by time, and not having that pressure has been really kind of liberating.

I think it's important to have a little bit of a reset. I think I've always used that and I imagine most people do. People who aren't The Beatles.

I do freelance artwork-- graphic design or art production. I also do architectural modeling. All different kinds of art production and design production. Our last album, Tad (Kubler) shot the cover, so I just compiled.

All the other albums, that's a part of it that I really like doing, but to have other people involved is something I also really like doing. I like singing backing vocals, but it's cooler when I get other people to do it.

Songwriting

I'm definitely the primary writer, which can mean a number of things. I also happen to play bass and drums-- I play all of the rock instruments at least well enough that I can write with them, so sometimes, when I'm coming up with an idea, I'll go all the way and just demo a whole recording with drums. Sometimes, when we then play it, it's fairly accurate to what I've done. Sometimes we'll take a demo and just mess with it and change it and see what anyone else can bring into the equation. The idea is that I'm always open for suggestion and I like the input of everyone in the group. The best stuff that we play tends to be when everyone is inputting their ideas, but the truth is, is that also the musical style sometimes doesn't suit everyone in the band, and the songs are different enough from each other that sometimes it's better to approach it in a different. We kind of always do what's best for the song. We did that some on our last record where Dan (our guitar player) would play drums on a song, or he'd play bass or I'd play bass. We'll kind of bounce around like that.

Things are changing. I always kind of reference ideas pretty specifically because it's been my experience that I can try and re-write a song and it's going to come out different enough that it'll still be my creation. So 'White Ride' is a Chuck Berry thing because I'm way into Chuck Berry and I thought that would be cool to do that. I don't mind directly referencing a band in that way. Like, it's clear where this came from, but this is how we're going to do it. Because we're not the Beach Boys, we're not gonna sound like the Beach Boys.

It's always all over the place. It's almost like for every song I could name the specific idea where that came from and sometimes that's not the case, but I would say with 75% of the stuff I can reference the band or the song. Right now, we just did a song that was this weird kind of funk-based thing. Kind of supposed to be a bit of an ESG kinds of thing, but I kind of ripped it off of a Peter Gabriel song, and then it got a little bit of a Clash thing going on. Somehow in the end it sounds like Spoon. I'm not sure how it happened, but it literally started with me trying to gank this Peter Gabriel idea and then it went through the ringer. I'm not against being straight-up about where things are coming from. I'm not that interested in being original. I don't know what original music would sound like. Of course it's original because it's come from my head, so I'm confident enough in that that I know no one's going to write the same song just 'cause that would be impossible.

I try and study a lot of music as much as possible. I've been listening to music pretty intently for a long time. When I was in middle school, I was into skate culture so I was into Minor Threat, Bad Brains, skate punk, stuff like that. Also the Smiths for some reason, but I guess that was just a middle school thing. In high school I got into old school rap, which, of course, at the time was not old school. So right around the first wave of rap I was kind of into it, but I got really into it when I got the first Run DMC record, so there as that whole period, and then I got out of that by getting into R.E.M. really strong and then from R.E.M., I went to Pavement and Nirvana and from there just went into indie rock, which started with Archers of Loaf and Polvo. From there, it's just been grabbing whatever's around. Figuring out where people are getting their influences, like listening to Otis Redding. I try to know about the stuff so I can talk about it. Candy Machine was a band that was around in Baltimore in the mid-'90s, and they did a kind of Gang of Four/The Fall thing, but when I first heard them, I'd never heard those bands. So when I heard them, I thought, man, this band sounds like no other band I've ever heard in my life. Just a sound I'd never heard before. And then I heard The Fall and Gang of Four. It didn't alter how much I liked Candy Machine, but it was just a lesson that music comes from someplace and it's good to know about that. I try and be as academic about music as I can be.

Recently I got this music archive from a friend of mine, and it has the Billboard charts for the last 50 years-- all mp3s. So it's got the past 100 for each year. It's an incredible resource. It's something that I look forward to knowing.

Also the bands that just didn't make the jump into legendary status or ones whose songs you know.

Baltimore

I moved here when I was 7 or so.

The city is not the way it used to be. They tore down Memorial Stadium and built Camden Yards, which is downtown, is much hipper, is more expensive, is cleaner, is cooler and appeals to people from D.C., and that pretty much describes the entire city. It's cleaner, it's a little bit cooler, it's safer, it appeals to people from D.C. and it's way more expensive. All of which is fine and good, except that I like it the way it was. I liked it being a little bit funky. I liked that I could live wherever I wanted and afford it.

There's a lot of development going on. I think someone finally realized that what Baltimore was was a major east coast city that no one was paying attention to. People figured that out quickly, and it changed the makeup of the city and the face of the city and the way that it acts. And that's not all for the bad. But it's lost that character: the ethnicity of certain neighborhoods. The class struggle seems a little bit more pronounced. As developers take over poor neighborhoods and turn them into little gold mines.

The place is always defined by the people, and I certainly have plenty of friends and people that I'm really happy to be around, and there's a lot of music happening here that's really excellent, and I would be hesitant to leave that scene.

It's not a regional problem: I don't think what's happening here is unique. I think it's happening in a lot of places and I wouldn't necessarily want to leave the east coast for any long stretch of time, and any place I'd end up would be similar. I've got this network of jobs and things that allow me to do what I do in general, which is work some, play some, tour some, play a little bit more, travel, and I guess I'd like to continue to be able to do that, so if that means I stay here, that's cool.

This is exactly what I'm talking about with the city: that building has been a club for 20 years if not more. In recent memory, it's been three rock clubs and servicing that community. Now all of a sudden, because there's development downtown, it's starting to be not a place where you can do this type of thing anymore.

I don't know how to feel about that kind of thing in general. I guess maybe that's how society happens-- it happens in fits and starts. Maybe it's dormant for a while and then everybody gets on the bandwagon.

The All-Music Guide

I kind of apologized to them because it was kind of a snarky little thing to do. I just thought it was funny way to approach that. I hadn't made any announcement that our old bass player had left and that we had a new bass player, and I didn't know exactly how to do it, and that seemed like kind of an appropriate way. For a long time they had us listed in the past tense and I'd always try to get someone at our label to do something about that. I tried at least one other time to figure out how to contact them with no luck, but I finally found the hidden link. Now that I have an in there, every other week, I'm just gonna send 'em a new update. It'll be like my own personal All Music Blog.

Labels and the business

I really like the people at Lookout, and our time there was really well-spent, but I don't think it was the best place for us to be and I think that some of the idea that we had going in didn't really work out that well. We felt like it wasn't going to be that weird that we were a pop-rock band on a punk label, because Lookout had spent its entire career redefining what it was and had had success with people like Ted Leo, but I guess I maybe overestimated that a little, because I don't think that people who were into Lookout as a label were into us being on Lookout, and people who were into us, were not all that into investigating what Lookout had to offer. I think Ted Leo certainly appeals to a Lookout type of crowd, just by who he is and how he conducts himself and his music. I think I maybe underestimated that a little bit. It was a little frustrating. I would just say our record didn't appeal to people, but the truth is, there's a lot of records on there that were kind of ignored. The Mary Tuney record was really, really great. Communique was a really great band. The Hockey Night record-- a lot of these were just great records. The roster they had was really phenomenal and they were just struggling to succeed with any of them, and that's what made me think that this wasn't just about me and The Oranges Band, it wasn't even about Lookout-- it's about other people.

There's a lot that's good about that, but there's a lot that's not. There's a lot that's really worrisome about it as well. It kind of swells and then it drops and what's next for them? A band like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah-- are they done now? Is anyone even interested? I have no idea. And I get the sense that maybe it's just so immediate that no one's interested in longevity. I just had a conversation with some friends at Merge, and they're preparing the next Arcade Fire record and they're like, 'I don't know what to do.' They're not sure what's going to happen. It's funny because you expect there to be a bit of backlash, you expect when someone has a phenomenal selling first record or second record, that the next one is not going to do that good, but if you sell 300,000 records, you can't say this one's going to sell 200,000. You can't want to sell less. It makes me wonder: when Fleetwood Mac came out with Rumours it sold, what, 13 million copies? Now they're preparing Tusk and people are going what are we going to do with this? I guess we have to sell 20? No, it's gonna sell 4. That's a good-selling record! But is it a failure?

Pearl Jam self-detonating their fame

That's such a healthy way to do it and I support that. I thought it was a pretty cheesy move to say we're not making videos anymore, because it was like, of course you don't have to make videos anymore-- you already made it. You already used the medium to its fullest extent and now you're above it? I thought that that was lame, but the way they continued to say, now we're not going to use Ticketmaster, we're not going to play in a venue that is a Clear Channel venue-- at the time I really recognized what was happening, and I realized they were instilling this punk ethic into a mainstream society. You know, 14-year0olds who listened to Pearl Jam had never considered the idea that you didn't have to buy your tickets from Ticketmaster because they're ripping you off. They got that from Pearl Jam, who got it from Fugazi. I thought that was great, eventually. The way that it started was a little suspicious, but they used the industry, and they continue to use the industry to advance their own idea. I think that's pretty cool.

Buzz bands

At times, you're like, how do these bands get so hot and no one's paying attention to my band? That sucks! But in the end, maybe this isn't such a bad thing, to just weather this weird storm and just continue to do what we want to do and maybe pick up a few fans here and a few fans here and build it slowly. I can't imagine what I'd be like if the first record I put out, people freaked out about it, and I certainly don't know what the music would be like. What is the challenge for them now musically? For me, it's always been: I've gotta make better music, because I've got to get more people to listen to it. I have consistently developed my music, not commercially, but with those kind of ideas in mind. More than anything it's caused me to think about it more, whereas if I were just going to make music the usual way, that happens to bands and they're boring. How many bands are there where their first record is their best record? People love that first record, so why would they make a different record? Whereas a band like Spoon, their first record is their worst record. They needed to make a better one, and they did. And they got dropped from a major label so they needed to make a better one and they did. There's so many ways to look at it, but that's how I look at it.

Well, I don't know about that ...

The full article

From the City Pages article on The Decemberists:

"The Decemberists turn works of short historical fiction into pop songs; they have no interest in blabbing about their feelings toward their friends or their last relationship breakup. Although they are from Portland, they decline to emote."

From "Angel, Won't You Call Me?" 5 Songs, 2001:

"So here I am in corduroy
Catch it in your Polaroid
Thought it was an off night,
caught in such a warm light

But, Angel, won't you call me?
Could I be the only
though I am a lost cause
Angel, won't you call me?"

From "Grace Cathedral Hill," Castaways and Cutouts, 2002:

"Sweet on a green-eyed girl
All fiery Irish clip and curl
All brine and piss and vinegar
I paid twenty-five cents to light
A little white candle

And the world may be long for you
But'll never belong to you
But on a motorbike
When all the city lights
Blind your eyes tonight
Are you feeling better now?"

From "Red Right Ankle," Her Majesty, 2003

"This is the story of the boys who loved you
Who love you now and loved you then
And some were sweet and some were cold and snuffed you
And some just layed around in bed
And some, they crumbled you straight to your knees
Did it cruel, did it tenderly
Some they crawled their way into your heart
To rend your ventricles apart
This is the story of the boys who loved you
This is the story of your red right ankle"

From "The Engine Driver," Picaresque, 2005

"And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones"

Now, I haven't gotten into the new Decemberists album enough to be able to find a quote to match up for that one, but it seems to me that their unique quality has long been an ability to deal with emotions in such deft and delicate ways, even when it comes to something as picayune as a break-up. To say that their music doesn't emote because it's literary is to deny the emotive power of literature, I think. Castaways and Cutouts remains my favorite album of theirs because to me it maintains the balance between Meloy's impressive vocabulary and contemporary narrative the best. "Grace Cathedral Hill" is most definitely about the present day; "We were both a little hungry, so we went to get a hot dog." For my money, the tail end of the last verse of "Clementine" is one of the most sweetly evocative lines I've ever heard: "And I watch as you sleep / so indelibly deep / And I hum to you 'Sweet Clementine.'"

Perhaps his early wordplay is overly precious, but as a fellow lover of words, I take great joy in his occasional overreach for rhymes like: "Medicating in the sun / pinch doses of laudanum" from "The Legionnaire's Lament." It's saying that words matter, that songwriting can be literate and evocative, that we can take comfort in the human construction of our world through language.

I see Meloy's lyrics as having anything but an "ironic, literary tone that sterilizes actual human experience to create a stylized, museum-quality version of the real thing." I feel like as the band has become increasingly comfortable within themselves, they've lost a little of the precarious balance that marked their first two (maybe three) releases. As Meloy's found the wheelhouse of his lyrical conceit, he's upped the quirkiness and played down the personal, and in response, the band has grown ever more ambitious texturally. The Crane Wife is certainly an accomplishment, and I recognize that my attachment to their first albums is emotional, and not the cold logic that is oh so ironically demanded of critics these days.

Chris Dahlen had an interesting column on Pitchfork today about the death of criticism, which is one of this blog's favorite topics. In a lot of ways he's right that the community approach to music criticism generated by blogs and other websites has taken away the upper hand that music critics have held onto for so long, so I heartily agree with him that we'll never run out of the need for simply good writing that's about more than just the buzz, the hype or how good or bad something is. Critics need to write critically, about the ideas behind music, about the people behind the ideas and about their own primary responses to the music--and not simply to say whether something's good or bad, but to illuminate the processes behind aesthetic judgements. I hope that's what I do, at least most of the time, and I hope that's what people are taking away from what I write.

Save the 331

Hey kids: It's come to my attention through a variety of sources, including Andrea Myers and Quillan Roe, that there's a threat afoot to stop the 331 in Northeast from having music. This would really be a terrible blow for the growing arts community in NE, especially when it comes to music. The whole noise issue doesn't really seem to hold water, sitting as it does on a block that's all businesses, across from a library and another restaurant. Seems like this is just some b.s., frankly. Below is club manager Jarrett Oulman's letter to all concerned members of the community about what they can do to help. Please take the time to write to your reps and help stop this from happening.

>Dear Community Member:
>
>As of November 15, 2006, the City of Minneapolis will require the 331
>Club to cease providing amplified music and entertainment. We are asking
>for your support in fighting this ban by the City. With your support,
>the 331 Club can continue to provide an exciting and progressive music
>venue in North East.
>
>The city's concern is that it needs to regulate businesses impact on
>their communities (ie noise, traffic etc). And amplified entertainment
>is considered to have an unacceptable level of impact to the community.
>We think that, rather than harming the community, the music programming
>at the 331 Club is providing an important opportunity for local
>musicians and performers and is making the North East community a richer
>place.
>
>We are asking you to write a letter to your city council member and to
>Mayor Rybak in support of the 331 Club. Please tell them how the
>developing scene at the 331 Club has had a positive (or negative) impact
>on the local community. Your feedback will be important to the City
>Council's decisions regarding the future of North East.
>
>Thank you for your support,
>
>Jarret Oulman
>General Manager
>331club
>jarretoulman@331club.com
>
>
>Note:
>
>Diane Hofstede can be reached at
>Minneapolis City Counsel - 3rd Ward
>350 S. 5th St. Rm 307
>Email: diane.hofstede@ci.minneapolis.mn.us
>
>Phone: 612-673-2203
>
>
>Mayor R.T. Rybak's office can be reached at
>Room 331, City Hall
>350 South Fifth St.
>Minneapolis, MN 55415
>jared.nordlund@ci.minneapolis.mn.us
>
>(612) 673-2100 phone

Best American New Band Names

I just got the 2006 edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading. It's always a great voulme, edited by Dave Eggers and this year featuring an intro by Matt Groening, he of The Simpsons, which I haven't read yet. I had to get it, of course, because the last piece is a commencement address by David Foster Wallace to the graduating class of Kenyon. I'd like to enroll in a college again, provided I could be guaranteed a commencement address by DFW four years hence.

But that's neither here nor there. The first part of the book is good deal more list-y than it's been in the past, including the Best New American Band Names. I'm just a little proud of the Twin Cities since included in this list of perhaps 100 band names are: Birthday Suits, Chooglin', The Deaf, God Damn Doo Wop Band, Kill the Vultures and Tapes 'n' Tapes. That means that roughly, let's call it 7% of the best new band names in America were thought up by people in the Twin Cities. Given the number of bands out there, that's doing all right.

Incidentally, they included a band called New Roman Times, which is fine and all, but it's not as good as Times New Viking.

My recently dalliance with running DOS on my Mac has also led me back to an old DOS term that would make a great band name: Echo Off.

Also, to go back to typefaces, Black Italic would be pretty hot. And Big Caslon, Blackletter and Century Schoolbook.

Why does Ted Leo hate Minneapolis?

Why, Mr. Leo? Saint Paul, too? We'd love to have you, and yet you've come here all of once in the two and a half years I've lived here. Please reconsider your position and pay us a visit. You can stay in my guest room.

The Velvet Teen

Everyone hates show reviews, at least according to Abby Myers, so I won't be reviewing the One for the Team / Askeleton / The Velvet Teen show per se here.

I got really into The Velvet Teen in the later spring/early summer of '04 when I got their CD Out of the Fierce Parade. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about the disc--it falls squarely into the vein of guitar-driven indie-rock, but it stands out for Judah Nagler's incredible falsetto vocals and signature melodies. I can't explain its significance for me without saying it was simply the right album at the right time--I was going through a turbulent time in my life, and Parade's rock solid, well, rock was something to hold on to.

Their last disc, Elysium was critically feted, but I never really got into it. I've decided to go back and check it out again after last night's show. They drew heavily on the recently released Cum Laude, but were gracious enough to reach back for "Radiapathy" from Parade and "Count Backwards" from their first EP, The Great Beast February.

The overwhelming thing about the show was the intensity of it all. Sometimes I'm naive enough to think that there's no way for a power trio to do something to me that hasn't been done before, but they absolutely poured every once of themselves into the music in such an unself-conscious way that it was impossible to resist. Their new drummer Casey Deitz was an absolute monster behind the kit, driving every song up against the wall so Nagler and bassist/vocalist Josh Staples could deliver body blows.

But saying it was all about the intensity isn't exactly right because there are plenty of intense bands that don't get at me the way these guys do. I think it's the marriage of total abandon to crystalline melodic structure that gets to me, plus their obvious repsect for the craft of making music. Nagler sang through a bullhorn at times, sometimes mic'ed, sometimes un-mic'ed, and when he'd sing through the bullhorn into a side mic while still singing through the regular vocal mic, the effect was instantly impressive. There were a lot of loops as well, probably running from Nagler's laptop, but it was all done in such an unfussy way that you hardly even noticed. Not to mention that the three musicians onstage were generating enough energy to eclipse any notion that the loops were taking up any slack.

Just a simple incredible show. They're heading out on tour with Russian Circles, P.O.S. and Minus the Bear for a couple of weeks, and you should really do yourself a favor and catch this bill. There's not a bad band in the bunch.

And by the way, Askeleton was pretty damned good, too. Lately, Knol and crew have been playing with a very trad rock lineup of two guitars, bass and drums, and seeing Askeleton in this kind of setting makes you appreciate the strength of the tunes, which hold up remarkably well without all the bells and whistles. Not to mention the new tunes I heard were fantastic, demonstrating Knol's recent trend towards simplicity and repetition. It's a completely made-over band from the one I first saw at the Turf Club nearly two years ago, and it's great to see a band really evolve, rather than just hone their sound.

Plus, I saw that guy Ghostwolf. He's everywhere these days.

Minneseries

So much great music is made by people in bars where there are only 7 people. Why? Right now I'm at the Nomad listening to some incredibly great music by Ghost in the Water, a Fitzgerald side project. I both wish there were more people here and am glad thar it's just the 7 of us: me, Matt Perkins, the members of Unicorn Basement and Lori B., plus a guy who Matt knows who's doing some interperative dance. It's like the music is being made special for you, the way the whole world seemed when you were, say, five. It's everything you'd ever hope for music to be and do.

salon.com's song search

Hey all you independent-minded music people: Salon is running a contest looking for unsigned acts, and I know some of you reading this fit that category. Here's the link:

Salon's Song Search

Normally I think songwriting contests and unsigned talent searches are crap: They inevitably pick the most bland and watered-down stuff because it's the most generally pleasing, and we all know how uninteresting that tends to be. But Audiofile is one of my most favorite music columns out there, so I'm betting this will be better than the usual. Get on it, Twin Citizens.

Tapped out

So yesterday when I posted about that Mars Volta I was a little tapped out, as it was the end of the day on production day and I had just read the review while waiting for my pages to go to the printer, so here's what I forgot to mention: my favorite sentence of the review:

"Now, I dig indulgence when it's done well (see: Finnegans Wake, that skinny guy who wins all the hot-dog eating contests), and what got me through multiple listens to Frances the Mute was the album's overall ludicrousness, that weirdo King Crimson corn-dogging."

Here's what's just brilliantly ridonkulous about it: he manages to join, by the virtue of excessiveness, James Joyce and Takeru Kobayashi. That's the kind of "charter member of the hipster club" card flashing I can appreciate. There's something about his odd choice not to even bother mentioning Kobayashi by name (which, let me tell you, takes about 10 seconds to find on Google) which just screams I care, but I don't; I'm in touch with popular culture, but above it enough to have read Finnegans Wake (which I can absolutely guarantee you he hasn't--no one has). It's just the kind of world-straddling ennui that's apparently a prerequisite for rock writing these days, an "I've seen it all and can tell you when it's good and when it ain't" attitude that just seems faintly ridiculous when you get down to it.

I mean, put Finnegans Wake, a tape of Kobayashi highlights and a copy of the new Mars Volta in a time capsule and tell me that if someone opens it in 100 years they'll find Joyce and Kobayashi equally satisfying and find Mars Volta lacking on some kind of universal scale of over-indulgence.

Enough. I'm listening to a disc by a guy named Charlie Mars, who's supposed to be Southern rock meets U2/Coldplay or something, but really just sounds like James Blunt. I can't really hear the Southern thing going on here at all, at least not when compared to Drive-By Truckers or My Morning Jacket. Hell, he doesn't even sound as Southern as Band of Horses. I'm pretty sure when they recorded this album, they plugged in the machine with the big button that says "Embiggen." It's a perfectly cromulent sutdio technique, I assure you.

In good news, I got a copy of the new Huge Rat Attacks as well, although my office stereo (and I use the term "stereo" loosely--$30 from Best Buy, y'all) apparently hates it and will not play it. It just spins dangerously fast. Maybe those scientists in Switzerland working on that underground particle accelerator would be interested in it.

Savor it

Pitchfork review of the new Mars Volta

Now, I'm a fan of the Mars Volta, and I haven't heard their new disc, so there's every chance in the world I'm not going to like it. And the whole Pitchfork thing's been beaten like a dead horse recently between the City Pages and the Strib. But please, if you will, pause for a moment and savor Stosuy's overarching metaphor of comparing the album to masturbation and then consider how it essentially turns the review into someone masturbating over his distaste for someone else's masturbating. Hell, at least the Mars Volta made an album.

malachi constant a constant no more

It is with regret that i pass on the news of Malachi Constant's passing. Hereafter is a note from Carl Wedoff ...

September 2, 11:51 pm

To whom it may concern:

After a sometimes fruitful seven-and-a-half year existence, Malachi
Constant has quit playing. No blow-out last show or anything, it was high
time to call it off. So that's that. When bands start spinning wheels and
stop having good times, it is proper to move on. Our first show was February
12, 1999 in the basement of Dupre Hall on the Macalester College campus. Our
last show was August 30, 2006 at the Triple Rock Social Club with Hockey
Night and Curtains. We released six albums in the interim: Incitement to
Discourse, Newspeak, Challenger, Zenith, Infinite Justice, and Pride. We
toured five or six times. I'm not sure which.

Thanks to everyone/anyone who liked us and helped us out; we met and
surpassed the modest goals we set out for ourselves as teenagers, and we
have audiences, press, radio, bar owners, teen maniacs, etc. to thank.
Malachi Constant was shown a surplus of excitement and kindness; we
apprecitate it more than words can express. It was quite the formative
experience.

In the future, be sure to hear from us. Ours are active musical lives;
we overflow with ideas and ambition.

Love always.

Carl / Malachi Constant.

I'd like to point out that their entry on MinneWiki already indicates that they've broken up. She moves so fast, this web of worldwideness.

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.

twin town high release show #1: a smashing success!

thanks everybody, bands and fans, for making the first twin town high release show the hott jamm! each and every band pretty much killed it outright and it was fantastic to see so many familiar and new faces at the turf. we even got photo of the week over at howwastheshow.com!

twin town high release show this weekend!

hey y'all. the twin town high page at myspace has been blowin' up, but apparently now it's just blown up, along with a lot of other pages there, so who knows if it'll be back in time for me to lay the hot jam on you?

:: S A T U R D A Y,  J U L Y  2 9  A T  T H E  T U R F ::

THE FIRST (OF TWO) TWIN TOWN HIGH RELEASE SHOWS!!!

featuring: Halloween, Alaska :: Kill the Vultures :: Martin Devaney :: The Pines :: The Glad Version

$5 gets you in and a copy of the CD. $2 gets you a pint from 8-10 p.m.

doors are at 8 p.m., music at 9 p.m. sharp.

the current has been jamming the disc all week and we've been getting some truly incredible and amazing press around the twin cities. doubting thomas? just look:

Press for Twin Town High 8

City Pages, 07.19.06 by Lindsey Thomas

Various artists
Twin Town High Vol. 8
I wish I could say that Pulse music editor Steve McPherson and I are engaged in a bitter rivalry that involves plenty of trash-talking (Hey McQueerson, I heard you like the new Scott Stapp record! Ooh, snap!) and poorly executed dance-offs in the Clown Lounge. Sadly, this is not true. Steve is a stand-up guy and he knows how to put together a damn good compilation. The disc has plenty of tracks worth mentioning, but some highlights include Painted Saints' accordion-and-violin lilt, "Lights Hanging Low from Heavy Cottonwoods" and Friends Like These's semi-apologetic lullaby, "Excuses." And the denouement to Middlepicker's "Top Down" ("Who's got the chops to make me shiver?") is my pugnacious new rock-crit battle cry. Watch out!

City Pages A-List, 07.26.06 by Peter Scholtes

Future collectors researching the Twin Cities music scene of the '00s will have no cheaper or more entertaining option than picking up all eight volumes of the Twin Town High Music Yearbook series. The latest edition (released by Pulse of the Twin Cities) follows the usual surefire formula: 22 exclusive tracks by one band each, which in one way or another pass through the organic confines of Ben Durrant's Crazy Beast Studio. Highlights this time around include contributions by Hockey Night, Claire de Lune, Bellwether, Big Quarters, and Jessy Greene (with Dessa). The disc also includes tonight's excellent CD-release celebrants: Halloween, Alaska; Kill the Vultures; the Pines; the Glad Version; and Martin Devaney. 21+. $5 (includes a copy of the CD). 8:00 p.m.

Pioneer Press, 07.27.06 by Ross Raihala

Pulse has issued the eighth volume of its venerable "Twin Town High" compilation, a 22-track snapshot of what the local music scene looks like these days. Kill the Vultures, Martin Devaney, the Glad Version, the Pines and Halloween, Alaska play the first of two CD-release shows Saturday at the Turf. (Another follows Aug. 25 with Building Better Bombs, Big Quarters, Middlepicker, These Modern Socks and Beight.) Fans get the disc for free with paid admission.

The Onion, 07.27.06 by Chris Bahn

Even though Pulse is a competitor, we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a nod to the latest edition of its Twin Town High compilation CD series. A strong lineup of hometownsters gathers at the Turf on Saturday for the TTH release show, including Halloween, Alaska, Kill the Vultures, Martin Devaney, The Glad Version and The Pines (who, by the way, signed with St. Paul folk label Red House earlier this month, and good for them).

Star Tribune, 07.28.06 by Chris Riemenschneider

“High on 'Twin Town 8'
Consistently the best local music compilations for the past half-decade, the Pulse-sponsored "Twin Town High" CD series hits arguably its highest note yet with installment No. 8. There's a release party for the 22-track collection Saturday at the Turf Club with Halloween, Alaska, Kill the Vultures, the Pines, Martin Devaney and the Glad Version. All have new/unreleased cuts on the disc, as does Bellwether (from its long-in-the-can album "Stinging Nettles"), Big Quarters, Hockey Night, Friends Like These, Joanna James and P.O.S.' band Building Better Bombs, plus Jessy Greene and Dessa contributed a great duet. The discs are free with Saturday's $5 cover, or free with any local CD purchase at Cheapo stores. The Pines, by the way, have a much-deserved new record deal with Red House Records. Look for a CD early next year. The St. Paul label's next big release is Greg Brown's long-awaited album, "The Evening Call," co-produced with Bo Ramsey (father of Pines co-leader Ben Ramsey).”

and, just in case it starts working ever again:

twin town high myspace page

the page has the tracks from four of the five bands playing on saturday. plus, hal, ak has put their track from twin town high up on their page, which you can get to from ours.

the live/recorded dichotomy

so i just came back from seeing phoenix at the fine line. first strange thing: it's a camel-sponsored event, at which i'm pretty sure they were giving out cigarettes in the alley or something, and yet phoenix had the marshall logos on their amps covered with duct tape. certainly wouldn't want to give an amp company that's helped thousands of musicians achieve their dreams any promotion when you can shill for a tobacco company that kills those same musicians.

but i digress. there are only a handful of bands that i've seen that were worse live than on record, the main ones being spoon and phoenix, and i think they suffer from the same problem: their albums are just too stunningly good.

i remember when my band back east recorded our first album. we were a blues band, and so our live sets leaned heavily on improvisation, but pretty soon after we recorded the tape (that's right, tape, muhf*cker), the other guitarist and i found ourselves playing the solos from the record, or at least little bits from the record, at every show. the thing about albums is that there's a dictatorial quality to them, and not just from the end of what the audience expects. i think that musicians, unless there is a stated goal to shy away from this, often end up replicating the album without even thinking about it. and most bands don't have records as good as phoenix and spoon.

phoenix's latest album, it's never been like that, feels like the product of countless hours honing every part--every guitar riff, string squeak, guttural grunt and drum fill--into the absolute perfect part. it's like a katana: a forged piece of metal folded a thousand times until the edge is so compressed and fine it can cut through stone. mess up one of those folds and the whole thing's shot.

so when the drum intro to "consolation prizes" kicked in, i knew just what i expected to hear: a gritty, growling ostinato on the guitar. so when it didn't sound like the album, it was a let down. same goes for the similar guitar part after the first chorus. the way the album sounds makes it seem as if they picked the only really possible and correct part for every instrument at every moment, and this is a pretty much impossible thing to replicate live. and even if they did, looking so definitively french and louche didn't really help the energy. understand, they weren't bad. just not as good as their disc.

it's a weird dichotomy, this live/recorded thing. the plastic constellations, despite putting out their best-sounding album so far, are still better live than on record. the absolutely unhinged energy they put into live performance is a huge part of it, but does that mean it can't be captured on record?

it seems like one has to suffer in comparison to the other, simply because they're always being held up to each other. the bands that seem to do the best at straddling the divide seem to be the ones who treat the two things very differently: jimi hendrix and wilco spring to mind immediately, but i'm sure there are others.

anywho. off to read.

god damn doo wop band

just got this release from afternoon records, who are expanding the sound of the label nicely with this disc from GDDWB. i met ross (piano/guiatr) at twin town guitars the other day the day before the band was heading out to nyc for some shows, about which he was pretty psyched, saying they hadn't had a bad show yet. bringing this kind of punk tock attitude to girl group pop from the fifties, it's hard to see how they'll ever have one. seriously, they just absolutely nail the structure of the phil spector-produced stuff, but then messy it up with a looseness and live feel that's instantly appealing. have i mentioned that the cover art is great? the three women in the band (kat, carissa and saumer) stand in floofy skirts, cut off from the waist up, in defiant stances. one of them holds a baseball bat behind her back. and then on the flip side lie all the guys from the band, beaten to a bloody pulp and laying spread out on the asphalt. i'm only making my way through this disc for the first time, so don't expect any kind of deep insight here. i'm simply trying to give you the heads up on this one.

halfway home

so in scrambling to assemble a half-as-long-as-it-should-be list for the best records of the year at the halfway mark, i thought i should check out riemenschneider's list to make sure i wasn't cribbing anything from him and found this:

The Plastic Constellations, "Crusades" -- "We started so young and so thrilled we could burst," TPC co-leader Jeff Allen sings in "Sancho Panza," a 23-year-old reflecting on his band's 10-year existence. They're not as young as they used to be, but these four childhood friends from Hopkins are bursting like never before on their third and best CD. Imagine all the pent-up, Fugazi-like roar of today's emo bands minus the whiny vocals and melodramatic lyrics.

i guess chris doesn't read this blog, so this won't make a difference, but seriously: the song is about jeff's wife, allison, not the plastic constellations. funny, though, since pretty much every other song on the disc is either obliquely or literally about the band.