notes - archives - may 2006

5.1.06
I think I've just about given up on I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. There's some appealing stuff on their debut full-length, Fear Is on Our Side, but it's different than what I expected from them based on their EP, and it's just not working for me right now. It feels like more of an October record, so maybe I'll give it another shot then and see if anything clicks.

5.2.06
The new Fiery Furnaces record, Bitter Tea, is definitely better than their failed spoken word history lesson with grandma, Rehearsing My Choir, but it's nowhere near as good as their first three records. It's still very top-heavy with the tinkling pianos that haunted Choir, with very little of the guitar weirdness that made their first three records so compelling. The basic songcraft is still there, but the combination of Choir's influence (they were both recorded around the same time) and the band's petulant desire to squash the hooks that seem to come as easy as breathing to them makes this record less than fulfilling in many places.

Still, it takes some pretty dedicated treachery (like Choir) to completely destroy the Furnaces songs, so there are still a bunch of wonderful moments on the record, and so downright great songs. I'm hoping it will continue to grow on me, though——the description I've written in the first sentence of this paragraph could have just as easily been written three weeks after I bought Blueberry Boat, which I now think is one of this century's best records.

Matt is virtually non-existent vocally——Eleanor has always been the main vocalist, but this is the quietest Matt has yet been (not counting Choir, which barely had any Eleanor, either)——but Matt supposedly has two solo records coming out this summer, so perhaps he was saving himself for those.

5.3.06
The Minus 5's new eponymous record has some great lines on it, but my favorites have to be these from "My Life as a Creep":

Show me where the lines can reconnect
And I will parallelogram you to the ground

It's just so absurd, I can't explain what it means. But I know what it means.

5.4.06
I don't know what's so damn appealing about Mike Skinner (aka The Streets), but his new disc, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, is the first CD I've gotten this year that I've listened to on repeat for two days straight.

His last album, A Grand Don't Come for Free, was one of the best records released in 2004, a masterpiece of a concept album about a sad sack everyloser who's desperately trying to figure out how to gather himself together in the face of a cheating girlfriend, untrustworthy friends, and his own predilictions to drink, get high, and gamble too much. That record worked because you could identify with this guy; you loved him despite his flaws, and you were rooting for him to come out on top even when he was being an unreasonable, lazy, self-pitying dickhead.

Contrast that to Easy Living, where he's rapping about the problems of being too rich and too famous, the boredom of being on the road all the time, the intrusive tabloids, the greed record companies and parasitic hangers-on, etc.——basically the opposite of the character he played last time. Sure, he still has a couple of more relatable songs, including one about his late father and another about building a relationship, that are reminiscent of the ordinary-guy tone on Grand, but basically this album is about what happens when an ordinary guy gets easy access to money, drugs, fame, and girls.

Somehow he still pulls it off though——it's still Mike speaking to us, and you're still participating in his struggles (even though it's hard for most of us to relate to being chewed out by our managers for having a public dalliance with a coked-up pop star). You're still rooting for him, because he's found a way to be a loser even when he's on top of the world. There aren't many people that make that work, but he's a genius at it.

5.5.06
It looks like Sliced Tongue and I will be continuing our recently instituted and somewhat odd tradition of seeing each other in person only at shows. This time we're going to meet up in July at Columbia's Merriweather Post Pavillion for a show featuring Belle and Sebastian (who we saw earlier this year at the 9:30 Club in DC), Broken Social Scene, and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.

I'm particularly psyched about the two opening acts, both of whom I've wanted to see for a long time. The Belle and Sebastian show I saw earlier this year was pretty good (although I don't know how it will translate to a large outdoor venue), and I probably would have gotten tickets for this show eventually if it had just been them, but when I saw that Ted Leo and Broken Social Scene on the bill, I made sure I was logged onto the ticket site seconds after the start of the presale.

5.8.06
Okay. I've been putting this off and putting this off, but there's never going to be a good time, so I might as well go ahead with it. This week's entries will be dedicated to Bryan Harvey and his music, specifically the unreleased demos he sent me with the intention that I would post them to my site for his fans to download.

Thinking about Bryan and his family and their brutal, senseless deaths still hurts just as much now as it did five months ago when it happened. Bryan sent me a total of four songs out of twelve; he never got around to sending the other eight, and I never bugged him about it, I'm sure because we both thought there was all the time in the world.

I'll start today with an overview from Bryan's letters of the whole album, and then post each of the four songs he was able to send me, in the track order listed below, along with whatever notes I can cobble together from his various emails about the songs. By the way, in case you don't know about it/haven't done it already, I encourage you to buy the Bryan Harvey memorial record put out by Plan 9 music, whose owner was also co-owner of World of Mirth with the Harveys. The record is called Remember Me Well (also the title of a House of Freaks song), and you can purchase it online or at any Plan 9 record store.

Here's what Bryan had to say about the album as a whole:

There are about 13 songs. Really, its my favorite stuff I've ever done. Recorded at a particularly rough period for my wife and me.....things are much better now.

I recorded this at home on an 8-track cassette. It's lo-fi & the song I sent you ["It's Lonely at the Top"], is about the best sounding one....this record is just collecting dust, might as well make it available for anyone interested......

My unreleased record was going to be called The Wild, Wild South. I even had the song sequence:

Trouble
Happy Birthday
Black Christmas
I Got a Wheel
End of the Century Blues
It's Lonely at the Top
Big Yellow
Thanksgiving
Another Piece of Meat
Burn Candles
Yer Blinker's On
Tell Everybody Hello

These notes are taken from several different emails, which is why there are a couple of discrepancies in the notes. The most obvious is that he mentions thirteen songs in the earliest email, but in a later email there were only twelve songs listed. I don't know anything about that missing track; like I said, Bryan never got around to finishing the transfer of the songs and the notes that went with them.

Tomorrow: "Trouble".

5.9.06
"Trouble" was intended to be the first song off of Bryan Harvey's solo CD, The Wild, Wild South. You can download it here. Here are Bryan's notes on the track:

This one is called "Trouble"....all me. Drums are me hitting a 5-gallon bucket with a wooden kitchen spoon...

Okay, so not much on that one. But the stuff in his emails to me wasn't meant to be the final notes for the tracks. They were just snippets of conversation, like any other email. Neither of us had any idea they might be the only things he got to tell me (and the rest of you) about these songs.

"Trouble" is a great little track, an upbeat, optimistic number reminiscent of "Rocking Chair"——it's fun enough to listen to as is, in rough, demo form, and I can only imagine how good it would have been if he'd had time to work on a full studio treatment. It's a nice opening salvo, for both the record and for this set of four tracks.

Tomorrow: "Happy Birthday".

5.10.06
"Happy Birthday" is a stark, somber number, especially in the low-fi context of Bryan's demo. You can download it here. Here are his notes on the song:

Recorded at a particularly rough period for my wife and me.....things are much better now.

"Happy Birthday" was written for Kathryn after she had a miscarriage.

The song is a real contrast to "Trouble", and you wonder if Bryan wouldn't have reconsidered its placement in the track listing if he had recorded this as a releasable album, since it's a real momentum-killer with its serious tone and subject matter. It's probably my least favorite of the four songs I have, but it is as raw and honest as you would expect from Bryan.

Tomorrow: "It's Lonely at the Top".

5.11.06
"It's Lonely at the Top" is a sweet, slow, dreamy number about the south (Bryan mentions Alabama and his home state, Virginia). This is the song that probably would have benefitted most from a proper studio treatment, but given that these songs were recorded on an 8-track in Bryan's kitchen, they actually sound pretty good. You can download it here.

It's a hard call to say this song ranks number three out of the four songs Bryan sent me, but that's just because "Trouble" and "Tell Everybody Hello" are so good. Bryan didn't send me any notes specifically about this song, but it was the first song that he chose to send me, so you can probably assume that it was one of his favorites from this collection of tracks.

Tomorrow: "Tell Everybody Hello".

5.12.06
The final song that Bryan sent me, "Tell Everybody Hello", was meant to be the album's closer, and it's also an appropriate way to end this series of downloads and say goodbye to Bryan and his family. You can download it here.

Here are Bryan's notes on the song:

I believe I recorded the last song "Tell Everybody Hello" a few months before my daughter Stella was born. Last song I wrote....it's a fitting send off....

"Tell Everybody Hello" was the last song I ever wrote (haven't written one in 5 years). You can even hear the sounds of my wife making tea in the kitchen.

Oddly, although the other three tracks came with no metadata in the MP3 file, "Tell Everybody Hello" came with an album name different than the one he mentioned in a later email (The Wild, Wild South): The Great Sir Not Appearing Again. It's another one of those unexplainable, haunting coincidences that started to emerge in Bryan's work after his death.

Those of us who were deeply affected by the death of Bryan and his family having been looking for some sort of closure, something besides the capture and punishment of the men who took them from us. There's really nothing that can explain why something so brutal and horrific happened to such genuinely sweet people, but I've taken some comfort in seeing this song as Bryan's peaceful farewell from beyond the grave. "Yeah, life can be ugly and crazy and unfair," he seems to be saying, "but everything's okay now. Say hi to everyone for me."

Goodbye, Bryan. Goodbye Kathryn, Stella, and Ruby. You will always be missed.

5.15.06
I am slowly being charmed by the Islands' Return to the Sea, the same way I was slowly charmed by the Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? from the Unicorns, two of whose members went on to create the Islands. My newest favorite track: "Volcanoes", a song about how the world will be destroyed when a gigantic volcano appears and violently erupts, melting all the ice on Earth and a rain of liquid magma covers the planet. I know, weird material for a pop song, but they make it work. They even make it sound kind of pleasant.

5.16.06
Why isn't there a good, simple, easy-to-use listing of new CD releases online anywhere? For a while I've been using Ice Magazine, but it looks like they're having some sort of financial trouble and they haven't updated their release list in a couple of weeks. Pitchfork's list was always thorough, especially in regards to the releases I was interested in, but they never seemed to update it more than once a month and now they've abandoned it entirely. Billboard's list is alarmingly complete, but you can't filter out reissues, classical releases, etc. (and when you filter by genre, which helps a little, it doesn't organize them alphabetically by artist).

I don't know what's so hard about this, really. Surely this is worth a couple of hours of someone's time at one of the big music magazines or online review sites.

5.17.06
Some of my favorite lines from Modest Mouse:

Mice eat cheese

Birds and worms don't get along

Polar opposites don't push away

Isaac Brock's lyrics can get pretty intricate and verbose, but he certainly has a gift for succinct bursts of truth as well.

5.18.06
What kind of world are we living in where Bauhaus is touring as an opening act for Nine Inch Nails?

5.19.06
New purchases: Grandaddy's swan song, Just Like the Fambly Cat (no, that's not a typo), Danielson's Ships, Built to Spill's You in Reverse, Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock & Roll, the Black Keys' Chulahoma, and Sunset Rubdown's Shut Up I Am Dreaming.

I've only listened to the Art Brut so far, and I like it a lot, but I'm really looking foward to Sunset Rubdown; this is the side-project from Spencer Krug, who is one half of Wolf Parade's dual songwriter attack, and the half whose work I happen to like the most (he's the one responsible for both "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son" and "I'll Believe in Anything", my two favorite songs from Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary).

5.22.06
Someone has to say it, and I haven't seen anyone else doing it, so I will: Danielson is this year's Arcade Fire, and Ships is this year's Funeral. If this record doesn't blow up this year the same way Funeral did two years ago, there's something massively wrong with the indie rock world.

5.23.06
Danielson continues to impress, but I'm also very taken with Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock & Roll, which is the first record (well, along with Danielson's Ships) that is likely to make my top 10 this year. Pitchfork had it on their 2005 list, but that's because those bastards count stuff that's only available via import, and for some reason it has taken months for an American distributor to see fit to give us a domestic release of this album.

Even though the Arctic Monkeys have kind of fizzled stateside, there's no reason that Art Brut shouldn't be getting the same kind of buzz from the music press——they're smarter, funnier, and I'll be damned if "Emily Kane" isn't just the single to kick off the summer.

5.24.06
Can't...stop...playing...Art Brut.

5.30.06
It's pretty tough to pull off a 9 minute album opener that doesn't seem like it lasts 9 minutes, but Built to Spill have done it on their latest record with "Goin' Against Your Mind".

5.31.06
The guy who chose the pre-game music at Camden Yards last year was pretty good as these things go: light on the overbearing sports anthems that seem to infect all stadiums these days (although they still play those during the game), mixing in some quirky choices (like the Smiths) with reasonably tolerable classic rock and a decent selection of not-too-annoying hits from the 80s and early 90s.

This year there's definitely someone new at the helm, and this guy has a taste for the truly awful. Lots and lots of near-misses from the worst of 80s pop, mixed with the most annoying hits from the worst of 80s pop. I'm not quite sure who this guy thinks his audience is, but I can't imagine there are many O's fans, whether they're into country, rock, or indie, who don't think this stuff is the musical equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.