notes - archives - november 2006

11.1.06
I know that well-educated, smarmy, middle class, white rock critics who don't really love anything but indie guitar records feel compelled to lavish praise on rap or country or pop albums every now and then just so that people don't think that they're the snobs that they actually are, but my god, the critcal accolades for Outkast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below, which started the second it was released and continues to this day, is unbelievably unjustified.

Most records today with more than ten tracks suffer from some sort of bloat, but the amount of extra crap on this double CD, especially Andre 3000's disc, is unrivaled by any criticallly heralded release since the Clash's massively overinflated Sandinista!. Sure, there are some great tracks on both discs, and no one is fool enough to deny the primal power of the genre straddling megahit "Hey Ya!", but honestly, there's plenty of stuff on this album that shouldn't even have been recorded, much less put on a major release.

You take the ten or so best songs from both discs and put them on one album, and then you've potentially got a classic on your hands. But you don't get to have your album called a classic just because it contains the pieces of a classic album strewn among a city dump's worth of garbage tracks. Being succinct counts for a lot, and I'm betting when the next wave of music critics starts to review the records their predecessors considered beyond reproach, Speakerboxx/The Love Below is going to leave them scratching their heads and wondering just what the hell everyone was so worked up about.

11.2.06
Earlier this week, I mowed the lawn for what is likely the last time until next spring, and my choice of music was once again the Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine, which, in addition to being a great album for keeping the blood pumping, has the extra advantage of having a running time that is almost exactly as long as it takes me to mow the lawn.

I've been mowing to this record since its release a couple of months ago, and each time I've hit play as soon as I started up the mower and heard the closing feedback of "I Hold the Sound" just as I'm wheeling it back into the shed. It's nice of the universe to make things easy every now and then.

11.3.06
The Islands have proven surprisingly good, but I still miss the Unicorns.

11.6.06
Weird. I wrote last week about how I hoped the impending release of a new EP, Your Biggest Fan, would spur Voxtrot to finally get their second EP, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives, uploaded to iTunes. And even though the new EP isn't due out until tomorrow, Mothers was loaded into the iTunes store sometime last week, something I only discovered after doing what I thought would be yet another pointless search for Voxtrot to see if there was anything besides Raised by Wolves.

I've only listened to Mothers a couple of times through, and while it's not as good as Raised by Wolves, it's still pretty good. Voxtrot is at a point where, after building a loyal following by touring and releasing two critically acclaimed EPS, they should be releasing their debut full-length, but from the post on their web site, it looks like it's going to be a while before we see a proper album from them. Hopefully that will come next year, because they've built a good bit of momentum, and I'd hate to see them lose it by going too long between releases.

11.7.06
I think a quote from the Strokes will suffice for today: "I've got nothing to say."

11.8.06
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Broken Social Scene has played two shows——TWO SHOWS——within an hour of me over the past two nights, and I didn't see either one of them. I remember seeing the dates on the schedule a couple of months ago and getting really excited about seeing one or both shows, but they completely dropped off my radar until the iPod served up "I'm Still Your Fag" yesterday. Something clicked, I remembered that the band was playing local shows in November, and I went to look up the dates only to find that it was too late and I wouldn't be able to go to either one.

Fuck.

11.9.06
Cool——Voxtrot did upload their new EP to iTunes at the same time it was released through other media. It's not as strong as their previous EPs, but I'm hoping that these are essentially b-sides and that they're saving the good stuff for their first full-length. Anyway, glad to see I didn't have to wait six months after the official release to hear this one like I've been forced to with the previous two.

11.10.06
Holy god——a new Modest Mouse song featuring recent addition Johnny Marr. This just might turn out okay after all.

11.13.06
I know I've already ranted about this once before, but I really wish the Decemberists hadn't included the three-part mini-epic "The Island" on their new record, The Crane Wife, and I especially wish they hadn't put it second in the tracklist. Otherwise this would likely be their most consistent effort to date, and it certainly remains compelling despite this flaw.

You know how the instrumental "Treefingers" keeps Kid A from being Radiohead's perfect album (well, that and the four minutes of silence that breaks up the otherwise flawless "Motion Picture Soundtrack")? The Decemberists' inclusion of "The Island" is an error of this same magnitude. And at least "Treefingers" isn't twelve and a half minutes long.

11.14.06

Mixtape: 1988

Track 4
"Juno"
House Tornado
Throwing Muses

One of my favorite stories about Throwing Muses is when I went to see them at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill while they were touring in support of House Tornado's successor, Hunkpapa. They played a decently long set, but it consisted entirely of material from their debut and from Hunkpapa; not a single song from House Tornado made it onto the setlist. When the band came back onstage for the encore and played yet another non-House Tornado song, someone in the crowd yelled what we were all thinking: "Play something from House Tornado!" Singer/guitarist Kristin Hersh's response: "YOU play something from House Tornado."

Anyone who has heard this record gets the joke: House Tornado is fiendishly difficult from a technical standpoint, with multiple time changes and some very delicate guitar work on nearly every track. Not that the band wasn't capable of reproducing the songs in a live context (they toured behind it, after all), but I'm sure that, after a couple of years of non-stop touring and recording, it was probably nice to take a night off from House Tornado and its complexities every now and then.

House Tornado is one of my favorite records of all time, and it's one of those records that's really hard to talk about because it is tied to such deeply personal emotions and events (I was in high school when it came out——need I explain further?) that I feel like when I talk about it, I'm revealing some very vulnerable parts of myself. It's a record that I can really only listen to alone; as brilliant as I think this record is, I can only share it with others by telling them about it or writing about it. This is partly because I get so lost in this record that I don't want to have anything interrupt the experience, and partly because if I was listening to it with someone I cared about and they didn't have the same response to it that I do, I'm afraid I would think a little less highly of them, however ridiculous that might sound.

The record has a lot more sharp edges and sudden time changes than the Muses self-titled debut (which is also amazing), and the intricacy of the guitar interplay between Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly presages the complex roar of intertwining guitars that would become the hallmark of the late, lamented Sleater-Kinney. There is a real austerity to the House Tornado recordings; the mental picture I get of the recording process is the band stranded in a single room, a concrete block building engulfed in a winter-long snowstorm. There's an echo that haunts the otherwise pristine clarity of the instruments on every song, and it somehow feels as if every band member is playing alone even though they're all in the same room together. Lyrically and musically, it speaks strongly to the isolation that's at the core of the human condition: no matter how close we feel to someone, no matter how many friends we have, at the end of the day, we're all by ourselves in our own skulls, and there's a certain separation from the people closest to us that no amount of openess and intimacy can overcome.

I'd say that "Juno" is one of the more accessible tracks on the record, but that's on a very relative scale. I actually love every song on this record, and I find them all catchy as hell, but I'm guessing that not many people would agree. On the liner notes for In a Doghouse, which compiles their earliest recordings, including a demo cassette and their debut album, Kristin writes:

I swear to God, I thought we were a party band. As Throwing Muses, at age oh, sixteen or seventeen, we were gleefully impressed with ourselves and our ability to bring joy to people through sound. We were then stunned and horrified to see our audiences react with something like stunned horror.

This pretty much sums up my experiences trying to proselytize about the band to my peers in high school: at best they thought some of the songs were okay, and at worst they thought everything about Throwing Muses was horrible. My roommate junior year even got so sick of me listening to their debut that he actually hid the CD for a few weeks, convincing me that I'd lost it somewhere (I think he thought about destroying it, but whatever small fragment of a conscience he had left kicked in and made him just withhold it from me for a bit).

Anyway. I love this band, even though they (or ringleader Kristen, either as a solo act or with her latest project, 50 Foot Wave) would rarely reach the perfection of House Tornado on their subsequent efforts. And if you love House Tornado as much as I do...well, I'm not saying we'd be instant best friends or anything, but there is some sort of cosmic frequency we're both tuned into that not many other people seem to be able to hear.

11.15.06
I thought I might get on a roll with this whole mixtape thing, but alas, I got distracted by other tasks and couldn't finish the Sugarcubes entry today. Tomorrow, though, I promise, and then Game Theory the day after that. I'm going to at least finish 1988 by the end of the this year, even if I don't meet my overly optimistic goal of creating and writing about the 1989 mixtape by then.

11.16.06

Mixtape: 1988

Track 5
"Birthday"
Life's Too Good
The Sugarcubes

Before Bjork became Bjork, she was known as one of the two singers for Iceland's the Sugarcubes. And she wasn't even the weirdest of the two——although she has since gone on to outweird just about everyone on the planet, the award for oddest Sugarcube would have to go to Einar Benediktsson, the male singer whose hesitant, barking vocal style can only be considered singing in the loosest sense of the word. Make no mistake, though, to fans, Bjork's voice was always the heart of the group, even though her bandmates not have given her the same standing.

Given how much I liked Life's Too Good when it came out, and how much I still liked it in the following years when the Sugarcubes released their second and third albums, I'm still a little surprised that I didn't purchase anything else by the band. I never really got into Bjork as a solo artist, either (although I'm aware of her influence, and over time I've added some of her work to my music collection), so this record is really the only strong

Life's Too Good holds up pretty well as a bit of quirky pop ("Deus" in particular is charmingly weird but also pretty radio friendly), but the darker (though still fun) "Birthday" is clearly the standout, the song that hints most strongly at the future direction of Bjork's career. It's almost indescribable (and therefore indescribably good); there's really not much else before or since with which you can compare this track. If I had been doing an annual top 10 singles list back in those days, "Birthday" would easily have been at the top of the list.

11.17.06

Mixtape: 1988

Track 6
"Wish I Could Stand or Have"
Two Steps From the Middle Ages
Game Theory

Two Steps From the Middle Ages was the unexpected swan song for Game Theory, and also a return to more straightforward pop sound after the dizzyingly eclectic (and brilliant) double album, Lolita Nation. This began a pattern that frontman Scott Miller would continue over the next several years with his next band, Loud Family, which debuted with a album full of sonic experiments and spoken word collages (a hallmark of Lolita), followed by album with ten unambiguous pop songs, followed by an experimental album, and so on.

But no matter how many studio tricks made their way onto the records, pop songs with great hooks and clever lyrics were always at the heart of Scott Miller's records, and that's the case with Two Steps. It's a pretty decent album, but it's probably the most predictable work Game Theory produced (which may be why Miller broke up the band and went on to continue his pop vision with a new cast of characters who could bring a few new ideas to the mix).

However, when you're as good as Game Theory, being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing, and Two Steps may contain the quintessential Game Theory track, "Throwing the Election". The only reason this isn't on this mixtape (and this may seem like twisted reasoning given that I'm trying to compile the stuff that I listened to most often and liked the best during these years) is because I put it on pretty much every mixtape I made for at least two years after this album came out. I chose "Wish I Could Stand or Have" instead because it's always been a close second for my favorite song on this record. Some people find it too short or too repetitive or too relentlessly upbeat, but whatever. I've never spent much time examining why I love it, I just love it and I have from my first listen.

The song also worked really well as bridge between the Sugarcubes and Morrissey, both musically and as a study in career transitions: with the Sugarcubes, we see future solo artist Bjork making her first major foray into the musical world as a member of a collaborative band, and with Morrissey, we see the frontman for a major band making his first attempt to define himself as a solo act. On Two Steps, Scott Miller falls somewhere in between, making his last record with a band he's fronted since he was a teenager, but on the verge of defining himself as a Billy Corgan-like solo artist who carries his unique vision from band to band while never officially becoming a solo act.

11.20.06
Sufjan Stevens is continuing his overly-prolific ways by releasing a special Christmas-themed boxed set featuring over 40 songs, including both Christmas classics and original Sufjan compositions. I'm expecting this to be every bit as good as everything else he's released, but it would be worth buying just to hear the cleverly titled "Get Behind Me, Santa!"

11.21.06
I want to write a bit about the new Sparklehorse album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, but my thoughts haven't quite become coherent yet. So instead, I'm linking to a page that has some MP3 downloads from the band Mark Linkous was in immediately before Sparklehorse. The songs aren't terrible (especially compared to the stuff Linkous recorded with the Dancing Hoods), but it's pretty far from where Linkous would end up on the Sparklehorse debut.

For fans, it's worth visiting the site to compare the pre-Sparklehorse and Sparklehorse versions of "Someday I Will Treat You Good", which probably best illustrates the artistic transformation that Linkous went through to get from an unknown, fairly generic songwriter/producer/vocalist to the very unique niche he's managed to carve out for himself under the Sparklehorse moniker.

11.30.06
I picked up a few records last week before I left on my trip: Sufjan Stevens' Christmas megarelease Songs for Christmas box set, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's aptly titled So Divided, Chin Up Chin Up's This Harness Can't Ride Anything, and Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor.

Food & Liquor is the only one I've managed to listen to in depth so far, and it's a pretty decent album, but he's definitely got some room left to grow. "Kick Push" is the clear standout, but you already knew that. The fact that this may be the best hip hop record I've heard this year tells you something about both 1) how many hip hop records I've listened to this year and 2) the quality of hip hop releases this year.

Anyway. I've been looking for a decent alt Christmas album for years to listen to while hanging ornaments, and hopefully Sufjan will deliver the goods. With titles like "Did I Make You Cry on Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)" and the previously-mentioned "Get Behind Me, Santa!", I think this batch of songs might be everything I'd like it to be.