My yoga DVD has an excellent workout.* But I hate the music. Like much yoga music, it ranges from bland to treacly to offensively annoying. So I recently took the routine’s instructions from the DVD and combined that audio with my own mix of downtempo instrumental electronic music, leaning heavily on the artists you’d expect, like DJ Shadow and Boards of Canada. (This is where music geekery and yoga assholery converge.)

But at the end of the program, during the “constructive rest” segment, comes “Bad Days,” by Timo Mass, the gorgeous closer to his all-killer-no-filler 2002 dance freakout, Loud. And while it’s ideal music for “letting my body undulate on the waves of my breath while my brain sinks into my heart” (the DVD’s words, not mine), I may have to swap it out with a less potent, emotionally loaded piece.

Because “Bad Days” actually connotes very good days: the sunny spring of 2002 when I didn’t have much of an agenda beyond drinking beer with Neil and playing drums in a party band. There were some bad days back then, too: I wasn’t so much on a career track so much as wildly derailed from it, and I was letting a number of personal relationships deteriorate for various reasons.

But euphoric recall allows me to only remember the sunny afternoons and the bacchanalian nights in Iowa City bars, and seeping in through the cracks between the dance anthems and the sweaty rock songs was this one—bright, patient, searching.

* That is an actual sentence I typed, on a blog with my real, full name on it; a blog that anyone in the world can read.

Posted: February 18th, 2010 under Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 1

I still prefer Marry Me by a slim margin, but Actor has its charms. It’s more mature, more assured, less desperate to please than its predecessor—though those qualities in the former might just be what endear me to it.

In any event, there are some towering songs on Actor. Sonically, it’s more adventurous and more polished than Marry Me, which is saying a lot. I would be able to tell that Annie Clark has been listening to a lot of Robert Fripp even if she hadn’t mentioned it in interviews.

“Black Rainbow” is probably the most frighteningly accomplished song here. Its final mounting crescendo is pure bombast, and its intricate arrangements marry the best bits of chamber pop and prog rock. I’d like ten more of these songs every year for the rest of my life, please.

Posted: December 28th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: none

Merry Christmas. I got you the best song of 2009.

You’re welcome.

Posted: December 25th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: none

So why the hell did it take me so long to realize the Dirty Projectors are my new favorite band? I half-listened to their set from across the field at Union Park at Pitchfork two years ago; I read good things about them; I had friends who liked them; I read Sasha Frere-Jones’ profile of them. Still, nothing.

Maybe I was put off by the Brooklyn thing. Maybe I was put off by the album title, or the band name. Something about the band name annoyed me. But plenty of great bands have dumb names, and pretentious album titles. The Beatles is a dumb name. Whatever was holding me back, I overcame it last week when I finally downloaded Bitte Orca and immediately got angry at everyone I know who didn’t force me to listen to Dirty Projectors sooner. I feel like the lamest kid around.

Better late than never, I suppose. Suddenly all the glowing praise makes sense. Suddenly I’m rushing back to re-read Frere-Jones’ profile. Suddenly I know what hocketing sounds like. Suddenly I realize that this is truly progressive rock music.

Posted: December 23rd, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 1

A slipshod assortment of my favorite music of the year.

Cheer-Accident, “Blue Cheadle”

It’s a minor miracle that I managed to 1) live in Chicago and 2) be a progressive rock fan without ever discovering Cheer-Accident, a progressive rock band from Chicago. They’ve been around nearly 30 years but I never heard of them until my band opened for them at the Hexagon in February. It was probably the most appropriate bill we’ve ever been on: four playfully proggish bands with decent senses of humor, culminating in these bedraggled prog heroes from Chicago playing their hearts out well after midnight on the Hex’s tiny stage.*

“Blue Cheadle” is the best example of the more accessible but no less dangerous direction the band’s taken with their new album, Fear Draws Misfortune. The song forms are shorter and poppier, with indie elements like a fat, wet snare sound, horns and strings, and female harmonies. Lord knows what the title means, or what the lyrics are, but it’s one hell of a song, as much for its grooves and melodies as its wickedly impossible meters.

Also here’s a video of the band performing the song at the Hideout, in Chicago.

*Two highlights of that show, by the way, were when some jerk in the audience shouted “Chicago sucks!” during a quiet moment in a song, and Thymme Jones responded, while still playing, “The city, or the band?” and when bassist Alex Perkolup told Run At The Dog that we sounded like the B-52s, only “less gay.”

Posted: December 17th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 3

(Well, not that new, but being as I’m a bit behind the curve on account of my being an Old, I think I’m doing pretty well.)

The last time I saw Bon Iver in concert, my old skateboarding buddy Mark was in the band, and neither he nor Justin Vernon would shut up about how much they loved Collections of Colonies of Bees. So I’m glad that Vernon was able to collaborate with them, and while Bon Iver fans will probably not find it as accessible as that band’s debut, it has grown on me, existing as it does at the perfect intersection of abstract sound collages and more conventional pop forms.

The best example of this is “Island, IS,” which I’ve had on constant rotation the past week or so, and which seems especially appropriate for Minneapolis’ first big Snowmageddon of the season. Because I’m still annoyingly precious about the music I listen to in certain moments, I don’t just throw on anything while inching my car through slushy traffic or holing up in my claustrophobic apartment. Unmap is good winter music, so I’m glad I came a little late to it. Justin Vernon seems incapable of making music that isn’t somehow tinged with the pallor of a long Midwestern winter, but then, his band isn’t called Bon Ete. (A little foreign-language humor for you there.)

Posted: December 9th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 3

ARE YOU A DRUM NERD? IF NOT, READ NO FURTHER.

Something about winter makes me want to hole up and get better at the drums. Perhaps because I recently read Tea & Drumpets, I decided to try and learn the very difficult songs on Bill Bruford’s solo albums. During the winters in high school I learned to fake my way through most of his parts with Yes and King Crimson, but the stuff on One of A Kind is just crazy hard. Tonight, rusty, out of shape, I was humbled but still having fun stumbling through this ridiculous song:

Posted: December 3rd, 2009 under Music.
Comments: none

Musician, cultural theorist, and jukebox saboteur Brian Eno says that it’s cool to be uncool. The cool vs. uncool distinction is no longer meaningful, he says, largely due to the explosion in access, hybridization, and genre bifurcation across every aesthetic plane.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

If anyone is cool enough to tell us when we can stop worrying about being cool, it’s the coolest 61-year-old on the planet.

This is good news for me, since I am approaching that age where I care less and less, with each passing day, about what’s cool, much less how to define the term. The inexorable uncoolness we swore we’d outrun at any cost, even as it devoured our parents, is nipping at my heels, and I’m okay with that.

Were this a critical essay, I’d have to go to all the trouble of defining what cool even means, and triangulating Eno’s argument against others, but fortunately I can just link to his essay and consider how it refracts the points made by an older one that’s always been a favorite: “Against Cool” by Rick Moody (not available online, but it is in the 2004 edition of the Best American Essays).

And with the time I saved, I can now go listen to Another Green World. Thanks, laziness!

Homer: You know what the song says: “It’s hip to be square.”
Lisa: That song is so lame.
Homer: So lame that it’s… cool?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Am I cool, kids?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Good. I’m glad. And that’s what makes me cool, not caring, right?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we’ve tried everything here.
Homer: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.
Bart: Well, sure you do.
Lisa: How else would you know?

Posted: December 2nd, 2009 under General, Music.
Comments: 3

Thank god we’re finally done with that long, dreadful weekend of face-to-face reunions and the terrifying embrace of home and hearth, right? I’m thrilled to be back in the realm of the daily grind and regular blog updates and, what’s more, listening to new music for the first time in a while. I bought several new(ish) albums for my Thanksgiving weekend drive: Volcano Choir’s Unmap, Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms, Bear in Heaven’s Beast Rest Forth Mouth, and Memory Tapes’ Seek Magic.

I realize none of these are the freshest, most cutting-edge musics out there right now, but the older I get the less concerned I am with any of that, and besides, the edgiest bands out there are so obscure, they don’t have names or even MySpaces yet! I just started a new band while I was writing that sentence and we’re playing our first show as soon as I alert the other members upon figuring out who they are.

So far my favorite of these new acquisitions is Bear in Heaven, which isn’t entirely surprising since they incorporate lots of synths and their drummer is lethal. Another secret to their success might lie with their name; bands with Bear in the name seem to do pretty well. The band I formed in the previous paragraph will be called Bear Wolf Iver On The Radio.

Bear In Heaven’s new album is called Beast Rest Forth Mouth, which, I don’t know, strikes me as kind of a dumb title. It smacks of laziness when a band, album, or song name resembles several random words thrown together. But maybe I don’t know the whole story! And the music is really good, so who cares what your album is called? Please don’t be mad at me, Bear in Heaven!

Hurry up and listen to this song; it’ll make your day better.

Update: I sometimes remind my blogging students to be judicious in the snark they dispense online, since every once in a while the target of your oh-so-clever nastiness might contact you out of the blue. In my case, Hometapes founder Adam Heathcott, a very nice man, wrote me an email explaining: “Beast Rest Forth Mouth is a mnemonic for the four directions of the compass: East West North South.” So, not random at all. Sorry for being a dick, folks!

Posted: December 1st, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 2

As my music journalism class heads into its final weeks, I want my students to read some unconventional, unprofessional, and esoteric examples of music writing. Last week they graciously indulged my sadistic decision to assign Hipster Runoff’s infamous Animal Collective post. This week I asked them to read a piece from the War Against Silence by Glenn MacDonald, a software engineer by trade and a music geek by default.

I forget how much I miss The War Against Silence until I revisit it. From 1999—when I discovered it while searching for fellow Loud Family fans—until 2004, when MacDonald discontinued it, TWAS was the source of some of the best music writing on the web, and was the first instance of cogent, articulate online writing I ever encountered. That MacDonald wrote TWAS as a labor of love, with purportedly zero interest in becoming a professional music writer, only makes his project seem more rarefied and noble.

Eight years after he posted it, his ostensible critique of Amnesiac, Vespertine, and Life on a String also frames MacDonald’s immediate response to the events of 9/11/01. Eight years later, the piece holds up not only as a review of three new releases but also as a bracingly prescient time capsule containing one very smart person’s comprehension of the incomprehensible.

One of MacDonald’s best lines in the piece comes near the front. “Here is a very simple rule,” he states. “Music is what humans are best at, so anything that seems to supersede it, we should not do. Or phrased as semi-solipsism, in a sort of inversion of Wittgenstein’s point about what language can’t express, anything I cannot comprehend, should not exist. We, as a species, must be past this, or we will not survive.”

I have read this piece repeatedly over the intervening decade, and that bit still makes me catch my breath. MacDonald doesn’t dither about the role music plays in our lives or how best we humans might employ our ability to listen to and perform music. I have had the privelege of making music with and reading the words of people who agree with this statement and think very hard about it, and MacDonald’s words—this whole treatise, because it really is a kind of manifesto, still makes my spine straighten a bit, serving as a mild admonishment to care more—about music, about other people, about life.

“This isn’t a record, it’s the inherent sound of streets and data and buildings, of all the wreckage we surround ourselves with even if it hasn’t fallen yet.”

Is that even music journalism? Who cares? I certainly don’t.

Posted: November 23rd, 2009 under Music, Reading & Writing.
Comments: none