evoke / evocative / evocatively
I realize that eliminating all of these words from my verbal palette vocabulary will make it pretty difficult for me to continue writing reviews. I’ll clean out my desk and be gone by the end of the day.
Posted: March 26th, 2009 under Fifty albums, Music, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 9
Talk Talk, Laughing Stock
Ever the optimist, I have a playlist on my iPod which is ironically titled “Feel Better”. It contains this album and Hex by Bark Psychosis, among other downtempo dirges for the downtrodden. But while a gloomy, exhuasted disposition is probably most suitable for this album’s audience, it is by no means a prerequisite. People have been talking about Talk Talk’s abrupt change in musical direction—from New Romantic avatars to the reclusive architects of foreboding, sprawling suites—for eighteen years now, so that’s all I’m really going to say about it. Besides, I knew the Laughing Stock Talk Talk before I knew the It’s My Life Talk Talk, and while the latter is arguably just as worthwhile as the former, I’m more interested in, and familiar with, the band who created Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, who refused to hold live performances once these albums—whose alleged inaccessibility got them dropped from their major-label contract—were released; this is the band whose leader, Mark Hollis, dropped off the radar for several years after the band’s dissolution in 1991, and to whom the ultimate dictum of taste and restrait is credited: “Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note. And don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.” Laughing Stock, even more than its predecessor, represents the successful application of this philosophy.
Back in November, on my first official night as a Chicago resident, I was drinking at the Beachwood with a large group of people and talking with Aden, who was repeating his emphatic demand that I procure and listen to Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock immediately, that my discovery of its beauty and magic was long overdue. He kept saying it all as one potent appellation: “TalkTalkLaughingStock, man. You gotta get TalkTalkLaughingStock.” Soon afterwards, I did indeed get TalkTalkLaughingStock, and I immediately knew why it had received his, and so many others’, endorsements. It’s evident in the near-silence of the album’s first thirty seconds, the way “Ascension Day” builds to a chaotic crescendo before being abruptly cut off by another near-silence, the barely audible piano intro to “After The Flood”—I’ll get to “After The Flood” in a moment—and then the denoument in the album’s last three songs.
Even if the other five songs here weren’t already compelling, I would still be overwhelmed and humbled by “After The Flood”, the geometric and aesthetic center of the album. How a person can prevent nine minutes of the same cyclical chord progression on a trembling Hammond from becoming monotonous or excessive is a secret only Mark Hollis and maybe a few other songwriters know. Over meandering piano and bass, and an almost lethargic drum part played with brushes, he somehow propels the song forward with carefully-placed guitar chords and his almost unintelligible lyrical pleas. The minute-long guitar squall in the middle of the song is reminiscent of the dissonant, grating connection tone a low-baud modem produces, but still somehow serves as a plangent cry of the disaffected, and the song’s thematic core.
I’ve been living in Chicago for ten months now, and for the most part, it’s been grand. But for a boy who grew up in a small town, the city can at times be exhausting, dirty, and depressing. Now, for example, I find myself wading through a muggy Saint Martin’s summer, wishing it would get colder like it’s supposed to, wondering if this is global warming or another innocuous meteorological bogeyman like El Nino. Arriving at my job sweating, sitting down to a workload in which I have zero personal interest invested: that’s when I listen to this album. Hungover, lying on my bed in a the humid air of a languid Sunday afternoon: that’s when I listen to this album. Walking outside in the single-digit temperatures of a Chicago winter, driving past barren Iowa fields on the way home for Thanksgiving: that’s when I listen to this album. Sometimes, at the end of the work day, I stand at the window by the elevators in my office on the 49th floor, looking at the buildings below and the lake beyond, and I envision the water rising, the whole scene swallowed up by the lake, with only the tops of the tallest buildings in this panorama—mine, the Aon Center, the Prudential building—rising above the surface. The soundtrack to this apocalyptic daydream is always “After The Flood”.
I might as well mention, here, that this is the last entry in my list of Fifty Big Albums. This is the last pedantic screed about music you’ll have to endure for a while (from me, anyway). This album was the most recent addition to my Big List of Fifty, and the first Big Album I embraced after moving to Chicago, after changing nearly everything about myself, from my name to my accomodations to my job to my band to my girlfriend. Laughing Stock acts as a sort of bridge between all those albums that were so formative for the first quarter-century of my life, and the music that I’ve yet to discover, the music I’m in the process of discovering this very moment. Its composite tone and color may not be upbeat, but its attendant connotations are uplifting, and ultimately forward-looking.
So, here’s to the next fifty.
Posted: September 14th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
Groove Armada, Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub)
My infatuation with this album began with “Superstylin’”, the infectious, bottom-heavy club single that blew up alongside my burgeoning appreciation for the gay bar where Mark worked, and where Neil and I would disingenuously scam free drinks from the owner, who had a crush on us. We made friends with the other bartenders and the cocktail waitresses and the DJs and got drunk almost every night of the week. We flirted with girls who assumed we were gay and went to after-hours parties where people used their car keys to do bumps and the stereo was inevitably playing this album, or Rooty, or something more incidental like the new Britney or Janet. I didn’t require much beyond my paltry paycheck at Barnes & Noble and several drunken hours a night with Neil. We were poor, frustrated, and unhappily single. It was November 2001, and the world was a mess, so my outlook became more insular, my expectations more humble, my hedonism more focused; the macro was supplanted by the micro.
The weather got worse and the days got shorter, and I found myself working retail during the Christmas ramp-up. I spent the majority of my days in the last place I wanted to be: the mall where the bookstore was located, a regional hub for the rampant consumerism we’d been assured would get our country back on its feet. I watched overweight people stumble clumsily around the food court, in and out of Abercrombie and Hot Topic, looking more like battle-dazed conscripts than proud Americans enjoying their freedom. Like most people, I didn’t yet have the emotional stamina to make sense of the deleterious course upon which our country’s leadership was about to embark, and it would be a while before people had the collective stones to question the excessive but vapid displays of patriotism borne by the flags slapped on the backs of enormous SUVs and shopping sprees in the name of Freedom. So I just clenched my jaw and hoped for the best.
Perhaps that’s how Goodbye Country developed the consolatory effect it still has for me: it was tailor-made to serve two purposes, as both an opiate and a stimulant. Dazed and/or aggravated by the banal trivialities of the day-to-day and the immediacy of an ominous global scenario, I could listen to “Edge Hill” or “Healing” or “Tuning In” and lower my heart rate a little and shut out the noise; then go dance my cares away to songs like “Superstylin’” and “Fogma”. Plenty of albums embody this sort of duality, but few of them do it as elegantly as this one. There’s something so self-contained, so assured and organic, about the comfortable interiors created by the chilled-out gems on this album. About half the songs are more bombastic, pop-oriented tunes crowding the front of the stage (“Suntoucher”, “Superstylin’”, “Little By Little”, or the car-commercial staple “My Friend”), but they inscribe a complementary orbit around the record’s real heart, which is made up of gorgeous layered soundscapes like “Drifted”, “Healing”, and the wistful goodbye track, “Join Hands”.
The only thing missing from this album is something that’s readily found on the previous one: the downtempo classic “At The River”. For this song, after all, is how I first came to know the group, just before “Superstylin’” dropped. Everything that happened that strange year, good or bad, was complimented and bookended by “At The River”. Sometime the following spring, Neil and I were listening to it and he said it evoked a strange feeling in him, a sort of nostalgia for something that hadn’t yet happened, or that might never happen at all. It’s a song that helped us find solace during a fucked-up, uncertain time. Listening to the way “At The River” couples mournful trombones (later reprised on “Join Hands”) with blissed-out vocals and strings, it’s not hard to see how it—and, by extension, Goodbye Country—is a subtle, rarefied example of that sad/beautiful dichotomy. It was the best of times, and the worst of times—in any event, it was the times, and the memories are fond nonetheless.
Posted: September 10th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
Elliott Smith, x/o
I’ve been working a lot of overtime lately. From my desk, if I crane my neck, I can see out the picture window of the attorney’s office directly across me. Evening comes earlier each day as summer draws to a close, and in this climate-controlled office environment—especially with the lonely atmosphere that descends on an office after normal business hours—it’s not difficult to look out on the darknening cityscape and the great lake beyond, and imagine that it’s early December, a time of year drawn with cold, barren lines and painted in bleak gray tones, whose uncompromising austerity provides a cleansing renewal in some perverse way, as our bleak and unaccomodating climate forces us to do yet another personal inventory, perhaps to be more ingenuitive and make do with what we have. (“Brother, can you spare sunshine for a brother? Old Man Winter’s in the air.”)
This making-do is what I sensed Elliot Smith doing throughout his career, in songs that were often bleak but not hopeless: though his voice may often be fragile, his lyrics dejected and angry, there still seems a current of hope in his best work, as if by merely writing and recording another song, he had gained another small, hard-won victory, and staved off oblivion for yet another day. Hence his recurring and inevitably prescient theme of death and a relieved, near-miss attitude about it that leaves him appreicating “any situation where I’m better off than dead.” This is why I read his songs as optimistic rather than morbid, even given the circumstances—both known and speculated—surrounding his eventual (self-)destruction.
Either/Or is usually hailed as the zenith of Elliott Smith’s ouvre, and is brilliant in its own way, but my money’s always been on xo. Maybe it’s because I was clued in to the Elliott Smith phenomenon when it was released, and didn’t have to discover it retroactively the way I did with Either/Or. Or maybe it’s the way its tone isn’t as uniformly bleak as its predecessor’s: whereas Either/Or was all spare, subdued arrangements that only rose to a roar on a couple of occasions, xo paints with a more diverse template, and has a boisterous, chiming chorus to match every hushed, foreboding passage. The production value has been upped, sure, and there are more instruments in the mix, but not once is the core integrity of a song compromised. “Waltz #2″ had “radio favorite” stamped all over it, and might have done even better commercially if it weren’t for its emotional ambivalence. “Baby Britain”, however, is the real treasure here, and joins the thin ranks of songs that are, in my estimation, absolutely perfect pop songs: nothing more can or should be done to improve it. It coasts in on a jaunty piano line and trots away three minutes later. While the music pays homage to the Beatles, the lyrics provide an endearing personification of America as a bipolar, self-destructive artistic animal—a portrait far too familiar to its creator. “Pitseleh” and especially “Tomorrow Tomorrow” are gorgeous acoustic reveries, the latter a triplet-based flurry of ethereal but articulate guitar lines beneath some of Smith’s best lyrics ever. Just as it’s blasphemous to say that I like this album better than Either/Or, I’ve found few people who agree with me that “Waltz #1″ is better than “Waltz #2″, but how can you argue with lines like “Every time the day darkens down and goes away / pictures open in my head of me and you”? How can you argue with the falsetto delivery of a line like “I wish I’d never seen your face”?
It’s been six years since xo was released, four since Figure 8 supplanted xo’s fragile blueprint, and nearly one year since Smith either did or didn’t stab himself in the heart. In the days following the news, I had the following selfish and morbid thought more than once: Well, at least we got a little more out of him than we did from Jeff Buckley. For me, xo could have been his last album and I would have been satisfied. In the pessimist’s universe of diminishing returns, we’ll take whatever we can get, and no victory is too small. I made it home from work, I had dinner, I have a place to sleep tonight; how can I not be grateful? Isn’t that all we can really hope to do, is live another day?
Posted: September 3rd, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream
It’s that time of the year: back to school. This doesn’t really mean much to those of us in the workaday world, but most public schools in the US will resume classes next week, assuming they have the federal funding to do so. In the un-air-conditioned hallways of my alma mater in Grinnell, the first day of school was, by my calculation, either today or this past Monday. Since I work year-round now, summer and fall only differ in terms of weather. But it was actually just today that I had a strange, and infinitely geeky, thought: I miss back-to-school time. And maybe you do too.
Think about it: the new shoes. The new clothes. The perfect outfit for the first day. New haircuts. New girlfriends. Marching band practice. The unproductive first day of classes, when no homework is given. That new-textbook smell. (Don’t pretend you didn’t love the new-textbook smell.) Feeling a certain guilty thrill at the prospect of seeing everyone again, even the people you hate, even the vapid hot girls and the brainless jocks. You needed those people to define your own exceptionally intelligent, subversive, endlessly clever clique. You needed bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the Pumpkins to speak for the disaffected, middle-class, angry young man/woman within.
It’s easy to look back and smirk at our naïveté, but that’s cheating. That’s not allowed; it’s like peeking at the answer key. For all the posturing and anxiety that goes into being an American teenager, US high school students are some of the least self-conscious, most sweetly hopeful people in the world. Give any one of them the chance to talk about something they really love, some great new band they’ve just discovered. They seek out their own amazing new shit and become rapturous about it; it knows no context or moderation or refinement; it’s pure unadulterated joy. And then they seek out the other kids who feel the same way they do, and they celebrate. Is that what “Cherub Rock” is about? Is it about high school kids on the first day of school? Ushered in with a sexy, perfect drum fill—one of the most easily-recognized beginnings to an album, ever—and a mounting intro that crashes anthemically into the main theme like a call to arms? “Hipsters, unite / come align for the big fight / to rock for you.” Of course. It’s so obvious, now.
But maybe it wasn’t so obvious eleven years ago, in the thick of it. Another school year, my junior year, halfway through high school. As summer ended, I was still recovering from a bad breakup with my Fundamentalist Christian girlfriend. I thought I’d seen the worst and had the emotional scars to prove it. Rather than cringe at that kind of naïveté now, I smile, grateful that I was once so green and gave impulsive, melodramatic emotions such a wide berth. The last week in August, right before school started, my band played an outdoor show at the gazebo in Central Park. The turnout was impressive and ranged from our friends to college students to our parents to the senior citizens who showed up expecting the usual bluegrass or Dixieland fare. Silly as it all seems in retrospect, it was one of our first bona fide gigs. Playing up there on an absurdly high drum riser, I had that indubitable, hopelessly hopeful feeling we got at the beginning of every year: “This is it. Great things are going to happen. I’m going to do something powerful. I’m going to rock out with my friends and we’re going to have the time of our lives and I’m going to get hung up on a girl and start dating her when the leaves start to change color and it’s going to be perfect.” Nothing sophisticated, nothing profound. I started that school year with at least two new pairs of Converse All-Stars. They’d come back into vogue the year before, along with grunge and the Singles soundtrack and “Beavis & Butthead”. I wore what was essentially, I realize now, a skater cut, even though I didn’t skate: Long hair hanging down around close-shorn sides. Big cargo shorts. Huge shirts. Flannel shirts. The obligatory piercing (left lobe, of course).
Literally the day before school started, I did a very uncool, unrebellious thing and went to the mall in Marshalltown with my mom, ostensibly to get new school clothes. But I also picked up the new Smashing Pumpkins album. To this day, there isn’t a better album to capture the optimistic rush you get from early autumn, the perverse feeling of renewal that comes during a season when so many things begin to die. Fitting, then, that Siamese Dream so consistently and successfully marries the euphoric to the melancholy and mines rock’s adolescent sex/death dichotomy for all it’s worth, again and again, in “Cherub Rock” and “Rocket” and “Silverfuck” and “Soma”. Even treacly, inescapable radio staples like “Today” and “Disarm” don’t sound mawkish when they’re placed back into the context of the album: they’re majestic again. “Spaceboy” brought the Mellotron back into fashion. “Silverfuck” still works, even if it’s overlong and the title is a puerile ploy and Billy insisted on the “bang bang you’re dead” line during the middle section. “Hummer” is the perfect makeout song, especially the coda. The languid and then cathartic “Soma” was the first thing I listened to every day in the winter when I got up at five-thirty for morning swim practice. This album was absolutely everything rock music was supposed to be, and I hazard to say that it’s the first such album that was released at a time when I could finally appreciate such a thing. I didn’t drink or do drugs, and wouldn’t for another few years, so rock & roll was the best high I could possibly imagine.
Musical scholars can talk all they want about how doom-and-gloom grunge was (and the Pumpkins weren’t technically grunge, I think everyone agrees) but it strikes me now as a predominantly optimistic, even celebratory genre. Maybe that’s going to be true of anything that was eventually commodified with astonishing quickness and sold directly to a demographic at whose core I happened to be residing at age seventeen. But I still don’t think it’s as cynical as all that: like the best music, Siamese Dream (and yes, Badmotorfinger and Vs and Nevermind and The Downward Spiral) was empowering rather than discouraging. It didn’t get me down; it didn’t anesthetize me. It made me say Fuck Yeah. It made me say This Is Awesome.
Earlier tonight, I drove past a Best Buy and decided to stop and see if they had the new Ali G DVD. The parking lot was a clusterfuck of cars waiting to exit, and the store itself was a zoo of mostly young people wearing dark clothing. I later learned there was a promotional event for the band Linkin Park, that tickets and other LP merchandise had been given away and/or sold. Reeling from sensory overload on my way to the DVD section, I winced as the in-store music rose to a volume level that would be obnoxious even if it were playing music I liked, much less generic aggro-rock pap. I watched swarms of young people walk past and suddenly felt really, really old. These kids were barely born when Siamese Dream came out. But I also realized they were probably experiencing the same youthful cultural epiphany as I did when I discovered Siamese Dream eleven autumns ago. Sure, I could get in their faces and try to deliver some passionate harangue about how the Pumpkins circa-1993 were a gazillion times better than Linkin Park circa-Ever. You and I both know that’s the truth, but it’s not fair. I don’t have the right to take that away from them. I can’t begrudge them their moment, just as I can’t rightly sneer at that seventeen-year-old version of myself, strutting around my small town in my Chuck Taylors with “Cherub Rock” my theme song, on the cusp of September 1993.
Posted: August 26th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
Cornershop, When I Was Born For The 7th Time
I got When I Was Born For The 7th Time at a used record store, along with Homework by Daft Punk. I ended up getting two of the year’s greatest albums for less than $15. I took both of them home and listened to Homework immediately; I was more excited about that than the other. But when I finally got around to When I Was Born, I was immediately aware of the hopeful magic in “Sleep On The Left Side” and the buoyant, smirking optimism of “Funky Days Are Back Again” and “Good Shit”. The same night I got those albums, I was getting drunk with my friend who also happened to be in a fraternity. Students in the Greek System at Lawrence didn’t quite fit the stereotype as well as those at larger schools; they were too geeky, for one, and even the beefy football players and champion drinkers were pretty tame when measured against most people’s preconceptions of Greek life.
My fraternity friend in question, Luis, was a Beta. Some Greek stereotypes did prevail on our campus: the Sig Eps were the Stoner frat and the Phi Delts were the Football frat, but then, almost as a foil, the Phi Taus were the Computer Geek frat and the aforementioned Betas were, by most accounts, the Gay frat. (Though really, “Gay frat” is kind of a redundant apellation.) Anyway, Luis and I got drunk and spun this record in his room that night while a bunch of his “brothers” came over and someone (probably a Sig Ep) brought over some weed. We got high and eventually switched on to other, more traditionally fratty music, and soon the requisite Phish and Bob Marley were blasting out over the neighboring houses’ crenelations. Anyway, for some reason I associate this album with that night, and that era in general. Maybe because it was spring, and the album’s repeated and various exhortions to throw off the shackles of the Establishment in the name of a hedonist’s agenda resonated especially well that time of year.
My relationship with the album continued throughout the ensuing years, and it became like a comfortable old jacket. The primitive two-chord structure of “Brimful Of Asha” and its absurd lyrics (“everybody needs a bosom for a pillow”) are endearing where once they were irritating; the same goes for the treacly country duet near the end of the album (“Good To Be On The Road”), the messy collaboration with Allen Ginsburg (“When The Light Appears Boy”), the half-realized ideas like “What Is Happening?” and “Chocolat”, or the instrumental collages “State Troopers” and “Butter The Soul”. George Harrison wasn’t back from the Ganges long before the world grew tired of Westerners throwing sitar on top of rock songs, but these guys reclaimed it and then threw it back on our faces, and not just on their Punjabi-language cover of “Norwegian Wood” but throughout the album, melding it with dub, trip-hop, and even country. It goes without saying that the album is eclectic, and I get so sick of hearing that word in music criticism that I may impose a moratorium on it in my own writing. “Eclectic” only just begins to hint at what’s special about this album, at the ineffible quality that sets it apart from the surfeit of “world music” that gets cleaned up and imported to provincial pop music fans in the West. Eclectic or not, there’s still a unity of theme, and that theme is fun, rebellion, and a big joyous middle finger to the Man.
The epilogue, then: There’s a Punjabi word, hanji, which can loosey translate to “yes” or “okay”, but is also an enthusiastic affirmation along the lines of “all right!” or “rock on!” Tjinder Singh kicks off the album’s centerpiece, “We’re In Yr Corner” with this exclamation, and repeats it several times throughout the song. Anyway, last summer, on my birthday, I got really wasted. But wait, there’s more. Drunkenly wandering the streets of Iowa City, Ransom and I came across one of his comupter geek friends. This fellow was Indian, and he was good-humored enough to indulge me while I repeatedly raised my fist in the air and yelped, “Hanji!” He would laugh, nod, and say, “Yes, yes. Hanji.” That, right there, that total ridiculousness and lack of self-consciousness, that affirmation, that’s what this album is about. Fun. Tolerance. Hanji.
Posted: August 25th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
Self, Breakfast With Girls
Five years ago, newly graduated from college and convinced I wasn’t sufficiently fed up with academia, I took a year of classes at Grinnell College. I rented an apartment in the basement of a house on Elm Street, half a block from the house where I was born and raised. (Situational irony, anyone?) I straddled the difficult townie/student divide relatively well, I think, and weathered that surreal year with considerable aplomb.
Grinnell College has a five-week winter break between semesters. To anyone who thinks this is a bit excessive, I reply: you’re absolutely right. Even worse than a five-week winter break is five winter weeks spent in one’s hometown, living half a block from one’s parents, with most of one’s friends gone back to their respective home states for the vacation.
That’s how I ended up mastering JetMoto with Mark for four hours, on average, every night. That’s how I developed a reluctant familiarity with THC. That’s how I read one book a day. That’s how I drove to Newton, twenty miles away, just to go bowling. That’s how I ended up sleeping fourteen hours a day. That’s how I ended up drinking rum drinks by myself while I watched bad movies in my apartment. That’s how I ended up looking forward to late-night talk shows.
That’s also how I fell in love with Breakfast With Girls, an unlikely winter companion, seeing as how it was released the previous summer and shimmers, crackles, and buzzes with instant musical gratification, its songs coated in a sheen of sexy pop-song brevity. There’s depth to some of them, though (the centerpiece “What Are You Thinking?” and the finale “Placing The Blame” [which cribs shamelessly from "Day In The Life" (in spirit if not in sound)]), and those were the ones to which I found myself returning over and over again, employing the rarely-implemented Repeat One feature on whichever stereo was spinning the copy of the disc I’d burned from Wes.
I perfected cabin-fever languor during those early weeks of January, drinking beer well into the night as Mark and I listened to this album on repeat, with all the lights off and the PlayStation’s volume turned down. Pretty pathetic, I realize. Wouldn’t wish such a sedentary purgatory on anyone. But I look back on it fondly all the same, perhaps because I am a masochist, perhaps because nostalgia inevitably ameliorates even the most unmemorable experiences, or perhaps because the unmatched thrill of discovering a new album/artist was the saving grace of that otherwise unremarkable stretch of ennui.
Posted: August 22nd, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
King Crimson, Discipline
When I was in 11th grade I took my first course at Grinnell College, mostly because it was foreordained for insufferable faculty-brat whelps like myself who thought themselves the shit and perceived a dearth of any real challenge to their advanced perspicacity in the public school curriculum. I stupidly chose Humanities 101, also known as The Hardest Class Ever Up To That Point In My Life. Accustomed as I was to my high school English classes allowing four weeks for the study of To Kill A Mockingbird, the syllabus pretty much caused my brain to shit itself. The professor was a reputed hardass even by college standards, the sort that gave everyone bad grades on their first papers so we’d all have ample room for improvement. I wanted to rise to the challenge, though, so I spent that winter reading the Iliad and the The Odyssey, along with The History Of The Peloponesian War, Plato’s Apology and The Symposium, Aristotle’s Poetics, and the obligatory Oedipus Rex, among other things. Some (most) of these texts I have not touched since, so it’s telling to realize how much of them I still remember. I guess my brain done worked pretty good, once.
That winter I spent most nights in Burling Library in one of the ridiculously cozy study carrels, reading line after line of Homeric verse that was alternately fascinating and impenetrable. My soundtrack for most of these study sessions was King Crimson’s Discipline, which is appropriate insofar as it’s a cacaphony of dualities: an academic veneer surrounding a visceral core, complex arrangements using austere instrumentation, a brash yet controlled sonic assault. The studied minimalism of “The Sheltering Sky” was an ideal backdrop for those interminable evenings of supposed intellectual benefit, coupled as it was by January’s early nightfall and deep freeze. The nearly impossible counterrhythms of the album’s eponymous track—one guitar line in 17/8, the other in 15—flow together improbably to create a compelling, even funky groove. This is how I began idolizing the Ultimate Rhythm Section that Bill Bruford and Tony Levin comprised; this is how I committed myself to learning every drum part, if it took all year. Well, it did take a year, more than a year, but I did it. I tried to emulate Bill Bruford in every respect, and then some. I tuned my shitty drums like his and held my sticks like he did. I tracked down a transcription of “Discipline”’s impossible drum part and tried to transcribe some of the other songs myself. I quoted the album’s lyrics in emails to girls, for Christ’s sake. I drove my friends crazy by talking endlessly about how awesome this album was, how these four guys with such prodigious talent made it sound so effortless.
Discipline’s album sleeve bears one of Robert Fripp’s pithy, pseudophilosophical aphorisms: “Discipline is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.” This could be translated, in the context of this music, to read: “Instrumental wankery doesn’t amount to shit if it isn’t going somewhere.” King Crimson’s ethos, at least back then, was not to cause conniptions with their odd time signatures; it was to make listeners forget that they were hearing odd time signatures and just relax and enjoy the music. One can easily ignore the fact that “Frame By Frame” is in seven, or how many different subdivisions are straddled by the groove in “Thela Hun Gingeet”. When Fripp strafes a song with arpeggiated 32nd notes, it’s more meditative than offensive. Unlike so many other prog and jam band juggernauts, they did not want to overstay their welcome or sully anyone’s carpet with intricate arrangements and expansive soundscapes. This is thinking person’s pop music, but it’s not that far from the dancing person’s pop music; it’s not so different from, say, the Talking Heads, with whom at least two Crimson members collaborated at one time or another. I mean, if a seventeen-year-old version of myself could get his feeble head around the Oresteia, certainly a casual listener could dig “Elephant Talk”.
Posted: August 17th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
One afternoon six years ago I was passing in and out of a light sleep on the top bunk in my future girlfriend’s room as she and her friends were getting ready to go out. One of them put on her mix tape, the one with “Autumn Sweater”. It was the first time I had ever heard the song. I had no prior associations with the song or with Yo La Tengo. But it made me instantly sad anyway.
We drove over to Hampstead Heath and unloaded the station wagon. My cousin Luke was eleven years old at the time and wearing his Rollerblades. He asked his father what a pedophile was. We walked into the park with Millie, the golden retriever. Luke sped ahead of us on wheels. I remember walking next to Mary, humming the bassline from “Autumn Sweater” quietly enough that only I could hear it, and ruminating in heartsick confusion upon how I could, through sedulous pursuit, somehow transform my then-future girlfriend into my imminent-present girlfriend. Down by one of the ponds, Millie charged at a two-year-old girl from behind and knocked her into the mud; it was hilarious. Immediately content in this setting, I was also homesick all the same.
One night a year later, before a gig, Wes and I had just completed our pre-show ritual of listening to “Cotton Avenue” by Joni Mitchell and moved on to “Autumn Sweater” and he pointed out that it’s one of the few songs he can think of that ends on a snare hit.
Last fall on tour I brought my YLT mix with me and Dino and I argued over which songs were missing from it. We drove into the heart of Minneapolis listening to “Moby Octopad” as the highway lamps came on and pulled shafts of light across the lumpy topography of the van’s interior.
When I find myself in situations where outmoded yet prevailing social strictures prevent grown men from crying, I generally retreat to I Can Hear The Heart and start with “Damage”, then work my way further into the album. I have to be careful, though. The weight of the years, and all.
Posted: August 11th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none
It’s a curious thing to love a band whose members you also know personally as friends. I got to know the Alto Heceta gentlemen four years ago when my old band Speed Of Sauce shared the bill with them many times at the Green Room. By the time they released what turned out to be their swan song in October 2002, I would’ve bought it and loved it whether Alto Heceta were four guys I regularly got drunk with or not. But since they were, I was introduced to the raging beauty of the parties after shows, the haggard practice space at 931 S Van Buren, and the jihads declared by this insane clique upon bars like the Deadwood, the Atlas, the Alley Cat, Quentin’s, and countless others.
When all of this started, I don’t think any of us knew what was truly at stake. I was still bummed about Speed Of Sauce’s recent breakup, and so I invested a lot of musical and emotional energy in Alto Heceta and its attendant bands—Burn Disco Burn, Racecar Radar, Nolan. The album took over a year to complete, only to have the band break up not long after its release, but to this day I love it as I would love any other album, with perhaps only a bit of bias since I know the band.
I am still blown away by what a solid, complete package this disc is, how consistent it is both sonically and thematically, how earnestly it transmits a unique Midwestern flavor of weltschmerz. There are the ambient segues, the way the fast rockers cycle into the slower, more reflective pieces, the uncompromising fanfare of “My Shrinking Paradise” and the contemplative trio of songs in the middle. There’s the thorough melancholia of the album’s last quarter, initiated by the haunting “Picture Being There” and brought to a close by the moribund “A Head Start”.
When this album was officially released, it was both the best and worst of times. I was working two shitty jobs so I could buy new drums to replace the cherished kit that’d just been stolen from my car. I was trying to convince myself that postponing my move to Chicago had been the right decision. (The answer is: yes and no.) I know that this music both complemented and alleviated that cold, rainy autumn and early winter I spent in Iowa City, the struggle to reconcile my love of music and the pressure I felt to settle on a “respectable” career, the transition from one friendgroup to another, the endless beer-soaked nights and the refuge we sought in the bars and on the front porches. It’s all there.
It’s bittersweet to listen to this album, but I think that’s probably true of all my favorite albums—I’m a glutton for punishment. These songs erase the unpleasant memories I have of my three years in Iowa City and help remind me that it can occasionally be a beautiful place. These songs remind me what beautiful friends I was blessed with there. These songs make me want to load up the car and blast off on a road trip, another small overture intended to close some of the distance that’s grown between us since.
Posted: August 9th, 2004 under Fifty albums, Music.
Comments: none