Welcome to your new favourite band… kinda like your old favourite band.
Okay, so that’s subjectivity raised to the n-th degree, but The Whiskers – who formed through the mediation of a Frog Eyes message board – often sound like a microscopically observed homage to not just one weird band, but the whole damn Axis of Krug, namely: Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, Blackout Beach, Destroyer… and even throws in some of their tourmates for good measure, like Xiu Xiu and Elfin Saddle. Perhaps in an effort to throw off the older influences, the new album builds its surreal ballads up from seesawing acoustic riffs stretched out to 6, 7, 8 minutes, and adds brass – entering Neutral Milk Hotel territory – but with a cast of vampires, ghosts, swans, and seamstresses sewing wings onto doomed lovers, the shadow of Spencer Krug is cast over much of it.
Formed around Connecticut-based brothers Thom and Jim Stylinski, the Whiskers are a shifting, pan-American collective who make quirky chamber-pop or freak-folk. You could call it a Prog revival, if it’s understood that The Whiskers are far more accessible than that makes them sound, if not instantly likeable. Albums #1 & 2 (_The Whiskers_ & _The Distorted Historian_) took the Frog Eyes formula of lo-fi garage-prog with rapid-fire lyrics starring mythical figures, and substantially improved on it with f/x-heavy synths and programming that explodes in several directions at once. That might make the Whiskers sound like a completely different band, but it’s those unplayable, machine-generated sounds that replicate Frog Eyes’ dozen-ideas-a-second, while (paradoxically) having more emotional impact for being tight in a way Frog Eyes just aren’t. (Alternative comparison: If you ever wished Magnetic Fields would re-make their first two albums with Stephin Merritt on vocals, instead of Susan Amway… look no further).
With their third album, _War of Currents_, The Whiskers have largely retired the synths, and taken a crack at the multi-segmented epic song, with the example of _In the Aeroplane Over the Sea_ or Sunset Rubdown’s _Dragonslayer_ behind them. In a nutshell: it’s a masterclass in epic songwriting, which only falls short of greatness in its reluctance to vary the (new) formula. Then again, unlike yer-akshel 70s progsters, The Whiskers never bore or jar by dropping in unnecessary movements; always unifying their songs with a strong riff or chord progression.
Granted, there are other precedents for this 7 track, 42 minute album, but with songs like ‘The Seamstress’ you have to wonder whether they’re not attempting a deliberate patchwork of Krug-isms (in this case: ‘The Mending of the Gown’ spliced with ‘Shut Up, I am Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings’). When Krug sings about chameleons and leopards, morticians and magicians, you know he’s fretting and sometimes snarking about the nature of performance, even as he mythologizes it; when Stylinski adopts these (and adds a few of his own, like ornithopters and wing-walkers), for better or for worse, it feels as if you’re just getting the fantasy, without an obvious route back to the personal. (Not that he doesn’t have his own quotable moments: “you married on the ferris wheel / honeymooned in the haunted house / you were buried in the cemetery / I want to blow the winter out of the sea…”).
Elsewhere, the Stylinski brothers deliberately mimic the vocal interplay of Bejar / Mercer / Krug on the Swan Lake records (those three songwriter showdowns), and as if they’re worried no-one’s got the point, they even pull Dan (Destroyer) Bejar’s trick of quoting classic pop songs with completely different melodies (on ‘Birds of Paradise’: “bird-bird-bird / bird is the word / everybody’s heard / about the bird…”). Somehow, it always comes across as affectionate rather than lazy; fun rather than tired, so keep watching this space for genuine greatness.
All three albums are available to download or order on CD at www.awkwardcore.com
[Re-published here since the sad demise of the band... not completely unmourned]
Friday, 22 July 2011
MUSIC: EDM, pt. II - an album and gig review
Early Day Miners @ The Lexington, King’s Cross (Sunday Dec 6, 2009)
EDM are heavy. Not ear-bleeding in their settings, or wall-of-sound in their lack of arrangement, but heavy in their emphasis on big, dynamic riffs and bass-grooves that sweep you up, without overpowering, or straying into the baroque of mathrock, metal, whatever. EDM share a musical language with shoegaze (currently being revived trashily, by the likes of No Age… and prettily, by School of Seven Bells). Unlike any of the above, EDM take what they need for the sake of a flowing, rushing layer within their sound; not a screen to disguise lack of tunes, or an amniotic haze, but a crucial component to songs whose words you can hear, and whose worlds you can inhabit. Any comparison to Radiohead is likely to sound like hyperbole or make you think Muse, but only a few recent songs, like ‘Arpeggi’, ‘Bodysnatchers’, and the live version of ‘Videotape’ come close to what EDM have been doing for years with this kind of surging, pulsing, organic music. (FYI: Mainman Dan Burton learned his craft as a producer from Daniel Lanois, who worked on all of U2’s best material.) Oh, and he can actually sing; not ostentatiously, but with a distinct resemblance to Peter Gabriel.
Tonight, EDM play an even split between the gothically-tinged All Harm Ends Here (2004), the post-rock leaning Offshore (2006), and their new foray into (or towards) mainstream rock, The Treatment. Opening the set, there’s something ritualistic about the simple refrain of “all harm… ends here / old faith…for-given…” as if the song’s impression of a long march has brought us to a place of sanctuary. Confidently, EDM follow up with two of the best songs from the new album, ‘So slow’ and ‘Spaces’, which manage to fit in squalling wah-wah solos worthy of The Cure, without breaking the flow, as a lesser band would (filling in while they wait for the guitarist to finish). Mid-set, we get a run of older tracks, namely ‘Deserter’ and ‘Sans Revival’ from Offshore followed by ‘Offshore’ itself. Composed as a string of images with haiku-like precision, the songs draw a thematic link between the devastation of the Civil War, and America post-Hurricane Katrina. I’ve said it before, but ‘Sans Revival’ (more like a deferred chorus to ‘Deserter’) is one of my most-played (and most shivers down the spine as you try to harmonize) songs of the decade. It’s hard to quote EDM without making them sound like a defeated, or depressing band, but the lyrics describe the moment before escape, before resolution, before defiance they can best express with recourse to post-rock crescendos, or desolate drone-scapes that depict the vast chasms of human experience to either side of what we can say at all, or bring ourselves to say.
Two more new songs follow: ‘In Too Deep’ and ‘How to Fall’, both underlining the band’s newfound commitment to strong choruses the audience can yell along to, and impressionistic lyrics that work through repetition. The former might refer to someone drowning before they even hit the beach at Normandy, and the latter refers to a prizefighter who’d rather be beaten than be fake, but with repetition your understanding alternates between image and symbol, suggesting: emotional pain in a relationship, commitment to art over commerce. Switch back: someone’s dying here, someone’s taking real punishment. Already, all of these new songs are as vital as the best of the old, and yet the old are made new – like the closing number from All Harm, personifying urban decay as a vampire “drain[ing] all life away”; re-arranged here as if it’s something from the second-side of Joy Division’s timeless Closer. That’s to say, the electric organ setting should be cheap and ersatz, but instead these shrill drones rise up like castle-walls, like a fortress that (this time) keeps feeling outside, because feeling means pain.
And yet. Andyet-andyet-andyet… they’re so damn hopeful! EDM know they’re not fashionable, and they’ve been ignored for years, or dismissed for reviving the sounds of yesteryear (slowcore, shoegaze, whatever) when they’re actually refining ideas, effects, and studio techniques the “originals” didn’t necessarily use to the fullest. A line of people queue to say thanks for coming all the way from the Midwest (from Bloomington, Indiana) and I’m one of the more hesitant wellwishers because… actually, I don’t figure out what I wanted to say until afterwards, on the nightbus home, which is that I’m grateful they're doing this, but I also feel sad for all my friends who beat their heads against the same brick wall, and this has been one of the handful of gigs I’ve seen – ever – that was captivating and urgent and life-affirming at every last moment.
EDM are heavy. Not ear-bleeding in their settings, or wall-of-sound in their lack of arrangement, but heavy in their emphasis on big, dynamic riffs and bass-grooves that sweep you up, without overpowering, or straying into the baroque of mathrock, metal, whatever. EDM share a musical language with shoegaze (currently being revived trashily, by the likes of No Age… and prettily, by School of Seven Bells). Unlike any of the above, EDM take what they need for the sake of a flowing, rushing layer within their sound; not a screen to disguise lack of tunes, or an amniotic haze, but a crucial component to songs whose words you can hear, and whose worlds you can inhabit. Any comparison to Radiohead is likely to sound like hyperbole or make you think Muse, but only a few recent songs, like ‘Arpeggi’, ‘Bodysnatchers’, and the live version of ‘Videotape’ come close to what EDM have been doing for years with this kind of surging, pulsing, organic music. (FYI: Mainman Dan Burton learned his craft as a producer from Daniel Lanois, who worked on all of U2’s best material.) Oh, and he can actually sing; not ostentatiously, but with a distinct resemblance to Peter Gabriel.
Tonight, EDM play an even split between the gothically-tinged All Harm Ends Here (2004), the post-rock leaning Offshore (2006), and their new foray into (or towards) mainstream rock, The Treatment. Opening the set, there’s something ritualistic about the simple refrain of “all harm… ends here / old faith…for-given…” as if the song’s impression of a long march has brought us to a place of sanctuary. Confidently, EDM follow up with two of the best songs from the new album, ‘So slow’ and ‘Spaces’, which manage to fit in squalling wah-wah solos worthy of The Cure, without breaking the flow, as a lesser band would (filling in while they wait for the guitarist to finish). Mid-set, we get a run of older tracks, namely ‘Deserter’ and ‘Sans Revival’ from Offshore followed by ‘Offshore’ itself. Composed as a string of images with haiku-like precision, the songs draw a thematic link between the devastation of the Civil War, and America post-Hurricane Katrina. I’ve said it before, but ‘Sans Revival’ (more like a deferred chorus to ‘Deserter’) is one of my most-played (and most shivers down the spine as you try to harmonize) songs of the decade. It’s hard to quote EDM without making them sound like a defeated, or depressing band, but the lyrics describe the moment before escape, before resolution, before defiance they can best express with recourse to post-rock crescendos, or desolate drone-scapes that depict the vast chasms of human experience to either side of what we can say at all, or bring ourselves to say.
Two more new songs follow: ‘In Too Deep’ and ‘How to Fall’, both underlining the band’s newfound commitment to strong choruses the audience can yell along to, and impressionistic lyrics that work through repetition. The former might refer to someone drowning before they even hit the beach at Normandy, and the latter refers to a prizefighter who’d rather be beaten than be fake, but with repetition your understanding alternates between image and symbol, suggesting: emotional pain in a relationship, commitment to art over commerce. Switch back: someone’s dying here, someone’s taking real punishment. Already, all of these new songs are as vital as the best of the old, and yet the old are made new – like the closing number from All Harm, personifying urban decay as a vampire “drain[ing] all life away”; re-arranged here as if it’s something from the second-side of Joy Division’s timeless Closer. That’s to say, the electric organ setting should be cheap and ersatz, but instead these shrill drones rise up like castle-walls, like a fortress that (this time) keeps feeling outside, because feeling means pain.
And yet. Andyet-andyet-andyet… they’re so damn hopeful! EDM know they’re not fashionable, and they’ve been ignored for years, or dismissed for reviving the sounds of yesteryear (slowcore, shoegaze, whatever) when they’re actually refining ideas, effects, and studio techniques the “originals” didn’t necessarily use to the fullest. A line of people queue to say thanks for coming all the way from the Midwest (from Bloomington, Indiana) and I’m one of the more hesitant wellwishers because… actually, I don’t figure out what I wanted to say until afterwards, on the nightbus home, which is that I’m grateful they're doing this, but I also feel sad for all my friends who beat their heads against the same brick wall, and this has been one of the handful of gigs I’ve seen – ever – that was captivating and urgent and life-affirming at every last moment.
MUSIC: Early Day Miners - one of America's greatest unknown bands
For almost a decade, Daniel Burton has led Early Day Miners, who still feel like one of the best kept secrets in contemporary American independent music. To say that Burton approaches songwriting like a Great American Novelist is not to say that, like Lou Reed, he has a large cast of sleazy but cartoonish characters, as his way of keeping it real. No, Burton melds landscape and history in a way that can only be compared to William Faulkner or Cormac MacCarthy. In fact, the Offshore from 2006 was a personal album of the year, joint with Ys by Joanna Newsom, but impossible to choose between because it seemed like its darker, masculine counterpart – an elegy in the midst of destruction.
So why haven’t you heard of them? Ultimately, Early Day Miners may take a long time to gain the recognition they deserve – their determination and integrity is pure punk-rock, but the sound and songs may not be so palatable to indie-fans who assume that integrity = trashiness. Think Bedhead without the irony… but Codeine without the depressive inertia; Dave Pajo (of Slint and Papa M) playing as all his different incarnations, at the same time; Talk Talk (circa Spirit of Eden, and Laughing Stock), if the playing had the heaviness and precision of US-hardcore. Then again, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to mention the decidedly unhip ‘Brothers in Arms’ (the song) by Dire Straits, or 1990s Peter Gabriel without the schmaltziness of the lyrics – literally, the core of each, beneath the “blues” and “world-music” signifiers. So, let’s just say this is the one independent band who won’t compromise by not sounding accomplished…
Way back when, Burton was apprenticed to Daniel Lanois, probably best known to DiS-readers as the producer who ensured that U2’s mid-80s left-turn into Americana would result in some actual classics (The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree), rather than excruciating pastiche. Burton could have had a career making Grammy-winning platinum albums, but instead kept his skills for the underground, and cult indie bands, including Okkervil River and Songs:Ohia; effectively, making him one of the most important people on the other side of the glass since Steve Albini.
Placer Found (2000)
“moving north through the snow / to the destination / but still a-ways to go…” (‘Placer Found’)
More of a state of the soul than a collection of discreet songs, _Placer Found_ remains a remarkable debut, and might easily have been named after its final track, ‘Desert Cantos’. Like Codeine (on The White Birch) and Low (on The Curtain Hits the Cast), EDM capture the mood of a place, and if they seem to be entering similar sonic territory, then that’s not to say they haven’t found their own musical idiom, to match a set of lyrics that sketch the tranquillity and loneliness of the Midwestern states. With its powerful but restrained drumming, hushed vocals, and delicate lead-guitar lines, Placer Found is slowcore reaching towards post-rock; in fact, the 12 minute closer is just that (think Mogwai’s ‘You Don’t Know Jesus’ at halfspeed).
Elsewhere, clear drones underlie the buoyant and trebly guitar lines of ‘Longwall’ and the meandering figures of ‘In These Hills’, both of which resemble the spare instrumentals sketched by Aerial M / Papa M (i.e. Dave Pajo, formerly of Slint, with whom Burton would later collaborate). Certainly, ‘Placer Found’ sounds like the best material from Pajo’s first full-length collection of songs, Whatever, Mortal, and linking the main nodes in the map of slowcore, you could easily persuade a hopeful Slint fan that ‘Stanwix’ is a lost track from Spiderland, or The For Carnation, as Burton whispers about a family coming together to sit, say Grace, and eat, over impossibly slow music that seems about to break into rock, when the cymbals first crash, but instead yield up a gorgeously lazy slide-guitar solo, that gradually subsides, and almost mews like a cat in its final few bars.
Let Us Garlands Bring (2002)
Burton had already established himself as an intelligent observer of place, but his second album was richer in detail, as well as being his most personal in its emotional candour. Verses unfold like haiku, with each cluster of images linking Place – Season – Feeling. The emotions are often: a private pain, an indeterminable sense of “something wrong”, or the loss of a “forgotten faith”. In a sense, you don’t need these abstract cues: breath by breath, Burton exhales his soul into the concrete features of the world, losing himself among billboards and powerlines, rivers that are “rusted” (‘Centralia’) or “blinding white”, until he has a “vacant soul” (both from ‘Santa Carolina’). See below, though, for a longer examination of ‘Offshore’ – an eight-minute masterpiece of songwriting (equalled only by Sun Kil Moon’s ‘Carry Me Ohio’) that was later expanded into a 38-minute album. (8/10)
Jefferson at Rest (2003)
Slightly lacking in focus, EDM’s third album may not have found a new direction, and resisted any of the tricks (or, more simply, the long tracks) that made its predecessors more dramatic. Nonetheless, every one of its songs is a beautifully crafted thing, with or without any post-rock climax. In other words, it’s an album that succeeds in conveying its intended impression: of peace, and perhaps even fulfilment of the historic promise to grant liberty to all in America, even if it’s impossible to erase the shame. It may help to know that Burton’s father is a history lecturer, and the previous album had ended with ‘Light in August’ (named after a William Faulkner novel), hinting that the references aren’t scenery – monuments you pass, in transit – but signs the past is alive inside the present; that’s ‘Jefferson at Rest’, after all, not “Jefferson: dead”. Then again, it’s equally true to say that some of the signs of human habitation you pass lack any connection to history – as much a home as the shell of a hermit-crab – not because these are the people excluded, but those who don’t even have a connection to the past through so much as a corrugated iron church. See the second song: “factory worklights / miles of windblown acreage / wind like a siren / howling through home-steads / wash---ed a---way // gravel roads trailing / move to the river / far across the border / oil light portraiture / all--- fall--- down…”
Considerations of how this fits with “slowcore criteria” aside, it makes most sense to describe Burton’s music (especially on _Jefferson_) as a kind of emotional minimalism, not to be mistaken for the oppressive sound of many slowcore bands – the relentless beatings of misfortune that contrast, yet explain, the crippling depression of Codeine’s lyrics; the suffocating atmosphere of Cat Power’s first three records; the inner fantasies of revenge soundtracked by Low on their own first three (with the bass like blood pulsing in your skull). In fact, Antony Hegarty’s immaculate new album, scored by Nico Muhly, provides the best comparison to the closing track of _Jefferson at Rest_, where Burton sings clear but quiet vocals over a guitar-line so discreet as to be ambient, with an identical second vocal, almost imperceptible, much lower in the mix beneath it than one would ordinarily set the levels when double-tracking – pulling at it, rather than boosting it. Demonstrating much the same economy as the best Low lyrics, Burton sings: “Community is on the rise; / you left me out, / in my mind. / You’re distant; / far behind.” Long, peaceful drones, almost indistinguishable from actual voices, begin at this point, and then the main vocal resumes: “What can we do / to bring us together? / To make us whole…? / What can we do / to bring us together?” What indeed? That false-vocal hints at the beginning of speech, infinitely protracted… eternally about to say the right words, which may in fact be any words, so long as they’re spoken at all.
All Harm Ends Here (2005)
“escape is simple / just leave” (‘We Know in Part’)
Aiming to write some of his most conventional rock-songs, whilst retaining the (characteristically slowcore) “power-in-restraint” of previous albums, Burton managed to deliver his most captivating set from start-to-finish. The songs are darker than ever, yet it’s not an oppressively bleak record (hence, “escape is simple / just leave”), and a closer listen to the record dispels any sense of self-pity, or the failed rockstar’s tendency to heighten their tragedy as if only that would constitute great art… all of which makes this a great comfort to anyone weary of rock’s histrionics. As Burton continues to sing/murmur, on ‘We Know in Part’, it’s possible to find a “secret world” if you listen closely. The guitars may snarl on ‘All Harm’, which picks up the tempo (okay, only as much as a Bedhead / New Years track), and the low-mixed lead guitar is overdriven to scratch and growl, but the mantra he’s singing is actually: “all harm--- / ends here--- / old faith--- / forgiv---en”. In a sense, then, this is a record about internalizing the lessons of the dark years, and moving on. Curiously, having established himself as one of the foremost realists among all lyricists – and Confessionalism isn’t the same as Realism, however sincere – a couple of songs (and the instrumental ‘The Purest Red’) allude to a vampire that seems to personify urban decay. Previously, the rusted and cracked human environment that Burton depicted had seemed always on the brink of being reclaimed by nature – that a decrepit factory is no more permanent and no more complex than an animal’s nest or burrow – but on this record, he discovers the malice lurking in the city, hence the subtle move toward more Gothic imagery, and a hint of Joy Division.
Offshore (2006)
The fifth album by Early Day Miners, Offshore, slipped out in August 2006, to no fanfare, and very few reviews. For listeners already aware of the high plateau they’d been occupying for several years, there was every expectation of another fine record, but no indications that this would be a record to rank alongside Joy Division’s Closer (1980), Songs: Ohia’s Ghost Tropic (2000) or Sigur Ros’ ( ) (2002); all of them records that transcend the idea of the album as a-collection-of-songs-by-some-people-in-a-room-somewhere, and instead come across as an experience in its own right.
Anyone familiar with the song ‘Offshore’ from the 2002 album will realize that most of the 2006 album’s lyrical content is taken from there, albeit spread across two tracks, now, and the climax of the earlier song is re-worked for two massive post-rock numbers. Writing and recording _Let Us Garlands Bring_ in 2001, Burton had been unable to respond immediately to the events of September 11th, but found that the song Early Day Miners had been closing their sets with for years had an added resonance after the massive betrayal of the people of New Orleans by the Bush regime. The lyrics below are no longer personal memories, but fragments of an oral history… or an urban archaeology, washed up after the floodwaters retreat:
“Twisted trail of fire / I’m losing you to your desire / in rooms---, with--- ocean views // A family in peril / broken and destroyed within / er---ased in warm--- concrete // Rusted oak and dragonflies / a masquerade ball / a Mardi Gras mask, a cheap façade / white--- heat and misery…” (‘Return of the Native’)
Returning to those albums by other artists for a minute though (_Closer_, _Ghost Tropic_, and _( )_ ), there’s both a musical and a lyrical continuity here, if you think of portentous lyrics like “here are the young men / the weight on their shoulders” (Ian Curtis), the imagism of “the ocean’s deep nerves” (Jason Molina), and Jonssi’s distended vocables democratically inviting you to find exactly as much solace as you need, the perfect words that should have been said. As you’d expect from those comparisons, and the EDM reviews above, the bass and drums are worthy of Hook & Morris, the guitar and organ drones are layered into a detailed soundscape receding into the infinite distance, the guitars are expressive even when the strings are just being stretched and scraped, or the guitarists are manipulating feedback (as in the first three minutes of ‘Hymn Beneath the Palisades’ before the delayed-guitars start squawling, and then the main riff arrives, almost at the five minute mark.)
Unlike those three albums, on which the darkness increases track-by-track, as they deliberately lengthen, and settle into ever more sombre riffs (or protracted guitar freak-outs) _Offshore_ has a curious symmetry to its sequencing. Book-ended by a pair of 9-minute post-rock masterpieces that charge along like a train seen from a distance (track 1) and a train bearing the listener toward a dark and skyscraping city, the lyrical content of the album amounts to two poems of desolation sung by male and female voices (tracks 2 & 4). Each of these “poems” roughly follows the melody that’s the album’s leitmotif, although each without a chorus. It’s a sign of the album’s integrity – demanding to be experienced as a single suite – that the tracks are cut-off so that they can’t be played individually without a jarring break, and the third track (between the two “poems”) is almost entirely a chorus:
Give up
Giv-ing in
Run-ning hand in hand
A-way from Destruction
In-to your Desertion
Give in-to Temptation
Se-ver all Relation
(‘Sans Revival’)
Here, at last, is hope. Is this the hope of a deserter from the US Civil War… or a contemporary immigrant, escaping one of the world’s countless wars (many of them precipitated by US intervention)? Is this the hope that led them to places like New Orleans, where they may yet be victims of “geographic racism” (i.e. the selective neglect of poor quarters, or the siting of environmental hazards near ghettoes). Is this, then, the hope that dissolves all historical distinctions when it’s You (plural) against the world?
[slightly edited from a previous publication on DiS]
So why haven’t you heard of them? Ultimately, Early Day Miners may take a long time to gain the recognition they deserve – their determination and integrity is pure punk-rock, but the sound and songs may not be so palatable to indie-fans who assume that integrity = trashiness. Think Bedhead without the irony… but Codeine without the depressive inertia; Dave Pajo (of Slint and Papa M) playing as all his different incarnations, at the same time; Talk Talk (circa Spirit of Eden, and Laughing Stock), if the playing had the heaviness and precision of US-hardcore. Then again, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to mention the decidedly unhip ‘Brothers in Arms’ (the song) by Dire Straits, or 1990s Peter Gabriel without the schmaltziness of the lyrics – literally, the core of each, beneath the “blues” and “world-music” signifiers. So, let’s just say this is the one independent band who won’t compromise by not sounding accomplished…
Way back when, Burton was apprenticed to Daniel Lanois, probably best known to DiS-readers as the producer who ensured that U2’s mid-80s left-turn into Americana would result in some actual classics (The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree), rather than excruciating pastiche. Burton could have had a career making Grammy-winning platinum albums, but instead kept his skills for the underground, and cult indie bands, including Okkervil River and Songs:Ohia; effectively, making him one of the most important people on the other side of the glass since Steve Albini.
Placer Found (2000)
“moving north through the snow / to the destination / but still a-ways to go…” (‘Placer Found’)
More of a state of the soul than a collection of discreet songs, _Placer Found_ remains a remarkable debut, and might easily have been named after its final track, ‘Desert Cantos’. Like Codeine (on The White Birch) and Low (on The Curtain Hits the Cast), EDM capture the mood of a place, and if they seem to be entering similar sonic territory, then that’s not to say they haven’t found their own musical idiom, to match a set of lyrics that sketch the tranquillity and loneliness of the Midwestern states. With its powerful but restrained drumming, hushed vocals, and delicate lead-guitar lines, Placer Found is slowcore reaching towards post-rock; in fact, the 12 minute closer is just that (think Mogwai’s ‘You Don’t Know Jesus’ at halfspeed).
Elsewhere, clear drones underlie the buoyant and trebly guitar lines of ‘Longwall’ and the meandering figures of ‘In These Hills’, both of which resemble the spare instrumentals sketched by Aerial M / Papa M (i.e. Dave Pajo, formerly of Slint, with whom Burton would later collaborate). Certainly, ‘Placer Found’ sounds like the best material from Pajo’s first full-length collection of songs, Whatever, Mortal, and linking the main nodes in the map of slowcore, you could easily persuade a hopeful Slint fan that ‘Stanwix’ is a lost track from Spiderland, or The For Carnation, as Burton whispers about a family coming together to sit, say Grace, and eat, over impossibly slow music that seems about to break into rock, when the cymbals first crash, but instead yield up a gorgeously lazy slide-guitar solo, that gradually subsides, and almost mews like a cat in its final few bars.
Let Us Garlands Bring (2002)
Burton had already established himself as an intelligent observer of place, but his second album was richer in detail, as well as being his most personal in its emotional candour. Verses unfold like haiku, with each cluster of images linking Place – Season – Feeling. The emotions are often: a private pain, an indeterminable sense of “something wrong”, or the loss of a “forgotten faith”. In a sense, you don’t need these abstract cues: breath by breath, Burton exhales his soul into the concrete features of the world, losing himself among billboards and powerlines, rivers that are “rusted” (‘Centralia’) or “blinding white”, until he has a “vacant soul” (both from ‘Santa Carolina’). See below, though, for a longer examination of ‘Offshore’ – an eight-minute masterpiece of songwriting (equalled only by Sun Kil Moon’s ‘Carry Me Ohio’) that was later expanded into a 38-minute album. (8/10)
Jefferson at Rest (2003)
Slightly lacking in focus, EDM’s third album may not have found a new direction, and resisted any of the tricks (or, more simply, the long tracks) that made its predecessors more dramatic. Nonetheless, every one of its songs is a beautifully crafted thing, with or without any post-rock climax. In other words, it’s an album that succeeds in conveying its intended impression: of peace, and perhaps even fulfilment of the historic promise to grant liberty to all in America, even if it’s impossible to erase the shame. It may help to know that Burton’s father is a history lecturer, and the previous album had ended with ‘Light in August’ (named after a William Faulkner novel), hinting that the references aren’t scenery – monuments you pass, in transit – but signs the past is alive inside the present; that’s ‘Jefferson at Rest’, after all, not “Jefferson: dead”. Then again, it’s equally true to say that some of the signs of human habitation you pass lack any connection to history – as much a home as the shell of a hermit-crab – not because these are the people excluded, but those who don’t even have a connection to the past through so much as a corrugated iron church. See the second song: “factory worklights / miles of windblown acreage / wind like a siren / howling through home-steads / wash---ed a---way // gravel roads trailing / move to the river / far across the border / oil light portraiture / all--- fall--- down…”
Considerations of how this fits with “slowcore criteria” aside, it makes most sense to describe Burton’s music (especially on _Jefferson_) as a kind of emotional minimalism, not to be mistaken for the oppressive sound of many slowcore bands – the relentless beatings of misfortune that contrast, yet explain, the crippling depression of Codeine’s lyrics; the suffocating atmosphere of Cat Power’s first three records; the inner fantasies of revenge soundtracked by Low on their own first three (with the bass like blood pulsing in your skull). In fact, Antony Hegarty’s immaculate new album, scored by Nico Muhly, provides the best comparison to the closing track of _Jefferson at Rest_, where Burton sings clear but quiet vocals over a guitar-line so discreet as to be ambient, with an identical second vocal, almost imperceptible, much lower in the mix beneath it than one would ordinarily set the levels when double-tracking – pulling at it, rather than boosting it. Demonstrating much the same economy as the best Low lyrics, Burton sings: “Community is on the rise; / you left me out, / in my mind. / You’re distant; / far behind.” Long, peaceful drones, almost indistinguishable from actual voices, begin at this point, and then the main vocal resumes: “What can we do / to bring us together? / To make us whole…? / What can we do / to bring us together?” What indeed? That false-vocal hints at the beginning of speech, infinitely protracted… eternally about to say the right words, which may in fact be any words, so long as they’re spoken at all.
All Harm Ends Here (2005)
“escape is simple / just leave” (‘We Know in Part’)
Aiming to write some of his most conventional rock-songs, whilst retaining the (characteristically slowcore) “power-in-restraint” of previous albums, Burton managed to deliver his most captivating set from start-to-finish. The songs are darker than ever, yet it’s not an oppressively bleak record (hence, “escape is simple / just leave”), and a closer listen to the record dispels any sense of self-pity, or the failed rockstar’s tendency to heighten their tragedy as if only that would constitute great art… all of which makes this a great comfort to anyone weary of rock’s histrionics. As Burton continues to sing/murmur, on ‘We Know in Part’, it’s possible to find a “secret world” if you listen closely. The guitars may snarl on ‘All Harm’, which picks up the tempo (okay, only as much as a Bedhead / New Years track), and the low-mixed lead guitar is overdriven to scratch and growl, but the mantra he’s singing is actually: “all harm--- / ends here--- / old faith--- / forgiv---en”. In a sense, then, this is a record about internalizing the lessons of the dark years, and moving on. Curiously, having established himself as one of the foremost realists among all lyricists – and Confessionalism isn’t the same as Realism, however sincere – a couple of songs (and the instrumental ‘The Purest Red’) allude to a vampire that seems to personify urban decay. Previously, the rusted and cracked human environment that Burton depicted had seemed always on the brink of being reclaimed by nature – that a decrepit factory is no more permanent and no more complex than an animal’s nest or burrow – but on this record, he discovers the malice lurking in the city, hence the subtle move toward more Gothic imagery, and a hint of Joy Division.
Offshore (2006)
The fifth album by Early Day Miners, Offshore, slipped out in August 2006, to no fanfare, and very few reviews. For listeners already aware of the high plateau they’d been occupying for several years, there was every expectation of another fine record, but no indications that this would be a record to rank alongside Joy Division’s Closer (1980), Songs: Ohia’s Ghost Tropic (2000) or Sigur Ros’ ( ) (2002); all of them records that transcend the idea of the album as a-collection-of-songs-by-some-people-in-a-room-somewhere, and instead come across as an experience in its own right.
Anyone familiar with the song ‘Offshore’ from the 2002 album will realize that most of the 2006 album’s lyrical content is taken from there, albeit spread across two tracks, now, and the climax of the earlier song is re-worked for two massive post-rock numbers. Writing and recording _Let Us Garlands Bring_ in 2001, Burton had been unable to respond immediately to the events of September 11th, but found that the song Early Day Miners had been closing their sets with for years had an added resonance after the massive betrayal of the people of New Orleans by the Bush regime. The lyrics below are no longer personal memories, but fragments of an oral history… or an urban archaeology, washed up after the floodwaters retreat:
“Twisted trail of fire / I’m losing you to your desire / in rooms---, with--- ocean views // A family in peril / broken and destroyed within / er---ased in warm--- concrete // Rusted oak and dragonflies / a masquerade ball / a Mardi Gras mask, a cheap façade / white--- heat and misery…” (‘Return of the Native’)
Returning to those albums by other artists for a minute though (_Closer_, _Ghost Tropic_, and _( )_ ), there’s both a musical and a lyrical continuity here, if you think of portentous lyrics like “here are the young men / the weight on their shoulders” (Ian Curtis), the imagism of “the ocean’s deep nerves” (Jason Molina), and Jonssi’s distended vocables democratically inviting you to find exactly as much solace as you need, the perfect words that should have been said. As you’d expect from those comparisons, and the EDM reviews above, the bass and drums are worthy of Hook & Morris, the guitar and organ drones are layered into a detailed soundscape receding into the infinite distance, the guitars are expressive even when the strings are just being stretched and scraped, or the guitarists are manipulating feedback (as in the first three minutes of ‘Hymn Beneath the Palisades’ before the delayed-guitars start squawling, and then the main riff arrives, almost at the five minute mark.)
Unlike those three albums, on which the darkness increases track-by-track, as they deliberately lengthen, and settle into ever more sombre riffs (or protracted guitar freak-outs) _Offshore_ has a curious symmetry to its sequencing. Book-ended by a pair of 9-minute post-rock masterpieces that charge along like a train seen from a distance (track 1) and a train bearing the listener toward a dark and skyscraping city, the lyrical content of the album amounts to two poems of desolation sung by male and female voices (tracks 2 & 4). Each of these “poems” roughly follows the melody that’s the album’s leitmotif, although each without a chorus. It’s a sign of the album’s integrity – demanding to be experienced as a single suite – that the tracks are cut-off so that they can’t be played individually without a jarring break, and the third track (between the two “poems”) is almost entirely a chorus:
Give up
Giv-ing in
Run-ning hand in hand
A-way from Destruction
In-to your Desertion
Give in-to Temptation
Se-ver all Relation
(‘Sans Revival’)
Here, at last, is hope. Is this the hope of a deserter from the US Civil War… or a contemporary immigrant, escaping one of the world’s countless wars (many of them precipitated by US intervention)? Is this the hope that led them to places like New Orleans, where they may yet be victims of “geographic racism” (i.e. the selective neglect of poor quarters, or the siting of environmental hazards near ghettoes). Is this, then, the hope that dissolves all historical distinctions when it’s You (plural) against the world?
[slightly edited from a previous publication on DiS]
MUSIC: Marnie Stern, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
Marnie Stern, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (Kill Rock Stars)
This review will try to avoid hyperbole about “technical ability” and “intellectual agility”, but the fact is: no other album springs to mind that makes so many declarative statements about desire and interior states with such nuance, and unique imagery expanding on them. As the title suggests, This Is It... is an album about the infinite inter-connectedness of everything… or, in one (much misunderstood) word, Love. Across twelve songs, Marnie Stern elaborates at least three inter-related themes, or perhaps one theme that’s the single face of a four-dimensional hyper-cube: that the perfect lover could only come from the future, or seem like they have done, because the present is a condition of painful alienation; that said-lover would take her out of time, extending the moment of connection indefinitely; that the only way to get the message across is to fill every second with notes. Call it psycho-geometry if you want, but Marnie’s lyrics insist on returning to reality rather than escaping into the domain of numbers, as if it’s the trite metaphors of popular culture (she’s implying) that are a betrayal of reality. Opening track ‘Prime’ aligns her with the “defenders of the real”, after all.
Thing is, this is all so much funnier and sweeter and – yes – more feminine than the exegesis above might make it sound; the “future lover” is a complex version of Tim Wheeler’s ‘Girl from Mars’ (or Frank Black’s), but sung about in a way that’s no less wide-eyed and this-must-be-love-because-you-make-me-feel-like-a-teenager. Take ‘Roads? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads’; yep, that’s the Doc at the end of _Back to the Future_, just like “point of no return” (in ‘Prime’) is probably a nod to _BTTF III_, and “road to nowhere” a hit from Marnie’s early-teens. That’s not to say these are shallow references – one listen tells you Marnie’s on the same road as David Byrne, and committed to “the sounds of the future”. ‘Roads?’ opens with a bold statement: “I present two sides: my hopelessness and my faith / my ego and my heart”. By the end, Marnie’s using her ultra-fast vocal-lines as texture, but never so much that individual lines can’t be heard, and even parsed should you wish to.
Elsewhere, the multiple references to “dimensions” act as a bridge between lyrics about the domain of numbers, and lyrics about the Ego and Id, as well as referring to the paralinguistic function of the music itself: to go beyond the limits of what words can say. The numerous “pyramids” could be metonymic of human achievements so enduring they seem to stand outside time; impressions of the World of Eternal Forms in our own; symbolic, too, of the triads that compose regular chords, somehow extended into a third (sonic) dimension by multi-tracking; and perhaps also representative (at a stretch) of the Ego & Ids of a pair of lovers interlocking as the vertices of a pyramid. (In case all this sounds loopy, bear in mind what Marnie told DiS: that practicing for hours, and playing fast, is how she escapes time, and finds fulfilment because, hey, life is hard and often lonely.)
Musically, this isn’t a huge leap forward from the debut, but at least four stand-out tracks rock HARD, even anthemically, rather than just FAST, to fit more notes in that suggest new textures. Comparisons to Van Halen, Mick Barr, and those fictive time-travellers Wyld Stallyns (!) are warranted, but also Tom Verlaine and Robert Fripp who know about restraint and emotion. In places Marnie wants the guitars to sound brittle, inorganic and crystalline, but elsewhere like a rush of neurotransmitters on a molecular level – y’know: a feeling. I’ll say it again: ‘The Crippled Jazzer’ sounds like the best track Sleater-Kinney never wrote, with Led Zep / ‘When the Levee Breaks’ drums, and a lead guitar that’s almost a fife. ‘Vault’ multi-tracks the final chorus to glorious effect: “will this lonely life get any better?” The only moment that sounds cloying – sorry – is on ‘Steely’, where the vocal-effects exaggerate what’s already the inner child squealing: “I’m hoping it’s true / I’m hoping for you!” This is the one song that tells us “she got what she wanted”, and describes “him” at the end (“there’s a party in his mind / and he hopes it never stops…”). An un-effected (more mature-sounding) Marnie appears for a single line, which is reassuring – the song becomes a dialogue between inner voices, rather than an expression of fragility-beneath-it-all at the album’s midpoint. Nonetheless, there’s an odd undertone to that final line – what does happen when the party stops? Is this fun or mania? The song doesn’t answer. Later, the synaesthetic attempt to assign sounds to numbers in ‘Clone Cycle’ is a lightning rod for Marnie fans – love it or hate it? – the structure’s always on the verge of disintegrating into a silly (King Crimson / Yes) version of 1970s prog (e.g. the guitars like a trumpet fanfare halfway through), but at least it’s never boring.
Admittedly, Marnie’s shred-guitar style might not win you over straight off, making this one of those occasional gambles you have to take, that proves more rewarding with each listen. Vespertine and Ys emphasised melodic complexity, impressionistically, and yet stand above a decade of alternative music with their depictions of New Love as New World; everything enriched because of the central “You” or “Him” (they’re also about making love, in symbolic language, which is much rarer than it sounds, when most else is euphemistic). Less physical but no less daringly personal, This Is It... is about getting inside someone’s head, and making sense of what’s in your own.
[Previously unpublished]
This review will try to avoid hyperbole about “technical ability” and “intellectual agility”, but the fact is: no other album springs to mind that makes so many declarative statements about desire and interior states with such nuance, and unique imagery expanding on them. As the title suggests, This Is It... is an album about the infinite inter-connectedness of everything… or, in one (much misunderstood) word, Love. Across twelve songs, Marnie Stern elaborates at least three inter-related themes, or perhaps one theme that’s the single face of a four-dimensional hyper-cube: that the perfect lover could only come from the future, or seem like they have done, because the present is a condition of painful alienation; that said-lover would take her out of time, extending the moment of connection indefinitely; that the only way to get the message across is to fill every second with notes. Call it psycho-geometry if you want, but Marnie’s lyrics insist on returning to reality rather than escaping into the domain of numbers, as if it’s the trite metaphors of popular culture (she’s implying) that are a betrayal of reality. Opening track ‘Prime’ aligns her with the “defenders of the real”, after all.
Thing is, this is all so much funnier and sweeter and – yes – more feminine than the exegesis above might make it sound; the “future lover” is a complex version of Tim Wheeler’s ‘Girl from Mars’ (or Frank Black’s), but sung about in a way that’s no less wide-eyed and this-must-be-love-because-you-make-me-feel-like-a-teenager. Take ‘Roads? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads’; yep, that’s the Doc at the end of _Back to the Future_, just like “point of no return” (in ‘Prime’) is probably a nod to _BTTF III_, and “road to nowhere” a hit from Marnie’s early-teens. That’s not to say these are shallow references – one listen tells you Marnie’s on the same road as David Byrne, and committed to “the sounds of the future”. ‘Roads?’ opens with a bold statement: “I present two sides: my hopelessness and my faith / my ego and my heart”. By the end, Marnie’s using her ultra-fast vocal-lines as texture, but never so much that individual lines can’t be heard, and even parsed should you wish to.
Elsewhere, the multiple references to “dimensions” act as a bridge between lyrics about the domain of numbers, and lyrics about the Ego and Id, as well as referring to the paralinguistic function of the music itself: to go beyond the limits of what words can say. The numerous “pyramids” could be metonymic of human achievements so enduring they seem to stand outside time; impressions of the World of Eternal Forms in our own; symbolic, too, of the triads that compose regular chords, somehow extended into a third (sonic) dimension by multi-tracking; and perhaps also representative (at a stretch) of the Ego & Ids of a pair of lovers interlocking as the vertices of a pyramid. (In case all this sounds loopy, bear in mind what Marnie told DiS: that practicing for hours, and playing fast, is how she escapes time, and finds fulfilment because, hey, life is hard and often lonely.)
Musically, this isn’t a huge leap forward from the debut, but at least four stand-out tracks rock HARD, even anthemically, rather than just FAST, to fit more notes in that suggest new textures. Comparisons to Van Halen, Mick Barr, and those fictive time-travellers Wyld Stallyns (!) are warranted, but also Tom Verlaine and Robert Fripp who know about restraint and emotion. In places Marnie wants the guitars to sound brittle, inorganic and crystalline, but elsewhere like a rush of neurotransmitters on a molecular level – y’know: a feeling. I’ll say it again: ‘The Crippled Jazzer’ sounds like the best track Sleater-Kinney never wrote, with Led Zep / ‘When the Levee Breaks’ drums, and a lead guitar that’s almost a fife. ‘Vault’ multi-tracks the final chorus to glorious effect: “will this lonely life get any better?” The only moment that sounds cloying – sorry – is on ‘Steely’, where the vocal-effects exaggerate what’s already the inner child squealing: “I’m hoping it’s true / I’m hoping for you!” This is the one song that tells us “she got what she wanted”, and describes “him” at the end (“there’s a party in his mind / and he hopes it never stops…”). An un-effected (more mature-sounding) Marnie appears for a single line, which is reassuring – the song becomes a dialogue between inner voices, rather than an expression of fragility-beneath-it-all at the album’s midpoint. Nonetheless, there’s an odd undertone to that final line – what does happen when the party stops? Is this fun or mania? The song doesn’t answer. Later, the synaesthetic attempt to assign sounds to numbers in ‘Clone Cycle’ is a lightning rod for Marnie fans – love it or hate it? – the structure’s always on the verge of disintegrating into a silly (King Crimson / Yes) version of 1970s prog (e.g. the guitars like a trumpet fanfare halfway through), but at least it’s never boring.
Admittedly, Marnie’s shred-guitar style might not win you over straight off, making this one of those occasional gambles you have to take, that proves more rewarding with each listen. Vespertine and Ys emphasised melodic complexity, impressionistically, and yet stand above a decade of alternative music with their depictions of New Love as New World; everything enriched because of the central “You” or “Him” (they’re also about making love, in symbolic language, which is much rarer than it sounds, when most else is euphemistic). Less physical but no less daringly personal, This Is It... is about getting inside someone’s head, and making sense of what’s in your own.
[Previously unpublished]
MUSIC: Super XX Man, There’ll be Diamonds
Super XX Man, Volume XII: There’ll be Diamonds
(Tender Loving Empire), Oct. 21
How do you feel about music by severely mentally ill people? No, really – I’m genuinely curious, and opening it up for discussion / recommendations / rants / whatever; personally, I don’t think there’s intrinsic added value, and the pros (catharsis; therapy; raising issues, or at least “voicing” a muted group) tend to counter-balance the cons (a lack of musicality, often; a lack of depth to said “issues”; a sense of exploitation or voyeurism, maybe). That’s to say, it doesn’t seem negligent or timid to end up just-not-listening to any more than a few tracks by Daniel Johnson, or anyone on Songs in the Key of Z.
Super XX Man actually works in a psychiatric institution, and this happens to be very important to what he writes, hence the first three songs on his twelfth album are entitled ‘Medication’, ‘Psychotic Break’, and ‘Crazy People’. The foregoing discussion is relevant, because his music recalls plenty of familiar figures from the canons of Outsider Music, or Lo-Fi by functional people who nonetheless sound like they’ve been close to the edge: Jad Fair, John Darnielle; maybe a less-produced Mark Everett or Jason Lytle. Super XX Man – but let’s call him Scott – inadvertently raises the question of what we can learn from supposedly “authentic” Outsider Music, because he isn’t restricted to performing his own OCD or Bipolar I (say). One song appropriates “rubber duckie, you’re the one / you make bath-time lot’s of fun”, and changes it in the second verse to “medication, you’re the one / you make my life-time lots of fun”. Cute, and appropriate (look up Kay Redfield Jamieson, on the way depression makes you regress), but it’s not a trick he over-uses, thankfully. The second track (‘Psychotic Break’) is prime Galaxie 500, bringing in the reverb to cast a glow over the imagery, whilst the lyrical premise suggests that the song could have been expanded into something like ‘Names’ by Cat Power, in which she goes through the casualties in her own life.
We could play the Sounds-like Game track-by-track, but suffice it to say – anyone Scott resembles at any given moment he can usually equal, and his voice (closest to FM Cornog, AKA East River Pipe) is far less grating than Jad, John, Jason. Half the time, mental illness isn’t mentioned but, after that opening triad, it always frames the quiet epiphanies. For one, ‘Downtown Chapel’ is – quite simply – the most heart-breakingly beautiful lo-fi song I’ve heard all year, when most of what Scott does is gently intone “The downtown chapel is mine / the downtown chapel is mine / the downtown chap-el… is my everything”. It’s his sanctuary, but it’s also a part of him, and every part “is” him, as he enumerates them in the lyrics. The last part of the song is a kind of improvised prayer, and as you listen, you find yourself wishing good things for the singer, or anyone like the narrator: that he gets married in that chapel, maybe, or it remains “his” for a long time, if it’s the best or only family he ever has. Listening to this on shuffle, a lump went straight to my throat, and stayed there all through a repeat of “rubber duckie, you’re the one…”
There are other great – No, gorgeous – moments on almost every track. ‘Crazy People’ should be a manifesto or anthem for Mad-Pride; it’s catchy and jubilant right through, also like Galaxie 500, and asserts that “they get – more from life than me”, but even the lighter numbers will be lifted by a harmony, somewhere. The closing track is basically The Mountain Goats play ‘Then he Kissed Me’ – how great is that? The album-title and title-track (‘There’ll be Diamonds’) makes me wonder if Scott’s heard Jandek (especially ‘Nancy Sings’ AKA ‘Birthday’ – one of the finest songs ever written, also on a Rough Trade compilation), which tells you that whatever you lack (be it a job, a partner, stability; all the lacks of mental illness) you always have the rain, and sometimes it rains diamonds, and in those odd moments of bipolar disorder’s euphoria “the rain will come / to kiss your hair”. This deserves to mean a lot to a lot of people, and whether you have right now, or have had someone with mental illness in your life, we all need those insights into what you’ve got left when you’ve got nothing.
[slightly edited from previous publication on DiS]
(Tender Loving Empire), Oct. 21
How do you feel about music by severely mentally ill people? No, really – I’m genuinely curious, and opening it up for discussion / recommendations / rants / whatever; personally, I don’t think there’s intrinsic added value, and the pros (catharsis; therapy; raising issues, or at least “voicing” a muted group) tend to counter-balance the cons (a lack of musicality, often; a lack of depth to said “issues”; a sense of exploitation or voyeurism, maybe). That’s to say, it doesn’t seem negligent or timid to end up just-not-listening to any more than a few tracks by Daniel Johnson, or anyone on Songs in the Key of Z.
Super XX Man actually works in a psychiatric institution, and this happens to be very important to what he writes, hence the first three songs on his twelfth album are entitled ‘Medication’, ‘Psychotic Break’, and ‘Crazy People’. The foregoing discussion is relevant, because his music recalls plenty of familiar figures from the canons of Outsider Music, or Lo-Fi by functional people who nonetheless sound like they’ve been close to the edge: Jad Fair, John Darnielle; maybe a less-produced Mark Everett or Jason Lytle. Super XX Man – but let’s call him Scott – inadvertently raises the question of what we can learn from supposedly “authentic” Outsider Music, because he isn’t restricted to performing his own OCD or Bipolar I (say). One song appropriates “rubber duckie, you’re the one / you make bath-time lot’s of fun”, and changes it in the second verse to “medication, you’re the one / you make my life-time lots of fun”. Cute, and appropriate (look up Kay Redfield Jamieson, on the way depression makes you regress), but it’s not a trick he over-uses, thankfully. The second track (‘Psychotic Break’) is prime Galaxie 500, bringing in the reverb to cast a glow over the imagery, whilst the lyrical premise suggests that the song could have been expanded into something like ‘Names’ by Cat Power, in which she goes through the casualties in her own life.
We could play the Sounds-like Game track-by-track, but suffice it to say – anyone Scott resembles at any given moment he can usually equal, and his voice (closest to FM Cornog, AKA East River Pipe) is far less grating than Jad, John, Jason. Half the time, mental illness isn’t mentioned but, after that opening triad, it always frames the quiet epiphanies. For one, ‘Downtown Chapel’ is – quite simply – the most heart-breakingly beautiful lo-fi song I’ve heard all year, when most of what Scott does is gently intone “The downtown chapel is mine / the downtown chapel is mine / the downtown chap-el… is my everything”. It’s his sanctuary, but it’s also a part of him, and every part “is” him, as he enumerates them in the lyrics. The last part of the song is a kind of improvised prayer, and as you listen, you find yourself wishing good things for the singer, or anyone like the narrator: that he gets married in that chapel, maybe, or it remains “his” for a long time, if it’s the best or only family he ever has. Listening to this on shuffle, a lump went straight to my throat, and stayed there all through a repeat of “rubber duckie, you’re the one…”
There are other great – No, gorgeous – moments on almost every track. ‘Crazy People’ should be a manifesto or anthem for Mad-Pride; it’s catchy and jubilant right through, also like Galaxie 500, and asserts that “they get – more from life than me”, but even the lighter numbers will be lifted by a harmony, somewhere. The closing track is basically The Mountain Goats play ‘Then he Kissed Me’ – how great is that? The album-title and title-track (‘There’ll be Diamonds’) makes me wonder if Scott’s heard Jandek (especially ‘Nancy Sings’ AKA ‘Birthday’ – one of the finest songs ever written, also on a Rough Trade compilation), which tells you that whatever you lack (be it a job, a partner, stability; all the lacks of mental illness) you always have the rain, and sometimes it rains diamonds, and in those odd moments of bipolar disorder’s euphoria “the rain will come / to kiss your hair”. This deserves to mean a lot to a lot of people, and whether you have right now, or have had someone with mental illness in your life, we all need those insights into what you’ve got left when you’ve got nothing.
[slightly edited from previous publication on DiS]
MUSIC: On the Other Side of the Sunset (Rubdown): "Dreamland" EP by Moonface (2010)
Running to just over twenty minutes (and therefore ineligible for any charts), the ‘Dreamland EP’ by Spencer Krug (trading under the name “Moonface”) is an appropriately sensuous suite in roughly three movements, with the marimba providing a gentle, lilting, south Pacific undulation; each note like sunlight on a wavelet. Played as a lead instrument, the milk-bottle toned marimba almost inevitably reminds you of Tubular Bells (or the Theme to The Exorcist, prog-haters), but if that doesn’t persuade you, think ‘Ten Day Interval’ by Tortoise.
Somewhere in the second movement, ‘Dreamland’ becomes a quest narrative like ‘Nightingale Song’ from the last SunRub record, and even without the full band, Spencer’s lyrical flow matches that sense of being on a journey through tropical dreamscapes, unstoppable because you’re fulfilling some mythic destiny; uninhibited by gravity or logic, because your meat-sack of a body’s lying back at home, literally paralysed:
I venture into a dreamland where the waves have come alive
& I watch them chase the people down the beach
But they are bound to the water
Like creatures on a leash
I have ridden on these waves
I have crashed into the shore
I have rolled along the floor
I will be there in no time at all...
What’s intriguing is how much Spencer’s following in the footsteps of Surrealism. Re-visiting The Magnetic Fields (as in, the seminal surrealist text from 1919, which is still very readable, FYI), it becomes apparent that surrealism isn’t just a generational discovery, it’s a personal one. Already fascinated by madness, psychoanalysis, and a kind of proto-Situationism (i.e. behaving like a twat in public to twist the collective melon of the bourgeoisie), André Breton started a series of experiments, and then a whole movement, to reproduce the poetic inspiration he had as he was drowsing over his books, one night. Almost a century later, Spencer clearly doesn’t want to be a rock-star cliché, which rules out hard drugs for inspiration, just as laudanum and absinthe were somewhat passé in Breton’s day. Like The Magnetic Fields there’s an evident sense of loss (in Breton’s case, for his nihilist friend, who OD’d on opium), although the “plot” of Dreamland is slightly more complex than cherchez la femme. Here’s the second movement:
I was hanging out in the tower
The tower overlooked the sea
I saw him check the girl for fever
By pushing all his fingers through her skin
He’s just reading her mind…
I venture into a dreamland where I can say this & you’ll believe
I’ve been here before…
I know your face from the last time I dreamt I was losing control
I was lying around with chameleons—I was hanging around with bitches
I heard that there’s a war on & I’m sure that they’re not with us
No no no no no...
In a few short lines the experience of being detached from your body, and outside time, as sensations from your limbs retreat, falling asleep, is collapsed together with the idea of ritual healing as a guided meditation, bringing the patient through their fever, and back into their body. It’s possible the ‘chameleons’ are like the ‘vampires’ and ‘handsome vultures’ elsewhere in the SunRub world – all those two-faced hangers-on – just as Spencer’s sung elsewhere about ‘actors’ and ‘leopards’ to figure out what it means to be a trained musician turned performer, but I don’t want to close off all the meanings; it’s up to you to venture in, and it’s well worth your while. Even at the end, when the singer’s re-surfacing from sleep, what might be banal details (‘I am making hissing sounds with my mouth’) don’t get diminished by the obvious explanations, but show how the mind plays on them to multiply meanings, and there’s some appropriately eeeevil white noise accompanying. Plus, ‘I am waiting for the fairies to kill the lights and chew the walls’ – disturborific.
I venture into a dreamland, where I am living on the edge
Where I am living I am living I am living right on the edge
The courtyard & the café are black
I am wearing 3 or 4 black coats
It’s dark on the stairs but it could be darker
I am waiting for the fairies to kill the lights and chew the walls
They take too long, they take too long
On my way back down the stairs they are gone
I have waited for their song
& now they’re feral & transformed
Into animals that scatter from the sun
I am making hissing sounds with my mouth...
Long story short: this isn’t intriguing because of the avant-garde echoes; more like a reminder of how moving and accessible Surrealism can be, whenever it arises. As it happens, Spencer’s influences (or fellow-travellers) may be closer to home. Spencer’s a fan of Phil Elverum (Microphones / Mt Eerie) whose splendid last album, Wind’s Poem, featured a devastatingly sad and beautiful trip to Twin Peaks, combining marimba, a sample of the theme tune, and a slinky bassline, into the best thing Elverum’s ever done. It’s easy to reduce Lynch’s creation to a sustained nightmare about the child abuse (and subsequent drug abuse) lurking behind the white picket fences, but Elverum sings from the perspective of those primal forces living in the Black Lodge, “always trying to climb out of the hole / buried… in space” – trying to push through to our world. Isn’t that what art, with or without overt surrealism, should be doing? Recreating that sense of adventure, and dread, by playing on the possibility that there isn’t always a rational explanation; that what you’re after, you may never find, and what’s after you may not be escapable, because it doesn’t play by the rules…
Somewhere in the second movement, ‘Dreamland’ becomes a quest narrative like ‘Nightingale Song’ from the last SunRub record, and even without the full band, Spencer’s lyrical flow matches that sense of being on a journey through tropical dreamscapes, unstoppable because you’re fulfilling some mythic destiny; uninhibited by gravity or logic, because your meat-sack of a body’s lying back at home, literally paralysed:
I venture into a dreamland where the waves have come alive
& I watch them chase the people down the beach
But they are bound to the water
Like creatures on a leash
I have ridden on these waves
I have crashed into the shore
I have rolled along the floor
I will be there in no time at all...
What’s intriguing is how much Spencer’s following in the footsteps of Surrealism. Re-visiting The Magnetic Fields (as in, the seminal surrealist text from 1919, which is still very readable, FYI), it becomes apparent that surrealism isn’t just a generational discovery, it’s a personal one. Already fascinated by madness, psychoanalysis, and a kind of proto-Situationism (i.e. behaving like a twat in public to twist the collective melon of the bourgeoisie), André Breton started a series of experiments, and then a whole movement, to reproduce the poetic inspiration he had as he was drowsing over his books, one night. Almost a century later, Spencer clearly doesn’t want to be a rock-star cliché, which rules out hard drugs for inspiration, just as laudanum and absinthe were somewhat passé in Breton’s day. Like The Magnetic Fields there’s an evident sense of loss (in Breton’s case, for his nihilist friend, who OD’d on opium), although the “plot” of Dreamland is slightly more complex than cherchez la femme. Here’s the second movement:
I was hanging out in the tower
The tower overlooked the sea
I saw him check the girl for fever
By pushing all his fingers through her skin
He’s just reading her mind…
I venture into a dreamland where I can say this & you’ll believe
I’ve been here before…
I know your face from the last time I dreamt I was losing control
I was lying around with chameleons—I was hanging around with bitches
I heard that there’s a war on & I’m sure that they’re not with us
No no no no no...
In a few short lines the experience of being detached from your body, and outside time, as sensations from your limbs retreat, falling asleep, is collapsed together with the idea of ritual healing as a guided meditation, bringing the patient through their fever, and back into their body. It’s possible the ‘chameleons’ are like the ‘vampires’ and ‘handsome vultures’ elsewhere in the SunRub world – all those two-faced hangers-on – just as Spencer’s sung elsewhere about ‘actors’ and ‘leopards’ to figure out what it means to be a trained musician turned performer, but I don’t want to close off all the meanings; it’s up to you to venture in, and it’s well worth your while. Even at the end, when the singer’s re-surfacing from sleep, what might be banal details (‘I am making hissing sounds with my mouth’) don’t get diminished by the obvious explanations, but show how the mind plays on them to multiply meanings, and there’s some appropriately eeeevil white noise accompanying. Plus, ‘I am waiting for the fairies to kill the lights and chew the walls’ – disturborific.
I venture into a dreamland, where I am living on the edge
Where I am living I am living I am living right on the edge
The courtyard & the café are black
I am wearing 3 or 4 black coats
It’s dark on the stairs but it could be darker
I am waiting for the fairies to kill the lights and chew the walls
They take too long, they take too long
On my way back down the stairs they are gone
I have waited for their song
& now they’re feral & transformed
Into animals that scatter from the sun
I am making hissing sounds with my mouth...
Long story short: this isn’t intriguing because of the avant-garde echoes; more like a reminder of how moving and accessible Surrealism can be, whenever it arises. As it happens, Spencer’s influences (or fellow-travellers) may be closer to home. Spencer’s a fan of Phil Elverum (Microphones / Mt Eerie) whose splendid last album, Wind’s Poem, featured a devastatingly sad and beautiful trip to Twin Peaks, combining marimba, a sample of the theme tune, and a slinky bassline, into the best thing Elverum’s ever done. It’s easy to reduce Lynch’s creation to a sustained nightmare about the child abuse (and subsequent drug abuse) lurking behind the white picket fences, but Elverum sings from the perspective of those primal forces living in the Black Lodge, “always trying to climb out of the hole / buried… in space” – trying to push through to our world. Isn’t that what art, with or without overt surrealism, should be doing? Recreating that sense of adventure, and dread, by playing on the possibility that there isn’t always a rational explanation; that what you’re after, you may never find, and what’s after you may not be escapable, because it doesn’t play by the rules…
MOVIE: The Fall (2008, dir. Tarsem Singh)
The Fall, dir. Tarsem Singh (Oct. 3rd 2008)
By any standards, The Fall is among the most ambitious films ever made, and may well be the most visually stunning, to rival works by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky, or Kenneth Anger. If Tarsem sounds familiar, it's because he made a cult horror/thriller 8 years back, called The Cell, in which J-Lo ventures into the mind of a psychopath whose perversity is matched only by the baroque architecture of the world in which he’s God/Emperor/Devil. The Cell wouldn’t have been memorable without a visual style film that conveyed the omnipotence the plot demanded; in a sense, The Fall raises that to an unprecedented omnipresence or omniscience. That’s to say, the locations include many of the most astonishing architectural achievements in the world (the largest maze, the most multi-layered castle), and many of the most beautiful sights in nature (the highest lake, the tallest dunes, a butterfly-shaped reef…). Tarsem’s strict no-CGI policy, however, means that all the actors’ reactions are as real as they can be… and so are yours. I’ll return to this point, below…
Plot-wise, The Fall is simplicity itself: a hospitalized silent-movie stuntman entertains a 6-year old girl with an improvized story. His motives are dubious – he needs a favour – but he’s also lonely, and we can see that his desire to entertain must come from somewhere other than self-love; as such, we’re rooting for him to be redeemed. The five heroes of his quest-story are sworn enemies of “Governor Odious”, for reasons ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous (revenge for being enslaved… rivalry as entomologists).
What’s conceptually exciting is the subtlety with which we’re shown the relationship between vision, imagination, and language (both linguistic and paralinguistic communication). For a start, there’s the double barrier that is a child’s limited knowledge of the world, and of English. Continually, we see aspects of the story (as imagined) follow from optical illusions, visual phenomena, but also homophonous puns. Much of the humour – and I do mean laugh-out-loud humour – derives from the split between (adult) narration and (childish) imagination: one of the heroes is “Charles Darwin”, but – understanding only that he’s “British” – the girl pictures him as a cleanshaven, effete fellow wearing long-johns, a bowler hat, and fur-coat dyed like a ladybird. That’s one joke spoiled, but there are many more, and funny enough to make this a crossover hit for families. That said, they’re also jokes that reveal the operation of the subconscious (as Freud proposed); providing gratification by relieving the mind of the pressure to resolve the contradictions of language. In Tarsem’s world, all is possible, and all associations are true. Even where there’s no grand point to make, innumerable details attest to the presence of the miraculous within the everyday (one definition of Magic Realism), and most of these aren’t remarked upon – they’re just slipped into scenes. The silhouette of the steam train, cast onto the river below; the keyhole acting as a pinhole camera, so that a horse & buggy are cast onto a wall, inverted.
Why is Tarsem’s method so important? Isn’t he just being bloody-minded and stubborn? Consider Indiana Jones IV – could you ever suspend disbelief? Didn’t you feel unconvinced by the collapsing temple CG’d around the actors, because it was meant to be bigger than anything you’d ever seen before, with no regard to what might be impressive and credible? Didn’t you feel insulted that the monsters were bigger in Return of the King than those in The Two Towers, as if we wouldn’t notice the plot wasn’t much better? The narrative of The Fall, however, was part-improvized by a 6 year old, with Tarsem matching the locations to a genuinely unfettered imagination; much of the remainder was selected from what best engaged her. These are pragmatic arguments against Hollywood’s relentless inflation, and over-reliance on focus-groups, but there’s an ideological or even metaphysical point here, too: the viewer is being given back their own innate ability to see the world as marvellous, using only the tools of their own imagination, rather than fostering a loathsome dependence on The Industry to dole out experiences that make false claims to be the telos and eschaton of sensation.
The film concludes with a comedy montage that I found curiously affecting. Like Reggio’s Powisqaatsi, you can happily call this a love-poem to our planet (without the pessimism of Koyaanisqaatsi), but the final montage of stunts from black & white silent-movies suggests that this was always a love-poem to cinema & cinematography, too. The combination of the montage and the plot’s final scene (I won’t spoil it) underscores the power of fantasy to cut through a life tarnished by death and exploitation – not to excuse it, of course, but to cut through it. So go see: this is the world at its best, and storytelling (paradoxically) at its purest.
[slightly edited from a previous posting on www.drownedinsound.com]
By any standards, The Fall is among the most ambitious films ever made, and may well be the most visually stunning, to rival works by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky, or Kenneth Anger. If Tarsem sounds familiar, it's because he made a cult horror/thriller 8 years back, called The Cell, in which J-Lo ventures into the mind of a psychopath whose perversity is matched only by the baroque architecture of the world in which he’s God/Emperor/Devil. The Cell wouldn’t have been memorable without a visual style film that conveyed the omnipotence the plot demanded; in a sense, The Fall raises that to an unprecedented omnipresence or omniscience. That’s to say, the locations include many of the most astonishing architectural achievements in the world (the largest maze, the most multi-layered castle), and many of the most beautiful sights in nature (the highest lake, the tallest dunes, a butterfly-shaped reef…). Tarsem’s strict no-CGI policy, however, means that all the actors’ reactions are as real as they can be… and so are yours. I’ll return to this point, below…
Plot-wise, The Fall is simplicity itself: a hospitalized silent-movie stuntman entertains a 6-year old girl with an improvized story. His motives are dubious – he needs a favour – but he’s also lonely, and we can see that his desire to entertain must come from somewhere other than self-love; as such, we’re rooting for him to be redeemed. The five heroes of his quest-story are sworn enemies of “Governor Odious”, for reasons ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous (revenge for being enslaved… rivalry as entomologists).
What’s conceptually exciting is the subtlety with which we’re shown the relationship between vision, imagination, and language (both linguistic and paralinguistic communication). For a start, there’s the double barrier that is a child’s limited knowledge of the world, and of English. Continually, we see aspects of the story (as imagined) follow from optical illusions, visual phenomena, but also homophonous puns. Much of the humour – and I do mean laugh-out-loud humour – derives from the split between (adult) narration and (childish) imagination: one of the heroes is “Charles Darwin”, but – understanding only that he’s “British” – the girl pictures him as a cleanshaven, effete fellow wearing long-johns, a bowler hat, and fur-coat dyed like a ladybird. That’s one joke spoiled, but there are many more, and funny enough to make this a crossover hit for families. That said, they’re also jokes that reveal the operation of the subconscious (as Freud proposed); providing gratification by relieving the mind of the pressure to resolve the contradictions of language. In Tarsem’s world, all is possible, and all associations are true. Even where there’s no grand point to make, innumerable details attest to the presence of the miraculous within the everyday (one definition of Magic Realism), and most of these aren’t remarked upon – they’re just slipped into scenes. The silhouette of the steam train, cast onto the river below; the keyhole acting as a pinhole camera, so that a horse & buggy are cast onto a wall, inverted.
Why is Tarsem’s method so important? Isn’t he just being bloody-minded and stubborn? Consider Indiana Jones IV – could you ever suspend disbelief? Didn’t you feel unconvinced by the collapsing temple CG’d around the actors, because it was meant to be bigger than anything you’d ever seen before, with no regard to what might be impressive and credible? Didn’t you feel insulted that the monsters were bigger in Return of the King than those in The Two Towers, as if we wouldn’t notice the plot wasn’t much better? The narrative of The Fall, however, was part-improvized by a 6 year old, with Tarsem matching the locations to a genuinely unfettered imagination; much of the remainder was selected from what best engaged her. These are pragmatic arguments against Hollywood’s relentless inflation, and over-reliance on focus-groups, but there’s an ideological or even metaphysical point here, too: the viewer is being given back their own innate ability to see the world as marvellous, using only the tools of their own imagination, rather than fostering a loathsome dependence on The Industry to dole out experiences that make false claims to be the telos and eschaton of sensation.
The film concludes with a comedy montage that I found curiously affecting. Like Reggio’s Powisqaatsi, you can happily call this a love-poem to our planet (without the pessimism of Koyaanisqaatsi), but the final montage of stunts from black & white silent-movies suggests that this was always a love-poem to cinema & cinematography, too. The combination of the montage and the plot’s final scene (I won’t spoil it) underscores the power of fantasy to cut through a life tarnished by death and exploitation – not to excuse it, of course, but to cut through it. So go see: this is the world at its best, and storytelling (paradoxically) at its purest.
[slightly edited from a previous posting on www.drownedinsound.com]
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