when everybody's lost without a trace

It feels a little inevitable that I would be sitting here at the end of the year/decade listening to and writing about The Clientele. There is always this sense of world weariness and ache of nostalgia attached to Alasdair MacLean’s songs that seems made for reflective moods, and their most recent Bonfires on the Heath is no different. (I have read somewhere that this album might be the band’s last collective effort, and I can only hope this can be interpreted as an “unsubstantiated rumor”.) A warm brew of sadness settles all over several of the album’s most beautifully crafted numbers “Jennifer and Julia” and “Never Saw Them Before”. The band prove to be adept as ever in filling out the porcelain sound, providing exquisite musical accompaniment to MacLean’s languid dreams: the plaintive steel guitar employed to mournful effect on the title track; the ghosts of childhood linger on “Graven Wood” with its softly spiraling violins and guitar atmospherics hypnotizing the listener into The Clientele’s world of buried disappointments through the verges of suburban light.

decade's best #29

If I remember correctly, I was commuting on the bus when I first listened to St Dymphna, and I started excitedly texting a bunch of friends about how simply awesome Gang Gang Dance are. My initial thought was that it's going to be the one album that’s going to have as much an impact on the contemporary musical landscape as Fear of Music, my favorite Talking Heads album, had on the post-punk scene back in 1979 or something like that (and sorry if the comparisons between the Talking Heads and Gang Gang Dance is more than a bit wonky; other than that both bands seem to be rather influenced by African pop music, though in very different ways, as far as one can discern) once more folks start to figure it out… maybe it isn’t quite supposed to pan out that way, but that does not take anything away from this album’s virtuosity.

29. Gang Gang Dance
St Dymphna [Warp, 2008]
There is this febrile quality to Gang Gang Dance’s music that fuels the sense of eclecticism on St Dymphna, their funkiest and most cohesive effort to date – and not too bad at all for a record titled after the patron saint of madness and confusion. While past, edgier Gang Gang Dance records were realized in much rougher (i.e. less than listenable) form, the mutant dance music of St Dymphna has evolved to make for a more coherent thread to their experimental-noise contemporaries Black Dice and (early) Animal Collective; although the stylistic leap into the exploratory global-sourcing of afrobeat-driven songs like “Bebey” and “Inners Pace” is mostly the band’s own doing, and this relentless cross referencing between disparate musical genres is perhaps the album’s real masterstroke. Indeed, listening to the album without first being acquainted to this band’s sonic sensibility (think along the lines of free-improvisational jams anchored by thickly textured dub grooves and the wickedly restless singing of Liz Bougatsos) is stepping straight into a musically convulsive shitstorm, where their unlatched jigsaw fragments of strange rhythmic overtones and beatific madness manage to gel together so brilliantly.

30. The National: Boxer [Beggars Banquet, 2007]

29. Gang Gang Dance: St Dymphna [Warp, 2008]

desert-island dirty dozen, plus two (it doesn’t feel like christmas and other holiday surprises)

(Holy shit, not another decades’ end related list. This is sort of inspired by the “major project” of my friend Wubin, who I can always count on for helping to put things into perspective, heh heh… Or more accurately, this came about after listening to this Velvet Underground album this morning and momentarily remembering how things were a few years back.)

It’s less than 200 minutes to Christmas, and I am glad to say that this year I have consumed just enough fine alcohol by this hour, while chilling out with my family no less, to write home about.

Several of my friends have expressed surprised how much I enjoy the holiday season – even to the extent of enduring the downtown crowds and overzealous carolers – and perhaps I should explain why here. About 12-13 years ago, when I was a destitute teenager barely surviving on a pitiful weekly allowance from my folks, CDs were a real luxury. But still I manage. There were many instances where I had to skip lunches just to scrimp together a few lousy bucks to buy that new, pretty fucked-up trip-hop record by Tricky from Tower Records (heh-heh!).

Each Christmas represented an opportunity: I’d get my sister and relatives to make gift requests for strange, esoteric CDs, and then I’ll buy the CDs off them on the cheap – good bargain both ways. (I still recall that from October onwards I’d start saving for this annual bonanza and there were quite a handful of albums that I got my hands on through this “scheme”: a few Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones – Exile on Main Street really made for such a fucking brilliant Christmas back in ‘96 – the Smith’s The Queen Is Dead one year (’98?), and quite a few others I can’t recall.)

This probably went on for about five years or so before I kinda grown out of it, but I guess those times really held a special significance to me still, made all the more special because it had to do with Christmas, and helped mold my rather parochial taste in music I suppose. And so in the spirit of these things, these are my 14 desert-island records (17 pieces of CD and 18 vinyl, I believe), definitive albums that I would definitely recommend to anyone I know. Maybe come to the next decade’s end, I shall expand this two- or three-fold. Merry Christmas everyone.

01. Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground and Nico [Verve, 1967]
02. Wire: Chairs Missing [EMI, 1978]
03. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde [Columbia, 1966]
04. Wilco: Summerteeth [Reprise, 1999]
05. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds [Capitol, 1966]
06. Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation [Enigma, 1988]
07. Neutral Milk Hotel: The Aeroplane over the Sea [Merge, 1998]
08. Joni Mitchell: Blue [Reprise, 1971]
09. Sonny Rollins: A Night at the Village Vanguard [Blue Note, 1957]
10. The Beatles: The Beatles [Parlophone, 1998]
11. Miles Davis: Bitches Brew [Columbia, 1970]
12. David Bowie: Low [RCA, 1977]
13. REM: Murmur [IRS, 1983]
14. Billie Holiday: Lady In Satin [Columbia, 1958]

down the aisles, along the titles where you're

I’ve been laboring uncomfortably deep into the night over the past couple of weeks – but thankfully, everything’s slated to complete before Christmas – and the casually chic music of Broadcast has been subbing as my musical companion; specifically, the Ha Ha Sound and Tender Buttons (*) LPs along with The Book Lovers EP. The latter, an early four-song release from 1997 later to be compiled into Work and Non Work, is probably my nostalgic favorite from Broadcast’s body of work; never mind that their uniquely warped sound aesthetics has yet to fully coalesce, and that the still-fledging outfit were mining the same territory as bands like Stereolab but with somewhat less convincing results. The sublime title cut is an early taste of what would make Broadcast’s name: Trish Keenan’s bewitching voice, the way the song straddle the 4 a.m. dream-lucidity/psychedelic divide, and the band’s dead-on ability to dose up “The Book Lovers” with just the right amount of retro flavor.

* I never quite liked their 2005 album Tender Buttons back then when I first heard it but I have slowly warmed to it. And now it strikes me as perhaps their most radical and bravest album yet, an almost-impenetrable din of lo-fi unease and ghostly acoustics that does justice to those Young Marble Giants comparisons. Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?

decade's best #30

By this time of year, I suppose most folks, magazines and blogs who care about such things would be done with their best-of-decade lists. I originally wanted to put out mine, a list of my favorite 30 albums released between 2000 and 2009, before Christmas but it turns out to be not so feasible. So indulge me as I roll these 30 albums out one by one, and who knows – or more accurate, who cares – how long it will take me to finish, but it'll be fun for my personally. And first up to bat, the dark and brooding music of The National.

30. The National
Boxer [Beggars Banquet, 2007]
The 2005 album Alligator is perhaps more representative of The National, but it is the bleary-eyed evanescence captured fully on Boxer that leaves a more lasting impression. These well-worn songs, sung in Matt Berninger’s very distinctive baritone, have the trancelike ability to evoke a profusion of conflicted chivalry, grown-up disaffection and feelings of insecurity – all drawing on the dark musings of a reluctant corporate workaholic, if you may. Boxer is an absorbing listen, albeit with a strong alcoholic aftertaste, as crisp drinking songs such as “Squalor Victoria” and “Slow Show” abound in the kind of torpid observational details that perhaps paint a familiar picture of dissipation, while in the underpinning swagger of “Apartment Story” a tired and wired Berninger manages to mumble out disarming lines about the absurdities of everyday life (“Can you carry my drink I have everything else/ I can tie my tie all by myself, I'm getting tied, I'm forgetting why”). And even if you’re not sufficiently moved by the soporific grandeur of piano-led opener “Fake Empire”, their elegant flail against oblivion (“Stay up super late tonight…”), the rest of Boxer project such an elegant sense of brooding romanticism throughout that you can’t help but give in to its after-hours sensitivity.

favorite movies (2009)

While I'm at it, here's another annual list:

Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
Of Time and The City (Terence Davies, 2008)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)
Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)
The Witnesses (Andre Techine, 2007)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008)
Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)
Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola, 2009)

favorite albums (2009)

I have been bogged down with a bunch of stuff of late, including work-related commitments of some sort, to really sit down and write short commentaries to go with each of the following albums. That said, I’ve written about a few posts about these albums here before – albeit in a rather offhand fashion – so you can follow the link if you want:

01. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion [Domino]
02. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest [Warp]
03. Flaming Lips: Embryonic [Warner]
04. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca [Domino]
05. A Sunny Day In Glasgow: Ashes Grammar [Mis Ojos Discos]
06. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Pains of Being Pure at Heart
07. Atlas Sound: Logos [Kranky/4AD]
08. Califone: All My Friends Are Funeral Singers [Dead Oceans]
09. Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt II [EMI]
10. Sonic Youth: The Eternal [Matador]
11. Real Estate: Real Estate [Woodsist]
12. Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix [V2]
13. Black Dice: Repo [Paw Tracks]
14. M. Ward: Hold Time [Merge]
15. Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career [Merge]
16. Cymbals Eat Guitars: Why There Are Mountains [self-released]
17. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast [Fat Possum]
18. Mos Def: The Ecstatic [Downtown]

19. Bonnie Prince Billy: Beware [Drag City]
20. The Clientele: Bonfires On The Heath [Merge]

mixtape (december 2009)

Saints born being saints, parallel movies in slow motion
Asobi Seksu “Thursday”
Sigur Ros “Hjartao Hamast (Bamm Bamm Bamm)”
Real Estate “Basement”
Atlas Sound “Quick Canal”
My Bloody Valentine “Off Your Face”
Broadcast “I Found The End”
Animal Collective “Bluish”
Mazzy Star “Fade Into You”
Wilco “She’s A Jar”
Mercury Rev “Opus 40”
The Magnetic Fields “Queen of The Savages”
Neutral Milk Hotel “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea”
Broken Social Scene “5/4 (Shoreline)”

Begin responsibilities: As per the end of every decade, my wish is to be completely lost in the mist of presumably could-have-been dreams. The Atlas Sound song “Quick Canal”, the Deerhunter dude Bradford Cox’s nine-minute kraut-fantasy/dream-pop collaboration with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, really anchors this list. (Anyway, just got back from Taipei, and it’s kinda exciting how the Deerhunter album Microcastle/Weird Era Cont match the city scenes and the ache of transience they gave me as I haul my ass around its busy streets.) Or maybe this has got more than a bit to do with the Animal Collective song too, how Avey Tare sings “pulling me into another dream, a lucid dream”. It’s unerringly revealing too, from this mixtape’s second half, that I am still so hung up on my favorite music from the decade before.

heavy paraphernalia

The Fuck Buttons seem to be given a considerable amount of latitude for making essentially the same album twice, with last year's Street Horrrsing and the new Tarot Sport. That hardly matters listening to the album, once you’re hit with the sensational fix of leadoff track/10-minute single "Surf Solar". Famed producer Andrew Weatherall is involved here but Tarot Sport is still essentially the Fuck Buttons firing off a fuzzed stream of their recognizable, gratuitously shoegaze-influenced brand of drone-rock noise. The sweep and warped virtuosity of “The Lisbon Maru” and “Olympians” (which roughly forms the album’s middle segment) takes on a distinctive emotional resonance that is mostly absent from the Street Horrrsing songs, it must be said; the club-ready sonic fissures of “Phantom Limb” will have you riveted too.

mixtape (november 2009)

Dreaming backwards, rehydrated
Black Tambourine "By Tomorrow"
PS Eliot "Entendre"
Boy Genius "Old New England"
Love Is All "Movie Romance"
Ampersand "Tokyo Girl"
Veronica Lake "When You Smile"
Orange Juice "Louise Louise"
The Champagne Socialists "Teardrop Tattoo"
Voxtrot "The Start Of Something"
The Vaselines "Molly's Lips"
The Aislers Set "Long Division"
Young Marble Giants "Music For Evening"
Best Coast "When I'm With You"
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart "Doing All The Things That Wouldn't Make Your Parents Proud"
The Shop Assistants "Train From Kansas City"
A Sunny Day In Glasgow "Panic Attacks Are What Make Me 'Me'"
The Magnetic Fields "I'm Sorry I Love You"
The Softies "Count To Ten"
Teenage Fanclub "Everything Flows"

Whole-grain madness: Anxious, slack motherfuckers are making me nervous. Probably after I watched this sorta-forgotten American movie Wanda recently or more so because of the current seasons - I love days that never stop raining - but I have been in the mood for some classic indie pop. Either that or I'll be commuting across town, disgruntled and immersed in Wire's Pink Flag, so help me God. My post-thirty days thus far can perhaps be summed up in my favorite Teenage Fanclub song ("I'll never know which way to flow/ Set a course but I don't know") that close this latest mix.

waking up on gilded splinters

What is this squall of psychedelic horseshit? With their latest Embryonic that sounds unlike anything they have done thus far in their decades-old careering, the Flaming Lips have delivered a phenomenal double-LP that celebrates, aggressively, their deepest acid-rock indulgences. A sprawl of incalculable influence of fucked-up masterpieces like Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Dr John’s Gris-Gris and Can’s Future Days are all over these epic Embryonic songs – fans of the more polished craftsmanship of past Flaming Lips albums like 1999’s The Soft Bulletin may well be disappointed, but what the hell. I haven’t bothered to make much sense of the inventory of warmed inventions Wayne Coyne is singing about on this record (mostly a whole lotta paranoia, bad vibes and meddlesome mysteries, it seems) but it all comes together so incredibly well; overwrought, druggy pop songs that sound so weird, disorienting and beautiful.

moon (2009)

Speaking of Elton John, I would probably take his “Rocket Man” over David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” as my pick for the essential space-travel anthem anytime, never mind that I am a huge Bowie fan. Moon, the directorial debut of Bowie’s firstborn child Duncan Jones, would be my pick for the Halloween DVD this year: not that it is a scary movie, far from it, and the robot voice done by Kevin Spacey is more dull than creepy; and not that the film is particularly good too, and I actually fell asleep halfway through this in the cinema, which is rare for me. This trippy, minimalist but ultimately disappointing sci-fi movie is written specifically for Sam Rockwell, who plays a homesick astronaut, named Sam Bell, contracted by a Korean space company to be stationed on a lunar base for about three years. As Sam confronts the presence of a clone of his self who somehow strayed onto the moon, the film digresses into an identity-crisis puzzle that is perhaps more confusing than convincing. Rockwell, who was particularly good in 2002’s Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, is always watchable of course, and I did like the fact that this film rather successfully work sparse gadgets into the narrative.

come down in time

Well yes, probably don’t mean shit to most everyone, but my favorite Elton John album, Tumbleweed Connection, was released 39 years ago on this day – you can’t get more unfashionable these days than to write about Elton John, to be sure. I love the comforting sound of these familiar country & western songs – yes, another one of those albums I turn to when I’m a little blue, if only to listen to "Come Down In Time" – and he would not record another album that sound quite as thematically cohesive like this. Tumbleweed Connection is also a huge inspiration for another much underrated album I love, Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm. Elton and his lyrics writer Bernie Taupin are apparently these huge Band fans, and you can hear a lot of that influence on Tumbleweed Connection songs like “Country Comfort” and “My Father’s Gun”. I suppose if I was actually a music fan of my current age living in the sixties, the Band would be one of my favorite musicians around too; not so sure how I might take to Elton John though.

friend's major project

So I’m think I’ll probably take some time to get back into the swing of “publishing” – a lot of attention would be wasted on my Yankees in the World Series anyway – but here’s a pretty long piece written by from one of my close friends that I’ve gotten permission to publish here. His major project, so to say, and a killer playlist by the way, with several unnecessary comments of mine in bold and italics:

Major Project (a.k.a. Before the Fall)
Music has been an integral part of my life since 1995, my first year in junior college, when I got hold of REM’s “Automatic for the People”, Joni Mitchell’s “Turbulent Indigo” and Red House Painters’ “Ocean Beach”. I also received an early and admittedly embarrassing introduction to emo-core via Radiohead’s “The Bends”. Since then, certain songs have served as landmarks and signposts of my life. I sometimes wonder: if I am a music anthropologist, mining through the songs that have marked my existence in the last 15 years, will I have anything meaningful to say about myself? Can I come to you with a song list and hope wishfully that you will know me better? k. vicious: my favorite emo album: heartbreaker by mr adams

I decided to give it a go – to compile a list of songs that scarred and thrilled my private life. At the start of this “major project”, I wanted to categorize the songs into the decades, based primarily on their date of issue. There was no specific reason for doing so, except an archaeological interest in such matters. However, midway through this experiment, I realized I was merely creating a buying list of songs. I was veering towards listing down songs that are critically acclaimed but have little to do with me. This is not a Mojo year-end project, I told myself. I have to be honest. As such, I have left out bands like Television, Mouse on Mars, Slint and Uncle Tupelo – bands that I respect but have not marked my heart.

There are of course certain rules that I adopted during the process of selecting the music. Each musician is only entitled one entry per decade. As such, I have to throw out four or five songs of Joni Mitchell from 1970 to 1979 and settle for “River”. However, I do consider a band member’s side/solo project as a separate entry, which is why Dan Bejar has two bites of the cherry with Destroyer and The New Pornographers in my selection for the last decade. As far as possible, I try to make this an in-and-out list and left out the more “experimental” songs. Furthermore, I must own an original copy of the selected songs, a sign that I have listened to these songs for uncountable times. The “ice-cube” sound of MP3s arrived fairly late in my musical education. I left out jazz altogether, although Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Mingus certainly deserved to make this list. Perhaps that will be another major project for another gap week. k. vicious: okay, got the neil jung reference

Naturally, at the end of such a project, it is also possible to make comments about the music in general through the decades. Without descending into a Pitchfork editorial, I would say that the last decade from 2000 to 2009 is the most diverse in terms of music production. Look away now, if you haven’t, dear MTV fans. k. vicious: “descending”?!?!

Popular perception also tells us that the 1980s was a bad decade. When I examine my list, it isn’t all that bad. The decade gave us Pixies’ first album. Sonic Youth took their no-wave aesthetics and clothed it in bubblegum. I even managed to slip in a 70s Joni Mitchell song “Amelia” via the live album she released in 1980, “Shadows and Light”. But the 1970s is unsurpassed. The end of the western dream is forever enshrined in songs like John Cale’s “Paris 1919” and Neil Young’s “On the Beach”. Set against that, the 1980s will always be the unfulfilled second son.

I hereby present you the play-list of my life. I have listed the songs in a particular sequence, not to rank them, but to create mini narratives within each decade. I do come from an era before the iPod Shuffle. You are more than welcomed to get a copy of the songs in MP3 format.

So what does my play-list say? A close friend Mr. K suggested that I should write a few lines for each selected song. That would take too much time and I am not sure if I want to revisit the self-pity that plagued certain junctures of my life. However, I have decided to add commentaries to certain songs as a way of providing context. k. vicious: Mr. K is so full of shit, but why "self-pity"? more like therapy..

Overall, the process of selecting the music has certainly given me an excuse away from work. The weather has been fairly erratic in Singapore the last few days – just the perfect way to think of friends and lovers who have left and those who have yet to arrive. What else can I say? I guess I’m un-cool, to steal a line from Lester Bang, via Cameron Crowe’s movie “Almost Famous”. While you are out partying, I am at home, picking songs for a road trip that never materialized. What more can my play-list justify?

Wubin
14 October 2009
Singapore, in horrific sunshine after a downpour

1960-69
California Dreamin’ / The Mamas and the Papas
[This is an instance where a song has become etched in my memory due to its inclusion in a film – in this case, Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express”. The movie justified the decision of unsophisticated young filmmakers in East Asia for turning on the slow-mo mode on their video camera.]
The Red Telephone / Love
See Emily Play / Pink Floyd
k. vicious: awesome choices, these last two - see emily play breaks my psychedelic heart
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) / The Beatles
[Nowadays, I associate this song more with the “Norwegian Wood” that Haruki Murakami wrote when he turned 40. He vowed to make all the women cry with that book. Will I bald when I hit 40?]
k. vicious: oh man - my beatles pick (if just one) I am the walrus
Hung Up on a Dream / The Zombies
The Amorous Humphrey Plugg / Scott Walker
I Ain’t Marching Anymore / Phil Ochs
[As a reluctant journalist, this song is a virtual guarantee in my play-list.]
Je t’aime… moi non plus / Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot
Venus in Furs / The Velvet Underground and Nico
[The Velvet Underground connected all the dots from Joy Division to Dalek.]
k. vicious: insanely good segue from gainsbourg to velvets - this should be a mixtape
Suzanne / Leonard Cohen
Dolphins / Tim Buckley
Rhymes and Reasons / John Denver
Ballad in Plain D / Bob Dylan
Who Knows Where the Time Goes / Fairport Convention
[I often wonder why am I such a self-proclaimed British folk fan. There isn’t anything topical that connects my life with what Sandy Denny or Nick Drake was singing then. The sarcasm of Dylan was absent in those songs. But the sense of truncation drew me. That was the end of idealism under the western sky.]

1970-79
Goodbye to Love / Carpenters
So Far Away / Carole King
[Why am I such a sucker for love songs? If you listen carefully, the essence of that decade is captured in the audio quality of this very song.]
What’s Going On / Marvin Gaye
Paris 1919 / John Cale
Starman / David Bowie
Perfect Day / Lou Reed
[The second year of my college life (2000 to 2001) was by far the most difficult phase of my life. I had crashed the cliffs with an imaginary lover. This is the song I was singing to her.]
k. vicious: oh man, like that image - write a short story based on this, except the song is, erm, like you mention, too obvious; for lou (old friend), i'll pick the eternally fucked-up "Coney Island Baby" (I'm not going to play quarterback)
Casey’s Last Ride / Kris Kristofferson
k. vicious: never heard this (gasp!)
Darkness on the Edge of Town / Bruce Springsteen
New Dawn Fades / Joy Division
The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime) / Scott Walker
k. vicious: haha - kinda like tilt
Way to Blue / Nick Drake
[In my times of isolation, more often than not, I turn to Nick Drake. I used to associate his fading away with an almost romantic sense of heroism.]
Riders on the Storm / The Doors
Avalanche / Leonard Cohen
On the Beach / Neil Young
Your Song / Elton John
Diamonds and Rust / Joan Baez
Idiot Wind / Bob Dylan
I’m a Dreamer / Sandy Denny
River / Joni Mitchell

1980-89
Where is my Mind / Pixies
Candle / Sonic Youth
Everybody Knows / Leonard Cohen
Amelia / Joni Mitchell
[I listen to “Amelia” fairly frequently on long-distance train trips and bus rides across Southeast Asia. The images in Mitchell’s lyrics provide a fitting contrast against the fleeting and impermanent landscape beyond the window. I imagine, with the next fall round the corner, I will be able to survive it better with this simple fact in mind.]
Walking on a Wire / Linda Thompson
[Fresh out of school, made the Dean’s list and totally jobless in 2003. For some time, I worked as a freelance invigilator for a private exam bureau. I remember meeting a few interesting characters at “work” and wondered then whether it could get any worse. My teacher’s wife, a respected Chinese author in Singapore, put it in a very nice way: “You are now standing at the end of your ‘education’ and asking yourself, ‘Is this it?’”]
k. vicious: the important question is - still hiring freelance invigilators or not?!?
The Boy with the Thorn in his Side / The Smiths
k. vicious: i'll pick "I Won't Share You", totally sick song
Here comes a Regular / The Replacements
It’s the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine) / REM
Last Harbor / American Music Club
[This is where I stole the name of my website. To reflect my English education in Singapore, I adopted the British spelling. Nevertheless, the song title is such an apt conclusion to a wandering life.]
Everyday is like Sunday / Morrissey
k. vicious: two morrissey eh??
Most of the Time / Bob Dylan
Chinese Envoy / John Cale
[The out-of-place-ness marked that period of my life. The watershed was between 2001 and 2002.]
Solitude Standing / Suzanne Vega
k. vicious: love homer simpson's version of "luka", can die..
The Eternal / Joy Division

1990-99
Into your Arms / The Lemonheads
Natural One / The Folk Implosion
[Whenever I needed to be brave, I would turn to Lou Barlow’s voice, which is really kind of odd on hindsight. Pardon my folly during college.]
k. vicious: lou barlow = total masturbation music (in a good way)
Time Enough for Rocking When We’re Old / The Magnetic Fields
k. vicious: love this one too, in a deeply personal, heartbroken sort of way.. but segue to pavement?
Range Life / Pavement
[There are times when I hope to be as messy as Pavement’s songs.]
Missile ++ / Blondie Redhead
[During college, this song gave me a false sense of superiority against those whom I despised.]
k. vicious:!!!
Round Here / Counting Crows
Teardrop / Massive Attack
Heart Cooks Brain / Modest Mouse
Between the Bars / Elliott Smith
Happy Cycling / Boards of Canada
k. vicious: whoa
Have you Forgotten / Red House Painters
[Put on your raincoat and listen in.]
k. vicious: whoa again
Goddess on a Hiway / Mercury Rev
k. vicious: all-time fave on my ipod
Generation Sex / The Divine Comedy
I Still Have that other Girl / Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach
Driving Sideways / Aimee Mann
Not Dark Yet / Bob Dylan
Last Goodbye / Jeff Buckley
[Jeff Buckley sounded as though he was ready to thrash everything out the window. Sometimes, I pray for that kind of courage.]
Find the River / REM
[Almost every song on this album can make my play-list. This is perhaps an underwhelming choice. But the gist of the entire album is summed up in four minutes. Not bad for a band that was supposedly at the end of its prowess.]
k. vicious: very good choice.. i would pick the same
King of Carrot Flowers Part 1 / Neutral Milk Hotel
Demons / Yo La Tengo
Wrecking Ball / Emmylou Harris
[By now, it must be fairly clear that the metaphor of leaving recurs fairly frequently in my play-list. And yet, we know, deep down inside, it is temporary respite.]
Listen, The Snow is Falling / Galaxie 500
[Come the day when someone would take a chalk and draw a line in front of my feet, proclaiming that this is the end of the world, I hope this song will be playing somewhere out there.]
No Easy Way Down / Mark Eitzel
I am a Scientist / Guided by Voices
I’m the Ocean / Neil Young
Skip Tracer / Sonic Youth
Waiting for the Miracle / Leonard Cohen
[I remember watching “Natural Born Killers” during my GP class at age 18. We had one of the most cynical teachers in school. She probably kick-started something in my mind, but I cannot be sure now. The film left no impression. Neither did Leonard Cohen’s music, until years later.]
Utilitarian / Spoon
Closed Captioned / Fugazi
Atlantic City (Gonna Make a Million Tonight) / East River Pipe
[My dead-end dream of failure is completely articulated in this song.]
Another Night In / Tindersticks
Sunny Sunday / Joni Mitchell
[When I was 18, before I had the means or courage to fly away, I would use the excuse of studying at the airport to take the one-hour bus trip that would tire me out completely before arriving at the terminal. Mitchell would be singing to me about the madness of Van Gogh on those trips. That ritual of going to my mythical Mount Olympus – the viewing gallery of the departure hall – would be repeated by my roommate in college before the arrival of the new millennium. I also remember laying down on the floor of the WTC Hall during the rehearsal of the junior college play while the rest of my peers were having a ball elsewhere. Bad habits generally develop early.]
Too Pure / Sebadoh
Guitar and Video Games / Sunny Day Real Estate
Here’s to the Rest of the World / Whiskeytown

2000-09
Hope There’s Someone / Antony and the Johnsons
[My apologies to Sublime 4199 for letting me indulge in some whining. On another day, I would have picked “Fistful of Love” from Antony’s haunting work.]
k. vicious: i'll take Fistfuls..
Leaf House / Animal Collective
Electronic Performers / Air
[This electric orgasm predates the widespread proliferation of self-made sex scandals on the web. Hello, this is my horniness speaking.]
Sad, Sad Song / M Ward
I Love the Valley / Xiu Xiu
To be Alone with You / Sufjan Stevens
Moorestown / Sun Kil Moon
New Hampshire / Sonic Youth
k. vicious: ha, i thought i'm the only idiot who notice this great song!!
Dear Chicago / Ryan Adams
[In the last few years, Ryan Adams has single-handedly kept me afloat with his songs. Whenever he puts his mind to it, he can give you gems like “Dear Chicago” in an album that was supposedly made up of odds-and-ends. Will I die alone and sad? Not with music.]
NYC / Interpol
[The Interpol EP remained on my CD player for weeks. Frankly, I have no connection with NYC. Bruce Gilden’s photographic work has taught me everything to know about the city. When the planes crashed into the towers, I saw it as the natural result of a Middle East policy that cultivated hatred. Perhaps the song gave Interpol and myself a sense of self-importance for vastly different reasons.]
New World / Bjork
We’ve Been Had / The Walkmen
k. vicious: love this one
Hours / TV on the Radio
Forever Close my Eyes / Dalek
Strange Form of Life / Bonnie Prince Billy
[Will Oldham has never sounded so angelic. This is another travel song that I put on fairly frequently. It has a certain, whispering quality that seems to justify the futility of the world.]
Wayside / Back in Time / Gillian Welch
Solitary Man / Johnny Cash
Superpowers / The Dismemberment Plan
[Whenever I needed a song to block out the collapsing world, I would turn to The Dismemberment Plan. But “Superpowers” is more than that. Is there anything wrong to feel good on the spite of others?]
k. vicious: gives me idea for my next mixtape - sentimental man
Hallelujah / Nick Cave and the Seeds
Our Live is Not a Movie or Maybe / Okkervil River
The Facts of Life / Black Box Recorder
Blueberry Boat / The Fiery Furnaces
Everyone Chooses Sides / The Wrens
Lover I Don’t Have to Love / Bright Eyes
k. vicious: "classic" one night stand song
Hotel / Broken Social Scene
Birds in your Garden / Pulp
[Produced by Scott Walker, this album signalled the emergence of Jarvis as a credible songwriter. Jarvis’ sarcastic humour gets me over for another day.]
Pretty Girls / Neko Case
Some Summers They Drop Like Flys / Dirty Three
Trembling Peacock / Destroyer
Up on Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days / Sunset Rubdown
Lazy Butterfly / Devendra Banhart
Internal Wrangler / Clinic
Shine a Light / Wolf Parade
The Long Sea / Arab Strap
[Twenty-eight years of foreplay led up to this song. Where will nearly 20 years of wanking lead me?]
Pyramid Song / Radiohead
[The tide of the post-rock movement and the callous invasion of Iraq / Afghanistan fuelled Radiohead’s decision to move away from the emo-core of “The Bends”. The muffled strings behind Thom Yorke’s voice sounded as though the end of morality was near.]
Humpty Dumpty / Aimee Mann
[If I would ever take up my mother’s offer to pay for my driving lessons, this would be my driving song.]
The End of Medicine / The New Pornographers
I am Trying to Break Your Heart / Wilco
Rehearsals for Retirement / Mark Eitzel
[First of all, I know Mark Eitzel writes killer songs. But his smoky delivery has seldom received acclaim. This cover of a Phil Ochs’ song should cast aside any doubts. Look, I am not trying to claim that he has a voice that is similar to Rufus Wainwright. Likewise for Wainwright, Eitzel makes it work. I also associate this song with a quote from the eclectic Robyn Hitchcock, who once said at the peak of his prowess, Why not retire? Why do anything? Now, that’s a call.]
k. vicious, eitzel nerd: you know this man write great songs, right?
One Man Guy / Rufus Wainwright
Bad Dreams / Joni Mitchell
k. vicious: What would the community think?

mixtape (oct 2009)

Storm tastes, savagery of microphone memories
White Hinterland “My Love”
Junior Boys “First Time”
A Sunny Day In Glasgow “Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs)”
Phoenix “Rome (Neighbors remix)”
Mary Timony “Aging Astronauts II”
Au Revoir Simone “Shadows”
Kings Of Convenience “Mrs. Cold”
Fireflies “Cherry Blossom Girl”
Clothilde “Fallait Pas Ecraser La Queue Du Chat”
Scott Walker “30 Century Man”
The Clientele “Joseph Cornell”
The Clean “Linger Longer”
Atlas Sound “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)”
Le Loup “Forgive Me”

Calamities noun: I pay attention to natural disasters on a fairly regular basis for my work and I can say I’ve just about had it, especially last week when these distressing incidents were unfolding across the region in such quick succession that it felt like infinities. So here’s a quick mixtape to take some of the edge off the sinister gloaming perhaps. The White Hinterlands’ cover of Justin Timberlake is phenomenal, so is Bradford Cox (Atlas Sound) trying his hand with a tune made famous by the Everly Brothers.

silence kit #21

Paul Westerberg
Stereo/Mono [Vagrant, 2002]

It’s always fashionable to come across like a bit of an insufferable mope, and I remember 2002 being “chock-a-block” (fucking bureaucratic language) full of sad-sack records to mope along to. Let’s see, there were Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for sulky starters. Beck released Sea Change, which a lot of his fans hated but which I love because it pretended to sound like the saddest shit. Listened a lot to Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights that year too, but not sure if it falls under this category of discussion (though “NYC” definitely sounds mopey as hell). Another one would be the double album by one of my favorite songwriters, Paul Westerberg. A lot of the songs on Stereo/Mono don’t come across as really all that gloomy to begin with (particularly Mono, credited to his Grandpaboy moniker, which contains several really good, Replacements-like rock tunes), but if you read enough of the interviews Paul was giving at that time, you’d notice he sounded totally depressed, disgusted with the time he spent on a major label (three average, commercially dismal solo albums on Reprise and Capitol, if I remember correctly, each containing a few stunning songs still, of course) and eager to disappear completely. These two albums were Paul’s basement tapes, performed and recorded all by himself. I listen to Stereo a lot more (mainly because I don’t have a clue where my Mono CD is) so I am more acquainted to its songs. I have always been drawn to the softer, sadly beautiful side of his songwriting more, and Stereo, while admittedly an uneven listen, got quite a few of these songs: “Boring Enormous”, “Let the Bad Times Roll”, “Nothing To No One”; and “Only Lie Worth Telling”, which to me is quite possibly one of most heartbreaking songs Paul has ever written – only if you’re in the mood for that kind of sad shit though.

it's not just the lipstick drawn on crooked

Right, work sucks and so I have just purchased tickets to catch Elvis Costello perform on October 5, and I’m pretty psyched. Likely that Costello would be performing a bunch of slower-paced ballads (just my guess) but that’s not bad at all. Here are six songs that I hope he’ll get around to performing in between chatters, will update on this after the gig:

“You Trip At Every Step” (Brutal Youth is actually the first Elvis Costello album I’ve ever heard – very good memories of those days – and this is my favorite track off the album)

“Nothing Clings Like Ivy” (From the recent, rather underrated album The Delivery Man, brilliantly parading his way with a nice old bittersweet ballad)

“Poor Fractured Atlas” (Not the best known of his songs, but I got a feeling Elvis would have a soft touch for this number, if only for the line “a woman wouldn’t understand it”; the All These Useless Beauty album also has this song co-written with Aimee Mann which is quite wonderful)

“Alison” (An old favorite, early promise in every sense, off his debut record in 1977 – "It's so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl/ And with the way you look I understand that you were not so impressed.")

“Little Triggers” (This Year’s Model is probably my favorite Costello album, and this is the one song that I’m betting he’ll pull out from this album, which got a 10.0 rating from Pitchforkmedia btw)

“The Sweetest Punch” (A song from Elvis’ collaboration with the man Burt Bacharach, incredible melodies and fantastic blissfully-yours lyrics: “You knocked me out, it was the sweetest punch/ The bell goes...”)

the right side of reflection

French band Phoenix have always been a reliable source of infectious pop songs in a guilty-pleasure sort of way for me. But their latest album, the fantastically named Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix released about five months ago, is proving to be a more than serviceable listen, if only for the equally fantastically named leadoff song “Lisztomania”, which is quite easily my favorite pop song of 2009. Part of why I’m starting to like Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix a lot more now – at first I thought it sounded a tad overproduced, especially with the two electro-pop numbers (“Fences”, “Love Like A Sunset”) the band threw right in the middle of the mix – is that singer Thomas Mars seems to sound more wizened and correspondingly less lovelorn than on their previous albums, singing in a slightly timeworn manner I think perhaps anyone who has ever felt caught in a rut can readily identify with; even when Mars indulges a little and goes soft-rock on our asses (“Rome”), the bleary-eyed sentimentality (romantic and not disgusting yet?) still kinda stick somehow. But it all comes down to the catchy and insanely melodic “Lisztomania” really, as you hang on to its ineffable lyrics (“Follow, misguide, stand still, disgust, discourage”) like a sacred code.

hope this life won't get you down

I was half hoping the Handsome Furs gig be something like the zombie video for their single “I’m Confused”; guess the fine young cannibals were out of commission last night, but that’s alright ma, we’re only bleeding. Eyes were saucered on the pair of excitable spouses, as Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry manage to readily recreate the ragged inferno of the hopeful rock songs showcased on their latest Face Control. Dan was in great voice, his guitar howling with admirable resolve, and their performance of the Face Control songs like “Nyet Spasiba” and “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” really have that whole fashionably uncouth insouciance nailed down so well. Everything you need to know about this band, it seems, is in Dan’s description of Handsome Furs being when he and Alexei first locked eyes – the love buzz in that momentous instant.

mixtape (september 2009)

Funny how her mouth tastes like linguine
Aimee Mann “That’s How I Know This Story Would Break My Heart”
Mark Lanegan “Pill Hill Serenade”
Elvis Perkins In Dearland “Slow Doomsday”
Ryan Adams “Harder Now That It’s Over”
The Rolling Stones “Sweet Virginia”
Yo La Tengo “When It’s Dark”
Dusty Springfield “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach “I Still Have That Other Girl In My Head”
Camera Obscura “James”
Bob Dylan “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”
Bright Eyes “First Day Of My Life”
M. Ward “Post-War”
Belle & Sebastian “The Boy With The Arab Strap”
Joni Mitchell “Cactus Tree”
Aretha Franklin “One Step Ahead”

Worthy ventures: Not being the most articulate motherfucker out there, I’m not surprised that I struggle most of the time to explain why making mixtapes is one of my favorite pastimes. Usually I just fumble along: last time I explained (or, over-explained) that it’s just like imaging doing a one-hour radio show or something. That’s not quite it, I think - plus I'm no Jack Frost -but this mixtape comes pretty close to that perhaps, a special hour show of familiar but unknown pleasures on some lost-highway radio station. I’m particularly fond of how the Ryan Adams song runs into the old Stones track. Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today” is such a classic pop song, and I think I like Dusty’s version best; “Cactus Tree” is probably my favorite Joni Mitchell song of all-time, if I had to choose.

the band come around

As a longtime fan, I must say that Wilco have never veered far off my radar. To me, it speaks volumes for Wilco that even when the band don’t seem eager to challenge themselves too much, Wilco (the album) still sounds effortlessly ravishing. Their seventh studio album, coming after the nice change of pace that was Sky Blue Sky (2007), practically finds Jeff Tweedy and company wielding out some outdated strategies with grizzled gusto rather than unease – yes, Summerteeth (1999) and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) would still be the watershed Wilco albums for most fans, but hey it’s kinda nice to hear Jeff Tweedy now sounding more comfortable in his own skin instead of indulging in light-duty moping. Indeed, Tweedy seems infinitely more relaxed throughout Wilco (the album); he has a good laugh at the expense of youthfully misdirected angst on “You Never Know” (“Come on children, you’re acting like children/ Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world”), gentles out a simple duet with Feist on “You And I”, and then combs over the mendacity of loneliness on “Solitaire”. Even the lovely “Country Disappeared”, for all its tender shades of Tweedy’s typical self-effacement, sounds more spontaneously rendered than usual. And Wilco (the album) is enough proof that the questing creativity of Tweedy is indebted to his band mates. For instrumentally wise, Wilco remains a pretty damn serious force to be reckoned with. On the standout “Bull Black Nova”, sort of a revisit of “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” which the band tackled with half indifference and half menacing ferocity, Nels Cline’s bellowing guitars perfectly match the uncannily ominous, Krautrock-driven setting the band whipped up. In a way, the brooding psychopathic groove of this inscrutable song will have you confounded and feels a little out of place with the other, more charitable songs – the darkened flashpoint where sunny feelings are taken away, indeed.

it's always fun and games until

Future’s looking pretty bleak for me personally of late, so it’s no better time than now for the music of Aimee Mann it would seem – that she performed her songs with such equanimity, while drawing on materials from almost all points of her career, is an added bonus anytime. Take her pensive delivery of “Amateur”, always one of my favourite out of her back catalogue, starting out a bit unsure, somewhat in the vein of the floundering confidence implied in her lyrics (“Despite conclusions I drew, there was a chance you’d surprise me”), then gathering momentum, tentatively, along to the sparse instrumental arrangements (this night, it was just Aimee and her two mates). Nice surprise too that she pulled off a rendition of “Invisible Ink”, probably one of the more surreal breakup songs that have been kicking around in my head somewhere. Then there were the few songs that found wider commercial applications in the frog-friendly movie Magnolia (the melancholic melodies of “Save Me” sounds particularly lucid, up close), where you find Aimee’s brittle songwriting still works best when listened as straightforward pop without too much interpretation. Modern life is rubbish, for sure – and so may it be, for we’re long wised up to that fate anyway – but it bears reminding that sometimes it really takes a sublime songsmith like Mann to make one feel a little less lost in space.

(Setlist)
The Moth
Nightmare Girl
Momentum
Build That Wall
Par For The Course
This Is How It Goes
Amateur
Wise Up
Save Me
Red Vines
You Could Make A Killing
Little Tornado
Little Bombs
31 Today
Freeway
Invisible Ink
That’s Just What You Are
Video
Ghost World
Deathly
Driving Sideways
Voices Carry

silence kit #20

Spoon
Kill The Moonlight [Merge, 2002]

For quite a while I have associated Kill The Moonlight with the underrated Will Ferrell vehicle Stranger Than Fiction, which features quite a fair bit of music by Spoon. These past few weeks though, I’m slowly thumbing my way through the hinterlands of cartoonist Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown series and his Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid In The World graphic novel and the suburban pop songs from Kill The Moonlight seems to be motioning along with Ware’s marginalized characters from one flat-toned comic frame to the next. That’s the way we get by, indeed. What’s unmistakable too is how the songs serve the purpose of caricaturizing the minute details of my own desiccated existence: my allergy to revoltingly arduous work, the melancholic pancakes on the breakfast plate, mornings hopelessly gray, the big innovation on the minimum wage. Musically, Kill The Moonlight is where Spoon’s current modus operandi precipitated in the haunting echo-drenched basement outbursts of “Small Stakes” and “Paper Tiger”, Britt Daniel’s barbed beatboxing on “Stay Don’t Go”, the startling futuristic heft of “Vittorio E”, their songcraft further sharpened on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007). Don't let it get you down.

speakers scream the same

We get older every year; Japan and Sonic Youth has some history between them going some way back, it seems, Lee Ranaldo reminiscing midway through the gig that they first played in Tokyo 20 years ago. An unseasonably festive atmosphere of rapt anticipation greeted these underground music veterans, and we weren’t short-changed – it didn’t quite have the feel of 1988-the-year-daydream-nation-broke transcendence, but for 67 minutes of revisionism genius it might as well have been. Experimental sound forms may be their lifeblood, but the sonic hardware from the recent The Eternal is more custom-made for enormous noise and blown speakers, the waves of mainlining guitar radiance they conjure up on new numbers like “Calming The Snake” and “Anti-Orgasm” are the stuff of forthright non-subjective joy. (Most rock dudes sound like real idiots saying shit like “Sonic Youth want all of you to have sex tonight”, as Thurston Moore did before kicking into the big dumb rock of “Anti-Orgasm”, but because it’s Sonic Youth and they did a Sister-era “Stereo Sanctity” that fucking blew your mind just ten minutes earlier and seriously left you believing you heard some otherworldly melodic noise you never heard before in your life, you let it slip as another one of those iffy propositions.) As with most things Sonic Youth, their performance spoke the language of despicably city-cool rock and roll, as epitomized by the hazy shades of electric blue on “Antenna” which the band seem to able to fearlessly stretch and bend at will.

(Setlist)
Sacred Trickster
No Way
Calming The Snake
Stereo Sanctity
Hey Joni
Anti-Orgasm
Poison Arrow
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
What We Know
Massage The History
Death Valley 69

a staged race has no thunder

As enthralling as their performance was, the short afternoon set Grizzly Bear put up recently during Tokyo’s Summer Sonic festival certainly felt rather insufficient for their glistening chamber pop to properly sink in with their audience. Especially after hearing the ever-wondrous “Lullabye” realized on stage, with the spacey subterranean shadings of the song circulating uneasily in the carnival atmosphere, I surely hoped for the band to do a bit more than just two songs from their Yellow House (2006) album, as great as the new Veckatimest materials are. The opening flourish of “Southern Point” perfectly captures the band’s essence as studio alchemists using the live stage more as a makeshift workshop of sorts, a flurry of ringing guitars calibrated to divine proportions. Their trademark fusion of archaic sound arrangements and unjustifiably beautiful harmonies gathered momentum from “Cheerleader” onwards, with Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen splitting even their turns on lead vocals, I can’t help the feeling the performance was compromised by the fact that Grizzly Bear had to rush through their set and had not enough time to properly stretch out their songs. A major quibble on my part then: which kind of left me there to stand and listen to the band close their set with their canorous rendition of “While You Wait For The Others” with somewhat vacillated emotions (“keeping up with the motions, still occupies our time/ You can hope for some substance, as long as you like”), the band exuding a curious tone of forewarning that felt a little out of place, present but not present.

(Setlist)
Southern Point
Cheerleader
Lullabye
Knife
Fine For Now
Two Weeks
Ready, Able
I Live With You
While You Wait For The Others

silence kit #19

Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch, 2002)

More news from nowhere: I'm typing this from an Internet cafe in the Tokyo playlands, hiding out in the big city blinking, tongue-tied lightning motioning behind the architectural skylines. So I was listening to this album on the relatively long but peaceful bus ride from the airport into the city, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot so perfectly captures the suburban scenes flashing by from the passenger's sight, the electric roughhousing of "I'm The Man Who Loves You" radiating loudly and brilliantly, Jeff Tweedy's ethereal wistfulness on "Kamera" and "Ashes From American Flags" worming its way into your tired daydreams. I've been listening to their new Wilco (The Album) too, but I have to be honest and say it haven't really done enough for me - "Country Disappeared" is lovely though. Back when it was first released, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot reminded me a lot of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers (1975), one of my favorite albums of all-time; but clearly Tweedy's malaise isn't quite the enormity of Alex Chilton's heavy melancholy.

mixtape (august 2009)

Murder tapes, her bulletproof smile
M. Ward "I'm A Fool To Want You"
Ilyas Ahmed & Grouper "Exit Twilight"
Silk Flowers "In This Place"
Interpol "Say Hello To The Angels"
Little Girls "What We Did"
Galaxie 500 "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste"
Leonard Cohen "Avalanche"
Billie Holiday "When You're Smiling"
Tom Waits "Dead And Lovely"
Warpaint "Billie Holiday"
Tom Verlaine & the Million Dollar Bashers "Cold Irons Bound"
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy "Only Someone Running"

Depression gangster issue: Just watched Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which could well be my favorite movie of the year; interesting use of Billie Holiday music too, and so influenced is this latest mixtape. A nod to all sorts of killings and robbing, jailbreak and other misdemeanors of "gangster type" criminals (as my colleague like to label them) then, in all their existential, gun-toting shapes and forms.

zidane: a 21st century portrait (2006)

Zidane, doin’ work. Experienced or remembered in “real time”. Perhaps this might be as good as any time to visit this stunning piece of experimental filmmaking, now it seems that Real Madrid is back in the fray of zealous overspending and “acting stupidly”. French midfielder Zinedine Yazid Zidane, Real #5 between 2001 and 2006, he who inked on the dotted line of the most expensive transfer at that time, is a most fascinating subject matter of course, and not just for his prodigious talents. This veritable genius is also an outlier of our contemporary world in so many terms, his languid elegance on the pitch able to singlehandedly elevate the game of football (or, soccer) to a wholly different level on occasions. Now Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait can be labeled in a number of ways, but it clearly doesn’t bother to be one of those promotional sports videos stoking the starmaker machinery. Filmmakers Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno used 17 synchronized cameras in their attempt to capture Zidane as some sort of serene existential character, the results of which are possibly unrecognizable to the sports star himself. The game itself (Real vs. Villarreal, y’all), set to a mesmerizing score by Mogwai, seemingly transforms into a theatre of Gauguinesque wonder, the action short-circuited with the luxury of the cameras’ almost uncomfortable sympathy for Zidane’s every unhurried motion, his stealthy twists and turns, his fluid movement into space. The calm breaks when Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait descends into a minor brawl, in which Zidane momentarily loses his cool, and the filmmakers (and Mogwai’s music) boldly milk this to maximum effect, as a feat of infinite frustration perhaps. Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all.

no direction home (2005)

There is this moment of pure heathen chemistry in No Direction Home where Bob Dylan is seen doing an acoustic, beautifully fluid version of “Desolation Row” on stage (“Cinderella, she seems so easy”), shot like it’s a surreal dream. Then this Martin Scorsese documentary cuts abruptly to backstage, where Bob, lightning in his pants, was badgering this Richard dude telling him about a shooting threat, or prank, from one of the audience members (no doubt pissed that Dylan’s band gone all electric). “I don’t mind being shot, but I don’t like being told about it,” Bob deadpans. That’s how I like to feel about things these days generally: directionless, unheeded, taking it each shitty day at a time. In that respect – and apologies for ignoring the historical ground the film covers – No Direction Home is heroic, very inspiring. It’s kinda neat to see old Bob, very relaxed in his cowboy pimp getup, being interviewed as he stammers along when chatting about his transition from earnest troubadour to rock shaman. The central premise of the film, and something that Scorsese captured quite admirably, is that Dylan was someone who just needed to be constantly on the move; like the only one thing he could have done wrong, is to stay in one place a day too long.

silence kit #18

Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Master And Everyone [Palace, 2003]

A muffled count-in barely decipherable begins Master And Everyone, possibly Will Oldham’s most understated album recorded under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker, and yet there is this feeling of quiet rebellion about the way these ten songs are performed. “Let your unloved parts get loved” he sings on the opening “The Way”, all its likely lasciviousness is flattened by how Oldham went about his business stoically; his muted delivery throughout Master And Everyone has the effect of quarrying the sublime out from the mundane. Too somber and private for some, maybe, but Oldham devotees undoubtedly would have found this slight change of pace quite illuminating – he employs the album’s general listlessness and slow rehabilitative moods as strengths. As Master And Everyone slides indolently into its quiet groove, the songs give the listener plenty of time to settle in, Oldham writing and singing about a bunch of simple stuff that are not outside the limits of our life experiences. I guess I listen to this album quite a fair bit whenever I am not feeling too good. Buried in the details of songs like “Wolf Among Wolves” and “Lessons From What’s Poor” are the clandestine undertones of one’s travails.

mixtape (july 2009)

Lethargy, a cavalry of obsessions
Grizzly Bear “About Face”
Bob Dylan “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”
Emmy The Great “MIA”
Alexi Murdoch “All My Days”
Jon Brion “Strings That Tie To You”
Phoenix “Lisztomania”
Peter Bjorn and John “Teen Love”
Best Coast “Up All Night”
Dirty Projectors “Two Doves”
The Fiery Furnaces “The End Is Near”
The Rolling Stones “Factory Girl”
Yo La Tengo “Alyda”
The Broken West “Back In Your Head”
Broken Social Scene “Swimmers”
The Free Design “Kites Are Fun”
The Vaselines “Molly’s Lips”
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart “Doing All The Things That Wouldn’t Make Your Parents Proud”
The New Pornographers “Letter From An Occupant”
Belle & Sebastian “A Century Of Fakers”

When with the fortunate only: Another month, another new job, and the quiet march of employment tedium rolls along discontentedly, it would seem, tired and no time to read, no time to discuss anything, whiling away in the bleeding heart of the city, an 80-yard rush into nowhere, discouragement and a big confusion, directionless, apocalyptic thoughts, indebted to all sorts of nonsense, waiting for some shit to happen. Or well, things just getting good, eventually? Be careful.

there is no such thing as

If I could write a book, preferably an escapist novel, this particular chapter would end somewhere with a loony tune or two Emmy The Great performed last night that made more sense than they really should. Emmy’s knack for quaint melancholy and her easy confidence on stage make the songs sound like wobbly faithful daydreams. A bit more about those two songs where her pop sensibility really shines through in the wild blazing nighttime. “MIA” pulled me in at first with the sheer simplicity of its central melody, slightly jaded but very pretty. The tweeness subsides upon subsequent listens and then the tragicomic ambiguities of Emmy’s lyrics, which she delivers in an almost happenstance manner, got to me. The lingering feel of the song, kinda like the dying flames of some button-down romanticism, is enigmatic and lovely. “Easter Parade” is, similarly, heartbreaking folksong stuff and more directly so, and seems to be addressing some manageable neurosis rather than getting tangled in needless metaphors – a sudden rush of warmth when I heard sing this one perhaps, never mind my reservations about such feelings.

new moons (life is elsewhere)

“I want to live inside (Jorge Luis) Borges’ mind. In fact, I hope my entire life is just a daydream that he is having as he drinks his morning coffee.” – David Longstreth, interviewed on Plan B #24

Well, yes. Some strange things are happening here – probably a lot to do with the idea of living inside someone else’s head, which actually doesn’t sound too strange when coming out of David Longstreth’s mouth.

Where the comforting smugness about his past Dirty Projectors ventures – be it reimagining a bunch of Black Flag songs on Rise Above (2007), or fabricating Don Henley into bizarre fiction on The Getty Address (2005) – renders his compositions mostly unlistenable, the new Bitte Orca taps straight into a vein of fantastical pop music that sounds easier to comprehend and, importantly, quite uncannily accessible. The songs having a much broader appeal, and Longstreth is learning to make the most out of the band’s influences. (And a couple of quick caption-like thoughts to back this last line up. Dirty Projectors is doing the whole Talking-Heads-of-our-generation better than TV On The Radio. Some parts of Bitte Orca reminds me of Prince’s Purple Rain.)

“Cannibal Resource” sets out the terrain: weird guitar chords ringing out anxious and flirtatiously; multilayered voices carrying a hungry, volatile force and motion that reverberates through Longstreth’s sense of awe about everything that is around him – “Everyone looks alive and waiting”, indeed. After that good start “Temecula Sunrise” is where one truly starts easing into the strange behavorial patterns of Bitte Orca. The song resembles a breezy morning drive through shitty streetscapes of a sickly suburbia, a deceptive acoustic tranquillity grazed by the twitchy electric noise the band produce in the background.

“The Bride” is Longstreth doing his contorted troubadour thing, probably the album’s weakest link and yet the band again pulls it together with a workshop of musical deliriousness. The girl vocalists take over the reins on the next two. I’ve read the stunning “Stillness Is The Move” being compared to Aaliyah and Mariah Carey (which kinda makes sense because Amber Coffman apparently grew up singing mainstream R&B), but that doesn’t explain how the joy and jubilee of this chic centrepiece can sound quite so life affirming every workday morning without fail. Angel Deradoorian’s “Two Doves” is almost just as good in a totally differently way, a delicate lamentation that comes across like something out of Nico’s Chelsea Girl album, not least because it share this one really tenderly candid line with “These Days”, as written 40 years ago by Jackson Browne: “Don’t confront me with my failures”.

The colossal-sounding “Useful Chamber” articulates Longstreth’s crush with eyeliner; the unpredictable and yet totally captivating way he wrings some sort of manic, disbelieving pathos out of an electronic pop anthem as choppy and eccentric as this song is. And as if the Dirty Projectors’ agility and mastery over the pop idiom on Bitte Orca is still not obvious, the sprawling, mutant soul music of “No Intention” would be more than enough to seal the deal; or, the lovers rock of “Remade Horizon”, with its flurry of joyous rhythms on which Amber and Angel harmonize like wildflower souls. “Fluorescent Half Dome” wraps things up with the album’s most indefinite moments of gravity defiance, as Longstreth’s inventory of dream sequences loom up and away, floating towards new moons.

I listen to this shit so much and yet I don’t think I have quite let the merits of Bitte Orca to fully sink in and write coherently about it. But fuck that. Probably no other record released this year has better abused the unclassifiable memories of every fucking day of our lives; nine perfect songs to help us through our trials and tribulations time out of mind, to help us in our daily cup of sorrow.

silence kit #17

Jens Lekman
Night Falls Over Kortedala [Secretly Canadian, 2007]

I have been using this CD as a mirror in my room every morning these days. (Don't ask me why it matters.) I bought my copy of Night Falls Over Kortedala in Brussels two years ago (also bought Caribou's Andorra at the same store) during a November spent vacationing in Europe. The autumn season felt right for Lekman's sort of music. I listened to this on the hourlong train ride from Brussels to Bruges, upon a friend's recommendation, with some pretty confused emotions - bits and pieces of elation from being alone and away from home, while at the same time feeling like the world's most miserable sod for being away from home for too long. Bruges was fine though. It was a strange time in my life. Every time now I hear "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" I think of the smell of European rain at 4am in the morning. For some strange reason "A Postcard To Nina" always remind me of the Velvets' "I'll Be Your Mirror". I caught Jens Lekman perform twice where I live. The first performance, a good nine months or so before the release of Night Falls Over Kortedala, was revelatory and quite possibly one of the most memorable gig experiences for me. Jens did an awesome "Opposite Of Hallelujah". The second a year later was easily one of the worst. I read that Jens was down with the swine flu. I wish him a speedy recovery.

dreams ridden

There is a lithe and yet incredibly savvy sensibility about Veckatimest that ought to get a lot of listeners all excited about Grizzly Bear, which has also contributed somewhat to the surprising sales this pop album has chalked up thus far too, I feel. Really nice work. Once in a while an otherworldly pop gem like “Two Weeks” comes along that is just too easy to adore (what’s not to like about an affectionate doo-wop tune about saving up vacation days to spend with a loved one?) and as you journey your way into the album's cabinetry of elaborate song arrangements and voice harmonies of such infinite grace, Veckatimest states its claim for this emerging band's greatness very well indeed. The songs carry on the healthful momentum first sparked on the well-circulated live versions of the swarthy "While You Wait For The Others": the simple folkways of “Southern Point” drenched in spirals of clattering commotion; the artful timbre of “Cheerleader”, riding confidently on a tremulous beat and waltzing into the fringes of a primordial dream. Songs on the top of the rotation of Veckatimest like “Cheerleader” or "Two Weeks" work like bona fide nostalgic commodities, while those playing a more complementary role don't necessarily lack in terms of inventiveness or impact. At the end of the odyssey, “Foreground” brings Grizzly Bear’s tenuous beauty to a mysterious close, with softly layered textures that stretches like runaway watercolors – the sonic canvas of their mostly fully formed album yet is a painted ocean that glistens in the wildest darkness.

gimme shelter (1970)

Altamont Speedway 1969, December 6. Or the day the countercultural era of the sixties died along with the stabbing of a concertgoer at a free festival headlined by The Rolling Stones. The convulsive Gimme Shelter has often been held up as a textbook definition of cinema verite filmmaking, and perhaps rightly so, and filmmakers Albert and David Maysles also quite clearly created a work of strange fascination. View it as a seminal film made by the three documentarians (the Mayles brothers with key collaborator Charlotte Zwerin) acting as benevolent caricaturists – and the Stones cast as the prodigal sons of a rock revolution gone to seed.

Much has been made at the time when the film was released that it pandered to the Stones and was protective towards the rock heroes. Sure enough, and in spite of the many clouded interpretations of the film, Gimme Shelter did provide snapshots of a band at the absolute top of their game: euphoric performances of classics like “Street Fighting Man”, animated by Mick Jagger’s narcissistic stage antics that inspired such testosterone-fuelled mania; the slow lunging swirl of “Love In Vain”. From the performance sequences pulled together from Altamont, it felt almost as if the band gained strength from the chaotic circumstances and played a truly incandescent set.

A sense of ludicrousity ensued in the way the film captured, in sketchy fragments split between the stage and the crowds, the homicidal glee set loose by the Hell’s Angels, Mick pleading helplessly for calm while an electrified “Sympathy For The Devil” all the more fanned the flames of pandemonium it seems. Better (or weirder) still are the aftermath scenes of stonefaced Charlie Watts and Jagger watching playbacks of the concert (and stabbing) footages in the editing room, glimmers of unfathomable remorse stagnating into indifference.

into the electric mist

This might surprise a little, though it really shouldn’t, but I think The Eternal is quite possibly the most succinctly expressive album in the three-decade career of Sonic Youth in many respect. (Well, stranger things have come to be.)

Okay, it’s not quite nearing the defining glory of Daydream Nation (1988) or even the nuanced quality of Murray Street (2002) but it’s still a really good record and simply put, rock musicians of their vintage that actually manage to stay as vital or as inexhaustibly creative as them are quite a dwindling niche these days anyway. Package the ultra-melodic pop traction of Rather Ripped (their 2006 album that preceded this new one, also their last on Geffen/DGC) into tidier, more lethal capsules, and you’ll come some way to breathing in the rarefied air of The Eternal.

With The Eternal, their first on Matador Records, Sonic Youth have now got 16 full-length albums under their belt and enough experience to comfortably revel in the sweet hereafter of fractured sounds and distortion like it’s second nature. Quite contrary to their elder statesmen image, throbbing tracks like “Sacred Trickster” and “Poison Arrow” still have all the quickfire immediacy of the undisciplined garage punks (Stooges, MC5, The Germs) that Sonic Youth identifies with.

“Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)” highlights the art-schooled iconoclastic side of these NYC lifers, shards of addictive noise riding on Thurston Moore’s streams of consciousness. On the snarly “No Way”, apparently the first song written for the album, the interlocking guitars pack the seismic force of a murder of crows loitering at the frontiers of an electric mist. The effect of this inspired simplicity is invigorating, enough to hit the road with raw remembrances of teenage riots. “It’s been quite a ride, with you my sweet here by my side,” Lee Ranaldo sings sarcastically in the demeanor of the latest toughs on “What We Know” while a clanging guitar rings in the background like a viciously detuned clarion call.

Likewise on The Eternal, Sonic Youth has taken the time to register new dimensions to this other meditative side of their songcraft that comes into the reckoning more as they mature as musicians. Thurston’s free-associative slow jam “Antenna” is given a gorgeous rendition that fits in thematically with the loose and yet focused vibes of the album in general, and Lee’s complementary “Walkin Blue” takes The Eternal into a milieu of confusion mixed with a sense of numbed contentment.

Be it in snapshot miniatures or in thick sonic spleens, The Eternal wells with such beautifully familiar elements. Taking cues from the album title, these are songs that operate from outside the enclaves of time and their intent is perhaps best surmised in the ten-minute closer “Massage The History”, a Kim Gordon dream vehicle where realms of illusion and the seeming melt into one another in grand chaotic fashion.

sonic-youth forever

plumb the feedback

For some reasons, I feel a bit compelled to try and keep up with the pace of posting here this month, whatever works. So again I’m recycling old stuff, this one written sometime back in 2007. I just bought my copy of The Eternal this morning; Sonic Youth is still amazing (more on that later of course). One afterthought about this gig review: I did not mention that former Pavement member Mark Ibold was on stage with the band in Shanghai that night, mainly because I somehow did not recognize him (embarrassing because I love Pavement too), and he’s now the latest official Sonic Youth member.

Jams blasting free

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crimes and gangs forgivable means of escape. – Federico Garcia Lorca

I have been a Sonic Youth fan for fuck-knows how long but watching them performing a bunch of songs I already know by heart in the triply crawlspace that is Shanghai, the colossal city which I will always have a love-hate relationship with, still gave me a sense of familiar unreality that is absolutely thrilling, the nostalgic surge inside the heart when the well-worn, chiming guitar intros to "Candle" rolls along right at the start of their performance. These veterans have soldiered on extraordinarily through an exemplary career – name me another gang of forty-fifty somethings who could kick it this hard – and few other bands old or new are as blessed with their ability to meld pop aesthetics with avant-rock instincts.

This was supposed to be a historical milepost in their long career trajectories too, Sonic Youth’s first two shows in the Republic of China (they played earlier in Beijing the night before).

And we had the additional benefit that they are touring behind one of their most pop-savvy albums in Rather Ripped (helps too that it has a high quotient of quality Kim Gordon songs) and while their set is saddled stitched to perfection, they were still able to throw in a few sonic surprises. Like making us wait till four songs in before launching into the frightening distortion vistas of "Mote" – and how they did it was spectacular, Thurston Moore skyscraping his gear while Lee Ranaldo punish the length of his guitar wire for effects, an ocean of furious freewheeling jams amplified to a perilous pitch. From there, the band doused the fire by segueing immediately into the clear-blue reverie of "Do You Believe in Rapture?", a performance that also hits home the truth for me that Sonic Youth’s underrated melodic finesse really does come through most brilliantly in a live setting.

Somewhere in between the newer Ripped songs and revisits to old classics from Sister and Daydream Nation (their blistering-fast version of "Silver Rocket" was particularly rad, with the velocities raised to almost revulsion levels I shit you not), they found room for a few oddities like a hard-boiled rendition of Lee’s "Skip Tracer", the only song they played from Washing Machine. Nothing’s sacred in their hands, it seems: right before playing the crowd pleasing "100%", a crass-sounding Chinese pop song came on the sound system while Thurston’s guitar feedback bubbled angrily all over the transmission.

As Sonic Youth tunneled towards the end of their set with the breathlessly long gauze of "Pink Steam", their unbridled enthusiasm is clear as they returned for two encores to round up two hours of thunderous bliss. They are still shaking hell, alright – superfreaky memories are made of these.

silence kit #16

Mark Lanegan
Field Songs [Beggars Banquet, 2001]

I always love the old truism John Huston uttered in the Roman Polanski film Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough. Same goes with someone like Mark Lanegan, who has flew under the radar somewhat but has aged in a rather respectable fashion notwithstanding your opinion on his collaborations with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Greg Dulli and Isobel Campbell. Dude’s already done six thoroughly solid solo albums under his belt after all. Field Songs (2001), his fifth, reminds me a lot of Tom Waits. Lanegan’s misprojected romanticism is given a particularly warm, country-blues kind of vibes on this album – the comfortingly weird chill you get from hearing these Field Songs is of someone trying to numb himself from encounters with dirty fiends and cannibal appetites. The way his ragged voice and swarthy instrumentations subsume into the whiskey-soaked ballads “Pill Hill Serenade” and “Kimiko’s Dream House”, the latter his cover of a song by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, really gets under my skin, Lanegan’s voice moving bewildering like a cheapjack anaesthetist doing his thing. But these days I think I prefer natural sleep, if possible.

a hardboiled rumble

Mingus Ah Um, recently reissued once again and now apparently expanded into a 2-CD set, still seems sort of ageless when I listen to it today. Some of the big man’s essential tunes are here – after all, whenever I think of the pure exhilaration of Charles Mingus when he’s truly on, first things first is the vehement hard bop of “Boogie Stop Shuffle” whistling through the eaves. While there are indeed several other Mingus records that are more inventive or more adventurous to make his reputation as one of jazz’s foremost modernists (don’t know why, something like Pithecanthropus Erectus come to mind), it is probably Mingus Ah Um that best captures the right amount of his characteristic ferocious bombast tempered with quiet moments.

Mingus spent a fair share of this record paying his own unique forms of tribute to some of his forebearers: Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Lester Young and Jelly Roll Morton (from which “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, his brooding farewell to Young, is particularly evocative). These shout-outs lend Mingus Ah Um its atmosphere full of anachronistic sparks to which I have always been irresistibly drawn somewhat when I was still in the pink of my youthful ignorance about some of these jazz titans.

So while most folks remember Mingus and his compositions as being animated by a raw fury, closer listening to Mingus Ah Um actually best illustrates about the man in that his music does require a certain amount of finesse as well. These days I have unreasonable cravings for the more ungainly regions of this record. “Self-Portrait In Three Colors”, which I never did know was originally penned for John Cassavetes’ debut film Shadows (which was scored by Mingus no less), now reveals itself in all its makeshift glories. “Pussy Cat Dues” does not do too badly too, Mingus leading his band through the serpentine glands of his mercurial song arrangement not unlike a rogue trying to shake off the throes of sensual enchantment or something.

mixtape (june 2009)

Candy floss and shady Swedish houses
REM “Parakeet”
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone “Natural Light”
Au Revoir Simone “Take Me As I Am”
Luna “Into The Fold”
Kath Bloom “Come Here”
His Clancyness “Nothing and Nowhere To Go”
Richard Swift “Buildings In America”
Wilco “Alone (Shaking Sugar)”
Iron & Wine “My Lady’s House”
The Wooden Birds “The Other One”
Mojave 3 “Starlight #1”
Okkervil River “A King And Queen”
Deradoorian “This is the Heart Now”
M. Ward “Involuntarily”
Grizzly Bear “Two Weeks”
The National “Apartment Story”

Uninhabitable daydreams: I was going to write down some of my random thoughts on Alain de Botton’s recent The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (well, a serviceable read) but one of the local dailies beat me to it by a whisker, last Sunday. But I hope I’m the first to recommend to you Albert Sanchez Pinol’s Pandora in the Congo (2008), the best new fiction out of all I read in the first half of this year – I was completely entranced by this Spanish writer’s incorrigible humor and relentless imagination. But back to this whole thing about using music to unburden oneself from the vagaries of work life, that I alluded to vaguely in my last Sigur Ros post. This latest mixtape is a soft one perhaps, the song choices and sequencing dictated by those moments of uninhabited (or uninhabitable) daydreams experienced ever so briefly when stuck for long hours in a dreary job. Two songs here capture this sort of vibe particularly well, I thought, one a bit older and the other brand new. I remember reading somewhere (though I might have gotten some parts of the anecdote wrong) that Dean Wareham wrote “Into The Fold” about a junkie dude he tried unsuccessfully to check into rehab one rainy morning, a friend who later stole some of his records from his home - the song itself is tender, forgiving and lovely. “Two Weeks”, from the Grizzly Bear album recently released, not only sound awesome but Ed Droste’s lyrics are pretty evocative as well, even when singing about something as mundane as saving up the obligatory 14 vacation days: "Save up all the days, a routine malaise/ Just like yesterday I told you I would stay".

silence kit #15

Sigur Ros
Agaetis Byrjun [Fat Cat, 2000]

Back to work this week after a month's break, and work sucks. And naturally all this is affecting my writing, or lack of it. But never mind, I’ll still give it a go. Certain songs, albums and musical novelties work better for me riding murder to work daily. REM’s Up holds up pretty well in this context with its sporadic spurts of unease; you wake up in the morning and reluctantly fall out of the bed. At my most miserable, a few of my favorite Okkervil River songs (“On Tour With Zykos”, “Calling and Not Calling My Ex”) keeps popping into my head, Will Sheff’s tired-out voice perfectly replicating the workingman’s exhaustion at the end of the day. Mostly I listen to a lot of Sigur Ros. It’s basically fucked-up nostalgia all over again, reconnecting to the beat that my heart skipped when I first heard this shit. Agaetis Byrjun no longer sound as revelatory these days of course – especially after each of their subsequent releases somewhat reek of nonsensical clairvoyance – but to my unskilled ears eight or nine years ago, the spellbinding, purehearted pop of Sigur Ros conjures up spells of escapism. To the spooked ramparts of an Icelandic wasteland, or something.

silence kit #14

The New Pornographers
Mass Romantic [Mint, 2000]

I’m not aware of too many power-pop albums with songs that are quite as heinously infectious as those on Mass Romantic, the hyperdriven debut of Canada's The New Pornographers. Where his former band Zumpano might well be one of nineties indie’s better kept secrets, Carl Newman truly jumps out of the gates with this set of twelve tuneful, thematically nonsensical pop songs (not one filler) that provide instant gratification – Mass Romantic certainly does not feel like an album that was recorded sporadically by the band over the course of three years, as each of the members were kept busy with commitments to other bands. While aided no doubt by the presence of associates like Neko Case (whose singing on “Mass Romantic” and “Letter From An Occupant” lends some legitimate star power) and the habitually cryptic songsmith Dan Bejar, the sharp sensations imprinted on Mass Romantic are mostly dominated by Newman's pop-monomaniac personality. Newman’s eclectic songs like “The Fake Headlines” and “The Body Says No” rolls along with the kind of patterned amusements that recklessly fuel serialized pocketbook adventures, while the two Bejar numbers are typical of his melodramatic shambles, as we would come to know from his various recordings that follows under the Destroyer banner. As with pop music of such exuberance, The New Pornographers could not quite keep up with the quality of Mass Romantic. The immediate follow-up Electric Version in 2003 comes pretty close actually, with three songs in particular (“From Blown Speakers”, “The Laws Have Changed” and “Testament to Youth in Verse”) matching their wit up with pop verve to great effect. But then again, three prawns do not make a galaxy.

down home

The cover artwork of the new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album Beware looks a fair bit like one of my favorite albums, Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night (1975). Not that it matters much to the discussion here, but I just wanted to get that out of the way early. (Beware doesn’t sound anything like the boozy self laceration of the raw and raucous Tonight’s the Night anyway.)

Now Will Oldham has always been prolific, keeping himself busy by releasing a string of consistently good records over the past twenty years or so. Other than the more ornate atmospherics of his 2006 album The Letting Go (recorded in Iceland, strings arranged by Nico Muhly) and the indie rock tie-up with Matt Sweeney on Superwolf (2005), he has rarely strayed far from his country-rock roots. A warm fog of laidback lightness comes over both last year’s Lie Down in the Light and now Beware, as if Oldham has set up to engage his audience more confidently than before to impart some life lessons. Pain and troubled waters are of course inevitable, these songs seem to say, but we muddle through.

When Oldham sings “I take this load on, it is my life’s work/ To bring you into the light from out of the dark”, the redemptive quality of his voice seems to command something more universal than one man’s devotion to his missus. Such layers of earthiness and Oldham’s unseasonable calm frame Beware in many domestic ways, and that feeling of friendly kinship is reinforced by the roster of likeminded collaborators that he has gathered.

Poignant song reflections like “I Won’t Ask Again” and “Heart’s Arms” are illuminated by the songwriter’s stoical intuitions, perhaps even connecting us depleted souls to Oldham’s restless dreams and visions. And when he sings “There’s a body made just for me, lying somewhere curled lonely” on the beautifully rendered “I Don’t Belong To Anyone”, it leaves the door ajar for an assuring bedroom romp. It’s again one of Will Oldham’s most cherished talents, I suppose, his ability to write songs convincingly about warm-bodied beneficiaries of lust.

essential reads, viciously (pt.2)

"It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." – Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

As alluded to on one of my earlier posts, I had been catching up on my reading over the past few weeks – a symptom of boredom maybe, but I am very grateful for the spare time in my life, once in a while, for doing this. And so, as befitting my self-anointed role of being kind of a “recessionist mentor” of sorts, I have revised my “Essential Reads” list, now bulked up to include 20 works of useful fiction (*). The picks here (some are bona-fide classic texts, some cult prescriptions, and some leaning more on the side of my personal idiosyncrasies) are customized according to my very own taste, preoccupations and literary pretensions. Have fun reading these, and here goes (in chronological order):

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway (1926)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)
Jill by Philip Larkin (1946)
The Catcher In the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Memoirs of Hadrian by Margurite Yourcenar (1951)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1959)
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
Americana by Don DeLillo (1971)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1997)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan (2004) *
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)

* The Bob Dylan book is essentially an autobiographical work, but I’m qualifying it as “reads like fiction” (heh heh) here. As for new Dylan music, Together Through Life is not all that great, as it turns out. While I’m a bit disappointed with it, I might well get around to writing about the album, some time later.