silence kit #10

Iron & Wine
Our Endless Numbered Days [Sub Pop, 2004]

I have been re-reading Don DiLillo's Americana (my third time around), possibly my all-time favorite by the writer. I love the minutiae of DeLillo's prose, the bits and small descriptions of things in the language that only he could conjure, almost to an extent that what he's writing about often doesn't matter. There is a part in the first chapter where the protagonist David Bell describes one of the boring social parties he attends, DeLillo wrote: This is the essence of Western civilization. But it didn't matter really because an hour later we were all bored. It was one of those parties which are so boring that boredom itself soon becomes the main topic of conversation. One moves from group to group and hears the same sentence a dozen times. "It's like an Antonioni movie." But the faces were not quite as interesting. Bell, a young television executive, would spend the rest of the novel exploring "America in the screaming night" and I would somehow try to visualize in my mind what the experimental road movie Bell was shooting would end up looking like; I imagine it ending up as these endless reels of rich brown cinemaphotography that would not make much narrative sense to most people. Sam Beam's exploration of the old weird America through the folk song medium, as Iron & Wine, is easily much more consumer friendly, but I can't help but feel that both Beam and DeLillo's character (or DeLillo himself) are working from the same vantage point.

less speaking like silence

At a time when lowered economic expectations and enough empty promises for your trouble are becoming the rules of the game, it’s not unexpected that the comfort of soulfully stewed folk songs like those on the new M. Ward album often speaks more to me than the regular hedonistic pop fare – plunge into the familiar canyons of shuffling acoustic guitars of “Absolute Beginners” and Hold Time immediately feels like home again.

Ward has had such a terrific run of form on his last three records that are just about three of my favorite albums over the last ten years – the surreally morbid folk outing Transfiguration of Vincent (2003), the distant found sounds and timeless Americana painstakingly resurrected on Transistor Radio (2005), the aching widescreen nostalgia of Post-War (2006) – that a slight dip in quality, when and if it comes on Hold Time, is understandable. Yet Ward’s latest is thoroughly enjoyable if less cohesive as a whole than his last three albums, and I have only one real quibble: that I had very little use for Ward’s overdrawn duet with Lucinda Williams on the old country standard “Oh Lonesome Me”.

First off, it is not a M. Ward record unless it comes with the electricity of ghosts that speak like silence. I got no real idea which Blake he’s referring to but the quiet grace of “Blake’s View” (“Birth is just a chorus, death is just a verse/ In the great song of spring that the mockingbirds sing”) feels very much like the songwriter contemplating the threshold of someone’s apocalypse. The haunted presence on the title track (“And I wrote this song about it, ‘cause I didn’t care about anyone in this photograph”) is given the plush strings treatment to create the grand, mournful emotional impact for listeners to fully luxuriate in. And as for the pained geography of the instrumental “Outro” that closes this album, it is basically Ward covering “I’m A Fool To Want You”, the song that Billie Holiday made famous on her tortured masterpiece Lady In Satin (1958).

Elsewhere, Hold Time is remarkable too for the less heavy feelings and a curious range of joys evoked on the other songs; “Never Had Nobody Like You” and “To Save Me” in particular must rank among the most pepped-up numbers in the Ward catalogue, for a refreshing change. Where we used to be lulled in by the hazy ruinous beauty of his haunted folklores, Hold Time projects a more consummately charmed direction for M. Ward, and turns out that’s not half bad.

silence kit #9

Battles
Mirrored [Warp, 2007]

Maybe I’m more apathetic to such matters but my friend made no bones about his slight annoyance at the exploitation of live loops and sampling techniques during Battles’ recent gig, one of the band’s several dates in Asia. (That and the fact that their performance was short by standards probably provided ample ammunition to critics.) As opposed to my friend’s quibble, I was just about completely sold on Battles’ metronomic swoon and their muscular instrumentals felt even more revelatory when performed live – or maybe that had something to do with the sight of Ian Williams and Tyondai Braxton trading guitars-and-keys melodic transmissions via alien lanes from each end of the stage. The root of all these excitable noise is assembled most uniformly on their debut Mirrored, a brilliant exposition of where electronic-jointed polyrhythmic pop can be taken when pushed ahead by wiry musicians that bring fire, power and discipline to the mix. While the visceral pulses of Mirrored are motored mainly by the forceful glam-metal stomp of drummer John Stanier, it is the other three multi-instrumentalists (Williams, Braxton and Dave Konopka) in the band who prove to be the more able consiglieres to their art-rock concoctions. “Atlas” erupts like a geyser of contortionist robotic funk while the unpredictable, busy-sounding trajectories of the album’s standout tracks like “Tonto” and “Tij” are at the same time peppered with unexpected nuances, the band constantly blurring the edges between computerized aids and pure musical virtuosity.

silence kit #8

Black Dice
Beaches and Canyons [DFA, 2003]

Not to take anything away from the Fuck Buttons but I think when I listed their Street Horrrsing album as one of my five favorite records of last year, somewhere in the back of my head I was plainly missing Black Dice. Not to say too that these two bands sound too particularly alike or that one copied from the other, except both certainly have a predilection for repetitive ambient drones. This week I was also listening to one or two Black Dice tracks from the new album Repo and it struck me that it would be virtually impossible now for Eric Copeland and company to recreate anything close to being as brutally compelling as their 11-minute black-hole ditty called "The Dream Is Going Down" off Beaches and Canyons. The much beloved stoner epic "Endless Happiness" is also on this album - listen to this early in the day and yes, the morning sounds eclectic. Other songs on Beaches and Canyons revolve around the same violent patterns, and as I mentioned in my last post on Sonic Youth, other American moderns were taking note. The other release from Black Dice around the same time that I really enjoyed is 2005's Broken Ear Record, which again sounds discordant and beautifully messed up and actually not as harsh sounding as the album title would suggest. But Beachs and Canyons clearly represented a peak for Black Dice and perhaps in years to come this is one album that will be a defining influence or reference point for folks to get obssessed over the idea of milking some pastoral-sounding melodies out of its infinitely fucked ocean beach.

silence kit #7

Sonic Youth
NYC Ghost & Flowers [Geffen, 2000]
Murray Street [Geffen, 2002]
Sonic Nurse [Geffen, 2004]

“Smiling beatific roommates, from dust to dust they create rock n roll”, so to quote Thurston Moore’s lyrics on “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style” from one of these three albums (Murray Street, actually) that have been invariably referred to as the New York trilogy. The song, with its evocation of art-noise anxiety and puerile punk exhortations, is also as good an anthem (or elderly statesmen statement) as any for Sonic Youth to break cover on another extraordinary cycle of their long, near-mythical record-making career, the band poised as ever in laying down the gauntlet for younger musicians.

For better or for worse, these three albums also happen to be the ones instantaneously associated with the time Jim O’Rourke clocked in with the band. And for all the believable rhetoric crediting the Chicago musician/producer’s brief stint with revitalizing the four original band members (unnecessarily in my view unless you can pinpoint to me the parts on which O’Rourke made crucial contribution to their sound or makeup – I can’t), one should also be mindful that Sonic Youth very seldom lacked in terms of musical vocabulary.

But let’s begin by kicking this shit back to 2000. In retrospect, the much maligned NYC Ghost & Flowers seems to hold up a bit better today than when it was first released but taken as a whole, the album while nice enough doesn’t quite measure up to the other two showpieces in the trilogy. The Thurston Moore pieces, “Free City Rhymes” and “Small Flowers Crack Concrete” specifically, deftly match bohemian beat poetry to impressionistic melodic hazes, while Lee Ranaldo’s frighteningly good title track composition builds beautifully from Lee’s wintry wails of echo-canyon soundscaping into its final two minutes of shattering chaos. Elsewhere the music was less impressive – for all the rickety guitar jams on the record, it felt like the band was interested only in providing clues t0 the small secret currents stacked in NYC Ghost & Flowers.
Moore himself had described these records as “spirit-like, architectural, and humanitarian”, and the subsequent Murray Street and Sonic Nurse, especially when taken together, do much justification to this interpretation. Where the broad palette of futuristic free forms of NYC Ghost & Flowers is delivered in a disjointed fashion rather on purpose, the more focused Murray Street mined the band’s newfound subtleties from micro perspectives, resulting in streams of lilting guitars wizened with rocky ruminations.

Either mewling in songs like “Karen Revisited” and “Sympathy For The Strawberry” that stretch with ease from spells of soft hidden energies to controlled feedback abuse within their ten-minute frames or running through short spurts of punk menace (“Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style”; Kim Gordon’s terrific “Plastic Sun”), the songs on Murray Street flicker by like mysterious montage visions of cross-country kinetics. Released post-911 and the album title perhaps a slight reference to the passenger plane engine that crashed right onto Murray Street, I can only speculate that the devastated landscape affected the course and urgency of the album osmotically.

Cut-rate surrealism is again the prescriptive order on Sonic Nurse, which probably features the most diverse spread of sounds, styles and influences. William Gibson on “Pattern Recognition”. The subdued chiming on “I Love You Golden Blue” tapping into the atmospheric rock tuning that is then the emblem of emerging experimental bands like Animal Collective and Black Dice. The snare of loose-limbed improvisations on “Dripping Dream” echoing free jazz. The languid “Peace Attack” reaffirming their slight interest in the spiritual regeneration mode first hinted on 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Remarkably the manifold sound and fury comes together seamlessly on Sonic Nurse, at the same time giving the sense that the songs had or followed a certain logic only Sonic Youth are privy to. And not a bad way to cap off a trilogy indeed, before 2007’s Rather Ripped (an excellent album too, and their final release on Geffen) rock-ferried the band back to more familiar grounds.

living room sound fidelity

Where the Yo La Tengo side project, the Condo Fucks and the recently released record Fuckbook, sees Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew doing a pretty tasteful job of vintage punk entomology, my attention is turned more towards the actual Yo La Tengo record that the Condo Fucks reference. Released in 1990 when the band’s formative lineup is made up of Ira, Georgia and two other dudes (James would only join a few albums later), Fakebook was clearly the handiwork of pop music addicts mucking about in the living room, an album of covers and a few original songs radiating with Yo La Tengo’s familiar idiosyncrasies. The casual, unostentatious songcraft kicks off in mellow fashion with Ira’s “Can’t Forget”, and listeners won’t take long to trace its lost-love country melodies to the Flying Burrito Brothers revisited later down the tracklist on “Tried So Hard”. Fakebook is littered with many such signposts of Yo La Tengo’s musical influences: Ira’s all-time songwriting hero Ray Davies is represented here by the wickedly scathing ditty “Oklahoma, USA”, from the underappreciated Kinks gem Muswell Hillbillies; the exquisite ballad “Andalucia”, one of two John Cale songs the band have covered; the obligatory Daniel Johnston cover, “Speeding Motorcycle”. Yo La Tengo would move on to much greater things but it’s fair to say that the trio would never quite recapture the kind of jangly epiphanies expressed on earlier records like Fakebook, the kind of unassuming record perfect for listening to when you happen to be alone at home on a rainy afternoon, trying to piece back together half-remembered scraps of an earlier daydream.

mixtape (march 2009)

The thicket that exploded
Black Dice “Street Dude”
Little Girls “Venom”
Richard Hell “Blank Generation”
Deerhunter “Nothing Ever Happened”
Crystal Stilts “Prismatic Room”
Crocodiles “I Wanna Kill”
Handsome Furs “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything”
Public Image Ltd “Annalisa”
David Bowie “I’m Waiting For The Man”
Dum Dum Girls “Brite Futures”
The Mayfair Set “Already Warm”
Vivian Girls “Surfin’ Away”
The Yardbirds “Stroll On”
The Black Lips “Drugs”

Deeper into movies: Just around the same time when many dudes around me are making peace with the fact that Liverpool FC won’t be taking the English title this season (some having made that contention earlier of course), I caught the latest Terence Davies film Time and the City (2009), the British filmmaker’s Proustian documentary about his hometown Liverpool. Davies is the greatest living British filmmaker, in my opinion, and the soot-flecked portrayal of working class consciousness that characterized his two greatest movies (1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and 1992’s The Long Day Closes) is evident in the barbed, revealing commentary (Davies did the voiceovers himself) accompanying the reels of vintage archival photos and celluloid footages used in Time and the City, along with some of the most hauntingly evocative use of music you’ll find in the cinemas these days (never mind that this is one filmmaker who hates the Beatles). Most potent is the weight of memory’s darkest and most fiercely perseverant contraptions that seems to be wired into every frame of Time and the City, Davies’ artistry clearly having a much more powerful effect than any of the chance-generated ambiguities of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I happen to quite enjoy as well). And well if David Fincher had made a more punk-ass version of Benjamin Button, then this latest mixtape might well serve as the soundtrack.