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.

futuristic malaise

So I’m slowly getting into the Fever Ray record that everyone has been talking me into. I was duly bewitched by the thick reams of atmospheric music that draw from the same dark reservoirs of the Knife’s pivotal 2006 album Silent Shout. And perhaps more so than in Silent Shout, the Fever Ray songs are made wholly in the dark. Karin Dreijer Andersson is an artist of cold pursuits – in her hands, digital pop melodies and strangely animated vocals are twisted into sallow proportions with the single-minded precision of a microphone contortionist. As the brooding subterranean synthesizers of Fever Ray opener “If I Had A Heart” pulse along hypnotically, the effect is one of getting sucked deep into its vacuum of futuristic malaise. Dreijer Andersson’s command of lyrics might be considered sparse but the words hit just the right mode, a constellation of shadowy notes to fill the narrative spaces the music so obsessively conjures up. Other key album tracks such as "Keep the Streets Empty For Me" and "Seven" are darkly nourished, keeping with the dry and dusty soundscapes. Satisfaction comes mainly though from how well Fever Ray packages her songs’ alienating beauty into a work of quite mainstream appeal, it must be said – take her sophisticated, superbly accessible single “When I Grow Up” (also the most Knife-like moment on Fever Ray).

silence kit #13

Beach House
Devotion [Carpark, 2008]

Ever notice how every note of music recorded by Beach House sounds soaked with the residuals of nostalgia? I enjoyed parts and pieces of their 2006 self-titled debut enough (particularly “Tokyo Witch”), and then Devotion came along two years following that with generally stronger song materials. From the first album to the second, you can hear the two Beach House members put the stamp on their brand of dream pop more confidently without dramatically shifting gears. The way Alex Scally’s guitars dance in circles around Victoria Legrand’s airy vocals on “Gila” and “Heart of Chambers” with psychedelic momentum is a hazy thing of beauty. And when you listen to them ‘right’, Beach House’s music can be a totally captivating affair; the church organ affects and the soft hallucinogenic clarity of Legrand’s singing having the infallible quality to expand the song experience at free will. Every track connects to a certain romance, it seems. On Devotion, there are these sublime songs of lovelorn commitments (“All The Years”, “Home Again”) but I always find myself drawn more to those one or two instances where Legrand sounds absolutely consumed with childhood reveries. On the bruised waltz of “Turtle Island”, she sings “In all colors and prizes, you will always remain” like she’s channeling the memories from a mysterious friendship into a simple plea more universal – to please, please let me get what I want this time.

my blueberry nights (2007)

Blank and beautiful

I happened to watch this film again recently and I can't find anything that better reflects my unaccountable moods of late (can't write shit, but reading a lot); a melancholic mood piece masquerading as a stifled, badly-dialogued road movie, a darkly-lit requiem for long-frayed memories. “I just wanted to see if I can remember what it felt like,” so says Chan Marshall’s My Blueberry Nights character, in her brief cameo.

Indeed, some of my friends (actually, quite a few of them) scoffed at my likings for My Blueberry Nights. Wong Kar Wai aficionados mostly consider it sub par at best, while its wistful aesthetics come across as overly indulgent to others.

Yes it is pretty vacant but I find it hard with each viewing to shake off the film’s many beguiling pleasures. The repetitive pop music. The deliberately off pacing, the swirl of fitful cinematic colors. The ineptness of Norah Jones as a celluloid heroine, the Chan Marshall cameo (apparently Wong was listening to Cat Power songs during the film’s making). The stop-motion sequences that unfurl like woodcut memories. The unknowable strangers that burn their way into your heart.

mad fright night

I have rocked a few Smog records in my time, mostly Red Apple Falls (1997) and Dongs of Sevotion (2000). Recently Bill Callahan has catapulted back into view with his new album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. Callahan’s lyrics are still tangled up in rickety blues and his voice still carries the pulse of indifference; what’s perhaps new is that these new songs seem invested in more well-bodied instrumentations. “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” in particular is a very persuasive piece of music, a classic dream song that is locked into the notion of wishful confusion. The night has opened his mind to labyrinthine dream fragments, waking up “so ripped from reality”, specific heats reminding him of a former lover’s touch. Fabricated weathers roll along morosely like the swirl of stony strings. “All these fine memories are fucking me down,” he laments, as per his propensity for pithy, self-deprecating putdowns. He dreams the perfect song, he scribbles it down. Its enigmatic answer seems patently lost in translation. But when adapted by the songwriter for his own purposes, it subconsciously spells hope despite the times.

mixtape (may 2009)

Something about a man laughing in an abattoir
Marnie Stern "Shea Stadium"
Dirty Projectors "Stillness Is The Move"
Deerhunter "Rainwater Cassette Exchange"
Animal Collective "Lion In A Coma"
Arch M "Cat Grave"
TV On The Radio "Playhouses"
Sonic Youth "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)"
Cymbals Eat Guitars "Share"
Sunset Rubdown "Idiot Heart"
Deerhoof "Midnight Bicycle Mystery"
Silk Flowers "Flash of Light"
Black Dice "La Cucaracha"
The Field "The More That I Do"

Conversation fear: I happen to put together this latest mixtape the week the writer JG Ballard passed away. I've never been the most dedicated reader of Ballard (1930-2009) as I only got around finishing three of his novels but I would always appreciate him for having the balls to actually write a book as elegantly subversive as Crash in 1970, never mind that I found its nihilist sensibilities better articulated in David Cronenberg's perfectly executed film adaptation in 1996. Ballard's influence on rock musicians (from Joy Division to the Klaxons, apparently) has been well documented of late, since his death. I am not sure how much of this mixtape's music would lay claim to be directly Ballard-influenced, though I was fucking around a bit with some vaguely similar themes of technologically-enabled abattoir blues and free-floating anxieties here. Anyway.