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.