doing fairly well...

decade's best #22

2010-05-23T23:49:00.001+08:00

22. The Flaming Lips
Embryonic [Warner, 2009]
One or two things we know about The Flaming Lips’ twelfth studio album Embryonic. Its 18 songs offer a marked departure from the symphonic pop of their last few albums, favoring a more aggressive, full-frontal acid-rock direction that is surprising and yet somehow retains the congruence of the veteran band’s original vision. Sonically, the epic album also leverages Wayne Coyne’s darkest impulses to the point of sublimation, as sinisterly-lit songs like “Powerless” and “Evil” make the most of a newly forged sound. It is the sprawling sound of The Flaming Lips surrendering to Dionysian urges, as deep rattling grooves and dense keyboard atmospherics provide the backdrop for Coyne to revel in his most formidable, paranoia-infused prophecies. The strange disorienting beauty of Embryonic is not only a return to form for the band – it is clearly a career highlight for these fearless freaks.

mixtape (may 2010)

2010-05-03T18:17:00.003+08:00

King of the road
Broken Social Scene "Lover's Spit (Feist vocals"
The National "Daughters of the Soho Riots"
Townes Van Zandt "I'll Be Here In the Morning"
M. Ward "One More Goodbye"
Paul Westerberg "Boring Enormous"
Nick Drake "Road"
Ryan Adams "Cry On Demand"
Wheat "Body Talk No. 2"
Nina Simone "I Shall Be Released"
Final Fantasy "The Dream of Win and Regine"
Beirut "Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route"
Iron & Wine "Sinning Hands"

I had a funny dream: Guess it is good to disappear completely sometimes, and hope nobody notices. Anyway, I once commented that Wings of Desire (1988) is Wim Wender's best film. Turns out I'm pretty dead wrong - have been watching his seventies Road trilogy, three films which are by far his finest (especially 1974's Alice In The Cities). This mixtape is sorta a tribute to these three films' cross-country wonders.

decade's best #23

2010-03-29T22:10:00.004+08:00

23. Interpol
Turn On The Bright Lights [Matador, 2002]
While the music of Interpol may always be inextricably tied to comparisons to Joy Division – most of which doing them little favor, it must be added too – there is no doubting that Turn On The Bright Lights managed to tap straight into a synecdoche for their hometown New York in such a prescient manner that few other bands are capable of replicating. The ruinous slo-mo grandeur of “NYC”, with Paul Banks singing about being “sick of spending these lonely nights, training myself not to care”, captures the very essence of the city that has often inspired such ambivalent feelings and disconnect, while the band prop up the album’s s shadowy ambience with a suite of the howling guitars, pitched as a tightwire act and seemingly lifted right out of the post-punk playbook – indeed, the edgy verve and relentless musicianship on display throughout Turn On The Bright Lights is the surest argument that Interpol are more than the sum of their familiar influences. Elsewhere, a sense of altered moods permeates “Obstacle 2” and “Leif Erickson” – again, the guitars shaking off the somnolence of Banks’ haunted vocals – while “Say Hello to the Angels” comes across as a violent repudiation of their music undeserved rep of being, well, mere Joy Division regurgitations.

no easy way down

2010-03-20T10:40:00.002+08:00

Here is something that I believe I wrote about ten years ago; probably still one of my favorite piece of writing from when I was younger (But I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now):

It is the rare gift of a supreme songwriter to be able to connect intuitively to his listeners, something that Mark Eitzel accomplishes with such ease.

His songs are never of the morbid death-wish variety. It is more about getting reflective: about the day that didn't turn out fine, about contemplating dashed dreams as you crawled into bed alone, and about the faithless lover who just left. And the cruel ironies of life and death he mocks so readily when he sings "nobody cares if I live or die" on his second solo album West (1997). And Eitzel could probably write a drinking song better than anyone, from the early barfly wisdom on American Music Club songs such as "Somewhere" to the sublime beauty of "Some Bartenders Have the Gift of Pardon" (off his first and best solo album, 1996's 60 Watt Silver Lining), on which the lyrics and title of the song pretty much says it all ("Just some old poets drinking the last nightmare in/ and the comfort of the dark and being forgotten").

Eitzel just lets it bleed so well, and it is to 60 Watt that I keep going back for more. It is here that his personal vision really shone through, on an almost concept album revolving around a near deserted bar by the shore. From where Eitzel sits in a corner, quietly observing the lonesome people and washed-out drifters that come around. The empty man forever distracted by his memories of decay and the old ghost by the wild sea, sad-eyed Cleopatra Jones with the drunken smile, all too disarmingly kind to strangers. Or of the old friend, gone beyond any salvation, as they sit down for a drink and conversation down at mission rock resort. The vivid imagery are all there, from the wrecked ship on the album cover to the many oceanic and barroom references in the songs; "a bar has a longer history than a country," he reminds us as he proceeds to drink to the last drop of his own reflection.

The song arrangements are appropriately sparse, with trumpeter Mark Isham lending much to its mood of elegaic weariness. On 60 Watt, Eitzel finally got around to being what he perhaps wanted to become all along - a torch singer par excellence, the way Chet Baker once was before that fateful day he came falling through his hotel window. In his own drab fashion, Mark Eitzel also comes across as curious hopeful in his songs, giving the promise of deliverance for the hangarounds from their troubles. "And there is no safety net in this world/ I have no time for good luck charms/ But I still long for your touch/ 'cause I know I'm saved," he muses on "Saved", almost enough to turn the stoniest-faced detractors into believers.

Make no mistake about it; this is not social music for the masses. Eitzel's songs are made for the downtrodden, the terminally disappointed, the haplessly drunk, the loveless and heartbroken. And those bartenders who have the gift of pardon.

mixtape (march 2010)

2010-03-17T23:14:00.005+08:00

Kidsmoke and cigarette gusts
Grizzly Bear "Marla"
Palace "Winter Lady"
Gillian Welch "Lowlands"
Ryan Adams "Tomorrow"
Feist & Ben Gibbard "Train Song"
Calexico "Crystal Frontier"
Davey Graham "Both Sides Now"
Cat Power "Who Knows Where The Time Goes"
Odetta "Tomorrow Is A Long Time"
Tom Waits "Hold On"
M. Ward "Here Comes the Sun Again"
Joanna Newsom "Good Intentions Paving Company"

Happens to know me pretty well: I thought, this brief hiatus from regular blogging - if you can call it an "hiatus" or this "regular blogging" - can only do me good. This mixtape is half inspired by Jacques Rivette's amorphous early films and half put together while I'm nursing another bout of self-doubt and directionlessness... but all with good humor though of course, so there you go.

decade's best #24

2010-02-26T20:50:00.003+08:00

24. Super Furry Animals
Mwng [Flydaddy, 2000]
Inside the Super Furry Animals canon, Mwng stands out and not only because it’s an album sung entirely in their native Welsh tongue – how often have their songs sounded as spontaneous, cohesive and purposefully inscrutable as on this priceless, somewhat underrated psychedelic pop record? The creative infrastructure of Mwng is loose but immense, pulling all of the band’s strange misshapen ideas and musical eccentricities into an alluring whole. Of course, a big part of the intrigue is in not being able to comprehend a word of what Gruff Rhys is singing. Rhys still sounds pathologically mellow as ever, but there is a sense of stridency to his vocals on Mwng, perhaps buoyed by the rarefied song material. “Drygioni”, an 1½-minute prog-rock flight of fancy, marks a meaningful start of something for this psychedelic troupe, while adenoidal tunes such as “Ymaelodi A’r Ymylon” and “Dacw Hi” romp into new enchanting dimensions, unpredictable and carefree in the knowledge that there is method to the madness of Mwng and its unusual medley of songs.

decade's best #25

2010-02-21T19:33:00.003+08:00

25. M. Ward
Post-War [Merge, 2006]
I think it was Bob Dylan who once said something to the effect that songs should be heroic enough to give the illusion of being able to stop time. The sort of magical transcendence described by Dylan may well apply here as Matt Ward’s operative mode on his fifth album Post-War, as he gracefully stitches together micro narratives of nostalgia that bear the indelible mark of his smoked-tinged croon: songs about time lost and time regained, songs about love in the time of unspecified wars. Ward has always sang like a man of constant sorrow and he put that moody tenor to good use on the opening “Poison Cup” and especially on the title cut – the introspective pull of “Post-War”, its lyrics curdled in a familiar warmth (“Don’t they love you in mysterious ways/ You say yeah but this is now and that was then/ Put a dollar into the machine and you’ll remember when”) as Ward pines for the better times of old over a fog of vintage keyboard notes, is quite remarkable. Aside from sad songs, he also tempers the blues-drenched melancholia with vivid joy in a few of the album’s up-tempo, rockier numbers; to have such accomplished musicians as Mike Mogis, Jim James and Neko Case backing him isn’t too bad a deal, of course, as the contemplative “Chinese Translation” and a raucous cover of Daniel Johnston’s “To Go Home” work especially well in this full-band setting. And yet, it is his haunted voice that you can’t quite shake off, as the curative comforts of Post-War transport you into a state of antiquarian bliss, unsure as to how it is that you got to feel this way in the first place.

beau travail (1999)

2010-02-19T14:59:00.003+08:00

I've recently watched Claire Denis's beautiful Beau Travail for the third time (this time on DVD) during the long weekend. Here is an edited version of what I wrote about it exactly three years ago:

The weirdest thing happened at the theatres, just before Beau Travail screened, when this middle-aged patron demanded to find out from the ushers why so few people were in attendance. (I counted about nine of us, which was a reasonable enough audience I suppose for such niche fare. I’m always infatuated with the emptiest picture houses anyway. Very Goodbye Dragon Inn.) It was a strangely profound moment, but whatever.

That evening in February 2007 was actually my second viewing of Claire Denis’ film (first caught it in 2000) and this French filmmaker’s brooding, obsessive work still retain that strange effect on me as in the first time round – it's a film still capable of fucking up my mood for days on end like few could. It’s like these mysterious objects at play in Beau Travail have hid out in the deepest and most remote outskirts of my consciousness for several years, only to return as these deep-dark dream sequences soaked in brine.

Denis seems to be building her story of an emotionally remote soldier’s personal reflections, which borders on suicidal remorse, more from her own life experience living in postcolonial Africa and only vaguely from the Herman Melville story that the film was supposed to be based on. Her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard (who also shot Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire), always have an unerring eye for the most ridiculously sublime images. How do you erase from your mind these scenes of haunted legionnaires ghost-trawling through a ghetto dawn, bare male bodies going through lavishly choreographed calisthenics routines under the sun, or that final shot of lead actor Denis Lavant gyrating wildly to the excruciating Corona dance-hit “Rhythm of the Night”?

decade best #26

2010-02-11T18:05:00.007+08:00

One of the best of those supposedly limited-edition compilations released in the past decade that I managed to get my hands on a few years back, via a friend (the hard-copy version, that is – oh now, those waning glory days of CDs!), was The Golden Apples of the Sun, the album of freaky folk songs curated by Devendra Banhart for Arthur magazine in 2004. It served as my introduction to interesting performers the likes of Josephine Foster, Vasthi Bunyan, Antony (a really wonderful take of “The Lake”) and the ever compelling Joanna Newsom. Her album is the only one helmed by a female singer-songwriter on this list, but I want to add that I’ve also rather enjoyed the works of Gillian Welch, Cat Power, Aimee Mann and Nina Nastasia in the past decade.

Joanna Newsom

The Milk-Eyed Mender [Drag City, 2004]

Many have burrowed deep into the whimsical music of The Milk-Eyed Mender, reveling in its unknown pleasures and Joanna Newsom's boisterous fairytale poetry. Kindred freak-folk musician Noah Georgeson's pitter-patter production serves her idyllic folk songs very well, allowing the sheer wonder of Newsom's unique voice and harp strings to sink in. Through the course of the melancholy tidelands as imagined in this full-time dreamer's adventurous storytelling, it is fantastical pop songs such as “Inflammatory Writ” and “Bridges and Balloons” that are truest to Newsom's escapist vision. “Never get so attached to a poem/you’ll forget truth that lacks lyricism,” she sings on the gentle ‘En Gallop’ like a haunting aphorism. It is on moments as such where The Milk-Eyed Mender exudes the familiar textures of fever dreams and casts its most endearing spell.

mixtape (february 2010)

2010-02-05T17:21:00.002+08:00

Storyboard of urban myths, the ascendance of doubt
A Sunny Day In Glasgow “The White Witch”
Real Estate “Green River”
Beach House “Zebra”
Frances Gall “Cet Air La”
Slumber Party “I Never Dreamed”
Grizzly Bear “Boy From School”
The Beach Boys “Surfer Girl (1967 rehearsal)”
Bart & Friends “Hounds of Love”
Belle & Sebastian “Put the Book Back On The Shelf”
Joan of Arc “Ne Mosquito Pass”
Luna “Bewitched”
The Sea and Cake “Jacking the Ball”
The Velvet Underground “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
Charlotte Gainsbourg “Me and Jane Doe”
Girls “Laura”
Cass McCombs “Dream Come True Girl”

All the time in the world for an unintelligible end: I had been boning up on a few bric-a-brac masterworks by prose artists whose writings – specifically, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Paul Auster’s Moon Palace and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, to name three – seem to have such an inextricable bond to the ashen cities they write about. By that same token, this mixtape of interstate love songs are kind of appropriate.

don't forget when it all felt right

2010-02-02T12:21:00.003+08:00

The place held by Beach House among the current crop of dream-pop avatars has already been well cemented by its first two albums of brittle paeans to love, devotion and a bevy of strange obscure objects of desire. The new and rather brilliant Teen Dream takes a slightly different tack, the song material better developed and sounding more fully formed, more immediate, though essentially it’s still Victoria Legrand (voice and keyboards) and Alex Scally (guitars) reprising their aching brand of atmospheric pop nostalgia. Legrand’s singing continues to dazzle, a lungful of romantic melancholy that cradles the lush mellifluous perfection of “Silver Soul” and “Real Love” – these torch songs aren’t necessarily autobiographical reflections, to be sure, but her singing gives them a sense of warmth and personal geography. Former single “Used To Be” (also one of my favorite Beach House songs) is given a fresh, more expansive arrangement. The duo are clearly developing into much stronger tunesmiths with the breathtaking musical settings of “Walk In The Park” and “10 Mile Stereo”; or take the uninterrupted bliss of “Better Times”, where the waltzing melodies shadow the damaged romanticism Legrand conveys (“Been a fool for weeks, ‘cause my heart stands for nothing”) like reassuring patches of darkness and light. Songs and drifting moments such as these underpin the soporific appeal of Teen Dream, with Beach House weaving an elaborate web of tenuous memories, frights and other glowing emotional relics.

same as it ever was

2010-01-24T17:15:00.001+08:00

A few quick words on Transference, the seventh album by Spoon. I’ve reviewed this album a few days ago “elsewhere” – not sure when it’ll surface though – in which I kinda pegged the album as sort of a “stopgap release” for the band, as compared to their career-best Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007). I wonder if that remark of mine was made was too hastily, but I’m sticking by it nevertheless because it is a fair assessment; no one listening to Transference, good as an album it is, would seriously place it in the same bracket as Spoon’s finest work. Since getting out of its major label troubles with Elektra in the nineties, singer Britt Daniel and main collaborator Jim Eno have established an enduring sonic identity on their third album, 2001’s Girls Can Tell (their first on the indie label Merge, which have released all their records since), for Spoon to refine their avant-pop garage sound with each album, at the same time developing into one of the bastions of indie rock. Transference manages to nail that immediate pop feel of a Spoon album, toggling effectively around the band's trademark tight, insistent rhythms, but the new songs just do not hold together as well as it normally would. That said, “Written In Reverse” does sound phenomenal and the tenderly lit ballad “Out Go The Lights” is a deliquescent wonder – and these two songs alone would be enough for Spoon to continue transcending their cult status.

decade's best #27

2010-01-19T18:17:00.005+08:00

In the years since it was released in 2001, I have developed this almost irrational affection for the slim collection of songs that is Oh, Inverted World (11 songs, 32 minutes in and out), especially considering that I have come to be rather lukewarm on the subsequent Shins albums. (Think I should also add here that I have not watched that Garden State movie yet.) Oh, Inverted World is definitely worthy of a place on my pantheon of power-pop albums, among the likes of Big Star’s #1 Record, Teenage Fanclub’s Grand Prix, Sloan’s Between the Bridges, Fountains of Wayne's Utopia Parkway, and a few others.

27. The Shins
Oh, Inverted World [Sub Pop, 2001]
All manners of jangly melodies and power-pop embroidery illuminate Oh, Inverted World and serve as a handy introduction to the charms of the Shins. This carefully stenciled debut of an album proved to be just the ideal turf for lead songsmith James Mercer to fashion his willowy pop songs and narratives of sullen romantic fumbles into a fully-framed portrait of suburban loneliness (or tedium). Scurrying from the nimbleness of zeal that punctuate the whip-smart declaration (“When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters/ I knew what worthless dregs we all are then”) of “Know Your Onions!” to the tender burlesques that lace the closing “The Past and Pending”, it’s a real credit to the band’s pop instincts that the pensive glow of Oh, Inverted World never does overshadow the hummable melodies and chugging geniality of Mercer’s songwriting; perhaps a way (an admittedly clumsy way) to describe the impression Oh, Inverted World leaves on listeners is that it’s similar to reading the midsummer sonnets penned by someone waking up to the deepest folds of winter. And listening to the wistful guitar strums of album centerpiece “New Slang”, with Mercer singing moodily in a state of befuddlement (“I'm looking in on the good life I might be doomed never to find”), the song seems able to locate or evoke the muffled sensation of a rather hapless existence unfolding and falling into place with its own uncanny momentum of disappointment. The albums that follow Oh, Inverted World may come with more expressive musical directions and be fuzzier for better commercial measure, but it is on their unassuming debut that the Shins have created a power-pop masterwork of introspective scope and undeniable quality.

wait until dark

2010-01-14T18:09:00.005+08:00

The sound was sultry and portentous, a turbulent indigo rendered in fitful hypnotic tones. The singer swings, she waltzes around slow and restlessly, her unsure steps veiled by a thin wild melancholy sound and the heated intimacy of her powerful, unpolished croon. Her pirate smile, the familiar ache in her voice singing songs of silken elegance that act as both sympathetic magic and bewitching method acting, a portrayal of someone raised on robbery and trying to outrun the wolves of memories from long ago, far away.

This being a Cat Power performance, you know you’re well in for some ragged song interpretation, either of her own tunes or the cover versions that fill up her last two records Jukebox and Dark End of the Street (both 2008) – any expectation otherwise just about went up in smoke as Chan Marshall opened by leading her band through a rambling, mercurial “House of the Rising Sun”. A souped-up “Silver Stallion” and a rather shambolic “Lived In Bars” tipped towards the Southern soul of her well-received 2006 record The Greatest, while the moodier and less immediate material (notably a haunting rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”) had the spook.

The earthy charisma about Marshall’s not entirely comfortable stage demeanor is kinda endearing to be able to witness in real time. As the band plowed ahead adeptly on the classic country heartbreak “She’s Got You”, there was a split moment when her voice cracks, her mouth sets slightly out of joint for a second, and time briefly slips out of mind. Another moment that you won’t imagine to be easily replicable: Marshall and her band melding the connective tissues between the jazz standard “Lilac Wine” (made famous by the late great Nina Simone) and her own “Where Is My Love” in lackadaisical chorus, and inevitably turning both songs into something unrecognizable and beautifully vulnerable. Quite breathtaking stuff.

seeds of dreams #01

2010-01-11T21:29:00.002+08:00

"I was playing at Max’s and going to summer school at City College, so I was pretty tired. But I remember sitting in Central Park just as the sun was going down over the old Atlantic building and getting my thoughts together. And then it was, ‘Oh well, time to record.’ And I walked over.” – The Velvet Underground guitarist Sterling Morrison

I suppose few things in music give me the shakes quite the way the impossibly memorable guitar lick of “Sweet Jane” on Loaded (1970) is able to hurl me into a nostalgic haze every time I hear it. Of the first four albums made by The Velvet Underground, Loaded never did get its proper dues for several reasons, despite this being the only Velvets album that resembles something of a commercial-sounding record. The band were already falling apart by then: drummer Moe Tucker was absent from the recordings because she was pregnant; main creative force Lou Reed would leave the band about the same time Loaded hit the streets. The record company fucked with three of the tracks without Reed’s consent, most significantly cutting out the “heavenly wine and roses” sequence. Or maybe these song-trinkets of unknown pop quality never had a chance to find traction among longtime fans of the avant-garde Velvets who are more accustomed to Reed’s chronicles of downtown dirt, and were simply pissed off at the commercial road Loaded was heading down with the sublimated moods of “New Age” and “I Found A Reason” – not helped that Lou comes across as being a bit bitter about the so-called “album loaded with hits” he left the band with.

Me, I just really enjoy the sprightly guitar interplay between Reed and the late Sterling Morrison and I find that on Loaded (the proto-punk nobility of “Head Held High” is so underrated), Lou achieving a nice compromise between consummate pop craftsmanship and grittier songwriting concerns.

Take the rather downbeat “New Age”: it’s sung slow and smooth in the ever-boyish voice of Doug Yule and features the subtlest of sounds, but Lou’s lyrics obsess over the career of a washed out movie starlet coming to a precipitous end (“Can I have your autograph? He said to the fine blonde actress/ You know I’ve seen every movie you’ve been in, from paths of pain to jewels of glory”). The doo-wop vocal harmonies are perfectly placed on the “I Found A Reason” while the downbeat “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” drones on beautifully for seven and a half minutes with the kind of scowling finesse Lou Reed patented. Or maybe it would be enough to say that I have come to include one or two Loaded songs every now and then on mixtapes for girls (not all that many opportunities as suck to speak of, to be honest, but hey), especially those who have no fucking clue who is Lou Reed), or that it is my second favorite Velvets record right after The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967).

dreams made good

2010-01-10T21:36:00.002+08:00

I did an interview with Philadelphian band A Sunny Day In Glasgow recently for www.agingyouth.com, and the Aging Youth guys are kind enough to let me reprint this here:

Over the course of their two terrific and fairly well-received full-length albums, 2007’s Scribble Mural Comic Journal and the latest Ashes Grammar (2009), A Sunny Day In Glasgow have pretty much established themselves as one of the quintessential dream-pop bands working today. Think of the mesmerizingly fogbound atmospherics of Ashes Grammar as the band’s progression to a newly mined sonic territory without actually ditching the old shoegaze template that has served them so well. The feat is perhaps even more impressive when you consider that main member Ben Daniels recorded these songs at a time when the band lineup was going through a major upheaval: bassist Brice Hickey and Daniels’ siblings Lauren and Robin weren’t able to contribute much to Ashes Grammar – for various reasons that included Brice injuring himself and Robin having to take care of him, and Lauren leaving for grad school – essentially leaving Ben to finish the album with guitarist/drummer Josh Meakim and vocalist Annie Fredrickson, and A Sunny Day In Glasgow currently operates as a six-piece (with newly recruited Ryan Newmyer, Adam Herndon and Jen Goma).

The band members might disagree or decline to comment too much on it, but this backstory somewhat weave itself into the fabric of Ashes Grammar, its chimerical nooks and crannies. Songs unfurl at a lilting psychedelic pace and seem to hollow out ecstatically in the private-space intimacy the band create. (Even though Ashes Grammar was recorded in a dance studio, the songs still largely retain the warmth or that sense of bedroom-pop ambience that we have come to identify with A Sunny Day In Glasgow.) Tunes such as “Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs)” and “The White Witch” are such indelible pop gems that blend in seamlessly with the loose experimental fragments that circulate Ashes Grammar. “Close Chorus” is perhaps the point of illumination that best serve to unlock the autochrome effects of the album – I get such a rush every time the MBV-like guitar swoon right out of Loveless breaks in at about the 5:41 mark of this song – capturing the sedentary and yet furiously kinetic afterglow of a dream. As such, Ashes Grammar provide for sort of an insular listening experience where previous generations of listeners would have found in, say, the Cocteau Twins, and closer listening will draw you further, almost unconsciously, into the album’s shell of serenity.

We caught up with Ben, via email, to briefly discuss the making of Ashes Grammar and other sundries.

The new record Ashes Grammar sounds more expansive than Scribble Mural Comic Journal, but it also seems like the band lineup was being reshuffled at the time of the recording. Can you share with us a bit about your original set of ideas or plan for how you guys wanted Ashes Grammar to sound like, and how the album has sort of evolved in the six months or so it took for the recording to be completed?

Ben: My original plan for the album was one dominated by vocals. I was planning to work on really intricate vocal arrangements and very minimal musical arrangements. But once it became apparent that both of my sisters wouldn't be around to record it, I abandoned that plan. It's something I'd still like to try some time. But in the end, Ashes Grammar started just like Scribble Mural did – some ideas that I worked on for a while, which turned into songs. This time it was different though, because I didn't finish the demos. I left them really basic, and then Josh and I worked them out in the studio. This was fun to do, but this is also why it took six months to get the album done.

Is there any significance or meaning attached to the album title?

Ben: Absolutely! I'd rather not say what it is though.

People have started to associate the band with a certain brand of "dream-pop", and we do hear and get that sense on Ashes Grammar, where the melodies and atmospheric song elements seem to drift seamlessly from one song to the next. But when you guys are experimenting and putting together the album in the studio, are you conscious of this ambient, dreamlike feel the songs seem to tap into?

Ben: Not so much. I think it becomes more apparent in the mixing process. I knew certain songs were going to go into each other, but the atmospherics don't really become totally apparent to me until I start sitting with the recordings and trying to make everything fit.

I think most of us are aware that you guys are fans of the likes of the Cocteau Twins, Sterolab and My Bloody Valentine, but what are some of the things that have influenced or inspired the band that may not be as obvious?

Ben: It's hard to say and I feel like other people are better at picking out influences for you. I really love Sam Cooke and Buddy Holly and REM and Led Zeppelin was kind of huge for me when I was a kid. Josh is really into Yes and Hawaiian music and the Beach Boys. I think we are all really diverse in our tastes though.

Last question Ben, any chance we'll get to catch your band performing in Asia any time soon, you think? And how does experiencing A Sunny Day In Glasgow live onstage compares to the way you sound on albums?

Ben: We would all love that so much! As soon as lots and lots of people in Asia start buying our records, we are there. I feel like we are maybe a little more loud and rock-oriented live. But we now have six people in the band and we are able to be a bit more nuanced. I think our live show is a good time – lots more dancing than the records might suggest.

snow angels (2007)

2010-01-09T01:24:00.002+08:00

The first two David Gordon Green films (2000’s George Washington and 2003’s All the Real Girls) are rather impressive, quietly affecting works that most of his subsequent films are somewhat destined to suffer by way of comparison. It definitely applies to something like Snow Angels – a modest but not particularly well-made film, in which the peculiarities in Green’s often mesmerizing observational filmmaking style barely registers. I wanted to read the Stewart O’Nan novel from which the film is adapted from before writing this – yes, I had wanted to figure whether Green’s first attempt at literary adaptation was somehow botched or was the source novel inherently flawed – but never got around to it. (Instead, I’m wallowing in prime Philip Larkin.) Also, watching Snow Angels, I never really cared about the ill-fated circumstances surrounding the grown-up coupling of the Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale characters; instead, I would have much preferred Green to focus his attention more on refining the first bloom of romantic attraction between two reserved high-school students (capably played by Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby), who drifts in and out of the narrative like two characters in search of a country song.

know when i can escape

2010-01-07T19:32:00.003+08:00

Even if you listen to Atlas Sound without any prior knowledge of Bradford Cox’s main band Deerhunter or any of their records, Logos would still make for a certain kind of mysterious attraction. Most of the initial attention, including when you’re listening to the CD, would undoubtedly be placed on two collaborative efforts on Logos: the dream-pop incandescence of “Walkabout”, on which Cox apparently credits Animal Collective’s Panda Bear for teaching him how to make use of music samples; Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier singing on “Quick Canal”, a propulsive 8½-minute song that glides effortlessly on the escapist joy of its unwavering beat and crests on a defiantly blissful ambience in the face of ebbing hope (“I found wisdom is learnt, through a costly process of success and failure”). The rest of Logos, featuring mostly Cox on his own, is as uniformly brilliant. The gauzy acoustic guitar tangos dashing for daylight on “The Light That Failed” (hey, Cox reading Rudyard Kipling or something?), the kiss-me-quick urgency of “Sheila”, and the overlapping melodic cacophonies of “Criminals” all mark the coloring of progress. Remarkable progress, that is.

mixtape (january 2010)

2010-01-07T01:46:00.000+08:00

(Wide awake on) wayside overestimations
Wire “Mercy”
Joy Division “The Sound Of Music”
The Fall “Fit And Working Again”
Public Image Ltd “Public Image”
Delta 5 “Mind Your Own Business”
Gang of Four “Damaged Goods”
Devo “Girl U Want”
Scritti Politti “Skank Bloc Bologna”
The Desperate Bicycles “Grief Is Very Private”
The Talking Heads “Memories Can’t Wait”
New Order “Ceremony”
Josef K “Revelation”
Pere Ubu “Final Solution”

Tell her what’s possible/all-day derision, is: Just when I remarked to a friend that I’m not finishing this non-definitive postpunk mix, something comes along to piss me off enough, providing enough bile for completion. Several things that “inspired” this: Simon Reynolds’ impossibly cool Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 of course (what a book); re-watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette recently (a tad unfairly maligned, maybe); crappy freelance wages and the sweltering, ever-pretentious frustrations of being, ahem, “generally unemployed” (or “positively unemployed”). The icy grandeur of Wire’s “Mercy” is an attempt of letting you in on all you need to know about postpunk in six minutes; or watch me jumpstart and wail along to David Byrne’s “these memories can’t WAAAAAIT”.

decade's best #28

2010-01-04T13:18:00.007+08:00

There is a moment within the first 25 pages of the Haruki Murakami novel Dance Dance Dance that never fails to crack me up; that is when this hotel manager dude was sizing up the protagonist (a doppelganger for Murakami himself, as always) and wasn’t left particularly impressed by the Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist. I suppose there are times where I get the same slightly-embarrassed-for me kind of reaction too, for what it’s worth, every time people finds out that I actually listen to rap songs still. Which is why Madvillain mattered so much, perhaps.

Madvillain

Madvillainy [Stones Throw, 2004]
Amid the bustle of advertisement-filler rap artistes and their lamentable sameness choking up traffic in the past decade, Madvillainy clearly stands out for its originality, an album that best personified the surpassing wit and wisdom of underground hip-hop veterans MF Doom and Madlib in complete communion. Everything about Madvillainy was kinda special, starting with the fact that this collaboration between these two unique individuals actually worked out in the first place: Madlib’s reference-heavy production, abstract yet accessible, and as irrepressible as those classic jazz records he reveres; the barking-mad ingenuity of Doom, wilding out on the mike and spewing clever verses in his signature sketch-poetic style that left many commenting on the lack of choruses on the album; and the pulverizing rate at which this stoned duo burn through a range of alter egos in the span of 22 dope tracks – things don’t get crazier than the noticeable swagger with which Doom (in character as Viktor Vaughn) disses himself mercilessly on “Fancy Clown”. In retrospect, Madvillainy holds a special appeal perhaps because the two seem to have developed a strange, mind-meld telepathy along the way; the delirious manner Doom’s rhymes are set canoeing back and forth in answer to Madlib’s uncanny beats and samples is, regrettably, about as outdated these days as the anachronistic armor Doom sports on the album cover. A pretty persuasive case can be made that the slow, soulful and unusually poised flow of Madvillainy presents a definitive statement for making albums that transcend their genres without sacrificing their idiosyncrasies.

when everybody's lost without a trace

2009-12-31T19:39:00.000+08:00

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

2009-12-27T12:19:00.010+08:00

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)

2009-12-24T22:54:00.005+08:00

(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

2009-12-23T02:06:00.003+08:00

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

2009-12-20T02:12:00.003+08:00

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)

2009-12-09T10:21:00.001+08:00

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)

2009-12-08T18:50:00.008+08:00

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)

2009-12-03T12:05:00.001+08:00

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

2009-11-22T14:17:00.001+08:00

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)

2009-11-18T23:39:00.004+08:00

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

2009-11-10T13:09:00.001+08:00

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)

2009-10-31T23:25:00.002+08:00

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

2009-10-30T19:48:00.001+08:00

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

2009-10-29T08:59:00.002+08:00

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)

2009-10-04T18:07:00.002+08:00

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

2009-09-25T22:52:00.002+08:00

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

2009-09-22T23:05:00.003+08:00

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

2009-09-21T20:20:00.001+08:00

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

2009-09-19T12:27:00.002+08:00

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)

2009-09-11T23:10:00.003+08:00

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

2009-09-07T19:43:00.001+08:00

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

2009-09-02T21:09:00.000+08:00

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

2009-08-29T00:01:00.004+08:00

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

2009-08-22T23:07:00.001+08:00

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

2009-08-16T09:45:00.004+08:00

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

2009-08-08T19:32:00.004+08:00

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)

2009-08-07T12:19:00.003+08:00

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)

2009-08-02T19:51:00.002+08:00

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)

2009-07-27T20:03:00.002+08:00

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

2009-07-11T21:54:00.004+08:00

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)

2009-07-11T16:25:00.002+08:00

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

2009-07-11T13:04:00.002+08:00

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)

2009-07-09T20:11:00.002+08:00

“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

2009-07-04T22:38:00.004+08:00

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

2009-06-30T18:26:00.005+08:00

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)

2009-06-28T15:28:00.000+08:00

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

2009-06-22T23:21:00.001+08:00

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

2009-06-20T19:25:00.003+08:00

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

2009-06-18T21:08:00.003+08:00

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

2009-06-14T23:13:00.003+08:00

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)

2009-06-09T22:36:00.002+08:00

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

2009-06-04T21:28:00.002+08:00

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

2009-05-30T22:11:00.002+08:00

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

2009-05-23T13:25:00.002+08:00

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)

2009-05-19T18:28:00.004+08:00

"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

2009-05-18T13:25:00.005+08:00

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

2009-05-16T20:14:00.001+08:00

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)

2009-05-14T17:03:00.003+08:00

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

2009-05-11T10:53:00.004+08:00

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)

2009-05-03T23:54:00.008+08:00

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.

wendy and lucy (2008)

2009-04-30T16:56:00.002+08:00

Sure as your fate and hard as your luck

Judging on the strength of two recent movies I caught and rather enjoyed, the barren ignorelands of Oregon seems to be pretty fertile ground for American independent cinema. Gus Van Sant has often set his films in his hometown of Portland, and Paranoid Park (2007), when I caught it only at the tail end of last year, struck me as an extraordinary portrait of a suburban street culture inhabited by skater punks and throwaway mall urchins. Kelly Reichardt’s equally splendid film Wendy and Lucy taps into the same vein of youthful disenfranchisement that Paranoid Park mines so thoroughly, but quite differently and with a more understated air of stoicism that is perhaps even more enthralling than Van Sant’s mercurial reels.

Michelle Williams plays the titular Wendy, taking her dog companion Lucy on an arduous road trip from Indiana to Alaska, where apparently the young woman would be able to find gainful employment. Shit happens on their stopover at a small town in Oregon. Wendy’s meager travel budget is carefully calculated and yet she fails to account for dog food, an understandable neglect that bred petty mischief in the form of shoplifting. One thing leads to another, and Wendy loses her dog.

I have no idea how much Wendy’s (and/or Lucy’s) hard-luck tale is intended to be a parable for the everyman’s economic malaise but it is clear Reichardt assails these contemporary concerns with her own, uniquely austere vision of bummed-out cinematographic realism (an overly clunky label/description, I know): long shots cast over the township’s affectless landscapes, foggy nightfalls take on a spectral quality, and automobiles run inexplicably into ruins. Keeping with the film’s neorealist edge is William’s restrained performance, accurately capturing the vulnerability and dogged persistence of her character. The compendium of bleakness and unexplained circumstances at the heart of Wendy and Lucy is held together by the recognizable devotion of Wendy towards her canine pal in spite of her feckless means of existence. The final heartbreak comes in the form of a classic drifter’s escape, as Wendy hobo-hops onto the boxcar of a freight train with a glimmer of lukewarm hope, riding towards everywhere.

silence kit #12

2009-04-28T00:12:00.005+08:00

TV On The Radio
Return To Cookie Mountain [Interscope, 2006]

When Scott Walker released The Drift in 2006, I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. I was pretty turned off by the music’s bleakness, its lack of humor. Music journalists were shitting all over themselves about the percussionist on Walker’s record hitting a slab of meat for beats or something, but I wasn’t getting into it. Maybe I was enjoying myself too much then, and that life was still relatively good. I think that’s probably it. Everybody gets occasionally deceived by an instance of fragile happiness.

But I also recall Christmas that year to be utterly depressing, for various reasons I won’t want to go into too much. Only then did I got around and listen to the Scott Walker record. Things in those dark and brooding songs start to slowly surface and make sense. But mostly I listened to a lot more of TV On The Radio. Return To Cookie Mountain had came out a few months earlier that year. (I was listening to the leaked version instead, by the way, the one with the song sequence all jumbled up and kicking off with the rocket-propelled “Wolf Like Me” – it is clearly the better version.)

Personal miserabilia aside, perhaps paranoid imagination (well, mine at least) is the common denominator here, and TV On The Radio has Walker well beaten. Credit is due to the industrial wall of sound David Andrew Sitek engineered for Cookie Mountain. The sense of punishing claustrophobia Sitek builds around Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s vocals is deceptively simple and yet so radically insidious, providing the ideal soundboard to take in the group’s divergent ideas – from the atmospheric swamp blues of “I Was A Lover” to the communicable funk of “Let The Devil In”, practically anything goes. The end effects of Cookie Mountain’s alien sound design are startling and vivid, or downright spooky at times, none more so than the lonesome whistle summoning a barbershop quartet from hell on “A Method” while Adebimpe and Malone harmonize on some truly wicked shit: “I'm a storm-faced cloud, hanging in dystrophy/ I'm a cold-base clown laughing at enemies”. What the two sing about aren’t particularly clear but the songs and their enigmatic glow most certainly create a portrait of a sickly epoch (barricaded lust, disintegrating worlds, meaningless wars) that feels uncomfortably close to the bone.

book-filled future that should have been now

2009-04-22T16:14:00.009+08:00

Jazz in its truest fanatic form is supposed to be this wild and really intense thing, or so I’m told. Then there is someone like Dave Brubeck, a celebrated jazz musician with a demeanor that seems to be saying he’s a cool, unflappable and sophisticated dude always. Polite sounding and deceptively bland, the Dave Brubeck Quartet might well be the least fashionable thing to get all hyped up about these days, so overrated that it’s underrated. I’m talking about their 1959 album Time Out of course, probably the most treasured of cool jazz artifacts that I have been listening to lot lately (perhaps strangely), an album made famous by the adult contemporary radio staple “Take Five” and also an album most interesting for the cabinet of freakish non-jazz curiosities Brubeck works into in its lean 39 minutes. Unconventional time signatures, rocky blues shifting in and out of waltz themes, seasoned jazz musicians decking their improvisations around a Turkish folk rhythm: the quartet sounded just like a bunch of easygoing guys who are able to snuff out any cynicism on the part of the listening public with their serendipitous mix of methodical musical forms. Seriously intense musicians still, yes definitely, but of the fun and bubbly variety. "Three To Get Ready" is probably my most favorite, its central melody gracefully swinging away like fingers tapping across dusty bookshelves and always playfully promising unexpected treats, or distractions.

a sentimental education

2009-04-20T10:36:00.006+08:00

My Maudlin Career, the newest one from Camera Obscura, comes off as a pretty optimistic album (especially for when the sheepdog moods hit) but don’t get hoodwinked by the songs’ bright personality and beguiling trajectories. My Maudlin Career echoes the retro paunchiness of the Scottish band's last, Let’s Get Out Of This Country (2006), in almost perfect symmetry, its bubblegum pop tunefulness washed over a heap of bleary-eyed sentimentalities. Yet even the saccharine sheen of the mascara-smeared balladry of “You Told A Lie” and “Other Towns And Cities” packs an acidic punch, not surprising when you consider how Tracyanne Campbell seems to write most of her songs from the perspective of one who got the fuzzy end of the lollipop in hamstrung relationships. Lead single “French Navy”, all tenterhooks, twee tongues and tall tales, may be the best single the band have cut since “Eighties Fan”. The title track isn’t that far behind in that regard: wistfulness, sarcasm and melodrama wrapped up in an enchantingly flushed arrangement, odd sonic elements (lugubrious organ melodies, fuzzy background guitars) of "My Maudlin Career" ushering in a girl-group meltdown in quite unsentimental terms, it must be said.

favorite nuclear squadrons

2009-04-14T16:26:00.011+08:00

There has yet to be a movie made about nuclear brinksmanship that quite equals Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, released back in the sixties, but if eventually someone does (maybe a propaganda work, to be commissioned by the North Korean leaders), the filmmaker would do well to consult the latest Black Dice album Repo for soundtrack assistance: the waves of paranoid load-blown dissonance; the terse handiwork of industrialized subterranean sounds; raw, roughened electro-textured twitches rubbing up against a seabed of itchy-bitsy radio-sampled histrionics distorted beyond recognition (or actually, the other way around instead). Going nuclear, in other words; writing on The Guardian, Creation Records founder Alan McGee calls Repo "a grand statement of visceral intent". All aboard the Black Dice bandwagon then.

Also: I am pretty excited about the upcoming Dirty Projectors LP Bitte Orca, their first on Domino Records. I am sure some of you guys would have heard the brilliant lead single "Stillness Is The Move", which is as appropriate an anthem for today's token recessionists as any, and some of the other Bitte Orca songs are just as good. I've never been the biggest fan of their totally messed-up previous concept albums, including the critically acclaimed Rise Above in which frontperson Dave Longstreth imagines himself rewriting Black Flag's seminal Damaged, but this new one has the band going into a more pop direction. Judging by the track record of kindred bands like Black Dice, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance that have done the same recently, I can't say it's a bad thing for Longstreth.

silence kit #11

2009-04-11T21:12:00.005+08:00

Yo La Tengo
Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out [Matador, 2000]

Not too long ago The Onion AV Club listed 25 albums “that work best when listened from start to finish”, from which my first reaction was that the selections veered, not expectedly, toward several what you might deem as concept albums: The Who’s Quadrophenia; XTC’s Skylarking; Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, just to name three. But getting deeper into it, I thought the list should be a bit more about songs rather than song cycles – specifically, or simply put, the relationship or thematic tie between songs, and how they benefit more from being sequenced next to each other than when listened to divorced from the album’s context. (Of course I’m making shit sense here too.)

To me, Yo La Tengo’s 2000 studio masterpiece And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (my personal favorite of the band’s output) fits the bill perfectly, an album of willowy summer-sad songs wheeled together into a long, swooning interlude of intimacy (77 minutes in all). While their nineties-indie classics (more on those next time) had the more expansive vibes, Yo La Tengo opened the 2000s with a newfound soft-and-bouncy flourish, favoring whispery keyboard affects over loud guitar feedbacks. The dreamy gaswork atmospherics of “Everyday” set the agenda brilliantly and many of the subsequent songs (“Saturday”, “From Black To Blue”) follow its reticent patterns right through to the 18-minute drone-fest finale “Night Falls On Hoboken”, domestic climes and old-time feelings unfolding in centegenarian pace.

And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out has largely been interpreted as the album that scrounges hazily through every nook and cranny of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s marriage (which is maybe why it is best listened to from start to finish), and sure enough, as with most relationships, there are moments of peace and maddening bliss (watching them perform “Our Way To Fall” live gave me fucking goosebumps every time) balanced with some facsimile of discontentment and strife (“The Crying Of Lot G” employs a Thomas Pynchon book title to explore marital paranoia). While I am not sure how much Ira is referring to Whit Stillman’s underrated film on “Last Days Of Disco”, perhaps no other pop song captures the edge-of-illusion essence of unaccountable nostalgia better than this one tune.

mixtape (april 2009)

2009-04-06T10:49:00.004+08:00

Unity concepts of the rational doomsayer
Sam Prekop “Practice Twice”
Nina Simone “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”
Atlas Sound “Dovers Jam”
Pavement “Grave Architecture”
Camera Obscura “My Maudlin Career”
Calexico “Trigger”
Iron & Wine “Love and Some Verses”
Devendra Banhart “At The Hop”
M. Ward “Shangri-La”
Beach House “Turtle Island”
Grizzly Bear “Cheerleader”
Big Star “O My Soul”
Yo La Tengo “Paul Is Dead”
Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La”
Matthew Sweet “Sick Of Myself”
Andrew Bird “Fitz And The Dizzyspells”

Walking Spanish: I am sure I have shared with some of you, in conversations probably, how much I love the smartass Tom Waits reference in Joshua Ferris’ very readable novel Then We Came To The End, where folks being laid off becomes “walking Spanish down the hall”. On a related note, I am currently, officially, out of work this week, though I must say that the realities and circumstances surrounding the decision to leave I had made some six weeks ago have not truly resonated with me yet. In better times, I might have felt in some way liberated from the drudgery of dispassionate work, and looking forward to some time off for holidaying, long-term decomposing and what not. But these are different times of course. These days, I don’t need to remind anyone (i.e. myself) that there is rich cause for apprehension instead. The economy, as you might have heard, is way down in a hole. Employment opportunities in my line of work have actually been rather limited even before the shit hits the fan, plus I’ve got this worrying tendency to strike out at job interviews as naturally as A-Roid taking bad swings at breaking balls. (Speaking of Rodriguez, below is my prediction for the MLB 2009 season, with the teams in bold making the playoffs but I end my predictions there because, as they say, it’s crapshoots from that point – if I don’t find a proper job soon, the silver lining is that I would have plenty of time for baseball.) I put together this current mixtape in that murky, lack-of-sustained-confidence kind of mood I was in, the whole thing took a while to really “click” (not until I added Nina Simone, because I am really starting to relate to the sentiments of the song in so many ways; the Atlas Sound live recording that follows is so insanely good), and perhaps that is not so surprising.

AL West
LA Angels
Oakland As
Seattle Mariners
Texas Rangers

AL Central
Cleveland Indians
Minnesota Twins
Chicago White Sox
Detroit Tigers
Kansas City Royals

AL East
New York Yankees
Boston Red Sox
Toronto Blue Jays
Tampa Bay Rays
Baltimore Orioles

NL West
LA Dodgers
Arizona Diamondbacks
San Francisco Giants
Colorado Rockies
San Diego Padres

NL Central
St Louis Cardinals
Chicago Cubs
Cincinnati Reds
Milwaukee Brewers
Pittsburgh Pirates
Houston Astros

NL East
New York Mets
Atlanta Braves
Philadelphia Phillies
Florida Marlins
Washington Nationals

silence kit #10

2009-03-30T11:44:00.005+08:00

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

2009-03-23T17:31:00.005+08:00

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

2009-03-22T15:57:00.001+08:00

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

2009-03-21T12:42:00.004+08:00

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

2009-03-18T11:11:00.006+08:00

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

2009-03-10T01:26:00.003+08:00

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)

2009-03-05T23:21:00.003+08:00

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.

broken blossoms

2009-02-28T21:49:00.007+08:00

Maybe because its stately songs sound like Antony and the Johnsons reaching deeper into the realm of life's melancholic abstractions, The Crying Light already engaged me more on my first few weeks of listening than I Am A Bird Now (2005) ever did. No rinky-dink celebrity walk-ins like before but the musicians backing the singer filled in most admirably with their classicist-like restraint, providing these songs that broach into mortality's mysteries with its singular force - no small task considering that Antony Hegarty's startlingly mournful voice is the obvious linchpin of these chamber pop ballads ("One Dove" and "Another World" are the standouts in that mold). On the gorgeously orchestrated The Crying Light, Antony reins in his expressive range as if eager for us listeners to slowly take in the strength of these new compositions (likewise, the lyrics written are more economical). The haunting quietude of "Dust And Water" is especially moving, while the broken-blossom soulfulness of "Aeon" elevates The Crying Light into the medicated fog of a phantasmic waking dream.

night of the atavistic junkies

2009-02-23T18:37:00.007+08:00

The new Franz Ferdinand record basically confirms two things that many would have suspected about these Scottish pop stars: that they have already said all they needed to say in the 39 minutes of their incendiary self-titled debut in 2004, and that the prototype Franz Ferdinand sound isn't half as resilient when taken away from their familiar (i.e. dance-rock) settings. Actually I'm more or less hedging on the latter point, for Tonight: Franz Ferdinand clearly does not attempt to drift too far away from their clubland assets, and wisely so too, as this is a band blessed with almost mutant abilities to dish out hedonistic post-punk like it's a junk routine.

Where this third Franz Ferdinand album does different is in coming up with a neat little concept, Alex Kapranos having claimed that the songs revolve around a wild night out partying and the morning after. This being Franz Ferdinand, their splenetic energy is on display throughout ("Ulysses", "No You Girls", "What She Came For") and then there are also some newfound sound elements roped in: a dose of indie/LCD electronics (main offenders: "Live Alone" and "Lucid Dreams") or a few daps of tribe/dub beats here and there, nothing too distinctive to distract from the neo-discotheque riffs. Taking a cue from the album's concept, Tonight does get more interesting down the stretch when things turn way looser and everybody's done getting stoned - the woozy futuristic commercial jingle of "Dream Again" isn't too bad at all, a percursor of things to come perhaps.

let the right one in (2008)

2009-02-21T21:35:00.006+08:00

Last thing we need is another teen vampire movie, you think, and perhaps rightly so. But obviously Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In, made and conceived in wintry Sweden, promises to be something different. Yes, technically speaking there is still blood and gore but the film revels more in subverting the prosaic details of everyday surburban horror, the literal kind. As 12-year-old Oskar (Kara Hedebrant) befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson), the female vampire who has been 12 "for a very long time", the setup is remarkably simple and economical (minimal effects, in other words) while the urban-legend narrative is elegantly paced throughout its 114 minutes to unsettle the viewer from frosty frame to frame. What's great about Let The Right One In is that the filmmakers clearly do not hesitate to fuck around with genre conventions, oftentimes making direct references to the pangs of adolescence (isolation, puberty, bully trauma) and it's interesting that John Ajvide Lindqvist, the writer of the novel and screenplay, made specific references to imagining a vampire's existence to be "miserable, gross and lonely". And rooting this tale of horror in a story that is fundamentally about two misfits slowly drawn towards each other, the uneasy ending of Let The Right One In (no spoilers intended) leaves me with the impression that this film is also Alfredson and Lindqvist's updated ode to to teenage vigilantes.

silence kit #6

2009-02-17T18:29:00.006+08:00

Four Tet
Rounds [Domino, 2003]

In another one of those supposedly random things, I was thumbing my way through this Haruki Murakami novel (After Dark) when the Four Tet song "My Angel Rocks Back And Forth" drifts, via my earphones, into the chance late-nite reunion at Denny's between two old acquaintances, the young, aspirant jazz musician Takahashi and foreign studies undergraduate Mari in her Red Sox cap. There are probably tons of other anecdotes that you and I can similarly cook up like this, about particular songs or melody being matched to particular books or movies or just moods, but I think such a random-fuck approach holds up pretty well for Kieran Hebden's music. In the book, Takahashi and Mari held conversations about everything from her sister's long slumber to plenty of other people's problems, the chapters keeping time dutifully while the post-midnight Tokyo portrayed by Murakami bristles with sensuality. To me, Rounds captures the the same passively infinite rhythm as some of Murakami's conversation pieces and Hebden never quite managed to hit the same high mark in his several follow-ups. And despite it being, for all purpose and intent, electronic instrumental music, the line of beauty of Rounds is all in the sense of naturalism Hebden brings to the songs, an assortment of spaceshifting, inconspicious sounds bulging across your consciousness.

silence kit #5

2009-02-12T17:08:00.008+08:00

Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Superwolf [Drag City, 2005]

On the liner notes for Superwolf, Will Oldham thanks "the SWEENDOG for kicking it so hard". Those among us jonesing for a little more medicine for melancholy were rejoicing and thankful too for this, an album of crumbly beauty that is easily an essential piece of the Will Oldham canon. Sweeney wrote the music, with Oldham authoring the lyrics, and Superwolf mixes the sublime and the creepy in a mesmerizing way perhaps only these two are capable of. The guitar-folk feel of songs like "Only Someone Running" and "Lift Us Up" are actually not far afield from the other Bonnie Prince Billy records that the prolific Oldham has been putting out, save for sounding much more bareboned and relieved of country afflections. "My Home Is The Sea" is a complete different beast though, taking on the guise of a rock bruiser and yet Sweeney's guitar playing is more erratic than epic. Superwolf reaches equilibrium with Oldham's most self-deprecating pleas on "Beast For Thee", as appropriate a song as it comes for bloody valentines (I used to joke that I'm gonna marry the first girl I could find who digs Will Oldham as much as me but well, that joke is getting to be kinda unbearable now and absolutely unfunny, for I did manage to meet a person of said description on my travels, and naturally she turns out to be practically unattainable), Will turning on his charms ("I will toil for years and years/Give you muscle, tone and tears/ Overcome and flay all fears/ Leaving me, a beast for thee") and joined by Sweeney's simple, most plaintive melodies. Vulnerable, spontaneous, softly wrenching and yet sounding a bit sordid: "Beast For Thee" is exactly the kind of offhand genius that Oldham has consistently delivered, be it in more intimate song cycles or in tutelary collaborations like Superwolf, kicking it hard with kindred musicians. (Oh I forgot to mention: Matt Sweeney used to play in Chavez, Zwan and a few other outfits.)

lovers on the bridge (1991)

2009-02-09T22:17:00.009+08:00

Rewatched Leo Carax's 1991 film Les Amant du Pont-Neuf recently. Here is one of the most indulgent cult-cinema contrarians of France making his grand statement about dispossession and I spent half of the movie's length imagining what it would be like to hang out with Juliette Binoche's character, the half-blind painter girl Michele who is just maybe a bit too well acquianted with the pains of being pure at heart. Carax takes these two precarious souls, Michele and the vagrant performance artist Alex (Denis Lavant) and plunge them into the fragmentary existence of living out on the streets. There is purpose and poetic pleasure to how the director frames the pair's increasingly debilitating relationship, as if to create an obsessive bird's-eye perspective of presumably doomed romance and shatteringly sad little moons.

mixtape (february 2009)

2009-02-08T00:50:00.008+08:00

Relationshipness (rollerskating at night)
Belle and Sebastian "The Rollercoaster Ride"
Can "Moonshake"
Califone "Your Golden Ass"
Yo La Tengo "Demons"
Throbbing Gristle "United"
Animal Collective "Taste"
Beach House "Used To Be"
The Antlers "Bear"
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart "Young Adult Friction"
The Velvet Underground "Here She Comes Now"
Ancient Crux "In Teen Dreams"
Broadcast "Before We Begin"
Lotus Plaza "Red Oak Way"
Wilco "Cars Can't Escape"

Truths: So the first time I test-drove this mix on a night jog, there were actually these two kids rollerskating along the canal with me, young boy and a girl who inspired the latter part of the mixtape title, for the short length of time Throbbing Gristle runs into Animal Collective runs into Beach House, seamlessly I like to think. The version of "Demons" I used was originally the one from the Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo record, which I replaced with the one appearing on the I Shot Andy Warhol movie soundtrack because I really like the slightly-crazed feminist/gendercide rant by Lili Taylor (in character as the unsucessful Warhol assassinator Valerie Solanas) tagged on the end of this soundtrack version. "Cars Can't Escape", one of my favorite Wilco compositions, is still officially unreleased to the best of my knowledge, Jeff Tweedy's lyrics I misheard on this particular song ("relationless") having something to do with the word "relationshipness" used here.

non-pain

2009-02-07T23:47:00.006+08:00

Something I wrote at the end of my last post referencing the Velvets, plus the fact that I wasn't in the best of moods and worrying about things the whole day (on a weekend for fuck's sake), prompted me to dig into some old Deerhunter, specifically their 2007 album Cryptograms. I previously wrote, albeit briefly, about the very impressive Microcastle/Weird Era Cont Deerhunter released last year and I'm planning to write about that one again, very soon. Also I did happen to write a capsule-type review about Cryptograms some time back; good times better times back then, maybe not... Here is a 'reprint', which I can't help but subject to a heavy edit:

John Cale’s self description of the music made by the Velvet Underground as “controlled distortion” comes to mind when listening to Deerhunter. A soporific spree, the songs on Cryptograms careen from flittering guitar shoegaze to introverted bedroom psychedelia with a dozy enthusiasm that goes a long way to prove that the influence of the Velvets never goes out of fashion. Updated with krautrock-driven shards and fragments, the spaced-out aesthetics is the right tool for pivoting around singer Bradford Cox’s somewhat morbid mood ranges. Best Cryptograms moment to remember Deerhunter by: the nocturnal melodic haze of “Spring Hall Convert”, the engrossed sound of someone blowing his mind out in a car.

judy let's go for a walk

2009-02-07T17:36:00.006+08:00

More worldly followers (or ex-followers) of Belle and Sebastian would probably be unmoved but I still got a huge kick out of my first spin through The BBC Sessions, already well familiar with the songs of course (at the very least, the first nine tracks), though unarmed with a tracklist and therefore unaware of the song order (which is perhaps the best way for old fans to listen to this - with an element of surprise). I don't think these immaculately recorded radio sessions does much of a service to the band as a live document, which is why I didn't bother to listen to the companion live-in-Belfast disc at all; that's understandable. Instead it does something else altogether when you get sufficiently drawn into Stuart Murdoch's wide-eyed verbiage: like you're being welcomed back to when the Belle and Sebastian was first unearthed, back into the folds of schoolyard experiences, old loneliness and other strange encounters at the end of youthhood. The evocative arrangement and Steve Jackson's singing on "Seymour Stein" sound more elegaic with time, more defiant in its indietrack career declaration. The band also runs through a spooked, pulpy rendition of "Sleep The Clock Around", sounding not unlike a nascent Velvet Underground, unsullied.

silence kit #4

2009-02-03T22:58:00.007+08:00

Califone
Quicksand/Cradlesnakes [Thrill Jockey, 2003]

A few years back this dude I met, upon hearing that I’m a huge fan of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, implored me to check out Califone. Turns out this dude was right on the money – I immediately understood why Califone are often seen as being one of the most perennially underrated bands around (a Pitchfork review quite nicely describes them as being “stupidly underappreciated”), a band led by Tim Rutili (who was also the creative force behind Red Red Meat) that produced a string of avant-rustic rock albums of wild, restlessly intricate imagery that rank easily among my favorite things this decade. Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, their second full-length and the first I heard, is quite possibly my favorite Califone record (but ask me in a few months and I might tell you different), while their other stellar albums like Heron King Blues (2004) and Roots and Crowns (2006) each have their own unique feel and are very worth checking out too. On Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, things unfold surely but slowly, like some of the better rendered Coen brothers pictures (understated noirshit like The Man Who Wasn't There and No Country For Old Men come to mind, specifically when listening to this music - though some may find more Califone affinity with the Appalachian folk music featured on O Brother, Where Art Thou?). “Horoscopic Amputation Honey” stretches and shimmers over seven fuzzy minutes to the measured pacing of a crime short story (“we’ll cut our hair and fake our deaths”). The domiciled blues of “Leon Spinx Moved to Town” and “Mean Little Seed” slither around in unpredictable trails, while the spellbinding “Michigan Girls” radiates spacey folk fumes thick enough to fill your lungs with soot. Then there is the amazing “Your Golden Ass”, the swamp rocker that throws a huge spanner into the sprawl of Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, the effect of which I've always imagined to be the sound of a thousand tin lizzies coming into life, Rutili mouthing such sweetly ominous non-sequiturs that could potentially rupture the confidence of any aspiring trafficker of stream-of-consciousness: “Early minor Japanese pitcher sidearm slow tic a wolfish mouth/ On a mouseish face lady from Shanghai 3rd man/ Shot wild in the house of mirrors vicodin itch bite/ Your lip take it all in but it ain't sticking it ain't sticking it ain't sticking it ain't sticking”

silence kit #3

2009-01-31T17:11:00.005+08:00

Super Furry Animals
Mwng [Flydaddy, 2000]

I have been debating myself about whether it should be considered a moot point or a merit that Mwng, unlike any of the other Super Furry Animals releases, is an album sung completely in their native Welsh tongue. Gruff Rhys and his bandmates have always fashioned themselves as pop eccentrics, and not comprehending a word out of songs bearing zonky titles like "Dacw Hi" must be a big part of the intrigue and appeal, right? It's probably truer though that I still enjoy listening to Mwng today, provincial Welsh or not, because this is by far their most cohesive piece of work. There is a rather deceptive, overly relaxed vibe about this album, especially in contrast with the flourish overload on the likes of Guerrilla (1999) or Rings Around The World (2001), so much so that the rose-tinted pop songs on Mwng somehow end up sounding not unlike unfinished demo recordings. But makeshift sounding or not, and no matter if you have misgivings as to being under the influence of anything from ELO to Welsh cult hero Meic Stevens or not, Mwng is one strange and glorious psychedelic trip all the way.

let's get away for awhile

2009-01-28T19:07:00.008+08:00

Having worshipped Animal Collective for some time now, my first listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion left me, as expected, feeling mindblown, amply convinced that this latest maelstrom of electronic/psychedelic rock is something the band have been building towards all along. Whereas there always existed at times an ungainly quality about their experimentations or primitive-soundscaping indulgences (not that I'm going to fault them for it, for I have enjoyed every esoteric bit about albums like Here Comes The Indian or Danse Manatee), the beautifully composed Merriweather Post Pavilion now finds the band more interested in transforming patchwork sound elements into vivid feels of escapism that can be readily digested. Whether it is the gorgeous way the opening pop-nostalgic conflagration of "Bluish" set the scene for Avey Tare's "I'm getting lost in your curls" reverie or the mantra-melodic porousness of "Lion In A Coma", each of these eleven cuts presents the Collective in a new adventurous light. Guitarist Deakin sits out this one, so the Merriweather Post Pavilion songs are noticably conceived without the guitar in mind and are none the worse for it, with quite a few of the more accessible tracks sharing the same swirling retro pigments and sampling bloodlines as Panda Bear's excellent Person Pitch, a forever-changes fluidity most evident in Panda's stunning domestication theme "My Girls". And what of the mesmeric things Avey and Panda can be heard singing about? Tundra wilderness, flower dancers, a living room filled with arts and crafts, the night smell of garbage: Merriweather Post Pavilion races breathlessly through its purple-bottle fantasies always in lockstep with human foibles before slowing to a trot with the icy, baleful tones of "No More Runnin" (which recalls a little of the loosely structured "Street Flash", an EP track released last year that is best listened to while rollerskating at midnight). Then senses awaken once again for the climaxing "Brother Sport", a song that for all practical purposes serves as a Panda-inflected conduit for letting go but whose sentimentalities are soon eclipsed by an endlessly clattering electronic drone that turns progressively intoxicating and more ecstatic along the way, until the song/album/band feel completely liberated of all the misfortunes and hang-ups hinted earlier. Befitting of an album that is by far the most expansive in Animal Collective's workaholic canon, ever shifting sounds and sensibilities light up every tendril of this genuinely audacious music that is hopefully a signpost of many exciting things still to come.

silence kit #2

2009-01-26T14:25:00.006+08:00

Joan of Arc
So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness [Jade Tree, 2003]

Matthew Perpetua posted a few really cool Joan of Arc mp3s a few weeks ago, which sort of reminded me that this Chicago-based experimental music outfit was one of my favorite bands for a short period of time, a band that my younger self would champion for being 'difficult'. That period of time was roughly in between the release of their 1999 album Live In Chicago (not a live album by the way, while the cover art was like a wicked sendup of a seminal Jean-Luc Godard movie) and So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness. On the records, Tim Kinsella and his band of revolving members always come across as being more than a bit inscrutable: weird lyrics definitely, the art-school influences that was always going on in the background, the band's dalliances with a kind of post-rock guitar soundchecking that comes at the listener at all angles, the combined effect sometimes sounding not unlike some fucked-up jazz troupe trapped in a time warp. Challenging, indeed, but very rewarding if you enjoy music that don't quite bother to start making sense.

and the way it is, I can leave it all

2009-01-24T18:41:00.005+08:00

I suppose the fuckest thing about Mogwai and their gig last night came when four songs into their set, they turned in a rendition of "Cody" that I must say I was completely unprepared for. Who would have thought that a bit of twinkly post-rock gone dark, companioned with nondescript singing, would be so accommodating to twinges of nostalgia? Indulge me if you will, but Come On Die Young happened some ten years ago, alright. Cut to the present and the slow wonder of this song performed on stage, everything about its monochromatic melodic glory, the way Stuart Braithwaite warble through the words ("old songs stay 'til the end, sad songs remind me of friends") -- while my outlook today is a world away from how I felt about numerous things ten years ago, from broken dream to dream this song has ranged, "Cody" still left me shaken. Besides this surprise inclusion of "Cody" on Mogwai's setlist, the only other acceptable expanation that I can come out with for why I enjoyed this performance so much more than the last time the band showed up in town (in 2006) was that the newer song materials the band was now playing were much stronger too. The better parts of their most recent album The Hawk Is Howling come closest to echoing the restrained sonic fury of Come On Die Young, as in tracks like "I Love You, I'm Going To Blow Up Your School", "Local Authority" and "Scotland's Shame" unfold in well-oiled motion and evolve into something much more deeply involving at their own pace. Appropriate or not, after an evening of music that called attention to the band's less well-advertised subtleties, Mogwai ended their two-hour set by shuffling off full gorge into viking berserker mode with a "Like Herod"/"Batcat" encore, the wavves of louder-than-you'd-imagine feedback abuse still sounding toxic, still brutally uplifting.

mixtape (january 09)

2009-01-17T18:43:00.006+08:00

Not a neutral discourse
Handsome Furs "I'm Confused"
David Bowie "TVC 15"
Tom Ze "Quero Sambal Meu Bem"
Filastine "Palmares"
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin "La Chanson De Slogan"
The Knife "Neverland"
Animal Collective "Peacebone"
Asobi Seksu "Breathe Into Glass"
Battles "Tij"
Os Mutantes "Dia 36"
Antony & The Johnsons "Shake That Devil"
Dizzy Gillespie "Upper Manhattan Medical Group"
Stereolab "Cellulose Sunshine"
Super Furry Animals "Y Teimlad"
Mogwai "Kings Meadow"

ps: perhaps the track that is closest to my heart for a long time now is "upper manhattan medical group", as performed here by a dizzy gillespie band, always been my favorite composition by billy strayhorn, duke ellington's longtime creative foil ("blood count" probably my second favorite of strayhorn's, love stan getz's rendition).

Macunaíma

2009-01-15T22:57:00.005+08:00

I don't know too much about Brazilian filmmaker Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's best known work Macunaíma (1969) before watching it; what an amazing feat this film is. Though based on a 1928 novel by Mario de Andrade that is widely acknowledged as an avant-garde classic, a prototype of magic realism, the celluloid version of Macunaíma benefits plenty from the director's sixties-infused update (apparently there are many areas where the two narratives differ),the film a full flowering of anarchic black humor, unrelenting satire, cannibalism, basically a load of demented folk legends melded with biting political protest (obvious in the references made to the 1964 military coup in Brazil). Plus the fact that Macunaíma is so ridiculously funny, haven't laughed so hard at the cinemas for a long while.