Let's rumble

I should know by now that you don't introduce Mark E. Smith; you just stand aside and watch the damage. Who'd have thought his vitriol would have such longevity? Here's one from the early days. Putting on a record by the Fall is like getting struck by lightning. There really is no useful preparation before or commentary after. Aside from its nervy thrill, this song comes uncomfortably close to my working life.

The Fall - Rowche Rumble

I'm the only one who ever set you free

I have this hare-brained scheme that has been gaining steam in my imagination. It continues to evolve and with every new detail, I become more obsessed. Maybe this can be real? OK I’ll lay it out for you. I’m gonna get a storefront in my neighborhood (I’ve already found a suitable piece of real state.) In front I’ll have things for sale, maybe really good records, yummy bites, books—cool stuff like that. Though people can just hang out if they want without even buying anything. In the back, I will build a studio! And people from the neighborhood, high school kids, heady vagrants, etc can come in and cut some tunes, for a nominal fee. Or maybe it will be free, and then the operation can be a nonprofit, but I will retain the masters and release compilations of the best material, sales of which will benefit the establishment. Maybe I’ll get a lacquer cutter and record straight to vinyl! Maybe there will be an in-house Wrecking Crew of musicians to back up lone songwriters. I’m not sure; I haven’t worked out all the details yet. But I really think this could work.

I imagine that the songs recorded there will sound sort of like today’s track, “Home Before Dark.” Not literally—this song, recorded in 1967, is very much of its time—but spiritually. Although the singer and artist to whom it’s credited, Nora Guthrie (daughter of Woody, sister of Arlo), is from an industry family, she is clearly not a professional singer. According to my research, it was recorded when she was 17 and dating an aspiring composer of same age. (I hope he wasn’t using her for her name!) Neither the relationship nor the pair's musical aspirations bore further fruit beyond this single. The studio wanted another, but Nora was too embarrassed from the results of the first, and he was going off to college, where he got caught up in the SDS, and well, you know how these things go. But they'll always have this beautiful snapshot of their teenage love and musical dreams. I think the song is pretty perfect, for all its silly naivete. It has romantic strings! Brazilian percussion rhythms! Baroque harp plucking! Killer bass tone! Is that a French horn I hear?? A classic pop bridge. It’s very arranged. Sounds like someone had something to prove. The lyrics and vocal interpretation thereof are so treacly that they come full-circle and I believe every word. Actually, I’m not sure if that’s sweetness I hear in Nora’s voice. I recognize that intonation—she actually sounds terrified. You can’t make this stuff up.

Nora Guthrie - "Home Before Dark"

Do androids dream of Songblague posts?

Flynn's riff about the musical implications of getting older has me a little bit anxious. Well, the nice thing about being a replicant is that you probably won't ever have that problem. And there's my awkward segue to today's track. Any snarky comments about the Vangelis cheese factor and the Songblague police will retire your punk ass.

As a sidenote, why has no one introduced the Blade Runner line of shaving razors?

Vangelis - Blade Runner (End Titles)

One look at you

Various springtime moments necessitate a certain sound, one that you assumed you would outgrow eventually but never quite did. It's airy and it's electronic and it's mumble-driven, and it sort of makes you want to hold someone's hand (a feeling you assumed you would outgrow eventually, but never quite did.)

The Radio Dept have been filling this seasonal void since 1995, which is forever in indie-pop terms and begins to beg larger questions, all of which plague Ely: "Does youth culture speak to us anymore?" he asks. "Do we still speak for it?"

This is code for "we're getting older." The old folks on the scene are still making music designed to make us feel young, to want to hold hands, and the young ones are making music that makes us miss the old music. This song is comfortably ensconced in that neverending nostalgia-loop, which will probably make you feel uncomfortable when you listen to it.

The Radio Dept - Heaven's on Fire

American gothic

Sunday evening on the Northeast Corridor line back home. Foggy gray landscape. The view steadily turns opaque. Rain comes down like salt from a shaker. Powerlines. Ominous hum of regular motion between stations. Sudden lightning. An equally sudden train thunders by on the parallel track. This song.

Carla Bozulich - Evangelista I

It's gonna be. Alright.

Why do we let songs get away with endless refrains about how everything's gonna be alright? It usually seems so untrue as to border on delusional or criminally manipulative. And yet, our collective faith in the validity of that sentiment lends it a power that makes it true in some weird, involuntary—but ultimately very real—sense. Things will be what they are. If bending our minds to believe that this state of things is 'alright' makes life easier, well then, alright, I guess. The hoax goes down a lot easier when you've got the kind of groove that Roger Troutman's boys have going here.

Zapp - Be Alright

What's on your mind

May as well follow yesterday's somber elegance with a blast of emotionally malformed crunch pop. I used to crank this up to 10 in high school. I still love how the bass sounds like it's tearing out its own eyeballs. Almost as much as I love this album cover.

Sebadoh - Magnet's Coil

Possible futures

I took piano lessons as a kid. If I had my life to do over, I would never have stopped. But kids never think about closing off life's paths when they do what they do. Maybe that's a good thing. Who would want a world of little neurotics afraid to make all of the great and tiny decisions that amount to growing up?

Having decided that drums were my fate, the piano went neglected, even as I found myself plinking away on bandmates' instruments and developing a karaoke addiction. Now that I'm in possession of a neat little keyboard, those instincts are coming back into my fingers. It's halting and awkward, but ideas are taking shape. This song makes me think of what I'd probably be making if I'd never started tapping on my lampshade with chopsticks.

Hauschka - Heimat

Pedals a'flowerin'

This is a last minute fill-in. I'm in the mood for something incongruous to the day—an autumnal, instrumental, vintage 4AD brood job. Go listen to this and fill up your journals with poetic musings, betches.

Dif Juz - No Motion

Saturday night captains

I went to see a screening of the Yacht Rock web series at the Bell House on Saturday. I am not ashamed to admit that I remain oddly and totally into the stuff that gets collected under that inspired moniker (misleading as it often is). So it was cool that Ambrosia was also on the bill, celebrating their 40th anniversary, though a quick look at their discography suggests that they've been laying low for about the last 25 of them. Hipsters were out in abundance, dressed in floral Caribbean shirts and captain hats. But about 2 songs into Ambrosia's set, it was clear that this was to be no festival of Loggins/Messina beardiness.

They're the kind of band that no one really remembers (myself included), but whose music will have gotten into the ears of anyone who's spent quality time in waiting rooms. Old farts or not, they brought the goods—progging it up and then smoothing it out with heavenly harmonies that sounded like a chorus of Michael McDonalds hiding backstage. They knew their audience's game but were jaunty enough to elide the "so uncool it's cool" paradigm that the venue suggested. They just worked it like smiling pros. Shit was tight, and joyous love was everywhere. I think I got some of it on me.

Here's a jam that inches a little onto Steely Dan's turf. Which is no crime in Songblague's legal code.

Ambrosia - If Heaven Could Find Me

Going rogue wave

I made a pact with indie rock a long time ago. I will overlook shitty/mumbled/pointlessly obscure lyrics as long as the music is awesome enough to contain my attention and the singer's voice isn't too irritating. It's working out pretty well. And here's a good example. Thumbs up on the hooks and the lead vocal that falls nicely within my singalong range.

Rogue Wave - Are You On My Side

Tolerance and tea

A belated welcome to Ariella, newest member of Team Songblague, who chose to zing me with her debut yesterday. In the past, I'd view her song choice as an act of war, but now it feels more like an inoculation. Or a reminder that it's not always so bad to have things around that you instinctively bristle at. Kinda like having your crazy uncle come live in your house for a while. One day you discover a weird mutual love of peanut butter ice cream or whatever. Takes diff'rent strokes to move the world. All that jazz.

Which gets me thinking about tolerance. And its limits. For example, I like tea—its many varieties, the texture of the leaves, the rituals around prepping and drinking it. Even the word itself - soft and homey. Your mouth ends in a smile when you say it. But it's tax day and that smile is failing me because I keep seeing news items about the tea party douchebags, the very existence of whom pisses me off exponentially. Beyond the obvious fact that it's bad to have armed, paranoid wackos pretending to be a legitimate political reality, I hate the hijacking of the word. Today I'm doing my small part for the cause of its reclamation. The one's damn catchy, and now I'm thinking about summer songs.

Time and Love - Tea For Two

Let's get some tie-dye up in this piece

I started getting along with the proprietor of this blog a lot better once I decided to strike all mention of the Grateful Dead from our conversations. They are a lightning rod of a band, and by that I don't mean that they were ELECTRIC, although they were! Instead, I mean divisive. (This is what "lightning rod" means, right?) If I tell you I like the Grateful Dead you'll probably assume that there's a good chance I'm high right this second. I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.

When I think of primal, late '60s psychedelic light show at the Fillmore West-era Dead, the song "Dark Star" comes to mind quickly. In concert, it was one of their sprawling, long-ass exploratory numbers often exceeding 30 minutes in length. The version on Live/Dead, often hailed by heads as the definitive version is 23 minutes, for example. To know the song and its live context and then later discover its initial beginning as a 7" 2 minute-long single is a revelation. They certainly had many other hit-friendly tunes at the time when this was recorded in 1968 that would have been more amenable to the single format. The decision to record "Dark Star" this way--fast, as though the tape had been sped-up; short; bathed in weird noises swooping in and out of the mix; using instruments such as organ and sitar(?) like sound effects; with Silver Apples-like vocals that emerge and then get reburied in echo, with a brief yet startlingly effective noise coda at the end--goes a long way to highlight the band's more disciplined experimental inclinations. This is the Grateful Dead who were at the forefront of what was going on in American avant-garde recording and music-making at the time, and throughout their career--one of the first to use ring modulation in recordings, for example, or whose members were hanging out with Steve Reich and Terry Riley at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Dark Star is also the perfect song to listen to while enjoying a great drug trip. As such, if the 30 minute 2-13-70 version were a multi-day peyote-fuelled vision quest, let this be your DMT, your "business man's trip"-- 2 minutes of mutilayered, textured psychedelia, bursting forth and then receding into the nightfall of ashes, for the busy psychonaut.

Dark Star

Looking for a revolution

Today's post, I warned Ely, was likely going to be a manifesto.

Most workdays are fueled by tiny bursts of caffeine and larger battles with self-motivation. For me, I'm powered in part by a deep love for what I do and in part by deep resentment about the myriad levels of total apathy involved in what I do. As such, I want to write fist-waving paragraphs on the nature of this beast and what, if anything, one can do to help right the situation.

And then it keeps me at work through seven-thirty and by the time I roll home, my brain is mostly turned off, and the manifestos are laid aside. Here, though, are a few things I would like to say about Against Me!

Against Me! is a band with the kind of fans who feel passionate about their older work and very angry about their newer work, a band who has the kind of label that gets the album leaked months before street date but doesn't pull together a digital strategy or preorder backup plan to help deal with it effectively, and also a band who actually manages to sing really compelling songs about digital strategy, about anger, and about throwing in the towel all together. If I were them, I'd feel defeated, but they just keep making records.

Some people would probably say similar things about me. There's a line in this song that probably explains why we do it at all, and it goes like this: "Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?"

Here is a link to the digital EP preceding the June album that contains this song.

Against Me! - I Was a Teenage Anarchist

Boss Swede

If you're like me, you've noticed a frustrating divide between music you acquired pre- and post- digital conversion. I was a pretty late ipod adopter, but I quickly filled my 80-gig capacity. And since I'm lazy about shaking it up, a whole galaxy of great albums that didn't get in when the getting was good now just gets short shrift.

The Cardigans' First Band On The Moon is one such album. I dug it out recently and ended up digging the whole damn thing. Pretty dynamite start to finish, with cool production quirks which—amazingly for a '90s record—still sound good. This is the album's closer and it has the bigness of outro songs on classic '70s records. A song of utter hopelessness matched with a triumphant flute melody. I don't think anyone pulls that trick off better.

The Cardigans - Choke

Listen listen

Here's another grower. Good in the background or up close. Your 10 minutes of attention will be rewarded with a spiritual growth spurt. Next time you think you're in a rut, consider that these are the same dudes who recorded this a few short years earlier.

Talk Talk - After The Flood

Faking teenage places

What is it they say...the older you get, the more you get compelled to rock out at random moments. Is it like the twitch of a phantom limb? Some nerve that suddenly got nostalgic? Funny, because I didn't spend too much time acting the garage/punk rocker in my youth, and yet sometimes I feel a very real nostalgia for music that didn't quite belong to me. Let me turn up my hearing aid now.

The Exploding Hearts - Making Teenage Faces

The few, the proud, the marine research

What do you get for having a stupid band name? An equally stupid reference to the US marines' tagline, which is about the furthest thing from the English tweelings of today's track. So it goes.

I have to say I never had a period of serious immersion in this kind of tidy/catchy indie rock. Bands like this never really clustered together on my stereo, and yet they consistently crop up one at a time along my listening landscape—Belle & Sebastian during the fall semester of my junior year, the Field Mice three springs ago, Marine Research during the very cold winter of 2002. I'm not sure why I continue to have a soft spot for this kind of stuff when I'm always so compelled to caricature it. Catchiness conquers all, I suppose.

Marine Research - Venn Diagram

We could start tonight

I'm obsessed with beginnings - and, well, to be honest, I'm obsessed with endings too. Somewhere in between those two, you get piles of songs about beginnings and endings and how the getting to either one can be really quite complicated.

Matt Pond PA is a band that excels at these kinds of songs, and they provide a rich sense of seasonality alongside it. Seasons are just beginnings and endings with temperatures, and songs sound better depending on those conditions. It is fitting that as we really swing into the craziness of spring and its fervent desire for new beginnings, MPPA has a new album out and the first released track is called "Starting."

I have a friend whose advice regarding all of my romantic relationships is "well, this will end badly." To that, I say, thank god, because otherwise we'd never have beginnings, and without beginnings we'd never have Matt Pond PA records.

Matt Pond Pa - Starting

Beach by proxy

The house where I grew up is a 15 minute walk to the Atlantic Ocean and a 10 minute drive to the finest pawn shops in Atlantic City. I went down for a visit this weekend. But sadly, a plumbing emergency was the closest I got to any great body of water. So in lieu of actual beach time, here's a song to approximate the confluence of sand and languishing. It also sports one of my favorite album covers. I am prepared to explain this at length, if you'd like. Happy Monday!

Marcos Valle - Tira a Mão

Brazil nuts

The sun is out, the layers are coming off, the molecules are speeding up. Whenever Spring begins in earnest, I notice a spike in the weirdness quotient around town. Maybe it's all the energy finding undirected expression after breaking loose from the cold. Here's a jacked-up nugget of Brazilian proggy funk to usher in the restless time of year.

Mário Garcia - A Graça

Head massage

So there I was yesterday on the massage table—hypnotic low light, oils and scents, my head in the little hoop. A half hour of absolute physical peace, even the parts where my muscles were being rolled flat. It would've been perfect except for the hokey, faux ethnic sounds piping in from the little ipod stereo. With so much great ambient music in the world, why shortchange the ears when the rest of the body is having such deep attention lavished upon it? I would've been happy with this exquisite tune on repeat.

Susumu Yokota - Tobiume