skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It's said that sunrises and sunsets are often indistinguishable. I guess that depends on the kind of schedule you keep. When I do see the sun come up, it's either a grumpy early call or I've had a night that doesn't lend itself to a serene melting away. Which make this one a curious title. I can absolutely put my mind in a place where the sunset feels like a blissful passage. But almost never does the morning arrive with such calm. Maybe I need to work on that. As for the hint of moaning at 4:07, well, hey, to each his own. Meanwhile, hope this helps put a mellowness in your day.
I often wonder how possible it is to truly live off the grid. And what parts of common culture you would allow yourself to bring along. The skinny on Eden Ahbez (born George Alexander Aberle, Brooklyn 1908) is that he was a proto-hippie LA denizen and songwriter who wore robes, slept outside, and lived on almost no money. Apparently, he wrote Nat King Cole's hit "Nature Boy" while living under the Hollywood sign, and found a way to be pretty productive craftsman over the years.
Which makes me wonder how much that kind of Venn diagram of worlds one could pull off today. Can you write pop tunes and be cut off from the culture that laps up pop tunes? At a certain point, would you start to see your own detachment as a form of novelty or publicity?
This exotica-tinged tune sheds no light on any of this and generally smacks of beatnik bullshit, but I am fully loving the atmosphere it perpetrates.
I'm not a big fan of spotlighting standards, but then this one came on the stereo on a recent cold evening while I was quietly reading at home, and suddenly, it was blammo! Living room dance party featuring myself and my wife, who is more than forgiving/amused about my spontaneous dance moves. Isn't that what jazz is all about, after all?
I wish The American Analog Set got more props for the cover art for their Know By Heart album. Indie rock conventions are easily mocked (just like those of pop stars), but I have a soft spot for exuding all the sentimental mushiness without the vocal trills and musical swells. That blank-faced, stare-at-the-ground veneer barely covers the pounding heart behind it, which gives even the laziest-sounding moments a real tension. And a quiet poignancy to this cover art that still gets me. Enough to warrant a 2-fer Tuesday from that modest-seeming album.
You close out the workweek, head home, put on your velour shirt with the giant collar, comb your hair in front of the mirror, and commence to hit the town with your buddies. Who would've guessed that mere hours later you'd be passed out in the back of an El Camino with a slowly deflating inflatable date and wearing nothing but a pair of platform shoes and Gene Simmons makeup? Shouldn't have gotten yourself warmed up to the sound of this tune.
My desire to remain in the rarefied air of the Cocteau Twins' lushness continues unabated. I'm not sure what it says about me that they come calling just about any time I put my headphones on these days. But speaking of air, a co-worker once told me that they were his go-to soundtrack for drifting out of consciousness on flights. My recent jaunt to San Francisco allowed me to put this to the test. The result — a distinct lack of zoning out. Which I interpret to mean that my ears are so keyed in to those guitar textures and alien vocal vibrations that true rest is not possible. It's not a tense kind of attention they command. Instead, I want to curl myself around their songs and rock back and forth. I doubt I'm alone there.
Some instruments are just blessed/cursed with being tied to physical places. Pedal steel guitar, for instance. Almost impossible to not evoke dusty sunsets and big open vistas, etc. Bruce Kaphan made a go of taking it into sad bastard indie rock territory, but even he had to go put on his metaphorical cowboy hat when it came time to make a solo record. Which is fine by me. I'm happy to enjoy and settle into a thousand yard stare.
Just when I think Vermont has little to offer the musical world but jam bands on skis, it turns out Brattleboro has a happening little freakout scene. I've been digging into the wild cartoon soundworld of Blanche Blanche Blanche, and I suspect my mind will be the weirder for it. With 10 or so albums blasted out in the last couple years, I truly admire their work ethic, nearly as much as I do the zigzag logic of the songs themselves. Ariel Pink is a natural touchstone for these guys, but the aforementioned rustic homeland lends them a friendly, non-menacing air. Here are a couple snapshots of the landscapes they inhabit.
Watching the Super Bowl gives me a weirder and weirder sense of the state of life in America. As always, I'm entertained. And as always, I vacillate between being eventually numbed and wanting more violence of all possible kinds (also, wanting more actual ideas and less celebrity distractions in the ads). And since I rarely care who wins, I'm free to imagine what my own personal victory music might sound like. Probably something like this, at least, for the few seconds of my touchdown dance.
When Dungen burst onto the scene (in the US at least), frontman Gustav Ejstes seemed a man out of time. Or at least one so devoted to the range of vintage psychedelic practices that one would think he had spent his whole life in a very particular academy. Since we pretty much live an environment of neighboring nostalgia bubbles, there's no point anymore in picking at people for lack of originality. Given that, I was totally sold on the songwriting and presentation, which was as faithful to Ejstes's notion of the ideal late '60s as it is a reminder that the music was never as tight as he imagines it. I'm glad his imagination keeps going, album after album. The work is a real comfort to me, especially now as I struggle with what seems like trench warfare against this cold that is brutalizing my nose and throat.
