Whiskey Pie

Weekly Whiskey Episode 41

2012-02-01T16:58:00.002-05:00

The triumphant(?) return of Weekly Whiskey (after only one week off, give a break!) sees us discussing changes to Whiskey Pie, the last entry in our 2007 retrospective series, and then rambling about Skyrim for awhile. Also starring intermittent beer burps.

Hobo With A Shotgun

2012-01-30T22:45:00.000-05:00

There are some movies which transcend normal ratings of 'good' or 'bad' in the same way that, say, the sugary sweet pop music of bands like Hanson and 1910 Fruitgum Company transcend such metrics. In the case of something like Hobo With A Shotgun, I think it transcends any kind of critical scores simply because it quite literally is-what-it-is: a movie about a hobo with a shotgun. The premise alone is enough to make you want to watch it, and if you do, you know what you're getting into.

A movie made because someone won a trailer contest for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double-movie, Hobo With A Shotgun is an exploitation film through-and-through. I will give this movie genuine thinking man's/art film credit for the overly saturated Technicolor style and also for taking its sweet time to get the titular weapon into the titular character's hands, and all along both playing to and against type, as often bowing to cliches and tradition as it does upsetting them. There's a scene where the hobo wants to buy a lawnmower for $49.95 from a pawn shop, and we see a rack of shotguns on the wall behind him for the same price...but he doesn't end up buying either. Well, kind of.

This film's particular genius lies not in the dialogue, which in all fairness will offer a couple of in-joke gems for you and your friends who watch it with you ("Welcome to fuck town!" is my pick of the litter), but in how creative it is with its violence. At a certain point in films like Tokyo Gore Police and, I don't know, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the violence becomes so over the top as if to be almost ballet-esque. Hobo offers up some gems, such as a scene where one evil dude plays 'Disco Inferno' while his even-more-evil brother uses a flamethrower to immolate a schoolbus from the inside, children and all. Cleverly, this image wraps back around when (spoiler!) said evil child-murderer gets his (spoiler!) package shot off by the titular hobo and presumably bleeds to death in a phone booth, the school bus representative of death and/or hell as it appears from nowhere to take him away.

There's also a part near the end where a chick stabs a dude with the broken off bone sticking out of her arm...yeah.

All that said, my friend Richard, who suggested we watch it, admitted later if he was watching it alone he would've given up 1/3 of the way through. I don't really know what that says about him or this movie. I said earlier that 'good' or 'bad' don't apply, and I think that's true. Hobo With A Shotgun is certainly an entertaining movie, and I doubt that anything you'll see, outside of Tarantino or Rodriguez's Grindhouse contributions, ends as seemingly abruptly and borderline-carelessly as this film. Imagine if Terminator or Aliens ended right after the big evil baddie was finally offed, with no epilogue, and you've got the right idea.

But damn if it wasn't entertaining, at least to me. Richard may've fallen asleep off and on during it, but:

1) he was in the process of moving that weekend and we were both pretty tired

2) he and I are both creaking up on 30 and thus becoming old men who fall asleep at 11, even on Fridays

3) he didn't enjoy it much, as I just got done saying, so perhaps for some people sleep is preferable to watching Rutger Hauer get stabbed by ice skates (did I mention this film is a Canadian production? and has a brief appearance by Ricky from Trailer Park Boys as well as some obvious accents?) or chew on glass to make money from a sadistic cameraman who I assume is a satirical reference to the deplorable but-I-bet-at-least-one-person-you-know-has-seen-them Bumfights videos.

I want to close by saying that this movie is as transformative for Rutger Hauer as any of his more critically respected roles. I would never have known it was the guy from Blade Runner if I hadn't accidentally confused him with Dolph Lundgren for the first 40 minutes and looked up the movie on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn't crazy. No, I wasn't crazy, just confused.

Actually, that might be a a better way to end this, and a good way to sum up my reaction to the movie: I wasn't crazy about it, but I was certainly confused. I more than a few times laughed out loud at the sheer spectacle and absurdity of it all, never knowing where it was going to go next. At least it was an entertaining kind of confusion, like when you first see Commando and can't decide if it's the cheesiest 80s action flick ever or the greatest. Well, can't it be both?

Scott Walker's Nite Flights/Climate Of Hunter

2012-01-28T14:57:00.001-05:00

Scott Walker is one of those cult artists you discover via one means or another and afterward you wonder why he's only a cult artist. Assuming you aren't aware of him and you have Netflix, you can't do much better than watching the documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man as an introduction to his music. Even if you don't end up digging his stuff it's still a fascinating story of a man whose career saw him moving between pop stardom, increasingly experimental baroque/orchestral vocal pop music, sellout-ish slum work that he still won't allow to be re-printed, and finally, over a period of 28 years, producing one album per decade that were among the most unique, arguably innovative, and experimental records of their (or any) era.

Well, that's not technically true. If I'm going to count the 70s I have to cheat a bit, since he didn't really release an album then. Rather he contributed four tracks to the last album by The Walker Brothers. Since his material is so unlike the rest of the album's songs, it's almost best to consider his material an EP and listen to it as such. But I digress.

Despite its 1978 release, Nite Flights is predictive of certain aesthetic trends in 80s pop music, by which I mean, the digital sounding instruments and distinctly 80s album cover (which is vaguely Peter Gabriel-esque thanks to being designed by the famous Hipgnosis team). In some sense you can posit it as existing in the same school as 70s art/experimental pop by the likes of Brian Eno and David Bowie. Both appear in the 30 Century Man documentary discussing Nite Flights and the latter went so far as to cover the title track. Walker was likely influenced by them as well, since the first song, 'Shutout', bears a searing guitar part highly reminiscent of Robert Fripp's playing on Eno's 70s solo albums. This is the most 'normal' of his Nite Flights tracks though Walker's oddly processed vocals, sounding half robotic and half human, keep things from being a bit too predictable.

'Fat Mama Kick' is where we first hear what Walker had been keeping inside all those years after the commercial failure of his last genuinely artistic record, Scott 4. It's also the most obvious bridge/jumping-off-point from this album to the rest of his career, pointing pretty clearly to his next release, Climate Of Hunter. It may not sound as timeless as his other beloved work, bearing obvious 80s sounding elements, but the oblique lyrics and at-the-time shocking dissonance of the other sonic elements make this quite unlike any other 70s/80s music out there. Plus that weird burbling keyboard line makes me smile for some reason.

Though as accessible as 'Shutout', the title track has such hypnotic delivery of such impenetrable-but-sparse lyrics that it seems like Walker might have used William Burrough's cut-up technique to randomly jumble words and phrases together into a seemingly coherent whole despite the randomness. Well, as they say, the human mind is designed to look for patterns and order in all things, and 'Nite Flights' is thus an eternal puzzle. I'm sure it means something; it makes me feel something when I hear this song but I sure couldn't explain what that is. As Walker's music becomes more abstract and hard to define, it also becomes more personal and difficult to discuss. You really just need to go to YouTube and listen to these songs.

Especially since up next is 'The Electrician', which quite humorously was released as a single(!). I was so astounded by this song when it came up in the 30 Century Man documentary that I thought I might've accidentally fast-forwarded past something. Seemingly a few minutes before, they were talking about the Walker Brothers reunion in the 70s and how Walker was at a low point artistically. And then...well here's the lyrics that floored me:
he's
drilling thru
the SPIRITUS SANCTUS
tonight
thru
the dark hip falls
screaming
OH YOU MAMBOS
kill me
and
kill me
and
kill me
if i
jerk - the handle
you'll die
in your dreams
if i
jerk - the handle
jerk - the handle
you'll
thrill me
and
thrill me
and
thrill me

Keep in mind that this is all set to a backing of abrasive repetitive strings that give way to a soaring orchestral melody that harkens back to his 'classic' late 60s records. We can now see this as the last time he would do this sort of music, and I have to wonder if it was his way of either bidding farewell to it or throwing the audience a bone for making it through the desolate atmosphere which surrounds this orchestral section on either end. Those desolate atmospheres with abstract, stunning lyrics, oddly enough, don't really point to his next album, Climate Of Hunter, as they do his next albums after that, 1995's Tilt and 2006's The Drift.

Even at its most experimental, Climate Of Hunter is in many ways more accessible and 'pop' than his material on Nite Flights. Rather than the musical direction picking up from 'The Electrician', it's as though he picked up from 'Shutout' and 'Nite Flights' instead. Which could've produced a throughly brilliant work except that, oops, this record was made in the 1980s and thus has that hideous 80s production style and flat/digital drum sound that make me wince. Were it recorded immediately after Nite Flights or with a different record label, Climate Of Hunter would undoubtedly be more interesting. Walker's lyrics may be as brilliant as ever, but unfortunately, by and large Climate Of Hunter is one of those cases where something sounded cutting edge and weird upon its release but seems dated and flat when heard today.

Now, I did refer to this album in the first paragraph above as being one of "the most unique, arguably innovative, and experimental records of its (or any) era", and I still mean that. It doesn't mean it's a particularly great record, besides which, the state of creativity in 80s music, pop or otherwise, was so abysmal that it's still, at the very least, more interesting than most of its contemporaries. Keep in mind that in 1984 former creative contemporaries of Walker's had been all but subdued by the contentment and lack-of-ambition which infected many former innovators in their transition from the 70s to the 80s. In Bowie's case, he became one of the embodiments of 1980s vaguely danceable pop music (that said, ironically, I think 'Let's Dance' is the best song Bowie ever did). In Eno's case, he retreated entirely from his astonishing 70s art/experimental pop records into enjoyable-but-forgettable ambient albums and a flourishing career as producer. In Walker's case...well, he tries to have it both ways. I doubt any other album from the 80s has guest appearances from Billy Ocean and Mark Knopfler...and a free-jazz saxophonist (Evan Parker).

All of this is a long way of saying, Climate Of Hunter has aged poorly but not as poorly as other 80s music. In 2012, it's not enjoyable as pop music (as some of Bowie's 80s material is, say) and it's not weird/experimental enough (as Tom Wait's 80s material is, say) to qualify as anything other than a curio from a fucked up decade. Perhaps a better way of saying it would be, Climate Of Hunter sounds like other 80s music in the broad sense, but very little 80s music really sounds like it where it counts, in the details. It's a record you might listen to a couple times and file away, now having an idea of how he got from there (going further back to his 60s stuff) to here (his nightmare-like soundscapes from his more modern work).

An Important Announcement

2012-01-25T19:46:00.000-05:00

By now you've noticed that there was no Weekly Whiskey episode this week, and that in general, Whiskey Pie has been seeing progressively less and less content over the past few months. There are many reasons for both of these situations though I'll spare you all the very personal ones that don't relate to the blog or my writing. Feel free to invent your own, too. I'll get to the point of this announcement in a bit. Just allow me some reflecting and explaining where I'm coming from first. Oh, allow me to go ahead and say "no, I'm not shutting down Whiskey Pie." Though the notion did cross my mind a few times over the past couple weeks.

BORING NAVEL GAZING GOES HERE, SCROLL DOWN TO LAST PARAGRAPH FOR THE "TOO LONG, DIDN'T READ" VERSION

I'm tremendously proud of the work I've done on Whiskey Pie over the past four years. I know it's a cliche, but I can't believe it's really been that long. I started this in...2008? Really? It's still a little surreal to me to think I've been semi-consistently updating a blog for longer than I went to high school or college. It's not even so much the fact I've stuck with this blog for so long, it's that I can look back on 90% of the writing I've done for this blog and I'm still pleased with it. I had written about music for six years, off and on since high school, before starting this blog and I really don't think I managed to produce quality work on a regular basis until I was doing Whiskey Pie.

The irony is that I think since those wild days of high school/college papers and pre-Whiskey Pie were more fun, for lack of a better term. This is something that occurred to me when I was editing Annotated Whiskey: Collected Pie Volume 1 (available now from Amazon!), too, though at that point it felt like this was a positive change. Certainly my writing has become more polished and professional since starting Whiskey Pie, but it had also lost some of that spark of personality and "fun" in the bargain. My reviews now are perfectly fine. And that's the problem.

Well, that's two problems.

Problem one is that I don't want to be a review writer. I always thought of myself as a critic more than a reviewer, and I think my writing has become more formulaic and studious while all the "fun", personality, and criticism ends up in videos or my Essay stuff. I'm sick of putting scores at the bottom of my reviews and it's something I've wanted to get rid of for a long time. I want to be a critic, not someone doing to music what a meat inspector does when grading beef.

Problem two is that I don't ever want to be "perfectly fine" with my writing. I haven't been pushing myself or trying new things for far too long. I keep thinking back to the first version of my review for The Walkmen's Lisbon. I wrote a quick, rambling draft of it while very drunk one night and ended up scrapping that entire thing because I felt it was too personal and uninformative. I thought back to the shit I used to turn in to my editor at my college paper, and while it was a damn sight better than most of the writing in there, it was still the archetypal "angry young man who hates everything except weird/obscure music" kind of writing. I was never happy with my writing back then but it felt like so much more of a creative act with interesting results than it does now. The review I wrote of A Hundred Miles Off by The Walkmen was written under the same circumstances as my first attempt at Lisbon and I like it much more than the eventual polished Lisbon one because I wrote it to help explain my feelings at the time. It was as much a music review as it was self expression. But more importantly, I wrote it because of what the music made me think and feel. That was what I really wanted to express, not just that I was feeling confused and fucked up at the time.

I've been re-reading Lester Bangs as of late and it's got me to thinking about why his writing still resonates with me. It's ultimately because he's an amazing writer. Bangs could be writing about anything and it would still be good. He resonates with me not because he's a music nerd (he was) or that he's a better writer than 99% of the other music journalists/critics in history (he was). Rather it's because he put his passion and personality into his writing. I don't want to write like Lester Bangs, however, I want to write like Greg Lytle.

I don't know that Lester Bangs's reviews are especially useful to decide if you want to go buy Fun House by the Stooges, but then again, it's 2012 and you can go to YouTube and listen to damn near any song, ever, or download entire discographies of bands in an hour or so via torrents. I can inject more of my personality (or perhaps I should be using the more literary term, "voice" here) into my writing because I don't need to be a professor lecturing students about the latest Band Of Horses record. Anymore when it comes to music, the worst that can happen is you wasted three minutes listening to Adele on YouTube and deciding you'd rather stick with hardcore punk instead or some damn thing. I don't think the original version of my Lisbon review would've helped you understand what it sounds like or how it's different from their other records, but maybe it would in its own strange way. Also, those are things you can easily remedy on your own. Anyway, what I can do is give you my perspective on it, even if that ends up being a rambling piece that references how The Walkmen sound like The Band, though I've never actively listened to The Band, so The Walkmen sound more like my idea of what The Band sound like...but I digress.

I've been increasingly stressing myself out with Whiskey Pie, making myself feel bad because I don't update enough or that the Weekly Whiskey videos are always thrown together at the last minute. Yet in the midst of all this self-abuse it occurred to me that the videos felt more real and honest than my writing did. My videos look and sound like the work of someone who overcomes crippling self-doubt and apathy to talk out loud to a Macbook for 20ish minutes every week because that's what I'm driven to do. It's part of my passion (or my sickness, I suppose). I have to make videos where I talk about Frog Eyes and Animal Collective albums because...I have to. Since I live alone and have no pets, I must reach out to the Internet for therapy.

Yes, writing about music was a kind of catharsis for me, but it hasn't been for a long time. Especially over the past year, it's become more like an obligation or a chore. I found myself writing reviews about albums I normally would skip over only because I felt a kind of duty to put a score to something, not because I had anything I particularly wanted to say about said albums. Writing, or anyway writing like I have been, feels like a job to me, a job I increasingly put less time and energy into because I don't care much about the final product. I feel like I have all these artificial conceits and constraints I put on my writing for Whiskey Pie, and I don't need to. I could've said everything I had to say about the Wild Flag record from last year in two paragraphs but since it was a "review" with a score attached I had to come up with more to say.

I also often want to write about things that aren't music related yet I keep them off here because, hey man, Whiskey Pie is about music and music only, right? Well, it doesn't have to be. The blog may not be named after me, and it may originally have started with a second co-creator way back in 2008, but now Whiskey Pie should be thought of more like...the blog of Greg Lytle instead of a blog that I write for. I won't be writing some LiveJournal shit, though, so don't worry. Anyway...

Whiskey Pie is going to change. I'm not going to redesign the site because I can't be bothered, but everything else is going to change. Here's a handy list!

1) No more scores. I think the strict five star system is still the best bet if you must use a scoring system of some kind. But I don't have to, so I won't.

2) Content about other subjects! I did sometimes dally in videogames and movies in the past, but expect more of that and more other stuff, too.

3) I'm not going to differentiate between different styles of writing any more. I will still often be doing what read like reviews of albums, but sometimes I might just write about one particular aspect of an album, or one memory I associate with it, and so forth. I may write Essay-style pieces, or things in between a review and an Essay. One day it might be a couple paragraphs, the next it might be something super long about great albums to get drunk to.

4) Weekly Whiskey is sticking around but it will change, too. Since I broke my promise and took a week off before the planned break after episode 52, I guess I just need to bring changes to the show gradually as I've been doing.

5) I can't promise any kind of consistent update schedule. I will still be releasing a Weekly Whiskey video every week, but otherwise, I need to mentally free myself of worrying about what I'm writing and when it's good enough to finally post. If I'm feeling apathetic and uninspired, as I have been lately, I need to just let sleeping dogs lie, as it were. Whiskey Pie should be a...celebration, not an obligation.

6) I'm not going to try to "keep up" with new releases this year. By the end of 2011 it became apparent that I was reviewing albums out of sheer obligation because all the sites I read were doing reviews of them. So I did my reviews like punching a clock even if I didn't have a lot to say about them. Ironically enough, then, I had a lot I wanted to say about Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but I never did a review because my points were more like social criticism and open ended questions than the usual review writing I do. Without a score attached, though, I'd have posted a "review" in an instant. But I digress. I will still be doing a numbered "best of" list at the end of 2012, so never fear. Some traditions never die.

I guess that's it. Comment or email me if you wish. I will probably talk about this a bit more in the next Weekly Whiskey video.

-Greg Lytle

Weekly Whiskey Episode 40

2012-01-18T20:46:00.002-05:00

We celebrate turning 40...with a long, rambling bitch-and-rant sessions before talking about a couple 2007 albums.

Random Thing: Time Lapse Animal Collective Studio Video

2012-01-12T17:49:00.000-05:00

http://pitchfork.com/news/45080-watch-a-time-lapse-video-of-animal-collective-making-strawberry-jam/

Welcome to a new series I'm starting this year for Whiskey Pie, Random Thing. It's an easy and lazy name, I admit, but it's the only one that seems to apply. Basically, there are times when I want to write about something for this blog and it doesn't seem to fit into any of my other series, so...here we are. Random Thing is going to be just that: random things that spark my interest that I want to write about. They'll still usually be music related. Usually.

The video linked above is...well, you can go read the Pitchfork news story for that. I'll wait.

OK, back with me?

I think any hardcore, nerdy music fan eventually becomes fascinated with recording studios, specifically, recording sessions that take place in them. Yet "the studio" as a kind of myth is key to a lot of music nerd-ery, from people writing entire books about recording sessions for famous albums to people buying equipment off of eBay because it was supposedly used by such-and-such band on such-and-such song or record.

It's strange, then, that I've never been all that interested in studio stories. I don't really know what I thought Animal Collective looked like when they recorded because it never occurred to me to wonder about such a thing. Certainly I read up on albums and I enjoy studio stories but they aren't something I actively seek out or fantasize about.

All the same, this video is oddly fascinating to me, mostly because it's kind of shown me that it's somewhat useful to seek out those stories. I never would've thought Animal Collective recorded a lot by playing live in the same room, since their music sounds so precise and exact that I thought it must've been sculpted a sound at a time by one member at a time. This casts new light on Strawberry Jam and makes me reconsider it as a piece of music yet again. This video also helps explain why Animal Collective are such a great live band because recording this record must've been as long and grueling as the practice sessions normal bands go through before heading out on tour.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 39

2012-01-11T18:06:00.001-05:00

A sun-enhanced version of Weekly Whiskey this week. As promised in the video, I should return with consistent written content (after taking a two-week-ish break from writing) within the next couple days.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 38

2012-01-04T06:23:00.001-05:00

A casual, rambling episode thanks to holiday laze and a slow time of the year for new releases.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 37

2011-12-28T07:16:00.004-05:00

Sort of a short one this week, but something is better than nothing, no?

Weekly Whiskey Episode 36

2011-12-21T06:29:00.003-05:00

Drum roll, please...
(Note: I was having a bear of a time getting blip.tv to work last night, so if the video is still screwed up, I'll fix it when I get home from work today)

Weekly Whiskey Episode 35.5

2011-12-19T19:58:00.001-05:00

Part 1 of a look at the best albums of 2011.

Best Of 2011 Nominees & Review Links

2011-12-17T11:11:00.002-05:00

Look for a video AND a text post officially ranking these albums in a few days. For now, though, here's the alphabetical list of nominees and links to my reviews of each.

Atlas Sound- Parallax

Blackout Beach

Bon Iver- Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Cymbals Eat Guitars- Lenses Alien

Destroyer- Kaputt

Eleanor Friedberger- Last Summer

The Field- Looping State Of Mind

Fleet Foxes- Helplessness Blues

Grouper- A I A: Alien Observer/Dream Loss

James Blake- James Blake

Moonface- Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped

Panda Bear- Tomboy

Real Estate- Days

Tennis- Cape Dory

Thee Oh Sees- Carrion Crawler/The Dream

The War On Drugs- Slave Ambient

Wye Oak- Civilian

Yuck- Yuck

Weekly Whiskey Episode 35

2011-12-15T06:35:00.002-05:00

Apologies for the lateness of this post. Technically I did have this posted to blip.tv last night but didn't have time to put it here, too. Ah, holidays...and local experimental music shows that keep me out late on work nights!

Blackout Beach- Fuck Death

2011-12-12T17:35:00.002-05:00

Whether or not you're as a dedicatedfan of his as I am, I'm no longer sure if metrics of “good” or“bad” apply to Carey Mercer's solo project, Blackout Beach. LikeScott Walker's modern music, it has few precedents or points ofcomparison and so it's hard to tell how good or not it is. You likeit because it's successful at what it's trying or because you find itinteresting, and you sure aren't going to put it on at a party.Anyway, I don't think it's possible to like Blackout Beach on analbum-by-album basis; by now, you're either all in or all out, andFuck Death will do nothing tochange anyone's mind.

Mercer'slast two releases, Frog Eyes's Paul's Tomb: A Triumphand Blackout Beach's Skin Of Evil,felt like they belonged in the same headspace even if they soundedlittle alike. The same dark, intense atmosphere permeated both, manyof the same characters haunted both records, and they were madearound the same period of time. Naturally, Fuck Death hasmuch more in common with Skin Of Evil,though it does feels of-a-piece with both albums.

Still,this is not Skin Of Evil Part 2 evenif the constituent parts sound similar. Mercer is pushing himself tohis greatest extremes yet on Fuck Death:at more than 12 minutes, 'Drowning Pigs' is the longest track he'sever made. Similarly, there are very few traditional guitar sounds onFuck Death as Mercerdecided to focus on synthesizers and atmospherics. Perhaps he wasinspired by Spencer Krug's Moonface release from earlier this year,Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped,where Krug limited himself toprimitive organs and drum machines. Or maybe the influence was theother way around. But I digress.

In apress release for Fuck Death,Mercer took a few swipes at the chillwave scene in between explainingthat the record focuses on themes of war, beauty, and cowardice. Allof this, somehow, makes sense to me after listening to this album offand on for a few weeks. One could make the argument that BlackoutBeach is the opposite of chillwave, forcing the listener intodiscomforting thoughts and environments, like a Lars Von Trier film.After all, there are no hooks or melodies, or anyway, no intentionalones. The way 'Be Forewarned, The Night Has Come' peaks at the end is strangely addictive to these ears, though it's worth noting Igenuinely like the No New Yorkcompilation, so perhaps I'm skewed as to what is catchy andaddictive. As for the war, beauty, and cowardice...I assure you, it'sthere in the lyrics and the sounds, you just have to keep working atit.

Andyou'll have to trust me that the work is worth it, because despitethe extremes that it goes to, Fuck Death isperhaps the most successful Blackout Beach album yet. Which is my wayof saying, it's perhaps the bestBlackout Beach album yet. The lengthy, demanding 'Drowning Pigs'seems like pretentious, slapped together dreck until you've heard ita few times with patience in tow. To be honest, it has most of theweakest moments of Fuck Deathand lacks the visionary progression of previous Mercer epics, thoughit still manages to be interesting and also has, yes, some of thealbum's strongest moments. The bit around the 8:00 mark when he'ssinging over himself made me realize just how pretty and traditionalhis voice can sound when he wants it to.

Fuck Deathis desolate, lonely music and by extension, it only makes sense whenheard on headphones or perhaps curled up in front of the recordplayer with a cigarette and some wine. If any of the above sounds atall compelling, this is the album for you. If you don't alwaysqualify music in terms of 'good' or 'bad', but how 'interesting' or'successful' it is, Fuck Deathmay be for you, too.

5 Successful Stars Out Of 5

Atlas Sound- Parallax

2011-12-11T10:23:00.001-05:00

Though the album begins with theringing sound of feedback, Parallaxis actually the most accessible and pop oriented release of BradfordCox's career. However, this doesn't mean it's an easy or mainstreamrecord; it's all a matter of degrees. After all, the last Deerhunteralbum was the most accessible and pop oriented thing that group hasreleased to date but it's still weirder and more experimental thananything you'd hear on modern rock radio. In the same way, Parallaxmay lack the abrasive/off-putting elements of Cox's past work but itstill manages to be a meaty and eccentric record, moving from classicrock/retro influenced pop songs to dreamy/spacey daydreams withsurprising ease and coherency.

Asde-facto leader of Deerhunter and solo artist under the Atlas Soundmoniker, Cox has quietly become one of the finest songwriters of hisgeneration. A track like 'Angel Is Broken' would be the clearhighlight of most other artists' careers but it wouldn't even make mytop ten favorites by him. While even I still primarily think of himas the guy who uses lots of effects pedals and always has a druggybent to his music, the reality is that underneath all that adornment,his songs (at least most of them) boast memorable hooks and affectinglyrics. True, like all of Atlas Sound's recordings, Parallaxsounds best on a pair ofheadphones but this doesn't stop it from also being an album thatsounds great in the car or on a stereo. 'Te Amo' is packed withdetailed touches that are lost without said headphone listeningthough it still sports a strong enough hook to trap you on firstlisten when heard out loud.

AfterI was left a little cold by Logos,I began to wonder if Cox would continue getting more—for lack of abetter term—accessible in his two projects. And I don't mean“accessible” in a good way. True, the main failing of Logoswas its lack of focus and the spotlight stealing guests, but it alsodidn't help that the songs were sometimes too stripped down for theirown good. It gave one the impression Cox still wasn't sure what theAtlas Sound project would be. I began to think of it as his tinkeringspace for where he wanted to take Deerhunter. Parallax,then, represents both a return to spacier/dreamier pastures as wellas finally nailing down why Atlas Sound was a separate affair fromDeerhunter.

WhereasDeerhunter is more about a full rock band approach, stopping off totry out shoegazer, garage rock, and psych-pop, Atlas Sound ascodified on Parallaxtoes the line between full band, retro influenced pop/rock songs likethe title track and 'Mona Lisa' and thestaying-in-bed-and-spending-the-day-alone spacey ambient/pop of AtlasSound's first album. Not that they're always separated. Iteffectively mixes the two styles, too: the aforementioned 'Te Amo'may be one of the poppiest tracks but there's also all sorts oflittle flourishes and electronic sounds in the background.

Indeed,the last half of Parallaxspends more time drifting off into the ether than it does rockingout, giving the record a sense of progression that makes it a morecohesive listen than the scattershot Logos. The two part finale, 'Quark', is actually moreexperimental than anything on even Let The Blind Lead ThoseWho See But Cannot Feel, thefirst part a seven minute collage of clattering percussion, spaceylooped sounds, and, near the end, some pretty xylophone lines. Theshorter second part, meanwhile, blooms beautifully with the sort ofbright, gleaming acoustic guitar loops he often uses when playinglive as Atlas Sound (checkout this performance to see what I mean).

Parallaxisn't as special to me as the first album yet I would say that it's amore complete album, succeeding where Logosnearly-failed despite having a wider variety of sounds. It's temptingto call it his most accomplished work to date, but perhaps a betterway to think of it is that it's his most finessed and committed workto date. If Atlas Sound always sounded like a sideproject with songsleftover from Deerhunter recording sessions, made on a whim alone byCox, this should be the record that proves he is putting his all intoAtlas Sound, too.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Thee Oh Sees- Castlemania and Carrion Crawler/The Dream

2011-12-10T21:12:00.001-05:00

Castlemania

One of the nice things about prolificbands is that, if you don't like the record they put out this year,all you have to do is wait a year or so, and something new will comeout to scratch your itch. In the case of Thee Oh Sees in 2011,however, that wait was a matter of mere months: the recently releasedCarrion Crawler/The Dream trailedits predecessor by less than half a year. Anyway, let's talkabout the first one first, as is accepted custom.

Castlemaniasports a more stripped down, recorded-at-home sound than mostprevious Thee Oh Sees releases, so much so that it wouldn't surpriseme if John Dwyer recorded it mostly on his own. So, yeah, it soundsdifferent but that isn't the problem. The weakness of this release isinherent in its production and vibe, which trades the rollickingpsych-garage of what I associate with this band for a moresong/melody oriented style, Dwyer twisting his voice in aborderline-bratty, nasally direction and simultaneously playing moreacoustic guitar. This means the title track and 'Corprophagist' arekind of awesome but also kind of annoying, the mid-fi productionworking against the band for once. The more song oriented directionalso means that the focus is put more on Dwyer's vocals, which aren'treally up to these songs. Or anyway, don't always fit them well.

Andthe songs also kind of don't sound like Thee Oh Sees, which isn't agood or bad thing. Well, it's not a good or bad thing for youraverage band, but when you're as maddeningly prolific as Dwyer, itmakes you seem restless and indecisive. He certainly has never had aproblem putting out releases under other names, so why not this one?After all, the few stabs at full-band garage rock on Castlemaniasound like half-cooked leftovers from the preceding WarmSlime, almost like he wasthrowing us a bone to prove it really is an album from Thee Oh Seesand not solo stuff. All of this combined with the acoustic psych-poptracks like the excellent 'I Need Seed' and the weird stuff like'Idea For A Rubber Dog' means this album is a mess. Ultimately it'san enjoyable mess yet it's also exhausting and only partiallysatisfying.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Carrion Crawler/The Dream

Sincethis release was originally going to be two separate EPs, you mightassume it would be even more messy and all-over-the-place thanCastlemania. Yet withthe full band in tow, including a propulsive two drummer backbone,Carrion Crawler/The Dreamends up being one of the best records Thee Oh Sees have ever put out.

Withthe emphasis firmly back on recorded-live-style production andenergetic dynamics, this record may not sport as many memorablemelodies as Castlemaniabut the hooks and playing more than make up for it. Try listening to'Wrong Idea' or 'Chem-Farmer' and not wanting to get up and groove,or at the very least, nod your head along. Even though they'reprimarily instrumental, the pounding drums and choppy guitar linesmake these songs some of the most memorable on this album, not tomention some of the finest in the band's catalog to drive or rock outto.

It'sthose moments of a great rock band in full flight which defineCarrion Crawler/The Dream,from the way the band sort of jam their way into the opening of'Carrion Crawler' to Dwyer's scorched guitar solos and exclamatoryscreams to the way 'Robber Barons' sounds like Wooden Shjips mixedwith White Fence. Dwyer's Castlemania-stylevocal delivery is mostly absent on this record, though when it doesappear, as on the bass driven 'Crack In Your Eye', it works farbetter in this context.

Prolificacydoesn't always mean spreading yourself too thin (just ask RobertPollard), and if anything, Carrion Crawler/The Dreammakes the preceding Castlemaniaall the more interesting because of how different it is. As far asI'm concerned, this band (or even Dwyer alone) could put out tworecords a year and I'd never get bored because there's always someunique wrinkle going on, whether it's the lengthy title track of WarmSlime or the sparing use ofpsychedelic effects on tracks like 'You Will See This Dog Before YouDie.' Anyway, this is classic Thee Oh Sees all the way, and easilyone of the best things they've ever done.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 34

2011-12-06T22:27:00.001-05:00

A three segment banger, just in time (early?) for the Holidays.

Quasimoto- The Unseen

2011-12-05T18:08:00.001-05:00

To say that The Unseenis the weirdest hip hop album I've ever heard feels like I'msimultaneously damning it with faint praise as well as making astatement about hip hop in general. To be fair, The Unseenis weird, but that's not why it's great (though it is one of thereasons). And while it is the weirdest hip hop record I've heard,that's not really saying much, since I'm a dilettante when it comesto this stuff.

Still,I know my weird music, and I know some weird hip hop via MF DOOM. HisOperation: Doomsdaypreceded The Unseen bya year, and in many ways they feel like long lost cousins. ThatMadlib would work with DOOM on 2004's Madvillain project speaks tothis, sure, but it's also the eccentric style, beats, and samplesthat both used which make this connection stronger. Well, I mean, thetwo albums do sampleScooby Doo, so the connection is already strong...though I didn'tmean it that literally. It's more like how Madlib's stoned flow andhis I-just-inhaled-some-helium voice as alter ego Quasimoto are aperfect foil to DOOM's sleepy and congested style. But I digress.

WhileDoomsday may have ahigher percentage of classic hooks and beats, The Unseenis better overall. It's safe to say, you've never quite heard analbum, hip hop or otherwise, that sounds like this. 'Return Of TheLoop Digga' is like a miniature epic, stopping in a record store fora skit halfway through before the beat is switched up and the songcontinues. Sure, Madlib may also showcase some killer beats in a moretraditional way, like the addictive organ loop of 'Discipline 99 Pt.0', but The Unseen isdefined by tracks like 'Return Of The Loop Digga' and 'Come On Feet',the latter of which singlehandedly could justify hip hop to anignorant friend who thinks rap is all posturing, bragging, sex, andviolence (watch the video for even more oddness). No, Quasimoto isnot as outright weird as, say, Captain Beefheart, but like thatlegend's most out-there moments, no one else sounds like this,either.

Andmake no mistake: you will have to go through a slight learning curveto truly dig this record as you would with something by Beefheart.Again, the comparison is as direct as their eccentriclearn-to-love-it vocals, but I refer more to how you don't know quitewhat to make of this music right away. It's true that Madlib neverwas and never will be a gifted MC, so there isn't an immediate drawthere, but his style is a brilliant match for the eccentric, spacedout production. As with Trout Mask Replica,The Unseen will takesome patience to unlock. Especially because, like most hip hop albumsof its era, The Unseenis 10 to 15 minutes too long.

Holdon, though. Unlike most hip hop albums of its era, TheUnseen has made this sprawl intopart of the appeal. Where skits become annoying tracks you skip overby the third listen on, say, Ghostface Killah's SupremeClientele, Madlib as Quasimotoincorporates them into his songs. Similarly, where there's two orthree tracks you could drop from MF DOOM's Operation:Doomsday to make it a betterrecord, there is no obvious filler or weak material here.

The Unseenwas supposedly recorded over the course of a weeklong magicmushroom binge, and while that mayhelp explain some of the weirdness going on here, it can't accountfor the imagination and talent on display. From this 2000 release,Madlib would go on to become one of the most prolific and influentialproducers/musicians of his generation, and many of his projects wouldgain greater recognition and praise. Yet The Unseenis a perfect distillation of what makes him so compelling as well asbeing a perfect case for how much can still be done with hip hop.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Tom Waits- Bad As Me

2011-12-01T18:33:00.001-05:00

Like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits has, over thepast 20 years, grown into his aesthetic. Both artists spent yearsplaying at being eccentric old men with bruised, whiskey soakedvoices, mining pre-rock 'n roll music to craft their own uniqueblends of roadhouse R&B, country, folk, blues, and various ethnicidioms. Now they're both well into their 60s (actually, Dylan is 70!)and have, in a manner of speaking, become their personas, right downto long periods without new releases, meaning every record feels likean unexpected gift from a mercurial Grandfather or uncle you see onceevery few years. This is especially true of Waits, who spent thefirst half of the last decade releasing three well received studioalbums and an exhaustive (but essential) three CD set of odds n'sods, then mostly puttering around touring and doing this or that.

ThusBad As Me is his first properstudio album in seven years and still somehow sounds rushed andhalf-hearted. It's hard to imagine any fan of Waits being outrightdisappointed by this record—he has long since become too consistenta songwriter and too unique a performer to turn in a truly bad ordull album—but at the same time, it's hard to imagine anyone trulyloving it the way people love Rain Dogsor even Alice . Thisis music which, at its best, is only good because it reminds you ofthe past. Moreover, this is the sort of record which, at its worst,is only tolerable because you rememberthe past. If 'Pay Me' and 'Back In The Crowd' weren't by Tom Waits,they would be amusing on-the-nose Waits parodies...except that theywere recorded by him,and they're hollow shadows of what he's done before.

Bad As Memakes consistency into a weakness instead of a virtue just as itmakes succinct song lengths into an issue. Much of this album eithermimics or mines Waits's past yet as a whole these songs sound lessdistinct and unique because the production and overall aesthetic isperhaps the most consistent since his jazzy crooner/barflypre-Swordfishtrombonesera. Where 'Big In Japan' was a unique stomping opener to MuleVariations, its descendent here,'Bad As Me', feels like an obligatory rocking song sandwiched inbetween two slower, more mellow tracks. Were Waits not singing thesesongs, they'd be as boring as any cover band playing standards andhits on a Wednesday night in a Minneapolis biker/dive bar. It's hisperformances that save this album and even then he seems barelyinvested, as if he's going through the motions.

Waits has beenquoted as saying that this would be a collection of short, relativelystraightforward material, and perhaps that helps explain why allthese songs feel like first or second takes with unfinished, vaguearrangements. Waits has never been at his best when he's limitinghimself, and it turns out that self-enforced short songs, at least onthis record, were not going to help the subpar songwriting. If'Chicago' were slowed down a bit and allowed to breathe, it could'vebeen a classic track. Likewise, 'Face To The Highway' plays like asequel to the languid lament of 'Sins Of My Father' yet tries to doso in half the time.

It allcomes down to two things: 1) an artist can't release a safe recordlike this after a seven year break, and 2) you can't spin consistencyinto a virtue if the songwriting isn't top-of-your-game. As statedabove, it's hard to imagine anyone being disappointed by BadAs Me, but it's also hard toimagine anyone truly loving it.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 33

2011-11-30T18:46:00.001-05:00

A whole lot of 2007 talkin' this week, folks and folkesses.

The War On Drugs- Slave Ambient

2011-11-29T18:44:00.001-05:00

The War On Drugs, at least on SlaveAmbient, are a hard bandto describe. Certainly their ironic, post-modern name beliessomething about their music, but the actual constituent parts don'tmake sense when described. The singer has a 80s Tom Petty/Bob Dylanthing going on, and many of the songs take on a majestic/anthemicfeel which some describe as being like Bruce Springsteen thoughArcade Fire is probably a more apt (or at least more modern)comparison. However, this isall filtered through a shimmering, noodle-y, and guitar heavy sound.It's not so much ambient as spacey and not so much stoned as joyful.

Slave Ambientwould already be an unqualified success simply because it featuresone of the most distinctive sounding bands in recent memory pullingoff their songs with confidence far beyond their years. That it isalso one of the year's best albums further cements the sense that TheWar On Drugs have achieved something truly great here. This is arecord with a sense of expanse and emotional resonance, but in a wayopposite to similarly expansive/emotional albums like Modest Mouse'sThe Moon & Antarctica orThe Arcade Fire's The Suburbs.Where those records are exhausting and draining, akin to a therapysession or intense drug experience, Slave Ambientis like a couple hours spent in a coffee shop catching up with anex-girlfriend and putting the past to rest. You leave this albumfeeling rejuvenated, and that is something worth celebrating.

It'sworth emphasizing, too, that this is indeed an album and not aramshackle collection of songs. The instrumental interludes,sometimes separated onto distinct tracks like 'The Animator' and'City Reprise #12', give the album a flow and sprawl that make itfeel performedinstead of recorded.To be sure, individual songs work well on their own, too. 'BabyMissiles' genuinely sounds like 'Walk Of Life' by the Dire Straitssped up a bit and filtered through some chemicals, while six minutealbum centerpiece 'Your Love Is Calling My Name' is like a samplerplatter of everything this band does and does well.

Still,to paraphrase the old saying, it's the journey that matters and notthe stops along the way. SlaveAmbient ismost impressive when taken in all at once because it manages tosprawl and yet to be consistent; it manages to be spacey and weirdyet anthemic and immediate. This is an album's album: SlaveAmbientis one of the most complete and satisfying releases of 2011. Likemany of the best albums of this year, it's the sound of a band cominginto their own, delivering their first great record.

Emphasison the “first.”

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Woods- Sun and Shade

2011-11-28T19:25:00.001-05:00

As by far the most jam oriented andGrateful Dead influenced of their peers, Woods are also notable forbeing something like leaders of the current retro influencedpsychedelic/garage rock/freak folk scene of bands like Real Estate,White Fence, The Black Angels, Thee Oh Sees, Crystal Stilts, andothers. Between their singer's high pitched, nasally voice and apenchant for leaving in the weird stuff and loose improvisations ontheir studio albums, Woods have always struggled with the sameproblem the Dead used to: how to craft excellent studio records butleave in all the interesting bits and long song lengths from theirinspired live shows.

The band's last record, At EchoHouse, saw Woods deliver ashort, focused collection of memorable tunes. It's the band's mostaccessible and immediately enjoyable yet. Ironically, this also meansit's the least interesting. There's a homemade, scattershotbrilliance to even the band's debut, At Rear House,which works because of those odd left turns and rambling instrumentalparts. The band seem to have felt the same way, since Sunand Shade brings this stuff backwith two long tracks though the majority is still in the slightlytrippy folk/rock style they perfected on At Echo House.This time out on the pop tunes, however, singer/guitarist Jeremy Earlpushes his voice toward further traditional prettiness, with hiseerie, melancholic delivery on 'Wouldn't Waste' making it one of therecord's most memorable tracks.

Whileall of this makes Sun and Shadethe most complete demonstration of what makes Woods such a greatband, it also makes Sun and Shadejumbled and only partially satisfying. It's jumbled because the starkdifference between a short pop song like 'What Faces The Sheet' andthe seven minute krautrock jam 'Out of the Eye' is never resolved byany tracks which bridge the gap between the two. Hell, it almostfeels like someone slipped a couple live tracks onto a studio albumto see if anyone would notice. Sun and Shadeis only partially satisfying because you don't get quite enough ofeither side of the band's sound, and what you do get isn't alwaystop-of-their-game material. No pop tune here bests what they've donebefore, while 'Sol y Sombra' never justifies its nine minute runtime, sounding for all the world like an aimless Animal Collectiveimprovisation circa Sung Tongsor Campfire Songs.

Whichis also to say, Sun and Shademay be jumbled and it may be only partially satisfying, but it is atleast more interesting than At Echo Lake,which is either a good thing or bad thing depending on what you wantfrom this band.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

The Field- Looping State Of Mind

2011-11-27T10:14:00.001-05:00

Like many great musicians, The Field isdefined by a series of paradoxes that don't need explanation orresolution in order to enjoy his music. While primarily using digitaland synthetic sound sources, the music never feels robotic orunnatural. It is technically electronic music made with computers andthe like, yet it has a blissed out atmosphere that genuinely owesmore to guitar toting dream pop and (the less noisy) shoegazer bandsthan it does ambient techno or microhouse.

The final paradox is that, if listenedto back to back to back, all three of The Field's albums sound verysimilar yet all have their own sense of flow and movement which makeseach unique. From Here We Go Sublimeset the standard and established the sound. It was and remains a veryspecial record for me, and is one of the few situations where Ideeply love an album but can't bring myself to write about it forfear of defining what the magic is and thus losing it. Anyway, thesecond album, Yesterday and Today,is more of the same but goes to greater extremes in both rhythm andtexture. Looping State Of Mind,meanwhile, partially tips its hat with its title. These are songswhich repeat incessantly like loops and certainly help to alter yourstate of mind, yet they aren't as repetitive as they initially seemand the blissed out/stoned atmosphere is undercut by a more heavilyrhythmic and earthy sound than you'll initially notice. The basslinesalone on the opening track will testify to that, and make asurprisingly good foil to the dreamy washes of synthesizer which madeSublime so unique. Infact, Looping argueswell for turning The Field into a two or three member live unit, witha drummer and bassist to groove along as The Field does his usualmagic.

All ofthat said, Looping State Of Mindisn't the evolutionary next step you might hope for. The Field isstill primarily mining the shimmering, minimalist ambient-techno hepatented with From Here We Go Sublime.'It's Up There' could pass for a remix of 'Silent', though I do meanthat in the best way possible. Even in those moments where The Fieldseems to be directly referencing himself, it's always through a gauzyfilter or battery of effects and loops to alter the entire dynamic ofa track. It helps that even the lengthy daydreams like 'ArpeggiatedLove' have heavier beats than From Here We Go Sublime.This keeps your body tethered securely to the Earth even as your mindfloats away, a little trick The Field may have picked up from TheOrb, who also knew the value of mixing up persistent, deep rhythmswith spacey, stoned textures and loops.

TheField already had legendary status based solely on FromHere We Go Sublime alone. WithLooping State Of Mind,he has inarguably secured this position. Loopingdoesn't have the sense of newness and special-ness of Sublimeand he really needs to try something new with the next one, butsometimes consistency and modest changes are all you really need tohave a fruitful career and to produce top tier work.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Feist- Metals

2011-11-26T12:33:00.001-05:00

It's rare to see an artist draw closeto commercial success and mass acceptance after years of relativeobscurity and proceed to make the best, most chance-taking album oftheir career. For all intents and purposes, however, that's preciselywhat Metals represents. Afterbeing known as “the chick who sings in Broken Social Scene” and“the chick who did that 1-2-3-4 song”, Feist has at last arrived,at least in my book, with this new record.

Thisisn't to say that The Reminderwasn't a work of finesse and ambition, or that reviews for Metalshave been overwhelmingly positive. Indeed, The Reminderwas one of those indie albums that became massively popular yetbacked up its accessible songwriting with genuine artistry. Metals,by contrast, has had no big single to sell it to the public and itsits at a respectable but not overwhelming 80 on Metacritic. All ofthat said, I think this album's cache will only improve with time. Itfeels carefully constructed and meticulously arranged such thatthere's no “ah ha!” song or moment. Love, if it comes at all,comes gradually.

Thebest way I can think to explain myreaction to this album is to say that Metalsis a record which initially promises the moon and eventuallydelivers it though it stilldoesn't completely satisfy. Every time I listen to it now, I canthink of no obvious flaws or problems. I can, as objectively as ispossible in this situation, say that Metalsis the best album Feist could have made. So why haven't I completelyfallen for it?

Feist,especially on Metals,reminds me of a less distant Tori Amos or a less depressed Cat Power,though the best basis for comparison is PJ Harvey's Is ThisDesire?, a similarly expansiveand experimental record. It's the kind of album where the artistconsiders it their most personal work and greatest achievement yet itusually ranks low on critic and fan lists. Metalsmay or may not suffer a similar fate as Is This Desire?,becoming the oblique black sheep of Feist's discography, but I doknow I share a similar attitude to both records insofar as I enjoythem but they never became...essentialto me. Essential for the artists to make, certainly, but not vitalworks that I return to again and again as the years go by. Whether ornot the artists would agree, to me albums like Is ThisDesire? and Metalsfeel insular and complete onto themselves. A listener is not needed,to put it another way.

WhileIs This Desire? wentfor non-traditional song structures and electronic flourishes, Metalsgoes for more of an ambitious orchestral/baroque singer/songwritersound. There may be some simple delights, such as the understated'Bittersweet Melodies' and 'Cicadas & Gulls', which is sostripped down compared to the rest of the record it seems like ademo. Yet the main story of Metals isthat of reach and ambition. Layered vocal arrangements areeverywhere, with 'The Circle Married The Line' sounding downrightchoral, and the general atmosphere of this album makes me imagine itwas recorded in an abandoned cathedral in remotest England on a raresunny day.

Metalsmay not end up being her greatest critical or commercial success, butit is undeniably the record where she announces, even if she may havea hit single here or there, she is still an artist first andforemost. Feist has now joined the rank of similar left-of-commercialsinger/songwriter types from the past. Metalsis not her version of, say, Rain Dogs orMurder Ballads,but it does demonstrate that sheis still growing and evolving.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 32

2011-11-23T18:45:00.001-05:00

As usual, this is going up later than I planned but...hey, it's nearly Thanksgiving, gimme a break here. After a couple food comas from the meal itself and leftovers for days, you'll forgive me.

Wild Flag- Wild Flag

2011-11-19T12:49:00.001-05:00

Oddly enough, I sat down to beginwriting this review while (unknowingly) wearing a Sleater-Kinneyt-shirt, and I suppose that's all the context you need to understandmy anticipation for this album. The Woodsleft me thinking Sleater-Kinney were heading in a new direction untilthe announcement of their indefinite hiatus. Nothing short ofa true reunion will sate me, so it's best to take this review withall of that in mind.

Wild Flag, while not a full blownreunion, features two ex-members of Sleater-Kinney and thus is asclose as you can get without bringing Corin Tucker in. Moreover, theself titled debut from Wild Flag sounds so similar, it might as wellbe a Sleater-Kinney record in disguise. It's a hell of a lot morelike that band than Corin Tucker's solo record, to boot.

Indeed, even if there were no membersof Sleater-Kinney in Wild Flag, they are still the most obvious pointof comparison, so let's see if wecan nail down the exact records Wild Flagsounds like. Well, to be fair, the addition of organ on some tracksgives Wild Flag a novel, yet not outright fresh, sound. Wild Flagreally need to make more use of it if they want to distancethemselves from the past. Most of these tracks could be takenstraight from sessions for either The Woods( 'Black Tiles' and, in particular, 'Racehorse', with its heavyhitting low end, fuzzy production, and six minute plus runtime) orThe Hot Rock (thetense, introspective, dark, and philosophical songs like 'SomethingCame Over Me' and 'Electric Band' nod to it most of all). This isn'ta bad thing, since those are my two favorite Sleater-Kinney albums...

...butit also leaves me wondering why I'm not listening to those albumsinstead, which is abad thing. Despite the strength of these songs and the morestraightforward, immediate indie rock Wild Flag employs, I can nevershake the feeling that it's more appropriate to label Wild Flag aSleater-Kinney side project than a supergroup or band in its ownright. Make no mistake, if the organ solo on 'Future Crimes' wereplayed on a guitar instead, and Corin Tucker was around to providebacking vocals, it would be a Sleater-Kinney song. I don't mean“would sound like one”, I mean literally would bea Sleater-Kinney song. Wild Flag is a side project or different bandin the same way Madvillain is a side project or different band for MFDOOM, which is to say, they barely sound different despite havingsome different people involved.

WhenWild Flag are cooking on all cylinders, such as during the jam in themiddle of the aforementioned 'Racehorse', there's a weird, new-ishthrill to the band. But I said “new-ish” and not “new” for areason. To put it another way, Wild Flag is more like a drug you useto help with withdrawal symptoms and not an outright cure foraddiction to Sleater-Kinney. If there were a different overallaesthetic or even more organ dueling with the guitar, it would makeall the difference. But I digress. The notion “it's almost as goodas a proper new Sleater-Kinney album” is all I think you need toknow about Wild Flagto determine whether or not it's for you.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Great Album Covers: Parallax

2011-11-17T20:07:00.001-05:00

It has been a year of very memorable album covers, from the classic 4AD aping cover of Wye Oak's Civilian to the crying crude drawing of Panda Bear's Tomboy to the oblique, borderline-suicidal looking cover of Destroyer's Kaputt. None, however, seems as in tune with its musical content as this.

Atlas Sound is Bradford Cox's solo project outside of Deerhunter, and his covers have featured deformed looking men with Marfan's syndrome-like bodies similar to Cox's own (I think Logos may even have him on the cover). This one, however, glamorizes Cox in a classic 50s/60s pop-vocalist way, with a washed out color style. Yet as close as he is to the camera on the cover, and thus to the viewer...as mellow and accessible as Parallax is as an album...it's all still quite distant and confused. Cox is deliberately averting his gaze, or perhaps he's distracted with a thought of someone or something from the past. Also note that he is still half in darkness.

Anyway, maybe I'm over-analyzing again. All that artsy intellectual ruminating aside, it is a hell of a great cover. And a hell of a great record. But that is a blog entry for another time.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 31

2011-11-16T17:13:00.001-05:00

A 'classic' style episode with introductory ramblings, 2007 retrospective segment, and a brief talk-through of records I bought recently.

Washed Out- Within and Without

2011-11-13T21:49:00.001-05:00

Is it harder to overcome a ubiquitous,beloved song or a critically acclaimed debut? Ask the hundreds of“one hit wonders” from the past and the answer becomes obvious.This problem becomes deeper when said song either belongs to or helpsdefine a certain scene or subgenre of music. In this regard, WashedOut's career has mostly amounted to being known as one of the mainpillars of chillwave as well as being the guy who made the music('Feel It All Around') that Portlandia uses for its theme song.

Even setting aside whether or not he'llever top 'Feel It All Around', it's obvious that Within andWithout is destined to eitherdisappoint or pleaseonly those who want more of the same. To be sure, there is no songhere as good as 'Feel It All Around', and even this record's bestmoments don't top what he's done before. I will concede that they dooften meet the level of his preceding material if only because theysound practically the same.

That's noexaggeration. The main difference between this album and the previousEPs is that the production is even more smooth and bright. Trackslike 'Before' and 'Eyes Be Closed' are the audio equivalent of whenyou bump up the exposure time on a camera and everything becomesblindingly bright and, er, washed out. What's more, even while thelyrics may occasionally be dark or unsettled, the music goes down assmooth as a particularly sweet German-style white wine. Sometimes,contradictory lyrics and music can work well...but not here.

As for thesmoothness part, that's the other minor new wrinkle on Within andWithout: most of the harder beats and murky lo-fi/mid-fiproduction of the EPs are gone. In their place Washed Out has taken afew steps closer to out-and-out synth-pop, albeit a spaced out, slowmotion, and dreamy kind of synth-pop. Unfortunately, this sounds muchmore interesting and memorable than it is. Even when he's attemptingsomething new, as on the electric piano ballad 'A Dedication', themusic has a curious ability to be forgotten soon after. When thereare hooks, they don't so much sink into you as they pass rightthrough; more like arrows than hooks, really. If you'll allow a bitof autobiography, I'll note here that I listened to this record atleast three times before starting this review and I still can't namea song or hum a melody without having to consult iTunes.

Within andWithout is an enjoyable, impossible to hate record even if itdoes have arrows-instead-of-hooks which neither cause pain nor getyour attention. Without any rough edges or imperfections, this recordends up being the hipster equivalent of smooth jazz or muzak. It'sthe perfect soundtrack for American Apparel magazine advertisementsor the fifth or sixth day of a staycation, when you're almost lookingforward to going back to work because you've been sleeping too much.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Girls- Father, Son, Holy Ghost

2011-11-10T19:09:00.001-05:00

Of all the retro influenced indie bandson the way up, Girls have the most interesting backstory, leaderChristopher Owens having grown up as part of a religious cult. Yetfor all the drama surrounding the band's past and the reportedly drugfueled making of their debut, Album,they've been a relatively forgettable band for me. At times on theirAlbum they soundedlike a more glossy and professional version of Wavves (like on 'BigBad Mean Mother Fucker'). With more listens, my opinion of it hasdulled slightly over the past couple years. By and large the band'sreach surpassed their grasp, giving their music the feeling of agroup trying on other sounds instead of forging their own.

Father, Son, Holy Ghostcontinues this “trying on sounds” feel though it is moresuccessful at it. 'Die' posits the band as Black Mountain-esque 70sinspired rockers though not as beefy or slavishly retro. If Girlsstill haven'tperfected their own sound, this record is at least entertainingbecause they're trying on some new hats and doing it well. Moresothan the debut, this is a record of ambition. It's telling that onlythree of the songs are less than four minutes long, with 'Vomit','Just A Song', and 'Forgiveness' offering just enough ideas andwrinkles to justify their length. Meanwhile, tracks 'Saying I LoveYou' and 'Magic' continue Girls's reverence for classic 70s AM popmusic, though they sound too similar to Albumand their influences to be true standouts.

Unlikemany of their retro influenced contemporaries, Girls lack any trueexperimental, psychedelic, or noisy influences. This isn't to saytheir music is always easy or simple, as the above mentioned longsongs testify to...yet even at their most extreme, the songs ofFather, Son, Holy Ghostare more akin to, say, Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?or the less extreme bizarromoments of A Wizard, A True Starthan they are other 70s experimental pop like Brian Eno's soloalbums. Where Rundgren tipped his cap to 1950s/1960s R&B, Girlsdo so to the music of his era. Rundgren, however, put enough weirdelements and eccentric lyrics in those albums to make them far morethan just barely-original songs aping the past. Unfortunately, Istill get this feeling when I listen to Father, Son, HolyGhost, even if it is, yes, a bitbetter than their debut at avoiding it.

Actually,that's a good summation of Girls' second album as a whole: it's a bitbetter than their debut. It took me more time to get tired of it, andas a whole it's, well, better. But only by a bit. Considering thewild backstory as mentioned in the opening of this review, it's alittle disconcerting how, well, orderly and normal the band's albumshave been so far. If the band would forge more of their own identityor go off in some weird directions, they might be capable ofsomething truly great.

4 Pooly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 30

2011-11-09T17:15:00.000-05:00

In this episode...well, you'll see.

Madlib- Shades Of Blue (Unedited)

2011-11-07T20:50:00.000-05:00

Just a short review tonight while I work on all the other Essays and reviews I've got going on. Think of this as a trifle; a side project of my normal reviews, if you will. That's a good state of mind to have when also doing something like listening to Madlib's Shades Of Blue, his "invasion"/remix of Blue Note records' vaults. But that's a bit unfair, actually, because even with high expectations, a wet dream like letting someone like Madlib have full access to a jazz label's catalogue turns out to be better than it has any right to be.

Allow me an example of just what I'm babbling about. MF DOOM is a sometimes-prolific artist, and his long running Special Herbs series of instrumental tracks from his various albums and producing gigs is the kind of interesting-but-inessential trifle I mean. They function pretty well as albums in their own right, the sort of kind you might spin when a friend is over and only a couple times a year listen to on your own. It's not as good as hearing the finished products with rappers over them, in the same way that Madlib's tracks here should be "not as good" as hearing them fleshed out with rappers.

However, Madlib's old friend J Dilla likely taught him something about instrumental hip hop with the legendary Donuts, because these songs are even more fleshed out and enjoyable than you'd expect judging by, say, early Madlib circa The Unseen by Quasimoto or mid-period Madlib as heard on Madvillainy by Madvillain. But enough of that technical crap. Madlib finds some deep grooves and head nodding hooks in some unlikely places in those vaults. It's the kind of stuff most MCs would kill to rap over but not be good enough for. A non-rapping appearance by even the formidable MF DOOM on one of the tracks also speaks to how complete Shades Of Blue is without MCs.

Anyway, it comes on two records, so you know the sound quality and mastering is great. And if you're a fan of Madlib, you're probably a record hound who knows what a difference that makes. Or anyway, you're probably a record hound who'd dig this album a lot.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Essay: Three Stray Thoughts (Unedited)

2011-11-05T21:06:00.004-04:00

1) I've recently been digging into more hip hop, and between discovering the joys of Wu-Tang solo albums via Ghostface Killah and finally getting into the Madlib Blue Note jazz remix record I have, I've been setting aside the reviews and/or other albums I meant to be working on right now to enter into one of these pure discovery periods. What I mean is, I'm listening to music as a pure listener/fan and not a critic. I'm not worrying about whether or not I'm going to review something; I'm not thinking about things I want to say or pose about it.

I think this is how Madlib alwaysmakes music.

The dude is ridiculously prolific, tobe sure, but I get the feeling for him it's all about pure creationwhen making music and pure enjoyment when listening to it.

Madlib's debut as his alter egoQuasimoto, called The Unseen,is one of the weirdest hip hop records I've ever heard. It has such asluggish, slow motion/stoned flow to it...even if you're perfectlysober, it seems to last for two hours. It's an album of scope andvariety such that one track, even on your first listen, is bound tohook you and keep you coming back until you love it all.

2) I'm working on a series of essays to discuss and define all those bands like the Vivian Girls, Thee Oh Sees, Black Angels, Woods, Wavves, White Fence, Wooden Shjips, Crystal Stilts, Best Coast, Surfer Blood, Kurt Vile (to some extent), The War On Drugs, Ducktails, Real Estate, Girls, Beach Fossils, etc. I feel like they all have a certain retro vibe in common even though they all sound different.

It'sgot me to thinking about what sets apart certain bands from othersimilar bands. How do we define sound in terms of differences? I feellike I resort to vague explanations like “they're more jammy” or“they're more noisy”, but in the end, aren't all genre labelsjust vague explanations? You could take any genre or subgenre andfind a few bands that don't precisely fit your parameters. Yet it's aparadox because without genre labels or vague explanations, it'salmost impossible to talk about music in any meaningful way.

3)Lately I've been thinking about doing more posts about non-musictopics, so let me use this opportunity to say that the weird CGIResident Evil movie is on Netflix instant streaming, and that it'swell worth a watch if you're a fan of the series. It practicallyfeels like watching a Let's Play of a Resident Evil game, or perhapsan hour and a half or so of cutscenes from a game edited into amovie.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 29

2011-11-02T07:18:00.004-04:00

An unprepared, short-ish episode, but an episode nonetheless.

Great Album Covers: The Velvet Underground & Nico

2011-10-27T19:50:00.001-04:00

The first Velvet Underground was one of those fine meetings of high art (Andy Warhol, who probably wouldn't consider himself high art, but he sure wasn't blue collar) and low art (The Velvet Underground, led by the poet of the streets and urban decay himself, Lou Reed). It's hard to imagine a rock band getting away with what they did with the backing of Warhol, but then again, he was only really involved at the start. The second record was way more experimental and dissonant, for starters...

But I digress. I find it kind of odd that there doesn't seem to be a definitive version of this cover. Some omit any text at all. Some have Andy Warhol's name but not the name of the band; some have it the other way around. Some add the famous "peel slowly and see" small text near the stem of the banana. Some even have a special peel off sticker, revealing a naked bright pink inner banana once the skin sticker is off.

In any case, the use of existing paintings or photographs usually makes for great album covers, but I like this one the most. I think it was one of the first cases where an established artist made something new for an album cover and didn't simply allow them to use an old work. Though I could be wrong, as I'm not too familiar with Warhol's history.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 28

2011-10-26T07:13:00.004-04:00

Hey, episode 28. I meant to say something else, but I got nothin'.

Cymbals Eat Guitars- Lenses Alien

2011-10-20T17:24:00.004-04:00

Divorced of the context of little greenmen in flying saucers, “alien” is a word both simple andprovocative. It's a more extreme version of “foreign”, really, inthat something which is alien is so unfamiliar and unlike anythingyou've experienced before, you have no context for it. What I meanis, I don't know anything about, say, Bollywood films, but despitetheir foreignness I can still understand them in the context of othermovies. Something truly alien would be utterly unknowable from anycontext I could approach it.

In that regard, thenew album from Cymbals Eat Guitars, Lenses Alien,possesses an intriguing title. The “Alien” part draws yourimmediate intention but it's the “Lenses” part that is key. Thismusic isn't so utterly foreign as to be unfamiliar and unlikeanything you've experienced before, yet it does offer some strange,non-traditional songs which take time to understand. This is a recordof blurry photographs of UFOs or abstract art, things which could beupside down or sideways for all you know. It's also a record whichnever seems to add up or make sense, constantly eluding you and onlyoffering a few standard choruses or hooks to latch onto. Lyricsbubble to the surface of your consciousness as you listen to it, onlythe last few evocative words of a given line such as “everything,everything changes”, “corner store clerk, who never looked up”,and “milky cataracts peel(?)” managing to catch your attention asyou drift along.

Mind you, in the case of LensesAlien, this elusive, formlessquality is pulled off with ease, suggesting that my initial worriesabout the band being a touch too derivative were groundless.I've listened to this album a dozen or so times but it keepssurprising me with its twists and turns. Much like Sunset Rubdown'sexcellent Random Spirit Lover,this is a record bursting with winding linear songs. Rarely is asection, hook, or chorus repeated, meaning you'll have to listen toit a few times and take it all in as a whole work rather than acollection of songs. Furthermore, Lenses Alienmay peak with its epic opening track, but the way the rest of thesongs flow together and are paced, the record may as well just be onelong song anyway.

Lenses Alienis Cymbals Eat Guitars coming into their own. It may not be theirmasterpiece, because I think they have still better things ahead ofthem, but it is at leastthe band shedding most of their obvious influences and establishingtheir sound. While Why There Are Mountainsmay boast more and better hooks, Lenses Alienis the stronger and more interesting album. I'm most impressed thatthis record also turned out to be the band pushing themselves whilestill leaving in those dreamy, catatonia-inducing wall-of-soundthings they conjure up every few songs—I think they do it at leasttwice on 'Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)', in fact—without turninginto arch-experimentalists who alienate (pun intended) theiraudience.

Lenses Alienis a perfect follow-up to a flawed and not wholly original soundingdebut. It leaves me confident in where the band are now and genuinelyinterested in their future. While not an outright masterpiece, it iseasily one of 2011's most accomplished records.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 27

2011-10-18T22:13:00.000-04:00

A Sonic Youth-focused episode thanks to recent news that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are separating.

Real Estate- Days

2011-10-15T15:19:00.005-04:00

Early October this year was an IndianSummer, as it were, in my part of Ohio. This means that in themorning it was quite brisk and you needed a medium-thickness jacket;when you got off work, the weather was in the 70s and the sunshine,so very good feeling, seemed like Mother Nature was winking at you.It was one of those week or so periods of time where I sat in an oldleather chair by my open window, smoking clove cigars, slowly gettingdrunk on cheap sangria, and beginning to read something I instantlyknew I was going to adore (in this case, The Sandman).The cherry on top of this perfect weather and week or sokind-of-a-bender was first hearing an album like Daysand falling in love with a band like Real Estate.

Lookingback at my review of the band's self-titled debut, I summed up myfeelings thusly: “RealEstate isthe sort of enjoyable, low stakes indie album with a refreshing lackof pretense or artifice that will never win awards or change theworld. Impossible to hate, difficult to fully love, RealEstate isa good little album, endlessly playable but only rarely remarkable.”On first listen, this also summarized my feelings toward the band'snew record, Days.I was ready to write my four star review and say the band were evencloser to making their masterpiece. “Maybe next time, fellas,” Ithought, “now let's go see how the new album by The Field turnedout...” However, something funny happened on a recent warm Octobernight: I fell in love with Real Estate.

Inthe review quoted above, I noted a similarity between Real Estate andThe Sea and Cake. This feels more pronounced on Daysbecause the band are drifting further from theirpsychedelic/surf-rock leaning debut into straight up groove-rockbuilt around the bright, shimmering interplay of Real Estate'sguitarists. To put it another way, Real Estate's debut sounds best inSpring and Summer; Dayswill still sound groovy, mellow, and amazing when Fall finallysettles in, and on through Winter. Indeed, Real Estate are more orless turning out to be the heir apparent to The Sea and Cake, minussome of the jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythmic influences of that veteranChicago band but adding a hypnotic interplay between the guitarists.It's like Television if Television had had two amazing rhythmguitarists instead of two amazing lead guitarists.

AsDaysis the kind of record which starts pretty good and gets better as itgoes, you can bet it also reaches its natural peak with the elongatedending of 'All The Same', hinting at a jammier side of the band thanis apparent on their albums or, judging by a live bootleg from 2010 Irecently heard, their concerts. One of the album's best songs,'Wonder Years', is a jangle-pop gem possessing a title which nods tothe somehow-80s-evoking scene the band has sometimes been lumped inwith. If Real Estate haven't exactly won the attention and sales ofbetter known somehow-80s-evoking acts like Washed Out, Best Coast, orKurt Vile, Daysshows that they have still outstripped them all in terms of nailingdown a unique and (seemingly) definitive sound. Call it “cominginto their own.” Call it “producing their first great record”or whatever else. No matter the label, it's still the sound of a bandrealizing their potential.

Daysis such a confident and endlessly enjoyable record that one hopes theband don't stray too far from it for awhile. At first, it may comeoff as lightweight and samey-sounding until, on further spins,something suddenly clicks and you find yourself listening to it overand over for a week straight. These are songs which start off “prettygood” and soon bloom into addictive little tunes you can't getenough of. “Lightweight” it may be...but so are summer shandiesand featherweight boxers. But I digress. Daysis one of the year's most unassuming and greatest successes. Highlyrecommended.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 26

2011-10-11T18:16:00.001-04:00

It's a lot of talkin' about a lot of albums in this week's episode. Enjoy!

Wilco- The Whole Love

2011-10-09T18:45:00.002-04:00

At some point in the past decade, Wilcowent from being America's #1 forward thinking, progressive,experimental-pop band behind a string of masterpiecesto... being America's #1 backward looking, hard touring, dad-rockband behind kind-of-OK craftsman-like work of Sky Blue Sky(underrated! secretly awesome!) and the kind-of-self titled Wilco(The Album). Whether thistransition took place as a result of Jeff Tweedy's successful rehab,or just as a natural growth of the band itself, it's hard to say.What I do know is that Wilco has, with The Whole Love,gone from one of those bands-I-love-to-love to being one of thosebands-I-still-want-to-love-but-don't.

Wilco (The Album)left me a bit bored. I also can't seem to remember many songs fromit, other than the meta-titled 'Wilco (The Song)' and experimentalthrowback 'Bull Black Nova', a sort of more nervous/anxious sequel tothe superior 'Spiders (Kidsmoke)' from A Ghost Is Born.See, Wilco are at their best when they're reaching or expanding, andto see them spend another album coasting is a disappointment. Theonly new-sounding experimental parts of The Whole Loveessentially boil down to the first and last tracks, which showcaseWilco's jammy, guitar-heroics side ('Art Of Almost') and theirmulti-part, slow-build epic stuff ('One Sunday Morning (Song For JaneSmiley's Boyfriend)'). In between, though, it's just a lot of Wilcosounding like Wilco all thrown into a blender together. 'I Might'recalls the retro, raucous edge of some Summerteethand Being There tracksmixed with some Sky Blue Skylooseness. 'Black Moon', meanwhile, sounds like a mix between thehaunted ballads of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (inparticular 'Radio Cure') with the jaunty alt.country stuff of A.M.

Alltold, however, this album is neither a step forward nor a modestreturn to form. I hate feeling this way about The WholeLove because it has got someexcellent songs, such as career highlights like 'Born Alone' and thewonderfully, well, jaunty 'Capitol City' which could pass for a 1930spop tune. Indeed, there's nothing inherently wrong with this recordat all. It's simply that, if this is what passes for experimentaland/or new from Wilco, they aren't really trying any more. A lesserband could never pull off a track like 'Rising Red Lung', but Wilcosomehow turn it into an oddly unmemorable reminder of better momentsfrom their past. Lyrically, The Whole Loveleans toward the less abstract and has a close to 50/50 split betweenpassable verses and forgivable clunkers. It isn't that Jeff Tweedyisn't trying, he just doesn't seem to be trying very hard.

Whichis precisely the core of my issue with The Whole Love.It isn't the band sounding like this or that album one at a time, asit was on Wilco (The Album),so much as it is Wilco kind of smashing all of their old albumstogether and odd combinations of those coming out here and there. Themore I listen to it, the more I like it, admittedly. 'Whole Love',maudlin lyrics aside, is simply too much fun to pass up. But thealbum as a whole also increasingly feels like if I give this record afull score it would be like rewarding someone for winning a race bycoasting for the last half-mile just to show off how much of a leadthey had. Yes, Wilco, you used to forward thinking; you used to be sofar ahead of us back in 2001-2004. But we've long since caught up.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 25

2011-10-05T18:27:00.002-04:00

Whew, sorry it's up a bit later than usual again. I'll do better next week!

Essay: Only A Fan Could Love Quebec

2011-10-01T14:28:00.003-04:00

Like many similar bands from the“alternative” era, (like, say, Primus), Ween were a really weirdband in the early 90s who didn't fit in with grunge or alternativerock. They still benefitted from the willingness of major labelsduring that time to sign any band they perceived as being alternativeand with a chance of having a hit song. Ween's brush with themainstream came from their single 'Push th' Little Daisies' thoughcelebrity fans like South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parkercertainly helped.

Ween'stime on a major label (Elektra) saw the band, much like They Might BeGiants, moving away from their acerbically strange, 4-track,just-the-two-of-us-playing-everything-and-using-cheap-equipmentaesthetic into music that, while still odd and far away from theirlabelmates, became more polished and professional sounding.Concurrently, Ween pushed their gift for genre experiments as far asit could go, putting out an album of legit country music, 12Golden Country Greats,and a (loosely) nautical themedhomage to the progressive rock they grew up on, TheMollusk. This all culminatedwith White Pepper in2000, a succinct record of accessible tunes and some classic rocknods. Ween left Elektra shortly after its release, supposedlydue to the label putting out the Paintin' The Town Brown: WeenLive 1990-1998 release, whichthey had intended for their then-new Chocodog label.

Backon their own, so to speak, Ween seem to have been inspired to returnto their roots. This is mainly apparent in the Shinola,Vol. 1 collection, whichgathered together outtakes from the band's past. However, the bandalso went back to their earlier sound for their next album of newmaterial, 2003's Quebec,an album only a fan could love. It's certainly possible thatyou could lay it on someone who didn't know a thing about Ween andthey might 'get' it, or even likeit, but the combination of weird lyrics and concepts with weird musicmeans the average listener will wonder what the hell they'relistening to. To be fair, Quebecis more akin to White Pepperthan Pod, sonicallyspeaking, yet it's still got enough outright bizarre songs and such avariety of styles that it's among the band's most varied anddemanding albums.

“Demanding”is indeed a good way to put it because, with 15 tracks in 55 minutes,Quebec never stopsthrowing curveballs at you. Ween produce some of their best genreexperiments here, whether it's the jam band twangy groove of'Chocolate Town', the Pink Floyd nod 'Captain', or the dreamypsychedelia of 'Alcan Road.' More importantly, there's also Weenfollowing their impulse for off-the-wall pastiches ('Zoloft' soundslike lounge music married to easy listening pop music filteredthrough, well, drugs) or indescribable oddities with primitivesounding instrumentation, like the drum machine grind of 'So ManyPeople In The Neighborhood' or the fake-out endings of theinstrumental 'The Fucked Jam.' Somehow it manages to hold together asa cohesive record and not a slapdash collection of disparate tracks.

Quebecmay not qualify as the band's best album; it certainly doesn'tqualify as their weirdest. Nevertheless, it's the sort of record onlya fan could love: only someone intimately familiar with Ween'sdiscography could make much sense out of this sprawling, diverse, andseemingly random record.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 24

2011-09-28T06:54:00.002-04:00

Aaaand it's episode 24! You know what to do.

Squarepusher- Music Is Rotted One Note

2011-09-25T13:24:00.000-04:00

In the past, jazz used to be what hiphop or rock are today, which is to say, a mass market, pop culture,and socially relevant genre of music. It survived and remained vitalfor so long because it kept changing andincorporating elements of other music. However, now jazz has becomean element that's incorporated into other types of music. Itcertainly still exists as its own genre just as blues and reggae dobut they, too, are mostly perceived by modern music listeners aselements to add to other kinds of music. Or, at the very least, nichemusic for small audiences.

Duringthe 80s and 90s, when jazz fusion had burnt itself out and jazztraditionalism had come into prominence, some predicted a new jazzfusion using elements of hip hop and/or electronic music. While thismay have happened in some cases, it never really became a thing,so to speak. In fact, what typically happens is the opposite:non-jazz artists sometimes incorporate jazz into their music. Thiscan take the form of anything from the subtle jazz touches on somealbums by The Roots or Tortoise to full-on hybrids like Q-Tip'sKamaal The Abstract. In allthese cases, however, the jazz part noticeably calls attention toitself, such that you aren't hearing an entirely new style of musicso much as you are hearing someone make obvious jazz references.

Bythat standard, one of the most interesting and unique examples ofjazz added to another genre is Squarepusher's Music IsRotted One Note. It's the sortof record I find myself returning to when I feel burnt out and boredwith music, that dreaded “I've heard it all before” sentiment.This album reminds me that there is still a lot of possibilitiesleft: its dark atmosphere and production style feel more akin tosomething by Burial yet it is arguably Tom Jenkinson's mostsuccessful attempt at using his virtuoso bass playing and talent withlive drums in an electronic context. The result is something thatdoesn't sound like jazz, electronic music, oreven an electronic musician playing with jazz sounds or tropes.

Music Is Rotted One Notetranscends genre labels. There's a seemingly formless, improvisedabstraction to the record as a whole, and specifically tracks like'Circular Flexing', which makes use of rhythmic and melodic elementsbut never in traditional rhythmic or melodic ways. The drum beats,even the live/non-sampled ones, seem chopped up and edited, as on thestuttering 'Ill Descent.' Meanwhile, chords and riffs on organs havea sound heavily evocative of Miles Davis's late 60s-to-mid-70selectric/fusion sound while also retaining their own feel, half ofthe time employed for dreamy and atmospheric effect and the otherhalf of the time as punctuations and accents for drum beats orJenkinson's (sometimes) rapid fire bass lines.

Evenwith some relatively accessible songs, like 'My Sound', MusicIs Rotted One Note defies easydigestion and understanding. It's a record which has no “ah ha!”moment, has no hooks; I'll be damned if, an hour or so after hearingit, I can hum any of the melodies. Nothing about it is easy orobvious yet unlike most difficult or challenging music, its appeal isimmediate. It remains a fascinating listen, one that I appreciatemore every time I come back to it.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 23

2011-09-21T06:49:00.001-04:00

Episode 23, aka the Post-Rock episode, is here! A little later than usual, but eh...

Grouper- A I A : Alien Observer/ A I A : Dream Loss

2011-09-17T09:47:00.003-04:00

It's difficult to express the kind ofimpact Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill(hereafter referred to as Dragging)had on my life. “Difficult”because the impact has been subtle; I can't point to any specificrevelations or feelings it's given me yet I know it's had an impactall the same. I think about it or hear its songs sometimes when I'mdaydreaming or just after I've woken up. There is something profoundand moving in the music of Draggingthat speaks to me on a level similar to My Bloody Valentine'sLoveless. In bothcases I can specifically define how the music works, how it was made,what genre it belongs to, and so forth, but all this objective talkof the “form” the music takes doesn't begin to capture thesubjective experience, its “function” if you will. Yet these arealbums that a wide variety of people have very similar subjectiveexperiences with and I think that speaks to the success of thecreators to bring their specific visions and ideas to life.

Superficially,Liz Harris's 2011 double album as Grouper, entitled A I A :Alien Observer/A I A : Dream Loss,sounds identical Dragging.She uses the same haunting, ethereal vocals, floating in from thedistance on dense fog walls of reverb and delay, and the sameindistinct guitar/organ drones, simple repeated melodic motifs, andsoundscapes. The total effect is like standing in dense fog with themusic seeming to hang in the air and also simultaneously to be slowlydrifting away from the listener. So, pretty much like Dragging,then? Kind of. The subjective experience of this double record isquite different from Dragging.The songs on these two albums are longer, less structured, and lesstraditional. The music feels more unsettled and uncertain than thelast album. This mostly comes on Dream Loss,where Harris even brings in some distortion on the noisy 'I Saw ARay', a track that would seem more at home as an instrumental on a NoAge record or perhaps on Wye Oak's recent Civilian.

If Draggingwas a water album, Alien Observer and Dream Loss arewind and cave albums. The vocals on the aptly named 'Wind Return'from Dream Loss sound like they were recorded on a portablemic while standing on a windswept beach at dawn, Harris gettinglouder and less coherent to be heard over the wind and water. Thetitle track of Alien Observer tells a tale of wanting 'to takea spaceship to the stars', which would seem to suggest a spaceysounding track, but it's the simplest arrangement (and shortest song)on the two records. A simple bubbling keyboard line and Harris'salmost-discernible vocals come through relatively restrained reverb,suggesting a deep cave either on a high mountain or far under thesea.

By anynormal standards, the A I Aalbums are monotonous and distant-sounding, neither engaging thelistener nor providing any memorable songs. Hell, half the time thesongs bleed into each other, as 'I Saw A Ray' does into 'SoulEraser', as if the delineations between tracks are meaningless. Yetjudged by the standards of capturing a moment, a feeling, or anatmosphere, Alien Observer andDream Loss are asperfectly realized as Dragging evenif the things they make you think or feel are more vague and lesscomforting than that record.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Great Album Covers: Bitches Brew

2011-09-16T17:40:00.002-04:00

I really did mean to post a review today, but I still haven't given Grouper's double album, A I A: Alien Observer/Dream Loss, enough time or listens to formulate a coherent opinion about.

Still, I recently let a friend borrow a Miles Davis boxset I own (The Cellar Door Sessions one) and it in turn forced me to finally listen to some electric Miles again. And hot damn!

Some of the by turns peaceful/stormy, Earthy/otherworldly music of Bitches Brew is previewed by this cover, so before you even hear the music you already, somehow, intuitively have a good idea of what it's going to sound like judging by the cover.

Extra points go for this being one of those awesome "the album art wraps around onto the back" covers, using the sweating woman as a sort of hinge between the two.

See? One could say it is truly bitchin'. If one were so inclined.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 22

2011-09-13T21:25:00.000-04:00

Presenting the succinct but substantive three segment episode: episode 22!

Yuck- Yuck

2011-09-10T13:58:00.001-04:00

It feels like every year a band leapsto the top of blogs and music websites simply by sounding like indierock from years past. They're not part of any trends, new genres, orapproaches to making music. They pretty much just sound like indierock bands from the 80s or 90s, whether leaning more toward theliterate/ironic Pavement, the loose and unhinged mid-to-late 90sModest Mouse, the noisy guitar workouts of Sonic Youth, or the goldstandard loud/quiet/loud dynamics of the Pixies. Granted there areother influences at play, but the end result is usually the same:bands with enjoyable, often exceptionally good, debut records whothen fail to deliver the magic again and never get out of a rut. Ilike to call it Tapes N' Tapes Syndrome.

Yuck get around this problem, at leaston their debut, by recording a fairly diverse set of songs, borrowingfrom many influences but never ripping anyone off. This means thatwhile they sound like the more punishing side of Dinosaur Jr. on 'GetAway' and sludgy album closer 'Rubber', they don't sound like aDinosaur Jr. cover band. Furthermore, the variety means you can't pina single band to Yuck's sound, and you can't really label themanything other than the basic 'indie rock' because they range fromnoise-pop to jangly guitar pop. If you had only heard 'SuicidePoliceman', for example, you would think Yuck sound like Yo La Tengoat their most mellow; hell, this track even has what is eithermarimbas or a xylophone and some horns on it. Then there's'Suck', which has Built To Spill written all over it, down to theplaintive slide guitar sound. Yet in all these cases Yuck are notcopycats so much as they are evoking the sound of other belovedbands.

However, there's a million differentbands who sound like other bands, so what precisely makes Yuck sospecial and one of those most recent darlings of the indie press? Itall comes down to songwriting and confidence. Oddly, then, watchinglive clips of Yuck on YouTube, you would never connect them with thisrecord. They look and sound unrehearsed and nervous; their baby facedfrontman looks like he had to fake sick from high school in order tobe able to play the show. Give a listen to the album and they'repractically a different band, brimming with hooks and self-assurance.Even if they're working inside well established sounds, Yuck arecapable enough songwriters to stick out from the crowd.

Yuck won't win any points fororiginality, and there are going to be those longtime indie rock fanswho feel like they're pandering to an audience with this album. Asfor me, I'm not sure whether what I'm about to say is praise orcondemnation, but I'm going to say it anyway: Yuckis the kind of record I want to criticize for sounding too much likeother bands yet it does it so well that it almost seems original. Andbesides, I've listened to this record too many times to talk myselfinto knocking off a star or two because it sounds like other music Ilove.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 21

2011-09-07T20:20:00.001-04:00

Yeah, I um...I should never drink while doing a video again.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 20.5

2011-09-02T21:35:00.001-04:00

A special episode of Weekly Whiskey, since I don't be posting much due to the three day weekend!

Great Album Covers- Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill

2011-09-01T18:32:00.003-04:00

My original inspiration for doing this blog series about album covers came from a random old booklet that was included with some records I had ordered from Insound.com In it, there was an essay from someone talking about Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, and it really got me to thinking about how certain album covers had filled me with strong feelings, like dread or sadness or love, in a similar way to what the essay was talking about.

I have to confess that for some reason the album art never shows up when I play this album in iTunes, and I don't own the vinyl, so the cover art rarely occurs to me when I listen to the album. The music seems more tranquil and...aquatic than this cover would make you think. It's also a more accessible record than her new double album, but I'll get to that eventually.

I feel like the lighting is what makes this cover work. If it were better lit, it would look like a silly little girl in a Halloween costume pouting at her parents. But with some haze and darkness going on, the little girl becomes a figure of uncertain menace, like coming across Bigfoot in the forest and being unsure how afraid you should be.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 20

2011-08-30T19:36:00.001-04:00

Yet another faithfully delivered-ahead-of-schedule episode of Weekly Whiskey. Ask for it by name.

Stephen Malkmus- Mirror Traffic

2011-08-27T11:28:00.001-04:00

Now that he's released the same number of solo albums as he did with Pavement, Stephen Malkmus has proven, if nothing else, that he's still committed to making music as a full-time career. Furthermore, the work he's done with his backing band, The Jicks, has been of a fairly consistent quality and definitely not the work of a man coasting on goodwill from his youth. Wandering between eclectic, song focused releases (his self titled debut and Face The Truth) and guitar-centric, jammy records (Pig Lib, Real Emotional Trash), his post-Pavement work has seen him go as far as he can. Now he's settled into the craftsman phase of his career, making music that never re-invents his sound or innovates but is nevertheless enjoyable.

Mirror Traffic is something of an attempt to combine the two sides of his Jicks-backed solo work. Boasting 15 songs, it's to be expected that it wanders a bit. Anyway, focus and finesse were never one of Malkmus's strongpoints. He's usually at his best when he's wandering to extremes, and this record tries to go to both of his extremes at the same time. So you'd expect that the obvious touchstones for this album would be Pavement's Wowee Zowee and Real Emotional Trash, and you'd be right. Except that, when he made those albums, those extremes were new and fresh. Mirror Traffic is, well, exactly what you'd expect of a new Stephen Malkmus album in 2011.

See, Mirror Traffic is a comfortable record. He's pretty much doing what he's always done, and even when the results can be as good as anything he's ever done, it's still a boring, disinterested album. When Malkmus goes for a big guitar solo, the playing may be as strong as ever, but it doesn't always follow coherently from the song—the way 'Long Hard Book' ends with a solo feels completely half-assed, as if he couldn't think of a good ending so he stuck in a guitar solo. Lyrically, Malkmus has never been the most sensical writer, but there was an oblique logic to his lines. On Mirror Traffic, I always got the impression the music was written first and then he improvised lyrics to fit; 'Share The Red' comes off like a song written around guitar solos, and the embarrassingly bad 'Senator' will rank up there with 'Discretion Grove' and 'Major Leagues' in the pantheon of Malkmus stabs at mainstream acceptance/relevance.

Tellingly, Mirror Traffic is at its best when Malkmus is trying new things. 'No One Is (As I Are Be)' argues compellingly for an all acoustic album from him at some point in his career, with an easygoing backing of skittering snare drum and modest bass lines. The short instrumental 'Jumblegloss' recalls the psychedelic ending to the album version of Pavement's 'Shady Lane' and unfortunately ends right as it seems to be heading for some lyrics. Continuing in his now established tradition of excellent album closers, 'Gorgeous Georgie' makes me wish he would use the Jicks more prominently as vocalists. However, the overall story of this record is one of good-but-redundant rock songs. After the first two tracks you could listen to the album in any order you wish. There's no sense of flow or pacing to where 'Stick Figures In Love', 'Spazz', 'Tune Grief', 'Forever 28', and 'Fall Away' are placed. Which isn't to say they're bad songs, they're simply forgettable and Malkmus sounds like he's going through the motions.

Feelings for Mirror Traffic are going to be all over the place. It's the kind of record where if you've been following Malkmus's career closely, you'll think it's a solid if unremarkable release, one that doesn't see him besting his past or going many new places. If you've only occasionally listened to Malkmus over the years, Mirror Traffic will seem quirky and interesting, sometimes sloppy but still fun.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 19

2011-08-24T20:24:00.001-04:00

Posted a little later than usual, but hey, there's a reason I always date the show for Wednesdays to allow myself some wiggle room.

The Walkmen- A Hundred Miles Off

2011-08-21T18:26:00.001-04:00

I've always thought of the The Walkmen as men of much finesse and ease, of professionalism and self-control. But during the mid-point of their career-so-far they recorded a cover of the entirety of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats. An album written and recorded during their infamous “lost weekend” together, it's a record of reverential tributes to music from their rock 'n roll youths but also one of debauched looseness. The Walkmen's take on the record is a bit more polished and less interesting, but it certainly must've influenced (or was influenced by) their sessions for A Hundred Miles Off.

You see, this is an album that overturns my assumptions about the band. The songwriting isn't consistently strong and finessed. Nearly every song has a claustrophobic/dramatic feel thanks to the pervasive, borderline-dissonant guitar and organ sounds. Recorded during the Fall of 2005 into early 2006, A Hundred Miles Off has a definite 'cabin fever' atmosphere. It's a record for those random work nights where you realize you've been sleeplessly pacing around your apartment and you have to wake up in three hours for work. Much of the time, it has an energetic rush: 'Tenley Town' is the closest they'll ever get to punk rock. This is also a record for those reeling drunken nights when you've recently broken up with someone or are about to. 'All Hands and The Cook' sounds like a nervous breakdown and the lyrics read like fragments from a bitter, rambling email to an ex-girlfriend.

This is a record which, taken on an objective-as-possible critical metric, feels sloppy and tossed off, more akin to something by Pavement than The Walkmen. Yet I feel like this is the kind of album which sits in your collection until that perfect moment when it suddenly seems alive and makes sense to you. In this perfect moment, the chaotic collage art cover and the very-appropriate album title call out to you because you're not feeling like your usual self, either. Indeed, you feel “off”, or more precisely, “a hundred miles off.” Whatever has put you into this state seems deeply analogous to the late night intoxicated dramas of A Hundred Miles Off such that you are finally happy you bought this record.

As this album sits at the point before The Walkmen became consummate professionals on the excellent You & Me, there's a certain bent appeal to hearing them as slightly-younger men who probably drank and spilled their share of beer during the year or so these sessions, and those of their Pussy Cats cover, took place. They were temporarily the kind of guys who went out to bars more than two nights a week, who threw horn sections into their songs for the hell of it; A Hundred Miles Off staggers to a start with the reeling 'Louisiana', mariachi horns and all. Everywhere, but particularly on 'Emma, Get Me A Lemon', Hamilton Leithauser's vocals are at their most pinched and strained, as if he had recorded everything in one take after spending the better part of a day recovering from a hangover while listening to The Basement Tapes and Blonde On Blonde over and over.

A Hundred Miles Off is the weakest record in The Walkmen's career but that's only because this is a “let your hair down” affair. Held to the standards of even their debut, when they were still trying to shake the last remnants of the Jonathan Fire*Eater sound from themselves, it comes up a bit wanting. But you'll note I just said “a bit”, because the more I listen to this album, and the more times I hear it in a mindset of appropriate desperation and unsettled-ness about my life, the more I like it. This is music for times when you aren't so much depressed as you are unhappy. When you're not so much an alcoholic as a temporary lush who can't face harsh reality just yet because it's still too much for a sober mind and heart to deal with.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

For Sale Now!

2011-08-18T17:15:00.007-04:00

Just approved the proof copy of the first collection of blog posts. You can order it now from the following site: https://www.createspace.com/3566369

It's not available on Amazon for a couple weeks but if you order from the CreateSpace site I get slightly more royalty money. But I know Amazon has that free shipping awesomeness going on...In any case, it's $12.99 for 252 pages and represents more than a year of hard work, between posting all the original articles during 2008 as well as spending the last six months editing them, writing footnotes/commentary on each article/review, and making the table of contents (which is a hellish ordeal if you don't plan ahead, as I didn't!).

I'm sure there are still some spelling/grammatical errors but since I did this all on my own I can only feel so bad about it.

Great Album Covers- Geogaddi

2011-08-17T19:31:00.002-04:00

Boards Of Canada are one of those bands whose every release is a momentous occasion, if only because it happens less frequently than Presidential elections. As such you're given plenty of time to absorb their albums and dig into every corner. Boards Of Canada further inspire intrigue and obsession by playing on music nerd past times, putting backmasked messages in their songs, referencing numerology and other weird religious themes, and so on. I'm sure there are still people trying to figure out why they put a track of pure silence at the end of Geogaddi. It couldn't be just to round off the album to being 66:66 in runtime, could it?! There must be something there if you listen close enough, sort of like the missing 18 minutes on the infamous Nixon Tapes.

Right?

Anyway, I feel like Boards Of Canada are also one of those bands whose every album cover is perfectly chosen. There's a simultaneously psychedelic, dark, child-like, and entrancing quality to their music which is perfectly captured in their covers. True, the Geogaddi cover may be the most coherent kaleidoscope image ever seen--it's a dude, with arms outstretched, in front of some trees!--yet it still strikes me as, well, psychedelic, dark, child-like, and entrancing. I really wish I owned this album on vinyl, but then again, it would only inspire me to do a lot of drugs and stare at it (and the rest of the album art inside) for hours at a time.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 18

2011-08-16T19:28:00.001-04:00

Whew, another long episode!

Iron & Wine- Kiss Each Other Clean

2011-08-14T20:41:00.001-04:00

Coming to prominence as a hushed, bearded indie folker, Sam Beam is still best known as the guy behind the cover of 'Such Great Heights' used in that M&Ms commercial. Barring that, it's also hard to shake the initial impression left by his debut The Creek Drank The Cradle, one of Beam as a rustic, minimalist singer/songwriter who played banjo or acoustic guitar with no accompaniment and had production quality that sounded like it was recorded in a dusty, dilapidated barn on a hand-me-down 4-track. But starting with Our Endless Numbered Days, and especially his EP collaboration with Calexico, Beam moved toward a more full band style that plays strongly to the gypsy/hippie atmosphere of Bonnaroo. His voice simultaneously became more energetic and emotive. No more whispering in the direction of his beard and toes; in fact, on Kiss Each Other Clean he even swears a couple times.

I saw Iron & Wine earlier this Spring, right around the release of Kiss Each Other Clean, and was surprised—in a good way—by this change which I had missed out on. They opened with a grooving version of 'Boy With A Coin' from 2007's The Shepherd's Dog, Beam chugging along on an electric guitar with wah-wah pedal and all. His nine-or-so piece band included a drummer and percussionist, and this same expansive and varied collection of instruments carries over to this record (as well as the preceding The Shepherd's Dog). You can be sure that every stock 70s AOR instrument makes an appearance here, whether it be a sax solo (as heard on 'Big Burned Hand'), marimbas and other 'ethnic' percussion instruments, what is either a Clavinet or similarly funky organ, piano, and so on. I'm frankly surprised he didn't work in a harmonica somewhere.

While the chillwave bands are busy evoking memories and feelings of the 1980s, and even Destroyer's recent Kaputt album has a similar 80s style, Beam is stuck in the 70s. The vibe Kiss Each Other Clean goes for reminds me of the sort of music people would drive around their rural small towns to back in that decade, sort of like a less hard rock version of music you could imagine the characters from the movie Dazed And Confused listening to. To give you an example, album closer 'Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me' makes effective use of its seven minutes, allowing you time to stop at a carryout on the way to a party for cigarettes and cheap beer and get back in the car before the song ends.

As such, Kiss Each Other Clean is the polar opposite of The Creek Drank The Cradle in that it's a 'hang out with your friends' kind of record. You put it on to create a certain vibe. As a consequence, the hooks aren't as strong as they could be because they don't need to be. Beam is painting in broad strokes with a wide palette of sounds at his disposal. This often means while he doesn't lack for ideas as to what sounds to use, the songs sometimes don't add up in memorable ways. Taken as a whole, it's a fine album, and great fun to listen to with a few friends. Indeed, I can certainly attest to the appeal of these songs in concert. However, like the good time grooves of late 70s Grateful Dead live shows, this kind of music doesn't translate well to a studio album.

Over the past few months as I've listened to Kiss Each Other Clean it never stays with me for very long. I've put off writing about it for months because it inspires no strong feelings or ideas in me. I only recently realized this is because it's not trying to. There are no grand statements here; the stakes are low and the songwriting is laid back in a sometimes-formless kind of way. How much you'll enjoy this depends almost entirely on how much you enjoy just chilling with some friends, talking about nothing much of import, simply enjoying the weather and passing the afternoon and/or night without incident. You never remember these times past a week or so later, but that's exactly why you need to have them.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Wye Oak- Civilian

2011-08-13T18:51:00.000-04:00

Some bands finally hit their stride after their line-up solidifies around a creative core due to the addition or loss of members. Others because of a style change, a new approach to making music, or any number of other factors. I'm increasingly most impressed by bands who don't radically change anything yet still deliver the best music they've ever made. Whether it's because of a sympatico producer or their first consistently great set of songs, it's comforting to know that not everyone is brilliant straight out of the gate, that it's never too late to turn a corner.

Beach House's Teen Dream was one of the best albums of 2010 despite the fact that the band weren't really doing much different. True, the music was more inviting and bright, but it mainly stuck with their take on dream pop as codified on Devotion. Its greatness lie in the excellent songwriting and engaging vocal performances of Victoria Legrand. Call it finding their voice or maturing as artists. Whatever the label, Wye Oak have taken a similar leap with Civlian even though it sticks close to what they had done before. Singer Jenn Wasner still has that husky/smoky vocal quality akin to, say, PJ Harvey and Nina Nastasia. Meanwhile the music continues to sound like Low with greater loud/quiet dynamics and spikier guitars. Indeed, perhaps a better way to describe them would be like a jam session between Low and Dinosaur Jr. Where Low often go for slow motion minimalism, Wye Oak draw more from dream pop and similar heavily atmospheric music. While not as noisy and overwhelming as shoegazer bands, songs do have moments of intense guitar storms, joyful and cathartic.

In 2009, Wye Oak's The Knot firmly established this aesthetic and came just shy of being their breakthrough; it's the sort of record where I would have a hard time deciding between a four or five star rating. No such handwringing is needed in the case of Civilian. Paralleling similar feelings I had when first listening to Teen Dream, there's an immediate sense that Wye Oak have fully delivered in every possible way. All of the songs are fantastic and both more distinct and more memorable than The Knot. Right off the bat, the band demonstrate greater imagination in songwriting. Album opener 'Two Small Deaths' avoids any expected loud/quiet dynamics, maintaining a mid-tempo movement with clattering percussion and a simple guitar line, blossoming into pretty choruses here and there. 'The Alter' follows and has an up-and-down groove to it, with a gorgeously psychedelic guitar breakdown around the 1:25 mark, all while sounding quite a bit like Beach House thanks to the repeated organ chords. 'Holy Holy' is up next, snarling to life with a noisy guitar right out of the playbook of late 80s/early 90s Sonic Youth.

Even while I find myself comparing Wye Oak to different bands, there remains a nagging voice in my head saying I still haven't nailed down what they sound like. 'Dogs' Eyes' operates under a logic only Wye Oak understands, with loud punishing riffs that would seem to have no place on an album you can compare to Beach House or Low (well, The Great Destroyer aside). At times Civilian sounds like a lost 4AD classic, gothic and folky, songs creeping along like kudzu vine overtaking cemetery gates. At other times, though, there's a glowing, headlong rush to the melodies, to say nothing of the pummeling guitar outbursts, two elements more akin to a band raised on a steady diet of indie rock from the 80s and 90s, when the “rock” part of “indie rock” got as much emphasis as “indie.”

Thus the splendid paradox of Wye Oak: they sound like many other bands, but because of the way they reconfigure these influences and constituent parts, they really don't sound much like other bands. And despite not changing much about their approach to making music or the overall feel of Civilian compared to The Knot, this one is far and away the superior album thanks to a full record's batch of memorable songs.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Moonface- Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped

2011-08-11T19:51:00.001-04:00

Musicians today have it really easy. While it's true not everyone has access to a wide variety of instruments, it is still ridiculously easy to make music if you want to. No need to book a studio and prepare songs ahead of time; thanks to computers and readily available software, bedroom auteurs don't even need to spring for cheap 4-tracks anymore. So now, more than ever, self-imposed limitations have a huge effect on how music is made and what the results end up like. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam recently released a solo album of songs written on/for ukelele. Matt Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces is putting out a series of solo albums using one instrument per record. And now Spencer Krug is going down a similar path. One of the most absurdly prolific artists of his generation, having recorded music with fully six different bands in less than ten years, last year he debuted Moonface, the name given to his solo project outside of his main bands, Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown.

Dubbed Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums, it was a single 20 minute track played only on the titular instruments. A demanding and tedious EP, it tests even the patience of hardcore fans such as I. Following on the heels of the indefinite hiatus of Wolf Parade, he now releases another Moonface record, Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped. Recorded when he was snowed in at his home during the winter of 2010, the album title, as with the previous EP, alludes to the instrument used, a primitive sounding electronic organ, though the record also has some cheap sounding drum machines. Some reviews have described this album as videogame music/chiptune sounding, but this is talking in terms of pure sound and not the feel of it. I would say this music is more akin to Wolf Parade co-leader Dan Boeckner's side project with his wife, Handsome Furs. While that band goes for a synth-pop dramatic intensity, recalling the purely synthetic sounds of early techno singles, Organ Music has a more atmospheric and trance-like quality, as if Kraftwerk had recorded an album with David Bowie in the early 80s and sang without using robotized voices.

Those who couldn't stand Krug's aesthetic before will find this the latest damning evidence that he is an overrated, pretentious, and self indulgent artist who hipsters talk themselves into enjoying. And even some fans will still dislike this release, thinking it repetitive and monotonous. I concede that is technically true; the songs of Organ Music sound like they started off in a drone/minimalist style before Krug decided to sprinkle in melodies and lyrics. That, to me, is what makes Organ Music a far more interesting and successful release than the Dreamland EP. It helps immensely that this album is only five songs and 37 minutes long, demonstrating that even when he is making dense and “indulgent” music, Krug still has some self control left.

Organ Music sounds to me like something recorded between 10 P.M. and 3 A.M. while drunk on wine and partially stoned, thinking about exes you wish you hadn't blown it with, or friends you haven't seen for two years. These are lengthy songs which slowly build, peak, and recede. Once the drum machine has faded out, the slowly dying haze of the last part of 'Fast Peter' piles on layers of organ into a grand finale. 'Whale Song (Song Instead Of Kiss)' may start off sounding like the opening to an 8-bit Nintendo game, but Krug's addition of more organ lines and double-tracked vocals as the song progresses proves that at this point in his career, he's at his best when he's given a long canvas to paint on. Instead of brush strokes, his non-linear song structures shoot out in grand ellipticals which never fail to resolve themselves in memorable and self-referential ways.

Where the monotony and repetition of the Dreamland EP turned me off, I find Organ Music completely succeeds. Krug's skills as arranger and hook-crafter may be on vacation, but his emotive way of singing oblique narratives and his ability to write surprisingly enjoyable melodies on even the most simple of instruments transforms this record from a boring vanity project into a transcendent and thrilling piece of music. If you are one of the Krug faithful or you want some dense, challenging music that doesn't follow trends or attempt to start any, this record is for you.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 17

2011-08-09T20:50:00.001-04:00

Episode 17! I think 17 is a prime number, and the prime number episodes of any show are always the best....right?

Great Album Covers- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2011-08-08T18:44:00.003-04:00

Though my opinion of the album has gone back and forth over the years, there's no denying what an important and iconic album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was and remains. Chicago had become a cultural mecca in the 90s for the indie and post-rock scenes though realistically the city was known as a center for great art of all stripes for many years. Indeed, it is the artistic mecca of the entire Midwest. That a band like Wilco would end up there seems only fitting, since they spent the first phase of their career moving from alt.country to more experimental music, much as young people from the Midwest often leave their suburban and rural birthplaces for the intellectual and artistic offerings of Chicago.

It's only fitting that something from Chicago would end up on a Wilco album cover, and that it would also be on the band's most iconic album is sweet serendipity. The low angle view of Marina City emphasizes the bizarre appearance of its towers; unless you're from the area you probably weren't sure exactly what you were looking at right away. "What are these, man, like prickly corncobs...?"

Beyond the unique look of these buildings, their use on the cover cements Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as a Chicago album through and through.

Eleanor Friedberger- Last Summer

2011-08-06T12:06:00.003-04:00

It's hard to know what to expect out of the Fiery Furnaces. They've never been an easy band to predict in terms of where they're going to go from album to album. Iconoclasts who make the music they want, when they want, the Furnaces avoid as many career cliches as possible. Well, this was true until their last couple albums, which saw them become more straightforward and accessible. I keep waiting for them to get weird and experimental again, to do something totally unexpected, so it's a little surprising to see them predictably continuing on in the same direction with Last Summer.

But wait, this is a solo album, not the next step for the Furnaces. While Matt Friedberger is spending 2011 releasing a series of limited edition solo albums using one instrument at a time, Eleanor is continuing in the retro rock/pop direction set by I'm Going Away and its digital-only companion Take Me Round Again. Last Summer goes further still and ends up being the most accessible and instantly enjoyable recording associated with the band. Mind you, when Matt released his first solo album a few years back, a double record supposedly divided between more 'out there' and experimental tracks (Holy Ghost Language School) and accessible pop songs (Winter Women), things didn't quite shake out as intended on the latter. It still had far too many of the usual weirdo Furnaces tricks—schizophrenic instrumentation, seemingly arbitrary song structures, keyboard freakouts and guitar skronk—to qualify as the sunny/summery pop album it was intended to be.

Last Summer, though, makes good on that intention, sounding less overtly rock than I'm Going Away and less stripped down than Eleanor's covers of I'm Going Away songs on the Take My Round Again release. This record is a nostalgic look back at all summers past, evoking the 1970s all the while. Hell, the cover even looks 70s vintage, matching the look of the Widow City cover but in classy black and white. This is the sort of album you can leave in your car's CD player for days at a time and never tire of; passengers won't ask you to put something else on though they probably won't ask who it is. You might think this means it is a slight and shallow album, but despite its accessibility, Last Summer packs a lot of detail and novel flourishes into its songs to keep you listening. Particular delights include the surprisingly funky, Steely Dan-esque groove of 'Roosevelt Island' and the shimmering peaks of 'I Won't Fall Apart On You Tonight' (which I've convinced myself is an answer song to Bob Dylan's 'Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight').

For good or ill, you will have to pay attention to pick up on the excellent playing on these songs because there is rarely a stretch of time where Eleanor isn't singing. You expect a solo album to showcase someone's talents, but even for a solo album, Last Summer is all Eleanor, all the time. This works to the album's advantage because she has matured so much as a songwriter and vocalist that those who used to grind their teeth at the Fiery Furnaces could easily love this record, just as Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion appealed to those who never liked that band. The aptly named 'Heaven' is like a cheat sheet to her appeal as a singer, a slow shuffling groove supporting her slightly ethereal voice (kind of like a less chanteuse-y/less smoky version of Victoria Legrand from Beach House). Her performance sells the seemingly inconsequential story of a stolen bike on 'Owl's Head Park', infusing it with an affecting sense of being lost, alone, and just wanting to get home to the security of the one you love.

The way that song bleeds into the album closing 'Early Earthquake' is evidence of the fact that Last Summer is an album which manages the rare accomplishment of getting better as it goes and getting better with each listen. Belonging in the company of retro-mining indie-pop acts with a strong female lead like She & Him and Tennis, this is an easy-going, light-but-not-shallow record and one of the year's best surprises.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

They Might Be Giants- Join Us

2011-08-04T18:31:00.005-04:00

While never recording an outright bad album, They Might Be Giants have had a spotty track record over the past decade and a half. Starting with 1996's Factory Showroom, the band relied more on kitsch and sometimes-too-clever concepts for their songs while the sense of professionalism which now wafted from their music seemed more slick than enjoyable. The weirdness and creativity of the band's lyrics and songwriting were in a slump, and so they began to use their full band, utilizing horn sections and guitar solos all over the place, as a crutch to make up the difference, leading to music that—while, again, not terrible—was wildly uneven. I always think of these albums as overlong even though they're just as long, in terms of the number of songs and playtime, as any of the older ones. Really it was a combination of the above factors and poor pacing/sequencing which had done them in and made these records seem like endurance tests. After all, They Might Be Giants will never revolutionize their sound, so it's all about creativity and novelty within the content, not the form.

Join Us is the band's first album since spending the past four years recording children's music, and I have to wonder if this got them back to their roots, when they were 20-somethings making songs with surreal/psychedelic concepts like 'Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head' and 'Purple Toupee.' Indeed, there are songs and moments here that could have easily been done with just the two John's and some cheap equipment: 'Cloisonne' has a linear story to tell, complete with genuinely funny affected voices, cheap sounding drum machines, and simple keyboard chords. One of Join Us's highlights, 'Protagonist', is similarly simple, with half-joking hand claps and backing vocals, all the while recalling the genre flourishes of Flood. The synth-pop of 'The Lady And The Tiger', meanwhile, is straight out of the production of the band's first two albums, as are '2082' and 'Three Might Be Duende', the latter of which has a wonderful strut to it, sounding like a mix between a march and a dance number from...oh I don't know, Robin Hood: Men In Tights.

By and large, however, Join Us feels like it welds their earlier, more creative and bizarre songwriting to the more muscular and expansive full-band sound of their mid-90s-to-present day era. This means that the album suffers from some of the same problems that the last few have, insofar as the lyrics and melodies might be good but the music sometimes sounds samey and oddly faceless. Never fear, though, it's not all about mining the past or repeating mistakes. 'Spoiler Alert' is this record's greatest attempt at breaking new ground, one of the few times you'll hear both Johns singing together throughout a song, trading lines back and forth. Furthermore, I think I might've once referred to Ween as the R-rated counterpart to Weird Al and They Might Be Giants, and I have to wonder if I was on to something after hearing 'Dog Walker', which lifts that band's patented helium-vocals and self-aware hard rock swagger.

If only they had moved away from their full band sound some more, Join Us might've given their best records a run for the money. However at a certain point, horn breakdowns and guitar solos lose their luster, especially when they're used incessantly. They Might Be Giants aren't suffering from it as much as they used to, but I still wish they'd try more new ideas instead of relying so heavily on their band's chops and energy to patch up a lack of ideas. Keep in mind, I'm a huge fan of John Henry (and the re-arrangements done for the live tracks on the underrated Severe Tire Damage are also brilliant) but in those situations the full band were used sparingly to great effect.

Join Us is the band's strongest album in years if only because they spend most of it either mining their most beloved era or trying new things. Unfortunately they didn't go far enough in either direction to completely hook me. Join Us is an almost-excellent record, showing that the band can still summon the old magic, and pull off some new tricks, when they aren't hiding behind their band. It just isn't quite the full comeback I had hoped for and tried to convince myself it was going to be.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 16

2011-08-02T19:10:00.001-04:00

Yeah, I know, I didn't actually post anything between these two videos. I'll make it up to you, baby, I swear it!

Weekly Whiskey Episode 15

2011-07-28T16:50:00.002-04:00

Well, it was a day late, but this is one of those rare episodes with three segments, so...enjoy!

Essay: Women

2011-07-22T19:02:00.002-04:00

Intro

I've been listening to Women's self titled debut and their 2010 sophomore release Public Strain off and on for the past month, but for whatever reason, I haven't felt compelled to write reviews about either. I'm not saying I never will, it's just that I'd rather talk about both of them together, and the format of a review doesn't allow this. So instead I felt like doing an essay and free-associating about some of the things this music has made me think and feel.

On Women As A Canadian Band

It's unique that Women have such a generic name, since their music is anything but. More unique still is the fact that Women are a Canadian noise-pop band. It should be clear to anyone who's given it any thought that last decade was primarily the story of the rise of Canada as a major player in music, especially indie. Canada and some of its major cities were to the 00s what Seattle and Chicago were in the 90s, though Canada's cultural relevance burned less bright and has thus lasted longer. Yet the majority of these Canadian bands—Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, etc—are all in the same ballpark as each other, sonically speaking. Women, along with Frog Eyes, are one of those rare cases where a band who would never be seen on the cover of Spin still got some success and exposure. In Women's case, they have much more in common with American noise-pop from last decade. Which brings me to my next tangent.

On Women & No Age Part I

No Age were one of the other noise-pop bands who came up age in the 00s. Though No Age and Women share a sub-genre label, they really don't sound much alike when listened to back-to-back. To paraphrase Pulp Fiction, it's the little things, the little differences. For all the dreamy and/or psychedelic interludes on their records, No Age are much more of a rock and/or punk band. There's a reason they shared a stage with Bob Moulder of Husker Du fame, another band who ostensibly were punk (hardcore, anyway) but ventured outside those confines. Women, by contrast, are a bit harder to pin down. Their self titled debut is indebted to much 60s pop though it leans more toward the “flowers of evil in bloom” of the Velvet Underground side of the 60s pop world. But then there's tracks like 'Black Rice' and the acoustic 'Group Transport Hall' which don't even qualify as noise-pop. On the other hand, 'Lawncare' descends into what could only be termed noise, period, and album closer 'Flashlights' sounds more like a furious improvisation from a live bootleg than a song proper. Yes, No Age and Women are noise-pop, but beyond that, they resist easy summarization.

On Women & No Age Part II/Public Strain

Whereas No Age's second album, Everything In Between, went for an expansion of the sound of their debut (note: Weirdo Rippers doesn't count as their debut, since it was made up of previously released EP tracks), simultaneously more noisy, poppy, weird, melodic, dreamy, and psychedelic depending on the song, Women took a different tact with Public Strain. If their first record could be lazily dubbed their 60s album, their sophomore release is more like their late 70s/early 80s album. Don't be thrown off by the hypnotic, drum-less opener 'Can't You See', a song I'm borderline obsessed with. No, Public Strain is more of a post-punk kind of vibe.

While their first album often tended toward a sunny and partially cloudy atmosphere, Public Strain belongs entirely to the night. The bass is more upfront in this songs, and the production is much cleaner and detailed than the lo-to-mid-fi of Women. I would roughly summarize this sound as Joy Division meets early Sonic Youth but that's really stretching it. The hazy slow-mo of 'Penal Colony' doesn't sound like either band, and 'Bells' is like a more palatable sequel to 'Woodbine' from the first album. Still, the krautrock groove of 'China Steps' sounds like Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth covering Can's 'Mushroomhead', and everywhere the singer's emotionless, flat vocals are taken straight from Ian Curtis's playbook though less, let's say, uhm...theatrical.

On Timelessness

I often find myself going through phases when writing about music in which I inadvertently repeat the same handful of phrases over and over again. True, it's mostly drawn from the usual critical shorthand, like “it grows on you”, or “a headphones album”, or “sophomore slump.” That kind of thing. But “timeless” as a term and “timelessness” as a concept are things I try to use sparingly and only when I can be very explicit about what I mean. I would consider both Women and Public Strain to be timeless in the sense that, while they belong to a codified sub-genre of music and evoke certain eras of music, they don't really belong to a specific scene or time period. Women could easily have come out on a small label in 1969 from a band influenced by the first two Velvet Underground albums and the summertime, feelgood pop hits of the day. Public Strain could have come out in 1985 from a band influenced by Joy Division and Sonic Youth. These are crude approximations, but I hope they make sense.

Outro/The Future Of Women

It's too bad that Women are on an indefinite hiatus. They're a band who have already realized some potential but still have so much more I think they could achieve. Much like how early releases from many groups are excellent but eventually overshadowed by later albums, I feel like Women have it in them to release their version of a Daydream Nation. The closing song of Public Strain, 'Eyesore', points to them following the same path Sonic Youth took in the mid-to-late 80s, allowing their songs to stretch a bit, becoming more jammy and improvisational but not in a hippie jam band sort of way. This is one of those tracks that seems like it could just go on and on, fading out before the playtime reaches double digits. Anyway, given another record or two (and perhaps a line-up shuffle, change of label, or a sympathetic producer), I think Women could reach the top tier of indie bands, noise-pop, Canadian, or otherwise.

Will they?

James Blake- James Blake

2011-07-20T17:20:00.001-04:00

There's something exciting and interesting about musical genres (and subgenres) hybridizing. True, musicians can still ring out some amazing music from firmly established sounds, but it's usually when new sounds and ideas are derived from the combining and re-jiggering of old ones that some of the most thrilling music is made. For instance, the late 80s/early 90s Madchester and 'baggy' scenes in England saw bands grafting 60s derived indie rock with then-new electronica. And of course, the explosion in musical genres during the 60s speaks for itself. But recent hybrids often burn themselves out quickly or reveal the shallowness of their sound when bands fail to rekindle the magic on follow-up albums. When was the last time you heard anyone talking about trip hop or dance-punk?

Still, this isn't to besmirch those joyous and novel records which seem to come out of nowhere to delight your atrophied musical worldview. James Blake's debut album has been such an occasion for me. Grafting together influences as complementary but disparate as dubstep, R&B, the vocoder-heavy vocals of Daft Punk (or perhaps Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak is a better point of comparison), and Jamie Lidell's Multiply, also a kind of one-man samples-and-loops thing, though Lidell leans more toward funk and soul. James Blake could also be considered a first or second cousin of the xx's self titled album, if only because that record's minimalist white-people R&B helps contextualize this record (something Blake has acknowledged in the press).

Blake combines all of these together in his own unique way, crafting one of those accidental masterpieces which sneak up on you until, after enough listens, you're hearing the songs in your head while doing the dishes or waiting for friends at a bar. By paring his music down to the barest of bones, he achieves a downright Low-esque minimalism though in an entirely different genre. His cover of Feist's 'Limit To Your Love' starts out absolutely skeletal, a barely-there piano and his unaffected voice eventually joined by skittering drum beats and altered vocal samples. The next track, 'Give Me My Month', does away with any electronic elements at all, the record's most naked moment, a piano-and-vocals ballad which sounds like a less falsetto Antony.

Some complaints have been leveled at the repetition of some songs, particularly 'I Never Learnt To Share.' Blake may extend its sole lyric beyond its limit, but repetition has always been a hallmark of minimalist music. Criticizing this song for repeating a single vocal phrase for too long is missing the point; the production and way all of the sounds progress until the electro-grind peak belies the fact that James Blake is as appropriate for headphones as it is the usual R&B method of putting it on a boombox surrounded by candles as a seduction aid. Not to mention this is one of those cases where one's distaste for a song has more to do with not liking something instead of the fault lying with the song or the artist. But I digress.

I suspect that this record may be a one-off triumph for Blake, since it's difficult to imagine him going anywhere with this sound now that he's simultaneously invented and perfected it. This is the promise and the curse of hybrid music, I suppose. Just to be clear, this doesn't diminish how outstanding James Blake truly is. It's an album which makes you realize there is still much territory to explore in music. Even though, in theory, it sounds similar to other things you're familiar with, the actual product sounds original and fresh.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 14

2011-07-19T22:19:00.002-04:00

Uhm, er, yeah. Episode 14! Kind of a weird one.

Bon Iver- Bon Iver, Bon Iver

2011-07-17T19:00:00.001-04:00

Those fans of Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago who find themselves confused by his new album should bear in mind that Justin Vernon didn't really plan for any of this to happen. Bon Iver was likely intended as a one-off fluke to purge some feelings Vernon had as a result of the break-up of a band and a relationship. It was an album that, in all probability, should have been relegated to the obscure dustbin of history, embraced by the two thousand or so who happened upon it, while his next musical project would have been his real ticket to fame. But sometimes quality wins out, even for a modest singer/songwriter album, and so Vernon was catapulted to the top of the indie heap and further still, collaborating with Kanye West and having his debut album praised by luminaries as unlikely as Moby. Still, it's probably best to think of Bon Iver, Bon Iver as the “next project from Justin Vernon” and not as “the follow-up to For Emma, Forever Ago.”

On first listen, this is an album of seemingly formless tracks, as if Vernon was attempting to hybridize ambient/post-rock with singer/songwriter-isms but missed the mark entirely. Indeed, this record often bears more resemblance to his collaboration with Collections Of Colonies Of Bees released under the Volcano Choir name than it does the debut. However, like Sunset Rubdown's Random Spirit Lover, another album of intricate songs which work best as a whole instead of as discrete tracks, Bon Iver, Bon Iver eventually reveals its secrets, its own sense of internal logic. Still, this music is not as radical a departure as other bands have attempted. It's more akin to MGMT's Congratulations or Radiohead's Kid A in terms of a fairly popular band changing their approach to music without radically altering the feel or tone of said music. Bon Iver is still making contemplative and bittersweet stuff albeit with slightly more abstraction in form and content. 'Calgary' in particular keeps threatening to achieve some kind of emotional peak that never arrives, sounding instead to these ears like Peter Gabriel's 'In Your Eyes' on quaaludes and/or pot. A similar 80s vibe overwhelms 'Beth/Rest', a song I either hate or love every time I hear it, sounding like (I'm not making this up) the closing ballad to an 80s film.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver doesn't trade in hooks or immediate emotional resonance. You'll need to work at it in many listening situations, whether just-this-side-of-too-loud in your car or at barely audible levels while reading a book on your couch. Furthermore, the greater diversity of instrumentation and ideas, along with a fantastic use of Vernon's now-patented falsetto, proves, if nothing else, that he is neither standing still nor throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Repeat listens reveal as many differences as similarities. The dreamy waltz of 'Michicant' could easily have fit onto the chilly Midwestern laments of For Emma, Forever Ago. 'Wash.' is, somehow, even more stripped down than anything from Bon Iver's debut, mainly relying on minimalist piano and faint acoustic guitar, with some swelling strings to provide needed emotional punctuations. If this is a record more about moments and ideas than songs or hooks, then 'Wash.' contains some of Bon Iver, Bon Iver's greatest triumphs, calling back to the intimacy of the debut but approaching from a different direction entirely.

Whether Vernon has here succeeded at establishing his artistic longevity, I don't know. I do know that his artistic credibility is without question; as with MGMT's Congratulations, this is a clear case of someone protesting to the world, “I am an artist interested in being creative and not just capitalizing on good will to make a quick buck.” Even if you ultimately don't like or understand Bon Iver, Bon Iver, the notion that Vernon isn't going to kowtow to the mainstream and remake the same kind of album over and over should be enough assurance to ride out a perceived misstep. As for me, I think this is a ballsy album that everyone should hear, unique and vital, the kind of thing that re-teaches me that I haven't heard it all when it comes to music.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Great Album Covers- Thrust

2011-07-14T18:40:00.003-04:00

I really wish I could find a bigger version of this cover. One that wasn't washed out looking, anyway, but short of scanning and stitching together images of my vinyl copy of this album, this is the best we can do.

There are many things I want to say about this cover, though perhaps it's best to start by saying that Thrust's artwork is more akin to a Parliament-Funkadelic live show than anything else in the world. Note the absurd keyboard controls for his weird bubble spaceship. Note the "surely inspired by drugs" intricate detail of absolutely everything going on here: the switches and dials at Herbie's hands, the mountain and labyrinth (maybe) he's flying toward, the moon, etc.

You'll also want to note Herbie's expression, which absolutely sells how badass this cover is even though it is also simultaneously dated and lame. What I mean is, even Ceelo couldn't get away with this kind of artwork in today's world. Even under the veil of retro kitsch it would be too far.

Also, it bears mention that this is a damn good jazz/funk record. My copy has skips in it that make it seem like it's making loops of itself for use on hip hop tracks; hearing it without them loses something, at least in my mind.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 13

2011-07-13T17:14:00.001-04:00

Technically I had this uploaded last night, but I got too distracted (drunk) and forgot to post it hee. Oh wellz!

Greg's CD Collection Part 4

2011-07-08T09:08:00.001-04:00

At long last, it's finished. The Ring has been cast into Mount Doom and Middle-Earth is safe.

Greg's CD Collection Part 3

2011-07-06T20:52:00.001-04:00

What's cracking? It's part three! Look for the electrifying* conclusion tomorrow!

*conclusion not guaranteed or likely to be electrifying

Weekly Whiskey Episode 12

2011-07-05T20:55:00.001-04:00

Hey, it's episode 12! I made it three months! Woo!

...yeah, it's a short episode, but I'm in the midst of doing the CD collection videos. So, give me a break.

Greg's CD Collection Part 2

2011-07-04T21:40:00.000-04:00

I, uhm, well, you know the drill.

Greg's CD Collection Part 1

2011-07-02T20:50:00.001-04:00

Hey! I'm on vacation and so finally got around to the long planned look through my CD collection. This is part one of at least a three part series. Look for the next couple/few over the next couple/few days!

Weekly Whiskey Episode 11 (For Realz)

2011-07-01T07:03:00.003-04:00

Well, it finally worked. Hope it was worth all the trouble! I have just had one of the worst 24 hour periods of my life, as if the universe wants to make surviving til my vacation as difficult and painful as possible. Such is life.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 11

2011-06-29T17:04:00.002-04:00

So, I uploaded this last night but blip.tv still isn't listing as being "not ready to watch yet." Here is the link if you want to check over and over because you simply HAVE to watch it now: http://blip.tv/whiskey-pie/weekly-whiskey-episode-11-5325099

Otherwise, I'll post the usual embedded version when it's finally ready on their end.

Low- C'mon

2011-06-26T10:21:00.000-04:00

The Rosetta's Stone to knowing what Low's new album is about rests squarely and obviously in its title: C'mon. As in, “come on in” or “follow me.” It's not often a band is so free of pretense and mystery as to what they were going for with a record, so I'm a bit mystified as to why the reviews have been talking about C'mon as a sort of backward looking, consolidating-the-last-few-releases kind of album. There may be strains of Low's older 'slowcore' style on this album, and the crunchy guitar sound certainly tips its hat to The Great Destroyer, but by and large the feel and atmosphere is distinct and different from previous works.

Low have always come off as humorless and unhappy people in their music. If you wouldn't necessarily agree with that (and you shouldn't, because it's inaccurate) I do think it's inarguable that they have always kept a listener at arm's length. Even the legendary intimacy of older releases like Secret Name felt more like you were in the next room, or anyway, that the band were singing/playing for each other and not you. C'mon, by contrast, is open and direct, aimed squarely outward and at the listener. Hopeful and upbeat, not to mention lush and unfailingly melodic, it is just as much of a revolution in the band's sound as The Great Destroyer or Drums and Guns. This time out, however, it's not about the instruments used or the lyrical topics; superficially this does sound like, as I put it above, a backward looking, consolidating kind of album. The revolution here is in the feel and atmosphere.

If C'mon didn't end up being the light and fun record it initially struck me as, it still contains some of the most beautiful and detailed music the band has ever made. 'Especially Me' recalls the indistinct loops and textures of Drums and Guns but replaces those electronic glitches and drones with intricate layers of instruments, from buried vibraphones (at least I think they're vibraphones) to plucked strings to what sounds like a swooning flute or treated organ. The mixing may make this more of a headphones-required record than I would've liked, but the tradeoff is that the vocals are mixed high and in the center. As a lover of husband-and-wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker's voices, whether together or alone, C'mon makes for a nice little gift to me. A sign of this positive change, '$20' sounds a lot like a leftover from the Things We Lost In The Fire or Trust sessions though this time the vocals aren't mixed low or hidden behind a veil of reverb and emotional distance. Now they're singing to you, not at you.

The true failing of C'mon, the thing that keeps me from falling head over heels in love with it, is that the songwriting just isn't there. There's an airy quality to tracks like 'Nightingale' and 'Done', barely there song structures which make more sense with further listens but still seem half-baked. This is ironic considering the four year gap between Drums and Guns and now; you'd think they'd have plenty of good stuff to choose from. This weakness ends up occurring in the middle stretch of the record, full of middling, forgettable material. It sounds lovely and nice while you're listening to it but it doesn't stick with you. This is also one of those rare cases where I think the shortness of a record hurts rather than helps. You're just starting to get into it when it draws to a close with 'Something's Turning Over', the kind of thing C'mon could've used more of, with strong-even-by-Low-standards close harmonies and retro “bah bah bah bah dah” backing vocals. The album's succinctness may leave Low with a strong EP or non-album single up their sleeve yet it leaves the listener with less cards on the table to play with.

True to its more pretty and direct nature, C'mon is full of music that gratifies a certain taste for immediate pleasure, a musical sweet tooth, if you will. Yet, like candy, it's quickly digested and doesn't leave enough of a lasting impression to qualify as true sustenance. There simply isn't enough here, or enough of enduring quality, to make this record as essential or fulfilling as Low's previous works.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Essay: Low In The 00's Pt. 3

2011-06-24T18:28:00.004-04:00

This is the final entry in an essay series on Low's albums from Trust to Drums and Guns. Look for a review of their new record, C'mon, sometime this weekend.

Drums and Guns

When a Low album starts off by proclaiming that soldiers, babies, poets, liars, and pretty people “are all gunna die”, you begin to wonder if some mistake has been made somewhere. Surely this must be another of Alan Sparhawk's sideprojects...? But, no, the cover clearly says Low on it. “Well, that was a strange opener, let's see how the next one goes,” you mutter to yourself.

Soon: “...what the hell is with all these loops? Where are the guitars and Mimi Parker's stark drumming? Boy, this is a weird one.”

As alluded to in the last essay, Drums and Guns is a very different sounding record from what Low had done before, even on the former big departure The Great Destroyer. Excepting 'Shots & Ladders' from Trust, some obscure split singles/collaborations, a remix records, and the underrated Songs For A Dead Pilot EP, Low had never explored this sort of musical territory before, doubly so on a main album. If The Great Destroyer could be accurately-but-lazily described as Low's rock album, then Drums and Guns could similarly be labelled their electronic album. Really, the nearest comparison I can think of is the sound of the more experimental/electronic/minimalist tracks from Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac. 'Take Your Time' is practically a Radiohead cover, so closely does the piano and tense atmosphere recall that band.

Whether Drum and Guns was a reaction to the second Gulf War (doubtful, since it was a couple years too late to be relevant) or the reception to The Great Destroyer (methinks no; they don't seem like the kind of band to do what they think people will like), Low were moved to craft songs which ooze along on currents of discrete loops, fractured guitar textures, and barely-there drumming. This record's closest kin is found in the less industrial and intense moments from Scott Walker's Tilt and The Drift, the parts where he sounds like he's brooding alone in abandoned cathedrals or muttering eulogies for civilization while the last television and computer screens in some kind of futuristic urban wasteland are flickering toward death, displaying only static or random colors. What I mean is, it may sound like Radiohead circa Kid A, but it feels more lime Scott Walker's recent work.

At the same time, the lyrics tend toward a more outward looking posture than I'm aware Low have had before or since. Even mid-album trifle 'The Hatchet', which helps relieve the tension of the rest of the album and calls back to the funner moments from The Great Destroyer, ostensibly is aimed at some other unnamed band. At any rate, without a doubt a theme of violence runs throughout the record; after all, underneath the olive branch of 'The Hatchet' is the copycat charge that the unnamed band's records “sound a lot like mine.” The brief 'Your Poison' could pass for a 60s political folk song, directly addressing the listener with the old fashioned terminology “good people.” And 'Murderer', if taken at face value, reads like a disturbing prayer from a fanatical/fundamentalist Christian, ready to give back violence in some kind of retribution or revenge against perceived worthy-of-punishment evil in the world.

Drums and Guns is the kind of record which sounds completely original and like a bolt-out-of-the-blue unless you are intimately familiar with the band it comes from and/or the album's influences. Even with reference points like modern day Scott Walker and '00-era Radiohead, though, this music is the most conceptually interesting and accomplished of Low's releases from the last decade. I would still waffle between this and Things We Lost In The Fire as best record from this time frame, but Drums and Guns is much more ambitious without its reach ever exceeding its grasp. If we can posit The Great Destroyer as a kind of shattering of any preconceived notions about who Low are and what kind of music they can make, then Drums and Guns is the sound of the aftermath, fragmented shards of sound that don't qualify as rock or 'slowcore.'

While this is certainly a dark and sometimes disturbing album ('Violent Past' alludes to some kind of strangulation taking place), it still manages to avoid the morose, melancholy, and leaden feel of Low's early music. This is partially thanks to Drums and Guns being the bands shortest album, though mostly it's thanks to the way the band never lets a song drag on too long or have too skeletal of a structure. How much of the indistinct sounds and loops which fill up the background are due to Dave Fridmann is hard to say, though I would imagine he had to have some input, since Drums and Guns sounds very little like the overdriven, raucous The Great Destroyer. In fact, despite the lyrics and droning, distorted organ, 'Violent Past' makes for an uplifting, optimistic sounding album closer.

This sense of optimism, along with a more immediate and melodic aesthetic, would serve the band well, after a four year break, on their 2011 release, C'mon. But that is something I'll be tackling in a forthcoming review...

Great Album Covers- Blonde On Blonde

2011-06-23T18:45:00.002-04:00

Do yourself a favor sometime and go the Albums section of Bob Dylan's official site. A wall of images greets you, small thumbnails arranged in reverse chronological order. For a man who has more than half a dozen iconic covers under his belt--even the first Greatest Hits is iconic--the one that still sticks out to me is Blonde On Blonde.

During this time it was common for bands to appear on their covers. Sometime in the mid-60s, though, the true art of album covers took off. Sure, jazz artists sometimes used works of art as covers and the like, but pop musicians never before tried new things. The most interesting Beatles cover to me is not the busy-yet-lush-and-detailed Sgt. Pepper's one, but the ultra-minimalist White Album. In fact, if memory serves, it's the only cover they don't appear on.

So why then did I choose one in which the artist does appear? Well, for two reasons. One, Dylan may be on the cover but his name and the album's title aren't. This had to have been one of the first examples of a pop musician not having their name or album title on the cover; it's as if Dylan is trying to get beyond his name and its attached fame, trying to make you dig deeper into the music instead.

And the second reason? I just adore this picture. It's hazy and out of focus, belying the druggy/boozy music contained therein. I don't know when this picture was taken or why, and I want to keep that mystery. This has always been the irony of Dylan to me; I don't really want to know the "real" Dylan like so many do. I prefer the image and the mystery; I prefer the music and lyrics without direct explanations of who/what they're about. This is the sort of record cover that appeals to my imagination, by which I mean, I fill in the blanks myself.

To my mind, he has just emerged from a house with a bad hangover and wishes nothing more than to smoke a cigarette without it making him want to puke before he gets on his motorcycle to head to the recording studio. A press photographer from across a street spies him while getting a coffee at a diner, rushes outside, and snaps a few quick shots with shaky, anxious hands. It's like spotting Bigfoot and knowing you have mere moments to get a clear photo. Dylan squints, annoyed, and heads back inside, deciding to stay home instead. The photographer hurries back to his dark room and develops the photos, impatient all the while, but the only one even halfway usable is still a little out-of-focus and Dylan has a sour look on his face. Still, Dylan's two-fisted-son-of-a-bitch manager Albert Grossman tracks down the photographer's publication and sues to get the photos back. Dylan, in his usual contrarian way, loves the real-ness captured in the photo and decides to use it for his next album cover.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 10

2011-06-21T21:44:00.002-04:00

It seemed like blip.tv locked up while I was uploading the video but as near as I can tell the upload finished before this occurred. Anyway, hey! New episode up early once again. You may have noticed these are usually dated as if they're released on Wednesdays though I usually manage to get them up Tuesday night. So even if they're not always the greatest of content at least I'm always on time.

Essay: Low In The 00's Pt. 2

2011-06-20T20:03:00.003-04:00

This is the second in an essay series on Low's albums from Trust to Drums and Guns. I'll be posting the final entry on the latter in a few days, and soon after, a review of the band's new album, C'mon. But for today, we look at...

The Great Destroyer

During the three year break from Trust to The Great Destroyer, Low changed record labels, signing on with indie powerhouse Sub Pop as well as putting out the vault clearing b-sides and rarities collection A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief. In 2003 there were rumors about longtime bassist Zak Sally leaving the band, which he eventually did in October of 2005. So, if it could be argued that Low had half-heartedly made some changes on Trust, this new era saw them making good on those unstated promises/threats. Whether or not you view Trust as the start of this new era or a sort of unintentional send-off to their old sound, something fundamental about Low's approach needed to change for them to continue as vital artists instead of becoming the kind of band only diehard fans could love, consistent but never surprising. At a certain point a band has to justify their continued existence with something, well, new and different, otherwise they're just punching a clock and creating art not out of inspiration but out of habit. Or to pay the bills.

Judging by the mixed reception the sudden changes of The Great Destroyer received, it's clear that some were unwilling to enjoy the music on its own merits, lashing out in particular at new producer Dave Fridmann. Bringing him in was just the cherry on top of the drastic differences the band had made; The Great Destroyer could correctly but lazily be considered their rock album. At any rate, Fridmann can be an easy target for derision because he has a profound effect on the bands he works with. His distinctive style, generally lush and often weird/experimental, as well as with a super-loud/distorted production, works well on most of his projects. It also means that he becomes a de-facto new member when he mans the boards for a band. This works extremely well when established groups need a new direction. Sleater-Kinney's The Woods and The Flaming Lips's Embryonic would be lesser records without him. When he works with bands who don't need such tinkering or aren't sympathetic to his style, however, the results are often terrible. To be fair to him, it's just as much the fault of bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! and Tapes 'N Tapes for coming to the studio with mediocre songs which no amount of production magic could salvage. Still, I think it's undeniable that the whole “it always sounds like someone is playing it through a guitar amplifier with overdrive and gain cranked up” aspect of those albums doesn't help.

As it turned out, The Great Destroyer is a more successful attempt to both progress and remake the band's sound than the preceding Trust, thanks partially to Fridmann's production. The slow and quiet moments still have the magical intimacy which inspired the trend of fans sitting down during Low concerts. On this record, though, they're the pleasant valleys between the brighter, more direct, and more energetic songs and sections of songs. 'Just Stand Back' is a huge departure for Low, effectively sounding like they've become a different band (and they had), all jangly guitar-pop with a much meatier backbone to all the instruments. Speaking of, it finally sounds like Mimi Parker discovered the joy of using a full drum kit more often, something immediately apparent on album opener 'Monkey', her pounding tom-toms ushered in by an ominous synthesizer and acoustic guitar strums.

'On The Edge Of' demonstrates one of the fundamental misunderstandings most people still have about Low, which is that they're only humorless, sexless aesthetes who play slow, quiet, boring music. Well, they do have a sense of humor—how else to explain their genuine love for the Misfits, down to performing some Misfits covers while dressed as the band, putting some of the results as hidden tracks on the A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief box set? Anyway, the hard rocking guitar and drums of this track speak to both the band's classic rock love as well as Sparhawk's numerous obscure side projects, including the bluesy Black Eyed Snakes and Retribution Gospel Choir, whose 2008 album sounds a lot like the kind of alternative-rock-with-a-capital-R which Low stood in defiance of, if not opposition to, during the 90s and early 00s. Moreover, one of The Great Destroyer's best and most memorable moments is the raucous, transformative peak of 'When I Go Deaf.' The band absolutely live up to the album title here by toying with our expectations until the guitar suddenly roars to life after nearly three minutes of acoustic navel-gazing , thereby silencing any doubts as to whether they could effectively subvert their old style.

As for the sexless part? Not all eroticism is physical; the way Parker and Sparhawk's vocals blend together has the familiarity and lack of self-awareness that only intimate lovers or very dear friends can have. But I digress.

Elsewhere on The Great Destroyer, things don't always go so smoothly. 'Step' is a poor attempt to throw in far too many ideas at once, including a sludgy, distorted guitar, buzzing amplifiers, affected vocals during the intro which sound like they come from a bad dance remix, handclaps, distant twinkling piano, and a boringly obvious acoustic and electric guitar breakdown at the end. 'Broadway (So Many People)' has a melody reminiscent of 'Like A Forest', surrounding it with hushed sections that sound like Parker and Sparhawk are singing inside a giant, echoey cathedral. However the actual result ends up being more like a live version of the song, as the band seem to be heading for a fade out but then kick it back in and continue on for two more minutes of formless vocal ahh's and distracting white noise that nearly swallows up the drums and chunky rhythm guitar. Strangest of all is 'Death Of A Salesman', a self-aware acoustic ditty which seems to have wandered in from another album entirely or escaped its more appropriate fate as a b-side. Then there's 'Pissing', which starts out sounding like an old style Low epic, the cymbals, guitar, and vocals building and building toward some peak until it's all sabotaged by out-of-nowhere distortion that makes the guitar howl and feedback. Then the expected peak never arrives. 'Pissing' is all tension and no release, ending abruptly, and is among the handful of missteps on this album that can't be blamed on the production. These don't ruin the record in the least but they do keep it from being the new-and-different Low's first unqualified success.

The Great Destroyer was a revitalized statement of intent for the band even if, in retrospect, it didn't establish what they would sound like for the rest of their career. That said, it did prove Low could still make great music without relying on their old bag of tricks. It may not rank among their best work, though it is arguably their most important release, the point on which their entire discography turns. Like Radiohead's Kid A, it's an essential listen even if you don't end up enjoying it. “Essential” for the band to make so they could redefine themselves and continue on as a still-vital creative entity. But also “essential” as listening for those who wish to understand what the band is about, to smash through some assumptions, and to uncover how they got from Secret Name to C'mon. In that respect, it's still a transitional work, as Trust was, though The Great Destroyer didn't point to the future as much as it hit the reset button to lay the future wide open.

Possessing just as many tracks as but thankfully 12 minutes leaner than Trust, the more I listen to The Great Destroyer the more it strikes me as being a better version of what I think the band secretly wanted to do with that one. I'd go so far as to say that the much touted rock of 'Canada' sounds restrained once you've heard this record. Whether it took more time, a new label, or a different producer, it is their most rocking album and, until C'mon, passed for their most immediately engaging. Much as credit or blame for this was laid at the feet of Dave Fridmann or their jump to one of the biggest indie labels, I'm not sure they deserve much of it. After only two years off and a new bassist, Low would return with the same producer on the same label though with the very different sounding Drums and Guns.

Essay: Low In The 00's Pt. 1

2011-06-19T17:38:00.001-04:00

Intro

Having perfected their style with 1999's Secret Name and 2001's Things We Lost In The Fire, it was only natural that the band would try new things in the ensuing decade. Their new album, C'mon, is their most extreme change yet in the sense that it mostly overturns their established aesthetic, savoring the fun of making and listening to inviting, melodic, and sunny tunes. But how did they get there from the well-worn cliché of them as a navel gazing minimalist band who all but defined the slowcore subgenre?

Well, I haven't kept up with Low since 2001, so C'mon came as something of a shock. Even so, examining the three albums I had missed out on has been something I've meant to get around to since starting this blog. In a three part series of essays, I'll be digging into each record one at a time; don't consider any of these reviews in the traditional sense. Rather, I want to take the long view, so to speak, and examine them in the context of the band's history as well as the present.

Trust

Low is a consistent band when it comes to putting out records. In fact, it's usually the three year fallows between releases where the major changes take place. The gap between The Curtain Hits The Cast and Secret Name saw the band moving from a pseudo-major label to indie stalwart Kranky, as well as working with sympathetic producer Steve Albini, a man well known for stripped down sounds and raw/live sounding records. He and the more appropriate home at Kranky allowed them to perfect their sound without having a major label breathing down their necks.

As Trust, however, only trailed Things We Lost In The Fire by a year, the most major change is in using producer Tchad Blake, who has an annoying-to-spell first name. Furthermore, he's worked with such a wide variety of artists it's impossible to pin a certain style on him. Unlike Albini or the forthcoming work with Dave Fridmann, then, most of the credit or blame for Trust lays with Low.

This is a classic transitional album with all the problems these kind of records usually have. It's their longest and most expansive work to date, keeping one foot in the older sound while sometimes noticeably nudging themselves to take new steps forward. 'Canada' is the clearest example of what I'm getting at, practically leaping out of the speakers with a fuzzed out bass and the most overt rock song they'd done up to this point. But changes are also demonstrated by the subtle banjo and (what sounds like a) buried horn section on 'In The Drugs'; the incredibly pretty piano solo showcase for Mimi Parker on 'Point Of Disgust'; and the suspended animation drones of 'Shots & Ladders.' This song serves as a kind of blueprint for Drums and Guns, but we'll get to that later.

With four songs over seven minutes long each, Low are no longer celebrating a different approach to making music, with minimalism and spaciousness as the key guiding principles, as they did at their best on past records. Now they're just taking too long to get anywhere. 'John Prine' is the worst offender here. It's not even that it's a bad song; its crime is being way too long and possessing an unsympathetic structure, drowning what could have been a quaint two minute song in the murky depths of their old approach where they would painstakingly build tension or atmosphere over the course of four or five minutes. During the entire course of the album there is also the issue of Mimi Parker's drumming, which is similarly unsympathetic to the arrangements. Playing while standing up with a crash cymbal and snare is brilliant for past masterpieces like 'Two-Step' and 'Closer' but for a beefier song like 'Canada' it comes off as thin and weak, as if she was laying down the click track and they never went back to overdub the real drum parts.

Trust is weighed down by its ties to the band's past. The album title and cover art, to say nothing of the themes of the lyrics, suggest a record about strained personal relationships, though as fans we could also interpret it as the album's defense statement. The band had to know they were trying to get somewhere but hadn't fully made the change, falling back on old tricks to pad out the runtime, as if to say, “not all this new stuff is great, but there's still plenty of the old stuff to help ease you in!”

To these ears, though, it doesn't work. The band must have realized this, too. It's very telling that the music they would go on to make over the next nine years sounds very little like Trust or their past at all.

Battles- Gloss Drop

2011-06-16T21:50:00.001-04:00

Whether or not you'll enjoy Gloss Drop hinges on two things the band has dropped from their debut: guitarist/keyboardist Tyondai Braxton (and his cut-up, looped, digitally processed vocals) and the sense of heavy metal/hard rock raw power that permeated some of their past songs. The first one is the biggest change, as losing Braxton wasn't like a band shuffling bassists; he was a unique element of their sound and their ostensible frontman. As for the second loss, Gloss Drop still manages to rock from time to time, but by and large it is a more freewheeling and fun record, picking up the sort of videogame-esque keyboards and funhouse, genre blending atmosphere of some moments on Mirrored. To put it in the nerdiest way possible, the change from the debut to now is like going from the original Terminator to the liquid metal one from Terminator 2. Gloss Drop is still muscular but more trim, like a long distance runner compared to a linebacker.

Similarly, it keeps taking on different forms to aid its attempts to kill John Connor. No, wait...that's just the liquid metal Terminator. All kidding aside, this record is guest heavy, which is both good and bad. These collaborative songs bring out different elements of Battles's sound (a la the liquid metal Terminator impersonating different humans) thereby exposing the band's ties to various genres and sub-genres. 'Ice Cream' is one of the primary reasons this is a more fun and freewheeling album than Mirrored, boasting an addictive stuttering organ melody on top of a general Summery atmosphere. It also has a surprisingly good groove considering the trio that makes up Battles are mostly known for their past associations with math rock and metal. In the most interesting pairing, Yamantaka Eye of the Boredoms stops by for the lengthy album closer 'Sundome', suggesting a possible new direction for the band as a genre straddling electronic/dub band. I would kill to see what Battles and Eye would do over the course of a collaborative EP or album; of the four guests, he ends up being the best fit as well as most appropriate choice for a dream replacement for Braxton.

To call Gloss Drop a disjointed album feels as much like a slight as it does a compliment. This is where that “guest heavy album is both good and bad” element comes into play. The guests pull the band in different directions and it always sounds more like Battles backing someone instead of them guesting on a Battles track. This causes Gloss Drop to lose the coherency of Mirrored, which, again, is good and bad, since this album is more accessible, grooving, and fun to listen to. Moreover, it's true that what exactly this band is and what they will sound like from release to release has been constantly in flux from the very beginning, so it's a bit unfair to say the guests are causing this. If the band seem less overtly experimental on Gloss Drop, it's only because the songs are more focused and traditional (or what passes for more traditional for this band, anyway), more like the tangible results of completed experiments rather than unedited improvisations or works in progress. Where on their EPs a dissonant, heavily electronic song like 'Rolls Bayce' might have gone on for three or four minutes, here we get by fine with a mere two. Still, the most successful experiments do end up being the collaborations; the songs without vocals invariably feel like pretty good b-sides or even above average Mirrored sequels, in particular 'White Electric.'

Gloss Drop ends up leaving the band's future even more wide open than it already was. This means that it lacks the unified feel and flow of their debut, but the tradeoff is that Gloss Drop is even more of a joy to listen to. This is the kind of album where you can just tell the band had a great time making it, and the guests help lend it a party atmosphere. This doesn't make it a better record, and in a few years time it will either make more or less sense depending on where the band goes next, assuming they ever settle on a direction or two. And you know, I'm not sure it's what they should do to begin with. At any rate, Gloss Drop is not so much a transitional album as one that sees Battles tinkering with their chemical formula before it's even been jotted down, as if a scientist kept adding more and more compounds to the mixture and calling in colleagues for their input. This results in a record that is a hell of a lot of fun to listen to even if it doesn't, as a whole, add up to truly stellar music.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 9

2011-06-14T20:50:00.002-04:00

Number nine...number nine....number nine....

Wilco- A.M.

2011-06-10T17:12:00.002-04:00

If I may: upon its release, Wilco's A.M. got an undue amount of grief and bad mouthing from every side imaginable. Even members of the band, in particular Jeff Tweedy, regard the album as a failure, inspiring him to craft the massively ambitious follow-up, the double album Being There.

While that may be the only silver lining of this record for most people, I have the strong impression that if anyone bothered to listen to the thing today, with all the alt.country/No Depression/rivalry with Jay Farrar's Son Volt in the distant past, they'd discover a decent little album with some fantastic songs. After all, Wilco often bust out fan favorites 'Casino Queen', 'Box Full Of Letters', and 'Passenger Side' as crowd pleasing stompers during their shows. If three great songs don't exactly a great album make, they do help make it a good one. In other words, A.M. is, depending on your familiarity, not as bad as you remember or not as bad as you've been led to believe.

I would add 'Too Far Apart' to that list of great songs from this album. As this is the only Wilco release on which Brian Henneman appears, his lead guitar playing on this track makes it among the most unique in the Wilco canon for that reason alone, though the mid-60s Dylan-esque organ stabs and ramshackle drumming help make this my pick for most underrated, unknown Wilco song. It's simply a rocking little album closer, unassuming and casual, the sort of thing critics and disappointed music fans probably derided the album as being boring or underwhelming for. Which means to me, it's populist and fun, hard to hate but also difficult to praise or critique in a meaningful way.

Yes, what strikes me most about A.M. is its populist appeal. Not so much alt.country as a country-rock record patterned in the rustic-by-way-of-folk-and-rock Bob Dylan/Neil Young style, the album title is also a dead giveaway for the band's aim, making music that would feel welcome next to, say, The Band on a classic rock station. Sure, there's some twang to tracks like the modest 'That's Not The Issue', the record's undiscovered treasure (next to 'Too Far Apart', anyway), featuring some spirited banjo picking and pedal steel guitar licks. Sure, nothing on here hints at the stronger rock, pop, and later, experimental elements that were to come, to say nothing of the forthcoming greater artistic ambition. Yet listen to this in the context of the band's discography as it stands in 2011 and you'll find that, as a whole, A.M. is closer in sound and spirit to Being There than Being There is to Summerteeth and everything after.

This may sound strange, especially coming from someone who generally loathes brainless, feel-good pop music, but even I enjoy modest, good-time music now and again. And A.M. is just that; nothing more, nothing less. Not every song is great or an amazing piece of art but with an album like this, it's unnecessary. Furthermore, it's ironically almost an asset that some of the songs are mediocre because, at a party (the ideal place for such music), it's nice to have a break to get up and grab another beer or greet those lackadaisical friends showing up fashionably late.

All of that said, A.M. is without a doubt Wilco's worst album. Being There is a more artistic and enduring rejiggering of its aesthetic minus the boozy fun-time country-rock swing, as if Tweedy was finally putting in a genuine effort to try. By which I mean, not only to try to best former Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jay Farrar but also to carve his name on the tree of rock history. Whatever record you think he managed to complete both of those with--I wasn't totally sold until A Ghost Is Born, which probably sounds insane--I don't think anyone would claim he did it with the debut. Still, calling A.M. Wilco's worst album is analogous to calling Grizzly Bear's Horn Of Plenty their worst, too. Both are true statements, though those debuts are quite different in spirit and tone from what they would go on to do, to say nothing of personnel changes. Thus I would append the claim to be a variation on the sophomore slump rather than "worst album." So, no, those albums aren't the worst; they're the "freshmen slump" of both bands.

3 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Dinosaur Jr.- Farm

2011-06-09T18:45:00.002-04:00

For all the comparisons to Neil Young that they've endured over the years, for all the influence they had on the British shoegazer scene of the late 80s/early 90s, the most intriguing thing to me about Dinosaur Jr. is the fact that they've gotten away with being what is essentially a power trio in an underground/indie scene which normally turns its nose up at such things. Really, especially after watching the Live In The Middle East concert film, I think of this band as the Cream of the 80s. It's not a perfect analogy, I admit, yet it's not hard to see the same clash of egos and resentment between bassist and guitarist in both bands.

Of course there's also the music. While Dinosaur Jr. don't sound much like Cream, give a listen to Farm and tell me that I'm wrong in considering them a power trio. The riffs are heavy and memorable, full of fist pumping abandon bested only by J. Mascis's searing, endlessly enjoyable soloing. Though the rhythm section lacks his virtuosity, they are every bit as solid as classic rock benchmarks like Led Zeppelin. Since bassist Lou Barlow spent his time away (from the mid-80s until 2005, when the original Dinosaur Jr. line-up reunited) making music in various bands, he now has the confidence and outside creative outlets to be a perfect foil to Mascis, delivering a couple great tunes per record and playing with creativity and energy. This is, ultimately, Mascis's band, but Barlow and drummer Murph are no longer just along for the ride, doing and playing what they're told to. Now it feels more like a "lesser but equal" situation.

Farm was Dinosaur Jr.'s second album after the reunion, and you get the impression throughout that the band have jumped on the opportunity to rewrite history. It's not hard to imagine this record coming out in some, say, alternate history 1999 where Barlow had stayed in the band through the 80s and 90s. In fact, Barlow's contributions to Farm sound eerily similar to Sebadoh's 1999 album The Sebadoh, down to the punchy, live-sounding production and all. But I digress.

With the pressure of their reunion tour and 'first album back' behind them, there's a real energy to this record which belies the band's enthusiasm for recording and playing music together. While they may have stretched out on stage back in the 80s, Farm feels like the most live and jammy of all of their albums, underscoring and highlighting how power trio-y they are. It's telling that this is the band's longest album ever, doubly so because most of the shortest songs were relegated to the bonus tracks included on the deluxe edition. 'Plans', 'Said The People', and 'I Don't Wanna Go There' all sprawl past the six minute mark, the latter in particular, featuring a soaring guitar solo that seems to last for half of the nearly nine minute runtime.

That sprawl and lack of concision to Farm as a whole means that this isn't the masterstroke it could have been if this were a more song oriented versus performance based record. The songs aren't all fantastic though the music is exceptionally good, if that makes sense. Such a situation cuts both ways, since this is the kind of music which makes you want to listen to it and it alone for the rest of the day. Farm doesn't supplant You're Living All Over Me as the band's high water mark...though you may be surprised how often you end up listening to it.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Weekly Whiskey Episode 8

2011-06-08T19:02:00.001-04:00

Hey presto, it's episode 8!

Essay: Personal Reflections On Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel

2011-06-05T08:21:00.008-04:00

Once you reach a certain age and are unmarried, I'm willing to bet that, like me, you have that one person for whom you will eternally pine. They understand you, and more importantly, they accept and love you for who you are whereas no one else can or does. To paraphrase Department of Eagles, no one does it like them. Yet for any number of reasons, things between you both never work out. Perhaps they only see you as a friend. Maybe one or both of you are too fucked up to make things work. Or maybe it's a simple case of them having someone else and not needing you. Whatever it is, your friends and family tell you to stay away, that you'll only receive pain and torment, that you've been down this road before, etc. However, that simple sense of commonality and understanding is so potent a draw you would cut off an ear, Picasso-style, if it would make them love you (or love you again).

A girl, no, a woman I love very much fits in this category. I could never explain how I feel about her in any rational way. Moreover, it's a distinct possibility that I will never be with her in a traditional relationship sense, and we'll come in and out of each other's lives like ships passing in the night. We don't even live in the same State anymore. The point I'm getting at is that I didn't even understand how much Atlas Sound's Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel meant to me until I introduced her to his music via Pitchfork.TV's mesmerizing live performance of his at a church for their Cemetery Gates series. I was simultaneously introducing her and re-introducing myself to this incredible music. We both became briefly obsessed with the performance, and by extension, his two albums. I never would or could have finally connected with this record if not for her, and I am eternally grateful to both the music and her for it.

To me, Bradford Cox's music in Deerhunter and Atlas Sound is completely tied up in the tension between nostalgia and the present, between accepting one's own weirdness and trying to fit into society, and between concrete emotions and a numbed, druggy indifference. Let The Blind... goes a step further by bringing in his own experiences, in particular his unrequited love for friend/Deerhunter member Locke Pundt and his troubled youth--parental divorce, drug use and abuse, and most importantly for me, his teenage surgeries and hospitalizations for Marfan's Syndrome.

Careful viewers of the Weekly Whiskey video series may have noticed a line-like scar running along the left side of my head. I won't bore you with the details as to its origins; suffice it to say that I had three or four surgeries by the time I was in kindergarten. Those experiences, along with all the feelings and thoughts a child has while facing such things, have shaped me as a person ever since. I'm willing to speculate that Cox would agree that it's not the physical scars I bear, or his emaciated, sickly appearance thanks to Marfan's, which really have the profound, lasting effect on us. Instead, it's all the associated mental and emotional baggage that comes from them and from the reactions of others.

Strange, then, that the first few times I listened to this record, it struck me as numb and detached. It still sometimes strikes me as the kind of music someone who was perpetually stoned (on weed and/or psychedelics and/or prescription meds for insomnia and anxiety) to the point of indifference would make in an attempt to reconnect with their feelings. This was all on the surface, though. Listen carefully to Let The Blind... and his other music in and out of Atlas Sound, and you'll find one of the most self-aware and emotionally connected musicians of our time. Just as Dinosaur Jr. rock harder than almost anyone yet often have nakedly-emotional/personal songs underneath all the blare and distortion, on this album Cox swaddles his feelings in seemingly cold/distant music. The more I listen to this record and the more I decipher the lyrics, though, the more warm and comforting it becomes. Just as the woman I spoke of earlier is one of the handful of people I've ever met who truly understands and accepts me, this is one of the few albums I feel a strong personal connection to. I don't mean this in the broad sense of "wow, I relate to Beatles songs", which play to many people in many vastly different situations. It's much more specific for me and this record. For example, though my own experience with 'sleeping til I threw up' wasn't drug related as on the song 'Ativan', the first time I heard that line goosebumps and tingling shot up my limbs and spine and the memory came roaring back.

What Let The Blind... represents to me is making something creative, positive, and therapeutic out of an abjectly terrible period of one's life. You can get so hung up on your own perceived issues and memories that you don't attempt to do anything about them, to make peace with them and yourself. I'm sure that making music hasn't "cured" Cox, but if it has helped him half as much as Let The Blind... and other albums have helped me, and writing in general has also helped me, perhaps a cure isn't the answer. He and I don't need to force ourselves to become normal people; we have to learn to express ourselves and be OK with who/what we are.

This is an album of purging personal demons, of displaying the most vulnerable and pained memories and pieces of one's self to the world. Most important of all, it's about being unafraid to do so anymore. I would never and could never review this music in any traditional sense because, in some other lifetime and series of events, I might've made this album.

NOTE: I apologize if it seems like I'm attempting to parallel myself and my life to Bradford Cox too much. I don't know him at all except through his music, interviews, and random blog posts I've read. I'm making a lot of assumptions in this essay and I acknowledge that. I'm sure my experiences were not much like his at all, and his were likely far worse, so take it all with a grain of salt.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 7: 2007/Ambient Edition

2011-06-01T20:56:00.003-04:00

Episode 7. Enjoy! Do some drugs and listen to ambient music, maaaaaaan.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 6.5

2011-05-30T14:34:00.002-04:00

Hey, whaddya know, two posts in one day!