Video: Tom Waits- God's Away On Business

Tom Waits is a champion squinter. Every time I see footage of him, his face is contorted in a look of either pain or passion, perhaps both, as if singing his damaged, idiosyncratic songs has a physical effect as much as an emotional one. Which kinds of makes sense due to his scratchy, whiskey soaked growl, though if you've heard him speak you know his voice isn't an affectation so much as, well, all he can really manage.

Anyway, this video is an old fashioned artsy one. Waits mugs for the camera in a desolate 20s/30s set that mirrors the old timey sound of the song. At various points he can be seen standing in a room with large birds (my best guess would be emu) and the lyrics of the song as well as the visuals imply that God has left and the animals have re-taken the Earth. Perhaps Waits is the devil or an angel letting us know that our time is coming to an end.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into that.

Same Title, Different Song

If you're like me, you probably keep your music organized on your computer by artist and/or album. However, if you arrange your collection by song title...

Song: 'All I Need'
Artists: Air, My Bloody Valentine, Radiohead
The Air and Radiohead songs are relatively close in tone, both being mid-tempo ballads that help anchor the emotional core of their respective albums. Meanwhile, the My Blood Valentine song is a cloud of noise such that no matter how loud you listen to the song, it always feel remote, far away, and up near the sun somewhere.

Song: 'Wildnerness'
Artists: Joy Division, Sleater-Kinney
Joy Division's 'Wilderness' couldn't be more different from Sleater-Kinney's if they had tried. Their's is an almost prototypical Joy Division number with a plodding drum, scrawling guitars, bucking bass, and reverb everywhere. Meanwhile, Sleater-Kinney's is a mid tempo rocker with impassioned vocals and everything redlined except the intertwining guitar during the chorus breaks.

Song: 'Animals'
Artists: Devendra Banhart, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads
Devendra Banhart's song is a short folk piece that reminds one of the time when he was an actual freak instead of someone constantly putting on a show. Sonic Youth's song, at least the one I have, is an early version of 'Mary Christ' from the deluxe edition of Goo. Meanwhile the Talking Heads song is a typically funky and catchy ditty about how animals are dangerous and untrustworthy foes. The line "animals are smart/they shit on the ground" is pretty ace, too.

Song: 'Dark Star'
Artists: Beck, Grateful Dead
I've always gotten the feeling that most people avoid the title 'Dark Star' because it's so associated with the Grateful Dead. In that spirit, you couldn't get much farther and yet closer to the epic, psychedelic, and improvisational Dead version than Beck's, which is a deadpan spacey dirge with all sorts of psychedelic flourishes.

Song: 'Venus'
Artists: Air, Low, Television
While I don't like the album nearly as much, I feel like 'Venus' is one of the best album openers that Air have ever done. I love the warm embrace of the synth washes that float up after the one minute mark. Then there's Low's 'Venus', which I only have on the hard-to-find live album One More Reason To Forget and which I remember hearing for the first time after I had broken up with a girlfriend. It's an atypically energetic number for Low, especially early Low, though it still moves at their usual slow pace. Anyway, Television's 'Venus' is just plain awesome from beginning to end. People tend to associate Marquee Moon with the longer guitar jams, but I think 'Venus' is the secret masterpiece, especially the backing vocals asking and reacting to the main vocals: "Did you feel low?" "No" "HUH?!"


Song: 'Untitled'
Artists: Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Burial, DJ Shadow, Fugazi, Interpol, Panda Bear, Pearl Jam, Sigur Ros, Sonic Youth
Yeah, are you really surprised that so many people in my collection used the title 'Untitled'?? Don't expect me to go through them all, since technically Panda Bear and Sigur Ros released whole albums where every song has no official title.

Song: 'Providence'
Artists: Deerhunter, King Crimson, Sonic Youth
I'll end on this one because I think it's the most interesting. All three of these songs are pretty different, but also pretty similar in an experimental way. Deerhunter's opens with looping guitars and adds layer upon layer of dreamy guitar sounds before descending into an ambient-esque climax with waterfall sounds and birds chirping. King Crimson's 'Providence' comes from the Red album though it is actually a live improvisation from a concert. This is the sort of song that's too difficult to describe. It trades off silence with free form guitar/violin/bass/drums drones and snatches of music and finally gains some momentum in its rollin' and tumblin' second half. Finally, 'Providence' by Sonic Youth is the (in)famous musique concrete piece from Daydream Nation that uses an answering machine message left by Mike Watt, a haunting piano, and errant white noise to produce a spellbinding, indescribable atmosphere that wouldn't be out of place in a David Lynch film.

Swan Lake- Beast Moans

People like to throw around the term "supergroup" as if it actually means anything anymore. Every time a few guys from other bands start a band together you hear that they're a "supergroup." I don't know about you, but the idea of "supergroups" becomes totally unappealing once you've listened to great musicians or artists thrown together at benefit concerts or music festivals. The cold realization is that it takes time for people to get used to each other, and it is exceedingly rare that people who've never collaborated together could produce something substantial on the first try. It's fun to make up dream bands--Hendrix on guitar, John Bonham on drums, that kind of thing--but the truth is they play entirely different styles and would take awhile to either learn to play in each other's framework or create something wholly new.

So, then, Swan Lake, which combines Dan Bejar (solo artist under the moniker Destroyer and the secret weapon of the New Pornographers), Carey Mercer (brilliant howler of Frog Eyes), and Spencer Krug (sometime member of Frog Eyes, main force behind Sunset Rubdown, and a significant creative half of Wolf Parade). At first glance this line up wouldn't make sense to anyone who isn't familiar with Destroyer's work. After releasing the synth/keyboard based Your Blues album, Dan Bejar decided to tour with Frog Eyes as his backing band, transforming the orchestrated and synthetic affectations of the album into a rocking and rollicking barnstormer. If you've ever seen Bob Dylan live in the past few years and witnessed how his band transforms the songs into new and fantastic shapes, then you have an idea of what the Frog Eyes pairing was like. Anyway, Bejar, Mercer, and Krug enjoyed the tour so much they recorded an EP under the Destroyer name, Notorious Lightning and Other Works, and made plans to record an album together. Thus, a year or so later, the Swan Lake project was born.

Where exactly does Beast Moans fall on the scale between "disparate musicians taking turns playing in each other's style" and "creating something unlike anything the three have produced before"?? Well, more of the former than the latter. Imagine me saying that with a tinge of disappointment and you've got the general crux of the issue. Beast Moans is a bit of a slippery album because I feel like Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug make better collaborators than either of them with Carey Mercer. This is no knock on Mercer or Frog Eyes, but that band's style is so distinctive and unhinged that one gets the feeling that here Bejar and Krug help make Mercer's songs more coherent and traditional while he, in turn, makes their's more unpredictable and odd. Consider 'The Partisan But He's Got To Know', which is just a typically great Frog Eyes song until Bejar and Mercer trade lines toward the end, adding much needed flavor syrup to the reverby Slushie that is Frog Eyes. Metaphorically speaking. On the other hand, consider album closer 'Shooting Rockets' which, though written by Bejar, is an apocalyptic dirge buried beneath dense guitar soundscapes and clattering percussion. Compare this to the version of the song that appears on Bejar's recent Destroyer album Trouble In Dreams in a cleaned up and much more enjoyable form.

Some new ideas do appear on Beast Moans, and promise greater things on the inevitable, all-but-released next album. After Bejar's magnificent 'The Freedom', the song segues into 'Petersburg, Liberty Theater, 1914', which has a title like a Frog Eyes song but belongs to each member equally. Over a repetitive drum beat, glistening guitars, and downright beautiful keyboards, Krug and Bejar harmonize very well before trading off vocals to Mercer, who is commended for singing in a fashion somewhat unlike his usual style, much calmer and almost speak-singing.'Pleasure Vessels', though Mercer penned, switches between reverb drenched walls of sound and clean guitar chording, a mood piece as much as a song.

It's always hard for me to review a "supergroup" album and not declare a MVP, so to speak. Were I forced, the easy victor on this album is Spencer Krug. Though we all loved the Wolf Parade album and Sunset Rubdown's Shut Up I Am Dreaming, he really proves himself one of the best and most consistent songwriters of the Canadian indie scene with 'All Fires' and 'Are You Swimming In Her Pools?' which combine his love of repeating everyday phrases with poetic/romantic imagery. The latter presents such gems as "please is not a word I ever said quietly" and "I hope you find your mother there" alongside the flat-out amazing second 'verse' which begins with the following three lines:

Are you running up her riverbeds and navigating long fingers of a hand?
Because fingers make the hand
And rivers make the land

I want to give some credit to Mercer and Bejar, but their best works lies elsewhere as far as I'm concerned, and I feel like their best contributions to the album are still overshadowed by Krug. It's true that they probably pushed Krug to this level and/or helped him realize his songs better than he could have with his other bands, but one gets the distinct impression they didn't bring their "A" game to the proceedings. Props to Bejar, though, for managing anything as good as 'A Venue Called Rubella' while he's also busy dividing his output between Destroyer and New Pornographers.

Though I do genuinely enjoy this album, I also feel that the next thing they release will be even better. Other than Bejar, who played it safe on his last two releases to diminishing results (I'm still baffled that people like Challengers by the New Pornographers so much), Mercer and Krug seemed to take the lessons of this collaboration to heart. Both of the last albums by Frog Eyes and Sunset Rubdown were phenomenal, and represented great artistic steps--if not a leap--for each. Whatever the future holds for the Swan Lake project, rest assured that its first product, Beast Moans, is well worth seeking out for fans of any of the three minds behind it.

The Videogame Solipsist: Dreamcast

September 9, 1999 was one of those weird numerical dates in history. It seemed ripe for people putting more significance into it than they should--9 is a powerful number, after all, and if I knew anything about Numerology I could probably list off a bunch of "facts" about it. Anyway, the main thing I remember about the date is that MTV was having some kind of awards show (they were whores for the "9/9/99" thing) and the Sega Dreamcast was launching in North America. I think that just speaks to everything that made the Dreamcast unique. Who launches consoles in September, let alone on a unique numerical date??

With a remove of less than a decade, it's easy to get nostalgic and lovey-dovey about the Dreamcast. However, we forget how sketchy the whole thing was when it first came out. Sega had given up on the Saturn in the U.S. by 1998, ironically a time when most of its best games were coming out here. By the end of 1998, it had been released in Japan, and we were teased for nearly a year with the amazing screenshots pouring out of that country. Still, we were very hesitant to buy in to the Dreamcast, after having been confused or burned by the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn.

So, while I wanted to point out that we had no reason to expect the Dreamcast would be good, in the end I, and many others, were proved wrong. Looking at the games list, the Dreamcast had utter classics in almost every genre, as well as doing things ahead of its time: the VMU memory cards, online multiplayer on a console, first console to support mouse and keyboard, and the first console to use voice chat via a microphone.

I didn't get a Dreamcast until around the time the Playstation 2 was launching. I remember there being this weird time where, in the holiday of 2000, I was concurrently playing Grandia II on my Dreamcast and Final Fantasy IX on my Playstation, and I got way more into Grandia II than I did FFIX, and it didn't make any sense to me. It may have been excitement about having a new console, but Grandia II had voices, which was something I hadn't seen in a RPG before, at least on console. At the same time, there were already a ton of great Dreamcast games to pick up, too: Power Stone 2, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, Virtua Tennis, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica...I think if you look at the list of Dreamcast games that were released, you'll be shocked how many games you forgot and how many were released in 1999 or 2000.

This is to say nothing of 2001, which was simultaneously the peak and the beginning of the end for the Dreamcast. Let's start with the peak: Phantasy Star Online. It's the one game that immediately jumps to my mind as being what the Dreamcast was all about. I will never forget buying this game with some leftover holiday money, coming home, and getting lost in it for the rest of the day. Other than Diablo 1 and 2, I had never experienced anything like this. It was a dungeon crawler like that series, but with a Japanese RPG style and an amazing idea: free online play across regions. You could play with people across the world on it, and the game even had an innovative chat system that used symbols and a mechanic that allowed you to build sentences out of pieces that the game would translate across languages. For instance, you could make a macro that said "Help" or "Hello" or "Follow Me" and it would show up, properly, in whatever language the other people in your game were using. My fondest memory of this game was fighting a boss with three other people, one of whom was either French or French Canadian. Three of us died in the battle, and watched the last guy somehow manage to defeat the boss on his own while we cheered via the simple, translated phrases.

The writing was on the wall for the Dreamcast, however. The Playstation 2 simply commanded too much attention, and with its ability to cheaply play DVDs, it was hard to ignore for long. The games may not have been there, but by the end of 2001, they were. Things kept looking better and better for Sony while they got worse and worse for Sega. Microsoft had announced their entry into the videogames market with the Xbox, a system that largely felt like their take on the Dreamcast idea. Meanwhile, Nintendo announced the Gamecube, which promised to improve on many of the errors made during the N64 era. February 2002 saw the last official Dreamcast game in the U.S., NHL 2K2. Though the Dreamcast had a relatively healthy lifespan in Japan (like its predecessor, the Saturn) it barely lasted three years in the U.S. and effectively ruined Sega as a hardware brand. It would be their last system ever, though rumors pop up at least once a year that the company may step back in. However unlikely this is, with the increasing nostalgia and love for the Dreamcast, it may actually work the next time...

On First Listen: Shellac- Excellent Italian Greyhound

One of my music buying habits is to just jump into a band I've never listened to at any point in their discography. I let fate and the record store decide where I'll begin with Do Make Say Think or, in this case, Shellac.

Shellac is an odd case, because I've technically heard a lot of work that Steve Albini has done as a producer--sorry, I mean, recording engineer--but I've never listened to anything he's personally done. I like the idea of his bands and the descriptions I've read, but never heard them.

Excellent Italian Greyhound is their latest album, and I could find a copy on vinyl, so here I am. Awesomely enough, the band includes a CD copy in the vinyl sleeve, though it's kind of a "fuck you" move because it's just a blank CD. So, then, I'll say "fuck you" back and listen to it on CD first.

The album opens with the spoken word driven and lengthy 'The End of Radio.' This is kind of a weird way to start an album. It reminds me a lot of Slint's Spiderland in terms of the dynamics, loud/quite/loud sections, and the plodding, exacting nature of the repetitive guitar. Obviously Steve Albini worked with Slint on their first album, Tweez and has been quite vocal about his love for Spiderland ever since its release, so the comparison makes sense. The song is, funnily enough, exactly what the title implies--someone broadcasting the last radio broadcast ever.

'Steady As She Goes' is not a cover of that Raconteurs song. Rather it's a pretty basic angry punk-ish song. Steve Albini (I'm assuming he's the singer on this song, anyway) yells the lyrics, but not in a death metal/screamo kind of way, thankfully. One thing I can say about this album thus far: it sounds as good as you'd expect from a notoriously finicky engineer. The instruments all sound clean and seperated and the vocals are mixed a bit lower than everything else. Which is the standard Albini aesthetic, and in Shellac's case, it certainly works.

'Be Prepared' is a math rocky "we have chops" workout. I've been thinking about why I don't know if I like or dislike this song, and I realize it's because this album doesn't make sense to me yet. It's going to take awhile to get into their way of doing things, because so far the songs are untraditional insofar as they don't have typical structures.

'Elephant' makes me think of Fugazi. The vocals remind me a bit of Ian MacKaye, especially the "repeat the lie" bit. So, then, Shellac sound like Slint mixed with Fugazi. Interesting.

'Genuine Lulabelle' is a long one. 9 minutes that trade between formless guitar minimalism, crunchy full band riffing, spoken word, and a strange dialogue between characters that reminds me of something off a Frank Zappa album. It actually reminds me of something off Gastr Del Sol's Crookt, Crackt, or Fly.

'Kittypants' is pretty damn good. Reminds me of what Slint might have released if they stayed together and released an all instrumental pop album. A nice, short instrumental that cleanses the palette.

'Boycott' is another angry, punkish song that reminds me of Fugazi. I love that pretty, upper register guitar line.

'Paco' is another instrumental, though it's longer and more varied than 'Kittypants.' Again, the closest comparison I can come up with is Slint, although faster and with more variety than that implies. One song from the end, I have to say that this album isn't as challenging and noisy as I imagined. Maybe I give too much credit to Albini for being difficult or experimental. But maybe I'm drawing too much of a conclusion from this, my sole listening experience.

'Spoke', the album closer, is an angry, screamed punkish number that doesn't remind me of Fugazi for once. It does, however, remind me of three dudes thinking it would be funny if they wrote a song where they could yell and scream a bunch of shit of no consequence and have mindless, fun backing music to pound out. And that's probably what happened, too.

So, my first Shellac experience. I don't feel especially positive or negative about the band so far. They certainly don't sound like much of anything I've heard before, except Slint and Fugazi, two bands that Shellac are at least familiar with, if not good friends with. I will say that it wasn't quite what I expect--a pleasant surprise.

Video: Beck- Loser

I tend to think of the 1990s as one long afternoon in late summer. I have no explanation for why I feel this way, aside from the fact that many of my memories of the decade revolve around just such a time. And one of the best things about later summer afternoons in the 90s was watching MTV, because they played all sorts of videos back then--rap, alt rock, R&B, metal, punk, and sometimes even techno.

The 90s style of music video for the alt rock/indie crowd was usually to be as obtuse and strange as possible, while simultaneously having as little to do with the song as possible. With all of this in mind, I present to you the video for 'Loser', which opens with Beck in a blurred out Stormtrooper helmet, and only gets stranger and stranger from there.

My favorite parts of the video are Death cleaning blood off a windshield, girls doing aerobics in a graveyard through a polarized filter, and live footage of Beck cleaning off a stage with a leafblower.

This is the kind of stuff you'd typically see on those late summer 90s afternoons, and it made sense, somehow, even if you were a kid and knew nothing about absurdism, surrealism, and irony. Though Beck's subsequent videos are all "better" by any metric, this first bolt out of the blue simultaneously puts the lid on his first phase as a no-name anti-folk/junkyard singer/songwriter and points the way to his next phase as the superstar David Bowie-ish artist who tries on many hats, sometimes at the same time.

Album of the Week: The Unicorns- Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

This may seem needlessly myopic, but for me, the musical heart of this decade didn't make itself clear until 2003 and 2004. While Radiohead's Kid A released in late 2000 signaled that artists could take major risks without losing their audience or the love of critics, it didn't end up being quite the revolution that, say, Nirvana's Nevermind was for the 90s. Rather, consider 2003 and 2004 as the time when indie rock made itself known as a force to be reckoned with. These two years saw definitive, decade defining releases from big names like Arcade Fire (Funeral), Broken Social Scene (You Forgot It In People), Deerhoof (Milk Man), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Fever To Tell), The Postal Service (Give Up), Death Cab For Cutie (Transatlanticism), Fiery Furnaces (Blueberry Boat), The New Pornographers (The Electric Version), Sufjan Stevens (Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State), TV On The Radio (Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes or the Young Liars EP), and, of course, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? by the Unicorns. A truly heady mix of bands, and I'm probably leaving a lot out.

The Unicorns have come to stand, at least in my mind, for the kind of overnight success and collapse of a band that can happen in the current music journalism world. The Unicorns came out of nowhere in 2003 with this, their only album, and it seemed that every publication--both online and off--was lavishing praise upon them. After touring for more than a year, the band, exhausted and (presumably) a bit sick of each other, posted on their website that the band was through, confirming this in early 2005. Since then, two members collaborated on an album under the name Islands though shortly after the release of their debut Return To The Sea one member had departed. Thankfully, other massively popular, out-of-left-field bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have weathered the initial storm better.

While the albums I mentioned above all, somehow, fit under the broad indie rock umbrella, I think that this album helped to define the specific indie rock template for this decade. First of all, it's from a Canadian band, and one of the big stories of the '00s has been the emergence and viability of Canadian bands. Secondly, the album makes use of perky, tight drumming, crunchy-or-very-clean guitars, spazzy retro keyboards, 60s style supporting bass that is mixed fairly low in the mix, and more immediate, affected vocals. I associate all of these elements, to various extents, with the current "indie rock standard" sound. I'm not saying that the Unicorns pioneered this sound, or that every band in indie rock today is influenced by them, but I notice a lot of these common elements, and this album came out early enough to cement it in my mind. Lastly, the album is a damn good slice of what, at barebones, could be called pop/rock, but yet sounds nothing like what we typically think of when we say pop/rock.

Other than the fact that Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? still stands up as a damn good indie pop/rock album, there's two more things that made it so irresistable to critics and fans. The songs are untraditional in the sense that they rarely conform to basic structures like chorus/verse/chorus. Quite often, they're linear, or quickly jump between sections like the Fiery Furnaces or, sometimes, Deerhoof. Take 'Sea Ghost', which starts with a pennywhistle, adds bouncy drums, crunchy guitars, and precocious, affected vocals as it goes. Over its 3:43 duration, it never once repeats anything. Then there's the studio bantery opening of 'Tuff Luff', giving way to a barely there dirge before violins and fluffy keyboards bring the song to the surface for fresh air. Things fall back to just a molasses slow bass line and sweet harmonies before, again, a full band sound comes in--then there's a quick drum break with a short rap--and the song draws to a close with a repeated refrain of "save us" with odd sound effects and resounding drums.

The other thing I think that people latch unto with this album is its self awareness and referentiality. The album opens with 'I Don't Wanna Die' and closes with 'Ready To Die.' In between, there's three songs in a row with the word "ghost" in the title, a few songs directly about the band ('Let's Get Known', 'I Was Born (A Unicorn)'), and, just maybe, a reference to future band Islands in 'Ready To Die.' Which is pretty meta, I suppose: it's a song about being ready to die, but it could also be about the death of the band and hints at the Islands project. But that's reaching a bit. The only other (non-live) album I can think of that's as aware of both itself as an album and the songs themselves is Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, which either gives that album another feather in its cap for being ahead of its time or just means that I'm the only one who pays attention to these sort of things.

I'm a little worried that as time goes on, this album will be forgotten or at least not given the attention it deserves. Typically when bands implode after one album, even if the members go on to record great things under other names, that first album is forgotten. While I like Return To The Sea a lot, and it could have easily come out as the second Unicorns album, there is just something joyous and fresh about Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? that was lost in the transition toward a more nuanced, mature sound. But that's a review for another day. For now, track down a copy of this album and enjoy.