Phish 2/20/03

 

Another day off, another change of city, and we’re in Rosemont, Illinois. As we enter the halfway point of this tour, it’s clear that the band, while not as spit-polish clean in the composed sections, has finally found their footing in terms of jamming. We still have most of the 2.0 juggernauts to go but this show, even more than any before, has the deepest jams I’ve seen in this project to date. Yet…do deep jams always equal great jams? Let’s find out. Sorry, that was low energy.       LET’S find OUT!

 

Set One

Rift > Rock and Roll to get us off to a high energy rocking start! A shame Rift has Oxy Trey in full effect, though, with some sloppy joe playing that leads him to redeem himself with the solo and with his performance during Rock and Roll. I’ve gotta be honest, this cover is ok but it’s not one I would’ve picked for them to keep in the rotation after the Loaded Halloween set. Now that I’m not an alcoholic sadboi Loaded is actually my favorite Velvet Underground album, though I’d have pinned ‘Train Round The Bend’ or ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill’ as the Phishiest feeling to keep in rotation. But I digress. This Rock and Roll has valiant efforts from Mike and Page to keep up but Trey is determined to steal the show, pulling out his usual bag of Machine Gun Trey tricks. Not saying they aren’t effective…simply that if you’re looking for the jam chart Rock and Roll’s, this ain’t it, chief. “It was alright”, indeed.

Guyute is…look, you read what I said the last time. I’ll just add here that I’ve never seen a Guyute get segued into or out of; it’s a lead weight that brings a set to a crashing halt each time, for good or ill. Driver is a fun not quite ballad, the lyrics give me a They Might Be Giants feeling, maybe that’s just me? Waves. Ok, now we’re starting to open up the jam jar. Out of the crop of new songs off Round Room, this and Seven Below had the most obvious jam potential to my newbie Phish ears back when I started listening in earnest in late 2003/early 2004. Anyway, this version is shorter than the debut from 2/15/03 but I actually like this one more. Page and Mike, as they have been this whole tour, are playing their asses off, and the times during jams tonight when Trey lets go of the reins lead to some incredible jamming. Anyhow! This Waves doesn’t deviate from the studio version but has the energy and interplay that can only come from a live version; hell they should’ve waited a year and put out Round Room Live on the anniversary of Round Room’s release date with all live versions. But I digress. As would become standard, Waves is brought back around and finished up with another run through the chorus, and then some eerie/calm vocal refrains over some spacey ambience that will either lead into a jam or a segue into another song. This one doesn’t leave us hanging too long as Trey emerges from the interstellar muck with the Simple riff.

Now, OK, I think someone screwed up the lyrics at one point. But this Simple has to go down as an all timer. And by that I mean, version of the song and as a jam in general. While it has those dark/spacey Trey-trying-to-replicate-My-Bloody-Valentine moments we associate with 2.0 type II jams, it also feels a bit like some of the best 3.0/4.0 style jams that move between different sections and styles almost as if the band is composing a multi-part song in real time. I will never forget hearing/seeing the 10/11/23 Ruby Waves aka Dayton Ruby Waves in person, and at some point wondering if they had segued into another song I didn’t know. But I digress yet again! This Simple, though starting off like most modern non-jammed Simple’s with a slowing down/quieting down mellow jam, starts to hint at its true attentions around 6:45 when Fishman starts up a new drum groove and Page and Mike keep pulling Trey further and further away from ending the jam. By 8:00 it’s clear we’re in for it, lifting up to the heavens on a beautiful, soaring jam that reminds me of a less serene, more melodic version of the Flatbed Jam from The Clifford Ball. 9:15 finds Trey using his pitch shifter to play in the upper register as he’s wont to do during spacey jams. Page gets nasty on the clavinet around 9:40 while Mike and Fishman boom and rumble in the background. Trey has all but disappeared into loop territory by now as Page can’t decide between piano or clav. Lovely little melody from Trey around 11:20 that’ll get stuck in your head. Mike starts using his super reverb bass domination effects pedal around 11:50; Page jumps on a synth and does droning, rising sounds. We’re in full on space jam territory now boys, almost as deep as 6/14/00. Right as I say this, Trey-trying-to-replicate-My-Bloody-Valentine starts up in full effect. At first the rest of the band doesn’t know quite what to make of it, so Mike doubles down on his bass effect and gets reverb sucked into the vortex being made by Trey and Page. I fear for the people in person who were tripping when this switched from a pleasant ‘99/’00 ambient jam into a hellacious shoegaze portal. By 14:24 Trey has returned to the pitch shifted loops but it’s all being swallowed up in a maelstrom of sound, texture, and noise that can only be described accurately as psychedelic as all fuck. I can see how hearing this in person, with imperfect acoustics, could just sound like a mess of incoherent noise, like some contemporary reviews were saying. That said…listen to this fucking thing! The last two minutes alone is more interesting than the best of the jams during the NYE run, shades of the 4/2/98 Twist and the 9/29/99 2001.

After that space/time matter/anti-matter explosion, you’d be forgiven for assuming they were going to give us a short Gotta Jibboo; maybe 10ish minutes total, bit of a jam, get in get out, that kind of thing. But nope, whatever was powering Phish tonight had only had its first of many fission flashes. I know a lot of 1.0 fans prefer the old ‘99/’00 Jibboo’s which mostly kept the same funky groove and had Trey loops and Mike pounding it out front and center for 8 to 15 minutes, and while this one is largely following those blueprints for a couple minutes it eventually turns into more of a rocking Trey led masterclass in type I Hose. Think the 6/14/00 Back On The Train in terms of everyone locking into a groove and responding to each other and playing their asses off, but making it sound effortless. Was it Bruce Lee who said, “be like water”? Anyway, around 7:40 Trey starts playing a super high energy, uplifting guitar melody that reminds me of the 7/6/98 Ghost, and round 9:30 it’s reminiscent of the post-Suzy Greenberg jam on 9/14/00. At this point Machine Gun Trey takes over and absolutely scorches Rosemont to ashes; you can barely hear Mike and Fishman trying to keep the groove going so Trey doesn’t fly off into the stratosphere.

At 12:00 Page starts trying to take over on piano, and Trey responds by stepping down a bit and playing more raw guitar tones in lower registers. Page jumps on the funky, funky clav for some fun wailing as Trey keeps a lockstep groove bubbling with Mike and Fishman. Thanks to Page we get increasingly funky albeit with a Hendrix-ian distorted, raw texture instead of typical ’97 wah-wah action. By 15:00 Page is back on piano and Mike tries to bring us back to the Jibboo bassline and melody as Trey resists and croaks out guttural guitar lines. So by this point in set one we’ve gotten a full space/ambient jam, a dark/evil 2.0 jam, a kick ass Trey-led Hose jam, and a funky grooving jam, what else can they do? Jibboo just keeps going and going…until it doesn’t. Perhaps sensing they need to save something for set two, Trey eventually gets back on the Jibboo bus and we bring the song to a normal ending, albeit a huge peaking one and a triumphant capper to an astounding 38ish minutes of music (counting Simple, duh) to end the first set.

 

Set Two/Encore

As if to leave no doubt the kind of mood they were in tonight, Phish open the second set with a dependable workhouse: Tweezer. While the general pace of the composed section is classic late 90s, they waste no time in establishing that we’re in 2.0 now with the ranges this jam goes. (No, it’s not as good as the forthcoming one, shut up, we’ll get there!) Trey is busy fucking with his pitch shifter loops so Page and Mike pounce on the jam around 5:35. Other than some faint loops, Trey must be adjusting something because he doesn’t play anything until 6:00ish. Around 8:00 Page is on the clav and organ in turn, while Trey is steering them further into a somewhat standard type I Tweezer jam like you might hear in 1996…until just after 9:00 when Trey starts to add some extra grit to his tone. Mike goes deep to get just below him. Page is on what almost sounds like a Fender Rhodes around the 10:30 mark but I think it’s just a keyboard/synth. Soon Trey starts to do these patient, spaced-out-by-a-few-seconds single note growl/moan sounds. This section stagnates with not too much development as Page tries out some different textures indecisively. It’s during some of these 2.0 jams where I can’t tell if Trey is just in his own world or he wants to just play in the background with guitar noises. Mike and Fishman try to add some momentum and by 15:00 we’re finally hitting on something interesting, with Trey making these weird slide guitar-ish sounds as Page follows him into the tornado. Still not finding their purchase, they gear up into a rocking jam that Trey takes center stage for. We get a fun and well done yet standard big rock Tweezer reprise feeling ending (but not Tweezer Reprise feeling) that feels to me like it should’ve been in the first set’s Rock and Roll to give that more meat but eh, whaddya gunna do? After a final run through of the Tweezer riff they do a slow down, slowly falling apart sounding ending which I vaguely remember being how early Tweezers ended.

Out of the feedback of the Tweezer ending, we > plop into Punch You In The Eye. Huh, another strange setlist placement on this tour. Anyway, it’s PYITE! It rules. Next! I’ll give them a quick, half-earned > segue into Fast Enough For You, which is the perfect cool off placement after the god damn jam gauntlet they just threw down between the end of the first set and now. Good vocals tonight, great Trey solo—but isn’t it always? I call malarkey on the notion there’s a > into Seven Below, they definitely fully end the song and then Trey takes half a measure or so to start the riff. Sorry, not having it. Right out of the gate during the jam, Mike and Page jump out front as Trey muddles around in the background. Page again can’t seem to decide between piano or the clav. Around 4:45 I feel like the tempo has increased and Trey is coming to life as well. Man, pay attention to Page around 5:30, dude starts fucking killing it on piano. That’s really one thing I notice more often in these 2.0 shows, the other band members seem to really assert themselves a lot more. Page on the clav soon with Mike wandering all over the place in the background, half melod/ half whirling dervish. Around 7:30 it almost sounds like everybody but Fishman is soloing at the same time yet somehow playing together too, it’s crazy. Page throws organ darts across the room around 8:15 and goes back to piano. We continue our way into what feels like a super high energy Bathtub Gin jam, and Page going absolutely apeshit on piano sure aids this feeling. Trey drops back to some funky rhythmic comping around 10:55 as Fishman brings the Seven Below drum beat back around. Mike seems to be splitting the difference between the original bassline and just jamming.

Before we’re know it, we’re in a funky jam that reminds me of the segue between Piper and Gotta Jibboo from 6/19/04. (Oh, we’ll get there!) Well, I have to say, I certainly wasn’t expecting a 2.0 spin on a type III aka porno-funk/cow-funk jam, but here we are! There’s a huge building crowd cheer around the 13:00 mark, I assume either a new cool lighting effect or the crowd settling into how insane this show has continued to be. By 13:42 we’re so far into blissful Hose funk jam territory I’m amazed more people don’t talk about this jam! It’s up there with the aforementioned 7/6/98 Ghost for “you have to hear it to truly get it.” We just keep grooving along on the Rosemont funk express. Actual Trey ’97 style wah-wah at 15:00! Man, not that the 2/16/03 version was remotely bad, but this version sets such a ridiculously high bar I’ll be curious to see if future versions top it. I can’t imagine what a dance party it must’ve been; by the 16:00 mark of this jam I would’ve been exhausted.  We’ve slowly entered into a more abstract, spacey jam by 17:15. Mike’s got his super reverb bass effect going for a while. Fishman is kicking up some fun new grooves in the background and Mike responds in kind around 17:50 as we head into proper fucking space funk territory. 18:45 stop start jamming for a few bars and then a building spacey jam that resolves itself like a cloud passing back into the sunshine and you blink and you’re back in Seven Below and they close it off. If I were in person by this point of the show I’d probably be beyond words and just grinning ear to ear and dancing.

Pebbles and Marbles follows after a minute’s brief respite. OK, now they’re just trying to kill us! I’m almost praying for it to turn into a super mellow ambient jam instead of the set ending rampager it usually is. Trey seems to be enjoying playing really loud and noisy around the 6:50 mark, nearly drowning out Mike and Page entirely. Page again switches between clav and piano as if he can’t decide what to do. Meanwhile Trey himself can’t decide between actually jamming or just holding sustained noisy sounds. Around 9:40 it sounds kind of like what I assume O Sees playing this song would have their jam sound like. Trey’s attempts to reproduce Loveless on his own give this jam a very claustrophobic, grindy, noisy quality you’re either going to dig or hate. Mike is very active starting around 11:25 as if he, Page, and Fishman are trying to push the jam somewhere further. Trey keeps dropping what sounds like crashing stars or meteors from the sky for a few seconds before he snaps out of it and goes back to shoegaze guitar. In fact, yeah, call this the Rosemont Shoegazer Pebbles and Marbles, it’s intense as any other dark, deep type II 2.0 jam. Right around 13:50, through the wall of noise I can hear Trey starting to play the main melody and the band soon gets back into step with him as the walls of sound dissipate.

You know the part in Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace does the bump of cocaine in the bathroom of the 50s diner and she pops up into frame and mutters “god damn, I said shit, god damn!” or something like that? That’s how I feel after this set. There can’t have been anything left of the crowd after this jam, just a simmering pile of goo.

Encore is 3 songs, fuck yeah! Golgi Apparatus, always welcome, and I don’t think Trey really flubbed up once. Eh but after these sets I wouldn’t count the flubs in this encore anyway! A pretty, well played but shortish Anything But Me soon gives way into, what else, Tweezer Reprise! (There’s no > between them like setlists say, nope, not even close) Sheesh, how was anyone left alive, audience, band, or crew, after this show? Mike’s bass bomb during the opening of this had to have destroyed someone’s pacemaker and caused another person to be cured of arthritis. Huge big noise ending with tons of loops and effects and insanity at the end. I think I just developed and then was cured of arthritis listening to that.

 

Overall

Looking at the setlist for this show, you might think it’s a pretty average one for the era. But there are fully five songs with long, intense jams to the point that Tweezer, motherfucking Tweezer, is not in the running for the top two jams of the show. What this show lacks in excellent fluid segues and rarities/covers it delivers in the jamming. For 2.0 this show is an embarrassment of riches the likes of which we hadn’t seen in 2.0 thus far.

I’m really switching back and forth between giving this show a 5 or a S out of 5. The sticking point for me is that this show lacks some ingredient to truly make me comfortable giving it the highest tier. If the Tweezer had been an A instead of a B, if the first set hadn’t come to a flow/pacing halt with Guyute and Driver,  if there had been some rarity or new cover, if the playing/lyrics during the composed sections had had less mistakes, if there had been some other X factor to contribute to the total score, I’d give it a S and not look back. As a show for beings who only love Phish for the deep jams, type II or otherwise, this show is an easy S for ya’ll. For everyone else…It’s with a heavy heart (well, not really, I don’t this stuff that seriously) I have to be somewhat objective and say it’s a 5 out of 5. I will say I think it’s a bit better than 2/16/03, for what that’s worth!

 

[Highlights]

Set One: Waves > SIMPLE, GOTTA JIBBOO

Set Two/Encore: Tweezer, SEVEN BELOW, Shoegazer Pebbles and Marbles, 3 song encore including a dynamite Tweezer Reprise

My Bloody Valentine- m b v

On m b v Vs. Loveless

It's impossible to listen to m b v without the weight of years of expectations pressing down on it. Keep in mind, other bands have taken a long time to make albums, but usually it's because they completely dissolved or had legal troubles that prevented them from releasing music. In the case of My Bloody Valentine, however, we'd been promised a follow-up to 1991's Loveless since at least 1993, and kept on being promised one, even after most of the band members left around 1997. Compounding this issue of how long it took is that m b v isn't just one of those albums that took forever to be released...it's also the follow-up to Loveless, widely regarded as one of the best albums ever made, every bit as influential and unique sounding today as it ever was. Even setting aside the context of history and expectations, m b v is neither the next step after Loveless, nor is it in the same league as Loveless in terms of influence and uniqueness.

On m b v As 'The Next Album From My Bloody Valentine'

I don't want this to turn into a critique of m b v which compares it to Loveless and finds it wanting in every regard. Not to mention, I don't mean to praise Loveless as though it's a flawless gem that makes everything else irrelevant. So while you can't really improve on Loveless, you can still do a lot of interesting things with the ideas and sounds therein...and that's basically what m b v is. Perhaps the easiest way to get past the years of waiting and lofty expectations is to think of m b v as 'the next album from My Bloody Valentine', and not as 'the sequel to Loveless.' That album will always be the gold standard of this kind of music, so take it as a sign of how good m b v is that I like it better than Isn't Anything and every other shoegazer album I've heard.

On How m b v Differs From Loveless

m b v lacks the cohesive, hypnotic flow of that 1991 classic and focuses more on self-contained sonic worlds. The variety of sounds is more akin to Isn't Anything and the recently released EP's 1988-1991. On the first few listens you'll probably be like me and peg m b v as sounding like a less memorable, less overtly melodic take on Loveless. The best way I can think to explain it is that m b v is one of those albums that slightly disappoints until you get over your expectations and let it grow on you. I'm reminded of Grizzly Bear's Shields, an album that did nothing to dispel the notion that Veckatimest is their best work but one that nonetheless grew on me because, not in spite of, it being less inviting and immediate. I don't think of m b v or Shields as challenging, per se, more that they are concerned with overall sound and feel rather than songwriting and genre innovation. Thus, in spite of its density and consistency of sound Loveless is a more memorable experience while m b v is, in some ways, more satisfying because it requires some patience and focus. Like Shields, it's more dreamy, hypnotic, atmospheric, less obviously structured than the band's previous work.

On m b v As Great And Allowing Yourself To 'Hear' It

Yes, I side with the camp who thinks that m b v is a great album. I'm not sure if it was “worth the wait”, since the way it ended up coming out felt so arbitrary and surreal, and I had long since given up on any new My Bloody Valentine music. Anyway, m b v may pale in comparison to the Loveless II I always heard in my head—for me, it would've been a mix between Loveless and the ambient techno of Boards Of Canada—but this is a fantastic record by any point of comparison aside from Loveless. If m b v had been released by another band, they'd have been praised to the heavens and derided in equal measure for using Loveless as a blueprint and doing something almost as good. As it stands, we finally got a new album from My Bloody Valentine and it's really damn good if you allow yourself to hear it for what it is. I suspect most of the people who find m b v disappointing or underwhelming are stuck in the mindset of wanting it to be something it's not.

On m b v As Early Birthday Gift To Me/On Wrinkles New & Old

I turned 29 in mid-February. Discovering the new wrinkles in My Bloody Valentine's sound, and how Kevin Shields folds them expertly into the established aesthetic, is one of the best early birthday gifts I've ever gotten. The clearest and most effective addition is the drum-n-bass beats on album closer 'Wonder 2', though the Stereolab influence other reviewers have spotted on 'Is This And Yes' is a close runner-up. Even when the band just kind of sounds like Loveless, as on 'In Another Way', with its booming drum loops and guitars that are simultaneously noisy and hypnotic, they do it better than anyone else. So: m b v is like Loveless but it isn't Loveless.

On m b v Vs. Loveless (Again)

No one can ever top Loveless. It's a perfect example of its genre yet is more unique and 'outside' of genre labels than anything else in said genre. It's like Bitches Brew; that album is jazz fusion, yet it's utterly unique and 'outside' of jazz fusion, too. You could listen to Loveless forever and never suss out where some of the sounds came from, or how all the elements came into place just so such that what would otherwise have been a great album became a timeless masterpiece. Loveless will always be a mystery you can't quite figure out, and that's part of its appeal and greatness. m b v is still a bit mysterious, but only in the way that most shoegazer albums are with their psychedelic guitar effects, vocals buried in the mix, and focus on dense sound over traditional loud/quiet/loud rock songwriting. So while you can “solve” m b v—that's a jet plane sample buried in 'Wonder 2' producing that flanger effect, right?— you'll still want to keep listening to it because it's god damn good....

...and who knows how long we'll have to wait for the follow-up.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 11 (For Realz)

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.

Grouper- Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill

It could that I'll have to eat my words someday, but the more time that passes since the 1991 release of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, the less likely it seems the band will ever release another album. Kevin Shields has made too many announcements over the years that have never come to fruition, and despite their surprising reunion and subsequent shows in '08 and '09, little news has come about any new recorded output. As with rumors and speculation about Neutral Milk Hotel ever recording again, it's best to not get your hopes up. Besides, what do you really want out of a potential follow up to Loveless? It's such a complete and perfect album; anything My Bloody Valentine could possibly record would either be too slavishly similar or too different to be comparable. Even other bands who have taken inspiration from it, or have outright copied its sound, don't come close.

Every so often, though, there's an album that has a similar quality to it that reminds me of Loveless. It's an indefinable trait or atmosphere that has me grasping at adjective straws: dreamlike, haunting, sex-less, warm but emotionally detached, etc. Boards Of Canada's music is this way for me. No, it doesn't sound anything like Loveless, but it shares those qualities. Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, however, shares those qualities and sounds like Loveless. Kind of. The easiest and laziest way to describe this album is that it's like an acoustic guitar flipside to Loveless's electric guitar squall. The patient chording and reverb soaked vocals and guitar of 'Traveling Though A Sea' could easily be turned into a Loveless track if you sped it up a little and suffocated it in beautiful-but-noisy electric guitars. Hell, Liz Harris's vocals, though obviously female in origin and quite lovely at that, could easily mix into the ambiguous male/female mix of Loveless.

But Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill is no mere Loveless sound-a-like or follower. Panda Bear's solo acoustic album, Young Prayer, is another point of reference, and makes sense considering Grouper has opened for Animal Collective. But it's still only a point of reference. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill has its own distinct feel and pacing, beginning with the red herring of 'Disengaged', which leads you to believe the album is going to be a lot more brutal and difficult than it is. Somehow Harris wrings a lot of variety out of just her vocals, acoustic guitar, and what must be some kind of subtle keyboards/organs. And of course, the ever present reverb. In fact, the reverb on this album isn't like anything else I've heard: it's like reverb from natural locations, such as abandoned tunnels, high ceiling'd haunted mansions, and bottomless canyons. All of this bundled up with tape hiss that sometimes is audible, sounding less like a shoddy bedroom recording and more like another texture. The stirring of leaves in a forest on a windy day, say, or perhaps someone running the sink in the kitchen while you're laying on the couch trying to take a nap.

There is no wasted space and no accidents on Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. Everything is completely purposeful and precise even if the whole thing never sounds as polished and sterile as that description suggests. There's a naturalistic perfection to the album, like a perfectly formed diamond erupting from a volcano or the mathematically precise shells of certain animals. I don't really know anything about Liz Harris or the recording of this album, and I don't want to. It would spoil the magic to know what she's singing on the borderline-angelic title track, or what the story is behind the instantly memorable album cover, or what kind of effects pedals she uses to make that sound that segues 'Tidal Wave' into 'We've All Time To Sleep.'

I listen to a lot of music, but it's very rare I come across something that's as immediately arresting as Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. It's the sort of thing you hear and all you want to do is lie down somewhere comfortable and listen to it, over and over. It's been the soundtrack, over the past month or so, to both some happy times for me as well as some very recent and incredibly painful news about one of my family members. This is an album that makes me feel and think things which make all of the old stand-by adjectives I usually bestow on other music hollow and overblown in comparison. With any luck, the cult around it will only grow with time just as it has for My Bloody Valentine and Neutral Milk Hotel.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Album of the Week: My Bloody Valentine- Isn't Anything

Don't worry. I'm not going to try to be an iconoclast and argue that Isn't Anything is better than Loveless. After all, it wouldn't be fair; Loveless is an iconic, landmark release that still sounds like nothing else in music history. It was a bolt from the blue. By any standard, Isn't Anything is a more 'normal' album: its got discernible lyrics, the guitars aren't constantly built up to huge swallowing walls of beautiful noise, and the songs themselves are more traditionally structured.

However, even if Loveless never existed, Isn't Anything would still be one of the crowning achievements of the shoegazer genre. In fact, listening to other bands of this era, you get the impression that they took inspiration primarily from this album. Nobody quite managed to make the jump to a Loveless level, or perhaps knew better than to try. Isn't Anything is more safely grounded in this reality, with an inspiration of its own to work from: The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy. I have to confess that I only very recently listened to that album, but its influence is shot through this album, from the druggy atmospheres and careful mix of noise/pop to the Velvet Underground-esque mystique and seeming danger of the whole project. What My Bloody Valentine did was to make this aesthetic a little more warm and inviting. Listening to Psychocandy is like being strung out on heroin in a crappy apartment after your girlfriend has decided to leave you for good; listening to Isn't Anything is like being stoned and sleepy while snuggling with a girlfriend who you had a serious fight with the night before.

It took Deerhoof to make me realize how much I like Isn't Anything. In 2006, the band released a free MP3-only EP through their website which contained live tracks and 3 covers. One of those was 'Lose My Breath' from Isn't Anything, and in listening to the EP over and over, it finally hit me what great songs this band has. Even the huge reverb monster 'All I Need', with its cavernous guitars, is a fantastic experience. However, Isn't Anything more often adheres to a noise/pop blueprint, with songs like 'Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)', 'You Never Should', 'Nothing Much To Lose', and the aforementioned 'Lose My Breath' all being, underneath all the sonic murk and thrashings, classic pop/rock songs waiting to be uncovered. There is also more of a Dinosaur Jr.-esque rock vibe going on in some songs, like the heady rush of 'When You Wake (You're Still In A Dream)' and 'Feed Me With Your Kiss.'

I love Isn't Anything. I consider it a 5 star album. But--and this is a very big but, indeed--it's no Loveless. Sometimes it's possible to listen to this album and come away with the impression that it's pretty good on its own merits, but it was still a warm-up for Loveless. And though Isn't Anything would prove more influential in the short term, Loveless would be moreso in the long run. Bands like Deerhunter and M83 have taken ideas from Loveless into very different directions, while others--such as Trey Anastasio of Phish and Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices--claim to be inspired by the album in less direct ways. In the end, though, Isn't Anything is worthy of consideration and appreciation on its own. Try to listen to it without the burden of Loveless and you'll find a lot to love.

Video: My Bloody Valentine- Only Shallow

I can go either way on performance videos. It's cool to see the band playing the song--or at least miming along to it--but it also feels kind of lazy to me. I mean, if you're going to make an official video, why not have some kind of concept or conceit??

Well, at least in My Bloody Valentine's case, they added a bunch of filters and film noise to approximate, visually, the sound of the album. As novel as it is to see the normally faceless band, it's slightly more interesting that they chose to make a performance video with art film overtones. "We'll let you see us, but only through a haze, because what we look like isn't important here--it's the haze."

I also remember reading somewhere that the iconic cover image for Loveless comes from a still of Kevin Shields' guitar from either this video or the one for 'Soon.' So, there's that.

Album of the Week: Neutral Milk Hotel- In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Though we've all probably experienced deja vu, there are actually three types of deja vu. One of which is called deja vecu, which is, apparently, what most people mean when they say "woah, deja vu!!": that feeling that you've experienced or done something before, and possibly, too, that you know exactly what you're supposed to say or do next.

Sometimes, while listening to albums for the first time, I feel that sense of deja vu. It's as if I have listened to it before, somehow, because it seems so familiar and yet there's no way it should be--I don't mean music that is predictable or trite, I mean new music I've never heard before, or heard anything like it. I can practically 'feel' or 'guess' what the next song or line will be like; it's strange and surreal at the same time. How appropriate, then, that one of the first times I remember having musical deja vecu was when I listened to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea for the first time.

Revisionists have been quick to declare the album an instant classic and a landmark piece of music, but the truth is it wasn't reviewed as such on its release. Even the now overly enthusiastic Pitchfork Media originally gave it a 8.7 out of 10: not a bad score by any means, but not exactly perfect, either. However, I do remember hearing about the album a year or two after its release. Someone mentioned that The Glow pt. 2 by the Microphones sounded a bit like it, and so I found myself in a record store trying to decide between the two. I went with the Microphones album, and had mostly forgotten about Neutral Milk Hotel until college, when a girlfriend had it in her collection and insisted I had to listen to it.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has that peculiar ability to sound familiar and yet totally foreign. It's the same way that Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, and The White Album have a unique and odd feeling to them, at once familiar and totally foreign. In short, "uncanny" in the literal sense of the word. They sound eerie and strange, created by people who's work you're familiar with, and yet there's some intangible element at play that seems to go beyond known scientific, logical reality. To me, albums like these are complete masterpieces that somehow transcend both the people who recorded them and their intentions for the finished product.

This album has always been particularly uncanny to me both for the way it sounds and the way it keeps popping up in my life. Though the album is, at its basic level, a singer/songwriter/folk concept piece vaguely based on the emotional response Jeff Magnum had to reading about Anne Frank, it has an unique mix of instruments and Magnum's bizarre voice to put a wholly original spin on things. Utilizing such odd instruments as shortwave radio, singing saw, bowed banjo, accordion, zanzithophone, and bagpipes, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has a vaguely Eastern European ethnic world music sound mixed with American indie rock lo-fi folk. Then there's Magnum's voice, which you'll either love or hate--nasally, always stretching for notes, strangled, pained, and ultimately, as transcendent and beautiful as the music itself. David Berman of the Silver Jews once sang "all my favorite singers couldn't sing", and that about sums it up.

Strangest of all is the way the album keeps recurring in my life. After first reading about it, and hearing the comparison to The Glow pt. 2, I would occasionally see it mentioned on message boards by people who said it was a must hear album. Then, after hearing it via my girlfriend, I was at a party once and happened to hear something familiar playing in one of the apartment's bedrooms. It's one of those times where your body physically notices some familiar thing before you consciously do--you stop and look around and think to yourself "wait, I know this song...it's....it's..." Sure enough, one of the girls who lived there had her iTunes on shuffle and 'Two-Headed Boy' was playing. About a year later, I heard a song from the album playing on the college's radio station after I broke up with the girlfriend who introduced me to it. Just recently, someone sent me a mix CD with a non-Aeroplane Neutral Milk Hotel song on it.

As for the music itself, well, it's amazing. Though build upon Jeff Magnum's rock solid acoustic guitar strumming, the songs take on all sorts of weird sounds and textures--witness the title track, which adds booming bass, light handed drumming, a flugelhorn solo, wailing siren somethings, and I don't even know what else. Similarly, the lyrics are as unhinged and skewed as the music and famous album cover. I'm sure that most people who listen to the album think the lyrics are nonsense garbage, but they do something to me that I can't put into words; in short, they're as uncanny and familiar/foreign as the music. The lyrics are highly poetic and very bodily oriented: there are all sorts of mentions of the body and its processes, and somehow even as odd as it all is, it captures what it's like to be human and, actually, to be in love. The final track, 'Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two' has always been particularly gripping to me, the way it harkens back to the first 'Two-Headed Boy' and wraps up the album on a devastatingly bittersweet note:

"And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
God is a place you will wait the rest of your life
Two headed boy she is all you could need
she will feed you tomatoes and radio wires
and retire to sheets safe and clean
but don't hate her when she gets up to leave"

Sometimes I wonder if people get bogged down in all the minutiae of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I do find myself wondering if everyone would feel the same about the album if Jeff Magnum had released anything in the past 10 years. I mean, what if OK Computer was Radiohead's second album and they had disappeared for 10 years: would that effect your opinion and love for that album any?? I'd like to think not. Many bands have released albums after their masterpiece but we all still rate those masterpieces as their best...but, you never know. I mean, where could you really go from In The Aeroplane Over The Sea?? But I digress. Don't read about this album anymore. Don't dissect it, figure out exactly what every song means, what every sound you hear is played by, and so forth. Just get a copy, listen to it, and let one of the most spellbinding and brilliant albums of the 90s wash over you.