Oh Sees Retrospective #1: OCS

Going back to the very beginning of a band or artist with a long, varied career is one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes they hit the ground running and sometimes there’s an incubational period before their sound and abilities fully congeal. In the case of John Dwyer’s Oh Sees, however, they started life by going under a different name…and being a side project.  By the time the first Oh Sees album was released, he had spent years in the bands Coachwhips and Pink and Brown. I won’t speculate too much about his motivations for starting another band, though I will say it seems clear in retrospect that one reason might be that Oh Sees is fully controlled by Dwyer. He is the only constant element since its inception as well as being its mouthpiece and frontman.

Anyway, let’s talk about the album already!

Released on an unknown date in 2003, the first Oh Sees album (well, OCS album) isn’t the solo project I assumed it to be. According to Discogs.com, some of it is credited to Jeff Rosenberg, so it’s hard to say how much of this has Dwyer as driving force or not. But I digress. This debut goes under a series of different titles depending on where you look. Known variously as 1, OCS, and 34 Reasons Life Goes On Without You/18 Reasons To Love Your Hater To Death, it’s technically two different CDs released as one set. It’s unclear whether they’re supposed to be regarded as one album but for the sake of ease I’m going to talk about them as separate works.

Disc one, using the 34 Reasons title, kind of sounds like Dwyer was listening to a lot of John Fahey, Jandek, and Throbbing Gristle. Spastic fingerpicked guitars trade dance moves with harsh tape noise and on occasion, other somewhat competently played instruments such as keyboards, pianos, and drum machines. Here or there, you can hear Dwyer and/or other people say things or mutter. Little care or thought seems to be put into any of it, suggesting perhaps it was improvised or recorded with no second takes, or even recorded under a self-imposed time deadline. Perhaps it’s better to label it carefree than careless? I dunno. There is a certain eerie late night atmosphere to it all, and if you have any interest or patience for this kind of experimental music, you’ll find some of its untitled 34* songs, or moments of them, to be more enjoyable than you might expect. I don’t think I’ll ever want to return to it yet it did grow on me a bit during second and third spins.

As for disc two, 18 Reasons, well, if you wished that 34 Reasons had less structure and more patience-testing noise, tape hiss, and feedback, then have I got something right up your alley! Don’t misunderstand me, though. I’m not automatically opposed to experimental/noise music. After all, Throbbing Gristle’s ‘IBM’ is one of my favorite songs by them, and one of my friends used to do a collaborative music project called Gargoyle Monument that sounds quite a lot like 18 Reasons. The issue I have with noise music is that I think it’s more interesting in small doses and it’s more enjoyable when leavened with other musical elements. To be fair, these 18 untitled songs aren’t just straight up ear shredding noise. Some tracks, such as 4 and 9, are downright Lynchian—in other words, imagine mysterious rustling/rumbling sounds and dark foreboding textures. Still, CD two of the debut is mostly ear shredding noise. Mostly. I have a higher tolerance and patience for this sort of material than most people but even I was only able to sit through its entirety once. If you don’t care for noise music but still want to know what the first album is all about, stick to 34 Reasons and you won’t miss anything. Ancestor of Carrion Crawler/The Dream, this ain’t.

Much like fans of Oh Sees will tell you not to bother with their first few releases, fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will warn you against watching the first two seasons, especially the true “first” season of the show, done on local access station KTMA in Minnesota. If you’re willing to slog through all the growing pains, poor quality VHS recordings, and awkward production quality and performances, there’s moments that at least gesture in the direction of greatness. So it is with 34 Reasons and less so 18 Reasons. They have moments here or there that diehard fans of the band and/or adventurous music listeners might enjoy, yet there’s no getting around the fact that the two-CD debut is an inessential release and should only be attempted when you’ve worn out all the good stuff.

*Since this album is long out of print and I couldn’t find it on any digital music services for purchase, I had to track down a shady website download for this review. CD one technically has 35 songs, despite its title, but the final track won’t play for some reason. I’ve seen people refer to the full album being on YouTube but all I could find was an upload of the first song.

Pink Floyd To Release New Album! Or Not!

Pink Floyd to release new album!....no wait, it's actually Pink Floyd to release album of unreleased material!....no wait, it's actually Pink Floyd to release album of unreleased material from 1994 recording sessions that didn't include Roger Waters...hmmmm....

So, really, Pink Floyd isn't releasing a new album. What is actually happening here is that a collection of subpar leftovers from a band who can more accurately be called David Gilmour's Exploiting Band Names For Money is going to be released.

Real Estate- Atlas

Real Estate's new-ish album, Atlas...:

1. ...is a continuation of, but not a progression from, their previous album, Days
   
2. ...is kind of a let down because it is kind of more of the same we got on Days
   
3. ...begins to seem like less of a let down when you get over the above two facts
   
4. ...is a sign that I am bad at predicting what direction a band will take, because I thought they might pick up on the lengthy outro jam of the closing track of Days, 'All The Same', and their admitted love for Phish and maybe produce their version of Marquee Moon
   
5. ...feels like the kind of album that makes the album that came before it seem even more perfect and fresh by comparison. See also Radiohead's In Limbo making us all realize In Rainbows is one of the best things they've ever done, Battles's Gloss Drop makes us all realize Mirrored is the sort of album that comes only once per generation and once per band, etc.
   
   5a) Atlas also makes the album The Flower Lane by Ducktails (Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanille's solo band/side project) seem more perfect and fresh by comparison, but I'm one of those people who think it's as good as Days or Mac DeMarco's 2. So.
   5b) Speaking of Mac Demarco, you should go watch the documentary about him on Pitchfork called Pepperoni Playboy. It is all sorts of incredible and makes me angry that I haven't had the chance to really groove on his new album yet.
   
6. ...kind of bums me out, because I feel like this band is rushing into maturity, writing songs about serious relationship issues and commitment to a spouse and real heavy stuff like that. Wasn't this the band that just 5 years ago was giving us an anthem with the lyrics “Budweiser/Sprite/til you feel alright”?
   6a) Maybe it is just what happens to everyone who is in their mid to late 20s. You start to realize that life isn't going to last forever. Being well over two decades into your journey, you start to question if everything you're doing I right. And I can tell you, it only gets worse when you enter your 30s.
   
7. ...feels like a parallel to Beach House's Bloom and The Walkmen's Heaven, in that it doesn't best the album that came before it, but you still end up loving it and listening to it a lot once you get over the initial disappointment that it's not going to end up one of your top two favorite albums by them.
   7a) This is, of course, assuming you're a music nerd weirdo like me who thinks so much about music that he assigns top favorite status to specific albums by specific bands as if it matters, really, to anyone. Ever.
   
8. ...has a few of the band's all-time best songs. Now that they're three albums and a handful of singles and EPs into their career, I think we can begin to start making “best of” mixes and imaginary “greatest hits” albums.
   8a) This is, of course, assuming you're a music nerd weirdo like me who makes “best of” mixes and imaginary “greatest hits” albums.
   
9. My Grandpa died today. He was 98. And even though we were very far from close, and he didn't have enough personality or conversation to fill a Dixie cup, he was still my Grandpa, and the world still lost something today. This review, however pathetic of an offering it is, is my attempt to put something back into the world on a day when I otherwise would just have come home, drank some beer, and listened to 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Throbbing Gristle and Alien Soundtracks by Chrome over and over.
   9a) Now, I feel like listening to Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong. I doubt my Grandpa liked them or any music, but it's the best I can do.
   

Apologies

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Life has taken a strange turn and I'm too busy listening to records by Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt, as well as mainlining Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges, to want to write anything for Whiskey Pie. But I promise I will return, like Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, and finish the 30 For 30 project. I mean, I kinda have to before I turn 31, right?

30 For 30: Hi, How Are You by Daniel Johnston

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 18, despair came knocking at my door.

In October of 2013, I felt like the bottom had fallen out of my life.


I hadn't gotten a raise in almost two years at my job and conditions continued to get worse. So why not quit and find something else? Well, I've been unable to find any better full-time employment where I live, and I can't just quit because...money. You see, in October I finally couldn't ignore my credit card debt which had resulted from years of only being able to pay the minimum required amount, thanks to my low paying job and some irresponsible living/spending from time to time (and irresponsible spending on girlfriends from time to time). I had to swallow my pride and ask my parents for help, a move that I probably should've done earlier but put off for various reasons too personal and complicated to go into (and if you notice how incredibly honest I'm otherwise being in this piece, you can probably guess it's for good reasons).


A couple weeks before I told my parents about my debt, I had met an awesome girl via a dating website. Despite spending one of the best days of my life in Ann Arbor puttering around the city with her—I don't think I've ever made someone laugh that much before—she inexplicably stopped talking to me a few days later and disappeared. Though I had the sense to let it go and not be that creepy guy who continually texts and emails to get an explanation, it still left me feeling confused and frustrated. Just when my life seems like it's going to break one way, all logic and karma goes out the window and I'm back to where I started or a few steps back. It's not that I think my life is some kind of movie or novel in which I'm owed a happy ending and so I'm trying to force it to happen. Maybe I'm just resentful of having to deal with the same problems for so many years when I see everyone around me solving their's and ticking off the checklist that allows one to arrive into the kind of full-on adulthood that is recognized by popular culture instead of the bohemian lonerism I've half 'stumbled into' and half 'willingly entered.' Anyway, I won't bore you with the numerous other less important problems in my life.


A week or so before telling my parents about my money problems, and about a week after things went nowhere with the girl, I began to listen to Daniel Johnston's Hi, How Are You over and over. And over again.

'Poor You'

I had this steady routine where I'd get home from work, crack open a beer, and immediately start listening to the album. Usually I'd replay the first side of the record as many times as seemed necessary before flipping it over. I'd listen to that once and start the process over, until I'd had enough beer and cigarettes and Daniel Johnston that I felt like doing something else. Some nights this would last for hours.


All told, it was probably one of the worst times of my life, certainly of my 20s. Due to anxiety and depression that came in the door with my various problems, I was sleeping only a few hours a night, usually when I passed out from exhaustion that had accrued for enough days in a row or when I got especially drunk. I don't remember being suicidal, because I've walked through so many fires in my life, so to speak, that it'd take something much bigger than my combined problems to do me in. Rather I think it was the one time in my life where I knew true despair. I'm sure I used the word in badly written poetry during high school and meant it, but once you've felt the dictionary definition of despair, you know what it truly is to feel hopeless. It's important to note that feeling hopeless and actually being hopeless are very different things. I may have felt like I wanted to just stay in bed all day or disappear into the wilderness, but I still got up and went to work and seemed mostly normal from outward appearances. I felt hopeless yet there were still some slivers of hope kicking around inside me that kept my sanity and allowed me to function without losing my job or my friends.

'I Am A Baby (In My Universe)'

Since this piece is ostensibly about Hi, How Are You, an album by Daniel Johnston, and not my personal problems, you might be expecting me to now segue into the topic at hand with some line like “Hi, How Are You saved my life.” It wouldn't be true. What would be more accurate to say is that one of the most important things for someone in the midst of despair to feel is understanding, and Hi, How Are You understands despair. By extension, you feel as though it understands you, too. Not your specific problems but the feelings that result from them. It opens with Daniel Johnston saying the album title to the listener, or rather asking the question posed in the album title, which may have been a cutesy whim on his part. To me it sounds like the most humane and caring way to open an album, the sort of thing you'd expect from a saccharine children's music program. Perhaps I'm just projecting here and it was a whim for him; in my repeat listenings over the course of that week-or-so, however, it started to sound like a friend checking in on me.


I said earlier that I used to listen to the first side the most, so let me elaborate. The second side of the album is less focused, more playful and almost theatrical with its boxing motif. So I would still cherish this album just as much if all it had was the songs on side one. I might even like it more, and it's most of what I remember from the record. 'Poor You', 'Despair Came Knocking', 'I'll Never Marry', and 'Get Yourself Together' are all written from different attitudes ('Poor You' seems to even be mocking the listener and/or the writer) and add up to something like therapy. All of the songs on the record don't give you any answers and advice is kept to basic mantras—“get yourself together or fall apart/make your mind up or let yourself down”—that could apply to any number of situations. Expressing something specific in a general way others can relate to is a difficult balancing act for albums like this to pull off. I think it's crucial, too, that Hi, How Are You never seems maudlin or immature. Even the most overtly sad/depressing lyrics are stated so plainly and sparsely that they could just as easily come from an elderly, cynical woman or a surly teenager—“I really don't know what I have to fear/I really don't know why I have to care.”



Truth be told, my personal life isn't dramatically better than it was in October. I'm more happy more often, and my money situation has gone from “critical meltdown” to “bad, but not, like, really bad.” I still sleep poorly most of the time, and anxiety and depression like to turn up a few times a day to make things more interesting for me. I'm still single, working the same job, living in the same apartment I have been since 2009, and I still struggle with drinking and smoking. Most of the time I just want to be in my apartment, alone, away from it all. Most of the time I don't feel like writing or doing anything productive. At least now, whenever I'm feeling particularly bad, with the October 2013 flashbacks creeping up my spine, I have a new companion to help me sort it out. It may seem pathetic to label a record from almost 30 years ago a companion, but it's there for me all the time and it understands what I'm going through. I'm now 30 years old and that's more than I can say for any person in my life.

'Desperate Man Blues'

30 For 30: Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 17, learn the true title of what I refer to as "the most beautiful and sad thing I've ever heard."



Back in 2012, I was dating and living with someone who was majoring in trombone performance at a local college. When studying an instrument at the college level, you not only have to be in several performances yourself, but you have to attend those given by other students, too. So in a few months I got a crash course in classical music and associated styles, and I saw way more live music in a few months than I had in my entire life up to that point combined. I even bought my then-girlfriend a huge assortment of vintage classical records. But as much as I learned and as much as I heard, classical music is just not my thing and I know now it never will be. I ended up liking the 'New Music' and experimental stuff way more than the classics, so that was kind of strike one. Strike two was that the music is too intellectual and requires too much reading; even the emotive pieces sound to me like a mathematician plugging in the right formula of notes to simulate emotion instead of it being music as a channel for emotion. And strike three was that my favorite piece of classical music remained the same as it was before I had my education in 2012. To a classical music fan it's such a popular and obvious choice as to be asinine, but I can't help it: Moonlight Sonata is the most beautiful and sad thing I've ever heard.


Except that it's not really called Moonlight Sonata, and it's not all beautiful and sad.


Well, never say that Whiskey Pie isn't educational. For you see, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata isn't actually called that. The official title is most often written as Piano Sonata No. 14 In C-Sharp Minor “Quasi Una Fantasia.” Furthermore, what everyone is familiar with and thinks is the entirety of the song is only the first movement of three. Admittedly there's something to be said for colloquial shorthand so that whenever we hear it we don't have to say the full title and can instead go with a simple question of “that's Moonlight Sonata, right?” For the purposes of the rest of this piece, I'm going to keep saying “Moonlight Sonata” and trust you understand that I really mean Piano Sonata No. 14 In C-Sharp Minor “Quasi Una Fantasia.” Say that three times fast.


I'm fairly sure the first time I heard this song was in a cartoon or movie. It's one of those classical songs that has been used so many times in so many different places that you don't always notice it. Using Moonlight Sonata to indicate that something is sad, or juxtaposing it against something decidedly un-sad for the ironic humor effect, has been done to death in movies, TV shows, and cartoons. I remember even a more modern cartoon like Ren & Stimpy used a lot of classical music, so it's possible that was where I first heard Moonlight Sonata. No matter how or where it's used, though, this song still hits me right in the chest. This is one of the most famous and ubiquitous songs of all time yet it somehow retains every bit of its power even if it's a Muzak version in an elevator or it's in a TV commercial for a car or some god damn thing.



As someone who has always been drawn to the bittersweet and melancholic in life, it only makes sense that I'd love Moonlight Sonata. To my mind it is the origin point of all sad music that came afterward, even though this is only strictly true of that famous first movement of the song. But it's hard to beat that part for establishing a mood, for getting a visceral reaction out of people. On any given day I can listen to all three movements and by the end I am in a totally different state of mind and mood, transported away by a single piano playing a piece from over 200 years ago. While it's very likely that no trace of my time on this Earth will survive 200 years into the future, I know that Moonlight Sonata will.

30 For 30: Bitches Brew by Miles Davis

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 16, we rap about double albums and use the word 'awesome' a lot.

The double album is a rare beast in today's music. The last modern double album I can remember was The Flaming Lips's Embryonic. However, that one is cheating a bit, since it's only 70 minutes of music spread across two “albums.” In the 90s, because of the way the CD format changed how albums were paced and flowed, it was not uncommon for a band's album to be as long as Embryonic despite being counted as a single album. For example, Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is 69 minutes long and Adore by the Smashing Pumpkins is actually longer at 73 minutes long (Billy Corgan was never known for being succinct). Of course, two of the first double albums, Frank Zappa's Freak Out! and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, were only 60 and 72 minutes, respectively, so as the years have gone by the idea of what really constitutes a double album has become a bit muddled. Is it defined by the length of the music or by the whims of the artist?



There is no such gray area with Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. Even without the bonus track often appended to new copies of the album on CD, it runs a sturdy 94 minutes. Bitches Brew is a double album through and through, and anyone who owns it on vinyl knows what I mean by that. Truly only a gatefold sleeve does justice to the cover art, which wraps from the front to the back; truly only a rambling, poetic essay by Ralph J. Gleason and an oddly framed picture of a shirtless Miles Davis could work inside a gatefold sleeve. There is something satisfying about the heft of a double record, especially one that would even take two CDs to contain it. I have a few double albums on vinyl and they put you in a different mindset when listening to them. It feels like something you do on a long weekend afternoon: burn some incense and relax next to the record player while staring at the covers and liner notes and such.

The full cover, albeit a scan of a CD booklet version of it

You need to have patience and focus to sit through double albums, something our increasingly short attention spans have made difficult. It's a different listening experience and a valuable one; compared to how we normally listen to music—in the car, on an iPod at work or while exercising, on a computer with the songs on random shuffle—it feels like meditation. To simply sit by a record player and listen to an album while not doing anything else feels quaint and outdated by today's standards, like something you'd expect Henry David Thoreau to write about in Walden. Even I don't do it as often as I used to but I suppose it makes it more of a special experience when I do. For instance, I had today off of work thanks to a snowstorm, and spent my morning half-awake drinking coffee and listening to Bitches Brew. Somehow it fit the visibility limiting wall of wind and snow outside my window. The experience of giving it a listen first thing in the morning with my full attention has also set the tone for the rest of my day. If you've ever woken up early on the weekend and watched a movie first thing, you might know what I mean by that. But I digress.

)

'Miles Runs The Voodoo Down'

“Awesome” was my response to hearing Bitches Brew for the first time. I was in high school and had finally made friends with someone who also loved music. As usually happens, you end up borrowing a bunch of music from each other and sitting around trading off on albums saying things like “wait'll you hear this one...” Every time I listen to Bitches Brew it takes me back to that mindset, when I was first discovering all that music had to offer beyond the forgettable modern rock and pop music that had been my only musical world since middle school. After Bitches Brew I finally went and listened to some of the records my parents had from their youth. After Bitches Brew I started to listen to jazz in all its forms, and to give other genres of music a chance. And so on.



If I'm ever making a list of my favorite albums of all time, Bitches Brew has to be on it. There are some Miles Davis albums from this same era that I think are more interesting (On The Corner) and some I think do a better job of being a jazz/rock fusion (A Tribute To Jack Johnson), but none of them can match Bitches Brew overall. It has everything in it. Despite being an instrumental album, every human emotion is in there at some point. What's more, it feels like it has every instrument in it, too. While I think most people listen to this record loud on a stereo, it works just as well on headphones since you pick up how much detail is in the production. How Davis and producer Teo Marcero managed to wrangle this many musicians at a time, and to edit the various parts of the numerous performances into the final versions on the album, is beyond me. Again, I implore you to give this a spin with some good headphones if you never have before. It's almost dizzying how many sounds are going on at some points, while at other calmer points the space and separation between instruments reveals how masterful all the musicians were for these recording sessions. If you follow a single instrument through each song, you see points where they step up to let loose and other times where they recede into the background while still contributing to the rhythms, textures, or melodies. There's collective improvisation, and then there's a group that has become a singular unit without an ego steering it. Bitches Brew is ego-less: Miles Davis, whose album this ostensibly is, doesn't even appear on the song 'John McLaughlin.'

)

'John McLaughlin'

But let us return to that initial “awesome” reaction. You see, I had never really listened to a double album before, and certainly not one with long songs on it. Keep in mind, there is only one song on Bitches Brew that is less than 10 minutes long. You can imagine how much of a 'brave new world' this felt like as I heard it for the first time in my friend's bedroom on a warm Saturday afternoon in Spring. 'Pharaoh's Dance' slowly worked itself up as I was looking through the CD booklet, trying to get some kind of context for the music I was hearing. I had something of an idea of what Bitches Brew might be like, since Radiohead had mentioned Miles Davis's electric fusion era as an influence on OK Computer, but imagining what music will sound like based on written descriptions is not the same as hearing the actual product. Anyway, I recall feeling lost inside 'Pharaoh's Dance', and I had to ask several times if it was still the same song.


Then the title track started and it sounded completely alien to me. I know now it's a trumpet fed through a delay/echo pedal, but at the time, I didn't know much of anything about recording techniques. Despite being a trumpet player for several years in school, I had no idea what I was hearing. And it was awesome. It was weird. It was...indescribable. It was the kind of experience that I repeat whenever I hear music that takes me completely by surprise and warps my expectations of what I thought sound and music could be like. Time and again I find myself muttering “awesome” and loving the challenge of figuring out something novel, making sense of something alien.

Bitches Brew is the album I would take with me to a desert island. It is the album I could listen to all day, talk about for half the day and write about for the other half of the day. Hearing it for the first time around age 17 made me say “awesome” and hearing it for the umpteenth time at age 30 made me feel awesome. So why is Bitches Brew on my list of 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years? Nothing complicated this time: it's because it's awesome.