Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band - Outer South

(listen to it on NPR’s “Exclusive First Listen”)

I keep catching myself wanting to dislike the Dylan/Beatles/Allman Brothers mishmash of this album, but I can’t, it’s such a great sprawling piece of positivity.

I love the Austin City Limits songwriters-in-the-round episode with Oberst and M. Wood (is that is name?) and a couple others - the guy from My Morning Jacket, I think.  I only watch it in my mind, though - for some reason I recorded over my VHS of it.  I think I succumbed to the same impulse to dislike - where does that come from?

Generally speaking, this kind of classic rock reconstruction strikes me as like the Annie’s brand of organic macaroni and cheese you can buy these days in the grocery store.  Delicious, but cognitively dissonant.  Don’t they risk enshrining rock and roll in the same kind of cultural straightjacket jazz occupies in mainstream culture?

In some respect, of course, the idea that Wynton Marsalis has ruined jazz is a myth.  Norah Jones, for example, in her role as the Shania Twain of jazz, clearly shows that people are still unbound by proscriptive jazz doctrines, and there are plenty of jazz innovators in between segments on All Things Considered - although even jazz too freaky for ATC is feeling rather cemented in place.  Really, though, the progress of pieces of culture from fringe to mainstream to relic is not undeniably a bad thing, much less any one person’s fault.

But if a given collection of ideas is like a person, every time a band does something because that’s the way the Rolling Stones would’ve done it is one more step towards rock and roll’s retirement.

This album and Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle are a couple of great-sounding new albums coming out of Texas. This one was recorded at some kind of awesome pleasure palace near El Paso - Sonic Ranch Studios.  Check out their “adobe studio”.  That’s just one of five studios and three houses on the site.  It’s kind of ridiculous.  I guess the results speak for themselves.  It ain’t Blind Willie Johnson!

Cat Power - Moon Pix

I’m going to try to “get serious” about writing.  We’ll see how that goes.

At the moment, I’m trying to convince myself, followed by Continuum International Publishing Group, followed by 5,000 or so lucky customers, that I can write a book about a great album.  Strictly speaking, according to the call for proposals, the album does not have to be great.

The albums I’m considering are:

• Cat Power - Moon Pix
• Bjork - Vespertine
• The Evens - The Evens
• Smog - Knock Knock
• OP8 - Slush
• Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom
• Shania Twain - Come On Over
• The Cure - The Head on the Door
• Tom Ze, who doesn’t have a “that’s the one” album
• The Grateful Dead - Live / Dead
• They Might Be Giants - Lincoln

What else?  There are probably a hundred more.  I feel vaguely competent to approach these albums, unlike, for example, The Talking Heads’ Remain In Light.  None of the bands have yet been covered in the 33 1/3 series, and none are in the list of 50 bands which have been proposed already.  All of these are universal - these are not sounds that precisely fit some crack in my psyche, like the chewed up gum of the Moldy Peaches or Glenn Branca’s hundred year flood.

That last point is important, because the book really does have to induce 5,000 people to drop the price of 10 mp3s for it.  I imagine that about 70% of the choice to purchase rests on the album in question - except in cases like Colin Meloy’s memoirish account of The Replacements’ Let it Be.  The big sellers seem to be books about an album adored by either a small, information-starved audience (eg Neutral Milk Hotel’s fans), or a massive audience, some of which prefers the format of these books to the 30 other books about a given artist (Bob Dylan).

Cat Power’s Moon Pix is a good choice.  It’s a set of eleven pure knockout songs.  The story of Chan Marshall moving to Prosperity, South Carolina and waking up out of nightmares and into half a dozen songs is a classic, even if it’s fairly well known at this point.  The audience is large, and still growing, but information is scarce - only one book about the band turns up on Amazon.com.

Moon Pix is the “that’s the one” Cat Power album.  I don’t necessarily have to say it’s the best, although it is, just that it represents her major turning point of departure. (I think there might be a Robert Wyatt song in that sentence.)  Before it, Cat Power was an OK indie rock band, not the great singer and watched artist that she has been since.

I remember being just hammered by this album when I put it on in my blue Geo Prizm, sitting in a parking lot on the Pacific Coast Highway.  It combines real lyrics, gooey underwater instrument playing, and Chan Marshall singing like she is overcome by the “Black Sleep of Kali Ma”.  What?

On the other hand, the harmonic structures and recording methods are not particularly inspiring on this one.  There are great sounds and great performances, but writers generally approach sounds and singing by pouring syrup over them and brushing off the flies.  “Chan Marshall’s evocative warbling creates a distinct unease in her transfixed auditors, while her greasy guitar-slinging curdles their milkshakes in a manner that can only be termed heavenly.”  My favorite music book is The Beatles as Musicians, by Walter Everett, who is interested in the Beatles as musicians, not just as story-fodder.  Everett approaches the album as a work with an inherent meaning, for which the history and personalities only offer us context.

Feel free to suggest other albums I should write about.