I get the idea that if this was in English, the lyrics would be the sort that utterly distract me from the pure joy of the music. She’d be all, “my man-a wanna me-a eat-a his banana” and “one two three four egg drop soup” (all rights reserved for my next album). Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except for possibly a small amount of damage to the psyche, about as much as a can of Coke Zero does to the body.
But it’s in French, so it just sounds groovy. I guess “Je Veux Te Voir” was her “I Kissed A Boy” - or whatever, the song that brought her to attention before her album was finished. It has a less bassy, more pop sound than the rest. I guess it was/is a “you are not by nature well endowed for procreation” type of song, but again, it’s in French, so my awareness is mediated.
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.
I can see why people like this. I don’t hear the words. He sings very high notes all the time. I like the sound of the acoustic guitar. He’s from LaCrosse, Wisconsin - just a couple of hours from where I used to live. He sounds like he’s a decent fellow.
Mostly these aren’t exactly songs, in that they seem inseparable from his performances.
I don’t hear the words, but I hear him singing the truth.
The Evens - The Evens part 2 (read part one below first)
…hmm - MacKaye obviously has a voice which carries conviction, which is a prime cause of his success… but anyway…
“Shelter Two”
went out route seven, stopped at samadi sweets we stood at shelter two and listened to the trees went to arlington hardware to buy some electrical tape you went to tulsa and I’m going to wait it’s all downhill from here we keep on climbing but we never find the top it’s all downhill from here
Attaining normality is seen as goal of being together. Do we care about the particular actions the Evens write about, driving, getting candy, waiting at the bus stop and paying attention, buying something, waiting for the other? Maybe not, but we would care if those were the things we remembered about ourselves.
One thing that bothers me about these lyrics is the line “we keep on climbing but we never find the top.” It doesn’t really express calm stasis like the rest of the song. I mean, this line means it is specifically not all downhill from here. So are we to throw it away, or to conclude that the authors want to hold on to this motive contradiction as some sort of engine of living?
Structurally, the song benefits from the energy of this section. The Evens frequently have songs full of contrasts and just odd movement in general. It’s common for them to have an ABCA structure, which is very unpop.
The Pogues - Rum Sodomy & the Lash (hear Sally MacLennane)
Shane MacGowan’s songs and singing make this a great album, the Pogues’ arrangements and playing make it a great album, the two together make it a classic.
But when it comes down to it, it’s the songs. I often gripe about well-made songs albums that just don’t have any songs in the first place. The Eels EP from 25 October comes to mind. It’s fine, it’s good, the songs are real songs, but there’s no fiber. MacGowan’s songs just kill.
What makes them better? To begin looking for an answer to that, I listened to “Sally MacLennane”. Originally, Sally MacLennane is a kind of stout, I imagine a good pub beer. But of course it’s also a name. So while ostensibly a song about a man leaving his barmates for a different life, the song is easily about Jimmy also leaving behind a sweet girl, who the narrator eventually marries. “I learned to love the virtues of sweet Sally MacLennane.”
At the same time, the song is about leaving life behind, and coming back in people’s memories as they get together to drink and reminisce.
… the point is, I can keep coming back to this song, hearing it from different angles… the sound of the words and choice of rhyming words also really sets the lyrics apart here (“born” “morn” “horn” makes me laff), and the music is on the other side of the map…
Even in a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would not be at the Toppermost of the Poppermost. Beck and Cat Power have far more immediately satisfying music, lyrics, and production; and of course Miles Davis - Kind of Blue would be perpetually hovering around number 10 with a bullet. (See, it’s funny, because the bullet is specifically placed next to fast-rising albums, hence “perpetually with a bullet” is an oxymoron.) People like to dance, so put Tom Ze and TV on the Radio up there too. Robert Wyatt is not everyday music, but he is everyperson music.
In a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would still be making his compelling, complete and complicatedly comforting music, but he would release an album every year rather than every five. Five hundred thousand people would come to depend on his filling the void left by the waning of his last album. Maybe he would have a TV show, on cable I’m sure, where he would talk to a friend for half an hour each Monday.
So Wyatt’s music is deeper than but not as broad as, say, Wilco. They map a similar part of the possibility of music.
Wyatt’s lyrics have a wordplay which I imagine is at first off-putting to many, but which actually breaks thoughts apart and reassembles them with real care. He calls a song “Free Will and Testament” and in it asks,
So when I say that I know me, how can I know that? What kind of spider understands arachnophobia?
There’s a certain common approach to Bill Callahan’s lyrics in Smog, especially on Supper, where for example in “Feather by Feather” he says,
It’s Ali vs. Clay Both pummeling away A champ always fights themself And you are a fighter, you are a fighter, you are a fighter
Callahan was brutalized in Rolling Stone as like the guy at a college party who rests on the back of a couch saying things that sound insightful for a moment but which you later realize are meaningless - an only mildly deserved criticism.
Robert Wyatt rather comes off as a natural, a peak-sitting guru who could make your cerebrospinal fluid boil simply by transcribing his everyday conversations with eagles and tailless whipscorpions, but instead looks inward and works over his own vertebral column. (Take that sentence as my submission to the code that “all persons writing about Robert Wyatt must mention that he is paralyzed from the waist down.” Really, why do record reviewers feel the need repeatedly to reacquaint us with their talking points for each musician?)
To seal the deal, he harnesses a team of jazz musicians, free- and otherwise, to a cart filled with great melodies and cool rhythms.
Of Montreal* has a tendency to “leave it all on the track”, as they say. No idea goes unturned, and turned, and turned. With Kevin Barnes’s bountiful ideas for basslines, synth noises, and backup vocals, this can induce overwhelming delirium. The lyrics, however, generally should have been scraped off the track and disposed of somewhere.
Eva, I’m sorry, but you will never have me To me you’re just some faggy girl And I need a lover with soul power And you ain’t got no soul power
Oh really? And where can I obtain some of this, this… this “soul power” which is of such value, dear sir?
On Metacritic you can find someone describing Barnes as “one of indie rock’s most gifted songwriters.” Are we seeing the end of writing? Brilliant production is not songwriting, dude.
Of Montreal’s and Why?’s (below) albums show the immediate effect of the home-studioizing of popular music. The real audio engineers with their fancy hats and pretty ears have been whining for years that music would no longer sound awesome, like Prince or Fleetwood Mac, or the Hampton Grease Band for that matter. Well, they were right. Few people can master disciplines as divergent as singing, running audio software, writing songs, and fixing broken electronics. But that’s not the point, really. Most of these new bands simply would not have existed 20 years ago.
* Surely you capitalize uncapitalized names when they begin a sentence, as with any word. Let us try limit ourselves to beginning sentences with these abominable self-imposed cutenesses.
Well, this album induces melancholy in me in so many ways.
I have to admit that I envy Will Oldham, travelling to Iceland and recording deep records with Bjork’s sound engineer. Having good friends who go to fairly great lengths to help him realize such an individual, peculiar album. Making so many records in his career that frankly I never knew where to start - this is the first of his albums that I’ve really listened to. I don’t understand why I envy him and not Bill Callahan, say, or Tom Ze, people whose music I have a longstanding connection to.
Then there’s the lyrics. Putting aside his subject matter for a bit, just reading the lyric sheet makes my head hurt. It’s like reading Hegel - each word relates to its immediate neighbors in a clear way, but as you move to the phrase, sentence, and verse the sense gradually dissipates until you have to start all over again at a different phrase. It actually makes more sense when just listening, because it almost turns into a list of related words, which create meaning without clearly representing it, a sort of Cubism. I suppose it’s poetic, but at bottom the poet has to guarantee his readers that he has discovered the most simple way to express an idea so insightful that simplicity is redefined.
The content expressed by the lyrics is just heartbreaking. Will Oldham seems to see love and mutual destruction as coextensive. Even “Lay and Love”, which mostly works as a straightforward but very careful and complete love song, has the line
From what I know you’re terrified, you have mistrust running through you, your smile is hiding something hurtful, it makes me lay here and love you
I often think about Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” when considering obscure song lyrics, that contradiction and nonsense are ways of encoding heterodox ideas. I may as well also think of R.D.Laing suggesting that the insane are making their best effort at a compromise of contradictory necessities. Here the opacity of the surface just seems to reinforce the darkness inside. If you watch the video for Cold & Wet, you can see a layer of distressed gauze impregnated with christmas lights laid over the top of the opaque darkness of the song - very creepy.
Oldham’s voice, too, is heavy. It sounds as if he’s asleep and begging the rest of the music to stop making noise and come to bed.
There are two reasons I return to DCFC from time to time - Ben Gibbard’s singing and his songs. I like that he is not a singer, but comes across well because he stays relaxed, and expresses ideas rather than techniques. When I sing, if I put that approach in my mind’s ear, I tend to stay happier with myself. Certainly Gibbard didn’t invent that approach, and I frankly prefer Bill Callahan’s singing on Smog albums from the turn of the century, but I have to admit that Gibbard’s singing is what I think of more often. I prefer DCFC’s version of “All is Full of Love” to Bjork’s original.
His songs tend to have overwrought lyrics, which I overlook because his choice of subject tends to be oblique. Residing in pop music, his metaphors typically keep love emotions as the tenor, but the vehicle may be something like a torn up vinyl seat in a restaurant, or a forgotten lock left over from a haircut in happier times. (Maybe I should write those songs before Gibbard does…) You have to give credit to people who aren’t just churning out typical fare.
The structures of his songs are often decent, too. In “I Will Follow You into the Dark” above, the main melodic phrase is a whole verse long (edit - actually the verse is two phrases. His melodic structures are still good). I love that stuff.
This album, though? Seems to find him singing into pitch-correction software, or maybe he’s just learned to sing. The songs are also more rote. I like “IWFYitD” - I like it a lot - and I was hoping to find 11 tracks of that. The lyrics are probably good, but I don’t know because the production pushes them back in the mix with effects and instrumentation.
I think Beck has finally left Odelay behind. That album is one of the best albums of the 90’s - perhaps tied for best album in the mainstream - but Beck’s way of walking away from Odelay (Mutations, Sea Change) and then running back (Midnite Vultures, Guero) only magnified his failure to top it.
What has he done now? Where Odelay mixed garbage noises and big beats with lyrics inscrutable in a tantalizing “let me just try to scrute that after all” mixup of culture references and big ideas, Modern Guilt’s lyrics remain difficult to scrute, but span from mopey to dire; references to pop culture are primarily musical, and very slick at that.
Here’s some lyrics:
Down by the sea Swallowed by evil Already drowned You and me Watching the sea Full of people Already drowned So many people So many people Where do they go? You and me Hit by a cloud Full of evil Watching the jets Pass go by You and me watching You and me watching Chemtrails is where we belong That’s what I mean When we talk In this jetstream We’re climbing A hole in the sky
(Chemtrails)
Yikes, right? Modern Guilt indeed.
Listening to Gamma Ray, above, is the first time I got really excited listening to Beck since Mutations, even with mope-lyrics - the music is just great. The whole album has really great sounds and structures.
