Grizzly Bear has taken a real step here towards mainstreaming an esthetic fairly well laid out by Robert Wyatt. This is an album that will probably turn up on the sound system at Starbucks at some point, but plenty of it is coming out of a tradition of pretty droney, spooked, playfully odd music. It’s bittersweet to behold, like a child growing up.
The place where this surpasses Animal Collective’s recent effort is in its sonics, its rhythmic stability, its production values in general. The A.C. has songs, though, which this album does not.
This is a tough kind of nut to crack. Rock Bottom is Robert Wyatt’s “that’s the one” album, but I have very little at stake in it. Shleep is the album I know and love. I would love to attach myself to this album somehow, though - it’s an “on the middle of my life’s journey I found myself lost in a dark forest” kind of work.
I guess Wyatt wrote this one while they were filming Don’t Look Now, which is a film I recommend to those who like Todd Solondz movies and the like. Fred Frith plays on a track too.
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.
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.
