Daily Listen by Brian Brock

The Sundowners - Goat Songs (hear “Tonight I Will Be Fine”)

This is a collaboration of sorts between Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, and Edith Frost from the middle nineties.  I guess each of them was featured on one single/EP or something?  Anyway, it’s pretty classic lo-fi stuff, with a ridiculously messed over cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight I Will Be Fine” - it sounds like some lost hippie jam session that Dave-o recorded through his effects pedal cause it sounded rad.

This one is out of print, for some reason, while the other two can be found for sale at Drag City Records’s Sea Note distributary.

Here’s a copy: http://www.mediafire.com/?mtrgnwxtzlj

Bill Callahan - Tucson, 3 July 09 (hear “Rock Bottom Riser”)

At this point Bill Callahan has to pass from being under the radar to massed on the border, waiting to invade.  He came back from his disappointing Woke on a Whaleheart with an album as good as anything he’s done.  Even though in this show he seemed somewhat haggard, and he gave up a couple of times in the middle of songs, if he just continues to reach the same high points, all of a sudden people will just refer to him in the same context as Leonard Cohen, or one of those Lyle Lovetty sorts.

Download my not-too-awful recordings from right in front of the stage.  I edited out most of the chatter and eighty percent of one guy’s repeated “YEAAAAH!”s, and equalized it a bit for better listening.

Part 1 - Our Anniversary, Diamond Dancer, Sycamore, Too Many Birds, The Wind and the Dove, Cold Blooded Old Times - http://www.mediafire.com/?ajondn4jtym

Part 2 - Jim Cain, Rococo Zephyr, All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast, Rock Bottom Riser, Say Valley Maker, (noodling before Let Me See the Colts), Let Me See the Colts - http://www.mediafire.com/?mytynmout4g

Robert Wyatt - Shleep (listen to “Maryan”)

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.

Death Cab for Cutie - Plans

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.