Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest  (hear “Cheerleader”)

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.

Jim O’Rourke - Tamper (hear “He Felt the Patient Memory of a Reluctant Sea” edit)

O’Rourke has a certain kind of album which I love. He will play a country-blues thing on the guitar, one chord, one lick repeated into minimalism. Gradually, other instruments (on Happy Days a hurdy gurdy, on Bad Timing a slide guitar and horn band) peek around the corner, then step into the street, until they are playing a big beautiful concert.

This is not one of those albums.

Jim O’Rourke has another kind of album which I love.  He writes quirky songs, sings them with ennui washed up from Lake Michigan, and interprets them with post-rock (Gastr Del Sol) or post-folk (Eureka).

This is also not one of those albums.

This album is one of those, which I never loved until now, where Jim O’Rourke alone or with a group of classical musicians, makes long, slow, whooshing noises for half an hour - Terminal Pharmacy comes to mind, maybe I should give it another chance.

Because the album art on Tamper is very similar to Happy Days, I was sure the music would be the same, but this is from 1990 (although the case of this reissue gives 2008), well before the kinds-of-Jim-O’Rourke-album-I-like started coming out.

But this is really cool, actually.  It’s much more Pauline Oliveros than Keith Rowe, more hummmla than kkchrrtap.  OK?