Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Sonic Youth - The Eternal

Sonic Youth throws another one on the pile.

Scenario: a band can consistently create really good albums in the vein of this one, Murray Street or A Thousand Leaves, or for that matter, EVOL, Sister, and Washing Machine.

Question: do they have a duty (to themselves, to God, to me) to do anything else?  Should they risk it all on a colossal mistake?

Consider The Whitey Album, from “Ciccone Youth,” the stunted Madonna-wallowing alternative path they took in 85 or so.  It is huge fun to listen to.  Thurston Moore’s folk-rocky solo album Trees Outside the Academy, featuring Steve Shelley, was a great follow up to Rather Ripped, which itself was a revelation that SY could successfully drop the distorted tone-clusters, edited freakout jams, and sucker-punch vocals in favor of beauty, structure, and really excellent singing from the usually murky Kim Gordon.

Is it dictated by the popular music market?  Look at Beck, whose innate appeal to frat boys and hippies (to the extent there’s a difference anymore) means his core audience is much larger.  He took pretty much the opposite approach, creating a unique sound-world for each of his albums, at least up until Guero.  Even if this was an artistically worthy choice, with Odelay and “Loser” looming in his discography, every move he made was considered not on its own but in terms of what that crazy Beck was going to do next.  Since Guero, he has relied more or less on his old formula.

Why can’t Sonic Youth do something like Trees Outside the Academy? More to the point, why don’t they make something that will really clean clocks and take out the trash?  They may be unable as a group to cooperate in any other endeavor.  Perhaps it’s a business choice, to create a consistent brand.  Maybe they are imitating modern artists who make an endless string of “Untitled #” paintings, all the same sampling of colors and shapes.

Tied with Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle for best sounding record of 2009.

Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

It’s very funny that DOE originally called themselves Whitey’s on the Moon UK, them being from New York and all.  Maybe I should name my band Saw Horse UK, now that some people in Maryland have started using Sawhorse.  Ehh, mixed feelings.  Of course, there was a punk band in San Fransisco in the early 90’s named Sawhorse, too, but I do feel regret at having to share language space with someone else.  Most frustrating is that I love my Saw Horse mascot and comics, and these new people seem unaware of the Sawhorse from the Wizard of Oz.  They’re very convincing about their existence, and I doubt I could influence them much, so I’m casting about for fresh fish to fry.

I admire the name Sparklehorse. Beyond its obvious qualities of meaning, sound, and form, it has the advantage of being searchable on Google.  Perhaps I’ll find another Wizard of Oz creature, and join the words together.

I might use the word “bark” somehow.  Saw Horse is a great band name, though.  Grumble.

At any rate, Department of Eagles is a name infinitely superior to Whitey’s on the Moon.  When I try to describe the music, I get something like Beach Boys Broadway Folk Rock, which description fails entirely as a predictor of how much I would like this, which is quite a bit.

Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

(hear two songs below)

I said before that TV On the Radio sounds better on their live CD than on their mannered studio CDs.  Wilco is the opposite.

I saw Wilco live a couple of years ago and loved it, but of course a CD is not a concert - you can’t see the interactions of the performers, it’s usually not as loud, and so on.  I often get bored at concerts, because bands tend to play the same song over and over again.  Live, Wilco might play a straight folk-rock song followed by a huge Nels Cline loop-driven orgiastic noise-smorgasbord, and I remain interested.

For home listening, though, and I am confining myself here to the popular idiom, I believe a collection of music should superficially have a consistent tone.  The listener should be able to depend on a given collection of music to fulfill a purpose in her life.  It’s not OK just to expect people to pay close attention all the time to every album, since people simply don’t listen to music in pure environments; the phone rings, the dishes wash, the dog eats poo.  (Concert environments are also corrupt, but for different reasons - not a lot of dogs at concerts these days.)

The close listener also should be rewarded, and this is why popular music should be only superficially consistent.  The internal workings of the sound, songs, lyrics, structures, performances, etc all direct the active listener toward greater involvement, but should not distract the passive listener.

What A Ghost Is Born expresses most clearly is the breakdown of this popular idiom.  For one thing, there is no volume level the passive listener can happily set on his stereo.  As Robert Christgau puts it,

Play the soft parts loud enough to hear and the loud parts will demonstrate the limitations of your cheapjack sound system, you pathetic transistorized consumer clone.

As you can hear below in “Less Than You Think”, the band, aided I’m sure by Jim O’Rourke as producer, further prevents passive listening by sequencing a ten-minute radio-breakdown feedback stream directly after a piece of lightly strummed melancholy, welding the parts into one track to foil shufflers and mp3-rippers.  That the lyrics invite the pairing is lost on the passive listener, who can’t even make them out, much less pay attention to them while trying to finish an essay on what Karl Marx would think of credit default swaps.

The breakdown of idioms is useful and beautiful in and of itself, and I have written about Cher and Mats Gustaffson making guest appearances at each others shows, but I don’t believe such works to be as important as those which have universal appeal.  Wilco already succeeded miraculously in inviting total passivity and/or total activity in listeners to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, so this album seems like a failure to pursue that endeavor, when from another band it would seem to be a good expression of experimentalism.