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.

Panda Bear - Person Pitch

This is an interesting album, to me, because it serves as a transition between the Animal Collective albums of the past, such as Sung Tongs (for crying out loud, what is up with these people and their embarrassing names for everything?), and Merriweather Post Pavilion (embarrassment level reduced by 10%), their album from this year. Animal Collective was, to me, an example of experimenting for experimenting’s sake, so I wrote them off until the hype got up about their latest. They seem to have turned a leaf, as it is in my view driven by values, not means.

Person Pitch ends up behaving like an iteration, one of a series of successive approximations leading up to Merriweather Post Pavilion. I’m curious to see whether MPP itself is a peak - perhaps these people will really tear into the fabric of reality next.

The Grateful Dead – Live / Dead

The thing about the music of the Grateful Dead in 1969 is that they were still improvising essentially by repeating a short phrase with variations. They had some good songs, like “St. Stephen”, which is musically fantastic and lyrically psychedelic to the max if not particularly meaningful. Most of the tunes were essentially just excuses for the aforementioned primitive jamming. “Dark Star” allowed instrumental wheedling and deelding on a chord, and “Turn On Your Lovelight” offers Ron McKernan the chance to hop up and down like he’s James Brown for a half an hour. It’s fine. Hippies would certainly use the most violent power they have, ostracism, to thwart my disdain, and I wouldn’t blame them. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is phenomenally performed. The feedback jam is enjoyable, and you have to appreciate the Dead inflicting such noise on parents of hippies and on “hippies” everywhere.

Good improvisation develops harmonically, structurally, melodically, in the same fashion as any good piece of music. Simply repeating a short phrase while one player improvises melodically is essentially performing a composition, and a poor one at that, even if the phrase has not been previously determined.

The problem is really not that the music is limited compared to the Dead’s later output, but that it’s limitations mean that any attempt to understand what is truly happening has to be primarily concerned with the social context of San Fransisco in the late Sixties, which has already been written about by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. It would be wiser to think about other such culturally driven music works, like early bluegrass, or punk rock, which aren’t nearly as played out.

A number of Grateful Dead albums succeed specifically on musical grounds, like Workingman’s Dead, Wake of the Flood, Terrapin Station, and American Beauty. The last is the album people will point to as the Dead’s classic studio album, but I find songs such as “Operator” and “Til the Morning Comes” drag down “Ripple” and “Box of Rain” a little too much.

As a result, I’m not convinced one can investigate any single classic Grateful Dead album on purely musical grounds.

Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

Nick Drake has a great album, and two very good albums.  Without Pink Moon, the first two are like dogs walking without a master.

People often unwittingly produce things which are dress rehearsals for the future.  It is not the same as making the same album or song (or painting of a chicken) over and over again, a very common practice I find boring - it is drilling down into a creation that may never be discovered, rather than narcissistically dwelling on one which has in fact been missed.

Often people only have one thing to say, and God help them if they say it while still young.

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.