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.
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.
Of Montreal* has a tendency to “leave it all on the track”, as they say. No idea goes unturned, and turned, and turned. With Kevin Barnes’s bountiful ideas for basslines, synth noises, and backup vocals, this can induce overwhelming delirium. The lyrics, however, generally should have been scraped off the track and disposed of somewhere.
Eva, I’m sorry, but you will never have me To me you’re just some faggy girl And I need a lover with soul power And you ain’t got no soul power
Oh really? And where can I obtain some of this, this… this “soul power” which is of such value, dear sir?
On Metacritic you can find someone describing Barnes as “one of indie rock’s most gifted songwriters.” Are we seeing the end of writing? Brilliant production is not songwriting, dude.
Of Montreal’s and Why?’s (below) albums show the immediate effect of the home-studioizing of popular music. The real audio engineers with their fancy hats and pretty ears have been whining for years that music would no longer sound awesome, like Prince or Fleetwood Mac, or the Hampton Grease Band for that matter. Well, they were right. Few people can master disciplines as divergent as singing, running audio software, writing songs, and fixing broken electronics. But that’s not the point, really. Most of these new bands simply would not have existed 20 years ago.
* Surely you capitalize uncapitalized names when they begin a sentence, as with any word. Let us try limit ourselves to beginning sentences with these abominable self-imposed cutenesses.
Why?’s lyrics must be called addled, presumably by drugs. They have the Neutral Milk Hotel quality of relentless particularity obfuscating universal truth. In this, NMH creates a communion of listener and creator which, in my listening, shows that the universal is completely contained in the individual. Philosophies and religions spend millennia describing the unity of self with all (atman is brahman, Jesus was god in the flesh, the Prime Mover is thought thinking itself), and in art we experience it in a moment. I’m not kidding. Maybe I should be.
The punctuation-defying Why? all too often slips out of the particular precisely when addressing the universal. This becomes a problem, because the listener stops parsing the complicated bits and waits for the answers. This actually further separates the universal from the individual. The song I’ve “reblogged” here and “Waterfalls” (listen at lala.com) are among the best on the album as far as remaining within their self-determined perimeters.
Rain is millions of tiny speech bubbles unused. The collected breaths of mutes and all our silent exhalations where we should’ve put words, or words we had no one to tell, emptied from clouds like cleaning horns’ spit valves, coming back to us now to remind us what we meant to say or that we meant to say something.
