Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Why? - Elephant Eyelash

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.

Sounds like it was made in Ableton Live.

gregbrown:

Why? - Speech Bubbles

One of my favorite rainy-day songs.

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.

Smog - Knock Knock (copied from original Daily Listen)

This is one of my favorite albums, so I’m only going to say one thing about it: this album has almost no information beyond lyrics listed in the booklet, or printed on the CD tray - even online there’s very little. That’s awesome. I really think it is part of why the album works so well.

When I first got this, it was because I was a huge Cat Power - Moon Pix fan. I guess I had heard that Cat Power’s Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan of Smog had been on friendly terms, and so I bought it without further thought. The music didn’t impress me at first - if I had known it was a Jim O’Rourke production, I would have paid a lot of attention, and heard all the awesome detail that puts this album next to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Airplane Over the Sea, OP8’s album (Calexico, Howe Gelb and Lisa Germano together at Wavelab studio in Tucson in 1997), and the Beatles’ Revolver. As it is, however, ignorant as a mucus-mite, when I finally began hearing the music I heard something much more incredible than the buried background vocals you can hear in the sample above. I heard the songs, one day with my wife, after she discovered Knock Knock in my collection of CDs which I knew were great but hadn’t discovered yet.

That was a good year.