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.

Norah Jones - Austin City Limits (2007)

This concert strikes me as really odd sounding.  It’s like listening to a really good band playing a bunch of songs they’ve never heard before.  Jones’s voice is by far the most interesting thing happening, but the songs are so light and, really, almost unsophisticated that it’s not really enough to just have a singer.  Of course, a voice is not a singer, and maybe Nina Simone could have found more in these songs.  Perhaps Jones is just distracted by the odd fit between band and song.

Then there’s this:

Ska Is Dead IV Tour - Tempe, AZ, 5 Feb 09

I always assumed that The Toasters were a great band which I just never listened to much, for some reason.  I think they did that song “Party At Ground Zero”, which was pretty good, although I guess they’ve retired it now, especially being from New York City and all.  Oh, did I mention they are from New York City?  The singer let this factoid slip about 15 times during the show.  He also couldn’t decide if he was in Phoenix or Tempe, so he had to sing “Arizona” every time the name of a place was required for his madlib songwriting approach.

The Toasters just don’t have any songs.  It’s so strange to see a band play an entire show without playing a single good song.  “Don’t Let the Bastards Bring You Down” is not too bad, but that was the only decent song in a set that, granted, was probably just barely an hour long.  It is strange, and it is frustrating.

Their chief virtue is that they play at a steady tempo.

I saw The English Beat play last year, and may I be so bold as to claim that The English Beat beat the shit out of The Toasters.  Dave Wakeling is frankly about as good as John Lennon at writing songs, and at singing them for that matter.  His band, which it must be noted is a group of guns for hire (as is The Toasters), was incredibly well rehearsed.  They stopped, they started.  They full stopped, they full started.  Hearing “I Confess” with a bunch of wildly gyrating fanatics, I felt part of a just and true celebration.

The strange thing about The English Beat is that the “band” still tours both America and Britain, but in completely different formations.  What’s up with that?

I saw The Voodoo Glow Skulls and some ratty band from San Diego open.  The VGS are pretty good, but don’t these guys ever grow up?  Seeing some 40 year old dude in sunglasses screaming like he’s about to jump off the balcony in his Sophomore-year dorm is kind of creepy.

I listened to Ray LaMontagne’s live EP today.  These breathy singers are all over the place these days.  Singing while breathing is for the big time - the local mode singers moan while the sing.

I’ve also been listening to this best of 2008 list today.  Before you go there, be sure to drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar: Yahoo! media player.  Then you can click it to listen to all the mp3s without downloading them first.  It’s worth listening to if you like Bon Iver, TV On The Radio, Nick Cave, Jenny Lewis, Girl Talk, Fleet Foxes, MGMT, or Mates of State.

Cat Power - Moon Pix

I’m going to try to “get serious” about writing.  We’ll see how that goes.

At the moment, I’m trying to convince myself, followed by Continuum International Publishing Group, followed by 5,000 or so lucky customers, that I can write a book about a great album.  Strictly speaking, according to the call for proposals, the album does not have to be great.

The albums I’m considering are:

• Cat Power - Moon Pix
• Bjork - Vespertine
• The Evens - The Evens
• Smog - Knock Knock
• OP8 - Slush
• Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom
• Shania Twain - Come On Over
• The Cure - The Head on the Door
• Tom Ze, who doesn’t have a “that’s the one” album
• The Grateful Dead - Live / Dead
• They Might Be Giants - Lincoln

What else?  There are probably a hundred more.  I feel vaguely competent to approach these albums, unlike, for example, The Talking Heads’ Remain In Light.  None of the bands have yet been covered in the 33 1/3 series, and none are in the list of 50 bands which have been proposed already.  All of these are universal - these are not sounds that precisely fit some crack in my psyche, like the chewed up gum of the Moldy Peaches or Glenn Branca’s hundred year flood.

That last point is important, because the book really does have to induce 5,000 people to drop the price of 10 mp3s for it.  I imagine that about 70% of the choice to purchase rests on the album in question - except in cases like Colin Meloy’s memoirish account of The Replacements’ Let it Be.  The big sellers seem to be books about an album adored by either a small, information-starved audience (eg Neutral Milk Hotel’s fans), or a massive audience, some of which prefers the format of these books to the 30 other books about a given artist (Bob Dylan).

Cat Power’s Moon Pix is a good choice.  It’s a set of eleven pure knockout songs.  The story of Chan Marshall moving to Prosperity, South Carolina and waking up out of nightmares and into half a dozen songs is a classic, even if it’s fairly well known at this point.  The audience is large, and still growing, but information is scarce - only one book about the band turns up on Amazon.com.

Moon Pix is the “that’s the one” Cat Power album.  I don’t necessarily have to say it’s the best, although it is, just that it represents her major turning point of departure. (I think there might be a Robert Wyatt song in that sentence.)  Before it, Cat Power was an OK indie rock band, not the great singer and watched artist that she has been since.

I remember being just hammered by this album when I put it on in my blue Geo Prizm, sitting in a parking lot on the Pacific Coast Highway.  It combines real lyrics, gooey underwater instrument playing, and Chan Marshall singing like she is overcome by the “Black Sleep of Kali Ma”.  What?

On the other hand, the harmonic structures and recording methods are not particularly inspiring on this one.  There are great sounds and great performances, but writers generally approach sounds and singing by pouring syrup over them and brushing off the flies.  “Chan Marshall’s evocative warbling creates a distinct unease in her transfixed auditors, while her greasy guitar-slinging curdles their milkshakes in a manner that can only be termed heavenly.”  My favorite music book is The Beatles as Musicians, by Walter Everett, who is interested in the Beatles as musicians, not just as story-fodder.  Everett approaches the album as a work with an inherent meaning, for which the history and personalities only offer us context.

Feel free to suggest other albums I should write about.

Battle / Parkening - The Pleasures of their Company

One of my favorite albums, by my favorite classical guitarist and a great singer.

Cat Power w/ Golden Boots - 7 Oct 08, Tempe AZ

Golden Boots is a Tucson band which is pretty great, one of those bands where one person writes straight Beatles-y songs and the other writes things that are fairly out there.  These kinds of bands always have the risk of splintering, when the pop songster wants to sell out and the weirdo clings to artistic integrity.  As a band they succeed precisely in combination, and it’s imperative that they maintain respect for each other’s work.  Sometimes the pop songs are just too good, or the freakonomics are too complex, and it’s like a centrifugal force whipping them apart - nothing can hold that together for long, and you know when that time comes.  I suspect these guys are not heading to that point.  They belong together; certainly now they succeed in combination beyond what they would apart.

My wife talked about juxtaposition - making a scene, in effect, where there is otherwise no content.  By placing a cup next to a flashlight, for example, and photographing it, you make people contemplate each in the other’s frame of reference.  The content is in the juxtaposition.  I think it’s unfair to say that Golden Boots is only relying on juxtaposition, but it did help them to get my attention.

Cat Power, on the other hand, we agreed had no juxtaposition.  Every song was in roughly the same tenor with roughly the same approach.  Every song succeeded in itself, from its own integral virtues, rather than by surprising.

Here’s the thing.  Chan Marshall originally appealed to me as a writer.  The songs on Moon Pix are extraordinary.  Her singing is great, of course, but the songs are the real draw.  I see now that she is not actually a writer, but a performer.

A writer has to feel something and simultaneously think something - to remain separate from while engaged in the subject.  The so-called stream-of-consciousness writings of Jack Kerouac are fun to know about but terribly boring to read.  Performers, on the other hand, precisely can not be objective. They can’t be embarassed about what they were feeling at the time they wrote the song.  A singer can’t think about whether the vocal is loud enough in the monitors or whether she is playing the guitar well.  She has to purely express core humanity.

If Marshall is a performer, why is Moon Pix so great?  Maybe because the songs were specifically written from a performance mindset.  As the legend goes, she woke up from a nightmare and wrote most of the album in one stream of frightened consciousness.

So what does that mean for a Cat Power show?  It means that when she sticks to expressing what she feels, she succeeds, and that’s precisely what she is doing now.  She’s deep in it, soul singing, climbing out of the murk, to the extent that every song she performed was in the same vein.  Even her own songs, like “I Don’t Blame You” and “Metal Heart”, are reworked into dark gospel numbers.  She’s Mick Jagger in jail, she’s Nina Simone without the glee.

By the way, is it just Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan, or is there a general trend of 90’s indie bands going gospel/soul?  I guess Iron & Wine came out with a 70’s rock album, so maybe the trend is generally towards our old friend authenticity.