September 25, 2008
Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go

(“The Seedling”, Daytotter Session)

Well, this album induces melancholy in me in so many ways.

I have to admit that I envy Will Oldham, travelling to Iceland and recording deep records with Bjork’s sound engineer.  Having good friends who go to fairly great lengths to help him realize such an individual, peculiar album.  Making so many records in his career that frankly I never knew where to start - this is the first of his albums that I’ve really listened to.  I don’t understand why I envy him and not Bill Callahan, say, or Tom Ze, people whose music I have a longstanding connection to.

Then there’s the lyrics.  Putting aside his subject matter for a bit, just reading the lyric sheet makes my head hurt.  It’s like reading Hegel - each word relates to its immediate neighbors in a clear way, but as you move to the phrase, sentence, and verse the sense gradually dissipates until you have to start all over again at a different phrase.  It actually makes more sense when just listening, because it almost turns into a list of related words, which create meaning without clearly representing it, a sort of Cubism.  I suppose it’s poetic, but at bottom the poet has to guarantee his readers that he has discovered the most simple way to express an idea so insightful that simplicity is redefined.

The content expressed by the lyrics is just heartbreaking.  Will Oldham seems to see love and mutual destruction as coextensive.  Even “Lay and Love”, which mostly works as a straightforward but very careful and complete love song, has the line

From what I know you’re terrified, you have mistrust running through you, your smile is hiding something hurtful, it makes me lay here and love you

I often think about Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” when considering obscure song lyrics, that contradiction and nonsense are ways of encoding heterodox ideas.  I may as well also think of R.D.Laing suggesting that the insane are making their best effort at a compromise of contradictory necessities.  Here the opacity of the surface just seems to reinforce the darkness inside.  If you watch the video for Cold & Wet, you can see a layer of distressed gauze impregnated with christmas lights laid over the top of the opaque darkness of the song - very creepy.

Oldham’s voice, too, is heavy.  It sounds as if he’s asleep and begging the rest of the music to stop making noise and come to bed.

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Tags: Bjork Daytrotter Sessions Leo Strauss R.D.Laing beautiful jumble lyrics opacity simplicity singing ugly will oldham songwriting
September 14, 2008
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Death Cab for Cutie - Plans

There are two reasons I return to DCFC from time to time - Ben Gibbard’s singing and his songs.  I like that he is not a singer, but comes across well because he stays relaxed, and expresses ideas rather than techniques.  When I sing, if I put that approach in my mind’s ear, I tend to stay happier with myself.  Certainly Gibbard didn’t invent that approach, and I frankly prefer Bill Callahan’s singing on Smog albums from the turn of the century, but I have to admit that Gibbard’s singing is what I think of more often.  I prefer DCFC’s version of “All is Full of Love” to Bjork’s original.

His songs tend to have overwrought lyrics, which I overlook because his choice of subject tends to be oblique.  Residing in pop music, his metaphors typically keep love emotions as the tenor, but the vehicle may be something like a torn up vinyl seat in a restaurant, or a forgotten lock left over from a haircut in happier times. (Maybe I should write those songs before Gibbard does…)  You have to give credit to people who aren’t just churning out typical fare.

The structures of his songs are often decent, too.  In “I Will Follow You into the Dark” above, the main melodic phrase is a whole verse long (edit - actually the verse is two phrases. His melodic structures are still good).  I love that stuff.

This album, though?  Seems to find him singing into pitch-correction software, or maybe he’s just learned to sing.  The songs are also more rote.  I like “IWFYitD” - I like it a lot - and I was hoping to find 11 tracks of that.  The lyrics are probably good, but I don’t know because the production pushes them back in the mix with effects and instrumentation.

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Tags: Bjork bill callahan death cab for cutie lyrics singing smog twee songwriting
March 17, 2008

The English Beat - Live at the Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque, NM

(copied from the original Daily Listen)

Rock shows are almost always as much about the audience in my immediate vicinity as about the band. People have poor space management skills, generally speaking.

At this show, these kids were there and they just FREAKED OUT when the band played “Mirror in the Bathroom”, which is my favorite song too, by the way. How does a group of 15 year olds get that excited about a band that broke up before they were born and wasn’t that popular to begin with? I mean, a Led Zeppelin or something is one thing, but when did the English Beat become so important to them? Or do they simply enjoy a good show… Very smart of their parents, too. Get the kids to jump around for two hours at a wholesome event like that.

The English Beat is one of those bands that is now just the one guy, the singer Dave Wakeling, and a bunch of younger fellows. A surprising amount of the sound of a band comes from the singer, it turns out. I wonder what happens when the other founders of the band want back in. Clearly if the guitar and bass players (who formed Fine Young Cannibals after they left, certainly a calling card of some sort) and Ranking Roger (the band’s toaster and a big part of its personality) were to rejoin the band, it would be a big selling point, and have staying power like the Skatalites. But then what, do the current English Beaters just move along? I rather liked a few of them, you know…

This was one of those shows where the opening band plays and you’re like, “ahh yes, music, I’ve heard that”, and then the headliner comes out and you find out that it goes so much deeper. The way the different people interact, musically and socially, and the arrangements are completely in a different league. The guitar, for example, has to do a big-moment triplet feel thing in order for ska to really gel, and the drummer has to do the rim shots before the verse reenters after the bridge or breakdown - and then everyone else is interlocking with those elements, multiplying the effect.

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Tags: English Beat live kids singing guitar