The recording is fantastic. It’s like Callahan has finally left the lo-fi bugaboo behind and tried to make an album that just sounds great. Here’s a link with some stuff about the recording: Bill Callahan - Progress Report - Stereogum
The songs are good, a significant return to form after the last one. I haven’t been blown away by them yet, but Smog Knock Knock sat on the shelf for a while before I discovered it.
Starts with a classical guitar, similar to a River Ain’t Too Much to Love - perhaps a conscious reference, given the kind of repudiation of the last album’s themes/sounds.
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.
Andrew Bird - Noble Beast (hear “Fitz & Dizzyspells”)
This guy reminds me of HanneHukkelberg. He does a good looping thing live - I saw him open for Smog several years ago - and it really comes through on record. His layers aren’t structural as much as textural. The structure is really determined by one part, and the other parts just add detail.
This is a “leak” of an album which will be released in early 2009. I have to admit that I am starting to allow myself to have things to which I have no right, strictly speaking. I doubt I will buy this album. I also listen to all kinds of things on Lala which I will probably not buy - which, to be honest I intend not to buy.
On the other hand, in the past around half the CDs I bought were things I listened to less than five times - I was just too curious about what they sounded like. Some of those risks payed off: D’Gary, Tom Ze, Gastr Del Sol, Lisa Germano, Smog, Bang On A Can. Now, I will be giving money to Times New Viking, and probably to Migala, and I even bought a few mp3s specifically to post here on the Daily Listen, or even just to hear again for fun. So I am still experimenting, and still paying when the experiment works, but I am not funding failed experiments.
In general, that is a serious consequence of the new music marketplace. Without some sort of payment to failures, do we risk losing the successes?
Even in a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would not be at the Toppermost of the Poppermost. Beck and Cat Power have far more immediately satisfying music, lyrics, and production; and of course Miles Davis - Kind of Blue would be perpetually hovering around number 10 with a bullet. (See, it’s funny, because the bullet is specifically placed next to fast-rising albums, hence “perpetually with a bullet” is an oxymoron.) People like to dance, so put Tom Ze and TV on the Radio up there too. Robert Wyatt is not everyday music, but he is everyperson music.
In a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would still be making his compelling, complete and complicatedly comforting music, but he would release an album every year rather than every five. Five hundred thousand people would come to depend on his filling the void left by the waning of his last album. Maybe he would have a TV show, on cable I’m sure, where he would talk to a friend for half an hour each Monday.
So Wyatt’s music is deeper than but not as broad as, say, Wilco. They map a similar part of the possibility of music.
Wyatt’s lyrics have a wordplay which I imagine is at first off-putting to many, but which actually breaks thoughts apart and reassembles them with real care. He calls a song “Free Will and Testament” and in it asks,
So when I say that I know me, how can I know that? What kind of spider understands arachnophobia?
There’s a certain common approach to Bill Callahan’s lyrics in Smog, especially on Supper, where for example in “Feather by Feather” he says,
It’s Ali vs. Clay Both pummeling away A champ always fights themself And you are a fighter, you are a fighter, you are a fighter
Callahan was brutalized in Rolling Stone as like the guy at a college party who rests on the back of a couch saying things that sound insightful for a moment but which you later realize are meaningless - an only mildly deserved criticism.
Robert Wyatt rather comes off as a natural, a peak-sitting guru who could make your cerebrospinal fluid boil simply by transcribing his everyday conversations with eagles and tailless whipscorpions, but instead looks inward and works over his own vertebral column. (Take that sentence as my submission to the code that “all persons writing about Robert Wyatt must mention that he is paralyzed from the waist down.” Really, why do record reviewers feel the need repeatedly to reacquaint us with their talking points for each musician?)
To seal the deal, he harnesses a team of jazz musicians, free- and otherwise, to a cart filled with great melodies and cool rhythms.
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.
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.
