November 30, 2008
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Times New Viking - Live at Modified in Phoenix 29 November 2008

Times New Viking is my new favorite band.  They wallop such enormous ass it’s like they are friends with the class clown in a school for fat kids.  “Kick me” signs printed on Kinko’s’s full assortment of paper colors pour out of their amplifiers like rainbows of blood.  Don’t worry, it’s actually ketchup, made from heirloom tomatoes and sea salt.

The band is completely in the moment but executing very well prepared ideas.  They come out of chaos on a dime and switch gears at will.  They have real songs, and can play their instruments.

The crowd was super-excited.  Right in front of me, a few cool kids straight out of the cool-kid catalog (hair scragged, goofy smiles, talking full of ideas) were ready to mosh, but only ironically.  They waited a couple of songs, then began jostling each other.  Then they “moshed”, disappearing briefly into a mess of bodies - then they were just standing again, having referred to a known quantity to a satisfying degree while staying far enough removed for coolth.

Modified exemplifies what I look for in a venue.  There’s nothing precious about it, there’s plenty of places to be, and it’s easy to get in and out of.  You can escape in two directions, because the main area is shaped like a donut - the bathroom is in the middle, which is a little smelly, but whatever it’s ***k rock.  I suspect this shape, combined with the plywood floor, is what leads to the decent acoustics.

In a rare case of actually having my head in the right place at the right time, I recorded this show.  Here is a .zip with mp3s all nicely edited for you.  Use it wisely.

http://www.mediafire.com/?wxjhjnzkmzk

Deerhunter also played.  It felt like watching the Beatles and Pink Floyd play back to back, or Sonic Youth and Joy Division.  Deerhunter was way too loud, though.

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Tags: Kick acoustics deerhunter live songwriting sonic youth times new viking I recorded this
November 23, 2008
Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy

Hm.  There’s no songs.  Axl Rose spent 15 years working on nothing.  It’s not hard to do, really.  You make some little thing of no consequence.  You want to hear what it sounds like, so you record it.  Listening, you think of another part or two that you can just put in there, so you add.  You add.  At some point, you develop a sentimental attachment to the work invested in the thing, and you’re stuck.

To put a finer point on it, there are no hooks.  Anyone who has enjoyed some Guns N’ Roses music will think of it and instantly hear:

“ah ah ah ah sweet child o’ mine”,

“take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty”,

“in the jungle, welcome to the jungle, watch it bring you to your knees, knees, I wanna watch you bleed”,

maybe “all we need is just a little patience”.

These combinations of lyric and melody are devastatingly effective and form entirely new, permanent neural pathways which in turn shape people’s lives.  This album has one song with a hook, “Catcher in the Rye”, but it’s the sort of thing a GNR (!) fan might write as an assignment in Language Arts II.

Buckethead, unfortunately, has no place at all on a Guns N’ Roses album.  He only does what is fun for himself, while Axl Rose and everything else about the band is married to self-seriousness.  With roles reversed, they could have something interesting.  Rose would be constrained from spiralling out into the piano-plucking stratospheres of gloom, and he could take Buckethead beyond his usual pretend intensity.  But here, in this context Buckethead’s wowee-zowee fiddly-diddlies are just one more bit of excess for Rose to play with.

I would love to see some incarnation of Guns and Roses come back with another album in 8 months or so - that could be interesting.

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Tags: Buckethead Guns N' Roses hooks intra-band relationships process production songwriting
November 1, 2008

The Evens - The Evens part 2 (read part one below first)

…hmm - MacKaye obviously has a voice which carries conviction, which is a prime cause of his success… but anyway…

“Shelter Two”

went out route seven, stopped at samadi sweets
we stood at shelter two and listened to the trees
went to arlington hardware to buy some electrical tape
you went to tulsa and I’m going to wait
it’s all downhill from here
we keep on climbing but we never find the top
it’s all downhill from here

Attaining normality is seen as goal of being together.  Do we care about the particular actions the Evens write about, driving, getting candy, waiting at the bus stop and paying attention, buying something, waiting for the other?  Maybe not, but we would care if those were the things we remembered about ourselves.

One thing that bothers me about these lyrics is the line “we keep on climbing but we never find the top.” It doesn’t really express calm stasis like the rest of the song.  I mean, this line means it is specifically not all downhill from here. So are we to throw it away, or to conclude that the authors want to hold on to this motive contradiction as some sort of engine of living?

Structurally, the song benefits from the energy of this section.  The Evens frequently have songs full of contrasts and just odd movement in general.  It’s common for them to have an ABCA structure, which is very unpop.

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Tags: Lyrics evens structure songwriting
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The Evens - The Evens (listen to “Shelter Two”)

The first cut from The Evens’ self-titled debut may be helpful in considering what makes a song succeed.

One thing that infuriates me is when people mistake the singer for the song.  These people will play a song they consider brilliant, which then consists of a minute and a half of some girl singing “my knees are wobbling” in a pretty voice, repeatedly hitting one high note. This is not worthless, it’s fine to enjoy it, I like some of this kind of music, but this is no more good songwriting than Panic at! the Disco has good songwriting because they put on make-up and prance around like they have ants in their pants.

Ideally I would record new versions of every song I consider, so as to remove the variance of performance and production.

The fact is, Ian MacKaye does not have a pretty voice.  He has a voice which sounds like he might be fun to hang out with, a voice which, if it asked me to cross the road, I would feel compelled me to do so as if it were my own soul speaking, but he can’t or won’t hold a note, and if anything he sounds a little goofy.  His music, from The Teen Idles to Fugazi, has always had to succeed based on his songwriting and arrangements.  Amy Farina, his collaborator in the Evens, is one of the best drummers in rock, and has a singing voice which I imagine is more commonly understood to be good, but the songs remain the backbone of the Evens.

… more to come…

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Tags: Amy Farina Ian MacKaye evens singing songwriting
October 31, 2008
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The Pogues - Rum Sodomy & the Lash (hear Sally MacLennane)

Shane MacGowan’s songs and singing make this a great album, the Pogues’ arrangements and playing make it a great album, the two together make it a classic.

But when it comes down to it, it’s the songs.  I often gripe about well-made songs albums that just don’t have any songs in the first place.  The Eels EP from 25 October comes to mind.  It’s fine, it’s good, the songs are real songs, but there’s no fiber.  MacGowan’s songs just kill.

What makes them better?  To begin looking for an answer to that, I listened to “Sally MacLennane”.  Originally, Sally MacLennane is a kind of stout, I imagine a good pub beer.  But of course it’s also a name.  So while ostensibly a song about a man leaving his barmates for a different life, the song is easily about Jimmy also leaving behind a sweet girl, who the narrator eventually marries.  “I learned to love the virtues of sweet Sally MacLennane.”

At the same time, the song is about leaving life behind, and coming back in people’s memories as they get together to drink and reminisce.

… the point is, I can keep coming back to this song, hearing it from different angles… the sound of the words and choice of rhyming words also really sets the lyrics apart here (“born” “morn” “horn” makes me laff), and the music is on the other side of the map…

(via micek:)

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Tags: beer eels lyrics pogues songwriting
October 25, 2008
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Eels - Manchester 2005 EP

A man full of ambition, pretty good songs, and an endearing crackly voice, Mark Oliver Everett aka E, has released a few of the tracks off of a forthcomingly difficult-to-find 4th-LP-in-a-box-set live album as an online mp3 EP —- that’s right, for free.  Get it before October 28th.  This song, Fresh Feeling, is definitely the hit - I think Packing Blankets (find it here in a moment) is the best lyrically, and Jeannie’s Diary has some heartbreaking vocals, although I can’t access the crack in M.O.E.’s heart through that song.

jenrobinson:

Eels - Fresh Feeling

From Manchester 2005 EP, available for free download here. Happy Saturday!

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Tags: ambition eels heartbreakt voice songwriting
October 16, 2008

of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

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.

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Tags: Lyrics bassline computer home studio name production songwriting synth
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
September 3, 2008

Helicopters - How to Fake Fall Asleep

On this album, Helicopters shows just how perilously close Death Cab For Cutie is to Savage Garden.

They differentiate themselves with rather scornful lyrics.  In one song (it might be the one called “Mrs Ordinary”) they are singing to a girl who just doesn’t get it, according to them.  There’s a kind of mastery of the technique of turning songs into recordings on display here, and a lot of neat weird noises and synthetic spaghetti, but little song to begin with.

DCFC’s “I will follow you into the dark” (or whatever) is quite humane, and has a great structure/melody combination.  Even Savage Garden’s “I want to stand with you on a mountain” must be admitted to be a decent song.

What kind of music do these bands play, exactly?

PS. here is a song from Helicopter’s 2008 album, which is something of an improvement over “… Fall Asleep”, which can be heard over at lala.com.

I would have “reblogged” this flash player from the Helicopters, but something’s up with the code over there I guess…

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Tags: Death Cab For Cutie Lyrics Savage Garden noises songwriting