I think Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy fits about like Bob Dylan when it comes to writing songs, but bear in mind that I think Dylan is overrated, especially when it comes to the content and not just the form of his songs; and Jim O’Rourke deserves his notoriety as one of the few producers able to swim in the mainstream while walking off the banks. This album should by all rights have been a classic, but somehow it doesn’t come together. It feels as though it was just thrown together from scraps of a sit-down. Still, it could easily be someone’s favorite work of either Tweedy or O’Rourke, if the songs hit just right, or the noodling guitar skronk seems fresh. I might even love it some day, and it deserves to be heard again.
(hear track 1, “Another Town Another Ride Another Window”)
Jay Bennett is utterly heartbroken.
Have you seen the Wilco movie, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”? It’s basically a movie about Bennett up against the reality of politics and relationships. The director put in a bunch of other stuff about how hard it was to get Yankee Hotel Foxtrot released, and a bunch of live and rehearsal performances (and how is it possible that those rehearsal shots all sound so great?), but the Bennett/Tweedy conflict is the story.
At the beginning, Bennett is a happy clam, turning instruments and playing knobs for all he’s worth. When it comes to mixing, you see him trying to pick his way through his bandmate’s intentions like a beaten animal. Finally, he’s alone, out of the band, on stage, and singing some kind of serious gloom - in a song which as far as I remember is actually a pretty nice lullaby or something.
Great vocal sounds. I kind of expect Bennett to drop some crazy YHF-to-the-extreme sounds all over his music, but what I’ve heard is usually pretty straight ahead folk/rock.
The album’s available free, as noted on his myspace page, although the website he posts only showed up in a Google cache, for me. Anyway here’s the file: http://rockproper.com/files/29/download.zip
There are some bands that invite comparison to others. Wilco sounds like The Replacements if they hadn’t been such lushes. Sean Lennon sounds like John Lennon. I love Syd Barrett’s solo albums, and I’m sure I would compare them to David Gilmour’s solo albums, if I ever tried to listen to the latter. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina kicks Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi’s ass.
Then there are bands which demand comparison. Anamanaguchi has made an album of Super Mario World grocery store versions of Weezer songs if I’ve ever heard one.
I said before that TV On the Radio sounds better on their live CD than on their mannered studio CDs. Wilco is the opposite.
I saw Wilco live a couple of years ago and loved it, but of course a CD is not a concert - you can’t see the interactions of the performers, it’s usually not as loud, and so on. I often get bored at concerts, because bands tend to play the same song over and over again. Live, Wilco might play a straight folk-rock song followed by a huge Nels Cline loop-driven orgiastic noise-smorgasbord, and I remain interested.
For home listening, though, and I am confining myself here to the popular idiom, I believe a collection of music should superficially have a consistent tone. The listener should be able to depend on a given collection of music to fulfill a purpose in her life. It’s not OK just to expect people to pay close attention all the time to every album, since people simply don’t listen to music in pure environments; the phone rings, the dishes wash, the dog eats poo. (Concert environments are also corrupt, but for different reasons - not a lot of dogs at concerts these days.)
The close listener also should be rewarded, and this is why popular music should be only superficially consistent. The internal workings of the sound, songs, lyrics, structures, performances, etc all direct the active listener toward greater involvement, but should not distract the passive listener.
What A Ghost Is Born expresses most clearly is the breakdown of this popular idiom. For one thing, there is no volume level the passive listener can happily set on his stereo. As Robert Christgau puts it,
Play the soft parts loud enough to hear and the loud parts will demonstrate the limitations of your cheapjack sound system, you pathetic transistorized consumer clone.
As you can hear below in “Less Than You Think”, the band, aided I’m sure by Jim O’Rourke as producer, further prevents passive listening by sequencing a ten-minute radio-breakdown feedback stream directly after a piece of lightly strummed melancholy, welding the parts into one track to foil shufflers and mp3-rippers. That the lyrics invite the pairing is lost on the passive listener, who can’t even make them out, much less pay attention to them while trying to finish an essay on what Karl Marx would think of credit default swaps.
The breakdown of idioms is useful and beautiful in and of itself, and I have written about Cher and Mats Gustaffson making guest appearances at each others shows, but I don’t believe such works to be as important as those which have universal appeal. Wilco already succeeded miraculously in inviting total passivity and/or total activity in listeners to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, so this album seems like a failure to pursue that endeavor, when from another band it would seem to be a good expression of experimentalism.
Vladislav Delay makes music somewhere between Pole and Tetsu Inoue, two of my favorites.
Pole pioneered a type of minimalist techno, involving a lot of clicks and static from a broken Waldorf 4-pole filter, as I remember reading somewhere sometime. The sound is very stable and brilliant. At lower volume, it more or less disappears into the dark walls. Listening closely, I am enthralled by it.
Tetsu Inoue creates drunken robot music. His CDs are impossible to understand and can’t be listened to at high or low volume, without some sort of detachment. I have looked at waveform displays of his music in audio editing software. Normal music - and by normal I mean almost all - looks like a line of fish, each biting his neighbor’s tail. Tetsu Inoue sets a cat loose in the fishtank. It’s really quite awesome.
Vladislav Delay is normal music.
One thing I’m interested in is the process of mainstreaming fringe ideas. Look at how Wilco or Radiohead took a bunch of noises and weirdnesses and by placing them in the mainstream context of pretty songs declawed them. Those cats have stopped tipping fishtanks.
Whether Vladislav is an odder Pole or a wilcoed Inoue is really immaterial.
