Album reviews: I’ll Follow You – Oakley Hall (Paste) Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Caribou, Nels Cline Singers, Dr. Delay, Marissa Nadler, Odd Nosdam (JamBands.com) Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Bishop Allen, Sir Richard Bishop, Diplo, Kamikaze Ground Crew, Patton Oswalt, Brazil 70 comp. (JamBands.com)
Track reviews:
“Boy With A Coin” – Iron and Wine (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Phenomena” – Akron/Family (PaperThinWalls.com)
“No Dreams” – Oakley Hall (PaperThinWalls.com)
“I Used To Try” – Nancy Elizabeth (PaperThinWalls.com)
Only in print: Paste #36 (Iron and Wine cover): album review of Oakley Hall; film review of Romance & Cigarettes; DVD review of Yo La Tengo/Jean Painlevé
September/October Relix (Ben Harper cover): album reviews of Thurston Moore, Sir Richard Bishop, The Sadies.
“The postseason is all about extending the summer, ” my friend Russ said last night, waxing philosophical sometime not long after I demanded the head of José Lima. For being the best, the World Series teams are allowed the pleasure of going to the ballpark day after day, reveling in the mechanics of routines they perfected in earlier, golden light, even as the leaves die and the sun changes.
“Summer Turns To High” – R.E.M. (download) (buy)
from Reveal (2001)
released by Warner Brothers
“Summer Turns To High” has lingered on a few summer playlists, and I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while. The season being what it is, though, I figure I better hop to it.
In his most excellent contribution regarding Stereolab’s Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements to the recent Marooned anthology, Douglas Wolk made a sadly unattributed reference to an academic study that somehow proved that one hears the most meaningful music of his life at the age of 22-and-a-half. While that makes perfect sense for a discovery of Neutral Milk Hotel (as occurred roughly that month for me), it probably also goes a long way in explaining my undying attraction to R.E.M.’s generally reviled Reveal (which I’ve posted about before).
So many of the song’s sins are circumstantial, like the sterile folktronica washes, which seems a totally understandable type of cutting edge to adopt for guys of R.E.M.’s age and could just as easily be reimagined with a Glenn Kotche-like narrative drumbeat (hinted at, for example, beneath the line “hopes and dragonflies”). Beyond that, it’s R.E.M.: Michael Stipe’s obtuse transformations, and — especially — that twangy Peter Buck guitar fill at the end of the chorus. What makes it compelling is that there is a song in there, like a shape in the shifting heat. What makes it divisive is how arbitrary the production is. It could be set in front any of those backdrops. It’s beautiful, but — for that — feels spineless, musically speaking, only able to be appreciated properly by a 22-and-a-half year old wanting an R.E.M. album of his own.
“Summer Turns To High” hung around in morningtime with me for a good chunk of late summer, and was quite useful, nestled between the Beach Boys and John Fahey. I love the way the drums come in, the baroque arrangement under the verses, the subliminal high percussion part that comes in. And, in the fall, it will linger, too, as if it’d absorbed extra warmth to last as the fall arrives.
Reviewing is a guessing game, no matter how informed one is: a guess about what the contents will do with time. Will the melodies lodge and reemerge later as lyric fragments? Will the textures — of the music, of the medium — bond with the changes in the season and permanently lash to an ultimately arbitrary time and place? Listening is ephemeral, of course, but what’s really there? Is there something there? What’s left when the newness of context falls away? In that sense, it’s terribly unfair to review an album after even after a few months of listening.
To use an indie-safe example: when I wrote about the Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow upon its release, I listened a bunch, took it for absolutely decent standard-grade rawk, tucked it away, and forgot about it. That is, until months later, when I heard it played under the din of bar chatter between bands at Webster Hall, at which point I realized I knew nearly every melodic turn. Go figure. Once I got past the relative blandness of the more guitar pop, it was mondo groovy.
I reviewed two albums today by two other indieish standard bearers: Devendra Banhart and Iron and Wine. One grabbed me. The other didn’t. One seemed like a real step forward for an artist I didn’t quite get previously. The other seemed like a goofy step straight into the middle of the road for a musician I’d grokked instantly on his previous discs. Is that how they’re going to hold up, though? I really don’t know, but one can look for familiar signs: a certain way the guitars are recorded, a certain vagueness in the lyrics that suggests their abstraction will be useful, a preponderance of a certain mood. That’s all they are, really: guesses about how people might want to spend their time in the future.
I sometimes think about Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape artist who designed Central Park, who intended for his work come into full bloom only with a century of time. Not that most musicians are as good or functional or meaningful at their work as Olmsted was with his, or that their work will make any sense whatsoever a century from now, but — by their very nature of captured time reproduced — albums are somehow like that. All they’ve got is the promise of future meaning.
“End of an Era” – Yo La Tengo (download)
from Old Joy OST (2006)
unreleased
(file expires September 23rd)
I’m not sure what the proper name of this tune is, but it’s one of a few extended Yo La Tengo instrumentals in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy. The voice at the top is Bonnie Prince Palace himself, Will Oldham, playing the role of Kurt with perfectly burnt detachment. With little overt drama, just submerged tensions rippling the surface, the picture plays like a short story — no surprise, given that it was based on one by Jonathan Raymond. Like this YLT’s contributions to the score, Old Joy is an extended mood piece, the whole reflected patiently in each of its parts. Absolutely worth seeing.
o Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner lets you see which organizations’ employees are editing Wikipedia entries.
o TV Links: full movies, TV shows, etc.., organized fairly immaculately. Like YouTube, if the Man never noticed it.
o Nobelcom.com provides international calling card codes at cut rates waaay better than the bodega.
o TubeTV allows the user save videos from YouTube and other embedded sources.
o Like Robert DeNiro’s renegade plumber in BrazilNYC iPod Doctor does out-of-service/unauthorized iPod repairs on street corners — and now, apparently, via the mails. We’re all in this together.
The soundtrack to “Architecture” — composed by Tom Vuozzo (aka Tom Perry) — is wiggy, electronic, and great… but I also couldn’t resist posting some math-rock to accompany it. Start at any point in “Atlas” & it should do just fine. Thanks to YouTube user sawing14s for putting it up.
1. “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (from City and Eastern Songs)
2. “Windfall” – Son Volt (from Trace)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Christopher Columbus” – Kamikaze Ground Crew (from Postcards From the Highwire)
5. “Black River Song” – Angels Of Light (from We Are Him)
6. “It Seems Like Nothing’s Gonna Come My Way Today” – The Outsiders (from CQ)
7. “Happy Together” – The Turtles (from Solid Zinc)
8. “Peacebone” – Animal Collective (from Strawberry Jam)
9. “Mexican Radio” – Wall of Voodoo
10. “Are You Hung Up?” – Frank Zappa
11. “Who Need the Peace Corps?” – Frank Zappa
12. “Concentration Moon” – Frank Zappa
13. “Mom and Dad” – Frank Zappa
14. “Telephone Conversation” – Frank Zappa
15. “Bow Tie Daddy” – Frank Zappa
16. “Harry, You’re A Beast” – Frank Zappa
17. “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” – Frank Zappa (from We’re Only In It For the Money)
18. “Porpoise Song” – The Monkees (from Head OST)
19. “Cirque de Soleil” – Patton Oswalt (from Werewolves and Lollipops)
The only reference I have ever seen to the village of Jarnow, Austria comes via an account in the New York Times‘ “condensed cablegrams” section published on 7 February 1892 wherein it was reported that an unnamed doctor was killed by two unnamed comrades of an argumentative (and unnamed) Captain.
Since then, events in Jarnow, Austria ceased to be documented by the New York Times — if it could ever be said that they were documented at all. Indeed, for the remainder of its years, the village of Jarnow managed to elude nearly every piece of written documentation since digitized, as well as the memories of at least three generations taking its name for their own.
