Knowing I was going to be sitting enthralled by the new Grizzly Bear tonight, I instinctively donned my Sennheisers tonight as soon as I got home, like a VR helmet in some early 90s utopian view of the future. There’s something about music like Grizzly Bear that is difficult to reproduce on regular speakers, even good ones – and I have decent ones – that is endemic to even mid-range speakers. It’s a magic, perhaps; by isolating yourself to the music, you allow it to transport you to a new realm. It’s no longer a background, even if it is just background: it still finds a way to burrow into your conscious thought. A lot of music is better served in this environment, so why not celebrate it? I think I’ll make this a semi-regular series.

Ok, back to Grizzly Bear. Each of the songs on Veckatimest feels like it was lovingly cared for, a sculpture rubbed and polished to perfection. None of the songs follow traditional structures. Instead, they meander through forests of sounds with a carefully tuned microphone listening for the distant falling spring water and the whippoorwills’ calls. In this song, a steady, plodding, no, impatiently waiting beat provides some continuity while the melody builds itself up. And then a grand finale as radiant as a smog-drenched sunset, harmonies washing over the stumbling guitar in violets and oranges.

I haven’t spent much time with it, but so far, this is turning out to be my favorite album of this first half a year.

Grizzly Bear – While You Wait for the Others

(A time when Lala failed..)

Today was one such day of traffic horror. I had a great (read:long, hectic, stressful, with only a few moments to actually knock things off the to-do list) 11 hour workday, and when I tried to get back home, every way across the river was backed up. Half an hour into a commute that should have taken 25 minutes, this song came along:

Don’t ask me why it’s in caps. One more annoyance, I guess.

Back to the song, though, I recognize that it has about the testosterone level of a Pet Shop Boys studio session. And it’s pretty silly. AND it’s basically absolutely sickening in its optimism. But the shiny veneer has a stumbling little banjo strumming out in front of the melody, and it’s like the little dispirited kid that the song is trying to cheer up. I guess it’s just encouraging after a long day.

And now I’m off to more work.

I think the last time I heard anything new from Cracker wasn’t too long after the “Low” days.  Low was a catchy hit perfect for the early 90s: along with “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)” it defined the hopelessness of the early 90s.

The songs were sloppy. But so was everyone else. I was in high school, the perfect time to embody the slacker lifestyle and still be a little bit intellectual (ie no internet to distract us).

I think somewhere I have Garage D’or, a compilation from 2000 featuring those two songs and a couple other fun ones (Eurotrash Girl, Shake Some Action). But this seemed like a final send-off from a band a couple years past their prime.

All this is leading to something, right? Well, band focal point David Lowery and company have a new album out – in fact, it’s the first album I’ve run across as it came out. On a lark, I grabbed it, and was shocked.

It’s kind of a cliche to see older musicians release a new album in which they let loose and simply rock out. R.E.M. did it last year with Accelerate (and supposedly are working on another); U2 have done it a couple times now, etc. Usually they sound like the artist is trying too hard (I’m thinking, sadly of Pearl Jam’s self-titled album) and it just comes out flat.

For at least half an album, though, Cracker brings on the rock. “Show Me How this thing works” is a rallying cry for an old man, fumbling around with his computer until he breaks out in frustrated song. (I picture a geriatric breaking out into a choreographed routine around a living room.) Snark aside, it’s really a song about how life itself works, and how no one can really figure it out. The next song, the hopeless “Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out With Me,” is as much about figuring out how life works and what society expects from you as it is about stepping away from the mainstream . It’s not a surprising struggle; later in the album he sings that “dying is easy, it’s living that’s hard.” It’s a sentiment borne of frustration (to quote one of their contemporary bands) with the strictures we face.

The highlights continue with We Will all Shine a Light, which frames a cruising melody with a grizzled old rock rhythm, and Hand Me My Inhaler, which is probably the first song about asthma with a guitar solo. (Actually, Hand Me My Inhaler has the same ridiculousness (and humor) as an action movie some aspiring filmmakers made about an asthmatic action hero, but that’s a different post.)

Most of the rest of the album slows down, which allows Lowery’s growl a little too much sonic space. It tries to go Americana and bluesy, but it seems like a bit too much of a shift, at least when listening to the album in one sitting. Moreover, these seem to have stepped aside from the overall tone and quest of the rest of the album, making them seem out of place. Nonetheless, there are a surprising number of hummable songs to keep this around for a while.

Telekinesis, in the vein of countless other bands (Voxtrot instantly comes to mind among contemporary artists) trades in bubbly pop rhythms masked behind lo-fi production values.  Delicate harmonies and melodies rule the day, as in the plinking piano melody of Awkward Kisser.  In that song, the melody serves as a stand-in for the awkward teenager that is the subject of the song; a tense, non-adjusted scamp.  Similarly, Imaginary Friends has a simple hook that dances with the same whimsy as the writer does with his childhood imaginary friends.

It’s good to see personal storytelling continue to drive modern power pop.  As in Awkward Kisser, Coast of Carolina, and Imaginary Friends, Calling All Doctors weaves a tale just under the surface.  In this case, it’s about being so anxious that the heart starts twitching.  But, like the album, it works out.

In real life, eels don’t actually howl at the moon.  But in e’s world, anything is possible.

I’m pretty excited about this album, as I have been since every album since electro-shock blues, but I’m not too excited by this song.  It works great with the video, as the song’s little quirks are mimicked on screen.  And the red wash of the video segment pairs nicely with the menacing bassline of the song.

But I have a hard time seeing how this works as anything but a gimmick.  I don’t see it as being exceptionally interesting to hear in the middle of an eels album, even one as crunchy as Shootenanny!  Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Today NPR found a new bogeyman, since swine flu wasn’t living up to all it promised: children dying from falling TVs.  Or, in their own words:

Your drawers and medicine cabinets may be child-proofed, but what about your TV? As it turns out, unhealthy messages on TV may not be as dangerous as the TV itself, if it’s perched on a high dresser or desk.

Researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who analyzed federal data on injuries estimate that as many as 14,700 children are injured at home every year by falling TVs and other heavy furniture.

Which of course makes me think of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin‘s Kill Your Television (apparently they’re re-uniting? weird).  Really, it’s the only choice we have left.

Sometimes I yearn for the misplaced optimism of 1993.

This song, a tribute to the kick-back, “slacker lifestyle,” makes me think of Vegas for some reason. It certainly doesn’t have any of the glitz or sheen of the sin city. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But maybe it recalls Vegas for me because it’s one of the few places where I can actually drop back from life. It’s downtime and relaxation. With alcohol. What’s better than that?

It used to be rats.  Then the birds came for us.  Now the pigs, with their murderous flu germs.  Or something.  What’s next?  The cat meow pandemic?

Of course, this gives me the opportunity to showcase a new Thermals song, called, naturally enough, We Were Sick (off of their excellent new record, Now We Can See). For someone suffering from illness, it’s got a whole lot of energy. But that’s ok; maybe it’s that point when you feel like you’re better, so you celebrate your recovery. And maybe we’re heading that way with the whole swine flu mess.

On the other hand, I don’t really get the big deal with H1N1, since regular influenza kills about 36,000 Americans each year. Maybe this is more easily transmitted, and a bit more violent, which would warrant some “helpful tips” segments on the local evening news – but not the feeding frenzy CNN, et al, are engaging in. Though I have to admit – it’s pretty hilarious that we apparently need lectures on hygiene to keep us healthy.

I don’t know. Maybe we’re just sick in the head. Like Fiona.

I wonder what it’s like to be a young and energetic music fan these days.  Most of the best music is more fully enjoyed with the proper context: an understanding of at least the generation before this one, which serves to provide context and texture.  How can one enjoy Interpol or any of its countless spawn without understanding the genius of Ian Curtis and Joy Division?  How can one contextualize the crop of electro bands without recalling a whole slew of synth-pop and other 80s bands?  Without this background, we’re doomed to repeat the worst of excesses: soon we’ll have hair bands and Right Said Fred all over again.

This may be just the lament of someone watching the eclipse of their 20s.  I remember desperately trying to figure out why a bunch of respected writers were so enthralled with Bauhaus (I only knew the Cure) as the standard bearers of a genre.  Or why the Clash mattered so much more than the Ramones to anyone with what seemed like good taste.  Only ten years removed, awash in the flannels and ripped jeans of early grunge, I relied on others’ sense of nostalgia to provide me the context of the cooler older music fans I knew.  I savored every morsel, every bit of musical trivia, because they were hard to come by, buried in the letters to the editor of Spin or a random music magazine I found at the back shelf of Waldenbooks.

I guess that’s my roundabout, crotchety way of saying that it must be difficult to establish context and depth when every fact is available with just a few key strokes; when any band that doesn’t market itself well enough or attract enough buzz will be forgotten to the electrons.

I sure hope that doesn’t happen to The Pains of Being Pure At Heart.

Their sound is an algebraic computation of  My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Slowdive, filtering out the excesses of noise and meandering experimentation of some of their shoegazery predecessors.  None of those excesses should be sneered at, of course; they’ve set the stage for where we are musically, and, frankly, a lot was pretty damn good.

…Pure at Heart can bring the noise when they need to, as they do in their opening track, Contender.

But whenever they do, the noise is subdued: it’s noise for texture, not for static.  The melodies dance at the front of the songs, rather than lurk in the background.  The snare drum sets an echoing pace, ensuring the songs never get stuck on a side trail.  They’re poppy when they need to be, layering harmonies as a new texture over the static:

This humanizes the machine. It separates us from the utopian future the 80s musicians were simultaneously lampooning and heralding (yes, there were harmonies in shoegazery’s past, but the songs were never propelled by the harmonies).  It reminds us that any future will be built by man.  That even as we build these technological tools around us to organize and enrich and confound our lives and collective knowledge, it will all be meaningless without recognizing the reasons why we’re rushing down the field.   Plus, it gives them a chance to throw in the hooks to make their buzz that much louder.

My formative musical years took shape in the shadow of that era, when musicians looked back to the 70s for inspiration.  Young music fans like me had time to hold on to each band for a while, savoring the music the way we enjoyed the scents of production that burst forth in full bloom whenever we opened that new disc. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are good enough to deserve that lasting attention.

Besides, as my friend Televisionarie said, you have to “support any group ballsy enough to write a song called ‘This love is fucking right!’”

John Davis, previously of Q and Not U and Georgie James, has released the first single from his new band, Title Tracks.  Two songs on the single, and both are great, fast, hook-chorused rock.  The record release party was last night, but I was working.

Lala.com isn’t cooperating tonight, so head over to the band’s myspace to check out some samples.

*****

Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, wants to expand his musical horizons.  Maybe he heard that the kids were listening to good music again, or maybe he picked up a staffer’s iPod by accident and wanted to know what the dreck was.  So he’s soliciting requests from constituents (with constituents defined broadly enough to include the entire internet).  Each month, he’ll share an artist he really likes.  The first one?  Wisconsin’s very own Bon Iver.

*****

Variable mp3 pricing hit iTunes and Amazon MP3 this week.  That means that oldies will be 69 cents, while new and popular tracks will be $1.29, with the majority remaining at the 99 cent price point.  Thank God the music I like isn’t all that popular.