The Final Recovery SXSW Post
So in some other reality, some time-shifted universe that’s a couple weeks behind us, my doppelganger is just recovering from a week of Lone Star beer and gallon hats. He’s got a bunch of new music options, and he sent me these missives through a wormhole that was only open during the brief window of our NCAA championship game (I made sure to not tell him the results lest I cause a Back to the Future style paradox):
I could do without this guy’s voice, but luckily the Nintendo music melody is featured way more prominently than anything coming out of his throat. Was that a little harsh? Perhaps. His voice isn’t that bad. Just a little whiny.
Les Handclaps – Cacti Are Delicious Fruit
Growing up int he desert, I sometimes had to eat cactus apples, a really sweet and spiny fruit that grows in clumps off the blades of Californian cacti. I should note that the emphasis is on the spiny, not the sweet: by the end, your mouth is so covered in needles that any taste buds have been destroyed. This song, on the other hand, leads toward the sweet: sugary indie dance pop. I’ll take that, at least in brief amounts, over the needly fruit any day.
Loxsly – As the Constellation’s Arms Uncurled
I think the key thing to note about this song is the tonal changes. At one moment, it’s a ghost rustling across a desert plain; the next, it shifts into a zealous rock song for the chorus.
Buddy – Is It Cold in Silverlake?
Nic Harcourt likes these 2000′s version of James (without the Englishness) so why shouldn’t I? The website says these guys have been featured on a bunch of sappy TV shows, and that makes sense – there’s a feeling of missed connections riding along the slowly unfolding melody. And I’m pretty sure it’s never cold in Silverlake.
The Urges – You Don’t Look So Good
Finally a kick-ass rock band. These guys are the hangover after a night of partying, but a little bit kinder to your sensibilities. Less of a headache, still kind of a mess, a lot more fun.
*****
That’s it for now. Some more of the bands from the festival might show up on here as time passes, but I’ll pretend that I found them on my own just like all the other music bloggers out there. Regular posts should commence soon.
Fake SxSW Summary Day 3: So many cowboy hats on my computer screen
So, day 3. I imagine the people who went to the big festival would have, by Day 3, either taken to the culture and integrated or found themselves in a permanent drunken stupor. Also, the tinnitus makes everything sound good.
Elliott Brood – Write it All Down for You
I’m sure I can’t be the first to notice it, but there’s been an interesting trend of bands that blend rock and folk in the badass sort of way (as opposed to the lame country pop sort of way). See Gentle Guest, Gentleman Auction House, Jared Mees and the Grown Children, and Noah and the Whale. Usually they have a banjo or a fiddle or six, and they generally know how to rock out. They’re slightly reminiscent of a hoedown, but with yuppy straw sticking out of their mouths. Man, my 15-year old Cure listening self would kick my ass for going this far to the country dark side. I promise younger self: this far and no further. Now go back to being depressed.
There’s a vague hint of David Byrne in the lead singer note slides, which is enough to make me fall for them. And it has enough of a driving rhythm in the chorus that you can close your eyes and pretend, if just for a few minutes, that it’s some Talking Heads song you never heard before, and that they didn’t release because it was a little too mainstream sounding.
Fight Like Apes – Lend Me Your Face
Little known fact: the 2nd track on the EP on which this song appears is titled Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues. How can you go wrong with that? This is just fun, outrageous, fuzzed out tweaker electro girl-pop.
Belated Obligatory SXSW Post for those who had to stay home and work
AKA as whine whine whine.
Anyway, as many know, during the SXSW Austin is filled with hippies and musicians (more so than usual). A thousand or so bands play shows throughout the city, from what I understand. Because mapping out your way amongst the shows is probably impossible if you’ve never heard of any of the musicians, the sxsw website has posted an mp3 of every band. I did the hard part of listening to all of them (and there was some dreck in there) and rating every band I didn’t know or hadn’t heard anything from in a while.
At the same time, Paul Ford from The Morning News posted a 6 word review of each song. Bastard. Makes my meager output 2 weeks later look, well, pretty meager and lazy.
Nonetheless, I did listen to 1302 songs, and I’m not going to let that, ahem, experience go to waste. So I’ve taken the top rated tracks (there were 18 tracks rated a 4 or higher, or a good 1.4% of the total) and I’m going to post a review of each over the next few days.
****
High Dials – Killer of Dragons
I’ve been meaning to track these guys down for ages. They’ve been hanging out at the top of my “To Buy/Explore” list since its most recent inception last summer. But their newest album, High Dials, from which this track was taken, isn’t for sale on any of the American digital music stores. Hearing this song again, though, made me take the plunge and pick it up from the Canadian store that kept it locked up. And with good cause – the song has a reverberating beat, like thunderclaps across a canyon. Coupled with a meandering melody, the song is laid back with a touch of excitement to propel it forward.
I’m glad synths are respectable again. I know that trend’s picked up a lot of steam in the past few years, but it’s uncanny how much a well-placed, subtle synth can enrich an otherwise ordinary rock song. In this case, it adds a touch of fantasy and mystery to what probably would have otherwise been a simple shoegazer song.
I have a soft spot for female singers, especially if they’re kind of quirky and their songs are a little sweet. Here, Terra Naomi, whose name I can’t type for some reason, throws together a quick ditty centered around a fun little casio melody. It’s a sweet song, and her bio is obviously creative and quirky. Nothing wrong here!
Pull the thread, a history unravels – The Midwest Dilemma’s Timelines and Tragedies
I think this album hit me somewhere around the second song, Francoise. In an eerie canvas, colored only by the scraping bow of a violin and some soft accordion, the album blossomed in my mind fully formed, a picture already painted. It’s a tundra tale of a lonely, desperate man trying to scratch out a living for his family in the frozen wasteland of an early Quebec. The plains of Eastern Canada carried few opportunities; it’s easy for any man to succumb to the destitution, falling victim to the cold wind of frontier life.
And so it goes in Midwest Dilemma’s Timelines and Tragedies. The album tells singer-songwriter Justin Lamoureux’s family history, starting with their initial journey from France to Montreal, the ship’s discomforting creaking lacing the song, fur trading their way into the U.S., down through the Midwest, where they’ve shared in the American story. In The Great Depression, the driving anxiety of the time motivates the song; pushes the character, Victoria, into leaving for greener pastures, even as the expected disastrous crescendo falls around her ears. But then the family sends its sons into war, where they march to a victory anthem.
And on through the Industrial Age the family wound its path around America’s, working on the railroad, finding love and losing it. Family members succumb to illness, but family is what keeps you going, and, like Faulkner’s Emily, their memory remains, lingering like the sound of angels. Even so, just a few generations later, a main character loses himself to alcohol, and another goes off to Viet Nam with fingers crossed.
The music reflects such tumult. “Good Samaritan,” the song about Viet Nam, is really three songs in one – a moody description of a broken man, decades after the war; a march through the jungle; and the wild behavior of the recently returned vet losing control. Sioux City is about giving up to alcohol; slide guitar and clarinet whistling through the vast open skies – nothing above, nothing ahead, until the bottle is as empty as the future.
This is an album for our times. Borne of despair, there are few lucky breaks, just the desire to push ahead, through economic woe, family tragedy, and hopelessness. But even when Lamoureux claims that the “damage is done” on the album’s closer, it’s obvious he hasn’t given up – how can one give up when there’s nowhere lower to go? It’s an insight only offered through historical analysis, through learning from the lessons of our predecessors, and carrying that knowledge into the future.
Bow to the Middle
I figure tonight, of all nights, as the Presidential candidates conclude their 3rd snoozeslugfest, is the best time to introduce this catchy little song from The Rosebuds:
The Rosebuds – Bow to the Middle: The Religion of Politics
This is a dance song, but not in the traditional sense: it’s not meant to get the listener on their feet (though it’s certainly catchy) but to describe the Chaplin shuffle politicians perform every couple years – the one the candidates are both dancing right now. I’m not going to get too far into the actual politics of our two candidates, or the substance of their arguments (though my roommate has a great dissection of one question in the last debate that I’ve been meaning to commend him for), but rather in the meta-aspect of it. The point is summed in the chorus:
Hey yeah, walk to the middle and bow to the middle
Hey yeah, walk to the left and bow to the middle
Hey yeah, walk to the right and bow to the middle
Hey yeah, walk all around and bow to the middle
It’s what candidates in our system are required to do:bow to the incessant demands of the inattentive swing voter, the person who still thinks Obama doesn’t give any policy details and McCain just wants to be like any other Republican, but doesn’t really get why. It’s the continual groveling before the altar of the low information constituency that really undermines everyone interested in furthering the country’s policies – including that very same swing voter. See, when you spend all your time tempering your statements with an eye toward the middle, with covering your beliefs up just enough that those in the middle will miss your appeals to your base, they end up seeing you as insincere – and that’s when they start doubting. You, as a politician, carry on your shoulders the mantle of the inadequacies of the system and all the old politicans you evoke in people, and it’s your job to move the discussion past it to the issues you want to discuss.
Incidentally, it’s the Democrats who have traditionally had the biggest problem with this. Even Bill Clinton, the master of connecting to the white working class, suffered from this. Republicans, like Bush, were able to wink in both directions by using coded language (see: the Dred Scott decision as a dog whistle to pro-lifers or Reagan, Philadelphia, MS and race). In this race, it seems that this dynamic has shifted a bit, with McCain being seen more and more as the insincere one, particularly in regards to the economy.
I spend a lot of my off time thinking about political movements – how they are formed, grow, communicate, and, eventually stagnate. Bowing to the middle on the election trail has been the premier requirement in American politics for at least a generation (right up there with kissing babies), and in that generation, one party has shown itself better practiced at this performance. I’m curious how much longer this will last, and the form this dance will take in years to come.
***
I haven’t written much lately; in part, my free time has been focused on the election and less on music (though I have picked up a lot of great stuff lately), but also because of the demands of end of the year performance metrics coupled with my knack for finding more side projects for myself. No clue when this will end, but the end of the year looks like a nice cutoff point.
Oh, and the Rosebuds are really great. Everyone should check them out.
Tilting at Windmills
Windmill, the nom de guerre of Matthew Thomas Dillon, is a rhythmic journey into the coldness of modernity. It’s cold marble and plastic; a life lived divorced from emotion. Events of the world, affecting millions, are just pictures on a tv screen, tinted unrecognizable with the glare of a morning winter sun.
One of the big name automakers recently released a commercial featuring a woman staring transfixed through a moonroof as her friends, party bound on a Saturday night, drove through an unnamed city. So mesmerized by the constellations of lights in the office buildings above, she completely missed the fact that her friends had all disembarked. This is what this song conveys: the calmness of drifting through a crowd, detached and aloof, yet in touch with the atoms colliding around you, people, sounds, lights, steel and plastic.
In my ever-increasing search to ensure that I’m doing this legally, I’m trying out Seeqpod. I’m not sure I like how it displays (which is what has kept me from using it before), so anyone reading, let me know what you think.
In Cadeo – Vultures
(Image from Flickr user thismeik)
It’s a rollicking game of poker, here in the Old West. None of us really trust each other, but we’re here for the money, the thrill, the rush of red splayed across our hands when we get the flush. Time isn’t linear here. It strolls by at low tide and then comes crushing back in hours later, making you realize just how devastated you and your wallet have become. And that’s when things get a bit hazy, as, your head spinning, you pull your gun, screaming about dirty cheats. You’re floating above watching the mess unfold, intent on where those bullets are going to go, screaming red balls of steel sinking into flesh, splaying crimson over the cards, until your inner addict, parasite as it may be, looks out for its survival and talks you back down.
***
In Cadeo’s website is sparse, but it does offer a free EP (from which this song came) and some hints at November’s full-length. Check it out and enjoy.
A Busy Week, or It’s Overflowing
Picture taken at Great Falls, VA
Whew, so 2 weeks ago, I said to myself, “dammit, must update blog!” and Self snickered but said sure. Who knew Self was going to rely on external exigencies to get its nefarious non-updating way?
Yes, the past week has been too busy for me to do any writing, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been listening.
There are some weeks where 1 or 2 interesting albums drop, and I pick up an album or two from a year ago from some band I’ve just stumbled across. But not last week! Last week alone the following great albums came out:
- Bound Stems – The Family Afloat
- The Broken West – Now Or Heaven
- Damien Jurado – Caught in the Trees
- Fujiya and Miyagi – Lightbulbs
- The Lovely Sparrows – Bury the Cynics
- Marching Band – Spark Large
- The New Year – s/t
- Okkervil River – the Stand-Ins
- Parenthetical Girls – Entanglements
- Tricky – Knowle West Boy
I also picked up:
- Birdmonster – From the Mountain to the Sea
- The Clientele – That Night, a Forest Grew
- Jessica Fletchers – Less Sophistication (yay!)
- The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age of the Understatement (finally on eMusic – glad I waited)
- Marissa Nadler – The Saga of Mayflower
- The Uglysuit – s/t
- Viva Voice – Get Yr Blood Sucked Out
- The Silents – Sleepwalker
I’m weary just from typing all of them up. So far, all of the new albums are standouts; not a bad album in there. I’ve never encountered Damien Jurado before, but I find his Elliott Smith suddenly got happy approach to music relaxing. The new Tricky, though at times a bit too reggae for me, reminds me how much I’ve always liked his work – and resurrects the giddy laughter that always bubbles up whenever I hear his music thanks to his minor role in Fifth Element. Some of the new stuff, like Marching Band or The Lovely Sparrows, is just beautiful orchestral indie pop. How can you go wrong with that? Finally, the new Okkervil River and the new Broken West kick ass. Haven’t gotten to The New Year’s latest yet.
So I threw together a quick mix; Part 2 will be up (probably) tomorrow and then it’s off to the races for another week’s new releases!
- The Lovely Sparrows – Year of the Dog
- Parenthetical Girls – Young Eucharists
- Damien Jurado – Coats of Ice
- Bound Stems – Happens to Us All Otherwise
- Fujiya and Miyagi – Knickerbocker
- The Broken West – Auctioneer
- Okkervil River – Lost Coastlines
- The Uglysuit – Chicago
Spinning Deastro
Today I’ve been stuck listening to Deastro for some reason. Ages ago, I had an extra download on eMusic – one of those perilous situations where I didn’t want to waste the 25 cents, or whatever it’s actually worth, soI spent an hour looking for that one perfect track that will complement the 99 others I just spent half a day downloading (of course, I almost always blow through my allowable downloads the first week I realize they’ve reset) – and ended up randomly grabbing Deastro’s The Goodman of the House. Goodman is a sprawling track that starts off brooding before exploding into a fantasy synth and guitar driven rock anthem.
Like M83 before them, Deastro sounds like a throwback to the best parts of late 80s synth-pop, but this nostalgia is edgier; informed by the layered simple melody approach to music indie rock was championing a few years ago (see: Bright Eyes’ Lover I don’t Have to Love). It’s fun and invigorating, especially for an office dweller.
Some Deastro samples can be found at My Old Kentucky Blog. Keeper’s, the newest album, is available only through eMusic.
On Holidays
High school Honors English often seemed at times like an endless stream of pointless, difficult, and hated books (ugh, Wuthering Heights) interspersed with a few that glowed with genius, originality and talent. Those are the ones that stick with you: Gatsby’s empty opulence informs your perception of the rich you encounter everyday; the swinging lightbulb in Wright’s Native Son reminds you of the beacon of hope you have to find in the darkest moments.
But no text stimulated me quite as much as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair’s description of the everyday horrors of the meat processing plant, and the efforts to unionize them, sparked the first inklings of political awareness – the first concrete idea that people can be exploited and abused. I can’t even recall much of the second half of the book except that the main character was adrift, trying to deal with the station of his life.
I bring this up because today is Labor Day, and like Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, we as a society have forgotten the reason we celebrate it. Instead of merely a day of barbeques, beaches, and baseball, and lamentations about the crisis of having to return to work the following day, those are supposed to be a means of actively celebrating the value of the American workforce, and the sacrifices that generations before us made in order to protect an honest day’s work. It’s a time to recognize the power of people-powered movements – to exploit an already overused phrase – to solicit change.
The strikes and beatings of the late 19th and early 20th century taught people that they didn’t have to be exploited; that, working together they could change the system. This, of course, culminated in events like the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where protestors and police went to war with each other. Now, though, mass grassroots political events seem to barely elicit notice; only in something like a speech given to 75,000 people can we see glimmers of something similar – though of course it’s directed from the top-down. And just a week later, as police raid the homes of protesters and arrest journalists on the streets of St. Paul surrounding the Republican convention, scant attention is paid in the media as a whole – just as their counterparts were ignored last week in Denver (note: I’m not endorsing any of them or their actions, just noting the lack of oxygen in stories about them).
So protests do almost nothing anymore, but they once did; and people bled and died to force better working conditions, shorter work weeks, and health and safety protections. That we live in a country where that could ever happen is reason enough to celebrate.
The Jungle opens with a traditional wedding – a night of dancing, of a community celebrating. The air carries hope and optimism, the sound of chattering fiddles and the warm aroma of ovens of food. It’s a truly ordinary event, replicated countless times any given weekend, but for the people involved, it’s momentous, connecting their future with the storied past of their families.
DeVotchKa evokes much of this spirit, bridging the past and the future with the exuberance of a classic wedding band. Their live shows, according to their bio, can feature sousaphone, accordion, piano, violin, bouzouki, trumpets, and theremin in addition to the standard rock instruments. The drummer was raised by Lithuanian polka musicians; the violinist is classically trained. Their most recent album, A Mad and Faithful Telling, which was released earlier this year, dips its toe into several classical styles.
The song below, Transliterator, is available for free on rcrdlbl.com.