Interpol - “PDA”
Now that the decade is closing out in just months and Best Music of the Decade is getting talked up everywhere, I look to Interpol’s love letter to New York, Turn on the Bright Lights (2002). It’s a viable contender for the top 50, if not top 25.
This Public Display of Affection, austere and cold, is as affectionate as these New Yorkers get. Paul Bank’s deadpan voice icily maintains a distance, as if he has accidentally run into an old lover on the subway. As he coaxes her over to sleep tight on any of his (presumably empty and meticulously detailed) 200 couches, his voice intensifies while retaining the seriousness, begging for a mutual connection. Everything but a solitary guitar freezes at 3:09, as does time itself. They lean in. They kiss once. The final couple minutes is a brief nod and her head laid on his broad right shoulder as therhythm section clangs and shifts and pulses around them both.
P.O.X. - “Antichrist & Devil Kicks”
If I were hosting a Halloween radio show, I’d dedicate my entire time slot to “Monster Mash,” “Thriller,” The Blood Brothers, and psychobilly.
As spacious and menacing as a thunderstorm, this sounds like the devil peering down on Sodom and Gomorrah from the horizon, laughing as the fire falls out of heaven and burns them to the ground.
Broken Social Scene - “Passport Radio”
Foggy horns are blown in by the wind wisps of high, praying strings. A train pulls into the brick and cement station in slow motion. Slow-eyed travelers follow its wheels with the tame head-tosses of tambourine until they stop, their heavy hearts the bass drum palpitations. A radio behind the ticket counter plays unintelligible AM crooners. Warm washes of static let the sun through the fog as folks exit their train. Beach waves bring a skin-pricking chill to the scarf-wearers awaiting their boarding outside and remove the exclamation points.
Parts & Labor - “Fractured Skies”
Usually when I review a song, I’ll put it on repeat or play a certain part a few times to really get a hold of what I want to say, really grasp the moment. Not possible with this song.
I’m intimidated by it. It’s scary in the way staring down a 15-shot espresso is, or a live power line. It’s a life-or-death dare. If you don’t die, you might wish you did, or think you had. The excitement of the stakes takes hold of something deep inside the red muscles of your heart and squeezes, quickening your breath, amping anticipation.
The drums don’t hesitate. They roll in, unrelenting and boulder-massive, knocking everything out of the way except small, discreet buzzsaw electronic blips and screeches. You don’t have the time to react. You dive out of the way of the first as it flies by. The vocals start low and echoed—from the mountain up ahead, another barreling at you!—and crescendo up tall, tall, taller, colliding with the drums at the same time the boulder hits the wall next to you, exploding in a hail of cymbal-shatters. The stun is blinding. You recover briefly.
The next explode just left, just right, each barely missing and always closer. Exhausted, spotting something up ahead, you let your guard down. There he is. It’s Goliath hollering from a mountain, throwing the final tom-tom boulder at your face, the screeches and squiggles pushing it faster, like cartoon speed lines, and you can’t get out of the way in time. It’s then you notice the clouds of static. From overhead, a bolt of fat lightening cracks from the sky and into the massive rock, sending pebbles and confetti into the air. Rain and trumpets come out of the sky. You dance in the downpour. Goliath gives you a high five.
DISCLAIMER
Side effects may include any or all of the following: escalated pulse, unintentional spastic movements, violent nodding, bloody nose, bloody ears, hours of sleeplessness, the urge to break things (esp. if shatterable), heart attack, stroke, brain hemorrhage, death.
Keep away from glass, small animals, little children, the pregnant and nursing, the elderly, the faint of heart, and anyone who has ever been nauseated by anything ever.
Skeletons - “This Building’s on Fire”
It is a crime that this band is not well-known. Somehow, against all that is good and right with the world, Matt Mehlan’s Skeletons avoided nearly any attention upon the release of this album, receiving just one traceable review by Pitchfork. In truth, this album should’ve had the blogosphere buzzing prior to its release with positive commentary, bloggers anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. I’m bitter, yes, especially in spite of the surge of new electronica and the development of the “glow-fi” genre (and others implying woozy, foggy electronics). This, however, would be that genre’s paranoid, claustrophobic, death-obsessed twin.
Life and the Afterbirth (2004) is a risk. In no way is Mehlan trying to play it safe by sticking to a formula, or by emulating any one influence. He compresses his expansive list of interests into just nine tracks, just over 50 minutes, and does it all with the confidence and coherency of an experienced musician. That is to say, it doesn’t come across like he’s throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. So it comes as a surprise, then, that this is only the second album he’s released.
Most of the tracks are washed in dense, shoegaze-y electronica and controlled by sometimes live, sometimes digital drums. Layered on top of this is any number of the following: bells, ponderous sax, meandering bass, mournful strings, ghostly multi-tracked vocals, amassed guitar fuzz, and blue, blue keys. The jazz of the live drums, sax, and keys lends the closeted, pre-programmed electronica some explorative nature, as well as melody, and keeps the music from being stiff and unapproachable.
The song starts off with a canned, faceless 80s beat before blooming suddenly with serene pond-ripple keys and high-low falsetto “Oooh-oooh“‘s. Most of the lyrics are muddled into the mix and some overlap each other. Some discernable bits: “When I woke up you pushed me out the window,” “It might be easier to jump,” “Either way,” and so on. Through this uneven delivery, there’s a sense of panic, confusion, and uncertainty, but one wonders why waste a verse being unintelligible? Of course, highly specific non-sequiturs, personal asides, and notes to self are about as musical as a children’s diary or a grocery list, but it turns out they work beautiful to preface a chorus if the chorus is then pushed to the direct front in brilliant clarity. Thankfully that was exactly Mehlan’s intention, and it clarifies some of what seemed so unintelligible about his lyrics at first. Submission, doubt.
And what’s a thousand times more, he is able to harmonize vocal delivery and lyric together to wring one of the most graceful and hummable hooks out of one of the worst pick-up lines I’ve ever heard: “If you give me the chance I’d like to / Fuck away your memory and / Fuck away mistakes I’ve made.” The equal parts sincerity and flippancy he delivers these with, paired with his flawless ear for melody, sells the lines completely as shimmers of bells and electronics, snare taps, and even muted hand claps (!) rejoice in his shrugged off come on. It’s an awkwardly beautiful and heartbreaking moment, and one that invites countless listens.
As the album is relatively difficult to find, I’m available for sharing if anyone is interested.
Delorean - “Seasun”
One last glint of sunshine before succumbing to another nine months of rain. Posts from here on out will likely mirror the weather. That’s not to say that they’ll be the same thing over and over again, but you might notice some similar tones. Mostly, it’s that nothing this flying-through-blue-sky-on-white-wings will show up until the sun produces heat that reaches me and doesn’t get swept away by wind or drenched in rain.
This song almost makes me miss summer, and is bound to make a few miss it terribly. All of the bright, smooth, and clear tones beg for a minute or two of reminiscing on the past summer’s memories.
The Antlers - “Bear”
There’s been a host of vivid, mesmerizing, and heartbreaking albums released in just the past few years focusing their entire track list and story arc on the ending and/or the aftermath of a relationship, and perhaps the best thing about these releases is how fresh they seem, regardless of their dependence on such a rote musical (or otherwise) subject. Two immediately come to mind. There is Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle (2009), which uses naturalistic metaphor to distance the narrator from his painful experience and maybe to avoid looking at things straight on. After all his mental wanderings reach a dead end, he arrives at closer “Faith/Void,” a bright folk-song trot focused on the stoic chant, “It’s time to put God away.” The other that comes to mind is the physiologically-detailed and bitingly direct narrative Get Lonely (2006) by The Mountain Goats. After John Darnielle details the narrator (unquestionably himself) wandering around the city and his house “like a little boy lost at the mall,” he concludes with “In Carolla” where he dispassionately drowns himself isolated in a marsh.
That leads us to The Antlers, whose album has just recently wormed itself into my consciousness after a good few weeks on my computer in occasional rotation. This was mostly because 1) Girl’s Album is an attention-hog, and 2) Hospice is entirely unassuming. This is thanks in part to the wine-glass-thin vocals of lead singer/songwriter Peter Silberman, thanks also in part to the empty space and sparseness of the arrangements, but mostly it is because of the atmosphere that envelops his voice and those arrangements.
Even with the moments like “Bear” that make enough noise to grab attention, the album’s unmistakable, frigid atmosphere almost eclipses its parts: the graceful vocal melodies, the breath-stealing drop offs, and the buzzing, soaring guitar bombast that’s joined later by the solemn hum of horns mourning the demise(s) to come. But it doesn’t entirely, thank God. That something so loud and gripping could come from such a hollow, Antarctic permafrost is akin to feeling the light touch of the sun after emerging from a frozen underground cave. That is until you realize the words you’re undoubtedly singing and that the sun is setting, and the snow will soon be ice, and you’ll be forced back once more into your cave.
Without spoiling the story arc with too many details (the first two albums I’ve described have plenty more to them than their endings, as does this one), it involves a hospital worker (the narrator) who meets and begins a relationship with a patient in the Kettering Cancer Ward with significant emotional scars (his allusion to her as Sylvia Plath in the bombastic, rafter-reaching “Sylvia” gives the audience a good idea of her mental state). It’s an album best experienced in full and close listening is rewarded tenfold as the character’s push and pull at each other, at a loss for what to do or where to go.
What sounds like something that could easily fall into self-pity and/or histrionic over-indulgence carefully tiptoes around these pitfalls by the stripping of pretension so that it becomes only a story related through a genuinely invested story-teller and supported by a successful portraiture of instrumentation like the two albums I mentioned previously. And while the first deals with the death of faith in anything, and the next deals with the narrator’s suicide, Hospice’s story of the death of a living-dead loved one might prove the hardest to get through without choking back some emotion of your own.
Xiu Xiu - “Fast Car” [Tracy Chapman Cover]
I imagine this cover - Jamie Stewart’s quavery, whispered words and the petted guitar strings - being the inner voice of Tracy Chapman. Rawer, unadorned, desperate. This sounds like the version that first presented itself to her before she took it and interpreted it into the radio-friendly 90s hit it was.
Girls - “Hellhole Ratrace”
By now, hopefully, you’ve already heard Girls’ song “Lust For Life,” which introduces their first album of warble-y sunshine pop. The track is, thankfully, not very far off from its Iggy Pop namesake as far as infectious guitar rhythms goes, although it’s far more sugar than stomp.
This track is the pace of heat waves rising off the Californian pavement at dusk. Christopher Owens’ voice ranges from helium high to just-woke-up low, like a sped up or slowed down version of Adam Cox (of The Exploding Hearts) with lots more drama. At the beginning, he’s singing alone on an empty stage in a lonesome spotlight. But when it gets to the 3:45 mark, the curtains pull back, the song explodes, fireworks go off, oohs and ahhs fan the fire, and the remaining three minutes sees the whole thing slow burn into nothing.
Pavement - “Major Leagues”
In light of the newly confirmed Pavement reunion and world tour, I thought I’d celebrate with the song that originally convinced me to hear this band out, that there was more to their less-accessible songs that I couldn’t quite pick up on the first time through. It contains one of the smoothest (on the ears) & stickiest (on the mind) melodies ever, and within the chorus is the aural actualization for the definition of “guitar hook.”
