Menomena - “Queen Black Acid”
While the coquettish bass keeps this from being an outright dirge, the slowcore pacing and overall mournful tone of the song certainly keep things less than cheerful. It’s soothing and sad, something to bring in the dry winter chill that has me holed up like a rabbit.
Low - When I Go Deaf
“Glacial pace” has been and probably always will be the descriptor leveled at Sigur Ros. Whenever I hear the band’s name, the first thing I picture is a gargantuan white and blue glacier, by all accounts motionless, surrounded by a jagged ring of arctic water. What that description fails to address is that the slow pacing of their songs is not at all the point. It does not survive on the tension of the slow pace, it survives on the heights and the depths of the terrain. Sometimes the glacier inches toward and falls off a waterfall, sometimes a camera pans from the base of the monstrous chunk of ice up to the cloud-surrounded top, sometimes you dive from those heights straight into the water below in blissful, graceful resignation. It is not idle music, it is immersion music.
Songs For a Dead Pilot EP (1997) is Low’s first transitional record. All of their recorded material prior was glacial pace in every sense of the phrase. It’s something you watch at a distance, curious, breathless, waiting for something and feeling the tension within the imperceptible movement. It’s like the beginning scene of a movie that has no motion and sits too long; your eyes are attracted immediately to the slightest movement. A shifting cloud, a wandering insect. Here, jagged guitar pieces shift, icy vocals whisper around the song structures, drums echo in an expansive atmosphere, but the scene largely remains unchanged. After that EP, global warming shifted their sound. Their gift of vocal harmony brought some life, albeit troubled, to their sparse and desolate glacier of sound. Animals began to populate the scene, if only briefly, in a migration to somewhere else. A polar bear bobs past slowly, some penguins edge in and then out. This is especially seen in Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) on songs like “Sunflower” and “In Metal” where they retained their steadiness while reaching for new and more pronounced melodies. They were a little louder, a little more active, a little more flexible. Warmer.
This song appears on The Great Destroyer (2005), Low’s second transitional record, and my first exposure to the band. While the album is largely an uncomfortable growth spurt (the feeling after An Inconvenient Truth?), it is also where they first take an outright attempt at Sigur Ros’ level of epiphany. On this song, the camera is zoomed in on singer Alan Sparhawk’s face. It’s only his croon, foreseeing the demise of his hearing, and some steely guitar strums raising goosebumps. Mimi Parker joins him after a verse, standing next to him. The lyrics begin sung as “I,” but when the third verse begins “And we will make love,” Mimi shifts from Alan’s supporting vocalist and band mate to his partner, the two of them standing on a glacier, holding hands, eyes now fixed on each other.
“When I go deaf” they chant, locked in their fate, camera slowly pulling out and out, revealing the glacier they stand on. It teeters on the edge of a waterfall. There’s a brief pause. The background goes black. Rocky drums and roaring, distorted guitars explode the stars in spangles of reds and blues and purples as the glacier tips sideways off the cliff into the endless white, their gray apparitions in flight.
Sun Kil Moon - “Carry Me, Ohio”
Mark Kozelek uses the fatherly hands of his voice to tuck his motherless-child loneliness in blankets of sympathetic strummed chords, humming bedtime bass, and glockenspiel twinkles. Its melodies are so harmless at a distance that it’d be easy to toss off as innocuous coffee shop music, but that’s the danger. The warmth is fireplace-inviting, but the inconsolable waver in his voice is a wind from the poles that chills to, and builds igloos inside of the marrow.
The Strokes - “Hard To Explain”
So I’ve been on a straight-forward indie rock kick lately, it seems, but I’ve recently re-fallen in love with the Strokes. This is about the fourth time around. I know my response in an off-season could be any of these if I saw someone had posted this.
Oh, that song, yeah. I remember it. It was pretty good.
I’ll listen to that later, [insert modern folk/psych/glow-fi artist] is currently on my iTunes.
I overplayed them, I can’t enjoy it as much as I once did.
Wrong. This is what happens when a band does everything right. You need to hear it again.
Built To Spill - “Hindsight”
This is the stuff that helped jumpstart the indie rock scene. Modest Mouse? They wouldn’t sound how they did or do without the influence of this band.
New Built To Spill sounds more like old Built To Spill, except it’s sliver-shinier production does just the right amount of good to underscore the technical exactness of the band. They’re mature musicians, but that doesn’t mean they add maracas or saxophone or quirky electronics into their already solidified sound, it just means they explore the tiny details to come out with something new. They’ve perfected their cruise-control distortion, their seasick slides, their zippery hiccup chord bounces.
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.
