Day 44: Clues – Clues

In the early 2000s the word ‘Montreal’ had a certain ring to it. It was a predictable response to the question of where the current trendiest band was from. Off the top of my head, I can recall that (obvious one) The Arcade Fire, Sunset Rubdown (substitute whichever Spencer Krug project you like best here), The Unicorns, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor were all born there, and all made their own significant splash in that part of the decade, granting more and more mystique to the word… Montréal.

“There was a lot of instrumental, shoegazer kind of music happening in Montreal. Every single show I went to was someone playing a cymbal with a bow, and it felt like the punkest thing we could possibly do in Montreal was play pop music at that time.” – Win Butler, to Rolling Stone

A quote illustrative of the music that came out of Montreal in that part of the decade, it suggests a maximalism born of frustration and boredom. From the Arcade Fire’s immediate insistence that they belonged in arenas, to Wolf Parade’s hard-driving, almost-wincingly-bright pop, to Sunset Rubdown’s primal, hallucinatory soliloquies, the common thread running through every Montreal band I can remember hearing is a willful rebellion against tedium and normalcy.

Clues carries on this tradition, and with good reason: They were the new project of The Unicorns’ Alden Penner and a member of the pre-Funeral Arcade Fire, and brought armfuls of both of those influences to the recording sessions for Clues. The album combines a broad range of styles from mid-00s indie, and it is apparent they are trying to use those things to build something huge, but it never really seems to take shape.

The album is unfocused in a way that is not so good. An album can be unfocused in at least two ways: One is that every track goes off in a new direction, and the narrative of the album coalseces. The other is in effect here, where each track seems to have some conceit that doesn’t have a lot invested in it. “You Have My Eyes Now” takes quiet shoegaze to a rolling boil, urged on by hollering backing vocals, but the music doesn’t get any bigger as it gets louder. It fails to claim the emotional climax that it spent a few minutes pawing at. The rest of the album goes similarly. Ideas are dropped casually next to each other with no compelling connective tissue, and the problem is that by themselves none of what they have to say or play is all that remarkable. The lovely “Elope” is given no context within which to be as interesting as it should be. For instance, it’s followed by “Cave Mouth”, a wholly uninteresting rock tune that exemplifies how difficult it is to use dynamics well. Like the rest of the album, it is all over the place — up, down, engaging for a moment only to sit down tiredly. The album never shakes this feeling of retreading well-worn musical traditions, and it ends up dragging the whole thing down.

Which is not to say the album is terrible or unredeemable somehow. It is entertaining in a lot of ways, and is certainly never offensive, but it seems like a curiosity.  The best albums are houses. They have an entryway, and then you walk into the foyer, and see the living room peeking through a doorway; the rug needs to be vacuumed and it smells faintly of Glade Plug-Ins. There are faint wine stains on the carpet on the stairs, and the floors are settling and creak and none of the pictures hang level. You can walk up the stairs and lay in the album’s bed. There is inhabitable depth. Clues is like a painting: though its brushstrokes often portray prettiness, it is simply a 2-dimensional representation. David Markson said in one of his books, “If I was the last person alive, and had to burn a Rembrandt for warmth, would that be so terrible?” An album, too, can take you in from the cold, or it can be kindling. Clues is in many ways a lovely painting, but it’ll be the first to go when a cold snap hits.

Day 43: Paul McCartney – Ram

After yesterday, just about anything would have been a treat. Living in Lou Reed’s aural hell for a day made me crave something less epileptic-seizure-y. This was good enough.

I’ve never listened to any of The Beatles’ solo work, mostly because I wore out enough Beatles tapes during my childhood that the songs are codified in my brain, and besides that I’ve almost gotten sick of them. I still love The Beatles and enjoy listening to them, but the solo stuff is in some separate category in my mind, and doesn’t feel necessary.

Plus, over the years I have associated the worst song of all time with McCartney/Lennon’s solo work, and have thus assumed that, subtracted from the beautiful equation of The Beatles, the members individually were some sort of perverse music rapists who delighted in ruining every happy memory their voices had ever forged.

So this morning, I started this up — noticing the album was credited to Paul & Linda McCartney, which for some reason made my knee jerk even harder — with serious apprehension, expecting something worse than yesterday. After two tracks I was relieved, to say the least. And then track three came on.

“Ram On” is one of the nicest goddamn songs I have ever heard. I feel like I am making this statement regardless of the context of my recent listening. It is wonderful. Almost every second of it is magical. From the studio chatter at the beginning, to the do-over Paul pulls on the ukelele part, the song seems to happen spontaneously. At the same time, it is lavishly decorated — McCartney paints the back of the soundspace with rich ribbons of voice, and the percussion in the song is all handclaps and whisper-quiet drums that quake with bass. It’s a truly fantastic song, and to be honest it’s almost kept me from even hearing the rest of the album. With each listen I just find myself getting impatient, waiting for it to come back around. And that’s after earlier today when I just repeated “Ram On” for about an hour.

What’s most striking to me is that it sets a number of precedents for most of the indie music I’ve loved in the last year. That’s probably a big part of why I like it so much. The backing vocals, with their unmiked-in-the-back-of-the-room sound and their ethereal tremulousness, are a precursor to the vocal arrangements of Grizzly Bear, and the ukelele part that drives the song could have come off of any Pitchfork top 10 album in the last 4 years. And the rest of the album, too. “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” plays at Pet Sounds’ “pocket symphonies” in its languid first half, before taking an absurd detour into a medley of almost-rock styles. “Dear Boy” is a nervy, bitter tune that teems with voices, all applied gorgeously and faultlessly. The use of studio effects on this track, as well as most of the album, is a big stand-out here. “Dear Boy” opens with the lead voice and the piano stuffed and compressed into a jar somewhere in the right channel, while in the left channel a lightly-touched conga drum sets the beat and its echo is allowed to ring out, lonely. When the song eventually grows into all of this space that these two effects created, it makes the whole song seem to have a real definable space. The album abounds with clever craft like this.

Which really gets at what’s interesting about this album, for me. For all the schmaltz — which is there — and the grating songs (“Long Haired Lady”, and “Monkberry Moon Delight”, which appears to be some sort of horrific Tom Waits tribute), there’s a “Dear Boy”, “Ram On”, or “Heart of The Country” that has enough great tricks or just plain lovely shit in it to make the whole thing shine. And though at its worst moments the album can be a bit trite (“Heart of The Country”, “3 Legs”), it just sounds so fucking good that the sometimes questionable content of the songs seems kind of beside the point.

And supposedly Linda McCartney was involved in this? I only noticed a female voice on one track. Oh well.

Day 40: The Dodos – Visiter

How the hell had I not heard this? This album is seriously good stuff. From the first minute of the first track I knew I had something special on my hands. I was taken aback because the opening sounds uncannily like The Goo Goo Dolls for a moment (except without whatever retching that may induce in you), but there’s something immediately and wonderfully strange about this.

The Dodos are a two-piece (with a third member added recently) from San Francisco who have taken their influences and cut tiny shreds from each of them and made them into confetti. The music has a distinct character, which is something most bands can strive after for years without obtaining. Take two of the album’s best tracks: “It’s That Time Again” and “Fools“. The first is a stirring dirge, an Irish drunk song if I ever heard one, saddled with a profoundly simple sentiment; the second, a kind pop tune turned danceable with the addition of a drum track that gracefully skirts the edge of incongruity.

I always focus in on the drums in music. I used to nerd out on bands’ drummers pretty seriously. The Dodos brought that back out. The percussion, played on a custom kit that omits a bass drum, is some of the best I have ever heard. The patterns he plays are creative; between his tribal-sounding tom patterns and his heavy use of the drums’ metal rims, he infuses the songs with an indefatigable energy. He plays distinct, short patterns that repeat endlessly with seemingly little or no variation, but he seems try to avoid the beat as much as possible, leaving accents in odd places, and it gives most of the songs a great tension, as often it sounds like if the pattern paused for even a second it would fall completely apart.

What’s remarkable about this album, to me, is that every song feels distinct without seeming like they sat down and said “Let’s write a reggae song” or “Now we need a ballad.” Songs diverge throughout the album’s length, as instrumental embellishments give songs hints of outside influence — for instance, “Winter“, with its weary trombone accompaniment tingeing the choruses with hints of Beirut.

This album plays at times like a study of duality. “Winter” is actually a good example. Split off from its drum track and maybe slowed down a notch, it would make a stirring acoustic ballad dedicated to a flighty, sour lover. When placed atop the drum track the song comes alive. A sad song turns aggressive, and mourning turns into an indignant shrug. While a songwriter could put a dozen “Park Song“s on an album and probably have something great on their hands, the album’s more curious moments come when the two musicians start channeling their energy into the same feeling — or rather, what is more obviously the same feeling.

The album’s heady latter half is built around four songs, each just over six minutes long, with palate cleansers in between. The long tracks find the band really bleeding into each other. While they spend much of the album sounding acutely aware of what each other is doing, on these tracks they really merge. The guitars and drums meet and calamity waxes and wanes.  These tracks are much noiser and more raucous, while never losing sight of the tenderness that makes tracks like “Park Song” so remarkable. On these tracks, at their best moments, these two manage to sound like something new and vital, something fully-realized. Highly exciting music from start to finish. I don’t want to go to sleep because I don’t want to give it up in the morning.