Day 77: All My Faith Lost – The Hours

This is more like it. I don’t know if I would have usually said that this “is more like it,” but in the proximity of the hugely boring The Heavy, I’m extremely saying that. Still, this is odd music to get excited about.

All My Faith Lost are a male/female Italian duo who do atmospheric, dramatic music that damn near necessitates some thesaurusizing (I’m going with ‘stygian’). And when I say they do atmospheric music, I mean they create an unflinching, unwavering atmosphere from the first track on. They do goth minus the graveyard and black latex bodice, solemnity with romance, music to watch a time-lapse of a rose wilting to. Their palette is limited, but it doesn’t feel limited — they get a lot of versatility out of a (gorgeously recorded) piano ringing in a creaky-wooden room, their voices bouncing in a reverb tank, and some keyboard string section presets. Their way with these synth strings makes for slowly rippling Bohren-esque noirscapes, as they tend to just drone an incomplete, tense couple of notes, seldom alternating, while the piano splashes in it.

It’d be easy for this combo to plod along, and at times it does. In writing a series of yearning, romantic lullabies (whose lyrics are frequently unintelligible and sound like a mother cooing to her napping baby)  they effectively lull you into the album and leave you puzzled at its end, wondering how many songs just went by, trying to remember whether you just heard anything and struggling to recall what you heard. On “House of Incest“, they exhibit this quality to lovely effect, as the song moves glacially along.

Great music to make out to, or to lay in a hammock to. However it is going in my head as some kind of dream or drunk, some chunk of time deleted from my memory that I cannot access and can only judge by hints of recollections in its periphery — remembering feeling warm, feeling touched, but seeing only blackness.

Day 50: Jackson Browne – Late For The Sky

This one was hard to appreciate. I listened to it quite a few times today, but could never get all that invested in it. Although, I did listen to the title track about five times in a row at one point. It’s that good.

Late For The Sky is front-to-back sad songs, and even the upbeat tracks spend most of their running time trying to shake off the pathos of the surrounding ones. It’s a bit much to swallow, and was difficult to endure on a good-mood day. This is music I would keep in a drawer like a tender memory, taking it out only in times of great inner turmoil, scared that handling it might hasten its aging.

This music sounds familiar, because it is what I hear when I think of hippie spirituals. I am using ‘spirituals’ very literally, as every track has almost choral vocal harmonies that supplement Browne’s kind, unaffected voice. It’s kind, sad folk, with heartbreaking lyrics. “Fountain of Sorrow” is a meditation on looking at a picture of a long-lost love and how a person’s qualities age in our recollections, where Browne paints word pictures of infinitesimally brief moments in stark color, and it’s all too easy to feel every single thing he’s describing.

I’m a sentimental guy, I have no shame in admitting that. I have letters and cards and photos stashed away that I take out once every couple of years and spend hours poring over. I look at a shirt in my closet and see a flash of memorable times I’ve worn it. I’ve thrown away a shirt because of such an association. The past is, to me, a perpetually bouncing echo resounding from everything I’ve ever done, and at any moment I can focus in on any one soundwave and find a vivid snippet of my life, and any sound I hear or stranger I see smiling to themselves or any green-and-black striped shirt can evoke just about anything.

This album made me feel proud of this trait, as Browne reached into his chest and finger-painted with his blood over and over, and for its glinting monochrome simplicity it describes emotional landscapes better than any 256-color crayon box possibly could.

Day 45: Nick Drake – Bryter Layter

Oh, my.

Here’s a good example of how important context can be when it comes to first impressions. I had only encountered Nick Drake in two soundtrack appearances: “One of These Things First” in Garden State, and “Fly” in The Royal Tenenbaums. Both songs were colored by their placement in the movie, and the tone of the story, and in both cases the movie ended up giving Drake’s tunes a sour taste for me.

In Garden State, the placement of “One of These Things First” echoes Wes Anderson’s characteristic use of songs, except without a touch of the nuance — the song’s lyrics line up with the curious adventure the protagonist finds himself drawn toward with the pixieish female lead, and the upbeat guitar pattern gives legs to a transitional scene. Neat, effective, and comes across as smug. I don’t remember where exactly “Fly” appears in The Royal Tenenbaums, but in that movie’s case it’s less a case of how the song appears than the movie itself. I love The Royal Tenenbaums, but the whole movie evokes a world that seems unreal; a quaint, insular, tweed-draped romance of eccentric people living in a fantastical brick walk-up in some abandoned corner of what is presumably New York, a world so effectively created that it has a gravity that pulls down any object placed near it. For the same reason I can’t stand hearing Nico or “Needle in the Hay”, hearing Nick Drake just makes me recall Tenenbaums. You’d think that would be a good thing, seeing as, I remind you, I did love that movie — its insistence upon its own aesthetic couldn’t undermine the simplistic brute force of the story and the inspired performances that carried it off — but the movie was so rebarbatively pretentious that anything associated with it has a wretched taint about it forever.

None of this is Nick Drake’s fault, anyway. But it did keep me from ever wanting to hear one of his albums. And as I’m learning more and more throughout the course of this project, I see this was folly, since Bryter Layter would have easily insinuated itself as a treasured piece of my musical experience at just about any point in my life. It says a lot, and says it better than I could here. Most albums I have gotten through in this project have had one or two tracks that I wanted to listen to over and over; this one had four (“At The Chime of a City Clock”, “Hazy Jane I”, “Fly”, and stand-out “Northern Sky”). The whole thing is unbearably pretty, and contains so many little musical jewels that I could quote them like hilarious lines from a movie (the captivatingly expressive piano in “Northern Sky”, the redemption of that most repugnant of instruments, the harpsichord, in “Fly”, the way Drake delivers the line “And now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done, come, come sit down on a fence in the sun” in a talk-sing tone that gives me chills). But moreover, it has a mood and style so definitive that listening to “Fly” now almost makes me wonder if Wes Anderson made a movie around it.

Drake’s suicide paints a grim retrospective picture of this album, but even if Drake had lived to get over feeling “so sorry for himself” (“Poor Boy”) this would have stood as a testament to the tense expressiveness of the depressive mind as it writhes against the chains it binds itself in. A masterpiece.

 

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 35: Emeralds – What Happened

I’ve always liked Noise as a genre, but it’s mostly been a theoretical appreciation. Even though I like and appreciate it, it’s something I find myself hardly ever wanting to listen to. The last time I played a noise album more than maybe twice was Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport. I loved to put it on at work, because the propulsive rhythm and catchy melodies let me really move with it, while my mind was free to explore the enfolding layers of noise. Truly a masterful album. But most noise music isn’t really made for dancing. Most I’ve encountered (a limited sample size, admittedly) is absorbing, deep, and puzzling. It calls for an armchair, a pair of cinnamon-roll-sized headphones, a total lack of light, and a handful of prescription tranquilizers.

Emeralds falls into that category. At 5 tracks and 57 minutes long, the album’s real meat is in its 3 long songs. Each builds up very slowly, establishing its own ambiance. As a result the album ends up a collection of explorations, as each of these songs takes its own path so far that it forgets where it came from. This is not necessarily bad in Emeralds’ case, as the 15-minute long epics cover a lot of lovely ground in their time. “Disappearing Ink” opens with a couple of bright organ tones (any instruments named in this review are going to be my best guesses) lapping over each other, jutting out here and there, notes and harmonies finding shape in the haze only to be consumed by ringing dissonance. A deeply submerged guitar arpeggiates somewhere far below this morass, and eventually establishes a line with which maybe it can pull itself free. Massive synths churn tectonically in blow-your-woofer range. You look up and 7 minutes have passed.

In those 7 minutes that just passed, very little really happened. However, over those 7 minutes, a lot of things happened. Emeralds rewards active, focused listening, and throughout the day when I’ve really sunk into it with my headphones and focused on it, I’ve found it to have immense gravity, such as in moments like the crescendo of “Disappearing Ink”, where the noise flares, and the fuzzy chips in the quiet analog synthesizers swell and devour the air around them. Emeralds uses noise as many post-rock bands use guitar, piling layer upon layer, tweaking one knob after another, until the noise is feeding back on itself and it sounds like a galaxy of blips collapsing into infinite density.

Anyone who grew up in the early days of the internet has to remember this:

There was, for me, a mysticism to this sound. Tentative machines screeching at each other, grasping dumbly and finding a connection. Then the sound ramps up exponentially in resolution as what started as discrete pinpricks of noise swell into a roar, each of these pinpricks being the sound of hundreds of thousands of pixels buzzing through the air, coalescing into words, music, pictures of Aerosmith, Beef Wellington recipes, chatrooms — this primordial wail bore along constellations of data. And that’s what I love about noise. It is the sound of computers’ subconsciouses, of ones being carried a decimal place to many and then copied, scaled up, the mathematical aberrations in its DNA metastasizing and taking shape as a monstrosity that rages against control. It is the sound of our calculator, our GameBoy Advance, our cellphone, our computer talking to us; it is the sound of electricity thrashing loose of its circuit restraints. The aptly titled “Alive in the Sea of Information” peaks with what barely sound like voices droning through a torrent of this noise, the voice of man and the voice of the computer trying to interlock, trying to connect. It’s utterly haunting.

This is why I love noise, and I appreciate that Emeralds manage to utilize what is itself a good idea that frequently has trouble finding a practical use. The album is long, and ultimately forgettable due to the almost geological time span over which its ideas unfold. But herein lies some of its charm. It does not try to speak your language, and is thus hard to internalize. And a full day of repetitive listening later, it still surprises me what kind of things I hear within.

Day 14: Syd Barrett – The Madcap Laughs

There were quite a few moments, 10 seconds and then 40 seconds etc into No Good Trying where I felt like I had accidentally put on a new Atlas Sound track. I continued to have pangs of déjà vu throughout the album as I heard Neutral Milk Hotel all over the place. And so on. This was a really nice feeling.

The thing that makes an album like this set my mind reeling is wondering if these artists I really like listened to this at some point, and were influenced by it, or if it goes further back, or if it’s just a coincidence.

Anyway, Atlas Sound is a good point of comparison here. The sound is deeply rooted in psychadelica; songs consist of folksy acoustic guitar over currents of trembling organs and vocals dubbed several layers deep. The album is charged with emotion, with even the most pleasant tracks having an undercurrent of utter alienation and interpersonal terror. Syd’s tunes vacillate wildly between extremes — manically gushing glee for the subject of Love You; wallowing in ambivalence, unable to discern between the misfirings of his mind and the LSD simmering in his brain; plunging meteorically into agony, clawing at the grout in his bathroom tile on Long Gone.

Syd Barrett here seems a disturbed person who could steel himself for a couple of minutes at a time with his songs. His singing shows this best of all. Despite being rough around the edges, he had command of his instrument, and yanks it up and down its range with aplomb, driving it to its peaks in the strained highs of Dark Globe. He is famous for being volatile and thoroughly detached from reality. His antics with Pink Floyd led to them firing him, their old friend, after it got so bad that they just decided not to pick him up on the way to a show. After that, his label urged him to go into the studio, and he, with some difficulty, put down these tracks, which were apparently all he had to say, as he went to ride out The Fear at his mom’s house after just a few more years, and remained there until his death.

I enjoyed this album, overall. Quite a bit, actually. I will be revisiting it down the road. Syd Barrett conveys a very sympathetic character struggling against himself, trying to reach out as hard as he can and, at times, succeeding marvelously.

On that note, I’m pleased that I’ve made it two weeks. It’s been increasingly difficult, as withdrawals have been ravaging my brain. My brain, petulant toddler that it can be, spent all day playing fucking Sec Walkin’, the My Morning Jacket song that I hated so much. I was singing that chorus for about 3 hours at work today, and had no way to force it out — I could merely let it run its course. That’s not the worst of it: I’ve been hearing Drake’s Thank Me Later and the new Kanye album in my head pretty much from start to finish for the last few days. The curious thing is that I’ve gotten much better and conjuring this music in my head. Now when I hear it it’s not just a suggestion or framing of the song, a skeleton that implies flesh and form; I can hear every note, from top to bottom and all around, and I can hear the instruments and the tones they convey. My head is basically being an iPod. It’s strange, because though I’ve always had great recall for tunes, I don’t remember ever thinking of so much of the songs. It’s nice, but also it’s a little like I’m tormenting myself by thinking of things I can’t have. However, I stand by my earlier resolve for this project. Today’s album could have made up for a week of My Morning Jackets.

One upside is that I’ve been spending more time at the piano. It’s fortuitous that I have it, now, because I can at least muster crude facsimiles of my favorite tunes. I don’t consider it cheating, for the sake of this project, if I spend half an hour playing Two Weeks my damn self. After all, in older times, if you wanted to hear a song, this was how you had to do it: you learned to play it yourself or you got a human being to come to your piano and play it for you.