Day 54: Le Loup – The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly

When I start in on an album and something like this , I get incredibly relieved. “Oh,” I think, “Something I would listen to.” Le Loup are a breath of familiar air.

Le Loup is the project of Sam Simkoff, a Washington, D.C. based artist, and that doesn’t matter. I just learned that from Allmusic and it has nothing to do with anything. The Throne… matters, though, but what matters about it is within, not without. It is an album that is deeper than it is tall, the kind of thing measured in how far into it you can sink. It contains every quality I can think of to describe what kind of music I like: compelling rhythms, soothing vocals layer-caked in overdubs, banjo with restraint; it is an amalgamation of elements from existing music, rearranged artfully into something generous and unfamiliar. You can isolate discrete threads, like Sufjan’s rippling banjo, the breathy whispers and coos of Simkoff’s multiplicitous voice. This music is gorgeous, desolate and sweet. I try harder and care more about music like this than I do the other days. I almost just opened a thesaurus. I am a subjective animal let loose upon a keyboard. I like this more than I liked many other albums because it reminds me of the albums I am not listening to because of this project.

I have not mustered even one useful smidgen of Stockholm’s syndrome. Rather, this project has so far been a sort of self-imposed musical exile. The project is analogous to my real life in a way that is a bit painfully obvious: Tiring of the routine of my hometown and the waning novelty of everyday life, and drunk on the notion of what progress might lie westward, I abscond to Seattle to start a new chapter, removing myself from the lives of everyone I had grown to love. And ending up here, finding many nourishing pockets of happiness every day, but being hounded by this idea that maybe this was wrong? Should I be here? What great things lie waiting for me at “home” if I just go back? If I just turn off this fucking album and put on Spoon or something, just scratch that itch, relent and return to the familiar, surely I would feel so much better, right?

This is not some “Fuck I’m so unhappy”  plea, because I’m not — every day I’m not. I enjoy life, I enjoy being me, and I can be me anywhere. The more time, though, I spend wondering what kind of alternate universe is running in parallel 7 hours and 45 minutes of frantic, homesick driving away, the less time I spend trying to get to know any of these new (musical, if you lost the rambling metaphor) friends, and the more assured I am to fail to become happier with my position. In living with my toe-tips in this imagined idyll of “home,” I deprive myself the full experience of being right here, right now, in a magical city in the prime years of my life. And the more time I spend refusing to acknowledge the beauty in the struggle of creating my life, day by day, the more certain anything I sculpt is to crack and crumble away.

And this album, then, is not a doppelgänger for someone I’d rather be spending time with. It is a beautiful, unique creature, rich with promise.

Day 46: Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Press Color

What an odd album. I listened to it all day before I did any research on it, and I was befuddled at its complete lack of congruity — how it opened with the kind of punk-disco rager that LCD Soundsystem filled 3 albums recreating, and then proceeded to forget how to dance and transitioned into a well-rendered Mission Impossible theme song cover. Very strange. The latter half of the album barely sounded like it was even the same band, being filled with toneless noise experiments that seemed to be canvases for drugged-up spoken word performances. I figured it was some sort of Best Of, a compilation of tracks plucked from several different albums. It was so hard to orient myself to the experience of the music, so hard to interpret what kind of anything it was trying to say, that it kept me from really grasping it as a cohesive album.

Turns out that’s because this re-issue had a few quirks: One being that they arbitrarily re-arranged the tracks from the sequencing on the original LP, cutting up a number of track transitions recorded into the songs, and putting “Fire“, a cover they did perhaps jokingly that absolutely tears, at the forefront. The result is that it creates an expectation that the rest of the album can only disappoint, whereas if this had been buried on the back half as on the original one would be pleasantly surprised by it after the quirky new-wave of the rest of the thing. The other is that it includes Lizzy’s original, obscure release, the Rosa Yemen EP, which explains the mess of weird and mostly uninteresting shit at the end.

Yes, I pretty much just ended up wanting the whole disc to be 7 or 8 different renditions of “Fire“. I haven’t listened to LCD Soundsystem in months, but they have sowed the seeds of a thousand euphoric, dance-fueled memories in my stupid sentimental brain. I spent a while earlier just playing the first 15 seconds of “Fire” over and over again. Perhaps this is kind of cheating.

But what a disservice this re-sequencing did to the album’s integrity, holy shit. I haven’t even really heard the rest of the thing, for how fixated I am on the awesome disco-punk of the new opening track. Which is too bad, because it’s an intriguing disc overall. “No Golden Throat” sounds like a rehearsal of a good idea for a jam that turned out to be more entertaining than the actual song they planned on making it. The album gets its groove back with the chase-scene surf-disco “Wawa“, and closes with the straight-faced jazz sendup “Tumour” and the sexy, agitated “Aya Mood”. But some asshole had to go and open the album with a goddamn Hercules & Love Affair track, and render the rest of the album sedate by comparison. Highly unfortunate.

In any case, days like this remind me why this project is at least as rewarding as it is deeply spiritually exhausting: I really doubt I would have ever heard this album otherwise, and I feel like I discovered something important and influential today, even if neither I nor the jerkoff at the record label who shuffled it around quite knew what to make of it.

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 30: Shipwreck A.D. – Abyss

I’m beginning to distrust my random number generator. It seems to land on hardcore for days in a row, sometimes.

Back on the first day, I remarked about how Belleruche sounded like a pleasantly convincing imitation of something else I really liked. And since I didn’t have the option of just listening to that thing I liked instead, I found that likeness charming rather than tedious. There’s a similar thing going on here.

I’m of the opinion that Mastodon’s Leviathan is pretty much unbeatable as far as heavy metal goes. There’s an album that just oozes licks, where every song is memorable; an album that just by its recollection makes me hum guitar parts out loud and headbang when I’m alone. It could be the only metal album I ever hear for the rest of my life and I can’t imagine tiring of it. The best thing I can say for it is that it’s so richly melodic and catchy, so full of music, that it contains its own mood. It doesn’t require anger, or frustration, or any such glum emotion to tap into, because it is a self-contained tale.

This would be a hard thing to imitate. I haven’t seen many people try. I don’t feel that Shipwreck A.D. were necessarily trying to draw from it, but the suspicion nags at me anyway. It’s compelling  that the band name, the album title, and several of the song titles (“Squall”, “Beached”) are vaguely nautical, but when the music starts the similarities fade away.

The album opens with “Squall“, an aptly titled song, which doesn’t fuck around. From the get-go the band’s twin-guitar riffage comes heavy, angry things are screamed, and the bass drum fires off a burst of machine-gun fire. Heads are banged. Unrelentingly they press on, taking a breather with the opening of “Samur“, peaking with a breakdown in which sustained power chords seethe over a brutal flurry of drums. On to its conclusion, they hammer away relentlessly. Rhythmically restless, the songs charge, retreat, and trample, often all at once. They never let the mood settle until “Ascent“, which (on the album) opens with howling winds and a forlorn guitar.

If I have one complaint about the album, it’s that it lacks riffs. The guitarists throw out some awesome parts, really good-sounding parts that interweave and pull against each other, but the band doesn’t play behind them. In the best riffs the whole band moves in formation, like Blue Angels, but most of the riffs on Abyss find the guitarists flourishing against the work of the rhythm section rather than because of it. But despite a lack of earworms, the album is enjoyable throughout, peaking (appropriately) with Zenith, which has several of the moments I describe — moments where the unified assault leaves you gasping, and later humming.

It’s no wonder ‘miasma’ is a popular word in metal. Meaning “an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt”, it describes perfectly what bands like Shipwreck A.D. do. From the start of the album through to its conclusion they forge a current of malevolence, a bitter channel of spite that burbles like a hot spring from a hillside, tainting the soil around it with alkaloid blood and searing the lips of any creature that dares to dip try a sip. Such is this album: a half hour of sheer spite set to rhythm, of frustration given a cadence. Abyss unspools a tale for you, a tale of mood perhaps rather than the Moby Dick-derived narrative of Leviathan, but one more general: one of a man adrift at sea, dying of thirst, lost in waters that cannot quench him.

Day 1: Belleruche – Turntable Soul Music

For some reason, when I think of record hiss in music, I think of Portishead. Instantly. Even though almost any music that’s been built on two turntables (with or without microphone) has had that telltale fuzz burbling under it to some degree, something about the way Portishead used it, especially on the fantastic Dummy, made it sound like a raging fire quietly consuming a film noir jazz lounge while the band played on. It suited the tone of the music perfectly.

Let me just say that already, one measly day into this thing, I miss music terribly. It has clearly been somewhat of a pacifier for me for as long as I can recall. Walking around at work, I kept humming guitar melodies from, say, a Radiohead song, and really hearing the song in my head. A prisoner of war might languish in a muddy cell, whispering memorized passages of the bible to the cockroaches to keep sane. Similarly, I can tell that in the next year I am going to get much, much better at conjuring songs in my head, as I find myself wanting so badly to hear them but being unable to.

However, maybe it will be the opposite — maybe this musical binge will shock my system and jar all those infectious tunes loose from my brain’s grooves. Maybe I’ll come away with a whole new set of earworms. I imagined listening to my favorites after a year of not being allowed to burrow into them would make the experience of listening to them thoroughly incredible. Maybe it’ll be just the opposite, as I grow fond of songs I might never have of my own will and scrub my tired palate clean. Maybe I will no longer give half a shit about the records I now hold as dear as lovers.

Being deprived of my favorite escape will be difficult for every single day of this project. Which is why today’s selection, Turntable Soul Music, was such a gracious introduction. It feels equally inspired in parts by Portishead’s crate-dug trip-hop — the aforementioned record hiss being as comforting a sound as there is — and by the vamping, smoke-breathing songstresses of the Jazz era. It manages to combine elements of some of my favorite music. I got diagnosed with musical diabetes and this album was a package of sugar-free Oreos — tantalizingly close to a beloved thing.

I enjoyed the album the first couple of times through, but after six listens it got rather tiresome. The album detours from its high points of pre-coital, swayable Jazz and into some uninspired straightforward blues songs that fail to jibe with the Regina Spektor-esque character in the singer’s voice, and overall they only wear out the welcome earned by the livelier tracks. Uunfortunately, the album really fails to make an impact overall. Every track sounds similar and it doesn’t really go anywhere.

If you uncheck some boxes in iTunes this would be a perfectly useful album to toss in your rotation for a cocktail party, or for petting heavies on a threadbare couch. As it stands, though, it’s hard to recommend.

I keep wanting to listen to Reflection, the track with the most prominent record noise. I am becoming naggingly curious about why I like this sound so much. Coincidentally I hate that sound on actual records. I have a decent turntable and amp and headphones and it seems like the more money I spend on my setup, the more irritating record noise gets. It distracts so badly from the music sometimes. On this one GY!BE record I have there is a pop on one spot on one side that hits every time it passes, leaving this booming metronomic snap in the sound that of course is not in time with the music. It’s like a drummer getting sick of the song the band is playing and trying to get them to just play an entirely different one. Super distracting. However, you take something smoky and sultry like Belleruche or Portishead, and the record noise underscores the music, giving it a pleasant murmur to float along on.

Other note: For some reason, every time I listen to Bump, I find myself expecting the chorus to be the chorus from Alice in Chains’ Rain When I Die, and it’s really startling that it isn’t every single time. Does anyone else hear this?

I also wonder if there’s something to how similar record noise sounds to a fireplace or a campfire. Perhaps there’s some vestigial feeling of safety inherent in the song of fire. What do you think about record noise, deliberate or no?