Day 25: The Lemonheads – It’s a Shame About Ray (Expanded Edition)

What a treat. I don’t want to attribute how much I liked this to nostalgia; that seems like it would cheapen the love affair we have shared  all day. Thank god I got this on a day off where I could really sink into it. Straight out of my Walkman circa 5th grade comes a lean slab of joyful, unalloyed pop, taking the crusty-eyed grunge of the time and turning it into something friendlier, more likeable, more chill-with-able.

It’s a Shame About Ray occupies a particular emotional space. Evan Dando’s vocals come off at times as ambivalent, morose, or indecisive, but when layered over the gleaming guitar, it tempers the mopiness with exuberance, resulting in a mixture that places the album in a perfect middle space between each extreme, its perspective accepting of happiness and sadness, and perfectly willing to acknowledge both (if simultaneously).

The album deals extensively in weird relationships, and describes with an understanding eye the turbulence in the spaces where people meet. In song after song, Dando confronts his own aloofness, as in “Confetti” when he sings “He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could’ve/He’d rather be alone than pretend“, and manages not to judge himself for the weakness implicit in his bind: that he believes in being fair to this unnamed girl, yet struggles to act in accordance to his morals. That he takes this reflexive reprobation and makes it into an irrepressibly infectious hook shows his mastery of songcraft.

But these binds come from situations that at least occasionally satisfy. “My Drug Buddy” describes a friendship(?) with a girl that hits its stride when the two are doing drugs together, and describes in unflinching romance every moment of their rendezvous; she’s coming over, they’ll stop to use a payphone along the way; her eyes lighting up as she makes a connect; “We have to laugh to look at each other/We have to laugh ’cause we’re not alone.” It’s lovely, and reveals Dando lost in a rapturous love that lacks definition, and that seems lovelier for it. But like the music, this is where he’s most comfortable: when he can just get lost in the indefinite space adjacent a strict boundary. He lusts uncomfortably, on “Alison’s Starting To Happen”, when he finds himself obsessing about a girl as she blossoms into a punk rocker; he loves a virgin girl and comes to find beauty in her decision to remain chaste; and finally, on the excellent “Shaky Ground” he takes a whole-hearted stand behind his love of a (just a) friend, singing “Always helps to have someone else along/But if my girlfriend sees us, she’ll come to the conclusion it’s wrong/Does this mean we’re on shaky ground?/I’m happy when you’re around/So let’s not put our friendship at bay/I love you in a different way.“

“Shaky Ground” is not only excellent for its beautiful acoustic intimacy, where Dando’s just-shy-of-strained voice can be heard in its every breathy shade, but because it segues neatly into the bonus tracks that come with this re-release of the album. The demo versions, one for almost every track, are lo-fi and sound like revised first drafts: the vocals and guitars are in place, and the simple but thoughtful melodies shine without the commotion of the drums and amplifiers. The songs relax, and the lyrics blossom in that grey room-noise space. “Bit Part” goes from its rollicking album version to a dirge, as the line “I just want a bit part in your life/Little more than a cameo/Nothing traumatic when I go“, disarmed of its platonic enthusiasm, reveals a desperate man pleading to be allowed to resign himself to a compromise.

Day 3: The Helio Sequence – Keep Your Eyes Ahead

I was pretty fortunate to pull this album this morning, I must say. Which is an odd thing to say, because until I started in on it this morning I hated these guys.

A few months ago, right when I got to Seattle, I went to see The Walkmen at Showbox. They’ve been one of my favorite bands for a while now; they’ve gotten me through some damned unpleasant times, and their You & Me on repeat soundtracked the writing of the latter half of my novel. I was looking forward to the show for months beforehand. I showed up a bit early so that I could get up nice and close, and was relieved to find there was only going to be one opener.

The Helio Sequence took stage, and stepped into the unenviable position of being the only thing standing between me and something I was excited and impatient for. The band consisted of a drummer and a guitarist/singer. They both looked uninteresting and proceeded to play some shitty repetitive guitar-pedal music like where the guitarist hits a note and it sounds like a chorus of dolphins complaining about the sardines they just received. The vocals sounded like the guy from Sunny Day Real Estate and it had no movement or passion. Overall I hated it and it was very shitty. The only saving grace to their unbearably tedious set was the drummer. Once he began playing his faced locked into a grim rictus, like a laughing skull baring all its teeth and straining against the definition of a smile. He played wonderfully, and was hypnotic to watch. Almost as if to caricaturize the term “drum machine” his movements were rigidly mechanical. In playing he’d move his limbs flamboyantly to hit the different parts of his set, and then repeat it exactly each bar, showing no emotion. It reminded me of watching a TV special about robotic arms assembling Nissans.

It was really friggin’ entertaining.

But I was growing increasingly upset with each new song they started, and then when the singer busted out one of those harmonica holders like Dylan used and added some harmonica flourishes to a couple of the songs, I got really fed up. These 18 year olds in front of me were absolutely being robbed of the entirety of their wits; they were ramming their pelvises against the stage and slapping each other and jumping up and down, and singing along so loudly I could hear them better than the band. I was almost more annoyed by them than I was the band.

Finally, they announced they only had two more songs. The end was in sight. Eventually The Walkmen came on, and their set list only contained two songs from the album that made them a band that I like (really exacerbating my pre-existing bad mood, you can imagine).

Ever since then, I totally forgot about The Helio Sequence until I got the suggestion to put them on my list. I fired up the album as I left the house to catch an Amtrak bus to visit friends for the holidays. As I stepped out of the house into the bracing cold and crunched through the brittle snow, the first track kicked on. And goddamn. From the moment the drums started and the guitars materialized, the music just thrilled and invigorated me. I was probably still a bit blunted due to all the Anal Cunt the day before; I listened to that shit for probably 13 hours out of that day.

I got to my bus, settled into my chair, and tried to read, but the music just consumed me. It was exquisitely soothing. As the bus got on the highway bound for eastern Washington and entered some really lovely scenery, I was so blissed out I fell asleep, and the music took me down like a lullaby and spooned with me and then made me breakfast when I woke up. It was goddamn perfect.

It made me curious to see how quickly my perception could change about something like this. This is pretty indisputably good music. They have been at it for nearly a decade, if I remember correctly, and have put a lot of heart and craft into it. It sounds entirely like things I like. Yet when they got on stage in front of hundreds of people and did me the honor of performing it, I self-centeredly ignored it, cast it aside, and hated it, because I was so impatient to get to the part I had wanted to see in the first place.

It made me wonder about older times. Back to the days of chamber music, for instance. What if the only time you could even hear music was when a bunch of people got together and performed it for you? Fast forward to now: I have 90 gigs of music. I forget the exact count but it’s got to be at least a month of music. I can conjure any of it up at any moment and dismiss it at an equally indifferent whim; what does this do to the way I perceive music as a thing in the first place? When I got my first CD, it was the only CD I owned. I could listen the shit out of it and never get tired of it. Same with the first MP3s I ever got. They were scarce in those days and I had maybe five of them. I could listen to them all day even if they weren’t even the songs I liked by that band.

A kid next to me on the bus had his iPhone kickin’ out some jams. I watched the album art change every couple of minutes. Gucci Mane, Sleigh Bells, some other stuff I genuinely like. But I could tell he wasn’t even finishing most of the songs; he changed every other minute or so. He was biting off half of the steak that a musician had spent days poring over in the studio, tweaking and perfecting, and throwing the rest of the steak in the trash.

On the other hand, I was savoring every single bite of an album by a band that months earlier I had impugned with disgust in favor of something else I ended up being dissatisfied with anyway. And I only was allowing myself to accept the music that was being given me because I had no options; I didn’t have the thought of what else I could be instantly listening to instead. This was all I had, and I, being an obsessive lover of music, someone whose brain needs that stimulus, was overjoyed to have it.

P.S., this album’s The Captive Mind is just a fucking ruthlessly good song. I do not ever want to stop listening to it. I envy those 18-year-olds at the show who got this album around the time they were driving around in their parents’ cars way past their bedtimes and telling stories about what they wanna do after college and trying to work up the nerve to take each others’ hands.