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2012, albums, music, reviews, thoughts, tympanogram, writing

Album review: of Montreal – "Paralytic Stalks"

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(Originally appeared on Tympanogram.com on January 16, 2012)

of Montreal - "Paralytic Stalks"
of Montreal - "Paralytic Stalks"

Kevin Barnes has always been one to experiment. From album to album significant changes in of Montreal’s sound and approach are apparent, which is what makes of Montreal one of the most exciting bands creating music today. They are an incredibly prolific act, putting out albums and EPs regularly, rarely skipping a year.

One can hear significant departures in sound between 2006’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? and 2008’s Skeletal Lamping. The next album False Priest, from 2010, saw Barnes backing off a bit on excessive experimentation and instead hunkering down with producer Jon Brion to make a psychedelic pop-funk album that captured the bands freakier side but also brought out their fondness for catchy, radio friendly hooks.

Lyrically the albums have run the gamut from the fanciful fictional tales of the band’s earlier output to the much more introspective lyrics found on more recent work, most notably beginning with Hissing Fauna…

Referring to that album as the crux of the latter part of output goes far beyond the fact that it remains their most popular work, and the work that brought of Montreal to the attention of many of their current fans. That is well deserved praise for a phenomenal album that found its rightful place on many year-end lists after its release. Digging deeper into that album, however, one will find the cell of an idea, the beginning of a rift: musically, lyrically, personally.

It was on Hissing Fauna… that Barnes brought to life the character of Georgie Fruit, who is in many ways a latter day Ziggy Stardust. Georgie Fruit is most likely Barnes’ way of exploring his inner psychological torment and sexual curiosities. Georgie is a man that has been through multiple sex changes, and the lyrics of many of the songs that are presented via his perspective are rather lurid. Of Georgie, Kevin states “He’s been a man and a woman, and then back to a man. He’s been to prison a couple of times. In the 1970s he was in a band called Arousal, a funk rock band sort of like the Ohio Players.” Looking at the way this character comes to life shows the birth of this idea, and the first instance of the actual depiction of physical, or psychological divisions in the music of of Montreal.

Hissing Fauna…was an album of two musical characters that eventually pulls itself apart, as literally as is sonically possible. It happens during the track “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” – a nearly twelve-minute long rumination on a circular chord progression that manages to build tension through incessant repetition. The song has no true verse or chorus, and varying phrase lengths offset the importance of certain harmonies over others. When the listener comes out on the other end of that track they are greeted with songs of a completely contrasting ethos. That’s the genesis of Georgie Fruit, coming out on the other side of a song that is the representation of a complete breakdown. This is where the journey that leads us to Parlaytic Stalks really begins. In understanding where this music is coming from it needs to be placed in this perspective.

If Hissing Fauna… is an album that is divided in two halves, Skeletal Lamping is an album of fractured songs that toss and turn into other songs in the middle, sometimes returning, most times not. It’s the representation of Barnes trying to hold things together. The inner demons are starting to surface and it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for us as listeners) to parse out where reality ends and the character begins. Skeletal Lamping was an album that had great parts of songs, and Barnes’ genius lies in stringing them all together. The divisions of these songs-within-songs were sometimes more jarring than others. The rift between Barnes himself and Georgie Fruit was beginning to show itself throughout the songs rather than in between them, and the alter ego Barnes had created for himself was being used to hide from reality.

Then False Priest comes along. It’s a pop-funk album. There is no longer a division; this is 100% Georgie Fruit. Just as Barnes said, Georgie used to be in a funk band. False Priest was that funk band. It was pure theater. We were no longer listening to of Montreal: we were listening to a band within a band, a character within the man.

This becomes quite obvious when one stops to consider that the titles for False Priest and Skeletal Lamping, as well as EP thecontrollersphere, are taken directly from a lyric from “Faberge Falls for Shuggie” – a song that comes after “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” after that first rift. thecontrollersphere, I remarked when it came out, contains bits that sound as if Kevin is physically tearing himself apart, and “Flunkt Sass vs. The Root Plume” takes its sonic cues directly from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. One of the more startling elements of this track is that, for the first time in the latter part of of Montreal’s catalog, Barnes is singing single tracked with little in the way of effects on his voice. He sounds as if he’s screaming for his life while re-entering the atmosphere without a suit. It’s his primal scream, something that can be heard throughout the entirety of Paralytic Stalks. The skillfully double tracked vocals that were omnipresent on earlier of Montreal recordings are now utilized sparingly, and only for special effect. More noticeable are the moments when Barnes screams out until his voice starts to break, providing this batch of songs with an emotional forthrightness and unabashed honesty. The lyrics are not simply more personal, but the songs find him connecting these ideas with the listener with no filter.

That trend of clarity and directness continues on this album, that, in typical of Montreal fashion, is obscurely named. There is no more hiding behind the irony of song structures that contradict the lyrical content, like the dance-y, upbeat “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” from Hissing Fauna…: a song about a crippling depression and Barnes’ pleading with his own body and medications to not fail him. He sings “I’m in a crisis, I need help, come on mood shift, shift back to good again, come on be a friend. Come on, chemicals!”, underpinned all the while by some of the most cheerful music on that album. Musically, it’s saccharine sweet, rich with synth hooks and a quick tempo.

That type of contextual dissonance is no longer present on Paralytic Stalks. Not only are the lyrics in the first person, but so is the music. The lyrics here are represented in direct correlation with the music, and the music is recorded in such a way that it puts the minimum amount of distance between the song and the listener.

The piano sound in “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission,” as an example, is recorded such that we can hear the room. The listener is placed directly in the presence of Barnes as he speaks to us, giving an unprecedented amount of weight to his words. Every punch connects. By this point Barnes has managed to completely strip away any sense of pretense, and has come out from behind his curtain, which stands in opposition to the heavily effected synth tones that have been occupying many of of Montreal’s previous recordings. Instead of using the recording process as a smokescreen where everything is manipulated, synthesized and recorded directly to the board, much of this album manages instead to connect directly with the listener. Barnes obviously learned quite a bit by working with Jon Brion. The sound of timpani at the opening of “Dour Percentage” is taken directly from the False Priest sessions.

Many of the lyrics on Paralytic Stalks are more relatable than usual. The opening of “Spiteful Intervention” jumps in with raw emotion and trepidation with the line “It’s fucking sad that we need a tragedy to gain a fresh perspective on our lives.” It truly feels like Barnes is including us as listeners. He is no longer speaking from a distance about himself or another party that we are not privy to as listeners. We have been brought into the fold and welcomed.

That personal forthrightness goes even further later in the song when he states “I spent my waking hours haunting my own life / I made the one I love start crying tonight and it felt good / still there must be a more elegant solution.” Though the opening of the lyric is honestly and painfully sung in a loud, trembling yell with a tenuous grasp on pitch, there is still that sense of reaching out to do more. Barnes is realizing the consequences of his actions and his feelings. The lyric doesn’t point to his being a self-obsessed animal, but the complete thought points to his willingness to change: the theme and process behind the past few releases.

Barnes, in recent interviews about what to expect from his latest album had this to say: “I don’t want to become a caricature of Georgie Fruit…I want to keep growing as an artist.” (source) This statement signals Barnes’ intentions to change everything in his musical process from the ground up. His art is a reflection of his life. Personal problems are being faced head on; Barnes is not shielding himself. There are attempts to change things, attempts to brighten up the band’s sound and turn the darkness in on itself. Paralytic Stalks is the sound of facing the things that made him turn inward.

The pedal steel has an uncanny ability to sound like a sunrise, and when it is used in “Wintered Debts,” it has exactly that effect. Its use, combined with the shift in piano style throughout the album, is more playfully reminiscent of Tin Pan Alley song pluggers of the early 20th century. “Malefic Dowery” is made gentler with the addition of that piano, and a delicate arrangement of woodwinds.

That characteristic of change has always existed on of Montreal records. It’s an unwillingness to settle for a certain sound, or a certain instrumental configuration to define them. Paralytic Stalks features woodwinds, strings, and some auxiliary percussion, in addition to the tradition rock band set up. of Montreal has always augmented that sound with two basses, with great effect, as is the case of the intricate bass-lines in “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission.” Those bass-lines can now be seen through the lens of psych-funk, like on False Priest. of Montreal isn’t bound, musically, by any outside conventions. This is a band that seeks only to evolve from album to album, and Paralytic Stalks they prove that they do that better than any other band working today.

“Ye, Renew the Plaintiff” drops a beat around the minute mark, another instance of the track tearing itself apart. After that disorienting rhythmic shift, a pulsating, straightforward rumination on only a few chords begins, and Barnes can’t help himself from shouting “How can I defend myself against this world?” and “I’m desperate for something but there’s no human word for it / I should be happy but what I feel is corrupted, broken, impotent and insane!” From there, the confessions continue rolling out, easily, effortlessly as if the dam has finally been breached and Barnes is helpless to cease the flow of confession. “I’ve become so hateful, how am I ever going to survive this winter / I can think of nothing but getting my revenge, / make those fuckers pay / but it’s not gonna happen and it’s eating a hole in me!” With that, Barnes is screaming at the top of his lungs through an increasingly wild guitar solo.

With “Exorcismic Breeding Knife” something out of the ordinary happens. Instead of everything being pulled apart, gradually or otherwise, the song starts in utter chaos and remains there throughout the majority of its seven-plus minutes. Toward the conclusion of the song, the chaotic elements come together in a beautifully resolute major chord that emerges from a cloud, at first with a suspension, and is then resolved.

Following this track is the album closer, “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission.” It starts off as the most straightforward track on the album, let alone the past several of Montreal albums. The intricately woven, multi-tracked bass-line is present; there are sweet harmonies, a danceable beat and an ultra catchy melody. It’s not until the lyric, “every time I listen to my heart I just get hurt” where nearly every instrument drops out of the mix completely, and things begin to descend once again into utter bedlam. Both the song and album close with the gentle sound of a reverb laden piano and Kevin’s solitary voice stating the most startling confessional revelation yet: “Til this afternoon I was an exile, but now that word is obsolete. There are no nations, no concept of ego. Our illumination is complete.”

With that, Barnes manages to sum up all the concepts he’s brought up since “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal” on Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer? That closing line manages to not only find Barnes at peace with his now exorcised inner demons, but simultaneously lets the listener know that we have traveled this path with him, and we have grown together through the journey.

Paralytic Stalks is, in certain ways, similar to many other of Montreal albums. Throughout it, we can never be certain which direction we’ll be traveling next. Upon its conclusion, however, we’re left with a mixture of closure and expectation.

[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/03-of-Montreal-Dour-Percentage.mp3|titles=Dour Percentage]

Beginning today Paralytic Stalks is available for streaming on Rdio and Spotify so head on over to those sites and check out the entire album and then head over to Polyvinyl and order one for yourself! There are still some of the limited edition Fuchsia 180g records left, hurry!

2011, miscellaneous, personal, philosophy, thoughts, writing

An Open Letter to Newsweek and TheDailyBeast.com

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I really never thought that it would come to this. I have been a subscriber to your magazine for several years now. Each time that I was offered the opportunity to re-subscribe I did so. I’m currently paid up to receive your magazine until May, 2013. So confident was I when I first subscribed to your magazine that I couldn’t think of not being informed and enlightened by your staff’s thoughtful writing.

This isn’t to say that I always understood everything that was presented, for example many of the discussions on the “housing bubble” and other economic and financial issues are hard for me to grasp. The fact that I didn’t understand them certainly wasn’t because those particular articles were poorly written, rather they just lie outside my interests.

I should have seen it coming! This was all foreshadowing so clearly your true objective at Newsweek. To you money is the most important thing in life. It’s worth being worried about, it’s worth living and dying for. Money is a tangible result of hard work and apparently the only thing of any utility in our country.

That conclusion comes from recently reading your chart that so helpfully ranks what you feel to be the “Most Useless College Degrees”, posted to The Daily Beast on April 27, 2011 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-27/useless-college-majors-from-journalism-to-psychology-to-theater/.

Useless.

It’s clear that you feel that there is such a thing as a wasted education. That alone is an extremely dangerous concept. I implore you to consider the implications of stating that any university degree can be deemed useless. Did any of you actually attend university? I can’t understand how a person that has successfully completed a degree program could possibly allow themselves to think this way, let alone publish something as offensive and damaging as this “study”.

My degrees in particular were ranked at number 7. I currently hold several degrees that you consider useless; a Bachelors of Music in Compositon (BMus. Composition), a Masters of Music Theory and Composition (M.M. Theory/Composition) and a Masters of Music Performance in Classical Guitar (M.M. Performance). I am furious to think that anyone would think of these as useless degrees of any rank; enough so to tell you why you are quite wrong. Thoughts such as yours are ultimately contributing to the ruin of this country.

Your “uselessness” is based on only the typical earning potential of the degree and how many jobs are typically available in the given field. This is ridiculous, biased thinking at such a basic level. Music and art are at the forefront (or should be) of any truly free society. By stating that studying music is useless to any measure is allowing the United States to become the lazy, slovenly, money hungry, cultureless society that many in the world already see us as.

According to your findings you would rather have me be unhappy and rich; not serving to attempt to build up our country’s battered and disappearing culture every single day. As musicians that is what we are all currently doing.

Saying that studying music is useless is kowtowing to the idea that our worth as people, and as a country, is almost completely dependent upon our worth in dollars and cents. How much a person earns in a year makes that person of more utility according to you. Though there are, admittedly, philanthropic individuals that spend their money doing things for our country that our government can’t seem to do, there are relatively few of them and literally tens of millions of the rest of us trying to make a difference every day in whatever way that we can.

I don’t even want to get into the studies that prove the usefulness of a well rounded education that includes studies of music and the arts. We have all read them, and we all know that it is one of the things that stands in the way of making the United States one of the truly great nations of the world.

I appreciate the timing of your little publication too. Just as undergraduates around this country are getting ready to step out into the job force; teaching, working and fighting to keep our culture from dying at the hands of close-minded cretins such as yourselves.

Every student that I knew when I was at the university knew that their earning potential would not allow them an extravagant lifestyle. The truly amazing thing about us though is that it doesn’t stop many of us. We know that there are much more important things to live our lives for. Musicians are quite often the butt of jokes regarding pay, where success is ultimately determined by how large a paycheck we can bring in. Vox populi can’t see, and doesn’t want to learn of how useful having hard working, brilliant, non-traditional thinkers such as musicians and artists around truly is. Thanks to you these troglodytes are substantiated in their ignorance.

I suppose that ultimately I am speaking to something you can’t really understand. I’m sorry. I know that all of you have obviously spent your lives doing very important, useful things. Important and expensive things. I only wish that I could have enough confidence and bravado that I could reach out to a nationwide audience and castigate entire groups of hard working people, that do important work, as useless. It’s funny, really, that the classless are attacking those of us that are doing something for reasons other than money. You have managed to make shunning culture seem like the correct, intelligent thing to do. Congratulations. That is really something.

Sarah Palin, undoubtedly one of the most fantastically and unabashedly proud ignoramuses to come into the public sphere in recent times, declared that the Federal Government needed to cut funding to NPR and the NEA because such funding is “frivolous”. It seems that you are at least somewhat in agreement with Her Royal Vapidness. I won’t even get into how cutting funding for those programs would do little to nothing to solve our budget problems. The government sees very little need to support the arts as it is. This, personally, makes me feel unwanted by even my own government. My work isn’t supported by the general population, or by the government, but that does not and should not stop us. Musicians and artists are culture warriors.

I subscribed to your magazine to support an ideal, to support a society where newspapers are going bankrupt and the ability for us as citizens to obtain free, fair and balance news is being challenged every single day. I believed in you. But, seeing as you feel that I am useless, and all of the people that I work with, study with and helped to teach- with all of their research that is being done in the name of music to help enrich our culture- are apparently useless because they are not making enough money, I can believe in you no longer. You, in fact, are beyond useless. What you have done with this pithy “study” (it was hardly a study, just salacious pandering disguised as research and journalism) is hurting the country. Just to be clear, you are hurting the country. I don’t want to have anything to do with any person or entity that so readily disposes of culture.

With this I am asking for a published apology to these concerns as well as my outstanding subscription canceled and the balance returned to me immediately. Considering I don’t have much earning potential, I’m going to need all the help I can get, right?

You can not put a price on culture. I don’t expect you to understand.

 

Note: A signed and dated copy of this letter was mailed to Newsweek via USPS, as well as e-mailed to them.

 

2011, miscellaneous, music, personal, philosophy, thoughts, writing

The meaning of Quartertonality

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I’ve had this blog for a few years now, but only really been seriously writing for it for just under a year. The real beginning was in July 2010 when I began writing for groovemine.com. Mark, the owner of that site, began sending me more music than I had ever heard before. I decided then that I really had an opportunity to fine tune my skills as a listener and as a critic and writer.

I’m trained as a musician. I can read music (obviously) and know a lot about music theory. I read books on music theory for fun because that is what I am interested in. In becoming a “classically trained musician” one studies a lot of “classical” music (though I abhor the term, but that is neither here nor there.) Instead of calling it “classical” music let’s just call it concert music, or serious music if you prefer. The term “classical” is weighed down with so many connotations of time period and it brings to mind dudes in powdered wigs and the idea that that sort of thing is “out of date” or only of interest to people of the upper echelon of society. Anyway, concert music is fine.

In the interest of simplicity let’s just call everything else that isn’t serious music “pop” music. Yes, all of it. Pop music. That doesn’t mean only Top 40 music, it doesn’t mean stuff that is just played on the radio, I mean music that isn’t played in the concert hall, by a string quartet, or by a symphony. Let’s just keep it simple. So there is concert music and there is pop music. We can argue ad infinitum about how to divide up pop music some other day. Let’s just pretend that Lady Gaga and Megadeth are lumped into the same group for now, ok? Ok.

Anyway, when analyzing concert music it’s common to spend a lot of time carefully considering the cultural significance of the work. It’s also appropriate to analyze the functional harmonies, the use of chromaticism, the instrumentation, the orchestration, the tonal scheme etc. etc. There are several ways to go about this: there is Schenkerian analysis, Roman Numeral analysis, one can derive a matrix, find the different uses of tone rows, find uses of hexachordal combinatoriality, tetrachords, modes and on and on.

The thing with concert music is that there is a lot of time wrapped up in it all. The composer is seen as this guy, or gal, that sits hunched over a dimly lit desk, one hand on their head, the other desperately clutching at a pencil as they place each note down onto paper with a purpose. Every single note is wrought with meaning, every second they spend conceiving their “work” and producing it and rehearsing it has a framework of genius at work. When the work is finally completed it is foisted onto the public (which generally doesn’t want it, but that’s another topic entirely) and only after it has survived out there “in the trenches” for 10 years or more, only then does anyone take notice and finally decide, “Hey, this might be something that we might want to look at!” Eventually a musicologist spends several hundred hours hunched over a dimly lit desk, clutching his or her head in one hand and a pencil in the other marking the score, making connections and shouting “Eureka!” to an empty house. Perhaps he wakes the dog. Soon his truly genius writing is published in a journal that is only read by other musicologists, theorists and grad students that are writing papers for the musicologists and theorists.

The general public, goes about their business outside the music hall, unaware that any of this is happening, not that it would change anything if they knew that it did. They listen to people like Sarah Palin that says wonderfully encouraging things like, “arts funding is frivolous”. The general public loves this woman. She’s so much like them.

It truly is great to feel loved outside of ones art. God bless America!

John Adams is one of America’s most successful composers. He has found a niche of sorts writing works about current events. His first opera (yes, people do actually still write operas!) “Nixon in China” premiered in 1987, about Tricky Dick’s visit to China 15 years prior. He also wrote another opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro entitled “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 1991, 7 years after the trajedy. His most recent opera (hey, the guy likes to write operas, and he puts a lot of people in the seats!) “Dr. Atomic” is about the Manhattan Project. The opera premiered in 2005.

These are all great works, and I’m only taking an example from one composer for brevity’s sake. The subject matter that Adams is tackling is a tangled web of complex philosophical questions. His works are almost universally loved and accepted upon their premiere. Most composers are not so lucky, but then again most composers aren’t nearly half as good either. The problem that I see is that these works do take such an extremely long time to produce. Because of this lengthy turnaround it appears that the only things really worth writing about are these really monumental moments in extreme human struggle.

Yes these works are worthwhile, and yes they are worth more analysis and promotion. I believe that everyone should take some time to familiarize themselves with as many great works as they can. It is part of our culture, it’s far more than “entertainment”. That being said, so is pop music.

Before I delve into that I’m going to quickly tell a story about my favorite concert composer, Charles Ives.

He was born in Danbury, Connecticut. A true Yankee New Englander. His father was a musician, in charge of a military band during the Civil War and leader of several community bands in Danbury. Charles, in his compositions, would include the sounds of his childhood whether it was the sound of two marching bands coming down the street in opposite directions, the sound of Central Park at night or the sound of the local hook and ladder company. He was not interested in what many other composers were doing at the time and didn’t actually make his living with his music, nor did he want to. He was an extremely successful insurance salesman who just so happened to be one of the most important American composers of the 20th century. Nobody knew this until after he died when conductors like Leonard Bernstein and Leopold Stokowski championed his music. Though during his life he did manage to win the Pulitzer Prize in composition for his 3rd Symphony. He declined the award stating simply, “awards are the badges of mediocrity.” Yes, someone that badass wrote serious music. Serious, experimental music.

One of his experiments involved the use of quarter-tones, an idea he got from his father. His father, equally as crazy, was trying to capture the pitches played by the local church bells. He would run outside to hear, and rush back inside to the piano to try and capture the pitches. Back and forth as many times as he could while the bells were still ringing. He was unable to capture the sound of the bells and concluded that the pitches they were sounding were notes that were located “between the keys of the piano”. He heard something that was so far outside of what was normal that he was not even able to reproduce it by normal means. He needed to wander far beyond what was accepted as normal in order to bring to fruition his music. Charles, throughout his works, continued this trend. He worked in near solitude, almost completely unknown by the serious music world and was truly innovative.

His music is truly amazing and I would urge you to check out his works.

To me Ives’ use of quarter-tones is the most identifiable and most unorthodox thing that he ever did. It was certainly the most notable thing he did as far as sound. If you hear his 3 quarter tone pieces for 2 pianos you will immediately notice a difference in sound. Nobody else was doing this at the time. Now there are several composers that work with exotic scales or scales of their own design in order to brand themselves with a unique sound.

What Ives was doing was writing music that was true to him and because of that there was a sense of immediacy. His music is also much studied to this day and much performed as well. Recordings are still being made and his name is firmly in place as one of the great American composers.

The point of this story is that at the time Ives was writing his music the divide of what was serious music and what was pop music was just beginning to be created. It was the time of Tin Pan Alley where songs were being cranked out by writers that were masters of formula, much like today’s mainstream music. A lot of that music has completely disappeared, but that time also gave us the music of George Gershwin, who doesn’t neatly fit into either category. Somewhere around this time it appears that the decision was made that serious music is worth being held up on a pedestal and being preserved through repeated performance and analysis and pop music is not worthy of the time it takes to listen to it.

With my blog I am directly challenging that idea. Pop music deserves better analysis, and serious consideration. The analysis of pop music needs to match the immediacy of the music. One can’t spend 20 years thinking about the implications of a certain album or a certain style of music because by then it is most likely irrelevant. The music deserves to be considered in its own time and it deserves to be considered by people that know what to consider, which is to say that typical blog-style analysis is not good enough for pop music.

I have read too many reviews that describe how an album makes the reviewer “feel”. That analysis is irrelevant to everyone except the reviewer. I want to know exactly why the guitar line is doing what it is doing. Where are things going harmonically and how does that compare to other music that we are currently hearing right now? I want to know where each band is getting their ideas from. I want to know why bands from Toronto sound different than bands from Bushwick. There are answers to all of these questions and the only way that they are going to be found is through repeated listening. Not just listening to one album over and over again, but listening to every album you can get your hands on, because each album is a piece of the puzzle and will help answer all of the questions that you have and bring to light some new ones.

The current state of pop musicology is ill equipped to handle this task. Most of them are still busy pondering the significance of Nirvana while the rest of us have moved far beyond that. Things take far too long in the university world, and by the time any studying is done the significance is completely lost.

Quartertonality is a word that is made up, but the meaning is real. Quartertonality is looking for new ways to do things. It is taking a serious analytical approach to current, worthwhile popular music. It’s the belief that just because something isn’t popular that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth looking into. It’s finding the motivations behind everything, the reason behind things, digging further than anyone else, listening more than anyone else and providing thoughtful, honest analysis that is based less on opinion and more on fact. One has to move quick because the amount of music that comes out every week is staggering. There isn’t enough time to sit on an album for 20 years and then write about its significance because that changes every single day.

Sorry there’s no pictures in this post.

2011, albums, miscellaneous, music, news, personal, thoughts, Uncategorized

Record Store Day, 2011

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Record Store Day this year is April 16th, this coming Saturday. In case you aren’t aware, it is the annual celebration of independent music stores. If I remember correctly it started out as a pretty small endeavor with only a few fanatical people paying any attention to it at all. It has grown to something significant with record stores all over the country in big cities and small all taking part. The day serves as a reminder to people that music is still made on vinyl and CD and it encourages everyone to go out, support local shop owners and musicians.

Over the years an increasing number of musicians and bands have started producing special releases for Record Store Day to help give even more of an incentive for people to get out there and support music. To honor this day, and give it a little bit more promotion, I’d like to recount some of my fondest memories of my favorite record stores in several different cities.

Rochester, New York:

The Bop Shop: www.bopshop.com
274 Goodman St. N #B123
Rochester, NY 14607

The focus at this store is on jazz, prog and garage. Every single album is in brilliant condition. Tons of used 45s and even an extensive amount of victrola records.

Very knowledgeable, friendly and helpful staff that can be found typically listening to Sun Ra or Syd Barrett solo albums on the stereo that broadcasts throughout the store. They also bring in musicians to play in front of the store. One recent concert featured the ICP (instant composer’s pool)orchestra.

You can check their obsessively cataloged and rated vinyl on sale at their webstore.

Memorable purchase: My copy of The Mothers of Invention’s “Freak Out”, original pressing in pretty good condition. He was asking a certain price and cut it in half for me, and also ran it through his Nitty Gritty and it plays beautifully. I was also there once when he realized a copy of “Pet Sounds” had a minor ding in it, so he handed it to me for free.

The Record Archive: www.recordarchive.com
33 1/3 Rockwood St.
Rochester, NY 14610

Although the original store, the one that I frequented, is no longer operating, they have a new location. When I was visiting the store both locations were open, but the original was closer to the school I was going to, so I would often skip class to go buy records.

That original location focused heavily upon CDs. New and used, and accepted trade-ins, as I’m sure they probably still do. What I remember most, and what I was there most often for was going through the aisles of used records that were shelved to the ceiling of the almost secretive basement back room.

Differing from The Bop Shop in that the record collection here seemed to focus more on quantity than quality, they did have everything. Showtunes, classical, metal, prog, rarities, punk etc. Very little in the way of new vinyl, comparatively but I was into prog. rock at the time so it was perfect for me.

It smelled like a basement, but felt comfy and cozy. I would spend hours there just searching around, never really looking for anything specific but always walking out with at least one purchase.

Memorable Purchase: King Crimson’s “Starless and Bible Black”. I set it onto the turntable that they would allow you to use to preview purchases and decided that I wanted it within about 4 rotations.

Buffalo, New York:

Spiral Scratch: spiralscratchrecords.blogspot.com
291 Bryant St.
Buffalo, NY 14222

Easily the best record store in Buffalo. I’m going to go with the Phoenix rising from the ashes cliché on this one. The original location was devastated by a fire and the owner, with the help of a huge outpouring from the community, managed to re-open the store in an even better location than before. It’s small and friendly with a lot of new vinyl and some used showcasing a love for old school hard-core punk. Concert tickets are also available at the location and talking to the owner is always a great time.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Rotate This: www.rotate.com
801 Queen St. West
Toronto, ON, Canada M6J 1G1

I used to spend a lot of time in Toronto, being that it is only a 2 hour drive from where I currently reside. I think I only visited the former location once, but their current store is like a beautifully organized cavern of records. From what I remember you can purchase concert tickets here as well. Lots of used vinyl, but they have plenty of new 12″ and 45s as well as CDs. No trip to Toronto is complete with a stop at Rotate.

Memorable Purchase: The only Silver Jews album that I own, “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea”, was bought here. People say that it is the worst of their albums, but I didn’t know any better and I came to love it.

Criminal Records: www.crimedoesntpay.ca
493 Queen St. West
Toronto, ON, Canada M5V 2B4

I always thought of Criminal Records in Toronto as the “hip” record store. Bright and white on the inside with turntables, shirts, belts and belt buckles for sale in addition to their vinyl. This store is more of a boutique setting with, like the Record Archive in Rochester, a focus on quality over quantity. Also, someone told me that Wayne Petti of Cuff the Duke, one of my favorite bands, works there. I always hoped to find him behind the counter when I stopped in, but alas….

Chicago, Illinois:

Reckless Records: www.reckless.com
1532 North Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, Il 60622

Ok, so their website is an abomination, but trust me the store is pretty much the opposite. This was the first record store in Chicago that I ever visited. In July 2006 I was extremely overwhelmed by everything that was in the store, so much that I couldn’t figure out what to buy. At that point I was still scared to a certain extent to listen to unfamiliar music. Meanwhile my brother and his wife were running all over, talking to the clerks about some, what I thought to be, obscure music that I had never heard of.

One of the things I like about the store is the description on every record. They have pithy reviews on everything they sell, which makes it easier for people like the 2006 me to branch out and try new things.

Memorable Purchase: Kraftwerk’s “Radio Activity”. It’s a reissue that I have, but I still remember it for being one of my first purchases there. I also have a t-shirt designed by Dan Ryan that I bought there.

Permanent Records: www.permanentrecordschicago.com
1914 West Chicago Ave.
Chicago, Il 60622

These dudes are insane. Lance, Liz and Dave run an amazing little shop that showcases their love for garage rock. They have in-stores (BYOB!), their own label and a podcast that amazes me every single month with the amount that these guys know about seemingly intensely obscure acts. They also write incredibly detailed emails every month describing exactly what they have in stock. I would feel completely comfortable just picking up anything at random that they suggest and giving it a spin. If you aren’t in Chicago and you want an education in new music, listen to their podcast, I can’t urge you strongly enough.

The important thing now is that you go out and support your local record shop. Buy a record or CD this saturday. There are tons of special releases coming out just for this event. You can check the official Record Store Day site here.

And if you don’t live near a record store (like me) then you should check out some record label’s online stores. My personal favorites are Polyvinyl, Kill Rock Stars, Touch and Go and Sub Pop.

Happy Record Store Day!

2011, albums, music, news, reviews, thoughts, writing

Album review: Radiohead – "The King of Limbs"

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We can always count on Radiohead to change the game from album to album. Because of this I feel that their latest album, “The King of Limbs”, deserves something beyond the usual track by track review. Everything that Radiohead does, musical or otherwise, is subject to an extraordinary level of scrutiny such that few, if any, other musical acts in existence today have to contend with. Not many would know how to cope, let alone be able to utilize all of that scrutiny and turn be able to turn it into something productive. This is one of the reasons why Radiohead is the most important bands active today. The public expects an almost inhumanly high standard from the band, who in turn are able to consistently live up to that standard by consistently producing groundbreaking albums that regularly change our ideas of what is new in current music. They are the singular arbiters of pushing the boundaries and raising the bar to a point where no other act can reach. Any attempts at following in their footsteps are hopelessly cast in their shadow.

Despite this the band, in interviews and concerts, don’t seem to think of themselves as so important. They manage to be immensely popular while at the same time retaining artistic credibility. It is a rare thing to have mainstream success while maintaining a high degree of indie acceptance. They constantly sell out the largest venues, yet remain out of the headlines and still manage to appear guarded about their personal lives. To me this points to them as not involved in music for the fame. They are creating intelligent music with artistic integrity. This flies in the face of anyone that thinks you can’t push boundaries, and still have something to say while retaining a sense of relevancy and importance with a large and emphatic audience.

As an audience we are responsible for elevating them to such a place of popularity and even importance. We are the ones that overly scrutinize every musical decision that they make. We are the ones cataloging every song they’ve ever performed live, comparing it to the previous instances of its live appearances and how those versions, in turn, compare to the recorded version. A song may not have been committed to tape until 10 years after it first debuted on stage in Stockholm but we are the ones that can chart its development and have therefore cast it into the realm of importance.

We are also the ones that argue over the validity of each version and whether the version that ended up being recorded, having therefore gained a level of permanence that the bootlegs and live versions lack, is the “definitive” version or not. The audience is responsible for deciding if what an artist is doing is good or bad, or more appropriately, they decide whether or not they are happy with the direction the band is taking and what it means for their cultural musical superiority, dominance and importance. All separate things.

Of course all of these things are done without the consent or approval of the band, who in turn seem perfectly content with going their own way and charting a unique path. Personally, I wonder how much the members of Radiohead use this information to guide their decisions. Do they think about manipulating the way that we are going to think about this album? Do we try to compensate for this by heading them off at the pass, intellectually, by taking into account that they think they know what we think and are therefore going to change our thoughts about their actions based on what we think they think we are thinking?

Radiohead - "The King of Limbs"
Radiohead - "The King of Limbs"

It’s all ridiculously convoluted, and you can see where the role of artist and audience member is challenged in this instance. It’s complex and perhaps you would think that it isn’t happening, but it is. Right now. The scrutiny, the over-thinking, the critical analysis, all of it is a testament to the importance of this band that we are even bothering to wrap ourselves up in this kind of process.

That process is my whole premise. Listening to a new Radiohead album has transcended the traditional listening experience to a point of a self-critical paranoia inducing obsession that eventually leads to submission.

With anything so new and different from anything that we have recently been listening to, the initial exposure to “The King of Limbs”, much like that first listen to “Kid A” is a point of aggravation to a certain degree. The mind is overcome with such a new and surprising experience that it doesn’t quite know how to process all of the information. We become overwhelmed.

Do our expectations exceed what we have been given? The answer to this question always seems to be an unconditional “Yes” at this point. We sit and try to pick out the memorable material, which is quite literally impossible at such an early stage as the music is passing through our ears for the first time. We wait for upbeat tunes, interesting contrapuntal textures, complexities in the lyrics that speak to us in coded, metaphoric language about politics (possibly). It’s difficult to find all of these things and explore them all at once, in one go. Frustration and awe are residing in equal parts within us as the end of the album draws near and we are left with choosing between “forget it, it’s a mess” and “I gotta listen to this again, there must be something in there.”

This is where Radiohead truly takes charge as a musical group of cultural importance. We trust that they are doing something that we need some time to understand, we trust in them. We have faith in their integrity that they have done something deserving of multiple listens.

After the release of “In Rainbows” there were discussions in several online forums that tried to unravel a code in binary that people thought existed that the band was hinting at all over the place, and had been for years. I don’t recall anything productive coming from those discussions, which ran parallel to surface arguments that stemmed from their “pay what you want” model that they had developed for the album. This is where most of the focus of the mainstream media was. People reached their own conclusions. Some felt that the physical release of the album was an admission from the band that their experiment had failed. Everyone ignored the main point the whole time was that if you release something officially, ahead of people that are going to just give it away for free anyway, there is some control there.

The real key is that people were talking. People were trying to unravel a supposed mystery, and nobody can conclude that it has been completely uncovered. Because of this we continue searching.

After a few listens one begins to sort things out. A few short motifs are memorized and the picture begins to come into focus. The acoustic guitar in “Give Up the Ghost” that sounds so intimate and subdued. The way in which that song opens up when an electric guitar makes a brief appearance and the vocals are looped and repeated, harmonizing into a swirl of dissipating sound before the bassline becomes the only thing we can hear.

Electronic glitches and other clipped up sounds permeate most of the album. Percussion and vocals are clearly the most prominent aspects of “The King of Limbs”. At first this makes the work difficult to grasp. There doesn’t seem to be enough melody and harmony to grab onto and hum along with. Perhaps this is the point. What ends up happening instead is really great. This alteration of the foundational elements allows the band to explore shifting metric pulses as the generators of the song structure. The songs exist without our participation. We can’t immediately internalize them, or sing along.

Radiohead
Radiohead

Think of the opening section of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”. There is the only melody at the very beginning of the work. The metric pulses seem to be lost in an ethereal state of suspended animation while the melodies are constantly spun out. Despite the unorthodoxy and apparent complexity the melodies have a fairly high level of memorability. That section gives way to a pounding, primal turn that features heavy use of downbowed strings with shifting accents that continually catch the audience off guard. That is where this album exists. In that juxtaposition. Where the rhythmic complexities take prominence and melody and harmony, though still very much there, are subjected to a more secondary role.

Music seems to change as we listen to it. Rather, our perception of the music adjusts as we listen and become more acquainted. We need to compartmentalize as humans. We have a space in our head for only a certain kind of music, so we force this album into that box. We change what we hear to what we want to hear, what we can hear and what we can understand. Soon, after a few dozen listens we are singing along to “Little by Little” while simultaneously wondering if that title is the band’s sly way of letting us know that that is exactly how we are coming into understanding this album.

They are still three steps ahead of us.

As the physical release date for the album approaches the band has announced that they will be publishing a newspaper. It will be free and available in major metropolitan areas. Nobody knew what exactly what was going to be published in the newspaper until yesterday, which is undoubtedly adding to the mystique surrounding the album release. Unfortunately people are also using this to dismiss the release as another piece of evidence that the band has lost its way. Do they really need to innovate everything, from the inside out with every release? What is a “newspaper album” anyway and does Radiohead really need to rush out and be the first band to release one?

There is also curiosity about the albums length, the shortest release by the band to date, as to whether or not there is going to be more to it. Will there be another release hot on its heels like the twins separated at birth that were “Kid A” and “Amnesiac”? The former seen by most as the first major point of departure for the band. The curiosity is no doubt stemming from the same people that were trying to break the binary code of “In Rainbows”.

The album opens with melodic and memorable looped opening that is soon overtaken by overlapping rhythms and disjointed bass. That very opening seems to spring to mind a state of déjà vu. It seems as though this has come from somewhere before. Perhaps it is just a result of listening to the album obsessively trying to get a firm understanding of it. The pulsating loops from the opening are then relegated to background bed track on top of which the remainder of the song is built. It serves as a constant pedal point that the rest of the material is weighed against. Peals of trumpets add a new layer, mimicking and varying the themes of Thom Yorke’s vocals.

“Morning Mr. Magpie” with its palm-muted guitar in driving rhythm with the off kilter hi-hat beating out borrowed metric pulses creates an incredible sense of restraint. Yorke’s voice is clear with a subtly distant shout of the lyrics. The interaction of guitars and bass here is similar to “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” from their “In Rainbows” album.

This seems to be their newly reinvented guitar arrangement style. Less like early Radiohead’s clear division of the standard rhythm guitar vs. lead guitar where Jonny Greenwood would hold back before bursting forth with angular lines with feedback drenched crunches and squeals out of the blue. The lines have once again become blurred.

The video for “Lotus Flower” has already been fed to the wolves at the meme machine of youtube, appealing to yet another level of audience. That audience seems to consist at least partly, if not mostly, of those that don’t even bother trying to listen to, let alone understand the music, instead creating a viral market from the ground up. Some of the results, though few original and none surprising, can be entertaining. It is appropriate that this song is the lead single, being that it is the most “song like” off the album and catchy with Yorke’s bluesy vocals spinning out a few hooks, though those hooks are unlike anything one would normally or previously think of as “catchy”.

After “Lotus Flower” the album seems to reach a breaking point. The feel doesn’t so much change as much as the style. Piano on “Codex” is shrouded in reverb, similar to that of “Pyramid Song” from the “Amnesiac” album. The peals of brass are also present on this track. “Give Up the Ghost” inserts a brightly strummed acoustic guitar into their sonic landscape.

“Seperator” sharply returns us to the style of the beginning of the album with very clean, clear mix and the drums re-entering and up front. The line that truly haunts from this song is “If you think this is over then you’re wrong” which seems to remind us that we think that there may be more to this. There may be a piece of the puzzle that we are missing. It seems that they really are playing with us. This song, like so many others on the album, has a way of really blossoming as it moves forward.

Not only does that song leave us wanting more, in a desperate search for something, but even after several listens we still don’t know what it is exactly that we are looking for. By this point it doesn’t really matter, we have succumbed to the album. We have allowed it to change the way that we think about listening to music, and what we typically expect from an album. This last track ends with a harmony that seems to go somewhere separate from the vocals. Yorke’s voice extends the harmony that is already  rich with intervals that one would typically not find outside of jazz.

“The King of Limbs” charts a path of exploration which is usual for Radiohead, but it seems to want to, at the same time, break off into a new direction within the album itself. Harmony is secondary to rhythm for parts, and then the opposite on the latter half of the album. The songs don’t necessarily feel segmented or choppy, they feel natural and are well written and intricately put together with utmost attention to detail. It’s this fission that develops across the album that helps get us to listen again and again in rapt attention as our minds adjust to Radiohead changing the game again. It meets our expectations by exceeding them, and that is why Radiohead will always have the upper hand.

[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/03-Little-By-Little.mp3|titles=Little By Little] [audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/07-Give-Up-The-Ghost.mp3|titles=Give Up The Ghost]

Buy it here: http://thekingoflimbs.com/

or here: http://tbdrecords.com/releases/radiohead-the-king-of-limbs/

 

2010, miscellaneous, music, songs, thoughts, writing

Sonic Youth Exegesis 1: "Hey Joni"

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I started doing this on twitter where periodically I would take a line from a Sonic Youth tune and expound upon it. The idea just came out of me being goofy and bored while listening to Daydream Nation one night. I just wanted to make the lyrics sound conversational, but in a really erudite and literate way, as if someone that was very proper, or perhaps went to a finishing school, would say them. I called these tweets by The Proper Sonic Youths. Some people started to enjoy it and I decided last night that I was going to extrapolate this idea on my blog by “translating” entire songs in this manner.

Specifically what I try to do when coming up with these is to follow the lyrics, line by line, using as many different words for the specifics in each line, but still holding the same meaning. Basically I’m taking the poetry and flow out of it and making it as dry as possible, like Thurston, Lee and Kim have been rendered hypnotized by a thesaurus. You’ll get it, just follow along if you know the song, which I have posted at the bottom.

exegesis | eksi jesis|
noun ( pl. -ses |-sez|)
critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture

Today’s exegesis comes from “Daydream Nation”. I pictured the lyrics of this track as if Lee were writing a letter to Joni (which is Joni Mitchell, if you didn’t know already). So I actually wrote down his letter. In case you can’t read my ( I mean….Lee’s…) handwriting, the text is copied below.

Dear Joni,

I would like to encourage you to place everything that has happened into the past. If you would do me this kindness I will offer to do the same. What is going on in your life right now is really quite confusing for you, I’m sure. Again, I would encourage you to just forget about all of those things that happened and just try to stay positive.

Be honest with me, Joni. I mean, we are in this together if you want me to help you out then I will. Perhaps it’s a result of living in this town, a change of location might help to guide your life in the proper direction. I’m remembering when we were younger, with our lofty ambitions, but you were unwilling to break the mold, until the one day we sat talking in the forest and I think that is where you finally had a breakthrough. We really bonded then, and I don’t think there’s any going back after what we said to each other.

Don’t you think I’m trustworthy anymore? Am I not a good person? How do you plan on turning your life around without me? When are you going to make good on all the promises that you’ve made to yourself?…Just assure me you won’t do anything you or I will later regret.

I dreamt the other night that you were standing in the middle of a large field, tall grass all around you, with gunfire in the distance. You were the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen, lighting up the sky in your brilliance. You weren’t concerned with anything but the precise moment you were in, right then and there. You were hoping to hold on to that moment forever.

Please, just put it all in the past. I’m serious about this and it’s all I can think about and you know I’m right! Just forget it, and I’ll forget it. Forget what “could” happen, everything is just a disaster right now. Don’t think about what did happen, and move forward with a positive attitude.

The years fly by, just place them behind you. Live in the present from now on.

Sincerely,

Lee – of The Proper Sonic Youths

[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/07-Hey-Joni.mp3|titles=Hey Joni]

2010, miscellaneous, music, songs, thoughts

A by no means complete list of emotionally devastating lyrics

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Musicians are of that breed of individual that wear their emotions on their sleeve. They seem to feel them more intensely than others, or are at least worse at hiding their emotions than everyone else. So many musicians, that didn’t die from a drug overdose (which might be a reaction to feeling emotions in itself), chose to kill themselves after a life of writing desperately painful, heartfelt songs and honest lyrics. Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart, Nick Drake overdosed on his anti-depressants after several years of insomnia and depression, and Elliott Smith possibly stabbed himself in the heart.

Words can be powerful enough, but, combined with music, some artists can really pull a listener in and make them actually feel how they truly feel. It is the purpose of art to make others feel and this collection of lyrics certainly could make even the coldest heart empathetic.

Andrew Bird, “Armchairs” from the album “Armchair Apocrypha”
“You didn’t write, you didn’t call. It didn’t cross your mind at all.”
The despair in this lyric is pretty intense. It conjures images of waiting by the phone, hoping that the one person that you love will just contact you and let you know that they feel the same. The call never comes, your heart sinks in the realization of your unrequited love. The time comes where you have to slowly let all of those built up feelings go, as they were misguided in the first place.

This longing is only heightened by Bird’s arrangement at this point in the song. Considering that it is over 7 minutes long it is really a daring bit of songwriting and arranging. He manages to, just before this point in the song, strip away nearly everything until only his voice remains, whispering into your ear. As soon as the line in question is sun everything comes back after a brief and dramatic build. The solitary upper pedal tone produced by the violin highlights the deep emotional torment plaguing the narrator of the song. Very powerful.

Listen

Titus Andronicus, “No Future Part 3: Escape from No Future”, from the album “The Monitor”
“I used to look myself in the mirror at the end of every day, but I took the one thing that made me beautiful and I threw it away.”
This line pretty much speaks for itself. Taken from the perspective of someone who has, apparently, fucked up their life beyond repair, or at least beyond what they think is reparable. There is so much regret that he can’t even stand to face himself anymore. The absolute bottom has been reached, and what is worse is that he knows that things used to be better but is unsure as to whether or not things will return to the way that they once were.

Musically this song is set in 3 general sections. This line appears at the beginning of the 2nd of those sections. Patrick Stickles growls and spits these words out with ruthless efficiency. He knows the pain he feels, and angrily shouts it out through clenched teeth. In an album that is full of emotionally devastating and honest lyrics this one stands out to me as one of the most affecting.

Listen

Hurricane Bells, “This Year” from the album “Tonight is the Ghost”
“You can always walk away if you see me comin’. I don’t think about you, I don’t think about you.”
It’s hard to accurately picture this lyric or portray it outside of the context of the song, which moves ably from optimism to pessimism from line to line. There is a sense that two people need to be apart, but no reason is given as to why. Perhaps neither of them completely understands why they need to be apart. It is clear, however, that the narrator is trying to be strong about it, knowing that he is going to go on doing what he needs to do and if that other person happens to come across him then it is up to them to turn around if they don’t want to or can’t deal with the sight of him. Meanwhile he tries to convince himself that he doesn’t think about her. His repeating this immediately, like a mantra is telling of the fact that he really isn’t strong enough to deal with the situation.

Listen

The Burning Hell, “It Happens in Florida”, from the album “Tick-Tock”
“Love, it’s like a hurricane. It happens in Florida. It destroys everything.”
The Burning Hell are full of tongue in cheek, self-deprecating lyrics. This one hits close to the heart though. There is a sincerity in this song that seems to want to let the listener know that they are serious this time.

This line is the final lyric of the song that is one continuous build. It is preceded by other lines that are borderline absurd, but after hearing these words the simple chord progression continues, unchanged for 2 more minutes allowing the listener to ponder the gravity of some of those lyrics that they may have previously considered silly. I have already talked about this one in detail here.

Listen

Tom Waits, “Georgia Lee” from the album “Mule Variations”
“Be sure to find me. I want you to find me and we’ll play all over, we will play all over again”
Tom Waits is a true artist and prolific songwriter. The grit in his voice lends an emotional power that few are able to muster. The fact that this song is simply his voice and piano with double bass also adds to the desperate loneliness of the subject matter. Abandonment, from family and even from God. There is no way to write a more heart wrenching song. The line here is the definition of devastating, longing for the past that will never return. “Be sure to find me, I want you to find me” speaks of our desire to be wanted and loved by others, but this song doesn’t find any silver lining. Sometimes you will be forgotten. It isn’t ones right to be loved, it can only be a hope and dream and sometimes dreams go unfulfilled. Sometimes there isn’t a silver lining, sometimes there is no salvation for people. Tom Waits is honest enough, and artist enough to speak this truth and I can’t imagine a soul on this Earth not being deeply touched by the setting of this lyric.

2010, music, songs, thoughts

Song in too much detail: The Burning Hell – "It Happens in Florida"

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I just want to write something, hopefully brief, about a single song. The song in question is by a band from Peterborough, Ontario, Canada that goes by the name The Burning Hell. The band’s personnel changes from album to album and from show to show, the two times that I have seen them. The main songwriter and driving force behind it all is Mathias Kom. He plays a mean ukulele and writes some of the best, albeit also some of the quirkiest, lyrics around.

There is an underlying feeling of tongue in cheek, self-deprecating humor present in most songs that Kom delivers in a very convincing and very low baritone. You never know if a song is going to be depressingly looking at the upside of things or cheerily looking at the depressing side of things. This song, falls more towards the latter, but not very much.

It begins with a lone strummed guitar, and the song continually builds for 5 minutes. It doesn’t simply build in volume, but instruments are added, lyrics become more dramatic, the singing becomes more desperate, Kom reels you in as if he is pleading with you on his knees.

There is no verse/chorus/verse structure in place here. Simply sets of couplets that each begin with the word “Love”, comparing it to everything from a monster truck, to an interstate, to a hurricane. Some of the comparisons initially elicit a smirk, or maybe more, but the tone of the song will instantly dart its eyes at you and make you feel awkward. This does not paint love in a favorable light by any means.

I think the lyrics speak for themselves. I have always just loved this song, it’s very moving, and very powerful. Have a listen via the link at the bottom of the post.

Mathias Kom of the Burning Hell

It Happens in Florida

Love, it’s like a hurricane:it happens in Florida, it gets into everything.
Love, it’s like a monster truck: it fills up whole stadiums, but it crushes smaller trucks
Love, it’s like a marmoset: it may be small and cute, but sometimes it eats its young
Love, it’s like a trailer park: ugly but functional, the rent is cheap enough
Love, it’s like a garbage man: it collects waste and filth, it smells like rotting flesh
Love, it’s like an interstate: it gets you from place to place, but it’s littered with dead raccoons
Love, it’s like a newborn child: seems interesting when it’s young, gets pedestrian after a while
Love, it’s like a hurricane: it happens in Florida, it destroys everything.

It Happens in Florida

2009, miscellaneous, music, personal, philosophy, thoughts, writing

Object Permanence Pt. 2: Crowd Control

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How much control does an artist have then is another question. The painter can fill up the canvas and decide how the work is going to be framed. How much control does an artist have over how the work is displayed? Would there be a problem with hanging a certain painting in proximity to the work of another artist? How much can we expect the audience to cast off as “not the work of the artist”.

There was a sculpture of sorts on display in one room of the new Modern building at the Art Institute of Chicago. The sculpture involved a pile of white rocks piled up on a conical figuration with tiny rocks on the outskirts and larger rocks towards the center and peak. Intersecting the rocks were mirrors in the shape of an asterisk. As I looked at this exhibit I wondered aloud to my brother, “do you think the artist comes to the museum that this work is displayed in to set it up or do you think that it is shipped with very specific instructions as to how it needs to be exactly?” We left it up in the air.

This is to say, how much of a degree of aleatory is there in all the arts? I know that Cage was convinced (and has convinced many others, including myself) that there is a certain degree of aleatory in all music. The variables being performers, performance space, conductor, instruments, tempo, audience…the list is infinite.

While in Chicago we also visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. There was a simple sculpture made of found items that were hung from a wire frame and meant to form a smiling face. Though it was enclosed in a plastic box and therefore unable to be touched, the string from which most of the sculpture was hanging had twisted somehow and it made the eyes, nose and mouth of the face appear perpendicular to the outer wire frame forming some sort of cubist idea of a face. This, I can say with almost complete certainty, was not the original intention of the artist. Should I, however, take it as I saw it? Or should I correct what I feel is “wrong” and remember the sculpture as being that of a right and true “face”? How far can one take this idea? I don’t think that many artists would appreciate the idea of their audience “perfecting” their art.

With a piece of music, how much is the audience expected to “correct”? There are going to be slight mistakes made, there are going to be choices made by the conductor that make some parts seem more important than others, and there are going to be cues missed and measures accidentally excluded perhaps by a particularly nervous percussionist that hasn’t played for 42 bars and lost count or was not cued. How much of the music, then, actually is what the composer wrote? I realize that this does overlap with thoughts about degrees of aleatory in music, but I would like to examine it one step further from an audience perspective. Is an audience experiencing music and taking it for granted that the performance was perfect? This begs the question about artist control. Exactly how much control does the composer have once the score leaves their hands?

2009, miscellaneous, philosophy, thoughts, writing

Object Permanence

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This past week I was in Chicago, a giant cultural leap forward from the small town that I currently occupy. This trip not only afforded me the opportunity to spend time with my brother and sister in law, but also to wander through the brand new Modern building of the Chicago Institute of Art.
I could go on for pages about how wonderful this new space is and what a beautiful building Chicago now has, and how great it is to see that art is flourishing, which stands in direct opposition to my myopic views on art as directly influenced by living in a one-horse town. Perhaps sometimes I am a bit too negative. This is not the point that I want to be exploring right now. When I have the chance to look at great art it makes me think. I have a few thoughts that are constants, and usually a new idea or two will crop up.
It is taking me far too long to get to the point here, I apologize. The point is this: should I, or anyone for that matter, take pictures of what they see at art galleries, to take with them? Should the experience of seeing a great work of art be something that is brought with a person wherever they go (via storage on a laptop or online gallery)?
There are so many connotations here that I can hardly stop to gather my thoughts. Let’s begin with the idea that art is to be taken with you when you go.

One takes a picture of a painting, or a sculpture or anything. First of all what is one expecting from this work of art? Is this sort of like portable “inspiration”? Does art have the ability to stir up thoughts when it is taken out of its “natural habitat” (being an art gallery)? What is an artworks “natural habitat”? If the painting is currently on display in Chicago, in that new building in that city in the summer and then travels the next week or better yet the next season to a museum in Seattle in the winter in a building that is of a completely different style of architecture…..will they both garner similar thoughts in the same person if they travel with the painting? How much does the location (which takes into account everything inherent in that word i.e. geographical location, climate, even the history of that area with regards to their general feelings of how arts and artists should be treated) affect how the viewer sees that work of art?

My point being how permanent is the experience of viewing art? Or better yet, how permanent should it be? This is, of course, ultimately up to the individual. This puts the “plastic” arts in quite a contrasting light than music. Or does it?

Perhaps bringing up more questions than answers is a really annoying way of going about things. The reason I am doing so is because I don’t even really know how I feel. I do believe that the object of art is to express what can not be expressed in words. That is the goal of the artist, no matter what medium they are working in I believe that this is the goal. We as artists are attempting to get to the root of the human experience. We are trying to create a universal language that can be perceived through any of the senses. As a musician should I expect my audience to be swept up in the moment while listening to one of my works and suddenly be driven to do great things, or feel one way or another? I suppose this would be the ultimate compliment, but am I thinking about it as I write? Absolutely not.

How much, as artists, can we expect our audience to take our works with them wherever they go? I know that I will never forget how I feel looking at the works of Pollack or Picasso. I can constantly turn over in my mind what those works conjure inside of me, and perhaps time and again I need to be reminded by looking at the painting again. Looking at it on my computer would certainly be a good way to spark those thoughts once again, but I can easily admit that the experience of viewing that work in that way will not even come close to the experience of viewing it for the first time in that clean, bright white room. The silence, the austere atmosphere of the gallery; all of these things add to the experience of the art.