I wouldn’t want to have to pick a favorite Christmas carol, but if I had to, I think this would be it. I think part of its appeal is the combination of the minor-key melody and lively good cheer—quite boisterous, in some performances. It’s very English and conjures all those wintry English Christmas associations that we Americans tend to love: holly, snow, and all the rest.
I’ve just spent an hour or so searching YouTube for a performance to include here. I couldn’t find my favorite, which is Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band’s, from my favorite Christmas album, A Tapestry of Carols (that’s a link to the eMusic page, where you can hear samples). One of the things I was looking for was a performance that includes all the verses. I didn’t find that, either. But here’s a good one, by the King’s College Choir (3:35):
And here, for something with a different flavor, more comparable to Maddy Prior’s, is Loreena McKennit’s version, featuring her characteristic Middle Eastern-flavored instrumentation. I have mixed feelings about her voice: it’s very good, but a bit...I don’t know, over-emotive or something. Still, this is very nice (6:49):
This is the third, and maybe last, of my investigations into classic punk. (The phrase itself is amusing, as the aging of a youth fad always is.) As I noted in the other two installments, on The Ramones and The Minutemen, I was not drawn to the whole punk vibe when it was new (I was in my late 20s at the time). And I’m still not. But I like this album, or at least about half of it.
If there was any pretense at the time of its release (1979) that this was just a group of untrained kids doing what comes naturally, I hope it was laughed at, because it’s plainly ridiculous. These guys are real musicians, and it shows. I don’t usually pay much attention to the drums in rock music, but I can’t help noticing that this is a really good drummer. Most of the songs here are top-notch lively impassioned catchy rock-and-roll. The title track is an absolute killer, by far the best thing on the album in my opinion.
This was originally a double LP, and to my taste there’s too much of it; of the 19 songs, at least half a dozen don’t do much for me, and most of those are on what would have been the second disk of the original release, assuming that the CD preserves the original song order. I think there’s a terrific 40-minute album in here. In general I don’t find their lyrics very interesting, so the album wouldn’t land near the top of my personal chart. But it’s good stuff. And anybody who wants to put the title song in their list of the top 50 or so greatest-ever rock singles would get no argument from me.
I was surprise to find that I recognized the last cut, “Train in Vain.” I had heard it on the radio without knowing its name or realizing it was The Clash, without thinking of it as anything very out of the ordinary. Outside the context of the album it just seems like a pretty good pop song, which makes me think that if this was punk, then punk was less a matter of specific musical values than of style and attitude.
I wonder if it was some natural quirk or a deliberate mannerism that made Joe Strummer often sing as if his tongue were anesthetized.
I haven’t done much listening this week since Tuesday afternoon when I listened to Mahler’s 2nd. So, since I’ve been on the subject of Mahler, I’m going to cheat a little and pull a comment on his 1st from an old Sunday Night Journal. I was writing about a concert I’d attended and I had this to say about the symphony:
This was as enthralling a musical experience as I’ve ever had. It had been so long since I’d heard the symphony that it sounded fresh, and I found it to be even better than I remembered. Mahler originally saw the work as depicting an artist’s innocent exuberance, rejection, disillusionment, suffering, and rebirth, but I hear something else. From my vantage point in the early 21st century I hear this late 19th century work as a prophecy of what the next hundred years would bring. The third movement in particular, Frere Jacques transmuted into a funeral march that turns slightly deranged as it goes on, seemed a window opening onto the distant vista of Germany’s impending madness. And the putative triumph of the fourth movement seemed overwrought and unsound, a victory likely to prove temporary.
You can read the entire post here; it’s mainly a tribute to the Mobile Symphony and other small orchestras. I always recommend this symphony to anyone who doesn’t know Mahler, because it’s of a manageable length and very melodic (the opening is magical to me). However, the discussion here of the 2nd indicated that my view is not shared by everyone.
Amiina is the group of four young women who comprise the string section for Sigur Rós in their Heima concerts, and I think on some of their studio recordings as well. Having discovered from the credits of Heima that they are a musical unit in their own right, I went looking for more information and discovered this wonderful album. If you’ve seen Heima and liked what you saw of them there, you’ll like this; it’s very much in keeping with their contributions to Sigur Rós. It’s not rock music at all, but quiet, subtle instrumental music played on a variety of instruments; the occasional vocals are wordless.
The album cover is an excellent indicator of what you hear:
There’s something about this music that strikes me as what young women should be, young women a little past girlhood, no longer high-strung and flighty, but not yet into, or not far into, the heavy responsibilities and inevitable suffering of marriage and motherhood. It’s pretty, modest, gentle, quiet, pensive, sweet, inward, a little whimsical. It makes me see a quiet and sunny kitchen, with a handful of wild flowers in a brightly painted mug on the windowsill.
Here is the eMusic page; as usual, if you like the samples, you’ll like the whole album. I especially recommend the 2nd track, “Rugla.” I have no idea what any of the titles mean.
Music of the Week: Various Artists - Mariachi Music of Mexico
Based on snippets heard here and there, I’ve wanted for some time to hear some genuine mariachi music. There’s a ton of it on eMusic—a search for “mariachi” turns up 153 artists and 117 albums, and that would catch only titles that actually included the word—but I had no way of knowing what was good. Where folk music is concerned, my taste tends toward the rougher and less polished—in general, the more it’s slicked up, the more it loses its flavor. This album caught my eye first because of its cover. It looked just old enough and low-budget enough to be authentic. When I noticed that it was distributed by Smithsonian Folkways, I really got interested. Then the samples convinced me to download the whole thing. Good move, as it turned out.
In the tradition of the Folkways label, these are field recordings of a sort, from the early ‘50s. I don’t know anything about mariachi in general, so I’ll just say this is great stuff. It’s not polished at all—the violins are often a bit off-key, and the sound quality is mediocre—but it’s not crude, either; I’m still trying to get my head around some of the rhythms. It has in common with reggae an infectious high-spirited quality, sort of an automatic mood-brightener. One Friday night a few weeks ago I was feeling rather low and found that a few tracks from this album combined with a few sips of bourbon was a wonderful cure.
Listen to the sample of the first track here. If you don’t like it, this music is not for you. If you do, you’ll enjoy the whole album. You can hear a different set of samples and read the fascinating liner notes here, as well as order a cd if you don’t do mp3s.
I’ll mention in passing that the world owes a huge debt to Folkways Records. Read more about its history and work here.
Your first reaction to the phrase “Heavy metal cello” might be to laugh; it sounds as if it would just be a stunt. Apocalyptica is four Finnish cellists, and I wonder if maybe their rock experimentation started out as something of a stunt, as their first album was a set of Metallica covers. But what they’ve done is much more than that; it’s a potent and versatile sound, unlike anything else I know. A friend of mine put me on to the group a month or two ago and I got this self-titled album from eMusic. I can’t say it’s a great album overall, but I keep coming back to it because what I like in it I like very much.
Start with the basic sound. If the first thing you heard was one of their hard rock uptempo songs like the first track here, “Life Burns!,” and you weren’t listening closely, you might think you were just hearing heavy electric guitars playing power chords. But there’s something different about this sound, sort of a rich deep growl, that’s very powerful. And most of the tracks combine this with the warm singing natural tone of the cello, to sometimes very beautiful effect.
I like at least half the tracks here a great deal, especially the melancholy ballads like “Bittersweet” and “Farewell.” What’s missing is a fully-developed artistic identity. This is almost all instrumental music, and pop music is a partly verbal art: it needs words and voices. The vocals here are very ordinary, sort of a generic and lackluster hard rock style; I like “Bittersweet” in spite of the vocals, not because of them. With a really gifted songwriter and singer, this group could do something really important.
Here’s an instrumental version of “Bittersweet” that really showcases their sound. It’s 5:25 long and doesn’t get heavy until about 3:50. Although you don’t hear it on this track, they’re capable of some impressive virtuoso “shredding” as practiced by guitar players like Joe Satriani.
Music of the Week: Music from the Hearts of Space - Shadowplay
Ok, I’m going to confess a guilty pleasure, because I really ought to give these folks a bit of publicity, at least, for all the enjoyment they’ve given me over the years. The guilty pleasure is what’s variously called ambient or space music, or, more bluntly, background music—except that it isn’t only background music, because if it’s good it can keep your attention if you wish to give it.
In Brian Eno’s famous definition, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” That (like many things that look simple) is harder to accomplish than one might think. (Here is the Wikipedia article if this is new to you and you want to know more.)
Music from the Hearts of Space (I always cringe a bit when I say that) is an hour-long weekly radio program that specializes in this kind of music. I’ve been listening to (and recording) their broadcasts for years. This week’s is especially good. It’s called Shadowplay and is a collection of mostly cello-and-piano-based chamber compositions; here’s the playlist. There is really some good music here, instrumental works that don’t fit any standard category.
So if it’s good music, why do I call this a guilty pleasure? Well, there is a certain California/New Age smarm and hokum about the program (hearts of space?!?). And the concept of ambient music is kind of hard to defend. And a lot of the music presented is, well, not going to be of permanent interest. But the show’s repertoire ranges from electronic science-fictiony “soundscapes” to folk music to very substantial contemporary classical works: for instance, one broadcast was dedicated almost exclusively to an hour of music from Arvo Part’s monumental Kanon Pokajonen. A final word on the repertoire, which will be enough said for those who know: ECM appears frequently.
You can sign up to listen to the weekly program online on Sundays at no cost, or for three dollars a month you can hear the weekly broadcast whenever and as often as you like during that week. (And, um...if you’re just a bit knowledgeable you can figure out a way to record them.) There are other plans that give you access to their entire library.
So: I’m posting this at 2pm USA Central time on Sunday; depending on where you are, there’s still time for you to go to the site, register, and hear Shadowplay, assuming you have a high-speed Internet connection.
Music of the Week: Delius - On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring
Many years ago, roughly 1970, I had an LP that included this and several more of Delius’s more familiar orchestral works. Although I thought the music somewhat bland and shapeless, I came to like it, but more as a sort of tranquilizer than as music properly speaking; it was very peaceful and for twenty minutes or so took me away from the very stressful life I was leading to a much nicer place, a place of green pastoral beauty and running streams.
Somewhere in that chaotic period the LP got away from me, and I don’t think I heard Delius again until recently, when, in a bout of nostalgia, I got this collection from eMusic. So far I haven’t gotten past the first piece, because I keep wanting to hear it again. What absolutely beautiful music—a pure, open sweetness to which the title is perfectly suited (although I admit I’ve never heard a cuckoo). You can hear it in this audio-only YouTube clip:
If you haven’t heard it before, it may not grab you right away, but give it a chance.
The pronunciation of Sigur Rós seems to be, very roughly: “seeger,” as in Bob Seeger, “rohss”—“o” as in “rose”, “s” as in “toss.” According to the Wikipedia article on the band it means “victory rose,” and is the name of the singer’s baby sister, who was born on the day the band was formed. That tells you something about them: this is not your average rock band, and not even your average indie band.
This is a documentary which opens with these words:
Summer 2006: Having toured the world over, Sigur Ros return home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland.
The title means “at home.” The format is pretty simple: images of Iceland and its people interspersed with performances from the concerts and conversations with the band members.
The visuals of Iceland are stunningly beautiful. My wife’s interest in pop music is about as close to zero as it can be without being totally non-existent; measured on a hospital monitor, it would be pronounced dead. (And yes, it is pretty funny that we’re married, but it just goes to show…something or other.) But she watched this with me because she was interested in seeing the pictures of Iceland. Part way through she said “Let’s move there.” Really, it’s that beautiful.
If you haven’t heard any of their music: it consists mostly of long, slow, mysterious compositions that usually start quietly and build to crescendos, sometimes quite noisy ones. They may sound similar to each other on first hearing, but they do grow on you. There are some truly enchanted melodies, perhaps made more so by the singing, which is mostly a single very high-pitched male voice (I guess a lot of it is falsetto). I don’t have any idea what the lyrics are about, as they’re all either in Icelandic or an invented nonsense language called Vonlenska, or Hopelandic. For all I know they could just be singing “oh baby I love you so” over and over again, but the effect is enigmatic.
I don’t want to go on too long here; I only want to recommend this very strongly. But I can’t leave without saying something about the whole atmosphere of the thing. It couldn’t be more different from the phoniness, vulgarity, conventional hipsterism (or simple stupidity, depending on the band), drugginess, and so forth that accompany most rock bands. The concerts are held in all sorts of venues, outdoors and in, and are attended by crowds of the most ordinary-seeming people: yes, there are the young people with green hair, nose rings, etc., but also whole families—middle-aged parents, children, old people. And for the most part the music is something in which they can all find something to enjoy. Some of the most beautiful images in the film are of the faces of people in the audience. And Sigur Rós themselves are almost freakishly unpretentious in conversation; they seem like genuinely decent people without big egos or the generally adversarial stance to the world of ordinary people that so often afflicts artists all across the spectrum. In concert they seem utterly focused on the music; there’s none of the bogus extravagant posing that makes many bands unwatchable to me.
In sum: do yourself a favor and find this. There is a second disk, by the way, which I haven’t seen yet, which I think is straight concert footage. Also by the way, the strings are provided by a string quartet called Amiina, who seem to be interesting in their own right.
Here’s the trailer, which gives you a pretty good taste of what to expect (3:54):
And here is a rather remarkable video. I’m only providing the link, because you need to read the info (click “more info&rdquo to the right of the video box). I don’t entirely understand the story, but…well, like I said, this is not your average rock band. You’ll need a bit of time, as the video is over nine minutes long.
Music of the Week: Scarlatti - Sonata in E K.380 (piano vs. harpsichord)
The first Scarlatti I ever heard was a collection played on the harpsichord by Wanda Landowska. And for a long time I didn’t want to hear his music played any other way. The truth is that I have never really loved the sound of the piano, in spite of all the great music that’s been written for it. And I’ve always liked the sound of the harpsichord. Now that I think about it, that Landowska recording may have been the first time I heard the instrument; certainly one of the first times, anyway, as it was back when I was in college.
But I’m beginning to change my mind. I don’t own the Landwoska recording (I think it was out of print for a long time) but I have a couple of other Scarlatti-on-harpsichord recordings and never really warmed up to them. The sound often seemed just as jangly and clanky and buzzy as people who don’t like the harpsichord have always accused it of being. I’ve begun to wonder if maybe it was something in the atmosphere of the Landowska recording that I liked; it was recorded in the ‘50s at the latest, maybe earlier, and perhaps the poorer reproduction actually improved the sound of the instrument.
Anyway, I’ve recently been comparing piano and harpsichord versions and finding that I prefer the piano: more expressive, more varied, more clear, and generally more listenable for a longer period of time (although three or four Scarlatti sonatas in a row is usually enough). I’ve heard four versions of K.380, one of my favorites (if you’ve ever heard much Scarlatti you’d probably recognize it): two piano, two harpsichord. Only one of these is by a performer, Horowitz, generally considered great, so maybe the comparison is unfair, but I do like his best of the four. I resisted it a bit, as Horowitz seems to play Scarlatti as if he were Chopin, which doesn’t seem exactly right, but, still, it’s very beautiful.
The Horowitz performance is from a Carnegie Hall appearance in 1968, found on YouTube, though with fairly bad sound. (I have the same sonata on an LP, Horowitz in Moscow, but I like this performance better.)
And here’s a harpsichord version; compare for yourself—the instruments, anyway; it’s probably not fair to compare the performers..
By the way, both these seem to omit some repeats, or something: at any rate they’re barely half as long as the other performances I have (Michele Campanella on piano, Richard Lester on harpsichord ). I’m inclined to think the omissions are a good idea, much as I like this sonata. And I do still like the sound of the harpsichord, but less as a solo instrument than as a color mixed with strings or other instruments.
Music of the Week: Metallic Falcons - Desert Doughnuts
Although this album could be categorized broadly as coming from the world of indie rock, it’s not a collection of songs but an extended sonic ambience in which fragments of music appear and disappear. I would think most people would find it either irritating or captivating. I’m definitely in the latter group.
How to describe it? Imagine a ghost town in the desert, “ghost” not only in the sense of being abandoned, but in the sense of being inhabited by ghosts. First there are the ghosts of the late 1800s when the town was born and died with a gold rush that soon fizzled out, or was built on the path of a railroad that proved to have no good reason to exist. And then there are ghosts of the mid-1900s, when hippies and rock bands used it as a brief escape from the city. You’ve been set down in the middle of the street (there’s only one) in the middle of the night. And you start to hear sounds coming out of the darkness: distant instruments and voices from the old music hall, a rock band fooling around with half-finished songs, whispers, sad young girls singing of loneliness and longing, encounters with strange beings (perhaps angels) and the sounds of the desert itself.
If that sounds at all intriguing to you, you’d probably like this. It’s mainly the work of two young women, and has a sort of guarded whimsy that I’ve noticed occasionally in sensitive young women who seem to be trying to escape or protect themselves from the brutal sexual climate of the times—notice the cover art, here, where you can also hear samples. And here’s a video; this track, “Airships,” is one of the more straightforward ones. By the way, there’s no sound until about 37 seconds in, so don’t crank the volume on your PC till after that. Length: 3:55.
Music of the Week: The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee
I listened to this album once and thought “wow, that’s brilliant, in a twisted sort of way.” Then several months went by before I got around to listening to it again, I think partly because I was in no big hurry to revisit the twisted part. When I finally did, I half-expected to change my mind about the brilliant part. But I didn’t. The Mountain Goats are, or at least were for a long time, a mainly one-man project, and that man, John Darnielle, is one of the most gifted songwriters in pop music, especially in his lyrics.
Musically, this is a pretty stripped-down album, although according to the reviews it’s actually more polished and varied than previous Mountain Goats releases. It’s mostly one or two acoustic guitars, Darnielle’s voice, and occasional percussion, electric guitar, bass, piano, and organ. Most of the guitar you hear is a very propulsively strummed acoustic. Darnielle’s voice is nothing very special, but it seems perfectly suited to the material: direct, pointed, able to convey a combination of anger and despair with controlled vehemence that only makes it more powerful.
So where does the twisted part come in? Well, this is a sort of concept album about an unhappy married couple who have moved, for reasons left obscure, to Tallahassee, where they are engaged in a sort of warfare which is clearly going to be the end of the marriage. When I say they’re “unhappy” I mean…well, here’s a sample lyric. This song begins with a pretty and gentle guitar figure and the words “My love is like…” So you think a tender moment is coming, but what you get is:
My love is like a powder keg My love is like a powder keg In the corner of an empty warehouse Somewhere just outside of town About to burn down
The last verse begins “Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania…” The title of the song is “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” with that traffic as a metaphor for a situation in which two people are busy accumulating weapons to use against each other. Here’s another sample, from the song that seems the emotional climax or rather nadir of the album, “No Children:”
Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong I hope it stays dark forever I hope the worst isn’t over
I’m not much of a fan of bitter domestic dramas in any medium, but the thing about this one is that it’s extremely funny. Yes, even those lines I just quoted, in their musical context and with Darnielle’s sardonic delivery, can make you laugh. Rob O’Connor’s eMusic review here says it very well. You can also hear samples at that link.
By the way, an extra attraction for anyone who’s ever lived on the Gulf Coast is that the lyrics are very evocative of the atmosphere—the heat and humidity—of our region.
This is the only thing I’ve heard by The Mountain Goats. I definitely plan to hear more.
I hadn’t heard this for years before this week, but I must have listened to it a lot at a more leisurely time in my life, because it was very familiar to me. I was about to say it was like meeting an old friend, but when one meets an old friend after twenty or thirty years there is usually a certain shock involved, which is not the case here. I remember that it was one of my favorites among the symphonies, and that’s still true. A few impressions, encouraged by Pentimento, who pointed out, in response to my hesitation in discussing classical music without a technical vocabulary, that critics used to work this way all the time:
The first movement is Beethoven in his robust dramatic mode, and as good as any similar ones in the other symphonies. The emergence of what I take to be the main theme in the first movement (I’m always a little hazy about these things) seems to me one of Beethoven’s great moments.
The second movement is a better funeral march than the funeral march in the Third, and seems to me to prefigure Mahler’s gloomy marches and dances. I’m not sure whether this is what Wagner had in mind when he described the Seventh as “the apotheosis of the dance,” but to me it seems less a dance than a lonely walk over grey hills under grey skies, burdened by regret, brightened once or twice by happy memories and a break in the clouds, ending in resignation.
The third movement is the second’s polar opposite: an excited revelation, unexpected good news, with a pause at the trio to let it sink in and to give a prayer of thanks. A very brief moment at the end acknowledges that all good news in this life is provisional.
As the fourth movement began I recalled that I had always thought it something of a letdown, and I still do. Well, letdown isn’t exactly the right word, because it actually cranks up the excitement past the level of the third, but it doesn’t seem to me the grand pull-it-all-together finale that one wants or expects. It’s almost like a second scherzo. But the sort of cavalry-charge theme that appears three times is wonderful. Perhaps there’s something technical going on that makes it fit in way that I don’t get.
The last two movements really rock, by the way. I wonder that some ambitious prog-rock group of the ‘70s didn’t try to work up parts of them.
I was about to skip Music of the Week, not having had time to write, but instead I’ll point you to a couple of wonderful songs from The Clientele’s wonderful album, Suburban Light, because I was listening to them on my drive this weekend and thinking how much I like them. If you’re old enough to have nostalgia for the English music of the mid-’60s, or if you just like the music, or maybe just if you’ve ever been in love, these are likely to push your buttons.
“6am Morningside” (1:54):
“Reflections After Jane” (3:47); I don’t know what the video has to do with the song:
What a lovely, graceful, gracious, serene, generous, and noble work. Not profound in itself, perhaps, as compared to some of the other symphonies, it seems to imply a consciousness of profundity, a sense that, yes, there are great questions and probably troubles to be dealt with, but at the moment life is showing us its benevolent face and we are content with that. Although there is plenty of movement in it there is an underlying peace—not at all a naïve peace, a peace that has not known or has forgotten war, but an almost transcendent peace, a peace proper to the aftermath of the Third and Fifth. The brief thunderstorm opens no abyss, but serves only as a contrast to the prevailing fresh sunlight and temperate breezes. This is life as we would like it to be, and as Beethoven too rarely experienced it: joyful activity and joyful contemplation, with the occasional storm, invigorating but not dangerous, serving only as a contrast and to keep the meadows green and the brook flowing.
I was never really grabbed by this one in the past, but I’ll put it among my favorites now. At this point the favorites—3, 4, 5, and 6—outnumber the non-favorites, which rather distorts the meaning of the term.
Music of the Week: The Mermen - A Glorious Lethal Euphoria
The Mermen are an instrumental trio roughly classified as neo-surf, but the relationship between their music and that of, say, Dick Dale (“Misirlou”) or The Chantays (“Pipeline”) is about like that between Beethoven’s symphonies and Haydn’s. This album might be described succinctly as Dick Dale meets Jimi Hendrix. The reverb and the minor-key melodies—that general early ‘60s vibe—are here, but they’re only the starting point for a pretty wild ride, sweetly beautiful or hard-rocking passages spiced with howling and shrieking distorted guitar, a combination of melody and noise that I love.
I’ve forgotten how I first heard of the group, but it was a good ten years ago that I bought this album. I was very taken with it, and in fact I put it on a desert-island list here a year or two ago. But I hadn’t listened to it for some years until I got a yen for it last week. It doesn’t seem quite as good as I remember, but it’s still really fine. My favorite tracks are the long ones, especially the nine-minute-plus “Between I and Thou” and “And the Flowers They’ll Bloom,” which are basically fairly simple, pretty figures that serve as a basis for variations exhibiting a wide, wild range of guitar colors and dynamics.
This was the first time I’d ever listened to the album on my home stereo—I had previously heard it only in the car, where there is almost no bass detectable. I was a little surprised to discover that the group has a real thunder-lizard low end. And the bass player is really good.
I looked for some Mermen videos on YouTube and found some, but none that really sound like this album. If the videos, mostly recent and all live, are a fair sample, their live sound is simpler and less saturated with feedback and distortion than their recordings. You can hear samples from this and their other albums here (you have to scroll down to get to this album).
Music of the Week: The Tom Baker Quartet - Look What I Found
Ok, I admit I never would have heard this disk if I didn’t have a familial connection to one of the players. And it’s basically not my favorite kind of music, being a free jazz/improv sort of thing (that label doesn’t quite do it justice, but it’s a good place to start). But I’ve really come to like it. It’s an unusual combination of instruments—electric guitar, clarinet, bass, and drums. The guitar sound is more rock than jazz, and gives the music a feeling of having one foot in that style, too. There are many moments that have almost a jam-band or avant-rock feel, notably the first track, “Swampled,” which opens with a riff that reminds me of Captain Beefheart and thus cries out, to my ears at least, for a vocal. There are moments that recall free-jazz greats like Ornette Coleman, such as the clarinet solo in “Grace.”
Pure improvised music often just sounds chaotic and random, but there’s structure here as well. A number of the tracks, e.g. the aforementioned “Swampled,” have a jazz-like structure: a composed theme, improv, reprise of theme (I think jazz people call the theme the “head.”) The composed parts will tell you, if you had any doubt, that somebody here can really write, and that the group can play very tightly and skillfully. These tracks are longer (6-10 minutes) and are my favorites; the shorter tracks seem like interludes between them. The more improvisational parts range widely in atmosphere: mysterious, whimsical, humorous, spacey, jazzy, ambient, aggressive.
With very few lapses, Look What I Found is unfailingly interesting. Much of it sounds like it could have been an ECM release, except perhaps that there’s more humor here, and that’s a real compliment. You can hear somewhat lengthy samples, and read a little more (and buy a copy!), here.
Tom Baker sums up the music as “Jimi Hendrix meets John Coltrane meets John Cage” in this YouTube clip; that’s a pretty good capsule description.
The 5th is to classical music as the Mona Lisa is to painting: a work so often seen, popularized, parodied, used in advertising, and in general made to serve as a representative or stereotype of its entire art form that it’s difficult to see it for itself anymore. It helps, then, in such a case not to look at it for a while, perhaps for a few decades. I didn’t set out to do that with the 5th, but I really can’t remember when I had last heard it before this weekend. I’m pretty certain that it must have been at least twenty years, and possibly thirty or more.
What I find, coming back to it with fresh ears and an open mind, is pure musical gold. This may well prove, in the end, my favorite of the symphonies, despite my earlier statements that the 4th and 7th were the ones I remember liking best. It seemed to me, as I listened to this one a little while ago, that there is no human emotion which is not expressed here. I don’t feel able at the moment to sort that out any further, to describe what seems to be the shape and meaning of those emotions. But to give one example: there is a beautiful moment in the second movement where a loud and dissonant chord which lands in the mind as a sudden outburst of dismay or fear produces a sort of mental pivot by becoming the opening of a joyful song. This, I think is the sort of thing that makes people feel a love for the man behind the music; anyone who can put this much of life into music seems like someone we want to know, or at least someone for whom we have a respect that goes beyond admiration for his art.
I’m sometimes a bit impatient with Beethoven’s repeated climaxes and near-endings, but here they seem to work perfectly. I don’t know if it’s technically a coda or what, but near the end of the last movement there’s a point where it seems that the symphony is about to end, and you think no, not yet, that’s not good enough. Then it comes back with another minute or two of intensity, ending with a sequence of—I’m sorry, I don’t have the technical vocabulary for this—what I can only call power chords that really do end it with the assurance and emphasis that everything previous seems to have led us to expect. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but to illustrate how carried away I was: I applauded at the end, though I was sitting in a room alone.
The recording I listened to was this one, Christoph von Dohnányi with the Cleveland Orchestra. I’ve been getting this set from eMusic over a period of several months with the idea that it should be a good choice for both convenience and quality, but for some reason I have not, so far, been very excited about it. It seems vaguely mechanical somehow. That’s probably just me; everyone who’s reviewed it at Amazon.com says it’s great.
A few days ago there was a discussion over at Craig Burrell’s blog, All Manner of Thing, about whether “Down By the Salley Gardens” is a folk song, a poem by Yeats (he published it as his own), or a folk song modified by Yeats (my supposition, and here is the post and ensuing discussion). This reminded me of an American murder ballad, “Down By the Willow Garden,” which begins with a similar phrase and which I know from one of Ian and Sylvia’s albums. And it occurred to me that I had never looked for any of their work on YouTube.
A quick search was quickly rewarded. Although I bought Ian and Sylvia’s records in my teens and listened to them over and over again, I never saw them perform in their heyday, the early-to-mid ‘60s. But they had made a few TV appearances, and I was delighted to discover them on YouTube. And even more delighted that one of them included a song that is to me one of their finest moments, an a cappella version of the English ballad “Greenwood Side.”
To my taste these two Canadians, Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker, were the best of the pop-folk artists of the ‘60s. By “pop-folk” I mean performers who weren’t directly a product of the authentic folk tradition, but who selected songs from many sources—American, British, black, white—and delivered them in a more polished way for an urban and mostly young audience. Usually this meant a certain sentimentalization and prettification, often a great deal. And the closer those artists approached the style of a Mitch Miller sing-along, the more weightless and dated their music sounds today. Ian and Sylvia were pretty sophisticated musicians, but their style had a harder center and a sharper edge than, say, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s, and their music remains more appealing today than that of most of their peers.
They were especially good on country, Appalachian, and British material. For me they aren’t as persuasive on gospel and blues. They do it skillfully, as in the following clip, but not as convincingly. Most of the pop-folk groups got this music wrong, putting a sort of over-earnest self-consciousness onto music that was meant to be rough and exuberant; Ian and Sylvia don’t escape this, but they’re better than most.
They did, however have a real connection to the Appalachian tradition via country music; this was especially true for Tyson, who had grown up working on ranches in Alberta and British Columbia. His voice sounds a lot like bourbon tastes, and although his natural mode seems to be something close to country and western he can do the old rural sound, too. And Sylvia’s voice has that real plaintive, keening, astringent country tone that can be chillingly beautiful. They could take a genuine country song like “Ol’ Blue” and polish it up without ruining it; all right, it wasn’t “authentic,” but their embellishments were in the spirit of the material.
I don’t remember where I first heard them, but I do remember asking my uncle Jimmy about them. He and his wife Libby introduced me to folk music when I was fifteen or so, and I have very fond memories of hearing people like Furry Lewis for the first time on Saturday nights in their living room. (Someday I’ll write about them; I don’t think they were very happy but they had a lot fun, and they died a few months apart ten years or so ago, not a great deal older than I am now.) Jimmy’s response about Ian and Sylvia’s music was “It ain’t nothin’ but fine.”
I guess that convinced me, because if my memory is not playing tricks on me, the first record I ever bought with my own money was the first Ian and Sylvia album, self-titled. I listened to it and its four successors continually (or so it seems in my memory) throughout my high school years. The last one I bought was Play One More, which came out in 1966 and saw them moving in a more pop-based and less appealing direction, although the good stuff on that album is as good as anything they ever did. The ones that followed were not well-received and I never heard them. But those first five albums—Ian and Sylvia, Four Strong Winds, Northern Journey, Early Morning Rain, and Play One More—still captivate me for the most part, the exceptions being some of the blues and gospel tracks.
They were terrific interpreters of contemporary songwriters, such as Dylan—their “Tomorrow is a Long Time” is my favorite version—and Gordon Lightfoot (ditto for “Early Morning Rain”). They also wrote some great songs: “Four Strong Winds,” “You Were On My Mind.” And Ian was a killer guitarist, especially when paired with a second guitarist who was just as good, John Herald or Monte Dunn. The guitar work on “Ella Speed” (Four Strong Winds) still knocks me out.
Ian has had a fairly successful solo career but I’ve heard very little of his work, an omission which I’ll have to remedy.
Here, finally, in the first two movements, is the Beethoven I love. I accept, on the testimony of people who understand the technical aspects of music, that the Third Symphony is a great achievement from that point of view, and that it does things that no one had done before. And as I said when I wrote about it a few weeks ago, I admire it and feel its greatness.
But if the Third constitutes a breakthrough, I would emphasize the breaking. There’s a violence in it, as in much of Beethoven. If we think of it as music breaking out of prison, we imagine not a cunningly planned and stealthy escape—a tunnel, perhaps—but giants smashing stone walls. I don’t know whether the Fourth is a consolidation and consideration of new freedom, or whether it is in some degree a return to older rules. But there is an ease and serenity about the first two movements which is not found any of the preceding three symphonies. It seems to flow freely, bearing little of the sense of straining after something that marks the others. It’s as if he is no longer struggling to become free, but being free.
The first two movements are simply beautiful, graceful and relaxed. The scherzo is brilliant and sunny, but I find the last movement a bit of a letdown. Taken as the end of a progress from reflection to joyful exuberance, it doesn’t, for me, quite live up to the promise of the earlier movements.
In a famous remark Schumann said that the Fourth in relation to the Third and Fifth is a slender Greek maiden between two Norse gods. Well, given that vision, I have no doubt that my eyes would be drawn to the maiden, so it’s not surprising that I like the Fourth so much. I don’t see why she has to be Greek, though—she can just as well be a maiden of the North, or for that matter a goddess herself.
Music of the Week: The Ornette Coleman Trio - Live at the Golden Circle, Vol. 2
Considered objectively, I’m sure this is not the best Ornette Coleman album, but it’s a sort of sentimental favorite for me, partly for non-musical reasons. I listened to it a good bit at a particularly dark time of my life, and, as we used to say back then, it took me to a good place; it somehow seemed an opening to a world I would have much preferred to inhabit.
Partly this was a matter of ambience. The album was recorded in Stockholm and at the time I had a romantic longing to be somewhere in northern Europe (still do, actually), which at least in my mind was a more beautiful and peaceful place than the U.S.A. of 1970 or so. There was the cover photo, which I assumed was taken in Stockholm: the black-and-white image of the three musicians in a snowy landscape, three very American-looking men in a European setting, a very appealing combination. They were dressed unostentatiously, conventionally and tastefully, unlike me and my hippie friends. And yet they were undeniably way more hip than any of us. They were hip but not stupid; they didn’t live in the world of Grand Funk Railroad. There was still a certain intellectual cachet about the world of jazz, or at least there recently had been, and Coleman and his friends were playing for an audience which I supposed to be much more sophisticated than an American one; after all, this was the country that gave us Bergman.
And then there was the music. This album begins with a track, “Snowflakes and Sunshine,” that’s usually treated lightly or even disdainfully by critics, because Coleman plays violin and trumpet on it, neither of which he was especially good at. The first reaction of most listeners to it is to wonder why anyone would ever want to listen to what seems like frenetic and aimless scratching on the violin. That was my reaction at first, but then somehow I began to enjoy it; the swirling fall of notes began to seem like snowflakes falling in sunshine, patternless but bright and enchanting.
And the next track, “Morning Song,” which is more typical Coleman, is the sort of slow loose lyricism that one could imagine feeling, if not being able to produce, on a quiet and hopeful but slightly melancholy morning. Those two were the first side of the LP, which I listened to far more than the second. Listening to it now as I write this, I see that its two tracks, “The Riddle” and “Antiques,” are at least as good, although more…well, “conventional” is not the right word for any of Coleman’s music, but they are certainly less strange than “Snowflakes and Sunshine.”
Free jazz is not my favorite sort of music, and it’s hard for me to explain why Coleman’s engages me while most does not. It seems to me that though his phrases don’t necessarily have a logical relationship to each other, they are striking in themselves. I have to resort to a literary analogy: it’s like poetry that’s a series of unrelated images and statements that are so striking in themselves that you don’t really mind the fact that they’re disconnected. And in the end they do make a sort of intuitive picture.
Best, though, is the fittingly offhand phrase used by Jesse Canterbury in trying to explain to me what captivates him about Coleman’s music: “the sheer beauty and humanity of it.” It’s that second word that’s most important; you feel like you’re hearing something that comes from the deepest places in the heart, the inchoate emotions themselves expressed by someone who happens to have a gift for giving them just enough shape and order to make them felt by others.
If you don’t know Ornette Coleman’s work, this is not necessarily the best place to start. That would probably be The Shape of Jazz to Come, which begins with the lovely-by-any-standard “Lonely Woman.” But then, who knows, you might hear in this one the same things I hear.
Those who read this column (or whatever you want to call it) regularly may remember that Mark Heard’s name came up in comments recently, very strongly recommended by a couple of people. I admitted with a little embarrassment that I owned this cd, a selection of material from his last few albums, and had never listened to more than a few songs from it.
I had picked up the cd five or six years ago (at least), either used or on sale, out of curiosity because I’d encountered his name here and there as a highly regarded Christian singer-songwriter who lived a tragically short life (1951-1992). Since I don’t care much for most explicitly Christian pop music—what’s generally known as CCM, or Contemporary Christian music—I’m always on the lookout for Christian artists who don’t seem to be just slapping a Christian message on commercial pop. I was disappointed in Heard, though. I put on the cd and half-listened to the first four or five songs, didn’t care especially for the sound, put it aside, and then forgot about it.
Now, thanks to those recent comments here, I’ve given High Noon another chance, and changed my mind. I won’t go as far as the commenter who said Heard is a better songwriter than Bruce Cockburn, but at his best he is very, very good. The best songs here are certainly in the league with those of Cockburn and a few others. There are a few that I don’t care much for, but considering that someone else’s idea of an artist’s best stuff is never going to coincide with mine, I definitely plan to seek out more of Heard’s work.
Unfortunately I’m not enthusiastic about him as a performer. In particular I don’t care much for his voice and general signing style. He sounds a good bit like T-Bone Burnett, but somehow more abrasive and a little over-intense. This is purely a matter of my personal taste, and shouldn’t discourage anyone who might be interested. It doesn’t by any means ruin the songs, but it does make me wish I could hear more of them sung by performers whom I like better: Buddy Miller, for instance, whose version of Heard’s “Worry Too Much” (not on High Noon) is one of the very best tracks on a magnificent album, Universal United House of Prayer (see here for my review). I’m probably going to be checking out the tribute album Orphans of God in which other artists perform Heard’s songs.
Here’s a video of one of my favorite songs from High Noon, “Treasure of the Broken Land.” I think his singing works better in this song than in some others. The lyrics are essential, so read them here. If you like this, you’ll like a lot more of Heard’s music.
If that ending seems abrupt, it’s because the video doesn’t include the whole track, which runs over six minutes and includes a lengthy instrumental break.
Now, suddenly, we’re in the realm of the master. There’s something unformed and hesitant about the first two symphonies, but it’s gone in this one. Now he speaks with authority, clearly established in the first few seconds. Perhaps a trained musician would have seen something like this coming, or at least its potential, in the first two symphonies; I don’t think I would have. But even a listener like me who doesn’t have the knowledge or vocabulary to understand how or why it works can tell that there is a wonderful combination of wild creativity and discipline here. It’s long—the longest ever when it was written, I think—but nothing seems superfluous, out of place, or out of control.
I still don’t feel the deep affection for this work that I do for some other music which is probably not its equal, if considered dispassionately. I think it’s fundamentally a question of personality and temperament; I don’t feel that Beethoven is speaking for me or to me. The romantic-heroic spirit which we are told is celebrated here is not one to which I’m much drawn. The second movement, for instance, the funeral march, leaves me a little disappointed, in spite of the marvelous main theme, because it seems too intent on making grand gestures to mourn.
Nevertheless, I like to think that I can recognize a masterpiece when I hear it, and this is surely one.
Like most people who grew up when what is now called “classic rock” was new, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing some very incongruous music in public places. I think it was back in the ‘70s when I first heard an easy-listening instrumental version of a Dylan song in the background music of a dentist’s office or a shopping mall. It’s still a bit amusing to hear something that was rebellious and subversive in its day so domesticated, like hearing a Black Sabbath riff from a high school band at a football game. But it’s not usually a shock anymore.
One night last week in the grocery store, though, I was shocked. I realized I was hearing “Pictures of You,” from The Cure’s Disintegration, a sad song from an album which would surely be among the candidates for saddest pop album ever made. If I were the only voter, Disintegration wouldn’t win—it would come in behind the Julee Cruise/David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti collaboration Floating Into the Night, which is the saddest pop music I’ve ever heard, too sad for me to listen to very often. But Disintegration would definitely be in the top ten or so.
So I stood there in front of the dog food at the grocery store, half-hypnotized by “Pictures of You,” then began to smile when I thought about what the CEO of Food World might think about a store providing these lyrics as an accompaniment to the grocery shopping experience:
Remembering you fallen into my arms crying for the death of your heart You were stone-white, so delicate, lost in the cold, you were always so lost in the dark
Here’s a video of “Pictures of You”:
Disintegration is a great album, but, as the title suggests, the state of mind it depicts is certainly not something one ought to cultivate.
Overall, I like this one better than the First. I like the second movement, the larghetto, quite well, actually; it has a pleasing combination of lilt and melancholy. And the scherzo is a lot of fun. The outer movements seem, still, like your basic Beethoven and I find my mind wandering away from them.
Next up is, of course, the Eroica, which I probably haven’t heard for twenty years, and the one which is generally considered to be Beethoven’s first great symphony. It includes a funeral march. That sounds promising.
Music of the Week: Sirenia - “Save Me From Myself”
A friend put me on to this striking song by Sirenia, a goth-metal group (and a spin-off of my favorite group in this sub-genre, Tristania). Since most people who read this blog are probably not interested in that kind of music, I’ll mention that you shouldn’t seek out the album from which the song is taken, An Elixir for Existence, hoping to hear more like it, because most of the rest of the album is definitely metal and not at all like “Save Me.” (If, on the other hand, you do like that kind of music—I know there are at least one or two of you—you will almost certainly like the rest of the album.)
This belongs with Tom Waits’s “Make It Rain” on a list of songs about the absence of God. It seems to me that one who cries out “Save me from myself” is halfway toward understanding what Christianity is about, perhaps halfway toward faith. And I wonder if any culture not shaped by Christianity could have produced the song.
Note: the video (actually a series of still images) contains a rather bloody vampire image toward the end, if that sort of thing bothers you.
It’s been quite a few years since I heard most of Beethoven’s symphonies, and I’ve decided to go through the whole set in order, attentively, over the next few months. I’ve always had, you might say, a difficult relationship with much of Beethoven’s music, especially the big orchestral works: I just don’t like them as much as I’m supposed to. And I want to see if that’s changed. It used to be the 7th that I liked best, and I also had a fondness for the less renowned 4th. Part of this is my natural favoring of things smaller, quieter, more modest and often more eccentric, than those favored by general critical opinion. But that doesn’t completely explain it, because I like many of the huge late Romantic symphonies.
As for this 1st, of which I don’t remember having any very strong opinion, and which I’ve heard four or five times over the past couple of weeks, I do not love it. I admire it, but I do not love it. There is obviously a great gift at work here, and the symphony is interesting, but little of it moves me. It’s of course very much more of the 18th century than Beethoven’s later work, but it seems a heavier Mozart, and a less orderly Haydn. I have the sense that he’s gotten hold of a powerful force but isn’t yet quite in control of it. And I hear some of the things that have always bothered me: the spasmodic leaping rhythms, the repeated quasi-climaxes, and a quality I can only describe, not very informatively, as “dryness.”
I’ve been wanting to hear more of this highly regarded Icelandic band for some time on the basis of one hauntingly beautiful track from their album Agaetis Byrjun. But Von happened to come my way first, via eMusic, so this is my first extensive acquaintance with them.
I’m almost always doing something else while listening (or “listening”) to music. And after hearing this a couple of times in that way, I wasn’t especially impressed; it seemed to have some good moments, but to be a mishmash of interesting music and chaotic noises and sound effects. Then I had an opportunity to listen to the whole thing straight through, with no distractions, and was considerably more impressed. This is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the parts.
There are no gaps between the tracks, and it really needs to be heard that way, from beginning to end. The opening is dark and at certain moments frightening, with cries emerging from deep rumblings. Then ethereal light breaks, as if the darkness had been suddenly pushed aside by angels. That gives way to ordinary, yet obscure, sounds—falling rain, unintelligible voices, noises that might be mechanical—as if we’re back in the realm of everyday life. There’s a pattern of darkness giving way to light throughout the album. At the its climax, the 12-plus minute “Hafssol,” there is darkness and conflict in the foreground, but in the background the calling of distant, yearning voices. These fade, finally, only to re-emerge in a closer and more earthly mode in the remaining songs.
I really have no idea what this album is about; the titles and lyrics (if there are any—it’s hard to tell) are all in what I assume is Icelandic, and I deliberately chose not to learn anything before listening to it. So my reactions are based entirely on the music. And it sounds to me like a troubled life haunted, and ultimately rescued, by the voices of angels.
Having written the above, I went looking for more information, and discovered that “von” means “hope,” so I guess my reaction is not far off base.
You can hear samples here, although samples tell even less of the story than with most albums. And I see one track is missing now. By the way the review wasn’t present when I downloaded it some time ago; I don’t especially agree with it. If you are considering buying this as individual tracks, you can skip track 12: it’s six minutes of silence followed by a backwards version of “Myrkur” (called “Rukrym”—ha ha).
I know, it’s only Philip Glass, but I like it. It’s the typical Glass sound, but reduced to its bare bones. At first I thought it was too bare, but after adjusting my expectation of hearing the melodic and rhythmic fragments bounce from one timbre to another I found the effect fascinating, at least in relatively small doses—I wouldn’t recommend listening to this entire album non-stop. Anyone who’s heard much of Glass’s music will feel that he’s heard some of the material before, and maybe we have—perhaps some of the themes are also heard in his orchestral works. At any rate, after a couple of hearings I found that I like most of it quite well, especially “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and the multi-section piece “Metamorphoses.” In the latter, you will find yourself thinking Didn’t I just hear that? and you’ll be right, because the last of its five sections is very much like the first.
Much to my surprise, I found a performance of “Wichita Vortex Sutra” on YouTube:
Well, here’s a Swedish girl with a Spanish pseudonym (meaning “dog of the sea,” I’m told, or maybe just “sea dog”) singing in English in a distinctly American style. One track from this album, “God Knows,” was offered as a free track on eMusic, and on the strength of that, and a good review, I downloaded the whole album.
It’s a pretty slight affair, ten songs in thirty-three minutes, and most of the songs themselves are slight to a fault. El Perro is a good, rather mournful singer, and there’s a lot of potential here, but although the songs are tuneful and very nicely arranged most of them are too simple and repetitive to maintain my interest. Musical repetition is ok in pop music, up to a point, lyrical repetition less so for me. Many of these songs have both, with the result that at an average of three minutes each, some of them still seem to go on too long. Here, for instance, is the complete lyric for “Dog”, as best I can make it out:
All the feeling you got for me Is that for a dog Oh what a feeling Oh what a feeling for a dog
The album has a saving grace, though, in the vocal arrangements. I’m not sure who first had the idea of giving a minor, melancholy, nostalgic twist to “shoobeedoowop.” “sha-la-la,” and other nonsense vocalizations of ‘50s and early ‘60s girl-group pop. The first time I remember hearing it was in the chorus of Eurhythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again.” The masterpiece of this bent-nostalgia sound, at least as far as I know, is Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night, one of my very favorite albums, although there it’s done more with instruments than with vocals. El Perro del Mar gets into that territory often enough on this album that anyone who’s susceptible to its appeal will find something to like in it.
I’ve known that this piece is considered one of the highlights of baroque religious music, but had not heard it until recently when my daughter told me she was going to be singing in a performance of it by her college chorus. I downloaded this version from eMusic so I could hear it a couple of times before the concert. It’s a wonderful work, although to modern ears accustomed to Romantic passion and Modernist bleakness, it may seem more sweet than sorrowful, even almost happy—as Clare put it, bouncy— in parts (e.g. the 4th section, “Quae maerebat et doleba”).
Non-Catholics and/or non-classical music fans may not recognize the title; “Stabat mater” is the opening phrase of a traditional Latin poem depicting Mary at the foot of the cross. It’s been set to music a lot. See here for the text and its traditional English translation, which I think is, to be blunt, very bad as a poem, and very loose as a translation. There’s a link on that page to a literal translation.
I can’t really comment very specifically on the quality of this performance, except to say that it seems very good to me. And Clare’s performance went very well, thanks: she had a solo in section 10, “Fac, ut portem Christi mortem,” and sang beautifully.
But wait a minute. I just went looking for a recording on YouTube, and the one I found provokes some thoughts about performances. As a fairly casual listener, I’m aware that there has been an argument for some years now between those who believe baroque and earlier music should be performed on instruments of the period and with various differences in technique, such as little or no string vibrato, and those who think earlier music is only enhanced by the technical improvements made since that time. I’ve never had an opinion on that question. But the recording I’ve been listening to is in the period style, whereas the one in the YouTube video below is, if I am not totally off base, more contemporary and romantic. And I must say it grabbed and moved me immediately in a way that the first did not. Just listen to the 30-second sample of the first movement at the eMusic link above and you’ll hear the difference.
I once got sick after eating Mexican food, and it was a couple of years before I could even stand the smell of it (happily, that did not last). I was the same way about Philip Glass’s music for a while. I got off to a bad start with him by listening to The Photographer when I had a headache. The ever-shifting staccato rhythms became the very sound of the headache, and established an aversion that lasted for a couple of years. I did eventually get over that, but still didn’t really like him very much unti I heard this symphony performed by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (for whom it was written) ten years or so ago. I wasn’t expecting much, but I soon found myself caught up in it and in the end was enchanted. It was like a swift voyage on a troubled, but not stormy, grey sea.
I didn’t hear it again till recently, and I find that it’s as good as or better than I remembered. I love it, in fact. I haven’t heard all of Glass’s music by any means, but surely this must be at or near the top of his work. I think it ends a bit abruptly, but aside from that it strikes me as the perfection of his style.
Leonard Cohen was born in 1934, and considering not just the productive life but the physical life of most popular music performers, it’s a little surprising that he was still active in 2001, at the age of 66, when this album was made. It’s even more surprising that he was still doing great work, at least if you think of him primarily as a songwriter, and as a songwriter primarily a lyricist. His singing is down to a sort of mannerism, and he gets even more help than usual from the sighing female voices with which he’s always adorned his music. But there are several songs here that I’d rank with his best, and not a single bad one. Perhaps his gift has fallen off somewhat, as his singing partner, Sharon Robinson, is given co-writing credit, but the lyrics are classic Cohen, so I would guess that Robinson’s contribution was more musical than lyrical.
The album has a mild weakness: the arrangements, also credited to Sharon Robinson. They’re simple and tasteful, which is all to the good, but too slick; the instrumentation is bland and synthetic-sounding, giving the album an inorganic feel which doesn’t suit Cohen’s voice or the songs. That aside, though, anyone who likes Cohen’s older work should not think that this late work can be safely passed over. The standout songs for me are “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” “Love Itself,” “Alexandra Leaving,” and “By the Rivers Dark.” The rivers referred to in the last one are those of Babylon, and the song should be heard with reference to Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
“Love Itself” is reminiscent of St. John of the Cross. The speaker is having some sort of mystical experience, bathed in holy light and love, but then:
I’ll try to say a little more Love went on and on Until it found an open door Then love itself, Love itself was gone.
By the way: Music of the Week is going on a six-week leave of absence: I’m giving up pop music for Lent. I plan to give a thorough hearing to several classical works of a religious nature, starting with Elgar’s Dream of Gerontion, and will probably discuss them here, but don’t want to commit myself to a regular schedule.
For most of this album you’re hearing one voice and two guitars, sometimes only one. There’s a second voice singing harmony on the choruses; there’s a banjo on one track, and a faint drum, or maybe just a foot stomping, on another. To hold a listener’s attention for the better part of an hour with these limited resources requires some really fine songs. And this album delivers: it’s just a few songs short of greatness. The overall pace is slow, the tone melancholy, and it was a very justifiable decision to throw in a couple of more up-tempo songs for variety. But to my taste those two (“Red Clay Halo” and “I Wanna Sing That Rock and Roll”) just don’t measure up; they come across as throw-aways.
The others vary from very good to great, including the best song about Elvis Presley I’ve ever heard (“Elvis Presley Blues”), a striking two-part meditation on certain great events and (one gathers) a couple of private ones that have occurred on April 14 (“Ruination Day”), and, most improbably, a song lasting almost fifteen minutes which tells no story and is fairly repetitive musically but nevertheless never gets tiresome for me. Welch’s voice is wonderful without being outstanding, if that makes sense: I mean that it isn’t striking, like Emmy Lou Harris’s, or spectacular, like Patty Griffin’s, but it’s perfect for what she does—warm and relaxed and just slightly countrified, which is pretty strange for someone who grew up in Los Angeles as the child of two television writers.
If you read these little reviews regularly you know I place a high value on lyrics, and these hooked me from the very first verse:
Darling remember When you come to me I’m the pretender And not what I’m supposed to be But who could know if I’m a traitor? Time’s a revelator.
I assume Welch wrote the lyrics, but the songs are credited to Welch and her collaborator David Rawlings, who is also the provider of the other voice and guitar, making one wonder if crediting the album to Welch alone is quite accurate. But that’s their business. You can listen to samples here.
Karen Dalton is sometimes described as a cult artist, and it was apparently a pretty small cult for many years, as I’m fairly familiar with pop music but as far as I can remember I had never heard her name until a couple of years ago. She was a ‘60s folksinger who issued two albums in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and then was lost to drugs and alcohol until her death in 1993. She’s become more widely known lately with people like Joanna Newsom praising her and citing her odd vocal style as an influence.
This is the second of those two albums. Judging by it, I would rank her near the top of the list of great singers with unbeautiful voices, up there with people like Dylan in his prime. She’s often compared to Billie Holiday, with good reason, but her voice is very different, sounding more a product of a rural white culture than an urban black one, and considerably rougher, sounding just a little like a crow at times. But like Holiday, she seems to consider the written melody and rhythm of the song as no more than suggestions, a rough sketch rather than a blueprint, and she somehow makes it work.
The version of the old folkie standard “Katy Cruel” on this album is astonishing, and several other tracks are equally good. But there are really only four or five songs here that I wouldn’t want to be without. Someone thought it would be a good idea for her to try soul classics like “When A Man Loves A Woman,” and although her supernaturally weird phrasing makes them interesting the tracks don’t really succeed as complete works. She’s at her best with more rural blues and country material and minimal acoustic instrumentation—banjo and fiddle, say, or just a guitar, like this (not on the album):
On the other hand, though, the first track here gives a tantalizing hint of what might have been a sort of female Astral Weeks. You can hear 30-second samples from the album at the eMusic page.
Ok, I’m a little late in recognizing this album; almost forty-two years late, to be exact. But now, finally, I understand why it’s so highly regarded by so many people—for instance, Paul McCartney.
A few words about my reasons for taking so long to get around to it: first, I never much cared for the Beach Boys in their ‘60s heyday. Although I wouldn’t have known to put it this way at the age of sixteen or so, their early stuff struck me as a bleached-out imitation of Chuck Berry and others. In particular I didn’t much like their vocals, which struck me as thin and whiny. Of course I mostly heard them on AM radio through tiny speakers, and that made it worse.
And second, they seemed the acme of commercial pop at a time when I disdained it. There was a brief period when I was a bit of a folk music snob looking down on rock altogether, and even after I got over that it was the more adventurous music that attracted me: the British Invasion, American folk-rock like the Lovin’ Spoonful, and of course Dylan’s new rock-oriented work. The Beach Boys were just top-40 music, loved by the cool kids at school, of whom I was not one, and that didn’t help, either. I didn’t hate the group, but they were just something I heard on the radio and didn’t take seriously. Pet Sounds came out the year I graduated from high school, and I do remember a friend who was a fan saying it was something special. But I wasn’t interested.
Well, it was my loss. This is, just as critics have been saying for decades, a masterpiece, one of the ‘60s landmarks that unquestionably deserves its prominence not for any sociological or cultural reason but because it’s really, really fine music. From first note to last it’s as inventive as anything the Beatles ever did, though without their counter-cultural poses. And it’s all the better for that, because it’s a picture of the heart of a young man presented with no big axes to grind and no big message beyond the struggle to grow up. I had a friend in high school named Carolyn who started crying when “Caroline No” came on the radio one summer day when several of us were riding around. I thought she was being a bit melodramatic at the time, but looking back on her, and hearing the song now, as if for the first time, she was right to weep; it’s an absolutely beautiful and heart-breaking song, capturing the first youthful experience of loss about as well as it ever has been.
Speaking of hearing things for the first time: Pet Sounds was available only in mono or phony stereo for many years. In 1999 Brian Wilson worked with an engineer to produce a real stereo mix which can be found on a CD containing both versions. I strongly recommend it. The stereo version has been a revelation to me. I had always thought of songs like “God Only Knows” as having a muddy, over-crowded, and indistinct sound. In the new mix all is spacious and clear and detailed, as if a very dirty window has been cleaned. I can say truthfully that I had never really heard the Beach Boys before.
I tend to be impatient with talk of lost American innocence, but in certain limited contexts there’s something to it. Wouldn’t it be nice if Brian Wilson had not fallen prey to whatever combination of drugs and mental illness it was that kept him from continuing to develop the gift that brought us Pet Sounds?
This is a revisiting of the themes and some of the songs of the ‘60s civil rights movement by one of the greats of gospel music. In the abstract that idea strikes me as one that, however well-intentioned, could prove a little dull, but the combination of Mavis Staples’ voice and Ry Cooder’s production and playing have resulted in something that keeps my attention for every one of its sixty minutes, then leaves me wanting to hear it again.. The arrangements are spacious and bluesy, with big drums, a lot of great guitar and mandolin playing, and rich backing vocals provided by the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Since I’ve resolved to keep these weekly reviews short, I’ll send you over to AMG for a fuller description. I don’t always agree with their reviews but I’m totally on board with this one. I’m betting that you will move when you listen to “99 ½”, even if you’re sitting down.
Any musical quibbles I might have here are exactly that, and not worth mentioning. But there is one problem. As a Southerner old enough to remember segregation, I find these memoirs of the civil rights struggle deeply moving, especially in light of its victories. But there seems to be an implication here, especially in the spoken sections of a couple of tracks, that nothing fundamental has changed, and that the problem faced today by the black community is still, above all, that the white community is holding them down. I almost wish that were true; it might be a more tractable problem.
But I’ll leave that topic for another day, and just add a big amen to what Staples writes in the liner notes: “Well, I tell you—we need a change now more than ever, and I'm turning to the church again for strength.”
