Music of the Week: God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

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):

No Music of the Week This Week

I had hoped to write about Beethoven’s 7th this week, but I’ve been too busy and distracted by Hurricane Gustav for the past several days to listen to music. Maybe next week.

Music of the Week: Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius

I had planned to give this work some serious attention during Lent, an intention which was only partially executed. It’s roughly 90 minutes long, and a stretch of uninterrupted time of that length is pretty hard to find for me. But I didn’t want to break it up. Moreover, its wide dynamic range makes it unsuited to listening in the car. Eventually I did hear it through several times in fairly big pieces, the last time on my iPod while I watered some newly laid sod. That actually was a rather memorable experience. It was the week after Easter, everything was green, and the weather was cool and sweet, sunny with a light breeze: a day that encouraged the belief that the gateway from this world to the next is not so remote, in any sense, as we (or at least I) generally think.

I would think that any non-believer who took the trouble to listen to Gerontius attentively would consider it a very good work. For a believer, it may be a great one. I didn’t think so at first, but it grew on me. Since I’m trying to keep these brief reviews even briefer, I’ll direct you to this sympathetic Wikipedia article for a detailed description, and I’ll mention just a few things that struck me:

• The prelude is, minute for minute, as beautiful a piece of orchestral writing as anything from the late 19th century (within my less-than-exhaustive knowledge). Only the fact that it doesn’t actually stop, but blends seamlessly into the opening words of Gerontius, keeps it from being a great concert piece.
• The priest’s blessing and sending of the dying man’s soul at its departure (“Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!”) is about as good a musical and verbal representation of what a shepherd of souls ought to be like as I can imagine. You can imagine that when this guy tells devils to buzz off, they do.
• The moment of judgment is unforgettable.
• There are a few weaknesses that are in part also weaknesses of the poem. It’s not quite convincing that the words of a dying man would carefully and explicitly touch a series of theological bases; if he were reciting the Creed, yes, but not in his spontaneous words. It’s more noticeable here than in the poem because you feel like the music is having trouble carrying the words.
• One who believes that what is depicted here is basically factual, even though the details are invented, may find that some passages bring tears.

The recording I have is this one by the Bournemouth Symphony and Chorus. I can’t say there’s anything wrong with it, yet I also can’t help feeling that it could be better, that there’s a bit of something missing, and so am interested in hearing another.

Here is what I said about the poem a couple of months ago.

Music of the Week Resumes

When I dropped this for Lent I wasn’t sure that I would pick it up again, as it had become something of a burden. But I think I’ll give it another try. Part of the burden was that I had, more or less arbitrarily, decided to write and post it along with the Sunday journal. Now I'm not going to fix it to any particular day of the week, but will probably post it sometime late in the week. I also intend to keep it brief.

Those who read it regularly will notice that I’ve changed the format a bit, putting the name of the piece (album, whatever) in the title of the post instead of the date. This is much more informative, and is also an experiment: I’ve noticed in my blog statistics for some time now that when the title of a post is straightforwardly representative of its contents, Google seems to direct people to it more often. I’ll be trying to do that on most of my posts now, if only out of curiosity.

Music of the Week — February 3, 2008

Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs

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.

Here’s the AMG review.

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.

Music of the Week — January 27, 2008

Gillian Welch: Time (The Revelator)

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.

Music of the Week — January 20, 2008

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time

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.

Music of the Week — January 13, 2008

The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds

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?

Music of the Week — January 6, 2008

Mavis Staples: We’ll Never Turn Back

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.”

Music of the Week — December 16, 2007

Minutemen: Double Nickels on the Dime

Continuing my investigation of punk classics, I arrive at this collection of 43 songs averaging something less than two minutes each in length, some under a minute. Aside from the brevity of the songs, the punk-ness here seems more a matter of attitude than sound. Musically, they remind me of something else—two somethings, actually: an artist and a style. The artist is Captain Beefheart; the style is math-rock.

As with Beefheart, the “songs” are bursts of often-intricate instrumental activity overlaid with fairly tuneless vocal lines, but without the Captain’s bizarre charisma and skill in the latter department. The result is more interesting than it sounds, mainly because the Minutemen have some very impressive instrumental chops—that’s where the math-rock parallel comes in, and in fact one of the songs refers to the Minutemen’s music as “scientist rock.” Frankly, the short songs are a good idea, because most of them would become tiresome if they went on much longer. Lyrically the band leans heavily on vaguely political ranting about the oppressiveness of American life, but they do it with a certain amount of humor that makes it, again, less dull than it might be.

I’m afraid I can’t go much further in the way of praise than “interesting,” though. There’s just not much here that touches me at any deep level. I stuck to my self-imposed requirement of listening to it three reasonably attentive times before committing myself to an opinion, but although I enjoyed the album it’s entirely possible that I may never listen to it again. Or at least not the whole thing: I’ll probably go back to a few nuggets, like “Take 5, D.,” a very funny recitation of what appears to be a note from a landlord (or landlady). Or “Maybe Partying Will Help”:

As I look over this beautiful land
I can’t help but realize that I am alone…
Maybe partying will help.

Samples at the eMusic page; you can actually hear a 30-second sample of a 46-second song.

Music of the Week — December 9, 2007

Solas: The Edge of Silence

This is a very good album, and I feel slightly churlish for not liking it more than I do. Solas is an Irish group that, at least on this album, does a sort of pop/Celtic crossover thing in the tradition of Clannad. And I’d predict that anyone who likes Clannad will like Solas. The level of musicianship here is extremely high, and any reservation I have about it has more to do with me than with the band: Celtic music is just not my favorite style. A few jigs and reels go a long way with me, which is not exactly reasonable, since I can listen to the blues, a more monotonous form, all night long.

Like Clannad, Solas has a female lead singer. I’m not extremely enthusiastic about her, but, again, I think that’s more a matter of my personal taste than any defect on her part: her voice is technically flawless and fits the band’s style and the material very well; it’s just, to my taste, somewhat on the pale side.

I’d be more enthusiastic if I liked all the material as well as I do the two or three songs that knock me out. Chief among these is the first track, which is the one containing the phrase which is the album’s title: a cover of the Jesse Colin Young classic “Darkness, Darkness.” It’s a great song, and this arrangement is at least as good as, and maybe better than, the Youngbloods’ original. If you don’t know this song, you probably should. There are also covers of songs by Nick Drake (“Clothes of Sand”) and Tom Waits (“Georgia Lee”), which are good although maybe not quite as striking as the originals (although those who can’t take Waits’s growl may prefer this version). There’s a relatively obscure Dylan song, “Dignity,” which in my opinion deserves its relative obscurity, but the band does as well by it as anyone could. There are two intriguing songs by a young writer named Antje Duvekot which maybe show more promise than achievement but are definitely worth hearing.

If you aren’t familiar with Solas but like Clannad and others in that vein, by all means check them out. You can hear thirty-second samples at the album’s eMusic page.

Music of the Week — December 2, 2007

Delerium: Nuages du Monde

UPDATE: I left out a step in the directions to the samples at the official Delerium site: click on the link I gave, then click on “Discography” to see the album cover thumbnails.

This is an album of which I’ve grown pretty fond and which I never would have heard if not for eMusic’s free daily download, which I rarely miss. I think it was the first track, “Angelicus,” which was the daily freebie a few months ago, and which led me to try a couple more tracks, and then to get the rest of the album. It’s also an instance of my continuing seduction (for lack of a better word) by the female voice. Everything here is a variant of one basic technique: lavish female vocals (except for a boy soprano on one or two tracks) over mid-tempo mostly electronic arrangements. It’s almost a synth-pop or even dance-club kind of sound, which may, on the face of it, not seem very appealing—at least, it wouldn’t to me. But it’s better than that description makes it sound.

The vocals, provided by several different singers, are terrific, ranging from classical heavenly-angelic-ethereal (with soprano allelujas, for instance), to warm and sensual. The songs are very strong melodically, some of them really haunting (e.g. “The Way You Want It to Be”)—and in addition to good tunes, they even have some lyrical substance. The effect is sometimes closer to a much less eccentric Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance than to dance music. I make no claim of greatness for it, but I’ve gotten pretty attached to it.

You hear samples of a minute or so here—Nuages is the album in the upper-right corner of the thumbnails—click on it to get a track listing. The eMusic page is here, but the 30-second samples aren’t nearly as helpful because they don’t get past the instrumental intro. If you can’t play the Flash samples at the first location, try tracks 1, 3, 8, and 11 on the eMusic page.

Music of the Week — November 25, 2007

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle

When it was released in 1968, I read some reviews that praised Song Cycle as a revolutionary masterpiece and Van Dyke Parks as a genius— this Rolling Stone review appears to have been contemporary, and gives you a good idea of the reception I remember. But it didn’t sell very well, which came as no surprise to anyone who heard it. In fact, considering how much it must have cost to make, it’s amazing that it ever saw the light of day, and, I suppose, a tribute to the adventurousness of some record companies at the time. I seem to recall having to look for a while to find a copy, and after listening to it a few times thought, “Well, that’s interesting,” and as far as I can remember never listened to it again until a few weeks ago, when Parks’s beautiful arrangements on Joanna Newsom’s Ys prompted me to dig out my old LP of Song Cycle, clean it up, and digitize it.

The result is that I’ve heard it as if for the first time. Yet my basic opinion is more or less the same as it was almost forty years ago: interesting. It’s more interesting than I gave it credit for at the time, partly because the recorded sound isn’t that good, at least on this LP, and there’s a lot of important detail that I would have missed in hearing it on my little portable stereo. It’s a sort of brilliant pastiche of American musical styles, and technically on a level far above most pop music, but it leaves me thinking that it’s more brilliant than profound. The lyrics are a problem, consisting of Joycean wordplay that for the most part doesn’t really add up to much:

Cracks in the heat and then caught by the wheel catch the country store feel for the hackamore crew view the crackerbare coterie standing by. One line bred randyrand and too few wretched meals.

Whatever. Ultimately it seems light, much of it merely playful. But really, it’s worth hearing; I can’t think of anything else in its class. I imagine there’s a remastered CD version around that does more justice to its complexity and nuance.

(By the way, here is my review of Ys.)

Music of the Week — November 18, 2007

Bob Marley & The Wailers: The Complete Upsetter Singles 1970-1972

I’m actually talking about the first volume of this two-disk set here; the second disk seems to be dub versions—mostly-instrumental “remixes,” as they would be called today—of some of the songs on the first disk. (Since eMusic charges per song, I’ve downloaded only the first disk.)

This material pre-dates the Island records heyday of Marley and the Wailers. In fact, as best I can tell from a little bit of reading on AMG and Wikipedia, it was probably originally credited only to The Wailers. It’s simpler and cruder and not as well recorded as the Island stuff, but in some ways I like it better. The Island sound is slicker, thicker, more complex, maybe overall a bit slower, with more varied instrumentation. I’ve read that it was consciously aimed at the rock audience in England and the U.S. But although albums like Natty Dread are indisputable classics, I miss in them a certain lilt and lightness. And besides, I tend to like music that’s a little rough around the edges. These tracks are definitely that. This is reggae of the sort produced by artists who did not, at least at the time, become big stars outside Jamaica; it’s the sound you hear on much of the classic reggae anthology, The Harder They Come. In other words, it’s about as irresistible as pop music gets, if you ask me. Of course it has the weird mixture of hedonism, eccentric religion, and politics that characterized reggae at the time. Watch out—when you listen to the music, it can all begin to seem plausible.

Check out the samples at eMusic. Or this complete song on YouTube (I think this is the same take), “Small Axe.”.

Music of the Week — November 11, 2007

Patty Griffin: Impossible Dream

Patty Griffin can do everything. She has one of the best voices in popular music, going with apparent effortlessness from a fully sung whisper to a bluesy croon to a roof-lifting shout to a Dolly Parton warble. If she chose to specialize in blues or country or rock, she’d be in the first rank of the genre; instead she pulls them all into her own style (which generally gets her lumped into the “singer-songwriter” category, but that doesn’t begin to describe her). And she’s not one of those sad songbirds gifted with a tremendous physical talent but little or no artistic sense. She’s a gifted writer, and I’ve deliberately left the prefix “song-“ off that word. Popular music is almost as much a lyrical art as a musical one, and like a good poet or novelist she has a deep and powerful artistic vision, and the judgment to shape it effectively.

This is the fourth of her studio albums. Unusually for me, I’ve heard them in the order they were released, and I think this is the best (there’s one more, Children Running Through, that I haven’t heard yet). I might have to make room for it on my desert island list. Even more than was the case with its predecessor, 1000 Kisses, everything seems important and in its proper place, so that the lesser songs like “The Rowing Song” still seem as if they should be here, and right where they are. I’m not going to say much about the emotional territory the album covers; you really have to hear it. Like the two Emmylou Harris albums I was raving about a few weeks ago, this one reaches way down. I don’t even want to name standout tracks, except to say that if you can listen to “Mother of God” without getting choked up you’re tougher than I am.

I spent a little while looking for a YouTube clip to serve as an introduction for those who haven’t heard her, and didn’t find anything from this album that really shows what her voice can do—all I could find were concert clips with terrible sound. But here’s the opening track. It’s pretty straightforward musically, and unrepresentative in that it’s the most up-tempo song on a generally meditative album, but the sound is decent and the lyrics are a good indication of the album’s general theme: the dream may be impossible, but she isn’t giving up on it.

Samples of all songs available at the album’s eMusic page

Several full songs at MySpace, though none from this album.

By the way, I have trouble believing that she grew up in Maine. This is not what I would expect music from New England to sound like. I would have bet heavily that she was a southerner.

(And thanks to Robert for introducing me to her music.)

Music of the Week — November 4, 2007

Swans: The Burning World

For reasons not known to me this group is called “Swans,” not “The Swans.” I had heard of them here and there, usually described in terms such as “dark,” “scary,” “aggressive,” “noisy,” and so forth: terms which don’t exactly attract me but make me curious. I wouldn’t have gone to much trouble or expense to seek them out, but a few years ago when cassettes were disappearing from the stores I picked this out of a bin of two-dollar items, expecting to discard it after a few listens.

Rather to my surprise, I found not the noise and screaming I expected but a fairly gentle, almost folk-rock sort of sound. Both musically and lyrically this music falls somewhere in the general area of Nick Cave’s more reflective side and Leonard Cohen. Principal singer and mastermind Michael Gira has a deep baritone voice much like Cave’s in its quieter moments. The songs are excellent, with (again) comparisons to Cave and Cohen brought to mind by the combination of melancholy, free-floating mysticism, and a sort of broadly erotic component, in which woman appears as an archetype of the mysterious (e.g. “Mona Lisa, Mother Earth”). The voice of female singer Jarboe on several tracks emphasizes the masculine-feminine dynamic; she sings a really beautiful cover of Steve Winwood’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.” My only real complaint is that the emotional trajectory of the lyrics is downward, from the first (and possibly best) track, “The River That Runs With Love Won’t Run Dry,” to the last, despairing song “God D**n the Sun,” a candidate for the “skip” button if only to prevent that refrain from resonating in one’s head when the album is over.

According to the very negative (1.5 stars!) AMG review, the group was not happy with this album, considering it too toned-down or too polished or something. That review suggests that someone who likes this album might not care for their others, so I don’t know that I’ll seek out anything else by them, but I rather like this one. I would, however, strongly dis-recommend it to anyone who is actually tempted by despair.

Music of the Week: October 28, 2007

The Ramones: The Ramones

I pretty much skipped punk rock in its day. What little I saw and heard of it didn’t much appeal to me—both the sound and the marketing imagery suggested flat, dull, monotonous. I didn’t even hear the Sex Pistols until sometime in the late ‘80s, when a younger co-worker lent me Never Mind the Bollocks. “I think you’re going to find this a bit of a letdown,” he said. “I guess it was something new at the time but now it just sort of sounds like bad heavy metal.” Yep.

But now and then someone tells me there really was something to the whole thing, and of course it became a major part of the pop music culture. So I’ve been trying to give myself a little education in the punk classics, and it doesn’t get much more punk and more classic than this album.

I can certainly see why, at a time when pompous and over-elaborate progressive rock shared the spotlight with dull country-folk rock (stigmatized for me by the term “mellow”) and vacant disco, the idea of going back to three chords and a cloud of dust (to borrow a football image) was both appealing and in fact needed. And I’m all for the do-it-yourself aspect of the punk movement, for encouraging people to make their own music without waiting to be spoon-fed by the radio (although of course the effect was mostly to have them spoon-fed by a different set of fashionable people, but that’s another story).

But I just don’t really like this album that much. I do get the joke, I think. I know the stupidity is deliberate. And it’s fun in small doses—four or five of these fourteen songs are extremely catchy and would be great to hear in the middle of a mix of more substantial stuff.

But there’s too much irony in it. It might seem strange to say that the problem with the Ramones is that they’re too artsy, but it’s true. The Ramones is almost a sort of conceptual art (starting with the stage names), less music than a statement about music, and a curiously flat one. The musical and emotional range is so deliberately limited that it begins to feel oppressive. This is a very short album (about 29 minutes), but I find it difficult to listen to the whole thing at once; to hear more than four or five songs in a row gives me a sense of unpleasant constriction.

I’ve read more than one tribute to the Ramones that goes on about how they restored rock-and-roll to its position in some extra-musical project, usually an incoherent desire for cultural revolution, which in turn is what rock-and-roll is “really about.” (Example from the liner notes of the Ramones anthology I’ve been listening to: “The four short lines of ‘Commando’…in one absurdist swoop obliterated the religio-jingoistic cold warspeak of the day.”)

Wrong. It’s about music, and the obscure rockers of the ‘50s and ‘60s who were claimed as inspiration for punk were making the best music of which they were capable, not dumbing themselves down as some sort of cultural statement. “96 Tears” may have been dumb but it wasn’t ironic. Although this music deliberately imitates certain aspects of the garage-rock sound that appeared in the mid-‘60s, its flattened emotional quality is totally different, and in that respect more truly a testimony to the atmosphere of the mid-‘70s than it was probably meant to be.

But I admit it probably would have been fun to be at this gig (CBGBs, 1977):

Although this song always leaves me wanting to hear “I Fought the Law.”

Music of the Week — October 21, 2007

Elis: Griefshire

I came across this album in my search for something in the symphonic/gothic metal genre as good as Tristania’s Illumination. I haven’t found it, but this one is rather striking.

Griefshire could just as well be classified as progressive rock, and in fact I can imagine that if the heavy guitars were lightened up it might even be possible to believe that it’s a product of the 1970s. Moreover, it’s what used to be called a “concept album”—a collection of songs on a single theme and, in this case, a narrative. The narrative is only implied in the songs; to get the whole story you have to read this explication (note: link is to a PDF file which loads slowly).

It’s an ambitious work, and that’s one reason why it stands out for me in relation to some others which are artistically comparable. I wouldn’t be able to argue if someone described it as pretentious and excessive, but I have a certain admiration for the grand effort even when it falls short. Like a lot of prog-rock, it’s more interesting than affecting, but it’s quite interesting.

The narrative involves a couple of brothers, a woman they both love, and a sort of spiritual quest which ends in disaster. It’s full of promising references to eternal truth and redemption and salvation, but these seem to be resolved in a conventionally vague psychological package of answers found within etc. The disappointing final song, which seems to promise some sort of transcendence, delivers only a decidedly trivial-sounding promise of “a new decade of solutions,” which sounds like a commercial.

The major weakness, and it’s a big one, is in the lyrics, which are talky and discursive, too often talking about emotions rather than summoning them. Maybe some allowance should be made for the fact that the band’s native language is not English (it’s German—they’re from Liechtenstein); still, they chose to write in English. Two songs are, for no obvious reason, in German, and to my ears they work better, but maybe that’s because I’m at best sub-literate in German. They certainly sound good: German might be a better standard language for heavy metal than English.

So the album is far from being an entire success, but—here comes that word again—it’s consistently interesting. And there’s an extra-musical aspect that makes it more so. The narrative and the lyrics are the work of the band’s very fine lead vocalist, Sabine Dünser. A couple of days after she finished recording the vocals for Griefshire, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died the next day, still in her twenties. Given the obvious sincerity of the spiritual search evidenced by the lyrics, a Christian can’t help but speculate: did God take her because she was at her nearest approach to him, more open than she would ever be? Not a question that can be answered, of course, but one wonders, and hopes.

You can hear thirty-second samples of the album at eMusic.

Music of the Week — October 14, 1007

I didn’t plan it this way, but it’s appropriate that this album follows Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, because there’s a definite similarity in general technique and atmosphere: a stripped-down rock sound, a melancholy atmosphere, a very distinctive singer. The sound of Dear Sir can be very roughly described as somewhere between the rawer Neil Young and the Velvet Underground. I’ve never taken narcotics, but the word comes to mind here: this is slow, basically simple, and very dispirited music. The songs are fragmented both lyrically and melodically—there are no tunes you’ll go away humming, and the best you can say about the lyrics is that they sometimes suggest something deep.

Yet it works, mainly because, like Neil Young, Cat Power (aka Chan, pronounced “Shahn,” Marshall) has a remarkably expressive voice and because her assistants—only two guitarists and a drummer—give it an instrumental framework that seems perfect for it, making the whole package come together as a pretty raw expression of the sort of somewhat disoriented depression that seems, sadly, to characterize a lot of young women these days. This will never be one of my favorite albums, but it’s not one I’ll forget, either.

You can hear samples here.

Music of the Week — October 7, 2007

Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Awesome.

Music of the Week — September 30, 2007

Emmylou Harris: Wrecking Ball; Red Dirt Girl; Stumble Into Grace

As everybody knows, Emmylou Harris came to prominence in the 1970s as a vocalist and band leader who primarily interpreted other people’s work in a country-rock style. Her work in that vein is extremely good, and I’ve always loved her voice, but as a style country and country-rock are not my favorites, so I didn’t follow her work closely and for many years only knew it through a couple of albums, such as the exquisite Roses in the Snow (1980). In later years, through the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s, I assumed she had settled into a pattern along the lines of other artists who were primarily vocalists (say, Linda Ronstadt or Rod Stewart), doing more or less the same thing she always had. It was not until sometime in the late ‘90s when my friend Daniel Nichols sent me a tape that included several songs from Wrecking Ball that I realized she was developing into something far more than a gifted performer.

I’m trying to keep these weekly reviews brief, so I’ll get to the point: with the three albums named above Emmylou Harris has created a body of work that in its combination of beauty and profundity is the equal of anything anyone has ever done in American popular music. The best tracks here are as good as anything by Dylan, Cohen, Waits, Springsteen, or any other of the bardic singer-songwriters of the past forty-plus years one could name. Let me emphasize that: anything by any of them. I suppose one could quibble mildly with that judgment by pointing out how important the producer’s work is in creating the haunting mysterious atmospheres which fill these recordings—Daniel Lanois’s influence is certainly obvious and huge on Wrecking Ball—but they don’t all have the same producer, so we have to assume that Harris is ultimately responsible. Nor does she write all the songs, but clearly hers is the vision that chooses and shapes them.

The term “cosmic American music” was coined ca. 1970 by Gram Parsons, who seems to have been a sort of guru for Harris as well as her tragically lost love (I’ve assumed that he is the subject of the gorgeous and heartbreaking “Michaelangelo” from Red Dirt Girl). It was left to Harris, carrying on alone after Parsons’ early death, to bring the idea to fulfillment in a way that I don’t suppose they could have imagined in the early ‘70s. There could be no more apt description of this music, although it may not give you much of a clue as to how it actually sounds. For that, you need to listen. I included Wrecking Ball in my desert island list a few weeks back, but probably any or all of these three albums would qualify. Possibly Red Dirt Girl would be the best place to start, as it includes “The Pearl,” which would be in the running for the best song from the three and contains the lines:

If there’s no heaven
What’s this hunger for?

That question might serve as an epigraph for all three albums: they’re filled with an intense and even desperate yearning, sometimes spiritual, sometimes erotic-romantic, sometimes both. I’m tempted to quote more of that lyric but you really need to hear it sung.

For biographical and career information, here is Emmylou Harris’s page at All Music, and here is Gram Parsons’s.

Music of the Week — September 23, 2007

Joanna Newsom: Ys

It appears that hippies still walk the earth. Not just the survivors of that long-ago age, the often rather dazed-seeming geezers and grannies who show up at rock concerts and political demonstrations, but young people who seem to have adopted the sensibility and the style of a certain element of the ‘60s (without, one hopes, the self- and socially-destructive behavior that went along with it). I say “adopted” but perhaps it should be “reinvented”—maybe this is a perennial expression of an attractive sort of bohemianism rather than a conscious imitation or attempt to revive the movement.

At any rate, here’s an example, which might be described as The Incredible String Band meets Victoria Williams. With the invocation of those names you can figure the word “quirky” is probably going to make an appearance, and indeed it’s a hard one to avoid, tiresome though it may be, when speaking of Joanna Newsom. A quick way to get an idea of what her music is like is to look at the cover art:

If that doesn’t say “hippie girl” to you then you’ve never seen a real one.

I would expect most people to find Ys a love-it-or-hate-it thing: either you’ll find it mannered and affected and possibly unlistenable, or enchanting. I’m firmly in the second camp, more so every time I hear it; I think it’s wonderful, but it’s definitely not for everybody. Its five songs range from just over seven to almost seventeen minutes in length, each an unbroken cascade of long melody lines, complex lyrics, and very…umm…unusual singing. Newsom’s voice has been called child-like but if that’s true it’s a somewhat peculiar child. I would describe it rather as a little girl trying to sound like a grownup (or should it be the other way around?), but that’s only one mode of her style, which is full of unexpected timbres. There are no purely instrumental interludes. The arrangements consist of Newsom’s own harp and orchestrations by the legendary Van Dyke Parks. There’s no trace of rock-and-roll here at all, which, I’ll note in passing, points out the futility of trying to generalize about the state of contemporary (or for that matter post-‘60s) popular music.

Like the best of the Incredible String Band’s work, this is music which takes you into its own strange and fascinating world, restlessly inventive both musically and lyrically, jumping back and forth between the mundane and the mystical, the personal and the cosmic, the playful and the serious. Newsom spent some time studying creative writing, and it shows, but in a good way: not in the sense that she sounds like a veteran of too many workshops, but in that she obviously puts a lot of care into her use of words (including what I’m guessing is the only know instance of rhyming “amen” and “hollerin’”).

Squint skyward and listen:
loving him,
we move within his borders,
just asterisms
in the stars’ set order.

We could stand for a century,
staring,
with our heads cocked,
in the broad daylight
at this thing: joy.
Landlocked,
in bodies that don’t keep,
dumbstruck
with the sweetness of being,
till we don’t be.
Told: take this
and eat this.

—“Emily”

The line breaks and punctuation are my attempt to represent the rhyme and rhythm as well as the sense of the lyric. I had to look up “asterism”; it’s actually the perfect word here.

The “Y” in Ys, by the way, is apparently pronounced “ee,” since Newsom has released an EP called Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band. No, I don’t know what Ys means, or whether it should rhyme with “ease” or “grease” (the noun—and why are those two words pronounced differently anyway?).

Here’s a YouTube clip which combines an interview with a bit of a performance (young single men should approach with caution, as it may be a romantic hazard). Here’s another which is a partial performance of “Emily.” The sound quality is poor, the performance a bit unsteady, and the arrangements are reduced to harp, guitar, and something which looks and sounds like an overgrown mandolin. But between these two you should be able to get an idea of whether you want to hear more.

Update: It just occurred to me to see if there is an entry for Ys in Wikipedia. There is. Maybe you already knew this.

Music of the Week — September 16, 2007

Chris Rea: Auberge

Everytime I hear Chris Rea I wonder why he isn’t more popular. His warm, gruff voice is striking and powerful, and his slide guitar work, although not flashy, is expressive in a way that doesn’t rely on the standard blues vocabulary. His best songs are terrific. He deserves a bigger audience.

Then I listen to this album, and get an idea of why he doesn’t have it. About half the songs here are magnificent, starting with the opener, but the others are a little dull. The musicianship is top-notch throughout, making every track worth hearing, and if you give them a chance the lesser songs will grow on you, but in the end they still don’t quite measure up, and they’re similar enough to each other that I can see why some listeners would not stick with the album. Also, to my taste the production is a little too slick; it’s flawless, but Rea’s strengths might be better served by a more immediate and less polished sound.

Something else, however, which might have tended to limit his popularity is a plus for some of us: he’s a grown-up who makes music for grown-ups. There is absolutely nothing trendy or shallow or meretricious about his work; you feel like you’re listening to a solid man with something solid to say. He writes about his family a lot, and is interested in quieter pleasures than partying; when he talks about heavy drinking and so forth it’s usually as of something in the past. He dwells on the past quite a bit, actually, and for me personally the fact that he leans toward the melancholy and nostalgic is also a draw. I think I should revise my desert-island list of a few weeks ago to include a best-of selection from his work.

Reportedly his more recent releases are just as good as if not better than this, which dates back fifteen years or so (but the newer ones can be hard to find—see this post). Here is the title song from Auberge on YouTube (the “video” appears to consist only of audio). You may think you aren’t hearing anything for the first thirty seconds or so; they’re a little sound-picture of someone walking around in his garage, starting his car, and driving away. It’s quite evocative on speakers that can do a really good job of imaging.

Music of the Week — September 9, 2007

Procol Harum: Shine On Brightly

The conversation with Ryan C about this album (see comments on this post) made me get it out and give it a listen for the first time in quite a few years. Shine On Brightly was Procol Harum’s second album, and I still find it, as I did when it was new, something of a disappointment. The first album, Procol Harum, was pretty uneven but about two-thirds brilliant. This one begins with half a dozen or so songs that are very much in the style of the first album, but to my taste not quite as good as its best—not bad by any means, but just not as memorable. These are followed by a long suite which might be described as either ambitious or pretentious, depending on how much self-conscious striving for profundity one thinks suitable for a rock group.

I was very definitely one of those who used the second word when the album came out. In the spirit of the times (1968), the suite includes everything from hard rock to sitars and spoken passages, and I found it almost comical. I remember a conversation with an acquaintance which began with my speaking derisively of the suite. There was a long pause while the look on his face went from shock to defiance, and he said, very deliberately, “I think it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” There was another pause, and we changed the subject.

More generous in my old age, I find the suite better now than I remembered, but still, to put it gently, not a success, although there are some very good moments. A couple of the individual sections would have made excellent songs on their own, especially “In the Autumn of My Madness.” And I’m struck now, as I wasn’t then, by the courage involved: you certainly can’t say the group was afraid of taking artistic risks. This is especially true for lyricist Keith Reid, who swapped his Dylan-influenced surrealism for painfully awkward soul-searching. That they followed this album with a rather different one which is now widely considered to be a classic, A Salty Dog, is a testimony to the virtue of learning from mistakes and keeping at it.

And give them credit for:

They say that Jesus healed the sick
and helped the poor
and those unsure
believed his eyes
—a strange disguise

Music of the Week — September 2, 2007

Louis Philippe: An Unknown Spring (again)

In an unprecedented development, Light on Dark Water devotes two weekly reviews to one piece of music.

I suppose—no, I know—that part of the reason popular music has such a hold on me is that it makes use of both words, my natural and favorite medium, and music. Really good pop music is not pure or absolute music; it has to be about something, in a literary sense. In last week’s rave about this album I never gave any indication of what it’s about. I think the content and placement of the songs would repay more close attention than I have time for, but here are a few things worth mentioning.

The majority of the songs are about romantic love, very fittingly so for the very romantic musical atmosphere. These are lyrically rich and fresh, giving new life to that old, old subject which sometimes seems exhausted. But the opening and closing songs deal with war and peace. Although it’s a little obscure, the opener, “No Sun, No Sky At All” seems to be a description of the moment when normal life is interrupted by the onset of apocalyptic war. The closer, “Wild-eyed and Disheveled” is an address to the United States, colored by the Iraq war, that’s both affectionate and sad.

I keep coming back to the title song, which seems to deal with some of the things I’ve been writing about here for the past few weeks: the longing for what is transcendent and perfect, and the hope that when we reach it we will also find what we have lost along the way. There are a couple of crucial lines here that I couldn’t make out by listening, and Louis Philippe himself kindly answered my email asking for the lyric. Here is the key stanza:

For it’s God’s own justice
If we all dream like this
If we all keep looking
For an unknown spring

What I like so much about this is not just the reference to the fact that we’re looking, but the fact that we must look; it’s the way we’re made, it’s what we’re designed for. Of course you really have to hear it sung; the melody is instantly memorable, a higher moment in an album that’s almost all high moments.

Music of the Week — August 26, 2007

Louis Philippe: An Unknown Spring

It’s pretty rare for an artist to go from “never heard of him” to “indispensable” in my book, but it just happened with Louis Philippe. He’s been making music for twenty years or so, but for some reason, undoubtedly having to do with the fact that he works in an unfashionable style, he remains little known. I only know of him because of the valiant (and persuasive) efforts of the eMusic subscriber who calls himself PapaLazarou to draw attention to him. PapaLazarou drew me in by connecting Louis Philippe to The Clientele.

What’s the unfashionable style? Well, for starters, it’s a very highly polished sort of pop music that owes more to Bacharach and David than the Beatles. I’m not a pop music historian and there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but it seems to me that the very careful and sophisticated craftsmanship in songwriting practiced by, say, Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer almost disappeared sometime in the ‘60s; the same is true of the sophisticated arrangement and production seen in some of the classic Frank Sinatra albums of the ‘50s. Bacharach and David were in the same basic tradition and succeeded in the ‘60s by adding a rock flavor to songs that were not rock-and-roll at all. And there were a few soft-rock groups who may have aspired to continue in that mode. But for the most part rock crowded it out, and rock’s origins in folk and blues made it relatively primitive almost by definition. Artists who might have been capable of the same technical achievement had different aims.

Louis Philippe’s work harks back to that mid-‘60s attempt to incorporate a bit of rock instrumentation into a songwriting tradition that owes far more to Cole Porter than to the blues. In fact it owes the blues, and country, approximately nothing. Philippe is a Frenchman who moved to England as a young man, and I have a vague idea that French pop music of the ‘60s may have sometimes sounded something like his arrangements.

Whether or not that sounds appealing to you, anyone who appreciates the art of songwriting really ought to hear this album. I don’t know of anyone today writing at this level of craftsmanship, unless some of the people still writing musicals are capable of it. Last week I was praising the matching of words to music in songs co-written by Rupert Hine and Jeanette Obstoj (see last week’s review), but they’re clumsy in comparison to Philippe. His matching of the musical to the lyrical phrase is flawless, truly in a class with Porter and Mercer: there’s no cramming of too many syllables into the musical phrase, and no awkward dragging out of a word to fill it up. To an almost astonishing degree the natural spoken rhythm of the words follows the accents of the music.

None of that would matter if the tunes and the words weren’t good, and they’re superb. The melodies are inventive, complex, and graceful; the lyrics are intelligent, coherent, and poetic. Some listeners might be put off by the arrangements, which are light, pretty, and lush, and which feature strings and breathy choirs of backing voices and in general the sort of instrumentation one hears in some ‘60s soft pop. But the effect is not sugary at all. The word “exquisite” comes to mind, but that almost implies “effete,” and that would be way off base. Nor is there the least hint of irony that would make the whole thing seem fey; the album seems as genuine as it is elaborate, and as intelligent as it is romantic. There’s a sort of tensile strength in the melodies that gives the music a core of strength, as if it were built on a frame of some light but very strong metal.

Listen for yourself at eMusic. Here is an overview of the man and his work at All Music Guide. And here’s his web site, where you can find downloads of some complete tracks, although as of right now none from this album. I’m going to be hearing a lot more of Louis Philippe; I’ve already gotten Azure from eMusic.

UPDATE: For a richer description, please read Chris Evans's AMG review. Sample: "...an album of pure melody, melody untrammeled and unconfined by the conventions of what passes for modern popular music, melody that unfurls gracefully, languorously and then, when you think it can't help but fold in on itself, unfurls a little more.On first hearing, this can be somewhat daunting. Not because An Unknown Spring can in any way be described as a tough listen, but because our cosseted ears simply aren't used to processing melodies that don't ingratiate themselves by means of repetition or overfamiliar resolutions. A delectable turn of phrase that might pass for a chorus or a hook drifts past and you wait confidently for a reassuring reprise. But it never comes: instead, the melody just carries on evolving."

Music of the Week — August 19, 2007

Rupert Hine: Waving Not Drowning

It’s been well over twenty years since my friend Robert sent me a tape of this album, which had gone out of print within a couple of years of its 1982 release. It’s still (or again?) out of print in this country, although you can get it as a thirty-dollar import. But it was only recently that I discovered that two of the best songs on the tape were actually from another Rupert Hine album, Immunity, also available now only as an expensive import, and according to the All Music Guide an even more unsettling work than this one. I’d really like to hear it, but am not sure I’m altogether prepared for it, as Waving Not Drowning captures certain aspects of urban/industrial society in the late 20^th century better than any other work of popular music I know, and it’s not a comfortable experience.

Those “certain aspects” are unpleasant ones that were particularly prominent in the late 1970s and early 1980s: anxiety, paranoia, disorientation, isolation, and plain old fear. The music relies, fittingly, although not exclusively, on the cold timbres and unnatural strength and agility of synthesizers and other electronics. To dismiss it as “synth-pop,” though, would be seriously misleading. If “pop” implies something at all frivolous and lightweight, it’s not a word that belongs anywhere in the vicinity of this music, which renders a very dark world with great skill.

The first song, “Eleven Faces,” appears to be about someone trying to pick a rapist (or maybe a rapist-murderer) out of a lineup. The last one, “One Man’s Poison,” is a bleak survey of the unjust vagaries of fortune. Between the two, the mood never lightens, although it runs through many varieties of unease. The experience could be extremely unpleasant if it didn’t keep you so busy admiring its brilliance.

The songs, arrangement, and production are truly extraordinary, all the way through. I have my favorite tracks, of course, but every one holds my interest. A large part of the credit goes to the lyricist, Jeanette Obstoj. As anyone who reads these reviews regularly knows, I place a lot of importance on lyrics in pop music. These misfire occasionally, becoming obscure or possibly just confused, but overall I know of very few more successful marriages of words and music this album.

I’ve found a couple of videos on YouTube and will direct you to them rather than attempt to describe the music further. Personally I have never liked music videos in general and don’t think these are very good even by standards of the genre, but they’ll give you a taste of the music. The first of these, “Surface Tension,” is actually one of the Immunity songs that was on my tape. But it conveys the atmosphere of Waving better than the other one, a bitter look at a disturbed family called “The Set Up.” Bear in mind that the poor sound quality of these videos means that you’re missing a significant amount of the sonic detail that makes the album so compelling.

I should point out that as bleak as the album is, its title suggests hope, being a reversal of the lines from the famous Stevie Smith poem:

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Music of the Week — August 12, 2007

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

This year marking the fortieth anniversary of the release of this album, I thought it appropriate to listen to it for the first time in many, many years. I had made its acquaintance in 1967 via a soon-scratchy LP and a portable record player, and was curious to hear it in digital audio on a good system. I half-expected to be able to say that the experience was a revelation, that I heard things I’d never heard before. But that didn’t really happen. It was much as I remembered it, just fuller and richer.

I had decided long ago that the album was more important as a triumph of production and arrangement than as music per se, and that still seems true, too. There really aren’t that many great songs here, and apart from the reprise of the opening song the “concept album” aspect—the notion that the album is a unity with a definite theme—is mostly an illusion, no more present than on many other albums of the time, such as the Kinks’ Something Else—rather less so, actually, in that comparison.

It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that the arrangement and production on many of the songs—“Fixing a Hole,” and the title tune(s), for instance—are really not that elaborate; you’re just hearing a good (really good) rock band, well-produced. And because these songs are, by Beatles standards, not that great, they ended up being the less-interesting tracks. I found myself more interested in exactly the ones that I thought might sound most dated because they’re more gimmicky: “Lucy in the Sky,” “Mr. Kite,” “Within You Without You.” The latter in particular (George Harrison’s Indian piece) I was prepared to snicker at, but it strikes me now as quite lovely. And “A Day in the Life,” with the sole exception of the stupid “I’d love to turn you on” line, is as vivid and powerful and strange as it was forty years ago. “She’s Leaving Home” is a truly lovely song and arrangement, marred by what I would nominate as the worst line the Beatles ever wrote: “Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy.”

The single most striking thing in my revisiting of the album was the brilliance and effectiveness of the rhythm section. McCartney’s bass in particular, prominent because of its bright, rubbery tone and avoidance of the lower range, often seems to be the engine of the music, both supporting and leading. If he’d been so inclined, he could have established himself as an independent virtuoso on that instrument alone, in the manner of Jack Bruce, and that was only one of his gifts.

All in all, I wouldn’t call this the Beatles’ greatest musical achievement, and I don’t even like it as much as I do the thrown-together Magical Mystery Tour, but it certainly remains interesting, and not just as a product of its times. What a monumental talent these guys collectively possessed!

Music of the Week — August 5, 2007

Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans

I could hardly have gone further in the opposite direction from last week’s artists, goth-metal Tristania, than this gentle, intimate, and explicitly Christian album. Yet I’ve been listening to both these albums to the exclusion of almost everything else for the past couple of weeks, well past the three mandatory hearings for a Music of the Week selection, and liking each of them more and more. Both speak to spiritual questions, Tristania indirectly and negatively, Sufjan Stevens directly and positively.

Stevens is an artist who’s been on my to-be-investigated list for quite some time. He’s a favorite of the indie-rock set, and although I consider that a positive recommendation it isn’t unqualified: more than once I’ve found that an artist who comes on a wave of applause from that corner has brilliant moments but doesn’t hold up for an entire album, or for more than one album.

I have an uneasy feeling that I may not be listening to Seven Swans seven years from now, but I really can’t point to any particular reason, except possibly the fact that the lyrics on many of the songs are rather on the slight side. If the simpler and less coherent ones are supposed to be symbolically weighty, it isn’t working for me. This is very spare, almost minimal, music, entirely exposing each song. Under these conditions every word needs to count, and too often they don’t.

That disposes of the negatives; let’s proceed to the positives. The album is full of simple yet striking melodies, supported by beautiful and slightly quirky arrangements, mostly acoustic: banjo, guitar, a Farfisa-sounding organ, piano, occasional drums and bass. The banjo is used very imaginatively, so that you’re almost not aware at first that it is a banjo; one rarely speaks of introspective or intimate banjo music, but there’s some of that here. Some very sweet and subtle female vocal touches are provided by members of another group high on my must-hear-more list, the Danielson Famile. These play a significant role in imparting a winningly innocent quality to the whole production.

More than half of these songs are exquisite, and even those that seem comparatively less interesting have something that ends up grabbing me, like the wordless chorus of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” which seems to have some connection with the Flannery O’Connor story though I couldn’t say exactly what. I think my favorite song is “In the Devil’s Territory,” which creates an image in my mind of something rising slowly to the light. If I had written this a few days ago I would have said that the last song, “The Transfiguration,” didn’t really do much for me, but on my last hearing it finally sank in, and now I think it’s one of the better tracks.

By the way, the high regard in which Stevens’ work in general and this album in particular are held by critics and fans at large explodes the mistaken belief under which some Christians in the arts labor: that secular audiences will not hear them. If you come up with something good, they’ll listen. Read the review at the Seven Swans eMusic page, not as far as I know written by a Christian, and notice the comment from the atheist at the end of the subscriber reviews.

Music of the Week — July 29, 2007

Tristania: Illumination

A year or two ago on the Caelum et Terra blog there was a discussion of guilty pleasures, with accompanying revelations. Being Catholics, we were careful to specify that we did not mean sinful pleasures—sin is sin, and when you sin you go to confession and try your best not to do it again; you don’t put it in the fridge with the intention of taking an occasional bite or sip. A guilty pleasure is one that isn’t a sin but in some way goes against your better judgment: if it’s food, maybe it isn’t good for your health or your waistline, like a bag of cheese curls; if it’s art, maybe it’s something of which your critical faculties can’t approve but which you nevertheless enjoy, like an old episode of Magnum P.I..

For my part, the thing that came immediately to mind when the topic was suggested was heavy metal music. I’m fascinated by sound for its own sake, and the dense, massive power and weight of the bass and guitar combination in metal is particularly fascinating—it’s as if someone had figured out how to organize thunderclaps. This music has never been something I wanted to hear very often, because in most of it the elements of music beyond the thunderclaps are pretty deficient, limited to the expression of rage and hostility. And the lyrics tend toward the hateful and violent, sometimes even the Satanic, and not in a tongue-in-cheek way.

A few years ago, thanks to eMusic, I discovered a sub-genre that I actually like and—I’m admitting here for the first time—has mostly moved out of the category of guilty pleasure. Sometimes referred to as gothic or symphonic metal, it adds melody, variety, and contrast, even subtlety, to the basic format, incorporating keyboards, strings, maybe even the occasional choir, and some of the techniques and ambitions of progressive rock. A sub-sub-genre sometimes described as the “beauty and the beast” style adds female vocals which typically are near-classical in their range and purity. Its atmosphere is not one of evil and violence but a gloomy, occasionally morbid, romanticism.

Of the bands of this type that I’ve heard, my favorite is Tristania. Considering that I have four of their five full-length albums, it would be dishonest at this point to pretend I’m not a fan. It’s true that I got the first three from eMusic for a negligible sum, when eMusic offered unlimited downloads for ten dollars a month. And it’s true that I don’t listen to them all that much, because their intensity wears on me after twenty minutes or so. And it’s true that much of their music—almost all their earlier albums—is marred by the presence of the so-called “death grunt” male vocal, which can best be described as the sound of a very large, very hostile Cookie Monster. But the interplay of the classic metal elements with the lovely soaring vocals of Vibeke Stene can be beautiful and very potent. I have half-jokingly described them as the Fairport Convention of metal. (Alas, Vibeke left the band last winter; one hopes they’ll find someone comparable.)

Their latest, Illumination, is an album very much worth full cd price. And my remark above about listening to them in small doses doesn’t really apply here, as the intensity is frequently moderated by quieter passages, and Beauty is given some really affecting melodies. They’ve gradually been leaving behind more and more of the conventions of metal and, as the AMG reviewer said, have almost re-invented the gothic romanticism of ‘80s bands like Bauhaus, Xymox, and the Sisters of Mercy (albeit with more power chords than synths). The mood here is predominantly one of melancholy, yearning, and regret, though there are occasional moments of bitterness and a couple of anti-Christian sentiments. As I wrote to a friend, I wish they didn’t think God is their enemy. I often think that people like them would be very committed Christians if they could ever get past their prejudices against the faith, because they seem to passionately desire what is real. The song “Sacrilege” reveals the misunderstanding: introduced by what seems to be a somewhat insipid Christian hymn, it defies the religion which they think would crush them. If they only knew…. In spite of that, I think they’re worth listening to, although certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. Their music is gloomy but, as the title of this album suggests, it does not hate the light:

But you must not fear the dark
I will watch over your sleep
Until the morning comes

(“Lotus”)

No doubt I’m reading too much into those lines, but they’re a good description of the way I feel when praying for someone I care about, especially those who may not be praying for themselves.

Here are: Illumination on eMusic, the official band site, and the MySpace page (very slow to load, but allows you to hear one of my favorite songs from Illumination, “Mercyside”).

And here’s a link to that CetT thread.

Music of the Week — July 22, 2007

The Clientele: Suburban Light

One rainy Saturday evening in 1976 I wandered into the only serious record store in town. By “serious” I mean it was like the record shop in the movie High Fidelity—the owner, Paul somebody, and most of the people who worked there were passionate music lovers, zealously evangelistic for the music they loved and mercilessly contemptuous of anything they thought at all meretricious. Having more than a little of the obnoxious music geek in me, I often got into lengthy discussions and arguments there. The store was dim and dusty and crammed with record bins of unfinished wood, not much better built than packing crates, and generally had a slovenly look about it, which was quite misleading, as the stock was meticulously organized. And if you still had trouble finding what you were looking for, most of the staff knew exactly where to find it, or could explain when it was expected or, possibly, why they would not soil themselves by stocking it.

I wonder if there are still such stores. In big cities, I suppose so, but this was a small college town, and the store is long gone. I moved away, so I don’t know for sure when it folded, but I don’t think it survived the transition to the cd era; somehow the cd was never quite as romantic as the lp.

The reason I had nothing to do on this Saturday evening was that I had recently been on the losing end of a breakup. Maybe I was looking for company at the record store. And, thinking back on it, I expect I had unconsciously decided to buy myself a present, an album I’d never heard before that would give me something besides her to think about for a while. The bright friendly windows gleaming through the heavy rain, full of new releases and rarities, were as inviting to me as a bar might have been to someone more convivial. I went inside, shaking off the rain, and found the store empty except for Paul—it was Saturday night. After a few pleasantries he left me alone to browse. I made a mental note not to stay past his nominal closing time, even though I knew he wouldn’t chase me out. An aging unmarried hipster with wire-rimmed glasses, hair vanishing in front and pony-tailed in back, pudgy, he didn’t have anything better to do, either.

I couldn’t find anything I really wanted. In a what-the-hell sort of mood I started browsing the expensive imports and collector’s items, something I rarely bothered to do, as I couldn’t afford them. In the second category I found a used copy of an album called Suburban Light. I’d never heard of it or of the group, but something about the title phrase appealed to my mood, as did the cover art.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The Clientele? Oh, that’s great. A totally unknown classic. Came out at the end of 1966 and flopped, then some critic rediscovered it a few years ago, but it’s hard to find. Sort of early psychedelic English kind of thing. It doesn’t sound like the Kinks but since you like Something Else so much you’d probably like it. Bring it here.” Another nice thing about the store was that Paul remembered your tastes: Something Else was one of my top five post-British-invasion/pre-Sgt. Pepper English albums.

I took it over to the counter. He slipped the disc out of its jacket—although it was used, it seemed to be in very good shape—and dropped the needle, expertly, on “Reflections After Jane.”

It was beautiful and under my circumstances almost preternaturally appropriate, so that was enough. I bought the album, even though it was outrageously expensive at something close to twenty dollars. I was so bowled over by the song that I probably would have paid that much for a 45. I thanked Paul, hurried back to my apartment in the rain, and spent the rest of the evening listening to the album several times in a nostalgic haze. It turned out that “Jane” was probably the best thing on it, but at least half of the songs were in its class, and if it didn’t quite deserve the “classic” designation it was certainly a very happy discovery.

*****

Except for the description of the music, and the fact that I did live in a small college town in 1976, the preceding is pure fiction. But it’s very believable fiction: that’s what the music sounds like, and that would have been an appropriate time, place, and manner in which to discover it. Suburban Light actually came out in 2000. Its best moments capture a mid-‘60s feeling in a way that anyone who has either actual or vicarious nostalgia for the time won’t be able to resist it. It’s definitely one of my top ten mid-‘60s English pop revival albums. And I hear it’s not even their best.

Here is the album’s page at eMusic. And here is the band’s web site.

Music of the Week — July 15, 2007

Sibelius: Kullervo

This choral symphony in five movements was written when Sibelius was only twenty-six and suppressed not long after its premiere, remaining unperformed for many years. As best I can tell from a bit of reading, the suppression was a result of bad reviews and the composer’s own doubts about the work. But it’s really very fine. True enough, it’s not in a class with his mature masterpieces, but it still often carries that sense of depth and mystery that’s so characteristic of this composer, who is one of my favorites. In a broad sort of way it might be compared to Mahler’s orchestral songs, with maybe a bit of Rite of Spring thrown in, not in the sense of technical similarity but in that there seems a similar impulse to evoke the archaic (this is of course the earlier work by twenty years or so). It’s cruder than Mahler, as befits its epic subject, a brutally tragic episode from the Kalevala.

As I don’t have the knowledge and vocabulary to discuss a classical work in much detail, I will direct you here and here for further background and description. If you’re an admirer of Sibelius’s better-known work and don’t know this piece, do yourself a favor and find a recording of it. I’ve been listening to this one. It seems a fine performance, but as a download it doesn’t include the text of the vocal parts, and I haven’t been able to find one on the web. Even without that, though, if you’ve read a synopsis it’s pretty clear what’s going on, and the lament of Kullervo’s sister in the third movement, followed by Kullervo’s cursing of himself, is very powerful even if you can’t follow it word-by-word. The fourth movement, “Kullervo Goes to War,” seems a weak spot to me, thematically: yes, it makes sense that after the shattering events of the third movement Kullervo would go to war “merrily,” but it ought to be a somewhat crazed merriment. The fifth movement re-establishes the atmosphere very effectively.

Music of the Week — July 8, 2007

Terri Hendrix: The Ring

Most of what I said about the Terri Hendrix album I reviewed a few weeks ago, Places In Between, applies equally to The Ring, so I’ll make this brief. The two albums are very similar in style and quality. I think The Ring is, overall, a more consistent set of songs, so I’d give it a bit of an edge. But Places also includes several of my favorite individual tracks, such as “Wish.” In the days of the mix tape I might have constructed my own superlative forty-five minute album containing the best of both. Now I can just put them on an mp3 playlist. According to AMG, the album that followed this one, The Art of Removing Wallpaper, “delivers in full the promise” of Places In Between. It will probably show up here sometime in the next month or so.

Here is the eMusic page for The Ring, which includes the AMG review and sound samples.

Music of the Week — July 1, 2007

ZZ Top: Tres Hombres

Ok, wipe that smirk off your face: you know you like “LaGrange.” If you don’t recognize that title, click here to refresh your memory (Windows Media sample). I’ve been wanting to hear the whole album for a while, since I read an interview with some famous guitarist, can’t remember who, in which he described it as a “treasure chest of [lead guitar] tones.” A local thrift store obliged me with a well-used LP, and maybe that’s a good way to hear it. The overall sound is so thick and skuzzy that the pops, clicks, and sizzle of the LP only give it more atmosphere. The gatefold photo—and remember, this is an LP, so it’s roughly 12x24 inches—is of a big sloppy Mexican meal with piles of tortillas, several heavy cheese-covered enchiladas etc. literally hanging off the plate, guacamole, peppers, beer, and limes. And it’s a good image for the music. This is not something I’d want as a steady diet, but as an occasional indulgence it’s very tasty: straight-up spicey blues-rock that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Yes, it’s full of great guitar playing, with a big, thick, scuffed-up, noisy tone (according to that interview, guitarist Billy Gibbons uses a quarter for a pick). I’m a little disappointed in the songs, though. To my taste only about half of the eleven songs get past the hurry-up-and-get-to-the-solo class, “La Grange” being one, and undoubtedly one of the top one-riff, two-chords, two-changes songs ever written. (The riff is said to have been swiped from John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun,” but I haven’t heard a version of the latter that’s exactly the same. Gibbons’s singing is a more direct imitation.) Other favorites: “Waitin’ for the Bus,” “Hot, Blue and Righteous” (not what you think—it’s about an encounter with an angel, apparently), and “Jesus Just Left Chicago.” The latter might seem irreverent, but you can’t really argue with this:

You don’t have to worry
Because taking care of business is His name

Music of the Week — June 24, 2007

The Innocence Mission: We Walked in Song

Never in the history of pop music has there been a more aptly-named band. Let me emphasize that I do not suggest that any member of the group was immaculately conceived or that they do not all need to go to confession with the rest of us. But there is something in their art, especially their more recent work, that seems to give some hint of something that we can’t easily imagine: a human consciousness unstained by sin.

There is a persistent and pernicious idea, one to which we all probably incline, that evil is somehow more alive and engaging than good. This is not so, but for most of us—for me at any rate—that’s often more an intellectual conviction than an immediate perception. Simone Weil remarks somewhere that fictional evil is generally more attractive than fictional good, whereas real good is more attractive than real evil. Substitute “imaginative” for “fictional” and I think you have a good description of the way most of our minds work. Moreover, there’s a tendency to see and portray the good person as somehow insipid, evasive of reality and possibly hypocritical, as in the phrase “goody two-shoes.”

The music of The Innocence Mission is a rare instance of success in the conflict described by Weil. When I listen to it I have the sense that I’m looking at the world through eyes which are enchanted by what is good and simply do not perceive “the glamour of evil.” It’s innocence, but an innocence of virtue and wisdom, not mere ignorance of evil. I have the feeling that it would recognize evil, in fact recognize it more quickly and fully than I, but perhaps fail to understand it, because unable to enter into the state of mind that would commit it or be drawn to it.

Some such explanation is required in order for me to understand what there is about this music that transcends any external description of it, which would be something along the lines of “gentle mostly acoustic folk-rock.” I’ve heard it described that way, somewhat dismissively, but I find much, much more here. A great deal of it is in the voice and lyrics of Karen Peris, the voice simultaneously womanly-warm and little-girlish, the lyrics simple but full of devastatingly effective moments where certain words are repeated and take on a resonance that never seems to end. And it’s in the melodies on which the lyrics float, and the simple but oddly moving arrangements, full of deeply evocative touches like the background vocals of “Into Brooklyn, Early in the Morning” (a song which I might wish to have played at my funeral, though the Brooklyn reference would be puzzling).

In my opinion this album is at least as good as the Mission’s last, Befriended. And in my opinion that makes it great. Most pop music is evanescent stuff, but I think I’ll still want to hear this twenty years from now, if I’m still around.

Here is the album’s page at the band’s web site. It contains links to eMusic and iTunes, where you can hear samples.

Here is my review of Befriended, most of which applies equally to We Walk in Song. I have not, obviously, changed my mind about Befriended.

Music of the Week — June 17, 2007

Brian Eno: Another Green World

As I’ve mentioned before, I make it a rule to listen to a work at least three times before formulating any judgment on it. That’s not always the end of the story, of course—sometimes I change my mind after six or eight or a dozen hearings. But three is the minimum for avoiding a premature dismissal of something that’s not immediately winning, or excessive enthusiasm for something that doesn’t hold up. As I’ve also mentioned, a lot of this listening takes place in the car while I’m on the way to and from work, which of course is far from ideal.

After hearing Another Green World twice in the car, I was prepared to object to the All Music Guide’s description of it as “a universally acknowledged masterpiece”: universal minus one, at best, I thought. Then I listened to it with headphones, and heard something entirely different. In the car—which is to say, on a poor system with a lot of surrounding noise that overpowers detail—it’s an eccentric light-pop album with some interesting tunes and a lot of electronic noodling. Through headphones it’s a tour-de-force of production and arrangement.

I missed Eno entirely during the LP era, which is maybe just as well; the sheer richness and variety of timbral detail of this work, much of it soft and subtle, really need the pristine digital environment. It still seems a bit on the light side, and I’m not willing to go as far as “masterpiece,” but it’s impressive and fascinating.

Music of the Week — June 10, 2007

Terri Hendrix: Places In Between

As with a great deal of music that I like, I owe my acquaintance with this artist to my old friend Robert Woodley. Places In Between is an uneven album, but it’s made me want to hear more of Hendrix’s work, a testimony partly to the merits of the music and partly to something likeable in what I have to call its personality, which in turn refers, obviously, to the personality of Terri Hendrix and also to the spirit of her collaborators: she has a dynamite band led by her producer, main instrumentalist, and sometime co-writer Lloyd Maines (who is, I learn from AMG), a man with quite a musical track record of his own and the father of one of the Dixie Chicks.

This is a sort of folk-rock-country music with touches of jazz. To locate it in the popular music landscape, it’s somewhere in the general vicinity of Sheryl Crow’s. I’d have to say that Crow—or rather, looking at the credits on her albums, Crow and her collaborators—are, objectively, the superior songwriters. But I’ve never entirely warmed up to Crow’s work, respecting it somewhat more than I like it. This is a purely subjective thing, but, for what it’s worth, on the testimony of this album, I like Hendrix better. There’s a warm, engaging quality about her singing and writing; I keep coming back to the word “likeable”—I come away from the album thinking that she would be an enjoyable person to know, certainly not a sentiment inspired by every artist whose work one admires. Even her melancholy songs leave you with the sense that a sunny energy is going to reassert itself shortly. Her lyrics are sometimes a bit heavy on the you-can-do-it, fulfill-your-potential side, and I wonder about the implications of her adoption of “Own Your Own Universe” as a slogan for her record company. But as a distributist I have to cheer someone whose successful career has, apparently, been an end-run around the major record companies; maybe an achievement like that requires a touch of power-of-positive-thinking attitude.

In my opinion the best track here is “Wish,” and it’s superlative. Head over to iTunes or eMusic and give it a try. Runners-up are “Invisible Girl” (I would prefer its sometimes risqué story be a bit less explicit, but it’s quite a romp, with a wonderful bit of voice-and-instrument doubling in the outro), the title song, and “My Own Place.”

Here’s the artist’s web site, and here is her MySpace site, where you can hear some complete tracks, including “It’s A Given” from Places In Between.