Daughn Gibson - All Hell
“I saw him, underneath the neon lights of a corner bar, crying like a child. So I asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘I’m just an old man in a young girl’s world…’”
Daughn Gibson delivers that little bit of theatrical scene-setting in his commanding baritone half way through All Hell, drawling the words in imitation of the old country musicians whose songs he samples to build his own. It’s a helpful encapsulation of what’s happening on this record, especially since without a hint of two we might be tempted to see Gibson’s music as homage or graverobbery. At his darkest—and this is a deceptively dark album—he sounds a lot like late-70s/early-80s Scott Walker, crossing from MOR and pop into the shadowy world of art rock. “The Day You Were Born” sounds like Leonard Cohen teaming up with Bill Callahan to cover Nick Drake, while “Rain on a Highway” finds Gibson incorporating a touch of Roy Orbison warble. When he flexes the hard edges of his voice, as he does in that above narration, it booms like Johnny Cash. All of this to say: Daughn Gibson bears a clear resemblance to several other traditionally deep, manful singers.
What Gibson doesn’t do, though, is linger behind his influences as some set of playlistable Spotify recommendations. Or, rather, he simply treats them as means instead of ends. Construction matters a lot on All Hell, since the perceived chasm between the dusty, raggedy country songs Gibson samples and the modern way he puts them together—slicing, looping, pitching up and down—is so wide. His methods allow him to investigate some established storytelling tropes about down-and-out anti-heroes littering the rank corners of a thousand stale dives (“Ray,” “Bad Guys”) while pitting them against the unstoppably sleek, plastic futures we all seem destined for. Notice how “Lookin’ Back on ‘99” nudges bits of gritty noir rock toward something resembling European techno, or how “Tiffany Lou”s lament pivots on a warped, glitchy chorus and sputtering drums.
The way I hear it, what’s at stake on All Hell is a handful of notions about traditional masculinity. Gibson puts it bluntly on “A Young Girl’s World,” but it’s all over every sound on this album. It’s not as simple as undercutting patriarchy or sympathizing with the truck-driving types who have less and less to offer the world, either. He’s looking for emotional intersections, commonalities that might let the symbolically old and new coexist without demolishing or corrupting each other. The cover image shows Gibson—his facial stubble somewhere between runway and highway—buttoning up a frayed plaid shirt in a multi-angled mirror as if he were expecting a fashion choice (or anti-fashion, if you wish) to transform him into the kind of man neither he nor the characters in his songs can really afford to be anymore. Remember, he’s not the old man in the young girl’s world, he’s the young man trying to make sense of both, and in the process he’s made one of the year’s most engaging, dramatic, and replayable albums.
Listening Journal: Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls
It’s hard to make soul music sound fresh. Perhaps there are one too many gold-cased 20-disc Time Life compilations in the world. Or maybe there’s just something in the stylistic DNA that tends to make it feel comforting and a little nostalgic. Bloody and visceral, too, but forgiving in ways rock ‘n roll rarely is. With that said, everyone getting excited over Alabama Shakes should really consider giving Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings another shot. Brittany Howard’s voice doesn’t play super nice with the muffly analog sound of these recordings. She sings with such heavy, spastic inflections that some of the detail actually gets lost, turning emotive songs into something resembling a tantrum. Like late-career Jack White (with whom they share a stage) and late-career Black Keys (with whom they undoubtedly share a fan base), Alabama Shakes’ sound doesn’t scan as ‘modern hybrid’ so much as ‘grab-bag of “classic” stuff.’ They’re clearly not art school weirdos and shouldn’t be held to those expectations, but I can’t help asking if the world really needs another record like this. Or, rather, if a record like this deserves the massive audience it’ll surely have. Hey, like what you like and who am I to begrudge people their taste and enthusiasm—I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.
Listening Journal: Rimar - Closer
Turns out chillwave’s smuggled beach margarita can still pack a solid punch when it’s, y’know, about something. Rimar has his own intriguing voice, though, so maybe I’m selling it short. He strikes a great balance between the intensity of his musical atmospheres—this is a record unflinching in its sense of hot, breathy intimacy—and the grounded sensibility of hip-hop beats. The nods to Quiet Storm soul don’t hurt either. In fact, you might call this an underground weirdo’s update on that particular branch of the adult contemporary tree, a sound that understands the language-of-the-heart promises of Sade and Smokey Robinson but takes the liberty of abstracting them much further from common language. Now we get samples and sentence fragments—“Only remember the future,” “We promised to never leave each other,” “I will stay…”—that make sideways sense uttered in the heat of a moment. Stretching out sound and space allows slivers of dark, childish psychedelia to show through, but it’s in the service of the grown-up vulnerability of love. Keep an eye on this guy.
(listen)
Listening Journal: The Shins - Port of Morrow
Y’know, under-production hasn’t been a problem for The Shins’ since they were called Flake Music. I wouldn’t mind all the bells and whistles here—hell, I probably wouldn’t even notice ‘em—if there wasn’t this odd sense of deference in the whole affair. All the glassy guitars, synth whooshes, extra percussion, bleeps and bloops, they hit your ears first. This isn’t an issue of misdirected purism. I’m not grousing about some abstract notion of “the song” being overshadowed by extra sounds, I just sense that the very ornamental arrangements have subdued or perhaps taken the place of that certain springiness The Shins used to have. Even “Simple Song,” a great single on its own, flattens out a bit in these environs and few other tracks attempt to match its charisma. Maybe Mercer’s just mellowing out as he ages, but I hear an inversion here: a lack of joy in making music compensated for by making more of it.
(listen)
Sleigh Bells - Reign of Terror
You wouldn’t think that boring technical minutia would matter when it came to a peppy, poppy band like Sleigh Bells, but it does. We’ve all seen the little track player widgets on SoundCloud before, yes? With the horizontal spectrum that displays the waveform of the song in it? Think of the very top and bottom edges of that SoundCloud player as boundaries†. If the amplitude (or “big spikes”) of a sound crosses those boundaries, it means that whatever device was recording it wasn’t physically/technologically capable of capturing that sound purely. The sound is thus ‘too loud’ to be heard. Are you following me? Even though human ears can pick up a much greater spectrum of sounds than any microphone, they’re still subject to certain limitations. There are sounds that are either too quiet or too loud for us to hear properly. When something is too loud to hear properly, we (along with pretty much all microphones) perceive the sound as grimy, garbled, and distorted. That’s how a lot of electric guitar pedals work—they make the proverbial SoundCloud widget spectrum narrower to disrupt the sound generated by the guitar so it comes out awesomely bad. It’s a neat audio trick which our ears are so used to hearing that, no matter what volume a song is being played at, we understand instinctively that distortion = loud.
There’s an important difference, though, between hearing a distorted guitar in an otherwise balanced recording, knowing that it represents loudness, and hearing that entire song—every guitar, drum, voice, whatever else—distort by virtue of collective loudness. That’s how Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss began making music together as Sleigh Bells: by dealing in the kind of auditory assault that eschewed the grunginess of individual voices in pursuit of the true outer edges of audio fidelity. They seemed like the perfect pair to do it, too—he with his years of experience in a thrashy hardcore punk band and she with her teen girl-group resume—all set to pose new and exciting questions about music and sound and raw power in a way that those of us recklessly enamored of sweet pop melodies could grasp. Those early Sleigh Bells demos like “Crown on the Ground” and “Infinity Guitars” weren’t just lo-fi because Miller couldn’t afford professional studio gear. They were sonic petit fours, ideological representations of some of the loudest music ever made. Even notoriously loud bands like My Bloody Valentine made recordings that balanced the rush of distorted guitars with softened, pristine vocals or synthesizers. Sleigh Bells’ early work was exciting because it raised the bar (or should I say lowered it?), suggesting pop music that was ‘too loud’ to be heard properly, yet more exciting for it.
On Reign of Terror, the band’s sophomore album, all of that is gone. This music is loud but manageable in the traditional studio sense. Miller now attempts to use his guitar—windmilled on power chords in homage to Def Leppard, et al—as a stand-in for the holistic distortion he used to employ. The result is an album that squanders its catchy R&B melodies and surprising pop poignance on a fool’s errand of overproduction. Everything from the mid-range drum machines to Krauss’ sing-song voice is coated in gloss. Terror hides behind its buffed-up sound because, well, it’s Sleigh Bells. Distortion is their thing. And if they’re not going to use actual distortion, they have to muddle their sound somehow, right? It would be a bold move if they wore it well, but the gutless kick drum rolls of “Comeback Kid” and the unending reverb of “Crush” sit as poor excuses for badassery that are still outdone by those grubby little loop exercises where they knowingly implied being louder and more forceful than anything our pathetic flesh-and-blood ears could handle. Miller recently told Spin that he’d grown sick of guitars when the band first started but has since fallen back in love with them. The sad fact he seems to miss is that, in the process of trying to abandon guitars, he crafted a sound that turned everything at his disposal—even Krauss herself—into one big, heavy electric guitar. To hear him regress to well-worn sonic ground is disappointing to say the least.
It’s a shame, too, because Krauss is clearly working to step her game up on all fronts. She’s writing stronger melodies, evening out her delivery, and (I think?) writing lyrics with some emotional heft. Most of the decipherable lines on Terror suggest the dark side of American teendom—ennui, depression, boredom, hormonal melodrama—which should be fruitful territory for a band so enamored of adolescence. “Leader of the Pack,” “D.O.A.,” and “End of the Line” take it a step further, appearing to address the sudden death of Miller’s father in a motorcycle crash, and it seems no coincidence that these songs also contain the album’s most poignant melodies. ‘Decipherable lines’ is a big issue here, though, as Krauss’ coo is newly edgeless, buried beneath the mid-range crunch of guitar and flimsy drum machines. Miller’s return-to-“rock” has deflated Sleigh Bells rhythmically, with programmed beats that echo the maximal pounding of hardcore without bothering to rattle the low end the way his danceable 808s used to. The mix comes off a poor facsimile of an overdriven onslaught, a set of careful concessions designed to make this record seem louder than it is—No, it’s cool! We’re still pummeling!—and any listener can easily spot the difference (never mind how the last half of the album peters out on increasingly spare ‘ballads’). The fact that about half the record—the first three tracks, “Comeback Kid,” and “Demons” for starters—works from the same basic tempo, structure, and sonic character should tell us something about the band’s narrowing conception of their own work.
It seems appropriate that Sleigh Bells are also trying harder than ever to cultivate their extra-musical image. American flags, toy machine guns, bloody Keds, leather jackets for her and letterman jackets for him. Questionable jingoism aside, it’s a one-dimensional collection of signifiers that only underscore (rather than enhance) their musical mish-mash of exclamation points. Grainy or grating as it may have been, there was freedom underneath the fuzz of their early work. There was space to move and experiment and forge new possibilities for how rock and pop could interact. Reign of Terror fails in my eyes because it finds Sleigh Bells taking the all-too-common route of settling for images over ideas.
Listening Journal
I have a habit of not pushing myself to hear new releases all the time, waiting around for good records to somehow find their way to my ears, which is not a good way to do things if you want to be an even half-decent critic. So I spent the last couple days playing catch-up on a handful of talked-about albums I’ve been meaning to listen to—some newer than others—taking notes as I went and trying not to get overwhelmed by the glut of new sounds. Here are some short thoughts on them.
Chairlift - Something - I didn’t expect to like this as much as I do. Popular and critical praise aside, there’s been an overabundance of ‘atmospheric,’ 80s indebted electro-pop albums the last few years and I find it increasingly difficult to locate vitality or personality in those sounds. Chairlift can certainly be too ethereal for their own good—and they rely far too heavily on rote, marchy (boring!) 80s drum beats—but when they allow themselves to branch out, like on “Ghost Tonight,” they reveal themselves to be keen, inventive sound sculptors. The melodic strength and cosmopolitan poise of “Frigid Spring,” “Grown Up Blues,” and even the silly “Amanaemonesia” don’t hurt either. Basically, the further Chairlift roam from Drive-soundtrack retro moodiness, the better off they are.
First Aid Kit - The Lion’s Roar - This record should be listed in a Dictionary of Modern Music under O for ‘Omaha.’ These Swedish sisters have Mike Mogis’ country-folk-pop production, a guest verse from Conor Oberst, and those close-knit harmonies that start off pleasant but sour quickly from overuse. Ten songs of dusty strumming filtered through orange afternoon sunlight and wrapped in quavering personal angst makes for an adequately moving record, but it’s far from a revelation. If it had better lyrics it’d be a lost Jenny Lewis album, or add a dash of impetuous pep and it’d scan like Slow Club (in a good way) or She & Him (in a not so good way). Serviceable catnip for Saddle Creek devotees, but I doubt I’ll come back to it much.
Sharon Van Etten - Tramp - A diary full of hard knocks isn’t a prerequisite for making sincere, affecting music (let us never forget it!), but in the case of Sharon Van Etten it sheds a lot of light on what makes her compelling. Tramp’s backstory of her struggle to escape the clutches of a controlling boyfriend has gravitas and fuels some great writing (“Give Out,” “All I Can,” “Ask,” etc.), but you can hear it just as clearly in her voice. She sings like a strong person beaten down into deep weariness—never timorous or fragile, but nervy and exposed. Aaron Dessner’s production wisely mirrors her attitude, with guitars and drums that never get too comfortable in their own spaces, sometimes murmuring in the background behind a thick curtain and other times crowding in so close around her that they simultaneously smother and lift her up.
John Talabot - ƒIN - This may boil down to a personal preference thing. I like the idea of headphone dance music in theory, but in practice I don’t seem to find myself making a lot of time for it. I tend to think of it as something to zone out to, and maybe I’m just too much of a sucker for songs to get deep into it. Some of Talabot’s tracks hew closer to my comfort zones—“Last Land,” “Journeys,” “So Will Be Now…”—but others can feel angular and blocky in a way that distracts my ears. I hear the contemporary steamy ‘tropical’ influences at work, though thankfully they don’t overwhelm the record. There are also smooth, dark, even woozy sides to ƒIN and so far those are the better ones.
Beach Fossils - What a Pleasure EP - A more downcast, melancholy addition to the world of indie surf bands. Beach Fossils have never been exactly brimming with energy or emotion, but here they manage to widen their pale sound while letting the appealingly bleached, morbid qualities of their debut slip through their fingers. The guitars sound fine, but the rhythm section is still too thin and papery, dropping the bottom out from these supposedly-deeper songs and making them plod where their influencers pushed. I realize it’s an EP and probably a stop-gap on the way to the next album, but What a Pleasure demonstrates what it sounds like for a band to not go far enough, in any direction.
Caveman - CoCo Beware - Yeah, I didn’t think Local Natives could get any more snooze-worthy either, but here we are.
“What Cue?…”
“…’Faye Dunaway’ take two,” mumbles Justin Moyer in a terse moment of verité that kicks off First Reflections, the otherwise spotty and confounding 2001 debut of his Edie Sedgwick project. It’s been a different ‘band’ every album, but in the beginning it was a bass-and-drums duo of Moyer and Ryan Hicks, both stalwarts of the DC Dischord scene. The blurb-able headline here, though, is the post-ironic (or maybe pre-ironic?) concept of half-intellectualized celebrity worship that serves as Moyer’s prime directive. Hence christening every song after a famous actor—Sean Connery, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep to name a few—and flying it all under the banner of Andy Warhol’s most renowned starlet. It’s not quite the famous-for-being-famous vibe of your Hiltons and your Kardashians, but it’s in a similar vein: stardom as both a flimsy construction and a cultural end in itself. The band may’ve argued that it was all a sincere form of avant-garde adulation, but the album’s not so convincing.
Why talk about it at all, then? I only bothered to hear a few tracks from the subsequent Edie Sedgwick albums (including the electroclash drag show of Her Love is Real…But She is Not!, arguably the project’s artistic peak) and the pretense is questionable at best. Yet First Reflections—and “Faye Dunaway” in particular—have stuck with me ever since I first heard it almost nine years ago. People don’t often talk about how an experimental piece of music fits into their lives because they’re too focused on what it means in a super-social context. Pop songs can speak to you, for you, and about you, but a noodly, abstract, honking 2-minute jazz-punk screed about Winona Ryder speaks over you. It’s condescending. You’re not supposed to relate to it. But this record is great in the way that its rubbery, immaculate minimalism—clean, undistorted bass guitar and perfectly-recorded drums—creates a sense of openness. That’s why Moyer’s album-starting aside is so important: it reminds us that, in the end, this is just the sound of two guys jamming in a room. He shouts his beat-poet lyrics above the din as if they weren’t the whole point of the band to begin with. For someone like 17-year-old me, such comfortable sonic looseness paired with the wiggling, hyperactive groove of “Dunaway” could be all you needed to forge a new experimental definition of rock music in your head.
At least that’s how it felt back then. This was toward the end of the Epitonic era—remember?—before free mp3s came packaged with six press photos, a Vimeo link, and aspirations of ‘grassroots’ viral buzz. For me it ended up working out as a kind of free-associative exercise in music discovery, where Edie Sedgwick got lumped in under the general banner of indie with, like, TV on the Radio’s early stuff. I heard Daniel Johnston for the first time on an internet radio station labeled “Alternative,” sandwiched between the Elephant 6 free-jazz group Bablicon and, I think, The Crystal Method. It was a strange time in my life. I was hungry for all things unknown and unusual, trying to skew my musical vocabulary toward the underground largely without the aid of critics, record store clerks, cool older friends, or any of the traditional pre-net gatekeepers. I would get into all of that soon after I graduated high school, but for a brief moment I was out there on my own, listening to whatever bits came along and biding my time until I could get the hell out of Orlando and grow up already. I wish I could remember more of it.
“Faye Dunaway” feels representative of that time, though, and (perhaps not-coincidentally) also of the sorta-unrealized goals of the band. Moyer zeroes in on Dunaway’s famous legs, but he adopts the prima donna attitude traced most directly to the 1987 drama Barfly (Mickey Rourke plays Charles Bukowski—yeah, I know…) in which a camera tilt over her legs that wasn’t in the script was added at her insistence. “These legs are guns—you get the good side!” Moyer snarls, casting his muse as a ominous weapon both on screen and off. Dunaway threatens with her legs and Moyer threatens with her. That’s why it’s hard to buy the deflection of post-irony: Moyer sounds too vertiginous, too snotty, and too eager to prove a point here (too “punk,” in other words). It would take another album and a reinvention of identity for him to get it right. Here he seems much more interested in drawing out the depths of dead-eyed stardom, even using the obvious metaphor of makeup for his opening call to arms, “Come rouge! Come blush!” All across the album’s lean 27 minutes he can never bring himself to put it bluntly. I get why—“celebrities are shallow” would make for a pretty boring lyric sheet—but just as Moyer makes like it’s easy to see through the stars he’s memorializing, we as listeners will probably find it easy to se through him.
I keep coming back to this record, though, and I’m finding it hard to be satisfied with “I heard it when I was a teenager” as a suitable explanation. I mean, there’s a case to be made that biography is responsible for all tastes, however indirectly, but I hear something in First Reflections that I don’t hear anywhere else, not even in my all-time favorite albums: the willingness to not matter followed up by actually not mattering. I believe this is one of the most important functions of indie rock as a musical subculture—to produce works that go deservedly nowhere, which indulge in irredeemable pretension or numbing facileness, and which are still out there floating around in the back bins of record stores or the deep corners of the internet for some kid to stumble upon and make his/her own. No one in their right mind would burn this album onto CDs, print up little jewel case inserts, and slap a $15 price tag on it thinking that it would sell, right? And even the most blasé or die-hard punk critics would hesitate to give it five stars, right? It’s not ugly or unlistenable like so much other failed avant rock, but it has no lasting pop acumen. It interacts with culture—painfully so, sometimes—but it doesn’t position itself within the history of music. There’s no creep of nostalgia or tribute to beloved records here. There’s no reverb. In many ways it’s the opposite of what the indie rock landscape (which I still love) looks like today—a farm system for internet-tier pop stars—so it feels like just what the doctor ordered. Please continue to ignore it so I can keep it for myself.
