Julian Lynch - “Terra”
Before I try to actually talk about this new Julian Lynch song, I feel I must briefly outline an idea I’ve been toying with since I read that Poptimist about James Blake and Brian Eno last month, namely that there are two essential questions that all music writing / criticism seeks to answer: How did this sound get here? And now that it’s here, what is it doing? That second one especially seems to have a lot of other common questions rolled up into it. The question of “why,” to me, mostly ends at “because the artist chose it (in however abstract or concrete a sense) and wants it to do something,” and the question of valuation—Is this good? Do we like it?—is a practical expression of what a sound is doing.
I say this because I often find myself at something of a loss for what to say about new little homespun songs like “Terra.” Laying out core values helps work against the impulse to pull some twisted, grandiose theory out of my butt in an attempt to make the song ‘matter’ more than it maybe does and justify my writing about it at all (before you say anything: I realize the irony in saying that while in the middle of ostensibly ‘deconstructing’ music criticism). Sometimes all a sound is doing is making you want to dance or reminding you of the TV shows you used to watch as a kid and that doesn’t mean it’s bad or not worth understanding.
Many of the sounds on the title track to Lynch’s forthcoming full-length—the acoustic guitars that twang like sitars, the hand drums, the tambourine—come from the mid 60s, when music from India became a fashionable influence on pop and contributed heavily to the idea of psychedelic rock. The more melodic voices (saxophone at the beginning, harmonica in the middle, and synthesizer at the end) come from the subsequent decades where there was both a nostalgia for the authenticity of rootsier music and an excited interest in futuristic possibilities. That’s about as much as I can say about the “how” question, the historical road by which these things have come to be paired together in recognizable ways. And in a sense, recalling older music is also part of what “Terra” is doing as a song, but I tend to think that, along with many of his Underwater Peoples compatriots, Lynch uses the recalling of old music to engender a feeling of comfort and wistfulness. Hand drums have a softer, earthier sound than a drum kit, as do acoustic guitars and Lynch’s perpetually mush-mouthed singing. When combined with “Terra”s 7th chords and reverberating, melancholic sax/harmonica/synth leads, they add up to a sound that retains much of the viscous, easy-flowing air of his previous work while employing rawer textures that, by virtue of not being subsumed in effects and distortion, feel more familiar and immediate (thus, again, comforting).
Judging by the increased attention to Lynch’s music in the last year or so, I’d say another thing this music does is show us quite plainly that comfort, nostalgia, and wistfulness are some important values we ascribe to music. On some level, lots of people want to feel these things without necessarily drawing them out of their own experiences (i.e. not just listening to the music you personally liked a long time ago). Building music like this is an act of recognizing not just the personal, but also the collective longing for that experience.
Beulah - “Popular Mechanics for Lovers”
Let’s take another stab at this “critically indefensible” thing because, as Casey at Crumbler queried yesterday: what’s so bad about Beulah? And of course, the short answer is nothing at all. They were a perfectly competent pop band with periphery Elephant 6 associations, which is a very neat and convenient way to slot their head-boppy 60s vibe into the ripple effect of Music That Was Important a la Dusk at Cubist Castle. Like countless bands before and after them, they worked hard but eventually fizzled out amid a small following and meager cash flow. If you’ve ever been in a band, you know this is a better fate than 90% of all people who make music can aspire to.
Musically, however, I’m less inclined to be so forgiving and I think it’s because—for lack of a better term—the music itself is forgiving. I will try to explain what I mean by this without sounding like a stuck-up jerk (a dubious task, to be sure!). OK, so: can we all agree that, although there have been many different ‘shades’ or ‘incarnations’ of it, we seem to have this idea of pop music that comes from the 60s that never really goes away? It’s not just your Beatles and your Beach Boys, mind you, though those bands had a big hand in essentially making rock ‘n roll the new ‘pop’ early in that decade, which is a big part of where this comes from. But for whatever socio-historical reasons, I think we can say our culture continues to further the echoes of popular music(s) from that period. This is what Beulah did, in the most reductive sense, so there is also a sense that bands like Beulah—amiable guitar bands that go mostly nowhere—will never be in short supply (currently, it is the job of everyone who has ever been in Vivian Girls to perpetuate this, but they will be replaced soon). ‘The 60s,’ whatever the term actually means, never really go away or come back; they’re always just sort of around.
Now, no: I’m not saying that there is one sound that defines an era or that people interact with music based solely on its historical antecedents. That would be silly and boring. It pains me to put it in these terms—since, y’know, its art and you just gotta feel it, man—but in the economy of pop music, Beulah represent an excess supply to a mediocre demand. When The Coast is Never Clear came out in 2001, David Pecoraro wrote in Pitchfork, “I can’t help but think of a handful of bands that do this sort of thing just as well, if not better,” and the more I think about it, the more I think that statement doesn’t speak to Beulah’s stylistic particulars so much as their general existence as a strummy pop band. Again, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ (and several things great!) about what they did, but our perception of it as generic causes us to undervalue it when it comes to criticism. For better or worse, we lavish finer attention on things that feel rare and distinct.
My favorite parts of “Popular Mechanics for Lovers” are the subtle twists of humor. There’s the self-deprecating chorus / title, the filmic facade lines (“Did you forget to read the script?,” “I can edit those parts out”), and the Magnetic Fields nod that conflates songwriting and wooing in a more self-aware way than most. One occasionally gets the sense, though, that some of the verses and/or bridges were rushed to leave more room for the payoff hook. The song doesn’t really open up for the first minute and a half, after which you wonder why it was so important to cap it at three minutes in the first place. It’s a good song, but as I thought about it yesterday I couldn’t escape feeling that everything I’ve described in this paragraph wasn’t significant enough to warrant its own post. I needed a more ‘critical’ position to defend; and voila!: indefensibility was the answer.
tUnE-yArDs - “Bizness”
Merrill Garbus is understandably nervous about the effect her moderate success will have on her and her art. Blog coverage and having a song featured in a Blackberry commercial might not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but compare that to where she was a couple years ago—recording the still-stunning BiRd-BrAiNs piecemeal, alone at home with little more than some free software and her trusty ukulele—and you start to see how all this could be overwhelming. In a recent interview, she talked about being uncertain of whether to stick to the lo-fi, no-cost ethos that got her here or to follow the route the project seemed to want to take, using the Blackberry money on studio time and an engineer. In the end, she opted for the latter, and now we get to start working through a lot of her concerns ourselves.
In my mind, part of what differentiated BiRd-BrAiNs from the lo-fi pack was that it was unconcerned with the illusion of live spontaneity. You could hear blocks of room noise being scooped out in between sounds, percussive slaps being looped into grooves, and Garbus’ voice being stacked into peripheral harmonies. Basically, you could hear the record’s seams—the mechanisms of the music’s construction—and recording in a professional studio obviously creates a less blocky sonic facade, erasing those audible ‘imperfections.’ Garbus is an excellent songsmith, so I was never concerned about tUnE-yArDs becoming ‘generic’ per se, but I did wonder if the music would lose that appealing sense of construction. Was honesty tied to fidelity or is it built deeper into the way she makes music?
The opening notes of “Bizness,” the first available track from Garbus’ sophomore album w h o k i l l, are reassuring, then, as she builds a cascading trill out of looped vocal fragments, hooting like a chorus of owls. Drum loops join in, all snare stutters and rim clicks like the ones she’s known to feed into a loop station on stage, and bassist Nate Brenner holds it all together smoothly in the background. Garbus’ knack for African-sounding polyrhythms—stacking triplet vocal inflections over duple drums—is on full display here, recalling at points the joyous cacophony of “Hatari,” but sonically enriched by the new studio clarity and the wonderful addition of funk/soul saxophones that color the tune just right. “What’s the business?!” she howls repeatedly, “Don’t take my life away.” Her voice is defiant, nimble and powerful and close to the ear as ever as she seemingly turns those fame-and-money dilemmas over in her mind. Talking to Pitchfork last month, she said “the glory of music is that those moments of singing really loud feel good—even if I haven’t figured some of those things out and they’re still confusing when I go to bed at night.” Listening to Garbus shout down her doubts on “Bizness,” I’m not sure you could find a better summation of her core ethos and what makes tUnE-yArDs such a vital and compelling project.
The Strokes - “Under Cover of Darkness”
Why does this new Strokes album feel like a reunion or a ‘comeback?’ I mean, sure, in the almost six years since First Impressions of Earth, every single member of the band has put out some kind of solo album or side project, but Portishead took eleven years to release Third and no one batted an eyelash. A decade after Is This It ushered in a new hype era, we still seem to be invested in the success of this particular rock band, perhaps needing proof that a pack of greasy art schoolers with a heavy nostalgia for pre-Giuliani New York and a couple great albums under their belts were not a flash in the pan (or that flashes in the pan are not good). Time was they could strut around like they didn’t owe anyone a flick of their hair and people loved them for it; now we seem to think they owe us a career.
With that in mind, it is both a tragedy that “Under Cover of Darkness” exists—for no matter what happens, The Strokes will never approach their past heights again and will only find themselves more roadblocked by age and experience (the disregard of which made them cool in the first place)—and a relief that the song doesn’t make First Impressions’ mistake of trying to rewrite the rule book. You know that head-bopping, staccato jangle rhythm they used to be really good at? They can still do it. Like Julian Casablancas’ everlasting vowel sounds? You’d better, ‘cause this thing is littered with ‘em. Strokes-iness, if there is such a thing, is somewhat intact. The melody on the chorus soars just enough to put some tension on your heartstrings, but it doesn’t ask for tears (or even comprehension). Of course, there’s also a very rote sense to it—not that it being what we’d except to hear from them is disappointing, but that this expected sound has lost some of its fire. You can tell they’ve been working out, but are still far from fighting trim. That and the mix is disproportionate: too much guitar and not enough vocals. “I’ve been out around this town / everybody singing the same song for ten years,” goes one of Casablancas’ more distinguishable lines. Pretty ironic for a tune that musters a hefty dose of 2001 nostalgia. And besides, wouldn’t we normally consider that a bad thing?
The White Stripes - “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”
Following yesterday’s news that the White Stripes have officially broken up (after a couple years of relative silence, mind you), lots of folks have been revisiting their favorite songs and talking about what the band has meant, for as the announcement blurb says, “The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want.” To get a handle on time and age, I tried to think back to the first time I heard them. I can’t recall for certain, but I was probably a sophomore in high school (‘01-‘02-ish?), listening to alternative rock radio on the way to school or something. This was during a very brief period in the early 2000s where rock radio would occasionally play some of these newfangled garage bands the kids were so wild about (not-so-coincidentally, this was also just before I forsook radio listening forever and always). Hey, it was the Orlando suburbs and I didn’t know about finding music on the internet yet—I had to make do.
Anyway, in hindsight “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” left a pretty indelible mark on me. It was one of their breakout songs and, as I and every other rock writer will tell you, the lead-off track on their most glorious, essential third album (which I would not hear in full for a couple more years, though I always pondered it when I passed it on store shelves). In the back of my mind I knew that this wasn’t necessarily a ‘new’ sound, but it was entirely fresh to my 16 year old ears. It was as minimal as the peppermint candy colors the band practically lived in and struck a kindred balance between sweet and sour. You could choose to hear Jack’s crunchy chords and Meg’s bare stomp as windmilling/caveman heroics—rock music stripped to its skeleton to emphasize the sheer force—or you could hear those same techniques as childlike and inspired, whimsical in their disregard for flashy technique. To top it all off, the color-coding and cloudy relationship dynamics and all the other stuff that we might now dismiss as gimmickry made them seem so incredibly cool in a way I hadn’t considered before.
Listening to “Dead Leaves” now, I feel like it’s a diagonal cross-section of everything the White Stripes did well. In their catalog there are heavier, more badass riffs (“Black Math,” “Seven Nation Army”—their legacy to marching bands worldwide), clearer pictures of the grade school regression (“Hotel Yorba,” “We’re Going to Be Friends”), more jarring moments of artsy theatricality (“The Union Forever,” “Take, Take, Take”), and better chunks of garage bubblegum (“Fell in Love With a Girl,” “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)”). All of them are great—and maybe my judgement is clouded by memory now—but I can hear glimpses of each in this song. It’s a subtle shift in context that ends up making all the difference in the world: heavy metal played by kids crouching in a sheet fort. Jack writes dynamite lines about being totally head over heals—“Every breath that is in your lungs is a tiny little gift to me”—and then tries to shrug it all off as a cliche (“Any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most”). He wants to play it cool, to be tough and grown up about all this, but can’t contain his excitement, which comes out in the wordless downstrokes of the chorus. “Shiny tops and soda pops when I hear your lips make a sound,” he admits. The White Stripes react to love and rock the same way: it makes them feel young again.
Fleet Foxes - “Helplessness Blues”
And now, without further adieu, Fleet Foxes present 2011’s Number One Source for Annoying Lyric Quotes on Facebook and Twitter for Everyone I Went to School With. Thanks, dudes. Where once the Seattle quintet’s pastoral west coast folk rock wound its way through hills and valleys and invoked vivid poetic fragments like the blood-staining passage from “White Winter Hymnal,” Robin Pecknold now belts his way through five minutes of existential musings on, like, life and stuff. “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique / like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes / unique in each way you can see,” he begins over muffled strums, while in the back of my mind I can’t help but think ‘oh brother, here we go.’
It’s tough because the subject he’s addressing really is an important one that more and more people seem to be struggling to understand. There’s a sense that the cultural imperative to counteract marginalization and low self-esteem by telling every kid how special they are makes for a bunch of disappointed adults who, when thrust out into a world that doesn’t really give a crap about their uniqueness, don’t know what to do with themselves. But when was the last time you heard an artful answer to a dilemma like that, especially in a song? Pecknold sings that after considering it, he’d rather be a part of something greater than himself, “a functioning cog in some great machinery,” but the language ends up shooting his point in the foot. We’re too used to seeing cogs and gears and machines used in a negative, dehumanizing sense to be able to appreciate the notion of being united that way (it’s ironically un-American). If you just stop there, as he does, the illustration isn’t inspiring enough to carry his wistfulness or his later vision of tending a humble orchard.
But if you don’t really care about all this (and I’ll just assume you don’t), you can rest assured that “Helplessness Blues” still sounds pretty much like a Fleet Foxes song. There are periphery electric guitar chimes for color and easy-rolling tom-toms and yes, the full-band harmonies are still a gorgeous thing to behold. Worth noting, though, is the fact that this song is the title track to their forthcoming sophomore LP. Conventional wisdom tells us that such a follow-up will probably be at least a little disappointing and that title tracks are supposed to act as miniature summations of album-wide intent. If Helplessness Blues the album is full of numbers like this—pleasant, pretty songs that miss the mark when it comes to evocative writing—I don’t see myself wanting to stick around until Pecknold “gets back” to me. More songs about mountains and meadowlarks, please.
Peter Bjorn and John - “Breaker Breaker”
This song is the first available bit of new material from Peter Bjorn and John’s latest album—Gimme Some, out in March—so my self-inflated music critic-y instincts tell me to glance backwards for context and preparation. I would say something like this: Falling Out was pleasantly poppy but a bit too indistinct, Writer’s Block was a near-ideal confluence of great songs and interesting production, and Living Thing leaned too heavily on production mostly at the expense of compelling songs (it was just so bare and clangy), so we should expect the Swedish trio to swing back toward straightforward accessibility in order to regain some goodwill. It’s a logical move and one the band themselves have copped to in talking about Gimme Some (John called it a “pure pop-rock album”), but according to Peter on “Breaker Breaker,” I’m “trying to explain something [I] haven’t got a clue about.”
That’s right, PB&J have aimed their punky, pugilistic new song at people like me (not actually me; people with big audiences) who write about and ‘critique’ music because it would seem they’re not 100% pleased with some of the things people say. No other reading of the song makes quite as much sense to me. If it were about a girl and the idea of rejecting her before she had the chance to reject him (“before you break my heart”), Peter’s vengeful threats of breaking arms and noses would be completely inappropriate and kind of disturbing. His annoyance at the explaining and “riddles” could suggest some silly pretentious dude at a party a la Living Thing’s “Lay It Down,” but then the idea of heartbreak doesn’t really fit. And besides, why would he be cut “like a knife” by words from someone he didn’t even know unless they were talking about him and his work? Musical references scattered across the verses take a stab at self-awareness (singing songs about singing songs as a defense against people who write about songs) to make sure we understand this is about a band. “Before you make a sound / and try to turn us down […] I’m gonna break your nose and sing about it.” Also notice the joke implanted in the album cover: nullifying reviews and riffing on Roger Ebert’s monochrome critical discourse by giving themselves ‘three thumbs up.’
The hard part about all this is that, on its own, a short little blast of a song like “Breaker” doesn’t produce a statement that lives up to itself. It’s fast enough to feel manic and unhinged while the band’s innate sense of pop still comes through and all the instruments have the kind of overdriven buzz to them that PB&J generally make good use of. But if Gimme Some turned out to be nothing but a collection of these numbers, I’d probably have to make some sort of Hives-related joke and leave it at that. Generally, I have more faith in this band than to write them off completely based on a minute and a half of music, having seen them produce enough dazzling indie bubblegum to consider “Breaker” something of an outlier and an odd choice for a first single. They may yet earn the three thumbs they’ve preemptively scored for themselves, but it’ll take ditching most of the defensive ‘statements’ and actually honing in closer on the things they do best.
