A personal music blog. Disclaimer: any opinions expressed in this blog are not intended as personal attacks or even sycophantic tributes to my favourite artists, but then again, all opinions expressed are right. ;)
A few years back, my friend Nita showed me a band who were a little bit like Belle and Sebastian (in the contrast between their upbeat music and insanely downbeat and bitter lyrics), a little bit like Franz Ferdinand (in the rhythms), and as I found out later, a little bit like Mother Mother (in the tight production and smooth, versatile vocals). All of these are things that made me open to listening to them, using my past loves to strengthen connections, give me the springboard from which I could plunge into the joys of this new band. I downloaded a track, listened a bit, thought it was a bit cool, then left them alone.
of Montreal didn't really reappear until today. Depression got to the point last night where I didn't even want to listen to Bright Eyes, Reuben, Portishead, any of those... I didn't want to write, I didn't want to hear myself talk. I wanted to sleep, but I couldn't sleep. I finally went to bed and woke up unrelieved, and Nita had posted this song onto my Facebook page.
It was unforgiving. "Nothing happens for a reason, there's no point even pretending, you know the sad truth as well as I." Unforgiving. Angrily snarled. A cacophony of ambient sounds, drumbeats, vocal harmonies like bad 60s acid spilling over a manuscript. Could music like this really have been released this year? I had been plagued and haunted by "I got the moves like Jagger" and bad Bob Dylan covers, and "wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle, yeah". No-one now seems to be saying anything, and bad pop is as bad as ever, converging in my perception into a relentless barrage of banal sexism, boring dancefloor rhythms and almost scientific replicability. Yet I heard that song and it felt like everything inside me had been thrown up and made into music by someone living and breathing right now. So next, I went and listened to this.
He drawls "now I'm considered ugly from every angle - you're the only beauty I don't want to strangle"; the maligned and the marginalised making music, at last bubbling to the surface, bubbling through the dross which dominates my consciousness. Music in the charts is all about loving someone forever, or wanting to have meaningless sex in a club, or eyeing people up with intent, or losing someone and feeling a bit sad, or dancing. The lyrics are generic, that's part of why it's popular. The words mean nothing. If a decorator left paint one layer thick, you'd say it was a bad job. You can identify endlessly with generic lyrics, or not identify at all - the art of vagueness and stereotype is well mastered by the lyricists, who have been told to write a hit, not something with any kind of analytical quality.
Not that "I want to get all fucked up and tell you how I really feel" could be considered poetry, pre-Bukowski. But it's being sung by the person who wrote it, over a cacophony of music he also wrote. It's powerful because from its core, the moment in which that line was born as a feeling, to its release as a record, it carried its base honesty and never let it go.
Who's the pop-queen of the moment? Adele. Yet at any point, anyone could feel they wanted to be with "someone like you"; it gives the listener freedom to input a name, a person, a set of qualities. In fact, all the line says is that there is someone that someone likes. By contrast -
"Lately I'm rotted in the filth of self-offered agonies that really should fill me with shame, but all I have is this manic energy."
That quotation from 'Spiteful Intervention' is very specific. Shame, mania, filth, agony - they're not emotions akin to the platitudes of pop. They're not Kevin Barnes' alone, however. That's why it's so wonderful: it's shared, at any moment in time, by an exclusive class of miserable, angry and self-pitying people, and it taps into a mood of division and exclusion.
I love it today, and I don't care if I'll love it tomorrow. This blog is getting rawer, probably since my partner expressed the fact he doesn't care about my writing, so I know he won't bother with reading it. I hope whoever reads this is enjoying the good music, and to a lesser extent, the commentary. of Montreal's new album, Paralytic Stalks, is definitely worth exploring, in my opinion.
I have already professed an adoration for Sonic Youth on this blog, probably extensively, and I remember a post which showed particular love for Lee Ranaldo. During the SY years, he was always given a song or two over which to drawl his dark lyrics like a marijuana-softened beat poet. Next month, he's releasing his next solo EP, Between the Times and the Tides, and SY are plugging his next single on their Facebook page. I like it enough to repost it here - it's atmospheric, blending laid-back, possibly too chilled-out rock with the discordant jingling indie guitars that Ranaldo pretty much invented in the 80s. Have a listen.
I probably don't value lyrics enough on this blog. I love good lyrics - they're poetry with the additional feature of having melody, harmony and rhythm to make them carry extra weight and meaning. I like a lot of instrumental music too, but there's something about a good lyric set to a fitting melody that adds an emotional charge; I don't think lyrics are valued enough generally, in fact.
First, something sombre which I keep returning to.
"I thought that I was full of such hope and light, and such love. But all my words - I wrote them for you, and all my songs - I sang them for you. Photos of me, they all show a staring man I don't know.
You know that I've been through... all this nonsense with you. And all my words - I broke them for you, and all my plans - I snapped them in two.
I could create like it was stealing I'd love to sing how I was feeling I had a soul that burned for beauty but who gives a shit? I must admit,
I've lost it a little bit."
That's the first half of the song. If you've just read those and feel incredulous, I urge you to listen to the song to see how perfect the words are to describe his feeling. Those first lines - "I thought that I was full of such hope and light, and such love" are perfected by their phrasing: he pauses after I, and of, and light, and love - you find yourself thinking of this man, this man the singer thought he was, an optimistic and 'light' man, light so heavy with positive connotations, love the garnish on this wonderful image. But then the 'but' comes. And at first it doesn't make sense. Why does writing his words and singing his songs jeopardise his great character?
The best thing about the song is that he doesn't tell you why. There's just this 'you', this person he broke promises for, abandoned plans for, but we never find out why. I assume total sacrifice, an image barely between the lines, and rejection, but it's left to you to pull your own experience into it, interpret the ambiguities.
My favourite words though are these:
"I could create like it was stealing I'd love to sing how I was feeling I had a soul that burned for beauty but who gives a shit? I must admit, I've lost it a little bit."
They cut through me every time, partly because the song builds up here, starts to take you into serious emotion with the dynamics and Jamie Lenman's unforgettable voice. This man that the singer describes was someone who could 'create like it was stealing' (great concept anyway), making art so easily, the epitome of youth, who had a 'soul that burned for beauty'. The word 'soul' always means a lot - sometimes it's clichéd - but here I know what he means. That feeling you get when you see something awe-inspiring - when you wake up in a top-floor flat and realise the whole world's out there, when you see someone you love waiting for you before they see you, then catch the recognition in their smile - that's a soul burning for beauty. It desires it, it is damaged and brought to life by it. And this fucker has taken that away from him. The line 'who gives a shit?' makes me hurt every time, because it's so nonchalant, yet so angry. And it doesn't rhyme, so as Lit teachers would say, your attention is drawn to it - he doesn't even care about making the lines flow.
But then it all softens up. "I can't breathe this atmosphere; can't wait till I get out of here." It's over. There's misery, not anger, and then that builds into a climax of perfectly played post-hardcore, ended with 'Cause I have wasted year after year, and smile I may, but it's insincere, my dear', ended with an endearment which is both acerbic and loving. Every breath and yell is conflicted, and the music echoes that and reinforces it perfectly. Good lyrics are like good poetry, but expressive even without analysis, because of the juxtaposition between each word and its backing, or the primal support the music gives to its meaning.
Some of the best lyrics in my music collection are Conor Oberst's, but he's a thirty-year old singer from Omaha, Nebraska who grew up Catholic and then gravitated into mysticism, so the level on which I connect to the sentiments in his tracks is often not the same as with Reuben. I recognise the sentiments and think they're beautifully expressed, but I don't necessarily feel them. (He also goes heavy on the sympathy-inducing stuff, which my British restraint finds slightly uncomfortable.)Still, I smile every time I hear -
"Now every dream gets whittled down just like every fool gets wise; You will never reap of any seed deprived of sunlight."
and the lyrics to 'Arienette' or 'From a Balance Beam'. In fact, the songs with good lyrics in his back catalogue are hard to choose, because they'd all be revelatory for someone, however navel-gazing they are.
So what makes good lyrics? Well, I think they're less subjective than good music as a whole; when Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys does his tongue-twisting and Dylan comes in with a nice bit of bathos, I think it's hard to deny some mastery even if you don't like it. And when Client sing:
"It's everywhere In everything Every day I'm not promising We don't have to be good Or play by the rules 'Cos we're the same in the things that we do And I love it in the morning And I love it in the evening"
I think it'd be hard to deny those lyrics are pretty horrific. Then again, like with poetry, you have to relate to them. For me, I think what primarily makes a good lyric is its observational astuteness (when you think, "Christ that's a real feeling" or "That highlights something I can understand/have experienced") and originality, at least of expression, and how the words are set to the music. That's why I think I like lo-fi so much, because they haven't tampered with the raw emotion of the voice too much. It's also why I dislike it when people never write their own songs - how can they profess to have made an album if they're singing someone else's sentiments? And often those same groups' music was written by someone trying to pen a hit, so there aren't even feelings there initially. What little is contained in the song gets lost in the mix.
When Adele sang 'Make You Feel My Love' and it got all famous a few months ago, I didn't know what to feel. I felt she did well with it, emotionally - it was a powerful rendition, and that's not something I often say about pop. But she'd missed the lyrics' nuances, or else ignored them. Dylan was an angry man. Adele sings sweetly, but inherent in that title is aggression. The verb 'make' should not be sung so softly in that context; it moves from being interpretation into what appears to be ignorance. He is suggesting he will force himself on this woman, make her love him, whatever you want to get from that - it's about as much a love song as Police's 'Every Breath You Take' is a love song. It illustrates how lyrics given music can take on a new character - and also, I suppose, not be as good standing alone.
Anyway, this has been a very long post, so I'll stop writing now. It's been a long and painful evening, not that this is one of those miserable self-examining emo blogs; this post, apologies for the length if you've got here, has served to distract me from myself.
Well, there goes seeing one of my favourite bands live. Leading band members Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore married in 1984, and 16 studio albums, countless tours and extensive critical acclaim later, they've broken up, and this probably leaves Sonic Youth unlikely to stay together. Sure, other bands have done it - Quasi, reputedly The White Stripes - but Sonic Youth have recently released an official compilation album, which indicates they might be packing up.
I love Sonic Youth, though their cacophonous early era is a bit too avant garde for mainstream consumption, with huge long tracts of 'arty' white noise. Their hardcore fans proudly proclaim their love for the sub-lo-fi Bad Moon Rising, but I think what Sonic Youth do (or did) best is the subtle melodic interplay on their later albums, Sonic Nurse, Murray Street, and even the 'poppy' Rather Ripped. However, there's just as much merit in the punkier, more grit-driven Dirty and the 1988 album widely recognised as their magnum opus, Daydream Nation.
Moore and Gordon were my second and third favourite members of the band respectively, though the defining members in many ways. My love was always reserved for the songs that Lee Ranaldo wrote. Honey-voiced poet Ranaldo is (was) always given a track or two on each album, and his songs are usually the most memorable and atmospheric. Some of them are haunting, discordant but still mellow, emotionally charged but subtle - it was all in his lyrics, his tone of voice and the harmonies at play behind his vocals. In 'Hoarfrost', below, you can hear winter creeping in through guitars; in 'Karen Koltrane', a tattered love story is gradually revealed, as much through the music as the words. The most harrowing track of those below is 'In the Kingdom #19', which follows the death of a man on a highway, caught in his confusion and yet rich with detailed imagery. Sometimes I hear the words from that track in my mind - "hard shoulder of the motorway"..."My eyes are blinded... I am in the darkness... that's it."
If it is goodbye, then it's farewell to an influential, life-changing band, who may have been overrated for individual albums, but who cannot be overrated for their varied and prolific back catalogue: there is something for almost everyone in there. If it is goodbye after this last Brazilian tour, then I hope they're not forgotten.
Winter has fallen. Tonight is due to be this autumn's first night of frost in this part of England; the second blanket is on the bed, the coffee in the grinder for the morning, and it's time to put the darker catalogue onto the iPod playlist.
Whilst 'winter' does appear to be the theme of this post, it is totally coincidental that my favourite track at the moment is called 'If Winter Ends'. Damn Conor Oberst has got me again. I wish he'd stop reminding me that I love navel-gazing lo-fi, because I wasn't aware I was that much of a hipster.
(I'm not, I promise. I don't own a single piece of floral clothing, my hair's its natural colour and I've only seen Pete Doherty live one time. One time!)
Anyway, this post has the late-night intention of showing you how 'emotional' Conor can be, without implicating that I'm sitting here in a puddle of my own tears or anything, which I'm not, because that would be silly. So without further ado, here's the song:
It's been a while, but I have another 405 post up over at that wonderful website; this time, it's a review of Prince Edward Island, who I gave a staunch but not brilliant 7 for a staunch but not brilliant album.
Recently I've been listening to a lot of Canadian Mother Mother's old output. They're a really fantastic band. Even though you know they never do what you expect, you still don't expect what they do. (E.g. in the chorus of 'Legs Away', both the guitar and singer slide from a minor into a major key in a single bar.)
Below is 'Hay Loft', a great track from the catchier end of their repertoire, one with immediacy and punch (others take longer to warm up, but it's all killer, no filler in the end.) The video isn't the official one, because I feel like that doesn't do the song's atmosphere justice.
That's one of their more whimsical songs, taken from the 2008 album O My Heart. I'd recommend listening to 'O My Heart' and 'Wisdom' if you want to hear some variation within that era of Mother Mother. Either way, go and discover a brilliant band before winter creeps up and you have to open up the darker catalogue.
