notbrianeno

[notbrianeno]

#266: LCD Soundsystem - American Dream

Wow, this random number generator is picking a bunch of obvious ones, isn’t it? I swear we’ll get to the archive recordings from the week of the JFK assassination soon, I promise.

A couple of summers ago I ducked out of work early on Friday, picked up a rental car, then drove down to Cobble Hill to pick up Ellen, the drummer, then the inevitably-hairy drive up the BQE to the Brooklyn Bridge, up the FDR then across the Central Park transverse to Brookes’ apartment on the Upper West Side, when she and Niveous met us with a couple of guitars and a couple of omnichords, and we drove 3 hours upstate to a house with a barn off a series of increasingly narrow roads, and we recorded an album in a weekend. That version of the album never saw the light of day as Ellen decided to get her master’s and couldn’t juggle 2 jobs, school, and a band, so she did what she needed to do, then a couple of months later Jay joined, and we did get around to recording those songs, by ourselves, in a space in Gowanus next door to the dearly departed Morbid Anatomy Museum, and that album finally came out, several months after I quit to pursue my dream of living in a city that wasn’t actively hostile to me on a daily basis. 

That weekend in that piney barn, recording songs with friends and a wonderfully relaxed and empathetic producer was a high point of my time on the east coast, and the retelling of it is less to give context to you, and more for my own benefit, remembering coffee on the porch in the dewy early morning, recording uninterrupted bursts of birdsong on my phone, in the time before pandemic. It was nice, and though it has passed, the knowledge that it was nice remains, and that’s enough. 

But so what got me on to talking about the Catskills was this album; for the drive up there we each put together a playlist of songs to inspire the mood of the recording: not necessarily what we wanted to sound like, but a mood we wanted to capture or build on, or a particular production vibe, or just some badass rock and roll for driving up I-87 to. I was very focused on the role of the bass in the music I enjoy, and I tried to try something new - a little flourish of fretboard technique, coming in on the off-beat, holding down the groove on the third instead of the root, ripping a solo through a pitch shifter set three octaves up - in every song, and I tried to pull from as many sources of inspiration as I could. The way the songs were written, the chord progressions, and Niveous’ own style of guitar playing - deep, almost percussive strumming, heavy on the low strings, rolling back the tone knob - tied melody and rhythm in a way that made the bass almost superfluous, so I got to have fun with my parts. Maybe too much fun! I was kind of a showboat; not like a Flea, say, or a Mark King, but more like a Carlos D, minus the style. I had room to explore the entire sonic spectrum, and fortunately the style of music we were playing wasn’t reliant on a steady bass groove, so little was lost in my upper-fret noodling or effects-pedal wankery. A lot of it was just for me: the sheer joy of the performing the riffs in front of an audience. It didn’t add much to the S O N G, and in the anti-folk scene in which LWRG was born, The Song is everything. This isn't a mantra so much as an observation: a cluster of bands and solo artists with very little in common except The Song. This pure, vital concoction of words and music, distilled to its most concentrated essence. The artist follows The Song. The story song, or the abstract sketch of the inside of the songwriter’s head song, or the murder song, or the song about robots. All written in tribute to The Song, and all else is frippery. That’s the anti-folk scene that I knew.

And as a bass player in service of The Song, your ego has to stand aside and give it all up to The Song. So my playlist had some Bad Seeds on it; Martyn Casey’s relentless bassline on Tupelo, sounding like a stolid pallbearer, single-handedly dragging a coffin down the side of a mountain after the rest of the funeral party fled from an apocalyptic thunderstorm. It had Mark Lanegan’s The Gravedigger’s Song; a fuzzed out hellride on a meth-scarred Harley stolen from a biker named Adam. No last name, no satanic nickname or prison moniker. Just Adam. It had R.E.M.’s Bang And Blame, which I believe is the most fun a person can have on four strings.

What I am now realising the playlist didn’t have, like a passport you know is in the pocket of your jeans, but not the jeans you are wearing as you walk into the terminal, is LCD Soundsystem’s Black Screen, which I actually put on another bass-inspiration playlist, just not the one I played after pulling out of a Wawa on the NJ/NY border. So the story was told under false pretences BUT I enjoyed telling it AND I’ve started so I’ll finish:

Black Screen is a revelation to me as a bass player, precisely because it doesn’t have a prominent bassline - and doesn’t need one. It has a persistent throb in the low end, an obstinate ostinato that goes on forever. The album ends in a locked groove, so the throb will last as long as there is electricity to power the player and the amplifier and maybe the speakers, and the soft lighting beside your comfy chair as you stare at your phone because no greater level of activity is really achievable right now, but at least you’re listening to music and paying at least 50% attention to it, and it’s actually crucial that you’re not paying full attention to it because if you were, you would have got up and changed the record, or maybe turned it off and put the TV on instead, those Parks and Rec episodes are all lined up for streaming like a battalion of happy memories, but no, because you weren’t paying full attention you just sat through an Eno-esque half hour of the same low synth throb without noticing that it wasn’t changing or ending or fading out, and man, doesn’t that make you feel better? 

[notbrianeno]

#537: Titus Andronicus - The Airing Of Grievances

I’ve written a little about production aesthetics before, and it gives away a lot about how I view the world and how my mind works: an embarrassingly superficial assumption that things just work. I used to think the director of a film was just a guy who said “Action!” and “Cut!” and couldn't understand why they got so much praise and credit. As if there were only one way to frame a shot and one way to tell a particular story, and anybody else would have done it the same way. Because I was never a big film buff, so I only ever saw the stuff that worked - there was no room in my world for experimentalism or the concept of an individual vision for a given piece of art. 

The same goes for music; it took me far too long to actually begin to listen to the sounds that made up the music - not just the notes being played, but the tonality of the instruments, the density of the mix, the way production and performance intertwine. And even longer to think about the intentionality of a particular sound - why the artist wants the song to sound that way. I’m a lazy music fan. I must have listened to Two Headed Boy a dozen times before I realised that there was only one guitar and one voice in the entire song - the intensity of the captured performance and the pre-amp pushed to its limits by an acoustic guitar signal that was far hotter than it had any right to be.

It never occurred to me that someone might actively choose a less polished way to record a piece of music. That the logistics of the transmission of an idea from the musician to the recording medium is just as important as the transmission of the idea from the hand or the mouth to the instrument, or from the brain to the hand, etc. etc.. I expect this is because my early listening was exclusively major label stuff, in an era where there was still a lot of money in the pot for guitar bands, and when digital recording technology meant you could cram a dozen guitar tracks onto a single song and you never had to spend a moment with your thoughts, uninterrupted by constant sound. This space where there was no reason not to have the most expensive production possible, and when “most expensive” automatically = “best”. Duh. 

I’m trying to recall when I first listened to something and was genuinely aware of the lower quality production, and aware of it as a deliberate choice. I remember hearing the Manic Street Preacher’s first single, Suicide Alley, when it was re-released as the b-side of Little Baby Nothing, and being aware of the crappy recording, but by the time they’d got to recording Generation Terrorists they were already signed to Epic and had a nice, moderately tasty budget to work with. Maybe Fugazi? I bought Repeater on a friend’s recommendation and found the arrangements to be jarringly sparse and thin-sounding, because I was used to big budgets, big rooms, big name producers. 

This is what’s so fascinating about The Airing Of Grievances - it’s not lo-fi per se, but the arrangements are so dense, the lyrical themes so broad and ambitious, that the fuzzy recording aesthetic screams intention, a deliberate constraint that was chosen to signal “punk” and preach authenticity and legitimacy amongst samples of quotes from Camus and Shakespeare as well as Simpsons references (”even Honest Abe sold poisoned milk to schoolchildren”).

Recently I’ve become very interested in the constraints that artists face - enumerating all the ways a creator is held back. Not necessarily held back from realising the truest version of their vision, though - often constraints are good in that they can help keep a work focused, but held back from a thing being more than how it ends up. Being occasionally literary-minded, I think of constraints as falling into categories based on the different kinds of stories that exist:

Man Vs Self - the limits of one’s talents and willingness to practice to improve. 

Man Vs Man - the limits of the relationships between collaborators, the critical response

Man Vs Nature - the limits of sound itself, though this might be better described as Man Vs Technology - lacking the existence of (or resources to pay for the use of) the means of creating a sound that is heard in the head

Man Vs God - God in this sense is Culture - the audience for the work, the established boundaries of genre, of taste, of what you can get away with... this one needs work, let me get back to you.

Titus Andronicus tackle each of these themes on all of their releases, to varying extents: the entire history of the band has been the history of Patrick Stickles trying to explain what it is like to be Patrick Stickles. On The Airing Of Grievances, the explanation comes in the form of an autobiography, or perhaps a bildungsroman: how he got to where you hear him today. I have a lot more thoughts about Titus Andronicus that deserve exploration, so here’s hoping the random number generator spits out more of their stuff before I get bored of this project.

And of course, I can’t leave this piece without acknowledging my ownership of this album on vinyl as a result of probably the greatest congrats-on-getting-engaged gift ever given. Thanks Adam.

[notbrianeno]

#373: Owen Pallett - Heartland

Beware the lure of the pre-order. 

There’s a complex algorithm that goes into my decision to buy a record on vinyl. It encompasses the concert merch-buying experience, including how close the venue is to sell-out capacity, how impressed I am with the band’s show, whether I already own the music digitally and find it worthy of summoning into physical existence in my home, and how likely I am to play the music on vinyl (living room, exuberant but not antisocial volume, sometimes background, sometimes foreground) vs on headphones (stalking the silent streets on my appointed Permissible Daily Exercise) or bluetooth speaker (in the kitchen, cooking something elaborate enough to warrant a full album’s worth of my attention.). Et cetera. 

But then there’s the unknown factor of the pre-order. There are several artists to whom I will blindly pledge financial allegiance upon announcement of each newest upcoming release. A lot of the time, the feeling that if you are buying a physical copy of an album, that is enough to convince yourself that you enjoy it, at least more than an album flitting WiFily through your ears with no physical form reminding you of your financial commitment to the anticipatory fulfilment granted by forking out cash for a lump of grooven plastic. Once upon a time, I pledged willingly to any and all artist with any degree of association with Arcade Fire, by and large with satisfying results. Owen Pallett’s releases under the Final Fantasy alias were wonderfully scrappy and exploratory grab-bags of violin loops and flourishes from whatever hyper-talented Montreal musicians he chose to jam with. So naturally I was in like Slint on the pre-order for his concept album about a farmer of some sort, under his own name. 

Folks, I didn't enjoy it. None of it clicked for me! I was thoroughly unmoved. Not in a negative way, it just failed to send shivers down my spine or even suggest that such shivers might be the reward for repeated listens. And honestly, there’s so much music that does make me feel that way, it seems foolish to commit the time on the off chance that it does win me over. There are occasions where I try;  I listen to Kid A at least once a year in hopes that this time I get it and can join the rest of the civilised world in the light of true wisdom, but it’s been two decades, maybe that’s enough? And I’m also not talking about albums that truly do pay off after multiple listens; those big, expansive, ambitious beasts and the glacial, contemplative, richly subtle opuses alike. Those kinds of albums signal their need for patience on the first listen. I don't claim to be special and the lone possessor of some generous god-given intuition, I suspect everyone has this ability to some extent or other. It’s just because it’s not obviously related to the primal, early-human instincts to make there be more people or make their be fewer people that it’s not been studied academically. The ability to know upon the first experience of a thing that it has the potential to belong in your life in a more meaningful and long-lasting way. A thing that, in the absence of the thing posing either an immediate threat to life or invitation to procreate, the mind pastes over with fluffy-edged cloud of that we experience as “beauty” or “wonder” or “spiritual fulfilment”.

I was really hoping that for Heartland, tonight would be its moment and you all could have witnessed an opinion change in real time, and I'm sad that you didn’t. We have to recalibrate our expectations for life and our interactions with each other right now, and the simple knowledge that a stubborn opinion, upon calm and rational revisitation, can be altered for the better, well that’s something special and heartening to see, and I wish it could have been so. Maybe next time.

[notbrianeno]

#203: Gates - Bloom & Breathe

It would be weird to say I think about musical genre a lot, and it would also be a lie. I don’t think about it that much, but I do enjoy thinking about it. I love reading metal forums because those dudes really care about genre, and sub-genre, and specifically about what bands are absolutely not true examples of a given genre. I love how it follows linguistic rules in its genre designation. I love reading about blackened deathgaze like it’s the most elaborate and delicious dish on a menu. I love how, very often, the differentiators between genres come down to a matter of a few beats per minute, or the specific divisions of snare drum hits, and very little else.

Because most genres, and all parent genres, come down to a difference in how the rhythm is defined - the interaction between bass and percussion; how the tempo determines the wider arrangement, and how much space the beat leaves for the melody, whether the rhythm is carried by melodic instruments alone, or the choice of percussion beyond the holy trinity of kick-snare-hat and/or their electronically-derived equivalent waveforms.

And then what I get really excited about is how the rest of the musical and vocal arrangements grow out of the rhythm, and whether a trope of a particular genre, disco, say, with its snappy, staccato guitar strumming - is an inevitably growth out of the genre’s rhythmic governance of groove - the rich and busy basslines paired with metronomic four-of-clubs drums are calling out for a top-heavy, cheerily frantic syncopation from the guitar - or whether one or two early players simply set the standard for the genre with their own idiosyncratic style - hello, Nile Rodgers?

Bloom & Breathe is not a disco album, and Gates are not a disco band. But just as Nile Rodgers is the Ozymandias of Groove, Gates are the Nile Rodgers of Post-Rock Reverb. You know Post Rock Reverb. It’s the impossibly long tail on an impossibly clean guitar, perhaps with some improbable echoes beneath it. We fool ourselves that because echo is a natural phenomenon, repeated delay lines sound organic. Oh, they sound very pretty, and the gradual corruption and decay of the source signal in tape delay or tape delay emulators makes for a wonderful metaphor of the current situation, where days bleed into each other apparently the same, but feel just a little more lost each time. But it’s not natural. Post Rock Reverb is Atmospheric and Evocative (doesn’t need to be evocative of anything, just generally evocative, you know?) and masks a multitude of poorly-executed melodic sins.

SIDEBAR:

[In their early days, Kerry and George of Deafheaven were so poor they had to record their demo on borrowed electric instruments; the songs were composed on an old nylon-string guitar: nowhere to hide. It has to sound good in its most elemental form, before you start layering all those genre-appropriate effects over it. That’s probably the origin story for how they ended up straddling all kinds of disparate genres; respected critics straight-faced describing as “blackgaze” a band that straight up rip off Champagne Supernova for the post-orgasmic comedown of their third album. Deafheaven are my favourite band to read about on metal forums.]

There’s an old Bill Bailey bit where he plays a jangly guitar line through a delay line designed to make him sound like The Edge, and he gradually fades down the echoes to reveal Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Gates don’t do that. They are the exception that proves the rule when it comes to Post Rock Reverb, and it’s perhaps to do with the fact that they’re not a post rock band. They’re not an emo band, either, but they fall somewhere in the middle between those and a handful of other guitar-forward sub-genres, in a bucket that I have just-this-moment coined as Magnificent Rock. “Epic” sounds forced, and Gates’ big moments sound pure and relatable. “Grandiose” is too negative; why should ambition and fondness for aesthetically rich tones be sneered at? “Majestic” sounds pompous. So Magnificent Rock it is. The other nice thing about Magnificent Rock is that because I have coined the term, I get to define its parameters and who is and is not Magnificent (I may have picked up some of my criteria for purity of magnificence from those metal forums). It’s aspirational; more bands want to be Magnificent Rock than actually qualify. It’s a lifestyle brand; sponsored by Meris and Strymon and Fender Amplification. It’s rock. It’s magnificent. It’s Magnificent Rock.

Bam. Birth of a genre, right before your eyes.

[notbrianeno]

#325: the Mountain Goats - Tallahassee

I’m pleased this one came up. Unashamedly autobiographical post to follow.

You know how Highway 61 Revisited is Dylan’s best album (Blonde On Blonde is horrible; fight me), but your favourite is Desire? Is that just me? Well, Tallahassee is not the best Mountain Goats album, but it is my favourite. It was the first time I had heard their music. I had heard the name, like a rumour. A punk rock webcomic name-dropping them as an example of quality non-punk music. The teacher’s assistant in my creative writing class at SFSU telling the group that the Mountain Goats were playing at the Independent and we should all go. I did not go. The Independent was four blocks from where I lived at the time. I did not go. Then a couple of weeks later I was at my internship, tasked with cleaning out the attic storage area that was home to boxes and boxes of t-shirts, books, perfume samples, dead Macs and dying plants. I asked the guy working the storefront if he had some music I could listen to while I worked. Without hesitation he reached behind a curtain and pulled out a CD from the store’s player. It was a CD-R, with just the word “Tallahassee” on it.

I can’t remember the first time I listened to Funeral, or where I was when I first heard felt Born To Run, or even the first Oasis song I heard. I have accepted poor memory of individual listenings as the price to pay for how invested I become in artists I love. But for some reason I do remember this one. I remember liking all the songs on the first half almost immediately, which is rare for me. And I remember reaching the end of No Children and pressing pause, because I was at a crossroads. I wanted to listen to this song at least five more times, immediately, and that has never happened, before or since. In the Discman days I used to shuffle every album precisely once, just to see, then go back to its god-given running order. The album is an art form and unless the artist is particularly deconstructionist or anarchic, the running order is an inviolable aspect of that. So yeah, you listen to the album, you listen to it from start to finish, and you listen to it in the correct running order. No repeats unless you play the whole thing over from the start once it’s finished. Except this one time... I couldn't decide if I should give in to temptation and do the unthinkable, just to hear that swinging, carefree piano and the lyrics about a terrible marriage, toxic and broken and inescapable from either side. More than anything, No Children changed my perspective of what a song could be, and how a skilled songwriter can separate the tone of the lyrics from the tone of the music, and not just in a “singing sad lyrics over happy music” way. I sat there for a couple of minutes, frozen. Just in awe of a song with a chorus that felt cut short by the line “I hope you die... I hope we both die”, marvelling at this perfect lyrical climax of the song, probably of the album.* And then I went with my gut and hit play to continue the album in order. 

Oh. Yeah. An order that goes straight into the wayward bus-ride-bender of See America Right and then grabs you by the scruff of your neck and hauls you home, to sit primly on the porch with a gin and whatever, and listen to Peacocks. Can’t ever be mad at someone who can stack a tracklist like that.

I owned my own copy of the album within the week, learning at Amoeba that I’d missed a free instore performance around the time of the Independent show. C’est la vie. Sometimes, it feels enough just to have discovered this band; I can’t be mad at all the shows I missed. I put a line from Old College Try in the note I wrote to my brother on his wedding day, and led off my best man speech with a quote from Dance Music, because I am, if not the worst, definitely worse than you might imagine.

Oh, right, also: all the above (apart from my brother’s wedding) took place in San Francisco in 2007. The last trip I took was in February. My wife and I rode the California Zephyr across America, crossing 2000 miles between Chicago and San Francisco in 3 days and 2 nights. We passed through Galesburg, IL at full force, crossing the Mississippi into Iowa, then Nebraska, into Colorado, Nevada, then California. Real, Steinbeckian California. Poppies like if liquid gold could raise a cream and you skimmed that cream off the top, you’d have a colour like those poppies. Old mining towns crumbling off hillsides, a few planks of wood each year, windows facing ill-kempt front yards. Into the city I lived in when I was twenty-one. And I finally got to see the Mountain Goats in San Francisco. And I got to sing “I hope I never get sober” along with all the others who found this band in their own way, with their own meanings applied to every single song, meanings I could maybe never understand, or could relate to on a frankly creepy level. It was a wonderful time, and a few weeks after that the world went on pause, and I’m glad I got so take that trip. It’s so good to know that from right here the view goes on forever.

*The only thing more cathartic than bellowing out the modified “I hope we ALL die!” in a room full of Mountain Goats fans is bellowing out “hail Satan” in a room full of Mountain Goats fans. And blessed we are that both often happen in the same night.

[notbrianeno]

#187: The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

A collage of thoughts in real time, as I listen to the album, edited for clarity and brevity:

Bottled joy. How does he write those melodies? R.E.M. Goes Spiritual - Volume 2. There’s a lost dub bassline wandering through a John Carpenter score. And then that joyful voice again. The only band that can pull off psychedelic vocal effects (sorry, Animal Collective). When did early French synth arrangements first begin denoting nostalgia? Now it sounds like, yes, pink robots, attacking a circus. It sounds like The Prodigy in a good mood. Or the middle point between Screamadelica and XTRMNTR, that moment right before the bikers show up to the rave. There’s a goodly amount of that high-up-the-neck, woody-sounding bass plunking that I enjoy so much. Mixing this album must have been an absolute nightmare. It’s actually more difficult to compile thoughts about this album than probably any other, every song is always in the process of morphing into another song, and you begin to lose all sense of identity and critical thinking. Ooof that pristine digital delay sound has not aged well. 

...

I slept on this draft and yeah, no, I’ll go ahead and hit “Post”, why not.

[notbrianeno]

#220: P.J. Harvey - Let England Shake

This one wasn’t chosen at random but I didn’t pick it myself and I was already sitting at my computer so it’ll do for tonight. 

I’ve already mentioned my friend Paul Harvey. In addition to sharing a name with a radio presenter, his middle initial is J, so he’s P.J. Harvey. To the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t a specific fan of his namesake, but not opposed to her either. 

You can tell I’m not feeling the writing today. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t. I know the whole point of this is to write every day, rain or shine, like it or not, so I’m ploughing ahead but probably won’t advertise today’s scribblings. We’ve been inside for a while now, with only brief breaks to walk around the block or go to the Middle Eastern Bakery to buy fifty pounds of flour because that’s the only flour you can buy right now. Future chroniclers of this age, take note: Flour was difficult to find because everyone decided now is the time to learn to bake, myself included. 

There’s the joining thread: shortages of basic goods, people pulling together in our time of need, making do and mending. Stupid wartime analogies, as if the enemy were visible, human, capable of conventional defeat if we just gritted our teeth and stared it down really hard in its face. Music about war, war as metaphor for sickness. Nah, I’m not feeling it tonight. Sorry, all.

[notbrianeno]

#261: Kishi Bashi - Brandenburg Stomp 7″

I dunno, guys. I think 45s are kind of pointless. As much as I enjoy the ritual of putting on a physical record, it’s a lot of effort for a single song per side, maybe 2 if you’re lucky or really into old school hardcore punk.

I suppose the increased RPMs mean you can get more information encoded onto the vinyl for technically a richer sound but since it’s just taking up the equivalent space of the squibbly inch or so at the end of the side of a 12″ it’s not really adding much to the high fidelity experience. 

It’s a nice format for songs that don’t necessarily fit on an album, and I appreciate that the Mountain Goats tend to slip in bonus 7″s as a limited edition with new album pre-orders, but as soon as they’re available on mp3, then that’s how I’m listening.

The most annoying thing with 7″s is that you have to change the speed, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but with these solo violin looper types like Kishi Bashi and Andrew Bird and Owen Pallett who all have perfect pitch and a pretty wide vocal range, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to tell if you have it at the right speed or not.

[notbrianeno]

#115: The Byrds - Greatest Hits

The record is slightly warped, so I had to adjust the weight on the tone arm to stop it skipping on that one Dylan cover they do, probably a good thing to learn that it wasn’t putting too much weight on the grooves before. As annoying as it is, I appreciate the need for mechanical calibration of yer playback hardware. Real musical vibrations shaking through the air, groovy. 

In my mind, The Byrds have always been more about the sound than the songs, and this best-of collection does nothing to dispel this notion. It might just be the gearhead junk that occupies a good chunk of my various social media feeds, but my mental Byrds word cloud contains lots of onomatopoeic words like “twang” and “jangle” alongside “harmony” and “flower power”. Rickenbacker 12-strings and misty-eyed teens riding west in VW vans. All vibe and no substance. Which isn't necessarily a negative thing. It’s great for filmmakers; want to firmly wedge the idea of The Sixties in the audience’s mind? Turn, Turn, Turn. Done, easy. You can listen to the entire record and walk away without a single note lingering in your head. They were the Beach House of the 1960s. 

That’s all I have to say about that.

[notbrianeno]

#290: Mew - Frengers

There’s a chicken-and-egg situation with Scandinavian music (yeah, sorry, get ready for some terrible and terribly broad regional generalisations, if not outright stereotypes), or at least that portion of it that reaches the English-speaking world. Or, well, the primarily- and often-only-English-speaking world. Most Scandinavians speak English very well; the difference being that most countries that speak English as a primary or official language are reluctant to make a significant effort to teach their young any other languages with any consistency or proficiency. Je m’appelle Tom, et j’habite dans Chicago. 

It’s frustrating; I can’t imagine, say, Built To Spill or Tame Impala writing a song as powerful and rich in imagery as Her Voice Is Beyond Her Years in Danish, yet we insist that our breakthrough Scandi-Nordic bands have either perfect English diction, or else blast us with glossolalic gibberish or impenetrable death growls...

I’m drifting; this wasn’t going to be about language, but about atmosphere. Here’s the chicken: Anglophone expectations of Nordic/North-eastern-Atlantic music to be deeply atmospheric, reflecting dark, misty mornings, endless dusk, and either absolute shitloads of trees or an unsettling, utter absence of any foliage larger than a few hardy colonies of moss. Here’s the egg: a lot of that music is, well, a good reflection of absolutely that environment. Of course, it feels like a stretch to lump Sigur Rós, Dimmu Borgir, and Of Monsters And Men into any kind of shared bucket (also vaguely ironic, potentially insensitive to harp on Icelandic music in a piece about a Danish band) BUT the common atmospheric thread prevails. My argument for extreme metal as a member of the ambient family of genres will wait for another time, but don’t deny that it makes sense. Drop the playback volume down a little, and black metal becomes a textural experience rather than a purely visceral one.

There’s a crack in the egg, of course, it is filled with all the pop, angular indie (like, say, Mew’s later work when they started hanging out with J Mascis), jazz, folk, hip hop and other genres that are brewing in those frosty locales just as much as anywhere else because we have the internet, we’re human, we love music, we love a variety of music, and it’s reductive and arrogant to assume a region (of several distinct countries with intertwined but independent histories, cultures, hopes and fears and shames) will produce a single kind of music for global consumption. 

In summary, I wonder how much we assume Scandinavian music to be atmospheric and moody is to do with our expectations, and just how dominant that sound is in the region’s music scenes as a whole. I sometimes need to remind myself to stay on track because I get excited about the opportunity to explore my thoughts about music and drift off onto other tracks; it’s like trying to clean out an attic or a storage locker, you get distracted by something shiny that you loved for many years, many years ago, and you lose hours to the re-examination of the Thing, and the Person that you were when the Thing was in your life, and the Person you are now, and how the Thing relates to this newer version of the Person, and before you know it, the sun is creeping down past the skylight and you’ve only made the mess worse, and you clamber back down the ladder with a lot of complicated thoughts that are in no way conducive to getting shit done, so you spend the rest of the night sitting on a chair from your childhood, turning the Thing over and over in your hands and thinking about what it means, if it means anything, and whether it’s OK for it to mean nothing at all any more.

Frengers is not like that at all; it’s no relic to be revisited but a living part of my cultural psyche. This is an album that I’ve been playing consistently for, Jesus, almost seventeen years. June 2003, me and Paul Harvey (my teenage friend, not the radio guy) took a train to Nottingham to see OK Go. Mew were opening, which was an utterly bizarre pairing, but one I was glad to see. I knew nothing about them, and I have never seen an opener so truly mind-blowing and powerful before or since. Just listen to the damn album. OK Go were also great, but a different kind of thing. They covered Toto’s Hold The Line, which was great. The show was at The Rescue Rooms, where I also saw Death Cab For Cutie that same year. We missed the last train and had to get a bus back to Loughborough that took twice as long. I had a nice night with a good friend who I haven’t  spoken to in too long. I should send Paul a message.

But Mew. I haunted The Left-Legged Pineapple* for weeks until they got in a copy of the Mew album, and it has been a fixture in my ears ever since then, almost exclusively between November and March. It will always be my going-for-a-walk-in-the-first-snow-of-the-season album, which if I’m being honest probably means it’s as close to my favourite album as I could ever settle on. It’s atmospheric, but it’s dynamic, there’s a good variety of tempos to keep it interesting, but not enough to be tiring or feel inconsistent or like more of a collage than a fine oil on canvas. There is loneliness and empathy in the lyrics. There is a Christmas song that feels OK to play before December. And it is bookended by what I believe to be both the best opening and best closing songs of any album, Born To Run included. It’s frankly unfair to every other band that they monopolise both ends of the bookshelf with such classics. I am a person who believes that the album, being a collection of interrelated songs no longer than 74 minutes in total (sorry, I’m a child of the CD age) but ideally as close to exactly 45 minutes as possible (i.e. to fit on one side of a standard audio cassette tape, so you can pair it with another thematically-appropriate album on side 2), is the absolute ideal art form. I will defend it from every angle against your Picassos, your Swan Lakes, your Hamiltons, your Lascaux cave paintings, your Moby Dicks, your Whitman anthologies and all the damn Shakespeare you can cram into a paper brick. A flat lump of plastic with minute grooves carved into a spiral, or a hand-span mirror digitally encoded with microscopic pips, or a magnetically-charged ribbon on a fragile, transparent spool, or nothing with any physical presence at all, a packet of data sent from a server through the air to a slab in your pocket and thence to an artificial vibrating membrane adjacent to the natural vibrating membrane of your inner ear... that’s the good shit, my friends. 

Where was I? oh, right. Mew. Albums. I’ve been lucky enough to see a few of my favourite albums performed in full. Without shame, and in total disrespect of an artists’ recent output, I love the anniversary album tour gimmick. The best format for a live show is the “an evening with...” format. You play an album in full, then you play a greatest hits set from the rest of your catalog. Perfect. A couple of these full album shows stand out to me. Okkervil River on the 10th anniversary of Black Sheep Boy - pure catharsis to hear the songs of an album I loved, I lived by for many months, and which at the time I no longer needed in my life. It felt like closure, victory, escape, somehow. That same year, I saw the Manic Street Preachers doing The Holy Bible in full (the twentieth anniversary tour bleeding into the twenty-first anniversary). This was a different kind of feeling; just as with Black Sheep Boy, this was an album I needed and spent years walking to its tempos, but it felt so far away, so deep in the past that I felt nothing hearing the songs live. I was an entirely different person back then, whereas I guess during the period where Black Sheep Boy was my beacon, I was just a worse version of who I am now, so there was something relatable.

In 2018, I got to see Mew performing Frengers in full for its fifteen anniversary. They opened with a mix of songs from other albums, then took a break and came back for Frengers, which was the perfect move because how could you possibly come back to the stage after the final notes of Comforting Sounds have died out? Unlike Okkervil River, unlike the Manics, this show was as thrilling, relevant and epochal as the first time I heard these songs in a red-lit Nottingham dive.

*at the time, one of two great independent record shops in Loughborough, the other being Castle Records, both long gone, sadly; I’ll have to write about them both sometime. Expect a story about Castle when I get into some other R.E.M. albums, and Left Legged when the randomiser turns up some of my Manic Street Preachers singles

[notbrianeno]

#201: Gang Of Four - Entertainment!

I.

I listen to Interpol more than Joy Division, Bloc Party more than Television. Cumulatively, I have spent days, probably weeks more time listening to Oasis than The Beatles. Patti Smith blew me away as a live performer, but as far as recorded output goes, I prefer Savages. I respect the hell out of these originators, I just don’t tend to like their music as much as those who came after. If you tell me a band is heavily influenced by Talking Heads, that’s an instant sell. I love that I live in a world so richly adorned by David Byrne projects, I just don’t like listening to them very much.

II.

It took me many years, but once I came to the understanding that if you get something, anything, from music, it’s doesn’t matter whether or not that same music does anything for me. It’s enough to know that you are moved by music the same way that I am. Hell, not even music. If anything at all in life makes you feel the same way that music makes me feel, that’s enough. It’s a nice low-stakes way of connecting with humanity. But for most of my life, I’ve been a snob. My music is better than your music. My tastes are more refined than yours. My love is bigger than your love, sing it.*

III.

Part of what helped me smoosh down my cultural snobbery to a place deep inside (where it mostly only rears its head now at the mention of reality TV concepts based around baking) was an inability to reconcile my contempt for people whose tastes differed from mine with my feelings for the Classics. Zeppelin do nothing for me. I don’t care for most (perhaps any) of the prog bands. Aretha, Queen, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison... generally their Greatest Hits are plenty for me, and I don’t feel a need to dig back into their respective catalogs. I know I’m cheating myself, but there’s more than enough good music still being made to keep me busy. 

And so:

Oasis shaped my understanding of music in some serious and fundamental ways, all of which I now recognise as flawed at best. When I try to write songs, I start with a mid-tempo strum through a progression of 4 chords straight from the Noel Gallagher songbook. My ears have been pummelled by brick wall mastering so long that rich dynamic ranges somehow annoy me. My dream guitar rig used to be a fat Epiphone hollowbody through a menagerie of Boss modulation pedals into a Marshall or Orange head feeding as many 4x12 stacks as you can fit on the stage, even though I don’t actually like any of those things as much as, well, literally any alternative. 

But because of this early obsession, my mind is wired to hear glossy, 64-track-tropical-island-studio production and mastering with the density and subtlety of a neutron star as the benchmark for “good”. The Beatles sound thin and lazy. Bowie’s “Heroes” is a better performance, obviously, but the version Noel sings on the B-side to D’You Know What I Mean? sounds better, d’you know what I mean? I can’t help it. The “oldies” of my childhood were The Joshua Tree and Brothers In Arms, both just splurging out of their sleeves with the finest production money could buy.

But.

I’ve been getting better. I’m learning that production aesthetics are as much a deliberate decision more than just simply “the best we can afford”. But it’s not just the production; it’s arrangements, vocal styles, even attitudes. I am a fundamentally lazy person. If you listen to the visionaries, the originals, the world-changers, you hear songs, albums, even entire careers that exist as a snapshot or a slow-motion film of the moment where a box of ideas has been hurled with seismic force at a wall that represents, oh, let’s say The Establishment. You know some of it is going to bounce right off, some of it will shatter into a million pieces and never be seen again; some will stick and slip slowly down the wall like a waterlogged sock with a squeak that sounds like “She’s Electric”. And some will smash a hole in the wall, and let more ideas of the same kind flow through over time. I just don’t have the patience to sift through these ideas to find the wall-smashers amidst the soggy socks. 

*this reference is probably a form of snobbery in itself. You either get it your don’t. I don't make the rules, sorry

[notbrianeno]

#497: Supertramp - Crime Of The Century

The records in our home fall into a few eras of ownership/collection for myself and my wife. Like most collections, there’s bleed-through and transitional records between eras, but mostly they are pretty distinct - you can tell the era by artist, by genre, by format (I am probably in the top 25 people worldwide with the most Cooper Temple Clause 7″s): I think the most exciting records come from the era (for both of us) between getting into music in a serious way, and getting into vinyl in a serious way. The “I love this music so much I must own it on a format I have no consistent means of playing” era. 

So (because I watched Inside Out last night and was delighted by all of it) if that part of the collection represents the formation of the psyche, and if the current era of collecting represents the ego and the conscious mind (”we have disposable income, a desire to support artists we admire, and it’s a Saturday before the plague and we’re casually walking up Clark St. to check out what’s new at Rattleback”), that must make the portion of our collection inherited, begged, or outright stolen from our families our respective subconscious. 

The thing with surfing the subconscious is that, while it can tell you a lot about yourself, it’s easy to fall off, and that water’s deep, man, so you do it rarely and only at times when you know you’ve got your wits about you enough to keep balance. 

That’s why I have never sat down and listened to a Supertramp album start-to-finish. The record collector in my wife’s family was her uncle, who passed away a couple of years ago. She’d liberated his LPs several years before that; he was a willing convert to CDs, later Spotify. The man did not fetishise a format, and there’s a lesson there for all of us, I’m sure. There are some legitimate, respectful-nods-from-folks-who-know-their-shit type albums; a Sgt Pepper picture disc, first pressing of Born To Run - as well as you-just-had-to-be-theres; Ted Nugent, the Moody Blues - and a good helping of The Ones Everyone’s Uncle Has; Dark Side Of The Moon, That One ELO Greatest Hits Collection With The Spaceship Thing On The Cover. And Supertramp. Lots of Supertramp. At least, inasmuch as more than two Supertramp albums seems like a lot; a couple would be plenty, probably.

I’d never really listened to them before. I knew that one part of that one song that Scooter sampled in The Logical Song. I had them down as like a more glam-rock Rush. And I’ve never really listened to Rush either so as far as I’m concerned, that is a 100% accurate preconception, based on the album I’m listening to right now. This is some superbly busy music. It feels like Genesis arranged by Danny Elfman.

Uncle Joey was in the exact position where I didn’t know him well enough to know how he lived as a younger man, but I did know him well enough to be able to imagine a life for him, based on what others have told me. But that’s always going to be a fairly two-dimensional image, and it’s unfair to the person, dead or alive. Because when I imagine Uncle Joey when he was just plain old Joe Schroeder, doing something with medical equipment in a hospital, going home to his Berwyn garden apartment, a beefy surround sound system with a respectable MSRP circling a well-loved Lazy Boy armchair, half a dozen bottles of the Champagne of Beers in the fridge, the music I imagined him playing did not sound anything like this, and I stand before you humbled, and with a deeper understanding of Uncle Joey. Good for him, shame on me. Once again music proves its ability to help humans connect with each other on a much deeper level than the next leading brand, and four out of five dentists agree.

[notbrianeno]

#426: R.E.M. - Out Of Time

“The world is collapsing around our ears...”

I wasn’t planning to write too much directly about R.E.M. or this album for today’s bit, but I had to acknowledge how on the nose the opening line to Radio Song is. Too soon, Mike. Too soon.

The reason I wasn’t planning on writing about the music that I’m using as a writing prompt is that more or less everything that can be written about R.E.M. has been written. How if they’d broken up in 1989 they would still be as venerated as The Smiths, but, like, the Hüsker Dü of The Smiths. How they basically invented alt-rock. How they pivoted to capture an angsty zeitgeist with their “quiet grunge” album Automatic For The People (by the way, professional music journalists, how much does it irk you that the perfect easy-money, clickbait-before-clicks soundbite for that album was coined by the band themselves?). How they carried on releasing decent music into their third decade, and called it quits at, hmmm yeah, no, just about the exact right time, yeah? Yeah. See, you know, because you’ve already read it.

But there’s another reason I’m not writing about R.E.M., and that is because I'm not a dad. R.E.M. are a fundamentally dad band, aren’t they? Not in a bad way, just... in a way. I am treading carefully here, because I am famed across the lands for my fatherhood issues. But they represent a really golden piece of dadhood, because they are a transitional band. They’re the band that you know through your childhood, but you never listen to, because they’re your dad’s band. And then one day you listen to them, you actually sit with an album, by your own choice, and huh. There’s a lot to get into here. There’s...a sense of humour, even. They’ve spent a career acting in defiance of the persona assigned to them by the press, but also not making much effort to change any minds about how the world sees them. And if that’s not an absolutely champion dad trait, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs. 

But just as an insurance policy, in case none of the above vibes with you, I’ve got another analogy for R.E.M.: a mullet. Business in front, party in the back. Listen to the ridiculous groove of the rhythm section, hiding under the workmanlike dad-folk guitars. Blue Öyster Cult X The Byrds. Maybe. Well. Not quite. Look, if you can’t find something familiar in depictions of R.E.M. as the archetype of Dad or a musical interpretation of a rat-tail, I don’t know how else to get through to you. We’re just too different as people.

[notbrianeno]

#294: Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West

I like America Music. Not American music, but I like that too. Nor Americana, though again, big fan. America Music is a form that describes very specific people or places, free of mythology and free of the weight of history. There’s no attempt to tackle any kind of a whole; it’s not a microcosm, it’s just A Thing That Is There.

It’s not a uniquely American thing, either; what I’m getting at is the difference between, say, the eternal seventeen-year-old’s Friday night of The Arctic Monkeys’ first album vs the raging cider bender that The Decline Of British Sea Power leads weaving through Britain’s entire twentieth century.

The thing with America Music is that it contains so much that is wildly different. The USA is far too big to exist as a single country, so it’s constantly being broken down into states, regions, coast vs flyover country, etc. Some artists like Springsteen do a tremendous job of crafting a vision of a whole that brings people together, but it’s difficult. What’s harder is shrinking the thing down to a single component part. The Hold Steady have to pull in old-world Catholicism to balance or explain their vision of distress and delight in the Twin Cities. Or you get a locale like Brooklyn which draws in so many people from so many places that it doesn’t really exist as place that you can write about. 

The Lonesome Crowded West is a double album, so I’ve got to forgive it for some divergence from my thesis; there’s Christian imagery, a disjointed cross-country road-trip, borrowed themes from an idea of the Old West. Y’know, Americana, on special offer, one day only, completely with a twitchy trigger finger and a loose hand on the whammy bar. 

Where it all comes together for me... oh shit, this isn't about America or Americana or anything like that, this is about me, isn’t it? Well, cat’s out of the bag. What are we but the sum of our experiences? I’m talking about how it feels when you get exposed to a depiction of an experience very far from your own but so fully-formed and beautifully constructed that it feels like home.

It all comes down to a single couplet, which, like the best poetry, is nothing without the title to give it context. 

The line:

“Short love with a long divorce And a couple of kids of course”

The title:

Trailer Trash

The “divorce” is almost unnecessary, existing just to give a rhyme to the defining line, “...a couple of kids, of course.” The inevitability, the children the final piece of the puzzle that reveals the full image. Of course. Of course there are kids in the picture for the trailer trash narrator. A whole scene emerges from these lines, and the music obligingly holds back until the words are all done, but then steps in with an almost triumphant coda. The outro sounds like the soaring Britrock I grew up on, played on guitars and drums found in the back of a pawnshop somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s an unrelatable scene rendered familiar by a comfortable melodic framework, tattered but still recognisable. It’s all about context, and yet the best art cuts through without any context at all. What a delightful paradox.

Assorted other thoughts:

- The production on this album took a while to click for me, but it’s a nice reminder that there are different ways to make an album sound good. On close listen, there’s so much space in the tracks. None of the instruments or voices ever intrude on each others’ space. 

- The grab-bag of styles and moods covered here make it a kind of inconsistent album, but it never feels like it was trying to be consistent, just a collection of songs, so fuck you for trying to make it into something it’s not, which is a pretty nice way of describing the difference between America Music and Americana, maybe?

- Isaac Brock deserves a Lifetime Achievement In Riffs for Cowboy Dan alone. 

- End Of The Road festival, Dorset, UK, September 2010:

[audience member] “Shit Luck!”

Isaac Brock: “yeah I’m gonna play Shit Luck on a fucking banjo, fuck you”

[notbrianeno]

#33: Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) (live 7″, b/w This Must Be The Place, feat. David Byrne)

There will undoubtedly be a lot to say about this band over the coming months so I’ll use this space to talk some more about this project. I’m aiming to write at least once a day, using as a prompt a record from my collection, selected by a random number generator against the spreadsheet that contains the details. Twice a day, if the randomiser picks a single or a short EP.

This is writing for the sake of writing, nothing more. I don’t want it to be wholly autobiographical, or even wholly factual. 

...you know what, that’s enough. I can't listen to a live performance of this band from this era without getting ruinously excited about what they used to mean to me, and how much soul-deep fulfilment I got from seeing them live. 

I’m the kind of obnoxious music fan that will sing along to the studio version of songs but add the little flourishes that a singer will add during the live performances (e.g. singing “I hope WE ALL DIE!” at the end of the Mountain Goats’ No Children). The outro of Power Out used to tail off to a vocal coda, before the band started back up with a clatter of noise that would resolve itself as if from nowhere into the bass-forward intro to Rebellion (Lies), and this is probably the most consistently thrilling gimmick a band has ever pulled.

I fucking love music.

[notbrianeno]

#443: Sigur Rós - Ágætis byrjun

A decade:

1999: I get a copy of the NME with a free CD* containing lots of songs by bands I don't know, and one or two by bands I do know. This was an era where apart from Steve Lamacq’s Evening Session on Radio One, I didn't have much of an avenue for musical discoveries beyond free CDs with music magazines, which I was grateful for. I can’t remember what else was on this CD, maybe Super Furry Animals’ <10 second secret track “Citizen’s Band”**. Oh, and a song by post-Britpop groaners Terris, who I despised for the singer’s voice. I suspect I might enjoy them if I listened to them today, but it’s too late for that now. The CD includes a single edit of “Svefn-g-englar”, which I listened to once and ignored afterwards. I didn’t get it. I liked songs with audible and assertive guitars, and men who lacked the articulation to properly sing about their feelings so they sang about beer and socialism. This was in the transitional period from my Oasis phase to my Manic Street Preachers phase. I think my first serious musical obsessions were pretty respectable for the ages I was at. 

2004: My friend Charlie has a radio show on UEA’s Live Wire station, and on these digital airwaves and in his whitewashed cinderblock bedroom across the whitewashed cinderblock hall from my whitewashed cinderblock bedroom, he introduced me to post-rock. Which I was grateful for. After hearing “Starálfur”, I finally got it. I made a lot of mix CDs back then, and this song made it onto most of them, or at least most of the ones I made for girls. My motives were pretty transparent, and my efforts largely in vain.

2008: Post-graduation, I’m living for a few weeks in London, doing work experience at Puffin Books, back when I thought a career in publishing was a viable option. Bit of advice for any younger readers: try not to graduate into a recession right as the wave hits the shore. On a whim, I walked over to a Methodist-meeting-hall-theatre in the indifferent shadow of the Houses of Parliament, and was on the receiving end of one of the more profound moments of kindness I’ve ever witnessed. The event was fully sold out, and only one solitary tout was trying to buy spares. I shadowed him, and pled my case to the kid who had a spare because his friend couldn't make it. He sold it to me for face value, under the nose of a tour offering him double. Which I was grateful for. My first time seeing Sigur Rós was, at the time, probably the best gig I’d seen, and still a top 5 show for me. During the outro of Olsen Olsen, a four- or five-piece brass band emerged from a doorway halfway up the wall to stage left, marched down a staircase, across the front of the stage, up another staircase and exit stage right. It was just about the most delightful thing I had ever witnessed.

2009: I’ve spent a weirdly-pleasant-for-London summer day touring City University with my brother (who either the previous Christmas or the next Christmas bought me this album on vinyl. Which I was grateful for.***), and for lack of anything better to do, we wander over to Hyde Park and get some cheap tickets for Neil Young. Paul McCartney came out at one point and they did A Day In The Life. Earlier in the evening, we were chatting to either a South African, an Australian, or a South African and an Australian, who was either trying to sell us weed or sell us on the concept of weed. My memory is hazy. I got distracted by the sight of a tattoo of the alien foetus cover art from this album on the shoulder of a person who I promptly declare that I want to hug, but by the time I get up to do it they have disappeared in the crowd. So it goes. Later that night I have a memory of sitting on the pavement by a bus stop talking to a man who said he was Jim from Massive Attack, and who I had no reason to disbelieve.

*IIRC the CD was titled “Come On Try Young” with a cover that was a parody of Mogwai’s Come On Die Young. Another band that I did not have the patience or palate for until I was older.

** I'm setting a dangerous precedent by putting song titles in quotes and italicising albums because I know I won’t remember to do this every time and then my whole style is going to look sloppy and inconsistent.

*** I just noticed I switched tense in every single paragraph, let’s just call it my own idiosyncratic style instead of taking the thirty seconds to correct it. Another dangerous precedent.

[notbrianeno]

I am not Brian Eno

This blog name came from a list of band names I floated, none of which were accepted. In the spirit of this blog which I conceptualised less than thirty minutes ago, posting a list of fake band names is one of the things that I categorise as “writing about music”, so. Here.

God is dead, the universe is meaningless, print journalism is dying but I was never going to get paid to do this anyway, here’s some junk that my bandmates were smart enough to reject:

Mano Pigna

Fire Creek Factory

Furnace Glow

Peregrine Falcon

The art of falconry

Raccoon tamer

Brunt bearer

Spiken

Thumb war

Nineteen ninety two

Collapsing airways

Restlessness

Numb arm

When music made money

Long ways home

Tactmaster

Westriff

Midwestriff

Raftfloater

Crawfish toil

All the dead jazz singers

Happen Stance

Weak wealth

Failure Rats

Broom people

chamber of commerce

Friendshome

The burdens

Safety razor

Businessless

Strawmen

Danny’s here

Easy way out

Fuckin’ Tuesday

Brooding

Golf is shit

Pale saviors

Pale grins

Seeing daylight

Lonely giants

Blood royal 

Crow crag

Not Brian Eno 

Calmer police

Roscoe

Horse blanket

Moss and machine

Glasphemy

Witness renovation

Are you the farmer?

Worldhogbutcher

ಠ_ಠ 

Quentintin

Century of progress

Red tailed

Snow Day

End of history