parlando

waiting

Posted on September 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

This weblog continues to be crippled by my desire to write longer pieces, and reluctance to post more offhand, trivial observations than I already do. But offhand, trivial observations are perhaps better than no observations at all -- especially given the way my memory works*.

Last week I acquired the first second Fun Boy Three album, Waiting. I'd had it on vinyl back in the day, but hardly ever listened to it; probably not at all after the first few tries. I wanted more Specials, and it wasn't, obviously.

I'm liking it a lot, now. The best songs have the eerie mood and sonic weight of "Ghost Town". What I thought was plodding at the time is actually graceful and controlled. These first few times revisiting the album, nothing is irritating and almost all of it is engaging.

Inspired by this, I acquired the first Colourfield album too. It's . . . kinda plain and ordinary. Maybe I'll like it in twenty years.

1 comment.

like to read

Posted on August 15th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Elsewhere.

Champion commenter Ethan is writing an intriguing weblog called Like To Listen To, where he's writing a thoughtful paragraph or two about everything he's listening to. For someone like me -- long on enthusiasm, short on attention span -- it's a great approach, and I'm thinking of adopting it in some form.*

He also has excellent, wide-ranging taste. Just in the last couple days, he's written about:

Brian Eno, Another Green World (1975)
Kylie Minogue, Fever (2001)
Jr. and His Soulettes, Psychodelic Sounds (1971)
Donna Summer, Once Upon a Time (1977)
Boards of Canada, Twoism (1995)
Roxy Music, Roxy Music (1972)
Angelo Badalamenti, Soundtrack from Twin Peaks (1990)
Animal Collective, Sung Tongs (2004)
Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking (1969)
kd lang, Hymns of the 49th Parallel (2004)
Portishead, Dummy (1994)
Lee Hazlewood, A House Safe for Tigers (1975)
Solid Eye, Electromagnetic Field and Stream of Consciousness (1994)
The Knife, The Knife (2001)

Check it out.

2 comments.

happy returns

Posted on August 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Posts that anticipate dismissive responses inevitably sound either disingenuously self-congratulatory ("I know this isn't going to be very popular") or defensive. One well-worn tactic is to dismiss their motives before they can dismiss yours. For example: Say you find yourself liking a new album by a great artist perceived as being in a long decline. People have cried wolf on this artist's comeback in the past, maybe even with every album; in truth few of the later albums by the artist are actually bad, it's just hard to imagine them inspiring anyone. If you're honest* with yourself though, you'll admit it's a failure of imagination on your part; not that you aren't entitled to your ho-hum reaction, but that someone else's professed enthusiasm is likely genuine, and you can consider it misguided without considering it insincere, or motivated by a mere need to provide copy and please an audience or an editor.

But you, now, find yourself sincerely enthusiastic about the new album. And you know, for you have seen it with each of the last several ho-hum but praised albums by the declining artist, that to profess enthusiasm is to invite derision and dismissal from the jaded set, some of whom gave the album a passing listen, a rare few of whom even wanted to like it, but all of whom know why you profess to like it*.

Your motives are presumably less in doubt when not being paid, nor speaking to a large audience. You may not be a hack; you may only be deluded, or your standards may be shot. Possibly they were never there; aren't you on record defending Mighty Like a Rose?

I hope I am only defensive, at any rate, and not self-congratulatory. The last R.E.M. album I thought was good was 1998's Up -- which took some time to grow on me but is possibly my favorite now -- and of course many folks would push the date back to 1992's Automatic for the People. The last Elvis Costello album I thought was good was 1994's Brutal Youth, and of course many folks would push the date back to 1986, citing (insanely) Blood and Chocolate or (correctly) King of America.

Costello's Momofuku and R.E.M.'s Accelerate were released three weeks apart this April. Each of them is inspired, energetic, consistent, memorable, not just potential growers but instantly ingratiating. Each of them will have me not waiting a few months to pick up the next one.

Accelerate sounds better after the first several plays. It's performed with passion, as though R.E.M. were eager to make people forget Around the Sun; Stipe in particular is at the top of his game. But if Momofuku doesn't rock out like Accelerate, it's still played with conviction; Costello sings like he's living inside the words, and it's been a while since I've heard this level of commitment -- and humor -- from him. Both albums have songs that stick immediately, and lines that jump out; both of them even have two of their strongest songs at the end ("Horse to Water" and "I'm Gonna DJ" on Accelerate, "Pardon Me Madam, My Name Is Eve" and "Go Away" on Momofuku), which is one of the most reliable signs of an album that's going to last.

In short, if you're an old fan of either who hasn't come around in a while, I think you should give these a try.

11 comments.

preliminary unfair opinion

Posted on July 1st, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I've listened to the Fleet Foxes album twice now, and it's a solid "eh" so far, compounded with a degree of "what the hell is the hype about?" that I'm trying to resist. It's well arranged, and that's definitely a virtue with me, and keeps me paying attention through the ordinary riffs and chord changes and complete lack of anything resembling a hook, but it's neither original nor an interesting variation on Americana/folk with simple harmonies, and there was nothing that jumped out the second time round.

Unfortunately, the only time the lyrics caught my attention was when they awkwardly broke lines on prepositions and conjunctions; I'll pay more attention the next time through. The singing is serviceable. The rhythms are okay. The attention to detail is admirable.

fig. 1 - admirable detail

Albums like this have grown on me before, so I'm not giving up. But there isn't much to hang my ears on yet.

1 comment.

new sloan, sloan tonight

Posted on June 20th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Live Music.

I don't read many album reviews, so I don't know if it's been generally noted how clearly "Down in the Basement" is Sloan writing a Dylan song.

Going to see Sloan at Bowery tonight (Hey Bill!). First time I'll have seen them since Between the Bridges, and the first time Velma and I will have seen them together.

1 comment.

a moment extracted from the crush of work

Posted on May 16th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I don't have a hell of a lot to say about it, but I'm among the many (it seems) who think the new Portishead album is terrific. I'm only a moderate fan of their old work -- like but not love -- so the departure from their old sound doesn't bother me. And I think the extent of the departure has been exaggerated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that a lot of old fans are down on it -- see the reviews at Rate Your Music, for example* -- and I'd expect that you, Donald, might not go for it.

1 comment.

today's work headphone music

Posted on April 1st, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

• Motorhead, Ace of Spades
• Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs
• Aterciopelados, Caribe Atomico

All solid toe-tapping albums. The Pinback has moved back into my near-daily rotation, and retains its grip on my Favorite Album of 2007 spot. I only stopped listening to it for a while out of fear of overplaying it. I say again, if you have a taste for lots of catchy, intricate parts strung together into hypnotically memorable songs, combining great musical instincts with an obsessive attention to detail, you should check out Autumn of the Seraphs. It's hard to compare Rob Crow's distinctive songwriting styles with anyone else, but if you imagine a somewhat cooler, more rounded and smooth-sounding Spoon, you wouldn't be far off from Pinback. It's also one of those albums that is gratifyingly, almost frustratingly consistent: nothing to skip, no letdowns, but also nothing so clearly outstanding from the rest that it would be the obvious choice to play for someone. Which also means it may not be immediately arresting, but if you keep playing it, it creeps into your nervous system and makes a home there. (Like Spoon.)

0 comments.

another strangely obsessive project

Posted on February 18th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, 70s Survival.

It's probably obvious by now, but the Seventies Survival Project is dead. I've just found too many missing songs to continue in the spirit I originally intended. It's too bad, because it was fun.

But in the spirit of Pointless Obsession, I've decided -- don't ask why -- to really, really know 1990. To that end I am putting all my 1990 albums on my mp3 player, and investigating all the important ones I don't know, and even ones I dismissed at the time. I am using RateYourMusic's top albums of 1990 and esoteric albums of 1990 as my main references. This is especially useful in two ways: there's a lot of hiphop I don't know, and RateYourMusic is over-represented with metalheads. Of all the areas I have been largely ignorant of in recent years, those are the two I have been most interested in recently. Prog and folky stuff are also pretty well represented.

On the other hand, country hardly shows up there, and the annual Village Voice critics poll is unlikely to be much help there either. Anyone know a reliable source of best country albums by year? Modern jazz doesn't fare too well, either (though jazz dominates the RateYourMusic charts well into the 1960s).

I'm also deliberately trying to know as little as possible about the albums before I listen to them. Album titles and covers are often a giveaway, of course, but I'm not reading about albums before I listen to them.

Very preliminary listening reports:

Megadeth's Rust in Peace, despite the stupid title, is a fantastic album. I keep listening to it in headphones three times in a row, and none of it has palled. That one's a purchase.

Bathory's Hammerheart is not bad, but kinda silly. I mean, even for metal. Viking concept metal is just hard to take seriously, and much of it drags. Hugely influential, apparently.

Brand Nubian's One for All is very very groovy. I don't know why I'd never listened to it before, since I've known for a long time that I like most of the Native Tongues-related stuff. Another definite purchase.

Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, despite the dumb title and the standard tiresome braggadocio, has monstrous beats. Probable purchase.

Mike Oldfield's Amarok sounds like a meandering mess.

6 comments.

another one for 2007

Posted on January 14th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

M.I.A.'s Kala sounds amazing. Great beats, great sonic textures, big clear production. I'm still getting my head around the songs, but it's consistently engaging, with a large number of arresting passages, and I'm confident this is going to end up in my top ten.

I wouldn't have heard of this album were it not for those awful hipsters (specifically, Pitchfork's best-of-the-year lists solicited from indie musicians). Thank you, hipsters!

2 comments.

taking for granted

Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I enjoy Radiohead, but they've never been a special favorite. I like some of their albums more than others, but I don't know their stuff inside and out. I admire their adventurousness, and I find it interesting that a large fanbase has so far followed them where they wanted to go. I think of them as a great band, more objectively than subjectively. I didn't like Hail to the Thief at all, and while I didn't give up on them -- almost everyone has an occasional bad album in them -- they slipped lower on my priority list, and while everything I heard about In Rainbows made it sound interesting, I hadn't got round to it and didn't really intend to anytime soon -- didn't even have it on my shortlist of potential Best of 2007 albums I needed to track down.

Which is a longwinded way of saying, I heard it in a bar last week and was blown away.

0 comments.

eponymous hiphop?

Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

It was only when I began actively compiling Eponymous Albums That Aren't Debut Albums -- now up to 86 items -- that I became aware that there seems to be a much lower percentage of eponymous albums in hiphop than elsewhere. Does that seem true to anyone else?

0 comments.

eponymous update

Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

The list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums is up to fifty. A surprising number of them are from musicians who actually had an eponymous debut, but chose to repeat the title.

17 comments.

eponymous but not first

Posted on December 5th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

Over at the useful and fun website Rate Your Music, I have begun a list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums. I've seeded the list with twenty albums, and am takin suggestions for more (I have to add them myself). I'm only interested in standard albums of new material: not compilations, box sets, etc.

11 comments.

c'mon already

Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Now that Pylon's fine debut album Gyrate has been re-released yet again, can we please get a cd reissue of their fantastic second album, Chomp?

4 comments.

puzzled regrets

Posted on November 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Why, when I was nineteen years old and obsessed with the strange avant-funk of the first, eponymous, 1983 Golden Palominos album, did no one tell me that I really needed to hear Miles Davis's On the Corner?

4 comments.

another contender

Posted on November 8th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Richard at the Existence Machine was right: I love Person Pitch, the 2007 solo album from Animal Collective co-leader Panda Bear. It's sonically beautiful, and it keeps opening up the louder I turn it; as with Feels, the tunes are memorable, and there are long hypnotic riffs, and it's alternately goofy and sublime. I see that Richard is also a little tired of people making Beach Boys comparisons, and says "The comparison is more conceptual, I think, than anything else. People are more reminded of the Beach Boys than really claiming that Animal Collective actually sound like them." That's probably true, and it's true of Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes, too, but there's still something in the sound that brings the comparison to people's ears before they start analyzing the music, I think. I hear the Incredible String Band in Animal Collective and Panda Bear's music as well, and that's also probably more a conceptual similarity than really sounding like them. As far as sound goes, has anyone compared this to Popul Vuh? The long meditative riffs with the echoey, otherworldly production sound more like Florian Fricke than Brian Wilson. I also hear the big hollow early Magnetic Fields sound in places, particularly on "Ponytail".

4 comments.

another candidate times two

Posted on October 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I wrote, briefly, several years ago, a quick reaction to hearing Cafe Tacuba for the first time:

Wow. Listened to this twice on headphones yesterday. Very occasionally, no more often than once a year (probably less), I hear an album for the first time that I immediately know is going to be one of my very favorites, an album I return to with pleasure for years. It's a warm feeling, mixed excitement and gratitude. It's usually with an artist I've never heard before.

I only found out a few days ago that there was a new Cafe Tacuba album due, their first in four years, and of course now I have it. "Of course" because I didn't think of them when I was ruminating the other day about who my favorite rock band was now that Sleater-Kinney have broken up, and the new album reminds me that there's no doubt that it's Cafe Tacuba. Sino, the new one, isn't their best -- that would be 1994's sprawling Re, one of the ten best albums of the 1990s -- but it's good enough to be almost certainly a top five album for me this year. It's not as experimental or as big as their last couple of albums; they've stripped the instrumentation back down to the basics, and the songs are rock songs. In a way, it reaches back to their earliest work in its straightforwardness and simplicity. The big difference is these days there is no part of the rock palette they don't try, and they're good at everything they do. There are modern rock influences in their sound -- a few years ago Pitchfork, flailing for a comparison, called them "Mexico's Radiohead" -- but they like the arena rock sound too; in fact, what I hear most in Sino is Who's Next (and Velma hears U2).

I've only listened to the album a half dozen times, so I haven't learned it yet; but I feel compelled to note it now because Cafe Tacuba remain unjustifiably off the radar of great rocknroll. I don't say "inexplicably", because it's perfectly explicable: their songs are entirely in Spanish, and they make no concessions to the American market. (They don't have to; they are huge in Mexico.) But I urge you, if you want a complete picture of what is going on in the world of rock music, you owe it to yourself to try them. Start with Re; it's consistently great, it's all over the stylistic map, and you'll know whether you need to hear more.

They're playing Hammerstein in November, and Velma and I plan to see them live for the first time. Excited!

3 comments.

early trivial response to andrew bird

Posted on October 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lyrics.

I've listened to the new Andrew Bird four times today, and some of it's sticking, while some of it sounds like ordinary indie singer-songwriter fare to me; I'll definitely be giving it more attention in the next week.

The only thing I have to note right now is that when he sings "We'll fight, we'll fight", it sounds to me like he's declaring "Whale fight! Whale fight!" It doesn't help that he goes on to sing "they'll fight, they'll fight", which rhymes with "whale fight".

1 comment.

2007 for me thus far

Posted on September 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I am, as I have mentioned*, much less assiduous about keeping up with current music than I was a few years ago. Not out of a lack of inclination*, but a lack of time, and an increased focus on exploring music of the past.

Right now my favorite album of the year is Pinback's Autumn of the Seraphs. I have a weakness for intricately patterned songs that could be described as infectious grooves in formal straitjackets, and if you make a consistently good album full of them (Pell Mell's Interstate, Spoon's Girls Can Tell, Komeda's What Makes It Go), I'm likely to get obsessive about it. Rob Crow has been a riff factory since his earliest days with Heavy Vegetable; Pinback have a burnished, smooth surface, powered with seemingly effortless invention. Autumn of the Seraphs is hypnotically catchy from start to finish, and is the album I think I'm most likely to come back to with undiminished pleasure for years.

If it weren't for Autumn of the Seraphs, either Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? or Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank would be unimpeachable albums of the year. The Of Montreal album explores new emotional and musical palettes for Kevin Barnes, who is musically my favorite pop songwriter of his time, and it's his best batch of songs since The Gay Parade. Modest Mouse have leapt so high with their most recent two albums that I realized I may have to consider them my favorite rock band (in the wake of the breakup of Sleater-Kinney); last year I would've said Spoon, but the most recent two Spoon albums feel like the band is running in place while Modest Mouse have exploded forward.

Edited* to add: How could I have forgotten to mention Gogol Bordello's Super Taranta!, which belongs with the two above. Bitingly funny songs, awesomely energetic folk-punk attack, and a vocalist who sounds like Rowlf the Dog with a Russian accent. I wish I'd taken a hyperfan friend's recommendation and seen them live several years ago, because the hype is growing fast this year. Super Taranta! isn't as consistent as the albums above, but its peaks are breathtaking.

Hovering right behind are Dizzee Rascal's Maths and English (musically amazing, but the subject matter -- being a star, how to be a star, those other phoneys, etc -- is uninspiring), and Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare (mainstreamed postpunk, witty, improvement on solid debut). I'm still getting my head around the new Animal Collective and Fiery Furnaces albums, but they sound like they're going to be well up the list once I've absorbed them. The new Wilco, Spoon, Art Brut, and Ted Leo are solid, enjoyable albums, not great but good. The Spoon and the Ted Leo haven't added any favorite songs (yet) for me to their extensive legacies, which is somewhat disappointing. The Wilco album has got some of their best stuff, but I'm not as big a fan of their best stuff as I am of Leo and Spoon. I probably haven't given the Art Brut as much attention yet as I should.

What else should I make a point of hearing this year?

16 comments.

today's work headphone music

Posted on July 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Boring Posts.

• Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society, What Spirit Say
• Shipping News, Very Soon, and in Pleasant Company
  (++ "How To Draw Horses")
• Phillip Johnston's Big Trouble, The Unknown

3 comments.

Older »