Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)

(Kranky)

!! CAUTION !!

Being impressed with Nicolas Jaar and somewhat enjoying James Blake, I thought I'd maybe dip in for another hip-approved ambient electronic album. This is one from a lifer who uses lots of tape delay and creates a kind of shapeless wall of sound different (very different) from the one Phil Spector used on those old b-sides. It's... it's so...

I don't know, I think I like avant garde music, right? I think I even like droning. But this is fifty-two minutes of droning with little variance, or rather, with variance I'm not capable of hearing. I don't want to tell other people how to do their job but damn, dude, couldn't it have been just a little shorter? Things do get a little more interesting toward the end with some piano textures, but approaching this from my philistine pop perspective I must say this doesn't move me at all. If you're seriously into ambient, though, don't steer clear; I'm sure it's better than what my ears allow me to realize.

(I think the last track has a sound effect from "Yars' Revenge" for Atari 2600 which honestly makes me like this a little more...)

Aaron Neville: A Collection of His Best (1966-2006)

(Hip-O)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Not in the mood to write very formally today, so bear with me. Someone I know felt I would greatly enjoy this compilation; luckily, they don't read this blog as far as I know. It isn't in dispute here that Aaron Neville has a hell of a voice. At times, like on his fine version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," it has the nuance and vulnerability of Marvin Gaye. But the production style he tends to be saddled with and selection of songs, often pop standards, he tends to be given are tasteless. It's extraordinarily difficult to listen to this best-of, and worse yet it omits many of his better cuts, like "Apeman." Instead it's firmly driven toward the adult contemporary pap market, with distressingly bland versions of great songs like "Bird on a Wire" and numerous instances of fine singing wasted on subpar material. Probably worst of all is the duet with the great Tammy Wynette, allowing you to hear two legends waste their time for the price of one.

I remain open to the possibility that there is Neville material out there that can convert me; I bet his spiritual recordings are solid. But this shit isn't even worth a full listen. Sorry.

Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise (2011)

(Circus Company)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Opening with the peaceful sound of sloshing water, children playing and a Leonard Cohen-like abstract narration, closing with an inverted revision of the same sounds, Chilean wunderkind Nicolas Jaar's debut album conceals much Wellesian peace and deception in its impressively rich textures. Presented as an electronic record but with much parlor trickery concealing just how much of the record is synthetic and how much is performed (Jaar is much more musician than DJ), Space Is Only Noise is the kind of album that renders genre a moot point. By the end of the first track, Jaar has already made a journey from pure ambient effects to gentle piano jazz; on "Colomb," a lonely faraway sound of distortion crumbles into the record's first actual beat, a morbidly slow one, while idly pretty processed vocals float aimlessly above. Jaar is a mood artist, but he doesn't make ambient music; he certainly doesn't make dance music, even though he is marketed as such. So what is this?

Maybe strictly because of the cover and title, I'm calling it "moon music." It has that faraway feeling that still hints at being an aspect of home. Take a close look at that cover art, and you discover you're seeing not a lunar surface photograph but nothing more or less than sandy earth, the lunar module a stroller. It's a handy metaphor for the album's magic; it's far more familiar than we intuitively grasp.

Jaar's peculiar gift is in finding the spaciousness and weird in what amounts to a soft -- if slightly druggy - aural comfort. Never background music, the record demands attention and earns it, and it is consistently inviting and entertaining, whether evoking a thumbnail sketch of disco or periodically allowing an organic guitar line to breathe. Through enormous production gifts, he captures a skewed and cohesive variance on a wide stylistic palette; the pleasure is immense and shockingly immediate -- far more so than the work of the more celebrated James Blake.

Space Is Only Noise is equally memorable as an entity, in an age when actual advancement of the album as an artform is (for the most part justifiably) rare. The Nouvelle Vague cool distance of "Sunflower' sits undisruptively alongside the mindbending vocal tics of "Keep Me There," an evocation of Medulla and doo wop that mercifully never moves past its smart minimalism. Everything here, even the high-pitched Mickey Mouse vocal tracks that see the album out (including a semi-clone of Patti Smith's "Birdland"), rises from the same powerfully slow heartbeat, its tribal rhythms, crawling pace, and hints of paranoia fusing these disparate ideas into a seamless whole.

There are moments that leap out, all the same. "I Got a Woman" is, even more than its neighbors, an orgy of calmly alluring, careful but sensual noise, opening as sample-happy sex, closing as mysterious eurojazz. The robo-rollick "Problems with the Sun" offers utterly celebratory, elephantine dance, most addictive in the way its modest vocals echo and fall confusingly into one another. And then there's the title track, a thrillingly catchy pop tune buried under only a thin e-cloud veneer that recalls Wire in their period of "Eardrum Buzz" and "Kidney Bingos" unmitigated joy. Wire is just as informative of the fashion in which much of these tracks are just teasingly brief pleasurable blips that make their point and instantly move on, a welcome development (shared by Flying Lotus, among others) for the typical overextension of electronica.

You don't have to be a lamenter of modern music, which I am not, to concede that very little of what we hear today feels truly identifiably new; I'm too much of a pop guitar stalwart to believe newness is what finally matters about music. But Space Is Only Noise carries more wisps of the new than anything I've heard in some time. And what's most bracing about it is its sheer accessibility; along amongst the wave of dubstep and electro-jazz breakthroughs of these past few years, it holds that proto-legendary vibe of the rare electronic record that any pop fan, especially any alt-pop fan, will understand and love. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Dig Your Own Hole, Play, and Since I Left You -- it's a short list but a profound one, of records that soared far beyond their target audiences and became a part of more lives than their creators likely imagined possible. As at so many other points when techno and electronica almost became mainstream, never before with a recording this subtle and quirky, I find myself on hearing Space Is OnlY Noise engaging in an undetached cry of joy for the future. It deserves to be as a communal as it feels, so make that happen, please.

Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (1971)

(Tamla)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The album cover's mildly Gothic appearance and grainy distance (its somber color scheme recalling Rubber Soul) are not an accident; Marvin Gaye's left-field intention is to evoke a pallid, foreboding landscape, to direct his listeners' eyes and ears to the newspaper-gray misery of the out-of-sight out-of-mind invisible elements of their world, a permanent rejection, forty years on, of royal weddings and Microsoft's purchase of Skype. This brief, chillingly direct set of nine songs dives into poverty, war, fear, anger, sober maturity, and the pure shit of trying to make a life and help along the lives one touches -- responsibility. It's the most uncommercial, wildly bizarre proposition for a pop record, one to which Motown head Berry Gordy was understandably resistant. To everyone's surprise, to the eternal befuddlement of the executive establishment, it was Gaye's career-making moment, a record of shining and revolutionary power. And a permanent record of his compassion and, more pressingly, his musical expertise, craft, taste.

The modern rock scholar underestimates Gaye's 1960s teen-oriented material at his or her own risk; the respect and awe Gaye as a performer -- as nothing more than a performer! -- demands is formidable, his greatness intimidating from the start. But he was still very much a Motown stable man, on the same Mobius strip as virtually everyone under Gordy save Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. So Gaye's demand of control over this release not only altered the course, the sound, the meaning and contextual merit of his career, it created a precedent that led to a gutting and rebuilding of Motown as a business and artistic entity. It is difficult, for instance, to imagine Stevie Wonder's triumphs of the '70s without What's Going On; Gaye and Wonder were the first artists at the label to gain total control of their output, and both took a greater level of care and interest in the entirety of that position than Gordy likely expected.

Gaye's career is divided conveniently, tragically neatly -- heartthrob and oddball -- his life cut short before he could explore the cunning popster he was becoming... He would reach bracing heights in the '70s, and in fact his two later peaks -- Let's Get It On and the magical, bizarre, insurmountable Here, My Dear -- eclipse What's Going On despite its lofty reputation. But this is the record that made everything possible, that opened the door for Gaye, who instantly proves himself a brilliant producer -- consciously aligning himself with a singular and distinct timely sound, forever identifying the record as a product of its '70s without sacrificing its universal elements. The stark, spacious but complex sound evokes cloudy urban squalor and its impenetrably intricate politics; the deft trickery of the songwriting, the most immaculately crafted of Motown up to this point, fuses with the emotional cresting in the remarkable arrangements to pay off, in spades, on the hundreds of brilliant 7" records the factory'd been churning out for the previous decade. It makes perfect narrative sense that this is the LP on which the Funk Brothers, Motown's immaculate backing band, finally received individual credit -- this is the product of everything they'd ever worked for, an artistic zenith worthy of any heady analysis, tearful evening, or dancing boom.

What's Going On is unmistakably, deliberately built around three centerpiece tracks, which also happen to be the three singles. The masterpiece of compassion "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" is as ideal a summation of the record as any, wrapping its waves and layers of beauty and misty-eyed altruism around to build a collective of humanity that lifts and tugs. Even more remarkable is "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," a politically conscious, nearly alien slab of funk slow-burn energy that upgrades the snake-charming voodoo of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" with coy anger and protest. For not merely is the music's abstraction and relentless, lush oddness a sharp contrast to Gaye's and Motown's standard material, its subject matter is remarkably dark, eloquent, and advanced, a perfect narrative to the late-twenties human growing glumly aware of his surroundings. Though the Temptations and Stevie Wonder had taken their stabs, this was typically the domain of Curtis Mayfield's Impressions. It must be stated, then, that Gaye's economy and soul, his ability to connect his ideas and concerns directly to the listener's heartbeat, stands above and beyond his peers.

This, for whatever reason, comes across considerably less on the album's most famous crucial cut, its title track. "What's Going On" is a solid single and deserved hit, but it shoves the musical innovation into a less central role, and what's left flirts with what we'd now call adult contemporary. To boot, it contains unquestionably Gaye's least inspired vocal performance of the album. It only colors itself in comparison, truly; everywhere else on the LP, Gaye is nuanced, calm, achingly sad, every millisecond of every recording awash with modest warmth and muted genius.

As soon as "What's Going On" fades, it leads to the suite that makes the record an undisputed classic. The segues are rapid and scarcely noted, the songs taking the form of pieces of a whole. "What's Happening Brother" immediately flies leaps and bounds above, the Funk Brothers persuasive yet nonchalant, the unhummable melody circling around and teasing without ever setting out to convert, a job left for the cumulative effect of the songs to gather. The drug lament "Flying High" is the masterfully vague first display of Gaye's great gift as producer and arranger, his goosebump-inducing vocal interplay with strings and instruments, and the immense, well-contained power of his self-recorded backing vocals. Less discussed but equally vital: the half spoken-word, low-key "Save the Children," which presents itself as powerful poetry quite admirably without overselling, and the insanely sophisticated "God Is Love," inspired in its brevity. All this leads to the climax of "Mercy, Mercy Me" and the LP side that shook the world halts, demanding to be played again.

The second half is less remarkable, almost strictly because one of its only three cuts is the record's sole serious misstep. "Wholly Holy," though it must be acknowledged as a classic of black American music, is shapeless and lyrically weak, the arrangement an overly busy mess. Happily, the seven-minute "Right On" is a worthy comedown from the mastery of the suite, and of course the falsetto and depressive tease "Inner City Blues" could lift anything.

What's Going On is the unveiling of a man, the rigorous and elegant documentation of a time and a culture. Its low piano lines and gorgeous da-da-das bring its time more vividly to life than any history book, perhaps because the dots it connects to the world to which subsequent generations have awoken are so strong. Vietnam is long over, but war remains, as do our struggles with poverty, addiction, and racism. Can something this beautiful have a part in helping us cope? A few seconds, really any, of the first side of this LP and/or "Inner City Blues" can't save the world, but damn if they don't feel like some form of deliverance.

TV on the Radio: Nine Types of Light (2011)

(Interscope)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

M. Ward: End of Amnesia (2001)

(Future Farmer)

RECOMMENDED

How hard is it to put "pretty" on record? Brilliant at it though they might be, Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens, and Owen Pallett make it sound like an intimidating, herculean task fit for only the most agile among us. But Matt Ward, as early as this sophomore album, seems naturally capable of it with less effort than it takes for Justin Bieber to break a teenage heart. Not the superhuman Mr. or Mrs. Incredible of Newsom or Stevens, he always sounds like a Regular Everyman -- he's you and me, and he can't sing much better than we can. But he presents his sliding, slinky folk rock as an Eno-like seduction; breathlessly gorgeous background music, the sound of bourgeois wallpaper introspection -- which is what more background music should aspire for.

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that the most striking moments on End of Amnesia have nothing to do with the vocal melodies, which are lovely but mostly overshadowed. It's no accident that the instrumental (or mostly instrumental) songs come off strongest; the singing sounds labored on the more structured cuts. At their best, Ward's vocals are casual and scattered, as on the down-home comfortable "Color of Water," which sways thanks to his ace guitar technique while the vocals quietly croak througha nd weave with the chords. Beyond that, the richest pleasures are on the title track, a gentle ditty with the three-piece lineup of piano, guitar and atmosphere, "Psalm" with its expressive, ghostly guitar line, and "Silverline," which amps up th eadventure with left-field descension and the most impressive guitar work on the record (plus spookily possessed, barely audible vocals).

Voodoo and speaking in tongues might run counter to the record's laid-back persuasion, but Ward doesn't want it so simple; the entire album is backgrounded by a distant hiss of noises enveloping and obscure, like old movies and nearby circuses are proceeding behind the music. The odd Fogerty and Ryan Adams-quoting stomp "Flaming Heart" leaves you longing for its carnival-like intro. "Half Moon" seems to open someplace in the 1920s with a faint shred of the last lonely note of some big band jazz number before the sound slowly builds from seductive mystery to full-band, with pounding drums and what sounds like pedal steel but probably isn't. That slow attainment of rhythm carries through on the next cut, "So Much Water," continuing the river-music obsession. Ward expertly captures the feel of classicist folk (mastering it later on the almost supernaturally antiquated "From a Pirate Radio Sermon, 1989," though that one is spoiled somewhat by a silly MOR chorus) while his whispery double tracking gives off breathy Elliott Smith-like tones.

Ward's ambitions clearly lie outside the scope of the record even at this point. "Bad Dreams" carefully gives the illusion of four-track production before the curtain lifts to reveal an unsubtle polish, not the most persuasive sound of musical improvement. The most complete song, "Carolina," is likely to perk up the ears of Mountain Goats or Eels fans, but more telling are its faroff shreds of AM radio glory, a sentimental affinity Ward would later explore to mixed results on his She & Him albums with Zooey Deschanel.

End of Amnesia is just a tad too long, particularly given its wispy textures that would seem to demand a certain brevity. Fourteen songs (running nearly an hour total) is a lot to digest of music that largely sidesteps great variance. And there's something unnatural about the last three tracks, which is deathly for music so reliant on its perceived simplicity. The harmonica on "Ella" suggest a somewhat labored folk lexicon quest that feels false; "Seashell Tale" is rather overly cutesy and homey, not unlike Paul McCartney's first album; and the storytelling suite stunt "O'Brien / O'Brien's Nocturne" is over the top in its explicit nostalgia (here comes 1989 again, rendered with Bryan Adams-like excessive shorthand longing). Nevertheless, even without cutting this material off the end, the record's sense of restraint as means to folkish beauty is impressive and endearing.

Ward's real winners still lay ahead at this point; Post-War and Transistor Radio display a confidence and individualism that can't be touched here. But he lays the groundwork on End of Amnesia, and taken on its own it's sheer delight. Even if it might threaten to rock you to sleep.

[SEE ALSO:]
Duet for Guitars #2 (1999)

The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

As the song goes, "I am not this body that imprisons me." Luckily, the appeal of the Mountain Goats' second most recent album isn't tied up in the Bible verses that form its central conceit, even though that comprises the bulk of discussion about the LP. I'll admit to a certain ignorance on Biblical matters, and additionally an ambivalence toward them. But even at that, I don't buy that the cultural or spiritual framework provided is any more important here than on any other Mountain Goats album, informed as John Darnielle's lyrics always are by the grand palette of religious and social and artistic American culture. I read all of the verses referred to in the song titles here and I understand the links most of them share with the lyrical content; the rigid context suggested by The Life of the World to Come's package still seems unnecessarily constraining, even pretentious to me -- it grapples with the same themes Darnielle always does, but dressing it up this way gives it a Gimmick. And at that, an inconvenient gimmick; replacing meaningful song titles with Biblical cross references makes remembering which song is which a tiresome puzzle game... unless you know your Bible, which I suppose is the point.

But that is my lone serious objection to this album, which does stand apart in other ways. Pretension isn't audible; even when Darnielle plants lines like "Go down to the netherworld, plant grapes" and "My house will be for all people who have nowhere to go" in the first couple of minutes, it sounds unforced. For one thing, even encompassing the adventurous and sprawling All Eternals Deck from this spring, it is Darnielle's biggest stretch to date, a real tour de force for him as a songwriter and performer. Moreover, it is an at times almost oppressively dark, haunting record, deliberately paced and marked by a seriousness that would be stifling if not for Darnielle's natural levity. The witticisms and gentle humor that populate most of his work is absent here ("Feel bad about the things we do along the way, but not that bad" would count if it didn't come across so threateningly); taken all at once, hearing his gifts applied to such dour material can be overwhelming, but what makes it all tick is his attention to detail, the lovingly defined feeling of heat in the dying man's fingers as he idly pores over a magazine left behind by a friend, holding it close to his face, just before the nurse comes in.

And although there is a conscious slowing down of pace, a concentration on stripped-down piano and acoustic laments here (the solemn reflection of "1 Samuel 15:23" a rather curious opening until the pounding from outside begins), these are some of the most durable songs Darnielle has written, even if it takes them some time to come into focus. In a few cases, string arrangements swirl around the songs, adding both a slickness and a sense of disorientation new for the band. And plopped down at scattered points on the record are three of the most advanced, expertly crafted pop songs he's ever released -- sounding as far from his boom box-recorded treasures of yore as can be conceived.

The chief difference, of course, is the absense of catharsis, which can be difficult to handle on first hearing something like "Philippians 3:20-21," but when the curtain lifts, the hushed folk rock reveals its beauty. The swirling, ideally placed strings and drums add ample drama to the stunning "Hebrews 11:40," but even it continues to retain the mood established in the record's first seconds. The sparest acoustic moment is the shattering death song "Matthew 25:21," the longest and most deliberate track here, and seemingly (though it's hard to be certain) the most personal; if Life of the World to Come feels like the document of a stressful period, this song gives some clue as to potentially why: an ending life is celebrated ("I am a witness to your life and to its worth"), but when the inevitable phone call arrives, there's "no one around to break my fall."

Upon reaching the second half of the album, Darnielle takes a Randy Newman stance, with some of his finest melodies approached in solo piano arrangements -- a stark sound applied to disparate material, the barroom hangover "Genesis 30:3" ("for several days the visitors were here") far off from the lilting lullabye "1 John 4:16" ("long ago and far away"), calm Darnielle at his all-time peak. The piano backgrounds hints of hope on "Deuteronomy 2:10" ("the sun above me..."), the brightest break in the tension that any of the ballads can offer, but then we descend into appropriate apocalypse for the closing "Ezekiel 7," cementing Darnielle's mastery of the ballad, and finding his voice begin to stretch in the ways he would further explore on All Eternals Deck. Its beating-heart close leaves you hanging; never before has Darnielle so avidly and devotedly captured and sustained a mood.

The exceptions prove equally fascinating. "Psalms 40:2" is Darnielle's regular nod to metal, with one of his most furious vocals, the sole instance of his once-trademark frayed edges across this LP. The genius popcraft of "Genesis 3:23" -- "therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden" spilled into a story of a man secretly returning to the home he shared with his ex-wife (chorus "I used to live... here") -- is one of the most tantalizing signals of progression Darnielle has yet emitted, a gentle and introspective but intricate piece that builds its character perfectly, musically and lyrically, until his "Drive home with old dreams that play in my mind, and the wind at my back" is so evocative you can almost see and feel it. "No Children" and "This Year" notwithstanding, "Romans 10:9" might be the closest thing to a pop single Darnielle has ever written, despite its overtly religious themes -- upbeat, back-against-wall strong, and redemptive, all cast into bliss by its decidedly un-Goats-like, delicious opening riff.

Best of all is "Isaiah 4:23"; this song, although it arguably relies more on the album's spiritual themes than any other track save "Romans 10:9," may have a claim to being, at the very least, one of the Mountain Goats' half dozen finest songs. It is here that Darnielle so lovingly delves into a drawn-out expiration and its hard-won acceptance, lifted and supported by the stirring chorus: "I won't get better, but someday I'll be free." If Darnielle set out to create something like a hymn somewhere on this album, here he's got it. He gets deep, unbelievably deep with this one; you feel it in your bones, shaking down to your heart, and it amounts to the rescue it so loftily describes. If The Life of the World to Come had only this masterpiece, this triumph, to offer, it would be worthwhile, years of development and work paying off in three and a half minutes. But there's more, lots more, and so much to reveal and reinforce its heights. Back to front, this is as strong as The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee, even if its unifying theme is less specific, even if its music is consciously less varied.

But can I please please please retitle all the songs??

[SEE ALSO:]
All Eternals Deck (2011)