2000s mixburst #20: token indie

wow, this one actually did only take me about an hour. and it's actually only about fifteen minutes. it's not for the party... pre-party, probably. though you could still dance to it, if you like. started out dancier and then i decided it should be a token indie mix. man, don't you had that word? (not "indie rock," just "indie.") ha.

#20: indie [15:46]


LCD Soundsystem - North American Scum (2007)
Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc. (2005)
Phoenix - Too Young (2000)
of Montreal - Disconnect The Dots (2004)
Belle and Sebastian - I'm A Cuckoo (2002)
Spoon - The Underdog (2007)
The New Pornographers - Letter From An Occupant (2001)
Franz Ferdinand - Darts of Pleasure (2004)
The Strokes - Take It Or Leave It (2001)
Ida Maria - Oh My God (2008)
A.C. Newman - Miracle Drug (2004)
Aberfeldy - Summer's Gone (2004)
The Mountain Goats - No Children (2002)

summer stock

whoa hi! what was i supposed to be writing? about how i'm such a foggy fogy that all the music i care about is indy rock oldsters from way back in the ninetees? like em tortoise and mirah and spoon [see above], all of whom i went to see perform in the past week. despite that they haven't even put out any worthwhile new music since like 2001, or 2004, or well last tuesday, respectively. i mean [more accurately/less pointedly] i've been liking these bands since i was in college(!), which in point of fact was not in the 90s, and nor was mirah's recording career. [bbut still it's like i'm stuck in time and i can never advance and embrace new music, right? or wait, my top 5-ish albums of last year were by artists that didn't even exist when i was in college. k nm.]

briefly then:

trts@wrldcfelv
whom i have been wanting to see forever, since somebody told me once that you don't even get the full genius of their compositions til you see them replicate them live. worth the wait? well they hardly even looked at the audience, much less deigned to speak - that was borderline obnoxious. one of them (john mcentire, i hope? that's who it was in my mind) was at least smiling and seeming to enjoy himself.

as well he should, rocking the rock out double-drummer-style, with both kits front and center (that's right, shove the guitarist and bassist upstage), flanking the central keyboard/control module, whence dude'd plunk something cryptic but with unflinching hep. and the mallets, of course, further out on either side of the stage. perchance the gentlemen would rotate.

it was fun - the gentlemen can groove, and the selections are trés well-apportioned, and precisely familiar, as promised (i recognized almost every piece, mostly from the last two albums, though i could only hazard a guess at a couple titles.) discomfitingly mannered for such fluid, empathetic sound, but: exactly what you'd expect, really. neat to run into caroline, with whom i saw my very first post-rock show way back (gybe!, pre-!-shift) in u-city-ish (the long-since defunct 4040) even if she didn't want to talk to me (?)

mrh@frstuntrnchrchbsmnt
the charmer. second time this year (fourth overall?). no surprises, is good news. well, she did do three ten-second preview-snippets-cum-guessing-games from the bugs project - which were predictably adorable (logan was annoyed about this...why?) they had t-shirts for that, but no cds. best part, i must admit, was the encore of "cold, cold water"...there's just no arguing with a great song. also: opening folker benjy ferree got kinda obnoxious, but pulled out a surprisingly affecting magfields cover ("grand canyon") to close his set.

spn@rckfllrprk
whoooo! gonna be writing and writing about spoon this week/month/year, i can tell. so just on the show then: well first off i ran all the way w/ heavy backpack from the wrong subway stop (rector st.) after twofold subway idiocy and general underpreparation, which ended up actually working out ok because i completely missed the rain at that end of the ride. and also they hadn't started, though i was 15m late, it took them another good half-hour, but [blablabla] good pre-show tunes, fittingly motown-heavy, plus "mannish boy," and then, for no reason, right as they took the stage [to fiddle about some more], the opening tracks of illinois(e). ok whatever.

this band....well, should i get into our history together? ell, this post is already getting hella selfy. [it's not, obv., just about being a certain age, or in college, but about developing a personal relationship with the makers of music; most folks just have the time/inclination/emotional latitude to make those attachments in adolescence/academia...] *

the show: better than last summer @p4k, when they were weirdly (slightly) disappointing, and bantered inanely. took a few numbers to really get off the ground. but by an amped-up (+drums) "small stakes" and the horns entrance for "underdog" (!!)...they were off. so glad they're playing "stay don't go" live now, albeit w/o beatbox. most of the new record, selections from the last couple. most exciting was "take a walk." "jon fisk" w/ horns, also excellent. they played most of the songs that had been in my head the preceding week, so well done there.

honestly, spoon are just frigging sexy - i can't think of another band that gets me hot and bothered just watching them play (or even, as earlier that day, strutting down broadway listening to them ga ga in my headphones.) it's everything - every adjective that's overused to talk about their stark, sleek, lean, muscular, gritty, edgy, intense, intimate, dark, rock, music, the tension and release, lyrical (and vocal) obliquity occasionally letting up to reveal warm, brooding emotional core, like art-damaged deep soulful vacant eyes, and then there's britt's physical presence, the guitar in his hands, the jeans on his legs, the spiky of his tousle - faux-punx indeed - and they let you in it with them - being there makes you (me) seductive, toothsome, devastating, too. it'd seem they're hipster-cad-unattainable, but there it is for the taking, and that's why maybe spoon are Great, not just for indies, it's a democratic rock-band sex hip you can access too. so yeah i was dancing and rocking/freaking out basically the whole time - not many other people were - silly them. but i caught some knowing nods. also good flirting on the subway back. knuffnow.

i also sawr:


thdcmbrsts@mnnmsccntr
last night. won tickets. (thanks aka!) cool beans. never been to the mann before. colin claimed they'd never played with an orchestra before, but that's clearly a lie. i guess he meant before this tour. (but that their only other experience with strings was a quartet from the portland youth orch? doesn't make much sense either.)

the decemberists with an orchestra did make plenty of sense, at least as realized in this instance: the arrangements were rich, varied, and well-suited to the songs, and complex enough that i was reasonably impressed by how well the mann pops pulled them off after presumably minimal rehearsals. and they were featured on all but one or two numbers in an hour-and-a-quarter set.

weirdly (for a rock show) it started on time: we strolled into the amphitheater at 8:13 and just caught the second and final utterance of "fontanelle" in "the crane wife parts 1 and 2," which by itunes arithmetic means they must have started at four after. too bad, that's the nicest song on the new record. actually though they didn't end up playing much else from crane wife - just "o valencia" (the "hit"?) and unaccompanied "perfect crime" (er, "2") (meh.) strange set list - "the infanta" and "we both go down together" and "l.a. i'm yours" were all pleasant to hear, but nothing particularly moved me - i guess their coolest move was playing the entirety of the tain ep, complete with time signature wankery, zeppelin-isms galore, and a melodica/mandolin hornpipe breakdown, with meloy on drums. hadn't heard that before; it's pretty neat. [disappointing: despite the month, they didn't play "july, july!", which i'd just described to matt as the only rock song they ever made..."ok, well, maybe the closest they ever got to making a rock song."]

gotta say though...apart from a couple of songs ("grace cathedral hill," "leslie anne levine," "red right ankle"), and fewer of them with each successive album, the decemberists have long since been a band that other people are much more excited about than me. (my parents, for example.) which is okay. it's nice to listen to things that other people like, even if they're not your favorite. it just turns out that what i liked most about them - the unassuming prettiness of some of the simpler, sweeter, not necessarily clever songs on their first album - arguably their less distinctive side - is not what they focused on developing in their later work, or what brought them a larger audience.

but it has been funny to observe their progression, since i first checked them out, for some reason i can't even remember now (a blanket music connection?) when they were still on hush. actually, come to think of it, and not to play the cred card, really, they're one of a surprising number of bands (arcade fire, sufjan, shins) that i got into, basically, before the hype kicked in, who have since managed to disappoint me to a greater or lesser extent, on their way to becoming more or less the figureheads of the indie universe. not, i swear, because of that becoming. (also, sufjan hasn't really disappointed me; i guess i just wasn't super-super-enthused about him for too long beyond the filial novelty kicks of a concept album about my dad's home state.) the strokes, on the other hand, ["pre-hype strokes" is pretty much an oxymoron, but i did see 'em open for gbv, if that counts] seem to have somehow reverted from practically-mainstream to practically-indie, and i still like them just fine. so whatever that says.

anyway. several enjoyable evenings. too many convoluted thoughts about my relationship to indirok that aren't that worth gettting into. a blog post: one in a continuing series! also, sat next to j valocchi, of the phl weekly, and friend, at the dec's show, so hi to them if they stop by here.

*[first band, as it happens, i ever blogged about, fwtw. seen em 5 times now; they put me in their album art; i won their shirts and tix and records etc. etc. you know. matt and i listened to their entire discography (well, i still don't have that lafitte single) the other day, and...yeah, well i love them. new record kicks kicks kicks. more s(p)oon.]

low; yo

low have quietly, slowly, gradually (well, you know how they do...) become one of my very favorite bands.

saw them last night, and that really clinched it - made me start to love them and relate to them as people, beyond the already strongly personal affinity i feel for their music.

(even though i'm not a very melancholy person like that might suggest; even though - and despite what i've said in the last post about my generationally-based difficulties accessing mid-90s indie - i didn't even really listen to them until four or five years ago, already almost a decade into their career.)

i saw them before, last year, in the sanctuary of the church in the dead of winter (an apt time for low - now it's not, but the lingering cold was fitting.) but this was better - maybe because i wasn't in the middle of a fight with angela; or because the church basement, though less evocative, is more intimate; or just because of how much i've been loving drums and guns.

they played a lot from it, including key highlights "belarus" (very minimal, with ambient loops and that keening high octave harmony), "dragonfly" (the prettiest one - addiction metaphor), "in silence" (which i hadn't noticed as much until hearing it live, but has been in my head since) and "murderer" (which seems to take the perspective of a religious terrorist, by my reading anyway - closed the set - slightly less intense than the album, actually.) and of course "breaker" - the single, if that means anything - which they did twice, first in the organ-and-handclaps ("you don't all have to do it, but some of you should - it's fun!") version from the album, and then in a more rocked-out and menacing encore.

[also of note - show opened with "cue the strings," lovely lilt from destroyer; first encore. by request, was "violence" - which i recognized but couldn't quite place as the opener from long division - amazing how they can say so much with so little, and then, nicely, by my suggestion and gentle prodding, but then taken up by the crowd in general, the first song of theirs i ever loved, "in the drugs."

there was some amusing - just slightly tense - banter between alan and mimi, about the lighting on his face (she said "it fits you" and he demanded to know what she meant), and later an attempt at a sort of open discussion on any topic of interest to the crowd - alan seemed to be suggesting legalizing marijuana as roundabout semi-solution to the crime problem; compared notes on disillusioned mayors - ended when mimi asked "what about disillusionment and marriage?" but they were in good humor. alan's funnier than you'd think.]

the new album is more anxious and bitter - more political, though obliquely enough that you can't exactly call it that - than anything they've done before. it's most similar to trust in that respect, but even starker and sparer, with a reenvisioned sound palette centered around glacial, quietly menacing drum loops and little snatches of ambient guitar noise. but there are still those ineffable, ethereal harmonies, low's sonic quintessence, all the more haunting and disarming when set in contrast to the foreboding music beneath them. (it's telling that the opener, the devestatingly bleak "pretty people" - devoid of harmonies - is the hardest song to listen to.)

they didn't do "hatchet," the lightest (and most atypical) song on the album, and probably my favorite (this revelatory article/interview calls it a "dance song," which may be going a little far) - i didn't really mind (not sure it would have gained much from the live setting) - but somehow just seeing them gave me a new perspective on its lyrics, which i've been puzzling over. (i guess i'll just post my thoughts there on songmeanings, so read it there if you like.) the beatles and stones references there made me think about yo la tengo (mostly "tom courtenay") (hey, have you seen that video? it's really good.) (actually, this review calls the song "yo la tengo-esque," which i guess it sort of is.) (and come to think of it, "hatchet" is in the title of my fave song from the new ylt album too.)

---

it's not like i hadn't thought of them in conjunction before (their albums are next to each other on my cd shelf, for one thing), but i'm not sure i'd realized how almost uncannily parallel those two bands are. the obvious: both are trios consisting of married couples - drummer-wife and guitarist/writer-hubby - one jewish, one mormon - with third-wheel bassists (though they originally started as quartets), from and strongly associated with small unlikely cities (hoboken nj and duluth mn.) both have been around for a really long time, have earned a tremendous critical reputation for consistency and quality, with similar but distinctive musical approaches (one more eclectic, the other more minimalist) that have developed and mutated only very gradually throughout their careers, and both have remarkably devoted fans who presumably collect their countless endless eps and ephemera (oddly enough, both have released christmas eps.) they're both noted for being fairly low-key and unassuming, personally as well as musically, and tend to underplay their considerable instrumental chops (the guitarist/de facto frontmen, specifically.)

they both released defining, consensus-pick albums late in their careers - and i can hear the heart beating as one and things we lost in the fire are very likely the first albums i heard by each, though their respective follow-ups (and then nothing turned itself inside-out and trust) were the first that i fully explored, digested, owned, and loved. (i've come to appreciate and eventually care for ichthbao and twlitf too, though for a long time i could only really connect with them as far as their first halves - it's taken patience to make it all the way through to their ultimately crucial, sweet closing tracks.)

picking up used copies as i come across them, i've gradually worked my way through much of their back-catalogs - indeed, i have exactly three earlier lps by each (which still leaves a lot more ylt albums, but only one - the beautifully titled curtain hits the cast - by low.) i actually purchased the three most recent low albums new and full-priced, around the time of their release (there are very few bands for whom that's true) - in ylt's case i got summer sun as a promo, although like the great destroyer, it was something of a critical disappointment which i wholeheartedly embraced (actually to a much greater extent, on both counts.)

there's something of a divergence after that in terms of my personal relationship to the bands. i publicly declared my love for yo la two years ago - as i'm doing now for low - but although i still stand by the things i said there, i've gotten a little distanced from them since. you know how you fall out of love with bands? not just letting your affections gradually wane, but having something diminish them more actively, acutely. it's happened for me most markedly with beck, and also elvis, sad to say - for both personal and musical reasons. not quite saying that's what's up w/ ylt - but there was something symbolic in my walking away, 20 (very enjoyable! so bad decision?) minutes into their p4kfest set, to go watch spoon (who also let me down a little bit - they've got a good shot to make it up though, with their forthcoming.) i was also underwhelmed by their live show in '04 (though i loved it in '02), but the scarier bit is that i've really been kind of turned off by their "return to form" [i am afraid of this album title], which sacrifices the satisfying cohesion of their previous two (unexciting, maybe, but still the only ylt lps i truly love.)

low, meanwhile, like i said, have subtly, gradually revealed themselves to me in the last few years - i've had much less difficulty connecting with their earlier work (i can live in hope, their 1993 debut, is in the running for my favorite), and now that i've caught up with them, i've enjoyed watching their style finally blossom and mutate in more dramatic, overt ways. and, clearly, their newest is far from a disappointment.

not that it's a competition. but i have been thinking in terms of the entertaining stylus "versus" features - which would be appropriate for these two. if i wrote one at this point, i'd obviously give low the edge, which might not be quite fair. (ylt's best shots: more lovable bassist - and better side projects, i'm assuming; possibly better album covers although their last may have screwed them there; better song covers by default, since although low have many lovely ones to their credit ylt are basically the kings and queen of cover songs.)

the thing is, their differences are almost as striking as their similarities, which makes them seem more like negative images of one another than mirrors. it's in their affect. low are somber; restrained; lugubrious; spiritual. yo are playful; direct; ebullient; worldly. both have undeniable beauty - but it's like light and dark; heaven and earth. there's some exaggeration here, of course - there are spaces in both for joy and sorrow, and each may at some point take on the qualities i've ascribed to the either - but in terms of the overwhelming, general quality conveyed by their music, the contrast is unmistakable.

yo la tengo's recent retrospective was titled prisoners of love - arguably a more appropriate title for low (theirs - three discs of rarities rather than a more scattered putative 2cd "best of" plus bonus disc was called a lifetime of temporary relief), but suitable for both. because earth and heaven can be prisons or sanctuaries, it's all in how you view them. it all boils down to love - sacred and profane; as you will - and maybe the distance is not so great.

i'm not in love with the modern

(arms race whoops i mean scene)

transferred from from the podcast post, for yr reading ease, and to combat wanton blog sprawl.

one of the many memorable moments of south-by-south-west that i didn't mention in my recap came right at the beginning, the first morning of the festival, in jenny's car on the way to austin java, when, in search of some blonde redhead song, we listened to the first few seconds of each track of two discs of somebody's 'introduction to indie' mixtape. it turned into a sort of rapid-fire pop quiz, with jenny not pressing the skip button until i could correctly identify the artist. it usually took about ten seconds, and i probably got at least 90% of the tracks: jolie holland, enon, neutral milk, john vanderslice, spoon, even tx weirdballs the baptist generals ("okay, it's kind of a fluke that i knew that one") - it made me feel slightly ridiculous, not so much like i was showing off as revealing an inordinate and casual familiarity with indie music, at least c. 1998-2005 or something. not that that's so surprising, but it prompted me to sigh, with performative resignation, as we stepped into the parking lot: "okay...i guess i like indie music..."

had been feeling a little bit lukewarm about sxsw just because of its pronounced emphasis on indie, as opposed to the kinds of music that i think of myself as being excited about these days (dance-pop, soul, electronica, '60s pop.) but obviously i did find plenty to enjoy, regardless of labels. 'course, these days "indie" feels like more of a cultural category than a stylistic one - as the music-industrial complex merrily bumbles its way towards apocalypse, the indie and main-streams become increasingly difficult to untangle, and the incoherently defined indie listenership is just as likely to devote itunes attention and mixtape-slots to folky singer-songwriters (the mountain goats, m. ward), hip-hoppers (el-p, the clipse), scandinavian electro-poppers (!) (annie, the knife), sonically expansive "experimentalists" (panda bear, scott walker), and big-budget dance acts (justin timberlake, missy elliott) and so forth as to the kind of prototypical "indie rock" bands whose albums, by the way, are hitting #1 and #2 on the billboard charts lately (modest mouse, the shins, arcade fire.)

if this diversification in the quote-unquote indie milieu is a relatively recent development - which i think is fair to say - why do i find myself - an eclecticist die-hard - with a growing ambivalence towards the concept of "indie"? it's a little hard to pinpoint. i don't want to delve into the muddle of trying to actually define "indie" or "indie rock" or what-have-you - no question these are major-league Superwords - just take a look at the wikipedia entries for some considerable confusion. but i think we more or less know what we're talking about.

whatever it is - and, by the way, i feel like i hear "indie rock" a lot less often than just plain "indie" these days, even though the two used to seem roughly synonymous and the former probably more prevalent - it still feels to a great extent like my "baseline" music; the foundation and starting point for my understanding of and perspective w/r/t popular music in general. even though i grew up listening to oldies pop radio, and such seemingly classification-proof deviants as tmbg, phish, and talking heads (on reflection, it turns out that they were all rock bands), i guess the groups that i stumbled upon in my later high school years represented the first music that i came to understand in terms of a coherent "scene" that, at least by early college, i could see myself as in some way part of.

i dunno. radiohead, belle and sebastian, and elliott smith are my "comfort music" (all class of '97-98.) pavement and guided by voices (and, even more so, sonic youth) - "seminal," milieu-defining acts who reached the height of their prominence (or better: "influence") shortly before my awareness kicked in - still maintain a vaguely mystical stature in my mind, a sense that they'll always be the province of people slightly cooler (that is, older) than me - unlike earlier, probably more objectively "important" bands like the clash and the velvet underground and even the pixies, who seem more approachable, more possible to own.

the acts that came up while i was in college - shins, strokes, spoon, new pornographers - i have total mastery of: we can relate as friends, as equals - we love each other but they hold no real mystique for me. (though there are some, like yo la tengo and the mountain goats and the dismemberment plan, slightly older and with longer and darker pasts that i may never quite get a handle on, who'll always retain just that slight bit of distance.) but now that i'm three years out of school, well beyond the tyranny of the wsrn rok playlist, the delimited benificence of olde club and r5 all-ages booking, the rockcentric listening interests of most of my musical colleagues... i feel like it's gotten away from me, or me from it.

i'll still devotedly keep tabs on those aforementioned friends; i'll still dutifully snap up used back-catalog from the likes of sebadoh, lambchop, and superchunk, bands whose early-90s work i feel i'm supposed to have already known and loved even though they came to me in later incarnations that will always bear more emotional significance. but i'm running into limited tolerance, and diminishing returns, for the more recent crops of touted, beloved bands, whose sound, i've gotta say, often seems so distantly related to "rock" per se that i'm more inclined to call it Indie Guitar-Based Music.

[btw, one pop-ular indie band that does stand out as undeniably, unrepentantly ROCK, in a distinctive albeit derivative way - and thereby sort of points up what i mean - is The Hold Steady. so go them. (and look, i made a movie!)]

funny thing. it makes me feel like a bit of a young curmudgeon, a bit of a traitorous ingrate (turning my back on the scene that made me?), a bit of counter-cultural cliché. and y'all know i hate to be a hater. so this is hard. some of it is undeniably cultural - it's not so much that being out of college has separated me from a community that's actively involved in this stuff; almost the opposite in fact, as more and more people are tuning in and turning on to the music whose oppositional definition as "independent" grows ever more dubious. i'm all for increasing audiences - far be it from me to heap scorn a band or style for becoming popular - but the sense of a cohesive listenership becomes increasingly vague as it grows; much like the stylistic limitations of the music itself: it gets so big and diverse as to become meaningless.

[i've just written a paragraph and a half that i'm now retracting b/c it kind of seems like unonvincing, insubstantive whining stemming from laughably flimsy generational bias.]

in musical terms though - and obviously this is just my perspective - i've really struggled to find any sustainable interest in most of the new indie rock bands of the last few years: wolf parade, clap your hands say yeah, tv on the radio (whose previous album i found much more distinctive than return), islands (even though i quite liked the unicorns record), menomena - even though i have enjoyed listening to them on occasion (some more than others)...and i'll admit that i haven't given any of them a lot of attention or listening time... they just really don't sound very interesting to me. rather, they all sort of sound the same - i think a lot of it has to do with the production - these records often sound flat, cold, muddy, cluttered, claustrophobic. it's like they're trying to hold on to the lo-fi aesthetic of earlier indie music, as if on principle, despite arrangements and performances that are too big to be translated justly by those means, so that an approach which should make the music seem more personal and idiosyncratic ends up making it rough and indistinct. when moments on these albums do stand out, it's because the songs or the singers succeed in spite of this unflattering presentation.

well. of course it's okay for me not to like them - obv. they're doing fine without my support, and it's probably healthier for me not to want to traipse down every single musical avenue i encounter. but, you know, it makes me a little sad, or at least a little confused, and distanced from my fellow listeners (which is the opposite of what music should do), to find little to connect with in music that's clearly struck a chord with many people. and since i personally feel like these bands could be more exciting with cleaner, more vibrant production and arrangements, i get to wondering whether folks are (unwittingly?) harboring complicated, inappropriately moralistic grounds for wanting to listen to music that's so defiantly "indie" (for better as well as for worse) in its production values...

as a final note on that strand, i better say something about the band that to some extent epitomizes this aesthetic, has found the greatest success with it to date (a #2 album, on merge! that's crazy-talk!), is starting to look like the biggest, most significant indie-associated act of the 2000s (well, who else... lcd soundsystem?), and is hugely emblematic of my personal relationship with guitar-based indie music. y'all know how the story goes. it's effing ridiculous. i saw the arcade fire in a tiny club in NC, two months before their album came out, before anybody had heard of them; they blew me away, i fell in love, bought their album they day it came out, my buddy dave gave it an almost-10 in pithfork (sic but i like it), i found it a little less exciting than the live show but still love it and name it my favorite of the year, i saw them once more in a somewhat larger club - still good but they rubbed me the wrong way by doing a lame cover of my favorite song; they got gradually massive, and even as i thrilled when "rebellion" becomes an end-of-the-night danceparty anthem, and they started to hobnob with my other buddy dave the famous rckstr (who wrote my favorite song that they butchered, and whose quoted lyrics had opened pfk review, but whose band i think has become majorly abused as a reference point in recent years, including/especially w/r/t the a.f., whose appeal comes from a very different place, imho)... eventually funeral started to leave me a little cold, hate to say it but maybe, just maybe my relationship with it has been corrupted by overexposure, although it can still catch me the right way on the right sunny morning...flashfoward to three weeks ago when the follow-up dropped (and hits #2!) and my unreconstructed (ha!) indie-devotee roommate buys it and loves the heck out of it and...well, i'm listening to it now: it's pretty good. i guess. it does sound like them, at least, though i wish regine got to do more - she (and esp. richard reed perry) always seemed much more charismatic and important to the band's unique appeal than the likable but kind of drudgy over-earnest (?) everymannish win butler. oh man. "no cars go" (rerecorded from the debut ep) is still a great song. "my body is a cage" has a nice melody. "keep the car running" has a sorta nifty jangle to it. those organs sure are big and imposing. oh dear...i don't know what to say. like, it's an album, you know? the cover art's kind of ugly...

indie hearts still beat the same

1. "Heretics" - Andrew Bird
2. "Don't Die In Me" (Mt. Eerie Remix) - Mirah
3. "Breaker" - Low
4. "She's Fantastic" - Sondre Lerche
5. "A New Name" - !!!
6. "Long List of Girls" - The Blow
7. "Someone Great" - LCD Soundsystem

vinyl-only bonus track:
8. "My British Tour Diary [Restiform Bodies (anticon.) Remix] - of Montreal

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(the play button is backwards, but i bet you figured that out.)

i originally posted this podcast a few days ago (sneaking it in at the end of march so it can qualify for the monthly quota), but it disappeared when i started drafting the text of this post, to accompany it. basically what happened is that i got back from sxsw, and the next week there were a whole bunch of records released that i wanted to hear, most of them, as it turned out, within the indie umbrella, so i bought a bunch of them, and that made me think a bunch about indie and my relationship with it.

but mostly i just wanted to say a little bit about some things about those records, in ways that may or may not illuminate or complicate the things i blathered about above.

so, sans plus ado: about the songs in the mix (in the form of album or concert reviews/first-impressions, or just more blathering):

[armchair apocrypha] might be [andrew bird]'s least interesting record to date. his idiosyncrasies were still markedly present on his last (and first seriously indie-hyped) album, mysterious production of eggs - and they're not entirely gone here (his weirdo smarty-pantsy lyrical proclivities and jokey song titles - "yawny at the apocalypse" anybody?; that unmistakable whistling.) but basically it's another step away from his most truly unique (and rocking, and best) album, '01's rootsy, genre-flected swimming hour. this is his least bluesy album, and it's his first on a blues label, fat possum.

put another way: this is the first time he's sounded so much like straight-up indie [rock]. though it's also possible that indie is just coming to sound more like him. certainly we've had a spate of literate but sensitive but quirky but mellow composer/songwriter types lately (sufjan stevens, owen pallet, colin meloy), and bird seems to be setting himself up to join their ranks in the public consciousness. but his own distinctive personality is in danger of being lost in the process. he seems to be getting more indie and less rock; as the guitars pile on, everything just ends up feeling langorous and subdued. not that this is entirely new territory for bird - it certainly feels familiar - even overly so, as when "heretics," probably the most immediately catchy track here, unabashedly bites the main riff from eggs' bangin' "a nervous tic motion" (fortunately it also adds two or three more hooks of its own.) dude loves him some "eastern-tinged" pentatonics. (fwiw, he was billed as "pop" in the sxsw schedule, whatever that means.)

anyhow, i don't mean to suggest that this is a bad album - far from it. it's not just merely pleasant either - it borders on hypnotic at times, and lyrically there's plenty to dissect (i'm only just starting to) - but, the uncharacteristically muted (i.e. boring) album art isn't entirely misleading either.
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oh man, i love mirah. hadn't thought about her all that much recently (well, that's what happens when you don't put out an album for three years.) but it all came back when i saw her a couple weeks ago, at the church. if i try to say anything about her performance, it'll just sound like i'm gushing and crushing, so i won't. but it was interesting that she has long, straighter brown hair and no glasses now (and i would definitely not have recognized her.) possibly the most resonant part of the concert experience was just being in that crowd - looking around and feeling like i knew exactly who all those people were, even though i didn't know any of them. (y'know, all those cute little indie punk lesbian folkies, and variations permutations therefrom.) (also, being able to turn my head and eavesdrop on dozens of people chatting about indie music - as vaguely delimited above - including no less than three separate and simultaneous conversations about the arcade fire. now that's what i'm talking about indie community.)

anyway, mirah's a total sweetheart with gorgeous gorgeous voice who writes terrific songs - every time she did a number from c'mon miracle (which was most of them) i was like...oh yeah, i love this song! damn what a good album... well the lady at the merch table (who also did the spanish speaking on "the dogs of b.a.") talked me into buying this recent 2cd of remixes, and i was skeptical (indie-folk remixes?) but i'm glad i did. it may be the best indie remix album i've ever heard (not that that's saying too much - biggest contender would be a people's history of the dismemberment plan) - it basically boils down to the fact that 1) mirah's voice is absolutely lovely, plus 2) the songs are still great, and most of the time these two things remain reasonably intact; also even though 3) most of the mixes hew pretty closely to classy but still interesting down-tempo/ambient territory, 4) they all hold down a pretty distinct indie aesthetic (guy sigsworth of frou frou fame contributes the token "polished" potentially-commercial reworking, but that one's so pretty i bet even her hardcore fans don't mind) and therefore 5) it all hangs together very well sonically while avoiding sounding too samey. it might have been interesting to hear something really radical (for instance, something that could have half a chance of working on a dancefloor?), but it's probably just as well that nothing's that divergent. as it is, the mt. eerie rmx of "don't die in me" is one of the most idiosyncratic contributions - and also one of the coolest, with vocal cutting/splicing that manages to be "experimental" and just a little off-putting without being annoying. of course, being phil elvirum's work, it doesn't sound hugely different from mirah's original records in the first place - it just exaggerates the general microphoneyness. nice stuff. (also worth checking out: jonah bechtolt - of YACHT/the blow's "screwed and chopped" version of "jerusalem."
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i have a lot to say about low right now, but i'll save it for another post later on, either just before or just after i see them on monday (!) (which knowing me means it will be up in about a month.) for now: drums and guns is really really good; i've been listening to it more than anything else in a while. and "breaker" is fairly representative of what makes it so good. (this video is pretty silly though. but i guess it's fittingly minimalist and heavy-handed/inscrutable. doesn't quite get the breathtaking beauty part.)
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"sondre lerche sucks" - said matt merewitz, the jazz publicist of northern liberties, offhandedly, upon noticing three titles by the sometime-wunderkind, sometime-crooner in the "individual artists; rock/pop-ish; male" section of my cd shelf. eh, he's probably right. mr. lerche did after all put out a smooth jazz-pop vocal album last year, which i suspect is largely responsible for mr. merewitz's opinion of him. besides, does astralwerks put out anything that doesn't suck these days? (isn't astralwerks, like, the most confounding label?)

i thought about going to see him at the tla last night, but not only were tickets $20 ($5 less than i decided not to spend to see him in austin), it was a seated show. like, with reserved seats and everything. do you realize how lame that is!? i guess they figured the crowd would be mostly upwardly-aged easy-listeners suckered in by the dulcet tones of aforementioned jazz crooner record (which, by the way, i haven't heard and don't particularly intend to, though i'm sure it's interesting enough.) little did they know that young sondre has changed his tchune and is now a bonafied rock and roller. ha-ha! sucker punch, more like! (meanwhile, his backing outfit have transmogrified from the "faces down quartet" to the leaner-, meaner-sounding "faces down." named, of course, for the chorus hook of "dead passengers," the lead track on his similarly titled debut album - still possibly his best song.)

but hey - lerche was scandinavian pop before scandinavian pop was cool. (er, hence him not being cool?) he was not-really-that-indie before marginally-indie was indie. actually, the scando-pop/indie crossover merits some discussion in its own right - but we'll save that for the swee/tweedish installment in the genrephilia post series (remember that? yes, i still haven't finished writing about the february podcast...but just wait!)

anyway, phantom punch finds him putting the /rock that little bit further ahead of the pop/ - kinda like (i'm obliged to mention) squeeze or graham parker or xtc or recent tourmate/cover victim elvis costello - without sacrificing the sophisto-. i'd call it his most readily digestible record, and just maybe his best. really, it's no more and no less than i expected it to be, and that's fine by me. "she's fantastic" might be my favorite, so take that as you will - but it's pretty solid front to back. yup. nicely done.
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the new !!! album, myth takes, has been getting pretty good reviews. i'm not that excited about it.

i hoped it would be dancier. it sounds vaguely "dancy" without really feeling all that danceable; it's "fun" but not actually fun. maybe it's too busy and stuffed with stuff - there are moments where the layers of instrumentation are stripped back, and the remaining grooves are revealed to be decently funky.

so it's pretty much indie guitar-based music. and it's okay. i should probably write about it when i'm actually listening to it, because i do enjoy it when it's playing. but is that enough? what good is that? don't we really want shelves full of albums that we can enjoy without having to listen to them?

on that note - i do really like the cover art, and especially how the insert folds out into a 4x larger version of the same image.
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the blow opened for mirah at that show, which for mirah's sake should have been in the sanctuary as initially announced, but for the blow the basement was perfect. it was just khaela singing/rapping, with all the beats/music in a backing track (cuz the other guy was on tour), but she was a-maaaa-zing. really, i think she must have won over everyone in the crowd, instantly.

the set took the form of a lecture/demo, almost, with the songs strung together in a narrative about struggling with her own inability to write songs about anything other than not being able to get with the people she wants (and her corresponding inability to have a satisfactory relationship), involving various attempts to write about other things, failed at first, and eventually more or less triumphant (closing with the perfect popslice love-song "parentheses," and then the more bittersweet but still optimistic "true affection.")

she did "long list of girls" and talked about how she should sell it to j-lo or beyoncé for a million bucks: "it's awesome, right?" well...yeah, it's pretty awesome - i've had it in my head tons lately - though it would be good if there was a little more song to it (also, b has already done the marching drumline thing, a couple years back.) anyway, this was one of the "failures" because even though it's about how she's over the guy, her friend pointed out that if she was really over him she wouldn't be writing a song about him.

her persona was perfectly-pitched self-deprecating sarcastic confessional, performative enough to seem slightly put-on, but that slightly exaggerated edge almost gave it more honesty - even, maybe especially, when the story arc veered out of the realm of the plausible. a lesser performer might have come off as indulgent and wallowing, but the frankness and biting humor of her approach helped convey something vividly resonant about human loneliness and self-doubt. that resonance is still there, if less visceral and somehow more hopeful, on paper television, the album from which most of her set was drawn. (by the way, that's the european cover up there, which i think i like better.)
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one more. AOTYTD (does that mean it'll be forgotten in 9 months?) sound of silver is indeed a good good good good good record. whether all those goods add up to a fanfreakingtastic is another question, but it's an album to smile to, darn tooting. "effortless" is a good word - it's flirtatiously close to "tossed-off," which might be the trouble. not that this album is, but i get a sense that, if he really put his mind to it, jimmy murphy could make a total bleeding masterpiece for the ages, one groove under which we could all get - cuz he's got love on his side - but as it is he's just bubbly crusin', givin' a chuckle and out pops yr rhythmical underwebbing for the next six weeks. could be longer.

am i being not nice? i haven't even listened to 45:33 (technophobic!) and this album sounded familiar like an old crush on first listen, which mind you was the day it was released and not a whiff sooner. i wonder sometimes but the bands that everybody complains about being the oh-obvious product of influences (the strokes too, holdsteady like i mentioned) often actually have an extremely distinctive steez - and what a case in point! it's so so supa-soundsystematic.

actual quibble: i'm not quite sure i'm buying "north american scum" as the pop stand-alone - it's no "daft punk" or "beat connection" and certainly no (hands-down, hush-hush LCD greatest single moment) "tribulations." i'm not sure this album has one. "someone great," which you can in fact dance to, and easily (you just have to beatmatch into it first), is a total total winner, and probably the (correct) consensus favorite. "all my friends" is close and (i think) is the one with the straight-up junior boys vibe. (also half-cops the melody from "count souveniers" is it?) "get innocuous" may be the biggest dancefloor stormer - i burst into the steamy floor of making time last friday just as it was blooming out from... some soulwax track i think. heck.

i am going to love this album for a long time.