friends not trends: 2008 in review (and otherwise)

the going assumption; the working understanding during much of 2008, in my head and at least a decent many others', was that it was an off year for music; lackluster, mediocre, no great shakes. in some ways, i'd still say that was pretty true – as i've harangued before, it was a sucky year for big pop singles, with nothing that felt truly epochal and zeitgeisty, or even especially inspiring ("low"? "single ladies"? "american boy"? dandy party-fodder all, my rather irrational distaste for the latter aside, but hardly the stuff of enduring greatness) – at least not until m.i.a. blasted in from the past with what was pretty undeniably the song of the year, only a year late.

if you ask me, it was also an underwhelming year for albums of the crit-o-sphere consensus-pick variety – fair enough that there are plenty people who, unlike me, were smitten by the fleet foxes, tv on the radio, and bon iver records, but you can't convince me that any of it is urgent and compelling music (tvotr could almost be if they'd get a new producer already.) but i've gotten pretty far away from the indirok party line, so it's pretty irrelevant to ask me anyway. save for the break-out indie-dance triumvirate of swoony sweeties cut///copy, niche-revivalist anomaly hercules & love affair ('08's biggest crossover success story?), and bona-fide auteurs hot chip, the widely-repped alb i dug the most this year was vampire freakin' weekend, by a band whose most notable (and greatest) quality was their endearing ordinaryness.

meanwhile, the year's biggest attention-getters, lil wayne and kanye west, mostly failed to engage me all that much, musically or otherwise. and there weren't really any other major narratives to latch onto, genre-wise or what-have-you, my valiant attempts to herald a big-beat revival notwishstanding (but just wait until '09, oh right it's already here!) save perhaps the perplexing hodge-podge of the auto-tuned/art-attuned afro-techno revolution, which isn't so much an emergent trend as a multi-strand interpretive lens that may or may not be coming into focus.

[there weren't even major genres or trends that got me excited on a more personal level, although i did listen to a fair amount of sleepy twinkly ambientronica (colleen, lullatone, theodore, yokota) and the still-scarequote-worthy "balearic" (hatchback, studio, air france) and glanced briefly at b-more (tittsworth, rye rye.) i've had flirtations in recent years with soul, country, folk and reggae, none of which made very strong showings on my radar this year, but the ethno-beat likes of nomo, el guincho, m.i.a. (as a guest-shotter and general booster), and most especially my recent enthusiasm over radioclit in their various guises – not to mention the shaabi cds i picked up in egypt, or reading about the international selections in tom moon's 1000 recordings book – have me feeling like 2009 may be a year that i try to delve deeper into world music, whatever that ends up meaning. in '08 however, much of my extra-curricular investigation focused on various strains of "classic" british indie-pop from the '80s and early '90s: in an effort to shore up my historical understanding of this stuff (which seems to have influenced a lot of swedes), and under the guidance of AMG (and the liner notes to the legends' facts and figures), i bought albums by felt, lloyd cole, momus, heavenly, the field mice, the auteurs, prefab sprout, and dexy's midnight runners, exactly none of which have managed to make much of an impression, thus far. oh well...]

so much for all that. on an almost completely unrelated note: 2008 was an awesome year for music. as has been pointed out more than once, there's no such thing as a bad year for music. an uninspiring spell for music-that-other-people-like is nothing but a perfect chance to go out and discover what else there is out there to get excited about.

in this case, i found it, by way of my AMG gig – this was my first full year back to being a music journalist (by vocation, even!) several years after having packed it in – and the opportunities it allowed me to hear some artists that i may not have encountered otherwise, especially scandinavians: the astonishingly sincere twee-meisters billie the vision & the dancers, bleeding-heart synth-disco purists juvelen and cloetta paris, art-pop songstresses britta persson, maia hirasawa, and firefox ak, and lo-fi texturalists silje nes, fredrik, and hanne hukkelberg. (a few scandi-pop artists i'd heard before, who didn't release anything of note in '08, nonetheless formed a significant part of my aural diet for the year, largely through my "expert" AMG assays of their excellent back-catalogs: the tough alliance, the ark and bertine zetlitz.)

i also found it with some trusty old favorites, like crypto-fantasist kelley polar, pavlovian powerhouse rex the dog, and neato neo-beatnik why? (what's up with this spelling it in all-caps business? it's as bad as the mysterious made-up comma in the tvotr album title.) also true-blue troubador billy bragg, sludge-rawk guitar-hero al sparhawk (whose retribution gospel choir made the only honest-to-goodness rock album to make my list, right up there at #37), domestic vignettist darren hayman (a lovely rediscovery, both with his new bluegrass bandmates watkins trout & lee and the slightly older project the french), transatlantic twin sweethearts of the radio marit larsen and taylor swift, and the trustiest oldest favoritest of them all, david byrne, who seemed to get way more attention this time around for a way more low-key album, mostly because he got another old dude to write less interesting chord structures for his songs. [sadly, i didn't find it with my other, increasingly-less-dependable old favorite, fat elvis the talk-show-host, who put out, come to think of it possibly the worst, and certainly most slapdash, album of his entire career, and with the silliest title to boot - but, sigh, i've gotten over that one. interestingly, i did find it with my goodfriend matthew sweet, not so much on his 2k8 offering but the delightful four-year-old kimi ga suki * raifu.]

i found it, too, with some total weirdos. it was a great year for weirdos – or perhaps i should qualify that; weirdos who mix some amount of pop in with their weirdness, or vice versa (which makes it far weirder than straight-up weirdness, which is old hat and mostly just boring.) i'm thinking in particular of abstract-expressionist melody masher/noise-terrorist nerd dominique leone, foppish imps (impish fops?)/goofball space-cadets the chap, dadaist retro-wonk/blues-addled alien lifeform pop levi (a late addition to the party, but a tremendously welcome one; his sophomore-step-up, never never love, which shot way up on my list after just one listen, was otherwise dissed and generally slept-on, which is both a shame and a mystery since it's totally accessible and fresh and fun...the weirdness there is more about him than his music per se.) somewhat less enthrallingly, there were those nutsos nôze, whose album was more of a befuddlement than anything. and most of all, there was the incomparable, irrepressible max tundra, who both out-weirded and out-popped the lot of 'em, and also has the distinction of holding down the top spot on my last.fm most-played artists list.***

but best of all, i found it right here in west philly – to be specific, over at the vegan luncheonette, which is where i met '08 great emily bate... already my neighbor, soon to become my friend, and now my bandmate – but first, first, first came the first-rate the fever in the feast, which grabbed me from first listen, and which i just can't say enough good about.

should i be apologizing? look, loving music is absolutely subjective; writing about it ("critiquing") is hardly any less so... and what could possibly be a better way of relating to a musician than, well, relating to her? to be honest, though, our friendship is only one, reasonably insignificant, contributing factor in my fondness for tFitF. which, incidentally, i can actually quantify, about as objectively as is conceivable: as my last.fm charts corroborate, when you factor out "compulsory" listening for review purposes, as well as the fact that the higher-placing artists all had multiple albums contributing to their tallies, it was almost certainly the album i chose to listen to most often in '08.***

although i submitted a request for the assignment, i didn't review emily's album (that is, i haven't yet) – not so much because of bias concerns or conflicts of interest, but more because i feel like i won't be able to write about it in a way that conveys how special it has been to me... or, maybe, more precisely, because i'm afraid that examining it with a view to expressing it in words will force me to see my friend's funny li'l folkysongs as, "objectively," maybe not entirely so special after all.

(which is a silly thing to worry about. that's the whole game of criticism, after all, but it hardly ever has that effect; at least in my experience, reviewing is far more likely to increase my enjoyment and appreciation of albums than to diminish it. which is what explains my tendency for rave inflation.)

or maybe that's not it. a simpler explanation might be that i just enjoy it too much to want to do much of anything else with it besides keep on listening. and singing. and sharing.

2008's been a great year for friends, both musical and actual. here's to hoping that i find at least a few, at least as fine, in 2009.

______________

***[bonus mini-essay!]

2k8 was definitely a different year for me in terms of my relationship to music. it was the first year that i did the vast majority of my listening with mp3s rather than physical objects. over the course of many months, i transferred my entire cd library to digital, all of it stored on my trusty (if sometimes a bit pokey) drobo: the current tally is 57660 songs, or 424.9 days. correspondingly, i spent untold hours in accreted discrete moments of intermittent frittering, pleasurable or painful or both, attempting to organize the constant flood of incoming iTunes data. also, i taught myself a fair bit about laptop djing; also, i got my first iPod (rubylith), lost it, and got another one (obsolith); also, i signed up for the rather ominously-named last.fm.

i'm still not sure if that was a good idea – i did it out of curiosity, but it has become a kind of compulsion; i check it constantly, avoid listening to undocumentable media (cds, for instance) as much as possible, and i'm inordinately peeved that the legends (whom i really don't think are all that great) are still standing as my third most-played artist, just because i apparently took a long time to review a couple of their albums back in the summer sometime...

anyway, last will tell you that my fourteen most-played artists of 2008 (or rather, from the time i joined, around may, until right this instant) were as follows: max tundra, cex, the legends, emily bate, marit larsen, owusu & hannibal, kelley polar, britta persson, firefox ak, cloetta paris, laurel music, amy diamond, miss li, billy bragg. i don't buy it, or at least not completely... i do a lot of my listening, and especially computer-listening, for practical purposes; mix-making, as well as record-reviewing [the names in italics are those that i didn't write reviews of in '08, which is pretty telling.] my continuing gig at amg was, of course, another huge aspect of my musical milieu this year, and the direct reason there are so many scandinavians on that list... all of which means it doesn't entirely match up to my "pure" preferences.

anyway, it's obviously an imperfect (though fascinating) system, and it's not really worth griping or quibbling about... on the other hand, though what's the fun of lists if not to argue about them.

summer stock 08

l-r: simon tong, kokanko sata, damon albarn, lobi traore, tony allen. thanx flickr...

been doing a lot of traveling (hence all the not-posting, not to mention the not-making-mixes, etc.) and actually none of it has been music tourism (although i was sorely tempted by the pitchfork fest lineup this year... too bad i can only think of 1 friend who likes in chicago, and planes are so spenny, and i was away every other weekend)... but even so i have managed to see a few shows here and there.

tonight, for instance, i was at the mann center to hear the philly orchestra play carmina burana. righteous good fun, and appropriately accompanied with beer, bread and cheese. just like the middle ages. that makes three free mann shows out of three, with last year's decemberists + orchestra and, a couple weeks back,

ani difranco and regina spektor @ the mann music center
great. i'd been thinking about going, but wouldn't have except matt called me up an hour before show time with an offer of two comps... complete with after-show passes which enabled us to, er, stand around in the grass for awhile and chat with matt's client [difranco bassist todd sickafoose.] ah well.

regina was adorable and definitely kookier than i remembered to expect - she has almost a nellie mckay vibe, though slightly more of-this-century - and her vocal ability is frequently stunning. she played basically all the songs from that album [begin to hope, all i know of her...for now], at least all the ones i could think of, and some others that were just as enjoyable. mostly just solo piano (2-chord guitar on "that time" and another one), though for her last number she had a beatboxer accompany her on the "orca whales and owls" song (which is so poppy - could totally be a big radio hit with the right production.) (you see how i'm being too lazy to look things up? that's good - it makes the blogprocess go much faster and increases the chances that i'll actually finish this and post it.) i couldn't believe she screwed up and stopped and false-restarted in the middle of "fidelity." that was pretty hilarious...

i don't understand the song "samson" (which was easily the most-requested, and was her penultimate selection) - is she supposed to be delilah or a previous lover? if its the former, why does she say the bible doesn't mention them? maybe i don't know the story well enough.

finally, the second half of the second verse of "on the radio" is so beautiful (from memory, so maybe a bit off): no this is how it works/you peer inside yourself/you take the things you like/and try to love the things you took/then you take the love you made/and stick it into some/one else's heart/pumping someone else's blood/and walking arm in arm/you hope it don't get hard/but even if it does/you start it all again. those are some great lyrics.

ani ani ani. wow, i saw her 10 years ago. nine maybe? (it was pre-up up up up up up, i remember, so yeah) have barely paid attention to anything she's done since the first track on the album after that...i wonder what percentage of her audience is, like me, essentially nostalgia fans, not an "active" following. anyway, she played enough new and old songs to please everyone as far as i could tell, me definitely included. "you had time" and "untouchable" and closing dance-number "shameless" and three from [her best alb] little plastic castle including [her best song] "as is" [maybe??] the new ones were plenty good too if characteristically a bit preachy - hey, it's a good thing! - strawberries in super supermarkets and the intelligent design manifested in the atom (i thought there was a line about "the science of boom" but actually it's "doom," a less good phrase, and she was lazy in the factchecking on "i bet there were no women in the room...) oh yeah, she's still a sick sick guitarist...

what else? finally started acting like the west philly folks musicky scener i'm a wannabe, saw
birdie busch, emily bate, a brief view of the hudson @ the green line,
mannerwhich was my first shermanarts/greenline show, and my first time hearing birdie and really my first time seeing em, except that one time with her rock band in a basement and also rehearsing on her roof. she and her music continue to be a total joy - she just gave me her last alb which i am just digging into (somewhat more generic and gestatory, you can tell, also feistier - still well creamy) - and her overall enthusiasm as a human being is only amplified in her on-stage manner (i keep thinking that ani line about a "chipper cheerful free-for-all") new roomie/2nd gtr/banjo(!) buddy zach(k?) is a poker-faced foil. that works out pretty well.

hell, she didn't play every song on fever in the feast.... i'm just gonna have to go see her again sometime and get my "greyhound"/"limos"/"mlle labelle" fix [the all-important midsection]. actually come to think of it she only did five out of ten. loved mouthing along to "warning." loved the gossipy new song with some of her snappiest lyrics (a kiss in the park/a shot in the dark... i've got to hear them again), about easy/difficult nights with difficult/easy women (so typical how she shirks the question of how it will work the third time by...not having a third verse, just ending with a bridge drifting into wordless vowel abruption. "girls with my same name" is still an all-killing #1 [w/ a bullet] in rossland...

hum yeah. also really really liked birdie busch. i think, as a person first, b/c that's how it works with folk, sometimes. it's, there's nothing especially outstanding about her playing or her singing or her songwriting, even, and that's almost exactly it, her charm is all about understated, down-to-earth, genuine normalness (seems normal if you know people like i know people), and that's captivating. b/c it's relatable. and don't we all want some more normalness in our lives (in certain ways, that is.) i mean, the flowery summer-dress is good too. and, especially, her homespun phillyphilia - "i really love it here... i love you guys" she said in reference to having had a sour time in brooklyn the night before, but in the kind of way that means a lot more from five feet away in the local neighborhood coffeeshop even than it would oh twenty feet away in the local districthood public-radio-run 'dedicated music venue.' do you know? we can feel good about being just us, and getting each other.

i bought both birdie's albs for about $2.49 plus shipping online (i figure i'll just slip her a tenner next time i see her around the hood, which i feel like i have twice since the show, though maybe i'm making it up.) so we'll see if that song about the boyfriend giving her an old lp of "songs he thought would last" lives up to the neatness of the concept i thought i heard in it, and if the huff singers song has as much replay value as it has goodhearted plain-spoken earnestness, and so on. as engaging as she was, with simple but sturdy structures to her citysongs, i still found my mind wandering mid-lyric when i thought i was right with her. no matter. i know she don't mind no.

oh yeah - openers brief view of the hudson were also really nice - boy-girl folk-blues hearty-harmonists, emphasis on the latter half of each phrase there - though the most striking thing might have been how uncannily more intoxicating it was when their voices blended on a single line than when they sang separately, even overlapping lines. and how many '00s-era 'mericans have written songs about katrina invoking the primal water/flood/deep-south imagery? that's a good one.

how about besides lady songwriters? saw
juvelen @ the annex on the lower east side.
i told y'all about juvelen right? right. just happened to notice on his myspace that he'd be in new york for three shows the week after i wrote the album review. three shows in somewhat random venues at random times - apparently they were put together with the help of matt from it's a trap, my fellow scandinavian music enthusiast and webcritic, who also reviewed the album, and whom i met at the show. wasn't hard to spot him, as apart from my tiny posse of ben and nan (whom we coaxed along after randomly spotting her umbrella-shopping at uniqlo) and juvelen/jonas's girlfriend, he was evidently the only other person there who was aware in the slightest of the immense and potentially explosive poptalent we were there to witness.

it went something like this:
7:20- roll into the joint and wander up to the balcony to keep an eye on the late-HS/early-college somethings who are onstage diligently delivering their overwrought one-gimmick prog-indie rock'n'rote with a somewhat Arcade-Fiery scope and sobriety. (at least until the keyboardist slams a little too hard on his instrument with his foot and it crashes onto the floor.)

8:00- head back downstage as jonas the 31-year-old one-man boy-band takes the stage and suffuses the largely empty bar with several bursts of synthtastic sentimental dance-pop euphoria, giving it a considerable amount of guts and gusto considering the near-absence of any attention he was receiving. ben and i stand tentatively toward the wall halfway back in the empty "audience" area, tapping our feet and reservedly wiggling in place.

8:10- we fully loosen our ties and wtfs and give it a bit of the ol' h-c-g-d-a, crunkadelic-style for a few songs; juvelen seems appreciative.

8:15- set's over. j packs up his stuff and goes to chat with matt and his gf at the bar; we go say hi and talk a bit too (tho i wasn't there when j sheepishly admitted to ben, by way of explaining his recent transformation to solo pop-god that he "was late to pick up on prince" or something like that) until the next band starts and it's too noisy to continue.

oh man he better blow up. he just better.

one more, which may take so much explaining to begin with that i'm not sure i'll have the energy left to add my own comments...

damon albarn presents the honest jons revue @ lincoln center
as pictured above. i'd just link you to the press release, but it's weirdly hard to track down. screw it. so damon albarn (maybe the biggest-name/lowest-pretension/highest success-rate recent rockstar-turned-freelance-collaborator/label-head/project-whore/general musical shepherd, though frankly i'd be just as happy if he ever allowed blur to really become a going concern again...) rounded up tony allen, candi staton, a bunch of malian musicians, many of whom he'd worked with on mali music, an underheralded, unassuming personal favorite of mine, a 6-or-7-or-8-piece jazz-funk brass band of brothers who usually play in union square subway, and a couple of singer-songwriters, and stuck them all on stage together.

a tight two-hour show in the swanky-stuffy avery fisher hall, i was worried it was either going to drag and be drab or else feel not nearly long enough to take in all the talent on hand. actually it was just about right lengthwise, and about as satisfactory as i could have realistically imagined. there was some amount of cross-pollination, as allen and the hypnotic brass acted more or less as the house band for anybody who needed it (albarn's right-hand guitarist simon tong was also on hand, and maybe a bassist or two, though damon himself did little more that add a bit of harmonium and melodica color here and there which you could barely even hear.) but for most of the show it was just one thing after another, rapid-fire, blues to brass to folk to soul and back to africana, one song apiece for kokanko sata, who is unmistakably virtuosic on her deceptively dinky-looking 3-string harp, traditionally a male-only instrument; victoria williams, southern folkslinger whom the program described as "notably eccentric" [how do you think that makes her feel, guys?]; candi staton [omg candi staton...more on that in a second...]; the aptly-named hypnotics, whose opening selection was a good deal subtler and less blazingly groovy than i'd have guessed, though they did that too; 'desert blues' demigod afel boucom; cutesy simple-song folker simone white (liked her a lot - a bunny in a bunny suit/tiger in a tiger mask...) and yeah.

ok, all so good, musical talent, yes yes, multicultural swath, very impressive. hands-down, though, the most stirring and memorable parts for me were the considerable number of songs i actually knew [thanks i guess to my hj's via astralwerks hookup back in college paper days]... most of them from mali music, a surprise since it's six years old now, but not, since many of these were the guys who played on it originally and (i sometimes forget), "world musicians" will more or less draw from a finite compositional repertoire just like western pop artists do. so yes, there were a handful of pieces i smilingly recognized from that album, including the (by-then obvious) show-closer "sunset coming on," damon's one moment behind the mic and stage-center (much as it is on the album), and an absolutely lovely song that sounded just great in that setting with accompaniment from the full assemblage, especially as it spilled beyond its sweeping contemplative balladry into a danceable (but too short) groovy jam section.

ok, but one more thing. candi staton was there, and she sang "i'm just a prisoner (of your good loving.)" [insert many exclamation points!!!!!] i have to think about this...would i have paid $50 (plus fees) just to see that alone? um um, i'm not sure, but actually part of the brilliance was i really wasn't expecting it, so it was a special extra bonus treat. look, it's one of my official favorite songs ever. [see, it's on the mix!] and it was recorded in...1968? 1969? and i just heard her sing it. minor internal freakout. so what if she later revealed herself to be a rather soft-headed and dippy stage presence, and somehow managed to make her soulful comeback-album standout "i'll sing a love song to you" seem saccharine and almost dull (i think it had something to do with her introducing it as a love song that she was going to sing to us), and preciously persisted in clapping on the one along with many of the later groovy african jawns... that was just so cool. ok, geekin' over and out.

on the radar comin' up maybe bon iver if i decide i actually like him and liz phair playing all of exile omg omg omg and maybe...maybe radiohead? and oh man totally joan as police woman at the tin angel...! if i'm not out of town that weekend. well we'll well.

friends and friends of friends

this is about the music that you can hear here, which was made by friends or friends of friends, mostly, mostly recently, mostly mellowly.

Joe Kille - $uccess
please don't take this as a true representative of the fabulous mr. kille's work...i guess you can hear summa that over at hisspace...it's just a little quick-recorded snippet he gmailed me a few weeks ago, a solo-guitar scramble through a tune that, as he said, had happened to pop into his head. it's a song that we played in a band we were in together four years ago that may have been called, at one point or another, "success," "brunchfest," and/or "zanzibar buck-buck mccandlish." (or just "buck-buck.")

i pretty much wrote the song, with some help from dave mcc if i remember right - it does have words (about an old woman losing her ability to distinguish the past from the present, more or less, though you probably couldn't glean that from the lyrics alone) and a melody too, and another bit that he doesn't play, but nevermind that. (also, that's not what the song's called, though i can't remember the actual title.)

anyway, i just thought i'd include this as a succinct intro bit and an indirect reminder (to myself) that i used to be involved in making music too - writing it, even. and maybe, soon, maybe, again. it's been good to see joe a bunch of times recently, performing in various contexts at the (semi-)weekly revues at special agent dale cooper house here in west philly, often on his funky hybrid phonograph-fiddle (er, it's a stroh violin), tho maybe best of all with the bluegrass harmony outfit "jew moon of kentucky." sadly i missed his recent record release show there (in tandem with ben bradlow's) for his first solo album, rough river, and i haven't seen him since to find out about acquiring the records. hopefully i'll get my hands on a copy soon, and will report back.

Emily Bate - Greyhound
current major music-friend crush on emily bate. it's even better than that time i was(/am?) in love with devon sproule, b/c emily is also my neighbor, a fellow west philly'n, which means we actually are friends, or at least we're planning to be soon. so far i've only seen/met her a couple of times, while i have listened to her great great new album, the fever in the feast, more times than that by a factor of maybe a dozen.

somewhat reminiscent of ms. sproule in that she plays folk music, essentially - acoustic and songy and writerly - but stretches out beyond that in refreshing and unexpected ways, in e's case not so much rootsy/folksy/appalachian ways as indie/quirky home-recording found-sound ways, and sometimes also quasi-euro-folk ways (á la beirut, if you like.) but also in that her songs often venture outside of traditional, readily definable structures. (something like the ways and ideas that i was struggling to grasp my hands around a while ago trying to make an overly conceptual, poorly grounded argument or explanation about songwriting styles...) not that they're overly complex - indeed, at least at first brush, her songs feel understated and straightforward, with an appealing, unassuming lightness. but on closer inspection they are often notably atypical, at least in structural terms. most of them don't have choruses to speak of, for instance, though they do have melody in abundance, and memorable repeated musical and lyrical phrases.

which, to cut myself mercifully (somewhat) short, makes the album a joy to listen to but sometimes a puzzle to fully take in and process, as the songs go blissfully by while you listen, forming an entirely enjoyable whole, but often evading easy individuation, even though there's plenty of musical and sonic variety. at least, that has been my experience. as the individual songs come into sharper focus though, with repeated and focused listens, they are all the more striking.

the one that's been ruling my headspace the most lately is the opening track, "girls with my same name," which has four distinct melodic sections, all of them distinctly catchy - at first it sets up a seemingly straightforward verse-chorus pattern, although there are no repeated lines in the chorus, just repeated rhyme-schemes. then there's a bridge ("don't bully me...") which is vaguely similar to the chorus, but not really. then there's another verse, but instead of moving to the "chorus" chords it keeps on with the same insistent minor-key fingerpicked progression, but with a new, simpler, melodic idea that carries on through the end of the song, with the titular phrase (introduced here for the first time), repeated (with variations) like a mantra or an anthem. [like so: ABA'B'CA''D] that final piece is the first time the lyrics shift from a position of wary, beleaguered aloneness to a recognition of a shared something, in this case, evidently, shared outsiderness - and, accordingly, emily's solo vocal is joined for the first time by tight harmonies, which made me think of the roches on first listen. [eta: speaking of whom...i shoulda wangled jenny's roche/wainwright connection into this piece somehow...]

and that's not even really getting into the actual content of the song, the stunning, evocative lyrics and hooky melodies (well, they're doing it for me) without which there wouldn't be much reason to dissect the structure in such detail - after all, it's nothing necessarily amazing in and of itself...actually i'm not really sure why i just spent so much time writing about the compositional structure instead of the lyrics, which are much more interesting. and also, this isn't even the song i put on the muxtape. (oops.) but you can listen to it here (at least most of it) and read the lyrics here.

the song on the mux is "greyhound," which is shorter and simpler, sort of. (actually...it only seems shorter - the track is the same length, though the song itself is shorter, since the last minute is instrumental.) it has, i suppose, two verses, which have only their final (semi-a cappella) refrain in common ("getting chased out of town on the greyhound") but share a lovely, circular internal repetition scheme; then another section (which also has a bit of loose internal repetition), and then the instrumental bit.

when i first heard the line "where are we headed/and is that a place you can get to on the bus?" (without catching any of the other lyrics) i thought this was a political song advocating public transportation, which would be awesome. actually, it's (at least mostly) about other things, though it's not entirely not-political, at least as i hear it. it has a nice balance between an apparently specific setting (looking at detroit through a bus window - songs about detroit always make me think about "papa hobo") and broad, variably-interpretable metaphors and sentiments (the feeling of being on a sinking ship; the questions at the end, which could be either practical and literal, or figurative and universal.) it also has some cute kid talking bits, and glockenspiel, and funny wordless backup vocals, so you maybe get a better sense of the varied, often whimsical, sound of the album.

[btw: web research reveals that e.b. has two earlier albums, and connections with a suspiciously hip-looking art collective thingy, and an all music guide entry - perhaps not entirely due to her having an ann arbor-affiliated associate? - which although it's currently lacking in content (hm...) does accurately identify her, in endearingly quasi-helpful amg fashion, as "alternative singer/songwriter." i guess i'll get her to tell me about those things sometime.]

emily, sorry if i'm embarrassing ya with all this scrutiny. you did say you needed a music reviewer. on to other stuff...

Andrew Rose Gregory - Anything At All
i have other friends. andrew's a friend. (ooh looky) even if i don't know or can't remember the five "top secret" reasons he changed his middle name to rose. he's more of a straight-up folky folkie, but that's cool too. you might wonder, you might, why so many of my musical friends and "friends" are folk-y, in disproportion to the music that i more generally like and listen to. i guess that's a good question, but my tendency would be to say that friends are folks, and folk is friendly, and folks play folk music. (also, folk is one of those words that starts to look really weird when you type it a lot.)

i was gonna put up andrew's song "when we closed our eyes," from his last album the lost year, because it's pretty and catchy and that way i could talk about how he lifts an entire stanza from "cheek to cheek" almost verbatim except for the crucial change of "vanish like gambler's losing streak" instead of "lucky", which subtly, albeit superficially, alters the meaning and wittiness of the line, and wonder whether that could have been an intentional transposition... but i figured i should feature something from his new album instead. (you can hear the other one, and in fact all of his albums, on his website - glad to see somebody is still using myflashfetish players, and classily.)

so, here's "anything at all," which is maybe not the most impressive or distinctive song on the album, but is pretty and sweet and is a waltz (and a duet, like the whole album pretty much) and has some nice quick rhymes. i suppose a more fitting song to go with the 'friend' concept might have been "west coast time."

Devon Sproule - Dress Sharp, Play Well, Be Modest
likewise, "stop by anytime" might have been a more apt pick from devon sproule, whom i reckon still not enough of y'all have listened to, partly as i've been doing a better job of writing about her glowingly (again) than actually playing her music for too many folks. last we talked, i invited her to come play a house show in west philly, and make some steps toward setting that up, but i have been lax and not responded to her most recent email, mostly because i'm starting to doubt whether a house would actually be the best place for her to play in westy, what with all these performance venues that have been opening recently. so maybe i'll make some more friendfolk and then get 'em all together to do a show with devon.

of course, she's got her own friends aplenty. i met her through andrew, above (he was opening for her at the tin angel, over two years ago now), and then through her i didn't-quite-meet carsie, whom i can now say i know, but whom i don't quite feel like friends with, despite having been to her house twice and danced with her a few times. so, she's not on the mux, except really that's because i don't have any of her music. this is cool though - i like "closer to him" and "baby can dance."

oh wait, yeah. "dress sharp, play well, be modest." great title, great song, relatively understated, certainly musically, but a massive grower - amg called it the album's centerpiece, and it does feel luxurious and sprawling, longer than its four-and-a-half minutes. not gonna really get into the lyrics right now, but i do love the casual, off-handed lifts from "take me out to the ballgame" and "home on the range." also how she's drinking dark and stormies ("with a whole half a lime.") oh, dev...

Jim's Big Ego - Cut Off Your Head
the segue here goes: like the previous two artists, i saw jim's big ego most recently at the tin angel, about a month ago now. a place for friends. right. and jim is now my facebook friend, so there. also, dan is my uncle. wtf, dan? i've probably seen them upwards of a dozen times, in boston, bryn mawr, and elsewhere (and even booked them once), but they haven't been around in a couple years, so it was great to see them again, and hear some new songs and olds. their records have plenty of good stuff, but i really enjoy them much more live (that's part of the thing about folk.) and they don't put out many records.

"cut off your head" is from the last one, they're everywhere, which is five years old now. (new one coming soon, supposedly, possibly to be entitled free*, which is a pretty great title.) it just might be my favorite of jim's songs; at least it demonstrates a lot of the best things about his songwriting. jbe are probably more noted for their upbeat, jokey songs, and those are certainly fun, but many of them ("lucky," "stress," "in a bar") are a little too simple and short on ideas to be really effective in my opinion - the best are those which have slightly more content or are at least a bit more nuanced, with slightly more complex humor ("asshole," "she's dead," "boston band.") but what i really love, maybe surprisingly, are his serious, introspective songs ("better than you," "love what's gone"), which tend to be actually more clever, and touching at the same time. [also, the political ones on the e-EP that i still don't have.]

"cut off your head" combines both sides of that effectively, taking a seemingly jokey premise but addressing it in a surprisingly straight-faced, if satirical, manner, and juxtaposing it with three very different, unexpected near-stream-of-consciousness lists in the verses, and creating some actual achieving some emotional resonance. also has some of the band's best "na na na"s, and nifty subtle lifts from "somewhere over the rainbow."

The Mountain Goats - September 15, 1983
john darnielle isn't really my friend, but i have talked to him. (and come to think of it he knows my friend jesse.) still, i've been through a fair amount with him, and he's enough of a folkie (deny it though he might) that i feel he's been there with me too. "september 15, 1983" is not my favorite song on heretic pride - oh, probably "sax rohmer #1" or "autoclave" though the title track and "lovecraft in brooklyn" are both pretty awesome as well as ridiculous - but it is the one i was most anticipating, not because it's about me being eleven months and two days old but because it's about the death of a reggae singer. the last time jd wrote a song about the death of a reggae singer it turned out to be maybe one of my favorite songs ever...

this one is not quite as stunning as "song for dennis brown", but it's still very good. i think i like that it's actually a reggae song. oddly, the lyrics are both more straightforward (it tells one story of one incident instead of several, apparently unrelated ones, although in equally imagistic, evocative language) and harder to understand, unless you already know what the song is about (it describes the death of prince far i in uncharacteristically straightforward, factual detail, but it took me a while and some googling to figure that out.) when i first heard it (live, at nyu, last fall) i took it to be less literal and more fragmentary, like "dennis brown" (partly because i misheard the opening lines as about a dinner taking place in 'portland'), and i took the first person voice of the chorus to be john himself, mostly because i thought that "israel" was what the "i" stood for (maybe it is, i don't know; i hope so, because that would make both readings work) and he was singing about wanting to preserve his memory. then i thought that it would be better, and more clever and darniellian, for the chorus not to be the same each time, but i didn't realize it was a reference to a psalm, which in itself is relevant to far i. actually i now think it's a better song than i thought originally. good one john.

of note: jeffrey lewis illustrated a very cool publicity one-sheet for the album including descriptions of all the songs, including a good explanation of this one.

Jim White - Jailbird
i'm really not friends with jim white (though i guess he is friends with his label head/my former boss yale), but we did have an extended conversation one night, two days before my 21st birthday, when i was trying to get into a bar to see him (he got me in by making me his merch salesman for the night.) and honestly, although i've reviewed them thoroughly
and approvingly, i've never connected with his more recent albums nearly as much as i did with the first one i heard, no such place, which is still way up there for me. (the song "corvair" has been haunting me of late.)

"jailbird" is maybe my favorite from his new one, the awesomely-named transnormal skiperoo though i freely admit that that's mostly because it sounds the most like his older work. it's awful languid and melancholy, and lush and smooth and lovely. drink it in.

Hanne Hukkelburg - The North Wind
i checked on marit larsen's myspace on the whim that it's about time for her to have some kinda new news going on, and sure enough, an adorable little note from about a short while back all but confirming that her second album must be well on its way to completion by now, which is an announcement full of wonderful and exciting. "good news for anyone with ears," as i saw someone comment on a similar post of joan['s?] as police woman['s?]. so no new music yet, but.

marit was my utter infatuation at last year's sxsw; this year there was nobody really comparable, which is not because i had a girlfriend in tow. (i do for sure love robyn, but not quite in that way.) i guess hanne hukkelberg came closest, or might have, except that neither she nor her music is even close to matching marit's appeal. although she is currently third in marit's top 8. honestly, the biggest similarity, besides their age and nationality, is that i had distinctly embarrassing (for me at least) interactions with both of them, specifically while trying to give them hugs.

anyway, hanne's music is quite lovely, if far moodier and less pop. i've been intrigued since i first heard her debut playing in a record store in chicago, and i'm glad to have gotten the chance to get to know her more closely since. i picked "north wind" because i'm a sucker for a good typewriter part.

Silje Nes - Ames Room
Rubies - The Truth and the Lies
Jeffrey Lewis - Punk is Dead
Retribution Gospel Choir - Easy Prey
i have not met or talked to any of the other artists on this mux. i've only even seen jeffrey lewis, and 2/3 of the retribution gospel choir (a.k.a. low.) silje nes, who was in marfa, tx just two days before me, make music that is almost uncannily similar to hanne hukkelberg's, although i underplayed that in my review of her album ames room, which does not have an apostrophe in its title. (the main difference: nes' stuff is slightly more 'out there' and 'experimental' and less song-based; but it's warmer and more inviting.) the title track is pretty representative, even though it sounds like a song.

rubies were 2/5 of call and response, who made one of my favorite songs ever, "the fool," as well as two very nice albums. rubies' album isn't terrible, but it's fairly mediocre by comparison. i don't know why i picked "the truth and the lies"; it's pretty in a somewhat vapid way, and it reveals that they don't sound all that good singing solo. but whatever, it's mellow and nice enough, i guess.

"punk is dead" is maybe the simplest and best thing on 12 crass songs, which i haven't ended up liking as much as my first listen suggested. it's funny now, but it's even funnier to think that the song was probably written in, like, 1979. it's pretty hard to believe that he's singing it with a straight face. i mean, he's obviously not. but an album's worth of this stuff? is this what they call taking the piss? we're supposed to accept it at face value, i guess. also amazing, that this used to be a punk song, and it's so a folk song now. q.v. will oldham williamsburg horror, which could practically be called "folk is dead."

[and i think i'll let rgc speak for themselves.]