When I wrote about the Cardigans last year, I remarked on how the band’s creative peak coincided with diminishing sales, and concluded that it was because their last two albums – while compelling, glorious and career-defining – were unable to find a commercial niche. And if a pop band like the Cardigans isn’t marketable – not thrilling or ringtone-friendly enough for the kids, not “authentic” or “classic” enough for £50 Man, and nowhere near hip enough for those influential, tastemaking hipster douchebags – there is surely little hope of commercial success for Nina Persson’s side project, A Camp.
A Camp’s self-titled 2001 debut is often described as “country” or “country-tinged”, and that’s not a genre that gets much exposure outside specialist US media. This description overstates the case somewhat, though, and the single “I Can Buy You” surely proves that “harmonica” and “country” are not necessarily synonymous.
This sprightly tale of a sugar mommy trying to hold on to a callow young lover is one thing country almost never is: it’s arch. The Cardigans are sometimes witty, sometimes knowing, sometimes playful, but their lyrics are usually heartfelt. A Camp has given Persson the opportunity to play around with characters, telling stories at one remove from the personal. In the album’s opener “Frequent Flyer”, she slyly claims “I’m a frequent flyer/A notorious liar” as if it were a disclaimer for all the porkies she is about to tell.
Despite being a little doomy in places (it was co-produced by Mark Linkous of doomy doomsters Sparklehorse), A Camp is not hugely different from a Cardigans record. The relentless chugging rhythms of “Hard As A Stone” are reminiscent of “My Favourite Game”, while the atmospheric ballads “Song For The Leftovers” and “Silent Night” wouldn’t sound out of place on Gran Turismo or Long Gone Before Daylight. For new album Colonia, Persson has recruited husband and former Shudder To Think guitarist Nathan Larson to accompany her, and the result is significantly less doomy. Although spotted with vague lyrical references to human beings behaving like dumb animals – ie killing each other, a lot – it has a sunny sheen that makes it irrepressibly uplifting.
The bleakness of the lead single’s lyrics, which suggest that although religion is often responsible for conflict love has been the cause of far more human pain, is offset by the crystalline chords and jaunty beats, not to mention Persson’s unmistakably pure vocals. (I like the video too, which rather than being a winking parody, a smartarse 2009 idea of what 1970s music TV was like, is done with clear-eyed earnestness, believably corny effects and an authentic lack of cuts.)
Elsewhere on Colonia the influence of 1960s girl-pop is obvious in the handclap-heavy “Here Are Many Wild Animals” and the simple, buoyant piano-chord progression of “I Signed The Line”. Although it’s no more a country record than A Camp is, the album occasionally puts me in mind of Dolly Parton (that poppiest of country artists) as well as folk singer Sandy Denny. “Golden Teeth And Silver Medals”, Persson’s duet with Nicolai Dunger, has echoes of “Silver Threads And Golden Needles” (a song recorded by both Parton and Denny) and “Islands In The Stream”:
Golden teeth and silver medals Beauty mark and scars That is what we got Raindrops in a reservoir And minutes in a jar That is what we got
To my mind Colonia’s standout song is “Bear On The Beach”, whose sombre, wintry air recalls Angelo Badalamenti’s superlative Twin Peaks soundtrack. While a meditative Persson sings mournfully of Iris, someone who has evidently grown tired of the constant battle that is life, the twinkly toy piano contrasts with a creepily inexorable bassline, evoking a sort of uncertain serenity, a calm assailed by doubt and fear.
It seems someone thinks that the song’s ominous tone, imagery of islands and bears and oceans, and themes of isolation conjure up visions of a popular ABC time-travelly drama series that Shades Of Caruso may have mentioned once or twice.
As one of the tail-end of the iPod generation, albums aren’t my strong suit, and most of my recommendations are from music that came out a year or two ago, so I’ll stick with these recommendations rather than subjecting you to another series of arbitrary lists. So on with my arbitrary song!
Chromeo is yet another band we first heard on Conan’s show — then investigated and found two albums’ worth of funny, spacey, slightly retro-sounding tracks. Electrofunk is not exactly my specialty — I’m not even sure “electrofunk” is an entirely real category of music, much like “shoegaze” and “slowcore” (don’t even get me started on how much I hate descriptions of music as “[blah]core”. Can we not stop this madness? Aren’t we better than this as a people?) — but these guys are too charming to resist.
The gem off their second album, Fancy Footwork, is the one they played on Conan’s show — a funny, weirdly sweet song about incestuous desires. It’s got a cool video, too, which thankfully appears to be incest-free:
The lighthearted hooks and equally funny lyrics make the song instantly catchy — I especially like the little riff that sounds like the theme song to an 80s sitcom that never existed but should have. It’s an endearingly lo-fi effort — like two kids who are messing around in their parents’ basement with a Casio keyboard.
In fact, the band’s two members, Dave 1 and P-Thugg (real names David Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel) have been friends since they were kids, and describe themselves as “the only successful Arab/Jewish collaboration since the beginning of time.” Delightfully, Dave 1 is getting his PhD in French literature from Columbia so he can teach, and P-Thugg is a trained accountant. Knowing this makes their performance, complete with bling and disembodied drum-beating women’s legs (they look awfully fra-gile-ay) of the title track off Fancy Footwork on Jimmy Kimmel’s show all the more entertaining:
But the best part about Chromeo is that they’re willing to take chances on reinterpreting their songs. When they performed on Conan’s show, they ditched the lo-fi approach and, somewhat bizarrely, brought in a string section. Have I mentioned lately that I love string sections? The result is beautiful, touching, funny, and kind of creepy. (Watch out for Dave singing “We’re just Obama’s boys” and grinning hugely as the audience cheers.)
Shameful Admission of the Week:
“Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” by Sasha Fierce Beyonce
It’s not quite as good as “Crazy In Love,” which may end up being the highlight of Beyonce’s career, but this single is infectiously catchy, as evidenced by its ubiquity. Though Admiral Neck is an unrepentant music snob (FACT!), he’s the one who showed me this video awhile ago — and I’m sure it was in no way influenced by the fact that Beyonce is on his List (or used to be, until he saw her on Punk’d and decided she was a heartless automaton).
It’s an entrancing, hypnotic video, and not just because Beyonce is thrusting her groin at the camera at regular intervals. It’s just three women dancing in black and white, but it’s beautifully choreographed, with the kind of energetic thigh-shaking that is Beyonce’s specialty and a stripped-down set that puts the focus squarely on our singer, who is a magnetic presence to begin with (though that may have something to do with her bionical arm) and becomes impossible to take your eyes off here. My favorite part of the video is when they run up a ramp at the side of the room for a few seconds — it’s not a big effect or anything, but it gives the video a sense of giddiness and hyperreality.
It turns out that Beyonce rejiggered this concept from somebody who dubbed the Unk song “Walk It Out” over a Bob Fosse dance routine of Gwen Verdon and two other women dancing to “Mexican Breakfast.” The slightly creepy original is here, and the terrifying mash-up/remix/unholy hybrid is here. Some YouTube commenters are apparently horrified by Beyonce “stealing” the idea. Hold the phone! An R&B artist using sampling for her song??? Where are my pearls, I must clutch them! Anyway, it’s a great idea and Beyonce’s updating of it works brilliantly — not least because it helps scrub the image of Gwen Verdon high-kicking in bell-bottomed sailor pants out of my horrified brain.
The song itself is a rump-shaking, hand-clapping barn-stormer, and as the thumping bass digs in and the mechanical whirring mimics the melody, it’s impossible not to want to get up and swing your cyborg arms along with it. The synthesizer that rises up during the chorus gives the song an almost epic, slightly menacing feel, which I think is appropriate for a song in which spurning your boyfriend’s love apparently turns you into a man-eating dance robot. It’s another feminism-lite track from Beyonce, an ode to female empowerment via, um, withholding sex until your boyfriend agrees to marry you. Hm. Well, hey, it’s got style and sass and ladies in skimpy outfits parading around with attitude, and that pretty much constitutes most feminism these days. Where are my bras, I must burn them!
Of course I’ve gotten in on this phenomenon just a bit late; I suppose it’s a testament to the power of the video that it’s imprinted itself on the national consciousness this way. We’ve already had the guy who does the choreography in his bedroom (he’s great, but I have to admit that his abs creep me out a little. There’s so many of them!), the Gwen Verdon version, and, of course, the SNL parody with Justin Timberlake, which was hilarious but did not feature nearly enough dancing from Paul Rudd. And then there’s the rest of them. Have a good time having the next nine hours of your life sucked away. Sasha Fierce will own you too!
Well, it looks like I’ve left this so long that Masticator has subverted the formula, leaving the douchebags among us out in the cold. So typical of corporate types like him: stealing our ideas and squashing all the soul out of them for mainstream palatability. And since this week’s band is slowly leaking hipster cred by the day, much like a tipping can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the slackening hand of a passed-out, cardigan-wearing skinny teenager, it seemed time I got back to the job.
So anyway, this week’s month’s quarter’s entry is yet another band we discovered through The A.V. Club. No, wait — we actually saw them first on Conan’s show, which tends to have the most unusual music of all the late-night talk shows (Okkervil River were on the show awhile ago, and Conan seemed genuinely shocked at how good they were). They were playing the first single from their latest album, and when I went to The A.V. Club to see if they’d reviewed it, I found this. I was a bit surprised and disappointed to see such a negative review when I’d enjoyed the song so much, but I downloaded procured legally purchased the album anyway on the strength of the single. Turns out that the writer was just some freelancer they’d gotten in, who’s apparently gone through a bad breakup recently, given his seeming hatred of happily married life. At any rate, the rest of the A.V. Club permanent staff absolutely loves the album, and many of them are planning to put it on their end-of-year best-of lists. Sucks to you, freelance reviewer who probably just wanted a paycheck and may have some lingering problems with his parents’ divorce!
The two band members, Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel, are indeed married, which gives the band a nice hook for feature writers, but it’s not like we’re dealing with Raffi-level sentimentality here. Their sound was a little bit spikier on previous albums, but it’s still much the same: lots of harmonies, disjointed melodies, and pop songcraft. Take my favorite song off the album, the first single “Get Better”:
Yes, there are people dressed as animals, but they’re more reminiscent of the bunny from Donnie Darko that freaked me the fuck out than anything boringly suburban (even though the video does have a bit of an Ice Storm vibe). It’s not a hard-driving song, but the clarity of the piano, the thump of the drums, and the gorgeous swell of the string section (have I mentioned that I’m a sucker for a string section?) all blend with the counterpointed vocals to create something beautiful, lighthearted, and yet a little bit creepy (maybe I’m just flashing back to Frank here). And yeah, the lyrics “Forget your politics for awhile / Let the color schemes arrive” are a bit hippie-ish, but it feels like a joyful song to me — not a song cloistered in middle-aged smug, boring contentment but a paean to wary hopefulness (“everything’s gonna get lighter, even if it never gets better”). Or at least a very good potential song for an AT&T commercial.
As for my other favorite song off the album, “The Rearranger,” it’s not available as a video on the intertubes except as a live version, which makes it at least 78% less awesome, because much of its beauty comes from its meticulous, heavily layered production. Thus, I instruct you, loyal reader(s), to go here and listen to the audio alone. The first few seconds should hook you in, as the horns seep in like an aural sunrise (ah yes, I’m a sucker for horns too); after that the harmonies come in, and then come the weird tempo shifts, and then the bursting sun of the chorus, where all the elements come together beautifully, as sunny as a Californian summer day (to drag this dead metaphor a little further).
As usual, the band is starting to get more recognition just after I find out about them — unfortunate, since I should have written about them months ago when I first heard their albums — and now they’ve got a song on an Ugly Betty episode. Is this the end of their hipster coolness? Or was it the AT&T commercial that did them in? Or is it cool to sell out now? The backlash begins. Time to put on my trucker hat and wade in.
And now that I’ve profiled some good music, it’s time for my…
Shameful Non-Hipster Possibly Douchebag Admission of the Week:
This is a new addition in which I admit my not-so-secret, undying love for cheesy pop tunes, thus undermining all the careful hipster-image-building I’ve done in the previous paragraphs. I’m going to do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid (“Right off!”).
“Spiralling” by Keane
I’m not proud of it, but come on, it’s catchy, right? That retro synthesizer hook, the bizarre football-crowd-witnessing-a-nasty-tackle “Oh!”s in the background, the irresistible chorus, and…the, um, video:
Okay, I don’t know what’s going on with the aerobicizing “Video Killed the Radio Star” robots, and nothing says high production values like Windows Media Player visualizations, but obviously the director is a very smart man — namely because he’s kept lead singer Tom Chaplin’s horrifying visage out of the video as much as possible, and when he’s been absolutely forced to show it, he’s masked it in so many layers of Photoshop effects and shadows that Chaplin looks more like Mr. Stay Puft than a recognizable human (though actually, this is what he normally looks like — as brilliant Never Mind the Buzzcocks host Simon Amstell put it, he’s a skinny man with the face of a chubby toddler).
But my favorite thing about this song is the lyrics in the chorus:
When we fall in love
We’re just falling
In love with ourselves
We’re spiralling
Looks like someone’s really proud of paying attention in his Intro to Psychology class. Or was this song his end-of-term assignment? I’m really looking forward to the next single, “Cathect My Heart, Mother (Or I Will Project My Neuroses Onto My Lover).”
And with that admission, I take off my trucker hat and slowly back away.
So this month’s week’s recommendation isn’t exactly a sensitive, mopey up-and-coming indie outfit, I admit. I think you lose claim to that label when you’re signed to Island in the US (though, admittedly, signed to an indie label in the UK), your albums have sold 12 million copies worldwide, and one of your songs has been lip-synched by Justin Timberlake in a mind-bendingly awful movie by a hipster director. And while the band may be too big to be liked by hipster douchebags anymore, they certainly are hipster douchebags — Brandon Flowers (the lead singer) in particular. Though he’s apparently a devout Mormon, he’s got a tendency to boast, and the jury’s out whether he’s an asshole or not. Though Rufus Wainwright mentioned how much he loves him at the concert we went to last year (and even wrote “Tulsa” about him — apparently he tastes like potato chips in the morning. Mm, potato chips), so he’s already close to having a free pass. And he’s right about Fall Out Boy. Fucking Fall Out Boy. Thanks for ruining that episode of The Simpsons for the rest of us, Wentz.
But really, none of that matters. I love The Killers. Many have pegged them as just another trendy It Band like the Arctic Monkeys or the Kaiser Chiefs (sorry, Masticator), but they are at least a step (perhaps half a flight, give or take) above their cohorts. (It’s interesting to note that most of their sonic influences are British — in fact for awhile I had a vague idea they were British — but the band’s actually from Vegas.)
The difference with the Killers is that they aren’t all pose and flash, and their music isn’t just of the era. They have a gift for melody — what initially may tick along like a standard rock track suddenly swells into an irresistibly catchy, hummable tune with a hook that won’t leave your brain for days. “Bones,” from their second album, Sam’s Town, is a kind of 80s synth-pop tune, complete with reverb-y vocals and grinding guitars, but it’s the brass section’s repeating arpeggio that wriggles into your mind like an earwig. “Change Your Mind,” off Hot Fuss, begins with a sing-songy guitar hook that never lets up and backing vocals that push the song into a beautiful, ecstatic climax. What makes the song for me, though, is the moment 2 minutes and 46 seconds in, when Flowers’ voice goes up on the word “no,” and for that second the song is absolutely sublime. Sometimes it’s enough for one note to make an entire song, and if I had any shred of musical knowledge, I would praise that note now. “Mr. Brightside” is a riff on the kind of glam-rock nonsense I hate, but the gorgeous hook of the chorus transcends the same-y muddiness of the genre and becomes something both propulsive and beautiful.
I’m hard-pressed to find much filler on either album. “Why Do I Keep Counting” is a bit of a silly one-off — it’s apparently about Flowers’ fear of flying — but for a throwaway song it is quirky but also big and anthemic and feels serious and playful at the same time. “This River Is Wild,” besides being (I like to imagine) an homage to a movie I secretly love, starts out fairly conventional but becomes more lighthearted as it develops (particularly with Flowers’ delivery of lines like “Sometimes I’m nervous / when I talk I shake a little”). With most albums, even if I really like the band, I usually only love about 3 or 4 songs. With The Killers, I love or at least really like at least 6 or 7 songs on both albums, which is a testament to how catchy most of them are.
One of the Killers’ biggest hits has been the silly gender-bending tale “Somebody Told Me,” which is one of their more conventional-sounding songs, but it’s a good example of a tune that will most likely grab your internal iPod and set it to “endless repeat,” at least until a Moonpig ad comes on TV. (Warning: I do not take responsibility for any lasting after-effects of Moonpig ads. Do not hold sharp instruments while watching.) “Smile Like You Mean It” is quite nice as well — again, the “da-DAH-dah” through the chorus is musical heroin — though it doesn’t get really interesting until the last 20 seconds or so, with the funky drum-and-guitar thing that’s over way too soon.
But to me, their best tracks are two of their biggest hits — “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young.” I’m surprising exactly no one with this analysis, and I’m not even championing songs that weren’t released as singles. Everyone’s heard these two songs. But that doesn’t lessen their power one jot, and it provides a useful platform for the difference between the two albums.
Hot Fuss, as I mentioned, was The Killers’ debut album, and critics fell over each other attempting to be the first to throw accolades at the hot new band and crown them the new kings of indie rock. Their take on glam-rock and 80s and 90s British sounds was a brilliant debut; I certainly won’t dispute that. As I said, they’re a cut above many other bands with a similar sound. But I can’t help feeling that the fact that that sound is trendy is the reason they became critics’ darlings in the first place. They did that sound, and they did it well, but deviation was not allowed. When Sam’s Town came out two years later, suddenly critics were declaring a sophomore slump. The band had — gasp! — changed their sound so that they could grow musically. My God what did those little punks think they were playing at? They didn’t even ask for permission! And who were they moving towards sonically? Bruce Springsteen! The nerve! Didn’t they get the memo? Arcade Fire and The Hold Steady were already filling that slot! How dare The Killers move out of their allotted indie ghetto?
It really puzzles me why The Killers got so much shit for sounding more like intelligent arena rock when other bands were being slavishly praised for sounding like intelligent arena rock. Ugh. Well, if this flaw is what’s keeping me away from reading more Pitchfork, then really it’s a virtue in disguise.
All right, enough preamble. On to the good stuff. Amazingly, I managed to miss “When You Were Young”‘s chart dominance, and I only noticed it because it was a song on Guitar Hero III. Obviously this means it’s a rock classic already and doesn’t need any defense from me, but I loved it so much that I kept playing it over and over, even though the song’s pretty easy and I’d already gotten five stars on the first try (okay, on Medium, not Expert). Meet me after the somewhat bizarre video and I’ll explain why.
The appeal of the shimmering guitar is obvious in the first few seconds — and the first progression up the scale after the first verse is one of the most addictive hooks I’ve ever heard. I can’t describe how satisfying it is to actually feel like you’re playing those notes in the game, to feel as if you actually have a part in creating this stunning piece of pop perfection. The song’s lyrics are full of sadness and longing, but it fills you with such joy that it’s hard not to want to simply get lost in the music.
The song is definitely reminiscent of Springsteen, but for all the right reasons — the propulsive, driving guitars, the swelling anthemic chorus, the emotional vocals, the shimmering little bells you can hear at the very top of the song that make the whole thing, make it feel big and magical and epic. Lines like “We’re burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane / that started turning when you were young” are very Springsteen-esque (Springsteinian?), but that’s no flaw — they too make the song feel epic and grand. They make the lives of a few small, ordinary people feel like the grand sweep of tragic and beautiful Americana.
It’s a coin toss whether I prefer this one to “All These Things That I’ve Done” — right now I think the latter is winning, but only because I haven’t listened to it quite as much and I think it’s a little fresher in my mind. But ask me another day and I’ll have reconsidered. At any rate, here’s the UK video, which was made earlier (the US one is here; it can’t be embedded because of evil corporate grumblegrumble).
It’s an accurate representation of the progression of a typical Saturday night in London, albeit with 50% less stabbing. It was obviously made on the cheap, and is meant to make the band seem like hip indie kids who are too cool to make a real video. Or it’s incredibly lazy, as it was clearly made in a couple of hours before a concert. (I must mention, though, how nice it is to be writing about a band that’s actually popular enough to have videos. The way forward.)
The standout section of this song is obvious — the repetition of the line “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” has already become iconic, and deservedly so. It’s so iconic that, as I mentioned, Justin Timberlake somewhat creepily lip-synchs it here. I don’t know whether to be impressed with Richard Kelly for such a bold move or disgusted with him for appropriating a popular song in a bizarre context — but then I haven’t seen what by all accounts is a hot mess of a movie, so I shouldn’t judge (yet). [The lipsynch scene is the non-Rock highlight of that awful awful awful awful awful movie, but it's little more than a video slotted into the movie for no reason. - Neck] I am, however, pissed off with the crappy TV series Jericho for using this song over the first few minutes of its first episode, thus making me like it instantly, then hate it even more in subsequent minutes when I realized that The Killers were by far the best writers on the show.
The Hot Fuss post-punk glam-rock sound is evident in this track as it starts, with a wash of guitars and cymbals and distorted vocals. I love the initial lolloping flow of the lyrics — the quick rhymes of “Another head aches / another heart breaks / I’m so / much ol / der than I can take” (I love the way Flowers places an odd emphasis on every other word — “so” and “older,” sliding the latter from one line to the next with an oddly syncopated rhythm), and then the relief of the chorus, with more odd rhythm in the line “Don’t you put me on the back burner.”
Then we have the bridge, which just begs to be sung by thousands of people yelling their lungs out in a concert. It’s one of those electrifying moments that gives you chills when you’re listening to it alone (it’s one of my favorite songs to listen to as I’m walking around London) but would be absolutely transcendent when sung in a chorus with thousands of other people. This, I think, is the Killers’ real talent — creating songs that are at once personal and anthemic, songs that are just as much fun to listen to by yourself, even as they have such scope and power that you know seeing them performed live would be like seeing them achieve the musical equivalent of self-actualization.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could not like this song, though I’m sure there are plenty out there who can’t stand it. But it’s a galvanizing tune, and it’s irresistibly danceable — I defy you not to start dancing a little in your chair as you listen. The Killers are playing in England soon, but unfortunately only in festivals in Reading and Leeds and not in London (as much as I like the idea of hearing The Killers in concert, festivals are not my bag, baby). But I’m sure they’ll be around soon enough, and then my hipster douchebag fantasies will be complete.
Since these posts have become a bit of a sausage fest, time for a recommendation for a female singer-songwriter. Most of my music collection is full of men (not actual little men skittering around with miniature violins and guitars, though that would be way cooler than what I have, which is a bunch of broken, empty CD cases and stacks of random, sticky CDs that never seem to match together), and I’m not sure why. It’s just happenstance, I guess, since hipsterism is just as much a female affliction, but it’s probably time to give in and finally listen to Lucinda Williams and Sleater-Kinney. (But not New Young Pony Club. They know why.)
So here’s Laura Veirs, a wonderful musician I heard on BBC Radio Six, which is an equally wonderful radio station that I don’t listen to nearly enough. I got in the habit when I was doing freelance work at home for a couple of months, and nearly every hour I’d hear an amazing song that got me into a new band, especially since they play so much music uninterrupted — a very rare feat nowadays. Most of their DJs are good, though (“Smerch” is one of them now, as are Adam and Joe), and it’s no hardship to listen to people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about music. Plus, the station streams online, which would be great if people at my job would leave me alone long enough so I could wear headphones. ::mutters, shakes cane::
One day while I was listening, Laura Veirs’ album Saltbreakers was the album of the day (week? Something like that), and they played the eponymous single from it, which was enough to convince me to buy the album — something I hardly ever do anymore now that I have the much more tempting option of stealing. It was worth it, though; the album is full of gems. But the best song by far is “Drink Deep,” which Admiral Neck has kindly provided another video for. Watch! And Be Amazed!
If the little piano riff doesn’t hook you a few seconds in, soon there’s the pipe (or keyboard that sounds like a pipe?), and then the gradual flooding of sound that, yes, does sound like waves of water rushing over you as you listen, a theme that runs through the album. It’s a quiet song but it’s full of power — restrained in its sound but urgent in its lyrics. And I love the lyrics: they are somewhat opaque — which, as I said a few weeks ago, is sometimes a cover for faux-profundity — but Veirs has a way with allusive metaphors that inspire thought instead of dampening it. I especially love the chorus, with the repeated lyric “Drink deep, my love, for the water is gasping for your mouth,” which turns an accepted idiom on its head. And the vision of the natural world the song presents — a place full of danger and passion and beauty — is deeply alluring but frightening as well. It’s a masterful song.
Apparently, however, even hipster douchebags can’t agree on Laura Veirs. That nexus of douchebags itself, Pitchfork, dismissed Veirs’ albums as a mediocre imitation of Sufjan Stevens and Colin Meloy. First of all, Pitchfork, Colin Meloy is a pretentious wanker whose pseudointellectualism matches your own, so I suppose I can see where you get your affinity for him. Secondly, he could be accused of just as much imitation as you see in Veirs — but at least Veirs knows her way around a melody. Thirdly, “To The Country” is awesome, and I have no idea why you think it’s even trying to imitate, as you call him, Sufjan Stevebs, but whatever it’s trying for, it succeeds admirably. We are so over, Pitchfork. At least until you praise something I like.
At any rate, there’s the song (I would put up “To The Country” as well so anyone who reads this could sadly shake their head at the Pitchfork reviewer’s tin ears, but we’ve been having continuing computer problems and I don’t have the patience or the ability to not throw the computer at the wall in anger). Oh, and before I go, I keep forgetting to mention: we got our own T-shirt! Display your douchebaggery with pride.
Actually that headline should probably read “Of The Fortnight”, considering how I only got three weeks in before missing a week. Oops. Listen, I’m busy reading Zadie Smith and going to lectures by Elizabeth Wurtzel and then hanging out in coffee shops eating tiramisu; I don’t always have time to sit here and post while redoing my dreads. (Actually I’m confusing myself with Ellen Page’s character in Hard Candy, which we just watched. It was ball-slicingly brilliant!)
This week’s selection is “Slow Show” by The National. Any of you Chuck or One Tree Hill watchers out there have probably already heard this song, as apparently it’s been on both shows (as well as being used incessantly by the BBC promo department), which pisses me off a bit. Not because I don’t like the shows (okay, not just because — I know Chuck is bad by firsthand knowledge; One Tree Hill is just bad by reputation) but because this always happens to me. I seem to have an uncanny ability to hear of a singer or band just before the producers of TV shows and commercials do, and for maybe a few months I think I’m relatively alone in knowing the music, but my illusions are soon shattered when I hear the songs on CSI: Miami commercials (Antony and the Johnsons’ heartbreakingly beautiful song “Hope There’s Someone” was played over images of our redheaded hero saving children from terrorist Nazi clowns or whatever the hell was going on that week, and oh god I hope Antony Hegarty feels good about himself).
I don’t know whether to be depressed at the way corporations co-opt “cool” bands to get themselves a bit of credibility (not that all TV shows are about corporate interests — but in the case of the above TV shows, they were certainly trying to appear “down with the kids” and “jiggy wit’ it” and “hep to that style, daddio”), or whether it’s good that bands that are probably struggling financially get themselves more exposure and more fans. A bit of both, I suppose. I suppose it also means that the music the bands are making is more appealing to the masses than people assume, which can only be a good thing, really. I absolutely love a lot of mindless Top 40 pop music — I’ll confess here that a few years ago I could not stop playing Hilary Duff’s “So Yesterday”, which probably disqualifies me from douchebaggery entirely — but it’s really good to see when actually properly thoughtful and complex music gets popular. Of course, anything that is critically respected at first usually ends up suffering a massive backlash (see: Coldplay), but them’s the breaks, I guess.
At any rate, here’s the best video I could find — set to Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculine-Feminine” because…well, just read the poster’s description. The song starts about 30 seconds in.
I really like the rest of the album (Boxer), though I don’t love it completely, and I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to the rest of The National’s output. But I adore this song. There’s something addictive about the way it builds — becoming (slightly) faster and peppier as the initially morose lyrics give way to cautious optimism (or is it?? Yes, it probably is).
Matt Berninger’s voice would make the aforementioned “So Yesterday” sound like a funeral dirge, I have to admit, but the song has a self-deprecating quality even as it becomes more hopeful. (I think comparisons to Stuart Staples of the Tindersticks are quite apt — the bands are even on the same label — but I think Berninger has a bit less of a muffled subway announcer’s drone. Though I may just feel this way because I had to sit through a Tindersticks concert of an album I didn’t like one song on. Damn you, Admiral!!) [Again with the Tindersticks hatred? I'm cut to the core of my flamenco-tinged fandom. Excuse me while I depart in sadness, and walk through the rain to the nearest sleazy bar, where I will smoke a cigarette, dolefully drink whiskey, and stare in heartbreak at a picture of Jacques Brel behind the bar - Neck] It starts out with the words that probably go through every introvert’s brain at a party:
Standing at the punch table swallowing punch
can’t pay attention to the sound of anyone
a little more stupid, a little more scared
every minute more unprepared
I made a mistake in my life today
everything I love gets lost in drawers
I want to start over, I want to be winning
way out of sync from the beginning
But as soon as we think that the singer’s going to become more depressed as the song goes on, berating himself more and more, we get this sudden ray of hope for the chorus:
I wanna hurry home to you
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up
so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
god I’m very, very frightening
I’ll overdo it
There’s such self-hatred in the lyrics that they’re hard to hear — he thinks he’ll even disappoint the person who loves him — but there’s hope and relief in them, too, at the knowledge that this person, at least, will give him some comfort. (Or there’s cowardly wish to escape, but I prefer the former.) The second verse is more self-recrimination, and the second chorus more wishing that he were at home with his lover, but this time a little faster and lighter.
Then the song shifts, and we hear the mournful yet weirdly hopeful sound of an accordion — which to me is the hook of the song — and then a piano riff that will make you instantly recognize the song the next time you hear it, and some even more poignant lyrics:
You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years
Which pretty much breaks your heart. It’s a love song about depression, or perhaps even about someone who’s loved unrequitedly for years. Either way it’s simultaneously depressing and hopeful (have I said that already?), and that’s all you can really ask for in a song. I’ll be listening to this one for years.
This week’s somewhat-late recommendation was made possible by the letters A and N (with a little help from a music-software program). Admiral Neck found a program that would allow us to make “videos” of all the songs that don’t already have entries on YouTube. They’re a bit like those educational “videos” you watched in middle school where the people behind it were too cheap to actually film their script, so they’d simply take a handful of still photos of kids with bowl haircuts and bell-bottoms acting out a morality play and run a soundtrack of dialogue over them. Think of these videos as our homemade version of What’s Harry Got In His Mouth?
So, this week’s selection is a song by Jens Lekman, otherwise known as the Swedish Stephin Merritt. If you don’t know who Stephin Merritt is, you must this minute beg/borrow/download (i.e., steal) 69 Love Songs, his magnum opus (with one of his many bands, The Magnetic Fields). Or perhaps you are a hipster douchebag too, and know that 69 Love Songs is one of the essential albums required for membership. And that if “Grand Canyon” and “The Book of Love” don’t break your heart, you probably don’t have one. So there.
As I’ve mentioned before, Stephin Merritt is one of my all-time favorite lyricists; his lyrics are intelligent and clever and witty and occasionally incredibly sad. His arrangements are almost as interesting; his songs range over almost every conceivable genre, sometimes in loving tribute and sometimes in acid parody. They are sometimes a bit precious, but they are always knowing, willing to puncture their own importance.
Jens Lekman is very much in this mold — intelligent, hyperliterate, and best of all, funny. Most songwriters can string together some decent-enough lyrics — or at least make their lyrics so incomprehensible that people assume they must be deep (I’m looking at you, Michael Stipe, you jive-dancing, perpetually-terminally-ill-looking star). But Lekman is one of the few who make close attention worthwhile, and one of the even fewer who actually do it with humor. I could count on one hand the number of musicians who write (intentionally) funny lyrics (I’m avoiding your needy gaze, Weird Al Yankovic); it seems odd that there are so few lyricists that bother to try being funny, given that most other forms of entertainment, even dramatic or tragic ones, usually contain elements of humor.
Perhaps it’s because most songs catch your attention with their melody (still my first requirement; a song could be a mind-bendingly brilliant poem set to music and I wouldn’t care unless I liked the sound of it), and you often don’t especially notice the lyrics until you’ve had a few listens. Maybe it’s just harder to fit humor into music without sounding like a novelty act. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen managed it, but their kind of talent is pretty rare. Or maybe it’s because so many musicians are self-important douchebags who can’t conceive of putting humor in their Art.
I’ve only listened to one of Lekman’s albums so far — Night Falls Over Kortedala — but only because of our hard drive failure and the fact that iTunes is a shitty program that won’t pull songs off my iPhone unless I’ve purchased them through iTunes and that won’t let me put any new songs on my iPhone now without wiping my current songs off it because it thinks I’m synced to a different library and I can fix all this but it’s incredibly time-consuming and annoying and arrggghhhhhhh I hate you Steve Jobs for making me love your product and then attempting to destroy that love at every turn!!!
Night Falls Over Kortedala is a good place to start, though — it’s Lekman’s second full-length album, and nearly every song on it is a gem. I’m not going to do a close reading of the song this week, since Lekman’s lyrics are so straightforward and front-and-center that there’s not much point, but I think it’s pretty obvious what’s appealing about this song. Lekman’s voice is Merrittian in its deep, resonant delivery, and the contrast of his throaty bass with the furious wind-up and clash of the orchestra creates a song of thrilling power. It’s called “And I Remember Every Kiss”, and it perfectly captures the feeling of a first kiss — the incredible build-up, the choral explosions, the naming of deadly weapons after a beloved. The following video, I remind you, was made by Admiral Neck. See if you can spot any tell-tale signs.
The song is drenched in emotion but still has an appealing wry detachment — “Your Arms Around Me” (the Admiral’s favorite song on the album) is much the same, making a trip to the emergency room into a bittersweet love ballad. Oh, and I can’t forget to mention my favorite Lekman pronunciation — in this case, his pronunciation of “soldier”. Most of the time you can’t even hear his accent, and I find it strangely endearing when it comes through on certain words.
Super-special bonus Jens!! Here’s the hilarious and touching retro-sounding “A Postcard to Nina”. Any song that can fit in the lyric “I send back Out of Office Auto-Replies” is a classic in my book (especially since the laugh is one of guilty recognition). I hope Nina and her girlfriend had a happy ending.
This wasn’t really the second song I wanted to feature, since we heard about the Guillemots a couple years ago and the thrill of discovery has worn off a bit. They’re pretty well-known in hipster douchebag circles — at least UK-based hipster douchebag circles (er, roundabouts?) — since they were nominated for the Brit Awards and the Mercury Music prize, and their album got pretty high in the charts. But as far as I can tell, they’re virtually unknown in the US, so my douchebag cred can remain intact in at least one English-speaking country.
I’ve used it now basically because I can’t find videos of the other songs I wanted to highlight, and it’ll take too much time to figure out how to make my own video to get any of those out today. Nevertheless, this is an excellent song, and just cause I’m a little inured to its loveliness, it’s certainly no knock on it. I was obsessed with it when I first heard it, and it gave me The Joy, more so than any other song in recent memory. (And I just found out through a stroll through Wikipedia that their next album is out in a few days, so hey! Relevant!)
So I was thinking I’d do kind of a close reading of these songs — specific moments that make the song for me, since it’s easy enough to say, “Oh, I love that song” but not so easy to actually explain why you love it. So here’s my best attempt:
:05 — Love the tuning up / tv coming on / distorted tape deck noises — they feel like the hesitation of someone who’s not quite ready to begin but forced to anyway.
:22 — “Love you through sparks and shining dragons I do” — dragons? They’d sold me 20 seconds in.
:25 — This simple little keyboard refrain, along with the wobbly distorted-circus sample (which metaphorically reinforces the song’s false starts), is what makes the first part of the song. We know it’s going somewhere and the lovely circular lead-up heightens the anticipation.
:3o — “Now there’s poetry in an empty Coke can” / “Now there’s majesty in a burned-out caravan” — These lines cut to the heart of what it’s like to be newly in love — the most ordinary, even depressing sights have a certain magic to them. I love that the image of an empty Coke can has made it into a love song — throughout the song, mundane images are contrasted with the operatic highs of the music.
:41 — Great little guitar/banjo/ukulele/whatever the hell that thing is riff here, as the various instruments seem to wake up to the song.
1:10 — Here the song kicks into a higher gear (and in the video, the images turn from a dingy black-and-white room to a full-color beach — obvious, maybe, but the song seems to demand it. However, the song does not demand Fyfe Dangerfield’s [!] seemingly earthquake-induced dancing. He dances like I imagine Faraday would dance). The bass and guitar take over the keyboard’s riff, pushing it to the front of the song and propelling it forward. The tension mounts through the next minute as the song builds towards its catharsis.
1:30 — “And the symmetry in your Northern grin” — this line always makes me smile, though that may just be because I understand the cultural meaning “Northern” has in England now that I’ve lived here and feel unduly proud of myself.
1:45 — Here a little barely-audible piano refrain sidles in, again propelling the song to even more tension as the tempo increases and the instruments all kick in.
1:47 — “You got me off the sofa / Just sprang out of the air / The best things come from nowhere” — Again, these are very simple, even cliched words, but in three lines Dangerfield’s able to capture the essence of falling in love — feeling like a whirlwind came from nowhere to propel you out of your ordinary life into something extraordinary (but still mundane because it’s so common).
2:00 — “I can’t believe you care” — the song reaches its catharsis here, both musically and emotionally. Where before Dangerfield sang that “I love you, I don’t think you care,” here he finally accepts it, extending the word “care” into one long, swooping, ecstatic note that is the musical equivalent of spinning around with your arms out on top of a mountain, feeling like you’re a part of the sky (or dancing like a maniac on a beach, as they do in the video). The instruments go nuts, and the chorus of backing vocals joins in. I fucking love this part, and I think it would be pretty hard not to feel uplifted by it. And though I’ve attempted to keep this pretty chaste so far, I’d be remiss in not comparing the song to a musical orgasm — the build of tension, the increasing urgency, the ecstatic release, and the dizzy, murmuring wind-down. (I don’t like thinking of Fyfe Dangerfield having an orgasm either, especially since it seems to involve screeching and copious throwing of luggage and cookie cutters.)
2:33 — And here we have the murmuring wind-down: “Yes I believe you” and “I’m in love” (I think) repeated over and over and mechanically slowed down to mimic a hazy afterglow. We could read this two ways: either Dangerfield has just convinced himself into believing the object of his love loves him back by pleasuring himself to thoughts of her, or the object of his love has just sexed him up to convince him of his/her devotion. Or I’m a sex-obsessed crazy and the song is about really appreciating your garbageman. Either way I think it works.
3:20 — We get little goodbyes from all the instruments here, winding the song down in much the way it wound up.
My only complaint about the song is that it’s not long enough — that glorious catharsis should go on longer, for two verses, though of course metaphorically it doesn’t work. We saw the Guillemots live a year or so ago, and I was looking forward to this song all the way through, but when they played it, it was a bit of a disappointment. I don’t know if it was just because the venue wasn’t big enough or they didn’t have enough instruments or what, but it just didn’t have the same joyous lunacy that the original did (their version of Sao Paulo was pretty great, though, and that’s got even more of a bonkers ending).
