whoa, whoa - slow down you guys, I can't keep up

I guess I should have expected this, after the Wrens made and ate a soup that contained samples of Robert Pollard's hair and fingernails: they've just made available for download two entire new songs in the last week or so!

Of course, once again (as with "In Turkish Waters" and "Pulled Fences"), the new, untitled song posted at Magnet Magazine's site a week or so ago is the same as "Marked Up," posted at Stereogum. It's even the same recording this time.

So no, the Wrens haven't premiered four new songs online in the last few months...only two. Cheating bastards. It's that kind of sneaky repackaging that ensures that in twenty years, the chief economic output of the state of New Jersey will be endless permutations of the Wrens' scanty catalog.

Slang King!

Fans of The Fall know that Mark E. Smith has a peculiar way with language and in particular has a cracked way with song and album titles. So it's no surprise that a long-running thread on Ye Olde Fallnet assembles fake Fall song titles, albums, and even artwork.

Some of my favorites (all peculiar spelling and punctuation is intentional):

"Of Their Phalanx! Episode 7#"
"The Flaxen"
1919 Disco Man
Addendum: Rot
Adherents of Debris Field
Aerobics Instructor vs. Zeitgeist
Ailerons Deployed
Are/Am Chaotic
Bar Code Formulate
Batwalk Nacht
Benefiction
Blank Fizog
Burstwich Arse Fiend
Castle Vernacular
Cat Gut Violator
Chamber of Errors
Chipping Machine Ranger (Cut Up)
Claimant IV's Insights
Cogent Discourse Tits Up in Ditch
Cornwall Dross Horse
Cough It Up, Functionary
Crust-Choke!
D. Crypto-Knight
Daft Song
Drag Man in Gdansk
Dream-Coitus w/Cooking Show Presenter
Factotum* If Applic.
Fall Title Authentification Protocol
FD.brimmedfork
Final Represented Qty.
Flaccid Plumber in Accrington Pub
Gallic Trophy-Haulage Inc.
Gaza/Conflate 78
Hairline Plenitude Assessment Board
Ham-Fist
I Cudgel Sky Saxon
I'm an Inter-Mingler
Inasmuch
Krieg Walker-Stassen!!
Larcenist's Last Redoubt
Lost Guitarist in Pudding Shoppe
Manxchester Extent(acle)
MES Channels Dead Poetaster
Met Hasselhoff
My Malt Shuffle
Oblong Vector
Paltry Return on Service Rendered
Peg and Awl Fornicants
Physicks Defied at Last
Pilf en Rectifier
Pist M'Self
Pith of Chasm
PRCLJJ.3 (Oort Cloud)
Ring-Tone Slattern Not Without Appeal
Schlock Cartel (& Its Pitfalls)
Shatner!
Shift-Key Curses
Sloven After Kid Pouch.
Stept-Up! Trail-Forth!
The Hatred of Ombudsman Fowler
Tit Fuck Hash Key 7
Vix. Waned Sheik
Whelk Legion
7'23" Whatever Was Near Mic

I believe these tracks would be assembled onto the following albums:

And Within
Conjoined Twin Emulsifier
Crooked Gap in Eiger
Defeat the Retina - AKA The Exposure of Infinity
Marrow Transplant Rejection Queue
Partisan Slump Chronickle
The Frictionary E.P.

And here are a few of my own:

Shite Natterer (Sans Prefix)
Petomane Horse
The Winch/Whinge Retrograde
I'm Not Fookin Morrissey Am I
Flak Jacket
Drink-Reich Blighter
The Arse Whisperer
Cabin Essence*

* Not a cover...just another song that happens to have this title, which is rather MES-like if you think about it.

oh dear...

If you are very, very bad, and you're a singer, when you die, you will go to Karaoke Hell...where you are compelled to sing your hits with horrifyingly cheesy rearrangements, courtesy of a demon specializing in such torture. His name is Bill Gates.

Pitchfork has linked to several extraordinary renditions of well-known songs, as "performed" by Microsoft Songsmith, which analyzes a vocal part, then comes up with what it thinks is a suitable instrumental background. The Van Halen track is particularly evil, while the Police...well, as the Pitchfork writer pretty much says, it's all that Sting deserves.

another in a series of insane musical comparisons

For the first time in way, way too long, I was listening today to Paul McCartney's Band on the Run. First thing I thought: why did I ever think this wasn't a fantastic album? Second, and odder thought: as I was listening to "Jet" (which is a brilliant pop song) I suddenly found myself thinking of Stephen Malkmus. Now, vocally there's almost no similarity; musically, while Malkmus sometimes draws from classic '70s rock and '60s psych (both of which, of course, McCartney had a hand in originating), the emphasis is very different...but what struck me is that the critical darts hurled McCartney's way in the seventies had much to do with the way he failed to fit with then-emerging rock-critical orthodoxy: his lyrics were rarely either deeply meaningful (or attempting same), knottily allusive, or at all self-important, and he seemed pretty unconcerned with being profound. Plus - I mean, Linda McCartney playing keyboards? She wasn't even a musician! (Of course, within a couple of years, had Paul been a young punk, Linda's non-musician status would have been a plus...Paul was ahead of the curve there.) But the reason I found myself thinking of Malkmus during "Jet" in particular was a certain insouciance, an off-kilter tendency toward little private jokes, and the way the lyrics seem to point toward some sort of heavier subject matter but then turn that very pointing into a sort of joking parody. That seems Malkmus-like to me: a couple of lines in "Jet" gesture at the British class system...but they're so vague and joking that any kind of idea refuses to gain traction. Coupled with that are goofy lines like "I thought the major...wass a lady...sufferagette!" - I spelled the last word wrong intentionally to get the extra syllable McCartney adds: you can almost hear him cracking up at the goofy pronunciation...kind of like Malkmus riffing on "career! career! Korea!" in "Cut Your Hair" - or that "the only lonely place was on the moon." Malkmus's word salad tends a bit more toward the recherché (a word that's much more likely to appear in one of his songs than in McCartney's) but he too seems content to riff on associations and sound (compare "jet"/"suffragette") rather than worry meaning to a shred.

So in the seventies, the peak of Rolling Stone high critical seriousness, McCartney's work was dismissed as fluffy, meaningless, pop pap...whereas in the nineties and uh-ohs, Malkmus gets branded with "irony" - which, although not necessarily as critical as "fluffy" was, is still off-base - in that it implies an emotional standpoint either critical or above-it-all, and most often there's little evidence in Malkmus's work to suggest either perspective. I mean, when you write a set of lines like "You are a gardenia pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack of an Afrikaaner candidate for mild reform" (from "Gardenia"), the "point," if there is one, seems more to be a joke at extending a metaphoric comparison far past its breaking point in terms of specificity - not some sort of withering critique of, I dunno, Afrikaaner candidates for mild reform, or mild reform, or the pressing of gardenias.

Next up: why Tori Amos is just like The Kingsmen. Or maybe Leonard Cohen. I'm not sure.

please - still no heart attacks

Long-time readers will know that I consider it my duty to mention any and every scrap of musical activity undertaken by Jersey's heroes, the Wrens (example, from my entry posted February 4, 2005: "Kevin Whelan, on his way to work this morning, tripped on a loose bit of carpeting and banged his left elbow on the piano. The chord that resulted consisted of E, F, F#, G, A, and C two octaves below middle C (the expected B is broken) and reportedly will form a leitmotivic chord for the operatic song cycle based on the tunnel builders of Newark, due to be released sometime in 2057. It is projected to be a full 47 seconds long, and recording will commence in 2012, with overdubs scheduled for the following thirty years, while the band's heirs negotiate direct-to-cortex release for the remaining fifteen years").

But really truly actually the Wrens have released a new song. Okay, it's "new" only if you don't notice it's really the same song as "In Turkish Waters," which was released last month (and was on one of my 2008 mixes)...but this is a different recording. What's more, it is the first time all four Wrenseses have performed together in a studio in ten years. And that studio, my friends, is none other than (Zappa looks over at the majestic Albert Hall pipe organ) Abbey Road studios.

Take that, Beatles! Ha - those guys haven't recorded together in the last ten years either! And you're thinking that's because two of them are dead...yeah, well, two of the Wrens were dead (for tax purposes) for a year in the early 2000s, so there.

Anycow, the new song (here titled "Pulled Fences") is available for an entire penny less than a dollar via this little chromium link here. Long-suffering Wrens obsessives may also note that ZOMG it's an entirely new website. (Note: "new" in this sense includes some text not updated since 2002 - but really, there's lotsa new stuff, including a much-more detailed discography, with notes in trademarked Wrens "we suck worse than all you guys think we do" style, and a new layout, and the rest of Charles Bissell's hair is being auctioned off. Hurry, before it's all gone!)

my new favorite joke

Philip Glass walks into a bar Philip Glass walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar Philip Glass Philip Philip Phil Philip Glass walks Glass walks Glass walks into Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Glass Glass Glass Glass Philip bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.

2008 top albums

Typically this entry will feature a mini-essay on some music-related phenomena I observed during the preceding year...but you know, I can't think of anything that isn't dead boring and analyzed to death: declining sales blah-blah, downloads yadda-yadda-yadda, market share zzzzzz... Oh well - at least the RIAA appears to have stopped suing its customer base. (Or the media have also grown bored with covering same.)

Anyway, I care about that stuff only to the extent it affects the music - and while some of those business-type trends indeed are dire (I'm still in shock that Atomic Records will be no more), as it happens there were indeed lots of good albums released in 2008. I don't know what else to call them: music is still most often released in packets of songs from 35 to 75 minutes long, whether such packets ever end up occupying a particular piece of plastic or not, so "album" it is (as in "collection of associated items"). I suspect this is so, and will continue to be so, both from marketing perspectives and from musicians' perspective: the popularity of online playlists speaks to the way people enjoy experiencing songs in the context of other songs, and so songwriters are still attentive to the way a sequence of songs establishes a particular context for each of those songs. And of course, the atomization into single digital downloads is exaggerated anyway; bands still write more than one song, listeners still download more than one, and the moment they start listening, they either put them in a sequence or experience them in one.

Anyway: here's the top tier of my favorite albums of 2008. Within each tier, the albums are simply alphabetical by title. I didn't even attempt to rank them any more finely. "DL" most likely refers to (legal) downloads via eMusic, although occasionally I may have acquired the tracks from a publicist or because the band's giving it away at their website.

Top Tier:

Alpinisms School of Seven Bells: This one blindsided me: I heard one track and liked it, heard another track and liked it, heard a third...then downloaded the album from eMusic and here it is among my ten favorites of the year. It's sort of like one of those old candy bars that has eight different flavors - although in this case, they're blended rather than separated. (DL)

Answers Ghosty: Clever, intelligent, sophisticated pop, well-played and nicely arranged: why ask more? (CD)

Don't Do Anything Sam Phillips: Phillips continues her stealth campaign to put out weird little records that casual listeners think are folk music...the production and arranging on this are spare, subtle, but often rather odd, but her voice is in the forefront, and there's usually an acoustic guitar, so people will overlook that the title track, for example, sounds rather like a My Bloody Valentine outtake. (CD)

Houses & Homes The Bye Bye Blackbirds: I used to agonize slightly over whether it was fair to put albums largely written by people I know on these lists - I don't have to do that when the albums are as good as this one. Songwriter Bradley Skaught says he was listening to a lot of mid-sixties Everly Brothers while the band was making this record, and that shows in the country/folk roots of the songwriting, the sophistication and airiness of the arrangements and recording, and of course in the vocal harmonies (which, being three- and four-part, are more Byrds than Everlys...but had there been a third singing Everly Brother, they would have sounded like the Byrds anyway). (CD)

Icing the Snow Queen The Black Watch: John Andrew Fredrick may not be exactly a one-man band, but clearly it's his sensibilities, and layers of guitars, that dominate proceedings here. The band has eight to ten excellent albums, but bad record-label deals and negligent publicity means they tend to be far more obscure than they should be. (Fredrick has, I believe, a full-time academic position as well, which prohibits much touring, which might contribute as well.) (DL)

In Ear Park Department of Eagles: Because Daniel Rossen's other band Grizzly Bear received reams of (deserved) publicity, people tend to think of Department of Eagles as a spinoff act...but in fact, DoE predates Grizzly Bear, being formed nearly a decade ago by Rossen and his then-college-roommate Fred Nicolaus. There's a curious combination of delicacy and power, even brutality, in the arrangements; the delicacy is easy to hear, but sometimes the band heaps up guitars and basses and pushes them into the red, and the effect is rather like an enormous tree, struck by lightning and falling directly toward you. (DL)

Lurch Mike Viola: This was released in late 2007 online, but since there was a physical release this year (and since I didn't hear the whole thing until this year), I'm counting it. Pure pop for now people (to be unoriginal): as I wrote the other day, I'm well past the peak of my power-pop fanaticism, but when someone gets that combination of melody, harmonies, and clever songwriting and arranging just right, it still sounds damned good. (DL)

Modern Guilt Beck: I keep underestimating Beck - every time he releases an album, I sort of delay picking it up (although having to hold my nose at his Scientology might have much to do with that), and then when I finally get around to it, the album almost invariably is better than I'd hoped, and tends to just get better on repeat listen. Modern Guilt is an exception only in that I actually bought the thing relatively early in its release - and this is the record where Beck seems to integrate much of the disparate strands of his songwriting rather than isolate them into particular albums. He's grown into a versatile, confident, and still exceedingly clever writer and arranger, and he's also become a fine singer - and he has a knack for hiring the right people to realize his sounds as well. (CD)

Real Emotional Trash Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Malkmus is another guy who seems to have settled into what he's doing: his first few post-Pavement releases seemed a bit uncertain, snatching from a stylistic grab-bag and sometimes coming up a bit sketchy in the songwriting department. I think it helps that, even though he's wanted all his "solo" albums to have been co-billed with the Jicks, this is the first album on which they actually sound like a band as opposed to hired hands playing Malkmus songs: even on the rather jammy Pig Lib, the songs sounded as if they'd been entirely written beforehand, and then the band stretched them out. Here the long songs sound as if they've been developed by the band, as part of the writing and recording process (this also means Malkmus and the Jicks are a fantastic live act these days, especially drummer Janet Weiss). It's also interesting to compare this with the most recent Pavement reissue (Brighten the Corners); listening to that Pavement album, the roots of Malkmus's current music are clear. (CD)

Third Portishead: If Portishead had wanted to give this album a real title, Lowered Expectations probably would have been it...at least before it was released. The band hadn't released a studio recording since 1997's Dummy, and as the band epitomized the frozen-in-mid-nineties-amber style known as "trip hop" (a style which had not experienced massive calls for revival), one could be forgiven for imagining that anything new would be either a lame retread or some horrendous attempt to be "contemporary." Nope: the band instead produced the most uncompromising record of its career. Yes, the sound is still cinematic, but from the dark yet romantic aura of its first releases, the sort of film evoked on this album is far darker, more unsettling: a sort of gothic, psychological horror film, whose violence is primarily emotional and almost exclusively offscreen. Beth Gibbons sings like ice on fire - if that fire were carefully banked and focused - and the arrangements are ruthlessly discordant, electronic, harsh...but sometimes also beautiful, a beauty which in such context is as disquieting as menace might normally be. "We Carry On" (the track on my playlist) is practically a Silver Apples tribute in its textures, but if the electronics sound soldered together by Dr. Frankenstein, the microtonal timbres wrench the whole thing out from its roots: there's a synth part whose pitch is halfway between the bass note and a lurching harmony a minor second above, which also plays a role in the song's texture. (CD)

Next Tier:

¿Cómo Te Llama? Albert Hammond Jr.: With his second solo album, Hammond seems nearly poised to relegate his main band, the Strokes, to the trivia-question file - this album feels more alive and lived-in than all but the first Strokes album. Hammond also contributes to what seems a mini-power-pop resurgence this year - in addition to the usual virtues of that genre, I really like the playing and recording on this record: there's a crackling presence to many of the tracks (one guitar in particular, I swear you think the guy's amp is in your living room). (CD)

Beat Pyramid These New Puritans: With Wire moving toward one of its more pop-oriented phases (successfully: see below), and the Fall in one its periodic drifts toward sketchiness, here's a band mining such obvious influences (they're even named after a Fall song) but without seeming like someone's tribute act. Partly that's due to sheer youth and enthusiasm (the band members are in their early 20s), but I think it's also just because they do it so well...and incorporate a lot of more contemporary, electronic influences as well. Oh - and they sound great played really loud. That always helps. (CD)

Dear Science TV on the Radio: While many past TVOTR songs sounded as if the band threw every idea (and every vocal track) they could think of into the mix, here the band cuts back - sometimes even becoming (gasp!) pretty in the process ("Family Tree" is an example, on the playlist). Maybe not as powerful or overwhelming as their first few releases, but when a band is still growing after several years filled with critical acclaim (rather than repeating itself or disintegrating), that's a good sign. (CD)

Do It! Clinic: Clinic roars back, with a little less subtlety than 2007's Visitations and a lot more noise, while still retaining the surrealistic crossword puzzle intrigue of their lyrics. (CD)

Joemus Momus: Aside from having a terrible title (Momus collaborates with Glasgow's Joe Howe, of Germlin and Gay Against You), this album finds Momus incorporating Howe's video-game squiggles into a set of songs often surprisingly indebted to Scottish folk...then again, given that one of Momus's in-the-works projects is something called The Book of Scotlands, maybe that's less surprising. I'm sure many will be alienated and ask why he ruins this perfectly good melody with all that noise (while others will lean the opposite way, wondering why he's gumming up such cool noises with sappy little melodies), I find the combination, and the tension it creates, intriguing and refreshing. And although it didn't fit the playlist, the album's closing track is one of the most affecting things Momus has ever done: a dying vaudevillian wheezes out his last breath, wondering what ever's happened to his world. (CD)

Mega Breakfast The Chap: Speaking of Momus, I sometimes think The Chap is what might have resulted had Momus and Wire formed a band largely influenced by Robyn Hitchcock's "Uncorrected Personality Traits" and the four-part vocal harmonies to go with. Sometimes The Chap's music is almost straightforward, streamlined 21st century rock-pop; other times it's sheer avant-gardist noise; but most often it's both at the same time, with those vocal harmonies piled atop cracking beats, guitar riffs, scratching violin, and glitchy electronic belches and hiccups. (CD)

Object 47 Wire: As I noted above, Wire's moving gradually toward the more pop end of its stylistic pendulations, but Object 47 is curious in that, with a couple exceptions, it works better as a whole than as isolated tracks. The lead track, released for download ahead of the album's issue, was "One of Us," and it's a fine number with a classic Colin Newman vocal melody, but it (along with the album's closer "All Fours") is one of the few tracks that works as well outside its context. Consequently, the album places a bit lower for me than it might have...although it may well be another example of a Wire album gradually rising in my estimation over the years. (CD)

The Week That Was The Week That Was; Sea from Shore School of Language: In a somewhat odd move, Field Music (one of the most intriguing acts of the past few years) split in two this year...even though the Brewis brothers still work together and some personnel are in common between each of the brothers' releases. So, instead of one new Field Music album, we get a short album (just barely 30 minutes long in each case) from two new bands. Fortunately, they're both excellent...and the other curious thing is that they're rather similar, stylistically (suggesting that the break-up was not due primarily to the usual "musical differences"). School of Language's album came out first, led by the simultaneously catchy and annoying glossolalic riff of the four-part "Rockist" (vowel-speak a la "O Superman"), and TWTW's self-titled album came along later in the year. School of Language seems more dominated by keyboards, while TWTW adds some light orchestral coloring to the mix. Both continue to sort of pointillist post-punk/prog mix of Field Music, sounding rather like Gentle Giant at times, although scaled down in terms of ambition and complexity. (CD for both)

Summer of the Whore Shannon McArdle: This is probably the most ruthless post-break-up album I've heard - ruthless both toward the singer's ex and toward herself (the "whore" of the title track isn't her ex's new lover, it's herself). Musically, it's first-rate Chicago-school avant-pop: some country, some folk, some post-rock touches, careful arrangements and production, all done with a great degree of skill, craft, and intensity. (DL)

Honorable Mentions:

One interesting thing about this section: a number of artists whose albums have frequently made the top reaches of my listings ended up here, in the second half of the top fifty. I'm not sure yet if that means they're subpar releases for those acts, or if they're just suffering from the "oh, another decent album from this band again" syndrome.

Doleful Lions 7, Aimee Mann @#%&*! Smilers, R.E.M. Accelerate, Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue, Stereolab Chemical Chords, Future of the Left Curses, The Magnetic Fields Distortion, Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell, David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Sparks Exotic Creatures of the Deep, The Fall Imperial Wax Solvent, The Helio Sequence Keep Your Eyes Ahead, Atlas Sound Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, The Raveonettes Lust Lust Lust, Deerhunter Microcastle, Elvis Costello & the Imposters Momofuku, No Age Nouns, Deerhoof Offend Maggie, Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping, The Hold Steady Stay Positive, Robert Forster The Evangelist, American Music Club The Golden Age, Destroyer Trouble in Dreams, The Baseball Project Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, Fever Marlene White China, The Walkmen You & Me

(If anyone cares, this link brings you to a chart listing the above as well as all the other 2008 albums I acquired, including those I haven't had a chance to listen to - a couple of which have potential to dislodge some of the above.)

The next entry will contain the playlist of tracks from my top 20 albums of 2008.

Total Lyrics/La Distribution

More Destroyer-oriented awesomeness (graphic arts department), via the new music site MBV (no, not a My Bloody Valentine tribute site). (I'm guessing that the link to "The Modern Listener's Guide" will become outdated as soon as a second object is produced, but the site is new, so I have no reference.)

depressing news

Atomic Records is closing its doors in February.

This sucks: I've bought music at Atomic since it opened (I remember that the building used to house a record store called "Ludwig Van Ear" back in the '70s...), and I'd assumed, or hoped, that it was doing fine specializing in independent label stuff while the majors crashed and burned.

The worst part, though, isn't one less place to buy CDs (and yes, I do still buy CDs); it's realizing how central Atomic was to Milwaukee's music community. Members of I don't know how many bands have worked there, probably met there; the store sponsored concerts and in-store appearances, and (my personal connection) was more or less headquarters for Milk magazine in the '90s when I wrote for them. The folks who worked there were always willing to order anything you wanted, or help you find some item that had fallen between the cracks (sometimes literally: once I dropped a used CD jewelbox between two shelves accidentally...).

I suppose in the grand scheme of the economy flying headlong into the ground, one record store, as most people still all-too-quaintly refer to them, isn't that important. And the particular set of economic factors that have led to Atomic's demise probably were well in motion regardless of the current crisis. But, as I said: it sucks.

Good prices on remaining merchandise for the next two months, though.

grammar among thieves

One of the CDs I pulled out earlier this evening featured a tiny little small-print notice about copyright law. After thanking the listener for having bought the CD, it moves to an increasingly preposterous list of illicit acts: "using internet services to distribute copyrighted music, giving away illegal copies of discs or lending discs to others for them to copy is illegal and does not support those involved in making this piece of music - especially the artist." Well, okay...maybe I can see that with the first point, but the second one? Which copies of discs are "illegal"? And the third...how do I know what my friend is going to do with my CD if I lend it? The philosophy utterly overlooks the fact that fandom is spread by sharing and enthusiasm...you've got to hear this! this is really cool! etc. In record company world, once you buy a CD, you can only let anyone else hear it under carefully controlled situations (hmmm...I'm not entirely sure record companies would even approve of that: shouldn't those other folks buy their own copy?), and certainly CDs cannot be lent freely, nor can copies of tracks be made. Back in the day, of course, people would make cassette tapes for their friends of their favorite songs. How much of my collection of legally-purchased music was bought because I came to know and love the artist's music because a friend made me a tape or CD? I'd guess one-quarter to one-half, at least.

But never mind all that foolish and dubious babble about what's legal and what supports the musician (musicians hate it when people who haven't paid for their music hear it and like it - they just haven't earned it yet, baby). The really offensive part of this little bit of pleading is the next sentence, which reads:

By carrying out any of these actions it has the same effect as stealing music.

With all those attorneys on the RIAA payroll, there's simply no funding left for proofreaders, it seems...

And you know what? To paraphrase Emma Goldman (sort of): If you won't proofread, I won't be part of your counterrevolution.

from the ADS "Last Year's Films" files

I was amused to discover that Atonement won an Oscar for Best Original Score...because in viewing the film the other night, I thought the score was the main element that kept the film from being truly outstanding. (A few scenes somehow came across as more familiar on film than they had in the novel, and I really could have done without the enormous MESSAGE COMING IN! of Cecilia's posture in her watery death.) First of all, while scores are meant to underline a scene's emotions, this one often did so by a forceful triple set of slashes that no doubt broke the pencil's lead. A couple scenes in particular had me wishing there was a selective mute button (dialogue and diegetic sound only). And the composer's device of using the sound of a typewriter as percussion was only cute at first (if marred by being way too high in the mix) but quite clickly became cloying. We get it: writers and writing are a key part of the movie!

I guess Oscar voters must have thought that last bit very clever, and apparently approve of emotional hammering over the head. Too bad: the rest of the movie nicely compressed a novel to the smaller scope of a movie without losing its essence.

keeper of the crypt behind the gates of delirium?

Some people age better than others. Rock musicians...are probably "others."

Here's one:



That's Steve Howe, guitarist with Yes.

And here he is without makeup, working the nightshift:

the other side

An essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the latest issue of Harper's describes a recently reissued, extremely rare country blues recording called "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley. At one point Sullivan cites some lines from the song, which he hears as "The Mississippi River, you know it's deep and wide, / I can stand right here, / See my baby from the other side." In the context of the song, whose narrator seems to be speaking with her dead father, the peculiarity of the syntax takes on a spooky literality: the narrator seems half embodied, this side of the river, and half ghost, viewing her "baby" from the other side.

While Sullivan acknowledges the possibility that such a reading pays overly literal attention to the lyrics (Sullivan quotes John Fahey, who - after asserting that the lyrics of these old songs didn't mean much - spends several hours trying to determine what the words are), and while he analyzes obsessive rare-record collecting to some degree, he only hints at one possible reason such collectors might be so compellingly haunted to track down these records. And that is the way that, much like the narrator of the Geeshie Wiley song, sound recordings can open a sort of virtual portal to another time and place.

The art of audio recording, conventionally conceived, tends to stress "fidelity" or "presence," the illusion that the performance you're hearing sounds as if it's taking place right there in your room - but even the highest-fi recordings generally sacrifice sonic literalism for musical purposes. On rock recordings, for example, no one bats an eye when an acoustic rhythm guitar is the same volume as, or louder than, a hugely distorted electric lead guitar, even though that's possible only with differential amplification. (This amplification already departs from the "realism" of the actual loudness of an acoustic guitar, and therefore calls into question whether there's any such thing as the "actual" loudness of an electric guitar. Of course one might argue that rock is the first fully postmodern music, conceived entirely in the era of mechanical reproduction of sound, which therefore never depended upon a hypothetical "real" performance based in real time and space.) I remember reading a fascinating article called "A Bedroom Community" by Franklin Bruno (from the 1997 issue of Badaboom Gramophone: it does not appear to be available online), in which he analyzed the effect of the creation of sonic spaces in recorded music: far too little attention is paid to the way such essentially spatial effects like reverb or echo affect listeners' perception of the imaginary space of the hypothetical performance, or the way even clearly patchwork recordings, dubbed part upon part, sometimes strive to create an aura of performed authenticity through the inclusion of count-ins, stray amp noise, or even mistakes in playing or singing (despite the obvious fact that if the song's made up of multiple overdubs, such "errors" could easily have been removed or eliminated in a subsequent take).

An interesting thing happens when the "fidelity" of a recording is less than ideal. First, there's the question of how that infidelity (secret noises offstage) came to be: through the unavailability of quality recording equipment or technique, through intentionally eschewing such equipment or technique ("low-fi"), or through aging and degradation of the recorded artifact itself (such as an old, scratchy 45). Clearly these things signify differently: the recording that's poor of necessity might convey the artist's persistence, rawness, amateur intensity, etc.; the "low-fi" recording might seek to convey those same things or, more smartly, undercut the assumptions that low fidelity just does mean persistence, rawness, or intensity; and the degradation of the artifact is often thought of as irrelevant to the "real" recording.

This last assumption isn't correct, though. First, although we might try to hear "through" noise and poor signals (and the more experienced we are as listeners, the likelier we'll be capable of pulling off this listening performance), I don't think we can fully escape the crackle of the vinyl or the attenuation of dynamic and frequency range. This is particularly the case with older recordings (whether by "older" we mean scratchy LPs we've owned since our teens, or recordings that are mastered from ancient 78s): I'd argue that the older the recording, the more we tend to hear those sonic accretions as part of the musical experience. It would seem strange indeed if, somehow, a Robert Johnson song were suddenly available in wide-screen, massively compressed, state-of-the-not-necessarily-high-fidelity-art 2008 sound.

One of the peculiarities of recorded sound is the way it can substitute itself for real-time performance even when such a real-time performance was a necessity. (Bruno quotes Stephin Merritt, who refers to the "false realism" of recordings that seek to convey the illusion of a unified sonic space, even though there was never any such space of performance.) My Robert Johnson example is unfair in that way: rather than imagine a Robert Johnson recording that sounds like a modern recording, imagine what being in the room with Robert Johnson playing "Dead Shrimp Blues" might have sounded like. Even though it was 1936, presumably our ears, and the air in the room, would have been every bit as capable of conducting sound waves without the imposition of crackling static as they are now when our friend or roommate belabors an acoustic guitar in the same room with us. Would that 1936 performance sound "right," the unmediated Robert Johnson, with no microphone, no recording equipment's stamp of sonic character, only his voice and guitar in the naked air? I think most people would like to say it would...yet since we know such a thing is impossible outside of science fiction, I wonder if we'd respond the same way to such a recording (if it were possible). I suspect that, just as some people respond to what they perceive as the "warmth" of vinyl, and most respond more positively to the exact same recording if it's louder than another, our history of contact with old, degraded sonic artifacts would mean that ultimately, we'd prefer those over the hypothetical, ultra-cleaned-up recording. No doubt such arguments would be mounted in terms of "authenticity," with claims that our hypothetical sonic clean-up device somehow distorts or cheapens the original sound (as if we'd know what the original sound was). Even though sound behaved in 1936 the same way it does in 2008, the context of a performance's larger sonic world is not the same now as it would be in the world of 1936. (A clichéd citation...but this idea is converging on one reason Borges' verbatim new Quixote differed from the original: though the object is identical, its context is not - and since no object is apprehensible without context, essentially the object is not identical in any real experience.) The removal of the patina of age, which might seem superfluous to the object itself, results in a significant loss.

Specifically, what would be lost is such a recording's ability to open a psychic time-portal in the listener: the sense that while I'm here in 2008, and the Mississippi of time is deep and wide, I can see myself listening there, on the 1936 side. I think this effect is one reason some people are so strongly attached to old recordings: the sound of the time is right there, magnetically arrayed, etched into shellac or vinyl grooves, encoded in cryptic digits of shiny, aluminum-coated plastic that can reflect another world.

The paradox is, that patina wasn't there from the start (except insofar as 1936 recording equipment was less capable of "fidelity" than contemporary equipment). It itself is an artifact of the fact that many such old recordings exist solely on a mere handful of timeworn old 78 RPM records, and it's the patina of such records that we hear. Which is to say, if a record collector or serious fan fetishizes such sound, it's because they hear themselves in the sonic reflection: the years of their and others' collecting, the inevitable wearing down of such records no matter how carefully preserved and packaged, their own obsessions emerging into the air, curatorial and remembered.

paging Dr. Lynne...

Can someone explain to me the popularity among dentists of the Traveling Wilburys?

I went to the dentist this morning and I swear, the last three times I went there, at some point while having my teeth cleaned, a Traveling Wilburys song played. My guess is that the mysterious Volume 2 is full of songs entirely about dental hygiene...

things I care about so little that writing a blog entry about them is head-spinningly contradictory

The world awaits at long last the actual physical release of Guns 'n' Roses*' new CD Chinese Democracy, whose first "single" actually exists, at least in digital form.

Can I hire the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing "so what?" for about five hours?

GNR sucked back when CDs were new, shiny, wonderful objects that would transform the music industry, and they suck even more irrelevantly now that CDs are bizarre artifacts purchased only by the elderly (why yes I did buy a handful of CDs just last week, thank you very much). Axl and his gang of idiot poseurs were always just a bunch of dunderheaded clowns laughably enacting the lamest possible rock-star clichés on and off stage, and it's been utterly mystifying to me why anyone ever gave them the slightest scintilla of cred.

And to take longer to produce a single album than it took Beethoven to write a handful of symphonies, well, it's just ridiculous. Me, I'm more hotly anticipating the release of a new left-handed flange-grip attachment to the 1947 Grimsby slide rule than I am any new GNR product.

* No, I don't know which of the apostrophes on the already-annoying "'n'" thing GNR decided, for no good reason, to omit. Multiply my not-caring about this album by god factorial, and you'll be within a few light years of my not-caring about that issue.

flimsy

I picked up the new Jenny Lewis CD a few days ago, and while it's a fine CD (in many ways it does what Elvis Costello's last album set out to do, but more effectively...), the packaging is annoying. It comes in a cardboard slipcase, so narrow that there's no spine, and with no inner sleeve to protect or hold the disc. There are four small snapshot-like photos included, which are just tossed inside the slipcase. The musician credits are printed on the back cover, along with the usual bureaucratic info...and the admonition DO NOT DROP THIS RECORD.

Yeah? Because the crap packaging means it might shatter?

Apparently major labels have just given up on trying to sell CDs, and are cutting their packaging costs...even though good packaging is one of the few aspects of physical recorded media that cannot be digitally reproduced. You'd think they'd be going the opposite direction, making more packages with aesthetic value in themselves. If this were the only example of shoddy packaging on recent CDs (and I suppose a number of my readers are like, you still buy CDs? Christ but you're old!), I might not be complaining...but PJ Harvey's last release was similarly packaged (although it, at least, had an inner sleeve, if I recall correctly, so there was some friction preventing the disc from just falling out onto the ground).

I suppose you could argue that such minimal packaging leaves a smaller environmental footprint, and if you did, I'd laugh in your face. There's a difference between packaging that's pointless because it's discarded as soon as the product is brought home (such as the nasty, hard to open, finger-slicing molded-plastic cases common on lots of household products) and packaging that's integral to the product and which therefore will not be thrown away, at least not until the product itself is tossed. But cheap packaging like this almost encourages further waste. I'm tempted to scan the cover and back cover and print it out on some decent paper, and put the whole thing in a conventional jewelbox, just so the CD can sit amongst my other CDs and not disappear and become unidentifiable (no spine, remember?). Which would mean I'd be using more paper, and probably more paper overall than a decent package would have used in the actual product.

Perhaps another irony here is that I bought this CD as essentially an impulse purchase: I was buying something else at the Large Box with Red and White Concentric Circles, and it was on sale, so I picked it up. If I'd known in advance the packaging was so flimsy, I might have decided merely to download it.

A musician named Zimmerman, from the same state as the store, had a new compilation of unreleased material out, too, also on sale, which I also picked up. Funny how that one was almost exactly twice the price of the Lewis release...yet it contained not only twice the music, roughly - two discs - but extensive info and documentation, including a 60-page booklet. Of course this suggests another reason for the lame packaging of Lewis's CD: lower production and material costs mean more profits for the label. I suppose Columbia, which put out that Minnesota guy's set, figures the only people interested in a 2-CD set of obscurities by him are old people who'd buy a CD because they can't handle all this newfangled digital rigmarole, whereas Warner Bros. figures Ms. Lewis's fans are just gonna download the thing anyway. It's also just my personal opinion, but I've gotta say Lewis is a hell of a lot more photogenic than that elderly folksinger dude anyway. I guess good on WB for not caving to the capitalistic pressure to exploit a singer's sex appeal. Columbia, on the other hand, saw fit to fill that 60-page booklet with shot after shot of the nearly seventy-year-old Dylan gazingly faunishly at the camera while recumbent in nothing but a snug yet well-filled pair of bikini briefs.

Thank god I'm kidding, please.

from the slightly confused art dept.

Uh, Jared? That's not how a shark works.



(From a new CD for which a publicist sent me a couple mp3s. I haven't had a chance to listen to them...but I'm just amused at the cover...)

might be a bit difficult to obtain...

I'm (still) in the midst of digitizing my CD collection, and I ran into Polvo's first EP. The name of the "label" (I think it's really just self-released) is "Jesus Christ," and I think it was chosen solely to allow the following copyright notice that appears at the bottom of the back cover:

Unauthorized reproduction without the express written consent of Jesus Christ is prohibited.

petty annoyances, oversensitive ears division

We're watching Season 4 of The Office (US version, obviously: the Brit version didn't have four seasons), and the thing that's bugging me? The production company's little trumpet tag at the end ("Deedle-Dee Productions") is ever so slightly out of tune with the musical tag that goes with the NBC thingy that follows, and it's like being forcefed very sour lemonade every time I hear it.

Dammit, folks: tune to the same pitch!

not at all the same as "bartime pairs"

A few months back, one of the music-related e-mails in my inbox was from a songwriter I hadn't heard of named Bennett Samuel Lin. Lin is the main songwriter for a band called Bobtail Yearlings (whom I also had not heard of), but rather than promoting his band directly, in this case he was interested in feedback on a book he'd just published, called The Bobtail Method for Composing Unique Pop Melodies. (The Method is available both in book form and online as a free PDF file, at the band's website - painfully cute front page and all.) While Lin does have some formal musical training, his method doesn't seem to follow typical songwriting advice or approaches. His main idea is that chord sequences and melodies ought to be composed together, rather than either a melody being written separately (often come up with from the blue sky) and chords built around it, or a chord sequence being written, over which an impoverished, stereotypical melody is improvised.

To this end, Lin walks his readers through the way chords and melodies work and work together. His basic device he calls "the barline pair": "exactly what its name implies: two barlines, signifying a harmonic progression of three bars, with one chord per bar." And what he does with this simple, simplifying device is provide for the musician a sort of puzzle: he leaves the third bar unspecified. So we begin with a question: given these two chords and/or these two melodic lines (he walks us through the construction of both), what chord and melodic line makes musical sense in that third bar? There are, of course, numerous possibilities - but Lin begins by exploring the nature of melodies: their distribution of steps (half- or whole steps), skips (a third or fourth, sometimes), and leaps (generally a diminished fifth or greater), their "points of emphasis" deriving from their intervals, changes in register (any leap defines a change in register), and rhythmic characteristics.

In practice (and probably because to construct a book, you have to begin somewhere), Lin begins with chords, in that he constructs "barline pairs" for every possible sequence of two chords, which chords he's categorized in terms of their harmonic relation, from closest to furthest. Progressing through the book, the reader finds the chords, melodies, and rhythms increasing in complexity and moving away from the harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically obvious.

So how useful is all this? First, I'm probably not his ideal audience: I do have some musical training, enough that it's reasonable when I write songs to proceed more intuitively, confident that I can spot out both the over-obvious and the unduly recherché chordal or melodic sequence. Well, I'd like to think I can, anyway: point is, at first I found myself thinking that Lin's approach was maybe too formalistic, too intellectualized, and that sometimes one just needs to trust one's ears. But (and I think Lin would argue thus), where do one's ears learn what works? Much of the music we hear is, for better or worse, rather clichéd harmonically and, these days, impoverished melodically - so one's ears may well be a poor guide, prone to lead one down only the most worn, well-traveled, and predictable paths. The advantage of Lin's method for beginning musicians is that without being as arbitrary as, say, the twelve-tone school, he doesn't privilege particular chord sequences but shows readers how each one might be made to work reasonably well, in certain contexts. And I suspect that such methodological order might help such musicians get a handle on the unruly array of possibilities a keyboard or guitar presents to them.

I'm not sure about some of Lin's quirks: nearly all his examples (at least in the early part of the book) are in 6/8 time because, he says, this "is an optimal [meter] for creating an interesting melodic contour that feels neither too sparse nor too crowded [and which] ... provides greater flexibility for consolidating a fluid melodic pace when different barline pairs are assembled into a single musical work, which can then be converted to common time (four quarter notes per bar) all at once." Maybe...I'm not entirely persuaded. I was also concerned (as I said above) that the musical exercises that would result from "The Bobtail Method" would be logical but uncompelling musically (that is to say, emotionally). Some of them probably are...but then, they're intended as exercises and examples in some cases, while others are drawn from his own compositions. Fortunately, nearly twenty Bobtail Yearlings tracks are downloadable from the band's website, and they go some ways toward answering the question of how well Lin's ideas work in practice. My first impression is fairly positive: they generally begin from a folk-like texture, but their variety is broader than "folk-like" suggests, and while they are more diverse harmonically and melodically than most pop music, they're not egregiously or clumsily so. In practice, at least, Lin wears his theoretical approach lightly and gracefully. That cutesy splash page does characterize the music to an extent: if you're one of those people who requires a heavy dose of obvious angst and heaviness in your music, you'll probably be disappointed. (Me, I think being boringly dark all the time is easier than the opposite, yet somehow critically more accepted.) Also, banjo.

My only real criticisms of the book are both trivial: I wish the print version had been made available bound such that it could lie flat, to make it easier to rest on a music stand and play the examples. (Perhaps future editions, if they come to be, can be bound this way. You can always download and print the PDF version however you want, of course.) I also think it might have been helpful, when Lin demonstrates the effects of particular chord sequences, to have provided examples from well-known songs rather than just his own music. While copyright no doubt prevented him from reproducing the notes and chords of such songs, he could certainly mention them (as in the well-known mnemonic - a bit outdated but still effective - that to remember a melodic interval of a rising augmented fourth, think of the first two notes of Bernstein's "Maria" from West Side Story, say). This would allow readers to "hear" in their heads the effect of such chordal sequences even if they're away from an instrument, and it would also illustrate (in conjunction with the examples from Lin's own songs) that the same chord sequence can result in sometimes dramatically different effects, depending upon other musical components (which melody and rhythm are chosen with those chords, texture, etc.).