Wilco... the Song

I know it's old news, but I just discovered this today. Pitchfork reported yesterday on the new Wilco record, with the meta-title Wilco, the Album, which includes lead-off single "Wilco, the Song". Apparently "Wilco the Song" is as ancient as Jesus riding a brachiosaurus, as they performed it on Colbert's show several months ago. I'm giving it its third go-through right now, and all I can think is that Wilco have officially made it to the same point that Beck, Spoon, and Stephen Malkmus have successfully reached in their career; namely, the point where all your music does is reference its creator. Wilco, in that regard, have picked the perfect title for their song: I'm certain they were thinking, "We just made a song that references all of our sonic transforms... how about we name it after ourselves to show we're aware of this"?

Musically, it's like Gimme Fiction-era Spoon meets Wowee-Zowee-era Pavement, to eschew the Wilco comparisons. It's a verse-chorus pop song in the most pure structural form, with just about enough room for a bridge and a noise-and-feedback guitar solo. To return to Wilco comparisons, its form comes from Summerteeth, its rootsy sound comes from Being There, and it's washed with the accessible pseudo-experimentalism of A Ghost is Born. However, Wilco are still screwing with you - the listener of their noble blend of postmodernism - in a few ways.

First off, there are those bizarre Sonic Youth chords they throw in every once in a while, such as in the middle of the first verse. And then there's the backdrop. Does anyone else notice that Wilco are playing in front of a projection of all of their album covers, endlessly rotating in 3-D like on some sort of Apple Computer product? I can't help but think this is tongue and cheek... like the rest of this track.

End verdict? I really have high hopes for the next Wilco disc, that's slated to come out next month. I think Wilco can leave their dad-rock slump and land back in the Jim O'Rourke/Sonic Youth trifecta of postmodern rock.

Shrinking Drum Kits, The New Pornographers, and BMSR

So, Pittsburgh's own Black Moth Super Rainbow came to campus last night. I could hear bits and pieces from the show from the basement in which I was playing Scrabble with some acquaintances or friends (you pick which, as that deviates long past the scope of this blog). That kind of pissed me off, since I've only heard their record once and really wanted to hear their music.

Essentially, after the opening acts - one craptastic high school Battle-of-the-bands one and one kinda like a blues-punk Deerhunter - and as the band's instruments were being soundchecked (I could see a guitar, bass, and acoustic drums, despite the record as I remember it being entirely electronic) I get a call from a friend saying that we should play Scrabble that night. I was up for it. We decided to play the game outside, citing a "half decent concert and decent weather" yet; however, the two other people we play Scrabble with, being computer science majors, demanded to play Scrabble indoors where there were electrical outlets. So, that's that.

The New Pornographers came, along with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, last week. Our university has something that we call "Spring Carnival". Along with an actual carnival - you know, with ferris wheels and carousels and the like - the main focus of the carnival is for groups on campus (mainly fraternities and sororities, though other groups are known to participate) to build these house-like "booths" and compete against each other to see whose is best. I've only seen photos of the completed booths, having only been on the "midway" while the frats and sororities were building, but they are insanely elaborate things, complete with electrical wiring and multiple floors. At Carnival's end, we had a concert with indie rock classicists Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and the ever-steady New Pornographers.

Both of these acts come from the classic '90s tradition of indie rock, though neither of them (at least to my knowledge) put out a record in the Nineties. Ted Leo's stuff evoked if Joe Strummer fronted Superchunk and forced them to be politically conscious. Nonetheless, they were the better of the two live: they felt more like a band, more like they were in time with each other rhythmically. On the other hand, the New Pornographers often felt a bit off the beat and the presence of two keyboardists and the use of a laptop as a musical instrument added to the chaos.

However, the New Pornographers' drummer has to be mentioned explicitly, primarily because he used such a minimal drum kit to incredible results. For reference, when you typically go to a music store and look at drumkits, you'll find on the average a snare drum, a bass drum, a hi-hat, a couple crash cymbals, a ride cymbal, two or three tom-toms, and a floor tom. Sometimes you might add an effects cymbal like a splash or china (I'll be talking a bit more about splash cymbals in a future post if I remember to) or some extra percussion like a tambourine or a cowbell. This guy's drumkit had the bass, snare and hi-hat, one floor tom, one tom-tom, and only one other cymbal, a ride cymbal that wasn't even mic'd.

And then there were those excessive Eighties drummers. No idea how many drums Phil Collins has in this video, but it's more than anyone would ever bother to use. I keep thinking of this idea that drum kits have been shrinking, as argued in this discussion. It just seems more authentic to me when a band uses a smaller kit. Of course, what the hell we mean by "authenticity" is another question in itself.

I've been listening to the drum sound on Pavement's classic Slanted and Enchanted record a lot recently. Probably the drum sound that most defined Nineties indie rock, it feels compressed and claustrophobic like most post-punk drum sounds yet is more earthy than mechanical. Probably the only puzzling part of it is the fact that the cymbals come in unrealistically fast and decay extremely quickly. The interesting part about the early Pavement drum sound is that I always felt it had some strong arena-rock undertones, and likewise I always thought that Pavement's then drummer Gary Young was playing on one of those excessive Eighties kits. Learning that he too was playing this era-devining drum sound a very minimal kit does not cease to surprise me.

Explicplication

I've no idea how long I've been listening to Pavement. Actually I do - having bought the expanded version of Slanted and Enchanted on Pitchfork's recommendation back in the wee months of 2003 - but the rhetorical elegance of that first sentence was hard to pass. If anything, the seeds for this post were planted close to a year ago, when, as my friend Katherine and I were working on a project for physics involving the construction of a bridge from pasta, I introduced her to Pavement, and more importantly, introduced her to their magnum opus Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

So let's fastforward in time - now Katherine has a blog, which is really worth your patronage if you ask me. On her blog, she has written up an explication (link goes to Merriam Webster's) of the lyrics to what is perhaps Pavement's only MTV hit (remember, this is back when they played indie music) - the ironic "Cut Your Hair". A lot of my reading of this song is based upon my reading of Michael Azerrad's Our Band could Be your Life, which, though not essential as a work of prose, is essential as a documentation of the rise of "indie" ethics into a mainstream dominated by glam metal, hair bands, and power ballads. What that book only hints at, though, is the end result of this process, when all of the major labels went and converged on Seattle looking to sign seemingly any band with flannel shirts and long hair - beginning the dry, watered-down grunge-pop and nu-metal sounds of "post-grunge" as we know it.

I still haven't read her explication, which I plan to do right after I finish mine.

The lyrics will be in this font and size. The analyses will be in this font and size.

I.
Darlin' don't you go and cut your hair
Do you think it's gonna make him change?

What exactly the "hair" refers to in this song is a bit ambiguous. The contrast between long hair and short hair exists in Azerrad's analysis of the hardcore and post-hardcore scenes of the Eighties, with cutting one's hair being seen as a rite of passage into the culture. Azerrad connects long hair with the flowing prog-rock and jam-rock of the hypocritical hippie culture, and demonstrates how the hardcore punks connected it with the excess of those genres, in the quest to strip down rock and roll. Additionally, we could see the hair in terms of Eighties "glam metal" (Guns 'n' Roses, Poison, Kiss, etc...) or - most likely - in terms of the grunge movement. Invoking Azerrad's analysis of the founding of Sub Pop, the long hair of grunge was calculated, with the intent of the common appearance to create the illusion of a common Seattle scene to foriegn record buyers. Long hair was essentially associated with grunge because that was what Sub Pop wanted. What I think we have here is a grunge rocker, in grunge's dying days, debating whether to make a superficial change in appearance to remain commercially viable, perhaps even on a major label.

"i'm just a boy with a new haircut"
And that's a pretty nice haircut

Of course, this being a Pavement song, it's most impossible for Malkmus to posit a serious point without somehow invoking his serious wit. We could say here that Malkmus is speaking up for musical "authenticity" - whatever the Hell that is - by deriding the grunge rocker's choice to remain commercially viable instead of creating music for the sake of making music. I'm reminded of the days of disco - when seemingly every rock act, from Kiss to the Rolling Stones to James Brown, made a disco record in a weak attempt to stay afloat. Additionally, I'm reminded of M. Ward's new record, Hold Time; on that, he's borrowing a lot (in my opinion) from Deerhunter-esque post-punk seemingly to stay afloat in a changing indie community.

Charge it like a puzzle, hit me wearin' muzzles
Hesitate to die, look around, around, the second drummer's drowned
His telephone is found

I don't have an interpretation for these lines. The reference to the second drummer could be a meta-reference to Pavement themselves (they had two drummers), a reference to their heroes The Fall (who had two drummers), or a reference to This is Spinal Tap, where seemingly every one of the fictional band's drummers died in some freak accident. The Spinal Tap remark yields an interesting remark, as Spinal Tap were meant as a parody of Seventies' big-hair, tights-and-Spandex glam metal. Perhaps Malkmus is making the subtle connection between the commercialization of grunge and glam metal itself.

II.
Music scene is crazy, bands start up each and every day
I saw another one just the other day
A special new band

We see this routinely at the radio station. Whether it be "RIYL Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, and Pavement" on that crappy new The Takeover UK disc some arbitrary major label sent us, or the elaborate artist bios we get sent by the big indie promoters, the labels and promoters will do whatever it takes to get us to notice their product in the sea of new music. Of course it fails. I love Malkmus' inflection on the word "special" - almost as if to show that he thinks it reeks of fail as well. It's enough to make me want to invite him to the station so he can comment on the new releases as we decide what's crap and what's not.

I remember lying
I don't remember a line
I don't remember a word

This seems to continue where the past three lines left off. Perhaps the only thing "special" about these bands is how much they sounded like Nirvana, or the Pixies, or Pearl Jam - and how much money could be made with a good one-hit wonder. Incidentially, "Cut Your Hair" itself would make Pavement a one-hit wonder in some people's eyes

At that point, is there an incentive to remember a "line" or a "word"?

But I don't care, I care, I really don't care
Did you see the drummer's hair?

III.
Advertising looks and chops a must
No big hair!!

Seems like the speaker in the song has switched from Malkmus to some arbitrary major label. By asking for "advertising looks" and "no big hair", Malkmus is commenting on a part of the music business that unfortunately exists at all levels: the fact that labels often seek bands that "look" and "sound" "trendy". Again, the big hair reference ties in post-grunge to glam metal somehow (see verse 1). This could also be a comment on so-called music "scenes" (see verse 2) themselves - that they often are the ideas of record label execs (the Sub Pop example from earlier, but also consider the Sex Pistols)

Songs mean a lot
When songs are bought
And so are you-

I think this is Malkmus' character narrating again. "Means a lot" seems to connect to the sarcastically-used "special" in verse 2; Malkmus, being Malkmus, has to open the book of wordplay again and steal from it. But this, like verse two, asks questions about what exactly musical authenticity is, and whether we can get it from major labels. There is a famous essay by superproducer Steve Albini, who gained fame playing abrasive hardcore guitar for Big Black before producing (though he prefers the term "engineering", as in his mind, the producer is not responsible for the band's creativity or lack thereof) for bands as diverse as Nirvana and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. This essay answers said question by saying that major labels suck the drive to make music from bands by placing them in debt to them financially - connecting to the lyrics yet again.

Bitch, rant down to the practice room (?)

Seemingly every lyrics site interprets the words said in this line differently. No comments.

Attention and fame so
Career, career, career....

Consensus: Back in senior-year English, we had to do similar explication to the novels we read. It was tiring and took up more time than it should have. As much as I love Pavement, writing this explication just sapped whatever creativity I had from me. Nonetheless, Malkmus provides a reference-laden, postmodern view of musical "authenticity" by examining both glam metal and post-grunge, with the long hair of both genres serving as the song's primary motif.

Smooth Jazz, Panflute Fusion, and...

I find it rather amusing to look at the stuff that gets sent to the radio station at my college. Sure, we get shipped the typical indie fare from Sub Pop, Kranky, Matador, Merge, and so forth - but what makes it worth going to the station every week is seeing the stuff we get that is not worthy of our approval. Every Tuesday night, all the CDs mailed to us are emptied - along with the paper promotional extravaganzas that come with the music itself - into an old post-office crate; we go through them, one by one, deciding what stays and what, to put it lightly, is crap.

Back when I started, I observed that much of the crap was very generic indie product - this band thought they were Sonic Youth; that one thought they could sound like Morrissey and get away with it; that one took the twee-er-than-thou aestetic a bit too far and its idealistic view of life and love makes us cringe. I remember liking a lot of stuff we threw out secretly - stuff like the recent I'm from Barcelona disc, which we panned because "if we wanted that, we'd be better off listening to the Arcade Fire".

But when we came back from winter break, something happened. We started getting more and more music of genres that were not "rock" (at the radio station, "rock" includes electronic and club music for some reason) or experimental. We'd typically grab a pile of CDs from the crate and be stuck in Smooth Jazz hell for the next twenty minutes, as we tried to give each its fair listen so we could at least claim "we gave it a chance" before we pseudo-violently crammed it into the crate with the rest of the crap. What's amazing is not only could you tell the smooth jazz records from the outlandish covers, but also from the liner notes. There was one disc I remember us getting three weeks ago where the liner notes not only told some story where the gods of different religions intermingled in cosmic space, but it gave goddamn reviews of the musical content wherein the form, timbre, dynamics, and instrumentation were analyzed.

Of course, I'd think this a fluke, but then we got Panflute Fusion. And then we got the sultry voice of Vayo.

The thing about Panflute Fusion I remember is that it was a CD-R single, on a vanity label, with one three-minute song. And what made it awesome, in retrospect, is that whatever man or machine (we really can't tell) made it displayed its suckiness on the front cover. If it weren't a single, we would have kept it as a novelty record.

Vayo, on the other hand - that we did keep as a novelty record. The cover of the disc promised nineteen tangos; however, upon listening to the disc, there was not a single note of music. Essentially, each of the nineteen tracks was a spoken word explanation of one of the tangos, all done by this Vayo person in a comically bad accent.

I'm certain that the person is real, and he's taking his work seriously. But out of context, with virtually nobody at the station knowing anything about Latin music, it was enough to keep as a novelty disc. I really wish I could post some stuff from it, but the disc is at another station member's dorm for the week, as he composes a review of the disc.

their clone was better...

This is a brief post in homage to a simple idea - that often, bands that got away aping other bands' sounds often are as interesting to listen to as the original bands itself.

The idea itself is based off a blog post I found randomly (do read it) last year when trying to find stuff about a band I had heard on WZBC called Silkworm. Now it must be admitted that after listening to both discs of the sadly out-of-print career retrospective Even a Blind Chicken Finds a Kernel of Corn Now and Then that the comparisons are superficial at best. At least in the Slanted and Enchanted days, both bands doled out guitar noise from the Lee Ranaldo and J Mascis school, but Silkworm's best early moments owed more to the atmospheric slowcore of Galaxie 500 than the frantic ranting of The Fall.

There were also the good-ol'-boys of Archers of Loaf during that time period as well. But where the Silkworm I've heard so far failed to sound like Pavement, the Archers of Loaf essentially come down as a more hardcore-derived Pavement.

However, where Pavement are still remembered and beloved as a cultural institution, many of these era "soundalike" acts were washed away by the tides of history. Bad metaphor aside, its truth is remarkably evident: unless I'm looking online, I can't find Silkworm and Archers of Loaf records to save my life. Finding Archers of Loaf debut Icky Mettle was a fluke from lots of used-record-bin searching, and we won't get into finding anything by Silkworm. But the end result is this: much of these Pavement clones are as interesting as the original artist, and really need to be dug back up from the crates.

Quantum Leaps

In the past few days, I've been reminded by at least three unique people in at minimum three unique situations that this blog still exists. But it exists dormantly in an almost hypocritical fashion: this blog, back in the naive days in which it was created, was made as a sort of soapbox to figure out the nature of music. A place where the transfer from simple "good or bad?" judgements and claims based on unproven generalities (i.e. "All british popular music is bad") to more sophisticated analyses: why do I listen to this and not that? What is the stigma in contemporary music on guitar solos? Why did every music critic or music magazine pick the same ten releases for their top ten of '08 lists?

Yet I'm listening to more music than I ever have at any point in my life. Sure, the actual magnitude of the amount of musical sound that hits my ear is probably the same, but more and more of it is truly within my control - a technical point if anything. So with that, one would imagine, there must be some serious epiphanies about music for its own sake and music's intersection with mainstream culture.

A lot of it is the simple realization that I really am not as qualified as I want to believe to talk about music. I belong to WRCT, the radio station that broadcasts from my college's campus, and it's there that I see people who should be talking about music and philosophizing over it. It's one thing to have an opinion. Anyone can have an opinion - absolutely anyone. There are a few people I know and a plethora more people I knew that absolutely refuse(d) to listen to anything associated with their definitions of "indie rock" - saying it and its byproducts were automatically bad music without justifying the statement or listening to the "genre" with open ears. Certainly they had an opinion, and a damn strong one to be added.

But it's yet another thing to have an opinion based on a very through listening of every genre of music. And that's where things diverge. Like the people who say "nay" to indie rock, I'm basing my opinions on a very narrow listening of music - to the extent that there are many prominent bands within the genres I claim to listen to that I am completely ignorant of. There seems to be more of a tendency for people at the radio station to base their judgements on a more complete listening of the musical canon - samplings of drone, ambient, electronic, industrial, metal, classical, jazz, minimalism, so on. It's a theme I've mentioned once or twice in last year's posts - or at least believe I did - that you really can't claim to be qualified until you know a tiny bit about everything.

And that's a monumental task if there ever were one. It's simply humanity's tendency to stick towards the familiar. We know there's so much more within the world (in this case, all these genres of music), but it's quite comfortable within the world of your one genre. The bands in your genre use a musical vocabulary you can pick up on - and a musical vocabulary that will be sure to leave you baffled when you look at other genres (and not in a good way).

I don't know what the ultimate conclusion is on the blog front, though. It'll probably be as sporadic and random as it's ever been.

um...?

I'm currently at college, listening to a crapload of new music every week - here consisting of two things. First off, the actual new releases; we'll talk a bit more about that in a later post, if there ever is one - and secondly, lots of bands I should have been familiar with years ago.

I spent close to a month listening to seemingly just mainstream music. The Killers, Pink Floyd, U2, and Guns 'n Roses got a crapload of play from me in late August/early September. If you're on iTunes, you get the option to connect to the iTunes of other PCs on the network that choose to share; it seemed as if everyone had the Killers, Pink Floyd, U2, and Guns 'n' Roses, and all four of those were bands that culture insists I be familiar with in order to get along with a world in which predominant tastes appear to be MOR mainstream.

But here's the scary thing: each of those four artists - though I would not convert to that camp of music - have their share of good music. You can't help but go back to the Killers' inoffensive dilution of Joy Division and New Order through Interpol. Provided you pick the right Floyd record, you can't help think they began as a band that was far ahead of their time. Provided you pick the right U2 record, you can't help think that they did a passable job combining post-punk ethic with arena-size rhythms and choruses... and can't help but be surprised that they're really a Christian band passing for normal. I can't vouch for Guns 'N' roses, though; the dichotomy between the power ballads and the big-nuts rockers is rather hypocritical (but that's another post).

Next time around we'll get to an examination of the new music.

Damn You, Pitchfork!

I read a review on Pitchfork today for the Boston-based band Hallelujah the Hills, who released their most recent EP as a free download. For Pitchfork, the 7.0 rating they gave it is relatively low - but it's free music and the review made it sound like electronic nerd-pop a-la Of Montreal meets '80s-period They Might Be Giants at the local independent bookstore by focusing almost exclusively on the lyrics and the singing.

Fortunately, it's not much like that. Consider if the Arcade Fire wrote a more literate version of Funeral during their alt-country phase (see the widely-circulated 2001 demos - link does not go to a download, as many of the download links available online are dead. If you're interested, I can upload all ten demoes). Consider the psychedelic horns and wild lo-fi distortion of Neutral Milk Hotel. Consider all this distilled into seven very short baroque pop tunes that could have just as well been imported from Kevin Drew's Canada. Then it might be a bit clearer.

The songwriting's in top form and the inclusion of a live track (from a performance at the Middle East) at the end does not feel like filler. It's what free music should be - a sample of a great band (even though Pitchfork reviewed this, it was the bottommost review for today) yet to be discovered.

Download from the band's site HERE. They even give you audiophile snobs the choice between lossy and lossless. How nice is that?

Revisited: Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation

With the prospect of a new record by the Portland-based Blitzen Trapper - who just took the plunge into the world of the mainstream by signing with (relatively) major-label Sub Pop Records - it would be a good idea to look back at last year's Wild Mountain Nation. I wasn't blogging when I got hold of that record last fall (and probably for good reason - no more than two people show up here), so any ideas of writing about it them were nonexistent.

Pacific Northwest experimentalists Blitzen Trapper walk a very fine line in their 2007 release Wild Mountain Nation. Their songs totter and swerve on the boundary between familiar classic-rock and psychedelic rhythms and wild, uncompromising experimentalism – often within the same 30-second passage. What begins as a coherent song – or a mere resemblance of such – often deconstructs itself into a meterless, tempoless void: the primal ooze out of which the music we today call rock originally emerged. Even when sticking with the familiar, the band coats it – perhaps the Byrds-like guitar on the title track – with layers of lo-fi grit, atonal keyboards, drums beating as if to other rhythms, and guitar noise straight out of the Slanted and Enchanted playbook.

Blitzen Trapper’s blend of ‘90s lo-fi ethic, psychedelic country, and deconstructive art-noise is extremely strange the first time around. The Pavement comparisons that Pitchfork & Company associates with this band don’t exist at first, but inch themselves out more and more each listen. But if you’ve got no choice but to demand a comparison to Pavement, think of how they might have played Range Life if it were on a Slanted and Enchanted that was not made in the shadows of the Fall.

Even though I really liked this record, not everyone is going to warm up to Blitzen Trapper. If you’re unfamiliar with them, Pavement is a good starting point; their debut Slanted and Enchanted is one of the few historically significant records that still sounds exciting - even fifteen years after its 1993 release. Deerhoof’s The Runners Four exists on the same boundary between the familiar and the experimental, and (if you can get over the lead singer) is far more immediately rewarding listening.

Rating: 8.3/10

[edit: That's only 0.2 points away from Pitchfork's verdict of 8.5 on the same record. That is rather scary.]

P.S. If you're interested in the new record, people have been talking about the song "Furr" (also the title of the new record). Try Here (You Ain't No Picasso) to get an MP3. The new track downplays the noisy elements, boasting polished production and an actual coherent song from front to end. The noise elements of the band are downplayed and the Sixties elements really come to the foreground.

More Twee than you'll Ever Be

What follows is a post on Radiohead. Yes, indeed, the contents of this blog post, entitled "More twee than you'll ever be"... yes, indeed, the same twee music of Belle and Sebastian (check out the Monty Python-esque vibe of that video), Beat Happening, and more modern experimentalists Architecture in Helsinki... concern Radiohead.

So I guess that's a warning, if you'd like to call it that.

Yesterday, I saw myself digging into the more obscure parts of the Radiohead discography. Though this is old news - the tape was posted online in 2006 - Radiohead did a series of demos under their former name, "On a Friday". Essentially, On a Friday and Radiohead differed in that On a Friday had a three-piece saxophone section (!), whereas that would never happen in Radiohead.

The On a Friday stuff is vastly different from early Radiohead. Which connects the whole twee thing to Radiohead. What's strange about the 1988 demo is that it shows that Radiohead's origins are in the twee pop movement. That makes sense, though; Radiohead were concieved as a guitar -based band. And that Radiohead changed their sound quite considerably before what we consider as their debut, the grungy "Pablo Honey"

Personally, I've always been dissappointed in Pablo Honey - as have most people who listen to Radiohead. But listening to the really early stuff puts pablo Honey into a different light. Now, Pablo Honey is not, as I might want to believe, a band trying to find their sound - the search more evident in the '88 demo - but a band that's regressing in the apparent search for mainstream success. Pablo Honey's not just disappointing anymore - it's disgusting.

What's really strange about these demos is that they eerily resemble Belle and Sebastian - a band that had not been concieved at that point in time. With "Happy Song," it's the prominent horn choruses, the sixteenth-note rhythm guitar, the bright production, and the conventional chord progression. With "Sinking Ship," it's more of a Belle and Sebastian meets R.E.M. hybrid.

The middle track, "To be a Brilliant Light," sounds more like Pink Floyd scoring a daytime soap opera and drops the whole twee thing altogether.

Do check these out - they're actually quite good.
Radiohead/On A Friday - 1988 Demos (13.44 MB, 3 tracks, 9:59)