I read somewhere that this song was written over one horrible week, while the singer waited on the results of an HIV test, and his doctor flew abroad on holiday. I'm not sure if it's true, but it sounds about right: this whole song is about worrying things better, wishing for the good things in your honest little life not to be outweighed by anything else, and wishing it so bad that you'll do anything.
As Internet-era songs go, this is an oldie but a goodie. {Buy}
Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire - Grave Robbers
This is a guest post by Jamie of the previously-mentioned great band The Last Dinosaur, in which he talks a little bit about his favourite album of his recent years.
In this digital age I've found myself longing for the days where, on the long bus journey to college, I would deliberately sit alone, pushing the mini-disc player headphones into my ears, drowning out the low rumbling of the engine and the constant chatter of other passengers, concentrating on every last frequency of sound, excited about what I was about to discover.
Every album bought was paid for with money slowly saved from avoiding lunch or skipping fares, anything possible, really. This scraping-of-the-pennies ritual that accompanied each album purchase gave me an overwhelming incentive to find something, anything to love in each and every new addition to the CD racks. I could probably now look through my collection and pick out at least half that couldn't have shaped me and changed me as much as they did if I hadn't given them the time and effort to grow on me.
With the cheap, fast and easy way of obtaining new music with the introduction of the internet and, more recently, fast broadband connections I have noticed a considerable reduction in the time I allow new releases to grow on me. This negative is balanced out with the volume of new music I discover and fall in love with that I almost certainly wouldn't have come across if it wasn't for the internet.
When the idea of writing a guest post for The Torture Garden was initially suggested by Shane I originally intended on writing briefly about one album from each year of the past decade that has been particularly important to me. The more thought I put into this list the more I found myself concentrating on an album that I feel has made the greatest impression on me in the brief time I have spent in its embrace.
Lost Wisdom is an album by Phil Elverum under the name Mount Eerie featuring Julie Doiron and Fred Squire.
Using an 8 track reel to reel tape machine the album was recorded spontaneously when a gap between touring and recording gave Doiron (of early 90's indie band Eric's Trip) and Squire (guitarist in Doiron's touring band) a few days free in which they decided to visit Elverum's Anacortes home unannounced. With an absence of studio sheen the album sounds like it was recorded live in a room with a couple of microphones and it very probably was. Each song features Elverum's humble acoustic songs backed with Fred Squire's understated electric guitar with the focus falling on the intricate interplay and incredible chemistry between Elverum and Doiron's voices.
If I had to compare this album to another I would say that it inhabits a universe very similar to the wonderful Carbon Glacier by Laura Veirs, except more stripped down, more raw, more human. Beautiful in its simplicity, all but two of the songs barely reach the two and a half minute mark. Conventional structures and rules don't necessarily apply. Songs finish suddenly mid-sentence. 'Undo' by Bjork is completely re-interpreted with nothing but a chorus refrain even suggesting what came before. Elverum has always been painfully honest and autobiographical in his lyrics and Lost Wisdom is no exception. Throughout the course of the album songs concentrate on aging ("We would not be so scared of losing hair and slowing down if we knew that our hearts are not aging"), death ("Every single shape I see for the pile of dust it is"), love ("With your hand down my throat you held on to my heart and pumped blood through") and failed romance ("The house that I walk home to is in flames in this wind").
Phil Elverum has been creating interesting, challenging and intensely personal music for the past fifteen years. Lost Wisdom was released in 2008 and criminally ignored by most end-of-year lists but, as far as I'm concerned, ranks up there as one of Elverum's greatest achievements (if not the greatest). This isn't music that gives away all of its secrets on first listen. This is music that requires a little effort. Music that requires a little extra time. To lose yourself in. And if you spend that little extra time, push the headphones into your ears, scrunch your eyes together and absorb every little frequency the music may just excite you like it did when you were younger.. at least it did for me.
This is because I have heard their new record, and it is fantastic. Their debut, Faker Death, I have already praised as one of my favourite albums of the decade, and they haven't disappointed with the follow-up. They've grown more comfortable with their unique sound (horn, drums, mumbly singing and moodswinger) and figured out the best kind of songs to play with it. They even have Owen Pallett's string work adding to this mix, a touch that has helped this record challenge his own in my listening rotation this year. And the album's standout, 'Moodslayer' is utterly stunning.
O Emperor
O Emperor - Heisenberg
This Irish band are making some of my favourite music of the moment. Their single 'Po' made our best-of-09 list, and it's not a fluke, as the gorgeous 'Heisenberg' shows, occupying a territory somewhere between Grizzly Bear and DM Stith. Everyone seems to be in agreement that there's good things ahead of them.
Twin Sister
I've written a lot about this band - their free EP Vampires With Dreaming Kids was one of my favourite releases of the last year, with not a bad moment on it. Their follow up will be appearing soon on Infinite Best records - see the teaser trailer above - and I am informed that it will be quite good indeed.
Another Irish band, but miles away from the last. They've got a knack for beautifully poppy melodies, layered with blips and beeps and all sorts of nice little synth lines. 'City Lights' will stay in your head for hours, and leave you looking for more.
Since I heard 'Home' many months ago, I've been waiting for this band's full-length, and it doesn't disappoint. There's a lot to it, layer upon layer of gentle guitars, breathy vocals, and softly-played piano. These are gorgeous songs, and I will have much more to say about this record once I've properly gotten my around them.
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As promised, you can now get TG t-shirts and hoodies. They're pretty nice, and they're not too expensive either. There's one with the blog name, which I like. There's the above Right Click Save As design, for those who don't want the word 'torture' on their chest. And there's random other ones which are basically just things I find kinda funny. They're on Cafépress, and the quality of the print and material is rather excellent. Anything made from these will go towards hosting, and would make me pretty happy.
I may be obsessing over Heartland a little, but it's all I'm listening to at the moment - when I'm not working on this mammoth songs-of-the-decade list. That'll be here soon, and then we'll get back to normal, non-list-based writing.
There are a couple of good reasons why Owen Pallett isn’t one of the most popular artists in the world. His former moniker, Final Fantasy, rendered him a little un-Googleable, and marked him as overly nerdy from the outset. He titled his last record He Poos Clouds. And up until now, his output has ranged from gorgeously accessible tunes to weird songs with a deranged level of musical complexity.
Heartland changes things. He’s found a balance between his tendency to lean towards the idiosyncratic and his talent at four-chord wonder pop. Sure, there’s one track here that sounds a little like a sonic terrorist attack, but there’s also ‘Lewis Takes His Shirt Off’, a charmingly synthy number that deserves to get stuck in heads the world over. There’s ‘Tryst With Mephistopheles’, which, unusually for an Owen Pallett song, actually has a bassline. And on every track, he sings with a sublime charm and confidence that his earlier works never revealed. The result is his finest album yet.
He hasn’t dumbed down, far from it. These are pop songs, no doubt, but the use of orchestral flourishes to stunning effect here is the mark of a master. The standout track, ‘The Great Elsewhere’ is the best example. It starts with Nico Muhly’s backward keys, developing into a slow melancholy meander – until it abruptly changes pace and grows into an explosive epic with thunderous drumming, something that challenges Arcade Fire’s most inspired moments.
He’s not any less nerdy either. Heartland has a plot, something like a Flann O’Brien-penned RPG, with cockatrices and seduction aplenty. The land of the title is Spectrum, a world in which Owen is the sole deity. He falls in love with a pious farmer by the name of Lewis, who’s not entirely sure about the whole thing, and that’s where the trouble starts. Before long there’s war, rebellion and deicide.
Thankfully, it feels less like he’s walking us through this story, and more like he’s playing us the folk songs that arose in its wake. The album isn’t devoted to its plotline: it’s more of a device that allows Pallett to run free with his lyrics, conjuring epic scenes to match the music. These lyrics are good enough to make the plot something that actually matters to the listener.
Cosmetic touches like his name-change aside, Pallett is certainly taking his music more seriously now. This is an album of ambition tempered with a mature softness of touch, an album that never once seems to be trying too hard. Heartland is probably not going to make Owen Pallett into the international star his fans may want him to be, but it shows that he certainly deserves it.
There's very little one can say about Haiti, because not much can get close to the chaos and suffering at the heart of it. So all I'll see is these pictures are quite affecting, and 94c out of every dollar Partners in Health (a medical charity specific to Haiti) receives goes directly to those in need. This is better than most charities. Every bit helps. Donate here.
So here we are, my favourite songs of the year. What be they? How sound them? All is revealed. I think what strikes me about the music of the last twelve months is the blizzard of originality. An awful lot of new sounds were made. It's a little like the melting-pot at the centre of western music worked very well this year, because a lot of these songs have influences that are wide and disparate. Is this list, taken as a whole, better than that of 2008? I think it just might be. But only just. The artwork is what Dublin looked like during the winter of 2009, or what it would have looked like if that winter had an iTunes library like mine. Dublin is a city that looks its best in the cold, I think. Christmas lights suit it. I hope you enjoy the list. Thanks to everyone who's read the blog this past year.
That was the day someone had stolen my violin. I spat and raged, and paced and pounded, and cursed and spilt whiskey, and threw glasses and bottles. Outside the wind roared, and the rain lashed, threatening our windows. Someone was singing with my voice, and clapping time with my hands, so I started singing something, the first thing that fell from my tongue, and clapping as loudly as I could, and I shouted somethin's goin' on in the backyard!! and after a while, I got over it.
45. Phoenix - Lisztomania
In some weird way, this song sounds like going into a club where you go in and lose yourself in the song and in movement, and look down to see that the dance floor is dancing too.
So one day, you're playing guitar, trying to make sounds like thunder and rainfall and birdsong all at once, when your amplifier suddenly explodes, falls over, and keeps exploding. The temptation here would be to stop playing, and go look for an adult of some sort, but no! Instead you play on, using the explosions as rhythm, a kick drum beat that propels you on to make this whole mess into a gorgeous song, built on the one thing you're sure of - that this, this racket, this is just another way to have fun.
42. Jay-Z + Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind
Most of this song sounds like wandering around between buildings and people, and not getting much done, sort of waiting for something to happen - but then that chorus hits, or hits back, a reaction to any sort of inactivity, at anyone who's not smiling, or at least hoping. That chorus is something special.
In the early hours of the morning we left the party, and started walking, and we walked all day. By the time we got back to our hometown, a shut-eyed little suburb out on the outskirts of the city, we noticed that things had changed. People were standing around, everybody we knew, or their parents, moving in lines, working in groups, working on buildings. It was like old footage of rubble women rebuilding cities after the war, but now they were fixing everything that had seemed to have gone wrong, removing the cracks in windows, polishing the signs in bus shelters, cleaning streets, replacing racist graffiti with smiley faces. We walked past them all, trying to take it in, but the long night had left us with heavy eyes, and we were ushered to bed. By the time we woke, the town was shadowed by the light of the moon.
This is a Sunday evening spent wandering around an empty home. A delicate guitar line is picked out like rain hitting the windows, leaving you content to be inside from the cold. His voice, heavy and rough at first, mellows its way into the song till it gets to the warmth at the heart of it. This feels like spending the day at home with the one you love, like any other day, but completely aware of just how lucky you are to be there.
This is Efterklang at their best, meaning: thrills, space, sounds that come up to you and sing in your ear. It's a fine song, and it's so so easy to get carried away listening to it. You want other people to be there too, you want it to be one of those moments where great crowds of people are flooding through streets, and for once, they're not searching for happiness, but bringing it with them, sweeping up all they see, everyone around the next corner wondering what the noise is, those at the last corner trying to keep up with the frenzy.
I won't say too much about this, what with it being a cover and all, and with Sufjan being capable of better things. But wow. Imagine making a song like that.
This song is good for those days when it feels like everything was better when you were too young to understand it. When you get nostalgic and remember the joy of getting up early on Saturday mornings. Sugar on your cereal. Waterfights and remote controls. And best of all, warm summers. This song is all about getting rain when you'd planned for sunshine. It's also ridiculously good.
I see this song as being a little like living in a rundown shack, putting on some music, and the frantic drumbeats seem to be like the shafts of sun peering in the holes in the roof. In a good way, obviously.
This song was recorded in the Grunewaldkirche in Berlin. It is nothing but piano and empty space. It is dark and quiet, and going into a dark and quiet church is something neither my family or I have done for some time, but we are doing it again now, both fearful and sceptical. It's always too quiet for me, too full of statues of people who are only half-there. But I like the sound of this. It's like sitting up high, by a blue stained-glass window somewhere, and staying very still. Like staying still and quiet enough, so that I am only half-there too.
This song is imbued with city nightlife. Not the drunken pub-crawling, but the lonely wandering after the last club has shut its doors, looking up at dawn stretching the night out of the sky, and streetlights still lit, keeping watch and taking care. Not drunk enough to be senseless, but enough to feel the outer world creeping in.
The love here is real, and honest, and it's not likely to give up. This song sounds like something a girl might leave on your voicemail, drawing you in, winning you over.
A woman sits in her car, holding steady, instruments in the back, driving away from the one she loves, not knowing when they'll meet again. She passes landmarks, mountains, hotels, and eventually she pulls in by the side of the road and lays down on the passenger side to sleep. She dreams that it's morning, the flickering sunlight wakes her, and she sees her car is moving, shifting gear, turning. She's sleepy, she thinks it's her instruments, taking control, and bringing her back to the one she loves, the source of all her songs and words. When she wakes up, she plays her violin, and it sounds like the one in this song.
This song breaks hearts, just for the way it gets across, quite clearly, that they can't be changed to suit anyone else. It's just as well it's inescapably gorgeous, or I'd have a hard time listening to it.
The way he sings this song, right from the start, is like he's beside you. It's something you understand immediately, like some familiar feeling, like hiding inside your favourite warm jacket, pulling the softened sleeves long over your fingers, digging your chin into your collar for warmth. That's all this song tries to be, something to keep us warm, something to take the edge off the cold, showing you the kind of comfort that comes from other people.
This song is like all those Disney cartoons we watched as kids, but all grown up, Alice going back to Wonderland as an adult. Annie Clark uses the same lazy winding tunes that my kid self loved, and wraps them around her earnest lyrics, and instrumental uneasiness. It works on me, and I remember that an adult is just a grown-up child, and I sit listening to this song again and again, loving it.
I had a dream about this song. I dreamt that way back when, whenever our heads evolved the need for sleep, things went differently, and what wakes us up no longer did - in fact, it did the opposite. I dreamt that falling asleep was a struggle, a feat of concentration, and the ideal circumstances for it were loud noises and violent movement. Like the start of this song. People would listen to this with big headphones, trying to get a bit of shut-eye, this fleet of guitars cresting waves of colour. Couples would scream at each other until they fell over onto the bed, energy expended, and they would have dreams of each other's laughing faces, because people look funny when they make loud noises. Slumber would be well-earned, not something to be staved off, but to be cherished. And people would love those who brought them to sleep as gently and lovingly as possible.
There's something world-conquering about this song, in the momentous stomping of the drums, and the simple strings, the direct and honest delivery of sweetly sad lyrics. It's some narrator standing in a room, fingers kicking and tapping across a gently turning globe, dotting different locations and memories: I loved you, here, here and here. It's the entire stretch of a love affair, holding it at both ends like a piece of jewellery, some handmade necklace filled with more love in its length of string, and flat-worn chunk of wood, than in any pearl. It's where things stop and start, showing that there's nothing separating the points where he ends, and she begins.
Hearing someone make music this inventive, irreverent and playful makes me want to go back in time with an iPod and tell someone: this is what music sounds like in the future. And in some weird, disconnected way, I'd be proud.
I have a thing about abandoned buildings. Everywhere I go, I gaze at them as though I can't stop taking them in, and can't help but imagine the last person leaving, locking the door of what was once their business, or their home, or their factory. I'll always enjoy living in an old building with scratched paint, a battered wooden stairwell, and a dangerous stairs winding down to a dank and dark cellar. It would become my home quicker than a space on the shelf of a bright new apartment block. Buildings like these have seen people come and go. The hard-working inhabitants or workers, they loved the place once, and had to leave it to nothing, leave it abandoned to nature, or vandals, or steady, unnoticed decay. You can see it easily, the desertion, the neglect, the hurt.
This song can't be listened to once, it doesn't work that way: you need to get familiar with it, let it in, until it stays on your mind. That tapping at the start, it's like your mind turning on, starting up, running your life again. These things will come back after you've forgotten the song's name, or where you heard it. And after that it only gets better, when you finally come back to it and decide that maybe it's right for you after all.
22. Super Extra Bonus Party - Comets {feat. Heathers}
As soon as this song kicks off, you know that it's one of those rare and surprising instances where everything seems to go together perfectly. Between the lunar guitar lines and the insistent vocals telling us to close our eyes, the entire mood of this thing is like being out on a summer night, at some vantage point over a city that once felt new and strange, but suddenly feels like it's yours. It feels like your home, where your friends are. And though it's starting to grow cold, you'd rather stay, because you like seeing it like this, everything at once, not as big and distant as you'd once thought. You only ever feel this for places you come to love.
This song sounds to me like being boxed in to some old home. The drums are the noisiest thing, thin and stocky, like walls that are so close you're always leaning against them. The keys are soft and warm, laid with the vocals, soft and almost conversational, the people kept close to you. The violin groans along gently like the old brass water pipes that keep the place heated. Everything is near and close, a family of things bumping off one another, gathering speed to crash at the chorus, finally overflowing and shouting about the things that aren't right, the things that just aren't there.
If you want a band to get really excited over, if you want a band that lays their guitar squalls down over the drums, then chants wordless whoops over them, with claps, accordion and strings thrown in, then this, dear reader, is that band. This song in particular makes you want to get up and run immediately to some special place, or some special person, to start doing the kind of things that send your heart leaping to your mouth, to get a glimpse of what you've planned for it. It really is that gorgeous.
In the future, musical boxes will sound like this. The little enamel case on your grandmother's dresser, the one you claimed for yourself and brought to your messy home, that little box will click open to this song, and perfect little animatronic figures with little voices and little guitars will follow you about the house in a line - banging drums and singing a chorus as you get ready to join the day that waits outside the front door. They stand there, half watching you busy yourself with your spider-black mascara, half calling out from their tiny mouths for your attention. You put your hair up, and let it down again, and you almost forget they are there huddled behind you like mice, calling at you around corners, till they follow you as you open the door, and you feel the music change. You can feel them throw every bit of cheeriness into the song that they can muster, but they're not hiding their sadness at seeing you go.
If you've had one of those dreams, you'll know the feeling. A night when unexpected emotional intensity gets into your head, from God Knows Where. Walking around, with everything tinted and changed, same skin but a different life, holding hands, or carrying the weight. It could be some new love or just the memory of it, but it's enough to leave you disjointed and half-grieving when you awake. You walk around trying to figure out how something you didn't even mean to imagine could have left this gaping hole in your chest, and this tight hold on your heart, and all you can do is wait for it to fade away as the day goes on, like a bruise healing, or the way the creases in your pillow-case have vanished by night time.
If you were putting on a show for a friend, this would be the song at the very end, that you play while everything in the story is happily resolved. This is what it sounds like, letting unhappiness fall behind you like a leaf, and moving on. Getting out of an unhappy bed and going out in the world, enjoying it while the sun shines. Getting on a plane in the depths of winter and getting out where it's sunny. Little acts like that, the kind of things that make a good person.
The way it builds up and descends at the end, it's like wandering around a cold, wintry city, waiting to sit down with someone at the end of it all. Like doing your Christmas shopping, investing yourself in the promised joy of it all, the great times when almost everyone you know agrees to be happy by convention, and it actually works. I can't tell if those are kids shouting at the end, or if I just think they are, because they sound so sure and so content. This song is an instant good mood.
14. O Emperor - Po
This song starts off all woozy and understated, maybe a little drunk. Guitar strings are plucked like lights dancing around shadows, and the vocals shift and seethe around the lyrics, detailing the story of Po, and it's not long before you begin to feel like you're seated in the corner of some dimly lit pub watching someone stalk around, growing more and more interested by the second. It's testament to the band's abilities as musicians that they manage to keep the song this dark, and yet hike the tension as slowly as possible. It's done expertly, and it's almost reminiscent of The National, the way everything seems in line, down to the finest detail.
Every time I try to write a poem I worry about the number of words in each line and it occupies me until I see them weighed down like shelving crowded with half empty glasses and half read books. Every time I write a poem it is like decorating a new bedroom and moving into a new apartment. I wonder what little corner-hidden mistake I will allow to remain this year. I try and flatten it into what I want and cut out the bloat but some words are already worn in a loaf blooming out of its tin while baking.
Six months from now we may look at each other over four feet of silence and agree that we misstepped hoping to walk backwards together until we find something familiar. This is the same feeling.
But so far this poem seems to be going well.
12. Cortney Tidwell - So We Sing
This is one of those songs that starts with such a rush of bewildering happiness, it makes you want to run out the door in joy. It's sunny and warm and ecstatic, and listening to it the first time is a little like watching someone beautiful having fun. There's such perfection in every minute of it, the layered guitars swaying together like the folds of a dress, the vocals that jump about like words leaping between people's mouths, that you think this song could do something. If you took it outside, and sang it loudly, with everyone around you listening, you could make the sun come out, you could make the sky blue, you could make summer get here early.
11. Burial/Four Tet - Moth
This song is for dancing, but also for flowing drunkenly down a street, walking beneath the streetlights of East Berlin, looming like soldiers, spilling yellow onto the street, oil and light mixing by the footpath. You look ahead and see young men crouched by a wall, writing something indecipherable. You look up and see a single red light blotting above everything in the distance, and the buildings around you stand tall and crowded, a city falling into itself. You stumble on the cobbles, and notice the beat in this song, hidden in some basement club. You want to dance with someone, but you've been alone all night.
10. Bell Orchestre & Elizabeth Powell - Lazy Love {live}
The beauty embedded and ingrained in every line of this song is oddly familiar. It's like something completely aware and accepting of its circumstances, its limited life, its inevitable defeat by it. But until then this love is supreme, standing firm and proud, like a statue by the ocean, lashed by wind and rain, but pointing out to sea nonetheless. That's the love here, a heart that doesn't quit for a second. And fuck, just listen to that chorus.
This might not technically be of this year, but I only found it this summer, and I'm such a fool for love songs like this that I'm willing to overlook 'Elephant', which may be the best thing Bell Orchestre have ever done on their own.
9. Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move
The sun came up, quickly at first, then slowly, travelling towards me as I walked on, amongst damp and glistening blades of grass, and insects heading homewards, dropping their heads into the sticky earth, and then, in a good mood, and remembering I was writing all this, I made all the flowers around me bloom in vivid and gaudy colours, like drips from some melted rainbow, surprised by my morning sun. I headed away from the dying night behind me, and taken up with a sudden love and ecstatic joy, I began to run and leap and fly in little bounds, and the birds wheeled in the sky and clouds formed and dissolved sadly, and the sun burned fiercely for me, and in the distant greatness the few stars that remained exploded or didn't and every molecule of my being hummed with some content smile, and happiness bloomed out of everything! And I wanted to take that exclamation mark I just created, and place it as a cloud in the sky for all the country to see, and I did. Or maybe I just listened to this beautiful, beautiful song a few times, and let my mind wander.
The glorious melody that takes off a minute into this song is like an answer to a distress call, but not one of panic, or worry. It's like some small consolation, a reassurance, a you-are-not-alone. It takes this song, unassuming in its jaunty little rhythm and two-chord switch, and rises above it, turning the scene inside your head from a worrisome little bedroom song into something more epic, and expansive, a landscape of valleys and the echos that flow between them, a landscape big enough to fit such a call. More and more voices rise up light like kites, or heavy like balloons, until everyone knows that everyone knows they are not alone.
7. Animal Collective - My Girls
There is a moment here - 1.27 in - when the song starts up like someone has lit a fuse. After that it becomes something incredible, the sound of beautiful melodies battling in space, and even though that's paired with a simple declaration of a father's love for his family, it seems to fit perfectly. To the moon and back.
You may think, at first, that this song is a bit of a meandering old-timer, repeating itself. But you'll wake up one morning, and it'll be there with you. You'll go about your day, and every little tap you make will be the snare here, starting a beat and bringing you along. You'll hear that hook floating around in the background everywhere you go, and you'll put the song on repeat until you know it off by heart, and it will keep you warm.
What's that? Yes, I've taken this test many times, and it was the best thing I ever did. One more question, and yes of course I will answer a few for you. If you could go back and do something differently, would you? Sorry - just a minute please, the question's not finished. If you could go back and do something differently, would you - would you spend more time with your mother? Would you have spent more time on that poetry, would you have gone walking in the hills near your family home? Would you have kissed that girl who was too shy to tell you how she felt? Would you have made sure you never ever said I love you without meaning it? I can see that this question has upset you. It is a rather long one... But not to worry, we have the perfect way to fix that sadness that rests on your face. Here, listen to this song. It has the answers - not necessarily the ones you want now, but something to help you find them. Apart from that, don't forget that it's summer. It's your time of the year, the sun is here warming the ground beneath your feet. And remember: you can never say no to a girl in a summer dress. I think that's what the song is really about, actually.
If, like me, you've found yourself staring out your bedroom windows lately wondering how to make sense of such massive accumulations of snow, and such unrelenting cold, here's a song to help. This is what it would sound like if the snow talked back, and showed you all the fun to be had, finger-numbing cold or not. It's -17°C outside, but my friends tell me about the best hill for sledding, and where the best snow is to build big snowmen. That's what this song reminds me of: a little like if snow came with instructions for use. This is how music helps us make sense of new things that seem big and overbearing, snow, or love or other weird natural phenomena like that.
'Red Feather' is both achingly sad and glowingly beautiful. It's sung by Timmy Gallogly, from whom (unlike Timothy Dick, the band's main vocalist) I had heard little before this record. It's simply astonishing, the kind of gentle epitaph to a faded relationship that just gets into you to become the tear in your eye, the lump in your throat, the pounding in your chest. It's got some of my favourite lines of the year:
"Phoenix can pick herself up off the floor / that don't mean she's rising again Go on red feather, fly off out the door / I can never make you happy again"
The now-released album version is better, but for most of the year I was in thrall to this live version, loving it for its energy, its devotion to every single beat, the precision it gives to getting everything right. And the song itself is perfect, note for note.
The finest song on the finest album of the year. It starts, gentle and lonely, a three chord movement, like a musical figure falling into bed from exhaustion - but from here it goes many places. A sinister cavern of noise, a sad moment in a familiar place, a grim realisation. There are refrains that bring us to think of ourselves honestly and without fear, the blue light, the home town. And it ends with the singer bringing himself to the fore, addressing himself by name and suddenly pulling the listener in close, in a shock, making sure they can see what's been going on before their eyes.
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That's that. I know 46 is an arbitrary number, and I could probably have stretched it to 50, but I didn't feel like stretching it. I hope you like the artwork; you can compare them with the originals here if you like. Again, thanks for reading!
As of yesterday, Heartland is now available to buy online. There's a lot to this album, apart from it having just set the standard for 2010 exceptionally high. While I'll be going on and on about the music at a later date, the album has a storyline that's worth a closer look.
"Spectrum! Is anything more beautiful than failure?"
Essentially, Heartland is about a fictional world, by the name of Spectrum. This world is populated by people basically modelled on Owen Pallett, who is their sole deity. It probably looks a little bit like this:
There are several characters, first introduced on the EP Spectrum, 14th Century:
Owen Pallett: musician, narrator, and the deity in Spectrum. As a God, he seems a bit tempestuous, with "a temper as shiny as any bling", as he declares on 'The Butcher'. He likes the fact that he is completely in charge of this world, stating it as nerdily as possible: "all your bases belong to us." He seems slightly ambivalent about the people, but he falls in love with a heterosexual farmer by the name of...
Lewis: who is flattered by the fact that Owen is lavishing him with attention, but also a little unnerved. He also happens to be ultra-violent. So when all this attention gets to him, he goes a little crazy, and as Owen puts it: "climbs up a mountain and disembowels me… and that's the end of the album!"
Blue Imelda: Not much to say about her, apart from the fact that she's the saddest bitch in all of Spectrum. This is apparently due to the fact that she's not getting any. She seems to be lusting after Lewis, but Lewis is devoted to his religion, declaring that he'll "keep myself as pious as my body will allow." As he sees it:
I am just a farmer, and the body of a farmer / Has one eye on the pussy and the other on the plough
Lewis seems to view her as dishonest and dangerous, and making serfs of the people of the land.
No-Face: he is the cockatrice mentioned on both the album and EP. A cockatrice is a mythical beast, popular in modern fantasy games, that can kill you if you see its face. He also seems to be a kind of false prophet, attempting to lead Owen and the other people of Spectrum astray:
Why can't these people see? Theirs is a life of mimicry...it isn't poetry, it's an orchestration, orchestration of their own demise!
When it comes to interviews, Owen is pretty reticent about the details of the plot, preferring to "let the album speak for itself." But the story comes through with a close reading of the album's lyrics.
Lewis has left his wife and daughter to properly devote himself to religion, after a spiritual experience that struck him when he realised his own mortality:
Until the sun rose crimson Crept across my limbs and I saw that they were earthen That they decay and worsen
Much time is given over to Lewis' relationship with his deity, and how it sours when he realises he can't quite process the attention he's getting. He takes off his shirt, and is perturbed to realise that his god is staring at him somewhat lustily. Where he once declared his love for Owen, he eventually grows fearful, and resentful of the fact that his "every move is guided by the bidding of the singer." Finally, he takes action, attacking other characters as Spectrum is plunged into war and bloodshed, with thousands of soldiers taking part. He throws Imelda down a mountainside, so that Spectrum may be free. He finds No-Face, and breaks his jaw, after which he can never speak again. On 'Tryst With Mephistopheles' (Mephistopheles being Owen's symbolic opposite) Lewis considers their relationship up to this point. He declares:
I've been in love with Owen ever since I heard the strains of Psalm 21.
You have granted him the desire of his heart and have not withheld the request of his lips.
But that is exactly what Lewis refuses on 'Lewis Takes Off His Shirt':
I know what you're looking for, and I'm never gonna give it to you.
The relationship has changed: Lewis, having given up his life and his family, and having resisted the (presumably rather bootylicious) charms of Imelda, finds that his god is obsessive and petty, adoring Lewis in the present, but ultimately indifferent to the eventual fate of his creations. Lewis comes to hate him, resenting him for a life misspent. He seems to be emboldened by the implied intimacy of their relationship, but this only encourages him to take it upon himself to rid Spectrum of what he has come to see as a tyrant. After this recap, he scales a mountain (presumably 'Mount Alpentine') and plunging an iron spike into Owen's eyes, declares: "Your light is spent!" He dies, and the song ends with the words: "the author has been removed."
There are many references on this record. It’s possible the title itself is a reference to Heartland, a video game played on the ZX Spectrum. The first line of ‘Keep The Dog Quiet’ is a reference to Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body is a Cage’. No-Face’s song on the EP contains the line “Why can't these people see? Theirs is a life of mimicry”, a reference to Destroyer’s ‘Looter’s Follies’. ‘Your Light Is Spent’ is a song title on Owen's first album.
I’m not sure if knowing all this improves the experience of listening to Heartland. I love a good story arc, and I’m a bit nerdy like this, so having a closer understanding of the characters definitely works for me. If you want a far better, more in-depth analysis of the album, see here and here.
You can buy Heartland online right now. It’s astonishingly good.
Multi-instrumentalist, noisemaker, and all-round nice guy Richard Reed Parry {of Bell Orchestre and Arcade Fire} is the man responsible for some of my favourite moments in song over the last decade, and will probably continue that trend into the next. He was also nice enough to talk a little bit about some of the music he enjoyed in 2009. Here it is.
This is from 2002 but I discovered it this year and I listen to it constantly. It's immensely, transcendently beautiful. Also really fascinatingly and subtly structured so that it has the effect of being a sprawling, drifty ambient record yet with this thorough sense of movement and purpose.
Not the most original choice I know, but the only album I've discovered since I was in high school that I've listened to every day, sometimes 3 times a day or more for months on end.
Hamlet Gonashvili
A Lithuanian friend of mine introduced me to this man - a stunningly gorgeous Georgian singer who died in the mid eighties. To my knowledge he was primarily an interpreter of traditional songs from his part of the world, and didn't write any of the material he sang. It's really haunting to listen to, I can get lost in this music for hours. I think he was on the soundtrack to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I somehow never saw this until last year. And I have been watching it over and over again since.
The Watersons
I was raised on this music - they had a heavy hand in bringing about the British folk revival in the 60's/70's. My parents were big into them. I rediscovered the music in the last couple of years on my own and it's impacted me heavily. This music has to make a comeback again, soon.
Nic Jones Nic Jones - Canadee I-O
Another singer who played a part in the British folk revival. My friend Tyler introduced me to him. Timeless, pure music, in the troubadour tradition.
Now that this harsh Irish winter has caught up with my end of the country, I figure it's time to come up with a soundtrack that properly matches the blue and white blanket of colour that seems to be covering everything.
Yes, this is a little late, but it doesn't really matter anymore. I've made some very slight changes to the list - some songs I lost interest in after a while, some I moved around, but the top thirty have remained the same. 2009 has been a good year for music, perhaps better than its predecessor, but these songs take some beating. I think the best thing to do is to stream the tracks while reading. Or just download them all, whatever's good for you. All the rather lovely artwork for this list is by Anika, who also did the illustrations for 2006 and 2007. Sorry about the delay! Thanks to everyone who kept asking about it, that meant a lot. And thanks for reading.
The cold beat here at the start is to let you know that it's a night-time story, full of nocturnal sights and feelings, blurring past like wet snow. There's a familiarity and confidence in the vocals that puts you at ease even though it's a stranger's voice, and the night he is describing is one that lies ahead of you, though it lies behind him. There's some charming non-native English (I went in the shop to buy some ice) that makes you try a little bit harder to understand what's being said to you. With all these little coincidences sending you somewhere new and yet familiar, like finding a new way home from the great loud mouth of the city, it's a good thing that the lyrics and the vocals are utterly beautiful when they get to you, a sad little story fully encased in an odd midnight Christmas encounter. This song is like an interesting stranger you're glad you listened to.
This is just one of the great tracks on I Prefer Hello, a ticking timepiece, a beating heart, going through the machinations of joy and sadness and all things at once, and like most songs, it uses guitar riffs in place of happiness and daring, and forlorn melodies in place of tears and buzzing dreams, and whirring synths because they sound great.
Because I can't go bounding and leaping and flying over continents and mountain ranges and river valleys, I have to listen to this song instead. It's the closest thing.
Richard Godwin has a voice that leans over the microphone like a drunk, simultaneously terrifying and charming the barmaid, rambling and vulnerable. It works very very well here, listening to a song that's like reading your old love letters back to yourself, all lofty emotion scrawled onto cheap paper, with stained ink where arguments were set off like fireworks from sentences and letters, like kids throwing stones through windows. All the helplessness - sad and happy - of any relationship is in there, and yes, it is beautiful.
This song is much blacker than most of those here. Like many of Laura Barrett's songs it takes place by night, starless, and lit by a bare-cut moon, a flickering reflection of itself, no clouds to hang in. On it goes, all dark imagery, agnostic nights and eyes shut, until she hits that hands-out-pleading refrain at the end, surrendering, and I remember that's why I listen to that song.
It's like Modern Times all over again, pistons and rough tannoyed voices pushing you through the motions, and a song that works and works so hard it's all torn up over it. This song is slightly scary, but undeniably good.
I adore this song. I adore the eyes-down confession of the lyrics, the mumbling truthfulness, but I don't quite follow. I'm running down the street following the narrator, asking him to explain. He fell in love, but with what? Does he say he is 'soaring' or 'sorry'? If love is so fine, why does he sound so damn sad? It's not until the rest of the world/band starts singing with him that I feel it too, and it's a little like those floating moments when you breathe in and feel someone's absence in your chest, between your heart and your lungs. It takes a fine song to make both your feet move and make your heart feel like it's beating in time with everyone else.
This starts gently and honestly. There is nobody there but your little self, sitting at the piano, sitting alone: there is a tap tap somewhere in the back, behind you, but that could be your beating heart. Then the careless vocals: "It's so hard sometimes" and you think: yes! finally someone admits it. And you wait and wait and then get up from the piano. And tell it to others, and pass it on. The chorus comes, and it's a shock - the kind of sudden surprise you feel when you are angrier than you had ever thought you could be. But then back to the piano, tapping notes like raindrops hitting a puddle on the street, murmuring away to yourself like someone walking home alone, smiling to themselves. At the end of the song, the music itself is happy, if that makes sense, and if not, well, it doesn't have to.
I saw a man from Limerick stumble on stage and play this. He strummed and mumbled and crooned and finger-picked spectacularly and stayed small and almost crouched on the seat, huddled up to the microphone, and his voice sounded so little it almost echoed in itself, and with all the reverb it wore like a big old coat, it sat alone in a hollowed-out sea. I don't know how the sea got hollowed out, but it did.
Whenever I picture this band playing this song, the instruments are old and rusted, the kind of worn-down things you'd expect to see washed up on a beach. It's got that kind of sound, old, wise, something from another place, and it knows things you don't.
When will you come back? We miss you. Someone said you would be at the bus station today, I waited for four hours. Standing before every bus as passengers gushed out, sweaty and aching from the trip. No face was yours, and the last face out each door, stepping onto the pavement - that was agony. I sometimes wonder what you did to me, to make me this way. And not just what you did to me, but what did you do to the sky? Every time I look up now, it's not like it used to be. Clouds used to be full and airy, with life and light in them. Since you left, it's like there's nothing in the sky but rags. Empty, torn things, with their insides pulled out, each one floating uselessly like an old cloth in dishwater. Nights, too, have changed. Stars used to glitter and hum brightly, familiar little signs telling everyone something secret - they used to, but stars now look less like pins of warmth holding up the night's blanket, and more like the dead insects smeared on my windscreen. I can understand why you left us, but I wish you'd have left the sky the way it was.
This song nails it. I'm not sure how, but it somehow reminds me of a bus-ride through the city centre, bombing along, so anxious to get to your destination that you're staring out every window, examining every face on every corner, hoping one of them is her.
This song is so full of energy it's like it can't think straight. The vocals come in skewed, but that's the best way for them, because that's the way people feel when they're having this much fun being bound up in life.
The shaker at the start of this song is the ticking of keyrings hanging from some ignition, rattling steadily, as the great hulk of metal and rubber brings little hulks of bone and muscle and thought somewhere, on a Night Out. They drown their sorrows in nightclub corners, and nod their heads at nothing at all, because the rhythm here is so good, and it tells them to. It's so good that in the next days it'll come back to you, to make that walk home easier and quicker, to make the change from day to night more seamless and tempting. This song changes like that, it starts with someone dark pacing into the night along concrete sidewalks and dirty wooden dancefloors, and ends up with someone leaving a city as the sun rises and the night retreats to its own starry bed. And as songs go, it's pretty great.
This song is simultaneously the best and worst thing about Times New Viking. It's one of the finest handfuls of song ever written with 3 chords, but it only lasts one minute. The lyrics are barely discernable, but ring utterly true. The whole thing is layered in a mass of scratchy fuzz, which sounds more than anything like that idea of Flann O'Brien's that night was just the accumulation of black air. This song is too great to be as throwaway as it is, but I know I still wouldn't change it.
35. Sigur Rós - Gobbledigook
There's an old film, I don't remember the name of it. Someone works in an office by day and he hates it, but he goes home and has great vivid dreams of towers and skyscrapers against the bright blue sky, and he sees how the workers in their pristine white shirts are standing at the windows, and suddenly it's like a second dawn, or an eclipse, he can't tell. All he can see is the endless reams of paper, turning and twisting, in the light. But by the time they hit the concrete, he's awake.
If I still wrote with a pen, then I get the feeling that trying to write up this song would involve something little and brittle and metal going snap! and the ink would flow ceaselessly, forming and spooling on the page. And if I didn't keep writing, keep forming the endless black into words and images and clumpy similes, it would consume the paper, the table, maybe even this cold room. I would have to throw the pen out the window into the cold wind, hoping it would stop, that the gale wouldn't just take the ink and mar the landscape with it, drawing new people to look at us with blank inky faces. That would just be weird.
Not every day is a good day to confront those ghosts of our own heads, the long-dressed heroines of a long-dead Weimar. The songs on China Mountain reach out like threads waiting for the pin, bare, with voices clinging to softly-played guitars like night swimmers, treading water amid the cold reflection of the moon. They beckon you in, but not on your own.
31. Frightened Rabbit - Keep Yourself Warm
Somehow this song builds a perfectly accurate image of a cheap student bedsit, the kind I've only seen in Britain. The floating organs at the start rise from some tinny guitars like heat from a cheap radiator, flecked with the thin paint haphazardly raked across the wall. You can see someone reaching over the bed to turn the heat up quickly having rushed into the still-icy room, bringing their own heat with them, but wishing to be surrounded by more, along with whoever is lying with them. Afterwards, there are awkward silences. There's the muffled sounds from the room next door. Eyes scanning the walls settle absently on patches of sellotape and missing posters. The heat is turned off, the room is suddenly less welcoming, the bed much smaller. All this the song creates perfectly, so listen, and enjoy, but never ever leave the album playing at the wrong time. You know.
This song takes an awful long time to get there, but when it does, you'll be too busy greeting all those disparate floating vocals and guitar notes to think about how happy you are that it did.
29. Earlimart - Happy Alone
The tap-tap-tap at the start here reminds me of those nights when you almost need to be out in the rain - nights that are so warm with atmosphere, between you and someone else, that when the drops fall, it feels perfect. Like each and every one of them is falling into place, there for you. That's partly what this song is about, but the rain is there to make you feel appropriately cold - or at least to remind you that the rest of the world gets by at that temperature, and always has. All the fine singing at the end, clinging onto a melody for dear life, is to show that there is warmth elsewhere. And in case you forget it, the melody is beautiful and catchy, and it will always be there to be sung.
28. Why? - Good Friday
There's something of the joy of wreckage here, the morning after glare of sun on what you'd rather not see, but don't want to miss. It's just like committing yourself to the wrong thing, moving to the wrong city. You should never have gone, but in going, you should never have left.
This is beautiful in a very physical way, like someone discovering sex, extending their legs, arching their back, and seeing themselves in a happy new light.
26. Spokane - Proud Graduates
A long time ago I wrote about a song, and said life was made for two, a bed too big to keep warm by yourself. But this song, this one is what happens when it gets cold, and it's just some of the softest and saddest noise ever to be made with guitars, and violins, and two sets of throats with lumps in them, and everything is only barely touched and played and whispered for fear of disturbing the delicate loneliness that reigns over the whole thing, like a layer of dust.
Listen to those machine sounds that burst in and out of the song, all percussion and staccato. It's like some part of your home pulling itself out of place, wires stringing from the wall, creaking and aching to its feet, reaching out and pulling parts to itself. A television is attached as its head, a heater for its barrel of a chest until it's something that can drag itself along the floor over to you, a message on its cracked plastic lips, telling you about what you've surrounded yourself with. Telling you about the fiercely thumping heart in your chest. This song is a little compulsive in its pushiness. Once you've listened to it through once, you'll want to play it again, often and repeatedly. It feels a little like being plugged in.
This is the original demo version, and it is great, and honest. But comparing this to the rework is like thinking about when we were content to dance to heartbeats, before we learned to listen to them.
22. Fight Bite - Swiss Ex-Lover
I think, at the beginning, it's all heavenly light, like a near-death experience, weird shades of white and red, and the distant voices ringing out like some hidden choir. Those soft keyboards, mixing with the vocals to make a sound so sad, so honest, sounding like far off city lights look, blurred in the edge of your vision. The whole song is a slowed down crescendo, and it gives a glimpse of the details of life that we never see. It makes me want to put up Christmas lights in the summer, and quit sleeping for a while. I have listened to this song so many times, the world seems to slow down when I play it.
Thao Nguyen (with her band, the Get Down Stay Down) have made an album with guitars like scissors, drums like paper, and vocals like glue! Or like a big shiny cocktail with ice-cubes that you have to drink for a straw, and the ice is knocking of the glass in a weird rhythm while melting. And yes, the whole thing sounds a little drunk, but drunk with the weight of the world, and the joys of it, and possibly whiskey too. It's a little like some of the more ramshackle moments on Tales of Silversleeve, but a bit wilder, and a bit dirtier, and from a much warmer climate.
There's a coldness to this song, a slightly mechanical nature. The start sounds like someone's given their computer arms and a guitar or two, at least until the vocals enter, like a face between a tangle of wires, the moon through a strangle of silhouetted branches. And the song goes on like this, foreboding and dark, like standing in the moonlight, out in the wild, and realising, as you move beyond the silence, that you are surrounded by tiny activity, watching you.
This song sounds like all the best things about being in bed. The melody barely moves, barely raises its head to you, keeping everything it says to three basic sounds, blurring and slurring, whispering little wishes to you: "Cover me... comfort me..." The vocals are ached out, over a rhythm that glides along peacefully, and twin guitars and synths that seem to wander around your dream unseen, like little streaks of sun beneath a distant horizon. Everything seems close to you, clinging, warm and a little loving, and it makes you look forward to falling asleep. It reminds you that you can move between worlds without leaving your bed.
Don't listen to this when you're walking down the street, or you'll find your stride has got a spring it didn't have before, and before you know it, you'll have swept someone off their feet, and they'll be asking you about baby names.
There's something celebratory about the way this song introduces itself, all shimmering drums and guitars that trace about like fireworks against the inky night's canvas. Dreamy melodies are picked out and give shape to lyrics that somehow seem sweet and earnest instead of schmaltzy:
you’re my lovely girl / my thump-thump beats for you
Here, one of the most beautiful pieces that Owen Pallett has ever written is unveiled, clanging steel-pans and mournful vocals, horns and strings matching to bring down a sunset over this scene, different warm colours spreading and mixing like paint over the sky, over all the inhabitants of Spectrum. It's like a little island celebration.
Shearwater's music so often sounds like natural habitats transcribed to song. This one in particular is serene and beautiful, and has a weirdly open and outdoor sound to it, as though it was some sort of natural phenomenon. The beautiful elongated moments when Jonathan Meiburg's vocals waver and sustain are like those hazy evenings when you can feel the light changing and slinking away around you, the gentle moments broken only by piano chords are as serene as the surface of a lake.
You can hear the river here, the one the narrator sits beside, and you can see how he sets his belongings floating away on its surface. He drops them slowly, his memories, the old feelings he needs to let loose, like an old tree leaning over its own reflection, drooping and losing its leaves slowly and naturally, giving each one the time it deserves. The lyrics recall each of these little winces, sadness running through them like wind through reeds. The music ebbs and eddies. This song sounds a lot like getting lost in thought, like those days when you decide to clear out your room, and spend hours in sepia going through old papers and photos and thoughts, melancholic and softened by nostalgia - before standing up and growing new leaves, before another autumn.
This is a rare Michael Knight song, in that I pay almost no attention to the lyrics when listening to it. I'm completely won over by the melodies here, the piano lines and vocals that float like ribbons to the ground, gorgeous and ever so slightly awe-inducing.
Deep down, I always think of the start of this song as a car crash, violent, rough, oddly compelling. Then those amazing drums kick in, and the whole scene rewinds, until we're sitting with someone at the wheel of their car, wondering what will happen next, waiting noiselessly for the serenity to give way to chaos.
11. Adam & the Amethysts - The Return
This song starts by half-falling downhill, everything at once, tumbling guitars, choppy drums, and oddly calm vocals. It's spring and autumn and leaves that are dying and growing and floating along in the sunshine, silent and beautiful. Adam and his band have taken these leaves and attached them to guitars and drums and shakers and rustled them into a beat, and made a song that sounds like stain glass should look.
It starts with a melody that digs into you, or puts its arms around you and drags you out into the desert or the dancefloor, promising to push any loneliness away beyond great curtain of the night. But unexpectedly, this song has its own sunrise (00.53) and that's where it goes, violins and raking guitars, and vocals curling like the first clouds of a bright morning, all together in one paling sky. This is the kind of song that could really mess up your sleep pattern, just because it demands to be heard as soon as you get back from the disco, or before the blue of night yellows out into morning. But it is a beautiful way to start, and there's no way you could hear it and stay in bed.
First of all, right now I think this is one of my favourite songs ever. Not a second goes by in it that isn't fun, or moving, or sweet and catchy. Almost half of it is taken up with some guitar noodling, and dammit, that's okay, because these noises are soft and mix in and out of those bright, cheery vocals, like wool sewing itself. The whole thing is exactly what a sunny day should be like, spent in the company of someone that loves you. And it's got these wonderful lines:
I could wear rags Or be dragged behind a car It wouldn't mean that much As long as I didn't get dragged too far
These words, the noises here, the realisation that the song doesn't need more than two chords to make nearly seven minutes fly by in an instant, it's all the irrational thinking that love produces everywhere. This song is the sound of happiness blooming out of everything.
In adapting old dusty American-settled songs like this, Sam Amidon is being pretty damn postmodern about love and loneliness and the unbearable lightness of being apart. It's a bit easier to understand the great depth of these feelings in a historical setting, with oceans between outstretched hands and fingers, but it's not the context that makes this little piece of music great. It's all the little angels fluttering about the poor narrator's head, winging this way on that on violin strings like living puppets, attracted by the longing full-hearted thoughts that send his gaze to the ground he's found himself walking, attracted like moths to a flame. In the weird way that even when caught up in feelings like this one, so alone and distracted by your longing that it's as if you've forgotten to get out of the rain, you are a bit closer to life, or God, or humanity or whatever it is that makes such depth of sorrow possible and real.
If you want a song that seems to plant the band in front of you, stuttering away, stammering out their notes, a song that grabs you and swings you around like a child, this is it. If you want a band that sound like your best friends almost immediately, that's The War on Drugs, and their album, Wagonwheel Blues, has been rushing through my head for some time now. It's full of songs like this that sound like you've been listening to them since you were little, that make you want to stamp and shout and dance and be an adult at the same time. It makes you want acting like a child to be taken seriously. It's a lot of fun.
A song which seems, when you really turn your head and listen to it, to be put together like some kind of constellation, guitar lines and streaking synths laid out and drawn together against a sparse black background, soft and big and beautiful, and telling some simple story ...in which Todd goes out, gets moody, drunk and sick, but ends up with a girl whose name he kinda forgets. This is the kind of story that sounds much, much better in a song, and he knows it, so he gives the story guitars that are angry yet catchy, vocals that are gentle yet insistent, and a beat that just won't fucking quit.
This song is half a setting sun, with a golden guitar tone that exactly matches the ever-weariness of his voice, and massing backing vocals and instrumentation that lasts long enough to give the feeling of vast emptiness, like the desert, or the night sky.
This is the closing song to one of my favourite records of this year. It takes a melody first played in the album's first moments, and wraps itself up in it, making it bigger and bolder. It's like putting your little imprint on an apartment you've found somewhere when you move in, when you push your furniture at angles to the wall, when you've filled the kitchen with your food, when you've put up your posters and left your books on desks, when you've slept in your new bed until it's no longer new - and then the day comes when you leave. You pack up these things in boxes, tight and full and pressed down, like the feeling you get when you hold back tears. You pick up your clothes, and use the key a final time, and you undo all the things you did with such simple joy. You shut the door a last time, temporarily homeless. You bid farewell to a place you made part of you.
That's what this song, and the whole album, are like to me. It's honest and it's sad. But lately, after a difficult year, I don't mind if something is sad, as long as it is beautiful.
My father says there was snow in winter when I was a kid, there was white Christmasses, and I remember them. I remember wrapping up and opening the front door, my two little brothers stuffed inside coats like eskimos, tumbling out into the cold. Making thin and uneven snowmen, coal for eyes, dirty black watering out into the white, little teary trickles. It's a long time since I held a piece of coal. We don't live in that house now. My father also says there was real summers in this country, once. When he talks like this he talks like he was back in that old warm farmhouse, briquettes roasting and strips of yellowy fly paper hanging from the ceiling when I looked up. When I was out in the fields, he says. You'd take off your jumper and you wouldn't put it back on you till you went back to school, that was a summer. In my mind he's pausing in the field, the grass hacked to yellow straw sticking out angrily after the harvest, leaning on a pike, but he's not some young man.
This song, oddly, is both summery and wintry. It's a little like going into hibernation, no matter the weather.
When Parenthetical Girls sing about love, they don't sing about the kind of love that tells you a heart is a soft red spade-shaped thing. They sing like it's a lump of twitching muscle, involuntarily pulsing and pushing affections around like it does blood. This band makes everything sound beautifully imperfect. They play piano that sounds shaky and nervous, they sing softly in and out of key, they strain every instrument nicely, and maybe with all this, they make a point. Maybe, they're telling us, falling in love is inviting a lot of minor chords into your life, and that's okay. You can find your own happiness in them.
If you woke up to this one day, you would know that something had changed. You'd feel the silence of an empty house, and feel the calm in it. You'd feel that it had finally left, that great second self, like an unwanted guest, or a rotting old piece of furniture that was too big to get down the stairs and out the door. Gone, like a muddy puddle that has vanished in the morning sun. You'd look out the high windows of the house, scanning the yellow fields for it, and see no trace, not even a cloud in the great blue sky. No more looking at yourself in the mirror and knowing something was wrong, like looking in a rear view mirror and seeing a dark passenger that you don't want around. You'd smile, you'd want to get out and realise so many things all at once, that you'd forgotten the warmth of the sun on your skin, the tickle of the breeze on your face, you'd want to sing, and spread your good mood. And you'd be right to.
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That's that! Check back over the next few days for the songs of 2009. Thoughts and comments are appreciated, as always. I probably missed a few classics.
