thump thump thump

Me in the Phoenix, on bassline house. They only let me do these full page pieces every so often.

The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

I think it's the emotional immediacy of John Darnielle's writing. It explains the electric presence of the "we're-all-in-this-together-and-right-now" feelings that careen through an audience at one of his shows. It also explains why his songs are so exciting to hear, especially for the first time. When he writes a scene of anger, love, or addiction–and they're all precisely scenes, all songs about things that happened in a place at a particular time–the microscopic precision of the writing is what provokes that reaction that never gets old: yeah, that is exactly what that feels like. I know exactly what that feels like but I never said it to myself. Think of the cool or hot air rushing through so many of his songs, or the running water that's just a little too hot to stand. Or all of the fruits and plants. Cranberries in someone's mouth, or jasmine on his tongue. All means of provoking that internal rush of sensory recognition. His songs are tastes of things, moving air, emotional life as something present and not yet remembered. Even on Get Lonely, in which memory plays a significant role, it's more about what it feels like to be remembering and less about the content of any memory in particular.

Starting with Tallahassee (divorce), then running through We Shall All Be Healed (meth addiction), The Sunset Tree (abusive stepfather), and Get Lonely (aftermath of romantic catastrophe), Darnielle took his lo-fi guitar strumming to a studio, and suddenly his brilliant but fairly schizophrenic collections of songs became album length narratives with exquisitely crafted sonic projects to go along with them. Tallahassee is suffused with a muted, swampy grind–remember that horrible organ buzzing away on "Southwood Plantation Road"?–that reflects the inevitable sad futility of the Alpha Couple's emotional thrashing. There is a glassy, suburban sheen to Get Lonely. We Shall All Be Healed has that spiteful electric buzzing. It's not that albums are a more dignified or worthwhile kind of project than singles. But some people just cannot cope with the disappearance of Darnielle's bedroom recordings, and that baffles me. All of his studio albums are rich with narrative invention and filled with subtle instrumental or sonic choices. They're also, after everything else, incredibly affecting. Tallahassee beginning to end is about the limit of what I can cope with.

So the first thing to know about Heretic Pride is that there's no story. Darnielle sings as a new father, a raving paranoid, a rapist. The second thing to know is that the larger musical preoccupations are still there. There are many lyrical references to the sea, as well as to supernatural creatures or places. There are gorgeously arranged strings (sometimes Darnielle's ear for the sound he wants is almost too good). The album cover's threatening clouds vaguely suggest a seaside locale. Just as a shimmering, friendly body of water can darken and roll at a moment's notice, just as a monster can grin and wave or bear its teeth, so does the sonic profile of Heretic Pride tread a line between nimble, secure instrumentation and clattering, noisy recklessness.

What's also very much in evidence on Heretic Pride is the wonderfully understated versatility of Darnielle's voice. Like Bob Dylan, Darnielle is easy to dismiss as a punky, nasal yeller, and there's no doubt that Darnielle's declamatory shout is at the core of many of his best songs. But let's not ignore the fact that he can sing in a pained whisper, or with full-throated melodicism, or through his teeth. There are at least five distinct vocal personalities operating on Heretic Pride. Ultimately, this shouldn't be a very surprising observation. What on earth do you think was holding your attention on the boom-box records? The guitar playing?

So, here are a few things I like:
"San Bernardino" – This is the one where Darnielle sings as a new father. His gift for melody is on full display, and the strings, both plucked and played in a warm drone, are beautifully arranged. There's a moment where everything drops out to make way for a soft, quickly ascending, high-pitched string harmonic. It'll provoke shivers.

"Lovecraft in Brooklyn" – This is the kind of thing that nobody else can do: "Woke up afraid of my own shadow / Like, genuinely afraid." That is exactly what I mean by the sensory immediacy of Darnielle's writing. It's a cliche, but not if you're actually afraid.

"Tianchi Lake" – The piano is so graceful here. There's a terrific combination of everyday animals and supernatural creatures (namely, the Lake Tianchi Monster). And, even though it's a monster, its appearance here is magically serene: "Backstroking on the surface, moonlight on its face / Floats the Tianchi Monster, staring into space." Darnielle moves on quickly, without fanfare, to sing about a temple on shore. Things that can exist share space with things that can't or shouldn't, which sounds about right I think.

Give this record a few listens! Go to his concert if he plays nearby! I know that he's been doing this stuff for years, but he isn't bored, or tired, or running out of ideas. I think I'm done with the Mountain Goats from time to time, but really, who has been a better songwriter this decade? Has anybody even come close?

I am forced into speech!

This could be nifty, although I didn't like Pan's Labyrinth all that much. Magical Realism usually seems kind of cheap. Still. Nothing but observations for pages and pages and pages, but the things described end up overloading something as dry and limited as scientific observation. Let's hope he doesn't try to add some kind of story.

Goodbye, Babylon

This is a box set of religious music from the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, and it is outrageously, abundantly good. I bought it four years ago, and every time I return to it I'm moved, scared, refreshed. It's implications are unavoidable. One can't enjoy the flights of rapture and joy without buying into the desperation and fear as well. It's the opposite of attending mass on Christmas and Easter only, or of identifying with the Jewish community instead of the Jewish religion (both of which are perfectly sensible ways to engage with a faith). Goodbye, Babylon is something more irrational, more threatening, and as a result it's some of the most penetrating, thrilling music I know. A review which appeared in Wire included the following: "This is such gorgeous, moving, vital, sensuous music, such a testament to the human spirit that it's a shame to drag God into it." I could not disagree more. I'm an atheist and all, but a good deal of the fun of listening to this is engaging with music that thinks I'm going to hell. So fine, SAVE ME! The songs I write about below are the ones that have most burrowed their way into me over time, but there really isn't a wasted track on any of the set's six CDs. Hear it post haste!

01-03 "Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind On Jesus)" by, Roosevelt Graves and Brother
Joyfully sympathetic guitar and tambourine playing here, but the real kicker is the way the brothers' voices harmonize on the word "standing," which happens 12 times during the song and sounds like a new faith every time. There are many songs in this set where death lends joy a tinge of desperation, but here the tears in Roosevelt's voice are there because he's been saved and he knows it.

01-06 "Satisfied" by, J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers
The fiddle that introduces this song is rich, gravelly, and modest. The gently rocking guitar has an almost narcotic effect, which is appropriate for a song aspiring to the peace of death. This one always ends too quickly for me.

01-13 "Crying Holy Unto the Lord" by, The Blue Chips
My roommate Noah reminded me that the shuffle happened when the blues crashed headlong into the polka. This is impertinently buoyant, earthbound music, and to me it's like the inverse of "Satisfied." There's a line, "For if I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood," but one gets the sense that the Chips aren't really too worried about it.

02-01 "There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down" by, Brother Claude Ely
This crazed Pentecostal roar is like Phil Spector's wall of sound before Phil Spector knew what the wall of sound was. It's only guitar–driving, always accelerating–Ely and various harmonies and shouts, and handclaps, but it fills up the sound space like nothing else on this set. When he holds the word "Graaaaaaaaaaaaaave" and sets the recording equipment to a mad kind of buzzing, I'd like nothing more than for the house I'm in to tear itself from the foundations and come crashing to Earth.

02-06 "How About You" by, Thomas A. Dorsey
This guy also wrote "If You See My Saviour," "Peace in the Valley," AND "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" in addition to this one, so, yeah, he had things figured out. I like how the recording dampens the piano, and Dorsey's voice is just so charismatic and cool.


02-07 "Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader" by, Skip James
This is a dumb thing to write, but Skip James has the kind of voice that doesn't really seem to exist anymore. It's keening, almost crying, even childlike in some ways, and what I really can't get over is that it's not a voice that has some bedrock foundation deep down in the gut. It just sings itself, almost straight from the mouth. James lists family members who have been led away–mother, father, sister–so if his voice sounds like crying consider that he no longer has anyone to cry to. It's hopeless grief, which means its irrationally, insanely sure of its own impending deliverance.

02-07 "No More, My Lord" by, Jimpson
Vocals, with wood-chopping accompaniment. This one stays with you, and the little buzz that happens when a wood chip flies into the microphone is a horrifying moment of sonic violence.

02-24 "The Bible's True" by Uncle Dave Macon
"Evolution teaches man came from a monkey / I don't believe no such a thing / In the days of a week of Sundays / For the Bible's true oh yes, I believe it / I've seen enough, and I can prove it / What you say, what you say / Bound to be that way." Macon also has the best track on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, called "Way Down the Old Plank Road."

03-05 "I'll Fly Away" by James and Martha Carson
"I'll Fly Away" may be my favorite song–it's inclusion on Kanye's The College Dropout is just another sign that the guy is a genius–and this country gospel rendition is perfect, probably the best song on this set. Martha's guitar playing is so wonderfully sonorous, and their two voices during the verses know each other well in a way that I think has to be the product of singing with someone for hours and weeks and years. If you're only going to hear one, hear this one.

03-19 "What Are They Doing In Heaven Today" by Washington Phillips
This recording, made in 1928, is the first ever recording of this song. Phillips finds a middle ground here between speaking and singing which is very affecting, and I love that he's accompanied by something that the liner notes only identify as a "Novelty Instrument."

03-24 "Death in the Morning" by Rev. Anderson Johnson
Because it was recorded in 1953, this record's quality is better than most, but I think it would take a lot to hinder Johnson's voice, which dances, sobs, and roars furiously through his own version of the Conversation With Death. Death takes his child, of course, but before he does Johnson pleads with such a range of tone and personality that he might as well be the whole congregation.

04-05 "Found a Wonderful Savior" by Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet
Unaccompanied, chugging gospel quartet madness. When you don't worry so much about melody and put all of your stock into impossibly intricate poly-rhythms, what you have is compulsively music that will set you to shaking. The lead tenor's nasal voice is also pretty silly.

05-08 "Keep On the Firing Line" by Brown's Ferry Four
This number's conception of faith as battle scares the hell out of me. Merle Travis' guitar is so efficiently well played–he doesn't miss a single note–and the harmonies are so exact that it has something of a martial feel to go along with its country swing.

05-12 "I Got to Cross the River of Jordan" by Blind Willie McTell
McTell's guitar playing here is absolutely unhinged. It's a fairly straightforward blues, and he takes time to linger a beat here, wiggle a note here, overplay something there. His vocals make use of the blues trick of dropping the final words of a line and substituting a guitar figure instead, which is deliciously alienating for a listener. As though McTell weren't so much interested in communicating as in working some things out on his own. Like the best blues, it's bottomless.
05-15 "Amazing Grace" by Mahalia Jackson
Stops conversation in its tracks. I've seen it happen. She only sings the first verse, and it's all you'll need.
___________________________

Phew! I didn't even mention the sixth disc, which contains only SERMONS ("The Black Diamond Express Train to Hell" = My Fave). I've recently started reading Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic, in which he makes the point that people think rock is actually about three minute thrills when it's really about a runaway train. So many of the tracks on Goodbye, Babylon, particularly those made by pastors and their congregations, start at a given tempo and then just rush and rush and rush. I think you can find the seeds of rock's runaway trains in the kinds of insane headlong leaps made on these songs.


I'm going to start writing more about things going on in the present, but I've been listening to these for a while. I'm not done with them by a long shot.

With Odds Like That

From The Crimson, me on music videos at the Museum of Fine Arts. I surprised myself by liking "Ali in the Jungle" by The Hours, which is so shameless as to include the line "It's the greatest comeback since Lazarus" multiple times. It's like a vision of what The Arcade Fire would be if they stopped dressing up their desperate feel-good-ism with ART signifiers, which they will never do.
__________________

PUTTING MTV IN THE MFA
Friday, February 8

When I was in middle school, there was a television station called “The Box.” A kind of mass-scale precursor to YouTube, it played music videos—chosen entirely by viewers—twenty-four hours a day. If I wanted to see pop at its trashy best (apparently viewers just could not get enough of Eiffel 65’s “Blue”), “The Box” was the place.

“Mirrorball,” a series of four programs of carefully selected music videos screening at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) through Feb. 23, may be the opposite of “The Box.” Quietly, respectfully watching music videos? In an art museum? If nothing else, the Mirrorball series demonstrates just how much the music video’s cultural place has shifted in recent years.

First of all, “The Box” ceased to exist years ago, and while MTV’s TRL is technically still on the air, it’s fallen a long way from the days of Carson Daly and the ceremonial “retirings” of its most popular videos. MTV and VH1 have both devoted themselves largely to reality shows, which are cheap to make and infinitely reproducible. Music videos today just do not exist in a TRL-dominated universe.

A sly reference to these days gone by was included in Saturday’s program. In Jonas & Francois’ ingenious video for the Justice hit “D.A.N.C.E.,” two skinny males walk disinterestedly through a nightclub while eye-popping words, letters, and illustrations dance across their form-fitting t-shirts. For a few seconds, one t-shirt simply reads, “Internet Killed The Video Stars.”

It’s a nifty play on the title of the song that inaugurated the music video era, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and it’s also so true. Nestled in the warm embrace of MTV, record companies could drop millions on clips in which Mariah Carey could ride jet skis in a wet suit with a plunging neckline. Michael Jackson could seduce Eddie Murphy’s wife in Ancient Egypt over the course of nine minutes. Britney Spears could do it again—on Mars. By comparison, music videos today find themselves without a home.

So in one sense, it’s very nice of art museums to try and give them a new home. More than any other kind of institution, art museums have the power to transform the raw materials of culture into intellectually elevated Works Of Art. The MFA and “Mirrorball” make no bones about these kind of aspirations: “at their best, these music promos have more in common with groundbreaking short cinema than commercial flash.”

But do they really? At last Saturday’s “Global Selection” screening, a few of the videos on display lived up to their high-art billing. Karina Garcia Casanova’s video for the song “Disown, Delete” by the Ensemble featuring Cat Power accompanied Cat Power’s breathy, threatening vocals with grainy, slow-motion video footage of hurricanes in action. As the song swelled to a kind of breathing, desperate mass, the video showed a world pulling itself apart shingle by shingle and branch by branch. Best of all, the video didn’t try to glamorize the performer or interpret the song by adding a story. Instead, the video focused on the sound itself, and it did a perfect job.

Koichiro Tsujikawa’s wonderfully strange video for the Cornelius song “Like a Rolling Stone” was another highlight. To accompany Cornelius’ ambient electronics, Tsujikawa created a detailed, swirling world of archways, pedestals, and many small plastic humans. At the end of the video, the plastic humans turn back into rocks. Of the twenty one videos shown, “Like a Rolling Stone” least resembled “commercial flash.”

In other cases, though, it was clear that a fancy video had more to do with a band’s efforts to construct a particular image of itself. Michael Spiccia’s video for the Jet single “Rip It Up” combined video and animation to little effect. Cut-and-paste style text danced across the screen, pencil sketches of buxom women frantically erased themselves: the whole thing looked like a vulgar high schooler’s notebook collage.

In fact, there’s a whole “Mirrorball” program devoted to animation. While the technique can signify everything from gothic emoting—The Horrors’ “She is the New Thing”—to folksy good-naturedness—Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End”—the videos themselves tend to dissolve into an undifferentiated mass.

More than anything, I kept coming back to the strangeness of watching mass-culture clips in a darkened theater. One of my favorite videos, made by Jonas Odell, accompanied a song called “Ali in the Jungle (version 2)” by a British band called The Hours. The completely animated video adopts the excessive, faux-Victorian, theatrical aesthetic embodied most prominently in the U.S. by The Arcade Fire—think old-timey machines, flickering projector light, and skeletons in top hats.

The song is shameless in its attempts to inspire, with soaring lyrics like “Everybody gets knocked down / How quick are you gonna get up?”, but I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that it has been added to my YouTube playlist.

That’s the thing, though. As gorgeous and ornate as the video is, it’s the song that really matters. And a cheesy pop song works better in a dorm room or car radio than in an art museum theater. “Mirrorball” is a terrific survey of the music video as a genre, but let’s hope that these clips find a stable place somewhere out in the real world.