Anhedonia

The first song by Low I heard was the following, "Shame." I saw them live in the late nineties when I was living in Philly, opening for the Swans down at the Trocadero. They had a certain aesthetic, combining silence and understatement with violence and frisson. In the continuing search for my "this-is-how-i-feel" moments in music, I found two Low songs, one of them "Shame" and the other, "Sunflowers." I need to do a longer post on the latter, but here is "Shame," and yes, fuck you, I was (am?) of those people best described as anhedonics [sic]

Babylon

There have been many versions of this song, most notably by Don McLean, the 1970s singer dude. Here is one version, featured in an episode of Mad Men, a TV show shown here in the U.S. on AMC for the past couple of years. David Carbonara scores the music for the show.

David Carbonara -- Babylon [mp3]

Phule Phule Dhole Dhole

Below, a short scene from Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964).

The song is, of course, "Phule Phule Dhole Dhole" written by Rabindranath Tagore, who adapted the melody from "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon" by the 18th century Scottish bard Robert Burns. The change to a minor chord gives the melody a deeply yearning quality (as opposed to the more maudlin nature of a lot of his other work).

Below also, an mp3 from a contemporary Bengali singer, Sahana (shown below), who recorded this version in 2007 for her album Notun Korey Paabo Boley. More about her here.

Miss home.



Sahana -- Phule Phule Dhole Dhole [mp3]

On Your Own

reminds me of my lost years, noho '95 in particular. i miss those days... living in the moment, place to place, month to month, song to song

love

Dan Deacon

Fucking hilarious.

Haunted When The Minutes Drag

The music of the late eighties remains an important touchstone for me, mostly because I was just at the right age to soak it up, i.e., young. I was enamored of British pop music of the period but at the same time deeply identified with a completely different strand of American pop music. The former was seemingly intellectual, the performers harboring aspirations of "high art." British pop stars seem to think that they were doing something enduring, something transcending the genre of disposable pop music. Most of the American music I liked, on the other hand, was much more self-consciously low-brow. This was the apex of American indie rock, converse shoes, and stupid but awesome songs by Camper Van Beethoven.

So, recently, somebody gave me a subscription to Rhapsody.com and I thought I'd revisit the late eighties, which rock critics commonly see as a fallow period. It's seen either as the period when a lot of synthetic pop shit dominated MTV (remember them?) or simply as presage to the revolution to be ushered in by Seattle. I remember neither. For me, the revolution had already happened in my head. Music was incredibly exciting, thrilling even, between 1986 and 1990. I'm not sure that if I heard the same music today I would find it exciting at all, but that is part of what makes youth so peculiar. Youth magnifies the resonant moments, the moments when you think that a piece of art (book, music, movie) deeply moves you into believing (some would say, tricks you into believing) that that piece of art is something essential in your life. You get older and these identifications seem, not so much trivial, but unattainable. After the age of thirty, how could a mere song (a song, imagine that!) mean anything more than a pleasant diversion for three or four minutes?

So I'm listening to a playlist of commercial pop music of the late eighties, the music of my youth, but I decided to go with the British spectrum of my tastes, exemplified perfectly by "Haunted When the Minutes Drag," the 6+ minutes epic by the band Love and Rockets, released originally in 1985 on an album with the particularly unwieldy title Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. As uncool as it was to like them, I always loved Love and Rockets. Every one of their albums had some tasty morsel, something fun about it. And indelibly (and unapologetically) British. Most laypeople remember Love & Rockets for their only Top 10 hit "So Alive" but their albums were all surprisingly fun to listen to, full of wry psychedelic touches, Syd Barrett-isms, and forward-looking atmospherics. They even had a couple of great techno albums (Hot Trip to Heaven and Lift), but really, their archetypical touchstone was the first album, Seventh Dream, and in particular, this epic track, worthy of many youthful indiscretions.

The Moon Is Down

This music is so fucking beautiful, I can hardly breathe. There is a moment at 5 minutes and 45 seconds into "The Moon Is Down" when the whole world collapses around me. This, their magnum opus, they did not play last night at Summerstage in Central Park. It rained and rained like the flood. Our feet, socks, shoes, ankles were wet. The sky was like a wet hood over our heads. Walking from the entrance at 72nd St. into Central Park, we walked through puddles, ran through pathways, soaked in the wetness of a June dusk. The band were animated, celebrating their tenth year together, four dudes from Texas. We stood around until we were too tired to stand.

Here is a review I wrote of a show in Brooklyn I saw in 2004:

None of their songs have words, each piece is roughly ten minutes long. There are only two electric guitars, a bass guitar, and a drum set. The music they produce is indescribably beautiful, passing through ebbs, flows, silence, pauses, crescendos, climaxes, and wordless guitar interplays that make (and made) my heart drop into the deep pit of my stomach. There are no chords in any of their music, only notes, clear pristine notes without a hint of tremelo, but with lots of echo. The notes circle around each other, going up, going down, sometimes just going around each other in a way that is absolutely obvious but you've never really heard before. The sounds of the silences come at you between the notes, the melodies breathtakingly beautiful and...also obvious but unheard.

They did not play very long, perhaps one hour or so but performed about six long pieces ending with "Memorial," another track off their new album. Unlike the other pieces, this wasn't drop dead melancholy but rather ponderous (in a good way) and in a way that may make you think of the word "behold." Behold what, I do not know. Just Behold. The song ended in a massed crescendo which was so fucking loud, that it made me feel the Earth, my heart, my lips, my blood, and the vibrating air in the spaces between my toes, so loud that the boys on stage were maniacally and unselfconsciously pummeling their instruments which such wanton abandon that at one point two of them--the two guys with the lead guitars--tripped over themselves and landed on their asses, still pummeling their guitars into outer space drone-noise ecstacy.

Explosions in the Sky are from Midland, Texas, apparently the hometown of the country's current President.

And another review I wrote after seeing them in 2005:

The one thing that struck me seeing them this second time was that it demands something of the audience in that you have to leave your expectations of a "normal" rock show behind. There are no typical musical cues (choruses, verses, climaxes, themes) that punctuate your time in neat segments. If you pay too much attention to the detail of the music (that guitar figure, this drum break) you lose sense of the beauty of the music. In one sense to truly appreciate their music, you have to abandon the rules of musical showmanship behind. Which I suppose is why some call them post-rock (although I hate that tag in general)... If you have ever felt sad in your life, even if for a short while... so sad that it dropped the heaviness in your chest deep into the pit of your stomach, you will probably be able to relate to this music. It is music deeply embedded in the essence of what makes us sad, and in knowing that what makes us utterly sad is often the exact same feeling that makes us exult and euphoric....

At the show, as far as I could tell, they ... omitted "Your Hand In Mine," the most obviously melancholy piece of their oeuvre, a move that in some sense was a relief to me; I could walk out at the end of the night without having felt the emotions too deeply in the pit of my stomach... What I remembered were the three guitarists at the front of the stage pouncing/pounding their instruments in unison at the end of "Memorial" in a way that suggested some unearthly dance of arms, some violence so fucking loud that I left the hallroom with a high pitch in my ears. How can music so sad be so loud that it'll rip your ears out?

So today's featured track is "The Moon Is Down," probably their most illegally sad piece, ten minutes of drowning in sound, from utter silence to manic frenzy. Turn off the lights when it's dusk and listen to the way the world falls away at exactly 5 minutes and 45 seconds into the piece.

On the way home, the rain had completely stopped. Central Park was a husk, just shadows and bright lights. A taxi, dirty feet, the couch, tired as hell, far from the war that Steinbeck once described in The Moon Is Down.

Explosions in the Sky -- The Moon Is Down [mp3]

NINJA Review

So....about 18 years ago, 1991, on a really hot August Friday, I managed to find myself surrounded by what in those days, the kids used to call "alternative" music. Sounds so quaint these days. Anyway, there, somewhere in the outskirts of Dallas, TX, a bunch of us freaks were at a Lollapalooza show to witness the music of an assortment of bands: Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Butthole Surfers, the Rollins Band, Ice-T, etc. Yet, most of were really there to see two acts: Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails, bands at the cusp of very different things. The former had somehow ascended to the top of the heap of the genre, having just released the unfuckingbelievable Ritual de lo Habitual the previous year. Unbeknownst to us, they were just about to break up. The latter, Nine Inch Nails, had just released their debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, which we had slotted in along with much of the other "industrial" music around at the time, bands like Ministry, A Split Second, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, etc. Unbeknownst to us, Nine Inch Nails, led by some skinny dude from Ohio named Trent Reznor, was about to launch into some global stratospheric level of fame.

Fast forward 18 (!) years, and lo and behold, I managed to revisit both bands, just last week at Wantagh, New York, way out the fuck somewhere in Long Island. The two are on a joint tour, cleverly named NINJA (get it?). Jane's has only the most tenuous of justifications for the tour. They broke up in '91 but have been sporadically reuniting with a number of rotating bassists, since their original bassist dude had refused to be in the same room with the others. A few years ago, with a new bassist, they released a fairly lackluster album (Strays) but we have heard nothing new from them since then. Said bass guitarist finally caved in last year and decided to join Jane's for a new tour, and hence they are on tour ("the original band!") peddling songs from their three original releases (Jane's Addiction, Nothing's Shocking, and Ritual de lo Habitual).

NIN, meanwhile, has been an ongoing enterprise, a veritable mega-corporate machine that has been running like a slick well-oiled machine for nearly two decades catering to the needs of America's disaffected suburban youth. After the stratospheric success of The Downward Spiral in the early nineties, Trent has continued releasing albums every so often. More recently, he's put out a flood of new music (Year Zero, Ghosts I-IV, The Slip) that suggests that he's in some sort of creative renaissance after what seemed like a cul-de-sac. So...Jane's is basically an oldies act while NIN is still a vibrant quantity. Never woulda guessed that in '91, huh?

How was the show? Well, I can't speak for crazy obsessed NIN fans, but I confess I was blown away by the NIN show. Their set was immaculately executed, the sound was crystal clear, and the energy level was high. Last year, NIN toured with a very elaborate stage show on their Lights in the Sky tour which, I am told was "fucking awesome" (Thank you E). This time, the stage show was fairly stripped down, putting more focus on the performers themselves. Trent has buffed up several orders since he was a skinny kid from Ohio fucking with keyboards and drum machines. He looks a little scary, frankly. On occasions in his career, Trent has skirted bathos with his insistence that he is ANGRY, always ANGRY. Yet, on stage, his performance seems less contrived than machine-like (and yes, there is a difference). His vocal affectations never seemed pulled back; on the contrary, he seemed to be projecting himself completely into his lyrics, his songs, his music, and his audience, never for one second letting up. I appreciated that.

The set was heavy with tracks from the early years, particularly, The Downward Spiral, whose songs came alive well on stage often in forms noticeably different from the album versions but not enough that it rendered them unrecognizable. If the songs from The Downward Spiral were there to please the casual fans, Trent was good enough to include a slew of lesser known songs from The Fragile, the double-CD album which many call too sprawling and without focus but which, I think, has aged much better than much of his other stuff, given that it communicates an emotional and sonic depth lacking in his other work. There were also a few stray (and fantastic) tracks from later releases, including "The Hand That Feeds" from With Teeth, and a couple from Year Zero ("Survivalism") and The Slip ("Echoplex"), two recent releases that show Reznor noticeably moving away from his usual "I" centered narratives to a more externalized view of the world. Year Zero was a surprisingly successful experiment at creating a post-everything dystopic world out of music (not a new idea, but well executed) while The Slip was a stripped down album of great succinct songs, his first non-concept album since the debut. There was nothing from Ghosts I-IV, a superb collection of instrumental tracks also released recently but such ambient music (à la Aphex Twin) would have undercut the momentum/inertia of the show.

Two covers underscored how Reznor is basically the mutant child of older sonic pioneers: "I'm Afraid of Americans" by David Bowie and "Metal" by Gary Numan. The show ended with an encore that combined one of his oldest and best songs, "Head Like a Hole" with "Hurt," the beautiful (yeah, beautiful) coda from The Downward Spiral. "Hurt" is a peculiar song in the NIN canon in that it combines a mournful acoustic guitar melody with a lyric that is genuinely sad (as opposed to angry or depressed). In perhaps the two most simple yet "gives-you-chills" lines the NIN catalog, Trent sings about the perils of self-destruction, about the trail of wreckage left behind:

You are someone else
I am still right here.

In concert, it's a strange moment, like the air being sucked out of you -- even though I've heard it a thousand times. At Wantaugh, you felt the chilly air of southern Long Island, the beautiful bay, a backdrop to the amphitheater. I felt a pang of what, I don't know. I knew I didn't want to lose what I had right there next to me. I wanted to hold on.

Fragile
She doesn't see her beauty
She tries to get away
Sometimes it's just that nothing seems worth saving
I can't watch her slip away

I won't let you fall apart





Jane's came on a little bit later. Their sound mix was vastly inferior to the NIN show, since some klutz had obviously turned up the bass sound to, like, Spinal Tap levels, way beyond distortion. I have a special fondness for the band. I kinda grew up on their two studio albums, and I still think the music on those albums are unassailable, a perfect mix of punk, metal, funk, glam, and God knows what else. They were blessed with fantastic musicians, a guitarist (Dave Navarro) who knew when to pull back, a drummer (Stephen Perkins) who had a particularly crazy tribal quality, and a bassist (Eric Avery) who was the real backbone of the band, creating entire songs out of some of the best motherfucking bass riffs this side of Jaco Pastorius. They also had a crazy asshole creative genius singer (Perry Farrel) who, while barely competent on an instrument, wrote some awesome space-age lyrics, half of which made no sense but kicked ass.

Two decades after their heyday, Jane's looked more or less in good shape. Navarro looks like he's been preserved in Madame Tussauds or something while Perry looks about as skinny as ever but a little tanned and more withered. They began with probably their very best song, "Three Days," a nearly 11 minute tour de force, that according to Wikipedia is a meditation on "death and rebirth." Um, yeah, whatever. From what I can tell, it's about a fucked up menage à trois, which is, well, fine, but fortunately, the song rocks. Here is a version from late 1990. Fucking rocks.



From that, they basically ran through much of their (very) small catalog. Being essentially an oldies act means that they don't have to play their new album, but they did dig deep here and there, uncovering a couple of choice obscurities, including "Then She Did," a song, apparently about Perry's mother's suicide which encapsulates many of the best things about Jane's original run in the late eighties: mystery, storytelling narrative, and da rock and roll. You get a sense of Perry's songwriting chops when the song begins with the simple words:

Now her paints are dry...

I love how a few choice words can set the entire stage for a scene. You get the whole scene immediately. Singing to one of his lovers, Perry finishes the song thus:

Would you say hello to my mom?
Would you pay a visit to her?
She was an artist just like you were.
Would've introduced you to her.
She would take me out on Sundays
We'd go laughing through the garbage
She'd repaired legs like a doctor
On the kitchen chairs we sat on
She was unhappy just as you were
Unhappy just as you were
Unhappy just as you were
Unhappy just as you were

They also did their chilling account of Ted Bundy's killing spree, "Ted, Just Admit It" although, unlike the last time, they did not have videos of Bundy on the backscreen. The show ended with a spirited "Jane Says," the song that most people associate with Jane's, the best singalong song about heroin addiction and prostitution ever written.

On the drive home, I felt close.

Overall score: NIN - 8.5/10, Jane's 7/10

She Cracked

"Well, she was sensitive
She understood me
She understood European things
From 1943"