'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Well as most probably know Godspeed You! Black Emperor has a new album out. And I don't yet have it. I was thinking of heading down to Other Music downtown to get it on vinyl, but then I remembered, oh wait a second, I don't have a record player. Which made me think that maybe I should get a record player, but then that reminded me that I don't have good speakers. So that pretty much defeated my mission to get the new Godspeed album.

But in any case, their new album is called 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! and it includes four tracks, two of which, if I understand correctly, are older tracks they were playing live back in the early 2000s, in their first incarnation. The track "Mladic" was originally called "Albanian" and is apparently a reference to Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb accused of committing war crimes in the early 1990s.

OK, OK, since I wrote the last two paragraphs, I gave up on my quest for a record player, and instead downloaded the album and I've listened to the album a couple of times. In fact, I'm listening to it right now. It's really fantastic. I was a but lukewarm on their last album Yanqui U.X.O. ten (!) years ago (although it included one of my favorite Godspeed tracks "Motherfucker=Redeemer"). But this new album is much more compact, produced much better, and most important, the two tracks that make up the heart of it are just perfect. They don't outlast their welcome. "Mladic" (aka "Albanian") is the more heavy track, reminding me of an army of Black Sabbath guitars stuck in Morocco. The latter track, "We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the more melancholy of the two, but still heavy and discordant in places. It's also a bit more complex, moving through different movements and moods, some sinister, some sad, as it sails towards its inevitable conclusion. These two tracks are rounded out by two shorter drone-ish pieces which are actually quite interesting. I'm not a big fan of the drone, but these two drone-tracks are sequenced well, in the sense that they serve as short periods to recover from the long 20 minute epics. It gives you space to breathe and regroup before heading into back into the vortex world of Godspeed.

For those interested in my earlier musings on Godspeed, I had a long love letter to Godspeed from a couple of years ago. You can tell I really liked them (ahem). I also felt strongly enough to name Godspeed's 2000 album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven my top album of the entire first decade of this century. I think I'll stick by that choice still.

All four tracks from the new album are streaming here, but I don't know for how long.

I will still buy the vinyl version, but that might have to wait until I buy a new record player. Readers of this blog are invited to suggest relatively inexpensive models to buy. I'm not an audiophile but I do appreciate warm/good sound. I'm thinking something in the range of $200. Any suggestions???

Steely Dan - Home At Last

Bernard Purdie is/was one of the coolest drummers around, having played in the 1960s with Aretha Franklin and James Brown. Shamefully, the first time I heard his stuff was on the Steely Dan song "Home At Last" from their classic album Aja (1977). There's a pretty cool exposition below of exactly how he played his so-called "Purdie Shuffle" on the song:



The song itself is a brilliant (both in its composition and how it's so concise) extrapolation of Homer's Odyssey, about Ulysses and his journey home after the fall of Troy. There's a bit of wanderlust in the epic poem, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the smartass geniuses behind Steely Dan, give it a perfect hipster summation:

Well, the danger on the rocks is surely past
Still I remain tied to the mast
Could it be that I have found my home at last?
Home at last.

I've always identified with that. Home is where your ship is. Like all good Steely Dan songs, it includes a word, "retsina," that you've probably never heard before ("She serves the smooth retsina"). Retsina is apparently a Greek white wine which has been made for at least 2000 years.

The song also boasts one of the most awesome guitar solos in classic rock. I am not a big fan of the Fender stratocaster sound (although I do own a stratocaster myself) but in "Home At Last," Becker turns in a beautiful, almost provocative performance that transcends the blues notes the Strat is known for, and heads off into an entirely different zone. It's like the guitar itself is on the rough shoddy seas with you. Hear the guitar solo below at 3:30.

Aja has some fantastic songs, but "Home At Last" is one of the best--it's the pinnacle of classic adult '70s pop music: there's a big meaning to the song (Homer, Odyssey, Ulysses, etc.) but you don't have to know anything about that stuff. Just tap your feet and shuffle along to the Purdie Shuffle. You'll find yourself rocking back and forth wherever you are.

København

Oh I forgot to mention. I'm in Copenhagen right now. That's right, Copenhagen. The one established in the 11th century. Damn straight. And the hotel that I'm staying at? Grizzly Bear, Al Jarreau, Jethro Tull (!), and Procol Harum are playing here soon. And just because Procol Harum is playing here at this very hotel sometime soon, it's only appropriate to post this, one of the most sublime pieces of music every made.

Bloc Party - Like Eating Glass

A bit of unfashionable nostalgia here, but this is the first track off one of my favorite albums of the early 2000s. They're still around and apparently have a new album out called 4, but I haven't heard it. But the first album, Silent Alarm was a monster. Pretty much every song off the album kicked ass.

My review (from 2005!) of the album can be read here. But in case you're too lazy to go the link, here it is:

Like many of their contemporaries (and indeed, much of what passes for the popular end of non-mainstream music these days), Bloc Party are firmly derivative. And that's really another bigger story about why this is so. Why are the "hip" guitar-based bands of today, to the very last one, all copies of replicas of imitations of tributes? So, really, in order to properly evaluate Bloc Party, you have to already begin from the assumption that what they (and Franz Ferdinand, Art Brut, Radio 4, the Strokes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, !!!, Arctic Monkeys and all these millions of shitty bands) are doing has been done, done, done before. Working within that context, Bloc Party are pretty good. Appealing to an '80s vision of high energy guitar-based pop, they write good melodies and kick some ass, combining the two in a euphoric rush in songs such as "Like Eating Glass," the opening and best track on this album. The rest of the album really doesn't catch up after that, but it doesn't get boring either; in song after song, they steer their muse from soft ballads to four-on-the-floor power pop wrapped in catchy melodies and the aspiration of saying something "deep" (which they don't). But I really like them. They recreate a fond memory of some sort of imagined nostalgia without being too regressive and they do it quite well. I saw them in concert on September 9, 2005 here in New York and they were loud, the drums of  "Like Eating Glass" reverberating loudly through the auditorium. The whole show was a manic pop thrill, guitars moving through speed and melody for an hour-and-a-half. If you like somewhat intelligent melodic power pop, pick this up. As a sidenote, they had this album remixed by a number of artists such as M83, Four Tet, and people like that. According to some, the remix album (Silent Alarm Revisited) is as good if not better than the original album.

Slowdive - Rutti

Well it's late at night. Thinking, missing, hoping, and (soon) sleeping.

Any Color You Like

Taking a break from listening to Merzbow and Ty Segall Band's Slaughterhouse, I've been recently jamming to dad rock recently. OK, maybe not the Springsteens and Wilcos of the world, but close enough: Pink Floyd. I've been on a massive Floyd bender covering everything from "Arnold Layne" all the way up to The Final Cut. What impresses is how creative these dudes were. Syd, Roger, all of them.

So this brought me square-and-straight with a question about music that has been bugging me recently. What if you like something, REALLY like something that everybody else really likes too. I think all of us people who love music, at some level, create an identity around music. And that identify is often based around the notion that music is intensely individualistic. When most people don't know or haven't heard of the music you like, it's not necessarily a negative thing. In fact, it can be a positive thing because it makes you feel a bit like you have good taste, not like the "masses." But what if your favorite album is something that everybody knows and loves? What if your favorite album of all time is Thriller? Or Celion Dion's Let's Talk About Love? Well, I suppose that means one of two things: that you have tapped into some wavelength of mass communal harmony that makes you closer to the rest of humanity; or that that album was actually so good, that even with your discerning tastes, you just can't resist it. It's just deliciously good! What can you say. Let's Talk About Love.

So here I am to confess my love for Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. It has sold 50 million albums. Bonehead jocks, dads who wear cutoff jeans, women who wear lots of hairspray, writers for Rolling Stone magazine, babyboomers by the millions, i.e., all the people I despise, love this album too.

But I do too. I don't know how to get out of this one.

What do I like about it? Well, there are concrete memories attached to it. It was one of the first albums I remember looking forward to listening to. When I was 12, we had a nice little stereo system and I always had to get permission from my father to listen to it, because it was so expensive and all. So for my 13th birthday, I asked my father if I could listen to Dark Side of the Moon all the way through on our new stereo really loud. And I did. That was the first time I really heard music loud, surrounded by sound. I've been hearing that album a lot since then, and I'm pretty old, so that's a lot of years. For some reason, I never outgrew it, never forgot about it, never got sick of it. I mean I didn't listen to it all the time, but every so often I would put it on, and it would really enjoy it, just like when I was 12.

I don't want to deconstruct the actual album but I will say that the lyrics themselves are rather simple, but also universal. You don't have to have a Ph.D. in English literature to understand it all. It's perfect for a teenager. But it's also perfect for a middle aged man. There's a kind of existential ennui in the album, a weariness about life and death and all that goes on inbetween the two. Not one word is actually out of place in the album, and surprisingly, there's nothing on the album that makes me cringe (the way, I'll cringe when I hear some lyric from a U2 song that I used to like, or worse yet, something by Tool). Roger Waters' words are very clear, without artifice and they understand the value of economy. Consider this brief couplet from "Time":

Every year is getting shorter / Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught / Or half a page of scribbled lines

It's like something straight out of Watership Down or high school poetry but it doesn't sound so bad actually, especially when you yourself are caught in the inexorable march of having to give up your dreams because you get older.

The music is very, um, classic rock but it has a kind of imaginativeness that is leaps and bounds above the generic garden variety 1970s stuff, first because there are no long wanky guitar solos or just general musical wankery. It's all streamlined into a brief little chunks, never outstaying its welcome. In fact, one of the things I still can't believe is how much they packed into 43 minutes or whatever it is. There are several albums worth of ideas packed into that single piece of music. And although on one level, it's a bit conventional, if you really want, you can also go find some "edgy" stuff, particular the electronic loops on "On the Run" which clearly prefigured anything Kraftwerk were able to do at the time. A bit of John Cage or Stockhausen thrown in. Plus, in the conventional songs, the melodies are great. Just great. From singalong melodies to transcendental beauty ("The Great Gig in the Sky").

Anyway, so I've been on this Floyd kick recently, partly energized by the discovery of several unofficial recordings, including a superb 1971 concert at the BBC just before the release of Meddle, a 1977 concert in San Francisco in support of the Animals tour, and several rare singles/songs from the Barrett era which I recently discovered. All great stuff. But the jewel of all these discoveries was a complete November 1974 concert that the band played at Wembley Stadium in London. It's just the four guys in the band. They play three new songs (which would eventually all make their way into future albums Wish You Were Here and Animals.) Then they take a break. They play all of The Dark Side of the Moon. Then they come back for an encore of "Echoes" (originally from Meddle). It's just a fantastically recorded show and the band are in their prime as musicians and performers. You can find most of the show on iTunes (broken into two parts as part of the extra discs on the deluxe versions of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here) so I urge anyone who likes long psychedelic music to go and get it. It is one of the best live shows I have ever heard, and that is saying a lot.

Below, I have clips of some of this show. First, an 8-minute version of "Any Colour You Like" from the Wembley show. Roger Waters' bass playing is superb.



Here is "Embryo" from the BBC show in 1971:



And finally, here's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" played at Wembley in 1974 long before it was actually recorded for release. So all of the audience were hearing it for the first time ever.

The Cinematic Orchestra

Quick post here. The following was recommended by a reader (Meep). People may recognize the song from various movies or TV shows (Friday Night Lights, Grey's Anatomy, etc.). The singer is Patrick Watson guesting on this song. The original song is from the album Ma Fleur, released in 2007.

The xx

The self-titled debut album from The xx was my favorite album of 2009. Granted, this was a bit of a guilty pleasure. At least one friend was aghast, having gotten sick of overplay. But what can I say? It's just a bloody superb album. There was much talk about how the band knew how to use space, how they underplayed everything. The rhythms, so understated, programmed and played by Jamie xx are the heart of the music, good enough for dance music but pulled back to a bare minimum. Romy Madley-Croft's chilling voice and guitar are the second weapon. And listen to "Islands" below and tell me that she doesn't have a genius-level feel for how two or three well-placed guitar notes can transport you to the stratosphere. And finally, there's Oliver Sim, the bass player whose vocals play off Romy's, much like Martha Graham and Rudolf Nureyev on stage. A bit hyperbolic, you say, but there you are. (I should mention that second guitarist and keyboard player Baria Qureshi who played an integral role on the album is not with them anymore). The album is top to bottom, brilliant, not a single misplaced song or note, and washed in so much reverb that once you finish hearing it, real life noises will sound uncannily plain and mundane. You'll want to return to The xx again and again and again, I guarantee it. These are perfectly crafted anthems, ideal for that hushed after-party feeling, best listened at 3 AM, as you wind down the night, empty bottles around and no one but you lying on your bed.

The xx have a new album out called Coexist which is supposedly even more minimalist and less beat-y than the debut. I confess I have not heard it but am looking forward to it. They are playing New York (actually the Paradise Theater in the Bronx!) on October 26 and 28, and I can't for the life of me imagine how these songs will translate on stage. We shall see. Stay tuned for a review. In the meantime, here's two old tracks:

Miranda Sex Garden - My Funny Valentine

Why are two things connected?

A few years ago, I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Around the same time, I was first introduced to Galaxie 500. I listened to their live version of "Summertime" a million times. I have no idea what the song is about, still. There are some songs that capture the way I feel as, um, a human being, and it's not about the words or the chords or the voice, just the whole thing. This song is one of those. It was fairly unremarkable on first listen but you know, the 12th or 15th time you hear it, it starts to lift you up. Especially the final 2 or 3 minutes of the song, this volcanic guitar solo verging on drowning in the thin air of the stratosphere. What does this have to do with The Lovely Bones? The story is about a teenage girl who is murdered; I guess the novelty is that it is told from the perspective of the dead teenage girl. For some reason, the two ("Summertime" and The Lovely Bones) are inextricably connected in my mind, not just in a random way, but totally so. Naturally, one must wonder if the song evokes the way I feel as a human being, does the book also? Well, I don't know, but the book sure left me thinking for weeks about death, loss, and stuff like that.

Why are two random things connected? Timing, obviously. Place is important. ("I first heard this song when we were in Washington Square Park"). People.

I don't have any real answers. I also don't have any readers of this blog, but let me throw this out to the massive emptiness that is the internet: In your life, do you identify a piece of music always with something totally and seemingly unconnected

Some Possible (but fake) Examples:

• Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" and steak burritos
• Mozart's "Piano Concerto No. 24" and the country Costa Rica
• Radiohead's "House of Cards" and Breaking Bad
• Urge Overkill's "Sister Havana" and Michael Caine

Oh, and don't forget to listen to the last 2 minutes of "Summertime," really really loud. It really is quite remarkable.