Indie Rock Singers

A complaint I hear sometimes when I play something a little too "indie" at work is that the singer "can't sing."  I also hear this when I play Bob Dylan, so I don't take it personally, but this is one criticism I actually agree with sometimes - often, they can't sing.

Over the course of the nineties, the inability of certain indie rockers to sing underwent a transformation - it started out with people who we all acknowledged, yeah they can't sing, but so what?  Not being able to sing didn't matter.  As the decade moved on though, people started to emulate those bands, and not being able to sing became the point.  At some point in there, some of the bands lost me.

I like Dylan, and I can handle a singer without a great voice.  But you have to draw the line somewhere.  I mentioned a post or two ago that Daniel Johnston is on one side of that line for me.  I'll put Neutral Milk Hotel on the 'Dylan' side of the line.  Johanna Newsom; over.  Bright Eyes - usually on the right side, but sometimes...

Over time my tastes (or ability to deal with bad singers) have shifted.  I used to love Elf Power, but they're on key no more often than by random chance, and the 'harmonies' can kill otherwise great songs.  I've never managed to get into On Avery Island.  Etc.  The problem is, I can handle great songs hampered moderately by a not-great singer.  I can't handle a singer who takes the genre as an excuse to sing badly.

Breakups

I'm lucky, in that I've never had a band I love break up while I'm a fan.  I've had a couple of close calls, though - when Ross Childress quit Collective Soul in 2001, I thought they were done; then Youth came out.  Also, Neutral Milk Hotel never really broke up (as it's all basically Jeff Mangum) but it's gradually become apparent that they will never record another album.

For some reason, we think of band breakups like we think of romantic ones - every one of them seems tragic, despite the fact that clearly for bands, breaking up is normal.  Think of your three best friends, think of working with them every day, being with them twenty-four hours for months at a time, and having serious disagreements about something you love, all the time.  Of course bands break up.  I'm amazed as many as do make second albums.

Still, I remember when I was seven and my dad told me about the Beatles breaking up, and how they could never get back together because John was dead.  I don't know if I cried, because I didn't really know the Beatles at that point.  But how many people did, for either event?  I can't really blame them.

I don't know where the expectation of permanence comes from - there are so few bands that last for any significant period of time, and so many fewer do so without lineup changes.  The Rolling Stones have three of the original members; Jethro Tull has one.  Clearly we need to change our expectations, see bands as an entity in the now without any expectation of permanence.  Adopt a Zen Rock and Roll mindset, maybe.

When I heard about the Beatles, I didn't really differentiate between what happened to the band, and what happened to John.  Clearly the gulf between the two events is vast, but to me (at seven) they meant the same thing - there would never be any more of this music.  When bands break up, it feels like something dying, which is ridiculous, but still true.  I don't know why that is.

Curtis Mayfield

Ah, random shuffle.  A Curtis Mayfield song that I apparently downloaded one day and then forgot about came on, and it has overtaken my brain: "Move on Up."  A fantastic piece of mid-seventies funk - not as heavy as say, the O-jays, it has some truly frenetic drumming, and a killer horn hook.  Mayfield's falsetto is worming it's way into my brain, and I've listened to the song several times today, before people at work started to complain.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine gave me a box set - "The Funk Box" - that has four discs worth of classic funk music.  It's a Whitman's sampler of funk.  This is sort of an in-joke between us, because a couple of years previously, I'd decided to try and assemble 100 songs in every genre (and thus become truly well versed in music) and decided to start with funk.  Ergo, the box set, and the (half-)mockery that ensued.

It's actually a great box set, too, if you want to get into funk.  It has the best Rick James song that isn't "Superfreak" ("You and I"); it has some Parliament/Funkadelic/George Clinton; it has many great James Brown songs (but not "Get Up, Get Into it, Get Involved" which I now nominate as the greatest horn line ever); and, best of all in a box set, it has a ton of stuff from bands you've never heard of that fits in perfectly.

I really like box sets, in general.  I got my dad a Motown box set once, that had something like every top ten single Motown had between 1962-1970.  Rather than have to track down the one Marvellettes song you want ("Mr. Postman") it's there, right between two early Miracles songs.  Etc.

The other thing my funk immersion taught me, besides the fact that the Temptations had great songs after 1970 ("Shakey Ground"), is how to appreciate rap.  I used to hate rap, on principle, but it's really not too different from funk - the emphasis is on the groove, and if it's less melodic, it's only slightly.  It wasn't until I fell in love with Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" that I could really get into the Beastie Boys "Car Thief". (Yes, I know it's "Eggman" where they actually used Mayfield's bassline, but "Car Thief" actually sounds like an old funk song, with its background singers, wah guitars, etc.)

It's this path that led me around to Danger Mouse's mashup album of Jay-Z and the Beatles.  Which I guess brought me full circle.

Why I haven't bought a New Release in a while

So the Them Crooked Vultures album is now out, and as excited as I was about it's release, I still haven't bought it.  I've listened to most of it - we downloaded it at work via the magic of the Zune pass (which is the only way Zune manages to compete with iTunes, and kind of shameful, really, that Apple hasn't attempted to match it) and I found myself somewhat underwhelmed.  The thing is too, if they'd just sort of slipped it out there, it might not have been a disappointment, but the band hyped it - in a really astute, clever way, via facebook announcements of surprise shows and the like, but still - and so you end up realizing that there's maybe three or four good songs on there.  "New Fang" and "Scumbag Blues" are both terrific, but everything else is basically a jam.

I have to be honest, I wasn't ever really thinking of buying the album the day it was released (I still might get the album at some point - it's susceptible to impulse now, and we never know where that's going to go).  There are very few bands that people buy the albums the day they come out, and those are almost without fail your favorite bands.  Buying an album the day it comes out is something a band earns, over time, and the list is short.  For me, Radiohead, Spoon, the Shins, maybe Iron and Wine.  That's probably it.  Smashing Pumkins lost it a while ago.  Collective Soul used to be on the list, but for whatever reason they aren't anymore (I do have the new album though - Collective Soul isn't my number one band anymore, but I still own every studio album they've ever produced.)

It's a trust issue, really, is what it comes down to.  I remember when In Rainbows came out, and they'd announced that you'd be able to buy it online for whatever price you wanted, a guy on the radio (a real obnoxious one who not coincidentally is no longer on air) said that Radiohead fans would buy anything Radiohead put out.  Thom Yorke making noise on an oboe for an hour; anything.  I remember thinking at the time that it was true, to a degree - I can't think of a band with more fans who'd buy the new album, sight unseen - but that it wasn't the point.   Over seven albums, they've earned it now.  It's not so much that they're a known quantity, but I trust them not to put out crap.

I love Queens of the Stone Age, and was excited to hear they have a new album coming out.  Based on that, I'd probably have bought Them Crooked Vultures no questions asked.  But I heard some of the songs, and didn't fall in love with them, and I remembered that Dave Grohl was involved, and that Foo Fighters have not earned, for me, what QOTSA have earned.

This is why I find it hard to get excited about New Releases.  Vampire Weekend has a new album coming out, but I'm not jumping up and down because I know I'll approach it with trepidation, listen to one or two songs (I already do like "Horchata," though) and slowly make up my mind.  This is how I treat old albums that I'm just discovering - why should it be different with new albums?  I'm still not sold on Dirty Projectors.  I've bought half of The Idiot one song at a time (I just barely bought "China Girl").

Still, new Spoon in January.  That, I'm excited for.

Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston is a name that comes up a lot when you start digging around in indie rock.  Just about everybody has dropped his name in an interview at least once; Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with his name on it.  And he's written some killer songs: check out Yo La Tengo's cover of "Speeding Motorcycle," or M. Ward's version "I Go Home"; Sparklehorse and the Flaming Lips teamed up (as SparkleLips) to cover his song "Go" for an album of cover songs called The Late Great Daniel Johnston.

You might have noticed that all the songs I named were cover versions.  There's a reason for this.  I can barely stand Daniel Johnston's music.  His (original) version of "I Go Home" is lo-fi - it sounds like it was recorded on a boombox (a la the Mountain Goats) - and is just him singing over a very percussively played piano.  His voice has a Neil Young-like whine to it, and lasts about thirty seconds on the stereo at work.  Not that it's without its charms - there's a sweetness to the way he sings the chorus that is disarming - but this is my favorite of his recordings, and I can barely stand to listen to it.  He version of "Speeding Motorcycle" sounds like it was played on a cheap Casio keyboard - it honestly sounds like a child's toy.  I probably wouldn't like these songs at all if someone with more patience than me hadn't sifted through his catalog for the true gems.

I don't mind lo-fi, honestly.  I like Sebadoh (in fact I think "Flame" is one of the best indie rock songs ever) and the Mountain Goats.  But I don't understand it as an aesthetic - where you like a song because it's lo-fi.

There are a lot of people like Johnston in my collection - Syd Barrett, Skip Spence - and others who I should have but don't - Roky Erickson, Jandek - and they all have one thing in common: they're outsiders.  For a long time there's been an obscurist streak going through the serious music fan community, and so you find records of schizophrenic or bipolar semi-hermits thrust into your hands with the assurance "listen to this, it's great."  Often you're told you can "hear their pain" but even if not, there's some attraction there.  The most dangerous word, though, is honest.  I don't know what honest means in this context, but lo-fi is "honest" and so is outsider rock.

All of this is fine.  I own Madcap Laughs and there's a couple of songs on it I really enjoy, so I certainly won't begrudge someone whose tastes venture a little farther out than mine.  But I think there is a group of people who don't like this music, but keep trying to, because they're supposed to like it.  Because it's "honest" and "real" and not like (to pull an example out of the sky) Kings of Leon.

Some people genuinely like Daniel Johnston, and I hope he keeps making records that they love.  But I, for the most part, just can't take him unless he's been filtered through a layer or two of M. Ward or Yo La Tengo.

Banjo

The banjo has a ridiculous reputation these days, bringing to mind for most people the Beverly Hillbillies.  The fact that the banjo is associated almost totally with bluegrass is probably because of Earl Scruggs, the first great virtuoso of the instrument.  But, in the last decade or so, the banjo = bluegrass association has faded.  A little.

It probably started with Dave Matthews' occasional associations with Bela Fleck.  Bela is one of the most amazing musicians I've ever seen - I once watched a video of him playing "Cripple Creek" with an Indian tabla drummer, and it ranged from old-timey folk, to bluegrass, to raga, to ...  His music has very little to do with twangy bluegrass, and he's shown that the instrument is capable of being a lead instrument in a rock or jazz context.

Then Iron and Wine came out.  Sam Beam's fingerpicked guitar and slide guitar playing were wonderful, but on his debut album, it was his use of the banjo for what would traditionally have been guitar solos that was the most revolutionary.  He eschewed bluegrass rolls, or clawhammer rhythm playing entirely, and played melodic lines on the banjo, using it to cut through the guitars, and showing it to be a perfect foil to the guitar.

Soon it became clear - Indie Rock was reclaiming the banjo.  It turns up in a Feist song, "1234," which itself became a minor radio hit, and reached a wider audience.  Sufjan Stevens uses it all the time, in a weird kind of dissonant clawhammer style.  Listen to, for example, "All the Trees..." from Seven Swans or his version of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

I think the banjo might soon become not a bluegrass instrument, or a country instrument, but a "folky" instrument.  My favorite banjo music has always been the older mountain folk music - my all time favorite of theose songs is "Shady Grove."  "Shady Grove" shares a melody with the old English folk song "Matty Groves" (with vastly different lyrics) which was done definitively by Fairport Convention on Liege and Lief.  "Shady Grove" was most recently recored by Tom Petty's band Mudcrutch.

My hope for the next folk instrument to be appropriated by young indie rock kids: Appalachian dulcimer.

Sometimes literal is better

I think English teachers, well meaning all, have destroyed people's ability to understand song lyrics.  I came to this realization when I looked up the lyrics to TV on the Radio's "Wolf Like Me" and found a raging discussion about what the song was 'about.'

To me there is no mystery what the song is about: it's about werewolves.  Don't believe me?

Got a curse I cannot lift
shines when the sunset shifts
when the moon is round and full

and later:

We could jet in a stolen car
but I bet we wouldn't get too far
before the transformation takes
and bloodlust tanks and
crave gets slaked

 It ends with the singer repeating: "We're howling, forever" over and over.

So what did the internet discussion board decide?  The song is about sex.  I'll give them this much - the werewolves are having sex.  But it isn't a song with the werewolf as a metaphor for sex - it's a song about a werewolf.

Perfect Songs

I love the movie The Princess Bride.  There's something about it; the funny parts are funny, but it's not totally a comedy; the romantic parts are romantic, but it's not a romance.  It's serious and sweet and way funnier than most straight forward comedies.  But more interestingly to me, there's literally nothing in it that (to me) doesn't work.  There is nothing extraneous in the movie - it's like a finely tuned machine.  For this reason, I've said (to people who will listen) that The Princess Bride is a perfect movie.

I feel the same way about the song "New Slang" by the Shins.  The song is perfect - the melody is haunting, the lyrics brilliant, but not overwrought, the two guitar solos just exquisite, and everything else - it's perfect.  When I first heard the song, I thought that the intro sounded like a Raffi song.  The folky guitars were there, after all.

Few bands ever get to write a song as good as "New Slang" and almost never get to do it twice.  The Shins are a terrific band without "New Slang" - you almost feel sorry for them, having everything they do compared to something they can't possibly match.  When I saw them live, they seemed to understand this, and resent it a little.  They took it out on the song, trying to bring it down from it's pedestal a little.  The almost reverential tempo was played faster, and looser.  The singing was a little ragged, and the phrasing tried to break free of the song a little bit.

William Goldman never wrote another book as good as The Princess Bride and knew it.  This kind of thing actually happens all the time.  It's more than the one-hit wonder thing.  Ben Folds is no one-hit wonder, but he'll never top "Brick."  It took a cover version, but Leonard Cohen finally got the "Hallelujah" he deserved. 

Sometimes, rock musicians write hymns, it seems.

New Release Eve

I haven't discovered many new bands in a while, and seem to be temporarily out of new music in general, so I'm doing what I usually do in these circumstances - dig into old bands.

Because of the song-at-a-time habit I developed a long time ago due to bandwidth issues and Audiogalaxy, I tend to have bands that I would describe as 'great' or bands that I'd say I 'love' that I have a total of half a dozen songs on my computer.  Usually, all six are killer.  But I have that weird fear that the next song of theirs I hear I won't love, and so I steer clear for a while.

So then, every once in a while, I go back, find a band like that, and timidly check out a seventh (or in this case, third) song.  Thus, I go back to my Super Furry Animals collection of two songs (for the record, 'At Least It's Not the End of the World,' and 'Something for the Weekend,") and look at iTunes offerings.  I also discovered that my once sufficient Oasis collection is completely gone, and decided that I can no longer live without "Acquiesce."  Etc.

Music consumption, for me, is a strange hybrid of Thrill-of-the-Hunt (why I own a Treepeople, and Throwing Muses album) and ridiculous timidity (I just barely decided to go for a fourth song off Iggy Pop's The Idiot, an album I know perfectly well I'll love).

Still, a new Spoon album looms large, and I know I'll come down on the Thrill side of the equation for Them Crooked Vultures tomorrow.  Which is ridiculous, because I've heard the single, and think it rates no better than a Queens of the Stone Age B-side, or a Foo Fighters album track.

I will say though, anytime I find my music collection without Robyn Hitchcock's "The Bones in the Ground" I remedy the situation.  And then forget about him for years at a time again.

Loudness, pt. 2

I got to thinking about Loudness v Volume after the last blog post, and had some thoughts in a different direction.  In the late sixties, guitarists started using feedback as a part of the electric guitar repertoire.  It's useless to say anything other than 'guitarists' because the number of people who've been credited with inventing intentional feedback includes: John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, and so forth.  So sufficeth to say that 'guitarists started using feedback.'

The reason it all happened simultaneously (or close enough) is that as we moved into the late sixties, musicians were looking for ways to play louder and louder, amplifier manufacturers were building bigger amplifiers, for musicians to play larger clubs, and people just started turning them up.  At some point, feedback becomes inevitable, as does the idea of using it rather than (hopelessly) trying to suppress it.

Now, this is a pretty standard explanation, but I got to thinking.  Rather than just trying to play with more volume, the musicians mentioned were almost all of them playing louder music - louder in the sense of yesterday's post.

Listen to the guitar in a song from the fifties, or even the early sixties, and it sounds pretty tame by today's standards.  For example, the Beatles song "I Feel Fine" has a scream right before the guitar solo - a pretty credible scream, by today's standards - and it leads into a very tame and laid back guitar solo.  Even the blues guys, who were turning it up and using distortion before just about anybody, weren't playing with the same sort of abandon and loss of control that typifies, say, a Jimi Hendrix solo.

Now listen to the music that was coming out in '67, '68.  The Who.  Hendrix.  Cream.  Even the Beatles, a la "Helter Skelter" - the music itself is louder, and they had to turn up the volume to match it.  It's one of the reasons Chuck Berry sounds dated in a way the Stones don't.  He was just a little too early, and for a lot of reasons, couldn't play as loudly as the Stones later did.

Feedback has kind of been subsumed into the mainstream now, and the thing that replaced it - Hip Hop's block rocking beat - is going the same route.  But I remember the first time I heard the Smashing Pumpkins song "Soma" which explodes halfway through.  The centerpiece of the song is a solo, and four notes in, it sounds like the guitar is being fed through a shredder.  The Pumpkins are one of the last times a band really sounded loud to me.  That solo in "Soma", the riff in "Pissant."  Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution."  But now that I think about it, I guess the White Stripes still manage it pretty regularly.  So maybe there's hope for the future.

Loudness

The other day at work (how many blog entries start this way? Anyway) I put on some Radiohead.  Radiohead is difficult for me to judge on the whole, can-I-get-this-past-the-censors scale - some songs are just fine, and everybody likes.  Some ("Bodysnatchers") get the reaction I got the other day - "Change that. (a few seconds pass) Sorry, I just can't take that. It's not comforting."

It was the "not comforting" that I found interesting.  I know my opinion is slightly skewed, but I don't consider "Bodysnatchers" all that cacophonous a song, especially for Radiohead.  If it had been "My Iron Lung" or something, sure.  But "Bodysnatchers" is just a heavy riff, with a little of their trademarked theremin guitar noises going on.

It reminds me of a quote I heard someone (maybe Peter Buck?) say about Nick Drake.  He said "even if the volume is all the way up, Nick Drake still sounds quiet" and this I absolutely agree with - I've never once been asked to change Nick Drake, unless it's three o'clock and we're all falling asleep.  Loudness, it seems, is only tangentially related to volume.

Unplugged

I'm not positive when it became required for every two-bit one hit wonder to record an acoustic version of their hit song, but I'm going to blame MTV unplugged.  A couple of months after a hit song comes out, radio stations inevitably start playing an acoustic version, which is almost inevitably recorded live at the station, and features the lead singer and one or two guitarists, playing the song exactly the same as if the guitars were electric.  And people eat it up.

Acoustic versions of songs can be great.  Look at the last decade of Johnny Cash's career.  But he (and Rick Rubin) understood that an acoustic guitar is a fundamentally different instrument from an electric one, and changes the song.  Listen to his version of "Rusty Cage" for example - he doesn't even try to match the opening riff from Soundgarden.

This is why so many acoustic songs are mediocre - they don't change the song one bit.  I heard an acoustic version of "Sweet Home Alabama" on the radio once, and for three seconds I was excited.  A country blues version of a classic southern rock song? Then the singer said "turn it up" exactly like he does on the electric version, and they lost me.  Turn what up?  It's an acoustic guitar - there's no volume knob!

The all-time great example of how to do Unplugged right comes from Eric Clapton.  Remember, in the early nineties, Clapton was a has-been - imagine Jeff Beck releasing an acoustic album now - and this album almost singlehandedly turned his career around.  He used the opportunity to reinvent his music as acoustic blues - half the songs on the album are covers of old blues songs, from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters.  He teases the audience "See if you can spot this one" before launching into an almost unrecognizable "Layla," (which for years was the only version of the song I'd ever heard) - but my favorite on the album is "Running on Faith" - it's a beautiful blues hymn, and Clapton's slide playing has never been better.  That's how you unplug.

Counterpoint

I'm a huge White Stripes fan, so naturally I bought the Raconteurs album when it came out.  I was expecting, basically, Jack White-punk with some Brendan Benson powerpop elements.  What surprised me, therefore, was how much more texture the album had than a typical Stripes album.  The addition of keyboards especially was revelatory.  My favorite song on the album quickly became "Intimate Secretary."  It's an unusually structured song; instead of verse-chorus-verse it's more ABAB.  There are two melodies, and it goes back and forth between the two sections (a little like the Beatles "We can work it out") - but the prestige is the coda, where everything drops away except a bubbling keyboard part, and then they bring the full band back little by little, with both the A and B melodies over the same part.

Two melodies simultaneously is called counterpoint, and Bach was basically the master of it (see, this, for example).  It remains more a classical thing than a rock thing, which is too bad because it can be breathtaking, as in the Raconteurs example.

Still, it got me thinking of other songs that do the same thing.  Sure enough, Mates of State "So Many Ways" does - Kori Gardner sings the first verse, then Jason Hammel sings the same melody (and lyrics) on the second as she sings a new melody (and new lyrics).  The gradual addition reminds me of canon - in classical music, where a single melody plays, then another takes over, and more and more voices are added on, until the limits of sanity are reached.

I've only ever encountered one rock canon - "Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space" by Spiritualized - and it is textbook canon.  A simple instrumental backs up a vocal - "All I want in life's a little love to take the pain away, getting strong today, a giant step each day-y-y" which repeats while another vocal comes in on top "Wise men say, only fools rush in, only fools rush in." and then a third voice enters, and they swirl around each other while the background music builds.  One of the things about recording in a studio, rather than with an orchestra, is that you can manage an effect Spiritualized has here - the various voices come to the foreground, drop away, etc. in the mix.

There's one other Counterpoint Rock song I can think of, and it's also the only rock song I ever played to a certain classical friend that blew him away.  Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair".  They actually took the folk song "Canticle" and worked it in with the melody to "Scarborough Fair" in counterpoint - and then as a bonus they had the instrumentation build from guitar to include drums, harpsichord, and so on.

What was interesting to me, thinking about these songs, is that every one of these songs is my favorite song for the various bands.  I wonder why.

Morphine

Morphine has to be the best kept secret in indie rock.  For a decade, they existed, quietly making fantastic music; then their singer died.  Still, no one knows them.

I got into Morphine because Collective Soul covered them - they passable cover of "You Speak My Language" on the massively underrated Blender album.  So I checked them out.  Downloaded a few songs.  Liked what I heard.  Downloaded a few more.  Etc.  I have dozens of Morphine songs on my computer now, and several albums.  I'd have more, but you might have picked up that I acquire songs slowly - rarely an album at a time.

One of the things I like about Morphine is a minor technical thing, but it still matters - their lineup was weird.  Drums, slide bass (like slide guitar, but bass) and a baritone sax.  That was basically it.  It goes back to something I've thought for a while - we get so locked into the guitar bass drums sometimes keys rock band lineup, that we ignore a lot of good possibilities.  How many bands would have prospered if they'd thought to put an ad up for a saxophone player?

Morphine concentrated almost entirely on the low range of the instruments - the slide bass would play these slippery riffs, the horn would bubble up, but never higher than mid-range, and Mark Sandman's baritone would sing these bizarre, almost Beat poetry lyrics.  The whole vibe was like jazz club full of menace.  My favorite line from a song of theirs: "Found a woman who was soft but she's also hard/While I slept, she nailed down my heart."  Second favorite: "She had a smile that swirled, she had a smile that curled, she had a smile that swerved all over the road."

Every once in a while I'll put Morphine on at work - it's mellow enough to usually make it past the radar, but still sometimes a pounding groove like "Eleven O'Clock" will raise an eyebrow.  The only problem with Morphine is that they had a tendency to go over the same ground a lot - they were one of those bands that had a unique sound, and stuck with it.

Still, to dip into every once in a while, it was a great sound.  That's one of the reasons I love indie rock - you find these weird bands, with their own sound, and you can sample them - add a little of their spice to your collection, dip in, and then head off to something else.

Built to Spill

Every once in a while I put my Zune on shuffle, and Built to Spill comes on and blows me away again.

A lot of the bands I got to know over the last decade or so, I got to know in a strange way, because I came of age musically at the height of the whole file-sharing thing.  So every band I got to know, I got to know one song at a time.  I didn't discover Magnetic Fields, I heard "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing" and came back for more.

The best site of all was Audiogalaxy which was like Napster cross-referenced with Allmusic.  So I'd browse through the newly discovered genre of Indie Rock, and one day came across a band called Treepeople.  I think I'm one of very few people who got into Built to Spill by way of Treepeople, but I will say, when they wanted to be, they were a tremendous band.  They had this dueling guitars thing that put every other dueling guitar band to shame; Allman Bros., the Stones, Television - none of them hold a candle to the Treepeople's best stuff.  Their version of "Bigmouth Strikes Again" is the textbook for duel lead guitars, and by far the best Smiths cover ever.

So anyway, Treepeople had Doug Martsch as one of their two guitarists, and he (and Audiogalaxy) led me to Built to Spill.  Which leads me to the song that came up randomly on my Zune today, "Distopian Dream Girl" which should go down as one of the great songs ever.  The guitar riff is sort of reminiscent of "Electioneering" but for a power trio, the guitar work is sublime, from that Neil Young school of guitar playing.  The song is weird; the most famous line is "If it came down to your life or mine/I'd do the stupid thing/and let you keep on living" - but, and this is crucial, the line isn't played as an emo pity fest, but as a singalong.  It's bizarrely joyous.

I've got maybe ten or fifteen Built to Spill songs (I only bought one album, but for some reason, Built to Spill works for me best on a song by song basis.)  The first one, actually, I ever heard, was their song "Strange" which is, under it all, basically call and response guitar playing.  It's an excellent showcase of Martsch's lead guitar ability - one of his fills is literally nothing but two notes, an octave apart, with rhythmic variation.

The top five Built to Spill songs, ever, are: "Dystopian Dream Girl", "Strange", "Car", "You Were Right", and "I would Hurt a Fly."

Isis

Any serious music fan has probably gone through that phase where the number of band names you know is greater than the music of those bands you've been able to absorb - i.e. you know Sonic Youth and Pavement and Yo la Tengo, but you only know maybe two songs each from these bands that you've been told were groundbreaking, and you are supposed to revere.

I sought out and listened to a lot of bands I was supposed to like: Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground - etc.  Of those bands, I usually like a couple of songs from each of them, but for none of them can I remember a time where I put on a whole album and just listened to it.  Almost inevitably, I like more bands that I discover through a song or album, and only later discover how influential they were.  The only person I can think of that's been an exception to this rule is Dylan.

I love Bob Dylan, without being one of those Dylan freaks who reveres everything he's ever done - he's definitely put out his share of crap.  I'm also different from many Dylan fans by not liking large sections of his most famous work - the early protest songs, for example, which are so preachy as to be almost unlistenable.  It wasn't until he decided to start playing Rock and Roll that I really start to like his music.

The song of his that has haunted my brain the most is the relatively obscure track "Isis" from his Desire album.  Desire is most known for "One More Cup of Coffee" and "Hurricane" - both great songs - but I think "Isis" stands up among his best work, period.  First off, there's the violin, which was all over Desire.  Second, it's in this waltz-time, and the drums just have a heyday with it.  But it's one of Dylan's weirdest stories - there's all this mystical imagery, but it never gets in the way of the story.  It talks about pyramids, and is equal parts Egyptian and Mexican in the reference.

The lyrics, man, where to begin:

I married Isis on the fifth day of May,
But I could not hold on to her very long.
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.

Cinco de Mayo, Samson, cowboy narratives, and that's one verse in ABAB rhyme scheme.  (Not to get real English Major, but that ABAB scheme is amazingly effective - the rhymes keep coming at you from angles you're not expecting.  So when he sings: "Said I got no money he said that ain't necessary" you remember that he's rhyming with the word "ordinary" two lines ago.)

He never sang better, for my money, than on this song.  His voice is a little nasally, like all his best work, but there's an expressiveness to how he wraps his voice around the words.  Seeing on paper the line "That's when I knew that I had to go on" does not do justice to the way he sings it.  Let me put it like this; some singers are tremendous interpreters of songs, and can breathe life into a song that you thought was DOA.  That's how Dylan sings this song, as if he's trying to prove to us that he's written a masterpiece.

I love Dylan for being able to write a song about an Egyptian god and making it sound like "Tangled up in Blue" the sequel - it's like how he can write something as bizarre as "The Mighty Quinn" and still have everyone singing along with the chorus.  Everyone talks about his lyrics, but to me, it's the storyteller in him that keeps me coming back to his music,

Out of Town

I'm leaving for the bustling metropolis of Farmington New Mexico first thing in the morning, and will be without internet access until Sunday evening.  Please forgive me the hiatus.

Kings of Leon

Something happened in the Indie Rock world when I wasn't looking.  Back in, say 2001 or 2002, a young indie band called Kings of Leon came out, with a southern rock, punky, Strokesy sound.  I liked their single, "Molly's Chambers" and left it at that for a few years.  I checked out that song, based on recommendations from sites like Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork Media.

A couple of years later, I decided, on a whim, to buy their album, Aha Shake Heartbreak.  It was brilliant.  Every song was fantastic, they'd refined their sound - everything you hope a new band does between albums one and two, they'd done.  A couple of months later, I bought their third album, and was blown away anew.  They'd progressed by leaps and bounds - their songwriting now had a grand ambition sometimes, the guitars were bigger, etc.  I started to hope that I might hear them on the radio; Death Cab for Cutie had recently made the jump.

When I read, though, reviews of the last two albums by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media, I was confused if we were talking about the same band.  Rolling Stone put them in the category of arena rock/indie also-rans, and gave them 3, or 3.5 stars - good, but not great.  Pitchfork, however, hated them.  They compared the band, unfavorably, to 3 Doors Down, and gave them an out of ten rating in the mid four's.

What is going on?  By the way, Kings of Leon's fourth album, which I bought the day it came out, continues their exponential progression - they've somehow managed to merge southern rock, U2, the Strokes, and something else (call it x factor?) into an amazing sound.  The songwriting is often brilliant, and always good - every song on the album is good.  They've become, in a very short amount of time, one of my favorite bands.  And Pitchfork continues to invent lower numbers for the reviews, while Rolling Stone is lukewarm.  I don't understand it.

Actually, with Pitchfork, I do understand it.  They've committed the unpardonable sin, see, of cleaning up their sound.  It no longer sounds recorded in a garage, and to the Committee of Public Safety, that means they're trying to sound commercial, which means they're selling out.  Plus, Pitchfork accuses them of the most unpardonable of sins - sexism.  I've listened to the Kings' lyrics, they're no more sexist than any other rock band.  They occasionally sing about girls.  But this becomes frat-boy sexism, and you are allowed to hate the album.  Jay-Z, on the other hand, is still allowed.

"I don't hear a single"

..."The future was wide open" sings Tom Petty, in "Into the Great Wide Open."  It's the line in the title, though - "Their A&R man said I don't hear a single" - that interests me.  It's a common complaint of record executives, that neverending need to bow to the commercial.  Record executives seem to live to find great bands, and then ask them to make music that will sell, rather than whatever music it is they are making.  It's like every Hollywood cliche.

But I wonder if sometimes these guys get a bad rap.  Sure, there are a number of masterpieces that wouldn't exist if the record company got its way, but I have to think that those guys, every day, deal with some young garage band that thinks they're the next Radiohead, when the executives know that they'll be lucky to break even on the album.  "Please guys, just give us something we can sell" and the musicians write an acerbic song about sell-outs.

Because let's face it, it's not good for people to get everything they want.  Artists given unlimited time and resources often produce self-indulgent crap.  Artists want to be left alone, but losing the sense of urgency to create an album is rarely good.  For example, look at Chinese Democracy - it's testament to Axl's talent that the album is listenable at all. But if he'd had someone breathing down his neck, someone with the power to pull the plug, isn't it possible that he would have committed to some decisions earlier, been content with only fifty different takes of the guitar solo, and produced the album in a mere, say, five years?

I think the ultimate example is Boston.  Boston started out as a couple of guys recording songs in their garage, in stolen moments when they weren't working, desperately trying to make a record great enough to get noticed.  Boston is called "arena rock" today and usually dismissed with Styx, Kansas, and so forth, but there are some stunning moments on that first album.  The back and forth between the bass and piano on the bassline to "Foreplay" with the guitars doubling it a minute later - this is music a band poured themselves into.  It was a such a success that they became one of the biggest bands in the world, and when time came to make their third album, they were essentially given a blank check.

Eight years later, they came out with a truly epic lousy album.  Why does this come as any surprise?  We understand that mindless self-indulgence is bad for rock stars when it comes to drugs, alcohol, or groupies - why are we surprised that when they indulge their "artistic" side, it isn't a work of shining brilliance?

The Shins: live

I saw the Shins a couple of years ago, after Wincing the Night Away came out.  I was and am an enormous Shins fan.  I got into them before the whole "Garden State" thing, but ironically, that was the movie that made me fall in love with "New Slang" - before then it was their second album I adored, and especially "So Says I" which remains one of my favorite songs.

So I took some friends to the concert.  They ranged from Shins fans to total newcomers.  The opening band got caught in bad weather, so it was an interesting experience - could they rise to the challenge, and deliver a killer set?

Unfortunately, they didn't give a set that converted anyone not already sold that night.  One of the reasons is that James Mercer, though a talented songwriter, is not a tremendously compelling frontman.   He said little between songs, and in fact most of the chatter to the audience was from the guitarist and bass player (who switched instruments a number of times during the show).  At one point, someone was tuning up, and there was a pause between songs, and the two of them started goofing around, and ended up playing the first verse of "Holy Diver."  This is not a song that lends itself well to the kind of crowd that the Shins attract.  There were a couple of weird audience-interaction moments like that, that night.

But by and large, the biggest problem seemed to be the fact that Mercer was uncomfortable with the Shins being the Shins.  He'd given interviews about how all anyone associated with them was "New Slang" and how he wished people would see the band for more than one song.  So when they played "New Slang" that night, they played it up tempo, and the harmonies were a little ragged, and a number of small things that in themselves aren't important, but all contributed to a sense of trying to pull the song off of it's pedestal, a little.

What it all comes down to, I think, is this: there are Rock bands, and there are Pop bands, and that concert was the Shins, who on record are a terrific Indie pop band, trying to be a rock band.

Simon and Garfunkel were a Pop band; so were the Beach Boys, and Oasis.  The Who, the Rolling Stones, and Cheap Trick were all Rock bands.  Bob Dylan is Rock.  Billy Joel is pop.  Etc.  There's nothing wrong with being a pop band, but there is a difference.  So the Shins played their songs harder, looser, and louder than they recorded them.  Some of the songs benefitted: "Caring is Creepy" and "So Says I" came alive under this treatment, so it wasn't an entirely misguided move.  But as a whole, it seemed artificial, and put on. 

It was this artificiality, or uncomfortableness, that meant that it was a concert for the faithful only, I think.

The Wah Pedal

I'm hesitant to talk about this, because even though I'm a musician, I've tried not to make this a musician's blog; I'm definitely not a gearhead, and don't want this to be a gearhead post.  But one of the things that happens when you play guitar for a while is you notice guitarists, guitar playing, etc.

I know for me, it was a revelation when I could pick out individual guitar parts in a song.  Up until then it had all been this big wash of sound.  But I think most people still recognize a wah-wah pedal, and almost everyone associates it with Jimi Hendrix.

Effects pedals in general are controversial, and seem to fall along the punk/prog party line.  Punks tend to think of most effects as flashy, and flash without substance is their nemesis.  Prog bands, on the other hand, tend to have rigs that look like the central defence computers of middle eastern nations.  Dave Gilmour, especially, tends to have a rig with forty some-odd effects, half of which are echo or delay pedals.

But punks tends to love their distortion pedals, so the arms race continues.