Musicfor

Bon Iver - Bon Iver

Music makes me feel high. I used to smoke weed a fair amount, but not anymore. Most of the time, I’m glad I’ve found ways to escape that doesn’t lead to spending two hours staring at a black mark on the wall that looks like a single-winged crow. But sometimes I miss the feeling. I think many people have that inclination. When they used to be obsessed with some form of escapism, even after they abandon it, the urge still presents itself every once in a while. It’s a sudden, inexplicable thing that isn’t capturable or repeatable, and it appears randomly, without a constant impetus. A strange sound or flash of light or bright colors can spark the split-second desire, and then it’s gone just as quickly.

Thankfully, I can still get that sensation from certain types of music. The kind with echoing guitars that warble into space, voices that sound like they’re sliding off metallic cave walls, plinks and plunks of electronically modified landscapes, ethereally curving steel guitars, an angelic, otherwordly falsetto.

I wrote the preceding paragraph while listening to Bon Iver’s “Holocene.” I’ll write the proceeding paragraphs while listening again. Here’s what I heard and saw.

Lightly picked acoustic guitars and simple shakers. Justin Vernon’s inhumanly ranged voice blending with layered vocals simultaneously delivering three notes like an angel in heaven, limbo, and the place below the world. His words create abstract paintings while I sit on a wooden bench in a French museum, staring at a black marble floor with twisting brown and silver streaks.

A snake-like warm bass lines swims and rivers and flows as neon-green guitars strike subtle notes in a repeating triadic pattern that forms a little electric yellow triangle.

Bon Iver’s water-colored album cover of a serene lake scene with a town set between deepest greens expands like wet paint across thin white paper, starting with translucent light pinks and deepening to maroon hues as it blends with sky blue.

Vernon’s voice becomes a lilting sparrow as he trumpets “And at once I knew” before bending back down to a resigned “I was not magnificent.” A chime like sun rays bouncing off the moon. The bass wrapping a warm silver blanket around my chest. Rapidly escalating drums make a march to the edge of a cliff as hawks burst apart in a flurry of feathers in front of a bolded sun as the song quiets.

“Third and lake burnt away the hallway was where we learned to celebrate” takes me back to years of college, sitting in dim dorms and laughing as ice clinked in shimmering glasses and laughter hit the walls and echoed back, where I was free from obligation and bills. Bills become green dollars that burn in a purple fire, a small simmering hole in the middle that expands to disintegrate and burn up the rest of the paper money.

Vernon hits the second “magnificent” and a saxophone appears as flittering buzzing bees orbiting my ears. The marching snares grow more pronounced. Vernon sends his voice over clouds and plummeting back down before everything coalesces like a gradually built wave washing against soft sand and receding.

The music calms and the waves stop and grow still. Vernon talks of his brother, and I see my kid brother watching from behind the screen door on my grandfather’s brick porch, watching me and my cousins play wiffle ball with a skinny yellow bat in a hot summer sun.

The soft acoustic guitar quiets itself and hides behind a tree trunk, then peeks its head out and starts walking back to me, pulsing its bass note against my ribs as Vernon builds his voice like a fat finger flicking a wine glass, and all the sounds furiously but precisely merge together and curl around themselves.

And as Vernon can finally “see for miles miles miles”,  a water-colored red sea parts before me, the waves cresting stories and stories high in the air, larger than downtown Atlanta and washing over the night-lit buildings that look like towers of small fireflies gleaming and beating their little wings.

Quiet.

We Are Augustines

You may remember a previous post on We Are Augustines’s beautifully haunting, cathartic, rocking tribute to a loved-and-lost brother in Rise Ye Sunken Ships. Well, they’ve signed on a new drummer, Rob Allen, to the band since then (the recording was done mainly with lead guitarist/singer Billy and bassist Eric Sanderson along with producer Dave Newfeld). The three Augustines members have now recorded a new iTunes session,  which you can check out here.

It includes covers of Damien Jurado’s “Ohio” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than The Rest” along with four songs from the album — “Book of James”, “Chapel Song”, “Headlong Into the Abyss”, and “Juarez.” The session also contains one original song that didn’t appear on Rise Ye Sunken Ships: “Ballad of a Patient Man.”

Allen sounds fantastic and adds a brash and bold rhythm to the already howling and brazen rocking sensation. The drums took a back seat on the record — because the band didn’t really have a drummer. But the beats are kicked up here (no pun intended).

McCarthy’s somewhat-swallowed howl sounds just as energized as ever (it’s also pretty cool how close he gets to Springsteen’s voice), and Sanderson keeps adding little twinges of an undercurrent that add well-placed depth. Well worth $6.

Gomez

Okay, I don’t get it. I just don’t. Gomez is a genre-hopping band that won the Mercury prize way back in the ’90s for their debut album, Bring It On. They hit the scene and tore up Britain, critically hailed and populous-applauded. But somehow, they’ve fallen through the U.S. cracks. They’re in the top 100 of British charts with each release. But in the U.S., Gomez barely scratch the surface on charts or radio or websites or print publications.

Their concert venues here are not tiny, but they’re not huge, either. I mention the name “Gomez” to people, and their immediate inclination is wonder why I’m asking about that girl on the Disney Channel — the one who’s reportedly romantically linked to Justin Bieber (I probably shouldn’t admit that I know that, but whatever).

One of my friends posted “Now listening to ‘Bring It On’ by Gomez” on Twitter, and I commended him for it. He said he heard it in London and thought it sounded great. Right, London. Didn’t hear it in the States. And unless you go hunting for bands that lie on the fringes of popular tastes — that is to say, indie — you’re not going to hear much of their music. And even if you do, you’ll still have trouble finding outlets that have devoted a significant portion of time and content space to Gomez.

While more appreciated in indie circles, the critical reviews cover the spectrum. With the exception of the opening two releases, Bring It On and Liquid Skin, most albums garner mediocre praise, and sometimes dismal. Every once-in-a-while, a review lauding their talents scratches the surface, but those are rare. Most writers reach the conclusion that Gomez’s music is take-it-or-leave it. It’s a B-level movie; it’s entertaining, but you won’t repeatedly return.

(And for their latest release, On Your Mind, they’re right. It’s pretty bad, which I probably shouldn’t mention in a piece about the underrated talents of an incredible group, but hey, Paul McCartney’s put out some pretty forgettable stuff, too.)

But that wide range of critical opinions, which isn’t that wide to begin with considering they appear almost exclusively in music-head publications, isn’t what confounds me. What confounds me is the mass U.S.’s lack of familiarity — the dismissal of Gomez’s sound, as if these guys aren’t inventive, aren’t talented, aren’t really worth paying attention to. Like their slipping from genre to genre is a pure exercise in experimentalism with rather average and unremarkable results — definitely not because the group truly excels at the practice.

But they do excel. From record to record — and sometimes within one album — and within one song – they swing from genre to genre like a spider monkey with jungle vines, going from blues to indie to alternative to indie pop to folk to adult alternative to grunge to psychedelia to atmospheric to experimental. But they don’t get it wrong. Nothing sounds like amateurs just slipping into a blues riff for the hell of it; or trying out a folk song just to see what it feels like. It all sounds, for lack of a better word, correct — how it’s supposed to be done.

I still have yet to come across any artists who so adeptly channel all those different genres and repeatedly produce quality work within each of them. Normally artists who veer outside of their comfort zone, so to speak, don’t fair too well.

Just break down an album by track and check out the various genres. Let’s go with the How We Operate. The opening song, “Notice” starts with a folky acoustic guitar melody with electric tinges before breaking into a full-instrumental adult-alternative chorus. “See The World” carries the same methodology, but “How We Operate” starts the shape-shifting, with its distant banjo and mandolin arpeggios that swiftly get dwarfed below heavy guitar distortion and wide-berthed bass. A few songs later comes the slow slide-guitar blues of “Chasing Ghosts With Alcohol,” which abruptly explodes in a cacophony of wrenching guitars and throbbing bass.

And it all works.

Yes, they’re piecing together most every influence you can think of, from The Beatles to Neil Young to Radiohead, but they’re not direct snatches; they’re sifting through musical ingredients and serving something different by using fractured bits of all those forms. Fuck sticking to one thing when you can do them all.

Although it’s common for lyrics to suffer. In all honesty, Gomez would be better off sticking to In Our Gun‘s approach, where the lyrics served more as filler than foreground content. They were impressionistic, visual, serving the extreme experimental nature of the record. They made sense at times, but none of it was cliched and sap-filled like their earlier works. When it did make sense, like the opener “Shot Shot,” it was by exposition with almost a conversational tone: “Well hey, how’s tricks man? I think I seen you before, blank blank to that. / You looked a lot older, you been workin’ out. What’s wrong with that?” right as the song explodes with a pulsing bass, sax, what sounds like a theramine, galloping drums, and an swirling blend of textures. The next song sounds like a psychedelic ballad with a Beatles-esque vocal melody. “Let’s take the sand from this bottomless pit / There’s hell to pay / So run away / Destroy on command all who came and then quit.” And just when you think the song’s gonna end, it completely shifts direction into an all-instrumental experimental outro with a distorted bass riff that gets joined by layer after layer of disparate sounds. The last bit is befitting of a Miami dance club at 2 a.m.

I just wish more people could hear that shift and appreciate it the way I do. Perhaps because people buy individual songs now instead of digesting entire albums, they don’t experience the vast array of approaches Gomez takes from record to record. Perhaps anyone who has heard Gomez has only heard ”Girlshapelovedrug” and wrote the band off as an adult-alternative, sunny-side pop group. They’ve ventured into that territory with some lyrical content, but the music still veered far from that path — apart from violins, which just don’t fit Gomez’s style. That’s one thing they haven’t been able to pull off, but I bet they could if they didn’t that instrument with one of the three lead singers, Ben Ottewell’s, deep howl.

Granted, this praise is hyperbolic, and it’s entirely biased. But I can’t be that biased, or I wouldn’t readily admit that their latest main release was far, far from perfect. It wasn’t even really… good. Barely decent.

(It was mainly the lyrics.I threw up in my mouth a little when I heard them. You could say I’m being harsh, but you can’t argue with the $200 cleaning bill to get the puke smell out of my car’s interior).

For all those people who don’t really agree that Gomez is seriously talented, or seriously catchy, good, inventive, malleable, or adaptable — or to those who don’t want to spend any time trying to find out whether I’m completely bullshitting here, just check out five songs. It’ll cost you $5 max.

“Ruff Stuff”, ”Tanglin’”, “We Don’t Know Where We’re Going”, “Machismo”, and “Devil Will Ride”

If you’re still unconvinced that they’re at least extremely talented, hell, I’ll pay you $5 (no I won’t, but I’ll feel kinda bad).

So in summary: Gomez is really good. I just wish more people knew it.

Fanfarlo - Rooms Filled With Light

Fanfarlo released a critically acclaimed album years ago with Reservoir, a record filled with decadent ensembles of eclectic instruments (e.g. saws, clarinets, mandolins) coupled with catchy melodies. It appeared on numerous Best-Of-The-Year lists, and now they’re back to (hopefully) exceed expectations with the follow-up, Rooms Filled With Light, which is due out February 28.

Judging by the single “Feathers,” (below), they’ve retained the uncommon array of pop-chamber sounds  and ventured even deeper into less-tapped genres. The bass is light but fuzzy, the lead guitar echoes with jazzy tinged riffs before exploding into overdriven punk styles and back, and the keys sound like something you’d hear at a Hawaiin luau. It’s quirky and not quite as orchestral as Reservoir, but its pleasing pop is still full of harmonious hooks (too much alliteration? yeah, probably). Check it out.

Sometimes a quiet night to yourself is exactly what’s needed to decompress from a stressful week. We spend so much time doing things we genuinely don’t wanna do, fulfilling obligations that – if given the opportunity – we’d shuck at the first chance. With an assistant and/or enough money, would we still take the time to pay the bills, do the laundry, fill the car up with gas, iron clothes, whatever? Probably not, unless we were incredibly bored. But if we had an assistant, chances are we’d have enough money to keep ourselves entertained. We could go fly our jet or something.

Anyway, after a week fulfilling those obligations and being at the behest of others, from bosses to children to our own conscience, we need time to ourselves. Time that isn’t filled with anything but our own contented voices and choices. Time that slowly slips by, but in a good way. Not from boredom or unease, but from the world’s more relaxed pace. We can keep ourselves busy and entertained with television or writing or, in this case, music.

We finally have the time to sit and listen, and do nothing but sit and listen. It’s finally quiet, both around us and inside us. That’s when I feel the most relaxed. I’m not worried about impressing other people, making a good impression, how a joke fell flat, how my work wasn’t adequate, how much I deteste that woman who plays the same radio station all fucking day long, and how that radio station plays the same four songs all fucking day long. I mean my God, there’s only so much Adele I can take before I start detesting her voice, no matter how great it is.

I love hanging out with friends, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a fair amount of stress that comes along with it. Having to show up at a specific time, worryin about whether the party will be a dud, or the movie will suck, or saying the wrong thing, or the having a boring conversation, or a having a conversation that results in an argument.

Granted, hanging out with friends leads to getting out of my head and getting invited into the heads of others, which is just about the greatest thing about friends, but sometimes I prefer nights by myself. Sometimes I need to be in my own head for a little while, figure things out. Or not, just let things be.

When we have a night totally to ourselves, we have the time to sort out what’s racking the back of our brains, and/or we have time to forget about ourselves for a while. We can spend a while thinking about a problem, getting some side work done we’re unable to pursue at our day-time vocations, then we can watch a movie no one in my circle of friends gives two shits about. Or read a book, get lost in another world.

It’s quiet. It’s unimposing. It’s nice.