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April 25, 2008 • 4:11 pm 0

Plants and Animals – Parc Avenue

Plants and Animals – Parc Avenue
Secret City Records – 4 Stars


Ladies and gentlemen, by now you should be familiar with the fruit of Montreal’s scene: Islands, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the mighty Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, et al. But you don’t know Montreal. No, until now the scene has lacked a unifying voice, a sound to call its own. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Plants and Animals.
Parc Avenue, named for the street in Montreal’s hip Mile End neighborhood where band members Warren Spicer, Matthew Woodley, and Nicolas Basque live and spent the last three years working on what would become this album, is a hike up Mont Royal for a full view of the city’s drapery. It’s quite a task, to be sure, as are the group’s attempts to shift from fellow Canadian Neil Young freak-jams to Toronto indie pop to feathery guitar jammers. Traditional verse-chorus-verse song structures quickly fade to slanted style bends; opener “Bye Bye Bye” blends My Morning Jacket, Coldplay, and Queen comfortably.
And I mean comfortably. Despite Plants and Animals’ ambition (three tracks here run near the seven-minute mark), they never seem to be in over their heads, whether settling into sweater grooves on “Good Friend” or wah-jamming over Broken Social Scene throwaways on “Feedback in the Field.” Even when the guitars are at their most dissonant, Parc Avenue never comes across as anything more than three guys playing in their apartment on a Saturday afternoon with the windows open, bangin’ out jams and grinning in between runs to the poutine shop. This is what makes Parc Avenue a winner. It’s ambitious without being annoying, boundary-pushing without alienating the listener. It stays far enough on Devendra’s side of freak to avoid being boring, but it never gives us more than we can handle. It is, at the end of the day, a pop record, despite what lengthy tracks, the presence of a gospel choir, and a chorus of Québécois-accented cheerleaders may tell you.
There are the obvious great tracks here – the aforementioned “Good Friend;” the spiky guitar, fiddle, and piano jam of “Faerie Dance;” the snaky post-rock of “Keep it Real” – but the sleeper here is the poncho-folk “Early in the Morning.” While the other tracks are more than happy to raise their fringed leather sleeves to the sky and wail, the band show a taste and restraint the belies their age, coming across as a mix between recent Wilco and Déjà Vu-era Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young with their soft hand-drumming and quiet guitar runs.
Of course, Parc Avenue is not a perfect record. “Keep It Real”’s long fade-out should been the end of the album, but the group instead tack on a seven-minute jam on what sounds like a sitar and a chorus of guitars. It’s an alienating ending to a record that has, up to this point, been so intimate. Hippie culture is big in Montreal – anyone who has seen les tam-tams in the Parc on a Sunday afternoon can attest to that – but “Guru” keeps its bare feet too deep in Bonnaroo territory and feels largely out of place here.
It’s a small matter, though. There’s love to spare on Parc Avenue, whether via overt messaging (“A New Kind of Love”) or the obvious love that the group has for its musical heritage. They manage to tackle Dave Matthews-style soul without sounding ironic and North American indie pop without sounding pretentious. But the real love here, the love that makes Parc Avenue the kind of record that refuses to be tossed into the black hole of the CD tower, is the love that the group has for Montreal itself. Parc Avenue has the city’s name written all over it, from the bilingual title to the picture of Parc Mont Royal on the cover, but its honesty means that it could have been written anywhere at any time. It is paradoxically trapped forever at home while at the same time being so well-made as to be completely free of its constraints. In that way, Plants and Animals become Montreal’s true ambassadors to the world of music.

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April 24, 2008 • 3:05 am 0

Animal Collective – Water Curses EP

Animal Collective – Water Curses (EP)
Domino – 4 stars

Picking up where the dense digistry of last fall’s Strawberry Jam left off, Water Curses finds America’s favorite animals tracking an uncharacteristically spare, wild territory.  While the tracks, which were recorded during the sessions for Strawberry Jam, retain the frenetic programming and glitchy percussion of their mother record, the songs themselves here are more stripped and organic; rather than rely on the chainlink of samplers and synth, here the group return to the layered guitar and vocal form that was the site of their early success without abandoning the lessons they learned on Strawberry Jam.
Opener “Water Curses” recalls the giddy folk of Feels’ “Grass,” with its “Chopsticks”-inspired piano lines, calypso percussion, and buzzsaw acoustic guitars.  “Street Flash” is a sub-seven minute shape drone typical of drummer Panda Bear’s work on Strawberry Jam, an ethereal chant of clipped and effected vocals whose trance-inducing beauty is broken by Avey Tare’s screams.  AC have always been fascinated by the possibitlies of the human voice, from Panda’s stacks of vocal harmonies to Avey Tare’s throat-shredders (both present in “Street Flash”), but they are at their most interesting when using their voices unconventionally.  The caramel organs of the track are punctuated by a loop of a woman screaming that eventually becomes more percussive than alarming, alongside snipped moments of speech from band members, and Panda’s rubberbanded whisperings shifting across the mix.
The most winning of the four tracks, though, is “Cobwebs,” which finds Tare singing (!) over a canned 808 beat, a percussive jet engine, and carefully wrangled organ squeaks; Tare is searching for an end-time answer here as he and Panda declare that they’re “not going underground” while a tabla gulps along nervous and eventually gives way to shimmering guitars and a chorus of Panda Bears exulting “Cobwebs!”  It’s a tender, even soulful song from a group who have built their considerable reputation upon a bed of rattle and hum.  “Seal Eyeing” closes the record with watery vocals, stereotypically “pretty” piano runs, and vocal crescendos.  What could be trite in the hands of another group, or in any other context, instead feels at home on Water Curses.
Animal Collective’s exploration of the relationship between the organic and the technological have powered some of their most successful work (Feels’ “The Purple Bottle” and most of Strawberry Jam come to mind).  Here, perhaps, they have found the balance that they have been searching for: a balance between what they have been provided with and what the future may hold.

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• 3:05 am 0

R’n'r Confessional: Ironing it Out

I recently spent a week or so in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing.  Calvin is a Reformed Christian school that prides itself on thoughtful engagement of the arts from a Christian perspective, as well as its open-mindedness in such matters.  In keeping with their long-standing tradition of inviting artists not of the Christian tradition to appear and speak at the Festival, Calvin this year invited Iron and Wine to play in their gorgeous Fine Arts Center at the conclusion of the Festival, and Iron and Wine principal Sam Beam allowed a Calvin student to interview him in (of all places) the school chapel, where he at first appeared to be stoned but it was readily apparent that he was, more than anything, nervous.
And why shouldn’t he have been?  There he was, bearded and brown-shirted like a monk in front of a floor-to-ceiling organ, answering questions both about the creative process and the role of biblical imagery in his songwriting.  For the most part, Beam’s responses, both in the words he said as well as the timbre of his voice, mimicked his recordings as Iron and Wine: he was soft-spoken, humble, refusing however politely to reveal much about himself personally and making careful consideration not to step on toes while remaining honest (“I hope this doesn’t offend anybody,” he said at one point, “but I’m not a Christian.”).  It was interesting to see him in such a setting though, without a guitar to hide behind and three hundred ears ready to listen to stories (prodded out of the ever-respectful Beam by the interviewer) about being asked by Wheaton College, another Christian school, not to curse during a recent performance.   This question came twenty minutes after Beam referred to himself as a “badass” to the delight of those gathered.  Beam alternated in his words between tension and calm, but his deadpan delivery was only occasionally pocked with a Georgian drawl or emotional rise.  I, for one, was hoping that he’d at least drop a “y’all” in there somewhere, in the interest of keeping things lively.
That night, junk-country band Califone preceded Iron and Wine on the FAC stage performing intricate and experimental folkisms to a (literally, I suppose) rapt audience.  There was a sense of hanging in time as the group crescendoed and decrescendoed, effortlessly mixing atonal guitar solos with pedal steel guitar and handclaps from a MacBook next to the drummer. The set was a mystical affair, replete with starts, stops, beauty, noise, grace, despair; meandering through a thousand points of light and dark.  After having held the crowd to their hearts for an hour, the band downshifted and ended with a long, quiet jam that only barely moved; percussionist Ben Massarella tinkling bits of metal like he was in Wilco, guitarists Jim Becker and Tim Rutili trading arrhythmic non-riffs with such gentle force that I began to wonder whether their amps were still miked. To be honest, the gentille jam was very, very boring, but it was paradoxically impossible to turn away from.  And just when it began to appear that Califone were going to blow all of the capital that they had worked for in the past hour by essentially forgetting that there were warm bodies in the seats in front of them, Rutili leaned into the microphone and wheezed the opening lines to an ancient Baptist hymn: “I am a pilgrim, and a stranger, travelling through this wearisome land.”  No chairs creaked; no shoes scuffed the auditorium floor.  Then, just as quietly as he’d begun, Rutili laid his guitar on the stage floor and Califone exited stage right as the once-seated crowd granted a (for Calvin) rare standing ovation.
Califone’s show could only have ended with the recitation of those two lines.  There are probably no other words in the musical traditions within which the group work that better evoke what their set meant.  I don’t know if Rutili is a Christian or not, but, if he’s not, it was genius to say – say, say, say, as in to confess and profess – those lines to a crowd that would be collectively waking up early for church the next morning.  In two lines, Rutili summed up not only the wandering “otherness” (which, in the Bible, is what the word “holiness” actually means) of the band’s music, but of the experience of trying to communicate and identify with a group of people to which you do not belong.  It’s tiring, and anyone who’s awake will tell you that if you care to listen.  It perhaps explains Sam Beam’s nerves as he sat under the gaze of resurrection eyes that afternoon in the chapel, trying to communicate in a way he wasn’t totally comfortable to a group of people who, he may have rightly feared, may not have been totally comfortable with him.  By invoking a hymn, Rutili attempted to draw his church-going audience to himself; by calling himself a pilgrim, he made his stance clear, a psalmic confession.
Art is about the relationship between the artist and his or her audience.  A good artist should make the effort to communicate true to his or her own vision, and a good audience should be willing to have the respect for the artist’s individual worth to at least attempt to engage on those terms.  If art is about our trying to communicate what it means to be human and alive, we should hope for ears to hear and eyes to see and understand the work around us.  It should be no surprise that we take such delight in art that communicates well; in a very real and literal way, it’s like spending time with a close friend.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the Califone set was a magical experience because the people in the audience self-identify as Christian and are thus inherently concerned with other people, because to do so would be to patronize both sides, Christian and non-Christian alike.  But what the audience  (prepped by a week of speeches from writers both of the faith and not) and the students (taught over and again to appreciate art as a genuine and honest form of loving one’s neighbor) and the band (attempting to create a unique, original, and beautiful thought, which is a strangely rare commodity these days) achieved together was something of what I think all of this was supposed to look like before we all decided that the best music was the sounds of our own voices and that the best films play exclusively in our mirrors.
In other words, it was a holy communion of the highest order, in some ways on a par with any trip to the altar rail.  It shifted boring show after boring show into an inarguable logic; one of those strange moments of grace that glides like an expert bobsledder’s icy groove, at once wild and completely tamed.

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• 3:04 am 0

R’n'r Confessional: Rock is Dead

Philosophy undergraduate and future critic Richard Meltzer wrote a book in 1967 called The Aesthetics of Rock that looked at the genre inquisitively, critiquing the various social and philosophical concerns of everyone from Martha and the Vandellas to the Beatles.  This was the year that Sgt. Pepper’s forced people to take rock seriously as an art form rather than some form of tribal entertainment.  In a certain sense, you could say that the Beatles’ LP gave birth to the hyperliterate review style of Pitchfork and, well, guys like me who devote incredible amounts of brain power to figuring out what Panda Bear is really singing about.  Rock music is now studied as literature: you can take History of Rock ‘n’ Roll courses in universities, and the University of Liverpool apparently offers a Ph.D. in the study of popular music (which means, of course, that its graduates are legally allowed to call themselves Dr. Rock; hello, future).
Blame it on the sophistication of the music, if you think you can.  Hell, blame it on critics’ insecure desires to be taken more seriously as thinkers.  But something changed the way that we appreciate music.  I can no longer simply put on and enjoy a record.  It has to be intellectually stimulating.  It has to challenge my thoughts or, to take it in the opposite direction, provide my aching mind with some momentary transcendence, something that I can disappear into for three and a half minutes.  And if something can do both of those things (Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home comes to mind), slap five stars on that thing and start glowing.  I’ve got five hundred records that I’m not content with.
Rock ‘n’ roll fails me.  Bringing It All Back Home is my favorite rock record, but it never really does what I want it to do.  It’s never good enough.  My ears give me no rest and are rapacious in their desire to find something better.  Despite what Black Sabbath may have told you, rock ‘n’ roll was never meant to save our souls.  Nor was jazz, funk, country – none of it.  It’s great stuff (well, except for funk; I could do without funk and be a pretty happy guy), but in the end, they’re all idols worth killing.  Godfather of soul, please forgive me.
Rock is dead.  It’s not dead in the sense that its boundaries aren’t being explored, its conventions examined.  There are bands making progressive, edgy, soulful rock ‘n’ roll right now, and there probably always will be.  But it’s dead in the sense that it’s a tapeworm, a black hole that spirals to infinite depths.  We need to be content with that; we need to give up our search for the Next Brilliant Record and enjoy what we’ve got.  We’ve put too much weight on the music; it can’t stand up much longer.  In the same way that water is bland when you’ve had a gallon of it but tastes like sweet heaven on a hot day, rock ‘n’ roll is never going to be truly fulfilling until we stop gorging ourselves on it.
I know people who have figured this out.  They’re the type of people who look at me like I’m a sick person when I tell them how many gigs of music sit on my computer (for the record, it’s twenty-seven, which I actually think isn’t too terribly much).  They’re the people who have had their emotional connection with their records and made the commitment to have and to hold in sickness and in health.  They get that far-off look in their eyes when they talk about the effect that John Darnelle’s lyrics have had on them.
There are people out there – maybe you’re one of them – who own five records and are perfectly content, and I’m jealous of those people, because they’ve learned that it’s not terribly important to know the name and Wiki file of every new band to score above an eight or below a three.  They’re content to wear out the grooves of what they know and love, to see the goodness and sufficiency of what they already have, to let that record needle carve in stone whatever it is that music does to those of us who love it.  They’ve learned how to listen to music with their heart and mind and without the critical ear of whatever’s fashionable and the expectation that this next record will be the one that will finally deliver them.  They keep their record collection in the right place, and they love their music that much more as a result.  These are good people.
So, yeah, rock ‘n’ roll is dead.  Long live rock ‘n’ roll.

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• 3:03 am 0

Evangelicals – The Evening Descends

Evangelicals – The Evening Descends
Dead Oceans; 3 ½ Stars

The Evening Descends opens with all of the drama of a Max Fischer play.  Guitars chime like harps, a few scene-setting sounds echo about, and one can mentally see the cheap curtain being raised on a still-drying set.  But unlike the Rushmore character (and perhaps like the band’s religious namesake as well), Evangelicals’ medium does not take a back seat to its message.  Instead, the cheap production – and believe me, there are a number of times when you can practically see the light cans in the back of the school cafeteria here – works closely with stoned-again search for meaning and God that lead singer Josh Jones guides his listeners through.
The problem is, I can’t decide if Evangelicals are overachieving or underachieving.  At times, the clipped and fading post-production tricks seem legitimately beautiful, as in the downy guitars of “Snowflakes,” but the wailing sirens and mini-skits that begin “Party Crashin” seem like shlock for shlock’s sake.  Sometimes, of course, the two coalesce, as in the gleefully dramatic “Bellawood,” whose horror-movie Theremins wail and moan along with Jones when he shouts, “Strange things keep happening inside my head!”
The group manages to channel 70’s television soul, old sound effects records, contemporary hardcore, and the Flaming Lips, not to mention the Rocky Horror vibe that saturates nearly every track.  While the sound is (somehow) a bit tighter and better controlled than 2006’s So Gone, The Evening Descends seems like a minor step backward; the group’s aesthetic has begun to congeal, however slightly, but it too often relies on slapstick instead of letting the music do the talking.  It’s a dark playfulness that is at times unnerving and lacks the stapled-together soulfulness that made parts of So Gone special.
Which isn’t to say that this is a bad record, by any means.  Evangelicals are far closer to the right side of the line between hokieness and authenticity than fellow Okies the Flaming Lips were by their second record, if for no other reason than because the Lips provided the blueprint.  And really, Evening feels like a cheaper version of At War With the Mystics, the Lips’ 2006 space rocker.  The difference, though, is that Evangelicals, perhaps by nature of their limited budget (not to mention fame), feel much more grounded in reality.  Wayne Coyne may be singing about what would happen if you had all of God’s power, but Josh Jones sounds convinced when he screams through a wall of distorted vocals, “When someone loves you very much, you’re fucked!” in the Broken Social Scene-y “Skeleton Man.”   It’s the album’s most winning moment, following Jones’ titular character’s attempts to fill a chest “left empty by the heart’s affairs.”  He may be screaming in fear, but he also recognizes that he’s no longer a lifeless stick collection when he sings, “Hands and knees knelt down and scraped skin replaced bone.”  In other words, as frightening as it may be to be known by something bigger than yourself, it sure as hell beats the alternative.  And yeah, id may have taken Jones a bit of maudlin drama to get there, but in this day and age, shock and awe sometimes feels like the only authenticity we have left.
All told, Evening is an at-times charming picture of where we seem to live every day.  Jones, bassist Kyle Davis, and drummer Austin Stephens have lovingly set their scene, trimming it with thrift store curtains just threadbare enough to let in a little light.

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• 3:02 am 0

Constance: Delicate Burdens

Constance: Delicate Burdens

If you don’t know someone – I mean really know them in the sense that you’ve made some emotional connection with them, gone out drinking with them, had that mystical one-night stand with them, sat on a back porch playing guitar with them, even if only once – if you haven’t warmed your cold hands on another person’s soul, can you really care what happens to them?  If you have looked, however quickly, into a person’s heart and tried to understand them, how can you possibly turn away when that person is in pain?
This, to some degree, is Constance: Delicate Burdens, the local art/design/literary journal helmed by Erik Kiesewetter and Patrick Strange [full disclosure: Patrick Strange was associate editor of ANTIGRAVITY until August of 2007].  Delicate Burdens follows in the form of Replicas and Replacements, the journal’s first issue, by offering not only a portrait of what life in New Orleans is like after Katrina, but by personalizing the work of each contributor.  Unlike in most journals, each artist or writer is given space to write about themselves, and contact information is listed for everyone.  The hope, according to Strange, was initially “to serve as a sort of avenue through which local artists could get their name out to a larger audience and then potentially garnish more work.”  What it has turned into, though, is an avenue for deeper connections.  While each contributor’s art is certainly sufficient in its ability to teach the reader about the artist, the personal touches remind the reader that the art here does not and cannot exist independent of its creator.  Or, as Strange put it, “the hope is that [readers] will grow connected to the people themselves, instead of trying to empathize with a ‘city’ or a ‘plight’ or something that seems so foreign and abstract. I mean, how do you stay emotionally and philanthropically connected to a ‘place’?”
Delicate Burdens, then, is about people, and on a very basic level, it’s about people trying to deal with what it means to be alive in a city that has practiced toeing the line between tragedy and comedy for far longer than any other.  It’s both a promotional vehicle for New Orleans art and a way to remind the rest of America that we’re still here.  After all, we no longer have the pull on our countrymen’s heartstrings that we once enjoyed and still need.  Few presidential candidates – besides John Edwards, who has bowed out – have even bothered mentioning Katrina anywhere on the campaign trail besides south Louisiana, which speaks not to the varying levels of benevolence of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John McCain, but to where we now stand in national eyes.  The small, personal touches of Constance – the mini-profiles, the email addresses – connect the contributor to the reader at a more practical level.  After considering the screenprint and watercolor of “Monks and Quakers” and “Pioneers,” and reading the somewhat-twee description of how she first found the depicted birds, it’s hard to not want to know more about artist Jenny LeBlanc.  This is what art is supposed to do – connect us to others, enable us to experience things that we would otherwise never be able to experience.
This is why Constance matters.  The contributors’ spirit of honesty – honesty about themselves and the city that they love and call home – brings the audience in closer to the true soul of the city.   The journal eschews the sides of New Orleans that America has seen for the past two hundred years, the tired landscapes that don’t say a word about the people who live here.  Nowhere in this issue will you find flowery pieces about the French Quarter, trad jazz, beignets, parades, Bourbon Street.  When these things and places do appear, they are just as much a part of the background in the art as they are for all of us.  We see the New Orleans that we inhabit every day, paintings and stories and poems that strike at the true soul of the city and the way that the bizarre becomes ordinary here, but without all of the window dressing found in tourist brochures and Blue Dog paintings.  Constance, in other words, does not need cliché to convince people to care; it is convinced that good art and real people are worthy enough.  The people in Delicate Burdens are not relegated to crowd-shots on Canal Street; they are valued as individuals, and the “feeling of disorientation and self-doubt that people in New Orleans seem to have,” as Strange put it, is seen not as a weakness or a cry for a handout, but as a genuine problem worthy of our compassion.
Times have changed since Constance’s first issue.  Where Replicas and Replacements reflected the hopeful spirit that buoyed us when we were still underwater, Delicate Burdens finds a “one foot in, one foot out, why-are-we-here, we-love-it-so-much-but-it’s-not-healthy attitude,” according to Kiesewetter.  “The general population feels fickle and forgetful [concerning New Orleans],” he said.  “We aren’t as sensational as we have been in the past.”  Now more than ever, we are forced to come to terms with the dichotomy of New Orleans life.  This theme shines throughout Delicate Burdens, from the sleepy nostalgia of Natalie Sciortino’s paintings to the photographs of Dave Relle, whose portraits of abandoned shotgun houses could just as easily be of exhausted New Orleanians for all of their slumping beauty.
The book itself is alternatingly hilarious (Michael Patrick Welch’s loving description of teaching music to inner-city kids comes immediately to mind) and devastating (as in the bleak dissonance of Bud Faust’s poetry).  At times, most notably in Susan Gisleson’s “Why I Live Below Sea Level,” it manages to be both.  But the piece that captures what Strange described as “the duality of living in New Orleans” with the most poetic accuracy is Jim Louis’ “Razor Knives.”  In the deceptively short non-fiction piece about the trials of tutoring kids in the Sixth Ward in 1995, Louis expresses the struggle of attempting to point others towards some sort of hope in the middle of horror, not to mention the effort it takes to remain positive oneself.  That “Razor Knives” takes place ten years before Katrina serves only to underscore how the storm amplified an already-existing condition.  The piece ends with a very simple setting of the scene, a scene that is a bit fantastical but, hey, in New Orleans in 2008, what isn’t?
The student that Louis has been tutoring has left for the day, returning to the neighborhood “that hears, as we do, the nightly cough of gunfire.”  Louis, meanwhile, is standing on his porch and looking out on the street when he perceives “five blocks down and one over, on St. Ann, a marching band practicing for Mardi Gras strut[ting] by a crime scene as the pregnant widow, seeing her husband’s blood washed by the rain into the gutter, faints.”
This is true life, the mélange of dark and light, good and evil, that exists everywhere but for whatever reason is played out in such shocking contrast in New Orleans.  There is happiness, and there is sadness, there are celebrations and catastrophes, but the one thing that remains constant is the humanity and worth of the people who live at the storm’s center, the people who, everyday, are forced to come to terms with what it means to be alive in a world gone mad.  Everywhere, in every city, life is a delicate burden; we just happen to handle ours – as we do everything here – on a stage much larger, much more extravagant.  But in doing this, by capturing and expressing the losses and gains of normal human beings with such prescience, we show the rest of the world both the despair and the hope of being alive.  In that way, New Orleans is teacher to the world.

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• 3:02 am 0

Blitzen Trapper [Spanish Moon, March 12, 2008]

Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for having little to say.  So goes the theory, at least, with Portland’s Blitzen Trapper, whose Wild Mountain Nation barnstomps across genres – stoner country, junk-pop, experimental noise – with little message but large footprints.  Wild Mountain Nation, the group’s third self-released record, was picked up and distributed by Sub Pop last year, launching something of a mid-summer media frenzy as journalists tried to pinpoint the group’s sound, some deciding that the six-piece is picking up where Beck left off after Odelay while others claimed that the title track’s guitar bends and the syrupy steel of “Country Caravan” makes BT heir apparent to American Beauty-era Grateful Dead.  The rest simply make comparisons to Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, another album known more for its ambition than its tunes.
Few, though, chose to comment on just how well Blitzen Trapper shift between these styles.  It takes a serious talent to jump from glam guitars to jawharp solos in a single album, much less a single song (“Miss Spiritual Tramp”) without coming across as contrived or unfocused.  Maybe it’s the layer of fuzz that seems to lie decadently across the album, but, somehow, the front-porch bluegrass of “Wild Mtn. Jam” doesn’t feel out of place between the power-dancing “Sci-Fi Kid” and the static ballad “Hot Tip/Tough Club.”
In any event, one thing that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that Wild Mountain Nation, in all of its afghan-covered glory, is one hell of an album.  Rolling Stone even called the title track one of the year’s 100 Best Songs, sandwiched between Nick Cave project Grinderman and a Kelly Clarkson song that is not “Since U Been Gone.”
ANTIGRAVITY chatted up B. Trapp frontman Eric Earley to find out just what his intentions are with our daughters, young man.

ANTIGRAVITY: So Sub Pop released Wild Mountain Nation.
Eric Earley:  They just have it internationally, but we still have it in the U.S.
AG:  And you released your first two records, too.  How did this one blow up?
EE: This one?  Well, this is really the first record that we tried to publicize when we put it out.  This is the first record where we actually had a publicist and toured and had a manager and all that stuff.  The other two we made but we didn’t really do anything; we just put them on the internet and sold them at shows.
AG: So I’m guessing there are a few more people at the shows these days.
EE: Yeah (laughs).  Definitely.
AG: Most writers tend to focus on the country songs on the record, and they’re really great songs, but they seem like they’re not very indicative of the album as a whole.  Why do you think that those tracks are such standouts?
EE: Oh I don’t know, I think they’re just the easier ones to understand.  They’re easier to talk about or write about.  There are other songs on Wild Mountain Nation that are good but they’re not in a specific genre necessarily so it’s more difficult to write about.  So people have just been focusing on what they can write about easier, like “Wild Mountain Nation” or “Country Caravan.”
AG: What are your musical backgrounds?
EE: What, do you mean, like, studying or something?
AG: No, like, what did you listen to growing up?
EE: Oh, yeah, definitely.  Like, Brian was into metal as a kid and Mikey was into hip-hop very heavily.  I like country and folk music, Marty was more into, like, hippie-rock, and with Drew it’s more experimental noise stuff.  We cover all the bases between us.
AG: So when you guys are writing new songs, is it a more collaborative effort?
EE: Kind of.  I write all the material but when I’m arranging stuff I pull from our group.
AG: How do the live shows compare to your records?
EE: I think they’re better than the record.  They have a different energy and they’re not as patched-together.  The record is almost put together like a hip-hop record where everything’s all pieced-together with all kinds of noises and stuff.  And live we do a lot of that, too, but I think it’s more cohesive live; you get a better feeling for what the band is.  I don’t know, I’m not allowed to see us play.
AG: You’re not allowed?
EE: Well, I’m usually up there playing.
AG: (laughs) Oh, I thought you meant, like, you refuse to listen to live tapes.
EE: Oh (laughs).  I’ve done that.
AG: You guys all come from pretty different backgrounds musically, and your sound definitely reflects that, and you don’t really see that much these days.  I mean, my friends and I, and I’m guessing most people, listen to all types of music – from country to rock to hip-hop – but not many bands let their influences shine through like that.
EE: Yeah, exactly, that’s how we are.  And there’s no reason why a band can’t move fluidly through all kinds of music.  It’s a fine line to walk, being able to actually do that and pull it off.
AG: I know you guys did a really different version of Heart’s “Crazy on You” for a comp.  Do you ever pull that one out live?
EE: (laughs) Yeah. (laughs) Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, we do some stuff live that’s just guitars, just keyboards.  We don’t do “Crazy on You” live, although I’ve thought about it.  Maybe on the next tour we will.
AG: Do you…you know, for most bands this would be a strange question, but y’all are from the Northwest so maybe it’s not that odd of a question, but do you jam your songs out much live?
EE: Typically no.  I mean, sometimes we’ll do…typically there are so many songs we wanna play that we won’t really jam but just move fluidly from song to song.  We’ll do that for four or five songs.  We don’t ever just jam out on a song, though.
AG: Do any songs from the first two records ever show up live?
EE: Yeah, we do one from each.
AG: And you have a new EP out, too, right?
EE: Yeah.  We’ll be playing some other songs as well.  There’s an iTunes EP and a tour EP and we’ll be doing stuff from both of those.
AG: I saw some of the new stuff on the last Daytrotter Session that you guys did.
EE: Some of that stuff’s pretty rough (laughs).  It was fun, though.
AG: Are those songs the direction that your writing is headed right now?
EE: No, that stuff’s actually older than Wild Mountain Nation.  Those are tracks that never made it onto records but that we still like to play live and we didn’t have recordings of them, so we decided that we’d just do them on Daytrotter.  Although, no, I take it back, one of those songs is going to be on the new record.  The kinda-country one, “Stolen Shoes.”  But the recording of it is much different than when we play it live.  But I wouldn’t say it’s indicative of the new record.
AG: Well, we look forward to hearing the new stuff.
EE: Yeah, you’re in New Orleans?
AG: Yeah, the magazine’s in New Orleans, though I’m in Baton Rouge.
EE: I think we’re playing in Baton Rouge, actually.
AG: Yeah, you are.  You’re playing with Man Man, who are actually pretty huge here and always pull a big crowd.
EE: Oh, ok.  Good.  Yeah, that should be a good show.
AG: I saw you’re playing a few shows with Mahjongg, too, right?
EE: I think so, I think we’re doing one.
AG: I saw those dudes at a truck stop outside of Baton Rouge when I was a freshman in college.  I didn’t even know they were still around.
EE: I don’t even know what that is.  I don’t know who they are.
AG: They’re this weird, gypsy dance-punk group.  It was really strange seeing them in a truck stop, believe me.
EE: (laughs) Huh.  I had no idea.  Well.  Cool.

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• 3:01 am 1

R’n'r Confessional: Animal Magnetism

Rock ‘n’ Roll Confessional

Perhaps it’s time I started treating this column more like its namesake.
I have a confession to make.
If you read my last posting back in December, you may remember me demanding to know whether Animal Collective has any fans.  To me they’ve always been one of those bands that people only like in order to garner cred; for whatever reason, liking Animal Collective makes people think that you either have an extremely refined ear or are incredibly pretentious.  This is sort of like being one of the seventeen people in America that regularly eats Brussels sprouts.  No one actually listens to them and enjoys doing so.
Or so I thought.  I noticed my façade cracking when I succumbed to the numerous year-end lists that put AC drummer Panda Bear’s solo record near the top and downloaded Person Pitch from eMusic.  I found it odd that I read as many reviews of Strawberry Jam, the Collective’s 2007 record, as I could possibly find.  Like a dog sniffing around fresh blood, I poked around the group’s MySpace and even downloaded the song “Peacebone” – you know, just to see what all of the hype was about.  I am, after all, a journalist, and it is my responsibility to be informed.
And then, like a junkie with hit in hand, I pounced.  I bought 2005’s Feels and devoured it secretly over the course of two days, letting Panda’s driving percussion and singer Avey Tare’s howls pulse through my head while Geologist and Deakin crammed as much noise and sheer feeling in while I wasn’t looking.  But I needed more.  I bought Strawberry Jam within two weeks and was no longer hiding my habit from my friends.  And now, with the publication of this article, my love for Animal Collective is officially out in the open.
What makes Animal Collective connect with the people who love them is the ambiguous but amplified emotions that their music seems to embody.  Beneath – or maybe among – the stacked layers of electronics, acoustic guitars, screams, samples, reverb, feedback, etc, is an honest intensity and conviction that drives the group’s music.  While the form of their songs may not make sense (and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I understand everything that’s happening in “For Reverend Green”), the tones of the music seem to jibe with Tare’s sing/screaming.  Like when looking at a good impressionist painting, when we listen to a song like Strawberry Jam’s “Fireworks,” we have a general idea of what is happening without being given the maximum amount of details.  As Mike Rodgers noted in the October ANTIGRAVITY, the vast majority of AC’s lyrics are nonsensical.  I honestly have no idea what “Fireworks” is about, but I have no problem applying it to my own life.
I don’t know that this is necessarily a good thing.  I’ve noticed lately that the artists I talk to claim to create their art fully aware of the fact that it will be appropriated by its consumers and, because of this, they refuse to assign meaning to any of what they do. This is a problem because it begs the question of why we should bother making art at all, or, to take it further, why should we ever express ourselves in any way, if we’re going to refuse to allow our words to mean anything.
It works both ways, too.  When we misappropriate a work of art, when we fail to take the author’s intent into consideration and instead warp its meaning to meet our needs, we are not only being selfish but ruining the work’s artistic merit.
Take a song like “Every Breath You Take” by the Police.  For what it is, it’s a pretty good song.  People have it played at their weddings.  And without really realizing what he’s doing, the groom will look into his wife’s eyes and, in full view of her parents and extended family, sing to her, “Every vow you break, every smile you fake, I’ll be watching you.”  The bride and groom think that this is a pretty song (and, to be fair, it does seem romantic if you don’t pay it any attention).  And it is a good song.  It’s a good song about a stalker.  No matter how much the bride and groom romanticize it, nothing can change the fact that Sting is singing from the bushes through a window.  All art has a meaning, whether it’s clear or not.
I’ll grant you that I’m being uppity.  I’ll also grant you that I’m an insecure artist who’s scared to death of having his work misinterpreted.  But if we’re going to be passionate about music – which we very well should be – we can’t suck the life and meaning out of it just to make it fit our current mood or situation.
As for Animal Collective and all of the other bands that flirt with ambiguity, their songs are filled with meaning.  They’re filled with meaning because people whose lives are forever being shaped and changed, whose various worldviews cannot help but be expressed in what they do, created them.  After all, to claim that a work is meaningless is to assign it a meaning.
So maybe that’s the real confession this month.  Not that I like Animal Collective, but that I take precious expression and confession from people and, rather than listening to what they’re trying to tell me, tell them what they should be talking about.  And really, the only thing worse than being a snotty hipster is to tell someone that their opinions and convictions aren’t terribly important to you.

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• 3:00 am 0

Built to Spill [Howlin' Wolf, March 3, 2008]

In 1997, Boise, ID, guitar-stretchers Built to Spill released Perfect From Now On, a sprawling record that patches together bits of Neil Young guitar, Pink Floyd atmospherics, and singer Doug Martsch’s star-gazing lyrics with melodies to match.  Though they had already released a couple of well-received indie pop records on Up that caught the ear of Isaac Brock, who went on to form Modest Mouse, it was Perfect From Now On that launched Built to Spill into the realm of Important Indie Rock Bands.  That record, along with follow-up Keep It Like a Secret, established Martsch as the genre’s only active guitar god, the one guy besides J Mascis who could trill into a wah solo and actually get the tight pants shaking.  The centerpiece of 2000’s Live is a twenty-minute version of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” that more-often-than-not surpasses the original in its spacy noodling.  In 2006, the group released You in Reverse, which, while lacking the slick melodies that so define Perfect and Secret, shows that Martsch’s ability to experiment with song structure without losing pop sensibility has only grown in the ten years that his band has been on Warner Brothers.
ANTIGRAVITY called Doug Martsch at home in Boise and immediately proceeded to confuse the voice of his wife for that of a child, much to our embarrassment.  Lucky for us, Martsch is a forgiving guy.

ANTIGRAVITY: Was that your daughter in the background just now?
Doug Martsch: No, that was my wife.
AG: Oh, wow, my bad.
DM: That’s alright, I don’t care.
AG: Okay.  Good.  So, you recorded You in Reverse in 2004, right?
DM: Shit, I don’t remember.  That sounds about right.
AG: Why did you wait so long to release it?
DM: When did it come out, in 2006?  I think we started it in 2004, finished it in 2005, and it came out in 2006.  It took about a year to make for various reasons and then it takes the record company half a year to put something out after it’s done.  They have to do – I don’t know what they have to do.  They have to produce it and do promotional things for it, supposedly.  It just takes a while.
AG: Have you guys enjoyed being on Warner Brothers?
DM: Yeah, totally.  The people we work with are all real nice and they treat us with a lot of respect and let us do whatever we want to do.  We’ve had a great time there.
AG: Have you been working on new material?
DM: Yeah.
AG: Do the new songs show up in the live show?
DM: You know what, over the last few years, some of it has come and gone in the live shows.  It kinda depends.  A lot of this stuff is kinda old and we go back and forth on it.  We’ll work on new stuff and get burnt out on it then hit it again.  We haven’t been playing these songs live for a while, just for the last few years, but some of them have been in the rotation for a while.
AG: I know you got deep into back porch blues while you guys were on hiatus.  Did you try to incorporate that into Built to Spill when you got back together?
DM: Yeah, sort of.  I think a lot of old folk record and reggae records sound cool.  We’re kinda trying to do that to some degree.  When you’re producing a record, some of the limitations are within the gear and within the people you’re working with and stuff, so it’s hard to make things sound exactly like you want them.  You may have a record in mind with a special kind of sound, and you can get close to it, and that’s what I think we did.
AG: Was it tough to get back together after the break?
DM: No, it was actually really easy.  It was fun and exciting to start playing again after taking so much time off.
AG: And you have a new single out that’s got a bit of a reggae sound, right? [“They Got Away”]
DM: Yeah, it’s just straight-up reggae.
AG: How did you get so into reggae being from Boise?
DM: (laughs) Well, I had heard reggae all my life and I never really like it much until I was maybe 30 years old and I heard some dub things that sounded really interesting to me.  Because up to that point, the only reggae I’d heard was Bob Marley or UB40 or something.  And there’s some good Bob Marley, but I’d mostly been exposed to Legend or whatever, his mediocre stuff.  Then one day it just made sense to me.  I heard some rock steady stuff, some Delroy Wilson, some Lee Perry, and I became kinda obsessed with it.
AG: Do you play the reggae song live?
DM: We played that song off and on for a year or two while we were writing it, but we haven’t been playing it for a while.  I don’t know if we’ll play it again.
AG: I read somewhere that you had a professor in college who described eternity as this process of whittling down a metal sphere ten times the size of Jupiter to the size of a pea with a single feather and that you took his words verbatim and wrote “Randy Described Eternity” from Perfect From Now On.
DM: Pretty close.  I think it’s a standard metaphor that’s used by Christian religious people to describe eternity.  It wasn’t exactly that.  I had to change some things from how I remembered because of syllables and meter and stuff, but basically that’s the idea – something giant getting slapped with a feather [until it’s worn down to nothing], you know, just some ridiculous metaphor for how long eternity is.
AG: You guys are one of the few bands in indie rock – maybe you and Dinosaur Jr – that are allowed to have these long, sprawling solos like the ones on Perfect From Now On.  For the most part, it’s seen as cliché in the indie world to strut into a long solo, but you guys are not only given license to do it but lauded for it.  Why do you think that is?
DM: We have different kinds of records, and to me that’s the only record that’s really like that.  Maybe there are moments on other records, but I mostly think of us as just an alternative rock band.  Like Dinosaur, we’re influenced by a lot of classic rock and all.  That band was important to me when I was young, as well as some other SST bands, in the way that they took alternative or punk rock sensibilities and tied them in together with more traditional music ideas like classic rock.  Punk originally was a reaction to the musicianship of the bands of the time, so it was taking some of the punk rock ideas and mixing them with musicianship and songwriting and that just made a big impact on me when I was young.  And the fact that you can kinda do anything, that nothing is off-limits as long as it’s put together in a tasteful way.  Bands like the Butthole Surfers and Camper Van Beethoven I felt did the same thing.  David Bowie was my introduction to that sort of thing, a musician who’s free to go wherever he wants, but those other bands – Dinosaur especially – they were closer to my age and easier for me to relate to than David Bowie.  What was so great to me about punk rock was that anyone could do it.  David Bowie was obviously an especially gifted musician.  But punk rock had bands like Hüsker Dü, where they write great songs but they weren’t Eddie Van Halen or anything; they were just regular guys that worked hard and figured out a way to make music with the medium amount of talent.
AG: So it must be pretty cool for you guys getting to play with a band like the Meat Puppets, who were certainly involved with the SST scene.
DM: Of course, yeah, it’s really exciting.  And we were able to do some shows with Camper Van Beethoven over the last couple of years.  It’s been really fun for me to be able to play with some of the people who really formed my ideas about music.  Dinosaur, too; we were able to play some shows with J and Dinosaur Jr.
AG: Are they just doing a couple of dates with you?
DM: No, they’re doing the whole tour with us.  Month-long.
AG: Whose tour is it?
DM: It’s actually ours.  It’s kinda embarrassing.  But it’s the same thing with Camper Van Beethoven: the band breaks up for ten years and a lot changes.  People who were into them don’t go out to shows anymore and young people don’t know about them.  Somehow we were able to avoid that.  We had the hiatus and stuff but we hit the road before we put out the record and reminded people that we exist.  We didn’t take a long enough break, luckily.  Yeah, we met the Meat Puppets when we were in Austin.  They were recording in a studio that we were recording at and met them briefly.  Then when this tour was coming up, I took a chance to see if they were up for touring with us and it all kinda worked out.
AG: So is there any chance that we’ll get to see you and Curt Kirkwood do some long jam on Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” or anything like that?
DM: I don’t know.  (laughs) You never know.  I hope something like that happens.  Usually something like that happens, unless, you know, we just don’t get along at all.  With Camper Van we did a little bit of that.  The thing is, we already have three guitars and it’s hard to go anywhere from there.  With Camper Van we had a couple of shows where Jonathan [Segel, Camper’s multi-instrumentalist] came out and played violin with us.  If there’s one or two guitars, you can bring another one out and it’ll make a difference, but anymore and it’ll get lost.
AG: Do you know if Neil’s heard your version of “Cortez the Killer”?
DM: I have no idea.  I’ve never met him or anything.  I saw him play for the first time a couple months ago.  He started his tour here in Boise.  But I have no idea if he knows about it.
AG: The tour where he did a split electric and acoustic set?
DM: Yeah, exactly.  His wife opened.  This guy in Europe told me that Neil Young had heard the song and that he really liked it and I thought it was cool, but I wasn’t convinced.  So I looked it up on the internet – I don’t remember what I typed in, something like “Neil Young Built to Spill” – and I couldn’t find anything.  Finally, I found something and it was like, “Neil Young likes Built to Spill’s version of the song and when I told Doug that he seemed pleased.” It was that guy who told me that, writing on the internet about it!  So I don’t know about that story.
AG: Are you doing any covers on this tour?
DM: Yeah, we’re doing a Brian Eno song on this tour.  “Third Uncle.”
AG: You guys along with Pavement and one or two other bands are usually called the Biggest Indie Band of the 90s, which I think means that you guys laid the foundation for what people are doing now.  What’s it like for you to look at what’s become of a genre that you helped to create, with Kidz Bop doing Modest Mouse songs and indie rock all over the place?
DM: I don’t really know what to think of all that.  To me it makes sense for Modest Mouse to be hugely famous because they’re so good; it doesn’t really surprise me that much.  But I don’t know about our genre; it’s kinda a loose thing.  All that stuff is neither here nor there for me.
AG: What kind of people come to your shows?  I’m 23, and I imagine I would be neither the oldest nor the youngest person at the show.
DM: You know, it seems like a pretty wide spectrum.  Like you say, there are people your age who seem to be interested, there are some even younger kids who are coming out still.  Then there are a handful of oldsters that still go out to shows, so it’s a pretty diverse crowd.  We feel pretty lucky to have that mix of people – or anyone at all showing up.  We’ve got people that have stuck around for a long time, people like you that learned about us later.
AG: I saw Willie Nelson a few weeks ago and his crowd was really mixed.  Frat guys, hipsters, the elderly.
DM: Totally, that’s exactly how the Neil Young show was.  There were rednecks, hipsters: the whole gamut.  Yuppies.
AG: What was it like growing up a music fan in Boise?
DM: Well, I moved here right when I started high school and I was into music, but I was just starting to break out of listening to heavy metal music.  I discovered Bowie and REM, a few of those alternative things.  And there was a thriving hardcore scene going on, so I met some of those people.  They were always having concerts, but it was all hardcore bands who weren’t that great.  But there was this local band, State of Confusion, that I liked a lot.  It was just cool seeing people put on their own shows and bring out of town bands into town.  There were all kinds of networks of fan zines and concert promoting and stuff.  Again, it’s like the SST thing where normal people put out records and put on concerts and did these things that you always thought big companies were only able to pull off.  I mostly learned about music through the guys in State of Confusion and a couple of other guys who were deeply into punk rock and stuff.  And I was into the Smiths and the Church and bands that were more pop.  There was only a handful of punk and hardcore that I liked, things like the Replacements, for instance.  Things that were punk rock but more melodic.
AG: You’ve said recently that you think that Built to Spill has yet to reach its full potential.  Where do you see the band going from here?
DM: I think that at some point, we could do something that’s really collaborative for the five of us.  The last record was more done between the four of us and Steve, the producer.  Brett Netson sort of got in at the last.  The reggae single that we did was really collaborative.  Everyone wrote their own parts and fit everything together.  This next record, I’m not sure if it’s going to be that one, because the songs have come along quite a ways.  This record is mostly songs that I’ve written and they’re mostly pop songs.  But I imagine us making a record where everyone brings what they’ve got to the table, and I don’t think that that’s happened yet.  There are moments of stuff, yeah, but I think that we can make a record that really highlights what everyone’s capable of.

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• 3:00 am 0

Drive-By Truckers – Brighter Than Creation’s Dark

Drive-By Truckers – Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
New West Records; 4.5 Stars

Despite their reputation for being the South’s most lovable drunks on stage, the Drive-By Truckers have always found their home on record. Never has this been more true than on Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the Athens five-piece’s latest record. Despite losing the brilliant singer-songwriter Jason Isbell (who quit the group in 2007 following his divorce from wife and DBT bassist Shonna Tucker), the group have finally made their masterpiece.
The Truckers’ songs have always at least had a bit of a playful spirit to them, even when they were singing about Satan and George Wallace and the fiery death of Lynyrd Skynyrd. That spirit is largely missing on the sprawling Brighter; in fact, the songs here that are meant to be playful (Mike Cooley’s “3 Dimes Down” and “Bob,” among several others) have not-so-subtle traces of melancholy. The negative emotional thrust of the record makes it a tough listen, though the group’s focused aim has served only to help them hit their target with more force. In other words, the lack of “fun” on the album doesn’t take away from its merit or the listener’s ability to enjoy it. Consider it a musical No Country For Old Men, from its black and white portraits to the stark twang and dim static of the music.
Though Patterson Hood has always been de facto leader of the three-songwriter band, Brighter is the first of the group’s records that feels like a unit as opposed to the work of three artists. Hood’s “Opening Act,” the album’s centerpiece, is at its most basic a portrait of the beginning of a musician’s life on the road. But when he croaks about “the sun rising over a Technicolor horizon” after having just mentally chalked up a cocaine purchase as a necessary evil, it’s hard to figure out what the narrator’s success has stemmed from. Do the ends justify the means? Hood’s narrator seems to think so, but the dewy lines dripping from John Neff’s pedal steel guitar seem to suggest otherwise. Hood has made compassionate portraiture his stock and trade for years, but never has it been so focused as it is here on tracks like Neil Young stomper “The Righteous Path” or slow-rolling banjo track “Two Daughters and a Wife.”
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark stands in the same dark corner as Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It’s a bleak, lush record that bleeds deep for the people whose stories it tells, whether it’s the soldier haunted by the humanity of his victim in “That Man I Shot” or the tired teenagers who live in Cooley’s “Self-Destructive Zones.” Like Neil Young and Neutral Milk Hotel, the Truckers are telling stories that are at once specific but also universal, stories about the world that we all inhabit every day. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark is not background music. It’s not study music, or music you listen to to have a good time. It’s the kind of music you listen to when you’re trying to make sense of the world around you as all of your lovely wallpaper begins to peel at the edges. As Cooley comments in “Checkout Time in Vegas,” “Sin City still shines brighter than creation’s dark.” Here’s hoping we keep our eyes open for the Technicolor horizon.

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