How about a little fire, eh scarecrow?

Day: all last week
Song: Don't Save Us From the Flames
Artist: m83
Source: Before the Dawn Heals Us

I had resisted picking this album up for a while because I was under the impression it was getting pretty severely trashed. Pitchfork gave it what seemed like qualified praise (it was still praise though) and the cartoonist/editor of Questionable Content dedicated a sidebar to warning everyone about how bad it was. I picked it up anyway, since I am pretty much a sucker for anything that gets compared to My Bloody Valentine (or the first 15 or so releases put out by Gravity Records, but that's a story for a different time) in a remotely positive way. Still I put off listening to it for a while for fear I would be disappointed and just got around listening to it in the past week.

A quick look at MetaCritic shows I was mistaken, a victim of limited my own limited reading habits, which is good and bad. Good because its a pretty good album and deserving as being recognized as such. It’s bad for purely selfish reasons. As a obscure scribe nothing is more fun than cheering for the underdog and proclaiming the genius of something overlooked that could perhaps benefit from your efforts. Alas for my own delusions of importance, even the people who hate the album (like QC) love this song. And for good reason, this song is pretty much indie crack-rock. Let me count the ways... There's the catchy uptempo pop barely sticking its head up from under a thick blanket of rich soundscape; the analog synth melody floating over a bank of dreamy vocals; the way the song starts at 10, before bringing it down for the verses, Pixies-style. Throw in a Interpol-like breakdown and a coda featuring a sound somewhere between the Godspeed!'s screwdrivers-on-strings trick (think of the "Monheim" section of "Lift Your Skinney Fists...") and the Werlitzer sound the New pornographers occasionally try to bring back and I defy anyone who knows half of the bands I mentioned to offer any resistance.

The hole's the size of this great big world

Day: all this past week
Song: Modern Girl
Artist: Sleater Kinney
Source: The Woods

I feel like I should be using this space to praise the direction Sleater Kinney have taken with their new album, The Woods, because it is a breath of fresh air and for that reason probably their best record since The Hot Rock. (It's also a testament to the strength of their back catalog that they could release an album as excellent as One Beat - an album that if I were in a band I would say, "that's enough, we've done all we can. Lets go back to our day jobs before we embarrass our selves by trying to follow it up" - and have it feel like they were treading water.) But I think that will be coming soon enough. Right now what I want to listen to is "Modern Girl".

As any music writer/geek/hack will tell you, Sleater Kinney has its roots in the riot grrrl scene. Said writer will then go on to drop a sentence or two about Bikini Kill or Bratmobile before mentioning the bands the members of S-K used to be in. What they'll neglect to tell you is why these bands were interesting. Before I continue, I feel a disclaimer is in orde. I am only speaking as a sympathetic but somewhat confused and outside observer. Riot grrrl was never for my whitemiddleclassmale self. Because so much of it seemed to be about grrrls creating both a space to speak for the themselves and the vocabulary and concepts with which they could forge an identity, trying to speak for the scene with any air of authority as a whitemiddleclassmale seems especially wrong-headed. Yet it was this process which made the music and scene so interesting to an outside observer. Because the given ideas about what it meant to be a girl or a woman or a punk seemed inadequate, they played them off each other trying to preserve what was good about them while highlighting and criticising the problems. It created exciting areas of possibility both in terms of the lyrics and the scene's politics as well as in the music itself.

You can see this in Modern Girl. The opening riff is an alternating two note figure that begins a bluesy minor-key (or perhaps chromatic? my ears aren't quite that good) descent, but where the turn-around occur, they instead resolve the riff by going major, balancing things off the rock with a hint of pop. The vocal line is simple a catchy, almost maddingly so. The lyrics are of a piece with the music, starting off with blissed-out optimism that borders on naïveté, again almost maddingly so. With each new verse they becoming more and more defiant and the song becomes more ornamented, adding a slowly swelling organ, my favorite harmonic accompaniment this side of early Dylan, and finally a few bars of drums. Along with this they use the studio like they never have before (a constant for this album), slowly saturating the tape, until everything is wrapped in blanket of distortion. All the while the simple tune is constant, a defiant bit of sunny optimism in a gathering storm of anger and cynicism. Which I guess is what reminds me most of the riot grrrl recordings I've heard. The song engages in a complex juxtaposition, using one thing to temper the other, while refusing to choose between them: pop and rock/punk, fun and politics, a childlike tune and studio sophistication, why should we have to chose? Why can't we have the best parts of all?

Day 6

Song: 06day6
Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Source: Download!

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to a french site that was hosting several mp3s of live shows from Explosions in the Sky. This was pretty exciting. As I've mentioned elsewhere seeing Explosions in the Sky was one of my favorite musical experiences of 2004. Needless to say, I started downloading immediately. But since EitS's songs are pretty long, there was plenty of time to poke around the site and after a few clicks I saw "nouveau titre en studio" followed by a link. Now my french is not too good, but now I was really excited and a little scared. Their last proper album, "The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place", came out in 2003 and their recorded output since then has been good but not up to the standards of either "The Earth..." or "Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever" which preceeded it. Their contribution to their label's compilation was fine but a little flat, and the music they recorded to the Friday Night Lights soundtrack was good, but having to fit their post-rock compositions to the external demands of a film's pacing rather than letting them work according to their typically looser and lengthier sensibilites limited the emotional range and impact.

So it is with relief that I say "06Day6" is a return to form. The song opens with a big reverb-ed riff played over and over again. There is a fair amount of space in the sound, like the themes that close a symphony where the entire orchestra is playing the same part over and over again. It's a little surprising, feeling like the end of something rather than the begining. (On the albums the songs often run into eachother, so this makes me curious if this song is supposed to follow something else -- "The earth..." only had 5 tracks, so perhaps this was recorded as an album closer? perhaps they have recorded more than their website would indicate?) As the riff builds and dies, a sustained note bridges into the song's second section. "06day6"'s final three minutes are a the kind of intricate guitar chorale that makes me love this band. The guitars slowly get added back into the song, the first one playing a chordal foundation, then another adds a long, sustained accompaning line and finally the third plays a more punctuated counter-melody. Each line is complementary to the others, shading the feeling created by the earlier parts and giving the song a sense of development and direction. They build until they reach the limit of the possibilities of their polyphony, and then they pull back, creating new space to build upon. The effect is somewhere between the typical start-build-fade dramatic arc of instrumental post rock and a more lyrical exploration of a feeling, with enough ambiguity to have it fit beautiful-blissed moods or beautiful-sad ones.

I Sell Ice to Eskimos

Day: May 31, 2005
Song: Origin of Species
Artist: Angel Hair
Source: Pregnant with the Senior Class: Discography

In my early 90s chaotic emo pantheon, Angel Hair are always just behind heroin, Mohinder, and Universal Order of Armageddon. The 7" was great but most of the time I found the album was a bit too noisy and arty. Listening to them again I can hear a genre at a tipping point. The other early bands on Gravity Records incorporated a certain degree of noise and sloppy playing turn their hardcore anthems into barely controlled chaos. It gave their recordings a kind of expressionist quality while still being recognizable as songs; Angel Hair pushed it one step further using the texture of buzzy guitars, distorted screams, and rolling drums as effects in and of themselves while slowly relaxing their grip on riffs or melody. You can hear what was to come: a scene burned out on itself subtituting irony for earnestness, and self-conscious craft for expression. What saves them from the hipster rabbit-hole of artiness for artiness sake is that they knew how to use these techniques to convey something other than just letting the listener know they knew how the chaotic emo game was played.

"Origin of Species" opens with a few seconds of looped static, before one of the guitars starts playing a high, discordant riff. To me "riff" connotes a kind of blues-inspired repeated figure - not quite a melody, but something tuneful enough to support the song. The "Origin" riff is more of a rhythmic figure, conveying motion but not a tune. This becomes clear as the song jumps to double time and the other guitar comes in with a muted single note figure. The original becomes a place holder, a familiar pattern to orient the listener for the assault to come. The bass's first note is thick and ugly like the gears of a neglected machine snapping back to life before it, too, joins the headlong rush. Having established a mood, the band shifts the playing and the arrangement. The guitarts or rhythm section drop out at various times, opening up space for the vocals, or giving the guitars a place for a recognizable multinote line. The effect is almost Romantic (in the esthic sense, that is) of a voice (human or melodic) struggling free from the fury that surrounds it, even if that fury is self-created (which in turn is an interesting tension: conveying angst while struggling to come out from underneath it). Of course you still need to work through guitar parts stripped of melody and a guy screaming in demented ways. And the whole thing is buried under trebly static. But if you can get beyond all that it's a thrilling rush coupled with enough in-your-face drama to make any art with bombastic intensions jealous.