Owning Music

Reviewed:
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone by Explosions in the Sky (The Temporary Residence Limited 2007)
“Bog Lord” from Half-Eaten Guitar by Wyrd Visions (Bluefog Recordings 2006)
Yahoo! Music
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Etc.

At this point in the accelerating history of the 21st century, with the Napster/Metallica controversy as old and faded as the Parthenon, any discussion of music on the Internet risks painful anachronism and banality. But a predominant focus on the rights of musicians has largely ignored many other questions regarding music ownership, questions that concern the paying, listening public in addition to the artist, label, or music thief. While the Internet may provide its customers with easy access to music, does it actually deliver true ownership? And do cheaper, easier means of acquisition come without a cost to aesthetic value? In addition to some excellent music, the true subjects of this review will be the modes of acquiring it: the aesthetics of the material object versus the liberating potential of the hyperlink.

Last week I purchased the latest Explosions in the Sky album, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, on CD. Its expansive, complex, post-rock instrumentals develop the sound established on their previous three releases, the album opening with a short storm of heavy guitar layered with a cascade of rising and falling tremolos before settling into a quiet melody. A drum beat throbs, building tension before quieting further, until suddenly the music lifts, surging into a propulsive anthem of rapid percussion and multiple, shimmering guitar blasts. The use of their music on the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights, the high school football drama, makes perfect sense: like their music, no sport has the kinetic range that football does, the utter motionlessness, the lengthy runs, the abrupt collisions, the cohesion and diffusion of players across a field. The band reconfigures the post-rock formula of soft/slow-loud/fast-soft/slow into countless permutations, conveying a broader spectrum of emotional nuance than similar epic instrumental bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor (as incredible as they are).

The track titles—“The Birth and Death of the Day,” “What Do You Go Home To?,” “Catastrophe and the Cure”, “So Long, Lonesome,” among others—articulate well the effect of the music, how the moments of poignant quiet evoke the beauty to be found in the loneliest twilight, how the momentum of the rousing anthems pulls the listener from despair to hope. One of the unexpected pleasures of All of a Sudden, however, is its packaging, a case of grainy textured cardboard and fold out artwork by Esteban Rey, which grounds the music in a suggestive, symbolic visual narrative. In the center of one side of the foldout a man stands with a lantern in a boat, floating across a deluged town with a small light far off in the distance. Surrounding this central image are portraits of people in various modes of connection and disconnection, children watching television, a man sadly alone at a birthday cake, lovers in a pool. The soft, pastel chalkiness of the portraits suffuses them with nostalgia, as if the scenes are being remembered by the central figure in the boat, who also stands representative for all those lost in the deluge of everyday life. Inescapably, too, the flood recalls Katrina, the tsunami, and other present horrors, and takes up the entire reverse side of the poster, in which the figure’s head now bends in despair, though the lantern remains held high and the distant light has neared—another boat has come. A simple yet suggestive enclosure emphasizing the personal connection strove for in the music, Rey’s artwork directs without enforcing multiple interpretive narratives for the album’s wordless songs. It also represents an aspect of the popular music listening experience that may vanish with the over-development of Internet music providers.

As a kid in the 80’s I never would have heard of a non-MTV band like Explosions in the Sky, despite the explosion in indie rock at the time. I would have no access to bands like Dinosaur, Jr. or The Replacements until college or even later from books like Our Band Could Be Your Life. The suburban New Jersey religious school I attended was culturally remote despite its proximity to New York City, counting among its student body no kindly mohawked senior classmates to fill me in on the underground. Until grunge broke through in the early nineties, all I had to relieve the boredom of top forty radio was heavy metal. In 6th grade I had been struggling to satiate a thirst for edgy music with the most visible—awful hairbands like Motley Crue and Poison—until a friend’s older brother loaned me an early Metallica album on cassette. I listened to it a hundred times—desperately—copying it before I returned it, and then biking to a record store a town away anyway to get a copy of my own with lyrics and liner notes. Even though Master of Puppets falls far short of anything put out by Black Flag or Husker Du at the same time (and of which I was totally oblivious), hearing it then was like finding water in a desert I had not known I wandered.

Had I the Internet back then my fate would have been much different; I might have been listening to Captain Beefheart and The Fall by the time I hit college. The conventional wisdom that the days of musical artifacts like the compact disc are numbered is no idle hype, and though I see no reason why the store bought CD should not continue to live alongside Yahoo! Music, Real Rhapsody, or the Internet in general, the scope and power such technology brings to music listening is undeniable. On Yahoo! I can indulge the slightest whim, clicking from Robert Johnson to Smog to Kelly Clarkson, from Arvo Parte to Lukas Ligeti to Joni Mitchell, from Modest Mouse to Ennio Morricone, reducing the days and weeks spent browsing record shops and libraries to minutes, and the hundreds of dollars required to purchase them all to the six dollar monthly basic membership fee. I can unearth that old Archers of Loaf album stolen from me in college; I can check out bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Kraftwerk that I have heard name-dropped for years without the commitment of a purchase.

The kind of listening the Internet encourages also releases songs from the regime of the album, privileging the single, allowing the track to stand alone to be appreciated and providing more opportunities to sample, pick, and choose. It also, however, tends to lack the patience required to enjoy the narrative complexity and multiple points of view possible on concept albums. As a record, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience would not have fared well in cyberspace: “The Lamb” remains blindly naive without “The Tyger.” The same could be said of Radiohead’s “OK Computer”; what is the self-annihilating postmodern despair of “Exit Music (for a Film)” without the closing one-line activist jeremiad of “The Tourist”: “Idiot slow down”? But not all albums are “OK Computer” and not all artists are Radiohead; plenty of collections contain only one or two standout tracks, while plenty of artists are best when tasted, not devoured whole.

Take Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, for example, with whom I started a recent several hour session of Internet music surfing, mostly on Yahoo! Music. A one-time boxer and would-be opera singer, Hawkins ended up a shock rocker, the Marilyn Manson of the 50’s and early 60’s, incorporating skulls and coffins into his stage act, voodoo and cannibalism into his lyrics. While I respect all of his music, I do not find all of it enjoyable. If this is a criticism, it is a criticism largely directed at myself: the novelty swamp sound effects, the bloated mud-bound bullfrog of a saxophone, and the pained, hysterical screaming of Hawkins are simply too much for me on “Alligator Wine,” a song about drinking a gator blood potion to entrap a lover. As hokey and ridiculous as this description may sound (and is), the song at one level really frightens, in the same way that a dust covered stuffed fish-boy at a cheap carnival funhouse will terrify and disgust far more than the most polished horror film. For all of its obvious artificiality, the former lays there palpably, looking back up plastic-eyed at the viewer, as a film never could—not to mention the fact that the mind crude and perverse enough to make such a thing could belong to the very man who sold you your ticket, just yards away.

But Hawkins was simply a detour that day, as was Odetta (50s and 60s folk matriarch, influence on Dylan and Baez), some early R.E.M., lo-fi Stuckist Billy Childish, and Final Fantasy, a.k.a. Owen Pallett, who composes perfectly elegant pop-chamber pieces for violin to accompany songs about videogames and Dungeons and Dragons (he also arranges strings for Arcade Fire). My true destination that day was the album Half-Eaten Guitar by Wyrd Visions, a black metal tinged Canadian psychedelic folk band whose song “Bog Lord” I had heard on NPR about four months ago. The track begins with the main vocalist climbing with a stately hum that descends into a moan landing somewhere between pleasure and pain, but that is ultimately too unearthly to understand. Several other voices whistle for a short time, as if the singer has been joined by a band of hobbits for a mystical adventure (there is really no other way to describe it). What is remarkable here is not the fantasy weirdness of it all, but how utterly persuasive the fantasy weirdness instantly becomes. It is the kind of sound Rip Van Winkle might have heard climbing through the Kaatskills. A strummed acoustic accompanies a loopy, sliding electric riff over the drone of an accordion or some other bellowed instrument to produce an effect so hypnotic that the lyrics become difficult to follow. The voice, too, lulls (not to sleep, but to dream), sounding ghostly or possessed, so detached it is from its own melancholy—until some word like “necromancy” jolts the listener to attention.

Here the Internet ends, apparently. Though Wyrd Visions have toured with indie bands as respected and well known as Grizzly Bear, they are not on Yahoo! Music—their album is not even available on Amazon. The band website has been under construction for months, as has that of their label, Bluefog. I have tried emailing the band directly, but to no avail. Fortunately, the track I heard, “Bog Lord,” plays on their myspace page, taunting me with the prospect of a full album of this bizarrely compelling stuff. But as with my first Metallica album, I might actually have to leave the house to get it, go on a quest all the way to Toronto in fact. And while I have neither the time nor money to do that, the idea that I could or would have to, the idea that something so interesting and vital can still escape the matrix of immediate convenient consumption, is immensely satisfying. It also recalls principles of ownership that Internet music downloading lacks entirely, principles that Walter Benjamin describes as drawing a “magic circle” around an item as the “thrill of acquisition” passes over it. In “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin describes how the books in his collection become valuable, not through their price tag, their contents (he does not read them), or their rarity, but through the effort expended to purchase them at an auction, the experiences he has in and of the city where the auction is held, and through the memories that accrue around this object in the process of its acquisition. Benjamin joins the greater history of the book and its past owners, even as the book provides him with a material record of his own personal history. This is total ownership, magical in its singularity, in its dependence on the purely individual relationship between possessor and possessed, and in how it involves the mind’s transformation of a blank piece of matter into something of value and meaning.

The disadvantages of downloading or streaming music are obvious, if under appreciated. Computer crashes, obscure licensing policies, complex regulations regarding extra fees for burning CDs or transferring tracks to mp3 players, all compromise a sense of authentic and permanent ownership. But the advantages are also clear and clearly commodifiable: ease, cheapness, and information (albeit information of a superficial, name-dropping sort), while the advantages of the CD or cassette are perhaps easier to feel than explain. Visual and textual supplements can illuminate and enrich an album. The physical object can leave memories of itself in the nerves of the fingers and eyes. I know exactly what Master of Puppets felt like in my hand, its color, where the crack in the case was. This seems important in some strangely intangible way, as if its physicality allowed the music to carve a deeper groove in the brain, for better or worse. Certainly the narrative of the cross-town bike ride clarified and reified its (and music’s) value in my eyes.

Strangely enough, just as I finish this review, Wyrd Visions has emailed me back, asking for my address. The Internet, then, does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of a “magic circle,” though if I actually ever do receive Half-Eaten Guitar, the acquiring of it will not have been convenient at all. And it will be all the more treasured because of it.

Holy Punks in the Fog of War

Reviewed: Black Monk Time by the Monks (Polydor 1966; Repertoire 1994).

In the midst of a mid-life crisis, F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested a connection between his nervous breakdown and his work as a screenwriter, a job that subjected his texts to the whims and profit-mongering of co-writers, producers, directors, and actors, his personality disintegrating with the corruption of his individual talent. As different as The Great Gatsby would have been without the guidance of editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s basic points stand: Hollywood films require collaboration and compromise; work and culture reflect and affect the mind. Some decades later, Joan Didion, too, would suggest popular film lacked artistic coherence, arguing that the few screenplays that ever get produced have chance and marketing to thank much more than merit or vision: when a deal-maker is at the right place at the right time, a film is made; individual writers at desks have very little to do with it. Film then, could be reduced to a simple equation: 1% inspiration, 2% perspiration, and 97% contingency. All this would suggest that popular film—not to mention corporatized popular music—shapes itself at several removes from the populace, its plots gestating in some inhuman cloud of industry interests and practices hovering apart from the tastes, concerns, and narratives of the individual human being living a real life.

Admittedly, I am a crank, especially during the American Entertainment Awards season. After years of disappointment, I have more or less given up hope of feeling anything other than cultural alienation at hearing Justin Timberlake win a Grammy or Paul Haggis an Oscar (though the nomination of Little Miss Sunshine this year gives me pause; the picture, I suspect, is not as bleak as I’d like to think). But the extent to which Hollywood continues to draw audiences indicates how much Hollywood already determines the “tastes and interests” of real, live individuals, begging the question, what is realer than film? Still, the pomp and ceremony of the Oscars leaves me quite cold, resting as it does on the pomp and ceremony already accrued by the Oscars. A tradition of glamour, wealth, and fame provides the medium with its mystique and power, vaulting it beyond any perceptible relationship to me.

But perhaps I should attend to the beam in my own eye before pointing out the motes in others’. Like any cultural form, music reviewing has its habits and rituals, rigidified into shapes outliving their original purpose. The ideal album to review must be new, by the young and beautiful, and just catching a building wave of hype. Instead, for this review, I’m going to rummage through a dust-covered corner of my personal CD library to retrieve one of the strangest and oldest items in its catalogue: “Black Monk Time,” put out in 1964 by the Monks, a little known though cult-adored quintet of GI’s who began playing together while stationed in Germany. They performed tonsured and cassocked like actual monks, but also looped nooses round their necks for neckties as a blunt symbol of society’s constrictions. Forerunning punk by a decade, the Monks were among the first rock bands to experiment with feedback and perhaps began to do so independently of anyone else. Tracks like “I Hate You” and “That’s My Girl” reverberate with the same kind of manic fuzz and roar of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” but with greater control and restraint. Their sound is blunt and rhythmic, all drums and gut-strung banjo, trading melody for beating repetition. They sound like a jury-rigged jalopy careening down the hill of the sixties, belching a fume of feedback and angst back at the madness of the decade. “We don’t like the atomic bomb,” says singer and guitarist Gary Burger on the opening track, “Monk Time”; “Stop it, stop it,” he then shrieks in terror, as if staring straight at a mushroom cloud: “I don’t like it . . . Stop It!” Vietnam and the nuclear age have left grown soldiers wishing for a cloister and throwing tantrums like children.

It is this kind of desperate simplicity that allows the Monks to beat literally a hole through the fog of war in “Complications.” While Burger belts out the slaughter-justifying euphemism of the title over and over again, the rest of the band respond, sneering, “People cry, / People die for you. / People kill, / People will for you,” a powerful condemnation of citizen complicity in distant theaters of war, all the more potent for being snarled by the mouths of actual soldiers to the layered hammered beats of voice, drum, banjo, and guitar. With so many people oblivious to obvious horrors, the Monks take recourse to the crudest form of musical strategy: they pound the song into the listener’s brain. Their insistence, directness, and urgency make them more relevant to the present moment than any rock album released in the last decade.

As insane as the external cultural landscape may be for this band, the interior hardly looks much better. On “I Hate You,” Burger again enters into a dialogue with the band, singing hoarsely, “I hate you with a passion baby,” while they chant the self-defeating afterthought, “But call me!” The song “Oh, How to Do Now,” which begins with the pop signature of a surf-rock drum roll, extends into an increasingly frantic tempo propelled by an off-kilter organ, the lyrics likewise undercutting conventional love song pop sensibilities. Burger’s desire is inarticulate, obsessive, and possessive, as he sings, “I’m going to make you you you you mine today . . . Make you mine long long time today.” The lyrics on Black Monk Time tend to be as repetitive as the beat, signifying psyches troubled from within and without, but also battering down the complacency of convention and demanding justice and sanity in the process. Their aesthetic seems epitomized in “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy,” the lyrics of which—in their stark nonsensical entirety—being, “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Way down to heaven / Yeah!” over and over again. The space opened up by this and other Monks songs disorients, peels away the familiar: what we thought was nonsense is actually the road to heaven, which is actually where we had always thought hell was. The music is ugly, weird, and discomforting, hammering away at the psychological foundations of love, God, and country, and leaving you with nothing but a bare, manic beat. But it is a beat to which you can dance, and one that makes me feel a hell of a lot more aware and alive than I ever felt watching the Grammys.

The Art of Noise

Reviewed:
I Dated the Devil by Antonius Block (Trost Records 2006)
Plays Polmo Polpo by Sandro Perri (Constellation Records 2006)

When guitarist and drummer Jorge Docouto handed me the debut album of his Brooklyn-based art-noise rock band Antonius Block, he told me he hated anecdotes and adjectives, especially in self-indulgent music reviews. I Dated the Devil—precise, direct—reflects this aesthetic: it cuts to the bone, the initial title track shrieking open with a riff as simple and urgent as a siren over the hammered throb of Andrya Ambro’s drumming. Austrian-born singer Tina Schula, whose detached, sometimes spoken, vocalizing invites comparison with Nico, complements the austerity of the instrumentation with a disturbingly blunt matter-of-factness on this and other tracks. Elsewhere emotionally inscrutable, here her voice projects at once disconnection, resilience, damage, and power as she sings alternately of dating the devil and breaking off his horns. Through restraint, simplicity, and minimalism, the band members leave a kind of space open between them that echoes the hollowing disillusion expressed in many of the lyrics—the disillusion, for instance, of beating off a devilish lover only to be left self-mockingly “Crying like a baby / For Jesus to save me / Waiting to be reborn.”

In the context of such severity, even subtle changes are dramatic, and songs that begin as skeletons of voice and drums can bloom quickly into moments of voluminous guitar rock, as does “Thanks.” After Schula sardonically thanks a deadbeat lover for all his lying, drinking, and manipulating over a frantic four-note riff and a one-two drumbeat for over a minute, the guitar abruptly swells open into full, grand, arena-sized chords. The lyrics seem to undercut the triumph of the guitar, however, as Schula sings, “I need you / I need you // But I don’t want you. / I don’t want you.” Disgusted by her lover’s lying and empty promises more than anything else (“Thanks for telling me” is the frequent refrain), the singer here ends without any kind of false or merely wishful verbal answer to the emotional quagmire of dependency. The guitar continues alone, leveling out and extending the track into a drone-dirge that conveys a sense of a new direction, though a flat and solemn one. Where words fail, the repetition of this simple, dissonant riff moves forward, demanding a second look at the concluding lines: perhaps wants can in fact trump needs, or, if not, at least there may be some kind of dignity in confronting the intractability of one’s fate. The resolution of the song—a hardened answer to bleak questions—depends entirely on the persuasive, stripped Stoicism emoted by the guitar’s metallic atonality.

Much of the album depends on electric guitar tone and texture, Docouto conjuring bleeps, steel drum sounds, mechanical grating, clicks, growls, alarm bells, and a lot of indescribable strangeness from his amp. While nearly always present and wildly innovative, distortion is nevertheless disciplined, as on “13 New Moons,” where furiously plucked notes spin into brief roars made edgier and more visceral by Docouto’s rigorous control. For all its unconventionality and experimentation, the band “rocks” like very few others, eschewing the alienating pretension possible with some avant-garde noise rock, but remaining firmly on the bracing, breaking border of what mainstream American sensibilities would define as music. It possesses the best qualities of the best of New York’s rock avant-garde old and new: the Velvet Underground, early Sonic Youth, Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But while the band-equation game may provide an accurate enough sketch of Antonius Block’s sound, it would be a disservice to suggest these bands as influences. Rather, Antonius Block taps into a New York tradition, its primal dissonance evoking the uncompromising concrete and steel walling the bohemian edges of city life. Better to describe the band as original and organic than experimental or unconventional considering the willful artificial novelty those latter terms sometimes imply. Even—or especially—at its most abrasive moments, Antonius Block achieves a directness, honesty, and emotiveness seldom if ever heard on the radio or television.

Like I Dated the Devil, Toronto-based Sandro Perri’s recent Plays Polmo Polpo (largely a reinterpretation of several tracks previously released under the name Polmo Polpo) incorporates sounds that many would define as noise if heard in isolation into richly layered musical soundscapes. Though an EP, Plays Polmo Polpo develops with the logic and unity of an album (a full-length is due this spring), beginning with “Romeo Heart (slight return),” a free-floating overture of descending harmonica, rumbling drums and clicks, electronic beeps, whirs, and drones, somber bass clarinet, and sporadically strummed and plucked guitar. Perri’s training in jazz and previous work in electronica combine here to create a warm, loosely structured, but cohesively moving, aquatic atmosphere, the unpredictability and variety of its sonic elements like a profusion of life drifting along with a slow deep current (a motif present in much of his work as Polmo Polpo, which roughly translated from Italian means octopus lung).

Track two, “Requiem for a Fox,” incorporates much of the layered diffusion of “Romeo,” but quickens into a regular tempo that carries the voice of Perri, who sings on the rest of the album. The final three tracks tighten and clarify the established musical themes by dropping the electronics and foregrounding Perri’s singing and acoustic guitar with minimal drum and horn accompaniment. As dreamy, entrancing, and relaxed as the first tracks are, Perri’s transition to the intimacy of singer/songwriter provides an unexpected and powerful comfort after their continually shifting, layered expansiveness. This movement from the liberating otherworldly atmosphere of “Romeo” and “Requiem” to the familiar homeliness of acoustic, verse-chorus-verse pieces defines the EP, which ends with “Circles,” on which Perri sings, “I run around in circles and I / Find the circles that transfer me to calm, / The circle’s getting smaller cause I / Made the point of tracing circles back home.” The lines, like the music, combine the thematic openness of formalism with a human tone and warmth. Similarly, the structured and seemingly less structured halves of Plays Polomo Polpo mutually complement one another: even as Perri frees his music from the constraints of typical pop forms to explore otherworldly soundscapes, he also reinvigorates those forms by reminding the listener why they ever developed in the first place: to provide us with a welcome, or at least inevitable, home.

But even the EP’s openers—at times less songs than sonic textures—establish a powerful sense of familiarity. Perri finds the warm tones and percussiveness of everyday sounds like closing doors, creaking, clacking, and clocks ticking, inserting them seamlessly—or mimicking them—alongside more conventionally played guitar and drums. Both I Dated the Devil and Plays Polmo Polpo succeed through expert musicianship. But it is a musicianship that relies on sensibility and the ability to find and select new tones beyond the conventional pallet as much as it does on skill or creativity, suggesting the uncanny conclusion that music is potentially everywhere if you stop to listen—in the roar of trucks and machines, in the accidents of amplifiers, the possibilities of electricity, in the noises a house makes as it settles.

Lost in America: The Myth and Symbol of Daniel Johnston

Reviewed:
Continued Story + Hi, How Are You by Daniel Johnston (Eternal Yip Eye Music 2006)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

While the absolute last thing the United States may need right now is another white male to stand representative for a mythic national consensus, a very strong case could be made for outsider folk artist Daniel Johnston. Recently released on DVD, the documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” makes clear how expansive a swath of American values, themes, and realities Johnston’s life and work encompasses. Propelled by his brilliantly individual artistic vision, an audience that yearned for the perceived authenticity of folk and punk, and the massive publicity he received when Kurt Cobain wore a Johnston t-shirt in multiple TV and photo appearances during the early 90’s, Johnston is a poster child for DIY cult indie rock success, despite—or because of—a lack of both conventional stage presence and guitar playing ability.

According to the documentary, Johnston first hits the Austin music scene in the 80’s after having fled the confines of his religiously conservative West Virginian family via a short stint selling corndogs with a traveling carnival. The film sketchily implies that a period of intense drug use culminating in a bad acid trip at a Butthole Surfers concert brings him back to the Christian fundamentalism of his parents: in one of many darkly funny tape-recorded conversations, Johnston neatly out-pontificates the mother who had so often dismissed him and his art as “satanic,” chastising her for not reading the “scriptures” enough. At around the same time as the acid trip, the already manic-depressive Johnston suffers a complete psychological breakdown, beats his manager with a pipe, and is institutionalized for the first of many times. In addition to straddling the apparently not so disparate worlds of evangelical visionary and psychedelic countercultural rocker, Johnston brings heartland revivalism into the heart of New York City cool, turning an exclusive gig at a hipster record store into a lengthy, sobbing call for salvation (making “everyone feel very awkward” according to Jeff Tartokov, his next manager). He poisons himself: he smokes, he works at McDonalds for a time, he becomes obese, he writes extremely dark jingles for Mountain Dew from a mental hospital (“Demons, demons drink the Mountain Dew” he sings). In college, he unrequitedly falls in love with a girl he would never see again (aside from a recent filmed encounter included in the DVD’s special features), but who would nevertheless inspire songs of heartbreakingly pure love for decades. A musician’s musician, he has been covered by Beck, Yo La Tengo, and Tom Waits. He worships fame, has an over-inflated sense of personal destiny, and expresses profound ambivalence towards sex. Like his high-pitched voice, he is infantile, his tyrannical parents saintly for the self-sacrificing devotion they show in caring for an adult at times not only helpless but dangerous. While the Johnston of “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” may or may not be a genius, he is certainly delusional, crashing a plane piloted by his father while under the impression he is Casper the Friendly Ghost. But then again, he might also be prophetic: “God Promises a Safe Landing But Not a Calm Voyage” reads the sign in front of the Church of Christ his father passes on his way home from the ordeal.

For Johnston, the themes catalogued above do not merely unfold one-by-one over the course of years, but often seem simultaneously held in mind, offering a tempting cultural explanation for severe bipolar disorder. His story is not that of a prodigal son who trades a crude and foolish excess for a crude and foolish faith (i.e. Dubya), but of a modern day Walt Whitman, whose mind breaks in encompassing too great a multitude of contradiction. But while Whitman’s great unifying “I” in Leaves of Grass functions as a safely textual repository of antebellum tensions, Johnston’s art is less a buffer zone between his mind and disparate external pressures than a record of their direct collision into one another. Wisely, however, director Jeff Feuerzeig avoids the classic romantic traps of metaphorizing madness as genius and the individual as nation, even as he clearly reveals why such metaphors have long compelled the imagination—and why they especially do in Johnston’s case. While acknowledging the brute but real tautology that mental illness is mental illness, Feuerzieg’s complex portrait nevertheless leaves the meanings of Johnston’s life and work generously available to interpretation, and provides a rich context in which to understand the lo-fi, tape-recorded gems on the recently reissued double-album, “Continued Story + Hi, How Are You.”

The song “Funeral Home,” for example, on which Johnston belts out “I’m going to the funeral home and never coming back,” symbolically expresses a bitter Christian hopefulness about the release death will afford, but also literally alludes to the fact that the woman he secretly loved in college married a funeral home director. As Feuerzieg’s documentary shows, Johnston constantly converts into art everything around him, tape-recording friends talking, doodling his own illustrations into comic books, filming himself as a teenager caricaturing his mother. In “Dem Blues,” an a capella dialogue, Johnston draws imagery from the banalities of his stifling upbringing when he scolds himself for upsetting the “juice” and “donuts” of staid church socials in the excitement of his despair (“I really don’t know what I’m after / You’re stepping on the crackers”). The chillingly simple “I Picture Myself With a Guitar,” however, questions just how much contact with the world his art in the end provides, the title rather solipsistically answering the only other line in the song: “I see your face.”

Sometimes playful, sometimes haunted, and often both at once, Johnston’s lyrics on “Continued Story + Hi, How Are You” are always powerfully direct. The buoyant melody of the cartoon based “Casper,” for instance, carries the starkest of opening lines: “He was smiling through his own personal hell / Dropped his last dime in a wishing well.” “Despair Came Knocking,” ploddingly spoken over descending pairs of atonal guitar notes, figures depression as a visitor who comes by only to sit smoking in morose silence. While many tracks feature a full band and exhibit a polished blues and Beatles inspired pop sensibility, the lo-fi rawness of songs like “Despair” more compellingly frames the dark simplicity of his words. And no amount of studio production could better deliver the lines “I’m a loner, I’m a sorry entertainer” than the dissonant plastic-strung-banjo-sounding guitar Johnston bangs on solo in “Sorry Entertainer.”

The roughness of the recording shines for other reasons, too, especially on “Hi, How Are You,” which unlike “Continued Story” was not recorded in a studio but by Johnston onto cassette. Songs are accompanied or interrupted by conversations with friends, strange mechanical pulses, bits of other recordings, ticking, a running faucet, and the loud clicks of the tape recorder as it stops and starts, infusing the album with the authenticity of a found object and the suspense that accompanies chaos, rather than the security of a planned product. Soft static suffuses the background of every song, rendering the air in whatever garage, basement, or trailer Johnston recorded them sonically palpable. While this makes Johnston’s voice muddied and distant, it also establishes an unsettling intimacy: you can actually hear the room in which he sings his nervous breakdown.

Strange dislocating things happen even in the packaging of the album, blurring the boundary between error and intention. The CD begins by continuing the story with which it ends, the earlier “Hi, How Are You” (1983) following the later “Continued Story” (1985), which in turn begins with a song that repeats the words, “It’s over, It’s over,” again and again. The lyrics included in the liner notes only vaguely follow the order of the actual CD, and list a song called “The Dead Dog Laughing In The Cloud” in the place of “Sorry Entertainer,” which does not appear at all in the printed matter. In addition to cover art by Johnston (who has received a great deal of attention for his drawings as well as his music), the CD includes a reprint of “Daniel Johnston’s Symbolical Visions,” the “Rosetta stone” of his work according to former manager Tartokov, because it explains many of Johnston’s most recurring images, among them a boxer with an opened skull emitting light beneath a large, hovering Satan: a cliché potently rendered of an artistic mind raw to demons both within and without, but that nevertheless retains the ability to transform them into objects of striking beauty.

Praise, Health, and Rock 'n' Roll

Reviewed:
“I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass” by Yo La Tengo (Matador)
“Gulag Orkestar” by Beirut (Ba Da Bing!)
“Return to Cookie Mountain” by TV on the Radio (Touch and Go)

A friend of mine recently pointed out that the purpose of most album reviews is to answer a simple question: should you buy it? Thanks to brutally efficient grading systems, the judgment is usually quick and final, more like an execution than a considered examination of testimony. But as convenient and pervasive as this evaluative habit has become in our ostensibly democratic culture, it smacks of a thoughtless absolutism. What exactly warrants four stars as opposed to three? A C+ instead of a B-? When does folk become folk-rock? Prog-rock become post-punk? And what of individual sensibility as judge? One listener’s whim is almost by definition another’s irritation. Having grown up in the eighties, I remember shrill and bizarrely defensive talking heads on TV responding to the emerging genre of rap, arguing that because rapping was not singing and sampling not creating, rap was lazy thievery, not music. Such criticism, of course, reflected the fear, racism, and confusion of the critic more than anything else, and remains a warning example of how dislike may—at best—be simply misunderstanding, at worst a refusal to accept difference and individuality.

With that in mind, the purpose of negative reviewing mystifies. What one critic censors might be better left alone for a more understanding critic to explain, leaving a natural obscurity to silence whatever no one finds worth explaining. Therefore, this review will look at three recent rock albums that deserve unmitigated praise. Each promotes to an exemplary degree expansive eclecticism, originality, and an admittedly most un-rock ‘n’ roll pair of virtues: health and sanity.

Proverbially encyclopedic in their pop knowledge, Yo La Tengo as usual work in a multitude of styles on their new album, “I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass,” including 1950’s pop, 1960’s psychedelia, shoegazing walls of feedback, barrages of surf and garage rock, punk, funk, atmospheric electronica, and touches of free-jazz. The album opens with “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” a ten-minute guitar epic built around a terse bass and drum groove stubbornly repeated for the song’s duration under a loop of washed-out, wave-like guitar drone. On top of this, singer guitarist Ira Kaplan solos, working from slow riffs of long-held notes to increasingly short and spastic knots of noise, which, when at their most constricted, suddenly unravel into layer after expanding layer of looped guitar riffage. Before this turn, Kaplan manages to sing something about microphones and something else about water slides, but his voice soon disappears altogether from the massive soundscape he has created, the many layers of which remain distinct from one another, their complexity bewilderingly clear.

Also clear by this time are the main thematic dynamics of the album, which both yearns for and questions—and creates—music as a space where melancholy might be transformed, isolation faced, and conflicts resolved. While the insistent piano pep of the second track, “Beanbag Chair,” makes the circular futility of lines like “I spent my life trying to understand / Just how my life led to where I am” sound positively chipper, the violin haunted “I Feel Like Going Home” has Georgia Hubley asking for a return to the “ground” from the free-floating drift of a “restless imagination.” In one of two all-out rockers, “I Should Have Known Better,” everyday belligerence is regretted; in the equally humorous “Mr. Tough” the same belligerence is met with generosity and an invitation “to the dance floor,” where pretending “everything can be alright” may be the first step in making it so. The closing track, “The Story of Yo La Tengo,” may be as much about Kaplan’s marriage to Hubley as about the trio or anything else, and it begins with Kaplan singing in bracing defeat, “We lied to ourselves / for awhile / in our usual style. / I wish we could lie / to ourselves again.” But the earnestness, volume, and furor to which the music builds over the course of the song’s ten-minutes (it’s their finest ten-minute guitar epic since “Blue Line Swinger”) suggests that the wish itself has been enough to win back whatever saving illusion had been lost.

Record shop clerks might be forgiven for mistakenly consigning Beirut’s debut, “Gulag Orkestar,” to that sad gulag of chain stores, the world music annex, which alongside the classical bin constitutes our culture’s repository of continents’ and centuries’ worth of narcissistically neglected music traditions. As eMusic puts it on the album’s promotional sticker, “Gulag Orkestar” is the “best indie-rock record of the 19th century” (worth quoting if only for being the first meaningful promotional blurb I have ever seen); and despite being the very recent work of 19-year-old New Mexican high school and college dropout Zach Cordon, the album sounds much more gypsy than indie, a collection of Balkan influenced marching/drinking songs fusing the plaintive and the hopeful, the young and the old, the near and the far.

The classification of Beirut as “gypsy music,” however, exoticizes, oversimplifies, and objectifies a little understood cultural other. Cordon himself appears both too innocent and too sophisticated to fall into this trap, producing what could best be categorized as a kind of “travel music,” comparable to that kind of travel writing that keeps the observer as much as the observed clearly in view. The self-consciously touristic “Postcards from Italy” captures the cinematically archetypal story of an American’s romance with the people and culture of “Europe,” broadly defined, and here conveyed through an idealized vision of Old World innocence: “That day is mine / When she will marry me outside the willow trees / And play the songs we made.” The album reveals more about the experience of travel itself—the intense appreciation it allows of the passing moment, its transitory liberating qualities—than the many places to which Cordon traveled, and it’s the intensity of such an experience that may explain how a 19-year-old’s voice manages to summon up the pathos and nostalgia of a 70-year-old, a feat on par with the 20-year-old Bob Dylan successfully channeling raw blues on his self-titled first album.

But Beirut does more than send a postcard from an imaginatively lived Europe; it also finds—and refines—a fundamental connection between the aesthetics of travel and the aesthetics of music and performance. For instance, in a “Scenic World” (a Magnetic Fields-ish departure from the rest of the album), Cordon attempts to release the liberating potential of a song by recalling the liberating position of the traveler and spectator, singing, “When I feel alive / I try to imagine a careless life / A scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking.” The closing track, “After the Curtain,” makes an even more concrete parallel between the space and subject of the performance, asking both western audience and newly democratized eastern bloc states, “What will you do / When the curtain falls?” The answer, for both, is an ambiguous and repeated “left, right,” suggesting a calm walk out the door, a productive dialogue between left and right wing, or a mindless authoritarian march. But as self-conscious as this may all sound, “Gulag Orkestar” remains astonishingly sincere and free of affectation. When listening to a Serbian neighbor’s record collection in Amsterdam, Cordon found not a trove of exotic allusion, but a vocabulary expressive enough to deliver whatever it is that so often stretches out his lyrics into indecipherable wails rich with yearning.

TV on the Radio’s much and deservedly praised “Return to Cookie Mountain,” their second full-length album, sends a simple message with a great deal of force: Wake up, take courage, and go forth. The American life tautly captured in such lines as “So who the hell are you? / Making out so high in the backseat of a car-bomb under carcinogenic sun” is choked by violence, war, fear, self-indulgence, addiction, and political, cultural, and environmental corruption. Industrial-paced beats and urgent blasts of distortion drenched guitar propel the soulful crooning of Kyp Malone through this rotten clutter, providing sturdy support for the uncompromising antiauthoritarianism of tracks like “Hours”: “Refuse these cruel / Unusual fools / Leave them to rule / In hollowpoint hell.” At the end of the same song Tunde Adebimpe affirms the individual in powerfully mythic terms, singing, “Know you are beautiful, aimless and alive / Broken and divine / O walk around know you are / Future youth / Summoned to the sky.” Such affirmations seek to heal the paralyzing violence done to any reasoning mind in a country where those in charge send horse show administrators to manage national disasters and pedophiles to manage child abuse legislation. “Cookie Mountain” begins in fact by acknowledging this close relationship between the political and personal, pointing out that the former can not only invade and demoralize the latter, but also seduce it into complicity. “I was a lover, before this war,” alternate Malone and Adebimpe, “I once joined a priest class, plastic, inert / In a slowdance with commerce / Like a lens up a skirt.” The album is apocalyptic in the sense William Blake used the word: outraged, admonishing, revelatory, and mind-altering, reminding the listener—as do Yo La Tengo and Beirut in their own ways—of the sadly obvious notion that there are better spaces than bar-room brawls and battle-fields to think through our differences and set freedom on the march.

Death of a Rock Cliche

Reviewed:
“Rather Ripped” by Sonic Youth (Geffen)
“The Obliterati” by Mission of Burma (Matador)

Since at least as far back as John Keats, who had produced his odes for the ages by the time tuberculosis took him at 22, it has been tempting to find a special kind of genius and energy in works by artists who died in their twenties. In such cases, a brief life suggests a life more fully lived and realized in art, not one cut short of its potential. Furthermore, an early demise freeze-frames the artist at their apex, when the qualities we tend to link to youth are presumably most alive—originality, radicalism, idealism—preventing the decline into conservativism to which longer-lived artists may succumb. Nowhere does this ideal of burnt out youth more persist in overshadowing the faded glory of experience than in rock music. The myth serves well an industry whose target market is the young—an unfortunate fact for serious music lovers, given that the industry tends to equate youth with superficiality, empty novelty, self-absorption, formula, materialism, and over-production (at least if its product is any indication). And while of course it’s easy enough to find much fine independently made music, this affords no protection from the radios, TVs, pop-up windows, and magazine covers that constantly intrude unwanted sensations upon our daily lives.

Fortunately, several releases this summer suggest that the myth connecting rock and youth may itself be past its prime. Even without considering Johnny Cash’s American V and Bob Dylan’s Modern Times (both extraordinary), the two new albums by Sonic Youth and Mission of Burma—indie rock veterans with well over two decades of experience each—would be more than enough to deal a mortal blow to such a cliché.

Hailed as their most accessible record to date, “Rather Ripped” finds Sonic Youth embracing as much as transcending a pop sensibility (yes, perhaps the very same sensibility I deride above). “What a Waste” suggests filth can liberate, as Kim Gordon demands, “Hey gimme hollow stimulation / It’s so sleazy to be free”—a demand that would fall as pure irony if not for the unstoppable beat and ebullient guitar melody carrying it. Explosive loves and open roads pervade the album, which is propelled by bursts of guitar noise and drone that transform the lyrics’ occasional menace and melancholy into something faceable if not downright enjoyable. On “Incinerate,” Thurston Moore proclaims a love that is violent, inspiring, and perhaps even inspired by violence, although softened by a humor that appears frequently: “You wave your torch into my eyes / Flamethrower lover burning mind.” With equal neo-Beat earnestness he asks in a later song, “Do you believe in rapture babe?,” evoking both ecstasy and fundamentalist notions of apocalypse over a slow two chord riff that is sweet, simple, but a touch strange. Perhaps “Jams Run Free,” however, best sums up the album’s ability to reflect and embrace musically the infinite movement of life, transforming looming threats into sources of something other than hopelessness: “I love the way you move / I hope it’s not too late / For me / Its too good / On this sea / Where the light / Is green.”

Movement indeed defines “Rather Ripped,” and it is the music not the words that most powerfully communicates it. The songs here are clipped much shorter than usual, but nothing fans have grown to love is lost. The dissonance of screwdrivers raked across fretboards, the long driving riffs, the anthemic buildups, the weird tunings, the trippy jams—they are all here, but expertly compressed into three to five minute gems that achieve as much intensity as the ten minute sprawling soundscapes of previous albums. Drawing from across the wide-range of a musical vocabulary developed since the early 80s, “Rather Ripped” feels like the culmination of Sonic Youth’s long, steady, and prolific career. Not only have they sustained as a respectable rock band despite entering their 50s, they have continued genuinely to evolve.

As have Mission of Burma, another avant-garde band with pop inclinations and a tremendous influence on indie rock that began putting out records in the early 80s. Unlike Sonic Youth, however, Burma broke up in 1983 after only one full-length album, an EP, and a couple of singles. “The Obliterati,” their latest album, and their second since reforming in 2002, proves that their agro-artsy post-punk abilities anything but atrophied during their long hiatus. The opening track “2wice”explodes into life with the hammered drumming of Peter Prescott, quickly joined by Roger Miller’s jagged guitars under Clint Conley’s sneering, “Take a look inside / what did you think you’d find?” As with “Rather Ripped,” everything Burma fans have grown to love is here: the shimmering walls of sound, the angular post-punk guitars, the anthems, the complex and abrupt changes, the pounding rhythm section, the tape loops. Somehow, though, “The Obliterati” brings all of these elements to a pitch of intensity greater than on any of their previous albums. In terms of sheer force, the chugging guitar and bass charge on tracks like “Spider’s Web” puts all the newest hard-rock, punk, metal, industrial, post-punk, and emo to utter and unredeemable shame.

Like the music, the lyrics return to the themes of their first releases, namely the alienation and disillusionment of early “hits”(I use this word in its most relative sense) like “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver.” But how can men far into middle age return to the angst of youth with any sincerity? Easily enough, given the many disenchantments that accompany age, a return to the music industry, and the state of contemporary politics. A sense of personal dissolution haunts many tracks, though they are often charged with a manic humor and a sometimes self-flagellating demand for action. On “2wice,” for instance, after begging the listener not to “make the same mistake twice” in a world of “Jet planes that fall out of black skies / and vanish without trace,” Conley confesses, “the heart grows tired. / The mind is weak . . . We're damaged without trace. / You've got me dead to rights / I'm a liar.” The last two lines become a doomed refrain until a slight qualification at the end offers a brief gesture toward hope: “You’ve got me dead to certain rights,” sings Conley. If the album’s title refers to a destructively oblivious elite (or middle-class), its many anthemic calls to consciousness and action are intensely skeptical, self-aware, hard-earned, and real. In a time when most pop music is empty of politics and wisdom, “The Obliterati” offers plenty of both, while proving that the benefits of thought and experience are far from incompatible with the explosive urgency of rock.