Our Country

Joe Henry put out a new album yesterday, so in honor.....

I saw Willie Mays
At a Scotsdale Home Depot
Looking at Garage Door Springs
At the far end of the 14th floor

His wife stood there beside him
She was quiet and they both were proud
I gave them room but was close enough
That I heard him when he said out loud

This was my country
This was my song
Somewhere in the middle there
Though it started badly and it's ending wrong

This was my country
This frightful and this angry land
But it's my right if the worst of it might still
Somehow make me a better man

The sun is unforgiving and
There's nobody who would choose this town
But we've squandered so much of our good will
That there's nowhere else will have us now

We push in line at the picture show
For cool air and a chance to see
A vision of ourselves portrayed as
Younger and braver and humble and free.

This was our country
This was our song
Somewhere in the middle there
Though it started badly and it's ending wrong

This was our country
This frightful and this angry land
But it's my right if the worst of it might still
Somehow make me a better man

I've started something I can't finish
And I barely leave the house it's true
I keep her out on my sores and joints
But I've guess I've had my blessings too

I've got my mother's pretty feet
And a factory keeps my house in shade
My children they've both been paroled
And we get back all the peace we've made

I feel safe so far from heaven
From towers and their ocean views
From here I see the future coming across
What soon will be beaches too

But that was him
I'm almost sure
The greatest centerfielder of all time
Stooped by the burden of endless dreams
His and yours and mine

He hooked each spring beneath his feet
He leaned over then he stood upright
Testing each against his weight
For one that had some play and some fight

He's just like us I want to tell him
And our needs are small enough
Something to slow our heavy door
Something to raise one up

This was my country
This was my song
Somewhere in the middle there
Though it started badly and it's ending wrong

This was God's country
This frightful and this angry land
But if it's his will
The worst of it might still
Somehow make me a better man

If it's his will
The worst of it might still
Somehow make me a better man

Youth Lagoon

Great new band on Fat Possum Records

Youth Lagoon - Montana from Tyler T Williams on Vimeo.

Album of the Year? Zola Jesus: Conatus

Three years ago teenager Nika Roza Danilova arrived upon the fringes of the pop-music world with a voice as big as her 4'11" frame is small, and a sound as exotic as her Wisconsin home seems Rockwellian. Clear from the beginning was that this young, dimunitive, mid-westerner is an unmistakeable force to be reckoned with.

At first encounter Ms. Danilova's Zola Jesus moniker alone carves out a place of iconoclasm and mythology in the pantheon of rock 'n roll history. Sonically, she matches that initial impression with a 21st century goth-electronic sound full of operatic drama, soaring vocals, and dissonance. Through the sounds and images of her first several releases Danilova has created a well-considered narrative of evolution for her goth-goddess image. Zola Jesus came to us a murky, dark and distorted voice of catharsis and decay portrayed that way consistently through imagery as well as her recordings. A slew of steady releases has allowed her to slowly lift the veil of obfuscation from her lyrics, persona, and sound. Holding constant the dramatic, gothy feel of her overall aesthetic, each release seems to bring her powerful voice and personality closer to the forefront of increasingly cleaner compositions.

Before even listening to the album there are two indications of Danilova's arrival upon a new phase of her career's evolution. Previously she has always been visually captured out of focus, in all dark colors, and even literally covered in sludge. However, Ms. Danilova appears on the cover of Conatus in front of a white backdrop, dressed in all white, even her usually-black hair bleached blonde, and in crystalline high-resolution. Then there's the album title Conatus, translated: the will to keep on, to move forward. It's quite a message to send fans of a gothy chanteuse, but there is nothing here to fear. There is continuity, visually in the veiling of her face, and sonically in the ever-present drama in her voice and atmospherics in production. The real changes lie in the translation of the album title. No longer a vessel of catharsis for a heart and mind weighed down by the inevitability of decay and loss, Zola Jesus is a celebrant of the beauty of chaos and that same process of decay. That perspective is evident in the quality of a more controlled chaos in production, increased elements of confidence and accomplishment in her already magnificent vocals, and the laying bare of the underlying pop-accessability that's always been lurking in her songs.

The album is streaming here, and will be officially released on September 26th, 2011.

Mike Egan show at Yard Dog + Timber Timbre

Mike Egan is a painter from Pittsburgh, PA. A former funeral director, his paintings are meditations on life, death and religion. The German Expressionists, stained glass windows, Halloween, Southern folk art, funeral homes, horror films, music, lowbrow art, outsider art and religious icons are some of the sources of inspiration he cites. Clearly, this is exactly my cup of tea. I'm sure you've also noticed with your eyeballs his pop art aesthetic that does well to balance out the otherwise creepy elements of his work.

I've been a fan for years and after missing his first show in Austin at Yard Dog I wasn't about to miss the opening of his newest show, The Death of 1977. On the drive to Yard Dog I happily realized I've had Timber Timbre's Creep on Creepin On stuck in the cd player (yes i still use those) for a good week and that it was the perfect soundtrack to a Mike Egan focused night. Yard Dog's proprietors agreed and Timber Timbre's skeletal compositions provided the aural backdrop to a great night of cheap beer and paintings of literal skeletons. The show continues at Yard Dog through October 9th.

Tinariwen - Tenere Taqhim Tossam (feat. TV on the Radio)

Forklift Danceworks Presents the Trash Project

I had the pleasure of witnessing the final performance of Forklift Danceworks', The Trash Project this weekend. The Trash Project was a choreographed dance of 16 municipal Solid Waste Services trucks, 30 Solid Waste Services employees, and a three-piece band, performed before 2,000 people on an abandoned airstrip in the triple-digit heat of an Austin dusk.

Forklift Danceworks' Choreographer, Allison Orr clearly set out to challenge the viewers' perceptions of: dance as a medium, public art, community, consumerism and waste generation, and the Solid Waste Services employees and machinery who constitute the entire cast of performers. What's as, if not more, remarkable than how deftly Orr recasts these terms in our minds, is how emotional that response becomes under the collective influence of the performers, Orr, the audience, and composer and performer of the original score, Graham Reynolds. Conceptually, it's easy to imagine a "public ballet of garbage trucks and garbagemen" challenging one's preconceived notions of the subjects and forms involved. Harder to imagine is a cohesive execution of that concept which evokes strong and opposing feelings of loneliness and a sense of community, or recognition that the love and artistry that resides, often deeply obscured, in our hearts is a universal occurrence. The ideas that beauty is found in the commonplace, or that love is in the details, are all but cliche these days, but rarely elicited so resoundingly and surprisingly.


Luckily for those who were not there to witness the live performances, filmmaker Andrew Garrison has captured, "An amazing vision of the people and the process that lead to this unique performance. Now in editing, the feature documentary brings you the usually unseen people who do a city’s dirty work, transforming their jobs into dance."

TRASH DANCE - Trailer from Andrew Garrison on Vimeo.

Graffiti

Best Music 2011... So Far

1. James Blake - st
D'Angelo, Justin Vernon, and Antony give the world a dub-step baby. And the world is a better place for it.

2. Destroyer - Kaputt
Dan Bejar sets a new standard for mining 80's straw and spinning gold.

3. Bon Iver - st
You've already heard everything there is to say about this

4. Dirty Beaches - Badlands
Careless, Reckless, Hopeless. Fuzzy, sloppy, distorted pop nuggets full of sex and soul.

5. The Cave Singers - No Witch
Northwest coast and folk heavy, but manages to fit elements of UK punk and bouncy power pop into the equation.

6. TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light
Kings of Brooklyn post-rock and funk step out of the fuzz into nine types of light.

7. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath 1972
Ambient experimental meets melodic.

8. Ghostpoet - Peanut Butter Blue and Melancholy Jam
Grimey, woozy UK hip-hop with dub-step beats.

9. The Antlers - Burst Apart
Doesn't quite match the intensity of Hospice, but there are moments that do.

10. Adele - 21
you know this one too

also
Beirut - The Rip Tide
Richard Buckner - Our Blood
Shabazz Palaces - Black Up

Dubstep, Evolved

2011 has already seen releases by mainstream mainstays from total opposite ends of the pop-spectrum, Radiohead and Britney Spears, that exhibit dubstep beats and characteristics, so I feel like it's time to talk about a fledgling genre learning to fly.

I'll start with a disclaimer.... I'm no expert, or even, in most cases, a fan of electronic dance music. I approached the genre in the last few years from the alternate angle of a fan of ambient/experimental noise. In it's early iterations, DJ's and producers' experimentations with bass frequencies and beat echos laid the groundwork for a dark, new, mostly-instrumental genre. Artists like Burial and Mount Kimbie fine tuned those atmospherics into an art form that defined, and set apart, the genre. And now, in 2011, we have witnessed the arrival of fully formed genre palatable for mass consumption. In addition to the previously mentioned 'dubstep-influenced' records, there have also been at least two exceptional, fully-formed, pop records released by dubstep producers already in 2011.

Ghostpoet is a producer, who's beats and tone are unmistakably dubstep. He's also a rapper who combines elements of grime with an almost lazy, intoxicated, or disaffected delivery. The result is a vocally driven, hip-hop album by an artist steeped in the world of dubstep. It's also fantastic, and representative of what's happening on the frontier of the music world in a way that records by artists trying to incorporate that "cutting-edge element" into their calculated repertoire can never achieve. Start with "I Just Don't Know" and "Survive It" and get hooked.
James Blake is another young dubstep producer who decided to throw vocals into the forefront of his 2011 release. As impressive as Blake's string of mostly-instrumental EP releases has been, his Self-Titled full-length 2011 release is a revelation. Blake channels Justin Vernon circa-Bon Iver, Antony Hegarty, and even, at times, D'angelo with his falsetto crooning over his own dubstep production. It's about as good a debut LP as I've heard. It sounds like right now, it sounds like the future, it sounds like the past, it sounds like soul, it sounds like a singer-songwriter, it sounds like experimentation, and it sounds so comforting and safe..... it sounds like the narrow spot between our world and the next.

Dubstep, Evolved

New Okkervil River Song on Jimmy Fallon

Destroyer - Kaputt

Indie rock's King of obtuse wordsmiths, Dan Bejar, has now been doing business as Destroyer for quite awhile and I was just beginning to think i could put a finger on what i love about him. However, Destroyer's ninth record, Kaputt, has left me equally awed and tongue-tied.

I'll start off by saying that since i've known who Dan Bejar was I've always loved Destroyer AND wanted a really tough-looking black cat with the same name. Of course I want said cat to be a cuddler and generally laid-back bookstore type of cat, in clear contrast to the cat's appearance. I guess that's how i've always seen Mr. Bejar. He's the lovable academic, with his unruly hair, scarves, beard, and commitment to alliteration in his lyrics, but his sardonic wit and ability to create urgency and indefinite drama with small hisses, snarls and pops in his delivery, match the dark name he chooses to record under. Then there's his penchant for 70's style glam that's perfect for exploring alter-ego's.... All that being said, i guess we should get into who we're talking about before the discussion of Kaputt. As the only constant member of Destroyer, the brain to AC Newman's heart and Neko Case's soul in the New Pornographers, a third of the yelping musical cereberus Swan Lake, and co-founder of Hello, Blue Roses, Mr. Bejar has maintained a cavalier persona, as well as a hyper-literate and sharp, if obtuse, tongue on the issues of modern culture, particularly, music and songwriting. His lofty indifference a charming, often funny, and, dare i say 'cool', balance to his apparent compulsion to verbally lay his surroundings to waste. Okay, now onto Kaputt.

Kaputt is a different beast altogether. Bejar's non-chalance no longer feels like he's playing coy, and the immediacy and urgency usually present in his vocals is nowhere to be found. However, his vocals won't be anywhere near the first departure noticed by any listener. While the rest of the indie rock world has been mining their influences from the immenintly cooler and more obvious touchstones of 80's music (i.e. Talking Heads, Blondie, the Smiths, Joy Division,etc) Destroyer's Kaputt is dominated by the sounds of saxophone-dominated early 80's soft-rock and smooth jazz. I'll be the first to admit that this equation sounds like a recipe for disaster. Luckily music, or any art for that matter, is not a math equation and has the ability to be far more 'true' in reality than conceptually. Bejar's vocal delivery stops just short of Nico-esque indifference, and avoids sounding at all contrived. Instead, his voice matches the appearance he's arrived upon. Once the sharp-tongued academic of the underground, Bejar is now the unassailably cool elder aesthete. I see him here as the Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World" of the music world, casually casting off pearls of wisdom and experience, indifferent to whether his audience will recognize them for what they are. He's calm, and confident, ever the obtuse-wordsmith, but somehow by removing the drama from his delivery he's arrived at a more majestic pose.

And then there's the music.... Bejar worked with acclaimed ambient electronic artist Tim Hecker for the immediately Kaputt-preceding EP, Archer on the Beach. This collaboration did not extend into the Kaputt sessions, however the exercise paid apparent dividends for Destroyer's sound on the record. At first listen, the saxophone-dominated early 1980's sound is unmistakable and hard to adjust to. However, the further into the record you get, and in subsequent listens, Hecker's influence becomes more apparent and the instrumentation, paired with Bejar's new delivery, more beguiling. I don't think any soft-rock or smooth jazz record has ever been described as minimalist or skeletal, and i wouldn't use either term to describe Kaputt. That being said, Destroyer does bring elements of those terms into this record, exploring atmosphere and space more than on any previous LP. At times sounding both lush and spacious, the musical backdrop to Bejar's perfomance (Destroyer is ultimately Bejar's platform) elevates his performance into the realm of a dream-like stateliness.

Destroyer's next move is always hard to predict, and while i certainly wouldn't begrudge a revisiting of the crackling urgency of Destroyer's Rubies, Kaputt seems poised to smolder around the periphery of the music world's consciousness for a good spell. As comfortable as Mr. Bejar seems to be in this new pose, I look forward to whatever our new reluctant advisor does next.

Winter's Bone

It's difficult not to compare Debra Granik's film, Winter's Bone, to The Coen Brothers', True Grit. The two films share so many similarities with each other and so few with any other recent films. Both are set in the foreboding environs of winter in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, and both feature a teenage girl on a determined hunt for a very bad man. True Grit was a great movie by one of today's best directing teams, but if you're looking for the best story of a teenage girl exhibiting determination and grit in the face of hardships presented by America's frontier look no further than Winter's Bone. Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Ree Dolly (damn, what a great name!) marks the emergence of a true talent.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Coen Brother's and I loved True Grit, but Winter's Bone is THAT good. And, don't be misled by me, Winter's Bone is NOT a western in the typical sense of the word. Dolly's frontier is not one of a 19th century, lawless, Indian Territory. Her's is one of meth houses, backwoods cops, and a lack of opportunity. Not that these themes are inherently superior, or even necessarily good. As with anything, it's the execution that sets Winter's Bone apart from other films of 2010. Another director could've easily made this story feel like any other overly-stylized, sensational investigation of modern drug culture. Ms. Granik's excellent choice of casting, music, pacing, and shot locations make the film something bigger than that, a true Southern Gothic. Just as important as the drug-world to the film's suspense and underlying tension are the culture-specific music, the surrounding environment and community. And to be clear, that suspense and tension is pervasive and palpable in this relatively quiet film.

What struck me as so remarkable about this film was how rare a thing it is. Western's have made quite a resurgence recently, but on average they bore me, mostly because of their inability to get at the essence of living in a time and place on the fringes of the 'known'. Directors have turned the western into a period piece, where the costuming is more important than the substance. Winter's Bone does more to articulate the hardships of living in an American frontier (on the fringe) than just about any recent Western i can think of (apologies to Dead Man, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and The Proposition), and all within the context of a rural American community. I've written substantially here of musicians exploring America's remaining frontiers and redefining what Americana means. Winter's Bone does the same for film, in particularly the Western.