My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

Albums listened to in full:

• St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy. Sometimes an artist will just knock you on your ass with an astounding debut, a mid-career left turn, or an unexpected commercial breakthrough. But you’ve got to hand it to the musicians who do the aural equivalent of showing their work.
  
  It’s easy to chart the development from St. Vincent’s earliest releases to the fractured ballads and skronky pop on Strange Mercy. You can practically hear Annie Clark adding and subtracting elements from her music, perfecting it—fewer choral overdubs, more rhythmic experiments, fewer funny ha ha lines like “Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did / Without the kid,” more funny hmmm? lines like “I’ve had good times / With some bad guys,” less piano, and more, more, more guitar.
  
  I loved Actor for the way that Clark played on Marry Me’s superficial* vibe of quirky warmth by slashing through it with violent noise. But it seemed as if Clark knew that those tricks couldn’t power the entire album and, instead of resolving this problem entirely, she front-loaded Actor with the dynamic light-dark juxtapositions, leaving four (five, if you count the bonus track) dramatic ballads to close things out. These ballads range from good-to-outstanding in their own right, but with each sounding like a denouement, their placement—perhaps even the inclusion of all of them on the same album—is a pacing killer.
  
  No problem.  There’s always the next album to fix this. 
  
  Which leads us to Strange Mercy. Here, Clark doesn’t bother with juxtapositions. When the Fripped-out guitars come fuzzing, squishing, and twiddling through, it’s no longer a matter of upsetting the Disney-pretty** status quo; it is the status quo. Appropriate for a soundtrack for what appears to have been a very bad year for Clark personally, Strange Mercy is easily her most musically aggressive official release (although the live Big Black and the Pop Group covers from this year prove she’s capable of even more directness). But her aggression doesn’t sound much like anyone else’s aggression. It’s a twisty guitar hook in “Cruel” that’s practically prog in its speed and efficiency or a kick drum that sounds unnervingly off on the title track. And, of course, it’s the lyrics about “dirty policemen” and recurring images of being stripped or opened up (“Oh Elijah, don’t make me wait / What is so pressing / You can’t undress me anyway,” “I’ve seen America with no clothes on,” “Best find a surgeon / To come cut me open,” etc.). 
  
  I go back and forth on whether Strange Mercy is my single favorite album of the year, but it’s St. Vincent’s best so far. I suspect that might only be the case until her next, though.
  
  * Superficial, if only because hearing Marry Me after getting to know Clark’s later work is a substantially altered experience.
  ** Clark’s acknowledged that Disney music was a major influence on the lush side of Actor.

• Tender Mercies’ self-titled debut. Reviewed here (and published yesterday, conveniently enough).  Honestly, a 4 might have been too generous, and I’m an unabashed fan of at least the first two-and-a-half Counting Crows albums. 

• Terius Nash’s 1977.  Chalk it up to my attention span.  I can’t fault The-Dream for recording such a candid breakup album, but damned if I want to listen to the thing in one sitting, particularly given the general uniformity of sound.  I mean, I suppose he does what he can with slow to mid-tempo contemporary R&B (and what can one reasonable expect on a confessional about a failed marriage—an up-tempo party jam or cross-genre experimentation?), but it’s just … a lot.  I suppose this is why I lean toward those albums that serve up their bleak relationship drama with plenty of stylistic shifts (e.g., Shoot Out the Lights, Rumours, Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer) rather than this or even the Mountain Goats’ masterful Get Lonely, which I’ve probably only listened to once or twice in its entirety.

• Thundercat’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse.  So naturally, I go from one of the darkest albums of the year to Thundercat’s world of absurdly fun bass runs and recontextualized Yacht Rock.  It’s not surprising that a jazz player of his apparent skills and jones for show-offy musicianship would have some affinity for the session player pop of the late 70s/early 80s (not to mention the jazz fusion and prog that fed into it). But The Golden Age of Apocalypse grinds those influences up and flavors them with Thundercat bro Flying Lotus velocity to amaze even people who don’t have subscriptions to Bass Player.
  

• Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972.  I  wasn’t originally planning on including this album in the marathon, since I didn’t own it when I started and had only played it (repeatedly) on Spotify. But, naturally, it made its way into my iTunes library in the meantime.  I have virtually no familiarity with Hecker’s other work and don’t have the vocabulary to go into too much detail on something so steeped in ambient music, but this thing is amazingly powerful.
  
  And unpredictable. I’ve tried listening to Ravedeath, 1972 while reading, editing, or performing other tasks, and sometimes it’s suitably relaxing and at other times, it simply refuses to be relegated to the background and demands absolute attention. It’s monolithic and needy at the same time, like a godlike being who just wants a shoulder to cry on. So I guess what I’m saying is that I recommend it.

Individual songs by:

• Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
• Superchunk
• Surfer Blood
• Tammar
• Ted Leo
• Telekinesis
• Thao and Mirah
• Thee Oh Sees
• Thurston Moore (2)
• Title Fight
• Titus Andronicus

mach20:

St. Vincent - She is Beyond Good and Evil (Pop Group cover)

(hattip to My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit)

Finally a good recording of the ridiculous cover we saw at the Pabst.

Hadn’t posted this yet, so I’m glad mach20 took the initiative. 

Why is it that so many of the most active Tumblr music conversations happen when I have a deadline?  Continually late to the party and wordy, that is me. 

There’s some background for the folks who don’t intently follow musical Tumblr goings-on here, here, here, and here, among other places. 

Okay, all caught up?  In short, some say that Wilco/Feist/Radiohead/indie rock is/are the new adult contemporary.  Others disagree.  Some possibly misunderstand the original point (notably, Nitsuh Abebe, the usually-spot-on critic who started this whole thing, seems to have intended “adult contemporary” as a mere description, not a criticism) and will undoubtedly see this argument as the means to throw acts they personally don’t like under the adult contemporary bus (“Wilco sucks!”), while sparing others (“NOOO, Radiohead!!!”).

What bothers me about this is not whether classifying something as “adult contemporary” is necessarily derogatory (it might be) or an accurate acknowledgment of acceptance by an older, presumably less hip audience (it probably is), but rather that, by association with a genre that’s traditionally been aligned with comfort, passivity, maybe conservatism, it ties music to a particular way of listening. 

Kind of Blue can be fine dinner music—unobtrusive, tuneful, quiet.  A friend once told me that he liked how simple it was, specifically how bluesy and traditional it sounded.  I don’t think it’s just the fact that Kind of Blue was, at the time of this conversation, a 50-year-old album that had informed so much that followed that its rougher edges had been filed off for my friend through cultural absorption.  It’s that, despite Miles Davis’ fairly radical modal approach to improvisation on the album, I’d be surprised if it ever came across as “challenging” to the layperson.  Its innovative qualities were for the people who cared to listen for them; otherwise, it’s just lovely, melodic music.  Which is fine. 

With rock/pop, things are just slightly different.  We don’t tend to talk theory when we talk rock/pop (which is dandy by me, since I wouldn’t understand most pop music writing if we did!).  This probably doesn’t always best serve artists like The National and St. Vincent, who so understatedly pull off formally complicated and outright weird moves and insert them into subtle, polite-sounding songs that some listeners probably consider them just as retrograde and comforting as Wilco, Feist, etc. (for the record, I don’t consider Wilco or Feist particularly retrograde in the context of current popular music—unlike any number of folky, bearded acts doing 70s folk rock or synth-based pop artists accurately aping the 80s, you couldn’t reasonably mistake Wilco or Feist for anything but contemporary).  

But even minus the language to discuss formal innovation as one might in classical or jazz, there are still levels of listening in pop and rock.  While we might not talk as much about key changes and time changes, there are lyrics, timbres, vocal tics, beats, etc.—a near-infinite number of things to consider.  There are complicated nuances in delivery and lyrics that you can gloss over when you hear, say, the Mountain Goats in a coffeeshop.  I use the Mountain Goats here, because unlike Wilco, John Darnielle seems to escape these sorts of complaints, despite his music being considerably less formally experimental than Wilco’s (has he ever put out a song as musically whacked out as “The Art of Almost”?).  Maybe it’s simply a matter of popularity. But my point is that Darnielle’s music could just easily be considered comfortable, adult contemporary fare if you’re listening to it in a certain way.  Similarly, an ostensibly “challenging” band like Fucked Up is absolute comfort food - mac’n’cheese for a particular type of punk fan who may not care a whit about David Comes to Life’s narrative complexity, etc.  But I suspect more people would be uncomfortable with calling the Mountain Goats “adult contemporary.”  And they probably should be.

A critic calling something “adult contemporary” doesn’t force that reading on others.  I’m not saying that at all.  At most, it makes me wonder about the level on which that critic is listening to it.  In 1959, would you want to be the guy who simply recognized Kind of Blue for its unobtrusive, dinner music-worthy qualities, or the guy who went bonkers over how goddamn listenable it is for all of its breaking from convention?  The new Wilco is far from their Kind of Blue, but to associate the band or the immensely vague genre to which they belong to a term that is, itself, associated with passive listening seems like a pretty good recipe for evaluating their future work with less active ears.

pitchfork:

St. Vincent performs the title track from Strange Mercy as part of her new 4AD Session.

No complaints about this great set, but I keep hoping someone will record and post a good-sounding performance of her “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” cover from this tour.  There are a few clips on Youtube, but they’re either super low quality or don’t feature the whole band. 

NPR Music is streaming the new St. Vincent album.

Second listen in, and I’m pretty sure that this tops Actor, at least in terms of pacing and texture; I haven’t absorbed the lyrics much yet.  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve even gotten to the songs, really.  There’s so much to digest in terms of riffs and unorthodox arrangement/production touches that I find myself getting caught up in the details.  Not a bad thing in my book.

(via pitchfork)

St. Vincent - “Cruel” (Strange Mercy)

So upbeat!  Well, lyrics notwithstanding, of course.

I love that I have to listen to Annie Clark’s songs a few times to figure out exactly where the guitars are and aren’t.  That main hook sounds almost like a synth horn part, but I’m pretty sure it’s all guitar and the right combination of effects.  Speaking of her prowess on six strings, that solo!  It’s like a Weld-era Neil Young bit turned into taffy, then stretched and chewed. 

(Source: The Huffington Post)

twentyfourbit:

Video: St. Vincent Covers Tom Waits - “Big Black Mariah”

“Rain Dogs Revisited” — a 5-night tribute tour honoring Tom Waits’ 1985 LP with live covers by St. Vincent, the Tiger Lillies, and others — debuted in France this week, complete with Annie Clark’s stunning follow-up to last month’s Big Black cover: “Big Black Mariah.” Watch footage of her performance at the London stop above (via Cover Me).

In other St. Vincent news, Clark unveiled the tracklist and cover art for her forthcoming album, Strange Mercy, this week.

I’m looking forward to Strange Mercy as much as anyone, but St. Vincent could probably just as easily keep me riveted by releasing killer one-off covers every few weeks or so.

(Source: twentyfourbit)

twentyfourbit:

While we wait for the new Tom Waits studio album that’s in the works, a group of notable musicians are set to honor one of his classic records, Rain Dogs, for those lucky enough to attend a string of forthcoming European tour dates. For an event dubbed Rain Dogs Revisited, the likes of Arthur H, the Tiger Lillies, Camille O’ Sullivan, Stef Kamil Carlens, and St. Vincent’s Annie Clark (who also has a new LP on the way) will revisit all 19 tracks of the brilliant 1985 LP under the direction of Waits’ The Black Rider collaborator David Coulter. An ambitious undertaking indeed, given the self-produced album’s vast array of styles and instrumentation. (Speaking of Rain Dogs, rumor has that one of the LP’s featured guitarists, Rolling Stone Keith Richards, is contributing to the forthcoming record, as well.) If you’ll be in Europe in July or November, check out the dates — alongside a clip of Waits playing “Time” on Letterman in 1986 — below:

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Looks like Steve Nieve is handling piano duties, too.  U.S. dates, please!!!! 

(Source: twentyfourbit)

There’s essentially zero chance that I’ll be able to make it to NYC for this beyond-intriguing show, but know that I just transformed into a being that is more envy than man.  These pairings are the best kind of insane (no love for Husker Du or Mission of Burma, though?).

Nat Baldwin, David Longstreth and Brian McOmber play Black Flag
Delicate Steve plays the Minutemen
Ted Leo plays Minor Threat
Titus Andronicus plays the Replacements
Tune-Yards plays Sonic Youth
Dan Deacon plays the Butthole Surfers
St. Vincent plays Big Black
Wye Oak plays Dinosaur Jr
Buke & Gass plays Fugazi