Dancing about Architecture

Today, a little peek into my creative process (such as it is).

So breaking out each album in my top ten into its own post was something I tried for the first time this year. I don't think it's something I'm going to repeat.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, 10 whole posts that would practically write themselves. After all, this was tuneage that I really dug. But what I'd forgotten to factor in was that I just don't write quickly. Although I've tried over the year to crank out content before revising, so I can get as much down as possible, I still have a tendency to tweak words as I'm typing them. While I don't approach Flaubert levels, if I bang out more than a thousand words in a night, I feel ahead of the game.

As a result, I averaged about a post a week. So about two months of the blog are taken up with my ramblings, and the middle of the year is not that far away. So much for timeliness.

Then of course there's the fact that, for me at least, writing about music is horrendously difficult. My responses to it are emotional first, logical second. I also have little to no music grasp of music theory, so there's not a lot of technical gibber-gabber I can recite. And unless Amazon has been kind enough to record some audio samples, you're not going to have many reference points to what I'm writing about (that is, unless you buy the albums, which you should totally do).

Next year I think I'll go back to one or two bulleted lists. Brevity seems to be working a lot better as far as this is concerned.

So a question to the blogosphere at large: how do you write about music?

Who's to Say I Don't Have Wings?

#1: Sleater-Kinney - The Woods. Well, this probably wasn't much of a surprise. In truth, it wasn't even close.

Musicians reinventing themselves is nothing new--witness U2's sea change from Rattle & Hum to Achtung Baby--and is actually something that they should do in order to keep from stagnating. Sleater-Kinney has been slowly modifying their sound over the course of their entire career, and in retrospect where they ended up sonically on The Woods makes perfect sense given that gradual evolution. But it's a rare thing for a band to make the previous 10 years of their career seem like just a warm-up, and S-K does just that with the very first note.

The reason the album is such a shift is because the band embraced distortion, volume and a smattering of influences from other sources: the shift to overdrive in "Rollercoaster" is worthy of the Stooges, the solo in "What's Mine is Yours" is pure Hendrix, the keyboards in "Jumpers" could be It's Hard-era Townsend. But there's a difference between absorbing influences and being absorbed by them, and that's a crucial distinction. The band may make nods to Hendrix, The Who and Zeppelin, but it isn't aping them--none of what you hear sounds like anything other than Sleater-Kinney.

Producer Dave Fridmann has received quite a lot of notice for his work, and what he has accomplished highlights how production can fundamentally alter an album (see: Brian Eno). The band has always employed some levels of dissonance on their albums, but the production had been relatively "clean." Not only is the sound louder here, but it's distorted even when it doesn't need to be, and there are more effects layered than I ever recall hearing before.

None of which takes anything away from the band itself, who purposefully took themselves out of their own environment (the album was recorded in upstate New York, a coast away from Portland) and their own comfort zone. According to interviews they've given after the album's release, the recording process was almost enough for the trio to call it quits. But what they managed to create as a result of that stress and effort is, to my ears, probably the high-water mark of their career.

They may never make its like again.

And Then So Clear

#2: Brian Eno - Another Day on Earth. It's a closely guarded secret in the music industry that there are actually three Brian Enos: Invisible Eno, Pop Eno, and Ambient Eno. Invisible Eno is, ironically, the one who's probably had the greatest impact on the populace as a whole, as he's the one who helps other artists (including U2, David Bowie, and Talking Heads, to name a few) make the best albums of their careers. Few people may recognize his contribution, but should really give him a hearty "thank you" should they run into him.

Pop Eno is actually the original Eno from whom the other Enos were created. After his stint in Roxy Music, he went off on his lonesome to make beautifully twisted songs that sounded almost Radio-friendly if you weren't listening too closely (or reading the titles to songs such as "Baby's on Fire" or "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch").

Then, of course, there's Ambient Eno, who--classical composers aside--not only helped to launch the genre but also came up with what I believe to be the best definition of what it's about: music that rewards both passive and active listening.

For the most part, these three Enos are not usually seen together. Most music fans who aren't prone to OCD have probably been exposed to Invisible Eno without realizing it (after all, how many bazillion people own a copy of The Joshua Tree?), but may not be aware that he has his own, extensive catalog. Sometimes Pop Eno lets Ambient Eno pop his head in for a few tracks, but Ambient Eno has never returned the favor.

Until this album.

In the past, the one clear indicator that an Eno album had been crafted by either Pop or Ambient Eno was the presence or absence of vocals. If there was singing on it, it was Pop Eno; no vox, Ambient. In my experience, this suited the fans of the two, visible Enos just fine, as they almost always preferred one over the other (to the surprise of no one, Ambient Eno is my fave).

Another Day on Earth, though, is a curveball: it is, essentially, an ambient album with vocals. And not the vocals one would normally associate with ambient--harmonic choirs, chanting, or wordless phrases--but actual lyrics. But it's the way that the vocals are treated that shifts them toward the ambient realm. Eno's one big weak spot has always been his voice: he doesn't have much of a range and his delivery is as emotional as a Cray-2. On this album, he compensates for this by treating his vocals as just another instrument.

As cliché as that reads, on this album it's absolutely true. The treatments are pervasive and obvious, as his vocals are pitch-shifted, phased and layered throughout. None of which would matter that much if he hadn't crafted music to support it. As usual, the album's production is excellent and the music is languid and somewhat mechanical-sounding without feeling sterile or cold.

It's not for everyone--and chances are the more you like Ambient Eno may have more than a little bearing on how much you enjoy this album. For me, there was only one album that I liked better.

Next: What it is.

A Writer of Fictions

#3: The Decemberists - Picaresque. Another group to which I'd not been exposed until last year, although at least I'd heard of them. Their previous album, Her Majesty, had caused quite a few ripples among the indie congnosenti, but I had no idea what to expect when I first put this on. Which was a good thing.

What I got was, as I've taken to calling it, musical theater--without the theater. Colin Meloy, who handles both songwriting and lead vocal duties, doesn't write songs so much as long narrative threads that sound more like short stories that have been set to music. Take this little snapshot of cleverness from album opener "The Infanta:"

Among five score pachyderm
All canopied and passenger'd
Sit the Duke and Duchess's luscious young girls
Within sight of the Baroness
Seething spite for this lithe largess
By her side sits the Baron--her barren-ness barbs her

The music tends to be folky yet dramatic, which just serves to reinforce the theatrical connection (to my mind, at least). To accomodate the stories, some of the tunes are stretched out to prog-rock length, but the time is meant to serve the virtuosity (and--let's be honest here--occasional verbosity) of the lyrics instead of showcasing the playing.

I'm not just pulling this out of my arse, either. Heck, the review over at AllMusic name-checks Kurt Weill. So don't take my word for it.

The other advantages of this approach is that, unlike actual musical theater, you won't have to pay ~$100 to hear it. Or, for that matter, be bothered with all that pesky dialogue they use to fill in the spaces between songs.

A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left

#4: Andrew Bird - Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs. I'd never heard of Mr. Bird before I'd had a chance to hear this album. This would be somewhat understandable if this were his debut album--but it's his fifth.

Primarily a violinist by trade, it's not surprising that his album has a bit of a relaxed, chamber pop/jazz feel, even though the violin isn't always front and center in the mix. Mr. Bird also plays just about every instrument on the album, which helps it achieve a pretty consistent sound. He also manages a rather eerie whistle, which, when I heard it on the unnamed opening track, I thought was a singing saw. Really.

What I also enjoy about this album beyond the sound is the wordplay. Bird doesn't have a particularly large range (or at least he doesn't make use of it) and emotiveness is generally at a premium. But I do enjoy his lyrics, even though they're somewhat relegated to the Beck school of quasi-nonsense. How can you not like a guy who rhymes "Valkyries," "proclivities," "trustees" and "B-17s?"

Hell Yes

#5: Beck - Guero. I like to think of Guero as the equivalent of a major league pitcher who's been in the game for a few years: you know they've only got a certain repertoire to work with, but they have such control that they're just as likely to jam you up with something you didn't see coming.

Guero is something like that. After the rather radical departure of Sea Change (which I also picked up recently and really enjoyed), Mr. Hansen went back to his bread and butter for this one: plundering music from disparate genres, crafting lyrics that generally make little to know sense, and gluing it together with a healthy helping of hip-hop.

It works. The album is remarkably solid through the vast majority of its running time, and there are a number of high points, including the insistent "Hell Yes," the catchy "Girl," and the slower "Missing."

None of it really transcends his prior work, but I'll gladly take this over an untold number of other albums that came out in '05.