Though I booked them to play our SXSW party, I was too busy that day to actually watch their set. After last night’s unbelievable display at Emo’s here in Austin, I realize what I missed. You hear people talk about how wonderful the A Place to Bury Strangers set is, but there isn’t really any comparable experience currently (except maybe Neurosis, who I got to see at last year’s Fun Fest, thank goodness) on the tour circuit.
Oliver Ackerman is an absolute genius, by the way. If they come to your town go see them, and don’t sit somewhere with a beer: stand up, put in your earplugs and watch him nurse what will probably be the most diverse group of tones out of his instruments you’ll hear in quite some time. That rhythm section ain’t bad either — when they’re able to keep up with him. Unbelievable show.
I have a long history with Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1986), reaching back to high school afternoons spent with a one of my dearest and longest lasting friends. His introduction to Bush happened without me, and my introduction came through him, as I did pesky physics homework on the floor of his living room while he tumbled through “Mother Stands for Comfort” on his piano. We’d talked about whether or not “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” was about David Gilmour or about masturbation, but we never resolved it.
All the records I really love take turns at the center of my listening cycle. I tend to have one or two durable favorites in rotation at all times, as I spend time with newer things peripherally. In the elite “almost always being played at least once a week” category are records like Tusk, All Things Must Pass, Red Apple Falls and Dire Straits. There are quite a few records that come around less frequently than that, but more frequently than others things, of course. A couple weeks ago I listened to almost nothing but Camofleur for a week straight. If things are good, something brand new takes stage center, knocking an old favorite back to the archives. I believe the most recent record to do that for me was Rook, and before that, Shining’s Grindstone. Recently, I’ve found it hard to listen to almost anything but Hounds.
Coming three years after Dreaming - a creative pinnacle and throbbing ode to the avant, particularly in terms of Bush’s then ear-splitting soprano - Hounds achieved what then must have seemed impossible to both critics and fans. Bush spent a meticulous three years in production, doing all the work herself (mostly in her home studio) and managed to retain her eclectic appeal while providing the pop consumers (and the Americans) something to bite on. The production includes samples, choral arrangements, her signature Fairlight CMI, surprising harmony and innovative mixing. It was also her most commercially successful album, and knocked Madonna’s Like a Virgin out of the top spot on the UK charts.
One of the particularly interesting things to note about Hounds is that Bush took great pains to distinguish between her more literary, esoteric style and her desire to demonstrate her pop credibility. Side one, the “Hounds of Love” side, features all the radio-ready tunes, including “Running Up That Hill” and “The Big Sky.” The later is said to be written in response to critiques of Dreaming that pinned it as “too obtuse” for common consumption. All of side one is gorgeous, and it introduced me to a Bush that was experiencing a vocal transition (perhaps with age? a lot of Dreaming’s tunes were written when she was still a teen) into a lower pitch, but not sacrificing the range that she was capable of mastering. It’s also the introduction to theme: side one is Sky,side two is Water.
And side two (”The Ninth Wave,” a title stolen from Tennyson) is where things really get good. The innocent stargazing girl disappears, and we meet the young girl that is stranded in water, facing certain drowning, slipping in and out of consciousness. She meets witches, angels and ghosts, and goes through nothing short of a philosophical revolution as she falls from the sky to the cold depths of the water. “Jig of Life” is my personal favorite on this side; the contrast between happy Irish jig against a deep and dark poem recital (courtesy her older brother) indicating a certain doom handed over from the gods of the underworld. Next, the penultimate track, “Hello Earth” actually walks us through the transition Bush’s character surrogate (and herself, conceivably) has traveled between side one and side two. The ominous choral arrangement in the song was arranged by Michael Berkeley, who was given instructions to collage something harmonically surprising with inspiration from the orthodox singing/chanting in Herzog’s Nosferatu. That piece, which they couldn’t identify at the time, was called “Zinskaro,” a traditional Georgian song. Beginning with what seems to be a dream about driving with a loved one, she’s quickly hearing the voices from under the water, reminding her of her now certain fate. Even as she looks to the sky, she’s being pulled under.
Go to sleep, little earth / I was there at the birth / Out of the cloudburst / The head of the tempest … Why did I go?
And as the drowning woman realizes her fate, the songwriter retraces her steps from the cloudbusting side one, full of pop and joy, falls out of the cloudburst and says goodnight to little Earth. In some ways, her shockingly calm goodbye seems almost like a relief, and perhaps that is indicative of something — especially if parts of this record are an attempt to wrestle with her conflicts between a pop life and a more introverted songwriter’s. That bridge between elevated lightning rider in the public eye and submerged artist is a long and wobbly one, and she was certainly dealing with these struggles at this time. Even the light of day has a lingering fog, as the album’s closing track says goodbye to her personal life: mother, father, siblings. Again, she seems content here, and this closing track is delicate and precious, even sweet. “Do you know what? I love you better now.” Almost as if the realization of her place in the shadows, underground, is what’s best for her.
“Being born again, into the sea” can be read as a middle finger to pop culture, but she’s never really thumbed her nose at us too glaringly. Over the years she’s taken long hiatuses and poured incredible amounts of time and energy into her work. In that way, she’s stayed clear of the pop machine — shouldering blistering speculation and rumors from fans and critics, always emerging again as brilliant and beautiful as before, with a new and interesting subject for our digestion. But she’s always been a sort of dark horse as well … thumbing her nose at the typical role women singer songwriters take up.
I still have some unfinished business to write about, but I’ll need to feel inspired to return to The Stand-Ins before I can do that. At the moment, I’m taking much more pleasure in some old records, particularly Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love.
Maura (and others) argue that there is something terribly sad about a band that seems to exist for nothing other than the possibility of licensing or sponsorship.
I was thinking about this while on the train back from Long Island today, about how music like Fleet Foxes and other seemingly made-to-be-licensed “indie” increasingly seems only to be really “indie” as far as its up-with-pop-music attitude, i.e., seemingly not wanting to connect with a mass level of people but in reality wanting to connect with a mass of the right kind of people—you know, the sorts of creative professionals who can then get at least one song in an ad. That could speak to the whole “Bob Ross” feeling it gives off; empty prettiness is both the means and the end.
In this day and age, there’s certainly a fair amount of bands who wittingly or otherwise exist to do little more than market to a culture of fringe music fans. Note: I said fans, not listeners. And the people who buy $.99 songs on iTunes because they heard it on a commercial or in an episode of The Hills are as much to blame as the people who write songs for that audience … it’s not a pleasant state of things but it’s not revolutionary. Here we are whining about albums and bands that are little more than wallpaper, but their biggest crime is that they wrote a catchy pop tune or are just too pretty, not quite edgy enough to really sit outside of the mainstream machine. The history of radio and pop music reminds us that this isn’t a new trend, it’s just the new generation of the same issue. Bands used to release 45s with two songs, and that endeavor was with one intention - to get one single song on the radio, so that hopefully some girl in an ice cream shop would run to the store and pick it up. One song. Maybe two. Now we have bands that crank out much more than that, but not for a much different purpose. There’s always going to be groups that aren’t creating for the sake of it, but stamping Fleet Foxes with that brand might be a premature move. They’re so young, let’s see if they create two more records that are equally applauded, then I’ll make my decision on their motives and capabilities.
For now, it’s pleasant — and beyond that, it’s a bit more on the outskirts of copyright ready pop music that some might think. They leave some room to breath in their songs, they don’t rush through things. They let space work its own magic on the melodies and structures, and they seem to take a simple pleasure in the openness that provides the music. I admire this, it’s the reason why I enjoy records like Spirit of Eden and Codename: Dustsucker (among others, like Rook) — there isn’t a rush to anything, there’s an appreciation for simple things like pregnant pauses and elegant piano parts. Fleet Foxes are good at this, most often when they’re letting the vocal work loom like a giant balloon in the middle of the living room: it’s huge, gorgeous and unavoidable, and it’s all that’s there. What’s so empty about that? Why can’t spare and simple arrangements be real, too? Have we learned nothing from Brian Eno?
I’m positive that Maura (and others) don’t want to say that it’s not possible to be pretty, simple and also great, but I still feel compelled to point out that sometimes it’s those simple compositions that strike me as the most complicated — especially in an indie music climate that seems obsessed with mashing, smashing and espousing a sort of everything all the time mentality to arranging. That’s an entirely different subject, though, and it deserves its own post, probably.
Perhaps accidentally, PGWP almost resolves Maura’s issue with the “Bob Ross pretty emptiness” she and others perceive when he says, “…the songwriting is sparse, letting the voices fill the air instead, and the song structures are often more complex than typical pop.” This is exactly the reason the record isn’t in the same category as the faceless indie background music (”creative-professional indie” as Maura calls it) most of us find offensive and boring. The division is clear to me, but perhaps I’m simply making a personal choice, not a compelling argument here when I say that it is completely possible for music to be simple, sparse, open and (yes) pretty while still being great. Not just good or nice or capable of being in a commercial, but great.
Whether of not Fleet Foxes is great isn’t really something I want to take up. I like them, their live performances are impressive, perhaps moreso than the record, but I haven’t ever felt like I had to hear them. When I do, I enjoy it. My primary issue is like something PGWP mentioned in his piece too — what’s with all the reverb? Why on earth would you sit in the recording studio with talented people, all of whom are able to sing and harmonize effortlessly, and drown it in that effect when the best thing which could possibly come from it is a comparison to My Morning Jacket? My smart boyfriend said, “That’s a style now, you know.” What’s a style? Needless effects that pigeon hole your group before you’ve had a chance to tour on the record and prove that you’re not hiding something behind all those reverberations?
Anyway, I want to go listen to some Eno and Hollis and forget about indie rock now for a bit, but stay tuned, before this week is out I’ll finish bitching about bands that have five or ten needless instruments on every record and for some reason feel like cramming them all onto an album makes their music more legit. Just because your drummer’s girlfriend owns a cello doesn’t mean you need it on your record.
Reading an old New Yorker piece by Alex Ross about Pavement just after Brighten the Corners came out:
At least one long and winding road to hell is paved with interpretations of rock lyrics. Writing on the subject tends to fall apart because lyrics make less sense to the eye than to the ear. Words are blurred and bent by the music that swirls around them. “A song doesn’t exist to convey the meaning of the words,” the critic Simon Frith has written. “Rather, the words exist to convey the meaning of the song.” (here)
I’d like to think about this more and return to this though. I really don’t want to get mired in a discussion about meaning, but would very much like to discuss process, as I’m having interesting real life conversations about writing music or lyrics first, whether or not The Stand Ins (Okkervil’s seeming Stage Names overflow/accompanying piece) is too crammed with words to be meaningful, and whether or not there is any parallel between lyrically overwrought albums an albums which cram in unnecessary instruments for the sake of an assumed legitimacy.
This makes no sense now, I hope to sort it out later.
Here’s something I wish I saw more of: a blog dedicated entirely to one record. Idiot Lust focuses on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, an album that was a huge leap for Pop at the time, and which also ties in very closely with David Bowie’s Low (pictured above is a scene from the studio during Low’s recording).
Written by Bradley Blanks, a NYC-based musician and engineer, Idiot Lust researches, documents and ponders both the technical and production aspects of the recording and “creative magic” that fueled its creation. He gives individual track analysis, expounds on production teams and equipment (pro tip: Eventide Harmonizer), and naturally, the relationship between Iggy Pop and Dr. Jim Osterberg.
Something I didn’t know was that Tony Visconti, a mainstay in the world of Bowie, mixed The Idiot after Bowie’s production. Low and The Idiot were recorded almost simultaneously at the Château d’Hérouville located in Pontoise, France. Many know about the friendship between Pop and Bowie, but in a quick half and hour I’ve learned more about microphones, China Girls and alter-egos than I could have anywhere else.
Do make a point to check it out — if for no other reason to admire someone else’s dedication to talking about things that are important. The contexts surrounding albums and songwriters that we all too often take for granted.
I have a long history with Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1986), reaching back to high school afternoons spent with a one of my dearest and longest lasting friends. His introduction to Bush happened without me, and my introduction came through him, as I did pesky physics homework on the floor of his living room while he tumbled through “Mother Stands for Comfort” on his piano. We’d talked about whether or not “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” was about David Gilmour or about masturbation, but we never resolved it. 
Coming three years after Dreaming - a creative pinnacle and throbbing ode to the avant, particularly in terms of Bush’s then ear-splitting soprano - Hounds achieved what then must have seemed impossible to both critics and fans. Bush spent a meticulous three years in production, doing all the work herself (mostly in her home studio) and managed to retain her eclectic appeal while providing the pop consumers (and the Americans) something to bite on. The production includes samples, choral arrangements, her signature 
