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By Robin Smith, May 15, 2012 10:00 am

mewithYou – Ten Stories

Pine Street 2012

Rating: 8/10

To start at the end of all stories, “All Circles” carries a quintessential mewithoutYou lyric executed like one of James Blake’s; it is a singular thought captured out of time, with its significance deemed only by itself. “All circles presuppose they’ll end where they begin but only in their leaving can they ever come back around, all circles presuppose.” That’s the kind of lyric that would be a connective piece amidst the narrative of any other mewithoutYou track, like something that jumps out half way through the story but sort of inadvertently lives in the shadow of the rest of the song. We’ve seen this in Weiss’ song writing over and over, in the bags of marijuana he left out on the track, or the money he gave reluctantly to the track, and all your favourites that seemed to fall out of line in their tracks only to be repaired later on. As a lyricist as obsessed with stories and fables as Weiss is, every lyric walks freely into the other and ties itself onto it in a moment of hypocrite bastadry, and yet what “All Circles” does with its words- the most “my brother and my sister don’t speak to me” of all lines- is have them in orbit for three minutes of repetition to create one of ten stories without ever telling it. As the music grows and grows before its simple climax, Weiss seems to be creating a song meant for a listen as instinctive as it is poetic.

“All Circles” may be my favourite mewithoutYou track of all time, which fills me with a shitonne of guilt because it replaces a song as contrastingly made as “The King Beetle On A Coconut Estate,” which is a descriptive song that delves the deepest Weiss has into storytelling. Regardless, “All Circles” is sold to me the way any track in the band’s career is; it’s a lyric that sounds placed above the melody, actually moving entirely to it. This is the only impulse I have to go on when it comes to mewithoutYou- the construction of their songs, with Weiss playing the narrator as the constant through what has become an expertly diverse career of punk-cores and psych folk- but no amount of time I pour into having an epiphany over the themes of Ten Stories, it will still seem, in many ways, the most at ease the band has been, even if it isn’t necessarily the happiest they’ve been. It flows between its stories with the confidence a band five albums in can afford, with the raucous “Grist For The Malady Mill” going tactful into the moody, crisp “East Enders Wives.” Or, if you’d prefer, “Nine Stories” and “Bears Vision” seem the same story separated for air. Whatever connection these songs make for you, it feels done so easily that an album could simply fall out of these guys.

Moments of this ease produce slabs of indie-rock proper for mewithoutYou, which is a first. “Cardiff Giant” is a twinkly alt-rock track, one entirely made out of guitar riffs and a conventional rock set-up, and it finds its way on the album neatly. And yet the confidence we hear on these new, simpler layers seem to do nothing to demystify Ten Stories, an album much like “All Circles”: never overtly explained, because you’d have to seek out the liner notes to know, really know, that a song on this album acts as an open dialogue about an owl and a walrus, with both parts read by Weiss. Ten Stories regains something cryptic through its words, which is what I’d guess it really shares with Catch For Us The Foxes. For another comparison, it feels as fabled as It’s All Crazy! but with its themes laid with less explicitly for the animal community: “Allah, Allah, Allah” is a very different look at religion from “Nine Stories,” which captures a desperation rather than the universal clarity of insisting “it’s alright!” in the face of spirituality. “Jacob knows a ladder you can climb” is not a lyric sang for joy, but for a different kind of impulse is captured entirely. Our own Channing Freeman noted that this album’s predecessor carried a solution to its own campfire problem: sing along, be happy, two things this album don’t quite entail in the same way- this is, I feel, a dark record, the stories in which Weiss’ animal kingdom gets put in trial and sentenced to hanging- but it remains the work of a band free of inhibition amidst all the soul-searching. In a moment of levity, however, Weiss draws his own comparison between this and the album that came before it, which is that the band will say what it wants to say, basically: “we’ll knead a bit of dough to get by.” Indeed? Ten Stories is at ease with its ambiguity and style-shifting.

And let’s not forget just how much a feat that is for a song writer who has been helplessly searching since day one. While I think I’ll never quite understand the madcap story behind Ten Stories, beyond the animals and the circus clown chilling in the corner, I don’t think I’ll ever forget just how circular mewithoutYou are being with it, right down to that amazing meta-inducing ending. “Only in their leaving can they ever come back ‘round” is a little line of self-help for Ten Stories, as it closes its album by going back to the start and thinking it all through again. Continuity is very much on the mind of this band through their albums, whether it lingers within the broad lyrical aphorisms- you’ll remember “I do not exist” in Brother Sister- or from album to album. You can call “February 1878” a whole song of its own, separate from “January 1979,” but both linger within the other. On Ten Stories, I think, there’s another chapter bring written about death from the breakdown on the railroad tracks; Weiss wonders if he’s “already died” on this album and doesn’t know, though some do, “no certainty exists.” What lingers in all mewithoutYou albums, and in the continuity of these two connective songs, is uncertainty, the thinking things through and coming back around. The way a thought changes in time: “sometimes I think all our thoughts are just things and then sometimes all our things are then thoughts.” And so yes, this is rather a traditional mewithoutYou album, because hasn’t that term moved beyond what musical styles they play in by now? It makes sense that “All Circles” is how it all closes out, with Weiss, as ever, instinctively working his way towards a thought, and with such absurd confidence that we would think he’d already arrived there. One would think he rather suits the concept-album. He kneads a good adventure, after all.

See larger image Ten Stories (Audio CD) List Price: $12.99 USD New From: $8.45 In Stock Used from: $9.78 In Stock Release date May 15, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, May 8, 2012 10:00 am

Best Coast – The Only Place

Mexican Summer 2012

Rating: 3/10

No matter how many times you say fun I still can’t have it. The Only Place feels like the greying out of Bethany Cosentino, the same sentiments she’s been pushing just rolling on to the next page, blowing through the streets, always the streets of California, like an endless gust of weed smoke. It is talking to the same people from the same couch as trashy TV rolls quietly and insignificantly in the background, thinking about fixing the same problems but clinging to them like little nuggets of meaning, pining over the same guy and being too lazy to do anything about it. We’re still supposed to take it to the beach and get high to it and take pictures of our cat to go on a clip reel with it. We’re right where we left off: “when I’m with you,” when we’re together, “I have fun.”

Okay. Either this record is boring, or I am. Don’t tell me. The way Crazy For You ended epitomized that record, because it held up a mirror to its mad dependence. All the weed was taken out of the skull-fucking boredom of waiting for your prospective boyfriend to not come ‘round; going half out of your mind and talking to your pet was a replacement act and saying the same thing over and over and over again was to calm the thoughts that consumed. The distractions only lasted minutes. Minutes? Perfect! Write a pop song. “When I’m With You” was a fitting conclusion of all these little anxieties, because what is an album about ‘weed and my cat and being lazy a lot’ without the fun you could be having? I guess it’s nothing. The Only Place is kind of nothing.

In its nothingness, everyone will tell me, “it sounds like every Best Coast album” and point back to Crazy For You as being as simple as what follows it. It will reinforce a lyric like “I wish my cat could talk,” a line that is pretty much the holy grail of simple lyrics. Give me a simple lyric any day, for all the obvious reasons: it’s honest, or it speaks to an experience we’re probably all having, or maybe it’s just easier to connect with someone over having a bad day than it is to grasp for meaning in it. When I hear a simple lyric of Cosentino’s, though, it’s simple because she has nothing to say and no experience to share with anyone but the dude she’s talking to. This would be James Last’s surf pop muzak if not for the elongating of words like “fun” and “life” and the constant repetition of that nothingness refusing to dig through the surface. All Cosentino has to write about on The Only Place is the distractions, and last time around that nothingness, played on a purely upbeat note, lasted the summer and died out as fast as the weather did.

And so the most hideous crime The Only Place commits is that, yes, it is an “emo” record, just like Cosentino said she wanted- emo not for the guitars twinkling or the skramz screaming, but for the gloomy, plodding place it exists in. It comes from exactly the same place that the sun shone on for Crazy For You, but with the grey shading. That doesn’t refer to the inevitable move away from being a lo-fi band, either- it barely factors. Again we’re at home with Cosentino on the couch, listening to her music the way it was lazily written, and lazy isn’t an insult: it’s like a badge a Best Coast record proudly pins on itself. Everyone is out somewhere with something to do and The Only Place is at home with the curtains pulled over.

The result of darkening the room by the beachside is this: the drab distractions of fun and the sad twee ballads all move The Only Place at a precisely made, sluggish speed through half an hour of Cosentino’s white lies about being unhappy and pissed off with friends. It’s all held up through jangle pop played in a major key, but in this even Cosentino seems unsympathetic towards her character- the melancholy is only ever piled on a happy melody and the never-ending sadness, as on the guitar-chugged “Last Year,” seems like a red herring played for the hell of it (again: nothingness). That’s why the song indulges in the surface of lyrics rather than the words on the inside, and why Cosentino becomes more entertaining when she expresses her “la de das” instead of the problems she seems little interested in. “What a year this day has been” is a lyric that reflects the grungy, uncaring nature of this track, but any venting on The Only Place remains simply that on this is an album of surface- nothing goes any deeper, because nothing can come from nothing.

What The Only Place entails is a list of reasons to not be having fun, but the description is unsympathetic, and not only in Cosentino’s lyrics: the music feels entirely out of step with the record’s moody facade, like eleven new versions of the impassioned, irony-smacked “Positively Fourth Street” but intending none of the scorn Dylan did in his music. And this is just how Cosentino writes; her dad-rock-surf-pop guitar music sounds nothing but sincere in its airy and carefree construction, and as a result it means as little as her lyrics do, just in the complete opposite way. What results is a bizarre record of contrasting base material, a bittersweet record without any of the force behind what make those words sting. The Only Place becomes a record that is suggesting everything but giving none of it, and what sucks the most is that this badge of laziness is entirely of Cosentino’s choosing. She neutralises these two parts into some sort of post-beachcore album that cynically rhymes words like “fun” with themselves, just to point to as it was last time around.

So it’s fitting that the best moment here is “Up All Night,” a song entirely about feel: it’s long and gloomy, but dedicated to its story for more than four minutes, ditching the superficial twee brevity for a little focus on what’s upsetting Cosentino and how a pop song of little guitar riffing can speak for that. This side of Cosentino feels none forced as the band rollicks through guitar licks and percussive snaps that dot together the bitter with the sweet in a more palliative way: Cosentino is wistful on this closer, and the music actually reflects that, without a smile. Best Coast’s style feels fully connected here, rather than just presenting the description, the “emo,” as an afterthought. It’s as if the saving grace to Cosentino’s sadness is the time dedicated, which makes sense for this album of nothing; there’s something buried under “Up All Night,” finally. But until this moment, I’m not having fun with The Only Place, and when it’s down and out I’m not not having fun with it. All I feel towards this record is some sort of angry indifference, which feels like the exact empty feeling that it impacts on us; like nothing matters as long as I hear the same words and the same chords over and over until all I can say about this record is nothing, over and over. This is an empty record, and the exact opposite of what it means to write classic music, because through all its forced smiles and fake problems, it’s an album that means absolutely nothing to me.

Best Coast – “The Only Place”

See larger image The Only Place (Audio CD) List Price: $12.98 USD New From: $7.99 In Stock Used from: $6.72 In Stock Release date May 15, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, April 24, 2012 10:00 am

Maps & Atlases – Beware and Be Grateful

Barsuk 2012

Rating: 8/10

My whole experience of Maps & Atlases reads like an off-base rockumentary cliché, but anyway: I understand that Maps & Atlases are not the band they once were. This seems like an absolutely ridiculous statement to make of a band that has done little more to their sound than nuance it; the guitar tapping is still present, muffled under the song though it may be, and the experiments have just been restricted to compact boxes to move about in. The band hasn’t split itself down its side like it may seem, rather it’s just suppressed the big and the bold into the background to make room for (sure, go ahead and use the word) a “pop” song. It’s the toning down of it all, though, that makes it so criminal, and so when they nuance, they nuance hard. Maps & Atlases were once something of an imposing band, which means they were in your face and clever and they did these things to you; their second and most noted EP was aggressive and progressive, trying a whole lot at raucous speeds. Now, Maps & Atlases are a band able; namely, they are “danceable,” the band that sat around and listened to Prince a shit-tonne. Beyond the immaculate construction of their record, we do what we want with Maps & Atlases these days; the fans who claim they’ve given up on this band but for a live show are just as righteous fans as those of us who embrace this new band who made “Winter,” the band with supposedly funky choruses. Whatever the result is, I recognise the lame cliché on this one: it’s like listening to two different bands.

Cliché number two: that side of Maps & Atlases that died (by being quieter than usual) has made Maps & Atlases the band I was always hoping they would evolve into. There were moments on Perch Patchwork where a very bright light shone down: songs as showy as “Pigeon” suddenly sounded like warm home recordings, even in their cerebral nature; it felt like listening to a band making the greatest equation on how to party. Awful math rock jokes aside, there’s something of a super-group to be had of a Maps & Atlases who can make a visceral impact rather than just construct one. People have said you can dance to Beware and Be Grateful, which essentially means you can feel things as you listen to it; you can hear the patterns of the saddest moments, like Davison’s ‘I, I, I’ repeating as an endless transmission in “Remote and Dark Years.” Yes, it’s not something you need to read in a review, but Beware and Be Grateful is even more a warm, touching record than the ones made before it. As Davison loses it on the guitar-crackling “Old Ash” and lets his voice loudly preach and then crumble in a heap, a new vision of Maps & Atlases comes beaming out. It’s a passionate band standing on the top of all their wacky, wonderful architecture and caring profoundly about it.

These aren’t ferocious songs and they aren’t always playing with everything on the forefront, and it’s compelling to see that; the band has rounded up the edges of their songs and put them into the ground, so that “Fever” is as many times as complex as “Everyplace Is A House” but comes out as a song with a very conventional beauty to it: no guitar noodling, maybe, but so many little things going on within it that constitute bro-y complexity, just in a better way: so many guitar patterns and little programmed noises to be followed. Beware and Be Grateful is easy to dismiss as too easy, or not the band we once knew, but it feels to me like the band that finally found themselves saying what they want to say and in the way they want to. Which is why, chief among all clichés, I consider this somehow representative of the band as a whole, no matter how different it’s all gotten: a band showing off as a secondary objective, playing songs with immense warmth and love. We can speak of the impossibility of reconciling version one of this band to version two, but for me, Beware and Be Grateful is just a band growing. Growth, at its most disgustingly ordinary and clichéd. Heartfelt geniuses that these guys are, they sell it.

Maps & Atlases – “Silver Self”

See larger image Beware & Be Grateful (Audio CD) List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $9.02 In Stock Used from: $4.15 In Stock Release date April 17, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, February 21, 2012 10:00 am

Cate Le Bon – Cyrk

The Control Group 2012

Rating: 7/10

On my absolutely wishy-washy but definitely noble search for as many singer plus guitar albums I could find, it was in Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day I was able to make a home- preferably a log cabin- to crawl up in. Not that this is a review of that (though if I can petition someone to write a glowing 5 for it, yes please), but it is the warmth in that album that startled me. Even if it isn’t the perfect acoustic album- there’s more to it around the edges than that, shout out to the album’s obscure fiddle player – Bunyan’s assurance on a song such as “Love Song” speaks volumes of how to make an album that carries guitar and voice to its core. It’s not her gorgeous voice we will wax lyrical about forever unless it goes hand in hand with the guitar below it, and the rest is a fill-in. There, in Diamond Day, lies a classic album built on a steady foundation.

This mini-review, of course, fails to point back at the actual make-up of CYRK, an album driven by a musician and her band - drums, organs and such, they’re definitely a mark on this album, curse ‘em- but it’s in sheer strength of will that Cate Le Bon comes across like the room’s been cleared out. To me, it’s an album of vocal and guitar, too dressed-up in places like “Greta,” maybe, for that assertion to be actually true, but transparent enough to hold those two fundamentals at its centre. It’s the guitar-work that compels Le Bon to the shade of herself that is punk, but it’s the same instrument she falls back on for her less acidic moments. At the risk of being caught out by someone else in their boxy bedroom who knows I have nothing to say about CYRK beyond “cool music” or worse still, “sounds like Nico,” allow me to distract the conversation to Le Bon’s startling live show: as support for St. Vincent, she was the living, breathing definition of sparseness, which is the most fabulous of endorsements for Annie Clark’s supplement, in a strange way. Her live show presented that unsettling singer-songwriter style nuanced into its purest form, something most would call nothing more than “a lady and a guitar.” I prefer to think of it as a lady and some ridiculous chord changes, liberated by her small-time status enough to push through the intense experiments she’d been purveying. An expert fit, I’m sure you’ll agree, to St. Vincent, but Le Bon didn’t fill the stage as a band-leader. This was a pastoral (whatever that really means anymore) take on her peer’s quiet debut Marry Me, tampered with so little that even if I knew none of the songs, I was hearing them as if getting their inaugural play-through.

That lovely, simple magic doesn’t feel lost on CYRK, even when the shuffling drums roll over “Fold The Cloth” or the keys try to get some authority over it, and how they try: even mixed in louder, they’re still somehow kinda unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Even then, the base of this album feels sprinkled on by the band around it. Those twinkling effects on “Puts Me To Work” are put on top like the most awesome of supplementary essays, further explaining the character and zest of CYRK but not taking away from Cate Le Bon’s simple image. The character of this album is in its fine lines- again, reminiscent of Annie Clark as she plays on the borders of comfort and its sinister, opposite number- and those, laid bare, are simply given marking points by all this stuff. The organs, the drums, and such, are going to lend Le Bon a certain amount of comparison, but it’s in the guitar we keep falling in with Stephen Malkmus and her voice we so desperately want to connect to Chelsea Girl. Not that there are any gosh-darn flutes in this album, but “Fold The Cloth” gets its power from those wandering guitar-lines at 1:24. If anything, CYRK is more the work of someone working in Kurt Vile’s discipline, chilling from the couch as she makes an album of two great talents. Le Bon is doodling, but as she refines it, CYRK becomes a clear piece of work with a well-clarified core.

Even if, once in a while, she’s all up for dismantling her world, dusting it off and putting it back together in some new ridiculous layout. “Greta” seems to stress a particular breaking point for the album, but neither side is radically different from the other. It stands, in this warped little interlude, one which will put the easily horrified among us off brass instruments forever, that Le Bon is as much of experiment as she is of constructing songs, and in its creepy-as-hell last gasp, “Greta” is consciously laying down the deliberately fragmenting sound of Le Bon, one that she tampers with for nothing more than the delight of it. And so the disorientating final seconds of CYRK are indicative of the musician behind them in many ways, which is almost frustrating in light of part one of the inverted “Ploughing Out.” Le Bon is playing beautiful chords for the first round, and if it’s not that which sooths, one can point to the earnestness of everything: the softness of drums and the cooing vocal enveloping the headphones is the album I’m constantly searching for. That’s a story, I’ll bite, that lends itself to about half of CYRK (and half of my life), but to me it’s in Le Bon’s guitar-work she finds her innate strength, that which demolishes with about the same dedication it helps her sparkle bright. This album sits in the comfort of a pastoral tune and its strong-willed, angular resolution. The twist in “Ploughing Out” moves entirely in chords, treacling down to the next movement like the rough patch needn’t have words, needn’t have a reason; it’s just Le Bon’s electric guitar, now near-autonomous, causing the scene. Now leading some semblance of a band towards singer-songwriter paradise, it’s just a startling achievement to see a musician command her music so well. No wonder her audience got her stepping onto that tiny stage alone: that’s a really cool guitar, after all.

Cate Le Bon – “Puts Me To Work”

See larger image Cyrk (Audio CD) List Price: $13.98 USD New From: $9.44 In Stock Used from: $11.54 In Stock Release date January 17, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, January 19, 2012 10:00 am

Guided By Voices – Let’s Go Eat The Factory

Guided By Voices Inc. 2012

Rating: 3/10

In a decade or two of very awesome ideas in indie rock, one of the best also has the least to do with music. It’s chronicled in the to-do list of Stephen Malkmus, and if it turns out that he doesn’t have one, I’m fairly sure these are the bullet-points: firstly, write some music. There’s no outlet better for a guy who still speaks in riddles after all these years. Secondly, don’t release another Pavement album. The live reunion, yes, that’s inevitable for such a legendary band, but Malkmus recognises his riddles are no longer Crooked Rain riddles, not by a long way: you have to write as if you don’t really care about writing to make “Range Life,” backhanded even if it was immaculately crafted. His lack of temptation to do it again- to be the casual genius only unlocked by Pavement- is kinda commendable in my eyes. He’s not arguing against how much he bloody well was Pavement. He’s just aware there’s no need to assert that anymore, because, well, being one thing doesn’t necessarily mean being it forever.

Robert Pollard is not Stephen Malkmus, sadly.

I’m not bringing this up to start a band vs. band argument, especially as Guided by Voices occupy that favourite band hall of fame in my sweet little head. But as far as reunions go, here’s one that shouldn’t have happened, and here’s the exact reason Stephen Malkmus got it right. Robert Pollard has billed Let’s Go Eat The Factory as a reunion album, a new era straight from the old era, one that brings the ‘classic line-up’ back together like a doting indie commune. What it is in reality, however, is far from that beautiful hippy image: this is just another moment of self-indulgence from a man with too much of his own stuff going on in his life anyway, all of it music. This is an album that marginalizes its most exciting aspect, the return of Pollard’s long-time companion Tobin Sprout, and ignores the return of old friends Mitch Mitchell and Greg Demos entirely. This isn’t a reunion album anymore than tacking the name on with four different guys would be. Rather, it’s Pollard’s declaration that this band is, through it all, his own. And god, what a mistake that is.

Because you have to wonder what happened to tear apart Pollard and Sprout here, why exactly their connection has gone so wrong. It’s not a partnership anymore, and I guess that’s another thing on this long list of inevitabilities I don’t want to face. That’s all Guided By Voices really are on this record- a band of crappy lists, a competing arena for a Pollard counting wins off of songs. It’s a game only Uncle Bob is playing, of course, and whatever little flag of jangle-pop pride Sprout is proudly waving on Let’s Go Eat The Factory is burnt to a crisp by the misguided leadership of his friend the jock. It’s a record in which Pollard trades personalities with himself obsessively, back and forth between the days when he was obnoxious as hell- the award goes to any number of his solo records- and those where he was just plain tedious. Sprout will remember fewer of those days than the line-up that informed Pollard’s late GBV records, of course, and so with him having a firm grasp on one of the band’s records for the first time in years, he shows up his dull and blocky counterpart a hundred times over.

In fact, for ten tiny minutes, Sprout finds a way to kick the ass out of Let’s Go Eat The Factory. He still has a Peter Gabriel quality (which, fittingly, would make Pollard Phil Collins in this particular Greek tragedy) that gets him to making a track as creepy and nostalgia-manipulative as “Old Bones.” He can also still write the odd R.E.M. throwback track- the advantage here being that these are consequentially worthy GBV throwbacks- and so “Waves” propels ever forward like a sweet, twee moment amidst the joylessness of Robert Pollard’s falling over and getting up again. Those ten minutes are a welcome distraction, but they’re hampered regardless by the time Pollard spends on Let’s Go Eat The Factory stumbling over himself. He starts doing it literally enough by the time “Cyclone Utilities” has bumped by, but the dents in the road Pollard prides himself in are no longer the warped fantasies they were. I guess, really, it’s as simple as it not being 1993 anymore. “Go Rolling Home” and “The Room Taking Shape,” are typical GBV snippet songs, dedicated to using the hook once lest it be overused. It’s only that the hook doesn’t emerge for those thirty seconds, and as I get all clingy over indie rock for the umpteenth time, I just wish I could be moved by this.

As he stumbles from place to place thirty seconds at a time, I can’t help but feel Pollard is to blame for the devastating, non tear-jerker, non-anything of an album Let’s Go Eat The Factory ends up being. It looks into endless possibilities and takes twenty-one left turns in all, moving unexplained from eerie spoken word to dissonant piano play, and yet it plays out so predictable that Mitchell and Demos- surely innocent parties in all of this- are probably wondering when “Chicken Blows” is going to crack up the room. To be this predictable while moving with such stylistic abandon seems impossible. Hell, it was Guided By Voices who made it seem impossible in the first place; who could be boring with so much going on? On Let’s Go Eat The Factory, each stylistic move feels like a cheap gimmick, something Pollard would give over to an unexciting, unsurprising solo album. “The Big Hat and Toy Show” might sound like nothing else on Let’s Go Eat The Factory, but that does not make its inclusion worthy or daring. It makes the album feel like it was made in the dark with no understanding of how Bee Thousand got moody or how Alien Lanes embraced its flaws. Instead, the mood is uninterested and the flaw is shitty basslines.

I’m aware, of course, that Let’s Go Eat The Factory will be awesome and explainable to other GBV nerds, or if it isn’t- which is more likely- it won’t matter anyway. You can’t tarnish a legacy set in stone on its own merits (or in this band’s world, on quirks), a fact that Pollard has well enough proved without this record. I hated Space City Kicks, but it didn’t detract from my belief that Pollard is some brand of mad-scientist genius. And so all this might not speak with as much praise to Malkmus’ decision, because he might have fun with another Pavement record. That’s all Pollard is doing at the end of all this, even if it just seems like one ridiculous tease to the rest of us: to get the gang back together, to release your cult indie band’s first record in eight years, all of it for belly laughs aplenty. The LP comeback of Guided By Voices makes no difference, it won’t make any difference in the summer, and so it’s not on the scale of music’s biggest mistakes. It’s not a Metal Machine Music, but only because it’s too unremarkable. It’s not Chelsea Girl ruined by flutes, because Pollard wanted all those awful guitar noises. Here, instead, is a bad album not doomed to be one in history. It’s just a sludgy, grumpy record from a band who once knew pop music needed whimsy. Is it the classic line-up’s fault they aren’t all that classic anymore? Mainly, it’s just Pollard’s, Pollard with his grump on, stomping angrily on the status quo as Sprout outshines him in his ten minute segment. How dull, Bob. What a boring record, and what an indie mistake.

Guided By Voices – “Waves”

See larger image Let's Go Eat the Factory (Audio CD) List Price: $19.98 USD New From: $10.23 In Stock Used from: $12.95 In Stock Release date January 17, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, November 16, 2011 10:00 am

Atlas Sound – Parallax

4AD Records 2011

Rating: 6/10

Bradford Cox is more comfortable with the lights off. Parallax is proof of that; on the cover of Logos he was pictured faceless, but here he’s in the dark. It feels like a big statement to make- here is a man and his microphone, literally clutching to music- but it also seems like a resoundingly ambiguous one: is this image of Cox stepping out of the shadow, shedding the discomfort that’s put weight on songs like “Agoraphobia,” or is he hiding in it?

For all the ambiguity, Parallax feels like another hiding place. He circulates the happy piano notes of “Te Amo” as some whacky detour from the horrible conversation he is having with himself. Talk about misdirection: “you’re always down.” In a way, “Te Amo” is much like the angriest of Bob Dylan songs, a “Positively Fourth Street” or “Rolling Stone,” in how much of a contradiction it is. Like those songs, it’s practically glowing, the noises moving in a dreamy, euphoric sequence but the lyrics out of step, their delivery chilling and hell, even the distracting album artwork putting the lights out.

The fact that Cox can make a song like this is a testament to how intriguing his career is. Deerhunter could lend themselves Strokes comparisons and little else if it weren’t for the way Cox writes music as conflict. It’s hard to remember Halcyon Digest, a year on, in the way I thought of it then; thinking it was a ‘celebration’ sums up how easy it is to forget the depth in any of Cox’s Deerhunter songs, no matter how comfortable they feel as pop songs. “Coronado” was another one that glowed, but behind the slick sax solos there was a confused man of so many questions and so few answers. That’s the kind of thing that draws you in to the “catchy” Microcastle and Halcyon Digest- the little conflicts- and so how can we not be drawn into the dark spaces in Parallax?

And I certainly am drawn to Parallax. I find it impossible to stop coming back to “Te Amo” and its bittersweet flips of the coin, but at the same time I’m completely intrigued by how impossible Cox makes it to grasp at his intentions on “Modern Aquatic Nightsongs.” The difference, though, is split: “Te Amo” is a working pop song, but I’m not sure Cox wants that so much this time around. Logos had a melodic bent and exciting features that made every adoring indie fan giddy (Panda Bear, say no more), but Parallax is made in some sort of endless vacuum of nothing but Cox.

As a result, it might feel more like a proper album, and maybe even the “comfortable” album we’ve been waiting for Cox to make. But this is only an album in how impossible it is to appreciate out of its context. No “Angel is Broken,” no point in the comedown that follows it in “Terra Incognita.” As for the comfort Cox may have finally found in Parallax, he only finds it in the obscure, the impossible to describe, and the ever-moving. Parallax never stays in one place for too long, regardless of how pretty it remains throughout its entire run. There is no revealing the world behind “Praying Man” or “Parallax” in the same way “Coronado” revealed more than simply a pop genius. Instead, Parallax comes with its own set of intentions, and few of them feel for us.

And for that reason, that lack of inclusion, there’s no rating I can find to do Parallax justice. It feels like a wholly unique masterpiece in ways, perhaps because it is simply impossible to shut off- there’s no turning away from this aching, mysterious music, and even the most basic tracks feel justified by the ominous things happening around the corners. But coming off the open Halcyon Digest, Bradford Cox has turned sharply on his heels for a different type of honesty. And by no means think that because Cox obscures himself he must be disingenuous. That’s never been his problem. But Parallax, unrealised masterpiece or not, sounds like the man in his bedroom with a thousand songs to leave unexplained.

Atlas Sound – “Te Amo”

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By Robin Smith, November 1, 2011 10:00 am

Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto

Parlophone 2011

Rating: 8/10

Mylo Xyloto is perfectly designed to blow up in your face. Eleven proper songs, all named after the biggest and the best, like landmarks tumbling side by side: holy lands, flames, princesses, waterfalls and uh, Charlie Brown? Each song hits some sort of ridiculous climactic hotspot that seemed impossible the second before it happened. Just listen to “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall” the moment the drums kick in for real. It seems completely implausible that a song that started so big could become any bigger. It sounds like the exact Coldplay song that you want to get made over and over again, and for Mylo Xyloto, it finally gets made. It’s Coldplay at heart. Nothing strung together by flimsy concepts; no X axis and no Y axis, no violent Spanish conquests. It’s just huge.

In that sense, the record feels like “Fix You” eleven times, exploding from all sides. There’s something about that song that can easily hit at the gut, and it’s more about when that moment comes in than how, the organ-like sounds shuffling off stage for a climax made glorious by Will Champion’s drum-kit. On Mylo Xyloto, however, Coldplay don’t dedicate much time wondering when their songs will hit their glorious peaks, for this time they appear confidently boisterous, at large when they go in and larger when the drumbeat kicks. It’s a powerful thing, hearing a band this way, so it’s a moment such as “U.F.O.” that kills the record’s infinite momentum, putting a band that seems energized at all corners into a state of contemplation too reserved for the bright colours they’re splashing their graffiti with. Mylo Xyloto was not a record made by a subdued band, and so when this acoustic number creeps in- along with the restrictively controlled beats of “Up in Flames”- it feels like too much thought and not enough waterfall.

To hell with the contemplation; what makes this record so good is the complete abandonment of making Coldplay a leftfield band. Viva La Vida might have had us begging them to take us back- our very own Adam Downer complimented Coldplay for their ‘balls’, and later their guts- but Mylo Xyloto completely refuses the listener a moment alone with their brain in that way. There’s no time to be surprised by any experimental balls when “Hurts Like Heaven” strikes full force, no time to ponder where Eno weighs in on this one. Interludes aside, every song is designed to bash you over the head rather than to let you use it. Mylo Xyloto is a big, broad album, with songs founded on themes no less than the greatest conceivable. And who doesn’t fall for that Coldplay? I mean, it hurts like heaven? It’s us against the world? This is a Coldplay in their very own world. It’s huge and relentless, and they’re wrapped up in it.

It makes perfect sense, too, that they’re so wrapped up in it. Chris Martin can sing that every teardrop is a waterfall on any track he likes, and so when those lyrics come on “Paradise” for the first time, it doesn’t feel one bit phony. If anything, the lyrics flow; just as Arcade Fire could engross every song on The Suburbs in its theme- the same words for the same problems- Martin’s newest record (and first since his favourite band’s third) is a successfully didactic and direct body of work. The lyrical themes that circulate like a broken record on Mylo Xyloto may be the first poetic success of Martin’s; on any other Coldplay record, it might be hard to take a line like “you use your heart like a weapon / and it hurts like heaven” into the gut, but Mylo Xyloto isn’t trying to get under the surface. It’s just searching for the biggest reaction and the most fantastic feeling. Everything Martin says here, whether or not he says it over and over again, is justified by how every song on Mylo Xyloto pushes the same buttons. Every song aims to make a waterfall of a teardrop, so why can’t he say it over and over again?

It’s kind of great how at ease I find myself with a Coldplay that can be this repetitive and use the same trick a hundred times over. To hear Rihanna’s absolutely stunning performance on “Princess of China” isn’t a surprise because it simply bolsters the style Coldplay are playing with on this record. Her spot amplifies a song to heights it wasn’t already at, and that’s what Mylo Xyloto seeks in every move it makes forward. This is a Coldplay that wants to build and build to a point like “Fix You” over and over again, a Chris Martin who only cites influence in ideas as ambitious as graffiti and The Wire. The results don’t have to be the same as those things, and so it’s hard to get caught up in the trippy, colourful artwork that the record tries to reflect. Instead, we just bask in “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall,” a song splitting at the sides, huge from start to finish. “Turn the music up!” is Chris Martin’s command on Mylo Xyloto, and it’s probably the only lyric he’ll ever get us nodding to.

Coldplay – “Charlie Brown”

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By Robin Smith, September 13, 2011 10:00 am

St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

4AD 2011

Rating: 9/10

Since Annie Clark is such a one for contradictions, how about this one? Strange Mercy is, at the same time, her most shocking and most unsurprising record. I mean, it’s like she put the thing through a blender, but of course it’s like she put it through a blender. Who are we talking about? This is St. Vincent’s career, which has thus far has developed into a glowing success without daring adhere to the normal structure of indie pop. It’s much more sinister than that- Actor, as she put it herself, was influenced by fairy tales, but only in the wholly ***ed-up, completely backwards Hans Christian Andersen way that fairy tales get told. That’s what made “Black Rainbow” sound as if she was travelling the Yellow Brick Road backwards, arriving at the hurricane for her final scene. So yes, it’s shocking to hear her send the structure of a song a little awol, to watch as she twists a purdy scene into a terrifying one (“What Me Worry,” my goodness), but don’t tell me you aren’t waiting for Strange Mercy to hit that sludgy, disastrous moment.

I guess St. Vincent likes the little disasters as much as we do. I found myself doing a fair amount of eye-rolling the first time I played Strange Mercy, because you’re not waiting for long. In fact, Strange Mercy self-destructs within seconds; “Chloe In the Afternoon” is deliberately off-centre, its swampy guitar work giving more texture than melody (that’s a guitar?!) and Clark flat-out refusing to resolve her voice with the song’s rhythm, putting her words a literal second or two early, or maybe late. It’s hard to tell when the song ends sounding so completely whole. You can be just as well astonished by the same trick played on “Northern Lights,” where she pulls back the song, ready to thrust into full gear, for a kind of non-solo in which her guitar simply circulates a disgusting noise for a little while before releasing the song for a climax played straight. It’s one of those on-paper things, really: these little noises should be nothing more than plain ugly diversions from otherwise irresistible pop songs, but thrown into the middle of a song as simple as “Northern Lights,” doesn’t that sludgy patch sound sort of assured? It’s like a signature, that squiggly, atonal moment of nothing, whether it stands out as surreally as it does here, or whether it marks the heavy chorus of “Cheerleader.”

Even if Strange Mercy is like a blender with its top blown off, it’s undeniable how convincing St. Vincent has become. Actor was produced to be almost suffocating, and as a result had songs that felt compressed in sound and time. Her third record feels like an attempt to remould Actor with all the space in the world. It continues to merge together two atmospheres, one eerie and the other distinctly vintage, and as a result songs like “Surgeon” ooze with the confidence of a musician who knows her own game. The intro of “Surgeon” echoes Nancy Sinatra’s ‘60s Bond tune, “You Only Live Twice,” but is only there long enough for the song to become too warped for this pleasant nostalgia (“best find a surgeon / come cut me open”). It’s a testament to Clark’s songwriting skills how we are forced to note both of these atmospheres colliding.

For a record that’s so deliberately messy, it’s nice to note that Strange Mercy says that nothing’s so cut up it can’t be fixed. “Strange Mercy,” the record’s title track, is as scattered as the record itself, the drum beat a little out of the way, but it feels like one of the most sincere pieces of music in St. Vincent’s short career. It’s devoid of any theatrics and awarded more space than she has given to any other song, only indulging a climax for seconds where a lesser musician would need minutes. The song reaches, of course, the moment it has to reach- it has to be contradictory, as unsettling as it is beautiful- but I like to think there’s no line in Clark’s career that can be as brilliantly sweet as this one. “If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up / I don’t know what.” Not that it even ends up meaning anything, but it acts as a summation of what Strange Mercy is concerned with- both the shocking and the comforting, always at the same time, always nothing less than beautiful, even if things have to get a little ugly.

St. Vincent – “Cheerleader”

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By Robin Smith, August 10, 2011 10:00 am

The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient

Secretly Canadian 2011

Rating: 9/10

I can call Slave Ambient rain music and not feel bad about it. Unlike the kind of music you’d usually tag for the rain, the sad stuff, it is a completely drenched record, taking its worn lyrics and pouring down on them. The War on Drugs has, in this sense, always been an intriguing band, able to do more than simply complement their lyrics with music. As musicians, they know the themes they sing inside-out, ready to take the Americana influences they have and invert them with all things “shoegaze.” They add in harmonica for good measure, but be it one genre or the other, The War on Drugs, and Slave Ambient in particular, is the work of a band already perfectly in control of itself, and so early in their career. They know how their music sounds, and I guess it sounds like it’s pouring.

Still, beyond that, it’s hard to write about this band. And I guess that’s because there’s no “angle” to write from. In one corner, they have a master-class lyricist, able to reflect with the pen as jumpily and worryingly as “wondering where my friends are going / and wondering why they didn’t take me” and then throw the line away. Granduciel’s lyrics always carry an indescribable kind of tone which can only really be called self-kicking, but even if this kind of lyric seems simple, no one else could write it, or sing it, in the way he does. He waves away the deprecating lyrics of “Brothers” so easily, and the music around it- the album’s second corner- refuses to play in any higher ground. The music on Slave Ambient moulds songs to feel perfectly for an atmosphere that plays on a hundred little details at once. That’s why there are only eight actual songs on this album, because the guys in the War on Drugs are so obsessed with the details and so ready to leave them their space.

I could talk about both the lyrics and music separately, of course, because they’re both such brilliant aspects for one band to have, but what would be the use in that? There’s no moment in Slave Ambient better than the opener “Best Night” to prove the point that without one the other wouldn’t exist: without the music tracing the words around it, the guitar notes copying Granduciel’s singing, the distortion drenching every moment, there would be nothing that makes the War on Drugs as brilliant as they are. You listen to every moment of Slave Ambient, the part where he sings “wondering where my friends are going” and every noise, big and small, that deals with the thought.

As a result, Slave Ambient is an album you play loud. The War on Drugs have, until now, been a very meandering band, with songs such as “A Pile of Trees” moving through eight minutes of what felt like improvisation, or else “Arms Like Boulders” mouthing off to cover a half-constructed song. Here, there’s a pattern set. And it’s a pattern so strong that every tiny moment counts: a song such as “My Love Is Calling Your Name” is impossible to appreciate quiet because of the layers the War on Drugs now lace it with, nearly all of them created with an assortment of clashing guitar noises. It is impossible to be distracted from the music by Granduciel’s lyrical mumblings either, so where the ambiance would take the centre-stage before this album, or, if not the ambiance, the lyrics, Slave Ambient moves the song with the pattern. As a result, “My Love Is Calling Your Name” feels connected with a song twenty minutes away from it. The flow is that good; sometimes I forget if I’m listening to “The Animator” or its actual song counterpart, “Come To the City.” And then things get going. Granduciel’s lyrics start thrusting the song forward. The noises twist the Americana around and around.

It’s so strange to think of this record as the band’s second. Slave Ambient is the work of a confident band and an articulate lyricist, both who always seemed so on their first record but never really cared. Here, they seem to know where everything goes, and it’s as if they always did but never really felt the need for things to fit. Now they’re ready to put it all together. The melodies on Slave Ambient know when it’s their turn. So does the noise. Granduciel knows where to kick himself. Slave Ambient is the work of a band making us listen for every piece of them. And it drizzled a little while I wrote this. So I played it loud. And I heard everything.

The War on Drugs – “Best Night”

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By Robin Smith, June 27, 2011 11:00 am

Alvarius B. – Baroque Primitiva

Abduction Records 2011

Rating: 7/10

Last year, the Sun City Girls name was respectfully put to bed by the Bishop brothers by the way of Funeral Mariachi, a record of material pulled from an archive so big that it reaches beyond whatever planet it might turn out the trio were channelling. It felt fitting that this material was taken from work done with member Charles Goscher before his early passing, but it serves as a reminder of this trio as the unstoppable force of the avant-garde, not only when they existed- Funeral Mariachi itself weird as ever, a crossover record of film tributes, world guitar music and language games- but also beyond. The experimental treasures to be found in the ridiculous amount of their recordings will live on, embodied in that final record, and while bands such as King Crimson may live in their different setups forever, Sun City Girls will remain the Bishops and their friend Goscher, immortal in their ability to fuck with the minds of those who let them and immortal for the depths of exploration they did in their thirty odd years. It was weird, cultish and mystical- at times, it was disgusting poetry, at others it was world music played as if by aliens. Most of the time it was a lot of fun and all of the time it was really freaky. And boy was it endless.

But while Sun City Girls were either musically demented or poetically disturbing on any given day, Baroque Primitiva, the second record of Alan Bishop’s Alvarius B., takes the alien nature out of the world-music tribute and strips down the lyric to no more than the noises you can make with your tongue. So “Naturally Absolute” feels a lot less avant-garde while still being layered beyond belief and constructed of complex guitar patterns that would’ve messed with your head if they were on, oh, say, 330, 003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda. Here, they’re welcoming, and the track at least sounds stripped to its core, leaving it meditative and listenable as an emotional piece for the less weird moments in life. The dah-dums might take you by surprise, which is not to say that Sun City Girls weren’t a laugh riot in their time- they mucked around with the avant-garde music they would later become heralded for, and as a result there wasn’t a second where Torch of the Mystics was gloomy- but the Alvarius B. project is the closest a member of the band has come to opening a dialogue with its listener. Bishop’s still fucking around, but as with “Naturally Absolute,” the music is softer, more reflective, and at the end of the day, nothing more than Alan Bishop playing chords on an acoustic guitar.

That, of course, fails to tell the whole story of Baroque Primitiva, which explores a whole lot of world music avenues. “Humor Police” is quickly paced psychedelic folk, and opening cover “Dinner Party” is a short exhibition of Spanish music. Both play in that slightly warped Sun City Girls way; the guitars are bent a little to the side in “Humor Police” and Bishop’s voice warbles unapologetically, but both still shed a little more joy than is to be expected. And where Baroque Primitiva really lets its guard down is on “God Only Be Without You,” a Beach Boys cover that finally gives indie fans the chance to apply the phrase “Beach Boys harmonies” to a band that wrote an album called Horse Cock Phepner. It is as it should be, warped beyond belief and with dissonance covering the little acoustic act of tribute below it. But regardless of the horns that eventually start blaring over Brian Wilson’s love song, it ends Baroque Primitiva as sweet and silly even when it puts up its avant-garde disguise. And what about that James Bond cover? This Sun City Girl is having a lot of fun writing three minute acoustic songs and reinterpreting the classics into a world setting, and while it’s coming across a lot more accessible to its audience here, it’s heartening that Sun City Girls remain forever a force, immortal beyond their name. And it’s nice that they give us a smile now and then.

Alvarius B. – “The Dinner Party”

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By Robin Smith, June 14, 2011 12:00 pm

Okkervil River – I Am Very Far

Jagjaguwar 2011

Rating: 8/10

It’s not healthy listening to Okkervil River. We can heap all the praise we want on them for their lyrical depth, we can crown Will Sheff as the wordsmith and world-weary analyst he most certainly is, but at the end of the day you’re listening to some fucked up stuff. A track like “Westfall,” featured on what is essentially a break-up album from a man of literature, cuts through the treacle of silly words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and instead just says “when I killed her / it was so easy that I wanted to kill her again,” with a horrible shrug to its audience. And it’s not that he always writes tracks with the same shrug, nor the same psychotic theme, but they always come with the same damaging, scary obsession. The suicide of Tim Hardin, chronicled in the dark spaces of Black Sheep Boy, is a terrifying look at Sheff reflecting how his hero has messed him up, and that the record starts with a cover of Hardin’s famous folk loner-anthem is enough to take the myth and make it real, the album concluded with a song just as bottomless as painful in “A Glow,” but coming from Sheff himself. That’s why it’s bizarre to call these records ‘concept albums’ when Sheff is deconstructing his themes so horribly, as if they weren’t so much concepts as Sheff’s reality. It’s the same with The Stage Namesand The Stand-Ins, supposed twin albums that don’t pretend to be from our world but become just as human when Sheff demystifies all the actors, all the porn-stars and pop rockers in the world and kicks them off their pedestal. But what’s scariest about Black Sheep Boy, about The Stand-Ins and so on, is that Sheff dives at these tragic themes and legends like he needs them- “I need a myth,” indeed. Tim Hardin and all the rock stars on rockaway beach are myths made real. Hasn’t he always needed one?

But I Am Very Far is more our myth than his. Sheff stated upon the records announcement that he was apprehensive to tell us what those four words meant for fear of taking what was mysterious out of his record. He told us that he wasn’t making music to please but rather taking it down any route that best interested him. And that explains a lot of why the avenues of I Am Very Far are so perplexing; the record isn’t the kind of thing you crack, and not just at first; I’ve spent a good month trying to work out what I make of these eleven songs, and even with a hundred listens there’s little reveal. It feels harder than ever to tell what Sheff is thinking, more so than on his most fucked up travels: “Westfall” was a disturbing track, but it was distinctly obvious what Sheff was saying because it was storytelling. Here, however, Sheff’s music feels a hundred times veiled, comprised of abstract non-stories told by a hundred characters making not one moment of sense. That’s probably why “Piratess” takes an old fan-favourite, “Murderess,” and recreates it as some sexy disco song, taking whatever Big Star folk vibe it had and simply murdering it. “Piratess” now twinkles with electric guitar riffs, moves with the pulse of a bass guitar, and plays with a completely different Sheff at its centre, no longer wailing like a man lost at his pirate-laden sea. It no longer feels like a story at all, focused on its weirder groove, with its obsession to be what Sheff called the “sexiest Okkervil River song ever.” There are hand-claps. Hand-claps!

This is very much the way of I Am Very Far. It packs an astonishing amount of things unheard of in an Okkervil River album. “We Need a Myth” feels lyrically impossible to grasp at, Sheff fending off listeners with his big-band to the left and right, forty nylon string guitars in as many hands. But it’s kind of glorious watching the rise and fall of these theatrics. No track in Okkervil River’s discography has ever quite been captured like any of the eleven here, none go off the deep end as much as “We Need a Myth” does in every second of its existence, dressed up as it may be. It bears down on us in a way that this band never used to do as a folk or rock outfit, but you’ve never heard Sheff care as much as he does here. “Hanging Like a Hit” starts clashing together with a similar indescribable need for something that simply becomes documented by noise. Stories that Sheff just started throwing filing cabinets across the room as he recorded don’t feel unfounded at all: it’s all explosions on I Am Very Far. They’re what translate the record named on an expression we don’t understand. It’s the huge, amplified moments in “Wake and Be Fine,” and the chaotic, Arcade Fire-big “White Shadow Waltz” that makes I Am Very Far. It’s the last fifty seconds of “Lay of the Last Survivor” that is everything about this record, with Sheff singing every word like it’s escaping from his gut. I Am Very Far is huge, but not because it disguises itself like “Piratess” might have you think. It feels like a complete emotional release, and even if we understand zero of it, Sheff’s not hiding.

In fact, for those of us waiting for Sheff’s moment as himself rather than the archivist, as someone who just writes the typically personal singer-songwriter album, we surely have it in I Am Very Far. This is the record where Will Sheff stops talking about all of the rock stars he wanted to talk about before, regardless of the odd cryptic lyric, and talks in the first person. And to get that, you need this big-band Okkervil River- it’s not about forgetting how emblazed everything sounds or forgetting the big-band theatrics booming on the twenty-billionth stanza of “We Need a Myth.” These things all feel crucial to how Sheff would write his manic version of For Emma, Forever Ago. He works backwards, brings in ten times the number he needs and creates a record that pummels us to pieces on every note. With more people than ever factoring into his work, Sheff creates the record that feels the most wholly his own.

On “Show Yourself,” a track that supposedly meandered for eight minutes in its first incarnation, Sheff uses all the song’s twists and turns to anchor himself at the centre, eventually shedding the songs unfathomably huge build to fall into the record’s most revealing (and most poetic) moment: “There is no one there to help you there is no one there to hold you / let it go. I’ve felt enough, can’t really feel it anymore.” At this point it feels obvious what I Am Very Far is about: it lets go of the smoky barrooms other people got drunk in and Sheff wrote about and creates something that looks inward. Regardless of who it is we’re looking inward at, Sheff has taken away what was grounded in his older personal songs such as “Calling and Not Calling My Ex” and instead created something impenetrable and abstract. That, I feel, is what Sheff was hitting at when he said he was making music he was interested in without a care for accessibility and understanding in the world. I Am Very Far is a record by a folk musician but without folk. It’s by a storyteller telling no stories. And yet it stands to be the material most reflective of its artist, an album that in years will surely be seen as his most personal and most misunderstood, because what is there to understand in this record? I Am Very Far is Okkervil River’s most mysterious moment, just as fucked up as Black Sheep Boy or The Stage Names but not chasing after another name. I Am Very Far indeed, whatever that means.

Okkervil River – “Piratess”

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By Robin Smith, June 2, 2011 11:00 am

Chad VanGaalen – Diaper Island

Sub Pop 2011

Rating: 8/10

Chad VanGaalen comes to us with an air of mystery. His hand in producing Women’s Public Strain helped disguise a record of conflict we only got revealed when the lyrics jumped out of line, and in his career as a composer his music has been no easier to take in. “Willow Tree,” a track that dealt with dark metaphors of death and the afterlife, was played jubilantly on banjo and sung halfway between melancholy and joy: “And when I die / I’ll hang my head beside the willow tree.” It remains perhaps his most beautiful achievement in song writing, but it makes an example of a lot of the quirks found in VanGaalen: he haunts us, dazzles us, jokes with us, and at the end of the day can’t sacrifice any of those things for the other. Hence “Shave My Pussy,” right? It sounds like a joke, but if that track didn’t haunt and dazzle in equal measure, it wouldn’t be the closer to Diaper Island.

But while VanGaalen has always been brilliantly diverse like that, able to take “Willow Tree” and make it horrifically bittersweet, what is so confrontational about Diaper Island (aside from that it’s called Diaper Island) is his ability to compress his diversity into this one little style. By creating an album that revolves around nothing more than coarse, often tuneless guitar work and those hopeless lyrics, VanGaalen has every song carry the weight of “Heavy Stones” or “Sara,” or even the whacky “Can You Believe it!?” Creating such a tightly-knit record is a simple style a myriad of singer-songwriters have lived by, and in that sense Diaper Island feels just as uncompromising, if in a different way, as the equally miserable Blood on the Tracks.

There’s a lot to be said of the ugliness that plays through Diaper Island, a record that VanGaalen seems to have designed around angularity. Whereas Infiniheart and Soft Airplane sprawled through folk touchstones and warped electronic sounds at the same time, his fourth record feels constantly tied to its gritty atmosphere, able to rock out on “Freedom for a Policeman” with the same tone of bitterness that comes on a track as bare and miserable as “Heavy Stones.” And a little more on “Heavy Stones,” a track that sounds like both a surf-rock b-side for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and a tensely obscured Public Strain number: it takes the angular nature of Diaper Island and says something that doesn’t even sound sweet in a tragic singer-songwriter way. The lyrics, instead, are shapeless: “lately, you’ve been some other thing.” Strange, then, that lines this vague could contribute to the least mysterious Chad VanGaalen record yet, a record able to look directly to its audience in spite of its burial in guitar noise and lo-fi production.

“Shave My Pussy” stands to be misunderstood as both an outrageous suggestion and a dumb joke, but what it carries with it is the same weight “Heavy Stones” did earlier on: “maybe if I shave my pussy then you’ll love me, baby will you love me? / I’m really feeling ugly.” The line is, against all odds, more heart-breaking than hilarious. It’s another declaration like the one on “Sara” to not be left behind, or the lament that he’s been waiting forever on “Wandering Spirits.” Diaper Island isn’t about taking these moments and pointing at them for how bizarre they are, hence why VanGaalen sings the lines of “Shave My Pussy” so straight-faced, and for that reason his fourth record isn’t ugly itself. It certainly thinks about ugliness and waits on it with all the honesty with which VanGaalen can deliver lines about his hypothetical pussy, but the music VanGaalen makes isn’t as ugly as it feels it is, is only vague if vagueness can touch you, and is only ghostly if we’re all having the same warped hallucinations our songwriter is. Diaper Island is a very open wound, and those who listen won’t have to seek it out.

Chad VanGaalen – “Sara”