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The lovely Cate Le Bon is an English/Welsh singer-songwriter whose been around since 2008, most notably in support of Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, but it’s her sophomore record Cyrk that is just starting to get some attention stateside. It came out January 17 and is a wispy bit of Nico-influenced dark pop with a tinge of St. Vincent. RIYL: indie pop, accents.
Cate Le Bon – “Puts Me To Work”
One of my favorite guitarists, J Mascis from alternative legends Dinosaur Jr. just released a new 7″ (“Circle”) with this lovely acoustic number as the b-side. Whether he’s ripping through electric solos or laying down this windswept acoustic motif on a simply fantastic Americana number, there’s few who can play the instrument better than Mascis. Also check out his Several Shades of Why LP that dropped earlier this year.
J Mascis – “I’ve Been Thinking”
Slow week – aside from the Black Keys and the Roots, the rest of 2011 is all Christmas albums and best-of lists. So here’s another one of my favorite songs from 2011, the best off St. Vincent’s excellent Strange Mercy (although I’m sure Robin Smith would pick a different tune from that album). “Cruel” is deliciously weird like the best Annie Clark songs, but its heart is that wonderful bridge and follow-up chorus and the way Clark’s beautiful vocals and the playful guitar motif work in concert. Great stuff.
Vancouver-based folk artist Dan Mangan has toiled in relative obscurity 2003, but it wasn’t until 2009′s Nice, Nice, Very Nice that he started to garner some serious attention, including a spot on the shortlist for the Polaris Music Prize. It’s good to see, then, that third album Oh Fortune (released this past September) takes everything Mangan’s always done well – acoustic guitar-based melodies, intimate lyrics, velvety hooks – and expanded on the possibilities with a full array of studio sounds. Opening track “About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All” is the perfect example, practically shining as it does with stately strings, woodwinds and vibrant horns. If you like singer-songwriters, Mangan is an artist you should hear immediately.
Dan Mangan – “About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All”
The best part about being a Ryan Adams fan is that there’s really something for everyone. Do you like populist ‘70s-styled rock ‘n roll, like 2001’s Gold, or do you prefer the tears-in-your-beer country reminiscent of Haggard and Emmylou Harris, in which case Jacksonville City Nights is one of the best you’ll ever hear? Or maybe you like depressing alt-rock akin to Elliott Smith (Love Is Hell), with a side dish of adult contemporary pop rock (Easy Tiger)? It’s easy to be frustrated with Ryan Adams, because he’s just as often to drop a dud as he is to release a brilliant pastiche of past styles. Then again, it’s easy to love him, because if you don’t like his newest release you can just wait a few months to hear another one. That’s why Ashes & Fire could be one of the most “anticipated” Adams albums in years, simply because it’s his first new material since 2007’s Easy Tiger, not counting last year’s requisite demos collection and the “sci-fi metal” concept of Orion that I’d sooner forget existed. The words that attach themselves to Ashes & Fire, consequently, are just those I would never have connected with Adams: tired, restrained, meditative . . . fucking at ease.
If there’s a touchstone for Ashes & Fire in Adams’ discography, it’s in the album that put Adams on the map, at least critically: Heartbreaker, specifically the acoustic parts of that superb record. Gone is that sparkling electric guitar tone that Adams’ has marked every record with since Rock N Roll, gone is the excellent Cardinals backing band, and gone is Adams’ anguished yelp. The songs here center on Adams’ acoustic technique and liberal use of keyboards, exploring the space between them while Adams sings about true love and miserable love. In that respect, nothing’s changed; the best Adams songs are those that reflect on messy breakups and the darker places he’s traveled, like the gorgeous tale of addiction “Lucky Now” and opener “Dirty Rain,” where Adams’ tragic nostalgia is in fine form. Elsewhere, Adams’ is tripped up by occasionally overwhelming amounts of sap (“Come Home”) or unbecoming schmaltz (“I Love You But I Don’t Know What To Say,” a song one-upped only by its own title in terms of clichés).
For an album heavily predicated on Adams’ historically hit-or-miss songwriting, Ashes & Fire is surprisingly steady. Whether it’s the Meniere’s disease that very well could have ended his career or his recent marriage (to Mandy Moore! If I had a celebrity marriage pool in 2001 that would have been dead last), Adams has a noticeably better appreciation for the intricacies of songwriting. Adams’ other largely acoustic effort, 2005’s 29, suffered from a general sense of malaise and engendered boredom rather than interest. Ashes & Fire, however, is nothing really new in the Ryan Adams catalog, but the sequencing and occasional creative flairs make all the difference. Here, Adams fleshes things out with a tentative hand – the guitar solo that closes out “Do I Wait,” the campfire drumming coupled with moody strings on “Rocks” – and is the better for it. “Chains of Love” could very well have been a full-fledged rocker, but Adams understands that more is not always necessary, and is left with one of the finest melodies on the record. Adams has always been a great songwriter at heart, but he’s always preferred to shoot himself in the foot rather than focus his energies in one place. Ashes & Fire is not his best record. It’s dragged down near the end by a sameness that is hard to avoid in an album composed strictly of acoustic, mid tempo alt-country tunes, and his lyrics can be unfortunately maudlin. Yet, two decades and thirteen albums into his career, it shows a newfound sort of maturity that proves that Adams is not necessarily the living example of “if you fling enough shit onto a wall, some will stick.” Let’s just hope he doesn’t follow this up with a rock opera.
It’s been a while since Leslie Feist was last on the scene with 2007′s out-of-left-field hit The Reminder, and the familiar tack with all the press leading up to third record Metals is that, no, Feist doesn’t want to soundtrack the new iPod commercial or become a fixture on soccer-mom playlists. Metals is predictably challenging (well, as challenging as a Feist record can get), but one listen to opener “The Bad In Each Other” proves the songwriting juices that made everyone listen to her in the first place are still all there. And her studio ambition is arguably better than ever.
Feist – “The Bad In Each Other”
Covers can be amazing when they’re done right, but doing a cover right is can almost be as difficult as writing a proper original. Mr. Little Jeans (aka Norwegian-born songwriter Monica Birkenes) dropped this cover of the titular song from Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs (2010) a few months back, and it is sweet and sexy and everything a cover should be. Birkenes sounds a bit like Feist, and the cover transforms the ivory-pounding indie rock of the original into a haunting electronic fog with some sinister bass. It’s a travesty it took me this long to hear it – get on it.
Mr. Little Jeans – “The Suburbs”
It would have been so easy for Wilco to just fade away. No one would have begrudged them any; Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still engenders enough goodwill in the music community ten years after its release that if Jeff Tweedy decided to spend the rest of his years writing paeans to fatherhood and singing sweet, insubstantial love songs with Feist, everyone would simply nod their heads and go along with it. But what Wilco has always done best is growth, from Being There’s epic expansion of classic Americana to the unapologetic power pop of Summerteeth to A Ghost Is Born’s startling abrasive rock classicism. Through it all the constant was Tweedy, suffering through a recurring painkiller medication and the woes of growing old, his biting lyricism continually well tempered with fine melodies culled from the best folk tradition, from Cash to Young to Bragg. That’s why it was so weird to see the band settle into such a droll tedium starting with 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, like the band had decided writing about midlife crises wasn’t enough and that maybe they should start living one as well. Wilco (The Album) showed that all the cries of putting this aging band out to pasture were a bit premature, but even that album was more a celebration of past successes, a victory lap of the things Wilco did best, like their updated “Via Chicago” rendition in “Bull Black Nova.” It was all well and good, but for a band as continually predicated on evolution as Wilco, it now feels depressingly stagnant.
As a first single, “I Might” was disturbingly coy; for all the lyrics about parental discord and setting children on fire, it was fairly rote late-period Wilco. That is to say, boring and not particularly memorable. In the context of The Whole Love, however, it’s one hell of a red herring. It’s the most conventional song on here, an old-fashioned rock ‘n roll respite cleverly placed after the delightfully unconventional opener “Art of Almost.” That is the song that sets out the mission statement of The Whole Love – an unassumingly complicated drumbeat propelling a foggy atmosphere of discordant electronics and haunting strings, Tweedy himself practically a ghost in the background, all the elements swirling around each other without falling apart. It’s a harkening back to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot territory, at least until Nels Cline rips in with a guitar solo that stretches the song to nearly seven and a half minutes and serves notice that this is not the same Wilco that made that seminal 2001 release. It’s the biggest mark Cline has made since joining the band, and the only tragedy is it’s taken them three albums to finally realize this incarnation of Wilco’s potential.
It’s hard to pinpoint just what The Whole Love does best. There’s hints of Summerteeth-esque pop bliss on crunchy guitar numbers like “Dawned On Me,” where Tweedy’s charmingly imperfect voice gives the chorus all the pizazz it needs. The countrified ballad “Open Mind” finds Tweedy at his most confessional, the campfire vibe recalling Uncle Tupelo and the lyrics Tweedy’s most unashamedly direct. “Capitol City” is a bit more ill advised, a disposable little vaudeville exercise that sounds like a Beatles outtake circa Sgt. Pepper’s, but what still captivates is just how damn well crafted it is. Mikael Jorgensen’s jaunty keyboard, Cline’s lilting pedal steel, Glenn Kotche’s waste-not/want-not drumming (the man is brilliant in giving even the wispiest rhythm a very real substance and gravity): it’s all greater than the sum of its parts. That is perhaps the enduring lesson of The Whole Love; for all of Tweedy’s evocative songwriting and pained, autobiographical stories, Wilco is a band, first and foremost. More so than perhaps any other album in Wilco’s catalog, The Whole Love succeeds because the band isn’t evolving exponentially or diving headfirst into musical waters unknown. For all its weirdness, “Art of Almost” isn’t exactly indicative of what’s to come, per se. It’s how the band members interact on “Art of Almost” and “Capitol City” and the deceptively simple title track that makes The Whole Love such an improvement over lackluster previous outings. There’s so much going on here that even the most straightforward of tracks has a subversive flair about them that an initial listen might not catch. The buzz saw lower-end distortion in the otherwise sunny “I Might” and the understated bass rhythm from “Rising Red Lung” are just two examples, and the fact that they both involve John Stirratt is no coincidence – he is the unsung hero of The Whole Love. But it’s more than any one man’s contribution, more than Tweedy’s forlorn vocals, more than Cline’s elegant guitar licks, more than Kotche’s economical drumming. It’s Wilco the whole band, a unification of talents so seamless you wonder why every Wilco album doesn’t come out so brilliantly (and so effortlessly) put together.
Perhaps nothing encapsulates what makes Wilco such a special band at this stage of their career than closer “One Sunday Morning (A Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend).” It’s not a song that reinvents the wheel; stylistically it would feel just as home on 1995 debut A.M. as it does here. It picks a destination and it sets out for it, riding the back of an irresistibly simple fingerpicked motif and a syncopated hi-hat. “This is how I’ll tell it / Oh, but it’s long,” Tweedy sings, and he isn’t kidding; at just a hair over twelve minutes, it’s one of the longest in Wilco’s catalog. But it never feels that way, despite the song’s unerring consistency. Embellished by strings and piano, it stays its course and gradually dissipates over a long outro, but the experience is timeless. For twelve minutes Wilco isn’t some institutional rock group, testing the outer boundaries of pop and creating something new and exciting. This is a song in the great American tradition of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, painting a picture of old dust roads and melancholy sunsets, Tweedy bemoaning at the end “bless my mind, I miss being told how to love / what I learned without knowing / how much more I owe than I can give.” It’s a celebration of the art of storytelling, a tradition and a template that Wilco have always been deeply indebted to. That’s what The Whole Love is all about, telling a story and sticking to it, crafting a mix of sound and lyrics that best symbolizes the music that beats under American highways and floats around American campfires. Wilco have had their peaks and valleys, but they have never sounded as confident as they do on The Whole Love. For a band with eight studio albums and coming up on eighteen years running, I can’t think of anything more impressive.
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.
Seems like just a few months ago I was reviewing another Ryan Adams record, but already there’s an announcement for Adams’ 13th (!) studio album, set to be released October 10. It’s called Ashes & Fire, and if this teaser is any indication, it’s a return to what made Adams’ great; the graceful alt country of Cold Roses and the confessional songwriting of Heartbreaker. It’s better than the genre exercises Adams’ has been seemingly tossing off the past few years, anyways. And if it’s a disappointment, I’m sure I won’t have to wait long to give him another chance…
Love me some St. Vincent. The singer-songwriter’s new album Strange Mercy drops on 4AD Records September 13th, and “Surgeon” is the first listen I’ve had of it. It’s pretty much vintage St. Vincent with a tasty little guitar riff that brings the chorus together and a delightfully odd outro. If you were a fan of the underrated Actor and female indie-pop in general you’ll love this.
If there were a simple way to describe brother-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces, it would be something between quirky and dense. 2005’s EP was a collection of singles that they followed with a concept album of their grandmother narrating stories in her life the very same year. I’m Going Away, their relatively uncomplicated last record, was quickly followed by an entire album of each sibling re-recording six songs from I’m Going Away, for an entirely superfluous “Friedbergers covering Friedbergers” experience. The more visible half of the Furnaces’ first solo album even comes with a somewhat gimmicky back story: Eleanor recorded all ten tracks in the summer of 2010, then put the tapes in storage for release this July. Unnecessary? Without a doubt, but Last Summer tends to lean more towards the “quirky” end of the spectrum; a frothy blend of Furnaces-esque pop and straightforward ‘70s singer-songwriter sunshine, the perfect yet disposable album for your next beach trip. Preferably with your Ray Bans and V-neck t-shirts comfortably prepped.
If one were to describe Last Summer as “a Fiery Furnaces album without Matt,” it wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Most of that, however, is purely Eleanor’s fault – the highlight of the Furnaces’ live show with her tongue-twisting lyrics and distinctive accent, her personality dominates Last Summer, as it should. Friedberger has an uncanny way with words, playing around with erratic turns of meter and rhyme to fit in her verbose tales of Brooklyn explorations and Los Angeles meeting spots. It makes me wonder what a Fiery Furnaces rap album would sound like, given Eleanor’s ability to squeeze every last syllable out of a verse. Last Summer is a travel album, and thanks to Friedberger’s talents it’s an evocative one. The trippy “Inn of the Seventh Ray” chronicles a relationship via a Topanga canyon hotspot, while songs like “Scenes from Bensonhurst” and the funky “Roosevelt Island” paint a wide-eyed lover’s view of New York City as seen from the outside. There’s nothing overly glamorous about it, though; Friedberger’s L.A. and New York are placid and hazy backgrounds to her (rather standard) relationship tropes.
It comes together, then, as decidedly more low-key than any Fiery Furnaces album and with an effortless, almost lazy summer vibe. Last Summer is certainly a relaxing album, but to call it boring would be off the mark. From “Inn of the Seventh Ray” and its trippy vocal echoes to the sugary synthpop of “My Mistakes,” Last Summer mimics shades of Fiery Furnaces albums old and new, particularly in the twisted structure and meandering horns of “Owl’s Head Park.” Friedberger has a more polished touchstone in mind for much of the rest of the record, however; the heavy piano chords of “I Won’t Fall Apart on You Tonight” and the revved-up acoustic strums on closer “Early Earthquake” call up Fleetwood Mac and sunny SoCal rock with nary a cocaine tray in sight. The lovely “One-Month Marathon,” meanwhile, is all Friedberger, gentle chords and whispery drums highlighting a nostalgic look back at love. In any other album it would stick out like a sore thumb, the requisite “acoustic ballad,” but with Friedberger it’s just an accepted change of pace, one that readily adds another dimension to Last Summer’s sound without sounding contrived. That never knowing what to expect is just what clearly differentiates Friedberger from your average solo project and Last Summer from your regular Starbucks counter fare. It straddles that difficult line between accessible and adventurous, making for a fine stopgap between Fiery Furnaces records and an excellent summer album regardless of the year.
Eleanor Friedberger – “I Won’t Fall Apart On You Tonight”
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