Music For Infants: My preliminary field notes indicate that babies, by and large, don’t give a shit about music. However, there are two exceptions in Vashti Bunyan and David Tibet, particularly Sleep Has His House. Weirds me the hell out, it does. Not because Sleep is a bad album, or because it is rightfully considered one of Current 93’s finest works and this indicates supernatural prescience, but because it’s about a dead father, sung by his living son.

But it soothes the savage beast, and so I worry not.

This past year was one of preparation and rediscovery. Health and Death and yet another triumphant Boredoms experience. Throbbing Gristle, set in motion during my own infancy, played “Discipline” in an old Masonic Temple and drew a circle around what I imagined my youth to be. Will Oldham demonstrated extreme American exceptionalism while millions inexplicably mourned a dead pedophile; Antony showed an overwhelming capacity for international superstardom, hemmed in only by being a beautiful woman who doesn’t look like one.

Some New Things I Loved:

An Imaginary Country; Tim Hecker is a man of genius, but he didn’t tell us that until this gentle slop fell into our laps.

Black Cascade; Yes, Wolves in the Throne Room is a one-note act of staggering inauthenticity according to those who know better than I, but this album has not left my player all year.

Tarot Sport; Shimmering anthems, so simple. Fuck Buttons as “Chariots of Fire”.

Get Color; I love the 80’s industrial-noise axis far more than I ever cared for post-punk, but Health’s balancing act makes me nostalgic for something I never experienced rather than annoyed by something I never experienced.

The Glass Bead Game; The most soothing recording of the last ten years.

Great Bringer of Night; This three song demo is one of my favorite things this year – whatever blackened doom sludge is, Coffinworm does it just the way I like it.

The Crying Light; Why wasn’t this in every Starbucks in America instead of Elvis Costello or some other useless old fuck?

Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free; Michael Gira is the underground’s best batting coach, grooming a stream of well-oiled players to leave his AA club for other pastures.

Some Other Things:

This year heard a heap of older Boards of Canada, whose oldest demo material has a sheen and guileless charm almost completely lacking from their later work. Same with The Black Dog, whose Radio Scarecrow got very little airplay and certainly didn’t keep any crows away. Explored the backcatalogues of Blackshaw and Fahey, and dang if I still don’t see a common thread beyond “talented guys with guitars”. Om had their moments with a new drummer, but ethno-hippy won the day while losing the war.

This year also heard a ton of metal. Old Death still thrills me. Apparently my bag is whatever you’d call new anthemic ambient black metal-ish stuff. I look forward to new work from Altar of Plagues and Coffinworm; unrelated I hope Mouth of the Architect pulls back from using female (or male, really) vocalists in such pedestrian ways. Back on track, supposedly the new Krallice is very good? Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s new one wasn’t too hot, and can someone please explain to me why Sunn is on everyone’s best list? Dear lord are they ever dull.

Biggest Surprise:

I really enjoy the Burzum album Hvis Lyset Tar Oss. As in “I listened to this album a bunch of times just this week.” Absolutely cheap and shitty, and the last track is a total panflute in the forest weep-fest that brings only tears of laughter. But it’s really quite good, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Filosofem, however, is an overrated load of honkey-tonk.

Endnotes:

A monumental screed against bass cars lands me on WordPress.com’s frontpage, but not one person asks “Is mass murder really the proper response to public incivility?” A reasonable question, if you live alone in the woods and grow your own mycoproteins.

Found this Simon Reynolds piece from way back when very interesting. (Despite being particularly unfamiliar with Sunn)

Followed that to this interesting essay (which I find apt, since most dubstep strikes me as dreadfully dull but I like what I’ve heard of Burial).

Yes, the conversation is a few years old, but the popularity of a few metal bands with the indie music nerd mainstream (and the general angst that produces in “metalheads”) is an ongoing phenomenon.

As an aside, describing metal lyrics as “intelligent” or, as a lesser prize, “more intelligent than pop music” is laughable and really, really beyond the point. You’re talking about a genre that encompasses both Municipal Waste and all those guys in clownpaint who got raped by the Swedish welfare state.

Intelligence is an ancillary issue at best.

The highlight of this evening was a deeply intimate version of “Blood Embrace” for which Matt Sweeney came out to play some guitar and sing a bit. Mr. Oldham paced, gestured, scowled and delivered in full a deeply moving performance, looking like a cross between a street preacher touched by the hand of god and a cro-magnon, what with his prominent brow and less prominent hairline. It almost felt like the audience was intruding upon a very private conversation of betrayal and bafflement, despite the spoken word portion being a performed excerpt from the film Rolling Thunder.

Mr. Oldham was fully possessed by each song, and in turn the audience was captive to his every move. The seven piece backing band – two drummers, keyboardist, violinist, upright bass, guitar and occassional sax – was incredibly fluid. The violinist – Jennifer Butt? – added her very light vocals to songs when required, but largely played a heavily countrified fiddle that fit well at this well-lit crossroads of country and indie rock. The lead drummer in particular (I wasn’t taking notes, obviously, but my wife says it was Jim White) pounded and deftly flailed, and was a joy to watch. Their version of “Easy Does It” hit all the right notes, being the most uplifting and joyful song he’s ever released; “Ain’t You Wealthy, Ain’t You Wise” was appropriately somber and mocking.

And so for two hours they played mostly newer material, a mixture of the sedate and the downright honky-tonk, ending with an endearing improv sing-along featuring the entire band with the members of Lightning Dust, the opening act whose performance we largely missed due to late arrival. There was one brief encore after that, followed by yet another standing ovation.

The Apollo is a great venue, and far smaller than it appears on television; unlike Town Hall it features seats where people over 5′ tall can put their legs forward a bit.

There was the usual contingent of shouted requests, all of which were ignored. All was truly right in the world.

Some of the more interesting current music fads include MBV reconfigurations, usually with several ladies in the mix; the emergence of “hipster metal”; and lo-fi quirk-rock, of which there has been a steady underground that is righteously pissed at the success of johnny-fuzz-lately types like Wavves.

Sour fuzzy grapes aside, the cultural current that interests me most is the pastoral retreat, and not just because pretty girls in peasant dresses lends sensual surreality to any concert experience. It seemed to bubble and rumble in the wake of the beginnings of the Iraq War and no doubt will continue percolate through this whole temporary recession/destruction of everything and everyone period.* One response to having no discernible power is to withdraw from the culture and its trappings, and to look back at what was imagined to have been.

A kind of conservatism, even, which is the closest thing to a slur that you can bust out during these days of hope und change, and so I don’t engage in such madness lightly.

Mr. Keenan from The Wire called it “New Weird America”, and that works well enough for me.

Some of it I like quite a bit – Akron/Family, the clean vocal maturity of Vashti Bunyan, some Joanna Newsom, Six Organs of Admittance and definitely Mr. Oldham if you want to lump him in with this cultural current, even though he predates it by a while. Some of it is deeply unlistenable – the shitty, winking doo-wop of Fleet Foxes, whatever the hell Cocorosie is or the Sufjan Steven/Iron & Wine axis. (I don’t mind a lot of Devendra Banhart’s recordings but his live show was pretty hellish, unless you really like Fleetwood Mac ’70s rock.***) A lot of it is kinda forgettable, particularly the animal-influenced naming thing and overbearingly twee cockups  we could blame on Animal Collective, but the underlying infantillism of that particular trend fits quite well into my overarching narrative.

Hypothesis: it is a kind of retreat, an escapism. Overall, it’s probably both mildly harmful and largely meaningless, a party driven by nostalgia for something that none of the participants actually experienced. I’m not quite going to go as far as these two 2007 savagings in Perfect Sound Forever (part 1 and part 2), as I’m not entirely sure that being white and pretty is nearly as devestating a critique as the author thinks it is, naturally. However, the overall points about the trappings of an alien otherness are worth thinking about, even if charges of capital-O Orientalism are overwrought and seem more bitter than biting.

Michael Gira, someone you could only accuse of having a truly dismal view of love, and perhaps by extension, relationships with women, helped birth so much of this particular cultural current that in a just world he’d have a medal named after him, or at least a decent retirement fund. Failing that, the guy who gave us both Banhart and Akron/Family is also giving us variations on this theme, and one of those variations is Fire on Fire, who used to be a post-punk band and are now a post-instruments you plug in band.

The solo-oriented female lyrical pieces by Colleen Kinsella are the least interesting on this album, something that’s true of the entirety of The Orchard – in a group, they have a very thick voice that rings across the spectrum of loud and soft and high and low. By themselves, it’s a bit too sing-songy, a bit too sardonic and ironic, and it sounds more like a put-on. It’s hard enough to buy the concept of backyard bluegrass without putting a cutesy twist on top. Compare the thick catchy refrain of “Toknight” or the dismal charge of album opener “Sirocco” to the listless swing of “Assanine Race”.

Musically, however, it’s damn near flawless. They are tighter than tight, and regardless of the socio-political implications of climbing backwards over a musical tradition birthed in poverty and racial animus and, well, lots of horrible shit, like most of human history.

As far as I can tell the album is only available through Young God Records’ website, along with a free download of “Hartford Blues”.

* I have actually heard people refer to the world having been broken by bankers, as if the financial universe in which we all participate on several levels is a mysterious, cthonic process directed by a few entities. The illusion of total control is incredibly real and perhaps a necessary human drive.**

** To parenthisize this parentheses, the converse would charge that my insistence on the world being a chaotic process of millions of vectors acting in millions of directions is my own version of the illusion of total non-control.

*** It should be pretty obvious that I couldn’t name a Fleetwood Mac song upon the pain of death, though I’ve no doubt heard them hundreds upon hundreds of times, but that’s the feeling I got from it.

Band recommendations, like deaths, are rumored to come in threes. Obviously that’s just selection bias, like a lot of what we’d call “folk wisdom” or “making shit up”. Oral traditions are a tangled web, and say what the Zerzanites and the back to the land types will, but I’m all for indexed Google searches and WYSIWYG interfaces. And antibiotics.

So I was told by others to seek out works by Asva and Nadja, described as avant-doom lunchlady/persons in the drone-ateria. Shitty wordplay aside, both operate with a relatively similar approach, low and slow into a set pattern of swells. Their palettes are vastly different, with What You Don’t Know Is Frontier showcasing a synthy gleam and some Trey Spruance-related orientalism. Nadja is more traditional, with slow, grinding guitars and fuzziness upon fuzz and the like. And a Swans cover of “Only the Lonely”, which was not half-bad indeed. (The third band recommendation I got was not worth delving into.)

This is off of Trembled, a live compilation. I found this live work far more engaging than the other Nadja CD I picked up during the same run, The Bungled and The Botched. That’s mostly uninteresting, like a lot of drone/doom stuff. It gets a bit wanky around the slow grind of the first live version of “Trembled” but at 17 minutes and change there’s a lot of ground to cover. That the group is two people, famous beardo Aidan Baker and a lady named Leah Buckareff, is pretty impressive, since they sound a bit like an angry and despondent Bardo Pond, minus the massive dopehead aesthetic. The second live version of “Trembled” is more compact and gains quite a bit from being trimmed down. Out of everything, however, the clear favorite is “Stays Demons”, whose plodding, muddy thud is endearingly emotional and almost anthemic. Almost.

All in all, I would definitely see them live. They have about a billion releases, so perhaps picking at random isn’t the best strategy but there aren’t a whole lot of other options. It’s not like the Alien8 press kit* is going to help you much.

This Asva album is four very chunky songs. The opener, “What You Don’t Know In Frontier” (nice minor word change there, guys), is a horror movie soundtrack for Earth fans, and features this awesome squeal that’s about as close as the slowest of the slowcore gets to a Steve Vai-style geeeetar freakout. “Christopher Columbus” is a jangled mess of drums n’ hums that only untangles itself near the end for a 70s slow-and-evil vibe.

I do love the odd slice of guitar tenderness that opens “A Game In Hell, Hard Work In Heaven”, before it turns into a weird little slice of Secret Chiefs-meets-a-falafel-stand-on-top-of-a-Casio-keyboard. That’s right before it goes back to the 70s slow-and-evil-but-a-bit-more-cheerful classic riffage, which itself turns into a crazy, happy post-rocky good time. With 15 minutes to fill, there’s room for a lot of things in here.

As a closer, “A Trap For Judges” is about as plodding and deliberate as 18 or so minutes of the same motif falling apart into a classic synth drone can get. It’s interesting, but obviously very slow.

As an aside, I’ve been told third-hand that many fans who have been in it to win it consider the rising popularity of Sunn O)))** (i.e. they get reviewed by the Haystackers, or girls listen to it, or something like that) to have really been fucking things up for the doom purists. All I figure is that it means the sonic pallette of “cool music” has continually expanded and reconfigured itself. Creative destruction is ugly, folks, like democracy and anarchy, and if you’re going to let some obnoxious college kids in funny glasses piss on what you love simply by knowing about it, perhaps you need to reconsider what love means to you.

Better yet, read The Collector by John Fowles. If you recognize the main character in the mirror, you’re doing love wrong.

* I can appreciate what a pain in the ass trying to write about music like this is, especially on a commercial level. But it’s still not very descriptive.

** They’re rather boring.

The indie/hipster post-rock-label- label- label- grind-death-jazz-fusion thing continues to tear along in weird places. So you end up with some really good things, like Genghis Tron, but outside of the more extreme Casio grind bands you also have this post-rock/prog metal fusion that’s pretty popular. Off the top of my head you have Pelican, Cult of Luna, Jesu, anyone who’s ever put out anything on Hydrahead Records, and stuff like that. Wikipedia actually calls this “post-metal” but as the Father of Lies, we would expect nothing less. I will agree with the Lord of Fetid Hosts, however, in blaming most of this on Neurosis.

The biggest name among all of these newer folk is Isis. Friends of mind have been repping Isis fairly hard for a while now, but I’m two albums into this particular journey and I still just don’t get it. Panopticon struck me as being very flat, and while I do like the way the band plays together quite a bit, I think the singing is, at best, ill-considered.Well, that’s being nice. Since consuming In the Absence of Truth, what I’ve actually said is “Psst…Isis is Queensryche, pass it on!”, which is mean. I probably should keep these conversations to myself. But it’s true, and I am nothing if not a servant of truth.

Listening to In the Absence of Truth I’m struck by a few tracks, namely “Dulcinea” which manages to overcome their pop-prog shortcomings (or attractions if you’re into that sort of thing) and gel together quite nicely over seven minutes and change. The grunting and barking is toned down in favor of sublimation and tone, which is a massive upgrade. It is a much stronger album than Panopticon, which seemed unsure of itself, whereas everyone knows where they’re going with this release.

But nothing changes the omnipresent pounding sensation that reminds one that you’re still listening to Queensryche.* I will buy any instrumental albums they put out in the future, but otherwise this relationship is over.

And so…

The last time I saw Today is the Day was on this past St. Patrick’s Day, at the Knitting Factory. It was a tremendously good set by Today is the Day, but I showed up a bit late and only caught two of the opening acts. The first was a decently tight grind outfit saddled with an annoying singer. That’s more or less how these things work most of the time, unfortunately, because metal singing is pretty damn difficult to pull off well. And even if you do, you run the risk of having your voice fucked up, such as what seems to have happened to Steve Austin. Talk about sacrificing your body to metal, huh?

Anyway, I’ll do a good Today is the Day roundup sometime soon, but the second to last opening act was a heavily bearded crew of young men called Mouth of the Architect. This lead me to form a baseless and wholly awesome stereotype about bands and beards. The shorter the hair and the longer the beard, the more likely the band is to be great. I realize this is a lie, but in this case it holds. Four part harmonized screaming slathered on top of a backdrop that slips from a grinding sludge to very pretty post-rock guitarscapes? Count me in!

I realize that they’re similar in many ways to Isis and the other “post-metal” notaries. But there’s something in the way they carry off their material that’s more Mogwai than metal. And I like those drug-addled Scots quite a bit, so this is high praise. But with Mouth of the Architect, there’s a fixation on composition that is absolutely sure of itself, and doesn’t get quite so hung up on “pretty” and “aggressive” as being two distinct halves. It just also sounds…better? I’m sitting here listening to this album for the third time in as many hours and I’ve rejected using “classy” twice now. It’s not that it has more class than In the Absence of Truth – that’d be a silly claim to make – but it feels like it has more class.

The “post-metal” thing has its ups and downs, and the usual stereotypes. Much like IDM before it, the song titles share similar themes, replacing things like “vector_grasp23″ or “COIoounN (for marjorie)” with “With These Hands I Build a Ship of Bones” and “Porcelain Crisis.” Rather than grasp at a shiny genderless future where there is only a few metallic tones and a single font (Helvetica, natch), this seems like more like an attempt to fuse Melville and Metal; alternately, it’s an attempt to bridge the violently joyful permanent adolescence of young men escaping various kinds of nerd labels into what was the most masculine musical form of their childhood. (Before you scoff, remember that hair metal bands, despite their appearance, still got the ladies.)

And both, of course, are trying to outrun large shadows (Neurosis, Autechre) in the form of oft-imitated founding fathers.

* Note: I am fully aware that there’s an umlaut in there somewhere. But seriously? Fuck those guys. I wouldn’t give Motley Crue an umlaut either. Or Motorhead, for that matter. Or Blue Oyster Cult.

www.myspace.com/mouthofthearchitect

translationloss.com

For the longest time I’ve described Will Oldham’s music as the sound of a bewildered encounter with the eternal feminine. I don’t know if that fully stands anymore, but it does accurately describe obvious classics like I See a Darkness.

But Lie Down in the Light is far more celebratory than baffled, which is a nice change of pace. I fully agree that women are a deeply confusing species, but the duets with Ashley Webber are a nice way to move past that heavy feeling of being sledgehammered by life and love.In fact, these duets – I confess I don’t know if that’s the official technical term for this sort of thing – form some of the best moments on this album. “So Everyone” is almost hellishly uplifting, especially for a song that – I think – is about sex in public. Or not. It’s hard to tell with these artist types.

The real kicker, the real proof of the death of the old whiskey and doom Oldham, is “You Want That Picture”; an awkwardly-phrased snapshot of the last parting accusations between two lovers that breaks into a “it’s totally cool ’cause everything ends and everyone dies” chorus. But even that’s still cheery, bright and summery.

There are worse things than the death of sadness. As obviously perfect as I See a Darkness is, it’s not the best salve for fragile mental states. There are far better ways to deal with depression and anxiety than listening to the title track on repeat for hours, to be sure.

As a whole, Lie Down in the Light is a beautiful summer barbecue, surrounded by friends and family. As the lights turn down and fireflies emerge, you realize that you’ll think of this moment right before you die and it will lift the weight. The album closes with “I’ll Be Glad.”

Its message?

Love is nice.

And it is.