Christgau wrote how Lykke Li sounds like something specifically nostaligic, albiet totally foreign. The Doo-Wops and finger picked clean electric guitar sound on ‘Unrequited Love’ conjure up teenage heartbreak ballads circa 1953. But instead of finding some yet unheard of sentimental synonym for unrequited love, Li just says it straight. She uses a language barrier like a brand new analogy. The straightforward, all to literal phrase strips all break up songs down to their very core using a Sweedish/English pidgeon and ends up the opposite of parody: Something disntincly different and meaningful. This formula is repeated throughout, backed by intensely intricate rhythms and tunes all succeeding in their own right. I ignored Lykke Li for far too long as something I was pretty sure I respected, but didn’t think I’d ever really align with. I stand corrected. Here’s a brief sampler of the new album.
There’s nothing better than summer in the Pacific Northwest. Aside from, possibly, summer in the Dordogne. But that’s a separate story. Living in the PNW constitutes a daily renewal of a hella Faustian bargain whereby we endure 10.5 months of tyrannical grey for a few weeks of the most subliminal natural surroundings one could ask for. See, the rain, what it does, while slowly draining our collective souls and sequestering us indoors to the point where we actually fear eye contact with other humans we pass on the street (it’s true, someone from the south told me this week outside a bar at 3am in Seattle, but that, again, is another story), is pump élan vital into the natural surroundings something fierce, which is then summoned fourth in full effect for a few weeks of sun every summer. And today was, I hope, the dawn of a minimum week long stretch of everything this summer’s been lacking. To celebrate, my wife and I coincidentally had a crabbing trip scheduled with a fellow teacher friend of ours. A whole day spent in the sun pillaging the sea for all its bounty–Dungeness crab and quasi-legitimate sole– and beachside gorging on crab–served a quick shovel induced death no more than thirty minutes prior to consumption–left us a little worn out. Rough life, I know. So when we arrived home with no less than twelve half bodies of crab to pick, and a steep learning curve of sole filleting for me, the choice of music and beer was paramount. The beer was a new imperial IPA made by Scuttlebutt, and the music was, fittingly, Yogoman Burning Band. We first heard Yogoman play live a few years ago at a wedding for friends of ours on Orcas Island. They play music suited perfectly to a summer afternoon in the northwest, subdued excitement (a phrase borrowed from the title of their second album) reigns throughout, capturing everything the euphoria of a summer afternoon in the northwest conjures up. The best way to find their songs, besides buying the album of course, is check out their website, where you can hear a load of their best songs at a much higher quality than what I’m about to share. If you’re feeling lazier than one click will allow though, here are a few finds from YouTube.
This weekend I went to my first high school reunion. Not my own but the ten year renion for my wife. I’ll admit I was skeptical, seeing as how my take on class reunions–at least the prospect of my own –is one of indifference at best with the advent of Facebook. But I volunteered to go along, and all told it wasn’t bad. An overpriced venue with strictly delineated (overpriced) drinks where by the very nature of the event I’m assured to be an outsider isn’t my typical idea of a good time. But I decided to suck it up, put on a suit and drink a bunch of vodka tonics and see what happened. And much to my surprise, it turns out ten years is plenty of time for most high schoolers to stop acting like high schoolers. So instead of cliquey, circular social interaction, everyone I met from the CK class of 2001 was an exceptionally friendly human, equally irked by the fourty dollar cover charge and seven dollar wells. Que sera. We spent the evening dancing, which is something I hardly ever get involved with in the absence of liquor. This evening presented no temperant restrictions however, and we danced like one should at a high school reunion, sloshy and uninhibited. And of all the proverbial jams we danced to in homage to 2001, ‘Juicy’ by B.I.G. is still stuck in my head as a timeless classic that only gets better with age.
I’ll admit it. I drive a Prius. I’ve always liked the (less impressive since I was fifteen) remake of Great Expectations with Gwynth Paltro and Ethan Hawke. And even though there are days when Wu Tang, Weezy and Immortal Technique must be played on blast for any activity of even marginal importance, my achilles stay exposed (at least partially) due to acoustic guitar driven, weenie guy, hypersensitive cry on my shoulder and reminisce over love gained, lost and otherwise inspired music. It started at the end of high school with my introduction to The Format. My friend Matt, after graduating a year before me, had been a roadie for some mid level punk bands in the Tooth & Nail scene, which to my friends and I was a whole level of cool beyond anything our small town had to offer. And when Matt came back from the road with an endorsement of some borderline indie boy band never heard of amidst a sea of Audiogalaxy suggestions branching out from Less than Jake, Blink-182, Goldfinger and other pop punk outfits, we swallowed the Kool Aid without hesitation. To this day though, I’ll stand by Interventions and Lullabies. Each song is shrink wrapped in three ultra formative years of my life, chronicling in eager, melodic gusto the equally fervent transition between being a teenager self aware of the fact and being a teenager in the throes of make believing adulthood. Most all of the songs were about leaving high school behind, graduating and never looking back; anthemic refutations of the precipice between childhood and independence I’d been waiting to stumble over for as long as I could remember. This album will always sound like driving around with my friends in the spring of my senior year, killing time before our adolescence—at least as we knew it—was officially over.
A few years ago I was introduced to Blind Pilot. When I first heard them, the thought that crossed my mind was, these guys sound a lot like The Format. But something was different. I was well over The Frormat by then. I never even gave their second album a second listen. But Blind Pilot was like The Format for grown ups. Their songs were more poetic. And instead of graduating high school and leaving childhood in the dust, the songs were more esoteric in their lyrical quality, narrating impressionist flashbacks of the period in my life The Format had led me into. ‘Things I Cannot Recall’ captures the zeitgeist of this album to me. A flurry of memories compressed into a blurry nostalgia, punctuated by brief, visceral moments.
With the advent of bandcamp, I’m spoiled for choice when it comes to dudes who strum guitars and sing about drinking wine and lamenting past love. All this choice has indeed diluted the pool, and outliers are hard to come by. But Beta Radio exists in a space reminiscient but distinctly otherwise from the two discussed so far. After only a couple multi tasking listens through, I can’t attest as accurately for the lyrics. But this band is more complex, in both their multi layered songwriting and lyrics. And while I’ll spare any would be unfortunate reader the painfull allegory waiting to be drawn between this pick and the progress of my own life, all I can say is the sound and lyrics imitate the cover artwork accompanying the album. Just like wearing suspenders and a vest in public, there is an aura of playfulness present at all times in their songs. But just like the commitment to shoot an apple of a friend’s head with a bb gun, their songs are earnest, patient and focused, not to mention sincere.
Last weekend I drove entirely too much. Three friends and I each shed a pound or two of masculinity so we could fit into my blue Prius and trek down I-5 between Seattle and Portland on our way to my friend Tyler’s bachelor party. While the party itself doesn’t warrant a whole write up on a music blog by any means, the drive itself is at least somewhat deserving of a brief narrative detailing the musical exploits of our pavement laced sojourn.
It began on a note of absurdity sure to portend the path our weekend would take. I’d only heard ‘Jack Sparrow’ once before on SNL, and while I thought it was funny, never thought I would play the song on repeat at least ten times in twenty four hours. Wasn’t I about to be proven wrong when the bachelor himself lobbied for the song just as our friend Shawn was joining us outside a bakery near Eastlake. Shawn knew all the words, and by the end of the weekend, I had at least memorized the line, “jester of Tortuga.” Another big highlight of the song for me is Michael Bolton in general, him quoting Scarface toward the end of the song in specific. Oh, and that for the rest of the weekend, doing anything positive could be seen as a ‘big, sexy hook.’ (Listen to the song before speculating on how that phrase came to be common language at a bachelor party.)
For the rest of the drive until Chehalis, the musical selection was a mixed bag, fueled mainly in my memory by Ha Ha Tonka, a band Anthony Bourdain hung out with on No Reservations. Early Kings of Leon comparisons are inevitable, but they have a sound distinct enough to make for a unique experience. Or maybe it just feels that way after listing to the latest Kings of Leon album.
Just outside of Olympia, as the tedium of the drive was starting to creep into the already all too occupied space of the blue mangina on wheels, I figured it was time for something shocking and artistic all at once: Tyler, the Creator. Tyler has apparently started a feud with Tegan and Sara regarding his overuse of the real ‘f’ word, the one besides fuck. Here’s my take: Dude is a genius. And kind of a bully. And in any other situation besides art, being a bully obviously isn’t alright. But because his music is the art, and his individual self matters about as much to me as the physical goop that makes up paint on a Picasso, his album is the only criteria I’d ever use to judge his music. If he tweets something misogynistic, spews homophobia in an interview or doesn’t tip his waiter at a restaurant, this makes him a dick. But as his album stands, alone, in my stereo, it is a haunting work of art. The character he plays in the album–mirror of reality or not–is exactly the kind of dude who would use the real ‘f’ word as an emasculating insult. Dude is disturbed, vile, homophobic, insecure and mentally unbalanced. This is the connotation we should have for people who go around dropping ‘f’ bombs at random. As is the case with so many sculptors, painters, writers and the like who wallow creatively in the dregs of human existence, just because it’s ugly, doesn’t disqualify it as art. Or genius.
After a brief stop for mid day libations at the Country Kitchen in Chehalis, where Shawn made the timely inquiry of, “doesn’t country have an ‘o’ in it?” we proceeded south, by this time starting to feel the anticipatory buzz of picking up our friend Andrew in Battle Creek. And let me tell you, my anticipation has never been more ripe than the prospect of driving into Battle Creek, WA for any reason, let alone it signifying the last leg of a journey. So it was agreed that Kanye West’s Magnum Opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, would match our collective spirits. There’s something good to be said about all the songs on this album, from lyrics to composition. The song I took away from that drive though was ‘Power.’ I can’t get enough of that 808, not to mention vicarious bravado that’s impossible to avoid when listening to this song on eleven.
We backed up Kanye with some new Beastie Boys. There has never been a time in history where a thorough speaker max out of the Beastie Boys wasn’t a fitting soundtrack for four six foot plus dudes mashed in a Prius, rolling down long stretches of southern Washington highway.
Harkening back to our arrival in Portland, my memory is instantly clouded by an impenetrable fog of war, the faint rhythm of the last song played a distant echo in my cavernous memory. The recollections don’t return until we reentered the ThaaanksWagon and began our trek home, greeted this time by ‘Turtleneck and Chains.’ It turns out Lonely Island is an invigorating way to start any road trip. We even threw on ‘Jack Sparrow’ for one final rotation; by this time most of us knowing enough of the words to loudly mumble our way through the chorus. Come Halloween this year, turtlenecks will be more valuable than gold, which, ironically enough will be in equally high demand in chain form.
Lonely Island was quickly supplanted with more Kanye, but by the time we had dropped Andrew off in Battle Creek, via a much more gratifyingly scenic route through the town’s bustling center of commerce (gas and golden food?), it was time for a change. The weekend was beginning to wear, and after departing Oregon we found our collective mana noticeably lacking. Something new was needed. Something that would sustain our temperaments for the–little did we know at the time–all too long drive ahead. Attempts were made on my part to remedy the situation through brilliant, albeit inappropriate music for the drive at that point:
Much too inaccessible for a first listen stuck in the car with four other people, especially with a hangover. (Easy to listen to on repeat for days after the first few times through though.)
I love this album. Eddie Vedder is an ageless genius. This is a sentiment shared between everyone in the car. Yet at that moment, the music sounded more like we were on our way to a Hawaiian wedding than trying to survive a tedious drive in the rain. (In this case, our perception was the only thing lacking, not the music.)
We settled on the Cave Singers, which, I hope, didn’t offend anyone directly. Weird enough to keep us awake and with plenty of drums to match the steady throbbing inside our heads.
During a detour from I-5 in an effort to avoid a traffic jam, we drove into what I’m pretty sure most cartographers would agree is the middle of nowhere. Uncomfortable jokes about what sort of Deliverance quality auto repair we would find if we were to break down surfaced in the car, and rather than practice our best pig squeals and purdy mouthed smiles, we threw on some DOM and figured if we were going out, we’d at least do so in style.
For our final push through an unexpected traffic jam in Spanaway, Washington, home of probably more broken dreams than just ours of arriving back in Seattle at our scheduled time, the prospect of any more unknown spans of time spent in the car was becoming intolerable. In a last ditch effort to save my own sanity, and hopefully abate the oppressive claustrophobia of a traffic jam on a single lane highway, we pulled up a streaming version of a comedian named John Daly doing Bill Cosby Bukowski, a routine I first heard on a live WTF podcast and laughed so hard I almost ran a red light driving home from Whidbey Island. This routine is probably NSFW, and generally horrible for human consumption.
The final selection of music was fittingly anticlimactic. Pleasant in every way, just as exiting the car was soon to be. But by this point our only goal was to maintain our collective cool and traverse the last length of south Seattle freeway in time to pick up my wife from the ferry dock. The Dodos made for fitting background music, as they do on almost any occasion. And as we circumnavigated the impenetrable labyrinth of one way streets surrounding the passenger pick up area near the Seattle ferry pier, this was the last song we probably all ignored as we cursed both past and present city planners responsible for the layout of Seattle’s main thoroughfares.
Christgau wrote how Lykke Li sounds like something specifically nostaligic, albiet totally foreign. The Doo-Wops and finger picked clean electric guitar sound on ‘Unrequited Love’ conjure up teenage heartbreak ballads circa 1953. But instead of finding some yet unheard of sentimental synonym for unrequited love, Li just says it straight. She uses a language barrier like a brand new analogy. The straightforward, all to literal phrase strips all break up songs down to their very core using a Sweedish/English pidgeon and ends up the opposite of parody: Something disntincly different and meaningful. This formula is repeated throughout, backed by intensely intricate rhythms and tunes all succeeding in their own right. I ignored Lykke Li for far too long as something I was pretty sure I respected, but didn’t think I’d ever really align with. I stand corrected. Here’s a brief sampler of the new album.
allthosewastedhours 