Ell Es Two

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had a chance to rip a couple of CDs that I’d left back home, and among them was the Matador reissue of Pavement’s 1992 debut Slanted and Enchanted. What I love best about this album is its cohesion as a collection of songs. From the bone-dry delivery on “Summer Babe” through the scatterbrained hi-jinx of “Fame Throwa” to the drunken 6/8 drum pattern on “Our Singer,” the songs hold up all the way through. Even Spiral’s throwaway “Two States” is essential to the mix.

Anyway, one of my favorite songs from this album is “In the Mouth of a Desert.” The song displays the band’s incredible ability to blend really bleak, dissonant sounding guitar with effortless, off-hand pop hooks that you don’t really notice are there until it’s too late and you can’t make it through a single day without singing at least a line or three of Stephen Malkmus’ inimitable lyrics.

Here’s a live version of “Desert” from 1994 that features a cool introduction called “Heckler Spray.”

Yee-uh: Heckler Spray/In the Mouth of a Desert

Caricatures by Dan Hay

Last summer I was lucky enough to basically stumble into a job drawing caricatures of tourists at Sea World Orlando. While I was there I basically sat out under an umbrella drawing passable sketches and sometimes earning a nice healthy commission for myself. On slow days I got to shoot the breeze with some really awesome artists who really know what they're doing and have real gifts for likeness and exaggeration.

I'll post some cool links to their blogs in the coming weeks, but I'd like to start with one of my favorite's. Dan Hay's been doing caricatures for a few years and he's pretty great at it. The above sketch was done by him of someone in the park. You can check out more of his work at his blog:

Blubberlubber

He updates it pretty regularly, so keep checking back.

Circa '62

“Don’t waste your precious breath explaining that you are worthwhile.”

Pavement are the greatest garage band of all time. It's a bold statement to make, and it's probably not true, but I want to make it anyway.

Initially comprised of Steven Malkmus (SM) and his buddy Scott Kannberg (later known as Spiral Stairs) in the very, very late '80s, the band released early EP with titles like Slay Tracks (1933-1969) and Perfect Sound Forever. They were recorded by the basically incompetent and insane Gary Young, who "engineered" and "played drums" on the band's debut album, Slanted and Enchanted. Still, it was this ostensibly unbearable combination of obnoxious slackerdom and erratic hippie nonsense that sired a sound that would inspire a big pile of teenage rawk bands in the next decade-and-a-half.

A word on my decision to use the distinction "garage rock." Pavement is garage rock because it was recorded by suburban kids in a garage. It's about as simple as that, and any other labels, amusing as they may be, are basically irrelevant. Drawing on the scatterbrained, shambolic aesthetic of bands like The Fall and coupling it with the drama of Echo & the Bunnymen, Malkmus wrote the kind of unbelievably catchy songs that bounce around in your head like quarters in a washing machine.

Anyway, this is the first of what will invariably be a series of posts on Pavement, the best garage band ever. Say what you will about their musicianship, this is a band that could really play. You can argue about whether ol' Gary Young was a better drummer than Steve West (he wasn't), or whether Bob Nastanovich is really a necessary part of the band (he is), but at the end of the day, Pavement are just what they set out to be: a bunch of brainy loser-types playing gloriously rudimentary rock for a bunch of other brainy, if utterly useless, loser-types.

Okay, that's an exaggeration to some extent, but really, Pavement is all about exaggeration. It's the heart of garage rock, finding a little bit of humor or grasping for some meaning in the mundane pointlessness of suburban life. It's just a series of attempts, successful or unsuccessful, to make something out of nothing.

Or something like that, anyway.

Now listen here: "Stereo" - Live @ Shepherd's Bush, UK ('97)

Big Ideas

"Housewife's Favourite"


By this point I've probably read twenty reviews of Radiohead's In Rainbows, but if only to prove that I still exist, here's my little review.

Now that I've had a month to listen and re-listen (and re-listen) to the album, it seems to me that Radiohead's "LP7" is the band's most significant accomplishment since Kid A. Thinking back to some of the news stories that popped up on fan sites like Green Plastic Radiohead and AtEase in 2006, I’m pretty grateful that the band ultimately decided to stick with Nigel Godrich as their producer. After all, why dismantle a winning combination? Godrich has helmed some of the best-sounding records of the last decade, including OK Computer, Kid A, Travis’ masterpiece The Man Who, Pavement’s swan song Terror Twilight, and Beck’s gorgeous acoustic album, Sea Change.

I won’t do a track-by-track because it’s been done far too many times in the past four weeks, but I will say that my favorite track is “Jigsaw Falling into Place.” It’s definitely the album’s most accessible track, besides maybe “Bodysnatchers,” and it’s a superb performance bursting with an ineffable and irresistible energy. Like “Bodysnatchers,” “Jigsaw” marks a notable shift in style for the band. Compared with the cold calculation and meticulousness of the songs on 2003’s Hail to the Thief, the tunes on In Rainbows have much looser arrangements that seem to suggest a return to a more performance-driven dynamic. It remains to be seen what kind of form the band will be in during their next tour (which is rumored to begin in May of next year), but if the recent “Thumbs_Down” webcast this past weekend is any indication, I think we can expect a rejuvenated Radiohead who seem to have recaptured a sense of fun and onstage immediacy in the last year or two.

Here’s a cool live version of “Jigsaw Falling into Place” from last year when it still had the working title of “Open Pick.”

GO! Open Pick (Live in Montreal)

Grizzly Bear - Friend EP

That dog is in every picture!


I just went and saw Grizzly Bear for the fourth time tonight at the Society for Ethical Culture near Central Park. Those guys are just incredible musicians. It’s really inspiring to be able to watch such a dynamic, young band like them. They’re the first band I’ve ever really known that is constantly changing the way they approach their material. Pretty much every song gets a different reading in a live setting. Among the most impressive of these new arrangements is the live version of “Little Brother,” which benefits hugely from an added opening section that features singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen belting disconcertingly, “My God, that’s not the way,” and a jarring, juggernaut of a coda not included on the more restrained rendition found on 2006’s Yellow House (It is, however, available on the band's new EP, details follow). Other highlights from the show tonight included a rare, yet confident performance of “Marla,” and a stunning-as-usual “On a Neck, On a Spit.”

The band releases the Friend EP this Tuesday, which includes some new songs including “Alligator,” which features Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth and Amber Coffman on backing vocals. Other new material includes a surging, horn-laden untitled collaboration with Beirut’s Zach Condon tucked away after Rossen’s quiet and creepy version of the traditional folk song “Deep Blue Sea.”

On a side note, Tonight’s show was part of an ongoing series of really interesting performances coming up at both the Society for Ethical Culture and Good-Shepherd Faith Church in the mid-town area. It's called "The Wordless Music Series," and it's hosted by a sheepish (though thoroughly hip) guy named Ronen Givony. Scheduled for next weekend are two performances by Icelandic group Múm, and in mid-January, The Church of St. Paul the Apostle hosts the US premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver. Finally someone has realized that cathedrals are perfect music halls.

Friend EP tracklist:

1. Alligator (Choir Version)
2. He Hit Me
3. Little Brother (Electric)
4. Shift (Alternate Version)
5. Plans (Terrible vs. Nonhorse Sounds Edit)
6. Granny Diner
7. Knife covered by CSS
8. Plans covered by Band of Horses
9. Knife covered by Atlas Sound
10. Deep Blue Sea (Daniel Rossen home recording)

Pre-order Friend EP here:

Insound

Listen to Yellow House for free online here:

grizzly-bear.net

Check out the Wordless Music Series here:

wordlessmusic.org

Oh, Naoko! Murakami's Norwegian Wood

I finished this book a few days ago, and I've been trying to write about it, but I feel like I've only just stopped mourning the fact that I can't live in Haruki Murakami's Japan permanently.

In Norwegian Wood, Murakami spins a frightfully sympathetic and heart-rending coming-of-age tale set against the social tumult of 1960s. In the simplest terms, the novel strikes a perfect balance between unbearable sadness and dry humor that never lapses into the sentimental.

What I liked best about the novel's protagonist, Toru Watanabe, is the vain sincerity he displays in his struggle to find a foothold in a new world of compromise and hypocrisy: a quality that sets him apart from the usual bunch of mixed-up adolescents one tends to come across in the realm of post-modern literature, along with the likes of Holden Caulfield or Esther Greenwood.

To summarize the story briefly, Toru is a young college student from Kobe, putting up with the usual day-to-day jive while living a mostly solitary life in Japan's capital city, all the while suffering intensely (albeit often subconsciously) from the traumatic experience of his best friend Kizuki's suicide at seventeen. Adding to this is his passionate, yet weird and pseudo-vicarious relationship with Kizuki's beautiful, bereaved girlfriend Naoko. Naoko's mental illness further complicates the already messy situation. However, it's when Toru meets the seductively outlandish and temperamental Midori, that the novel really starts to pick up the scent of life in the real world, where our relationships so often seem to be forged in the most unlikely (not to mention unnatural) ways.

Anyway, it was a great read and I highly recommend it. On a side note, the prose can be a little strange at times, but I tend to chalk this up to the fact that it's a non-western text in translation. It's also a little heavy on the music and pop-culture references, but that's just a matter of taste I guess. At least Murakami seems to like good stuff.

Buy it here: Amazon

And here's a great interview with the author from just after Wind-up Bird Chronicle: Salon