This song is built of energy, particles in motion, maybe more so than others. It is full of might and fraught with warmth, threatening to break into pure light at any moment.
There is a great regard for the anecdote embedded in this thing, it feels like a great account. It is a special thing and worthy of revisiting.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Unless of course you’ve got some bleach, in which case sunshine can go screw.
This is a timeless track. Many distinct elements compile in concert, with great measure and purpose: horns, synthetic strings, a bass line that goads and simmers throughout.
There’s no reason to be afraid, technically. It probably won’t help. Unless the fear is a prerequisite to the release of adrenaline. Unless the body can’t administer this panic without adequate fear, a mere recognition of the danger insufficient to trigger the response.
On this dead blog we celebrate winding loops of guitars nestling into the parietal lobe.
Also, this from Denis:
It is a fine, beautiful
and lovely time of warm dusk,
having perhaps just a touch
too much
enveloping damp;
but nice, with its idle strollers,
of whom I am one,
and it’s true,
their capacity for good
is limitless, you can tell.
And then—ascending
over roofs, the budded tips
of trees, in the twilight, very whole
and official,
its black
markings like a face
that has loomed in every city
I have known—it arrives,
the gigantic yellow warrant
for my arrest,
one sixth the size
of the world. I’m speaking
of the moon. I would not give
you a fistful of earth for
the entire moon, I might as well tell you.
For across the futile and empty
street, in the excruciating
gymnasium, they
are commencing—
degrees are being bestowed
on the deserving,
whereas I’m the incalculable
dullard in the teeshirt here.
Gentlemen of the moon:
I don’t even have
my real shoes on. These are some reformed
hoodlum’s shoes, from the Goodwill. Let
me rest, let me rest in the wake
of others’ steady progress,
closing my eyes,
closing my heart,
shutting the door
in face after face
that has nourished me.
Denis Johnson, “This is Thursday, Your Exam was Tuesday.”
I don’t think anybody can in good faith argue with how good a line, “Satan made a mansion for love to live when it dies,” especially in the way it is casually uttered here, and considering its fine abbreviated state existing as both precursor and title.
Few and far between are such killer refrains.
And that is not yet to mention some of the best lo-ish-er-fi production this side of the infinite lapse.
You don’t need me to tell you whose fingerprints are on this one. I only wish I could do my influences this kind of fearless and forthright justice.
The title track off 2013’s Mug Museum is one of my favorites among many. The whole album is intriguingly sonically textured and well written.
One of the two primary reasons my partner responded to my online profile was a reference to Cate Le Bon and another to David Mitchell & Robert Webb’s Peepshow. So I am in it’s/her debt.
Though I have felt slightly distanced from the colder, more abstracted art rock direction she is exploring in the last few releases, it is all still worth looking into. But to my taste, she has not yet returned to this level of melodic and lyrically qualitative consistency since.
On this record, the bridge has yet to be retracted. There is a great effort at precision in the lines and the onus is not put upon the audience to rearrange the fragments of coherence. Which is fine, too. An audience has been built, tediously, over decades. Do what you like. We don’t need the same thing in endlessly mild variations.
All that shit said, I am still very glad Mug Museum exists and it is proudly one of the paltry 19 vinyl records in my collection.
Similar to the stylistical influences of The Mystery Lights, Big Thief always appear to draw from something deeper &/or richer.
Adrianne Lenker is one of the most imaginative and compelling American songwriters working today. And this timeless track is not any exception to the very fine records she’s been rapidly producing the last few years.
I was lucky enough to see them around Brooklyn/manhattan several times in the Masterpiece era and a little thereafter, the first time with Alvvays and Ducktails at Prospect Park/Bandshell. For free! And I walked over to it! You suckers.
That’s well worth the thousands of dollars in monthly rent that all of us alternate suckers pay to live in this wonderful/hellish city… or, anyway, it’s some kind of compensation. And proof that some of the funds diverted away from the piss-soaked half burnt out subway go to things that aren’t entirely worthless.
Christ knows that Big Thief don’t need any more press. They’re the one band written about on this blog so far that your mom knows. But rightfully so, qualitatively.
The five tracks capable of preview for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You are all solid and inventive, both in melody, construction and the usage of language. It seems like Masterpiece and Capacity came out 6 months ago and I am surely already dead / time moves quickly.
This is the 57th post here, day by day, but the sentiment of this track applies to any given present day or any day in the foreseeable future for that matter. Our deranged, bloodthirsty and perpetually underfunded society will see to that.
We are incapable of wresting funds to properly address systemic fault from the hands of the gluttons that dominate and cripple our infrastructure and damn the general wellbeing.
Stylistically the mystery lights (mercifully) seem to have skipped a few decades of rock tropes and pull from a richer, older, but somehow fresher history, influences better preserved in their tombs than whatever has been recently left rotting in the sun.
Somewhat recently a friend or at least acquaintance of mine from high school / college passed away. I don’t even know how. But he had a blog that I used to intermittently remember and then voraciously read through every 3-6 months.
We were young and in bands simultaneously, from neighboring towns in the suburbs of Indianapolis. And while he was undeniably cooler/more musically gifted in all respects, we would host shows for one another and play on the same bill at places like The Festivilla and a rented Eaton Hall.
Later, as many good Hoosiers, we ended up at the same college (IU Bloomington).
In any case, we’d say ‘hello’ around town. And after his death I was very glad to see the blog remain accessible. It is full of his lovely poetry, lyrics, and daily testaments. It is valuable to me both for his insightful assessments and selfishly for my own tangential relation to them.
Part of the reason for starting this was 1) return the favor of people writing kindly about my obviously insufficient music, to return a part of that good feeling to others. 2) After death I’ll have some kind of semi-public record that any one could visit, and maybe enjoy if they have similar trash-rock tastes.
Regardless, this is a good song that mirrors that nostalgia.
Let us please have more songs that address explicitly unjust hierarchies… and, if possible, ideally, remain compelling with regard to instrumentation and lyrical craft.
“there’s burning to be done / so I’ll sleep when I’m dead”
The track is more than a little seething. And with great energy and righteousness there is a palpable sense of alienation and disgust.
It reminds me of a quote of Camus writing about the poet René Char:
Camus felt that Char…
“was quite alone, without having a taste for solitude. And he cannot conceive of a life without friendship, and he cannot love most of the men around today. Therefore he is very demanding to the few men he esteems, sometimes violently so… He deserves to be encouraged and accepted wholly because he himself is whole and of a quality so rare that without him it would take the world far too long to be reborn.”
In Los Tones’ What Happened we have some quintessential fun pop-garage rock. There is an undeniably solid lead riff set atop driving drums and a compelling vocal delivery.
The verses don’t undercut the chorus, they’re stabilizing, though they are ballast for balance. There are no gratuitous asides, fills or solos.
Every aspect combines to serve the core purpose of contributing to the single.
The track pushes slightly past the three minute mark then gracefully exits after one final build in which the band manages to more than muster sufficient intensity required to justify this trek which tacks another minute onto the runtime.
Plainly & Painfully 