Enduring Love For Trail of Dead

The two boxes of books and CDs I sent home in early June, when I didn’t know whether I was staying or going (cue Clash song in the soundtrack of my life, ha ha), have arrived. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Source Tags And Codes until it started distracting me from Enduring Love, which I’d been hunched over till very late the previous night.

Perhaps it was strange coincidence, but just as the album started getting better, the book started losing its momentum. An uneasy balance between ears and eyes had been maintained for the first five songs, which are “merely” catchy, but then Heart In The Hand Of The Matter came along, with its bells and crashing pianos and amazing drumming, and from then on Trail Of Dead started majorly kicking Ian McEwan’s ass.

By the time Relative Ways began, I’d become thoroughly annoyed with the book’s protagonist for his whining and paranoia, which I do think then begat more reasons for whining and paranoia for him than may originally have been likely, and I was getting depressed by the way the relationship in the book managed to spiral so suddenly out of fairly idyllic conjugal bliss into a minefield of recrimination and bitterness. On a personal level I wasn’t feeling great either. But there was something powerfully persuasive about those It’s okay passages, a sudden hushed drama in the music and the chord changes, a heartfelt earnestness in the vocals akin to how in Tonight Tonight (Smashing Pumpkins) Billy Corgan beseeches us to believe. And I always find myself believing, and so too, yesterday, everything really did feel okay for a while.

Every now and then something always manages to get under my skin sufficiently to manipulate me (even if just temporarily) despite all the cynical rationality I think I epitomize. It’s good when that happens.

One Day, Fourteen CDs

I held out as long as I could. I really did. But I had to leave the house at some point, and Music Warehouse was (kind of) on the way to the optician’s, and Gramophone was (kind of) on the way back. Okay, so maybe they involved little detours, but they were on the same bus route.

Well, er, these are all new:

  • Work 1989-2002 (Orbital, S$18.99)
  • The Private Press (DJ Shadow, S$17.99)
  • No More Shall We Part (Nick Cave, S$18.90)
  • Love And Theft (Bob Dylan, S$16.90)
  • Harvest (Neil Young, S$14.99)
  • Roseland NYC Live (Portishead, S$18.99)
  • Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (Lucinda Williams, S$15.99)
  • Murray Street (Sonic Youth, S$17.99)
  • Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Wilco, S$18.99)
  • Pet Sounds (in mono and stereo, Beach Boys, S$17.99)
  • Souljacker (eels, S$17.99)
  • Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” (EMI Classics, Otto Klemperer conducting, S$17.99)
  • A 2 CD choral compilation (S$18.99)
  • The Mirror Conspiracy (Thievery Corporation, FREE because of Gramophone’s buy-10-get-another-free offer! So I’ve saved, really I have…)

Ohdearohdearohdearohdearohdear. Somehow my usual excuses of “It’s my only vice” and (recently) “I deserve a graduation present” aren’t really cutting it in the face of such gluttony.

Help? Please?

David Grubbs (The Spitz, London)

Music Industry Trends Not Yet Overexposed (A McSweeney’s list). I swear some of these already exist on the AMG.

Elsewhere in music, we went to see David Grubbs at the Spitz on Tuesday. I’d never heard any of his solo stuff before – what drew me to the gig was more the six degrees process of connection i.e. David Grubbs was in Gastr Del Sol with Jim O’Rourke who now works with Sonic Youth, who is Michelle’s favourite band. So I already knew it wasn’t going to be one of those gigs where I could stick my head up my arse for a bit and, based on my own personal knowledge of the artist, revel smugly in the indieness coursing through my veins. This is probably why I spent a large part of the “song” where sounds of a baby crying/cat wailing (not sure which it was), opera, orchestra and random blips were repeatedly and what felt like randomly pastiched together inwardly giggling at my cliched wondering of whether he was just getting his sound samples ready for the song, or whether the song had already started, or whether everything had gone horribly wrong technically and he was desperately trying to regain control. (Aside: Man, that was a convoluted sentence.)

I enjoyed the gig, though. He looked and acted like his name, which is not to say he was engorged and slimy and writhed around on the floor under a big log, but rather that he seemed overwhelmingly ordinary when he wasn’t being a brilliant guitarist, the sort of person who’d mooch unassumingly into a gig and sit stolidly two thirds of the distance away from the stage with his Bud, watch quietly and leave.

We sat at a bad angle from the stage, and I think poor Alec spent most of the gig watching a pillar playing the guitar. Every now and then the tea light at our table would wink out from a draft and we’d have to relight it. I didn’t actually observe everyone else around us that much, except for a guy with some serious beard action and an aging hipster whose reactions to the music tended to be obvious but didn’t seem put-on. For some reason, even though I was perfectly happy being in a room with lots of other people, none of whom were irritating me (this can be rare), even though I was definitely absorbed in what was a fairly remarkable performance, there was a corner of my mind where the edges of the room seemed to blur where Alec ended, where the hand that wasn’t touching him didn’t register as a part of me and the hand that did, did.

Bart Davenport/Homescience/Amazing Pilots/Ladybug Transistor (The Arts Cafe, London)

On Saturday people on the boating lake in Regent’s Park may have been pleasantly reminded of the age of imperialism by the sight of a small yellow girl rowing a tall poncily reclining white guy round the lake, although Alec had admittedly rowed me round the lake for the previous 45 minutes, and the Irish arguably have as much cause for resentment about imperialism as us yellow people do.

At night I’d decided to indulge my delusions of indieness by going to a gig at the Arts Cafe. We had a good time, but I ended up enjoying the performance of Bart Davenport (who wasn’t even advertised) most, and Ladybug Transistor (the only band I’d actually heard of) least. In between those two were Homescience (not the most cohesive or animated performers around, but their songs were mildly Pavementy so I liked them well enough) and The Amazing Pilots (who were, in contrast, incredibly cohesive, really got into their performance, and had much better rapport with the crowd, but whose songs were for the most part less interesting except for one called I Thought About It And I’ve Still Not Changed My Mind, which lived up to its rather great title).

Alec bought Bart Davenport’s CD on the strength of what he managed with just the quality of his voice, his songs, his guitar and the occasional kazoo, but it turned out to be disappointingly glossier – a bit too sunkissed and xylophoney – than what we’d been expecting from the performance. Still pleasant enough though, and well worth looking up if you like Summer Hymns or Yuji Oniki, who produced some of the CD.

There was nothing I specifically disliked about Ladybug Transistor, but there seemed to be a sameness to all aspects of their performance and their songs that didn’t capture me at all. In response to the last sentence of this review at Pitchfork, I guess I do just prefer the less sophisticated and trippier ways of channelling 60s sound that the Elephant 6 bands come up with (which reminds me, must go listen to my Olivia Tremor Control CDs for maximum summerness).

On Deciding Not To Engage Zadie Smith In Conversation

I can’t guarantee it really was Zadie Smith I saw coming out of Bookhouse (lovely discount bookstore off Tottenham Court Road) on Saturday, but it certainly looked a lot like her. Thoughts of saying hello skittered briefly across my mind, but disappeared almost immediately. I figured even literary celebrities might get tired of being recognised, and what with loaded Tesco’s bags in my hands and a bad hair day, I didn’t really feel I was in optimum mode for meeting anyone anyway.

What would I have said, anyway? Do you come here often? Lovely bookshop, isn’t it? Hey, liked your book. You really do like Salman Rushdie a lot, don’t you? Not that I’m saying your book’s derivative. He should be flattered, really. And so should you, because his writing style’s so tough to copy, I mean, emulate, no, I mean…er…lovely day, isn’t it?

I was probably right to keep all that for the inner monologue. But I really do like White Teeth, even if a large part of that liking is derived from loving Rushdie.

[Indulge me on a tangential analogy here: I like And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead largely because they manage to incorporate a ridiculous amount of all that is good about Sonic Youth in their work, and avoid the bad (Kim Gordon vocals, for example). Perhaps it’s completely arbitrary of me to say Trail Of Dead’s Madonna and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are influenced but not derivative, but somehow that’s how I intuitively feel about them. The realm of artistry is theoretically open to both the Velvet Undergrounds and the Velvet Underground-influenced, although in practice we may justifiably bicker about the door policy. (There is no guest list.)]

[Footnote to above tangent: I probably diss Kim more than necessary. She takes a lot of getting used to, but it wouldn’t be the same without her. Love Kim, really.]

Juxtapositions

I decide my cheek and the library table are getting on a little too well for their own good, so I stagger to my room and put on some Sonic Youth at their most dissonant and abrasive – crashing guitars, wailing feedback, screamed vocals, the lot. I jump around a lot.

Feeling better, I go downstairs for dinner and find a string quartet playing in the dining room. How nice. A former hallmate’s brought his quartet here for some small-scale performance experience. I sit down and spend most of the performance trying to physically restrain my cringes at off-pitch notes and jittery timing, both of which literally give me goose-bumps in their imprecision.

Sometimes life’s little juxtapositions amuse me.

Fumbling With Múm

I already have problems writing anything remotely original, profound or unpretentious about a lot of the conventional instrument-based music I listen to, despite the fact that I like to believe I appreciate it on more than a superficial level, so I’m not even going to try to say anything more about Múm’s Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK other than that it is one of the most exquisite little collections of bleeps, fuzz, static, dinky music-boxes and glockenspiel chimes that I’ve heard in a long time.

Force Of Habit (20 Minute Loop)

Sometimes I probably take music deconstruction too far (although I hardly ever write about it here for fear of (a) sounding pretentious and (b) being wrong) but it was quite an epiphany when I was blissing out to Force Of Habit (20 Minute Loop) yesterday and trying to figure out what made a reasonably ordinary sounding song feel so tragically beautiful, and realized it was the augmented fifths in the chorus. (There you go, guilty of (a) already. Proceed with caution.)

Kelly Atkins’ and Greg Giles’ voices don’t convey anything particularly special when singing on their own but the minute their harmonies begin you’re drawn into their misery; they’re staying up all night “finessing a way of keeping each other down”, they’re locked into a relationship destroying itself by “force of habit”, and those augmented fifths strain at the seams with hurt and helplessness and regret.

I hasten to add that the song doesn’t reflect my current mental state at all, and I hope it never does. For now the lump in my throat is pure sympathy, no empathy.

East, West, Buying CDs Is Best

I’m sure foot reflexology is an enjoyable and beneficial form of alternative therapy when actually done by a foot reflexologist, but right now the most visible effects of the foot reflexology slippers my mother sent from home via my brother are that I jump a mile every time I put them on and shriek “Fuck me, that hurts.”

“Retail therapy”, on the other hand, is a phrase too Generation X’y and Douglas Coupland stylie even for this Coupland fan (“parental units” is another), but it undeniably works wonders once embarked on. Sunday saw the acquisition of:

  • Closer (Joy Division)
  • Music Has The Right To Children (Boards of Canada, finally)
  • Sound01: A Big Dada Sampler (excellent)
  • Hip-Hop 24/7 (3 CDs featuring a surprisingly good range of styles: Roots Manuva, Aim, Jeru The Damaja, Public Enemy, Sugarhill Gang, and, er, Snoop)
  • Urban Funk Breaks III (also much better than your usual bog standard Ultimate! Party! Breakbeats! compilation)
    (all of the above for a total of £28.85 at HMV)
  • three pink items of clothing (one little top and two unmentionables)

Yet another saddening example of the triumph of evil Western capitalist values and consumerist culture over ye olde Oriental ways, I suppose.

Rocket (Smashing Pumpkins)

Ever since Yoichi nearly banged my door down in glee on Tuesday brandishing the Smashing Pumpkins DVD he’d just bought, and we rushed downstairs and monopolized the TV room by sheer noise and enthusiasm and nostalgia, thumping out drumming climaxes on the tables, belting out choruses and air-guitaring ourselves into a frenzy, everything has been building up to this morning.

Sun. Breeze. Saturday. All you need is Rocket.

Around 1.00 the riffs start sliding into that wonderful progression and I realize the rules I learnt in Grade 5 music theory about how some progressions just work and always will were actually spot on.

Around 1.20 what I’ve always somehow thought of as the “Indian motif” comes in. It’s too insistent and compelling to feel sensuous, but it’s damn sexy in its own way all the same.

They haven’t hit us with the big chorus yet. It’s coming. At 2.00 the guitar wails steadily and inexorably upwards, Billy sings “the moon is out, the stars invite. Think I’ll leave toniiiiiiiiight…” and we’re off, up, away, employ all the rocket metaphors you want, baby, because they’re all good.