Two Memories

Yesterday, trying to wake myself up, I put on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. In the first few seconds London is asked to make some noise for Public Enemy, and I remembered making lots of noise for Public Enemy, a few months ago, in London.

Last night, trying to get myself off to sleep. I put on Sigur Ros’s (), and lay there in the dark listening, remembering sitting entranced as that same opening track started their gig in London, that sparse beauty in the bass clef, that earnest weary voice singing words that mean nothing and everything at the same time.

Purty

Some music is real purty. These songs make me want to turn my face upwards and sway from side to side, kind of like a tipsy wolf baying at the moon:

  • Black Heart (Calexico). He sings “One man’s righteousness is another man’s long haul” and the high plaintive strings unfold, destiny rushing up to overwhelm you like a flash flood in the desert.
  • Don’t Worry Baby (Beach Boys). Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson, if you only knew what those soaring high falsetto notes in the verses do to me, you would take out a restraining order pronto. I just found out the song has an entire review to itself at AMG and is analysed in mindboggling musical detail elsewhere, so I will refrain from further gibbering and go try to solidify my melted innards.
  • Stephanie Says (Velvet Underground). That violin melody in the background is just indescribable. I probably shouldn’t be describing anything by (arguably) founding fathers of punk as a darling perfect little gem of a song you just want to keep close to your heart and love and cherish forever, but it really just is.

In case you were wondering, I am not drunk. These songs are just really that purty.

Parentheses Before Sleeping

I was lying in bed the other night waiting to fall asleep, and the Sigur Ros () album was playing softly as it often does at these times. The first three songs of the album always seem to me to convey a sense of deep, unutterable yearning (I can see the movie soundtrack producers lining up already). A gentle tension starts to build when track 3 introduces that repeating (but not repetitive) sequence of notes on the piano; they ascend and descend over and over again, and even though the notes are always the same you get the feel of wafting slowly upwards, maybe following a loosely spiralling path, and when the piano finally comes in several octaves higher with the same sequence of notes I find myself imagining fireworks underwater, clarity found, and quiet contentment.

[Posterity music-geekness note: Strange. I was writing this, and also remembering how, at the time, my anticipation of that pivotal moment was affecting my ability to enjoy the music as it happened. This also happens with Orbital’s In Sides album, when I’m waiting for The Box Part 1 to segue into The Box Part 2.]

Sigur Ros’s () – First Impressions

First impressions of the new Sigur Ros: it feels sparser to me than Agaetis Byrjun. More pared down, less of a feeling of majesty. It doesn’t transport me the way that album did. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the restraint – the more I listen to Agaetis Byrjun the more the vocals seem over-emoted, and what I used to think was wonderful flow sometimes feels a bit samey these days (though to be fair, intensive listening probably contributed to that too). This one’s got guitars and buildups the first didn’t have, and somewhere in track 8 I was reminded of Mogwai at its best, which is always a good thing for music to remind me of.

I don’t give a toss about the whole Hopelandic thing (the Cocteau Twins have been there done that), and find their doing a John Cage with this CD booklet a bit pretentious, but at the end of the day they still make extraordinarily evocative music, and I can’t wait to see them in February.

[For reviews I agree with see Pitchfork and Almost Cool. The first four paragraphs of the neumu review, on the other hand, are a veritable showcase of Sigur Ros review cliches.]

I Hear…Goodnight (Low and Dirty Three)

I Hear…Goodnight (Low and Dirty Three) is consuming me with its gorgeosity. Hours I spend not listening to it are hours spent in a world without beauty, hope or grace. It plays unceasingly in my head, slowing the world around me to a languid gentle crawl of violins and harmony and candlelit desert porches. I shout at people on the streets, asking them if they hear goodnight too. They must. Everyone has to.

Do Black People Love Nick Cave?

Scattered thoughts while trying and failing to understand international trade law, and listening to Nick Cave (No More Shall We Part):

  • Something about the dinky piano instrumentation in 15 Feet Of Pure White Snow reminds me of Tubular Bells (Mike Oldfield), in a good way.
  • I think God Is In The House doesn’t really work as the title of a Nick Cave song, unless he’s trying to be ironic. If I were a bootleg remixer, I’d find some way to do God Is In The House vs Jesus In The House (Novelty Irish release by Father Brian and the Fun Loving Cardinals) vs Our House (Madness). Perhaps all to a house beat.
  • I love whoever came up with Black People Love Us, despite being yellow.

Oh dear. This is one of those days where boredom breeds banality.

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.

Celine Dion Reviewed

I have decided that every now and then on this site I should do something uncharacteristic. Branch out from the same ol’ same ol’. Stretch wings, and hopefully find myself surprised by unexpected gold at the bottom of rainbows, light at the end of tunnels, new and unhackneyed metaphors bubbling up from cesspools of cliché…

So here are some excerpts from a rather enjoyably-written review of Celine Dion’s latest album.

On My Heart Will Go On:
“The problem wasn’t so much an excess of technique, but rote excess. (Also, ever since Titanic I kept picturing Celine as the prow of a ship.) There was a primal leviathan of something, but it failed to engulf me. I felt right to be unengulfable, but not right to be ignorant about the nature of the engulfment. Twenty-eight million people can be wrong, but they’re not all likely to allow themselves to be bored.”

On lyrics:
“The sky is touched in one song, moonlight is touched in another, two songs have light in someone’s eyes, nine of the first 10 have sky or weather metaphors, rain can be cleansing but storms signify trouble, sun signifies rebirth, heaven signifies heaven, every child creates a skylight of beauty, etc”

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.