O, Song! Daily Links

daily linktumblr, etc. (about) (my other tumblr)

Favourite Albums of 2009

In a way, my favourite albums of 2009 – the ones I most listened to, the ones that inhabited my head the most – were an album from 1999 (XTC’s Apple Venus Vol. 1) and an album I played on (Lazy Susan) that will come out in 2010. I couldn’t get enough of Apple Venus and the cleverness and snark of its songwriting, of songs as perfectly crafted as “River Of Orchids”, “I’d Like That”, or “Your Dictionary” (I find the production on 1980s XTC to be difficult listening). The Lazy Susan album – so far untitled, and with an exact tracklist yet to be decided – is the kind of thing that I can’t quite believe I contributed to. Those are my sounds, my ideas, my style that help enliven those songs; it seems a simultaneously more mature and more fun set of songs than anything they’ve done before. I suspect I could be biased. In other new developments in my music taste, I also listened to a lot of Prince, becoming most fascinated with Sign O The Times, and listened to a lot of Robyn Hitchcock – Black Snake Diamond Role and Element Of Light in particular (though I was reasonably indifferent to the albums Prince and Robyn Hitchcock put out in 2009).

Once upon a time I put a lot of credence into making lists of my top albums of the year. I gave the albums marks, with certain percentages of the marks coming from (averaged) individual songs, from the success of the overall thematic arc of the album, from the simple sound of the album, and even from the artwork. But eh. I know that this year there are three albums that I really loved in particular: The Decemberists’ Hazards Of Love, Emmy The Great’s First Love and the self-titled Telekinesis album. If I were to rank them, I know which would be #1, but not which of these would be #2 or #3. I will probably also make a post about the other 6-7 albums I’d put in a top 10.

The Decemberists – Hazards Of Love

The Decemberists’ 2003 EP The Tain was the point where they became interesting, their own thing, rather than a lesser, more restrained, Neutral Milk Hotel; it combined the literate indie folk of their earlier stuff with absurd prog-rock musical narratives, with Celtic myth and some interesting sonic textures. The Hazards Of Love, of course, is The Tain magnified. But, then, so was The Crane Wife, which didn’t grab me. So what is it about The Hazards Of Love?

The things I most like about The Hazards Of Love:

  1. Colin Meloy singing about killing babies. As Matthew Perpetua pointed out on his mp3blog Fluxblog (mp3 still works too), “The Rake’s Song” (also see the video) uses the quirks of his voice to great effect. Where most rock singers slur and slide between words and notes, Meloy is quite a stilted, well-pronounced singer. In this, you can hear the influence of the icy folk maidens of the 1960s – Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny – on his singing. Because of this odd, uncomfortable singing style, inflected with English folk, Meloy sings a good villainous lead vocal – you could almost imagine him singing “no, Mr Bond, I expect you to die”. So, when he voices the character of the Rake, who sings of killing his children and then, “I expect that you think that I should be haunted/ But it never really bothers me”, there’s a genuine creepiness about it.
  2. The Diamonds, Lavender and My Brightest, singing the parts of Margaret and the Queen. The different sounds of their voices contrast with Meloy fantastically; Lavender Diamond’s Margaret has a sweet innocence to it that brings a warmth to the lyrics that Meloy’s voice cannot. And My Brighest Diamond, singing the parts of the Queen, communicates the Queen’s unearthly magical power simply in the tone of her voice, half Roy Orbison and half Robert Plant. It’s a voice all the more powerful for its control; most people singing as forcefully as she does sing without control, breathing raggedly, with volume rising up and down – whereas she doesn’t sound like she’s even breaking a sweat, even when she sings the highest, most powerful notes at the end of “The Wanting Comes In Waves / Repaid”.
  3. The simultaneous sheer unlikeliness and completely-making-sense-ness of the several Led Zeppelin grooves on the album (e.g., “Won’t Want For Love”, “The Wanting Comes In Waves / Repaid”). I mean, they’re a indie-folk band who sing literate pop songs. But the Led Zeppelin makes so much sense musically; Led Zeppelin were huge fans of icy English folk – see “Battle Of Evermore”, complete with Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny on vocals. And Led Zeppelin’s lyrics often portrayed a similar milieu to what the Decemberists are trying for on The Hazards Of Love, mysterious medieval magic and all.

The best thing about the album is its sheer sound – the sounds of the singing voices, the Led Zeppelin grooves, the beautifully recorded instruments – twelve string guitar and organ, harpsichord and autoharp, Rhodes and double bass. All of that is a powerful hook in itself. It’s a carefully composed album, with good hooks on almost every song, and cleverly crafted lyrics (but this is so expected from Meloy that it almost doesn’t rate comment). But also, the album is full of dynamic swells, lulls, and abrupt blasts of power. It’s a concept album, but the concept is secondary – or even tertiary - to the music, and to the sound.

Various free downloadable goodies: a PDF of the album booklet; an mp3 download of the Decemberists doing the entirety The Hazards Of Love live at SXSW, live on NPR.

Telekinesis – Telekinesis

When I’ve tried to describe Telekinesis to friends, the usual description I’ve given is “like a cross between Nada Surf and Weezer”. Michael Lerner’s vocals often have a similar quality to them to Matthew Caws’ singing on Nada Surf songs like “Inside Of Love”; you hear suggestions of fiercely held emotions, but also a humility and unassumingness. He’s not really trying to make you feel his emotions, but he wants you to know that he feels them. But Lerner writes more unabashed guitar pop songs than Nada Surf would, and when the walls of guitar hit in songs like “Coast Of Carolina”, they’re big, dumb and wonderful, and slightly Pinkerton.

Telekinesis seem to get called “power pop” a lot, but my power pop friends seem relatively unperturbed by them, if they’ve even heard of them (which is odd, seeing they’re on Merge, one of the biggest indie labels in the US). I’m not sure they’re particularly power pop – not enough Beatles worship or harmonies. What they are, however, is unabashed pop with loud guitars. Very little on the album feels like filler or weak songwriting – the hooks dig in after a couple of listens, and they satisfy again and again. But the focus isn’t on the pop songs themselves, or on the guitars, as is often the case in power pop; instead the focus in Telekinesis seems to me to be on the emotions in the songs.

As a lyricist Lerner is fairly matter-of-fact – apart from the first track, “Rust”, there’s little in the way of metaphor, abstract imagery, or fancy words. Instead, much of the album seems either inspired by overseas travel or the desire for travel. The most obvious in this respect is “Tokyo”, which begins “I went to Tokyo/Only in my dreams because they’re all I know”, but the travel imagery pervades the album: “dreaming of the coast of Carolina”, “people of London, where do you go to sleep?”, “we booked a flight to another country”, “freaked out in a foreign room”, “coast to coast, I will travel any length”. There are songs about travel, songs about wanting to travel, songs about being freaked out by being in another country. Lerner obviously has the travel bug in a big way.

I don’t really have the travel bug, though I’ve travelled enough as an adult – to Europe, to Japan, within Australia – to relate to the details of the themes. For me, I think, if I relate to the album, it is because the travel functions within his music as a proxy for an exploration of who he is as a person, a voyage of self-discovery; to freak out in a foreign room or to kiss someone in another country is to find out things about yourself you might not have already known. And perhaps the dominant tone of the album is openness to experience, openness to finding out who you are.

Various free downloadable/watchable goodies and such: an mp3 of “Coast of Carolina”; official videos for “Tokyo” and “Awkward Kisser”; “Calling All Doctors” video live on KEXP; an NPR Tiny Desk concert; mp3s of a Daytrotter live session; and an interview with Aquarium Drunkard.

Emmy The Great – First Love (bonus track edition)

There is a lot about Emmy The Great that screams quite loudly that she’s a wispy, whimsical acoustic-based female singer-songwriter. The transparently silly stage name, the brightly coloured handmade-collage on the album artwork, the interviews where she claims her lyrics are all written about a fantasy village. And, if you don’t listen too closely, that is what you will hear. Musically, it is uncomplicated acoustic guitar-based folk music, intimate in tone; she most reminds me of the Australian singer-songwriter Laura Jean, in the tone of her voice, and in the roomy sound and occasional bursts of chamber instruments. It’s always pretty, sometimes quite stark, and it’s rare that she writes a song with a weak melody. But what draws me into the music on this album is the contradiction between this cutesy image, and the brutal honesty of the lyrics.

Lyrically, First Love is most reminiscent of Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville in terms of it describing sex, relationships and life from the perspective of a twentysomething female. But where Liz Phair describes a long string of casual sex encounters in a song like “Fuck and Run”, Emmy, in “We Almost Had A Baby”, fantasises about having become pregnant to a deadbeat ex-boyfriend, and being able to ruin his life via the power she would have as the mother of his child. It’s a horrible, unpleasant lyric in one sense – I can think of few worse reasons to bring a child into the world – but the song is powerful. Singer-songwriters often portray themselves as romantic heroes, or as victims, in a self-serving and not entirely honest kind of way; Emmy, on the other hand, isn’t afraid to wear unpleasant emotions that most of us would hide from public view – disappointment, revenge, gloating, and schaudenfreude. To an unusual extent, you feel as if you have a pretty good idea who Emmy is after listening to her music. And all this over a cutesy 12/8 doo-wop girl group chord progression.

And, much like Liz Phair, Emmy is also unafraid of explicit sexual imagery - “I knew you best back when love was just a feeling that ran out between my legs onto the back of my dress” (“Two Steps Forward”) - and shrewd characterisation - “in the garden of a girl whose mum was friends with Elton John, or so she kept telling us” (“Two Steps Forward”). But there’s considerably more subtlety and poetry in Emmy’s work than on Exile In Guyville (not that this is a criticism of Liz Phair – those songs work because they are blunt).

The other thing in her lyrics that draws me in is her obvious pop music fandom, and the way she riffs on references to music (“Dylan”, “MIA”) and television (“24”) to illustrate complex situations and feelings, often quite slyly. For all the brutal emotional honesty, the songs are written quite playfully, full of wordplay, clever allusions, and poetic technique. Take, for example, “Dylan”. There are thinly veiled references throughout the song to Bob Dylan song lyrics - “reading an Italian book from the 13th century is not that hard to do”, for example, riffs off a line in “Tangled Up In Blue”, and the backing music – all that gypsy violin – evokes Dylan’s 1975 album Desire. But because the song is about someone who is unwilling to talk about Dylan’s lyrics with her, who wants his emotional connection to Dylan untainted (which she basically uses as a metaphor for his lack of emotional commitment in general) the way she uses the music and the lyrics comes off as another sly way to get the point across - “I really actually get Dylan!” as a metaphor for “I would have been yours if you were ready for commitment”.

Various free downloadable/watchable goodies: mp3 of “We Almost Had A Baby”; official videos for “First Love”, “We Almost Had A Baby”, and “Easter Parade”; Black Cab Sessions video of “Two Steps Forward”; “Dylan” live on Jools Holland; and a session on rockfeedback.tv.

  1. o-song posted this