Raw Materials - Album Review - Love's Crushing Diamond

Love's Crushing Diamond, Mutual Benefit, 2013

Rarely do I get excited about indie folk. Nor do I usually expect cohesively crafted albums from the genre. Love's Crushing Diamond is stunning and beautiful start to finish. Just seven tracks, coming in just over a half hour, the album maintains a balanced restraint throughout. At times impressionistic (hear the sun rise in the opening moments?) and borrowing tricks from dream-pop, the songs seem bigger than indie folk, though the banjo part makes sure it knows its roots. Built around the symbol of the river and all of it's possible meanings, it's an album about transitoriness, about the demand placed on our mortal souls to swim upstream; the river is strong, but, as we see in the final track, "Strong River", we are up to the challenge - the opening lyrics repeated as the closing lyrics: have we gone full-circle? Have we been swimming in place? All we know, for our efforts, is all the river knows: "The river only knows to carry on..."

Ideal listening conditions: the closing hours of a long road trip; the sun is down, the passengers asleep, and this comes on, referring you both backward to the road covered, and ahead, to home, and, hints, restlessly, at to the next journey. 

Raw Materials - Plastic Ono Honor

7th Floor, Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, from Take Me To The Land Of Hell, 2013

7th Floor incorporates some really interesting sounds. From the groovy percussion (nice bongos/congas), which has a Talking Heads quality to it, to the funky guitars, which are perfectly layered with varying degrees of distortion. The synths and B3 organ fill in the spaces excitedly. My favorite part of this song is the ascending riff behind the vocals right before the chorus. Ono’s spoken word approach to the vocals enhances the surreal content of the lyrics which have a nightmare-like quality to them.

“So I slowly stepped outside 

And stood over the body

Maybe it was not me after all

It was only a shadow”

Her screams and throaty vocalizations at the end are quiet intriguing too. Her voice is mixed very well throughout, with well timed delays emphasizing certain words like “shadow”. Ono sounds inspired and confident with the power of her wailing words.

Other cool tracks to check out on Take Me To The Land Of Hell:

• Take Me To The Land Of Hell
• Bad Dancer
• There’s No Goodbye Between Us
• Cheshire Cat Cry

Isolation, John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band, 1970

“You’re just a human...a victim of the insane”

What can I say about Isolation? It’s one of my all time favorite Lennon songs. The moving, yet soulful piano, the simple drums (sans hi hat) and meandering bass lines, and quaint lyrics just resonate with me. Plus, the bridge is phenomenal the way it breaks down to just kick drum, piano, and Lennon’s aching doubled voice panned hard left and right. After a rather condemning description of the world and our place in it, Lennon absolves humanity by wittingly pleading insanity in one long sustained cry, at which point his doubled voice pans to the center of the spectrum and merges into one (each voice no longer isolated from one another).   

In honor of John Lennon (Oct. 9th 1940 - Dec. 8th 1980)

Raw Materials - Lyrical Doubt, Rhythmic Resolve

We Carry on, Portishead, from, Third, 2008

Opening dramatically with an alarm tone, a gong, and then a rather tribal beat on the toms and hi-hat, We Carry on quickly reaches cruising speed. The most up-tempo track on Third - and maybe on any of their previous albums - We Carry on easily stands out (compare preceding and following tracks, e.g.). The near relentless drum rhythm and synth-riff, the two-tone alarm (evoking the 'locked-in' signal of a fighter jet), and the harried vocals all give the impression of very urgent anxiety, and of pursuit. The effect of the trance-like drum beat is that of an adrenaline fueled, entranced flight - during the verses the focus is very narrow, and tight; this opens up with the 'bridge' part - "Oh can't you see...I bleed the taste of life" - at the very point the lyrics address us and the martial snare enters. Instrumentally, the song almost seems to be an extended war cry - lyrically, however, the song is about surrender: 'can't' seems to be the most frequent word; the song is about ineffability, indecision, doubt, and, above all, begrudgingly 'going on'.

This track, like everyone on this masterful album, demands close listening, in a way that their early work didn't. There are some interesting details amidst the other wise rather monotonous song. Of course, the drum beat during the chorus breaks the spell; notice too the recurrence of the 'alarm' tone during the chorus ("On....and On...) and grating, cloying guitar; the backing vocals during what I've here called the bridge, haunting, and not giving the impression of company (indeed it is Gibbons herself) but just more solitude; also notice the stunted bass part that comes out from under the drum beat in the bridge; finally, notice the slight, almost wryly humorous pitch-bend in the main synth-riff just before it fades out completely. Even this fade out just adds to this feeling of the burdensome nature of going on in the face of something like an eternal recurrence of the same: it says, to quote Beckett, I can't go on. I'll go on.

Afterburner, Panda Bear, from Tomboy, 2011

Speaking of flight, Panda Bear's Afterburner seemed an obvious choice for juxtaposition. It is built around a similar driving one-and-two-and beat, gaining early and retaining this momentum throughout, and developing through the addition of layers. The lyrical content is also similar, expressing an anxiety about attaining, about slipping up, of weariness and skepticism. Especially interesting sonically, I found, are the strummed electric guitar, which enters soon, and the engine-like noise that opens the track and reappears several times. Like in the Portishead, one seems to get a breath of fresh air periodically, here with the vocal heights reached by "I don't buy, I don't buy it". Many of the lyrics are stuttered, and though he is constantly talking, he actually utters few complete thoughts. After the vocals exit, we come upon a nice expanse of Reich-like shifting rhythmic layers (there's at least one xylophone in there!). Both of these tracks - the Portishead and the Panda Bear - create what is commonly the effect of rhythmic layering - the impression of a sonic space, a landscape. What they also do in these cases is create the impression that we are traveling through them. Despite the reluctance these songs express to the pace that drives them, despite the fact that it is not we who initiated this ceaseless motion but rather we were thrown into existence, still, "it moves forwards"; "We carry on." 

Live Performances

Tiff, Poliça, at Mill City Nights in Minneapolis, 9-29-13

Raw Materials - The Polished Approach 12-1

Games People Play, The Alan Parsons Project, from The Definitive Collection, 1997

The Alan Parsons Project is music I never throughly explored (maybe similar to your experience with Exile On Mainstreet). Sifting through their definitive collection is somewhat overwhelming due to the spectrum of their sound, but I spent a few quality hours introducing myself to what I can imagine will be a long and fruitful relationship. Games People Play stood out in the initial listening phase by provoking a gut level appreciation for rock n’ roll. It has incredible drive (most notably sustained by the synth arpeggio and cowbell) until being swept out over an ocean of ethereal pads and liquid jungle noises in a quintessential breakdown leading up to a three section climactic guitar solo (love the screams in the background). This sound is in sharp contrast to that of Modest Mouse. In fact, this might be one example in which a real polished approach can work. There’s a deep space in the music and all the instruments spread out over vast terrains, while simultaneously leading each other in a primordial dance. 

This live performance in Madrid in 2004 has a different guitar solo which pays a cool homage to Jimi Hendrix by adding a couple licks form All Along The Watchtower at the end. Very tasty. Nice to see old guys rocking out that hard.

End Of The Day, Beck, from Sea Change, 2002

The mellowness of the guitars on this song is refreshing. They slip slide around your head carving a pocket for Beck’s pensive vocals. The chorus is quiet incredible how the incremental melody stair-steps down. Listen for what sounds like a distorted Fender Rhodes in the pre-chorus and chorus playing sustained low notes. The lyrics “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, but it still kills me like it did before,” remind me a little of The National in how personal they sound while maintaining a poetic interpretability. 

Raw Materials: The Deconstructed Lounge Act

Plastic Palace People, Scott Walker, from Scott 2, 1968

Scott Walker's early music is a strange blend: it takes the form of an easy-listening, 60s, lounge crooner but its content deals with death, disillusionment, and inauthenticity in a highly literate way. By the time of his second album (1968) he is already beginning to deconstruct this lounge act; you need only compare Montague Terrace (In Blue), from his debut Scott with Plastic Palace People: both are ostensibly about day dream and fantasy; while in the former the orchestra amplifies the sentimentality and provides an expansive, dreamy, spaciousness within which its subjects can be willfully naively romantic, in the latter, the orchestra serves to disorient us, making dizzying loops, hemming us in its circling - the effect of the squealing strings in the chorus is one of claustrophobia, and indeed, their sour, flat and cloying tone serve to deflate the romanticism of the now self-deluded subjects of the song.

The most remarkable moment in the song is the stark transition from the verse - about Billy floating above the town - to the chorus - about the emptiness of the denizens of the plastic palace. While the former is a wistfully dreamy (and tragic) narrative, the latter takes on the self-assurance (due to the entry of the bass and horns as well as the less breathy vocals)  of the shimmering lounge act, which now feels as smug and insincere as the plastic people themselves, until it finally breaks down: the instruments anarchistic, Walker's voice frightened and reverberated: "Like gods they bark replies." A horrifying notion. Then back to Billy.

Beyond the various complex emotions the strange instrumental composition evokes, the lyrics themselves challenge us: asking us at first to take them literally (in particular in the narrative about Billy) but then abandoning us to increasingly obscure referents ("She steals her cards tomorrow" "buzzing eyes" "submarine air") as well as syntactic disturbances (Not till I've seen the sky's not lit up//In tears, child try and understand). This intensification of abstraction will characterize the rest of Walkers's musical career - listen, for example, to Farmer in the City, off of 1995's Tilt, or, well, anything off 2005's The Drift. By this point the menace hinted at by the crooning balladeer Walker has become fully manifested. Most notable about Scott's later work is his complete disregard for familiar vocal melodies - he doesn't even sound like he's singing anymore - or, rather, his singing seems to mimic the actual melodic intonations of speech, and, in particular, the speech of suffering. His vision is pretty uncompromising, even if you don't really want to listen.

Silver Trembling Hands, The Flaming Lips, from Embryonic, 2009 

The immediate similarity between Silver Trembling Hands and Plastic Palace People is the use of a big, sweeping, lounge act sound for the chorus, which stands as a rather abrupt break from the verses. This similarity is more than just in the instrumental composition - these 'self-assured' choruses both serve to underline the theme of escapism - to the plastic palace, to getting high. And like the Walker, the Flaming Lips' track suggest menacing forces from which one flees: the blindfold, the secret society, the jaguar (which reminds me of the Leopard Dante encounters in the dark woods prior to his descent into the Inferno), night, fight: tomorrow. It suggests a duel, a fight to the death. But it is just suggestive - what exactly "The" fear is is left shrouded - and this adds to the sense of menace, it allows us to imagine the worst, at least until we too are swept away with the organs and horns and bells and harp of the chorus. But the driving, pursuing rhythm of the verse returns, and we feel, once again, hunted, as prey to something - the fear is certainly animalistic: this is enforced not just by the jaguars and "the animals and trees and insects" of the second verse, but by the simian "oooh - oooooh" and the cries that open the song, and indeed persist throughout. "Is it wrong not to believe//nature makes us all compete?" This simple musing refers us to the fact that there just isn't enough matter for all the would be life forms. That the individual survives by assimilating the living world around it.

Another remarkable feature of the song is the repetition of this "She" - the very anonymity of which gives her a universal symbolic power, and also repeats the technique of suggesting while shrouding, thus heightening the song's suspense. Finally, I want to point out the breathless transition with which "daggers", presumably part of the pre-chorus, is tacked on to the end of the last line of the verse, another technique that adds to the urgency and violence of this song. It tempts us to flee with its chorus, from what we know comes tomorrow - fight, and, inevitably, night. 

Raw Materials: Dynamic, Big Picture, Indie Rock

Third Planet, Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica, 2000

I was a latecomer to Modest Mouse, but a song like this has, I think, something of a timeless appeal, at least so far as this is possible for indie rock to attain. No doubt the immediate appeal to me is the sentimental, semi-philosophical lyrics - the somewhat ad hoc beginning lyrics hit there frenetic stride with "Your heart felt good...it was dripping pitch and made of wood" and resolve with "and that's how the world will end". To me the progression of the chorus evokes a literary epiphany: an awakening that moves from a sensuous exhilaration - feeling the heart, the cold wet grass, the light of the moon - to a collected, profound insight - how the world began, how it will end. This having the whole of the world - the 'third planet' - in one's grasp is repeated once achieved (the universe is shaped exactly like the earth...) and by the end renounced: the return to the individual with all his failed attempts to cope with life: "Everything that keeps me together is falling apart...". The song comes full circle - from self-critical resignation to that moment of clarity during a moment of love-making back to the resignation: if you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were. These lyrics are ambitious - they span the abstract ("When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming around in the water in the oceans in our bodies and another had been found another ocean on the planet given that our blood is just like the Atlantic) to the concrete ("outside, naked..."), from the (suspiciously) sacred ("When they get to the promised land...") to the profane ("Baby cum angels..."), from the impersonal whole (the universe is shaped...") to the 'dear self' ("everything that keeps me together...). As such, it has a ambitious totality to it; as such, it can evoke our sentiments about the big picture. 

But beyond the lyrical power of the song, it is also an achievement of dynamic composition and instrumentation. The variety of guitar parts adds to the ability of the song to move us emotionally. Sonically the song pulls us in different directions - it has a grandness to it (the alternation between the subdued verses/bridge parts and the raucous, built-up chorus, the reverberated vocals, the humming bass, and is that a woodwind instrument I hear?) and yet has a 'garage rock' quality to it too: particularly - the production on the drums and the chorus guitar part. I think that the former quality lends to its ability to be emotionally effective, while the latter adds to its perceived sincerity - a too polished song might have to fight against its own self-assurance.

Dry the Rain, The Beta Band, The Three E.P.'s, 1998

I think the great virtue of this song lies in the transition made mid-song - from it's slacker beginning, it sort of comes alive, with busier instrumentation (especially the addition of the horns), a catchier, livelier, vocal melody, the entrance of vocal harmony, a punchier bass, and even a rarely used increase in volume. I'd say it transforms from rather lazy to an energized: lyrically, we begin lying in bed, choking on a vitamin, eyes of gloom; this evolves to speaking out loud, to the singer's being light. Listen to the stumbling, clunking bass become lower, groovier. This song definitely works through this contrast - much like the Modest Mouse track. And like the Modest Mouse, it doesn't suffer from being too polished (take the warm, static noise that underlays the track) and retains the sincerity of a track that, we might believe, could be produced rather faithfully live.

Commentary:

Comment on 3rd Planet

I especially like the lyrics in this song too. I think the timbre of Issac Brock's voice (his vocal chords plus any filtering effects used on the recording) is the distinct element that draws us into the song (in the same way the fence that breaks the picture plane of Max Ernst's Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale effectively invites us into the surreal scene.)

Brock's lyrics are bizzare, but believable, unlike Dan Wilson's in Breathless, that have a tinge of insincerity (you hit the nail on the head by comparing them to a "teenagers first stab at poetry.") 

The one line of Brock's that keeps catching my ear, that I don't understand, is "I've got this thing that I consider my only art of fucking people over." To me the profanity seems arbitrary and unnecessary (but that's partly because I don't know what he means.) I find it interesting how he repeatedly incorporates the idea of three ("we used to be three and not just two" as well as "a third had just been made") and references conception ("didn't know then was it a son was it a daughter.") I also like the way the beginning sounds like an indie rock lullaby until the drums burst in with that raw garage ambience and the heavier guitars rocket-ship into head banging orbit.

Further listening: Out The Window, Violent Femmes, from Add It Up (1981-1993)