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.