Originally posted Friday, October 26, 2007
Track review: “Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes” from Welcome to the Night Sky by Wintersleep
It seems to me that the most powerful aesthetic responses are based on a certain kind of mistake.* You hear a poet speaking in your own voice – not your voice, of course, but the one you would use if you could see more vividly, speak more clearly – and the world means something again, the wind animating the leaves, the late arm of light slung across one corner of a field – these things speak to you again, just like when you were a kid and believed that the universe had nothing better to do than to tell you things.Or you hear a song, a human voice expressing the sort of misery in which one seems intractably (if irrationally) alone – and feel, for a moment, wholly understood, feel as if this voice, coming from nowhere, suddenly spoke to you directly and personally.The nature of the mistake, I think, is that it is recognized immediately, even simultaneously – that’s probably why it hurts so much. You return to the world as it is – a world where the trees aren’t talking to you, where the voice on the radio doesn’t know your name, and your unhappiness is still very much your own.Philip Larkin offered his own take on the error in a poem called “Faith-Healing”, and though he was speaking of rural women seduced to hope by the half-minute’s attention of an American evangelist, the mistake is common in religion and art – wherever an impersonal gesture, a prayer or a movie or song – is taken personally so as to resurrect some spark, some ardency and self-absorption that properly dies sometime in adolescence: “[A]s if a kind of dumb/And idiot child within them still survives/To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice/At last calls them alone, that hands have come/To lift and lighten...”My own dumb and idiot child, who has slept pretty soundly through these last several months of illness, woke a couple weeks back at the sound of Wintersleep’s “Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes”. If you read my entry on “No One Would Riot For Less” you might notice a tiny bit of an apocalyptic strain in my thinking lately, and “Dead Letter” speaks to that, drawing epic lines between sickness and grief and numbness in private life, and the public spectre of environmental collapse.The thing is, it doesn’t sound like an epic song, With its downbeat piano-based setting and intimate Hayden-esque vocals, “Dead Letter” sounds more like a message in a bottle than a public service announcement – or, rather, like the abandoned letter the song opens with: a voice that doesn’t expect to be understood or answered or to reach its destination, a voice that isn’t even sure if it has anything to say beyond the usual “it hurts” or “I can’t” or “help me make it through the night”, but is compelled to keep speaking anyway. What it says is oracular, almost incomprehensible, but points towards a crack in the world mirroring the crack in the self.In the face of the logical response, you just think the world is broken because you are, the voice affirms, tentatively, unswervingly, that he’s seen something “real and significant” in the swamp of self-absorbed pain.“I think it’s coming,” he sings, again and again, even if in between he admits that he brings a fair bit of personal baggage to the question and yeah maybe his therapist is right and maybe he thinks too much and maybe that’s even part of why he’s sick in the first place, but that doesn’t change the fact that a whole lot of people are sick in the same way – numb, frantic, but mostly just really, really, tired.“Dead Letter” hits its emotional stride right after the first chorus, when, high on the momentum of the “I think it’s coming”, the singer suddenly breaks from the “I” to the “we”. “I don’t know why our bodies are dead,” he sings – and it’s both a leap of faith and an admission of defeat. The sensitive, naval-gazing singer-songwriter has abruptly shoved his face in the listener’s, announcing “I know you feel like I do” – only to look down again and shrug and say he has no clue what it all means.(Cue my “dumb and idiot child” “twitching and loud with deep hoarse tears” – Larkin again – for whom I played the song a dozen or so times the first night I heard it, not just because those sobs are the sort of thing the Object Formerly Known As My Body can actually get behind, sap running again through leaden extremities – but because of something else, unique to the sort of song that, if it works, makes you grieve for both yourself and the world in the same spasm.At some point that evening while I was wandering around, sobbing and pressing repeat and feeling comfortably sorry for myself, I noticed that I could see certain things again. Like the trees. Most years around this time I’ve been able to dredge up some feeling at the changing of the leaves, some residue of the age – say, pre-sixteen – when it was all just prelude to setting the world on fire.So this year I was watching, cautiously, waiting to have my gaze caught by a patch of vivid colour I knew was there because my eye registered it, passing over, no nothing. But after wandering around and hearing “Dead Letter” for the umpteenth time, something happened – nothing, of course, like the miracle in the faith healer’s tent, no abrupt return of the deadened sense “I can SEE!” – but I did notice a patch of orange, translucent in the dusk and vivid against the solid background of evergreens, and I noticed that I could look at it pretty closely and keep looking and not feel as if it was all some exhausting assignment to find the world beautiful.It helps, of course, that “Dead Letter” is a very pretty song, full of open chords and with a delicate, piano-led counterpoint at the climax, rising as the melody falls. It doesn’t say, “it’s all going to be okay”, doesn’t stand against the desperate lyrics, but like the brief ministrations of the huckster priest in the Larkin poem, it does surprise the listener with just enough hope to grieve again. Unlike in the Larkin poem, that hope doesn’t frame itself as a momentary regression into sweet and groundless faith. In “Dead Letter”, at least, it’s framed as a question of sorts, urgent, if unanswerable.I don’t know why our bodies are dead, either, or why 10% of women between the ages of 13 and 30 feel the need to self-mutilate into order to feel something, why my friends, those with certain genetic or psychological vulnerabilities, are breaking down fifteen, twenty earlier than their parents, or why depression has grown into an epidemic such that the WHO estimates that, if current trends continue, suicide will be the leading cause of death by 2020. I can think of lots of perfectly reasonable explanations that don’t involve projecting my private angst onto the world: we expect too much, spoiled by the materialistic eighties, we eat the wrong foods, too many pre-packages chemicals, we’re over-dependent on the constant influx of new media, the instant gratification of the digital age blah blah blah blah which has crippled our ability for deeper forms of meaning (almost none of my friends fit this last description, by the way – introspective, media-unsavvy sorts whose insularity from the culture of distraction turned out to be more liability than advantage during periods of extremity – it seems to be far more difficult to weather illness and exhaustion and hospitals when one is incapable of giving oneself up to the television set).I can think of lots of more reasonable reasons, but I’ll tell you what it feels like to me – and if I’m not projecting here, too, what it feels like to the writer of “Dead Letter” – it feels like we’re falling apart because the world is dying.Pretty stupid, huh?
*I should say that I’m not talking here about the kind of power art has over a Bach scholar who spends ten years trying to synchronize the movements of the Goldberg Variations to the order of the Fibonacci sequence or a Beatles fan who knows how every part on every track of Abbey Road was made, and has several dozen theories as to why. “Powerful” here, means the intense, immediate response for which a pop song and a Shakespeare sonnet are equally fair game. Durability, I think, is a separate question.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Track Review: "No One Would Riot For Less", Bright Eyes' Cassadaga
Originally posted Friday, October 26, 2007
This track starts as a more up-to-date version of Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” – itself a modernization of the Yom Kippur psalm to a God who shapes our ends by a logic that remains necessarily mysterious. Both songs list various horrors by which we leave the world, then partly submerge that horror in the beauty of its evocation. Cohen uses swooning back-up singers and a stark modal melody that shares its harmonic language with the songs of faith and mystery of synagogue services. Oberst uses the build-up from a lone voice, nearly lost in reverb, lapped by incoming strings to a symphonic climax that is the universal pop language for you are not alone.But “No One One Would Riot For Less” tells a fundamentally different story from “Who By Fire”. While Cohen’s version would not be entirely out of place in a ceremony for the Day of Atonement (it’d have to be a reform synagogue, of course), Oberst sings of what can’t be forgiven, of bombs and bullets falling in patterns no one seems able to account for, of a way of life so poisonous it promises to render the earth uninhabitable in a matter of centuries. Yet this song, too, looks to unify its various horrors into a single mystery: “From the madness of the government/to the vengeance of the sea/well everything is eclipsed/by the shape of destiny.”Which, at first glance, looks like a load of poetic crap. There’s a difference, a rather large difference, between 50-odd civilians blown up by a misfired “smart bomb” and a boat going down in a sudden and unpredictable storm. Until every soldier, every engineer, every mourner, every taxpayer, every last carrier of human memory is wiped off the face of the earth by some final environmental apocalypse, dead by a precision-guided bomb in your apartment in a working-class Baghdad neighbourhood is not the same as dead by bad-luck waves crashing over the side of a passenger ship.But then, that might just be the point. Maybe the word destiny means something different now than it did when the psalmist penned his lines about fire and water, sun and darkness – when it was maybe still possible to believe that things happened in their own time, in God’s time, and that there was a time for everything, even the end of time.And it meant something different when Mr. Cohen, in the wake of Vietnam and with the cold war still hovering, brought those words up to date with reference to barbiturate suicides and the self-destroying acts of the powerful – when it was no longer sufficient to speak of the ancient human frailties, terrible and intractable but somehow almost comforting, almost absolving in their necessity – not now, when we held in our hands the possibility and responsibility for complete global destruction. And it means something else again when that possibility, having gained momentum from decades of looking away, feels like it’s rolled right out of our hands.On the first track of 2003’s Lifted, Oberst signals his awakening as political songwriter with a shrilly self-lacerating tirade against a young person who tries to make sense of the world with his head stuck up his ass: “You can try and live in darkness, but you will never shake the light….When you’re wrapped up in your blankets baby, in that comfortable cocoon. But I’ve seen the day of your awakening boy, and IT’S COMING SOON.”The tone on “No One Would Riot For Less” could not be more different. “Wake, baby, wake,” Oberst sings in the final verse. “But keep that blanket around you, there’s nowhere else safe.” Meaning that the terrain of destruction is vast and unnavigable, the space of earth that we can warm and protect is real enough, but very small.I think in this song we are being asked, very gently, to give up hope. Not to ignore what’s happening exactly, not to stop recycling or donating to Oxfam or buying local or performing whatever minute acts of resistance make up the daily political life of the just-enlightened-enough-to-be-terrified-slash-stricken-with-guilt liberal masses.Just that as the world become more and more a place where things happen that we (meaning me) can’t even really imagine, maybe a little darkness isn’t such a bad thing. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to read another book on Iraq or Cambodia or the Holocaust just now, trying to put together the pieces on something I can only pretend to understand, pretend to look for solutions I’d never have the guts or power or sense of direction to help bring into being. Maybe if there are things we can’t forgive, things we can’t ask forgiveness for, maybe forgetting is what we’ve got, everything eclipsed by the shape of destiny, etc.I don’t know. I’m not sure I like this song, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the “love let us be true to one another, because the world is shit” resolution. But I’m also not sure I can answer the questions it raises. Why do you (and by you, I mean me) want to understand? If you understood fully, intellectually, emotionally, imaginatively, what’s happening in Baghdad, or the war-zones of the Congo, or the upper echelons of the Bush administration, what good would you be, anyway, either to the people suffering in countries you “can’t even pronounce the name of” or to the people around you? If you understood, all you could ever do is mourn.
This track starts as a more up-to-date version of Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” – itself a modernization of the Yom Kippur psalm to a God who shapes our ends by a logic that remains necessarily mysterious. Both songs list various horrors by which we leave the world, then partly submerge that horror in the beauty of its evocation. Cohen uses swooning back-up singers and a stark modal melody that shares its harmonic language with the songs of faith and mystery of synagogue services. Oberst uses the build-up from a lone voice, nearly lost in reverb, lapped by incoming strings to a symphonic climax that is the universal pop language for you are not alone.But “No One One Would Riot For Less” tells a fundamentally different story from “Who By Fire”. While Cohen’s version would not be entirely out of place in a ceremony for the Day of Atonement (it’d have to be a reform synagogue, of course), Oberst sings of what can’t be forgiven, of bombs and bullets falling in patterns no one seems able to account for, of a way of life so poisonous it promises to render the earth uninhabitable in a matter of centuries. Yet this song, too, looks to unify its various horrors into a single mystery: “From the madness of the government/to the vengeance of the sea/well everything is eclipsed/by the shape of destiny.”Which, at first glance, looks like a load of poetic crap. There’s a difference, a rather large difference, between 50-odd civilians blown up by a misfired “smart bomb” and a boat going down in a sudden and unpredictable storm. Until every soldier, every engineer, every mourner, every taxpayer, every last carrier of human memory is wiped off the face of the earth by some final environmental apocalypse, dead by a precision-guided bomb in your apartment in a working-class Baghdad neighbourhood is not the same as dead by bad-luck waves crashing over the side of a passenger ship.But then, that might just be the point. Maybe the word destiny means something different now than it did when the psalmist penned his lines about fire and water, sun and darkness – when it was maybe still possible to believe that things happened in their own time, in God’s time, and that there was a time for everything, even the end of time.And it meant something different when Mr. Cohen, in the wake of Vietnam and with the cold war still hovering, brought those words up to date with reference to barbiturate suicides and the self-destroying acts of the powerful – when it was no longer sufficient to speak of the ancient human frailties, terrible and intractable but somehow almost comforting, almost absolving in their necessity – not now, when we held in our hands the possibility and responsibility for complete global destruction. And it means something else again when that possibility, having gained momentum from decades of looking away, feels like it’s rolled right out of our hands.On the first track of 2003’s Lifted, Oberst signals his awakening as political songwriter with a shrilly self-lacerating tirade against a young person who tries to make sense of the world with his head stuck up his ass: “You can try and live in darkness, but you will never shake the light….When you’re wrapped up in your blankets baby, in that comfortable cocoon. But I’ve seen the day of your awakening boy, and IT’S COMING SOON.”The tone on “No One Would Riot For Less” could not be more different. “Wake, baby, wake,” Oberst sings in the final verse. “But keep that blanket around you, there’s nowhere else safe.” Meaning that the terrain of destruction is vast and unnavigable, the space of earth that we can warm and protect is real enough, but very small.I think in this song we are being asked, very gently, to give up hope. Not to ignore what’s happening exactly, not to stop recycling or donating to Oxfam or buying local or performing whatever minute acts of resistance make up the daily political life of the just-enlightened-enough-to-be-terrified-slash-stricken-with-guilt liberal masses.Just that as the world become more and more a place where things happen that we (meaning me) can’t even really imagine, maybe a little darkness isn’t such a bad thing. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to read another book on Iraq or Cambodia or the Holocaust just now, trying to put together the pieces on something I can only pretend to understand, pretend to look for solutions I’d never have the guts or power or sense of direction to help bring into being. Maybe if there are things we can’t forgive, things we can’t ask forgiveness for, maybe forgetting is what we’ve got, everything eclipsed by the shape of destiny, etc.I don’t know. I’m not sure I like this song, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the “love let us be true to one another, because the world is shit” resolution. But I’m also not sure I can answer the questions it raises. Why do you (and by you, I mean me) want to understand? If you understood fully, intellectually, emotionally, imaginatively, what’s happening in Baghdad, or the war-zones of the Congo, or the upper echelons of the Bush administration, what good would you be, anyway, either to the people suffering in countries you “can’t even pronounce the name of” or to the people around you? If you understood, all you could ever do is mourn.
Lo-fi singer-singwriter electronica
Originally posted Sunday, September 9, 2007
When Owen Ashworth started making lo-fi electronica under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, he found the perfect angle for shocking avant-garde audiences: he abandoned irony. Casiotone’s first two albums, Answering Machine Music and Pocket Symphonies for Lonely Subway Cars, may have set hyper-literate lyrics to a beat that played like house music inside a tin can, but there was no knowing wink behind it all, no sense of the technician-musician manufacturing reactions from safe inside his electronic laboratory. Instead, Ashworth favoured the strong melodies, catchy rhythms, and emotionally accessible narratives of his folk-singer heroes Willie Nelson and Hank Williams. He just performed them on battery-powered children’s keyboards.The response surprised him: he found audiences prepared not just to look past the circumstances of the production, but to embrace them as part of the Casiotone’s charm.“I think people just liked it because they assumed it would be gimmicky, and were surprised when they found serious, sincere song-writing,” says Ashworth.These days, they might not be quite so surprised. Since Ashworth put out his first Casiotone cassette in 1997, a whole crop of minimalist electronica outfits has sprung up, bands like Xiu Xiu, Say Hi To Your Mom and The Books, who transpose the catchy beats of the dance floor and the beeps and bleeps of electronica into the private worlds of “serious, sincere” singer-songwriter material.Of course, these bands didn’t invent the notion of thoughtful, accessible electronic music – they owe an obvious debt to groups ranging from Radiohead to the Young Marble Giants -- but they differ from the electropop bands of the nineties and the New Wavers of the seventies and eighties in that they generally accept the old-fashioned values of traditional songwriting. Often, like Ashworth, they’re looking to give a new twist to those values, choosing instruments and spaces with painfully “dry” or non-resonant tones in order to evoke the highly personal atmosphere of self-reflection that has long been the domain of singer-songwriter folk. “The songs are absolutely supposed to reflect a claustrophobic, almost uncomfortable closeness, where the listener goes, ‘Yeah, that sounds familiar’,” Ashworth says. He cites influences that range from the Carter Family (“things that sound really personal and small”) to Riot-era Sly and the Family Stone (“where it all seems to be happening in a really close space and you can hear lips smacking and stuff”).The choice of medium has a pragmatic element as well. Ashworth says that his initial forays into electronic minimalism had more to do with the tools at hand than any significant aesthetic decision. He’d spent some time writing songs for friends’ bands, experimenting with beats and tones using the simple, inexpensive keyboards he had around the house. Performing them himself was just the next step, and since he couldn’t afford a Moog or high-end recording equipment, he stuck to his Casiotone and four-track. “I just found I could put the music out faster that way,” he says.Eric Elbogen, who records synth-and-drum-machine-tinged powerpop on his home computer under the name Say Hi To Your Mom, adds that the self-sufficiency of the process helps. “When I started Say Hi, it was my intention to do everything humanly possible on my own.…There would be no possible way that Say Hi would have been able to have put out four records in as many years, or have toured as frequently as it has, if more people were involved in the process.”Tom Steinle, who runs Tomlab, a Cologne-based label that emphasizes electronic music with a strong songwriting component, argues that the pragmatic considerations here are really the only ones – he believes that the notion of lo-fi as a genre is unnecessarily limiting. “This ‘movement’ is really more a necessity given the means of production we can afford right now,” he says. “The artists we’re working with are really talented and have a vision that points way beyond this sort of style.” Elbogen seconds this. “If I had the money, sure, I’d go to a studio,” Elbogen says. “But it takes me 2-8 months to record an album. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a studio.”But for some, this means can also turn into a sort of end. Ashworth’s initial pragmatism turned into a kind of bargain with himself: he decided to put out three albums within these original limits. “I’d just come out of school, so there was this sense of giving myself these really specific, self-contained assignments in order to prove myself.” By the third album, Twinkle Echo, he started to get bored and decided “cheat” a little, adding strings and a few other instruments: “I added a guitar, which is like the cardinal sin.” By that time, Ashworth says, he was experiencing the initially artificial limits as a genuine form that forced him to focus more clearly on what he wanted out of a song. “I felt that I had to have a really good reason to cheat, and that made the process really interesting,” he says.Ashworth says that though he recognizes a tension between his often highly introspective song material and the upbeat, club-happy melodies, he sees this as part of the music’s strength: “I’ve always been attracted to songwriting that sounds honest and legit, and to me mixed feelings just seems more real than just a happy pop song.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu combines confessional noise-rock with preprogrammed sample tracks, argues that the personal, emotional content isn’t even unusual in more traditional electronica: “There’s a lot of dance music that is almost like disturbingly direct. House music lyrics, they’re all about – I know this is a really gauche way of saying it – dancing the pain away.”In fact, pain dominates this music to a degree unusual even in an industry overrun by confessional singer-songwriters. Lo fi electronica, maybe even more than its folk predecessors, is the music of petty grievances and private misery. The ironies of the upbeat setting allow the performer to express sentiments that would seem overwrought in an acoustic ballad, while second-rate recording equipment and emphasis on mechanical white noise evoke a grinding frustration with the clichés of self-expression that a more polished production would smooth over.Seth Smith, frontman for Canadian indie rockers Dog Day, released a home recording of down-beat electronica under the name Hi Firey while the other band was between projects. Hi Firey’s Don’t Worry About the Future features distorted vocals (Smith used a telephone receiver as a mic in order to muffle the sound and "make [his] voice sound less embarrassing"), electronic “mistakes” that rub out the emotional climax of a chorus and catchy pop songs dissolving into white noise chaos. But Smith says his choices weren’t subversive – he says Don’t Worry About the Future was recorded during an “all-time low” in his life, and claims that the music came out sounding “dirty and stoned” because he couldn’t be bothered to clean it up (yet he acknowledges that not only did he use all the mistakes that arose in the process, he also added extra sounds and effects to showcase them). “I use Hi Firey as an outlet for music that doesn't to commit to accuracy, timing, tuning or professionalism,” he says. “Music has always been the best treatment for depression for me, so it comes out that way because of that, too.”Ashworth adds that he hopes the music provides the same kind of relief for the listener. “I think of it as comfort music for when things are really bad,” he says. “The kind of music you listen to on headphones, alone in your room in the middle of the night.”Ultimately, this kind of therapeutic model that places a high premium on sincerity may mean a fairly limited range of expression. “Electronica, especially lo-fi electronica is a trap,” Steinle notes. “Once you get classified in this field, every step you make outside it makes you seem like a traitor, or someone half talented trying to get recognised - an electronica artist who is now trying to do pop music. It’s like a 'nerd' sign glued to your forehead.”Elbogen says he’s often startled by the extent to which his music is expected by audiences to reflect his private life. He likes hearing that fans have made an emotional connection to him through a song, but always finds it slightly strange, since his work is almost entirely fictional. He adds that Say Hi To Your Mom typically irritates those who come to it expecting confessionalism and catharsis. “I had a show review where the writer said she didn’t believe a word I was singing, and I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not claiming these songs are about me or my emotions’. I mean, that particular show was really heavy on Impeccable Blahs, which is an album about vampires. And, it’s probably obvious that I’m not a vampire. So her logic kind of escaped me.”Ashworth, who beginning on Twinkle Echo began to make clear distinctions between himself and the troubled characters of his songs, is now starting to chafe against the formal restrictions of the genre as well. His fourth album, Etiquette, includes strings, back-up singers, and even a little rock guitar along with his trademark drum machine beats. He notes, though, that he sees more and more up-and-coming bands embracing the limitations.“When we started out, I really thought we were doing something different – I don’t know, maybe someone else was doing it, but I hadn’t heard about it. These days it seems like every time we play there’s another Casio-type band on the bill.”
When Owen Ashworth started making lo-fi electronica under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, he found the perfect angle for shocking avant-garde audiences: he abandoned irony. Casiotone’s first two albums, Answering Machine Music and Pocket Symphonies for Lonely Subway Cars, may have set hyper-literate lyrics to a beat that played like house music inside a tin can, but there was no knowing wink behind it all, no sense of the technician-musician manufacturing reactions from safe inside his electronic laboratory. Instead, Ashworth favoured the strong melodies, catchy rhythms, and emotionally accessible narratives of his folk-singer heroes Willie Nelson and Hank Williams. He just performed them on battery-powered children’s keyboards.The response surprised him: he found audiences prepared not just to look past the circumstances of the production, but to embrace them as part of the Casiotone’s charm.“I think people just liked it because they assumed it would be gimmicky, and were surprised when they found serious, sincere song-writing,” says Ashworth.These days, they might not be quite so surprised. Since Ashworth put out his first Casiotone cassette in 1997, a whole crop of minimalist electronica outfits has sprung up, bands like Xiu Xiu, Say Hi To Your Mom and The Books, who transpose the catchy beats of the dance floor and the beeps and bleeps of electronica into the private worlds of “serious, sincere” singer-songwriter material.Of course, these bands didn’t invent the notion of thoughtful, accessible electronic music – they owe an obvious debt to groups ranging from Radiohead to the Young Marble Giants -- but they differ from the electropop bands of the nineties and the New Wavers of the seventies and eighties in that they generally accept the old-fashioned values of traditional songwriting. Often, like Ashworth, they’re looking to give a new twist to those values, choosing instruments and spaces with painfully “dry” or non-resonant tones in order to evoke the highly personal atmosphere of self-reflection that has long been the domain of singer-songwriter folk. “The songs are absolutely supposed to reflect a claustrophobic, almost uncomfortable closeness, where the listener goes, ‘Yeah, that sounds familiar’,” Ashworth says. He cites influences that range from the Carter Family (“things that sound really personal and small”) to Riot-era Sly and the Family Stone (“where it all seems to be happening in a really close space and you can hear lips smacking and stuff”).The choice of medium has a pragmatic element as well. Ashworth says that his initial forays into electronic minimalism had more to do with the tools at hand than any significant aesthetic decision. He’d spent some time writing songs for friends’ bands, experimenting with beats and tones using the simple, inexpensive keyboards he had around the house. Performing them himself was just the next step, and since he couldn’t afford a Moog or high-end recording equipment, he stuck to his Casiotone and four-track. “I just found I could put the music out faster that way,” he says.Eric Elbogen, who records synth-and-drum-machine-tinged powerpop on his home computer under the name Say Hi To Your Mom, adds that the self-sufficiency of the process helps. “When I started Say Hi, it was my intention to do everything humanly possible on my own.…There would be no possible way that Say Hi would have been able to have put out four records in as many years, or have toured as frequently as it has, if more people were involved in the process.”Tom Steinle, who runs Tomlab, a Cologne-based label that emphasizes electronic music with a strong songwriting component, argues that the pragmatic considerations here are really the only ones – he believes that the notion of lo-fi as a genre is unnecessarily limiting. “This ‘movement’ is really more a necessity given the means of production we can afford right now,” he says. “The artists we’re working with are really talented and have a vision that points way beyond this sort of style.” Elbogen seconds this. “If I had the money, sure, I’d go to a studio,” Elbogen says. “But it takes me 2-8 months to record an album. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a studio.”But for some, this means can also turn into a sort of end. Ashworth’s initial pragmatism turned into a kind of bargain with himself: he decided to put out three albums within these original limits. “I’d just come out of school, so there was this sense of giving myself these really specific, self-contained assignments in order to prove myself.” By the third album, Twinkle Echo, he started to get bored and decided “cheat” a little, adding strings and a few other instruments: “I added a guitar, which is like the cardinal sin.” By that time, Ashworth says, he was experiencing the initially artificial limits as a genuine form that forced him to focus more clearly on what he wanted out of a song. “I felt that I had to have a really good reason to cheat, and that made the process really interesting,” he says.Ashworth says that though he recognizes a tension between his often highly introspective song material and the upbeat, club-happy melodies, he sees this as part of the music’s strength: “I’ve always been attracted to songwriting that sounds honest and legit, and to me mixed feelings just seems more real than just a happy pop song.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu combines confessional noise-rock with preprogrammed sample tracks, argues that the personal, emotional content isn’t even unusual in more traditional electronica: “There’s a lot of dance music that is almost like disturbingly direct. House music lyrics, they’re all about – I know this is a really gauche way of saying it – dancing the pain away.”In fact, pain dominates this music to a degree unusual even in an industry overrun by confessional singer-songwriters. Lo fi electronica, maybe even more than its folk predecessors, is the music of petty grievances and private misery. The ironies of the upbeat setting allow the performer to express sentiments that would seem overwrought in an acoustic ballad, while second-rate recording equipment and emphasis on mechanical white noise evoke a grinding frustration with the clichés of self-expression that a more polished production would smooth over.Seth Smith, frontman for Canadian indie rockers Dog Day, released a home recording of down-beat electronica under the name Hi Firey while the other band was between projects. Hi Firey’s Don’t Worry About the Future features distorted vocals (Smith used a telephone receiver as a mic in order to muffle the sound and "make [his] voice sound less embarrassing"), electronic “mistakes” that rub out the emotional climax of a chorus and catchy pop songs dissolving into white noise chaos. But Smith says his choices weren’t subversive – he says Don’t Worry About the Future was recorded during an “all-time low” in his life, and claims that the music came out sounding “dirty and stoned” because he couldn’t be bothered to clean it up (yet he acknowledges that not only did he use all the mistakes that arose in the process, he also added extra sounds and effects to showcase them). “I use Hi Firey as an outlet for music that doesn't to commit to accuracy, timing, tuning or professionalism,” he says. “Music has always been the best treatment for depression for me, so it comes out that way because of that, too.”Ashworth adds that he hopes the music provides the same kind of relief for the listener. “I think of it as comfort music for when things are really bad,” he says. “The kind of music you listen to on headphones, alone in your room in the middle of the night.”Ultimately, this kind of therapeutic model that places a high premium on sincerity may mean a fairly limited range of expression. “Electronica, especially lo-fi electronica is a trap,” Steinle notes. “Once you get classified in this field, every step you make outside it makes you seem like a traitor, or someone half talented trying to get recognised - an electronica artist who is now trying to do pop music. It’s like a 'nerd' sign glued to your forehead.”Elbogen says he’s often startled by the extent to which his music is expected by audiences to reflect his private life. He likes hearing that fans have made an emotional connection to him through a song, but always finds it slightly strange, since his work is almost entirely fictional. He adds that Say Hi To Your Mom typically irritates those who come to it expecting confessionalism and catharsis. “I had a show review where the writer said she didn’t believe a word I was singing, and I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not claiming these songs are about me or my emotions’. I mean, that particular show was really heavy on Impeccable Blahs, which is an album about vampires. And, it’s probably obvious that I’m not a vampire. So her logic kind of escaped me.”Ashworth, who beginning on Twinkle Echo began to make clear distinctions between himself and the troubled characters of his songs, is now starting to chafe against the formal restrictions of the genre as well. His fourth album, Etiquette, includes strings, back-up singers, and even a little rock guitar along with his trademark drum machine beats. He notes, though, that he sees more and more up-and-coming bands embracing the limitations.“When we started out, I really thought we were doing something different – I don’t know, maybe someone else was doing it, but I hadn’t heard about it. These days it seems like every time we play there’s another Casio-type band on the bill.”
Album review: Dog Day's Night Group
Originally posted Monday, August 13, 2007
On the last, untitled track of their first album, Thank You, Dog Day, a band known best for its intricate pathologies of toxic relationships and numbing isolation, attempts something that sounds suspiciously like a love song. “…” is a lo-fi sketch of an interstellar soundscape, complete with gloopy synths and staticky dead air straight out of some 70’s sci-fi flick about a nuclear holocaust.Trembling wires and whistling space – then the sound of our hero’s final transmission, the last martian radioing the last living earthling, asking – no, demanding, since a touch is as good as a blow in the void – that they join the lumpy, gelatinous bodies in some last semblance of comfort: “Come on, come on. I’m the last man alive. You belong to me. You have no choice. There’s no end in sight.”It’s a perversely sweet moment on a thoroughly unsweet album, a tenderness no less real for arising more out of exhaustion than conviction, husband coaxing wife at the end of one of those all-night fights they’re always having, making the same perfectly banal, perfectly cutting criticisms of each other, again and again. “Yeah, we suck,” he seems to say. “But at least we have that in common.”That odd, double-edged sweetness, is front and centre in Dog Day’s latest offering, Night Group. Here, frontman Seth Smith sounds like he’s realized for the first time that he’s not alone in his misery, that the things that make it so hard to relate to the rest of the world are really pretty common. “Everyone’s got the same problems”, he admits on “Career Suicide”, and the result is an album both darker and more hopeful than Thank You – less obsessed with private failures of communication, animated by a wider vision of suffering and even (sort of) redemption.Actually, Night Group is an album about the end of the world, about those last coherent chunks of DNA floating together in the void, united by a common disaster. Everything Thank You avoided through neurotically clever jokes, wordplay, convolutions of thought and feeling is faced head on here, in a self-induced dark night of the soul. The title track speaks of facing “the evening of soul deliverance” with neither medicine nor religion to soften the passage; “End of the World” (much like Thank You’s “…”) finds the upside of Armageddon in the destruction of those troubling distractions from intimacy, other people.Song by song, the album acknowledges, mourns and mocks the familiar cushions and consolations that keep a safe distance between life and death – love (“Sleeping, Waiting”, “Know Who You Are”), marriage (“Vow”), ambition (“Defeat”, “Bright Light”), “fun”, i.e. drinking and making noise, (“Night Group”) – each is considered, dragged through the murk of Smith’s deadpan vocals and the stretto of narrow electronic harmonies, and abandoned.A few tracks almost come clear, like “…” sweetened rather than ruined by ambivalence. “Sleeping, Waiting” sings of love and catatonia: a quick bright guitar pattern over one, droning synth note. The narrator’s asleep, lost to the world, and nothing can rouse him, not even a lover’s presence in bed with him. But he feels her, in glimpses, comforting fragments, like an outside sound distinct enough to burrow into his dreaming, not quite enough to dissolve it.“Bright Light”, a more self-conscious answer to Counting Crows’ “Mister Jones”, is about that great and stupid yearning for transcendence leftover from adolescence, desiccated by chronic poverty and depression but not dead, not yet. More acoustically spacious than the rest of Night Group, with cathedrals of reverb opening on the “Amen” chorus (sung by Nancy Urich with churchly solemnity), “Bright Light” is a joke on all those old, vague dreams, yet manages to get sucked back into dreaming despite itself. “Can I have twenty dollars?” Smith cracks. “Can I have twenty wives, oh God?” - but his chronically flat, I-just-killed-my-parents-and-I-want-a-cheeseburger voice keeps breaking, and the song’s determinedly pessimistic refrain, “I will never find the bright light”, keeps turning back into a question.For the most part, though, Night Group finds its footing best in its darkest corners. The strongest tracks, “Gayhorse”, “Oh Dead Life” and “Great Pains”, conjure up a purity of bleakness mitigated only by its familiarity. “I keep hearing voices,” Smith sings on “Gayhorse”, “they tell me where we’re going”. You can tell, from the gloomy synths, and from Urich’s eerie counterpoint, that it’s nowhere good, and yet there’s an odd, unmistakable consolation here, as if the place didn’t matter so much as the fact of going somewhere, and having it given, as if even hell could be borne so long as you knew its name, an affirmation that all the bad things yet to come had already happened and nothing was required, nothing more you could do now to make it right.
On the last, untitled track of their first album, Thank You, Dog Day, a band known best for its intricate pathologies of toxic relationships and numbing isolation, attempts something that sounds suspiciously like a love song. “…” is a lo-fi sketch of an interstellar soundscape, complete with gloopy synths and staticky dead air straight out of some 70’s sci-fi flick about a nuclear holocaust.Trembling wires and whistling space – then the sound of our hero’s final transmission, the last martian radioing the last living earthling, asking – no, demanding, since a touch is as good as a blow in the void – that they join the lumpy, gelatinous bodies in some last semblance of comfort: “Come on, come on. I’m the last man alive. You belong to me. You have no choice. There’s no end in sight.”It’s a perversely sweet moment on a thoroughly unsweet album, a tenderness no less real for arising more out of exhaustion than conviction, husband coaxing wife at the end of one of those all-night fights they’re always having, making the same perfectly banal, perfectly cutting criticisms of each other, again and again. “Yeah, we suck,” he seems to say. “But at least we have that in common.”That odd, double-edged sweetness, is front and centre in Dog Day’s latest offering, Night Group. Here, frontman Seth Smith sounds like he’s realized for the first time that he’s not alone in his misery, that the things that make it so hard to relate to the rest of the world are really pretty common. “Everyone’s got the same problems”, he admits on “Career Suicide”, and the result is an album both darker and more hopeful than Thank You – less obsessed with private failures of communication, animated by a wider vision of suffering and even (sort of) redemption.Actually, Night Group is an album about the end of the world, about those last coherent chunks of DNA floating together in the void, united by a common disaster. Everything Thank You avoided through neurotically clever jokes, wordplay, convolutions of thought and feeling is faced head on here, in a self-induced dark night of the soul. The title track speaks of facing “the evening of soul deliverance” with neither medicine nor religion to soften the passage; “End of the World” (much like Thank You’s “…”) finds the upside of Armageddon in the destruction of those troubling distractions from intimacy, other people.Song by song, the album acknowledges, mourns and mocks the familiar cushions and consolations that keep a safe distance between life and death – love (“Sleeping, Waiting”, “Know Who You Are”), marriage (“Vow”), ambition (“Defeat”, “Bright Light”), “fun”, i.e. drinking and making noise, (“Night Group”) – each is considered, dragged through the murk of Smith’s deadpan vocals and the stretto of narrow electronic harmonies, and abandoned.A few tracks almost come clear, like “…” sweetened rather than ruined by ambivalence. “Sleeping, Waiting” sings of love and catatonia: a quick bright guitar pattern over one, droning synth note. The narrator’s asleep, lost to the world, and nothing can rouse him, not even a lover’s presence in bed with him. But he feels her, in glimpses, comforting fragments, like an outside sound distinct enough to burrow into his dreaming, not quite enough to dissolve it.“Bright Light”, a more self-conscious answer to Counting Crows’ “Mister Jones”, is about that great and stupid yearning for transcendence leftover from adolescence, desiccated by chronic poverty and depression but not dead, not yet. More acoustically spacious than the rest of Night Group, with cathedrals of reverb opening on the “Amen” chorus (sung by Nancy Urich with churchly solemnity), “Bright Light” is a joke on all those old, vague dreams, yet manages to get sucked back into dreaming despite itself. “Can I have twenty dollars?” Smith cracks. “Can I have twenty wives, oh God?” - but his chronically flat, I-just-killed-my-parents-and-I-want-a-cheeseburger voice keeps breaking, and the song’s determinedly pessimistic refrain, “I will never find the bright light”, keeps turning back into a question.For the most part, though, Night Group finds its footing best in its darkest corners. The strongest tracks, “Gayhorse”, “Oh Dead Life” and “Great Pains”, conjure up a purity of bleakness mitigated only by its familiarity. “I keep hearing voices,” Smith sings on “Gayhorse”, “they tell me where we’re going”. You can tell, from the gloomy synths, and from Urich’s eerie counterpoint, that it’s nowhere good, and yet there’s an odd, unmistakable consolation here, as if the place didn’t matter so much as the fact of going somewhere, and having it given, as if even hell could be borne so long as you knew its name, an affirmation that all the bad things yet to come had already happened and nothing was required, nothing more you could do now to make it right.
Dog Day's Night Group: An Anhedonic Manifesto
Originally posted Monday, August 13, 2007
Forget death, love, sex, suicide. There really is only one question in contemporary rock culture and that is pleasure – getting it, losing it, looking for it, but mostly not getting it, mostly not getting it or understanding it or even really wanting it.The party line on this is that our pleasure receptors have been damaged by all the overstimulation – all those flashing lights and exploding frames and gratuitous boob shots – of pop culture (very old story, by the way – Plato accused his contemporaries of ruining their philosophic souls by choosing the lyrical grief of Euripides over the higher, harder pleasures of mathematics). Then there’s the opposite view, that we have had a century more or less devoid of pleasure in art, with the over-intellectulized, anti-emotional fallout of modernism and post-modernism leaving us incapable of touching the world except through several layers of irony and ambivalence.Right. Anyway. I used to be pretty militant in the former view – I don’t think I saw a single television program for ten years (this was easier than it sounds, since for some strange reason I had no friends). I was derisive of all Hollywood movies, even – no, especially – the arty ones (even now, something in me dies when I hear an otherwise reasonable person singing the praises of Lost in Translation). I threw myself into the modernists, the stoics, the negative way mystics, convinced that the pleasures of actual, like, experience could never match those of sitting alone in a room where one word led to another to a constellation of ideas possible only in the rarified air of my perfect solitude.Then I had a breakdown. So I switched to the other view, decided I would only survive by learning to enjoy the things other people enjoyed. I spent two years attending rock concerts, renting DVDs of hit HBO series, trying desperately, and with varying levels of success, to like pop music, blockbusters, parties, sex, and the flashing screens of Time Square.Then I had another breakdown. Now I’m too confused or just don’t care, which I think puts me in a perfect position to appreciate Night Group, the latest album from new wave quartet Dog Day. The album, as I hear it, is an anhedonic manifesto, a step-by-step guide to living life with the pleasure and pain knobs turned way down. I like this album, not because I think it does anything new exactly, but because it crystallizes something that’s been in the air for years, a numbness that is not separate from feeling, that is its own legitimate expression of what its like to be an (at least potentially) thinking, feeling person at the beginning of the 21st century.You can hear it on “End of the World”, where the singer eggs on the end times because he can no longer tell his happiness from his unhappiness (whether keeping his head above water or sinking back down into the swamps, “a subtle change is all I feel”); on “Oh Dead Life” where a (maybe literally) deadening apathy is indistinguishable from life as usual.Night Group isn’t nihilistic. It has gone past the “no fun, no feelings, no future” of punk, past the “let’s fuck and get high like there’s no tomorrow because there is no tomorrow” of new wave. Instead, it affirms the ceremonies of feeling as placeholders, waiting for life to return to them with the patient confusion of a senile old woman regarding her husband and trying to remember what he has to do with the life she once had.All nodes of meaning and possibility are acknowledged here – love (“Sleeping, Waiting”), marriage (“Vow”), ambition (“Defeat”, “Bright Light”), “fun”, at least in the sense of drinking and making noise (“Night Group”) – acknowledged and treated with all due respect and passed over. On Night Group’s standout tracks, “Oh Dead Life”, “Great Pains”, and “Gayhorse” (but especially “Gayhorse”), the singer has decided to live, not for any of the reasons stated above, but because the form of things demands it, because just as love means living with someone you might not always like, just as the flash of feeling and insight onstage is the result of piecemeal grunt-work behind-the-scenes, so living consists of the small, repeated decision that one can’t stop here, that there is still a direction, still somewhere – not better, perhaps, but at least different – that one is going.
Forget death, love, sex, suicide. There really is only one question in contemporary rock culture and that is pleasure – getting it, losing it, looking for it, but mostly not getting it, mostly not getting it or understanding it or even really wanting it.The party line on this is that our pleasure receptors have been damaged by all the overstimulation – all those flashing lights and exploding frames and gratuitous boob shots – of pop culture (very old story, by the way – Plato accused his contemporaries of ruining their philosophic souls by choosing the lyrical grief of Euripides over the higher, harder pleasures of mathematics). Then there’s the opposite view, that we have had a century more or less devoid of pleasure in art, with the over-intellectulized, anti-emotional fallout of modernism and post-modernism leaving us incapable of touching the world except through several layers of irony and ambivalence.Right. Anyway. I used to be pretty militant in the former view – I don’t think I saw a single television program for ten years (this was easier than it sounds, since for some strange reason I had no friends). I was derisive of all Hollywood movies, even – no, especially – the arty ones (even now, something in me dies when I hear an otherwise reasonable person singing the praises of Lost in Translation). I threw myself into the modernists, the stoics, the negative way mystics, convinced that the pleasures of actual, like, experience could never match those of sitting alone in a room where one word led to another to a constellation of ideas possible only in the rarified air of my perfect solitude.Then I had a breakdown. So I switched to the other view, decided I would only survive by learning to enjoy the things other people enjoyed. I spent two years attending rock concerts, renting DVDs of hit HBO series, trying desperately, and with varying levels of success, to like pop music, blockbusters, parties, sex, and the flashing screens of Time Square.Then I had another breakdown. Now I’m too confused or just don’t care, which I think puts me in a perfect position to appreciate Night Group, the latest album from new wave quartet Dog Day. The album, as I hear it, is an anhedonic manifesto, a step-by-step guide to living life with the pleasure and pain knobs turned way down. I like this album, not because I think it does anything new exactly, but because it crystallizes something that’s been in the air for years, a numbness that is not separate from feeling, that is its own legitimate expression of what its like to be an (at least potentially) thinking, feeling person at the beginning of the 21st century.You can hear it on “End of the World”, where the singer eggs on the end times because he can no longer tell his happiness from his unhappiness (whether keeping his head above water or sinking back down into the swamps, “a subtle change is all I feel”); on “Oh Dead Life” where a (maybe literally) deadening apathy is indistinguishable from life as usual.Night Group isn’t nihilistic. It has gone past the “no fun, no feelings, no future” of punk, past the “let’s fuck and get high like there’s no tomorrow because there is no tomorrow” of new wave. Instead, it affirms the ceremonies of feeling as placeholders, waiting for life to return to them with the patient confusion of a senile old woman regarding her husband and trying to remember what he has to do with the life she once had.All nodes of meaning and possibility are acknowledged here – love (“Sleeping, Waiting”), marriage (“Vow”), ambition (“Defeat”, “Bright Light”), “fun”, at least in the sense of drinking and making noise (“Night Group”) – acknowledged and treated with all due respect and passed over. On Night Group’s standout tracks, “Oh Dead Life”, “Great Pains”, and “Gayhorse” (but especially “Gayhorse”), the singer has decided to live, not for any of the reasons stated above, but because the form of things demands it, because just as love means living with someone you might not always like, just as the flash of feeling and insight onstage is the result of piecemeal grunt-work behind-the-scenes, so living consists of the small, repeated decision that one can’t stop here, that there is still a direction, still somewhere – not better, perhaps, but at least different – that one is going.
Track Review: "Lime Tree", Bright Eyes' Cassadaga
Originally posted Saturday, August 11, 2007
This isn’t the best track on the album – it’s one of several moments on Cassadaga when the heart-swell strings and shivery back-up vocals are played so straight as to be sacharrine – but lyrically, it’s the album’s keystone, telling the baseline story that tracks like “Clairaudients” or “Four Winds” bury under tales of epic journeys and the dizzying everything-at-once of expectation and omen.The plot of “Lime Tree” is simple. There’s a girl, of course, and the narrator seems to love her – but not, of course, quite enough. The usual story: enough to miss her, not quite enough to stay. There was a baby but they both knew the time, maybe among other things, was wrong. She took care of the details while he was away, or maybe he just didn’t bother to show up at the clinic at the appointed time. So anyway, he gets the news in an answering machine message and thinks a lot about timing and a lot about home, about a life half memory and half imagination.All of which is very Bright Eyes, the after-the-fact regret, the loving-at-a-distance, encapsulated in lines like “so pleased by a daydream that now living’s no good” that might just as easily been written by the adenoidal Oberst of Letting Off the Happiness as the world-travelled, rehab-weary Oberst of Cassadaga.But there’s a verse in “Lime Tree”, the key verse, that so frustratingly mingles hope and defeat that it sounds more like real life than anything that’s come before:“Under the eaves of that old lime tree I stood examining the fruit. Some were ripe and some were rotten I felt nauseous with the truth. There will never be a time more opportune.”That’s the difference, that’s the recognition that makes Cassadaga, despite moments of plodding predictability in the arrangements, a more mature album than any of Bright Eyes’ previous efforts. There is never a moment when life blooms wholly, when, as Kevin Costner’s character burbles in Field of Dreams: “all the cosmic tumblers click into place and the universe opens to show you what’s possible”. There are connections, blips, flashes of meaning, but no order in which each thing is illuminated in its place (I’m jumping songs here, paraphrasing a line from “If the Brakeman Turns My Way” that seems to sum up Cassadaga stance on all the new age spirituality it surveys: “it’s an infinite coincidence, but it doesn’t make a plan”.)The inverse, unfairly, is true. There really is a moment when all the times are out of joint and all the fruits rot on the vine. The peculiar hope and intensity of much of Oberst’s earlier stuff – from “If Winter Ends “ with its half-formed hope for an impossible zero summer to “Arc of Time” with its grasping after the whole cycle, blossom and decay, at once – comes of extrapolating from this moment of absolute unhappiness to a moment of happiness equally absolute.Cassadaga doesn’t take such a cleanly polarized route. For all the unworldly characters who populate its tracks, from spiritualists to psychic hotline operators to W.B. Yeats to the graffiti artists of Alphabet City, this is the least mystical of all Bright Eyes albums, the anti-Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. There’s a couple moments of grasping after the “big picture” – a wind that blows “older than Rome and all of this sorrow” (“Cleanse Song”), the scales that measure out a rough equivalence between life and death – but mostly this is an album of details, of individual lives, lived and unlived (and if this means a few moments of embarrassing presumption – when Oberst projects himself into the dried-out soul of a small-time soul singer who substitutes gratuitous expression for actual feelings, or the sublimated grief of a middle-aged psychic who responds to her failed marriage by living vicariously through the lives of her clients – it’s still an impressive expansion of vision on the part of an artist whose imagination has so far focused pretty exclusively on different incarnations of himself). Cassadaga is, as the opening track suggests, a search album, but the search is not for some great truth or peace of being, but for the mixed and relative blessings of a life slightly more liveable – the grey areas of consolation and compromise (“Middleman”), home envisioned as the “mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown” (“Lime Tree”).The narrator of “Lime Tree” is in the process of realizing, maybe too late, that he’s found what he’s looking for – not the perfect harvest, but a love that might have been enough after all, not a place where all points intersect and all things bloom at once, but a bit of level ground on which to stand.(Don’t get me wrong; I wish Cassadaga was a better album, the vocals a little less self-imitative, the strings a bit less programmatic. But I also think that anyone who trashes this album for “selling out” has got to have no soul, or an overly romantic sense of the spiritual value of certain kinds of useless struggle. I mean, if Conor fucking Oberst has found a way to live in the world as it is, who’s to say there isn’t hope for the rest of us?)
This isn’t the best track on the album – it’s one of several moments on Cassadaga when the heart-swell strings and shivery back-up vocals are played so straight as to be sacharrine – but lyrically, it’s the album’s keystone, telling the baseline story that tracks like “Clairaudients” or “Four Winds” bury under tales of epic journeys and the dizzying everything-at-once of expectation and omen.The plot of “Lime Tree” is simple. There’s a girl, of course, and the narrator seems to love her – but not, of course, quite enough. The usual story: enough to miss her, not quite enough to stay. There was a baby but they both knew the time, maybe among other things, was wrong. She took care of the details while he was away, or maybe he just didn’t bother to show up at the clinic at the appointed time. So anyway, he gets the news in an answering machine message and thinks a lot about timing and a lot about home, about a life half memory and half imagination.All of which is very Bright Eyes, the after-the-fact regret, the loving-at-a-distance, encapsulated in lines like “so pleased by a daydream that now living’s no good” that might just as easily been written by the adenoidal Oberst of Letting Off the Happiness as the world-travelled, rehab-weary Oberst of Cassadaga.But there’s a verse in “Lime Tree”, the key verse, that so frustratingly mingles hope and defeat that it sounds more like real life than anything that’s come before:“Under the eaves of that old lime tree I stood examining the fruit. Some were ripe and some were rotten I felt nauseous with the truth. There will never be a time more opportune.”That’s the difference, that’s the recognition that makes Cassadaga, despite moments of plodding predictability in the arrangements, a more mature album than any of Bright Eyes’ previous efforts. There is never a moment when life blooms wholly, when, as Kevin Costner’s character burbles in Field of Dreams: “all the cosmic tumblers click into place and the universe opens to show you what’s possible”. There are connections, blips, flashes of meaning, but no order in which each thing is illuminated in its place (I’m jumping songs here, paraphrasing a line from “If the Brakeman Turns My Way” that seems to sum up Cassadaga stance on all the new age spirituality it surveys: “it’s an infinite coincidence, but it doesn’t make a plan”.)The inverse, unfairly, is true. There really is a moment when all the times are out of joint and all the fruits rot on the vine. The peculiar hope and intensity of much of Oberst’s earlier stuff – from “If Winter Ends “ with its half-formed hope for an impossible zero summer to “Arc of Time” with its grasping after the whole cycle, blossom and decay, at once – comes of extrapolating from this moment of absolute unhappiness to a moment of happiness equally absolute.Cassadaga doesn’t take such a cleanly polarized route. For all the unworldly characters who populate its tracks, from spiritualists to psychic hotline operators to W.B. Yeats to the graffiti artists of Alphabet City, this is the least mystical of all Bright Eyes albums, the anti-Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. There’s a couple moments of grasping after the “big picture” – a wind that blows “older than Rome and all of this sorrow” (“Cleanse Song”), the scales that measure out a rough equivalence between life and death – but mostly this is an album of details, of individual lives, lived and unlived (and if this means a few moments of embarrassing presumption – when Oberst projects himself into the dried-out soul of a small-time soul singer who substitutes gratuitous expression for actual feelings, or the sublimated grief of a middle-aged psychic who responds to her failed marriage by living vicariously through the lives of her clients – it’s still an impressive expansion of vision on the part of an artist whose imagination has so far focused pretty exclusively on different incarnations of himself). Cassadaga is, as the opening track suggests, a search album, but the search is not for some great truth or peace of being, but for the mixed and relative blessings of a life slightly more liveable – the grey areas of consolation and compromise (“Middleman”), home envisioned as the “mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown” (“Lime Tree”).The narrator of “Lime Tree” is in the process of realizing, maybe too late, that he’s found what he’s looking for – not the perfect harvest, but a love that might have been enough after all, not a place where all points intersect and all things bloom at once, but a bit of level ground on which to stand.(Don’t get me wrong; I wish Cassadaga was a better album, the vocals a little less self-imitative, the strings a bit less programmatic. But I also think that anyone who trashes this album for “selling out” has got to have no soul, or an overly romantic sense of the spiritual value of certain kinds of useless struggle. I mean, if Conor fucking Oberst has found a way to live in the world as it is, who’s to say there isn’t hope for the rest of us?)
Thumbnail Review: Bright Eyes' Four Winds
Originally posted Saturday, March 17, 2007
With a perpetual quaver in his voice and a knack for letting his vulnerabilities hang out, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst has long been the voice of high-intensity confessional pop. But lately, Oberst has been putting down roots in the decidedly chiller soil of old-school blues-rock, and Four Winds, the single to Bright Eyes’ sixth full-length, Cassadaga, shows this side of the band in full bloom.
There are few surprises on this six-song EP, but enough catchy, driven tunes to satisfy confirmed believers, with even a couple tracks to perk up the ears of agnostics. The title song, “Four Winds”, is the obvious hit, a foot-stompingly fun ramble about the end of the world, with swelling strings and a jittery groove that makes the fires of Armageddon feel like kids burning textbooks on the last day of classes. The slow-burner “Smoke Without Fire” finds Oberst trying on a mellower blues with the help of alt country wunderkind M. Ward; the languid vocals and plangent bassline evoke Leonard Cohen at his most gentle and hopeless. It’s as good a proof as any that, at 27, bedroom folk’s poster child is ready to rock with the big boys and cry like a man.
With a perpetual quaver in his voice and a knack for letting his vulnerabilities hang out, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst has long been the voice of high-intensity confessional pop. But lately, Oberst has been putting down roots in the decidedly chiller soil of old-school blues-rock, and Four Winds, the single to Bright Eyes’ sixth full-length, Cassadaga, shows this side of the band in full bloom.
There are few surprises on this six-song EP, but enough catchy, driven tunes to satisfy confirmed believers, with even a couple tracks to perk up the ears of agnostics. The title song, “Four Winds”, is the obvious hit, a foot-stompingly fun ramble about the end of the world, with swelling strings and a jittery groove that makes the fires of Armageddon feel like kids burning textbooks on the last day of classes. The slow-burner “Smoke Without Fire” finds Oberst trying on a mellower blues with the help of alt country wunderkind M. Ward; the languid vocals and plangent bassline evoke Leonard Cohen at his most gentle and hopeless. It’s as good a proof as any that, at 27, bedroom folk’s poster child is ready to rock with the big boys and cry like a man.
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