Ugh. I began to write this entry while procrastinating a week’s worth of hell, and I finished it doing the same thing. Only this time it was a different week. Regardless, this list took a lot longer than the last, for obvious reasons, and only makes me dread making part 3 (the movies list) sometime in later January in ways that still somehow allow me to look forward to it. Either way, it’s a nice feeling of relief to know I’m done with this, and I like my picks. I’m eager to see how different mine are from Pitchfork. After all, that’s the only reason I wanted to put this out so soon – to beat Pitchfork and to prevent myself from being influenced. Anyway, here goes.
Posts Tagged Vampire Weekend
Dropping acid under the hood; Walkmen review
So when I originally planned to write the review, that title was what I first wrote, because I wanted my little “this is my life” paragraph to explain how when I got my car inspected, they found that my car battery was leaking acid inside the car, which sounds a lot worse than it is. But that’s really all I had to say about it; that and thank God my car is okay, I love everything about the way it drives, I just want to take its CD player outside and viciously murder it. But that’s that about that.
I’m overjoyed at how my contributors have stepped up their game of late. Their reviews, probably as a result of being less frequent, are overall better than mine, which I love. Feels like bringing in hired guns (and if you wish to see that analogy explored further, check out my own contributor bio over at BOTO). And I also know that this is probably a punctuated equilibrium thing, and that these runs will be the exception, not the rule, and I’m perfectly cool with that (but I do dare my contributors to prove me wrong). Still, if it gets me to step up my game, awesome.
This review was long-delayed, and I think it was because I wanted this review to be bigger than the album itself, because I think this jumped to my favorite album of the year basically the second time I listened to it all the way through and has only solidified itself as such since. I was just looking for an angle, and thanks to previewing it with Ben and Kriti, I think it’s well-developed enough to finally write about here.
I think that this album is important in balancing out this year in music. Up until this album’s release, the physical version of which will happen on August 19th (you can buy it digitally for 5 bucks that go to charity here! Do what I did and be a good person!), the great indie rock albums of the year, which in my opinion are: Devotion by Beach House, Red, Yellow & Blue by Born Ruffians, Visiter by The Dodo’s, Nouns by No Age, and Vampire Weekend’s self titled album, have all been youthful. When I say youthful, that can be applied in different ways; Born Ruffians is about teenage awkwardness and the love that is borne and hampered by it, Vampire Weekend is so college it just switched majors from “Being like by all the cool kids” to “Being dismissed, but still secretly liked, by all the cool kids”, Nouns is an album that glories in being undeveloped, ragged, and teenaged, The Dodo’s are just generally bright-eyed, and Beach House implies in both theme and the name of their band what they stand for – a summer vacation.
The Walkmen stand for none of these things on their newest album, You & Me. The one word that has stayed in my mind about it is mature. All of the albums mentioned above were either the first or second full-length from their band; this is the Walkmen’s fourth LP, fifth if you include their note-by-note cover of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Album Pussy Cats, titled Pussy Cats Starring The Walkmen, and you can really hear how confident they are in their sound. In addition, all the above albums except for No Age were released in March or earlier, with Nouns coming out in May. The music industry had taken its yearly break for summer tours and festivals, and those of us who can’t blow hundreds of dollars one weekend for a music festival have been without something fresh for a while. So here comes You & Me, the perfect introduction to the second half of the music year, hopefully an indicator of things to come, in addition to showing us why child’s play is just that.
Beyond that, however, you can tell that this album is about adult love, not young love. And this isn’t even the adult love I talked to Kriti about, where you go on a first date, a second date, and you begin a relationship with having a relationship as the stated intent (as opposed to young love, where you see a girl in your chemistry class and you Chem Is Try to get her to make out with you). There’s both the “I’m still in love with you, after all these friggin’ long years” love (“On The Water”), the “we’re both older and without love, so what the hell” love (“Canadian Girl”), there’s the “I’ve spent so long being your friend that I’m fucking tired so I wish were in love” love (“Seven Years of Holidays”), and a different kind for every song. None of these loves are physical, except in “Red Moon”, where the “you’re beatiful” line still feels more like an emotional thing than lust.
This album really could be considered a concept album, in that I can imagine that every song here can be sung on some old riverboat going gently down the Mississippi River, just with different characters with different histories on each song. This goes beyond just maturity, it’s world-weariness that’s downright charming and enrapturing. I mean, all of these lyrics (and this is a mark of incredibly well-developed songwriting) could be just read as a poem and still be understood and appreciated. In “Postcards From Tiny Islands”, lead singer Hamilton Leithauser croons: “I’ll be drunk before too long/And I’ll keep up this sappy talk/This letter does it all/It’s too much to enclose/These postcards from tiny islands/do more than you know.” Leithauser is best known for having the most Dylan-esque voice around, if a little raspier and higher, but throughout the album he takes the similarities a bit further, adding Dylanesque sentimentality to his bag of tricks, while keeping the songwriting a little less verbose, a little more “read-between-the-lines”.
On a purely musical level, this album doesn’t really have any flaws, and isn’t all that ostentatious. The drums from Matt Barrick are totally solid, but not spectacular like on previous records, but that’s more than tolerable; this isn’t as drum-centric as 2004’s great Bows & Arrows was, but as Drowned in Sound, the only journalistic review I could find already published, says, “The musicianship is almost routine in its excellence; Matt Barrick’s drums in particular kick and roll throughout, propelling the songs with a sick-at-sea feel…”
The classic Walkmen sound is back, with lots of space in the music for echoes (not reverb) from the guitar and the cymbal crashes. But the difference here is that unlike previous albums, either with the keyboard in their first two or the brass band in A Hundred Miles Off, the four key rock components (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) are the only primary sounds on the album. A couple trumpet flourishes aside (most notably, and beautifully, in “Red Moon”), this is a self-contained effort, and I think the album benefits from it. These songs don’t need a keyboard to make them better; they’re great as is.
Individual highlights, while hard to pick out since really, every song is great, are probably these: “Red Moon”‘s slow, slow waltz is absolutely sublime, and “Canadian Girl”, which follows it, shows Leithauser channeling Motown with his “ahh-ah-ahh’s”, and flexing a bit of versatility. “On The Water” is the most aggressive song on the album, but it still manages to keep some benign influence to prevent it from being just another repeat of their breakthrough single “The Rat” from back in ’04.
Well, 2008, you don’t seem to be done cranking out the great music, but you’ve still got a lot of work to do if you want to surpass ’07. If TV On The Radio matures like the Walkmen have in their third effort, that should make it a lot easier.
A movie review will probably come tomorrow.
Phone numbers here, getcha phone numbers; Girl Talk review
So Jonathan Smith has me looking through a bunch of call lists (lists of people to call for donations) to find ones we haven’t called yet, to find ones that we have called so that we don’t call them twice, to find ones who asked for literature so that we can smoke out the spy who has been prevented said literature from being sent. (Really. That is really a job I was asked to do.) I will dream about phone numbers tonight, for sure.
I promise to have a movie review tomorrow, probably of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. It’s so much easier to listen to music I haven’t heard before than it is to do the same for movies. But for now, let’s turn our attention to mash-ups.
UPDATE: So, charitable commenter too_legit was correct, the version that I heard was, in fact, fake. I didn’t think it was terrible at all, though. Maybe I just don’t have a discriminating eye for these things. Regardless, I will have an abbreviated review of the real version up later in the week. Hey, two for one ain’t bad, right?
Mash-ups are interesting things – some people really love to get down to a mash-up of, say, “Country Grammar” and “Sweet Home Alabama” (that’s a great one, I swear), and some even deny the power of “Bittersweet Symphony/ Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, which is one of my favorites. Regardless of opinion, everyone will agree that the combination of two or more songs in one creates something entirely different. That’s its whole appeal – if not to the listener, than to the artist in making it.
Girl Talk (AKA Greg Gillis) is the king of the mash-ups. As opposed to putting the lyrics of one track against the instrumentation of another, with adjustments for pitch, like most mash-ups, he combines lots of songs in one, with rapid-fire references and drastic changes in effect, like octaving up or down lyrics of one song to complement lyrics of another, while both play over the instrumental lines of one or two more songs. The end result is basically Auto-DJ: hundreds of songs dumped into one album to blast at a party and let the partygoers grin whenever they hear a song they recognize.
As Pitchfork pointed out in their review of Girl Talk’s last album, Night Ripper, pointing out all the songs is half the fun of listening to his music. And it is fun. Oh, is it fun. Is it fun? Regardless, Girl Talk’s new album, Feed the Animals, is just that: fun. I’m not sure if it has been officially released yet, but if it is, then it’s just a digital release for the time being. Either way, I downloaded it…legally. Legally. Legally. Hey, shut up. Listening to it is just a joy for me. But why?
By rights, I shouldn’t like this album. Those who know me know well my total distaste for Top 40 music these days. I just can’t stand it at all and I gnash my teeth and get morose and annoyed whenever I hear it. But there’s plenty of it on here, so what gives? The only explanation I can give for it is two-pronged: a) the total mutation that music undergoes here means that you can’t really compare one version to the other, and b) the songwriting REALLY doesn’t matter here. This is for dancing and head-bobbing. This is club music. People don’t listen to the lyrics in club music.
Feed the Animals gets better as it goes on, and the references get more grin-inducing. My favorite is in the track “Rockin”, when the song “Freak on a Leash” by Korn (yes, that one – don’t tell me you don’t know it, you fucking do unless you’re Kriti) is octaved up so that the lead singer sounds like a freaky chihuahua/midget hybrid, like he’s meant to. That is followed by a sample of the piano figure from “My Moon My Man” by Feist. He really goes everywhere with these.
Other favorite samples include: Vampire Weekend, The Beatles (twice), Outkast (twice – including “Sorry Ms. Jackon), Eminem (thrice), Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix (with some Jamaican rapper over him [pitch-adjusted Sean Paul, perhaps?]), and the capper, DMX played over Queen and then Black Sabbath in “Watch What You Do”. Now you know what I mean by grin-inducing. I can’t say that this will be at the top of my end-o’-year list, because it doesn’t seem fair to put it over people who wrote their own songs. Then again, I could have a change of heart by the end of the year because of how much fun this is. Just plain fun. That’s the one word you should take out of this review, because I’ll still be grinning from listening to this album when you’re reading this.
SIX FUCKING HOURS and I’m going back; Richie review
So despite waiting in the blistering sun for six hours to see Vampire Weekend and their two openers, my compatriots and I were rained out after Born Ruffians’ 25-minute set and my phone’s battery was water damaged and had to be replaced. I had taken my dad’s minivan since it gets free parking at Croton Harmon train station, so my parents used my car to go out to dinner. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, as soon as they pull into the driveway at around 11:30, my car’s alarm starts going buc wild and won’t shut off until my dad unplugs the battery. So let’s recap Saturday: six hours of waiting, albeit fun since it was with fun people, 25 minutes of music, one broken phone, one broken car. Eesh.
Of course, the next day I got my battery replaced, and once my dad plugged the battery of the car back in, the car was fine, so Sunday was a bit of a reset and today was fine and uneventful. But I was reeling from an unbelievably crappy day, so after taking what I think will be my one day off per week (Friday), I had two days of bereavement leave, as it were.
So, Central Park, what are you going to do to me this time? I’m going back Friday night to see a free show of Mike Birbiglia, one of my favorite stand-up comics on the same stage (he’s performing with Stephen Lynch, whom I think is okay, but could get annoying if he goes on first, and if he goes on second, I’ll probably leave). If anyone wants to go with me who I haven’t talked to because it didn’t occur to me that you know/like/would like to find out about Mike Birbiglia, just contact me whatever way you can.
That was the longest prologue to a review I’ve done so far, so let’s move as quickly as possible to the business at hand.
So after I browbeated (browbate? browbote? everything comes up as wrong in SpellCheck, which comes up as wrong itself, so I don’t trust it anyway) Richie into sending me a copy of In This Room on the house since I’m as poor as Oliver Twist, if Oliver Twist lived in Cortlandt Manor (which would make him considerably less cute, if only because he would lose the British accent), I set myself to reviewing it, since the next piece of music I’ll review will probably be something none of you have heard of, so this will be a nice contrast. That was the longest sentence in WordPress history, I’m pretty sure. Oh, well.
After recording his first two albums in the studio, something that he couldn’t monetarily stick with, In This Room is his second homemade full-length, I believe. It’s the second homemade full-length that I have, at least. I will admit that I still listen to Nowhere Far more than the other two – there’s something magical about that album that seems to never get old for me. However, his first homemade album, Let Go, Let Go, still felt pretty polished, so I didn’t mind at all. Aside from the songwriting and the great voice work that we’ve now become accustomed to as Richie’s strengths, though, In This Room seems less developed than all three of Richie’s previous albums, more like a demo tape than a fully-realized album.
Don’t get me wrong, Richie’s in as strong a writing form as ever – two huge highlights are opener “Looking Up at the Stars” (fomerly “Walking”, I believe?) with everyone’s favorite lyric: “My days are starting off/With sunshine in the sky/My roommate’s getting high” and “Melting Snow”, the greatest strength of which is resisting the urge to get bigger as it goes on, like Richie does more commonly – the delicate quality of the song wouldn’t have survived such a crescendo.
However, this album really could have benefited from a less off-the-cuff approach. At times, the electric guitar part, provided by Charlie Schneider, though it adds a good third dimension and is played well, seems thrown on and not really synchronized. Also, the false starts and laughs with the vocals should have been held to once per album, at most – after the first time, it seems like a mistake instead of just being playful.
It’s been tough writing a review of an album made by one of my best friends that is anything but glowing, since not only do I adore the guy, I also have really loved his music until now, and I don’t doubt that his next work will return to form, if not surpass it – I hear tell of a full band album, which excites me to no end, as it should for anyone fortunate enough to catch his show at the Black Cow a couple of weeks ago.
Look for another, more obscure review tomorrow, and keep fighting the good fight all.
I Ate My DVD Collection 