And here we come to the purpose of the exercise - in this post there are only three artists with four hours of music across five albums...and probably no more than six hundred words spent on any single record.
American Music Club - The Golden Age
American Music Club is from San Francisco, in case song titles like "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" and "The Grand Duchess of San Francisco" didn't clue you in. To be fair, though, "Windy City Funk" was supposed to be a b-side before getting cut entirely. The Golden Age is full of an atrocious acousticsm that hits its nadir quickly in the album kicker, "All My Love." The band can't settle on a mood, trying to play both junkie and jangly and gets stuck in what I believe is an inadvertent phoniness. Case in point: the record's best song - the aforementioned "Lost Souls" - easily reads as music for the opening credits of an uninspired Hollywood rom-com.
Anavan - Cover Story
One of many records I reviewed for the former KSCR, Cover Story's fun, quirky electro slant just makes The Beat Is... seem like an even bigger steaming pile of shit. Anavan is notable for carrying on a tradition of nasal, stream-of-consciousness weirdos like Devo and the B-52s, storming the gates of the hipper-than-thou with nothing but energy and enthusiasm. It's not the most original record - "Skin Like Heather" is a lot like "Beautiful World" by way of Silence of the Lambs - but it's hard to resist the prankish spirit in songs like "Off to a Fighting Start," striking a classic neener-neener stance by exhorting us to "take a long walk/off a short dock."
But flip the counter to 3 on pointless hidden tracks with the worst one yet (and not even halfway through 'A'!), an indecipherable phone message that includes an intolerable amount of (simulated?) retching.
Andrew Bird
I saw and heard Andrew Bird for the first time at an Amoeba Records in-store performance, by which time he had been elevated to minor prophet status by a handful of friends who I wanted to impress very, very badly. These were heady days - one of these friends would place the dust jacket of the Armchair Apocrypha CD on a bookshelf at parties and warmly remind me that "he watches over us."
I actually worked backwards to Weather Systems to better understand Bird's initial appeal, which is pretty simply understood - it's pure whimsy. This blitheness can be better as an ideal than as a practice, but Bird hits most of his marks. "Lull" is a pretty great song. No frills, just fun.
Armchair Apocrypha, by comparison, is Bird's epic. The unBirdlike electric guitar is featured prominently in many of the standout tracks like "Fiery Crash" and "Plasticities." But strings and whistling are Bird's meat and potatoes, and they are here in full force. "Yawny at the Apocalypse" gives us the word to describe his signature sound: it's not sleepy, but it's tired. Beautifully tired.
His most recent album, Noble Beast, feels more of the same with its morbid fascinations married to twee affectations. To be honest, I really wanted to bury this turkey based upon memories of more than a year ago, scoffing at the pretense of this, the album with its own recurring column in the New York Times and a second disc of instrumental tracks (Useless Creatures).
And though this Beast is overstuffed, it may just be appreciably better than Armchair. Even if it's highs aren't as high as "Dark Matter," it's more consistent in deploying the loud-soft dichotomy in book-learned fiddlin' songs like "Fitz and Dizzyspells" and "Nomenclature." It's also takes a surprising number of detours outside of Bird's comfort zone, including a song - "Not A Robot, But A Ghost" - that uses (gasp) a drum machine.
It's a bold step for a man who's turned whistlin' and pickin' into a livelihood.
No comments:
Post a Comment