Say Comeuppance

This shy blog has never sought the stature or repute of the heroic.  The music, after all, is not all about us.  But we also never have, nor will, shirk the heroic alms that are sometimes, rarely maybe, due us.  Some of those alms arrive in the form of double orange vinyl.  Some in double blue.

A Quarter of Life with the Trashcan Sinatras

The drive after work one evening from Oregon’s Willamette Valley to the Tri Cities of interior Washington is every bit of five hours.  The next day is another ten to Billings, and the day after that about the same to Sioux Falls.  East beyond Sioux Falls the land folds into hills again, and trees begin to bunch up between the fields and sometimes into actual woods and forests of their own.  The world’s finest unknown band is on a “jukebox” tour across the country, playing every one of its 100+ recorded songs over the span of the two-month run, and the obvious challenge is to see as many shows and hear as many different songs live as possible.  My itinerary involves a drive to Wisconsin and then shows in Milwaukee, St. Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Portland.   It’s a fairly long trip there and back again, and it’s been a fairly long time coming.

For Scott Hutchison

 

 

It’s an odd thing that two of this writer’s favorite bands feature singers whose voices, at first listen, were so jarring as to require ducking away from the music for a short period of adjustment.  Brent Best of Slobberbone was the first of these—his barrel-chested moan wheezing forth to capture all of the love and dread that lies between Texas and the Great Lakes. 

Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit was the second.  He died this week.

Amber Soles still hasn’t heard a note of the band’s debut album Sing the Greys.  But when The Midnight Organ Fight sprouted up out of the ground in 2007, in many ways it seemed instantly massive, a pinnacle piece for all that indie music had been climbing or building toward since the 1980s.  The guitar and studio work was brilliant for an early-career album.  The melodies were everywhere.  And my God, there were the words.

A lot like Mr. Best a few years before, Mr. Hutchison’s lyrics erupt like a geyser or a shockingly successful oil drilling.  The words are everywhere, arriving in great clusters crowding into lines, every clause a vivid image and many of them via metaphor, many of them harrowingly clever…all of them linking together into a sepia wallpaper pattern of care and anguish and loss.

And his voice was a brass mallet.  For ears perpetually eased in tones of Francis Reader, Tracyanne Campbell, and Neil Halstead, the voice of The Midnight Organ Fight was a shock—what Ted Hughes had described in the previous century as a “sudden sharp hot stink of fox”, alive and moving through a midnight’s moment forest.  It sounded like no other voice in music, raw and unkempt and unloading serial volleys of sardonic lament.

Frightened Rabbit eventually managed the supreme feat of the artist—taking a perfect achievement of talent and somehow improving upon it.  The Midnight Organ Fight was perfect, and a few years later they gave us Pedestrian Verse, which was better.

The indie “aesthetic”, to the extent that foolish writers are allowed to generalize, has always been at least partially about poised separation and detachment; the genre has included a smirk, and an understanding that the artist and the audience are a least a little bit knowing.  Melodies and guitar lines are always at least slightly off-kilter, indirect.  Full-bore emotional immersion has rather been an approach for straight-ahead rock or other less indirect forms of musical expression.

Low among the horrible things about Mr. Hutchison’s fate is that it seems that there was no separation here.  The writing was clearly not from a safe perch at a distance, with fields and hedges of recovery and healing in-between.  May he have found peace in separation now, and rest within it.

Dear God.  Please get him a guitar.  Give Yourself a short while to get used to that voice.  It will be worth it.  

 

May 2018

For Carey Lander

The climbing piano notes of Camera Obscura’s “My Maudlin Career,” from the identically named album of 2009, did quite a bit to prepare the world for the band’s public re-emergence after the very successful Let’s Get Out of This Country album three years before. 

The band released this new song a few weeks before the album itself.   Piano rang forth from a minor cacophony of echo and reverb.  In the relatively new tradition of Camera Obscura, and in the very slightly older tradition of indie music itself, the piano melody was simple but it was both layered and defiantly, um, obscured by a Wall of Sound.  There was elegance everywhere, and beauty throughout, but the sonics were as cloudy as unrequited love. 

At that point, Camera Obscura were two, going on three, albums into a ten year, four-LP run of consecutive brilliance.  And they were also two, going on three of four albums with Carey Lander holding court at the keyboards.   Now we must somehow learn to accept that there will not be a fifth with Carey.  She passed away this month of recurrent and metastatic osteosarcoma.

Ms. Lander was a fixture on Stage Left of most Camera Obscura concerts, bivouacked between terraces of keys.  She seemed, based upon six or seven concerts of observation, to be in perpetual head-bopping mode while part of this efficient factory of melody.  And she seemed to be perpetually in range of eye contact with lead singer Tracyanne Campbell.

This latter detail was clearly important.  Perhaps consistent with their middle-albums tendencies toward noise and distortion, Camera Obscura have always been a post-shoegaze study in stoicism.  In concert, Mss. Campbell and Lander “smiled” only rarely and with apparently enormous internal resistance.  While none of the band ever seemed to be staring at their shoes, any abrupt concert turn toward joy seemed to send the eyes of these two musicians immediately careening toward their footwear, crumpled smirks forced downward. 

Whether this was garden-variety shyness (doubt it:  see below) or a much more complex, and coordinated, method of interaction with the audience, the effect for concert-going lovers of the band was equal parts hilarious, endearing and alarming.   If noisy applause and adoration sent the women of Camera Obscura into squelched uncomfortable grin-grimaces, what good were we as an admiring audience?  And how could this vessel of musical perfection sail on, in the absence of received gusts of kind regard?

Unrequited love, thy soundtrack was written by Camera Obscura.

Having never met any of the band, it is this writer’s opinion that a fair chunk of this stunning aesthetic was Carey’s accomplishment.  Both she and Ms. Campbell donned absolutely incredible vintage threads for their gigs, sailing onto stage like pale Glaswegian ghosts of melodies past, present and future.  Try as you might to make them smile, try as you might to humanize these larger than life spectres, they just wouldn’t crack.  Meanwhile the songs tumbled out, invoking sad narrators and much sadder lovers of narrators. 

This was all remarkably heady and well-conceived stuff for a group of folks moving from their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.  Again, disproportionate credit seems due to the departed, who was the only other person this writer heard of admitting to having a few weeks ruined by the death of John Updike.

The world has lost a living classic, and so horribly many years early.  There is no hope of replacing Carey Lander—no mould could produce more than one such work of art before likewise passing on. 

October 2015

No Let Up

Most Messed Up – Old 97’s

            We’ve been doin’ this longer than you’ve been alive,

            Propelled by some mysterious drive.

It turns out there was at least one meteorite-proof dinosaur. 

Old 97’s have been lumbering alone through deserted groves of cycads, and along the shorelines of vast shallow inland seas, for years now.  The alt-country era is long over.  Jeff Tweedy, for example, has had time to leave his original band, build his own proper band, tend to that band’s gentle decline, and then wander away from it, too. 

It has been more than twenty years.  There is no No Depression.  But somehow, like a Coelacanth in a modern ocean, Rhett Miller and his band full of wiseass remain very much alive.

On This Corner

Everyday Robots – Damon Albarn

It has been a long road already from the smartarse blonde smirks on so many old Blur publicity photos.  Damon Albarn has worn a plurality of hats since then, and carried off nearly all of them well.  There were latter-day Blur albums of increasing complexity; a Gorillaz phase of laptophilia, and quite a few other cul-de-sacs of published material.  What’s more, basically all of it has been pretty, or better:  remaining both fun and interesting despite the escalating tariffs paid to maturity.

While no one portion of this output could quite be accused of immortality and greatness, that fate now is now unavoidably assigned to the burgeoning sum of Albarn’s career.  Post-Blur, the albums have been of uniformly humble scope—sometimes playful, sometimes gloomy, but generally always modest.  But his combined output has nonetheless achieved in total a stature of rare importance.  All of us should be listening when this man strikes a chord.

The latest album, Albarn’s Everyday Robots, has made the point both irrefutable and permanent.

A Galaxie Far, Far Away

Dean Wareham – Dean Wareham

Dean Wareham, who may set the standard for handsome faces of the middle-aged indie circuit, is now 50 years old.  And although his sugared melodies and honeyed voice have dominated the recordings of his multiple prior professional associations, his first proper solo album now officially exists.   He has enlisted no airs with a choice of title.  He has wasted no misdirection in opening lyrics:

            I was the arrow,

            I was the bow,

            I loved it here but I’m ready to go,

            Now that we’re here I’m ready to leave

            This whole wide world behind.

So it begins with “The Dancer Disappears,” and it makes maximum sense that this restless bard used the first lines of the leadoff track of his first ever solo album to announce his readiness to move on.   Wareham’s modus operandi has always been a far-seeing march onward—even if forever fewer colleagues seem capable of keeping up with him.

Our Fear of Flying

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything – Elbow

The unique career of Elbow is elegant testament to the impact, or non-impact, of a couple of larger-than-life songs on an otherwise unassuming indie rock career.  The band released a debut album in 2001.  Seven long years and two more interesting albums later, they released The Seldom Seen Kid, which included two of 2008’s greatest songs:  “Grounds For Divorce” and “One Day Like This.”  The former was every inch a drunken swaggering piss-take through a week’s worth of lousy poetry lines, in which even the handclaps were made to sound outrageous; the latter was as perfect a celebration of a perfect day as a bunch of mumbling lads could ever hope to make.  It was a gorgeous epic.   And it was a hit.

Popularity and acclaim, including major industry awards, ensued.  The career of Elbow had reached a natural joint of pivot.  The band had spent three prior albums being incorrigibly endearing and odd.    An inordinate number of their songs, while pretty to listen to, seemed to go absolutely nowhere while taking a while getting there.  Many were defiantly, steadfastly quiet, erupting in louder volumes only when it was most jarring and obnoxious.   And then, two magical songs later, a seat at the head table seemed on offer.  Elbow appeared poised to become a bashful version of Coldplay.

Together Forever

No Way There From Here – Laura Cantrell

Ranking just ahead of gothic novelists, toward the top of the list of magical things about the American South, is the equanimity of its women.  In perfect tones, for instance, they can use the term “sweet” to make it clear to you that you are an incapable fool doomed to drown face-down in a swamp of your own haplessness, or that you are God’s perfect Lothario, due the romantic tithings of many counties.

Laura Cantrell lives and works and sings and makes records in New York City.  But her songbird voice, generally arriving low, even and impeccably clear, manifests a similarly devastating Southern effect.  Since launching a traditional-and-now-therefore-basically-alternative-country singing career in 2000, Ms. Cantrell has maneuvered within the same relatively limited vocal range, but the results of her work have been so haltingly affecting, with so little apparent strain to the attendant craftsmanship, that it must be asked:  how is this woman not from the South?