Entries Tagged 'Music' ↓
January 1st, 2010 — Music, This Year
For a good half of this year I could rarely bring myself to listen to new music. It had been a while since I devoured recommendations from Pitchfork and the mp3 blogosphere, but now I was just not interested in hearing new things. I would try to listen to them and realise that I wasn't even listening properly, let alone enjoying the experience.
The most notable side effect of this condition was the amount of Mountain Goats that I listened to.
Leaving aside the year's two new Mountain Goats releases, which I'll get to in a moment, there were a handful of their albums that I really got into for the first time. In chronological order:
Get Lonely (2006), which I may have heard described as "spending a long time at the bottom of a swamp". Not the sort of thing that has clicked with me in the past, but I discovered this year that sometimes all one can do with an overwhelming feeling that one is suffocating at the bottom of a swamp is wait it out with some music that feels the same way.
Full Force Galesburg (1997). Wow. Just wow. This is now on approximately equal footing with We Shall All Be Healed as my most dearly-beloved Mountain Goats album. It is very close to perfect.
The Coroner's Gambit (2000), which had slipped under my radar until I happened to listen through it in a year saturated with reminders to consider mortality. "Elijah", "Baboon" and "Alphonse Mambo" are high points, but the whole thing is somehow very different to its individual parts.
Finally, Zopilote Machine (1994), a late entrant propelled by my sudden discovery that it is not just a "Going to Georgia" vehicle after all, and Nothing For Juice (1996) which I was tricked into exploring by the Awesome Yet Unfinishable Mountain Goats Project and which turned out to be marvellous.
Actual New Music From 2009!
All that being said, there were four new releases this year that I can call my favourites. They are also the only four that I have paid any sustained amount of attention to, but never mind. In alphabetical order:
Eyedea & Abilities - By The Throat
Hip-hop and I have never really gotten along. I have a huge amount of respect for the skills involved, but it's pretty rare for me to find even a single song that I can connect with. Imagine my surprise when I heard the title track of this album, liked it a lot, went to listen to the whole thing, and liked that a lot as well! I lack the vocabulary to explain what I like about it, but with luck it will inspire me to learn.
The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice - Moon Colony Bloodbath
I am not a fan of John Vanderslice. For a while I found this EP kind of alienating, and I blamed it on "the Vanderslice taint". Then I remembered that he produced the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, which I love almost more than anything, and was forced to reconsider. Suddenly, I no longer liked only the John Darnielle-centric songs. Repeated listening really fleshed out the theme, and by the end of the year I had listened to those seven tracks a total of 276 times.
The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come
The Life of the World to Come was my most anticipated album of the year. My first reaction was mixed: some tracks were disappointingly inconspicuous, one was eerily reminiscent of a Barenaked Ladies song, one made me cry uncontrollably the first time I listened to it and has continued to have a similar effect since, and a couple of others landed on me just as hard. I still don't have much of a sense of it as a cohesive whole (much like Heretic Pride or most of the pre-4AD albums), and I think that if I did not have such a strong sense of John Darnielle the person (rather than just John Darnielle the musician) I would be able to maintain a greater emotional distance from it; as it is I think Darnielle is a genius but listening to this album too much (or perhaps at all) constitutes very poor emotional hygiene.
Windmill - Epcot Starfields
A vocalist who sounds like a weird hybrid of Tim DeLaughter and Kimya Dawson. Piano and strings by turns sparse and lush, warm vocal harmonies and cold synthesisers. Lyrics with a tendency towards the bizarre. This album did not stand out when I first heard it, but I keep coming back to it again and again. It is a very pretty, if sometimes affected, album about a very small person in a very large universe.
New-to-me Music Not Actually From 2009!
Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning
I had previously written Bright Eyes off as some kind of ridiculous, bleating, self-indulgent emo nonsense. Thanks to a recommendation from How To Be So Real, I checked this album out and was blown away. Sorry, Connor Oberst, I misjudged you.
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
Another previously-written-off band! What am I, some kind of reformed music snob or something? The Hold Steady's other albums still don't do anything for me, but Boys and Girls in America perfectly captures a reckless, full-throated, self-destructive kind of youth that I can romanticise from a distance without ever wanting to live through.
Manchester Orchestra - I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child
One of Stefan's best recommendations to me ever (so it is in very good company). Standout tracks are "Where Have You Been?", "Sleeper 1972" and "Colly Strings". It's good to let go and just be emo sometimes.
Mission of Burma - Vs.
I sought out Mission of Burma, among other bands, after reading Our Band Could Be Your Life. This was the album that stuck. It's good to listen to really loudly. I think I need to make an effort to listen to music really loudly more often.
Moscow Olympics - Cut the World
This is a strange little EP from a Filipino (I think) dream-pop/new wave/post-punk group who somehow manage to remind me of New Order, Sonic Youth and the Pet Shop Boys simultaneously. I am not sure how "good" it is, but it broke my listening-to-new music drought for me. And I do really like it.
Oops
This is only a part of the post I had intended to write today. As it has grown somewhat large, and my self-imposed deadline for writing something approaches, I will leave writing about the unmusical aspects of 2009 until another day.
For those of you who have made it this far, I am pleased to present my soundtrack to 2009 in pseudo-mix-CD format:
Driving Through Ghosts, or, Don't Mistake Proximity For Fate.
September 7th, 2009 — Music
The last day of the Woodford Folk Festival was the first day of 2009. I woke up and didn't know what to do with myself.
I ended up at the last session of FYI with Martin Pearson, which also featured Sandy McCutcheon, Kristine Olsen, Liz someoneorother and Alastair Hulett. Before the talking started I got chatting to the people sitting either side of me; bizarrely, this was the first such occurrence all week. Perhaps I was setting the scene for a more sociable and outgoing year. We talked about playing music and made small talk and it was not even unpleasant.
FYI itself was quietly entertaining, a good way to ease into the morning. It was more enjoyable than the resurrected version of Good News Week that has been on television in recent years, but much less awesome than the Good News Weeks of old. I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that someone should run "rationality awareness workshops" at the next Woodford, a welcome indication that I was not alone in feeling somewhat beseiged by woo at the festival. There were also bizarre underwear stories, and Alastair Hulett had a Scottish accent.
Then I went to see Rosie Burgess, and was immediately kicking myself for not going to every single one of her performances at the festival.
Completely unaffected, down-to-Earth, Australian modern-folk-ish music from an entirely adorable group. The violinist didn't seem terribly comfortable on stage, but a lack of showmanship did nothing to disguise the fact that she rocked. The drummer was all sunshine and snare, and Rosie was the charming hinge it all swung on. I think my eyes may actually have turned into tiny hearts when she played a harmonica solo. I was very sad to miss her recent show in Melbourne.
It turns out I posted the wrong photos of The Ellis Collective in my previous post, so I have none left to use now. Never mind, it would probably just provoke unjustified comments about beards. I had the odd feeling that I had heard their music before, not just the day before but going back long enough for me to have favourite songs and a general sense of familiarity. I would like to hear a lot more of The Ellis Collective. I love the well-ordered, uncluttered, subtly complex results of having so many musicians on stage without them getting in each other's way. They weren't even subject to the festival-long curse of terrible sound mixing at the Grande stage.
I just had a look at the Ellis Collective's Facebook page, and noted that they have added "Tasteful Bogan" to "Bloke Folk" in their list of descriptive phrases, and also that they have an album due out late this year.
The Wells struck me as a country-rock'n'roll-type band in the vein of The Wallflowers (at least, The Wallflowers when I was paying attention to them in the mid-nineties). Their performance didn't really click for me, although that may have been because everyone in the band was Too Hot and complaining quite vocally about wanting to get off the stage. Another blow was struck for the Skeptics of Woodford when a band member cried out "Is there a doctor in the audience? I need a real doctor!"
I laughed. Not all that many other people did.
Later in the day Dougie MacLean did the shortest soundcheck I have ever seen. He walked on, made a little bit of noise, asked for less guitar and vocals in his foldback, then walked off again. Like The Wells he was suffering in the heat, although he just made a brief reference to drowning in his own sweat and then got on with it. I think I will probably continue to have a weakness for Scottish folk music until I die. It's in my blood, or something.
In the absence of anything else to do (the program becoming increasingly gappy as everyone went home) I went on the Mystery Bus one more time. The band of the moment turned out to be The Wells, who were much more to my taste in an acoustic (and less overheated) setting. A song called "Got Love" was particularly nice.
Between the Mystery Bus and my last scheduled performance-to-watch of the festival, I had the misfortune of sitting on a hill near something called Belswagger Morris. All my notebook had to say on the subject was:
Augh!
PIECES OF FLAIR
Were I given to such things in non-keyboard-mediated contexts it would have said D: as well. The morris dancers seemed to be entirely in earnest and their recorder was not in tune. I am all for people doing things they enjoy but being in the vicinity of such people doing this particular thing is not something that I enjoy.
Alastair Hulett and David Rovics brought up the rear as a kind of filthy-commie double header. By far the most overtly political music I had heard at the festival, which was not unwelcome. Some of Hulett's material felt a little dated and studded with empty rhetoric, and Rovics sounded a bit too much like Weird Al for me to concentrate properly; on the other hand, Hulett's amiable Scottishness and a song about Mrs someone's Army won me over, as did Rovics' moment of channelling John Darnielle and song about pirates. Also, they came from two of my favourite places in the world: Hulett from Glasgow and Rovics from Portland, Oregon.
And that was the Woodford Folk Festival. Unfortunately I was completely burned out on new music for six months afterwards, but it was packed with interesting discoveries and opportunities to take pictures of bands without getting in people's way and being obnoxious. A week away from reality and full of music is not to be sneezed at.
August 31st, 2009 — Music
Now, where was I? Ah yes, waiting for The Quills to play.
I want to avoid saying purely negative things about this band, but it is difficult. Things got off to a bad start when they came onstage with ridiculous, pretentious hipster outfits (and one of them had a laptop) and then the singer launched into an "inspirational" and pretentious introduction to the band or their recording process or something like that. I'm not sure. I wasn't really listening. The music turned out to be fairly generic pop-rock of the kind that makes me a happy ex-Triple J listener, and in no way vindicated their pretentious schtick. (Did I mention I found them pretentious?) When the second or third song was a mellow tune incorporating samples that sounded like painful mic feedback I gave up and went somewhere else.
The Ellis Collective, on the other hand, were one of my Woodford highlights.
Their website describes their sound as "bloke folk", which is accurate as well as rhyming. I appreciate it when artists sing in their native accent and, while a broad Australian accent can be grating in song, Matty Ellis' is not that kind. Instead, backed by strings and perfect vocal harmonies, it's a sound as immediately and endearingly Australian as the Lucksmiths'. That Lucksmiths comparison can be stretched further: while the Ellis Collective deal less in whimsy and more in melancholy, both bands excel at portraying small pieces of ordinary people's ordinary lives.
Refreshing and wonderful. I was only sorry I hadn't made time to see them earlier in the week as well.
I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the final of the band competition. All five bands had pulled together pretty great performances in the space of a few days, but the winners - the Woodford Weatherers - were probably the best band overall, most of the other groups being "star performer" + backup people."
In the evening I went to see a group called On the Stoop, but instead spent fifteen or twenty minutes watching them futz around trying to set things up and do a soundcheck. By the time I gave up and went away there was still no sign that a performance was likely to occur. As a result I caught the very, very end of Mic Conway's National Junk Band's set, and discovered that I should probably have been there for the whole thing. Some guy playing a singing saw, fire breathing and fire swallowing, and a stage full of bizarre contraptions. Ah well.
The Kin were next up on the Grande stage, but fell somewhat flat. The audience tended to encourage the brothers' diva tendencies, and the magic of their previous performance was absent. Plus, the sound at the Grande was still terrible.
I had plans to head back for the tent for a brief nap, then wake up in time for the three minutes' silence at 23:30 and stay awake until midnight. I set an alarm but must have turned it off without even waking up properly, because I missed the lot.
July 12th, 2009 — Music
This is what the last morning of 2008 looked like. I couldn't tell you what it felt like, because I've left writing this post until more than six months later.
This is Ange Takats. According to her introduction she won the 2008 National Folk Festival award for vocal excellence. That sounded appropriate enough to me; her voice was lovely. Her songs didn't do so much for me, although I was charmed by her self-deprecating tales of googling ex-boyfriends and making inept life choices.
Next came Jack and the Giant Killers, a slightly funkier variant on the Triple-J-rock staple. Good energy on stage, a not unpleasant listening experience - and then some giants showed up. Stilt-walking normal-sized humans, to be more accurate.
Jack and the Giant Killers did not live up to their name.
I have no pictures of the next thing that happned, mostly because I was too busy having an excellent time. I went to a vocal workshop run by The Kin, who turned out to be giant hippies of the raised-from-birth variety. They talked about singing with reference to chakras without batting an eyelid. They also asked the participants to stick our hands down our pants in order to dig our fingers into our pubic bones, and appeared surprised at the awkward giggling that ensued.
In the end, though, they got a tent full of people to start with making funny noises and work up to singing loudly, melodically (in tune, even, and in two parts!) and confidently, and I enjoyed every moment. It made me think, not for the first time, about seeking out singing lessons, the aim being to gain a better physical understanding of how I make sounds and thus (I hope) some form of confidence.
I showed up to see Psycho Zydeco with a certain weariness, mainly because I thought they were another gypsy/balkan-influenced band that I would struggle to differentiate from all the others like them at Woodford. This was completely unjustified, of course, as zydeco music hails from the southern USA and leads to people wearing washboards and performing cowbell solos.
Psycho Zydeco reminded me a little bit of the Blues Brothers, but not because of the style of music they played. They seemed a little older than most of the musicians playing loud music at Woodford, and also a little bit out of place - no "gypsy influences", no 20-something guys with hair product and guitars, no wistfulness or political content. Despite a relatively small and lukewarm audience, they had a rollicking good time making music that would have made anyone less dance-oriented than me get up and dance.
This post threatened to sprawl oppressively and indefinitely across my Drafts folder, so I am turning the first part loose. Still to come: The Quills, The Ellis Collective, and more.
May 15th, 2009 — Music, Personal
On Tuesday morning we were greeted by the most scorching incarnation yet of the Blue Screen of Death. My goodness, it was hot in the tent. I rewarded myself for my clever escape by buying a delicious mushroom burger for breakfast.
Today's early-in-the-morning gap-filling artist was Grace Barber, from the Seychelles via Perth. Playing what she described as a combination of reggae and African island rhythms, she apologised for her hayfever-stricken voice (although I didn't notice anything amiss) and had a fake horn section (a Korg synth). I have no real literacy or even frame of reference when it comes to this kind of music, but I liked this.
Brothers The Kin followed, as did their not-inconsiderable following; people were standing in the aisles before the set even started. I have to admit to being a little dubious - a couple of pretty boys with lots of teenage girls clamouring to see them? Chances were good that this would not be my kind of thing at all.
But then they started singing. At first I didn't even realise they were both singing (the joy of singing in unison with relatives), and their voices were very beautiful. Sometimes the performance was marred a little by the younger brother's tendency to be a diva, or the overshadowing of a melody line by vocal gymnastics, but their musicianship and showmanship made what would otherwise have been a neutral experience very enjoyable.
Particularly notable was the comparison of audience members to cows (clustered under the one available tree - it was a hot, hot day) and some impressive audience participation.
I find Kevin Mitchell's decision to perform as Bob Evans a little bizarre. His "solo" performance here, backed up as it was by several other musicians, came across not so much as "Kevin Mitchell performs country music solo", more as "Kevin Mitchell wants a grown-up band now". For all his rock-star antics and aviator sunglasses, this was pretty middle-of-the-road stuff.
Few of the new-to-me artists I saw at Woodford had been talked up as much as Doch. Perhaps it was unfortunate that they were the third or fourth group that I'd seen with a trumpet and Eastern European influences; perhaps the blame lies with the sound engineers at The Grande, who once again let muddy, bass-heavy sounds assault my ears, or perhaps I was just getting burnt out by days of Woodford and no longer properly receptive to new music. Everyone else absolutely loved this show, so I am confident in saying that the problem lay with me.
My favourite thing about this set was the pillar of rising gravel dust kicked up by the dancing people and illuminated by the beam of sunlight that came in through a gap in the top of the tent. My least favourite thing was the air-ukelele that the bandleader appeared to be playing with his trumpet.
Arriving (extremely) early for the next heat of the band competition, I was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of another Hey Rosetta! set. This time complete with violinist, they put on as great a show as before: the cellist's bow was worn ragged and at one point he ran around the stage waving a tambourine, the electric violin added a wonderful dimension to the sound, and my notes indicate that at one point I was moved to write down "hee hee skinny white boy arse dance".
Afterwards the members of Hey Rosetta! were signing copies of their CDs at the merch tent, and despite my general lack of interest in such things I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to them. There was quite a clump of fangirls centred around the singer, leaving the more interesting end of the band (mmm, bass and cello) vulnerable to my conversational attack. So I chatted a bit to Romesh and Josh (ooo, first name basis), found them to be friendly and interesting and somewhat shellshocked by the transition between Canadian winter and Queensland summer, and promised to try to send them audience members for their Melbourne show.
During this time I also noticed that the guitarist is Very Tall. Goodness gracious!
I don't have any notes from the band competition heat from that day, but I remember even now how impressed I was. The competition was a perfect illustration of why I value creativity within constraints so highly; give people something to bump up against and all of their energies are concentrated into a smaller space, so that (unless they get the sulks about the constraints and don't try) the result has a focus and quality that's often missing otherwise.
After wandering around aimlessly for a bit I claimed a spot on the hill to watch Dougie MacLean. Something of a Scottish folk legend, he had the sort of unassuming air that tends to win me over. Another victim of the extraordinary heat, he apologised for displaying his Scottish legs and suggested that it would be a "short" concert. I wasn't paying a great deal of attention during his set, but nice folk songs and a Scottish accent meant he couldn't go too far wrong in my book.
Ducking into the Empire tent, I saw the last part of The Grimstones, a charming, dark little fairytale about a family of monsters and freaks. The marionettes reminded me quite strongly of Tim Burton fare like and , and the musical accompaniment did nothing to dispel that impression. I liked that they had two narrators, one speaking and one signing; unfortunately, the nature of the venue meant that it was quite difficult to see what was happening on stage most of the time.
Next came the performance I was actually at the Empire to see: with Miss K. Sadly, this turned out to be a nasty, homophobic piece of cabaret trash instead of the boundary-pushing queer cabaret I had somehow been led to expect. I left very quickly indeed.
As a result, I had some extra time on my hands and didn't feel the need to collapse into sleep just yet, so I trekked up to the Amphitheatre (my one and only visit for the festival), where Augie March would be playing later. As luck would have it, this meant that I saw The Boat People finishing up, playing the one song of theirs I knew: "Awkward Orchid Orchard". A lovely little song, and a nice little band, the kind of thing that makes me wish Triple J didn't play so much junk nowadays so that I could keep listening and hearing good stuff.
Ah, Augie March. Since I have paid no attention to them at all, but some of the songs from that album put down particularly strong roots in a tumultuous period in my life. Seeing Augie March live tends to mean a pleasant mass of unfamiliar but listenable sound seeded with wonderful nostalgia bombs.
I lay on the hill and let the bombs fall where they would.
