Get Ready for Some Stunted Prose

Swinging on the Midyear Mix Meme vines of, I guess, Matos (who I don’t know) and Anthony (who I do). A few older tracks that I’ve spent a lot of time with this year are included and asterisked. I am proud to say that I think many of my friends would call this mix overwhelming.

Right Brain: Raisin’ the Roof, Which Coincidentally, is Heaven:

1. “Rubies,” Destroyer (9:25)
2. “Can You Get to That,” Funkadelic (2:50)*
3. “Annie, Let’s Not Want,” Guillemots (4:43)
4. “Figure in Your Dreams,” Comus (3:11)*
5. “Quero Pensar (A Mulher de Bath),” Tom Zé (4:01)
6. “Province,” TV on the Radio (4:36)
7. “In a Gadda Da Vida,” Albert Kuvezin & Yat-Kha (3:50)
8. “Bulgarian Chicks,” Balkan Beat Box (5:59)
9. “Get It,” T.I. (3:40)

Destroyer proved his feast-or-famine presence by leading off Rubies with a 9-minute Wikipedia entry for, well, Destroyer. Weed out the casuals up front. Still, he confesses, “Please don’t wake me from this—my golden slumber—I am proud to be apart of this number,” peeling his teeth back to show the same mushmouth/throbbing heart combo that so tragically sparks “empathy” in the Human Being. He ascends in a haze of vibraphone and re-animated Pavement licks. Funkadelic fumbles with the keys to heaven for 10 seconds, which is fine, because apparently heaven is a place where, amidst much grooving the fuck out to steaming folk-funk, you have to have your earthly mistakes read to you by the voices of 100 diapered angels on acid. Todd Burns said that I was supposed to dislike the first 30 seconds of “Annie, Let’s Not Want,” but I was too preoccupied with stupid, open-mouthed bopping to hear him. Come to think, “Annie, Let’s Not Want” seems to hold the sacred, secret PBW Dance Key—a very dangerous item, given the fact that my routines usually combine old footage of the Twist, a child exploring its body for the first time, a palsied horse’s imitation of Duran Duran, and shook Jello.

After the great, foreboding First Utterance, Comus recorded To Keep From Crying, which painstakingly documents every wrong turn you could possibly take with overbearing prog-folk. Thankfully, they also made the mistake of putting on “Figure in Your Dreams,” four minutes of rapture sung by a woman who sounds like she loves being on fire. Also, there is a bassoon. This song started showing up on my computer’s anti-virus scans, such was the depth of my addiction.

Tom Zé could slay Mozart—maybe not Bach, but Mozart—in a competition of countermelody. He also tricks you into the idea that feeling like you’re covered in bugs is a good thing. “Province” is the soul-searing gospel power ballad that alternative rock has needed since Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” which is still garbage unless Robbie is singing it. Similarly, nobody has pulled off “In a Gadda Da Vida” like Kuvezin, who simultaneously maximizes the novelty potential of Tuvan throat singing and shames every cookie monster metal vocalist this side of Pluto. Most anticipated record of 200never: Balkan Beat Box split tour EP w/Gang Gang Dance covering “Hounds of Love” at a Turkish wedding in my fucking dreams. Of course, if I just wanted unremitting chaos, I could go for Swizz Beats’ “Get It” from the T.I. album; not even the Mannie Fresh “I’m in an expensive helicopter” feeling can top the collapsing building vibe.

(A Disturbing Interlude!)

10. “Pretty Ugly Husband,” Sway
11. “One Hit,” The Knife
12. “Rock Stepper,” Excepter

Sway and The Knife decided to make very very live songs about the half-dead condition of the abused woman. “Pretty Ugly Husband” doesn’t barrel, but it never stops moving; it’s constant collision, venom, and crossed wires. Obviously, I pick the Sway song with no discernable punch lines, in the traditional comedic sense of the phrase. The Knife’s domestic violence number out-Drifts Scott Walker with pitched-down horrorshow vocals and swallows Bjork, too, bones and all. Alternation by Excepter is the electro-pop zombie hymnal they’ve been hinting at over their last couple releases; Throbbing Gristle, meet Soul Jazz Records: let’s dance, I mean die. I mean dance.

Left Brain: You Can’t Spell Gloss Without Loss (aka PBW Still Dazzled by Near-Batshit White Women)

13. “My Name Is Love,” Amy Diamond (2:56)
14. “Teach Me Sweetheart,” The Fiery Furnaces (5:56)
15. “Out in the Streets,” The Shangri-Las (2:45)*
16. “Lonely Hearts Still Beat the Same,” The Research (2:37)
17. “I Love You,” The Pipettes (1:37)

“Out in the Streets” is a song I’ve adored for years now, but it was only recently that I started to really recognize the tandem extremes that made it work—a queasy blend of dispassionate performance and true vulnerability. Eleanor of the Fiery Furnaces has never sounded more sincere, but the scene is a dream; I’d just as soon guess her emotions are dipping out of some psilocybin-stained peak in her brain—imagining your in-laws as snakes and dogs trying to kill you, definitely a poorly planned trip—but “I’m alone, teach me sweetheart” is one of the most resonant, affecting lines I’ve heard sung all year. The Research sound like a synth-less Stereolab dying inside of a seafoam bubble, trying vainly to keep themselves alive with a single clever heart metaphor; I kid you not when I say that the first day I heard this song, I listened to it for four hours straight. Amy Diamond is 14 and doesn’t know what love is, except that it sells; oddly enough, this makes her much more convincing as love—the paradox of the Shangri-Las maximized as the glossiest gloss manages to make me swoon. Amy Diamond is sterile and inhuman enough to actually trust.

The Pipettes, who sort of disgust me, ended their album with the suckerpunch of “I Love You.” PBW TMI Story Corner: for a little while, I dated a very confused bitch; like the Pipettes, she seemed fun and sweet at first, but turned bewilderingly awful. One afternoon, just when I decided that it really wasn’t worth it, she turned her cold body towards me, said “I love you,” and started weeping uncontrollably. I didn’t believe her and I didn’t console her, but was overwhelmed by a strange kind of pity: maybe she really did mean it; maybe she was grasping frantically at something she didn’t really understand. One of the most unforgettable and alienating experiences I’ve ever had.

The Dude Has Icky Moves

Caleb King is one of my favorite people in the universe. Hear us make the glorious noise of friendship on an extremely tender edition of my Stycast, Easter Everywhere No. 13: Caleb’s Asian Fetish.

Appropriately turns up on a Google image search for “difficult new feelings”

Normally, I’d feel like a total goofball-ass to be blogging more than once about unreleased records for the benefit of nearly nobody, but in honor of J.T.’s message the other day—“hey, update PBW when you get the chance; it’s good, informal writing”—I’m gonna. And it’s gonna be about the Mountain Goats, because damn it, K-Punk and Simon get their Scritti joneses for the benefit of us all; granted, that album is already out, but PBW is both bush league and passionate. Consider me carving teeth on the evergrowing totem to John Darnielle’s status as a national treasure.

Plus, Carl Wilson seems to have already gone in the direction of Get Lonely, and he’s pro. Double-plus, he’s a patron saint of PBW and seems to have read the post below this one; (this is what anthropologists will someday cite as the sick, delightfully productive breakdown of conversation)—

“It’s not so much a breakup album as an in-the-void-of-separation album, threaded with an image of monstrousness, of having been rendered radically alien by loneliness - but, in the manner of The Sunset Tree, with a tone of calm remembrance, perhaps years after the fact, rather than reeking of trapped-in-the-moment panic or claustrophobia.”

Well, I think my “after the quake” characterization is synonymous with Carl’s “void-of-separation” one, but really, isn’t that definitively breakup material—what life feels like in the wake? There’s nothing particularly rich about losing someone; the meat is in coping.

(Here lies, muted, a long digression about love and loss and time—things you already understand.)

Most of the songs on Get Lonely take place in the early morning or late night. In the wake of my own heart-quake, I can vouch that those are basically the two most dangerous times of the day—waking up alone and being in bed at night with your own thoughts (I’ve found a way to circumvent the latter, but it’s not working and I’ll try to keep stories you don’t need to hear to a minimum). Of course, there are weird mid-sleep spells that PBW has come to know as “nightmares” or the elusive, forceful “11 AM Breakdown.” But mostly, it’s morning and night; they’re sharp.

John Darnielle has always performed through his characters and not as them—ironic distance, the bitter humor of his best stuff. I was listening to Tallahassee the other day and was struck by the realization that Darnielle’s characters are the kind of people that never experience the acuity that they’re leant in his narratives; his songs work because the most desperate, intense losers are given the gift of true perception. We get a taste of their hopelessness, their hilarious melodrama, etc.; a clarity that is basically antithetical to all the fascinating failures they constantly act out.

So it’s a gamble for him to have lines as close, bald, and warm as “On the morning that I woke up without you for the first time, I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared.” Other mornings aren’t as promising.

And they’re not funny, either, which is why I have a hard time swallowing Carl’s “calm remembrance” tack. The present feels alternately blank, possible, and crushing—you don’t have the power to be bittersweet or wise about it yet. Only literal. (And it’s telling that “Wild Sage” is directly in the present tense and “Get Lonely” in the future.) So in that sense, I completely understand Carl’s abstract but palpable feeling that to take it in, you sort of have to live right next to it (my joke about being contractually forbidden to listen to it during office hours seemingly not entirely in vain, yeah). Anyway, I’m not going to lock myself away with it and I’m not going to keep it at a distance; it only seems appropriate that I’d take such a bundle of nerves at face value: in my stride, stumble, or soar; however all this shit turns out.

Kim Jong-Il is 65 and He’s Got Missiles and Syd Barrett Was 60 and Now He’s Dead

This is how I feel about Syd Barrett and then some. Uncanny; I always seem to forget the impact his music had on me—his name is always just at the back of my tongue, in the shade of my throat’s shadow. Ooh, so tickled today.

And where else to start? Well, the rocketblooming ground. No need to be nervous; The Economist just has the best magazine covers in the universe and now I can finally stare at something other than—all Powellpatations excusable in summer—this. The Sunset Tree left the Mountain Goats on scorched earth; Get Lonely, which will come out in August, totters around in search of vegetation and fresh air. John Darnielle always manages to capture the reassuring glint of intuition in the wake of something traumatic—our hero is cold, so he puts on a sweater. I get a better look at the land after the great quake. So yeah, it’s a breakup record, haunted by that uncanny post-breakup feeling of lightness. Launchable, again. Well, I told Alfred last night that I’d prefer to be somewhere that had more devastating weather. I have been reading Ben Marcus, and you should, too. I read The Age of Wire and String a couple months ago and have gone back to Notable American Women. Those are ground-up like Tender Buttons was, or like The Raincoats. Syd goes ground-down and I stay on two feet. Not baaaad.

I Did a Freehand Sketch of this Picture Two Hours Ago and Yes, It Was For a Girl and No, Sorry, You Can’t See It

Son: Dad, what was Radiohead, really?

Dad: Well, it sounds dumb now, but we thought that computers were going to rule the world and that our watches would all stop and that the banks would go silly at midnight on 2000 and Radiohead was this massive, billion-selling shaggy dog story about alienation on the horizon of dystopia and dark blossoms of modern paranoia in an eerily technocratic world and it had lots of chrome words that don’t grow in our beautiful jungle anymore.

Son: So they were like the evil U2?

Dad: Yeah, but with more pedals and tighter shirts.

Son: So that was before the Wild Gospel?

Dad: Well, it sort of happened at the same time. Nobody believed Devendra Banhart when he hawked love and freedom. I mean, Animal Collective had started doing things like—

Son: Like actively espousing hope and sincerity, right?

Dad: We were ashamed to call it that then because the cynics were in the cockpit, but yeah. And then there was that TV on the Radio record.

Son: Well what I read was that everyone was sort of lukewarm on wild gospel until that record came out, and then they realized that there could be something weird enough to snare the freaks but with enough testosterone to make kids throw out their Staind CDs.

Dad: Yeah, it hedged its bets well.

Son: So was Jesus a rockist then?

Dad: Kind of. I mean, in 2006, “transcendence” was basically a cuss word.

Son: That was during the great Self-Policing, right?

Dad: (shudders) We just wanted to make room for everyone’s love.

***

Son: Daddy, who was Washington Phillips?

Dad: He built a house a hundred years ago and he filled it with the most beautiful music you’ll ever hear.

Son: Like tumbling through iridescent motes of sound?

Dad: Like making love under the spray of a dandelion in June.