If you live in the Pacific Northwest and follow music, or if you have opened The Stranger in the past 4 months, then you know that Fleet Foxes released an album. The band have been buzzworthy for months, with content about how they aren’t hippies, a super-hyped stint at Sasquatch, a gig opening for Wilco, and with our local indiepop tastemakers falling all over themselves to praise them.
But are they any good?
I’ll be frank. When the words “Celtic-flavored march with a searing Richard Thompson-style guitar line” and “pastorals” are used to describe indie rock music, I do not get excited. I am not a huge fan of PoMo (or is it Po-PoMo?) sea shantys (a la The Decemberists) or of new-wave Vaudeville (a la Of Montreal’s concept album Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse). I am a much more simple beast. I want my rock music to be, well, rock music. If I want an Appalachian-style folk pastoral I will go listen to some of my parents old bluegrass records.
But there’s a difference between what I like and what is good, and Fleet Foxes is good. I haven’t decided yet if I like it, but if you’re a fan of 60s/70s folk music (Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby Stills & Nash, etc.) you will enjoy this album quite a bit. Admittedly, I’m slightly bored by it, but I have found myself going back to it at various points during this past week when work was stressing me out and letting the rich and easy melodies carry me away.
Plus, “He Doesn’t Know Why” is shatteringly gorgeous.
There’s something that rubs me the wrong way about “White Winter Hymnal” though, and I think it’s because it veers a little too close to plain old traditional southern gospel music (minus the God part) and it strikes me as a little bit like the dude who wears a cape to class every day in college just to be weird. In other words, a little annoying. Sure, he’s not doing anything to you personally, and the cape looks pretty good, you have to admit, but there’s that weird mixture of jealousy and anger you feel toward him because a) he won’t conform and b) wearing a cape is kind of stupid. Or maybe I’m just wound up too tight to enjoy neo-hymnals:
Like, you know. It’s good. But, eh. Yawn.
What I like very much about Fleet Foxes, though, is their obvious ability to string together a ridiculous amount of instruments into a unified sound. Acoustic guitar, at least three different kinds of drums, bells, multi-harmonied vocals, slide guitars , organs and horns all make an appearance, but whereas sometimes I feel like Arcade Fire (who use a similar number of instruments) can sound like noise with little purpose of melody (side note: I know I am alone in that assessment since they are one of the most beloved bands currently, but I saw them in concert in September and thought that about 50% of their songs were just a bunch of noise), Fleet Foxes’ gentle use of their music virtuoso blends everything together in winding harmonies that feel both easy and natural. “Quiet Houses” is a great example of that:
A band with more misplaced bravado would have made a very different song, but Fleet Foxes are content to let the vocals and harmonies float effortlessly above the music and let the music lend atmosphere rather than be the focus. Yet the sound is very distinct, and it’s nice to hear a fresh, truly unique voice coming out of the upper-left of the country. Ultimately, the fact that they sound “distinct,” might be their downfall. They have to be careful not to sound the same on subsequent albums. It will be interesting to see where they go from here.
I don’t know if I’ll ever go see Fleet Foxes live, unless I go to the Wilco show. I am much more rocktastic. But I find their music good and pleasant and I wish them a long career of making interesting – if perhaps not exactly rockin’ – music.
There are very few musicians I truly idolize anymore. Sure, I’ve had my moments, as detailed in this blog, with Adam Duritz, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson and others I have yet to detail, but these days there’s less of an urgency about my musical obsessions. I follow careers, but I don’t cry at concerts anymore (true story!).
Having said that, Jack White makes me weak in the knees. He is a one-man entertainment machine, churning out hits with his main band The White Stripes and his side project the Raconteurs, while acting in movies (like Cold Mountain and a hilarious turn as Elvis in last winter’s Walk Hard), performing onstage with Bob Dylan, and producing that Loretta Lynn album, Van Lear Rose, previously mentioned here. It is rumored he did the vocals or possibly the backing vocals for a bunch of Electric 6 hits (like “Gay Bar”). He pops up on other records as well, often credited with a pseudonym, and he’s made a hell of a lot of money. He often plays his electric guitar like a slide guitar in the White Stripes, which produces a very distinct sound, and is, I think, going to be one of the things that rock and roll remembers him for. So, who else do you know that can hang with Loretta Lynn, make music to thrash to, make sweet country ballads, caught Renee Zellweger’s eye and can play the guitar like that? Yeah, it’s official. Jack White is dreamy.
Pop culture these days doesn’t get a lot of true musical geniuses. My theory is that our attention span has become too short and people who are or could be truly great are either relegated to the indie circuit, heard by a few fans but not the public at large, or never picked up at all because they won’t “sell,” but Jack White is one exception. Commercial success and true artistic innovation are hard to come by, and despite his eccentricities (of which he has many), his talent overshadows his strange personality, which is a very good thing in rock and roll.
I’m going to talk a bit more about the White Stripes than about his other projects, because I like them best. I love that WS are constantly reinventing their sound, but because of that distinctive way Jack plays guitars, and because his guitars are accompanied only by Meg’s drums, they always sound like themselves and never like anyone else. From their first album and the hit “Fell in Love With a Girl,” they were taking on a sound decades older than them and combined loud, fierce, electric guitars with American roots music and blues, to create a genre-defying first album White Blood Cells (they say they play “folk music”). That album got them the label of a “garage” band, and their success went hand in hand with the success of bands like The Strokes and The Hives. Remember that moment in 2001 when you thought “rock is back, baby!”? Sadly, it was over too quickly, though The Strokes are still around, it is clear that they are a garage band while the White Stripes are another – more expansive – creature entirely. I think that this was hinted at on that first album on the track “Hotel Yeroba,” which features acoustic guitars and a familiar, country-stomper sound. And yet White’s vocals somehow channel an old blues musician.
That kind of country/blues influence was largely absent from their subsequent albums, but the sense of wild, crazy fun was not, and I think that’s what I like best about both the White Stripes and the Raconteurs. They are playing good, fun rock music. The White Stripes’s most recent album, Icky Thump, revisits an Appalachian influence in a couple of weird – but undeniably awesome – ways. There is “Rag & Bone,” a spoken-verse song that casts Meg and Jack as junk collectors/con men. This is probably one of my favorite tracks of theirs of all time, mostly because of Jack’s confident, braggging, swaggering vocals and guitars, and the sheer fact that it’s just such a strange little song that I doubt any other band would have the chuzpah to include, especially on an album that also includes faux-Scottish folk and electric bagpipes (“St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)”). This is range, people.
I think it’s possible Icky Thump is one of the great albums of the post-modern age of rock & roll, with its self-conscious efforts to recreate a – for lack of a better way to describe it – White Stripesian version of practically every influence rock ever had. Each song on the album is a tribute, and yet each song is also its own magical creation.
For that alone, despite the fact he’s not washed up and old yet, Jack White should be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame immediately. Of course, that is usually what happens at the end of careers, and I hope Jack White will be around for a very, very long time, creating more weird, awesome music with any band he chooses in any way he chooses.
(The title is semi-ironic because this is a LONG post)
So it’s my blog and I’ll emo if I wanna, because this entry has been one of the hardest things I’ve written in a long time and I’m just going to get it under the wire for Thursday West Coast time. At least one person who reads this probably expected me to make this entry first. And, honestly, I didn’t because I didn’t know how but as far as bands that have had an impact on my life, Arab Strap comes second to none.
See, thing is, I didn’t want to get too personal here, but I also want to write about Arab Strap, the drunken Glaswegians who made their home on Chemikal Underground Records and made anti-melodic low-fi records that were either loved or hated by critics and fans. They are often lumped in with Belle & Sebastian (afterall, they were friends with Belle & Sebastian and seem to have spent many a-night out on the piss with Belle & Sebastian) but they are the anti Belle & Sebastian. Where Stuart Murdoch would add some jangly guitars, Malcolm Middleton added a tense electric explosion. Where Isobel or Sarah added clear-toned harmonies, Aidan Moffat added a growl, or a cough, or a break in his voice that made it sound like he was about to kill himself. They are each other’s opposites, and despite loving both these bands, my heart will always be with the quintessential Scottish miserablists.
Why so sad boys? Those are ace kilts!
As I said, it’s hard to talk about Arab Strap without getting personal, and I’d prefer not to do that here. Those of you who are from my other journal can guess at the incidents I’ll be hinting at here, and I’ll leave it at that. I’ve been trying to include in each of the Thursday Memoirs what that person/band taught me about music. Paul Simon taught me what music was. Smashing Pumpkins taught me about the importance of anger in rock & roll, and that music could be a part of you. Arab Strap…Arab Strap taught me what love was all about.
And I meant that, sincerely. For those of you familiar with the band, that will sound absolutely ridiculous, because all of their songs are about getting drunk, sleeping with an ex, popping pills, and hating yourself. And all of that is true, but their songs are really also all love songs, in the truest sense of the word. The songs are about the experience of love; about what it means to love someone (in a real, adult relationship, where sex is involved, as in “Afterwards”); about how you feel when you are in love, but have already had your heart broken, as in “Islands” when the narrator says:
We were lying in bed, staring at the moon, and I was wondering if I was supposed to be in love. But we couldn’t quite decide if the moon was full, but I thought, well, tonight it’s full enough.
That, to me, is more true to my own personal experience with love than any pop song ever written. You make a decision somewhere along the way and you just kind of go with it. I have found myself whispering that lyrics to a bewildered boyfriend on more than one occasion.
And, of course, self-hatred is also one of the major themes of Arab Strap. These are songs are about being the kind of person who blames themselves for love gone wrong, who hopes that each relationship will finally work out, and when it doesn’t, getting into the kind of trouble that booze and random sex provide. It’s not songs for a cynic, because one gets the impression with each relationship gone wrong, the boys of Arab Strap are crushed because they thought it was really going to work that time. And trust me, you can listen to all of their albums, and very rarely does it EVER work out.
Whether or not I have actually experienced these specific things, I have been broken hearted. So broken hearted that there are still moments – years later! – when I doubt that my recovery will ever be full. And the man who broke my heart, funnily enough, was probably the only other person in the world who understood that it’s Arab Strap’s love songs that ring the truest of all because they are written by people who have been broken hearted.
See, this is where I didn’t want to take this entry, so let me back off that line of thought. If Counting Crows and Smashing Pumpkins gave me an outlet for my teenage angst (and now fall under the category of bands whose lyrics seem a little juvenile), Arab Strap wrote songs that in my darkest moments I could have written, about the very scary, very adult emotions that come along with love. The drunken slurring in Glaswegian accents appealed to me long before I lived in Scotland. The barely-below-the-surface anger, depression and deep sadness are such naked emotions on most Arab Strap albums that they are very nearly difficult for me to listen to. I cannot be objective about the Strap or about Malcolm Middleton’s solo offerings (about which I will write more later) because he appears at most moments to be inside my head. Yeah, sometimes it’s a pretty dark place in there. But isn’t it for everyone?
Let me take track-by-track the samples I’m handing out.
“The Shy Retirer” is off of Monday at the Hug and Pint, probably their most accessible and yet still most Arab Strap-y album. It describes a night out, with a backbeat and some absolutely stunningly gorgeous string work. There are drugs, there’s a club, there’s that awful hope. “I want to fall in love tonight,” he says. And in the next verse, “But when I feel like this I know it doesn’t matter / When I eat when I’m not hungry I’m sure I feel my face get fatter / Then I thin out every weekend and I think that she might want me / But I always slip off on my own…”
“Afterwards,” as mentioned, is probably my favorite love song of all time. It’s about the afterwards of sex, quite explicitly. “The telly’s silent, the rooms lit only by the screen / And there were perfect moments with just our pulses in between” the male voice slurs. “Well I’m not listening to what my mother said / What we’re doing inside my bed / I’m not pretending this time you’re someone else / But I’m cleaning these sheets all by myself” the female voice slurs back. Icky, but true to the actual experience of love and sex. Afterwards is, of course, best.
“My Favourite Muse” is the story of a guy who “pulled the ex last night.” What I love about this song is that is portrays such an encounter accurately. “I couldn’t get it up / Too much to drink, too much to say / She picked her clothes up off the floor / And promptly headed for the door.” It makes my heart ache for lost evenings and pints of cider, but not in a good way. If that makes sense.
“Who Named the Days” is about…well, I’m not sure. I think about a poisonous relationship between two guys, who, um, tend to bring out the worst in each other. Autobiographical? Possibly. Or maybe about split personalities, about the depressed voice and the normal brain duking it out over some more signature lovely strings. “He makes me treat girls like shit / He makes me lie to them and use them / I think he loves to watch me playing games / And he loves to watch me lose them…”
Arab Strap write the poetry of modern love, and I was sad to see them split up after Ten Years of Tears in 2006. I’m glad Malcolm has a flourishing career as a solo artist, and he still writes songs that reach into my chest, pull my heart out and stomp on it. But the Strap will always be the band I turn to when I really need someone to understand.
And I know, I know that that makes me just a crazy and seem just as depressing as these Scottish miserablists. But, frankly, I’m OK with that. They get it. They really do. They get love in a way that very few other artists do, at least from where I’m standing. They get the real experience of love, both very, very good and (more often) very, very bad. Or, at least, they write about the kind of hopeful, awful, passionate, sex-filled love matches I am determined to have myself.
And my whole life I’ll be looking for the people who understand the salient fact about love is that it totally and completely sucks and makes you hate yourself and your lover. Except when it doesn’t. Then there’s a lot of messy sex and even messier vulnerability involved, particularly for people like me & Arab Strap who either love too easily or not easily enough.
If you read this entry and are like “Woah! I must listen to this bad because they sound like they will brighten my day!” First of all: HA HA HA. Second of all: I suggest either Monday at the Hug & Pint or Mad for Sadness, their live album, which is an awesome live album and includes many gems.
I am unsatisfied with this entry of course. Explaining my relationship with Arab Strap would be akin to laying my whole emotional life naked, and I’m just not prepared to do that here (I TOLD you that music means a lot to me). Most of this entry is ridiculous, pointless rambling that no one can hope to understand because it lives inside the brain of me, but at least it came with free music. I hope I’ve whetted your appetite on them and if not, you can look forward to Songs About Los Angeles on Saturday, which will be the subject of my next post.
So there are some notable brand new releases today. The Breeders, for example, have a new album out call Mountain Battles which is probably amazing (cos Kim is hot) and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have one called Dig, Lazarus, Dig!! which sounded, at first listen, more like Nick’s other band Grinderman and less like the Bad Seeds, which, personally, I am OK with (not that I have anything against the Bad Seeds; I could listen to Nick Cave read the friggin’ phone book). But I’m going with a less well-known group of musicians this Tuesday, in the hopes (and assumption) that dear ol’ Kim and Nick will get their due somewhere else.
The Minneapolis band’s 2005 debut The Loon was widely regarded as a brilliant album, with many reviewers lauding the band for taking the best of Pavement, Modest Mouse, and Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah! and making something new and innovative out of it.
I agreed at the time. The Loon never became a favorite album of mine, but I liked it a great deal and heard something extremely promising in Tapes N’ Tapes’ sound. Sure, it was a little derivative, but the obvious talent made up for the slight lack of originality. It seemed that Tapes N’ Tapes were a soon-to-be-great band still finding their voice.
Cut to 3 years after their debut. I’d forgotten they existed until I looked at the albums out on April 8th in the US. “Oh hey!” I thought. “I remember them!” So I picked up Walk It Off and gave it a listen.
Still derivative. “Headshock” proves it:
Damn if that’s not Modest Mouse. The vocals? The guitars? Everything.
Which is a shame because when Tapes N’ Tapes get it right, they get it really right, and on Walk It Off they get it really, really right with “Conquest.”
Ok, they still sound a little bit like about a zillion other bands here, but listen to those vocals, man. Josh Grier’s voice is absolutely flooring. Better than Isaac Brock. Better than Win Butler (from Arcade Fire). Maybe not as good as Malkmus, whom Grier is clearly channeling on “The Dirty Dirty” (and on much of the rest of the album):
Still, there’s something here, right? And those pounding guitars on “Conquest,” full of such nervous sexual energy? Tasty. And did I mention those vocals? Because, um, I say yes, please to Josh Grier. Also, they have a song on this album called “George Michael” which is very dark and moody, but which I like to think is somehow about Arrested Development.
“Say Back Something” is also a song on which I think they showcase their own sound, trading the electric guitars for an acoustic one, still with a symbol-heavy percussion backbeat. It is lovely, haunting (but, um, sounds a little like Band of Horses…NEVERMIND INNOVATIVE ENOUGH) and very beautiful in a sort of make-your-heart-ache way. That, along with “Conquest” really seem to be the only two examples of their own sound on the album.
It’s maddening to me because I still believe they are a great band; this CD was produced by Dave Fridman of the Flaming Lips and with that much rockin’, badass talent in the studio, it should have showcased the clear virtuosity of the band; it should have been great. And it’s not. It’s boring. It’s so boring I don’t have a lot else to say about it.
They just played SXSW and I have no doubt they put on one hell of a good time live (or at least it sounds like they should) and maybe I am being too hard on them because, let’s face it, Modest Mouse are a great band, the Arcade Fire are a great band. Being Modest Mouse The Sequel or Arcade Fire 2 isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you can keep up with those guys, good on you, I guess. I’m just pretty sure this band is meant to be more.
Tapes N’ Tapes? Hi! I’m watching you for that fantastic CD I know is in you. I hope to see it soon.
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