I decided to sit down at home and give another listen to a few albums from the past decade that were too intricate or chaotic to pass my Jeffries/Lodge test, or simply gave me a headache the first few times I tried to listen to them:
Frances The Mute by The Mars Volta
I’ve complained before about the current generation of youth abandoning rock music. If they hadn’t, there’d probably be a Grunge-sized multitude of bands playing music that sounded like this. Call it Ritalin Rock.
All the lyrics and song titles on Frances The Mute, the story goes, were taken from a diary that a band member found abandoned on public transportation; I hope the diarist was soon rounded up by the caregivers who allowed him or her to slip loose in the first place.
That leaves the band to answer for the music, and here comes the full sweep of the ADHD factor.
On first listen (some years ago, before banishing this disc to the banker’s box in my closet with “Never” scrawled on its lid), I found the music impossible to follow. It sounded like wankery for wankery’s sake, with not a single musical idea fully formed, much less anything resembling an actual song, and I quickly lost all patience with it.
Playing it again last week, I found the qualities I’d originally found so off-putting kind of intriguing, once it occurred to me that this was the kind of rock music you’d play if you grew up listening to John Zorn and Frank Zappa and Sonic Youth while your friends snorted up all of your Ritalin.
Only time will tell, but I can see myself sitting down with The Mars Volta catalogue and trying to figure them out. I might like them.
Ys by Joanna Newsom
I really liked Joanna Newsom’s first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender. I’m no great fan of twee, but Joanna Newsom’s music is like the heavy metal of twee. She’s a bright sensitive girl who dropped a tab at the Renaissance fair and never went home. Her croak of a voice, and her harp(!), make me think of Kate Winslet and her cohort in Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures and the powerful fantasy world they concoct for themselves.
Ys (wise?) is a tougher listen: five tracks over sixty minutes, all with orchestral accompaniment. Except it’s not accompaniment, it’s Van Dyke Parks.
On first listen, I thought he was recording something else – an album of his own? -- in the next studio, and they’d neglected to soundproof; after several listens, I still wasn’t convinced otherwise.
The CD wasn’t consigned to the “Never” box, but I hadn’t given it a listen for some time when I put it on recently. With fresh ears, and an immersive listening experience, it does sound like a masterpiece. The only other album it reminds me of is “Astral Weeks”, although I can’t say Joanna Newsom manages to connect her insular visions to the universal, the way Van Morrison does. And it will take many more listens before it clicks, musically, the way “Astral Weeks” does – that orchestra still sounds ahead of her, or lagging behind her, every moment, in a way that’s formally interesting but never particularly soulful.
I’d like to hear this on vinyl.
Pink by Boris
Boris purports to be a Japanese stoner/doom trio, led by a female guitarist whose amplifiers are three times as tall as she is. I never got the stoner/doom vibe from this album, it’s way too fast and too noisy for those sub-genres, and I never took the time to consider it for what it actually is, on its own merits.
New verdict: It’s way too fast and too noisy for me. Sounds like…rush hour? Further listening required.
2 comments:
Stoner, you're welcome to come over anytime to listen to Ys. It sounds fabulous on vinyl. Yet I still can't get into the album. The music is just too shapeless and a little too rambling. I sense Joanna Newsome is the Laurie Anderson of the noughties--critically acclaimed, popular with the hip, pretentious crowd, only to be looked back in 20 year with embarrassment.
One thing I implore every music lover to do is to get a decent stereo system. A boom-box or a car stereo cannot do justice to complex, intricate music. Some albums don't have a chance of capturing your attention without playing them on a decent stereo. There have been a number of times I was unimpressed with an album listening on the car stereo, only to change my mind listening on the home stereo.
A good stereo system doesn't have to cost a lot. You can put together a used vintage system consisting of a Pioneer, Sansui, Harman Kardon receiver; Polk, Advent, JBL speakers; and any decent CD player for less than $500 that will do your albums justice. Add a Technics turntable and you're really in business. Try Craigslist or a stereo repair shop that sells old equipment.
I'm not surprised very few people these days really listen to music. CDs are loud and compressed and most homes are lacking a good stereo system.
Excellent post by the way.
I think of Laurie Anderson as a performance artist whose career as a recording musician was secondary and kind of a fluke, since her act was largely visual. Newsom sounds like a genuine oddity rather than a willful one, but I know nothing about her; maybe it’s all shtick, a shrewd leveraging of the hipster penchant for embracing “outsider” art. Twenty years from now, who knows? Stoner’ll still be enjoying Motorhead, tho.
Post a Comment