Heartache With Hard Work

Best Night – The War on Drugs

Electro-folk, roots rock with Dylan or Petty-esque nasal twinge, a series of songs that turn putting-one-foot-down-after-the-other into a sort of apocalyptic elegy. Psychedelia mixed with synths mixed with saxophones mixed with whiskey. The War On Drugs have a niche, and they have stuck within it on Slave Ambient. But it’s a great niche to occupy.

We got a hint of things to come last year, with the Future Weather EP that shares a couple songs with this full record (including the delightful, churning ‘Baby Missiles’ that made my list of top songs for 2010). But the fully realized product is a marked improvement. This is a complete record, with a clear tone and texture that unveils itself slowly but surely.

In some ways it’s problematic that they open with the two best songs on the record. In normal cases that’s the sign of an album draped awkwardly on a couple hits. Here, though, that’s not at all the case. What you get on the first two tracks is a compact narrative full of urgency and passion. Then, the next 10 songs retrace those same steps, but do so more slowly and languidly. You get an opportunity to dwell on themes that burst past you the first time around. It gives Slave Ambient an almost orchestral feel.  You can’t help but wish there was a bit more resolution, but the more you listen the more you come to understand that the endless movement is itself sufficient.

Awesome albums that I haven’t had time or the creative spirit to talk about yet:
Beirut
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

What unites these three? They’re indie bands that have received some rave reviews over the past few years, but who never really struck a chord with me. Well, that’s all changed now. All three of these albums are capital G Great.

We’re already starting to see ‘what happened to Rick Perry?’ articles, usually very clear that he’s in no way out of it yet.  But there is a lot of surprise about just how quickly things have gotten rocky for him.

This is precisely what I was talking about when I said a month ago that Perry wasn’t ready to really do what it takes to run for president.

His performance in the debates reflects someone who was expecting to just be able to use his tremendous natural charm and devout right wing credentials.  But he seemed to have failed to recognize just how much gets tossed at people in these circumstances.  You can’t just skate by on generally good credentials – people will challenge you.  And when they’ve done that (at least so far) Perry doesn’t seem to have the skill or temperament to deflect the attacks.

To be clear, there is plenty of time for him to shore up, and he may still run away with this.  But Mitt, just by being Mitt, has reminded people of how good a candidate he is.

Rider – Okkervil River

I’ve been writing this blog for about five years now. And for basically that entire time, I’ve insisted that Okkervil River is the best band in the world. Unbelievable live shows, a string of great records, extremely smart lyrics, great melodies. They make it all look so easy that you wonder why there is so much dreck out there.

With the release of I Am Very Far this year, the first kernels of doubt have begun to enter my mind. Which is not to say that this is a bad album. It is emphatically not. However, there is no denying that it’s worse than The Stand Ins, which was worse than The Stage Names, which was worse than Black Sheep Boy. And while your mileage may vary, I think you go back even further to Down the River of Golden Dreams to find their high-water mark.

It’s a testament to just how ridiculously good this band is that they can decline significantly and still put out one of the best records of the year.

I can divide the weaknesses of this record into two general categories. First, there are simply too many filler tracks. “Piratess” is excruciatingly dull: a listless beat combined with a strangely atonal vocal performance from Sheff. And the less said about “Show Yourself” the better. Suffice to say that it would feel overlong at 90 seconds. At five an a half minutes it is just begging to be skipped. The same can be said to a lesser degree about “Your Past Life as a Blast.” In fact, those two tracks, combined with the untapped possibility of “The Rise” mean that the final third of the record is mostly a waste. You could treat this is a 7-song EP and it would come off a lot better, really.

The second problem is the forgettable lyrics. Every previous record from them has developed stories, characters, and ideas. The songs have made revealed themselves through their evocations. This time: the lyrics are fine enough, I suppose. But there is nothing particularly memorable. There is no war criminal rising and speaking. There is no festering anger of the black sheep boy. You don’t finish the album feeling like you genuinely understand the psychology of the guy with a girl in every port, or the plus ones. “Rider” or “Lay of the Last Survivor” or “We Need a Myth” – these are great songs but what are they really ABOUT? I’m not sure. The general theme of the record seems to be mythic creatures and stories, but it’s all a bit too abstract to really cohere.

But enough dwelling on negativity. Let’s talk about what makes this album absolutely worth your time. At the top of the list is the aforementioned “Rider.” They’ve always had a little bit of Springsteen in their sound, but on this track it’s in full force. It’s vibrant and energetic, with the sort of spitfire delivery that Sheff is so good at. It’s right up there with their very best songs.

The following track “Lay of the Last Survivor” is also stupendous. More low-key in tone, extremely pretty. It’s a paean to inevitable ends, the mortality of all things beautiful. We fight against it but deep down we know that there is no victory, only delays.

Some other songs have a lot to recommend. “The Valley” is a bit too ostentatious, but is a tremendous rocking start. “Hanging from a Hit” is tender and jagged. “We Need a Myth” is slightly rote but more than makes up for it with pure energy.

Flawed album? Sure. Minor disappointment? Yes, again. But it’s still really good.

Spectre – Miracle Fortress

The first Miracle Fortress record was a revelation, a masterpiece of swirling organic energy and achingly beautiful melodies. It’s one of very few records that I enjoy more every single time I hear it. The second effort, the recently released Was I the Wave? is clearly derived from the same basic outline. But this time, the themes are far more electronic. If the first was the condensation of all things lovely in the music of the late 60s, this one draws far more heavily from the 80s.

There is something profound lost in the translation. Gone is the sense gentle intimacy; this is a far more impersonal sound. However, there are advantages as well. The lushness is replaced with a silvery metallic tone, one which blends in wonderfully uncanny ways with his voice.

It’s a relatively short record – only 10 songs, of which 4 are essentially interludes. But the six substantial tracks are given plenty of room for elaboration. This is both a strength and a weakness. When you really get down to it, there are maybe a dozen absolutely wonderful moments on this record. If you can devote yourself to listening to it as a whole, they gain a lot of power from their placement within the scheme of the whole record. However, if you aren’t in the mood, or if you are trying to digest it in doses the overall structure gets dislodged and you can’t help but think that these songs drag a bit.

Some examples of the perfect moments: the percussion on “Raw Spectacle” after it gets going; the final moments of “Awe” after the throbbing synths dissipate; about 3 minutes into “Miscalculations” when the wave crests; the vocal performance on “Spectre” which accentuates and develops the melody of the song into something stunning.

Was I the Wave? is a very good record, but one that feels just a bit too one-note. Van Pelt is a master of building soundscapes, but you can’t help but wish he’d given himself a little more variety to play with.

Don’t Know How To Party – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Serious question: can anyone point me to an economist saying that the Obama jobs bill wouldn’t help the economy?  That it wouldn’t reduce unemployment?

I occasionally try to read the perspective from the other side.  My go-to is The Corner at The National Review – which strikes me as having a nice balance between vaguely reasonable and totally crazy conservativism.  So I stopped by there today to see the reactions to the jobs speech.  Not to find out if they liked any element of it – obviously they will not.  But just to see what rationale they could provide for rejecting it.

These are my findings:

Category 1: This bill is not as good as a more comprehensive thing that I support.  Ergo, it must be rejected.  Example.

Category 2: We already did stimulus and the economy is bad, lol.  Example.  Another example.  This category is the most infuriating.  It is taken as a religiously confirmed truth that stimulus ‘doesn’t work’ so it’s not even worth assessing the details here.

Category 3: I prefer to live in la-la land where ideal forms of private economic expansion are already taking place, so there is no need for the government to get involved.  Example: “We don’t need more federal spending on infrastructure. Instead, we need higher-quality infrastructure spending financed and built by the private sector. We need private airports, private air-traffic control, private toll highways. When the federal government spends on infrastructure, it often misallocates the funds.”  Yes, if such things were being built, it would be true that stimulus wouldn’t be necessary.  Because, you know, we wouldn’t be in a recession.

As far as I can tell, that’s it.  No evidence that the program won’t work.  No economic support for any of the claims.  Just snark.

Meanwhile, every reputable economist who has looked at it agrees that it would boost GDP something like 1-2% and produce a fair number of jobs.  That’s not great, but it’s a whole lot better than doing nothing.

The whole thing is really depressing.

The premise of parties relies on an underlying unity – on a lot of non-controversial things there is general agreement within the bureaucracy.  Fights take place at the level of how to implement general policy goals, rather than about the goals themselves.  This allows for the stuff where there is a genuine contrast in positions to be shown in stark relief.  The people get to express their will on those subjects, and those opinions filter down into the actual day-to-day business of governance, which mostly goes on in the background.

That ideal bears almost no resemblance to our current system.  On the major crises of the day, there appears to be no interest in the actual operations of government.  There is no background.  Everything is an absolute disagreement.

Look, I have no problem with Republicans being opposed to the plan.  But opposition and fingers-in-ears-refusal-to-listen are very different things.  Responsible opposition entails being able to distinguish between 1) those things that the other party is doing differently than you would like and 2) those things the other party supports that you absolutely reject.

If Republicans are intransigent on issues of genuine moral distinction, that’s fine.  But to be intransigent on the very idea that economics works is…stunning.

Putting on my political adviser hat: the best possible response from the Republican caucus will be to insist on breaking up components of the bill and passing a few of them.  To absolutely reject the whole package will clue in even the most inattentive observers that something is seriously wrong in the state of Boehner.  I’m genuinely curious to see whether the higher-ups in the party are capable of making this clear to the rest of them.

Of course, we’re talking about a party whose presumptive-ish nominee thinks (and thinks it’s politically useful for him to say) that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.  So who the hell knows.

Ignite – The Raveonettes

Sometimes it’s refreshing to hear a record that sounds exactly like you’ll expect it to sound.  Today’s example is Raven in the Grave, the newest output from The Raveonettes. For their last record I lamented that they had never quite put together the breakout effort I kept expecting from them.  With another album from them, I’m increasingly thinking that there is no breakthrough to be had.  They’re just going to keep turning out slight variations on the same theme, and that’s just fine.

The big hooks are a little bit more sparse this time around, with only really two tracks that jump out of the speakers at you (‘Recharge & Revolt’ and ‘Ignite’).  On the other hand, the excessive faux-grittiness that plagued the last record has also mostly been expunged. What remains is some very nice harmonies, and the washed out reverb of guitars turned up way too loud.  There’s the slow burner (‘War in Heaven’) and the girl-group harmonies (‘Forget That You’re Young’) and the gorgeous encore (‘My Time’s Up’).

The only real downside here is an occasional drift toward the soporific. ‘War in Heaven,’ for example, is a nice enough song but it drags quite a bit and doesn’t have the energy to sustain itself.  It takes over 3 minutes to really hit its stride by which time you’ve already drifted away.  Same goes for ‘Apparitions’ which never quite gets going.

By far the choice track is ‘Ignite,’ which exemplifies the very best elements of their sound. It starts with a real kick of a bass beat, which leads right into a nice big guitar riff, and an opening verse that offers their best Jesus and Mary Chain impressions.  And then there’s a surprisingly beautiful and tender chorus.  It’s a great song, the closest this album comes to ‘Suicide,’ their high-water mark as a group in my opinion.

Home – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

I may be literally the last person on earth to have realized it, but this song is really damn catchy.

I’m sure I must have heard it a dozen or more times over the last two years, but it was not until today that I finally got around to noticing it for real.  The whistling!  The madcap feel of it!  It sounds like it was recorded in a barn with 50 of their best friends, and it’s glorious for just that reason.  Hipster artifice combined with pure naïveté – somehow it just works.

Why are they called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros anyways?

Modern Inventions – The Submarines

I read the Freakonomics blog, but occasionally I wonder why.  About one in five posts seems to offer some interesting little tidbit that merits some attention.  Unfortunately, many of the rest offer pseudo-economic pablum and increasingly geriatric complaints. Today’s example is a post about how how reading standards have fallen since the 18th century.  The evidence: Common Sense sold 500,000 copies in 1776, and books don’t sell nearly as well anymore.

Why this is supposed to be evidence for ‘literacy,’ I have no idea.  Surely the author is aware that people engage in a massive amount of reading in the modern world wholly unrelated to books.  The internet, for example, contains quite a few words.

Beyond that, Common Sense was written in the midst of a revolution that affected the lives of everyone in the fledgling country.  Is it really that surprising that works of political philosophy feel less urgent to the citizens of this country these days?

The post also remarks favorably on “the sophistication of the writing and reasoning” in Common Sense.  Which is also strange, since I’ve always thought Paine’s writing was hackneyed and poor, not to mention pretty simplistic.  The whole premise of Common Sense was to take the complex ideas of the Enlightenment and strip away the musty philosophical notes.

If you want evidence of the 18th century public operating at a higher level of literary and political awareness a far better example would be the Federalist Papers, which are genuinely good pieces of pragmatic political thought in addition to being tremendously important for shaping popular consciousness.  But even there we’re talking about a vanishingly small number of people who were genuinely engaged.

The basic point I’m making here is that people in 2011 have a massive number of things they need to be smart about, and a massive number of possible avenues for learning and self-expression.  This obviously means that in some respects we are going to look inferior to previous eras on the issues of their focus.  But people today can speak coherently about the strengths of the West Coast offense, about the psychological motivations of Tony Soprano, about the wonders of the umami flavor, about the emotional resonance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”  They can follow earthquakes and hurricanes in real time.  They can imagine what it is like to live on the other side of the planet.  They can beat Angry Birds.  And, if they are so inclined (and they should be!) they can read Thomas Paine.  In fact, they can read it easily since it’s in the public domain.

There is, of course, some danger that if aesthetic and imaginative possibilities are too easily grasped we come to lose appreciation for them.  But I think there are more interesting words being written today than at any point in history.  I think there are more interesting songs being written today than at any point in history.  And they can far more easily be shared with the rest of the world, too.

Rockets – Moby

I had a brief interlude with Moby in the late 90s.  I enjoyed Play and re-discovered Everything is Wrong (and had my mind blown by “Everytime You Touch Me”).  But it faded fairly quickly and I never really returned.  But I listened to him guest DJ on NPR’s All Songs Considered in March, and was reminded of what intrigued me about him as an artist.  So I picked up his newest record Destroyed, and was pleasantly surprised to discover…it’s pretty good!

There are plenty of somewhat unnecessary indulgences (as you might expect on a 70 minute record from the guy), but more than enough jewels to make it worthwhile. Opener “The Broken Places” is spacey, but in the best of ways: delicate and measured.  The following bunch of tracks is a step down, with a few decent ideas stretched out too thin.  But the real core of the album shines through in the middle.

“Rockets” is a perfect example of what Moby does best.  There’s an absolutely beautiful singing sample–so wispy that it feel likes it’s being heard at a distance of 100 years–held up and sustained by a network of electronic cables.  It’s a wonderful balance of old and new, past and future.  And the line being sung “it’s gone…that’s alright” feels eerily prescient.  See “The Right Thing” for another great example of this aging effect.

“The Day” is a far more straightforward song, with a relatively simple verse-chorus-verse form.  The result is something that lacks a bit of sophistication, but provides a rousing upbeat element.

Elsewhere, “The Violent Bear It Away” is a bit overlong (almost seven minutes) but packs a tremendous punch in its slow build.  By the end, when the strings are swelling and beat marches on, there is a powerful urgency to its movement that remains completely self-contained.  And “Victoria Lucas” offers a similar them, but this time building off of a low-key but rousing electro-dance beat.

I could do without some of the tracks here (“Blue Moon” seems wholly unnecessary while “Lie Down in Darkness” just feels like a weaker version of the albums’ good tracks), but the good work more than makes up for the inessential.  It makes me think I might need to re-visit some of the intervening years in Moby’s work and see what I missed.