Sunday, November 11th, 2007 // Paperhouse
Andrew Carnegie, forefather of our university and lover of plaid, instilled our institution with a strange tie to his homeland, Scotland. I present five songs by Scottish groups.
Boards of Canada, “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” is the second track on Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores: a five-minute masterpiece that has aged incredibly well. I know that it’s made with machines, but BOC fools me, fusing organic fuzz of real space, murmuring of a crowd and emotion with a space-age melody. “Turquoise” is a BOC classic, displaying the band’s uncanny ability to toe the line between ambient, psychedelic, and even disco.
Mogwai, “Stanley Kubrick” Glasgow post-rockers Mogwai released EP in 1999, having already garnered significant attention for their music. “Stanley Kubrick” is the foundation for EP, starting off with the slow patter of drums and murmurs, then arching into the band’s signature rich bass and guitar twang. Well-balanced distortion, drones, vocals and epic cymbal crashes elevate “Stanley Kubrick” to be one of Mogwai’s finest tracks.
The Twilight Sad, “Cold Days from the Birdhouse” With a powerful voice and thick Scottish accent, vocalist James Graham is what really sets The Twilight Sad and their album Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters apart from other bands in the same vein (think The Arcade Fire crossed with My Bloody Valentine). “Cold Days from the Birdhouse” opens their album with intensity, as Graham shouts “Where are your manners?” to the end, and “Cold Days” is among many awesome songs on a surprising debut album.
Belle and Sebastian, “Wrapped Up in Books” If you’ve seen John Cusack in High Fidelity, you’ve heard long-time indie darlings Belle and Sebastian. Their signature sound is understated indie pop, complete with rock organ and twee vocals. What I like most about Belle and Sebastian is their ability to tell serious emotional stories without melodrama. You feel like you’re listening to an upbeat song, while the lyrics are something else entirely. “Wrapped Up in Books” is a little ditty about fantasy relationships and the unwillingness to change course and follow your real desires.
Franz Ferdinand, “Cheating On You” As tired as they sound now, I have a fondness for Franz Ferdinand — the soundtrack to a lot of reckless driving senior year of high school. It wasn’t “Take Me Out” which got me hooked; it was “Cheating On You,” a song by all accounts much less musically interesting. But there was something exhilarating about shouting “I’m cheating on you!” out car windows, as relationships became strained and the angst of high school came to a head.
Sunday, November 4th, 2007 // Paperhouse
It’s easy to find agreement on the Internet. Just type in a band name on www.last.fm and you’ll find hundreds of fellow listeners, along with suggestions for other “similar” bands to listen to, but are they really similar? Most websites list bands together based on who listens to them, not how they sound. They base their statistics on average listening habits, which says little about the actual quality of music.
For example, post-punk bands The Sound and The Chameleons have both clearly influenced the group Interpol; the music sounds the same stylistically, and the guitar work on some Chameleons songs is eerily reminiscent of certain Interpol lines. But neither band appears on Last.fm’s “Similar to Interpol” list — instead, the website recommends The Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse, bands that sound nothing like Interpol and just represent some sort of indie band zeitgeist that has nothing to do with the music.
Music-based social networking does not reveal true musical connections, which is a problem, because most people aren’t willing to look any further. Average listeners are often uninterested in expanding their musical educations; they seek little beyond what is fed to them by the Internet or their friends. But services like Last.fm cannot replace the time and effort needed to find new exciting artists. For truly new music, listeners have to look elsewhere.
One idea is www.scaruffi.com, run by Piero Scaruffi, who claims it’s one of the first websites ever. Scaruffi updates frequently with truckloads of new content, including contemporary music reviews. He has his own strong opinions and isn’t afraid to share them. I’ve probably found more new artists that I’ve loved from Scaruffi than from any online taste aggregator so far, even though I disagree with many of his opinions. I remember being crushed when reading his thoughts on Björk, a musician I love; he wrote, “The first impression with Björk’s music is always of something terribly trivial, obnoxious and, ultimately, boring.” But Scaruffi also led me to Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, an album which not only earned me some serious cred with my dad, but also introduced me to one of the most beautiful male voices in rock, along with some really weird song structures. By exposing myself to the opinions of one other person who really loves music, I’ve discovered more than I would have by following the aggregated listening habits of a million others.
So, next time you’re looking for something new to listen to, ask just one person. Better yet, ask one cranky opinionated guy on the Internet who thinks Captain Beefheart is possibly the greatest rock musician of all time.
Sunday, October 28th, 2007 // Paperhouse
Sometimes, when bands make their albums, they get the idea to make one song transition directly into another, proving that the album format isn’t quite dead yet. The popular concept of “shuffling” kind of screws this up. I like listening to albums all the way through, probably largely due to the fear that maybe I’ll miss one of these sweet transitions: Shuffling through my playlist, one song just cuts off mysteriously! Terrified, I’ll hurriedly try to figure out what I just missed out on, only to learn that I’m already on to some other random track. I appreciate spontaneity, but this is just annoying. Below are some times when you should flip off your shuffling and slip into loop to fully appreciate these excellent transitions:
Radiohead, Kid A, between “Idioteque” and “Morning Bell”
The players in Radiohead take their song transitions very seriously. On Kid A, not only do you get that noodly ending on “Optimistic,” but also a neat little fade-out at the end of “Idioteque.” Does the song end there? Yes and no — the music smoothly transitions from a fuzzy guitar wash to insistent drumming and more of Thom Yorke’s crooning. It goes from electronic to spastic. Despite the smooth transition, “Idioteque” and “Morning Bell” are two distinctly different songs.
Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary, between “Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts” and “I’ll Believe in Anything”
In this transition, the pseudo-ending of “Dear Sons” is reminiscent of its intro, until the drums kick in — kind of like Radiohead’s transition into “Morning Bell.” Perhaps intense drumming is a tenet of the song transition: Here, the band uses them to emphasize the songs’ different rhythms.
Justice, Cross, between “Genesis” and “Let There Be Light”
Though the two songs have the same sort of feeling at the transition point, overall each has a completely different mood: “Genesis” is loud and overbearing, whereas “Let There be Light” is a much more wobbly number, leading into Justice’s bouncy and poppy hit single, “D.A.N.C.E.”
The Microphones, The Glow Pt. II, between “I Want Wind to Blow” and “The Glow, Pt. 2”
This transition is great because it’s unpredictable; it moves from a repetitive drum rhythm and chord progression to crashing drums and cymbals and a wailing electric guitar. After getting your attention, the band switches back to acoustic guitar strumming while vocalist Phil Elverum sing-talks about taking his shirt off and other things.
