Pictures and Talk
The Jealous Sound. A Gentle Reminder. Release date: January 24, 2012.
It’s fitting that The Jealous Sound’s long-delayed sophomore album, A Gentle Reminder, is being released on a label that calls itself “Music is Subjective.” It is impossible to separate an album from its context, much as we may try to listen without preconceptions. Some albums are more indebted to their creation myths than others: Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago; Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. For long time fans, A Gentle Reminder will hold a similar allure.
For those of you just getting on board, The Jealous Sound, an unsupergroup then consisting of ex-Knapsack singer Blair Shehan, ex-Sunday’s Best guitarist Pedro Benito, ex-Neither Trumpets Nor Drums bassist John McGinnis, and ex-Pulley drummer Tony Palermo, made their full length debut in 2003 with Kill Them With Kindness. That album was a polished slab of post-millennial indie pop, and was itself delayed thanks to an unproductive visit to major label land. The band toured heavily following the release of their debut, then headed back into the studio, only to disappear. An EP of three songs from the aborted sessions surfaced in 2008, and the band formally reunited in 2009 for a tour with Sunny Day Real Estate.
This much we know for sure: in the meantime, Shehan moved to Las Vegas, got married, held down a steady job, and totally eschewed making music. Benito and long-time friend and Foo Fighters/Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Nate Mendel held down the fort in Los Angeles, hoping that the band would get back together. When Shehan’s marriage dissolved, Shehan and Benito, with Mendel on board to replace McGinnis and Bob Penn behind the kit, entered Dave Grohl’s home studio in LA. A Gentle Reminder is their stunning reintroduction to the world.
Every track on A Gentle Reminder seems posited as a grand statement: “Here we are, stronger than before.” Like its predecessor, the album is an embarrassment of sonic riches. Producer John Lousteau gives each instrument space to breathe while maintaining a sense that there is real meat to each guitar and drum. A Gentle Reminder is a very familiar sounding record. Nothing leaps off the page as a great work of originality, but at the same time it is hard to think of another band that does sweeping meat & potatoes pop rock as well as The Jealous Sound. In fact, the only other band that A Gentle Reminder calls directly to mind is one that bares few immediate aural similarities other than a love of delay pedals: Explosions in the Sky. While The Jealous Sound hews closely to standard pop song structures, like Explosions, the songs absolutely overflow with instrumentation that is best described as billowing. Like Explosions, The Jealous Sound takes aim at the most obvious path to your heart and marches down that path with gusto.
In less adroit hands, some of the clichéd lyrics on A Gentle Reminder might come off as clunkers and certainly would transcribed here, but Shehan delivers them with such absolute conviction that he never misses the mark. It doesn’t hurt that Shehan’s voice has never sounded better. Old fans will delight in filling in the blanks of the past nine years with the many references to casual drug use, dissolving relationships, starting over, and finding forgiveness. New listeners will find the constant strand of hopefulness that runs throughout the record comforting.
On the closer, “Waiting For Your Arrival,” Shehan asks for your hand as he watches the world end. Drums thunder, guitars swell, and the bass rumbles discontentedly, and Shehan invites us to watch stars crash to earth as if we’ll happily witness an all-encompassing fireworks display. If that’s the scene, The Jealous Sound have set it to one hell of a soundtrack.
I frequently say that I like punk. What I am trying to say is that I love Jawbreaker. Some might suggest that Jawbreaker would be properly classified as “pop punk,” but that term has long since been coopted by music writers looking to describe something far more bubblegum than those Bay Area greats, something that they might also describe by the not-a-synonym “emo.”
In some ways, Brooklyn’s The Men remind me of Jawbreaker - primarily in the way that they seem poised to replicate the jump that Jawbreaker made between their second and third albums. The Men broke through last year with their own second proper record, Leave Home, which, although sonically more in indebted to psych and shoegaze than Jawbreaker ever was, reminds me of Jawbreaker’s sophomore effort, Bivouac. On both records sprawling, minor key art punk rubs elbows with more bracing traditional bangers.
Based on the title track, The Men’s Open Your Heart, due March 6, is poised to be their 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, despite the rather disparate titles. “Open Your Heart” finds The Men sharpening their hooks and punching up the sonics just a bit, just as Jawbreaker did on their own third record. The song opens with a cough before slamming the pedal to the floor. The guitar tone faithfully replicates that of Dinosaur Jr’s third album Bug, but the chords are bashed out, the solo more Misfits than Mascis. If “Open Your Heart” seems promising now, just wait until the weather gets warm and you’re screaming “I’VE BEEN RIDING WHAT THE NIGHT PULLS IN” out the window of your car, drumming furiously on your steering wheel. It’s a fun song, and even after an album as varied as Leave Home was, a pleasant surprise from a frequently surprising band. The Men truly seem to embody the mantra that Jawbreaker delivered on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy’s “Indictment” - “If you think we’ve changed our tune, I hope we did.”
Sometimes when you wake up in the morning, you shake yourself. You hope, unreasonably, that the heartache you feel is some residue of a dream. That once you’ve washed your face and your eyes start focussing properly, that everything will reboot to how you started the day before, that you will be granted a version of Groundhog Day where everything will go the way you intended and you can move on from there. Not here.
Your favorite team has been eliminated from championship contention yet again. It’s all real. The plays you saw them making in your mind’s eye when you woke up yesterday? They didn’t all happen. Or they did. It doesn’t matter. It’s over, and you’ve got months or years to wait, to agonize before they get another shot. Thank God that Los Campesinos! know how you’re feeling. This is way worse than that break up that Bon Iver went through.
Kurt Wagner deserves a place in the pantheon of the great story-songwriters of our time. The little details of every Lambchop song are rich, and like a good piece of prose, require a few readings to grasp. Even then, Wagner is able to create dense but watery little worlds that constantly slip through your fingers. Perhaps this is why he’s frequently overlooked as a songwriter.
It could also be that his songs skew too much to the mundane. There’s little grandiose in writing a song that celebrates your wife calling to remind you it’s National Talk Like a Pirate Day, but that’s just what Wagner did on the best track from 2008’s OH (Ohio).
It should come as no surprise, then, that Nashville’s most fucked-up country band doesn’t approach politics head-on. The closest they’ve come was a memorable bit of banter from Live at XX Merge, wherein pianist Tony Crow mumbled a joke: “What would you get if you crossed Rush Limbaugh with Coldplay?…I don’t know. I was hoping you’d be able to tell us… Maybe Horseweenie?” This is probably as coherent as a Lambchop political manifesto gets.
That said, the absolutely gorgeous & heartbreaking “Gone Tomorrow”, culled from their forthcoming 11th full length, Mr. M, just might address politics a bit more directly, all the while taking the time to wallow in the little personal details of a country mired in recession. “It was their last night on the continent. The production was shutting down,” opens Wagner, possibly referring to some manufacturing jobs, before diving headlong into the details of a a hard existence. Coins are found on the streets and traded in for something more, even if that something is a drink behind the local stadium.
Then, about halfway through the song’s seven minutes, the words drop out, and the music takes over. Based on this and the other available teaser track “If Not I’ll Just Die”, Mr. M is more string oriented than previous efforts. Although “Gone Tomorrow” undoubtably sounds like a band in the studio, it does not suffer for it. The strings and piano perform a delicate dance around the melody that mimics the way Wagner comes right up to some grand statement and then takes a step back, asking only for “a thing or two today”.
In that way, “Gone Tomorrow” might not be about outsourcing but rather Lambchop finishing up a run of shows in Europe or any number of other bittersweet conclusions. Like much of Wagner’s best work, “Gone Tomorrow” is laden with detail but light on specifics - a recipe for something universal.
For someone who loves big, expansive music, I’ve been inexplicably repelled by Shearwater’s music up to this point. Please don’t take this to mean you won’t like it. The problem of course is that we can be at once in and out of tune with our own tastes. I could easily make a checklist of the ingredients that make up the music I love: Thundering, soaring melodies? Check. PhD student living double life that yields vicarious enjoyment for me? Check.
Let’s be mathematical for a second, shall we? The music I love is a subset of all music that contains those ingredients. It is not itself equal to all music that is pressed from that mold.
But if you keep mixing up the ingredients, shifting up the proportions a bit each time, you may stumble upon alchemy, and Shearwater has done just that with “You As You Were”. By dialing down his brainier tendencies and shooting straight for the heart, Meiburg has crafted an all-out jam of twinkling keyboards, the steady throb of a bass drum, and that voice.
Stephen Colbert interviews Maurice Sendak.
This is the greatest interview in the history of “The Colbert Report.” (Go to our actual tumblog if you have trouble watching on the dashboard.)
This makes me unbearably happy.
720 notes (via washingtonpoststyle)
John K. Samson. Provincial. Release date: January 24, 2012.
The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle once told John Samson that “writer’s block is a bourgeois luxury.” Samson, though a noted booster of the proletariat, doesn’t seem to have taken this as much motivation. Provincial is being billed his first proper solo record and is Samson’s first full-length release of any type since his Weakerthans released Reunion Tour way back in 2007. The Weakerthans contributed to a release by Jim Bryson last year and Samson put out two parts of what was originally to be three to four part 7” series in 2009 and 2010. (I assume that this series has been aborted since all of the tracks from the previous installments reappear here.) Otherwise, Samson has been quiet.
If this sounds like a slight on Samson, it’s not meant to be one. Samson is a gifted writer whose words deserve to be heard, no matter the quantity delivered. Much like Darnielle, Samson delights in character sketches of people who want more than their current lot. Whether that means a borrowed car to cruise around Winnipeg on a Sunday night or to see their beloved Reggie Leach inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame is up to the individual, but they’re mostly simple demands.
Provincial is very much a record from and about Samson’s hometown of Winnipeg and the relationships that natives of Manitoba have with their birthplace, as evidenced by “Heart of the Continent” (a sequel of sorts to the much beloved “One Great City!” - each phrase has served as a motto for the capital city). This may sound specific, but it’s not a whole lot unlike my relationship with the DC suburbs. There’s a lot I don’t like, but ultimately it’s nice to be at home, share a beer, and root for the local hockey team. How much you enjoy this record will likely correlate highly to how much you sympathize with those sentiments.
Provincial continues the trend of the last few Weakerthans records of upping the ratio of hushed, shuffling numbers to rockers, and it is a fine, if not particularly unique, addition to Samson’s all-too-small catalog. The bourgeois narrator of Provincial’s “When I Write My Master’s Thesis” could stand to write more too. See, when the prophesy of the title has come to pass, “it’s all gonna change.” Maybe, but you’ve got to get there first.
John K. Samson - Letter In Icelandic From The Ninette San by Epitaph Records
Sometimes I think about what it takes for an artist to receive a lifetime pass. Take, for example, two bands who I acknowledge have each made several records that I have greatly enjoyed: The Hold Steady & My Morning Jacket. Through some confluence of mediocre later works & my own constant thirst for something new, I somehow enjoy even those albums I would once (and maybe still) call “great” less now than I once did. I almost never listen to them now. Meanwhile my enjoyment of the best works of Elvis Costello, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Built to Spill, & Dinosaur Jr continues unabated, despite full acknowledgement that each has spent or is spending time in the wilderness.
My love for Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is unequivocal. I just cried real tears on my couch watching Scooter introduce Danny & the Big Man in an old live video of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” The run of albums that the Boss went on from 1972 to 1986 is, to my mind, unassailable. After that, well… let’s talk about “I’m on Fire”! So good, right? You’re really into “Mary, Queen of Arkansas”? It was never my favorite, but I get it. Have you taken the time to really get into The River yet? You know I’ve been asking you to. I’m not kidding about Tunnel of Love. Look, you love low-key synth pop. I know it’s not what you look for from Bruce, but I’m telling you those songs are a serious punch in the gut.
What? You wanted to talk about the new Bruce song? It’s a post-millennial Springsteen song. The tune is good. It’s catchy. Yeah, yeah he does that “Born in the USA” thing where it sounds super patriotic but he’s talking about how we took care of our own at the Superdome. Of course it’s a little more on the nose. I know someone will fall for it, but is it really fair to laugh at them any more? We can’t really pat ourselves on the back for getting the joke, you guys. Those fuckers still kind of run this place, whether they’re as deep into pop culture as us or not.
Shit. Now I have to listen to “Backstreets” to cheer myself up. Here comes Clarence.
Shit. Now I’m crying again.
There is a certain well-earned stereotype about PhD students that I believe I often embody for better or worse. That being said, a friend once said to me, “you know, for such a white collar guy, you sure listen to a lot of blue collar music.” I think there’s a lot of desperation in every life, a lot of struggle for everyone. That’s a platitude. It’s cheap. There is a lot of to see in the cheap seats. A lot of other warm bodies around you. This new song by The Jealous Sound swings for those of us up in the rafters, and my goodness does it hit.
