Wistful is an overused word when describing music. '11 has seen a lot of wistfulness within indie spheres, from the reverb heavy nostalgia evoked by Real Estate, and Youth Lagoon to the bittersweet hyperreal narratives of Sam Beam's Iron & Wine. There's an art to being mopey. It can't just be depressing, it must be sad, yes, but beautiful somehow, too.
Allusion to summers lost, childhood or things perpetually just out of reach usually feature highly in such songs. And they can either take the understated approach a la Real Estate, or go the whole hog- rushing strings, falsetto vocals, transcendent yearning etc. Think Sigur Ros, or perhaps Coldplay.
When it's done right this is my favourite kind of music. When its not it usually ends up on the X Factor.
Tim Buckley, (father of more famous son Jeff ), was a master of melancholy, as seen on the track, "Once I Was". The title itself evokes a time romantically distant. And he goes further - even the present moment is rendered null and void by time's winged chariot: "Soon there will be another, to tell you I was just a dream."
Such ruminations sound bleak on paper but Buckley's tune is effortlessly dramatic, and shockingly beautiful. Just listen to his voice on "sometimes" or "me"- during the chorus- as his voice skips octaves like stepping stones.
So, yes, it does aid wistfulness if you have an outrageously good voice. But its not showy. And it's the whole package here which combines to make the song so timeless. The marching style drums, the harmonica - (one shade the right side of 'Last Of The Summer Wine' theme tune) and the sparsely strummed acoustic guitar. It's all seamlessly perfect.
There's more profundity in a couple of seconds of this song than in the entire history of stadium rock.
Listen either via this spotify link. Or through a superb live video below
This is my favourite Okkervil River song, indeed, one of my fav songs full stop. From the Black Sheep Boy Appendix album (the same sessions as 2005's Black Sheep Boy, their best album imo), 'No Key, No Plan' sees Will Sheff at his impassioned best. He uses his gift for narrative to imbue his characters with vital relevance full of implication as to how to live our humble everyday lives. In this case Sheff uses the persona of a destuctive criminal hell bent on "crash land(ing)", to represent the adrenalin of living for the moment. Of carpe diem. "Back on the road again, with maybe 13 grand", the song then flips to "a rich young sophisticate", who, like Sheff, is "doing what I really like, and getting paid for it". These worldly pleasures are elevated and justified in the song's transcendent finale where Sheff screams with that cracked voice, of how "There is only now", no hell, thus no use in inhibition or morality: "just breathe it in."
This song always gives me comfort when I think of the essential senselessness of what we are doing, why we are here. Existing. It is so urgent, compelling a listener, if not to go out and pull a heist like the character in the song, at least to go out and truly live. This is your only chance.
Sheff seems to revel in this lack of a higher meaning. And obviously the song is very meta, (as with all Okkervil River). It's a song about itself, about being in a band, the rock and roll myth, and making art for art's sake. At once cerebral and fiercely visceral, Sheff transmutes the futility of life in a post religious age into something glorious, through an exaltation of hedonistic excess.
I don't know how much hard living Sheff does- he's always a couple of steps removed from his characters- but he sure has put a cogent and passionately argued case for going out and getting wasted. Or at least doing what you want.
Kevin Shields spent his whole career trying (in vain) to recreate the magic of 1991's Loveless, My Bloody Valentine's second, and final, album. Such was its power and beauty it's hardly surprising. It combined the noise and distortion of punk, with a dreamy, reverb soaked melodicism. In a hugely influential union.
Unbelievable success can stymie even the best artists. Look at The Strokes, for whom Is This It became an unsurmountable summit, and to a lesser extent, bands such as Broken Social Scene, whose incredible You Forgot It In People, still stands like a collossus over their, still good, recent work.
But for Sheilds Loveless became his nemesis, many albums worth of material were thrown out, deemed inadequate against the mighty spectre of their old LP. And nothing was ever released again. Yes, that's right, nothing.
Anyway, the song I've chosen to highlight is my favourite moment on Loveless. 'What You Want' is a piece of transcendent reverie that moves me every time. The intensity of the layered guitar squall and the sheer beauty of the melody make this song irresistible. This is five minutes of perfection as far as im concerned. After the three minute mark, the guitars soar to an unworldly perfection that leaves me struggling for adjectives. Just listen. Ageless.
This a song that took Justin Vernon over a year to complete, both lyrically and musically. He wanted to perfect the lyrics so they really reflected the situation he had in his mind. This is admirable, especially so given that his last (and rightfully lauded) LP was a selection of sparse emotionally resonant, acoustic ditties. Such tinkering is brave. And a years toil is deserving of some critical attention, I feel.
The song is split into a distinct two parts.And an exquisitely crafted two, too. The first minute and a half has a hymnal feel with Vernon's choral delivery of a series of elliptical images. The blissful contented sounding organ notes further this zen, monastic atmosphere.
The writing is good too, and benefits from being looked at written down. Lines like "Hair, old, long along/ your neck onto your shoulder blades" both sounds, and is beautiful. But the run on line which aides the meaning obviously isn't heard in the song. So perhaps Vernon has just created something that reads beautifully on paper, but also sounds fantastic as this is all most listeners would be able to hear, or indeed care about anyway. Thus in a sense satisfying himself and his audience.
Anyway each line stands alone, almost as a distinct entity to the next, and intimates very obliquely of internal struggles , relationships/ loss. Very little is concrete, except the lake, the "one piece swimsuit" and our "bodies"; a recurrent motif. But as we all know these are not permanent or definite. Indeed, in the song, "our bodies.... break" under "little waves." It doesn't take much force to crush the two lovers, or maybe this is what unites them.
Just before the two minute mark, on the word "Joy", comes the change in the tenor of the song. What, if we were talking about a sonnet, would be called the 'volta' or 'turn'. The beatific first half of the song dissolves as some percussion kicks in then and then on "joy", we get guitars and bass. The song becomes more expansive, leading a listener into the emotional centre point of the song. Into, literally, the "fire." It works up to this through subtle increases in sound, and layering.
When this eye of the storm hits it's obvious, Vernon's voice becomes anguished and he drops the falsetto. There is distortion on his vocals and the guitar for the first time. Is it anger, passion? Who knows for sure? But the repeated image of bodies and the "one piece swimmer" hint at desire to me. Also the song, tellingly, moves into the present tense. The sense of immediacy and urgency is palpable. The first time I heard it I was very moved, not least because it strikes a listener almost unawares and is somewhat incongruous with the placid verses. But on reflection and analysis one can notice the build up. It is very subtly done, a bravura masterclass in restraint and understatement.
This fire that just as it starts is already "burning out" is a profound image of lust or love expiring, perhaps. A flame that is unable to last in the lake. Then the sudden switch back to the verse format. All distortion gone and Vernon sings, once more with almost resignation, of being "sold, as Ever", and the song switches back to the retrospective past tense. It is as if this brief springing into life has taken its toll and the narrator is once again wearied.
Vernon also neglects traditional verse- chorus- verse structures, playing with the listener, creating that sense of suspense. As he has repeated verses then the powerful bridge bit, which is the nearest thing to a chorus in the song. It is inventive and powerful, making the song as incendiary and unpredictable as the emotions he describes.
This is curious and beguiling work; as beautiful as it is mysterious. Like all that is worthwhile in art, it doesn't yield its meaning too easily. It is a song that can be moulded to fit whatever the individual listener brings to it. And all the better for it.
Just to clear up the meaning of the song once and for all (not); here is the video.
Some songs just lodge in the memory, and this from Wilco is a case in point. Initially I disregarded it cutting it off from my cherry picked selection of songs from its album, "A Ghost Is Born, which I deemed "fit" for my mp3 player.However, years later I rediscovered the song and it spoke to me in a way it hadn't before; revealing subtleties and meaning I perhaps wasn't able to appreciate on first picking up the album.
It has got a fairly plodding Beatlesy piano melody, though as is Wilco's wont, the lyrics steal the show. They catapult the song from the mediocre to the magnificent. There is something indubitably moving about Tweedy's words. "I'm an ocean, I'm all emotion" he sings, before noting, abstractedly, "I'm a cherry ghost." The latter image being an example of the expressionistic style of Tweedy's compositions, and so striking that a band decided to name themselves Cherry Ghost in homage.
Some songs you have to earn the right to being able to comprehend, and this is one. There seems to be an unfakeable, hard earned quality to it.
For, despite the lilting piano and major chord jocularity, the song carries a poignant, melancholy message. No one can map each other: our emotions are literally "oceans" undefinable, opaque to others, let alone "Theologians". We are ultimately, all alone and all there is to us is emotion and vagueness. Indeed the very fact of our cognisance of this makes it somehow tragic.
But we may as well have a jolly melody to back up such cheery sentiments, eh? Wilco – Theologians
Conspiracy theory or not, today will be a day to remember. The day Obama declared Osama no more.
It made me think of an Okkervil River song which quite beautifully captures the "what were you doing when" moment that events like these inevitably produce. So out of the blue and seemingly portentous, yet ultimately, just one insignificant life.
What Will Sheff, songwriter for Okkervil River, does brilliantly in "The Presidents Dead", is to capture the microcosm in an event of magnitude (the macrocosm). The songs narrative zones out from the present to the narrator's future self looking back on this day in "lets say 30 years" on, noting accurately and beautifully what the human memory really records: sensory experience. No lumbering political message or diatribe; just the "eggs on the plate and the bacon hissin' ", with "spring on the wind." It's the sights and smells that really shape our experience and how an event is recorded in our minds. And it is events like these that, I feel, give our lives shape, or at least the semblance of it.
I mean, who didn't flinch today with the 'news' that it was nearly 10 years since 9/11. Ten years..... God! So regardless of their political significance, or lack of, these events serve as kind of pesonal bookends and landmarks. As, indeed, do songs. So in a way its a kind of meta-song; a song about itself.
There is also the unexpected empathy for the individual; the man, not the president. The life lost no matter how misspent that life was. "The early obits say he was a good man, and you cant argue with that, not today you cant." This is where todays events aren't obviously relevant, (who can label, from a western perspective at least, Bin Laden "a good man"!), but nevertheless, a man he was. I think Sheff was envisioning a presdent like Bush or Nixon being assasinated, and these sentiments are spot on. It takes a cold hearted person to rejoice at another humans death.
Anyway its a fantastic song, and its worth checking out the lyrics too. See it performed live along with "Black", probably their most accesible song, in quite shambolic footage here.
I always hate it when people ask me what my favourite band is, it seems such a gross simplification and injustice to all the music you are implicitly shunning, to say this is my favourite. I find it quite a facile concept to single just one note from all the possible others and say this is the greatest. Maybe i'm just not musically monogamous. Here's to polygamy.
And as for having a favourite song, well, just don't get me started...Hence my new invention the "Best Song Ever" category. In this I am going to select one special song that I think is worthy of being someones "best ever song", and say a few words about it. This should keep me busy: I have a lot of favourite songs!
So onto #1 in this new creation. I have chosen, completely at random, Feist's Past In Present.
I love love love her voice, and although she isn't pushed to the max here vocally, the understatement and directness of the lyrics / melody just totally does it for me. Was there ever a more pertinent, truer lyric than "there's so much past inside my present" ? I think that no matter whose past it is that's in question, the sentiment is pretty much universal. To nail such a complex idea in one line is commendable, to make it hummable and danceable,whilst avoiding moroseness is downright brilliant. Add some fantastic, slidey minmal guitar playing, with some well judged handclaps and you have a magical two minutes fifty three seconds.
The recent release of Radiohead's eighth LP has got me listening to their back catalogue again. Back to a time before Yorke and co became completely immersed in electronica, and increasingly outre sounds. This isn't to say Radiohead's later output is any less than brilliant, I just feel that the band reached their zenith with the twin peaks of The Bends and OK Computer. These albums transcended the drab brit pop of their peers, with intense, intelligent, truly epic guitar music.
If The Bends was a giant leap forward from Pablo Honey, OK Computer was a paradigm shift. Sonically, the band went to a different plane, there was just so much more going on on every level: lyrically, musically, and rhythmically. Anyway, this album has been rightly lauded, coming top of "greatest album ever" polls with almost boring regularity, to such an extent that its greatness has become a kind of cliche.So I will say no more about the album as a whole, just one song. Let Down.
This is without a doubt my favourite Radiohead song. It can be read as a comment on the emptiness of modern consumerist living, mortality, motion sickness, or just the essential pointlessness of life generally. Cheery stuff then, I hear you sigh. Well, yes, actually, not to be perverse but i find the whole thing mesmerising and, especially the second half of the song (from about the three minute mark), defiantly life affirming.
As the drums get more and more complex and Yorke increasingly emotional, it's as if the song enacts what it describes and truly "grows wings;" leaving the monochrome everyday behind in a glorious crescendo of noise. The "wings twitch" image always reminds me of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, transformed, just like Yorke's voice, from the mumbling sullen first verse, to the translucent urgency of the ending coda. The second half of the song has a liberated feel, like a kind of letting go; an acceptance of our state perhaps, or simply a successful escape from it.
Regardless of the meaning, the result is a song of shimmering beauty. "Hysterical and useless" we may be, but if capable of making sounds like this, perhaps life is worth living after all.
And if Yorke's soaring falsetto doesn't give you the goosebumps then check yourself for a pulse.......
