The Summer That Ends
Smog – Red Apple Falls
Exhibit A: I was worse than a stranger. I was well known.
Exhibit B: Alone in my room I feel like such a part of the community, but out on the streets I feel like a robot by the river.
Exhibit C: All of my old friends want me to stay down with them. I could extend them a hand but they would only pull it off in their grasp, in their power. So I find myself isolated in these fine, fine days.
What a psychologically consistent album! Heart-full Callahan wants to love his fellow man, but something is making it impossible.
Richard Buckner – Since
Wake up in some wild familiar time… You might say these songs have a cumulative effect—Buckner tends to arrange his lyrics like pages of a single short story, and has been known to forgo cutting these stories into individual tracks—but that would be overlooking the phenomenal synchronicity of his band, hitting peaks and backing down in mere seconds. The songs are packed to the brim, but even if you just listen to the general rush of the album, you’ll get a similar, longer form, sense of craft.
Neil Young – Tonight’s The Night
The two-part title track is very nearly the worst rock ‘n’ roll song ever recorded, but it’s also one of the finest frames a rock album ever had. Who could trust the barely-put-together beauty in between, if the band had not exposed honestly the process of trance/purge/primal hum/cloying (for elsewhere the despair is sweet) hopelessness that leads into and out of it? The other ten songs are pretty sharply played, but the lead-in helps tell us whence that indefinable slippery quality that threatens to unravel all, and wherefore the courage to continue. For 1975, Tonight’s The Night was, believe it or not, their best foot shakily forward.
Mary Margaret O’Hara – “Year In Song”
For a few seconds you might think you’re hearing a cynical take on the music biz like Nick Lowe’s “They Called It Rock” or The Smiths’ “Paint A Vulgar Picture,” but quickly O’Hara’s agitated singing dissolves into an even more indecipherable panic/exaltation, perhaps the very feelings that kept her from ever recording a second album. So maybe this song enacts rather than declares the oft-told rock disillusionment tale. And consider something else: siblings don’t stray far. Imagine Mary Margaret’s sister Catherine O’Hara at her best, locked into character in a frantic sketch, and render it as song.
The Last – L.A. Explosion
“The first thing you gotta remember is that rock & roll was dead. As a doornail. You must realize this or nothing wonderful can come from anything I am about to relate.” So begin Joe Nolte’s liner notes for the 2003 reissue, and it’s true. You see the dangerous cover art and explosive album title and expect a certain kind of tonic, but then you hear the modest pop hooks and remember that yes, modesty was mightier than noise in the battle against mid-70s bullshit.
No Age – Everything In Between
I never would have guessed that today’s loudest live band and makers of Nouns would record an album that fails to come across as loud, no matter how loud you play it. That’s its beauty. This is noise, but a weirdly sleepy strain of it, like it only briefly existed in the physical world.
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Mirror Traffic
So he didn’t relearn anything from Pavement, didn’t need to, but I think it would be unwise not to think of this as a post-reunion album. That’s a big deal, and a weird era to find oneself in: After the Reunion. It might explain the weary beauty of Malkmus’s voice on this record. Most say he sounds relaxed; I say he ages same as everyone else. Call it Mortal Traffic. The best thing happening here is his continued “White Album” deep cut excavation, the way the “Mother Nature’s Son” horns of “No One Is (As I Are Be)” play like a soft echo of 2005’s “Loud Cloud Crowd”: recent buoyancy already lost, purposefully sacrificed for age’s more acute pleasures.
EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
That jumbled mess of an album title worried me. If the artist can’t narrow down the terminology of her preferred mythology to a single defining word, what hope is there for the music? But Erika M. Anderson is a prematurely wise musician, and the sounds on her debut have the sort of specificity that suggests an artist with traumas needing precise translation. Time will tell if Anderson is that artist: it’s so far hard to glean any definite traumas (except that she’s from South Dakota, ha ha) but when she sings of her homesteading great grandmother and feels an inherited sense of “nothing,” you suspect the setting is no trauma, but merely the wide open space she needs to re-gather a native empathy. The proof, the storytelling, lives in the music, wordlessly.
Björk – “Sun In My Mouth”
The words come from e.e. cummings, though I would’ve guessed Frank O’Hara, given the (sexual) submissiveness to nature in the imagery, sunbeams like probing fingers. Or you, skeptic, might have guessed only Björk could have conceived it, but know now that she sings not the feminine ethereal, but the human.
Atlas Sound – “Terra Incognita” b/w Mercury Rev – “Endlessly”
Imaginary 7-inch. Music exists in time; the best songs make time stop with only a handful of notes, the very things that tick off the seconds also dilating and erasing them (side A) or condense it into a pretty, non-stop cosmic carousel (side B). Also, all good songs define their titles.
