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American Music (Gagauthier)
The music of 311,581,968 people (as of Saturday afternoon, and excluding the dead), as played by a couple dozen and heard by one. In no particular order.
Mary Gauthier – The Foundling (2010)
How wonderful to discover someone new in the time of her greatness. Gauthier is equal parts Lucinda Williams and Randy Newman, romantic drawler and cynical dazzler. “Sideshow” even seems to contain an element of Newman-esque parody, maybe because it’s born of a tragedy that has made everything feel false and unreal, until the foundling completes the process of rejoining the world.
The Decemberists – The King Is Dead (2011)
If Peter Buck wasn’t a guest they might have gotten in trouble for “Calamity Song,” but elsewhere the traditionalism is entirely their own.
Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (2011)
Blues does not delight as much in the rich ringing sounds of youth, and it’s not an album to be taken lightly, but it is still very sweet. I’ve been pondering over the lyrics, and have concluded that when it comes to describing relationships, the words are entirely at the discretion of their writer. Cliches can be intensely personal, when shared between two people.
Alejandro Escovedo – Gravity (1992)
Hope for my forties. Escovedo was never a major leading man until he started a solo career at age 41 with this album. Needless to say, the poetry and stories hadn’t dried up yet.
Come – Eleven : Eleven (1992)
As a kid in the 90s, I was happily ignorant of the deeper meaning in the songs of most of my favorite bands, but I guess it’s no accident that I never listened to Come, whose harsh chords, so familiar to these ears, assemble into feelings and doubts a bit too intense for the inclusion of childish imagination. This is the band Kristin Hersh could have been describing as her own at age 18: “My band is … spinach, I guess. We’re ragged and bitter. But I swear to god, we’re good for you.”
Arcwelder – Jacket Made In Canada + This (1991, 1989)
Their longevity is probably evidence of a lack of psychic pain in these songs as beautiful as Hüsker Dü‘s, but as part of the perpetual cycle of the divine spirit (Twin Cities clang, in this case) made living flesh, these guys are crucial.
The Beach Boys – Friends + 20/20 (1968, 1969)
What’s better than uncovering the weird, reckless productivity of The Beach Boys post-Pet Sounds? The band’s reclaimed pluralism resulted in a masterpiece in 1970, Sunflower, but it’s no more difficult to love an album as personal, singular and miniature as Friends, which is more like the slow, soft decay of a dream upon waking than a bold emergence into the world.
The Secret History – The World That Never Was (2010)
My Favorite‘s Michael Grace Jr. recruits rock royalty Lisa Ronson (daughter of Mick) for new project? This must have escaped my attention in 2010 because it’s almost too good to be true. The songs (the ones I’ve heard, anyway) are so lively that everything easily escapes being a shadow of past romance.
Death Cab For Cutie – Codes & Keys (2011)
Wow, beautiful, Codes & Keys is like one long, cool tone unleashed from the pop music laboratory in the sky foretold in 1966. I’ve never sensed so strongly that Death Cab have made exactly the album they intended to make, not for previous lack of confidence, but due to this album’s unshakable purpose.
Lady Gaga – Born This Way (2011)
The soundtrack of a road trip, and anything more? Sure! A number of these songs (“Scheiße,” “Bad Kids”) beguile with lush and slyly stated melodies, while Gaga & Team, perhaps living up to early “artistic promise,” lose no opportunity for excessive production while somehow creating the least garish and earache-y music in modern pop (which can’t be said of the cover art). The lyrics are still hopelessly mixed and confused, mostly, though sometimes they really say what they mean, sans tasteless eccentricity, and are the better for it: “I just want to be myself and I want you to love me for who I am.” That’s hard to do with Gaga, but if we remind ourselves that the author has never been more dead than now, these are pretty good songs!
