Cleaning House
The Magpies – Jester’s (Helena, MT) – Saturday, October 15, 2011
I don’t know much about The Magpies. They say they come from Sucker Creek in Montana. I’ve heard they run a farm up there, come to town and play music when the crops allow. But they could pass for city dwellers. Lead dude Tolan Harber is classically lanky, Thurston or Malkmus or Verlaine even if you don’t blur your eyes, sings like Iggy Pop or Chris Bailey, and to his right, Samantha Pollington sings and shouts like Carrie Brownstein must have done when she was equally unknown. They make the kind of noise that’s remarkable anywhere, but that always seems revolutionary in Montana. A cover of Jay Reatard’s “I’m Watching You,” his rare ballad reimagined as more characteristic in-the-red bliss, set the mood, while the band’s originals often recalled the great Versus (see “Charlie Hustle,” with its ringing, silvery guitars).
And yet, much as one tries to contextualize, The Magpies retained their mystery, as any band from rural Montana will do. The Jester’s stage is set back from the floor, bordered by pillars, suggesting the television proscenium of an MTV childhood. So you could stand there and project your fantasies onto the screen… the stage… and wait for the band to be whisked away into the ether.
Ghost Wolves – Burt’s Tiki Lounge (Albuquerque, NM) – Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The stage at Burt’s allows no such fantasy projection, but has its own neat concept, separated from the crowd by the thinnest film of distance (a short semicircular wall) and united with them beneath the bar-wide sprawl of stuff-spewing rafters and walls. There’s no danger of lapsing into a dream while watching, nor of an accidental merger between band and audience; the band stays real, but safely, barely removed. So it’s appropriate the first band I saw there was Ghost Wolves, a drum and guitar duo with an intensity that instantly defies you to compare them against The White Stripes, or even Flat Duo Jets. Carley Wolf on guitar and Jonathan Konya (rechristened Jonny Wolf on this night) on drums play their instruments with an easiness that makes the loud, intricate swagger of the music a little baffling.
Later on they swapped instruments, initiated the hootenanny, as there was a fair amount of awkwardness in the transfer. The songs became rudimentary, very careful slap-slaps on the drums and strum-strums of the guitar—or, channeling this awkwardness into art, combination rudimentary / avant-garde. Ghost Wolves come from ruthless Austin, Texas, which has yet to produce a band I don’t find intimidating, and which, between this duo and the live act of Hidden Ritual, I am starting to conjure as an enchanted land of Beat Happening worship.
Real Estate – Days
The album of the moment. The fleeting moment, celebrated even as its passing is lamented: I knew this came across in the music of Real Estate as it has in the work of very few bands since R.E.M., but I hadn’t quite registered how good, definitive their lyrics are. It’s real as far as I can see…
M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Certainly a big pleasure, but where are the songs? Their absence, and the predominance of mood pieces, makes this the first M83 album with a central idea that refuses to come into view. Are these various attempts to re-score the Where The Wild Things Are trailer? That’s one way in which they succeed.
Björk – Biophilia
“Sacrifice” is the only song title here without an overt cosmological connotation, and it’s also the name of this album’s greatest quality. The arrangements here are eminently restrained (some rendered as haunting music box ballads), so that in her rhythmic freedom, it again sounds like Björk is finding music in the stars, not forcing her musical template upon them. And that makes the occasional drum ‘n’ bass eruption all the more exciting.
Discotays – Concealer
Discovered it while surfing the web, and immediately it shows signs of what so much anonymous internet art lacks: perspective. The first song is called “Woke Up On The Mesa,” which begs the question, how often do electronic music kids wake up anywhere but in a bedroom?
The Twilight Sad – “Kill It In The Morning” | Guided By Voices – “The Unsinkable Fats Domino”
The year in music 2012, maybe the last one ever. I don’t know what it will bring beyond these two signs of end times: “No one can ever know,” the unspoken admonition in every Twilight Sad song, becomes the title of their third album, which threatens to incorporate Pretty Hate Machine industrial atmospherics, because guitars aren’t despairing enough, because domesticity isn’t evil enough; and a new album from the mid-90s Guided By Voices lineup might be, after all, indistinguishable from solo Pollard, or Boston Spaceships, or… What else could there be for these bands to prove if the world doesn’t end?
Lloyd Price – “Come Into My Heart” | Barbara Lewis – “My Heart Went Do Dat Da” | Jimmy Ruffin – “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted”
1959 – 1962 – 1966 – the story of the heart. And not told just in the words, but also in that expansive sound where the heart does more than just beat along with the drums: it pleads with the horns, overflows with the strings, busts with the crackle of a voice.
The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow | Air – Moon Safari | LTJ Bukem Presents Logical Progression
First three CDs played in my new apartment, and a logical progression, for though they represent a trip back through the years, starting in 2003 with The Shins, I still hear the infinite drum ‘n’ bass of Bukem and disciples, now 15 years old, as the teleological endpoint of all culture. Where’s Bukem today, where’s Roni Size, to tell us what next?
East River Pipe – “14th Street Boys Stolen Car Club”
New apartment anthem.
