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Crucify Your Mind
“How much of you is repetition?”
King Tuff with Audacity – Launchpad (Albuquerque, NM) – Monday, August 20, 2012
The members of opening act Audacity must be drinking age, at least, but they struck me as absurdly fresh and young. Never have I been so endeared to a band on account of raw talent, a well-practiced set, and the sweet sincerity of youth. That’s a sensation that will surely multiply in the coming years, but it’s already too late to deny that I like Audacity for the same reasons adults liked Hanson in the 90s.
The power pop of King Tuff was more my usual speed, if only because King looks a bit older, or because his band is more muscular and without as much effort. Melody and energy are the beginning and end of his music’s considerable charms, but the songs tend to blur together when they’re not the awesomely spirited “Bad Thing.”
Neil Young Journeys | Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Americana | Neil Young – “Winterlong”
a. Young’s new concert film (the third by Jonathan Demme), documenting a show at Toronto’s Massey Hall in support of 2010’s Le Noise. Or: A human legend still lives on planet Earth, among creaking, growing stuff, blasting out noise but never just for its own sake, as far as I can tell. Shots of stubble, spittle and teeth. In between blasts he drives around Ontario, and says how he can always tell if he likes a song by listening to it in a car.
b. More guitar, tons of it in fact, country-wide, but the silvery, desolate chords of Le Noise traded for something looser, more casually triumphant.
c. Some old noise (early ’70s), the stray decibels more than usually affixed to a fine riff.
Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel…
Not many musicians have the luxury to say that they don’t listen to other people’s music while making their own music, but when the artist in question is Joanna Newsom or Fiona Apple, it’s wise not to question the process. Idler Wheel’s insularity is its art. Here’s the rare album that doesn’t try to transcend what ails it (futility, and the brain fevers already present as “Every Single Night” begins, never to be calmed) but still beats it into a compelling shape. Some of the vocals might be said to overreach if they sounded like performances. But most sound like immediate communications, none better than “Anything We Want,” which could be her version of The Hidden Cameras’ joyful anthem of monogamous discovery, “Underage,” if her voice wasn’t at its crying-est.
Sharon Van Etten – Tramp
Two of Tramp’s guest vocalists set the endpoints of its musical world, which wavers between moments of intimacy and calm (à la the wordless melodies of Julianna Barwick, featured throughout) and louder, more disorienting spikes (à la the dynamic noise of Wye Oak, whose Jenn Wasner helps fill up the sonic space of “Serpents”). Here’s another fine New York album, but like a lot of the recent ones, too personal to be routinely iconic.
Frank Ocean – Channel Orange
On the basis of 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, I hoped that Ocean would soon make his Double Nickels on the Dime, and then came Channel Orange, which I’ve had trouble thinking about in any but those terms. But the terms are appropriate: A long album with short songs and long ideas, arranged according to some invisible but undeniable scheme, surrounded by ambient, possibly diegetic sound.
Twin Shadow – Confess
Because his music contains hallmarks of 1980s pop music, some will try to make a political question out of George Lewis Jr.’s perceived sincerity and authenticity, or lack thereof, but I know that this is the same man who sang amazing couplets like “I am trying to remember all the things that I’ve known / They all shine soft and stand alone” on 2010’s Forget, so I guess I’m biased in his favor (having listened to his music). Confess doesn’t do so as consistently as Forget, but at its best it finds an amazing communion between generic words, whose specificity lives entirely in their sweet articulation, and the big, bursting musical analogues to so much romance and heartbreak: “The stunning things you say, like: ‘It’s been sooo looong’” (as silence descends); “Here comes your love, he longs to be near you” (as the love brick hits).
Rodriguez – Cold Fact (1970)
When Rodriguez asks how much of you is repetition, on the sublime “Crucify Your Mind,” you might ask in return how much of him is a repetition of Bob Dylan. The new documentary Searching for Sugar Man, about his obscurity in America and unexpected popularity elsewhere, might answer that question, but as it stands Cold Fact is full of startling arrangements and lines, including that unusually good and cutting one.
The Reivers (Zeitgeist) – Translate Slowly (1985)
Slowly or not, this band translates Daniel Johnston’s “Walking the Cow” and even “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” into its own guitar-rich language.
Whiskeytown – Strangers Almanac (1997)
Currently filling all my needs for rock ‘n’ roll in the world of real life expectation.
Luna – Penthouse (1995)
This summer’s great rediscovery. On a plane ride to Montana, the album, as unshaken as the flight attendant, was a cool lie, its peacefulness and luxury a glorious denial of an aircraft’s violent passage through space. Later, on Indiana roads, it was more apt and just as pretty.
