Archive for January, 2004
5. Vic Chesnutt - Silver Lake
January 10th, 2004
It’s a testimony to how fantastic most of this album is that it holds this position despite the presence of “Girls Say,” among the worst songs Chesnutt has ever written, and the way over-extended one-joke number “Sultan, So Mighty” (it’s about a eunuch and it is more than eight minutes long; that’s what it says next to the word “tiresome” in the dictionary). I know there are some huge Salesman and Bernadette fans out there, but for me this is the most satisfying Vic disc since About to Choke. No half-assed arrangements. No nonsense poetry that doesn’t seem to have a purpose. No distraction, no restraint.
Instead, it is just a well-produced prism showing off all the facets of this Athens, Georgia-based marvel’s native genius: his abstraction, his humour, his acerbic interpersonal critique (in track 1, “I’m Through,” he claims “I am not Emily Post/ You know I’m nowhere near that precise,” which is delightful for how exactly untrue it is), his effortlessly beautiful melodies, his effortful imperfect ethics, his Southern barstool-novelist storyteller’s gifts, and his ability to hit emotional soft spots line after line after line. The final track, “In My Way, Yes” - the title is his answer to the question “do you think you deserve it?” - shows him in a new mode, struggling to claim the hopefulness his ordeals have earned, and it’s not only one of the most beautiful things he’s ever written, but one of the most beautiful things anybody’s written in ages. Plus, there ought to be some special Grammy category for the verse in “Band Camp” that involves the vodka-soaked tampon in second-period science lab.
And of course he makes it sound as easy as falling out of a wheelchair, the way he looks he has on the front cover. Which when you think of it, can’t be so easy.
6. Drive-By Truckers - Decoration Day
January 10th, 2004
More subtly ambitious than last year’s blatantly inspired Southern Rock Opera, there’s a depth and maturity to this disc that’s generously enhanced by the new songwriter and guitarist in the band, the boyish Jason Isbell. Named for the southern American occasion when ornaments are traditionally laid on the graves of the fallen, it is a concept album light-handed enough not to seem like one, about southern men, but not the kind Neil Young sang against. These are the men of the New South, with a newly cosmopolitan sense of life but a truckload of baggage — which plays itself out in these songs about their daddies and mostly their male friends, and how the conflicts and impossibilities that arise in those dynamics, in the hothouse of Southern traditions and troubles, are apt to lead to an early grave. (The first tune is an exception, dealing with brother-sister incest, based on a true story, but that’s not too far off from the theme.) But the main thrust is that, despite all the shrapnel exchanged in these relationships, the core of the “southern thing” they sang about on SRO is really all about love.
The Truckers’ Skynyrd-meets-Replacements triple-guitar assault sounds ever-more like the most classic sound in current rock, with the Muscle Shoals bottom end that lead Trucker Patterson Hood comes by honestly, from his own father. If you hear it live, as I did for the first time this year, you can’t forget the joyful noise that leavens all the darkness of this disc, which Hood has said springs from the strain the band members were under in the long gestation of the Opera, with families and finances in crisis. (They were rescued when a major label picked up the disc, but when Lost Highway heard Decoration Day they decided it was too much of a downer, and - with unusual grace - let the band buy itself out of the contract. They’re now happily on New West.)
Yet for all the violence and despair here - there are several songs about suicide - they also prove true to their claim that “Southern men tell better jokes,” with lines like “Rock’n'roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies” and the fatherly advice, “Don’t call what you’re wearing an outfit/ Don’t ever say your car is broke/ Don’t sing with a fake British accent/ Don’t act like your family’s a joke.” So the gothic elements are spiced with rue and sage, and the pain is worn as casually as a jean jacket, just part of the way things are.
A final note: It was a bit shocking at the end of the year to learn that bassist Earl Hicks had been summarily replaced with Jason Isbell’s wife, but after some reflection - the kind this album naturally provokes - it seems to me that nobody can really judge what happens inside an intimate situation, whether a family or a band, unless you’re one of the people involved. Every song on this disc reinforces the lesson that the wise outsider knows better than to argue or to judge.
7. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow
January 10th, 2004
I was just wondering if there’s any common thread in these choices, and then we get to this - so I guess not. My second-favourite discovery experience of 2003 took place the same week as the first (see No. 1) — I was in Scratch Records in Vancouver with my friends Lee Henderson and Kevin Chong, all of us shuffling through the bins in that classic bespectacled-record-nerd fashion, when the clerk put this disc on. I immediately ran over to the “L” section.
How to describe it? Guitars and drums possessed by psychosis in the wilds of Rhode Island. Slabs of feedback that paint the sky between your ears in shit brown and puke pink, a hallucinogenic rawk fundamentalism that makes nearly any other rock-based music sound as if it’s preoccupied with trivialities.
(And did I mention they’ve got a furgin’ great web page?)
This record was good enough to revive my interest in heavy music in general, leading to new forays into death metal and black metal, but not even the likes of Emperor were up to this level — in a sense it’s the ideal jazz-rock fusion, completely without non-rock harmonic elements but achieving the same spontaneity and abstracting effect as great free jazz. The best noise music works the same way of course, but there’s something encouraging in the notion that this can be achieved without actually leaving the genre behind.
And if that’s all too reasoned and stiff to get at it, which it surely is, let me sum up: SHEEEE! YEEEEE! SHEEEE! YEEEEEE! AAAAAIIII! OOOOOOOOKKK!
8. The Constantines - Shine a Light
January 9th, 2004
I think I was nearly the last person in Toronto to come around to this band, but their earlier work didn’t cry out to me the way this second album does. For people in this city, 2003 was a tough (thanks to SARS, the blackout, economic uncertainty and other factors) but fascinating year - and one of its happiest moments was when longtime mayor Mel Lastman finally got the hell out of office. And as if that weren’t good enough, thanks to the efforts of a lot of committed civic-minded people, our new mayor turned out to be David Miller, a man who inspires more faith than pretty much any politician that I’ve ever seen.
(You should have seen him at the special election-campaign Trampoline Hall that I helped organize in early November: dealing gamely with odd questions from the young crowd of artists and others, speaking on “Beauty and the Aesthetic City” and in every other way adapting himself as much as you could ask to the eccentric particularities of the event rather than sticking to any spin game of his own. It was remarkable.)
And what does all that have to do with the Constantines? Well, from an opening line quite directly about the scandal-ridden Lastman - “Your mayor is raising fences to keep bodies off the Don Valley Parkway/ Send your praises to the mechanics of the state” - through the only song I know to portray the Biblical level of violence that has been taking place in this area’s suburban discos, to a final line that evokes the tireless work against the gloomiest odds that people do to keep this city living - “Reconstructive scavengers, termite sympathizers/ All sick and sleepless, caught up in the wires” - this album captured the darkest parts of the city’s mood and proclaimed them fuel for fury and change - which is exactly what they turned out to be.
I’ve written in a column about some of my problems with the exact place of politics in these songs, but those are relatively minor complaints: If all the artists and the citizens were this engaged, and as engaging as the Constantines’ geometry-problem guitars layered over with soulful horns and hushed voices, not just this city but the whole world would be quite a different place. I’m happy enough, though, that this city is such a different place than it was twelve months ago.
9. John Oswald - Aparanthesi
January 9th, 2004
Count on Toronto-based Plunderphonics creator Oswald to toss a conceptual grenade through the picture window, with two time-stopping compositions (each one note for a half-hour’s duration) that have John Cage grinning in his grave. As Chris Cutler puts it in his superb review, “a meditation on hearing” - much the way that a lot of the best abstract art has been a meditation on seeing.
10. The Hidden Cameras - The Smell of Our Own
January 9th, 2004
It was unlikely enough that this band existed in the first place - a posse of visual artists and intellectuals and a few actual musicians congregating around the cheeky songs of Joel Gibb, whose description “gay church folk-choir music” really does communicate quite effectively what this dozen-strong party band sounds like — except that it leaves out the element of the whole audience dancing and singing along to the words on the overhead projector, the go-go crowd-stimulation leaders kicking it in their underwear, and the generally ecstatic experience that the Cameras have taken everywhere they go for the past two years. Unlikely enough. For the rest look here.
But then, last spring, when Rough Trade decided to sign them and propagate the word around the world, it wasn’t just the quintessential pop experience - I felt a bit as though I’d been hanging out at the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1962 — but a huge stroke of redemption for Toronto. Along with gay marriage in Canada (to which idea the Cameras sing “Ban Marriage!”) and the brief, fruitless promise of legalized pot, the Hidden Cameras put the planet on notice that little Toronto isn’t exactly the sexless bore it used to be. It’s kind of a miracle.
Comments: Discs 11-25
January 9th, 2004
25. The Blow - The Concussive Caress
This record is difficult to follow if you haven’t seen the one-woman rock opera it’s based on, a story about lesbian crushes, summer camp and the secret voice of the moon
Other 2003 Favourites
January 9th, 2004
More CDs I enjoyed in 2003, outside the top 25. In alphabetical order. The asterisks* flag Canadian CDs.
Angels of Light - Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home
Animal Collective - Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished/ Danse Manatee
Azita - Enantiodromia
The Barmitzvah Bros. - Mr. Bones’ Walk-In Closet *
The Books - The Lemon of Pink
Still Listening To…
January 9th, 2004
I haven’t spent enough time with these yet to make any legitimate judgments, though some seem like extremely good records. Reviews of many of them will show up here in the future. In alphabetical order:
Ken Aldcroft Trio + 1 - From Our Time
Lina Allemano Four - Concentric
Tony Allen - Home Cooking
The Bad Plus - These Are the Vistas
Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash
The Unheard Music
January 9th, 2004
If there were money enough and time, I would have picked up the new discs by all of these artists in 2003, among others. If your favourite isn’t in the “best of” list, maybe it’s because it’s in this wish-list.
Josh Abrams; Gary Allen; Ellen Allien; Antipop Consortium vs Matthew Shipp; Architecture in Helsinki; Art Ensemble of Chicago (two new albums);
