After all, the essence of the album is its expression of a coherent set of ideas, feelings, and powers in a roughly 60-120 minute timeframe. Albums matter. That's why since time immemorial, bands have talked about the writing process in terms of the album; gushed excitedly about "going into the studio"; and mused about "recording cycles." That's why musicians care about cover art and liner notes--because the album is a medium for the message. We often take for granted that musicians (at least the good ones) are real people, and that their music is an expression of the joys and pains (and in many sad pop examples, the vacuity) of life. Well, life happens episodically, and so does music (compare Weezer's Pinkerton to the Blue Album and tell me that doesn't represent two different phases of Rivers Cuomo's career).
If albums didn't matter, then bands would be content releasing disconnected one-off digital singles with no accompanying art. This might be the Brave New World of Music that Apple Corp. and the Obama administration see when it sleeps, but it will never come to pass. Take heart. When the musical Armageddon is upon us, me and the other heretics will strap on armor of old CDs and LPs, arm ourselves with the raw power of Led Zeppelin II, Beck's Midnite Vultures, and some Fugazi Album. And we shall turn back the tide of .99 cent downloads!
Wait, what was I saying?
Ah yes, life is episodic. Music is episodic. And what's more, our connections to albums are subject to the same random tumult of our own lives. When did you first hear an album? Did someone give it to you? Who? Where were you at the time? Did you have reason to revisit it? How did it make you feel? On and on with questions we never consciously ask ourselves, but that abound when we really dig into an album.
Which brings me to seasons. I could probably group albums in an infinite number of ways, but something just feels right about seasons. Not only are they a reasonable size, but like albums they all have their own characteristics that we tend to associate with certain feelings and ideas-- some unique, some abstract--in a very personal, subjective way. Spring for instance is a time of renaissance. We emerge from our winter cocoons charged with energy and ideas; older and wiser but naive and hopeful. We find music that matches this wave of fresh air. But our enthusiasm is ripe to be dampened. As I write this, the skies have unceremoniously opened up to drench Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the temperatures have surged above 60, and the humidity has coaxed the tulips out only to wash their petals into storm drains.
Without further adieu, here are 5 albums that, for me, are forever tied to Spring. In memory, in experience, and in spirit.
1. Zwan- Mary Star of the Sea
A controversial pick, I know. I am a card-carrying disciple of the temple of Corgan, but hear me out: MSotS came out in the first week of February, 2003, almost three years after the Pumpkins broke up. After listening to months of dirty rumors swirl about what Corgan had up his sleeve, he delivered a payoff-pitch curveball. Zwan was a supergroup for musicheads, featuring Matt Sweeney (Skunk, Chavez), Paz Lenchantintin (Babe/bassist from A Perfect Circle), and David Pajo (Papa M, Slint and Tortoise), along with formerly disgraced Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. Billy Corgan tapping someone from Tortoise was a veritable collision of worlds, and it gave currency to Corgan's renaissance.
And that's what Mary Star of the Sea is about: rebirth; both for Corgan, and his listeners. Arguably no living band/musician of my time (90's on basically) has had a more tumultuous and public career than the Pumpkins. Think about it. There's actually some very deep similarities between Corgan and Axl Rose that I won't pursue now, but they're there. In 2003, memories of the Pumpkins' demise was fresh in every fan's mind, along with the band's last album, the grand, dark and narcissisitic opus Machina: the Machines of God. When Zwan unveiled MSoTS in 2003, (I still remember buying it at Newbury Comics) all we wanted was something to believe in.
And that Spring, we got it. Happiness and hope lived in Zwan. The three-guitar ensemble rocked, Chamberlin was in top form, and even Corgan's voice sounded rejuvenated. The first single, "Honestly" was a bouncy, emotive rock love song. When was the last time we were gifted one of those on the radio? Well-known Pumpkins-haters started approaching me to sheepishly admit tht they loved the single. We even found out what Billy looks like when he smiles (strange). Corgan's songwriting was thriving on a sense of spiritual certainty that had been absent in the Pumpkins' final years (though never explicitly religious, Corgan's "spirituality" could not be ignored on MSotS, or in the press surrounding Zwan). The music was fresh and unique--it was hard not to think big. The most direct statement of the album's spirit is first track, "Lyric." Watch the video and you'll see exactly what I mean. Marching through the streets of Chicago behind Billy Corgan? Yes we can!
It seems dubious in retrospect, but at the time, MSotS was a powerful and inspiring album. Even though it was released in Winter, it was a staple in my rotation throughout my final Spring semester of college. It also helped that Zwan came to Boston in April, and played one of the best shows I've ever seen to sold-out Orpheum. What better soundtrack for times of such importance? Listening to this album could literally make make a trip to the grocery store seem like an existential experience. My personal favorite: on "Ride a Black Swan" Corgan preaches the refrain, "Remove my spirit from darkness / love become my hammer" over a cresting tidal wave of guitars and drums. Music can have great power, and Zwan harnessed it, albeit briefly. This album is every promise--realistic and unrealistic--you make to yourself on the first sunny day in April.
2. Richard Hawley- Cole's Corner
It's Spring, 2006, and I've taken up residence in the gothic fortress of solitude that is Yale's graduate dormitory. Richard Hawley is a regular on 2005 year-end top ten lists, so I buy the album on an impulse. I know what to expect: lush sound, emotionalism, and Hawley's throwback crooning. After all, that is his calling card. I listen; I like. Over time, I am slowly conquered by the feeling of the album. Taken in pieces, it's easy to marvel at Hawley's talent for simply writing good love songs. Not songs expressing love per se, but songs inspired by love. Taken together, the songs on this album suggest something far more powerful--a longing that exists in and out of our relationships with loved ones. New Haven thaws and blossoms and I open the window, despite the biblical rains pouring into the concrete gutter outside. We long for the those we have left, and despite ourselves we long for the ones we have at hand. It's a persistent loneliness of society, and a deteremination to defeat it. Hawley's songs weave in and out of physical and emotional confines: wandering the street at Cole's Corner, eager to encounter love or something; inside a Hotel Room, locked in arms with an old friend and lover; down by the ocean; watching the city lights from a car on the hill, trying to forget someone. Hawley seeks and seeks, unable to escape his romantic hex, finding no refuge, and leaving us only with a reassuring lullaby: "Papa's gonna shoe your pretty little feet/ mama's gonna glove your little hand/ I'm gonna kiss your ruby red lips/ mmm hmm hmmm." I walk the streets of New Haven, my own Cole's Corner, and reacquaint myself with the evening.
3. Destroyer- Your BluesInterestingly, this abstract (some might say inaccessible) album was my first exposure to Destroyer. I still remember listening to the opening song, "Notorious Lightning" for the first time, looking out the back window of a lonely Georgetown apartment in Spring 2004. It was trial by fire--that first track, "Notorious Lightning", is everything audaciously good and bad about Daniel Bejar's music in one 7 minute opus. It starts with graceful acoustic guitars draped in true poetry ("I lay myself down to observe your gilded jeans hit the ground and still haven't grown from this worship"), and then crescendos into a crashing, synthesizer-laden, flamboyant refrain in which Bejar caws "someone has to fall before someone goes free!" It is the beautiful but awkward emotional climax of the album, five minutes into the first song. But it sets the tone.
Afterwards, Bejar goes about his business exploring all sorts of unfamiliar people and places: Oakland, Warsaw, fops on the terrace, actors seeking revenge, inviting army sluts, lovers stealing gondolas to sea. All orchestrated around a synth, accoustic guitar, light drums, and that piercing voice. There are moments of light and happiness in this effortlessly imagined world, but all of it is imbued with a vague sense of foreboding, of collapse; of a weight that hangs on even the most mystical images. That unnamed feeling is of course, sadness, and Destroyer's music about that feeling is, by artful definition, the blues. His blues. Your Blues. Think about that for a second.
Your Blues is every rainy day in April that you decide to walk instead of taking the subway. It is, as he sings in "Certain Things You Ought to Know," when we reflect on our "springtime on the barricades/our Springtime charades." And it is the peace of the evening after an April shower, in "What Roads?", when Bejar chants, "Tonight we work large, we aim high, pillars stare at a sky designed to come down upon everyone at once."
4. The Clientele- Suburban Light // Preston School of Industry- All this Sounds Gas-
I'm cheating. These two go together because I bought them together in Spring, 2002 at a 2-for$20 sale at newbury Comics in Boston. These are two niche albums that I can't explain my love for. The former is a collection of Clientele B-Sides (I don't even own any A-Sides!!!) that feels like a Sunday evening with friends (or a lover) outside on a freshly cut lawn. The second--the underrated solo project by Spiral Stairs from Pavement--is just plain good. It's about traveling, and understanding home-neither especially deep subjects but pertinent ones at that time in my life. More importantly, the songwriting and recording embodies a spirit of adventurism and ambition that Spring dutifully renews every year.
5. Modest Mouse- We Were Dead before the Ship Even Sank
Another controversial pick. This one generally goes down like ballast water with most Modest Mouse fans, who decided that the band sold out long, long ago. Longer ago, in fact, than you even realize. So goes the predominant hipster narrative, anyway.
These days, wringing your hands over the fate of Isaac Brock and compatriots is strongly discouraged, if not passé. The mainstream commercial success or 2003’s Good News for People who Love Bad News betrayed the band's trademark gritty esotericism, which now appeared to be bordering on the trite. Even Brock’s trademark guttural screams were starting to sound more like polished growls. As the band picked up legions of new fans (I cannot forget one local homeboy in a Redskins jersey and sideways cap, flailing around to "Float On" like a Kanye West song at Constitution Hall in DC), those more heavily invested in one of the best rock acts of the late millennium began to feel a distance from the band. This is the point at which we generally project on others as "selling out." The seeds had been sewn—many were quick to remind themselves—in 2000, when Modest Mouse left Up Records for Epic. [never mind that the album, LP and side project that followed were blisteringly good]. What came after that was just fait accompli. First there was Good News, with "Float On" in heavy rotation on Clear Channel adult contemporary radio stations [Say it ain't so!]. We Were Dead was just a followup. Same label, same sound...why even bother?
There's just one problem with this revisionist history: it forgets what it means to be involved with a band; to root for them. If you listen to WWDBTSES in search of reasons to dismiss it, you'll find them. There's no denying that Isaac Brock's poetic psychosis has ebbed, and taken his lyrical edge with it. The band has expanded from a 3-piece crew with a larger-than-life sound to a 5+ member well-produced collective. The addition of former Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr (a major press point leading up to the album's release) produced riffs that hang like repetitive ornamentation on songs throughout the album. And do we really know what that second drummer is for?
On the other hand, if you listen to the album with a forgiving ear, an entirely different experience emerges. From the very first chords and lines of the first song, "March Into the Sea," the album rolls and pitches like a cutter lost in the straits of Magellan, with Isaac Brock as the grizzled, and generally insane, Captain. "March into the Sea" swells like a storm around choruses that featuring Isaac's self-mocking laughter: "Bang your head like a gong/ Because it's filled with all wrong/ A-ha-ha!/ Clang, clang, clang!" It sounds weird--maybe even a little contrived--and no doubt the Modest Mouse longingly cry to themselves,"what have you done with the REAL Isaac Brock?!" Then, in the eye of the storm, we hear a voice that resembles something real: "If you think you know enough/ To know you know we've had enough/ And if you think you don't, you probably will/ Our tails wagged and then fell off/ But we just turned back, marched into the sea." Sounds like he's sending a message... Then the raging sea is back, slamming your eardrums to the climax of the song: "Cut me down like the trees/ Like the lumber or weeds/ Drag me out of the sea and then teach me to breathe/ Give me forced health till I wish death on myself/ Give me forced health till I wish death on myself/ [more maniacal laughter]."
Egan Caufield contrarian opinion here: "March into the Sea" masterfully sets the stage for one of the most poignant inward-looking concept albums I have ever heard. This album is a posthumous death-knell from a watery grave. Isaac Brock doesn't give a fuck that you think he's sold out. In fact, you might be to blame; you and all the other fickle bastards that unceremoniously marked the band for dead the minute it was cool to do so. You know what? He doesn't care about you either, because even death, it turns out, makes for good music. The album is painted on a canvas of perpetual motion--boats, dashboards, marches, rickshaws, even carbon --and Modest Mouse is the hapless band of travelers, always moving, never settled; never arriving. Death is prominent on the album, as are bugs; it's lovely. But it's the marine motif ties the album together (see the brilliant video for Dashboard for more of the marine motif). The sea: that normally hopeful, infinite expanse on which Modest Mouse once sailed, has now swallowed the band and turned them into another one of Indie Rock's coral reefs.
I'll admit, it's dangerous to interpret albums so simply, but here it's impossible to escape the notion that this is an album about the band; marching, wailing, touring, growing, recording more albums in the face of death (perceived) with a healthy sense of cynicism and even some moments of apologetic hope (at the end of the boisterous "Spitting Venom" when Isaac sings reassuringly "Cheer up baby, it wasn't always quite so bad/ for every little venom that came out, the antidote was had," it kills me). It is art mocking life; theatre within film within music. And when it's all over, we are surprised to learn that no one has drowned after all. Modest Mouse is still alive and breathing, though perhaps amphibiously. Now there's a concept album for you.
The fact that so many Modest Mouse fans write this one off will never make sense to me. There's so much depth [no pun intended] to this album, so much of their gritty spirit, but most seem deaf to it. Unfortunately I don't think the new fans totally get it either. But I'll stand down. What does this have to do with Spring, anyway? Everything. This album is a string of April defeats: getting shafted on tax day, rejected from graduate school, betrayed by a best friend...and keeping on. Dig?
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