Thievery Corporation

It's been brought to my attention that copyrights may have been infringed upon in my last post which has now been removed by blogger. Henceforth, I will probably be sharing songs from albums rather than full albums, since every blog and their mother does that anyway. Still, I am going to try to share full albums when possible.

Mostly, I'm shocked that somehow this little blog got read by someone who felt it necessary to report it for posting the album Tight Knit by Vetiver (which I gave a 4.5/5 and you should listen to its folky goodness). Thanks for reading, random person! I am quite curious as to how anyone high up in the corporate mechanisms of labels or recording associations stumbled upon this fledgling effort of mine.

Oh well, stay tuned-- the Audiobahn will not be derailed so easily.

The Friday Find: Byrne - Slowly and Gloriously

Byrne - Slowly and Gloriously [Rocket Girl, 2002]

[click to download]
5/5

Byrne's Slowly and Gloriously has been one of my most listened to albums (well, its an EP if you want to get technical--only 6 tracks) since the day I bought it on a whim from a Newbury Comics used bin for 50 cents. I was drawn to the eerie cover art, the fact that their band name caused mild confusion with David Byrne, song titles like "Waiting for Winter" or "Drink All Day."

This is certainly not a pop-accessible album (with the exception of "Tidal Wave," their "single"), full of melancholic piano, humble vocals, low tempos, and sparse (if not absent) drumming. Many songs tend to chug along on one-chord for their entirety. While this may sound boring, it is anything but. The atmosphere created by the music is beautiful and haunting, hopeful and devastating, other cliché paired antonyms. Fueled by the "byrnetempi," or singer/writer Patrick Byrne's self-modified electric keyboard, the album has such a unique sound it is quite difficult to really compare it to any other artist.

Opening with "Waiting for Winter," Byrne dive right into the kind of song you'd expect to hear based on the cover. Light piano, ghostly "oohs," echoes of harmonica, and eventually a simple electronic beat back Byrne singing about waiting for the winter while standing in the sun, or, looking for the bad times while still in something good--a sort of nervous apprehension that tends to reverberate through the rest of the album.

From there, the plodding "Sleeping Giant" comes in, hammering away on one chord for nearly 6 minutes, but still managing to take the music somewhere and build intensity with swirling organ, guitars, and bass (which really provides the variation from the single chord). This is my track pick for the album, by far. Byrne's vocals strike hard on the oft-repeated chorus, "if it's everything you wanted baby, you're never gonna get it all," building to a swirl of chromatic guitar that pushes the song to its climactic end, then gradually strips apart into the next track. "Greener" and "Tidal Wave" bring the focus back to acoustic guitar, and pull off lines like "the grass is always greener when it rains" or "everybody knows that when you're up, I'm down" without seeming over-the-top emotional, just brutally honest.

My other favorite track off the album, "Embers" is built on melodica and trumpet counter-melodies, while the lyrics evoke a scene in a smoke-hazed bar and the mystifying allure of a blues singer. The track builds to epic bombast, and then slowly deconstructs itself into a lone descending piano line. This paves the way to the album closer "Drink All Day," a song that features Byrne's vocals almost naked, with a barely-there electric guitar providing a base for his toast to lonely times. [A short two-minute instrumental hidden track follows later, a duet of bass clarinet and piano called "Ballad for the Wet Dog."]

The sad story behind Byrne is that in 2004, they posted a new, incredible demo on their website, promising new material to come soon, but then their domain expired sometime in '05 or '06 and there has been no official news of whatever happened to the band since (they were rather obscure to begin with, anyway).

Sometimes I feel like Slowly and Gloriously just completely synced with the person I was back when I bought it, and so it has a sense of nostalgia to me, but upon many many many repeated listens, each of these 6 amazing tracks still seem like something special to me, years later. Unless they lose their luster (something I don't anticipate happening), this album will always be perfect, to me. Give a listen and see if you agree.

New Music "Tuesday:" Andrew Bird - Noble Beast

Alright! Welcome to the first real full-blown album review. I am going to try to post every Tuesday on something new (released within the last month), and then every Friday with an old find. Ideally, these will be albums, but should time be constrained I might limit to a track review, just so I am getting something out! Anyway, without further ado:

Andrew Bird - Noble Beast [Fat Possum]


4/5

Andrew Bird holds an interesting honor in my life of music-- he was the first artist where I purchased an entire album on the basis of hearing just one song. Back in 2005, I heard "Fake Palindromes" off of Pitchfork (back when they actually did constructive track reviews). What really caught my attention was how unique that song sounded-- the looping, lush violins, his distinct singing style, the odd vocabulary choices... it was something different, I thought. While The Mysterious Production of Eggs was certainly a pleasing album, what really got me hooked was his earlier forays with his project Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire: unapologetic swing revival with ripping violin solos.

So, fast forward 11 years after the Bowl of Fire debut Thrills-- which sounds like it was recorded coming out of an AM radio-- to Noble Beast. As Andrew Bird's music has progressed, it has evolved from swing to chamber pop to violin-driven indie pop to... plain pop??

Probably the most striking part of Noble Beast was how long into the album it took to really hear a violin featured. Despite downplaying what you could consider his "signature" sound, this album is surprising enjoyable as an entirely different affair. On this album, much more attention is given to percussion and the interplay of acoustic/electric guitar. His violin playing now adds a richer layer to the music, rather than being the major focus of every song. Where the changes he made in 2007's Armchair Apocrypha bored me at times, the innovation he has made this time around is much-welcomed.

Opening with the great "Oh No," the album starts off strong, with a sound very reminiscent of his previous albums. By the second track, "Masterswarm," Bird switches gears from his trademark "bah-bums" and whistling into experimentation with Latin/Flamenco-style percussion with looped finger-picked violin that surprisingly blend together very well.

By the time the album comes to "Not a Robot, but a Ghost," I realized I hadn't been imagining the fuzzed bass and distorted guitar laced throughout the first few tracks, and that Bird had really been branching out into new territory. With a beat that would sound in place on any Radiohead album, his violin floats along with vocals that seem to channel a bit of Thom Yorke as well. This track was certainly the most surprising, but also one of the most enjoyable.

From there, the album works to its close with a string of equally excellent tracks, with standouts being "Anonanimal" which features some of his best string looping/layering to date, and "Souverians," a sprawling 7-minute epic that has more musical ideas in one song than some bands can fit on a whole album.

The only real detraction from the album is the trio of "Effigy," "Tenuousness," and "Nomenclature." These three songs are all a little too similar in tempo (mostly downtempo) and feel to come right after each other. "Effigy" and "Nomenclature" aren't all too remarkable on their own, and when strung so close together I tended to lose interest during that stretch. Also a bit puzzling are the two brief instrumental interludes in the middle of the album, which don't seem to build off of the songs before them nor build into the songs that proceed them.

Overall, Noble Beast is a very enjoyable step in the always-evolving sound of Andrew Bird. This is a great album for first-time listeners (though, make sure to grab The Mysterious Production of Eggs ASAP) and should be a pleasant surprise for most long-time fans.