Tops Off, Part I

I don't know that I would declare the following "the best", but they were "my favorite"...

10. The Night Marchers - Allez Allez
Arguably the best release from the Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes gentlemen since Hot Snakes' Audit in Progress (2004). John Reis, a self-proclaimed "downstroke warlord", and his Marchers are in excellent form on their second full-length together, settling into a somewhat relaxed yet familiarly aggressive, driving sound led by John's unmistakable rousing growl. For those initiated with Hot Snakes and Rocket From the Crypt, Allez Allez should come as no surprise, as we all know Reis's instincts rarely let us down. While the record is mostly a fairly straight-forward guitar-bass-drums game, the ears are occasionally tickled by some Rocket-esque horn section parts ('Big in Germany') and classic blues-rock harmonica wails ('I Wear the Horns').

9. Kronos Quartet with Bryce Dessner - Aheym
Like most others who recognize the Dessner name, I knew of Bryce only as one of the guitarists in The National - until now, that is. It turns out the dude is a fairly accomplished classical composer, and this is his first proper album release under his own name. Enlisting the help of the prolific Kronos Quartet to perform the dense pieces on Aheym, the album begins frantically with a palpably tense arrangement of jagged layered harmonies that eventually open up to provide some much-needed, spacious relief... until it sucks you back into the tension (which is what you wanted anyway, the masochist that you are). 'Little Blue Something' is mostly an easier, almost feather-light listen until its dark build at the end, which momentarily harkens back to the first track's theme. All in all, this is a great record for doing some deep thinking or working on that script you've had half-finished for the last three years.

8. Coliseum - Sister Faith
After dabbling in some slower, sludgier material on 2010's House With a Curse, Coliseum are back in true form with their dark brand of no-bullshit, riffy punk rock. The album's closer, 'Fuzzbang', exudes a more hopeful tone than anything else in the catalogue (is that a major key I hear?), but there's enough confrontation and occult imagery in singer-guitarist Ryan Patterson's growl throughout the record to soundtrack a fistfight at a seance. To add another kicker to this shebang, as if that was necessary, they included some enviable guest appearances on Sister Faith by J. Robbins (who also produced this beast), Wata of Boris, Jason Loewenstein of Sebadoh, and Jason Farrel of Bluetip/Retisonic.

*Further reading/shameless plug: an interview I did for ALARM with Ryan Patterson about the album and some other stuff

7. Yuppies - Yuppies
This is definitely not a typical record for me to become attached to, but when a co-worker suggested it to me (comparing it to the awesome Bostonian trio Pile), it really struck me. While they may certainly draw reasonable comparisons to apathy-rock bands like Parquet Courts and Pavement, there seems to be a totally different force driving Yuppies. I can't help but make some connection between the sonic attitude on this record with the junkie ramblings of William S. Burroughs. The anger sometimes feels tongue-in-cheek, juxtaposed with positively-charged chords and upbeat (but not necessarily aggressive) drumming ('Getting Out') - but it all feels very real, nonetheless. Then other times, the frustration and aggression is so overwhelmingly in the foreground ('Worms') that the uncomfortably dissonant nature of the music forms one of the most uniquely "heavy" songs in recent memory. The delivery may come off as simple on the surface, but this onion has some fragrant layers worth peeking under.

6. Cass McCombs - Big Wheel and Others
Big Wheel... is about as musically and lyrically expansive as the American western frontier that is its setting and subject matter, which is no simple task. While the vibe sits comfortably within a general folky style, McCombs paints the vast expanse with a pretty wide brush, employing some outright rock & roll, a jammy jazz instrumental, and a little avant-garde to breathe life into the gritty characters in these vignettes. It's lines like "A man with a man - how much more manly can you get?" ('Big Wheel') and "In a perfect world, we'd all have 40 acres and a mule / But this ain't a perfect world, it's a perfect storm" ('Everything Has to Be Just-So') that reveal McCombs's complex challenges to the seemingly obvious routine and "it is what it is" mentality that plagues our day-to-day. The album's title lends itself nicely to imagery of modern semi trucks, covered wagons, and even the childish plastic tricycles of our childhood, which allows McCombs to explore widely and wildly with his mellow, matter-of-fact storyteller's voice on this excellent (very-) full-length.

5. The National - Trouble Will Find Me
The National just keep finding new and subtle ways to make their unassuming songs interesting as hell to the attentive listener. Two songs in and both have had non-traditional time signatures, without striving to let you know they're being "mathy". If you like The National because of this and because of Matt Berninger's gentlemanly baritone and bizarre-ish lyrics and because their recordings are always full of sweet, sweet ear candy, then you probably already know why Trouble Will Find Me is on this list.

4. Comadre - S/T
Sadly, these guys broke up not too long after this excellent swan song of a release but, to the Comadre dudes: way to go out with a fucking bang! This record, equal parts youthful and thoughtful, is probably what I always wanted Kid Dynamite to be. It's hard to imagine that an album full of almost nothing but atonal yelling could be catchy, but surrounding the edgy, combative vocals are melodic guitars, tight, groovy bass lines wound neatly around solid, energetic drums, seasoned with modest piano and organ with a little trumpet to taste. ("No keyboards, synthesizers or artificial reverb used in the making of this recording.") The tunes have a way of lodging themselves into your head and begging you to come back as if they were a diabolically inviting ex-lover's bed. There's also something to be said when a band with fairly abrasive music acknowledges the listener's need for occasional relief - Comadre got that memo, strategically placing a few nearly soothing interludes that act as the twine to neatly tie the album together. Do yourself a favor and jam 'Cold Rain' as loud as your stereo goes, but be prepared to break some shit in the process.

3. Volcano Choir - Repave
*To read my full review of this album, go here

2. Savages - Silence Yourself
Post-punkish trend benders Savages came out of the gates fast and bearing razor-sharp teeth this year - and seemingly out of nowhere. Actually, they came from London, and while the post-punk label isn't inappropriate, it certainly feels like a lame attempt at pigeonholing a band that is much more than a Joy Division or Siouxsie & the Banshees worship act. The fierceness with which singer Jehnny Beth fuels her wide-eyed wailing is arresting, and her voice manages to be calculated and spontaneous simultaneously. The band plays with unrivaled purpose, matching its catchy, even danceable, moments with angular, artful dissonance which reminds you that, even if you're smiling, Savages are still angry. You ought to find that 'Shut Up' and 'She Will' are shining examples of a healthy marriage between the ghosts of punk's past and future.

1. Speedy Ortiz - Major Arcana
What may have begun humbly as singer/guitarist Sadie Dupuis's solo project has blossomed into something truly special. When she begins 'No Below' with "You didn't know me when you were a kid", it almost makes me wish I did - the songs on Major Arcana all give off this pungent sense of guiltless nostalgia as Dupuis's stories are spun into appropriately fuzzy, jangly pop songs that bounce back and forth between recklessly heavy and delicately sobering. Something about her quirky vocal melodies reminds me of the best parts of Craig Wedren's (Shudder to Think) playful and sometimes confusing vocal patterns, and they're perfectly complemented by the conversational guitar work between Sadie and fellow guitarist Matt Robidoux. Speedy Ortiz may not be re-inventing the wheel, but they've certainly managed to use it their own way. Of all the excellent records that have come out this year, this one has tested with the most addictive results for me, and who am I to resist such urges?


THE HONORABLY MENTIONABLE
Red Hare - NITES of MIDNIGHT
Bosnian Rainbows - Bosnian Rainbows
Owen - L'Ami du Peuple
The Bronx - The Bronx (IV)
Phosphorescent - Muchacho
INVSN - INVSN
Islands - Ski Mask
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away
Waxahatchee - Cerulean Salt
Native - Orthodox
Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Daze
Pissed Jeans - Honeys
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
Into It. Over It. - Intersections
Sombear - Love You in the Dark

XLII

The music-industrial complex is a complicated beast with many heads and is in a possibly permanent state of flux. We all know this. Lots of learned folks have lined up to shout from digital mountaintops that the "solution" is this or that, tit or tat - but music fans are still left wanting more for less money, musicians are still left longing for appropriate compensation in return for their offerings, and somewhere in between are all the various labels, execs, agents, etc. siphoning their cut of this insufficient dough.

A couple of relevant statistics I heard this week (thanks, Sound Opinions):
(1.) 40% less people are declaring "musician" as their profession now than in 1999.
(2.) Only 1% of digital tracks released are reaching the 1,000 sales mark (as of 2011).

Let out a sigh. We are the 99%.

So, this whole quandary has brought to the surface this question: what exactly is a song worth?

Do I have an answer for you? Douglas Adams's great supercomputer Deep Thought put it pretty well when confronted about its seven-and-a-half million years of calculating the answer to "life, the universe, and everything": Yes. But you're not going to like it.

Here it is. Ready your eager brain for imminent chair-slumping, head-shaking, vegetable-chucking disappointment.

The value of a song is completely and hopelessly unquantifiable.

This street performer in the Clark/Lake Blue Line subway stop was playing a particularly spirited rendition of 'All Along the Watchtower' the other night, when he peppered in Neil Young's famous line "it's better to burn out than to fade away" (from Crazy Horse's 'My My, Hey Hey - Out of the Blue'). It was evident that this guy was really having a moment with it, and my experience was a total contact high from that. After the song, I walked up and dropped all I had in my pockets - a couple dollar coins (yeah, I had some dollar coins, so what?) - into his case and said something tragically un-clever like, "You had me with that Neil Young line in there, man."

After playing through another tune that seemed a bit more in his wheelhouse, he then nodded to me and admirably attempted to get through all he was able to muster of Young's 'The Needle and the Damage Done'. I could see on his face that the gears had been turning after I'd made my meager donation. So he clearly only really knew a couple parts of a verse and the chorus, but he very smoothly improvised some melodies to fill out the song and give it a sense of completion. To give my evening a sense of completion. This may be a shameful understatement, but the attempt and this half-song certainly meant far more to me than my two dollar coins were worth. If I'd had a $10 bill in my pocket instead of those two coins, I surely would have spent it on this interaction before going to iTunes to shell it out on the re-mastered mp3s of Harvest.

This man was reaching out to a complete stranger in the only way he saw fit at that moment, as he recognized I had feebly attempted with him. To him, his song may have simply been a $2 gesture like mine, but it left me with a certain wealth, in the the form of a (partially-comprehended) life lesson: that the purpose of performing and expressing ourselves (I think) is chiefly in creating an actual and direct relationship with any individuals who will open themselves up for such a connection - and that those connections are so likely to occur outside of the conventional modes of musical patronage... but only when we open ourselves up to them.

We, strange individuals, connected. What we each gave and gained has nothing to do with what an mp3 or an LP or a guitar or a ticket to stand, iPhone in hand, at a concert might cost. It rests high above those quantifiable things, even if those things can often be a gateway drug to more "real" and spontaneous moments.

The Song exists completely outside of economics.

Lit Up Like Arseny

I like to imagine that Arseny Avraamov viewed the world through a lens that was cleaner than yours or mine; that the blemishes of stale tradition did not exist in the vision of a man who turned factory sirens and live artillery fire into an actual symphony. His bombastic 'Symphony of the Factory Sirens' actually feels less like a symphony and more like a living, breathing machine meant to represent a unified front of human beings. The conductor and the engineer, the musician and the factory worker, the performer and the pedestrian - these things all became his machine.

I like to imagine that Arseny Avraamov viewed life as a massive experiment - a tangled web of sentient and mechanical beings, together striving to find clarity and build a practical existence yielding nonstop creative output. A world where envelopes, instead of being pushed back and forth between anonymous desktops, are pushed from the insides out by myriad manmade curiosities. Science and art would be woven into a fabric under which our fiery dreams would be nurtured. In my head, his world was full of brooks babbling about stories they'd read from littering passersby and rivers raging like mad drunks about the weird characters met on their ambitious travels.

I like to imagine these things because Arseny Avraamov left little else by which to remember him. For now I'll close my eyes while the factory sirens wipe my lens a little bit cleaner.

*More on Arseny Avraamov at 99% Invisible

Black & White Portraits and Quotes About Music

"...a song is something you write because you can't sleep unless you write it." -Joe Strummer

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"One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner." -David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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"Without music, life would be a mistake." -Friedrich Nietzsche

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"I immerse myself in sound. I see the world in sound. I want life to be a never-ending toga party of primitive noise. I have scoured this god-forsaken, greasy marble with a ravenous appetite, searching for the goods - the goods being violent sounds of the wildest variety." -John Reis

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"Music is...a higher revelation than all Wisdom and Philosophy." -Ludwig van Beethoven

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"The only truth is music." -Jack Kerouac

(Some of) the World's a Stage

Art, the social butterfly that it is, tends to interact with other art. Always has. Paintings and poems, songs and sculptures, dramas and dances, films and photographs, comedies and culinary creations, all tango together in a progressive step in our heads. Artists, the social butterflies that they are, also tend to interact with other artists - but not all the time.

While I'm sure I could go a number of ways with this, the topic I'd like to focus on is the relationship (or lack thereof) between the musician and the muse of theatre. Now, almost every theatre production I've seen has had some relationship with music, whether it employs actual live musical accompaniment or a simple soundtrack comprised of the director's favorite pre-recorded songs to help set the mood. The reverse, though, with the exception of the music video, is rarely ever true. One might argue that any live show by a musical outfit is a sort of performance piece, but I'd argue that Mastodon is a far cry from Mamet. This is not to suggest that every punk band should be armed with a theatre troupe to perform Shakespeare shorts between songs at every show - my suggestion, in short, is simply that in my experience the musician tends to distance him or herself from the theatre sphere. My intention is to examine the whys, and to (hopefully) ebb that fear and trepidation away.

As the Lincoln Loft pointed out in its poignant 'Theatre People' blog, perhaps the rest of the artistic community of "normals" is hesitant to dive into the theatre community because of an over-arching feeling of outsiderness. I personally come from a pretty strictly musical background, and it wasn't until I started dating and living with a true blue "theatre person" that my horizons were really expanded in this context. My venturing out into the world of theatre began as a timid boyfriend simply going to support his girlfriend in doing the thing that she loved. At the beginning of our relationship, though, the volume of extracurricular rock shows versus plays we attended together was pretty disproportionate, the scales weighing much heavier on the side of the rock show. I'll even admit that this discrepancy was likely largely due to my initial lack of enthusiasm for this somewhat foreign thing that didn't seem to resemble what little I really knew of the arts and entertainment arena.

The more I saw productions of hers and the more we ramped up our attendance of other plays, though, the more I started becoming genuinely enraptured by this foreign thing. Now, just like any other art form, there are good shows and bad shows. At some point or another you have no doubt been guilted into seeing a friend or co-worker's shitty band, kicking and tweeting the whole way through the shitty experience; frankly, the same shitty scenario is likely to happen with plays - when you inevitably start making a bunch of theatre friends after reading this. Don't let that get you down, though, because it just helps you to hone your tastes. Be a critic! But goddamnit, don't be a philistine.

Not only have I found that I simply just enjoy sitting down with a beer or a glass of wine (you'll find that most of these things are BYOB, if they don't have their own bar) and letting a story unfurl in front of mine own eyes, but it's inspired a lot of my own completely separate creative outlets. My aforementioned musical background mostly involves sweaty, stinking bars and basement punk shows. These two worlds may seem lightyears from one another, but I don't know... there was something in the way George (played by the phenomenal Tracy Letts), seething with decades of withheld bitterness, slowly unraveled his wife and his guests in Steppenwolf's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - it inspired me to say things I had previously found no way to say, in songs or otherwise. (I lovingly borrowed part of a diatribe of his, titling a Cut Teeth song "Blood Under the Bridge".) Anyway, it's pretty obvious that a healthy dose of culture just makes us better humans, too.

So you may be thinking, "Whatever, dude. That one Weezer album is totally based on some play, and Green Day made that one thing into a musical and stuff. You creative types got that whole theatre thing covered, man." And yeah, Pinkerton totally is (loosely) based on Madame Butterfly, Green Day did make that one thing into a very popular musical, and David Byrne is a known connoisseur of theatre around the world. That's great. But if I had a dollar for every time someone wrote a concept album loosely based on a novel or featured a song title borrowed from a movie line or an E.E. Cummings poem, I might have more than a few hundred dollars in my checking account. Conversely, I'd have about five bucks if the same dollar was granted for every rock & roll theatre reference I could come up with. Perhaps this just illuminates my own past shelteredness that I am only now beginning to shed, but I've found that there seem to be plenty of other folks out there like me, who have suffered from varying degrees of Dramaphobia.

For those worried that a newfound respect for this community might tarnish your punk cred, fret no more. I'm talking independent theatre - DIY spaces, suggested donations in place of oppressive ticket fees, basement shows in place of rock club routine, and none of those stale, uptight Nutcracker productions your fourth grade teacher dragged you and your miserably bored class to when you were eight. The Oracle, in Lakeview, puts on incredible shows that are completely free to the public. The Right Brain Project, with a suggested donation policy, produces a uniquely immersive experience tailored to each project by way of using its audience to envelop the players. The show that my lovely lady and the folks at Wayward Productions just wrapped up was an awesomely raucous version of Shakespeare's Richard III, which took place in a Sons of Anarchy-esque biker bar, complete with more sex, drugs and rock & roll than you could shake a stick at. So while most of us might think of CBGB's or the Fireside Bowl before some of our more well-known drama centers when the word 'punk' is whispered, just remember that Steppenwolf started out in a basement.

You never know what you might walk in to, but with an open mind and a penchant for the provocative, you just might find a night at the theatre to be a new spark to get those creative juices flowing. I know I have. So don't be afraid to lose that cocoon and take a dance with drama, you social butterfly, you.

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Below is a short list of some super rad independent theatres/companies worth supporting:

Oracle
Right Brain Project
Wayward Productions
The Inconvenience
Jackalope
Chicago Mammals
The Den
Redmoon