Ah shucks. I started writing this post a month ago at least. Been hard to find the time lately. I think I might have to start changing my post style to blurbs that are more Twitter-length or something so I can actually find time to blog more regularly…
Without further delay, the music I’ve been loving lately:
Back when I was at Grand Royal, the At The Drive-In dudes turned me on to the first !!! record that was out on GSL. I loved it. Where the Chili Peppers (if anyone remembers them in the 80s) were punk rockers who got into Parliament, !!! were punk rockers who’d discovered Fela. I saw !!! live and the floor shook with the bounce of hipsters doing the hippy dance. They opened for Trans Am at the Knitting Factory for that show and I remember that half the audience *left* after !!!. (!) I made some weak attempts to get them signed to Grand Royal, quickly giving up when it sounded like they didn’t really exist. The word I got back was that half of them were living in SF and the other half in NYC and the practicality of a new record just wasn’t there. Too bad, because the vision of these guys being the indie rock Grateful Dead wouldn’t really leave my mind.
So imagine my disappointment on hearing they’d signed to Touch and Go. Doh! But I didn’t mind as much when the record took forever to come out, was a little weak when it did, and didn’t really go anywhere. Oh well. Was a good idea.
I wasn’t expecting a new !!! record anytime soon, but I was definitely curious when I saw the review on Pitchfork. I’ve now listened to it about 300x in the last three weeks (just check my Last.fm page) and am happy to say this is the record I was hoping they’d make. I disagree with Pitchfork, I think they do some of their finest work to date when they stretch out on tracks like Sweet Life, but there’s no question the disco dance corkers like Must Be The Moon and Heart of Hearts are what they do best. But to make a record that’s punk in its way, dance-able, cleverly written, unlike anything else to date, and somehow legit and un-corny is no small feat.
But they didn’t stop there. In an age where album covers are 40 pixel square gifs, !!! made a gorgeous hand-drawn package featuring the artwork of Kevin Hooyman. Get the MP3s from where ever you’d like, but invest in the vinyl for this one. I did.
I was an early proponent of Dungen, the Swedish psych-folk-rock band that topped my best-of list for 2004. From the opening flams of Ta Det Lugnt I was sucked in. The melodies, the psych guitar lines, the overplayed drumming, this was *it* for me. Best record in five years. Changed my entire outlook on music that year.
Then Zoe and I saw them live three or four times and solidified the myth. The mastermind songwriter/producer turned out to be a pretty, skinny, long-haired Leif Garret character alternating between flute, guitar, and keys, all the while singing about what I can only imagine is trolls and mushrooms in Swedish. But the secret weapon is the guitar player, moustache straight out of Spinal Tap and riffs straight from Mick Ronson live on the Ziggy Stardust tour 1972. The real deal.
Still, somehow I was nervous they’d walk off a cliff for the encore. First of all, how do you follow up such a lightning in a bottle masterpiece as Ta Det Lugnt? Easily could have been a product of the songwriting/recording style, holed up in a farm house in Sweden with a four-track, trying to kick off the cobwebs of a mediocre-at-best Swedish major-label debut. After touring four two years straight and have everyone tell them they’re the greatest band on earth, I could easily see them heading another direction and missing the mark.
Nope and nope. They dug in for *more* of the same from Ta Det Lungt, but deeper, heavier, and somehow even more beautiful. From the opening drive of the “intro”, a relentless single riff with the aforementioned, moustached shredder laying down soloing unmatched in 1975 let alone 2007 to the descending chord changes that finally provide the relief, Dungen is reminding you up front that they aren’t going to come soft. Then immediately following they remind you of their beauty on Familj, a sensitive tapping of the ride and gorgeous melody sung in Swedish remind you there just isn’t anyone on earth doing this and make you wonder why anyone bothers doing anything else. Fantastic. Order now from Amazon, or do what I did and pre-order the vinyl from Insound.
I love the new Wilco record. I’ll cheat on this review and just copy/paste an email I sent to Bruce Gilbert from the airplane the other morning:
Nels sounds so fucking good on this. Totally inspiring. Listening in headphones on the plane and loving it. The sound of the album overall is incredible, it’s some of Tweedy’s best songwriting, and then you have Nels just wrecking shop all over the place like it’s a god damn steely dan record or something. This album could have come out in 1978 and WAOR in Niles, MI would have played the shit out of it. Now it’s just me on a plane.
Track 1 is incredible sadcore. Willie Nelson quality writing. And then you have Nels just lilting in and doing his thing so effortless like Jeff Beck on Talking Book.
Track 2 drifts in gently and then out of nowhere turns around to something with bite. Genius and again Nels is just owning in a way only an outside jazz dude rocking on an alt-country track could pull off. Tweedy delivers his most soulful vocal ever starting with “I have no idea how this happened…” And we’re only on track two, ladies and gents!
Track 3, the “Impossible Germany” single. At first this was my least favorite track on the record. This is what Wilco used to sound like to me. Corny lyrics, so-so songwriting, tepid and limp. But then the end of the song builds into a stunning guitar jerk-off fest which sounds like Aja meets Sweet Home Alabama. This song is a four act play in which Nels saves Wilco from mediocrity. If you listen you can actually hear the exact note where he flies in wearing a cape.
OK I’ll stop now.
I’ve never ever been a Wilco fan. I saw the movie and it was cool, but the music has always been boring to me. But honestly, I don’t even know a person who wouldn’t like this record. And I don’t want to.
Word. George White pointed out that Steely Dan + Lynyrd Skynyrd = Allman Brothers, and that this is close to an Allman Bros record which I should go back and check out.
There are actually a few more: Panda Bear
Speaking of Deerhoof, Zoe and I managed to catch them at the Natural History Museum a couple weeks back. Pretty amazing to stand next to a taxidermy’d elk and watch them against a background of stuffed bison. Autolux opened up and did a set that was excellent but I’m not sure how many people understood. The first twenty-five minutes were on some serious Eno/Kevin Shields action. Great but heady.
Thanks for reading. I promise I’ll keep the posts coming much more fast and furious in the future.
ian