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If you’ve never experienced a Phil Elverum project before (Mount Eerie, the Microphones, other K Records stuff of the early ’00s), I cannot recommend listening to Wind’s Poem.
As a previous Microphones fanatic, though, I can only speak of the album through my expectations.
Mr. Elverum has not strayed from his major-key, 5 note melodies, nor has his lyrical powers moved beyond the awkwardness of his earlier, more emo-tinged work. “My heart a frozen boulder” always stuck out in every listen. His words are more removed form his emotions this time, making the content he covers more distanced, more cerebral. It seems like he’s attempting to construct a metaphysical landscape out of his relationship with nature. But as my wife exclaimed on one car ride: “Those words just don’t fit!! [laughing]” It’s true, the rhythm of the words are sometimes incredibly clunky. I am sometimes inspired by philosophical texts, but their jargon is not the stuff of songs.
Wind’s Poem is made up, on the larger scale, of two different style of sound: loud, abrasive and simple; and gentle, meandering, and simple.
1. Loud songs. Walls of loud guitars and a wash of cymbals. Mr. Elverum’s voice comes in occasionally, but the mix has no room for him. This competition of sound makes for an unsatisfying listen. I tended to skip these song for that reason. The songs perpetuate themselves with a droning note or chord, perhaps to build tension before moving to the next note or chord. This gives that incredible sense of walking through waist-high sludge when executed successfully, but the muddy mix (no pun intended) causes it to simply feel like an extended wait until the next note or chord! Oh no!
2. Soft songs. These have always been Mr. Elverum’s strong point and Wind’s Poem is no exception. Each song has an interesting sonic space and arrangement. His vocals don’t compete as much in the mix, though being able to distinguish the words are not always desirable, as I stated.
I struggled, though, as I said in my previous post, with the energy of the record. These soft songs feel motionless. They feel largely uninspired. Like they were written in a period of numbness. Whereas Mr. Elverum’s work as the Microphones was powered by his strong emotional feelings, these songs feel like they lack that compositional will to be. He has some nice melodies, some interesting arrangements – the record is fairly well-crafted. It’s lacking energy, though. But that’s purely my intuition. Nothing objective.
If you are interested, here are the tracks that I particularly enjoyed. “Between Two Mysteries” is particularly great! That track comes highly recommended.
8. Between Two Mysteries ****
9. Ancient Questions
11. Lost Wisdom pt. 2
12. Stone’s Ode
Note on the reviews of the record: too much attention paid to Wind’s Poem’s debt to metal. Other than loud, abrasive guitars, moving in unison, I just didn’t think it was such an important factor in experiencing the album. No double-bass drum, no screeching/guttural vocals. Then again, my understanding of metal is limited. To me, this record sounded just like his other records. No additional references necessary.
Cult acts are hilarious in that they are lauded for exuding mystery. I tend enjoy cult acts because they have a great story. Scott Walker has both of these. What he doesn’t have is a lot of fans of his sole recording of the 1980’s, Climate of Hunter.
The textures are bizarre and rather troubling at first. The fretless bass is employed as a true dated-1980’s weapon, although I wonder if it’s actually a Chapman stick. The drums range from tinny electronic snaps to richly EQ’ed full drum kits.
The strings are of course the name of the game here, as they usually are on Walker’s outings. Songs like “Rawhide” and “Sleepwalker’s Woman” are incredibly haunting as the arrangements calls for blocks of chords who quiver in microtonal bliss.
Otherwise, keyboards are used to create and capture sonic irregularities. Most songs contain one or multiple drones that, like the strings, drift in and out of pitch, creating a hazy but menacing backdrop to Scott’s words. Horns are employed in a similar manner, rarely suloing in the traditional sense, such as Evan Parker’s incredible wall of saxophone bleats on “Song 6.”
This is an incredibly diverse album, one that shares haunting atmospherics with chart-teasing promise (the Billy Ocean-duet “Song 3″), and ends with a mournful blues number, Walker’s somber tale of a drifter set to Mark Knopfler’s solo acoustic guitar.
I dug this set, as it connected with his old solo work while pointing firmly in the direction of his future endeavors. Grab this if you can find it and are also obsessed with Senor Walker.
Wow. My whole life gets completely turned around sometimes, and music normally the culprit. Over the past five years, this feeling is attained only under the best of circumstances, and it certainly isn’t as frequent as it was when I first realized there was music beyond the realm of top 40 and Grateful Dead.
Last night I watched Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, a documentary of the life and career of Scott Engel, the American transplanted in the United Kingdom who assumed the Walker surname upon joining the Walker Brothers, a group whose popularity rivaled that of the Beatles and Stones during their heyday in the mid-60’s (gosh do I love rambling run-on sentences.
Anyways, it’s a great documentary. A lot of luminary figures appear, among them David Bowie (he also played the role of executive producer), Eno, Marc Almond, Julian Cope (in letter form), Evan Parker and the many producers and arrangers from Scott’s past.
The interviews are wonderful, and they thankfully don’t pound you with too much background. You get a sense of their fame, Walker’s burgeoning song writing skills, his amazing run of solo records (Scott 1-4, all must-haves if you ask me), and his inevitable downfall. Overnight, he went from the prince of melancholy orchestral pop to a cabaret covers singer.
The point in the film that truly grabs me is the section pertaining to the Walker’s reunion album Nite Flights. I don’t download music (not out of principle, I merely hate the idea of downloading spyware), so these were all new songs to me. I had heard Scott 4, and portions of his solo records, as well as 1995’s startling Tilt.
The title track ‘Nite Flights’ pours out of the speakers, a pulsing hi-hat reminding me that this was the late-70’s era of disco. But the bass line is falling down a flight of stairs repeatedly, and the song is basking in a drone of shimmering electronics and strings. Scott’s vocals are as per usual meter-less, wandering amongst the sound scape with lyrics of terrible nightmares and humans that take on cretinous forms. Awesome. Just awesome. Brian Eno appears later in the same scene and listens to the “Nite Flights” tracks and is similarly taken aback. “It’s humiliating, really,” he says. “No, really. We haven’t gotten any further.” Woof. Coming from Eno it is a searing indictment of today’s musicians. And he’s right.
Watch this film. It broke me in half, and made me want to collect his entire catalog of music.
I’m off to Europe, so expect even more doldrums here. Rats. Updates soon though. Bye!
Busy busy busy. I got married, Evan’s getting married. Woof town. Anyways, here are some things I noticed about these records that may be informing are music soon:
Ry Cooder – Self titled
This is Ryland’s first record, made under the supervision of Lenny Waronker/Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks. Cooder had played with Taj Mahal in Rising Sons, and helped arrange and played on Captain Beefheart’s magnificent debut “Safe as Milk”.
Cooder is known as a guitar virtuoso, but what amazed me about this record is his remarkable restraint. He’s obviously gifted, but there isn’t a wasted guitar solo to be found. The instrumental pieces, such as Cooder’s lone compositional contribution “Available Space”, offers slippery slide guitar dueling with Van Dykes’s piano for less than two minutes time. “France Chance” is a rampaging rhythm guitar stomp that the Velvet Underground wished they’d copped, and “One Meatball” pits Cooder’s tentative baritone against a wall of orchestration that somehow manages not to completely swallow the dark humor of the song.
Continuing the theme of economy, Antony and the Johnston’s debut record is mostly piano and vocals. Whether it’s Rufus Wainwright, Boy George, Lou Reed or Antony’s warbling operatics, the voice and words are the centerpiece of this record. The drums and bass that accompany the record are expertly recorded, adding a gritty punch and bottom that such a muted experience demands.
The balance is perfect, as the occasional murmurs of synthesizer and orchestral swells accompanying the sparse arrangements are give room to color the rather somber environment the songs inhabit.
Neither of these records are particularly long, probably averaging at 40 minutes. Each artists knows their strength and play to it, but don’t give in to ambition’s sometime suffocating grasp.
A Subset Column on CDs:
Am I the only one who hates Bonus Material? An album gets rereleased, remastered, etc. and the label/artists decide to give us Bonus Material. I understand the marketing behind such a thing: make the fans who already own the album buy it again.
This is perfectly understandable when tacked onto a film. There are menus. The bonus material, deleted scenes, etc. must be selected in order to be accessed. But with CDs, there is no choice. One must stop the CD in order to NOT experience the bonus tracks. Obnoxious. If there could’ve been some way to disengage the bonus material, to be able to simply listen to the record without another batch of lesser material beginning, I would have been happy, but instead the label/artist compromise the purity of the product.
Recordings provide no visual. There is nothing for us to hold onto, nothing that occupies space with a recording. We found with album artwork and the jewel-case, though, that music was somewhat successfully captured. Ornate housings of an experience-intangible. I’ve since sold all of my compact discs, but I do fondly remember sifting through my collection, finding that favored case, and marveling at the power it held. The relationship that the disc had to the Album was direct.
When the Bonus Material was added the power of the packaging weakened. The CD was now just a carrier of data, holding not just the album, but this other stuff, too. And not only that, but the two could not be disconnected. When the final song finished playing, YOU HAD TO PRESS STOP. This (not always) intricately crafted artistic experience was diminished due to its proximity to material not intended to be a part.
My need for the compact disc and packaging to be that wonderfully direct link to the experience of the album went so far as to disallow CD singles to appear in my collection. The idea that the same packaging was used to deliver just two songs ruined the illusion. I even had trouble holding onto EPs because of this!!
Nevertheless, I am finally free of such problems. Betty Davis’ self-titled album is now called “Betty Davis”. The bonus material released with that album “Betty Davis (Bonus Material)”. Thanks audio software applications!
I’m tired of it! It is in no way ‘dead.’ That must be noted. I despise that kind of language. It’s lazy. It makes people fret and frown unnecessarily. The album is not dead, I’m simply tired of it.
One of my concerns with the album focuses on how it groups content together amorphously. The numbering of the tracks is something that album fanatics talk about with rather obscure and imprecise language. Track 8 on an album can have incredible meaning to certain people. For others, track 3 is the most exciting moment because it defines the tone for all of the music that follows (that taking into account the fact that tracks 1 and 2 are introductory singles, which is not the case for all albums). In the end, the study of track ordering is a science best left foggy. Artists (and mastering engineers) order their content in a way that best serves the “flow” of the album.
The problem with this “flow” logic is that first listens then tend to, well, fail. With classical works, you have a program that tells you the names of the movements. You look at a Beethoven symphony. It has four movements. The title of each movement expresses the tone of what you will hear. You stop paying attention for a few minutes, but when you come back to the moment at hand, you still know that you’re in the slow movement. You can come back. When I experience an album for the first time I never know where I am. All I have is the moment and rare do I get the feeling that that moment extends much farther than the end of the song. Only once you have listened to the whole album can you go back and begin to piece together the track order logic. After a couple of listens (usually breaking up the album into smaller listening) can a full listen-through be satisfying. The experience of the album as a whole is thus problematic, because the experiential narrative must be learned before it can be appreciated.
I believe this “flow” logic comes from the process that many artists follow in creating an album. In my experience, we would write some songs, record them, and then we would decide the order of the album by listening. I could make the argument that this is a wonderfully pure form of decision-making. Anti-intellectual, etc. There were always songs, though, that no matter where we placed them on the album, didn’t fit. The pitch-content transition between songs was awkward, the emotional landscape shifted too quickly, or the two songs on a very superficial level sounded too alike, thus diminishing the impact of both songs. We worked on each song separately and heard each develop into, hopefully, something uniquely magnificent. Cliche, right, but we the artists would sit down and craft each puzzle piece before putting the full picture together. Problematic!
For us it was fun to try and contextualize each song. Each song already had meaning to us, and now we could extend their meanings further by putting them into a larger context. My issue with this is that as a consumer, I think of the album first, the songs second. The best songs on a sub-par album suffer under the weight of the whole. I can’t get them out of the album, even if I go as far as purchasing a song separately on iTunes or Amazon. That amazing song is a piece of something, contributes to something larger than itself, thus I am always left feeling slightly unfulfilled if digested solely separated.
[I'm cutting myself off here. Already covered too many topics in too few words. Think of this as an introduction, then. 'Two' will be more succinct, hopefully]
