7/31/12

This song broke my heart five times today. And it's not just because summer lightening turned the sky lavender as I drove home in the rain, the perfect Gaslight scene.



First I simply couldn't get the chorus out of my head, because the vocal line's so beautiful. And the guitars are so mournful. Have we all not buried the thought of someone somewhere so deep that we'd never have to feel it again?

But then, it made me think of unrooted family trees, and about answers, the need to find them within ourselves, our families, our compound histories.

"And I'm not looking for your love
I'm only sniffing out blood
Just a little taste of where I came from"

So it's a beautiful song, and I keep listening to it (along with the rest of this fantastic album that I will surely bring up again). And then it really sinks in that, perhaps unlike our sorrowful narrator, I have a mom and a dad, who I really should call even if they have no idea what the hell to say to me anymore. I have so much to ask them -- what is stopping me? One day I will not have the chance. Some never get it to start. There is much about my own history I do not understand, and the mysteries are buried about 150 miles north at the state line...

"And at the bottom of this river
Is where I put you down to lay
So I can live with it
And in my heart, heart, heart there are these waters
Where I put you down to lay
While I learn to live with it
Keepsake, until I'm free"
~Keepsake,
The Gaslight Anthem, Handwritten

7/28/12

Surprise, surprise, she's won me over again.

Fiona Apple doesn't release albums often, but when she does, rejoice. Fiona albums only grow better with time and "Idler Wheel..." is no different....Flurried and frantic sometimes, steady and desolate at others, it sounds like nothing else out there. It took me about four listens to truly understand it, understand where it was coming from, but I love that I couldn't give up on it; I couldn't because her words were drawing me in past anything else that I wasn't getting. You will see reviews talking about private she is and how revealing her songs are and whatnot, but at the end of the day she's an artist. She's honest and weird and metaphorical, an artist we only know of because of the pop charts who produces these strange and wonderful narrations of internal struggle and external desire and just feeling.

On "Idler Wheel...." there are multiple moments of painfully bold sharp notes and bellows. She growls, she writhes, she shrieks. But then she resolves, with patience, and returns back to a decisive cleanliness...vocally, her control is phenomenal and used to convey meaning like none other, see "Left Alone" for a taste of the variety Apple can cram into two measures. She says every single syllable with its own intensity, capturing insanity, loneliness, self-doubt and self-assurance with the most appropriate vocal tone, even if they're all in the same phrase. Quivering on the right words is interspersed with whisperlike trills, and Apple hits the blues notes with just enough throwaway....there is really just something behind every syllable. Instrumentation is sparse but purposefully so, the use of space and texture is refreshing to ears used to everything electronically layered so damn close...piano is center stage sharpened by unique auxiliary (shakers, ringing bells and hard-to-identify drums are in no small number, even what appears to be nat sound of footsteps on stones), and it's expansive, so, so expansive - the intro on "Anything We Want" is probably my favorite, playful and primitive.

But delivery, and instrumentation, would be nothing without these words. She just says it....lyrics are wry and dark and often tortured but exposing all the sad, scary vulnerable bits we feel and never say. "Werewolf" and "Periphery" in particular show immense perspective wrapped in metaphors and the end result is achingly real. She puts your head in a place that's always on but rarely tuned; these songs are the result of one woman's subconscious turned inside out and the lessons to be learned, the insights to glean, the connections to forge, will give and keep giving as long as you're willing to look.

"I could liken you to a werewolf the way you left me for dead
But I admit that I provided a full moon 
And I could liken you to a shark the way you bit off my head
But then again I was waving around a bleeding, open wound 

But you were such a super guy 'til the second you get a whiff of me
We are like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity 
But we can still support each other, all we gotta do's avoid each other
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key 
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key

The lava of the volcano shot up hot from under the sea
One thing leads to another and you made an island of me

And I could liken you to a chemical the way you made me compound a compound
But I'm a chemical, too, inevitable you and me would mix
And I could liken you to a lot of things but I always come around
'Cause in the end I'm a sensible girl, I know the fiction of the fix 

But you were such a super guy 'til the second you get a whiff of me
We are like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity
But we can still support each other, all we gotta do's avoid each other
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key"
~Werewolf,
Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

7/26/12

"Paper thin conviction
Turning another page
Plotting how to build myself to be
Everything that I am not at all

Sometimes I get tired of pins and needles
Facades are a fire on the skin
And I'm growing fond of broken people
As I see that I am one of them

I'm one of them
I'm one of them

Oh, why must I work so hard
Just so I can feel like the nobles ones?
Obligations to my heart are gone
Superficial lines explain it all

Sometimes I get tired of pins and needles
Facades are a fire on the skin
And I'm growing fond of broken people
As I see that I am one of them

Sometimes I get tired of pins and needles
Facades are a fire on the skin
Oh, and I'm growing fond of broken people
As I see that I am one of them

I'm one of them"
~Pins and Needles
MuteMath, Armistice

7/24/11

"Do you ever stop to think 
Who built those walls around you?
Do you ever wonder 
Who all those people were?
Because the hands that give you shelter 
Are the very ones that you refuse 
And the proof of what they're worth 
Will live long after you're gone 

Ne'er do wells and woebegones
Show your face, for we were wrong 
Ne'er do wells and woebegones
Feel no shame, it won't be long" 
~Ne'er Do Wells
Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound, Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound

I could probably write for awhile about Audra Mae, about the complete richness of her voice, incredible range, and that the dead-on dark and soulful blues sound suitable for day and night. About her so not "the look" look that looks so perfect for what she's all about.

Homegirl can write a hell of a blues rock tune. You can hear these songs in a dirty bar stage somewhere, somewhere with dirty dancing in the front row and foot-stomping in the crowd and beers spilled on tables going unnoticed in the fray. You can hear her belt the long high notes with pride and passion and fury, imaging a hollering crowd cheering her on and raising their hands in soulful solidarity.

Her band, dubbed Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound, is pretty kick-ass, too. I've had a lot of fun listening to this record, as a sassy pick-me-up, or a way to liven up a dull morning or afternoon. From what I've learned of Audra Mae (since stumbling upon her on AltPress of all places) she is indeed the real thing, as a track on "Almighty Sound" proclaims --



-- music is in her lineage, and she laces in references to her clearly beloved home state of Oklahoma and her probably pretty rad Dodge Dart classic. No shame or shyness, which is so refreshing from a female singer in the age of arguably untalented scenesters who look good in front of a microphone, where laying down sexy whispers crooned over laptops counts as being a singer and all that god-awful pitch correction.

This whole album is a fun, in-your-face, modern Dust Bowl spectacular; but moreso it is the mainstream LP arrival that gets the blog mentions and magazine reviews marking and proving that yes, true talent will still find a way to surface. It's fun to sit around and complain that real talent gets buried in the masses, but those who are willing to pick up their life, pack it in a car and drive to the destination, play for free and fall on their face til they get it right...they tend to get their moment. They tend to make an impression, and that, to an artist,  is the utmost validation.

7/24/12

Someone I love told me something really freakishly beautiful once. Something about how souls are like glasses of water, and once you combine them, you'll never be able to separate them again, because if you pour them back into glasses, it's not the same glass of water you had before.

It is a different temperature. Maybe a different color. Different elements than before, added or diluted or filtered. 

"The Atlantic was born today and I'll tell you how...The clouds above opened up and let it out.

I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
When the water filled every hole.
And thousands upon thousands made an ocean,
Making islands where no island should go, oh no.

Those people were overjoyed, they took to their boats.
I thought it less like a lake and more like a moat.
The rhythm of my footsteps 

Crossing flatlands to your door have been silenced forever more.
The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row
It seems farther than ever before

I need you so much closer."

~Transatlanticism 

Death Cab for Cutie, Transatlanticism

For awhile I trusted in love, in fate, to tell me the difference between what is real, what is in my sad, scared head and what is worth my time....more I see, it is about choices than anything else. What you choose to love. What you choose as your fate. What you choose is right, or wrong. Even still, it's not all up to you. Something's got to choose you back.