- Doug Stephen in FOR FUCK SAKE EVERYONE KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE GOD DAMNED ACCORDIONS JESUS CHRIST Woah, okay Vice Magazine.
- Doug Stephen in Vampire Weekend - S/T I’ve never listened to a solo Paul Simon record, or to Graceland, so I don’t know about that. But the songs I’ve heard by Vampire Weekend...
- bjyhore in New Single: Patrick Wolf’s “Accident and Emergency” She had actually been robbed of it cant be cruel. Mistress. I could do. jennifer lopez porn Three.
Pop music is certainly no stranger to talented brothers. Right off the bat, the names The Everly Brothers and The Statler Brothers come to mind. Both were bands that used the kind of arrangements and harmonies found in traditional country and bluegrass music to craft a kind of earnest pop music that moved fans both young and old. After the release of their ninth full length studio album, Emotionalism, the Avett Brothers should be considered as part of that group of great pop music brothers.
The order of the day here, and in the majority of what I write elsewhere, is snark. The sharp tongue and the biting wit are a gift, especially when it comes to critique. But I cannot in good faith be snarky about this record. Emotionalism is quite simply one of the best records I have ever heard. It is at once strong and weak, angry and triumphant, desperate and hopeful. In a word, this record is love.
And that’s the point really. The newest record by Scott and Seth Avett, and upright bassist Bob Crawford, is maybe the most accurate document of the roller coaster ride that is passion and love and need since Leonard Cohen’s debut Songs of Leonard Cohen. And like that record by NYC’s favorite bard, Emotionalism will become, for many fans, the thing they turn to in the dark, when things have gone sour, and they need proof that they’re not the only person to have to go through what they’re going through. The newest record by the Avett Brothers isn’t just pop music, it’s pop music that can save lives.
There are songs like Shame, where the banjo haunts the melody from a place just on the periphery of sound, and the lyrics craft the picture of a man wrenched from the inside out by a decision he regrets, and the revelations he’s forced to make as a result of that decision.
Or The Weight of Lies, in which the songwriter lets us into the aftermath of those bad decisions, and explains that you can’t run from that aftermath. Eventually, despite how far you get away from the things that frighten or anger you, those things will track you down. It’s a lesson of life we all have to learn, and the song lets you know that you’re not alone in the learning.
But the real strength of this record, the song that will stand the test of time, like Sisters of Mercy from Songs of Leonard Cohen, is the Ballad of Love and Hate. An account of the relationship between Love and Hate, the song shows us a picture of base need, using the two emotions we’re most familiar with, and the two emotions that exist on two sides of a very thin line, to do so. By naming the characters Love and Hate, the Avetts are telling a tale of a relationship at its most reckless and it’s most hopeful. Love and Hate can’t exist without each other, and anyone who has ever been in a love so deep they could taste it on their lips and feel it in their bones knows exactly what this song is about, and will always be moved by it, regardless of how many times they hear it.
Emotionalism uses the same kind of stark soundscapes, simple chord arrangements, and earnest lyricism that have become the trademarks of the Avett Brothers recordings and live shows. The album dips and peaks, pulling at every emotion and memory in these expansive domes of ours, to create an accurate and moving picture of what it means to be human, and what it means to need. Seth Avett’s guitar, Scott Avett’s banjo, and Bob Crawford’s upright bass are no doubt strung with heartstrings, and each time they play them, they touch something inside us all.
Believe it or not, the Shins existed before Garden State. Despite how it may have seemed at the time, they did not spring fully formed from the womb of Natalie Portman. In fact, Oh Inverted World, the seminal Shins album that became the indie badge of identification after Zach Braff’s film, had been out for a few years before the movie ever hit theaters. In the resulting media saturation, many new fans emerged, but it seemed that the discerning music crowd started to turn away. Too many overnight fifteen year old fans with Samtastic pink hoodies was a lot to bear for people who had loved this band, and this album, since it’s release in 2001. It would be a few years then, after the hype of the Myspace generation’s answer to Say Anything had died down, that the Shins regained their regal place at the top of Mt. Indielympus.
And I’m here to tell you they deserve to be there. So what if you see Zach Braff in your mind’s eye when Caring is Creepy or New Slang begin. Those songs, along with the rest of this record, transcend their brief moment of blinding popularity. When you strip away the angst associated with this album because of the movie, you’re left with a gentle, passionate declaration of talent and influence.
The guitar work on Oh Inverted World draws from influences as varied as reggae and country/western music, and thus recalls the work of bands like the Clash, the Kinks, and most importantly, the Smiths. And the triumphant yet heartbreaking lyrics, powered by James Mercer’s powerful yet vulnerable voice, recall Morrissey at his best.
Oh Inverted World would have been fine without Garden State’s help. It was a declaration of things to come. And long after the dust of Zach Braff’s surprisingly resilient career has cleared, this album will remain a vanguard of a movement that has had a profound effect on rock and roll.
Ryan Adams is considered by many to be the king of alternative country. He
rose from the ashes of his ground breaking band Whiskeytown to become one of America’s most infamous troubadours. In a world where songwriters such as Rhett Miller, Jeff Tweedy, and Jay Farrar were his contemporaries, Adams managed still to craft a unique and genuine voice. His earliest solo records were continuations of the earnest, desperate songwriting he had crafted as the leader of Whiskeytown. Suicide Handbook came about in 2001, a sort of side project to his own solo career, when the singer was finally beginning to peak. And while it looks as though his label Lost Highway intends to include this in some kind of career spanning box set, they kept it on the shelves for a long time.
This is my first exposure to Suicide Handbook, even though it’s been available as a bootleg for quite some time. And after listening through both discs twice now, I can honestly say this is the moment when Ryan Adams jumped the shark. Adams claims that this collection of songs was his way of coping with a terrible breakup. Well, judging from the sound of it, he couldn’t have cared about the girl very much. The same hipster cowboy quality of Adams’ songwriting is evident in these recordings, but it’s easy to miss, considering how utterly forgettable each song here is. There are moments, like on the song Cracks in a Photograph (“…tell her Elvis is cool, but the Rolling Stones will sweep her away”) where that poetry almost reaches through the miasma and grips the listener, but the easy listening pace and damnable similarity of the songs always ruins those chances. I’ve had my heart broken before, and the pain and anger and confusion I felt gave birth to beautiful, passionate art. I poured all that betrayal, all that doubt, all that desperation into my brain and let it spill out all over everything creative I touched. Suicide Handbook doesn’t sound like the testament of a man who’s just had his heart broken, it sounds like the testament of a man who just found out the dry cleaner couldn’t get that mustard stain out of his favorite shirt.
When given a serious listen, Suicide Handbook sounds more like James Taylor than Gram Parsons, more like the Eagles than the Flying Burrito Brothers. The record never takes the kid gloves off, never cries and screams and pounds the walls in anger, never goes on a bender to wake up two days later in a stranger’s bed with the name of broken love still on its lips. It just coasts, the way someone might do in a relationship that’s comfortable, but by no means passionate.
But that’s not the album’s only transgression. Suicide Handbook marks the moment when Ryan Adams began to become so self-involved that he couldn’t see when to just stop. Now his albums feel a lot more like watching your favorite movie ruined by a terrible “director’s cut” than a revelation of great songwriting and honest, passionate music. At the time, maybe he felt this was too deeply personal to be released, or maybe he was still capable of deciding when something wasn’t as good as it could be. I’ve thought in recent years that if he would just have held back some of his songs, not been so overzealous with the releases, that he could have crafted some beautiful albums. Suicide Handbook, with a proper editorial hand, could have been one of those albums. Instead, it was a harbinger of things to come. Let’s hope that Easy Tiger, Adams latest record, will mark a return to his old form.
It’s fitting that Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers final album in the Tent Trilogy (Believe, Pandelirium, Swampblood ), and likely their last on North Carolina label Yep Roc, explores the theme of death in the crazy world that is the American South. It is also fitting that Swampblood marks a return to the dirty Southern blues rock that was this band’s hallmark sound back before they ever left Bloodshot Records. Turning to the comfortable and familiar is something we all do when faced with the finality of death, and the Shack Shakers are no different.
Colonel J.D. Wilkes’ brand of “bump in the night” songwriting gives justice to the South in a way that few other songwriters can. With his songs, Wilkes explores the dark, but he does it with a romantic bend, showing us the things about the dark that we love to hate, and indeed, the things we hate to love. He realizes, as so many good writers have, that it’s only when we’re lost in the dark that we truly meet ourselves. The Colonel doesn’t just write songs, he takes you on a Wonka like tour of the truth, pulling back the curtain to show us how we can be in the throes of religious fervor, sideshow terror, and finally, death.
Swampblood is as much a celebration of influences though, as it is a document of the dreams and the reality that populated the South of Wilkes’ childhood. The runaway train that is guitarist David Lee is finally free here to run right off the tracks, destroying everything in his path, urged on through it all by the frenetic hillbilly drumming of Brett Whitacre. And the whole album is brought back to the light, anchored in reality by the consistent play of bassist Mark Roberston. The music thunders along, the album itself clocking in at just over thirty-two minutes, referencing Hank Williams (Hellwater), CCR (Swampblood) and the ghosts of old bluesmen with distant eyes and haunted strings (The Deadenin’).
Swampblood takes the listener through a day in a Southern Gothic nightmare world, forcing the ears and the eyes open, not allowing them to ignore what they are experiencing. Then the sun rises on a new day (Bright Sunny South) reminding us that light will eventually shine in even the darkest of places. The Tent Trilogy is about a man facing the truth of a life down South, learning to love the twisting and the snarling things, and embracing the life-affirming joy of terror. This album marks the funeral and subsequent wake for that man, so the only question before the Shack Shakers and Colonel Wilkes now is, “What does the afterlife hold?”
