The downer vocals, the whispers of regret, it’s all hitting me as I listen to the opening strains of “Dream State Flying”, one of the tracks on Firecracker People, by Hotel Lights, a project helmed by Ex Ben Folds Five Darren Jesse. In this song I can see clear through the Summer to the Winter, with me standing outside that old brick building I used to work in. Decked out in a sweater and blue jeans, I watch the wind push the sinewy branches on the trees.

Even from the first time I listened to Firecracker People it only took a few lovely drops of piano for me to start warming up to it. The touchstones are all there: a comforting falsetto voice, tasteful production, and a solid acoustic guitar strum that occasionally builds to electric. It brings to mind an image of a warm candle shining light in the darkness of an old barn. And like an old barn, the foundation is rock solid, with everything else worn down and on the verge of falling apart.
 
On Firecracker People I hear the built in wintry scenery the songs contain: the roads that go on for miles, the dried cracks in the muddy ground, the endless snowdrifts. That’s not to say it’s a depressing record, but there’s more than a shred of melancholy to be found here, and if we can grab a hold of that melancholy we’ll be amazed at the places they take us, to those dark things we don’t dare think about.

It can take you back to that thing you did last Summer that you never told anybody about, to that affair you thought you covered up, to that person you were selfish with, to that relationship you willingly destroyed.

There’s a sense of recovery in this record, a sense of beginning again after a great moment of tumult, a regrouping. How a song can fit that mood so well, with just a flicker of rain, the vocals coming in and out of the mix, and instrumentation that bottoms out into a tide pool. The guitar sounds fill in the plucky holes just enough to support the melody before the whole song drops away.

In these post-millennial, post everything days, its nice to rely on this sturdy-as-an-old-house record, so close and personal, its like flipping through an old photo album. In one of the pictures I am holding up to the camera a homemade bow and arrow made out of construction paper. I made it in the middle of a two-week blanketing Minnesota blizzard. Another picture is taken from the diving board of an opulent Miami pool and is faded at its edges like so many childhood memories are.

The progression from Summer to Fall and Winter is in this record in spades. It’s in the hushed vocals that bring to mind hardwood floors of New England, a lace that radiates around Fall, that old heartbreak in the air, the northerly winds that carry disappointments and regrets, rolling delicately towards the granddaddy of depression time, Christmas.

With a simple guitar-bass-drum contingent and great understated vocals, Hotel Lights are about as cloying as an unassuming bed and breakfast. They might not dazzle immediately, but come winter you’ll crave its down-home comforts.

The pace quickens on “Norina”, an up-tempo number that threatens to rock and finally fulfills its promise at the end of the song. “Why should you count the days on your hand?” He asks over delicate strumming, inviting us back to his place and pouring us a whiskey, neat.

“Blue Always Finds Me” is an assurance that no matter where I go in this life, the blue fog of Winter will follow me, and each Winter I’ll come back here, to relive it all over again.

 “Firecracker People” is a sweeping, lilting ballad an exploration of some of the more destructive elements in our lives. We see that these Firecracker People are eternally “going off all the time” and through this song, we see a whole world constructed with bits of string, songs with characters cut out and propped up, a living diorama with tempers flaring up and blowing out, all framed by a memory of that familiar piano, the ghosts of Ben Folds Five creaking into the sound. It sums up the record nicely, a companion to get you through the coldest, bleakest months of the year.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/1279594

There’s something about the act of discovering a new band, of making room in your mind for a new act, the character in a singer’s voice, a new recognition, an understanding that starts the first time you hear and artist’s work and is reconsidered for every track and for every note you hear of theirs afterwards, and with each record comes this anticipation that the record is going to be as good, if not better than the last one.

Sometimes it takes a committed act, on behalf of the listener, as sometimes what initially sounds like a disappointment, ends up being something remarkable later on down the line when given the advantage the distance and time to mature and appreciate.

The way in which a record changes in the ears of the listener says as much about who we are as people, and how generous the listeners mind is to receiving this new information.

The last time I wrote a review for this band, I had, only recently, come across a record that only comes along every once in a while, maybe once every two years or so, but its hard to recapture the hold they had on me, the first time I heard “Scarecrow” sung by the Felice Brothers bassist, Christmas, the way the tone in his was new to me, my brain making room for a new act, a new voice.

I saw them live first, and that night introduced me to so many compelling characters, and if you could have seen these guys play live on that tour, and seen them, drunk in the alleys of the cities they played in, lived out their characters, the ones they sang about, there wasn’t any difference between the guys in the band who would, like Kerouac or Ken Kesey, traveled thousands of miles to make revelry, these five gentlemen who make up the Felice Brothers, they were and are the real deal, the true weird Americans, the kind that don’t exist anymore, an analog band for the digital age, they are the leftovers of vaudeville when we thought there weren’t any left.

And with that brings the variety of songs, and how their songs seemed to have been worked on for years, maybe carried around in their short bus they use to tour the country with, slips of songs bursting out of their cases, and with all of the knockouts on “The Felice Brothers, ” They seemed to have so many up their sleeve, and each of them as grand as the tracks on their last album. I thought they had hours of this top shelf class a material, and while “Yonder is the Clock” still boasts a few heavy hitters, it feels like a genuine come down.

And just like an old wino, inebriated on Wild Irish Rose and time, The Felice Brothers seem to be eternally looking back instead of forward, living in the lazy haze of broken time, only this time the words are too far gone, and the wino has lost a bit of the poet in him. For the songs on “Yonder…” are submerged, buried in ice, and the band is like a a drunk slumped in the alley, and while all of its living history might still be there, the drunk is nearly comatose.

Things start off with the lurching, “The Big Suprise” and once again, we are back in that special place, there’s an odd amount of wisdom in Ian Felice’s vocals, as the song is sung with the patience of a sage witnessing the passing of an epoch, looking back on moonshine bill passages, carpetbaggers, all the way back to the first settlers. It’s the kind of opener that’s an underhanded punch, whose weight you don’t feel until you walk away from it awhile.

The unpredictable nature continues on “Penn Station”, a rousing drunken chorus which lets the camera zoom back to see the whole drunken cast and crew of rascals and roustabouts, pulling out all the stops on their eternal vaudevillian tour.

“Buried in Ice” is barely sung straight, a-one-last-track-before-we-hit-the-sack kind of track, an old rousing chorus, punctuated by the kind of vocal gestures a drunk uses, emphasizing the wrong syllables, middles of sentences taking on a special meaning. And the spare piano in the background, lingering there, providing shape to the form of the block of ice that carries the question, is a lovely lifting thing.

“Cooperstown” succeeds in the way that all good Felice Brothers gems succeed, sounding like a song memorized several hundred times but you just cant think of at the moment, conjuring up the old glory days of baseball parks, the burnt acrid smell from after the fireworks have all been lit, the smell of sulfur when they take the lights down.

Four records in the Felice Brothers sound like they are not so much ready for a victory lap as they are for a nice lie down. But for all the distance of the first half of the record, the second half finds it’s footing, dragging its slumped carcass across the finish line for an even draw. The songs on the second half have melodies with enough muster to allow their voices slide above their stupor long enough to cement a memory, and “Yonder…” begins to find its focus.

“Cooperstown”, “Rise and Shine”, “All When We Were Young”, “Katie Dear”, there is a heavy dose of loss here, a sense that by traveling as much as they do, they feel the need to touch down on the darker side of things, to linger long enough to kiss it goodbye.

Like the song “All When we Were Young” shows, these characters might be drunkenly alive, but there’s an odd tone of somber reflection, a life of regret, of having to grow up and tell the same stories, but the stories and their joints don’t move like they used to.

And it’s refreshing how these songs are still deeply American, the kind of old weird America, the kind of history of the various wanderers, junkies, hobos and transients we’ve loved, like Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg sung through the hard-scrabbled sweetness of John Prine. And we know with the Felice Brothers, we know the possibility of American Lore will continue to create new voices such as these. Mark Twain is a perfect reference point, as “Yonder is the Clock” is an old Mark Twain phrase, but as with later Twain, our heroes don’t burn as bright as they once did, but they just might have another “Huck Finn” in their canon.

And by the end of the record, we get past the last songs, as their melodies fade from memory, we realize something, that as much as the record turns in the second half, one thing it cannot quite replicate is how these songs don’t cut as deep, don’t draw the listener in these stories. Maybe it’s a noted step back, even though they can still produce the goose bumps-on-your-arm-awe that “Cooperstown” has in spades. To nail such a specific shade, a burnt twist of melancholy, means they are still tapped into the bombed out shacks or trailer parks, the vein of that heavenly American night.

If the last record was the elaborate exposition, then these are the doldrums, things a band might have done if they didn’t have such a good time leaning on what it is they do well, which is to trade in a certain kind of nostalgia, music for people too young to have stopped drinking when Tom Waits did, who won’t care to spot the influences and will just take it straight up. Which is where future listens will pay off, and there’s much to be had here, but compared directly to their previous work “Yonder is the Clock” is an album better know for what could have been rather than a breakout like their last, self-entitled record, “The Felice Brothers.” the one my mind will always have room for.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/1228259

You are Jason Isbell, and you are on a brutal tour with your band, the Drive By Truckers, touring their latest record,  “A Blessing and a Curse.” During this tour, the fighting with your wife, who also happens to be the bassist, has grown so intense that it threatens the very existence of the Drive By Truckers.

You leave the group after this tour, separate from your wife whom you later divorce, and the band goes on to record their best album,  “Brighter than Creation’s Dark.” No longer playing huge shows, the shows with your current band, The 400 Unit, play to audiences a fraction of the size of your old band. So you head back home, to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, home of the famous studio, the sound of which has shaped you musically more than the imagined propensity for drink in your family.

You enlist various musicians ready to play your masterpiece. And you’ve got more than enough emotional material to start, and now the question is how to frame all that it is that you have to say.

You could directly confront the issue, forcing each critic to draw parallels between your lyrics and the disparate heartbreak found in your previous marriage, or you could instead bury your pain in the subterfuge of your songs, and maybe find a character that can bear the brunt of your disappointment, maybe in a soldier, who is still fighting a stinging war in Iraq.

Isbell does a little bit of both on this record, and the first time I listened to this record, the first song that really hit home for me was “This is the last song I will ever write,” which is the track that closes the record. So I know, it’s kind of like walking into a movie early and catching the end before it has a chance to really start, but the song did such a good job of announcing itself, the way the lyrics faded out, and into the freewheeling piano-guitar-bass-drum blues tribute that flies in afterwards.  The narrator is a solider who is just about to breathe his last breath in combat. He could be a soldier serving in Iraq under the last days of George W. Bush, or he could be someone who is already dead. But its the breakdown in the song where the records pulls back and reveals its teeth, that blast of sound after we hear the last words from the narrator, the explosion where all the pistons in this 400 Unit really nail the emotional center of the song, and capture all of its melodic glory that is the soldier’s last gasp struggle to hold on, to show the weight in the thrashes of a soldier’s last breath.

It’s a truly intimate moment because it feels like you trapped in a room with the band, which are hell-bent on staying true right through to the bitter end of the song.

As soon as I heard this song I knew that Isbell had really raised the bar on his music,  and after “The Last Song I’ll Ever Write” he has now grown in my mind from accomplished singer-songwriter to accomplished bandleader, and where his last record felt a little too stitched together, and sounded like separate set pieces, this one sounds like the complete movie.

Through these songs, Isbell and his 400 unit are able to grab the listener by the lapels of their denim jacket and even though the songs might be soaked in whiskey, they are just as heartbreakingly real as they are direct, offering up music that hits right to the heart, it’s a drunken buddy being honest with you for the first time in years.

Isbell’s not trying to reinvent rock and roll here, he’s just trying to tell a story and make us feel what the characters been through, and no matter who the narrator is, he comes across as pure Isbell through and through.

“Soldiers Get Strange” is another favorite, and this one is again told from the perspective of a soldier, but this time the situation seems like it could have come straight from Isbell’s sour mash life,  “She tells you she wears your ring,” He sings, “After a couple of drinks she’s a little bit scared of you.”

It could be a soldier trying to re-adjust to life, “to towing the civilian line, but their all scared of you.” But it’s easy to see the parallels in the armed forces and being on tour, and if touring to a musician is a battle every night, then what do they do when they come home and have to come back down from the lights and the cheers and the crowds? They have to get used to the silence.

“Its not the time that made it go south, Its not the liquor that burns in your mouth, its not that her figure has changed, Its just that soldiers get strange.”

There are moments all over this record, moments where the righteous anger of Isbell’s voice matches the ferocity of his band, on tracks like “Good”, where he, sounding more like himself than on any other track, laments that he will always be a bad person, that his fate is sealed.

“I can’t make myself do right, on a Friday night,” he sings “With all of these shadows they get bigger, and bigger in the light” and in so doing makes an almost an direct reference to his own past, how in the swarm of all of this celebrations and revelry, he still feels paralyzed by the loss, like “petrified old wood.”

There’s a ray of hope through all of this desert dust, heat, whiskey and mortality, in the form of “However Long” that holds onto the light with a rousing chorus, while the stop on a dime percussion provided by way of double duty producer/ drummer Matt Pence (Pence, who produced the record, also plays in seminal Denton, Texas act Centromatic) drives the needle into the shot in the arm of the chorus, with lines that propel the track into the sweet kick that it delivers. “However long the night the dawn will break again.”  And after the pervasive sense of loss on the record, it’s nice to know that some of this homespun wisdom isn’t fatal.

Recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and at the same studio where many of the classic soul records were made, many by Patterson Hood’s father, many by various members of Isbell’s family.  Music to Isbell runs as deep as the blood in his veins, as deep as religion, and that deep conviction can be felt all the way through “Coda”, a fine two minute instrumental track with the whole band playing the melody they will go on to repeat on “Last song I will ever write.”

“The Blues” is a straight up RnB number, and Isbell’s ragged whiskey growl is perfectly matched by the swing the band deploys here.  The melody might be disarmingly cute, but the lyrics cut right to the bone. The song is about what the blues does to us who choose to live it, and it’s Isbell pulling out his emotional scars out with a bittersweet twang, and its surprisingly light in it’s composition, with an up tempo swing that’s really delightful.

The traditional R&B sound carries on in “No Choice in the Matter”, replete with horns, whiskey soaked piano, and that great Isbell moan, lean close enough and you’d swear it was recorded in 1962.

At this point in Isbell’s career, he has just produced a record that cements his status as a bandleader in full command of his musical powers. He has shown, at thirty years old, that he is a mature artist capable of employing a variety of styles in order to get the characters in his songs to really ring out.  It’s a record you’ll play and play until the record’s arc comes clear – from the homespun childhood reverie of “Seven Mile Island” to the last breath of a veteran in “The Last Song I Will Write” – Isbell and his 400 unit have released a solid collection that’s full of heart, guts, heartbreak and regret, a work that cements his reputation as a bandleader while creating a truly riveting break-up-and-recovery record.

These are the ones who rose to the top, my most listened to records of the year, more or less.

1. The Drive By Truckers – Brighter than Creation’s Dark

Expectations were high on this one. Would they be able to live up to the consistency they’ve maintained over the years? What effect would the departure of guitarist/songwriter Jason Isobel have on the rest of the band?

A double album? Aren’t those usually affairs where the strongest stuff could be distilled down to one record?

Well all questions were answered on the first go around. And there were two not-so-good-songs, “Bob”, and “You and Your Crystal Meth.” Bassist Shonna Tucker pens two tracks, the stellar exercise in heartbreak, and a true story based loosely, I think, on her divorce from former band-member Jason Isobel, “I’m sorry Houston” and “Home field Advantage” Patterson Hood continued to create masterworks, centerpieces that showcase his ever expanding musical palate.

Cooley on the other hand, really gives the rest of the band a run for their money by writing some of his best songs ever. Is there a better country song out there then “Checkout time in Vegas”? I don’t think so.Legendary lap steel player Spooner Oldham plays on almost every track on here, and seeing him live really added a sturdy sense of intrigue to every track.

It took months to really hear all the nooks and crannies on this set, but it remained a highlight throughout the year, and their live show, well, I don’t know of another performer who is happier with performing on stage than Patterson Hood and his Drive by Truckers

2. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive

I saw both The Hold Steady and the Drive by Truckers on their package tour, and while no one  brings it on home live better than the ‘Truckers (OK, maybe My Morning Jacket), The Hold Steady sure did a fine job of gunning for the top spot. Craig Finn had honed his writing skills on the interim between “Boys and Girls in America” and “Stay Positive”, creating these rhyming couplets that absolutely get lodged up in the listener’s brain like an obsessive thought, a loose tooth, a fingernail you absolutely have to pull off. 

“Second dates and lipstick tissues, New York is pretty heavy, girl I hope it doesn’t crush you.” The way the words rhyme in a way that tells the story and matches perfectly with the line before it, “Magazines and daddy issues, I guess your pretty pissed, I hope you still let me kiss you” 

The songs on Stay Positive were more song oriented, and less story telling was involved, but there was a sense on “Stay Positive”, that the level of momentum from their previous efforts was cresting on a wave of “Born to Run” inspired rock coupled with one of Rock’s most gifted songwriters.

3. Deerhunter – Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.

I didn’t care for Deerhunter’s first record, and did not expect this one to take hold with the sheer ferocity that this double album did.  I still prefer the comfortable blanket of fuzz that seems to be cloaked over every song on “Microcastle”, and while it brings to mind the shoe-gazing era of My Bloody Valentine, its shot through with enough of the wide eyed optimism, or maybe drugs, to pull the whole thing off. It takes a few listens, but “Microcastle”, and “Weird Era Cont.”, because I heard them as one album straight through, even in the age of I-tunes, it was hard for me to separate the two, and I prefered the porterhouse meal of fuzz and druggy rock found within both albums, among the ones and zeros of these some twenty five mp3s.

 4. Ryan Adams and Cardinals – Cardinology 

Ignore the cop-out album title, ignore the fact that Ryan Adams’s image is more tarnished than that of the acting career of Mickey Rourke, forget the tabloid-chasing singer and his compulsive desire to release every song and album he seems to record on a monthly basis, the fact that cannot be ignored is that Ryan Adams has refined his writing skills to a much finer point that before, and the results are nothing more than sparkling.

Within each song there is the soul of someone who has rebuilt their entire life, so as listeners we get the opportunity to see into his new self, and look at the demons that crop up, the band gels so well together on “Go Easy” and “Sink Ships” that instead of a Ryan Adams solo record, it sounds more like the cohesive sound of a band in full control of its powers, who has walked through hell to bring out these songs, these timeless songs, that stayed with me longer than any other record released in 2008. Even for a die-hard Ryan Adams fan like myself, there is relief and joy to be found in the clarity that Ryan Adams has found. Long may he run.  

5. Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst

Its no coincidence that this year was more “adult” than any other. I was dealing with first time fatherhood and maybe for the first time in my life, actually feeling like an adult, and coming to terms with all the neurosis that comes along with it. Because of this, my listening habits became more streamlined, and my need for structure and stability led me directly to this record. It’s not enough to say that Conor Oberst is in full command of his talent, so instead of his lines and singing coming across as overwrought, or sounding like he is trying to break the record for number of words in one song, he instead uses his talents and writes in a language that is clear, strong and wrought with symbols, without the structure weighing down the songs.

It’s effortless and timeless and rocks like a monkey, if a monkey could, or would, rock.

6. The Felice Brothers – The Felice Brothers

7. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

8. R.E.M. – Accelerate

Where one of the 90’s finest bands come back and genuinely, without irony, put their rock foot triumphantly into the pool.

9. Elf Power – In a Cave

10. My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges

Honorable Mention: 

1. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
2. Lambchop – (Oh) Ohio
3. French Kicks
4. Spiritualized – Songs in A&E
5. Nada Surf – Lucky
6. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
7. M83-Saturdays = Youth

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/185246

How do you a review a record for a band whose previous work you admired so much over the years that when you look at their catalog, you are really looking back at the events in your own life, proof of how music can get grafted onto us and lodged within us so deeply that the music becomes synonymous with who we are.

Case in point with Verve’s fourth record, Forth. To say that this release was anticipated by the music world is to stretch the very notion of patience. Ever since the promise found in certain songs on “Urban Hymns” and three near disastrous Richard Ashcroft solo records, a new record from the Verve is about as hopeful to me as my middle age encroaching self is capable of getting these days.

So is it any good or not? And I say like with everything else, that all depends, because while there are several worthwhile tracks on here, longtime fans can’t help but be a bit disappointed, but will find enough to reconstruct that world, where a grip on sanity wasn’t always guaranteed, and we couldn’t have been further from knowing who we were.

The first time I heard the Verve it was back in 1992, a sophomore in College, The Verve EP came to the radio station, and I had enough copies of NME and Melody Maker lying around my dorm room to recognize the name, and knew that these guys were going to be great, gods even, and if the English Press couldn’t come up with enough hyperbole to convince me, there was that cover, of a girl, probably on drugs, spinning in the middle of a room messy enough to be my own at the time, a single dormer with cigarette butts and beer cans everywhere. I was used to a little squalor about as much as the girl spinning on the cover was.

But what I was unprepared for was how much I fell for that record, Listening to “Man Called Sun” at two am after a heavy night was akin to hearing what Pink Floyd or the Dead might have sounded to the hippies back in 67, stretched out leisurely, the EP had jams that painted a lived-in psychedelic world, one entirely of their own creation. In reality they were aping all sorts of folks, too many to list on paper, but to my addled brain back then they were everything.

I heard A Storm in Heaven a few years later from my T-Rex fanatic friend Kris. Kris said it was his make out album, the one he would play when he brought girls back from seeing some third rate bar band at Frank’s Hot Dogs. The Verve seemed to inhabit their own world even more so then, the boundaries and walls of this world getting louder and more uncomfortable. Then there was the stellar B Sides Collection No Come Down and I remember the acoustic version of “Make it Till Monday” was on my walkman, and I played it until the tape got all warped. It was blessed out and blue, stoned and elegantly wasted, and back then Richard Ashcroft seemed to sweat charisma.

I hardly heard “A Northern Soul” when it came out in 1995, but it wasn’t until “Urban Hymns” came out in 1997 when I fell fully in love with both records.

For me the almost self help vibe of both of those records seem to really gel with where I was at in my life, and it seemed like the band was taking its victory lap. Tracks like “Lucky Man” and “Velvet Morning” on Urban Hymns announced their newfound optimism on their sleeves and with lyrics to yell out to like “Born a little damaged man, look what they made” and through these songs I found a kindred spirit in these easy answers to life’s biggest questions.

I hope that at least one of these songs chart and get these guys some hard earned scratch. Their previous hit, “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, yielded them exactly zero royalties, due to a sample nicked from a Rolling Stone song, “The Last Time”, so Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones manager at the time, got all the royalties from that ‘hit’.

“Sit and Wonder” makes a fine start, a shuffling stadium ready opener, one when played next to their finer moments hide some of the weaknesses that repeated listens eventually reveal, but the chorus, sweeping and all encompassing rouses the whole psychedelic monster up from its slumber.

The Single “Love is Noise” takes some getting used to. hell you practically have to ignore that pratty cat call of a chorus, a sound not unlike a pelican being hit with one of those Whack A Mole mallets found at County Fairs, used to punch down Moles that periodically pop up from pot holes with lights flashing , yeah, it’s that annoying.

But once you ignore that awful cat call, the song itself, with its call and response refrain of “I was blind, couldn’t see” and some kind of vague protest to China, “if these feet in ancient times these shoes were made from China”, evoking, William Blake’s, “And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green.”

B Side Mover is a reworking of the 1997 version, but its all bluster and cock of the walk in the right direction its assuredly braggadocio, but it has the chops and the rhythm section to back it up. It’s also better than any other song on Forth, lending credibility to the whole reunion, though that depends on your mood.

“Judas”, with its track length up to the seven minute mark, lovingly meanders in the previous pool that The Verve EP and Storm in Heaven swam in, and because of that alone, its my favorite track. Its still a treat to linger in this world, to know that this can happen, that Nick McCabe and Richard Ashcroft can still get together and create this otherworldly magic. And barring a few awful lyrics, “The trip has just begun” for example, makes up for the positively cringe worthy lines like “A latte, double shot for Judas.” Each time I listen to that last lyric, it never fails to throw me out of the soundscape, so much so that I have to bury it enough to still make it one of the best songs on this it- could-have-been-so-much-worse record.

“Rather Be” has the same propulsive melody line as “Bitter Sweet Symphony” and for the brief moments while the chorus is playing I get a twinge of bitter nostalgia wishing that this record could be as good as the others, but feeling grateful for the time all the same.

But that leaves us with the misfires: The positively catatonic drudgery that is the somnambulist “Numbness.” The vague sound of the band playing with a paint kit, painting a monster not even the “Verve” can crawl their way out of in “Noise Epic”,
The lumbering go-nowhere “Colombo”, whose sound bows back to their first full length record, A Storm in Heaven but whereas the tracks on that record created a tapestry of sound, a distinct sound whose more pointed songs told stories and the ones that didn’t faded successfully into the back ground, but “Colombo” does neither.

It’s as if someone turned on a tape recorder during an in between song moment in the studio and hit record. It shares many of the faults of this record, notably that while the ideas are interesting, engrossing even, reminding us of an earlier time long enough to warrant a repeat listen, and songs that only have a four minute shelf life are stretched out to passed the seven minute mark.

It’s a record to lose yourself in, for sure, but a record that you might not be able to find your way out of. And while occasionally, as on “Valium Skies”, “Sit and Wonder”, “Judas”, and closer “Appalachian Strings” brings us around one last time, leaving us wanting more rather than less, the rest of the record could have been left in the can, relegated to b-sides.

One thing’s for sure, “Forth” would have made one hell of an EP, one to match that moment, when I, unbeknownst to me at the time, was handed a band that would follow me kicking and screaming into adulthood.

    The very nature of this record, its’ essence, the spaces where the edges of songs come together, demands the listener to question their own expectations of pop music. That is whether or not it is the job of pop music in general to provide a catchy melody with which to sing along in the car to or should it be used as a device to shine a light on man’s deepest desires and faults?

    Such is the dilemma on Aimee Mann’s sixth record, an attempt at bridging her compelling, some might say novelistic character sketches and pairing it with catchy sing- along choruses.

    Not to get into an argument of the nature of pop music, or to suggest that artistic integrity is mutually exclusive with catchy melodies, but on Smilers she once again captures the bleak landscape of her characters as well as she did on her last two projects, The Forgotten Arm and Bachelor Number Two, as heavily sampled in the film Magnolia.

   I say bleak landscapes, because for her inspiration this time around, Aimee found an online newsgroup entitled, and I swear to god someone better write a novel about this, Alt. Bitter, and on this newsgroup she found a jewel of a posting that referred to happy people in general as ‘@#%&! Smilers’.

   And as difficult as that was to transcribe, it does work as an effective frame with which to hang the narratives of these thirteen down and out souls. We can view her songs as a complete narrative similar to 2005’s The Forgotten Arm or as thirteen separate disparate threads that together  make up a record.

   And once again, Aimee Mann has the ability to precisely find that spot in a character’s head that makes them different from everyone else. So in a refrain like “get up, you’re borrowing time” we get to pilot the freewill of someone who is sitting idly by and watching life fly past them, or the emotional distance in a relationship where one wants the other but thinks that “I want you, but you’re a poltergeist” and we see how often the theme of alienation falls under her microscope, “I got high on the Ferris Wheel, realized got what made me feel so alone. ”

    Drugs are a way to describe alienation, as they have been on the last few records, and one image I can’t help but get out of my mind, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, “Magnolia” is when the woman turned cocaine addict meeting and falling for the cop, and both of them unable to grab hold of life long enough to make it work, all while Aimee Mann’s Bachelor No. 2 played in the background. It was a perfect pairing, because the characters in Aimee Mann’s songs always seem to be reaching for something, something profound, a lack of answers or closure.

    All of the characters on @#%&! Smilers face specific problems, and while on The Forgotten Arm she spun a wide yarn of a boxer and his girlfriends as they roamed the country in search of heroin and redemption, on Smilers, the problems don’t have a specific place, but reveal those innermost problems we all have.

    And therein lies the rub. While thanks to Mann’s insightful lyrics that pinpoint the frailty, the addiction or neuroticism, there’s this vague cloud cast over the remaining characteristics on the rest of the person she is describing, so we feel left out, more than we did before. And even though we only see this person for one song, we are left wanting to know more about this person, and their surroundings, but instead we move onto the next song, the next character.

    Perhaps it’s a sign when an album as strong as Smilers, where the melodies really grab you, but compared to the three pronged attack of The Forgotten Arm, -with a full narrative, more interesting arrangements, and a storyline that could easily be translated into a film -we can’t help but come up a bit short.

    Maybe Mann is just returning to writing songs, without a novelistic or cinematic arc. Maybe it’s my fault, for needing the narrative in the first place.

   “Maybe you’ll wake up in jail alone and hold the handle of the one pay phone.” She sings on Medicine Wheel, and I can’t help but see the actions recorded in the song put to life by the cast of Six Feet Under, a Bukowski poem, or Raymond Carver Short Story, lost souls in Los Angeles, wandering across the great sprawl of city, in search of their next fix.

   I suppose that this dilemma is my own cross to bear, but I’ll gladly go back and construct an arc for these songs, time and again.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/166028

Evil Urges is a lot of things, it’s loud, proud of its third funk nipple, and isn’t afraid of flaunting it, but really a band with this many expectations weighing on their shoulders have done the right thing, and made an abrupt left turn into the jungle, it’s just that this time, thousands follow them, unaware of the band’s true nature.

The record’s concept, if one can be found, is to embrace new genres and continue the work of evolving their sound as they did on their last album “Z,” only this time instead of trying to inject elements of reggae into their sound, they try for a deep french kiss of Funk and R and B. But unlike on “Z,” there are a few serious missteps. And that line that I just wrote, “a few serious missteps” for me and many other My Morning Jacket fans that’s a hard fact to swallow. Especially about a band that for many was the savior of modern music, proof that it isn’t all just pre- programmed samples and a copy of a copy of a copy.

And that’s the thing about this record, no matter how many other songs make me believe in them – and when NPR played a snippet of “I’m Amazed” after a story on Barack Obama clinching the nomination it brought tears to my eyes – all of that is almost ruined when I attempt to listen to “Highly Suspicious.” It never lasts long before I have to hit that ‘next’ button. The whole tune sounds like a ruse, a gag, an attempt to push the envelop on what their sounds is and who might find it acceptable, and for the life of me, I can’t separate the rest of the record from “Highly Suspicious.” This record is what I like to call the Moonraker of My Morning Jacket albums, with its slick clean production, the layer of plastic wrap sheen over every note and bridge. Where once MMJ opened up the tallest doors to heaven by way of Crosby Stills & Nash, Neil Young, the Band, and America, the doors now slide open without any hum, automated by robots, by Kraftwerk and the soul- stripped sound of late period Marvin Gaye, distilled and filtered through Boz Scaggs. All is not lost in the land of Evil Urges though. Opening track, “Evil Urges” has become a real favorite, with two peak moments, one where Jim James high falsetto belts out clean and strong, in tandem with strings and piano and even though they are by way of a synthesizer, you get that feeling of transcendence that the very best soul records achieve.

The second part comes midway into the song by way of an Allman Brothers guitar breakdown. It’s a breath of fresh air that the song returns to the core sound of My Morning Jacket, and all on the first track. “Thank You Too” has another one of those moments, where you can really hear Marvin in the refrain “Although our world seems, fallen apart.” In this refrain all of the music behind the vocals fly past us, like it does on Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and we are flying, through the clouds, allowing us to see a little glimpse of the ground. The guitars, when they do come into this ballad, they slip out of the speakers as effortlessly as on the band’s other records, and all is right with the world. The guitar is not lost in Evil Urges, but waits for the perfect time to pounce. Then that guitar goes one further and dips in a beautiful solo, slipping and sliding like the closing credits, its schmaltzy sure, but still ranks as one of the album’s better tracks and along with “I’m Amazed” and “Evil Urges” these will be the ones that stay with you. “Sec Walkin” Sounds like Jim James channeling Boz Scaggs on “Dirty Lowdown” and then there’s this weird compression on his voice that’s not reverb, but some sort of interstellar stardust. But it’s delivered in such a relaxed way, it seems earnest, it’s sun-drenched in reverb and features great falsetto harmonies. Think Marvin Gaye again with a tear in his eye and Stevie Wonder during his Fulfilling-ness First Finale period. “Smokin from Shootin’” mixes their earlier sound with a futuristic ELO reverb, and it sounds like a band hanging up their old “Tennessee Fire” sound, sitting back and staring into the fire. Brushstrokes in the form of a perfect lap steel bubble up, and it sounds like Jim James questioning his own happiness, a life of missed opportunities on the road. Lyrically, it paints a portrait of a man not unlike Don Quixote, heartbroken, demented and lost. The tone of the song seems dated too, echoing moments radio snips of old Eagles’ songs in my head, tender and embarrassing at the same time. There’s a new-found tenderness to their sound on this record, a lightness of touch missing from their heavier songs, a trait which could seem like a weakness and might contribute to the lack of faith that he speaks of in “I’m amazed”, one of the better songs on the record, one that taps into the yearning for change era of American Politics, and its one of the ones you will find yourself listening to the most. The trademarks of old mix successfully with this robot-themed sound, as Jim James sings about things that amaze him: a lack of faith, a divided nation, the ocean, stuff like that. It’s propelled by the same rhythm section as many of their classic songs are, and the whole song leaves the listener with another good friend to add to the canon.

“The Librarian” makes me think of a certain lyrical laziness, “since we got the interweb” left me feeling like the making of this record maybe wasn’t their highest priority. For any other artist this track would be a success, and the tasteful string sections is placed just where it should be, but this track shows that maybe the songwriting mechanism might be in need of some oiling. But one success can be mentioned, that about halfway through the song, the strings and the lyrics all come together and it actually sounds like what they were trying to achieve, this emotive soul sound, where Jim James can fully drape around him, to be, without irony, ensconced in his rhythm and blues soul side neglige. That same airiness prevails on the next track, “Look at You,” and at this point we are in the slow drawn out painful break up mode perhaps, a chance for Jim James to do a bit of bloodletting, and his voice sounds fantastic as he sings “Hope and Glory, let me follow you.”

“Remnants” is maybe the hardest rocking My Morning Jacket song in their entire catalog, which charges forward with a glam-induced sense of urgency, carrying on the rock despite everything else on this record that doesn’t rock. It may stick out a little bit, but we all know that when MMJ play it live the plastic wrap and bleating drum beat sounds will fade and we will remember these songs in their proper context. “Aluminum Park”, with its Detroit Horn section sound, should by all means work, but to me it sounds like My Morning Jacket are running on autopilot, letting the strengths of a band drag them through the track. The breakdown in the middle of the song is still amazing though, and when this and everything else on Evil Urges works, it clicks together and illustrates just how incomplete the rest of this record feels. I know what I said earlier, but you’ll find that your expectations will change depending on how much you listen to this record, whether by listening one track at a time, or pulling it apart, and reworking it, changing its intended order, like the Dadaists do or did, or don’t do anymore. The closing track “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Part II”, what starts out as a great idea, one tailor made for this My Morning Jacket Mach II project, a bit of Space Disco, but when its stretched out over eight minutes the conceit wears a little thin. And what starts out as great momentum leads into a great middle, like dancing on the saddle of a horse, or riding it bareback, rounding the corner of the track on a run,but what could be a victory lap is a slow limp to the finish line.

And what I walk away most with is, along with the unexpected strength in the act of creating powerful ballads with tongue firmly in cheek, the what does it all mean, general lack of coherence this record has. And still after all of that said, there are some real strong songs here, all with the bitter feeling from “Highly Suspicious” lingering in the background like a two day hangover. I still can’t get over the act of using the line “Peanut Butter Pudding Surprise,” as a chorus and my only guess is that it is either a practical joke or deliberate nose dive for the band. I mean what do they gain by doing this?

All I can come up with is that Jim James, and the band, with all of this scrutiny, decided to have a little fun with a record, and not take every track so seriously. Perhaps the joke is on us the listener then for us having high expectations in the first place, like we set ourselves up for this. So in the end how do we treat “Highly Suspicious?” as a Bob Dylan self-sabotage hatchet job or a clandestine inside joke? Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, maybe there’s an alternate world where “Highly Suspicious” is memorized by every spotted teenager wanking away at Guitar Center. God I hope not.

M83’s latest, Saturdays=Youth, takes the listener on an imaginary time warp, one where seemingly dissimilar musical blends and memories meld, where Cocteau Twins era dream nostalgia merges with old techno styles to create a hermetically sealed world, imagined through the eyes and ears of various High School students, including you, dear reader.

This record is so well put together its like scenes unfolding in a film, all working together, to define us, then and now, each end of each song a smooth transition into the next one, so it’s the night out and the morning after, from puberty to prom night, the third wine cooler and the sick feeling next morning.

It starts off with a simple piano etching out the skies. Then the synthesizers come in, reminding us where we are, placing us there, on the morning of the day that changed your life, maybe it was the morning after the prom, the first letdown in a lifetime of letdowns. Then the vocals bleed in from other tracks, spindled memories from college radio, from the back seats of cars, passing a whiskey bottle nicked from the parents sadly ignored liquor cabinet. Burning down the road, the music on so loud, you can barely make out the sound of the wind over the synths and voices that come in.

After the introduction of “You Appearing”, next up is the immediate ear candy, of “Kim & Jessie” and you’d be hard pressed to find a more lovely a fitting tribute to the decade of cocaine and synthesizers, with its lilting chorus that nicely scuffs up your Trapper Keeper. Early Human League is a reference point, as is OMD, China Crisis, maybe even Flock of Seagulls, all filtered through the haze of a cold high school morning. Sonically its all there, from the sublime guitars part that sound like My Bloody Valentine, the birds chirping backwards sound, the chorus, of “Somebody loves you shadows”, whispered across the halls of our imagined high school like a rumor floating from the quads to the commons.

And my god is the sequence on this record perfect, for just as the sweet airy chorus of “Kim &Jessie” hits us, after a brief return to instrumental vintage electronic music, “Graveyard Girl” comes next with an opening not unlike New Order’s “Ceremony”. With a strident drum sound giving way to the opening of one of the best melodies of the year, the guitars, synthesizers, and the bucolic vocals talk about high school and seems to control the plot, who told what to whom and how the are all connected by this “Graveyard Girl.”

“Graveyard Girl” is all told through the canvas of a really great Echo and the Bunnymen song smoked through an ethereal filter, the synthesizers overlapping into guitars, driving home the dreamy days and nights, when the sky seemed as tall and endless as the person you chose to sit next to until long after dark.Then the narrative switches, and we hear this Graveyard Girl actually step out and reveal herself.

“I’m going to jump the walls and run… I won’t miss them… I’ll read poetry to the stars… waiting for someone to love me… I’m fifteen years old and already I feel like its already too late to live… don’t you?”

That moment in particular captures the cant wait to grow up, cant wait to get out of here feeling of adolescence, of loving everything too much until it hurts. It all makes for one of the best songs of the year, wrapped in my own memories of High School, the sounds all tumbled together, with the alienation of rejection in a disappointing prom night, barely graduating, the t-shirts and haircuts, promises and lies, all of my youth heavy and traumatic served up in delicate layers of froth and steam, electronics and breathy vocals. From there we venture into instrumental territory, a fizzy tribute to New Order in “Coloures”.

And in this scene we could be at the Prom, the haircuts refined and defined by Flock of Seagulls, the punks in the corner with mohawks, chains and those skeleton Misfits logos running up their arms.“Up” gives us a glimpse, a come down in the form of a lost 80s FM radio classic.“We own the sky” is a kind of overly ambitious anthem where droning keyboards show the cars lined up at the impromptu park party, the one where the cops brought out the police spotlight across cars where teenagers crouch on the ground and sip beer out of red cups.“7AM, dusty road, I’m going to drive until it burns my bones” Declares the narrator at the start of “Highway of Endless Dreams” the voice sounds like our Graveyard Girl, after she’s moved past the graveyard, and wants escape so badly she can feel it in the way the song creeps up and folds over it self, perpetuating motion, as we can see the suburban landscapes giving way to mountain ranges, receding ice packs, state borders, highway patrol cars and shimmering coastlines.

All of this is meant to accompany a listener’s interpretation of the 1980s, and how each year the music changed, and sometimes it brought you closer to someone, and sometimes the songs were like a kegger, the voices and faces and personalities blurring together to the endless techno beat blotted out by kegs of Natural Light. And as the eighties looked out over the precipice into the nineties, to the Acid House movement, we feel like we’re right in that pocket, watching the sun go down. “Dark Moves of Love” with its rising chorus out of a cloud of guitar and keyboard tells our imaginary high school that its not too late, because they like just broke up like yesterday, calling our hero to action to traipse across the campus to where she is, over to the art room, and maybe when he goes through the circular tube that is the entrance to the print room.

And she was in there, her face framed by the half waterfall of blonde hair, head cocked back just so, and this was falling in love for the first time. Because being sixteen, seventeen its like you’ve already missed your chance. With the teacher far away, it was just her and him and being alive then meant living forever and he is you and you had to settle for the red lights and the image of you two coming up under the fixer in the photo room.

An image taken last Saturday at the park, where she leaned onto your shoulder, and the synthesizers kicked in slowly like they do in the final song “Midnight Souls Still Remain”. In this song, memories of High School fade in a long slow dissolve (11 minutes) to the present, looking back at who we were then, an older image, one in the bottom of your drawer. a photo you made in that dark room that day, an image burned into photo paper clinging to the bottom of the fixer tray.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/155249

There’s something about Oregon Winters, how bleak the days can be, the afternoons lazily going by, and getting used to the endless variety of cloud cover, be it white or cream-colored, that makes me think about Sun Kil Moon.

There is something in the voice of Sun Kil Moon lead singer Mark Kozelek that seems to hit me with a stormy sense of arrival, the way it washes over my ears, and how sometimes his voice seems almost comically one-dimensional, and others it hits the way that you feel, just nails it, and you have thoughts in your head since you last got out of that Leonard Cohen phase. And there are whole corners of people in the world that never listen to this stuff, because it’s too melancholic?

The first few times I put the record on, it seemed too much for me to judge in one sitting. I wanted time with this. The second time I put the record on, it didn’t fare well. The sun was out, maybe for the first time this year, a lick of warmth of Summer in a cold Spring, but then that guitar on “The Light” hit me, and there I was, the two of us, in bed, right before it happened, and next thing I knew I was taken off to a better place.

The next time I only thought about it as an entity, how sound waves reverberating off of a wall constitute one hell of a thing, and this record was now becoming a challenge to review. The truth was I couldn’t find anything to call it, anything to compare it to, but this huge empty white canvas on my computer monitor and the words that couldn’t describe the sounds being wrung from this disc with my heavy hands.

Part of the blame lies on the creator Mark Kozelek, as he doesn’t write typical songs. You listen to Mark Kozelek for where he takes you, the atmosphere. There are common markers for the faithful: sunny days take a back seat to gray ones, there are gusts of wind in his songs, and torrents of sea spray abound.

His last record under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, 2003’s “Ghosts of a Great Highway” was a flight through the stratosphere, where time unfolded slowly with great effort and focus, as we waited for one thing that was slowly revealed musically, and whether it was a turn of phrase, a melody or swelling guitar solo, it made the listening so rewarding that it made it well worth the wait. So his new album, “April” then, deals in similar atmospherics to its predecessor, and it often feels like music that one could surrender to completely, as one surrenders to the voice of a favorite author or a mad proclivity.

For this record Kozelek slows down a bit, letting many of the songs luxuriate into the seven minute mark, which makes it even easer to block out all other senses and just listen and wait for a slow realization to hit. Maybe at the time I’m falling in or out of love, maybe I’m watching someone I love suffer greatly. It might be too late to save my marriage, your marriage, but during one listen we will be transcended, disappointed, inspired, dispirited, taken in on a very personal journey. For this is music to have epiphanies to, music for reflective times, as Sun Kil Moon, really just Kozelek, set up atmospheres where you will want to linger in for multiple listens. You may not always be in the mood for it, but if the timing is right, and you are in the coast of your mind with waves crashing and your whole landscape continually changing, you will be rewarded.

Sometimes when I listened, I wanted to warn all of you. “Reader take heed.” I wanted to say. For just as too much naval gazing can cause self-obsession, you might find that time spent with this record is akin to time spent too focused on one painful event, as the record at times does, and you get swept up in the undertow. Much of the record goes by slowly, with the clouds forming into a fine sketch of someone’s face, like a forgotten moment in third grade pulled out of a memory and digested.

The record then picks up speed with Crazy Horse-inspired “Tonight the Sky”. This shuffling, catapulting rocker holds us down to earth as the storm pulls on our kite, the lightening and thunder in his voice guiding us through the storm, leaving us soaking wet and compelled. Mark Kozelek has taken great care to construct the cliffs that overlook the hill, places meticulously drawn out of his breath that immediately wraps the listener into this world. The feeling that it was all too much faded as I stretched out into “Tonight in Bilbao.” For these songs are like viewpoints on cliffs and I am in these places on the cliffs, watching the clouds go by, watching all of this nature swim up around me. And I feel like I am truly living inside of these songs.

Bonnie Prince Billy makes an appearance on a few tracks, and both of their voices when taken together, while hymn-ally hypnotic, occasionally act as too much filler, more dumpling than broth, and threaten to bloat what is by most accounts a perfect cement to bury these corpses of American legends. For this is a grand album, one not capable of fully figuring out in one sitting, but two weeks later when the record had already hit stores, and people were waiting for the review, and in six months time this will all make sense to me, my bearings complete and comfortable in their newfound chaos. It will be fully enjoyed at a time where you either fell in our out of love, or just want a comfortable spot to watch the wreckage slide into the ocean. Because in the end this record sets up for me a Mount Rushmore of melancholy, with Mark Eitzel from American Music Club, Mark Kozelek from Sun Kil Moon and Bonnie Prince Billy chiseled out and perched over the crashing waves of Big Sur, just to let that be an example for the rest of us.

For a few years during the late 1990s, the Elephant Six collective ruled supreme, and bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, and the Apples in Stereo built out and decorated a world of their own, one where the heroes of history books and the bible became intertwined, offering a second story existence from the showroom floor of reality.And that’s what Andrew Rieger’s voice and lyrics do to me when his band creaks into these songs, cracking open a new world, but really returning to an older one, like sitting in an old chair you’d forgotten about,and rocking back and forth, taking us back to that world, and breaking it wide open while pondering the universe as it flies above in the exposed roof overhead.

For these songs seem to know a future that I do not and open up demons in my past, bringing up a time when I had more facial hair and felt the dirty shag carpet of a friend’s living room. The record will become my obsession for a few weeks and then I will return to it, and in so doing I will know, once again, all the dark twists and pitfalls.

For in all of Elf Power’s music, the narrator is a higher power, situated at a level from where he can view the world ahead, and in so participating in this religious exercise that is listening to this record, I felt that I had to preface the listen with the following statement:“Gentle voice, speak to me so that I may see the infinite wisdom, from the clouds that embrace this land of ours, for I through you, have been imparted with this gift of perception, to see all the things that you see and know, for you are my vessel, my only crack into the blissful realms of eternity.”

This sort of religious reference is the results of Rieger’s voice, this lilting thing that comes up from a familiar place, a little voice inside pulling me into the song. And in so doing into skeletons that live inside of it, so all you can hear is the intention of the song, the idea of the singing, an impression, a thumb print on the inside of a cave.

I’ve been following Elf Power since the dawn of Elephant Six, when Laura Carter still played for a band that was too unreal to actually exist, Neutral Milk Hotel. My own memories of seeing Neutral Milk Hotel are murky, late night explosions, songs too overwhelming to take in, Scott Spillane and singing saws, Jeff Magnum being completely transcendent, for in his mind he was not playing in a shitty little dive bar in Columbia, South Carolina, no. He was hosting the god of Shiva the destroyer through his veins and limbs and Shiva was adjusting all thirty-eight notches in his spine.

But while Neutral Milk seemed almost too otherworldly, Elf Power at the time were real people and the good friends of good friends of mine, and Andrew Rieger would send tapes of Jeff Magnum and Elf Power to my friend’s place, and the one we listened to the most, apart from Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, was Elf Power’s first album proper, “When the Red King Comes.”

And the friend who received all of the tapes, who read the letters aloud, in the dingy hardwood floor upstairs apartment, this person, who’s no longer alive, is paired with me forever in Elf Power, and on every record since then I’ve found a little bit of him there.I’m not entirely sure that I am correct about it being there, and maybe I am only hearing it, because each time I miss him, especially on “Walking with the Beggar Boys”, because it sounds like Rieger is feeling the loss as well. For he died a year or so before “Beggar Boys” came out, enough time for his story to be included in the record’s song cycle. I heard his voice in many of the songs, specific lines that referenced my memories of him. And so each time the ghost of him would prop itself up, the tragedy coming back as well, of how someone so alive and so bright one minute can be dead the next.

I tell this story, because on “In A Cave” the songs stretch far back, take a step back sound-wise, right next to “When the Red King Comes”, so close I can make out the yellow paper Andrew’s Letters came on, the smell of the place, my friend’s smile when he listened to the record for the first time, feeling proud that his friend had made such powerful music. So “In a Cave” with its strange interludes, trap doors, bursts of tangled branches of noises, backwards chants that sound like John Lennon inhaling the Tibetan Book of the Dead, has so many caverns and crannies to get lost in, has all of the moss, stalactites and stalagmites of a dirty psychedelic rock record.

“New Illusions appear everyday it’s getting harder to wish them away,”In this song, we can’t tell if Rieger is talking about a young person becoming older in an increasingly jaded world, or if it’s a teenager waiting for the assurance of the drugs to kick in.Either way, at either end of the spectrum, it’s prophetic, and seems to operate on both of these levels simultaneously.There’s something motherly about Rieger’s voice, that until now I hadn’t notice, a comfort for gray skies and that dark inevitable disappointment and deceit that eventually falls on all of us, to fight off friends left behind in dark rooms with bruises all over them.

There are reasons why people cling to music as their salvation, and songs like “New Dark Lord” when taken at face value, could be a new darker lord in the form of the supernatural realm, or a dark political storm brewing, either way if we acknowledge the darkness then we give ourselves permission to live.A bit of fifties girl group in the melody line of “Softly through the Void” lightens the mood a bit, and if that just-mentioned title in itself doesn’t just go ahead and just define the whole record, the gentle passage over the tip of inferno’s tightrope, nothing else will.

“The Demon’s Daughter” comes in towards the end, another title that pits the familial against the fabric of darkness, another juxtaposition of fairytale chaos against the vacuum of the natural world around us, where an evil force is sucking the life out of earth, each drop of ocean, people splinter, one person dies, and into this “one comes alive”. “Demon’s Daugther” opens up the possibility of a messianic figure to show up and straighten things out in the next song, “Quiver and Quake” but that never actually happens, just more natural disasters, but the ship remains on course for one of the better tracks on a record filled with natural peaks and valleys, areas where we are supposed to check out in confusion, to be lulled away by sirens that take us back from the dark islands back into more subtle tones. And in this way, old friends who’ve passed away are brought back through memories, no matter how dark.