(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

So, this was going to be the year when I finally got my act together and published a nice bunch of reviews of my favorite albums of the year by the end of the year. Turns out it’s not going to happen, as I got dumped on this December with snow, work, family stuff, and, most recently, preparing to move.  So, no plethora of album reviews for you, but I will try to do better next year. I figured the least I could do is put together some lists of favorites, even if I can’t provide much of any context, description, or justification for my choices.  Here are my favorite albums of 2009, arranged in an arbitrary manner most convenient to my purposes.

Fifteen Favorites:

1. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
3. Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
4. M. Ward: Hold Time
5. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
6. Woods: Songs of Shame
7. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
8. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
9. Passion Pit: Manners
10. Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
11. Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
12. Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
13. Girls: Album
14. Atlas Sound: Logos
15. Ganglians: Monster Head Room

Five EPs:

1. Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
2. Abe Vigoda: Reviver
3. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
4. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
5. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

A Trio of Great Rock Albums:

1. The Dead Weather: Horehound
2. Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
3. Sonic Youth: The Eternal

Two Magic Albums:

1. Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
2. Memory Tapes: Seek Magic

A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)

• Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
• Dan Deacon: Bromst
• Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
• Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
• Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
• Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
• Mos Def: The Ecstatic
• Small Black: Small Black
• Wavves: Wavves
• Wilco: Wilco (the album)

Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time.  I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.

Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com.  They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it.  I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music.  You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album).  I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site.  I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.

An Album Review

Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!

Dan Deacon: Bromst
Carpark Records
Released March 24, 2009

Try “Woof Woof” ( Track 8 ) right here right now for some fun, free, immediate gratification. It’s just as easy as pushing that button your parents really don’t want you to push. Go ahead, push the button. PUSH THE BUTTON!

I absolutely love music, but apparently I do not often respond to its performance with prescribed, socially-sanctioned behaviors.   Although I have vague memories that, at least in the context of compulsory elementary school performances, I may have actually been a decent dancer and furthermore that I may have actually enjoyed dancing, I don’t dance at all. I might occasionally take the liberty of nodding my head or tapping my feet to some music, but that would most likely be in the privacy of my own home, or the false privacy of my own car.  My preferred stance for watching a musical concert is to sit or stand, probably with my arms folded. Symphony or jazz performances work out pretty well for me, but moving beyond those genres I am kind of at odds with the rest of the audience.

This stoicism with regards to musical performances has given me much social trouble and internal anguish for many years (cue the sorrowful strings and/or alienating electronic soundscapes). The first time I remember being cognizant of my socially-maladaptive-live-music-behavior was at a Yes concert my friend and I went to in high school. Even at that time, I was given to understand that going to a Yes concert as a teenager in 1996 was a somewhat nerdy thing to do. And yet as it turned out, I was far too cerebral even for this crowd. Throughout the opening set, played by none other than The Alan Parsons Project, (APP, as I have just monikered them, is the 80s band famous for “Sirius,” that dramatic arpeggio synth/guitar intro that they use to announce the home team players at every Utah Jazz game ever played, that also, when played on the classic soft rock radio stations, leads directly into their proto-Radiohead/Coldplay song “Eye in the Sky,” featuring the chorus, “I am the eye in the sky / Looking at you-ooh-ooh / I can read your mind?”  That’s the Alan Parsons Project, and you’d better believe I saw them do it live), this fifty-year-old drunk guy sitting next to me was absolutely spazzing out, dancing, yelling, and swinging his arms all over the place. He inadvertently hit me a few times, and every time he did this and saw that I didn’t really appreciate it I received remonstrations from him and his wife for just standing there and not dancing or being more excited. Apparently I was not simply allowed to freak out and have a seizure over The Alan Parsons Project as they performed their opening set, but I was expected to do so. Also, apparently I’ve never enjoyed life.

Fast forward through the years, and I’ve only gotten worse in regards to correct concert behavior. A year or so after that Yes concert I saw Pearl Jam play a huge benefit concert at High School Memorial Stadium in their home town of Seattle. Pretty cool, right? I haven’t told you how at this General Admission concert, with plenty of room everywhere, I was sitting far, far away from the stage up in the bleachers of the stadium. Also I have not disclosed that I was sitting next to my parents in those faraway seats; they came not for even the slightest love of Pearl Jam or rock music, but because while on family vacation they wouldn’t let me go to a concert by myself in a strange town. Not wanting to destroy my hopes of seeing my favorite band (at the time) perform, they insisted on coming with me and were extremely nice in their paranoid over-protection. To be honest, though, I’m not sure if my behavior at that concert would have been any different had I been there by myself. I may have wandered around the stadium a bit more, but I’m not sure if I would have dared descend to the field in front of the stage where all the action was, among all the people who really “loved the music.” The concert was alright. The sound was tinny, I could barely see the band, and Eddie embarrassed me by swearing a whole bunch in front of my parents, which was kind of lame.

Since then, I have pretty much never gone to concerts. Like I said, I do love music. I have daydreamed and conjectured as to how certain songs or bands sound when played live. I’m curious to see how people manipulate their instruments, and how their voices sound live. I even made this list about a year ago, after finally going to see one of my favorite bands (Broken Social Scene) perform live at a free concert.

But when artists whose records I have pined over for years roll into town, I suddenly find that I am not that interested in going.  I fear that they may not live up to my expectations.  I don’t have anyone to go with, or I don’t know where the venue is, or I am afraid I won’t know how to navigate all the weird private club business in Utah because I never do it otherwise, or I won’t act appropriately. I won’t dance when I’m supposed to dance. I won’t be wearing the right clothes. I’ll be too old, or too young. I won’t be drunk. I won’t be screaming at the top of my lungs. I generally just won’t fit in with the theoretical crowd of my imaginings.  I can think of tons and tons of reasons why I might be uncomfortable and not enjoy the concert, and these worries combine to ruin whatever positive experience I might have listening to the music and watching the musicians.

A case in point would be the aforementioned Broken Social Scene concert. They performed an outdoor concert at the Gallivan Center in Salt Lake City, part of the city’s free summer concert series. For years I had wanted to see BSS live. From what I had read in a couple of interviews and reviews of their concerts, I had intuited that certain songs that on their records featured inscrutable vocals buried low in the mix, or that had been otherwise remixed and deconstructed into oblivion, would be recast as dynamic rockers when played live. On this count my intuitions were correct: the Scene contrast their occasional “shyness” on tape with a robust, celebratory, collective performance. They interact with the crowd, they are good showmen, they have great energy and a strong collection of songs, and musically they have a looseness and a swagger, operating practically like a jam band without the long, tepid noodling. In other words, they are a great rock group.

But the crowd ultimately kind of ruined the concert experience. Before the concert started the people around seemed like good enough folks. There were people who looked to be regulars of the concert series, younger and middle aged couples, a few young families. Hanging around in front of the stage there were a lot of kids who may or may not have been hipsters, I really can’t say, but many were the type of kids that I imagine as filling up a Kilby Court concert (I’ve never actually been to one) and making me feel not very cool, clothed in what I intuited were the latest anti-styles (in this case a year ago it was v-neck t-shirts and tight girls jeans for the guys, unflattering retro-styled dresses for the girls).  These were the types of people one would expect to see viewing and enjoying this concert, and that’s great.  However, as the concert progressed we stayed in the same spot but everyone who had been around at the start of the concert seemed to have disappeared. In their stead were seething masses of high school kids that seemed to be there just to hang out and didn’t really care about the band or the music at all.  It was mystifying to me how quickly the concert mutated into a high school stomp.  There were tons of kids up in the front moshing and crowd surfing.  There were lots of thuggish kids moving through the crowds, oblivious to what was going on onstage.  These guys in front of us took their shirts off and performed dances that looked like aerobics routines, and random girls just came up and danced with them.  Where did they all come from and why were they there?

I enjoyed that concert, but over the subsequent months the memory of the crowd has worked on me to the point that I am afraid to go to a concert again.  When this year’s Gallivan Center concert lineup was announced, it included several of my current favorite musical artists, including Sonic Youth, who you may notice are prominently included on the above list I composed one year ago.  Would all those kids show up and try to push Sonic Youth into playing punk-pop like they were part of  the Vans Warped Tour?  (Not that Sonic Youth would cede to such a push; that may have been an interesting confrontational concert to watch.)  Would they try to crowdsurf to M. Ward’s easygoing folk-rock singer/songwriter stylings?  I was afraid to even find out.  Because of a busy schedule, but mostly out of fear of a negative experience, I didn’t go to any of these concerts this year;  not even my favorite Sonic Youth.  Chicken.

* * *

Last Friday evening I walked out into the backyard of my in-laws house, just to feel the cool, rainy air for a minute. After standing out there for a second, I noticed music emanating from somewhere in the neighborhood. It sounded very much like live, amplified music. This was intriguing to me, as my in-laws home is nestled in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, nowhere near any place that would be considered a concert venue. Furthermore, it seemed to be trying to rain, not necessarily the ideal condition for an outdoor performance. Curious, I walked to the front of the house to look for any indications of what was going on. I walked down the street, towards the source of the sounds. The cars parked up and down the street convinced me that it was definitely a party, but I still wasn’t entirely positive that they weren’t just blasting a CD out over a great sound system, because the music was spot-on. As you’ve probably determined by now, I’m not much of a partier, so I just walked around the block for a minute, listening to a really tight country-funk-southern rock groove and the sounds of someone absolutely killing on the electric fiddle floating around the neighborhood. There was no questioning at this point that it was a live band. The only question was, who the heck was this band and why were they playing someone’s backyard party in Holladay?

I went back to my in-laws’ house and found Gin, and asked her to come on a walk with me to see what she thought of the music and to see if she by chance would be able to figure out who these people were and what was going on. As we reached the house, she, being much more socially brave and nonchalant than I, pulled me along and we followed some guy through the garage of the party house and out onto a balcony deck, where we found ourselves overlooking a giant pool party and backyard filled with people of all ages. The band was set up beneath the balcony right by the side of the pool, and an advertising slideshow on a TV set up next to their equipment informed us that they referred to themselves as Bonepony. This seemed a familiar-sounding name for some reason.

So we stood up there on the deck and watched them for a few minutes. This was the first time I had ever crashed a party. At first I kept expecting someone to come and ask us who we were and be irritated at our presence, but the whole thing was very casual. Nobody paid us any mind. There were people playing around in the pool, some of them dancing to the music. There were people sitting in lawn chairs, watching the band. There were people standing in groups talking and drinking beers. I actually saw a guy come up to a woman and say “Do you come here often?” and he wasn’t joking.  At one point, the singer invited all the neighbors to come over, rather than call the cops.

Thinking about this house party concert, it is totally illogical to me that at this gig, which looked to be very much a party, rather than a concert, it was easy to just watch and enjoy the music without ridiculous distractions from other crowd members, and without any social pressure to get rowdy.  The crowd was not pushing one way or the other; everyone was able to do their own thing and enjoy the experience in their own way.  In contrast, many crowd members at several of the concerts I have attended attempt to hijack the concert and turn it into some wild party.  I guess what those great men once said is true, “You’ve got to fight for your right to party,” even at a rock concert.  I guess it turns out that while I look at a concert as an opportunity to hear and watch some music performed, many people take a concert as nothing more than an opportunity to dance, drink, goof around, grope somebody, whatever. The music and musicians that may be playing are simply incidental to the main purpose: to act like an ass. It turns out you can party to the Alan Parsons Project if you are loaded enough.  You can mosh or get crunk to Canadian indie rock collectives.  I suppose you can party to Sonic Youth or M. Ward.  I guess while you’re doing all of that, I can stay home and listen to my records.

[The title of this post comes from "Do the Standing Still," an entirely appropriate song that the Dismemberment Plan were nice enough to write about me. Listen to it below. At one time, the Dismemberment Plan were my favorite band, but sadly, if nonetheless inevitably, their plan came to completion, and they no longer exist. It must be noted that one of my most regretted concert misses ever was their Death and Dismemberment Tour with Death Cab for Cutie, which happened before the Plan broke up and before Death Cab became kind of like a big deal. This song comes from the Plan's second album, The Dismemberment Plan Are Terrified. I think that album's kind of hit and miss, but their third and fourth albums, 1999's Emergency & I and 2001's Change are stone cold classics of post-emo indie rock hipster geekery. They are sorely missed.]

I guess I kind of forgot that posting to my blog isn’t a major literary event, and maybe something is better than nothing at all.  It’s been rather too quiet lately here at the Freez.  To my credit, I did finally improvise a rudimentary, homemade masthead (see above), which debuts today.

So, in lieu of the fabulous pieces of writing the FroztFreez has remained virtually unknown for, I’m passing along a little summertime musical treat for everyone.  It sounds like ice cream trucks and carnival rides.  (I actually heard an ice cream truck driving through Vivian Park today and it made me want to listen to this song some more.)  It’s a great jam called “Walkabout,” a new collaboration between Atlas Sound (the solo project of Bradford Cox, lead singer for Deerhunter) and Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear, a member of Animal Collective).  I predict it will make you smile and maybe bob your head.  I also predict it will eventually be used to sell Volkswagens and maybe mutual funds.  Since I like to say that Animal Collective are my favorite band, and I know that secretly Deerhunter are probably really my favorite band, it was certainly nice of these two guys from my two favorite bands to get together and make this track.  Just press play to hear it, and right click on the link below if you want to download the free track to have for yourself.

Walkabout – Atlas Sound with Noah Lennox

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It sounds like a hand-labeled cassette given to you by a friend, or found in an attic or an old drawer.

We have had a lot of rainy days lately around these parts.

It feels like it was recorded in a cabin in the mountains, a homespun recording with the tape hiss in the background to prove it.

It is filled with both simple folk songs and swirling psychedelic jams.

I pretty much live in a cabin in the mountains.

It is as likely to have been recorded four decades ago as four days ago.

With the exception of the giant eyeball UFO.

The songs of this album are full of pattering drums, dripping guitars, and falsetto harmonies. They make me think of the rain when I listen to them.

The cover art might as well be my own home canyon it looks so similar, all green-hued and overcast.

One of the best songs on the album is called “Rain on You,” and features the chorus, “Oh, how the days will rain on you.”

Um, Neil Young.

This is a great rainy day album.

See my pictures of South Fork from last week if you would like a comparison.

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino, 2009)

It should be good to share our favorite things
I’ll keep an open mind if you let me in
Don’t let your temper rise, don’t get a bitter face
Try not to judge me on my kind of taste
And don’t go changing clothes when they don’t like yours

This invitation and counsel comes from the closing verse of the song “Taste,” a squelching Beach Boys-meets-Main Street Electrical Light Parade stomp from Animal Collective’s latest opus, Merriweather Post Pavilion. If ever there was one album worth leaving your musical comfort zone for, an album worth spending some time getting acquainted with, allowing it to grow and reveal its many delights and rewards to you (even, and maybe especially, if you didn’t like it at first), this is the one.

Throughout their career as a band, Animal Collective has tapped into the joyful, scary sounds of childhood sonic exploration. By this I refer to the fun, meandering, genius songs that some four-year-olds make up on the spot, or the wild sounds you might hear an untrained five year old who has free reign at a piano pound out. In other words, these are the musical activities children feel free to do before they learn to do them the proper way, before they become self-conscious and embarrassed about such behavior, or before the keyboard cover is slammed down and they are dragged out of grandma’s living room to timeout. The members of Animal Collective either never moved past this stage or they found some magical way to revert to it. They are “playing” music, and as play it is imaginative, primal, experimental, fun, obnoxious, and, perhaps above all, mysterious.

I emphasize the mystery of their music because It is often nearly impossible to figure out what instruments, sounds, or playing methods you are hearing at any particular moment in an Animal Collective song.  In past efforts their lyrics were sometimes difficult to correctly decipher and included words placed together as much or more for their sound as for their meaning.  Again, this mystery and abstraction points back to that childlike propensity to “play,” their ignorance of many of the conventions of musicianship or their belligerent refusal to adhere to them. Over the course of their career they have developed their own idiosyncratic methods of creating music using their instruments, their computers and their voices, and this has made for several albums worthy of the listening ear of an open-minded music fan. However, with the songs on Merriweather they have clearly become masters of their self-made musical methods; this is their most accomplished and accessible album to date, in both songwriting and arrangement. Each song is fully formed, inhabiting its own lush and unique world.

Their instrumental mystery/mastery is in full play from the outset of the album with the song “In the Flowers.” Various abstract noises soon resolve themselves into a waltz rhythm featuring a triplet figure played on an instrument that, with each morphing note, sounds like it could be something different: Is it a harp? a harpsichord? a guitar? a treated piano? a synthesizer? After the second verse the song explodes into a beautiful cacophony of abstract sounds that give the effect of a full-on symphony orchestra: strings, brass, woodwinds, the whole package. I say “give the effect” because this “orchestration” is likewise of indeterminate instrumental origins. This wonderful noise blasts out over a thick electro-timpani beat and orchestral percussion. It simultaneously evokes a Tchaikovsky ballet movement and contemporary electronic dance music. Such musical references to dance make the lyrics and music entirely symbiotic, as the singer imagines dancing with the one he loves, from whom he is currently far removed.

Unabashed playfulness and lyrical mastery also abound in “Summertime Clothes,” which is at once a hugely weird summer jam, a perfectly written pop song, and a sort of “Good Vibrations” or “Singin’ in the Rain” for 2009. Sizzling, gurgling soda pop sounds and ambient street noise accompany euphoric singing that describes a hot summer nighttime walk through city streets:

It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel
Hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal
I point in the windows, you point out the parks
Rip off your sleeves and I’ll ditch my socks
We’ll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass
Weave through the cardboard, smell that trash
Walking around in our summertime clothes,
Nowhere to go while our bodies glow
And we’ll greet the dawn in its morning blues
With purple yawn, you’ll be sleeping soon
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you

To me, one of the most winning aspects of <em>Merriweather</em> is the fact that so much sonic playfulness and weirdness is coupled with lyrics firmly grounded in domestic life. These are not songs about random sex, drugs, violence, and rock n’ roll excess, nor are they political rants, trite love songs, or absurd fantasies, but rather songs about wanting to provide a decent home for your family (“My Girls”), songs about missing your spouse when traveling (“In the Flowers,” “Guys Eyes,”), songs about waking up early and getting your child ready for the day (‘Daily Routine”), and songs giving advice to a little brother (“Brother Sport”).  In these songs the mundane becomes magical and the banal goes wild.

A fine example is “Daily Routine,” which, with its cut-up organ flourishes, vocal harmonies, and fat hip-hop beats sounds like a Timbaland remix of Yes’ “Close to the Edge.” However, in contrast to the mysticism of Yes songs and the vulgarity of much of hip-hop, “Daily Routine” lyrically depicts the pedestrian events the title implies, “Make sure my kid’s got a jacket / And coat and shoes and hat. / Strap a stroller to my back / Bouncing along every crack.” The true genius comes in the second part of the song, all slow, echoing, reverb-drenched drone over which the lines “Just a sec more…in my bed / Hope my machine’s working right” are sung repeatedly, musically re-creating the feeling of wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.

Despite the many details and colors of the music, it is the simple exuberance of many of these songs that keeps me listening to them over and over again. I love the counter-intuitive brilliance of closing the album with a song as enthusiastic, infectious, and stadium-ready as “Brother Sport.” I smile and marvel at the audacity of filling the hand-clapping pop anthem chorus of “My Girls” with the so not rock-n-roll lines, “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things / (like a social stance) / I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls / (Woooooooh!)” Taken together, the songs of this album set forth a refreshing view of life in which the hottest party is at home with the family, and nothing is more exciting than spending time with the ones you love. In my opinion it’s a mature perspective to express with such wild and childish sounds. Due to this album’s sonic inventiveness, its musical hyperactivity, its total lack of cynicism and negativity, and it’s all-around positive energy and joyousness, I can’t really imagine an album coming out any time this year that I will like more than this one. Ultimately this is why I feel this is the one album among so many that is worth the time of the not-usually-patient listener: the more you listen to it, the more it may make you happy.

TV on the Radio: Dear Science(DGC/Interscope, 2008)

TV on the Radio showed up on the scene a few years ago with the startling soul/punk/industrial/doo wop Young Liars EP. Their second full length, the absurdly titled Return to Cookie Mountain, was a dense grower with multi-layered soundscapes; it eventually won out as my favorite album of 2006. With Dear Science, TVOTR have synthesized and put into practice all the knowledge gained from their prior experimentation. They have de-cluttered their mix, trading in some of the noise for an array of clean, polyphonic grooves and some more overt pop moves, even adding some great string arrangements to several songs. What results is a strong album in an evermore eclectic and satisfying fusion of styles that hardly anyone else dares to throw together: R&B, post-punk, hip-hop, indie, electronic, jazz, afro-funk, prog/art rock, and probably a load of other things I haven’t picked up on. They’ve spent the past few years sounding like absolutely no one else in rock, possibly because they sound like scattered fragments of everyone else, deconstructing everything from Radiohead to Usher to the Pixies. On this album they’re putting it all back together.

“Halfway Home,” the high energy album-opener, is also the track most in keeping with the expected TVOTR sound, if slightly more upbeat than usual. Syncopated drumming and heavily effected, chugging guitars create a drone background for some Beach Boys-styled “B-B-Ba-Ba-Boms,” over which lead vocalist Tunde Adebimpe croons with a voice that is not entirely unlike that of Nat King Cole.

Adebimpe is not the only vocal force, however, the band having been blessed with not one but two gifted vocalists and lyricists. Kyp Malone contrasts Adebimpe’s smoothness with a slightly more idiosyncratic, soulful vocal style. Check out his voice on “Golden Age,” the album’s celebratory “lead single” which sounds like it could have been unearthed from Michael Jackson’s long-lost collaboration with David Bowie and Brian Eno. The classic groove is clearly meant to get everyone on the dance floor, but the lyrics here have as much in common with the language of hymnody and the biblical psalms as they do with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,”

Move your body
You’ve got all you need
And your arms in the air stir a sea of stars
And, oh, here it comes and it’s not so far
All light beings
Come on now make haste
Clap your hands
If you feel you’re in the right place
Thunder all surrounding
Feel it quake with the joy resounding
Palm to the palm you can feel it pounding
Never give it up you can feel it mounting
Oh it’s gonna drop gonna fill your cup
Oh it’s gonna drop gonna fill your cup
The age of miracles
The age of sound
Well there’s a golden age coming round, coming round, coming round

This simultaneous subversion and fusion of mainstream pop musical styles with spiritual (or in other cases political, poetic, and scientific) language to create curious and stunning lyrics recurs on many tracks. Production-wise, “Stork & Owl” sounds almost like something Timbaland could have brought to Justin Timberlake, but instead of the stereotypical lover man lyrics one expects from such a track, a close listening reveals more of a meditation on death and the challenges and chances of life, with lyrics like,

Death’s a door that love walks through
In and out, in and out
Back and forth, back and forth

Turn from the fear of the storms that might be
Oh, let it free, that caged on fire thing
Oh, hold its hands, it’ll feel like lightening
Oh, in your arms, safe from the storms.

A couple more favorite tracks I would be remiss not to comment on specifically:

• the absolutely vicious afro-funk groove of “Red Dress,” with its equally vicious and self-eviscerating lyrics which once again mix the biblical, the popular, the political, and the sociological.
• the souled-up In Rainbows-ish tracks “Love Dog” and “Shout Me Out,” which follow directly on its heels,

and

• album closer “Lover’s Day,” an absolutely ecstatic and occasionally explicit love song set to a fife-and-drum New Orleans march, complete with a multitude of both live and sampled woodwinds and horns.

Each song on the album is rock solid, fully formed and fully inhabiting its own sonic world. Quite a feat for an album of such diverse sounds. The heterogeneous sounds have made it easy for me to get caught up in repeated listens, as it’s hard to get bored with all the variation. And yet, despite the differences, the tracks seem to beg to be listened to one after another, as sequenced. They gain resonance by their juxtaposition. Taken as a whole, I feel the album partakes of a bit of that freshly canonical/instant classic feel most recently exemplified by In Rainbows.

Recommended for anyone who likes smart, adventurous funk/soul/rock music, and anyone who’s ever wanted to somehow listen to Kanye West and U2 at the exactly same time (am I the only one?)

By the way, you can listen to any or all of the tracks on this album for free just by clicking on the little triangle play buttons in the box at the top of this article. Streamed courtesy of the excellent lala.com music site.

I should also note that the only reason that this review is included in my best winter albums of 2008-2009 series is that I listened to it a whole lot this past winter.

We met at an art exhibit. We met in the comment section of my blog. We met in a snowstorm in a cottage in the mountains. We met at a symphony concert, sitting next to each other. We met at Family Home Evening and commiserated because we both hated Family Home Evening. We met at the library and traded poems. We met in the Provo temple. We met in empty parking lots and Mexican restaurants and our parents’ houses. We met at a movie theater where we were both making fun of the movie. We met at IKEA, buying bookshelves. We met at an art supply store. We met at a little Chinese place by the hospital. We met on the yellow BART line between San Francisco and Lafayette. We met hiking on a trail in Millcreek Canyon on the last nice autumn day before winter.  We met to shovel snow under the full moon.  We met because we both liked a painting by Brian Kershisnik.

Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop, 2008)

I don’t know that I can honestly call the Fleet Foxes’ debut a wintertime collection of songs. A few unabashedly wintry songs are included (check out “White Winter Hymnal” and “Blue Ridge Mountains” below), but they also sing songs of summer, songs of fall, and, most of all, songs of spring:

What a life I lead in the summer
What a life I lead in the spring
What a life I lead in the winded breeze
What a life I lead in the spring

the foxes sing in a cappella harmony as the needle hits the groove on side one of the Sun Giant EP. So how do I get away with calling this a featured winter album? It is exactly this full-on seasonal frenzy that made this music so appealing on those days when our house was entombed in snow. It gave me hope in the eventual arrival of other seasons. The rustic, pastoral details of the lyrics reminded me that the natural world brings life and color, not just an overbearing white coldness. And also maybe it is more simple: despite all the hype, I really just became acquainted with this pleasant folk phenomenon at the turn of the year. Since then, many of these songs have become the definitive soundtrack to my winter. My wife loves this music too, so many times we listen to it together. And as for the winter influence, it’s hard to deny the complete appeal of lines like, “Come down from the mountain, you have been gone too long / Spring is upon us, follow my only song,” in the middle of a cold February in the Wasatch Mountains.

I mentioned hype. This album has gotten a lot of it, from the time of its release last spring through to topping a lot of end-of-year lists. I ashamedly admit that I ignored this music partly because of that hype for quite awhile (although since then I have clearly humbled myself), and I’m not exactly sure what I will write at this point that hasn’t been written a hundred times already. I could mention that this music sounds natural and organic in every way. I could speak of fine folk-inspired songwriting and impeccably arranged vocal harmonies. I could describe their sound as the King Singers collaborating with the Shins. I don’t know for sure if these things have been said or not, because I’ve been trying to avoid the reviews so I can write this without inadvertently plagiarizing anyone. I’ll just end with this recommendation: if you like the song “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes. If you like Crosby, Stills & Nash, John Denver, Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Byrds, or Joni Mitchell, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes. If you like Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Bobby McFerrin, or My Morning Jacket, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes. If you like music, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes.

[By the way, this is another album that sounds absolutely incredible on vinyl. I know I said that about Microcastle, too, but I promise I'm not going to say that about every album I ever talk about. The vinyl edition includes the superb Sun Giant EP as a separate record in a gatefold LP, which otherwise you would have to buy or download separately. You will want to get your hands on that EP because its songs, a couple of which are sampled above, are as good as or better than those on the full length.]