Year In Review, Vol. 4 - Pitchfork Predictions

With “List Season” in full swing, and Pop Headwound in the season’s spirit, I thought it would be fun to take a day off from the usual music posting and make some predictions as to what you might soon find on the biggest year end list of them all - Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of the Year. It’s like the music obsessive’s version of March Madness - picking winners, waiting for upsets, and inevitably being shocked when schools you’ve never heard of have suddenly released an album that goes to the Sweet 16. Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve agreed with many of Pitchfork’s top choices, but there is no denying the impact their list can have on a band’s career, as well as on the indie-rock buying/stealing public in general, and this year should be no different.

Let’s look at some possible candidates for Pitchfork’s Top 10, genre by genre:

Indie Rock Contenders:

Radiohead - In Rainbows
Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
The National - Boxer
Deerhunter - Cryptograms
Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Battles - Mirrored
Feist - The Reminder
Liars - s/t
Okkervil River - The Stage Names
Iron & Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog

* Radiohead and Panda Bear are pretty safe bets to end up in the top 10, as is Boxer, both on its own merits and to make up for Alligator getting shafted in ‘05.

* Cryptograms was overrated stuff in my opinion (although the Flourescent Grey EP was superb), but P’fork loved it, and they often stick to their guns when albums aren‘t as praised by others as much as by them. But then the lead singer got involved in some pretty weird stuff, so who knows about Deerhunter.

* Spoon and Arcade Fire figure to do well, riding lots of good press, strong live reviews, and mainstream attention. I heard "The Underdog" in the supermarket the other day. No joke man, frozen food aisle. The old ladies were clapping along.

* Feist is riding a tidal wave of attention, both indie and mainstream, plus it was a slow year for female artists (I think). She could find The Reminder in there, though I feel it works better as a few killer singles than an album.

* God I hope Liars doesn’t get in, I’ve never gotten into their sound and find them one of the most overrated bands working today. Oh snap.

* Okkervil River and Iron & Wine released great albums this year as well (coming in #1 & 3, respectively, from Harp Mag), and both were praised by P’fork, but I don’t see both making their top 10. Maybe 1 of them, and if so I think Iron & Wine.

* Of Montreal may be the sleeper - online praise hasn’t died even though it's been over 10 months since the release. It hasn’t placed well so far in the Stylus, Paste, or Harp lists. I bet it does well.

Electronic/Hip-Hop/Dub/Other/etc. contenders:

M.I.A. - Kala
Kanye West - Graduation
Jay-Z - American Gangster
Gui Boratto - Chromophobia
Burial - Untrue
Justice - t (sorry, I don’t know how to make the cross)
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Lil’ Wayne - Da Drought 3
Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury (was this 2006?)

* I can’t pretend to be an expert on any of these releases, but I have enjoyed a bunch of them a great deal. Kala is probably a sure thing for the Top 10, but like Feist, I find some killer singles on it but don’t enjoy listening straight through.

* Gui Boratto could slip in there, his Chromophobia is fantastic, but with The Field already a seeming lock there may not be room for 2 electronica records.

* Burial could sneak in there based on recent hype, and would certainly be deserving. That’s a great, great record.

* I’m pretty clueless as far as hip-hop goes, but heavy-hitters Kanye and Jay-Z both got glowing reviews and usually at least one rap album finds its way into the top 10.

* LCD is a ‘fork fave, but Stylus already hit them up for #1. I smell a snub, although it still stands to place well. I tried listening to Justice and didn’t enjoy, so it’s hard for me to say, but I could see it in their Top 10 based on the positive press it‘s recieved.

The Swedish Invasion:

The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
Sally Shapiro - Disco Romance
Studio - Yearbook 1

No doubt about it, Sweden is the place to be these days if you’re not from Brooklyn or Austin, and maybe even if you are. The Field is all but a shoe-in, and deservedly so, From Here We Go Sublime is fantastic. Jens Lekman’s record was somewhat divisive around the blogs, but Pitchfork loved it and it could do very well on the list. I’d be surprised if Studio or Sally Shapiro found themselves in the top 10 though.

Wildcards:

Pitchfork has a fairly reliable habit of throwing you for a loop with some of their left-field choices, so who knows what could get in there. I wasn’t ready for Silent Shout to be #1 last year being as how I’d never even heard of it. But that was before I was a blogger, now I’m ready for (almost) anything they throw our way. I think.

My predictions for the Pitchfork Top 10 (in no order):

In Rainbows
Person Pitch
From Here We Go Sublime
Kala
American Gangster
Graduation
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Boxer
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
The Reminder

What do you think will make it? What have I overlooked? Too much indie-rock? Leave a comment….
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New Music: Beach House

I wasn’t on board yet in 2006 when Beach House released their very well-received self-titled debut. Early in 2008 though we can look forward to their next record, simply titled Devotion. It comes out February 26 on Carpark Records, and after hearing this beautiful first single, I’ll be paying closer attention.

MP3 :: Gila
(from Devotion)
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Year In Review, Vol. 3 - Eric Wolfson

This December, to celebrate the music of 2007, I asked a bunch of the artists I’ve featured on PHW over the last 11 months to share their thoughts on the “year that was”. I asked a mix of my favorite local artists, as well as several larger acts, with the hope of having a diverse assortment of reflections on the music that mattered to the artists that mattered to me.
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Eric Wolfson is one of the local New York artists I came across this year whose music completely blew me away. After spending the past few years honing his chops at the Sidewalk Café open mic, and befriending most of the best musicians on that scene, Wolfson recorded his debut LP, the Dylan-infused State Street Rambler. Through its 11 tracks he writes and sings as if he’s a Dylan-scholar - with the “thin, wild mercury sound” the swirling organ provides on “Cross The River”, or the steamrolling folk-blues of “Graveyard Girls”, which sounds like it was lifted straight off of Side 1 of Highway 61 Revisited. Hell, there’s a song called “North Country Girl Blues”. But all of this Dylan aping wouldn’t work if Wolfson wasn’t so convincing at it. The dude can flat out write, and his songs, while mirroring those of his obvious idol, reflect the pained, confused, and open heart of its creator. State Street Rambler is a swaggering, poignant procession down an imagined highway 61 running through the heart of New York City. On it Wolfson captures the beautiful chaos of the city - its passions, histories, fairytales, corner bars, clear skies and dirty underground with a startling precision. And yes, he sounds like Dylan doing it.

MP3 :: Graveyard Girls
(from State Street Rambler. Buy here)
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Here is Eric Wolfson’s Personal Best List For 2007 (and Eric, if you want a non-paying job contributing to this blog, you're in! This is awesome...):

* Best Album, Indie: Frank Hoier, Love Is War

The release of folk singer-songwriter Frank Hoier’s debut album came and went this year with little attention or fanfare, which is too bad, because it’s a hell of a record. Hoier has that rare Dylan-esque gift of writing a song that sounds like it’s been around forever – that mystic, instantly-classic feel. Recorded with next-to-no overdubs at Major Matt Mason USA’s studio, Love Is War finds Hoier trying on a never-ending series of masks – the weary soldier of the title track, the jilted lover of “New York City Girls,” the lonely jailbird of “Heartless Words,” the drunken bootlegger of “Moonshiner” (the sole song on the album that Hoier didn’t write; oddly, it’s one of the few tracks on the album that he still performs live), the young child of “Little Lamplight,” the old man of “Deathbed (of a Rich Man)” – all delivered with the surprising fullness of his acoustic guitar and harmonica and the warmth of his sometimes melancholy, sometimes ironic, but always pretty voice. And it’s the voice that stays with you in the end. I know in my mind that Frank Hoier is a twenty-something kid from LA who talks like a twenty-something kid from the Midwestern heartland, but when he sings of fearing the chain gang, I believe him, just as I believe him when he sings that the New York City girls won’t call you back. And that’s not even mentioning the album’s third song, which is the most perfect protest song written yet this millennium: “Jesus (Don’t Give Tax Breaks).” You owe it to yourself – and your country – to check it out.

* Best Album, Major: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
A white British woman reminds the world what soul music (and a pop song) really is – everything I’ve always read that Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis is supposed to be, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black actually is. Hipster tested, soccer mom approved.

* Best Film: Into the Wild
Easily the most mind-blowing film I have ever seen. Lasting for a little over two hours, the movie threw me in a jaded, depressive funk for close to two weeks. Never before had a film called into question so much – never before had a film provided so many answers that seemed simultaneously personal yet universal. And then I got my hands on the book that the film is based on, which blew my mind all over again.

* Best Television Program: YouTube
From the epic silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc from 1928 to Nancy Regan appearing on Diff’rent Strokes in 1983, herein lays the subconscious of culture – anything you can think of, at the tip of your fingertips, in tasty ten-minute bytes. And, if you have a laptop, you can watch it all in bed.

* Best Book: Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor
This book tackles the most tangled and elusive subject matter of them all – authenticity – and provides an astonishingly clear survey of it through the popular music ages. The result is a camera obscura where nothing is what it seems; along the way, old heroes are celebrated (Neil Young), new heroes are discovered (Donna Summer!), and the most empty artists of them all (the Archies??) are turned inside-out into benchmarks of just how sophisticated the issues of authenticity have become.

* Best CD Reissue: Various Artists, People Take Warning!: Disaster Songs and Murder Ballads, 1913-1938
The Old, Weird America faces the Apocalypse. Disc One, Man vs. Machine, is all train wrecks and sunken ships; Disc Two, Man vs. Nature, is all floods and hurricanes; Disc Three, Man vs. Man, is all murder ballads. Some of it gloriously wonderful (“Wreck of the Old 97” by the Skillet Lickers), some of it is fascinatingly terrible (“Ohio Prison Fire” by Bob Miller), some of it is shockingly timeless (“When the Levee Breaks” by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie), some of it is esoterically dated (“The Trial of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Parts 1 & 2” by Bill Cox), but the best of it, like mush-mouthed white blues singer and slide guitarist Frank Hutchison’s “Last Scene of the Titanic” – where he evokes the captain checking the doomed ship’s instruments on one deck while the people dance to pop songs in the decks below – plays like an unfinished riddle, a faded old photographed pulled out of context with no caption or clues.

* Best DVD Reissue: The Jazz Singer (Three-Disc Deluxe Edition)
(Young Immigrant + Musical Ambition ÷ Jewish Faith) x Unintentional Racism = America (in the form of its “first” talking film)

* Best Musical: Grey Gardens
If you’ve used or seen any New York public transportation in the last year, you probably know the premise: “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale are mother-and-daughter high society dropouts (and Jackie O relatives) who live in the condemned squalor and filth of their once-majestic, now-dilapidated East Hampton estate, Grey Gardens. But what makes this once tragic (in its original documentary form), now comedic (in its new Broadway form) tale so powerful is its vindication of its central figure, “Little Edie,” who walks around in confusion and madness, always performing to a crowd she thinks is there, which – thanks to the musical – it now is. As that great philosopher Paul McCartney once said: “And though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway.”

* Best Concert: Antifolk Covers Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea
Conceived of and organized by Erin Regan – the finest antifolker who has yet to release an album – the bill read of a virtual who’s who of New York’s Antifolk scene, including Regan, Major Matt Mason USA, and members of Soft Black, Urban Barnyard, and the Elastic No-No Band. Regan herself turned the sometimes tedious “Oh Comely” into a stunning work of beauty, while Whisper Doll’s Daniel Bernstein hauntingly cut through “Communist Daughter” like a cold knife. But most significant of all was the return of MIA antifolker Mike Baglivi, who had disappeared suddenly the previous summer after receiving a stellar write-up in the New York Times for his powerhouse performance at the Antifolk Fest. Now he appeared onstage with fellow New Jersey rocker Vin “Soft Black” Cacchione to sing the album’s title track; Vin sang the verses, Baglivi, the bridge. And Baglivi sang the bridge beautifully like the Prodigal Son returning home – resulting in one of the most memorable live moments I’ve witnessed in this or any year.

* Best Performance: Creaky Boards plays the Antihoot
Five men: Andrew Hoepfner, Michael David Campbell, Eric Wolfson, Daoud Tyler-Ameen, and Dan Costello. Four instruments: drums (Campbell), bass (Wolfson), guitar (Tyler-Ameen), and piano (Costello). Three minutes: the length of the average Creaky Boards song. Two songs: “I’m So Serious (This Time)” and “I Cannot Love You.” One standing ovation: the first (and so far only) one in the history of the Antihoot, New York City’s longest-running open mic.
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Year In Review, Vol. 2 - Earl Pickens

This December, to celebrate the music of 2007, I asked a bunch of the artists I’ve featured on PHW over the last 11 months to share their thoughts on the “year that was”. I asked a mix of my favorite local artists, as well as several larger acts, with the hope of having a diverse assortment of reflections on the music that mattered to the artists that mattered to me.
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In 2007, Pennsylvania-by-way-of-Brooklyn country rocker Earl Pickens proved to be at the head of the pack, both musically with his wonderful EP Turn On The Radio, and in the world of youtube with a trio of quirky, homemade music videos. You can watch him unicycle along the Jersey Turnpike in “Can I Turn On The Radio?”, come to life as a giant version of his own artwork in “I Know What You Want”, or unbelievably out-parody the ultra-parodied “I‘ve Been Everywhere”. He’s also received radio play all over the Northeast, including a recent interview on John Platt’s “City Folk Sunday Breakfast” on WFUV (90.7) in New York, and formed a new band - the ominously titled Earl Pickens & the Band of Thunder.

Earl was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to send in the following Top 10 List - showing that wholesome wit that comes through so naturally in everything he does:

Earl Pickens Top 10 Favorite Days, Colors, and Songs of 2007:

1. "Heart of Glass" / The Puppini Sisters

2. Orange

3. "Rehab" / Amy Winehouse

4. "Most Likely Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" / Dylan-Ronson remix

5. May Seventeenth

6. November Thirtyfirst

7. Teal

8. "She Called Up" / Crowded House

9. Orangey-teal

10. Septealber Thirtorangeenth
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Stream :: Can I Turn On The Radio?
Stream :: So Wild
(from Turn On The Radio EP. Buy here)
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Photos taken by yours truly at The Rodeo Bar, NY - 11/07

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Baby, It's Cold Outside

For reasons I can’t fully explain, I somehow never heard (maybe never noticed?) the holiday classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” until I saw the great version Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel turned in during the hilarious “naïve peeping elf” scene in Elf. But that neglect has been righted over the past few years as it now stands as one of my favorite Christmas songs. Yes, their version is good, but here are a few of my other favorites.

MP3 :: Baby It’s Cold Outside (Ray Charles & Betty Carter)
(from The Spirit of Christmas. Buy here)

MP3 :: Baby It’s Cold Outside (Marah - Dave Bielenko & Felicia Navidad)
(from A Christmas Kind Of Town. Buy here)

MP3 :: Baby It’s Cold Outside (Louis Armstrong & Velma Middleton)
(from Christmas Through The Years. Buy here)
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Year In Review, Vol. 1 - The National Lights

The end of a calendar year is a fascinating time to be a die-hard music fan. With the misery of endless Christmas music hogging up the airwaves and endless lines in all the stores comes the glory of List Season. List after list turn up on the sites of trusted bloggers/websites everywhere, providing ample opportunity to check out music that I missed out on the first time around.

This December, to celebrate the music of 2007, I thought I’d ask an assortment of the artists I’ve featured on Pop Headwound over the last 11 months to share their thoughts on the past year with the world (or at least the people in the world who check in with this blog every once in a while). I asked my favorite local artists, and reached out to many larger acts, in hopes of having a diverse assortment of reflections on the music that mattered to the artists that mattered to me.
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I feel it’s only appropriate to kick off this year-in-review series with a reflection from Jacob Berns, lead singer/songwriter of The National Lights. When I started this blog back in January one of the first things I did was contact Berns to find out when we could expect the release of his band’s debut album, The Dead Will Walk, Dear. You see, sometime in 2006 I came across a track from it called “Midwest Town” online and fell head over heals for its gentle, aching folk melody. I kept checking their myspace in hopes of finding that their album had been released, only to be continually disappointed by the ever-delayed date. Finally though, with a new year and a new blog, came the release of the album, and somehow, after waiting in anticipation for months, I was still completely overwhelmed by it.

The Dead Will Walk, Dear sounds like traditional folk. It sounds like a singer singing to a lost love; 10 songs of heartache and hard feelings. But listen closer and you’ll find a songwriter obsessed with Flannery O’Connor and the chilling tendencies of the Southern Gothic author. Listen closer and those songs of lost love reveal themselves to be some of the most beautiful murder ballads in the American music canon. You may actually hear the ghost of a girl crying as her heart and bones wash up on the edge of the river. The Dead Will Walk, Dear remains one of my favorite albums of the year; cold and haunting in its words, warm and beautiful in its sound. I can’t wait to hear what The National Lights do next.

2007 Favorites (of Jacob Berns):

Album: No Shouts No Calls — Electrelane
Song: “Flume” — Bon Iver
Novel: The Road — Cormac McCarthy
Hobby: crossword puzzles
Concert: Gillian Welch at Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines, IA
Band you may not know, but should: Sleeping in the Aviary
Restaurant: 821 Café, Richmond, VA
New musical instrument: 1961 Gibson C-1 classical guitar
Movie I should have seen in 2006: The Lives of Others

Top 5 Negative The Dead Will Walk, Dear Review Quotes
“A form best reserved for campfires, and people with beards.” — PopMatters
“Wankery.” — Rate Your Music User
“The interaction between weak, effeminate male vocals and the bizarre lyrics is bad enough before realizing all the music is boring. It usually takes multiple listens for something to become actively disliked, but The National Lights manage to make it there after one shot.” — Rate Your Music User
“Wimpy is a dish best served without horrifying lyrics … Woof.” — On Tap Online
“About as exciting as a vasectomy.” — The Eagle Online

What to expect from the National Lights in 2008:
If all goes to plan, the follow-up to The Dead Will Walk, Dear will see light sometime winter 2008. Most of the album is written, and recording is underway. It is called Who the Sea Will Keep. Also, more excitement, beards.
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MP3 :: Midwest Town
MP3 :: Buried Treasure
MP3 :: Mess Around

(from The Dead Will Walk, Dear. Buy here)
[official] [myspace] [original post] [interview]
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The picture of Jacob Berns is from here.
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Christmas Music :: Evangelicals

Here’s a warped little future holiday classic that probably won’t be heard sung by carolers at your front door this season. Mistletone Records, Australian home to Evangelicals, will be releasing Mistletonia, a Christmas compilation that features a slew of like-minded twisted pop mavericks from around the globe. With this song from the compilation, Evangelicals continue to show they are full of holiday spirit, no matter the season, even if they do sound like they’re celebrating Christmas at the end of the world.

Evangelicals will be releasing The Evening Descends, their brand new record, on January 22, ‘08 in the U.S. via the Dead Oceans label, which is home to several PHW favorites from 2007. If “The Last Christmas On Earth” is any indication of what we should expect, it sounds like they’ll be kicking off 2008 with a bang.

MP3 :: The Last Christmas On Earth
(from Mistletonia. Buy here)
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Music News - Wakey!Wakey!

Next Wednesday night (12/12) at the Mercury Lounge PHW favorite Wakey!Wakey! will drop their debut record, a live album called Silent As A Movie. The event, based on the press Mike Grubbs & crew have been garnering of late, will more than likely be packed, so make sure to look into getting tickets before it’s too late. Need further encouragement? The above video is a recent Wakey!Wakey! performance of a relatively new song (an insane jam called “Fading Like The Fourth”) at Rockwood Music Hall that shows exactly the type of passion and musical genius you can expect. And if somehow you’re still not convinced enough to mark your calendars, another PHW favorite, A.A. Bondy, will be playing in the exact same venue on the exact same night, just a little bit earlier. I’ve spilt enough (proverbial/digital) ink on Bondy this year, with more to come as my year-end lists are finalized, so needless to say I’m pumped for what promises to be an exceptional night of music.

To celebrate the record release, Wakey!Wakey! and Family Records have been issuing a new cover song every Wednesday for the past 6 weeks. This week is a cover of Palace Music/Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “New Partner” - which finds Grubbs turning the folk-rock classic (and one of my favorite songs of all time) into a tender piano ballad. Of course, as always with Wakey!Wakey!, you get a spine-tingling, damn-near operatic vocal performance as he puts his unique spin on it.

MP3 :: New Partner (Palace Music cover)

Past weeks:
MP3 :: California Girls (Beach Boys cover)
MP3 :: Maps (Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover)
MP3 :: Say It Ain’t So (Weezer cover)
MP3 :: Two Headed Boy (Neutral Milk Hotel cover) (highly recommended!)
MP3 :: Apology Song (Decemberists cover)

Previous PHW exclusive:
MP3 :: LGA (live)
(from the Liberated Matter Holiday Album)
Original Post
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New Music: Destroyer

Dan Bejar is currently riding a prolific streak that should be a tutorial to all the young artists out there who think the world needs to hear their every whim. First, Destroyer’s Rubies was my favorite album of 2006 (by far), then he showed everyone who “the man” in The New Pornographers is by contributing the best song on Challengers (“Myriad Harbor”/mp3), and finally, he threw us a curveball (by everyone’s standards but his) with (another) side project, Hello Dear Friends, with gal-pal Sydney Vermont.

The first released song from the new Destroyer album (Trouble In Dreams, Merge, 3/18/08) has surfaced and it furthers my notion that Bejar is damn near infallible these days. Not so much a dramatic departure from Rubies as a refinement of it, the song begins gently with Bejar sounding as “mature” as ever. The song proceeds to build slowly, with Bejar’s lyrics gradually becoming more idiosyncratic (re: his patented non-linear eccentricities) as the music swells. The music is lifted by a beautiful string arrangement (interplaying with a creaky guitar solo) and even whistling as it fades out. Compared to the oddball poetry and reckless song structures of Rubies, this sounds about as soft as its title suggests.

MP3 :: Foam Hands
(from the forthcoming Trouble In Dreams)
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Eric's Trip :: Love Tara

Long before I’d ever heard a note of Daydream Nation I wore out my copy of Love Tara by Eric’s Trip. The first Canadian band signed to Sub Pop, Eric’s Trip was comprised of Julie Doiron, now a successful solo artist for Jagjaguwar, and singer/guitarist Rick White. I first heard of the band when they were name-dropped in the Tragically Hip song “Put It Off”, from Trouble At The Henhouse. At the time the Hip were my favorite band, and the line went “I played Love Tara by Eric's Trip on the day that you were born,I had to find the cuteness in the unadorned, but I was torn.” I was intrigued, and picked it up soon thereafter.

It was a tricky first listen for these naïve ears. It was the early-to-mid 90s and I was waist deep in my jam-band phase (weak, I know), one that would continue for a few more years until those shimmering alt-country chords found and redirected me. Eric’s Trip’s lush bedroom melodies were interspersed with bursts of white guitar noise. Their songs were 2 minutes long instead of 12, filled with passion over precision, and sounded like they were recorded “Behind the Garage”, as the lead-off track was called. But I kept after it, and soon enough had fallen so deeply for the album that it was practically all I listened to for a few months in 1994.

The name of the band, as I would later learn, was lifted from a Sonic Youth song from the classic Daydream Nation. And although I wasn’t familiar with the term at the time, Love Tara was my first “lo-fi” listening experience. The songs were equal parts heartbroken melodies and angst-fueled guitar noise, like a shoe-gaze band with punk rock roots. The production was murky enough to make the beauty Hip singer Gordon Downie sang about hard to find at first. But it’s there alright. Listening now I’d call Love Tara a place where Bee Thousand meets The Creek Drank The Cradle meets Daydream Nation, if such a place were possible.

MP3 :: Behind the Garage
MP3 :: Secret For Julie
MP3 :: Sunlight
(from Love Tara. Buy here)
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Songs:Ohia - Magnolia Electric Co. Demos

Here’s a logical companion to my recent post featuring the live Jason Molina session captured over the telephone from sometime in 2004 or early ‘05. Those who purchased the final Songs: Ohia studio album, Magnolia Electric Co., on vinyl were rewarded with a bonus disc of acoustic demos from the same album. Unavailable anywhere else, the set does exactly what one would expect - it strips down the Crazy Horse-inspired sound that dominated that neo-classic album to show just what a powerful singer and lyricist Jason Molina had developed into at this point of his career.

This set is interesting to collectors for several reasons. First, songs like “Farewell Transmission”, “John Henry Split My Heart”, and “I’ve Been Riding With The Ghost” appear in very early forms (with their original titles - “The Long Dark Blues”, “You Can‘t Save Everything”, and “I Made The Change”, respectively), with some different lyrics and structures as those that appeared on the actual album. Also, there are a number of quality outtakes from the album that don’t, to my knowledge, appear on any other release. “Whippoorwill” is especially strong and would have made a fine addition on the more acoustic follow up, What Comes After The Blues.

Finally, we get to hear Molina sing “Peoria Lunchbox Blues” and “The Old Black Hen”, sung on the album by Scout Niblet and Lawrence Peters. Though a good friend of mine loves the album versions as they are, I’ve always held that Magnolia Electric Co. would sound so much more confluent if Molina’s voice sung all 8 songs. If there’s one flaw I find with an otherwise perfect album, it’s this. Here though we get to listen to the songs as originally conceived, with Molina’s natural ache the primary focus.

MP3 :: The Long Dark Blues
MP3 :: Just Be Simple
MP3 :: The Old Black Hen
MP3 :: I Made The Change
MP3 :: Peoria Lunchbox Blues
MP3 :: Whippoorwill
MP3 :: The Big Game Is Every Night
MP3 :: Hold On Magnolia
MP3 :: You Can’t Save Everything
(demos from Magnolia Electric Co. Buy the original album here)
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New Music: Bon Iver

You’d be wise to check out the rustic indie-folk of Bon Iver now before it explodes. You see, after receiving praise from all over the music blogging world, and then wowing New York audiences during CMJ, his self-released debut For Emma, Forever Ago was picked up by Jagjaguwar and will see wide distribution on February 19th, 2008. This is music I’ve been hearing about for a few weeks now, but have only in the past few days really listened to attentively, and I’m glad I did. Bon Iver is one of those artists that is easily deserving of whatever internet hype he receives.

Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for "good winter" and spelled wrong on purpose) is the work of Justin Vernon, a native of Wisconsin who returned home to record in a cabin in the woods after his band, DeYarmond Edison, disbanded. The results are endlessly soulful and intimate folk and folk-rock. Vernon has a voice that is worlds beyond most of his contemporaries, both in range and nuance. He swings from a haunted falsetto to a strained roar throughout the songs, most closely recalling, as Pitchfork reported in their review (Recommended, 8.1), TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe.

From Jagjaguwar on the recording process: It wasn't planned. The goal was to hibernate. Vernon moved to a remote cabin in the woods of Northwestern Wisconsin at the onset of winter. He lived there alone for three months, filling his days with wood splitting and other chores around the land. This solitary time slowly began feeding a bold, uninhibited new musical focus. The days slowly evolved into nights filled with twelve-hour recording blocks, breaking only for trips on the tractor into the pines to saw and haul firewood, or for frozen sunrises high up a deer stand. All of his personal trouble, lack of perspective, heartache, longing, love, loss and guilt that had been stock piled over the course of the past six years, was suddenly purged into the form of song.

MP3 :: Skinny Love
MP3 :: For Emma
(from For Emma, Forever Ago)

Stream the whole album at Virb
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