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On Repeat: Willie Nelson Sings Leonard Cohen
Would you believe that I went to not just one, but four separate stores this morning, in search of the spectacular new Leonard Cohen live album, only to be disappointed? I’ve heard it already, obviously– thanks, NPR!– so I suppose I can stand to wait a few more days for a hard copy to arrive from Amazon. In the meantime, what’s your favorite version of “Hallelujah,” the oft-covered song that stands as arguably Cohen’s greatest, most enduringly popular work? I’ve recently come to believe that Willie Nelson’s version– he plays it as a somber, understated country waltz on his sorely underappreciated album Songbird– is the best version of the song that I’ve heard, at least recently.
You can listen to the whole thing for free at Last FM.
Swan Lake: “Enemy Mine”
It’s probably fair to call Swan Lake an indie rock supergroup — at least to the extent that there can even be such a thing as an indie supergroup. None of the band’s three members are household names exactly, but what they lack in star power they more than make up for in prolificacy: Carey Mercer is the mastermind behind the warped, herky-jerk indie pop of Frog Eyes, while Spencer Krug does double duty in a pair of indie staples, Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade. And Dan Bejar is pretty close to indie royalty, playing not only in Canada’s New Pornographers—the greatest of all indie supergroups—but also the critically beloved Destroyer.
But these three men aren’t just indie stalwarts. They’re also indie eccentrics, known as much for their strange lyrical conceits and vocal tics as for their inverted and subverted understanding of what pop should sound like. And therein lies the central danger of a group like Swan Lake: Any time you rope together three such distinct talents, you can’t help but get three distinct egos, and when those egos are as prone to inspired weirdness and offbeat ambition as these three, the potential for a trainwreck is fairly high.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Leonard Cohen: “Live in London”
“I’ve seen the future/ And brother, it’s murder,” sang Leonard Cohen, all those years ago. The great irony of that statement, of course, is that Cohen has always seemed to exist altogether outside of linear time– not just for his reputation as rock’s perpetual old man, and not always in a good way, either. As one of the greatest poets in all of popular music, Cohen brings to his songs a certain sense of the timeless and the eternal, and yet the music has often belonged very explicitly to a particular moment in time, be it the synthetic tones that marred his albums from the 1980s– they sounded dated and out-of-fashion about five minutes after the albums released– or the kitchsy, Casio keyboards from his post-2000 records, tinny sounds that might have made him sound like a has-been lounge crooner in Vegas were his words not still so sharp and lively.
That Cohen embarked on a tour in 2008– his first in a decade and a half– is another out-of-time surprise, as it certainly isn’t what one would expect from an icnreasingly reclusive artist at the age of 74, but this surprise is a most welcome one, not least because it results in the marvelous tour document Live in London– which, as one might imagine from an artist like Cohen, is anything but a mere tour document, or even a major event. In fact, it’s nothing less than the great Leonard Cohen record, as, for the first time, all of his very best songs, spanning his entire career, are collected in one place, and they’re all given the presentation that they deserve: Live, organic, full-band arrangements and vigorous performances, with none of the dated studio sheen that makes some of the original versions hard to take. Live in London bests even The Essential Leonard Cohen set to become, well, the essential Leonard Cohen.
Cohen began as a poet before taking the plunge into music, and his latter-day recordings have been increasingly preoccupied with words over music, but the setting in which Cohen finds himself here is ideal: A full band, including horns and keyboards and female back-up singers, gives the show a laid-back, jazzy vibe that’s warm and endearing and full of great band interplay, but never distracting; Cohen, his voice rough and gravelly, recites these songs more than he sings them, but that’s just fine, as the music is so easy and natural that it’s easy to become lost in his words and melodies. All of his best-known songs are here, as are a few recent highlights, and the result is a feast of provocative words and images that address all of Cohen’s favorite themes– sex, love, death, religion, humanity. It goes without saying that it’s a profound and moving set, but this is no mere tower of song; Cohen’s on-stage persona is gentle and humorous and warm, as he cracks jokes and banters with the audience, keeping this from being a ponderous, Important record– it is, in fact, a joy to listen to.
Of all the ten thousand artists to cover “Hallelujah” over the years, Cohen doesn’t give the song its best reading here– he hams it up a bit too much with his overly dramatic interpretation, robbing it of some of its solemnity and power– but even with that minor complaint, this two-disc, 25-song set is remarkably coherent and consistent, with each song and performance earning its placement here. So whether it’s remembered as one of Cohen’s great achievements or simply a trinket for fans, Live in London stands as the single best serving of Leonard Cohen, a celebration of poetry and performance that’s as profound as it is joyful.
Film Break: “Monsters vs. Aliens”
My review of Monsters vs. Aliens– the so-so new animated family flick from DreamWorks– is posted at CT Movies.
Amadou & Mariam: “Welcome to Mali”
Here in the West, I think we have a tendency to think about so-called world music all wrong. The term– itself embarrassingly reductive; must we lump all non-English speaking countries into the same giant heap?– invokes images of tribal musicians huddled in a circle with hand-made instruments, banging out some kind of rudimentary, primitive folk music. Never do we pause to consider that maybe– just maybe– some of these “world musicians” have actually heard songs from clans outside of their own, and integrated these sounds and ideas into their own style. In other words: We assume that the musicians in other parts of the world are just as ignorant of other cultures as we are.
Amadou and Mariam put us to shame. I’m not sure where they got their Stevie Wonder records, or which American pop stations they’re able to pick up in their native Mali, but the music they make together is a thing of marvelous, integrative beauty and cultural synthesis: They know almost as much about Western pop and R&B as they do their own native blues. They are shaped but not defined by their own geography, and their songs are as much a celebration of globalization and melting-pot diversity as they are an homage to a particular culture and set of traditions. Though the two are a married couple who met in a school for the blind and subsequently became internationally-renowned musical virtuosos, their amazing life story is actually nowhere near as remarkable as the music they make together.
Welcome to Mali is both a culmination and a continuation of their incredible journey. Their first record to be domestically released in the United States, it follows on the heels of Dimanche a Bamako, the album that made them stars in Europe, and it both hones and advances their cross-cultural imagination. They write and play with the confidence and vision of the veterans that they are, but the album practically bursts at the seams with ideas and eclecticism– the kind of freewheeling enthusiasm one might expect from a much younger duo.
But if their years of making music together haven’t left them jaded, they have tempered their ambition with a lived-in wisdom that keeps their adventurous inclinations from overshadowing the heart and spirit of their music. That they’re increasingly interested in exploring non-African musical idioms is evident from the fact that they invite Damon Albarn to produce the opening track, “Sabali,” and the collaboration brings out the best in both artists. Albarn has Mariam sing the lead vocal through a hazy filter– suggesting a certain retro vibe– but the synths he surrounds her with suggests something else altogether. It’s more than a meeting of African blues and Western pop; its sonic signifiers are out of time and space, and the emotional impact transcends not just culture, but any cognitive notion of crossing boundaries. It’s simply great, emotionally rich music.
The rest of the album both follows that blueprint and splinters off in all kinds of new directions. Amadou’s guitar work– complex and sophisticated, but also deeply funky– keeps things rooted in Africa, but the brass, winds, mallet percussion, and synths betray a musical vocabulary that comes from somewhere other. Rapper K’naan helps them guide one track into full-on hip-hop territory, and, on the record’s most European number, “I Follow You,” Amadou sings a sweet, simple love song to his wife, entirely in English.
The fact that most of the rest of the album isn’t in English is of no consequence; Amadou and Mariam serve a timely reminder that vision, craft, and inspiration sound the same in any language. An album so ambitious and inclusive has to be big, and Welcome to Mali is certainly that: It’s a sweeping work of astonishing diversity, and it takes a few spins to pull it all together. But its rewards are inumerable, and at the top of the list is this: That the album just might cause us to think twice about our reductionist stance toward music from other cultures. After all, it’s made by two musicians who know much better.
Debating The Decemberists
Stereo Subversion– an online publication to which I sometimes contribute– is launching a new series of “internal debates,” wherein several of the ‘zine’s writers sound off on a particular record. The first installment features a smattering of opinions on The Decemberists’ new album, The Hazards of Love, including a comment from yours truly. The whole thing is worth reading, but if you just want me bit, it’s this:
Following the prog-rock leanings of The Crane Wife to their logical extreme, The Decemberists return with not just a concept album, but a full-fledged rock opera, and everything that such a work entails. There is sprawling ambition and complexity, but also a dearth of individual songs that stand on their own, making Hazards an impressive feat but a frustrating and exhausting listen.
In other words, I’m pretty much sticking by what I said in my review. Don’t mistake my lack of enthusiasm for a lack of appreciation, however: I deeply respect and admire the artistry and musicianship on display on this ambitious, compex record. However, I have to agree with Marc Hogan’s Pitchfork review: “Too much work, not enough payoff”
The Antlers: “Hospice”
Everything about Peter Silberman’s latest opus, Hospice– from its title, to its stark, blood-red cover image, to its conceptual structure as an album about caring for a terminally ill loved one– would seem to suggest a certain melodrama– so why is it instead a triumph of composition and craft? Silberman may wear his heart on his sleeve, but he’s too smart for emo; he trades in glacial sheets of shoegaze and post-rock noise, but he’s too pop for the avant-garde; and he croons with a choirboy tenor that recalls everyone from Jeff Buckley to Shearwater‘s Jonathan Meiburg, but his compositions are too lavish to fit under the singer-songwriter banner.
Hospice is Silberman’s second full-length outing as Antlers, but where that moniker was once just a pseudonymn, now it’s a full-on band; after the first Antlers record, In the Attic of the Universe, Silberman went into a period of self-imposed exile, but he emerges from his isolation with a newfound sense of community, inviting some friends to flesh out his bedroom fantasies into full-band realities; but if The Antlers make a bigger noise than ever before, their music is still unerringly faithful to the vision of its auteur: Hospice finds its full sound in the new blood flowing through it, but it still feels more like a series of overheard conversations than a pop record.
Silberman channels his period of loneliness and isolation into these songs, which form a (mostly one-way) dialogue between a man and his dying lover; what he captures here is the sound of raw, broken humanity, a pure and simple outpouring of sadness and grief. The history of this couple and their relationship appears like a series of ghosts in the singer’s head, but the whole album seems to take place in just a moment: The singer sits by his beloved’s bed, her limp hand in his own, all the heartache and hard work, the joy and the complications of love dancing arm-in-arm with guilt and regret. An entire relationship seems to unfold in an instant; two become one, and then death tears them apart again. Yet, the feeling of the record is not one of misery, but of incredible catharsis. As the narrator’s heart breaks, it break open, allowing the light to shine through. It becomes not an album about loss, but mourning; not an album about being griefstricken, but about moving on.
Silberman seems to craft his songs from big chunks of sound, but while most in the post-rock world are sonic sculptors, Silberman is more a miner, excavating pure pop melodies from the murky depths. Indeed, this is, if nothing else, a composer’s album: The songs ebb and flow with a precise sense of dynamics and texture, and the expanses of beautiful space are offset by pristine pop hooks. Silberman is a musician who understands the value of a silent pause, the relationship between time and space inside a song, but he’s also a songwriter who crafts achingly pure melodies, songs with momentum and layers of depth.
The record moves steadily from its clattering, droning instrumental prologue to its glorious crescendo, “Wake,” and then into a benedictory, acoustic epilogue with purpose and vision, with elaborate musicality and primitive humanity. Intellectually, it’s an album that rewards repeated spins and careful, attentive listening, but more than that, it’s an album that you feel. That’s the triumph of Hospice: It’s an astonishing marriage of emotion and craft, and the result is an album that’s painfully, disquietingly beautiful, mesmerizing, and bewitching all at once.
Gomez: “A New Tide”
Gomez has always seemed wise beyond their years. Their debut album, Bring it On, received rave critical notices upon its 1998 release, not just for how great the music was, but for how incredibly advanced the band members all seemed; though the album was banged out in a garage by a bunch of upstart twentysomethings, it mixed a surprisingly assured musical sophistication with a set of influences—classic American country and blues, mostly—that really ought to have been decades outside of their grasp. And ever since then, the band has steadily been coming into its own with increasingly mature and complex albums, gradually softening their rough edges while deepening and enriching their sound.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Dan Deacon: “Bromst”
I can’t listen to Dan Deacon’s song “Snookered” without being reminded of old-timey gospel music. It’s not it resembles gospel music in either its form– it’s a slow-building, densely layered, eight-minute epic– or in its sound– there’s no church organ, but plenty of electronics– so much as it captures the spirit of a gospel song, beginning with what sounds like a weary trudge up a mountain before reaching a glorious peak, with Deacon’s lyric signifying a journey that could be life, faith, or even ordinary, real-world traveling: “Been wrong so many times before, but never quite like this.” After that, I’m pretty sure he says something about rain turning into bliss, and the whole song seems to exhude a certain sense of catharsis, as though it’s the sound of someone reaching a plateau of peace and acceptance after a long, steep climb.
That word “signifying” is, I think, a pretty good way of summarizing exactly what Deacon does; though he creates sounds and landscapes that can sound alien, he also has a weird gift for making them sound familiar, picking sounds and structure that signify well-worn emotions and thematic conceits to us. It might be easy to forget that Deacon– whose last album was called Spiderman of the Rings, and whose favorite production trick is altering his voice to sound like a choir of chipmunks– is a conservatory-trained musician, and he brings to his music not only a prankster’s sense of fun and whimsy, but also a composer’s sense of craft. The songs on his new album, Bromst, contain plenty of the sonic wankery on which he made his reputation, but also a compositional focus and grace, as each piece feels like it’s moving toward a clear horizon, each song fitting in as part of a larger journey.
And it is very much a journey, a piece of music that sounds like it was constructed to signify a physical landscape and a spiritual one at the same time. There are peaks, of course– nost noteably the euphoric mountain song “Snookered”– but also valley passages of… well, not exactly darkness, but weirdness, such as the sampled ethnic chanting of “Wet Wings” and the elastic, cartoony rock of “Woof Woof.” Indeed, the songs can almost be divided into two halves, mirroring the two facets of Deacon’s ever-maturing art: Some songs suggest an emotional journey of breahtaking beauty and awe, while others are exercises in flat-out weirdness that simply have to be heard to be believed. To his credit, Deacon has grown a great deal as a composer, and he’s made a record of deep feeling and sophistication without compromising his nerdy sense of humor or his love of quirky, cartoony sounds.
Bromst also differs from Spiderman in that it’s the first Dan Deacon release to prominently feature acoustic instruments, alongside his keyboards and electro-gizmos, and he makes it all sound very organic. The first track, “Build Voice,” establishes the blueprint that the rest of the album follows, both in its sound and its title, as each track starts off relatively simply before slowly picking up steam and adding new instruments, as though new voices are continually joining the choir. This is another of Deacon’s great gifts: That he is able to capture the sound and spirit of community, each track feeling like a celebration in which anyone is allowed to pick up an instrument and join in the ruckus.
In other words: Bromst signifies a journey, but it isn’t one that we must or should take alone. It’s the sound of a swarm of pilgrims, treking together through the same valleys and peaks. And if the ocassional chipmunk choir suggests that Deacon is having plenty of fun along the way, there are enough somber moments to prove that he is taking it seriously. He’s grown up just the right amount for Bromst, a bizarre and beautiful record that suggests its maker has wells of joy and ingenuity he’s just beginning to tap.
