Matt Bauer - The Island Moved in the Storm (review)

Here's a review of Matt Bauer's The Island Moved in the Storm I wrote back in 2008.

artist: Matt Bauer
title: The Island Moved in the Storm
label: La Société Expéditionnaire
release: 2008

Matt Bauer's banjo-driven folk songs hang together on a gossamer thread, moving from background to foreground with an understated power. The Island Moved in the Storm, his third album and first for La Société Expéditionnaire is a travelogue of worn memories with the gravitas that makes even the mundane elements of the past grow more significant even as they blur out of focus. 

Singer/Songwriters mining the darker side of Americana is nothing new, but Matt Bauer shares some of the same traits that made Iron & Wine's debut stand out: the hushed delivery, lo-fi recording and use of pre-pop melodies makes the music timeless even as it transcends the confines of a strict folk style and become something its own. The instrumentation is predominately just Bauer's voice and banjo, though sometimes embellished by female backing vocals, horns, strings, keyboards and light percussion, courtesy of members of Dirty Projectors, St. Vincent, and others. 

Though the songs could easily slide into theatrical bathos, their economy keeps them from going over the edge. Just as the sentimentality threatens to devolve into bombast the arrangement pulls back, circling on itself and repeating a phrase, letting the listener know that it doesn't subscribe to expected songwriting norms. The point of the buildup isn't to eventually explode, but to revel in the missed opportunities and connections that the songs describe. Like the static shots of rainy landscapes and banal scenes that fill Andrei Tarkovsky films, there are sections of the songs designed for reflection and not necessarily to move the plot along. 

Matt Bauer's baroque arrangements and use of mostly acoustic instrumentation will probably peg him as another dark poet of the unseen America, but he seems as prepared as any for the role. His songs are suffused with the same hidden melancholy of modern life as William Eggleston photographs; seemingly unremarkable scenes unfold to reveal layers of memories and horror.

Thirty-Three

The re-release of The Aeroplane Flies High has led me to revisit Mellon Collie era tracks to see if they hold up after nearly 20 years. While Siamese Dream remains an unimpeachable combination of butt rock and shoegaze (before Corgan’s ambition outstripped his songwriting), I’ve winnowed the double album follow up down to a single track, the final single “Thirty Three”. While “1979” remains the apex of his talent, it got so much radio play in the mid-90s that it’s been flattened into more of a nostalgia piece than a song (a song about nostalgia becoming nostalgic? Damn you, Corgan!). The same goes for “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, which I once heard playing simultaneously on Dayton, OH’s two modern rock stations.

“Thirty Three” was released as a single thirteen (!) months after the album, and the exhaustion shows in the music video. The band had been on the road constantly, lost their touring keyboardist to a heroin overdose, and kicked out their drummer. Chamberlin doesn’t appear in the video or the song itself, which uses the original demo’s drum machine. A band that were never good friends to begin with are putting on a show to wring out more money from a behemoth of a record that was a success despite clinging to a framework that went out of style in the early ‘80s.

Fashion photographer (and Corgan's girlfriend at the time) Yelena Yemchuck directed a literal interpretation of the lyrics in a series of short vignettes that range from interesting-on-paper to bizarre kabuki theater. It probably seemed the height of art on MTV in ’96, but it’s so ham fisted and NINETIES that the only saving grace is Corgan himself doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Perhaps it’s his closeness to the director, but while D’arcy & James Iha sit stone-faced in a tableau, his eyes follow the camera as he lets a smirk slip out.

Corgan’s made no secret of his love of the classic rock album myth, and that comes around as the video closes with a recreation of the Mellon Collie album art with the woman looking at the camera & winking (groan!). It’s cheesy as hell but having been the perfect age when it came out, I can’t help but finding the finality of it oddly affecting. While the album has no storyline or concept (besides “I’m angry and no one understands me”) the sheer length made it into a journey, and the final video had its own kind of closure, even if I can only cringe at the memory. 

Alkaline Trio

Alkaline Trio released a new record this year, their eighth, My Shame Is True. It's decent in the unchanging way their output has been for the last decade plus: Matt Skiba still writes the same song over and over (with increasingly cheesy wordplay), and Dan Andriano still sounds like he's chafing from the miserablist pop punk corner they've painted themselves into.

It's bizarre that their last 3-4 records have passed completely unbeknownst to me, because in the late 90s/early 2000s, they were my favorite band. They were pop punk, but there was something askew; while most of the (admittedly white, male) bands I liked sang about girls breaking their hearts, Alkaline Trio directed the misery inward, describing self destruction and depression in a way that was maybe a little outside of my experience. They were sloppy, and their bass player's ska chops were all over the place, but they were a breathe of fresh air in a scene dominated by the ultra glossy pop punk of bands like Blink-182.

Between '98 and 2000, they released two full lengths and a self-titled compilation of old tracks and EPs. If you're curious at all in them, that's all you need to track down. Even their second record is divisive, containing both their favorite song of mine ("5-3-10-4") and their absolute worst ("Sleepyhead", which shows they didn't yet possess the melodic acumen to deal with a dissonant harmony). So what happened? Longtime drummer Glenn Porter left the band in a manner that rumor suggested was due to either personality conflicts or any of the disgusting scenarios put forth by message boards. Porter wasn't portrayed as a driving songwriting force in the band (a long way of saying he didn't sing any songs), so how did they go from fractured song structures to the paint-by-numbers pop punk of the material following his expulsion?

The situation reminds me of an interview R.E.M. gave during their farewell press tour. Both bands lost a drummer and their subsequent records paled in comparison to their previous work. With R.E.M., that could just as easily be chalked up to age; after all, they were wealthy middle aged men with none of the spark that led to their greatest work. Bill Berry was an equal songwriter with the rest of the band, so maybe he was their secret weapon? That may be true, but I think the bigger issue is the admittance that Berry was vocal in the song arrangement phase, continually chiding the band to make the songs shorter and more concise (the epic intro to "Leave" would never have happened on his watch). I think it's the same unspoken power of the drummer in songwriting that made Goddamnit! and Maybe I'll Catch Fire sound fresher than most late '90s punk, as opposed to the following records rigid verse/chorus/verse structure. The drummer has the power to shape the song and, if they want, get it over as quickly as possible (rarely a bad thing).

Truthfully, Alkaline Trio's songs always followed a pretty standard structure, but what Porter did under the riffs kept them from overstaying their welcome. The most noticeable change is that after Fire, the band stuck to a rigid habit of intro x 4, verse x 4, chorus, verse x 4, outro x 4, etc. That's pretty much the basis for the arrangement of most Western music, basing everything on 4's, but most musicians will add little fills and asides to avoid sterile repetition, or at least to keep themselves entertained when playing the song for the 1,000th time. Porter was constantly scribbling outside the lines, and the result was a lot more interesting than sticking to the rule book.

After Porter left the band, Smoking Pope's drummer Mike Felumlee appeared on From Here to Infirmary. Journeyman drummer Derek Grant filled the permanent role in 2003, and while he's a solid drummer, his workman like style is a testament to his experience as a sideman, where dependability trumps style. His membership is credited with keeping the band together, though I suspect it has more to do with his songwriting style aligning more to the rest of the band that contrasting with it. That's a shame, because history shows it's friction that makes the most compelling music.