Explosions in the Sky review

I wrote this review for a now-defunct music website. Besides fixing a couple grammar issues, this is how it looked way back when. 

artist: Explosions in the Sky
album title: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
label: Temporary Residence Ltd. 
release year: 2007
rating: 6.5

Explosions in the Sky have made no-frills post-rock their forte; no orchestration a la Godspeed You! Black  Emperor, no jazz pretense like the Chicago scene, and little of the straight ahead rock meets  electronic noodling of Mogwai. Instead, they use the same combination of echo-laden guitars,  chiming bass and martial drums as their elements to forge soundscapes that alternate between  introspective passages and soaring choruses.

So what does their new 6-song album sound like? Much like the others, but that’s not necessarily  a bad thing. You’re hard pressed to find a band with a distinctive sound, and even rarer to  find one with the discipline to develop and refine it.

Even without the title “The Birth and Death of the Day”, the opening track’s brittle guitar and subsequent explosion of chords evokes a violent birth, development and gradual death. The track ends as dulcet tones fade away until a thin, underlying tone is revealed that carries on into the second song, "Welcome, Ghosts." What we get is more of the same, but somehow different; anyone who has listened to their oeuvre can attest to the fact that each album is basically one long song divided into movements that echo each other in theme and approach.

"Welcome, Ghosts" ebbs and flows between shimmering chords and mountains of distortion, fading into the 13 minute centerpiece, "It's Natural to be Afraid." In the album’s major mood shift, it uses a repetitive piano riff, whirling distortion, sawing strings and backwards guitar to sound vaguely menacing before fading away. It's closely followed by some gauzy electronic distortion, which itself fades away before a standard Explosions riff enters. It would have been interesting to hear the proceeding 5 minutes of kaleidoscopic noise be developed, even at the risk of breaking the atmosphere of the album.

The tracks ebb and flow in a similar manner, though the repetitiveness is broken up here and there: a flurry of piano notes that recalls vintage Genesis suddenly appears among the otherwise droning "What Do You Go Home To". "Catastrophe & the Cure" opens with possibly the albums most animated moment: a quickly strummed chord makes its presence known before a volley of slightly overdriven snare hits introduces the rest of the band. Surprisingly, the energy doesn't flag for a while, taking the same basic elements that make up the quiet parts and beating the hell out of them.

A plinking piano melody introduces the relatively brief closer, "So Long, Lonesome." The whole band rallies around that single piano riff, giving it a bed of ascending chords that evaporate just when things get too claustrophobic. Drums charge forward, guitars get more distorted, the piano becomes more insistent, and then… nothing. But they aren't after the big, heroic payoff that one might expect. Their meandering sound lets the listener get lost on the way, unencumbered by the expectation of a destination.

Ted Leo & the Mighty Mighty Bosstones

I take full responsibility for any facts my brain has mixed up in the last decade.

Around 2003 or '04, me & some friends drove up to Detroit to see Ted Leo & the Pharmacists play at the Shelter, which is the basement space below St. Andrews Hall. We pull into the deserted parking lot across the street from the venue and see a couple teenagers sitting on the steps dressed in stereotypical ska punk clothes: checkered vans (nothing wrong with that), Hot Topic bondage pants, Manic Panic hair, and Mighty Mighty Bosstones shirts. 

"I wonder if the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are playing St. Andrews Hall?"

"Ha yeah right, I thought they broke up."

The Bosstones hadn't had a hit since 1997's "The Impression That I Get", in the brief period of time between grunge and the boy band explosion when ska punk barely squeaked into national attention. They've also been around almost as long as I've been alive, so it's understandable that their longevity would result in a solid tour schedule; but in 2004, ska punk was thought to be dead and gone. 

So Ted Leo starts playing, and about 20 minutes in, all of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones exit the dressing room next to the Shelter's stage and walk through the packed crowd while carrying their instruments. The dressing room placement seems a little awkward, especially for the guy carrying the trombone. The whole display seems a little cocky, despite the necessity to get to their show, since a line of a dozen men in tailored suits walking away from the stage looks disrespectful no matter the context. 

The Bosstones disappear within a minute and all attention returns to Ted Leo, who is slaying in the full-band +  keyboard Hearts of Oak version of the Pharmacists. There are no punches pulled, all the hits are there, and everyone is enjoying themselves. 

Then, even before the 10-minute rendition of "Stove By A Whale" (where they're joined on 2nd guitar by I believe James Canty), the Bosstones return from serenading skanking teenagers upstairs, and soaked in sweat under their suits, march through the crowd yet again, lugging their horns past an appreciative crowd that is eager to hear "Timorous Me". The Bosstones, who probably commanded a much larger check for playing the big room, played for half the time as the indie band in the basement. 

The Pharmacists finish up and man their own merch table while, presumably, the Bosstones sit in their dressing room and wait to get paid. The two instances of the show being interrupted are forgotten, or remembered as a bizarre interlude to an otherwise great show. 

Blink 182 - "Dumpweed"

The iPod connector to my car stereo broke, but since my car CD player can play MP3 CDs, I've been making 5-6 hour mixes to make the commute bearable. After realizing most of the ambient instrumental music I listen to at work wasn't going to cut it, I dug out a bunch of pop punk CDs that I haven't listened to since high school. One of them was Blink-182's Enema of the State, which I remember really liking 14 years ago. Does it hold up? No. Oh dear God no.

Before I get to the terrible, possibly destructive lyrics, I have a couple words on compression. In the audio world, a compressor takes a signal and boosts low frequencies while pushing down high frequencies, which is useful in making certain instruments stand out in a mix, especially if they share the same basic frequency range. By the late '90s modern music was in the midst of the Loudness War, where high profile releases were subjected to punishing compression that squeezed each instrument into it's own part of the spectrum so you could hear the snare just as loudly as the lead guitar. This destroyed any nuance and subtlety in a track with the goal of making it stand out when listening to it on the radio; nevermind the fact that radio stations have their own compressors to make sure the songs they play fall within their broadcast guidelines. The most famous instance of this is Metallica's widely panned St Anger album, which angered enough audiophiles to briefly become a news story (and the only interesting thing about the record).

Enema of the State was compressed so much as to become an oppressive, punishing listen. At first listen, the technique does its job, making the instruments push the speakers in a way that gets the listener's attention. After a couple plays, it becomes the aural equivalent of looking at a posterized photograph, where all the gradient and shading is gone, replaced by solid blocks of color.

Who was asleep at the switch when a line like "I need a girl that I can train" was recorded? The arc of the song goes something like this: Guy can't decide whether to break up with his girlfriend because she's crazy, and laments that he could sow his wild oats if only he could find a girl that obeyed him. It's not the subtlest song ever, and it reminds me a lot of the dickhead skaters at my high school, who considered themselves apart from the fray of meathead jocks yet indulged in the same moronic, misogynist behavior. It's not so much that they were terrible people-high school is a training ground for kids to mimic the terrible choices of their parents; it's that they honestly thought they were rebelling against a status quo, not fitting into a demographic that MCA Records exploited all the way to the bank.

This was back when TRL set the agenda for mainstream popular music. They had boy bands for the teen girls, rap for the kids who could drive, and R&B to soundtrack awkward makeout sessions. That left the most-white, mostly middle class droogs that didn't like rap but still tended to invite their girlfriends over to watch them play video games. Blink-182 became The Rock Band, just like Foo Fighters and later Queens of the Stone Age. Mainstream media only picks one white rock band to get behind at once, and their success is due to whatever shady backroom dealings happened between publicists, A&R, MTV and radio.

That kind of chicanery sounds like the only explanation for an album that sounds like it was focus grouped to death; or, fantastically, made in the future where its reception could be measured, then adjusted to achieve maximum exposure. With the money put behind the promotion of the album, nothing was left to chance: so why were the lyrics, ostensibly aimed at idiot kids, set somewhere between Vapid (which is understandable) and Awful? I'm not saying some 90s pop punk band owed it to anyone to be politically progressive, but opening a record with a song about the exact wrong way to handle a relationship, without once reflecting "hhmm maybe that was a bad way to deal with it", sounds like a damaging thing to do.

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.

Derivative Remix

One of my remixes has been included on the Derivative Netlabel compilation and…and…and… (Disquiet Junto derivations of The Conjuncts by C. Reider). The track was originally done as part of the Disquiet Junto  project, which posts a set of constraints every Thursday and invites people to share their contribution via SoundCloud. My track is called "mateimartainment".