For reals-like, get yourselves over to Beck's RECORD CLUB for a little more of the above goodness. To keep the creative particles smashing in his Hadron collider of a brain, he's taken to doing covers.......
of entire albums.......
in a single day............ (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
The first album- Velvet Underground and Nico. He's putting out each song one at a time with a roughshod DIY video on his site. Guest artists, actors (? Giovanni Ribisi?), plants, and animals are all fair game. I guess it started when Sonic Youth approached him about involvement on a Boxed Set they're putting together. Included will be a cassette (yes.. tape...) only version of EVOL as interpreted by Beck and friends. Oh and yeah.. you guessed it- he recorded the album in a single day. Matador released a split 7" not too long ago with his version of "Green Light" on one side and Sonic Youth's version of "Pay no Mind" on the other. Haven't heard either.....limited pressing w/ no mp3s......
.....you will pay for your sins, Matador!!!....
Anyway, who knows what album he'll do next? Maybe he'll settle down in Reno and become the Coverband Chameleon! Seriously though, as fun as this looks and sounds so far, he's really hoping to boost creativity by doing covers? I guess it's a way to stretch you in musical directions you might have shied away from. But... if they all come out just sounding like Beck songs.... We'll see where he takes it.
Ok, so this isn't going to be pretty but I've got to get it out of my system. (I got halfway through a gargantuan post (10+ videos) last summer for the Sub Pop 20th Anniversary Fest. and then totally burned out... too much information... sorry Sub Pop, I still love you, though..)
Music festivals are like a cross between a Tapas Bar and an Indian Buffet, nice mix of stuff you know and stuff you don't, potent little morsels piled up in such a spread you could never possibly eat them all. You soak in so much sun and sound, you can puke it all out your ears again.
Sasquatch!!! The Gorge Amphitheater in George, WA!! (Did you know there's a Martha, WA too?) A dusty bowl perched atop the cliffs of the mighty Columbia, a roaring hillside wall of sound (if not the Phil Specter variety). Check out some of the videos I took of some of the shows! (don't mock my feeble camera skills...) I need a bigger memory card... or camera!!!
BLIND PILOT
We missed the first couple of bands but made it in time for these guys. A very pleasant surprise as a live show and a great way to start off the day. Banjo, bass, guitar pickin' ditties... great sunny afternoon music.
DEATH VESSEL
Scooted from the Wookie stage to the Yeti stage for this Sub Pop group. Billed as a "neo-traditionalist" folk act, both their name as well as their visage (all black, long hair, vampire-white skin) conjure visions of a norwegian black metal group. I think it might have been the tiny Yeti stage (few bands sounded great there), but DV was pretty underwhelming. We ditched them early to go see Doves down at the mainstage.
DOVES
Brit boys. The mainstage suited their sound, some cool songs but not enough to keep me from leaving early to go see Passion Pit....
PASSION PIT
...which was pretty disappointing... one of the biggest let-downs of the day. just don't translate well into a live show. like animal collective, they would have benefited from an indoor or nighttime venue.
DEVOTCHKA
Probably the biggest surprise for me at Sasquatch! You listen to their recorded material and they're decent to good (everybody knows their biggest hit- "how it ends" made popular by the preview for the film adaptation of everything is illuminated, and the commercials for Gears of War) but they're MONSTERS on stage. Really fantastic live show. I had planned on leaving early to go catch Shearwater, but was too hypnotized to move... Gypsy music meets mariachi meets rockin' balkan polka. Super rad.
M. WARD
M. Ward!!!!!!!! One of the best shows of the day. We were up close and personal for this set at the mainstage. I just laid down in the sun using my jacket as a pillow and listened with my eyes closed. Not very engaging with the crowd, but a well-performed set chock with greats and covers.
Animal Collective
I was really looking forward to this set and wasn't disappointed. They kicked off with Summertime Clothes which transitioned seamlessly to My Girls which bled into a 10 or 15 minute blow-your-mind version of Fireworks (the three songs together with some jammage clocked in at around 40 min). The thing that sucked was that they went on in the afternoon instead of the evening... they should have had the Yeah Yeah Yeah's slot...
Ra Ra Riot
One of Ann's favorite bands- she's seen them multiple times/places (even in NYC). I'd never heard them, though, and once again the acoustics of the Yeti stage were pretty subpar. Seemed like some pretty cool songs, but the set was a bit underwhelming given the sonic limitations.
THE DECEMBERISTS
You know? I haven't been able to dig their stuff since leaving Kill Rock Stars. Maybe someday it'll grow on me, but maybe I'm just bored with Colin Meloy. Me and Ann watched from the top of the grassy amphitheater of the mainstage and wondered if we might have dug it more being down closer to the action... maybe. I guess during the set way over to the left of where we'd been (after we'd ditched for Mos Def) a couple got nekkid and intimate for all to see.... man, how i've missed music festivals at the Gorge....
MOS DEF
HOLY MOSES!!! The Def is back! I thought he'd gone all hollywood... He was all smiles and energy- the sun was setting opposite the Wookie stage and he freaked out for a minute or so about the ambiance and the landscape, "Look at this place!!! Look! Look! It's unreal!" Would have been nice to see him indoors with better acoustics, but his juxtaposition against the dry hills and the twilight canyon was pretty surreal.
BON IVER
The night effectively ended with Bon Iver. I had no interest in seeing the mainstage show Yeah Yeah Yeahs (we watched a song or two just to say we did...Karen O's voice is like a cheese grater on my brain) Kings of Leon and Crystal Castles came next, but Bon Iver was the perfect cap to a near-perfet day; a sweet nightcap catharsis to a sun-drenched and sonic-soaked day. Justin Vernon sure knows how to work the crowd! Of the videos above I only recorded the cover of Kathleen Edwards' Mercury (ran out of card space...but kept this one for its uniqueness). I could have listened for hours more.... but he practically played every song he's ever recorded (including the Dark was the Night stuff) Hats off... one of the best live sets I've seen in a while.
Here's a freebie- check out this awesome acapella version of "for Emma"
So we listened to one song by Kings of Leon and split. Long day... and nothing was about to top what we'd just seen. Can't wait to see next year's lineup!
Check this out!!! This video called Scintillation was made by Xavier Chassaing, a director from Paris. He used a combination of stop motion and live projection mapping of 3d animation. Its a little slow at first, but stick around until around a minute in and you won't be disappointed.
Wow..... what terrible news. It was reported that his parents found him in his new Minneapolis apartment, having apparently fallen and died as a result of hitting his head on a concrete floor. Really nice guy and great songwriter. (Why doesn't this stuff happen to Mexican drug lords or serial killers?) Man, I'm bummed.
(First paragraph accidentally erased.... sorry Spencer... I was trying a new thing with embedding the player inside the post and I chopped it. But to paraphrase: Spencer was being hard on himself for not having posted this sooner, but school happened... blah blah blah, wah wah wah... oh yeah and he's so tired of going to see the Liberty Bell... Spencer- there are starving children in China who would give their left ear to see the Liberty Bell.... jeesh. :) Sorry again. )
But the last of Lisa’s family winged home this morning, and I have a week until my job in SLC starts, so I have all the time in the world to wax rhapsodic about the new album.
And what an album it is. Back when Merriweather Post Pavilion came out in mid-January, I had a review planned out in my mind where I called it the best album of 2009. Granted, the dramatic heft of that statement has been somewhat neutered by the intervening five months, but it’s as true now as it was then. Grizzly Bear who? Bat for Lashes what? No matter how you slice it, I guarantee 2009 will end with MPP being the best album of the year. At least according to me.
This is normally the point at which I would delve into the history of Animal Collective and discuss their back catalogue. The problem is, their back catalogue is so dense, so rich and frothy, that it would take me several posts to sum up their musical history before getting around to reviewing MPP. Suffice it to say, like with most challenging music, new listeners of Animal Collective should start at the end and work their way backward; a LIFO approach to familiarization, if you will. Whatever you do, if you’re new to Animal Collective, don’t jump in with Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. That’s the deep end of the pool. That way lies madness.
As for the band itself, Animal Collective features a rotating membership mostly comprised of Avey Tare (real name: David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deacon (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz), four friends who met in college and decided – probably while under the influence of psychedelic chemicals – that they should write some bizarre music. Although that music has been described as “Noise Pop,” “Experimental” or “Freak Folk” (I agree with Bart – misleading in the extreme), the label I most prefer is “New Primitivism” (see my 2008 top ten list for an all together too lengthy discussion of New Primitivism), if one really must apply labels at all. Regardless, their music features throbbing beats, samples, tortured shrieks and yelps, screams and grunts, and what sounds like broken Casio keyboards – in a word, it's wonderful. At times, however, Animal Collective strays too far into self-indulgence. Almost every one of their albums has at least one song that’s a seven-minute long drone of shifting, grating noise. I’ve grown to appreciate even those songs, but it’s been a process, almost an act of faith. That said, MPP is remarkable in that it entirely lacks any soft, dead moments; the entire album from start to finish is pure, gold-plated joy. Join me on a whirlwind tour:
The album starts of with “In the Flowers,” probably the most traditionally Animal Collective of any of MPP’s songs. Swirling vocals and watery sounds build until about two minutes thirty seconds, when a crazy carnival erupts and carries the listener, captive, into the next song.
“My Girls” is one of two songs on MPP that come the closest to being traditional singles material. It also features one of the most hummable choruses that Tare and company have ever produced: “I don’t mean, to seem like I care about, material things, like the social status. I just want, four walls and adobe slats, for my girls. Whooo!” Another reviewer pointed out that there might have been some intentional irony there, as social status is not a material thing, whereas four walls and slats are. Whatever the meaning behind the song (and trying to find meaning behind Animal Collective songs is not a feat best attempted sober or sane), I dare you to listen to this song without bobbing along to the beat.
The next song, “Also Frightened,” is a manic fire dance of a song. Faint shrieks punctuate laidback, almost contemplative lyrics. It feels simultaneously slow yet fast, relaxed yet anxious, until around the three-minute mark when it evolves into the somehow triumphal refrain of “are you also, frightened?” before returning to the earlier pattern and fading out.
If “My Girls” makes you bob your head, “Summertime Clothes” will make you get up and dance. The second very single-esque song on the album, “Summertime Clothes” wouldn’t feel out of place on a slightly more psychedelic Cut Copy CD. By the end you’ll be singing along: “But I want to walk around with you!”
The next four songs slow things. “Daily Routine” is cascading notes morphing into drawn out vocals and whiplashes. “Bluish” is an almost sweet love song; “I’m getting lost in your curls,” sighs Avery during the chorus. “Guys Eyes,” is all layered vocals and samples, and sounds like it wouldn’t have been out of place on Panda Bear's 2007 solo album Person Pitch. “Taste” is a solipsistic circus ride, as Avery muses whether he’s “really all the things that are outside of me.”
“Lion in a Coma” picks up the pace again; it’s the best (and only?) song I’ve ever heard that features a didgeridoo. Of all the songs on the album, this is the most tribal sounding, but of course this is intentional as Avery yelps that “this wilderness up in my head needs to get right out of my clothes and get into my bedroom.” Again, no idea what he’s talking about, but it sounds fantastic.
“No More Runnin” suggests a secluded lagoon with its slow-tempo beat and drippy sounds. Indeed, the song was written to evoke visions a relaxed, watery refuge. Yet the song begins to take on a melancholic, introspective aspect as the listener realizes that the narrator might currently not be floating in the lagoon, but looks ahead to the day when he will be able to do so. “It’s what I hope for; no more runnin.”
The album finishes up with “Brothersport,” a madcap, droning, reggae-esque, tropical anthem. If this song were in Spanish, it would have easily fit right into El Guincho’s Allegranza. It’s a lively, optimistic song, and it’s the perfect way to finish up the album after the mellower “No More Runnin.”
In MPP, Animal Collective has crafted an album that’s not only their most accessible, but their most cohesive album as well. A lot of good stuff has come out this year, and a lot of good stuff is still on the horizon (new Sunset Rubdown in June!) but for my money, Merriweather Post Pavilion is the best CD 2009 has to offer.
Here's a video of Animal Collective performing "Summertime Clothes" on Letterman:
Here's the music video to "My Girls":
And here's the music video of the song "Fireworks," from their previous album Strawberry Jam:
