...or how I learned to stop worrying and love the troll.
Asthmatic Kitty, 2006
You’re a painter. You paint landscapes, mainly. The paintings are beautiful and extremely detail: you use the thinnest brush you have to individually paint in each blade of grass. Your paintings are full of life: there’s often a herd of deer dancing in the background, the trees are filled with birds, mice hide in between the bushes. Your paintings are vibrant, painted with the brightest of colours so that, when you cover your studio with them, it feels like you’re in the middle of summer, even at night. What amazes people the most is that you don’t even live in the countryside—you live in inner-city Chicago. Your days are filled with the choking fumes of mid-day traffic. People ask how you manage to draw such detailed pictures without a reference, but you don’t understand—all you have to do is close your eyes, and the pictures are right there, even more beautiful than you can ever realise. You slowly build up a small following, getting places in some major galleries, but you don’t really like the attention.
Your brother died a year or two ago. The police said it was an accidental death—but you’re not so sure. He was always such a good boatsmans, and he always wore his life jacket. It just doesn’t seem possible. Somehow, he keeps appearing in your pictures. Your brother is there, drowning in the lake, his body soaking in the harsh blue water. You don’t know how, you swear you don’t draw him. Sometimes you swear you didn’t even mean to draw water, but his body is still there, floating in the river, wearing his blood-red Arcade Fire tee shirt. In your heart, although you try not to think about it, you know it was probably suicide.
You draw another parade of rabbits, hopping across the front of the forest.
5/5
Reviewed by David.
Tracklist:
- The Avalanche
- Dear Mr. Supercomputer
- Adlai Stevenson
- The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies
- Chicago (Acoustic Version)
- The Henney Buggy Band
- Saul Bellow
- Carlyle Lake
- Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in His Hair
- The Mistress Witch from McClure (Or, the Mind that Knows Itself)
- Kaskaskia River
- Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version)
- Inaugural Pop Music for Jane Margaret Byrne
- No Man’s Land
- The Palm Sunday Tornado Hits Crystal Lake
- The Pick-Up
- The Perpetual Self, or What Would Saul Alinsky Do?
- For Clyde Tombaugh
- Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder Version)
- Pittsfield
- The Undivided Self (For Eppie and Popo)
Hannibal, 1991
This one’s for all you lovers out there. That’s right, you. Take the time and stop your love making to check out Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Band. Ivo and his boys are masters of Bulgarian wedding music (that’s right, you heard it, Bulgarian wedding music) and on this album they have no problem showing off their their style and control, all in the name of love.
Essentially, these guys are out of their minds; they play with the oddest time signatures, offbeat syncopations, quick glissandos all over the place, and an overall frenetic intensity that doesn’t stop. Even when the songs slow down, the energy stays. It takes you on a wild roller coaster ride at breakneck speed and then proceeds to make you cry at your long lost buddy’s funeral, staying oh so stylish all along the way.
Although the music is highly complex, it still feels natural. All the techniques that are alien to western music are somewhat filtered out by a jazzy, sometimes even funky, rhythm section, along with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flourishes. While some might say these modal tendencies detract from the authenticity of the music, it makes it extremely listenable and gives it some major eclectic points.
So fuck it, next time you feel the need to spice up your love life, try your hand at getting down to Ivo Papasov’s Balkanology.
330° out of 2π
Review by Quiroz
Track List:
1 Mladeshki Dance (6:17)
2 Hristianova Kopanitsa (3:26)
3 Istoria Na Edna Lyubov (4:17)
4 Ivo’s Ruchenitsa (9:42)
5 Song For Baba Nedelya (3:30)
6 Ergenski Dance (3:36)
7 Mominsko Horo (8:48)
8 Tziganska Ballada (5:24)
9 Veseli Zborni (4:19)
10 Proleten Dance (2:38)
11 Kasapsko Horo (2:15)
Download!
4AD, 2008
OK, now I might not be the best person to review this album, but I do own it and that’s qualification enough in this newfangled world of blogulated reviews!
We have the usual tracks of Darnielle and his guitar proving everyone who thinks Conner Oberst is the next Dylan utterly wrong. Even though he’s been established for a while longer than Mr. Oberst, and has a bit of a loyal following comparable to his as well.
What struck me with this album more than other stuff I’ve heard is how well he controls his warbling melancholic voice with such finesse, and the good sense of instrumental sparseness. Of course, this might just be because I haven’t sat through all of The Sunset Tree.
Favorite tracks are: Craters on the Moon (excellent dramatic build-up), Lovecraft in Brooklyn(pretty rockin if i do say so), Tianchi Lake (eat your heart out Jack Johnson), Marduk T-Shit Mens Room Incident (I want to know more about the lyrics, nice backup singing too), and the title track which reminds me of the last track on The Sunset Tree.
A very solid album from perhaps one of the most consistent (quality wise) artists I can think of. Did I mention the Sunset Tree is Awesome?
The only problem might be the song arrangement in places or if it just ain’t your cup of tea (coupla buddies think he sounds like a mountain goat). It also gets a bit too sappy in places. San Bernardino has touching subject material but… it’s TOO saccharine.
A 4.5/5
Review by Squishy
Track Listing:
1 Sax Rohmer #1
2 San Bernadino
3 Heretic Pride
4 Autoclave
5 New Zion
6 So Desperate
7 In The Craters On The Moon
8 Lovecraft In Brooklyn
9 Tianchi Lake
10 How To Embrace A Swamp Creature
11 Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident
12 Sept 15 1983
13 Michael Myers Resplendent
Download!
Very Friendly, 2006
This album is like the bleeding heart of lost America, oozing desperation and dust out of its aorta, letting the thick blood pour onto sand, not because it’s dying, but because that’s the only thing left for it to do. Diane Cluck started off as somewhat of an alternative and watered down Regina Spektor, and yet this album was recorded from 2001-2004, overlaying her musical output at the time. Like the sculpture in Drawing Restraint 9, this is the waste product of a bigger project, yet its value is far greater than would be expected: Diane Cluck manages to sculpt it into a petroleum jelly bast of the 21st Century’s mind.
That’s not to say the lyrics are a zeitgest to our Id’s, as might be expected. Unlike Cluck’s usual work, there’s no intricate weaving of themes and words—barring Parlor Trick where she sings of “the deep and rosure kisses that spring only to existence in the instances your lips come into knowing mine.” But this, like most of the album, gives way to brutal minimalism:
oh
you beauty
i can’t
bear you
i have
wished to tend to you
i half
wanna tear you
no no no no no no no
i don’t mean
i want to hurt you
i just want to love you
all the way
all the way
oh
and yet, in those simple words she speaks more than any angst-ridden and eye-liner wearing band of the past decade: eschewing verbosity for simple cutting lyrics and never forgetting the power of her voice. This whole album is that moment on Skinny Love where Justin Vernon’s voice wavers a little and he shouts out his soul into the microphone. For a record where the majority of it is just her, her guitar, and feedback, it can be a tiring listen as she pulls your heartstrings into 50 different directions.
This is all coupled with some of the most discordant harmonies to ever approach beauty—like Oh Vanille, her magnus opus, Diane Cluck never lets you know whether she’s multitracking or simply using a group of her friends, layering voice upon voice upon voice until some tracks approach nothing but a series of infinite echos: one voice singing, but a thousand ones in reply. If Nick Drake’s soft, calming yet disturbed voice was the mirror for the early 70’s, then this is the the one for the early 00’s and its obsession with the media fire of our lives: self-destructive, introspective, minimalistic and desperate.
11 Pipers Piping/12 Days of Christmas
Review by David
Tracklist
1. Snake
2. Beatless Wonder
3. Real Good Time
4. Countless Times
5. Countless Times
6. Lucifer
7. Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony
8. Diamonds
9. Gardenovena
10. Leave Me Alone
11. My Virtue’s Gone (Hooray Hooray)
12. Reverly
13. Dilapidalliance
14. Reveller
15. (Untitled)
16. Modern Day
17. Parlor Trick
18. (Untitled)
19. Pray Headaches Away
20. Honed. Hemmed In.
21. Nothing But God
22. (Untitled)
23. If You See Sunlight
Download
Recorded 1995, unreleased. Leaked 2007
Track four. That is the only reason you need to listen to Hello and Farewell Gothenburg. Titled I Love You, Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire and under two and a half minutes, the song contains some of the most heartbreakingly simple lyrics John Darnielle has ever written. “What’s going to be the death of me?” He starts, with a vocal style similar to a later album, All Hail West Texas. “Static electricity.”
The whole album consists of him, a guitar and some background noises - a car, for example, at the start of I Love You, Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire. It is very obviously an early Mountain Goats album. It was recorded in 1995, and leaked in 2007; it was never officially released, and is unfortunately not sanctioned by John Darnielle; he cites poor mastering as one of the reasons. Fans of the band might note just how bright the guitar sounds are, and his voice. Darnielle has gone on record as saying that the record was mastered a full tone higher than the tracks were performed.
While this is by no means the best Mountain Goats album out there, it has the lo-fi feel that many of us love. It’s like All Hail West Texas without the grinding sound of the broken recorder to see us through from track to track. While Hello and Farewell Gothenburg doesn’t have the complex arrangements of the most recent Mountain Goats albums, it is a heartfelt, aching album that many fans are sure to enjoy.
To continue with Gearmond’s fabulous tradition, I give this album 4 out of 5. It’s fucking John Darnielle; what more needs to be said?
Review by Frankih.
Track List:
1. Hello, Old Rabbit (1:33)
2. You’re So Vain (3:00)
3. Four New Trees (2:12)
4. I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire (2:17)
5. Milk Song (2:12)
6. Ghosts (2:37)
7. Red Choral Diamond Spray (2:26)
8. Ending the Alphabet (2:36)
9. Crane (1:49)
10. One Frozen River (2:28)
Download!
