Fall Musical Madhouse - Don't They Know It's a Recession?

Y'know, even in the early part of 2011, it would have been difficult to compile a best-of list for the year, what with important works from Decemberists, Civil Wars, The Joy Formidable, Mogwai, Wye Oak, etc. coming out. During the summer, we saw ambitious works from artists as diverse as Smoke Fairies, Brian Eno, and the Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration. Then, in mid-September, the floodgates opened. Didn't anyone tell these musicians and labels that the UBS collapse makes it certain we're diving into a double-dip recession? Who needs art when we have to buy groceries?

Some short-sighted reviewers automatically called the Sept. 13 release of "Father, Son, Holy Ghost" by Girls the album of the year, and I have my own reasons for thinking that's wrong, as explained below. Keep in mind, as you peruse this list, that we still have fall releases from Wilco, Kate Bush, Florence and the Machine, Bjork, Real Estate, Coldplay, and Tom Waits yet to land. Here's my take on most recent, but the year end will be a tough call for 2011.

Tori Amos - Night of Hunters - Writing lyrics for modern classical composers, with her daugher and niece helping her sing? Too haughty for words, right? Wrong. This album is layered and strange and beyond description, might have to be deciphered over several hours. Orchestration only rarely goes over the top, and usually brings in the strings in a spare, strident, and minimalist way. And Tori's daughter sounds like CocoRosie.

Blitzen Trapper - American Goldwing -- Whod've guessed? This is Blitzen Trapper's Lynyrd Skynyrd album, the band has decided to cut a perfect Southern-rock-genre album. Fact is, they do it with a lot of talent, and the result may be less confusing for many folks than the Rundgren-like spastic hop between Dylan and MMJ sounds that characterized Blitzen Trapper's Destroyer of the Void. The problem is, is it better do one style really well, or to try and offer up A Wizard, A True Star style of gumbo? Probably depends on if you like a reincarnated Lynyrd Skynyrd or not.

Bev Barnett & Greg Newlon - Love Can Change the World - Folk duos used to playing the house concert and coffee house circuit always take a risk when expanding studio sounds to include layered percussion, woodwind, and the like. Some might begrudge the Zen references to Thich Nhat Hanh styles of teaching (I'm not one of them), but the power in songs like 'There's a Light' makes it obvious they're steering in the right direction. Inspired move to include two versions of Greg's 'What Makes a Man', too.

Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost -- This is a very ambitious, varied, and accomplished album with lots of stylistic references from the 50s to the 90s. I'm sure to have it in my Top Ten, but I'm getting a little perturbed with everyone from LA Times to Pitchfork to Pop Matters chomping at the bit to declare this the instant Album of the Year, and anoint Girls as the saviors of rock. Why do I have problems with this album? Because the styles from other decades they choose to borrow are the swooshy, long-chord arena-rock styles that often put one to sleep. Case in point: the NPR reviewer (again, worshiping Girls) pointed out that the song 'Vomit' sounded like parts of Dark Side of the Moon. To me, that's not good, and not just in being too derivative. To me, Pink Floyd hit their stride with Ummagumma and Obscured by Clouds, and had already gotten middle-class and predictable by the time Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were released. Same with U2 - Boy and War were the exciting albums, less so Joshua Tree. But Girls has chosen for the band's riffing points the broad arena sound of crowd-pleasers that may be the most popular way of presenting a song, but at the same time can lead to finger-drumming tedium. And believe me, there are a couple definite clunkers on Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Still worth hearing, though.

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know - Very aptly named album, because this is very different from her first two, to the point where her voice is close to unrecognizable on some tracks. She gives us old-timey hillbilly on 'The Muse', 1930s Norah-Jones-style crooning on 'I Was Just a Card', Neil Young and Crazy Horse-style buzz guitar on 'The Beast', and she pulls this all off with some excellent arrangements and playing. Laura Marling has moved from being a capable bluesy-folky indie rock artist to being an amazing chameleon.

Mogwai - Earth Division EP - In the tradition of the magnificent Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, maybe a trifle more acoustic, and if you like the majestic end of 'Music for a Forgotten Future' from the two-disc version of Hardcore, you will love the way this EP ends with 'Does This Always Happen?'

Barn Owl - Lost in the Glare - I listed this one after Mogwai, because Barn Owl is sort of morphing into Mogwai. Since they signed with Thrill Jockey, they've tried to get a more accessible instrumental sound than the days when they played with Charalambides and My Cat Is An Alien. It's still droney, but it's a richer melodic sound that builds from quiet intensity to a Mogwai-like crash and boom. Nice instrumental work.

St. Vincent - Strange Mercy - I thought the 'Cruel' video was a bit too pretentious, and I was almost afraid to try this album, figuring Annie was turning herself into the ice queen. But she has pulled it off, with a whole bunch of very interesting and odd songs. Even more so than Actor, St. Vincent is beginning to sound like Frank Zappa directing a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical. And that's a good thing. Good and weird.


Wild Flag (s/t) - It's great to get Carrie Brownstein out of Portlandia, Janet Weiss out of The Jicks, and Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole out of whatever self-imposed exile they've been in, putting them all together in one rockin' band. The grand dames of riot grrrls can show others how it's done, and they do so aptly, but remember - there are newcomers like Le Butcherettes and Shilpa Ray and the Happy Hookers who will be challenging you out there on the road, and that's what good slash and bash music is all about.

Poems: Ekphrastic with Walker Evans and Mogwai, Brad Manning anger, and mistaken ecstasy

If it weren't for Ruth Mowry, I wouldn't get the guilt level up to appropriate levels for updating this gol-durned blog, poor little neglected creature. It's been a busy time for poetry, since Colorado Springs is making the theme of its runup to National Poetry Month "Ekphrastic Poetry" - Poetry based on or inspired by works of visual art. There will be a big whoop-de-do at Marika's April 16, with artists and writers listed to the left, but to kick it all off, the Poetry West organization had Brian Barker of CU Denver and Copper Press conduct a workshop on ekphrastic poetry on March 5. Since Barker brought along a huge portfolio of Walker Evans' photography, and I still haven't gotten over the obsession in my teenage years with James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I of course had to pick my favorite Evans photo, with the result below:

Rivertown Apostasies (for Walker Evans' 'Main Street Faces')

Disdain of the downward glance
Hat brims 45 degrees from condemned.
Morgantown, Beantown,
collaboration or a temporary alliance?

Black-market vegetables,
the Capone we never saw,
Fallen in a Thunderbird stupor
or the getaway Schwinn of ruptured kickstand,
offering the rolled shirtsleeve as tourniquet,
but with every bank in failure who smirks at the fallen?

Loring Wirbel
March 5, 2011

I also realized after the fact that a poem from late February, based on a piece of music and the cover photo of Mogwai's Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, fit the ekphrastic definition nicely:

On Crying at Mogwai's 'Music for a Forgotten Future'

Some days, you just have to let out a primal scream – IdaRose Sylvester

I’ve sampled enough trails to brokenness
Minus a healing option
That missing doll parts
are the expected palate cleanser

Jigsaw pieces kicked under a walnut armoire
The wound of incomplete grown common.

The path to Chorro Falls admits no jaded warrior.
I see the cityscape in a waxing moon,
its back bay undisturbed
Still water to crusted sand
to cancerous mercury vapor Star of Bethlehem.
A pattern love enabled,
save the missing jigsaw.
This step in love, that step in love.
But mad belief does not replace a slate shelf
tumbling to the canyon floor.
Instead, this tightrope replaces one absent jigsaw.
Will the next?
My niece, priestess of high adventure,
is glad she did not fall to her death today.
I am glad that only the jaded turn around,
but so very tired of Godel’s incompleteness.

Why not a winter’s end
praising the melting ice carnivals,
Madison to Sana’a?
In Finland the finest hotels are carved anew
each year from blue ice
a crystal bed of consummate cum
a palate cleanser
But frosted concierge does little good
in the horse latitude of Carthage.
An ice sheet, a slate sheet
tumbles from a Siberian Camino del Rey
to the canyon floor.
So much for your revolution.
So much for the world made new.
So much for that jigsaw puzzle.

“Peaceful, peaceful!”
Manama moans.
I long to lift the Cabernet
to savor victory upon victory
to find my missing socks
but we always travel the path more broken
and that has made all the difference.

Loring Wirbel

Feb. 18, 2011

(If you click on the highlighted song title above, you'll find the music that inspired the poem. The truly obsessive can walk to Chorro Falls in the video below.)




Now, here are two other recent poems to conclude this mess. My friend Robert said that topical poems have a short shelf life, but when I heard about Bradley Manning being subject to new death-penalty charges and being stripped naked nightly in solitary confinement, well of course I had to offer this poem:


The Legitimacy of a Naked Manning

Synonym search in the Merriam put out to pasture,
a stolen NATO playbook,
assumes a dictionary legible to all.

No-fly in Tobruk
responsibility to protect,
assumes I voted a captive parent
in the last My Weekly Reader poll.

Dangerous toys in wrong hands,
boys in bound hands,
assume I trust my toy chest
to the warrant officer hiking nuclear football.

Goddess Diana of the thousand-day epoch of Harvey Milk,
leading our blessed prayer of Espionage Act
assumes I have witnessed her halo afire in a leaked life hereafter
Assange assignation assertion assume assume.

I assume nothing.

Myriad miles of copper-zinc pipes springing WikiLeaks
at each T-joint
carry less legitimacy than Bradley’s hands
testing the slipknot,
The five centuries of Westphalian honor,
nightmare, triumphalism,
more transitory than the piss spattered on Manning’s toes.

Loring Wirbel
March 6, 2011

And finally, to rejoice in all the myriad things done wrong in a banner year-of-doing-wrong:


Ecstatic Mistakes

What if neither tactics nor strategies are intended to work? – Kent Ingram

Wisdom attained from the error of infinite looping is merely Lesson One.
Yes, the dessicated nerve endings of the phantom limb
howl like gangrenous bone shard.
And yes, many students flunk early.
Just ask the wrong-angled pile of rag and bone
who leapt from the steak-house roof
in a dizzy stupor of self-imposed identity theft.
He is not having fun.
He will have to take an incomplete.

But that was first semester’s lesson plan.
We skip the obvious sociopath for now.
Watch the peristaltic bile in the healthy specimen
collect for each lover’s lie, each agile cheat,
an acid meant as solvent for chronic pain.
Now here comes the hard part,
take it to the bridge.

Installed the flange upside down.
I love my wrong.
Let my child hear the audible bile.
I love my wrong.
Conduit cut to the wrong diameter.
I love my wrong.
Defrauding the lover that mattered most.
I love my wrong.

Newbie first-formers chant “The things which hurt, instruct.”
You laugh past hurt.
Let the cartoon clown hammering his thumb
be your silly satori.
Every fuckup sparkles in prevenient grace.

Loring Wirbel
Feb. 21, 2011

Sounds of Autumn

The pre-Christmas mad onrush of music releases began in the last few days, at a time when consumers are hard-pressed to spare a 99-cent iTunes download. How is one to find the jewels amidst the torrent of dross? Have no fear, Uncle Loring is here to point you to the good stuff. It's not like I've actually listened to the 200-some-odd new offerings since mid-September, I'm just using an intuitive sense of what's indispensable:

TV on the Radio (photo above) - Dear Science, - Some might be compelled to call this TVotR's disco album, since it's clearly the most danceable. Don't think that means that lyricism or arrangements are sacrificed for rhythm. This is probably the most intelligent and layered album from these strange purveyors of urban folk tales.

Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue - The sticker on the cover tells us this is a sequel to Rabbit Fur Coat, but there aren't many similarities. In her first solo album, Jenny relied on the Watson Twins for stripped-down country. This album has guest appearances by Elvis Costello, Zooey Deschanel, M. Ward, Chris Robinson, et. al. for a straight ahead rockin' songwriter showcase. Another difference - Rabbit Fur Coat, like the 2006 album by Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous, was all about Jenny taking her lyric skills to town. This album, like Rilo Kiley's Under the Black Light from last year, focuses more on song structure and arrangements. But Acid Tongue, unlike Black Light, isn't a 1970s retro throwback, it's Jenny and Zooey showing how Hollywood stars can be great musicians.

Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling - Mogwai's BBC sessions a couple years ago showed the Glasgow band migrating toward more of a mid-period King Crimson sound, and this continues that evolution, with maybe traces of other all-instrumental bands like Dirty Three and Godspeed You Black Emperor. All the songs here have a certain majesty to them, even the ones with silly titles. The early copies of this CD come with a fascinating documentary DVD, Adelia, I Want to Love, about a 90-year-old Italian woman who produces an outdoor Mogwai concert.

Boston Spaceships - Brown Submarine - Robert Pollard puts out music under so many aliases, it's hard to decide what to pay attention to first. In late spring, he put out Off to Business under his own name, filled with traditional pop-rock tunes as classy as those in the dual albums he released last October. Earlier in 2008, the album We've Moved by Psycho and the Birds contained strange, haunting melodies that nevertheless were filled with insistent hooks that drilled into your brain. But Pollard surprised everyone when Boston Spaceships ended up being the band he took on tour. And this album shows why. Every song, from Andy Playboy to Winston's Atomic Bird, is the kind of driving, three-minute masterpiece that made Guided by Voices famous. Is there anything Pollard can't do?

Duffy - Rockferry - If you saw her Saturday Night Live appearance, you no doubt thought she was over the top, like a cartoon hybrid of Dolly Parton and Marilyn Monroe. Listen carefully to the album. This woman cares about bringing back a sense of Motown, and gives you an odd vocal style for orchestrated pop, without the personal dramas of Amy Winehouse.

Kings of Leon - Only by the Night - Several critics have pointed out that the Tennesee-brothers-and-cousin-Followill-family are giving us a more U2 arena sound in their fourth album. I think it's better than that (from the perspective that arena rock bores me). This CD has unpredictable riffs and rhythms with a well-defined sense of play, like teaching a young Joe Cocker contrapuntal rhythms. In fact, songs like 17 even border on pseudo-dissonance. But with Kings of Leon, you know they want to be normal, Southern, macho, and hard-rock-poppy. But on this album, they find a very interesting and inspired path to getting there.