Kurt Vile

I once read that genius is not that which is not an imitation, but that which cannot be imitated.  By that definition, I don't doubt that Kurt Vile (yes, that is his real name) is a genius.  Countless reviewers have pointed out the similarities to Tom Petty, Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen in his latest album, Smoke Ring for My Halo, but it never quite seems to explain what you are listening too.  Ordinarily, when we say that an artist has a certain 'influence', it's because we find a specific element of their music to sound like the prior artist.  Tom Petty's voice sounds like Bob Dylan's which sounds like Woody Guthrie's.  Kurt Vile sounds like Tom Petty played wrong.  The simple chord structures are there, the half-sung, half-intoned vocals are there, but it's been picked apart at the seams - the memorably pointless guitar licks have been replaced with wandering fuzz that shifts and falls over the beat; the glibly simple melodies are reduced to repetitive, almost a-melodic drawls that slur out like an afterthought;  the faux-hardscrabble lyrics (think of the empty nostalgia of Mary Jane) scorched away by a Cobain bleakness that doesn't even try for redemption.

It's easy to hate this album on first listen.  It's so painfully uncool - the FM rock influences are so... sincere.  Even the lyrics seem to come from the wrong decade:

I bet by now
You probably think I'm a puppet
To the man
Well, I'll tell you right now
You best believe that I am

Who talks about 'the man' in this day and age?  The guy has hair past his shoulders, for crying out loud. I mean just look at him - he should be playing for the Meat Puppets in 1986, or a mid-90's Vaselines cover band, or for Pearl Jam, well, ever.  He just has no right to be relevant in 2011, and yet somehow he is.

There's nothing ironic about any of it: no pop-inspired hooks and no 'I'm cool for being so bored' lyrics.  Instead he's singing "I get sick of just about everyone / And I hide in my baby's arms / Shrink myself just like a tom thumb / And I hide in my baby's hands" and then on the next track he's straight into a beautiful, catchy guitar melody for 'Jesus Fever' (my favorite on the album so far) that sounds like the love child of Fleetwood Mac and REM.  It's a beautiful finger-picked line that seems to stretch out just two bars too long.  But that's what you start to fall in love with on this album - nothing has been sanded flush.  The joints are all visible, the flaws left exposed - one guitar part too many here, a syllable drawn out too long there, it's the polar opposite of my last obsession.  Just listen to the rattled bass note at the beginning of every four bar phrase on On Tour. It sticks out.  It shouldn't be there - it's too heavy, too overdone. But it's very intentional, and it it rings out the monotony of the touring life - it's Seger's 'Turn the Page' minus the romanticism.  It's just ugly and menacing:

Watch out for this one
He'll pump you full of lead for turning your head wrong
I would know
I see through everyone, even my own self now

Not every song on the album works.  "Society is My Friend" is just too high-school poetry, as is the title track, but if you've recently overdosed on Radiohead, The National, or the Smith Westerns, this just might be your antidote.

Smoke Ring for My Halo on Amazon
Smoke Ring for My Halo on iTunes

Permutations

When I visit Manhattan, I often have the impression that I am seeing the same 7 or 8 people over and over again:  The skinny-jeaned hipster, the girl with the teddy bear hat, the confused asian tourist...   It's as though these archetypes wander across my field of vision and then race off stage to change their shoes and put on a different necklace, maybe a wig, before they are shuttled up to the the next block to reappear in their new permutation.  It's a feeling I don't get anywhere else - I suppose when you have 8 million people packed into such a small area, the need to establish one's identity at a glance becomes a matter of tribal membership.  How else could you maintain your sense of self when you live with in a mile of more people than a human being would typically meet in a lifetime throughout most of history?

It's a digression, I know, but I have this same feeling of reappearing permutations when I listen to "No Color," The Dodos third album, especially comparing it back to their first.  The core remains the same, while the particulars are rearranged - folk rhythms (particularly celtic drumming, to my ear), highly percussive guitar work, short melodic phrasing and repetitions that treat the vocal track almost as a drum in itself - these are always consistent, while the particulars are reconfigured from track to track, and even within a song. Intentionally or not, it seems to borrow from Ornette Coleman's idea of harmolodic music, where every instrument carries melody and percussion with equal weight.  This same idea was a direct influence of Soul Coughing, and I hear much the same effect in Rodrigo y Gabriela's virtuosic guitar work on 11:11, though all of these bands have (thankfully) dropped Coleman's atonalism.

Done well, this aesthetic is energetic and engaging, and The Dodos certainly do it well.  Meric Long's guitar work is forceful and precise, working equally well for finger-picked acoustic lines and the occasional driving electric shred.  Logan Kroeber melds his syncopated drum work seamlessly with the guitar, complementing Long's own rhythmic play.  But the style can also be limiting.  The emphasis on percussion is sometimes to the detriment of melody - each of Meric Long's vocal and guitar lead lines are beautiful, but he often constrains them to repeat a very exact motif over a couple bars, which leaves little room for harmonic or melodic development.  Instead, The Dodos create forward motion by switching across distinct sections of short, repeated rhythmic, harmonic and melodic motifs - changing clothes when our heads are turned, but returning as much the same person we saw a moment before.  This is actually a distinct improvement on Visiter,  where Long and Kroeber sometimes let each section persist for all or most of the song - no matter how good those two bars are, they just can't sustain an entire song.

The album is at it's best when Logan and Kroeber give their creations just a little space to breathe, particularly on "Companions" and "Don't Try and Hide It," where the duo allow the patterns to mutate and shift less precisely. Neko Case's appearance on the latter track is extremely welcome - I often prefer Case's work on other artist's albums, where the unusual but beautiful character of her voice adds potency, where on its own it can be a bit intense.   Kroeber's lead lines on the electric guitar are also particularly good in that song.  There's also real melodic development in "When Will You Go?", and (in another clothes-changing moment) there's a certain 60's folk-pop influence to the vocals, much like my favorite track on Visiter, "Ashley," which for some reason that I will never fully understand, always makes me think of Mrs Robinson in the The Graduate.

While I do think it would benefit if The Dodos relaxed their precision just a bit more, the highlights of this album are incredibly rewarding, though I found it took a couple listens before they started to reveal themselves.

Yellowman

I had the privilege this afternoon of seeing my friend, Rachel Christopher, in Trinity Rep's production of Yellowman.  She plays opposite Joe Wilson in an overwhelming hour and a half of theater about the nexus of color, gender and class within a 1960's Southern Black community.  The play is shattering most of all in the absence of overt white racism: this is about how the legacy of prejudice, slavery and poverty infects a community until it devours itself.  How a cast of two can sustain an audience through such a painful and taxing drama is beyond me, but I certainly know that this was true virtuosity.

For me, the musicality of the dialogue (really, closer to monologue) is irresistible.  Throughout, the actors repeat permutations of their lines that highlight the cadences of southern oratory, gospel and blues traditions.  As Eugene and Alma (Joe and Rachel, respectively) slip from their own characters voices into the Gullah accents of their parents and grandparents, each character-within-character becomes a rhythm of it's own, and the director highlights this at times by playing the actor's voices on tape behind their continuing dialogue.  Later in the play, after Alma escapes South Carolina and moves to New York, she carries us through the city in the clicking of her newly-beloved high heels, making her walk (and her words) into a dance, a beating drum. Music becomes a backdrop, an simple necessity for the play - as Eugene asks, "Is there anything beyond church music and blues?"

Painting Isolation

Other than writing my review for Kaputt, I spent most of yesterday's ride back from New York listening to Brooklyn Rider's Dominant Curve. The afternoon before, I'd been to the Whitney to see an exhibition of Edward Hopper's works. I wasn't terribly familiar with Hopper - of course everyone knows Nighthawks. Those paintings kept coming back to me during the ride: the deep sense of isolation embedded in mundane, often bright and vivid scenes.  A Woman in the Sun and New York Interior in particular stuck with me and it seemed appropriate subject matter for as rain-slashed bus ride back to Boston. You sit right next to someone, within a few feet of a 50 more for 4 straight hours, and no one says a word - very Hopper.

Dominant Curve is one of the few things to get me interested in modern classical music in a long time. I don't feel in the least qualified to review it (not that I've let that stop me so far) but the jangled notes, the quartet ceaselessly pulling together and breaking apart across the second movement of Achilles Heel... Well, it fit the bus ride and the paintings.

Dancing with Himself

"I write poetry for myself / I write poetry for myself / I write poetry for myself"

Self-referential, pop-referential, post-modern to the nth degree. Destroyer's latest album, Kaput, is a Depeche Mode album remixed by Blondie, a photocopy of a photocopy of a CBGB poster. It's self-indulgent to a degree that's almost nauseating on first listen, but on reflection, is appropriate for the subject matter. Somehow it works, if you can stomach it.

Dan Bejar seems to be trying to build the ultimate 80's album: disaffected lyrics heavy with apparent poignancy and yet ultimately ephemeral; The words fade as quickly as the manufactured fog at a discotheque. He layers these with synth washes, mindless soft-rock saxophone wails and drum tracks that would sound right at home on the Yamaha keyboard my father brought home in 1986, and the result is an homage which is strangely longing and yet completely honest about the pointlessness of that decade. The effect works best on "Savage Night at the Opera" - the guitar riff could have been lifted right off London Calling - where Bejar seems to be singing directly to the ennui of New York City club scene.

"A savage night at the opera. / Another savage night at the club. / Let's face it, old souls like us are being born to die"

This album is maddening: I hated it from the first time I heard it, but I keep coming back and listening to it anyway. The composition is so carefully and intentionally over the top, and each hook feels like it's a song you already know - you just can't remember where you heard it before. Was that sax solo from a Billy Joel album? The guitar solo on smile: it's Bejar imitating a new wave band that stole it from 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' and vocals on the outro are an homage to a ripoff of 'Hey Jude.'

But the album borders on an altar to atheism: glorification of nothingness, of pointlessness. At a certain point I start to think that solipsism may be an indefensible artistic viewpoint. If there is nothing to be known or communicated, why write a song? And why listen to it?

But I still keep listening to it. And maybe that's Bejar's point: no matter how vague and pointless, the music that he pays homage to drew people to the clubs night after night and made them feel something.