Euterpeos: The Shepard's Dog

There's something primal about Sam Beam's music. And when I say primal, I mean old---not wild, feral, and uncouth, but some ancient thing that wells up from a deep historical and cultural well. It's the same feeling you get from the theophanies of the blues and the supernatural, superstitious spiritualism of the Southern Gothic (as expressed, for example, in Flannery O'Connor).

My exposure to Iron & Wine is admittedly limited. I heard his first album, Our Endless Numbered Days, a few years ago in college. I thought it was good, but kind of forgettable. The music had some interesting harmonies, but his breathy voice was a little too John Mayer to make me like him. But a year or so later I heard "He Lays in the Reins." I just had to respect the way Beam had combined the machismo of the vocals of Mexican ranchero ballads and the twang of an electric slide guitar with a lulling, cascading rhythm. This was music as expansive as the landscape of the American west, but without all the sell-out sentimental jingoism and emotional manipulation of modern country music. That takes talent.

Then last month I read Susan M's review of The Shepard's Dog over at Kulturblog. I was convinced. I bought The Shepard's Dog the weekend we moved, and have been meaning since then to do a write-up. Finally, now that oral arguments are done, I'm getting around to it.

The Shepard's Dog is easily Sam Beam's best album to date. It is certainly the most ambitious and the most musically complex. Beam lays down layer upon genre-straddling layer of rhythm, melody, and counter-melody. The music has an almost symphonic quality to it. And he uses a wide variety of instrumentation drawn from several traditions to keep it interesting. With jumping rock-folk rhythms and more expansive vocal back-ups, the music rocks enough that Beam's breathy voice doesn't bother me in this album---less John Mayer, more Dan Fogelberg.

"Lovesong of the Buzzard," for example, starts with a syncopated hand percussion line entwined with a simple acoustic guitar strum. Vocal melody comes in, and is joined by harmony. Then a cheery Van Morrison/Janis-Joplin style organ comes in and slowly grows in volume and complexity. Then the acoustic guitar part picks up and gets rocking. Thats when the accordion arpeggios start. That's right: accordion arpeggios. The tracks ends with a little nautical-sounding accordion part that is joined briefly by a western electric slide guitar and then breaks down into chaotic electronic noise.

The album opens with one of my favorite tracks: "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car." If King Lear had had a theme song this would be it. It begins with a steady acoustic guitar rhythm, develops with some Celtic-inspired slow-drawn fiddle, more complex acoustic guitar parts, and otherwordly vocal harmonies, and then climaxes with some high piano twiddling. The different parts work together and jam like an Appalachian jug band transported into some heather-crowned Celtic highland. You gotta love these lines:

I was still a beggar shaking out my stolen coat
among the angry cemetery leaves
when they caught the king beneath the borrowed car,
righteous, drunk, and fumbling for the royal keys

But even though Beam draws heavily on folk roots, it's not all fiddle and gut-bucket. This album also nods to celtic, reggae, electronic, Indian, country, and other traditions, but it plants its roots squarely in rock and roll soil. The second track, "White Tooth Man," opens with sitars and sounds like a late Beatles tune. The tenth track, "The Devil Never Sleeps" is a joyful old-time rock and roll tune. With its snippets of honky-tonk-esque piano and its 12-string/electric guitar duets, it sounds like an early Beatles tune. And the last track, "Flightless Bird, American Mouth," is a waltz ballad picked out on acoustic guitar with accordion and electric guitar accents and almost Righteous Brothers-esque vocals. The title track has a reggae beat, but combines it with a groaning 12-string and a Janis Joplin style organ part. "Peace Beneath the City" gives you sitars with wah-wah electric guitar, a deep background cello drone. A Theremin makes a ghostly appearance.

"Ressurection Fern" is perhaps the simplest song on this album. An single acoustic strum and a shaker holds up the tune, supported only minimally by electric slide accents. This song is a mystery to me because it reminds me of country music but doesn't make me want to stab lead pencils through my eardrums. Even C likes it, and she hates country even more than I do.

Another substantial strength of The Shepard's Dog is that Beam is enough of a poet that he matches his interesting sounds with equally interesting images. Just as the sitars in "White Tooth Man" echo the sound of late Beatles, that track's lyrics mirror the imagery of songs like Eleanor Rigby. Beam's line, "the postman cried while reading the mail and we all got trampled in the Christmas parade" reminds me of "Father Mackenzie, writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear." The Shepard's Dog is fraught with images of rural America, religion, and nature. It deals with themes that range from violence to innocence to consumerism, but does so through images rather than polemics. As a result, the poetry is subtle, unobstrusive, and memorable.

This is an album worth having.

Euterpeos: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

What happens when one-time punk/grunge band with a vaguely Foo-Fighter-eqsue sound decides to go minimalist and hitchhike to Motown? You get Spoon's last album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

A week or so ago, I was ordering some stuff from Amazon and was close to getting free shipping. I had heard that Spoon had released a new album, so I looked it up and bought it on impulse for 10 bucks, only 3 more than my shipping would have cost. I don't much about Spoon, so I'm probably not qualified to say much in the way of comparison to their previous work. But what I do know is that they claim the Pixies as an influence and in the past have been compared to Nirvana, another Pixies-influenced band. Overall, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga doesn't sound that much like Nirvana or the Pixies. But there are footprints of Seattle grunge---like the bass lines on "Don't You Evah," and "Rhthm And Soul" and the power chord rhythms on "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case."

Most of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is what I would describe as minimalist rock. The sound is for the most part pared down to the essential elements of the genre. It tends to favor acoustic, simple rhythms, repetition, and above all simplicity. You don't get a lot of guitar duets, overlapping melodies, or even much vocal harmony. "The Ghost of You Lingers," which features multiple vocalists, is essentially call-and-response as opposed to simultaneous harmony. In fact, the name Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is supposed to suggest the simplistic repetition of a piano rhythm; it aptly describes the minimalist sound of the album. When you do get a more complex melody line (like the Flamenco-inspired guitar-picking in "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case"), it's showcased against an unembellished background of muted rhythm guitar and percussion.

That it favors acoustic simplicity is not to say that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga eschews electronic elements, though. They're there, especially on "The Ghost of You Lingers." And some songs use echo effects on the vocals, but on the whole electric elements are used sparingly. In this case, a little electronica leaveneth the whole lump.

But the minimalist overtone of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga makes the few larger, deeper arrangements really stand out and rock, especially with the Motown inspired horns. In particular, "The Underdog" and "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" incorporate this little touch of soul. "Cherry Bomb" even adds in the Martha and the Vandellas-style bells. It's fun.

Actually, one of the most interesting features of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is its use of percussion. I already mentioned the Motown bells, but there's more. My favorite track, "The Underdog" incorporates, in successive layers, shakers, tambourines, sleigh bells, and, spoons---yes, spoons---over a folksy, O.A.R.-reminiscent acoustic strum rhythm with Motown horns. The Jazzy trumpet flourish at the end even sounds distinctly like something They Might Be Giants would do. They use spoons---it's so eponymous. And you've gotta respect that.

Yaaarrrrrrrrgh!

Scene I:
A street corner in Minneapolis about 8:00 AM in late August. A hobo walks down the street toward me. The first thing I notice is the smile gaping in his soiled visage. Not the usual glazed smile of the inebriated and insane, but a real genuine, hearty, roguish smile paired with a set of glinting baby blues. Curving over the top of the smile is a thick mustache that manages to be bushy and yet at the same time curl up rakishly at the corners---reminiscent, perhaps, of more muscular incarnation of the famed whiskers of Dalí. This singular lip-mane is matched by a lustrous black mullet that falls in Jacobean fashion, cascading abundantly down both sides of the shoulders. This man is wearing a dirty loose-fitting, red shirt, tucked into a pair of close-fitting black jeans that cover the tops of a pair of scuffed patent-leather loafers with gold-colored accents.

Scene II:
A flashback. Two weeks ago I sit on a couch with my brother, visiting from New York. He shows me the website of a band called dark dark dark. I wonder if it's an allusion to Milton or Eliot. Or if Eliot is alluding to Milton. My brother clicks on a demo song and the eerie sounds of a squeeze box begin to emanate from the computer, punctuated at regular intervals with percussion that sounds oddly like breaking glass. (Apparently this band was playing in Mpls the night we got back from Nauvoo, but we didn't go.)

Conclusion:
It must be time for me to list my top five pirate songs. I am not picking actual authentic pirate tunes (that would be too obscure). Instead, these are pirate-related songs found floating around in today's cultural flotsam. Here are my picks of the top five:

1) Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, based on Coleridge's poem of the same title is first because it has the distinction of being the rocking-est song on the list, and also the one with the most and longest face-melting guitar solos. Also the best use of an electric guitar to imitate the creaking of the decks on board ship.

2) The Decemberists' Mariner's Revenge. A Poe-esque tale of revenge and filial devotion set to a pirate-y tune performed mainly on accordion and tambourine.

3) Disney's Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me) from Peter Pan. "You'll love the life of a thief, you'll relish the life of a crook. / There isn't a boy who won't enjoy a-working for Captain Hook."

4) Henry H. Russel's, Ocean Wave is the tune set to Hannah Cornaby's 'Who's on the Lord's Side?' in the current LDS Hymnal. Russel apparently wrote a lot of swashbucklin' type tunes, judging by their titles.

5) They Might Be Giants' With the Dark is not musically very buccaneer-like. However, it makes the list because it has this line: "I'm growing tired of all my nautical dreams / I'm growing tired of all my nautical themes / bustin' my pirate hump / rocking my peg leg stump / my mind naturally turns / to taxidermy, to taxidermy, yeah!"

What be yer picks, me hearties?

Euterpeos: They Might Be Giants' The Else

I am Euterpeos, friend and associate of Cinematographicus. We roomed together in college, where we would sit on our porch and look down our noses at unfortunate passers-by as we discussed Art in an ultra-modern context. I have been invited to compose the occasional music review for We might be windmills.

They Might Be Giants has been evading genre definitions since 1982, only barely snagging itself in the catch-all nets of indie and alternative rock. While their music can be considered both indie and alternative, those labels don’t really do justice to the diversity of John and John’s work. Analysis of 25 years of music reveals influences from 60s rock & roll, 80s electronic pop, 90s alternative, folk, jazz, blues, show tunes, punk, ska, et cetera. You can’t really pin a sound or a label on the music of They Might Be Giants. The same statement applies to their new album: The Else.

If I were going to try to call The Else something, I’d call it electropunk. The plurality of the tracks (“I’m Impressed,” “Take Out the Trash,” “Climbing the Walls,” “The Cap’m,” “The Shadow Government,” “Feign Amnesia”) seem to call on that genre as influence, though admittedly some are more electro and others more punk. Two of the tracks (“Careful What You Pack,” “Withered Hope”) have an eerie, Sufjan Stevens-esque sound. The rest (“Upside Down Frown,” “With the Dark,” “The Bee of the Bird of the Moth,” “Contrecoup,” “The Mesopotamians”) stubbornly refuse to be lumped in with any of the others.

Electropunk is a fairly new and different sound for TMBG. Adopting it for their latest album shows the band’s continuing ability to adapt itself and successfully innovate. The Sufjan Stevens influence demonstrates TMBG’s ability to stay current with musical trends while maintaining a style of their own.

The Else also succeeds in demonstrating TMBG’s other quality that has helped the band’s staying power: the ability to compose songs on subjects that nobody else would consider musical. “The Shadow Government” talks about a corrupt municipality; the lyrical voice yearns for an overthrow that will allow him to run his meth lab without local, invasive surveillance tracking him. “The Bee of the Bird of the Moth” describes the actions of the hummingbird moth, which acts “like a bird that thinks it’s a bee.” “Contrecoup” advocates the use of phrenology to examine a concussion. “With the Dark” was hard to understand at first, but after watching the music video of it on YouTube, I determined that the song is about a girl and her love for a giant squid, whom she abandoned to take over the world with her little friend that she spontaneously generated.

“The Mesopotamians,” in my opinion, deserves special mention. When I first saw this track listing, I assumed that it would be one of the band’s quasi-educational songs, in the same vein as “Why Does the Sun Shine?” or “James K. Polk.” The song, whose tune and composition recall something from The Turtles’ greatest hits, is actually about a band named The Mesopotamians. The members of the band are Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh. No one’s ever seen them, and no one’s ever heard of their band, but they drive around in an Econoline van and scratch their lyrics down in the clay in case someone one day gives a damn about them. Ingenious. And by ingenious, I mean who in the world would have thought to write such a song?

Overall, The Else is an enjoyable album. It’s exactly what you would expect from TMBG (quirky, original lyrics and music), augmented by the band’s continuing ability to reinvent their sound and adapt to modern musical tastes. And they do it all without selling out. Bravo John, John.