Traversing the Great Republic

Some bands make a career of striving toward the new: new sounds, new techniques, new combinations, new instruments. Few bands live in the past, making bygones relevant once again and resurrecting parts of music that died well before the start of the twenty-first century. But when a group like The Great Republic of Rough and Ready comes along, with the power to conjure the ghosts of music past, it can be a magical, albeit nostalgic feeling.

Everything about The Great Republic is of another time. From their hand-woven album artwork to the ‘30s jazz-club presentation of the music at bars around New York, The Great Republic reeks of a time and place in America that has been lost for the better part of a century. Guitarist Samuel Stein, sitting on a stool with only his guitar mic’d, never speaks a word and wears his vagabond suit and argyle socks as if he’s only just stepped off the steam-engine train after an arduous journey. He projects the style of a grizzled vet, wise beyond his years. Singer Elissa Spencer stands at the microphone, completely at ease, oozing confidence and consistently sipping whiskey that, despite her outwardly obvious twenty-something years, gives her voice a sixty-something fineness. Think Nina Simone. Think Ella Fitzgerald. No effort at all…just smooth and smoky.

This picture that was painted in the dim light of Banjo Jim’s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is painted just as clearly on The Great Republic of Rough and Ready’s eponymous debut EP. From the opening croon of “Candyman”--the song that drew me toward the front of the room at Banjo Jim’s and whose sweetness seeps from the speakers--to the closing electric riff of “Gospel Ship,” The Great Republic of Rough and Ready is twenty minutes of ephemeral and ethereal time travel. As Spencer croons “Candyman” again and again, accentuated only by a light mandolin, the silences between her breathy pleas are rife with both pleasure and pain. Her a cappella jazz-vocal intro to “See See Rider Blues” harkens back to a barbershop quartet. At first Spencer is a lone voice, but slowly (as the magic of computers allow), three other Spencers fill the sound, signaling the entrance of Stein’s fingerpicked guitar licks and droning bassline that underlie the remainder of the song. Stein whips out the electric on “Cherry Ball Blues,” and his driving groove dances playfully with Spencer’s choked, meandering vocals. The intricate electric guitar riffs on “Gospel Ship” play similarly with Spencer’s carefully crafted melody, but with a more rhythmic and lyrical focus. This is all to say that, despite the EP’s diminutive runtime, between jazz vocals and blues riffs and subtly experimental instrumentation, The Great Republic of Rough and Ready have covered nearly half a century of American blues tradition.

The Great Republic of Rough and Ready’s twenty minute journey tells of a transient man and a weathered woman from the early 1900s putting on a traveling show, telling the stories of their life together. Through the quaint simplicity of a guitar and a voice (with some horns, strings, harmonium and mandolin sporadically and subtly thrown into the mix), this brief yet powerful narrative seems very honest in a way that more modern electronic music simply cannot be. It sounds like the roots of Americana and folk and Southern blues just reaching through space and time to remind us that, without such sound routes, the Justin Vernons and the Sam Beams and, yes, even the Elissa Spencers, would be nowhere at all.

Listen to and follow The Great Republic of Rough and Ready at http://www.myspace.com/grrready

Review: The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love (2009)

It's funny how quickly a judgment can be turned on its head. After 2006's The Crane Wife, I had all but dismissed The Decemberists as overdone (especially lyrically) and overhyped. But with the release of The Hazards of Love (Capitol), which is even more over the top conceptually than the Japanese-folk-inspired Crane, Colin Meloy has managed to establish himself as a modern day librettist and composer of the highest degree. What seemed campy and forced about Crane seems meticulously executed and nothing short of one of the more pleasantly unique indie albums to come out in years in Hazards.

If I were to break down the plot of the album, which is a narrative that listens as a string of chapters much better than it does as individual songs, you would either be intrigued at the prospect of an album about a Narnia-esque woodland universe or irritated by the pretentiousness of such decadence. The album is, without a doubt, an exercise in self-indulgence by Meloy. Who else could meld a virtuous and innocent maiden, a shape-shifting fawn, an evil rake, a forest queen, and a baffling vocabulary, but someone serving a very particular and personal artistic desire? Meloy's perceived failure on Crane is his utter success on Hazards. He engages the listener so immediately and so emotionally that it almost doesn't matter how fantastical or absurd his plot. An infanticidal rake? Sure, I'll buy it! Oh, you want to call the forest a taiga for seventeen songs? That's OK, too!

There aren't many lyricists out there that can sell such intense abstraction to such a wide audience, but much like the Japanese folk inspiration for Crane, Meloy stuck to his guns and built lyrics around the 1960s British folk revival (the album’s title comes from a 1964 Anne Briggs EP). The parallels between the critically acclaimed 2006 album (not by this critic, but apparently there are other opinions out there) and its 2009 follow-up are many and obvious. In The Crane Wife Meloy used two musical themes and built them up all through the album to convey the various moods that act as themes throughout. In The Hazards of Love, Meloy has chosen another two of these motifs to define moods throughout the album. There is the "love" theme, featured on each of the four tracks entitled "The Hazards of Love," which varies both in tempo and dynamic intensity across all four of its incarnations. The "lust" theme on "The Wanting Comes in Waves" (parts 1 and 2) is interwoven with the march of the domineering taiga queen (also the narrator's mother), a Led Zeppelin riff that reeks of Darth Vader’s “Imperial March”. The lustiness of the narrator’s theme and the anger of his mother’s meld brilliantly to convey a dangerous amalgam of tension and rage and want.

In opera, musical themes are called leitmotifs, and they often divide the heroes from villains, the victories from the defeats. On Hazards, Meloy harkens back to this classic composing technique by combining leitmotifs with his operatically overly dramatized librettos. Meloy’s inventive method on Hazards appears to be a historically significant one. Few artists have taken such distinctively bold and obvious historical influences and turned out such successfully adapted music. Meloy’s loyalty to the operatic style of composition and lyricism is surprisingly successful not because it is simply carried out, but because it has been adapted in a way that makes The Decemberist’s evolving music accessible to the listener rather than pretentious or exclusive. As he is one of the few artists to even attempt, let alone accomplish this feat (Mastodon’s latest Crack the Skye attempts the same, with questionable results), Meloy should be lauded for his novelty as well as his increasingly obvious virtuosity as a composer.

After listening to The Hazards of Love dozens of times this month, I went back and gave The Crane Wife another shot. I was surprised to find that the things that had turned me off three years ago – a pompously dramatic vocabulary, strangely connected musical lines, and unrelenting emotionality – were the same things that drew me into Hazards and allowed me to reassess and appreciate Crane. If The Hazards of Love is the endgame, The Crane Wife was a necessary and appropriate stepping stone, though it is much harder to appreciate the latter without the former. If, however, Hazards is yet another stepping stone for The Decemberists, I am intrigued to discover where the next leap will take them.

Best Albums of 2008 (A Retrospective)

As a music semi-journalist, there's a clause in the contract with myself that says I am required to write a "best of" blog for the Albums of 2008. This year was a rather unique one for music. The indie scene took several very separate but intertwining paths, namely into electronica and dance music (Goldfrapp, Jamie Lidell, Animal Collective, Of Montreal), Afro-Baroque-pop (Vampire Weekend), gospel-rock (Fleet Foxes), and a conglomeration of the three (TV on the Radio). Of course, the ever burgeoning singer-songwriters (Mountain Goats, Conor Oberst) have been around for decades, and even Bob Dylan joined the fray (but, thankfully, he didn't join The Fray -- har har har) and released a much acclaimed bootleg album of rare material (Tell Tale Signs).

Of particular note in 2008 was the incredibly unique instrumentation that has begun to shine through in popular music (popular by my standards, not by records sold or money made touring). TV On The Radio used an entire marching band, Vampire Weekend thrived on their strings section, and Fleet Foxes soared to new vocal heights with five part harmonies. So, without further ado, I present to you, retrospectively, in descending order, my list of the Top 5 Albums of 2008.

5. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
Fewer bands were a lightning rod for such disagreement in 2008. Vampire Weekend plays ivy-league music that is borderline exclusive, filled to the brim with Baroque strings and harpsichords and afrobeaets all jumbled and pounding together. The instrumental and stylistic combinations, on one hand, are detrimental to the band by serving as ploys delivered simply for the sake of novelty. However, those same combinations create the distinctive "Baroque-pop" sound that makes Vampire Weekend so interesting to listen to. The results are undeniably entertaining, though unbearably pretentious to some. Most importantly, Vampire Weekend's breakthrough debut album gives hope to millions of aspiring young musicians that playing house parties and building your own buzz is well worth it. Love it or hate it, VW will have you moving and singing with boundless positive energy (even if the lyrics do reference Louis Vuitton or Peter Gabriel).

4. The Fireman - Electric Arguments
After his outstanding 2005 album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard was followed up by the commercially monumental (but critically mediocre) Memory Almost Full in 2007, I had almost lost hope that Paul McCartney, now in his 60s, was still able to create the great music of his youth. Though Electric Arguments was released late in 2008 as an alter-ego collaboration with producer Youth, it is a McCartney album through and through. Songs about love and quintessential McCartneyan sentimentality abound, but that does not stop the production from keeping songs like "Two Magpies" from becoming just another "Blackbird." The same goes for the album's opening track, "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight," which reeks of "Helter Skelter," but manages to obscure Sir Paul's familiar vocals by pushing them to the very edge of their ever-lowering range. It's not fair to expect McCartney to match his earliest and best work (see: "Yesterday"), but this effort is his best in years, and it reminds us that half a lifetime ago, this man was a part of the greatest band in history.

3. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
Is it arrogant to reference myself? Or just plain lazy? Either way -- this says it all. After seeing John Darnielle perform the songs from this album, any criticisms that I had of his repeating rhythmic theme have been overcome. I was convinced not only by his incisive lyrics, but more importantly by the purpose that the rhythmic theme plays in managing to subtly connect each of the songs to which it is applied. Those songs are clearly the most important on the album, and though they are manically dissimilar in lyrical theme, the thumping repetitious rhythms manage to tie them all together. My very own April 2008 review says it best: "Most songs after the first are rhythmically identical to the ones before it. If Darnielle did this intentionally, a rhythmic theme is a stroke of genius." I was so right.

2. TV On The Radio - Dear Science,
I probably would have named Dear Science, my album of the year had I not read the Spin interview in which lead singer Tunde Adebimpe declares that, while he appreciates all of the praise that the band's fourth album has gotten (which is about as much as their 2006 classic Return to Cookie Mountain got), he is fairly certain that most reviewers just got lazy and started copying each other. I didn't want to look like a plagiarist, but this album is all I can listen to lately. The tunes vary so widely, from gospel to hip-hop/R&B to soul to funk, that each listen feels like a complete musical trip. The album's highlight has to be "Golden Age," whose intensely uplifting theme is in sharp contrast to most of the material on both Science and Cookie Mtn., which are often riddled with a deep dark bass that underlies very busy arrangements and satirical lyrics. One of my most treasured answers to the question "What type of music do you listen to?" is "If I can listen to an album twenty times, and still hear new things each time, I'll keep listening." This album is the epitome of a synergistic, evolving sound that is just as surprisingly diverse and explosive on the twentieth listen as it was on the first.

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
As if from another planet, Fleet Foxes arose from the burgeoning Northwestern US indie scene like so many Douglas-firs. Never in recent memory has a band debuted to as much acclaim and excitement as Fleet Foxes did in 2008. From the first notes of their Sun King EP to the closing of "Oliver James" on Fleet Foxes LP, a palpable magical quality seemed to engulf both band and listener. The melodies and harmonies are incredibly unique and, most impressively, organic. It is pleasantly clear that lead singer Robin Pecknold and co. feel out every note, and even the imperfections add to the earthiness that so deifies their singing. The album is all at once new and old, drawing on Renaissance flutes and chants as well as electric guitars. Each trip through the album brings new sights and sounds, and it plays out like a great movie that utterly involves the audience. Getting lost in this album was one of the best parts of 2008, and it is for that reason that it is my Album of the Year. It was a year filled with struggle and fear and cynicism from all sides, but also one filled with optimism in the prospect of a better and changed year ahead. Fleet Foxes captured that flourishing optimism, while still acknowledging and overcoming the negatives that preceded it.

A 'Prospekt's March' Straight to Hell

I have made it abundantly clear how much I admire, respect, and enjoy the music of Coldplay and hyperpretentious frontman, Chris Martin. That was, I did until November 21, 2008 when Prospekt's March, the accompanying EP to June's masterful Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, was released. This was, coincidentally, just in time for Christmas shoppers the world over to gobble it up like so many Coldplay-hungry termites. Had they heard the drivel that is embodied in every second of the EP, however, they may have gone with the new Britney Spears disc instead.

Prospekt is nothing short of a Capitalistic farce, created for the holiday season as a means to package VLVODAAHF with the "bonus edition" stamp. Unlike the latter In Rainbows disc from Radiohead's 2007 collection, which greatly added to the original short release, Prospekt makes a complete and utter mockery of everything that Coldplay achieved on Viva la Vida. Three of the eight "new" tracks are just alternate takes from the originally released A-sides. There's clearly a reason that these were scrapped. "Life in Technicolor II" takes the Viva opener, doubles it in length, and adds chintzy and underdeveloped lyrics about Martin's feet not touching the ground (which he also references in the final Prospekt track "New My Feet Won't Touch the Ground," as well as "Strawberry Swing" from Viva).

"Lost + (featuring Jay-Z)" is virtually the same as "Lost" on the original disc, but adds a completely displaced, unoriginal, and dynamically static rap from Jay-Z before the guitar solo. Other than that, there is no feature of Jay-Z or remixed hip-hop beat...just a one verse rap about Biggie and Tupac and things that have been rapped about for the last fifteen years. I don't doubt Jay-Z or his mad skillz, but his performance is a sad attempt by Martin and Parlophone Records to put a prolific name on a song in which it has no place.

The final repeater is "Lovers in Japan (Osaka Sun Mix)," in which there is literally no discernible difference between it and its original "Lovers in Japan/Osaka Sun" from Viva save for some background chanting during the choruses. From what I can tell, there was absolutely no earthly reason to put it on a bonus disc that is already decidedly lacking in bonuses.

Arguably worse than the repeating tracks, however, are the new songs on Prospekt's March. All five tracks are simply lesser versions of songs that were written better on Viva la Vida. There is no reason for a slow piano intro and odd-rhythmed chorus in "Glass of Water" (though it is Prospekt's only redeeming song, if any such thing exists) when you can hear the same art achieved much more effectively and beautifully on Viva's "Death And All His Friends." The other tracks aren't even worth a mention, as not one of them measures up to even Coldplay's earliest acoustic work (or James Blunt's for that matter).

Even more than the release itself, I found the very idea of Prospekt's March as accompaniment to its far superior predecessor to be outright offensive. With Viva la Vida, Coldplay worked hard to prove themselves a band worthy of rock (or at least pop) immortality, but with Prospekt's March they have undeified themselves and disserviced both their fans and the music loving world as a whole. This EP paves the way for other overpaid, cash hungry bands and record companies to try releasing half-assed B-sides as viable bonus discs when the original itself was more than sufficient for an albumsworth of listening. The fact is that Prospekt's March was completed during the Viva la Vida sessions, and Coldplay's record company rightfully decided to scrap those songs. Their ulterior motive, we now know, was to fleece the consuming public into buying an overpriced and underachieved bonus edition of an album that hundreds-of-thousands of gullible preteens and their parents had already purchased when it was worth something back in June. Coldplay owes their fans at least an apology, if not a collective refund, and a promise that in the future they'll stick to their A-game and leave the B-sides on the cutting room floor.