art is the new religion

Best of 2008: Wildbirds & Peacedrums

A few Sundays ago, I sat with a group of friends at a bar before we all headed to the same show.  Three of the five of us hadn't heard much from the band we were about to see, so they asked me to describe it.

Me: "Well, they're not going to change your life --"
Friend:  "Why do you say that?  You said that when you were describing another band, too."

I say that because most of the music I truly love does change my life.  The highest calling for my most beloved musicians is that they touch my ears and my heart in a completely new way.  They open up new worlds of possibility in my imagination.  Their work can make me feel new sensations, emotionally and physically.  When I hear, for the first time, an artist whose work will change my life, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever known. 

Accordingly, it's not often that I find an artist that affects me this way.  This is not to say that I don't enjoy a lot of music.  In fact, I regularly discover new artists and uncover artists from the past whose music I love and who I rave about and recommend.  But my life-changers?  I only run across one of those artists once every year or two.

A few Fridays ago, I discovered another one*: 

Wildbirds & Peacedrums

How did I find them?  I was making a rare visit to Stereogum, paging through post after post about bands I don't care about -- new bands that are covered mostly because they're new and heaven forbid Stereogum not cover the next big [blank] -- when I saw My Brightest Diamond listed in one of the posts.  Thinking it would take me to a live performance or news or a video by My Brightest Diamond, I clicked through only to discover it was a post where Shara Worden, aka MBD, talked up "a couple of her recent favorite outside sounds" in a series about bands from Sweden. 

(A word of advice: whenever you get a chance to get recommendations from an artist you love, listen to them.  It's the best kind of word of mouth.)

Wildbirds & Peacedrums are Mariam Wallentin (vocalist) and Andreas Werliin (drummer), a married couple from Sweden.  Much of their music consists of spare arrangements of drumming and singing with only the occasional embellishment from another instrument.  There isn't a whole lot written about Wildbirds & Peacedrums yet (at the time of this post, they have less than 3000 MySpace friends), but what's out there includes a whole lot of comparisons.  You can drop names like The White Stripes (another two-person band), Joanna Newsom (it's just an occasional similarity in timbre), Karen O (I don't hear this one really) or PJ Harvey or Feist, but I promise you've never heard anything like Wildbirds & Peacedrums before. 

"We had no musical ideals to trust or lean on, so we just had to believe in ourselves and each other"

- Werliin

Their album Heartcore is high art: it doesn't follow convention, it finds its own way, makes its own strange sense.  It's not easy, but it feels right.  It rewards the careful listener, blooming brighter with each successive spin.  There are no signposts here; the terrain changes from one song to the next so you must be willing to get lost with them. Wallentin's voice is a universe unto itself, a true original.

After reading Shara's words about them that Friday night, I woke up the following morning and made a rare trip to Amoeba to buy their album.  Thank you, Shara, for the tip, and thank you Amoeba for having one copy of Heartcore on vinyl.

I cannot wait to see this band perform live.  Until then:

#9.2 Wildbirds & Peacedrums - Doubt Hope from Handheld Shows on Vimeo.

#9.1 Wildbirds & Peacdrums - The Window from Handheld Shows on Vimeo.

• Buy Wildbirds & Peacedrums Heartcore on vinyl from Insound.
• Related: My post about My Brightest Diamond's new album

*I'm not saying they'll change your life, I'm saying they're changing mine.

Unboxing Insound

I don't really understand the fascination with unboxing, but I'm excited enough to get my order from Insound today that I'm going to share photos!

I opened the box to discover some free stuff that had been thrown in.  Seven inches from Trail of Dead and Midnight Movies, a RATATAT iron-on, and a Spring/Summer Insound catalog.  The other seven inch is one I ordered - Constantines' "Hard Feelings/Easy Money" - in order to reach the free shipping over $x threshold.

 

My Brightest Diamond A Thousand Shark's Teeth & Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago:

 

Constantines Kensington Heights & RATATAT LP3:

My Brightest Diamond

My Brightest Diamond, a.k.a. Shara Worden, released her second album last week.  I don't have A Thousand Shark's Teeth yet but I'm going to snag a copy on vinyl as soon as possible.  The tracks I've heard from it, online and during a live set earlier this year at SXSW, are even more haunting, gorgeous, challenging and ambitious than those on her first album.  I love to hear an artist grow, mature and stretch, filling an ever more unique shape amongst the edges of their influences.  I usually despise it when people compare artists to Jeff Buckley, either because the comparison is completely unfounded, or because the comparison just highlights outright imitation.  Shara comes close to copping a few of Jeff's most unique legacies in her vocals, songwriting and guitar tones, but for some reason I register her similarities as tributes and not theft.

I got to see Shara perform at SXSW earlier this year in a church with gorgeous acoustics.  I sat with dear friends, eating homemade cookies we bought from the churchgoing ladies while Shara serenaded us with her opera-quality voice, theatrical garb, and comfortable command of dynamics.  Watch this live performance from Other Music (a record store in NYC - I used to work right across the street from it) for a taste of Shara's talents.

Hear more of Shara's thoughts about the new record:

Shark's Teeth - Part I from My Brightest Diamond.

The copy editor in me would like to point out, due to the placement of the apostrophe in the album title, that we're talking here about one thousand teeth (which come from a shark), and not all the teeth from one thousand sharks.

• Buy A Thousand Shark's Teeth from Insound (mp3).

Summer of Vinyl

There are oh, so many reasons to declare this a summer of vinyl:

• Firstly, it was the fine folks over at Insound who originally declared a 'summer of vinyl', which is music to my ears, of course. They're running a new vinyl-related promotion starting every Tuesday for eight weeks.  Today's your last day to buy a turntable and get a free record (I highly recommend the Vestax Handy Trax) and starting tomorrow you can get 10% off their Best of 2008 (so far).  Check out their Summer of Vinyl calendar for full details.

• I went record shopping yesterday at Open Mind Music.  I didn't see my friend and owner Henry there, but I did pick up a few gems that I'll tell you about later this week.

• Last week I bought my final piece of furniture for my living room, an Ikea number which gives me lots more room to expand my vinyl collection.

• A great retail and art space near my neighborhood, Lower Hater, is currently displaying their Vinyl Apocalypse collection featuring new and original art painted on records.  I stopped by yesterday and might have bought this piece if it weren't already spoken for. 

• In the article "Retailers give vinyl another spin", CNN.com claims "manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million."  If you ignore the raw numbers and just look at the percentages, vinyl purchasers are blowing up!

The summer of vinyl has begun.  Who's with me?

Related post:  Why I love my Vestax Handy Trax.

Happy (belated) Record Store Day!

This past Saturday was National Record Store Day.  I woke up to a forecast of 85 degrees in Austin, so I put on my favorite green sundress and set out to buy some records.

The Chronicle had posted a full page ad with every participating record store, 12 in all, but I only ended up making it to three of them.  After I stopped by the Sunset Valley Farmers Market, I made my first stop at End of an Ear.  I've blogged about this store before, so I already knew they'd have a good selection of indie vinyl and small but well-curated selections of older records.  It was really nice to see more than three people in the store.  In fact, all the stores I went to seemed to be benefiting from increased traffic.

At End of an Ear I picked up St. Vincent's Marry Me (of course I've had the CD and mp3s since the get-go, but it's such a great album I wanted the vinyl version too) and Bob Dylan's Hard Rain which caught my eye because he looks so dreamy on the cover.  I tell you, eyeliner on certain men, at certain times. Seriously. 

And I bought Shirley Bassey's How About You? partly because she looks so fierce on the cover.

Whatever she was singing about, I was prepared to listen.  I hope to someday have something happen to me that makes me want to strike that same pose.  I've already told you about the other purchase I made at End of an Ear, which, I'll admit, came close to making me strike the Shirley Bassey pose in the middle of the store.

Next stop was Friends of Sound Records which I'd never been to before.  The Chronicle's big pull out map was a little misleading, plus it was just listed as "in the alley" off South Congress.  It took me a while to finally find it tucked back behind a row of buildings, around the corner and at the top of a concrete ramp.  The fact that I actually spent about ten seconds wondering if I was trespassing was not a good sign. 

Once I found the place, it was small and set up a bit awkwardly, with the record bins feeling just slightly too narrow for the actual records, so that I ended up shuffling through the albums at a weird angle.  If ever I were to open my own record store, I would make the record bins tall so that you didn't have to bend over to look at them, and wide enough to allow for quick shuffling, and - most importantly - I wouldn't overstuff the bins so as to prevent people from actually being able to look through the records. 

At Friends of Sound I picked up a copy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Blacknuss which contains his cover of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" (read my previous posts about Withers and Kirk) and also a random jazz record by Cal Tjader called San Francisco Moods.  Each song is named after a San Francisco landmark ("Sigmund Stern Groove", "Grant Avenue Suite") but having never heard of Tjader I wasn't sure if it was worth the asking price.  Once I discovered it was pressed on red vinyl and released in 1958 (according to the guy at the counter) I decided to take a chance.

I was heading home after Friends of Sound, when, driving north on Lamar, I saw the sign for Emerald Press Coffee.  I'd stopped by there earlier in the week to try out their drive-thru service and had gotten a pretty tasty soy latte, so I decided to park this time and try out their iced soy latte.  As they were making my order, Ben behind the counter engaged me in a friendly chat and we ended up talking about records.  I told him what I'd bought and we talked about turntables, although he uses his to DJ and likes house music, which isn't my cup of tea.  Then he served me the second best coffee beverage I have ever tasted:

Best Coffee Beverages Of All Time

1. Blue Bottle's soy latte - San Francisco, CA
2. Emerald City Press' iced soy latte - Austin, TX

I've been back there almost every single day since to order the same thing.  They even wrapped my drink with a silk rose one day.  I love that place.

Since Cheapo Discs (not to be confused with Austin's beloved Chepo) is just across the street from Emerald City, I made it my third and final stop.  There, I picked up Joni Mitchell's Mingus, Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Best of the Doobie Brothers, Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1 by the Philadelphia Orchestra.  The Doobie Brothers have so many good songs -- and Michael McDonald to boot:

Young Michael McDonald makes my heart stop.  So handsome, and that voice!  I'll leave you with this snippet, because, really, young Michael deserves his own post.