art is the new religion

the dark side of Crowded House

Yesterday afternoon I was leafing through my albums, looking for the right record to lift my mood.  I settled on Crowded House's eponymous debut from 1986, the one with their biggest U.S. hit "Don't Dream It's Over". 

I know every single word to this record, and being able to sing along to it was part of the reason why I put it on.  It's also a fantastic record from start to finish, and it began my love affair with Neil Finn's voice and songwriting skills.

What occurred to me for the first time yesterday is how morbid the lyrics are across the entire album.  Here is a sampling of the dark topics found on this melodic and upbeat(-sounding) pop masterpiece:

Mean To Me: 
"now her parents are divorced
and her friend's committing suicide...
I was thinking of a padded cell"

World Where You Live:
"friends come round
you might remember and be sad
behind their eyes is unfamiliar"

Hole in the River: 
"Theres a hole in the river where my auntie lies
From the land of the living to the air and sky
Left her car by the river left her shoes beside...
We were touched by a cold wind, my father and I
The sound of desperate breathing her fear inside us all
She was coming to see him but something changed her mind
Drove her down to the river
There is no return"

I Walk Away:
"Reveal whatever you desire
To you it may be death defying
Black day
In the coldness of winter
Black words
Slipping off my tongue
I say forget it - its over
As a dark cloud covered up the sun"

That's What I Call Love:
"Feeling devastated
Thats what I call
Hangin on and fallin over
Thats what I call
Tired and deflated
Thats what I call
Love...
I got a little room
The air's still pretty bad
I die tonight"

I would love to know what Neil was going through when he wrote these songs.  As a lyricist he consistently valued creativity over cliche, but I don't recall many of his other albums being quite this dark.  If you just listen to the music and his buoyant voice, you'd never know he wasn't going along, feeling just fine.

Let's watch some Crowded House videos from this era.

A live version of "Mean To Me" from '87:

Surely you've seen this video for "Don't Dream It's Over". Speaking of his creativity as a lyricist, I love the thought of millions of people singing along to lines like "try to catch the deluge in a paper cup..."  This is such a beautiful song:

Uno mas.  The video for "World Where You Live" is pretty great.  This song describes a whole genre of people I've known in my life:

"Tell me, I don't know where you go.  Do you climb into space?  To the world where you live."

Crowded House is a must-own album.

Chad VanGaalen & Blogs.com

Today, the company I work for launched a really cool new website at http://www.blogs.com**.  A team of editors is curating lists and picks of the best of the blogosphere, so you can go there to discover new blogs to read.

One of the coolest features is a bunch of Top 10 Blogs lists created by web personalities and a few celebrities.  I couldn't resist clicking on Alyssa Milano's 10 Favorite Blogs, and I was shocked to find amongst her recommendations a link to a blog post I really wanted to read: 

I love Chad VanGaalen, so I clicked right over to 3Hive and found a link to the song "Willow Tree" off his forthcoming album Soft Airplane out on September 9th on Flemish Eye Records.

• Listen to Chad VanGaalen "Willow Tree"

VanGaalen can careen stylistically from fuzzed out lo-fi punk to lullaby-worthy ballads, and this song lands in his underwater-y Neil Young-ish milieu, which we've heard on his prior two albums.  In a short description of the forthcoming album, his label references his characteristic genre-hopping and even the rare gem that is Neil Young's On the Beach.  But you can't get a read on a VanGaalen record from a handful of words or with just this one song.  I'm very much looking forward to buying this record -- on vinyl as it'll have two bonus tracks -- as soon as it's released.

And now for some Chad VanGaalen appreciation videos:

CVG animates some of his own videos.  Here's a great one:

CVG performs live from his basement, when he couldn't get across the US-Canada border to play at SXSW last year:

**I promise this isn't a thinly veiled promotion for Blogs.com, because I make it a point to keep my work blogging and personal blogging separate.  This is just me marveling at how Alyssa Milano inadvertently led me to a new Chad VanGaalen mp3.  Who would have thought?

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:

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.