One Track Mind: Frank, AB

I have a dilemma. I want this post to be about a track by the Rural Alberta Advantage, but something gnaws at my conscience.

Fraxas and I started out this project, One Track Mind, to automate our music-recommendation process. And, so far, it's working swimmingly. The tracks that Fraxas highlighted are all awesome, and I've assembled a playlist with all the posts so far. Listening to it is like drinking a tall glass of eclecticism made physical.

My dilemma comes from a long-debated issue that has faced music buffs from the early mists of time:

Single or album?

Fraxas and I are busy guys. We love to talk music. But the day is short, and thanks to certain sources, the pool of good music is deeper than I can ever remember. One track a week is a small commitment, manageable, digestible, and enough to ignite a decent conversation. As much as I appreciate a good album, we confine these blog posts to the subject of a single track at a time.

Critics, performers, and connoisseurs from all across the historical spectrum vary widely on this essential question. Some acts, such as Arcade Fire and Radiohead, insist that the album is a holistic experience, going so far as to prohibit the use of their tracks on compilations or to boycott music videos. On the other hand, to be blunt, most songs by most artists are terrible. By extension, the same is true of most albums.

Industry analysts agree that the true cause of Big Music's demise was its long track-record of releasing albums padded with filler. Given the public's short attention span and appetite for easily digestible singles, the rise of filesharing technology was only the catalyst for an overdue drop in album sales.

Now, I like singles as much as the next guy. I consider an album “good” if about half its songs are re-listenable. I don't take the extreme of deleting the tracks I don't like –-after all, HDD space is cheap-- but I'd consider a lot of my favourite tracks to be a Single experience. This would be true of most of my prior posts.

That's not to say I don't have my favourite albums. Radiohead's OK computer, Firewater's recent album the Golden Hour, and-- I'm not ashamed to admit it-- Achtung Baby by U2 are best experienced from the moment you press play. These are rare accomplishments that tower over even the selfsame band's remaining oeuvre, let alone the wider music world.

So here's my dilemma. Hometowns, the debut album of Toronto band The Rural Alberta Advantage, is one of the best I've ever heard. The whole thing hangs together like the Dude's Room before his carpet was peed on. It's Canadian Rock in all its thematic, heroic, unapologetic, anthemic, melodious glory, complete with lyrics that evoke geography and virtuoso, spare-kit percussion. What am I supposed to do? I can't pick out a single track to write about. It's too difficult. As pretentious as Arcade Fire and Radiohead are for their championship of the Whole Album, I'm afraid that I have to join their ranks in this case. Hometowns is 38 minutes of bliss. That's not a lot is it?

Okay, maybe it is. I will pick a track at random and blog about it in the only way that would be appropriate. Haiku.

Track Title: Frank, AB
Artist: the Rural Alberta Advantage
Album Title: Hometowns

Pizzicato first.
Cymbals rise towards chorus.
Heartbeat speeds, wordless.

One Track Mind: Inaugural post

Welcome to One Track Mind.

Fraxas and I have challenged each other to blog about one musical track per week. The queue of our mutual music recommendations grows ever longer, and we need a way to manage the quality glut. This feature of the (soon to be resurrected) Shiny Things Distract Us web-log will be a regularly recurring laser-guided smartbomb of taste-making tuneage.

If a track appears here, it may be good, it may be bad, but one thing is certain: one of us wants the other to hear it. So let's drop the puck... now.

Track title: Death Watch
Artist: Alias
Album title: Resurgam

Fractured guitar notes clip at a striding rhythm. The melody explodes on the scene like a UFO tractor beam punching through the clouds. Alias calls to mind the triumphant moments of Boards of Canada's The Campfire Headphase.

Comments?

One Track Mind: Pick Me Up, Beyond, Dinosaur Jr.

I'm not familiar with Dinosaur Jr.'s oeuvre; in fact, Beyond is my first listen to the band past a few 30-second clips of avant-garde noise I turned off before they finished back before music was easy to find. I'm happy I took the plunge and bought Beyond, because Pick Me Up - the 3rd track on the album - has one of the best stadium hooks I've ever heard in this kind of distortion rock.

In fact, the whole album has a Shakespearily familiar feel; Dinosaur Jr. captures the essence of the distortion-rock sound so completely (mostly by being one of its originators) that listening to them is a little like reading Hamlet and learning where those cliches came from.

One Track Mind: DLZ

Dear Science,

Let's not be humble. We both know what you are: the most successful attempt to systematize and organize knowledge in the history of the Universe. Your method is madness, your technique impeccable. You drive my life; I live your drives. You dot my eyes and tease my cross.

Science, sometimes I wish you were more than the realization of my thoughts. Other times, I feel that my thoughts are the realization of your wishes. There are no other times, because time itself is an illusion. Thanks for that one. I.e., Thanks for that identity element, so long as we're talking about the multiplication operation. If the subject is addition, I guess I should say thanks for that zero.

Is free will neutral? By that, I mean to ask, is free will free of charge? I mean, is it balanced? Am I?

Here's where I sign off. Off with my sign! I am neither positive nor negative. I am nothing.

Signed,
Pharaohmagnetic

P.S. I will leave the rest to TV On the Radio, as expressed in DLZ:

Never you mind
Death professor.
Your shocks are fine,
My struts are better.
Your fiction flies so high,
Y'all could use a doctor
Who's sick, who's next?

One Track Mind: Lovecraft in Brooklyn

Track title: Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Artist: Mountain Goats
Album: Heretic Pride

Whither H.P. Lovecraft? He of the overwrought, modern classical horror narratives, purveyor of all things "squamous" and "rugose?" He seems to be enjoying a minor renaissance among the net's intelligentsia, despite his bizarre proclivities towards eugenics and other outright violations of political correctness. Taste-makers from BoingBoing to MeFi peddle Cthulhu-themed tea-cozies and other mind-boggling, long-tail elements of niche hipster consumerism gone awry. Modern auteurs such as Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro borrow liberally from the fertile, feotid soil of ol' Howard Phillips' imagination, with admittedly entertaining results.

None of this excuses the truly execrecable aspects of Lovecraft's actual oeuvre, from his gender theories to his prose. And yet, despite his horribility, Lovecraft's stock continues to rise among present-day interwebbers. I can't explain it.

Now, something exists that might excuse these aspects of Lovecraft, and that is this song by the Mountain Goats.

H.P. Lovecraft, you can keep doing whatever it is you do, so long as you continue to posthumously inspire rock and roll such as this.

P.S. I like the double entendre of the song's rallying cry: "I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn." At first listen, I did not think of Lovecraft the Proper Noun, but rather "lovecraft" the possible neologism in the vein of "statecraft" or "songcraft." I feel like lovecraft in Brooklyn indeed.

One Track Mind: Transdermal Celebration

Track title: Transdermal Celebration
Artist: Ween
Album: Quebec

It is prudent to interpret the hipster-speak phrase "such-and-such are a band's band" as a warning that their music is inaccessible and impossible to appreciate from any rational perspective. Common examples: Radiohead, the Pixies. I love those bands, but let's not "Kid A" ourselves.

Ween is a band's band's band. They hop from one musical genre to another, all the while squirting virtuoso pieces of anti-serious songwriting, seltzer-like, into the clown-face of pop-culture. Once in a while, they record a straight-out pop-song that shows the world how easy it should be.

This video powerfully demonstrates that cartoons can be terrifying and poignant. Watch it when you have three and a half minutes to spare.

One Track Mind: Float

Artist: Flogging Molly
Album Title: Float
Track Title: Float

Melodic, melancholic Irish bar rock is always good, isn't it? Well, Maybe. This review on Sputnikmusic nails the album pretty well. Money quote:

As sea-faring analogies go, Float definitely fits the description, but only just. Despite the conspicuous absence of a Nathan Maxwell pirate shanty, or an instrumental, that might have injected its middle ranks with some welcome momentum, Float is rescued from abject tedium by the deep, poetic lure of the subject matter and a couple of genuinely outstanding compositions in ‘Float’ and ‘(No More) Paddy’s Lament.’

Fortunately for Flogging Molly, this track has enough reeling violin, drunken banjo spirit, and emotional resonance to almost redeem the whole album. The song wouldn't feel out of place lilting from the open, beckoning doors of the Irish pubs of my youth. Pour yourself a pint, listen to this song, and imagine yourself on King Street.

One Track Mind: Stormy High

Yet Another independent rock band from eMusic's top 88 list (they make almost all my music recommendations these days), Black Mountain's a Canadian 70's-metal band.  At least, they are on In The Future, the only point of contact I've had with them.

The opening track of the album is a song entitled Stormy High.  I'm not sure what it's about - the lyrics are pretty vague - but the opening guitar riff is in 7/4, so they won immediate kudos for that. Then they won more kudos by extending the feel of classic metal - I'm thinking Sabbath vol 4, maybe pre-Wall floyd - through the entire track.  Guitar and bass mostly in unison on rising scale patterns, the keyboards acting more like percussion than anything else, drums that just keep on stomping forward, vocals that - despite the mildly cheesy female moan that surfaces in places - fit into the melody rather than wandering around it.

One Track Mind: Pianos From Hell

X-pressions, the 1997 album from X-ecutioners, is what happens when a group of DJs decide that it's time to step out from behind the masters of ceremony and take the limelight. Pianos From Hell is what happens when those same DJs have the composition chops to leave a beat almost entirely alone for three minutes.  The neat thing is that by doing that, they put the turntablism in the listener's mind.  I couldn't help but think of the scratching I'd do over that beat while it played.  You know how pretentious jazz drummers talk about the space between the noise being as important as the noise itself?  yeah, that.

One Track Mind: My Favourite Book

My Favourite Book is track 4 on Stars' 2007 release, In Our Bedroom After The War. It's a female-vocalist love song with a soft-pop aesthetic: light, thin drums, syrupy organ playing 7ths on the downbeat, flute backup, strings on the bridge. It's as mushy as you'd expect it to be and as universal as any love song. Romance. Long walks on the beach at sunset. Holding hands in the grocery store. Typical Stars.

One Track Mind: Rooks

Song Title: Rooks
Artist: Shearwater
Album: Rook

The AV Club is hosting the song in its review of the album here. Go listen. But first, one comment and a few warnings.

Comment: Shearwater is, by far, my favourite band with an ornithologist front-man.

Warning: That front-man is also a member of ingratiating indie darlings Okkervil River. Don't hold that against him; in fact, let that bump the latter band up a few notches. It worked for me; after thoroughly enjoying this album by Shearwater, I want back to Okkervil River after dismissing the "The Stage Names," and I don't regret it. Their follow-up, "The Stand Ins," is even better, but don't tell my hipster friends I think so.

Warning: Falsetto. Get your eardrums ready for some high-pitched male vocals. Don't let the similar, embarrassing vocal efforts of the Dandy Warhols, Beck, or David Usher taint you with prejudice. It works here, against all odds.

Warning: at 1:43 in this song, a pounding bass drum and a triumphant trumpet line enter after a dramatically descending melodic theme in the vocals. Like the unabashed guitar solo in a Dinosaur Jr. Song, it may cause you to take notice and stop working.

One Track Mind: I Lived on the Moon

Last time, I posted a video that, if briefly, portrayed a father-son relationship touched by fantastical tragedy. Here's another song/video in that series, via a long-ago post from metafilter.

Track Title: I Lived on the Moon
Artist: Kwoon
Album: Tales and Dreams

A high-quality download of the incredible video is here. It's by the animator Yannick.

Watch, listen, react.

One Track Mind: On the Loose

A few weeks ago, Fraxas blogged about Stormy High by the band Black Mountain, calling them "a Canadian 70s-metal band" in all but chronological actuality. The reference touched off some free-associating on my part, and by the power of suggestion, I soon found myself listening to bona-fide Canadian 70s metal. To my delight and amazement, emusic offers a few albums from the back-catalogue of Saga, Canadian 70s metal band extraordinaire. Here I highlight their single hit On the Loose, which to this very day can be heard on the air waves of my hometown rock and roll radio stations. The unabashed synth virtuosity, the unironic pretensions to insanity, the echoing distant vocal stylings... I know I should be embarrassed to be writing this, but I'm not. I'm not. Every indier-than-thou geeky hipster has to have some guilty pleasure, right?

P.S. "On the Loose" is from Saga's 1981 album Worlds Apart, but I would like to still classify the song as Canadian 70s metal, because Saga was formed in 1977. Also, I need this post to make sense.

UPDATE: According to the titles at the intro of this youtube video, the song is actually from 1978! I win! But on second thought, upon actually watching the video, I realize just how embarrassed I should be feeling for blogging about this song. Very, very, very embarrassed.

One Track Mind: St. Lawrence River

Lee Mellor is on eMusic's list of non-American Country artists (He's Canadian by birth). The cover of his 2007 album, Ghost Town Heart, is a moodily-lit portrait of him looking scruffy and tired and shaggy and all dressed in black, like a city dude's impression of what a country singer should look like. He's got a slightly nasal voice, a strong understanding of the tropes and patterns of alt-country, and enough Canadianness in his lyrics that I feel a connection to him I probably shouldn't.  Case in point: the song St. Lawrence River. It's a catchy ballad about bad choices and redemption that could have been set anywhere with a few minor lyrics changes. I've never seen the St. Lawrence; I can find it on a map, to be sure, and I know what it is and why it's important economically and historically and culturally, but it's not home in any meaningful sense of that word.  And yet, listening to Lee, I feel like nodding. You will too - but whether it's a feeling of shared experience, or just moving in time to a really catchy piece of alt-country, is up to you.

Metareview: Worst Review Ever

Pitchfork has always been one of my love-to-hate-it destinations. But this review is just so incredibly terrible, the utter badness of it has got to be some sort of joke I'm not getting. And that makes me feel dumb, which is the point of the whole Indie Rock Review Scene anyway, I guess.

Here's my attempt to imitate the writing in this review. Tell me how I'm doing!

Track 1 is a song that I think is a song I don't like. Hey, it sucks. And the track isn't very good and hey, isn't ben folds a guy? Hey, let's say hey again. It's not like hey, I can't contradict myself in the same sentence as this one.

Track 2: Instead of a banana, this is a song that is sitting on a desk I once ate. Propulsive, opening, swirling, gerunds never grow me bored. My attempt at a witty simile is as awkward as a an attempt at awkwardness by, yes, an awkward aardvark (hey that's a lot of a's.)

Tracks I can't count that high: Hey, do something I like and I'll say I don't like it. This song opens with a an opening and then hey, something after that (hey, isn't that hey hey hey!) What a cop-out.

If Ben Folds plays piano, then yes, I'll conclude this sentence with a random non sequitur. Yes, I changed my mind and didn't know what to do with the diaper. And when I'm done, there's a word I'll use one more time, yes, it's hey. Yes too is a word I overuse. And hey, I'm a scared little boy, I never meant any of the stuff I meant, this is a comma splice because there's no coordinating conjunction after, yes, the comma. Hey.