Destroyer - 'This Night' (Scratch)

Once again, a great Destroyer album has somewhat forgettable artwork, and lists the track titles right on the front cover. But this is a step forward for sure - a leap to a major indie label (and his home ever since, on Merge, though this LP is actually on Canadian label Scratch) and a leap towards larger production and more expansive songwriting. At two LPs, This Night is just a slight bit too long, but contains some of Dan Bejar's most magnificent performances. One way to read This Night is that Bejar feared this would be his only chance so he tried to make a statement - a great, sprawling double-LP masterpiece-of-intention. Right from the beginning we can hear it - the long, spacious title track seems to pull back the neurotic intensity heard on the last few records in favour of just letting it breathe, man. The production has tons of echo, reverb around his voice, and the dry, scratchy tinniness is nowhere to be found. The electric guitars rage, the keyboards are more atmospheric than lead-based, and Bejar sounds confident throughout. I believe 'Crystal Country' is made great by it's sinewy guitar licks, taking it in a surprising Crazy Horse direction while still giving space to his familiar cadences. 'The Chosen Few' is a frantic, Spanish-influenced acoustic number that's in my Destroyer top 5 -- in fact, I remember when I got my current speakers, I guess 10 years ago, this was on the turntable and 'The Chosen Few' was the first track I listened to through them.  The lyric associations are less rooted in indie culture as on Streethawk, though 'Trembling Peacock' is as autobiographical as we'll ever get from Bejar (more-so than 'Self Portrait with Thing'), and it's touching (and with the same dramatic rushes found on Thief). Everything feels much more sketch-like than we've heard before; the songs have a lazy swing sometimes, and the lyrics feel almost improvised. 'Hey, Snow White' is barely a song compared to the precision shown before, and I find that to be the best and worst thing about This Night. It's great that this record stands out against his others, and I've always liked to view albums as total concepts, moods to stand alone. I don't find myself pulling it out very often, but then again, it's a somewhat demanding listen; the songs are all long and seem to never quite know when to finish. The biggest exception is the closing cut, 'The Night Moves', which feels like a holdover from the Streethawk era with it's direct 4/4 rhythm and wordless chorus, a throwback to the 'You've got the spirit' code of 'The Bad Arts'. Elsewhere, there's goodness everywhere. 'Here Comes the Night' feels written to be a hit, and it's catchy, though never one of the great Destroyer songs for me. Despite the dark artwork and nocturnal lyrics throughout (three songs with 'night' in the title, versis one with 'white' and one with 'light'), I associate this album more with warm summer days, maybe due to the tube-based warmth of the production. After this, Bejar starts to really experiment - Your Blues and Kaputt are total departures, and Trouble in Dreams and overly wordy mess; only Rubies from the later record has the same magic as this one, a 'return to form' for sure, though that's not to say I don't love parts of all of 'em.

J,J. Cale - 'Okie' (EMI)

The nightshade comes up and there's a bump-bump-bump across the sky. Okie has a lot of boogie-woogie but also some smooth sliding, and I think this is some sort of cornerstone of Cale's career, but I don't know really. J.J. Cale is a mystery to me. I'm not sure exactly where that mystery began - years of passing up his records, not really knowing much about him besides 'After Midnight', and just always assuming he's the predecessor to that whole genre of music that I heard a lot of when growing up. It was sort of rock, but for adult men in the 50s, and definitely not cool, and that's where stuff like Dire Straits and the Travelin' Wilburys get filed in my brain. But Okie was a 50p car boot sale find, in pretty great shape, so I thought I'd dive in to see what the fuss was about. If there is any fuss. There's a sunburst sheen on everything and the basslines are kinda, I dunno, electric. It's a fluid sound but there's too many shackles around everything. Shackles are okay sometimes, and these ones have a nice rust, but I can't help but shift about restlessly wishing there would either be some break-free or perhaps some quasi-romantic cynicism that I can immerse myself in. Cajun influence is there, or maybe just a song called 'Cajun Woman', cause Dr. John this is not. There's some nice vocal harmonies, a pretty instrumental title track, and not much else to get excited about. I guess I like the soft strum more than the boogie rock, though Molly Hatchet this is not, either. What the hell does 'boogie' actually mean anyway? Blues-rock with all the blues sucked out? I played this record twice when trying to write this and failed to get anywhere -- nothing left an impact, and nothing lasted, no memories, no tendencies I wanted to revisit. The weird thing is, I always thought I would fit well with this kind of music, but I guess I'm just basing that on how I love mellow adult-sounding indie rock, later Mekons records, etc. But still, it's so goddam inoffensive that I can't even get the passion to dislike it.

Tim Buckley (Elektra)

In my reality, the best crooners wear checked jackets and sport turtlenecks, white pants and a whitefro. You throw together Jack Nietzche, Van Dyke Parks and a 19-year old Tim Buckley and you're gonna get something at least interesting, if not earth-shattering. I know this Buckley record the least of his work, or at least as little as I know Goodbye and Hello (because I've never found a copy). But it's solid, though still in the whole 60's singer-songwriter style. About half of the songs are co-written with someone named Beckett (Samuel?) and they are given that warm, soulful production technique that always makes me think "mainstream". Plus, these liner notes are so awesome I'm gonna paste 'em verbatim:

Tim Buckley, an incredibly thin wire, just nineteen-years-old, is already a kind of quintessence of nouvelle, the sensitivity apparent in the very fineness of his features. The man is a study in fragile contrasts: yet everything is in key, precise. His songs are exquisitely controller: quiet, complex mosaics of powerful electric sound, they hold the magic of Japanese water colors. The voice - crisp, full of strength and character, can soar, yet remain tender and delicate. This is Tim Buckley.

This sums it up better than the Underbite could ever hope to say. There's little to jump out at me as this lacks the freedom of his later records, but the strings are dark and mournful and his voice has the sophistication that lends a gravitas to even creepy songs like 'Song Slowly Song' (though singing about a 16 year old girl ain't so bad if you're only 19 yourself, but how old was Beckett)? The melancholia that I love in Buckley is present, but buried a bit - or rather, as he hasn't really come into his own yet, it doesn't feel like his melancholia yet, but a generic sort. In some ways the blurb above feels more like a prediction of his future records than a description of this one - specifically the watercolour thing, which really comes to life once he shakes off steady rhythms and lets things roll. Van Dyke is pretty much just a session musician, though his harpsichord is pretty when you can hear it. Imagine how amazing a full-fledged songwriting collaboration would have been between these two? Move over Smile, cause the one thing I've always wanted from Tim Buckley was for him to be singing cryptic layered word-poems that gesticulate about American landscapes, political discontent and the fleeting inevitability of moments past. Or maybe a Samuel Beckett/VDP/Buckley collaboration would be an even greater rock music what-if jackoff. But yeah, I'm sad to say that this self-titled record gets filed back after this one listen because I'm just psyched to hear Blue Afternoon and Happy Sad again.

Robert Ashley - 'Automatic Writing' (Lovely Music)

Listening to this record essentially twice in a row (I mean, I slept a night in-between) is a bit like subjecting yourself to sleep deprivation. The mumbling and groans here may have actually been recorded while Ashley was sleeping, and the synth tones in the background (not to mention the distant rhythm as described on Elbowed Cinderblocks) give it a dream house quality. I didn't say anything about the cover art last time, which I also think is brilliant. Because it sounds like your neighbor is having a party, I always associated this record with casual living - beaches, button-down short-sleeve shirts that are open a few buttons, ya know. Besides my obvious LP bias this wins out over the CD, DESPITE having to be flipped, because it's presented as one complete work, without the weird rape explorations of the CD bonus tracks. Plus you get a 27-minute LP side without any apparent compromise of sound quality (I mean, the whole record is low volume to begin with). And like great ambient records, or Rafael Toral's Wave Field, this is amazing at a low volume yet if you crank it up there's more goodies inside. And to be honest, when Ashley and Mimi Johnson shut up and just the synth intervals take over, it kinda reminds me a bit of Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, specifically the parts where the clouds part and the voice of God rings down. Except here it's the lack of voice that make things so holy. Not that I'm reading anything particularly spiritual or liturgical into this beast.

Air - 'Air Lore' (Arista Novus)

Source: Ross. Honestly, I didn't get all of my records from one source, just a lot of the A's.

Can you hear the 80s on the horizon? For their sixth album, these innovators decided to 'explore not only the roots of American black music, but their roots as well', conincidentally making a very commercial record of standards just before the dawn of an era when avant-garde jazz went into remission. Well, Roots was big in '78, I guess. I don't mean to knock the effort - you can't deny that a musician might want to convey soul and feeling and not just write obtuse weird shit their whole career - but there's something a bit heartless in the Scott Joplin pieces here. They take on Jelly Roll Morton with a bit more life, though it's still missing something. Or maybe my ears are slightly occluded by the cover art, which is actually pretty incredible and maybe the best cover yet in this project. It's not the sepiatone aspect that I love the most, nor is is the suits, shoes, or glasses of white wine. It's the plants - and it's a shame the florist isn't credited on the back (since the shoe outfitter and stylist were) because I've love to spruce up the piano at Vinyl Underbite HQ with a similar species, but I don't know who to call. Anyway, side 2 is more Jelly Roll and then a Threadgill composition right in the middle that's all flute and bowed bass and McCall stepping lightly on clouds, and then it's more Joplin to close out on a high, or at least upbeat, note. Weird to kill the momentum with the Threadgill jam and it's also weird to spoil the conceptual purity of your "back to the roots" record but, hey, that's how the Air blows.