Songs Of The Days: Week 30

July 23: Noonday Underground - Go It Alone (Surface Noise, 2002)(Not available on Spotify)

July 24: Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You (Gorgeous George, 1994)

July 25: 16 Horsepower - Alone And Forsaken (Folklore, 2002)(Not available on Spotify)

July 26: Joan Osborne - What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted? (Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, 2002)(Not available on Spotify)

July 27: The Raconteurs - Store Bought Bones (Broken Boy Soldiers, 2006)

July 29: The Pogues - Fairytale Of New York (If I Should Fall From Grace With God, 1988)

Week 29: Beck - Sea Change (2002)

"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange”

-          William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”

There are few things in music more difficult than making quiet music sound interesting. Unlike rock or pop, which can fall back on danceable, clappable rhythms to keep people interested, quiet genres like folk or blue jazz must rely on either sheer quality or a hope that the audience is stoned enough to pay attention to anything. By definition, the awe-inspiring, bombastic wall-of-sound techniques of baroque pop are out, as are virtuosic solos and sudden shifts in mood or volume. Quiet music must either focus on maintaining its atmosphere and mood over the entire song or build to a crescendo; there’s little room for the terraced dynamics found in alternative music.

Generally, quiet music is designed to provide a vehicle for the singer. It’s no coincidence that the singer-songwriter genre provides most of the best examples of understated, near-silent songs; even if such songs are often dappled with strings and other instruments, the focus is still almost always on the artist whose name graces the album cover.

While that focus on the singer is present, to some extent, in most Western music, folk, singer-songwriter, and other similar genres are bound by their tendency towards quiet volume. In genres like pop or soul, where the singer is the unquestioned master and ruler, the vocals are allowed to soar in volume and octave to the limits of the singer’s ability. Artists like Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston, and Freddie Mercury used volume and melody to keep the attention of the listener on them during all but the 8-bar intros and solos of their songs. However, that freedom of range isn’t as total in other genres; when changes do happen, they happen slowly.

In quiet genres, the singer must demand attention in other ways, usually through their lyrics. Leonard Cohen, a man often lambasted for possessing almost no vocal range at all, nevertheless commands respect and attention simply through his inventive, beautiful lyrics. Bob Dylan is another case of this, and John Darnielle and Laura Marling are borderline cases.

Songs Of The Days: Week 29

July 16: The Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000)

July 18: Moby - Everloving (Play, 1999)

July 19: The Throne - Otis (Watch The Throne, 2011)

July 20: Tricky - Hell Is Around The Corner (Maxinquaye, 1995)

July 21: The Hollies - Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress (Distant Light, 1971)

July 22: Saul Williams - Skin Of A Drum (The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of Niggy Tardust, 2008)

Week 28: Giant Panda - Fly School Reunion (2005)

Rap is a singles genre. The teams of crack producers aside, rap tends to thrive on the image of a single man (or, very, very rarely, woman) presenting themselves and their opinions in an unfiltered way, an extreme form of the frontman in traditional rock bands. The ideal rapper, in this school of thought, is raw id, able to say the things we would never dream of giving voice to and get rich while doing it.

Without exception, this raw id presentation is diluted the more people are present on a given track. The more guest artists and ghostwriters one has, the more diluted the personality of the actual rapper gets. There’s no real secret as to why this is; the more people you have in a band the more input the songwriter gets for a song, leading them, often, far away from the original emotions they were trying to deliver. Compare the schmaltz of the studio version of “Thunder Road” to Springsteen’s original demo, for example. In my opinion, the wall-of-sound style that’s all over the Born To Run album ruins what Springsteen was writing at the time; Darkness At The Edge Of Town improves on that tendency, but there’s a reason the all-acoustic, ultra lo-fi Nebraska is the music snob’s album of choice from The Boss.

Songs Of The Days: Old School Flashback (Week 28)

July 9: Fastball - The Way (All The Pain Money Can Buy, 1998)

July 10: Jimmy Eat World - The Middle (Bleed American, 2001)

July 11: The Wallflowers - One Headlight (Bringing Down The Horse, 1996)

July 12: Third Eye Blind - Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind, 1997)

July 13: Coldplay - The Scientist (A Rush Of Blood To The Head, 2002)

July 14: Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On (Miss E… So Addictive, 2001)

July 15: Cake - Never There (Prolonging The Magic, 1998)

Week 27: Dr. Dog - Be The Void (2012)

“I was never that young/I was born old and grey/Alone and in shambles/It’s alright, it's ok”

-          Dr. Dog, “Get Away”

What place does the topic of age deserve in discussions about music? One of the most basic ways to dismiss something, from a critical perspective, is to label it as ‘immature’ or ‘childish’, a criticism that I’ve used on this very blog. I stand by my usage of those terms, mainly because such things don’t generally hold up under an analytic lens.

Poptimism, the critical perspective that pop music should not be criticized in the manner I described above, runs into this problem constantly. Artists like Beyonce may be making music that is brilliantly put together, but the accomplished whole doesn’t appear to me to have any real content. Most everything about pop music is put clearly on the surface level, without any need to dig deep for meaning, a pop song can only generate interest in itself by making sure the music is intricately arranged and, at best, offers some kind of interesting composition.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach to music. Entire books have been written on The Beatles, including their poppiest songs along with the ones that came closest to blues or folk music. Oftentimes it’s those intricate pop songs that attract the most critical attention, thanks to how readily they offer themselves to music majors with heads teeming with Italian words and a lot of free time. In a more general sense, pop songs are often the songs large groups unite around when they need something to fill the dead air between conversations. Taking examples from my own blog, I love “The Radicalization Of D” by Gareth Liddiard, but if I were to throw a party I’d be more likely to reach for Holy Ghost. Similarly, if I were to play some Kanye I’d have to cherry-pick from 808s quite a bit (“Heartless” would be a good choice; leave it to Kanye to make crippling depression danceable).

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make pleasant music, which is the only thing that truly unites all pop musicians. I hate modern pop for its constant, almost desperate attempts to eliminate all traces of humanity from their music, simply because doing so transforms pop into uncanny electronica. Making the human voice into an instrument has a long proud tradition in music all around the world and visa versa, but attempts to manipulate the voice in post as if it were a guitar string to be fretted gives me the oogies. How can you have joyful, happy music if the humanity has been clinically removed? It’s like marrying a Stepford Wife.

Songs Of The Days: Week 27

July 2: Booker T. Jones - Everything Is Everything (The Road From Memphis, 2011)



July 5: The Cannonball Adderly Quintet - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (Live At "The Club", 1966)



July 6: Prince - I Wanna Be Your Lover (Prince, 1979) (not available on YouTube)

July 7: TheTheThe day:

The Protomen - The Hounds (The Father Of Death, 2009)



The Budos Band - The Volcano Song (The Budos Band, 2005)



The Lawrence Arms - The Disaster March (The Greatest Story Ever Told, 2003)



The Wiseguys - The Grabbing Hands (The Antidote, 1998)



The The - The Twilight Hour (Soul Mining, 1983) (not available on Spotify)

Week 26: Contemporary Noise Quintet - Pig Inside The Gentleman (2006)

As the title suggests, Pig Inside The Gentleman is an album fundamentally based in stark contrasts. Much like the baroque and grunge technique of quickly shifting from loud to soft, soft to loud (which is called either terraced dynamics or sforzando (sƒz) depending on how pretentious you’d like to be), the album uses surprising shifts in tone, mood, and complexity to keep the listener’s focus nailed down to the music. If you don’t, you’ll likely be unable to recognize any given song on the album from one minute to the next; the Contemporary Noise Quintet work under the assumption that you’re paying close attention to what they’re doing.

While Pig Inside The Gentleman does use the classical technique of sƒz in many of its songs, the real tool of contrast for the Contemporary Noise Quintet is, as suggested by their name, chaos. While the opening track, “Million Faces” provides the purest example of chaotic noise in a mid-song, two-minute long aside, almost all of the other songs on the album use either frenetic percussion or free-flowing solos to suggest that any given song could repeat that kind of breakdown.  By proving their willingness to abandon structure in “Million Faces”, the Quintet are able to make a noisy piece like “P.I.G.” all the more interesting, simply because the listener is kept wondering how long the song’s ramshackle structure will survive.

Songs Of The Days: Week 26

June 25: Kings Go Forth - I Don't Love You No More (The Outsiders Are Back, 2010)



June 26: Fatboy Slim - Praise You (You've Come A Long Way, Baby, 1999)



June 27: Wall Of Voodoo - Mexican Radio (Call Of The West, 1983)



June 28: Digable Planets - Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat) (Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space), 1993)



June 29: The Who - The Punk & The Godfather (Quadrophenia, 1973)



June 30: The Stooges - Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell (Raw Power, 1973)



July 1: Void Pedal - Women In White (Void Pedal EP, 2010) (not available on Spotify) (freely available here)