Voices in my head (king shit and the golden boys)

do you love the who?

do you love the beatles?

yeah?

you'd better. regardless, here comes a bit of noise about guided by voices.

there is an earlier, but brief and less than informative, post about rob pollard on this lil' rant repository. rob pollard is guided by voices. there have been any number of permutations of the band, but pollard is the meat of the thing, writing the songs and often recording the majority of the tracks for a given song himself.

i have a near pathological love for guided by voices and, seeing as i've gotten nothing but more self-indulgent this eve, imma give ya'll what i think of as a brief primer for what you should pick up in order to pick up on this band.

first:

under the bushes under the stars
good god, this is a great album. as a point to jump off from this might be a bit tough, but worth the listening effort. it can acquaint you with the low-fi recording quality that characterizes the majority of the band's catalog while still grounding you in catchy songs and familiar melodies. of particular interest for the neophyte are the following tracks:
"man called aerodynamics"
"the official ironmen rally song"
"your name is wild"
"ghost of a different dream"
"atom eyes"
"don't stop now"
"it's like soul man"
"redmen and their wives"

now, a couple records that might be easier introductions, but miss a bit of the spirit of the thing.

isolation drills
a really good album. a pop record through and through, but full of great songs and built specifically for a summer day.
songs of interest:
"fair touching"
"twilight campfighter"
"sister i need wine"
"glad girls"

do the collapse
many people shit all over this album. they are wrong. there are gems on this brute and i've seen many a listener be turned to the good gospel of rob pollard by some of these tracks:
"teenage fbi"
"hold on hope" (i include this because you may have heard it before, but it is among my least favorite on this record.)
"surgical focus"
"much better mr. buckles"

now for a more recent record

earthquake glue
i count this album among my personal favorite guided by voices records for a number of reasons, here are a few:
"my kind of soldier"
"she goes off at night"
"useless inventions"
"the best of jill hives"

now, while those may (at times) feel like musical ideas being stretched into longer songs, here you'll find distilled songs in concentrated (although certainly raw) form.

alien lanes
this is where it's at. this was the record that made me truly fall for this band. to take nothing away from other, truly important, pieces of music like bee thousand, this is what turned my head around. melodies obscured and aided by noisy production and sloppy arrangement. oddball songs with a snore in them. by the way, there isn't a single song on this album that is more than three minutes long. take a listen:
"a salty salute"
"watch me jumpstart"
"as we go up, we go down"
"game of pricks"
"a good flying bird"
"closer you are"
"motor away"
"ex-supermodel"
"always crush me"

after all of that and all of the track listing, i'm actually going to warn you against just listening to tracks. for all of the two minute glory that is guided by voices it is still a band best taken down an album at a time.

if there were only one record that you were to pick up it ought to be alien lanes, but if you were to pick an easier intro and then get another record afterward you should look first to under the bushes under the stars.

worth your time and your limited cash. i swear on any number of graves.

--dan

3 degrees of isaac brock

here's the train:

modest mouse--> isaac brock-->ugly casanova-->holopaw.

you all know modest mouse, i've no doubt. you all likely know that isaac brock is the creative push behind modest mouse (songwriter, singer, blahblahblah). fewer of you may be familiar with a side project brock was involved with called ugly casanova. ugly casanova put out a fantastic record in 2002 titled sharpen your teeth. there is a whole quasi-mythology surrounding that record that, while certainly entertaining in its own right, is not the point right now. the point is that brock managed to get one of his co-conspirators on the ugly casanova project a record deal.

john orth.

john orth is the push behind the band holopaw.

their first record was released by subpop in 2003 (and will likely be the subject of another little rant at some later date). in 2005 they put out quit +/or fight.

these are pretty songs, but to simply dismiss them as such is criminal. orth and his crew manage to blend a sort of soft country construction with a production style very similar to the promise ring's wood/water. these are songs not at all dissimilar to songs: ohia's magnolia electic co., but with much more shine.

largely a quiet record, the extent to which this band is able to exploit (and i do mean exploit) slight dynamic changes to great effect is, at least, impressive, and at best truly masterful.

tracks like 3-shy-cubs move from subtle and catchy shuffle to oddly anthemic with a magician's slight of hand, while the haunting falsetto of the following track, "curious," and it's lockstep rhythm move from repetitive guitar melody back to the same rhythmic vocal and instrumental shuffle left in the track prior.

all in the space of six minutes and eighteen seconds.

of eleven songs there are four that clock in above three minutes, only one of which manages to beat four. there is an admirable economy of music on this record that should serve as a lesson to those bands that feel they need six minutes to get their sound across, specifically, "velveteen (all is bright)." a song that very literally hits its sonic peak at the halfway point in a track that runs just under three minutes, only to offer one last (albeit restrained) explosion just prior to ending.

a somewhat melancholic choice at this point in the evening, but i do believe you should give holopaw a go.

--dan

john henry split my heart

well, he did. his own as well, but that's not the point right here.

songs: ohia is the point. the record the magnolia electric co. specifically.

there are many comparisons to neil young to be made with this particular young man's voice, and while most would be apt and deserved, what is more important is a series of eight songs out of the mind of jason molina.

these are phoenix songs. not the sort that pay attention to the bird rising out of the ashes (although there is a bit of that as well), but the sort that pay close attention to the texture of the ashes and the burn that lead there.

these are often sad songs, but songs focused on the glory and majesty of that particular sort of sad. with a combination of well placed pedal steel slide guitar, flat-picked chords, beautifully awkward and fragile melody and harmony, country the way you want to hear it, and balls-out rock prowess, molina managed to build a record that will burrow into your brain and hold it captive.

with that said, it's only appropriate that he conflates the truly american myths of john henry beating the machine and robert johnson courting the devil in the track "john henry split my heart."

boy what you gonna do with your heart in two?
half i'm gonna use to pay this band,
half i'm saving, 'cause i'm gonna owe them

purely american music.

--dan

i lost my shape trying to act casual

in an alternate universe i like to imagine that our current president and his cabinet listen to "crosseyed and painless" by the talking heads and alternately commiserate and cry:

making a list, find the cost of opportunity
doing it right, facts are useless in emergencies

facts are simple and facts are straight
facts are lazy and facts are late
facts all come with points of view
facts don't do what i want them to
facts just twist the truth around
facts are living turned inside out
facts are getting the best of them
facts are nothing on the face of things

go listen to remain in light right now.

--dan

eXTaCy

honestly, "dear god" by the often overlooked XTC is a truly fantastic little single that slid by during my years of paying close attention to the radio.

i vividly remember the video for this song...some kid in a tree singing the opening verse.

fantastic song.

not sure if it could possibly be more british.

or more fantastically dated. just listen to the production. damn.

--dan

shoulda done, shoulda done we all sighed

warren zevon.

the man shuffled off his coil a day after my twenty-third birthday.

he was a favorite of my father. a sentimental favorite no doubt, as warren's songs were a weird and brutal cross between the comedic and tragic. characters meant to be laughed at in some cases, laughed with in others, but cried with in many.

he had a way with the turn of phrase, able to write as credible a song about werewolves in the uk as he was able to tell us about a fortunate sun wishing for legal council and weapons or a homicidal date to a high school dance.

he was a contemporary and friend to another much missed friend of similar disposition. i say friend because i miss his voice in the same way that i miss hunter. there was a beautiful brutality to them both. he and hunter thompson shared a great many sensibilities and sentiments, savageries and softness.

it's a shame he's gone.

this afternoon i was stopped by the song "accidentally like a martyr." a beatiful song, but what i can't stop replaying is this:

"the days slide by
shoulda done
shoulda done we all sighed"

it loses a bit when typed out, but tied up in that three and three quarter minutes of song it is as powerful as a death rattle and first love.

--dan

it's about to get drunk and sloppy...

to all three of you who may actually read this, my apologies.

tonight done went and got weird on me. as such, i'm going to spend the next hour or so spinning brief missives about whatever music wanders into my head...

information and odd connections

i just found out that i'll likely be teaching english to high school kids in either the south bronx or east harlem...

...and i can't stop thinking about warren zevon.

"mr. bad example."

"accidentally like a martyr."

maybe there'll be more to say later.

--dan

you in reverse

as a convenient and nicely symmetrical re-entry into regular posting on this thing i'm gonna talk a bit about the new built to spill record, you in reverse, that was released this week.

i was wrong.

sort of.

this is a really good record, of that there is no doubt. it has all of the proper builttospillishness i've come to expect and is a welcome shift away from the more polished songs and production on their last record, ancient melodies of the future. at the same time, i'm a bit put off by some of the noodling on this outing. i'm more than willing to indulge two minutes of guitar melodies soaring and crashing against each other (and there is plenty of that), but there seems to be more of a meandering tone to this record, and i'm not sure that i can get fully on-board with that.

one last criticism before i heap on the praise: "conventional wisdom."

ted leo wants his song back (well, at least the good parts).

it's not that it isn't a catchy lil' pop song, because it is. however, around the 3-minute mark (in a song that runs 6:21), it falls into the most insipid b-rate phish jam imaginable. after around a minute of that, you get some big crunchy chords and a single guitar melody...for another minute or so before the song even approaches the sort of glory you would have expected from the whole track on any other built to spill record.

it may seem like i've been piling on here, but it's only because this is such a good record otherwise and the missteps really come to the fore.

now for the shiny parts:

"goin' against your mind" is still a kickass song. it suffers (only ever so slightly) from some of the amorphous noodling i was harping on earlier, but in a way that reminds you of the charming sloppiness of a song like "car", so all is forgiven on that count.

"liar" floats past you on a punchy baseline, some tastefully jangly guitars and a plaintive melody. The sequencing of the record deserves mentioning here, as the transition from "liar" into the brief (2:24) crescendo of "saturday" is especially well done.

"wherever you are" recalls keep it like a secret's outstanding "time trap", but with a decidedly darker turn. where i'm bothered by the wandering on "conventional wisdom," "wherever you are" never loses the plot. the staccato rhythm guitar line punctuates and anchors the instrumental portions of the track, allowing doug martsch's guitar melodies to climb and crash with full dramatic and aural effect.

that's about all i've got in me at the moment. i'm happy to have many of my early fears about this album put to bed, and after repeated listens it does certainly stand up.

--dan

so, it's been a while

a little over two months later, and we're back.

as with any project born on the wings of a heavy red-wine-drunk, this page had a strong start but suffered the inevitable fall.

here's to changing that.

--dan