Indy Throwback: Autumn Album Suggestions. Sorry About the 9-month Delay

The following is an article originally published in The Indy in November. Based on how much I've listened to Quicksand/Cradlesnakes since then, this shit is really not season-specific. Enjoy anyway:

            A few months back I was driving an old family car when I found a series of mix CDs, each labeled with a different date in November 2007. Turns out the three mixes were mostly dispatches from the Mountain Goats, Elliot Smith, and the Smashing Pumpkins—a group brought together by the lyrics’ explicit confrontations with pain. Lyrics like the Mountain Goats’ “I played video games in a drunken haze/I was seventeen years young/hurt my knuckles punching the machines/the taste of scotch rich on my tongue” are powerful because singer John Darnielle’s anger resonates with a variety of listeners’ diverse personal experiences, despite the particularity of Darnielle’s own.

            Four Novembers later, I’m still drawn to a particular type of telling, though perhaps a more nuanced one. The tension between the rainy temperature drops and gorgeous visual stimuli strongly recalls the coexistence of the melancholic and the cathartic in music. Which seems appropriate for a season defined by a sense of transition and change: these days, the space between a tragic story and a blissful one seem especially open to exploration. Accordingly, there seems to be a particular brand of discordant storytelling in the music I gravitate toward during autumn. Here are five album suggestions for the season, each ambivalently articulating conflict in their own way.

5. Invincible- Shapeshifters (2008).

            It would be tempting to locate Invincible in a lineage of message rappers, brought together by their socially conscious themes and avoidance of anger as a guiding principle. One imagines an Invincible fan also digging Talib Kweli, KRS-1, and other rappers who are conscious without being revolutionary.

            But that would miss what makes this album so special. Invincible covers Israeli/Palestinian relations, corporate greed, racism, sexism and gentrification, with impressive fluidity and cogency. The result, though her lyrical content is specific and substantive, is much more than just emotionally charged commentary. It’s a philosophy of witness and transformation. The title track begins “Music is not a mirror to reflect reality/it’s a hammer with which we shape it.” Her anger exists within a holistic framework of healing that has a systemic resonance. So it’s not even the overflowing content that’s important here, it’s the act of confession—an articulation of the challenges of community building as a way to break through them. In a season of change, what could make more sense?

4. Califone- Quicksand/Cradlesnakes (2003).

Americana. Freak Folk. Soul. Garage. Raspiness. Vibrations. Feedback. Breathing.

            Breathing. The album embodies it. The record is not a subject as much as a process, the way that sounds—whether guitar/banjo twangs, electric fuzz, or those ribbed fish instruments—trip over each other in seemingly endless rotation. There are crescendos but it isn’t clear where they begin or end. Califone’s genius is that many of their songs are series of memorable moments, yet the transitions to and from those moments are so seamless that they are hard to discern, even after dozens of listens. Like a decontextualized trip into another space triggered by a vaguely familiar smell, Califone’s music is a tribute to the power of the sensory. Their lyrics are heavily associative, with animal descriptions and metaphors often as a unifying trope. This is appropriate, since the music is more instinctive than rational. However, the album’s power lies not so much in the solutions it offers for living in a heavily sensory world, but in the beautiful, often non-sequitur musical possibilities of such a world. Conflicting sounds and styles are the air the keeps the album breathing.  

3. Television- Marquee Moon (1977).

            Television is generally separated from other NYC punk explosion bands by their complex guitar interplay, which synthesized blues and jazz influences to create something wholly original. And in the context of the 1977 punk scene, this was perhaps doubly subversive. But beyond that, they also transcended their peers by the way their stylistic experimentation complemented their lyrical content. Marquee Moon is mostly removed from the senses of swagger and rage that defined the late-70’s CBGB’s scene, instead focusing on alternating paranoia and hysterical joy. Opener “See No Evil” sets the album’s majestically bipolar tone by acknowledging the ridiculousness of what might, in less able hands, be a self-indulgent song about invincibility. Follow up “Venus” is structured like a ballad until Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s interspersed call-and-response exchanges question the narrator’s reliability just in time for the chorus. And then there’s the title track, which has to be the most economically creepy, suspenseful and ecstatic 10-minute rock song in history. Marquee Moon is then a punk album in the purest sense: by taking elements of classic (even arena) rock, punk, blues, and an indie sensibility that hadn’t even been invented yet, it remains Television’s lasting middle finger to all their influences and imitators.

2. Clipse- Hell Hath No Fury (2006).

Much is revealed in a rap album through its use of skits or interludes. The most traditionally ambitious ones use them as breathers, sometimes signaling tone changes or introducing standout tracks (see: Ghostface Killah, Fishscale,). But Hell Hath no Fury is different—the first song is a cyclical intro, boasting the Re-Up Gang label name with the looping line “we got it for cheap,” and coming full circle with the same samples at the end. But the second loop comes 3:42 later, after an explosion of Pusha T and Malice’s harrowing accounts of crack dealing, outlining the thrills, guilt and instability of hustling. The tactic of embedding stylistic bells and whistles within the album’s dystopian lyrical universe complicates the rappers’ considerable showmanship. The result is a distinct feeling of entrapment within the Virginia beach drug culture, and all its ecstasies and insecurities.

            But then, the entrapment is layered. Malice is Pusha’s older brother, and the album captures the sense of mutual responsibility for each other’s scarred consciences (Malice: “To my little brother Terrance who I love dearly so/If I ever had millions never would you sell blow”). These days Pusha is collaborating with members of Odd Future while Malice is writing a born-again memoir. I don’t know to what extent their life trajectories were diverging during the Hell Hath No Fury sessions, but the line between art and life seems especially fraught during the brother’s moments of alternating didacticism and bravado. Mid-album highlight “Hello New World” perhaps epitomizes this opposition, as Malice answers Pusha’s golden line “some people called it crack I called it diet Coke!” with his own “this information I must pass on to my homies/if hustling is a must be Sosa, not Tony.” Their tension never compromises their chemistry, though, instead making it even more breathtaking. Since their clashes exist in the same spacey, drugged out world that even the skits cannot escape, each intricate, scary piece of Hell Hath No Fury feels like a step on a downwardly spiraling staircase. Let’s be thankful the descent was so beautiful.

1. The Wrens- The Meadowlands (2003).

The Meadowlands is broadly an album about failure, about fighting the shame of being poor, single and depressed at 30. Which is a pretty brave statement on its own terms: these are not romantic problems to have, and attempt to first-person dramatize them can pretty immediately open one up to a world of scrutiny. Even braver, though, is that The Wrens’ don’t try to romanticize these problems, shying away from making their subjects proletariat heroes or wounded souls. Instead, they are more interested with the conflicts of finding a voice. The Meadowlands is about fighting the shame of not knowing how to articulate failure in a meaningful way. It’s about the profound directionlessness when the system is the problem rather than the individual who is embedded in it, and bettering your life can never be infused with a sense of vengeance because the problem is an unfeeling system that can’t experience vengeance. And, maybe after that, it’s about the shame of feeling like you need revenge in the first place.

             By focusing on failure, The Meadowlands transcends the need to imply a narrative conclusion to the narrators’ suffering. Instead, the emotional descriptiveness of The Meadowlands makes the passage of time seem downright irrelevant, despite the fact that aging is a recurring theme. Take the transition from second track “Happy” to third “She Sends Kisses. ” The former closes with singer Kevin Whelan shouting “Your lies to me/won’t win again/so don’t kid yourself/it’s better this way/it’s all back to me,” against the peak of a crescendo of feedback and shredding before a final fadeout riff. However, the immediately quiet and slower “She Sends Kisses” begins with “Ten tons against me and you’ve gone/I put your favorite records on/and sit around/it spins around/and you’re around again.”

Such a sequence is typical: the band’s perspective often switches between reminiscence, in-time narration, and cautiously optimistic fuck-you declarations with a seeming disregard for coherence, leaving only a swirling sense of working through. And if the album is as much about the pitfalls of testifying to one’s failures as it is the subjective experience of failure, the album’s most explicit moments of existential confusion come from “This Boy is Exhausted,” which is literally about the difficulties of writing the album itself, including the lines “I’m way past college/No ways out/No back doors not anymore/but then once in a while/we’ll play a show that makes it worthwhile.” The song became the band’s biggest hit, which shouldn’t be surprising—the Wrens’ biggest strength is their ability to be deeply self-conscious without losing a sense of urgency or sincerity.  So, The Meadowlands might be the perfect Autumn album because it’s so deeply and essentially processual: the bandmembers’ anguish of articulating their disappointments creates new disappointments to work through. The album is then its own solution. And if that leaves you wondering what happens in between, the answer is conflict. Gorgeous, swirling conflict.