Pages from the Musical Journal Issue 4
Ted Waldbillig
Undergraduate/ English
The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
(Unknown.mid-spring.2008)...And boredom strikes the indie-kid spitting out and out about the things that happen everyday.
Damn, it was bound to happen. There aren’t more than five or six chords in Heretic Pride. No more than ten or fifteen words…
Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too
(Unknown.mid-fall.2008) Theodore: "Oh Pitchfork, where art thou, my Pitchfork?"
Pitchfork Media: "O’er herest, my dearest... Theodore-music-fan!"
Theodore: "Oh, and what today shall thou recommend I adhere to and hear to, now, hitherto? Please make it good, as Brightblack Morning Light’s Motion to Rejoin was a real bore and thou suggesteth it once; I subject mine ears to such froof ne’er again!"
Pitchfork Media: "Theodore, why would thou even begin to now imagine I would be a dreadful companion again? I am in one hundred regrets for my misstep only a fortnight past! Dear Theodore, Lindstrom is nothing like Brightblack Morning Light of olde! He be a sorcerer of electricity!"
Theodore: "Oh, how lovely mine Pitchfork hast returneth to me! Now, as once ago, bearing fruitful treasures for one’s exhausted mind!"
(Puts on headphones and listens, grudgingly, to this fifty five-minute-long trance album that varies only in key as it repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats over and over and over one melodic line over a generic thump into eternity)
Theodore: "...God damnit!"
Bat for Lashes - Two Suns
(4.10.2009) Meh. Keeping up with the blogs is difficult enough. Without all the things I actually want to listen to.
(4.18.2009/2:27p.) And eight days later, it still doesn’t seem to make any sense that now all these beautiful girls are doing electro-pop singer-songwriterisms and the blog-o-sphere praises them without refute. I don’t think this is so new, even if enjoyable. Still, let’s take a look:
"Glass," the soaring first unsingle (could become one in just a little while), is probably the best song on the entire album. It’s doldrums polyrhythm churning with that bass synth. "Went over the sea / what did I find? / A thousand crystal towers / A hundred emerald cities." OK she’s clearly been in love with John Orangeslice for, like, a long time. But she doesn’t have to name drop Emerald City to let people know she’s in the indiestry to stay. "Sleep Alone" Rolling Stone Magazine talks about like.
(Changes subject abruptly)So, I mentioned I’m only listening to this because Pitchfork.com recommends it as a selection in their Best New Music pile. But how can I be convinced here? What? Are they going to bring her to the festival this summer? When the Internet starts lying, I don’t know where to turn anymore.
I’ve been trying to write this poem for the last four days and it keeps spinning in place. I can get fancy language that doesn’t mean anything - but it sure as hell is coming out of me. But from where? Professor G. says that sometimes we surprise ourselves when we write because it somehow seems smarter than us. As if we can’t believe (really, CANNOT believe) that that came out of our head.
"Is language smarter than us?" he asks. I don’t know, but writing is hard when you’re a perfectionist. And I know for a fact Bat for Lashes’ Two Suns is a boring record aside from the two singles. Maybe "Pearl’s Dream," too, but that’s just because it sounds exactly like a castrated "Glass." Ouch.
"Good Love": "’Cause my heart caught fire... / Passed it last night in a dream." Allow me to share a dream experience. Because this middle song had me thinking about my own future, surprisingly enough:
Seven April Two-Thousand and Nine: One of the first real relevant dreams I’ve had in my life standing in my childhood home. The backyard in some sort of bubble; a visit to the past.
I look up in the corner woods by the dead grass pile where we had our first tree fort. It’s wavering (wasn’t it always?), but there’s something I don’t remember: an engine-run water heater tank up in a stand. A tube is running to the fort, the supply.
Now the whole structure looks sad. I stand in the opposite corner, above the rock wall, by the neighbor’s garden. I stare down the wall, wondering about my two choices: hit the road, or start a career and family with one I love. I’ve always felt I could defer the latter, but do some couples wish they had spent more time together in the end? What are the costs of being on the road? I know well the costs of beginning a career or family and settling down, it’s why I’ve made my decision to travel... But what do I have to lose? I know that I haven’t much now, but what will I have in ten years?
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Beware
(3.27.2009)Where are you going so fast, Mr. Oldham?
(4.19.2009/10:14a.) "That’s where the seed of soul sucking grows." Bonnie "Prince" Billy is one of those guys who has perfected the art of staying in the shadows, but is still signed to a big player in the indiestry (Drag City), and prolifically releases music. He’s mysterious until he opens his mouth and sings, then you can see part of what it means to be an American.
Oldham’s latest crush has been the countrified mountain music, full of twangy licks and life-loving lyrics. His last full-length, 2008’s Lie Down in the Light, which is graced with an amazingly whimsical record sleeve, reflects the cover art as more play- and color-full.
Beware is also much like the cover art. It’s toned down. Occluded. More than half of the tracks on this album are country ballads, and they are certainly not in the same vein as the legendary I See a Darkness. Those songs weren’t even ballads, they were funeral dirges. Yet Beware, en totale, falls short of the spectacular emotionality I’ve become accustomed to hearing from Mr. Oldham.
* * *
Even if Bonnie "Prince" Billy has retreated to the glade that Sal Paradise found halfway through Kerouac’s On the Road, I don’t think he’s necessarily turning inward as hardly. These last couple of countrified years haven’t found Oldham locking himself up inside himself, he’s been enjoying life more than anything. He’s been traveling and meeting all kinds of folks. Hell, he collaborated with Scotland’s Harem Scarem just last year, and that’s a dream come true for a country singer like Will Oldham. His lightheartedness has been more fun - I’m sure for him - but sacrificing his work’s unfade comes as baggage.
Some are more OK with that than others.
* * *
"I Am Goodbye" is the real stellar track, breaking out of the lashings that bind Beware so tightly (and ironically). Nope, there’s nothing you really need to beware for, in general - save for when Oldham lets his voice crack into a falsetto and do a quick stair-stepping workout in the chorus.
"Without Work, You Have Nothing" is the best of the polar opposites of "I Am Goodbye."