ON THE COVER  |  NEWS & VIEWS   |  THE TOWN DANDY  MEDIA MAVEN  |  OFF THE PAVEMENT POEM  |  IN REVIEW  |  GARLICK'S NOTEBOOK  |  MOVIES TALK OF THE TABLE  |  THE HUM  |  CALENDAR January 3, 2008 Book: Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 CDs of 2007 by various artists Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 by Luc Sante YETI Books Sixteen years ago Luc Sante’s first book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, explored the the sheer weirdness and teeming danger of life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th century, conducting a vividly impressionistic tour of a world of drug dens, street gangs and racial strife that was at once arcane and oddly contemporary. Sante, for whom English is a second language (he was born and raised in Belgium until he was 10), is a concise stylist who rarely wastes a word. His aesthetic, as Greil Marcus points out in his introduction, is that of a hard-boiled surrealist open to strange juxtapositions of culture, and he prefers less traveled historical byways.   In his new essay collection, Kill Your Darlings (the title is from an apocryphal remark by William Faulkner about the ruthlessness required of good writing), he shows himself to be the kind of wide-ranging writer who can find interest in disparate subjects such as Victor Hugo, Buddy Bolden, Tintin and the ’60s garage rock of the Nuggets collection. He avoids numb academic “expert” approaches for the enthusiasms of a dilettante — though he’s a dilettante with a taste for unearthing lost histories, marginal figures and underdogs. It’s not all just cultural criticism though: His fragments of autobiography in the book compliment the more heady essays. Sante revisits his high school stint as a worker in a hellish plastics factory, a job where he read snippets of Celine between cycles of mind-destroying work and writes encomiums to his poetic heroes Allen Ginsberg and Rimbaud with a self-deprecating eye toward his earlier self, who had pretensions to be their successor. He delivers a satisfying coup de grace to the last vestiges of the cobwebbed myth of Woodstock, seeing the roots of the greed and sexual violence pervading the ’90s cash-in version of the festival prefigured in the original. He’s particularly good in a piece breaking down Bob Dylan’s method of songwriting, which he claims is a mix of traditional ready-made lyrics and original material. He appreciates Dylan’s recent memoir for being “open to currents that run up and down the ages outside the confines of the popular culture of any given period.” Sante is similarly open to echoes and rhymes over time, and likes nothing better than excavating a word, an idea or a place through the accumulated layers of history. His etymological essay on the word “dope” uses the word to entertainingly sketch the country’s history and mores in miniature, and is a case study of lexical flexibility of American English. “The Invention of the Blues” is an essay on the origins of American music that punctures some of the tidy myths of blues iconography. Sante describes the blues as a peculiarly modern invention uniquely suited for the early mass media of the radio and phonograph, and argues that the folk element has been overemphasized by early paternalistic scholars such as Alan Lomax, who preferred a sentimentalized view of “the people.” Perhaps the best piece in the collection is his positively sinful and seductive paean to the subtle erotic gestures of cigarette smoking, “Our Friend the Cigarette.” It actually made this non-smoker want to light one up, and should probably be suppressed for the common good. This book is a varied collection that shows once again that the clearest view sometimes comes from the margins and displays the art of the essay at its best. — Jay Herzog, Journal critic CDs of 2007 by Various Artists Jose Gonzales, In Our Nature. Argentinean singer/songwriter who was raised in Sweden and sings in English delivers a haunting, spare recording, with songs that revolve around war. It’s the sound of this record, with only Gonzalez on vocals and acoustic guitar strummed in an uniquely unorthodox manner that draws the listener. Beautiful. Handsome Furs, Plague Park. Dan Boeckner, a member of the Canadian band Wolf Parade, and his partner Alexei Parry have put together a record of lo-fi pop that still sounds full and engaging. Ironically, it overshadows the material of Wolf Parade. Only problem: The disc isn’t long enough (less than 40 minutes in length). Wilco, Sky Blue Sky. If Ghost Is Born was Tweedy’s painful journey into the landscape of “Handshake Drugs,” Sky Blue Sky is his personal recovery, with sad resignation and small joys of a sober life, awake in a dark world. Wilco, at their most organic, recording in a live atmosphere, exhibits why this current line-up, including the scorching and delicate guitar work of Nels Cline, may be its most definitive formation. Panda Bear, Person Pitch. This seems to be the year for solo projects (St. Vincent/Annie Clark, Thurston Moore, Gruff Rhys). Case-in-point: Animal Collective member “Panda Bear” (Noah Lennox) has released a recording of swirling sounds — from industrial clanging to flying jet fighters — and catchy rhythms, with layered Brian Wilson/Pet Sounds vocals. It’s one of the most eccentric and original releases this year. Radiohead, In Rainbows. What makes this new recording by Radiohead so engaging is that it sounds like a full band effort. Intricate rhythms, beats, guitar, keyboard and bass lines, and melodic vocals intertwine fluidly, creating finessed, complex songs. Sir Richard Bishop, Polytheistic Fragments. Founding member of the noisy Sun City Girls, Sir Richard Bishop has released a number of solo records that explore free noise to subtle acoustic guitar. Polytheistic Fragments puts all of these elements together in a cohesive guitar record that draws equal inspiration from Bill Frisell, Middle Eastern folk, gypsy guitar and John Fahey. Bishop’s guitar translations are stunning, inventive, killer. Nels Cline Singers, Draw Breath. Nels Cline’s guitar is all over the place. And that’s good. Teamed up with his Cryptogramophone colleagues, Devon Hoff (contrabass) and Scott Amendola (drums, percussion, electronics/effects), the Nels Cline Singers display a wide sense of intense execution to their “contemporary jazz,” from the frenetic to the spacious, atmospheric. Individually, these musicians are amazing; together they are monster. Listen for yourself. Iron & Wine, Good Shepherd’s Dog. Singer/songwriter Sam Beam has surrounded himself around an eclectic group of musicians, ranging from Joey Burns and Paul Niehaus (Calexico), to Brian Deck and Jim Becker (Califone), to Rob Burger (Tin Hat Trio). The result is a multi-layered textured wall-of-tones that compliments Beam’s soft-sung, dark lyrics. With the aid of Brian Deck’s production (he also produced last year’s excellent Califone release Crown and Roots), this could be Iron & Wine’s strongest release yet. A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Self Titled. Drummer, percussionist and accordionist, Jeremy Barnes, formerly from Neutral Milk Hotel, has strayed a great distance from his musical past with his partner Heather Trost (violin, viola and cello) and the Hun Hangar Ensemble (and some help from Zach Condon). Here he crafts a collage of old folk and gypsy music, from Budapest to Hungary to Albuquerque, with frenetic pace. The Detroit Cobras, Tied & True. Straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll and Detroit seem to always blend well and dirty together. Rachel Nagy and Mary Ramirez have recruited Greg Cartwright and Carol Schumacher from the current Reigning Sound, who help provide tight arrangements, with just enough of that garage edge, giving a new sheen to these tasteful cover songs. — Mark Shikuma, Journal aesthete More CDs of 2007 by Various Artists The most monumental release this year is certainly Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail, a recording of a piece scored for 400 electric guitars commissioned by the city of Paris. Moving far beyond the actual spectacle of having 400 guitarists playing to an audience of 10,000 in a massive French church, Chatham fashioned a gorgeous, chiming work out of beautiful elongated group chords, creating a serenity that hangs within a shimmering, grandiose and outright majestic moment of time. A similar musical essence was mined by the Boredoms on their new live album Super Roots 9, in which frontman Eye manipulates the sounds of a pre-recorded choir accompanied by three drummers in 40 minutes of cosmic bliss. The similarity is not surprising: Chatham is thanked in the liner notes. Panda Bear’s Person Pitch was embraced by a large cross-section of open-minded listeners and made many year end lists. With sampler loops and Beach-Boys-in-an-airplane-hanger vocals, the Animal Collective member’s album greatly eclipsed his own band’s full-length offering from 2007, creating the perfect soundtrack to many a summer. Rock-wise, Columbus, Ohio’s unfortunately named Psychedelic Horseshit four-tracked inaccessible, ramshackle pop on Magic Flowers Droned, coupling reckless pop abandon with a complete disregard for recording techniques in an unabashedly lo-fi sound world. Portland artists Privacy and Grouper both treaded intimate territory on Without Mercy and Cover the Windows and Walls respectively, the former sounding like solitude spun over stark blankets of bedroom guitar strum, the later sounding like the former dipped in a vat of liquid codeine. Minimal techno outshined other forms of electronic music this year with two German labels, Kompakt and Dial, offering up a slew of textured, repetitious and ultimately engaging albums that were surprisingly evocative, especially Thomas Fehlmann’s Honigpumpe, Pantha du Prince’s This Bliss and The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime. The Field record proved to be a surprising crossover hit, spinning microscopic shards of pop songs into transfixing cycles that would make Steve Reich proud. In terms of overall sonic uniqueness, Finnish collective Kemialliset Ystavat’s new untitled album sounds not quite like anything else, a disorienting stew in which freeform electronics, unidentifiable folk instrumentation and disembodied voices are heavily effected and haphazardly arranged into an overwhelming psychedelic outpour. In similar territory, forward thinking experimental musician/ex-jazz drummer Lee Rockey’s collected works from 1959-1974 were finally released by De Stijl Records, and with layered violin and looping electronics they sound more in line with modern noise excursions than anything in their time. Reissue-wise, Young Marble Giants’ timeless Colossal Youth finally got a deluxe, expanded re-release. A product of their geographical isolation (Cardiff, Wales) and apparent lack of distinct influences, their spacious arrangements of primitive drum machine, organ and snaky guitar/bass with male/female vocals evoke more in their simplicity than most bands can do with a 200 track studio. This 1979 album is a must for any fan of minimal, lo-fi-based indie pop: not only did they originate the sound, but no band since has done it with as much elegance and poignancy. Another important reissue was Hungry Beat, a retrospective of Scottish band Fire Engines, who, along with Orange Juice and Josef K, were key in the early ’80s Scottish post-punk zeitgeist that modern bands like Franz Ferdinand and Bell and Sebastian stole most of their key moves from. There were also a fair share of rescued ultra-obscurities, most importantly the real people psychedelia of Bobb Trimble’s criminally unknown Harvest of Dreams and the harrowing string quartet dissonance of Harley Gaber’s Winds that Rise in the North. And lastly, let’s not forget Vashti Bunyan, whose double-disc Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind couples early singles with her original ’60s demo tape, illuminating a whole new side to the forgotten singer, one of chiming pop decadence with an intimate folk tint. — Spencer Doran, Portland-based hipster   ON THE COVER  |  NEWS & VIEWS   |  THE TOWN DANDY  MEDIA MAVEN  |  OFF THE PAVEMENT POEM  |  IN REVIEW  |  GARLICK'S NOTEBOOK  |  MOVIES TALK OF THE TABLE  |  THE HUM  |  CALENDAR Comments? Write a letter! © Copyright 2008, North Coast Journal, Inc.

ON THE COVER  |  NEWS & VIEWS   |  THE TOWN DANDY  MEDIA MAVEN  |  OFF THE PAVEMENT POEM  |  IN REVIEW  |  GARLICK'S NOTEBOOK  |  MOVIES TALK OF THE TABLE  |  THE HUM  |  CALENDAR January 3, 2008 Book: Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 CDs of 2007 by various artists Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 by Luc Sante YETI Books Sixteen years ago Luc Sante’s first book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, explored the the sheer weirdness and teeming danger of life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th century, conducting a vividly impressionistic tour of a world of drug dens, street gangs and racial strife that was at once arcane and oddly contemporary. Sante, for whom English is a second language (he was born and raised in Belgium until he was 10), is a concise stylist who rarely wastes a word. His aesthetic, as Greil Marcus points out in his introduction, is that of a hard-boiled surrealist open to strange juxtapositions of culture, and he prefers less traveled historical byways.   In his new essay collection, Kill Your Darlings (the title is from an apocryphal remark by William Faulkner about the ruthlessness required of good writing), he shows himself to be the kind of wide-ranging writer who can find interest in disparate subjects such as Victor Hugo, Buddy Bolden, Tintin and the ’60s garage rock of the Nuggets collection. He avoids numb academic “expert” approaches for the enthusiasms of a dilettante — though he’s a dilettante with a taste for unearthing lost histories, marginal figures and underdogs. It’s not all just cultural criticism though: His fragments of autobiography in the book compliment the more heady essays. Sante revisits his high school stint as a worker in a hellish plastics factory, a job where he read snippets of Celine between cycles of mind-destroying work and writes encomiums to his poetic heroes Allen Ginsberg and Rimbaud with a self-deprecating eye toward his earlier self, who had pretensions to be their successor. He delivers a satisfying coup de grace to the last vestiges of the cobwebbed myth of Woodstock, seeing the roots of the greed and sexual violence pervading the ’90s cash-in version of the festival prefigured in the original. He’s particularly good in a piece breaking down Bob Dylan’s method of songwriting, which he claims is a mix of traditional ready-made lyrics and original material. He appreciates Dylan’s recent memoir for being “open to currents that run up and down the ages outside the confines of the popular culture of any given period.” Sante is similarly open to echoes and rhymes over time, and likes nothing better than excavating a word, an idea or a place through the accumulated layers of history. His etymological essay on the word “dope” uses the word to entertainingly sketch the country’s history and mores in miniature, and is a case study of lexical flexibility of American English. “The Invention of the Blues” is an essay on the origins of American music that punctures some of the tidy myths of blues iconography. Sante describes the blues as a peculiarly modern invention uniquely suited for the early mass media of the radio and phonograph, and argues that the folk element has been overemphasized by early paternalistic scholars such as Alan Lomax, who preferred a sentimentalized view of “the people.” Perhaps the best piece in the collection is his positively sinful and seductive paean to the subtle erotic gestures of cigarette smoking, “Our Friend the Cigarette.” It actually made this non-smoker want to light one up, and should probably be suppressed for the common good. This book is a varied collection that shows once again that the clearest view sometimes comes from the margins and displays the art of the essay at its best. — Jay Herzog, Journal critic CDs of 2007 by Various Artists Jose Gonzales, In Our Nature. Argentinean singer/songwriter who was raised in Sweden and sings in English delivers a haunting, spare recording, with songs that revolve around war. It’s the sound of this record, with only Gonzalez on vocals and acoustic guitar strummed in an uniquely unorthodox manner that draws the listener. Beautiful. Handsome Furs, Plague Park. Dan Boeckner, a member of the Canadian band Wolf Parade, and his partner Alexei Parry have put together a record of lo-fi pop that still sounds full and engaging. Ironically, it overshadows the material of Wolf Parade. Only problem: The disc isn’t long enough (less than 40 minutes in length). Wilco, Sky Blue Sky. If Ghost Is Born was Tweedy’s painful journey into the landscape of “Handshake Drugs,” Sky Blue Sky is his personal recovery, with sad resignation and small joys of a sober life, awake in a dark world. Wilco, at their most organic, recording in a live atmosphere, exhibits why this current line-up, including the scorching and delicate guitar work of Nels Cline, may be its most definitive formation. Panda Bear, Person Pitch. This seems to be the year for solo projects (St. Vincent/Annie Clark, Thurston Moore, Gruff Rhys). Case-in-point: Animal Collective member “Panda Bear” (Noah Lennox) has released a recording of swirling sounds — from industrial clanging to flying jet fighters — and catchy rhythms, with layered Brian Wilson/Pet Sounds vocals. It’s one of the most eccentric and original releases this year. Radiohead, In Rainbows. What makes this new recording by Radiohead so engaging is that it sounds like a full band effort. Intricate rhythms, beats, guitar, keyboard and bass lines, and melodic vocals intertwine fluidly, creating finessed, complex songs. Sir Richard Bishop, Polytheistic Fragments. Founding member of the noisy Sun City Girls, Sir Richard Bishop has released a number of solo records that explore free noise to subtle acoustic guitar. Polytheistic Fragments puts all of these elements together in a cohesive guitar record that draws equal inspiration from Bill Frisell, Middle Eastern folk, gypsy guitar and John Fahey. Bishop’s guitar translations are stunning, inventive, killer. Nels Cline Singers, Draw Breath. Nels Cline’s guitar is all over the place. And that’s good. Teamed up with his Cryptogramophone colleagues, Devon Hoff (contrabass) and Scott Amendola (drums, percussion, electronics/effects), the Nels Cline Singers display a wide sense of intense execution to their “contemporary jazz,” from the frenetic to the spacious, atmospheric. Individually, these musicians are amazing; together they are monster. Listen for yourself. Iron & Wine, Good Shepherd’s Dog. Singer/songwriter Sam Beam has surrounded himself around an eclectic group of musicians, ranging from Joey Burns and Paul Niehaus (Calexico), to Brian Deck and Jim Becker (Califone), to Rob Burger (Tin Hat Trio). The result is a multi-layered textured wall-of-tones that compliments Beam’s soft-sung, dark lyrics. With the aid of Brian Deck’s production (he also produced last year’s excellent Califone release Crown and Roots), this could be Iron & Wine’s strongest release yet. A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Self Titled. Drummer, percussionist and accordionist, Jeremy Barnes, formerly from Neutral Milk Hotel, has strayed a great distance from his musical past with his partner Heather Trost (violin, viola and cello) and the Hun Hangar Ensemble (and some help from Zach Condon). Here he crafts a collage of old folk and gypsy music, from Budapest to Hungary to Albuquerque, with frenetic pace. The Detroit Cobras, Tied & True. Straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll and Detroit seem to always blend well and dirty together. Rachel Nagy and Mary Ramirez have recruited Greg Cartwright and Carol Schumacher from the current Reigning Sound, who help provide tight arrangements, with just enough of that garage edge, giving a new sheen to these tasteful cover songs. — Mark Shikuma, Journal aesthete More CDs of 2007 by Various Artists The most monumental release this year is certainly Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail, a recording of a piece scored for 400 electric guitars commissioned by the city of Paris. Moving far beyond the actual spectacle of having 400 guitarists playing to an audience of 10,000 in a massive French church, Chatham fashioned a gorgeous, chiming work out of beautiful elongated group chords, creating a serenity that hangs within a shimmering, grandiose and outright majestic moment of time. A similar musical essence was mined by the Boredoms on their new live album Super Roots 9, in which frontman Eye manipulates the sounds of a pre-recorded choir accompanied by three drummers in 40 minutes of cosmic bliss. The similarity is not surprising: Chatham is thanked in the liner notes. Panda Bear’s Person Pitch was embraced by a large cross-section of open-minded listeners and made many year end lists. With sampler loops and Beach-Boys-in-an-airplane-hanger vocals, the Animal Collective member’s album greatly eclipsed his own band’s full-length offering from 2007, creating the perfect soundtrack to many a summer. Rock-wise, Columbus, Ohio’s unfortunately named Psychedelic Horseshit four-tracked inaccessible, ramshackle pop on Magic Flowers Droned, coupling reckless pop abandon with a complete disregard for recording techniques in an unabashedly lo-fi sound world. Portland artists Privacy and Grouper both treaded intimate territory on Without Mercy and Cover the Windows and Walls respectively, the former sounding like solitude spun over stark blankets of bedroom guitar strum, the later sounding like the former dipped in a vat of liquid codeine. Minimal techno outshined other forms of electronic music this year with two German labels, Kompakt and Dial, offering up a slew of textured, repetitious and ultimately engaging albums that were surprisingly evocative, especially Thomas Fehlmann’s Honigpumpe, Pantha du Prince’s This Bliss and The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime. The Field record proved to be a surprising crossover hit, spinning microscopic shards of pop songs into transfixing cycles that would make Steve Reich proud. In terms of overall sonic uniqueness, Finnish collective Kemialliset Ystavat’s new untitled album sounds not quite like anything else, a disorienting stew in which freeform electronics, unidentifiable folk instrumentation and disembodied voices are heavily effected and haphazardly arranged into an overwhelming psychedelic outpour. In similar territory, forward thinking experimental musician/ex-jazz drummer Lee Rockey’s collected works from 1959-1974 were finally released by De Stijl Records, and with layered violin and looping electronics they sound more in line with modern noise excursions than anything in their time. Reissue-wise, Young Marble Giants’ timeless Colossal Youth finally got a deluxe, expanded re-release. A product of their geographical isolation (Cardiff, Wales) and apparent lack of distinct influences, their spacious arrangements of primitive drum machine, organ and snaky guitar/bass with male/female vocals evoke more in their simplicity than most bands can do with a 200 track studio. This 1979 album is a must for any fan of minimal, lo-fi-based indie pop: not only did they originate the sound, but no band since has done it with as much elegance and poignancy. Another important reissue was Hungry Beat, a retrospective of Scottish band Fire Engines, who, along with Orange Juice and Josef K, were key in the early ’80s Scottish post-punk zeitgeist that modern bands like Franz Ferdinand and Bell and Sebastian stole most of their key moves from. There were also a fair share of rescued ultra-obscurities, most importantly the real people psychedelia of Bobb Trimble’s criminally unknown Harvest of Dreams and the harrowing string quartet dissonance of Harley Gaber’s Winds that Rise in the North. And lastly, let’s not forget Vashti Bunyan, whose double-disc Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind couples early singles with her original ’60s demo tape, illuminating a whole new side to the forgotten singer, one of chiming pop decadence with an intimate folk tint. — Spencer Doran, Portland-based hipster   ON THE COVER  |  NEWS & VIEWS   |  THE TOWN DANDY  MEDIA MAVEN  |  OFF THE PAVEMENT POEM  |  IN REVIEW  |  GARLICK'S NOTEBOOK  |  MOVIES TALK OF THE TABLE  |  THE HUM  |  CALENDAR Comments? Write a letter! © Copyright 2008, North Coast Journal, Inc.