Music Library: Antony & The Johnsons, Any Trouble, Aphex Twin, Apollo Nove, Apples In Stereo, Arcade Fire, Archie Shepp, Archies

Antony & The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now. I also like most of Lou Reed's albums from the 70s, Roxy Music, Bowie, Eno's rock albums, and any number of other half-showtune glam tracks.

Any Trouble - "Dimming of the Day". Clive Gregson, who I mostly know as a Richard Thompson back-up singer, covering Richard & Linda Thompson's classic song with his pub-rock outfit. I've heard good things about this band, but this cover is pedestrian enough to discourage me from pursuing them further so far.

Aphex Twin - Richard D. James. Not my cup of tea. A friend gave me some Aphex Twin albums, and I've kept them to occasionally challenge my horizons. But while I like the melodies and noises pretty well, the over effect never really moves me.

Aphex Twin - 26 Mixes For Cash. Same deal, although I like what's happening on this album quite a lot. In small doses. But, Jesus, 26 in a row is a long time to put up with this sort of music.

Apollo Nove - Res Inexplicata Volans. A gift from the same friend, this is Brazil pop with strong tropicalista tendencies. I'm pretty sure that's Rita Lee from Os Mutantes singing on some of the tracks. The music isn't as wildly ambitious and dream-logical as Os Mutantes were, but I dig it, anyway.

Apples In Stereo - "Holiday Mood," "Stephen Stephen," and "Energy." My least-favorite of the Elephant Six bands. I dig Robert Schneider as a person and a producer, but his work does almost nothing for me. The first song is a Xmas track. The second is one he wrote for The Colbert Report green-screen showdown with the Decemberists. The last is off their most recent album. They all leave me cold.

Arcade Fire - Funeral. Everyone and their sister has heard of the Arcade Fire. I'm pretty ambivalent about them, though, and have been since I first bought this album. It sounds like a lot of 80s alterna-bands playing at once, which isn't a bad thing so much as an undistinguished thing. I hear U2, the Smiths, the Cure, and about a dozen others. All those anthemic bands that have heard of minor keys, basically. Sometimes it works on me (see The National), but usually I think it's good for a song or two, but nothing worth getting het up over.

Archie Shepp - "Attica Blues." I thought I had this whole album, but it appears that this is the only track I have. Must rectify soon.

The Archies - The Archies' Greatest Hits. I actually like bubblegum pop pretty well, but this is far too much Archies. I could cut this down to "Sugar Sugar" and "Jingle Jangle" and still have all the Archies I ever need.

Music Library: Animaniacs, Antietam, Antoni Wit/Messiaen

Animaniacs - "Yakko's Universe". I think I got this from David Smay. It's the formerly-popular cartoon characters singing about living in a notably secular universe.

Antietam - Music From Elba. This is music like a puzzle. Part post-punk, part jangle-pop, part roots-rock, and yet all art-rock, with three different lead singers coming together in strange, often discordant ways. Two bassists, one guitarist (the nimble Tara Key, one of the all-too-few female guitarists in post-punk's mid-80s flowering), a drummer, and some occasional sweet violin. I always thought "Elba" to be a reference to the often-flooded Alabama town, but most reviewers think that it's a reference to the island best known for Napolean's exile.

Antietam - Burgoo. Produced by Ira & Georgia of Yo La Tengo and sounding like it. This is a more coherent album with more direct songs (and only one bassist). I kinda miss the anarchy of Music From Elba, but I dig it on its own terms, anyway.

Antoni Wit - MESSIAEN: Turangalîla-Symphonie. According to Wikipedia, Messiaen explained this work by saying, "It's a love song." Also according to Wikipedia, he derived the title from two Sanskrit words, turanga and lîla, which roughly translate into English as "love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life, and death," and described the joy of Turangalîla as "superhuman, overflowing, dazzling and abandoned." As with most modern composition, I find it beautiful, but quite exhausting, and I lack the vocabulary and experience to explain why.

Music Library: Animal Collective + Catch-up: Acetone, Andrew Bird

Animal Collective - Sung Tongs. Man, this is sonic perfection. Just as hazy and trippy and pleasantly disorienting as any evening spent intoxicated with some of your oldest and most-loved friends camping miles away from civilization.

Animal Collective - "Baby Day" (B-side to "Who Could Win A Rabbit?" single). Not as great as any song on Sung Tongs, but a lovely blend of electronics and Beach Boys-like singing.

Animal Collective - Feels. Wait, THIS one is sonic perfection. This is what summer days during college felt like when I didn't have to work or go to school and had no plans other than hanging out with friends, maybe trying to find a pool to jump into, taking my dog for a hike in the woods, jumping off a cliff into Lake Nichols near Tuscaloosa, or just plain sleeping in the sun. I love the hell out of this album.

Animal Collective with Vashti Bunyan - Prospect Hummer EP. I love Vashti Bunyan's solo albums, especially her first one from back in the early 70s. Joe Boyd writes about how much he believed in her despite her nonexistant sales. As he was with many artists, Boyd was right. This collaboration is lovely and dreamy and pastoral, with Bunyan's honey-smooth voice dripping over the sharp edge of many of Animal Collective's other recordings. I don't know if I'd actually enjoy an album-length collaboration, but an EP is about a perfect length.

Animal Collective - Grass single. Since "Grass" is on Feels, I have only the two B-sides. "Fickle Cycle" is not all that great, and "Must Be Treeman" is actively annoying.

Animal Collective - Peacebone EP. "Peacebone" is also on Strawberry Jam, but this came out first, so I bought the single as wells as the B-sides. B-side, singular, really. The only track that isn't "Peacebone" or a remix thereof is "Safer," which is practically ambient with noise and unusually clear vocal (for AC, at least) front and center. The two remixes are neither necessary or illuminating. In fact, the Black Dice remix is annoying (they attempt some sort of approximation of the sound of the tape being eaten in Neu! 2, but it just doesn't work) and the Pantha Du Prince remix is just plain boring.

Animal Collective - People EP. I like the song "People," even though there is almost nothing to it. This EP has a studio version and a live version. The other songs are decent, too, if not as immediately arresting as anything on Feels or Sung Tongs.

Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam. This is the next full-length album after Feels, and it's a bit of a disappointment. The music is colder, relying on loops and noise over guitars and drums and losing, in the process, the neat mix of organic and artificial that marks Animal Collective's best work. Pushing the vocals to the foreground was not a great move, either. There's a few standout tracks, but overall Strawberry Jam's not one of their top-tier albums. I find that I like it more now than I did when it came out.

Animal Collective - Water Curses EP. I just bought this last night, so this is my first listen. It sounds a little more organic than Strawberry Jam, but it's not up the the heights of Feels. Very, very good, though. I'm interested to see where they're going to go from here.

Catch-Up:
Here's a few albums that slipped through the cracks up to now.

Acetone - If You Only Knew. This was a gift from a friend, so I wasn't sure what to expect. From the cover, I was guessing rootsy alterna-rock from the late 80s. Instead, it's lovely dream-pop pitched somewhere between Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers album and the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album. Without vocals, you might think it to be an outtake from Luna or Yo La Tengo. With vocals, it's its own thing.

Andrew Bird - Fingerlings. Live tracks from around the time of The Swimming Hour. Like that album, they sit somewhere between the retro-swing sound of Bird's earlier work and the forward-looking oddball-indie music.

Andrew Bird - Fingerlings 2. As Fingerlings is to The Swimming Hour, this is to Weather Systems.

Andrew Bird - Fingerlings 3. And, likewise, this to The Mysterious Production of Eggs. By this point, you can hear how Bird has perfected his ability to loop in real time onstage, suggesting a much larger ensemble than he actually has.

Book No. 16: Herman Melville - Bartleby The Scrivener

Is it cheating that I'm including a novella? Fuck it, I make my own rules, man!

Bartleby is a wonderful story, natch, and this is maybe the 30th time I've read it. I just spent too much money on the attractive Art Of The Novella printing. They have a great idea - printing great novellas in pleasant colors adorned only with the declarative font you can see at left. However, I paid almost $10 for mine, and the thing about novellas is that you can typically read them in about an hour, tops. So... worth it? Maybe and maybe not.

Anyway, if you've never read it, the narrator is a bureaucrat who is telling the story from years before of a young scrivener (sort of like an attorney and a copyist) who slowly retreats from his duties and eventually all trappings of life itself with the statement "I would prefer not to." Rather delightful for anyone who has glanced about their life and realized that the game is rigged and that the only way not to lose is not to play. That's a concept easier to imagine, of course, than it is to implement, as refuseniks will often end up with poor Bartleby's fate. The rest of us are on a pay-to-play plan.

Music Library: Animal Collective

Animal Collective - "Forest Gospel," Live February 9, 2001. Don't remember where I found this. It's from a radio show, sounds like, and very similar to all of Hollinndagain.

Animal Collective - Campfire Songs. Somewhat like camp counselors on acid attempting to cover one of Brian Eno's ambient albums. Not a song in the bunch, but there's a lot of strummed guitars and wordless singing.

Animal Collective - Here Comes The Indian. There was a brilliant review of this album in which Christopher Robin and his pals from the Hundred Acre Woods discussed Animal Collective while preparing for a rave. It's like that. This is the first one that sounds like Animal Collective in all its glory: lots of psychedelic loops, beats, noise, and electronics, sing-songy melodies that erupt into, well, animalistic screaming, Beach Boys harmonies, and a willingness to push the envelope wherever the songs leads, all resulting in a perfectly weird Americana experience.

Animal Collective - Live in Bristol 10/21/2003. This is a single track of an Animal Collective performance I ganked from the Internet. There's quite a few snippets of recognizable songs from Sung Tongs in and amongst the general weirdness. It's pretty trippy-delic.

Animal Collective - At the Dublab Summer 2003. Another single track of an Animal Collective performance. It's creepier (and earlier) than the Bristol performance.

Next time: More Animal Collective! Oh my god, is it obvious that I like them?

Book No. 15: Carl Wilson - Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love

Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book is unusual in many senses. First, Wilson is not enamored of Celine Dion's album, which is very much unlike the relationship most of the 33 1/3 authors have for their subjects. Second, Wilson is primarily interested in fan reactions: why do so many people love Celine Dion's music while so many critics hate it? Third, Wilson's methodology is aesthetic. He is trying to explain his own reactions to Dion's book through the signifiers it carries for him.

It's not just unusual but astonishing, too. Wilson rises to the occasional admirably, breaking out why Western listeners have their aesthetic reactions, delving into a brief history of aesthetics, constantly challenging not just himself, but his readers, too. As a work of music criticism, it's more like Harry Frankfurt's work of popular philosophy On Bullshit than anything else. I loved it and recommend it to anyone interested in pop culture, not just the music and lit geeks who usually enjoy 33 1/3 books.

Music Library: Andrew Bird, Andrew Hill, Andy Kim, Andy Partridge, Animal Collective

Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha. The best one yet. Thoroughly weird and American and beautiful.

Andrew Bird - "Self-Torture" eMusic single. An outtake from Armchair Apocrypha. Sounds like it.

Andrew Hill - Point Of Departure. Hill's work recalls no one quite as much as Charles Mingus. This is augmented in that all of Hill's sidemen are artists typically associated with Mingus. Except Hill's work is different from Mingus's in a way that I don't have a vocabulary for. Mingus started with Ellington, but Hill is coming at his compositions from another angle, just as resonant. There's very few musicians who could even stand to compare with Mingus, and Hill holds his own.

Andrew Hill - Dusk. This is a late entry in Hill's catalog, but it sounds like the answer to the question of what Mingus would have done if he'd lived longer.

Andy Kim - "Rainbow Ride" and "Tricia, Tell Your Daddy". Bubblegum from a schock-meister. The former is actually fairly rockin', and the latter is lyrically interesting, at least, as Kim asks Tricia Nixon to remind her father that he's everybody's father for now. Groo-vay.

Andy Partridge - "It's Snowing Angels". I really don't like Partridge or XTC. I don't know why they rub me the wrong way. Lots of sharp music geeks dig them, but I don't find them clever or funny or even particularly tuneful. It's a dead space in my ear. I don't like this song.

Animal Collective - Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished. I love Animal Collective for synthesizing avant-garde compositional works with strange and dark folky songs and an unabashed love of pure pop for fractured people. This is Avey Tare and Panda Bear's first album together and it sounds surprisingly cohesive, considering how weird their journey is to be.

Animal Collective - Danse Manatee. Adding in Deacon and Geologist for the full Animal Collective experience, this album is more offputting than Spirit etc. for its weirder effects and skronkier loops and hooks buried much further than before under blank noise.

Animal Collective - Hollinndagain. Somewhat unfocused early live album. There's some real beauty here, but as many misses as hits.

Next time: More Animal Collective!

Music Library: Amy Rigby, Amy Winehouse, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Andrew Bird

More music library stuff. I think I'll be doing this off & on until 2011.

Amy Rigby - Middlescence. I mentioned her wit and exuberance when I wrote about her first album. Those still stand. This one isn't as good as the first one, but it has some great songs on it, "The Summer of My Wasted Youth," foremost.

Amy Rigby - The Sugar Tree. Same as above. The standout tracks (for me) are the clever "Cynically Yours" and the sweet "Sleeping With The Moon." I used to like the song "Balls" a lot, but the punchline ("Wish I could grow a pair") has diminished with time, alas.

Amy Rigby - "Keep It To Yourself" - 18 Again: An Anthology. My wife & I liked this song when we heard it live. For a while, it was only available as a free download on Rigby's site, which is what this mp3 actually is, I think. She released it with the anthology of her first three albums, which was, I presume, an attempt at growing her audience.

Amy Winehouse - Back To Black. Retro R&B. Some pretty good songs. Is there anything else one can say about Amy Winehouse?

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Worlds Apart. 'Sokay, I guess. Too much bombast, really. Sounds like a lot of other bands, too. Maybe it's not so okay.

Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire - The Swimming Hour. This is the earliest Andrew Bird recording I have, but it's clearly a work with one foot in the past and one in the future. I knew Bird's name from his work with the retro-swing enthusiasts Squirrel Nut Zippers (in fact, I recall seeing them with a wild violinist back in the late 90s, and now I wonder if that man was Bird). Bird was about to start creating some truly startling indie-rock, and this album sounds equal parts retro-jazz and future-indie.

Andrew Bird - Weather Systems. Bird apparently moved to rural Illinois to work on this album, and it sounds like an intense leap forward in creativity from The Swimming Hour. Using loops, whistles, minimalist arrangement, and songwriting that is both unique and well-informed by the past, Weather Systems sounds like the demo for all of Bird's future music.

Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs. Utterly brilliant. Bird fractured those same blues, jazz, and avant-garde sources that make Tom Waits' music so vital, and rebuilt them all into little indie-rock symphonies. Each album Bird makes is another way of pushing the now into the future.

I have one more Bird album, so next time: the future is now!