Tarkio - “Helena Won’t Get Stoned” (mp3)

Continuing baby picture week (not that I was planning to do this as such, but I’ll see what I can dig up): Decemberists singer Colin Meloy’s previous band. Tarkio will get the full archival treatment from KRS next month; the EP Sea Songs For Landlocked Sailors has some proto-Decemberist charm (though not as much as you’d think from the title), but Tarkio’s first record, which will take up basically all of disc 1 in the two-disc package, is honestly kind of dull. This song’s an exception, and as a bonus, I can’t imagine Meloy singing it now. At the very least, a Decemberists version of “Helena” would have to be set in 50s Beat culture or something.

Conor Oberst - “Lava Monster” (mp3)
Conor Oberst - “Space Invaders” (mp3)

Been busy with a big project, but here’s something interesting– two songs from Conor Oberst’s second album, Here’s To Special Treatment, which was released on Sing, Eunuchs! early in 1995. Oberst was 14. It’s a little eerie to hear that the basic mechanisms of his singing have been the same since before his voice changed, but the real fascination here is his subject matter; “Lava Monster” mostly deals with his Oberst’s promise of protection, but it does sound like the lava monster is a literal threat, not a metaphor, while “Space Invaders” is about the emotional strain of repelling an alien invasion, the end.

If the historical aspect doesn’t interest you, you probably don’t want to listen to these. They are not “good”.

More inexplicably smug Canadian pop. Why is this happening? “Morally Deficient Business” couldn’t be as bad as it sounds, could it? It is. The title track rants about advertising. The song after it concerns selling out your dreams for a career. (One shouldn’t.) Had “Dean” been about the current DNC chair it could have had some humor, intentional or not, but instead it’s a character study of a pretentious guy– he has a ponytail!

It crossed my mind that “Dean”, for example, could be ironic; maybe they wrote it in the voice of a meathead, and identify themselves with the flamboyant Dean. But it’s such an inane perspective that attributing it to a straw man doesn’t make you substantially less dumb than holding it yourself.

I had way more patience for this than it must sound like, because a false alarm this morning about a new Salteens album (the one from two years ago apparently has a US release coming, which is good news anyway) made it seem worth some irritation to find a new cheery Canadian song with piano and horns. And Aim Right… does contain one, called “Abbey”. I listened to it a few times in a row trying to catch the lyrics and noticed that, in any case, the melody didn’t get old. Those of you who buy things through iTunes know what to do.

(iTunes also has both Salteens albums, including the wonderful, albeit atypical, “Emptyhead”, a piece of fake New Order released quite a while before everyone else’s fake New Order. You can try some Salteens songs for free at their label; I don’t entirely agree with the selections, but on the other hand you do get to visit a website called ‘Boompa’.)

I don’t know if Stars have improved as songwriters or if they just don’t radiate as much self-satisfaction as they did last time, but I like this record a dozen times better than Heart. That said, can any Canadian hipster make it through a whole album without a smug song about how much George Bush sucks? That ought to be a very hard sentiment to make unsympathetic, but, as with Emily Haines of Metric, not so. (Torquil Campbell said in an interview that “He Lied About Death” was inspired by Bush, but added, “I specifically didn’t mention his name. It can be about Osama Bin Laden or anyone.” He must have forgotten writing the line “I hope your drunken daughters are gay”.)

Lady Sov only recently turned 18, meaning the first time I heard someone say “vertically challenged, ha ha ha” may predate her being born. Does this excuse the lousy title?

I had to get past that, and the hooting (she always says “S-O-V” with that rising teenage girl intonation I used to hear constantly on school buses), and beats mixed a little higher than their quality demands. But then, yeah, she’s an incredible MC. “Random”, with its novelty-song string of quotes from other hip-hop songs, doesn’t come close to showing it.

Or maybe it just had so much more hooting that I didn’t pay attention.

A friend says this will come out in the US next year, which is nice, since it is now the time of year when I stop looking for things to put on my year-end list and start looking for excuses to leave things off. So I can postpone a second listen to this in good conscience, although, given how much I liked my first one, it may be hard.

I also like how sound loops and field recordings no longer seem strange in the background of what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward album by a songwriter with an endearing, slightly adenoidal voice.

Hey, I wonder if Christine Fellows’ appeal would overlap with that of Erin McKeown.

Well, well!

This is a recent side project of Barry Andrews– the leader of Shriekback for most of its history, and therefore also the guy I complained a couple days ago had gone all mooshy. Except here, in 2003, he combines his own recent ambient noodlings with the snarl and creepiness he inherited from Carl Marsh when Marsh left Shriekback in 1985. Impressively, it’s weighted toward the former but doesn’t bore me the way Shriekback often has during the past decade of nebulous semi-existence.

Anyway, going back to the “world music” jab I made, it’s true that Andrews sounds silly when his attraction to odd musical instruments and non-specific mysticism makes him come off as The Great White Explorer. But you know, he’s basically got it right. It’s just that, as evidenced on brilliant tracks like “Muarg Muarg”, he needs to accept that he’s actually Mr. Kurtz.

A partial list of instruments (I left out “bass”, “drums”, “lead vocals”, etc.) that players on the record are credited with:

big rubbery vocals, pervo & distorto vox, vwizz JP8, nembo gong, attack-clavinet, jawbone treatment, unforeseen Kurzweil fast strings, tiny splash cymbal, army of hateful quicas, Insectocutor guitar, DX7 logdrum, JP8 organ surrogate, YOB VOX, Zen bass, low voice, “fairlight: sararr 1, newt 1″, sampled 808 maraca and cobol explosions, bottleneck guitar, glossy guitar, enlightened backing vox, 51 eels, heroic cguitars, shlang guitar, beastly tunes, 23 bells, 66 eels, luminous guitars, event guitars, bell-tree, rogue whoopee cushion 570, skipping rimshots, milkbottle-in-f, big yellow kalimba, bland JP8 chord-organ, piano gank, sea-mart marimba, insect cymbals, good-looking guitar, glorious human singing voices, genuine vibes, snakelike cabasa, cobol distant explosion, star-trek vocals, saurian bass, Kurzweil mongas, intra-uterine bass drum, G-piano gank deployment, numinous bass-ganks, audacious JP8, Little Hammond Tunes, return of the great brush dance, Motown tambourine, guira, terrifying quica of hell (sampled), black-light-trap-ams-clapperboard, sexually-correct-picking guitar

1. There’s a new Shriekback album!

2. Oh, it’s goth-adult contemporary-world music.

3. Well, that must be very nice for them.

4. I’ll just go listen to Jam Science and pretend this was a hoax.

Going through piles of CDs to make my year-end list… the first time around I did not fully absorb how much better this gets as it goes on. For all the times I’ve noticed massive frontloading on CDs that only had a few good tracks to survive on, I apparently have the same listening patterns as all the other inattentive slobs who frontloading panders to.

I recently watched New Order Story on DVD, a huge reminder of how perverse the band are. It ought to show up in their music more, like the clubby voice repeating “I want your love / I need your love” throughout “Guilt Is A Useless Emotion”.