It’s unfortunate that sometimes a band may get overlooked because they named themselves something that doesn’t sound at all like what they are. The Harvey Girls are one of those bands. Maybe it’s because I live under a rock, but when I looked at “The Harvey Girls” the first thought that came to my head was: oh, this is probably some horrible poppy girl-group bullshit (like, say, The Dum Dum Girls, no offense to dum girls). Then I saw the album title: I’ve Been Watching A Lot Of Horror Movies Lately, which also sounds like something a group of obnoxious woo-girls would name an album. Like, “Ya know, I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies lately, heee!” It just sounds like that, to me, all of it.

So imagine my surprise when I put on the album and instead I found some moody and creative folky jams in the vein of early Akron/Family. In fact, now that I’ve made that comparison, this album sounds a lot like the first Akron/Family album with a little dash of These Were The Earlies. It’s almost like this album comes from a different time—through time, perhaps, from a date somewhere around the time those albums came out—through the eons this album has traveled, the five long years since 2005, and now here it is, in 2010.

And it’s good stuff. I don’t have much else to say besides that it’s good, and it sounds like Akron/Family at their least noisiest. Check it out.

P.S. I am getting into the bad habit of telling bands that email me that I’ll go ahead and post one of their songs, and then I never get around to it. If you’re one of those bands and you’re reading this wondering where your music is: I’m sorry. I can only motivate myself to write about things I feel a connection to and for some reason 85% of the music that is emailed to me I just can’t get fired up about. I’m still trying to listen to your material and eek out some words or inspiration but you just can’t force this kind of thing. Well, you could, but then I’d just be a big fake and whatever I said about your music wouldn’t mean a damn thing and then I’d probably stop sleeping so good at night because I’d be kept up by all the terrifying thoughts that there is someone out there, right now, listening to bad music because I recommended something I didn’t have my heart in. I’m sure you understand, or at least if you hit the bottom of this giant paragraph you may have some sort of idea, or at least you’re just annoyed.

I don’t know what happened to us, E. It didn’t used to be like this. You’d release an album every two years or so and they were great. Your Blinking Lights is one of the finest albums I’m sure I’ve ever heard. I spent the day it came out travelling between record stores trying to find it, until I gave up and I went to Target and they were the only place that had it—evidence against the usefulness of independent record stores, for sure, and that was five years ago. I was twenty and that album held my hand through what was, at the time, the most devastating heart break I had ever experienced.

But now you, you’re breaking my heart. Hombre Lobo was one thing, because at times it sounded like you were revisiting the sounds of Souljacker and I appreciated that, but the rest of the album was uneven, listening like it was an outtake jukebox from all your different eras. It had a few good songs, but overall it just wasn’t an album I cared to listen to. When you announced that you were going to release two more albums in the next year I was floored: you’re increasing your discography by 50% in such a short time, this will be totally rad.

But then I didn’t even write about End Times. It was just too depressing and there was nothing on it that made me feel like I’d ever want to listen to it again after the first time. For someone who always made sadness sound like it was something to be happy about, you released the first album that sounded like you were sad about being sad, and it all seemed so resigned. I couldn’t stomach it.

Initial reviews from fans of Tomorrow Morning suggested that this was a return to form in some way. I wondered briefly if you churned out two shitty outtake albums so you could fulfill your contract to Vagrant so you could then release another Blinking Lights-style masterpiece on your own (you do sing “My record label hates me” on this album). I became a little excited: this really might just be awesome.

But it’s not. In some ways it’s just Hombre Lobo Pt. 2. It starts off so strong, too. “I Am A Hummingbird” is one of the most unique songs you’ve ever made, and it’s almost shocking how beautiful it is. The near-subconscious string flourishes in the background on “What I Have To Offer” take a so-so song and turn it into something lovely and uplifting.

But then there’s songs like “My Baby Loves Me” which seems to borrow from Blinking Lights‘ play book, the same loud and awkward place “Going Fetal” came from. “The Man” could be an Eels parody song, with the lyric “ask the birds singin’ I am the man”. These sorts of things were cute at one time, but now they just seem kind of tired. With the exception of “This Is Where It Gets Good” and “I Am A Hummingbird” I feel like I’ve heard all these songs before.

It doesn’t really stop there either. I can’t hear “After The Earthquake” without waiting for your voice to come in singing “if you see Natalie…” because I swear it’s the same song. “Spectacular Girl” might as well just be the same song as “Sweet Little Thing” even if they’re not that similar, it’s the same damn song.

I’m just hurt, you know, E. I don’t think it’s too much for me to expect from you another album that is on par with Blinking Lights. Tomorrow Morning isn’t disappointing so much because the songs aren’t good—they’re Eels songs, after all, and you are my favorite band—but because it all sounds so rehashed and mashed together. This isn’t an album, and neither were the other two. These are just collections of songs loosely united under a common theme, and it seems like there is only one album of really good songs between all three.

I am disappoint.

Sincerely,
Stuy Parker

There’s this John Cusack movie called High Fidelity, and if you haven’t seen it you should probably just shut down whatever it is you’re doing right now and go watch it. Cusack’s character runs a record store, at at one point he puts on this song and says something to the effect of, “I am now going to sell three copies of The Beta Band’s The Three E.P.s,” and we watch as customers in his store take note of how good this song is.

I wish I could run a record store. The fantasy will be one I’ll never fulfill, unlike the grilled cheese sandwich store which I will undoubtedly own some day, because I can recognize that physical media is pretty much worthless. I don’t hold any nostalgia for the day when I had to carry around a 200 disc pack of CD-Rs and CDs in my car so I could have my pick. I don’t miss having to haul it up into my passenger seat and dangerously flip through it while picking something. Now I can easily scroll through my iPad and then dangerously text while driving and it feels much better. I actually briefly contemplated throwing out one of these 200 disc packs of actual CDs this weekend when I stumbled on it, but the complete discography of Skinny Puppy started whimpering at the thought.

I’ve never been in a record store where the owner or employees seemed to give any sort of a shit. I’ve never run into a John Cusack, walking the aisles, eagerly awaiting for someone—anyone—to ask him what the band playing is called. In fact most of the stores I’ve been in seem to play music that no one could possibly ever want to buy, the kind of obscure pretentious shit no one really listens to except for those people who sit behind record store counters looking at you smugly, which can vary from bizarre ethno world free association jazz to hardcore minimalist math punk. I just made those up but I am sure I’ve heard both of them being played at Lovell’s while I was busy not finding stuff to buy.

Maybe my fantasy is misplaced: maybe people who go to record stores don’t want someone like me telling them what they should try to listen to. Maybe when you ask a store employee for help finding something you don’t actually want them to help you and instead tell you that the band sucks and they won’t stock it.

But if I did run one, it would be awesome. You’d walk in, and “staires! radio” would be playing. You’d perk up your ears: “Hey, this song is good!” and I see that thought flash across your face, so I’m like, “Hey, brother, I saw you perking up your ears, what you’re listening to is the latest album by so and so called this and that and boy howdy it sure is rad, I got a couple copies sitting up here if you want it,” and you smile and nod and walk into the rest of the store.

The store itself doesn’t feel damp at all, unlike most indie record stores. The paint isn’t peeling off the walls. There isn’t even some random guy standing in the aisles who smells bad who is either going through everything or is possibly an employee of some kind taking stock. Instead there are just rows of carefully arranged CDs, complete with poorly handwritten placards separating the individual bands. I’ve put little hearts next to my favorite bands, with the “first timer album” suggested on each one.

There’s a sign next to the register in block lettering you can read from the back of the store: “STUCK? ASK STUY FOR A RECOMMENDATION!” I’ll ask you about the last few albums you’ve listened to and how you liked them, and from there I’ll recommend something. Long time visitors who get to know me learn that they can come in whenever they like with a partial lyric or a hummed melody and I’ll pretty quickly name the song they heard and grab the CD for ‘em. With every purchase you get a burned copy of a random staires! playlist, to further encourage you to listen to more bands.

My record store would be awesome. That’s probably why it’ll never exist.

P.S. The Beta Band are pretty cool, and I love The Three E.P.s, but I don’t really get them. I saw them open for Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl back in 2001. “She wrote me a letter on the back of the road” is one of my favorite lyrics.

I’ve said this before, but the first track on an album is probably the most important track of all. It’s the first thing that the listeners are going to hear of your album (if not your music in general) so it needs to be some sort of mission statement. Terrible albums lead off with the band’s most popular single—an admission that all attempts at sequencing the album decently had resulted in a big mess with a single peak, so we might as well turn it into a straight slide from greatness to mediocrity. Great albums start with songs that make you pop your head up like a prairie dog catching the scent of a black-footed ferret.

The first time I put on J Roddy Walston & The Business’ “Don’t Break The Needle” in my car, I did just that. I actually uttered the words, “Holy shit,” because of how I surprised I was at how strong and awesome this opening track is. I don’t know exactly what “I’ve been pulling thread, doin’ all kinds of evil, I know you hate me baby but don’t break the needle” means, but I feel like I’ve probably said the equivalent to any number of different women in my life. By the time Walston lets loose with his laugh near the end of the song, it’s pretty clear that this album is going to kick ass. That’s a good opening track.

It’s said by a lot of different people across the internet that Walston and his Business put on quite the live show. It’s pretty easy to imagine, since the album’s production and mix sounds so live that I’d be inclined to believe the album was just recorded live, track by track. I’ve described Sara Hernandez from The Angry Orts as being “stuck at 11″ and I have to reuse that here, and say that this album never really turns itself down. Every song is driven to the hilt by Walston’s gravelly wail. If anyone is holding back, I’d be scared to hear what it sounds like when they don’t.

In short, this album is pretty consistently rad all the way through. It succeeds where Vagrant label-mates Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes failed completely and miserably: Walston sounds genuine, like there isn’t really any other music he could be making, like these songs are bursting out of him. (Where as “Edward Sharpe” sounds like every word that comes out of his mouth is the result of some great internal struggle to sound as much like a stereotype as possible in spite of himself, all in an attempt at impressing a girl, I think.) This is, what Walston provides, all I want from music, for someone to sound real. Walston, thankfully, sounds real, and probably fun to drink with if he does that sort of thing.

J Roddy Walston and The Business will be playing at The Troubadour on September 12th here in Los Angeles. Tickets are $12. I’ll see you there—or I won’t because you don’t know who I am or what I look like, which is cool, too.

I know, I know, is this LCD Soundsystem week or what? Two songs… in a row? Am I crazy? It’s just that I’ve been listening to nothing but them for the last three days, so I figure it’s only fair that I stick to what I’m doing. At least I have something to write about.

For the last couple months (since October, I think, so we’re nearing a year now I suppose) I’ve been playing around with making music using various software suites. I’ll insist I am fairly rhythm-less, and I never learned to play an instrument despite being on my third guitar in my life so far. In my youth, if I couldn’t dissect it and learn how to be awesome at it pretty quickly I’d get bored, which is funny because the excuses everyone made for me at school was that I wasn’t being challenged enough. I wonder what that’s about.

These days I try to learn things kind of the same way, without the giving up part. With unicycling and freeline skating it was all about learning what things should feel like and then just drilling that for hours at a time until I got it. Computers and HTML and it’s ilk, it’s all stuff I slowly taught myself by doing it over the years.

So when it comes to things that are more about feeling, more about just instinctively knowing what’s right, like music (and relationships, and life in general), I’m pretty much entirely in the dark. I’ve been looking for the “trick” to making music, that makes music sound good and not like flat monotone bullshit, and as far as I can tell there either isn’t one, or the trick is actually composed of about five hundred other tricks.

Again, in truth I started this knowing absolutely nothing about music creation. I didn’t even really know what keys were or how they apply to music (and I’m still confused: should every instrument start on the root note of the chord you’re in for each measure? does it not matter what notes other instruments play, or should they all be within the key? is that what “in key” means? oh, lord). I still don’t know how The Beatles turned I – IV – V into songs.

Obviously a lot of this would be helped by, say, tackling guitar earnestly and learning a song or two. Or maybe I could just, say, take a class and get it over with, but I’m really, really stubborn. I feel like if I don’t just figure it out on my own I’ll deprive myself of the real “Eureka!” moments when they come around, of which I had one last night when I started improvising vocals over the noodling I had going on in iSequence and suddenly the whole thing started to sound more like a song.

LCD Soundsystem has been especially inspirational. A song like “Tribulations” takes my breath away. I’m sure I’ve listened to it on repeat several times now. I’m generally just floored by LCD Soundsystem’s ability to take a relatively simple sounding beat and make it so subtly exciting that it can carry a whole song into and past the 6 minute mark. If you listen to this instrumental version of “Tribulations” after hearing the original, something becomes pretty obvious…

It’s not really a song without the vocal. It’s got different instruments that come in from time to time to play other instruments (the only signifier of the chorus is that little dingy synth guitar thing, which is interesting since most things you read on the internet say you should change up the beat a bit, throw some cymbals for power and speed in there, open up the hi hats, but Murphy does none of that on this track) but for the most part the song is just one long repetitive beat with a bouncy fuzzy bass line (until the guitar riff breaks in, that is).

But I can make beats in iSequence or Ableton Live that should sound just like this, but they don’t, so what is it? What am I missing? Is it really just the flare? Should I tap my hi hats back a little bit, and throw in ghost notes on every snare and kick drum hit? Is that what makes Murphy’s programmed beats so exciting, or is it because he programs them, plays them live, then reprograms them again? What’s the secret to that bass line? It hits high every third sixteenth if I’m hearing right (and I can’t keep time) and low on the kicks. How is it that something that sounds simple (peak valley peak valley peak valley) be so catchy?

Is it the chords that it’s playing? What are they? B, F#(Gb), D, A, A#(Bb). What the fuck is that? I’m trying to match it up with anything I know about normal chord progressions and that shit, it is not in there. But it sounds good. It has awesome forward movement. It carries the entire song without the vocal, so it has to.

But that’s really the trick to the entire song: the vocal. While “Tribulations” in instrumental form sounds interesting enough, it’s not really a song you’d want to listen to. You can tap your foot to it, and probably dance to it if necessary, but it doesn’t start to actually affect you until Murphy comes in with the melody in his vocal.

So, what’s the secret then? Don’t know yet. Seems to me that you find a chord progression that doesn’t sound like balls. Then you figure out how to build it over a beat without destroying the beat (pretty simple, really, if you can even compose a decent sounding beat). If you’re lucky your chord changes are carried by your bass line, but if it’s not you have to come up with a bass line (which is really hard if you don’t know how to play bass and don’t have any instinctual clue as to how basses should sound). After this you have options: come up with a vocal (scary! but with good chord changes it should come pretty easy because it should just make you want to sing something) or figure out what frequencies you can fill up with other instruments without distracting from the other instruments.

But yeah, that’s it, that’s the trick. So why haven’t I been like “OMFG I just wrote this amazing song!”? Because there is no trick to knowing what sounds good, even years of listening to music hasn’t given me an understanding of the nuances of basses and the proper way to program pianos so they sound natural, as if a human is playing them. In truth, I wonder if it’s easier to just program something, learn to play it, and then rerecord it so it sounds naturally. I have the sneaking suspicion a lot of artists do this.

As I progress in my attempt to dissect the secret to making good music, I’ll do posts like this from time to time. I’ll be stuck on this whole “trying to divine LCD Soundsystem’s secrets” thing for a while I think.

First up, it’s a damn shame the Deluxe Edition of Rated R isn’t as awesome as the ten year anniversary deluxe edition of The Downward Spiral which was remastered beautifully and even mixed into 5.1. This is just the album, mastered a little differently but not sounding any better for it, with a disc of bonus stuff. Nothing special. But, with that out of the way.

Truly great albums change with you over time as you listen to them. Early on when you first listen to it, you think: “Wow! These couple of songs are so rad, totally feel like me right now, but these other songs, I kind of don’t get them but they’re pretty good too I guess.” In the iPod age this means you listen to an album a lot, rate the songs you like, and forget about the others. Luckily Rated R came around pre-iPod era for me, but that doesn’t change this effect much.

Then you age and you start looking at the world differently, however differently, happier, sadder, optimistic, or jaded, and different songs come at you and hit you in the chest, and you think: “Wow! I can’t believe I didn’t used to like these parts of the album, but now they totally feel like me right now!” Well, “Auto Pilot” is one of those songs for me.

Nick Oliveri writing about drug use is not much of a surprise, especially considering pretty much all of Rated R is about drugs, and sex, and sex on drugs, but it’s the emotion of this song that really floors me. It’s like waking up in a car drunk and not knowing where you are and before you realize where you are you realize first that you miss her (or him) and your head lolls and then you’re suddenly back in your life and there’s wind in your hair and you briefly contemplate drinking more but there’s nothing in the car and people are talking to you but you can’t hear them because you just don’t care to and when you get home you lie down on the floor for a bit but you think that’s melodramatic so you crawl into bed with your pants half off and when you wake up in the morning it’s like it never happened but you still make sad eyes at yourself in the mirror but that’s just how it’s been for at least a couple days now.

That’s what this song is like.

Years ago when the BLAH BLAH BLAH started about LCD Soundsystem I turned my nose up in the air. “Dance music, you say?” I cried, while putting in my monocle and stick—one in my eye, one in my ass, never to get mixed up thankfully. “Dance music? Only unsophisticunts listen to dance music! Harrumph!”

So, that is to say, prior to This Is Happening, I never got into LCD Soundsystem. I listened to “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” but all it sounded like to me was a repetitive beat and some guy going “Daft Punk is playing at my house… my house!” in various ways. I didn’t get it, and if I listened past it I probably really didn’t get it. I come to you as someone unfamiliar with LCD Soundsystem, where This Is Happening is officially my first real listen to them.

And I totally dig it.

While I went through a Bowie phase when I was seventeen, I guess my familiarity isn’t very strong because I don’t get the David Bowie comparisons, but then again when someone says “Bowie’s Berlin triptych” I also have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, so I guess I’m just unqualified to comment on that. What I will say, though, is that if you’re listening to this album from the other room a couple things come to mind:

1. What year of the 80′s did this come from?

2. How do the Talking Heads feel about influencing an album that has obviously time traveled?

If anything I have to give this Murphy guy a lot of credit. At work I’m hounded all day with JackFM, so I get to hear every single popular 80′s song at least twice a week, and sometimes I find myself wondering what really separates 80′s music from today. Synthesizers are still alive and well, though they don’t dominate most music like they did back then (except in the case of Yeasayer, the only band who seems to actually want to use synthesized drums, as unfortunately as it is), so it can’t be the synthesizers.

The mix, while not low-fi compared to back then, always has a certain feel to it. You can feel the 80′s in certain songs that don’t even use the main-stays, but even that might not really be the whole story. Then I tried to think of bands I was familiar with who really evoked the 80′s, and one of the few that really does is Yeasayer. So what makes Yeasayer sound like the 80′s?

The vocals. It’s the 80′s vocal. David Byrne, Andy Partridge, Thomas Dolby, Danny Elfman, whoever the hell is in The Human League, they all have this distinct way of singing (in the era, at least), where it sounds like their voices are rubber bands that are bouncing around the inside of the song and they’re just about to snap and take out someone’s eye. Maybe Bowie started it in the 70′s, I don’t know, but I do know this: the trick to sounding like the 80′s is to sing like it. The rest falls in line.

So, LCD Soundsystem is the first band I’ve encountered that 100% brings the sound of the 1980′s forward. The only thing missing is the shitty mix that sounds like each instrument was recorded on cassette tape. Synthesizers, sing-speak, ADHD-Gene Vincent vocals, and dance beats, it’s all here, and it’s pretty much totally awesome.

Also, as a side note, it’s pretty significant that every song but one on this album is nearly six minutes or over six minutes, and the songs never get boring or repetitive. The song-craft on this album is pretty damn impressive if only for that reason alone. I can only dream of one day making music that sounds this awesome.

I’ll be sitting in the middle of the Hollywood Bowl come October 15th seeing Sleigh Bells, Hot Chip, and LCD Soundsystem. I impulse bought the tickets yesterday after falling in love with this album. Big sigh…