Bat for Lashes - Two Suns & Fever Ray

Looking through the compilation section at the record store the other day, I was struck by a realization and a memory simultaneously. The memory came first: I was in ninth grade, riding the band bus to a parade. The era of the ipod and segregated listening had not yet dawned and so the upper classmen brought a boombox, sat in the back and filled the bus with a dictatorship of sound. This time, it was Rage Against the Machine. While I appreciate the band and their content, they've always been a bit too repetitive for my taste. My friend sitting next to me was a fan of Billy Joel and jazz played on trumpet. He turned and said, "You know, when we get old, classic rock radio is going to really suck."
As I picked up decade-spanning compilations, it was easy to see how we've defined our past half century through its popular music. You will likely never see a '70's compilation without Carole King on it. You will never see an '80's compilation without Duran Duran on it. While Rage Against the Machine won't make it onto too many '90's comps, it'd be better for most of them if they had. While Rage may be too hard for some listeners to deal with, the validity of their music eclipses the buzzbin output of most of their well-remembered contemporaries.
Even if the CD industry weren't bleeding to death, it's hard to imagine a '00's compilation. It's a frightening prospect to consider what passed for popular music over the past decade, and unlike the past few decades, that strong connection between society and its literal rhythm is weak, if not broken. Whereas Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, and others were what the 1980's sounded like, what does it sound like today?

These two albums ARE the contemporary sound. They are both dark but tender, cold but welcoming, progressive yet comfortable. They take familiar elements and build on them, creating vast, moody soundscapes that warp their imagery and structure something completely alternatative. Postemodernism is a gooey term that I don't use often, but it applies to these two works.
Two Suns is Bat for Lashes' second album. On her previous work, Natasha Khan's project sounded like an adapted Black Box Recorder; now her vocals have matured to a transendency exhibited by Kate Bush in her best days. The album opens with some absorbing numbers. 'Glass,' and 'Sleep Alone' are a great one-two opener; deep, dark, and shimmering. The synthesized sounds that create the glittery dance of the music provide the aura that Two Suns is dependent on. After the pop-bliss of 'Daniel,' the album slows down into a series of misty numbers that suggest smoke and mirrors. By this point though, the album has suspended your disbelief and the listening experience is pure magic.

The aesthetic experience of the album is mirrored in, what strikes me as a related work, Fever Ray. Check out the cover art and you'll see the similarities begin immediately with the lone figures acheiving a sort of tactile balance. This is the first album under the name, but Karin Dreijer Andersson, honed her music talents on 2006's exquitise album Silent Shout, by The Knife. The synths here delve deeper and explore darker, more subconscious territory than Bat For Lashes. In a way, Two Suns is a listening exercise for Fever Ray. The synth-drenched soundscapes supplement to form a unique cinematic environment. 'If I Had a Heart' plays like a march for Yeats' rough beast, and is about as radio-unfriendly a "single" as I've ever heard. 'When I Grow Up,' is a wonder in contrast. The imagery is lush and verdant, while the sound is glossy and cascading, the effect reminiscent of Blonde Redhead's trembling, yet strong vocal delivery. 'Dry and Dusty' adds further mass to the album and makes it completely inescapable from there on in. Listening to it is like listening to the music from John Carpenter's '80's flicks with their pulsing, suspenseful sound that is weighted with sinister promises.
Fever Ray is unquestionably a lonely, introverted album. Yet while most artists find either weepy, mopey guitar tunes or angry, shouty guitar tunes the best way to express those feelings, Fever Ray do neither. They create their own lonely sound and it is stupefyingly beautiful. Its bold confrontation of inner feelings in crisis and at odds with one another may be the best audio representation of our current cultural climate I've heard since Neon Bible.
While it certainly would never have gotten played on the band bus' boombox, the best, most defining music NEVER did. As our culture encourages isolation and the boombox's massive speakers die off like dinosaurs to give way to the highly individualized earbuds, Bat for Lashes and Fever Ray prompt musical evolution with a nostalgic look over their shoulder. They pay homage to the sound that brought us here, provide impressions of where "here" is, and look ahead with dark determination.

David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames

In an era of visual media saturation, eliciting a laugh-out-loud response is becoming increasingly harder for the print medium. Humorists have to work twice as hard for diminishing results.
While I often find the actual authenticity of David Sedaris' memoir writings questionable, it doesn't particularly matter whether they are true or not because they COULD happen and that is enough. His pieces, while undoubtably exagerated accounts, provide effective, identifiable associations for the reader.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames shows Sedaris' sharpest, wittiest, and most focused writings to date. The book has a coherency which his earlier books lacked. While this is a collection, there is something about the sequencing of the pieces and the overall flow that ties it together remarkably well.
He hits on familiar areas throughout the book; his familiy, his partner Hugh, childhood memories, and smoking. The final chapter, a longer bit entitled 'The Smoking Section,' is his best writing to date. Laid out with dynamics that are little short of verbally symphonic, he chronicles his struggle to quit smoking, laying out the particular pleasures, the crutch of the patch, and the curious void of self-fulfillment felt afterwards. His fight against nicotine addiction is set against the backdrop of his living experiences in Japan. Overlaying the experiences uniquely connects both subjects and gives each of them greater resonance. As he moves through an alien environment, trying to learn the language well enough to tell the difference between bottles of shampoo and baby lotion, he feels alien to himself without a cigarette between his lips. With humorous and practical examples, he dredges the notions of suffering and the desire for familiarity as he purposefully denies vices disguised as comforts.
Rather than go straight for a laugh, Sedaris nimbly dances with his accounts, using referential humor and honest human connection to paint scenes that pan the entire emotional landscape, often within a single ten page poigniant story.
Bonus points for the predictably awesome Chip Kidd cover.

The Soundtrack of Our Lives - Communion

What a pity no one believes that the power of a rock n roll record can change the world anymore. It wasn't too long ago that The Beatles, The Clash, hell, even Nirvana did more than impact the music scene, they broke the genre's self-created boundaries and became cultural mammoths showing what happens when the power of the music is unleashed.
That's not to say that The Soundtrack of our Lives' new album, Communion, is on the same level as London Calling. It is, however, a perfect example of how the new means of marketing and listening to music; digitally, on a track by track basis, rather than for the album's flow and overall message, will not allow an album created as a coherent whole to make such an impact.
Appropriately, this is the sort of ideology that TSOOL lambast against in Communion. Whereas one of the things that bugs me about that last Swedish rock export, Peter, Bjorn, and John, is that it seems almost purposefully in denial of contemporary reality, thumbing its nose at things that can't be laughed at anymore, TSOOL boldly take on these issues from Communion's start to its finish.
Oh, yeah and that end...well, give yourself some time. Communion is a double album that plays for over an hour and a half. Improbably though, there are no clunkers. Not every song reaches the anthemic heights of its brightest spots, but for as long as it is, it maintains its pace like a triumphal march.
Opening, Communion builds slowly up to the throbbing bassline of 'Babel On,' a track that acurately foreshadows the long journey ahead. The pun is apparent if you know the Biblical story. Whereas communication differences may have allowed cultural diversity to thrive, the fact that an omniscient god would prevent a single global tongue is sadistic and purposefully antagonistic. In our shrinking world where communcation breakdowns lead to cultural ideological differences, which lead to more and more global conflicts, a united language would prove undoubtably beneficial. Addressing the issue, lead singer Ebbot Lundberg yawningly sings, "The language that we speak was spread out to complete and communicate as one so turn the towers of Babel on."
A bit more than halfway thru the first disc, the band throws a curveball with a cover of Nick Drake's Fly. While it may not seem a likely fit, TSOOL put a beat behind the weepy folk tune and bring it up to speed with the rest of the album. The song's melancholy is preserved, but only for those listeners who know to look for it as it is covered with cheerful twelve-string guitar and tom tom percussion. The result is a cover that does what its supposed to. It stays respectful to the original but provides a new perspective and toys with fresh insturmentation.
While the first half of Communion keeps its focus on upbeat British invasion style rockers, the second half waxes more acoustic. Focused and precise, the second half showcases some truly beautiful numbers. The last two tracks, Lifeline and The Passover provide a solid capstone, leaving the listener humbled and hopeful. Lifeline is an introspective track that attempts to help the listener locate and establish whatever connection they can in our society of alienation. The Passover is the sound of gray clouds parting to let in golden light.
TSOOL have always been about big sounds, sounds that have always seemed a little derivitive of their British peers. With Communion, their ambition elevates them over all the bands they draw comparisons to; its a career album that shows a band meeting and exceeding their potential.
Communion is an album out of time. The degree of concentrated listening necessary to appreciate its complexity is one that few will ever get. Sad, because TSOOL's substantial messages are sugar coated with some very sweet tunes. Released forty years ago, this album goes side by side with Physical Graffiti, but today will garner a cult following who find themselves personally reflected in its songs. Maybe its better this way.

Peter Bjorn & John - Living Thing

Every artist inevitably lives in the shadows of their former work. It would be nice to think of every artist making a steady evolution; getting better, more complex, and skilled with each new piece of work, but this so rarely happens. That's why we have the phrase "sophomore slump" and that's what Living Thing exemplifies.
Peter Bjorn & John's first album is full of so many majestic high points that it seemed improbable that they'd be able to repeat its brilliance. However, Living Thing's highest points barely approach the lows of Writer's Block.
The ubiquitous whistle that burned itself into the public consciousness from 'Young Folks' is the rare piece of music that makes you feel as though you've heard it before the first time it seeps into your ears. It is the rare track that feels both familiar and new. Even after hearing it at the grocery store, while pumping gas, and backing up network television shows, it is a song that brings undimished pleasure with every spin.
To expect another 'Young Folks' would be foolish, but this...
Comparing the albums, it is easy to see that Writer's Block is the true living thing, while the new LP better suits its predecessor's title.
No one else seems to have noticed that the hook from the first single, 'Nothing to Worry About,' is a repetition of 'Amsterdam' from the last album. It sounded better the first time around and the kids' chorus that 'Nothing...' relies on for its drive is ineffective and confounding. After a disapointing first half, the listener hopes for a pickup, instead we get 'Lay it Down,' an uncharacteristically abrasive track that completely disagrees with the album's flow and rudely halts any forward momentum.
Credit the Swedish trio with at least making an effort to vary their sound. They back off from the sharply honed pop edges that carried Writer's Block and attempt some darker, more syrupy textures. Songs like 'The Feeling' approach breakout moments numerous time but are never allowed the space to grow, which ultimately proves to be the case for the entire album. By the end of Living Thing, it has faded into background noise and that is not what PB&J are about.