My parents and I were at an Indian restaurant several years ago and they had Indian pop music videos playing on some televisions suspended from the ceilings. My father and I got into an argument about whether the videos were intriguing because they were so similar to American pop videos (my position) or because they were so different (my father's position).

There's a documentary on Pitchfork TV about contemporary Icelandic music. It's got the famous folks (Bjork and Mum and Sigur Ros), but it's mostly about non international Icelandic musicians. It's good and its got great music. At the end of the film Bjork is talking about how all national anthems sound the same, they just give different feelings for the folks who are from each country. This is good timing because I wanted to do a post about how all national anthems sound like Western marching music. Nationalism in all of its glory and horror was born in the West and so I guess it makes sense that the artistic emblem of each nation should abandon its unique cultural history and sound like European music. But I was struck by the difference in feeling between the Ukrainian (like most, full of pomp and seriousness) and the Italian (almost jolly; certainly celebratory) anthems. So Bjork is right, but not really.





Perhaps my father was right, it's the little things about the content that make the difference.



Contrast to this (embedding is turned off for famous people)

I'm pretty excited about both of these videos, but for different reasons. "Boy With A Coin" marks a really impressive high water mark for Iron and Wine, who I think have begun to own their sound without getting bogged down by the limitations of their breathy and fragile vocals. This is a notably progressive song to write within that framework and the video is just positive and beautiful.

The second video is a live performance of "Bag of Bones" by Owen. It's a great song; it's a decent video, but I'm still into it. Owen can be cartoonishly depressive at times and, unlike American Football, it can sometimes lack depth, which often appears with calculatingly somber melodies or angst-filled lyrics. But Mike Kinsella is amazingly talented and he often conveys that talent. Thus... video two.

So I don't know if Rich Boy is undeveloped or if he's peaked, but he seems to lack the consistency of most rappers in his echelon. I mean, a lot of Rich Boy songs are boring or uninspired, but every now and then he does something like "Let's Get This Paper" and it's just breathtaking. I can't believe they let "Get To Poppin'" on the same album.

"Buried Alive" is, essentially, the second intro track on Rich Boy's Bigger Than The Mayor mixtape. The mixtape is enjoyable, but unremarkable. "Buried Alive" never commits to a tempo until the low end kicks in. The quick clapping gives way to a slow swing that is eventually filled in with a driving hi-hat. Rich Boy sounds in command the entire time. He starts off keeping pace with the faster tempo, matching syllables with each clap, then backs off and hits the downbeats before loosening up for the rest of the lines, starting his lines slightly behind the instrumentation. It's not the most technical verse you'll ever hear, but it works beautifully.

I've commented on this before, but folk and country-influenced punk rock is a great direction for the music to be taking. The battle here is trying to make punk artistically relevant, something it hasn't been for a long time. To the extent that the genre is treated as an aggressive or nihilistic reaction to conservative social currents, its relevance will always be ephemeral. Currents, much like the reactions to them, dissipate and leave you sitting on your couch, eating Chinese food, and listening to some talking head on VH1 rip through the history of rock and roll in the 80s in about 7 minutes. This will likely mean that bands will have to make music that is more emotionally expressive and emotionally diverse. For a genre that has prided itself on stagnation and a reverence for a punk rock cultural of earlier decades, that may be a stretch. But I think folk and country influenced punk rock is a good sign.

The kind of country you hear house bands rip through at dive-y country bars always sounds like the tales of weary and simple every-men. Even the uptempo songs sung with a clean voice have this hint that all the great things they've been telling you might fall apart at any moment. And, sure enough, the sad and twangy ballad is always a song or two away.

Much like punk, there's an undercurrent of frustration running through the melodies. A sense, in many cases, that the subject of the song is undeserving of the hardships inflicted upon him or her by outside forces. To that extent, the genres mesh well, with the strong and steady melodies of country providing some refuge from the sonic tension of punk .

Nothington's whiskey-drenched basement sing-alongs fit somewhere along the great country-punk spectrum, but I'm not going to take the time to cram them into a specific spot. I think their music speaks for itself. Instead, I'll just direct you here and hope that you find Nothington as refreshing as I have.

I need The Burg to make a second season. So open up iTunes and subscribe the their video podcast sitcom thing. It's great.

My first run-in with Estonia came when I was 12 or 13. We had only recently moved back to Saint Petersburg (FL) and my mother had jump started her passion for dance. She fell in with some famous former-Soviet dancers who were living in the sister city. Elena Martinson, while apparently born in St Petersburg (RU), identifies herself as Estonian. Her husband, Andrei Ustinov, was also born in St Petersburg. They were both principle dancers with the Kirov Ballett. Andrei was one of if not the last artistic defector the US. They are tremendous dancers, but I know them mostly as people and through my mother's many stories about them. At any rate, Elena was the first contact I had with Estonia.

During college I had a dream about going to Talin and then taking a ferry to Finland to do some trekking. Or perhaps I'd go to Talin and then head south to the other Balkin states to do research on folk music (Balkin and then continue south to hit up the Slavic tradition). But that never happened. All of this is to say that while I have no real connection with Estonia, I've heard stories and seen photos and it's been in my imagination a very neat little country of castles and dancing and singing.

So tonight I was excited to see The Singing Revolution (I tried to see it yesterday, but I ran into a friend (Altes) from New College and talked to him for three hours instead). It's the ('till tonight unknown to me) story of how Estonia gained its independence from the Soviet Union days before the Union's dissolution. It's a remarkable story that I won't try and tell in any abreviated form here. The people of Estonia did peacefully (including an incredible peaceful diffusion of an attempted coupe). The film is all smiles really and likely avoids some of the dicier issues surrounding the Russian population in the country. But it's a great story and recommend it.

So why I do feel that I can write about the Estonian revolution in a music blog? Because the film is in part about the role that music played in holding together a country of less than one million together over almost a century of foreign rule. These people lost one quarter of their population to the Nazis and the Soviets and yet their sense of cultural identity remained strong enough to peacefully gain independence from one of the most oppressive regimes in history. It was in part their culture that pulled these people together.

Here you have a nation with one of the largest folk song books in the world. Estonians have gathered every year for almost 150 years. Something like 10% or more of the population comes out to sing traditional songs every year. In 1987 300,000 spontaneously gathered at the singing grounds for days to sing Estonian songs and really kick start the revolution that would eventually lead to independence.

I don't know if it's music that made the Estonian movement possible. Perhaps any kind of tradition would be possible. But outside of dancing (think the rave seen in the Matrix sequel), it's hard to imagine what else could bring folks together. Almost anybody can sing. And the more folks you have doing it the better. Music might be the ultimate participatory artistic and cultural form of expression. It's physical and easy and seemingly everyone in the history of man kind has done it (I spent several hours today at the Carlos Museum, where I saw four thousand-year-old instruments).

I guess I have no great insight into the power of singing. See the film to get a sense of what I'm talking about.

I'm amazed by pretty much everything. Taking a moment to consider almost anything about the world leaves me utterly confused and scared and fascinated. Even that recursive ability to consider my consideration is startling. Consequently, I'm utterly bowled over by my ability to perceive music, and I'm baffled that my perception and experience can change listen to listening and even moment to moment. Whenever you see footage of hippies listening to music, be they Woodstock hippies or Dead Heads or Phish Heads, they always have their eyes closed or close their eyes shortly after the camera focuses or are opening their eyes. It's accompanied by awkward swaying. It tends to look silly from the outside, but they are on to something. I know next to nothing about out cognition of music (or much about any other sensual experience (or experience in general)), so I can't tell you what happens in a person's brain when they close their eyes and listen to music versus when they open their eyes and listen to music. But I am lucky enough to have a brain and to use it to experience things and I can tell you from my own experiments that closing my eyes has a profound effect on how I hear music. Now, I wish I could tell you that I have incredible experience of synesthesia, but I don't. I do, however, get some kind of imagery in my head sometimes when I close my eyes. In particular I remember listening to the Otis Redding version of "Change is Gonna Come" in a Philosophy of Music class and closing my eyes and getting kind of vision of Fantasia-like fireworks when the horns come in. I also know that when I hear Beethoven I follow the harmonies better when I close my eyes but I loose much of my fear of the music and miss melodies. Maybe I use more brain power to deal with the music when my eyes don't have to do any work. There's probably a well documented answer to that, but I'm not sure I need to know. I'm just putting my plug for closing your eyes while listening. Don't do it while driving, but do it when you're in your room. Or better yet, do it in a concert hall. Then you get to feel the music and hear it but not see it. Can't beat feeling music.

The Chromatics’ cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” sounds spacey and sullen, like it was written under a bad hangover and heavy rain. Despite the group’s impressive ability to get lost in the endless expanse of their riffs, they stay pretty true to the original song, including in regards to track length, and they never really dismantle its distinguishing characteristics. When covering a classic song by one of the most important American musicians of all time, that’s probably a really good idea.

Both versions of “I’m On Fire” traffic in tension and longing, but the Chromatics’ rendition sounds once removed. It’s a step slower and roomier, the interplay amongst the instruments creating a much more open musical landscape. Considering the relatively narrow scope of the alterations made, the Chromatics’ version evokes much different emotions. Where Springsteen’s version sounds lustful for the woman he’s writing about, the Chromatic’s version sounds slightly mournful, as if the moment has passed them by. I find that especially artful considering they kept all of the original lyrics and melodies.

I don’t know if the youtube video (Embedding disabled? Are you fucking kidding me?) was created by the band or a fan. It’s not an especially exciting video, but it has that creepy-old-cartoon-played-on-silent-at-a-party-vibe to it, which probably has more to do with the editing than the original footage itself. Either way, it doesn’t impede the expressiveness of the song, it just might not add.

I promise that I'll not be one of those who only thinks female musicians are only good for their voices, but I've been overwhelmed by the voice since I first heard Berio's "Sequenza III" my first year of college. You'll read a great deal about singers and singing and the sound of words and sound of voice and other sounds that come out of or near a human's mouth. And so my first post about a female musician is about a singer-songwriter from Canada named Basia Bulat.

I walked in on Bulat when she was opening for Devotchka last month. I missed her first tune but got to my spot on the floor just as she and her band started the ukulele/hand clap backed "Before I Knew." It's a short little song about the moment that an artist creates for the first time. The harmonies hit me hard. Bulat is a great singer (more on this later) and while no one else in her band is going to blow your mind, the two women (ukulele and viola) and the guy (cellist) work hard on that song and its about as perfect as it can be for a song about someone who didn't know they were incomplete until they sang for the first time. It's about transcendence but it's also about the brevity of transcendence and the inevitable return to the blind. That's what the song sounds like.

The set then followed the album pretty closely. Bulat plays a country-influenced kind of contemporary acoustic music. Her writing is quite nice and she has a great ear. The second song on the album Oh, My Darling, "I Was a Daughter" has been on a loop on my computer for weeks now. I'm a sucker for how certain words and phrases sound (I'll put that in my pocket as a post) and I have a new favorite from that song. "Turned into dusty roads/that we both wandered on;/We prayed for perfect Avalon;" I could (and do) listen to those five seconds over and over.

Bulat's voice on the record isn't as powerful as it is in person. Apparently they recorded everything in a couple days as demos and she lost her voice part way through. But someone thought they were perfect they were so they never re-did any of it. I don't know if I agree, but the performances from those sessions are sometimes fantastic. In person Bulat is a joy to watch it. She can't be more than 5'2'' with blond hair and (when I saw her) a sun dress and no shoes. I can't recall a more jubilant performer. She played damn near every instrument on the stage and did some impressive singing all while leading a five piece band, but not once did she look anything less than ecstatic to be singing. You might think the grin on her face in the video for her first single "In the Night" is contrived, but that's what she looks like the entire time she is singing.



And that's what impresses me most about Bulat. The record is better than most, but you have to see her in person to get the full effect. I see some good live music. That night I saw an excellent show by Devotchka. But while they were perhaps more polished than Bulat and her crew and Nick Nurata has one of the most underrated voices in music these days, there wasn't the same kind of joy in the act of creation. Bulat's performance left me not only wanting more of her energy but left me wanting to create. Somewhere along the line in Western culture we decided that making art is for the artists and our role is to experience their genius. Suddenly crafts were just ugly things for lame people to peruse in the heat. But art need not be good to be important. It's the act of doing that might be just as if not more important. If art is experience, then let's not settle for the experience of others' art, but let's experience our own.

The urge to listen to post-hardcore comes over me in waves and, when I lived in Chicago, it usually coincided with winter. There’s something really raw about the cold and gray and how it slowly chips away at your willingness to confront it until you start planning your nights around it. So I’d spend a lot of time listening to bands like Small Brown Bike and The Plastic Constellations and tracking dirty snow into my office (read: cubicle). Maybe the thick distortion and moody riffs captured the essence of riding the “L” first thing in the morning when it was too cold to feel my face – the rough and textured melodies conveying the sort of frustration I’d experience when even good days were marred by bad weather. Maybe it somehow helped me cope with my affection for a place that was slowly driving me insane. It really doesn’t matter. The closest I got to a post-hardcore kick in Atlanta were a few hours spent on a Big Business binge.

I’m spending my summer working in San Francisco and living in Berkeley, but neither city has shown much appreciation for their seasonal obligations. It’s often cold and windy and the temperature always drops substantially at night. I’m sleeping under a comforter and shaving in a freezing bathroom. The gusts of cool air in the morning launch my tie into my face and my throw my suit jacket back like a drag racer’s airbag. It makes me bring warm clothing when I go out at night. It also makes me listen to the Polar Bear Club.

So I guess I would feel comfortable calling the Polar Bear Club the middle circle in the Thursday/Small Brown Bike Sven diagram I just created. The heavy distortion and violent drums on those heavier grooves remind me of when I first heard Small Brown Bike. They were on every mixtape in my car and seemed a fitting soundtrack for driving my 1989 Buick Century down unplowed streets. But the weather is easier out here and the Polar Bear Club is more accessible, especially with “Election Day.” The rhythm section locks together more often than Small Brown Bike but they never lose themselves in those massive emotional songs that Thursday sprinkles throughout their albums. The harder elements of the song (see: palm-muted lead into the chorus) provide context without being overbearing so when the group gets to the generally up-tempo chorus, it doesn’t seem out of place. Anytime a band avoids some the standard pitfalls of their genre I get pretty excited.

Writing about music is a difficult thing and it requires a good deal of skill to do well or, in my case, a great deal of luck. It’s difficult to write about a song when you first hear it because it can be pretty challenging to articulate what attracts you to a certain sound. By the time you’ve become more familiar with it, you might lose your desire to write about it or fail to convey the excitement you felt not so long ago. Last night, after I saw that Justin had posted, I felt the need to contribute, and fortunately found myself pretty enthused about “Election Day.” Unfortunately, that enthusiasm arrived well past my bedtime and I’m a little tired today. I guess it’ll be an early one tonight.

Josh and I are both too lazy to blog regularly on our own (you can check out my possibly updated blog at bestnamesaretaken.wordpress.com), so we've decided to do some music writing together in this space. We haven't talked about the format, Josh doesn't even know that I'm posting already, but suffice to say there will be music writing.

I had a memorable live music experience on Friday. It all started with a Boylan ginger ale. Boylan makes by far the best bottled ginger ale and I was delighted to find some Thursday night in a local grocery store in Candler Park. Friday, while reading law journal articles about judicial opinion writing I got a craving for a carbonated delight and went to the fridge to indulge. Mind you I had recently returned from doing work at the Highland Bakery where I had their out-of-this-world corn cakes. Anyway, I sucked down the ale and continued my reading on the couch. My awkward position combined with a fifteen minute nap caused the gas from the soda to get lodged squarely in my abdomen. I was uncomfortable. An hour and a half later I had to end my work for the day to go to the gym where I did three rounds of a half-mile run in 90 degree heat, 50 back extensions, and 50 sit-ups. This did not help my cause. I then took the dog for a walk and hit up Soul Vegetarian (the vegan soul place in the neighborhood) for some grub. At this point I knew I had made a huge mistake somewhere along the line. By the time I got the venue to see Shearwater I was experiencing escalating discomfort and pain, and the anti-gas stuff I took was not helping. After the first act I found myself leaning heavily on the elevated small table hovering in the center of The Earl, clinging to it like a life raft. I thought about catching a cab home; all I really wanted to do was lie down and fart all night. But I thought better of it, and being that we were in a smelly, loud club I settled for just farting all night. Mid-way through the second act I stopped feeling like I was going to explode and was just upset that I was so tired and the opening bands were taking so long to play and set up. Don't worry, I'm getting to the music.

The first band was nice. They were called Jeffrey Butzer and they played keyboards and melodicas and toy pianos and stand-up basses. They had a wonderful vocalist and the lead dude was a good performer if not a great pianist. The second band was another local, named Silver Lakes. A straight forward indie rock band that wasn't interesting but was very tight.

Shearwater opened with an acapella version of Nico's "Nibelungen."



A fine opening for a band that is always close to moving from playing in small clubs and attracting audiences unworthy of their virtuosity and ambition to Spinal Tap lows.



Jonathan Meiburg's lyrics and compositions never reach Wagnerian heights, but his voice comes close, and one can't help but get the sense of a closeness to the epic mythology of the Ring Cycle (and the Lord of Rings). If nothing else, he has the pipes to go toe to toe with most singers you're likely to hear and it was almost painful how out of place his singing was in the crap hole that is The Earl (no offense). But it did set up a startling contrast between the devout in the room and the folks who seemed to have wandered in. His epic voice coming across chant-like to the few drunk folks in the back who couldn't help but snicker, mostly due to discomfort more than anything else. It's amazing how a voice on its own can make the room so tense. You vacillate between awe and being embarrassed by such an earnest, virtuosic performance.

After the opening things picked up pace, but always there was Meiburg's voice out in front. The band was very tight. They bowed their glockenspiel and other bells, which I had never heard before; it's a great sound. They ended with a real barn burner, but then were forced to come back for the now standard encore. I really loved the performance, but they ended so well that the encore that we all knew had to come was not just as meaningless as always, it completely wrecked the flow of the set. My last image could have been of Meiburg thrashing a guitar with his hair flying and his voicing reaching some of the greatest heights of the night, but it wasn't to be. Instead I was left to suddenly remember that I was tired and realize that I had stopped passing gas at some point.