A Personal Canon

Every now and then, over the past few years, I would venture to update the "Personal Top 100 Favorite Albums" I put together in 2011, complete with write-ups, following a challenge issued by brothers Isaiah and Josh Hoffman, old friends of mine. 

The task got harder as the number of albums I loved grew. No point ranking them all, for one thing. With the Dylan project there was a point, since I was eager to demonstrate how a true lover of Dylan's work could regard 1979-80 as his peak. With a whole life's collection of treasured records, not so much. What matters is that the music has kept me company, comforted me, or shook me up when that was what I needed, pained and painted and altered the hours... I want to celebrate that these albums found their way to me at all, and to refract a bit of their light. I don't want to waste time wondering how they stack up against each other. Music is (obviously!) not some kind of tournament or competition, never mind what modern media's year-end lists would have us believe.

Anyway, the other month, I figured out the way to present such a list: in tiers! Three of them! 

Within each tier there will be no further ranking, the albums will appear in order of release/recording date.

This list is updated often, as things get shuffled around and new albums are introduced — and especially "as I overreact to new stuff," to quote Nic from Critter Jams. It'll also serve as a "table of contents" for the Assorted Gems series. It would be fun to write an AG piece about each of these.

FIRST TIER
The best albums I know.

McCartney (1970)

Ram (1971)

風街ろまん (1971)

Happy End (1972)
Obscured by Clouds (1972)

A Passion Play (1973)

Approximately Infinite Universe (1973)

Hosono House (1973)
On the Beach (1974)

Homegrown (1975)

Pour Down Like Silver (1975)
Tropical Dandy (1975)

細野晴臣提供楽曲集 LP 1 [1-01 to 1-11] (1971-1977)

Street-Legal (1978)

Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978)

Slow Train Coming (1979)

Solid State Survivor (1979)

Tusk (1979)

Saved (1980)

Naughty Boys (1983)

Watering a Flower (1984)

Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo (1985)

Landing on Water (1986)

Amused to Death (1992)
Oh Me Oh My (2002)
Pyramid & Magnolia Electric Co. (2002)
Blemish (2003)
Rejoicing in the Hands/Niño Rojo (2004)
Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (2007)
We Are Him (2007)
I am Alive and You are Dead (2009)

Already Gone I (2009)
Dead Songs (2010)

Big Blood & The Wicked Hex (2010)
The King of Limbs (2011)

The Glass Trunk (2012)

The Seer (2012)
The Ring of the Rise (2013)
Nothing Important (2014)
Popular Problems (2014)
Storytone (2014)
Universe Thin as Skin (2014)
Unlikely Mothers (2014)

Double Days II (2015)
Ape in Pink Marble (2016)
Peace Trail (2016)

Big Blood & Thunder Crutch (2017)

Finally Free (2018)

Operate Spaceship Earth Properly (2018)
Out of the Blue (2018)

Deep Maine (2019)

Dandelion (2020)

Anomalous Events (2020)

Free Humans (2020)

White Flag (2020)

McCartney III (2020)

Henki (2021)
The Ruby Cord (2022)

Skeletons at the Feast (2023)

SECOND TIER

Seriously excellent albums with hardly anything I don't love about about them; maybe there's a brief weaker stretch somewhere in amongst the glory, or there is an element or two that isn't altogether to my taste, and/or the albums don't have as much personal resonance; what it all means is that I can listen at an awed distance rather than melting into a puddle on the floor.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)

The White Album (1968)

Abbey Road (1969)

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Moondance (1970)

Stage Fright (1970)

Meddle (1971)

Relics (1971)

Wild Life (1971)

Red Rose Speedway (1973)

I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974)

Another Green World (1975)

Minstrel in the Gallery (1975)

Bon Voyage Co (1976)

Desire (1975)

Animals (1977)

Before and After Science (1977)

細野晴臣提供楽曲集 LP 2 [1-12 to 1-22] (1977-1979)

Back to the Egg (1979)

Stormwatch (1979)

A (1980)
Common One (1980)
Double Fantasy (1980)

Hawks & Doves (1980)

Law and Order (1981)

Pipes of Peace (1983)

Milk and Honey (1984)

Across a Crowded Room (1985)

Кино (Чёрный альбом) (1991)

Mirror Ball (1995)

What Comes After the Blues (2003)

Cripple Crow (2005)

The Angels of Light Sing "Other People" (2005)

Stadium Arcadium (2006)

Memory Almost Full (2007)

Sew Your Wild Days Tour I (2007)

Sew Your Wild Days Tour II (2007)

Space Gallery 1.27.07 Sahara Club 1.28.07 (2007)

Big Blood & The Bleedin' Hearts (2008)

The Red River (2008)

The Waiting Grave (2009)

Troubadour (2009)

What Will We Be (2009)

Come On Board (2010)

The Magic Bridge (2011)

2 (2012)
Carolina Moonrise (2012)
Country, God or the Girl (personalized edit) (2012)

Old Ideas (2012)

Old Time Primitives (2012)

English Electric - Full Power (2013)

Networking in Purgatory (2013)

Push the Sky Away (2013)

Lost on the River (2014)

To Be Kind (2014)

Holiday for Strings (2016)

America, Location 12 (2017)

Both Ways (2017)

In the Passing Light of Day (2017)

Taking the Long Way Home (2017)

Old Chestnut (2018)

Sonr Ravns (2018)

Ghosteen (2019)

Jesus is King (2019)

Visions of the Higher Dream (2020)

Forever Love's Fool (2020)

A Splendour of Heart (2020)
Better Woman (2020)

Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? (2020)

Panther (2020)

ROG II (2020)

Kissing the Foe (2021)

Barn (2021)

Still Life (2022)

The Zealot Gene (2022)

THIRD TIER

Of which I could, were the album to come up in conversation, and despite either a number of reservations or a relative (as compared to the first two tiers) absence of personal resonance, say with sincerity, "Oh, [X] ? Yeah, that's one seriously wonderful album."

John Wesley Harding (1967)

A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)

Astral Weeks (1968)

Let It Be [...Naked] (1969)

All Things Must Pass (1970)

Aqualung (1971)

High Winds White Sky (1971)

Virgo's Fool (1971)

Saint Dominic's Preview (1972)

Thick as a Brick (1972)

Hokey Pokey (1974)

Planet Waves (1974)

Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) (1974)

War Child (1974)

Horo (1975)

Caramel Mama (1975)

Have Moicy! (1975)

Zuma (1975)

Long Journey (1976)

No Reason to Cry (1976)

Warren Zevon (1976)

Paraiso (1978)

Cochin Moon (1978)

Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1978)

Mirage (1982)

Hand of Kindness (1983)

Infidels (1983)

The Final Cut (1983)

The Trouble with Normal (1983)

Blue Navigator (1984)

Various Positions (1984)

A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)
Radio K.A.O.S. (1987)

Under the Red Sky (1990)

White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991)

Love of Life (1992)

No Knowledge of Music Required (1994)

The Division Bell (1994)

New Mother (1999)

Silver & Gold (1999)

Flag of the Shiners (2002)

Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home (2003)

Greendale (2003)

Silver Lake (2003)

Hither & Thither (2005)

Jokes & Trials (2005)

Mezmerize/Hypnotize (2005)

Prairie Wind (2005)
Snow Borne Sorrow (2005)

Antonia's 11 (2006)

Strange Maine 11.04.06 (2006)

The Orchard (2006)

Future Suture (2007)

The Grove (2007)

Already Gone II (2009)

At the Cut (2009)

Josephine (2009)

Over the Stones, Under the Stars (2009)
Radio Valkyrie 1905 - 1917 (2011)
Road Salt (2011)

Whatever Happened to Gerald Bostock? (2012)

Hey Hey It's... (2013)

Homo Erraticus (2014)

The Hermit (2014)

Double Days I (2015)

Dzieciom (2015)

The Monsanto Years (2015)

A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)

The Glowing Man (2016)

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie (2017)

The Daughters Union (2017)

Tomorrow's Modern Boxes (2017)

Egypt Station (2018)

2020 (2019)

Ma (2019)

#IDEOLOGIAMOZILA (2021)

Fight for Your Dinner II (2021)

Forest Lovesongs (2022)

And okay, I know I said there will be no further ranking within tiers, but I want to contradict myself and list what (at most recent reckoning, in early 2024) I decided are my current ten "favorite albums of all time" (ha!)... Al Joshua's Out of the Blue was on here for ages, but Skeletons at the Feast is so different and so great in its own right that now I'm convinced like Al's best album is still up ahead somewhere. It makes Out of the Blue feel less like a fulfillment and more like a promise.

1. Saved (1980)

2. Unlikely Mothers (2014)

3. Happy End (1972)

4. Nothing Important (2014)

5. Slow Train Coming (1979)

6. Universe Thin as Skin (2014)

7. We Are Him (2008)

8. The Ruby Cord (2022)

9. A Passion Play (1973)

10. Rejoicing in the Hands/Niño Rojo (2004)

Assorted Gems: Skeletons at the Feast

 

AL JOSHUA - SKELETONS AT THE FEAST  (2023)

(Disc 1)

A1 Fight

A2 Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle

A3 Cleveland Street

A4 Moving Along

B1 Sensitive Young Men

B2 I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down

B3 Let My Body Sing

(Disc 2)

C1 Laurel and Hardy

C2 Strange Red Afternoon

C3 Will

C4 Whisper Your Name

D1 Muffin Man

D2 Bullfighter and the Bull Go By

D3 Like a Tree

This isn’t likely to be the final time I write about Al Joshua’s Skeletons at the Feast, so I'll let myself be informal and spontaneous, just to get some thoughts down.

 

The lead single came out nine months ago, the album itself five. So I’ve been living with the songs for a while. I can hum each part as it comes and get most of the words right when I sing along. The music continues playing in my head when the album itself is over or paused. I’ve probably rehearsed/sung/shouted Laurel and Hardy, in my head or aloud, more times than I’ve heard the actual recording. Same with the first verse or two of Strange Red Afternoon, which I sing all the time to our young daughter. Ditto for the refrains of Like a Tree and Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle. Al’s cadence as he sings “I’ll be moving along” has resounded in my head thousands of times. 

But the album still confounds and surprises me. I’ve been wanting to interview Al about it, but I can’t think of any good questions: I think I’m still too deep in the music, still in its grip, still delighting in the process of living and wondering my way into it. Not that I’ve stopped delighting or learning about or being surprised by Al’s previous three full-lengths (all of which would appear in a list of my, say, top 25 records of all time), but when I think of those three, the sense I have of them, the emotions associated with them, the colors they give off, the lyrical markers and mainstays—all of that is quite clear by now; solid, intact. When I think of Skeletons at the Feast, there’s a multitude of conflicting senses and feelings and colors. It makes the album cover more apt than I originally realized. Back when Al shared it, I thought, “Hmmm, a collage. Alright.” But it is right, it’s exactly right. And I’m still in the labyrinth with the minotaur.

Regardless, here are some early (first-year) guesses or glimpses. 

There is some serious stylistic sprawl on a song-to-song level—from bold and brave (Fight, Laurel and Hardy) to unprecedently happy (Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle) and tender (Whisper Your Name), to brightly epic (I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, Strange Red Afternoon, Like a Tree), to darkly epic (Let My Body Sing, Will), to capital-r Romantic (Moving Along), to liltingly ironic (Cleveland Street), to Mephistophelian (Sensitive Young Men), to cozy (Muffin Man), to jagged and weary (Bullfighter and the Bull Go By)—and yet the album coheres, for ... well, for at least two reasons. 

The first being that Al is backed by the same small band on each cut. Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle and Let My Body Sing are two very different songs, but they sure have the same keyboard/[harpsichord?] player. The loud bits near the end of Sensitive Young Men and Will are kin, despite the songs themselves being so unlike. The spare drum sound feels comfortable, at once folkish and punkish, no matter what the song. And of course there are always Al’s own rhythm guitar and voice holding the center. 

But the other reason(s) remain a mystery. I am fairly certain there is something else that binds the songs together. Six singles were released in advance (I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, Let My Body Sing, Fight, Cleveland Street, Strange Red Afternoon, and Sensitive Young Men, in that order) and I was taken aback, every time, at how new and different the latest offering was. “A bag of cats,” Al called it—but demurred that somehow they had found a way not to murder each other. The double album feels cohesive, despite the different directions the skeletons go dancing away in. That was what seemed strangest to me back in mid-February, when the full album came out: that, in the context of the whole, the disparate parts fit. 

There is an underlying (often overt) theme that many songs share, which helps with the unity; but not all songs partake of it (not Sensitive Young Men, not I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, not Whisper Your Name). So though the thematic links should be part of this elusive other reason, they remain only part. The secret heart is just that, secret.

Side B makes the most epic statement, which means that Disc 1 closes with grandeur. Disc 2 comes roaring in with Laurel and Hardy, much as Disc 1 roared in with Fight; but much as Side A sidestepped the fire lit by Fight and went off exploring quieter streets, so too the whole rest of Disc 2 moves quietly around the (mostly) daylit city. Based on what Al had written about the new songs on the album’s GoFundMe page (see below), I expected every song to sound like Fight or Laurel and Hardy; or maybe, in the more peaceful outskirts, like Strange Red Afternoon or Muffin Man. I thought Skipping Rope, from Anomalous Events, would be the new album’s nearest kin. But only Fight and Laurel and Hardy sound like electrified, full-band co-conspirators of Skipping Rope; and the album as a whole sounds like nothing Al has done before (even when songs originated, as my guess goes, in the writing sessions for Out of the Blue: Moving Along, Will, maybe Bullfighter and the Bull Go By—a new band and new context ease the transplanting). It makes for a strange and absorbing structure, akin to—again—a labyrinth.

And it is precisely this labyrinthine nature of the record that makes me wonder how well I’ve come to understand it at all. I like thinking that maybe I’ve only begun.

-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=-

Given the vagaries of web pages and link rot, it occurred to me that I should append a copy of the words Al wrote on behalf of Skeletons at the Feast back when the album was in its funding stage, before the words are gone forever:

Greetings friends and strangers.

Dark times are upon us again, I know. Sorrow and exhaustion surround us. The bad men are in the ascendant and seem to have us, and the sun sets on ruins of one kind or another. But it is, de profundis, from the depths, that we sing. For me this means to create. And to keep on creating until my time runs out. If I stop to dally or rest, I am wasting time and wasting the best part of myself. 

It is true that alcohol slowed me down, but I am two years out of the bottle, and I have no plans to crawl back inside. Illness stopped me in my tracks, but I have jumped out of my sick bed. Delusion and depression too have pecked at my liver, but I shall grow another and creating is how I will do it. William Blake sang, “How can a bird that is born for joy, sit in a cage and sing?” Words and tunes are upon me. Good lord, song is upon me! The dancing plague of 1518 is upon me! Fetch me down my old guitar. Roll me to that broken piano – let me hit the keys bent hell for leather. 

I’ve got 18 or so new songs and I need to get into the studio with my ragtag army and record a new ragtag album for these ragtag times. “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” I have always tried to be bold with my work and now I am asking for aid. Seek and ye shall find. Ask and ye shall be given. Squeaky wheel catchee monkey. Even Indiana Jones had to take a leap of faith to get across the invisible bridge to see that old knight. 

So, is there a knot at the end of the rope? Do we have a snowball’s chance in hell? Is there a giant snake hiding in the river? Will it rain after the drought? For me there is only one way to find out. It is time, as Whitman wrote, to unscrew the locks from the doors and then the doors themselves from the jambs. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but things are quite serious sirs and madams. I am Lassie and there is trouble at the old mill. Please buy lemonade at my lemonade stand. Get in this little red toy wagon and let me pull you up and down the street - it may not seem much, but it will get you there. 

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

On Devendra Banhart

Few musicians are as near to my heart as Devendra Banhart. There may be a larger group that I would consider equals of his in artistry—a group that itself would be equal to the “top tier” group of my favorite songwriters and musicians of all time, some thirty or forty figures—but when Devendra sings into my headphones, it feels like spending time with a beloved friend. 

I could name musicians who may be further along the “unguarded” scale, like Yoko Ono and Ragnar Zolberg, but with Yoko and Ragnar it’s possible to feel, sometimes, like an intruder; they have released their songs out into the wide world, so we’re welcome to them, of course, but it does occasionally feel like (gleefully...) eavesdropping in on private matters. 

With Devendra, I feel specifically invited, and embraced as soon as I arrive; it feels like he really wants me to be there; it feels like he cares about me, like he’s looking out for me, like he means me well. Every (proper, which is to say, careful and attentive) listen is an intimate experience. It’s like Marc Bolan said in Spaceball Ricochet, in a parallel context: “Book after book I get hooked / Every time the writer talks to me like a friend.”

Devendra put out a new single last month, Twin, from September’s forthcoming Flying Wig. I’ve listened to it upward of thirty times, with growing awe. It has made me want to do a deep dive into Devendra’s back catalogue, which I do anyway once or twice a year, and it has made me want to think more about that wondrous body of work. And one of the most fun ways to think about music is to write about it.

So: here’s a personal and unabashedly besotted guide to Devendra Banhart, in the form of a ranking of his eight full-length solo albums, each of which would appear in a personal Top 100.

Ah, but first, the unranked:

The Charles C. Leary (2001) - the pseudo-debut, parts of which Michael Gira reshaped into Devendra’s Young God Records debut, Oh Me Oh My. I’ve begun poking around among the non-OMOM songs and, so far, am duly amazed.

Vetiver (2004) - by Devendra’s close friend Andy Cabic. There are two Devendra co-writes and heavy Devendra presence on guitar and vocals throughout. Just getting into this one. Oh Papa is great.

Surfing (2008) - a collaboration with Gregory Rogove. It sidestepped critical (and listener?) attention with its intentionally silly and lighthearted lyrics (or at least titles, which is what all the songs began with). Early impressions suggest that this is really excellent, a sonic companion to Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon—but I haven’t given it the kind of sustained attention it would need for me to proclaim its greatness and know what I was talking about.

Refuge (2021) - a collaboration with Noah Georgeson. Beautiful ambient material that I haven’t listened to enough.

And the ranked:

8. Mala (2013) - A modest return to a more hushed approach to his art; and the opening act of Devendra’s second decade as a recording artist, which has been very different from the first. He’s become far less prolific, for one thing. 2013-2022 saw only three vocal albums, where 2002-2009 saw six, three of which were full-scale double LPs. I wish Devendra were still putting out a new album every year, but I caught on too late for that (summer 2016). And one record every three years isn’t bad either, considering the quality of what comes. Anyway! This record is charmingly diverse, within the limits of an esoteric bedroom pop experience. I don’t go in much for electronic dance pop, a direction towards which this album makes occasional steps, but Devendra always keeps it interesting, even for a skeptic; and when he hangs about in the folk/psych corners instead, the results are typically wondrous. A Gain is one of what I think are only two songs recorded post-2004 (the other being Now All Gone on Ma) that seem animated by a spirit identical to the one that led Devendra to such strange heights between ‘01 and ‘04. 

Try: Daniel and Never Seen Such Good Things

7. Ma (2019) - Perhaps yet to rise? Ever since it came out, I’ve meant to put it into heavy rotation—the kind where I listen to almost no other albums, just the one, over and over again—but four years have passed and I haven’t yet. If I do, I know that I might uncover treasures that would bring Ma up into a higher echelon; or I might find that, yeah, it is bottom-half Devendra (there are string arrangements, after all). In any case, Is This Nice and Memorial are among his most gentle and tender songs ever, which for this songwriter, is really saying something. The whole album is fairly rustic, which I love. And, like its predecessor (and successor?), it’s all of one color, which with Devendra isn’t a given. The Lost Coast suggests a direction that could lead to an altogether new and unique corner of his world. Kantori Ongaku, Ami, Carolina, Love Song, and Taking a Page are Devendra at his easeful best. I bet he could spend the rest of his life putting out one album full of such gems every three years: comfortable, deep, provocative things: provocative in the sense that they pull thoughts, reflections, and memories from me that I’m surprised and delighted to discover were (or were still) inside me. 

Try: Now All Gone and Ami

6. Cripple Crow (2005) - has a rough “uh oh, I’m on my own” energy that occasionally means the light shining down upon the material colors it less splendidly than it deserves. Get deep enough into a full listen, though, and you’ll forget the production isn’t ideal. Shed of Gira’s watchful eye (their friendship is beautifully celebrated on I Love That Man—and, in the same year, on the Angels of Light song The Kid is Already Breaking), Devendra allows goofy and rocked-out material to share tracklist space with the haunted, beautiful, strange, earthy, and tender songs that the Young God albums would have led a listener to believe was just Devendra’s thing. There’s still a lot of these latter, especially on the fantastic vinyl-only Side D, for which I’ve made myself a (sometimes-lo fi, by necessity)digital equivalent (onto which I’ve also slipped irresistible outtake Shame); but now they’re caressed into life by a group of young players, and offset by these amazing ensemble rock pieces. Devendra’s whole songwriting spirit is in the process of morphing. It’s a cocoon album. Fascinating and fun. 

Try: Hey Mama Wolf and Long Haired Child

5. What Will We Be (2009) - The first Devendra album I heard, after stumbling on a review that I think called it a slightly psychedelic take on Jack Johnson. One listen was all it took. How could I not love——the groove on Can’t Help But Smiling (mixed by none other than Daniel Lanois) ! The multiple hard shifts in Angelika! The groove and sweetness of Baby! The ravishing beauty of the two Songs for B! The heavy riff in Rats (mixed by none other than Daniel Lanois) ! The extreme idiosyncrasy of everything post-Rats! And the fact that the album ends with a reggae song! The charms are abundant and they have not faded. Amazing production too, for the first time since 2004. It’s Devendra’s warmest and most joyous album. The track Baby once came on in a literary bookstore in the center of Zhengzhou, a city in central China, and it sounded as classic and beautiful as a Beatles or Grateful Dead song. I think any other song on the tracklist would have left the same impression. The two outtakes (Welcome to the Island, Pray for the Other Person’s Happiness) are as vital as the album tracks. 

Try: First Song for B and Meet Me at Lookout Point

4. Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (2007) - It took me the majority of my seven-year love affair with Devendra’s music to accept the genre-hopping middle stretch of the album for what it is. I would lament that he elected to plop so many curious, ragged, and playful stylistic experiments in the center of what is otherwise a mystical, melancholic, and chillingly lovely swath of sea-mist. But, hey, it’s a double album. And the songs are weird but they’re awesome. And though Saved is a rather outrageous plunge into gospel, the lyrics are in line with the forlorn stuff on either side. And the music behind the bizarre wordplay and narrative shenanigans of Shabob Shalom is no big shift from Seaside. All these little revelations piled up and now I’m a Smokey convert. Top five Devendra—as you see. But good as the middle is, the true bliss is frontloaded and backloaded. It’s a proggy and foggy sound, a slow and rambling sound, a walk alone along the seashore. Still muddy production-wise, like Cripple Crow was, but this time the production highlights the charm and ingenuity of the songs and the ensemble playing rather than obscuring them; or maybe it just feels necessary and natural this time around, like sand on seashells. The songs at the start and the end of the album are pierced by the sadness of profound love lost: a sadness so heavy that Devendra had to run from it for a while, into the escapades in the middle: a sadness vulnerable and defeated enough to shake, or altogether break, an attentive listener’s heart. Also noteworthy for including the eight-minute prog epic Seahorse, which could have rerouted the direction of Devendra’s art altogether, if he’d so wanted.

Try: Cristobal and I Remember

3. Oh Me Oh My (2002) - Gonna default to early champion and label head Michael Gira in a moment, but I want to note first that if I could sing like Devendra does on this album, and get the same recording sound/production (the balance of guitar and voice, the conjoined clarity and warm hiss), I would sing and record every album of my own songs exactly this way. A grail album for me, sound-wise. Anyway, here’s Archangel Michael, from the relevant Young God Records page: “To say Devendra is unique is an absurd understatement. When I first heard his voice I could not believe it. His occasionally warbling falsetto is alternately bizarre, soulful, comical, gentle, and often a little frightening (listen to 'Nice People' and see if it doesn’t set the hairs on the back of your neck on end). His advanced (though often somewhat elliptical (!)) finger-picking guitar style, coupled with his wildly surreal lyrics (truly exceptional in many cases) have convinced me personally that he’s a potential major talent, and I would never use this latter phrase lightly. The 21 songs (some of which clock in at about 30 seconds) on this CD each contain their own special (psycho?) drama and immediately memorable melody - no mean feat when your instrumentation is limited to acoustic guitar and voice with only the occasional hand clap or whistle thrown in as 'orchestration'. In a popular music environment inundated with computer/electronic generated sound and sanitized ProTools mixes it’s a tremendous relief to hear something so ridiculously compelling that’s also so low tech, utterly personal, and hand made .The songs were recorded on assorted borrowed and usually broken 4 track cassette recorders by Devendra himself, in various haphazard locations around the globe. These recordings were made solely for himself, and were not intended as 'demos' in order to get the proverbial 'record deal', and they’re better for it – devoid of any self consciousness or artifice, just Devendra’s skewed, idiosyncratic, magically twisted world and imagination. My first impulse on hearing these songs might have been to take him into a studio and 'produce' a record for him, but the more I thought about it the less sense it made. There’s an abundance of hiss on these recordings, and the tape heads are often out of alignment - which adds an additional unnerving warble to many of the songs - but to me, it just makes the effect of the music even more special and intimate. I hear all kinds of references and comparisons that might be relevant in describing Devendra – from Marc Bolan’s pre-T Rex recordings, to Daniel Johnston, to Nick Drake (in my opinion some of the songs have a similar inner purity and pathos), to Karen Dalton (one of Devendra’s idols), to Syd Barrett, to, well, Tiny Tim (!)(Ok, Tiny Tim high on gasoline fumes! ). In the end, these comparisons don’t matter, because, as I say, Devendra is completely unique, and I’m really just trying to get you to LISTEN TO THE MUSIC and decide for yourself. So here’s hoping you’ll do just that. I’m confident many of you will be pleased with what you discover. As Devendra says: '…You certainly are nice people…The horse licks your skin, begin!'” Also essential: contemporaneous EP The Black Babies. 

Try: The Charles C. Leary and Surgery I Stole

2. Ape in Pink Marble (2016) - The first new Devendra album after I became a fan. I really, really wanted to like it as much as I liked the Young God stuff—or even What Will We Be—I didn’t. But I adored a few of the songs, and was intrigued by others, and kept trying. For years and years. I kept coming back to it, skeptically, carefully—and very, very slowly, the songs got under my skin. Eventually I realized how marvelous the vibe of the whole album is. Even later, I realized that Fancy Man and Fig in Leather are not stylistic twirls out of the album’s vibe, like the (then still dreaded) middle section of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but a crucial and welcome part of it. The softness of the record is easily mistaken for sameyness. The spareness and restraint—for a lack of ideas. At this point, I can’t fathom how I ever heard this as anything but a grouping of some of the most beautiful and patient songs (the silences between the notes in Linda, good lord!) ever written and recorded. Intimate, kind, fearless, curious, full of longing, full of humor, full of wonder. And it has koto.

Try: Middle Names and Saturday Night

1. Rejoicing in the Hands/Niño Rojo (2004) - Someday I should try to write a proper account of what this album means to me. I listened to it almost nonstop (alongside the two Fire on Fire records, and a little bit of Big Blood, now my favorite band of all time) the summer that followed the late spring in which the woman who is now my wife and I began dating. We spent that summer of 2016 apart; she was in China, in industrial metropolis Zhengzhou, while I was in the mountains of Colorado, with no Internet access, only a landline phone. I would drive to a town forty-five minutes away where there was an Internet cafe so my wife-to-be and I could exchange messages, she staying up ‘til odd hours of the Chinese night to accommodate the opening hours of the cafe. My mother went hiking most days, and I would drive down forest roads to drop her off and pick her up at the trailheads, this album (a double LP on Young God, and exactly that in my mind too: a 32-song double album, not two separate single albums) on loop. “Mystical” is the word for its appeal. But it’s also just bursting with phenomenal songs: a songwriter coming into his kingdom: or, possessed by a spirit about to leave him for what may amount to forever, a loss that the formerly possessed has learned to make magnificent work within: anyway, it’s a miracle. Word has it that the sessions weren’t much fun for the young Devendra; future producer and collaborator Noah Georgeson said, “The image I have is of him in a sweaty shack in a swamp being forced to play take after take, getting yelled at in German until he got it right ... [with the performances] motivated by fear and anger.” But the German-spouting archangel knew what he was doing. And the arrangements Gira oversaw for Devendra’s thirty-two masterpieces are all-time marvels of sensitivity and care. This double album is the apotheosis of one human hearing endless and unimaginable beauty in the music, heart, and voice of another, and doing his utmost to allow that beauty to glow, resplendent. Easily (and perhaps always to be) in my top ten favorite albums ever, by anyone. 

Try: Fall and Insect Eyes

Al Joshua from way long ago...

"Francis Bacon said he wanted his paintings to assault the viewer’s nervous system, and so return them back to life and consciousness more violently. I’m just trying to do that for myself. I’m looking for images and sounds that fray my nerves. Disturb, confuse and provoke myself is exactly what I want to do. Because it wakes me up and brings me back to life. And if it does this for me, then it will for a few other people too. Out of twenty people, nineteen might not like us, but for one person it will ring out like the right note being played in the right room and suddenly resonating."

(from an early 2009 interview preserved online. Orphans & Vandals were playing live but the album wasn't even out yet ... speaking of albums that at this point are out: remember, Skeletons at the Feast)

Assorted Gems: What Comes After the Blues

 

MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO - WHAT COMES AFTER THE BLUES  

(rec. 2003/rel. 2005)

I think in LP sides. Basically all the time. On occasion it may not be practical (it isn’t really fair, is it, to feel miffed at Neil Young + Promise of the Real’s generally excellent The Visitor because it’s a three-sided album instead of a straight-up proper double) but at this point there’s no turning back. It’s just such an elegant form. 15-22 minutes to a side. A pause in the middle. Two openers, two closers. Two chances for an artist to grab hold of a listener (or, two challenges: fail either and the album fails). Two distinct structural, spiritual, emotional arcs adding up to a whole. The grace of it! The possibilities!

I don’t know who first had the idea of using an LP side break to draw a formal or stylistic as well as a structural dividing line (while holding on to the ideal of a single, cohesive album that’s great when heard straight through). It doesn’t matter, because being the first to do something doesn’t guarantee you’ll do it well. But I’m aware of a few great examples across time, like Neil Young’s Hawks & Doves, with its quiet, beautiful, haunted, acoustic Side A made up of songs off Homegrown (Little Wing), Homegrown outtakes (The Old Homestead), and more recent experiments in folksy psychedelia (Lost in Space, Captain Kennedy), while Ben Keith helms a rocking hoedown of deceptively simplistic, pseudo-patriotic, hilariously inventive (“up there on the old Dew Line...”) punk/country songs on Side B. Neil’s On the Beach, too, though most of its songs stem from a single set of Rusty Kershaw-produced sessions, keeps signs of life close to the front, allowing the band to stretch into soft, starry-eyed languor on the first cut of Side B, and then eschewing the band altogether for the two slow, lonesome, sad, and/yet hopeful closers. Brian Eno’s Before and After Science follows a similar pattern, with the bouncy pop songs (such as they are) collected on Side A, except for the most mournful, which opens Side B, its leftover cheer like a boat disappearing into the sunset, so that, in the concluding four tracks/seventeen minutes, there’s nothing left to hear but the monotonous, endlessly various motions of the tide. Micah Blue Smaldone’s magnificent album The Ring of the Rise has a Side A which is mostly light—though you can feel the darkness clawing at it—and a Side B that’s mostly dark, if tinged with the partial light of Harbingers and the brighter light of Iris.

I don’t know why albums aren’t structured this way more often. Jason Molina didn’t either, which is presumably why he made (well, the Magnolia/Pyramid double album, for one thing, but also) What Comes After the Blues. If you’ve never heard it—Magnolia Electric Co’s first studio offering, following the barnstormer live record Trials & Errors—stop here. And don’t come back until you’ve listened in full...

...awesome, right? Even if the songs and performances haven’t grabbed you yet, you’ll admit that when an album opens with the defiant, richly colored rock and roll of The Dark Don’t Hide It and long-time friend/collaborator Jennie Benford’s song The Night Shift Lullaby, and then barrels on into Leave the City, Hard to Love a Man, and (bridging the side break) Give Something Else Away Every Day, you really don’t expect the band to just vanish. But while there are contributions from bandmates on guitar, dobro, and fiddle on the acoustic Northstar Blues, Hammer Down turns out to be Jason solo, and I Can Not Have Seen the Light just Jason and Jennie. The band never returns. A little past halfway through Molina’s first proper band album, we’re left with, for all intents and purposes, only Molina and his wounds.

As for the material, there are eight out of eight perfect songs, plus steel guitar by Mike Brenner, who may have been (in more ways than one) Jason Molina’s Ben Keith—plus, Mark Rice’s drum fills—plus, Albini on the boards—plus, Mikey Kapinus’s trumpet part on Leave the City—plus... I could go on, or you could go listen to the record again and start (or continue) finding out for yourself.

I love that the bandleader & songwriter does himself one better after what was spiritually and sonically, if not officially, the first Magnolia Electric Co record, where The Old Black Hen and Peoria Lunch Box Blues (two Jason-penned, guest-sung songs) opened Side B. What Comes After the Blues makes room for a five-minute song Jason didn’t even write. The Side A closer, moreover—Hard to Love a Man—was on its way to the songwriter’s scrap heap when Jennie Benford, who loved the song and had worked hard on the harmonies and a fingerpicked guitar part, intervened. The idea of opening the album with the aggressive sound of an electric guitar strumming an Am chord full force was also not Jason’s. And Hammer Down, the album’s sole 100% solo cut, was written in the early morning of one of the very days the band spent powering through full-band takes with Albini at Electrical Audio. So though structurally the album implodes into loneliness, at heart it’s a group effort. The lyrics that the album ends with may be conflicted and torn, but Jennie’s voice is right next to Jason’s, keeping him company, mixed just as high.

Lyrically/thematically, it might be said of this album in particular, and Jason Molina’s writing in general (at least the post-Songs: Ohia catalogue, which is what I’ve been getting to know), that the time spent exploring the darkness, only to find what appears to be inescapable doom (whether personal or, as in the opener, universal)—this tendency is not what it may sometimes seem to be—a tribute, or a toast, to despair—but, rather, the act of spitting in despair’s face.

When Jason sings in death’s persona, “See, I had a job to do / But people like you are doing it for me / To one another,” the violence in his voice is at once an accusation and a challenge to himself and the listener: all right then, if that’s the case, and clearly it is, then let’s stop. 

In the famed opening lines of Leave the City (and by the way, Jason’s writing is one of the best examples I can currently think of, of what it is exactly that songs, as an art form, have over poetry or prose fiction; read the best Molina off the page and you have license to shrug, but hear the same words set to the chords and melodies Jason chose, played by the band he put together, and sung with that inimitable phrasing, with emotion drawn from the noblest parts of his spirit——and feel your own spirit falter), the sadness in the first line is tempered by the gentle, broken-down humor of that afterthought in the second.

And then there are my favorite lines in what is currently my favorite song on the record—Give Something Else Away Every Day, weary as the desert moon—here’s how they go: “It was easy making myself the same / It was easy making myself less / But to get better? / That’s the hardest thing.” Again, you have to hear Jason sing it, and you have to hear the band back him. But when you do, what you’ll have taken in is not an admission of weakness, not someone confronting an impossible task and taking a daunted step back; you’ll have found a beacon that burns strong enough and bright enough to guide someone out of the dark once and for all.

[P.S. Recommended further listening: the charming, insightful, and articulate Brent Walburn hosting a roundtable discussion with several players on the album, about the album. Worthwhile for, among much else, a fantastic Albini anecdote and a member of Magnolia Electric Co shitting all over my favorite song.]

(Back to: A Personal Canon) 

The baffled explorer's springtime report

In the past twelve months, I’ve had the good fortune of finding my way to not one, not two, not even three or four, but five brilliant songwriters. In a great year I make two such discoveries, tops.

In the case of Pain of Salvation’s Daniel Gildenlöw, I had an overdue awakening to the excellence of an artist I’d long treated with skepticism. I’ve detailed my road into Daniel’s arms elsewhere, but I want to note that watching the long and beautiful documentary series I Set Myself on Fire, which covers the making of Road Salt and some of the touring done on its behalf, helped. In it, Daniel is vulnerable, honest, funny, charismatic. The devotion to band and craft that he displays helped me learn to respect the albums I don’t love (the early stretch, up to and mostly including 2004’s “BE”), but sheer awe overcomes me once that dedication collides with music I can’t really imagine sounding better than it does, or being better-written than it is (2007’s Scarsick on).

Then there's Ragnar Zolberg, who co-wrote the music on Pain of Salvation’s In the Passing Light of Day. Before his stint in Daniel’s band, Ragnar had a power-pop group called Sign (with an excellent so-far-final album, Hermd, in 2013) and a darker, quieter, more ruminative solo career. He continued to put out albums while he served as Daniel’s second/lead guitarist in Pain of Salvation, and so he has gone on doing—modestly, without fanfare—since leaving. As my journey through his discography has revealed, it’s all gold, from 2008’s The Circle (Darker Side) right through to last year’s Forest Lovesongs and Hjartastjaki.

Ragnar writes and sings with a fearlessness and directness that won my heart at once, and I really mean at once. Of Artistry, the first solo song of his I tried, had me captivated, in disbelief, before my first listen to it was over. His songs have made me cry God knows how many times. If it was from Neil Young that I learned how powerful an “unvarnished heart on sleeve” approach to lyricism and delivery can be, Ragnar revealed how vast and deep that kingdom really is. 

I was shown more of the kingdom when, a few months later, a list of music recommendations by Colleen Kinsella of Big Blood included the Yoko Ono albums Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space. Big Blood’s 2017 album The Daughters Union is dedicated to Yoko, and on 2020’s Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream?, 11-year-old Quinnisa, the band’s occasional third member and perennial firebrand, named Yoko Ono alongside Joan of Arc as someone who “changed the century.” Colleen’s 2022 list got me investigating the individual albums, whereby I learned that Fly and Approximately Infinite Universe are double albums. It’s usually when I discover that some intriguing artist I’ve been investigating has made a double album that I commit to giving them, and it, a proper try. So with Yoko. By the end of Side A of Approximately Infinite Universe, my mind was in splinters. By the end of Side B I was completely won over.

That was autumn. Come winter, I fell in turn to Richard Dawson, having stumbled on the cover art to The Ruby Cord in the week of its release and gazed at it awhile in that "Oh, right on!" kind of way. Reading up, I learned it was a double album. Alright then. I also realized that I had previously read intriguing reviews of Dawson releases (Peasant, Henki), and played a track or two each time, but things hadn’t clicked. Time to try again, because reviews of The Ruby Cord (mixed reviews, no less) made it sound phenomenal. And it was. I started with The Fool. Loved it. Went on listening in order. Loved the gentle Museum and especially its poignant, level-toned catalogue of the photographs on display. I was floored by the next song up, The Tip of an Arrow, with its gorgeous Joe Hisaishi-esque verses and unabashedly heavy metal (via folk) refrains. And the album closed with a song that made me think of Big Big Train. I think the sequence of my thoughts about the Big Big Train/Horse and Rider connection would have gone something like this: "How could that even...? What?! Too good!!!"

So then of course it was right back to Track 1, the 41-minute, LP-length opener, Disc 1 of a double album in the form of a single song: The Hermit. One of the best songs ever, as it turns out: a story that starts with a dream, awakes into the quotidian and not exactly lonely present, gazes backwards in a long and riveting, mostly a capella flashback, and concludes with a holy vision of the bloody center of life, suffering, and death.

Research showed that Richard Dawson has a band (Hen Ogledd) with, ahem, a double album (Free Humans). The album opens with the wild and evocative masterpiece Farewell (those lyrics, good lord! I mean, the thermal baths? and the sadness! and the bassline!). What exit did I have? And Crimson Star? "We were naked! We were naked!" But while those were both primarily Richard compositions, the contributions of his bandmates proved that, evidently, they were mad geniuses as well. Thus on, also, to Bulbils...

And now, with a mere month to go before my awakening to the splendor of Gildenlöw and Zolberg turns a year old, the doors of a fifth hidden palace have opened to receive me, and here I am, already a diehard fan of Magnolia Electric Co. How did I not find, and fall for, Jason Molina earlier?! Greatness always seems blindingly obvious after the fact. How, I wonder afterwards, could there have been a time when I was into Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but not yet into Brian Eno? How could I have spent so long adoring the Frusciante-helmed Red Hot Chili Peppers albums without delving into his solo discography? And how is it that, given my already multi-year interest in the generation of songwriters born in the 1970s, I found my way to the likes of Chadwick Stokes, Ned Collette, and James Jackson Toth, even (through the Vic Chesnutt/Undertow Orchestra connection—though I also, unwittingly, saw him drumming for Monsters of Folk at their Beacon Theatre concert in 2009) brushing up against Molina collaborator Will Johnson, but skipped ignorantly past the lighthouse that is Molina himself?

But all to its rightful season, of course. If you gathered every pearl on your first plunge, where would you find the time to live with your discoveries, to learn from them, to be nurtured and hallowed and remade by them? It would be like trying to enjoy the gentle, patient rolling of a mountain stream when you’re standing under a waterfall.

Skeletons at the Feast 2/17/23

On this February day, a new Al Joshua record has come. It is called Skeletons at the Feast and it's 75 minutes long, which makes it proper double-LP length: a full four-sided affair, beautifully sequenced. Buy it on Bandcamp and get the FLACs, or stream it if you must, but listen. Be lifted, be muddied, be purified, be puzzled. In any case, listen. Listen to it in full, listen to it often, listen to it carefully, then listen to it again. Let your memories, your thoughts, your sleeping, your dreaming, your waking, your walking melt into Al's melodies and words, into the shimmer and cacophony of the band. Just listen. Let it take root in you as it has, and as it yet will, in me. 

"Finally awake. This time really, truly, completely awake."