This Bear Will Hunt

Being on the Outer Banks in November or December presents a hermetic world, a sphere where memory and deep solitude are encapsulated, the spray from a grey and windblown sea acting as flakes for this microcosmic snowglobe, the cold, breaking water the Outside World beyond the thin ribbon of sand. The hand that shakes the world every so often is that thick, humid, cold southwest wind, a once-warm Gulf Stream breeze chilled by the Pamlico Sound, the salt content reduced but still piquant in the nose. There is a grit in the breeze, perhaps fine sand or crystallized salt, or just the needling of remembering pin-pricking the cheeks as the wind sweeps over and down the dunes, disappearing into the foam and gun-metal-grey clouds, the horizon at some hours an indistinct ash color. There is a loneliness, but a comfortable loneliness. There is a blustery world afoot, but softened by the safe distance from the water and a sturdy coat. Only the face is vulnerable, but the head can always be turned in the other direction to avoid direct confrontation with the elements. Peering into the junction of sky and water sets the mind into a well-controlled nuclear reaction, one thought engendering another begetting another developing another until the end-product of remembering, re-imagining, and re-romanticizing a subject arises, with the rest of the world of thought safely contained by the skull, the most important control rod of the human race.

Or, this is what happened about the eighth time I listened to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest all the way through, which came around 3 in the morning several days ago. This is a review long overdue, perhaps; my knowledge of this band is limited aside from The Yellow House, which was an offering I could have taken or left as it became something that played into the Brooklyn-cum-Montreal world of prep-school indie. Veckatimest may very well be the best album I have heard this year, musically speaking, and stands with Beck’s Sea Change and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret as one of the best “break-up albums” of the past decade. I could not bear to remove my headphones, and I did not shuttle between a few songs as I am prone to do when a new album enters my life and have heard it once through, trying to find the highlights. All twelve pieces on the album stand well together, creating a strong architectural shape – as albums ought to do but frequently do not – in terms of musical material and lyrical content and emotional curve, and while some songs are favored, I have difficulty not dropping the needle on side A and not letting the needle trace its way to the paper; I have difficulty not flipping the album and letting the needle groove again; I have difficulty not repeating this ad infinitum.

I am hard pressed to find a pop group (let’s ditch the “indie” misnomer for a minute) that has zero difficulty in integrating a fresh, “challenging” (for the uninitiated), and consistent harmonic language with timbres and textures that at once evoke and hegemonize all the band’s influences, from The Beach Boys down to The Walkmen. I do not think I can name another pop group that has no problem (and maybe implacable tolerance for) completely nixing the three-chord tonic-dominant scheme in favor of modal harmonies that move more toward Messiaen than Miles. I cannot think of another rock drummer in a band formed after 2000 that has his musicality under more control than Christopher Bear, who dares perform on the set like it is an actual collection of instruments and not a time-keeping device. In terms of form, even though verse-chorus is still popular and in use by Grizzly Bear (time-tested, ear-approved, perhaps), so much through-composed music permeates the album, and the softening of the delineation between verse and chorus, or verse and verse, or reprise, or subject, or sub-subject, or parenthetical phrase is incredibly welcome. Harmonically, the group is right at home with chords in inversion, nebulous tonal positioning, and something that escapes the world of good pop music at large: convincing voice leading and contrary motion. Who knew that the simplest of musical formulas could be employed so well? Much of this is helped by the incisive yet above-reproach gentle voice of Ed Droste (and occasionally his mirror-voice in Daniel Rossen), a mild breeze coming in off the sound that ramps up, withdraws, and occasionally exhibits an edge that, like the fine grit on the southwest wind, causes a head to turn, only to take more benign masochism.

“Southern Point” starts as a sea breeze turning directions, high tide coming a minute into the track, with a peculiarly piquant harmonic world: a vacillation in the verse between minor tonic and flat submediant dominant (that’s i-VI7 for the theory nerds; or if you’re counting, a Ger+6), and constant minor-major mode mixture doused with the “pretty” Major-7th chords in the chorus (is it a chorus, or an extension of the verse?) creates the world of late Brahms if he listened to a lot of Floyd and early Crimson. The tempestuous world between meter and its hypometric counter help propel the piece into the wayward, distant modulations, the drums acting as a marker between horizon and sky, somewhere between Samba and Jack DeJohnette.

Perhaps the most direct, non-confrontational pop song on the album is “Two Weeks,” which has had plenty of indie-station airplay and was even thrown into an iTunes promotion (which, no doubt, helped the album debut at the #8 spot on Billboard). This song, while beautifully constructed – again, Bear is in command of the entire ensemble with his subtle, well-orchestrated percussion – belies the rest of the album. While the preponderance of vocal harmonies in thirds and fourths and usage of the Lydian mode can serve as exemplars, the clarity of the form and the conventionality of the harmonic language (to an extent) may serve as a bad example to the lay audience. Nonetheless, Droste’s lyrics provide the necessary smokiness, ghostliness, and coldness to counter some of the sweetness in the convention. The text of the song, of lingering and forgetting (perhaps – Droste has remarked that the content’s interpretation can be as ambiguous as the words themselves), of sludging through some sort of relationship going nowhere, of asking the questions to which no answers will ever be satisfactory, lends a sadness, a meek anger, to the dulcet gloss:

Think of all the ways
Momentary phase
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Every time you try
A quarter, half, a mile,
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Would you always?
Maybe sometimes?
Make it easy?
Take your time…

The brilliance here is the subtext: the desperation and totality of regret. Droste’s unseen protagonist, facing the cold wind, maybe even spitting into it with the demure of a true Southern Genteel-man, can only take so much of an apparent silence, of an apparent need – and a promise not met, even halfway.

“All We Ask” starts out with a riff that could be placed on The Walkmen’s Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone without question, with a tape-saturated Starburst, but this evaporates as no distortion comes into play, and the lightly chromatic vocal lines accompanied by dominant-substitutes or dominant-add-6th and a repressed, skulking, constant, neurotic percussion part. “Leave us alone,” calls the voice; “lead us all home.” Take us out of our heads. Take away the sea. Take away the sand. Or give it all back. The journey satisfies no one: “I can’t get out / what I’m into / with you,” despite the calls harmonically and vocally to simply leave. Walk out of the cold.

“Fine for now” is the bitter pill of irony on the album. “Done askin’ for your permission / Please understand / We’re all faltering / How’d I help with that? / If it’s all or nothing / Then Let me Go / We’re all faltering / Why’d I help with that?” Rossen gives his slightly-more-crooner-ish voice to the lead character of this mini-drama, stating “There is Time / So much Time,” but for everything to go ever more downhill. The washy nature of the soundworld here: the breakers soaking everyone. No one is unscathed. Even Rossen, as his voice occasionally struggles to overcome the envelopes pushed forward by rolled cymbals and reverb-drenched Telecasters. It’s impolite, of course, to kill the protagonist, but this is what happens: the dominant never appears; tonic-center pedal points linger; 7th scale degrees get thrown around like sea gulls in a gale; fake steel drums pinprick the eardrums, a fleck of warmth in an otherwise cold tide pool; the vocalist writes himself out of the story, unaware.

“Cheerleader” is cheekier, but no less insidious in its handling of a relationship soured: Droste’s delivery is imagined as a series of dialogues with his Other and asides with an audience that doesn’t hear him (or, perhaps still his Other). The bridge is out ahead; we’ll plunge to our watery deaths, but I’ve got to keep driving, because there doesn’t seem to be a good stopping place. This isn’t Chappaquiddick. This is love. That’s the difference. “I should have made it matter.” The problematic relationship the audience has with the text, though, is the statement of making it “matter.” The narrator may be taking on the long-past regrets of the Other while belching “it does not matter” when he can, a calm vine of sour grapes trampled by ponies with their eyes on the next pasture. The lushness of the harmonic language here – perhaps the most added tones and busiest of chordal textures on the album – helps to create the conflict and give the narrator (and the intended audience) a sensation of agoraphobic claustrophobia. Helpless and halting wherever, no matter how close or far to the situation.

Rather than continue the blow-by-blow, I assure you the next several pieces are necessary listening; the subject matter doesn’t vary too much, and the same rich blend of production – warm, close vocals, intimate settings for the drums and backup vocals, with plenty of spatial differentiation and depth differentiation (in short, exceedingly well-produced) – accompanies the beautiful melancholy-without-hatred of the lyrics. I want to focus on three more songs: “Dory,” “Hold Still,” and “I Live With You” – simply because of what happens musically. (“While You Wait for the Others” needs no introduction and comes close to being “Two Weeks” redux)

“Dory” begins over a pedal point on D which bursts into a weird mix of Cole Porter and the Cocteau Twins. The favoring of arpeggiated chords in lieu of solid chords – that is, Peter Buck and not David Crosby (yet another reason I can’t get behind “freak-folk” as a label) – works especially well here (as it does throughout the album) and contributes the open, desolate space “Dory” sets up with the extended metaphor of fish swimming, diving, and dying in the freezing depths due to whatever poor choices they made. But the chorus. Oh, the chorus. D major, Bb major, F major, Ab major. After a world of ct7 chords, chromatic neighbors, and others: the final fade out – the progression over a… D pedal. As it should. Perfect circle – or a spiral, if you go the Tonnetz route and favor the ultimate construction of the harmonic language in tritones and m3s. Which is more probable, given the nebulous character of the chorus’s Bb Major. The production layering and pedal sustain, in tandem with spectral desires of the D major triad, seems to create a world somewhere between B Major and Bb Major in that second chord. This is no mere Procrustean analysis, but a thorough examination of the rhetoric: spiraling out of control of these metaphoric sea-dwelling critters, descending into their grave; the metaphor dives into the music, ending the piece with the circular motion, the mild disorientation after staring into the abyss of the horizon for too long: the shock when the horizon stares back and becomes upside down.

“Hold Still” is – and I cannot put this in better, more mellifluous, or more direct terms – simply a beautiful, effective, moody, and spare piece. The guitar line 1’20” – a Lydian mode with some unresolved dissonances that moves against a I-IV motion – is simply staggering in its effect of facilitating that plaintive desperation that comes with wanting to dive into the wreck of a cold sea but knowing all the ramifications and stripping to skivvies and catching a hypothermia-induced cold a few hours later. “I’ll take our chance / Without compromise / There isn’t anything left to try.” Washing away the sins of memory, baptism as protection against future destruction. Indiscretion only exists on paper. Regret only exists in time; memory only truly belongs to one person: he or she who wants to remember, though nothing can be gained from it. “Here we go again … The story goes on file / As if we never were there at all.”

But go listen to “While You Wait for the Others” anyway. Repeatedly. I have to mention at least the circular self-destruction of sour grapes trampled in a vineyard of “I did nothing to deserve this but fuck you I will lash back and goddammit I missed and shot myself in the foot.” And, here it has been mentioned.

“I Live With You” is gut-turning. One thing Grizzly Bear does masterfully is working the emotional fader. Certainly, well-orchestrated songs, adventurous harmonic language, and exceptional musicality help with this. Still, the achievement here is in the exquisite beauty of the ambiguity:

“You brought us this far / We’ll do what we can / Return / Don’t put me on / Return / Don’t make me beg / Return / And they’ll try / They’ll try /To keep us apart”

Such circular pleading, such unrestrained yearning with the confidence that the Once is the Now, crooned and/or belted out over irregular phrase-length structures and an echoic, if not mocking, youth choir backup texture makes anything that has come out of Montreal in the past ten years look like the dung of a hermit crab. Inconspicuous and straining for meaning. “I Live With You” is the anxiety of isolation. Not being able to leave Corolla once the ferry stops or 12 gets flooded over. The song marries together the malevolence of love with the grace of separation; the hatred of sharing with the earnestness of selfishness.

The album has convinced me, if nothing else, that this world is grossly unfair, filled with victims at every turn, filled with villains before every victim, filled with perpetrators who become the mugged. The wind knocks us all down. We get slapped with a wave yet we dive in for more at the worst possible time. We dream of silent space, a gust to refresh us, and what we get is a white-hot, self-contained apparatus of self-destruction that only we can control. Just this side of neurotic breaks do we stop ourselves and keep ourselves in our own universes, our miniverses, our macrocosms. Just this side of memory and forgetting, of love and desperate hatred, is where I found this album, where I fell in love with this album, where I began to hate myself for not loving this album more. And then I realized: while I wait for the others to make it all worthwhile, I can simply take off my jacket, get chilled to the bone, and cower under the leeward side of a dune until the weather turns.

Which might be in April or May. Until then, the speakers pump the world of brine and grey tides and a narrow love of isolation into me, and I’ll gladly take the abuse. Over and over again. “[I] could hope for some substance as long as [I’d] like / or just wait out the evening.”

The Sea and Cake: Car Alarm

Whatever rust left in my ears by Everybody, The Sea and Cake’s last attempt at an album, is knocked away with the first drum jolt John McEntire sends through the speakers, a thunderbolt thrown by the resurgent Zeus of bands hailing from inside the Loop. Car Alarm does not take over from where Everybody leaves off; instead, we might as well go back in time, before the turn of the century, even, to the last time The Sea and Cake demonstrated – and celebrated – an edginess in their music. The Fawn or the eponymous debut album, and to a lesser extent, the more rock-inclined, yet smoothed-over Nassau: ten to fifteen years have passed since TSaC have opened an album with an abrupt energy, since the last time the band was not merely recording an album. The fine, yet effective, distortion and redacted, dirty drum production get us back to TSaC’s roots of confronting the listener, but doing so gently – bringing her onstage and connecting with the listener, forcing the listener to listen, not to hear.

Where Everybody failed is where Car Alarm seems to want to succeed. Prewitt and Prekop have always operated best when the deal with subtlety. Effortless marriages of upbeat, transparently-textured pop with austere, open-ended lyrics, and striking combinations of electronica or jazz mixed with slight variances in phrase lengths and unresolved dissonances in harmonies are what we come to expect from the four gentlemen from Chicago. Everybody veered, inconsistently, in one direction or another: too much rock in “Up on crutches,” not enough in “Coconut” or “Middlenight.” Too much Afro-tinged Talking Heads retread in “Too Strong,” and too much ‘70s game-show camp in “Introducing.” The only consistency was the lack of a solid, unified voice – the burnished production of One Bedroom, the Beach Boys meets Beck of Oui. There was a four-year hiatus between One Bedroom and Everybody, and it shows. Everybody was the working-out of numerous ideas in form and technique; the album saw John McEntire stepping away – perhaps reluctantly – from the production booth in favor of a lo-fi, slowcore veteran in Brian Paulson, which may have been Everybody’s undoing on at least one level. McEntire has the benefit of absolute familiarity with TSaC’s voice and had steered – if not dictated – the sound world of the band for fourteen years. Entrusting the band’s sound with a new set of ears, while theoretically admirable and necessary to gain some sort of aural perspective, is dangerous: it has been largely McEntire’s hand that has shaped production levels, production values, and the end-product. The changes are very clear: the hi-hat and Prewitt’s voice have a greater high-partial emphasis, Claridge’s nominally crisp bass playing becomes fatter where the emphasis is placed on tone rather than pitch – a typical lo-fi approach – and the rhythm section sounds less polished. Electronic effects and digital processing tend to well up high into the mix, recalling McEntire’s earliest, more experimental days with blatant production differences from song to song on The Biz. Luckily, McEntire returns to intimate territory, a benevolent sonic dictator, to work out his own kinks from a five-year production absence of a band that, for better or worse, bears his imprint, more than Prewitt’s floating falsetto, more so than Prewitt’s understated, occasionally complex harmonies.

Subtlety has always been a driving force in TSaC’s music, as much as economy of means and effective exploitation of effects in musical methods. “Aerial” starts the album with a high-energy shot, rivaling anything the band have ever produced, and puts to shame the anemic acoustic guitar opening of Everybody. The band claimed Everybody was a “straight-ahead rock album,” so, perhaps, by their own standards, Car Alarm is probably their version of Black Flag’s Damaged. The gated distortion on the evenly-paced eighth-note opening rhythm conjures to mind, at the very least, Sonic Youth at their poppiest – which is great – and at the most, their first few albums. The energy encapsulated in this two-measure riff propels the song forward, with a more-unified rhythm section than we have heard in at least seven years. Claridge’s light syncopations and McEntire’s agogic emphasis on the tom-toms during the first course of the song helps create the atmosphere of anticipation and forward momentum The Sea and Cake have been lacking since 2000. There is a palpable sense of urgency in the delivery of Prewitt’s lyrics – which may simply be McEntire’s return to the production booth -- but his voice, never strained or reaching, remains a mellifluous croon with ample upturns and downturns of pitch at cadences. As one associate put it, Prekop is Billy Corgan with some musical training.

“A Fuller Moon” reverts to older, more familiar material: a Zydeco-tinged, brush-beaten drum rhythm; light phasing and chorus on the rhythm guitars; a clear bass presence; and, Prekop decidedly in front of the mix. While engaging and up-tempo, this is still decidedly softer, poppy territory and a quiet acknowledgment of the successful mechanics of One Bedroom: well-laid instrumental layers and easy stratification, gentle rhythmic complexity that never dwarfs Prewitt’s spare guitar playing, and a tonal ambiguity hovering around the dominant scale degree, nevermind all the added tones and pre-dominant harmonies. McEntire’s deft production comes back with various treatments on each layer: changing the space of the lead guitar during the chorus, the slight reverberance and stereo-separation echo Prekop’s sentiment: “you decide just what you need / and still I want to know / … still I grow / just invincible” – all while the Bb tone held is finally brought forward as harmonically important, just as the next verse ensues adding in steel drums and lessening the apparent Bb drone.

“On A Letter” starts off, confusingly, like a well-produced Police song. “De Do Do Do De Da Da Da,” to be precise. The same flanging effect in the guitar, the same spare, tight drumwork and super-close snare miking, the similar high tessitura bass playing. It is not difficult to see TSaC’s influences or references in most cases, but this track juts out immediately because of it. The pentatonic scale usage throughout the chorus and reliance on added-sixth dominant chords continues the reference, but the savior here is McEntire’s performance: vacillating just enough between hi-hat and ride, the structure of the song is probably best demarcated by cymbal timbre than by harmony or verse. It helps, too, that McEntire places various elements of the drumkit in different stereo spaces, keeping the song interesting enough beyond initial reaction – or shock – about the song’s origins. This is probably one of the weakest songs on the album.

“CMS Sequence” is an odd little instrumental, all keyboard sequencing (as suggested by the title) that acts as little more than a palate cleanser, bringing to mind “BBC Radiophonic Workshop” from the Magnetic Fields’ Holiday: an aperitif, a petit-four, an hors-d’oeuvre. Something to distract the attention, and perhaps give McEntire more practice time with effects buses in ProTools or Logic. Or Cubase, even.

“Car Alarm” brings us back to the high-energy, layered yet spacious and translucent sound we – or I – have come to expect from TSaC. Trademarks abound here: driving rock drumming given McEntire’s signature subtlety in production; Prekop lazily, happily delivering lyrics in dotted rhythms against four-square, martial bass playing; plenty of major-seventh harmonies abounding; gentle figurations from the electric piano and guitar to complement and augment Prekop’s hazy meta-narrative lyrics:

still don’t know

why don’t you

I don’t do that

time refusing

it’s haunting me

rejection’s fine

river find dementia

to fall down so easily

The restrained energy, the sonic signature of band very delicately breaking free and reaffirming its voice, is most evident here in the title song. All of the imprinting and trademarks are here: an edginess that gets honed down ever so slightly by adding on each layer, a smooth lyrical delivery matched by constant rhythmic charge. Of all the clichés and images that come to mind, with this song being emblematic of their output – or of least this album, the idea of very fine-grained sandpaper comes to mind. Perceptibly innocuous; fragile, even. But, there is no going against or with the grain here – Johnny Rotten in a suit is still Johnny Rotten – and only just enough edge to take off the top layer of inhibition before it becomes ineffective. One of my main criticisms with many Sea and Cake songs is that they simply do not last long enough; here, however, I recant my critique, and the blaring of “Car Alarm” is just long enough: it gets our attention, shows us what it wants – and what it wants us to do – and as suddenly as it begins, it stops, a crash of silence from the street.

“Weekend” takes off into interesting directions, echoing the recent trend in the Indie world for juxtapositions of curious, or attempted-clever, electronic gadgetry and sequencing with acoustic guitar, dance-punk –or at least pushy and hi-hat-heavy danceable – drum beats and a bass line that belongs more to Lincoln Center or Tonhalle Zurich than the Black Cat or Orange Peel, regardless the probably synthetic origin of the bass. The stereo-conditioning of the acoustic guitar becomes a little cheap, but is finally met with electronic chordal treatments that meet and offset the constantly shifting stereo placement of the guitar – which may or may not have changed chords during the entire (brief) song. Where “Car Alarm” was just enough in duration and maximal impact, “Weekend” lacks entirely: it deserves much more development, much more articulation in production, and at least one significant harmonic change to add a little depth to the otherwise monochromatic theme. Brevity is wit? Perhaps. Brevity as a sad condition of a day off? Perhaps, as well. Prekop’s largely unintelligible delivery – without the aid of lyrics printed out – lends no semantic credence to the song as a symbol of the all-too-short respite from workaday life, and otherwise, little insight or inroads can be made.

One of The Sea and Cake’s primary downfalls is the treatment of their albums qua albums. After “Weekend,” Car Alarm goes precipitously downhill in terms of excitement, grandeur, and reinventing the TSaC sound through their earlier music. “Weekend,” in the bad old days of tapes, would be where I flipped the tape over, considered whether I wanted to listen to more of the album and skip Calculus, smoked a cigarette, and decided 3 absences in Dr Hulsey’s class was enough for the semester. After class, I would be sorely disappointed. TSaC treats practically all their albums in this manner: they frontload the album with the most listenable songs – generally the most polished, the most upbeat, the most hummable – and leave the diamonds in the rough for the B side. We can typically find one or two good tracks on the second half of each album, but it gets taxing to wait for the payoff that unanimously never comes. Each album tries to finish with a bang but falls short. Granted, not every world can end with a bang; this would be asking the ending of every classical music recording to have the Schwerkraft of Beethoven 9, or asking every Indie band to close their album with the melodramatic, ham-handed evanescence of “In the Backseat.” However, to have a string of albums that choose to unevenly distribute the wealth, as it were, and place higher expectations on the second half only to see those expectations unsatisfied, is alarming for a band as inveterate as TSaC. “New Schools” retreads the least tracks from One Bedroom and Everybody and in fact is a few chords away from being a replica of “Up on Crutches.” “Window Sills” rehashes any number of the smoothed-over attempts at garage from the past three albums. Is this the true voice of TSaC? Were we merely deceived by the first half of the album, thinking we were heading back in time? Is TSaC growing up and becoming adult contemporary, worst of all? Are we doomed to listening to yet another unimaginative fadeout?

While we have no evidence of the relent of the fadeout, we get, at least, in “Down in the City” a reprieve from airy-pop and a return to the electronica-infused B-sides of One Bedroom where production and density take on new heights. Reserved usage of steel drums and electronic treatments as synergetic elements helps keep the song afloat, with a digitally-manipulated drum track lending some degree of energy to Prekop’s small-ranged, defeated lyrics:

There’s no middle

no middle distance

it’s complicated

got it’s own mind

startin over

not getting even

just a whisper

Fortunately, the song ends with an orchestrated fade out, where instruments and layers back out one by one, rather than a generic motion of a signal fader. Still, this is not quite the crux the album stands to deliver based on its first half.

“Pages,” unfortunately, stops any momentum. While contemplative and as well-honed and articulated as any “slow song” by TSaC, the formula remains consistent: a straightforward form, harmonic variety confined to closely-related keys and arpeggiated backup guitar get punctuated with occasional three-against-two hemiolas and dotted-rhythm vocal delivery.

“The Staircase” starts out with a curious descending figure – most appropriately elements of a scale (from the Italian scala, meaning stair), and this figure is repeated a number of times in a vamp that does not really build with any sort of palpable tension. As is the case with most TSaC songs structured thus, the power is in the anticipation, and the surprise – though we see it heed its onslaught and are aware of the eventuality – is the entrance of the vocals, sustained keyboard drones, and (re)entrance of McEntire – both on drums and multitracker – to shape the song on both front and rear ends. Another brief song, the effectiveness is in McEntire’s proud drum announcement that, much like in “Parasol,” becomes rife with expectation until the 54 second mark and a headnod to Magazine, the Smiths, and the former selves of The Sea and Cake. Could this mark the first strong-ending album since The Fawn?

Heavily-processed steel drum samples and a tenderly vacillating keyboard figure ease in under the radar as “Mirrors” begins. As quickly as it begins, it ends, perhaps recalling “CMS Sequencer,” or, recalling the introspective codas found on albums ranging from The The to The Cocteau Twins or Wire or David Bowie’s Low, “Mirrors” is more of a muscle-relaxer than an album ender, but given the energy of the preceding song, there is some sense in its placement. It does, however, still lend an air of expectancy to it, and the placement on the album – not mirroring the structure of the other instrumental track – is perhaps suspect. The album neither ends with a bang or a whimper: it merely ends, and it ends too soon.

The Sea and Cake recorded this album rather quickly – a “three month gestation,” according to one rife-with-superlatives review. While the album certainly stands on its own against Everybody, the quickness of writing and recording shows: by and large, locking in to stock formulas with few departures is the prescription for a rusty ensemble. As soon as their Australian tour wrapped up in March, 2008, the band hit the studio instead of the showers. Still fresh and “limbered up,” as Prekop puts it, The Sea and Cake have no trouble working out this album in record time, having cleared away all the rust in their joints on tour. Still, it never hurts to take a timeout and observe the situation – and innovate a little – before the team gets back on the court. Nothing is worse then a conservative defense, and the only offense here is the predictability. The standouts are all on the “first side” of the album; there are inconsistencies among songs that hearken back to earlier successes and failures; economy of means and material does not necessarily mean economy of time; the ending and structure of the album as a whole is a little one-dimensional and disappointing. The bright spots, of course, are in what TSaC does well: subtlety; grace; dignified grunge; stern, thorough production and leadership. Prekop’s lyrics maintain the same nobly nebulous contexts and subtexts, and Prewitt’s guitar work is tempered and articulate, yet reserved. Claridge – through McEntire’s return to the booth – is spot-on with providing consistent rhythmic leadership to the group. McEntire’s adequate, subtle drumming and apt production return TSaC to its roots as a five-member, four-person band. This is not an album to fawn over or to worship. It is, at least, an album for everybody interested in the band, as it returns The Sea and Cake back to their crisp-autumn-nights on Lakeshore Drive origins and stomping grounds.

Fleet Foxes: eponymous debut

Please help me understand how this landed on so many best-of lists and exactly why this is on some list (of dubious origin and propriety) discussing the best debut albums ever released.

This is not a definitive album; it is, in fact, one of the most derivative pieces of moderately-produced modestly-distributed pop music trash I have had the pleasure of hearing today. I say that with a wry smile, of course, having given Fleet Foxes ample chances. I have listened to each of these overly-honeyed, contrived-mellifluous songs multiple times. I have occasionally been able to get through the entire album without chain smoking or resorting to cheap vodka.

I just can't do it. I can't bring myself to call this album anything more than what it is:
hackery. Sheer, total hackery.

If we take the most salient lyrical points and standout musical traits in Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket, Neil Young, Iron and Wine, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Tangerine Dream, Brian Wilson, and Calexico, put them in a butter churn, and skim off all the fine, sweat cream, we're left with the chunky carbon copies of the best sitting at the bottom of the vat, the bottomfeeder critics jumping upon this, throwing their words and mouths onto the teats of this overblown, soured, already-been-done detritus, labeling it BEST this and BEST that, if only because 2008 was a retiring and reserved year for new acts, but moreover because the allure of those leftovers has the sweetness and irresistibility of corn syrup and the addictiveness of nicotine. Granted, a few tunes on this album are ridiculously catchy. Atrociously so. This a fine album or series of well-crafted songs does not make.

As seems to be the style du jour, the ability to stay on pitch while singing isn't really necessary, and, of course, fans and critics will jump to their aid and to the conclusion that it's "experimental" singing. There is a difference, a huge one, between microtonal inflections in vocal delivery and having a bad pair of ears. This wash of reverb, this living-in-a-cavern-the-size-of-Utah approach to production is not mesmerizing, or oceanic, or transportive. It's brutally annoying, doesn't vary any textures or timbres, and covers up a devastatingly wide swath of mistakes in vocal delivery and guitar playing. This is an old, boring trick: the band sounds marginally decent or minorly unacceptable in a dry environment, so let's drown the space in cathedral-like impulse reverb to blur the musical inability!

I will simply decline to discuss the lyrics, which barely belong at home with Spinal Tap's "Listen to the Flower People," never mind lyrics by Joan, Joni, Bob, Neil, or even Christopher Guest.

There are a few negative reviews of this album out there, and a few intrepid listeners judging this band (rightly) on face value. Even Pitchfork seems enamored with this group, and they hate everyone! Perhaps the world will indeed end in 2012 after all. I'll bring along a five-pound bag of sugar and some benzaprene to the End of Days, then: it will be easier on my stomach and nerves than this 40-odd minute sonic filibuster.

The Walkmen: You & Me

Here it is. Seven short, long, agonizing, far-too-brief years after Hamilton Leithauser thrust his deep sadness into a Shure SM57 with the delirious energy of a rabid cougar in a tenth of the speed, we get the best-produced, most connected, most homogeneously honed offering by the Boys of St Alban's, and the content and delivery - despite being far cleaner than the quality of Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone and far removed from advertising Saturns during Conan O'Brien - has remained fairly constant. The requisite expansion of musical palette and Leithauser's voice settling are subtle differences after this near-decade, most noticeable in A Hundred Miles Off where Leithauser struggled to crank his voice to the acmes reached in the previous album and where the rest of the band dabbled in punk-zydeco. The Walkmen's most recent offering (I say this six months later and many, many listens later) is far more sinister, tired, and skeptical of the world in which it exists. Hamilton's voice is mellower, more distant, more thoughtful, and more accurate than any other point; the vintage tube amps and one-off guitars and thick, saucy cymbals remain consistent, but even here is a lurking, dirty edge, one of functional desperation and oppressive shadow. Structurally, the songs are the most complex the band has offered up; Leithauser's voice grows more and more unsettling in moments where resolutions simply never occur after a tonic-dominant phrase or measure. There are worry lines in this album; to cover this up, the guitar work is the most technically proficient since Bows and Arrows, and the percussion (I hesitate to say trap set) has evolved from marking time or being used for special effects into an instrument, sparingly used, wisely exploited, and ferociously slaughtered when the resignation boils over.

The Walkmen are far too overlooked in the rock music world, never mind the erroneous "indie" world. I credit them with re-pioneering garage and tube-amps and dirt and fuzz and soul in rock. They technically beat The Strokes to it as well as all the derivative acts thereafter, and while they were a few years behind Jack and Meg, their aesthetic is closer to a Bob Dylan Gospel Choir than Screamin Jay Hawkins or Chuck Berry. Hamilton Leithauser's voice is some deliciously queer mix of Rod Stewart and Sinatra, with far more energy and truth behind his singing than any other artist working today. The music and primacy of craft takes Dick Dale, Richard Thompson, The Zombies, and Gang of Four and throws it all in a blender, coming out the other side a nervous, dreamy, decayed, and wistful melange -- someone driving a dirty-stringed Rickenbacker into a rare Russian tube amp cranked up and pushed through a bastardized Leslie cabinet, your ears four city blocks away from it all, the sound snaking through naked streets and abandoned storehouses and tenements and wrestling the night fog just to get to your earlobes. Of course, someone is just back and to the left, thrashing away on the drums, or claves, for pete's sakes. How many rock bands still use percussion these days, not just drums, and not in the tired Montreal sort of way? Seven years ago the lyrics were haphazard and written by prep-school naifs; now, they're as laconic as W C Williams on his deathbed, images reserved, direct, and emphatic. The words are earnest, the music a bit more dejected and far more experienced than the target audiences. Leithauser occasionally meets this salt of the earth music with a candor and deep sadness that every other act out there tries so hard to conceal through irony, makeup, beards, stage antics, corny music, or self-serving and self-referential lyrics, despite the subject matter of many of the songs positive or at least non-depressing.

Not at all a retread, though showing their roots well, a threadbare band gets vulnerable for you, just for you. Take them up on the offer. They've grown up quite a bit, you know. They're certainly no children anymore. You might even want to hold their hand a little before they slink off into the foul black brooding of the studio.