Ever feel like you’ve said it three times when you haven’t said it at all?
What a weird weekend. My band went on vacation and left me alone for 72 hours to finish up vocals on some demo songs. Nine-and-one-quarter songs, of which I made two sound partially tolerable. I finished about half of the rest, but blew out my upper register during hour 30 of the 32 hours I spent trying my best. A light bulb went out in the room minutes before my voice turned to mush. It was terrifying.
As my Last.fm can testify, I couldn’t really listen to any music when I was away from the rehearsal room. In my apartment—where I took most of my meals—I sat in silence, alone and gravelly, drinking a cup of Throat Coat per hour. All I could think about were melodies that didn’t quite work and lyrics that I did or didn’t find oppressive, insincere, too-ridiculous or any of the other things that drive me crazy about lyrics. Literally, I would go to the practice space around 2 pm, then come home around 2 am. Before going to sleep all I could do was drink tea and watch Twin Peaks Youtube’s until I knew I’d have some sort of nightmare. On Sunday night I dreamt I was in a house that only had stairs on the left side of this ochre room, and when I walked up the stairs it became pitch black until I emerged in the same room I was in before, with the same crooked frames on peeling walls, unsavory faceless people on torn velvet couches, and that same flight of stairs going up to the left. Somewhat logically, I looked out a window. Outside looked like that dreamy desert from Beetle Juice, with a few more of these houses that went up five or six stories to the left. Like I said, weird weekend.
Friday was great, though. All day long I felt excited about being alone with these songs that have been months in the making. I threw my iPod on shuffle at work and enjoyed the randomness of the 12,500 songs crammed in there. Admittedly, I hoped for inspiration. The third song to come up was this Bruce Springsteen song, “Downbound Train.” I’d never really listened to it before and until The Boss comes in I swore it was a twangy Cure song. It’s a great song about lonliness. I listened to it three times in a row. I thought about the song all weekend. It hovered above my own songs, a distant statute of tamed greatness blurred across a weird desert of my own flat notes, awkward words, and imagined monsters with Michael Keaton’s face.
Click to download “Downbound Train” by Bruce Springsteen from the album Born In The U.S.A.
One of the few things that could have made this poster better is if the headliner was, in fact, The Postal Service.
Two Saturday’s ago we played a good show in Reno, NV. The spot we play is a tiny bar called Satellite. I’m going to call it our “spot” because we’ve played there at least four times, not counting that one time at a different venue through the same promoter—or the show we’re doing there in ten days. Shows at Satellite are fun. The crowd is always young and excitable, and they’re not going anywhere else anyway, so you know someone close to your age and drunk will be ready to get down.
Another cool thing about Satellite is that the employees and owners are friendly and attractive. That Saturday, the only thing better than the drink specials was the bartender’s iPod mix. In quick blurs of audacity, she would cut off a recognizably great song (like the blurpy first seconds of “SexyBack”) and, in a flash, be playing something totally better.
The primary example being this peach gumball from electronic artist John Tejada: a remix of Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.” Tejada slows it down; if James Scott Tamborello’s original mix was a frantic, impassioned dash towards distant love, Tejada makes it a confident jog, like indie rock Fabio Lanzoni approaching Jenny Lewis on a white sand beach in the South Pacific. Oh my god, I just reread that last sentence. So “crit.”
When this came on at Satellite, it wasn’t instantly recognizable. But when Benjamin Gibbard’s vocals drop, sounding even clearer at the slower speed, I melted. I found the remix on iTunes. Turns out it sounds great when it’s not Saturday night in Reno, too. The things you learn in The Biggest Little City In The World.
The video for the original, un-remixed “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service.
The video of “We Will Become Silhouettes” by The Postal Service. Directed by the guy that did Napoleon Dynamite and featuring Jenny Lewis.
The Postal Service’s WEBSITE. The Postal Service on MYSPACE. The Postal Service on PUREVOLUME. The Postal Service on LAST.FM, where, according to wikipedia, the song “Such Great Heights” has been in the Top 10 most played songs list since the website's inception. The Postal Service on WIKIPEDIA. The Postal Service on ELBO.WS. The Postal Service on HYPEMACHINE. The Postal Service on AMAZON. Learn about the upcoming release from Tamborello’s other project, Dntel. Support The Postal Service’s LABEL.
An unflattering picture NAVE took of this prototype Gibson guitar.
I have little perception of how many of my 21-25 year-old friends enjoy The Fall Of Troy. I’m almost certain none of the damaged-artsy noise kids do. Same goes for the post-damaged-artsy kids who moved showering up on the prerogative list about the same time as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah overtook Xiu Xiu as the show-to-wear-a-party-dress-at. I think most of my math-rock friends probably enjoyed TFOT back when the band played basements for free, though I’m unsure they’d admit it now. I’m sure that my “post-hardcore” friends like TFOT, and I’m certain that all my 15-20 year-old friends love (or are about to love) TFOT.
I know pigeonholing doesn’t make or keep friends, so let me be clear: I don’t care who likes TFOT and I’m stoked for whatever they’re liking instead. But a lot of people love TFOT and I think these people—though younger—have amazing, significant reasons for their appreciation. I think the qualities of the appreciation—it’s pretty fervent and viral—make TFOT a new yardstick in an industry changing so fast it’s psychedelic. TFOT farmed a cult of fans from the ground up. The band toured incessantly since all the members were under 18 (they are now 21-ish). The trio easily outshined the zillion-watt lights burning out the decade’s first international music scene. Instead of doing this by innovatingmascarausage, pissing off an Osbourne, or rehashingMötley Crüe, TFOT succeed by updating the progressive swirl of Rush so that kids into My Chem could compute. In fact (and here's a big compliment), I'm sure TFOT is a gateway band for a lot of kids, leading them to music outside of the mentioned "scene." That scene—like a totem with only one repeating face—had become profitable, popular, and largely disposable long before TFOT entered the pit. It remains that way today. Really, it's stronger than ever, as we’ll see next Tuesday when Fall Out Boy bury The Used with an album of songs that Robert Edward McCracken should have purchased the rights to years ago.
Don’t read into this too much: I’m not saying this scene of scream/sing after-emo produced TFOT. Nor does TFOT sound remotely like FOB (hopefully you're still with me). I am saying that I’m impressed that this scene allows for a band like TFOT, and I’m especially impressed with TFOT’s ownership over its career within the homogeny that helped foster its success. The case-in-point is the seemingly hand-selected lineup for the band’s current headlining national tour. All the bands are exceptional in their own way: Portugal. The Man, one of Fearless Records’ recent stabs at remembering a better past, are as progressive—if softer—than TFOT; Damiera, labelmates with TFOT, take Cap ‘n Jazz-style math rock and give it a dose of contemporaneousness; and Tera Melos, the love of my life, provide the purest, unhinged artistic integrity that I’m arguing this tour is full of. It’s a big deal that a band like TFOT, that will end up selling out a majority of the shows on this, its first national tour, is willing to assure this sort of musical quality succeeds in its wake. And succeed these bands will: I’d feel like Judas by mentioning just how much income all the bands are generating, but be assured, the numbers across the board are very high.
That should mean that the audience will grow and (hopefully) sustain for every band on the tour. I went to the kick off for the tour, a show in San Francisco that might have sold out twice over. The line was enormous. Half the attendees (myself included) missed most of Melos waiting outside. I’ve seen a bundle of sold out shows at the 250-ish capacity Bottom Of The Hill. I’ve noticed types of sold out shows: Minus The Bear sold out the night of, so it seemed fairly packed, but not too crazy. The Mars Volta (on their first tour ever) and Thrice (way back in the day) were much fuller. Or maybe the crowds had more panicked energy, as if they knew it wouldn’t be like this again.
This kid, upon finding out that the show was gonzo-sold out, decided to try and jump the razor-wire fence. We have no idea what happened to him, but rumor has it he’s trapped in the maw.
TFOT’s crowd had that energy, as if next time ‘round it would cost $45 to see TFOT open with Circa Survive for Coheed And Cambria at the 3,500-capacity Warfield on the “Equal Vision Records Just Made Another $50 Million This Year Tour.” But at BOTH, people went apeshit for every band. Melos’ music, peerless as it is, earned polite applause and confusion, which usually means that everyone’s brains were (understandably) about a minute behind what was happening on stage. Damiera and Portugal. The Man had more and more people singing along. And TFOT had 200 fists raised for an hour straight. TFOT ringleader Thomas Erak could step into the crowd like a Jesus-in-girls-jeans and walk all over his fans, who looked even happier than when their guitar hero wasn’t touching them. Erak shreds phenomenal riffs, and this is what gets me wettest about this whole salad of screamo, prog, math-rock, and pop: it’s founded on incredible, thoughtful musicianship.
As songwriters edging their way into the centrifuge of pop culture, TFOT bring more to the table than most bands of comparable size: key changes, timing switches, riff after riff, solos, jams, all captured by wicked musical choreography. The band represents many things, the most important of which—from where I’m standing and singing along—is the proliferation of technical audacity in the mainstream marketplace. I think that cultural tastes seem to change when cults outgrow themselves. Rarely does music this complex cause a cult audience to outgrow itself, and rarely still does that growth even begin to take over the scene itself.
TFOT will release an anticipated album in just a few months. They know there’s an army of interest. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m wordy when I’m excited, and I’m excited that music this creative can make such an impact. It gives the future a lot of purpose.
Click to download “Marching With 6” by Portugal. The Man from the album Waiter: "You Vultures!".
Click to download “Lessons” by Damiera, from the album M(US)ic.
Click to download “The Werewolf And Ben” by Tera Melos, from the vinyl-only release Drugs To The Dear Youth.
This is a new song, probably my favorite I’ve heard. Live at Bottom Of The Hill. No one is holding it together.
“I Just Got This Symphony Goin’” live in Italy.
Tera Melos playing at The Door in Dallas. There were over 800 people at this show.
The Fall Of Troy’s WEBSITE. The Fall Of Troy on MYSPACE. The Fall Of Troy on PUREVOLUME. The Fall Of Troy on LAST.FM. The Fall Of Troy on WIKIPEDIA. The Fall Of Troy on HYPEMACHINE. The Fall Of Troy on AMAZON. Support The Fall Of Troy’s (and Damiera’s) LABEL.
About 22 hours ago, I sat in my room working on my movie. My experience with ideas has me understanding that ideas are uncontrollable, which is to say I don’t remember when or why or where I decided to start thinking about this random batch of ideas as a movie. I think it just happened. Last night, however, I do remember that I started thinking about my movie while I was making a really late dinner and listening to the singular, progressive jazz pianist, Chick Corea. I was cooking up some fried matzo, no kidding. Literally, I was just using a spatula, when all of a sudden strange strands of dialogue start bleeding out of my mind and into the antechamber of my brain-space. I don’t recognize it at first and think to myself, do I even need dialogue for anything? Then I remembered: the movie.
My movie is about a woman named George who has three productive, happy, and functionally unique personalities with three separate, successful careers, tastes, and styles. Two of these personalities fall for a cameraman named Dizzy, who works for a team of doctors following Geo around all the time documenting her unusual condition. (Most of the characters come to call her Geo.) I’m calling the movie The Origamist, because the only tendency the personalities share is a passion for (and skill with) manipulating paper.
So, here I am, deep inside what was tomorrow night just yesterday. The space of a day allowed me a chance to parse the dialogue I trotted out last night. Through the misty looking glass of retrospect, I've decided on and posted my favorite bit: This dialogue occurs as one of Geo’s personalities sits on a park bench folding paper. She is confronted with three children in Halloween costumes who come play in the park all the time and are familiar with one of her other personalities sitting on the same bench and folding the same paper the same way.
Below the dialogue is a great song Chick Corea performed called, “Toy Room”—a title that perfectly describes the feeling of unexpected late night inspiration.
DIALOGUE FROM THE ORIGAMIST, A WORK IN PROCESS, RATHER, PROGRESS.
COWBOY: I reckon you owe me a swan.
INDIAN CHIEF: ...And me a leaping frog.
ALIEN: You assured me of a spacecraft.
GEO: Excuse me?
COWBOY: Get foldin’ bandito! Or else I’ll shoot ya!
INDIAN CHIEF: I’ll scalp you.
ALIEN: I’ll abduct you.
GEO: Do I know you guys?
COWBOY: Of course you do.
INDIAN: It’s us.
GEO: It’s you?
COWBOY: You betcha! Now git to it you varmint!
GEO: (Playing along) Take it easy there, Butch Cassidy, or you ain’t gettin’ nothin’.
There's a bit of pressure to accumulate one's cultural discoveries into a tidy list at the end of every year, quarter, or whatever. I feel like I think about these lists all the time—when I want listen something comforting, when I'm pissed or bummed, or when I listen to music in the van with the boys. But I consistently acquiesce from flushing the list out of my mind and onto the page. Don’t get me wrong, I selfishly love that everyone else scribes these lists, because there’s a lot of writers and websites I respect—and because I haven’t heard more than a small fraction of everything out there, so I like to have some guidance. I’m just the guy hoping those people—namely myself—eventually discover all the stuff that could have made their list but didn’t because they missed it in favor of listening to Silent Shout over and over again. I guess the point of having “favorite” artists means that you make the concession of listening to less music. But frankly, I don't like the idea re-listening to all the shit I've already listened to when I could be scouring the universe for just-as-exciting new shit. It's against the basic principles of Neoism.
That said, one of my favorite things about any year is whatever the wacky founding fathers of Hella—Spencer Seim and Zach Hill—decide to create and release. These two—Sacramento’s finest—mastermind all sorts of coherent noise rock. The first concert I ever saw with my band mate and personal style guru NAVE was Hella’s fifth or sixth show ever. It was in a basement on D Street or E Street in the college town of Davis, CA. In the middle of the third song Mr. Hill kicked through his bass drum and created a new type of false understatement by saying shyly: “Sorry. That’s it.” Of course that was shortly after the night sky parted, God fainted, and the moon melted golden tears of silk that pierced through the roof of the house and the linoleum in the kitchen, illuminating the basement with a shower of the finest light you’ve ever seen, all of which circled safely around Mr. Hill’s suddenly scruffy head. And that’s how Mr. Hill got his hair.
Nave and I may have been new friends, but we’d both studied the same scriptures on musical divinity. We looked at each other and knew: this was it. We weren’t wrong, either. Enjoying Hella is like an evergreen exploration of rock music. For me—and many I know—Hella is a deeply rooted, unusually successful band, timelessly cool and personally experienced. Hella is my favorite active musical act, all plotless adventure and dependable virtuosity. Since touring and collaborating with peopel like System Of A Down, Dillinger Escape Plan, The Locust, and members of Manson and Pinback. That's how Hella have become very popular, perhaps a couple outsider-pop moments away from doing pull-ups with Deerhoof at the Beverly Hills Hotel, waiting for Rolling Stone to finish poolside with Elijah Wood. The magazine asks Mr. Wood what he’s listening to on his new 300 GB iPhone, which, allegedly, Lohan re-gifted him: “There’s this band from Sacramento that most people have never heard...”
Ok, I’m saving the rest of that fantasy for me-time. The point is that Mr. Seim’s and Mr. Hill’s five years of unusual decisions culminate this month when Hella releases its first contractually obligated record for Michael Allan Patton’sIpecac Recordings label. Mark your calendar if you don’t yet know how to get all your music for free: January 30. The album introduces Hella as a quintet featuring an additional guitar player, a bassist, and a singer that used to be a butcher. It’s titled There’s No 666 In Outer Space. Few albums this year will be as phenomenal or mean as much to me.
I ran into 60% of Hella at Safeway last month (possibly experiencing 60% of the perks of living in Sacramento). It was the affable Mr. Hill, the great bassist Carson McWhirtner, and my old chum Josh Hill, Mr. Hill’s older cousin. Mr. Josh was one of my earliest Sacramento acquaintances. In 2003 or so, he and I geeked around and jammed a couple times at the Hill’s residence in East Sacramento where Mr. Josh and Mr. Hill lived with an uncle. It was just some acoustic diddling that we slowly figured out when we weren’t talking about new bands and old bands and about how Mr. Josh was teaching himself how to use this composition software to program his own orchestra. You know, guy stuff. We actually recorded 50 seconds of material, which you can download a pretty lousy Brilliant MP3 of below. We recorded this the same day Zach gave me a pre-release copy of The Devil Isn’t Red, Hella’s last proper full length. That was a great day.
So, back in Safeway last month, I wasn’t really thinking about it and mentioned that I’d “heard that the album leaked.” Yeah, the Hill’s mumbled. “Bummer,” I said, not really meaning it that way at all. “Do you know where I can get it?” I never feel bad about getting music for free; this goes back to the whole year-end thing—I’d rather hear more than decide what’s best about less. Which is why I never want to feel like I can’t access something that might be provocative. Which is why I’ll especially never trip about hunting down free Hella songs. I’ve seen the band a dozen times. I bought one of the first 50 shirts they made. I own some of the albums on vinyl. I’m a supporter, baby. “You should be able to find it on Soulseek,” Josh said, finally experiencing Hella’s cultish fandom first hand. The look on his face was awesome.
Now that I’ve absorbed There’s No 666 In Outer Space a dozen times, I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr. Hill (Zach) is basically like some kaleidoscopic distortion of Phil Collins. Mr. Hill may not sing, but he’s a powerful front man, working harder than anyone else on stage or in the studio. Rumor has it he co-wrote the lyrics with Aaron Ross. The lyrics are pretty great, too. Though they rely on abstractness, the experimental/abstract-gothic/retro-sci-fi/medieval-zombie imagery achieve humor—something The Mars Volta seem to fear worse than sucking it up and admitting that it’s time to go platinum. Don’t get me wrong: The Volta lyrics are dark and weird at no expense to the overall product, but it’s nice to hear Mr. Ross moan about “the ungrateful dead” while Hella seizure all over backing track. The track I speak of—called “The Ungratefull Dead”—is one of my favorites and an exemplar for the new album and band. As Nave points out, it feels like a relief to hear Mr. Hill and Mr. Seim stop on a dime every so often, especially since there’s 150% more sound that needs to stop on any given dime. Also, I think Nave would agree that the last couple Hella releases—the sporadically tolerable double album and the nonsensical musical component to the Concentration Face DVD—were heavy on the noise and light on detail and craft. The biggest victim seemed to be the production clarity established by the first two Hella albums (and even Total Bugs Bunny On Wild Bass). The clarity of No 666 succeeds perfectly—if geometrically: each listen is like finding another face of the shape. Listen once and attempt to decipher Mr. McWhirtner’s bass parts, which are like audio Braille (confusing but helpful). Listen again to pick out the dueling guitars—who knows who plays what when both sound this good. And I’ve found a new hero in Mr. Ross. He sings with the oblique gusto Cedric Bixler reached for (desperately?) on The Volta’s Amputechture. But now I understand that Mr. Bixler lacked the surprises and melodies that Mr. Ross tackles and holds down. Mr. Ross sounds like one tuneful weirdo.
I don’t want to keep involving The Volta—I have like a zillion more tiny anecdotes about seeing Mr. Hill at the coffee shop, or playing with Mr. Josh’s old band, or about Mr. Seim’s custom guitars and progressive hair styles. All of which I’ll save for next time. So as I was saying: The Volta is one of my other favorite groups—a group I might have been more impressed with at some points in my life. That makes it feel like a big deal to say that with No 666, I think progressive music officially has two Zues’. The Volta’s hasty follow-up to one of my favorite 2005 albums was indeed one of my favorite albums in 2006. But Hella have basically invaded, destroyed, and repopulated The Volta’s every proggy intention. All this excites me for the future; I feel like a groovy sorcerer just reanimated Yes and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. I’m hoping to score front row seats for the inevitable showdown between Hella and The Volta, where they duel for the intergalactic sonic supremacy on a stage made of emerald dreams in the heart of Mt. Vesuvius. I hear the acoustics in there positively kill.
The Greater Mekong... is also home to striped rabbits, bright pink millipedes laced with cyanide and a rat that was believed to have become extinct 11 million years ago.
