Helicopter Seeds

I was born in 1982 and thus formatively, I am a child of the 1990’s.  Musically however, I am very much a child of the 70’s.  One of my earliest childhood memories is of my dad setting an enormous pair of JVC headphones on my head as I sat on our brown floral print couch.  He said, “This is ‘Frankenstein’ by Edgar Winter… it feels like the sound is traveling right through your head as it goes from one ear to the other.”  He was right, it did.  I vividly recall spending childhood evenings laying on the living room floor and listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.  By the time I was ten years old I knew every word of “Roundabout” by Yes.  The very first cassette ever played in my very first car was Aja by Steely Dan (followed closely by Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows… It was 1997 after all).  As such, I was more steeped in the Psychedelic /Acid Rock of the 1970’s than most children should be.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the so-called “Hippy Music” or “Acid Rock” of the late 1960’s and early 70’s did more to perpetuate the role of the technical studio and engineering aspects of music creation than any other era or genre of music.  The concept of in-studio experimentation was born during the sessions of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles further explored the potential that studio and engineering prowess could have on the final product of recorded music.  By the time Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973, the recording studio was being utilized as an unmentioned additional instrument in music creation.  The albums of this era from Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, or Electric Light Orchestra were for the first time using the limitless potential of the recording process to add previously unheard of dimension to their music and to combine orchestral movements with traditional rock song structuring.  The studio had become just as elemental as the stage in the song development process.  In the tradition of the psych-rock pioneers before them, Citay’s Dream Get Together waxes nostalgic, pays tongue-in-cheek tribute to, and further exemplifies the rock inclinations and studio deftness of the 1970’s; yet does so in a way that belies its constituent influences to create an album that is both refreshing and timeless.

Citay is the musical endeavor of San Francisco’s Ezra Feinberg and a revolving cast of up to ten other bay-area musicians.  Their fourth album, Dream Get Together, manages to elicit a certain headiness and nostalgia simultaneously.  Much like the Fleet Foxes release of 2008, they reflect their influences without apology and craft their songs with careful attention to detail and stellar musicianship.  The end result is an album that hides its density and complexity well- with jangly guitar melodies, four part vocal harmonies, and proggy, meandering song structuring that never comes across as heavy-handed.  Album opener ‘Be Careful With That Hat’ finds Feinberg wryly remarking with refreshing self-awareness, “It’s an homage, not a mockery I swear,” as staccato rhythmic guitars float around the mix, one sonic layer creeping atop another into something elaborate and anthemic—a sense that pervades throughout the album’s 45 minutes.  The homage continues on the title track as Feinberg recreates a summer evening: “Two hands out the window, two hands shifting gears / Next thing you know we’ll be reelin’ in the years.”  It’s an obvious nod to the band Steely Dan which comes just before Feinberg perfectly emulates Walter Becker’s crystal clear, reverb-less electric guitar noodling.  The stunning chamber pop of ‘Mirror Kisses’ finds Feinberg marrying guitar riffing with dischordant squall in a way that immediately calls to mind that of Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Johnny Greenwood; just before fading into the sprawling and heavily Electric Light Orchestra indebted instrumental ‘Hunter,’ which begins with multi-tracked synthesizers and guitars over acoustic strumming before giving way to chugging Jimmy Page-esque rock riffing.  The album closes with the fusion pop of ‘Tugboat’ which is heavily in the vein of the music of another psychedelic San Francisco band, The Grateful Dead.  Over an airy mix of guitar strumming and tambourines, Feinberg remarks, “I don’t want to stay at your party, I don’t want to talk with your friends / I don’t want to vote for your president, I just want to be your tugboat captain.” It comes across in a way that’s so effortless and unassuming, Jerry Garcia himself would have been proud. 

While it doesn’t exactly challenge any musical conventions, Dream Get Together affirms itself as a nostalgic joyride, a breezy and effortless rock record, and as a testament to the timelessness of careful songcraft and execution.  At a time when so many are querying as to what the forthcoming decade will represent musically, one of its most satisfying albums thus far seems just as at home now as it would have forty years ago.

Helicopter Seeds is counting down the best albums of 2009…

Top Ten Albums of 2009

The first of the Helicopter Seeds Year End Music Features:
Top Ten Songs of 2009

It’s hard to overstate the compelling nature of The Bible.  In addition to containing the Word of God, it is also a sprawling historical narrative which spans thousands of years.  Passages of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, or the writings of Luke are widely regarded as some of the most accomplished writing in existence.  For good and for bad, it is a collection of writings that has made an indelible impact across that span of human history; arguably more so than any other causal influence. 

It remains a book that represents hope to countless millions.  It instills wonder and dares its readers to embrace the impractical and believe the implausible and does so with powerful deliberation.  Beyond that however, the true power and efficacy of The Bible lies not in the miracles and the audacities, but in the quiet minutia and its relatable subtleties.  It is to this end that The Life of the World to Come, the most recent offering from Durham, NC’s The Mountain Goats excels.  As a concept album it consists of 12 songs which are inspired by, corroborate, and are named after different passages of The Bible.  It emerges as “The Gospel according to John Darnielle (singer/songwriter),” through which he imparts a careful and experiential realism to scripture; and in doing so finds that hope and grace are all too often tempered with pain and loss, yet remain the only things we can ever really have in this life.

The album opens with “1 Samuel 15:23” (“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry”) and Darnielle presents a deceitful “crystal healer” as a metaphor for his own rebellion.  He sings with a trademark deliberate breathy diction over subdued guitars making the song seem as innocuous as Darnielle would have you believe his character is.  Standing in stark contrast to the opening track is “Psalm 40:2” (“He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock and established my steps”) in which Darnielle paraphrases the title verse, “He has fixed His sign in the sky, He has raised me from the pit and He will set me high!”  His strained vocals stretch over raucous drumming and frantic guitars as the verses cast our lives as a lawless road trip, seemingly to ruin were it not for the grace of God, “We will get there when we get there, don’t you worry / Feel bad about the things we’ve done but not really that bad / We inhaled the frozen air, Lord send me a mechanic if I’m not beyond repair.”

 Lyrically, The Life Of The World To Come features the flawless merging of broad and personal themes, blunt assertions and lofty wonderings, high and low diction, tender narratives and cited verse.  “Genesis 3:23” (“Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken”) is a seemingly light story about revisiting a former home until it is compared with its namesake reference and we realize the former home represents the biblical Garden of Eden, and the narrator’s leaving is synonymous with the fall of mankind.  Contrasting in scope but similar in presentation is “Romans 10:9” in which the narrator deals with personal loss and searches for the strength to go on, finding cold but real comfort in the well known Bible verse—“I won’t take the medication but it’s good to have around, a kind and loving God won’t let my small ship run aground / If you will believe in your heart and confess with your lips, surely you will be saved one day.”

The climax of The Life of the World to Come comes with the song “Matthew 25:21,” (“Well done, good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things, I will make you a ruler over many things.  Enter into the joy of your Lord”) an incredibly poignant narrative of someone traveling to be at the bedside of a terminally ill loved-one.  Darnielle expertly creates a series of concise images with which he moves the story forward, blending observational writing with thematic weight and careful metaphor, much in the style of poet John Berryman, whom Darnielle cites as one of his primary writing influences—“Between the pain and the pills trying to keep it at bay lies a traveler going somewhere far away…  The last of something brightly burning, still burning beyond the cancer and the chemotherapy / And you were a presence of light upon this earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth / It’s three days later when I get the call / And no one is around to break my fall.”  Despite the hope and grace afforded to this ‘faithful servant’ there is still the sad reality of the pain and the yearning we are all subject to.  The hope of heaven is all too often distant and untenable but it is all too often all we have.

 The album concludes with “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” a somber and minimalist song, featuring Darnielle singing over sparse piano, “Drive til the rain stops. Keep driving.”  It is a dark and depressing song, and when coupled with the vengeful text of Ezekiel 7 there is seemingly little grace to be found; save for the humble realization that we aren’t truly worthy of any of the blessings we receive in this life and anything short of the hope of Heaven is futile. 

With its seamless blending of lyrics and liturgy, The Life of the World to Come manages to find hope in the hopeless despite the sorrow of human experience… and therein lies the true efficacy of The Bible.

(Tongue firmly in cheek)

Over the past 2 decades, there has been a profound cultural shift taking place in America.  Over the previous several centuries in America and Europe, there has been a diametric opposition between the aristocratic social set and the iconoclastic bohemian social set, as was evidenced in the stark examples of 19^th Century Paris, or 1960’s Greenwich Village.  There was a divide and disconnect between the etiquette and mores of the establishment bourgeois and the anti-establishment intellectualism of the bohemians.  Beginning in the 1990’s, this long-standing class conflict gave rise to a new hybrid, meritocratic social set.  They were the new upper-middle class– their resumes weren’t comprised of pedigree, but consisted of scholastic and professional achievement. They were indwelt with an ecumenical worldview and a new entrepreneurial spirit that has profoundly changed the shape of American business and social mobility.  They brought businesses like Apple, Starbucks, Pottery Barn, and Birkenstock to prominence.  They introduced a new appreciation for balance and aesthetics to American affluence and an affinity for minimalist creativity and effective problem solving.

The music world has been something of a lagging indicator of this new Meritocratic ideal.  Now, nearly a decade and a half after this cultural shift really began to be apparent, the reach of the Meritocrats has extended into the indie clubs.  There is a newfound appeal both for nostalgia as well as for cross-cultural or novelty acts.  Artists like Fleet Foxes or Kanye West perform night after night to sold-out crowds of white suburban kids.  Bands like Vampire Weekend or The Dodos pick up where Paul Simon left off by embracing African musical influences and they are heralded by some as the next great hope of American music.  Brooklyn, more so than just about any other music scene, has emerged as something of a microcosm of this social set phenomenon.  The aristocratic air of TV on the Radio or the nouveau-bohemian Animal Collective have come to represent new fronts of the ever changing musical dynamic.  Most recently, the album Veckatimest from Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear emerges as something of a new soundtrack of the Meritocracy.

(Tongue slightly removed from cheek)

As such, it is an aesthetic wonder.  In the wake of their 2006 masterpiece ‘Yellow House,’ Grizzly Bear has greatly refined their ability as a band to convey movement in their music, and ‘Veckatimest’ certainly exemplifies that.  True to the Meritocratic ideal, ‘Veckatimest’ also strikes a near-perfect balance between nostalgic homage and technological embrace.  So many of ‘Veckatimest’s’ most memorable moments come as Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste create sweeping vocal harmonies reminiscent of 1950’s era pop which are given further interest by their incredibly detailed and deliberate production and engineering– which has become something of a Grizzly Bear hallmark.  Often it is not only the music that moves but the sound as well; drum tracks fade from front to back and vocal parts from left to right giving ‘Veckatimest’ new dimension when heard through headphones. 

Also, like the meritocratic social set that ‘Veckatimest’ somehow embodies, the album’s principle shortcoming is that it fails to represent more than the sum of its constituents… there are twelve incredible songs but little in the way of a grand, overarching vision.  Much of this is due to the individual development of Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste both as musicians and as songwriters.  The Rossen songs often stand in contrast to the Droste songs, which serves to lend a strange and interesting tension to ‘Veckatimest,’ but is also disruptive to the album’s continuity.  Lyrically, it is often ostentatiously impersonal which makes ‘Veckatimest’ a very relatable piece but very much lacking the incredible poignancy of Droste and Rossen’s previous work.

That said, although I feel ‘Veckatimest’ fails to be more than the sum of its parts, its various parts still add up to a very remarkable album, certainly among the year’s best.  The Droste led “Two Weeks” and “Cheerleader” are nothing short of brilliant and beyond infectious; beautiful deconstructed pop in the vein of Wilco’s ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ where the obvious melody lines are eschewed in favor of more idiosyncratic ones.  Daniel Rossen continues to establish himself as a modern Paul Simon with tracks like “Southern Point” and “While You Wait for the Others,” and a preternatural sense for harmony that lends warmth and interest across the album. 

Far and away the unsung hero of ‘Veckatimest’ is multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor, who also produced and engineered the album.  In its moments of restrained creativity as well as in its cathartic indulgences, the production on ‘Veckatimest’ is something to behold.  Upon carefully listening to any Grizzly Bear recording, one gets the sense that they have no reservations about moving a microphone and re-recording a track, and that attention to detail and quality control is readily apparent across ‘Veckatimest’… and the instrument tracking is amazing.  There is a pervasive sense of production one-upmanship across the album.  The drum tracking on “Two Weeks” rivals that of the incredible Radiohead effort “Reckoner,” the risky tracking of “About Face” would have seemed contrived in less capable hands, the atmospherics of “Ready, Able” are on par with any of Deerhunter’s recent work, the intricate harmonized vocals of “While You Wait for the Others” or “Dory” match anything done by The Dirty Projectors.  The end result is a collection of songs that, while incredibly deliberate and complex, feel effortless and organic; and therein lies the brilliance of ‘Veckatimest.’ 

While much has been made of ‘Veckatimest’s’ indebtedness to the Top 40 pop music of the 1950’s and 60’s, it owes just as much to the Prog Rock stylings of Yes or the Moody Blues as it does to the harmonious work of The Righteous Brothers or The Beatles, giving the album tremendous nostalgic appeal as well as real sense of steadfastness. 

The song that perhaps best represents ‘Veckatimest,’ and to that end the Meritocratic ideal, is “Ready, Able”- one of the best songs of the year thus far.  Ed Droste continues to amaze with his vocal range and versatility as what begins as a sparse and minimalist song swells into a dense and aurally textural wonder as creepy synthesized organ and indecipherable falsetto drone over dissonant guitar noodling.  Droste so effectively reveals the essential thesis of ‘Veckatimest’ and of the emergent meritocracy-  “Checking it off of my list, unable to rewrite.  Five years, countless months, and a loan, hope I’m ready, able to make my own… They go, we go, I want you to know what I did.”

“And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow

The dew that flies,

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the Red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.”  

(An excerpt from “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath)

Two weeks ago, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, was found dead in his Alaska home after committing suicide by hanging himself after a years long struggle with depression.  In the wake of Hughes’ death, the tragic life and work of Sylvia Plath seems just as ominous as it no doubt did after her own suicide in 1963.  Sylvia Plath was a pioneer of what would become known as the Confessional Poetry movement in which she, with a self-wounding honesty, grappled with themes of death, depression, and tragedy.  In both style and substance the latest album from Peter Silberman’s The Antlers very much embodies the tragic poet, Sylvia Plath.

In 2006, Peter Silberman moved to New York, somewhat ironically, to be alone.  He cut off all ties with family and friends and essentially sequestered himself in his apartment to compose and record what he intended to be an elegy for his planned disappearance.  Nearly three years later, the end result is ‘Hospice,’ an incredibly poignant, overly vivid, and intensely sad concept album that carefully explores the beautiful and terrible intimacy that is borne of destructive tragedy.  The overarching narrative of the album is that of a grief stricken hospice nurse assigned to take care of young girl who is terminally ill with bone cancer.  Incidentally, the girl’s name is Sylvia- a nod to Sylvia Plath as well as to the tragic novel “Sylvia” by Leonard Michaels; which recounts the suicide of Michaels’ own wife in 1960’s New York. 

As an album, Hospice is deeply indebted to the Neutral Milk Hotel masterpiece ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea,” as well as to Cursive’s ‘The Ugly Organ.’  Silberman’s aching falsetto is reminiscent of Bon Iver or Jeff Buckley while musically ‘Hospice’ channels a melancholy Deathcab For Cutie coupled with the art-rock tendencies of The Mars Volta or The Flaming Lips.  Much of ‘Hospice’ was recorded and engineered in Silberman’s apartment; which gives each track a certain Lo-Fi intimacy while careful layering makes each song seem rich and voluminous.  As the narrative weaves between dreams and reality, the music does as well, walking the line between melodic pop and ambient experimentalism. 

The album opens with the somber instrumental “Prologue,” in which minor key piano chords lie over ethereal noise swells that seem to simulate the sounds of life support.  This soon gives way to the expository “Kettering” where Silberman, in his breathy vocal, introduces the listener to his character and to the situation he finds himself in: “I wish I would have known in the first minute we met the unpayable debt that I owed you / Because you’ve been abused by the bone that refused you and hired me to lay down with that… But something kept me standing by that hospital bed / I should have quit but instead I took care of you.”  Depressingly evocative, the lyrics across the entire album are both effortless and painstakingly deliberate; the result of years of refinement by a careful wordsmith.

Silberman further develops his beautiful tragedy with the sprawling, two part “Atrophy/Wake.”  These two songs serve to book end the album’s central movement and clock in at nearly 8 minutes apiece.  The grief stricken “Atrophy” shows the influence of the Leonard Michaels novel as it clearly invokes a frustrated and grieving spouse: “With the bite of the teeth of that ring on my finger, I’m bound to your bedside, your eulogy singer… I’d happily take those bullets inside you and put them inside of myself.”  Musically, it is reminiscent of the quieter moments of the Wilco album ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ until the song’s final minutes when, as if to belabor the tortured point as soul is separated from body, “Atrophy” erupts into a grating swell of static, and guitar squeal, before yielding to a soft acoustic dirge.  It is profoundly depressing to be sure, but poignant in the way it delves into the truth and the tragic duality of love.

The album takes a brief detour from the Hospice theme for the jangly pop of “Bear”- a metaphor filled abortion lament in the vein of the Ben Fold’s Five masterstroke “Brick.”  The song is fascinating and incredibly effective in the way it portrays the turmoil experienced by the young expecting couple and a cynical view of the selfish decision making that precedes an abortion: “We’re not scared of making caves or finding food for him to eat / We’re terrified of one another and terrified of what that means.”   

The album concludes with the aforementioned “Wake” followed by the closing track “Epilogue.”  “Wake” represents the album’s climax, as Silberman’s character begins to find closure and redemption.  One of ‘Hospice’s’ most cathartic moments comes as Silberman reflects: “The hardest thing is never to repent for someone else, it’s letting people in.”  As the album progresses, the listener gets increasingly drawn in and there is a tremendous satisfaction in the rapturous final moments of “Wake” as Silberman’s Antlers triumphantly harmonize: “Don’t ever let anyone tell you deserve this!”

Sadly, the closure is short lived, as the acoustic “Epilogue” reveals the lingering guilt and haunting that often accompanies tragedy.  Silberman elaborately recreates a recurring nightmare: “But you return to me at night, just when I think I may have fallen asleep / Your face is up against mine and I’m too terrified to speak / You’re screaming and cursing and angry and hurting me / And I’m smiling and crying and apologizing…” 

Despite the intense sadness, ‘Hospice’ remains incredibly compelling in the way it effectively fleshes out incredibly complicated relationship dynamics and the truth that tragedy is very much a part of the human experience, one that profoundly shapes each of us as individuals.  It is an album that is very much the musical equivalent of the film ‘The Diving Bell and The Butterfly,’ in that despite its difficult subject matter, it remains uniquely beautiful and affecting.