Show Me The Money

Song: "Lump Sum"
Artist: Bon Iver
Album: For Emma, Forever Ago
From: Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Year: 2007

The beginning of "Lump Sum" sounds like a church choir warming up in some religious abbey in Romania. It turns into brilliant 1,2's of acoustic melodies swooning like Grizzly Bear or Beach House.

"Sold my cold knot/A heavy stone
Sold my red horse for a venture home/
To vanish on the bow --
Settling slow/
Fit it all, fit it in the doldrums/
(Or so the story goes)/
Color the era/Film it's historical"

Bon Iver is clearly one of the breakout bands of 2008, even though this album was released in 2007. I love: "Color the Era". How would we color this era? It can't be black, white or grey because those are shades. We need something with pigments, something dense and thick and saturated. How about a sauvignon-red wine? No, too cliché. I'd say a muted yellow, for all uncertainties and relating to the shit we're so deep in. Jungle yellow.

So I take it Bon Iver goes from church abbey to valley/forest/Shrek-land (red horse) to a boat. After all they're "Settling slow" [In lyric analysis]. In our lives we HAVE to fit it all "in the doldrums", no matter how exciting, humdrum, or expensive it all may add up too. Life is a lump sum, but what is its net worth? What do we value our daily ventures without actually totally our real life expenses? What does travel time and phone catch-ups and bars equate to?

This whole folkie/neo/indie sound is not new, yet Bon Iver plays so elegantly-simplicity within complexity- it's like a new era...breaking dawn. Thanks, Stephenie Meyer. The image below is picturesque. The dollars and cents and ATM's I see in my mind when I hear this song equate to this simple snapshot of a human, wood, nature, and a saw. Is this all we need? Please say YES.



Bon iver, in French, translates to: the coldest winter. Bon Iver is traveling in and out of seasons with graceful hums and la-de-da's. Wooden, unshaven, and the perfect red flannel.

Icelandic

Artist: Sigur Rós

Album: Ágætis Byrjun

just listen to it all.

Album: Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust


^ Bonnaroo 2008- so thrilled I could be a part.

Fire, Fire, Fire!

Song: "Two Magpies" & "Sing the Changes"

Artist: The Fireman (Paul McCartney & Youth)

Album: Electric Arguments

From: UK

Year: 2008

I had an incident with fire once.  It was my junior year of college and I was pouring hard spaghetti in a boiling pot of water around twilight.  A noodle slipped inside the stove/underneath the Williams Sonoma pot and caught fire.  Skinnier than I feather I still managed to wreak havoc in the kitchen. That is when I turned to my roommate and screamed "Fire! Fire! Fire!" Each "Fire!" louder than before because my roommate clearly did not understand what "Fire!" meant the first two times.  I thought the stove was going to explode.  By the time I turned back to the pot, the fire was gone, noodle black, roommate laughing.  

A new type of fire is The Fireman's third album, Electric Arguments.  Here we listen to the flames of multiple concoctions that make these two brilliant artists boil.

Electric Arguments cover art:

"Two Magpies"

Why, when I hear the Paul McCartney influences in this song do I think of The Floorwalkers, a Columbus, OH based band?  This is discouraging.  Not for all, but for me.  I don't know, maybe it's because I never saw The Beatles live.  Electric Arguments, is based on an Allen Ginsberg poem, "Kansas City to St. Louis", so back then.  I hadn't even heard about The Fireman until recently, though now that I have, I realized I must've been living happily under a rock.

"Two Magpies" has an easygoing feel- good for a road trip, drinking coffee on a Sunday morning, or cleaning around the xmas tree.  It's good for anything, fuck, who am I to judge where or why you should listen to Sir Paul.   Granted four stars by The Times and Rolling Stones, The Knight and Youth pull of a stellar album that enables one to feel many things when listening.  What do I mean by this?  Each song sounds so completely different than the previous, you just have to question their influences in current pop/rock music and how long the recording took place.  

For example, "Sing the Changes", the next track on Electric Arguments, is so U2ish I swear Bono was in the room with commentary.  Wide exclaimed messages of :CHANGE: and :PEACE: are still being tried by the duo; because sadly the message wasn't understood 40 years ago.  "Sing the Changes" is a stadium song, ready to fill arenas with doobie smokers and "angel headed hipsters".  Acoustic and electric guitars join to what appears to be a dulcimer, simmering the first seventeen seconds like a pot of precious gold.  The duo are the miners that never stop.  They dig and dig for new waves in music, humoring travels of communication,mocking alias', and voicing ideals because they can.  And we love them for it.  

just because...

Water and Music

Song: "Streamside"

Artist: The Album Leaf

Album: In A Safe Place

From: San Diego, California

Year: 2004

As the snowflakes are beginning to fall (and stick) in my backyard grass, weeds, and porch banister, I come to find The Album Leaf's music is even warmer than before.  I can sit fireside with a cup of hot chocolate (or Bailey's) and slowly drift somewhere deep in my head.  "Streamside" is exactly the type of song I think of when things are mellow, could be better or worse, but I'm content because so and so correlated with this and that, and everything will be okay.  You have those moments?  To be clear[er], "Streamside" is the kind of song that's good for grass-laying, sky-staring, or tuning out the city but watching it at the same time.

The Album Leaf can be compared to Explosions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven, though the drums aren't as heavily used in their music.  Sometimes when you google this band, you might see advertisements for yoga practices, although I do not think The Album Leaf is yoga appropriate.  "Streamside" is exactly it's title.  I wonder where it was written or thought of.  Was Jimmy LaValle sitting next to some random stream in Western Pennsylvania or down a small valley in Southern Cali?  The songs longing for that small piece that's missing in our lives replays itself in the accordion drools.  The acoustic guitars comply so harmoniously, they sound like a lullaby I forgot from my childhood- there's a familiarity in this tune that makes this song comfortable.  No pretense.  No fret.  You can watch the fishies (purposely childish dreamlike word choice) swim by and as they wish to be colorful and pretty, you can day dream for three minutes and thirty-four seconds.  If you give it a listen maybe your anxieties will go away for a few moments in time, and you can concentrate on what's good.  

I'm 22, That's Old Enough.

Song: "Old Enough"

Artist: The Raconteurs (feat. Ricky Skaggs & Ashley Monroe)

Album: Old Enough

Year: 2008

From: Nashville, TN

Just enough country and never enough alternative, "Old Enough" satisfies by yearning to live in Tennessee by a river drinking whiskey from a barrel.  Because we all know I'll probably be fifty by the time I do that and have more of a reason to, I'm just gonna say 'So for now, I'll play Jack White's new folkie song over and over again.'

"You never speak so I have to guess you're not free-ee-ee", sings Monroe.  These days what or who is free?  I was just in DC and saw a little reminder outside the Korea Memorial, "Freedom is not free".  So whatdoioweya?  

Jack sings, "Well maybe when you're old enough, you'll realize you're not so tough/and somedays the seas get rough".  White and Monroe, "You're too young to have it figured out/you think you know what you're talking about/you think it'll all work itself out."

We're young.  We think we know everything.  And then we visit our grandparents and we come to find  we are clearly wrong.  Come to think of it, even our grandparents can't predict out futures anymore with the way the world is currently turning.  But maybe this banjo will get them off the couch, and we can dance a little diddy with them just to make sure they remember how.  This song is a not-so-pleasant reminder that I'm getting older, but at least the downbeat is enough for me to clank my drank against any wooden bar and smile.  The Raconteurs really do need to receive more credit for their artistry.  I think they are one of the best band;s of my generation, and I DID VOTE for them on NPR's album of the year.  [Hello NARAS, wake up!] They rock out, they country-out, and they blend genre's without so much as a blink, as if there were no genre's to be categorized in.  

"Old Enough's" muse is "Little Suzie".  "Wake up", they preach to her pearly ears...or beg her, depending how much you read into the song.  We are all little Suzie's, or at least my friends; who need to wake up to the fact that college is over and the world is ours...well sort of.  Now there's a shitlong list of how much stuff we need to accomplish in order to be remotely considered applicable.  The singles artwork is pretty damn clever, with a no-so-young-lady (Suzie, I presume) writing a letter to a pen pal of sorts.  It's in black and white, has a Victorian-era undertone, and Jack Lawerence is reflecting within Suzie's little desk mirror.  Hey there fella, how you doin?  A bird cage and old photographs hang pinned above Suzie's desk; could she possibly be reminising of old love-battles, waging "if it was worth it", questioning her life decisions?

"Old Enough" reminds anyone of any age that we are not free.  We are somehow tied to the ship of commerce and dollar signs, heading due East.  Fuck, we couldn't even pay for the gas to fill the damn boat.  The song winds down without dying down with the artists repeating, "You're not free".  It's our neon warning to GET OUT NOW.  But the question is, where do we go?  I have no fucking clue as much as the next Suzie, but I do know you should buy and listen to this song.  Peace.