When … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead made its more prog rock influences known on 2005’s Worlds Apart, listeners familiar with the band’s output were left wondering, “Hah?”
This foray into seemingly unfamiliar territory made sense, given the tight construction of the band’s previous albums, but it was hard not to miss the bombast of Source Code & Tags and Madonna. Thankfully, The Century of Self brings everything together.
The loud crush of guitars propel such tracks as "Isis Unveiled", "Far Pavillions" and "Halcyon Days", but they veer into tangents that don’t feel needless.
All the album’s tracks blend seamlessly, returning to the solid architecture that anchored the band’s early work. Festival Thyme, the four-track EP that previewed the album, didn’t capture the depth and breadth the album. The EP’s tracks — including "The Bells of Creation" and "Inland Sea" — make more sense in the context of the album.
Pianist Clay Morris adds a new dimension to … Trail of Dead’s sound, providing a velvet glove to the iron fist that is the guitar work of Conrad Keely and Jason Reese. The band, on the whole, sound more fiery than ever, the album recorded live to tape (or hard drive?) than meticulously multitracked.
The Century of Self brings … Trail of Dead back closer to its roots while taking the best bits of the recent past. The band has always experimented with its sound, but this time, they sound complete.
While most people complain about the revised eMusic subscription plans, I have a sense the smaller quota will benefit me in the longer term, because then I won’t inundate myself with so much listening.
As for the encroachment of Sony catalog in what used to be a major label-free zone, let me just point you to this gem for sheer WTF?-ness.
This entry is less a review and more of a reminiscence.
The first time I listened to this collection of Morton Feldman’s work was in 1992. I was on a student exchange program to New York City and having a rough time with homesickness. I was also nowhere near coming out of the closet, and on the night this album was playing on my boombox, a fellow exchange program participant approached me and said maybe I should come out of the closet.
That talk was the first time another person voiced what I had been thinking, but before we entered that discussion, he remarked the music sounded like some horror movie soundtrack.
The album, titled American Masters: The Music of Morton Feldman, was on loan from CRI, where I worked as an intern that year. I brought it back and considered buying a copy for myself, but I never got around to it.
Some listeners admired the audacity of the band’s reckless abandon. Other listeners (myself included) found the wild improvisation lacking and unskilled.
In the end, ZAZEN BOYS III was an extreme album, and going further would have taken Mukai Shuutoku and company down some creatively treacherous paths.
Instead, Mukai stepped back. He went to long-time producer Dave Fridmann to helm the follow-up, and the band started to experiment with synthesizers and beat boxes. ZAZEN BOYS 4 is the result, and it reigns in all the ideas Mukai has been exploring up to this point into something actually cohesive.
Before VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE released its full-length debut album, Android ~like a house mannequin~, the band did a few live shows with POLYSICS. The one-note, Ritalin-immune influence of VOLA’s tourmates could be felt all over the album, and it didn’t do it any favors.
Some of that unfortunate residue can still be heard on VOLA’s major label debut, Halan’na-ca Darkside, but it’s been mitigated with the tunesmithing from 2005’s brilliant debut, Waiting for My Food. Despite the compact 20-minute length, Halan’na-ca Darkside is actually an incredibly ambitious release.
(I guess you can tell I can’t fucking stand POLYSICS.)
All right — let’s just get the Rufus Wainwright comparisons out of the way.
Matt Alber and Wainwright do share a certain timbral similarities in their voices — rich and crooning. Both are grounded in classical training — Alber probably moreso than Wainwright — and neither is afraid to employ it. And they’re both gay.
But the differences in the details are more striking than the similarities.
Wainwright makes no bones about his fabulousness. (Check out the minor role he plays in the movie Heights.) His music reflects that flamboyance. Alber, on the other hand, comes across as more rustic, even when his music dives deep into the ethereal.
And as convenient as comparing the two may be, it is ultimately an exercise in inaccuracy. The most important commonality they share is a distinct sound.
When I was in high school, sampling was still fairly new technology, and its use in pop music was crude even back then. You need look no further than MC Hammer — his commandeering of Rick James’ "Superfreak" conned a lot of unschooled listeners into thinking wholesale theft of a hook was creatively OK.
I didn’t buy it. I rolled my eyes at my classmates who would light up when someone would play that hook. They would answer, "You can’t touch this". I would answer, "She’s a superfreak, superfreak".
A few years later, Public Enemy and N.W.A. would break samples down further, pasting together aural collages that inched toward something with its own identity. But Hammer and Chuck D and Dr. Dre probably would have never imagined the power of software today or the mashup culture that would emerge.
DJ Greg Gilles, who also goes by the moniker Girl Talk, uses more than 300 samples on his latest album, Feed the Animals. He’s chopped up, sliced and layered the most unlikely sources to create the ultimate conundrum — new music that’s instantly familiar.
One of the highlights of Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue was the simultaneously unhinged and unflappable performance of Sam Amidon. Amidon’s cool delivery of a traditional murder ballad integrated seamlessly with Muhly’s fractured score. It was enough for me to seek out Amidon’s most recent album, All Is Well, which features orchestrations by Muhly.
As much as I liked Mothertongue, I loved what Muhly did for All Is Well.
Amidon’s previous album, But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted, established a template by which traditional material could be warped and re-rendered. All Is Well takes that aesthetic to a whole new level.
When news first broke that Spangle call Lilli line were recording a "Gothic classical album" of "salon music", my first reaction was, "What the hell is ‘Gothic classical music’?"
That’s my classical training getting in the way — there is no such thing as "Gothic classical". There’s Romantic, modern, Baroque, Medieval and Classical (as in 18th century), but Gothic? And "salon music" is just as meaningless, unless "salon" is supposed to be "chamber".
I had to listen to this album when it was released just to figure out what the band meant. As it turns out, "Gothic classical" is actually French impressionist music from the early 20th Century, and ISOLATION does a beautiful job weaving the hazy harmonic language of Erik Satie and Claude Debussy into the band’s usual dreamy pop.