anytime | Tunes Consumed: the Poutine Silver Platter

Archive for the 'anytime' Category

Beirut Soundtracks France: “The Flying Club Cup”

Published by

August 31, 2007 in the french, baroque, anytime, horns, folk, orchestrated and worldly. 1 Comment

Before even dipping into the latest Beirut offering The Flying Club Cup there’s a whole host of things to keep in mind.

For starters, while not a concept album, per se, Zach Condon was explicit with the intent of the album, and that intent is not so distant from Sufjan’s own 50 States project, on a much smaller (practical?) scale. Each song is meant to carry with it the air of a particular city in France, and as Joshua points out in his review, it makes atmospheres come alive with rich vibrancy through orchestration just the way the soundtrack for Amelie was able to. While listening to the album and trying to draw connections, it’s sometimes just as easy as a cursory glance at the track name to know which city it’s attached to, cities like “Nantes” or “Cherbourg” are directly connected to the track names (tracks #2 and #11, respectively), while others require a little more digging. Track #12, for instance commemorates the statue of Saint Appolina held at the church in Locronan, and still others are plays on French words (track #5: La Banlieu -> “banlieue” as French for “suburbs”). Translations aren’t always as fruitful, with tracks like “Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route)” translating to “Last Drink (For The Road)” or track #8 “Forks and Knives (La Fete)” is fêteor celebration.

“Forks and Knives” celebrates with violins, and with easy-come drums that sway to-and-fro, backed by voices that almost cheer in the background, cheering for one old man easing and passing away “he means well, sang ‘I’ve got stories of wine, and of course my childhood forks and knives and then the hospital bed where I turn my life over and over again.” It is homage to the folks who live, breathe, and fade away from the lives of the cities themselves. If it wasn’t for the instrumentals, you might even well up, fortunately it is dosed up with a senile, blissful cheer and you can’t help but sway along.

Interestingly, that last track is followed up by “In The Mausoleum” which stings of piano work reminiscient of Charlie Brown, and for me at least, conjures up in those first few strokes an image of the children scurrying along concrete floors. I also can’t help but think of the famous bass-section keys from “Linus and Lucy“.

If you have a knack for Eastern-European instrumentals like I do, you’ll be delighted to know that Jeremy Barnes (A Hawk and a Hacksaw) is once again a real and strong driving force for the studio work on Club Cup, as is Owen Pallett (of Final Fantasy and Arcade Fire fame) present in supplying guest vocals and even some of the signature string arrangements he’s known for. The trio working in tandem like this is undoubtedly one of the reasons that Beirut, since Gulag has seemed to have aged nearly a decade, successfully generating a palette of decadent tracks, and without compromise can seamlessly move about between the playful and the emotional.

As a final and important note, the cover, lush with old-time beach fun (read: bold stripes and over-clothed women in lawn chairs) was Mr. Condon’s beloved inspiration that hung on his wall during his in-home composing sessions for The Flying Club Cup: “Back in the early 1900s, like the 1910s or 1920s, there used to be this hot air balloon festival in Paris– it’s titled after that and after this very bizarre 1910 photo I found. It’s one of the first color photos ever made, at the World’s Fair, and it…shows all these ancient hot air balloons about to take off in the middle of Paris. I just thought it was the most surreal image I’d seen in a long time.”

listen:
Beirut - Nantes
Beirut - Forks and Knives (La Fete)
Beirut - In The Mausoleum
Vince Guaraldi Trio - Linus and Lucy

The album is slated for an October 9th release on Ba Da Bing records, and Amazon has pre-orders up for when you’re ready.

[header image cropped from this photo]

I am the dotted line.

Published by

tyler

August 10, 2007 in lo-fi, anytime, wordy, fuzz, folk and tunes. 3 Comments

Okay so I’ll admit: I have the habit of moving music (from whatever source) to my iPod as soon as I get it. I feel like if I’m to hear something for the first time, it should be in conditions as close to an isolation chamber as I can manage, and so It’s rare that I feel like auditing something new at home, at the helm of my control tower (as Alley affectionately calls it) where traffic and cat noises abound.

The way I listen to music is not unlike reading an adventure book for the first time. I navigate on whim or fancy, barely taking the time to digest the names what’s being clicked through until something perks my ears, or the adventure suddenly comes to a dead end. It would seem that on my iPod this morning was something like a prophecy.

It’s been within my circle of friends for a while now an intricate series of debates on art, creativity, and essentially what it means to embody culture. Being a mash of artists, philosophers and psychologists, we each tackle these things with a head full of our own ideas, and I usually love what comes of it, but lately it seems that these questions, too, have been headed for dead ends.

After seeing to it that my iPod play something, the first thing that came about was this track by Deer Tick. The words, surreal:

When I talk about these debates we have, I see these dead ends in form of an apparition, which is to say in no form at all. They seem to be headed nowhere because honestly I don’t think anyone is taking them anywhere; part fear, and part fatalism I think we’ve forgotten that life and art are more than simple fill-ins. The mind is more than alchemical, the world is more than mere reductionism, and life is more than simply humble routine.

The trouble I think is in our education: this professional training is more like definitional exercise than mentoring, and when that mentality bleeds into other aspects of life (like the very core of creativity) we somehow think we can change the world by definition. Motile minds we have no more.

Anyway, I know I can only blather in philo-spaek for so long before Matt comes back from vacation and shuns me for being a weirdo. I prefer to talk about something real to me than simply gush about this track, so think about it, and think about this Deer Tick song: “Art Isn’t Real” - it’s more than just strings and strings of words. Pretty strings as they are.

P.S. If you really need a sense of the music, you can go by FEOW!’s description: “[It] is not going to be the record they play at the dance party in the warehouse that you got all done up for. This will be the record you listen to on the drive back, alone and after you’ve sobered up enough to make it.” Personally, it reminds me of a folked-out Black Heart Procession married to a stripped-down, early John Vanderslice.

isolate, (for just a little bit)?:
Deer Tick - Art Isn’t Real
Deer Tick - Standing At The Threshold
Deer Tick - Axe Is Forever

The album, War Elephant lands in just shy of a month on FEOW! Records. You can find Deer Tick’s website here, and then there’s also his Myspace.

Holler, Wild Rose! and Confessions

Published by

tyler

August 8, 2007 in nostalgia, house-special, tall-walls, anytime, reverber, fuzz, 90s and tunes. 1 Comment

This album is fantastic.

From the very second it entered my earphones: John screaming “Holler!” met my ears and my world started to break anchor; at its very onset the drums crash, and the guitar reverbing is already at such a high plateau that you have to wonder where it’ll go from there. You soon find that it’s nothing like your typical build-tension-&-chorus formula, and it has a quality that blocks from the mind these drab flourescent walls, and the damp murky day that awaits beyond them. Even the ache of my growing wisdom teeth is (gratefully) lost somewhere in this noise.

The emotional core of the music will lead you inward, sit you down in a corner of its tangled web, and then toss streamers to the air that sparkle and tint whatever it is your mind might be occupied with. If I were somehow to not have all these duties to work, school, family and friends, I imagine myself sprawled out on the floor enraptured in this & in some kind of trance. Days, weeks would pass by, the world wouldn’t stop spinning by any means, but that wouldn’t matter to me.

I remember this feeling, and I think it was sometime in the 90s, when music was a new phenomenon to me. I’m not ashamed to say that at the time it was Marcy Playground and Radiohead that would take me places, and not that I’m trying to draw stylistic parallels here, but it brings me back to that feeling. Those were the days when there wasn’t a thing on my mind that dwelled outside my small hometown; those truly were weightless days.

–

Confession: It’s not always easy maintain this blog, constantly ebbing and flowing between excitement and boredom, yet always searching for the next great tune to indulge in and then pass on. It’s sort of my duty (and passion) now to keep on the fringe, and sort through the mess of new music. I’d say probably 90% of the time that I feel like a kid at a candy factory, and the rest of the time I feel kind of off-put asking myself all sorts of “whys” and “what-fors”.

Now, I do a lot of baking & cooking (stay with me here), probably more than the average 21 year-old college student, but I only cook when there’s an absolute need, a desire that burbles up from my gut. When I do cook, I like to cook up the most elaborate dishes, and Alley helps quite a bit with that and her worldly cuisine. I can make the meanest German chocolate cake, but I imagine sometimes that if I were to cook always, daily, and without that inner tension, would it just be a job, and would flavour start to fade from everything I taste?

I sometimes get that fear with music, the sweetest of all candies, by merely writing in this space. When I find something like this music here, and it really makes me feel something; it takes me both backwards and forwards, then I really know what I’m in it for. It’s the delight, the pleasure, the feeling, and to write about it, as hard as it is to express sometimes, I’m thankful for that too.

I wonder, who else has to go through this, too?

–

Holler, Wild Rose! has this CD, you know? How about you check out this sampling of my favourite tracks from Our Little Hymnal, and then go buy it in September if you like it. You can keep up to date over at their home on the web, even.

indulge?
Holler, Wild Rose! - Mercy Beat
Holler, Wild Rose! - Holler, Wild Rose!
Holler, Wild Rose! - Captive Train