(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)
Artist: Frightened Rabbit Album Title: The midnight organ fight Year released: 2008 Year reissued: 2018 Details: Heavyweight vinyl, 10th anniversary edition
The skinny: Here’s another record, along with the Ride record I featured last weekend in this space, that I purchased during my Boxing Day sales exploits. There’s not a lot of photos to share. It’s a pretty bare bones release but a great one nonetheless. In 2018, Frightened Rabbit released this 10th anniversary pressing of their critically-acclaimed, second album, “The midnight organ fight”. They had also arranged a tribute recording of it by friends of the band (later released the following year) and were also in the midst of celebrating the anniversary with a tour when frontman Scott Hutchison went missing. Unfortunately, he was found the next day drowned. The hype sticker on the cover of this release has the NME claiming the album as “utterly beautiful, scathingly honest, darkly hilarious, and impossibly grandiose”. It is all that but like all of Frightened Rabbit’s music in hindsight, it’s all quite heartbreaking.
Sit right back on that comfy white leather sectional there and let me tell you the tales of all my previous dwellings. Not where we currently sit in the lovely home that was built for us out in the suburbs over twelve years ago, where we saw a community rise up around us, displacing wetland flora and fauna and welcoming the usual suburban wildlife.
No. I’m talking about the litany of apartments, starting with the two bedroom unit on the third floor of a low rise, where the radiator heating never truly worked and our landlords would hand us electrical heaters to supplement. And before that, the low rent, basement apartment in which we could always hear our landlords yelling at each other above us. The beautiful but tiny, tiny, tiny one in Sandy Hill (an area that is a mix of students and embassies) that was our first apartment in Ottawa, where my wife wrote countless papers for her masters degree and I tried not to get in her way.
And prior to that, a one-bedroom in Ronces in Toronto, the only apartment in which I lived alone, well, not alone, truly, because my cat Lucy spent more time there than I did. Then, there was the two-bedroom, railroad style apartment that I lived in for two years at Bathurst and St Clair with two different roommates, Ryan and Chrissy, consecutively, not concurrently. And I’ll stop this list with Armenia, the nickname me and my roommates gave the three-bedroom apartment that we all lived in just off campus to finish off our degrees in at York University. That place that saw more than its fair share of parties, laughter, and heartbreak.
“July! July!” is track three on The Decemberists’ brilliant debut album, “Castaways and cutouts” and it is, reportedly, Colin Meloy doing what I just did there but in song form and only speaking about one of the places in which he lived.
“This is the story of the road that goes to my house
And what ghosts there do remain
And all the troughs that run the length and breadth of my house
And the chickens how they rattle chicken chains“
Colin Meloy has said that the song is about the place he was living in at the time of writing for this first album and that the place was an old slaughterhouse. That he imagined it was haunted by the ghosts of the chickens that had lost their lives there and that he wrote about it could be a nod to Neutral Milk Hotel, a band with whom The Decemberists were certainly oft compared in their early days, and their song, “Ghost”, off “In the aeroplane over the sea”. But Meloy and his Decemberists weren’t ever just about simple mimicry. They have always added their own touch and twist to the legends and the traditions that they mined.
“And we’ll remember this when we are old and ancient
Though the specifics might be vague
And I’ll say your camisole was sprightly light magenta
When in fact it was a nappy blueish grey“
Here, Meloy plays on memories and how we distort them over time. Our lense on the past changes with the winds of time, rosy and cheerful or black and bleak, depending on our mood or character. Meloy is obviously of the former, choosing the ‘sprightly’ remembrance over the ‘nappy’. He and his players accompany the words with only peppy drumming for the first few bars and then the organs kick in for a wild dance. Yeah, for a song about chicken ghosts and gut shot, crooked French Canadians, it’s a chipper track, perhaps the most upbeat track on the album, and all tied up neatly in a bow at just under three minutes.
Enjoy your Saturday all!
For the rest of the Best tunes of 2002 list, click here.
Back in 2017, Phoebe Bridgers’ debut album, “Stranger in the alps”, just eked its way into my top ten albums for the year. Since then, however, the album has grown in my esteem and if I had to redo the list, it might find its way a few spots higher. Bridgers, herself, has also become a bigger name, her indie cred seemingly as impervious as her keen ability to write songs and to turn any project she has a hand in to gold. Last year, for instance, she formed a supergroup of sorts with two other indie ‘it’ ladies, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and released a six song EP under the name “boygenius”. She also seemed to be popping up quite regularly in my social media feeds and in news items on the music sites I frequent with other one-off collaborations, live performances or otherwise. Then, out of nowhere, this past January saw her announce a project with Conor Oberst (!) and the immediate, digital release of the eponymously named “Better Oblivion Community Center”.
To be honest, Oberst has never been a favourite of mine, though I have tried many times, sampling his solo work under his own name or the Bright Eyes moniker, and even his early punk band Desaparecidos. Yet when I gave this album a go, it sounded like his voice had found a home next to Bridgers’, and I immediately set myself to work trying to find a copy of it on vinyl. It wasn’t an easy task. With the usual pressing woes and delays and the seemingly incredible demand for it, the record wasn’t easily found. But that only made my success in finally obtaining it that much more sweet. Since then, it’s quite likely the new wax that has frequented my platter the most this year.
“Better Oblivion Community Center” is more than two like minded indie folk singer/songwriters working together. Despite their differences in backgrounds, experiences, and age, their work on this album suggests they are bringing the best out in each other, stretching each out of their collective comfort zones. Backed by usual collaborating musicians from both camps, along with contributions by members of Dawes and Yeah Yeahs Yeahs, Bridgers and Oberst have produced a ten song collection that sometimes does but doesn’t always jive with either of their past works. Yet all of it is great.
Have a listen to my three picks for you below and give me your thoughts.
“Service road”: Oberst starts this one off, singing solo over an introverted acoustic strum. “You should really call your brother. Someone put up a picture where he can’t stand.” This leads credence to the theory that it was inspired by his brother, who basically drank himself to death. But Oberst isn’t alone here. Bridgers joins him after the first verse and like you’ll find elsewhere on the album, their voices are stunning together. They sing as one, much like they wrote all the songs, and in this way, they are stronger, giving hope to the universal grief. And man, when Bridgers sings “who are you” at the choruses, it sends shivers.
“Didn’t know what I was in for”: Track one on the album was also the first one written for the project. Bridgers sings the first two verses of the song, it sounding very much like something off her solo album, struggling with herself and everything she sees around her. “My telephone, it doesn’t have a camera. If it did I’d take a picture of myself. If it did I’d take a picture of the water and the man on the offramp, holding up the sign that’s asking me for help.” And again, it all changes when, this time, Oberst joins her, and you realize it’s going to be very different this time around. The acoustic that is so prevalent at the beginning seems to take a backseat to the highly affected guitar effects that had threatened to be mainly decoration, the drums kick in and there’s momentary bliss. Yeah, it all seems so hopeless again at the end but there is something so thrilling in it all.
“Dylan Thomas”: The project’s second single and first to be released off the record also happened to be the final one written for it. By both accounts, it came the easiest. Named for a Welsh poet by whom there was a book in the house the album was recorded, the song is a catchy kick at the state of politics. Indeed, it is much like the showboating politicians they are raking, using shiny confetti to thinly obscure their message. It’s a jangly rocker. It’s a fun song to bop to. It’s Oberst and Bridgers singing together as they do through most of the album, a two-pronged assault, each highlighting the other’s text in bright yellow. In the end, it’s about getting all too comfortable with the uncomfortable. “I’m getting used to these dizzy spells. I’m taking a shower at the Bates Motel. I’m getting greedy with this private hell. I’ll go it alone, but that’s just as well.” …And with that, happy new year folks!
In case you missed them, here are the previous albums in this list:
My (life in) music lists 