Tag: Indie

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Albums

Best albums of 2010: #2 Broken Bells “Broken Bells”

Broken Bells is a collaborative project between The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and über-producer/musician, Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). I first came across Burton’s work care of his production efforts on the second Gorillaz long player, but I really stood up and took notice when he recorded an album with Cee Lo Green under the moniker Gnarls Barkley. Of course, I was already late to party at that point. Danger Mouse had already snagged the listening public’s attention a few years earlier with “The Grey album”, his infamous mashup of the obvious classic albums by Jay-Z and The Beatles. After the success of Gnarls Barkley, Burton was called in to produce albums by The Black Keys, Norah Jones, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, and Beck. For a while there, it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, including this album with James Mercer as Broken Bells.

In the case of Mercer and his band The Shins, on the other hand, I picked up on them very early on, well before they received the plug by Natalie Portman’s character in the film, “Garden state”, though, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her bold proclamation at the time. I never saw their music as life-changing but I definitely enjoyed it. Interestingly, I became a bigger fan of The Shins after listening to Broken Bells. It was as if his collaboration with Brian Burton opened my eyes to Mercer’s talents as a songwriter. Another golden win for Burton, I guess.

Indeed, I took to “Broken Bells” immediately, much like I did with The Postal Service’s 2003 classic, “Give up”, an album to which I’ve often compared this one. It bears the same mélange of organic and electronic sounds but where that album pushed boldly forward into futuristic space, “Broken Bells” felt more retro. Yes, there are nods towards science fiction but it isn’t the future we envision today, rather, it’s the present day that we imagined in the past. On many of the songs, Burton and Mercer seem to encapsulate the listener on a silver screen era rocket ship, jettison all of the technical laws of space travel since discovered, and return us to the romance of the thing.

This is the way of the entire album. It sounded like no other music being made in 2010, yet each song sounded instantly familiar, like you grew up listening to Broken Bells’ remixes of the music to which your parents’ parents listened. It is ten tracks of utter brilliance and yes, romance, employing all the cannons in their symphonic arsenal, reinventing the songs and their structures at a whim, a well-placed horn blast here and a shock of string flourish there, like the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting that shouldn’t work but does. You listen to it and find your way to the end of the album, not knowing how you got there, not really knowing anything except that you want to restart it all over again.

In case you haven’t listened to the whole thing already, here are my three picks for you off the album worth listening to right now.

“The ghost inside”: We start things off four tracks in. “Just like a whiskey bottle, drained on the floor. She got no future, just a life to endure.” The heavy lyrical themes of isolation and haunted introspection are subverted by falsetto vocals, handclaps, humming bass lines, haunting melodic synths, it all sounds so dark and disco, you just need to add smoke machine and the words fade away.

“Vaporize”: Track two starts off sounding like it could be an early Shins track, all Mercer and acoustic strumming, until the vibrating organs and that dirty, hammer-down rhythm kicks in and the speakers low end blow out like beautiful confetti. The words, though, remain thoroughly Mercer. “What amounts to a dream anymore? A crude device, a veil on our eyes.” The ideas dance and dare, play upon depth and angle slyly within the melody, unique and happily hummable.

“The high road”: My very favourite song from 2010 starts with pixelated frequencies that melt into a sliding mellow groove complete with jiving handclaps and there’s that wicked singalong bridge that leads you out of the wilderness. “The high road is hard to find, a detour in your new life. Tell all of your friends goodbye.” This is the opening track on the album and does a great job setting the stage for the tracks to follow. I’ve written before that this is hipster funk for martians but I don’t think this precludes us mere mortals from getting on the bus.

Stay tuned for album #1. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:

10. Diamond Rings “Special affections”
9. Bedouin Soundclash “Light the horizon”
8. LCD Soundsystem “This is happening”
7. The Drums “The Drums”
6. The New Pornographers “Together”
5. Stars “The five ghosts”
4. The Radio Dept. “Clinging to a scheme”
3. The National “High violet”

You can also check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2020: #18 Bright Eyes “Mariana trench”

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Conor Oberst started out releasing music under the Bright Eyes name way back in 1998, a year after his previous band, Commander Venus, disbanded. It really all began as a solo project, with Oberst bringing in different musicians to help out with recording and live performances, but a trio eventually coalesced, with multi-instrumentalists, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott rounding things out. They were quite prolific in 2000s, releasing eight studio albums through to the end of that decade, including two (plus a live album) in 2005 alone. After one more album in 2011, the group went on hiatus for nine years before releasing the “Down in the weeds, where the world once was”, the album on which this song appears, in August 2020.

I was quite aware of Bright Eyes and their music throughout most of their pre-hiatus period and even saw them once (perhaps twice, if you count Conor Oberst solo). And though I tried a few times, I could never really get into them. But as I wrote when this last album appeared at number eight on my Best albums of 2020 list, I found a connection here that I didn’t have with Bright Eyes’s previous work. I still haven’t made the time to go back through their previous work to see if I had been wrong about it all along or if it would just be this one album for me. However, I can say that the sentiments with “Down in the weeds” matched my mood and that generality that I witnessed with the few people I was able to relate with in the early days of the pandemic.

“Well, they better save some space for me
In that growing cottage industry
Where selfishness is currency
People spend more than they make”

These are the words that kickstart track four and the fourth single to be released in advance of the album. It’s equally a commentary on the state of things, our commentator’s acknowledgement of his place in it all, and how he’s contributed to it. And yet, as meagre as the words are, the music travels in the other direction, looking instead to raise spirits rather than dampen them. It’s upbeat and catchy, the drums chug along and the bassline dances all around it, and Jessca Hoop’s appearance on backup vocals serves to lighten Oberst’s tone with her harmonies. And I just love the singalong chorus and the way it makes you look at you and me with a knowing smile and a questioning glance.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2013: #24 Steve Mason “Oh my Lord”

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My maxim for a number of years now has been “So much music, so little time.” As focused as I’ve been over the last couple of decades on keeping on top of the best music available, rather than settling in on the heap of proven music already in my collection, I often find myself behind and missing out on some great releases. Just as an example, I have a running playlist for which I post a part every quarter year, that includes songs from some of my favourite releases for those three months, but inevitably I discover a song or album or EP after the fact that I could have easily included.

Steve Mason’s brilliant sophomore solo album, “Monkey minds in the devil’s time”, was one of those albums that I originally missed out on when it was originally released in March 2013. I came upon it months later, kicked myself after listening to it and catching interest mere moments after the spoken word intro faded into the reverberating and haunting “Lie awake”. And even now, I often lose sight of how compelling of a listen it is, until I come around to it again. Thank goodness I have these lists that I create that force me to go back and revisit all the music I’ve loved over the years.

…But I am digressing…

In the decade that passed after Steve Mason abdicated his post as frontman of indie buzz group, The Beta Band, he suffered bouts of poverty and depression, released a variety of material under multiple pseudonyms, and most importantly, seemingly rediscovered his joy for writing new music. And thank goodness for such small mercies. “Oh my lord”, the first proper single off of “Monkey minds in the devil’s time”, appeals to my penchant and weakness for a good groove. The piano lays a jaunty riff and the drum beat jives easily with the laid back bass line while Mason leaves it all laid bare, a soulful turn on vocals. It just bleeds old-school psychedelic blues rock, à la Primal Scream’s “Give out but don’t give up”, but with more sincerity.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2013 list, click here.