Second Thoughts

Just under the midnight wire.

5. Stephen Malkmus - Face the Truth
This may be the surprising album on my top ten; it surprises me. I heard this album once or twice and it didn’t affect me very much--it didn’t have enough hooks to make a huge impression, and the songs were just strange enough to be a bit offsetting. The first song was such an odd combination of weirdo guitar work and falsetto repetitions that I kept skipping it. I put it away for awhile and started playing the album in the background when I was reading or cleaning my room. It wasn’t compelling enough for sitting down and concentrating on intensely, but it wasn’t easily swallowed as a categorizable, middle-of-the-road sort of pop record. But it was in this liminal space that the album began working on my psyche. Lyrics I couldn’t consciously remember hearing would end up in my thinking; parts of the album that frustrated me would end up as melodies I would strain to remember and be unable to place. Then, all at once, the whole thing made sense. The tiny guitar riff at the end of “I’ve Hardly Been” was suddenly immensely interesting; “Freeze the Saints” was suddenly a comforting song about feeling feeble towards a desire to love; all the electronic experimentation became a wonderful respite from the thickness of the melodies; the lyric “You’re a maker of minor modern masterpieces for the untrained eye” made sense. I will concede that Malkmus gives in to his indulgences more than once: the waa-waa guitar stuff at the beginning of “Kindling for the Master” can get annoying--but it turns into such a great song. And the 8-minute long guitar jammy thing in the middle is probably a bit much. But I am one who really hates jam-band luxuriating, and I am willing to give it to him. It could be that I have only a cursory interaction with Pavement and so this style was all new to me, but this album went from vaguely interesting to something which I intensely loved and understood overnight.

4. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
It didn’t take long for this album to floor me--actually, it was the first measure, when the drummer lays down a beat which claims for itself an expansive landscape the size of Montana, and never concedes an inch back. Instantly I was in a frozen tundra of ghosts and howling wolfs and open spaces, a place away from civilization, where I had to reach the end of myself by running, away, “farther than guns will go.” Away from the modern world and all of its complexities, where I am a hero in the daylight and a villain at night. What I’m trying to say is that this is an album of metaphors, harsh and potent ones, and it works marvelously, it transcends the world of metaphors, it feels intensely real. This album reminds me that society and the individual is not completely reconcilable, that in the end, it’s impossible to avoid rejecting it. It reminds me that God is distant. At the same time, the album forced me to examine what it is to love someone, to know that loving them means a desire to escape away into a lonely place, and that loving them means colliding with them in ways that seem strange and awful, going into ones darkest places and believing that there is a light to be found in the center of it, a light which comes from putting oneself aside long enough to care deeply for another person, as Tennessee Williams said it. And beyond all of it, my God, the music is incredible and anthemic and emotional. There’s nothing more to say.

3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
At first, this album came across as really silly and a lot of fun (see the first song, which sounds nothing like the rest of the album, though I don’t think it’s as bad as Pitchfork implied). I started playing the album every time I felt like being in an indie-pop sort of good mood, which was often since it was my first month in New York and I had no responsible plans for my life. Obviously, nobody has any idea what the lead singer is saying in any remote way, and that was perfect. So I started playing it in my empty apartment (no time and/or money for furniture) every morning and singing along in non-descript strings of vaguely english-sounding words. I picked out a few things “You look a bit like coffee, and you taste a bit like me” or “You look like David Bowie, have you nothing new to show me?”, which was basically fun nonsense. Oh, and “Who--Will get me to party? Who--do I have yet to meet?”--that, for me, was the essence of summer in New York: ending up at parties full of Spanish people and finding that I speak it fluently, wandering into apartments in Brooklyn which were hollowed-out storefronts and seeing a gentlemen in a bee costume sing pop melodies over homemade electronic beats..and finding out that there was a free Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show on a pier with $3 beer and $1 hot dogs with the sunset and the Brooklyn bridge in the background. I still don’t know what he sings about, but I really don’t want to know, and of what I’ve read it’s all pretty strange and oblique--it’s not the point. All of the songs on this album are so carefully put together, so subtly designed to grow with age, not immensely astounding at any particular point, but on the whole way above the fray, and so irresistibly sing-alongable despite the impossibility of discerning the lyrics. For me, it was all about the mood they set, and the importance of it being a nonsense-lyrics soundtrack to my life.

2. Andrew Bird - Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs
This is an album that, for some reason, made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me. It must be one of those cases when idiosyncrasies align, or something like that. Most people like it and obviously it’s a masterful album, but I literally could not stop listening to the songs on this album since I first listened to it in February, and I don’t understand why nobody else has the same problem. Every season of the year, this album has made immense sense. The whole thing pulses with this magnetic precision, these masterful arrangements, impeccable songwriting, and abstruse lyrics that make sense on a subconscious level. I have tried to dismantle all of these songs and I can’t “figure them out”, which is when, I think, a song can begin to lose its appeal. Every time I try I get turned around and sent in a different direction. The album has a whimsy, a humor, a wisdom, a poetic genius. I love the mathematical aspects of this album, both in the scientific way the music sounds to the lyrics taking about ones and zeros and GPS. At the same time, the entire project seems effortless, like it’s just the result of a set of formulas that Andrew Bird dreamed up. In fact, that’s the sense his live show gave: all the songs sounded different, way different, so they were sometimes only recognizable by the actual words of the lyrics. All the arrangements were changed and they kept changing, the melodies interacting and harmonizing on the fly. It was absolutely amazing, and I think that these songs are really just complicated formulas that are worked out, and so he just plugs in some different ideas and the thing comes out differently every time. Andrew Bird operates in a mathematical world of music, on a different plane. I am completely convinced that he is a genius.

1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
This album came out of nowhere and everywhere. I mean, I liked Seven Swans and Michigan was a pretty great album. I liked the literary nature of his approach, his subtle quietness, the way he possessed a disarming honesty in his approach to music. And the first time I went through this one, it sounded about the same. And also the second and third time, despite the many times that Austin would get serious and happy in such alarming proximities while playing this album all spring. It just didn’t click, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know when it began to click, either. I know it had something to do with leaving Chicago and treking across the country. It might have been the chill I started to feel when the opening chords of the album would play, the way they felt like a desert at night. Or, when I listened to “John Wayne Gacy” in the dark and Sufjan’s frail voice cried “Oh my God.” Or the way “Casimir Pulaski Day” became a perfect evocation of growing up in the magical, disquieting contradiction of church youth groups. Or the way “Chicago” conjured up my own trip across the country, when “I drove to New York / in a van with my friend.” Or the moment the female vocalist begins harmonizing in “The Seers Tower,” and the persistence of a gentle symbol builds into a some kind of quiet frenzy. This album’s gift is the way it builds and builds into a collective experience, as each member of the cast joins in, infusing stories and myths, spirituality and religion, death and celebration. Listening to this album, for once I feel some pride in that abstract idea of Americana. This is the kind of album that speaks in many voices, and Sufjan’s gift is his ability to conduct and orchestrate and channel all of that. This is not an album that would have made any sense to me at a younger age. At 74 minutes long, it is sprawling and indulgent, but each moment of sprawl doesn’t feel superfluous, it feels real and correct and a metaphor for the intersections of ethnicity, assimilation, guilt, democracy, ideals, religion, urbanity, imagination, and fear that is the American contradiction. Music just doesn't ever do this sort of thing. An album like this causes America to make sense. I think that’s what he’s trying to do. That’s meant a lot to me.