Future Islands's "An Apology"

I have a theory about listening to New Order: it is really good for you! If you came to me and said, "Corey, 98% of the good music made in the last thirty years is a direct result of people listening to New Order," I would say, "You're probably right." (I would also say, "HEY, WHO'S WRITING THE BLOG HERE, PROFESSOR STATISTICS??") Baltimore's Future Islands know what you're talking about, too, and thank the maker for that.

I've been thinking for a while on which song to write about when holding up to you the band's latest effort, In Evening Air, as the most exciting record I've heard in 2010. Should it be "Swept Inside," the track that best crystallizes the band's update of New Order, built upon a Peter Hook-style is-that-a-bass-or-guitar hook and an absolutely transcendent outro (and which begs for a 12" extended cut, so that the simple melody can go on forever and ever)? Or should it be "Long Flight," which sees synths interlocking with that bass again, all tension and all building to vocalist Samuel T. Herring's flooring outburst in the song's final seconds? Maybe "Inch of Dust," replete with the absolutely huge beat that drives its themes of loss and reconnection right through your heart via your hips?

I suppose, though, that it has to be "An Apology". (Although, really I suppose that I put a couple of extra tracks at the bottom of this post, because who cares let's get crazy!). Like most of the tracks on the record, it's a song based on a slow build, simple drum programming letting the instruments breathe and create a sense of insistency and burning urgency. That's one of the reasons it's so difficult to pinpoint one song to highlight from In Evening Air -- the album works so well as a whole, each song relying heavily on mood and tone to tunnel its way into your brain, where it will make camp and become your new landlord.

"An Apology" lets Herring get his Tom Waits on, if Tom Waits had immersed himself in the Factory Records scene of the 1980s, instead of New Orleans roots music. Herring's vocals here have what you might call "texture". His lungs are crawling out of his throat. When he hits the refrain -- "so far away / so far away" -- I feel like my trachea's about to rip itself to shreds by proximity. In other words, he's got a knack for a convincing delivery. There's heartbreak, here. His voice inflates those simple lyrics to a place that makes them the most important, the most critical sentiment he could utter, and we believe the authenticity coming through the microphone. It's as real as it gets for us, too.

Crucially, Herring doesn't always sing this way. In Evening Air shows him in perfect control, understated when the mood suits him and confident enough in his melodies not to feel the need to max out the levels on every track. He lets the band guide him to where he needs to be. Listen to that distorted squall that caps out "An Apology," and you hear a group of musicians perfectly attuned to one another, each member of the band contributing to a deceptively complex blanket of sound that evokes their desired mood utterly and entirely. I'm on board for the duration.






--Corey

How to Dress Well's "Suicide Dream 2"

Of course I would love music made by someone called How to Dress Well. Other bands I would like: How to Cook with Various Gravies; How to Talk About Literature At Least as Often as You Talk About Television; How to Shut Up Your Child on the Metro Train and Just Please Get Off Before the Zoo So You Stop Breathing On Me With Your Mouth Just Please. These are all important things to learn to do!

How To Dress Well is actually just a dude named Tom Krell, who lives in a suburb of New Jersey called "Brooklyn". He also apparently sometimes lives in Cologne, Germany, where he translates post-Kantian philosophy (this is not an oblique joke regarding hipsters in Brooklyn; he actually sometimes lives in Cologne, Germany, where he translates post-Kantian philosophy). I assume he does not wear pleated pants.

What he does do is create the kind of bedroom-electro-R&B that tricks my brain into thinking I've just swallowed twenty ounces of codeine. The track above, "Suicide Dream 2," is from a free EP recently posted to his blog -- you can download 7 of these EPs there, in fact, though he also includes a convenient "pay" option (take that, conscience!). "Suicide Dream 2" is the kind of soulful, aching song that hooks you slowly, pulling you into its swirling folds with a force subtle enough that you almost don't notice that you're up at 2 AM, still listening to it on repeat. I'm doing that now, by the way, as I write this. How could I not?

I felt the same way when I first heard Bon Iver in 2007, and Tom Krell's music has more in common with Justin Vernon's than you might think. The former locked himself up -- infamously, now -- in a Wisconsin cabin to record For Emma, Forever Ago, and Krell's going it alone, too. The two men share a falsetto almost shameful in its decadent beauty (though both can hit those low notes when the occasion calls, as it does in the latter half of this track). Both, too, have much of the impact of their music rooted in a lo-fi appeal, the tinny chimes of Vernon's resonator guitar in "Skinny Love" and the way Krell's loops go into the red in "Suicide Dream 2," the final notes of each keyboard swell fraying and spinning away into distortion. It's music intimate and haunting, the kind of thing you feel you should listen to through a cracked door or with your ear to the wall of the next room, hoping that whoever's making these sounds will keep going, unaware.

--Corey

rag & bone, Spring/Summer 2010

When OYL hero Matt Berninger employs his listener to "cover me in rag and bone" in a recent song, I can't confirm that he's talking about the increasingly popular design company. Probably he's not, and probably he's just hinting at a little self-destructive impulse, asking someone to just please slather him with trash and compost (the song's called "Sorrow," after all). Still, you never know -- dude's a well-dressed man.

rag & bone (caps lock must be turned off for the name, lest we slip into HEDONISTIC EXCESS) has been around for almost a decade now, racking up attention and awards. They're based out of, who knew, New York, though they started in the distant borough of Kentucky (bridge-and-tunnel-and-systemic-economic-disenfranchisement crowd). What they do, more or less, is the kind of disarmingly simple, vaguely militaristic, old London-inspired clothing that's the tip of everyone's bowler at the moment.





Check the rolled trousers, perfect for sidestepping the human waste of the lower classes on High Street (can a bloke just get to the bloody haberdashery, please?!). I love most of the pieces in their newest collection, though I'm not quite sure they fit the company's manifesto of making clothing for the day-to-day needs of the masses. Don't be fooled by the Holmesian (Sherlock, not Oliver Wendall) affectations, here. After all, these are Southern boys at heart, with no "formal fashion training" who made a start-up company and saw wild success, in a finely American pull-up-your-preposterously-expensive-bootstraps tradition. That being said, I'd feel a little ostentatious in some of these garments, which is to say they're erring on the side of high fashion rather than friendly consumption (navy tailcoat, anyone?) -- but then again, runway shows have their own goals and designs (sorry), while storefront operations have theirs.

What I do like are the shirts. I would wear these shirts. Unfortunately, they are for ladies. You might not know it at first, since rag & bone's military or blue collar bent shows up in its women's line, as well. Still, the designs -- simple, classic Americana -- are enviable, even for a hypermasculine, testosterone-drenched, football-leather-chewing man like myself:




That first shirt is made of chambray (or cambric), a tough but soft classic workshirt fabric that I'm happy to see coming back around to collections from the runways to rag & bone to J. Crew and Gap. Steve McQueen would be proud of rag & bone here, if Steve McQueen was into ambiguously crossdressing. Were he alive today, he just might have been, folks, he just might have been.

Ugly Casanova's "Lay Me Down"

Isaac Brock is busy. Modest Mouse, a popular indie rock band who have sold some records, are headlining just about every festival this summer (unless their ARCHENEMIES PAVEMENT are headlining them, instead*). He devotes a large amount of time to sitting for portraits with wild boars, so that the mayor of Portland, America's largest combination Bike Rack Whole Foods, can have some art to hang in his office. When he has any time left over from all of this exertion, he spends it talking to his team of Superlawyers, who he keeps in constant employ in order to properly restrain me from contacting him directly in pursuit of a full-body latex cast to serve as the new centerpiece for the shrine I keep for him in my closet.

*note: I am completely willing to take Isaac Brock and Stephen Malkmus out to dinner in order to help them lay to rest this legendary and not at all completely fabricated archrivalry.

Apparently, Brock has time to write songs, too. When I heard the news that Ugly Casanova, Brock's long-dormant side project, would contribute 8 new songs to the soundtrack of a film, I was so excited that I tweeted about it in all caps. (ALL RIGHT, IT'S HARD TO PROPERLY SHOW ENTHUSIASM IN THE MODERN INTERNET AGE, OK?!!?! TRUST ME I WAS PUMPED.) The film in question is 180 South, a documentary about surfing and x-treme nature sports in Patagonia, all common themes to Modest Mouse's music (because, what?). Still, Brock could do the soundtrack for Sex in the City 3: Carrie Saves Kabul and I'd still buy three copies on compact disc.

"Lay Me Down," the first officially released track from the upcoming album, shows Brock comfortably settling back into Sharpen Your Teeth territory -- back porch banjo, ramshackle percussion, some trumpet here and there. This is Brock living his toothless woodsman dream, something from which he usually restrains himself in Modest Mouse, at least slightly ("Devil's Workday" and "So Much Beauty in Dirt" come to mind as the strongest breaches in the dam). Of course, the most effective instrument here is Brock's voice, which becomes increasingly unhinged as the song goes on. "Blisters on my feet" become "blisters on my heart," and soon the words become unintelligible altogether, Brock getting blisters on his throat from barking Ugly Casanova back into existence. Excuse me while I go light some incense for the shrine.

--Corey