In my last CCoB post, I likened the way they built their compositions to a game of Jenga–elements are added then removed and placed elsewhere until they can go no higher (higher in terms of form, not in terms of emotional climax, which they don’t trouble themselves with).
On GIVING (their first release after being brought to a wider audience by Volcano Choir, the band they’re in with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon) the game is a little more direct.
The pieces aren’t as oddly shaped as on Birds, nor do they shy away from sudden dynamic shifts like their brothers on the other end of post rock, Explosions in the Sky. In fact, the end of “Lawns” might even find a place in a movie trailer some day—but for an art house indie drama rather than a football movie.
That’s not to suggest (as some have) that GIVING finds CCoB taking the easy way out. There’s still plenty avant-garde textures: “Lawns” itself has a strange vocal part created on a sampler. “Vorms” features an interlude of no fewer than a dozen looped instrument).
In the end, GIVING is just as masterfully crafted as Birds, deciding instead to use combine that experimentation with more immediacy.
I got through about ten minutes of this record without realizing it was playing at the wrong speed.
Even with as long as I’ve listened to Fugazi, I am almost completely unfamiliar with Red Medicine. In fact, the only thing I hear when I think of the album is the super-gained choppy intro and the chorus of opener Do You Like Me? Purchasing the vinyl (and cassette! Gotta love overstock on record companies’ websites) was an act intended to force me to spend time with the record. Well, that and to fill in the two gaps in my collection (Steady Diet of Nothing, I’m coming for you).
Economics teaches us that the more abundant something is, the less appealing we will find it. For example, if you eat one cookie, it will be delicious, but if you eat 30 cookies, you will soon be sick of cookies. For another example, the Flaming Lips released their last record in 2009. Since then, they have released a song-for-song remake of The Dark Side of the Moon, a split with Neon Indian, a USB exclusive track available only inside of a marijuana flavored gummy skull, a 70 minute, 13 track collection of collaborations with everyone imaginable, covers of songs by Madonna, The Beatles, and more, a compilation of their first several records (along with those same vinyl reissues), a URL-exclusive twenty-four hour long psych-freakout track, twelve YouTube videos meant to be played simultaneously, live performances of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi in full, assorted car commercial singles, Wayne Coyne’s constant twitter feed, and on and on and on and on and on…
So, economically speaking, The Terror should simply fade in to the constant barrage of nonsense that Wayne Coyne & Co. is constantly spouting out.
But I guess The Flaming Lips don’t understand economics very well.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Fugazi post for tonight’s purchase.
Any new Radiohead-related release is always treated with a heavily stirred mix of eagerness and dread. One the one hand, Radiohead (or Thom solo) has never released anything that was anything less than stunning (Pablo Honey excepting, and I’ll still fight anyone who knocks Hail to the Thief). But every time they release any new material, pressing play is always preceded by a moment of, “what if this is it? What if their talent has run out? What if this is the one where Thom gets too out there?” And given that two of my favorite releases of the two past years were the creeping, skittering King of Limbs and Nigel Godrich’s moody, grooving Ultraísta, my hopes for Amok were high. So high in fact that I purchased the record without being fully convinced that it was worth the money beforehand.
For a while, I held the assumption that everything Animal Collective did before Strawberry Jam was impenetrably avant garde, stomping along like some pagan ritual that had more to do with hollering through synth noises than making anything concerned with the traditional definition of music, let alone pop music. Then, it came to my attention that they had at one point made an acoustic album, and curiosity bade me to seek it out.
If the 1s and 0s used to encode written text on the internet were limited resources, then those specifically allocated for writing about Can (the rock face of krautrock) would be in short supply.