Well, kind of – somewhat to my relief, it wasn’t the full-on interview treatment that Raina got, so I didn’t talk have to talk about myself much.  Instead, I participated as a guest on a Spotcast episode of Euge’s People You Don’t Know site, in which he talks with someone about a particular topic.  In this case, we talked about U2.  I’ve been told it’s interesting and that I’m speaking in “my nervous voice.”  I’m not sure what that means.

Give it a listen here.

Well, you may know her, but she’s one of the first guests on our friend Eugene’s new podcast interview site, People You Don’t Know.  Here’s his explanation of the site: 

PYDK is a semi-professional interview show where I talk to normal, everyday people about their story, where they’re from, how they got to where they are now, and their views, opinions, and beliefs on politics, culture, media, art, or anything else that comes to mind. At the end of each interview, they recommend someone else I don’t know who’d be interesting to talk to.

To be completely honest, I was initially skeptical about how much entertainment value he might be able to squeeze out of semi-random people in this format.  But I’ve since listened to every one of these podcasts so far, and each is compelling in its own way, due in equal parts to the folks being interviewed and Euge’s engaging, creative interviewing style.  The guy’s cranking them out at an amazing pace, too.

Raina’s interview (about librarians, feminism, and the phenomenon of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl) is here.

And a sprint to the finish (which means I’m going proofread-free)!

Vampire Weekend – s/t
The members of Vampire Weekend just dare you to hate them.  They’re a bunch of well-educated, upper-class guys who look less “amiable, troubled Wes Anderson artiste wannabes” and more “obnoxious, privileged Whit Stillman bores”.  They dabble in African music that seems more derived from Paul Simon, David Byrne and Peter Gabriel than from any firsthand experience.  Then there’s that name… that ridiculous name.

But as they throw this stuff in your face, it’s damn near impossible to not like them.  They’re too generous with the hooks, too charmingly enthusastic in their performance, and too self-aware and honest to try to put one over on us – their songs are about love, friendship, campus life and even punctuation (note that I’ve adapted my grammatical rules accordingly for this review).  Even more impressive is that they have a easily-identifiable sound, but never fall back on it at the expense of songs.  While “Oxford Comma,” “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and “Mansard Roof” are unmistakeably the work of the same band, you’d never confuse them.  I’m still not sure whether they’ve got a great second album in them, but this is an immensely enjoyable debut.

Vivian Girls – s/t
It’s a common oversimplification about punk rock that “anyone can do it.”  Sure, you can do it.  It’s not hard to pick up an instrument and learn the fundamentals, put something on tape or onstage, and thrash about like you really mean it.  But who cares?  If you’re not going to be good, at least be interesting.  Plenty of technically unskilled artists have made accomplished, brilliant albums – but they used their lack of formal training as an advantage.

The Vivian Girls take the “anyone can do it” ethic and stop there.  There’s absolutely nothing essential about these songs, which are really just sped up versions of 60s girl group style pop with tons of reverb inelegantly applied to everyting.  This is presumably supposed to make us think of Phil Spector’s wall of sound, and it does, but only as a means by which to make unflattering comparisons.

I always feel as though I have to pull punches here when it comes to female artists – this goes back to a conversation that Raina and I often have about the circular nature of women in rock.  In rock music, the ladies have always been outnumbered.  Is there something inherent in the male psyche and missing in the female psyche about this sort of exhibitionism?  Is it a matter of social roles established at an early age?  Is it a matter of the industry not backing the female musicians that are out there?  Hard to say.  But I find it even more condescending that a band like this can make it on the basis of novelty, and it most certainly is the novelty of a girl group that’s driving this train.  This is a bad album.

Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing
I went into this one cold, so I’m reserving judgment, to some extent.  You’d think a hip-hop album (or mixtape – it seems like a fairly dubious distinction in cases like this) featuring a loose conceptual framework based entirely on Seinfeld would be much more than a goof, but Wale does a nice job of balancing the humor you might expect with more lyrically substantial tracks.  The standouts are a condensed version of the Roots’ “Rising Down” (here called, accurately, “The Roots Song Wale Is On”) and “The Kramer,” a sharp riff on Michael Richards’s infamous racist rant that deftly exposes the personal and political ramifications of careless use of the word “nigger.”

The Walkmen – You & Me
For some reason or another, I have every album the Walkmen have released to date (even the Nilsson cover album).  I’ve seen them live twice.  One of these days, I’m convinced they’re going to totally click for me.  As it stands, I tend to like a few songs per album, and this one’s no exception.

The War on Drugs – Wagonwheel Blues
The War on Drugs were suggested to me on the grounds that they combine the rootsy populism of Springsteen or the Replacements with the guitar artiness of Sonic Youth or a shoegaze band.  This seems wrong 0n nearly all counts (aside from a few moments of shoegaze blurriness, but this is mostly backdrop or confined to stretches of abstract noise that separate the songs proper).  If we’re playing comparisons, singer Adam Granduciel reminds me of no one as much as Waterboys frontman, Mike Scott, hitting notes just out of his natural range and projecting earnest belief at every turn.  The band sounds more just like a natural outgrowth of 20 years or so of indie rock – jangly and jagged guitars covered in a gauze of reverb, tasteful percussion, and basslines that drive the songs forward but don’t make much of an impression.

If nothing else, Wagonwheel Blues shows some common ground shared by bands seemingly as disparate as Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire.  To the uninitiated (say, a jazz fan, classical fan, or even maybe a classic rock fan), this is probably what “indie rock” sounds like.  But for those of us who can tell the good from the “eh” when it comes to guitar-based, not-all-that-commercial rock music, this is clearly the “eh”.

Weezer – s/t (Red Album)
So you thought that the worst thing that could happen to Weezer was Rivers Cuomo continuing his descent into utterly insipid lyric writing and hackneyed arrangements?  Well, you’d be part right, since Cuomo, himself, is responsible for more than his share of the low points on this album (there’s a room in rock’n'roll hell reserved for anyone capable of penning “Heart Songs”).  But you probably didn’t even consider what would happen if he started letting the other guys write and sing the songs.  The kindest thing that can be said is that Cuomo, himself, doesn’t have to shoulder all of the blame for this latest tarnishing of the Weezer legacy.

I wondered if I was being too hard on this album when it first came out, but time has revealed that I was going easy on it.  Aside from a few spare riffs (undone by careless, idiotic lyrics in every single case), there’s actually nothing good about it.  I suppose this utter lack of quality would be kind of impressive in its own way if this weren’t the band responsible for two bona fide Great Albums of the 90s.  But as the ratio of great Weezer albums to bad Weezer albums (balanced out primarily by the pretty good Maladroit and a few decent tracks on the green album) continues to shift, it becomes harder and harder to expect much quality to come from this band.

Kanye West – 808s & Heartbreak
Sometime in mid-2008, I’m pretty sure that we reached a milestone in music history when the number of top 40 pop songs with audible* auto-tune/vocoder effects outnumbered those without.  At this point, it naturally became useless to use clarifying statements such as “you know – like on that Cher song?”  The most unnerving thing about the heavy use of auto-tune is that we don’t like our artists to be lazy.  If you’re a singer, you should be able to hit the notes.

It’s for this very reason that Kanye West’s extravagant use of auto-tune on 808s & Heartbreak is fascinating. It also serves to remind us that any musical tool is only as good or as bad as the artist using it:  anything can be artful in the right context.

West isn’t a singer, he knows it, and he wants you to know it.  He’s a rapper, but rap is not the ideal medium for heartbreak; we like to sing along to heartbreak.  In choosing to sing with the very obvious aid of machines, he’s further exposing his deficiencies and humanity, displaying a vulnerability that we’ve gotten snatches of in songs like “Roses” and even “Through the Wire,” but that has never been central to his work.  808s didn’t get much play as a reinvention, but West going from rapping about what doesn’t kill him to singing about what does is practically the equivalent of P.J. Harvey embracing the piano on last year’s White Chalk.

Even with this in mind, it might be tempting for the cynical to attribute West’s newfound appreciation of heavily auto-tuned singing to bandwagoning if it weren’t for the additional dramatic break he makes from the elaborate production on his previous efforts.  True to its title, 808s & Heartbreak leans heavily on the simplistic beats of the Roland TR-808, with additional, spare tribal drumming adding a primal element.  But, perhaps most bravely, West keeps the keys and samples minimal.  He wants you to notice his voice and he lets it carry most of the melodic weight – he wants you to hear the places where he misses the notes and the auto-tune kicks in.

The whole thing plays like a budget version of Peter Gabriel’s Us, which similarly fuses the electronic and the organic to detail the artist’s personal woes of the time.  It’s the unlikeliest of moves for a guy seemingly driven toward mass appeal (although it seems to be working out for him, anyway), but it’s certainly his most groundbreaking release, musically speaking, and it could even win over non-fans who give it a chance on its own terms.

*  As opposed to pop songs that use auto-tune in less inaudible or non-distracting ways, which I’m pretty sure would put us closer to the 99.999999 percent mark.  The .000001 percent of artists who don’t use it are Neko Case.

Paul Westerberg – 49:00 (and associated singles)
Longtime Westerberg fans like me weren’t quite sure what to make of the ex-Replacements frontman in 2008.  After a year-long layoff resulting from a nasty incident with a screwdriver, he quietly started releasing download-only new material starting with a 49 cent track that was essentially an album’s worth of songs and song parts and continuing through a series of bizarre collages and straightforward singles (full disclosure:  I still haven’t managed to download all of them, since he snuck a few more out at the end of the year).

49:00 (which runs a confusing 43:55)  is generally held to be the biggest and best of these releases and with good reason.  It’s exactly the kind of spontaneous home-recorded singer-songwriter rock that Westerberg’s been putting out for nearly a decade now, but it’s also nothing he’s ever released before.  He’s always been more of a song guy than an album guy – even his albums that hold together best seem like happenstance, as if he just wrote a bunch of great songs, threw them together, and achieved coherence through quality.  But here, that’s thrown into question.  Some of the songs are great, certainly (“Something in My Life is Missing” is essential Westerberg, “Devil Raised a Good Boy” rips along in tribute to Johnny Thunders, and “Everyone’s Stupid” is a cute and sad take on divorce from the kid’s perspective), but about halfway through the album, he pulls out the rug.  Songs abruptly begin and end, play in opposing speakers at the same time, and play quietly in the background during each other.

Maybe it’s reading too much into the intent of a notoriously private artist, but it seems telling that these rips in the fabric of the album start right before and during a remarkably-detailed description of what seems to be Westerberg’s father’s death called (presumably) “Goodnight, Sweet Prince.”  Westerberg has devoted a number of songs to his dad over the last few years, but his shadow seems to loom large over this one.  It’s as if he’s so broken up that he’s just barely able to maintain focus (even as the so-promising new songs fly by unfinished).  Ultimately, the whole thing breaks down into a series of excerpts from cover songs (which led to the album being pulled due to publishing rights), then concludes with an original co-sung with Westerberg’s son, Johnny, an appropriate way to finish an album that seems, in large part, about fathers and sons.

An expansion on the more collage-oriented aspects of 49:00, 3oclockkreep is even weirder than its predecessor.  It begins with a series of difficult-to-place demos (mostly low-key), but eventually settles into a series of snippets presumably recorded during the sessions for the Replacements’ Don’t Tell a Soul, including a bit with Westerberg and Tommy Stinson trying to pull it together to finish a song with Tom Waits (which likely led to the DTAS-era track “Date to Church”).  Most surprisingly, there’s a Westerberg-Waits duet on “We Know the Night,” a song that didn’t see release in any form until 1997’s All for Nothing/Nothing for All ‘Mats compilation.

“Finally Here Once” and “5:05″ round out the initial barrage of surprise Westerberg releases.  Solid songs, but probably not as good as some of the treasures buried in 49:00 or the bizarre surprises of 3oclockkreep.

Why? - Alopecia
Getting exhausted here, but I’ll try to squeeze out a few kind words in honor of Why?’s stellar Alopecia (probably fewer than it deserves).  One would assume that middle-class white guys attempting to inject hip-hop into their pop or pop into their hip-hop have some pretty dangerous minefields to avoid.  This gambit could land most in a musical no-man’s-land with either bullshit up-with-people positivism or, in fewer cases (I hope), hard-to-believe fabricated tales from the street.  Fortunately, Why? takes a different path altogether.

Alopecia is a hugely musical album, almost never relying strictly on grooves to get the songs across; in fact, it’s not even overly reliant on catchy choruses, but rather on fully fleshed-out songs.  Check out “Simeon’s Dilemma,” which is catchy as hell, but doesn’t even really have a specific chorus, merely a number of repeated musical motifs.  “Fatalist Palmistry” (probably the least characteristic song of the album in its non-hip-hop-ness and upbeat tone, but one of its best) is driven by a bright, 12-string electric guitar hook.

But despite this musicality, singer Yoni Wolf’s dense lyrics suggest hip-hop in their detail and rhyme schemes.  Even better, he doesn’t just layer on the rhythmic language and tell stories at once impressionistic and detailed, but recurring lines and images bounce around the album (initials embroidered on a towel, characters carved on a palm), lending even greater weight to what may or may not be autobiographical tales.

In short, highly recommended.  My list of “best songs” on Alopecia grows every time I listen to it (although, I still rank “The Hollows,” “These Few Presidents,” and “Fatalist Palmistry” as tops).

Wolf Parade – At Mount Zoomer
I’m tired, and it’s the last album, so write your own review in the comments section below.

My original intent was to finish this by the end of January, so I’m going to have to speed things up a little.  Forgive me if my reviews become a little… impressionistic from here on out.

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Real Emotional Trash
One of the problems I have with iTunes and iPod technology is that it’s kind of a pain in the ass to maintain sort order by last name where it should apply.  So I ended up manually moving all of the albums in my master 2008 playlist into alphabetical order, and I missed this one.

Anyway, it’s a Malkmus album.  As with all of his solo works, it’s instrumentally tight like the late-period Pavement albums and a little more complex musically.  He’s always good for some lyrical twists (“Cold Son”’s infamous ‘Who was it that said, “The world is my oyster?”; I feel like a nympho trapped in a cloister”), and when he keeps things short and tuneful like on “Gardenia,” a ringer for recent Thin Lizzy-influenced Belle and Sebastian, it’s great.  But he seems to be testing the improvisational waters he last hit hard on Pavement’s Wowee Zowee.  This may have something to do with the new Janet Weiss-enhanced Jicks, but Malkmus isn’t exactly Neil Young or Richard Thompson.  I don’t need the solos and instrumental sections.  Give us the songs.

Sun Kil Moon – April
I do this Music Marathon every year  to force myself to come to conclusions about the music I listen to.  In my experience, the ability to do so, not the size of one’s music collection, number of concerts attended, or ability to play an instrument, is what separates music enthusiasts from casual music listeners.  As an enthusiast of something, you should have some aesthetic concerns.  Certainly not a strictly parameterized code (“if there’s a drum machine, it’s not for me!” or “only songs under 3 minutes, please!”), but the ability to think through your taste and present some arguments for or against something.

So it’s frustrating when I have to write about an album like April.  April’s inarguably similar to Sun Kil Moon’s last collection of original compositions, the hauntingly beautiful Ghosts of the Great Highway.  But despite the great similarity, April feels like a pretty big misstep.  Something’s wrong with the pacing, the song lengths… I’m not sure.  Basically something’s wrong with something.  It works great as background music, but Mark Kozelek can be and has been better than that (such as on Ghosts and on The Red House Painters’ Songs for a Blue Guitar).  April’s high point, “Tonight in Bilbao,” adds to the mystery for me.  It’s a great song, but not fundamentally different than some of the others on here.  I have no idea why I like it, but feel pretty ambivalent about so much of April.  Even more perplexingly, it’s a 9 1/2 minute song near the end of a very long (unnecessary long – maybe that’s one issue) album that mostly doesn’t do much but just sit there for me.  I have no idea why this is the one that sticks.

So I’ll admit to failure.  I have no idea what to make of my gut reaction to April.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band With Choir – 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons
An organic, orchestral-traditional rock setup hybrid bashing out lengthy, dramatic compositions.  Sounds good, right?  It isn’t.  It’s a monotonous bore augmented with doubled (infrequently harmonized) so-serious vocals.  They get the dynamics right and practically nothing else.

These New Puritans – Beat Pyramid
SPEAKING OF BANDS BROUGHT DOWN MOSTLY BY ANNOYING VOCALS.  THESE NEW PURITANS ARE CLEARLY INDEBTED ENTIRELY TO LATE-70S POST-PUNK BANDS LIKE GANG OF FOUR.  JOY DIVISION.  AND, ALL TOO CLEARLY, THE FALL.  IN FACT, LIKE MARK E. SMITH, JACK BARNETT INTONES EVERY PHRASE AS A MATTER OF SUCH GRAVE IMPORTANCE THAT HE SEEMS TO THINK IT WOULD DO IT A DISSERVICE TO JUST SING IT.  HERE ARE SOME SAMPLE LYRICS:

What’s your favourite number?
What does it mean?

Number 1 is the indvidual
Number 2 – duality
Number 3, … numerology is all shit
Number 4 is the number that runs through this music

DOES IT LOOK LIKE THEY REQUIRE SUCH GRAVITY?

Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell
Not much more than a fun guitar-pop album, but after Thee Silver Mt. Zion and These New Puritans, it was like manna.

Torche – Meanderthal
And things got even better from there, because Meanderthal is like getting tackled by a big load of awesome.  Ostensibly metal in that the guitar sound tends toward the thick and heavy, Torche has such a propensity toward hooks that they veer just as much toward guitar-centric late 90s rock like Far or a less angst-ridden Deftones.  In fact, if it weren’t for their apparent volume or propensity for touring with bands like Isis, Jesu, and The Sword, the metal label would almost seem sort of ludicrous – these guys could reasonably tour with the Foo Fighters, and it wouldn’t be that weird a fit.

But it’s that heavy sound that keeps things interesting – it’s envigorating to hear those massive guitars essay the perfect pop hooks of “Across the Shields,” and to hear what sounds a little like Sonic Youth’s “Mote” jacked-up a few notches in volume and tempo in “Healer.”  Even more to Torche’s credit, they keep the songs remarkably short and direct for such – few break three minutes.  Typically, I have enough room in my heart for maybe one or two metal (or “arguably metal” or “heavy music” or whatever we’re calling it) albums a year, so folks who might not normally be interested in this sort of thing, take note:  Meanderthal is worth your time.

TV on the Radio – Dear Science
And the upward swing continued with the reliable-as-usual TV on the Radio.  I’m not quite as hot on this album as others seem to be – I don’t think it’s the be-all, end-all of the band.  The opener, “Halfway Home” sports a general groove that promises a successor to their greatest moment, “Wolf Like Me,” but it feels hollow; single “Golden Age” is a little limp whenever it veers too far from its estimable chorus; and the album just generally goes for well-oiled consistency rather than staggeringly unusual stand-outs, quite a change from the last two albums, which were inconsistent, but had obvious stand-outs, like the driving “Wolf,” the stuttering groove-and-noise experiment “I Was A Lover,” and the a capella “Ambulance”.

But, even as it clings pretty closely to a distinctive style of electrified dance rock, Dear Science is hard to dispute as high quality work, and it expands admirably on the band’s prior work.  While “Stork and Owl” is in the mold of Return to Cookie Mountain’s mid-tempo songs, it’s livened up with some plucked string parts and a lovely melody.  “Family Tree” may be one of the band’s prettiest songs to date, all lush orchestral padding, piano and harmony vocals.  The two up-tempo standouts, “Dancing Choose” and “Red Dress” drive forth with all instruments a-blazing – the horn section (a welcome addition to their sound) does battle with the sharp rhythmic turns we’ve come to expect from the band, and outdoes them at their own game, blurting and overwhelming as they go.  And, above it all, hover Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, who have never sounded better than they do on this album – the falsettos and harmonies never threaten to go out of tune as they occasionally did in the past.

I realize I’m not doing much to rock the boat here.

‘Not Sailing Just for Sport’:  The Biographical Songs and Transport

Not content to simply tell stories, Will Sheff injects an ongoing symbolic motif into his ruminations on fame and artistry.  The Stage Names and The Stand Ins are largely about transportion, whether on a personal or social level.  His characters aimlessly sail, take shore leave, and look back upon their bad trips with disdain. They also occasionally pull others along for the ride.  In a bit of inspired parallelism, both albums end with biographical pieces on doomed artists, but the respective journeys they embark upon couldn’t be more different.

In “John Allyn Smith Sails,” Sheff invents an internal monologue (or perhaps even a fictional, impossible unpublished poem) representing the last thoughts of American poet John Berryman. Berryman, born John Allyn Smith in 1914, is considered one of the leading poets in the Confessional movement, although he disputed this idea on the grounds that he didn’t consider his work particularly autobiographical.  Best known for two volumes of poetry collected into The Dream Songs (many of which feature a very Berryman-like protagonist named Henry and his unnamed companion who refers to Henry as “Mr. Bones”) and for being a difficult, temperamental teacher of future acclaimed poets at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Minnesota, Berryman ended his own life in 1972.

Sheff’s Berryman begins by telling us that he’s not going to make it past the second verse of the song in any physical sense (although he just keeps going after that, echoing Shannon Wilsey’s disembodied personality posthumously talking to us in “Starry Stairs”), but wants to preface his fractured monologue with the words “live and love.”  Through a sly allusion, Sheff stresses the burden of influence by invoking one of Berryman’s artistic influences, the Roman poet Catullus.  Sheff’s Berryman is quoting a translation of “Catullus 5″, in which the poet lays a carpe diem trip on Lesbia, the object of his affections*.  But here, of course, the emphasis isn’t so much on seizing the day as on the ultimate reason why they’re worth seizing at all.

Suddenly, we’re back in 1931, and the teenage Berryman is sitting in his room, recalling lines of poetry and trying to feign death for the benefit of his mother and stepfather, John (confusingly, Berryman, his father, and his stepfather, from whom the poet eventually took the last name “Berryman,” were all named “John” – for the record, that’s a John Smith, a John Berryman, and a John Allyn Smith who renamed himself John Berryman).  Berryman was haunted by suicide and death most of his life, being only 12 when his birth father killed himself.

We rejoin Berryman “on a bridge on Washington Avenue, the year of 1972,” moments before he plunges off, fulfilling the promise made in the first line of the song.  As his descent begins, he thinks upon his years as a scholar, cursing both sycophantic students and his own tendency to belittle them (although the line about the “ass that I’ve exposed to you” might just as easily be about an unintended propensity for confessional writing, despite his best efforts).  It’s at this point that he rewinds to a moment of clarity that inspired his decision, a drunken night at a neighborhood bar.  Berryman had been sober in the months leading up to his suicide, but had only recently overcome a pronounced battle with the bottle.  He remembers himself as figuratively tongue-less and ball-less; inspiration and strength have left him, and death has become his means of leaving his legacy intact.  Much like the case of Hunter S. Thompson years later, Berryman’s suicide binds the artist to his work – with the spark gone, the poet must depart.

But seemingly from the moment of death, the song takes a miraculous turn – the transportation metaphor takes over, as the band shifts into “Sloop John B”/”The Wreck of the John B,” a traditional West Indies folk song popularized by the Beach Boys and, interestingly, famously anthologized by Berryman’s fellow Midwestern poet, Carl Sandburg.

The pretty sadness of Sheff’s melody makes way for major-key celebration.  Berryman may be going out, but he’s leaving on his own terms with “a book in each hand.”  Unlike Sheff’s Savannah,  his Berryman doesn’t necessarily see his past notoriety as a “shimmering silver ship,” but as the very worst of trips, so he’s taking one last jaunt on the ol’ John B to join his dad.  By balancing the morose subject matter with a matter-of-fact delivery and triumphant accompaniment, Sheff places Berryman’s decision on the same level as all other views expressed on the two albums.  Suicide may not be the only response to artistic decline, but it’s one of them, and Sheff’s tone suggests that it can’t be dismissed out-of-hand.  He’s a non-judgmental writer, who allows us to weigh the points and counterpoints and come to our own conclusions.

He’s not averse to the fake-out, though.  The first actual song of The Stand Ins, “Lost Coastlines,” is another nautical-themed examination of creativity, and you might think that it’s meant as some sort of counterpoint or continuation of “John Allyn Smith Sails.”  But the thematic concerns are quite different – rather than being about the decline of artistic relevance or a journey toward death, it’s about navigating the waters of inspiration alone or in collaboration with others.  But in a brilliant move, Sheff hints that our real answer song to Berryman is yet to come – the first track on The Stand Ins is an instrumental called “The Stand Ins, One,” and its chief melody is borrowed from the last song of the album, “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979.”  This is where we find the most complete response to Berryman.

(Oddly, there are no clips of Okkervil River performing this song live on youtube; I can only guess that the band doesn’t play it live due to its complicated arrangement on the album.  Here’s a lovely solo version by Crooked Fingers’ Eric Bachmann, which highlights how uncomplicated the song really is – although he mumbles over the key line, in my opinion.)

Bruce Wayne Campbell is better known (although not much better known) by his stage name, Jobriath.   This page has a nice, succinct history of Jobriath**, but to be even more succinct, Jobriath was the world’s first openly gay rock star. Elektra aggressively promoted him in the early 1970s as a sort of American version of David Bowie***, but the campaign failed, and, after a second album was released to even less critical acclaim and public attention, he was dropped.  Most tragically, his contract forbid him from recording for another decade.  Whether it was homophobia or the unrealistic expectations foisted upon him that did Jobriath’s career in, he would never again come close to reaching the quite modest heights he attained while on Elektra.  Campbell retreated to a strange, pyramid-shaped apartment on the roof of New York’s Chelsea Hotel and took to performing classic Broadway-style songs under yet another assumed name, Cole Berlin.  He died of AIDS in 1983.

But Sheff throws us another curveball.  The name of the song is “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979,” not “Bruce Wayne Campbell Reminisces on His Deathbed, 1983.”  Of Sheff’s real-life subjects, Campbell may have burned the least bright for the shortest amount of time, but Sheff refuses to go the easy route and make Jobriath his ultimate tragic figure.  Instead, he freezes a moment in time between Campbell’s early near-success and his death, using the sole interview he conducted during this time as a starting point.

Like Sheff’s version of Berryman, Campbell’s thoughts jump from the present to past, thinking of his occasionally tedious current role as small-time performer (“fuck long hours, sick with singing…”) and back to the old days which held such promise.  Those days seem to “win on every issue” as his fire to create remains lit but he’s without a means to set the hearts of fans ablaze.  But he’s not ready to quit.  He addresses his personified past directly:

… I bet you think I’m finished.
Think I’m not winning.
Well, go on, assume.

As the music swells, he signals the great transition of the song:  “Take me, I’m yours, Morning Starship!” (invoking both “Morning Starship” and “Take Me, I’m Yours” from his debut album).  It’s a surrender, but not to death as one might expect, given what we know of Campbell’s eventual end and the song’s counterpart on The Stage Names.  As with “John Allyn Smith Sails,” the transportation metaphors hit mid-song and carry through to the end, but here the tone is even more celebratory and optimistic, though guardedly so.  If the Morning Starship is his artistic inspiration (perhaps Urania, the muse of astronomy, has finally made her appearance?), he’s given himself fully to it.  And as Campbell’s journey begins, Sheff raises those basic issues that he’s dealt with again and again on these albums:

• What constitutes a “pop lie”?
• What happens when the maps fail and “nothing you’ve actually seen has been mapped or outlined”?
• What do you do when “this thing you once did might have dazzled the kids, but the kids once grown up are gonna walk away”?

The starship descends to take aboard “this man left almost passed out/Cause we’re pretty sure he needs a hand.”  It’s not clear whether Campbell is in his distant or recent past now, but it doesn’t matter:  there’s a broken-down fan in need of musical salvation, and Campbell’s prepared to be his savior.  This is because, unlike John Allyn Smith and Shannon Wilsey, Bruce Wayne Campbell chooses life and art even in the face of failed popularity and artistic decline.  So he’ll engage in some pop lying.  He and this solitary fan are going flying tonight, no coastlines in sight, much less maps to guide them on their trip.  And who cares if the kids grew up and walked away?  This guy’s still listening.

And even if he weren’t, there’s the one crucial issue that I intentionally left out above.  It’s a question that embodies the struggle every artist occasionally has – why am I doing this?  It could be a matter of playing to the bartender,  confronting yourself over your artistic integrity and honesty, or wondering what to do when the well runs dry.  It’s a rhetorical question asked only once on either album, but it’s one that Will Sheff has clearly answered for himself, even after the soul-searching that he does on The Stage Names and The Stand Ins:

• “What gives this mess some grace unless it’s kicks?”

It’s fucking fun to play music.

*  To give you an idea of what a clever bastard Sheff is, it took me a good 15 minutes of googling to to confirm that Sheff was, indeed dropping relevant quotes from Berryman’s life all over the song, that the line was from Catullus, and that Berryman was, in fact, not only a fan of Catullus, but spent some time translating his work.  Since I’ve never read Berryman’s autobiography, and this is a blog post, not a thesis, I’m not going to go much deeper into the literary allusions here, but I assume the song is loaded with them.

**  This page has a lot more, although the streaming MP3s don’t seem to work.

***  The resemblance in style is certainly there, but Jobriath is even more indebted to American musical theater.  His music is more overt and less experimental than Bowie’s with a greater emphasis on his primary instrument, the piano.  As if to compensate for this lack in musical innovation, the visual elements of his act were pushed to an outrageous level that sometimes vaguely resembles Bowie’s late 70s video for “Ashes to Ashes”.

So if you’re actually wading through this series we’ve got going, part 4 is up at The Geek Prospectus.  Check it out. 

Calliope in the Bleachers

We forget, at our own peril, what a Muse is capable of being. Granted, the waters have gotten a little muddy, as the Oxford English Dictionary nicely illustrates. On the one hand, the OED notes that a Muse is one of those nine lovely ladies, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, residents of Mount Helikon. Hesiod named them in the Theogony, heaped upon them stanzas of praise, acknowledging that “they breathed into [him]/a voice divine.” They are the sounds he makes; the very air that he breathes.

But, somewhere along the line, the job description shifted: “A person (often a female lover) or thing regarded as the source of an artist’s inspiration; the presiding spirit or force behind any person or creative act.” While it’s still a flattering position to be in, please note the shift from activity to passivity; from respiration to inspiration. The small-m muse may still be key to the creative act, but all she really has to do is sit there and look nice and/or make the artist miserable to achieve her aims. But even this is an overstatement, in that the muse has no aims to speak of. She lacks intention and autonomy, but, most importantly, she lacks a voice. As the OED tells us, the muse could be a person, a thing, or even an ephemeral spirit that is content to merely preside. Somehow, they have gone from having Hesiod by the throat to being little more than what is required to get the artist out of his comfy chair or off of his barstool. They have gone from being the prime mover to a pretty face.

So let’s consider, O Muse, the ways in which the truly respired gentlemen of Okkervil River sing of those modern Euterpes, the girls with the band, who help with load-in, hang around awkwardly during sound check, know all the words to songs that no one else has ever heard, curb the urge to call down Nemesis on some jerk who doesn’t know basic local show etiquette, haul equipment at 3 a.m., and totally, totally go to bed with the drummer. The female characters in the following songs are not pleasing objects for contemplation, but actors, movers, capital-M Muses, in the oldest, old-fashioned sense of the word. The Muses told Hesiod -

Hillbillies and bellies, poor excuses for shepherds:
We know how to tell many believable lies,
But also, when we want to, how to speak the plain truth.

Theogony, 27-29

And don’t you forget it.

A Girl in Port (The Stage Names)
Virgil invokes Erato at the beginning of the seventh book of the Aeneid, calling her the “Muse of all Desire.” She is traditionally associated with love and erotic poetry. We find her in this song, taking her clothes off for the narrator all over the country. Of the women I will write about here, her manifestations, Marie, Cindy, and Holly most closely resemble groupies in the stereotypical sense, in that it is strongly implied that they sleep with the narrator, a rock musician, when he’s in town.

The  narrator repeatedly asserts that he’s “not the lady-killing sort,” which isn’t necessary, really, as the women he describes seem untouchable. He couldn’t hurt them if he tried, because they do not make themselves available for injury. We’re a long way from “Cherry Pie” here: while the relationship of the narrator to these women seems primarily sexual in nature, what we learn about them isn’t. The narrator is most interested in describing their lives and the things that happen to them when he isn’t around. Moreover, in a motif that reoccurs in Okkervil River’s work, Holly, a soon-to-be-ex resident of Madison, WI, speaks through the narrator. She’s about to embark on her own journey overseas, a noteworthy choice in a song that likens a life of performance to that of a sailor. By drawing such a direct parallel with the overarching metaphor of the song, the narrator places Holly on equal footing. Or, really,  by speaking, she places herself there and, in the process, draws an entire song out of him.

You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man (The Stage Names)
Thalia, the Muse of comedy and idylls, manages to claw her way out of Sheff’s throat two-thirds of the way through “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock ‘n Roll Man,” in the guise of a world-weary woman named Marie (the same Marie, I wonder, that we see in “A Girl in Port?”). She speaks to us directly and the joke is definitely, definitely on the narrator, who loses control of his own story when she announces:

“I’m done with looking back
And you look your age
Which is 37, by the way
And not 28
Fucking let them stare
Cause at this point, I don’t care
I have been your bride stripped bare since ‘98
And our silver screen affair
It weighs less to me than air
It’s a gas now, it’s a laugh just how far several mil’ can take it”

This pointed, bitter interruption trumps the narrator’s own frank admissions about his lifestyle. In fact, it seems that he is being judiciously critical until Marie comes on the scene and tells us where the truth really lies. She has been around the block and in the company of this narrator for nearly a decade; she has no illusions about the nature and value of her relationship to him. And it isn’t so much that she has given up on him, as it is she has given up on illusion or pretense. She doesn’t care about trivial things like age or the opinions of others. It’s nothing more than a joke at this point and Marie seems to be intent on riding it to the punchline.

Calling and Not Calling My Ex (The Stand-Ins)
Clio is the Muse of history, so it seems appropriate to note her influence in a song about things that have irrevocably passed. Like any good Muse would, Clio has removed herself from the narrator’s life without a backwards glance, transforming herself into glossy paper and television pixels. Our narrator is left to tell us the story of how they fell apart, admitting his own guilt, and wishing her well. She does not speak directly to us, but she walks, flies, shines, demands, and on and on while the narrator can only sit and watch while his life glides by.

Love to a Monster (Overboard and Down EP)
Melpomene won’t be happy until we’re all miserable. She’s the Muse of tragedy, and she’s riding high in “Love to a Monster,” a story about the most vile kind of breakup, the sort where Mistakes Were Made and everyone’s too stubborn to admit it. The narrator keeps making a run-up to an attack on his ex, but all he seems to be able to do is talk about the utter insincerity of such an attempt. He says that he’s destroying any hope of reconciliation, but what he’s really doing, mostly out of boredom, is eying up the pretty thing, the “blonde in the bleachers” in the audience at his show. Is he underestimating her, too? Is he going to end up making the same stupid mistakes with her that he did with poor, distraught Melpomene?

Blonde in the Bleachers (Golden Opportunities Mixtape)
Oh, probably.

Polyhymnia discharges her office with a particular fervor – she is not only the Muse of song and dance, but also of religious song (check the name). She’s Patient Zero in the world of Lead Singer Syndrome. As such, the line between secular pleasures and spiritual passions tend to get a little blurry when she’s around. Here, she speaks through Sheff (by way of Joni Mitchell) in the form of a groupie who is beginning to give up. There is nothing amusing (har) about being Polyhymnia; she can’t laugh these things off like her dear sister Thalia. Instead, she “tapes her regrets to the microphone stand.” The lyrics of this song tell us that someone’s very soul is at stake; this seemingly shallow game of Muse-hopping might be far more dire than Erato would have you believe.

On Tour with Zykos (The Stand-Ins)
Let’s not forget, dear Calliope, poet chosen to lead them all, that, once they wash the smoke out of their hair and put their earplugs away, these women often choose to keep the company of artists because they, themselves, are artists. In “On Tour with Zykos,” our narrator is a woman, heartbroken and positively livid with her musician ex-boyfriend. This song is another possible response to the narrator of “Love to a Monster.” This is the woman he’s left behind for the blonde in the bleachers. The narrative arcs are identical. As was the case in “Love to a Monster,” we understand that the musician regrets the breakup and the jilted female lover is unwilling to forgive him, despite how badly she might want to. Both songs conclude with the image of the musician drowning his sorrows in a physical encounter with a stereotypical groupie. The female lover is left to her fate, which is presented in far more detail here, as this is wholly her song. She’s in her late 20s, has a day job, and, most importantly, is a frustrated poet. In a scene that any creative person will recognize, she avoids her work by getting stoned, watching television, and going out for a drink. The men at her watering hole repulse her which, interestingly, says a lot more about her than it does about them -

I’m discussed with desire
by the guys who conspire
at the only decent bar in town
And they drink MGD’s
And they wish they had me
Like I wish I had fire
What a sad way to be
What a girl who got tired

Note the reference to Promethean fire and the way the metaphor functions, tying the song into a knot: her lust for creative energy is akin to the barflies’ lust for her, which she finds sad. She is, at once, a muse, and desperate for her own, too exhausted and repulsed to do anything about it.

You will note that that’s just seven of a possible nine. I know – they only show up when they want to and there’s not much we can do about it. All we can do is sing of them, first and last, and hope for the best.

Just a reminder to check out E’s terrific post at The Geek Prospectus for the second installment of our little cross-blog experiment series.  Raina’s contribution (part 3) should be up here later today.

So we’d been trying to come up with a project on which we could collaborate with our friends L and E from The Geek Prospectus for a while.  When we originally hatched this plan months ago, we were taking a cue from their excellent analyses of some Decemberists songs in their Daily Rec feature and the release of Okkervil River’s fantastic new album, The Stand Ins.  Well, work and graduate school got in the way, and The Stand Ins isn’t so new anymore, but it’s still fantastic – probably my favorite album of the year, in fact.  So I’m selfishly using this project to tie-in with my annual Music Marathon.

In any case, we decided to put together the thematic puzzles of The Stand Ins and its immediate predecessor, 2007’s The Stage Names, which may be an even better release, overall.  Originally conceived as a double-album, these works intertwine in fascinatingly specific ways, with multiple songs taking on different positions on the same theme and motifs repeating throughout.  This is our attempt at tying the whole deal together.

‘A Different Kind of Alive’:  The Savannah Songs

While the lion’s share of songs on The Stage Names and The Stand Ins are presumably about composite characters and original creations, some of the albums’ most melancholy and inspiring moments come from a set of expertly drawn biographies.  Four of these – “Savannah Smiles,” “John Allyn Smith Sails,” “Starry Stairs,” and “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979” – deal directly with doomed, stage-named, semi-obscure artists (“Blue Tulip” is arguably a fifth biographical sketch of a pseudonym’ed tragic figure, but the presumed subject, Blue Tulip Rose Read, is on the other side of the fame equation).

Shannon Wilsey, known professionally as “Savannah,” scores two songs, “Savannah Smiles” and “Starry Stairs.” For a brief period in the late 80s and early 90s, Wilsey was the reigning queen of the porn industry.  A stripper, model, and adult-film actress, Wilsey was perpetually obsessed with marrying a rock star.  Wilsey had a troubled childhood, although accounts vary as to whether she was physically abused or simply had abandonment issues, having had virtually no contact with her father until she was 13.  She left home early, becoming romantically involved with Gregg Allman while in high school.  After this relationship ended, Wilsey began a series of relationships with other musicians of note (Billy Sheehan of Mr. Big, Billy Idol, and Slash are among the big names), eventually turning to porn magazine photo shoots and adult films under the name “Savannah,” inspired by the early 80s children’s movie, Savannah Smiles.  With her youthful looks and porn-legal age, she was a hit.

She was also a mess.  Often described as arrogant, Wilsey alienated others in the industry and developed all-too-expensive tastes in clothes and a debilitating drug habit.  She also developed a love for fast cars.  Privately, though, she was insecure and began to find that the rock stars she so desired weren’t interested in long-term commitments.  As Peter Wilkinson writes in a Rolling Stone article on Wilsey’s death:

“They always want Savannah and never Shannon,” she complained. The result was that Savannah spent more nights than she wanted to admit home alone as Shannon, curled up in her red beanbag chair, making collages out of snapshots, clipping coupons or dressing her Barbie dolls.

Careers in porn don’t last long, and Wilsey was already approaching has-been status by 1992.  She’d started to earn much of her income via stripping and began making offhanded references to suicide.  Despite seeing a therapist, she continued her drinking and heavy drug use.  She had paranoid visions that burglars were repeatedly ransacking her house and bought a .40 caliber Beretta to defend herself.

On July 11, 1994, Wilsey ran her Corvette through a white picket fence into a tree.  Her nose bleeding (although the autopsy later showed that she suffered little injury from the crash), she drove herself and a passenger, a House of Pain hanger-on, back to her house.  She suggested her companion return to the fence to check the damages.  After he left, she called her manager who called an ambulance; by the time it got there, Wilsey had fatally shot herself in the head.  Earlier that year, she had told a friend, “”If I got in a crash and ruined my face so I couldn’t be who I am, that would be it.”

As rock groupie and porn star, Wilsey operates on both sides of the fandom and stardom gap that Will Sheff examines on The Stage Names and The Stand Ins, but Sheff doesn’t focus on either side on “Savannah Smiles.”  As if to remind us that there are human beings behind these stage names, he tells the “Savannah” story from the point of view of Pam, Wilsey’s mother.

In a Pitchfork interview, Sheff provides a possible reason for this indirect take on the perils of fame:

The case of Savannah is interesting because– while not particularly special– her parents blamed the adult film industry while the adult film industry blamed her parents and nobody really knows what the hell happened. And that’s sort of the point of “Savannah Smiles”– you don’t know.

One of the most lyrically spare songs on either album, “Savannah Smiles” plays with the idea of guilt, but, as Sheff explains in the interview, the song never assigns it.  “Is she someone I don’t know at all? / Is she someone I betrayed?” Pam wonders as she pages through her deceased daughter’s diary.  Meanwhile, second husband, Joe, conspicuously “turns the TV on with all the lights out.”  This single, offhand reference makes one wonder if there’s some culpability there.  Was Shannon’s stepfather abusive?  Wilsey would often allude to familial sexual abuse to friends, but never directly implicated anyone.  In Sheff’s song, it seems that Pam might have some vague suspicions of this or, at the very least, isn’t sure where to put the blame.  Herself?  Joe?  The industry?  But she never questions Wilsey’s responsibility; Shannon’s the victim here – someone broke her.

Not so in “Starry Stairs,” its companion song on The Stand Ins (originally titled “Shannon Wilsey on the Starry Stairs” and released as a bonus track on the iTunes download of The Stage Names).  Here, Sheff gives Wilsey her own voice – a fragmented, confusing voice, but one decidedly resigned to its fate.  It’s a tougher song to pin down, but it seems to be, at least in part, a conversation between Savannah, the disembodied image of the minor celebrity, and Shannon, the real woman who hides behind her hair while basking in the attention, who bleeds, and who ultimately dies.  But while Shannon may have died in 1994, Savannah is “alive, but a different kind of alive than the way I used to be” as her image persists in “old stag magazine[s].”

In the middle of “Starry Stairs,” Sheff sums up the dichotomy of Savannah/Shannon in his delivery of a line from her acceptance speech at a 1992 adult-industry awards ceremony:  “If you don’t love me, I’m sorry.”  In the context of her speech, it’s snarky and tossed-off, a follow-up to her earlier words, “I’d like to thank… all the critics who voted for me.  And all of you who didn’t, ha, ha.” (The band uses the original speech to interesting effect in the live performance embedded below, though – and some enterprising fellow tacked a video of her speech to the end of the youtube clip.)

In the studio version of the song, it’s heartbreaking – part apology and part goodbye.  To whom?  Maybe to the industry people she’d made enemies of, the rock stars who took her for granted, the mother she aimed to impress with the illusion of wealth and success (Wilsey was in severe debt when she died), or the perpetually absent father who emerged, born-again, only to make her feel worse about her career choices.  But, at the same time, there’s a sort of strength in Sheff’s delivery, a reclamation of the circumstances that Sheff’s Pam ascribes to others in “Savannah Smiles.”

Elsewhere in “Starry Stairs,” Savannah describes her journey in the land of fame as “a shivering silver ship.”  Images of vessels (from boats to starships) run through the two albums.  While the most obvious may be the metaphorical sea journey of “Lost Coastlines,” “John Allyn Smith Sails” ends with Sheff’s take on the Beach Boys’ version of the classic seafaring folk song “Sloop John B,” and “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979” ends with a ride on Jobriath’s “morning starship.”  I’ll discuss these last two songs in my next installment at the end of the week.  In the meantime, Raina, L, and E will hit some of the other themes of The Stage Names and The Stand Ins.

Check out  The Geek Prospectus tomorrow for the next entry.

Sources:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/44522-interview-okkervil-river

Wilkinson, Peter.  (1994). “Dream Girl.”  Rolling Stone pp. 693 – 81.

In an effort to catch up, I’m resorting to a “clever” rating device for this post in honor of the new season of Lost (possible spoilers ahead).

Ra Ra Riot – The Rhumb Line
Ra Ra Riot garnered a lot of acclaim and criticism on the idea that they’re some sort of Arcade Fire-Vampire Weekend synthesis.  The Arcade Fire comparison really doesn’t hold up aside from regular use of stringed instruments and death informing the release of their debut album (while Arcade Fire mourned the deaths of relatives on Funeral, The Rhumb Line is haunted by a recently-deceased bandmate).  The Vampire Weekend comparison, however, is apt.  While the spirit is far more melancholy, there’s a shared talent for melody, and the lead vocals that split the difference between the boyishness of Ezra Koenig (complete with what I think might be a regional accent – they share some odd vocal tics) and the aloof swagger of Spoon’s Britt Daniel.  Ra Ra Riot and Vampire Weekend have done some touring together, so I’d be hesitant to pin either as the imitator, but they seem to have some shared aesthetic ideas.

In reading about this album prior to writing the review, I like it even a little better.  “Dying is Fine,” which reminds me a little of ex-Clash bassist Paul Simonon’s long-forgotten Mexican-influenced surf/pop band, Havana 3 A.M., apparently steals some lines and key concepts from e.e. cummings.  And I had no idea that “Suspended in Gaffa,” possibly my favorite track, is a Kate Bush cover.

The Rhumb Line is Juliet.  I wasn’t sure if I liked it at first, but I soon learned to appreciate it on its own merits.  Just as Juliet may have been viewed as a superfluous Jack love interest when the writers hadn’t even made good use of the existing female cast, Ra Ra Riot may seem like a redundant addition to any collection that already has Vampire Weekend in it – but it’s actually different enough to warrant some attention.  Perhaps not a main player, but a solid addition to the cast.

The Roots – Rising Down
For Christmas, I got Love Train:  The Sound of Philadelphia, a wonderful primer on 70s Philly soul, and it helped illustrate something about the Roots for me – hip-hop (at least as the Roots perform it), though soul-influenced, is not soul.  There’s a constant battle between the band’s impulse to retain some sort of fidelity to the idea of hip-hop by emphasizing the beat and the words and a pronounced proclivity toward melody and instrumentation – hooks, for lack of a better term.  At their best, they manage to incorporate these warring tendencies into tight songs (see 1993’s Things Fall Apart for a terrific set of well-integrated soul and hip-hop), but, lately, it seems like the band has been having more trouble reconciling them.

Rising Down, at first, comes off like a less melody-focused set with “Rising Down” “Get Busy,” and “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)” three words’n'beats-driven tracks setting the tone.  They’re fine, but undistinguished.  I’ve never taken to Black Thought as a lyricist or MC, so the songs suffer for me when it’s mostly on him to do the heavy lifting (even when there are plenty of guests pitching in).  The emphasis gradually shifts to the musical, though, and it helps considerably.  “I Will Not Apologize,” “I Can’t Help It,” and “Singing Man” all have wonderfully catchy choruses, and “Unwritten” is half-sung.  By the end of the album, the band has taken a turn toward catchy, reggae-influenced pop with “Birthday Girl.”  It’s not a perfect song, but I wish the Roots would do more like it (and like “Rising Up,” another song that stretches the musicality of their sound)- why waste a terrific live band on beats and basslines that could just as easily have been composed on a computer?

Rising Down is Jack.  Generally dependable, but his flashback/flashforward episodes are always somewhat dependant on the other castmembers (or guest artists) involved.  Also, like The Roots, Jack is torn between hard, cold reason (the hard rhymes of Black Thought) and the call of the island (the musical explorations of ?uestlove and the other instrumentalists).

Santogold – s/t
A female artist of color with multicultural influences, pop savvy, and an occasional penchant for hip-hop?  Oh, surely we must be talking about M.I.A., right?  That was the initial perception pushed out by the less perceptive folks in the music press.  As it turns out, it’s almost completely untrue (“almost” only because of a few moments, like “Creator” that might draw a connection between the two artists).

If anything, Santogold is far more of a Beck figure, plundering various genres and sub-genres to create winning, accessible pop music.  So, while there’s a little hip-hop, the most audible influences curiously come from the radio-friendly side of early 80s post-punk/new wave (who would have predicted that Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons would be a key vocal influence on a much-touted Next Big Thing in 2008, but “Lights Out” suggests that this is the case).  Even her forays into reggae and ska grooves don’t seem so much borrowed from Jamaican culture, but borrowed from British and American bands who borrowed them from Jamaican culture.

Yet, despite all of this appropriation, Santogold makes this stuff sound undeniably new and utterly listenable.  In fact, her influences are so wonderfully integrated that it’s hard to imagine that she intended the wonderful “L.E.S Artistes” to sound like the best Tegan and Sara single of the year; things probably just came together that way.

Santogold is Sayid.  At first, she seemed like she might be a little more militant, based on those early M.I.A. comparisons, but it turns out that she’s all pop song heart.  Just as each of the Sayid episodes has brought the goods, so do each of the songs on this well-rounded, immensely likeable debut.

Jenny Scheinman – Crossing the Field and s/t
Scheinman is a violinist in that crowd of New York jazz artists who, once you notice them, seem to pop up everywhere (see also:  Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Erik Friedlander, Greg Cohen, etc.).  Like a few in that bunch, she’s released albums on John Zorn’s label (among them The Rabbi’s Lover, a terrific klezmer-influenced album along the lines of Zorn’s Masada recordings), recorded with very non-edgy types like Norah Jones, and has sat in with the band on Elvis Costello’s new talk show.  So you have to give her credit for diversity.

Unfortunately, that propensity to genre-hop backfires a little on her self-titled album, an attempt at country and folk-influenced songs that feature Scheinman on vocals.  It’s not that any of the Scheinman-penned songs are bad, exactly, nor are the covers (aside from an inexplicably extended version of Tom Waits’ short, sweet “Johnsburg, Illinois”), but the performances just aren’t particularly memorable, and her voice isn’t nearly as flexible or impressive as her violin-playing.

This is even more clear in light of the expressive Crossing the Field, an instrumental jazz effort that effortlessly evokes the rural, wide open spaces usually associated with the very folk and country she attempts on the self-titled album.  At the same time, it’s balanced with an urban sophistication – sort of like Copland filtered through Rhapsody in Blue on a more intimate scale.

These two albums are Sawyer.  Just as Lost becomes bogged down whenever we’re forced to deal with the interminable Kate/Sawyer relationship subplot, Scheinman’s self-titled album seems forced, a not-so-compelling mix of artist and genre.  But if you put Sawyer into his natural environment – swindling, devising nicknames for Hurley, allowing his natural bravery to emerge when his friends are engangered - he shines, just like Crossing the Field.

She & Him – Volume 1
Volume 1 is a breezy collection of 60s-inflected originals and appealing, if by-the-numbers, covers that’s probably gotten a little more attention than it deserves based on the artists’ respective day jobs (that is, manic pixie dream girl of both big and small screen and subdued indie singer-songwriter type).  Still, Zooey Deschanel’s songs have a simple charm to them, and her straightforward, unadorned voice is a perfect instrument for them.  M. Ward does a nice job building the production around her without overwhelming – this may sound like something that could have come out of the Brill Building, but Phil Spector wasn’t around that day.

Volume 1 is Claire.  Cute and affectingly melancholy, but not so remarkable that we can’t go a season without her (as we soon will, I hear).

Shearwater – Rook
At one time merely an Okkervil River side-project, Rooks sees Shearwater come into their own.  While not all that sonically different than their previous album, Palo Santo, Jonathan Meiburg and company tighten and refine what made that album so memorable, basically coming up with Palo Santo 2.0.  It seems simultaneously shorter and more epic due to some nicely varied tempos and song lengths, as well as an impressive use of dynamics, starting with a mighty guitar-and-horn blast out-of-nowhere midway through opener “On the Death of the Waters.”

If “Leviathan” and “Century Eyes” sound like songs on Palo Santo, it can’t be denied that they’re improvements on the formula.  Meanwhile, “Rooks” is easily the strongest song from either album (I admit to not having heard their first three albums), and “Snow Leopard” is a beautiful, piano-driven, distant cousin to Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song.”

It also has my pick for album cover of the year.  Striking and perfecltly matched to the sound within.

Rook is Faraday – mysterious, but shakey and occasionally stirred to agitation.  Also, as Faraday is single-minded in his examination of the island’s bizarre temporal abnormalities, Meiburg is an ornithologist and his obsession with birds comes through in the title track (there’s also a related focus on nature in many of the other songs).

The Shivers – Beaks to the Moon
Beaks to the Moon is Scott or Steve, the two background guys who get confused for each other.  It’s actually not a bad album (especially the cover of The Velvet Underground’s “There Is No Reason” and the reggae-tinged “Hey, Mr. Officer”), but, despite some clever lyrics and catchy moments, it just doesn’t stick with me.

Sigur Rós – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
Tðsí óesíg ilðum – eð endalaust róvuðm, suð.  Aðegit við! Just kidding.  I’ve got no idea what those squiggles mean, either.  Stretches of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust should come as little surprise to Sigur Rós fans.  Much as their native Icelandic appears to most of us English speakers, it’s mysteriously foreign, but it’s a mystery to which we’ve now become accustomed; slow, atmospheric crawls coated in reverb and fronted by a falsetto who might as well be speaking Elvish for all his voice and language have in common with most popular singers.

But it’s those other stretches of the album that most impress.  If the innovations on previous albums were subtle (and welcome, although I don’t know if they’ve ever surpassed their breakthrough Ágætis byrjun in terms of sheer beauty and consistency), it seems like the band is ready to start taking some more chances with formula.  “Gobbledigook” starts things off downright playfully, a word not often associated with Sigur Rós.  It’s a drum-heavy, melodically-loaded foray into Animal Collective territory, and they wear it extremely well (better than Animal Collective do, themselves, a lot of the time).  The upbeat feeling is even more pronounced on “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur,” a jubilant re-tooling of the strings, choir-like vocals, and dynamics for which the band is known into pure celebration with only a hint of melancholy.  Other tracks lean more heavily on acoustic guitar than the band ever has before (“Illgresi”, in fact, is almost all acoustic guitar and voice)  and its usual contemplative sadness is broken up by faster tempos and triumphant optimism.

I think I’d still recommend Ágætis byrjun as the ideal entry point for Sigur Rós, if only for the fact that it seems most “them” – an entirely new thing, practically free of obvious influence.  But Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust expands their range considerably, and it’s quite impressive in its own right.

Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust is Locke.  Mysterious, yet earthy and vulnerable.  And just when you think you have Locke pinned down as unable to separate himself from his pattern of being taken advantage of, he throws you a curveball by shooting Naomi or taking up with The Others.