A Love Letter to: The Avett Brothers

I don’t claim to be the biggest Avett Brothers fan alive, I don’t own all of their albums, and I didn’t discover them before everyone else. In fact, not being completely in tune with my local music scene at the time, I had about 4 friends tell me about this band before I actually listened to them. The first two songs I heard were Swept Away and S (Untitled), which had been kindly placed on a mixed CD for me while I was living near Hazard, Kentucky in the beginning of January 2006. At the time, I was in the car a ton, both for work and then for when I wanted to drive somewhere and see civilization on the weekends. I listened to these songs over and over ago--the sweet sorrow and beginning of great love in Swept Away, and pure, earnest, and clever devotion of S. But, that was it. I had this small taste of something great, two songs; but as many loves begin, that was all I got.

Finally, a few months later, I got my next taste. I was working that summer with the Appalachia Service Project in Lake City, Tennessee with four other 20-somethings coordinating home repair. This involved massive amounts of time together in the car. Unfortunately for me, my co-worker Amanda and I had vastly different music tastes. She was far more interested in top-40 rap and the Rent soundtrack (shoot me now) than Alligator by The National, an album I had become obsessed with, and an album that fit the humid country nights of my summer. But, one day as I sifted through her ipod, seemingly in vain, an entry for The Avett Brothers caught my eye. Finally, I was reunited, and that summer we listened to Mignonette approximately 400 times as we drove around the mountains of eastern Tennessee. S became our anthem for the summer. The joy of At the Beach buoyed us during long days. Please Pardon Yourself helped us wallow in our own sorrow when needed. Signs recounted a personal moment I had in the final semester of college that I still dwelled on. It was quite serendipitous, finding this ranging and extravagant album that we could all agree on, allowing us to forgo the compromise of a mix between The National and Rent. This, coupled with a post-summer concert at The North Carolina Museum of Art outdoor pavilion was enough to send me head over heels.

After returning to civilization in the Fall of 2006, I began to devour the rest of the Avetts catalog. First, was A Carolina Jubilee. The first song was the essence of the Avett Brothers at the time. The Traveling Song doesn’t have a story, it’s more of a call to action for the Avetts and their fans. The rest of the album is similarly upbeat and hard-working—the boys always sound as if they’re trying their damnedest to please us. Sure, there are missteps here (I personally could do without Love Like the Movies and Me and God), but the album as a whole stands up on banjo and effort. You even see preludes to their most recent album in The Offering and Sorry Man. It’s less polished but just as honest.

Emotionalism, released in 2007, was a different beast altogether. I’ve heard a lot of people bemoan the change in sound of I and Love and You, but the real change happened here. I think it was just that without a big name like Rick Rubin, nobody noticed it. Shame is one of the best songs the Avett Brothers have ever recorded, a worthy homage to Brian Wilson. It starts off as a normal Avett Brothers ballad replete with banjo and all, but about 2:25 in becomes completely different as they bridge and then float into an organ induced free-fall before they pull it back into the chorus. I knew at the moment I heard this song that the Avetts were becoming a better band, and a band that I hadn’t quite expected them to be. They didn’t let off either, jumping right back into it with Paranoia in B Major, introducing the piano that would become so prevalent on their next album, and mixing it in with their usual vigor. Then, again, almost out of nowhere we get the three part suites of Salina and Pretty Girl from Chile (which would be better if they left off the answering machine bit at the end). The rest of the album is above average Avetts fare, but these songs portended the changes that were to come on I and Love and You.

I wouldn’t lie to you and tell you it sounds the same—I and Love and You is very, very different than any other Avetts album. There is a ton of piano on here, and a lot less banjo than any other recording of theirs. But they are changing. This is good. Would you really be satisfied with a retread of Four Thieves Gone or Mignonette? They are growing, and while we could postulate about their personal growth to no end, we can actually see and hear the tangible musical advancement here. And I’m not talking about learning to play the fiddle or banjo faster than before (not possible?). The song-writing here is much, much better.

The title track builds for five minutes before revealing the climax, an exercise in patience and discretion. And it Spread is a typical Avetts rocker, but is tighter than anything the put down on Four Thieves Gone. Laundry Room is my personal favorite. Normally, Scott and Seth are able to get away with things in their lyrics that I think other bands cannot. But here, they craft a song that somehow walks that fine line between trite and sadly beautiful. On top of that, we even get a brief respite into old Avetts in the closing instrumental. The album is a tightly packed 51 minutes, and there’s a lot to take in here. Their previous work was generally scattered but brilliant, here it’s shined down to an even excellence. The high points may not be as loud, but they’re still as high.

But, in the end, I suspect that the lamentations I hear are not because of any dislike of this new album, but more because we are must now share the Avett Brothers with everyone else. Some felt like they got in on the ground floor with this one, seeing the Avetts with 20 other people, sharing it by word of mouth with their closest friends. Now, they sell out shows across the country and play the late-night tv circuit. I’m happy for them. And we don’t have to “love them and set them free,” they’re still ours too. If I want “old” Avetts, I’ve still got those albums, and I’m happy they were made, just like I’m happy they’re changing and making new records. This love isn’t ending, it’s different, it’s growing.

Grab the Baby, the River's Rising

Its only mid-October. Today in this high-altitude hamlet in the Rockies an icy wind is rushing down off the snowy peaks to the west and bending trees and humans to its will. What golden aspen leaves that are left are plucked from their branches and sent skittering past oblivious elk stooped at chewing the grass in my yard. I guess we skipped fall this year. Already we've had a significant snowfall reshaping the mountain world into white for a few days. We've had five and six day stretches of cold weather, with leaden skies and fog that settles into the hems in the landscape. The word 'blustery' was coined for days such as these. And what can I say? My mood is like a chameleon that molds itself to fit the seasons. I can't complain. It was a good summer. A nice stint down in Santa Fe, then back here fly fishing the stream near my house, hiking deep into the mountains with my Weim, and lots of reading and writing. My spirits were up and the soundtrack to my soul, to my days and my moods, was all circa-1966 Brian Wilson, with layered harmonies provided by his spiritual progeny... Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, even some Of Montreal. I was feeling good.

This morning as I sat looking at the 12- and 13,000 foot peaks in the distance going from ashen to lavender, storm clouds started building in charcoal shelves above the peaks. The underbellies of the clouds were catching the morning light and turning crimson. 'Red sky at morn/ sailors to warn.' Then the clouds sank and swallowed the beautiful vista. Not a mountain in sight. I gave in with a sigh and eyed the powder made from crushed prozac and celexa that I had scraped into a thin trail of dust on the cover of A Fan's Notes. I grabbed a twenty and started rolling it into a tight cylinder. Then I went over to my iPod and click-a-clicked down to the Ns and put on some Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

To be clear: we are talking about Cave's early work here. Which is in no way a judgement about his later and latest work. But in his early, post-Birthday Part songs, you find a man that is walking a dark path, but a path that is rich, evocative and beautiful while at the same time suffused with an epic strangeness and not a little evil. His songs, and the people that inhabit them, tread in a world of shadows, murder and sorrow. Mr. Cave hails from Australia, but you sense the spirit of Appalachia here. It is clear that he has done his time in the South, whether literally exploring the region or spiritually delving into the songs of the great bluesmen and country singers. The real country singers, not the plastic, gift-wrapped and palatable country singers that make pop songs with an occasional twang of slide guitar thrown in. He seems to revere the musical territory shown the light of day by the Blind Lemon Jeffersons, Buell Kazees, Leadbellys, Blind Willie Johnsons and Johnny Cashes of the world. To name only a few. Songs of murdered lovers, of loss, of prisons real and of the soul, of jealousy. In these spare, seemingly simple tunes, you can almost picture Nick Cave sitting at the fire with Culla Holme and the three bearded men that have cut a wide swath of mindless death across the South in Outer Dark. Or sitting at the edge of the woods, watching intently and taking notes, as necrophiliac Lester Ballard adds another unfortunate lady to his collection.

If we lived in a former age without all the evidence provided by media and technology, interviews and archives, I would think Nick Cave and Cormac McCarthy were one and the same man. As it is I see them as close kin. Blood brothers using different mediums (though Cave is a gifted prose stylist, and his screenplay for The Proposition echoes McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian') in an attempt to understand and create this strange world through words, both written and sung. They conjure stories from the depths of mankind's heart. Like the Aborigines in Chatwin's 'The Songlines', they sing/write the world into existence. Their territory seems to be an amalgamation of two lands: the green spine of the Appalachian mountains running through West Virginia, Tennessee and beyond, but with foothills and hinterlands of red Australian dust. Cave's songs could very well provide the soundtrack to the lives of John Wesley Ratner, Ballard and Cornelius Suttree. Judge Holden seems to be a character sung to life, straight from one of Mr. Cave's songs.

The world of these songs is replete with themes from the Old Testament. Vengeance, murder, loss, rage, rising waters - they are all here. Moses and Noah even pop up as characters - along with dwarfs, a dog-boy, a dead horses and circling crows - in the frightening, droning, cacophonous song 'The Carny'. He takes dark song and makes them darker, as with the excellent cover of 'Hey Joe'. From his prison cell, a man laments his wife laying in a pool of blood on the floor, in a cover of Tim Rose's 'Long Time Man'. Fittingly, before giving up the ghost, she stares up at her lover/killer with blue eyes and says, "baby... I love you", and then is gone. Like a quality actor, Cave's vocal delivery is impeccable. It isn't a question of Cave having a 'good' voice or not. He knows just how to use his voice. He softens it in the right places, wails at times, or evokes desperation in others. Listen to 'Stranger Than Kindness' and you will swear the ghost of Ian Curtis (on Joy Division's 'Transmission') has possessed him. And while the subject matter of these songs could be considered bleak and depressing, listening to these early Cave albums I am exhilarated, awed and taken to a higher place by his art.

But enough of my talk. The songs speak for themselves. As the cold weather sets in, go back and listen to them. The book of Genesis, Heart of Darkness and the trials of Job, as put to music and reinterpreted by Nick Cave. And as a closing note, I recently learned that Nick Cave has written the musical score for none other than the film version of Cormac McCarthy's bleak, post-apocalyptic novel, 'The Road'. How fitting.

Late to the Party

I recently started thinking about which songs and albums were going to grace my year end best of lists, and was struck by how many things I hear this year that I hadn’t heard before, yet were released before 2009. It’s great finding new things—I remember hearing My Morning Jacket for the first time in the Fall of 2005 and the joy that followed in listening to the four albums they had released up to that point. I’m not sure I found anything from the past this year that I’ve enjoyed that much, but I did fill in a few holes in my musical repertoire, and enjoyed doing so.

Chad Van Gaalen-Soft Airplane: I saw Chad open for a band I cannot remember a few years back at the Cat’s Cradle. He was fantastic—great with his songs, and killed a Bruce Springsteen cover (and I’m not a big fan of The Boss, as it were). This album is great, but I was a year late hearing it. While some of it trends electronic, the best are quite folk-oriented and simple. I won’t say that that the record is a hangover cure, but it is comforting to hear his voice simply over a plucked banjo— Sleep all day / just waiting for the sun to set / I hang my clothes / up on the line / and when I die / I’ll hang my head beside the willow tree / when I’m dead / is when I’ll be free. If I didn’t live in a city without trees, I’d sit on my back porch in these late fall afternoons and put this record on. Favorite tracks: Willow Tree, Cries of the Dead, Inside the Molecules.

Al Green-Various: I mean, I knew who Al Green was before this year, but I’d never listened to enough to know what I was missing. His voice isn’t always in front of his songs the way that Otis Redding and Solomon Burke albums seem to be mixed. This means it’s a little less accessible, but when you really turn these tunes up they’re amazing. It’s the first soft music I’ve heard that’s meant to be blasted. Favorite tracks: Call Me, I Can’t Get Next to You, Let’s Stay Together, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.

The Concretes-Say Something New: Goddamn, I love this song (and mentioned it in an earlier post). I just got their albums and haven’t given them a full listen yet, but I like what I hear so far

Brian Eno-Various: I blame my parents for this. They had this horrific Roxy Music album that I heard before anything else, and I swore off Brian Eno in any form until Lauren sent me a few tracks this year. So he’s begrudgingly on here. Favorite tracks: Baby’s On Fire, Blank Frank, St. Elmo’s Fire.

The Knife-Heartbeats: Still haven’t fully bought into this band, but this song is very, very good. I want to hear someone play this song at their wedding.

Vampire Weekend-Right, so last year I dismissed them. I don’t know, I didn’t give it a full listen, I wasn’t in the mood, I had a headache, whatever. I thought that it just didn’t kick hard enough to be worth my time. My friend Josh couldn’t believe what I had said, and advised me to take another listen, and so I did. Damn, they are pretty fucking good. It’s not the greatest album you’ll ever hear, and you won’t get emotionally invested in it, but it’s light and fun like making out with an 18 year old. Favorite tracks: Oxford Comma, A-Punk, Campus, Walcott.

What did you find recently that you had missed out on before?

Mid Life Crisis (Bands that should have broken up already) (Part Three)

Things change as you get older, and it’s less a general feeling than the small realizations you have as your routines change. It’s Monday night—not even 10:30 and I’m already thinking about going to bed. Instead of having a beer while I write, I’m flossing my teeth. I’m flossing now! It’s good for my gums! I wonder if my mom reads this. And yes, part of me wishes that I was still spending my Monday nights eating 10 cent chicken wings, dollar slices of pizza and having dollar beers at Farmhouse Pizza, but it wouldn’t be the same. The food is more expensive, the bar more crowded, the owner replaced by his lackeys, and my friends replaced by douchey fratboys. But you gotta embrace that shit. I like going to bed early, and I’ve grown to love my first two cups of coffee in the morning. But I ain’t embracing this is my music. It just doesn’t age gracefully. Here are a few examples of things I don’t want to follow into my old age:

Wilco: Oy. They didn’t make this easy. There are some redeemable moments on the past couple of albums. Somehow, a song called Wilco (the Song) is really fucking good. Parts of Sky Blue Sky reflect the band’s growth over the years (You Are My Face and Side with the Seeds strike me as songs Tweedy couldn’t have written a few years back). But that same polish and maturity is also what destroys these records to some extent. Wilco was a sloppy love—the dirty piano drenched blues during the last minutes of Dreamer in My Dreams that recall Exile era Rolling Stones, the raw blood-draining vocals on We’re Just Friends, and the brazenly casual yet deliberate guitar playing that opens A Ghost is Born—these moments are missing on the past two records. But I don’t want Wilco to “find themselves” or try to somehow go back to what they were. You can’t fake these things, you can’t fake a feeling and make it sound that good. They’re a different band now. Somehwere along the line they decided to take the worst song on A Ghost is Born (Spiders: Kidsmoke) and use that as the template for most of their instrumentation. Sighs. It’s over like me staying up past 2AM.

Built to Spill: One of the first “indie” bands I ever listened to. There was this online service called Audiogalaxy where you could read about bands and download them for free. It’s where I found the White Stripes, Built to Spill, and more. Anyhow, Built to Spill were always one of the highest rated/most talked about bands on there so I checked them out and fell in love. That was nearly ten years ago. I’ve seen them in concert multiple times, and even passed my love of them down to my little sister. There’s Nothing Wrong with Love is a great pop album, the ones that follow just great guitar rock. There was a time when I could listen to their 20+ minute cover of Cortez the Killer and enjoy it…but now when I saw that the opener on You in Reverse was over 8 minutes long…I sighed. Maybe I’m growing old quicker than they are, but I doubt it. It’s just not new/fresh/exciting like it used to be.

Of Montreal: Basically, Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer is a motherfucking classic and if you create something that good you have to just quit. No way to satisfy anyone after that, least of all a needy bastard like me. I guess that Skeletal Lamping wasn’t that bad, but it was so shitty (and weird, frenetic, spastic) compared to Fauna that I didn’t even give it a chance. It’d be cool to see them try and come back and write some 3 minute pop songs and give up on the sexual transformation epic concept albums, but I don’t see that happening, so I’d rather not hear anything at all.

Ryan Adams: Only non-band here. I’m with Fran—this is just some awful shit that he keeps putting out. But I heard that he quit music and is writing a book with Mandy Moore? Or that’s what I remember from a drunken conversation with Deacon. Is that true? P.S. Deacon we tried to go back to the grey area but I think it’s closed and it wouldn’t have been the same without you.

Weezer: See my earlier column. Those fuckers.

*As a side note, I didn't forget about solo artists, I'm just having a hard time figuring out how they fit into this (with the exception of Ryan Adams).

**Pretty proud that I made it throughout this whole thing without saying “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

We Need to Talk (Bands that need to break up soon) (Part Two)

Sometimes, you can just feel it. Usually it starts with a record that’s pretty good but not quite as great as the ones before it. Because you love the band, you talk yourself into it, but deep down you know it’s not as good. But you trick yourself, and then when the next, even worse album comes out, you know for sure. But by then, you’re fucked. So, here we go:

Spoon: Just released their best album with the best song (The Underdog) in their catalog. Then, a mediocre EP about a month ago. I get the feeling that the next album is going to be a step back, and then it’s all fucked. And I LOVE this band, but I get the feeling it’s time. I’m rooting against it though.

Radiohead: Not fully because they’ve already kind of broken up, but it might have been nice if they had called it quits after either Amnesiac or Hail to the Thief. The pricing scheme on In Rainbows made everyone overlook the fact that they were paying tuppence for a b-sides collection. They’ve announced they’re not really looking to do full-length albums anymore because of their personal lives. This is ok. They gave us the seminal indie rock records of the late 90s and early aughts, and that’s plenty.

The New Pornographers: The band I was thinking of when I wrote the intro to this section. Mass Romantic and The Electric Version are must-haves. Twin Cinema is very good, but drops a level from the first two. When I go back and listen to them, I never go to Twin Cinema first, the album is about half-duds. Challengers is worse, maybe 2 or 3 good tracks. Couple this with A.C. Newman’s disappointing second solo effort, and the evidence points to this band being done.

The Flaming Lips: Saw them live a couple of weeks ago, show was great, but they played maybe one new song. They have a new album coming out this year and I’m interested to hear it, but after the fall off between Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and At War with the Mystics, it’s a little hard to see a huge comeback. They’ve been around for a long time, especially for indie-rock standards, and while it would be a shame to see them go, it may be time.

Modest Mouse: I was more sure on this one before I heard the EP they released recently, No One’s First and You’re Last. This was a supposed collection of B-Sides, but was as good as anything they’ve done since The Moon and Antarctica. Now I’m not sure—We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank wasn’t that great and looked like they were on the downturn—but this EP makes me think I was calling this one early.

The White Stripes: This one hurts. The last record was pretty good, and I rooted for it and defended it but now I just cannot anymore. Icky Thump is just not as exciting as Get Behind Me Satan was, and not as consistent as any of the previous records. There are some serious missteps there (Prickly Thorn but Sweetly Worn and St. Andrews) that render the middle of the record unlistenable. And despite some truly good tracks around them, I think the next album will be even more painful in parts.

So there it is. I love these bands and wish that it was still the same, but it ain’t. Coming Sunday or Monday, Part 3—bands that should have broken up already.

All Things Must Pass. Or, Why Every Band Should Break Up (Part One)

The most famous band breakup of all time yielded very little musically. George Harrison's first solo effort, All Things Must Pass, is probably the best of any post-Beatles effort. Ringo isn't in the discussion, and McCartney and Lennon ironically but not surprisingly could never duplicate the greatness they achieved together (though Ram and Plastic Ono Band come somewhat close). Of course, any worthwhile music in these efforts is just a bonus. The real reward here, thing thing that I am thankful for, is that they did breakup. All things must pass. The Beatles knew this, if not consciously, then at least subconsciously. Why?

Every good band should break up. The history of music is fraught with examples, but since we're talking about the Beatles, maybe we'll just compare them to their counterparts, The Rolling Stones. Count me out of any chance these days to go see the carcasses of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at $200 a pop. By all accounts, this band should have been dead by 1978, and earlier if not for the surprising Some Girls. Since then, the Stones have released at least 7 or 8 mediocre studio albums and at least as many unessential live records. When I think about the Stones, I'm immediately filled with loathing. Why are they still around? At this point they've just become a parody of themselves. Even if they wrote a decent record (which is highly unlikely for so, so many reasons), it would still fall far short of Exile on Main St or Out of Our Heads etc.

There is just no way for a band to maintain that kind of peak that produces great albums for more than 10 years or so. The Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, and others have proved this over and over again, and this is not limited to classic rock. To prove my point, we'll use some modern and semi-modern examples. I've decided to group these bands into three....yeah, three categories. This isn't an exhaustive list, just an illustrative one. Feel free to point out additions or argue in the comments section. As I see them:



The Lucky Ones (Bands that broke up at the right time)

Nirvana: Um, ok, so they didn't "break up." Cobain died. But, he died at the right time. He died leaving two or three masterpiece albums, and allowed Nirvana to get out before all of their imitators clouded the market. Who was looking forward to strife between Nirvana and the Stone Temple Pilots? Did anyone really want to listen to a Dave Grohl side project later on? Erm...ok, point taken. But Nirvana's musical record is perfect, unmarred by sidesteps or the dreaded "experimental" album.

Pavement: Yep, Stephen Malkmus is still making records, and they're still pretty good. But by all accounts the last two Pavement records were mostly him anyway. This is a bit of a different case. As the band progressed, they got a little tighter, musically, but the sloppy brilliance was beginning to lose it's shine later on. Suddenly, these guys weren't 20 years old anymore, and the half-finished nature of their earlier songs was disappearing, for better or for worse. Don't get me wrong, I think Brighten the Corners is a fantastic album, but when you hear Stereo and Shady Lane, there's no doubt that this band is completely different than the one who gave you Summer Babe and No Life Singed Her.

TV on the Radio (Partial): Just announced they'll be taking a break, there are some side projects coming, perfect timing. Just released a ridiculously new/fresh/transcendental/otheroverlypraisingadjective album in Dear Science, and how the fuck do you possibly follow that up? You don't. Just give up. You hear that kids? Just give up. I'd make a great high school teacher.

The Shins: Maybe should have broken up before the last album (Wincing the Night Away), but it gave us two great songs (Australia and Sleeping Lessons) so I'll put the Shins here. Thankfully, James Mercer fired his bassist and drummer, one of whom is now running a taco truck in New Mexico (ok, I'm not sure if that's exactly right but you can fact check for me if you want). Either way, the Shins as we know them are no more. Good. Two classic records, a pretty good third, and we don't have to sit through an average at best 4th. Instead, we get whatever weird shit Mercer cooks up for us.

Outkast: Another asterisk would be necessary here if I gave a shit. Ok, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below were really solo records maybe but damn that shit was good. And so was everything before it. Now they make movies (and no, Idlewild doesn't count as an album). Um, ok. But at least they're not making mediocre rap albums with Lil whoever. There will never be another Sorry Ms. Jackson, Bombs Over Bagdahd, or ATLiens.

Whiskytown: Ryan Adams' first band, based out of my hometown, and one perfect album, called Pnemounia. Later, Adams would make another near perfect record in Heartbreaker, and then he should have retired. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sleater-Kinney: Retired after their masterpiece, The Woods. Now Carrie Brownstein is doing musical commentary on NPR's All Songs Considered and writing a blog called Monitor Mix. The Woods is a modern day Led Zeppelin album, and better than anything Page/Plant have done/touched since 1975. These girls could wail in a way that Wayne Campbell would have loved. Tia Carrera, eat your heart out.

The Velvet Underground: Broke up before they sold any records or made any money. Now the first band name dropped once you're too cool for Stones/Beatles/Zeppelin. I mean their name is the fucking Velvet Underground. How cool is that. A friend of mine who was introduced to them recently told me that they put into music like no one else the feeling/ecstasy/comedown of being completely fucked by drugs (I'm paraphrasing). Of course, that sound, just like that high, could not be sustained. UPDATE: Actually, I just asked her for the quote, and she said "it makes me feel like I want to be completely fucked by life," but she cannot remember the exact conversation either.

I should have ended this earlier. Off to bed.

Coming tomorrow, current bands that need to call it quits.