Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

2005 by Scott Miller

"This Year" - The Mountain Goats
Ever since Dan Vallor played me "The Bad Doctor" from Songs For Petronius—in, what, 1992?—John Darnielle has had a strange way of getting stuck in my head. I wouldn't have guessed that this much later he'd be doing very respectable business (sometimes the music industry actually works) and with the momentous 2005 development of Kristine getting me my first iPod, there became such a thing as catching up with other releases of people like that—in this case thanks to a Joe Becker recommendation.

"Girl" - Beck
Sue Trowbridge and Joe Mallon's best-of-year CDs are what originally inspired me to write this blog, and this is one of several selections that I pinch from theirs.

"My Doorbell" - The White Stripes
They're a lot like Led Zepplin in that they can be melodically simple without ever being melodically undernourished. They can take a fairly simple Mixolydian progression (people, there's no stopping me since reading that Wiki chord progression article) and add a line about ringing my doorbell, and the thing hops and bops and drips music out of every pore. There's a great touch where you can hear him wandering around the room away from the microphone while singing the bridge.

"1 Thing" - Amerie
This is one of those 2000s R & B hits like "Crazy" that are based on a sample with a little bit of deliberate imprecision in the looping that gives it an interesting tang of arty sophistication. "1 Thing" does it with an extremely elaborate Meters percussion sample, and adds an uncrowded but decidedly complex grid of downstroke chords and vocal gymnastics. Amerie gets plenty of industry respect so I needn't go on, but it's startling how well she and the team make this all work.

"Goodbye Caroline" - Aimee Mann
More outstanding packaging on this one: graphics and a booklet look like a fifties noir paperback with the lyrics printed as text on yellowed pages and a floridly dramatic oil painting of a prize fight. The lyrics actually sustain a thread about a junkie fighter.

"No Wonder" - Neil Young
His father's death and his own brush with death are usually mentioned when talking about Prairie Wind, and "No Wonder" is certainly one sober piece of work, what with church bells and which bluebird is the one to take me home. Only in a Neil Young song—and this is the great thing about Neil—will you get lines like "911... I'll always remember something Chris Rock said/'Don't send no more candles, no matter what you do'." Humorous and oddly unforgettable, I doubt I know what it means with any precision, but without reckless guesses why am I here? I'll venture that he may mean that too much memorializing threatens a subtly unhealthy social unity beholden to death.

"I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" - Arctic Monkeys
19-year-old Alex Turner's unmistakably English and entirely believable dance club banter has the backing of a fast, precise, toughened-up band that in my small world I imagine derives from ska and maybe the Libertines, but I wouldn't want to attempt real-life genealogy at so great a distance. Can't say I understand why they were quite such a big deal, except that, once again, English people just do this crazy word-of-mouth thing periodically and that's a lot more fun than what we do here.

"Jesusland" - Ben Folds
After the Ben Folds Five debut and the Shatner album I probably love Ben Folds for life; I'm not sure what his gripe is in these lyrics exactly (I have to think a travelogue about a nameless suburb called "Mosesland" would leave some unanswered questions), but the little slightly Philip Glass-inspired piano tag is aces.

"Feel Like Myself" - Brendan Benson
I'm an uncommon case of being a Brendan Benson fan before I was a Jack White fan. Alternative To Love didn't have quite the high points of yore but I still approached the Raconteurs with a little more sense of Jack having an opportunity to work with Brendan than the other way around.

"The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage" - Panic! at the Disco
Are people just making up that there's a style of music called "emo"? That's how igorant I am—so ignorant I apparently don't know enough to dislike this group as much as nature intends. First, as some people know, I lack the gene for being annoyed by long song titles. It's kind of like mimes (whose influence, interestingly, PATD may not have completely escaped); it's a cliche to hate mimes, right? Well, I'm that guy there going "wow, it looks just like he's in an invisible box!" "Swear to shake it up if you swear to listen/We're still so young, desperate for attention" just seems amusingly self-aware to me, and with a hot little damn tune. It happens not to be true that martyrdom and suicide are the same except for press coverage, but it's also not true that God is a concept by which we measure our pain; not so easy to go docking those kind of points, y'know?

"Cells" - Teenage Fanclub
Spanning fifty years, this survey I'm doing started out interactive, with readers choosing what year I did, and that causes the endgame to be a study in contrasts; the last few years are the earliest and latest years because, statistically speaking, nobody picked them. One thing it's clear you didn't get in 1957 (the next and last year of the project) was "Cells" by Teenage Fanclub: a beautiful folk song about aging that goes, "Breaking down, cells breaking down." It's not quite literal lament, not quite absurdist humor. It's a little odd to reflect that while 1957 people would not have the slightest idea what to do with such a tone—Ernie Kovacs and the Kingston Trio just couldn't be shoved together into the same room—it's probably pedestrian vocabulary today. My six-year-old could probably watch an episode of Sponge Bob, then hear "Cells," then watch a Zoloft commercial. Then maybe crank some Tortoise.

"Just Friends" - Nine Black Alps
Big fuzz guitar, fuzz vocal hooks put this Manchester alt-pop right into the skull. Rob Schnapf—who, Don-Dixon-like, I only know as the other guy besides Tom Rothrock who produced Beck and Elliott Smith—went on to do the Vines, so aggressive youngsters must have become his thing.

"Conversations" - The Posies
Jon Auer didn't take a day off from crafting great music in the mid-2000s; his break-out Big Star moment (read on) only barely surpasses this Posies return to form, whose unhurried stroll up perilous baroque scales and back to meaty rock are an immense favorite of everyone in my household. I must have listened to this song a hundred times by now and it never gets old.

"I Predict a Riot" - Kaiser Chiefs
In the relative latter-day isolation that is my dad-dom, I mentally tuck a song like this away as an obscure find, then one day I learn, oh, the Kaiser Chiefs are immensely famous. I'd be the guy in 1969 playing you a Doors song, warning you, hey, these guys can be kind of dark. So, the Kaiser Chiefs remind me a little of the Jam, maybe with a little more singerly croon. Oh, you know the Kaiser Chiefs?

"Gold Digger" - Kanye West
Then I guess one or two of you might also know this, hands down my favorite hip-hop recording. First, screamingly funny; but, a huge musical success. The beat is phenomenal—the way it develops with the Jamie Foxx lines up through the clav riff. Just as impressive is the way Kanye skirts the line between rapping and singing. It's like a plausible set of pitches to deliver natural conversation with, but they modulate in and out of working as melody lines. And so many great one-liners here: "She walking round looking like Michael wit your money."

"How Many Worlds" - Brian Eno
I don't know about you, but a new Brian Eno vocal album was a pretty big deal for me. Another Day on Earth doesn't dive right back into crazy "King's Lead Hat"/"Third Uncle" territory as might have been my adolescent fantasy, but there's "How Many Worlds," the most transfixingly beautiful piece of music he's ever done. There's a simple and homely but enlightened-wisdom-laden verse: "How many people will we feed today/How many lips will we kiss today, if we wake up?" This eases into an extended string-led instrumental passage I can only describe as new age if I had to pick a style category, but with disarming subtlety, precision, and dramatic range.

"Friends to Go" - Paul McCartney
Another of Paul's periodic stunning successes, this Nigel Godrich production was played entirely by Paul and would have been, oh, in the top one-fifth of his Beatles output. The half-time drum meter with the piano and backing vocals tugging at an uptempo pound, the hard slam from minor to major key mid-verse, the confession of social awkwardess--it's easy to believe a storyline that has Godrich smacking Macca around like the non-yes-men mates who knew him when.

"Lady Sweet" - Big Star
Considering how left-field was its perception, In Space picked up in surprisingly close proximity to where the seventies Big Star left off, with Alex Chilton hell-bent on underproduced R & B mischief but still in the gravity well of the Tommy Hoehns and Jon Tivens of the world willing to coax Byrds-influenced pop like "She Might Look My Way." "Lady Sweet" succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of such efforts, one guesses mostly bypassing Alex entirely and letting a principle disciple take a crack. No doubt the mind maintains a stubborn semiotic reluctance to accept a song branded as Big Star but sung by the Posies' Jon Auer as a music milestone as one would "Thirteen" or "Kanga Roo"—to which I'd say, you didn't accept those at the time either, ya doof! Give yourself a slap and get over it. With—against all odds—musical gifts worthy of Big Star's best, "Lady Sweet" hints at ethereal longing well enough with a line like "what I see is so exactly what I need to find" and then leveraging the Big Star device of nailing inexpressibility with an adolescent blurting-out like "I know she can't be beat."

"Casimir Pulaski Day" - Sufjan Stevens
[Come On Feel the] Illinois[e] may have the most sheer presence of mind of any album since Sergeant Pepper. It doesn't come right at you. It goes three songs without threatening to be anything but elaborately peculiar, and then there are "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." and "Jacksonville" which hit you up both sides of the head with indisputable proof that he can do both lyrics and music very, very well. Yet, then three good-enough cuts allow you to cool down: "Gacy" is a button-pusher, you reflect as these amble by, then you don't remember why "Jacksonville" was really all that good. And then come "Chicago" and "Casimir Pulaski Day," after which there's little question that you're listening to the album of the year, and probably the decade. It has to be said that Sufjan's first impression can in general be a little annoying (I sniffed at his previous album)—the catch in his voice seems like a device, the arrangements seem a little Belle and Sebastian but more heaped-up than orchestrated. "Chicago" is the best demonstration of the fact that what I identified as a flawed process is really getting the job done better than what I would have posited as a good process: it's a little like the Remain In Light via Breakfast In America method (be a faux-naif but a soul man, overinstrument)—two objectionable projects in my book—but Sufjan's able to conjure and redouble the moments of success that happened in both. Then there's "Casimir Pulaski Day," one of the key songs of our time. First, it made me cry—real tears—which is extremely rare. Second, it put a Christian sentiment across. That is no small deal. It's a song about the delicate first stages of falling in love, during which time the object of his affections contracts bone cancer, and the singer continues to nurture the ever-fragile romance to the fatal end. Yes, button-pusher again, but by now the man has earned your cooperation; you move back and give him room to work, and he doesn't disappoint. It starts out with decent set-up, a little faux-naif but nothing problematic. Then starting with the second verse, he makes his move: "Tuesday night at the bible study/We lift our hands and pray over your body/But nothing ever happens." How can anyone not be right there at that point? Not only is the song's emotional battery now fully charged, but he's suddenly and unexpectedly got most religious skeptics by the scruff of the neck; it's earnest faith, but if that's proselytizing, it has the virtue of subtlety! I can't go into all of why the rest is so good, but the use of repetition alone is phenomenal: "with [your/my] shirt tucked in and [your/my] shoes untied...", "in the morning..."; "all the glory..."; "and the complications..." The intensity of the singer's loss is finally focused with Dantean adroitness: the belief that "He [capital H] took our place" is a challenge to suffer great sadness without resorting to emotional distancing strategies. "On the first of March, on the holiday"—Casimir Pulasky Day—an Illinois spring holiday notably not Easter, unrelated to resurrection, "I thought I saw you breathing." The naive tone after this achievement then reads as real and earned sensitivity. "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." reads in retrospect as a more formidable phenomenologist's admonition that there but for the grace of God go we.