Albums From This Year:

Gorgeous:

Fiery Furnaces - EP and Rehearsing My Choir

The Fiery Furnaces this year were saviours. Moments from "Slavin Away" and "Evergreen", where Eleanor is singing about "coming home through the windshield of my car" and the line about "driving down to Cheyenne on my bike" deliver with such poignancy and motion that I couldn't help but feel inert. Not only when they specifically talk about transportation, but with the various locales (Gallowsbird's Bark's and Blueberry Boat's everywheres, EPs nowheres, Rehearsing's Chicago) create in their recitatives the kinds of places I look forward to living to get to. They make me treasure where I am, in the two-word toss-off hosannas and hallelujahs and abstractions of the everyday, but more than that, they look emphatically towards the future. They are the band that most wants me to go somewhere and do something. Me specifically.

Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

His 50 States project, in part two, gives a lot to look forward to. The backing is all kind of rudimentary, yeah, blah blah phase music isn't THAT hard to do, ANYBODY can write in 7/8, banjos? Everybody has those! But its the man that pulls everything together. The way that he (and his waifish, pretty voice) brings everything together, this whole sense of community from the duets to the group vocals to all of the 'interludes' that feel absolutely necessary in the context of the album. I get this impression that he's a great uniter. He writes these really crushing songs about 'cancer of the bone' and then goes on to rhyme alligator and aviator and emancipator in a goofy mean-nothing kids ditty and it all flows together really nicely and you miss it when it ends. It sounds so simple, but it would take anybody else five years to put together. The shortest 70 minute album I've ever heard.

Of Montreal - The Sunlandic Twins

Drum machines and two basslines at once punctuate this album which feels more internal and less band-like (I think Kevin Barnes plays every instrument on this album) but more transcendentally accessible. I feel like well-dressed angels listen to this kind of stuff in Heaven. "Let's pretend we don't exist / Let's pretend we're in Antarctica". The first song sounds like the Cars and there's a song in the middle that sounds like Bowie and the last song sounds like Queen and none of them sound like anything that came before.

Boys You Write Real Good:

The Hold Steady - Seperation Sunday

Gravel voiced Craig Finn lets us have it with all of these brilliant half-rhymes and semi-truths (ER... Jam jar... this ER is like an after-bar, etc...) and talks his way through kareoke night at the Bar At The End of the 1980s.

Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock And Roll

This was the only album this year that I felt triumphant while listening to. "The first time I saw her, I wanted to do more than just to hold her, I wanted to bend her and fold her!" the lead singer tells us. And woah! He gets to! Way to go, buddy! There's a lot of other moments where he puts us in his place (Emily Kane), and moments where he puts us in our place, and a bunch of rollicking guitar moments.

Silver Jews - Tanglewood Numbers

Again, more of the same kind of "hold on, rewind that, 'Christmas in a Submarine!' fucking brilliant!" kind of dialogue that I have with the Silver Jews. This one seemed a lot more triumphant and joyous, (Punks in the Beerlight, How Can I Love You...) Not that I really listened to it very much, or plan on listening to it, but its a really great album.

Not as Good As I Initially Thought They Were:

Lightning Bolt - Hypermagic Mountain
Deerhoof - The Runners Four

Great Albums From Next Year:

The Strokes - First Impressions of Earth
Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea
Destroyer - Rubies
Belle And Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

J-A-M-S RABBIT I-B-T-B!!!!!!!
The Weather is Your Boyfriend on a Saturday Stay in Bed

Recording starts Friday for our album Cavalier. Until then I am writing and ripping up notes about how the album is going to go. We are going to record thirteen songs for it. The process I want to create for the recording of this album is me having written a song and then the band (so far Max, Conner and Vanessa but maybe also Maria, Megan, Dylan, Grayson etc...) comes in and un-writes and over-writes it. And then I unwrite their contribution. And then they rewrite it. The finished effect will hopefully be like the wicked side of the wall between a new housing development and the train tracks.

Because, as Continental witnessed, I have no idea how to put together the arrangements of my songs anymore, I have to subvert, disperse, destroy. I am going to hide in the bushes while the song plays on the speakers in the backroom and then I am going to jump in the window, over the couch and run at the computer with a knife and record the final result. The important thing is not that I have something infinitely tolerable and safe like the worst of Contintental*, but something aggressive and meaty and uneven (I plan on having fistfights next week) and chaotic and bursting with ideas (all participants will have equal say on everything).

So here's the first song we're going to do: its called "International Wings/Gale Force Winds Can't Stop Me Now!!!!!!" and it is the first song on the album. I am going to introduce the song to Conner and Max and whoever else is there and we will, the three of us, come up with a plan for how we are going to record the rhythm track. The song begins, in the demo, as a kind of Schumann homage, but I wanted to turn it into either a really funky stomp thing or an electro dancer, so I'll submit what I have to Conner and Max and whoever else what I have and give some ideas as to what I want it to be, and I'll have them play their different parts and see if we can come up with something, the three(or more) of us. And then we'll move from part to part like that, them learning the form and getting the hang of it. I'm ridiculously excited, but excited like a guy on death row. I'm nervously pacing my cell, knowing that I've got a very limited amount of time to do what I'm going to do, because I might not have another chance at it.

I'm planning on starting to record albums in Santa Cruz once I have the space for my computer up here. There's this problem I have with the quality of records that I make. I'll do something with Conner and we'll spend a really long time on a certain aspect of it and then I'll hear about somebody else I know doing a similar thing and it taking less time and winds up sounding much better, so then I figure that I'm better off recording in a new environment with somebody else. But then I'll go and talk to someone else about recording and maybe do some recording with them and it ends up all falling on my shoulders and of course, I don't care anything about how anything sounds if I'm the one responsible for it and do things very destructively and it ends up sounding worse than if I had been doing it by myself. We're going to try and do Cavalier half and half recordingwise, where I'm going to be just as responsible for the final product as Conner (since Trauma Season, Conner has been in charge of the sound mostly, from the recording of the rhythm tracks to mixing to mastering).

SO. What I am doing now is getting through the week (work is great, but it is also work) and getting back to Fresno (unclear at this moment as to HOW) and then getting down to it; basically untangling a bunch of cords and getting the brother to stop playing the drums long enough to listen, communicate, and then play the drums. And then we Lego-Maniac it up, stacking the pieces in no discernable order.

- TJ Martin 12-12-05 6:36 pm




*Here's the story of Continental so far. It started as twelve tracks and then ballooned to sixteen tracks when I was done writing it. When we finished recording it, it was those sixteen tracks, but as a collection they were really tepid and a pitiful shadow of what I had envisioned. So we decided to add the B-sides we had finished and some new singles and mix up the tracklists of the two, creating a double album. When the double album seemed unwieldy and over-full, we cut out most of the songs and were left with a bunch of singles and a few songs from the original Continental album. That version is currently sitting in the computer while Conner does his finals, which he will finish at the end of this week and hopefully be finalizing and burning the Master copy of Continental as I am on my way back to Fresno. Then we'll try and cut it down to twelve of the best tracks and re-do the liner notes and release that. Also, everybody reading this should send me an email letting me know where I can send them a copy of the album when it is finished, I'm dying to hear what you think of it.

I had this daydream today about what I want my job in music to be.

Picture a group of buildings, located somewhere in an industrial district. Each of these little 'portables' house a number of instruments and recording equipment and something is always going on in them. Either a group of individuals is working out a verse melody, or a single person is overdubbing himself singing twenty tracks of 'bah bah bah bah bah'. I would be in charge of these people and I would write (or help write) all of the songs that they would be working on. I suppose the technical term for what I envision would be a 'musical co-op', but that term implies too much touchy-feely togetherness, which is not at all what my music assembly line would be like. Everybody involved would be ridiculously focused on the creation of music. Each person would be able to stand alone as a solo artist, but focus on the greater goal.

To fund our endeavors, we would make money by selling songs for advertising purposes. This would be one of the daily jobs, along with 'cleaning' and 'PR'. You would arrive and look at the schedule and see 'Tyler - Advertising' and be like 'Okay, great, I'm going to spend the day with... Bill coming up with lyrics and guitar riffs about Real Estate.' And maybe some local company would buy our song for three thousand dollars and we'd be able to get an amp. Everybody that worked with me would be very creative and willing to, at any moment, come up with something to 'knock our socks off'.

We'd do this for as long as we could, recording albums under one name or under many names (all it takes is a change in tone) and maybe taking breaks to tour or just to not have to listen to any more music. I guess it couldn't be a 'job', so much as an endeavor. We'd either all hate each other or run out of money after a few months, but we'd look back on it with at least some fondness. Maybe afterwards, we could keep doing the advertising thing, just not have to work together on it.

Today I did some work in a place that was a compound of a bunch of smaller buildings, and I got really into the idea of moving around these buildings doing music things and how much fun it would be to enter a room of people all doing handclaps to something I wrote or to conduct a mini-orchestra where all of the instrumentalists knew their parts already, how to make it up as they went, according to what they understood was something that I liked.

Great Moments in "First Impressions of Earth"

"You Only Live Once" - The fake-echo vocals, the chorus where the guitars slap you in the face and stare firmly at you.

"Razorblade" - The bubblegum reggae breakdown bridge/chorus.

"On The Other Side" - The pause before the chorus.

"Vision of Division" - How the song keeps building into a chorus and keeps adding layers of vocal/guitar aggression and then they scream into this System of a Down-type solo! And then they repeat it.

"Ask Me Anything" - The line 'Don't be a coconut, God is trying to talk to you', the vocal harmonies(!) at the end.

"Fear of Sleep" - In the chorus, where one guitar is doing a surf twang thing and the other one is just doing a lake of soft feedback.

"15 Minutes of Pain" - The entire song seems like a drunken ramble, but the end, after they've gone into 4/4, seems like Julian is just slamming shot glasses at the end of the table in a terminal fashion, slur-shouting his way through the triumphant-but-it-cant-be finale.

"Ize of the World" - The solo, which seems like it hits only passing notes and then blooms into a wonderful Is This It? flower. The vocal thing he does in the last verse where he keeps rising in triplets.

"Red Light" - The guitars are such chums, this is the only time where I can picture the guitarists leaning against each other while playing. The goofyness in the vocals, especially when he says 'Get yourself a lawyer and a gun' near the end.

Only "Killing Lies", some sub-tropical no-chorus fest is less than stellar. 9/10.