going back to England to play cards again
A copy of Gallowsbird's Bark by The Fiery Furnaces arrived in the post today (Sav, if you ever read this, you are a scholar and a gentleman). Early thoughts based on the tracks I listened to on the bus to work: nice, very nice. I can hear the reasons they've been compared to Royal Trux - it's the more playful, surprising side of Royal Trux, the one that was more about mucking around with odd instrumental arrangements than digging around in the muck of rock'n'roll history (not that I mind that side of Trux at all). I also hear the hint of Patti Smith in Eleanor Friedberger's voice - although, unlike certain of her contemporaries, it doesn't sound like a deliberate imitation, which is refreshing. Yeah, and I hear a little bit of late Beatles, maybe, although I always wonder whether that reference point is just the most obvious of many one could invoke on hearing a certain kind of pop. Anyway, I like hearing all this.
Stand-outs so far:
'Leaky Tunnel' - oh gosh, it's production WOW time. The sounds on this track impress me much in the same way as the RZA's 'Cherry Range', so much so that I'm slightly disappointed when the most interesting stuff drops out around the two minute mark. It's still great, though, and so far it's the song on which the Furnaces' thing for singing about London tourist spots and the like is most charming.
It also transitions nicely into 'Up In The North'. Now if I was still drinking, and if I could organise it, I would love to persuade a whole bunch of my favourite people to listen to 'Up In The North', fall in love with it and learn all the words, and then at the end of a long evening of carousing we would sit in someone's front room and have a good old sing-along.
'Don't Dance Her Down' - is also very good. Sorry, here my ability say something interesting about a song after one listen has failed me (unless "it sounds a bit electro at the start" counts), and I just have to register my approval and the likelihood that I will soon be humming this one regularly too.
Not for the first time, it occurs to me that writing about music *as* music - as opposed to what I'd perhaps call music as ideas - is frequently a struggle for the musically untrained writer. This is a subject covered accurately by Eppy at clap clap blog, here - it's very much worth reading, and I suspect will strike a chord with a fair few regular readers of this blog. Here's an extract:
We do have very few descriptive terms for smell in our language, and only a very few more for sound. That's why we need to invent them. That's why professions develop a jargon: so members of that profession can make themselves very specifically understood.
Still... it's precisely this lack of a jargon, and this focus on cultural rather than musical analysis, that makes music criticism, along with movie crit, somewhat widely read.
It's a Catch-22, no doubt about it - the number of times I wrestle with whether I can justify repeating myself by describing yet another vocal performance as "yearning", or saying that a beat makes it impossible not to dance - and then reason that the most important thing in writing about music might be to communicate what you think about it in as clear a way as possible to potential readers/listeners... God knows how I'm doing so far.
(I may or may not be fishing for feedback, there.)
A copy of Gallowsbird's Bark by The Fiery Furnaces arrived in the post today (Sav, if you ever read this, you are a scholar and a gentleman). Early thoughts based on the tracks I listened to on the bus to work: nice, very nice. I can hear the reasons they've been compared to Royal Trux - it's the more playful, surprising side of Royal Trux, the one that was more about mucking around with odd instrumental arrangements than digging around in the muck of rock'n'roll history (not that I mind that side of Trux at all). I also hear the hint of Patti Smith in Eleanor Friedberger's voice - although, unlike certain of her contemporaries, it doesn't sound like a deliberate imitation, which is refreshing. Yeah, and I hear a little bit of late Beatles, maybe, although I always wonder whether that reference point is just the most obvious of many one could invoke on hearing a certain kind of pop. Anyway, I like hearing all this.
Stand-outs so far:
'Leaky Tunnel' - oh gosh, it's production WOW time. The sounds on this track impress me much in the same way as the RZA's 'Cherry Range', so much so that I'm slightly disappointed when the most interesting stuff drops out around the two minute mark. It's still great, though, and so far it's the song on which the Furnaces' thing for singing about London tourist spots and the like is most charming.
It also transitions nicely into 'Up In The North'. Now if I was still drinking, and if I could organise it, I would love to persuade a whole bunch of my favourite people to listen to 'Up In The North', fall in love with it and learn all the words, and then at the end of a long evening of carousing we would sit in someone's front room and have a good old sing-along.
'Don't Dance Her Down' - is also very good. Sorry, here my ability say something interesting about a song after one listen has failed me (unless "it sounds a bit electro at the start" counts), and I just have to register my approval and the likelihood that I will soon be humming this one regularly too.
Not for the first time, it occurs to me that writing about music *as* music - as opposed to what I'd perhaps call music as ideas - is frequently a struggle for the musically untrained writer. This is a subject covered accurately by Eppy at clap clap blog, here - it's very much worth reading, and I suspect will strike a chord with a fair few regular readers of this blog. Here's an extract:
We do have very few descriptive terms for smell in our language, and only a very few more for sound. That's why we need to invent them. That's why professions develop a jargon: so members of that profession can make themselves very specifically understood.
Still... it's precisely this lack of a jargon, and this focus on cultural rather than musical analysis, that makes music criticism, along with movie crit, somewhat widely read.
It's a Catch-22, no doubt about it - the number of times I wrestle with whether I can justify repeating myself by describing yet another vocal performance as "yearning", or saying that a beat makes it impossible not to dance - and then reason that the most important thing in writing about music might be to communicate what you think about it in as clear a way as possible to potential readers/listeners... God knows how I'm doing so far.
(I may or may not be fishing for feedback, there.)
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