Ruminations on Conor Oberst's Ruminations

Given that I'm a huge fan of Bright Eyes (especially Lifted and Fevers & Mirrors), it's perhaps odd that until a few weeks ago I'd never listened to anything Conor Oberst released under his own name. There have been almost half as many Conor Oberst albums (4) as there have been Bright Eyes albums (9), and yet it wasn't until the 9th of this month - the day we learned that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States - that I bothered to buy one of them.

Ruminations came out last month, and it's *wonderful*. I quickly formed a closer bond with this album than I formed with either of the last two Bright Eyes LPs; Cassadaga and The People's Key were both fine records, but in my view they lacked the intimacy and feeling of Oberst's best material.

Famous Last Lines

As I flicked through my Twitter feed yesterday morning, I spotted this tweet from @fourfoot:

Now listening to Martha by Tom Waits.

Nobody comes close when it comes to crushing final lines in recorded music. Nobody.

— Fourfoot (@fourfoot) November 20, 2016

I too revisited Martha recently (along with the other 13 songs on the excellent Asylum Years compilation), and Fourfoot is totally right about that last line. If you haven't heard it before, do yourself a favour and have a quick listen now:

"And I remember quiet evenings, trembling close to you"

Fourfoot's assertion about Tom Waits and his talent for devastating final lines got me thinking, not just about the last lines of songs but about the last lines of albums. A good last line leaves you reeling long after the song has ended, and that impact is magnified tenfold when there's not another song straight after it.

November Playlist: Hang Like a Star

Eek - it's almost December! Before I give my ears entirely over to Christmas music, here are 10 of the tracks they've enjoyed this month...

1. Eugene - Sufjan Stevens

(from Carrie & Lowell)

Carrie & Lowell may not be as emotive as I'd hoped, but its constituent tracks - including this pretty ode to holidays in Oregon - are never less than lovely.

A Crack in Everything: Fevers and Mirrors

It's the long-overdue return of A Crack in Everything! This is the part of the show where I spit on the albums I love and pretend to think them anything other than great. Click here to see which albums I've spat on in the past.

We can all agree that Fevers & Mirrors is the best Bright Eyes album, right?  Or, okay, Lifted is the "best" one, but Fevers is our favourite, the one we all secretly prefer in spite of the fact that Lifted and maybe even I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning are objectively better records. I may be a little biased because Fevers & Mirrors was the first Bright Eyes CD I owned, but I suspect that most other fans share that personal, 'but this is my Bright Eyes album' sense of attachment regardless of their own entry points.

It seems kind of dumb to give Fevers & Mirrors the ACiE treatment; I mean, of *course* it's not perfect, the flaws are the whole point. To iron out the musical creases and Polyfilla the cracks in Conor Oberst's voice would be to fundamentally alter the very heart of the Fevers & Mirrors experience, and for the worse; the fragility, the confusion, and the raw shakiness are all crucial components of the LP, and major factors in my own enjoyment thereof.

So, like my write-up of Neutral Milk Hotel's winningly nasal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, this post will ignore the flaws and faults that I consider to be integral parts of the album's appeal. However, there are still a few improvements that I feel could stand to be made to Fevers & Mirrors, so let's dive in and, um, reflect on those things.

The Long Song (Guest Post)

In today's blog, Paul Jennings scours his library for >8 minute odysseys that he actually likes...

Meat Loaf. It's always Meat Loaf. Usually Bat Out Of Hell. All 9 minutes 53 seconds of it.

You know the guy. He's the one nursing his quid, analysing the pub jukebox, trying to find the long songs. It's quantity over quality. He demands his VFM. He wants his Meat Loaf. If you're very unlucky he'll double up with a portion of American Pie, weighing in at a calorific 8 minutes 33 seconds. I feel sick and fetch my coat.

The beauty of the 3 minute pop song is that if you don't like it, there'll be another one along shortly. Hard to do when ruffle-cuffed theatre boy insists on dragging his songs out to a fortnight.

The long song is wide open for self-indulgence. The six minute solo for the bassist who feels undervalued by the band or the drummer still irked that he didn't get a co-writer credit on the last album.

So, I set myself a challenge. Five songs of eight minutes or over that won't make you hit the skip track button.

1. Johnny Was - Stiff Little Fingers

from Inflammable Material, 1979

“Woman hold her head and cry,

'Cause her son has been shot down in the street and died,

Just because of the system”

Encore favourite from 1979 classic Inflammable Material. SLF have made this Bob Marley cover so firmly their own it's hard to believe it wasn't written in and about their native Belfast.

Music Not to Get Married By

Avid followers of The Album Wall may well be wondering why I haven't posted a new blog since last Wednesday. Where was Friday's blog? And Monday's? Are you getting lazy, Joel? Don't you care any more?

Okay, I'm not suggesting that laziness didn't have its part to play, but I'd like to think that a larger chunk of the blame for this minor schedule slip can be pinned on my cousin's wedding. The ceremony took place on Saturday, and it took place in Yorkshire, which meant that the time I usually reserve for blogging was instead spent driving to and from Stamford Bridge*.

Pictured: me at the reception. I was probably making that face because of all the driving it took to get there.

Still, it was a lovely wedding (with, if you'll excuse my sudden verve for matters decorative, a wonderfully autumnal colour scheme), and the three-course meal was obviously much appreciated. In fact, the only thing that wasn't perfect was the choice of music.

10 Fucking Songs

Last week, I went on Twitter to complain about how long it had been since I last sat down and made a proper playlist. Eager to crack my knuckles and exercise my track-selecting skills, I asked people to suggest potential themes; Ash Cooke's suggestion (famous painters) proved too tricky, especially given my self-imposed "no songs I don't have" rule, but this suggestion from @Archrawr seemed a lot more doable:

In fact, I decided that "sweary songs" would be too broad a playing field, and so I added an extra restriction of my own: my playlist would solely consist of songs with the word 'fuck' in them.

Knees Up!

To be honest, today's blog is going to be a bit quick and rubbish because I'm preparing to hit the Knee Deep Festival for the second consecutive year (I'll be playing the drums for Scriber, just one of the many brilliant people mentioned on my new 'Friends of This Blog' page).

Start Slowly and Gently

As far as opening tracks are concerned, my general rule of thumb is to start with a bang. I feel that a big, attention-grabbing gambit tends to make for the best beginning; the five tracks that I mentioned in my Track Ones blog (cripes, that feels like an eternity ago now) are all pretty good examples. The Chad Who Loved Me has its epic movie strings...Cloud Shadow on the Mountain gives us those pounding drums...heck, Grace Kelly Blues starts with a friggin' brass band!

Lately, though, I've been coming around to the opposite approach, i.e. opening your album with a quiet, gentle song. Matthew Jay's Draw (which I recently received in a 1p Album Club swap) starts with a song called Four Minute Rebellion, and it's the most stripped-back, simplistic, and affecting song on the disc:

This track - being relatively unembellished and less than two minutes long - feel like the sort of thing that ought to be buried somewhere in the album's mid-section. And yet there is a certain charm to the idea of easing your listener in, and Four Minute Rebellion is a pretty arresting opener in spite of its slightness. The sweet melody and tactical F-bomb make sure of that.

Matthew Jay's minute masterpiece got me thinking about other such track ones - which other classic openers knock politely instead of tearing the door off its hinges?

Little Bear by the Guillemots springs nimbly to mind. I realise that I was blogging about Through the Windowpane only a few days ago, but the album's first track is also a great example of what I'm talking about here.

Concept Albums

I'm having a bit of a rest this week, but rather than neglect The Album Wall entirely, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you some blog posts from the past. Today's update was originally posted on my last.fm journal back in August '07:

Confession: I am a total concept album freak. If I so much as hear the same word in two songs on the same album, I'll set about looking up lyrics and drawing somewhat fanciful lines between them.

Okay, so we've got the ones that everybody knows are concepts - The Wall, Tommy, and so forth - but I'm talking more about the excitement you (well, I) draw from spotting recurring themes and ideas nestled in the records that didn't otherwise scream 'concept album'. Let's look at a few examples, shall we?

1) Attack Of The Grey Lantern

I've only recently got into Mansun. Apparently, when they were big, there was a big debate between their fans over whether or not ...Grey Lantern does, in fact, stow a concept. Yes, all the tracks flow together perfectly (I feel sorry for the Americans who had the whole thing minced up), but does it tell any kind of story? Well, one look at the lyrics should at least persuade the naysayers to reconsider their position. The title character from Dark Mavis pops up in several songs, as does the Stripper Vicar. Mansun's lyrics are pretty oblique, mind, so it's hard to work out exactly what's going on. Don't let the chorus of the hidden track, An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter ("The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much/They're just a vehicle for a lovely voice"), put you off; apparently, lead singer Paul Draper has since admitted that the song was meant ironically.

2) Secrets of the Witching Hour

If you haven't heard of The Crimea, I would first advise you to hop over to their website (here) and download this album for free. Yes, free! I suffer from a serious case of CD scruples, so I had to get the physical version, but I'm sure the less ridiculous of you will happily take it for nothing, especially now that it has my "Seal of Approval". Download it now, I'll wait.

Now then. Secrets... is an altogether different beast to the Mansun album. Whereas the tracks of ...Grey Lantern all run into each other, some punchy with big choruses, some widescreen experiments, Davey and Co. give us 11 relatively compact pop songs-gone-bad (like a neurotic, self-loathing Beach Boys with more complex arrangements and a less camp Brian Molko doing vocals). They seem to document a) the breakup of the relationship between the narrator and his girl, and b) the end of the world. Whether these two are happening simultaneously, or if the latter is simply a metaphor for the former, or if it starts as a metaphor and then actually happens, or WHATEVER, the songs are certainly deeper than your average 3-minute pop song. Just to pick out some pivotal moments in what might be the plot: Bombay Sapphire Coma sees our protagonist regretting "disown[ing]" the girl, Don't Close Your Eyes On Me is a sort of "We ain't finished here yet" song, while Wierd [sic] is the epic final curtain (as a sidenote, it also contains the darkly brilliant line "Rapunzel above me, recieving chemotherapy/Throw down your- oh, sorry, how stupid of me").

3) Beautiful Freak

If you thought I was clutching at non-existent straws up 'til here, just wait 'til you've read this one. I reckon, right, that all Eels albums have at least an element of concept to them (most notably Electro-Shock Blues, which is pretty definitely about the death of his sister and mother). This one, however, requires a bit of imagination. I first imagined this a concept album when I noticed the similarity in theme between Beautiful Freak and  My Beloved Monster; both are about E's affection for a social outcast. Most of the other songs also deal with the narrator's OWN status as a bit of a pariah (Mental sees all of his peers describing him as such; Rags To Rags documents a down-on his luck loser's arduous struggle to the same exact spot). If you're like me, and willing to claw at whatever tiny links you're given, you might say that the borderline agoraphobia experienced in Not Ready Yet is caused by the events of Susan's House, or that the girl to whom the lyrics of Manchild are addressed is the titular "freak". Or you might not. Up to you.

4) Fevers & Mirrors

If the mock interview at the end of An Attempt To Tip The Scales is anything to go by, Conor Oberst - Mr. Bright Eyes himself - was deliberately using a lot of repeated imagery in the writing of this record, if not actually telling a story. Fevers, mirrors, scales, clocks and calendars all crop up multiple times, not to mention this enigmatic Arienette lady. Now, I have to admit, if there is a straight concept here, then I'm not entirely sure what it is. I've often considered that Arienette (who, remember, is made up, and yet "as real as you or I") may be a mental manifestation of Conor's "dream girl", who, even in his head, can make his life miserable one minute and bring him great joy the next (although, admittedly, the "great joy" to be seen in these ditties is sparse). At any rate, I'm going to leave the gaps in this one for you to fill in yourself, as I'm tired and I'm obviously unsure what I'm on about here.

5) Through The Windowpane

Last one, promise! I like to envisage this one as a sort of musical, if you will, featuring Guillemots main man Fyfe Dangerfield as our overly romantic protagonist. The album documents his (ultimately fruitless) attempts to woo his girl (a lot of girls in this list, ain't there?), including "leaving [his] best friend" (Redwings) and embarking on some big journey with her (Come Away With Me; not in a creepy rapist way, of course, more a romantic trip kinda way). Eventually, however, her constant rebuffs get to him, and he goes a bit mad (Sao Paulo). Bless. The whole "musical" idea works best if you imagine the curtain opening after the interval to reveal a lone, despondent-looking Fyfe, who bursts into Blue Would Still Be Blue, accompanied only by those weird boopy noises. Magic.

* * *

So those are my thoughts. If you're not a "lyrical trainspotter", you might just view all of this as the ramblings of a crackpot who ought to get a job. Hopefully, though, you'll have at least partially understood what I'm getting at, and you'll have some could-be concept albums of your own at the ready.

P.S. If anyone could explain to me the concept behind Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, that'd be great, 'cause I've got no idea.