The Decemberists + Gillian Welch

An iTunes Session from the Decemberists + a new one from Gillian Welch

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 27, 2011
By Matt Ashare

It’s been what you might call an awfully good year for the Decemberists. Back in January, the Portland, Ore.-based group and brainchild of the brainy Colin Meloy saw their sixth studio album, The King Is Dead (Capitol), debut at the top of the Billboard charts — a rather remarkable achievement by a left-of-center band who got their start on the indier-than-thou Kill Rock Stars label and who have never seemed particularly interested in playing by the rules of mainstream pop. Perhaps it didn’t hurt that one of Meloy’s professed musical heroes, R.E.M. guitarist Pete Buck, was kind enough to lend a little of his patented 12-string jangle to the folk-rocker “Calamity Song,” as well as mandolin to the disc’s countrified opener “Don’t Carry It All” and churning electric guitar to the dark, Neil Youngian “Down By the Water.”
And Meloy’s decision to simplify his approach after penning the ambitiously arcane rock opera The Hazards of Love (Capitol) in 2009 was evidently a smart move.
     Meloy and his current cohorts — guitarist Chris Funk, bassist Nate Query, and keyboard/accordion player Jenny Conlee of the newgrass band Black Prairie, plus drummer John Moen and violinist Sarah Watkins — have been mighty busy since January.
Along with playing the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on a tour that brings them to the nTelos Wireless Pavilion in Charlottesville on Aug. 3, they found time to record an NPR “Tiny Desk Concert,” which ranked The King Is Dead as the year’s best album (so far), over, among others, Radiohead’s King of Limbs. I smell a least a couple of Grammy nominations in the Decemberists’ future.
     In the meantime, the band are gearing up for the imminent release of a downloadable “iTunes Session” recording, featuring eight live-in-the-studio performances of tunes to which they’ve been treating club and festival audiences. Buck’s guitar is barely missed on the opening “Calamity Song”; Meloy pulls off a particularly pretty rendition of the pastoral “June Hymn” from “The King Is Dead”; and he’s at his fiercest and most inspired on the propulsive single “This Is Why We Fight.”
     Elsewhere, Meloy digs into the Decemberists’ past, reaching all the way back to their first EP, 2001’s 5 Songs, for the wistfully folksy “Shiny,” a track that takes full advantage of Funk’s pedal steel embellishments and Conlee’s accordion. For a taste of just how willfully obscure Meloy can be, there’s “Shankill Butchers,” a sorta ye olde English dancehall number from 2006’s “The Crane’s Wife” that details the murderous exploits of a loyalist gang who operated out of Belfast in the 1970s. (Yes, I had to look up that one.) But the real treat here is a countrified cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” which prominently features Conlee’s gorgeous background vocals along with a nice violin solo. Here’s to hoping it remains part of the current Decemberists’ set.

FOLK HEROES: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

It was Americana songstress Gillian Welch whose voice so wonderfully complemented Meloy’s on The King Is Dead. And she’s not having such a bad year, either. For starters, after a long songwriting drought, she just released her first album in eight years, the spare, acoustic, old-timey The Harrow & the Harvest (Acony). And now she and her longtime collaborator, guitarist/producer David Rawlings, are embarking on a U.S. tour that begins July 30 at the Newport Folk Festival, ends Jan. 1 at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and brings the duo to Virginia for three dates — Aug. 17 at the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, the 18th at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville, and the 19th at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond.
     The new disc is more or less a return to the austere aesthetic of Welch and Rawlings’ two Grammy-nominated releases, 1996’s aptly titled Revival and 2001’s Time (The Revelator). Intimate, alluring, and often quite dark, The Harrow & the Harvest finds Welch’s spectral voice framed by little more than a pair of strummed and flat-picked guitars, as she hauntingly delivers lovelorn lyrics like “I lost you a while ago/Still I don’t know why/I can’t say your name/Without a crow flying by” (“The Way It Will Be”). It’s very much a genre work that blends elements of Appalachian roots, country, and folk without departing from convention. In a sense, that’s both the disc’s strength and its weakness — and one reason why it would have been cool if Meloy had returned Welch’s favor by dropping in for a cameo or three.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_reviews_an_itunes_session_from_the_decemberists_a_new_one_from_g

MEREDITH BRAGG

Virginian Meredith Bragg puts his own twist on singer-songwriter

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 20, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

MEREDITH BRAGG, NEST (The Kora)

“I’ve always wrestled with the idea of ‘singer-songwriter’,“ admits Arlington’s Meredith Bragg. “I think people get a particular idea or image in their head when they hear that. But I haven’t been able to come up with a better moniker, so I guess I’m stuck with ‘singer-songwriter.’“

SWEET VIRGINIAN: His delivery brings to mind Elliott Simth

     The 35-year-old Bragg was indeed the guy who wrote and sang songs he then brought to a band on his 2005 debut, An inquiry into the nature of pressure waves through eleven songs by Meredith Bragg with his band the Terminals, Vol. 1. But, as the title suggests, it wasn’t your rote heart-on-your-sleeve, dude-with-a-guitar offering. Bragg’s wistfully soft delivery and tendency to layer his vocals did earn immediate and favorable comparisons to the late Elliott Smith. But his penchant for penning impressionistic, non-linear lyrics rather than straightforward confessionals marked him as something quite different from your typical, well, singer-songwriter.
     “It’s always flattering to have that comparison,“ Bragg says of the many times his name has been mentioned in the same breath as Smith’s. “It’s also funny because the first time I actually heard Elliott Smith is when I was recording with another band and the producer mentioned that when I double tracked the vocals, it sounded like Elliott Smith. I had never heard him, so they handed me one of his records — I think it was XO. And then I went out and bought XO and Either/Or. They remain two of my favorite records.“
    Bragg was still with the Terminals — cellist Elizabeth Olson, drummer Jon Roth, and multi-instrumentalist Brian Minter — when he recorded the more collaborative 2006 release The Departures EP. But when he and his wife moved to Charlottesville later that year, Bragg finally found himself on his own with what you might call the standard tools of a conventional singer-songwriter — his voice and an acoustic guitar. What followed, the 2007 full-length Silver Sonya, was anything but conventional.
     “I couldn’t really get together with the band, so I decided to put out a solo record,“ he recalls. “And part of the idea was to give myself extreme limitations just to see what would happen. I worked with Chad Clark, a fantastic producer, and PJ Lipple; the three of us cut it up and messed around with it, treated it, and put it back in the songs to the point where they sounded like beats and ethereal strings and weren’t even recognizable as either guitar or vocals. I like the idea of creating walls and being able to delve into just the few things that you have there. It was also fun to figure out what you can do with production. You do have to limit yourself or you can end up going down the rabbit hole.“
     Bragg took that production know-how back to Arlington, where he’s resettled with his wife and their one-year-old daughter. And he also reunited the members of the Terminals when he entered the studio to record his new album Nest, a disc that finds an artful and compelling balance between the cut-and-paste avant-folk atmospherics of Silver Sonya and a sound more grounded in the rock of indiedom. Those haunting echoes of Elliott Smith remain, especially when Bragg pares down to simply strummed acoustic guitar chords on the reflective “Civilians” and harmonizes with himself against the shimmering, fingerpicked-guitar backdrop of “Arrowstork.“ And Bragg isn’t afraid to settle occasionally into something resembling a natural, if expressionistic, narrative in “Civilians,“ with verses like “Take me in/Into the summer haze/Hold me closer/A smile across your face/The light is right/The reasons are wrong/Seasons pushing/Pushing us along.“
     Elsewhere, it’s all about drone, tone, and texture. Quiet synths intersect with subdued electric guitars, and rhythms that seamlessly blend real drums with looped grooves to create the lush electro-organic soundscape of “Second Golden Age,“ as Bragg drops intriguing lines like “Take a minute for the breath to stretch and catch inside/Take a minute to check if we’re alive.“ Olson’s cello brings a chamber-pop feel to the rockier “Birds of North America,“ a track that builds calmly toward a buoyant, melodic climax. And in “Point, Line, and Plane,“ a song inspired by the ideas of the Russian artist/theorist Wassily Kandinsky, Bragg, who again has Clark on board producing, ponders the sublime in a near whisper with little more than random samples to guide him.
     “I consider it one long arc,“ Bragg says of where his muse had led him. “For whatever reason people are calling this the solo record. But even if you have songs, when you bring them to a group they put their imprint on them. You could really say the same about producers, especially the way I go back and forth. At the end of the day it’s very easy to stay in a comfort zone with an acoustic guitar and a voice. I feel like I’ve done that before, and I can still do that. But I like a little more experimentation and the give and take of collaboration.“
Email mattattheburg@gmail.com with tips about any local and/or regional music events 
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_virginian_meredith_bragg_puts_his_own_twist_on_singer-son 

DEATH GRIPS + 33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

Protest pop, revolution rock, and Death Grips

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 13, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Although it can be difficult to avoid, romanticizing the past in music is a dangerous game in that, too of-ten, it leads to the problematic conclusion that things “back then” were way better than they are now. Sure, the late ’60s were qualitatively different from, say, the mid ’90s for any number of reasons that may and probably do include socio-political forces, trends in technology, and the very nature of the record business itself. But, take personal taste out of the equation, and there’s really no convincing or reliable way to de-termine objectively whether music was “better” during one era or another, only that it was “different.”
     I’ll happily concede that hindsight, coupled with a natural human tendency to remember the great art and artists of a particular period while relegating the lesser to the proverbial dustbin of history, creates an op-portunity for fruitful comparisons that can lead to useful conclusions about the past. But those tools can’t be applied to the present. And, let’s face it, most of us remain partial to the music that first moved us and gravitate toward newer artists in that same vein.
     In his new book 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day (HarperCollins, 2011), UK critic Dorian Lynskey cherry picks 33 songs — Dylan’s “Masters of War,” R.E.M.’s “Exhuming McCarthy,” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” to name three — that represent his idea of a proper protest song, and devotes a chapter to each. As with any list of this sort, there’s room to quibble with the selections — to my mind, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is a better U2 “protest song” than “Pride (In the Name of Love).”  But Lynskey does a fine job of getting the stories behind the songs, often from the artists themselves, and placing them in the context of what else was going on musically at the time.
     However, Lynskey doesn’t seem to have a particularly firm grasp on the peculiar dynamics — the vagaries of chance, the unpredictable interplay between artist and audience — that make for a successful protest song, or even how relative success might be measured accurately. Dylan, who would later disavow any ties to “the movement,” had written and performed “Masters of War” over a year before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution signaled the formal commitment of ground forces in Southeast Asia. It was only later that it was adopted as an anti-Vietnam war anthem. And Spike Lee’s inclusion of “Fight the Power” in the opening credits of 1989’s Do the Right Thing almost certainly added to the shocking urgency of the song.
     Lynskey doesn’t entirely ignore these factors, but at the end of the final chapter (“Green Day/‘American Idiot’/2004: The Protest Song Revival That Never Was”) and in a short epilogue (“33 1/3”) that follows, his confusion leads him straight into the nostalgic trap of concluding that, yes, things used to be way better than they are now. Even after delineating the numerous ways artists as diverse as Lil’ Wayne, Dixie Chicks, and Neil Young lent their voices to the mounting opposition to the Bush administration, he singles out John Mayer’s passively defeatist “Waiting for the World to Change” as a signal of the imminent demise of the protest song. And then, in an about face, he uses an anecdote from The Simpsons Movie and a bunch of conjecture about Facebook groups and “the release-valve nature of online protest” to blame apathy among today’s audiences for the decline of the protest song.
     Really? Wouldn’t it be just as plausible to suggest that all the anti-Bush sentiments expressed by artists leading up to the 2008 election — not to mention online networking — actually succeeded in mobilizing support, especially among young people, for the election of our first African-American president?

These days, protest songs are where you find them, if you’re willing to look. Some of the best overtly politicized music I’ve come across this year, coincidentally enough, came to me via a link from a Facebook friend. Exmilitary, the new “mixtape” album by the Sacramento-based avant-rap group Death Grips, is a free download (just Google “Death Grips Exmilitary” and it’s yours). It comes on like a more ferociously audacious and confrontational take on what N.W.A. did when they brought a little Sex Pistols punk attitude to hip-hop. Actually, American hardcore may be a better touchstone for the aggro production style applied here: MC Ride’s deep-voiced anti-cop rap “Klink” is set to a glitchy beat, random screams, and samples from the Black Flag tune “Rise Above” and there’s a snippet from DC’s supercharged Bad Brains buried in dark-hued electrosquelch of “Takyon (Death Yon).”
     Which brings to mind another form of “protest” inherent in the digital age and embedded in Exmilitary: the appropriation of samples (Charles Manson’s voice and Link Wray’s guitar are two of the more conspicuous here). Some may see that as criminal sabotage, others as the sonic equivalent of collage art. Either way, to sample in the manner of Death Grips is to create a kind of 21st-century protest song that’s outside the realm of 33 Revolutions Per Minute.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/protest_pop_revolution_rock_and_death_grips

BON IVER

Justin Vernon stops making sense on ‘Bon Iver, Bon Iver’

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 06, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

MAN WITH A PLAN: Justin Vernon as Bon Iver

Heartbreak remains one of the more reliable muses for aspiring singer-songwriters — which, perhaps, is just another way of saying that the bar is set fairly high for artists intent on bearing their emotional scars to the world. Justin Vernon cleared that bar handily when, in 2007, he left the obscure Raleigh, N.C.-based band DeYarmond Edison, returned to his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisc., sequestered himself in his father’s hunting cabin, and poured his damaged soul into For Emma, Forever Ago. Credited to Bon Iver (allegedly an intentional misspelling/simplification of bon écrivain, French for “good writer”), the disc not only revealed Vernon to be a better than merely “good” songwriter in the indie-beardo vein of Iron & Wine’s scruffy Samuel Beam, it also hinted at his burgeoning talents as a producer capable of sculpting starkly captivating, if somewhat skewed, soundscapes as richly evocative as the plaintive falsetto he favors.
     Emma easily secured for Vernon/Bon Iver the status of critics’ darling. But it was an improbable invitation from rapper Kanye West, who wanted to sample a section of the Bon Iver tune “Woods” for the track “Lost In the World” on his 2010 disc My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, that put Bon Iver on a much larger stage. Literally. West subsequently brought Vernon into the studio to record additional vocal tracks. Then, at a 2010 NYC gig, West surprised fans who’d packed the Bowery Ballroom by having Vernon join him on “Lost In the World.“ Earlier this year, Vernon and West did it again in front of a much larger crowd — somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 — at the Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif.
     The exposure Vernon’s garnered for Bon Iver through West may go a long way toward explaining the anomalous position the new Bon Iver, Bon Iver attained on the Billboard “Top 200” sales chart last week. The disc hit the ground running at No. 2, right below Jill Scott’s The Light of the Sun. (To put that in some perspective, that put Bon Iver, Bon Iver a full six spots up from Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, which sold over a million copies when it hit the racks the last week of May.)
     Vernon hasn’t made any major concessions in the general direction of anything one might consider mainstream accessibility with Bon Iver on the new album. In fact, in many ways it’s a much stranger, if no less enchanting, beast than Emma, which had a backstory to ground it in something resembling a traditional narrative. It’s as if, having gotten “Emma” off his chest, Vernon’s found a more abstract muse and the poetic license to stop making sense. Here’s a sample verse, as posted on the Jagjaguwar blog, from the disc’s serenely textured opening track, “Perth”: “In a mother, out a moth/Furling forests for the soft/Gotta know been lead aloft/So I’m ridding all your stories/What I know, what it is, is pouring — wire it up!“
     Six of the disc’s ten tracks appear to be named for places real, like “Perth” and “Lisbon, OH,“ or imagined (“Minnesota, WI” and “Michicant”), but only one, the hushed, finger-picked, vaguely countrified “Holocene,“ actually mentions a specific locale (Milwaukee) in its lyrics.
The more straightforwardly titled “Towers,“ a jangly and at times even jaunty tune that puts a poppy twist on Bon Iver’s generally somber tone, delivers several arresting images (“Oh the sermons are the first to rest/Smoke on Sundays when you’re drunk and dressed/Out the hollows where the swallow nests”). But, good luck locating an allusion to anything that even approximates a tower.
     The reason behind Vernon’s rhymes may be a mystery, but from start to finish, Bon Iver, Bon Iver is more about creating mood than meaning. Vernon electronically pitch-shifts his multi-tracked falsetto just enough to give it a touch of the otherworldly. And, while many of the arrangements are spare, they’re never quite spartan. In fact, along with a number of familiar Bon Iver enablers, Vernon flew string arranger Rob Moose (the National, Antony and the Johnsons), pedal steel master Greg Leisz, and a horn section whose individual credits include playing with everyone from Tom Waits to the Arcade Fire into his Wisconsin studio to help vary the tone and texture of the recording. There are even times — the midsection of “Calgary,“ for one — when distorted guitars and a propulsive backbeat bring Bon Iver fairly close to sounding like a trad rock band. For a committed non-formalist like Vernon, that might constitute a major leap forward.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/justin_vernon_stops_making_sense_on_bon_iver_bon_iver