The Decemberists – Castaways And Cutouts (2011, 180 g, Vinyl)

I think it was Thanksgiving 2006. We were living in Blacksburg. I was working at Barnes & Noble down in Christiansburg and everyone came to our place for Thanksgiving. Adam brought Picaresque and we were hooked.

Castaways and Cutouts ebbed and flowed for a while. There were times when it was my favorite Decemberists album, especially when we were in London. Then we saw them perform Hazards of Love live and I was set on that. 

Castaways is in the period when Colin’s ambition outstripped the band’s skills. I love that. I like when things fray around the edges just a little and you can tell the author or singer is working toward something. 

There’s an interview with Jimmy Chamberlin where he discusses joining the Smashing Pumpkins. By his recollection, he saw them play a show in some bar and there’s Billy Corgan up on stage with James and D’arcy and they’re all plugging away with a drum machine.

Jimmy said, “They were atrocious. But the thing I noticed was that not only were the song structures good, but Billy’s voice had a lot of drive to it, like he was dying to succeed.”

The feeling that comes along with that kind of determination is what made a lot of Castaways and Picaresque work. Colin is telling these beautiful stories and pulling out all of his favorite five-dollar words. It stretches the fabric of the songs in very pleasant ways, but sometimes things just rip.

Odalisque walks through a whole litany of terrors. The song starts out with a woman killing herself, set to a sleepy Colin-driven tune. The meldoy fills in and then we dive into rape, antisemitism and general violence. 

Musically, it’s all over the place, which is pretty typical in a Decemberists’ song. It’s done better in other places though. The move they make on Hazards between characters is often sudden and incongruous, but it’s incredibly well-executed.  

Odalisque brings together all of these pieces (violence, musical ambition, haunting imagery, etc.) that they band will make work a few albums later. On Castaways, it’s good and it’s compelling, but it’s rough around the edges. 

I really like it, but part of the reason I like it is for the rough edges. Maybe that makes no sense. Maybe I just like it because it reminds me of that Thanksgiving and having all those people together. 

I bought the album on a bit of a whim. I went to Barnes & Noble to check out a sale they were having on vinyl. There were a few records I was really hoping to grab – Cursive, NIN, Radiohead and some others. They had the Cursive LP, which is magnificent. Nothing else I was looking for was in-store. I grabbed this and the Rushmore OST as impulse purchases.  

It’s never going to be my favorite, but it’s also an album I’ll always listen to.

Cursive – The Ugly Organ (2014, Vinyl)

Art is Hard was the single off The Ulgy Organ that caught me. The whole album is self-discovery wrapped in a thin gauze. On Recluse, the other single from the album, the protagonist hopes to be “not that desperate” when thinking about staying in the bed of a one night stand because he’s worried he’ll never be able to get back in. A beat later, he realizes he is that desperate.

Art is Hard is a song about the nonsensical idea of the wounded artist. A songwriter telling himself or being told by an exec they need to “recreate your misery” to sell albums. It’s a fascinating song because the idea of failure as muse is two things – crazy and impossible to shake.

Reading Hemmingway or Joyce or Wilde or Chabon or Dickinson, you get the feeling that they’ve tapped into the horror of their own lives to make something beautiful. You couldn’t do that if you didn’t have horror to tap into, right?

Here’s the thing. I really like Spider-Man: Homecoming. I know Johnathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have some relevant background. Goldstein was raised in NYC and Daley was on Freaks and Geeks. So that stuff is important, sure. I don’t think, though, either was ever a teenage crimefighter coming to grips with the powers imbued in them by a radioactive spider.

The story is still compelling. The characters are believable. The thing holds together well despite these drawbacks.

You don’t have to be the people in the story or have lived a specific life to generate good work. The deification of sadness is bad news. The people who make art driven by depression don’t end up in good spots and they could make the art without the pain. Or they could make different art, that’s a thing too.

The Ugly Organ isn’t entirely about overcoming expectations of misery. A lot of it is about loss, regret and the weirdness of life. It’s the presentation of those things as reflective experiences that makes the album coherent and powerful.

Instead of telling a sad story, Kasher sings about what happens after the sad story. What the characters think about the events that have unfolded. Art is Hard isn’t about being told to be sad to make art, it’s about thinking about being sad and the burden that puts on a songwriter. 

In Sierra, probably my favorite song on the album, the character seems to be basically stalking his ex-lover and daughter. He sees her from afar and wonders about the life she’s now living, regretting his forced distance.

“I’ll never know
Know who you are
And I don’t deserve to”

He envisions her life and the father who now lives with her. He wonders about the things a person would just know if they hadn’t screwed something up so irreparably that they were walled off from that life. It’s not about the thing he screwed up, it’s about the way he now feels.

The reflection makes it that much more powerful. Regret is one of the things I’m most terrified of. I feel it all the time, but I can’t shake it’s impact on me. At the end of this post, you’ll find the poem BoJack’s father reads in the penultimate episode of BoJack Horseman. It does a great job of capturing the thing I’m terrified of.

Reflection is one of the parts of life I most enjoy. I mean, I’m writing a blog about pieces of plastic I bought. Maybe it’s assumed.

I didn’t end up listening to much Cursive outside of The Ugly Organ. Kasher has said the first three albums weren’t as personal. The band was trying to make the music they liked instead of their own music. 

(Cafe aside. If you’re on a conference call, you mimic being in a meeting. That means, if you’re learning something, you take notes, listen intently and maybe ask a question. If you’re leading the call, you make yourself interesting. A good meeting lead keeps the spotlight on themselves. As such, if you’re leading a meeting in a coffee shop, you’re inadvertently making yourself the center of attention for everyone else in the shop. Please, please don’t do that. Lady.)

People seem to love their stuff, with Happy Hollow being another standout. I should listen to that more/at all.

###

‘The View From Halfway Down’

As written by Alison Tafel for BoJack Horseman
Nicked from Vulture’s oral history of the final episode

The weak breeze whispers nothing
The water screams sublime
His feet shift teeter-totter
Deep breath, stand back, it’s time

Toes untouch the overpass
Soon he’s water bound
Eyes locked shut but peek to see
The view from halfway down

A little wind, a summer sun
A river rich and regal
A flood of fond endorphins
Brings a calm that knows no equal

You’re flying now
You see things much more clear than from the ground
It’s all okay, it would be
Were you not now halfway down

Thrash to break from gravity
What now could slow the drop?
All I’d give for toes to touch
The safety back at top

But this is it, the deed is done
Silence drowns the sound
Before I leaped I should have seen
The view from halfway down

I really should have thought
About the view from halfway down
I wish I could have known
About the view from halfway down

Bon Iver is one of three bands in an odd little metal collective. It’s a shortlist of things I listened to when I was in North Carolina. There’s more to it than that, though, as I was also listening to Surfer Blood and The Fratellis and some others. Bon Iver sits alongside Blitzen Trapper and Iron & Wine.

We saw Blitzen Trapper. In Chapel Hill. They played Cat’s Cradle in 2011. We must have gone with some folks from Alexandria’s program, but I can’t remember who. Sorry.

It was a fantastic show. For a band that I often pigeonhole as being a folk band, they’re not really. They’re a rock band. The show was all guitars and bravado (in the best possible way) and just classic rock sweat. I should get Furr.

Bon Iver gets lumped in there because it’s the same sort of lyricism, if not the same musical presentation. 

Of the three bands, Iron & Wine is the one that resonates most with me (or it was pre-2010). His songs about sadness clicked with me – still do. Blitzen Trapper was always the most fun.

I’m realizing Fleet Foxes were also in this mix. 

Blitzen Trapper had an upbeat, harder edge. There are guitar arrangements on Furr that are clearly designed to rock a human. To make them bounce a leg or nod a head as the rhythm carries them along like an undulating wave beneath their couch. Iron & Wine wasn’t trying to rock anybody’s socks off.

Bon Iver wasn’t either. Justin Veron is the dude behind Bon Iver and he’s not the kind of person who set out to make a driving album. In fact, he did effectively the opposite. He went up to a family cabin in Wisconsin and watched a bunch of Northern Exposure while he got over sickness/break-up/disbanding. 

He eventually started recording stuff and the results are collected on For Emma, Forever Ago. 

Earlier this year, preorders started for a reissue of Blood Bank, an album I honestly have never listened to. In a discussion about that album, someone mentioned that For Emma was still available on the Bon Iver website.

For Emma has a whole host of excellent tracks on it, and Justin does a great job of tying them all together with his quiet vocals. There are some just lovely lines in here. Skinny Love is a great song. Flume is excellent. The thing holds together like a rural village covered in snow. It’s warm and wonderful and I’m happy to own it.

That all said, this isn’t necessarily a life changing album for me. I like it and it’s the kind of thing I’m going to pull out a few times every winter. It’s not part of some musical bedrock, though.

Iron & Wine got there. Our Endless Numbered Days and The Shepard’s Dog have lines and tunes that run through my head on an endless loop. They frame the way I think about other pieces. 

For Emma has a lot of moments that I adore, but it’s not the top of the pops. 

That might be all I have to say about it. It’s a good album, I’m glad I own it but it’s not something that I was dying to own. I bought it on a whim and I’m not upset about that. 

Really, it just makes me realize that I need to hunt down these Iron & Wine albums. Those I would listen to all the time.

It also reminds me that I heard Justin Veron on a podcast the other day. It was an interesting interview for a few reasons. The main one was that you could hear how far he’d come from his original recording system. He has collaborators and support systems and all sorts of moving pieces. 

For Emma, Forever Ago was a thing recorded by him and for him. That’s one of the reasons I like it. It’s not fancy or trying too hard or even polished. It’s just a thing a person did. I know he can’t recreate that a million times over and, even if he could, who would want to?

I like that though. I don’t need the evolved version of this thing with a new attack. I don’t need Raichu in my life – I’ve got Pikachu. 

That’s a Pokemon “joke.”

We didn’t listen to Bon Iver when we were in Iceland last week and that seems like a missed opportunity.