how I spent my two and a half years in the wilderness, pt. 1

Hey there, loyal readers. Yes, all three of you! It’s me, Ben. How are you? Oh, that’s good. Me? I’m just fine, thanks. I recently got a haircut and a sand­wich and my very own pair of shoes!

You know, it feels like it’s been years since I saw you. What’s that? It has? But how can that be?

Well, Niina wasn’t far off when she inti­mated that it has been an “unmu­sical” couple of years since Girl­pants faded from rel­a­tive obscu­rity to the blackest depths of the internet. The past year has been per­haps the most unmu­sical of my life–I think I lis­tened to less than a dozen albums total before the Christ­mas­time arrival of my ridicu­lously named new media device by a cer­tain soft­ware titan caused me to go on an tunes-acquisition spree. I’ve dis­cov­ered some remark­able things since then (lookin’ at you, jj), but in gen­eral my tastes are still hope­lessly stuck in 2007.

That said, I do think there have been some excel­lent albums released in the inter­vening months. A few dozen have really stuck with me from the dark years, when I was living under the freeway and des­per­ately trading opin­ions for sand­wich crusts. In my next few posts I’m going to high­light a few of these, for your lis­tening enjoy­ment and the preser­va­tion of my ever-dwindling sanity.

Menomena — Friend and Foe (Barsuk, 2007)
This is a band that makes straight up inter­esting indie rock music. I know… them’s some big words, right? Listen: Menomena aren’t trying to go back to nature or create the synes­thetic equiv­a­lent of an acid trip or create a sonic tapestry of all 50 of our glo­ri­ously star-spangled states. No–they just want to make some cool sounds that no one else has made before. In that way, they remind me of The Flaming Lips, but without the druggy noodling and overly bom­bastic world­making. Much was made at the time of this album’s release about the band’s recording strategy. Appar­ently, they create their songs in loops on custom soft­ware before trans­forming those arranged loops into live per­for­mances (you can get more info here). The result is music that’s unusu­ally com­plex and lay­ered for this sort of indie rock–John Vanderslice’s studio wiz­ardry comes close, but it’s got a dif­ferent aim. In Friend and Foe, drums skitter along to techno-like beats, sev­eral guitar tracks scrape stac­cato over one another, pianos zoom in and out of the fore­ground. It’s a truly big sound. [Buy]

Menomena — “Wet and Rusting”

Richard Hawley — Lady’s Bridge (Mute U.S., 2007)
A long­time col­lab­o­rator of fellow sleazy-voiced Brit Jarvis Cocker and his band of mer­ry­making men and wom­en­folk, Richard Hawley is a honey-voiced singer in the great tra­di­tion of the 20^th Century’s uncounted bal­ladeers. Occa­sion­ally he picks up a rock­a­billy or a doo-wop touch, but for the most part Hawley’s songs are vel­vety smooth and achingly quiet, but entirely without pre­ten­sion. They’re songs of love and loss, and on Lady’s Bridge they flow with a master’s touch. This is the per­fect album for an evening at home, curled up with a glass of your favorite scotch and the sort of arti­fi­cially illu­mi­nated memory of a past, lost love. He’s put out a new album since this one, called Truelove’s Gutter, but I haven’t found my way to hearing it yet. Hope­fully soon. [Buy]

Richard Hawley — “Lady Solitude”

The Besnard Lakes — The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse (Jag­jaguwar, 2007)
The Besnard Lakes get lots of com­par­isons to their more pop­ular fellow Mon­tréal… eans? ites? ers?… I dunno… Anyway, I’m talking about The Arcade Fire. Such com­par­isons are really unfair. Sure, both are good at anthemic, arena-sized rock ‘n roll, but The Besnard Lakes are a much rawer, much more heart­felt (rather than heart-considered) act. Every song on this album breathes with a kind of pas­sion and vision rarely heard in modern indie rock, raw around the edges but incred­ible sure­footed son­i­cally. Great big riffs of feed­back and dis­tor­tion crash over the lis­tener repeat­edly, backed by huge cho­ruses and lay­ered vocals, and simple but tried and true rock ‘n roll song struc­tures. And man, those drums… These guys have a new album coming out this year that (at least some small part of) the internet is all abuzz about. [Buy]

The Besnard Lakes — “Devastation”

I’ll be back soon with the ones that stuck with me from 2008, a year that saw me con­structing a home out of dis­carded hub­caps and Big Mac wrap­pers at the con­flu­ence of Inter­states 75 and 85. Look for­ward to it!