Dark Night of the Soul: The Album EMI Doesn’t Want You to Hear

I may have mentioned once or twice that I am not fond of EMI’s recent business strategies, which seem to be calculated to irritate the music-buying public. You know, the very people they should be trying with all their might to win back in this age of the digital downloading and whatnot. Certainly, EMI is making a more compelling case that stupidity (as opposed to piracy) is what’s really killing the music industry. And while we’re on that cheery subject, you know what I’ve never heard? I’ve never heard a single musician that I care about or respect say that they’ll stop making music if the kids don’t knock off all the downloading. Billy Corgan can testify to Congress all he wants about needing to get paid, but let’s face it: if I thought downloading Billy Corgan’s shit would make him stop producing music and go get a job at  Arby’s, I’d be pirating that shit on a 24/7 basis.

One of the things I was bitching about (and will continue to bitch about at every opportunity. If I could get a meeting with the assholes in charge at EMI, I’d say all this & more to their doughy fucking faces) was EMI’s refusal to release Dark Night of the Soul, an album-length collaboration between Sparklehorse (Mark Linkous) and Danger Mouse (you know, the guy who is half of Gnarls Barkley; the guy who did the fucking Grey Album; the guy who breathed new life into the Black Keys last year… that guy) meant to accompany a book of visual goodies from none other than David Lynch. I should mention that Dark Night of the Soul features guest performances from such indie luminaries as Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas, Jason Lytle, Frank Black, and Iggy Fucking Pop. In other words, this album is full on, mind-blowing indie bait. This thing should’ve sold a billion copies for its list of contributors alone. But it was not to be; Danger Mouse let the good folks at NPR stream the album as an exclusive “First Listen” and the babies at EMI pissed their wrinkle-free khakis, despite the fact that what NPR and Danger Mouse were doing was essentially getting the indie kids (myself included) to respond to the album in a way that can only be described as Pavlovian. As of this writing, Dark Night of the Soul still does not have a release date, and it looks like EMI has no intention of releasing it.

Which is too bad, because it turns out that Dark Night of the Soul is worth every bit of the hype it has received and then some. It’s a moody, funky, grumpy, gorgeous record. I mean, this album is so awesome that it strikes me as statistically impossible that Tom Waits didn’t have some hand in it. Wayne Coyne is the first guest to appear, opening the album with “Revenge”, a song that admittedly sounds like it could be a Flaming Lips tune, but if that’s the worst thing someone can say about your song, what they’re really saying is, “Goddamn, that song is really awesome.”

The album has a freaky, psychedelic, middle-of-the-night feel to it that fans of Sparklehorse will recognize from 2006′s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, which also featured some production from Danger Mouse, a guy I can’t stop praising for his ability to hear exactly how a song needs to sound and making it sound that way. So Dark Night of the Soul would have been musically worthwhile even without the high-profile collaborations, but having Iggy Pop shout, “et cetera, I quit,” on your album (as he does on the awesome “Pain” – if this is what Iggy’s new record sounds like, sign me up) is certainly an entertaining bonus.

I could go on and on about each track’s individual loveliness, but that’s hardly the issue anymore. It’s a great album, and I’d tell you to run right out and get it, but you can’t because EMI is dumb. The book is still for sale and it comes with a blank CD. So maybe you should go download the sucker and burn it to disc and then, if you ever meet Mark Linkous and/or Danger Mouse, buy them a round of their favorite beverage as a way of saying thanks. Although it’s not like EMI has put the lid on every opportunity you have to hear Dark Night of the Soul; search any torrent engine and you’ll find it (EMI is probably too busy keeping their music out of independent record stores to sue you anyway. Hell, given all the ways they’re finding to not sell music, they’ll probably be handing out pink slips to their legal department in a matter of days). Or, if you want to hear it completely legally and for free, the damn thing is still available here at the NPR website. That’s right – EMI put the brakes on the only way they have to make money off of Dark Night of the Soul without ever stopping NPR from basically giving it away. So either EMI has been infiltrated by anti-industry moles who are tearing it apart from the inside or it is entirely staffed by people who are so stupid that any just society would prohibit them from breeding.

In any case, Dark Night of the Soul is a pretty great album and, since there are so many ways to hear it without giving EMI a dime, you really can’t afford not to listen to it.

All We Want, Baby, Is Everything

So Dan Boeckner and his wife, Alexei Perry, are touring Eastern Europe as Handsome Furs and they’re talking to people about life under communism, etc. Boeckner told The Villager about meeting people who were “illegally importing bands into these countries and running clubs with no money and building all their equipment themselves”. Boeckner and Perry were moved by these people’s “tenacious attchment to promoting music, whether it’s gonna make money or not” – so moved, in fact, that they began writing Face Control on that very tour. Coming home to an increasingly right-wing Canadian government and the last days of GW Bush in the U.S. helped add the proper dash of modern paranoia to the mix and the result is a simple (at first) sounding pop record that celebrates music’s ability to lift our spirits even when the powers that be are out to crush them.

That said, nothing on Face Control is all that overt – these are songs about people, and they’re rock songs. Boeckner recognizes that to the real authoritarians out there, rock ‘n’ roll itself is a threat. Anything that’s fun for the kids, anything that gets ‘em all sweaty and huggy, is intolerable to most types of dogmatic people, be they religious fundamentalists or revolutionary dictators. Sure, the Clash (whom Boeckner quite rightly praises in the Villager article) sang overtly political tunes, but they also sang “Lover’s Rock,” the first song I know of to suggest cunnilingus as an effective means of birth control. This is probably why Face Control‘s best moments are upbeat rockers like “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” with its gleeful bass drum stomp (courtesy of Perry) and Boeckner’s shouting “Baby’s outta step with the occupation.” Boeckner adds, “I don’t know/ but I’ve been told/ every little thing’s been bought and sold” just in case you forgot that the narrators of Face Control‘s songs are living under a cloud of oppression and censorship.

In the Villager article (linked here – you should check it out. It’s brief but informative), Boeckner takes a moment to pan indie acts who are dressing up love songs in what he refers to as Dungeons & Dragons metaphors while their continent is plunging into economic ruin caused by nearly a decade of fuck-awful leadership. Boeckner is talking about basically walking a highwire over two pits – one is the Preachy Band pit, where even my hero Billy Bragg is wont to fall (one of my friends summed up Bragg’s entire catalogue once by shouting in an off-key cockney accent, “I don’t like the government.” I was hard-put to argue with him). The other is, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Boeckner, the “bleached-out, ’60s Eagles” Pit. (*cough*Fleet Foxes*cough*). Face Control walks the line pretty well, delivering the rousing “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” and the beautiful “All We Want, Baby, is Everything,” where Boeckner sings, “Heaven was a place we built out of stone.”

Face Control has been panned by some critics for sounding a like a tossed-off, done-in-a-weekend sort of project, and it does kinda have that sound to it, but whether that’s good or bad is in the ear of the beholder. I happen to like that the album feels that way – it makes me feel like Boeckner and Perry had a sense of urgency about making the music, which suggests that, just as music helped people deal with the atrocities of communism (and, despite what Bob Avakian might have you believe, there is not one communist regime in history that hasn’t censored, persecuted, and trampled the rights of the people they’ve claimed to be helping), perhaps music is helping Canadians Boeckner and Perry deal with the fact that their PM suspended Parliament just as they were finishing the album. Immediacy alone is not reason enough to like an album (sorry, Neil Young. I like that you did Living with War more than I like how it sounds), but the songs on Face Control are quite strong and usually pretty catchy.

The album closes with a song called “Radio Kalininbrad,” which the Villager suggests is alluding to radio station B92 in Serbia, a station that snuck factual reports about Slobodan Milosevic’s crimes out to international news outlets. Boeckner and Perry met with staffers from the radio station who were routinely persecuted by the Milosevic government. Despite being shut down repeatedly, Boeckner credits B92 with helping to get protests going in Belgrade and calling attention to the ethnic cleansing that was going on there at the time. These are the people who need to be celebrated in rock songs and Handsome Furs do them a great honor on Face Control.