It’s Scott McCaughey’s Fault

I first heard of the Minus 5 because I read somewhere that perennially underrated guitarist Peter Buck played with them (Buck’s day job is playing in an obscure little band named R.E.M. who, say what you will about their recent work, managed one of the most difficult tasks in all of music history: being awesome in the 1980s.). At the time, I was playing music genealogist, running down every band my favorite artists had ever had anything to do with. This endeavor, quite fruitfully, led me to Uncle Tupelo and the Minus 5. And I learned that the Minus 5 are not merely Peter Buck’s side-gig; they are, by their own admission, a “loose creative collective/serious drinking association” and also one of Scott McCaughey’s two full-time bands (the other being the Young Fresh Fellows, who also released an album this year called I Think This Is. They were also name-checked on the 1990 They Might Be Giants song “Twisting”: “She doesn’t want her Young Fresh Fellows tape back/ there’s not a lot of things that she’ll take back”) and they are slowly piling up evidence that McCaughey is one of the most underrated songwriters working today.

In a Pacific Northwest music scene that his crowded with awesome talent (like Everclear! I kid, I kid. Is Everclear still a band? I sure hope not), McCaughey seems to be that awesome guy that all your favorite bands know but you’ve never heard of. However, if you’ve seen R.E.M. live since (I believe) New Adventures in Hi-Fi, you’ve seen McCaughey on stage. He’s the guitar player who looks eerily like Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. And now, lucky you, you’ve heard of Scott McCaughey because I’m here telling you all about him.

For the Minus 5, McCaughey usually plays with Peter Buck and drummer Bill Rieflin (who is now officially a member of R.E.M., I believe. He’s played live drums for them since Bill Berry retired and he did all the drumming on last year’s pretty-decent Accelerate) and whoever else he can find. For Killingsworth, the new Minus 5 album, he’s recruited several Decemberists (including John Moen for the drums) and some backup singers credited as the She Bee Gees. So Killingsworth, named for a street in Portland, is a very northwesty album and just looking at the cover (while sitting here in hundred degree heat) makes me ache for rain and clean air and Ninkasi beer and… Oregon. I’m kinda sad Killingsworth didn’t come packaged with a free microbrew (probably a legal thing, I’m not sure). But I’m no hometown referee (witness my hatred of Portlanders Everclear and the Dandy Warhols) and I’m not gonna give the Minus 5 a free pass just because they made me miss my favorite state.

On musical merits alone, Killingsworth is not only the best Minus 5 record (with Down with Wilco a close second), but it is one of a handful of records this year that I’ve had to make a very concentrated effort to stop listening to. When I’m listening to stuff that I’m going to review, I usually listen to the album once and then listen to a random favorite album, sort of as a palate-cleanser. Killingsworth served as my palate-cleaner while I was wading through the We Were Promised Jetpacks album. And when I was listening to Killingsworth. See what I did there? That puts it up somewhere near Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone and the Hold Steady’s Stay Positive in my estimation. That is, it’s an album that grabs me immediately and only gets better with time (if I was still in college right now, I’d probably spend some time drinking to this album. Also, if I was still in college now, I’d be a fucking moron because I started college ten years ago this fall… shit, I’m old.)

Killingsworth is a dark, country-tinged album (country-tinged? I dunno, it’s a “mostly” countryish record – steel guitars on a lot of songs, lots of acoustic guitar, some accordion, and omnipresent female backing vocals – I just say “country-tinged” to keep from scaring off people who don’t like country), dismal in mood if not in tone, and catchy from start to finish. The album opens with the awesomely titled “Dark Hand of Contagion”, where McCaughey wastes no time establishing the mood: “your wedding day was so well-planned/ like a German occupation/ I signed the note on your nightstand:/ ‘the Dark Hand of Contagion’”. McCaughey has a very dark sense of humor that naturally lends itself to the slowly strummed, mournful songs but it really shines on some of the more upbeat tunes as well, especially my new favorite song, “I Would Rather Sacrifice You” (as in “I would rather sacrifice you/ than to miss sweet Jesus’s call”), which is the sort of song that’s just begging to be used by some humorless (and irony-immune) right-winger during election season. I’m looking at you, John Boehner (as far as I know, his last name is not pronounced “boner”, but feel free to say it that way anyhow).

As much as I love McCaughey’s songwriting (dude really has an incisive wit, but you can find that on any given Minus 5 album), I really think part of what draws me to Killingsworth so strongly is the exceedingly effective use of the She Bee Gees (my extremely hasty internet research reveals that the She Bee Gees are, apparently, a Portland-based Bee Gees tribute band made up entirely of women… and also a shady group of Freemasons who meet once a year with the Federal Reserve Board and plot the assassinations of world leaders who oppose their efforts to enslave all of humanity while simultaneously proving that Barack Obama was born in Kenya before it was… well… Kenya.) . Their harmonies lend an awesome 1970s vibe to the proceedings (in a good way – think She & Him Volume 1, which is, in my opinion, among the best albums of the 1970s) and they form a nice counterpoint to  McCaughey’s nasally snark. Perhaps their greatest moment on Killingsworth comes on “Scott Walker’s Fault”, which also features a lead vocal from the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and, if you’re like me, will send you running to the internet to find out who Scott Walker is.

Killingsworth isn’t going to sell a million copies or propel Scott McCaughey to household name status, but I’m not necessarily gonna lament that here. Part of his appeal is his (somewhat self-styled) reputation as a “wayfarer and musical enabler” (as quoted from the Minus 5′s website) – he’s a guy who can afford to do whatever he wants. On Killingsworth, he wants to lend a country twang to “incoherent yarns mostly told after midnight by highway hobos in and around Portland, Oregon,” and the result is electrifying. Mr. McCaughey, welcome  to that sacred list of People I Would Totally Buy a Beer.

Honey Moon

There are albums I review because they get good reviews elsewhere and, from said reviews, I discern that there might be something interesting about the album in question. Of course, there are albums that get great reviews that I then review because I can sense, intuitively, that they are crap – in such cases, I feel it is my duty to take the piss out of people who orgasm over every hip new thing. You can thank me later. (It should be pointed out, however, that there are plenty of albums that get bad reviews and I end up loving them – Regina Spektor’s last record comes to mind, as does the oft-mentioned on Bollocks! Evil Urges by My Morning Jacket)

So now here’s The Handsome Family (Brett and Rennie Sparks are the only people in this family, which tells me they must be pretty happy) and their Honey Moon, the compound word divided, no doubt, to remind us all that ancient Babylonian cultures had the best wedding custom ever: the parents of the bride had to supply the groom with all the mead (honey booze) and beer he could drink for the first month of his marriage. They used a lunar calendar back in the day, hence the term “honey moon.” There are no songs on Honey Moon about this specific event, but I trust that the Sparkses are aware of it (why? maybe because Brett Sparks looks like a cross between Elvis Costello, Craig Finn, and Santa Claus and if you can’t trust a dude who looks like that, you just can’t trust a dude).

Honey Moon is definitely outside my personal musical comfort-zone. Not out there with like, say, John Zorn, but out there nonetheless.  It smacks heavily of old-school country and folk (dude has what can only be described as a nasally whiskey baritone for a voice, and it’s actually quite refreshing to hear) and every song on it, by choice of Rennie Sparks (she writes the lyrics, Brett does the music), is about love. Now, I’m not against love songs on principle, but let’s face it: it’s a lot easier (and thus more common) to write a shitty love song than it is to write a good one. So I had some apprehension going into this album.

The thing is, musically, Honey Moon is actually pretty nice. It absolutely does not rock, at all, but I’m not a “rock rulez, everything else is teh suck” kinda guy. Honey Moon is exceedingly mellow and I’ve had a hard time finding a proper context in which to sit down with the thing. But right now, I’m sitting here drinking coffee with the dog sleeping at my feet and Honey Moon coming up through the speakers. It kinda fits here, I think. There are some over-the-top moments, to be sure. “The Loneliness of Magnets,” sees Brett Sparks getting a little too howly on the chorus, but throughout most of the album, his voice is pretty solid. “Magnets” is followed by the simple, charming, “June Bugs,” and I’m suddenly stricken by the notion that this is probably what I was supposed to feel about Bill Callahan’s last album.

Honey Moon can feel a little long and a little sleepy, and I wonder if it isn’t due to the personal nature of the work – the album is meant, according to the couple’s website, to commemorate their 20th year of marriage and the songs seem like love notes passed back and forth in class, without the cloying cutesiness that implies. The album rarely gets above a slow, meandering tempo (although there is “A Thousand Diamond Rings”, a semi-upbeat number that wouldn’t be out of place on an old Waylon Jennings record) and thus could prove quite a challenge to people who are more oriented toward the generally uptempo genres of hip-hop and rock.

There’s plenty to criticize about Honey Moon, beyond it’s general lack of being my musical cup of tea (it’s like a tea I try because some hippie friend of mine likes it and I like it too, but I’m probably just gonna go back to Earl Gray tomorrow). For one thing, if you’re not part of a happy couple, these mellow love songs might drive you up a fucking wall. Also, the best song on the album is “Wild Wood” (“We can make a god/ out of sticks and bones”) and that’s because we here more from Rennie Sparks, whose voice compliments her husband’s wonderfully. The album would benefit, texturally speaking, from more clear harmonies between the couple. (For those of you who read my Wilco review, what I just did there is suggest something the artist could do to make the album better, rather than lazily suggesting that they’re capable of So Much More and leaving it at that). The album relies to much on Brett Sparks’s baritone to carry the songs and, while it works most of the time (especially on “Darling, My Darling”), his range is too limited to have his voice be such a huge part of the album without something to counterbalance it.

That said, though, Honey Moon is the kind of record you can slip on at your parents’ house and they’ll think it’s one of their old records (this could be useful the next time they wanna bust out their Gordon Lightfoot or Jimmy Buffet albums). And, if that works, you can tell them that The Handsome Family is an indie band and that all indie bands sound like this. Then put on a Hold Steady album and see what they do.

Post-Apocalyptic Country-Gospel Music?

Alas, poor Yorick. I… oh, wait. That’s just Will Oldham on the cover there. Sheesh. Kinda dark, eh, Mr. “Prince” Billy? From Oldham’s skeletal photo on the cover of Beware, you might think his latest offering was dark indeed. Like I See A Darkness dark. And there are dark moments (Oldham sings of fearing “destiny” and, as usual, sings plenty about death) on Beware, but it’s not anywhere near the darkness of…um… Darkness. Instead, Oldham has taken is increasingly country/gospel sound, thrown some horns into the mix, and coughed up one of his most satisfying albums to date.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham, if you haven’t figured that out yet) has released an album a year for the last three years now, going back to 2007′s The Letting Go and increasing in country-friend awesomeness on through this year’s Beware. Along the way, the Bonnie Prince has perfected a scintillating stew of country/folk/gospel/blues that is arguably  the most “alt” thing I could think of to call alt.country since Uncle Tupelo disbanded. (P.S. if you don’t know who Uncle Tupelo is/was, find yourself a copy of No Depression right fucking now.)

Oldham has, over his last two albums in particular carved out a niche for himself in the “future music of the past” category; I mean, maybe I’ve been playing too much Fallout and watching too much Cowboy Bebop (note: it is impossible to do too much of either of those things), but the more my entertainments tread the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the more fitting Oldham’s music seems. His music sounds to me exactly how I imagine the post-nuclear-holocaust folk/gospel will sound, only with more songs about fucking. Which is a good thing. Some folks will tell you that Beware is one of Oldham’s most overtly country records in a long time, but that simplistic label doesn’t do justice to what the dude has created. There’s straight up jazz in the muted trumpet that outroduces “You Don’t Love Me,” and it’s the kind of move no one – no one – in country music today has the stones to put out there (Incidentally, my favorite modern country album title is Shooter Jennings’ Put the “O” Back in Country – I might listen to that album on those merits alone).

On first listen, I was a little put off by the giant, seemingly out-of-place chorus singers on opener “Beware Your Only Friend,” but the more I listened to the whole album, the more the thing seems to fit together. Oldham’s gospel is one of sensual delights, with an awareness of God and His laws but also a firm desire to duck the Dude in the Sky and his capricious-ass wrath. Oldham affirms life, love, and sex, but never denies death (making one of the better “death-as-a-season” analogies on “Death Final,” a song that also illustrates Oldham’s gift for excellent and quirky word choice – how many songs do you hear with the word “hamhock” in them?). I can picture him wandering the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3, singing “You Don’t Love Me” and sending me on a quest for some irradiated rat meat. Or maybe he’s passed out in a chair at Moriarty’s saloon, waking up to be ridiculed by the mutant working the bar. Oldham uses multiple back-up singers all over Beware and with them creates more beautiful (and more hard-won) harmonies than an entire fleet of Fleet Foxes could ever come up with. For instance, the utterly lovely chorus of “I Won’t Ask Again,” where the chorus sings the titular line in awesome major-to-minor progression that gives me chills. Chills. So take that, all you people who read my review of The Boy Least Likely To and decided I just hate pretty music. I like pretty music fine. I just don’t like The Boy Least Likely To make it.

With Beware, Oldham has wandered far and wide as a minstrel in a universe of his own creation and, this time around, he has struck a particularly deep vein of musical gold. The melodies in Beware’s songs reach up from the depths of the chiming electric guitars and plucked bass notes, cresting like a wave and crashing down on a shore where, as Bukowski once wrote, “Radiated men eat the flesh of radiated men” (yeah, I know that’s from the same poem Doom sampled for “Cellz,” but it’s appropriate). I realize that some people feel Oldham is a much more traditional country-folkie than I give him credit for, but I cannot listen to his music in its proper historical context – this shit doesn’t come from Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie, not directly. It comes from the guy who, after the bombs rain down, will remember, through a sun-blasted haze, fragments of the old music and he’ll patch it together as best he can with his own strange words, making something that is at once old and new. He’ll shout the new gospel from mountaintops of rubble and bones, and it will be not in exact praise of the god who let it all happen, but in praise of the abilities of humans to still love and fuck and carouse, even after we do the Dr. Strangelove ending and crawl out of the vaults a hundred years later. Appropriately, Bonnie Prince Billy Oldham ends Beware with “Afraid Ain’t Me,” a song that is grammatically nightmarish but still drives home the point I’m making – the Bonnie Prince has trod the wasteland, seen God’s plan and where it got us, and is utterly unafraid to be alone in the face of it all. So once “all that Mad Max bullshit” (thank you, Modest Mouse) goes down, look for Will Oldham out in the wasteland and toss him some mole meat, a Nuka Cola, and sit down for a spell to hear the New Ol’ Stuff.

The Living and the Dead

If you can’t tell by the accent (I couldn’t), Jolie Holland hails from Texas. She sings like she’s from one of Tom Waits’ stranger dreams, with a musical style of pronunciation that lands her somewhere between Jesca Hoop and Joanna Newsom (not bad company, that.) 2006′s Springtime Can Kill You was one of the most underrated albums of that year and now Holland is back with the beautiful and comparitively straightforward The Living and the Dead which features two awesome guitary guests: Matt Ward (aka M. Ward aka the Him in She & Him) and Mister Marc Fucking Ribot (the most underrated guitar-player in modern music, responsible for some of the awesomely weird licks in Tom Waits stuff and a player on the occasional Elvis Costello tune).

Of the Jolie Holland albums I’ve heard, The Living and the Dead strikes me as the most personal to date, with a fair amount of these songs discussing faces from her past, both lovers and friends. “Corrido Por Buddy” is a heartbreaking true story of a junkie-friend of Holland’s who was so wasted away she couldn’t recognize him until he said her name. Seeing her long lost pal in this condition, Holland (who excels in empathizing with all the characters in her songs, much like the afore-mentioned Mr. Waits) can only say, “I wish I’d been/ a better friend.”

Albums so laden with tunes about death and loss of love can get too heavy too quickly and tumble into an abyss of unlistenability. Holland never allows The Living and the Dead to go there because the album is shot through with a wry, weary humor, best exemplified by this line in “Sweet Loving Man”: “That dark horse you’re riding/ has to carry me too”.  There are genuine bright spots as well, such as “Your Big Hands,” which features M. Ward playing what is basically the opening lick to “Honky Tonk Women.” “Your Big Hands” is “Honky Tonk Women,” if one of the women sang back to Mick Jagger, “I’ve got a bunch of stories/ I should’ve never told.” On her website, Holland says that “Your Big Hands” is a song that “Daniel Johnston made me feel brave enough to write,” and even calls the song “terribly naive.” Anyone familiar with Daniel Johnston’s work (and you should be) will get the comparison upon hearing “Your Big Hands.”

The instrumentation on The Living and the Dead runs the gamut from the country/folk of opener “Mexico City” to the classic rock of “Your Big Hands,” and Matt Ward gets credit for helping “shape the sound” of many of the tunes on this album, which leads me to this conclusion: if you’re hanging out with M. Ward these days, you’re probably pretty awesome.  The dude’s fingers are in some pretty awesome pies this year, not least of which was his album with Zooey Deschanel under the name of She & Him.

The Living and the Dead quiets down considerably after “Your Big Hands,” but it doesn’t lose any of its steam. The masterpiece of the back half of the album is “Love Henry,” an old tune that, according to Bob Dylan (who should know), predates the Bible.  It’s a song about a woman who murders her lover and is left singing to the parrot, who thinks it will be the next victim of her viciousness: “I won’t fly down/ I can’t fly down/ and light on your right knee/ a girl who’d murder her own true love/ would kill a little bird like me.” It’s a funny image for a murder scene, but Holland never plays it for laughs. In her hands, it’s a full-on tragedy, from the perspective of a talking bird who witnesses a murder.

Holland follows that slap-happy number with the heartbreaking (and heartbroken – Holland reports “really kind of crying and holding on to the piano” while writing it) “The Future,” with it sad refrain of “Hey, come on/ and wake up with me.” It’s a beautiful song for sure, but following an ancient murder-ballad, it makes for a depressing several minutes of your day. So what does Holland do to end the album?

She laughs her way through “Enjoy Yourself,” a very simple song that got stuck in my head after I saw Synecdoche, New York (It’s one of the most depressing and most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen) this weekend. It’s only one line: “Enjoy yourself/ It’s later than you think.” Whether that’s later in the night or later in life, I don’t really know, but if The Living and the Dead and Charlie Kaufman’s new opus (which honestly couldn’t have less in common with one another) could unify to convince me of one thing, it’s this: you have limited time. Make the most of it. Watch Charlie Kaufman movies and listen to Jolie Holland albums.

The Little Honey EP

It’s interesting to note that Elvis Costello has now done two duets with Lucinda Williams (first on “There’s a Story” on his Delivery Man album and now “Jailhouse Tears” on her new Little Honey album) because the two artists have exhibited similar behavioral patterns over the last few years – namely, releasing some of their best and worst work, sometimes within a single album.

Anyone who heard West, Lucinda’s last album, was wise to just throw it out after the cringe-inducing “Come On” (the song is a dis to some ex-lover and rather than simply stating, “You couldn’t even make me come”, Ms. Williams tried to make it all cute and punny. Given the strength of her voice and songwriting, it should’ve been easy for her to be so boldly graphic, but what can you do? The song took the whole album down with it) and then you were probably stuffed up with trepidation upon the release of Little Honey. Well, like Elvis Costello’s most recent offering (Momofuku), Little Honey has both reasons to be encouraged and reasons to shake your head in disapproval.

The album starts off nothing short of awesome. The first 8 tracks of the album are really great, some of Williams’ finest work to date, not overwrought or given to her any of her worst excesses. And that’s when you get to “Knowing,” which starts off a long, steep plummet into the meandering, overlong stuff that sunk West. Literally every song after “Jailhouse Tears” is a stinker, especially the ill-advised (and slowed down! Why the fuck would you slow down a cover of an AC/DC song?) finale: a cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top”.

But there’s kind of encouraging news here: you can just pretend the album ends with “Jailhouse Tears,” making Little Honey an 8-song EP instead of the bloated 13 track half-monstrosity it is.  In which case, Little Honey is transformed from a mostly good album brought down to mediocrity by its last 5 songs into one of the best EPs of the year and a real return to form for Lucinda Williams. Well done!

“I’ve found the love I’ve been looking for,” she sings on EP-opener “Real Love.” And she found it “standing behind an electric guitar.” Now, anyone who has ever held an electric guitar and played one (assuming it was of any quality at all) knows exactly what she’s talking about here.  “Real Love” incorporates Lucinda Williams’ tendency to see no line separating country and rock, which is why her best stuff sounds a lot like early Rolling Stones stuff.  And, much like the Stones themselves, Williams would perhaps be best served by making sure she starts off every day listening to Exile on Main Street and then saying, “Oh yeah. I should sound like that.”

You can’t blame Lucinda Williams (or Elvis Costello for that matter) for wanting to expand her sound and try new sonic experiments but you also shouldn’t have to pay for the experiments when they go horribly awry. Perhaps the answer is for Williams and Costello to team up and just record an album together. They could check and balance one another into producing something of enormous quality. Or… they could enable each other into producing one of the most unlistenable pieces of shit in modern history (second only to whatever the Dandy Warhols do next).

It’s always more frustrating when an artist who has blown your fucking mind in the past produces embarrassingly crappy work. For example, when Fall Out Boy produces a shitty album (and they’ve produced nothing but shitty albums), I don’t sweat it. That’s a band that has never done anything but making infuriatingly awful music. But Lucinda Williams made Carwheels on a Gravel Road. That’s one of the best albums of the last twenty years. So when she makes stuff like West and the back end of Little Honey, it’s way worse than knowing that Fall Out Boy is going to release another album soon. I expect them to suck and I expect Lucinda Williams to rock. She still mostly does, especially if you ignore everything on Little Honey after “Jailhouse Tears.”

Summer of the Whore

Ha ha, yet another post to lure in the all-important Porn-Googling demographic!

You’ve never heard of the Mendoza Line, which I’ll forgive for now. Okay, no I won’t; go find and listen to Full of Light and Full of Fire right now. Do it. Did you do it? You’re listening to it right now? Good. That’s a husband and wife team on that album, Timothy Bracy and Shannon McArdle. That album, however is not new.

Ya see, McArdle and Bracy recently divorced, which,  unfortunately, meant the end of The Mendoza Line, perhaps the most underrated band to come out of Austin, TX, in quite a while. Rumor has it Bracy is working on a solo record but, in the mean time, McArdle has released a frighteningly honest look at their split called Summer of the Whore. You can guess from the title how she feels about things.

Break-up albums are a fickle mistress; trying to force the emotion can turn your break-up album into a cringe-inducing, emo-filled affair but holding back the real meat can make it seem superficial, like you’re merely trying to cash in on your heartache. On the other hand, if you strike the right balance between melancholy and honesty, you end up with things like Summer of the Whore or The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit. In declaring it the Summer of the Whore, McArdle is telling us the decision she’s come to about her break-up: she’s going to fuck her way out of the misery, at least for now. Album opener “Poison My Cup” sets the tone: “Don’t want to go to a show, no baby/ take me to your room”. You’ll get the sense, over the ten songs on Summer of the Whore that McArdle has already left the Summer of the Whore behind her, but her willingness to chronicle it is utterly compelling.

It helps that her voice is such a finely tuned instrument – she can sulk, she can sigh, and she can seduce all in the same tune and it helps to get you on her side even while you’re listening to her admit, “I’ll have no conscience to speak of, I’ll have no guilt to lament.” (I’m not saying you should take her side in the divorce, mind you – that’s none of our business. We’re concerned with the songs here and McArdle does a good job of being that friend you know who’s lonely and fucked up and making some bad decisions but you know they’re just trying to get… well, whatever it is out of their system.)

The subject matter can weigh down an album like Summer of the Whore, considering that most of the songs have images of death (usually by drowning, usually in a wedding dress) or discussions of when one takes the ring off and admits that things are never going to be the same. Luckily, Summer of the Whore is only ten tracks long and not entirely devoid of hope – by “Come, Autumn Breeze,” (“The heat has lifted,”) McArdle is talking about the next guy she could actually see herself with and there’s the sense fo the slow healing begun (perhaps her next album will be more upbeat). But McArdle’s musical sense makes even the biggest downers on the album worth hearing again – the title track is exquisite, one of the best songs on the album, as is “Leave Me for Dead,” a feisty little revenge song (“You can say that it’s over/ but, baby, I’m not finished with you”).

I can easily imagine that, like the afore-mentioned Midnight Organ Fight, Summer of the Whore will provide a real catharsis for the recently romantically fucked-over. I imagine, in fact, that this album goes down very well with your own personal bottle of wine during a rousing session of setting fire to all those photos of your ex. Fortunately, I can only imagine these things because I am in a happy relationship and, as such, perhaps am incapable of getting the full benefit of something like Summer of the Whore. But from a musical perspective, it’s a beautiful album by a great singer and is hopefully an indication that she’ll be around for a while, even if the Mendoza Line is dead and gone forever.

Kathleen Edwards Made Me Cry But I’m Not Going Emo On You

More people know of Alanis Morrissette and Avril Lavigne than Neko Case and Kathleen Edwards. If you’re a little out of step with me, here’s the thing: they’re all female vocalists (and, presumably songwriters) from Canada, eh? Obviously, the similarities end there. If you know your ass from a hole in the ground (and if you’re reading Bollocks!, I have to assume you do; unless you just come here for the abuse), you know that Neko Case and Kathleen Edwards are far superior songwriters, musicians, and vocalists than those other two Canucks. But again… the two inferior ones are better known. You and I both know that people who argue that a musician’s popularity (record sales, income levels, etc.) in any way speaks to their musical ability are people who lead lives utterly devoid of substance, adventure and – barring the occasional happy accident- taste. Their favorite band is the Beatles, their favorite playwright is Shakespeare, etc. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with digging the Beatles and Shakespeare, but you know what I mean – they’re defaults for a lot of people. These are the kind of people who will tell you Citizen Kane is the best movie ever, even if they’ve never seen it.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Kathleen Edwards has a new album. It’s called Asking for Flowers. If she’s asking for flowers, you should probably send her some. Go on, I’ll wait. You’re already reading this shitty blog while you should be working, so open a new tab (Ctrl-T, Dad), pop over to whatever flower delivery site you like best, and send some flowers to:

Kathleen Edwards, Care of Canada.

Include a note, will ya? “Dear Kathleen: Love your voice, love your songs. Here’s those flowers you asked for.”

Kathleen Edwards has one helluva voice, doesn’t she? Do yourselves a favor, aspiring female vocalists – don’t draw your inspiration from those breathless, synthesized teenagers. Listen to Kathleen Edwards telling you not to be like that on “Buffalo,” or -better yet – listen to her talk about “cold ambivalence” on “O Canada”. Follow that with heavy doses of the aforementioned Neko Case, Emma Pollock, and Regina Spektor.

Point is, Asking For Flowers is probably Ms. Edwards’ finest album yet. I didn’t think so the first time I heard it, but it has grown on me slow and sure, just like Failer did way back in the day. Back to Me was a little to FM-friendly for me (although “The Independent Thief” is a dope song) and it made me long for the lonesome, tired Failer. If you took the mood of Failer and dated it for a while, dumped it at a truckstop (sticking it with the bill, of course) with nothing but a name and a newspaper full of bad news and bullshit, you might end up with something like Asking For Flowers. Edwards taught herself to play the piano for this album and she shows off her new chops by opening the album with “Buffalo.” “Buffalo” lets you know what you’re in for; it’s a slow-burning, mostly depressing ride from Canada across the border (but she can’t go back, according to the customs guy in the song).

Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of piss-and-vinegar stuff on Asking for Flowers. “The Cheapest Key,” showcases Edwards’ ability to go from flirting to flipping you off in less than a second. “The Cheapest Key,” apart from being a music theory in-joke, is one of the better uptempo tunes on the album. “I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory,” is really the only misstep on Asking for Flowers; it’s a little too gimmicky for Edwards and, while I get that there’s precious little room to laugh on this record, “I Make the Dough” just doesn’t fit. I want to curl up with the rest of this album and bawl. “I Make the Dough” only gets in the way of that.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but “I Make the Dough,” really ends up looking bad (it’s not awful, it’s just a mood killer in the middle of the album) sandwiched between the stellar “Alicia Ross” (about a real murder case in Canada; a young woman was abducted from her back porch by a neighbor and killed. Apparently, the guy who did it claimed that she called him “a loser,” which is what made him snap… proving that he’s a fucking loser) and “Oil Man’s War,” about a dude going AWOL to Ms. Edwards’ homeland (good luck with the customs guy, pal). Kathleen Edwards has plopped herself at her most gimmicky (“I Make the Dough”) in between two examples of her at her best.

I didn’t start this here music blog (I love it when newspapers refer to “web blogs,” don’t you? Really shows you why print is dead) to whine about my personal shit; I started it to swear about my favorite (and least favorite) bands. But, as the six or so people (on average) who read Bollocks! know, my sister died earlier this summer. There are three albums that have helped me deal with this fact (I almost wrote that I “lost” my sister earlier this summer. She would, no doubt, appreciate me pointing out that I haven’t “lost” her; I know right where she is, it’s just not here.): the first is The Airing of Grievances by Titus Andronicus, the second is Stay Positive by The Hold Steady, and the third is Asking for Flowers. The Titus Andronicus record is for when I’m angry (and I think I’m within my rights to be mad that my sister only lived 31 years; there are far too many tossers in the world who will live twice that long on average; but I digress), the Hold Steady one is for when I’m happy and at peace (or trying to be) and Asking for Flowers, especially “Scared at Night” (fucking hell – she talks about watching her brother die in that song. Fucks me right up, but in a weird, cathartic way), is for when I just need to be tired and sad about it.  I realize that may be a slightly emo note to end on, but don’t worry; I’m not gonna start cutting myself or anything. Just saying – sometimes, you need to recognize that you feel like shit and Asking for Flowers helps with that. Thanks a lot, Kathleen Edwards.

I See A Lightness (And No, Mr. Kundera, It Is Not Unbearable)

Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy and The Palace Brothers) is the most bearded bard in all of indiedom, rivaled only by Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell, Sam Berm from Iron & Wine, and (occasionally) Jim James of My Morning Jacket. A photo of this man hung on a post office wall would suggest that he should be wanted for something by all major U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Fortunately, Mr. Oldham is only (as far as I know) wanted for his musical gifts, which are numerous. Like Steve Earle, Oldham manages to put something out there for the kids about once a year. This level of consistency (Oldham’s not Ryan Adams prolific, but that’s why he still makes good music) means that if Oldham puts out an album you don’t like, you wait twelve or fewer months and he’ll give you something else to sink your teeth into. His latest offering as Bonnie “Prince” Billy is the folksy as fuck Lie Down in the Light, another in a long line of home-runs for BPB (not counting a so-so covers album he did with Tortoise but choosing to count his collaboration with Matt Sweeney, his last few records have been fucking dynamite – quiet, melodic, harmony-rich dynamite). Ashley Webber joins the Bonnie Prince on this album for rousing tracks like “So Everyone,” (the best song about fucking in public that you’ll hear all year) and “You Want that Picture.” Webber continues Mr. Billy’s tradition of matching his high whiny voice to a more full-voiced female counterpart. The combination is pretty stirring to say the least.

This album has been out for a while so you may have read reviews of it already that declaim its greatness – “best album since I See A Darkness” is a common theme in the reviews I’ve seen. These laudatory sentiments are accurate; Lie Down in the Light is damn fine album, more country/folk than his last few records (although 2007′s The Letting Go was starting to tilt in that direction) but every bit as beautiful. Oldham has a knack for building a song to a beautiful chorus or sometimes even just a well-turned couplet and Lie Down in the Light is chock full of examples right out of the gate – “Easy Does It,” “You Remind Me,” and “So Everyone,” start the album with a soft bang (enter Phil Ken Sebben here: “Ha Ha Ha! ‘Bang!’”), setting the tone for what is, overall, the happiest Bonnie “Prince” Billy album I’ve ever heard (in the interest of full disclosure, my favorite BPB album is I See A Darkness, which is an album so depressing that I can imagine the Grim Reaper putting it on to cry himself to sleep the day his girlfriend leaves him, takes the dog with her, and then he gets a call informing him that his mom is next on his list of folks to escort into the sweet hereafter).

Where other BPB albums seem to trend between folksy indie and warped classic rock (see Superwolf for stellar examples of this), Lie Down in the Light picks up the ball that country music has dropped pretty much since the late 60′s – namely, music that sounds like country music. High lonesome harmonies like those on “What’s Missing Is” would make Hank Williams (the first and, in my opinion, the only Hank Williams – no, I am not ready for some fucking football) proud and probably more than a little misty-eyed. Some folks might file Mr. Billy under the dubious alt.country genre, but most of the stuff that people call alt.country is really just what country music used to be (country has mutated into pop now – listen to Patsy Cline then listen to Faith Hill and you’ll see what I mean; Faith Hill sucks. It’s also interesting to note that pop used to be The Beatles, R&B used to be Marvin Gaye, and jazz used to be John Fucking Coltrane – this is not to sound old fogeyish and suggest that everything was cooler Way Back When, but it’s to point out that genre has become meaningless. The best rock bands in the world right now might be considered “indie” or “alternative,” but they’re still rock bands. The best jazz musicians in the world… well… no, sorry; jazz died with Coltrane) – music free of the gimmickry and pop-schlockiness of your Trace Adkinses and Toby “Idiots for a Redneck Foreign Policy” Keiths (seriously, please, someone harm these individuals in a way that prevents them from making music ever again). Johnny Cash’s music was powerful because he wasn’t trying for pop-crossover success. He was trying to sing songs about being lonely and fucked up. And it worked because he was lonely and fucked up or, when he wasn’t lonely and fucked up, he could accurately recreate what it was to be lonely and fucked up. Bonnie Prince Billy (superbly covered on Mr. Cash’s American III – JC does “I See A Darkness,” and when he sees one, you sure as fuck do too. I don’t know why everyone had a thousand orgasms about his cover of “Hurt.” His rendition of “I See A Darkness” is not only far superior, but also one of the all-time most powerful songs I’ve ever heard, a cover version rivaled only perhaps by Joe Strummer’s take on “Redemption Song.”) usually paints a nice lonely and fucked up portrait as well and no one could accuse him of trying to write 2008′s “This Kiss.” He’s just doing what he does and sometimes it sounds folky and sometimes it sounds rocky, but it’s always worth the listen.

She & Him Have Made the Best Album of 1970

From what I can garner from IMDB, and depending on your tastes, Zooey Deschanel’s best movie is either The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Almost Famous. Might your opinions of Ms. Deschanel’s cinematic output determine your expectations of her musical abilities? It might, but again, depending on your taste, you might be selling the lass short.

She & Him is Zooey Deschanel (she’s the She) and Portland, Oregon’s own M. Ward (yes, world, better musicians than Everclear come from Portland: namely M. Ward, the Decemberists, The Thermals, and Menomena). Volume One is, as the title suggests, their first collection of songs together. I, for one, hope it is not their last.

M. Ward’s music is pretty old school to begin with so it’s not entirely surprising that She & Him sounds like it belongs in the record collection of the hippest Boomer you know. In fact, you could probably throw this on at the next family reunion and not alienate anyone (although, in all honesty, no self-respecting music snob is going to put something this tolerable on when that fantasy moment arrives, that great moment when Mom makes the mistake of saying, “Why don’t you put one of your albums on, honey?” My family knows not to make this mistake because they probably understand that would mean being force-fed Bone Machine, London Calling, or Daydream Nation.).

Zooey Deschanel wrote ten of the songs on this album (there are three covers, including album closer “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which was written by God or someone, I’m not sure), despite the fact that they sound like 70′s country tunes, and Mr. Ward (he’s the him, in case you’re high right now) produced the thing, and the dude knows how to bring out the best of Deschanel’s voice which is both lovely and unique. When she’s lovelorn, which she is often on Volume One, she really breaks your heart. When she sings, on “Change is Hard,” “I can try/ I can try/ to toughen up,” you know – you know! - she’s not getting any tougher and, frankly, neither are you.

And so it goes, throughout Volume One, a truly lovely listen from start to finish. Ward’s arrangements fit Deschanel’s voice and lyrics to a tee. The first time through the record, you might be tempted to dismiss it: it’s a quick trip, but is it that great? The answer’s yes. As with Destroyer’s Trouble in Dreams, She & Him’s (She & His???) debut is one of those albums to crank up on a lazy summer evening (we get those 11 1/2 months out of the year in Los Angeles, which is why we have no perspective here) when you’ve got a bottle of wine that needs killing. You could share the wine with a friend, although Deschanel and Ward have crafted a pretty good Lonely Persons album here. In any case, it’s a beautiful record and a real accomplishment – a lot of bands make albums that are obvious homages to the music that they love. At its best, this tendency results in things like She & Him’s Volume One and anything by Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. At its worst, this tendency gives you things like the Brian Setzer Orchestra (who obviously love swing) and The Raconteurs (who obviously love Foreigner). Obviously, Volume Two, should it ever come out (please Jeebus!), can’t be a carbon copy of Volume One, but Volume One establishes Deschanel as a capable songwriter and a truly wonderful singer. For the next outing, I want more duets. Ward’s old-school warble would sound great next to Deschanel’s husky, warm lilt. Still and all, She & Him have crafted somethin’ special here and you Lonely Persons and Happy Couples alike ought to be listening to it right now. Preferably on a record player. Does anyone still have one of those? Can I have it?