90. Damaged

90. Damaged, Lambchop (Merge, 2006)

A lot transpired for Lambchop and leader Kurt Wagner in the thirty months between the ’04 joint release of the Aw Cmon and No You Cmon LPs and their ninth studio work, Damaged.  The fluctuating Nashville collective, often claiming over a dozen members, had made eight studio albums in a decade, each a progression of their meticulous, elegant update of the ’50s Nashville sound melding country with strings and its ’70s Countrypolitan descendent that subtly incorporated soul music.  In ’05 they released the CoLAB EP, a mutual effort with ambient duo Hands Off Cuba--consisting of Lambchop members Ryan Norris and Scott Martin.  Three of its four tracks find Lambchop tunes rearranged into unrecognizable electronic pieces; this work would figure heavily in the creation of Damaged.  Early ’06 saw two rarities compilations released, both titled The Decline of Country and Western Civilization and featuring different track listings in its US and UK guises.  Most grave, though, was Wagner’s series of health crises including jaw replacement surgery and a bout with prostate cancer.  He recovered, his difficult year informing the typically quotidian lyrics on Damaged.  The album’s inner sleeve features an x-ray of his jaw.

Despite these troubles, Damaged was the lushest, most beautiful Lambchop album to date.  Recorded by their longtime producer Mark Nevers, its sound is more luxurious than that of earlier Lambchop records and is bolstered by string arrangements on three tracks; the songs are linked by electronic interludes constructed by Norris and Martin from samples of the record’s own material.  More subtle than the pieces on CoLAB, they give the album a finespun undercurrent.  Numbering eighteen musicians here, the complex orchestrations of Lambchop circa late-summer ’06 seem to hinge on the understated guitar of William Tyler and the deft piano of Tony Crow.  Wagner’s lived-in baritone is mixed higher on Damaged; on the ’04 albums it was often so low that it disappeared among the accompaniment.  While those LPs featured many upbeat tunes stemming from a Wagner project of writing a song every day for a year, the songs on Damaged stretch out, revealing their more premeditated gestations.  The album opens with its most absorbing number, Paperback Bible.  A literal transcript of a radio call-in show devoted to trading household goods, it exemplifies Wagner’s knack for making the mundane heartbreakingly lovely; Crow’s rationed piano lines appear every minute or two, adding more fragile beauty.  I Would Have Waited Here All Day is a rare male-sung song with a female narrator.  It depicts a woman who spends afternoons at home waiting for her lover to arrive, noting that “The fading sense of anticipation/Is something I’ve come to know”; when he does pull into her driveway, she resignedly concludes “it’s been a lousy day.”  The sole straightforward tune from CoLAB is reprised, here titled Prepared [2], to whose swelling string quartet Wagner declares “I am the most undisciplined of man.”  The closing number, its title taken from the band’s ’06 rarities compilations, is a bombastic, angry survey that takes in the indie-rock blogosphere (“You see your Pitchfork I-rock saviors/And I’m sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors”), Wagner’s health problems, and KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, each verse concluding with the fuming “Damn, they’re looking ugly to me”; by song’s end, the self-deprecating, romantic Wagner has calmed, quietly concluding “And I’m still alone/But you’re good looking.”  Damaged is a striking album, borne of artistic growth and personal difficulty, and a highlight of Lambchop’s expansive body of work.
 
Highlights: Paperback Bible, The Decline of Country and Western Civilization, Fear, The Rise and Fall of the Letter P

Sublime bit: The entirety of Paperback Bible; or, alternatively, Tony Crow’s sparkling piano lines that run intermittently through that song.
 
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91. Enemy Mine

91. Enemy Mine, Swan Lake (Jagjaguwar, 2009)

There is a temptation to call any meeting of individually accomplished musicians a supergroup.  If this is accepted, Swan Lake surely qualifies, if on a smaller scale than, say, Emerson Lake & Palmer.  What Swan Lake shares with the likes of ELP is a love for prog rock--not twenty-minute organ solos, but lapses from typical song structure and a penchant for fantastical, thespian lyricism.  The members come from a clutch of Canadian groups known as wordy, prog-leaning dramatists: Spencer Krug, frontman of Montreal’s Sunset Rubdown and co-leader of Wolf Parade; Carey Mercer, singer/guitarist for Victoria outfit Frog Eyes; and Vancouverite Dan Bejar, occasional lyricist and vocalist for the New Pornographers but most accomplished as the chief of Destroyer.  All have unusual voices.  Krug and Mercer are sometimes hard to distinguish, but Mercer’s voice is the more frantic stripe of tremulous melodrama.  Bejar’s voice is high and reedy.  In Swan Lake, they all take turns singing lead. They have relatively similar writing styles, and before their ’06 debut LP Beast Moans had worked together in various capacities.  Krug served on-and-off in Mercer’s Frog Eyes, and Bejar made an ’05 EP credited to Destroyer but using a Krug-less Frog Eyes as its backing band.  All of this cross-pollination makes collaboration obvious, and Swan Lake retains the feels of its members’ groups while shaping its own sonic identity.  It most closely resembles the swirling, avant-pop theatre of Sunset Rubdown, but is even more arcane and gothic (not goth); Bejar, the strongest lyricist, has in Swan Lake a more oblique template than usually afforded him in his other work, and Mercer’s twitchy, clamorous Frog Eyes outbursts are tempered by Swan Lake’s more deliberate pace.

But what of Enemy Mine, their second LP?  More focused and engaging than Beast Moans, it emphasizes the side project’s long-term viability.  Opening tune Spanish Gold, 2044 builds from a ragtag arrangement like a faltering New Orleans funeral procession into an ostentatious production finding Mercer name-checking Palinurus, Julliard, and Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire before bellowing, “I left this bullwhip/On the nightstand” to Bejar’s wordless, gliding backing vocals.  This is heavy theatre.  One senses an aura of camp, particularly on Mercer’s tunes (the nutty cover art of a courtroom sketch is another giveaway to this triad’s strange humor).  Krug’s Settle on Your Skin is a hyper piano blast and the LP’s most upbeat number.  His second contribution here, Paper Lace, would appear three months later on Sunset Rubdown’s Dragonslayer LP, continuing a Swan Lake habit of blurring the boundaries between the side project and the primary group (Beast Moans included a tune that would reappear, dramatically rearranged, on Destroyer’s Trouble in Dreams LP; the Krug-penned Paper Lace also features the character Jackie, a name that haunts many Bejar compositions).  The album’s most stunning moment comes in Bejar’s Heartswarm.  It opens with a gently strummed acoustic guitar, a heavily reverbed but gentle drum cadence, and a delicate piano figure; Bejar then sings, “Do my eyes deceive me/Or is it truly springtime in Paris for that piece of shit?”  Bejar has a knack for injecting profanity into lyrics without gratuity, and this is about the finest example.  A willfully pretentious lark combining the quirks of three difficult, arty groups, Swan Lake is not for everybody.  Fans of its members’ other bands require these records, though, and at the Aughts’ end the best entry point for Swan Lake remained the perverse delights of Enemy Mine.
 
Highlights: Heartswarm, Paper Lace, Peace, Spider

Sublime bit: That first line of Heartswarm and its jarring, hilarious juxtaposition of the coarse with the lovely.
 
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92. Into the Woods

92. Into the Woods, Malcolm Middleton (Chemikal Underground UK, 2005)

Malcolm Middleton toiled for ten years as half of Scottish duo Arab Strap, providing musical accompaniment for longtime pal Aidan Moffat’s bleary-eyed tales of romantic misery.  Over six studio LPs they earned a reputation as humor-filled but forlorn wretches, the tunes often half-paced and drifting with Moffat’s mumbled, nearly spoken vocals giving vulgar accounts of wasted nights and squandered relationships.  Following their fourth LP, both released solo albums.  Middleton’s 5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine (’02) rivaled any previous Arab Strap work, revealing a keen songwriting wit yet lyrically rooted in oppressive self-hatred.  Its closing tune, Devil and the Angel, is a signpost for much of his starkly autobiographical solo material--the angel whispers encouragements; the devil tells him, “Malcolm, you’ll never be good at anything/And your songs are shite.”  Middleton reveals it was just a dream, shaking it off to then say that he agrees with the devil.  Arab Strap made two more albums before splitting, with their second solo records sandwiched between.  These final group works were their best, no doubt invigorated by the freedom the two found in their solo careers.

Just four months before Arab Strap’s final studio album, Middleton issued his sophomore LP Into the Woods; it is a striking progression from all of his previous work.  Joined by fellow Scots Barry Burns of Mogwai on piano, Delgados drummer Phil Savage, and Arab Strap collaborator Alan Barr on cello, Middleton produces a set of energetic, whip-smart tunes built on Arab Strap’s electro-folk customs and encompassing full-blown pop orchestrations.  While many songs mine the self-loathing territory of 5:14, they are mitigated by the dynamic arrangements; in moments such as the gently descending verses of Monday Night Nothing, lines like “I need to crash this piece of shit into a tree that fits” are even beautiful.  The album crashes open with the sparkling Break My Heart, a comical forecast of a relationship doomed to either fail--or succeed, but ruin his career.  No Modest Bear incorporates heavy techno-dance beats alongside an uncharacteristically positive lyric to a lover (“No more despair/No more being scared”).  The album’s highlight is Loneliness Shines, its driving choruses filled with swirling walls of electric guitar recalling My Bloody Valentine’s most frenzied shoegazing attacks.  Middleton is a world-class miserablist: he resents seasons (Autumn is a “fucking cunt”), he gets stabbed on Christmas (Burst Noel), and he apologizes for his face (Bear With Me and A Happy Medium).  In A New Heart he sings “I’ve been asked to write a song without a swear word or a slight/At myself or another,” later noting “I almost got accosted by the good old negative.”  His next three Aughts solo albums tempered these indulgences a bit; still, none comes close to the strengths of Into the Woods.  A remarkable confluence of instrumentation and Middleton’s drollery, it bests his former group’s entire catalog and serves as the finest introduction to his prolific solo career.
 
Highlights: Loneliness Shines, Break My Heart, Monday Night Nothing, No Modest Bear

Sublime bit: Those walls of guitar squall that explode with every chorus of Loneliness Shines.
 
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93. The Crying Light

93. The Crying Light, Antony and the Johnsons (Secretly Canadian, 2009)

After fifteen years of singing and conceptual performance in the NYC art scene, Antony Hegarty found success with his second studio album, ’05’s I Am a Bird Now.  Controversial winner of the Mercury Prize—an award for UK-only artists, and the England-born Hegarty had lived in the U.S. since age ten—Bird is a nakedly emotional examination of gender identity draped in Hegarty’s ethereal yet muscular croon.  In the years after Bird, Hegarty filled many guest slots, most notably working with Lou Reed as well as serving as vocalist for Andrew Butler’s electro-dance project Hercules and Love Affair on their eponymous ’08 LP.  Hegarty’s personal recording pace is slow at best, however, and when the hotly anticipated The Crying Light arrived it was only his third album in eleven years.

The four-track EP Another World preceded The Crying Light by three months, its title track appearing on both; the two records’ aesthetic presentation echo that of I Am a Bird Now, cloaked in wordless sleeves with stark, monochrome photographs capturing real-life examples of gender fluidity.  While Bird's explorations of sexual identity were housed in a photograph of Warhol transvestite associate Candy Darling, The Crying Light and its related EP show male Japanese conceptual dancer Kazuo Ohno.  Ohno pioneered a highly conceptual style of dance termed butoh, embracing controversial sexual themes as early as the 1950s, its performers often in drag.  Ohno performed into his nineties; confined to a wheelchair and 102 years old at the release of The Crying Light, his work’s trajectory echoes the themes of Hegarty’s LP: nature, the soul, aging, and transmutation. While Bird examined people’s relations to themselves, Light finds its subjects relating not just to the world around them but also to eternity.

Another World’s narrator, readying for death—or perhaps just some type of metamorphosis—says goodbye to temporality.  “I need another world/This one’s nearly gone,” sings Hegarty, suggesting it may not be him that is dying; he lists a dozen things he’ll miss, including sea, snow, bees, and things that grow, before concluding “I’m gonna miss the wind/Been kissing me so long.”  This evocative, romantic hymn is the album’s centerpiece.  The Crying Light’s music is even more delicate than the piano balladry and dark, restrained pop of I Am a Bird Now.  Guitar and bass do figure in the Johnsons’ roster here, but several songs find the group and pianist Hegarty accompanied by a chamber orchestra and the arrangements are beautifully austere.  The record’s feng shui is impeccable; there are 27 musicians credited, yet the album’s sound is never cluttered or overwhelmed by activity.  One Dove, for example, features a variety of percussive crackles, a horn section, and a recorder embellishment, but the song still feels clean and spacious.  Kiss My Name is the album’s mid-tempo pop showpiece, its elegant melodies propelled by a twirling string arpeggio and gentle flutes.  In its sparkling, poppiest moments and soberest ruminations alike, The Crying Light is among the Aughts’ most lovely, gripping sets of songs, and with I Am a Bird Now it forms one of the decade’s most stunning pairs of albums.

Highlights: Kiss My Name, Epilepsy Is Dancing, Aeon, Another World

Sublime bit: Hegarty’s urgent, impassioned repetitions of “That man I love so much” in the closing verses of Aeon, a love song to Father Time.

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94. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

94. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon (Merge, 2007)

Spoon’s sixth long player and final Aughts album, the daftly titled Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, finds the Austin group’s music sharpened and streamlined.  Half fidgety, tight pop songs and half breezy white-boy soul, the record was Spoon’s most concise and economical record to date.  While the junior executive indie rockers’ Aughts catalog consists of four smartly appointed LPs of increasing achievement, these can appear interchangeable to the casual listener; while earlier efforts like the ’01 Girls Can Tell, for example, is built on the same blueprint of taut yet groovy guitar-based backing and Britt Daniel’s obliquely clever lyricism reminiscent of an art-school Elvis Costello, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is more focused, entertaining, and memorable.  As I’ve noted elsewhere (see #108), the Spoon LP you favor may come down to drawing straws; should you decide on this effort, though, the rewards may last longer.

With the group’s lineup in flux at ’05’s Gimme Fiction after the departure of longtime bassist Josh Zarbo and much of that record recorded by Daniel and drummer Jim Eno, Spoon’s Ga lineup is stabilized as a quartet, including bassist Rob Pope of then-dissolved emo veterans the Get Up Kids.  Horn and string guest spots spice up a handful of tunes.  At just over 36 minutes, Ga is about as long as any Spoon album but unlike some of the others it is the kind of record that zips by, begging for another play.  This is in despite of the peculiar placement of The Ghost of You Lingers as the album’s second track; founded on a pounding, one-note piano riff that dominates the song’s three-and-a-half minutes (and whose phonetic approximation provides the album’s title) and with little other sonic meat on its bones apart from a handful of competing, disembodied vocal fragments, the song is long and jarring enough to make listeners with short attention spans turn off the record.  Should the casual listener persevere, the album’s truest reward comes at the third track with a shift to crisp pop mode, continuing at a pithy clip for its remainder.

The band is literate enough to feature a 1963 photo of American sculptor Lee Bontecou on the album cover but classy enough to avoid referential pop-culture overkill in its songs, and much of Daniel’s wordplay on Ga is more abstruse than ever.  Only The Underdog and Finer Feelings offer explicitly linear narratives, the latter an account of a hapless chap from Memphis seeking salvation in the help-wanted or dating sections of the local paper, whichever comes first.  Don’t Make Me a Target, with its “Nuclear dicks with their dialect drawls/That come from a parking lot town,” evokes the slightest whiff of politics.  As important as the album’s lyrics, though, are its arrangements.  Split between the jaunty yet tough-edged pep of tunes like The Underdog (built sunnily on invigorating acoustic guitar, a soft horn arrangement, and handclaps) and the slinky groove of Eddie’s Raga and Don’t You Evah (a cover of a theretofore unreleased song by NYC trio The Natural History), the record is paced brilliantly, at least after the confounding gambit of its second track.  Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is strong while remaining freshly loose and, despite the mix-and-match tenor of Spoon’s catalog, it is as spirited as they'd yet gotten and it makes a respectable choice for the finest record they’d recorded thus far.

Highlights: You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb, Don’t You Evah, Finer Feelings, The Underdog

Sublime bit: How each chorus overlaps with the first line of the next verse in Eddie’s Raga, one of a handful of great uses of vocal overdubs.

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