…maybe. For now, some YouTubage recommended to me by my roomie: M.I.A. and Timbaland frolicking in-studio. A moment of Zen if I’ve seen one.

Spoon “Everything Hits At Once”

The radio got totally intolerable last night while I was driving home from work, so I needed a change. I put in Girls Can Tell, Austin rockers Spoon’s moody and marvelous 2000 return to the indie world after an ill-fated sojourn into the indifferent arms of Neglektra Elektra. I ended up kinda just listening to “Everything Hits At Once,” the album opener, on repeat. (Yeah, you got me, at first it was all about that “lights in traffic we become/on the way back home” line.)

I notice that I focus a lot on lyrics–which are easier to pick apart in that “what is a song but poetry set to music” way, especially for a words guy like me–to the exclusion of talking about the actual, you know, music. Sometimes it’s really hard to get past the rockcrit mad libs: [stock adj] [instrument] (e.g., “swirling organ,” “jangly guitar,” “booming drums”) or “sounds like [band 1] meets [thing 2].”

So today, one and a half instrumental things that surprised me about “Everything Hits At Once,” and one and half that didn’t.

The Trouble Tone: If you’d've asked me what the very first sound on this song is, I would’ve said, “Easy. The drums kick in, ‘bish-dum-dum-doo-dat.’ ” But really, a split second earlier, a really quiet synth drone comes in, and maintains that chord for the song’s first 30 seconds or so. (It might go on longer, but I lose it around the half-minute mark.)

That the presence of this sound is a revelation to me speaks to either (1) my listening so often on shitty computer speakers, (2) my habit of listening while distracted by some other task or (3) that hole in my head everybody keeps talking about.

Anyway, as the song gets going, the bass moves and some brighter keyboards alternate between a couple chords. But that static drone in the background hangs, somber, creating unease like the sound of distant sirens. It’s super-subtle, but it’s alerting yr animal brain that this isn’t necessarily a happy time coming up.

Dreamtime Solo: Britt Daniel, the main Spooner, has always had an inventive touch with guitar solos, at times ending up just this side of out–blasting minimal skronk or tearing off figures that are more rhythmic in character than shreddy or melodic. Solos become little detours and tangents in Spoon songs.

Elements of this approach translated to the mellotron solo, played by one of the dudes from Trail of Dead, that starts around 2:16. “Everything Hits At Once” goes all the sudden from being lean and dark to turning lush and weird and starry-eyed.

Skins: I love the way Spoon places the drums in their mixes. They’ve figured out a consistent sweet spot where you really feel and hear what the drums are doing, but they don’t overpower the song, while the overall sound remains streamlined and clutter-free. As a result, they’re one of the few rock bands who have sat out the overcompression/loudness wars but nonetheless make songs that can sit next to a hip hop track in yr party shuffle without sounding weak.

In “Everything Hits At Once” you get a steady, nuanced performance from sticksman Jim Eno. It sounds like a real drummer doing his thing in a room (this is rarer than you think), booms loud and clear enough to really move the song, and has accents that actually, you know, seem to accentuate the feel and meaning of the song.

(And OK, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks: I find the refrain “I go to sleep and think that yr next to me” to be a perfectly succinct encapsulation of the post-breakup desolate devastation blues as I remember them; and the concept of fading into the sea of rush hour cars as a kind of communion is mystifying.)

Please enjoy the computerized rotoscope magic of Divya Srinivasan’s video for this song. It’s got parts that are lean and dark and lush and weird and starry-eyed, so it’s kind of perfect.

Girls Can Tell at Target. (and at iTunes.)

Daniel Johnston “I Had Lost My Mind” “Living Life” “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience”

Last weekend the little lady and I netflix’d The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a marvelous and heartbreaking biography of the troubled Austin artist, singer-songwriter and pioneering home recordist who’s been a touchstone for a couple generations of indie rockers. The filmmakers truly do justice to a life that is the stuff of tall tales.

Picking up the strand from Lindayism like a month ago, I’d highly recommended this DVD to pretty much everybody. It has moments of hope and is full of beauty, although it’s ultimately harrowing in its depiction of Johnston’s psychosis. It’s amazing how much archival stuff they were able to use–audio tapes of family arguments, Super 8 films of the crush that became a lifelong muse, video of some of his most disastrous performances.

The film demonstrates how the urge to document, to tell stories, has been intimately intertwined with Johnston’s creative play since his teens. It also shows those who fetishize, and even seem to goad along, his illness to be as ill-equipped as his family and friends when it’s time to actually face the ugly results.

It was amazing to see how shrewd and self-conscious Johnston could be even in his disconnected moments–a stark contrast to his image as an inspired naif. And his illness aside, the man’s music has never shone as incandescently as when paired with the imagery in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Here’s one case in point:

Oh, so I’m not going to front like I’m a D. Johnston expert. I’m not.

I just want to share a couple tracks originally from 1980’s Songs of Pain, but taken from last year’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. This double-disc comp presents Johnston originals and covers of the same songs by various alt-rock luminaries.

And I want to tell you what I love about his music.

“Living Life” is rough-hewn but plaintive. Johnston’s childlike voice shuffles through yearning, hope, joy and sadness beyond his years at the time. The tape warble on his vocals and the basement acoustics reverb around the piano lend the proceedings a timeless but distant warmth, like a yellowing photograph whose exact age or era you can’t quite place.

He’s singing about the span and scope of life here, but highlights a basic conflict that anticipated his later struggles, like the little rumbles before the Big One: What do you do with the artist? Not to be too precious about it, but how does someone who feels so deeply, devotes his waking hours and his dreams to a basically impractical pursuit, deal with the dulling concerns of the workaday world? Johnston evades pretension in tackling this pretty Big Issue (I fear I haven’t) by being plainspoken, bleeding honesty onto a magnetic reel.

If I have the story straight after watching the film, “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience” comes from a time when the only instrument Johnston had access to was a chord organ, a fan-powered keyboard that’s a cousin to the accordion. So he pumps away, channeling his loneliness and his anger at limitation into a letter to himself, a mini-sermon against loneliness, limitation and anger.

For better or worse, he’s never alone when he has his quixotic ambition, his outsized imagination. During a closing breakdown/vamp of the chorus starting about 2:28, he leads the audience in a singalong. Thus the exile, jury-rigging a studio from scraps in his brother’s garage, conjures a stadium of fans to keep him company.

The Late Great Daniel Johnston at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston at Target.

Tahiti 80 “Big Day”
Phoenix “On Fire”
The Push Kings “Sunday On The West Side”

I went through a little angst about whether to post about Tahiti 80.

The group was brought to my attention by a couple publicist-type folks, and up till now what I write about has been decided pretty much by whim. The apt introduction to the band: “I know you don’t necessarily do new music, but I’ve snooped around your blog a bit and I think you might like them.”

And I indeed like what I’ve heard.

So: it’s my blog, and to coin a phrase, “I don’t care. I do what I want.”

For me Tahiti 80 fits in the context of other recent skinny indie kids reviving an amalgamated AM Gold/yacht rock/disco crossover style–dudes with a residual affection for George Michael, Hall & Oates and Bread (it can’t be just me, right?) making smooth sounds for the now times.

Exhibit A–”Big Day.”

This sounds a bit like the Bee Gees during the recently-mentioned days of white suits, but Tahiti 80 is really scratching the same itch for me that Justin Timberlake, or Q and Not U on Power, or the Scissors Sisters scratch. I’ve already confessed my weakness for music carrying affirmations, and while “the big day waiting for you” in this tune is a come-on, it also feels like perfect waking-up music as I try to shake off the daybreak grog.

So their record Fosbury dropped stateside yesterday. Apparently they’re also touring the U.S.–with a bear suit. (Don’t tell Kanye. He’s been kinda touchy lately.)

Tahiti 80 are from Freedom, so the mind trips to Phoenix, other Francofunky purveyors of Amalgamated Smooth^tm. “On Fire,” off their 2000 debut United (which also gave us Copollatastic hunk of mellow yearning “Too Young”), attains the almost perfect lulling groove, promises “it’s gonna be alright” over and over while organ and clavinet choogle along.

On the one hand, I think there’s sort of a sly undercurrent of real turmoil here, the implication of a medicated zombie of a b/f who perhaps deserves to ultimately lose the gurl. I mean, after all the lovey-dovey, how can he say, “baby left me for another/don’t you know it’s gonna be alright”?

On the other hand, I invite you to imagine this as the story of lovers falling to pieces during the 1968 Paris student riots (an event that the Phoenix crew would have to be too young to remember) or during the 2005 Paris riots (the future at the time this recording was made, if that doesn’t blow yr mind).

If we go a little further back, to 1998, we get the sexy Moore Garety bros, of the Connecticut Moore Garetys (their daddy’s rich and their momma’s good-looking, legend has), leading the Push Kings through “Sunday On The West Side,” one gem among an unbelievable trove of Amalgamated Smooth^tm to be found on Far Places.

It’s really a cute, almost Romeo & Juliet stylee tale of a suburban boy limited to weekend bus-trip sojourns to romance his city girl. There’s even a precious tinge of “parents just don’t understand” on the breakdown starting at 2:28.

The production on this one is minorly ridiculous and wonderful–the song as song has sunk enough into my consciousness that I have to remind myself to notice the flute, the wikka-wikka record scratches, the vibes.

Beneath this wash, just for a moment, we get to feel teenaged again, but with none of the grief.

Fosbury at ArtistDirect. (and at iTunes.)
United at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
Far Places at Gemm.