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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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HALFWAY HOME: Mid-year best
Thursday 06 July @ 11:16:28 |
 By Steve McPherson
It’s the first week of July, and you know what that means, dear readers: We’ve reached the halfway point of 2006. If you’ve put in any time at all watching the Discovery Channel, you know that there’s nothing the wild music journalists enjoys more than listing things. The prize, of course, is the Year End Best Of, but you can’t get started on that kind of thing on Christmas morning. We track these things relentlessly, so, like my brethren across the country, I’m putting my stamp on my favorites, local and national, so far.
Adam Arcuragi
Adam Arcuragi
It seems like by now we should have exhausted the possibilities when it comes to a man singing and playing an acoustic guitar, but then along comes another artists like Adam Arcuragi to put the lie to the singer/songwriter genre’s limitations. Much like Neutral Milk Hotel’s magnum opus, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Arcuragi’s debut album marries a yearning voice to an insistently strummed guitar and finds dusty magic in the space between. Around this core, Arcuragi hangs vibraphone, electric guitars so precious they sound ceramic and sentimental percussion, resulting in an album as seductively alluring as a summer afternoon on a porch. Arcuragi, a Philadelphia native, is also a playwright and poet, and it comes out in lines like, “Whispering how much I love you/ seems like far off coastal lights/ And all the jealous winds I could gather wouldn’t stretch these tall sails tight/ But oh, this nursery for lost jealous sons/ sing in a low and continuous refrain of joy I’ll never know.” In print, I know it might come off a little precious, but when it’s coming out of Arcuragi, he sells it. Let’s be honest, you’re probably making a mix tape right now for someone, and you’re probably looking for the perfect song to close it, open it or slow it down to show how you really feel. Let me recommend just about any track off of this album for that task. You won’t be disappointed.
Haley Bonar
Lure the Fox
Lure the Fox is the album upon which Haley Bonar’s considerable potential has finally borne fruit. Her previous efforts have all been strong, but none of them singular. Lure the Fox is a completely different story, enveloping you in a lonesome, harmony-laden dustbowl sandstorm from the first creaky guitar notes of the opening title track through the final echoing strains of closer “Blue Ridge Mountains.” Evocative songwriting has always been one of Bonar’s strong suits, and her gently whispered voice- supplanted ably by bassist Chris Morissey’s harmonies- delivers lines like, “I want something/ have I been good enough?” with the kind of slightly unhinged sultriness perfected by the likes of Hope Sandoval. Like most of the discs on this list, Lure the Fox has vibe in spades, and it’s this distinct sonic personality that gives it staying power. Just last week I was riding a train out of Boston near sunset into the wooded environs of Plymouth, Mass., and Lure the Fox’s ancient-sounding melodies and oaken instrumentation provided the perfect backdrop for pulling into the town where the Pilgrims settled, married, got homesick and had their hearts broken so long ago.
J Dilla
Donuts
When James Yancey passed away last February from complications associated with lupus at the too-young age of 32, the hip-hop world lost one of its true artists. He cut his teeth making beats for Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Pharcyde in the ‘90s and made his reputation with a sampling acumen that had every producer around emulating his style, specifically his talent for drum production. Released three days before his untimely death, Donuts stands as his most nuanced production. Over the discs 31 instrumental tracks, Dilla achieves, in a bizarre way, something akin to the feeling you can get from early Guided By Voices records. Stunning hooks and grooves surface for a minute or less before being drawn back under by the weight of the next one. This isn’t just a collection of bangers, though. A thread runs through it, making for a record that demands you alter your expectations and embrace what at first seems like attention deficit disorder, but over time becomes more like a transcendental non-attachment. In Buddhist meditation, the goal is not to stop discursive thought, but rather to not grasp at them. In the end, Dilla has created just that: a meditation on hip-hop culture and the art of beatmaking.
Midlake
The Trials of Van Occupanther
Midlake’s just-released album is a prime example of how to make a record with staying power. The first shock comes when you realize that the album’s nearest sonic reference is not the Clash or Joy Division but Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. The drums are mixed to gently nudge the songs along, the tempo never rises above a trot and the expansive harmonies, not the guitars, are the catalyst that lifts the tunes up. Tim Smith’s laconic delivery recalls Thom Yorke in his more pensive moments, and for the first several listens, that’s enough: Fleetwood Mac meets Radiohead is pretty fascinating as it is. After a while though, the lyrics will start to stick, and that’s when you begin to perceive a bigger picture. The entire album is some kind of fantasia about life in a pre-technological society, where a premium is put on fidelity, hard work, marriage and the good of the village. “Bring me the news all about the town/ how it struggles to help all the farmers out during harvest time,” sings Smith in “Head Home.” “There’s someone I’d like to see,” he continues, “she never mentions a word to me/ She reads Leviathan.” Surely this has got to be the first song to reference Thomas Hobbes’ social and economic masterwork. The sepia-toned lyrics combine with the sky-blue musical setting to create the aural equivalent of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph. The characters seem eerily still and far-removed from the present while simultaneously burning from inside with familiarly human emotion.
One for the Team
Good Boys Don’t Make Noise
Ian Anderson, who’s ably provided guitar for Aneuretical while building his very own scene, model-train-style, with Afternoon Records, makes his intentions plain from the first line of the debut from his own power-punk-pop project’s first track: “I’ve been meaning to write these songs for some time/ I hope that they don’t waste yours.” In a way, he’s tipped his whole hand right there: the entire album teeters back and forth between the blustery swagger of the music and the wounded vulnerability of the lyrics. Such a balancing act is not a new thing, but Anderson performs it with the kind of aplomb that puts him in the good company of forebears like Matthew Sweet, Built to Spill and Weezer. He pulls off a lot of neat lyrical tricks, like the hook from the title track which manages to blur the line between “You’re taking off” and “You’re taking off your …” by cycling it back into itself. Much like my buddy Rob van Alstyne, I was a little worried about how I was going to feel about One for the Team’s disc, seeing as how Anderson is an occasional contributor to the Pulse, so it was with relief that I could give this staggeringly great debut effort four rock fingers up. That’s two index fingers and two pinkies.
P.O.S.
Audition
Stef Alexander has the kind of talent that could eat the world. In the wake of the release of Audition, critical opinion has seemed to go in two directions: Reviewer either think he’s just another entrant into the tired contest of who can mix rock and rap most effectively, or they realize he’s really onto a completely new strain of urgent underground music. One review I read compared some of his new album to LL Cool J’s Rick Rubin-produced stuff like “Rockbox.” Here’s a tip, though: James Smith never fronted his own hardcore band. Alexander isn’t just playing cut and paste; he lives and breathes it. Audition is too massive and multi-faceted to cram into a list entry like this. Try to pick one song to play for people who don’t know and you’ll just end up flummoxed. “Stand Up (Let’s Get Murdered)” has the dexterous wordplay and the hottest beat (thanks to Lazerbeak), “P.O.S. is Ruining My Life” has the spleen, “De La Souls” has the heart and “Safety in Speed (Heavy Metal)” has, well, Craig Finn. My advice? Sit ‘em down, duct tape some headphones to their ears and crank it. Rinse, repeat.
The Plastic Constellations
Crusades
At Grand Old Day, I witnessed quite the spectacle. Forced to extend their set to fill in some time, TPC didn’t resort to a cover or an obscure old track (they retired their anthem/albatross “Let’s War” at their last release show). They danced. With drummer Matt Scharenbroich laying down the thunder, bassist Jordan Roske and singer/guitarists Jeff Allen and Aaron Mader got down in a TPC dance-off where the audience was instructed to stand in front of their favorite. The crowd vacillated among the three, and there was no clear winner- aside from everybody who got to see it. The pent-up energy that The Plastic Constellations uncoil into their songs found its outlet that day through dance fever, but about this time last year it was getting sprayed onto tape in the form of Crusades. Sure, they’ve left behind some of the wackiness that made Let’s War and Mazatlan such goofy pleasures, but they’ve exchanged it in equal measure for a more focused attack that retains the playfulness. Couple that with a near-conceptual thread running through the album—something about dragons, earthquakes and the struggles that we all have to overcome—and you’ve got a many-headed hydra of a record that hits on all six.
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