“…and then it gets into another scene:” Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez are Buke & Gass.

“Medulla Oblongata” (streaming @ TP)
Buke & Gass’s EP, +/-, streaming for free @ bandcamp

by Blake Cooper

Sometimes I ask myself, “why isn’t this music really, really popular?” I said it aloud when a friend played me Chris Thile’s Deceiver — a pretty great record (it even won a Grammy) written and produced by a super-talented musician — and I say it to myself all the time while listening to Nick Drake, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Paul Westerberg and the Fiery Furnaces. These are creative artists who, I feel, should have mass appeal.

The most recent addition to this list is Buke & Gass. Like any good band, they make music that uses existing paradigms in creative ways to generate something refreshing. This applies to their songwriting — thundering polyrhythms pulse around what sounds suspiciously like pop songs — as much as it does their actual musicianship: Buke & Gass even play tweaked and modified versions of traditional instruments (a “buke” is a bass ukulele; the “gass” is a guitar/bass combo), creating an admirably metaphorical relationship to the music.

It’s hard to compare Buke & Gass to a type of music, or at least to one type of music; big drums and distortion give it a little ’90s rock edge, female vocals resembling a prettier-sounding No Doubt-era Gwen Stefani, production suited to the tastes of two musicians from brooklyn circa 2010… maybe I’m not painting the best picture here. But it has a somewhat gallop-ey sound. It was described by, uh, buke player Arone Dyer (in an interview with Radiolab) as being like “a recently retired schoolhouse janitor riding the back of a big horse that’s galloping over different scenes— like, one scene could be a really calm, rose petal-surfaced pond. It jumps over that, and then it gets into another scene where there’s a big party, and there’s topless beach-goers, totally pruned out from hanging out on the beach, and they’re very surprised…” The audience, says Dyer, is the janitor. It has edge, but that edge is attached to totally catchy and well-designed songs. Without such a strong core to their music, Buke & Gass might be little more than a novelty act. They pull it off because they make music that is interesting enough to be different yet consistent enough to draw one in immediately.

Riposte is out September 14th on Brassland. If you want to buy it, click here. They’ll also be on tour next month, and tour dates are here.

blakecooper:

Yeasayer, “ONE (Blake Cooper remix)”
Made by me, for Mad Decent’s Yeasayer Remix Contest. 

If you like it, feel free to vote for it (but please don’t feel in any way obligated to do so).

The indelible enigma that is Fleetwood Mac, c. 1979 

Tusk is a record that is for no one, really. At least no one in the way that a fledgling music business executive might think. First, it’s a Fleetwood Mac record from the late seventies-the Mac’s “superstar” era-so, if you are someone whose favorite band is, say, Grizzly Bear, you probably think this record is really lame (if you haven’t heard it, that is). But it is also not a record that quite sounds, uh, ready for commercial radio, in many ways. Sure, they had a hit with “Sara”, but the record as a whole is a little rough around the edges, which is particularly interesting for a band very publicly known-and scrutinized-for being very rough around the edges themselves. If you’re a fan of the cheating, coke sniffing drama of Fleetwood Mac, then Tusk is your logical conclusion. And, incidentally, if you are a fan of interesting records, and creatively-crafted music, then Tusk is also your-and the band’s-logical conclusion.

What, exactly, caused Tusk, this giant paradox of a record of pop music? Where did it come from? What does it mean?

First, a little history.

Given that Fleetwood Mac is a band that has reached the highest pinnacles of mainstream popularity, accessible to very few of even wildly popular musical acts, it’s not surprising that the personal goings-on of the band are scrutinized to a high degree by the public. Also not surprising is the scandalizing nature of the behavior of these (suddenly wealthy and influencial) individuals: backstabbing affairs, ruinous cocaine dependencies, violent outbursts(1), etc. But what is surprising is how fucked up their pre-epic-fame days were— before anybody, in the U.S. at least, started paying attention. Fleetwood Mac got their start as a British blues band, modeled after Clapton, the Yardbirds and John Mayall. And, in the process of transcending the Atlantic ocean as well as genres of music, the band became a constant magnet for oddity: Peter Green, the band’s first leader, had an LSD-induced schizophrenic ”awakening” and left the band to become a compulsive philanthropist and eventual mentally-unstable/homeless person; another band member joined the Children of God and left the band suddenly in the early seventies. The band even had to contend with another band to which Mick Fleetwood refers in his autobiography as “the fake Mac,” a band under former management of Fleetwood Mac using the name Fleetwood Mac but containing none of the original members of Fleetwood Mac.

It wasn’t until the mid-seventies, when the remaining core of the British blues band met two young, struggling musicians trying to make a living in Los Angeles, that their luck began to change (somewhat); Stevie Nicks and her then-boyfriend, a Brian Wilson-devotee named Lindsey Buckingham, would soon become the relatable physical element to Fleetwood Mac’s American audience (that is, two foxy, young California-Americans) as well as the California-pop element that made the band so successful on this side of the Atlantic. Their first record with this trans-atlantic lineup was not incidentally the second record the band would release under the simple title of Fleetwood Mac; it represented a new start for the band, and at once an American audience rewarded the band for its past suffering. The album was wildly successful(2), and it was during the recording of their next record, Rumours, when things started to fall apart again— this time under the harsh, magnifying limelight. Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship dissolved, as did bassist John McVie’s nearly decade-long marriage to keyboard/vocalist/songwriter Christine McVie. Nicks briefly shacked up with drummer Mick Fleetwood. Nicks and Fleetwood, as well as Lindsey Buckingham, all developed documented cocaine problems at this point. Things got generally kind of hairy in a Behind-the-Music kind of way.

At this point it’s almost certain that the personal lives of the members would have been spared had they dropped off the face of the earth, lost all their money, and were forced to find steady employment. Unfortunately for them, their next record, 1977’s Rumours, was an insanely large “smash-hit” success(3), as well as a genuinely fascinating and high-quality collection of songs.

Fast-forward to 1979. The band-members of which now have jealous and/or jaded dispositions and serious substance abuse problems-have been touring the world in support of Rumours, and pressure is building for a follow-up. Under immense pressure, the band released its follow-up, Tusk, in October of ‘79.

Tusk has a mixed reception even among the members of Fleetwood Mac. In Mick Fleetwood’s biography he seems lukewarm at best about Tusk, admitting to having “reservations… that [the songs] might be too alien for our fans.”(4) At the time, Warner Bros. told the band that releasing a semi-experimental double-album as a follow-up to Rumours was a bad idea, commercially. And, while the record made it to number one on the Billboard chart, it was indeed a relative commercial flop. Fleetwood blames this on a low-key, non ‘vulger’ advertising campaign (at the request of the band), and the implementation of cassette-tape recording and dubbing(5).

But it can’t be denied that the album is less accessible than its predecessor. This is largely attributable to Lindsey Buckingham, who felt like a sellout being a commercially-successful pop musician in the burgeoning age of Punk and New Wave, and set out explicitly to add a little edge to the Mac sound. Much of the production, especially on Buckingham’s songs, is a late-seventies translation of the ethos of contemporary music— particularly the DIY recording movement taking place now: sped up tape tracks of tacky(6) guitars (“That’s Enough For Me”), vocals bathed in Brooklyn-style delay (the similarly-named “That’s All For Everyone,” which sounds exactly like a song Beach House might write, starting around 1:41), dreamy vocal layerings (The Ledge), etc. The latter is my favorite example of the Buckingham post-Rumours mind set. The song is a short (2:08), paranoid rant about rejection. The motif in the recording is near vs. far; deadringing toms bump in the foreground while a snare snaps somewhere in the background; layers of vocals both near and far, clean and reverberating, float in and out of the mix(7), all while Buckingham stands back and snarls:

Counting on my fingers
Counting on my toes
Slipping through your fingers
Seeing how it goes

You can love me, baby, but you can’t walk out
Someone ‘ought’a tell you what it’s really all about(8)

While not as prevalent on the other songwriters’s songs, Buckingham’s production makes its definite mark on the songs of Nicks and McVie on this record. Christine McVie’s “Brown Eyes” is another production high-point on the record; the vocals particularly so. The song is sparse enough to mix the vocals up front, and the super-present, many layered vocals of Christine McVie here are haunting… there isn’t any other word for it. And the tick-tock interplay of pianos and layered guitars on Stevie Nicks’s “Beautiful Child” reminds one of time slipping away, while Nicks laments that “there is so little time…” The song, lyrically and musically, lament the passing of time and aging (and, vicariously, death). Although almost completely estranged, the musical partnership of Buckingham and Nicks reached a new pinnacle on this record(9), which speaks against the assertion made by bassist John McVie that Tusk had suffered the curse of the White Album— sounding more like multiple solo albums than the work of a group in total. Sure, Buckingham’s songs are often erratic (but not always, particularly in the case of “Walk a Thin Line”), but Christine McVie’s “Think About Me” sounds like it belongs on Rumours, and Stevie’s songs from this record (particularly “Sara” and “Sisters of the Moon”) are exemplary of the following two decades, in which Fleetwood Mac would often become a de facto backing band for the wildly popular Nicks.

I started out writing this trying to argue that Tusk should be more popular, but I can see why it probably won’t be— in 1979, Fleetwood Mac-and Tusk-are caught in a sort of purgatory, an artifact of a band knowing (A) they are wildly successful, and (B) need to advance artistically and stay relevant in a rapidly-changing music business. As a result the record is, in many ways, too commercial for the independent thinkers among music listers, yet too experimental and noodly for the average consumer. But, for any given band in this position, that’s a lot of pressure, and it’s a pressure many contemporary bands felt when the music industry all but collapsed in the early ’00s. Think, for example, about the commercially viable, FM radio-ready Radiohead of the ’90s compared with the blip-blooping, pay-whatever-you-want-for-our-record Radiohead of the following decade. Now I feel compelled to state that I in no way mean to say that Fleetwood Mac is more adventurous than Radiohead. That notion’s absurd, obviously, but Lindsey Buckingham did what he does best on Tusk, which is big-yet-organic production, and as a result it definitely stands up to time-even the sappier tracks-than Rumours (and way, way, way more than 1986’s Tango in the Night, on which they got the equation all wrong). On Tusk, it certainly feels like Fleetwood Mac successfully chose the road less traveled, at least a little, and the result is the most adventurous-and, therefore, interesting-record from an essentially excellent group of musicians and songwriters with a long, interesting past.

I’m going to be uploading a few songs from Tusk; transfers from my LPs, which don’t sound great but still offer a really close glimpse at what makes Tusk so fascinating; which, it turns out, is what perennially stunts its overall popularity: that duality of commerciality/integrity. But, I say to the consumer (probably not reading this): ‘tune in!,’ and to the purist, ‘sell out! (just a little).’ Both groups, I imagine, should be able to appreciate Tusk in different and rewarding ways.

—

(1) Lindsey Buckingham once physically assaulted Stevie Nicks, trying to strangle her against the hood of a car. It’s true: Fleetwood Mac enjoyed virtually every kind of hyper-wealthy rock star indulgence except haphazard self-comparisons to the Christian lord and savior, which kept them perfectly in the good graces of a society that idolizes the indulgent, violent tendencies of the rich but abhors irreverence (but that’s another point for another article).

(2) Well, actually, it was only mildly successful in the American market, but their mild American success proved far more plentiful than a pretty vehement success they had achieved with their bluesier sound in the British market.

(3) Rumours spent 31 consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, eventually becoming the 10th best selling record of all time, with 40-million copies sold worldwide.

(4) This, incidentally, caused more strain between Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham, Tusk’s main architect. From Fleetwood’s biography: “To this day, Lindsey feels I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about the album.”

(5) As part of the marketing strategy for Tusk, the record was played in its entirety on FM radio. According to Fleetwood, “millions stayed home that night at taped the whole album.”

(6) Tacky referring to the tone of the sound. You know, not as in vulgar.

(7) My favorite moment on the record as a whole is the depreciating layers of vocals-disappearing but somehow getting closer-on the line “You’re never going to make it babe, make it babe, make it baby…”

(8) Buckingham is audibly bitter about the relationship between his ex-girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, and the drummer Fleetwood, throughout Tusk (see: the title track).

(9) Buckingham and Nicks have always been fantastic musical accompaniments to one another. Their pre-Mac record as a duo, Buckingham/Nicks, is wonderful, and many of Fleetwood Mac’s most popular songs (particularly “Landslide”) are essentially the product of the professional relationship between the two.

Little media documentation exists of Drake, whose career in the late sixties and early seventies went largely unnoticed during his lifetime and for several decades afterward.

American record producer Joe Boyd has just completed a three-night tour with his Way To Blue band, a tribute to the late English folk singer Nick Drake.

Boyd, highly influential in the career of Drake as well as fellow British folk groups Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band, has always been an outstanding advocate for Drake’s music—as legend has it, his contract with Island Records ensures that Drake’s three commercial studio recording will remain in print indefinitely—and he has enlisted the help of stars from various eras to help tout Drake’s moody, prophetic work. Singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, folk commune-dweller (and Animal Collective collaborator) Vashti Bunyan and Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch have all been tapped to perform Drake’s songs, in an “everybody plays a song, then people collaborate” style of tribute performance.

Peter Teehan, a contributer to claus.com, reviewed Way To Blue’s performance last Saturday at the Barbician Theatre in London, and noted how the performance, which also featured a five-piece backing band and a seven-piece string section, helped the listener appreciate Drake’s songwriting ability. “He had an ear for hooks and was more than capable of writing songs for large rooms” than his lifetime output would have us suggest, said Teehan.

In honor of these performances I’m posting a download link for a collection of home recordings made from Nick Drake’s home in Tanworth-in-Arden, England. It’s a great listen for fans of Drake who want to delve deeper into his life and motives, and it provides a rarely-documented look into the private life of a troubled man in a haze of dope and depression. For those who have never heard Drake’s music, I would suggest any one of his three studio releases: the brilliant “Five Leaves Left,” the underrated “Bryter Layter” or the hauntingly beautiful “Pink Moon.”

According to Pitchfork, Andrew W.K.’s 2006 Close Calls With Brick Walls is finally being released in the U.S. The album will be available, with a bonus disc, on February 23rd.

Since Close Calls is the album I always cite in my ongoing argument versus everyone re: the legitimacy of Andrew W.K., I’m understandably excited. Not only does this record mark the first measurable growth in his career (his music career, mind you; I’m not talking about his television career, motivational speaking, NYC club entrepreneurship, etc.), but it’s exponential. Yes, there are hard-hitting, hyper-positive party jams (“You Will Remember Tonight”), but there are also loads of oddities, from the (allegedly) drugged-out “Pushing Drugs”, to the album’s closing track, “The Moving Room,” which sounds like Born To Run-era Bruce Springsteen.

My two hopes for this release are that: (A) they do a better mix, because the international version of the record I have lacks the pumping immediacy and decidedly American amount of compression of his U.S. releases. Plus, I’m hoping the bonus disc will contain the four ridiculous (in a good way) tracks on the Korean limited-edition release, because hearing the Broadway-fueled absurdity of “This is My World” or the nonsensical “I Want Your Face” again will be phenomenal.

Everyone should buy this. And, if you happen to live in the NYC area, you should definitely attend Andrew’s town hall meeting about the record on 23rd at Santos Party House, the club that he co-founded (and, I’m assuming, got to name).

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#10: Animal Collective, “What Would I Want? Sky” (2009)

Download.

I began the decade listening to Radiohead, a band that a great many have claimed to hold the key to the sound of our era; Kid A (as I mentioned before) has been proclaimed the Rosetta stone to the sonic landscape of the ‘aughts with its cold, lifeless blips and hiccups superimposed with occasionally sparse but always entrancing human elements.

Now, with 2010 approaching, I cannot help but feel that way about Animal Collective. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve been hearing non-stop about Animal Collective from everybody, as they have been an internet favorite and an all-around divining rod for hip, forward-thinking indie-rock since they released Merriweather Post Pavillion early this year; if you happen to keep your ear to the emerging popular music scene, you probably heard about Animal Collective from their previous “popular” releases, the rock-oriented Feels, or the glistening (literally), futuristic Strawberry Jam; if you’re cooler than the room, than perhaps you’ve been a fan since their early decade work, culminating in the wonderful psych-folk infused Sung Tongs. But regardless whether you’ve been playing “My Girls” non-stop, or prefer the, er, trickier Danse Manatee (a record described by band member Brian “Geologist” Weitz as an experiment “in extreme frequencies, both low and high,and how they occupied space in the room and moved around in your heads”), you’ve probably noticed Animal Collective on the radar, in a big way, this year.

Which brings us to “What Would I Want? Sky”. “WWIW?S” had been road-tested at live shows throughout 2009 and made its recorded debut on the band’s ceremonial post-LP EP release Fall Be Kind. The whole EP is great, but “WWIW?S” stands out as a track that is instantly likable, regardless of almost any musical bias. Gone is much of the effects processing from the voice and snare hit, leaving a song with a clear melody, steady—albeit staggered—rhythm, and an immediately pleasing and catchy tune. For the AC purists: a three minute-plus jam starts the song, blowing breezily into the main section of the song, which utilizes in a rather creative way a vocal sample from the Grateful Dead song “Unbroken Chain”. All in all, “WWIW?S” is an example of Animal Collective at (arguably) its creative and commercial peak, as well as an example of how largely electronic music can be made to sound warm, inviting, and human, in a way that (albeit intentionally) Kid A doesn’t always achieve. This is mainstream, organic electronic music for the next decade and, well, I’m just fine with that.

Thanks for putting up with my rambling! The new year will bring—I promise—more real news and journalism, hopefully. I’ll see you all in 2010. -BC

#8: Vampire Weekend, “M79” (2008)

Look everybody! Someone’s blogging about Vampire Weekend!

I won’t win any points for originality, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to listening to a lot of Vampire Weekend in 2008, when they released their self-titled debut. Also admittedly not unique was my initial resistance against what I saw as a substance-less, trendy New York band brainwashing all of my friends. Part of the problem was that the hype peaked with the release of the single, “A-Punk,” a song that I still consider one of the weakest on the record. From hearing “A-Punk” I got the impression that, while their targets were unique (read: African), they still came off mostly like erudite cultural thieves, with very little to offer other than making Graceland-era Paul Simon and New Wave cool again (something I didn’t even think needed be done).

But it was the song “M79” that made me realize that I was just being cynical. I saw them perform it on Saturday Night Live with a string-quartet, and while I could have just scoffed and said “oh, they’re trying too hard,” the quality of the music demanded my attention. “M79” too sounds almost unbearably trendy—I think it no coincidence that the font in which their band name/album title is inscribed on their album cover is shockingly similar to that which Wes Anderson uses for all his titles—but it’s also almost unbearably catchy, and fun— a quality shared with the rest of the record. “M79” has been, to some extent, stuck in my head ever since. I walk around my apartment humming that choppy string part in my head. Vampire Weekend have become part of the soundtrack to the poorly-paced film we all imagine our lives to be, and that’s pretty hard to deny.

#8: Laura Veirs, “Don’t Lose Yourself” (2007)

Download.

“Don’t Lose Yourself”, from 2007’s Saltbreakers, is a song that continues along the ever-maturing career arc of Laura Veirs: it takes the initial stripped-down cute-but-substantial folk she matured to by her third record, 2003’s Carbon Glacier, adds a little bit of the dry contemporary production from Year of Meteors, and matures that sound even more, adding a hiccuping drum machine and synthesizers—conservatively—to Veirs’ guitars and highly enjoyable voice. It’s the balance of new and old that I enjoy most about this song: although, at heart, it is a simple song, some smart and somewhat aggressive modern production helps Veirs avoid the career lull that artists making this type of cutesy, civilized folkey indie-rock sometimes fall into by making the same record over and over.

(Veirs’ new record, July Flame, is on sale now).

#7: The Flaming Lips, “It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small… Do I Stand a Chance?” (2006)

UPDATE: Speaking of the Flaming Lips, here are some links to The Flaming Lips’ cover of Dark Side of the Moon (via Pop Tarts Suck Toasted):

Brain Damage (with Henry Rollins)
Money (also with Henry Rollins)

Although faintly praised, I always felt that the Flaming Lips’ 2006 record At War With the Mystics was underrated. It’s less widely heard than their previous Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, but not because Mystics lacks the catchy, accessible tune that Yoshimi had with “Do You Realize?”; in fact, Mystics pretty effectively balanced the catchy accessibility of the previous record with some of the, well, weirdness for which the Flaming Lips are known (for example, check out their silver fetus Christmas ornament).

What I like best about the longwinded-ly titled “It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small… Do I Stand a Chance?” is that it exemplifies this dual nature of the Lips on their records from the past decade (including this years’ pretty great Embryonic). The first section is the catchy, bouncy, and downright poppy (but in the weird and mostly artistically valid way in which, say, Lady Gaga makes pop music), and the second section (the one, I assume, represented after the slash in the song’s title) is spacey, cathartic and, true to the Flaming Lips’ nature, very cosmic.

This track has everything that kept the Flaming Lips relevant two decades after their formation. And, seeing how you can hear “Do You Realize?” on commercials for (nearly) everything, it seems as though, finally, the punk rockers are taking acid.

#6: Sufjan Stevens, “Decatur, or, A Round of Applause For Your Stepmother!” (2005)

I spent 2005 studying abroad— or, at least, this is what I tell people. In truth I was in Canada, at an audio production and engineering school. It was cold (predictably), and I didn’t know anyone. When I wasn’t studying I spent most of my free time wandering around Toronto with headphones on, composing a sort of mental slideshow of pictures and music from a strange experience in my head. Certain music I cannot help but associate with that place and time, some of it understandably—Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade’s first record— and some of it for reasons even I don’t understand (for instance, I spent a good portion of that winter listening compulsively to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk).

But the record that epitomizes that time to me is Sufjan Steven’s generally epic Illinois. Not that I’m alone here—Illinois was a big record in 2005—but I was surprised by the way it absorbed me, and, to be honest, it sort of scared me. When I first heard “Decatur”, as an mp3 on the internet to promote the yet-to-be-released record, I listened to it over and over while I searched the internet until four in the morning for a leak of the record (all the while with Stevens melodically, creepily singing directly into my brain via my headphones “Stay awake, and watch for the data…”). The next day it was raining, but I took a very long walk anyway around the city so I could listen to the 70+ minute record in its entirety, twice.

I don’t know what about “Decatur” did that to me, specifically, but as a song it’s super-likeable. The dual-voice melody and its simple, unique arrangement makes it sound at first listen both warmly familiar and totally unique. It’s a short song, so it takes a long time to wear out its welcome, instead beckoning the listener to put it on again, and again, etc.

Since then I’ve not been particularly interested in Stevens’ output; in fact, there are some things I’ve realized I just plain don’t like about Stevens (for example, his refusal to continue working on the 50 states project post-Illinois. Also: those creepy wings), but at the time I, being someone who doesn’t like crowds or loud music, and generally prefer recorded music to live music, was convinced to walk two hours and beg for extra tickets to see a sold-out Sufjan Stevens show in a church in North Toronto. Regardless of how I feel now about it, it was worth it to be able now to reflect on a time when I was so moved by music— a feeling I can only try, over and over, to recreate.