Flashback to the Oughts: 2004

2004 was a year of beginnings that were fueled by equal parts confidence and, if I am honest with myself, delusion. At the end of the previous year, I acquired a Chapman Stick, and the practice that I had been using as therapy started to manifest in some real musical output. Determined to master this non-traditional instrument and use it to somehow subvert academia, I began coursework for a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology. My studies included jazz improv courses and a seminar in global pop music, both of which began to further diversify my listening.

At the same time, I continued to teach out at Krum. The breadth of these new experiences make connecting the dots between my memory episodes and the reality of the calendar particularly confusing. My propensity to listen to older albums or to let albums simmer for a while complicates matters further.  I’ve had to refer to school records, Amazon shipping statements, and even dates on old pictures to flesh out specifics.  Still, after toying around with my memory and all available information, the 2004 list is, like its predecessors, a good representation of what I was into at the time.



This project is making me realize the extent to which memory episodes resist lining themselves up in neat chronological order.  They seem to arise in vivid flashes as I revisit this music, bringing to mind seemingly random events that must then be categorized.  This all might seem to be more trouble than its worth, but organizing my life story by the music that I surround myself with has, in recent years, emerged as a satisfying narrative in this blog.

10 The Drowners - Think of Me: I continued a steady diet of inexpensive power pop albums throughout 2004, many of which were unremarkable. The Drowners’ Swedish identity provided a unique perspective on the style that was slick and compelling.

9 Muse - Absolution: It has been a rare occasion for me to favorably compare any band to Rush. In 2004, however, I discovered Absolution, which earned Muse that distinction for a time by virtue of its accessible songs, impressive chops, and intense energy.

8 Blackfield - Blackfield: I supported Porcupine Tree’s move towards heavier and more identifiably progressive territory, but part of me missed Steven Wilson's relatively straightforward songwriting on Stupid Dream. Blackfield became the place where I could get my fix.

7 The Decemberists - Her Majesty the Decemberists: I saw The Decemberists in Denton on a lark, without ever hearing a note of their music, one night in 2004. Their show was impressive, and within 24 hours, Her Majesty the Decemberists had the dubious honor of being one of the few albums that I uploaded through ITunes in its earlier iteration.

6 Green Day - American Idiot: I saw American Idiot as the 21sy century Tommy - a punk rock opera of resistance for the Bush administration. Alas, within a few years Green Day would jump the shark with this great album and run it as a broadway musical, but at the time it was quite the statement.

5 The Trey Gunn Band - The Joy of Molybdenum: As I was getting more and more into transcription, I started making more of an effort to find other Stick and touchstyle guitar players that I felt a connection with. Gunn’s style was, and still is, a baffling exploitation of the instrument’s affordances, but his melodicism and conceptual adventurousness makes him one of my favorite players and The Joy of Molybdenum remains my favorite of his solo works.

4. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: I owned Kind of Blue for decades, but in retrospect, I had never really engaged it beyond mere background music. Transcribing solos from it for an improv class changed all that, however, and provided me with a deep appreciation for the clarity of Davis’ ideas.

3 Brian Wilson - SMiLE: Brian Wilson finally released the long awaited follow-up to Pet Sounds in 2004 with compelling results. The tour that followed provided one of the best live shows I had ever seen.

2. Fela Kuti - Zombie: A seminar in Global Popular Music fleshed out my understanding of Fela and his unique political position. I ended up getting several Fela albums this year, but Zombie remains the best of the bunch.

Album of the Year: 2004

1. Opeth - Damnation: Opeth’s one-off experiment in melodic melancholy would, in hindsight, serve to pivot them from their black metal roots into their current progressive rock incarnation. In itself, however, it remains a unique masterpiece in their catalog.

North Atlantic Oscillation's Shimmering Light in the Fog

For a prog rock album to surpass the status of guilty pleasure or, even worse, token in my library, it can’t rest on the laurels of the past too much. Admittedly, I have my share of favorite retro-prog projects, but they are often consumed quickly and discarded. For this reason, I generally take greater notice when an indie or alternative site calls attention to a new prog band than when a progressive rock site heaps praises on the next big thing. Every now and then, though, a group comes along that breaks the expectations of what progressive rock is, but whose proggish adventurousness can’t be ignored by the more conservative communities. The last time this happened, I discovered Mew, a band that has evolved into one of my all-time favorites. I still lurk on progressive rock sites for rare instances like this.

Several months ago, I read a review of North Atlantic Oscillation’s Fog Electric that piqued my interest. It was, by its own admission, somewhat vague, but it indicated that instrumental histrionics were downplayed in lieu of songcraft in a “modern take on progressive rock.”  These descriptors begged me to dig further, so I looked up the video for Soft Coda.

Its triumphant, expansive tone captured my attention. Indeed, North Atlantic Oscillation did not fit the classical prog paradigm. They did, however, seem to have a distinctive sound and an exploratory veneer. Still, I was wary, so I subjected Fog Electric to a somewhat uncharacteristic vetting process. I began running the entire album on low-fi Spotify during late night chores. Only after several months did it finally earn its way into rotation.

What immediately set the band apart from a lot of current progressive music I run into is the translucent vocal approach of guitarist and keyboardist Sam Healy. I readily admit that Peter Gabriel was, and is, a conceptual genius, but after 40 years of reinvention, his flamboyant approach to progressive showmanship has resulted in some embarrassing melodrama. North Atlantic Oscillation neatly sidesteps this issue with a crystalline falsetto that has more in common with Brian Wilson than Fish. When it is stacked in harmony (and it often is), comparisons with the Beach Boys are impossible to ignore.

Like a lot of progressive rock, it takes a little familiarity for the listener to gain a foothold on what is brewing beneath the surface of Fog Electric. It is, however, not so aloof and self-indulgent that it holds the listener at arm's length. On the contrary, it’s immediately quite inviting and consistent. Granted, there are bombastic Marillion-esque bridges, Hackett-inspired guitar interludes, and cleverly crafted asymmetrical time signatures that are clearly derived from the progressive rock canon. By and large, however, North Atlantic Oscillation also compares quite favorably with more subdued explorations from contemporary torchbearers like M83, Sigur Ros, and Radiohead.



In actuality, many of these comparisons are feeble at best. During the vetting process, it was not so easy to draw a straight line between Fog Electric and anything else I was listening to, which is what made it so compelling. The more I unraveled it, the more influences I seemed to add to the list, until finally I decided that perhaps North Atlantic Oscillation might be onto something a bit more unique than I was giving them credit for. Fog Electric is, I think, something special: a much-needed, genuinely fresh, creative statement in the progressive rock genre that could also serve a much broader audience.

Brian Wilson's Return to the Beach Boys: The Big "What If?"

I like and respect The Beach Boys, but without Brian Wilson as the primary creative force behind the group, I am a lukewarm fan at best.  Without his vision, variously fractured lineups have danced precariously on the edge of becoming cruise ship lounge versions of the band, offering up very little more than paint-by-number versions of the songs that once defined them. Under normal circumstances I would not have given a 2012 release by the group much notice.

The new Beach Boys album, however, grabbed my interest. That’s Why God Made the Radio features Wilson returning to an “authentic” Beach Boys lineup with all surviving members. Many fans of Pet Sounds, like me, often love to play “what if..?” games with the Beach Boys’ creative arc if the band had supported Wilson’s vision for SMiLE. The potential of a true follow-up to these artistically adventurous albums, no matter how slim, earned it a spot on my Wish List which, like Etudes earlier this year, got it into my hand on my first Father’s Day.

That’s Why God Made the Radio is the first album of all-original Beach Boys compositions in nearly forty years, and it does capture the band’s classic aesthetic, particularly in the lush vocal arrangements.  However, the band froze their artistic progress decades ago in order to commercialize and cash in on their distinctive sound, so reproducing it is not that great a feat. In reality, the rusty melodic clichés associated with well-worn doo-wop progressions are sometimes too pronounced to ignore.

If the less daring tracks on That’s Why God Made the Radio were released by a younger band (like the Wondermints, who show up as studio contributors) they might leave a different impression. There is, however, a perhaps unfair distinction between purposely manipulating nostalgia and just being old-fashioned.

On the other hand, there are several moments on That’s Why God Made the Radio that acknowledge the potential of this seemingly impossible reunion.  Wilson’s relatively prolific solo output for the past decade often serves the album well.  At 70 years old, his expressive voice and compositional sensitivity preserve an almost childlike idealism, and when he takes center stage it is often sublimely beautiful. When the band focuses their still-intact vocal harmony on Wilson’s bittersweet arrangements, the rust flakes away to reveal the old deuce coupe, still running and cruising after all this time. Tracks like Pacific Coast Highway are easily worth the price of admission.



As it stands, That’s Why God Made the Radio doesn’t exactly pick up where Pet Sounds left off, but it certainly feels more uniformly genuine than anything else they have done since the late 60s. There are not many bands that can boast a credible creative spark in their fiftieth year of existence, but despite being somewhat uneven, the album suggests that The Beach Boys just might.