The Shaming of the True: Kevin Gilbert's Swan Song

 A look back at Kevin Gilbert's posthumous 2000 rock opera, The Shaming of the True

Steven Wilson's The Future Bites: Living in the Algorithm

 Review and Discussion on Steven Wilson’s 2021 album The Future Bites

An older text post about my earliest encounters with Porcupine Tree A text post on Steven Wilson’s Grace for Drowning Another text post on Steven Wilson’s The Raven That Refused To Sing

2021 Album Eliminations Ep. 17: Aimee Mann vs. Once and Future Band

Preview featuring The Forgotten Arm Post on Deleted Scenes

A Tale From The Other Side: A Quarantine Commentary

Interview and discussion on Timmy Sean's 2021 album A Tale From The Other Side, featuring feedback from the artist.

Extended footage with Timmy Sean.

Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On:" The Virtuosity of Message

 Review and discussion on Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Going On.

Swimming With The Fish Part 3: Misplaced Childhood

Review and discussion on Marillion’s landmark 1985 album Misplaced Childhood

Relevant Links

Part 1 of this series 

Part 2 of this series

Modular and the Power of Suggestion

I stumbled across Modular in the artist recommendation area of Bandcamp one evening while doing the menial but necessary tasks associated with being a band director. Although it was my intention to employ it was background music in my office, it immediately resonated beyond this function. Rather than take note to further vet the album at a later time (as I ususally would), I ended up streaming it in its entirety several times throughout the evening.  It seemed to capture all the epic post-rock grandeur of Tortoise’s best work while paradoxically remaining as intimate as a jazz trio recording. The room seemed to feel empty without it and nothing else really came to mind that could effectively follow it up. 



By the time I was ready to head home, I was sold. I was eager to get Modular in regular rotation, but I was disappointed to find, as is increasingly the case these days, that the album was not available in a CD pressing. Not to be dissuaded by lack of access to my preferred format, I purchased the MP3 album as soon as I got home and in the weeks to follow Modular came to be standard evening music in the household.

I heard a curious balance between improvisation and composition throughout the album that urged me to look deeper into the album’s inner workings. Normally, this would mean combing through the CD liner notes, looking for recording and performance clues. Most MP3 albums are sadly lacking in this regard, but Modular came with a 36 page interactive PDF that implied the album’s scope was much broader than I had suspected.

These “soft” liner notes suggested that Modular was informed by a meticulous data gathering system that used movements of clouds, tectonic activity, water currents, and other natural phenomena. This data was gathered by six analog sound components, each specifically designed to process information from aspects of a given environment. Each track on Modular was somehow based on the data gathered from nature. Beautiful pictures of these components in their respective settings and graphic renderings of acoustic data drove this point home.

I was spellbound by this idea. The components presented in the liner notes seemed functional, and the way in which the data was used added a third dimension to the spectrum of improvisation and composition. There was only one problem:

I could not for the life of me understand how it was done.

I strained my mind's ear with every playing, trying to figure out how the data was being used, but I could account for most of Modular’s sounds within the synergistic musicianship of guitarist Dan Phelps, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and bassist Viktor Krauss.  Were sounds generated from the data and used as backgrounds? Was it used as an organizing principle for the compositions and improvisations? Were there subtle envelope filters draped over the performances informed by the data? Was it in the guitar effects? Was it in the melodic material? The possibilities were endless, and my inability to suss out the truth was maddening.

Finally, after several months, my curiosity got the better of me. I actually contacted Phelps through e-mail and asked him directly how he used the data that he had gathered. He replied in a timely manner and apologetically admitted the “scandalous truth:” the entire data collection aspect of Modular was a fabrication of the graphics team of Nate Manny and Gabe Kerbrat. Although that made more sense than any of the outlandish methods that I had imagined, I was still quietly crushed. I really wanted to believe in the potentials in the proposed Modular method, and I truly felt like the pieces painted a compelling picture of the environments to which they referred.

I was not the only one that felt this. While I was still questioning how much my impressions were informed by the liner notes, my wife picked the track Constellation for her performance art installation. In its earliest iteration, this performance was to take place outside under the stars, and she picked the song out from a lineup of contenders because of a connection she heard with this setting.  Weather restrictions ultimately forced it into our garage, but the change of venue did not constrain the track’s suggestion of the night sky’s vast openness.



Despite having a more conventional creative process than I envisioned, Modular still succeeds at capturing something essential about the natural environments that inspired its concept.  I am left to wonder, however, if this perception is irrevocably influenced by my struggles to decode its "mythos."  As of this writing, I am unsure if the concept drove the music or the music allowed the concept to emerge.  Only Phelps, Chamberlain, and Krauss can really answer this conundrum with any authority.  In either case, the album has survived intense scrutiny and still never fails to engage my attention in terms of both musicianship and concept.  My investigation of and experience with the album caused Modular to emerge as an absolute favorite listen this year.

The Enduring Catharsis of Genesis' "Duke"

For a dedicated, if critical, progressive rock fan like myself to have maintained a music blog for nearly ten years and not once dedicated a post to Genesis is a pretty glaring omission. Predictably, I have opinions about the unique arc of their oeuvre, but I have waffled for years now on the best way to do justice to their unique transformation from 70s symphonic surrealists to 80s radio staples.

Now the recent Facebook “game,” in which the participants post the cover art from a personally enduring album once a day for ten days, has forced my hand. For a pathological music listener like me, choosing only ten albums to represent all of the most enduring music in my collection was nothing short of tortuous.  After much deliberation, however, I came up with a list that I could mostly live with.

Until one of my nominees posted Duke.

I considered this 1980 release from Genesis when I made my list, but gave it a pass in lieu of other subjectively important progressive rock milestones.  Duke is very personal for me, though, and seeing it posted by someone else felt as if I had failed miserably. I can think of very few albums in my collection that have been more enduring and that I have come back to more often than this unique and sadly overlooked gem. In an act that was equal parts penance and anticipation, Duke found its way back into rotation this Spring.  Now, months later, it would be a contender for album of the year if it had not already earned the title at least four times already.

Duke was in no way my introduction to Genesis, and for a very long time I probably would not have even counted it among my favorites. Initially, I appreciated the album as a unique axis upon which Genesis’ past as progressive rock innovators and their future as a pop outfit rotated.



Throughout the past three decades since I added this album to my library, Duke has retained its initial prog-pop fluency.  The album has revealed layers of depth, however, as my life experiences have unfolded.  Like most, I experienced breakup and heartache as a teenager and a young adult, but it took going through a divorce and, later, having children to really grasp Duke’s narratives.

Duke is, arguably, a concept album about fame and failed relationships,  The themes that hold Duke together were inspired by the toll that the band’s extensive touring schedule exacted on Phil Collins’ disintegrating marriage. Fueled by the ordeals of his private life, Collins finally shed the vestiges of Gabriel’s surreal storytelling and revealed a uniquely personal iteration of Genesis. That his expressions are genuine are, I think, beyond question. I can think of few songs more gut-wrenchingly vivid than Please Don’t Ask, which captures the emotional arc of a grieving man’s internal dialogue as he struggles to keep his composure in the face of deep loss.



Despite being so personal, Duke is not a solo album.  Genesis was made up of three distinctive songwriters, and its a feat of collaboration that they were able to trace the outlines of Collins’ ordeals so clearly. In fact, the perspectives of Collins’ bandmates contribute greatly to Duke’s success. Of particular note is keyboardist Tony Banks, who wrote a multi-movement composition describing an artist’s relationship with the public eye. To distance themselves from their earlier work and perhaps generate a single or two, the band elected to edit the movements of this long-form piece throughout the album. Weaving this narrative in this way imparts Duke with the sense of an objective storyline that frames Collins’ more personal and subjective insights.



This narrative structure suggests that Duke might veer into "rock opera" territory, but a close look at the libretto shows that any story that revolves around a character named "Duke" is more a suggestion than plot.  In fact, such a character is never named in the entire album, and his counterpart "Duchess" only exists as a song title.  Rather like the character "Billy Shears" did for  Sgt. Pepper's,  the idea of "Duke" is set up so vividly in the opening tracks of the album that he frames the listening for all the songs that follow, whether he is intended as an actual character or not.

Looking at the emotional facets of ending a relationship from both inside and out, the band unified their work around Collins' struggle, resulting in a focus that is unique in the Genesis catalog. As a vocalist, Collins called on emotions in ways that he never had before, harnessing an edgy screaming range that would become his signature for years to come. The band’s instrumental aspects, which were always top-notch, rose to meet the challenge of backing his cathartic delivery, and aside from a missed opportunity for a humming low end, the production captures these performances with convincing clarity. I have a hard time imagining any album with better drum sounds than those on Duke.



Revisiting Duke over these past few months, I keep thinking about how it's a shame that the album isn’t considered more highly than it is in the prog-rock pantheon. To be blunt, however, it was too pop to be prog and prog to be pop. Like 90125 and Moving Pictures, it stood at the crossroads of these two genres and was able to inhabit them both with distinctive ease. What makes Duke so enduring, however, its its brutal honesty in describing an experience, both musically and conceptually, that I could only relate to after going through my own trials.

Anais Mitchell's "Hadestown:" Thinking Themselves Gods

Writing is hard, no doubt. Minds operate in abstractions that precede words, and the human capacity to capture those pre-verbal concepts and arrange them into something as clumsy and concrete as written language is nothing short of miraculous. Capturing musical ideas and impressions, which are even more abstract and ephemeral, is particularly difficult.  For these blog entries, I often struggle to figure out when (or even if) I really “have” enough of an album to write anything meaningful.  For example, I have had at least two aborted attempts to begin an entry for Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, both of which I shelved because as I began to reify my thoughts with the written word and look at them, I felt like I was missing something. There always seemed to be more to this album, and every time I tried to pin it down, I noticed a new layer of meaning and craft that seemed to deserve some attention.

Initially, I discovered Hadestown at the top of some website’s “all-time best” list (unfortunately, I can’t remember which one), and other accolades from reviews were substantial. My first search on Hadestown brought up this live solo performance of Mitchell performing Why We Build the Wall.  Lyrics are rarely a hook for me, but the layers of meaning folded into this song grabbed my attention.



On its own, Why We Build the Wall is a memorable and profound commentary on the self-sustaining illusion that the poor are essentially “other” in relation to the rich. Within the larger context of Hadestown, however, it takes on a much more nuanced meaning.

Hadestown proudly wears the label “folk opera,” but thanks to the arrangements of Micheal Chorney, the album is far more colorful than the name would suggest. There is a heartfelt and subtle cleverness that brings to mind some of Elvis Costello’s more eccentric collaborations. Like most contemporary pop opera, however, it owes a debt of gratitude to Tommy, and I think Pete Townshend would be proud. Hadestown has clearly defined characters that follow a plot arc, character development, a climax, and a resolution. These characters are convincingly enacted by a great cast of established musicians that include Justin Vernon as Orpheus and Ani DiFranco as Persephone (although I do feel like the voice of Hades, Greg Brown, pays a groaning tribute to Leon Redbone that grows a bit threadbare by album’s end).



The perceptive might have guessed - Hadestown retells of the myth of Orpheus. In this story’s most common form, Eurydice dies and becomes lost in the underworld. Armed only with song, Orpheus travels to the underworld and convinces Hades to release Eurydice, on the condition that Orpheus resists the temptation to turn around to see if his love was indeed following him. On paper, a contemporary libretto based on this well-trod tale might seem pretentious. Mitchell, however, dodges cliché by resetting the story in the Great Depression, opening up a distinctive set of conditions and relationships that capture the fanciful ideals of Greek mythology while shrouding them in the aesthetic of a prohibition-era variety show.



From a purely musical standpoint, Hadestown is incredibly compelling. Its playful use of style and emotion keeps the entire experience serious, but relatively lighthearted. The concept that undergirds the songs that comprise the album, however, is even more unique and well-executed. The abstract, archetypical concepts underlying the Orpheus myth take on a more visceral meaning in Mitchell’s reinterpretation, where rich men take the place of ancient gods, and greed is a force as unrelenting as death itself. After several weeks of regular rotation, the depth of this extended metaphor just hit me today and made me realize that there is much, much more to Hadestown than I had previously thought. I might be listening to this one for quite awhile.

The Roots' "Undun" and Growing Up

As a music-fanatic dad, it is my intention to indoctrinate the Little One into a wide variety of music, but the lack of rap and hip hop is a glaring hole in my current listening habits. I admit that I am a very picky rap listener, mainly because I’m not always sure what will stick with me. My favorites have a mysterious combination of musicality, intellect, and authenticity that I can’t quite explain. Regardless, every so often I stumble across something that mixes these ingredients in just the right way, and a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the recipe cooked up by The Roots seems to hit the spot.

Their recent release Undun is a concept album that outlines the story of a quasi-fictional character named Redford Stevens, a black youth whose time was cut short in a flurry of missed opportunities and frustrating circumstances. To me, it seems like a rap concept album is a no-brainer: rap depends heavily on the delivery of verbiage and storytelling, so it is a logical step to extend a narrative arc outside of the limits of a two to four minute song. There is a risk that inconsistency could derail such an ambitious project, but The Roots’ experience, intellect, and passion deftly handles the challenge. Sit back and check out the short film attached to Undun.  It features snippits of several tracks from the album.



Undun is a pristine example of mature, artistically ambitious rap. It’s an engaging commentary on the conditions of black youth, and eschews the sensationalistic narcissism that threatens to dilute rap as an art form. What brings the entire album into sharp focus, however, is its infectiously singable choruses. Each track on Undun has a hook that not only drew me into the song, but into the storyline of the album. In just a couple of passes, I found myself carefully studying them, which enriched my appreciation of the lyrics and overall concept.

The Roots have an added advantage with me because, counter to rap tradition, they identify themselves as a band. Rap and hip hop originated in the first-hand treatment of funk, soul, and R & B records. In its early days, a live performing group was unheard of. The Roots began bridging that gap over a decade ago, and now they effortlessly epitomize the musical connection between the great Motown studio bands of yesteryear and the work of today’s best turntablists. Their melodic and harmonic expertise provides access to a wide array of moods.  This is a somewhat low-quality video of my favorite track on the album, but it adequately shows The Roots in action.  Check 'em out on Jimmy Fallon any night of the week if you doubt their skills.



As engaging as Undun is, there are still conventions of rap makes it difficult to justify as an introduction for the Little One.  My sensitivity to these conventions indicates a change in my outlook as the mantle of “dad” starts to crease my brow. The Roots, while hardly foul, are not afraid to drop the occasional f-bomb or employ the socially complex n-word in the telling of Redford Steven’s story. In the past, I wouldn’t have given this relatively gentle rap language a second thought, but now it seems to stick out when the Little One is in tow. Go figure.