The Agrarian Radiohead: Midlake's Trials of Van Occupanther

A review and discussion on Midlake's 2006 album The Trials of Van Occupanther

Finding a Job: Frost*'s "Falling Satellites"

If you read between the lines on my last couple of posts, it might be apparent as to why I have not posted much in the last few months. I was the one who instigated my family’s move, but as of my last post, I still did not have a job. My lack of success weighed heavily. Despite nearly twenty years of band directing experience, the application process was gruelling, frustrating, and often disheartening. It took precedence over working out, practicing, writing, and almost everything else besides daily family duties.  I felt like any moment I spent away from hammering on applications was a missed opportunity that might have serious repercussions for my family's future.

There were lots of times I wondered if it were the right thing to do. Although my band program was in no way perfect, I was very proud of the successes that we had. Things had changed at my school over the past couple of years, however, and the once positive environment on my campus had devolved. It had become routine for students to disrespect and refuse instruction with very little consequence. I did the best I could to keep that culture out of the band hall, but ultimately I could not fight the tide. I spent a lot of time and energy dealing with behavior issues while good students withered on the vine.  I still felt the conviction to continue shepherding those who sought excellence, but I could not stay in that environment without burning out before retirement. I needed a change

Out of respect for my campus and the good of my kids, though, I had to submit my resignation without actually having any interviews in line. I was committed. I finally landed a very positive interview in a small district within commuting distance of Denton. The program is in need of restructuring, and my previous position allowed me to speak with some experience on the challenges ahead. After the interview, I felt quite confident that I was going to land the job.

I had made plans to go to aikido class in Denton that evening, but I had some free time to kill and I found myself on the square. One of the things I will definitely miss in Austin is going to record stores like Waterloo and End of an Ear to browse the ever-shrinking CD selections, so predictably, I dropped in to Mad World Records. I knew that most of their CD selection is reused, so I was not expecting to find much. I was shocked, however, to find that they had Falling Satellites, the most recent Frost* disc, on the shelf.  Bonus points for them!

I enjoyed Frost*’s debut Milliontown quite a bit several years ago. I always had the sense that, although it would be hard to confuse the two, fans of Morse-era Spock’s Beard would find a lot to like in Frost*. Keyboardist and primary composer Jem Godfrey’s vocals share some timbral similarities with Morse, and the band plays with an energy that recalls the Beard’s driving, rhythmically disorienting instrumental side. In fact, if the Beard had not found success in their current line-up, it’s fun to play “what-if” games with Godfrey leading the band.

Despite my respect and admiration for their work, I did not follow them with much vigor after Milliontown. Falling Satellites received enthusiastic accolades on one of my usual online progressive rock resources, however, and also featured a guest solo by Joe Satriani. These two things earned it a spot on my wish list, and a physical copy sitting on a record store shelf on such a potentially momentous day was just too good to pass up.

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Falling Satellites is a dense listen, much more so than Milliontown. Like the best progressive rock, it takes time to get familiar enough with its complexity to see the album’s best aspects. It does, however, have plenty of attention-grabbing passages, both in terms of virtuosity and production. If Frost* were not so clearly led by Godfrey’s keyboard playing, they might even border on prog-metal in some sections. Despite its intensity, however, Falling Satellites sounds very clean, perhaps so much that at times, it loses its edge and teeters on sterility. Overall, however, Frost* comes off more like a particularly fleet-fingered Collins-era Genesis.



Joe Satriani’s appearance is, as expected, fleeting, improvised, and probably mailed in. It is but a moment on the album, but it is a joy to hear nonetheless (below at 3:20). That is to take nothing away from the fantastic work of regular Frost* guitarist John Mitchell, who I have followed since Arena’s The Visitor, but Satriani is a phenomenal player that pushes the possibilities of rock guitar into new realms as a matter of course. Like the best jazz musicians, he takes a few very simple musical ideas and expands them into a full solo.


After floating around the square with Falling Satellites in hand, I made my way back to the car to head towards the dojo On the way, I received a message that I would be offered the job. Without question, I accepted the offer and put another piece of the Denton puzzle in place. It still doesn’t seem real - but what is very real is that I have been able to let go of the application nightmare I had been living in for months. That is a true relief.

Seryn: More Than A Band of Foxes

I put This Is Where We Are on my list early this year after countless ringing endorsements from many people whose musical opinions I respect, but I just never quite got around to ordering it. It’s not that I didn’t try - I looked into Seryn on a few occasions, and there was nothing about them that I didn’t like, but, despite having some common ground with the Fleet Foxes (whose album Helplessness Blues was my top album of 2011), they didn’t quite hook me into taking the plunge. Still, advocates of the band were unrelenting. Finally, one devoted fan, who is an ex-student and fellow blogger, was insistent enough to send me a copy of This Is Where We Are through the mail. You can’t get much more fervent backing than that.



So, OK, I get it already. Especially as a relatively young, local Denton group just starting to get their work more widely recognized, Seryn is impressively mature.  When I was involved in the Denton “scene” in the late 90s, it was not much more than an appendage of the Dallas live music scene, which circled greedily around the promising success of Deep Blue Something and Tripping Daisy. More and more, I am surprised to see adventurous Denton bands getting national and international attention through current information sharing conduits.  Unlike the pop feeding frenzy that preceded it, the current Denton scene seems more artistically motivated.

As an example, there is a lot more to Seryn than is superficially apparent. At first, I thought that they neatly occupied a space right between Fleet Foxes and the Band of Horses, so I jokingly referred to them as the Band of Foxes.  In the long run, however, this easy and prematurely flippant categorization did not do justice to the way the album evolved in my experience. The tone of This is Where We Are is a bit restrained on the surface, but peeling back the layers reveals a vibrant, radiating, creative center.  Although I still think that they have a certain Appalachian tone that overlaps the Fleet Foxes’ style, there is also Peter Gabrielesque transcendentalism that lifts their work above being merely “folk.”



Also, it does not take much insight to see that Fleet Foxes is centered on the inestimable talents of Robin Pecknold. In comparison, Seryn feels more like a collaborative effort. The band's identity is generated by the synergistic interactions of the band's members rather than a singular musician’s presence. Seryn does, indeed, have some standout performers, but their individual musicality focuses purely on enriching the moments that arise in their music as it happens

Obviously, although I do get a kick out of discovering good music out of the widely available options, I find it much more gratifying to spread the word on local artists with a smaller visibility profile. Seryn has their own distinctive approach - one that I think that is artistically gratifying but also harbors the potential to be widely popular. By potential, I don't mean to imply that sometime in the future, they might release a great album. Seryn has an audience out there right now: This is Where We Are would not be out-of-place playing overhead during your daily Starbuck's constitutional, a medium that by itself probably reaches more people a day than current commercial radio.

Brendan Benson for Dummies

Sometime in Denton around 1997, there briefly existed an independent record store in the Carriage Square shopping center whose name is now lost to obscurity.  After the Sound Warehouse closed on Fry, it was one of the few places where a music fan could go and browse close to UNT campus.  I'm quite sure that they were aware of this, too, because the store had a loose system in place for suggesting up-and-coming artists.  In most stores, this would take the form of haphazardly sharpie-scrawled endcap claiming that “employee [x] (who you don’t know, but under whose authority you should unconditionally bow) suggests artist [y] (simply because we said so).”  This store was a little different, and I’m not sure how they did their research, but at least in the case of me and Brendan Benson, it worked out pretty decently.

At the time I was an avid fan of Ben Folds Five, and as I was browsing through their section, I ran across a label suggesting Benson.  I glanced over and found his full-length debut One Mississippi, and I bought it on a relative whim.  It subsequently became a personal favorite that I spread far and wide amongst my friends with a near- evangelical fervor.  Since then, he has consistently proven to be one of  my favorite power-pop solo artists.

Early in his career, Benson projected a charismatic Weezeresque slackerishness that seemed to contradict his effortlessly clever songwriting.  

Now, quiz time.  Were there any emerging bands or artists worth their salt in the late 90s that did not get dropped by their label?  The answer is no: it was the industry standard at the time.  Benson, like Wilco, Jon Brion, and many others, had to deal with this type of malarkey, and for a time it seemed that the raven might have croaked "nevermore" on him.  Finally, though, in 2001, Lapalco was released.  It was little less explicitly aggressive than its predecessor, but it did show a marked increase in Benson’s already impressive songwriting prowess and emotive capacity while preserving his seemingly lackadaisical persona.  Life in the D was one of the more reflective songs from this album.

In 2005, he largely shed his carefree demeanor in favor of a more polished musical approach on The Alternative to Love.  I have plans for a more focused blog post on this one in the future, so I’ll save it, but its 2007 successor, My Old, Familiar Friend, continued in this somewhat more mature vein.  In either case, the progression in his sound suited him incredibly well, and both of these albums are, again, personal favorites.  Is it very, very difficult to pick a standout track from My Old, Familiar Friend, but this crunchy little tidbit always seems to hit me where I live. 

Aside from his obviously freewheeling approach to songcraft, Benson has an astonishing consistency to his work that he continues to innovate and improve upon.  Although he can place a beautifully introspective folk ballad right alongside a ripping self-conscious punk-pop anthem that would force Green Day out of their front seat on the bus (even on their best day), Benson’s albums always have a particular character and they clearly progress from one to the next.  If you are interested in Benson’s oeuvre, I think that the best experience might come by starting at the beginning and traveling through his catalog chronologically, but you can get any one of them with very little fear of a dud. 

Despite having such a long and, I think, artistically successful career at this point, Benson remains frustratingly relegated to the fringes.  So, being such a longtime fan of Benson, I get a little defensive when he now is referred to as “the other guy from the Raconteurs.”  Everything Benson does now seems to revolve around his participation in that band.  It’s not like he came out of nowhere.  While I accept that Jack White is more visible, and I think that he is genuinely talented, I’m not quite ready to call him a genius.  I think that Benson’s track record, on the other hand, ranks him amongst my favorite artists, which exceeds a mere respect for his talent.