Layers of Thanksgiving: "Junun" Over Dinner

I was really looking forward to having a full week for Thanksgiving this year. I would have some quality time with the wife and kid before I went down for the big annual event on Padre Island with the extended family. Inevitably, having a lot of free time with the Little One eventually results in a little Netflix-for-Kids, and I was very surprised to find that there were absolutely no thanksgiving specials up. Not a one. There were, however, lots and lots of poorly animated b-rate Christmas features. The best I could find was a grainy, third-party posting of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on YouTube. It has been up for a couple of years, as if no one cares enough to challenge its legality!



I think that this, along with the scads of Christmas sale ads popping up in my feed early in the week, caused me to be a little defensive about Thanksgiving this year. I have always felt that it is its own holiday with its own feeling, and I dislike the sense that it is increasingly becoming subsumed by consumerism related to a totally separate holiday.  I am starting to get the feeling Thanksgiving has devolved into nothing more than some time off to let the public get some shopping done.

Taking matters into my own hands, I organized my own little informal Thanksgiving dinner and invited my bandmates from Ethnos over. We are all super-busy, and as we get closer to the end of the semester it is safe to assume that we would only get to be more so. It seemed like a good opportunity to hang out before the holidays scatter us to the wind.

One catalyst for our conversation was Junun.  I acquired this album with the intent of listening to it on beach walk like I did with Barrett a few years ago.  Long before its recent release, a brief article about the cross-cultural collaboration that produced Junun generated quite a bit of personal excitement.  Its authorship is so complex that it took the whole staff at Waterloo Records to figure out where the CD was filed.

The most visible contributor is Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, and going into the store I was aware that he was working with an Indian ensemble called the Rajastan Express. The surprise, however, was Shye Ben Tzur, an Israeli musician who is trained in Indian styles.  Although a superficial listen to the album doesn’t bring traditional Jewish music to mind, his songwriting contributions placed the album in the “Israel” section of the international music.

The album as a whole is really quite incredible - perhaps even compelling enough to be considered a very late contender for album of the year.  Superficially, it is easy to indulge in the exotic aspects of the album, but the harmonic environment provided by the guitar work and the subtle electronic atmospheres frame Junun’s “Indian-ness” within a decidedly contemporary field. Even more layered is Shye Ben Tzur’s Hebrew lyrics performed in ecstatic Indian styles. Certainly, with the current state of the Middle East, his identity structure makes a political statement that should be read as particularly relevant.

This statement was not lost on us. My bandmates are a very diverse group, with members from India, Taiwan, and Pakistan, and each of us had different perspectives about the way the various contributions of Junun fit into a cohesive statement. I was enthusiastic about its textural overlap with Kid A, while our tabla player nodded his head in approval to its roots in Indian street music. The exchange was as layered and engaging as the music itself.  As I have said many times in the past, I am very grateful for the opportunity to know and create with these outstanding individuals. Spending time and conversing with them, however, reminded me of just how thankful I am for having such open-minded and diverse friends.

Oh, and shameless self-promotion: The band's website is right here.  Check us out....

Steven Wilson's "Grace for Drowning" in the Real World

The death of the record store is a tragic loss for the music fan as a site for cultural exchange, especially as we become increasingly specialized in our listening tastes. I was fortunate to pick up Grace for Drowning at the closeout sale of a local record store. When I brought it to the counter, the clerk's face lit up.  I stuttered through a conversation about Steven Wilson's genius that I never thought I would have with a living, breathing being, distracted by the knowledge that encounters like this are irreplaceable in the virtual realms.

Like the clerk, I am astonished by the amazing breadth of Wilson's work, but his sprawling output is somewhat challenging to my listening categories. I was introduced to Wilson through his prog band Porcupine Tree, so historically I have viewed everything else he has done as a side project. In truth, Porcupine Tree is a relatively small component of Wilson’s oeuvre. Nevertheless, whatever he touches seems immediately essential to understanding his overall concept.

In recent years, however, Wilson has taken a further step – cultivating a solo career. Cut free from the confines of collaboration or expectation, Grace for Drowning spills free of the boundaries set by a singular project. Its broad, orchestral palate pits choirs against grunts and orchestras against post-industrial studio manipulations, and its dissonance overlaps harmonically advanced metal with jazz fusion. On a Porcupine Tree album, these extremes might be cause for alarm, but within the context of a solo album, they reveal the breadth of Wilson’s imagination.



Wilson is probably one of the only progressive rock artists out there that is able to avoid cliché and nostalgia in major doses, but whose work is identifiably in the genre. It’s true that there are many progressive rock bands out there that are infatuated with the sound of their predecessors, but not as many capture the ideology of exploration that lies at the roots of the prog tree. Steven Wilson, however, gets it, and although he shows hints of his influences to those that are in the know, overall is work is distinctively moody and intellectual.



When I gave Grace for Drowning its first serious listen a couple of weeks after picking it up, I was on my annual trip to San Antonio to attend the Texas Music Educator’s Association convention. TMEA is usually a conflicting combination of inspiration and frustration for me, and despite being surrounded by like-minded people and networking opportunities, it can sometimes be a lonely experience.

The album's gently self-flagellating melancholy empowered my introverted mood. With Grace for Drowning on headphones, I meandered out of the showroom floor onto the Riverwalk on that overcast February afternoon and, while I ate lunch and watched the bustling crowd, I took that time to appreciate the movement of pigeons begging for food and boats full of people lazily floating down the canals. Perhaps a good number of them were feeling isolated and aloof in the crowd as well, but I doubt that any sought out the odd comfort of Wilson’s resigned loneliness.

Bon Iver's Soft Resistance

In certain circles, Bon Iver’s self titled release was getting some attention last year, but I was cautious.  Hype is often controlled by gatekeepers with unknowable motivations, so it makes me apprehensive.  I certainly didn’t want to force-feed myself an album’s worth of warbling coffee shop folk if I did not have to. Still, Bon Iver came up with high recommendations on many year-end lists, so eventually I caved in and gave it a listen on Spotify.  My preconceptions were immediately shattered. Impressed, I saw a live video for the song Perth, and realized I had been missing out on something quite special.



Judging by the bass sax alone, it's pretty clear that Bon Iver is intended as a departure. The band's nearly orchestral scope stands in direct contrast with the majority of current music, harkening back to the stadium acts of the late 80s. Dire Straits, the Who, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, and even the Police toured with multiple guitarists, drummers and horn sections in an attempt to fill arenas with pristine recreations of their albums. Of course, this format fell out of favor in the 90s when the alternative became the mainstream. Now “indie” is the new alternative, and Bon Iver’s innovates by embracing the large rock ensemble as an independent collaborative environment.

This collaborative approach is the key to the artistic success of Bon Iver. Lead singer, songwriter, and conceptualist Justin Vernon keeps Bon Iver from falling into Coldplay’s “New Adult Contemporary” trap with a complex yet fluid intermingling of lyrics, timbres, harmonies, and atmospheres that inextricably binds each song to its ambience and instrumentation.  This environment was the result of the musicians to sharing in the development of Vernon's ideas.  In the end, covering the songs in a stripped-down format, although possible, would do them an injustice, and to extricate any given song from its place in the arc of the overall listening experience would do it a disservice. Bon Iver is an album in the truest sense, and if you don’t listen to it as a whole work, you are missing out on something, too.



Oddly, finding a CD copy of Bon Iver was far more troublesome than it would seem, and was the inspiration for my previous post concerning the fate of the album as a format.  Despite garnering so much critical attention in 2011, I stopped at no less than five stores, one of them an actual record store, before finding a copy of Bon Iver at Target on a baby supply run. One Best Buy had a card for Bon Iver, and a copy of their first album, but no copies of the current release. Judging from the dwindling size of the music section at Best Buy, I assume that they simply will not restock it.

Despite my first, ill-informed impression, Bon Iver is an incredible work, so it is nice to hear that every now and then, the Grammys get something right.  They certainly deserve their recognition - the album has set the standards incredibly high for 2012.  It is even more gratifying to hear that Bon Iver refused to perform on the ceremony. Judging from the format of current big media performances, I can imagine that Justin Vernon was asked to perform as Bon Iver as a talking head in a medley or in an overglamourized, mismatched duet.  Performing in such a format represented a compromise that he, and the band, was unwilling to make. Good for them.

A Lament for the Death of the Album

Photo Credit: Kate Wurtzel

The physical manifestation of a recording has always influenced popular music forms. Even today, our musical attention span is affected by the three and a half minute running time of the first wax cylinder recordings. For a long time, the recording industry revolved around this “single" format. Later, however, when the LP evolved, artists started to weave unifying narratives through the lyrical and musical elements of its individual tracks.  Its roughly 45 minute playing length began to be carefully sequenced in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. The album was born.

The album is my standard unit of musical consumption. It survived the portable but ultimately lo-fi trend of the tape and found a home in the late 80s on the CD in a slightly altered form.  Two sides became one, and album lengths tentatively began to stretch to fill an 80 minute capacity.

I had a few LPs and quite a few tapes for the walkman, but the CD was my medium of choice when I became a serious music fan. I began my CD collection in 1986 when they were touted as the ultimate in indestructible lossless hi-fi (lies, lies all!). Record enthusiasts bemoaned their lack of analog warmth, but we scoffed and thoughtlessly hit the “next track” button without fully understanding that this action laid the seeds of the album's demise.

Today, I almost always listen to an album from beginning to end. I never skip tracks, and I try to consider the context and potential of each individual song as it relates to the larger work. I find great satisfaction in this practice.  For example, When Wayne’s World just about beat Bohemian Rhapsody into the ground in 1992, I always found that the song was still profoundly moving nestled towards the end of Queen’s truly classic album A Night at the Opera.  I still do.



From my perspective, then, it seems that the Mayans were partially right about 2012. The apocalypse is coming.  Major labels are considering discontinuing CD production this year, which is a disturbing but unsurprising announcement. Simultaneously, streaming music services such as Spotify and (a major resource of this blog) Grooveshark have come under fire by what it is left of the music industry.  Their transparent desire to maintain the status quo, now the downloadable MP3, squeezes out music consumers using outdated, shortsighted, and intimidating methods.

Feels like Napster and the CD all over again doesn't it?

More to the point, although I am attached to the physical object of the CD, I might be able to let go of it if the delivery device is sufficient.  After all, I’ve already begrudgingly accepted a future of MP3s filled with slushy hi-hats and guitars compressed past the point of distinction. If I can see artwork, organize songs into albums, and enjoy tracks that segue together without a startling bump, I'd probably be relatively satisfied.

On the other hand, perhaps I’ll just revert to the trendy solution of purchasing a turntable to play "high-end" vinyl at exorbitant costs like I did when I was in sixth grade.  That'd be real cool.

Of greater concern is what this wholesale switch to "softcopy" will mean to the integrity of the album as a creative format. Without the constraints of a physical object, be it LP, CD, tape, or 8-track, the organizing principle of the album will most likely dissolve. Sequencing and unity will become pointless if there is no longer the expectation to refine 45-75 minutes worth of music into something cohesive.  Songs will be published as online, playlist-ready singles without consideration of a larger narrative potential. What was once like writing a novel essentially becomes more like blogging.

Some musicians, like the Flaming Lips and their recent “24-hour song” 7 Skies H3, will undoubtedly explore the limits of this freedom (the "hardcopy" version of this project is a USB drive mounted inside a human skull - promo shot to the right!).  It is also possible, however, that the music scene will, by and large, crumble into a deluge of unrefined “singles,” drowning out more unified and cohesive efforts in a sea of shortened attention spans.  As a representation of an artistic endeavor that is cultivated over a span of time, the album is very quickly headed towards anachronism.  Abandoning the CD format seems like its death knell.

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.