Not Best: Maybe Most Enjoyed

by Weston Cutter

(I’m pretty anti-top 10 anything, and end-of-the-year stuff makes me nervous in weird ways, so I apologize for whatever hedging comes through in the following.)

My top discs of the year are, largely, what you’d expect from a nerdy white dude who wears glasses. That said, there were five tracks this year that seemed to over and over come back to me, tracks that I’d spend weeks playing first thing in the morning (real literally, that: I hit play each morning (and dozens of times through the rest of the day—anyone who wants more luscious writing about that need to “decode” or break down a song should just go buy Hornby’s Songbook and read his entry on Nelly Furtado) for two or three weeks on each of the following tracks, and, in one case, for well over a month). Maybe this is best done chronologically:

 

1. “Bring it on Home to Me” covered by Britt Daniel.

There should be a whole separate year-end catalog of all the shit we find in a calendar year that’s not of that year—the year, say, you discover Dylan or Neko Case or Holly Golightly or Rachmaninoff. The first half of this year was real heavily dominated by Sam Cooke, and I got into him because I got into a girl who liked him, and because I’m an idiot and somehow the SS Cooke had sailed while I was getting down on the SS Redding. So: that happened.

And then, on one of the blogs, this cover was posted. I honestly don’t know anymore if I got the Cooke or Daniel version first, but I’m pretty sure it was the Cooke version. It almost doesn’t matter.

I won’t say this version’s better than Sam Cooke’s original studio recording, and it sure as shit’s not even close to the live version on Cooke’s just insanely great One Night Stand. It’s a great version because it’s B. Daniel, and because there might be no better white dude right now in terms of measured, perfect growling (of which this song has several fine moments). It’s a great, almost-blue-eyed-soul track, but it’s just great, great rock and roll: all hunger and urgency and snarl and softness, hand-clappy and jangled guitar-y and god knows if the comp this was originally part of is even worth a damn, but this track’s worth plenty of damns.

 

2. “I’m Sorry” by Feist.

So, I know: Feist is all AAA radio and lame adult music and, Jesus, she sold out and went all Apple and now your parents talk about that woman in that One Two Three Four song and blah blah blah: I don’t give a shit. Do you remember how great this album was when it came out? Do you remember how it felt when Feist was still just “Mushaboom” and you and your friends’ obsession?

I got her disc to review, and so (of course: thanks a lot, record companies) I could play it neither on my computer nor my stereo proper (because it was copy protected, and I have a disc player from 1997), and so the only disc player in the house on which it worked was my dinky CD alarm clock (which is pink and white, no joke)(it was the cheapest one at Target). I live, basically, in a cave: it’s all heavy-duty brick and no carpeting, so sound bounces great and sounds, I guess, dusty—that’s really the only way to describe it (music in one room and you in the other is, to me, one of the all-time great sensations). 

But so anyway, playing The Reminder was a separate-room thing for me, all year, and there was (and still is) something magnificent about hitting play on the disc player in the bedroom and then sitting in the other room, coffee in hand, listening to this quietly pretty and perfect and searingly honest song. Maybe it’s just me. In terms of music experiences I’d like to go back and take in again fresh and anew, this is my top pick for the year.

 

3. “Die Die Die” by Avett Brothers

What’s funny is that this track’s got the same title, of course, as a Dr. Dog song (and Dr. Dog’s latest is well-worth your listening dollars, and should be part of any decent year-end top-ten list). What’s funnier is that the Avett Brothers are ridiculously talented and wild and funny but, for my money, are only now starting to get really just sickeningly good melodically, and this song’s the best example there is of that trend. Get Emotionalism, seriously. Even if you hate it, the money’s worth giving to these guys.

 

4. “New York I Love You” by LCD Soundsystem

The less said the better on this one. I can’t get over it, still. I just want to point out that the song seems to be quoting real specifically from Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby” (the track, not the album), and it’s worth listening to both tracks back to back. Also, for any of us who may or may not have, for good or bad reasons, spent time going broke in NYC: Thank you, James Murphy, for nailing the feel perfectly.

 

5. “Coffee” by Aesop Rock feat. John Darnielle.

This track’s a fucking monster. According to Wikipedia, Rachmaninoff once said about Vladimir Horowitz’s playing of the 3rd piano concert “He swallowed it whole!” I haven’t heard Horowitz’s version of that piece, but that sense of swallowing something whole applies absolutely to Aesop’s “Coffee.” This, by the way, was the track I couldn’t stop playing for more than a month. 

I’m not ready to believe or admit that Aesop’s somehow forged a new path in rap or anything, though I do think None Shall Pass is one of the year’s best, rap or otherwise. That said, I do think Aesop’s working territory that’s been relatively untouched: the Roots get into this sort of musicality in concert (and on their best tracks and discs (Phrenology, obv)), and Roni Size sometimes lets rappers go to these lengths as well (most notably on “Railing,” the first track on the two disc New Forms, an album that if you don’t already have you’re likely in more trouble than you think), but this sort of frantic, frenetic, musically percussive work is just not at all common enough.

It really is: I’m listening to the track right now, and it’s just such a monster. Darnielle’s almost just an added bonus, but of course his part’s dynamite as well (and weirdly contrapuntal in terms of whatever hell narrative’s happening in the song (if there is one at all, which seems real debatable)). And the hidden track? And that holy shit video? Get this track. Get the disc. Listen to more Aesop for a happier life.

All Hail Graywolf, etc.

by Weston Cutter

The third Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize book is Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent and, like Kate Braverman’s Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles and Ander Monson’s Neck Deep, the book’s a formal phenomenon, structurally interesting and likely to get pegged, somewhat incorrectly, as “experimental.” What the book for sure is is: great and interesting and a good read and, in the best possible way, containing that vital element of some of the best nonfiction books, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent has a conscience.

 

The structure’s basic enough: Svoboda’s uncle was an MP in occupied Japan, after the end of World War II. After a lifetime spent stolid and hardworking—well, it’s there in the title, Clark Kent, right?—he falls into a depression, unable to break out of it. He tells his niece that he has a story to tell her, one worth retelling, about his experiences after the war. He sends her tapes of his story, and she transcribes them. He hints at a clincher moment, something astounding enough to make the story more worthwhile and pressing than any of the author’s other obligations (and she’s a fiction and poetry writer, and a mom, and you’ve got to sort of figure the list of things she’s got to keep her busy is likely long as a train). Then he kills himself.

 

The secret Terese Svoboda’s uncle may or may not have carried for nearly 60 years is that the United States killed some of its own men after the war, in a dingy prison in Japan, on a gallows draped in black. No joke. It’s weird and awful enough to consider the Army killing its own lawbreaking members (no matter how sensical it is that, as a corporation, the Army’s got “kill people” listed in its job description), but as Svoboda’s uncle begins his hinting game with his niece, the story of Abu Ghraib breaks. Suddenly an old Svoboda family story—true or false or mythic or whatever—about strange treatment at prisons half a world away takes on, shall we say, a deeper resonance.

 

There’s no way to argue that a storyteller (musician, author, painter, someone who kisses you) doesn’t know what’s coming next, which is why this seems to be such a hard point to make (or it’s proving difficult for me to write, anyway): lots of why Black Glasses Like Clark Kent works so well is because there feels to be an element of surprise on the part of the author. The best stories, of course, carry a surprise for the witness/listener/reader—and the very best contain surprises that somehow feel inevitable as well. What Svoboda’s done in weirdly deceptive ways (coming all the way clean: I didn’t like this book right when I finished it, but over the next few days, like to a painting I couldn’t quite tease apart, I kept returning to the book, surprised and still curious) is woven her own surprise into the narrative, her own reticence and confusion and wonder and hope and hopelessness so that it’s not simply a book about what may or may not have happened to and/or because of her uncle sixty years ago in Japan, but also about how that information is shaped and shaping, how it morphs and shifts and takes on or sloughs off weight depending on circumstance, history, etc.

 

She cops to all this, too, Svoboda does: “Who tells any war story is what is important, that is, who has the authority to tell it, and then when and why.” Questions of authority are, of course, the heart of war stories: it’s infinitely more urgent to hear a soldier’s firsthand account of something experienced than to read some DoD memo of it. Which is, curiously, the buzzing call at the heart of Svoboda’s thin and beautiful book: that we’re no longer in the presence of a generation anyone would mistake for the “Greatest”; that the “official” story, cluttered and sutured with words thick enough to dam rivers of outrage, may not be the story we need most to hear; and that, despite the inherent confusion of any story, especially any war story (would you be surprised to know that Svoboda, in her research, finds conflicting accounts of the hangings—at the hands of MPs—that her uncle hinted at but never spoke of?), the stories must be told. And maybe most important (since it’ll depend on the reader whether or not one feels this book “concludes” satisfactorily): the telling of a story, sometimes, must be enough. The luxury of a true and complete account of anything is almost laughable, and history seems to have a good grip on that fine, final thread. What we have to do, living within history, is tell whatever we can, whatever we know, and Svoboda’s written a great book both about an actual incident and the telling.

 

(Just for the record, too: can we all just nominate Graywolf as the best small press in the world? And can all of us who are both from and forever devoted to Minnesota just kiss the damned ground every time we’re in the state for being the magic sort of place that lets things like Graywolf not only happen but flourish? Also: T. Svoboda’s Tin God is miraculous: buy that one too).

The Best Music Of 2007: Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago

by Tim Lockridge

Each year I listen to stacks and stacks of albums, looking for the disc that resonates and moves me and becomes a staple in my audio rotation. And each year delivers a good number of good albums, records worthy of remembering and compiling into a year-end list, albums I then share with friends and set aside for revisitation somewhere down the line. But 2007 had something special: A new artist delivering a record so beautiful and devastating that I’ve had it in heavy rotation since this summer. I can’t stop listening, and the record only gains gravity with each listen.

This album–Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago–is the rarest kind of record, a self-released and promoted masterpiece. And it seems, on initial listen, unassuming enough: Most of the songs couple a softly-strummed acoustic guitar with doubled vocals (normally a low melody matched with falsetto). There are occasional exceptions and flourishes (a choir-like introduction, Pet Sounds-like vocal arrangements, and a percussive crash), but, on the whole, this is a hushed and bittersweet record. In fact, if I’d heard this album played overhead in a cafe or record store, I doubt it’d receive much consideration. For Emma, Forever Ago is a record that needs headphones and your attention, maybe a glass of something strong, maybe the lights off too. Think of it like a movie, how some films seem so much better in the theater. There’s a contract between you and the film, something that says, “okay, we’re here together for the next two hours, show me what you’ve got.” This album needs that commitment from you.

But why? I’ll offer a two-song example. Track three, “Skinny Love,” seems simple enough. Here’s a live version you should watch:

So there’s a jangly acoustic guitar and heartbeat-like kick drum and Justin Vernon carrying the verse with falsetto vocals. And, oh yeah, the lyrics aren’t half-bad:

Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My my my, my my my, my my my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

So this goes on for a bit and then–wham–the chorus hits. When, in the verse, Vernon sings “Come on skinny love just last the year,” it feels like a plea, like a hushed begging. But when we enter the chorus, we’re facing something forceful. The vocals here are gritty and growling and remorseful: hope, here, is gone. There’s no use for pleas, here it’s just regret and I told you so’s. This, of course, sets us up for the bridge and outro, which is where the song really starts to hit below the belt. Here the heartbeat kick drum meets a rim-click and the tough questions come up: “Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?” The song, at this point, feels like it’s leading us to a crescendo, to a defining moment–but it doesn’t, it all just falls off. I think the connections between form and content are fairly obvious.

The album follows “Skinny Love” with “The Wolves,” a track that, initially, seems unassuming and sparse. Here the strummed chords seem especially long, and there’s no pulsing drum to push the song along: it’s just a bit of guitar and long, held vocals. “The Wolves” offers a slower build than “Skinny Love,” but when the crescendo starts to hum, it’s amazing. The guitars move to a faster strum and the vocals soar, the highest of which sounds like its pumped through a vocoder (which, written, sounds misplaced and excessive, but, in the song, it’s perfect) and the whole mess of guitars and vocals decays into a crash of drums that seemingly come from nowhere. “What might’ve been lost,” Vernon sings, “Don’t bother me,” but the track offers beauty through creation and destruction: We hear the song evolve and devolve in only minutes, and then, at the end, we’re back at the beginning, hushed chords and slow vocals.

The entire album follows this pattern of soft guitars and vocals sometimes building, sometimes balking. We often relate music to seasons or scenery, but For Emma, Forever Ago seems to transcend this inclination. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes bitter, the record feels like a complete cycle, like it’s creating and feeling through its own course of motion. And it often sounds as if Justin Vernon has created a fully realized catalog of emotion, a cross-section of a moment than conveys so much more than the sum of its lyrics or melodies.

Again, I can only insist that this is the rarest kind of record, one that will likely draw instant comparisons to Iron and Wine’s The Creek Drank The Cradle, a beautiful album that likewise fell from seemingly nowhere. However, where Iron and Wine offer something like tone-poems, Bon Iver deliver what I can best call an audio memory, a small, sonic document of something passed. For Emma, Forever Ago’s strength isn’t in the weigh of its lyrics, but rather the rise and fall of its melodies, the way it can move between the whispered and the soaring in seconds. It’s an album that’s as heartbreaking as it is beautiful, and it surely isn’t part of the standard end-of-year affair: I’ll be listening to this one for years to come.

I can’t recommend it enough.

(A Note: While For Emma, Forever Ago was initially self-released, the Jagjaguwar record label has since–smartly–picked up the disc. The record will officially go on sale 2/19/08. More info at http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG115).

A French Way to Yes

by Weston Cutter

Imagine this: you’re dating someone and the two of you are very in love (even though there’s been trouble recently, some friction), and one afternoon when you’re out for coffee, your beloved sees someone across the room, goes and says hello, and several hours later leaves with that person—not just leaves with the other person, but doesn’t even pause to say goodbye to you on the way out. Imagine that person not once calling after that sort of exit. Imagine that: how just utterly, devastatingly confused you’d feel, to say nothing of how heartbroken.

Here’s the book—nonfiction, its worth noting—that works from that premise onward. It’s Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, and if you’ve heard about it its because it came out in hardcover in the autumn of 2006 and all of the usual suspects celebrated it—Esquire, Slate, New York Times. It had, in the hardcover version (and also, thankfully, in this new paperback iteration from Mariner Books), one of the all-time best blurbs, written (of course) by John Hodgman.

Step back into that imaginary scene from before: imagine, after several years of not a single word, the lover who’d left you that day at the coffeeshop calls, out of the blue, on a Sunday. Just calls on the telephone! And she’s calling not to apologize or ask for you back or anything, anything like that, but simply to ask you to be the mystery guest at an upcoming birthday party for a “contemporary artist” (Bouillier puts the phrase in quotes, we’ll put it in quotes). Imagine it.

But here’s the deal: however you can imagine all of the above, you need Bouillier’s Mystery Guest. Not because it maps out the casual this-then-that events that transpire, but because you need his heart, you need his just overwhelming and wonderful kindness and hope and humanity. Someone named Logan Pearsall Smith said (wrote? I’m guessing wrote) “What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers,” and that phrase’ll ring like a church bell when you read Mystery Guest.

Here’s a fine sample sentence, to give you an idea (and I don’t speak French, so I don’t know how much of the musicality of the line’s due to the even and evening translation by Lorin Stein, but I’m guessing its both): “The place where the taxi dropped me off was gloomy, across from a railroad track with big concrete panels clearly designed to muffle the noise of the trains, and nothing made a sound but the streetlights, shining on a deserted corner, and in the cold they produced a uniquely tentative, peevish halo of light. I don’t know how long I must have stood there, tapping my foot on the sidewalk, stuck and at a loss, facing the small bare metal door.” A tentative, peevish halo of light! Can you believe that? And in that second line, can’t you hear this weird sort of echo back to (or maybe even companion with) Eudora Welty’s single best sentence (and this reviewer’s nominee for best sentence ever written): “She must have been lonesome and slow all her life, the way things would take her by surprise.” (It’s from “A Piece of News,” from Curtain of Green, though you should just buy the Collected if you don’t have it already)?

(That’s at random, by the way: there are fine, wonderfully and strangely detailed sentences on every single page of the book.)

Almost all the reviews of this book, when it came out last year, bore some mention of the fact that the book is, in the end, remarkably positive, and I’d like to echo but modify that compliment here. It’s not simply that the book is positive, or that it ends on an upward arch, so to speak: its that the positivity, the yes the book strides toward (from page 1, basically, but certainly, especially, in the last 40 pages or so) is incredibly earned, is a positivity and yes that’s come through fracture and darkness and doubt. I’ll herein admit that I’m a huge sucker for not simply happy endings, but positive endings—all the books I like the best have, somewhere in their endings, some glimmer of hope, even if the glimmer’s so tiny you’ve got to squint and almost lie to yourself to see it. And I’m happy to report that The Mystery Guest is now among those books I like best, and the hope at the end of this book is nothing you’ve got to squint even a little for: it’s right there, large and waiting to hit you, eyes wide open.

Quick Take: new Stewart O’Nan

by Weston Cutter

The dangerous part of writing about Stewart O’Nan’s phenomenal new Last Night at the Lobster is that there’s the temptation to say—truthfully, too—that this is the best novel (novella? It’s 146 pages: you decide) ever written about a restaurant. Far as I know, it’s the best treatment of a restaurant yet committed to page (and yes, I’ve read D. Gibson’s Waiting: True Confessions of a Waitress, and it’s a decent book, but O’Nan creates the whole restaurant better than Gibson does (which, in fairness, wasn’t her goal, so it’s not really a criticism, but whatever)). What seems like the simplest trap to fall into in a book about a restaurant—especially a chain restaurant like Red Lobster, which is what O’Nan’s writing about—is to cut it too simply, leave it clichéd and obvious, and it’s my great, great pleasure to report that O’Nan’s written a book that happens to be set in a Red Lobster on December 20th, and that the background is that there’s a snowstorm and the Lobster’s going to be closing as of 12/21 and there’s some love triangle stuff, but this book is, magnificently, perfectly, all about heart.

And the reader’s entry into the great big beating heart inside this book? Manny, the manager, a lovable, flawed, deeply good (or deeply trying to be good) guy. Too much detail won’t serve this review all that well, but you should know, picking up and purchasing and making your way into this book, that, in the best possible way, this character is flesh and blood—is real enough to make you ache for him, and laugh with and at him.

The story all takes place on the last day of business at a Red Lobster in the northeast, a Red Lobster like any of the countless chain restaurants we’ve all seen at the edges of mall developments and studding highway exit ramps like bumps from some ancient, giant, invisible corporate mosquito. What O’Nan does so magically is make this Red Lobster—despite the thick shellac of exhaustion and cynicism and weariness any reader may have in approaching a novel about a fucking chain restaurant (I mean, come on, right?)—specific, he makes it real. The foibles and troubles and actual details of this one little place—which, in the book, may very well be nothing but a dot on some corporate ownership map, just as it may be a vague haziness in the mind of the consumers who patronize it (how much do you know about your local Red Lobster? Your local Wendy’s? Could you tell a difference between the one nearest you and another a state or two away? Does any of that even matter? If it doesn’t, why not?))—make it resoundingly real, make it that magic sort of book that’s way, way too rare: a book that, though story, feels emphatically true.

There are within this slim but large-hearted book no tirades against downsizing or corporate layoffs or global-political blah blah blah, but the fact of the book’s drive is, perfectly, the simplest and most final rebuke to any heavily-winded, rhetorically charged argument: we may not love the glowing golden arches stretched forever down the highways, the gas station that could be in any state’s Albany, the queasy equalizing effect globalization has on specificity, but in each of these nameless, identical places are real people, with actual stories, with the same sorts of hopes and frustrations as any of us. The magic of O’Nan’s book is that, thankfully, he tells the largest possible story—about corporate everything, about that faceless/placeless/nameless American fact of chain stores—by telling the small, wonderful, heartening story of the people who do, in fact, have names and faces.

Can you see him there, Manny, the manager of this Red Lobster? It’s the last day of business. He’s just about to open the store, one last time. You’re a fool not to enter.