Best of 2008 Part V: Little Joy

by Weston Cutter

It seems like every few years we get a band that makes just a perfect and perfectly approachable and low-key pop/rock/indie/whatever disc. 2004 was the Elected’s Me First, 2007 was Dr. Dog’s We All Belong, and now, 2008, we get Little Joy’s Little Joy. I’d argue, in fact, that Little Joy’s music sounds almost startlingly like a blend of the Elected and Dr. Dog (plus a dash of Portuguese singing).

The basis of the name, just for the record: a bar in Echo Park, which LA neighborhood was where the three members of LJoy lived while making the album.

Members of the band, just to get that out of the way, too: the drummer for the Strokes (Fabrizio Moretti), Rodrigo Amarante from Los Hermanos, and Binki Shapiro.

Basically every review I’ve seen about this record mentions how it’s an almost absurdly perfect pop/lounge album, and the truth is, all those reviews are right: Little Joy’s music sounds like exactly what you’d expect to happen if some contemporary cool kids decided to basically like take Getz/Gilberto and update it and un-saxophone it and keep the really easy, swinging, beach-front feel. Don’t believe me? Here’s a video of the album’s opener, “The Next Time Around.”

 

Wait, too: it gets even more ridiculously lounge-y and easy-going and etc. Here’s a video of their song “Unattainable.”

 

Those two, actually, pretty well cover what you’re getting into with Little Joy: the music’s just delightfully easy and calm and if you can’t put this on and relax with it in the background, you’re probably in bigger trouble than music can even help.

More than anything else, at least to me, they sound like the absolute poppiest version of the Velvet Underground imaginable, though I’m sure I think that lots because of the almost unbearably sweet lilt of Bikni Shapiro’s voice—if there’s been a woman better suited to record a definitive, updated version of VU’s “After Hours,” I don’t know who she is (and, having now just looked a little bit at some more reviews, I see I’m just like everyone else in thinking like this: every review, along with mentioning “lounge” and “beach,” also mentions “Mo Tucker”). Her voice has about as much sweetness and innocence as one could conceivably hope for.

It’s just good, good music, Little Joy’s Little Joy is. It’s not the most complex and forward-thinking and envelope-puncturing album of the year (TVoTR’s Dear Science,), and it’s not the strangest, most out-of-left-field album of the year (Shugo Tokumaru’s Exit), but LJ’s self-titled debut might be the album you can come back to most often and most easily and, maybe best, most unexpectedly. It delivers wonderfully.

Best of 2008 Part III: Shugo Tokumaru

by Weston Cutter

Shugo Tokumaru’s Exit.

I don’t know how much sensical commentary I can offer on S. Tokumaru‘s Exit, for at least a few reasons:

 

1. I don’t speak/understand Japanese

2. Though I’ve listened to this album at least 100 times since I got it two months ago, I still don’t ‘understand’ it: I still can’t really wrap my head around it.

3. I don’t know what else to possibly compare this album with.

 

That last fact’s probably the one that’s most significant in this context. The salient details are as follows: Tokumaru was born in 1980 and this is his third album (his first released in 2004, second in 2005). He’s worked with a band before, but I’ve been able to track down none of their work.

 

Maybe it’s easier to come at this sort of from the side: one of the reasons I (and lots of others, I’d guess) so like Girl with the Curious Hair is that the stories within are all so hugely different, stylistically. The book ends up reading not like a collection of one author’s stories, but as a strange anthology, the connective thread running between the stories at very very best unclear and murky (because, seriously, what do “Everything Is Green” and “Westward” have in common?).

 

Tokumaru’s music feels, to me, much the same: thematically, the disc sounds, in the best way, like the inside of one very clever/interesting/whatever person’s head. Much as I love me some obviously-connected albums/music (off the top of my head: Richard Buckner’s Devotion+Doubt, Iron and Wine’s Creek Drank the Cradle, Westerberg’s Stereo/Mono), a disc like this—a disc which sounds like chaotic scattershot reachings instead of well-plotted and organized statements—is such a sock-knocker-offer if only because of how wild it sounds. That, maybe, is the best way to approach Shugo Tokumaru’s Exit: it sounds like a disc that, intentionally or un-, is stretching what a cohesive ‘album’ can both sound like and contain.

 

These elements/issues are there right from the start: “Parachute” sounds like an outtake from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra with Japanese vocals. The song’s major (as in key), features recognizable instruments (guitar and bells being the big two stand-outs), and is almost epic-sounding: it takes no work to imagine this song being used as a backdrop in some crucial montage in a rags-to-riches movie. Meaning, I guess, that the song’s got a sort of uplifting heft to it, even if you can’t understand any of the words other than ‘parachute’ (though that’s even sung just weirdly enough to make you need to listen to the track a few times to get it).

 

And but so when you think the album’s gonna make a sort of sense, track two, “Green Rain,” begins with what is either a backward accordion or something closely thereto related. There are bells again, like the first track, and the Shugo’s still singing, but then the music takes off at around the 35 second mark: strange, melodic drums make an entrance, and the whole song moves (really really awesomely) herky jerky toward a break around the two-minute mark. It’s a staggering song in-and-of-itself, but all the moreso following, as it does, the pretty and prettily straightforward first track.

 

Of course you can’t find your bearings again in the third track: “Clocca” starts with what sounds like some sort of flute, features handclaps, vocals, and guitar, but underneath all the music there’s this melodic hint that the song is about to fall apart into stranger, more chaotic sounds (not, though, like Wilco’s stuff from YHF in which you could hear the static start to push through the music: the repeated line here sounds more like the song’s about the change mood—the line sounds, basically, like how seeing dark horizon-sitting clouds feels).

 

It goes from there: the fourth track, “Future Umbrella,” sounds like an audio outtake from whatever musical sessions produced Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure; “D.P.O.” sounds like deranged kids music; the album’s closer, “Wedding,” is one of the prettiest things I’ve heard all year and is, for my money, the best closing-track I’ve heard in a long, long time. The track sounds like something like a send-off: underpinned the whole time by a banjo, the track sounds like a very pretty and very interesting goodbye.

 

Top-to-bottom, Shugo Tokumaru’s Exit is the strangest and most delightful thing I heard all year, and if nothing else his disc should push other young sitting-in-their-apartment-making-music dudes to reach for bigger, stranger, farther away sounds and ideas. 

Yes, Everyone’s Right

by Weston Cutter

            Writing about Bolaño’s 2666 seems almost silly at this point: if you’ve read any decent book-review outlet in the past month and a half (best pieces: FProse’s Harper’s piece and the SKerr piece in the latest NYRBooks)(that’s not at all a dig against Lethem’s great and effusive NYTimes one, I just thought the other ones were a bit better), you’ve already read how flabbergastingly great the thing is.

            What’s nice, though, is that the reviews are largely totally correct: 2666 is a staggering motherfucker of a book, and it is, hands-down, the thickest book I’ve read in a long, long time—thick in the sense of GGMarquez, in the sense of CRZafron’s The Shadow of the Wind. It’s weird, realizing how I’m listing those, to realize that maybe there’s something about novels-in-Spanish (though not necessarily all: Javier Marias’s stuff is, though astounding and great and cool, not as thick-seeming; his stuff’s cooler, more cerebral and arch [not at all in a bad way]) that lends that feel of thickness. (or maybe it’s just me and my associations).

            But so what am I getting at with thickness? It’s Pynchonian, I guess, some of it: every single page has so much living stuff scattered/spattered throughout that you can’t imagine how you’ll be able to keep track of everything…and yet, of course, you do keep track of everything, because the story’s so well-told you (or maybe just I) cannot help but remember everything that happens. The sentences are serpentine (there’s one in the first or second section, I can’t remember, that’s three pages long). Sentences begin with a character remembering something—let’s say a party—and then remembering a person at the party. But then, often, the story’ll just jump to that person, the remembered person, and there’ll be new traces carved in the narrative…it’s hard as hell to explain, but the word I felt most when reading was that the stories and sentences felt gravitational: they yank you in all these directions, broadsiding you over and over.

            The book’s in five sections, and the first one follows four academics as they think and drink and talk and have sex, all the while circling around the object of their intellectual pursuits (a german author named Archimboldi). The second section follows a man the reader meets in the first part, a guy who was helpful to the four academics when they came to Sonora/Santa Teresa, a northern area in Mexico modeled after Ciudad Juarez. The third section features a character named Oscar Fate (think Masked and Anonymous) who connects narratively by trying to help/save the daughter of the dude from the second section…

            That’s the sort of thickness I’m talking about: everything’s so interwoven and mixed that one of the unique frustrations of trying to talk/be clear about 2666 is that the center’s so stuffed with stuff you’ll automatically miss stuff. That second section’s dude? His wife’s upping and moving to be next to this institutionalized poet takes up bunches of physical and psychic space in the narrative; ditto the book the guy hangs on his clothesline. The first section features an artist whose last big work was a work that featured his own cutoff hand. That sort of thickness: how do you even get to the real story?

            The funny part is (actually, only like a quarter funny: it’s actually better to say ‘impressive’ or ‘wild’ or something like that), none of these things even come close to what the guts of the real story is, which has to do with the disappearance and murder of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez/Santa Teresa—but that’s not even fully it. Google Ciudad Juarez and get the details—the numbers of women gone, dead, people locked up, searched for, found in the worst possible ways. Santa Teresa’s got the same problem, and so, as of the third and fourth sections, bodies start coming up at a gut-churning rate.

            But, of course, building a book around disappearances and deaths means the book’s literally built around something we might call a haunting (that haunting being especially vexing since it’s still happening in Ciudad Juarez: the best piece I’ve read recently about the whole thing is something by CBowden from earlier this year in the Atlantic, but I can’t find the link, so maybe we should all read this instead). And so, then, the book’s about something relatively inarticulable (how does one reduce the experience of a ghost? a haunting?) and for sure that’s literally beyond grip/reach (both physically and, to some degree, mentally/emotionally/psychically: hauntings are what they are because they fuck with the witness on at least both emotional and intellectual levels, though usually others, too).

            Bolaño actually gives the reader a pretty strong hint of just what’s gonna be transpiring as of page 159 (in the hardcover: the book’s come out in both a hardcover and a three-softcovers-in-a-case):

            “Archimboldi is here,” said Pelletier, “and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.”

            That’s the story’s heart: our proximity to stuff, our inability to touch/hold stuff. It’s a fucking brutally great book.

Best of 2008 Part II: Lykke Li

by Weston Cutter

Lykke Li’s Youth Novels

Download:

Dance Dance Dance

Everybody But Me

 

I’m woefully late to the Lykke Li party, and it’s shitty because she’s like one or two steps removed from lots of stuff I really like—for instance, here she is with El Perro Del Mar, singing back-up on “Somebody’s Baby”:

No, I’m not sure how to pronounce her name, but the details are:

• That her full name’s Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson

• That she’s f’ing twenty-two years old

• That her debut album, Youth Novels, came out in May of this past year, and has to be one of the absolute best CDs that’s come out this year (and I’d actually argue strongly that hers is one of the strongest first albums in the past five or so years, easily).

 

The video above, with EPDMar and Lykke Li, was especially gratifying to find like two weeks back, because up until that point I’d been thinking this is so weird: Lykke Li’s like a musical cousin of EPDMar. She is: that’s actually the best way to describe Lykke Li’s music: it’s like El Perro Del Mar’s first album, except it’s sweeter (as in: more sugary, not necessarily nicer) by a factor of ten, and it’s also (somehow, simultaneously) more raggedy and rough-edged than El Perro Del Mar’s first album’s stuff.

 

Lykke Li’s voice is, hands-down, one of the finest instruments you’ll hear this year: it’s almost startlingly cutesy and innocent and also just vulnerable as hell. When I think back on her songs, in my head her voice breaks and wobbles much more than it actually does on her recordings, meaning, I guess, that she makes her stuff feel a ton more vulnerable than it actually is, on CD. Which, really, is a hell of a thing to do.

 

Part of it’s simply about lyrics, too. Take the song “Everybody But Me”: she starts the song “standing in the corner” thinking of whether or not to “go home, still sober,” or buy another glass of wine. The insularity’s just everywhere—you can see it, right? This pretty person who’s totally alone at a party—and the song continues, the chorus talking about how everyone’s dancing, drinking, laughing, and how the song’s protagonist keeps saying/singing that she doesn’t want to. The really cool thing, though, is that I, at least, can’t be sure that she doesn’t want to: I get the sense that, in fact, she’d love to dance and laugh and have fun, but just not right then, not at this party where there are

 

fellas, who got the look in their eye

they want to take me home without knowing my name…

 

It’s just dazzling stuff.

 

Here, just for fun, is one of the coolest artists of last year (Bon Iver) and one of the coolest from this year (Lykke Li) doing her song “Dance Dance Dance” together at some public fountain in LA:

 

 

That song, by the way, “Dance Dance Dance,” is the first song I hear from the album and it’s sick how cool the song is. I’ll say nothing: just download it and listen. It’s incredible. As is, really, the whole album. 

Best of 2008 Part 1: Throw Me The Statue

by Weston Cutter

(I, like everyone I know, just love year-end lists, but I always think the strict numeracy of the whole thing’s silly. A top-ten’s fine; numbering things from 10-1 seems nuts (unless it’s super-obvious: 1970, when Hundred Years of Solitude was translated and released; 1996, Infinite Jest; 1998, Birds of America; 2000, The Last Samurai; etc.). With that in mind: from now till the year’s end, I’ll be posting best-of-2008 stuff. Mostly bands (and, by and large, mostly bands that’ve released their debut disc this year). Obviously books. Movies? Doubtful, but who knows.)

 

Throw me the Statue’s Moonbeams

 

(I’d meant to put up songs to download here, but the songs I wanted to put up aren’t cleared for download. So, instead, here’s a video of one of the cleared-for-posting songs, and also one of the coolest songs on the disc, and also one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen (the song’s called “About To Walk,” and there’s a version at Daytrottere here as well)

 

 

Throw Me the Statue crept up on me this year. At some point I downloaded “Your Girlfriend’s Car” and I remember listening to it (this must’ve been like April) and thinking hm, but getting neither really super invited-in nor super pushed-out. I do remember thinking that it was an almost obscenely weird song: little in the way of lyrics, and what lyrics there are either seemed associatively strange (meaning, I guess, the meaning was fuzzy), or just flat-out strange—for instance, the part from which the song takes its title:

 

There is nothing

Here I’d

Like to steal

from your girlfriend’s car.

 

The bit there’s a bunch of things, but more than anything else it’s just ridiculouly, evocatively weird. Download the song and listen to it: maybe stranger than that set of words is the fact that there’s no morality in them: it seems neither a good nor bad thing that this dude should want to steal things from this other person’s girlfriend’s car. The whole thing, at the time I heard it, struck me as interesting, but not enough to get seriously invested in.

 

Maybe some months passed: I’m not really sure. I know the next song by Throw Me the Statue I listened to was “This is How We Kiss,” which is much more direct (in certain ways) than “Your Girlfriend’s Car”: gone are the real obtruse lines, replaced by stuff like:

 

Little chance, Eddie Haskell,

tell again how you were born a rascal

they screen my calls at the charity chapel

I lost the keys to the friendship castle

 

Okay, so, hrm: not so much more sensical, actually (plus the first chorus has got “This is how we kiss,” and the second one’s got “This is how we missed,” [plus I should just say here that 'chorus' isn't the real term: the actual chorus is just a vowelly oh oh oh oh repeated]).

 

What’s for sure, though, is that “This is How We Kiss,” was the track that made me realize how much I absolutely dug the hell out of this band. Again: download the songs. These are folks who’ve picked up all the lo-fi/indie sounds you’d expect, but they’re just doing things much, much better than most other bands. I suppose the music-snob class would here say that the band’s somewhat indebted to Pavement, and perhaps they are, to a degree: I hear more of The Glands than Pavement, plus, more simply, Throw Me The Statue have pop-music chops that put most other ‘indie’ stuff to shame.

 

Idle hypothesis: the whole indie/lo-fi thing’s actually not too technically difficult (I played enough guitar to know that much, anyway), and so the thing that separates a band like Throw Me The Statue from other bands of this genre/ilk is that instead of just droning stuff and feedbacking amps and etc, they’ve got something like the spirits of B. Wilson and P. Westerberg animating some of their decisions. “Your Girlfriend’s Car”? Regardless of how weird the lyrics are, the song’s as compelling as it is because, musically, it feels about as inevitable as falling down a set of three stairs. Some of the moves may feel, at first listen, counterintuitive, but listen to the song a few times and you can feel how smart these guys are, musically.

 

And who are these guys? Scott Reitherman, apparently, a Seattle-ite (according to Wikipedia), and the band he’s helped shape around himself. Their album Moonbeams, for the record, was actually released on Reitherman’s Baskerville Hill label in 2007, and re-released this year by Secretely Canadian (which label has just been dynamite in the last while, putting stuff out by Catfish Haven, Damien Jurado, Bon Iver, etc.).

 

I don’t know much more about these guys, but I’m pretty sure that nothing else I’ve got to say about them’s worth as much as listening to the songs here, the last of which will be this: Earlier this year, Throw Me The Statue released this track (on Stereogum, but the track’s also part of a H. Lewis covers comp called Are You Still With Me?!, which should put to rest any question about how great and sharp and incredible their pop-instincts are. Say what you will about indie rock and everything else: I can think of maybe five bands whose cover of an old Huey Lewis and the News song would make me not just disinterestedly curious but thrilled and pleased and (admit it) pretty up for going back and listening to more old H. Lewis songs. Please: make sure your year-end round-up includes stuff by Throw Me The Statue.