Sarah Jaffe’s The Way Sound Leaves a Room is, hands down, among the very best recorded things released this year. Maybe it’s a function of aging, but the idea of besting certain things, ranking absolutely #1 on down, seems silly. There have been a handful of necessary things to listen to this year, and Jaffe’s ep is among them. Decide for yourself what sort of rank you’d like to give it.
To prime the Jaffe pump, here’s a video:
What’s remarkable about that is how seemingly simple the whole thing is. Watch Jaffe open her mouth and just pour gorgeousness as if it was as simple as throwing the wash into the dryer. Notice how absolutely controlled the thing feels and seems—the song seems perfectly boundaried, something with real edges but flexible as well (all that background sound, all the tiny pieces coming together like elements suddenly perfectly aligning over and over).
You think it’s a rarity somehow? That she doesn’t do that every damn time? Here’s more:
I was lucky enough to see Jaffe with friends in Omaha and we were among maybe 30 people in the audience, and Jaffe herself was incredibly cool and kind and drinking whiskey or bourbon, I can’t remember which, and the reason she’s worth talking about as among the very most exciting musicians at present is how shockingly quickly she’s growing. Before talking at any length about The Way Sound Leaves a Room, let’s revisit Suburban Nature, her 2010 debut. It’s a gorgeous, compelling disc, and it was among my favorite records of last year, but it was also, indisputably, younger, less sure of itself. For the audacious confidence of tracks like “Perfect Plan” or “Before You Go,” there were shakier, less certain tracks like “LUV.” Weirdly, the song that at the time seemed to me the absolutely most compelling thing imaginable—”Clementine”—still holds up to a degree, but its murmury hesitance is striking now, in the context of Jaffe’s latest.
The Way Sound Leaves a Room is an audacious and confident collection of 8 tracks that I think offers pretty inarguable proof that Jaffe’s the most exciting thing going. Evidence? Fucking ep starts off with a cover of Drake’s “Shut it Down,” the song stripped down and given harmonies and pianos and a tiny sandpapery casiotone drum beat in the track’s back, and if you hear Jaffe’s version before hearing Drake’s, you’ll never hear the original again—Jaffe owns the thing, absolutely. The ep would be fantastic enough just for that cover (which for the record is, in my mind, among the best covers of the year, a category which’d have to include the two amazing covers Bon Iver dropped this year [Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" and his cover of Bjork's "Who Is It" at his DC show]), but of course there’s more.
There is a piano version of “Clementine,” which to me feels weaker than the original, but even that’s not a mis-step or anything, just a track that doesn’t quite hang as awesomely as the rest. For my money, the second half of the ep, from the title track to the haunting, almost Imogen-Heap-ish “All that Time,” is why this thing stands so tall and powerfully. What the listener gets in these four tracks is a level of confident messiness that was developing in parts in Suburban Nature but is hugely, awesomely more pronounced now. There’s also just more noise: electronics in “When You Rest,” and, in the ep’s single, “A Sucker For Your Marketing,” a hard bass line couples menacingly with the lyrics (“Whatever you put out, I’m gonna buy it / so what’s your latest, I wanna try it / are you still in love, are you over it again / when the damn thing grew with no intent,”) to make one of the most aggressive I-want-you songs I’ve ever heard.
Jaffe’s been at the top of my list of holy-shit-she-can-do-anything artists for awhile, and this new ep bodes exceptionally well for her. It’s past time to consider what she might do next, how she might do it: look what she’s doing. No one is doing anything close to what she’s doing; no one’s taking such big, masterful steps. Listen now, if only so you can brag later, when she’s got all the attention she already deserves.
(If yr interested, here’s a brief interview I did with her last year)
Peter Wolf Crier is all of the following: a band from Minneapolis made of Peter Pisano and Brian Moen; a band whose debut album, Inter-Be, has a) been released TODAY by Jagjaguwar and b) spent a month getting pushed + hyped (deservedly) by 89.3 The Current, among others; a band who, instead of playing a CD release show at the 7th street or something, played their album in a house on a relatively secret basis (add that to your list of concerts you wish you’d seen); a band whose 11-song debut features some of the year’s best music (in a year of frighteningly good music, too: the new National is just godawfully brilliant [click here for an old interview I did with Matt Berninger, the National's lead singer], Sarah Jaffe’s stuff should be clotheslining everyone, Happiest Lion’s making strange young-man untroubled noise out of Boston, LCD’s new one’s actually not as bad as my friends and I’d feared, etc.).
But let’s be fair: Inter-Be is one of the year’s best albums, one of the year’s best collections-of-working-together songs. If that seems an obvious or simple thing, try real hard to think of the last disc you heard in which the songs interwove in any sort of pleasing ways (it’s almost comically simple to dismiss most pop straightaway; I’d guess the last album for most of us that worked like this was Bon Iver’s For Emma, an album it’s admittedly easy in several ways to compare with PWC’s debut [Jagjaguwar, midwest, etc.], but it’s unfair to both artists: they’re totally, wildly different discs). Inter-Be is a gauzy, wood-floored masterpiece, a full house of low-fi gorgeousness (mostly acoustic guitar [or at least hollow-body electric] and drums) and, through it all, Peter Pisano’s mildly aching voice, Brian Moen’s insanely communicative percussion. “I felt I had the album pretty well tied up and had figured out the aesthetic,” said Pasano in another interview, “[b]ut once I started working with Brian…I knew the project would only benefit from untying those knots and digging into the songs again.”
Sit with that thought for a second: imagine an artist whose convictions are strong enough for him to trust untying the knots he’d already created. Imagine how much work it’d take for you to allow someone else into your own late-night rush of creativity and invention, and to allow someone else not only in but in with discretion, with administrator capabilities.
Inter-Be sounds like all of what made it: it sounds Midwestern in the best ways, it sounds risked and open and opened, it sounds unbelievably welcoming and honest, sounds capital-t True in exactly the ways we all claim to want our best art. This is a True disc, and, for my money, the year’s best: we’ll all be very, very lucky if Peter Wolf Crier keep making knots, keep untying, keep digging. Sincerely: this is an album you 100% need.
Here’s them doing an in-studio @ Radio K (and yes, MN’s got the best radio in the world, has since REV 105):
Peter Pisano was also massively cool and answered some emailed questions, and they’re all as follows:
1. What are you reading? Likewise, to whom do you listen, what movies do you watch, what sports teams do you follow, cooking shows, HDTV, etc. Basically: what’s the input that leads to your output? The wider/wilder on this one, the better (I think).
When I was quite young, my father caught me stealing baseball cards. As my punishment, I was not allowed to collect with him for sometime. Shortly thereafter, while throwing a tennis ball against my grandfather’s brick siding, a stray throw broke a glass screen. Again, I was not allowed to collect cards while the $75 penalty was amassed. When finally I was ready to return to my favorite past time, the league went on strike in 94-95. I believe I loved sports more than they loved me.
As of late, I rarely move past hip hop. I listened to Eyedea and Abilities until it was no longer good for me. No Bird Sing and Kristoff Krane round things out. I listen to these friends (Mike Larson, Joe Horton, and Chris Keller) freestyle so very much and it fills my heart with love for the moment. Like, it really nails me with compassion.
When I talk about LOST late at night, after an episode, it makes me tear in the same way that recounting dreams at high school sleepovers did.
I read Zen Buddhist talks as a means to live. It has meant that much to me. It has given me that much.
2. What would success mean to you? Where are you, literally, in this process? Yes history/time will judge, no you have little direct control on album sales, and yet you’ve made this great disc, and you seem to be getting good notice, your label’s hugely supportive, the Current’s all up in yr stuff, etc. Is this success?
I find, viscerally, a great sense of peace to inhabit each musician who, after accepting themselves as an artist, finds comfort in the uncertainty of their career. I know this well because it causes me much suffering.
2.1. How’s PWF different from Wars/1812? Not sonically (which the listener can sort of deduce on his own), but to you, from inside it? Did you know, right away, that the songs that make up Inter-Be were not 1812 songs? Also: why Inter-Be? It’s evocative and works perfectly, but I’m curious why you picked it?
That is really fucking insightful, that question. I found, once inside Peter Wolf Crier (when it became a thing outside myself), it to be much the same. I was having the same conversations, hearing the same voices, and drawn to the same habit. Once we become aware of how thoroughly we color people around us in our likeness and how discretely we project upon them, we are free to truly sit with ourselves (even while collaborating). While working with Brian, I felt incredibly light. My fears, my insecurities, my pride, my creativity became my own in such a way that was both liberating internally and of far more use to him as a band member. In short, no matter where you sit you sit with the same demons. Calling them home, holding them close, and allowing those which do not belong to you to roam is a suitable space to communicate whatever truth you can grab hold of.
3. Who would be your dream collaborator? With whom would you love to work—musician, producer, whatever?
John Frusciante: Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt is the album in which I discovered pure beauty in honest, vulnerable, authentic art. It twisted, bent, tore, and healed my high school self. I wish, still, to grow most in this way.
4. What’s your favorite place in the twin cities? (best place for whatever you want, too. Or, if you want, best place for any/all of the following: beer, smoke, kiss, run, hand-clap, burger, tortilla chip, forgetting something, remembering something, skipping a rock, buying/hearing music).
It became abundantly clear as my parents visited this past week just how little of the city I know outside of the venues. Likely, this is because they fulfill all the needs you described above (save skipping a rock, for which I prefer Lake Calhoun).
4.1 If you’re at all interested in it, can you talk about your stuff as specifically midwestern? This is something I care much about (I’m from the twin cities, I dig the Replacements and Dylan, I deep-down believe in the magic of the MN Twins, I think writers from the midwest [Ander Monson, Bob Hicok] are just fundamentally different/better than others…), and I’m curious if it’s something that occurs to you guys as well.
It’s funny, I never understood myself to be a product of the Midwest. We suburbanites readily trade in that pride for a shot a being confused for Chicagoans. Since moving to Wisconsin for school and Minnesota for music, I’ve come to know that pride from a distance.
5. Do you like touring? Where’ve/what’ve been yr most enjoyable shows? Are you gonna be doing a whole bunch more this summer? What do you most look forward to w/PWC, aside from (presumably) the album actually hitting? Along those lines: are there any bands you’re really looking forward to 1) playing with, 2) seeing, or 3) hearing their new albums this summer?
I don’t know touring. I’ve romanticized it. I’ve demonized it. I’ll tour with little rest this June and July with little more knowledge than how beautiful nights can be spent with acts you admire. This lesson came after sharing two nights with Sharon Van Etten in Chicago (with Final Fantasy) and Madison (with the Bowerbirds). I didn’t feel alone, I didn’t feel scared, and I didn’t want anything more those nights.
6. On the album itself: you said in another interview that your influences are Wilco and the Beatles. Are Dr. Dog and M Ward part of that conversation, too? (they’re who I hear, somewhat). It’s just interesting: I write, and I think of writing as being in conversation w/ other stuff (like, the poems I write are in some way working with/against other poems I’ve been reading and/or writing), and it feels like that’d be true for music as well, so I’m just curious if there was some conversation going on on Inter-Be, and, if there was a conversation, what was part of it, and who
Dr. Dog is surely in there. I’m of the same ilk as those guys, I think. We have the same sensibilities, I hope. I find them to be one of the greatest touring pop bands. Whatever it was I needed to say in this album, had to be said with the same patient immediacy of Transfiguration of Vincent. As well, that album should be forever held as an example of self-containment and specificity in sonic locale. I believe Brian did an incredible job in making a home out of Inter-Be for each song to live, drift, but never escape, in much the same light.
6.1. Along that line: is there an intended “you” on the album? There’s no clear narrative or anything connecting the songs, that I could tell, but I’d be curious.
At times, I was fully aware who I was speaking to. At times, I was entirely oblivious. At times, I hear myself writing songs for different faces than they were intended. I’m not sure which intention to believe. Really, it is sometimes scary.
7. This is one of those sort of dorky/obligatory answers, but what’s yr take on the state of the music business at present? I’m just an outsider, a fan–I like that there’s blogs and blog aggregators, and that big companies have less and less a position in my life, but I’m curious about how it feels from the other side, as a musician, especially a musician who has gotten such mileage from word-of-mouth and community-built power. Again: expand away, I really don’t even know how much more clear to make the question. It’s maybe more of just a prompt.
I think this is a really important question for another time. Like, I think I’ll need to change my answer before sending this off.
8. What’s the view out your window?
My sitting practice takes place facing my window. Outside it, I find the neighbor’s motion-sensitive light to be a centered point. I think because it is far enough away not to take a definite shape. Of greater interest to the casual reader, my neighbors recently tore down a tent used to host all-night tickle sessions. I sleep with my windows open 6 months out of the year. I’m serious on both accounts.
(last note: this interview’s been real mildly clipped and altered, but please be assured: if Peter Pisano is even remotely as decent in person as he is over email exchange, you owe it to yrself to clap him on the back in congrats WHEN [not if] you go see him play sometime this summer.)
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.
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).
6. On the album itself: you said in another interview that your influences are Wilco and the Beatles. Are Dr. Dog and M Ward part of that conversation, too? (they’re who I hear, somewhat). It’s just interesting: I write, and I think of writing as being in conversation w/ other stuff (like, the poems I write are in some way working with/against other poems I’ve been reading and/or writing), and it feels like that’d be true for music as well, so I’m just curious if there was some conversation going on on Inter-Be, and, if there was a conversation, what was part of it, and who
