But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief:

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. (1999) — A little glib goes a long way. That’s how I felt by the time I reached the end of Bryson’s collected columns, written for an English newspaper after moving back to America following a 20-year sojourn abroad. Any one column was great, and Bryson frequently made me laugh out loud. The book was chucklicious. But it was also a little much, perhaps because the columns were short and, by their nature, jumped from topic to topic, which made the overall feel of the book a little manic. Had I spaced the book out over a few weeks and read just a few entries at a time, I’m sure Bryson’s charm and droll humor would’ve worked for me much, much better (because, let’s face it, the guy is hilarious!). I can see myself giving the book one of those “It’s not you, it’s me” speeches.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. (2009) — I picked this up because it was a travelogue about two college graduates who decide to backpack across China in the mid-1980s. “Hey, let’s be Odysseus,” she and her friend decide. “Let’s be Byron. Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one—except with lip gloss.” Their story turned out to be funny, tragic, interesting, and gripping. Gilman pulled me in quick, and I didn’t want to put the book not (not that I had the leisure to even if I wanted to). Gilman’s book has pitch-perfect pacing, and it reads like a good novel even though it’s nonfiction. “God knows I couldn’t make this up,” she says in her author’s note. Her post-9/11 perspective as a writer (and a more experienced traveler) gives the book extra resonance.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (1995) — This collection of essays was so good I don’t even know where to begin with it. Only a few of her essays focused specifically on place (my reason for reading), but those that do made me feel like I was in the crater of Hawaii’s dormant volcano Haleakala or in a crowded village in the African country of Benin or along the banks of Horse Lick Creek in the mountains of Kentucky. Cumulatively, Kingsolver captures what it means to be human—or should mean, anyway. “It’s starting to look as if the most shameful tradition of Western civilization is out need to deny we are animals,” she writes. The book is a paean to curiosity and wonder. “I have taught myself joy, over and over again,” she says. I constantly found myself highlighting passages, making notes, copying quotes. Kingsolver’s essays are so rich. In the final accounting,” she writes,” a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address.” A hundred different truths—and more—reside in this collection. Kingsolver might be the great discovery of this entire reading project.

Previously: I hope you took a few minutes to explore the outstanding recipients of this year’s Gold and Platinum LP awards. Honorable Mentions, too.

I don’t think many readers will find much controversy in the assertion that things have been hard over the past few years, and 2010 and 2011 were especially hellish in my neck of the woods. So it’s no surprise to find artists focusing on the difficulties they see (and often live themselves). It’s rare, though, to find someone who’s singing about the bad times with as much depth and empathy as we find in Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit’s Here We Rest, my 2011 CD of the Year.

Andrew Leahey, writing at AMG, explains that this song cycle focuses on

the archetypal characters that populate most struggling Southern towns: the barflies and ball players, the heartbreakers and the heartbroken, the war vets who return home and the starry-eyed kids who leave. Isbell’s hometown was hit hard by the Great Recession of 2008, and he captures his subjects somewhere between the realization that their lives have been impacted and the sad resignation that they’ve been irrevocably changed.

I’d expand on this to argue that the album oscillates, in some cases drawing a bright line between dreams and realities and in other cases simply inhabiting a landscape of numb despair. In the lead track, “Alabama Pines,” Isbell finds himself in a cheap hotel room reflecting on the end of a relationship that he didn’t know how to make work.

If we pass through on a Sunday, better make a stop at Wayne’s.
It’s the only open liquor store north, and I can’t stand the pain
of being by myself without a little help
on a Sunday afternoon.

I needed that damn woman like a dream needs gasoline.
I tried to be some ancient kind of man,
one that’s never seen the beauty in the world,
but I tried to chase it down… tried to make the whole thing mine.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard a song about not knowing how to be the man she wants, but Isbell grounds it in such a vivid sense of place that we can almost feel the fact of the failures sticking to our skin long after the last note has faded.

There’s not much that passes for happiness or credible hope on Here We Rest, but what finally broke me down, after seven or eight spins, was sitting with the lyrics and humming along to “Stopping By,” a gut-wrenching number about dropping in to see Dad, unannounced, after 15 years. I’m sure most of us understand how the dysfunctions of one generation all too predictably serve as the only role model the next generation has. If we wonder why a boy grows up unable to connect with a woman – say, the woman in “Alabama Pines” or perhaps “Daisy Mae” – we might have a look at their parents. Add a hint of bygone scandal, the intimation of bile and repression that still characterizes family and community in the Gothic South, and what remains is a moment where little is said, even less is understood. Bear with me as I quote a slightly longer passage:

How did your life turn out? Do you ever think about
a teenage girl in Chattanooga?
You ever tell your folks the truth?
That might’ve been the last of you.
Would’ve been a shame. We hardly knew ya.

Now I’m stopping by. I’m stopping by, Daddy.

I think the best of me’s still standing in the doorway
Counting cars and counting days and counting years
I could say you made me go through life the hard way
But it might’ve been worse if you were here…

Looking through a picture book. There’s one I think my momma took.
You couldn’t have been much over twenty.
Shirtless in your cutoff jeans, you hand a lollipop to me.
I probably asked where you got the money.

A picture on another page. I recognize my eyes have aged.
I’d been alone for quite a while then.
Trying to get a match to burn. Waiting on a latch to turn.
I still have difficulty smiling.

The sins of the father… I guess this song hits me so hard because I recognize too much of it. A lot of us grew up a bit stunted because our dads were only marginally equipped for the world they lived in, and they themselves were far too crippled emotionally and spiritually to provide us with any kind of continuity that might sustain us in a world that seems to change profoundly every 15 minutes. They passed on their brutality in order to make us tough. Their pathological inability to express love or joy engendered in their sons a desperate hope that having no idea what to say would be mistaken for cool. Their transience left us uncertain as to what exactly was meant by the idea of home and an abiding suspicion that there was something suspiciously effeminate about domesticity. Manliness demanded faithlessness, because only in the fleeting sexual attentions of a parade of “strange” could masculinity be validated.

I’m probably projecting more than is healthy, but the genius of Here We Rest is that Isbell tells his stories and the stories of characters he knows in a way that invites the listener to share his/her own experiences. That he gives voice to such crushed affect is one thing. That he is able to do it with such intimacy is quite another.

At some point I should probably mention that Isbell is a superb tunesmith, that the production and arrangements manage both sparsity and complexity in ways that lend resonance and tonal depth to the proceedings, and that in a better world you’d be able to tune into a Country & Western station in your town and hear this disc instead of whatever autotuned bullshit Taylor Swift’s army of cynical Svengalis have cocked up this week. There are moments where he reminds me of Jeffrey Dean Foster and others where I think I hear an echo of Warren Zevon. Praise doesn’t get much higher in this quarter.

Here We Rest is nothing short of brilliant and I’m honored to add it to the list of albums that have topped my Best of lists through the years. I hope you’ll give it a listen. He’s a little sample to see you on your way. First, the official video for “Alabama Pines.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

And a music-only YouTube upload of “Stopping By.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

Previously: the 2011 Gold LPs and the Honorable Mentions.

The Platinum LPs, awarded for exceptional artistic merit, are always the point where this process begins to wear on me. I want to make sure I have included all the worthy bands and that my words do those acknowledged justice. I never feel like I have succeeded on either count, and this year seems even worse than usual. So my apologies to the artists here: my remarks are in no way up to the standards of the music you produced last year.

[sigh] So here we go.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong
It seems like each year there’s that one band, sort of an accessible, trendy indie outfit that pegs everybody’s hip meters and makes it okay to like intelligent guitar pop. A couple years ago it was unquestionably Phoenix. Last year I argued that it was Two Door Cinema Club. This year I think it was supposed to be Army Navy. As much as I liked the Army Navy disc, though, Belong is the cool-to-be-melodic standard bearer for 2011.

The band’s previous work had been on the twee side. The songwriting was been engaging, but there wasn’t a muscle in sight. This album, though, begins by jacking up those fuzzy guitars and delivering a sugar-coated boot to the teeth at precisely the 15-second mark. Perhaps working with the likes of Flood and Alan Moulder helped the band grow into something more substantial. Whatever, the signal-to-noise ratio is a tad higher on Belong, and the result is 100% joyride.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Snake Rattle Rattle Snake: Sineater
For awhile there 2011 was starting to feel like the year of dark, female-fronted bands who remind me of The Airplane. Esben & the Witch got all the hype but Denver’s Snake Rattle Rattle Snake turned out to be the real deal.

My entreé to the band was my discovery that the drummer was Kit Peltzel, formerly of Space Team Electra. (Kit has since departed.) In an odd way, SRRS puts me in mind of STE – this might be what an updated, more dance-minded Space Team might sound like. Hayley Helmericks exhibits an intensely literate command of the microphone, and every note emerging from the simmering murk behind her seems calculated to maximize her impact on the listener’s consciousness.

I know that the old triangulation technique rarely communicates the truth about a band’s sound, but I can’t resist suggesting that SRRS is kinda like if Grace Slick and Siouxie got together and formed a shoegazer band.

Yeah, I know. Just go listen to it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Baron Bane: LPTO
My senior year in high school we read Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and it proved to be a defining moment in the formation of my artistic aesthetic. It was the first time I had encountered such a close juxtaposition between darkness and beauty, and I’ve never quite gotten over it. Which brings us to one of my very favorite CDs of 2011.

Dark, haunted, intimating a hidden beauty just beyond the reach of the headlights…I played LPTO to death last year and every spin rewarded that thing in me that seeks loveliness within the deep of night. Baron Bane hails from Sweden, and as it turns out Swedes are used to long dark periods with no sunshine (especially this time of year). The songs on this disc, though, articulate the tension between light and dark, with moody minor chord structures and performances shot through with the radiance of Ida Long’s vocals.

I’ve described them to friends as being a bit like Kate Bush. The differences matter, though. Whereas Kate leans heavily into the avant, BB is more committed to accessible pop song structures. Also, where Bush’s voice is wispy and etherial, BB singer Ida Long brings considerable dynamic range to the proceedings.

Major to thanks to my friend Anders Thyr for introducing me to them (they apparently hail from the same neck of the woods). I owe you one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Raveonettes: Raven In The Grave
While we’re talking about Northern European bands (in this case, Denmark), another of my favorites is back with a bit of a change-up. I love how Tim Sendra sums up The Raveonettes’ past as ”noisy girl group and razorblades wall of sound” before characterizing Raven as building

a lingering mood of melancholy and sadness that pervades the entire album. It’s not a forbidding or cold sound since the duo still has melodies so hooky that even a blanket of gray mist can’t cover them up. The arrangements are more enveloping than usual, with the fuzzy walls of guitars replaced by waves of synths on most of the songs.

I agree with this largely, although (perhaps in keeping with my “Eve of St. Agnes” fetish from above) I do feel a coldness and darkness about this disc. The difference is, perhaps, that I find comfort in the cold. For instance, listen to the guitars throughout (although what I’m describing is instantly evident on the lead track): that beautiful dissonance sounds less like guitar strings being played than hammered. The iciness of this effect is enveloped by sweeping keys that will remind you of every electropop hit you loved in ’80s (without actually sounding like any one you can recall in particular). The total effect is like being inside a warm fleece blanket on a frigid day.

In other words, plenty of melancholy. But it’s a comforting sort of melancholy that reminds us: some gray afternoons are prettier than others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Blueflowers: In Line With The Broken-Hearted
No surprises here – I’ve been raving about this CD ever since The Lost Patrol’s manager, Ed Colavito, introduced me to it several months ago. Then, in December, they capped a big year by winning S&R’s Tournament of Rock 3 (ironically enough, nipping their good friends TLP in the final).

Along the way, I pondered the challenge of describing their sound to my friends. In marketing themselves they made use of “Americana,” but that wasn’t quite right. “Americana-noir” gets us closer to the longing affect of Kate Hinote’s aching, retro-ingenue vocal style and Tony Hamera’s wide-screen, surf-inflected guitars. (And if you think you’ve heard me use the term “wide-screen” before, you probably have – in so many ways, Hamera and Lost Patrol guitarist Stephen Masucci are mining the same rich vein; you’d never mistake them for one another, but you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were friends who respected each other’s work, either.)

If I’d been spinning vinyl on my old turntable I’d have worn through In Line With The Broken-Hearted this year. I honestly have no idea how many times I played it from one end to the other. Several dozen, anyway. And I’m nowhere close to tired of it. It’s just one of those albums with a sonic, intuitive depth that seems to reveal some new nuance with every pass.

Brilliant, brilliant stuff. I hope I don’t have to wait long for the follow-up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Adele: 21
Back in the day hype tended to be married to merit. These days hype and merit are completely, utterly and tragically divorced from merit. So anything generating as much media heat as 21 is probably to be avoided. But damn, every once in awhile an artist comes along who deserves that kind of critical and commercial acclaim. This CD is on a lot of best of 2011 lists and for good reason – for awhile there I thought it might even be my CD of the Year.

Nobody who’s only 21 ought to sound this way. Adele’s voice is a thing of wonder – rich, resonant, mature and big as the sky. Much has been made of the pain of the breakup behind this song cycle, but the truth is more than a woman in pain – this is the sound of a strong woman in pain. A woman who’s hurting, but who is going to be okay. It’s sort of the inverse of that first Fiona Apple album: all the depth and gravity, minus the fear that she might come after you with a knife.

Probably the best part is this: Adele is such a powerful talent that she’s going to be plenty viable long after the neo-Soul movement has faded away.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The consensus seems to be that Wasting Light is the best FF effort since The Color and the Shape, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s take at AMG borders on suggesting that it’s their best ever. He accurately notes the album’s ferocity, attributing it to the latent influence of Dave Grohl’s old bandmate, QotSA’s Josh Homme. Whether that’s the inspiration or not, Wasting Light takes no prisoners and the result is pure freakin’ adrenaline.

Also, I don’t know how much extra you have to pay to get Lemmy as your limo driver, but I bet it’s worth every penny.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mayer Hawthorne: How Do You Do
I was in the midst of grooving hard on Fitz & the Tantrums when my friend and former colleague Carole McNall passed along a link to something she thought I’d enjoy. Because she knows I dig me some neo-Soul. That link turned out to include Mayer Hawthorne and the world was never the same again.

Okay, well, that may be overstating the case a tad, but as fun, can’t-get-that-song-out-of-my-ears ’60s and ’70s-influenced R&B goes, it’s hard to beat How Do You Do. (BTW, for those of you back in the Carolinas, this is the best Beach Music CD you’ve heard in years, except maybe for Dixon’s 2010 release.) There’s never a false referent and every track takes you somewhere you haven’t been in years, but wow, it’s great to revisit the place. Granted, The Temptations never had the potty mouth that MH does, but you got to roll with the times.

This isn’t the only best-of list Hawthorne is on, and good for him. Some might snipe a little that he’s working CeeLo Green’s turf, but I can’t imagine Green having any complaints at all about How Do You Do except maybe “turn it up.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dum Dum Girls: Only in Dreams
If Dum Dum Girls remind you a little of a slightly garage-y/noise-gazey Chrissie Hynde, join the club. Except that, as much as I respected Chrissie, I just never dug her music. “Chain Gang” is the only thing she ever wrote that I liked at all. Songs aren’t a problem with Dum Dum Girls, though.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this disc because I’d been hearing about the band for some time (okay, mainly it’s just one woman), but the tracks I had been able to get my hands on underwhelmed me. They lacked polish and focus (I mean polish in the professional sense, not the overworked-in-the-studio sense). Mainly the sound came off like a kid in her basement who didn’t really understand how the equipment worked. You could tell there was potential there, but just not quite realized.

For Only in Dreams, though, Dee Dee hooked up with some real producers (including Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes) and all of a sudden all that potential is up front and sparkling. She’s a fabulous songwriter, in this case working around various personal hurdles (including the death of her mother), and the lingering effect in my case is that something this raw, inexperienced and low-fi should be barely noticeable, let alone this damned noteworthy.

I absolutely love pleasant surprises. Only in Dreams is one of the most relentlessly enjoyable CDs of 2011 and I can’t wait for what comes next. Want to hear some swirling ear candy that will be following you around the rest of the day? Click play.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Lost Patrol: Rocket Surgery
I don’t really know what to say here. TLP has been one of my favorite bands for several years now and after a painful personnel shakeup a few years ago they have continued to improve as a unit. On her first outing with the band, singer Mollie Israel did a nice job but the overall effect was a bit disjointed. She’s good, the guitars are good, the songs are good. All good, but not all fully integrated. It was like with a basketball team that had never played together. Great individual talents, but not yet a team.

Boy, has that changed.  Israel has more than grown into her spot at the microphone – she has become the sort of dynamic face and voice that can take a band to the proverbial next level. And maybe the level after that. Meanwhile, Stephen and Michael have allowed plenty of creative space for her to grow into. It’s clear that they weren’t interested in just finding a new singer. They wanted a new, fully invested, completely equal partner. And that’s where the phrase “more than the sum of the parts” comes from.

I’ve gone back and forth on Rocket Surgery ever since its release. It’s a fantastic piece of work that displays all the trademark elements the band’s fans have come to love. It also exhibits both a lyrical and aural expansion (note the instrumentation and arrangement of “Sweet Ophelia,” for instance) that signals an intent to evolve. This is very good news. As much as I have loved Stephen Masucci’s signature cinematic surf-twang guitar sound, I also value a drive toward creative growth in an artist.

On the other hand … dammit, I just loved 2010′s Dark Matter so much. I always want each CD to be better than the last one, but I’m not sure I can make a call between the two. So there it is. My big criticism: Rocket Surgery might not be better than Dark Matter.

Looking ahead, 2012 feels like a big, big year for TLP. They were featured on an episode of Gossip Girl last night and are queued up for a couple of significant movie soundtracks in the coming months, including the Amy Heckerling vampire comedy Vamps. There can be no question that Rocket Surgery affords the band an exceptional springboard to that next level mentioned above.

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Hiatt: Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns
The critics don’t seem to regard this as one of Hiatt’s best (although not much that anybody does measures up to that standard). Still, even if it’s a bit more polished than his recent work DJ&MH plays as something very elemental. Perhaps this is due to the world-gone-to-hell tone of the songs, beginning with the opener, “Damn This Town.” As the economy has cracked and the attendant political machinery has demonstrated that it really doesn’t much care, millions of American lives have gotten worse, in some cases tragically so.

Hiatt’s voice, crusty and raw as ever, could make “It’s a Small World After All” into a blues dirge, so when he turns his attentions to the plight of American decline (in all its macro and micro iterations) we can hardly help feeling the bitterness, and perhaps the vague numbness that sets in as hope fades.

Click here to view the embedded video.

M83: Hurry Up We’re Dreaming
I wrestled with Hurry Up We’re Dreaming more than any other release this year. I had anticipated it eagerly and when it dropped the critics went nuts. Considered objectively, I understand why. Still, I guess I had been hoping for a few more “Kim & Jessie” moments. I do love “Midnight City” (and not just because of the Victoria’s Secret commercial), and I admit that it has grown on me.

The CD is expansive and ambitious, almost as if Anthony Gonzales had set out to score an epic film set in the ’80s but made in the ’00s. Such a thing would need to capture the essence of the time, but it would also need to be contemporary. And it would need to exhibit an expansive emotional range in order to underscore the power of the narrative.

In the end, I feel like my early disappointment with the disc is a reflection on me, and not a good one. Some part of me wanted more bite-sized ear candy and M83 is to be applauded for ignoring me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fountains of Wayne: Sky Full of Holes
There’s nobody quite like FoW anywhere in the indie world. You have two exceptional storytellers, and over time they’ve so honed their lyrical skills that even the cleverest moments play casually and conversationally.

All FoW albums concern themselves with the foibles of regular folks, and most particularly they enjoy having at regular folks who lack self-awareness. In the past they’ve produced these character sketches with a certain edge – maybe a bit of smirk and snark, some subtle mockery. You might say that their songs come in two varieties: laughing with and laughing at. Here, though, the attitude has mellowed a bit. The lights are still on the ne’er-do-wells (“Richie and Reuben / don’t know what they’re doing / they’re both a little out of their minds”) but there’s more empathy than I’m perhaps used to.

We also get the usual array of place and lifestyle songs (where we went, what happened, what we did) that FoW fans have come to expect. Again, though, there’s not as much of the decadent train wreck as in the past – instead, there’s the genuinely nostalgic “Dip in the Ocean.”

In many respects, SFoH is precisely what we’ve come to associate with Fountains of Wayne: insanely memorable tunes, insightful storytelling, a lingering sense of place and time and the people who were there. Some listeners might think less bite is a bad thing, but others might find the affair to be more adult, more seasoned in ways that suggest a willingness on the band’s part to evolve organically, in harmony with the tides of age and maturity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Doco: Stereo Chemistry I always have a hard time where Doco is concerned, for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t spend much time in their genre so I always feel inadequately informed. Second, who am I kidding? I’ve known Joh and Trev Booth since day one, just about literally, as their father is one of my best friends. So no, I’m not 100% objective.

But certain things we can say with great clarity, and those things are obvious when you listen to the band. Put simply, they can fucking play, and they’re working a musical culture where that is essential (unlike, say, Punk, where you can be successful even though you think a G-string is something you stuff dollar bills in). Trevor is one of the best guitarists at his age I have ever seen and Josh is arguably as good on bass, or better. Dave Burkart seems to intuitively understand the role of a drummer in this kind of power trio dynamic, and while he doesn’t bother with flashy, he is unquestionably the rock upon which the tent is pitched.

Not only that, Doco has continued to improve in one area that I have always held sacred: songcraft. They funk about a great deal, but they also demonstrate a great fluency with more accessible structures, and their lyrics are simply way too intelligent for popular music. Seriously, Josh and Trev (who both write) can go seriously deep on you, as in English professor deep. Spend a moment with “Experimental Railroad,” if you will.

I don’t know what else to tell you. Doco is incredibly talented and this is their best CD to date. If you think I’m biased, fine – go give it a listen and tell me what you think.

So, there are your 2011 Platinum LPs. You probably won’t agree with me on all of them, but I’ve got money that says there’s something in here who’s going to be your new favorite band. Feel free to let us know what you liked.

Now, let’s have Doco play us out. This is from their appearance last year on Eleven O’Clock Rock. Happy TunesDay, folks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next: the CD of the Year

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Most of you know the basics. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s. Olympic greatness. Sonny Liston. Draft dodger. Muslim. One of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history.

Social activist. Global icon. The Greatest.

And for one working class white kid growing up in the North Carolina outback, his very first African-American role model.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

No Viet Cong ever called Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali a nigger, but a lot of people I grew up with (including very close family members, I’m ashamed to say) sure did. Ali was everything that terrified the white South. He was physically dominating (with all the undercurrents that implies). He was “uppity” incarnate. He was unAmerican for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was the devil for converting to Islam. And deep down, the part that scared them the worst was this: they understood, I think, that he was smarter than they were, too.

The problem was, I never believed that I was supposed to hate him. Maybe it was my age – I wasn’t quite old enough to take offense at the Vietnam thing. All I really knew about the war was what I saw on television, and every night they’d show the number of boys killed that day in the fighting. I don’t recall thinking about this in anything like deep, philosophical terms, but if I had I imagine I might have figured Vietnam was well worth dodging.

As for the Islam thing, well, all us crackers were afraid of blacks. Especially crowds of them demanding stuff. But … even if I was young and ignorant and irrationally afraid of blacks, I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t seem to asking for anything unreasonable and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Maybe I thought that if we met he’d like me, too.

But I was just a kid. All I really knew was what I saw: Ali was brilliant. He was objectively the best fighter alive and he was also fun. His charisma didn’t just fill the room, it overwhelmed the entire world. You could feel it, almost tangibly, even through the little 13″ black and white TV in our living room in Wallburg, NC. He said he was the greatest and it was obviously so, especially for a smart-aleck kid from the “it ain’t bragging if it’s true” school of thought.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

Today Muhammad Ali, the most famous man in the world, turns 70, and we as a nation, as a species, are better for knowing him. It’s even more certain that I’m a better person because of the courage and verve with which he lived his life.

A life that I hope is nowhere near over. Happy Birthday, Champ.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

First, let me disqualify a CD.

Paul Lewis: Bag Of Rain
If my objectivity is clouded by close personal relationships, it’s absolutely obliterated by great self-interest. And since I was fortunate enough to contribute lyrics for two of the tracks on Bag of Rain, I’m not even going to pretend that I’m being critical. I can say, however, that Paul is an outstanding tunesmith and an even better singer – I’ve been saying he has one of the best voices in the business since the first time I saw him perform in the late 1980s. These qualities have only improved with time. “Platform of Our Lives,” for instance, displays a rare emotional vulnerability, and Paul the singer understands when to coat a tune in velvet and when to stomp the accelerator.

Fans of his past work will note that he’s exploring stylistically a little, even beyond the jazzy moments we’ve come to expect (the ones that provide such a nice showcase for those golden pipes).

Paul’s talent deserves a much larger stage, and here’s hoping Bag of Rain breaks him through to some new audiences. And I don’t say that just because I’m hoping for massive royalty checks. Not that this would be a bad thing…

And now, in no particular order:

Dotsun Moon: 4am
The good folks in The Lost Patrol turned me on to Dotsun Moon, a Buffalo band they’d gigged with, a few months ago. And wow, thanks guys. Here’s what I wrote back in March:

I’ve always been a sucker for bands descended from the Portishead side of the trip-hop family tree (oddly, I like many of these artists more than Portishead themselves), and Mary Ognibene’s understated, sultry delivery hits me right between the, ummm, well, let’s just say eyes here to avoid any trouble with the broadcast standards department, shall we?Musically, Rich Flierl (keys, guitars, and the primary songwriter) conjures a smoky, minimalist economy of sound that feels quite polished despite its sparseness.

Who do they remind me of (because since you haven’t heard them, we have to triangulate via bands you may know, right)? Well, I mentioned Portishead, and Flierl admits to a fondness for Massive Attack and Jah Wobble. “Who Do You Love?” suggests that he’s heard a bit of Love & Rockets, as well. There are places where Ognibene reminds me a lot of Girl Next Door’s Kat Green and the CD’s more animated numbers put me in mind of a sort of noir version of Supreme Beings of Leisure. Other places I swear I hear bits and pieces of The Church, U2, maybe a little Echo. Or maybe I’m projecting – hard to say. Sounds and influences sneak into a mix from all over the place.

S&R readers seem to agree with me, as their support propelled the band into the semi-finals of our recent Tournament of Rock 3. All in a all, a great year ad I’m already wondering when the next CD is due.

Click here to view the embedded video.

REM.: Collapse Into Now
There’s a great argument to be made that REM is the greatest American band in history. Yeah, we can debate, but if you’re having the argument and REM isn’t in the discussion your credibility is automatically suspect. This is significant, because Collapse proved to be the band’s swan song.

A lot of people thought the previous disc, Accelerate, was the best thing they’d done since Automatic for the People, but I felt like their decision on CIN to revisit the haunted Southern goth atmospherics that defined their greatest moments from the ’80s and early ’90s was inspired. It had a warm, broken-in quality that I found comforting and appropriate for a farewell. In my book, REM’s final effort was even better than Accelerate, and while I know we all wish they could have recaptured the vital relevance they represented once upon a time, this was a far better way to exit than what we get from so many bands.

Best of luck, guys, and thanks for the memories.

Rose Hill Drive: Americana
Hmmm. Fun-loving, no-frills, pass me another beer party stoner rock. From … this can’t be right … Boulder?

I played the hell out of this disc last year and I actually want to say a word of thanks to the band. In a lot of ways 2011 really, really sucked. But Americana never once failed to pick me up. Rock has always thrived on the ability to immerse itself in sublime moments of hedonism – think about the cover of It’s Only Rock & Roll, for instance. Or anything Electric Six ever recorded. Even when they’re making an interesting point (“Psychoanalyst” comes to mind) they’re doing so in a way so throbbing with positive energy that you can’t believe you’re actually learning something.

When it stops being fun, it stops being rock, right? And folks, this was the most fun CD I heard all year.

Death Cab for Cutie: Codes and Keys
I never quite know what to say about a Death Cab CD. I mean, Ben Gibbard is one of those guys who has sort of ascended – even his least interesting work is better than most artists’ best. He’s in this category of automatics for me: Eels, Peter Gabriel, World Party, Graham Parker – if they release something I buy it without bothering to sample.

All that said, Codes and Keys doesn’t grab me as hard as the previous two discs. I wonder if it has something to do with Gibbard’s personal life. While he was making this he was married to Zooey Deschanel, and I can’t help thinking that would make you happy. And maybe happiness wasn’t as compelling a muse? In any case, they’re now divorcing, so I expect the next one to be one for the ages. I mean, if Zooey left me, we’d have to rent out a stadium to handle all the muses who’d show up to wallow in my misery….

Army Navy: The Last Place
I have to be honest – I was just stunned to see this amount of attention showered on a Power Pop group (even one where the front guy used to be in a band with Ben Gibbard). There are seemingly thousands of PPop Underground bands, all immersed in the legacy of The Beatles, Badfinger, The Raspberries and Big Star, jacking out tons of hook-infested guitar pop every year and most of it goes unnoticed outside of the community, which is passionate to the point of obsession but too small to sustain much of a market. Witness the recent demise of Bruce Brodeen’s Not Lame label: it was regarded with nothing short of reverence, but in the end it just didn’t pay the bills, so Bruce had to move on.

Anyway, as guitar-driven ear candy goes, this is indeed a great disc, and part of that I think owes to its unifying theme. Instead of a collection of neat songs, The Last Place revolves around lead singer Justin Kennedy’s ill-fated affair with a woman who was apparently a very prominent Hollywood starlet. And also very prominently married. (I still have no idea who she was, despite a bit of frenzied Googling.) The emotional tragedy that unfolded seems to have grounded the CD, affording it a depth that a lot of Power Pop never quite musters.

Oh, yeah, love the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Washed Out: Within and Without
As a term with the ability to signify goes, “chillwave” is damned near useless. It encompasses bands that we’ll charitably call “experimental” as well as this kid in Georgia who, says Tom Breihan of Pitchfork, “makes bedroom synthpop that sounds blurred and woozily evocative, like someone smeared Vaseline all over an early OMD demo tape, then stayed up all night trying to recreate what they heard.”

I can’t top that line. I can tell you that I love music that can weave an unobtrusive ambient tapestry around me when I’m trying to work but that also rewards close attention. Within and Without is a gorgeous, lush aural experience that makes me think “washed out” less than it does “washed over,” as in being washed over by waves of pure color on a tropical beach at sunset. With a beautiful woman and maybe a Mai Tai.

Queen Electric: Queen Electric
First with Wanderlust and then performing solo and as Bachelor Number One, Scot Sax has been quietly jacking out melodic, infectious guitar pop since the mid-1990s. Of course, I don’t think the “quietly” part has been by design. Sax just has the misfortune to be brilliant at a genre deemed unfashionable. Maybe this new project will generate a little more buzz for him. Queen Electric is the most muscular Sax project to date, with an extra dose of “power” in the Power Pop. Unlike past efforts, this crisp seven-track EP takes its cues more from the Rock side of things, very adeptly echoing everything from ’70s-era Elton John to ELO to Todd Rundgren to early-’90s U2 (note the guitars on the lead track).

With luck, QE is but a tasty 20-minute amuse oreille preparing us for something more substantial in the coming months.

Allen Stone: Allen Stone
2011 was a fun year in the world of neo-Soul, and Allen Stone was a big, blue-eyed part of it. I discovered this disc when my friend Carole McNall forwarded me the link to an NPR feature on Stone, The Alabama Shakes and Mayer Hawthorne. At the time I was playing Fitz & the Tantrums to death, so I was looking for more artists up that general alley.

It’s always seemed that this genre comprises a spectrum, with Soul on one end and Pop/R&B on the other. Abstracted, you have James Brown vs. Dusty Springfield, and in the neo- context this adds up to Sharon Jones vs., say, Lucky Soul. Stone lies somewhere to the James Brown side of center, and his best moments serve up a smooth, muscular white-boy sound that reminds me a lot of Ryan Shaw. And that’s a compliment, trust me.

Ida Long: In Dark Woods EP
Ida is the singer for Baron Bane, who you’ll be hearing more about in an upcoming post. So I won’t spend too much time here, save to say rumor has it that this EP is a precursor to a 2012 solo effort. Such a thing is to be much hoped for. Fans of Tears for Fears are especially going to want to hear the cover of “Mad World,” which she did for Mad Men. Gorgeous stuff, and in places a tad more experimental and quirky than the Baron Bane disc…

Able Archer: The Way Machines See Us
Matt Huseman was the front man for The Greenberry Woods and Splitsville, two fantastic Power Pop quartets. For a few moments once upon a time, The Greenberry Woods seemed poised for something big, but labels can’t seem to stop being labels and so the story went. Splitsville, meanwhile, jacked out one of the best guitar pop/rock CDs I own, Incorporated.

Now Huseman lives in Denver where he has hooked up with some new bandmates descended from very different musical pedigrees. When I first found myself thinking “this is kinda like Radiohead and Coldplay informed by a vague Power Pop sensibility” I realized that it really, really shouldn’t work (especially since I’m not a huge Radiohead fan and have no regard whatsoever for Coldplay). But somehow it does, and I think it’s because the band doesn’t try to be a fusion of contrasts. They give the guitars their heads and Huseman’s vocal presence sort of integrates the rest organically.

The result is alternately aggressive and reflective, melodic and dissonant, and it’s ambitious and complex from one end to the other. Truly deserving of a wide audience….

The Horrors: Skying
It isn’t hard to find bands influenced by Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division and Bauhaus these days. The danger, of course, is coming off as overly derivative. The last thing any of us needs is a generation of Joy Division cover bands terrorizing the Holiday Inn lounges of America.

The Horrors certainly do swirly, swimmingly dark neo-Post Punk, but they also import a dissonance that suggests the presence of a My Bloody Valentine CD or two in their collection (and maybe even a copy of Verve’s essential Storm in Heaven). It’s that shoegazer element that sets them apart and makes this CD so genuinely interesting to listen to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

She Wants Revenge: Valleyheart
I loved SWR’s 2006 debut. Yeah, it was making no attempt at all to distance itself from the influence of Joy Division, but it was absolutely seething with modern-day LA excess that, in its finest moments, cut like a designer boot full of straight razors. The 2007 follow-up? Not so much. I still don’t quite know what went wrong there, but the inattention to songcraft didn’t help.

At that point I wrote them off. Hey, we had some fun but let’s not spoil it, okay? Then my buddy Mike Pecaut sends me the Spotify link to Valleyheart and, well, it was one of the most pleasantly surprising moments of the year. Heather Phares at AMG says:

…Valleyheart injects the band’s sound with some much-needed ambition and eclecticism. A concept album about the San Fernando Valley and the turbulent relationships of its denizens, this set of songs proves once and for all that while She Wants Revenge’s influences may be from New York and England, they’re undeniably a product of Los Angeles.

You had me at “concept album about the San Fernando Valley.”

The Cars: Move Like This
I imagine a lot of us received news that the surviving members of The Cars were reuniting for a new CD with a degree of trepidation. How will they be able to translate that decade-defining sound from a generation ago into a 21st century indie context that’s extraordinarily suspicious of anything that smacks of slickness?

The answer? Well, it’s like they never broke up. Move Like This is unmistakably a Cars album, but the production and arrangements are contemporary enough that it doesn’t really sound out of place here in the third millennium. In the final analysis the new disc isn’t as groundbreaking as the debut or as absolutely iconic as Heartbeat City, but it’s better than Door to Door and on a par with Panorama or Shake It Up. Not bad at all.

The Outfield: Replay
I was always a huge fan of The Outfield, which never got much love after the explosive success of its debut. But their two follow-ups, Bangin’ and Voices of Babylon (especially the latter) suffered not because of a lack of ambition or quality, but simply as a result of changing musical fashions.

Turns out the guys are still together and recording, and if you liked them in the ’80s you’re probably going to like Replay. I might have counseled then to pick a name for the disc that connotes something a little less “hey, you’ve heard this before!” Still, that may be just as well: there’s no real effort to innovate here. No, it’s just a disc chocked full of really catchy guitar pop that sounds exactly like, well, an Outfield record. And I’m fine with that.

Wire: Red Barked Tree
What the hell. The Cars, The Outfield, and now Wire? Talk about your year for dinosaur comebacks.

[ahem] If you didn’t know, Wire was one of the most influential bands of the ’70s and ’80s, evolving from a Punk standard bearer into an important figure in the development of post-Punk. Very few bands have exerted this kind of influence, and just about none of them are still at it 30-35 years later.

Red-Barked Tree isn’t changing the landscape again, but it’s a most worthy effort that reminds us what made the band great in the first place. Minimalist, with nods to accessibility, uncompromising and intelligent, this CD should serve as an inspiration to younger bands thinking about how to matter to decades instead of weeks.

The Sounds: Something to Die For
My friend John (hi, John!) hates this CD. Seriously loathes it. And I sympathize with him – he’d like the band to be mining the same vein that made 2003′s Living in America so damned great. Loud, smart, melodic, strutting, all up in your grille. I know not all critics agree with me but I thought it was a superb record. But now our Swedish friends have decided they want to be a dance band, and Something to Die For has massive club play as its driving motivation.

My take is that people like to dance and when I was DJing I was always looking for tuneage that didn’t suck the IQ out of my head while I was partying. I see Something to Die For as analogous to their earlier work: as Living in America was to garagy Punk/Pop, so Something to Die For is to club. I wish it had been released when I was behind the turntables.

IAMX: Volatile Times
Honestly, no release conflicted me more this year. I’m a massive IAMX fan and the previous couple of discs I think are among the best of the past decade. So my expectations were sky-high for Volatile Times. Perhaps that’s the problem. By any fair measure this is an intelligent – extremely intelligent – work that continues Chris Corner’s insanely inventive dark electro-pop cabaret sound. Had I never heard any of his other work I might well be blown away by VT.

However, it seems a slight regression from The Alternative (2006) and The Kingdom of Welcome Addiction, which was a super-platinum honoree in my 2009 list. I just don’t know if what I’m thinking is a result of what the disc merits or simply the result of trying to match ridiculous expectations.

In any case, Volatile Times is recommended. If you don’t know IAMX, hopefully it will inspire you to investigate the rest of the catalogue.

Ladytron: Gravity The Seducer
Ladytron has always worked to conjure an aura of the mysterious, and 2011′s Gravity the Seducer offers up a chilly, atmospheric wash that always seems to imply slightly more than it’s saying. A number of tracks wold lend themselves nicely to the dance floor (“Ritual,” “Ace of “Hz”), but there are more ambient swaths of the disc which seem intended for the lounge (or opium den). In an alternate, and exceptionally cool universe, this is what ABBA sounded like, and “White Gold” reminds me of Switchblade Symphony’s final CD, so I suppose I should find a way to work “trip-hop inflected goth/darkwave” in here somewhere, shouldn’t I?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cults: Cults
It took me forever to figure out what I was hearing with Cults, and I’m still not sure I fully get it. But the other night I was playing the CD again, and when I got about halfway through “Most Wanted” I said hey, wait – this is like a neo-girl group track with a Chillwave overlay. That may be wildly misleading, but you have to admit that it’s an interesting idea.

AMG confirms a bit of this, saying:

Cults’ twinkling experimental pop arrived in a shroud of mystery early in 2010, when the group posted three songs on their Bandcamp page. One of those songs was “Go Outside,” which mixed dream pop haze with girl group harmonies (and, fittingly, samples of Jonestown leader Jim Jones) and earned the band acclaim from publications including Pitchfork and NME.

I don’t quite hear Jesus & Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine here, although the Phil Spector mention on the AMG overview page makes perfect sense. In any case, Cults is a CD that I admit, without reservation, that I did not care for on first listen. After about five spins, though, it started to take root and it keeps getting better and better.

Telekinesis: 12 Desperate Straight Lines
On first listen, 12 Desperate Straight Lines reminds me a lot of Death Cab for Cutie, only brighter and happier. Upon repeated listens, though, it … well, it reminds me a lot of Death Cab for Cutie, only brighter and happier. This is not a bad thing at all. Michael Benjamin Lerner has a finely honed knack for writing a song that’s upbeat and engaging without being off-puttingly bubblegum. I hear that complaint about a lot of Power Pop bands, and while I don’t think it’s always valid, I do understand the nut of the sentiment. Here, the production is beautifully aligned with the earnestness of the songs, providing plenty of professionalism without burying the songs beneath too many layers of polish.

Galaxie: Tigre et Diesel
My French was never great to start with and I haven’t used it since college, so I can’t really connect lyrically with this Montreal Francophone Garage outfit. Boy, I love the songs, though. The raw, distorted guitars remind me a bit of last year’s outstanding Tame Impala disc, and there’s more than a little T. Rexy stomp going on with the keys.

I wonder if they’re saying anything interesting?

Cheerleader: Vegas or Bust I can’t remember who turned me on to Cheerleader, but I was listening along thinking how unfashionable they were. The CD reminded me of hook-heavy pop-rock form the late 1980s, maybe a tad of hair metal and an echo of The Outfield here and there. Just damn, great songs that had been born 25 years too late. Really, they were almost like one of those great Swedish revivalist acts that don’t give a damn if you think they’re derivative or not. Like The Hellacopters, whose stance is along the lines of “you worry about what’s stylish, and we’ll be over here rocking the fuck out of it.” So I hit the Googles and did some snooping. Ah, of course. Cheerleader is from Stockholm. Let it fly, boys.

Ron Hawkins: Straitjacket Love Chemical Sounds was one of my best of 2008, but I totally didn’t see this coming. Former Lowest of the Low front man doing a stripped down alt.country disc? Raw and elemental, there’s simply nothing about the production that gets between the listener and the soul of one of Canada’s most under-appreciated treasures (south of the border, anyway). Wildy’s World has this to say:

Ron Hawkins continues to dig closer and closer to his own personal truths on Straightjacket Love, striving like a miner to find what’s real in the structure of song. On what is perhaps his most personal and compelling work to date, Hawkins delivers an entertaining blend of celebration, rumination and remorse from the building blocks of country, rock, folk and blues.

The Catch Fire: Rumormill I first heard this band on Art Jipson’s Tuesday afternoon WUDR show, as I recall. I liked what I heard so I bopped over to Spotify and liked the rest of the disc. Rumormill isn’t complicated – it’s your basic really great Power Pop Underground disc, laden with irresistible hooks, silky vocals and guitars that remind you of a time when guitar pop was a shared cultural value. I did a little research on the band and realized that, aha, that’s why I like what I’m hearing so much. One of the main guys is Mike Mitschele, who used to be in Jolene. And they’re from Charlotte in my native state, so props for that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nicole Atkins: Mondo Amore I loved 2007′s Neptune City. Atkins was not only doing a bang-up number on the emerging world of neo-Soul/R&B, she was doing so with the most dynamic set of pipes in the genre (and I say that with all due respect to Sharon Jones). I was expecting more of the same, perhaps, and was thus taken a little off-guard by Mondo Amore, which has left the ingenue act behind in favor of a persona that’s more worldly and occasionally just a little pissed off. She’s still mining sounds from decades past, but is doing so in ways that are more muscular, even bluesy in spots. The songwriting is seductive as ever, and her ability to preserve the legacy of the artists she clearly adores (Roy Orbison’s name keeps coming up, for some reason) while growing visibly is great news. Neo-Soul is a fun moment, but any artist who gets too mired in it is going to be left behind when the audience moves on in a couple of years.

Up next: the Platinum LPs, to be followed by the CD of the Year….

One caveat, based on something I’m becoming more aware of lately. I’m not a record reviewer. I’ve done that from time to time, but I never liked the nuts and bolts of being a pure critic and I never thought I was very good at it. Still, this list, through the years, has worked to be as critically honest as possible. But dammit, I have reached the point where I care less about the technical process of arguing artistic merit (in my year-end CD review, anyway) and more about promoting music that I like and respect. If this weren’t true, I’d devote more time in my S&R music ramblings to things I don’t especially care for, wouldn’t I?

Maybe I’ve reached the point where I should just say up front, before I get started, that each of the bands I have included here has passed a test in my mind, and I could, if I had the time and inclination, justify their inclusion in mind-numbing detail. However, I don’t want to write all that and you probably don’t want to read it. So instead of reading the list as a hard-fought intellectual process, maybe treat it as “here’s this guy who knows a lot about music, listens to hundreds of records each year and has been doing so since way back when they were called “records,” owns thousands of CDs and has been writing about music, sometimes for money, since the late 1980s, and these are the albums he really thought highly of last year – let’s listen and see if we like them, too!”

Up first, a hybrid category that includes honorable mentions as well as CDs that I liked after a listen or two, but just didn’t have time to consider in depth. This is in part due to a wonderful development, Spotify. I can now listen to, in its entirety, just about everything. Which is great for Sam the listener, but overwhelming for Sam the guy who feels an obligation to include everything worthy in his year-end list.

Peter Murphy: Ninth
I was never, oddly enough, a big Bauhaus fan. I loved PM’s early solo work, but I kinda signed off after Cascade, though. This may not be fair, but somewhere along the line it felt like he’d gotten too happy for the music to quite work for me. I couldn’t really get my ears around the happy family goth approach, although I acknowledge that any number of astute critics disagree with me emphatically.

I came across Ninth late in the year and have only had a chance to spin it two or three times. I think I like it. It is, in places, both energetic and direct while being mature and reflective in others. I look forward to getting to know it better.

Eilen Jewell: Queen of the Minor Key
Another late-in-the-year discovery, Eilen Jewell was recommended to me by Tony Hamera of The Blueflowers as a possible entrant in Tournament of Rock 3. AMG describes her music as a “country-flavored and blues-infused version of contemporary folk (which also can include healthy doses of rockabilly and surf),” and that’s about right. She seems to be getting a lot of well-deserved praise for Queen of the Minor Key, which I think I’m going to like a lot once I’ve had a chance to listen to it a few more times.

The Amends: The Amends
As I noted in a piece back in October, Boulder is mainly known as America’s Mecca of hippie music. Pure rock, garage rock, indie, not so much. But there are exceptions, and I really like the debut release from The Amends (one of two Boulder bands who feature in this year’s Best of series). The Amends are young and raw, but they’re already demonstrating a knack for penning a compelling rock song and the ability to play the hell out of it once it’s written. I think fans of bands like The Strokes and The Nines are going to appreciate this disc, especially if they also dig The Gaslight Anthem.

And their new video for “Hotel Lobby” is a lot of fun, too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Portugal. The Man: In the Mountain in the Cloud
More than any disc I encountered this year,  In the Mountain in the Cloud illustrates the double-edged sword that is Spotify. Without Spotify I’d never have heard it. Then again, it was all the other stuff on Spotify that had to be checked out that kept me from investing more ear-time in this one. I can say this, though. A lot of bands dig into Bowie and T Rex for inspiration, but very few do it as unselfconsciously as P.TM.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Esben and the Witch: Violet Cries
This was one of the most critically anticipated CDs of the year. Based on the video for “Marching Song,” which was released in late 2010 (shown below), I was pretty jacked to hear it, too. Dark, drenched in distortion, it had me expecting a throwback to Haight-era psychedelia, like Grace Slick on ‘roids. In the end, though, I felt like the product was low on the signal-to-noise ratio. Yeah, there was lots of distortion and noise, but I just couldn’t find enough song in there to justify the hype. In the final analysis, I felt like it was okay. An interesting and worthy experiment, to be sure, but one that could have used a little more there there.

Viva Voce: The Future Will Destroy You
Hmmm. They don’t sound like they’re from Muscle Shoals. Another very late discovery (found them in the Tournament of Rock process, along with Eilen Jewell), so I’m still trying to catch up with their atmospheric and deceptively inventive sound. AMG puts is better than I can:

The Future Will Destroy You is an expansive and somewhat slow-burning mix of the indie rock, psych rock, and pop sounds they’ve delved into over the years.Viva Voce have always evinced an interest in the kind of garage rock meets baroque pop aesthetic of such acts as Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse, and fans will be happy to know that not much has changed here.

Like a couple of the others mentioned above, I like what I have heard of this disc but have not yet had a chance to give it a fair listen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Up next, the Gold LP Awards (followed by the Platinum LPs and the CD of the Year). It’s gonna be great.

I’ve always found it somewhat ironic, if that’s the word, that two of the best novels I’ve ever read about America—Dvorak in Love and The Bride of Texas—were written by a Czech expatriate author who lived in Toronto. In fact, they’re two of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. Skvorecky, who died this past week at 87, had what one might call an interesting life—he grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (experiences which formed a substantial focus for much of his fiction), got into constant trouble in Communist Czechoslovakia for his writings, and was banned repeatedly. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1968, and he spent the rest of his life writing excellent novels and short stories, teaching literature, and publishing other Czech expatriates through his publishing house. Lots more details can be found in the NY Times obituary, or in the Telegraph obituary. A fuller literary appreciation will undoubtedly show up in the NY Review of Books soon.

He is perhaps best known for The Engineer of Human Souls, which is a fine and visionary novel about the role of the writer in society, any society, but takes on a deep irony by contrasting the life of Danny Smiricky, who happens to be Czech exile teaching in Canada (as was Skvorecky), with life under both the Nazis and the Communists. This makes it sound like a simple political novel, which it is far from being—it’s a deeply felt, albeit meandering, novel about individualism that happens to take place in multiple locales, with more than its fair share of pathos and humor. Skvorecky used Danny throughout his literary career—the early collections of Danny Smiricky stories are wonderful too, especially the jazz stories. And it’s all good–The Bass Saxaphone stands out here.

But the two that stand out in my mind are the two that concern America. Dvorak in Love is about just that—Dvorak’s journey to America in 1892 to 1895, which produced, among other works, his best-known work, Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Of course, what Dvorak did in America is pretty much what he did in Bohemia all his life—he wandered around and listed to music that people played and sang—in villages, in towns, wherever he could. The novel captures that wonderfully, as Dvorak adapts negro songs and spirituals to symphonic form. But it captures more—Dvorak was in love with America, what it was becoming, and what it represented to many of his countrymen–its energy, its freedom. It’s a wonderful novel, told from multiple perspectives, and not least because Skvorecky is not blind to America’s faults, particularly its racial history, but still, like Dvorak, is enamored of what America represented to Europe and much of the rest of the world—hope.

This theme is explored in more detail in The Bride of Texas, a longer (and much more experimental) novel set in the American Civil War, which follows the exploits of a group of Czech immigrants who enlist in the Union Army. This actually happened—the Union ranks were loaded with immigrants, including Czech immigrants who served, as do the book’s characters, in the 26th Wisconsin battalion under Sherman. And while motives likely varied, there’s no question that at least some of it derived from Skvorecky’s area of concern—the feeling of gratitude to a country that offered hope. The novel itself is probably the most experimental of Skvorecky’s works, with its constant shifts of time and character—but it’s well worth the effort.

It’s easy to forget this sometimes, when the current American political circus seems to offer nothing but ignorance, mendacity and viciousness about immigration (and, lord knows, so many other things), what America used to represent to the world–hope. And to some extent it still does, although the past decade certainly hasn’t helped. But we’re all (or mostly all) descended from immigrants from somewhere, and it’s good to be reminded of why that is. Skvorecky was a wonderful writer with the ability to create a broad canvas in a number of areas—and like his Czech soldiers, I’m grateful to him for having brought me so much pleasure, and I will miss him.

Scholars & Rogues wants to thank our music-loving readership for making this the most successful Tournament of Rock yet, and we’d especially like to say a huge thanks to all the bands who participated. ToR3 featured a number of surprises and upsets, but in the end we hope that everybody found a new band to love.

So, the Finals represented our biggest turnout ever and the margin was incredibly close. The Blueflowers and The Lost Patrol asked their fans to vote and they did. When the last chad was unhung, the winner by a 52-48% margin was…The Blueflowers!

Major congrats to Tony Hamera and Kate Hinote. You guys have given us one of the year’s best CDs and the win is richly deserved.

We’d also like to congratulate The Lost Patrol, who likewise served up some amazing music in 2011. The irony in all this is the email I got from TLP manager Ed Colavito a few months back. It went like this:

Ed: Hey Sam, do you know The Blueflowers?
Sam: I’ve heard of them but never listened to them.
Ed: You have to hear them. Email Tony Hamera and tell him I said get you a promo disc to listen to.

In other words, if Ed had a little more Simon Cowell in him this all might have gone differently. But that isn’t who TLP is. They want everybody to hear the music they love whether it’s theirs or not, and S&R is proud to be associated, in any small way possible, with people who understand the importance of music to community.

So again, congratulations to our winners and our runners-up. It won’t come as any surprise to anyone when both bands make prominent appearances in our Best CDs of 2011 series, coming soon…

When ToR3 started some of you probably looked at the relative popularity of the bands involved, reflected in things like the size of their Facebook communities and the numbers of people they draw when they’re on tour, and figured the Finals would wind up featuring either The Horrors or The Postelles facing off with either The Raveonettes or Eilen Jewell. But, now that The Blueflowers have defeated Doco in the second semi-final, we’re looking at a battle we maybe didn’t expect: two bands that are somewhat lower in national profile (although hopefully that’s changing). And who are actually very good friends when they aren’t in the ring (it was Ed, TLP’s manager, in fact, who turned me on to The Blueflowers several months ago).

Major congrats to Doco, by the way. They’re one of those no-frills acts that does nothing but practice and tour and thrive on the energy of their fans and the live show. Great run, guys, and we’ll see you here shortly in our Best CDs of 2011 series.

And now, let’s go ring announcer Michael Buffer….

The Blueflowers: ”With [Kate] Hinote leading the lines, the result is an album that is as haunting and soul-invading as it is enthralling. Songs like the title track and “Fragile” give the listener the impression that they’re in on a secret, like they’re reading Hinote’s diary. That level of refreshing honesty, some damned fine tunes and the stellar musicianship of the band is what makes In Line With the Broken-Hearted such a tremendous piece of work.” - Metro Times LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Lost Patrol: ”The Lost Patrol aren’t here to comfort you on Rocket Surgery. Instead, it’s a chilly feeling of abandoned county roads with empty barns and ghost towns, like on the slower, darker, farther away “Coming Down,” or the slyer and twang-ier “Don’t Give Me Love.” The echo-sustain on the twelve-string acoustics brings out a harpsichord-like sound on the penultimate “Love” and especially middle track “Not the Only One,” and the harpsichord is the most haunting instrument there is (even more than the xylophone, which is, “The music you hear when skeletons are dancing” – Homer Simpson).” - QRO : LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now it’s in the hands of S&R’s readers. Who’s your winner, folks?

Good friends Dotsun Moon and The Lost Patrol squared off in our first semi-final. TLP surged to an early lead, only to have DM mount a furious comeback. In the end, though, TLP was a little too much, holding on for the win and a spot in the Tournament of Rock finals. They await the winner of….

Doco: ”Short version: a fusion of funk, rock, rap, white-boy reggae and blues from three kids who can by god play their instruments. I once wrote, in a ten-second music review for my mobile content service, that they ‘burned with an intensity no single genre could contain.’” - Scholars & Rogues LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Blueflowers: ”These are ballads for sadly/sublime sunsets and blustery, moonless evenings where you crate out the candles, stirring up all kinds of volatile yet inspiring emotions and resolute/re-affirming notions.  They take you on almost more of an earnest sunshine-pop dreamscape rather than overly-heady psychedelia, and it’s benefited by penchants for surf-rock/dream-pop sandwiches, thus transcending, or at least ameliorating the hazy-blazey twang of Americana.” - Deep Cutz LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now it’s up to our readers – who gets the other slot in the ToR Finals?

Our fourth quarterfinal match lacked the drama of the previous one, as Doco handily dispatched Rose Hill Drive to move into the semifinals. And now, we move into the semis, where it starts to get personal. See, our next two bands know each other and play together sometimes. You might even say they’re friends. Although, maybe for the next couple of days we can make frenemies of them.

Dotsun Moon: ”The band has labeled their music as ‘dream beat.’ I don’t think I could think of a better description even if my life depended on it. I love Mary Ognibene’s voice. She can make the little hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up one minute and put you in a trance the next. ” Ear Candy LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Lost Patrol: ”…spiritually resonant, like you’re listening to the heart-broken spirits of melancholy minstrels from beyond; angel-headed hipsters with reverb-guitars guiding us morose mortals through this cruel sea of tears. None of this is nearly as depressing as it sounds.” - Retrospect : LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Time to vote. Polls close Monday at midnight.

First off, wow. Our previous match, The Blueflowers vs. Eilen Jewell, saw Jewell jump out to an early lead. Then The Blueflowers blew past her and established a huge advantage. Then Eilen’s fans battled back and re-took a late lead, only to see Blueflower fans mount a late surge to nip Jewell at the wire. This match saw the largest turnout in any ToR match to date (that includes all three tournaments) and final margin was a scant few votes. The irony, of course, was that Jewell was nominated for this tournament by none other than Blueflowers mastermind Tony Hamera. So, again, wow. Congrats to both artists and thanks to their fans for such a truly fantastic show of support.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. We’ll see how fans of our next two bands respond.

Doco: ”Doco overlooks the creation of an image, believing that eyeliner and women’s jeans don’t compensate for boring, cliche music. Focusing on songwriting, the band constantly creates witty, thought provoking lyrics, stuck-in-your head riffs, and moving beats. The sounds are always fresh, and often hard to contain in a single musical genre.” – CD Baby LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rose Hill Drive: ”Similar to the way that Ford has retrofitted the new Mustangs to recall the classic look of the fastback coupes, Rose Hill Drive is a riff-driven throwback to the heyday of AOR radio; there’s a distinct air of familiarity, but this clearly isn’t your daddy’s muscle car.” – Westword LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident.

It was January, and the country’s eyes were on football. The NFL had moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California because Arizona had failed to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day an official holiday. To protest Arizona’s decision, and to show support for the new holiday—and, perhaps even to show solidarity with the NFL—someone on my college campus in northwestern Pennsylvania decided to celebrate with a rally. I can’t remember how, but I wound up on the program.

I read Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: 

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

To tie in to the King holiday, I added a verse of my own, how the Negro stood on the banks of the Potomac, on the steps of an American temple, and dreamed a dream of peace and justice with a preacher from Montgomery.

It was King’s day, to be sure, but for me, my big takeaway was Langston Hughes. He wrote “Rivers” when he was only nineteen, inspired by the sight of the Mississippi while on a bus trip. The poem appeared in The Crisis in 1921, and it made Hughes’ reputation almost instantly.

The Great Migration had already shifted the face of the country: Southern blacks had moved into northern cities, and possibility was palpable in the air. World War I infused everyone, particularly marginalized blacks, with a can-do attitude and renewed faith in the American dream. No where was this more evident than in Harlem, New York, which thrummed with creative energy, intellectual optimism, and wild, white-hot jazz. “In a Harlem cabaret / Six long-headed jazzers play. / A dancing girl whose eyes are bold / Lifts high a dress of silken gold,” Hughes wrote in “Jazzonia.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the intellectual fathers of the Harlem Renaissance, touted the power of the “talented tenth”—the top ten percent of the black population, representing the intellectual and creative genius of the entire race, who would show the rest of the world just what that race was capable of. Hughes, too, stood at the front and center of the movement.

Born in 1902—the same year Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk—Hughes moved around a lot growing up because of divorced parents. He was raised for a while by his maternal grandmother, by family friends, and eventually by his mother and her second husband. In 1919, he lived for a while with his father in Mexico, but the two shared a troubled relationship. He continued to move around throughout the twenties, attending then dropping out of Columbia, traveling overseas, living in D.C., and then finally alighting in Harlem permanently by 1929.

During that time, he continued to publish, following up on the attention “Rivers” brought to him. A chance encounter with Vachel Lindsay provided a further boost. As legend has it, Hughes had been working as a busboy at a restaurant where Lindsay was dining, and he slipped the famous poet some of his own work. Lindsay, impressed by the “busboy poet,” proved to be an energetic advocate.

Hughes counted Walt Whitman as a major influence. Carl Sandburg, too. “By 1926, when he published his first volume of verse, The Weary Blues, he already had fused into his poetry its key technical commitment,” writes biographer Arnold Rampersad:

the music of black Americans as the prime source and expression of their cultural truths. In these blues and jazz poems, Hughes wrote a fundamentally new kind of verse—one that told of joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, of ordinary black folk, in the language of their typical speech and composed out of a great love of these people.

Listen to the rhythm, for instance, in “Song for a Banjo Dance”:

Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chile,
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em swift and wil’—
Get way back, honey,
Do that rockin’ step.
Slide on over, darling.
Now! Come over
With your left.
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em, honey chile.

“If there was a Renaissance going on in Harlem, the people on the street didn’t know it,” Hughes later said, perhaps a bit disingenuously. After all, Hughes served as the voice of the common black man and woman of those times. Compared to the formal poetics of Countee Cullen, for instance, Hughes was the poet-laureate of the street.

Consider the voice he captures in “Dressed Up”:

I had ma clothes cleaned
Just like new.
I put ’em on but
I still feels blue.

I bought a new hat,
Sho is fine,
But I wish I had back that
Old gal o’ mine.

I got new shoes,—
They don’t hurt ma feet,
But I ain’t got nobody
For to call me sweet.

Over the span of more than forty-five years, Hughes wrote poems, essays, plays, short stories, histories, and even libretti. In his later years, he also served as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. In the sixties, even as that preacher from Montgomery led the March on Washington to the banks of the Potomac, Hughes supported King’s peaceful, moderate approach. He defended King against attacks from militant blacks, Rampersad says, and he himself attacked the “obscenity and profanity in the new militant black writing” of the time.

Years after his death in 1967, Hughes even made a cameo appearance for a younger generation. In Jonathan Larson’s 1996 musical Rent, in the act-one closer “La Vie Boheme,” he appears with “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, and Cage. Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes [and the stage].” A new generation, singing along, celebrated all things Bohemian and, in doing so, found a new excuse to rediscover Hughes’ poetry.

But it’s for his association with the Harlem Renaissance that Hughes is best remembered. The poems he wrote then swing wild with energy and resonate deeply with voice. They are, most of all, fun to read. They are a delight.

Poetry “is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words,” Hughes said shortly before his death. For Hughes, poetry was life.

“He wanted no definition of the poet that divorced his art from the immediacy of life,” Rampersad says.

That is why a poet can look back and know ancient rivers, because that knowledge helps him understand the now. “Each human being must live within his time,” Hughes said, “with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country.”

Each human being must live.

In our second quarterfinal match, Dotsun Moon made quick work of Snake Rattle Rattle Snake. Congrats to SRRS for making the quarters, and again, I love the new CD. We’ll see you again in our upcoming best of 2011 review.

Up next, a quarterfinal match between two acts working the neo-Americana side of the street.

The Blueflowers: ”With [Kate] Hinote leading the lines, the result is an album that is as haunting and soul-invading as it is enthralling. Songs like the title track and ‘Fragile’ give the listener the impression that they’re in on a secret, like they’re reading Hinote’s diary. That level of refreshing honesty, some damned fine tunes and the stellar musicianship of the band is what makes In Line With the Broken-Hearted such a tremendous piece of work.” - Metro Times LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eilen Jewell: ”Sometimes as darkly damaged as Lucinda Williams, at others as defiant and teasing as prime Peggy Lee and always authentically Americana in the Gillian Welch tradition….She’s mighty good.” - LA Daily News LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can’t go wrong either way, can you? Still, only one can advance to the semi-finals. Who shall it be?

In the first match of round 2, The Lost Patrol handily defeated Baron Bane to advance to the semifinals. They await the winner of today’s throwdown, and my inner conflict continues unabated….

Dotsun Moon: …”Dotsun Moon’s secret weapon is the soulful and authoritative voice of Mary Ognibene. On tracks such as the breathy, skipping opener, ‘And I Rest,’ the riveting , floor-thumping standout ‘Savages, and the languid ‘Glory,’ her powerhouse pipes repeatedly amaze. Though well suited for dance club PAs, 4am is also varied and intriguing enough for intent home listening.” The Big Takeover LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Snake Rattle Rattle Snake: The record, the first release by Denver startup label The Greater Than Collective, is a black tapestry of pulsing, macabre rock n’ roll that feels as if it is being slowly slashed apart by bright head-nodding hooks – deconstructing the sinister underbelly only to sew it back together. LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Time to vote – who should advance to the semi-finals?

“Technology is a vehicle for our humanity,” declared the first poem, “Muse/Manifesto.” “It is the face of humanity, its functions reveal our designs, desires, deficiencies, deifications, discontents.”

I flipped through the book. Science fiction poetry. I’d never seen such a thing before. It was good stuff. So, after reading Age of Miracles, I called up Annie Boyle to ask her about it.

Chris Mackowski [CM]: I found Age of Miracles in a Barnes & Noble in Binghamton, New York, of all places. You published it through Lulu.com, so you wouldn’t really expect that it would randomly show up someplace like that since you’re from Salem, Massachusetts. How did that happen?

Annie Boyle [AB]: I’ve been trying to figure that out myself! (she laughs) It’s available on my website and on Amazon. It’s also sold locally here in the Salem area. I figure whoever was ordering volumes for that store in Binghamton must’ve seen it somewhere and liked it and so ordered a copy to have on the shelf there.

CM: I’d never seen science fiction poetry before.

AB: It isn’t common, although it’s more common now than it used to be.

Science fiction is always something I’ve read almost ever since I started reading. I read constantly, and it very much informs what I write. “Write what you know,” right? I know science fiction. I’m inspired by science fiction.

One of the first things I remember reading was There Will be War, a collection edited by Jerry Pournelle. The first volume. My dad had it in his book collection. There were a couple striking things in the anthology, including the original “Ender’s Game” short story by Orson Scott Card. There’s also a piece by Joe Halderman, who wrote the novel Forever War. There was a formal poem in [There Will be War] that he’d written, a sestina—which is a real bitch to write, but he did it beautifully. It was called “Saul’s Death.” I remember when I’d first read it, and so I’d always just had that in the back of my head that you could tell a story in a poem—a science fiction story.

I like the dichotomy of it. It looks to the future, real high-tech, using this ancient form of communication. You’re communicating using language.

There were stories I wanted to tell, and some of them were science fiction. I was more into writing short stories when I started. I wrote poetry as it came to me and not really as a project in and of itself. When I wanted to challenge myself, I started taking a closer look at what I’d learned about different kinds of writing. That’s what brought me back to the poetry.

CM: So poetry let you see your storytelling in a different way?

AB: In a poem, I’m telling a story or I’m writing a scene. When I write something like that as a piece of poetry, I’ll challenge myself to be very precise with the language but still make sure it has a flow to it. It has to have a flow to it.

I like lyrical poetry. By that, I mean that what I write works in my head as song lyrics. There’s not a standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure to it like that or anything, but you have to have a flow to it. There’s some repetition. I might start a “verse” and then change it up from stanza to stanza as the poem unfolds.

I kind of have Snow Patrol playing in my head for some of them, or maybe a David Bowie song. There’s a poem in the collection, “Ziggy,” that was very David Bowie inspired. I thought about changing it so that it didn’t seem so derivative, but I thought, “You know what? It’s Ziggy, so just leave the name in there. That’s how it works for me.”

I love David Bowie. Not only is he inspirational to me for his lyrics but also as a science fiction poet. He combines science fiction and poetry, and he’s treating it lyrically.

I have other poems inspired by songs or musicians, too, or other writers.

CM: Your dedication lists a lot of brilliant science fiction authors: Philip K. Dick, Warren Ellis, William Gibson, Frank Herbert, Dan Simmons, Lois McMaster Bujold, C.J. Cherryh, Kim Stanley Robinson…all these people who’ve influenced you.

AB: I could have a whole page of them! (she laughs) If I was going to write another science fiction collection, it’d be influenced by China Mieville, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Alastair Reynolds. They’re all people I’ve read since Age of Miracles was published. They’re fantastic. I loved them. They’re great. So, they’d probably show up if I did another volume.

CM: There are some other surprising people who appear in the book, too: Keats, Homer, Poe, Emily Dickinson, Christopher Marlowe….

AB: I really like Christopher Marlowe. I’ve just always loved him. He’s so mysterious, and mystery surrounded him. I first came across him when I was reading about Shakespeare and was very intrigued. Never mind even just the conspiracies about “Did he write Shakespeare?” He was surrounded by spy networks and espionage and murder. Because of some of that, he isn’t that well documented. Of course, Shakespeare isn’t that well documented, either, but there’s even less about Marlowe.

CM: I really liked that sequence where you’re ordering up clones of authors as pets. The idea of a pet Rudyard Kipling seemed hilarious.

AB: That’s the first idea I had for the poem “Age of Miracles.” I’m not particularly attached to Kipling, but I thought he worked well. I thought it made a make a great poem. So then I thought, “Oooo, who else could I do?” So I wrote a few more. I thought, “Maybe I could make this work.”

When I wrote the Keats poem, I thought of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series. In that, there’s a character who’s a Keats android, although it’s a completely different sort of story going on. I didn’t think of that until I’d started writing the clone poem.

CM: That’s, what, a seven-poem sequence that opens the book? That’s what really got me hooked. How long did it take you to write the collection?

AB: The vast majority of the poems were written over the course of a year. Once I started with the “Age of Miracles” set, I wanted to have more to work with. Obviously, there are things that are in there that are not strictly science fiction. It’s just what I was writing at the time. Not all the first-person narrators are me, either. Not every “I” is me–they’re characters.

CM: Your most recent piece is Nimue’s Challenge. Can you tell me a little about that?

AB: It’s the tale of Merlin and his apprentice. I’ve been obsessed with the Arthurian legend and Merlin. I read Mary Stewart’s series, The Crystal Cave—which was really excellent—when I was growing up. It made a huge impression on me.

So, along with that, I’ve done a lot of fantasy. I like folklore, mythology, postmodern retellings of fairy tales. I love that stuff. Like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber.

CM: You working on anything else at the moment?

AB: I’ve been having a few knee surgeries. I have a lot of leg pain, and I have fibromyalgia, so it’s difficult to sit and work at a computer. I haven’t figured out how to do that for long stretches yet. So, things like that have kept me occupied. I’ve given the local library a decent workout.

I have a few pieces I’ve been working on, though. I’m just not sure where they’re going to end up.

I recently put together an e-book of microshort fiction. It’s titled Servo8 Is Drunk Again, and it’s available through Lulu. It’s half a dozen really, really short stories. I wanted to see if I could tell a little story in a really short time. It’s my first venture to tell something a little more humorous, too. It’s been gratifying to me that others have found it funny. I’m so glad it wasn’t just me!

CM: Would you go back to Lulu? What did you think of that experience, self-publishing like that? What took you there in the first place?

AB: A friend had suggested it. Also, I knew that I wanted to do everything myself. I knew what I wanted—what the book cover would look like, the layout, the editing—and I wanted to try it myself.

I had a friend tell me that I deserved a medal for designing and basically publishing a book using Word. It was really a pain in the ass, but I really liked being able to go through in detail and say “This is what I like and this is what I don’t like.” If you go through Lulu, there are services you can buy, but if you want it to look good, you really have to pay attention. I was really, really happy with the print quality I ended up with.

For my next one, I want to look at an Amazon e-book. I haven’t done one yet, but I know people who have and they’ve been pleased.

CM: Does that include your cover?

AB: The cover is just as much a piece of work as anything in the book itself. I went to some craft stores to see if I could find mask, and it just started with putting some silver stickers on the lips, but then I wondered, “What else can I do to this?” I had a friend who’s a photographer take some pictures of me with the mask, and I had another photographer friend who does a lot with photoshop, and I asked him if he could make it look like so….He added the circuitry and made it look like part of the mask had been peeled back. The idea is that if you peel away the mask of the cyborg, if you peel away the technology, you’ll find our humanity underneath.

CM: Any final advice for people who pick up Age of Miracles?

AB: Don’t be afraid to take it in small doses. It’s kind of intense. Don’t be afraid to find humor in there, either. If you see something that comes across as sarcasm, or you’re wondering if it’s dark humor, it probably is.

————

As an S&R exclusive, check out two of Annie’s poems, “The Gears are Gods” and “Crisis Engine.”

In conjunction with our  interview with poet Annie Boyle, S&R is pleased to feature an exclusive look at a couple of her poems: “The Gears are Gods” and “Crisis Engine.”

The Gears are Gods

I am stretched thin as a wire
my soul writ infinitely large

copper cogs bite into my flesh
my blood turns to oil and quenches their maws

I am stretched thin as a wire
reaching from one star to the next

the lenses over my eyes show me spectra
the lenses within transmute them to joy

Crisis Engine

there’s a crisis that you’re having
about identity and dreams
can’t find the deus in your machina
no ghost in the machine
just an engine running clean
that can’t explain your dreams

you look inward on infinity
an eight turned wrong way round
a moïbus feedback loop
leaves you cursing the recursing
that leads you back to this
a helpless twisting on yourself
and turning on your world
the switches don’t explain
why you’re coded on this curl
why you can’t break and unfurl
the vicious cycle mandate
from a maker you can’t find
if there’s a tangle to untwine
to free your soul and mend your mind

you were built just to be broken
to shatter and break others
to wound with fractal flaws
once you’ve slipped under the wire
once you think you’ve learned the laws
learned the rules and found a place
then you know you have a heart
because you feel it break
as you watch with distant eyes
your own destruction’s wake

the nightmare eats your time
even riding in the day
vision just a blink away
of a line of spiraled numbers
of a set of switches signed
“deliberately broken
do not seek repair”
God’s abandoned your machine
you can’t escape your program
you can’t erase your dream
of a line of days unbroken
of your soul at peace and clean

In the final match of round one we had a close encounter, with Rose Hill Drive finally easing by The Raveonettes. Now, it’s on to round 2, and from this point forward I’m going to be in a state of constant conflict. Here, for instance: two bands I love, two bands that produced CDs that are among the year’s best.

Baron Bane: ”LPTO is truly a lovely listen front to back; while its energetic moments drift unassumingly by, however, it is the quiet that resonates the longest.” – Pop Matters : LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Lost Patrol: ”Rocket Surgery is sprawling, glistening music as full of bursting beauty as 11 red roses springing open—and as dazzling as their World’s Fair (Queens) at supernova-dusk sleeve.” – The Big Takeover : LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now it’s up to you. Who should move on?

I worry about hyperbole whenever I hear someone talk about a physical reaction to a piece of writing, so I’m hesitant to describe Rachel McKibbens’ book of poems, Pink Elephant, as a gut punch—but damn, it is. At one point, it also sent willies down my spine, too.

This is a collection of poems not to be trifled with.

“I am the star of the violence,” she warns in her first poem. In the second, “The First Time,” she and her brother are trying to run away. It might be any two kids running away from home, as almost all children are apt attempt at some point.

But subsequent poems make it clearer and clearer—and more horrifying—why they’re trying to escape. Jealousies, abuse, alcoholism, molestation, terror. “God was too busy for kids like us,” she realizes.

She watches her father beat a man with a crowbar at a gas station as the man’s wife watches impotently.

She watches her stepmother get dragged over the glass of a shattered taxicab window as they tried to escape. “The sprinklers came on / in the courtyard / as I made my way up the sidewalk, / following a trail of blood back / all the way home.”

When her father admits, drunk, that he killed the family dog years earlier, her fury finds itself. “That night, I learned vengeance can mean / one less knife at the dinner table; / an infuriated child tucked beneath / her father’s bed, / waiting. / Waiting.”

Even when her father is not the main antagonist, he helps heap on the misery. In “For Peter’s Sake,” she gets molested by a stranger on a church playground. “Proud, I told my father,” she writes. In response, “he smacked me like a housefly” and swings her into the car by her hair.

McKibbens is insidious in her efficiency, though. She frontloads “For Peter’s Sake,” for instance, with the phrase “The first time”—as in, “The first time I was molested….” The awful implication of that sits like a big ugly thing over the rest of the poem. Another poem in the collection, “The Doll,” tells of molestation, too. It is one of the most devastating poems I have ever, ever read.

“The Balance” tries to conjure the good memories she has of her father. “To live at all, I have to remember these days, too / place them on the highest shelf like glass figurines caught mid dance,” she writes. They are the memories that power her own attempts as a parent to break the cycle of violence. Poems chronicle that struggle to become the kind of parent she wants be, not the kind of parent she herself had feared. Her own childhood, filled with large-scale violence, boils down into all the small ways a parent can hurt a child. Check out the heartbreaking “Central Park, Mother’s Day”:

“To forgive my father means to uncover / the value of my own life,” she writes in “How It’s Done.” Pink Elephant searches, searches, searches for that value.

McKibbens’ poetry is not for the fainthearted, but Pink Elephant is a collection that’s so powerful, so unrelenting, so uncompromising, that you can’t afford to ignore it. After these poems hit you in the gut, they’ll sit there for a good long time afterward.