Harmonica Alert
The woeful state pop music is in owes a lot to bands like Low Anthem, who owe a lot in turn to the New York Times for its commitment to writing them up. With antique instruments “which the band works on and repairs,” witheringly false lyrics that have their author traveling by train “to Ohio” (the state, one presumes, makes no difference, so long as it says Americana), and a fool’s gold sound made “authentic” by following the formula Dylan + whispery indie vocals + period instruments + closing your eyes, Low Anthem is the real thing alright: authentic bourgeois horse turd.
From the New York Times piece: “They point to the rafters where the bats roamed during late-night recording sessions. “This place was full of creaks and cracks, ghosts and hidden screams,” Ms. Adams said.
“Part of what is going on is that people are suspicious of sincerity,” says one of the band members. Sincerity comes easily to this band. Apparently they are so sincere that the band members ”were Dumpster diving a few years ago for cereal boxes to make CD cases out of.” Later, in keeping with the theme of sincerity, the members say they “really have no concept of what a musical career is.” And: ”the first 7,000 CD and 5,000 LP covers were printed there in a garage jammed with ancient presses.”
Pretending to live in a bygone era isn’t sincere or authentic. In fact, burning cds and making covers with Photoshop is a lot more so, and don’t tell me these guys, after they’ve ridden home from the studio, presumably on horseback, don’t use computers as handily as their parents do.
David Carr, to give him the benefit of the doubt, doesn’t sound completely won over, neither in the article nor on the NYTimes “popcast,” but you would hardly know it from the puffy, complimentary quotes in the article. Mike Mogis, the band’s producer, says of the band, “they record live, and in a kind of haphazard way, ended up coming up with their own sound that is timeless and unpredictable.” And then this: “I wouldn’t say that any of us is a virtuoso, except maybe Jeff on the bass and Jocie on the clarinet,” Mr. Miller said. “We are more interested in the noises that are made and how we can bring them together.” Well, even if two of your four members didn’t fall into that august categorization, you wouldn’t be doing yourself that much of a disservice to swear off virtuosity; we all know in what low esteem it’s held these days, and for a band striving for authenticity, surely it’s almost anathema. And - congratulations - being interested in “noises that are made” is thoroughly banal, even when it’s not coming from retrogressives. You can’t use something John Cage might have said legitimately to shore up the artistic credibility of some corny old folk tunes. You can’t have it both ways.
The music itself is as bland as it comes. Not only does it not seem in any way sincere to me, it seems exactly the opposite: desperately phony, and not just in the lyrics, though that’s the petard by which I’ll be hoisting them here…
from To Ohio…
I left Louisiana on the rail line, oo oo
I left Louisiana on the rail line, oo oo
I Lost my love before her time, oo oo
I lost my love before her time, oo oo
On the way to Ohio
Did she die on the train? I guess it is a pretty long trip. That’s probably where the nearest doctor was back then.
from Champion Angel…
We come now to a fracture in the road
Here time has taken her toll
The endless freezing and the thawing of the heart
Will eventually divide us apart
A very tricky verse. An estrangement is being compared to a “fracture in the road,” which is then compared to a heart that is like a road and has cracked. It tries to say that the relationship, because of the way it keeps warming and cooling, can’t last. That’s fine. But, other than the mixed metaphor, there is another weird problem: if the fracturing of their heart is going to divide them apart, it’s strange that they’re on the same side of the fracture (“we come”) in the first line. It’s like they’re meeting their future selves on the road. One of them is going to have to get on the other side of the crack so that they can eventually be “divided apart,” or they were meeting each other coming in opposite directions, which means they were never very close to begin with. Perhaps it was being in a long-distance relationship that caused the crack to appear. It just took their coming together to see it. The fact that it says “time has taken her toll,” though we don’t know whether on the heart or the road, mitigates their individual responsibility for the impending split. It’s a natural thing, this division, particularly if they’re just meeting.
from Ticket Taker…
They say the sky’s the limit
But the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books cradle and all
They say before he bit it
That the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gamblin’ man
With a ticket in the rain
What an atrocious mixture of cliche and non sequitur, not worth trying to parse. I find something grating about their dependence on the word “them” as a rustic substitute for “those” throughout the album (all of these lyrics are from the second to latest one, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin). David Carr thinks there is a “consistency” between what they say and the music they play, but I doubt they talk like cowboys in Providence, Rhode Island these days. Lyrics aren’t meant to be read, I know, least of all those written by twenty-somethings. But there is a big smelly rot in music emanating from bands like this; the lyrics are just symptomatic of the bigger problem, ie, the music. See for yourself…
Harmonica Alert
The woeful state pop music is in owes a lot to bands like Low Anthem, who owe a lot in turn to the New York Times for its commitment to writing them up. With antique instruments “which the band works on and repairs,” witheringly false lyrics that have their author traveling by train “to Ohio” (the state, one presumes, makes no difference, so long as it says Americana), and a fool’s gold sound made “authentic” by following the formula Dylan + whispery indie vocals + period instruments + closing your eyes, Low Anthem is the real thing alright: authentic bourgeois horse turd.
From the New York Times piece: “They point to the rafters where the bats roamed during late-night recording sessions. “This place was full of creaks and cracks, ghosts and hidden screams,” Ms. Adams said.
“Part of what is going on is that people are suspicious of sincerity,” says one of the band members. Sincerity comes easily to this band. Apparently they are so sincere that the band members ”were Dumpster diving a few years ago for cereal boxes to make CD cases out of.” Later, in keeping with the theme of sincerity, the members say they “really have no concept of what a musical career is.” And: ”the first 7,000 CD and 5,000 LP covers were printed there in a garage jammed with ancient presses.”
Pretending to live in a bygone era isn’t sincere or authentic. In fact, burning cds and making covers with Photoshop is a lot more so, and don’t tell me these guys, after they’ve ridden home from the studio, presumably on horseback, don’t use computers as handily as their parents do.
David Carr, to give him the benefit of the doubt, doesn’t sound completely won over, neither in the article nor on the NYTimes “popcast,” but you would hardly know it from the puffy, complimentary quotes in the article. Mike Mogis, the band’s producer, says of the band, “they record live, and in a kind of haphazard way, ended up coming up with their own sound that is timeless and unpredictable.” And then this: “I wouldn’t say that any of us is a virtuoso, except maybe Jeff on the bass and Jocie on the clarinet,” Mr. Miller said. “We are more interested in the noises that are made and how we can bring them together.” Well, even if two of your four members didn’t fall into that august categorization, you wouldn’t be doing yourself that much of a disservice to swear off virtuosity; we all know in what low esteem it’s held these days, and for a band striving for authenticity, surely it’s almost anathema. And - congratulations - being interested in “noises that are made” is thoroughly banal, even when it’s not coming from retrogressives. You can’t use something John Cage might have said legitimately to shore up the artistic credibility of some corny old folk tunes. You can’t have it both ways.
The music itself is as bland as it comes. Not only does it not seem in any way sincere to me, it seems exactly the opposite: desperately phony, and not just in the lyrics, though that’s the petard by which I’ll be hoisting them here…
from To Ohio…
I left Louisiana on the rail line, oo oo
I left Louisiana on the rail line, oo oo
I Lost my love before her time, oo oo
I lost my love before her time, oo oo
On the way to Ohio
Did she die on the train? I guess it is a pretty long trip. That’s probably where the nearest doctor was back then.
from Champion Angel…
We come now to a fracture in the road
Here time has taken her toll
The endless freezing and the thawing of the heart
Will eventually divide us apart
A very tricky verse. An estrangement is being compared to a “fracture in the road,” which is then compared to a heart that is like a road and has cracked. It tries to say that the relationship, because of the way it keeps warming and cooling, can’t last. That’s fine. But, other than the mixed metaphor, there is another weird problem: if the fracturing of their heart is going to divide them apart, it’s strange that they’re on the same side of the fracture (“we come”) in the first line. It’s like they’re meeting their future selves on the road. One of them is going to have to get on the other side of the crack so that they can eventually be “divided apart,” or they were meeting each other coming in opposite directions, which means they were never very close to begin with. Perhaps it was being in a long-distance relationship that caused the crack to appear. It just took their coming together to see it. The fact that it says “time has taken her toll,” though we don’t know whether on the heart or the road, mitigates their individual responsibility for the impending split. It’s a natural thing, this division, particularly if they’re just meeting.
from Ticket Taker…
They say the sky’s the limit
But the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books cradle and all
They say before he bit it
That the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gamblin’ man
With a ticket in the rain
What an atrocious mixture of cliche and non sequitur, not worth trying to parse. I find something grating about their dependence on the word “them” as a rustic substitute for “those” throughout the album (all of these lyrics are from the second to latest one, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin). David Carr thinks there is a “consistency” between what they say and the music they play, but I doubt they talk like cowboys in Providence, Rhode Island these days. Lyrics aren’t meant to be read, I know, least of all those written by twenty-somethings. But there is a big smelly rot in music emanating from bands like this; the lyrics are just symptomatic of the bigger problem, ie, the music. See for yourself…
