How To: Begin a Rock Album

Grinderman is raw, razor-sharp, rock and roll. On their second studio album, Grinderman 2, Nick Cave’s stripped down quartet punishes their guitars with devilish zeal and thrashes drums and cymbals as if they have committed some atrocious offense, much like they did on their debut. The result is just over forty minutes of untamed, unfiltered, emotionally-charged music. In creating any album, the first tracks are always the most vital. They shape the path of the album, its atmosphere, in order to fashion a coherent vehicle of art these tracks must be its backbone. It has been a long time since I was gripped so by the start of an album the way I was when I first listened to Grinderman 2. A wolf, its teeth bared in a brutish snarl, adorns the cover, and the albums first two songs, “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” and “Worm Tamer” pull that strained snarl back further, unveiling a gritty sound.

“Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” kicks off with an addictive bass loop and high-pitched, distorted screech of guitar. Cave’s voice rises above the grinding, grating guitars and churning percussion, with the roughness of a man who has seen it all: “I woke up this morning / I thought what am I doing here? / My brother he starts raging / Watch him rising / See him howling / And sucked her, and he sucked her, and he suck her dry / And he bit at me, and bit at me, and said goodbye / Up on the twenty-ninth floor.” The track barrels forward as Cave recounts the aftermath of a raucous night, his frank delivery in even play with a rapidity of percussion and crashing cymbals, only broken up by Cave’s own piercing yelp and the melting distortion of guitar.

There is hardly a moment to retrieve your breath or your senses as the music fades, and chuck-chuck-chuck of one garbled guitar exchanges twisted notes with another jagged axe in the lead up “Worm Tamer.” Backed by understated ascending harmonies and strewn with pating breaths that are barely human, Cave looses an aptly venomous string of words, charged with the most overt sexual allusions, each verses ending with the cutting phrase: “I guess that I’ve just loved you for too long.” In this second track amidst waves of buckling, distorted guitar strings, Cave loosens his grip over both his own insecurities (“She leaves me every night and who could blame her”) and his inability to detach himself from this nightmarish woman and find contentment elsewhere (“I cry a storm of tears till the rising dawn / You know I’m only happy when I’m inside her”). It is both a cyclical and finite piece, Cave could likely go on into the night about the deprave twists of this relationship, but track ends with Cave acknowledging the unmistakable: “I guess I’ve loved you for too long.”

Listen, this is how a rock album begins, unapologetic and feverish. And, after a complete listen it is undeniable that Nick Cave and Grinderman have no intentions of loosening the slack.

Song of the Day: "Kentucky Pill"

In a year during which the English folk-rock outfit Mumford & Sons have gained widespread play for their rousing choruses and nimbly-plucked banjo, their compatriot Johnny Flynn deserves equal recognition for his work, blending the spirit and arrangements of traditional English folk music with his personal predilections much the same way The Tallest Man on Earth has reinterpreted the likes of Dylan and Guthrie. A man who during interviews regularly references Shakespeare as a major influence, indeed before releasing his 2008 debut A Larum toured New York with a stage company performing Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew, recently played in Boston and I regret missing him, not knowing the quality of his catalog beforehand.

Flynn's most current release, this year's Been Listening, features the same blend of folk-inspired arrangements, with ample amounts of fiddle and banjo and horns interjected amongst an album that illustrates Flynn's growth, as well as his undeniable debt to previous acts who have straddled the same line between traditional folk music and more contemporary rock and roll. One of the key tracks off of Been Listening must be "Kentucky Pill," a beautifully arranged pieced, layered and yet straightforward, a track that demonstrates Flynn's lyrical abilities (other not-to-be-missed tracks include: "Churlish May," "Barnacled Warship," and "Sweet William pt.2" - who can resist a song with their name in the title, I ask?). To put it simply, if you've enjoyed what Mumford & Sons have brought to dinner with Sigh No More, then stay for dessert because what Johnny Flynn serves up on A Larum and Been Listening is more of the same, and it is a delicious sound indeed.

Links and Videos

First, Cee-Lo's hotly anticipated release The Lady Killer is now available. Here is a great review from Pitchfork. Admittedly, I have not yet listened to the album from start to finish. It is a matter of time and restraint, not intentional neglect, because, secondly, tonight and then Friday, I will be taking in first Deer Tick and then Sufjan Stevens. Playing the part of an anxious student, I am cramming in anticipation, refusing to listen to anything other than those two artists. As much as I admire Cee-Lo and his music, he is certainly one individual who could derail my plans, and end up monopolizing my musical listening for days, even weeks, with those soul-filled vocal chords of his. He will just have to wait until Saturday morning.

Below are four songs, all of which I desperately hope to hear in the next forty-eight hours.

Frightened Rabbit Concert Review: October 29, The Paradise

Two Fridays past, I headed over to the Paradise Club to see Frightened Rabbit in Boston. It was a show that I had been eagerly awaiting for several weeks, and it did not disappoint. An added bonus to the evening was arriving in time to see the first of the two opening acts, The Phantom Band. Like Frightened Rabbit they hail from Scotland, and like their countrymen they are a predisposition toward pounding drums, and a swelling, layered musical orchestration, their songs complete with extensive instrumental intros. Definitely a group to keep an eye on moving forward, you can find more of their work on iTunes.

Any apprehension that Frightened Rabbit would not live up to my lofty hopes and expectations, the kind you always have for your favorite bands, was quelled shortly before the band took the stage. Speaking with a couple who had driven up from Philadelphia, I was pleased to learn that they had seen the group some two years ago, and that they had put on a remarkable show, and that I would almost certainly enjoy the evening. They were not wrong.

Taking the stage, lead singer/guitarist Scott Hutchinson and the band were all smiles and seemed excited to get underway, launching into “Things” from their most recent release The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Set against the heavy pulsing of ambient keyboards and crashing percussion, Hutchinson’s voice strained as he therapeutically sung of moving on, letting go, of boxing up an old life: “I didn’t need these things / I didn’t need them, oh / Pointless artifacts from a mediocre past / So I shed my clothes, I shed my flesh / Down to the bone, and burned the rest.” Bared emotions of fragility and uncertainty are never lacking from the Scottish quintet, and it was something to behold to see how well the group’s studio work translated to the live stage. For all the extravagantly dark overtones that Frightened Rabbit’s lyrics possess, make no mistake they are heartfelt and sincere. Hutchinson seemed at times Atlas with a guitar in hand, a weight only he can feel threatening to crush him unless he tensed and strained and fought the emotions threatening to flatten him.

2007’s The Midnight Organ Fight tells of a ruptured love and the darkness that follows, and The Winter of Mixed Drinks is its sequel in all but name. The tracks from both albums meshed well upon the stage, the band pulling from one album and then the other. It is clear that The Winter of Mixed Drinks is embedded with a determination to move forward, a knowledge that while life is still scarred by the painful fracture of an old relationship, that it is something of an accomplishment to be “doing alright” when looking back to the abyss of emotional ache from which you climbed. Questions of vulnerability continue to arise, as in “Yes, I Would” (“Well, what if I am never thrown that bone / And what if this tear in my side just pours, and pours, and pours”), background vocal harmonies paralleling the narrator’s inner turmoils and doubt. Unlike the atmosphere of defeatism that entwined the spirit of The Midnight Organ Fight, the staccato of guitar melding with the nervous steps forward during “The Wrestle” (“Bare those teeth to me please, man eater / You can see of all me naked with fear / This is the test I left land for”), and the emotions spit rapidly, dueling with riff of guitars and jarring pound of Grant Hutchinson on drums, the uplifting anthems of “Nothing Like You” and “Living in Colour” illustrate a distinct resolution of spirit. For all their rousing spirit and orchestration, both songs are still yet marked with an insecure gloat, and tinge of incomplete rejuvenation.

It was not simply the words Scott Hutchinson yearningly delivered into the microphone, but how the rest of the band fed off his emotions, equal parts elation and distress, that made the performance memorable. Perhaps the best demonstration of this symbiosis came during “I Feel Better,” off Midnight Organ Fight. Speaking to the crowd, Hutchinson delved into the background of the song, saying that he had gone to New York City, “to win a girl back, like you always do.” It was a trip that ultimately ended in failure, and writing this song was a means of coping. With bass guitar plodding rampantly, Hutchinson calls out, “I’ll stow away my greys, in a padlocked case, in a padlocked room / Only to be released when I sing all the songs I wrote about you / This is the last one that I’ll do.” It is a naive attempt to bring closure, locking one’s troubled feelings away. Cymbals crashing, an echo of vocal harmonies rising and falling in the background, reflecting Hutchinson’s struggle to find balance: “I feel better, and better, and worse, and then better / Than ever, than ever, than ever, than ever / I feel much better, and better, and worse, and then better / Than ever, than ever, than ever, than ever.” It was a song that lifted the crowd, and a song from which the emotions all other songs that Frightened Rabbit played that night could be drawn: the loss of love is a lonely struggle, and packing the emotional hurt, not matter how deeply, leads only to further torment. Inverting the first verse, the track closes with an illustration of sentiments that refuse to die: “I’ll stow away my greys, in a padlocked case, in a padlocked room / Only to be released when I see you walking round with someone new / This is the last song I’ll write about you.”

It’s hard not to believe Hutchinson, as he strains with those finals words in “I Feel Better,” but you come to find they simply are not true. All the songs Frightened Rabbit played that night, before and afterwards, from “Be Less Rude” of their debut album Sing The Greys to “Good Arms vs. Bad Arms” to “My Backwards Walk” to “The Loneliness and The Scream” are colored in one shade or another with Hutchinson’s past. Everything about the show reiterated to me why I was, and continue to be, so drawn to Frightened Rabbit’s music.

And one more video, just for luck, and just because The National's "Fake Empire" is partially covered...

Song of the Day

I simply cannot play this track by TV Girl enough, it seems. Entitled "If You Want It," and catchy as anything heard so far this year, it's a poppy tune that will wrap itself inside your skull and refuse to leave. I am looking forward to whatever else this duo has in the works. Check out the link to the track at Pitchfork: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/12022-if-you-want-it/ and the band's myspace page.