Kronski
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M83 ’s latest, Saturdays=Youth, takes the listener on an imaginary time warp, one where seemingly dissimilar musical blends and memories meld, where Cocteau Twins era dream nostalgia merges with old techno styles to create a hermetically sealed world, imagined through the eyes and ears of various High School students, including you, dear reader.
This record is so well put together its like scenes unfolding in a film, all working together, to define us, then and now, each end of each song a smooth transition into the next one, so it’s the night out and the morning after, from puberty to prom night, the third wine cooler and the sick feeling next morning.
It starts off with a simple piano etching out the skies. Then the synthesizers come in, reminding us where we are, placing us there, on the morning of the day that changed your life, maybe it was the morning after the prom, the first letdown in a lifetime of letdowns.
Then the vocals bleed in from other tracks, spindled memories from college radio, from the back seats of cars, passing a whiskey bottle nicked from the parents sadly ignored liquor cabinet. Burning down the road, the music on so loud, you can barely make out the sound of the wind over the synths and voices that come in.
After the introduction of “You Appearing”, next up is the immediate ear candy, of “Kim & Jessie” and you’d be hard pressed to find a more lovely a fitting tribute to the decade of cocaine and synthesizers, with its lilting chorus that nicely scuffs up your Trapper Keeper. Early Human League is a reference point, as is OMD , China Crisis, maybe even Flock of Seagulls, all filtered through the haze of a cold high school morning.
Sonically its all there, from the sublime guitars part that sound like My Bloody Valentine, the birds chirping backwards sound, the chorus, of “Somebody loves you shadows”, whispered across the halls of our imagined high school like a rumor floating from the quads to the commons.
And my god is the sequence on this record perfect, for just as the sweet airy chorus of “Kim &Jessie” hits us, after a brief return to instrumental vintage electronic music, “Graveyard Girl” comes next with an opening not unlike New Order’s “Ceremony”. With a strident drum sound giving way to the opening of one of the best melodies of the year, the guitars, synthesizers, and the bucolic vocals talk about high school and seems to control the plot, who told what to whom and how the are all connected by this “Graveyard Girl.”
“Graveyard Girl” is all told through the canvas of a really great Echo and the Bunnymen song smoked through an ethereal filter, the synthesizers overlapping into guitars, driving home the dreamy days and nights, when the sky seemed as tall and endless as the person you chose to sit next to until long after dark.
Then the narrative switches, and we hear this Graveyard Girl actually step out and reveal herself.
“I’m going to jump the walls and run… I won’t miss them… I’ll read poetry to the stars… waiting for someone to love me… I’m fifteen years old and already I feel like its already too late to live… don’t you?”
That moment in particular captures the cant wait to grow up, cant wait to get out of here feeling of adolescence, of loving everything too much until it hurts. It all makes for one of the best songs of the year, wrapped in my own memories of High School, the sounds all tumbled together, with the alienation of rejection in a disappointing prom night, barely graduating, the t-shirts and haircuts, promises and lies, all of my youth heavy and traumatic served up in delicate layers of froth and steam, electronics and breathy vocals.
From there we venture into instrumental territory, a fizzy tribute to New Order in “Coloures”. And in this scene we could be at the Prom, the haircuts refined and defined by Flock of Seagulls, the punks in the corner with mohawks, chains and those skeleton Misfits logos running up their arms.
“Up” gives us a glimpse, a come down in the form of a lost 80s FM radio classic.
“We own the sky” is a kind of overly ambitious anthem where droning keyboards show the cars lined up at the impromptu park party, the one where the cops brought out the police spotlight across cars where teenagers crouch on the ground and sip beer out of red cups.
“7AM, dusty road, I’m going to drive until it burns my bones” Declares the narrator at the start of “Highway of Endless Dreams” the voice sounds like our Graveyard Girl, after she’s moved past the graveyard, and wants escape so badly she can feel it in the way the song creeps up and folds over it self, perpetuating motion, as we can see the suburban landscapes giving way to mountain ranges, receding ice packs, state borders, highway patrol cars and shimmering coastlines.
All of this is meant to accompany a listener’s interpretation of the 1980s, and how each year the music changed, and sometimes it brought you closer to someone, and sometimes the songs were like a kegger, the voices and faces and personalities blurring together to the endless techno beat blotted out by kegs of Natural Light. And as the eighties looked out over the precipice into the nineties, to the Acid House movement, we feel like we’re right in that pocket, watching the sun go down.
“Dark Moves of Love” with its rising chorus out of a cloud of guitar and keyboard tells our imaginary high school that its not too late, because they like just broke up like yesterday, calling our hero to action to traipse across the campus to where she is, over to the art room, and maybe when he goes through the circular tube that is the entrance to the print room. And she was in there, her face framed by the half waterfall of blonde hair, head cocked back just so, and this was falling in love for the first time. Because being sixteen, seventeen its like you’ve already missed your chance.
With the teacher far away, it was just her and him and being alive then meant living forever and he is you and you had to settle for the red lights and the image of you two coming up under the fixer in the photo room. An image taken last Saturday at the park, where she leaned onto your shoulder, and the synthesizers kicked in slowly like they do in the final song “Midnight Souls Still Remain”.
In this song, memories of High School fade in a long slow dissolve (11 minutes) to the present, looking back at who we were then, an older image, one in the bottom of your drawer. a photo you made in that dark room that day, an image burned into photo paper clinging to the bottom of the fixer tray.
There's something about Oregon Winters, how bleak the days can be, the afternoons lazily going by, and getting used to the endless variety of cloud cover, be it white or cream-colored, that makes me think about Sun Kil Moon.
There is something in the voice of Sun Kil Moon lead singer Mark Kozelek that seems to hit me with a stormy sense of arrival, the way it washes over my ears, and how sometimes his voice seems almost comically one-dimensional, and others it hits the way that you feel, just nails it, and you have thoughts in your head since you last got out of that Leonard Cohen phase.
And there are whole corners of people in the world that never listen to this stuff, because it’s too melancholic?
The first few times I put the record on, it seemed too much for me to judge in one sitting. I wanted time with this. The second time I put the record on, it didn’t fare well. The sun was out, maybe for the first time this year, a lick of warmth of Summer in a cold Spring, but then that guitar on “The Light” hit me, and there I was, the two of us, in bed, right before it happened, and next thing I knew I was taken off to a better place.
The next time I only thought about it as an entity, how sound waves reverberating off of a wall constitute one hell of a thing, and this record was now becoming a challenge to review. The truth was I couldn’t find anything to call it, anything to compare it to, but this huge empty white canvas on my computer monitor and the words that couldn’t describe the sounds being wrung from this disc with my heavy hands.
Part of the blame lies on the creator Mark Kozelek, as he doesn’t write typical songs. You listen to Mark Kozelek for where he takes you, the atmosphere. There are common markers for the faithful: sunny days take a back seat to gray ones, there are gusts of wind in his songs, and torrents of sea spray abound.
His last record under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, 2003’s “Ghosts of a Great Highway” was a flight through the stratosphere, where time unfolded slowly with great effort and focus, as we waited for one thing that was slowly revealed musically, and whether it was a turn of phrase, a melody or swelling guitar solo, it made the listening so rewarding that it made it well worth the wait.
So his new album, “April” then, deals in similar atmospherics to its predecessor, and it often feels like music that one could surrender to completely, as one surrenders to the voice of a favorite author or a mad proclivity. For this record Kozelek slows down a bit, letting many of the songs luxuriate into the seven minute mark, which makes it even easer to block out all other senses and just listen and wait for a slow realization to hit.
Maybe at the time I’m falling in or out of love, maybe I’m watching someone I love suffer greatly. It might be too late to save my marriage, your marriage, but during one listen we will be transcended, disappointed, inspired, dispirited, taken in on a very personal journey. For this is music to have epiphanies to, music for reflective times, as Sun Kil Moon, really just Kozelek, set up atmospheres where you will want to linger in for multiple listens.
You may not always be in the mood for it, but if the timing is right, and you are in the coast of your mind with waves crashing and your whole landscape continually changing, you will be rewarded.
Sometimes when I listened, I wanted to warn all of you.
“Reader take heed.” I wanted to say. For just as too much naval gazing can cause self-obsession, you might find that time spent with this record is akin to time spent too focused on one painful event, as the record at times does, and you get swept up in the undertow.
Much of the record goes by slowly, with the clouds forming into a fine sketch of someone’s face, like a forgotten moment in third grade pulled out of a memory and digested. The record then picks up speed with Crazy Horse-inspired “Tonight the Sky”. This shuffling, catapulting rocker holds us down to earth as the storm pulls on our kite, the lightening and thunder in his voice guiding us through the storm, leaving us soaking wet and compelled.
Mark Kozelek has taken great care to construct the cliffs that overlook the hill, places meticulously drawn out of his breath that immediately wraps the listener into this world. The feeling that it was all too much faded as I stretched out into “Tonight in Bilbao.”
For these songs are like viewpoints on cliffs and I am in these places on the cliffs, watching the clouds go by, watching all of this nature swim up around me. And I feel like I am truly living inside of these songs.
Bonnie Prince Billy makes an appearance on a few tracks, and both of their voices when taken together, while hymn-ally hypnotic, occasionally act as too much filler, more dumpling than broth, and threaten to bloat what is by most accounts a perfect cement to bury these corpses of American legends.
For this is a grand album, one not capable of fully figuring out in one sitting, but two weeks later when the record had already hit stores, and people were waiting for the review, and in six months time this will all make sense to me, my bearings complete and comfortable in their newfound chaos. It will be fully enjoyed at a time where you either fell in our out of love, or just want a comfortable spot to watch the wreckage slide into the ocean.
Because in the end this record sets up for me a Mount Rushmore of melancholy, with Mark Eitzel from American Music Club, Mark Kozelek from Sun Kil Moon and Bonnie Prince Billy chiseled out and perched over the crashing waves of Big Sur, just to let that be an example for the rest of us.
Comments
i love the tone of this song, the moodiness. i'm not sure if this is the D scale, but it has that kind of melancholy sound...
Red house need painting? Bad moon deserve termination? Kozelek's your man. He is simply brill - dark and deep, but revelatory.
Been feeling the Sun Kill Moon love on MOH . The guitar work sounds very CSNY "Ohio" - inspired.
For a few years during the late 1990s, the Elephant Six collective ruled supreme, and bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, and the Apples in Stereo built out and decorated a world of their own, one where the heroes of history books and the bible became intertwined, offering a second story existence from the showroom floor of reality.
And that’s what Andrew Rieger’s voice and lyrics do to me when his band creaks into these songs, cracking open a new world, but really returning to an older one, like sitting in an old chair you'd forgotten about,and rocking back and forth, taking us back to that world, and breaking it wide open while pondering the universe as it flies above in the exposed roof overhead.
For these songs seem to know a future that I do not and open up demons in my past, bringing up a time when I had more facial hair and felt the dirty shag carpet of a friend’s living room. The record will become my obsession for a few weeks and then I will return to it, and in so doing I will know, once again, all the dark twists and pitfalls.
For in all of Elf Power’s music, the narrator is a higher power, situated at a level from where he can view the world ahead, and in so participating in this religious exercise that is listening to this record, I felt that I had to preface the listen with the following statement:
“Gentle voice, speak to me so that I may see the infinite wisdom, from the clouds that embrace this land of ours, for I through you, have been imparted with this gift of perception, to see all the things that you see and know, for you are my vessel, my only crack into the blissful realms of eternity.”
This sort of religious reference is the results of Rieger’s voice, this lilting thing that comes up from a familiar place, a little voice inside pulling me into the song. And in so doing into skeletons that live inside of it, so all you can hear is the intention of the song, the idea of the singing, an impression, a thumb print on the inside of a cave.
I’ve been following Elf Power since the dawn of Elephant Six, when Laura Carter still played for a band that was too unreal to actually exist, Neutral Milk Hotel. My own memories of seeing Neutral Milk Hotel are murky, late night explosions, songs too overwhelming to take in, Scott Spillane and singing saws, Jeff Magnum being completely transcendent, for in his mind he was not playing in a shitty little dive bar in Columbia, South Carolina, no. He was hosting the god of Shiva the destroyer through his veins and limbs and Shiva was adjusting all thirty-eight notches in his spine.
But while Neutral Milk seemed almost too otherworldly, Elf Power at the time were real people and the good friends of good friends of mine, and Andrew Rieger would send tapes of Jeff Magnum and Elf Power to my friend’s place, and the one we listened to the most, apart from Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, was Elf Power’s first album proper, “When the Red King Comes.”
And the friend who received all of the tapes, who read the letters aloud, in the dingy hardwood floor upstairs apartment, this person, who’s no longer alive, is paired with me forever in Elf Power, and on every record since then I’ve found a little bit of him there.
I’m not entirely sure that I am correct about it being there, and maybe I am only hearing it, because each time I miss him, especially on “Walking with the Beggar Boys”, because it sounds like Rieger is feeling the loss as well. For he died a year or so before “Beggar Boys” came out, enough time for his story to be included in the record’s song cycle. I heard his voice in many of the songs, specific lines that referenced my memories of him.
And so each time the ghost of him would prop itself up, the tragedy coming back as well, of how someone so alive and so bright one minute can be dead the next.
I tell this story, because on “In A Cave” the songs stretch far back, take a step back sound-wise, right next to “When the Red King Comes”, so close I can make out the yellow paper Andrew’s Letters came on, the smell of the place, my friend’s smile when he listened to the record for the first time, feeling proud that his friend had made such powerful music.
So “In a Cave” with its strange interludes, trap doors, bursts of tangled branches of noises, backwards chants that sound like John Lennon inhaling the Tibetan Book of the Dead, has so many caverns and crannies to get lost in, has all of the moss, stalactites and stalagmites of a dirty psychedelic rock record.
“New Illusions appear everyday it’s getting harder to wish them away,”
In this song, we can't tell if Rieger is talking about a young person becoming older in an increasingly jaded world, or if it’s a teenager waiting for the assurance of the drugs to kick in.
Either way, at either end of the spectrum, it's prophetic, and seems to operate on both of these levels simultaneously.
There’s something motherly about Rieger’s voice, that until now I hadn’t notice, a comfort for gray skies and that dark inevitable disappointment and deceit that eventually falls on all of us, to fight off friends left behind in dark rooms with bruises all over them.
There are reasons why people cling to music as their salvation, and songs like “New Dark Lord” when taken at face value, could be a new darker lord in the form of the supernatural realm, or a dark political storm brewing, either way if we acknowledge the darkness then we give ourselves permission to live.
A bit of fifties girl group in the melody line of “Softly through the Void” lightens the mood a bit, and if that just-mentioned title in itself doesn’t just go ahead and just define the whole record, the gentle passage over the tip of inferno’s tightrope, nothing else will.
“The Demon’s Daughter” comes in towards the end, another title that pits the familial against the fabric of darkness, another juxtaposition of fairytale chaos against the vacuum of the natural world around us, where an evil force is sucking the life out of earth, each drop of ocean, people splinter, one person dies, and into this “one comes alive”.
“Demon’s Daugther” opens up the possibility of a messianic figure to show up and straighten things out in the next song, “Quiver and Quake” but that never actually happens, just more natural disasters, but the ship remains on course for one of the better tracks on a record filled with natural peaks and valleys, areas where we are supposed to check out in confusion, to be lulled away by sirens that take us back from the dark islands back into more subtle tones.
And in this way, old friends who’ve passed away are brought back through memories, no matter how dark.
Comments
Very airy-fairy, as befits the name. But very nice, too. Rare that anyone does a concept album anymore, so this is particularly refreshing...
Interesting how you explain Rieger's voice as being motherly (brilliantly put in to perspective, btw Kron). It sounds strange, but rings true if you really sit and listen to Elk Power. Almost makes me look at his style in a different way.
I'm going to have to check this album out. Thanks for the heads up
Comments
This is a really killer review. I saw every scene you wrote, could hear the music without actually hearing the music although this album has been my driving music since I bought it last Saturday. Great writing!!
agreed, great review. totally agree with your take on the imagery. it's one of their best albums in my opinion. having recently turned 20, it definitely makes me feel more aware about growing up, and a little scared. sign of a great album that it can stir up such strong emotions!
Nice one, clipped a chunk over at Moodmat