MOG - ngtivspace's Posts

my cleanest dirty shirt

ngtivspace — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:44:30 GMT

Those first stretches of morning after a long night, you know them – it’s quiet outside, the kind of peaceful that soothes and then turns sad. What I’d give on these days of mine to amble like Kris Kristofferson or Johnny Cash, nursing tobacco stains and a wounded outlaw soul. Me, I wear the boots but skip the beer for lack of mettle.

This strained and breaking cover by Phosphorescent seems a salve to us less-than-rebel souls, for our lonely Sunday side-walks in skinny-leg pants.

everything i've told you was true

ngtivspace — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:28:54 GMT

A clock-measured 2:00AM won't appear longer than neighboring hours; but in practice, it's the one with power to grow, to stretch and loop, ignited by small bad thoughts. It's waker's choice - need to mow the lawn, leave her, tell them all the truth? Sift it through. Gather up records & vices for the dark duration, but be careful when pleading for passage; heed instead this Zopilote Machine warning: there are worse things to lose than sleep.

Because when the fucking sun comes up, yeah, morning sounds alot like "Alpha Incipiens." This is John Darnielle's Southern California, but it's yours, too, when you've felt how the daylight you sought turns a sudden broomstick to your windpipe. The first Mountain Goats LP tells only of daytime's beating and bleaching, pounding it out in strident strums. Christ, the things that make hearts bleat for shade. Now 14 years old, Zopilote Machine suggests it was the songwriter's gift from the get-go to tell the tiny torturing truths of waking life. No more of this coffee house crap about night-blossoming pain, Darnielle can't give day that kind of break, and why should he? What's day ever really done for you?

On this early album, the sun and its high-noon companions (say the Zopilote itself, a desert vulture) blasts into all of the cracks that the Mountain Goats will later probe with defter fingers. The furnace of "Orange Ball of Love" and "Orange Ball of Hate" melts and halts and shines down on the powerlessness of youth, the ticking clock ugliness of intimacy, and the shuddering loss of both. It's all here, but the knowing's just the half; Darnielle's whole, forgiving truth, is that the humans in this muck aren't the pieces, they're the paste. The LP and those to follow show us the authentic specifics of this sun-lit world, and we're the best of it - showing up to these dawns, fighting towards twilight, and carrying one another home.

i am a product

ngtivspace — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:27:29 GMT

For Jeffrey Lewis the guitar is the telephone, microphone, megaphone. It's all just transit for words and he has plenty, boy, packing the cars and jumping the rails, surprising, straightforward with optimistic specifics about the ways we live in the world.

Played live these words come with pictures projected and painted on sheets, but the draw is still his spoken-sung story - of politics, love, age, and the occasional disembodied giant brain.

On 12 Crass Songs, Jeffrey filters hard-line punk through anti-folk mesh, gently sifting out the anger from fine grade indignation.

too blind to see

ngtivspace — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:30:54 GMT

It was almost just us when Blair went on at 8:30, one girl on a dirty bar stage. Lit from above by flashbulbs that spell "salvation," she says thanks for coming early, I'm going to play a few songs for you and then she does, straightaway.

Her voice feels for the pitch, god, I almost cringe just with hope, it's that earnest. A few unsteady notes and she cracks, cracks but then blooms, warm & hollow, wavering like a memory in the far reaches. So lovingly vulnerable it turns me back to my beer, blushing and measuring my own mettle.

Incurious arrivals, here for the bigger draws, chatter in the rear - they'll wait to be told what's good, unwittingly armed against what's great. Giving up their shot at finding true love.

don't lie to you

ngtivspace — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:12:57 GMT

11-85 on Sycamore, please roll a tow truck. Copy that, we're nearby. Pleas crackle from the dash, each call's a lotto drawing; I wonder what numbers you're holding. Are your fingers crossed for simple heroics, 10-17, request for gasoline on Delancey, or is breath baited for bigger buildings to scale? 10-32, 10-32 at Thompson Lake? 10-32, do you copy? The drowning is well in progress.

Come quick if you're close but don't worry: your secret's safe if you only play games you'll win. Just remind us to take you off speed dial.

Quieted by thoughts of potentially pervasive cowardice, I exchange scanner hiss for the dream pop timidity of new Headlights. Predictably lulled for a moment and then – what’s this? - I'm roused by "Get Your Head Around It" and its subtle gathering of strength. Sure, the move's a cribbed one, but I like the hope of even borrowed boldness, late-arriving in skinny pants. Urgent chimes lead the 2-minute-mark-march and I can’t help but think, well. Maybe we have it in us after all. 10-32? 10-4.

in my real life

ngtivspace — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:52:05 GMT

Once we lived up a hill so steep even groceries made us gladiators, heaving plastic bags towards our small flat. We made dinner on the floor and slept there, too; we watched each other, the TV, our city: growing dark past ten thin panes.

We remember this perfectly but not with longing, not here, warm now in bed on our 6th street. Before you wake I will be still and draw it in detail, adding also the rooms that come later; a compound of the spaces we've touched. I am a compound of the spaces you've touched. Put your feet on mine & I'll add a room I've just recalled.

tell everyone you were

ngtivspace — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:23:19 GMT

Many break-up songs seek glue, adhesive for all of these pieces. The Mountain Goats have a library full of them; John Darnielle knows nothing's lonelier than pockets failing hands no longer held.

Nothing, that is, but the hands still crushing your throat. "No Children" lives just here, beneath the weight of what we once wanted.

The song feeds on anger and terror but does not breed it. If you live with either, give yourself this gift: standing at a Mountain Goats show, singing these words with strangers will sap your strength to stay suffocated. Gathered here you'll find not rabid fans but nearly patients, addicts after the giddy high of knowing no matter how hopeless you feel, you're not alone.

{Live recordings, cathartic sing-alongs in the comments}

of the same questions

ngtivspace — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:52:29 GMT

The Submarines were a couple of musicians, then a musical couple; they broke up, wrote songs to endure the separation and reunited to record them. This new collaboration became a new marriage.

"Declare a New State!" was mastered as a wedding present - the document of their time apart, the genesis of their new life together.

A lo-fi lament of lost love wrought in the safety of things recovered. The very idea gives such sweet, damning hope.

some kind of record

ngtivspace — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:55:20 GMT

Leonard Cohen destroys by being destroyed; Tori Amos mourns what he's lost, what you've lost, that things can be lost, and always will.

every switch is thrown

ngtivspace — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:14:51 GMT

That's "Hey Jude" at the beginning, just a venial sin, a minor desecration; we're not here to hurt anyone. It's the tiny-sample launch of a spacemountain mash-up, lights blurred and synth giddy.

bored with being god

ngtivspace — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:53:13 GMT

Teddybears is from Sweden, Iggy Pop's not. I don't think. I could look it up but it's quite late and I'm lazy. I've got ten bucks says Iggy's not from Sweden. I think he's from Detroit.

Nonetheless, he plays nicely with the Swedes on this one, an unexpected gift from Stockholm. A need-it-louder addition to your all-purpose playlists. Hearing his voice again in this setting also reminds all the postpunk kids, once more, that they owe Iggy his due.

(He's from Muskegon, Michigan, not Detroit. Yeah, I looked it up. His real last name, Osterberg, is, get this - Swedish. You heard it here - Iggy Pop may not be from Sweden, but he is Swedish. You may now continue to enjoy the song, apparently a marriage of Swedes old and new.)

maps from earlier days

ngtivspace — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:45:18 GMT

This week brought illness and funerals; 2008's first air thick with loss & so many plans unmade. Bound tight with regret I leave West Texas through high painted deserts, days straight, lanes wide. The way the land empties you.

Alpine, El Paso, Tuscon I sleep by the roadside, half-wild in unbreaking darkness. We're making good time, I think and then remember I'm in no hurry to get back to what's gone. I'll take pictures of burnt out motels, I'll call in sick to work, no: I'll rush out of habit & I'll arrive home and I will wish for 200 more miles to go.

An iPod full and charged on this trip may as well just have John Darnielle on it, I begin at the beginning (scratchy cassettes and tracks of town names) and play songs in order, all the way to the new one, out next month. Less like music than hostage negotiation, this library played full - left on for whole states, he can get you off the ledge by sitting there beside you.

Chasing rain I hit San Bernadino near noon, looping this song, thankful for the new record. Ready to try.

to claim and shoulder

ngtivspace — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:05:47 GMT

Label upon label gave up on Steve Forbert in the years following "Romeo's Tune"; not many deep pockets seek spare change vocals. Take away who he was supposed to be (the next Dylan, and who's not?) and who he never became (no Tweedy-esque rise & what a shame) and you'll find a truckstop-busker at ease with a creaky middle seat.

"Oh, To Be Back With You" haunts, but pleasantly; tune sweet & voice sad, it misses what's gone, regrets what's happened, and quietly longs for another chance.

can't make anything of why

ngtivspace — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:59:44 GMT

They call it ice fog, the ghosted weight unsettling our livestock. It's midnight, but grey - white moonlight white stars on tin roof & dead grass, on muddy rapids. Cows lay down in rain, but this fog bewitches; forward space uncertain, obscured, they hold. Still.

I'm warm inside but know the paralysis. I'm looking out and can't see a damned thing, looking back's the same haze. The whole year was troubled with smoke, but smoke, well, that's an end to a story we all know how to tell. The fog gives no history & no pattern to follow, and, my god - no reliable sign of lifting.

I don't need headphones to get to the Red House Painters; I haven't heard this song in ages and it's playing in my head so fully it may as well be filling the room, this house, that field. Kozelek's voice seeps and expands through the cracks like heat escaping frozen earth.

not been feeling the same

ngtivspace — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:43:10 GMT

To fall asleep, I read of wars: young and bleeding boys in German trenches, soul-deep mud in the Falais Gap. These troubles that so far exceed my own, I could blush. I worry about being broke, I flail to protect my stakes from those who would violently unearth them. Some days, feeding myself as a writer seems as likely as becoming an acrobat. That one can churn for hours on end.

But on no upcoming night will I sleep in a frozen wood, bent over boot & rifle, praying for life, nor, eyes tight, for deliverance.

As I contrast my own alert midnight to this, I wonder where to find context for simpler heartache & uncertainty. Where to find the howl, the voice for wounds fatal only to a sense of self-worth?

If you're lost on this quest tonight, stop here. Will Oldham's vocals cling next to us on the modern ledge; the uneven tones crack & raggedly cry out for the cover we seek. On new days, we'll let his lyrics articulate our thoughts - for now, the very sound will tell of our safe but fevered skin.

all the time in the world

ngtivspace — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:02:54 GMT

The best day begins with vegetables, beets and carrots on card tables and tailgates, just south of Dublin.

Off the train I find a small market, food stalls and craft stands lining the harbor parking lots. Drawn in by the colors I start out snapping photos of vegetables and right away a man in a nametag flags me down. I nearly bolt, so sure am I that he's coming to tell me to get the hell away from the produce.

He gets close and he's smiling, pointing at my unwieldy camera and asking my rate. My rate? He thinks I'm a professional - before I can say "tourist" and "misunderstanding" and "hobby" he's pointing to his stand, his small marble statues, pleading for a few shots for his website. Unsure of how else to respond, I finally agree to be who he thinks.

We start working right away, shooting patrons and purchases; at first, he's unsure how to answer curious customers. I nervously show each photo on my digital display and wait for him to find me out. And all of the sudden, we point-and-click, and for a moment, lose who we were. We offer the other a brief but hopeful costume, us two, this after-hours chiseler and accidental obituary writer. Just for now, we'll be intrepid artists, celebrated and sought after.

Just for now, we'll feel lucky to have been found.

We lose our light and shake hands, exchanging emails for the photos. He thanks me and offers me a few bills, I don't accept, I can't. I thank him, and again, and he hugs me.

I owe you for this, he calls out as I head back. And also for the photos.

don't mean jail, exactly

ngtivspace — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 03:35:59 GMT

If you know me you know I think no one does devastating like John; the Mountain Goats' bleakness is plainly-hewn and sharply cathartic. Seek and you'll find black nights that don't break, blistering daytime that illuminates fault & failure, and a lack of poetry to soften the blow.

Most familiarly, most painfully, you'll find the plea. Your plea. "Masher" is this: the resigned plea to receding happiness, a hands & knees offering to a brokenness come to reposses what's just been fixed.

"Masher" is your last dime on a postcard to yourself, fingers crossed it finds its way.

Just wish you were here.

a union card and a wedding coat

ngtivspace — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:50:52 GMT

There's little else to say:

Bruce Springsteen's most brutal ballad, so broken & real, presented here, solemnly, in Josh Ritter's humble & familiar warmth. As lovely as hopelessness gets.

leaving, but never far enough

ngtivspace — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:57:27 GMT

I'm headed to Ireland next week, for a brief wandering spell, for a touch of personal sorting-through & soul-settling. I've never been, and haven't much of a plan beyond "see, listen & write."

Are you from Ireland, in Ireland, familiar with? I'd love your thoughts, your warnings, your music.

That last one, I warmly request of all of you who've already given me so many songs I'll be packing for the trip. Would you pass along your best songs of adventure, inward & outward? I always need the help - and would love for the audio discoveries of this trip to begin right here at home.

you could surely try

ngtivspace — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:42:06 GMT

It's rare that a twee band forces my sun roof open, makes me long for a convertible.

Give this one all four windows down.

like figures in the distance

ngtivspace — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:15:00 GMT

4:09 and I’m on the 7th floor of the tallest building on this stretch of Wilshire, overlooking a tar-park filled with imperiled plaster animals. From the nearest window you can see the air is thick with smoke, most likely from fires extinguished; the very sign of a problem solved now plagues the city-proper.

Three hours ago I had a hot dog on the patio at the modern art museum. I listened to the Mountain Goats and watched the ash fog settle over the E! building, everyone near me focused on a street magician's cup game. He’s a homeless guy. They’re tourists. Made for each other, yeah? Each imposing foreign needs on annoyed strangers. I think about Ireland, about my upcoming weekend of turning a bad book into a good movie. I think about quiet.

4:09 and I’m still thinking these things when my new stack of obits arrives. 10 this week, 10 deaths to note and file, marshaled beyond by the top notice, the first to pass: Oopsy the Clown. Oopsy. My silent wish for each notice is that life was long and lived now, but before I mark this one, I am reassured: life can be nothing but long in a red nose and face paint. Only 9 wishes today. And then I’m done.

troubled men just the same

ngtivspace — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:49:07 GMT

I have songs that are blankets and boats, some that are warm company and others that eliminate the need for same. This song is a cloak. More than others, it grants invisibility. I play it, sometimes once, more often on a short tight cycle for days at a time, whenever I need the world to stop at the end of my street.

13&God is the Notwist accompanied by Themselves, German electronica meets bay area underground hip hop. Curious enough about the marriage, I plucked this track at random from the first album upon debut. While the others are trippy & intriguing - only this one seeped so fully into the cracks, insulating and keeping watch.

when you were young you were

ngtivspace — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:45:46 GMT

I'm reading Food & Wine at In & Out, the kid this-close next to me is scribbling a post card, addressed to Australia. It’s the Hollywood kind, a big picture of the star-walk and the sign. The kind I might send, for the irony, if I were the kind to send post cards home.

If I could remember to send post cards.

I want to ask him if it’s all everything he hoped; I’d like him to tell me how it feels to have gotten here just now. I want to hear about packing, and planning, and saying goodbye. I glance at his backpack and I think … I want to hear about running. In return I can share about lunch hours, about the boots that might be the only thing I’d take, about a sad & sudden sense that all Destinations are somehow lonely. About how I’m certain I don’t believe that. About how I never used to.

He takes out his iPod and scrolls to the exact same song I’m on, like a nod: hey, tourist - you can’t fool me. You are running away. He mouths, post station? I shrug. I’m just visiting, too.

the best for our lives

ngtivspace — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:22:07 GMT

The carnival imagery is too easy, the calliope-colored nostalgia too obvious. Nonetheless: there’s a fairground, a Ferris wheel in the underwater accordion-oom-pah, and there are eager fingers, interlacing for the first time. God, the first time. The nerve it takes to take a hand.

From here there will be things to build and to burn, to write down and to write off; you will one day not forgive me. I may, one day, no longer try. The joy of this song is in its straddle over the pain of how it ended – offering instead a picture of how it began, and how it became safe to remember.

carrying this scrap of paper

ngtivspace — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:36:50 GMT

First, an ad in a paper, the Village Voice. We need a singer. He wanted to play a traditional, Americana infused sound, she sent him a tape of lullabies.

The only trouble, she says in a note, is I'm not a singer. Not really.

He plays the tape again, you can't miss the whole truth on a second listen: this voice doesn't sing, it heals wounds and grows green grass and sets, sets just like the sun.

how much i took from you

ngtivspace — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 01:44:25 GMT

Forget, if you must, that it's a showtune, that it trails characters glittery and bizarre. Ben Kweller strips it of these shiny trappings of birth and leaves you with wide-eyed honesty, all youthful & so sorry:

You'll never find love faster than when you're sharing schemes of prisonbreak; there's no harder fall than learning the escape was never meant for two.

hear your sense of things

ngtivspace — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:54:32 GMT

It's the tremor here that breaks your heart, the shaking but determined voice seeing itself through. There's a plea, but not a desperate one, not desperate, not dramatic, just at once hoping and anticipating the quiet uselessness of hope.

My best friend once slipped this into a hearty playlist of country music, alt- and otherwise, near Lucinda, near Tom Waits. Beside the loud, the angry and the drunk, the Be Good Tanyas lay lower to the ground, somehow sultry in their sweetheart sadness.

through cities one saturday

ngtivspace — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 16:00:22 GMT

A lighter side of Ted Leo, "Gold Finch" is a song that reminds me of cold weather settling in a warm place.

The single guitar gives stark, sparkling frost - the violins rise and dampen like failed heat off a late winter sun. It's several autumns since, but I once came here often for the sense of peace found in the simplicity.

This track, back then, held the world in it for me, the way the right song does when you're invested in something: a project, a relationship, a trip. Do you have these? The ones that make you feel, hearing it, as though you're the only one who ever has, who ever will? That it will remain in this one moment in time?

of the life we used to love

ngtivspace — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:08:44 GMT

One of my top 5 songs of all time, Holland, 1945 is bedrock, it's rebar. A song that's the earth you walk on, the floor you sleep on, by a band that - once you love them - can change who you are.

I love this cover for how much this cover loves the original. The truckers slow it slightly & pack it in new layers of warm red dirt.

a bender when it's 80 degrees

ngtivspace — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:03:55 GMT

This year, so far, has given good show.

It's been sweaty and close and absorbing (Cold War Kids, Tapes n' Tapes, David Vandervelde) heart-quickeningly intimate (Loney, Dear, Great Lake Swimmers, Mountain Goats), sharp and sparkly (Essex Green, Mezzanine Owls, Malajube), and unselfconsciously joyful (Bishop Allen, Thao Nguyen).

But then, oh! And then! Then there was last night, Band of Horses: haunting and tilting at rowdy, their voices pitch-goddamn-perfect, their stage-stomping insistent, their new album my favorite of '07.

A top-five moment, this, when you hear a new favorite song for the very first time. I want to buy this song a drink and ask it about its childhood.

you won't be the last

ngtivspace — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 03:46:32 GMT

And so I would listen to this song again. This album, in fact.

I played it so often I couldn't ever imagine a time when I might not listen to it. I loved it instantly and kept it on repeat, the way I do when something strikes me so fully. I sang to it the first time I drove under real palm trees, and I remember thinking: this will be my California soundtrack.

Then, and it wasn't planned - other songs, other albums happened. At first I stopped repeating, and then listening, altogether. It's funny, isn't it? The way you don't remember the end?

Today, years later, I hear it in the background in a Chevron Food Mart (true story) and I catch my breath full stop. I won't do the thing where I say it was like running into an old love. But.

Hello, Thrills. No one told me you were still so lovely.

The Go! Team: Proof of Youth

ngtivspace — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:05:17 GMT

On "Proof of Youth," The Go! Team's a mish-mash fever dream of summer. It's 100 degrees outside, that supernatural heat that burns pavement & skin and causes illusions, delusions. Causes you to recall summers you've never had, that no one's ever had, that we all construct from pop culture and accidentally remember fondly.

The Go! Team is colorful short shorts & hipster knee socks. "Proof of Youth" is me with a pistol, you with roller skates, and together? Well, we're on the run.

They're still from Brighton, still a (base) six-piece - the blueprint & the raw material's the same as it ever was. 2004's "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" pulled together retro chase-scene music, cheerleaders, hip hop (old school), twee pop (new school) & funk, and pushed out wall-to-wall party music. There was novelty in the parts but budding sophistication in the whole: each collection of sounds became a solo instrument in an overstuffed, overjoyous soundtrack.

I enjoyed it the first time around, but I was prepared to be over this band, over this sound on the second outing. I wanted it to be beyond anything resembling novelty (a charming quality not known for its endurance), but the beginning snagged me, and right away. "Proof" opens with a distant siren and races, really races, into “Grip Like a Vice,” building an early hip-hop party anthem (hey girls, are ya with us?) on top of the 70s action themes that star-wiped across the debut. The signature chanting cheerleaders & horns show back up in "Doing it Right," and then, surprisingly, drop into a sweet instrumental intermission ("My World.") The just-right switch in album energy applies as a larger statement about the band's awareness of (the limits of) their quirk; each song pushes the nostalgic, noisy sampling to the very limits of tolerance, and then builds and deepens - just moments before you write it off.

This deepening gathers momentum from its wide-ranging guest list. Public Enemy's Chuck D ("Flashlight Fight") and Marina Ribatski of Bonde du Role participate in the collage-building, alongside the Rapper's Delight Club and the Double Dutch Divas. The tracks follow their respective leaders into new sonic corners (never far from the main noise-hall) in earnest, either building up or stripping down to find new growing space, however awkward ("I Never Needed It Now So Much" does its best Belle & Sebastian, it's not quite what we came for.) The exploration takes the occasional wrong turn, but the maturity of the mash-craft makes the fumbles worth it.

So appreciate the growth, but enjoy that it isn't the point. The hyper-kinetic 36 minutes ultimately desires little else than to make you fucking happy on a hot day. Just shut up, put on your skates and get in the car.

how long the race is

ngtivspace — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:27:36 GMT

This song shoots past like lights in a tunnel, a glittery zoom blurring at the edges. You can hear a basement in the endeavor - everytime I listen I suspect Emperor X (Chad Matheny) records (or at least, recorded) somewhere near the family room, only after being excused from the table.

I saw him once, accidentally, at the Silverlake Lounge, a tiny dank hallway with cheap pitchers. He wailed & hit buttons on a laptop, filling the space with brutal, repeating distortion. Two of the other three patrons left. As it had become an impromptu private show, I stuck it out with the boy and his homemade drum machines, and just when I thought the loud, loopy tunes might do me in, he played this.

And I've been playing it since.

too changed to ever change

ngtivspace — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:26:09 GMT

During record-breaking heat, we lost our energy: flickering then fluttering and by Sunday at sundown, the strain on the grid won over. Everything went all at once. I dragged chairs to the porch and sat in the sticky stillness, glimpsing neighbors illuminated by odd flashlights and melty tapers.

It's uninvited, often dreamt of, this unplugged quiet. Not just the TVs off - we're also missing the hum of the fridge, the clank of the dryer. The perfect quiet of powerlessness.

My brain rattled on fully fueled; I thought, I need to buy candles, I think, surely I've got matches somewhere, wouldn't it be strange to have an earthquake now, my god where's my life going, I think, Good Christ, it's hot, and I wonder, almost out loud, if you can suffocate under the weight of regret. And so the silence gets too loud. I search for my iPod, hoping it has batterylife.

It does, and I cover dark(ness) thoughts with this.

someone else's rules

ngtivspace — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:58:53 GMT

And how was your day? My fingers found Elliott Smith (because you're disappointed in yourself), found Damien Jurado (because everyone's disappointed in themselves), then sought louder (drown it out), angrier (out maneuver it), then crashed at Leonard Cohen (because the linoleum's as good a friend as any).

You know these noons, before- and after-, where you can't be convinced of much other than the ride's twisty, the line's long and you're likely to get puked on just when the going's good. Oh, now. That's why we don't invite Leonard to these (pity) parties.

So I stopped trusting my fingers and just hit shuffle, and right at first, all at once, an annoyed savior, a short country girl in tall dirty boots, changed the air. Iris Dement's chewy little-sister twang, delightfully pissy, sloppy and forceful, isn't where I'd have turned. Today was for a nice long wallow in warm, greasy future-panic, but the song wouldn't allow it, and I kept it on repeat.

If you're country-averse, just give her a shot to get you a little muddy.

feel that i could

ngtivspace — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:12:49 GMT

Too early for beige carpet, this Monday morning in a cube farm. I set my mind to places I’ve been, and places I’m going, and I keep thinking: it’s easy to be an existentialist under fluorescents.

Not quite high nor perfectly lonesome, the sound of the Innocence Mission still shines a later kind of light. The strum here’s a train ride, the young-girl vocal a distant whistle, and in deference to this union the world unfolds before it. Hints of endless landscapes to roll through, lands to leave to, and return from.

In Sufjan’s hands (banjo) “The Lakes of Canada” moves in a little closer. It breathes faster. The cracks in his voice splinter the softer edges, grasping for the landscape and fearing, finding, all at once - you can’t get there. Not from here.

look for me

ngtivspace — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:21:18 GMT

There are the sounds that do more to evince quiet than simple quiet itself, songs that steal emerging stillness from the late-latest parts of day.

It's a voice and a guitar that came out here to search the dimming landscape, to recover things obscured, and me, tonight? I came here to sleep in the backseat.

living in a lonely world.

ngtivspace — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 15:54:21 GMT

I love covers, both strange & faithful. I have great affection for the rework that brings out subtle new shades of meaning in the original; I more often collect bizarre choices made by odd artists.

I have so many covers I love so deeply that I have no business interrupting this conversation with the song I came here to upload. I offer reasons over excuses:

1.) Everyone loves this song. (Oh, stop lying to yourself.) 2.) It's a capella. 3.) It will provide a nice launching point for me to post a few of my other favorite inappropriate novelty covers, in all of their unbridled awesomeness, in the comments.

Perhaps my next post will be back to the covers I love un-winkingly. But until then.

*I'll admit I wish she didn't slip into spoken word. But the first minute wins me enough to get over it.

won't eat your friends

ngtivspace — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:00:10 GMT

The afternoon needed alt-rock, and who am I to deny my afternoons what they seek? I already too often lock them in a cubicle, force them to stand in lines, make them wish they were evenings or late-nights.

Here's where I tell you about Dinosaur Jr; about J Mascis (without the Fog), and how listening to "Bug" for the first time in a decade made the cubicle walls feel wider.

But I never made it that far. I got D-i-n-o-s into my itunes search field, and up came this. A sweetheart lo-fi valentine, downloaded errantly during some blog stroll, never fully played.

The Gongs: dependent on my need to search for the better known band, the hopeful by-catch of an alt-rock fishing trip.

Here's to the wide net & its tiny treasures.

me, well i just don't know.

ngtivspace — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 23:04:07 GMT

I can’t not say ‘croon’ and can’t avoid ‘troubadour,’ so here I’ll take the road easily traveled & keep traveling it: I’ll say ‘dreamy’ and ‘catchy’ and I’ll say ‘phonograph,’ the kind left playing in another room.

Ferraby Lionheart’s new album “Catch the Brass Ring” is an abandoned wood-floor dancehall, maybe at the edge of a carnival midway, certainly near the sea. Ferraby leans into a saloon-style upright, heavy fingers clipping along dense, chipped keys – that is, when he’s not strapped up as a one-man band, busking along the pier.

And just then, just then before you can’t not say ‘quirk’ and ‘novelty,’ an unmissable modernity arises in the lyrics, presenting little-t truths that lash the sepia world firmly to the one we inhabit.

It’s not that I don’t see / It’s that I don’t want to see.

Truth is you’re not on that pier, and Ferraby’s not either, not in reality and not in song. He’s stuck to sticky booth-vinyl at the 101, a dingy Hollywood diner named for the freeway it’s under. Hipsters order eggs at the counter, tourists spit from the Best Western adhered to the rear, all set against bygone linoleum and details from the Golden Age:

Along the intersection of How It Was & How It Is, writ with saltwater taffy, and pancakes, and song.

all you tweakers with your hands out

ngtivspace — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:08:29 GMT

John Darnielle tells you exactly what’s happening and precisely how it feels. There’s no pretension; the pain isn’t romantic, the regret isn’t a scrapbooked backward glance, the characters aren’t dressed better than us.

What’s being said here needs to be said now, right now: there’s not time to encode it, no time to decrypt it, can’t wait don’t stop tighten the tourniquet.

Hold fast.

The need for searing immediacy births (in)elegant details – the Travelodge, the carpenter ants, St. Joseph’s baby aspirin – details that, well, tell the truth, don’t they? The scary, joyous, unremoved kind.

Palmcorder Yajna’s got youthful self-loathing, born of the nervous anxious glory of one’s escape attempts (from and to what, you already know.) Of the terror that you might not make it out alive.

you could die in your living room

ngtivspace — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:03:45 GMT

on studio recordings, josh ritter is bright and lovely. warm folk-country tones for the late afternoon. whole albums worth listening to, driving to, sitting to.

played live, josh ritter's music unpacks its things, right there on your back porch, right now at the end of the summer.

he'll give you poetry, plainly, and new stories that feel familiar. listen to the past in his voice meet with the now in his songs, and you'll forget, for a moment, that life's not easy.

here's his cover of john prine's "my mexican home," one of my favorite bittersweet summer tracks.

can't know for sure

ngtivspace — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 05:01:12 GMT

it might be the world's too large & too small all at once. the walls now cozy, now closing in. the distant horizon exciting then overwhelming.

in daniel johnston's music i hear the dizzying succession of these modes, reality & magic chasing one another into a terrifying blur. sustainable for art, perhaps, but not life. not peace.

i won't weigh in on whether reading madness as brilliance is misguided; i can't be certain here if it's the medium or the message. i am moved by the sounds of a mind impatient to make sense of itself, to sing because it must, to try to order what it sees. nailing things down, if just for a second.

austin musician kathy mccarty, a close friend of johnston's, created a set of covers once his instability peaked. in "walking the cow" we get the curious, earthbound whimsy of the artist himself, and the warm affection of a dear friend celebrating & protecting a troubled loved one the best way she knows how.

for the next three minutes

ngtivspace — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 01:53:55 GMT

the harmonica tells you the train's ready to leave, and you're too late.

there's time running out here, all over the place. planes departing, engines chugging to life, last call & final boarding. can you get there, if you try harder? if you mean it enough? if you put it right there in your voice?

shel silverstein wrote this song. in classic form, he wrings emotion and tension and winking wit from the mundane: the desperate call to an unmoved answer-er, ever interrupted by an uncaring operator seeking more coins.

dr. hook's an am outfit who lent shel a pop-country voice from time to time, only rarely peeking over the novelty act wall. but here, in "sylvia's mother," the 8-track country vocal begs so fully & aches so convincingly that i can't help but catch my breath, and hope.

hope that there's still time.

you don't mean that

ngtivspace — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:42:42 GMT

St. Vincent's the Bjork next door, the un-awkward Tori Amos who isn't scared of the popular kids, the cool girl in great glasses.

There's curly sound-craft on the edges, but the bottom line is The Voice, pitch perfect & rich & torched, anchoring the experimental flights, the playful novelties.

"Now, Now" has two things that draw me in: a vast, warm Peter Gabriel-style blip&swirl body, and a children's choir (or at least the sound of one.)

Collected child-like voices singing unexpected lyrics, in non-traditional contexts, never fail to be haunting, haunted. Creepy. Occasionally emotional. Or, at the very least, satisfyingly ironic.

Check the comments for the also-amazing "Paris is Burning."

Of Sufjan, Broad Stripes & Bright Stars.

ngtivspace — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:03:17 GMT

in the intro (to a crowd of canadians), sufjan stevens calls this "new tune" a "traditional american song."

it's an understatement.

at first solemn, and then utterly feral, the song, in his hands, is so shot through with shaky grief that nothing traditional nor anthemic remains.

oh say, can you see / by the dawn's early light / what so proudly we've ... / at the twilight's last gleaming

after awhile, the lyrics change (and do not go on to endorse america), though the seven swans crawl reappropriates, sufjan-izes, even those that remain accurate.

Bishop Allen in LA

ngtivspace — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:09:54 GMT

At first, there's foot-tapping. Then head-nodding. People look up from the bar, move in to the stage. Now foot stomping, and, wow - the kids in front of you have broken in to a full-on who-cares indie version of the twist.

Bishop Allen, collectively, knows about energy. How to create it, to sustain it, to hook you on it. They use simple tools: a guitar with mangy strings, a discarded piano, a sweet & sour vocal that reaches and recedes.

You can poke through their massive collection of recordings and like the band well enough - but, once you're there, live, it only takes a moment to become Bishop Allen's biggest fan.

the complications you could do without

ngtivspace — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 03:07:06 GMT

i'm in texas (right now) and from texas (many a year ago) and leaving texas, tomorrow.

and this, too, is from texas.

i collect live sufjan, and while i often have to search hard to find great recordings, this one came right to my tivo. and to yours, if you're an austin city limits enthusiast.

the chimes at the beginning cause tiny hairline fractures that split deep & wide as the song rumbles forth.

World Music in Polos?

ngtivspace — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:42:32 GMT

I listen to this song and I hear 'Graceland' covers by the Arcade Fire, except everyone's in Lacoste. And we're all late for class at our Private Liberal Arts College.

I read that description, and even I don't want to play the track again. But believe you me, I'm gonna.

i just live down from here.

ngtivspace — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 01:42:41 GMT

i'm in tin top, texas. it's not so near denton. nor anything, for that matter. there's a freeway, then a paved road, then an unpaved road, and then: tin top. miles of flatness, a gun store, a few sheds and a handful of cows. this week, tin top's been soaked through by thunderstorms, the kind that sneak in and unleash.

I've driven up & down the unpaved roads today, watching the rain and the sun breaks. listening to this.

damien jurado's pained, tumbling strum knows everything these roads want to teach you.

Kentucky Isolation

ngtivspace — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:20:40 GMT

This song is an imaginary postcard from your last great road trip, the one you took before things got complicated. Bought for a quarter at a gas station near the World's Largest Ball of Twine where you stopped for Twinkies and enough brake fluid to get her shitty car through to El Paso. You picked it up, tacky and charming, signed fake names and sent it to yourselves - notes from the grand American adventure:

Wish you were here (glad you're not!), rained like mad in Baton Rouge. Still broke and so scared. Having the time of your lives.

And you really were.

Been hijacked too many times.

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:17:53 GMT

Ghosty's from Lawrence, Kansas, not so far from where I once got a $%@#$ Christmas-travel-from-hell-related speeding ticket in a rental minivan on my way from Denver to Dallas. I won't hold it against them. But hey - Kansas Highway Patrol? Thanks for the good times.

The groove is even & mellow, the instrumentation often straightforward and occasionally crafty. Listen to it twice, and damned if you won't listen to it five more times.

The Essex Green: Track 4 on Your Summer Mix.

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:46:26 GMT

Cannibal Sea was one of my favorite albums last year; every song winds tight and releases in a joyful, slinky whir.

When The Essex Green comes to town, buy new shoes, order a drink you can't pronounce. Go early and make friends with strangers, stay late and drive to the beach at dawn.

When the Essex Green comes to town, it's spring, it's summer. It's daylight, all night long.

If Norah Jones was a badass,

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:14:01 GMT

Or Cat Power played the banjo,

You'd have Thao Nguyen. You need it for summer. Seriously.

Beirut

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:21:11 GMT

First a distant, pulsing synth and a teenaged croon in slow-motion. Now a loop of recorded applause, and only then does the song really begin: the clapping roils, the howl turns to moan, a simple, sad, electronic piano peers in over the collected sounds.

It's cul de sac wizardry, homemade.

Sufjan in Portland - "The Transfiguration"

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:22:45 GMT

The Transfiguration was my first favorite Sufjan song, the first listened to on a loop so consistent as to be read, from afar, as madness.

The first time, we watched with about 20 other people, on the floor in front of a tiny stage on an ancient boat. His band almost larger than the crowd. He played this song first. All 20 people wondered what magic we'd stumbled upon.

Years later, we watched with about 300 other people, on rumbling floor boards in an old ballroom, and though I desperately wanted to hear it, I knew he wouldn't play it.

And then he did. Here's the live recording from that show. Give it to your soul on a loop.

Broom People

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:08:50 GMT

He's devastating, John Darnielle is, and cathartic. There's plenty of darkness and light on all of his many albums and tapes, but there's something about this song. It's the precision of the lyrics, the description of a house (a life) in utter disrepair, and the churning, excited strumming that nails the will to survive right there onto the bottom rung.

And the line, "I write down good reasons to freeze to death."

God. Long live the Mountain Goats.

Mezzanine Owls

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:35:42 GMT

This song's a race to the dream-pop horizon, tearing along densely layered waves & oh, wow, those pleading vocals. Mezzanine Owls haunt angsty corners, sans whine or eyeliner.

Miracle Fortress

ngtivspace — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 04:08:29 GMT

There’s Brian Wilson in here, there’s summer ease and small town restlessness. It’s an optimistic lightrail ride, head lolling on the dirty glass, watching, rolling past suburbs and office parks.

Headed away, and towards.

Ferraby Lionheart

ngtivspace — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:12:31 GMT

Making good on the indie, do-it-yourself credo, Ferraby recorded this EP in his own kitchen. The warm folk-pop tones conjure images of its creation: a lazy, warm Los Angeles afternoon, just breeze and birds and late-summer light.