Albums of 2010: Write About Love

(So, as it turns out, starting a new series on my blog a week before Christmas was a bad idea. But I'll try to regain some momentum by finishing off my little reviews of albums from 2010 I liked, and then get back into some book reviews and other stuff...)

Like Sufjan Stevens, Belle & Sebastian had gone several years without releasing an album by 2010. Also like Stevens, there had been diversions along the way, most notably 2009's God Help the Girl album of songs written by bandleader Stuart Murdoch, and featuring most of the group (albeit with vocal duties handled by outsiders), as well as the 2008 release of The BBC Sessions. So it may not have seemed like it, but by the release of Write About Love, four and half years had passed since the last studio album by Belle & Sebastian - by far their longest break (and approximately as long as the break between posts on this humble blog...).

Unlike The Age of Adz, however, Write About Love does not see B&S breaking much new ground - think of it more as a refinement of the last few albums, with some influence from their earlier period as well. (Bluffer's guide to B&S's musical evolution: first two albums & associated eps were quiet, subdued indie pop; the next few years saw increasing orchestration and variety, but within a largely similar sonic framework; and from 2004 onwards a distinct '70s pop influence started to dominate proceedings.)

The album opens with Sarah Martin's 'I Didn't See It Coming', the first time one of the band's non-Murdoch members has been handed opening-track duties. And 'I Didn't See It Coming' is easily Martin's best song to date - a gorgeous melody, and wonderful vocals from her & Murdoch. 'Come On Sister' is similarly upbeat, and points to the album being similar in feel to its predecessor 'The Life Pursuit'. Track three, 'Calculating Bimbo', quietens things down, however, and also provides this album's first character-sketch-as-lyric song (a speciality of Murdoch's).

My favourite track off Write About Love (& one of my favourites by anyone in 2010) is up next: 'I Want The World To Stop'. It's an unashamedly pop song, with Murdoch's vocals, superbly supported by some of the others, atop the band firing on all cylinders. Unfortunately, it's followed by the underwhelming Norah Jones duet, 'Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John'. While Murdoch's & Jones's voices play well off each other, and the production is as lush as B&S will ever provide, it definitely feels like a Norah Jones song, not her on a B&S song. An interesting diversion, yes, but not much more than that.

The second half of the album kicks off with a bang with the title track, as catchy a pop ditty as you're likely to hear. Guest vocalist on this track Carey Mulligan chips in behind Murdoch, subtly undermining him:

I know the way
(So you know the way...)
Get on your skinny knees and pray
(Maybe not today)

Guitarist Stevie Jackson's lone songwriting contributing to Write About Love is 'I'm Not Living in the Real World', and it shares the off-kilter pop feel of many of his songs. Two quiet songs follow, 'The Ghost of Rockschool' and 'Read the Blessed Pages'. Both are pleasant without being particularly memorable (the latter sounds a little as if it is about former bandmember/Murdoch ex- Isobel Campbell - but that might not be accurate or fair). If I had a criticism to make of modern Belle & Sebastian, it's that the slower songs seem to have lost their bite - while slow, quiet songs on the band's first few albums tended to be some of the highlights, these two (along with 'Calculating Bimbo' & 'Little Lou...') are a little too '70s radio pop for me. A decade ago, who could have imagined that the peaks on the new Belle & Sebastian album would be soul-inflected pop songs that you could dance to, and the hushed ballads would feel out of place? That's testament to the band's growth, of course, but it also feels odd to be underwhelmed by the quiet tracks here.

Luckily, the last two songs restore some of the tempo: Martin's 'I Can See Your Future' may not stack up to 'I Didn't See It Coming', but it marks her continuing development as a songwriter, and 'Sunday's Pretty Icons' sounds like a quintessential B&S album closer - upbeat, a little optimistic, and eminently hummable. (Itunes bonus track 'Blue Eyes of a Millionaire' is also worth springing for, being a simple & sparse but lovely slice of acoustic guitar-driven pop.)

Write About Love does not mark a huge leap forward for B&S, as, say, Dear Catastrophe Waitress did. But it's a concise, punchy albums with at least three songs ('I Didn't See It Coming', 'I Want the World to Stop', 'Write About Love') that stand amongst the band's best, and hopefully also signals their return to regular album-making & touring...

'I Want The World To Stop' (YouTube)

Albums of 2010: The Age of Adz

As the end of the year approaches, I thought I'd cast an eye over some of my favourite music released this year. This is not intended to be the Definitive Guide To 2010 or anything - I've not listened to anywhere near enough of this year's music to be able to make that claim. It's just a series of reviews of stuff I like. Keep checking in over the next week & a bit for more entries...

It's been, as nearly every review has reminded us, five years since Sufjan Stevens' last 'proper' album, the much-lauded Come on Feel the Illinois. Since then, he's released a boxset of Christmas music EPs, an album of Illinois out-takes, and the orchestral piece/film The BQE, and also admitted that the 50 States Project was probably not going to get past the first two entries. In August he suddenly released a 60 minute EP, All Delighted People, and then a week later announced the October release of a full album, The Age of Adz. From that first press release on, Stevens made it clear that this album would be heavily electronic-based, largely eschewing the banjo-led folk-pop-rock that dominated his three most famous albums (Greetings From Michigan, Seven Swans, Come on Feel the Illinois). On the other hand, his second album (Enjoy Your Rabbit) was an electronic-based instrumental affair, so there was some precedent.

Still, most casual Sufjan Stevens will probably find The Age of Adz difficult to immediately love. Not only has he significantly changed his sonic palette, but here we see an album of intensely personal songs. Some time after hearing The Age of Adz I read that Stevens was badly - & somewhat mysteriously - unwell for a period in 2009, but that came as no great surprise to anyone who'd listened to the album at all attentively. (Or, for that matter, noted that the penultimate track is called 'I Want To Be Well'...)

The Age of Adz begins softly, with the piano-&-vocal 'Futile Devices', probably the most familiar-sounding song here. While he has, mostly, smothered his songs in old-school synths & electronics throughout, Stevens' ear for a simple, beautiful melody has neither deserted him nor been deliberately discarded. In more ways than one, 'Futile Devices' serves as an effective introduction to the album, given that the devices he describes as futile are words. Next up is the squelchy electronics of 'Too Much', and the big title track. 'Age of Adz' features all manner of sounds competing with each other, creating a disorienting feel.

'I Walked' was the first song released from The Age of Adz, as a free download from Stevens' website, and is one of the album's highlights for me. Sparse, especially compared to its predecessor, 'I Walked' is a nakedly vulnerable song, with Stevens' voice catching on the line "But at least I deserved the respect of a kiss goodbye" (one of several indications throughout the album that Stevens' romantic life hasn't been entirely painless in recent years), in a way that hasn't yet ceased being heartbreaking every time. 'Now That I'm Older', 'Get Real Get Right' & 'Bad Communication' form a mid-album mini-suite noting Stevens' determination to take stock of himself and move on.

That impression is strengthened with 'Vesuvius', in which he takes the drastic step of addressing himself:
Sufjan, follow your heart
Follow the flame
Or fall on the floor
Sufjan, the panic inside
The murdering ghost
That you cannot ignore

The song itself builds from a quiet, piano-only, start, adding layers of backing singers, low-tech beats and increasingly multi-tracked lead vocals. And The Age of Adz's theme of trying to be happy despite things not going well is hit again in 'All For Myself':
Improving all the time, I am
Improving as I kiss the hem
I promise I won't be a trouble at all
For I'm okay, I'm in the red

After which we get to the album's monumental final two tracks: the aforementioned 'I Want To Be Well', and 'Impossible Soul'. The former is another explicit (in more ways than one!) plea for life to get its act together. It climaxes, after numerous repetitions of the title phrase, with the repeated claim: "I'm not fucking around", Stevens' first recorded lyrical swearing. His nice-guy persona makes 'I Want To Be Well's finale all the more effective and emphatic.

And then we have 'Impossible Soul', 25 minutes of everything that every happened. (One review I read suggested that this song contained more ideas than many bands' entire careers...) It begins quietly, and beautifully, with a passage that will warm the hearts of Illinois-lovers feeling lost on this album. That builds and builds, before breaking down completely at about the ten-minute mark. From there, Stevens single-handedly redeems Autotune's existence, filtering his voice for the next few minutes over a sparse backing before the track once again builds to its triumphant conclusion:
It's a long life, better pinch yourself,
Put your face together, better get it right
It's a long life, better hit yourself
Put your face together, better stand up straight
It's a long life, only one last chance
Couldn't get much better, do you wanna dance?
It's a long life, better pinch yourself
Get your face together, better stand up straight

The album finishes (in its cd & download versions, the vinyl shifts this bit to the end of side three, following 'I Want To Be Well', for space on side four reasons) with a quiet coda, not dissimilar to Illinois's 'John Wayne Gacy Jr', and coming full circle from 'Futile Devices'.

The Age of Adz is not an easy album, emotionally or musically, and I'm sure it will not attract everyone who loved Stevens' last few albums. It is, however, a wonderful album, highlighting personal turmoil but also building a defiant response to that. And Stevens is one of the most talented composers and arrangers in modern music - as well as possessing a beautiful voice and considerable instrumental versatility. The Age of Adz gets my highest recommendation.

Art + Technology

In the absence of a new Booker post (I'm currently reading - & loving - Jonathan Franzen's Freedom... and also marking essay introductions), I thought I'd post a few thoughts on other recent interesting finds.

Despite being barely technically minded, I've always been interested in new technologies - or new uses of old ones, particularly when these intersect with my interest in music or books. And I've come across a few such things recently:

1. Sufjan Stevens releases a new EP without telling anyone.

Sufjan Stevens is one of the most talented musicians of this young century, and both Illinois(e) & Seven Swans are amongst my favourite albums. But it's been a long time since Illinois, his last 'proper' album, and while we had rumours that something was coming soon, a couple of weeks ago he just released a new EP (although - 8 songs; 60 minutes is stretching how Extended something can be before it's just Long) on his website. For $5 (US), it was available for immediate download, and in every audio format known to modern listeners. (Well, except Windows Media, because it sucks.)

Releasing music via internet download is hardly new, of course, but what Stevens did - inadvertently or otherwise - actually created more of a buzz than months of pre-release hype would have done. Because all of a sudden, you could just go and get new music out of the blue from a favourite artist & be listening to it within an hour or two of first being aware of its existence (depending on your internet speed).

And the music's fantastic, by the way. Some of his best work to date - some quieter songs, a la Seven Swans, and some lengthy, more experimental tracks. A few days after the release of All Delighted People, he announced a full album (entirely unrelated to this ep) in October. Yay! A couple of tracks from that have been officially made available for free download, and that's just whetted my appetite.

2. Radiohead essentially give away a free concert dvd.

The main problem with Radiohead's In Rainbows was the fact that its brilliance got overshadowed by the band's marketing strategy (download for as much as you want to pay, in case you've been living under a rock). In Rainbows is - in my opinion - as good as anything they've done. And they have done some very serious good.

And, in a neat repetition of that release, they've done a similar thing with a live concert video from the tour (in Prague). A group of fans got together & all shot the show on video cameras from different places in the audience, and then they edited it all together. And, remarkably, rather than shut the distribution of that video down (as one suspects most bands would do), Radiohead actually gave the organisers the official audio recording of the night, straight from their soundboard, to use on the concert video. Their condition? That the video be made available free to everyone via download.

I've downloaded it (from here) in both Ipad and dvd video formats. It's a tremendous show (especially for someone who's never had the chance to see them live in person), and looks about as good as any 'official' concert video I've ever seen.

Had the band bunged the exact same show onto a dvd & charged $30 for it, I would've paid. But for them to help fans make a free download video just makes me love them all the more. And demonstrates the difference between bands who understand how to use the internet to their (& their fans'!) advantage, and those who are still running from the idea of it.

3. Arcade Fire take Ipod technology in new directions.

So, Arcade Fire released a new album - The Suburbs - a month or two ago. You can buy it on vinyl, cd or, if you're a chump, via Itunes download. On the other hand, you can download it from their website for less than half of what Itunes (Australia) charges. In doing so, not only do you support the band directly, without Apple etc taking their cut, and save a decent amount of money, you also get a vastly superior product.

Why? Well, for starters, they encode their album at a higher bit rate than does Apple, and you get your choice of formats - including several varities of lossless & high-bitrate MP3. You also get the digital booklet in PDF form, featuring all the lyrics & artwork.

But even better than that, they've included a second digital copy, using enhanced files. In short, instead of just displaying the album cover on your Ipod (etc), each song has a different background image. On top of that image, as the song plays, the lyrics are displayed, a line or two at a time, in a vaguely karaoke manner. And they also include other special variations, including some lyric-themed effects (when they sing 'someone cut out the lights', the screen goes black, for example) and a link to a website related to the theme of each song (for play on internet-connected devices like Iphones).

This is incredibly cool. I literally had no idea that this sort of thing was possible. Why has it taken so long for someone to take advantage of the Ipod/Iphone technology in this way? (My only beef is that it doesn't seem to work on my Ipad, which I had thought would be the best platform for it. But even on the Iphone it's tremendous fun.)

I was not previously actually a huge Arcade Fire fan, but heard good things about this album, listened to a few songs on YouTube & saw the cheap download with an interesting-sounding use of technology, so happily plonked down my $8 (US). And I've really been loving The Suburbs, so I'm glad I did. But again: it was through hearing songs on YouTube that I decided this album was worth a shot.

Artists & record labels have to adapt to new technologies if they expect people to continue paying for music. Physical releases will continue to have a place in how people buy music (hell, I still buy vinyl records!), but innovative digital releases like these three will encourage people to pay for legal & interesting releases of quality music. It's worth noting that, in the last month or so, I've downloaded:
- an eight-song, hour-long release in cd-quality audio
- a two-hour concert video, suitable for both Ipad and dvd player
- a complete album, in both cd-quality and enhanced-artwork audio files
all legally, for under $15AUD.

Each of these artists is big enough for this sort of thing to work, of course - they have built-in fanbases and enough people curious enough to have a listen. But, simultaneously, they're also not the three biggest-selling music acts in the world today either. I just hope that more artists - & record companies, for that matter - continue to see that making good & interesting things can actually be all you need in terms of marketing.