la pomme du ciel

It finally happened. I finally made it to a show. I haven’t been to one since, unless I am mistaken, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! What did I miss in the meantime? The Dears. And, oh, just Autolux. Just the Fiery Furnaces. Haven’t seen a local show since the Jenn Gooch CD release, unless you count bartending for the Beagle Brothers CD release show in June. Which I do. Not. As much as I love that album.

I’ve been a bit jaded about music as a whole, at least until a few weeks ago, when I discovered the Army behind Black Mountain. Ironically enough, I’d been pretty jaded about everything lately. I was about a fingernail clipping away from not giving a damn about a ticket I got in April. I mean, I was just hoping for a couple of my favorite songs from a band that put out one of the worst EPs I had ever heard. I hadn’t even bothered with the Hazards of Love, which kind of sounds like something the Arcade Fire would come up with.

I couldn’t think of a more perect mindset to go into a show with. My mind was blasted, blown and undone, as only the head of an apathetic can be.

First of, Heartless Bastards opened, and I was delighted to discover that they could be secret members of the Black Mountain Army, if their sound is any indication. It was a happy coincidence, and I was invested as soon as Erika Wennerstrom let those PJ Harvey-esque pipes soar. My favorite music will and always be the stuff you can let slip like the dogs of war in a bar that seems a little too sleepy for your tastes, and my fellow Ohians are now a part of that repetoire.

So that brings us back to the Decemberists. I had been content to give them The Crane Wife for a shark jump, especially after hearing “Valerie Plame” too many damn times. It took about ten minutes into their set, but then I figured it out- they were playing Hazards of Love in its entirety, which accounted for the two additional players upon the stage. So I settled in, and let the epic take me. I’m only just now taking my first real lesson to the album itself, nothing will ever compare to seeing and feeling it live.

While Wife had its threads and themes, the Decemberists had not really visited the realm of heavy consistent concept, at least in terms of making one long opera (Yes, I know they put The Tain (that is on The Tain) to music, but did you?).

The reviews are already out on the album, I know. It’s nothing like any other Decemberist album; comparing it as such is an insult to its sheer audacity and derring-do. It’s a landscape with oases and deserts, Cliffs of Insanity and blissful plains of purple buffalo, cracked crystals and hideous Nothings. It gallops, it stomps, it throws fits, its bones rattle to sublime dust. It’s a leprous healer with an axe to grind, because that chapel ain’t gonna build itself.

It’s an A.

Some bands manage to get to the part in the story where they can throw together a decent set, communicate on that higher level, and give the audience the best night they’ll ever have until they have it again. Other bands get past that part, where they so fully understand what the music is, and that they have less and less to do with the music the higher the audience is lifted; they simply let what they have crafted work for them. The Decemberists made it look easier than a dream.

As if that weren’t enough, they had a second set, something more along the lines of that former band, the one that does what they do with enthusiasm, but might never stride through the cloud deck like the giants do.

So we heard “July, July!”, my all-time favorite song of theirs, which was my only hope for the concert. You can see why I was floored by the experience. They also played “Shankill Butchers”, my second favorite song. I had heard in an interview that Meloy was a drama student, and that it came out in thier shows, so I was waiting a little on that, too. They re-enacted the Battle of Fort Pitt amidst the audience with a less than scrupulous or sensical account of history, halfway through “A Cautionary Tale”. Then got right back onto the stage for the second half with nary a beat missed.

With the song’s final admonition, they left the stage. I expected an encore, given the band’s flair for the dramatic, but was shocked and rocked by what they delivered:

Sadly, that’s the best of the videos. But you get the point.

I would be lying if I said the show didn’t provide an incredibly beautiful counterpoint to what my life is doing down here on the ground. As it goes with all inspiration, it tends to find you, slap you silly and get you imagining the day your head reaches above the clouds. Working towards it is another matter, but then that’s why we have heroes who risk, well, the hazards of love.

Grade:

The Decemberists at the Byham Theater, August 14, 2009: A+

The Decemberists: The Hazards of Love: A

(It’s a difference of seeing a play and reading it)

Perusing Google Reader today led to this little gem from Magnet, my snobby-indie-as-fuck-asshole’s magazine of choice. Dude, they are so hip that they only publish three times a year. Take that, Pitchfork, you ‘print is dead’ dilettantes.

The article is Corey duBrowa’s take on the five most overrated and five most underrated Radiohead songs of all time! He’s known for, I guess, a 1,700 word review of Hail to The Thief, which is about 1,700 more words than I need to read about that self-indulgent ode to Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear.

To be fair, he and I agree, with the strange exception of “I Will”, that the album is better left to listening to everything they did before instead.

Which brings us to his list of the overblown. Again, I agree. Almost completely. Name any “hit” Radiohead song, and I’ll probably tell you it’s a gust of hot alternarock air. But while “Electioneering” is a bit of an anachronism within Ok Computer, it presages the full brunt of Bush-era insecurities several years beforehand. So, given the fact that that album is so “ahead of its time”, let’s put it into a total context and agree that “Electioneering” is a badass rock song which also happens to epitomize the callow irony that so many intellectuals hide behind in the face of Politics as Usual.

Okay, onto the most underrated. I’ll get to the My Iron Lung EP slections later.

I guess I can hang with “Blow Out”, but I’m tempted to say it’s a contrarian sort of logic that points one to find one of the only redeemable tracks on Pablo Honey, an otherwise forgettable album, especially in light of the rest of the catalogue.

Kid A? Seriously? Two of the tracks made it onto the “Vanilla Sky” soundtrack. That album, by all accounts, should have never sold so well, not because it isn’t genius, but because (especially at that time) it’s fairly unlistenable for the unwashed masses. Because we all know not enough people have proclaimed “genius!” enough times.

We get it, and it’s not underrated. It might well be overrated and I never want to see Tom Cruise paired with a Radiohead song ever again.

The rest of his list seems purposefully obscure. That’s right, kiddies. Big brother is gonna tell you where it’s at with tracks you’ve never heard, but should.

Except that, yeah, you should hear them, if only to realize there are reasons they’re obscure. And if you want obscure Radiohead cuts, there’s better songs.

I’ll see “Meeting In the Aisles” with “Maquiladora”, because I’d rather rock with the “beautiful kids and their beautiful troubles” than stand around looking thoughtful, deal with the love of the My Iron Lung EP with a “Bwuh?”  and politely suggest “Cuttooth”, “Trans-Atlantic Drawl”, and above all else, “A Reminder“.

I’m having a crisis of confidence in my social    stratum. There’s something wrong with the whole indie fucktard demographic. Are we really so desperate? Are we really so eager to rush headlong towards the record store for the latest CSS record, to make excuses for overblown heaps of mediocrity like Interpol’s second disc, to recognize bands more for the trademark and not talent?

Of course we are. The real joy of straddling the 90′s and the oughties is that I am fully aware that, well, we turned out to be just as susceptible in 1997 as we were in 2007, and stop playing that MIA record, it’s kinda obnoxious. Wanna borrow my old KOrN records?

So it wasn’t surprising to my meta-self that when I got wind of a new series of Decemberists’ joints, I was pretty stoked. O me. So I put it on. At first I thought I was listening to “16 Military Wives”- “Valerie Plame” is cut from the same irritating cloth, right down to the progression. I like my politically aware songs with a slice of de la Rocha or at least a bit of Manics, thanks.

Le sigh. Okay, fine. EPs are rarely heavy-hitting. I can deal. Then “Valerie” aped “Hey Jude” in its drawn-out closing. Jesus H. The next two songs didn’t grate me as much as pista uno, but they’ll never get stuck in my craw the same way “July, July” or “Shankill Butchers” do. By the end of “O New England” I was already lamenting the fact that the Decemberists, after four LPs, A smattering of EPs, including an adaptation of the Tain (of all things) was risking their long-standing indie-darling status. Then it got worse.

Can we please leave the dead horse alone? While I don’t mind the occasional cover, a Velvet Underground cover, especially of a yawn song like “I’m Sticking With You” is too much for me to take. Unimaginative, lackluster covers are for over-the-hill farts and powerpunk bands singing the Nerverending Story theme. Shut it off.

It was appropriate then that the banjo-laced “Record Year” followed; a creepy orchestral meditation on the impermanence of our culture: “In the annals of the Empire, did it ever look so gray?”

Not until this farce, Meloy.

“Raincoat Song”, the final blast of the series, relies on the Decemberists’ most consistent strength- oh I love those memorable choruses!

But they’re all an invite to sing along, and who really gives a shit anymore? I was grateful the song was a short ditty, so I could get back to the routine of irony, suspicion, and quiet optimism that marks our tribe, the halls of our idols a bit dimmer.

Until of course, the Decemberists release Hazards of Love in late March. Or maybe Björk’s new joint (remember her?)- I hear her new album will take three years to record (true) and is to be comprised entirely of her clipping her toenails and warbling like a drunken bird of paradise (Seriously, I wish that weren’t likely true. Oh Homogenic, I miss you.).

We’ll all be there on that fateful Tuesday, won’t we.

Grade: D-