Some Places Are Forever Afternoon, Wayne Horvitz, Songlines
The track with the strongest subtext on Wayne Horvitz’s Some Places Are Forever Afternoon — an album by no means lacking for subtext — bears the title Nothing Dies as Slowly as a Scene. It has a bittersweet melody ringing distinctly of the American West, with a contrapuntal melody for bassoon and cornet, and a steady-burbling undertow of piano, bass and electric guitar.
To anyone familiar with Horvitz, the pianist and composer who also booked musicians at the original Knitting Factory in New York, and now helps program the Royal Room in Seattle, the title might refer to the social energies behind any musical scene and the nostalgia that often trundles along in its wake. Maybe that is the intention, but the title also comes from a Richard Hugo poem, Death of the Kapowsin Tavern, that ruefully considers something plainer and sadder: the charred wreckage of an old bar.
Horvitz conceived of Some Places Are Forever Afternoon after delving into the poetry of Hugo, another artist with ties to the Pacific Northwest. (Born and raised in Seattle, he died there in 1982.) The album’s subtitle, 11 Places for Richard Hugo, hints at a methodology: Horvitz followed in Hugo’s footsteps, visiting places that inspired him, from Seattle to Missoula, Montana, where he taught for years at the University of Montana.
Each album track is named after a phrase from a corresponding poem, which in turn often refers to a physical place. You Drink Until You Are Mayor, a dissonant chamber piece, evokes the bleary alienation of Hugo’s Dixon, while the roadhouse shuffle on All Weather Is Yours No Matter How Vulgar? signals the punctured pretensions in the poem Fairfield.
Hugo was a plain-spoken writer who compressed great emotional weight into language at once casual and exacting. Horvitz comes to the table with a similar feeling for the American vernacular, drawing from Muddy Waters, Charles Ives and one of his peers, the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. (Tim Young, who plays guitar on the album, often waxes Frisell-ian, and Ron Miles, its cornetist, is a regular in Frisell’s groups. Among the other featured players are Peggy Lee on cello and Sara Schoenbeck on bassoon.)
Horvitz was wise not to incorporate a vocalist on the album, instead creating compact soundtracks for the scenes that Hugo so evocatively sketched. The earthy nobility of this music could easily stand on its own, with no poetic corollary. But that sells something short — the way, for instance, that the sad, sweet air of the title track complements a poem called West Marginal Way, with its image of a tugboat straining upriver, “and the saw mill/bombing air with optimistic sparks.”
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
The Blackest Eye, Aye Nako and Don Giovanni
Right about the time when the listener might be reaching saturation levels of 25-year-old indie-rock gestures on Aye Nako’s new six-song EP, The Blackest Eye, the song Human Shield arrives.
It charges forward from the beginning: the vocal and staccato guitar line moving in tense downward steps, the bass line moving in tense upward steps. The song piles into a groove after nine seconds, then repeats the pattern of tension and release a few more times. And soon the chorus comes, with the lines “Who the hell would I be/Without the awful things inside me?” You stop thinking about what it sounds like; the song has its own life force.
On its Facebook page, Aye Nako, from Brooklyn, lists “non-college rock” besides “queercore” and “homopop” as its genre descriptors. That’s good, because it challenges what might be your first assumption: This band gets close to the details of what was long ago called “college rock,” trebly, fuzzy and slightly feckless. But throughout The Blackest Eye, various charged sequences suddenly light upon the songs: some overlay or collision, a vocal counterline, a passing chord adding an extra half-measure to a line, a total pause before a whole new strain begins. Or a bit of complexity in the lyrics, provocative or principled, that gets in your way: “You’ve got me bleaching my skin/Are you linked up with reptilians?” or “I’m preoccupied, casually hating my life.” (Or the singalong chorus in Killswitch: “I think you’re rude.”)
Listen closely: These songs are not feckless. The guitarist Jade Payne recently said in an interview with fanzine The Miscreant that the lyrics she’s been writing for the band are about “things directly related to blackness and trauma, like cultural erasure, anger and mental health.”
There are more of these moments on The Blackest Eye than on the band’s first album, Unleash Yourself, from 2013; it’s a step forward. Payne, the second guitarist, is new to the band since the recording of Unleash Yourself; her playing, and the arrangement of the songs to accommodate it, enlarges the band’s music, giving it new dimensions of depth and color.
And the vocals have more depth, too. In the same interview with The Miscreant, Mars Ganito, the main singer and songwriter for the band, spoke about taking testosterone and learning how to sing with a changed voice. It’s not a categorical difference — the basic skeptical, semidetached tone remains — but there is a powerful lingering over words, and a new kind of growl.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Communion, Years & Years and Interscope
Pop needs its distillers, its translators, its flatteners. The path of an original idea from obscurity to ubiquity might be more frictionless than it once was, but often to reach the most ears possible, someone has to come in and polish it up, sand down the burrs.
As work, it’s thankless, but not artless. You could almost argue that it’s noble: It helps reinforce an idea’s importance and influence through streamlining and amplification. Either that, or it’s shameless style-hopping, borrowing from innovators without assuming any of the risk of stepping on untested ground.
Let’s concede from the top that Years & Years is all received wisdom. None of its gestures are pure or novel. This British dance-pop trio — the tender singer Olly Alexander and the multi-instrumentalists Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Turkmen — is an inheritor of all sorts of traditions, not a creator of new ones.
Communion, its debut album — largely produced by the group with Mark Ralph — is cotton candy, 90 percent air. There is breezy, finger-snap house music (Real); two-step garage without any of the bite (Desire); new-wave-influenced pop that totally foregoes moodiness (King). Eyes Shut sounds like someone smoothing the rough edges off Sam Smith, a performer with no edge to lose.
And yet all of those songs are excellent. (Not Eyes Shut, though — that dog won’t walk.) They have fleet energy; they’re vivacious. Goldsworthy and Turkmen understand how to compress complexity into neat packages. Shine begins with warm ascending chords and erupts at the first chorus into a fit of ecstasy and liberated joy — it’s a cliche, and it works. And though Alexander’s vocals sometimes need multitracking for his lyrics about fickle lovers to have import, he’s an astute writer, especially on Without: “You don’t belong to me, you’re too far away/Everything falls apart when I try to say/You’re in love, in love without me.”
There are low points here, of course, and given this group’s approach, nowhere to hide during them — those songs are amateur, failed replicas.
Accepting the accomplishments on this album of diet club music perhaps requires a suspension of distaste for bandwagoners and carpetbaggers. But in this album’s most thrilling moments, whether the music is effective because it’s familiar, or familiar because it’s effective, almost ceases to be a concern.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
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