I don’t know about you but I’m still pretty angry about what happened yesterday when the Oscar nominations were announced. Seriously, how could The LEGO Movie not be nominated for best animated film? It’s almost as if the Academy is prejudiced against plastic toys.
*Le sigh*
So, normally, when I talk about The LEGO Movie, I find an excuse to include the video for Everything is Awesome.
But you know what?
EVERYTHING IS NOT AWESOME!
And today’s song of the day — which is also taken from The LEGO Movie — reflects that point. As performed by Will Arnett, here’s Batman’s Song (a.k.a. Untitled Self-Portrait.)
I was basking in the golden glow of San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall when I first laid eyes on The Decemberists. It was Summer 2004, and it was a day I still remember well. I arrived alone, but I ended up befriending two girls about my age from Sacramento. It was a pretty thing–three kids too young to buy drinks and too engaged to harbor ulterior motives, thrilled to witness a band that seemed to capture every novelty of a world we were only barely old enough to traverse independently. It wasn’t particularly crowded–we walked right up to the front of the stage–but there wasn’t a stranger in the audience. “Billy Liar” was a hall-wide sing-along. On “Red Right Ankle” you could hear a pin drop. Chris Funk dawned a fake beard and marched through the audience pounding a drum strapped to his chest for “A Cautionary Song”. “California One / Youth and Beauty Brigade” was a swaying dream that will resonate in me until the day I die. I wanted to marry those girls by the end of it–both of them, and I never bothered asking their names.
Austin Texas, fall 2006, I stumbled into Stubb’s BBQ in a daze. “Indie rock” had become the musical movement of the decade, and I felt like a king in the middle of it all. It was a crazy two-week stretch: The Album Leaf, The Mountain Goats, a trek out to Houston for Built to Spill, a return to my metal roots for Between the Buried and Me, and somewhere in the midst of it all I found my sleepless self in a sea of humanity as Colin belted “Culling of the Fold” outdoors to a sold-out crowd. He was exhausted but elated, grinning from ear to ear the whole set, and so was I. The irony of “I was Meant for the Stage” was not lost on either of us.
Pittsburgh, 2009, I took my seat at the Byham Theater to witness The Decemberists in a traditional performance hall. I had traded in faded proofs of attendance for garb with actual buttons, and the band was decked out in full suit and tie. The Hazards of Love was larger than life–Shara Worden striding across the stage like a spidery temptress to a majestic display of lights and an unprecedented rock opera. The Decemberists rose to their fame as only they could, and the result was in one breath a self-aware mockery of their grandiose ambitions and a brilliant realization of the same.
…I wrote of The King is Dead‘s simple folk rock sound that it seemed like The Decemberists were “coming down off their own high. I imagine it’s difficult to be as… musically intelligent as they are without some fear of becoming pretentious.” The album title might even hint at this, and the band’s subsequent three year hiatus seemed to confirm it. Now it is 2015, more than a decade since that wonderful night in San Francisco, and What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is due out in just over a week. I don’t really know what I expected, but I know what I was feeling. It certainly wasn’t the grandeur of The Hazards of Love, nor epic ballads reminiscent of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” and “The Island”. I was waxing nostalgic on Colin at his sweetest. “Grace Cathedral Hill”, “Shiny”, “Red Right Ankle”, “Of Angels and Angles”… Because The Decemberists were no longer a novel in their own right. That beautiful rise ended with The Hazards of Love, and the hiatus laid it all to rest. Theirs was a tale to look back on fondly; the story had come to an end.
What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World gives me that sweetness, in a way. Tracks like “Lake Song”, “Make You Better”, and “12/17/12” are absolutely beautiful. All of the songs fall somewhere between these mellow numbers, blues/folk tracks like “Carolina Low” and “Better Not Wake the Baby”, and upbeat pop like “The Wrong Year”, “Cavalry Captain”, and “Philomena”. I could live without the latter three, but suffice to say the album is generally pleasing to listen to, though Jenny Conlee’s accordion has sadly all but left us. “Lake Song”, “Make You Better”, and “12/17/12” definitely steal the show for me, but I won’t soon forget the catchy choruses of “Anti-Summersong” or “Mistral”, nor the lulling blues melancholy of “Till the Water is All Long Gone”.
But this album breaks my heart. Through it all, I can’t escape the feeling that some fell force sucked away Colin’s joie de vivre, substituting mellow content to lead a normal life where once the world had been a playground. The music is still great, but I can’t feel the synergy between it and the lyrics anymore. At least “Lake Song” has been spared this fate. Here is what I can understand of “Mistral”: “So we already wrecked the rental car, and I’ve already lost my way. I feel entombed in this tourist bar, for a day anyway. So lay me out on the cobblestone, and unfurl this aching jib. The streets are built on ancient bones, and the crib of the rib. Won’t a mistral blow it all away? Won’t a mistral blow away? So it’s me and you and the baby boy, and a ? shed away, reeking out a little joy. What a waste. Bad mistakes. Won’t a mistral blow it all away? Won’t a mistral blow away?” I don’t know. It’s just… kind of shallow–a bit of babbling around the surface of a theme–and it’s pervasive through much of the album. “Better Not Wake the Baby” is packed with creative one-liners, all tied by a refrain of “but it better not wake the baby“. What does that mean? Plenty of Decemberists tracks have sent me to Wikipedia in the past, but I’m not going to find an answer here, and for that the song means nothing to me. “12/17/12”, my favorite track, still totally jars me out of my happy daze when Colin appears to rhyme “grieving” with “grieving” and “belly” with “belly”.
Go ahead. Crucify me. Point out the most obvious meanings; remind me that Colin still has a robust vocabulary; explain how it’s none of my business to criticize someone else’s creativity; note that it’s still better than 90% of popular music; tell me to shut my mouth and go listen to something else if I don’t like it. I don’t care, because the sad fact is I will go listen to something else. I spent more time on Castaways and Cutouts than on What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World while writing all this. I don’t want that. I want to love this album and hold it dear, but I can’t. I listen to the lyrics and more often than not I just hear Colin going through the motions without any of the magic. From the 5 Songs EP all the way to The Hazards of Love it was a constant indulgence, and now it is gone.
The opening track, “The Singer Addresses His Audience”, is the reason I can still listen with a faint smile. It is not one for the album, but for the memory of all that The Decemberists have meant to me over the years. In almost a parting farewell to Colin’s old stage persona, he sings in classic form: “We know, we know we belong to ya. We know you built your lives around us. Would we change? …We had to change some. We know, we know we belong to ya. We know you threw your arms around us in the hopes we wouldn’t change… But we had to change some, you know, to belong to you.”
And they still do, and I still love them, and I still look forward to catching them on their upcoming tour, but What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is a bittersweet experience.
I don’t think a New Years rolls by that I don’t say something amounting to “odd-numbered years produce better music”. The trend inexplicably holds true once again. I actually listened to a good bit of new music this year–far more than I did last year at least–but when it came time to recap, my options felt… a bit lacking. The best of the best are still grand indeed, but the quality drifts away rapidly if I dig beyond a top 10. I’m pretty happy with the list I ended up with though, and I hope you’ll find something new and inspiring in the tracks I’ve sampled below:
10. Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere (track: The Astral Dialogue)
Marrow of the Spirit was a pretty bold divorce from everything we’ve come to expect out of Agalloch over the years, for better or worse. On The Serpent & the Sphere, the band make a return to a more direct evolution of their regular sound. The album offers a nice mix of vintage Agalloch and further dabblings into the post-rock/metal sphere. It didn’t grab me by the balls and thrash me upside the head like say, Pale Folklore or Ashes Against the Grain, but it’s definitely a solid entry in the band’s formidable discography.
9. Cormorant – Earth Diver (track: Daughter of Void)
I was a bit more critical than complementary of Earth Diver when I reviewed it a few months ago, but that mostly boiled down to the feeling that it could have done with better production. Honestly, if I don’t own the cd proper I have no business speaking of such things, because for all I know my copy is just a bit lossy. The raw songwriting on this album is stellar, and I hope to hear more out of this band in years to come.
8. Bast – Spectres (track: Outside the Circles of Time)
I am not sure where Spectres would have placed on my year-end list had I had a bit more time to listen to it, but it could only have moved up from here. I’ve only had about two weeks to check this out and make a call, but I was dead convinced that it belonged somewhere in my top 10. The freshman album by this dirty doom trio does it all, and better than your band. With ease they develop a post-rock build-up into a bassy doom dirge, bust into a stoner metal rockout, and then fuse it into some pretty sinister black metal sounds. When black metal leaks its way into headbanging rock, really awesome things happen. Case in point: “Outside the Circles of Time”.
7. Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry (track: Clarissima Mundi Lumina)
A bit more down to whatever planet these guys hail from than the 777 trilogy, Saturnian Poetry is still a bizarre journey into another dimension that only Blut Aus Nord can seem to access. Its constant whirlwind of motion blasts us into a haze of celestial chaos, wherein the band’s synth chords and clean vocals command us to stare in awe and reverence. Few black metal bands on the market can claim to have forged as unique a sound within the genre as Blut Aus Nord, and they’re still breaking my brain in 2014.
6. Saor – Aura (track: The Awakening)
I tend to think of Aura as a straight-forward album that serves its purpose beautifully. Top-notch woodwinds and string paint a majestic Scottish landscape where the old gods still tread in all their glory, at one with the earth and its people. Without ever really breaching any new territory beyond the tried and true boundaries of pagan metal, Andy Marshall has managed to craft what is probably the most grand Gaelic/Celtic variant of the genre I have ever heard.
5. Boris – Noise (track: Melody)
I fucking love Boris. You know that. They could literally shit on an LP and I’d claim it shear brilliance. But thankfully, they keep pumping out one masterpiece after another instead. Noise is so layered in the band’s two decades of perpetual evolution that I don’t think you could begin to grasp what the hell is going on here if you didn’t already know half their discography by heart. It’s a little bit of everything they’ve done before all crammed together in yet another novel new way. No other band in existence sounds anything like this, and at the same time few bands have borrowed more liberally and diversely from other musical scenes than the bastion of badass that is Boris. Boris Boris. Boris! God damn, this is awesome.
4. Woods of Desolation – As the Stars (track: Unfold)
As the Stars is 2014’s Aesthethica, albeit of more modest proportions. If the obscure Welshman known simply as “D.” could append to his public image anything approaching the epic douchiness of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, it might even be popular. (Ok, I’m one of the few people who’ve actually read Hunter’s writings and think he makes some valid points, but whatever.) This album is a bloody mess in the least figurative of ways, and it’s exactly the sort of raw sincerity that I love about post-black metal. In a new scene that divorces black metal’s brink-of-the-abyss soundscape from its machismo closet-bound harbingers, the bands that play with their hearts on their sleeves tend to touch closest to home. As the Stars offers neither the epic intensity of Liturgy nor the refined sound quality of Deafheaven, and the metal world is sure to forget it in time, but my brief love affair with Woods of Desolation will be remembered fondly. Its humble reach is part of what makes it endearing.
3. Harakiri for the Sky – Aokigihara (track: Jhator)
I hold my top three choices for 2014 in a league far above the rest. Aokigihara is an absolutely enormous bastion of sound that presses the weight of its world on your shoulders from start to finish. And that world is heavy indeed, because it is firmly rooted in reality. Harakiri for the Sky doesn’t play that tried and true metal game of glorifying violence. It shoves some real modern nightmares in your face and says “this is really, really terrible, and there’s nothing we can honestly do about it.” I can see this album attracting a “DSBM” label, which is typically shorthand for “wallowing in self pity”, but Aokigihara is the real deal. If it doesn’t leave you feeling a little sick inside, you aren’t paying enough attention.
2. Spectral Lore – III (track: The Cold March Towards Eternal Brightness)
At more than a dozen listens through this album, I am still not sure what to make of it. 87 minutes of music crammed into seven tracks is pretty hard to swallow, and to make matters worse, the first two tracks are its weakest by far. I find it next to impossible to commit myself to a full attentive listen from start to finish, and it’s not an album that offers much on the surface. Yet, I can’t escape the feeling that something really special is going on here. My mind may drift away for three or four minutes at a pop, but I am always drawn back into some beautiful synergy that dances on the brink of euphoria. 2014 might be at an end, but I haven’t finished listening to III by a long shot. I am going to keep plugging away until I’ve got it fully within my grasp, and when I do I think I might regret passing it by for the #1 spot.
1. Panopticon – Roads to the North (track: The Long Road Part 3: The Sigh of Summer)
The first time I heard Roads to the North, I was routing a rather lossy early leak through my Droid into the particularly horrendous sound system of my wife’s Mazda 6. (My 2006ish Nissan Sentra has godlike audio and the car was half the price. What’s up with that?) I definitely did not think on that initial listen that it would end up my favorite album of the year. With a properly purchased copy through my headphones, it’s easy to tell why an album as subtly mixed as this would translate to crap when pushed through crap. I am absolutely captivated by the melding of sounds on this album. It’s simply beautiful, and you couldn’t ask for a more conscientious artist to craft its folk, post-rock, black metal, and melodic death metal melodies than Austin Lunn. The lyrical and thematic content of Kentucky showed him to be one of the most honest musicians in the metal scene. On Roads to the North, he translated the spirit of Kentucky into sound. Kentucky is the album I think about. This is the one I actually listen to, over and over and over again.
Continuing our look back at 2014, below you’ll find 14 of my favorite songs of the past year. Now, you should understand that I’m not necessarily saying that these are the best 14 songs of the year. Instead, they’re just some of my personal favorites. These are the songs that either made me want to dance or that I inevitably found myself singing off-key while I was in the shower. These are the songs that got stuck in my head and which I found myself singing whenever I was stuck in traffic.
These are 14 of my favorite songs of 2014.
(By the way, click on the links in this sentence if you want to see my favorite songs of 2013, 2012, and 2011.)
14) Everything is Awesome — Tegan and Sara featuring The Lonely Island
13) Mess Is Mine — Vance Joy
12) Summer Nights — Kaskade featuring The Brocks
11) Chandelier — Sia
10) Take Ü There — Jack Ü (featuring Kiesza)
9) Blank Space — Taylor Swift
8) Runaway(U & I) — Galantis
7) Blue Sky Action — Above & Beyond featuring Alex Vargas
And finally, here’s my pick for the worst song and video of last year. In the past, I’ve defended some of the notoriously awful songs that have been produced and promoted by Patrice Wilson, just on the basis that they were, at the very least, memorably weird. Friday remains one of my favorite singing-in-the-shower songs and it’s fun to sing when you’re trying to annoy people on Monday. Chinese Food is — well, Chinese Food sucked but I do love Chinese food so I could at least relate to the song. But then, in 2014, came both the song Sush Up and the video featuring 11 year-old Alison Gold playing a sexualized criminal who gets electrocuted in the electric chair. And, of course, Patrice shows up to rap. And seriously — BLEH!
While I’m not going to share the video for Sush Up because it’s really creepy and icky, I will share another video that’ll make my point about Patrice Wilson.
Tomorrow, my look back at 2014 will continue with 20 good things that I saw on television in 2014!
Okay, this new is really late but, as always, better late than never!
Last Friday, the Academy announced that 79 songs had been judged to be eligible to be nominated for Best Original Song!
Now, if you know anything about me, you know that I love long lists and playing “what if.” Quite a few Oscar commentators have said that Patty Smith is so obviously going to win the Oscar for her song from Noah that it’s pointless to even speculate about anyone else. Well, that may indeed be the case but hey, it’s still fun to look at all of these possibilities and wonder “What if…” Speculation is never pointless, as long as it’s fun.
“It’s On Again” from “The Amazing Spider-Man 2″
“Opportunity” from “Annie”
“Lost Stars” from “Begin Again”
“Grateful” from “Beyond the Lights”
“Big Eyes” from “Big Eyes”
“Immortals” from “Big Hero 6″
“The Apology Song” from “The Book of Life”
“I Love You Too Much” from “The Book of Life”
“The Boxtrolls Song” from “The Boxtrolls”
“Quattro Sabatino” from “The Boxtrolls”
“Ryan’s Song” from “Boyhood”
“Split The Difference” from “Boyhood”
“No Fate Awaits Me” from “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them”
“Brave Souls” from “Dolphin Tale 2″
“You Got Me” from “Dolphin Tale 2″
“All Our Endless Love” from “Endless Love”
“Let Me In” from “The Fault in Our Stars”
“Not About Angels” from “The Fault in Our Stars”
“Until The End” from “Garnet’s Gold”
“It Just Takes A Moment” from “Girl on a Bicycle”
“Last Stop Paris” from “Girl on a Bicycle”
“Ordinary Human” from “The Giver”
“I’m Not Gonna Miss You” from “Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me”
“Find A Way” from “The Good Lie”
“Color The World” from “The Hero of Color City”
“The Last Goodbye” from “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”
“Chariots” from “The Hornet’s Nest”
“Follow Me” from “The Hornet’s Nest”
“Something To Shoot For” from “Hot Guys with Guns”
“For The Dancing And The Dreaming” from “How to Train Your Dragon 2″
“Afreen” from “The Hundred-Foot Journey”
“Yellow Flicker Beat” from “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1″
“Heart Like Yours” from “If I Stay”
“I Never Wanted To Go” from “If I Stay”
“Mind” from “If I Stay”
“Everything Is Awesome” from “The Lego Movie”
“Call Me When You Find Yourself” from “Life Inside Out”
“Coming Back To You” from “Life of an Actress The Musical”
“The Life Of An Actress” from “Life of an Actress The Musical”
“Sister Rust” from “Lucy”
“You Fooled Me” from “Merchants of Doubt”
“Million Dollar Dream” from “Million Dollar Arm”
“Spreading The Word/Makhna” from “Million Dollar Arm”
“We Could Be Kings” from “Million Dollar Arm”
“A Million Ways To Die” from “A Million Ways to Die in the West”
“Way Back When” from “Mr. Peabody & Sherman”
“America For Me” from “A Most Violent Year”
“I’ll Get You What You Want (Cockatoo In Malibu)” from “Muppets Most Wanted”
“Something So Right” from “Muppets Most Wanted”
“We’re Doing A Sequel” from “Muppets Most Wanted”
“Mercy Is” from “Noah”
“Seeds” from “Occupy the Farm”
“Grant My Freedom” from “The One I Wrote for You”
“The One I Wrote For You” from “The One I Wrote for You”
“Hal” from “Only Lovers Left Alive”
“Shine” from “Paddington”
“Still I Fly” from “Planes: Fire & Rescue”
“Batucada Familia” from “Rio 2″
“Beautiful Creatures” from “Rio 2″
“Poisonous Love” from “Rio 2″
“What Is Love” from “Rio 2″
“Over Your Shoulder” from “Rudderless”
“Sing Along” from “Rudderless”
“Stay With You” from “Rudderless”
“Everyone Hides” from “St. Vincent”
“Why Why Why” from “St. Vincent”
“Glory” from “Selma”
“The Morning” from “A Small Section of the World”
“Special” from “Special”
“Gimme Some” from “#Stuck”
“The Only Thing” from “Third Person”
“Battle Cry” from “Transformers: Age of Extinction”
“Miracles” from “Unbroken”
“Summer Nights” from “Under the Electric Sky”
“We Will Not Go” from “Virunga”
“Heavenly Father” from “Wish I Was Here”
“So Now What” from “Wish I Was Here”
“Long Braid” from “Work Weather Wife”
“Moon” from “Work Weather Wife”
MUSIC! Kids love it, parents hate it! Or something like that. I don’t know what that means. I’m just trying to figure out a good way to introduce the obscure 1982 film, Rock: It’s Your Decision!
Rock: It’s Your Decision is an hour-long film about a teenager named Jeff (played by Ty Taylor, who I assume is the son of the film’s director, John Taylor). Jeff and his mom have been fighting about the music that he listens to. She thinks that it’s way too secular and therefore, a bad influence. She turns to her church’s youth minister and asks him to talk to Jeff. The very earnest (and kinda creepy, to be honest) minister challenges Jeff to spend two weeks only listening to Christian music and actually researching what the lyrics of his favorite songs are actually saying and what other people his age get out of those lyrics. Jeff agrees and then, at the end of the movie, gives a ten minute sermon to his youth group in which he reveals what he has discovered.
What’s interesting is that, up until he delivers his sermon, Jeff comes across like not that bad of a guy. Sure, he takes himself too seriously and he’s kinda boring and I know that, when I was in high school, he was exactly the type of nonentity that I would dread having to sit next to. But other than that, he seems almost reasonable. Stupid but reasonable.
But then he gives his sermon and — OH. MY. GOD. It’s as if stepping up to the pulpit unleashes Jeff’s inner douchebag. Suddenly, he’s pacing around the stage and talking about how musicians are all homosexual drug addicts. He talks about how, when he listened to secular music, he would actually get possessed. Even worse, when he talks about listening to that terrible music, Jeff acts it out for us. He turns on an imaginary stereo. He talks about how much he used to love hearing a good “get down beat.” He starts physically dancing to the music in his head. Scornfully, he reminds us that modern songs have titles like, “One of These Nights” and “Let There Be Rock.” He points out that even so-called “safe” singers still sing about sex. His audience, of course, sits there in rapt attention. The youth minister watches from the back of the room and you can tell that he’s mentally high-fiving himself. Jeff goes on and on until finally, he shatters a vinyl record on a church pew. (Amazingly evil demons do not immediately fly out of the remains of the record….)
What makes all of this especially amusing is that the songs and musicians that Jeff so vehemently condemns are basically the same songs and bands that my parents used to listen to back before I was even born. (And they continued to listen to them even after I was born, regardless of how many times I begged my mom not to sing along to the oldies station while driving me to school.) The next time I find myself arguing with my Dad, I’ll know that it’s AC/DC’s fault. (Or maybe I’ll just blame Captain and Tenille because, according to Jeff, they’re all equally bad…)
According to Mike “McBeardo” McPadden in the book Heavy Metal Movies, this film was specifically made for showing in churches and Christian schools. As such, it’s a very low-budget film that mainly features amateur actors. Instead of using idealized sets or costumes, it was actually filmed in someone’s house and at a real mall and in a real church and everyone pretty much wore their own clothes and, as a result, the film does have some anthropological value. Having watched Rock: It’s Your Decision, I at least now kinda know what some people were like in 1982.
Anyway, for those of you who just want to jump to the good part, you can watch Jeff’s “sermon” below.
And, for all of my fellow history nerds who want to get the full 1982 experience, you can watch the entire film below.
To be honest, there is really only one reason why Spirit In The Sky is today’s song of the day and that’s that it happens to be so very stuck in my head! I’ve seen the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy a few dozen times and I now not only hear Spirit in the Sky when I close my eyes but I also end up picturing a surly raccoon walking down a hallway with a tree-like creature that repeatedly says, “I am Groot.”
And that’s not a bad thing at all!
Believe it or not, before I sat down to write this post, I actually did some research on the origin of the song. And, of course, by research I mean that I looked the song up on Wikipedia and read the first half of the article. Spirit in the Sky was written, recorded, and first released in 1969. Norman Greenbaum mostly wrote it as a challenge to himself, to see if he, despite knowing nothing about gospel music, could write a gospel song. As for the song’s distinctive “beep beep” fills, they were the result of a last minute improvisation by guitarist Russell Dashiell. The end result, of course, was the world’s first psychedelic gospel song.
Finally, before Greenbaum recorded Spirit in The Sky, he apparently had a hit song called The Eggplant That Ate Chicago.
And who knows? Maybe that song will be featured in the trailer for the sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy!
But for now, here is Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky…
Earlier today, one of my favorite films of the first half of 2014, The Lego Movie, was released on Blu-ray. With that in mind, how could I not pick this song for song of the day?
Why do I love Everything is Awesome?
Not only is it insanely catchy but its probably one of the most sarcastic songs ever written. How could I not love it?
Through the Shattered Lens 