TBJ’S FAVORITE RECORDS OF 2012: GODSPEED YOU!, GRIZ BEAR, MT. EERIE

Originally published on thebomberjacket.com

There really wasn’t one album from 2012 that owned my ears the same way that Destroyer’s Kaputt and Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor did the last two years. Barring a long-winded tangent about why it’s nonsense for anyone to decide what were the best sounds recorded within a twelve-month period with no criteria whatsoever, suffice it to say that those records were my favorites for two reasons. One, because I enjoyed listening to them to death, and two, because they represented something greater than a collection of ten to fifteen songs. There were a few albums from this year that had a little bit of both of those qualities, but always more of one and a little weak on the other.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

With Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, Godspeed You! Black Emperor captured something contemporary in a way that most people want to call “political,” but which is an inaccurate term for it. As instrumental music with few words to give clues, the record is presented as a bit of a puzzle.In an interview with The Guardian, they said, “figure it out yourself, all the clues are there.”

The biggest hint is probably the title of the first track, “Mladic.” Most reviews of the album I’ve read don’t even mention that Ratko Mladić was the “Butcher of Bosnia,” a military leader wanted for crimes against humanity and genocide. The crimes were “supposedly” committed during the Bosnian War from 1992-1995 until he was captured in 2011. His trial began in May of this year at the international tribunal in the Hauge, Netherlands, but is currently on a six month hiatus because the defense accused the prosecution of failing to disclose certain information. The rest of the puzzle perhaps is unwound in the strange charts and images in the album’s packaging, including the odd triangle that looks strangely similar to a bad early 2000s hard-rock band logo.

One of the most quotable blips from the aforementioned interview is, “Things are not OK. Music should be about things are not OK, or else shouldn’t exist at all.” While the album’s confusing commentary of modern warfare and human rights is interesting, what’s maybe more interesting is the connection of politics to culture just with the record being a piece of popular media.

It’s a similar idea to the insert for their last album, Yanqui U.X.O., which contained a diagram that connected the major record companies to arms manufacturers. The best art of our time will be the stuff that is more than just a collection of pretty songs, but that captures something more about the society and culture.

Yet, while all of this is compelling and gives the listener a lot to think about during those long instrumental expanses, I can only listen to seven minutes of helicopter bagpipes a certain number of times. One, actually. The number of times is one.

Grizzly Bear - Shields

On the opposite end of the scale, the album I listened to the most this year was Grizzly Bear’s Shields. Yet, most of Grizzly Bear’s appeal has always been that they made “chill,” accessible music. Admittedly by the band themselves in an interview with Pitchfork, Chris Taylor said, “There were lyrics in previous albums that seemed to have no meaning whatsoever. And that always really annoyed me. We agreed it’d be really important and awesome if we could just try and make all the lyrics tell something.”

What they came out with was a personal and introspective album that seems to be a bit of a confessional about the distance between people, particularly the intentional distance. Emotional shields. “A Simple Answer” repeats a mantra that could seem like existentialism at first, with the casual ear tuning into Taylor repeating, “No wrong or right / Just do whatever you like.” Yet, the simple answer is that the mantra is a personal excuse, with one of the preceding lines being, “Move on, let’s face / that all you trust is a cynical phrase.”

Yet, for the most part, the album is just a wonderfully textured piece of music. Part of what can make an album one of your favorites isn’t just pretty music, but the way that the music reaches out into the world and into your life to create situations and memories with people that you care about that you wouldn’t trade for anything. I had the chance to cross seeing Grizzly Bear off of my bucket list at the Pitchfork music festival in Paris, which is one of the things that helped make Shields something more for me. Either way, it’s great to see the band thinking beyond just playing instruments well and it would be even better to see them go deeper.

Mount Eerie - Clear Moon

Mount Eerie - Ocean Roar

One band that had a pretty solid balance of meaningful music that’s also pleasing to listen to was Mount Eerie. It was part of the odd coincidence verging on would-be conspiracy as one of the many artists to release two albums in 2012. Yet, what makes Mount Eerie distinct is the two album are related, one not complete without the other.

The most famous work by songwriter Phil Elverum was under another pseudonym, being The Microphones. The material released during his “Mount Eerie period” has been more abstract and less poppy than the spontaneous, diverse, and catchy albums with The Microphones and have seemingly been more focused on nature.

With Clear Moon, Elverum very bluntly examined and addressed his output and the response to it.In “Through the Trees, Part II,” he sings, “I meant all of my songs not as a picture of the woods, but just to remind myself that I briefly live.” Even the multi-layered guitar riff and the “part II” in the title are call backs to earlier Elverum days. Yet, it’s not returning to techniques that made a cult following for fans of the album The Glow, Part II, that makes Clear Moon and Ocean Roar great sister albums, but how he uses it to construct a greater theme. Clarity vs. obfuscation, the moon vs. the ocean, bright light vs. white noise, accessibility vs. reclusiveness, understanding vs. confusion. It’s a multi-faceted theme that is pondered in a lot of Elverum’s songs, but never so directly and deeply as with these two albums. The conflict is not only dealt with in regards to understanding the universe, but also as a recording artist, trying to balance audience expectations and abstract artistic compulsions. It’s also something that I talked to Elverum about a bit in our interview earlier this year, which can be read here.

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brainwashed.com/godspeed
grizzly-bear.net
pwelverumandsun.com

Originally published on thebomberjacket.com

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"There is No Nature" Part III, Mount Eerie Sinking into the Ocean Roar

The car sped down the highway with an intensity of some impending unknown cataclysm

until it wasn’t clear if there was still a road underneath the wheels or just falling into the vast

roaring ocean. The foam was blue and iridescent carrying the colors from the dusk into my windshield

or the rain from falling clouds and it was a marimba or a glockenspiel or an organ or something, I

don’t know. On the dock there were pale lights glowing from across the water from houses or

people or lanterns. I heard a voice and called, “Who is there?” but the small yelp on the wind

grew louder until I realized that it was the voice of the water, being carried by waves into a mass

of static fuzz. There was clapping in the clouds turning into the sound of a stream running that

turned into a passing car or an oxygen ventilator. Rain fell into the slapping waves so that water was

everywhere, in the air, the earth, the vessel for the ocean, in me, in the car, in the light trying to shoot

its way through the drops of sound. It washed over noise of children laughing and playing with a

piano and a lovely girl humming. There was a constant beating that made my shoulders tense,

yet at the same time sounds so lulling that they blew the billowy sky over the distance

between me and the island and the mountain. I was there, or I was in the car, or I was off

somewhere making love or dying. There was barely even any rhythm to it. In dreams the ground

drifted off beneath our feet and all the water that was contained underneath seeped up through the

grass. It spoke of ancient questions, sometimes in German. We were sure that the water kept on

going and that swaming it, the distance between the waves and the molecules of the night sun

split before the pixelating mountain. OBFUSCATION. The fog was rolling in from that rocky pile

out west to get tossed in the waves. In the middle of it all, far out enough that the land shrinks

into a tiny dot, it becomes an alien planet orbiting some distant sun that has a name that no human

tongue can pronounce, because it was so heavy and churned like some great wooden mechanism were

below it. A giant wheel turning and keeping everything moving. So vast and empty that it becomes a

desert. The place that is the absence of water is the same as the place that is the absence of land.

Sinking; light doesn’t sink it water. It tries to reach into the deep, but turns into a mess of

rippling expanse. The storm had stopped. My shirt was wet and my pants were dry. I walked

the road back to the town with beads of water sweating off of strands of my hair. The town was

empty. Everyone didn’t even have time to pack up their things before abandoning the place. The world

had stopped moving. I wasn’t even there. Someone was snapping. A final breath of the storm wafted

around in the street before being swallowed by a storm drain. I saw Phil walk out of the studio,

the keys in his hands. He dropped them. He’s standing there dropping them over and over

again, a skipping image of burning film. Over that wild westward expanse there was so much

nothing, but in nothing there was some kind of peace. An easier type of piece. I was trying to reach

for something to hold, but it was something that I couldn’t hold; something dissolving my hands in the

wind. I lay down in bed, with a night cap on that drifted past my waist and had a poofy ball on the

end. I pulled the covers up to my chin and I could still hear the ocean. In this place where he

lived, there was a constant roaring, constant noise all the time. From my bed, I heard it swell and

lengthen. A wailing solo, saying something, but nothing. Roar like an animal. Hungry and adoring. 

***

Read part I here.

Read part II here.

***

pwelverumandsun.com
pwelverumandsun.bandcamp.com

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"There Is No Nature," Mount Eerie Under the Clear Moon, Part II:: The Interview

Published on thebomberjacket.com

Below is the transcript of my conversations with Phil Elverum that inspired "There Is No Nature," Part I, found here.

I had brought a tape recorder with me just in case and switched it on before ever time I went out, so luckily I was able to capture our discussions. Read them below.

MANGO NEBULA: Do you think there’s a difference between Phil in the music and in real life?

Phil Elverum: When I make records, they’re not about me. They kind of are by default just because I write in the first person and there aren’t very many other people in my songs. They’re not songs about interpersonal relationships or anything. At least, usually not. Not lately. Not for the last ten years or something. Yeah, in my mind it’s not about “Phil” necessarily, but I think culturally, outside of the albums themselves, just as part of the mechanisms of making records and being a public figure and playing shows, this character of who I am, “Phil Elverum,” like playing shows, Mount Eerie guy that person is different from who I am when I’m at home living my life. Which I think, you know, everyone has multiple versions of themselves. I’m giving a really complicated answer, but it’s a really complicated question.

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"There Is No Nature," Mount Eerie under the Clear Moon

Published on thebomberjacket.com

Read the transcript from the interview with Phil Elverum in Part II: here.

Mount Eerie loomed in white with curtains of mist surrounding it that were too low to be clouds and too high to be just fog. Water hung in the air, constantly threatening to condense into rain, but it hadn’t yet. The mountain appeared to be ever-changing and darkening, continually obscuring the peak. I had come to the mountain following a bright Clear Moon, or what I thought was the moon. That shield of grey made it hard to tell when day ended and night began without a watch.

I was looking to commune with nature. I had packed granola and trail mix with chocolate candies in it. I was looking for a story I had heard. Stories that had been floating around the country for more than a decade about a man living in the woods of Anacortes, Washington. Some said he was the spirit who guarded the mountain. Some said that he was just a guy who liked camping.

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