• Tipped off by a positive NY Times review by Kelefa Sanneh, I got “The Body, the Blood, the Machine,” the new album by the Thermals, a Portland band, and it has been steadily knocking me out. Musically it’s relatively simple — flawlessly executed classic pop-punk in the Buzzcocks-to-Green Day tradition. Lyrically it appears to be a narrative song cycle. At first I thought its Biblically infused verses (full of Noah’s ark references and titles like “Pillar of Salt”) might be about a Heaven’s Gate-style cult, but I read on the band’s Web site that “the album tells the story of a young couple who must flee a United States governed by fascist faux-Christians,” which makes things a little clearer. It’s as if someone took American Idiot, subtracted the teen anomie and the Tommy-style riffs on celebrity, and injected it with a little bit of the acid from the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” I’m finding it irresistible.
• I’m also enjoying the new Mother Hips release, Kiss the Crystal Flake. This Northern California band’s sound — straying over the years from jam-band to country rock to folk and now neo-psychedelia — has always hovered on the edge of derivative cliche only to be rescued by great vocal harmonies, smart lyrics and a devotion to the sheer sonic pleasure of a well-played guitar well recorded.
• We got a piano for my sons to learn on a while back, which means I can pursue my half-baked musical noodling on multiple instruments now. The other day I started playing the old Eno chestnut “St. Elmo’s Fire” — the kids love it! — and realized, in a flash, that its chord progression is almost identical to that of Elvis’s “Burning Love.” This is the sort of realization you are in an especially good position to experience if your piano-playing, like mine, consists of sounding out simple triads, because you are stripping the music down to its chordal essence (a nice way of saying that you make most of what you play sound the same).

[tags]thermals, mother hips[/tags]

I originally got hooked on the music of the Mountain Goats by listening to the first four tracks of the album “We Shall All Be Healed,” late one February night three years ago. The riffage of these low-tech rock songs reminded me of the Velvet Underground songs I grew up with, and formed memorable frames for the mysterious lyrics of John Darnielle — evocative, in songs like “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Letter From Belgium,” of sacred rituals, ancient science fiction plots, and David Lynch movies. (It was only later that I figured out that the whole album is a kind of memorial to doomed meth addicts Darnielle had hung with in his youth.)

As I made my way through the Goats’ voluminous back catalog I came to understand that these full-band song arrangements were the exception to Darnielle’s rule of recording mostly with an acoustic guitar, solo into a boombox mike — and touring, most of the time, as a duo, with bassist Peter Hughes.

All of which is by way of preface to a report from the last two evenings that I spent, enraptured, at the Independent (the venue I knew formerly as the Kennel Club), watching the Mountain Goats metamorphose into a rocking band. Yes, friends, the Mountain Goats are now a power trio, with a drummer joining Hughes and Darnielle and the latter trading in his acoustic for a natural-wood Telecaster after the first few songs of the set.

How did it sound? Wonderful. The last time Darnielle swung through San Francisco he gave a subdued show at the Bottom of the Hill; beset, apparently, by the flu, his set leaned heavily on the hushed falsetto of so many of the tunes on his most recent album, “Get Lonely.” (His voice was so shot he essentially turned over the vocal chores on “No Children” to the sing-along crowd — an event preserved in MP3 and celebrated in the blogosphere as an instance of band/audience bonding.) This week, those songs remained part of his set, but they have assumed their rightful place as the slow songs, serving as mood- and pace-changers rather than centerpieces.

The new full-band mode gave the Goats a chance to rearrange much of their catalog. Songs like “Jaipur,” “The Pigs That Ran…”, “The House that Dripped Blood,” “Quito,” “Lions Teeth,” and “See America Right” all emerged with extra-hard edges and careening speeds. Darnielle performed even more unexpected transformations on “Peacocks,” from Tallahassee (the quiet 6 a.m. song got an infusion of mid-tempo energy); and on “Dance Music,” which traded in some of its bop for some bittersweetness; and on “Dilaudid,” a desperate love song given a tougher bite.

Recent articles by All Axess describe how Darnielle is in full-throated form again, moving nimbly from a feather-light whisper to a piercing pleasing bray, never losing grip of the syllables that define each moment of each song as unique. As he bangs away on his electric guitar, jaw dropped open an inch or two to release a goofy “I still can’t believe I’m doing this!” smile, he looks like he has moved through all the pain in his songs, found his own little corner of nirvana and invited us in. (Here’s some good descriptive writing about his performance style.)

John Vanderslice joined the band for the conclusion of both shows, adding to the fun and layering “Palmcorder Yajna,” “Half Dead” and “This Year” with some extra exquisite crunch. Then the young women of Pony Up, the warmup act, trotted out to sing backup on Darnielle’s devotedly straight-faced cover of Thin Lizzy’s ode to vernal rebirth, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

It’s a great time to see the Mountain Goats. Go if you can. They’re playing again tonight at the Bottom of the Hill. Full tour schedule here.
[tags]mountain goats, john darnielle[/tags]

Several of my favorites have new albums out:

• Leading the pack, the Mountain Goats’ latest, Get Lonely, lives up to its title via a series of hushed, introspective tracks that create a landscape of desolation. Through headphones, these songs — many delivered in a fragile falsetto that might be echoing over a Martian moraine — feel almost unbearably intimate. This album has none of the rollicking word-party spirit that propelled its triptych of predecessors — Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree — and as such it is far less immediately winning. (For a hit of the more uptempo Goats spirit, there’s “Babylon Springs,” a superb five-song EP the Goats released last winter.) But it’s powerful and memorable. John Darnielle (whose writing and singing leads the band of two) plainly had no interest in repeating any kind of formula, so instead of trying to build on the considerable success of Sunset Tree, he’s decided to take us down a dark road in winter. It’s a bleakly moving trip.

  At an in-store show last week at Amoeba in the Haight, down the street from my old Cole Valley home, Darnielle talked about his difficulties writing this new batch of songs, which started out as a song-cycle about monsters before evolving inward. He elaborates in this L.A. Times piece about the making of the new album:

  There had been something in the personal responses of audiences and correspondents that made a total return to older styles seem dishonest. These songs did not feel dishonest. They came from some sad and frightened place, and felt like natural heirs to their predecessors…

  Writing with these priorities in mind is a new thing for me because I used to put all my focus on just telling a good story and trust any issues of tone to resolve themselves. New priorities replacing old ones is the constant process of writing for me; maybe this time next year I’ll want to write about imaginary kingdoms under the Earth instead of flesh-and-blood people walking desperately across its surface.

• Then there is the new disc from The Long Winters, Putting the Days to Bed — a more consistently, rockingly upbeat set of songs than its wonderfully motley predecessor, When I Pretend to Fall. Warmly, tunefully distorted guitar clothes the bones of John Roderick’s opaquely bitter songs; this time out, though, the pop spring overpowers the resentment, and even when he’s snarling out the “Positively Fourth Street”-esque put-downs of “Rich Wife,” he sounds like he’s having a blast:

now tell me is your high horse
getting a little hard to ride?
And your little bit on the side
getting harder to find?

When you get restless at night
but it’s too late to start
and there’s nothing left to eat in this house
but your heart

I’m thoroughly enjoying Putting the Days to Bed, even though it’s less musically adventurous than both When I Pretend and the wonderful Ultimatum EP.

• The prolific Frank Black is back with more Nashville recordings. I wasn’t in love with Black’s first Nashville batch, last year’s Honeycomb; it’s not that I don’t like Black turning to country — it’s just that Honeycomb sounded a bit listless, and Black’s singing was strangely restrained, in some places entirely numbed-out. On the new double-CD, Fast Man/Raider Man, Black sounds more engaged again, and the whole set has more crackle. (Rolling Stone talks to Black here.) It’s a lot of music, and I can’t say I’ve yet found any of it as immediately great as the long run of Frank Black and the Catholics albums. But I’ll give it time.

• Meanwhile, out here on the Internets, there’s a flood of amateur virtuosity. If you haven’t already read Virginia Heffernan’s superb New York Times piece tracking down the nimble-fingered guitarist behind that amazing Pachelbel-Canon-goes-electric Youtube video, do so now.

This process of influence, imitation and inspiration may bedevil the those who despair at the future of copyright but is heartening to connoisseurs of classical music. Peter Robles, a composer who also manages classical musicians, points out that the process of online dissemination — players watching one another’s videos, recording their own — multiplies the channels by which musical innovation has always circulated. Baroque music, after all, was meant to be performed and enjoyed in private rooms, at close range, where others could observe the musicians’ technique. “That’s how people learned how to play Bach,” Mr. Robles said. “The music wasn’t written down. You just picked it up from other musicians.”

…That educational imperative is a big part of the “Canon Rock” phenomenon. When guitarists upload their renditions, they often ask that viewers be blunt: What are they doing wrong? How can they improve? When I asked Mr. Lim the reason he didn’t show his face on his video, he wrote, “Main purpose of my recording is to hear the other’s suggestions about my playing.” He added, “I think play is more significant than appearance. Therefore I want the others to focus on my fingering and sound. Furthermore I know I’m not that handsome.”

And if you’re tired of Pachelbel, there’s always this amazing “While My Ukulele Gently Weeps” (courtesy Gary Wolf).

I’m knocked out, stunned, by the new Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped. I’m not one of the band’s cultists. Over the years, from the mid-’80s on, I’d hear, from friends who were, that I was missing out: They’d tell me that whatever their latest album was — “Daydream Nation”! “Goo”! — it was the album that would persuade me to join their ranks. I’d listen, feel respect for the legendary New York art-noise band’s work, but never feel like coming back for more.

So I’ve been out of the Sonic Youth orbit for a while. Maybe I missed some transformation or evolution; “Rather Ripped” is incredibly seductive — just melodic enough to engage you, just experimental enough to keep you hitting “repeat.” The guitars shimmer with lanky Lou Reed/Feelies lines; the lyrics are entirely audible; the incredibly tight rhythm section could do this in their sleep, but they’re wide awake. There is a fundamental joy working its way out in this music, in a fully audible way. I am hooked.

In other musical events, the Mountain Goats are slated to release a new album, Get Lonely, next month. But if you are impatient, there is an EP from their Australian tour titled Babylon Springs that is also a fine piece of work. If some of the chord sequences sound a tad familiar, the full-band arrangements are sparkling, the lyrics sharp, the feelings painfully intense.

I was sorry to read of the passing of Jamaican singer Desmond Dekker, whose hit song “The Israelites” appeared on my musical horizons in 1969 as a strange and alluring message from another world.

As a ten-year-old only just tuning into the world of top 40, I’d never heard anything quite like Dekker’s song, with its off-kilter rhythms, its patois lyrics, and those groaning backup harmonies. Dekker’s voice, a sweet tenor gliding effortlessly to an even sweeter falsetto, spoke of shantytown hardships in scriptural language. But it was the key changes rung by the rhythm guitar between the end of each chorus and the start of each new verse that really hooked me.

Over the years the ska, rock-steady and reggae rhythms would become more familiar, and I’d hear more of Dekker’s music and the sounds of his contemporaries in “The Harder They Come” and later compilations of Jamaican treasures. But the spell of “The Israelites” remains strong to this day.