I listened to the Neutral Milk Hotel albums a lot, but not so much in recent years. I felt like one of the few chumps there who couldn’t sing along with all the lyrics, even the really loopy ones. The audience mostly opted to double Mangum an octave lower; Jordan Hall has a very warm natural reverb, and it sounded pretty good. Mangum did some Q&A between songs, kinda like David Bazan does, which contributed to the intimate atmosphere. Spellbinding.

String quartet opener ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble) treated us to a more-than-competent run through Satie’s Les Gymnopédies and an often stunning arrangement of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which I had somehow never encountered before. (In retrospect this seems odd; I can almost imagine one of my former band leaders sitting us all down and making us listen to it at tortilla point, or some such.) It’s odd-but-somehow-logical cadence has a clear structural kinship with Mangum’s cover choice for the evening, Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End,” (although Johnston’s tune is set in a more conventional time structure) and it’s certainly not hard to hear its influence in Mangum’s own work.

The Ackleys (2005); Forget Forget, Derive Derive (EP, 2006)
Indie-power-pop. Splashy drums, some keyboards give it a slightly new-wave sheen.

as King Everything:

The Drought (2008)
Mostly acoustic guitar/vocal

with P.S. Eliot:

The Bike Wreck Demo (2008, read about Bike Wreck demo here), Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds (2009), Living in Squalor (EP, 2010, pay-what-you-want download), Sadie (2011)

Except for the demo, which is crazy blissed out fuzzerific, this is straight up pop-punk. If you have to play the sounds-like game, maybe try Sarge, but since you can at least sample some guilt-free, don’t bother playing sounds-like; just listen & decide for yerself.

with Bad Banana:

Crushfield (2010; artist-approved download (mediafire))

Treble and sugar overdose low-fi buzz saw pop-punk. Yum.

as Waxahatchee:

Split release with Operation Cliff Clavin (2010)

Severely-traumatized-microphone-style acoustic guitar/vocal record. If not for the Internets, I’d still be wondering if “Clumsy” was a tune on one of the KRS Elliott Smith albums that I’d somehow overlooked due to its proximity to all the other awesome songs on those records. A thing about Crutchfield’s singing and production: it hasn’t, ’specially lately, fetishized clarity or anything, so a thing that happens a lot is I’ll be digging a tune basically just because it’s catchy and a really good lyric line will just jump out and floor me. So it’s helpful that the lyrics for the Waxahatchee split are available.

(Also on the read-the-words tip: Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds)

Except for Sadie, which is not out yet and now near the top of my “most anticipated releases” list, I think I listened to everything on this list as least twice this week. So, yeah, I endorse this.

h/t I Could Die Tomorrow, without whom my week woulda been a little duller

Any strummy folk act (as opposed to a tarantula-fingered, alternate-tuning prog folk act) has to deal with the fact that countless musicians have used these chord progressions and mostly likely melodic phrase fragments before; the trick is to tie your words to the notes through conviction, metrical trickery, or sheer alchemy. AAJ do pretty well with this; “Ladykiller” follows classic earworm-construction rules, and there are a few nice arrangement/production details throughout, like the “what the hell is that?” sound that decorates “Dylan Cook’s Theme Song.”

Any band of this ilk worth its salt ought to be able to offend all of its listeners at least some of the time. They get me by deploying the “c”-word for shock value in one tune, and not in the British sense. Like the “n”-word, it’s too thermonuclear for it to matter whether it’s used satirically or not, and it makes me cringe a bit, especially coz they also detonated it in the otherwise unreservedly awesome “We Didn’t Come Here to Rock,” a seemingly sincere song about how asshole rock critics should just shut the hell up from 2009’s Can’t Maintain, which I’ve also been listening to lately.

Note: Candy Cigarettes, Capguns, Issue Problems! and Such is a reissue of the 2005 LP Candy Cigarettes and Capguns combined with the 2006 EP Issue Problems!

Not entirely dissimilar recordings are sold as relaxation aids, not as music, but labeling this recording as music — and giving it the formal length of almost exactly one hour — invites the listener to look for the things we expect in music: motifs, variation, repetition: structure. The length of the piece doesn’t make it easy to determine how structured it is: there are discontinuities of volume, but do they follow long crescendos? It’s hard to say. Was that car perhaps the same car from ten minutes ago? The listener can also look for structure at the micro scale. We don’t usually think of cicadas or grasshoppers or whatever they are in terms of notes and chords, but it’s certainly possible to transcribe them as such.* And there’s also the “4:33″-ish dimension: by nature, Galaxies will interact with the sound in your listening environment, so, arguably, you can’t hear it exactly the same way twice.**

Giving the piece the title “Galaxies” further invites the listener to look for meaning in the soundscape and/or the selection/structuring of it. Is Asano making a statement about the quantity and diversity of life? Or perhaps about how closely examined things reveal complexities of structure not originally apparent? (Points of light become pinwheels of points of light & so on.)

With pieces like this I can also rarely discount the possibility that playing a joke on the audience is an aspect of the work (to a greater or lesser degree), but Galaxies has another interesting meta dimension: it’s the product of a prolific artist — Asano’s 44th album — but it follows a several year drought between releases, which might suggest that Asano finds it particularly important (or worked particularly hard and long at the creative decisions it embodies).

Galaxies is well outside my comfort zone and musical expertise. I can’t say I get it, or even that I enjoyed it. But I did find it very thought-provoking, and I’m not sorry I devoted an hour to it.

Asano makes it uncommonly easy to experience his work, if you’re so inclined: You can download his entire catalog at Koji Asano.com.

* this sort of reasoning always makes me think of a science fiction/fantasy story that made an enormous impression on youngun-me called (I think) “Rites of Spring” (or maybe “The Rite of Spring”) that started out with the unbalanced scientist protagonist decoding a message in the pattern of raindrops hitting his windshield. The Internets have not helped me track it down. Apparently it was not published in F&SF as I thought.

** True of all music taken to extremes, I suppose, but much more evident here than in a 3-minute pop song.

At a recent show, I thought they played another hated card, “we’re cute women, so we don’t have to play very well, but all the males will still swoon.”

On the other hand, the silk-screen-look packaging of this EP is gorgeous.