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.

Then he brought up his brother Bob on electric guitar, and his two of his former bandmates in Scud Mountain Boys, Tom Shea on mandolin, and Stephen Desaulniers on electric bass (since Bob played some guitar in Scud Mountain Boys, it was very nearly a full reunion, but Pernice mentioned there’d been some recent discussion with original guitarist Bruce Tull about playing together again, too). Last night’s set was special in a way you don’t get to hear very often: both a little rough, and also spot-on. I don’t think the quick pre-song conversations about key and tempo were staged for the audience’s benefit, and there were a few audible blown cues — but the guys recovered from them really fast, and without a trace of tentativeness. Only band members who are really listening to each other can pull that off. Pernice was visibly laughing in the first chorus of Olivia Newton John’s “Please Mister Please” — which didn’t stop him from singing it like a heart wound was being reopened. And Desaulnier’s harmonies were just there in a way I wouldn’t expect after a 14-year hiatus. Magic.

In addition to being a fantastic writer, Pernice is also — back to baseball again! — a five-tool singer. He’s solid at the technical things rockers are not necessarily known for: intonation, breath control, mic technique — and he’s got compelling phrasing and often gut-wrenching (but critically understated, not oversold) emotional delivery, to boot. To my mind, Pernice and Ted Leo are at the top of the male indie-rock singing heap. So when I saw some singer-songwriter dude I never heard of getting set to open for Pernice, my first instinct was pity: “poor guy, he’s about to get schooled.” Only it turns out Paul Melançon is also a pretty great singer — killer pure tenor, an effortless upper register, gorgeous delivery and solid technique. He knocked Neil Finn’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” — by no means an easy song to sing — outta the flippin’ park. Basically after about 4 or 5 bars of his first number I’d decided to buy his latest disc, and after I stopped being too distracted by his voice to pay attention to the songs (and his wry patter), I was committed to picking up everything I could lay hands on.

Dept. of egregious naval gazing: The Lizard Lounge was one of the venues for my first date with she who is now my wife (my wife! I feel like that always needs an exclamation point) and the Scud Mountain Boys, in a weird but awesome bill with Jenny Toomey and Jale, were in the first handful of live shows I ever wrote about on the Internets. Danger Will Robinson! Creeping nostalgia!

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

There’ve been a lot of release-a-new-song-every-day/week/month/whatever projects on the internets in the past few years; this one is a new song written and recorded by Hayman every day in January. This sounds like a schedule that might encourage the artist to be slapdash about both the song-making and the recording part, but Hayman is really smart about he approaches it. He’s booked a lot of friends to help with the songs, including a co-write or two, and some lead vocals not delivered by his own distinctive-but-not-to-everyone’s-taste-and-admittedly-rather-nasal voice. Most importantly, he’s aware that it would be easy to let the writing quality slip, and he’s consequently conscious about avoiding his comfort zones, using tactics like recording in a park he avoids because his dog was hit by a car there* to jolt himself out of routine. Although he warns upfront that the songs “won’t all be good,” I’d say that remains to be seen.

I even watched a handful of the video diary entries, something I almost never do.

If you need more persuading, here’s a bloke who seems to have committed himself to review each individual track with a much less brief take.

* Beaulah was badly hurt, but happily recovered, and appears in the video diary.

Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

Hitchcock’s voice is holding up quite well. You can hear a bit more strain at the top of his register, but not much. Rock-solid timing has never been his strong suit, and the one-two punch of “no drummer” and “lots of frantic strumming” led to several noticable gaffes. Hitchcock, who seemed relaxed and in good humor throughout, joked that we were getting the “organic” version of the show, from which the mistakes would subsequently be excised by the professional film crew.

Since there was a professional film crew (one could imagine that there might be some sort of 25th-anniversary hoopla for I Often Dream of Trains in the works for next year…) quite a lot of attention was paid to visual presentation, with Robyn taking the stage as a backlit, top-hatted silhouette, and wearing a black-and-white polka-dotted shirt against which his black-and-white polka-dotted electric guitar almost disappeared.

Highlights for me included the haunting, weird, and beautiful “Flavour of Night,” and “I Used to Say I Love You,” one of Hitchcock’s most straightforward, sad, and incisive songs (I think its lines “But you were reluctant/Although I was so hot/Now I understand it/But back then I did not” is genius). The barbershop trio arrangement of “Uncorrected Personality Traits” was outstanding, as were the three-part harmonies on faux-country “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” (with lyrics updated from Cold War anxieties to Global Warmng anxieites). (Hitchcock also revised “This Could Be the Day” to make it slightly less un-PC, or perhaps he just mumbled. Either way, I can’t say I blame him.)

My favorite of Hitchcock’s trademark loopy anecdotes involved the recent colonization of Boston, and the construction of Logan airport after several hundred planes had landed there. The introduction to “This Could Be the Day,” was also memorable, casting the song’s narrator as one of the “Mojave Shrimp,” waking to fornicate (with a passel of synonyms) after the arrival of the once-in-several-decades deluge.

I try to avoid Neutral Milk Hotel as a point of comparison, not least because it sets a standard that’s insanely difficult to live up to. To say an album isn’t as good as In the Aeroplane over the Sea is criticism so faint as to be useless. Jeff Mangum used an intensely personal vocabulary of metaphor and symbolism to make a singular and complex album that retains emotional directness in spite of lyrical content that is sometimes willfully obscure (and sometimes seems to deflect personal connections through historical vehicle of Anne Frank).

Comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel also often strike me as fundamentally misguided. Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (for instance) is also an obviously literate songwriter with a similar vocal timbre who sometimes uses similar arrangements. I don’t think The Decemberists are much like Neutral Milk Hotel in terms of their artistic approach or goals (or, really, the level of artistic achievement). I don’t mean to slight Meloy’s outfit too much; “I Dreamt I Was an Architect” is clever, pretty, and despite an intrinsic preciousness it’s not emotionally unaffecting. But “Two-Headed Boy” is deeply weird — the lyric is weird, Mangum’s melody and phrasing are weird, the very sparseness of it is weird. But it’s also compelling, because Mangum inhabits the performance completely; there’s something almost scary about the way he sings and plays the song.

Like The Decemberists, Elvis Perkins’ Ash Wednesday shares many superficial qualities with Neutral Milk Hotel: a timbral vocal similarity, arrangements centered around an acoustic guitar that marches doggedly along through the songs, often picking up other instruments along the way, sometimes including a saw. But as unfair as the NMH comparison may be — Ash Wednesday was in the upper percentile of 2007 releases, but probably not of the decade — it also seems apt, both thematically and because one of Ash Wednesday’s hallmarks is the intensity of Perkins’ performances.

Ash Wednesday also evokes another classic album it can’t quite live up to. Like Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers, Ash Wednesday is a record that seems to be fueled by deep and nakedly evident pain. It wrestles with age-old questions like “why do bad things happen to good people?” and “what am I doing here, anyway?” (Given the details of Perkins’ biography this is scarcely surprising.) When Perkins sings “No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive,” he really sounds like he means it, and his intensity is compelling and maybe even a little scary.

Perkins’ artistic approach isn’t merely diaristic; the opening “While You Were Sleeping” piles a Dylan-esque torrent of fable-like events upon its sleeper over it’s 6-minute span:

The heavens fell/The earth quaked/I thought you must be/but you weren’t awake/You were dreaming/You ignored the sun/You grew your power garden/For your little ones/And you found brides for them/On Christmas Eve/They hung young Cain/From the Adam tree.

“Sleep Sandwich,” (which would’ve been my mix-pick) is full of oddball but evocative imagery, like, “Last night was the science fiction/Movie with you and me/You in your velvet space helmet/Me in my rainbow hat,” and the even better, “You write the Bible/And I’ll read it off my eyelids.” Even a pair of songs (”It’s a Sad World,” “Good Friday”) that skirt the “sleep with me ’cause I’m hurting so bad” cliché do so with unusual sublety and ample conviction. Thanks to some truly gorgeous harmonies, they’re also among the album’s strongest (Perkins’ stable of backup singers includes Shana Levy from Let’s Go Sailing and Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond).

Producer/arranger Ethan Gold makes an enormous contribution to the excellence of this record. Throughout, his choices support and enrich the songs without overwhelming them. Allmusic doesn’t list any prior production credits for him, but I just can’t believe this is a debut recording effort. Gold seems to have chosen not to use pitch correction software on Perkins’ vocals, a choice which I applaud. Perkins pushes his voice out of his range and beyond his technical chops, but it adds to the honesty and immediacy of his performances.