An Index of Birds

How often has a band you liked changed for the better? Lateral, non-opinion changing changes don't count: the new Wavves stuff, for instance, is super polished and catchy as hell, but it's still fundamentally what Wavves was always trying to be, just suddenly accessible. And slow-burning changes don't count either, so A Silver Mt Zion's half-decade-plus growth from depressive chamber music to cathartic yelping Klezmer romp is out too. I think I've entirely lost sight of what I was getting at, but the basic point is the new Carta album is different and really damn good, so let's work from there.



Yeah, people have whined about the transformation from post-rock business to this new slowcore kinda sound, but ask yourself: how many more post-rock bands do we need, especially when criminally few are worth listening to? Carta, instead, have transcended with brilliant results, combining the grandiose post-rock composition with very Low-esque subdued vocals. It's fairly languid in an entirely positive way, but they've still retained their roots and the dense instrumentation swells and gives way in all the right places. It's beautiful, it's depressing, it's strangely catchy at times, and really just a fantastic record. If you're into that sort of "slowcore/shoegaze/post-rock" genre-straddling a la Low, iLiKETRAiNS (I'm still not sure if I love that band name or cringe every time I write it, but I mean, trains are neat) or Toma then give it a listen.



Carta - Building Bridges

As per usual, the fine folks at Silber are treating you well and offering the CD real cheap or a high-quality download even cheaper, so definitely check it out here. Read the other reviews, too, if for some reason you doubt me.

I'm livin' in the doldrums, yeah

Goddamn, when did people start caring so much about Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti? Recently? Around then?

Seriously, though, all of a sudden this man's everywhere, and it's blowing my mind. "Round and Round" is tearing things up, and rightfully so. It's got the chorus of the summer, of course, but retains a bit of the trademark strangeness and is sort of wildly progressive for a pop song. I mean, seriously, how many ideas are crammed into these 5 minutes? The entirely misleading introduction? Or the misleading first minute with the red-herring chorus? The weird segue telephone call? The strangely sincere-sounding quiet section? Have you heard the real chorus? Yeah, he deserves this sudden attention, no doubt.



(ok, reader, stop here and skip the next four paragraphs unless you either a) like Ariel Pink a lot, or b) like reading a lot of my writing. You've been warned.)

Now, I promise not to turn this into one a "I was there first!" sort of hipster pissing contest (I was tossing around some portmanteau of "hipster" and "pissing" but it would have been more of a visual pun), so I say this as a fact and not as a boast or "holier than thou" proclamation, but I have been listening to Ariel Pink for years. It's been a slow, steady evolution to where he is now - the ultimate refinement of psychedelic weirdness with 70's radio staples and off-beat humour - but I'm partial, either because of nostalgia or legitimate preference, to his earlier albums. BUT OH LAWD, when isn't that the case with anyone and their favourite bands? Yeah, yeah, I know.

The Doldrums is one of those albums for me, one of the records that can instantly take me back to a very specific time. Namely, at the end of high school where I was cautiously allowing some vague semblance of "pop music" into my library, no longer preoccupied with being as extreme/abstract/br00tal/outsider as possible (though whether I accomplished any of those is debatable). In any case, I checked out Ariel Pink on a whim, picking up The Doldrums and being, er, very confused. Not by the lo-fi aspect, I had expected and accepted that, but just the music. It was thrilling, really: when was the last time you were legitimately interested enough in an album to listen to it repeatedly to try to understand it? I don't need/want to get into a "back in my day when we bought our records" thing, but y'know.

Point is, it was album I worked at liking. Which I don't mean to be as image-conscious as it sounds. I mean, I liked the album, sure. I liked the aesthetics. I liked the sound. I liked the ideas. I just couldn't really reconcile it all. I couldn't understand Ariel Pink. I couldn't understand this weirdo no-fi beatbox-pop. And there weren't any resources to help, either. Now it's pretty clear who he is. And hell, he has a band. He has the actual Haunted Graffiti. All I knew when I had The Doldrums in my walkman was: 1) Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti is really just Ariel Pink, jamming/beatboxing into a tape-recorder, and 2) Animal Collective liked him enough to put out his albums.

TOTALLY SIDETRACKED FOR A MINUTE: Have you read the new Chuck Klosterman book? It's pretty cool. There's a whole chapter on irony and Weezer, focusing on how Weezer confuses people by being entirely unironic and earnest about their lyrics, and etc jaded society etc. Point being, I love this idea with relation to Ariel Pink, because I think I fell into the same trap. Not knowing a single thing about this man, I really couldn't tell how seriously I should take it. I think I want him to be completely serious. I want to believe he beatboxed all the drums because he had to. I want to believe he is entirely serious when he tells us that "good kids make bad grown-ups" in his pouty, childish whines of "growin' up means getting a job/oh, I don't wanna grow uuuup!". I want to never know why he refers to both "Kate" and "Cathy" on "For Kate I Wait". I love this complete mix-up of irony or earnestness and mystery and I am completely overanalyzing an album Ariel Pink shat out years ago.

(SPEAKING OF IRONY AND ARIEL PINK: the 16-minute track "Pedestrian Pop Hits" makes me giggle.)

So here it is, folks, one of my all-time favourites, in it's murky no-fi glory. One of very few albums I both like every song on and know every song on, intimately so. Just download it already.



ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI - THE DOLDRUMS

Leaving

Oh yes, I've been waiting to talk about this record proper for a while. Planning for Burial has finally gotten a proper release for the full-length Leaving, which has been in the making for quite some time, apparently. And does it ever show.

Leaving first dropped, to my knowledge, towards the end of 2009 with a fairly quiet online release that didn't get to nearly enough people but nonetheless blew the minds of pretty much everyone who heard it (myself included, natch). Among those people was Dan Barrett, one half of Have a Nice Life and owner of Enemies List Home Recordings (HANL, Nahvalr, American Addio, Afterlives, etc.). So rather than a modest online release and quiet home-pressing, Leaving got the EL Treatment, meaning: a) super-enthusiastic label support, and b) super-fantastic packaging. Seriously, if nothing else, this is a strong case for why you buy your goddamn music: hand-numbered, hand-assembled, stark but beautifully presented.



And yet there isn't nothing else, there's so much else, much more than this clumsy segue would have you believe. Hyperdespressive doomgaze, heavy in all the right places and impenetrable atmosphere throughout. It occupies much of the same ideological space of its labelmates, which is not to say it sounds like Have a Nice Life, but it's similarly fashioned faux-black metal aesthetics with doomy rumblings and shoegaze density (can I go ahead and coin "doomgaze" as a genre already? It sounds right. It feels right.) Really the whole thing is stellar throughout, but if you need to be convinced in the next five minutes that you need to own this, go ahead and check out "Memories You'll Never Feel Again", which is probably the heaviest waltz I've heard in a while. Heavy, heavy guitar work, enthralling piano banging, soaring melodies on top of it all before it collapses under its own weight into listless groaning and xylophone. Killer, killer stuff.

Planning for Burial - Memories You'll Never Feel Again

Buy it now while you still can.

This used to be a free release, but it doesn't seem to be now that it's gotten an official release, so I'm going to respect that (oh shut up) and point you towards this preview track and some Planning for Burial b-sides.

Please buy this, though. Really. Both the artist and the label deserve your support fully.

Next up: New stuff from Silber Media, who have also done a lot to get a bit of your hard-earned money.