Category: Music

Favorite Music of 2013

January 29, 2014

A new year is upon us and that means it’s time to hand out meaningless accolades to various media properties because making lists is fun! I am quite intentionally calling these “favorite” lists rather than “best of” lists because there’s a lot of games, movies, and music I didn’t experience in 2013 which no doubt deserve attention and praise, but I can’t consume everything in a year.

Can I make a confession? I’m terrible at writing about music. I lack the vocabulary, I guess. It seems to me that music is the most subjective of all the popular media and therefore is the most difficult to analyze, critique, and discuss meaningfully with others. Music reviews are a strange thing to me for that reason. All it boils down to is “I like this” or “I don’t like this” without a lot of concrete or consistent reasoning about why that is. But I’m probably wrong about that. As I said, I lack the vocabulary.

Nevertheless, here’s some music I liked. Maybe you’ll like some of it too.

KFB show

Continue reading “Favorite Music of 2013”

Reflektor

November 21, 2013

Greek Facepalm

Actually, I quite like this album.

Reflektor is one of the best albums of Arcade Fire’s career. Then again, the same could be said for any of the band’s releases. Exactly how the new double-album stacks up against the rest of the band’s discography is up to the listener to determine. I’m still not sure, but I’m willing to say Reflektor is in the running as their best album. And that’s saying a whole lot.

I was a bit befuddled back in September when the title track was released as a single. Clocking in at 7:30 minutes, the neo-disco tune “Reflektor” is a nice illustration for my experience with the album as a whole.

My first impression was incredulous – even skeptical.

Disco. Really? I don’t hate or even dislike disco, but I really questioned the direction AF was taking with this new single and I worried that it was indicative of the whole album.

Also disconcerting was the news that Reflektor would be a double album. The Suburbs, much as I like it, is pretty long. It’s a bit too long at times and it deters me from listening as often as I might otherwise. How could they have made an even longer album?

Then about a week after the single dropped I gave it another chance. After all, this is Arcade Fire. They’d always been great before. Maybe I just needed to let it sink in.

Yep. I guess that was it.

After that I was hooked. I played the song again. And again. And again. Seven and a half minutes and I listened over and over.

And that was pretty much my experience with the album too. My first listen left me kind of cold and unimpressed. But Reflektor (the album) came alive to me on my second listen. And my third. And forth. Et cetera.

Yes, the album is long, but like the title track, it justifies its length… mostly. Reflektor is the most obviously disco-influenced song, but that vibe permeates a lot of the album most notably “Afterlife.” There are quite a few songs that wouldn’t sound out-of-place on AF’s other releases. “You Already Know” would have been quite at home on The Suburbs and “Here Comes the Night Time” doesn’t sound too far removed from the sounds of Funeral.

But there’s plenty of new ground broken here. For some long time fans that might be a turn off. “Flashbulb Eyes” and “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” sound like nothing the band’s ever done before. It’s all really good stuff and amazingly produced. There are a lot more synths and electronic instruments at work here. Really, the overall sound is sort of an extrapolation of “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” from their last record which is great since that was the best song.

The one unfortunate miss for me is the final track “Supersymmetry.” It’s not a bad track, but it’s fairly minimalistic and never comes alive for me like the others. Since it’s the last song on the record it hurts the overall experience more than it might have were it placed elsewhere. Arcade Fire has a history of great finishes. “My Body is a Cage,” “In the Backseat,” “Sprawl II,” and even “Vampire Forest Fire” are among their best songs. It’s a shame they couldn’t stick the landing on this album quite as well.

On the lyrical side of things there’s a lot going on. The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a major influence especially in the album’s second half. The first disc, on the other hand, seems more dedicated to exploring the affect technology has on people in our “reflective age.”

I can’t pretend to “get” all the songs yet, but I love the fact that there’s more going on under the surface. Certainly one could accuse the band of pretension and I won’t argue against that. If I were not so enraptured by the music, my inner cynic might have dismissed all this Greek myth and modern age commentary as Arcade Fire trying to sound smarter than they really are.

But I like the music. At the end of the day, that’s what matters for me. The album is sonically and thematically cohesive. And the music good. Really good.

Reflektor left me asking myself why I ever doubted Arcade Fire. They’re pretty good at this music thing.

reflektor logo

truth of expression

October 23, 2012

“If you are yourself and you don’t become successful, the happiness that you get from creating something that is that truthful to yourself should be enough to propel you forward in life.”

– Justin Vernon

I’ve been listening to a lot of Bon Iver lately. I stumbled upon that quote in an interview with frontman Justin Vernon. Well, calling him the frontman is a bit of an understatement. He basically is Bon Iver.

I started listening to their stuff last December. As the cold weather returns I find myself going back to the record. Fittingly, the music goes well with the colder half of the year. The name is derived from the French phrase “bon hiver” which means “good winter.”

For Emma, Forever Ago is this really sad, wistful album. You can tell it’s about loss and past pain. It’s the best kind of guy-with-a-guitar singer-songwriter stuff. “For Emma” is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s wonderful.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is absolutely beautiful music from start to finish. I don’t know why. I think it’s freeing for some reason. It isn’t trying to be anything other than beautiful: not cool, not hip, not ironic. There’s way too much sarcasm and vitriol in society and in my own heart. I think that’s why it’s freeing. The final track is lead by this old style keyboard that sounds almost cheesy at first. But then you realize from the tone that it’s utterly sincere like the rest of the album. And like everything else it’s gorgeous too.

So, yeah, that’s my love letter to Bon Iver. Great stuff.

As for the quote, I’m finding myself more and more drawn to that philosophy and I think it must be the philosophy of the true artist.

The very best art in the world, I think, was done by artists being true to themselves. They aren’t gunning for fame and fortune. They’re just expressing whatever is on their heart. If it takes off, great. If not a soul responds to it at least they have created a true expression – something they can be happy with having done.

Athletic people work out. Analytic people analyse. Creative people create. We have to. It’s just this odd itch we need to scratch every once in awhile or else be unfulfilled.

For the redeemed person who is also a creative type, I would modify the quote a bit. We need to not only be truthful to ourselves in our expression but also to God and his truth. His ultimate truth. And you can do both.

To make expression true to your person is to indelibly stamp the work with your form – the form of a uniquely created individual. To make an expression true to God’s ultimate truth is to make it universal and pleasing to him. One without the other is not as good. It may even be bad.

Recently I finished a collection of lyrics which I am considering posting here soon. It took me years of work to create something I was happy with as a whole, complete collection. But I believe that it meets the two criteria listed above. Regardless of whether anyone else feels that it is of quality, I am happy with it.

If you are a creative type I’d highly suggest following these criteria as guidelines. If it’s true to yourself and true to God’s truth, then don’t listen to the critics or people that don’t get what you’ve done. But do yourself a favor and identify some trusted people who will keep you honest. It would be a grave error to express yourself in the voice of another, but it would be perhaps a bigger mistake to believe that you are the only one that matters in your art.