Friday, August 24, 2012

36 Songs, 36 Days, Day Twenty Six: Open by Regina Spektor

Remember...the Big Bad Wolf came out of
a forest as well....
Some time ago, before I decided to finally join the technologically savvy '00s by getting a primitive version of a smart phone (what I referred to as my 'mentally challenged phone' to my friends), I had a ringtone based on the Ben Folds song 'You Don't Know Me.' And the main reason I chose that ringtone was so I could hear Regina Spektor sorta half-sigh 'you don't know me/at all' to herald every phone call I got.

Spektor is another strange figure in my personal musical firmament. She, much like Fiona Apple, sits in my mind as a ghostly (dare I say 'spectral') figure besides Tori Amos, representing an alternate universe version of that artist I respect so much. Unlike Apple, who seems to be Amos if Amos decided to study jazz instead of classical music, Spektor is the Tori Amos who gave into her darker urges. I frequently find her music more gothic and nasty, as if she is using it to disturb the demons in her soul without dispelling them....

And boy, is this song indicative of that. It's one of the numbers from her most recent album, What We Saw From The Cheap Seats, and it actively frightens me. There's an overpowering sense of claustrophobia to this song. The lyrics are simple but unsettling, as the singer tells us of how she waits in a room she made herself, apparently restrained in some way, suspended but open. Now I know that I could take this literally, but I like to think what our POV character is saying is that she is suspended in time--she has become this thing in amber for others to examine, for others to 'open' and interpret as they wish.

Of course, the lyrics don't account for those gasps--shuddering struggles for breath that make this song seem all the more terrifying. If this is a metaphorical imprisonment, it is a horrifying and stifling one, one that's literally choking the life out of her. When I first heard this song, I jumped when she started making those noises.

In reading some of the interpretations of the song online, there is a tendency to claim it's about Anne Frank, a subject Spektor has mediatated on through her music before. I don't know if it was intended to be this specific, though; in my mind, there's something universal to her pleas. After all, don't we all at one point feel confined, feel as though wires are pulling us back from the life we can lead, suffocating in a malaise of the everyday?

Regardless of whether this is about one specific person or a certain kind of isolation, this is powerful stuff. And it's one of the reasons why I find Regina Spektor both so attractive and intimidating as an artist, even amongst all the beautiful piano playing.
 
Here is a live performance of the song....


Wednesday, August 15, 2012

30 Songs, 30 Days, Day Twenty Five: Dress (High Fashion Remix) by P.J. Harvey

She's looking at you looking at her...do you really want to
know what she's thinking?
This one's for you, Fil....

And let's be honest, it's not just my friend Fil (maven of the Pogo-A-GoGo Blog) who went insane for Miss Polly Jean back when she first grabbed hold of our collective shirt collars, announced her arrival and threw us down on the floor so she can walk all over us. She wasn't the first female artist to take the male gale and turn it back on her audience as part of her onstage persona; hell, she wasn't even the first one who did it in the 90's. But unlike many of her contemporaries (I'm looking at you, Liz Phair), Harvey has never softened to the point where she was Safe For Lite-FM. Sure, she's softened, and she's cast her musical net much wider than she did when she fronted the P.J. Harvey Trio....but she's kept her output more or less consistent. Much like Tori Amos, the impression I get is that Harvey writes for herself first and foremost, and worries about whether other people will care to listen later.

This is a remix of the very first single Harvey released with the Trio in 1991...and even in this dance-friendly form, it's an angry little song (But then, weren't most of the songs she released as singles from this period? I can't imagine anyone thinking 'Sheila-Na-Gig' a good time anthem, after all). It's about how the female body image is shaped by the aforementioned male gaze, with Harvey at turns hoping the dress she's wearing will make her 'clean and sparkling' for a man when she goes out dancing...all the while being very aware of how uncomfortable the garment is, and how difficult it is to move in the constricting thing, and how it results in her 'spilling out like a heavy loaded fruit tree.' It's the sort of thing Harvey did a lot in her early career, making the listeners uneasy by grinding our face in a reality most similar song scenarios won't give us.

I think it's telling that Harvey continues to be able to do what she wishes musically while others of her class have surrendered to a softer, more commerical sound. While an argument can be made that there was a slight immaturity in these early songs, they are still the seeds from which later, more complex and nuanced albums have sprung from. She has continued to stretch her musical muscles both on her own and with frequent collaborations with other artists. And I always look forward to what she's going to pull out of her bag of tricks next.

Here's the video....

Sunday, August 5, 2012

36 Songs, 36 Days (2012 Edition), Day Twenty Four: No One Listens by Ray Davies

"Now where did I put my creativity?"
Ahhhhh, Ray Davies. A personage I sometimes love deeply, and sometimes I look upon as the 60's version of Alex Aleakis.

And there's no denying whatsoever the role Ray Davies has in the history of rock music. His band The Kinks should rightfully be considered part of the Holy Trinity of 60's Britpop, and should be looked upon as one of the Grandfathers of my beloved power pop. When he's good--large chunks of Kontraversy, Something Else, Village Green, Arthur, that 80's revival of interest heralded by State of Confusion and the highly underrated Word of Mouth--there is simply no one as good a songwriter as Davies....

However, the sad thing is that the bulk of Davies' work is at its best lazy and at its worse downright, cringe-inducing awful. The smirking obviousness of Low Budget and Muswell Hillbillies, the imitativeness of Destroyer, even the downright radio baiting of Think Visual paints a picture of Davies' muse as fickle, callous and even cruel in its reduction of his vision. I sometimes wonder if Ray needed the out and out hostility of his brother Dave (or, during the 80's, his similarly conflicted romance with Chrissie Hynes, the disintegration of which led to both the adorementioned Word of Mouth and his first solo album, Return To Waterloo) to keep his tendency to muse on English cliches and obvious wordplay in check and drive him to greater heights...because when he's on his own, Ray Davies can frequently fall into a rut. Witness how, of the albums that are considered his post-Kinks solo career, four of the six albums are either composed whole or in part of previously released, reworked Kinks material.

This is from Davies' last solo album composed of original songs, 2007's Working Man's Cafe, and--unlike many of the other tracks on this otherwise middling-to-okay album--it's indicative of the obvious, imitative part of Davies' brain. It's one of an increasingly large body of songs by older rockers railing at the increasingly digitized world, and it's....not very insightful. While it mines the themes of alienation that Davies has found gold in before, there's none of the wonderful wordplay and sarcasm that makes Davies a rock maven here. Instead, it's a crotchety guy complaining that because we're so dependant on computers, no one listens to him. I find it fascinating how Davies cites a lot of older forms of communication--writing to City Hall, calling authorities--and then whines that the breakdown of new technologies results in no one listening to him, his complaints stuck in the system. Even the melody seems tired, as if it was slightly tweaked from a previous Kinks composition...from the 60's, naturally, since it'll evoke warm fuzzies of nostalgia from us older fans while seeming coolly retro to the newer fans.

Since the release of Working Man's Cafe, Davies has released an album composed of choral arrangements of Kinks classics and the true kiss of creative death, an album where he re-recorded Kinks classics with a selection of modern, new artists like Mumford and Sons to prove how 'with it' and 'influential' he was. And the ironic thing is how if he hadn't dove into the same 'see, we mattered' pool that Art Aleakis has been swimming in, his reputation might have improved--instead of having it tarnished with the crappy green fakey-gold patina of greed, opportunism and desperation.

I love Ray Davies, and will always honor his songwriting talents for what they were and for the way he helped shape power pop. But stuff like this makes me want to scream at him. It's a dichotomy I have grown to live with.

Here's the song in the popular 'shot of the album cover' format....