Wooden Wand, Ducktails, Ulrich
Schnauss, Foxygen, & Strange Relations...
Well hello again, everybody!
Welcome to Songs Of The Week #33!
For those of you who aren't quite
sure what you're looking at, here's the scoop: Each week we ask two
of our contributors to download the songs given away via The
Current's Song Of The Day podcast. After spending a few days with
them, we as them to write a review of each song and give it a score
of 1-5.
As always, we strongly suggest that
you follow this link and subscribe to the podcast yourself. It's
free music! To that end, we've also posted a poll to the righthand
side of the page. Please vote for whichever of this week's songs was
your favorite. The artist with the most votes at the end of the week
receives the peace of mind that comes with winning an anonymous poll
on a blog. High stakes!
Now, if you've been following the
Songs Of The Week column at all, you'll know that we've been unable
to find a second person to review the songs. Who knew it would be so
hard to find a blogging music critic in the Twin Cities?
So, yet again, all we can offer you
is the perpetually available TCDroogsma and his take on the tracks.
So, Droogsy... thoughts?
01. Wooden Wand
– Supermoon (The Sounding Line) (from the album Blood Oaths Of
The New Blues)
TCDroogsma:
“Supermoon (The Sounding Line)” is a tough song to pin down.
Wooden Wand (essentially singer-songwriter James Toth) has made a
career of left turns and “Supermoon” is yet another.
To those who are not overly-familiar with Toth's work (like, say,
myself), this doesn't prove to be a benefit. If you've been a fan
for him, I'm sure the airy-spaced-out country vibe he's hitting on
here is just another intriguing guise for a man who's built a career
out of them. For the rest of us, however, it's just an
airy-spaced-out country song, and not a particularly compelling one
at that. Without that frame of reference, what are we supposed to
make of this?
The actual song is a bit charming enough, if not confounding. The
titular “supermoon” is a reference to the time that Toth and his
significant other fell off. The line leading up to the chorus, “No
one's gonna climb this sounding line,” lends an air of dread to the
fallout from this supermoon breakup. Down past, “the Mark Twain at
two fathoms... the Deep Six at six fathoms...” we expected to find
something more sinister than just Toth's emotional struggles. Sadly,
that's all that's waiting at the bottom of the water. Frankly, they
probably could have just stayed there.
Final Score: 2/5
02. Ducktails –
Letter Of Intent (from the album The Flower Lane)
TCDroogsma:
I'll be honest, I had never heard of Ducktails before this song.
Turns out it's the solo work of Mathew Mondanile, guitarist for Real
Estate. It took me a few listens to finally “get” “Letter Of
Intent.” Secretly, I was hoping it was a song about the struggles
of committing to a college as a high school football player.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Fortunately, we are treated to
80's-style, synthed-out groove that's one half Madonna and one half
Hall & Oates (or, I guess, one quarter Hall & one quarter
Oates). For about the 1,000th time here on Songs Of The
Week, my love for boy/girl vocals is going to trump any other factor
in song evaluation, and Ducktails does it surprisingly well. To
their credit, they ride the female's lead (sorry, I don't know their
names) as far as her charming voice can take before a bridge built
around the Molandile's voice. This vocal trade-off lends the song a
lot of color.
Really, that's where the appeal of “Letter Of Intent” lies.
Stripped down, it's an average-to-good song, but Ducktails do a
remarkable job of adding just enough little things to reward repeated
listens. A keyboard flutter here, a vocal affectation there, and
just enough room to breathe that “Letter Of Intent” sounds
tailor-made to be the spring anthem of every skinny, awkward kid
saying goodbye to his first crush at the end of freshman year.
Final Score: 3.5/5
03. Ulrich
Schnauss – I Take Comfort In Your Ignorance (from the album A
Long Way To Fall)
TCDroogsma:
This is the second week in a row that I've been tasked with reviewing
an instrumental track here on Songs Of The Week. Unlike last week's
song from Mister Lies, with its club-ready drums and keyboard blips,
Ulrich Schnauss takes a little more time to stretch his legs out with
“I Take Comfort In Your Ignorance.”
(Sidenote: That's a brutal title for an instrumental song. For
better or worse, the title is going to set the mood of a track,
moreso if it's lyric-less. Calling a song “I Take Comfort In Your
Ignorance” comes off as condescending at best. However, that's
only an initial take that, for the most part, leaves your brain after
a few listens.)
“I Take Comfort In Your Ignorance” is not built for sweaty clubs.
Oh, it acts like it is. The keyboard buildup at the beginning of
the song is just begging for that pause... DROP moment.
Wisely, it never comes. A lot of electronic music seems built for
people on ecstasy. “I Take Comfort In Your Ignorance” sounds
more like it was made for someone who's had a few bowl hits.
Those keyboards that sound like a buildup at the beginning eventually
turn into a canvas for Schnauus to paint on. Melodic keyboard lines
show up and then disappear just as quickly, giving the listener the
sensation that a lot is happening, when, in actuality, there's so
much less to it than you think.
“I Take Comfort In Your Ignorance” can be framed as a two-part
suite. The pulsing of the keyboards is eventually replaced with
actual percussion in the second half of the song, but again, it's not
a Drop moment. In fact, the second half of the song is almost
like sequel to the first half. Not as good, lacking the subtle
rewards of the first, but a necessary climax.
Final Score: 3/5
04. Foxygen –
No Destruction (from the album We Are The 21st
Century Ambassadors Of Peace And Magic)
TCDroogsma:
Woah, woah, woah... Put down the copy of Nashville Skyline and
step away from the turntable...
Listen, when it comes to Bob Dylan, there's a difference between
“influenced by,” and “hero worship.” When it comes to
Foxygen's “No Destruction,” the only question left on the table is spit or swallow?
I should note right off the top that I'm predisposed to hate shit
like this. Growing up on punk rock taught me that the idealism of
the 60's was a fool's pursuit, self-centered and fruitless.
Evidently, Sam Francis and John Rado did not grow up on punk rock.
“No Destruction” is drowning in long-dead tropes like, “the
door of consciousness, San Francisco,” and a world of, “no
destruction in the waking hour...” The fact that the most
rebellious action they could come up with in our post-OWS world is
smoking pot in a subway gives them away as aping their idols rather
than updating the message.
And then, just in case the weezing vocals and middling lyrics weren't
bold enough signposts, the harmonica shows up to take us out. The
title “No Destruction” is brutally appropriate. Those idealistic
hippies from the 60's were concerned with the destruction of a flawed
system. Foxygen seems concerned strictly with leaving the system
intact and ringing every last cent from the bloated corpse of those
same hippies.
Final Score: 0/5
05. Strange
Relations – Endurance (from the EP Ghost World)
TCDroogsma:
Remember last week when I reviewed Fury Things? If not, I lamented
how the key to a really good shoegaze-pop song is giving the listener
something new to discover each listen. You can't just turn up the
reverb and hope that's enough.
To that end, Strange Relations has done their homework. “Endurance”
got better and better every time I listened to it. Coming off like
the bastard child of Gospel Gossip, Solid Gold, and Night Moves,
there's a lot of things going on in “Endurance” and all of them
are being done very well.
The guitar doesn't squall so much as it lingers like a fog, with
random leads rising up like steam from a sewer. The rhythm section
is deceptively tight, conjuring up a danceable groove that can, I'm
assuming, be turned into a monster live. Add to that mix a vocal
line that takes half a dozen listens to really reveal itself and
Strange Relations comes off like your older brother's impossibly cool
girlfriend, cigarette hanging between jet black nails and the smell
of whiskey following her up the stairs.
Final Score: 4/5
There you have
it, music fans! Another week's worth of songs downloaded, reviewed,
and filed away!
As always,
please bear in mind that neither Newest Industry nor its contributors
is in any way affiliated with the artists above, The Current, or MPR.
We're just music fans with laptops and a little too much time on our
hands.
For more
TCDroogsma he can be found on Twitter (@TCDroogsma). He can also be
found right here on Newest Industry hosting our free weekly podcast
Flatbasset Radio.
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