Hi everyone - thanks for all the feedback, the kind words, and the various statements in support of, and opposition against, the Scots. It's wonderful to know that you're reading - whether or not you liked the new Mase track. Sorry about the holiday, but I now have the right to wear a mortarboard hat in public.
As promised, today's music comes mostly from the tour-only split EP that Okkervil River and Shearwater have been carrying with them on their trip across the USA. It's called Hoax Funeral/Sham Wedding. Some of us (like me) live in cities not not lucky enough to be on the bands' itinerary. And yet some of us (like me) have friends (like Ian James) who will still pass things our way, even when the band refuses to sell the CD by mail-order.
As I've said before, Okkervil River is one of the very best bands in America today. Don't Fall in Love With Everyone You See is a marvel of noisy, riverside folk - macabre love-songs and blasted murder ballads. "Okkervil River Song" is one of the very finest alt.folk songs ever recorded - I'd share it with you but, uh, I already did. Last year's album Down the River of Golden Dreams is good too - rushing chamber folk with grey-eyed lyrics. You should buy them.
Okkervil River - "Moonshiner". One of several traditionals on the Hoax Funeral/Sham Wedding split, as heard on records by Uncle Tupelo and Cat Power. The song bumps and clatters, staggering on aching legs down a dirt road and into the brush. No need for dramatics from Will Sheff: the story's an old one, familiar to all, full of misguided hope and a tired enthusiasm. It's in the repeated squeezebox theme that the song shows this exhausted side, the worn creases at the sides of the moonshiner's smile, the wrinkles from decades of waiting.
Shearwater - "Mountain Laurel". Jonathan Meiburg sings high over mandolin and acoustic guitar, then the drums tumble in and - with the violin that sounds like electric guitar - a blackyellow bird darts out of the sky. Like chamber pop with a particularly serious Hawksley Workman, David Bowie in a Kentucky rainstorm. ("Trouble in Mind" is also a great track - Sheff with acoustic guitar, a simplesad thing.)
And then because I didn't feel I wanted to leave things quite so spare, here's a song I wrote about back before Said the Gramophone was full of mp3s, an Okkervil River rarity that's among the best things they've done.
Okkervil River - "The Blackest Coat" This song starts wrong. There's a monotonous back and forth between bass and high-hat, Will Sheff's voice a little sharp, or flat, or something. It's not quite right, even with the gentle picking of acoustic guitar, the big round images. When the wurlitzer appears at that first chorus, things still feel slightly off-center. Everything's a half-step away from beauty.
But the magical thing that the band does is that it stays there. It circles that beautiful nut, it eyes it, but it stays on its side of the veil, where things are not quite right. It catches glimpses of the beauty in shadow. We grow used to this.
Suddenly - at precisely 4:11, - the curtain lifts, the disco-ball begins to spin, stars dapple the walls, and there it is. The fiddle is playing on beams of light, on friends' long glances across the room, on snowfall in an open doorway. As I said last August, it's "a juddering opening-up," a musical place that elicits, for me, an almost physical reaction. Everything's standing on the edge of a precipice, imagining the downward hurtle, the wind-whipping and blood-rushing and bone-crashing. It's a "loud-yelling-crashing victory finale". And then it takes a breath, it shakes its head, and steps away (or through?). (From last year's split EP with Julie Doiron.) [buy]