Norwegium.

From that distant land come many artists. Some I know, many I don’t. I’m aware, for example, that Flunk is from Norwegium. They haven’t been particularly well-received here, for being perhaps too Bjork-ish, but I rather like them. Gorgoroth comes from Norwegium, too! Remember them? They’re not Bjorkish at all. (Gaahl, their lead singer, is one of the most un-Bjork characters in the whole Black Metal scene.) Also from the land of burning churches and audio shrapnel? Burzum, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Dimmu Borgir and Emperor. You have to wonder, looking over these acts how it came to pass that Norwegium also gave birth to Anne Marie Almedal.

Dulcet of voice and dulcet of face, Miss Almedal stumbles from the northland like Conan from the land of Cimmeria, with eyes of volcanic blue and… alright, I’ll knock it off with the stereotypes. Seriously, we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Norwegium has also spawned The Kings Of Convenience. How anti-Black Metal can you get? Annie is Norwegian, too (and as it happens, sits right after Anne Marie Almedal in my iTunes library.) The melody for Annie’s “Chewing Gum” drags Gaahl out of fevered sleep in a cold sweat with sheets tangled around his body. Also from Sweden’s neighbor? Sondre Lerche and Serena Maneesh. It is, indeed a land of many facets. Musically, anyway.

Almedal, formerly of the band, Velvet Belly, has just released The Siren & The Sage. It plays like Nick Drake by way of Vashti Bunyan and Alison Goldfrapp. In fact, “Trouble,” the second track on the album, has a crescendo so similar to that of “A & E” that it could almost be its parallel universe cousin crossed over into this world. It’s a lilting collection of tunes, with lyrics that celebrate spring and romance and catching leaves and well, actually, even insanity. If an album is a journey, this one is a journey on a strange, musical cloud that carries you through an emotional landscape and then, with the final cut, “Happy Ending,” deposits you back on your couch with gentle hands. That works for me.

Mostly, what this album does for me is make me wonder what’s next. I like it just fine. It’s a nice drifty wisp of silk. Quite a lovely one, at that. But if she takes one more step forward in style and production she’ll be a force to reckon with. She’s got sweetness and looks, but what makes her interesting is that slight undercurrent of darkness, that Nick Drake-ishness to which I referred earlier. Maybe that dark streak is what inspired her to cover Massive Attack’s “Safe from Harm” (see it here.) Maybe it’s just the word “Siren,” which connotes both beauty and danger. I dunno.

For an excellent glimpse into Almedal’s inspiration and her musings on creativity, check out CC’s interview with the artist here. And head over to mySpace for a smattering of songs. Almedal, if my spider sense is telling me right, will be the next big Norwegian thing. So brace yourself.

What’s that? It’s not Norwegium? It’s Norway??

Nobody tells me anything.

Anne Marie Almedal: The Siren & The Sage: iTunes

“The First Picture Of You”

I didn’t sleep well last night. There were probably a lot of reasons why, but a general combination of factors kept me awake until about three. You know how, when insomnia strikes, a song will often lodge in your mind like a hot nail and flat-out refuse to leave? Well that happened to me last night.

“Down On The Ground” by British Sea Power is an infectious, rollicking jam that makes me think of mid-nineties Brit rock like Wild Swans or Ocean Blue. I think it’s the vocals. They lilt. They float in through the harder-edged intrumentals in a dreamy, melodic way, offering a counterpoint to the lively, hammering rhythms (much the way a soap bubble might drift through a forest of knives should it find an occasion to do so.) I want to say there’s a nostalgic feeling to the tune, but then nostalgia is like controversy. If you look for it hard enough somewhere you’re likely to find it. And I’ve been in a nostalgic mood, lately.

When I get nostalgic, I can get sentimental over a soft boiled egg.

Check out the tune. then find the album. It’s quite good, easily the most accessible of their past couple. And don’t be surprised to see them show up at Bonnaroo and Coachella this year. This time out, theirs is a festival sound.

Finally, notice how, by juxtaposing the two thoughts above I led you to believe that it was this song that was stuck in my head until three AM? it wasn’t. But that’s the power of clever associations. Be careful how you interpret what you read. Especially in this year of elections.

Oh and the song that was stuck in my head? It was Delta Goodrem again. Sigh…

British Sea Power – “Down On The Ground” 

British Sea Power: official site, rough trade

Then by sheer coincidence, WNYC’s excellent Radio Lab show devoted an entire piece to Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The episode is called “The Ring & I” and it examines the enormous hold the 20-hour operatic series holds on its devotees. Sigfried’s Funeral March is part of the cycle, called Götterdämmerung, or, Twilight Of The Gods.

Me? I know it as that incredible music from the end of Excalibur.

To this day, there are few films that move me in their final minutes as much as Excalibur does (Hal Hartley’s Trust also comes to mind, as does Caroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf.) In the case of the Boorman film, it is almost entirely because of the music. Boorman knew he was working with the stuff of myth and legend, so wisely, rather than use the work of a modern-day composer, he went straight to the classics and peeled bits of both Orff and Wagner to get the job done (possibly even Mozart’s Deis Irae if memory serves–or wait, maybe that was the trailer for Cliffhanger.) Remember the bit where a dying King Arthur instructs Percival, one of the last surviving knights of the round table, to take Excalibur and hurl the blade back into the lake? He rides and rides and decides he can’t do it. He returns to Arthur, whose dying plea is to return and try again. So Percival rides back to the lake and hurls Excalibur. The slender, sliver-clad arm glides from the lake and catches the sword. Holds it for a moment. Then retreats into the water, signaling the death of a king and the end of an era.

That was true Wagnerian stuff. The Twilight of the Gods. Götterdämmerung.

The Radio Lab episode is remarkable. Listen to it here. As for a definitive recording? Apparently, the Georg Solti version is the high watermark. And as long as we’re talking Excalibur, who could forget the remarkable art by Bob Peake for the one sheet?

The scene itself is on YouTube (of course.) I’ll post it here until the inevitable cease & desist knocks it out of commission:

And finally, the piece itself, as I heard it that night in the throes of insomnia:/>

Wagner – “The Death of Siegfried, Funeral March”

Sia’s last album, Colour The Small One, almost didn’t make it out in the U.S. I guess after lackluster sales of her debut a couple years earlier her label not only refused to release the follow-up overseas, they dropped her. But the Adelaide, Australia born singer’s star was already rising. She was a regular guest on efforts by Zero 7, and then out of the blue, “Breathe Me” was plucked from the ether and dropped into the finale of Six Feet Under. Presto-change-o. Instant attention.

Her new album appears with little fanfare today. I mean, I say little fanfare because I didn’t even know it was coming out until the other afternoon, a discovery which accompanied the inadvertent spraying of my monitor with coffee. Fanfare or no, it’s here. Damn that wait seemed long.

It’s another collection of buoyant pieces engineered around her potent, soulful voice. On first spin, the impression is that there’s a different focus this time around. Of course, that’s not a bad thing. There was something timid about Colour The Small One. The beauty there was hesitant and uncertain, like she was offering up the music with a sad yet hopeful smile. This finds her more confident, a little more outrageous. Not to say that her music is more in keeping with the colorful wackiness of her offstage personality. As you’d expect from Sia, there’s plenty of quiet introspection. But there’s also an irrepressible exuberance this time out. On “Electric Bird,” for example, she trots out the horns for a blast of exuberance and bombast. I dig it.

“Academia” teams her up with Beck, in what may be the most whimsical moment on the album, and the song that most seems in keeping with Sia’s offbeat sense of humor and her goofy Australian affect. But only barely. In conversation, she’s a riot. In performace, she opens a different, more introspective door.

Sia Furler: official site, wiki wiki, itunes, amazon

Check it out:

Sia (with Beck) – “Academia”

Besides being one of the most gorgeous women in rock, Alison Goldfrapp also one of its most mesmerizing voices. But it hasn’t all been about her voice. Since Felt Mountain, three albums ago, Goldfrapp has been restlessly exploring new vibes from album to album. From the eerie dreaminess of that debut to the funky dance hall sleaziness of Black Cherry to the cleaned up electroni-cized pop of Supernature there’s been a new vista granted with each outing.

They’ve just dropped a new single to whet our appetite for the February release of the outfit’s fourth album, Seventh Tree. Though an advance single does not an album make, it does sound like we’re again veering yet a new direction. The single is softer, more rolled back, evoking a touch of Goldfrapp nostalgia, reigning in the edgy bounce of the last couple albums. It’s an interesting track, but I need more than just these three and a third minutes to know whether the album itself will keep the glitter train going. We need more.

Another point of anticipation is that Goldfrapp tends to mix very well. There are already a couple decent mixes of this song floating around out there, including a pair by Gui Boratto. But if we get anything near as interesting as the growling, ecstatic “We Are Glitter” remix of “Strict Machine” that cropped up on Sasha’s Fundacion mix a couple years back then it will be a happy occasion indeed.

Goldfrapp: myspace, official site, itunes, “Strict Machine” (We Are Glitter mix) (also iTunes)

Goldfrapp – “A & E”

This wasn’t really a contest. And to anyone who’s been by my last.fm page lately (yes, that’s Seals & Crofts at #3,) it wasn’t really a surprise. Annie Clark, recording as St. Vincent, put out what was just a hair’s breadth shy of the album of the year. That honor actually rests with Deerhunter’s Cryptograms (see previous post) but only because that album held together better as a cohesive whole. This album is a little more fractured, but only because Ms. Clark’s imagination has run wild throughout. The number of music ideas on Marry Me is staggering. It’s a fantastic collage of sounds and melodies and moods and words that, months after its release, still resonates.

The album is meticulously produced. The sounds that we encounter on even a cursory jaunt through the track list are varied and precise. There are handclaps, horns, bells, piano, synths, harmonics and strings, often within the same 32 bar stretch. It’s an explosion of texture, and it’s all held together by Clark’s sense of melody and her throaty, pliable voice. One gets the sense that she’s a restless genius, trying out everything that comes to mind and having the audacity to pull it off. She played and toured with both The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens before putting this album together and it feels as if these ideas had been stored and were building pressure before she released them.

“Your Lips Are Red” is the embodiment of this chaos and beauty. It took a few listens before the genius of the tune struck me. It’s simple on the surface. There’s a driving rhythm. Interwoven throughout are off-kilter vocals, minor key guitar riffs and explosions of sound, little Trevor Horn-like bursts of cacophony. It’s aggressive, unnerving material, seemingly without form, but building to something (we hope) bigger and different. As it progresses it begins to get beneath the skin. The discomfort grows. We need it to turn somewhere, to resolve, to come into a different sort of focus. We’re off balance. We’re tilting.

The turn comes at almost the three minute mark, and what a jaw-dropping, head-spinning turn it is. Like a fading storm, the chaos recedes and we’re left with a strumming guitar, a mournful violin voice and then, finally, a full bore, major-key finale. “Your skin’s so fair / Your skin’s so fair it’s not fair,” she repeats, as if it’s supposed to make sense, but though it doesn’t really mean anything taken literally, we feel like it does, because the music somehow provides the meaning that the words do not. The piano still bangs away in the background, the strings still spin about like dervishes, and a chorus of voices join in, but it holds together and as the last violin settles into quiet, we get it. I don’t know how it works, but it does.

It’s powerful stuff. And I can’t seem to get enough of it. In fact, I’ve perfected a way to inject it intravenously. Saves the ol’ iPod battery.

So hey, that’s it for the Ten (12) Tracks That Mattered in 2007, but I’m not done bloviating about the year in music. Not by a long shot, so stay tuned. I’ve still got the runners up to talk about, the stuff I didn’t like (even though I was supposed to) and the stuff that I never got around to listening to but I thought I’d mention anyway in case you’re wondering where [your favorite band] is on the list. Plus, Delta Goodrem! Can you stand it?

St. Vincent: Pitchfork review

St. Vincent – “Your Lips Are Red”

Preconceptions. Sometimes you hear of a band, or see the cover of their album, and you immediately get it in your head that you’re not gonna like it. And usually, because your prejudices are so strong, you don’t. it took me six months to finally getting around to trying Cryptograms. There were plenty of reasons to avoid it. I’d heard it described as “noise,” for example, which, granted, isn’t very descriptive and could really be applied to music of any sort, or I’d gotten the impression from reviews, perhaps, that it was difficult, or maybe even I just assumed, based on the name, Deerhunter, that they’d sound like one of those bands I was supposed to like but didn’t, like The Mars Volta or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Or maybe it was because I didn’t realize that Bradford Cox has Marfan Syndrome. Who knows? It took me while.

When I finally got my mitts on a copy I dropped it in and hit play and walked away, content to let it try and win me over from the background. I went to another room. I forget why. Maybe I was hunting llamas. When I came back some really interesting noise filled the air. I actually forgot what I’d put on. I had to check. It was still Cryptograms, but rather than the atonal screech-a-thon that I, for some reason, had been expecting what I was hearing was lush, atmospheric and, well, lovely.

[photo by akmal naim]

It’s beauty with a blade hidden within its folds. There’s a central paradox in this stuff. It’s music borne of pain but it serves as a soothing anodyne at the same time. To hear it is to walk a lovely path, but to listen to it–I mean really listen–is to discover the darkness beneath the surface. It moves from one stage to the next, balancing noisy pop with shoegaze atmospherics, sometimes within the same tune (this one is case in point) and with such skill that it’s hard to believe that the album came out of sessions so fraught with confusion and depression and aimlessness.

It’s best listened to as a whole experience. Tracks intertwine and stretch and bunch and do other non song-like things, so it was difficult to single out one cut, but “Spring Hill Convert” comes the closest to encapsulating what, for me, is the album of the year. (Yes, thought it’s my favorite album of 2007, my fave track of the year comes from somewhere else, as I’ll write about tomorrow.) And in a bitter twist, Deerhunter has ostensibly gone on hiatus. Hell. But then we hold no illusions. One can’t (and shouldn’t) hope for another Cryptograms. Cox has got a new project in the works (Atlas Sound) and he’s still making music. If we’re lucky, it’ll be bigger and different and completely strange and weirdly beautiful.

Deerhunter: official site, Pitchfork review & interview, amazon, itunes, the deerhunter blog

Deerhunter – “Spring Hall Convert”

The Pitchfork review of Autumn Of The Seraphs makes a good point. They claim that Pinback’s last proper album, Summer In Abbadon has more of an autumnal, frostbitten sound where as this new one feels more like summer fare. They’re right. When I go back and listen to its warm-ish tones and relaxed rhythms I can’t help but think of the lazy days of the school-free season. That helps these days. New Mexico weather has been chilly and gray. It’s almost possible to set the album on repeat and huddle in front of the speakers, hands extended, rubbing away the chill.

Pinback is intricate, precise and articulate indie pop music. The album is layered in ways that reveal new insights with each repeated listen. If you want to get an feel for the songs you have to listen to them more than once. “Bouquet” was no exception. There’s a division that happens at about 2:50 which turns the undercurrent of tension with which the song begins into a lustrous lament. The final lyrics go something like this:

You can take that how you want

I adjust the time
For you to be here

Don’t go

And you taste my tears
And we share our souls

I’m walking on my own
I’m walking all alone

But this is no straight recital of verse. True to Pinback form the voices leapfrog over the words, piecing music from lines in a decidedly non-linear fashion, lines that seem more constructed by how they sound than what they mean, and come up with something both potent and pretty.

Pinback: official site, itunes, amazon, nice fansite

Warm your hands:

Pinback – “Bouquet”

My friend Dayle gets a fair amount of music from me. Or she did, when she was more into it. I would throw together a few small collections every so often and she would dutifully drop them onto her iPod and enjoy them. I specifically chose stuff she’d like, which is, of course, what you do if you’re a friend/music-pusher. But occasionally I’d slip something in there among the pop country and the female singer-songwriter choices that I knew she wouldn’t like but that would give her an extra boost of credibility on the dating circuit (of which she was an avid member) in the event a prospective boyfriend perused her collection to see what she’s into.

M.I.A.’s Arular was one of those tastemaker albums. Just as I’d guessed, Dayle didn’t like M.I.A. at all, in spite of my occasional needling. But I thought that some day she’d stumble across it and give it a spin for heck’s sake, or some dude would spin that little browse wheel and go, “Wow, Trisha Yearwood AND M.I.A.? You’re so eclectic!” and a relationship would be born. I don’t know if it worked or not. She’s engaged now and I never asked whether it was because of M.I.A. But yours truly is set to be spinning the tunes on wedding night and I’m gonna do everything I can to drop this track into the mix somehow, bride’s wishes be damned.

There’s a lot of great stuff on Maya Arulpragasam’s newest album. In fact, of all the year-end lists I’ve perused, this is the only album that consistently finds a place in the top ten. I guess I’m no exception. I like this track in particular. Its noisy, confrontational bounce is perfect for summertime, top-down, music appreciation. And hell, listen to it loud enough and you might just attract a soul mate.

At least, that’s my fantasy.

M.I.A.: official site (might induce seizures), allmusic, itunes, amazon

listen:

M.I.A. – “Boyz”

I was in Australia when the last interesting album by Nine Inch Nails came out. That was The Fragile, and the year was 1999. A few years ago, his follow-up to that album was released. With Teeth it was called. I barely noticed. I mean, sure, I listened to it, but there was nothing that struck me as interesting or great about it. It wasn’t “interesting” in the same way The Fragile was. And the word, interesting, is hardly a compliment. There’s stuff to love about The Fragile (the smoldering build of “Somewhat Damaged,” for example,) but most of it was, well, just good. It didn’t come close to the towering greatness that was The Downward Spiral, an album so good and so nuanced and so complex that if I were making a list of the ten Albums That Mattered Most in All Of My Recorded Time, it would likely claim a berth.

I needn’t explain why, when Year Zero came out, I was hardly expecting much. Even its crazy marketing, which involved mysterious websites and numerous clues of a sinister nature that alluded to the album’s theme, served to bolster my anticipation. But damned if it wasn’t a halfway decent album. In fact, there are moments of aggression and beauty on it that make me wonder whether it isn’t the true follow-up to Spiral. “Zero Sum” is a good example of what I like about Nine Inch Nails at their best. Reznor has a knack for building a rough, saw-bladed rhythm and then plucking notes of delicate beauty out of the air around it and weaving them together. This tune is on the thoughtful, pensive side. Indeed, it kinda jogs along at a quiet pace, and taken out of context of the album itself, which tells a dark and metaphorical tale of a world gone seriously awry, it loses some of its power. But here it is anyway. Take it and love it and call it your own.

Nine Inch Nails: itunes, official site, allmusic review (glowing)

listen:

Nine Inch Nails – “Zero Sum”