The White Album: Drinks in Copenhagen

the white album (the band from Copenhagen, not The Beatles album)

If Mumford & Sons found themselves stranded on a desert island with Jack, Sawyer, Lock, Kate, Sayid and Bon Iver and together they pooled their creative emotional resources and fashioned a societal structure comprised of all that a human community would need to survive including but not limited to food, shelter and love then the band The White Album would have emerged from the next generation on that desert island provided, of course, that Claire's ability to birth a child pulled through for the original inhabitants of the desert isle.

If you haven't seen every single episode of LOST then you may not understand and may be tempted to under appreciate the previous ridiculous run-on sentence.  The summary:  The White Album sounds like Bon Iver and Mumford & Sons.  Of course, these guys are from Copenhagen and although they do their best to hide their accents when they're singing like many European artists, their Denmark-ness shines through fairly cleanly especially considering the above pic.

One of their videos on YouTube (not shown below) captures their vibe showing the band playing in a field (of corn?) with misty and tranquil sunlight ambiently imposing on the background, occasionally filling the camera lens with nothing but white; pure white light refracting and fluxing in and around subtly groovy depictions of slight human tragedy, relational warnings of failure and complication of simple love.  Their live video below gives you can idea of their approach...

That complication can be tough to pallet; difficult to digest.  "As She Drinks" follows a woman in the middle of a tipsy evening, alludes to a peaceful romance and offends no one.  A rougher side of "drinking" is revealed in verse two when a loss of human control is admitted in the wake of an alcoholic trance mimicked by trance-sounding distortions from who-knows-what kind of instrument or electronic addition.

Simple.  Clean.  Folk.  Beards.  Welcome to Copenhagen, featuring The White Album.  

TWO new sufjan stevens songs saunter even farther from the norm

Sufjan IS actually on bandcamp though these two songs I will now refer to are not...

If basing an entire album off of a little known and mostly scary "prophet" wasn't offbeat enough for you wild and smart Sufjan Stevens (or Rosie Thomas) fans, these two songs are sure to at least keep the offbeat moving further in the "off" direction:

Beak and Claw

Clearly Sufjan is pushing his own genre boundaries but who's complaining?  

Feeling Low With Brendan Losch

The ever popular line, "drove to Chicago" will be timeless soon enough.  A great city, a clean city, good pizza.  Whilst in Chicago, look up Brendan Losch.  As with all the bands I review, he's the kind of artist you simply want to keep listening to.  Or, the kind of artist to which you want to keep listening.  I guess.

Embracing the lonely nature of being human.  According to Losch, merely by being a "being" we are separated from other "beings" and therefore exposed to the ruthlessness of loneliness.  Somehow we have to come to grips with this looming philosophical idea of alone.  It seems some song lyrics contradict others:  you're never alone.  Three songs later, I'm on my own.  One song later, Everything you've ever known has left you alone.  I guess that dual nature is reflective of experience; a time for never being alone, a time for being alone.

I'm not going to bother listing comparable bands or artists.  It's the kind of music you've heard in your right brain your whole life.  Now you've actually found what you've been listening to all along.  The words don't matter.  In this situation it's better just to listen and go from there.  I'd recommend starting with Time Stood Still.

I'd also recommend listening while driving out into the country sitting in the back of an early 90's station wagon lying down facing out the back, looking up at the trees from underneath as they go passing by.  Scratched paint, rust over the wheels, one hubcap missing never to be replaced.  Preferably with some friends you like headed to a place you like where you have some memories from childhood where you can eat some good cheese and red wine and throw a frisbee.  Long pants, a t-shirt, sandals and cheap old sunglasses you can't even remember where you bought.  That's what I picture.

Ambient tones and slow, simple progressions haunt the ethereal and groovy flow of this album.  I truly mean this is as a compliment that I want to listen to this album while asleep.  I want my dreams to follow suit and I want to happily travel through this smooth, dreamy beautiful musical lo-fi world in a way that only a dream could process, flip and verbalize into something truly creative - wild yet somehow understandable and even likable.  How many times have I woken up from a gorgeous dream wishing I could go back to the world my subconscious mind created.  It didn't even make sense but existential hopes were nonetheless explored, portrayed, experienced and enjoyed.

Sip your wine, savor your cheese.  Pick up that frisbee...you're not alone.

Take Care: Daniel Dixon and the Ultimate Portland Experience

Portland continues to be a land of talented misfits shaping the course of modern music.  Daniel Dixon pokes his head out of the hoard of talented underestimated musicians crowding western Oregonian streets.

The ultimate Portland experience (I perhaps erroneously assume) is to sit in a coffee shop on a rainy day talking with the 20/30-somethings about some hipster ideal, some political idealogy, or a new cool indie band.  I'll forsake the former two and focus on the latter though I'd make a lousy hipster (couldn't bring myself to wear skinny jeans) and I only drink starbucks coffee.  That's not true (I mean about the coffee).

There's nothing attention seeking about Daniel's music but even in the simplest evaluation, I just want to keep listening.  The next story; the next line.  A new image.  To me, this is modern indie folk at its best.  No need to shy away from distorted vocals, wild pictures, grim realities, roughed-up experiences.  Daniel's progressions are patient and progress on a calm time table.  If he wants to take two minutes to groove with a simple guitar line and some reverb, then he does.  Casting Away could be the anthem of 98% of Portland's young hipster crowd:

    it's hard to get ahold of yourself
     this late in the game
     but someday i'll do good
     i'll put my hand to the plow
     and choose the thing i know i should

Agreed, Daniel, agreed.  Sans skinny jeans, throw me into that coffee shop on a rainy Saturday and right now I couldn't think of a better song to push through my headphones while catching up on the latest issue of Scientific American or whatever publication might be able to interest a wandering mind.  I'll wander on down the list of tracks to Rest On You:

    and there's so many whisperings
     about how i should be living
     and i'm so tired of the fight
     i can't keep my eyes open
     can't see where i'm going
     and i just want to rest on you

This would be anthem #2 for the post-college 20/30 something who graduated right into the recession, was forced to re-align hopes of a thriving career, and move into the city in search of...well...maybe a job and a cup of coffee and perhaps a new pair of skinny jeans.

Track 8 makes me picture a park on the other side of town and everyone has made arrangements to be there for a cook-out family reunion.  It's been years since the whole family has been together.  The kids have grown, the adults have weathered well, but weathered nonetheless.  Gray hairs are now tough to hide; earned through experience: the things you thought would be small instead kept rest from your eyes.  You want everyone to know you, to see how you've changed, to appreciate and respect how you've matured and to want your opinion - be interested in your new ideas.  You all secretly love each other but the word is never mentioned.  Dysfunction hangs in the air.  Words referenced about past misunderstood events and situations that are too late to explain and too serious to talk about without a licensed family psychologist to weigh in and without a handful of tissues to mop up unforgiven tears long left sleepless and alone.  Almost inappropriately the park is gorgeous, the food is delicious and you try not to think about how much you'll miss everyone.  Everyone.  After the day is over you drive home smiling with sandy bare feet.

Singing Trees and Broken Bodies: Indie Band Geology

After listening to his first EP, Geology, who would have guessed this guy (Greg Jehanian) was straight out of the poetry-screaming, hard-rocking eccentric now-quartet, mewithoutyou?  His earlier songs hint at influences as mainstream as Ben Gibbard (death cab for cutie) and The Decemberists however the offbeat is still present both lyrically and musically - reminiscent of our good indie friend Sufjan Stevens.  The newer songs add The Shins to the influential list and a more low-key indie rock feel.  Geology loves trees, love songs, creative rhythms, charming lo-fi harmonies and a wide array of melodic biblical references.

Like all good music, Geology's songs explore human experience: strumming strings, pushing diaphragmatic air past vocal cords, pounding keys and hitting just about anything that just so happens to be in the room at the time of recording to capture even just one tiny little seed of a new thought about the tension between God and man in Geology's case.  A broken body and a perfect invisible being - a beautiful yet busted view - a tall and strong yet dying tree - a variety of conflicted characters starving to verbalize some hard-earned learned truth.

Their most recent EP, The Neighboring Sea, makes me picture a fast-forwarded offbeat nature film showing the formation of a new planet (if such a thing were possible.  it's science).  90% of the film is rough-edged rocky crags, volcanic ash, fiery center-of-planet lava crashing into the bottom of new ocean ridges buried miles under salted, sulfuric (neighboring) seas.  Inhospitable to any kind of life.  Dissonant lo-fi eletro vibes, a distant vocal presence and sounds that comes from unidentified sources.  But the entire purpose of the film is to create a context for the 10%:  the beautiful, green, life and biodiversity-filled ending humanity is hoping for in our minutes, days, summers, childhoods, years and lifetimes.  Some kind of pretty redemption - not one that denies all the wild violence that came before, but one that fulfills it; redeems it.  Makes it all makes sense.

Just like the ending to the song Arboretum on The Neighboring Sea, I'll end this review suddenly on that open-ended note. 

Post Empire Indie: Will Stratton

Dissonance never sounded so beautiful.  The first song on the album, You Divers, makes you want to run upstairs to put on your newest pair of skinny jeans and jump around inventing your own modern American dance; shaking your scruffy hair around like a metal head while smiling and spinning dawning your hemp shirt like a hippie.  Even though I don't own a hemp shirt, have dread locks or skinny jeans if I have to get those things in order to get into a Will Stratton concert I most certainly would.

This is the kind of album and artist that as you listen you know it would be an absolutely sick experience in concert.  Give Mr. Stratton a weekend with a looping pedal + acoustic guitar and then put him in Central Park - I'm certain a crowd would gather and drop quarters into his guitar case.  I mean many quarters, like enough to roll into a $10 paper roll that none of us could have enough patience to pull off when we were kids.  Will, that is somehow a compliment I assure you.

The keys and note choice give the songs a dark edge though the vocal melodies do not follow suit.  The lyrics are mostly "positive" though the larger picture of each song's story are slightly mysterious and will take a few listenings to track.  Who doesn't like a bit of mystery?  "Folk" is dead center of this album despite any conclusions made during or after You Divers, however I will secretly request more songs like the first on the next album.

Post Empire makes me want to take a long drive out of the city on a cloudy day threatening rain.  Skip breakfast; go meet an old friend you haven't seen since high school.  She used to laugh at all your jokes.  You catch up over coffee though the two of you are tea drinkers and you both know it but you don't want to break each others' hearts.  You want to be sensitive, you want to fit in, you want to sound interested and caring like you are.  There's so much you have in common.  She hasn't changed, she's just grown out of her characteristic naivete that made you consider her more of a younger sister.  Words aren't always chosen correctly; conversations go on too long.  You spend three hours in the car each way for a 43-minute cup of coffee.

It was worth it.

I Hate You Just Kidding: EP Album Review

for best results, listen below while reading

"Days Grow Longer" seems to be the result of a musical maturing going on behind the scenes over the past few years.  New branches have grown on their humble indie folk vine though I loved the old branches too.  Untitled EP was nothing to overlook.  The name is cute and the tunes are mostly happy but I admit that I scrub bandcamp for emerging artists whose talent clearly surpasses their current clout in the musical world and i hate you just kidding is a prime example of the tasty fruit of this mostly fruitless endeavor on which I embark from time to time on a whim or when I can't sleep at night.

Oh to quit my day job and be a band manager for emerging indie artists!  Clearly not a lucrative vocation.

The first lesson learned in reviewing mostly unknown artists is that you can't waste time.  You listen to a song or an album until you don't want to listen anymore.  If you find yourself adding the artist to your recently titled playlist "song that make me feel cool" then you know you've stumbled upon a winner.  i hate you just kidding makes me picture an old house on an acre of land off the beaten path.  Lemonade on the upper wrap-around porch and a soft and sunny Alabama sky on a mid-summer's eve.  In the glow of the setting sun, a simple stage appears with strung-bulb lighting strewn in the tree above.  A clever, full crowd of young and grown alike assemble as if the intimate music session was publicized.  Midway into the evening you feel connected to an age-old experience of the tragedy of the human condition.  But you're okay with it.  You've accepted it.  You smile as the evening ends and you say goodnight to friends you've known forever.  

My suggestion for moving forward for the band is spend a weekend listening to Untitled EP and without losing track of how you've grown and where you've come from, remember the simple captivation of a story well told, a lyric well sung, a poem well crafted and long-standing sadness well written out with pen and paper.

I look forward to the next EP.