"Quitters" Never Quits (i couldn't resist)

Gorgeous simplicity can calm storms; like a good bourbon it can help you forget your worries for a bit, turn your stress inside out and let you walk while you were crawling.  Maybe you were aimless, and you still are, but you hear Lauren O'Connell and you find it comforting to know someone around you isn't.  Perhaps you lost sight of things.  Listening to her won't give you your sight back (she's not jesus) but you may forget for a time that you can't see.  

She has the kind of voice that makes you take your ipod off of shuffle.  The kind of inflection that makes chairs turn on The Voice.  A subtle rasp that reassures your concern of sonorous maturity.  At this point I've already grabbed my dancing shoes - who doesn't like a good cover song now and again?  Like a good red wine, a 30-year scotch, perhaps a fine aged cheddar cheese you can feel and experience the time spent lingering in Lauren's songs.  It's been said she's done her time sitting in chairs getting her start in coffee houses riding around Rochester, NY with a guitar and, well, that's just about it.  I would imagine the musical simplicity left too much room for ghosts and, bound for California (as we all are at heart), she burnt her old house down and now we've found ourselves here at Quitters with a full band, piano and a seriously professional sound.    

Not the typical scratchy pulled together sound of bandcamp recorded in someone's mom's bathroom, clearly there's some professional influence here.  I hear Ben Gibbard, Norah Jones, Tori Amos, Wilco and even a little Bob Dylan.  I guess it's no surprise she's done some notable covers of some of these artists.  

Sometimes music gets busy and it's great.  Like in the end of If Found/Gravity, a lot of things are happening, opportunities building, progress mounting, relationships developing, events bouncing and working off of one another.  But all of the sudden you notice the track has changed when you remember old times, old friends, old spots, old thoughts.  Your pants now have holes at the knees, the books you loved are dusty in the basement.  Things get quiet and you can hear your own heart again.  It weighs your decisions rightly with nothing to hide your blemishes.  In this way, to give the heart an open forum to speak can be brutal.  But without it you can't find that clean musical sense and you lose your way.

This is what music like Lauren's is for.  Like all good acoustic/folk/alt country/intelligent rock there is a touch of melancholy unresolved, a grief explored, love lost, slow groove, tasty but subtle choices and a leading intimate voice breaking open a theatre for musical feeling and inviting you in to the story.  The story is why I want to keep listening to this girl.

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?  

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.