Engine

So I was reading this piece of..thread and one thing got my attention.

It was when mr dave said:
This is something I do in my album reviews and I will defend the practice by saying: my system isn't meant to be arbitrary, it's meant to represent 1 - 10 which I assume everybody understands. Of course, my idea of any number can be considered arbitrary - but then so can the entire review - because I wrote it. So the whole shebang is arbitrary and why shouldn't it be? A review that is not written arbitrarily is more like a Wikipedia entry (which mr dave also righteously derided).

On the other hand.
mr dave's comment made me think..

What is the point of rating an album 1 - 10? Specifically, in my Squirrel Bait thread, why should I do it? The answer is that I am trying to convey how I like the albums in relation to each other. But is that necessary? I'm starting to think not. I obviously like all of the music so why bother explaining that I like one album more than another to the 10th degree? I think I'll stop the numbers after my final review of The Sea and Cake.

Upcoming reviews (not nec. in order):

June of 44 - Engine Takes to the Water (1995)
Codeine - The White Birch (1994)
Directions in Music (1996)

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

Tracks:
1. Sporting Life
2. The Argument
3. The Fawn
4. The Ravine
5. Rossignol
6. There You Are
7. Civilise
8. Bird and Flag
9. Black Tree in the Bee Yard
10. Do Now Fairly Well

Band:
Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, Eric Claridge, John McEntire

Recorded by John McEntire 1996

Released by Thrill Jockey 1997

The Fawn is the album on which The Sea and Cake goes electronic. Not really, but they do add layers of drum programming and other instrumental sequencing on top of their usual act. Also, the production is crisper than ever before. Often the addition of those elements is bad news for a band but it fits The Sea and Cake nicely. While their songs have always been smooth, here they are completely glazed. Your mind may slip on them because the band has added all kinds of percussion sounds to McEntire’s already complex, driven drumming. The result is psychedelic or, rather, hallucinogenic. It’s not that they have made wanking psychedelic rock music here. It’s that some of the sounds seem like they could have only come from your own mind – possibly after ingesting a psychedelic drug. The slick production helps slide all these sounds down your ear hole before you even realize where they came from.

The first two songs do their best to set the new stage for the band. ‘Sporting Life’ is virtually full of synthesized instruments yet it is far from synth-pop. It’s just The Sea and Cake with a lot of extra sounds. The core band is as present as ever and it is a testament to their strength that they do not sound changed by all this additional stuff – simply enhanced. Also, while Prekop has always sung clearly, softly, and on key – it sounds like he sobered up before entering the studio. Like everything else on this album, his voice has never sounded smoother. ‘The Argument’ is the best example of how this album can make you wonder if you have forgotten that you just dropped LSD two hours ago. No, it just sounds that way. The song is a barrage of percussion; sometimes sliding into the territory of jungle beats. About halfway into the song, the vocals start and you relax into the usual comfortable lounge seat that the band always provides. This is a common technique on The Fawn. The instrumentation is often given a long while to spread out and develop but, just when you are convinced that you are hearing an instrumental track, the voice, like Voltron’s head, tops it off and make The Sea and Cake complete.

After the first few tracks, the songs begin to sound more like traditional Sea and Cake – just more buttery. They continue to use plenty of effects and extra sounds but the result is the lulling pop that you’d expect from the band. The Fawn is a mixture of lullabies and mildly forceful indie-pop. It usually depends on whether McEntire and his drum kit want you to dose off or to dance around in your seat. He seems to always control the pace and he turns your emotional dial up and down as easily as he adjusts his synthesizers. ‘Bird and Flag’ is a standout track as it conjures disco with a jangly guitar riff straight out of the late 70s. The rest of the band also doesn’t do much to resist sounding like the Bee Gees. Two quiet, meandering tracks close out the album on a distinctly different note from which it began. It seems like McEntire brought a little bit of Tortoise with him on these because they whisper like mellow post rock without any of the dazzle of the first few songs.

As the years go by I only listen to The Sea and Cake occasionally but when I do, The Fawn is what I automatically reach for first. I find it their most interesting, if not best, release. To me it is where they hit the sweet spot where freedom and innovation converge to make heroic, forthright pop music.

9.1/10

The Argument


Bird and Flag

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

Along with John McEntire, the Squirrel Bait family also has Doug Scharin in its ancestry. The man is a drum genius. Choose your favorite drummer and Scharin is as good or better. What makes Doug special, though, is how he applies his talent. He is a rare artist who plays what he feels when he feels it. The proof is that hardly anybody gives a fuck about his music even though he has been a consistent innovator for decades. This is not to say that the man is an indie musician who can't play his instrument but makes entertaining sounds like some kind of Machiavellian schemer. I mean that Doug Scharin is a highly skilled drummer. He is up there with Buddy Rich and Dave Lombardo. He played and continues to play music that speaks to the soul of humankind. He is a goddamn good drummer.

The next 3 albums that I will review all feature Doug on the drums. Without intentions to detract from the other musicians in the bands who made the albums, I will say that I am not sure that I would be reviewing any of them here and now if Doug Scharin did not play drums on them 10-15 years ago.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Gavin B.

If I live to be 100 years of age, I don't think I'll ever see the names of Carolyn Chute, Will Olham and Eminem mentioned in the same paragraph of text ever, ever again.

I'm fascinated with your quirky analogies and idnosyncratic methodology. I once met Carolyn Chute and she was about the most unglamorous literary figure ever. She looked and acted like one of the rustic characters out of her books. She walked into a record store on Martha's Vineyard where I worked during the first snowfall of the year wearing one of those lumberjack hats with ear flaps and a funky old tweed overcoat that was about 3 sizes too big for her.

Engine

that's the best compliment I've ever received - thanks.

Damn, Gavin - I hope you write a memoir that will involve all the interesting cult figures you've met. I gobbled up each of Chute's novels about Egypt, Maine as soon as I heard of them - definitely some of my favorites.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

1. Sea
2. Loss Leader
3. Vacancy
4. Kitchen Light
5. Washed Up
6. Tom
7. Ides
8. Wird
9. Smoking Room


John Engle – guitar
Stephen Immerwahr – bass, singing
Douglas Scharin – drums
David Grubbs – guitar on Tom and Wird

Recorded by Mike McMackin 1993

Released by Sub Pop 1994

In 1994 life moved a lot slower than it does today. At least mine did. Learning about music came more from direct experience than the internet. Logic coupled with many hours of CD rack browsing was how good bands were discovered. I had to seek out music by bands on certain record labels and peruse the credits on the CD covers and such. This is how I found Codeine. I had heard the name and a song or two before and had filed them in my mind as a band that was probably a fairly boring specimen of the early post rock bands. The music press term ‘slowcore’ was applied to them after all (“it’s like indie-punk, man, but like, slow”), and they did name themselves after an opiate. Then I found their album, The White Birch, and saw that it was released by Sub Pop and decided that maybe there was some actual rock in it. I admit, if the album was released on another more artsy label, I may have passed it by at the time assuming that it was too boring to justify paying $11.99 for their CD (that’s how we used to get music in the olden days). Thankfully, I bought the CD that day and it was a solid purchase; the album continues to rank high on my list of all time favorites.

The White Birch is perfectly slow throughout the album. And the whole thing chugs along at a fairly steady pace. Still, the band uses distortion and loud/soft dynamics in the fashion of real rock-n-roll bands so it is not a typical example of what is now called post rock although one could argue that it is prototypical. It is slow music for slow times but it also reaches emotional highs and, despite the low speed, it is far more energetic than a lot of latter day post rock that was influenced by Codeine. A lot of the energy comes from Immerwhar’s vocals, even though his singing is slooow. Some of the songs have a spoken/muttered quality that was popular at the time. But usually he employs melodies and tempo shifts just like a real rock singer. He also packs a lot of emotion into those lazy-ass phrases. And since I’m talking about the players now, I’ll bring out the big guns: drummer Doug Scharin. He is not the band’s original drummer - that’s Chris Brokaw who went on to play in some other interesting bands that will probably be discussed later in this thread. The White Birch is Codeine’s last album and the only one with Scharin. I feel that it takes an exceptional drummer to play so damn slowly and, no offense to Brokaw, but Scharin took Codeine to a higher level. His drums on The White Birch are amazing at times. He goes incredibly slowly but still plays so many interesting fills and small flourishes. There’s also the sound of sheer power. Scharin’s drumming sounds like an unyielding force lumbering forward slowly like an elephant in an ancient Roman battle. John Engle is also no slouch on the guitar. He does quite a bit of the loud-quiet-loud thing and likes to step on his distortion pedal giving the songs a thick texture despite the slow, simple arrangements. The White Birch is one of those albums that feel perfect – for lack of a better cliché – like planets aligned and the right musicians got together at the right time to make a special, superior album.

The White Birch is a collection of songs that flow together as they should on a good album. I hardly think of the songs as separate entities and, no, that does not mean that they ramble around in circles for 15 minutes. In fact, other than the 7-minute opener, the album is full of concise 3 to 5 minute songs that pretty much have beginnings, middles, and endings. There are some definite standouts, though. ‘Loss Leader’ is probably the biggest crowd-pleaser as it has a heavy, emotional tone with dark-sounding bass, melancholy melodic vocals and loud, fuzzy guitar choruses. It’s this kind of thing that probably interested the management at Sub Pop – they almost sound like Sunny Day Real Estate here. ‘Kitchen Light’ brings the drama with a repeated verse that’s basically a small crescendo over and over, building to bigger and bigger crescendos through the song. All at a snail’s pace. ‘Tom’ is another high point with a dramatic intro that gears up to a loud, sad chorus. Then, thankfully, the cycle repeats.

The insipid practice of attaching the suffix “core” to other words to describe music has been a flaw of the music industry for over two decades. It has been proven useless and silly many times by bands like Codeine who have been called ‘slowcore’ and *shudder* ‘sadcore’ in the press. I still have no idea how the additional core-word helps the otherwise descriptive terms. Oh well, at least you get the idea that the band plays music slowly, and that’s certainly true. The White Birch is a slow, sad album but the lack of speed is not the point – it is also a catharsis. Slow movement is only a side effect of opiates, their real purpose is to mitigate pain and the same is true of Codeine’s masterpiece. So – when you can find the time - head to the Slow section of your local record store and pick up your copy of this classic piece of core.

Loss Leader


Tom

Engine

Songs:
1. Have a Safe Trip, Dear
2. June Miller
3. Pale Horse Sailor
4. Mindel
5. I Get My Kicks For You
6. Mooch
7. Take It With a Grain of Salt
8. Sink is Busted

Band:
Fred Erskine – bass
Sean Meadows – guitar, vocals
Jeff Mueller – guitar vocals
Doug Scharin – drums



Recorded by James Murphy 1994

Released by Quarterstick Records 1995

If you had good taste and were into heavy music in the early 90s you had to look around a bit to find the good stuff. The metal scene had become a ridiculous cartoon. Punk was dead to me and hardcore had been overrun by political bands that were increasingly fascinated with bouncy beats and the vocalists tended to rap too much or sing too much (I’m looking at you Revelation Records). Outside of all of that noise there were some shiny new subgenres that filled the void – you know, math rock, etc. And so June of 44 released Engine Takes To The Water which broke more than one boundary. They were post rock in the fashion of Slint (goddammit I swore I would not use that word in this review) but they were more ‘rock’ than they were ‘post’ as they made a lot of head nodding beats, dynamic songs that went somewhere and had a bit of screamy vocals to satisfy the rocker in you.

The album opener, 'Have a Safe Trip, Dear' let’s you know what you’re in for straight away and it guarantees their future popularity. Softly ringing guitar harmonics mixed with spoken vocals form the intro but the drama builds up fast. A mathy riff soon takes over and the vocals gear up to unpretentious yelling that fits perfectly with the sounds behind them that almost spiral away but keep coming back to a familiar melody. Then of course there is our friend, Doug Scharin, on drums pounding a ferocious but controlled rhythm that doesn’t allow the rest of the band to stray too far from the general rock formula. The energy goes up and down for about eight minutes, and I believe that anybody with good taste in music who heard this could not resist listening to the rest of the album. Everybody else probably just stopped it and put on their Rage Against the Machine album.

The second song is called ‘June Miller’ who was Henry Miller’s wife and who the band is named after. This is a nice satisfying number and pretty much pure math rock. The guitars are used to make a repetitive, energetic and oddly melodic riff. It sounds a little bit like a funky dance tune which, by the way, is the general direction that June of 44 ultimately went in their later years. This song made June of 44 fun – a word not usually associated with other similar bands. The nest song ‘Pale Horse Sailor’ goes in the opposite direction and heads into avant-garde territory to satisfy bespectacled fans of art rock. The band rambles around like they are improvising and the vocals speak and scream random shit with some kind of nautical theme. You could say that the song speaks to the alienation of bored kids suffering from ennui in the 90s but I won’t because that’s what disengaged critics say about this kind of song. It’s really just a noisy example of contemporary math rock. But next up is ‘Mindel’ which falls back into the band’s trademark groove. On this song, June of 44 proves once again that you can be a jam band without having any regard for the bullshit sounds of Phisch, et al. ‘I Get My Kicks for You’ sounds a lot like Slint (damnit!) with its slow pace and mumbled vocals and it’s topped off with a mellow trumpet melody. It degenerates into a long segment of nothing but mild feedback. They could have left this one off the album – but then they may not have grabbed all those Slint fans. Anyway, in those days it was pretty standard for songs to trail off into random sounds for an inordinately long period. I was so used to it back then that I hardly noticed this but it sounds fairly dated and pointless now. ‘Take it With a Grain of Salt’ is another classic June of 44 number. It rocks sort of like the late-80s post-hardcore bands did and it’s oh-so-satisfying. The album closes with the song ‘Sink is Busted’ which highlights the prettier side of the band. It’s math rock with softly and sweetly sung vocals and the whole song lingers cohesively in the air but still captivates.

Engine Takes To The Water is not June of 44’s best album but it’s their first and it began their tradition of making interesting, heavy math rock and packaging it with gorgeous album cover art. While my beloved underground American rock music got overrun by preachy, overproduced ‘hardcore’ and other heavy bands that wanted to jump on the breakbeat train, I feel indebted to June of 44 for giving the world intelligent rock music that went in a new direction but retained most of rock music’s fundamentals. Engine Takes To The Water rocks, grooves, and goes artsy, usually all at once, and it made the music world a better place in 1995.

June Miller


Take It With A Grain Of Salt

Engine

8 untitled tracks

Released by Thrill Jockey in 1996

Band:
Bundy K. Brown
Doug Scharin
James Warden

Directions in music is the result of a leisurely recording session at Brad Wood’s Ifdul Music studio. Bundy K. Brown got together with his old friend Warden to make some guitar songs that he wanted to record. He didn’t want to or couldn’t play these with his other band, Tortoise, because they had been consistently moving further away from the guitar. By this time, Brown must have been used to having the best drummer in the world, John McEntire, back him so he probably wouldn’t have settled for anybody less than Doug Scharin on drums. The three made an album of pastoral, atmospheric guitar-based post rock with a tight focus on musicianship. This would be a typical description of many albums made by the talented Louisville/Chicago post rock bands but Directions in music is warmer. More sublime.

Yes, the name of this band/project is stolen from the ‘Directions in music by Miles Davis’ tag that adorned Davis’s late-60s albums. So, yeah, these guys are into Jazz and they and their peers in the Chicago bands were making music that was increasingly Jazz-like. But apparently Brown had been writing beautiful, acoustic guitar compositions on the side. Sometimes he made a sad folky Nick Drake sound and other times more jangly ones. The album sounds like it could have been improvised, but it was not. Brown wrote music that flowed like jazz and, of course, any kind of verse-chorus-verse structure was not to be tolerated in his line of work. He has stated that the album came out the way it did, though, because the three had time to relax in the studio and stretch out parts wherever they felt like it. Certainly they occasionally lapsed into full improvisation around a theme.

The band creates intense sounds that are always laid back and reserved. There is a lot of acoustic guitar and even more undistorted electric. There’s strumming, riffing, trilling and almost-classical flourishes tossed around all over the songs. As for the drums: Being the genius that he is, Scharin plays his instrument as if he’s just another part of the melody. He doesn’t so much make beats as he builds patterns, following the other music, guiding it, hovering around it. The whole time displaying that subversive power of his to rock hard while staying calm and even quiet.

In the end this album is not a whole lot different than what Tortoise was doing at the time, but I’ve always liked it better. Although there are some slow passages and some electronic enhancements in Directions in music, they are rare. This is more of a rock album than Tortoise were interested in making..I’ll call it a ‘Fusion’ album. It fuses jazzy, folky post rock with, well..rock.


Track 1


Track 4

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

I'm not a guitarist but I've been playing the instrument for over 20 years. I was pretty serious about it for the first few but never got good enough to stay interested. I've gone long stretches without owning or touching a guitar but I usually have one nearby.

Now and again I get motivated to try to learn/write songs but I always get bored or frustrated and end up playing the same simple shit as ever. Like the opening arpeggios on 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)' or the chord progression on 'Where Is My Mind'. I wouldn't say I suck but I also would not say that I am a guitarist.

But some of the people I have been talking about on this thread are great guitarists who really take the craft seriously.

The next album I'm going to review is my best proof of the above statement.
It's Turnstyles and Junkpiles by Pullman, a band comprised of: Bundy K. Brown, Chris Brokaw, Curtis Harvey, Doug McCombs and David Pajo makes an appearance. They recorded the album live with an array of guitars and other acoustic stringed instruments. Here's a taste..

Barefoot

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Gavin B.

I appreciate your numerous items on the artists associated with the venerable Chicago based indie label Thrill Jockey. It takes a visit to the Thrill Jockey homepage to fully appreciate the remarkable diversity of their stable of musicians. Thrill Jockey is the kind of music that one should always pay for, even if it's abundantly available for free at pirate file sharing websites.