All My CDs, pt 53: My Shoes

My Shoes - Tret Fure

It was March of 2010. It was five months past my first devastating breakup and I was only just beginning to recover (I have always taken these things embarassingly hard.) I'd just been offered an exciting new job, to start in a week. I'd impulsively asked my brother and his then-fiance to dye my hair pink, and then the three of us had spent the evening drinking and having fun. After midnight, when I thought I'd finished this long day, the phone rang. It was two of my friends, and they had to drive seven hundred miles to Philadephia. Never mind why. And they had to be home within twenty-four hours, so they had to leave now.

 So we went. It was the most reckless, most daring stunt of my life. It seems almost mandatory that every youth must undergo at least one act of spontaneous and hairbrained adventure on the way to adulthood, and this was mine. I'm just glad it was pretty tame as wild twentysomething antics go. No drugs except caffeine, no broken laws, just three friends and a highly illogical road trip.

 How is this story relevant? Shortly before that trip, I'd heard Tret Fure's song Fly on my Pandora station, and instantly loved it. The album, My Shoes,  soon joined my collection and was in my CD player when the three of us got in my car that night. By bizarre coincidence, the music was in a style we all enjoyed and was thematically very appropriate to the situation. It was not the only CD we listened to on that trip, but it was the one we played the most. It was the most emblematic of our collective mood.

Tret Fure is a feminist folk rocker in the same tradition as a favorite of mine, Indigo Girls, whose albums I'll get to review in a few short weeks. Fure's career is no less long-standing and prolific with fourteen albums, but for some reason My Shoes is the only one I have. I will have to change that soon.

I don't know what it is about folk rock that lends itself so beautifully to road trips. Maybe it's just that folk rockers often write songs inspired by personal experience, and musicians often travel. In any case, this album definitely goes in my top ten travel albums, with several songs explicitly about travel and several more about the kinds of life upheavals that often involve travel. L.A., the opening track, is about both, using a visit to an old haunt as catalyst for discussions of the "wayward path" of life that surprisingly may exclude people whose importance was once assumed. Bigger Than I is even more road-centric, throwing out rapid-fire impressions of US locales as seen from a car window, describing not just a single trip but an entire lifestyle led in transit. It's cheerful, maybe even manic, full of the excitement of new experiences. The album closes with Minute By Minute, which tells the same story but is calmer and quieter, more reflective of the exhaustion that must follow from such energetic highs. "And I'm standing this side of tomorrow, shadows long from yesterday / minute by minute we live our lives / moment by moment we try."

Other songs dwell more on the metaphorical movements associated with major life changes, both welcome and traumatic. The title track, My Shoes, is about a painful choice to leave a loved one and all the losses associated, including loss of respect. How in the World shows the other side of that coin, with the finding of a new love and new life elsewhere. This and the other love songs are full of honest emotion, and ring true to my own experiences of both love and loss - even more since I first heard them five years ago.

The best song on the album is still the first one I heard, Fly.  An upbeat melody and soaring flute seems to encapsulate all the exhilarating freedom and empowerment that is expected of a self-led life, with the perspective switched to second person as if to encourage listeners to embody those feelings more fully.

The only place where I feel this music falls short is where the subject matter switches from personal experience to social commentary, as in The Hawk and the Dove, a very transparent  anti-war song. Now normally I love social commentary, and anti-war protest songs are folk rock's bread and butter. But somehow Tret Fure fails to strike the balance where the message is appropriately hard-hitting without sounding preachy. But nobody's perfect.

Listening to this album now has inspired me to look back on the past five years and all the changes they have wrought, both for me and for the two friends I shared that trip with. One got married, only to divorce only a few years later. The other had to change career goals just a few months away from completing a degree, and embarked on an ambitious new mission in life. As for me, I went on to get engaged twice,  change religions twice, move three times, run a marathon, and publish a poetry book. Some changes have been painful losses, but sometimes they lead to beautiful new discoveries. Maybe it's just by association that I see these themes so clearly in this album. But I think it's true that as songs expressing powerful life passages, these are particularly potent.

Next: Bleed Like Me

All My CDs, pt 52: The Fountain

The Fountain: Soundtrack - Clint Mansell

The Fountain is my favorite movie, yet somehow I managed to get the soundtrack years before getting the DVD. Partly because I'm just not nearly as interested in movies as I am in music. I own less than ten of the former. As for the latter... Well, see the number at the head of this review.

This soundtrack is more typical of soundtracks than any other I own: all atmosphere and very little musical substance. The closest thing to a memorable melody is mostly a five-note string riff repeated over and over for several minutes while different instruments weave in and out to vary the sound a little. And that track, called Death is the Road to Awe, ends up being the most exciting track on the album. The rest are barely-noticable background music, serving only to evoke a mood... usually sadness. Pleasant, but ultimately not very memorable.

About Death is the Road to Awe. It’s time for me to admit that I’m persistently fond of long musical pieces with lots of false endings - that is, where the music will seem to die down and resolve, only to start back up again, like a runner getting a second wind. If the music is good, this gives me the feeling of getting a bonus - more of what I like, just when I thought it was going away. That may account for my intense liking of this track. It is eight minutes long, full of slow crescendos leading to sudden false endings followed by new crescendos, each new beginning more urgent and fast-paced than the one before, until the end. The music is, itself, a road to awe.

 This is what really makes the soundtrack worth listening to on its own as opposed to just leaving it in the background of the movie itself. I would go so far as to recommend skipping straight to it, but somehow I feel it's worthwhile to listen to the rest of the album as a lead-in, at least sometimes. Death is the Road to Awe owes a lot of its appeal to a slow build-up of tension, leading to a climactic release of energy at the end. The rest of the music simply extends that build-up from eight minutes to forty-six.

But if you only have eight minutes, you really only need that one track.

Next: My Shoes

All My CDs, pt 51: One Cell in the Sea

One Cell in the Sea - A Fine Frenzy

Reviewing this CD back-to-back with Obsolete is quite an exercise in emotional whiplash. While Obsolete was sonically harsh, heavily electronic, and fatalistic with booming male vocals and concerned with universal themes, One Cell is light and airy, accoustic, and sugary-optimistic with quiet female vocals and concerned with personal themes. It is difficult to find anything they share, yet I feel both groups have put serious thought into their lyrics and how the music supports their underlying messages. And both carry some rather heavy emotional baggage.

I bought One Cell because one song, Almost Lover, showed up on my Pandora station when I was recovering from a breakup and therefore especially susceptible to the impact of its lyrics. "Goodbye my almost lover/ goodbye my hopeless dream / I'm trying not to think about you / can't you just let me be?" It's not the only song on the album expressing the fruitless attempt to leave behind a failed romance, but it remains my favorite. When I am in an angsty mood, I can put this song on repeat and just weep for hours to its bittersweet pianoness.

The songs that are not on some level about romantic love and its many anguishes are about a sugary ideal of the unity of all beings. The Minnow & the Trout uses evolutionary theory as a basis for a "can't we all just get along?" message of universal love. "Please, I know that we're different / we were one cell in the sea in the beginning."  Lifesize is similarly sugar-coated, with the bonus of imagery even trippier than the title track's tales of interspecies friendship. Yet in my opinion these idealisms do not come off as insipid or unrealistic. I'm prone to fits of uncynical agape myself sometimes. After all, we really did come from one cell in the sea, didn't we?

One thing does make me almost want to smack the lead singer in the mouth, though. The first lines of the first song:

 Come on, come out
The weather is warm

The high temperature the day I put on this album to review it: 12 degrees Fahrenheit.

Next: The Fountain

All My CDs, pt 50: Obsolete

Obsolete - Fear Factory

This was another CD I got on impulse, sight unseen (sound unheard?), after finding it on the bargain rack at a record store. This was early on in my music-collecting career, when I was perhaps in my preteens. It's a heavy metal album, and a good one, and has always been one of the most stereotypically "metal" albums in my collection, with all the shouting and distortion that implies.

It's also yet another concept album (hooray for concept albums!). If you follow along in the liner notes while it plays, the songs are interwoven with images and written prose to tell a complete story about a dystopian society and one man's struggle against its corrupt authorities. Very anti-establishment. The story itself isn't exactly literary genius and the ending is downright insipid (spoiler: the hero finds Jesus. I'm not kidding). However, the way it is expressed in the songs comes across as meaningful and surprisingly relevent, even seventeen years after its release. The dystopian society it describes could have easily been a commentary on the current political controversies of government monitoring of private information, drone warfare, and militarized police forces.

On close examination, it's not quite made clear what makes society dystopian in the first place. Songs like "Securitron" imply a world where power is enforced by technology. Machines are used by authorities to monitor, track down, and even destroy those who do not comply. References throughout the album allude to a conflict between machines and humanity. Or rather,  between The Machine and Humanity. The distinction is, I think, significant. Society becomes dystopian when it operates as a machine, fundamentally dehumanizing its members. That is the meaning of the key phrase of the entire album: “Man is obsolete.”

Aside from the grim philosophical implications, it’s also a fun album to just listen to without thinking too hard. In particular, I like to sing along, even though the growly deep vocals are well below my range. The melodies are simple enough and the riffs fast enough to make it good rockin’ out fare.

Next: One Cell in the Sea

All My CDs, pt 49: Family Album

Family Album - Faun Fables

There were two songs that had come up on my Pandora station and sparked a curiosity about this odd little band. Roadkill led me to buy The Transit Rider, and Eternal led me to this album. I love everything about Eternal: the catchy tune, the bow-wow of the rhythmic bass, and best of all the lyrics.

With my hair on, it’s easy.
It’s something I can hide behind
I like what is not easy,
just love me as the bald kind.
I want to be loved for my skull, 
my little parietal bone.
I want the men to go crazy for
my charming occipital bone

Now who could argue with that?

In my review of The Transit Rider I spoke of Faun Fables’s strangeness and how that attracts me, and how it makes me want to take this music by the hand and run off with it into the woods where no-one will ever hurt us for being different. (Maybe I didn’t put it quite that way.) Well, this album is even more so. Every song seems to express some sense of otherness and vulnerability, and at the same time strength and courage that will not be bossed around. Eternal is a great example of the kind of strength I’m talking about: the kind it takes to lay one’s self bare and expect, nay demand, to be loved without condition.

And what is being brashly, nakedly presented here? Weird, sometimes nonsensical lyrics. Animal noises used as an instrument. Breathy, rapid flute-playing. A child singing tunelessly to herself. Singers singing badly on purpose. And I love it all. I find that, really, that is all I have to say.

Next: Obsolete

All My CDs, pt 48: The Transit Rider

The Transit Rider - Faun Fables

I recently had a conversation with a friend about finding beauty in ostensible ugly things - things that are grotesque, pitiful, scary, or just plain weird. My friend suggested that any inclination toward the macabre is only morbid fascination, while I argued that often my attraction to such things is genuine and unironic. Sometimes, I like ugly things because they're beautiful.

My love of Faun Fables began with a song about roadkill. And that was actually one of the less experimental songs on this album. I hesitate to speak of my love of this music because it is so beautifully offputting that I do not trust others to see its beauty as readily as I do.

The Transit Rider is a concept album (and you all know how much I love concept albums) about public transportation - mainly trains,  but also touching on other modes of transit. Even with those tangents, the focus on the experience of a rider on a public commuter train is clear and consistent. I first discovered it when I was still spending many of my days on busses - either long-distance greyhounds to visit family or commuting to school via RTA. A bus is not a train, but there are many overlaps in the experience of riding them, so naturally I identified strongly with The Transit Rider.

As to the style of the music, it is difficult to describe, except as strange. The first sounds heard on the album are the distinctive rhythmic noises of a train clattering down a track, and suddenly a human voice imitates its long and plaintive whistle. In a later track is In Speed, a song from the perspective of the train itself, where more voices combine with various instruments to complete an onomatopaeic portrait of the train's sonic reality.

The other tracks similarly blend human voices with instruments or recorded noise to create some unique effects. I No Longer Wish to Compete is a poem spoken in an urgent whisper over the background noise of some crowded public place. The poem is about wanting to retreat from the bustle of urban living to a more solitary, peaceful existence - and the contrast of the whisper over crowd sounds is evocative of that desire.

Other songs are more musical in the expected sense, with sung lyrics and instrumental background, if sometimes with bizarre words. One of my favorites has always been Roadkill, the first Faun Fables song I ever heard. Centering around the image of a dead coyote by the highway, it paints a landscape of other road-related scenes that reads almost like a shamanic ritual. It ties all things together in a very cosmological metaphor of the road itself: "and the gray road (and the gray road) / is the great worm (is the great worm) that eats its tail / beneath our feet."

The House Carpenter is a cover of a well-worn ballad, connected to the transit theme only in that it involves a journey at sea. Yet there are more subtle connections in the themes of abandonment and the fears, doubts and vulnerability that are constant companions of those who travel alone. Several songs refer to that vulnerability. Fire & Castration superstitiously guards against danger with possibly-useless charms. Dream on a Train makes explicit mention of the dangers of falling asleep on public transport. The Questioning portrays the borage of intrusive yet well-meaning conversation that threatens an introverted train rider who may well prefer to ride in silence.

Yet in spite of these threats, there is a peace and a spiritual calmness to be found in travel that is also reflected in many of the songs. Taki Pejzaz, Earth's Kiss, and especially I'd Like To Be seem to evoke the mesmerizing sight of a landscape passing in a train window, detailed yet motion-blurred, and the gentle rocking rhythm of the vehicle allowing the mind to relax and wander into a kind of oneness with all things.

The Great Worm that eats its tail may be continually engaged in self-destruction, but also in self-creation, as is the world itself in its continual moving from one state of being to another. And these are the kinds of mystical revelations that may occupy your mind on such an early-morning commute. I know that's when they tend to come to me.

Next: Family Album

All My CDs, pt 47: All the Pain Money Can Buy

All The Pain Money Can Buy - Fastball

This is an album I was once so ambivalent about that a year or so after buying it in my teens, I got rid of it, and a few years after that I bought it again and simply never listened to it. (The second purchase was at a yard sale for fifty cents, so this ambivalence has hardly set me back much.) Since then I’ve realized that the source of my ambivalence is that only one song is really worth much to me, and for a time I felt that meant I should not own the album. But this is not the only album I keep around mostly for one song, so I think this time I’ll keep it in my collection for good.

The one song that I thought worth buying the album for - twice - is The Way, the opening track after which all the others seem to be bland and rather meaningless light rock. I don’t remember exactly when I first heard The Way, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t on the radio. I think my father must have put it on when I was a child. (Since the album was released when I was ten years old, I can’t have been very young, but my memory is indistinct nonetheless).

From time to time after that, the words and melody of The Way would haunt me until I tracked the song down and bought the album. And after all these years, I still find it compelling in a dark and beautiful way. It tells the story of two people who pack up their lives and leave, with no warning and, apparently, no plan: “Where were they going / without ever knowing the way?” Even more disturbingly, they have no intention of returning, which means they have abandoned all their responsibilities and their children. (Yes, children.)

Although the song clearly describes the travelers’ journey as taking place on roads, by car and then on foot, I have speculated that it is actually a metaphor for suicide. The chorus contains too many allusions to a paradisaic afterlife : “The road that they walk on is paved in gold / it’s always summer, they’ll never get cold / they’ll never get hungry, they’ll never get old and gray.”

 The rest of the songs on the album are certainly adequate to listen to. I’d have no problem putting them on for a party or any other situation where pleasant music is called for. And I’d be lying if I said some of the songs can get stuck in my head sometimes (Better Than It Was comes to mind when I’m feeling appreciative of life in general). But none of them really stands up to The Way, in my mind.

Next: The Transit Rider

All My CDs, pt 46: Save Rock and Roll

Save Rock and Roll - Fall Out Boy

In 2013, shortly after I'd gotten into my head that I was going to run a marathon, I happened to hear My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark on the radio. I decided I wanted it on my running playlist, thinking its driving beat would be perfect for helping to keep up a good pace. This would be the first time in about a decade that I'd bought an album just because I'd heard a song on the radio. Despite my usual habit of ordering online, I decided to pick up a copy at my local record store. It had just been hit by a car (no really) and I thought that my business might help it through that tough time. I have no idea whether it did.

I decided that my first listen-through of the album should be during a morning run. I ended up lengthening that run, on a whim, so I could listen to the whole thing a second time. As luck would have it, Save Rock And Roll is forty minutes of what I call "auditory Gatorade": simple, formulaic music perfectly calibrated to support athletic endurance.  Every song on the album has the essential elements of a good running song. A strong, fast beat is of course part of this formula, but so are lyrics just interesting enough to sound cool but not intellectually stimulating enough to distract from the important task of pushing one's body to its utmost limits.

About those lyrics. They're rather banal, for music that otherwise evokes an intense emotional response. The Phoenix, one of the most adrenaline-pumping tracks on the whole album, actually has the refrain "I'm gonna change you, like a remix / then I'll raise you, like a phoenix." Pretty corny, in my opinion. Then again, it also contains the lines "Time crawls on when you're waiting for the song to start / so dance along to the beat of your heart." That somehow crosses the line from poser to profound. Maybe it was by accident.

Now about those beats. I make no secret of my tremendous bias toward percussion. Some of my favorite songs have percussion as either the only or one of a few instrument types. But I am liable to get just as giddy over a song where the percussion section still pounds deeply into the brain and body despite being accompanied by many other interesting sounds.  Fall Out Boy's percussion crashes and resounds through guitars and orchestral strings in a way that somehow melds chaos and order with its relentless constancy (and provokes me to pretentious language).

Another interesting characteristic of Save Rock And Roll is how much of it was made in collaboration with other musicians. Four tracks out of eleven are “featuring” others, including two of my favorite tracks: Save Rock and Roll (featuring Elton John) and Rat A Tat (featuring Courtney Love). The former has an interesting combination of dismal-sounding lyrics with an sound that makes it seem like those lyrics should be uplifting (You are what you love /not who loves you / In a world full of the word yes / I’m hear to scream / No). The latter is just fun to listen to, and I’m not sure why.

My absolute favorite song here, though, is Young Volcanos. It’s so relentlessly cheery, both in sound and in words:

Tonight, the foxes hunt the hounds
it’s all over now
before it has begun
we’ve already won

I can’t not run a little faster when it comes up in my playlist.

Next: All The Pain Money Can Buy