Five Songs For: When I Light Your Darkened Door

If you are viewing this post from a secondary source and cannot see the Flash content, click here.

“I.O.I.O.”
by The Bee Gees

Yes, that says “The Bee Gees.” And yes, that song, with the bongo drums and without any sign of disco, is by the same band that made the Stayin' Alive soundtrack. And yes (why so many questions?), that song is very, very good. A long time ago, I read an interview with Noel Gallagher of Oasis where he named his top three bands of all time. I know the first was The Beatles, and I forget the third, but I'm certain that I was shocked when I read that The Bee Gees made the list. Imagine my surprise to learn that before disco, The Bee Gees were the equivalent of Australian Beatles, with complex music and even the occasional concept record. Most of the stuff from that era in the band's career is fantastic, and it stands as a testament to the fact that not all musical evolution is necessarily improvement. These guys were even better before the hair spray quaffs and the bell bottom jeans. “I.O.I.O” is from Cucumber Castle, a really good album but an oddity in their discography. At the time of the recording, the band was on the verge of a breakup, and as such, only two Gees are on the record.

“Slide Away” (Live)
by Noel Gallagher

And speaking of Oasis, I should admit that I still think they're the best band putting out music today. And it's not even close. After most people hear that, though, the first thing asked is almost always whether or not the band is still around. Yes, they are, and last year's Dig Out Your Soul is a great album. But after the many times I have had to frustratingly answer that same question, I realize now why it will always be asked. As good as their newer records are, nothing beats their first two. “Slide Away” might be the band's best song, a ballad from their debut Definitely Maybe, and this live version was recorded late last year (or early this year) by Noel Gallagher for a charity event. The addition of a full orchestra does change the song in a way, but it only serves to bolster the soaring beauty of the original. I have a solo acoustic version, too, that is just as great, and the fact that in so many different forms, the song still shines, only affirms its status as a classic.

“Lonesome Swan”
by Glasvegas

Everything about Glasvegas is over the top. The singer's accent is as thick as cold molasses, the music has more reverb than every Coldplay album put together, and the subject matter of the band's songs is all over the place. All these elements go together to create a product that has no right to be, well, happy -- especially with songs about mental instability, abusive fathers, school fights, and what it feels like to be stabbed. But the contrast between the lyrics and the music is of course intentional, and Glasvegas' self-titled debut is one of the most assured you're likely to hear of any band in the past five years. As a group, Glasvegas expects you to buy into their music, and if you can accept its theatricality, you will certainly enjoy what you hear.

“Down From Above”
by Vetiver

This is one of the most chilled-out songs you'll ever hear. The music fades in and seems to float on passing clouds, and before you realize it, it's all gone, fading out in the same direction it came. Vetiver is a folk band that unfortunately got their start playing with the awful Devendra Banhart, but thankfully, the band has distanced themselves with four records of melancholy guitar and rainy day atmosphere. “Down From Above” is from their latest, Tight Knit.

“When I Light Your Darkened Door” (Daytrotter session)
by J. Tillman

There might not be another male singer today with a voice as angelic as J. Tillman's. (I say male in particular only because there might not be anybody with a better voice than Zooey Deschanel. Just saying.) For the life of me, I still cannot get past the fact that this guy plays drums and sings backing vocals for his main gig in the band Fleet Foxes. He's got a better voice than the lead singer! This song, from his solo work, is a great example of the stark beauty invoked by his spare guitar playing and wonderfully unique voice. Damien Jurado has covered it well, but nothing can match Tillman's breathy vocals. “When I Light Your Darkened Door,” along with four other songs, is available for free as a Daytrotter session here. The somewhat boring, if not entrancing video below is for the song “First Born,” off Tillman's latest album, Vacilando Territory Blues.

Something I'd Like To See #294: A Return To Form

These guys are not cool. I mean, by all objective accounts, this is just incredibly lame. Like really, really awful. I have actually seen Christian pop bands look tougher than this.

***

I still remember how awesome Youth & Young Manhood sounded the first time I heard it. Jangling guitars, a slight country twang, and some truly bizarre lyrics all mixed to make the Kings of Leon sound unique in indie rock. If you recall, the scene was already dominated by a hip young band from New York, and in fact, I can remember plenty of reviews that described the Kings as “Southern-fried Strokes.” The comparisons were appropriate. For one thing, the Kings had the same penchant for very tight guitar arrangements, and the styles of the two bands were also similar. But the Kings were different. Even their stomping grounds provided a stark contrast to bands like The Strokes or The Hives. Nashville, Tennessee is popular as a music hotspot, but the only time its fashion has seriously appeared in NYC has been in the impromptu gigs of the inimitable Naked Cowboy.

I've heard many rumors that the first Kings album isn't actually their own work, that it's written by a third party and performed by the band, Monkees-style, to create a very intentional indie “product.” I've always shrugged off this assertion for many reasons. For one thing, even indie music is a product, and the hippest bands simply make their musical creations more “authentic” or “legitimate.” This idea, though, that even my favorite artists could be less “real” than I have found them to be, has been a struggle for me to wrap my head around. But the easiest way past this rabbit hole criss-cross of entertainment and philosophy has always been the music itself. If it sounds good, it doesn't matter how “real” it is. It's aesthetic value is real to me. As far as the Kings were concerned, their debut album sounded great, and as far as I was concerned, that was all that was important.

However, when the second album arrived -- the hipper Aha Shake Heartbreak -- the Kings formula started to change. After touring with The Strokes, the influence was even more noticeable than before, and the things that made the two bands similar in the first place -- the tight guitar solos, the shorter “poppy” songs -- were amplified with clearer production and cleaner performances. For all the changes, though, Aha Shake Heartbreak was still a great album to listen to, and it still sounded like the Kings, albeit a 2.0 version.

But this chameleon-like change was not a step in the Kings evolution, it was the beginning of a very different process. The Kings were becoming a completely different band. As much as I liked Heartbreak, I couldn't get past how silly the band looked in their fashion photos in the CD inlay. When I saw them live that year, too, it was remarkable how uninterested and even bored they looked on stage. The Strokes had tried the same act when I saw them that same year, but where The Strokes could pull of the indie hip thing quite well, the Kings just looked lazy. Needless to say, it was a disappointing show.

Still, it was not even close to the disappointment that was their next album, the difficult to pinpoint Because Of The Times. Apparently, like some musical equivalent of Absorbing-Man, they had sucked up the darker, grimier sounds of their new tour partners, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and created an album that tried to add the shoegazing tendencies and aggressiveness of BRMC. As you might expect, these new sounds don't fit so well with country twang and New York punk, and the album was understandably a confusing mess. A few good songs, to be sure, but still a mess. Their latest album only makes the results of this adaptive musical strategy into some sort of hilarious joke. On Only By The Night, the band adopted the U2 sound (yes, U2), and emerged as a caricature of themselves. But the best part of this joke -- the truly funny part -- is that the people actually in the band seem to be the only ones who don't get it. (One of the singles from that album is “Sex On Fire,” which would be less funny but more respectable if it was in fact about a painful STD. The video is one of the funniest things I've seen all year, which is a huge statement because I just watched The Room and have Troll 2 in the queue.)

Judging by sales, you could argue I'm totally wrong. Only By The Night is the most popular Kings album yet. But the sad fact is that there are a hundred bands who go for that stadium-filling U2 sound, and a good chunk of them do it much better than the Kings do. Coldplay, British Sea Power, and Longwave come to mind. Heck, even the country-tinged stadium-like sound is already done much better by the likes of Band Of Horses. Does the world really need another bland, mindless, and overly ambitious indie band like The Killers? I liked the Kings albums -- no, I loved them -- when they were unique, when they sounded like something only the Kings could put out.

I had a dream once, embarrassing and music-obsessed as it may sound, to hear the Kings of Leon do something live that only they could pull off. Creedence Clearwater Revival has always been one of my favorite bands, and they share some surprising similarities to the Kings. CCR was never truly country (impossible when you start in sunny California), and their style, like the Kings' decades later, was a creation that only partially reflected their roots. But like CCR, Kings did something with their first two albums that other bands in their day could not. They sounded great while sounding like themselves. My dream was to see these two bands unite in the form of a perfectly selected cover. I wanted to see the Kings play “Commotion” by CCR. They would have been perfect for it, and it would have made for a great show. I cannot imagine them doing that today, but I can imagine them playing awful covers of U2 songs or BRMC songs or even Strokes songs.

What I would like to see is a good band return to form. I would like to see the Kings go back to playing music that is theirs, both a nod to the past and something new. I doubt that day will come (or return), and until that does, I'll have to be satisfied with those first two albums. But seriously, Youth & Young Manhood is fantastic, a solid record from first song to hidden track. What happened to these guys?

Having Christianity Both Ways

As I left, walking under the glittering red sign at the 2008 Austin City Limits Festival, I could hear the bullhorn ahead of me. Figuring it was some hippy rattling on about local politics, I didn't really give it much thought. It wasn't until a few minutes later, as I moved along with my fiancé and younger brother through the sweaty mass of people exiting Zilker Park, that I realized who was talking so loudly.

They were Christians.

Immediately, I felt disgusted. There they stood, in the middle of the road, yelling at everyone who passed by them. With sandwich boards draped over them outlining the horrible Hell that awaits the unsaved, these people were actually screaming the gospel to anyone in sight.

It wasn't the message, of course, that bothered me so much. Obviously, a very large chunk of the people leaving ACL were likely unsaved. It was the way that message was being conveyed. What insulted me was that these people actually thought that yelling at the festival goers would somehow fill up the seats in churches everywhere. I find it seriously doubtful that anyone there was convicted to any conclusion other than that Christians were very angry people, bitter about the world around them. In the sounds from the megaphone, one message seemed blatant to the people forced to hear it: Christianity was irrelevant.

Today, there are few things as difficult for young Christians to get around than the notion that Christianity might be uncool. Nobody wants to be left out of the “in” thing, and even on this blog, I regularly highlight music and reference jokes that are a large part of our popular culture. The problem, though, isn't in enjoying popular music or laughing at popular jokes. This, to me, doesn't make a Christian “lukewarm” in God's sight. What does make us lukewarm, though, is when our desire to be accepted begins to erode the truth of our faith.

Of all the issues that present such a clear example of this desire to have Christianity both ways -- true and widely acceptable -- few are as instantly recognizable as the issue of abortion. Today, it is easy -- yes, easy -- to take stances on global famine, on genocide, on poverty and homelessness. These are important issues, to be sure, but they are relatively simple for a person to support. Nobody in the world is for global famine. Nobody supports poverty. No legitimate government is pro-genocide. Granted, there is a difference between outwardly protesting famine, genocide, and poverty and actually doing something about these issues. Nevertheless, there is not a public stigma against fighting these problems.

Abortion is completely different. When someone hears that you are pro-life, your first fear might be that you are now a sandwich-boarder or a megaphone-holder. If you are pro-life, you become fundamentalist in popular terms, and as we all know, taking that side of the issue would not be very cool. It would not be acceptable. As a Christian, I can do the smart thing and fight mass murder abroad, with full support from the people around me, and I will still feel like I'm doing something grand. Why would I bother with fighting abortion at home, right?

What we have done is drawn lines in the sand where they never needed to exist. We have allowed vitriolic politics and the fiery hatred of some to create fault lines among Christians. There is a professor at my university who is fond of the old cliché: if it quacks like a duck, has feathers and a bill, and loves the water, you should probably call it a duck. It is amazing to me that Christians have gotten into the business of classifying the issues before us in a hierarchy of acceptability. Abortion is murder. There, I said it. Sue me. Why do we have such a problem with saying that genocide is wrong, and well, abortions might be, too. Is our timidity on the subject of abortion any worse than the fire-and-brimstone screams of the festival protesters? Don't both stances give the unsaved a false impression of Christianity?

I'm aware that Paul was "all things to all men," but what does that mean exactly? Was he what all men wanted? Or was he what all men needed? These two things are mutually exclusive. People can want what they don't need and often need the difficult processes they don't want to experience. Those who are unsaved need neither angry, guilt-inducing lectures nor shy, easily diluted convictions. Our positions on issues should be filtered through one prism and one prism only: Jesus. How would He feel about the issue? How would He feel about how we argue it? What people need is an unwavering love, one that is courageous and certain. Neither of these attitudes -- the frightening or the permissive -- shows the love of Christ.

It would be a sad life for a Christian in America who allowed his politics to dictate his faith, rather than the other way around. The world needs God for many reasons and on many issues. I pray that we would not dilute the beautiful truth of God's message in an effort to be accepted, when it is up to God, and not us, to move hearts to Him. Something to think about when you watch this possibly -- but not justifiably -- controversial John Piper video:

Five Songs For: When My Time Comes

I decided to upgrade the "Song of the Week" posts on my other (old?) blog to a sort of mini-playlist. With a flash "mixtape" like the one above (which Vox was unable to support), anyone reading this can hear all the songs I mention. Also, each of these posts will include at least one song you can download for free, usually from Daytrotter.com.

"I'm Going To Forget"
by Attack In Black

I don't know too much about this band, but I have really enjoyed the two albums I've heard. This song is the first track off of their Curve Of The Earth album, and if you ask me (which you didn't) they deserve just as much attention as The Shins. They have the same indie rock sensibilities but somehow, less pretension.

"Murder By Mistletoe"
by The Felice Brothers

I decided to give this band a bigger listen when I found out they were playing ACL this year. Their self-titled album, where this track is from, is excellent, and they definitely play the part of The Band quite well. Depending on who you ask, they are either completely unoriginal in their nod to Dylan's Basement years, or they're simply paying respects. I'm still making up my mind, but they sure sound great, either way.

"Ship Of Fools"
by Doves

Doves are possibly the most criminally overlooked band in music today. Seriously. This song is a b-side. Somehow, it didn't make the cut for their new album, Kingdom of Rust, and having listened to them for a while now, I'm still shocked by the omission. They're one of the few bands where everything they put out is excellent, and even on more forgotten tracks like this one, they prove why their musical genius is equal to that of more popular bands like Coldplay or Travis.

"Black Eyes/Prices"
by Damien Jurado

In the last post, I mentioned how Damien Jurado has quickly become one of my favorite artists. He's been putting out music since 1997 (1997!), and his output has been remarkably consistent. Like Doves, even his b-sides and assorted toss-outs are fantastic. This song is from the rare tour-only release Walk Along the Fence. In that collection it was called "Black Eyes," but on the Just In Time For Something EP, the same song was called "Prices." Whatever the correct title, it's a fantastic song. Jurado has the uncanny ability to recognize a great song when he comes upon it, whether it's a six-minute epic or something barely over 90 seconds. I could go on and on, but I'll leave it at this: I can't get enough of this guy's music. Go buy Caught In The Trees.

"When My Time Comes"
by Dawes

This is another band I don't know too much about. I "discovered" Dawes listening to Delta Spirit cover one of their songs on Daytrotter. Dawes had just opened for Delta Spirit on their tour, and shortly after, Dawes also did a session at Daytrotter. This song is part of that session and available free online. The band looks like they know how to put on a great show, and I have to admit, it was pretty awesome to see on their MySpace a live cover of the Wonder Years theme song (viewable below). I'm paying attention.

Since We Last Spoke: A Late, Post-Hiatus Buckshot

I am happy to say that another semester is behind me and that my time away from blogging has ended. I will be posting again on a regular basis. Below is a list of things I learned in my nearly three weeks away from this space:

• I am badly out of shape. It is possible for me to be 5'11” and 140 lbs. and still be getting my Roker on. Justice O'Connor used to grill her engaged law clerks to make sure they were staying in shape for their significant others. I point this out only because I am starting to look like Justice Scalia. I have seven months. (Michael Scott says always leave them with an ultimatum.)
• After watching him in Spike Lee's Kobe Doin' Work, Kobe Bryant has convinced me that it is possible to possess enough talent to take all joy from its use. Tim Keown says it best.
  
• I'm pretty sure Damien Jurado is in my “Top Ten Artists of All Time” list. Watch the music video for “Caskets” from his new album. It feels a lot like There Will Be Blood, only happier.

• Somehow, the equation for a successful grad school semester has been discovered: me - free time - sleep + panic + prayer = straight A's. If I had figured that out sooner, I'd be a much better student. Still, this will come in handy when I start my thesis next semester.
• Star Trek is completely nerdy but still totally enthralling, in a generally awesome and still slightly embarrassing way.
• Aziz Ansari continues to be the funniest guy in the entertainment industry that looks like me. (Kal Penn is just too Indian, and Aladdin doesn't count, as he's a fictional cartoon character. I will accept, however, “that guy from Slumdog Millionaire” as a close second.)

• For the first time in a long time, I really felt like I worshiped while playing guitar on stage. Sometimes in life you have to use the E-Bow.
  
• The best Spurs blog on the internet is, like the organization it follows, highly accessible for its fans. I even got to write a post for it! This last season was great for Spurs fans, even considering the early playoff exit, and Graydon Gordian's blog had a lot to do with it.