"New Grass": Floral Music

Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore

This lyric from Radiohead's "Reckoner" is as elliptical as it is intimate. And, since Thom Yorke's singing it, it also sounds dripping with beautiful meaning. But I have no idea what it's about. Likewise, there's something about the rest of "Reckoner" that is impossible for me to get my head around, and so I feel like I can never love it enough. Everything about it – the jumbled chord progressions, the haphazard arrangement that gradually fumbles into self-awareness – seems intended to mirror nature's asymmetrical sprawl. The way that home decorators or architects try to be visually unpredictable by avoiding rigid shapes and too many straight lines. It's as if Radiohead have taken that design principle and applied it to a song. Most music comes in boxes of verses and choruses, but "Reckoner" is floral.

Because it has no real beginning or end, it seems impermanent too. The track starts abruptly with a crude edit, chopping in on a loose, wide-open drum pattern already in progress. The sound of the kit is harsh and roomy and is almost swallowed by bright, rattling percussion. The playing is almost juvenile – the way good musicians who are non-drummers can usually bang their way through a beat and still sound respectable, if not fluid. A guitar starts to noodle under it, without confidence. Yorke begins moaning words in falsetto and because you can't make out what he's saying it gives the impression of somebody trying to improvise lines for a melody they've been workshopping. It all feels unplanned, but before too long a bass, and then a rhodes piano, drop in and plenty of structure begins to arrive in the form of medieval chord changes, plumes of incandescent strings, and the muffled harmonies of what sounds like a barbershop quartet singing underwater. Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the song fades into the ether, taking its jostling, tambourine-cluttered melancholy with it.

Because it's so untidy, the effect that "Reckoner" has on me is of being on the verge of a listening catharsis that never arrives. I'm moved but I can never quite capture a sense of release, and so the pleasure is inexhaustible. Tantric.

"Reckoner" is one-of-a-kind, but it's not the first time a song has given me this feeling. With its floral shape, and a compositional style that hovers at a musical melting point – going in and out of crystallization – it seems like a sister to Talk Talk's "New Grass," from their final album Laughing Stock.




Laughing Stock, and its predecessor Spirit of Eden (released in '91 and '88 respectively) came as the band was facing burnout with their successful synth-pop sound and decided to scrap everything to reinvent themselves. They are perfect, astounding albums and are generally considered to be among the first explosions of post-rock.

In a sense, Talk Talk were trying to reverse-engineer their music. They wanted to compose the sound of spontaneity, and make recordings that were fully-realized while also having the sense of disorder and discovery captured on their home demos. Easier said than done. According to co-producer and engineer Phil Brown, who wrote about the sessions for Tape Op Magazine, the band recorded for months straight, in near total darkness, experimenting with repetition and disjointedness. Rather than try to hammer out an arrangement as a band and then nail it to tape, they built their tracks in pieces of this, scraps of that, always looking for a way out of traditional form. There were stretches when all they tracked were the same two-chords of guitar, strummed over and over, or the same drum bar, looped endlessly, for days at a time, while the rest of the band sat in the control room listening attentively for the right kind of happy accidents. This brought complaints from other recording suites in the same complex and, worse, drummer Lee Harris developed a nervous disorder and had to leave for a few months in the middle of the Laughing Stock sessions, suffering from exhaustion.

Even though that sounds like pure torture, Talk Talk finally got that rare mix of improv and collage they were after and left a conceptual blueprint for everyone from Fugazi to Bark Psychosis to Radiohead (lead singer Mark Hollis was incomprehensible long before Thom Yorke made mumbling famous). And there's no better example of what they discovered than the perfectly named "New Grass." Over a bed of crooked jazz drumming and hollow organ swells, tufts of reverberated guitar and plump clusters of piano chords sprout out of cracks in the mix. It sounds random yet preordained, like the examined life. It's gorgeousness without end, the sound of something growing.

Radiohead "Reckoner" [From In Rainbows]

Talk Talk "New Grass" [From Laughing Stock]

The Man Behind the Flow Curtain

The best thing I can say about this track from the new Britney Spears album is anecdotal: I was in a record store, heard it, and thought it was the new Prince.

Britney Spears "Why Should I Be Sad" [From Blackout]

I wasn't surprised to find later that it was produced by Pharrell Williams:



Pharrell's work is pure poetry – excuse me, flow-etry. For further proof, try anything off Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury, which he co-produced as well:

Clipse "Hello New World" [From Hell Hath No Fury]

Tell Me You Love Me

Last Sunday was the season finale of the new HBO series Tell Me You Love Me and it was a brilliant end to a solid ten-episode run. I have to admit, I was seriously hooked on this show, and it surprises me a little. On the surface, it has all the things I hate about dramatic television: mopey vignettes about pretty people with too much time and money on their hands, completely overwhelmed with unfulfillment and suburban woe – the Sophia Copolla effect. But Tell Me You Love Me is not a pouty show, and beneath its slick surface it has all the things I love about dramatic television, specifically the space that serialized storytelling has to really develop a character - or tell a story - which a two-hour movie does not. And this show has a sharp focus, a small-scale thesis about intimacy by a team of creators that really took the time to think its characters through. Executive producer Cynthia Mort, who developed the project, has genuine insight about relationships and Tell Me You Love Me's scripts are full of believable moments rather than flashy, pithy one-liners designed to sound like new urban wisdom, but which then don't really ring true.

Tell Me You Love Me worked up a lather of sweaty buzz about its graphic sexual content, which includes generous helpings of testicles, breasts, butts, penises, vaginas and barnyard animal sounds. But honestly the show needed that suggestion of color to offset its very low-key tone and the stricly un-sensational and narrowly-defined scope of the little story it wants to tell. It follows four couples of varying ages and status as they work through unique intimacy issues: Jamie and Hugo are young and rash, they screw a lot, and they struggle with jealousy and commitment. Carolyn and Palek are in their thirties, moderately successful and are trying with no luck to conceive their first child. They screw a lot too, but eventually all the attempted baby making begins to take its toll. Dave and Katie are the most traditional couple (for example, they don't swear). They've been married forever, are in their fourties with two kids, and don't ever screw anymore. As it turns out, there is some really deep-seated stuff that turned off the sex faucet in their bedroom. And finally there's May and Arthur. They're pushing 70 and they screw a lot too (I hate to say it, but you might be at least a little horrified at those scenes. Nothing can prepare you for the shock of seeing a senior citizen giving head.). May's a therapist and at one point or another, all of the other couples eventually make it into her office. That is presumably what unites the four storylines, although all of the relationships are meant to symbolize a single relationship at different stages of development, with May and Arthur representing the finished product – the couple that made it by sticking out everything from infidelity to "bed dread," and are now reaping the rewards of all that struggle and persistence. It's a pretty ingenious concept and it totally works.

The show is pro fidelity and pro self-truth. It wants its troubled couples to face their problems and work through them, rather than seek solace in distraction or repression. As Mort points out, beneath all that soft core porn is really a fairly conservative sensibility. It reminds me of Stanley Kubrik's Eyes Wide Shut, which was a very old-fashioned meditation on fidelity that was unfairly eclipsed by the rating scandal about its macabre orgy scene.

To me, cable television has become the new best place for narrative form. And of its endless channels, HBO is still setting the standard. They have the cash and, by now, a creative mandate to greenlight quality; and when you combine that with good taste in projects and talent, as HBO does, genius ensues. Personally, I prefer at least an attempt at realism in my novels, movies and television shows – whether drama or comedy; it just heightens the effect. So I was never a fan of HBO staples like Six Feet Under or Deadwood, which seemed art-directed to within an inch of their lives and didn't crystallize into believability. But I thought The Sopranos was as good as the hype and The Wire is probably the most relevant and consistently affecting work of art in the last 10 years. And then there's Entourage, Extras and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which aren't "serious" shows but are as smart as they are feel-good. So I guess I qualify as an HBO fan of some sort.

I think Tell Me You Love Me already ranks with any of those shows in quality. Right out of the gate, it knew what it wanted to be and it went about it flawlessly. The casting is perfect, you can't imagine anybody else playing these characters, and all the couples have believable chemistry and the actors plenty of depth. It's probably not for everybody - most people watch TV to give their brains a rest and, like The Wire, this is the kind of show that you have to engage with for it to work. But you can tell that the creators really love the characters and I can't think of another show that actually seems to want to benefit its viewers rather than just entertain them. Even The Wire, which is so full of social concern, is more nihilistic about its complaints than proactive.

I don't really have anything to link to. I think the DVDs come out in January. However, if you are able to catch the reruns on HBO, make sure to watch the promotional podcasts they created where they ask real couples to watch the series and talk about it. In their own way, they're just as entertaining as the actual show. [Those promos are also available as a free download in iTunes.]

Sean Madigan Hoen – "We Two Are"

Sean Hoen's presence has loomed large in Southeast Michigan for years. By the time I met him and became acquainted with his bands The Holy Fire and Leaving Rouge, he was already a slightly cleaned-up version of his former bloodshot-eyed, manic persona. Before I moved back to Detroit, Sean had already made his mark fronting the hardcore band Thoughts of Ionesco and was a minor legend for his apeshit antics. It's like this: everybody who came up indie in the '90s has a David Yow (Jesus Lizard) story, and if you came up in Detroit, you have a Sean Hoen story too. In his own words, people didn't go to his shows to hear the music, they went to see Sean lose his shit.

But that kind of self-destructive theater has its limits. And given the choice between keeping up a faked version of the catharsis or moving on to less abrasive forms of expression, Sean chose the latter while keeping it just as articulate and lucid. It's interesting to watch an artist like that not losing the edge, but sublimating it. Like a volcano that teaches itself more subtle forms of eruption. It puts Sean in the great company of ex-hardcore band leaders like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKeye, who I think of as human tuning forks that maintain their tremulous appearance through even the most presentable of aesthetic haircuts.

I love the sound of Sean's voice. It seems like two octaves at once. It has the reedy bite of a tenor, but somehow still seems baritone deep. Maybe it's that whole devils vs. angels thing in his rock'n'roll-as-demonology lyrics. Two versions of the same person – one higher, one lower – meeting in a voice. "We Two Are" is my favorite moment on The Liquor Witch, his first solo album, and has all the requisite qualities of a Sean Hoen song as well as a great title that frames moral schizophrenia in a three-word Zen kohn. It takes its time getting to beautiful places but gradually inflates with reverb, like a giant hot air balloon, before Sean punctures everything with a spectacularly ugly moan.

Sean Madigan Hoen - "We Two Are" [From The Liquor Witch]

Sean on MySpace

Mobius Band - I Am Always Waiting

I can't figure out the difference between
Your love and your company

After about the fourth or fifth listen, this song revealed its myriad mysteries to me. It's a grower, but as the hooks sink in, so do the details. Like those diving seagull sounds that dart in and out of the chorus explosion. And the fuzzed-out kazoo sound Ben Sterling gets out of his guitar during the denouement seems more appropriate every pass. For pop music, the arrangement finds ways to sneak in pockets of invention, but subtly - it still feels like an unadorned serving of catchy.

I love the tone, and the modest way Sterling sings. I love the contrast of his light drawl with the urbanity of Mobius Band's droid-aided rock. Emotionally, it's breakup-song big, the kind of cut you want to listen to when your life feels like plates of massive, tectonic shift. But even in breakups, the tearing is sometimes balanced with adrenaline, and "I Am Always Waiting" strikes that kind of balance.

Mobius Band "I Am Always Waiting" [From Heaven]

Bob Marley & The Wailers "Trouble Dub"

All reggae recordings should sound this way: like a bootleg of a Bob Marley & The Wailers rehearsal if the Wailers practiced in a bomb shelter. And Marley should have made more animal sounds. Three quarters of the way into the track, mere singing fails him – fails to express his troubles in fullness – and he resorts to soul-screeched cat calls and sharp grunts.


Bob Marley & The Wailers - "Trouble Dub" [From Satisfy My Soul]