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Thursday, June 16, 2005
OHIO
CocoRosie
The Believer June 2005 Music Issue
[Buy it]
OHIO
Damien Jurado
Rehearsals for Departure
Sub Pop: 1999
[Buy it]
BRIDGES AND BALLOONS
The Decemberists
The Believer June 2005 Music Issue
[Buy it]
BRIDGES AND BALLOONS
Joanna Newsom
The Milk-Eyed Mender
Drag City : 2004
[Buy it]
Much love to The Believer for their second music issue (well, I haven't read it yet - but props for the CD, a collection of modern indie musicians covering modern indie music). Especially since it includes covers of two of my favorite songs by artists I admire (more than two, actually, but I don't want to blow their whole wad, so I picked the absolute swooniest tracks). The best covers reimagine the originals while honoring their essential nature - each artist here adds their own spin to the object of their affection, altering the components just enough to make it their own but not so much as to lose sight of whose they actually are, complicating and enriching them by contrast.
First, CocoRosie, whose music nestles snugly among "freak-folk" artists like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, takes a crack at one of modern indie folk's most winning traditionalists, Damien Jurado. The original version of "Ohio" is all smooth guitar and mournful harmonica, Jurado's dulcet voice spinning out one of his depressive, sharply-drawn tales of doomed love and the impossibility of home. While Jurado tends toward a smooth, frictionless mournfulness, CocoRosie makes the quiet desperation lurking in the song explicit. Paring it down to the broadest, crudest gestures - lush harmonica becomes tinny bleat, gentle acoustic guitar becomes raw electric, silky croon becomes cracked warble, silence becomes canned mechanical drums - CocoRosie pulls the chain in Jurado's closet, lights up the skeletons, and makes those fuckers dance and shiver something terrible. And beautiful.
Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender was my absolute favorite record of 2004. It was everything I look for in music - strange, unique, unclassifiable, gorgeous, penetrating, melodically bold and lyrically potent, haunting, incandescent and sublime. On on album full of favorite songs, "Bridges and Balloons" was my favorite favorite. But the young harpist with a voice like an angel being electrocuted wasn't everyone's cuppa, and many people I know couldn't make it past that shrillness to even hear what a tremendous songwriting talent Newsom possesses. "Bridges and Balloons", with its "catenaries and dirigibles", fits perfectly on Colin Meloy's limber tongue, and his straight rendition of the song (sans-shrillness, twinkling arpeggios replaced by simple acoustic riff) proves that its potency was in its melody and its phrasing, not its singularity. What's also interesting is that Meloy, whether deliberately or by mishearing, changes a few of the lyrics in minor ways that nevertheless adjust the color of the song. For example, where Newsom's catenaries and dirigibles "brace and buoy the living room," Meloy's "brace and boil." In Newsom's version, both images are of support. In Meloy's, the introduction of "boil" also casts its chaos backwards onto "brace," which in context ceases to mean "support" and begins to mean "to cause tension." Amazing what one little word can do.
posted by Brian
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