looking Minnesota, feeling California

There has been a fantastic spate of good albums coming out lately featuring artwork by Minnesota artists.  Of course, much of that music has been locally grown, and in our thriving lil' artworld, like supports like.  Many MN musicians either know, or are themselves, practicing artists/designers.  Due to the awesomeness of some of this music and probably, the geographically-obliterating tendencies of social media and internet marketing presences, Minnesota is really rockin' it in the rock n' roll design world.

Bon Iver - Bon Iver   cover by Gregory Euclide

I first saw Gregory Euclide's art at the Urban Bean coffee shop in Uptown about 12 years ago.  While there was a nodding resemblance to his current work - soft blues and greens, almost pastels, and layers of imagery that slide deftly between abstracted landscapes and well-rendered moments of realism - he has since drastically refined his drawing skills and expanded his approach to creating more sculptural paintings and installations.  I'm happy to have this gorgeous new Bon Iver on vinyl for the obvious sonic reasons, but it also offers a drastically  better viewing vantage on the surreal landscape that Euclide created for this cover art.  Reading like a Japanese scroll, the painting brings you up into the background space rather than creating a receding sense of deep perspective.  It's also somewhat easier to see, with the larger format of the lp,  that the paper Euclide created the painting/drawing on, has actually been ripped and crumpled, toying with the relative lack of pictorial depth by creating a literal depth of 3-D-ness with the piece.  There's a nice synergy between the artwork and the music here too.  The expanded palate of instruments Justin Vernon  uses on his new compositions create denser layers than on previous work, with banjos and staccato drum brushes standing sharp against the guitar and his wavering voice, both of which were recorded with a guazed layer of reverb and auto-tune. Overall it is, as they say, a nice package.

Japanese landscape painting - artist unknown

I was fortunate enough to be at the Bombay Sweets record release show at the Turf Club this past Saturday night.  Brute Heart, Birthday Suits, Bombay Sweets, and Blind Shake - that's an amazing line-up already before you add in Michael Yonkers showing up late night to join the Blind Shake for 5 or 6 crazy-a*#! songs that would've been worth the price of admission alone...though the Birthday Suits set had already taken care of that.  Besides the sheer energy and great music that each of these sonically diverse bands brought to the stage, they also each boast excellent recent releases that showcase MN artists/designers as the aesthetic arbiters of our consumption of their products.  And how yummy it is!

Brute Heart has released 2 full lengths in the last couple years, 2009's Brass Beads and this year's Lonely Hunter.   The Brass Beads cover featured a painting by local duo Tynan Kerr & Andie Mazorol and the even better 2011 lp, Lonely Hunter, features artwork by local phenom Crystal Quinn.  

Brute Heart - Lonely Hunter    art by Crystal Quinn

Birthday Suits destroyed the Turf this night, as they do really everywhere they play.  Calm and incredibly mellow in person,  they   tear. shit. up.   on stage and they do it with aplomb. 

Birthday Suits - The Minnesota: Mouth to Mouth

Bombay Sweets were the new kids on the block tonight.  I didn't know them so much as the other bands and they stepped into their rock star spotlight with a bit more trepidation - seen through their overdramatized stage presence and apparent hesitancy to really stretch it out musically.   When they did stray from the page a bit and stretch things out, they were at their best and were a band I'd like to see some more of.

Artwork by Aesthetic Apparatus

The Blind Shake!  Shit...I guess I really had no idea who these guys were.  I'd heard the name enough but hadn't seen a show yet.  It seemed like they had emerged from a Navy Seals stake-out of Devo's house via a 1985 punk portal - channeling some revved-up version of Wire...then, about 1:30am, Michael Yonkers came out to join them...Minneapolis's wild-card-up-the-sleeve for the past 20+ years.  They truly kicked out the jams and put out another 40 minutes of amazing rock n' roll.   epic.  The artwork for their newest release features a painting by The Blind Shake's own Jim Blaha. 

art by Jim Blaha

It was a couple years ago already that POS put out his kick-ass Never Better album.  Artwork by Eric Carlson (also of Hardland/Heartland).  Carlson is a fantastic draftsman who balances a tight technical proficiency with defiant drips, smudges, and off-kilter decisions all created with a whip-smart graphic designer eye.

POS - Never Better   cover art by Eric Carlson

An aside:

Sooo, who cares.  the album is dead right?  The thumbnailed album art is just a marker of on the screen - not art anymore but just a blip of information to click on?  I'm certainly a bit old fashioned when it comes to this but I really think that album art is an amazing reflection, and sometimes even an arbiter, of contemporary pop-culture consumer's tastes.  Music is still the most broadly consumed artform out there...nevermind how 'artsy' your tastes are, music is being written, recorded, played, listened to, danced to, etc. by pretty much every demographic and right or left-leaning yahoo out there.

Back in the day, when the transition was being made from hand-cranked 78's and 45's to long-play 33rpm's, jazz was the primary music being pressed on vinyl.  From the very get-go, the graphic design of the album art was integral to the package being marketed and sold.  The Blue Note imprint quickly found their signature look in the graphic work of Reid Miles.

Bold shadows on dynamically posed musicians - most not yet household names, often with a vibrant monochromatic tinted filter, and precisely modern and graphic font and text choices - designed with "a splendid sense of certainty"* and a new, for the time, importance placed on space - negative and positive - in the layout.  These were some of the first 'long play' albums (not 78rpm singles) being sold in the world ever! and the first introduction, on this scale, of black artists creating such phenomenally proficient and groundbreaking performances.  They were being packaged as such - iconic individuals, thoughtful and in charge of the proceedings contained within, and - just to slightly placate the biases of the times - not entirely black skinned, just a filtered touch of red, white or blue over the nicely sleeved package.


* from Robin Kinross, Eye Magazine, 2001

The Best of It

Now that Summer's finally established itself and the spectre of Autumn has already begun to creep onto my horizon, I'm looking back over music that's come out in the last 8 months and adding yet another list to my already teetering pile.  There's also a bunch of releases that are probably excellent that I just haven't heard -- some glaring holes such as the new Grails - Deep Politics, Radiohead - King of Limbs, Fucked Up - David's Town, Richard Buckner - Our Blood, and others that just haven't made the listen/purchase list yet.

So what have I been digging this year?

Bon Iver - s/t

A flat-out gorgeous album that was a bit of a 'grower' for me.  Much more fleshed out than For Emma, Forever Ago but still retaining a sense of the personal and intimate that infused that lovely debut.  Some of the production buries certain instruments too much, esp. guitars, but a great album as a whole.

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Sadly, I lost touch with PJ after her first 2 releases and missed out on a few of her stronger albums (To Bring You My Love and Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, esp.).  Though her new one is touted as a companion piece to 2007's White Chalk, I find it drastically more interesting and engaging.  She sings of war, collusion among nations, loss of faith in her country, all with an anger that can only come from a deep engagement and love of her muse.  She sounds more like her fellow angry countrymen, The Mekons, than I've noticed before - making use, like them, of non-rock n' roll instruments, esp. the Autoharp that is so prevalent on this album.  She was just nominated for England's Mercury Prize again - now tied with Radiohead for the most nominations for the prestigious award.  Go Polly Jean!

iceage - New Brigade

Straying away from the Dad Rock that somehow has seeped onto my turntable over the past couple years, iceage are a blast of teen hormone angst from 2011 via 1981.  The opening track(s) - Intro. into White Rune, literally make me laugh with their awesome-ness.  A swirly atmosphere kicks around for 30-some seconds, grinding industrial clatter that could be a song segue from early Sonic Youth before we're thrown head-first into the monstrous speeding riffs of White Rune which sputters a minute or so in as a breakdown tempo shift drops your jaw - as cool as any since Sebadoh's Gimmie Indie Rock - before throwing you back into the mosh pit to close it out.  This awesome-ness continues, with out letting up or retreading anything they've clearly been listening to on their parent's turntables for the duration of the album.  For 34 minutes, I'm 18 again.

Destroyer - Kaputt

Chasing cocaine, through the back rooms of the world, all right...

This is sung, deadpanned, with absolutely no irony or sense of sensation by Dan Bejar (aka Destroyer, always in the room with an amazing band, be it the New Pornographers or his current line up of the Destroyer band).  Well, maybe some irony...the video to Kaputt is awash in irony, flying whales, desert dance scenes, and other cerebral wankery.  On many of his releases, Bejar has been accused/applauded for sounding so much like Bowie.  Here he mines the 70's lite rock heavily but makes an album that is truly unique and fully his own.  His nod to Bowie is a brilliant one - side three (of the vinyl version) is a song series that basically updates what Bowie was doing with the latter half of Low.  It's a gorgeous wash of atmosphere and just-below-the-surface paranoia that is steeped with 1970's-era studio session brilliance but, listening through headphones at night, it's absolutely time-less.

Brute Heart - Lonely Hunter

The mighty Brute Heart.  I think of those who shambled out to watch Husker Du and the Replacements in the early '80s as they gigged around the Twin Cities and beyond - sometimes not even knowing about the ripples of influence that were spiralling outward from their plop into the collective consciousness (ie.  I heard a 90 min. Husker Du set on Bozeman's KGLT college radio in 1987 that turned my head around - I still have it on Maxell 90 min. Chromo.(no Dolby) cassette tape -  and then I saw them at Bozeman's MSU basketball court/stadium in 1988!...what venues were they playing in Mpls. in these days I wonder?..).  Anyways, will we look back on seeing Brute Heart in a similar way?  Those who saw the Raincoats in the early 80's or still talk about Throwing Muses shows as shambolic rituals where they played Pearl with an acoustic guitar intro...yep, Brute Heart is this type of experience...a great band that has put out yet another great album capturing this moment of their ascendance.

City of Music: Brute Heart from MPLS.TV on Vimeo.

Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo

Bedroom Garage Rock.  That's what I said the opening band for Thurston Moore was like as Emily and I headed out on a Hot date night (hot like 100+ deg. hot).  That is, picture garage rock being raucaus noisy guitar rock made by snotty teenagers drinking cheap beer in their parent's garage...Bedroom Garage Rock is made by older dude - singular, dude - in his bedroom, drinking good beer/pot on acoustic guitar but holding tight to that virile inner punk-ass 17 year old.  Add a great band and awesome producer (John Agnello of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. fame) and you've got the best album Vile's done yet.  Lots of melodic folk-y rockers buried under a psychedelic warm haze with a few tunes that border on Tom Petty-style classic rock.  

Jessie Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter - Marble Son

I love Jessie Sykes and she loves me...so she wrote on the lp I bought from her when she opened up for the late Mark Linkous nee' Sparklehorse a few years ago at 1st Ave.  Though her last album wasn't great imo, it featured some laid back but still fiery guitar work from Phil Wandscher (ex. Whiskeytown guitarist) and, of course, Jessie's smoky voice.  The new one has limited spins for me so far but it definitely sits high on the year's best-of list already.  Way heavier and full of life than the last release, some of the songs veer towards psych-rock work-outs with dark, slow passages that erupt into heavy riffage and then soar off in guitar jam wonkery that mashes bits of Black Sabbath with Jefferson Airplane.  The production is beautiful - capturing the surprisingly loud and boisterous songs with as much finesse and detail as the softer subtle moments.  Her voice is still awesome too.

The title of this post, of course, refers to the best music of the year so far - from a totally objective viewpoint (ahem)...it is also a line from one of my favorite poets of late - one I keep coming back to and gleaning new tidbits and tiny revelations from :

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

~ Kay Ryan (from The Niagara River)

A few honorable mentions that are no slouches:
Wye Oak - Civilian
James Blake - s/t
Earth - A Beaurocratic Desire For Extra-Capsular Extraction (a 2010 reissue I know but...awesome!)
J Mascis - Several Shades of Why