Showing posts with label Jeff Tweedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff Tweedy. Show all posts
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Album Review: Low - The Invisible Way


Husband and wife team Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have culled Low's high quality tunes from dusk and dreams for nearly twenty years. Recorded in Chicago courtesy of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, their latest child, The Invisible Way, intentionally features less duets between Sparhawk and Parker and more solo spotlights on Parker. The final product, however, is as eerily consistent as anything the band has put forth.

On the lovely new record, Sparhawk and Parker seem confidently settled into their trademark sound. The Invisible Way carries with it a Taoist sense of spiritual enlightenment, using references to the “empty” and the “hollow" and "everything worth nothing" as directional arrows toward bliss instead of signs of depression. Although the melancholy is as present as the transcendental, the competing forces are fused together beneath the lulling blanket of Low's characteristic sleepiness.

 Taoist sensibilities aside, not all is well along The Invisible Way. The songs that place primary focus on Sparhawk contain more bite than bliss. The clicks and claps of the apocalyptic "Clarence White" and "Plastic Cup"'s odd take on a drug test's urine-filled vessel as seen through the eyes of a future archaeologist ("This must be the cup the king held every night as he cried") are bleakly comical reminders of how wonderfully weird Low can be.

 Though Parker's piano-driven forward charges on "So Blue" and "Just Make it Stop" may inject brief tempo variation into the album, Low mostly sticks to the slow, quivering quietness that has long informed its oeuvre. The Invisible Way is a path Low has tread before. The band’s music, however, is far too entrancing to ignore, dismiss, or criticize for lack of progression. Seeking autumnal serenity in a winter abyss, Low's somber Zen-folk simultaneously soothes and unsettles as it finds rest in the womb of darkness.

 Grade: B+




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Making It: The Pitfalls of Music Criticism



For whatever reason, much of the U.S. media arena and it’s critics are obsessed with typifying every category of entertainment. To an extent I get it, top ten lists are fun to read and award ceremonies have their place, but at what point does it get tedious or fruitless? At what point does it cause us, the audience, to misinterpret a piece of music or take it for granted? I know many people, including myself at times, who will only listen to an album on grounds that it received the right amount of critical acclaim. For the record, I am a big fan of Bon Iver and think he makes extraordinary music, but I often find myself trying to reanalyze his work; I am constantly putting Bon Iver thought a critical filter, attempting to find debris. And I have. This isn’t about Bon Iver being a good musician in so far as it’s about how the majority of listeners have come to find this out. What if Pitchfork or SPIN or whatever other copycat source didn’t give the self-titled sophomore album 5 stars or a 9/10 or whatever it was? What if the day that influential review was written the assignment was instead given to the writer who was having a bad day and wasn’t really feeling the whole chamber-folk falsetto getup? This also goes for the phenomenon of people who hate an artist precisely because they are critically acclaimed (you know who you are.)


While these foolhardy rating systems and top ten lists have propelled readership for music magazines and websites and opened up a lot of avenues for independent artists, I fear they have additionally limited the way in which we listen to a work, and decipher it’s strengths and weaknesses. I’m not saying there aren’t objectively good and bad records per se. I have a lot of respect for music critics, and try to read a multitude of various sources, but what I am proposing is that we attempt to break away from the habits of skimming music like we would a textbook a half hour before a final exam. 


Obviously most of us have thought about this before; I am certainly not the first to bring up how Pitchfork can be notoriously over-critical. Most of these thoughts actually sprung from a song I heard just yesterday from a largely unknown, new artist. It was a remarkable song by Jeff Tweedy’s (lead singer of Wilco) son, Spencer, called “Rushmore.” Even still, all I could think upon first listen was, “This is terrible. This kid will never get out of his father’s shadow.” It was a great first song. My first thought should have been, “Wow, this kid is going places.” But then I started over-thinking and coloring everything. I thought, “how much of this kid’s talent is fostered out of his father being a musician and having a bit of money, instruments, and influence?” I mean, how can he not get into a studio to record something great. Right?




Upon further contemplation, I found that that’s another thing the entertainment world is profoundly obsessed with. As much as Spencer Tweedy is at an advantage, he is already at a great disadvantage. That being his last name. Sure, Jakob Dylan has had a good run with the Wallflowers, and Ziggy and Damian Marley have achieved mainstream success, but it’s hard to think of any offspring of a famous musician ever living up to the legacy of their parent, or even being able to classify themselves as a completely different musician. Even the article where I heard Spencer Tweedy’s new song felt they had to mention that the song “hints strongly at his father’s own work.” I don’t know why that made me so frustrated. I expected them to mention how it sounds like Summerteeth, and I’m sure Spencer is proud of that fact, but I couldn’t help but think how this young musician would ever make it out from the shadow of his father’s sacred 10/10 rating from Pitchfork for 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

This string of thoughts on the idea of “making it” was also spawned from a book I’ve been reading: The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, which was the poet’s first and most acclaimed book. Throughout the book Berrigan fragmentally recounts friendships he’s had in his life. Part of sonnet XLIV reads, “Anne is writing poems to me and worrying about “making it” / and Ron is writing poems and worrying about “making it” / and Pat is worrying and not working on anything.” It doesn’t really matter who the people in this poem are. They were most likely friends of Berrigan’s, they might sound like friends of your own. This may not make very much sense out of context, but I think what I pulled from these lines is that we’ve become a culture that is much to worried about “making it” to the point where we forgot why we listen and talk about music in the first place.

I think part of what it comes down to is abandoning this whole umbrellaed idea of "indie." I don't really know where I'm getting at with all of these thoughts, but I think we've come to the end of the indie road, especially as it is starting to become synonymous with a word I hate entirely: hipster. Whatever conotations that word has started to carry could be the plague of the music world, but that is a whole different type of rant. Essentially what I'm getting at is this: if you really enjoy a piece of music or art then you should know why. Like, really know why. Basically, don’t end up like that pony-tailed-how-do-you-like-them-apples guy who gets bested by Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting. 



Tom Dennis
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