Merge Records celebrates its 25th anniversary next week in its hometown of Chapel Hill/Carrboro, N.C. The tiny label that could
long ago outgrew its association with its founding band, Superchunk: first it
was as the label that brought Neutral Milk Hotel and Magnetic Fields into the
world, then it helped alter the landscape of independent music in the last 10
years with the 2004 release of Arcade Fire’s Funeral.
On a road trip to Merge’s 15th anniversary
celebrations, I fell for the lady I’m still with, and with whom we have a
three-year-old son. I have numerous sentimental reasons to head south for their
25th, as well as the fact that Neutral Milk Hotel, Superchunk,
Destroyer, Caribou, Teenage Fanclub, Bob Mould, Wye Oak, Telekinesis, the
Mountain Goats, Mikal Cronin, Mary Timony’s new band Ex Hex, and many more also
happen to be there.
At least half the records Merge puts out these days are either
new albums by lifers who refuse to give up, or reissues of a current artist’s
past catalog: Merge rescues early work by Destroyer or Mountain Goats or Bob
Mould’s albums with Sugar from obscurity; they’ve brought back the Archers of
Loaf and kept the career of Richard Buckner alive, etc. Sure, the average
age of a Merge artist is probably well into the mid-40s (like the label owners
themselves). That doesn’t mean it’s resting on its laurels. Many other articles about
this anniversary will retell the tales of the label’s flagship acts and
landmark albums; many of those tales are captured in John Cook’s excellent oral history of the label (Torontonians, take note: if name Cook’s
sounds familiar, it’s because he’s also the former Gawker journalist who, along
with the Toronto Star’s Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan, broke the Rob Ford
crack tape story to the world.)
Here, however, are 10 highly underrated albums from the five
years of Merge’s history, since the last party. We all know about the essential recent records by Spoon (debuted in Billboard's Top 5), M. Ward, Caribou (Polaris shortlist), Destroyer (Polaris shortlist), the Mountain Goats and Superchunk—or that She and Him exists—and oh yeah, there's the minor matter that Arcade Fire's The Suburbs won a freaking Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Put that in your pipe. Here, however, are some less obvious titles that make
the label much more than a nostalgia trip.
The Clientele – Bonfires on the Heath (October 2009)
My original review:
How much you like The Clientele depends entirely on how much you
can stand wispy British men singing autumnal odes over languid dream-pop with
sparkling guitars, tinkly keyboards, brushed drums, and a melodic bass player
who ties it all together. If that works for you, then Bonfires on the Heath
will sweep the clouds away from your rainiest days.
Most of the references here date back to ’60s British folk-pop;
at times it sounds like Nick Drake fronting The Velvet Underground; there are
shades of the Zombies and hints of Pink Floyd (especially the Dark Side-ish
pedal steel on the title track). The sunny optimism of their game-changing 2006
album God Save the Clientele surfaces only on a couple of tracks; here,
they’re back to being their mopey selves, only now they sound a lot more
muscular doing it, and relatively recent fourth member Mel Draisey fleshes out
the arrangements beautifully with violin and a variety of keyboards.
Singer/guitarist Alisdair MacLean has threatened that this will
be The Clientele’s final album. And after the excellence of both this and the
previous album, he might just be spinning his wheels from now on anyway—it’s
hard to imagine The Clientele capturing their essence any better than this.
Tracey Thorn – Love and its Opposite (May 2010)
I put this album on this week for the first time in years—and
remembered why it had been so long, despite its brilliance. This album kicks me
in the gut, such is the efficacy of Thorn’s portrait of the uncertainties of
middle age. It’s so good that it can never possibly be background music.
My original review:
Tracy Thorn, of Everything But the Girl, is definitely not
making music for girls (or boys) anymore: this, her second album, is for mature
audiences only. And by mature, I mean anyone with enough life experience to be
in a long-term relationship that either fractures after years of slowly
developing cracks, or somehow survives despite years of disappointments. Mature
in a way that will no longer accept a tired cliché like “I miss you like
deserts miss the rain.”
Thorn let’s you know exactly what you’re in for right off the
top: “Oh! The Divorces” is a devastating song about watching friends fall
apart, lost idealism, the fallacy of romantic pop songwriting, and the fall
from passionate beginnings to mundane custody obligations—the latter is done
during the song’s bridge in a mere 11 words: “the honeymoon/ the wedding rings/
the afternoon handovers by the swings.” Ominously, the song both opens and
closes with the question: “Who’s next?”
Love and its Opposites is not a breakup album—after all, Thorn is
still married to her former EBTG bandmate and father of her children, Ben Watt.
Rather, it’s full of well-crafted observations of middle age in general:
parenting teenagers (“you worry about growing up/ I worry about letting go”),
singles bars (“Can you tell how long I’ve been here? / Can you smell the
fear?”) and family ghosts in the old hometown.
The lyrics are the real selling point; on first listen, the
music is merely pleasant and, well, adult. Thorn’s melancholy, empathetic voice
is nothing if not subtle, but understatement serves her well; the arrangements
here are often sparse, but always spot-on, and there are enough colours and
tempos to rescue it from being a middle-aged mope. Much like the quiet, unseen
daily dramas that she documents, there is far more going on here than first
meets the eye. (June 10)
Wye Oak – Civilian (March 2011)
My original review:
Wye Oak don’t sound like
a rock band, certainly not a rock band from a city like Baltimore. They sound
like a force of nature: a rushing river, a towering mountain range, an
expansive Montana plain. Not that they sound natural: there’s nothing acoustic
about Civilian, their third album, which is full of raging electric
guitars and distorted sounds. But the way this duo conjure the elements at
their disposal is magical, the way a sonic gust suddenly slaps you like a
galeforce wind, the way Andy Stack’s drums gallop and lurch, following the push
and pull of Jenn Wasner’s guitars, the way Wasner’s calm and understated vocals
anchor everything like the eye of a hurricane.
It’s a massive sound for
a duo—Stack juggles keyboards while drumming—but imagining the challenge of
reproducing this live shouldn’t distract you from this incredibly vivid
recording. Themes of regret and loss dominate—the opening lyric is “Two small
deaths happened today”—but Civilian is powerful and uplifting, despite
being a bit a downer on the surface.
Their lineage is
obvious—Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo—but they take the
best of all those acts and reinvent them for a new decade. With each album, Wye
Oak has improved exponentially, and Civilian is no exception. It’s their
first full-blown classic, and likely the first of many.
Wild Flag – s/t (September 2011)
Hey, remember when Carrie Brownstein was a musician? Many know
that she was part of Sleater-Kinney, but this punk rock dream project with Mary
Timony seems to have been shoved under the rug in many a lengthy profile of the
Portlandia star. The geographically dispersed band decided this would be their
one and only album; a shame—not just because of the talent involved, but
because this felt like they were on the verge of totally blowing our minds. No
doubt Timony will step up to the plate with her new band, Ex Hex, whose debut
is due this fall, but already I can’t help but wonder what it would sound like
to hear her bouncing off Brownstein again.
Crooked Fingers – Breaks in the Armor (October 2011)
I know I have a thing for underdogs, but I frankly cannot
believe that Eric Bachmann is not more beloved than he is. There’s never been a
bad Crooked Fingers album, and he keeps getting better. He’s been spending the
last year as part of Neko Case’s band; at her Massey Hall show in May, she let
him open the encore with his song "Sleep All Summer" (from 2005’s Dignity and
Shame), which instantly brought tears to eyes of this enormous fan (and my
lady, the ubersuperfan). Anyway, yadda yadda, 2011’s Breaks in the Armor,
another amazing Crooked Fingers record. Ho-fucking-hum.
My original review:
Over 20 years and 12 albums, Crooked Fingers’ Eric Bachmann has
nothing left to prove to anyone: especially after his slick 2008 masterpiece Forfeit/Fortune
(a perfect album that’s easily one of the most underrated albums of the last
five years) and this year’s triumphant reunion of his ’90s indie rock band
Archers of Loaf, the legacy of which overshadowed his singer/songwriter work as
Crooked Fingers for far too long.
So rather than return to past glories, Breaks in the Armor
sounds like Bachmann starting fresh, alone in the studio (except for female
vocal harmonies by longtime bandmate Liz Durrett) and feeling his way around a
drum kit with a primal pounding that brings a refreshingly raw amateur feel to
otherwise carefully constructed and arranged songs. Despite its solitary
nature, Breaks in the Armor is not a quiet affair; Bachmann belts it out
throughout, even when tempos dip. He plays with your expectations; the
catchiest rock song on the album (“The Counterfeiters”) is played mostly on
just bass and drums.
Bachmann has a rich and deep discography; newcomers will be
surprised to learn that Breaks in the Armor is just the tip of the
iceberg.
Divine Fits – A Thing Called Divine Fits (August 2012)
Everyone loves Spoon. Lots of people loved Wolf Parade, and
there was plenty of love for Handsome Furs as well. So how come people didn’t
shit themselves for this collab between Britt Daniel and Dan Boeckner? Beats
me. This is ripe for rediscovery.
My original review:
Between them, Spoon’s Britt Daniel and Dan Boeckner of Wolf
Parade and Handsome Furs have made at least four of the best rock records of
the last decade. It should shock no one, then, that when they teamed up as
Divine Fits that they should make one of the greatest albums of 2012. Eleven
songs in under 45 minutes: these men know how to write great pop hooks, rock
riffs, leave room for experimentation and get it all over with before anyone
has any time to get bored.
Spoon records are beloved in part because of their minimalism,
their distillation of every production trick in the book into bare
necessities—that is just as true here as on any Spoon record. Which makes one
of the most interesting things about Divine Fits—where the vocals are shared
equally between Daniel and Boeckner—the power dynamic: Boeckner clearly loves
synths more than Daniel does (the last Handsome Furs album featured barely any
guitar at all), but there’s very little else that distinguishes this from a
great Spoon album, a natural follow-up to that band’s 2001 breakthrough Kill
the Moonlight.
Even though both men have hardly been slouching lately—the final
Handsome Furs album is a posthumous contender for the Polaris Prize—Divine Fits
sounds like a creative rebirth, the sound of songwriters and studio geeks
rediscovering the joy in their craft. With the dissolution of Handsome Furs,
Boeckner is now a free agent, and who knows what state Spoon is in, but Divine
Fits is far too good to be a temporary side project.
Daphni – Jiaolong (October 2012)
Pilfered from my original review and this Maclean’s article:
Dan Snaith of Dundas, Ontario, has made dance music for the last
decade as Caribou: sometimes of the bedroom, minimalist variety; sometimes as
psychedelic rock; sometimes as astounding, vivid and fully realized as he did
on 2010’s Swim. For the past year, Snaith has been quietly releasing 12”
singles under the name Daphni, hastily assembled tracks using samples and an
analog synthesizer. This is material distinctly designed for dance floors;
Snaith hesitated to assemble it on an album at all. Many Caribou fans might
find it too repetitive and not as delicately layered as Snaith’s main project,
but there’s no mistaking that it’s the product of the same creative mind. The
bass lines are nimble, the synth squiggles are melodic and endearing, and the
drum programming dances around the four-on-the-floor pulse. On “Jiao,” he takes
a synth solo that sounds like a nod to Charanjit Singh’s recently reissued Moog
classic Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat.
Key to Daphni’s strength, however, is that it also
sounds tactile: this isn’t electronic music created in its own vacuum, where
the listener has no idea where the sounds came from or why they’re all
colliding at any given moment. Listening to Jiaolong, you can picture
Snaith manually adding and subtracting various layers: from ostinato synth
patterns to long-lost African soul music samples to Indian raga motifs to—I
could swear this is on the Daphni track Pairs—Sophie the Giraffe, that
ubiquitous baby squeak toy. That guarantees a good time right there.
Telekinesis – Dormarion (April 2013)
Do you like good songs? Do you like rock music? Hell, doesn’t
everyone? And yet here’s another guy who’s insanely talented, and yet languishes
in total obscurity, even among people who claim to like these sorts of things.
Seattle’s Michael Lerner is a drummer who loves New Pornographic power pop, and
made this, his third album, with Spoon’s Jim Eno producing. Eno dialled down
the guitars a bit and brought more synths to the fore, but ultimately the
sonics are secondary to the riffs and hooks Lerner packs in here—and he gets
exponentially better each time. Dormarion’s songs are seriously
stadium-sized—even the one with just Lerner on solo acoustic guitar.
So c’mon, the likes of Foo Fighters, Weezer and U2 continue to phone in snoozerific new material and
the far infinitely superior records of Telekinesis can’t catch a break? Listen,
I’m old enough that it’s rare for me to fall in love with new rock’n’roll music
(but not new music, obviously). I learned long ago that many artists I like
fall outside the mainstream for a reason. The only time I get remotely irked is
when someone like Lerner has all the goods and no one seems to care.
Okay, grandpa out.
Mikal Cronin – MC II (June 2013)
My original review:
A garage rocker from San Francisco with a taste for psychedelia
and a B.F.A. degree in music, Mikal Cronin is much more than another
shaggy-haired guy with a distortion pedal, power-pop melodies and a love of
folk-rock harmonies—though he’s all that too, like a next-generation J Mascis. Cronin
is a much better songwriter than most of his contemporaries—including Kurt Vile
and Ty Segall, two peers he’s often compared to (he also plays in Segall’s
band)—and switches easily from wistful country rock to summer anthems to
acoustic ballads to heavy shredding, and leaves room for the occasional violin
solo. Though the recording is raw and live, there’s nothing remotely sloppy
about this; Cronin proves to be a master craftsman in every aspect. Anyone
looking for the great guitar rock album of summer 2013 should pay close
attention.
Reigning Sound – Shattered (July 2014)
Instant classic! Reviewed last week, here.
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