The Decemberists
Meloy, Chris Funk (guitars), Jenny Conlee (keyboards), Nate Query (bass), and John Moen (drums)—had announced that they would be taking a break when their touring cycle finished following the release of 2011’s The King is Dead. Meloy wanted to spend time with his family and work on the children’s book series that became the acclaimed, best-selling Wildwood trilogy. To be sure, they had reached a new peak in their career: King entered the Billboard album charts at Number One, and the track “Down by the Water” was
nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Rock Song” category. Even during the hiatus, the group remained visible: they released an EP of outtakes from the album titled Long Live the King; contributed the song “One Engine” to the Hunger Games soundtrack; and put out We All Raise Our Voices to the Air, a live album documenting their ferocious intensity on stage. They even
had the honor of appearing in animated form on The Simpsons, and performed on the season six finale of Parks and Recreation.
nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Rock Song” category. Even during the hiatus, the group remained visible: they released an EP of outtakes from the album titled Long Live the King; contributed the song “One Engine” to the Hunger Games soundtrack; and put out We All Raise Our Voices to the Air, a live album documenting their ferocious intensity on stage. They even
had the honor of appearing in animated form on The Simpsons, and performed on the season six finale of Parks and Recreation.
Mostly, however, Meloy was concentrating on the Wildwood series—the 1,500- page saga of two seventh-graders who are drawn into a hidden, magical forest, illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis. So when the band reassembled in May 2013, the plan wasn’t to make an album in their usual way. “Typically we book four or five weeks in the studio and bang out the whole record,” says Meloy. “This time, we started by just booking three days, and didn’t know what we would record. There was no direction or focus; we wanted to just see what would come out. We recorded ‘Lake Song’ on the first day, live, and then two more songs in those three days. And the spirit of that session informed everything that came after.”
They reconvened in the fall and added some more songs. Gradually, over the course of a year and a half, the album came into focus. What was initially apparent was a fuller, richer sound. “There was a grandiosity to the songs in different ways,” says Meloy, citing Leonard Cohen’s 1977 collaboration with Phil Spector, Death of a Ladies’ Man, as a reference point. “We were layering textures, adding strings and dedicated backing vocals—the early songs created the peaks of the record, and that started to dictate the overall tone and tenor.” The first batch of songs, Meloy notes, represented the more personal side of his songwriting, a change from the strong narrative thrust that characterized much of the Decemberists’ work. “Writing books as this raw, fantastic narrator has been
the outlet for that part of my brain,” he says. “Having a family, having kids, having this career, getting older—all of these things have made me look more inward.
the outlet for that part of my brain,” he says. “Having a family, having kids, having this career, getting older—all of these things have made me look more inward.
So some of these songs are among the more intimately personal songs I’ve ever written.” Perhaps most notable is “12-17-12,” a song named for, and inspired by, the date that President Obama addressed the nation following the Newtown school shootings, and read the names of the victims. “I watched that speech and was profoundly moved,” says Meloy. “I was hit by a sense of helplessness, but also the message of ‘Hold your family close,’ and this was my way of marking that for myself.” This bewildering, conflicted feeling came out in a phrase near the end of the song—“what a terrible world, what a beautiful world”—that gave the album its title. As the sessions continued, other elements of the writing and the sound surfaced and a more rounded picture emerged. “As soon as I finished the books, I immediately started writing more narrative songs,” Meloy says. “‘Cavalry Captain,’ ‘Carolina Low,’ those all started coming out. But there was a more subtle voice coming in; I wanted moments of levity, a little tongue-in-cheek. Also, we figured out that the big, pop sound we were making would also make the quieter moments more still, create more dynamic peaks and valleys.”
Without a deadline, the Decemberists were also able to explore every song to completion. “Usually you have to let some songs slide because of time constraints,” Meloy says, “but nothing was relegated to the b-side pile, everything was given a fair shake. Which is a blessing and a curse—we ended up with 18 songs, and each had champions and detractors. There were a multitude of albums you could potentially make—somber, over-the-top pop, folk—and I think every band member would have created a different record.” Ultimately, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World found its final form, a distillation of the best things about this remarkable band. A new way of working led to a renewed excitement about the next chapter for the Decemberists. “I’ve never lived with a record for so long,” says Colin Meloy, “documenting my shifts and changes as a songwriter, with a real sense of time passing. And there’s something very freeing about working on music with absolutely no agenda, and just letting the songs become themselves.”
Spoon
How many times in musical history has the most acclaimed act of an era peaked in its 20th year? We're not talking a reunion, return to form, twilight years surprise or any of that. We're asking how many times has a critically and publicly adored band—one still in its prime-eleased (arguably) its best album at the start of its third decade?
To save you valuable Googling time: It's happened once, it is in fact happening now, and unlike Haley's Comet streaking by or whatever, you are fortunate enough to be able to hold it in your hand or on your hard drive. It's called Spoon: They Want My Soul. Yes, the new album from the single most favorably reviewed musical force of the previous decade (Metacritic numbers don't lie: http://www.metacritic.com/feature/best-music-of-the-decade) already being hailed as "perfect" (Rolling Stone) and "fantastically infectious… perhaps the most confident point of its career" (NPR) also falls roughly on the 20th anniversary of Spoon's barelyeleased 1994 debut EP, Nefarious.
So on to the obvious questions: How and why does this happen? After a 20-year streak of unerring excellence in the form of albums like Telephono, A Series Of Sneaks, Girls Can Tell, Kill The Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Transference (not to mention EPs like the indispensable Soft Effects, Love Ways, Don't You Evah and Got Nuffin), how does They Want My Soul raise the bar with surprise premiere first single "Rent I Pay" (http://www.npr.org/event/music/318886316/spoon-premieres-new-song-live), current chart climbing summer anthem "Do You" and the sublimely trippy "Inside Out" (all three of which comprise the 45RPM 10" currently flying out of indie record retailers as part of the http://www.spoontheband.com/vinylgratification/ program)?
Maybe the answer lies in the rejuvenation provided by a first-ever break following a grueling 10-year run that kicked off in 2001 with Girls Can Tell and saw the band plow tirelessly through the 2002 2010 releases of Kill The Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Transference, and the ever expanding tours supporting each album, all without a pause. Sure, the momentum was as irresistible as it was self-induced: spurred on by singles like Kill The Moonlight's "The Way We Get By," Gimme Fiction's "I Turn My Camera On," Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga's "The Underdog" and more, sales were progressively doubling from album to album, hitting an incredible peak when Transference entered the U.S. album chart at #4.
So who would even think about jumping from that runaway train… until it just happened: at the end of the Transference tour, Britt Daniel, Jim Eno, Eric Harvey and Rob Pope all went their separate ways. No consulting one another on next moves, when the band would re-convene, or even if it would at all. Spoon had effectively gone on a naturally occurring indefinite hiatus. Mind you, even Spoon's hiatuses defy convention. The band members were anything but idle: Britt formed Divine Fits with Dan Boeckner (late of Handsome Furs, Wolf Parade) and Sam Brown (ex-Gaunt, New Bomb Turks) and recorded the brilliant A Thing Called Divine Fits with producer Nick Launay (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Public Image Ltd., etc.).
And speaking of producers of renown, Jim continued his ascent in that arena, taking advantage of the downtime to go full-time at his own Public Hi-Fi, producing records by Polica, !!!, Telekinesis and others while releasing a series of Public Hi-Fi Sessions on the studio's own label banner. Rob opened a (new) bar and embarked on the adventure of family life, Eric released the solo Lake Disappointment and worked on visual art in Dallas.
So a few years of passion projects, traumatic break ups and even a new marriage later, the members of Spoon started to succumb to whatever force it is that inexorably draws them to one another. And this time there was a significant addition, fifth member Alex Fischel, found on the side of a highway being raised by wolves by Britt, who taught him to play keyboards, gave him a job in Divine Fits, and in turn exacted Alex's blood oath to play by his side in everything he does from that point. The result has moved the likes of NPR to call They Want My Soul "unmistakably a Spoon record" while noting that the band is "challenging itself and stretching its sound, particularly with synth textures courtesy of the band's newest addition, Alex Fischel."
But lest the new guy get too big a head too, there were other forces at play in making the new disc such a mind blower. They Want My Soul found Spoon working with not one but two newproducers: Grammy winner Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT, Tame Impala) and Joe Chicarelli (White Stripes, The Shins) were both enlisted, one sonic innovator known for his psychedelic palette, the other a big rock producer known for his arsenal of monolithic tones. The two producers' individual styles couldn't have been more dissimilar, and here they were each crafting half a Spoon record—a band whose signature style made sense with neither of them.
The resultant shake-up was as necessary as it was revitalizing. It accounts for that new energy crackling in every groove of They Want My Soul, a wild card frequency underlying every familiar groove and melody… and one that serves to bolster that overall sentiment that this is the best record the band has ever made. It also shouldn't be overlooked that a good share of They Want My Soul's alien vibe may come as the result of the extended periods of isolation they endured during its recording—one man's pastoral paradise is a primarily Austinborn and bred band's dark night of the soul. The guys spent a lot of time at Fridmann's Cassadaga, NY (pop. 625) outpost, much of it snowed in and some of it punctuated by incidents involving True Detective/Blair Witch style teepees and stick structures, mysterious trails of bloodstains in the snow…
Details are fuzzy and cabin fever is a real thing, so suffice to say the five men who made that trip are not the same five men who came back from it. Anyway, whatever happened up there was evidently worth it, as the band that turned heads by leaping from Matador to Elektra nearly 20 years ago (only to begin its true ascent on Merge roughly a year later) now triumphantly resurfaces on Loma Vista for album number eight. But hey that's Spoon, "one of the most consistently great bands in indie rock" (Rolling Stone) yet one not necessarily on an indie label or making records that sound particularly "indie," the kings of the underground whose music has wormed its way into your brain on Veronica Mars and Saturday Night Live, the band that has conceived and executed the Vinyl Gratification campaign in the age of the digital pre-order incentive… If there's a tried and true formula for anything in this business, look for Spoon to be coming in an opposite lane or direction—but when a band is making records as undeniably classic as They Want My Soul, does any of that matter?
The Districts
"The Districts are an impressive young four-piece from Lititz, in Lancaster County. The band channeled the rock-and-soul vibe of Cold War Kids and Spoon; singer Rob Grote's searing voice cut across the concert hall, blending with the band's smartly-arranged instrumental interplay. They do the very Pixies loud-quiet-LOUD thing, but in a more textured way than simply turning their overdrive pedals on and off. A thundering swell cuts, leaving a clean guitar arpeggio floating in space as Grote catches his breath; the verses build in waves, with the heaviness sometimes derived just from Braden Lawrence's drums. Grote is an intense, emphatic, occasionally bewildering stage presence — he kicks, stomps and snarls, both at the mic and far away — but guitarist Mark Larson and bassist Connor Jacobus hold their own, shuffling and bobbing and giving the overall band a dynamic stage presence. Check out "Four and Four" from their album Telephone." –WXPN
Write up courtesy of: Monqui Presents
