Post "Merriweather Post Pavilion"

This Sunday, Animal Collective will stream their forthcoming album "Centipede Hz" online—but we aren't talking about it like we talked about "Merriweather Post Pavilion." Matt Domino investigates why.

Help!: A Review of Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes

The first line on Helplessness Blues, the fantastic new album by Fleet Foxes, is “so now I am older, than my mother and father, when they had their daughter, so what does that say about me?” It is the best lyric of the past fifteen years and perhaps the most apropos to this current generation of youth that is seeing the population rate slowly move to an inverse pyramid—that is to say we are doing things later than before, including having kids. We can learn things better and quicker than our parents or our grandparents; we can go to the far ends of the Earth with easier access, though with perhaps more fear, and embark on more adventures than our mothers and fathers ever imagined. However, we seem to lack the want or desire to manifest love or to start families. We have the urge and the vague longing for deep love, but not the means to make it real. We contain the notion of family, but not the understanding of what it takes to be a parent. Our lives are multifaceted and without limits, but we can’t seem to remember what it is that people actually do. And maybe that’s what Helplessness Blues are.

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When I was in San Francisco on vacation last month, I did the Cliff Walk starting at Sunset Park and heading up to Baker Beach. It was a sunny day and the wind blew as it does in San Francisco—in rising sporadic gusts that are at first warm and then briskly cold. I walked with a girl who I once loved. We climbed stairs made from roots and walked underneath shade. There were spots of sunlight and the flowers were fragrant. I would’ve sweat if I wasn’t so comfortable walking in my sneakers at a good pace. We talked about and around things like people who once loved each other do, recognizing the shape of the other, remembering an attachment, but not noticing the finer details, the fact that those two people walking side by side hadn’t existed five years earlier.

At one point, as we walked up and down hills, we talked about an old friend of hers who had changed.

“She yelled at me for even listening to pop music,” my old love said.

“That’s crazy. Everyone has to listen to pop music even just in passing. It’s just what you do.”

“Exactly,” she said, wiping her brow. “And especially when we used to work in the café and make fun of them together.”

I picked up a walking stick and followed behind her as she walked down the path. She continued to talk about her friend.

“She’ll like only listen to the most indie music, the most obscure. And only drink microbrews and eat only completely organic things. All of that is fine, don’t get me wrong, I love good  beer as much as anyone else and eating healthy too. But it’s like you can take the fun out of things if you go too far. You know?”

A view of the Pacific suddenly appeared. You could see the green rounded peaks of Marin and the wind ripping across the water and waves.

“It’s something I’ve thought about,” I said. “Life can be pretty simple.”

She laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

I poked the stick in the dirt as we rose up another hill.

“I know I have a history of reading into things, but I mean that a pop song can just be a pop song. Sure there are plenty of good beers out there, but you can just drink a beer and that can be it. You can just walk somewhere or talk to someone. Life is obviously messy, but there are simple things in it. We can want something simple. We can just get dinner.”

“Right. No, I totally get it.”

We continued walking and eventually the path led to an extraordinarily affluent neighborhood that stood on the cliffs. Each home was more intricate and elaborate than the next, with gates at each driveway and little gatehouses. Vines grew over and along wooden and metal gates, homes and doors were painted solid reds and blues of varying shades. Some homes were white. We walked down to a little beach and, with strong wind blowing in our faces, we ate sandwiches on rocks looking at the Pacific.

“This is what you wanted, right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

We ate quietly and drank water, watching a Spanish family climb into the small waves to get to a larger rock. That was the best time we had.

*                          *                        *                         *                        *                       *

Fleet Foxes’ first album, Ragged Wood, could have almost been the soundtrack to the summer of 2008. Their EP Sun Giant had caused plenty of buzz and had caught me off guard when a friend sent it to me, causing me to have one of those “Where did these guys come from?” moments that you have from time to time with a new band. So, when Ragged Wood came out in June of 2008, I and most of my friends had been looking forward to it and were pleased to find out how terrific it was. It was my first summer in Brooklyn and it turned out to be one of the best of my life. Most of us had been out of college for a year and had gotten through the initial blast of post-college depression without much harm. The weather was beautiful and there was plenty of music to see in McCarren Park. I’d run at the track after work as the sun set and then meet friends afterwards at a bar somewhere. We’d spend time at my apartment or on my roof and listen to Ragged Wood. Or, I’d play the album in my down time while I cleaned the apartment without a shirt on, looking forward to drinking a beer outside during the day and getting a tan. The music was pastoral and delicate and seemed to immediately fit right into the canon of Americana music. Songs like “White Winter Hymnal” and “Ragged Wood” had some kind of simplicity and innocence that emnated from them. The group singing and harmonies were something that had not been used so prevelantly in recent years in music. I never even paid attention to the lyrics because the album created such a strong mood, a mood that was carefree and tailor made for the great summer I was having, the first summer of truly feeling like I might actually be an independent adult.

And now Helplessness Blues starts in medias res with that fantastic first line. The “so” suggests that a story has been started before we came in and now here we are, feeling insecure about being older than our parents were when they had their first child, when the had seemingly made the decision to grow up, to care about a life that they created. This is followed by Pecknold’s lament of “oh, man that I used to be, oh man, oh my, oh me,” which sounds very much like any person in their mid to late twenties who goes to work every day and then gets drunk on the weekends and tries to remember what it was to actually like and enjoy things and not just live in a world of waiting for night: waiting for work to end or waiting for it to be time to go out.

There is a darkness to the songs on this album. It is not something sinister or even darkly spiritual—one doesn’t get a sense of questioning their entire existence or the terrible things they are capable of doing. Instead, there is a sense of stock-taking. It is brooding music that is buoyed by the harmonies and the “folk” playing that have been carried over from Ragged Wood. The music on Helplessness Blues reminds me of late-era Simon and Garfunkel more than anything. Where the harmonies on Ragged Wood were so prevelant and startling that they almost seemed forced, though welcome and well-done. After repeated listens, Ragged Wood became a style of music that one played—a back to basics, folky independent rock that wouldn’t be complete without the angelic group harmonies. When you listen to Helplessness Blues a handful of times, you are left with the feeling that what you are listening to is important, that whatever you take from the songs will end up meaning something to you, that this album will be something that you return to in ten years. The harmonies are still there, but they are used to compliment the complexities of the subject matter and the sensations that the band are attempting to give word and music to. There is an heoric, rambling, cinematic quality to “Battery Kinzie” that wouldn’t have appeared on Ragged Wood. Likewise, “Lorelai,” using a Bob Dylan chord progression, is a song that is meaner, more concretely visual and haunting in its presentation of thinking about someone that you can’t love anymore. Who hasn’t spent part of their twenties having long nights with dreams about a lost love? Having dreams so vibrant that they could be real and that makes whatever loss you are feeling fresher than it felt before you went to sleep after a few beers

*                          *                        *                         *                        *                       *

When I finished the Cliff Walk in San Francisco, we waited for a bus in Sunset Park to take us back to the part of the city she lived in. We were both slightly red from the sun and our legs were tired. A slow wind blew along the desolate streets picking up sand and dirt. I thought of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown and for some reason I started humming a song that an acquaintance of mine had written.

“What are you humming?” my old love asked.

“This song ‘Take My Car.’ This guy that I know wrote it. Tony Wain.”

She looked away back to the sun over the Pacific. “Don’t know him.”

“He’s a good guy. One of those good people you meet sometimes.”

“Just good Topeka people,” she said.

I recognized the line from a movie I liked. “Do you want to see me feed a mouse to my snake?” I said playing along.

She laughed and we were both quiet as the small electric sign in the bus stop said that there were three more minutes until the bus came. I tried to whistle but my lips were dry and I decided that there was nothing to say.

*                          *                        *                         *                        *                       *

Your twenties are supposed to be the best and worst time of your life; too many movies and songs have tried to capture the aimless feeling of having youth, freedom and not a lot of money. But there is something absolutely attractive about it time and time again. We all look great in our twenties, we are allowed to make mistakes, pick the wrong job, the wrong apartment and the wrong lovers. Everything is at stake and yet nothing is at stake because we have no mortgage, no children, we having nothing to worry about but making money, paying the rent, getting laid and getting drunk. Yet, you listen to a song like “Battery Kinzie” on Helplessness Blues, a song that may not be as obviously poignant as some of the other track, and you can’t help but remember that the whole point of getting to the age of thirty is that you have to learn what it is that is important to take with you. When I hear the song, I think of myself has that heroic loner that I’ve always wanted to be, truly wandering and not caring where I end up. But the truth of the matter is that I know that’s not how it works. You end up wandering through your life, but you are not alone, you just pare things down to the essentials, to what is absolutely important. You find those simple things and you love the hell out of them because they are simple and they can be enjoyed. That’s what you do, even if it means realizing that you don’t recognize people, places and things that were once immensely important to you. And if someone tells you that loving something simple is boring, then they have no sense of adventure.

2006-2008: A Fan's Notes

In the summer of 2006, I was maybe as lost as I’ve ever been.  That summer vacation marked the thankful end to an alienating second semester of my junior year of college.  I had returned from my study abroad in Ireland which was nothing more than a prolonged drinking binge with little study of linguistics and a brief visit to the Martello tower on the sea where Joyce lived with Oliver St. John Gogarty where I watched an old couple swim under grey December skies.  I had returned to a school I wasn’t quite fond of to see most of my friends either graduated, graduating or dismissed.  This semester had begotten quite a few bad habits that I was more than hoping to get rid of.

As that May got off to a wet start, I found myself looking for ways to occupy my time, which is also known as a summer job.  I had spent most of my summers before 2006 working in my father’s warehouse that was part of his veterinary supply business.  However, we both thought that it would be better for my own sake that I move on from those canine and feline anesthetics, antihistamines and antibiotics to something less dusty and more substantive. 

I applied for jobs as a strawberry picker (not a racial or sexual innuendo), a waiter at a country club, a janitor at a pool club and a journalist at the town newspaper.  None of these options took and I was beginning to get desperate.  However, I soon found a job working as a camp counselor for a summer camp at a boarding school near my home whose campus happened to sit right up on the waters of Head of the Harbor – anyone who is familiar with the North Shore of Long Island knows that this is quite a beautiful area. Simultaneously, I had happened to land a minimally paid (read gas money) position at a local fitness magazine with a staff that was comprised of myself and an overweight woman who would sometimes massage people by candlelight while I interviewed local fitness celebrities over the phone.  Although, I did once interview Victoria Recano of Entertainment Tonight.

That June was tremendously hot - as the rest of the summer was, or maybe I just remember it that way – and work at the camp seemed easy enough.  They needed me to “float” from group to group, but when one of my teenaged colleagues would be spending too much of his summer vacation vacationing with his family, they stuck me with a group of fifth graders.  Although the work was fine, I was still finding myself in bad habits: getting drunk at strangers’ houses and falling asleep to wake up in the middle of the night and walk home or to call the mortalest of enemies to “just help me with a ride home, man,” littering beer cans in the roads in my neighborhood, riding around with drunk people.  As I saw my final year of college approaching once the weather grew cooler and more exciting in September, I began to feel anxious at the walls of my life, which I had constructed with such uncaring indifference and distance, caving in.

It was at this time that A Hundred Miles Off by the Walkmen came out.  I had followed the Walkmen sporadically before that album.  As most people my age, I was infected with “The Band Fever” during high school and scrounged for any new piece of music by a band that had inserted the word “the” in front of their name.  So, I had gotten my hands on the Walkmen’s first two albums in bits and pieces, downloading singles.  I knew they had come from a cult band by the name of Jonathan Fire*Eater as well.  However, it was A Hundred Miles Off that set the tone for that summer and for perhaps some change in me that I am still feeling or trying to understand.

During the heat of the day, I would take the kids to the pool, to the harbor of Head of the Harbor, to the sound at Long Beach in Smithtown, to the dirt fields to play soccer, to the basketball courts to teach them the art of the layup and the bank shot and to relive my past high school hardcourt glories; I would encourage their weirdnesses, hobbies and secret interests that they may have normally been embarrassed to share, because if I thought it was OK and if I looked like an older kid who was not quite an adult but not quite a kid, then I must know something about what was cool.  So while my colleagues were groping and horny teenagers or teachers trying to make money during their summers, I was a privileged college student, daydreaming rock n’ roller/country singer (listening to a LOT of Gram Parsons in these days) and aspiring writer who was prematurely trying to dry himself up on the short side of forty (40). 

So, after the last pieces of dust from the last SUV picking up the last kid had settled around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon, I would hop in my own SUV - a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder - and slide A Hundred Miles Off into the Bose CD player.  Then, I would begin to imitate Hamilton Leithauser’s insane Dylan whine as the mariachi horns of “Louisiana” spoke to me about having “my hands full all summer long” while there is “thunder and lightning a hundred miles off.”  I’d get wistful – and so did the plunking and playful piano - as I drove along the sloping horse field lined streets and through the shimmering leaf sunlight and think of hammocks under trees and of past summer girls that I’d lazily cared for and of Levin standing on the balcony of his home looking at the storm clouds roll in over his lime grove.  It seemed like things would get better just like he’d thought at the end of Anna Karenina.

Or on other days, I would feel my restlessness rise and subside, just like the insane rubber band tempo of “Tenleytown,” which thrashes and then stalls like no other song in the history of mankind. I’d listen to this gem of a song and scream at the top of my lungs with the windows of my car rolled down, feeling young and unjaded, feeling everything very immediate and real and knowing that even though when I got home, things would all be still in the late afternoon to evening light, that the energy was always out there.  That I could grab it and access it whenever I wanted to and that even if things were still and hazy, that it was OK to sit on the porch and think about that.  Or, in the dank basement of the magazine office, flubbing my way through another interview with a mother of three weightlifter while my “boss” and her Latvian boyfriend fed each other cheesecake, that in the end its all just a damn joke anyway, tempered by our own made up melancholy and seriousness at not getting the whole thing.

And yet, there were other days, when I would temper my own perceived melancholy with a real melancholy while I listened to “Emma, Get Me a Lemon” with its pounding verses and soaring gut wrenching choruses.  And I would think about moments with girls that I actually did love or maybe could have loved if I paid attention or were astute enough to listen to myself.  I’d play my air guitar behind the wheel of the car and while thinking about those passing, starry visions of my past, would feel the extreme restlessness that the chorus builds in a listener as well.  Sometimes I would be driving at night and listen to the album, and if, while stopped at a stoplight or stop sign, “Emma, Get Me a Lemon” was on, I would look out into the darkness and smell in the perfume from the trees and homes all around me.  First, I would let the car stall and wish I had a cigarette, then a notion would hit me, something profound, something to due with the slight shade between the darkness of tree leaves in the summer and of the sky when its clear.  That notion would pass and I, not knowing what it was, would drive on, ambling after it in my mind.

Soon, though, the camp was over and my body had been appropriately sunburned with little use of suntan lotion throughout its duration.  I wrote the kids nice messages in their camp yearbooks and told them that I wished them the best.  I meant all the things I wrote to them; because what I learned from them was that their little lives were infinitely more interesting than mine and that if these little kids thought that I was a good camp counselor, than there must have been something still human left in me after all.  And that was something to build on; that was something to have confidence about, as small as it may have been. 

The summer wore on for a few remaining weeks and I drank comfortable beers by my pool with whatever friends were still around and I cooked dinners with my family.  But, I always found myself up late at night driving and listening to the album.  The last song is a cover of the Mazarin song “Another One Goes By.”  It’s a shuffling soul beat that could have even been a Roy Orbison song.  I’ll break my little “voice” character here to say that it is literally one of the best songs of all time.  There was one lyric that always stuck with me, “Don’t know what to offer you when I’m only broke and lonely.”  It struck me because that was how I had often felt towards the people in my life.  And yet this summer had gone by, another one floated by, and there was more that I could offer and I was bound to determine that as I packed my gold SUV full of crap to take to my final semester at a college I had outgrown enough to finally enjoy.

Flash-forward two years and I’ve of course fallen in love with other bands and other girls and other waterfront settings.  Now, I’m living in Brooklyn, finishing up one of the best and most exhausting summer of my life and lo and behold (Bob Dylan and the Band Basement Tapes reference) the Walkmen are releasing a new album under the radar.  I of course leap on the damn thing once I hear about it.  I get it early and I start playing the songs to death on my rooftop sitting there in the heat with my friends and piling up beer cans and laughing while the fluorescent light of my kitchen shines out onto the black tar and above us, the light pollution makes that terrible illuminated canopy bed that feels so inevitable.  The songs this time around were subtler, refined in places were  they were edgier.  They had not lost their edge, but rather they had grown into it, expanded on it.  There was something comfortable in the guitar and vocals on these songs and there was something comfortable in my foot up on the white table on my black tarred roof.

I got tickets to a show the Walkmen played at the Bowery in August 2008.  They blew me away.  It was the most excited I had ever been to see a show.  I knew all the songs and the show took place on the day the album was released.  And those reverby, echoey songs stuck with me as the summer died out with the romances I had.  Those wailing and wistful vocals grew stronger and bolder as the winter months came and I enjoyed the first snowfalls of my living in New York.  And as the rest of the world caught on to how good the album was.  I realized that this album and this band had transcended being simply good or important to me – they were a part of me, or rather they felt like they had come from the source of my creativity of what causes me to speak and want to put something out into the world.

You & Me is an extremely melancholy album. The single “In the New Year” is all about a narrator who is still living at an old address even though things around him are changing.  His friends are married to all of his sisters, and even though everything is changing and his heart is in the strangest place, its going to be a good year moving out of the darkness and into the “fire.”  This song was an anthem – at least to me and those I knew – when it came out.  It was to me because my life had certainly changed and was – is – continuing to change and I could only see the good in that.  Even, if sometimes those old yous and those old times get blurry and out of focus and don’t seem familiar to you, you have to believe its going to be a good year, because even if you are living at the same old address, your old bum friends got it together enough to marry your sisters.  And if your heart is in the strangest place, then you are on the verge of figuring something out.

And then there is “Red Moon” a slow pirate or boat waltz that makes one think of a calm night at sea.  The singer and his horns think of some loved one that he’s lost and the dynamics and space of the song allow this common tale to gain a resonance.  The rest of the music falls out at the right places to emphasize the echo of the vocals and then the horns come in to suggest the warmth of the breeze before the singer says, “I miss you, there’s no one else. I do. I do.” And the song comes to a graceful end.  It doesn’t matter who that’s about.  Those lines are true because they’re simple and we all want to say that to someone. Whether the motion or the words are inappropriate or misplaced or not.

“Red Moon” flows perfectly into “Canadian Girl,” which builds and builds from a pleasant little shuffle to a soaring coda with horns and chiming guitars as the singer tells the girl he’s singing to that she’ll miss him when he’s gone because she “is the morning” and he “is the night” and only he “still calls her” his.  I could never quite figure out what this song was about, but it sounded romantic enough and if you don’t fall for that horn coda, then I don’t know what kind of soul you have or if you are even capable of romanticizing the small postures in life.

The Walkmen don’t lose their edge ever and “Four Provinces” proves that.  Maybe the most artfully aggressive song since “The Rat” this song packs a thump that doesn’t allow you to not shake or groove.  There is a break in this song where the horns come in that adds an element of grace that “The Rat” never achieved.  When the singer says “the next time I see you at Sophia’s place” there is a mastery over the phrase.  He knows the world he’s traversed in and even moved past, however the familiarity still makes him uneasy and puts him on edge as he finishes the song “every bone in my body broken one time or two/every hour of the long day trying to spend it with you/every year that I’m living trying to stick by your side/the sun goes down moon comes up sky is black and blue/me I stand running with you.”  There is something simple and also tumultuous in the lines, which is just like the whole song itself.  When you know your world in and out, it can be very simple, but the simplest things, when focused on can breed endless complications and disturbances.  Just ask Joyce’s Dubliners.

The main event of this album is “If I Lost You,” which perfectly melds the two sides of the Walkmen – the aggressive and dramatic, and the cool, controlled shuffle.  This is all about a car driving through the night, maybe even just circling a neighborhood with the kids in the backseat.  Yet, just like in all the songs on the album there is a line about missing someone when they’re gone.  The song picks up steam and you can start hearing those horns in the background, while the drums begin to pound a little louder and that guitar chime becomes more of a wail to match the singer’s vocals as he asks someone throw him a rope. “I knew you when I was young…I wish you were still around/I waited a long time/I lost you/ I was sleeping in the backseat when I got home/I lost you.” That’s how the song finishes on a dramatic and powerful blast.  And that’s very much how I felt – and still feel – about a lot of things in that end of summer through winter of 2008.

I saw the Walkmen two more times in that stretch.  They were the band of that moment for me even as Animal Collective became the band of the moment and of the scene and perhaps rightfully so.  However, what this has all been for is the fact that the Walkmen grew with me as I grew up.  I could have described that time period when You & I came out in the same Frederick Exley voice I did for my description of A Hundred Miles Off, however, I grew up.  In 2006, I was wild and all over the place just like The Walkmen were.  They were fidgeting and couldn’t stay in one spot.  Then they reached a mood on You & Me, they reached a mood and fleshed it out as far as they could and in doing so, they touched on levels of poignancy and craft that they never had before.  That’s what we should all be capable in our lives and our arts.  Focus and flesh it all out, know your form and your craft to its fullest to create what is timeless and forever poignant to others.

And maybe you can’t just compare yourself to a band or an album and maybe I haven’t grown up and maybe most of us haven’t grown up.  Sure, this isn’t anything that is going to change the world or make tragedy any easier.  Art wasn’t made for that, art was made for us to question our own makeups in a cracked looking glass and it is only through doing this that we can then go out and make that decision to change and heal the world – to take on the pain and toil that others can’t.  I’ve seen glimpses of that in myself and I’m going to try to find more and more of it as I figure out that I’m the least interesting person I know.   I can only hope the same for the rest of you.