I yearn for and seek out the new song, band or sound in a genre of entertainment that by its very nature is as derivative as it comes. So how much of a surprise can a new song bring or is this just my aging memory forgetting on Groundhog Day what I listened to before?
Much of what laughingly passes for 'popular' music is not that popular in terms of either the number of people listening or for how long they listen to it. The marvels of the interweb have taken the blight of fixed playlists from radio and customized if for the listener, further removing the need to know what you are listening to, as long as it sounds like something you like - the Curse of Pandora. Music is no longer objectified and idolized in the way I worshipped at the Altar of a newly bought gatefold sleeve, as I read the holy writ of liner notes and memorized the catechism of recording engineer and additional bass played by. As much as hipsters buy vinyl in increasing volumes for the reliquary power as much as the sound quality I think less people are keeping and possessing music in a physical form, not even an .mp3 and instead are streaming from Spotify or Google instead, the Plague of the Playlist. The shock of the new technology is not the portability or the immediacy or the encyclopedic diversity but ultimately its impermanence.
I notice that even though I am an avid consumer of vast volumes of music the depth of knowledge about a song or an album is so shallow and temporary without the physical mnemonics assisting in the engraining process and much of what I listened to 6 months ago is fast becoming a fading echo and what I listened to 10 years ago is reduced to a few pin pricks of light amongst a backdrop of uniform dusk of memory.
However when something does come along that really does strike a chiming chord and that weeks later I am still singing, humming and, annoying to both women and dogs, whistling a song or songs then some magic must be at work. In the most recent case it has been the happy acquaintance with Alex Schaaf's bountiful output as Yellow Ostrich. Inventive and prodigious is that output with 4 EPs and 6 full length albums in 5 years and I am in awe of the imagination at work both individually and in collaboration with Michael Tapper, Jared van Fleet and latterly Zachary Rose, who have taken what was a solo effort started in Wisconsin into a full blown noise making machine in Brooklyn. Alex Schaaf does all this while holding down a day job digitizing vintage home movies and touring and when I met him last week selling the merch to pay the bills.
It helps that Michael Tapper is an amazing drummer who experiments with differing time signatures so that they explore different ways to propel the stories coming out of Alex's exploding imagination. The latest offering is Cosmos named after the Carl Sagan love fest with high resolution photographs of the heavens that I remember watching many moons ago.
I managed to miss them play at the Bottom of the Hill a couple of months ago through the embarrassing circumstance of just not having the energy to drag my sorry my ass down there. So I was relieved and excited when they were added as support to the Antlers tour for Familiars on the West Coast. They played the old lady that is the Great American Music Hall, a venerable venue that dates back from the 30's in its current form and started in a prior identity in the ashes of the 1906 earthquake. Its been a strip club but in its present guise it is a small, balconied venue much beloved by aging hippies who remember seeing the Dead there. It is next door to an ongoing strip club in the area of San Francisco called the Tenderloin which is a shithole, literally and there are maps tracking the incidence of human feces.
They played the typical 40 minute support set, no encores allowed but were obviously enjoying the GAMH vibe and it was a busy Friday night crowd with the typical SF wafting weed cloud looking like mustard gas rolling over the Somme in the stage lights and everyone buzzed. Songs from Cosmos dominated for obvious reason but they played the sultry Ghost from the EP of the same name and Marathon Runner but not the 'hit' Whale nor my favorite Seven Umbrellas - how can you not love a song that starts with the line "A good man is a dry man, thats what my father told me, and I believed him".
Then with a brief on stage unsynchronized swim amongst cables and drum sets the Antlers took the stage and played their way silently through Familiars.
Silently in so far as Pete Silberman could not even muster the cliches of his calling, it does bug me more than it should but how tough is it to say "How ya doing Cleveland!" or "You having a good time?", really? The Antlers do not do jocular songs about he-horses and she-horses or multiple umbrellas, thats not what you go to see them for. You get intensity and the fragile falsetto telling sad stories. They played the slightly more catchy Palace but after 7 of the 9 songs the exact same beat and phrasing was starting to drag and I missed already the crazy noisy harmonies of the flightless bird but was stuck instead on the horns of a much more noble beast.
Especially live the energy of the listener reacts to the energy from the performer and the response is coerced and cajoled to a mutual experience. Without the variety, without the surprise, without the contrast there is no amazement, no astounding stories. So as much as I love the album Familiars the live experience was not adding to the memory banks in a way that I will look back and say "great gig", which was exactly the response to Yellow Ostrich.
So when you listen to their fine album Cosmos you should ask yourself what would Carl Sagan drink? I think he looks like a man who would drink whisky on the rocks in a very chunky highball glass, or he does in my memory of him, being a sophisticated man I think a Lagavulin 16 year year old should do the trick.
