#22 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

The Mistress by Yellow Ostrich

I’m not sure if things have always been this way and I’m just now noticing it (I’ve been paying close attention for a relatively short time), or if this is indeed a phenomenon of the way the internet is shaping the music industry today, but the process of going from a nobody to “oh my God everybody is talking about this new band right now and I must partake” has sped up considerably this year. There are a number of acts on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar that have gone this route, and #22 is the first we’ve come to.

I first heard of Yellow Ostrich via a tweet from @loserboy on November 2. I give messages like this a lot of clout, because @loserboy is John Richards, aka John in the Morning on KEXP, the most popular/influential DJ in indie music today on the most popular/influential independent music station in the nation. (A quick aside — if you’re reading this and have not heard of KEXP, please turn off whatever ambient noise (TV or otherwise) you currently have playing and tune in immediately). Man it’s taking me a long time to just get to the music already!

So, based on the tweet from @loserboy, I sought out “Whale,” the song posted above, by Yellow Ostrich. Then I downloaded the rest of the album (for free) and proceeded to devour it whole. Infectious, slow and brooding, upbeat and melodic all at the same time, it was a shining example of the DIY ethic and a triumph for the “little guy.” Yellow Ostrich is Alex Schaaf, who looks like he’s about 23 years old, from Wisconsin. Each song was written, recorded, performed and produced by him.

There are videos out there showing him doing the Andrew Bird / St. Vincent thing (using a sequencer to record multiple layers of sound linearly and have them overlap to create a full-band sound), but it appears as though he has done little to no performing outside of New York City. It’s great to read his Tumblr site, because you can see his popularity growing by reading from the first entry on June 7 to now.

OK, I’ll shut up now. If you hit play when you started reading this, then you’ll know if you like Yellow Ostrich or not. There’s not much else I can say.

__________________________________________

23. Halcyon Digest by Deerhunter
24. Been Listening by Johnny Flynn
25. The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth
26. Lisbon by The Walkmen
27. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel
28. All Day by Girl Talk
29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

Introducing Campfire OK, Seattle’s next big thing™. This is a live-performance video for “Strange Like We Are” (filmed by Christian Sorensen Hansen at KEXP’s studios). The band’s debut album, also called Strange Like We Are comes out in February. Look for it on next year’s Musical Bacon Calendar.

#23 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

Halcyon Digest by Deerhunter

OK, we’re finally breaking out of the singer-songwriter folk music that the Bacon Calendar has been mired in for what feels like weeks. Deerhunter is a difficult band to define for me. Even though they’ve been loved by critics since the beginning, they were off my radar entirely through their first three studio albums. I knew little about them, other than a rough estimation that they were “kinda like Animal Collective.” And while I’ve liked Animal Collective for a while now, I didn’t really think I needed anyone like them in my library.

But as you’ll see further on in the list, Deerhunter isn’t the only band that fits the loose mold that Animal Collective (and before that, Radiohead) pioneered. A couple months ago I got to see Bradley Cox and crew play, and as I wrote then, I was struck by the distinct lack of instrumentation on stage at the Showbox:

Four guitars and a bass guitar, all on stands; a drum kit, in the back, on the typical raised platform, dead center; two mics, positioned on opposite corners of the stage. Where were the noise makers, the knobs to tweak, the necessary keyboards that are the heart of nearly 100 percent of all touring indie rock acts? Not that I’ve been counting — didn’t think I needed to — but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a band without at least one keyboard on stage. And this is Deerhunter! Their albums are chock full of electronic goodness. Am I at the wrong venue?

And that’s what is most amazing about this band. Yes, they make very good psychedelic ambient rock, but they do it entirely on analog instruments, with not a single synthetically-generated sound among them. Give Halcyon Digest a listen and you won’t believe your ears. Go see them live, and you’ll be grinning from ear to ear.

__________________________________________

24. Been Listening by Johnny Flynn
25. The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth
26. Lisbon by The Walkmen
27. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel
28. All Day by Girl Talk
29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#24 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

Been Listening by Johnny Flynn

I know deep down my tastes in music are indirectly influenced by the internet’s biggest indie music critic, Pitchfork.com. But I also know deep down that Pitchfork’s taste doesn’t have to match my like or dislike for a band. Quite often it doesn’t; I still sometimes listen to Travis Morrison’s Travistan, which the website infamously gave an 0.0 rating. But it still gives me some sort of strange pleasure to feature a great artist in my 2010 list that is decidedly “indie,” but has somehow flown under the Pitchfork radar. So, please allow me to introduce Johnny Flynn.

If you manage to hail from somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, chances are a little better that you may have heard of Johnny and his band, the Sussex Wit. Been Listening is their second album, and even though they have little-to-no following here in the states, they managed to fill up the High Dive in Fremont with expats when they recently came through town — on a Monday night, no less. As I said in my review at that time:

Skinny, of average height, with a grey flannel shirt, levis, and a blonde mop raked across his head in that emo-boy way, he masterfully played the steel guitar he had strapped to his chest. The most surprising thing about him is the depth of his voice. Somewhere between Peter Murphy and Robyn Hitchcock, he sang one beautiful story-based tune after another.

Those of you that know Elvis Perkins’ music will find a familiar home in Flynn’s songs. Filled with horns, guitars, hollow-sounding percussion and the aforementioned steel guitar, Flynn paints a canvas of sound that you think you know, but can’t quite put your finger on. But I do hope you pick up Been Listening. You’ll thank me later.

__________________________________________

25. The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth
26. Lisbon by The Walkmen
27. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel
28. All Day by Girl Talk
29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#25 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth

This past Memorial Day I had the distinct pleasure of basking in the glory that is the Gorge in Eastern Washington for three days of musical bliss, otherwise known as Sasquatch! (The exclamation point is part of the festival’s name.) I got to see a number of bands I’d heard of but was unfamiliar with beyond their name. At the end of the weekend I was left with a new appreciation for a handful of them.

The Tallest Man on Earth was at the top of the heap. The moniker of Sweden’s Kristian Matsson, The Tallest Man on Earth played by himself on the medium-sized stage at Sasquatch!, in front of a couple thousand people. I wrote of his performance:

I’ve seen a number of folk artists at festivals over the years attempt to pull off the “lone-person on stage” bit — no backing band, no excesses, just a man and a guitar — but Matsson is the only one to ever actually succeed. His style of singing, somewhat Bob Dylan meets Tom Waits, with an acoustic guitar and some very strong lyrics about divorce and lost love, was mesmerizing. The crowd quieted down for the entire set, generally silent with rapt attention. He played the first few songs on an acoustic guitar, then moved onto an electric one, but carried through with his quiet fingerpicking throughout the set.

Matsson’s recorded work is a true reflection of this performance. The song heard in the video shown above, for “Love is all” from The Wild Hunt, is very similar to every other song on the album. I imagine his voice, like the voices I compared him to in my Sasquatch! review, polarizes people. Where do you land? I fell in love with the rawness of his voice and his lyrics, and his ability to command a stage. Watch the video above, head over to his MySpace page and give “King of Spain” a listen, and then just try to resist running out and picking up the album.

__________________________________________

26. Lisbon by The Walkmen
27. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel
28. All Day by Girl Talk
29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#26 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

Lisbon by The Walkmen

When The Walkmen created an album as good as You & Me, which I included in my Top 10 Albums of the Oughts, they set an impossible bar to surpass. The pressure to make something half as good as their previous album must have been insanely great. But they came pretty close.

Lisbon is not You & Me. These eleven songs sound somewhat like the long-lost b-sides to that seminal 2008 album. With Hamilton Leithauser’s strained-voice vocals pushing and pulling these songs along, you can’t help but think of the previous album. It creates a slight problem for me, hearing bits and pieces of the previous album throughout this new work. I estimate this will diminish in time, as similar situations have proven in the past (see The White Stripes, et al).

I’m curious to know what people who are not familiar with the band’s 2008 album think of this new work. Does it stand on its own, or am I so completely in love with You & Me that I can’t give an honest opinion about this new record? Give the video above a listen, and you’ll get a good feel for the band, but not necessarily a good feel for what they’re capable of. For that, you’ll need to pick up the record. I recommend that you do.

_p.s. I love the completely unplanned sentence above “…am I so completely in love with You & Me…” Of course I am: you’re all lovely!

__________________________________________

27. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel
28. All Day by Girl Talk
29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#27 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel

There are few musicians that have their strengths dialed in as well as Peter Gabriel. Emotion, dramatic crescendos, whisper-like lows — the man could sing “Row, Row Your Boat” and I’d have to fight back tears while listening to it. Scratch My Back is a collection of songs originally performed and made famous by other bands, covered here through the signature Gabriel filter.

Covering artists as varied as Elbow, the Magnetic Fields, and Paul Simon, the album is full of songs you know the words to but don’t recognize the arrangements. The brilliance of the album was that it was supposed to be released simultaneously with a companion album called I’ll Scratch Yours. With every artist covered on the Gabriel album in turn covering a song of his, it was going to be one of the most interesting projects I can recall in recent music history. But after Radiohead, David Bowie, and Neil Young declined to record covers of Gabriel's material, the companion album sadly was put on hold.¹

A few of the covers of Gabriel’s songs have been released via iTunes over the year (Stephin Merritt singing “Not One of Us,” Paul Simon singing “Biko,” Bon Iver singing “Come Talk to Me,” Lou Reed singing “Solsbury Hill,” Elbow singing “Mercy Street,” and David Byrne singing “I Don’t Remember”), but it’s unclear if there are any future songs to be released from the project.

The above video is not a song from the album. It’s a cover by Peter Gabriel nonetheless, this time of Tom Waits’s “In The Neighborhood.” My favorite rendition that Gabriel put on Scratch My Back is his cover of Bon Iver’s “Flume.” It’s absolutely heart wrenching, with every word dripping with emotion.

Some may say that Gabriel’s work is fairly clichéd and formulaic. And I don’t think I could disagree. But I’m also ok with that. I like the direction he takes with his songs, and I thoroughly enjoy going to those places with him. Like my grandfather’s cashmere cardigan sweater that I’m wearing as I write this, these songs are immediately familiar to me, wrought with meaning. And I will continue to come back to them time and time again.

^{1. And I’ll Scratch Yours finally saw release in September 2013, with Brian Eno, Joseph Arthur, and Feist filling in for Bowie, Young, and Radiohead.↩}

__________________________________________

28. All Day by Girl Talk
29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#28 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

All Day by Girl Talk

By now most everybody knows who Girl Talk is and what he’s about. But just in case: Girl Talk is somewhat of an anomaly in the music world. He creates new songs out of old songs unlike anyone before him. Everything in the sampling world is child’s play compared to what Gregg Gillis does with the popular songs he cuts up and splices back together.

Give the above song, “On No” — track #1 from his new and freely downloadable album All Day — a listen and you’ll get the gist of what he’s capable of. Some people find his approach to songmaking a bit much. I tend to listen to music as background filler, but this album forces itself to the foreground any time I listen to it. It’s full of songs you recognize, and I invariably find myself trying to pick apart each sample. Thankfully, there’s a website that does the work for you, telling you which samples are playing at any given time while listening to the album.

All Day doesn’t present anything new, but that’s ok in my book. What Gillis does is so unlike everyone else out there, it continues to feel fresh and new to me. The interesting twist this time around is the offering of the album for free. Not only does he sample a huge number of popular songs that he has not gotten permission to sample from the artists within, he’s now giving those newly compiled samples away for free. That’s gotta raise some hackles. And for that, I commend him.

__________________________________________

29. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.
30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#29 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head by Bobby Bare Jr.

Bobby Bare Jr. is one of my favorite performers on the planet. I’ve seen him at least nine times over the last seven years. Consequently, I am always excited when he puts out a new album. I had heard him play a few songs from this album before the album was released earlier this year, and those acoustic renditions he played on the small stage at the Sunset were just enough to leave me wanting.

Now, A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head isn’t his best album, but it would be hard to outperform the perfection that is The Young Criminals Starvation League. Also the usual name bestowed upon his backing band, TYCSL is hands down one of the best albums of the decade. For this new album, Bobby doesn’t credit TYCSL. It’s his first full length without them. I’m not sure if it’s the absence of that name for the backing band (the backing band has always been a rotating cast of characters), or the fact that a tree literally crashed into Bobby’s mother’s house and landed on her head, but this album is definitely his most rocking.

Being from Nashville, Bobby has a twang in his voice that is infectious, and a way with words that is unmistakably related to his father, Bobby Bare — a famous country act in his own right — and their long-time family friend Shel Silverstein. This album has some great stories, some very loud moments, and some quiet finger picking tunes as well. Give it a listen, and join me down in this world of Southern Rock.

__________________________________________

30. 03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan
31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

#30 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

03 to TEN by Knathan Ryan

It’s nice to have the opportunity to put an album on my Top 31 of the year that most everybody reading this blog has not yet heard. Allow me to introduce Knathan Ryan. He’s a salt-of-the-earth kinda guy, and his songs reflect that. (Full Disclosure: Knathan is a long-time friend of the Bacon Review.)

Knathan has been in (and is still in) a number of smaller bands throughout Seattle, in addition to his vast experience as a solo artist. 03 to TEN is the culmination of that experience. The music on this album is much grittier, loud, and fuzzed-out than any of his prior recorded works. But much like his previous works, the prose is amazing in it’s direct yet obtuse manner. You get the sense these are stories passed down through the ages, but somehow told through a reversed smoke filter. It makes for an emotional experience you won’t find in most “popular” music today. “Brother K,” the song linked above, is a great example of what you can expect on the album. Featuring Phil Peterson on cello, it’s a twisted tale of death and madness. Make sure to give it a listen all the way through, as it gets quite interesting at around the 3:30 mark.

One of the best things about this new album is that it can be had for free. Knathan has posted it over at bandcamp.com, which is a great site for works like this. It follows what’s now known as the “Radiohead Method,” where you can donate any amount to the artist who created the music, all the way down to $0.00, in exchange for being able to download the entire album right to your desktop. So you have no excuse: download this album right now. You won’t regret it.

__________________________________________

31. In This Light On This Evening by Editors

Welcome to the 2010 edition of the Musical Bacon Calendar.¹ December crept up on me this year, but thankfully I had a four hour plane ride in which I was able to comb through all the 2010 albums and quickly establish my top 31 of the year, enabling me to kick things off before midnight tonight. And wouldn’t you know it, as I’ve been mulling things over throughout the day, I have already modified the list I wrote not 10 hours ago.² So, without further adieu:

#31 on the 2010 Musical Bacon Calendar

In This Light On This Evening by Editors

My love for the Editors took a major hit after I saw them perform at the Showbox on February of this year. As I wrote then:

In the end, I think what brought the show down the most may have been the new songs. It’s hard to enliven music that, while recorded and reproduced beautifully in my headphones, generally leaves one feeling bored when performed. And no matter how hard a band can try to bring the songs to life on stage, they’re doomed from the start.

While I had listened to In This Light On This Evening many many times up to that performance (the album was released in the UK in October of 2009, and in the States in January 2010), I subsequently shelved it, never to return. This was partly due to my changed listening habits: I went to more shows in 2010 than ever before (I think), and I found it easiest to simply listen to whoever’s show I was going to next. But that couldn’t have been the whole story, because there are a handful of albums I’ve continued to listen to throughout the year in spite of that band not having a pending live performance in Seattle. The truth was that the Editors’ performance that night was so staged, I just felt I couldn’t go back.

Until this morning. I ended up accidentally playing the album in my headphones while developing this list. And quickly determined that they deserved to be added to the Top 31 of the year. The album itself is quite a departure for the band, going from guitar-lead songs to letting keyboards drive the melody. But the general feel remained the same: classic quite-loud-quiet, Joy Division / Depeche Mode-like structures. Which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just an observation. Hello, my name is Royal, and I like goth music. You should, too.

---

1. Formerly known as the Musical Advent Calendar, I have abandoned this Christian-laden name as it doesn’t relate very well to the task at hand, in the following ways: a) a true advent calendar counts down to Dec. 25. This calendar counts down to Dec. 31. b) This is not a Christian publication, and has nothing to do with Christ, but everything to do with bacon. OK, maybe not everything. But it has more to do with bacon than it does (Jesus H.) Christ. c) It’s more fun to have Musical Bacon. ↩

2. Earlier today, I had originally thought She & Him’s Volume 2 would be my #31 on the calendar. But after having listened again to In This Light On This Evening again today, it narrowly beat out Zooey and M. Apologies to those two people out there that I had prematurely revealed what I thought would be today’s charted band. Feel free to consider Volume 2 #32 on the list. ↩

One of the stranger things I’ve seen in a long while: Hot Chip, with the Bonnie “Prince” Billy version of “I Feel Better.” Not sure how I feel about any of it, but had to share it regardless.

Yellow Ostrich is the brainchild of Alex Schaaf, out of New York City. Most of the music he’s made over the last couple years is created entirely by himself. And did I mention that you can download it all for free? But slip him a few bucks for the effort — support good people making good music!

/via @loserboy

Chills. Those solos. My god.

merlin:

Dire Straits - “Sultans Of Swing” (OGWT; Recorded: Jan. 1978; Broadcast: May ‘78)

Gold. Taped two weeks before they started recording their first record—a full nine months before it was released.

Featuring variations on not one, but two, of my favorite guitar solos.

The man pulls-off like a mofo.

Trust me, this guy is amazing. John O, aka Diamond Rings, opened for Perfume Genius when I saw him play at the Crocodile recently, and he blew my mind. Read the review I wrote about the show to learn more about him, and keep your eyes/ears out for Diamond Rings’ debut album, out on Oct. 25. It‘s going to be HUGE.

/via @BrittneyBush

A rather long video that you don’t need to watch, but should bring yourself to put on in the background and listen to as you go about your day.

I just saw Frightened Rabbit for the second time last week, and the video above was recorded between those two sets. Neither time I saw them did they perform The National’s “Fake Empire” (47:40) or the Hold Steady’s “Southtown Girls” (1:06:23), but both of those covers make it well worth the price of admission to watch this awesome video.

Enjoy.