[you guys knew this was coming, didn’t you?]

so, in the few scant months since fleet foxes topped my list of locals to watch for in 2008, it seems as though the band has garnered a fair amount of amazement from fans far and wide, due to lots of hard work, quite a few amazing songs, and probably a little luck, as well. i’ve pretty much documented everything that’s happened to the band– type “fleet foxes” in the search engine and i’m sure you’ll find no less than forty posts, haha– but all points pretty much lead up to this album: their self-titled debut record.

fleet foxes is an extremely ambitious piece of music, with a plethora of instruments sticking their heads into the songs and popping out just as quickly. it’s a lush work that– as all great pieces of music do these days– draws from a wide range of inspirations and influences, including but not limited to: traditional and 60’s folk, chamber pop, and the occasional nod to vintage super nintendo RPG games. the multi-part, ethereal harmonies cascade throughout the songs, giving the tunes almost a choral feel from the reverb [an obvious, if overstated, talking point when discussing the band]. songs are often delivered in multiple movements; moving on to a different style in order to prevent the songs from losing momentum. and it works.

robin pecknold’s lyrics touch on life’s big themes: life [obviously], death, and escapism, but like another wildly talented pacific northwestern songwriter, phil elvrum of mt. eerie, pecknold writes these stories through the bright, beautiful lens of nature. throughout fleet foxes, woodland creatures scatter about, the yellow moon ascends, the snow and rain both fall, and rivers and streams flow mightily. first names are shouted out as often as places, and the lyrics paint an entire landscape, a land far off– both in time and distance– from modern america.

a bunch of hullabaloo has been made over the similarities that fleet foxes bear to my morning jacket, but i feel as though this is only accurate when discussing the bright voices of pecknold and jim james, both with high tenors so strong, they could each probably break down brick walls if they ever felt the desire. in sound, i feel as though fleet foxes are most similar to both midlake and yellow house-era grizzly bear; taking a well-worn genre like folk music, building on it in different ways, and fusing something classic with elements that are intangibly modern to create something that sounds ridiculously fresh.

keep in mind that the sun giant EP was recorded after fleet foxes, so if the former sounds a little more dynamic to you [although “your protector” is pretty fucking epic], this is why. however, whether on its own or as companion pieces with sun giant [as the EP will be packaged with the full-length on vinyl], fleet foxes takes a well-worn template and puts a fresh, inventive, and really incredible spin on it due to beautiful singing, outstanding musicianship, and poetic lyrics. and if all of you were expecting me to say all of these things, forgive me for being predictable, but i do have a feeling that fleet foxes will be an album that will stand the test of time.

remember when i referred to valet’s honey owens as a “portland-based multitasker?” well, in an interview for stereogum’s excellent quit your day job series, she reveals that digging through garbage for cool shit falls under that umbrella of tasks. here’s an excerpt from the interview:

One time I found diamonds in this old ’70s Nike jacket. That was pretty sweet. These Italian diamond dealers downtown were straight outta Meanstreets or something. Trying to sell them diamonds and explaining how I wasn’t a cop was quite enjoyable in this sort of sketchy kinda way. There were lots of locked doors and security henchmen in brown polyester suits to get through before finally arriving at the top floor to deal with ‘Tony’ the diamond cutter. Hilarious for sure.

in addition, naked acid, valet’s sophomore record, is somewhere in my top-ten favorite albums of the year so far. if you’re strictly a pop kid, “fire” will be right up your alley [sorta]. the rest will probably not be your cup of tea.

i love daytrotter. you love daytrotter. this week’s muxtape is pretty simple: it highlights my favorite daytrotter performances to date. who knows? i may share some favorites with you, or you may discover a few you haven’t heard already. well, here goes nothing. [SIDEBAR: i know quite a few of you jeffrey lewis fans on the internet, but NOONE wrote about his excellent daytrotter session. i’m superlatively disappointed.]

THIS WEEK’S THEME: bands with messy hair and smooth white faces: the best of daytrotter.

tracklisting:

one. dirty projectors- depression.
two. deerhunter- dr. glass.
three. the thermals- misfit.
four. horse feathers- father of failure.
five. sunset rubdown- winged/wicked things.
six. jeffrey lewis and the jitters- wildflowers.
seven. the mountain goats- ethiopians.
eight. phosphorescent- a picture of our torn up praise.
nine. shearwater- nobody.
ten. marissa nadler- sylvia.
eleven. castanets- strong animal.
twelve. david bazan- bands with managers.

hey, remember when i posted this and told you that if you didn’t enjoy “linger,” that i don’t know if we could be friends anymore? well, i just covered the song, so now, you don’t really have a choice. you probably should download it before it expires.

fresh cherries from yakima- linger (cranberries cover).mp3

one night not too long ago, a friend of my one of my sisters was hanging out at our apartment. i believe he was half-white/half-mexican, about 5′10″ or so, and wearing a black fitted cap and black, baggy clothes. he tapped on my bedroom door, where i was [naturally] working on a blog post. i was wearing my usual “chilling at home” wear: a super v-neck tee [american apparel? nice try. it’s from urban outfitters. theirs are thicker and less flimsy], skinny jeans, and a rag tied around my wrist. i sat down and opened a beer that he brought me. after a short conversation, he drunkenly slurred, “so, that one time when you bought me a beer, i was trying to get at you.” this is exactly what i thought i heard, but i didn’t really think so, thus asking him, “huh?” “i tried to get at you,” he replied. i gave him sort of a funny look and an awkward pause. “i’m bi,” he replies. in return, i give him a really awkward smile, and ask, “you don’t think i’m gay, do you?”

awkward pause. “you’re not?”
another awkward pause. “uhhhhh, no.”
“really?”
my patience starts to wear thin. “uhhhh, no.”

i then applauded his drunken courage as he looks down at the floor, absolutely mortified, and apologizes. i reply, “it’s cool, man. you didn’t know.” he then goes and hangs out with one of my sisters and has another beer.

i’m sure this really doesn’t shock any of you that have met me in person, but the whole “gay” thing does come up in conversation a whole bunch. i mean, i get it. i talk a certain way, most of my friends are girls, and the sexist, piggish, “alpha male” mentality that most dudes display sort of disgusts me. a white dude dressed like me would be called a “hipster,” but because of stereotypes, blah blah blah, i could wear the same thing as your average urban outfitters/american apparel/vintage boutique clerk and be called a “homo.” i’m not, but i get it. it’s cool.

“but why do you act like that? are you in the closet or something?” my thing is i don’t give enough of a fuck about what people think to hide in the closet. if i were gay, i’m sure being gay would be somewhere in one of my first posts on fresh cherries dot com.

that extremely lengthy intro was to discuss a topic that sort of plagues the rap community: homophobia. i’m sure you’ve heard about it, but a book came out yesterday entitled hiding in hip-hop: on the down-low in the entertainment industry, which is sort of an exposé on secretly-gay hip-hoppers, but sorta isn’t, because unlike superhead, terrance dean doesn’t name names for profit.

as jeff weiss brilliantly stated in his half-joking “guide to the gay rapper”, “the ‘gay rapper’ is hip-hop’s version of the bigfoot myth.” due to the rap world’s obsession with being the baddest, noone wants to out themselves. apparently, you can’t perpetuate your “gangsta rapper as superhero” status if you like dudes. superman’s not gay. batman had a ton of dime-pieces. even as geeky as spiderman was, he still pined after mary jane. so, there ends up being a lot of chest-thumping in public, and lot of alternative living in secret.

in 2005, right before the release of late registration, kanye west publicly stated that homophobia is pretty much the same as racism, something i will stand up and wholeheartedly agree with him on. if there’s anything just as stupid as generalizing, stereotyping, and hating someone of a different skin color, it’s doing the same thing to someone because of their sexual preference. legislators around the country define marriage as “a union between a man and a woman,” but interracial marriages were once illegal, as well. although there are lots of places that are tolerant of homosexuality, gay people are still very often ridiculed, taunted, feared, and often beaten to death, just because they prefer someone of their own gender. this should sound pretty familiar to those of us who don’t check “white/caucasian” on job applications.

terrance dean, the writer of hiding, states in an interview that he hopes the book will inspire someone mentioned [all names are changed to protect those “in hiding”] will have the courage to come out of the closet. i share this hope with dean, because i think if there were a person brave enough to do so, it will come a long way to strengthening the hip-hop community’s tolerance towards homosexuality, and make people realize that, as cliché as it sounds, no matter what color your skin is or what gender of person you like, we’re all human beings, and deserve to be treated as such.

let me preface this post by saying this: unlike 87% of the indie rock community, i can’t say that i’m much of a spoon fan. it’s not that they’re a bad band– they’re actually very good. it’s just that, being that they work is seemingly based on minimalism, they’re easily imitable; it seems as though any four-piece rock band could write these songs. at its worst, spoon’s sound is anonymous, even with frontman britt daniel’s raspy vocals. however, there are a few points in the band’s career where they have taken sparse elements and created impressive songs that most bands are incapable of writing.

“merchants of soul,” the closer of gimmie fiction, is one of these songs.

starting out with a lone drumbeat and a simple piano lick, the song seems like it was meant to get the listener bouncing from the start [something “i turn my camera on,” coincidentally from the same album, does pretty well, also]. afterwards, right before daniel chimes in with an instantly memorable vocal melody saying, “i was a heartbeat on the danger side,” off in the short distance are these awesome rhythmic handclaps. i think this has been said before, but in addition to the obvious influences [elvis costello, et al.], spoon’s best moments recall motown in terms of rhythm, melody, and– especially– economy.

lyrically, spoon songs are nearly always a challenge to figure out, but with its title and namedropping of ralph reed [a nearly extremist right-winger/founder of the christian coalition], it seems as though the song may be about people who turn profit from religion. lyrically, daniel nearly always seems inscrutable, so it’s a nice reprieve that the lyrics in “merchants of soul” are generally easy to figure out.

all in all, songs like “merchants of soul” help me see from the vantage point of so many of my friends that are spoon fans, and helps me realize that spoon could very well be one of america’s best bands.

over the past ten years, death cab for cutie has not only become one of my favorite guitar-pop bands, but they’ve also become one of my hometown’s biggest draws, second probably to only pearl jam in worldwide popularity among active seattle bands. and for good reason: ben gibbard has spent his entire career dissecting those uncomfortable moments in relationships where everything is on the cusp of falling apart. the other sides of love are well-represented, but, in my opinion, gibbard is at his best when he’s surveying the scene right before it all turns into wreckage and debris.

with no less than three truly-great albums, including one that’s probably somewhere in my all-time list [the recently “revisited” we have the facts and we’re voting yes], i would have been foolish to think that death cab’s discography would not have a blemish on its permanent record. plans was a slight disappointment in my eyes, not in the least due to the subject matter, but in the fact that the majority of the songs seemed a little sterile, the guitar interplay and interesting production [provided by guitarist/solo artist/for-hire producer chris walla] replaced by well-manicured pianos and major-label polish. of course, this would have been saved if the songs themselves were outstanding, and though there are some of those here [”marching bands of manhattan,” “stable song” (which is the band’s own “stability,” minus about six minutes or so), and the heartbreaking “i will follow you into the dark”], most of the songs were, sigh, fairly forgettable. which brings us to the present, and the band’s seventh full-length album.

opening with a lonely guitar and ben’s bright high-tenor, which creeps up to a falsetto, gibbard sings about his jack kerouac-inspired time in big sur, which ends up snapping your attention into place with a loud burst of distorted guitar(!) and an uncharacteristically forceful vocal from gibbard. next up comes the band’s eight minute lead single(!), “i will posses your heart,” featuring gibbard taking the role of an obsessive stalker(!!), after a bass-driven buildup of nearly five minutes.

“long division” is a driving number that recalls the photo album, complete with shout-along chorus. “your new twin-sized bed” has gibbard using new furniture as a metaphor for post-relationship loneliness. “grapevine fires” is a somber number recalling gibbard’s character watching his lover’s daughter frolicking in a graveyard, gleefully unaware of the pain that comes with visiting a cemetery. “you can do better than me” is a short, beatles-influenced track [complete with bright organs and bouncy drums and a piano breakdown] about staying with someone “out of fear of being alone.”

the record’s high point is “cath…,” a song that is begging to be the album’s second single, with a memorable guitar riff, an incredible chorus, and a pretty brilliant character study, featuring a woman who “holds a smile/like someone would hold a crying child,” which has got to be one of gibbard’s best lines. if “cath…” does end up being a single, it’s likely to be the band’s best one ever.

a notable point about narrow stairs is that the album contains more distortion and feedback than pretty much every other death cab release combined. there have been songs in the past where the band has been known to rock out [”tiny vessels”], and there have been songs where gibbard has written outside of himself [the scathing “styrofoam plates”], but perhaps you weren’t expecting them on the band’s second album on a major label, especially after the resigned, death-fearing tone of plans. generally, a band will either follow the same template that gave them a platinum plaque, or they’ll derail the train entirely by creating some inaccessible art-piece. death cab for cutie has done neither of these things.

if anything, narrow stairs is a continuation of transatlanticism; a very solid pop/rock album from a band that quite obviously has a decent recording budget, with carefully written and insightful songs, with interesting [but not overproduced] production. as the band themselves have said, the album’s not going to convert anyone who already dislikes the band, nor is it going to scare away diehards. if anything, the adventurousness [both in sonics and in lyrical content] of narrow stairs will probably only draw confusion from people who credit plans as their first death cab record, because narrow stairs sounds like the album that plans should have been: an above-average creation from one of america’s biggest bands, complete with mature songwriting and good production; a record that doesn’t dwell in the past, but doesn’t go too far into the future as to sound like a complete different band. as far as mainstream bands go, i don’t think there’s one that’s created an album better than narrow stairs in a while.

[reppin’ the northwest, sorta.]

so, once again, pitchfork.tv is sonning every other online video network. a couple of months ago, fresh cherries favorite and current portland resident ray raposa of castanets [but, given his migratory patterns, he could very well have moved somewhere else in the time that it took to write this post] revealed details about tendrils, a video companion to the fresh cherries from yakima feel-good hit of the year and year-end list-maker in the vines. i was, naturally, pretty stoked about this. then, i became even more stoked when i found that pitchfork.tv is playing tendrils in its entirety for one week only.

tendrils features appearances from dave and angel from dirty projectors, phosphorescent, a preview of city of refuge [the forthcoming castanets LP, due sometime this year], and a fair amount of pretty weird shit. you have six days to watch the film before pitchfork takes it down.

as for me, i’m going to look up golden ghost on myspace. you’ll see why about halfway through.

“new york streets/where killers would walk like pistol pete/and pappy mason/gave the young boys admiration,” starts off the opening track of nas’ sorta-underrated 2002 album, god’s son, behind an instantly recognizable james brown breakbeat. the authority in which nasir spits over the beat is what sells the stories he spins over the course of the track, but the lyrics themselves recall the brilliance in which nas has shown in past efforts.

the first verse runs through a character in his drunk teens, taking a hand-to-hand and ducking the cops, and as a grown-up, going to dice games and thinking about his man, who is in jail while his girlfriend is running the streets, sleeping with other guys as he himself is behind bars with an issue of playboy underneath his prison bunk. the last part of the verse is where nas shows his superior storytelling prowess:

in the courtroom, the look in his eyes is wild
triple-homicide, i sit in the back aisle
i wanna crack a smile when i see him
throw up a fist for black power
’cause all we want is just freedom
he took the court officer’s gun and started squeezin’
grabs the judge, screams out, “ain’t nobody leavin! everybody–”

the second verse is just as vivid, with a character dealing with an independent southern hip-hop label, in the southern hip-hop tradition of selling albums right from the trunk of their cars, who also had the coke game sewn up, and offering nas’ character a laced blunt. the second part of the verse deals with a los angeles-based cousin who runs with crips, getting set up and reenacting a scene from a jet li movie. it’s pretty fascinating stuff, and it flashes shades of the nas from yesteryear, hip-hop’s foremost poet/storyteller.

the thing about nas is that because of the fact that he wrote what is widely regarded as the best hip-hop album in history on his very first try, noone’s going to let him live it down. i don’t think anyone’s going to allow him to write another illmatic, because of the obscenely high quality of the album, making it just as much our fault as it is his that he hasn’t been able to create another classic, timeless album. i do, however, still think nas is CAPABLE of doing so, but it’s just a shame that he’s invested his time into making controversial publicity stunts [hip-hop is dead, the forthcoming album, titled– ahem– nigger] rather than genuine artistic statements. i’m still rooting for nas, though, because i feel he has a little untapped brilliance left in that mind of his, and he’s too busy courting controversy to actually use it.

SEATTLE: nas is performing at the showbox sodo next friday, may 16th.

sorry i’m late today. this shouldn’t mean much to very many of my daily readers, just one of the really important ones that live several time zones ahead of me.

so, last friday, colin meloy played seattle on his third solo tour. and being as though meloy’s somewhere in my top-ten of all-time favorite songwriters, i really wanted to be there, but you may not have heard that i sorta had a prior engagement. in addition to playing the standard meloy-penned decemberists tunes [did he play any tariko songs, anyone?], he covered sam cooke’s “cupid” [how is that sam cooke covers CD, by the way?], and there was a rumor flying around that he even played neutral milk hotel’s “the king of carrot flowers.” so, this week’s muxtape is dedicated to meloy. [DISCLAIMER: the fresh cherries from yakima song in this mix is not another shamless plug; i actually wrote the song with his influence in the back of my mind.]

THIS WEEK’S THEME: >throwing out candy that looks like money: songs colin meloy should cover.

one. shearwater- nobody
two. phosphorescent- the waves at night
three. fleet foxes- oliver james
four. fresh cherries from yakima- don’t mind me, i’m just unconscious
five. page france- dogs
six. elliott smith- rose parade
seven. the mountain goats- new star song
eight. iron & wine- my lady’s house
nine. modest mouse- baby blue sedan
ten. deer tick- these old shoes
eleven. smog- palimpsest
twelve. the avett brothers- die die die