XL, 2013
I think I was probably too harsh with Contra.
Or maybe I wasn’t, I haven’t listened to the album since I reviewed it in 2010.
I referred to it as milquetoast and suburban and background music. I also wrote
“I’m hoping it’s a sophomore slump because I want Vampire Weekend to make
another record full of killer pop songs that are so good I don’t care that
they’re copping African rhythms or whatever.” That was three-and-a-half years
ago. I’ve mellowed out a bit. I’m still a bit of a wanker but I feel like I’ve
gotten better at avoiding the hype machine after spending my entire tenure at
KJHK living inside of it and, as music director, piloting the whole fucking
thing (or at least that’s how I thought of it). I lived in trends, the next big
thing, and that’s why when I graduated I listened to nothing but the Lemonheads
for six-months straight.
Shortly after the release of their debut LP, I had a chance
to interview the band with a friend of mine in the basement of Liberty Hall
before a show. There is an audio file of that clumsy interview floating around on
KJHK’s webserver (or better yet, it is gone forever. I never transcribed it). I
was already a fan, but despite bassist Chris Baio’s bulldoggish attitude any
time I said the word “hype” or “blogosphere,” Ezra Koenig was a total
sweetheart and I came away understanding that they really weren’t faking. That
though I didn’t have very much in common with these east coast boys who dressed
like preppies, their hooks were pure, their songs were catchy, and their lyrics
weren’t just a bunch of silly bullshit. They had a sense of humor but never got
jokey. They were fresh.
Modern Vampires of the
City feels like more of a successor to their eponymous debut than Contra (although I suppose the three fit
together and illustrate an evolution that is important to judging the band’s
work as a whole). It is a violently elegant pop record, and I’m not just saying
that because of the harpsichord that pops up and really makes everything sound
like a wonderful period piece. The melodies are both immediate and subtle. They
are catchy enough to get stuck in your head with enough muscle to get better
and better upon repeat listening. Which is why “Step” is the perfect first
single. It almost sounds lazy. The
song is so spare at times, with Koenig singing just through some light drums
and a sleepy bass line. But then there’s the harpsichord, and the
pitch-shifting that adds so much texture to the record. “Step” succeeds because
it sounds both nostalgic and futuristic.
I pretend that I’m some kind of purist. A wonk bemoaning the
fact that none of the music these days has guitars and it’s all a bunch of
dipshits standing in front of laptops. And here Vampire Weekend have made one
of the best indie rock records of the year and nothing is real. The live drums
have been sequenced and programmed to death, the vocals are frequently
manipulated, and the EQs have been clipped and manipulated to soften
everything. But the songs come through so well. The melodies are what matter,
and you can tell the band spent hours and hours trying to make them shine as
best as they possibly could. Sometimes I feel like the great records are the
ones that make me realize I’m wrong about something. The first time I listened
to “Ya Hey” I fell back onto the futon halfway through the song and just
listened. I stopped tinkering with my fantasy baseball team and just sat back
and listened to the music. I never do that. I have a sort of amendment in my
constitution of musical appreciation that says if a record can get me to put
down everything and just listen, it has done something magical. It’s a sad
relationship to have with music, but holy shit, when something cuts through the
multi-tasking haze of my brain and really makes me stop and go “Goddamn, that
is a fucking great,” that’s what I live for. The more I listen to Modern Vampires of the City, the more
that keeps happening.
Matador, 2013
Kurt Vile always reminds me of the worst time in my life. That would be the
summer after I graduated college. 2009. I’d just met the girl I was going to
marry and I had absolutely no prospects. No job. Nothin’ but a girl who loved
me which is really always enough pretty much. But I was dicking around. I was
freelancing for the Pitch and that ruled but it was still college mentality.
Adulthood was foreign at the moment. And then one of my best buddies Chris Bianculli
got me a job at the property management company he worked for. First
Management. They own a bunch of real estate in Lawrence and I heard the dude
who owns the company has a giraffe or an elephant and a private jet. Some
serious fucking moneyed guy. Anyway, I got a job doing move-out inspections,
apartment cleaning and move-in inspections. I tried to hang on and at least
have a ten-hour a week job to hang on to until I found something but the hours
kept vanishing. Eventually Chris got fired for some nebulous reason and the
person hired to fill his role managing the Canyon Court apartment complex in
West Lawrence was totally out of touch. The first day I worked there she had
left this note that instructed me to post all these fliers on every door of every
apartment at Canyon Court but specifically instructed me NOT to throw all of
them in the trash. It might have read like a joke if it hadn’t implied that I
was some simpleton and was just going to say “fuck what my boss told me, I’m
gonna play pool all day because there is a pool table literally twenty feet
from my desk.” So I wrote her a note. It basically said “I think what you wrote
here was really condescending. Why would you even imply that I would throw
these fliers in the trash? I was paid to do a job and I am going to do that job
and I think it’s kind of messed up that you implied that I wouldn’t do the job
I was hired to do.” So I put up the fliers in the summer heat and went back to
work. Work basically consisted of waiting for residents to get locked out of
their apartments and charging them $25 to get let back in. It was a shitty
place but I did it because I didn’t have a job. The rest of the job mostly
consisted of playing pool and putting up balloons. I was still pretty annoyed
with the new manager, and since she specifically instructed that I put up
balloons I used the office’s helium tank to pump up like fifty balloons and I
daisy chained them with ribbon and made a monolith of balloons out by the pool.
I should note that the tone of her instructions was pretty horrible and that my
note really wasn’t that bad. OK, it was pretty bad. I was totally in 22-year-old
fuck you mode, but really, she had it coming. Because if you just took over an
apartment complex and you want to win the trust and respect of your underlings
you don’t get all I AM THE BOSS AND YOU WILL RESPECT ME on them. Because that
is some stupid shit they probably teach you in business school. I don’t know. I
never went to business school and I could probably out-manage any of these
fucking pretenders at this point in my life. But anyway, I got fired for my
transgressions. It was a beautiful firing. Grandiose and full of fuck you. A
firing I never thought I would have because I am usually such a dutiful
employee. Always on time, always eager to learn and eager to help. Once when I
was working at the Chase Court Apartments KU Basketball legend Sherron Collins
got locked out of is apartment and I let him back in for free! I knew I should
have charged him, but who charges a local hero a fee to get let back into his
shitty overpriced apartment that is probably being covered by the University
anyway? Not this guy. When I was doing move-in inspections at Apple Croft (the
lowest-rent of all First Management’s properties dubbed “Crapple Loft” by
pretty much everyone because it was a dump) I encountered a German exchange
student who was baffled by the amount of roaches in his apartment. The roaches
were myriad. I’m talking climbing up the walls, climbing on the ceiling and
navigating the carpeting. He had mattress cased in plastic wrap leaning up
against the wall and the roaches had managed to find a way inside and were
climbing all over the mattress.
“This
is really messed up,” I told him. “I’m going to get someone in here right
away.”
He
just laughed. “In Berlin, apartments are much worse,” he said in his immaculate
accented English. He poked at one of the roaches under the plastic wrap over
the mattress and I ran back to the office at Chase Court to get the manager to
send the exterminator out. Most of the apartments at Apple Croft had roaches.
Most of the apartments had black mold too. I reported this problem and they
just sent out Patrick the maintenance guy to paint over the black mold with
white paint. Done and done. Apple Croft was also home of the pool where all of
my friends and ex-friends notoriously went skinny-dipping. An absolute dump
through and through.
But
I lost the thread. The point is, I was trying to make a stand for what was
right and just and trying to make management see things through my eyes and
they flat out refused. The next Monday, on the day of the all-staff meeting, I
was called into the Chase Court office. I was met by the manager of Chase Court
(who I’m fairly certain was the highest manager there was who didn’t own a
Mercedes/exotic pet) and the new manager of Canyon Court who I had oh so
recently reprimanded. I was promptly fired. I knew I was going to get fired
because I’d been specifically instructed to come in early. I told Jenny I was
probably going to get fired for what I’d said to the new Canyon Court manager
and she didn’t seem too upset because it wasn’t a real job anyway. I got in the
car and Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy was
in the CD player and it was just starting over. Track one. “Hunchback.” It only
took me five minutes to get to Chase Court from our apartment on 22nd
and Tennessee and that song got me pumped up to get fired for the very first
(and I can only assume last) time. I went in cool as a cucumber, had my
transgressions recited to me and told the Chase Court manager what I thought of
what was happening. I told her that I thought it was bullshit, and that what
the Canyon Court manager had written was bullshit and I stood by the helpful
notes I’d left on the weekend instructions. I awkwardly pried the keys off of
my key-ring. I really should have taken them off before hand because that just
made things weird. I threw them on the table, told them to “get bent,” and
walked out the door. I reentered the office and told them both I was sorry I’d
said “get bent,” and that I’d always wanted to say that to somebody and it just
happened to be them and that I understood completely why I had been fired.
In
the parking lot I ran into my bro Mark. Mark and I had started at the same
time. Both of us had been hired to clean apartments and not so explicitly let
go at the end of turn. I slapped hands with him and told him what had happened
and wished him good luck. A solid dude, through and through, forever and ever.
He wished me luck and I left to the rest of Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy.
Four
years later, I’ve managed to work my way up into the management team at the
Half Price Books in St. Paul. Lately, I’ve been driving to work listening to
Kurt Vile’s latest album Wakin on a
Pretty Daze and every morning I drive to work I can’t help but think of
getting canned because Kurt Vile immediately makes me think of music to get
canned to. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s music for the people who understand
that the world works in a specific way and that the way the world works is
never a way they’re going to work with. It’s a big fat fucking game, and I
think Mr. Vile gets that. To me, his music always feels like a big fuck you to
everybody. He just does his thing, rambles on, and then goes on his way.
There
is plenty of rambling here, more rambling than ever even. Childish Prodigy is still my favorite record of his because it was
so messy and so built on Kurt Vile becoming a bona fide Singer/Songwriter with
capitals. Smoke Ring For My Halo had
a few tracks I loved but mostly I got bored. At first, I got bored with Wakin on a Pretty Daze until I listened
to it a dozen times on the way to work. There was something transcendent about
listening to the quasi title track at 7:45 in the morning and waiting for
trains to pass on my way to a job where I felt like I was doing legitimate good
work. Where no one is going to fire you for sticking up for yourself. I’ve
always felt like that was why I got fired, and why I’ve always held the opinion
that Doug Compton and First Management could all go fuck themselves. I
fantasized about doing a mini comic about the whole experience and leaving it
in the plastic Apartment Finder stalls located around downtown Lawrence. But
the whole thing is easier to fit into an album review. Honestly, it’s ones of
the best experiences I’ve ever had. You get it if you’ve ever seen the inside
of one of those $900 a month apartments.
After
that I worked at CD Tradepost in Olathe for a handful of months (a job I did
actually write a mini comic about) until I parlayed that experience into a job
at Half Price Books. And I’m content enough. It’s not a dream job but I’m
hungry and I like the work and I like the people and I like that I’m not
working for a CEO who owns a private jet and a giraffe and buys up all the cheap
property in a town and sells it back to the people at exorbitant prices. Those
people can all get bent.
Kurt
Vile’s latest album is a bit long in the tooth, but it’s a piece of
motherfucking honest work. You get an impression of this guy when you listen to
his album. There’s not posing. No artifice. No goddamn dicking around. Just a
dude from Philly speaking his mind and often doing it at length. “Wakin on a
Pretty Day” is over nine minutes long and it’s got maybe the prettiest little
riff I’ve heard all year. A laid-back riff that puts the mind at ease. To this
day Childish Prodigy is my
quintessential fall record. Every autumn, it finds its way back into my CD
player. Something about the finger picking on “Blackberries” and pretty much
every song. There’s a tone that bathes that whole album in dimming golden light
and it is so insanely beautiful it’s almost impossible to express. Wakin on a Pretty Daze abandons the
distant tone for directness. You can hear it best on the absolutely gleeful
“Shame Chamber,” the sassy-as-fuck “KV Crimes,” and the chord changes in “Pure
Pain.”
Don’t
be fooled into thinking Kurt Vile is some sort of prodigy. The feast he offers
up is mostly sick guitar work and drugged-out-sounding vocals and cryptic
lyrics, but the level of refinement he has achieved is brand new. I loved Childish Prodigy for its rawness, and I
love Wakin on a Pretty Daze for its
confidence. Kurt Vile is probably the sort of guy who wants nothing more than
to be reviled in his own time and only appreciated years after his death. Too
bad for him so many people are catching on.
Price: $4
I was never very good at being a punk. There was a solid year in high school
where I really cared about being legit, but that all fell apart when I admitted
to liking Radiohead. But there was a year where I was listening to nothing but
Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Descendents and every band signed to
Fat Wreck Chords (I always had a soft spot for pop). Against Me! Were a part of
that too, but I never had the nerve to ever consider being an anarchist. Sure I
wore an American flag patch upside down on my patch-covered hoodie but who was
I kidding? I hated America, but 9/11 had just happened so I couldn’t really hate America. I was sixteen, and
if I remember anything about sixteen it’s that all of my beliefs and opinions
about God and Country were so fresh off the boat that they were quaint at best.
Just groundwork for a more adult understanding of the Issues. But holy shit I
loved Against Me! So much. They were making punk rock in a way I’d never heard
before. The folk elements and the scream-a-long atmosphere like it was all one
big party drew me in on the surface but it was Tom Gabel’s lyrics that really
made me fall in love. There is just so much honesty in these songs. A sort of
honesty that was kind of absent from NOFX (with the exception of The Decline) or Bad Religion or any
other band trying to topple the system or making fun of George W Bush. Part of
it was the way Gabel sounds like he’s about to lose his voice at any second,
part of it was that he was just singing about his friends and himself. Personal
politics are way more interesting than world politics. I still can’t tell if
he’s serious when he’s singing “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” but it doesn’t matter
because the point gets across. The point gets across because it’s funny. Not like fart-joke funny but like
legitimately, at its core, beautifully hilarious. I find it hard to believe
that Gabel was being entirely sincere on that track considering Against Me!’s
eventual signing to Sire Records and making a slick sort of folk-punk that was
apparently better suited to the masses. I saw them play at one of 96.5 the
Buzz’s summer concerts at City Market and I was just baffled that they looked like they were trying to be rock stars. I know it’s
silly to call anyone a sellout, because as an adult and not a sixteen year old
punker I understand that if you can justify compromising your ideals so you can
provide for your family then you probably do it so long as it’s not too sleazy, but it wasn’t the band I
fell in love with. The band that helped me stay politically aware and
suspicious in a time when blind patriotism could have very easily taken over my
young brain. You really can’t expect your punk rock idols to stay young and
hungry forever, I suppose.
For all the haterade the 80s get dumped on them, were they
really any worse than now? Are the 2010s the new 80s? The fashion is stupid,
the popular music is brainless garbage, and the cool music all sounds like the
same electronic bullshit that is going to sound incredibly dated by 2020. But
that’s just the haterade talking. The haterade that courses through my veins
and abates when I find a band that feels honest and genuine. I am reminded that
they still exist, and get to avoid the fact that I’m living in the decline.
This ties into Sparks because I feel like they were just weird and didn’t give
a fuck and had fun. It’s incredibly dated to the era of early 80s synth-pop and
new wave, but it’s cool. “Angst in My
Pants” came into my life circa 2008 when it popped up on a mix CD a friend gave
me. I was told the track was from the Valley
Girl soundtrack. And then it never quite left my rotation. It would
occasionally come up on shuffle and I’d be like “Oh yeah, this song is weird
and catchy and great!” And I found the album a few years after that and that
was that. When I finally watched Valley
Girl a couple years ago I was dismayed that “Angst in My Pants” was not
featured in the film proper. Instead the film uses “Eaten By The Monster of Love”
and I cannot for the life of me understand why the soundtrack used a different
Sparks song from the same album on
the soundtrack instead of the one that was in the actual goddamn movie. Ok ok I
figured it out. The point I was trying to make was this: Why does every cool
band have to give off the appearance that they are too cool to have fun? Everyone
is so fucking SERIOUS about their craft and/or image these days it’s impossible
to enjoy anything. Angst in My Pants is
enjoyable, dumb, and brilliant and I wish more bands were willing to be brash
and more willing to make fools of themselves.
