Saturday, July 11, 2009

You`re an extra, lost in the scene

It has been a long, long time since my last post. Don`t let the gap of 3 months fool you: I`ve been listening a lot of music and learning about myself in the process. It for instance seems that I`m a person who likes a bit of structure in music. Groups like Animal Collective and the Dirty Projectors seem to be on the wrong side of this thin red line of mine. I don`t think they're bad, but I just don`t get it (yet). I don`t get what's so appealing about it (yet).

Artists that are appealing to me at the moment are Phoenix, The Pains, Allen Toussaint, Talking Heads (yea,yea, due to the dirty Projectors), Apostle of Hustle, T. Rex, Charles Spearin and St. Vincent.

St. Vincent in particular makes me smile. It's hard to describe how her music sounds like; It's a mix of styles. It's a (lot) rougher version of My Brightest Daimond - with a beat. Her latest album is a carefully constructed patchwork of songs. Some can start of as dreamlike and then at one point fall back into harsh distortion. It is this combination that makes me really like Actor, and songs like Marrow and The Strangers perfectly demonstrate this. Playing them very loud though will get your neighbours yelling at you.

Luckily she has some very neighbour friendly songs like Save me from what I want and Laughing with a mouth of blood. Judging from their titles and lyrics you would not call them upbeat, but they do sound like it. I especially appreciate those nice backing vocals she did on both the songs; the "Watch your step's" give Save me.. that little bit of extra.

Finally, the first single Actor out of work is a great stacato marsh from the start to the end. I really like how the songs builds up to the finale. It's not a second too long at a little bit more than two minutes, and makes you want to play it, again, again and again.

The best thing about this is that I`m going to see St. Vincent live in action in Nijmegen in about a week's time. I`ve taken half a day of to go see her perform her songs. And if this Letterman performance is anything close to what I`ll see that monday, I`ll go back home happy. Hopefully my right foot doesn`t drop off in the meantime.