60. Nick Drake – Pink Moon

There are so many artists that have had their legacy cemented by an early visit to the grave. Dying too soon can be an extraordinary way to leave the audience salivating for more. Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley, the list goes on. And Nick Drake could be considered the prototype for all of them. And Pink Moon is an incredibly fitting swansong.

Disillusioned with the music business and his lack of success therein, Drake walked into the studio at midnight on two consecutive nights. Over eight hours, he sat in front of a microphone, and with only a guitar, poured every inch of his aching soul onto record. Pink Moon is, to this day, the pinnacle of the lone singer-songwriter milieu. Jose Gonzalez, Damien Rice, even Jack Johnson, all can be traced back to this sparse, unbelievably haunting album. But don’t hold that against him.

The story - probably apocryphal - goes that Drake was so indifferent to the success or failure of his album that he dropped the master tapes off with the secretary at Island records and walked off. However, no such carelessness is evident in the music. While there is only one overdub on the album – some gentle piano on the title track – the guitar provides more atmosphere than the densest wall of sound.
Abetted by Drake’s lilting tenor, track after track of seemingly simple, but surprisingly intricate chamber folk weave a tale of melancholy that so many that have followed in his wake could only hope to recreate. Odd, then, that the closing track, ‘In The Morning’ ends proceedings on a positive note, odder still that words from that song – “And now we rise/And we are everywhere” –…

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The Suburbs

Win Butler and Co. show they haven’t lost their deft touch for melody and harmony on the excellent opening track, a jaunty ballad with a tone far less dark than the openers of Funeral and Neon Bible, ‘Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)’ and ‘Black Mirror’ respectively.

Ready to Start

One of several throwbacks to the band’s chief inspirational era in 1980s punk/alternative rock, ‘Ready to Start’ is a post-punk with the now familiar Arcade Fire crescendo in its pulsing, bass-driven bridge, a very solid track that stands up to their prior work.

Modern Man

A slower, more laid-back track which has neither climax nor a particularly memorable melody. Filler.

Rococo

Now they’re really getting into gear. ‘Rococo’ is a Funeral-style sing-along driven by acoustic guitar and choral harmonies, with a one-two punch of in its chorus and towering strings. Sure to become a concert mainstay.

Empty Room

An interesting flurry of strings leads into a pacy pop song made memorable with its eerie backing vocals. The first track to feature lead vocals by Régine Chassagne is also the first that can be fairly described as Springsteenian.

City with no Children

Another solid rocker that fails to take it to the next level. It seems as though Arcade Fire have toned down their tendency towards the dramatic in favour of a tighter, more restrained style. Let’s see how that plays out with the die-hards and over a few more spins.

Half Light I & Half Light II (No Celebration)

The first of two two-song vignettes, ‘Half Light I’ marks the moment…

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Welcome to the second edition of The Quarterly. It’s a recap of the best of the last three months as covered by WB, our writer’s highlights of the year to date and an Australian-only list from our friends at Mess + Noise (www.messandnoise.com).

Half way through the year and we need to say ‘Kapow’. 2010 just keeps getting better. Following on from Newsom, Spoon, Vampire Weekend and Beach House last quarter, we’ve got the likes of Sleigh Bells, Broken Social Scene, The National and Australia’s own Tame Impala vying for our hearts and minds.

Sure, we may all have nanosecond attention spans because of the party drugs, Ipad/Iphones, knives on our streets and political uncertainty but still there’s a lot to get through and a lot of new music to love. In fact, in the three or so years of WB’s small, but hardly insignificant, life this is the best batch of music we’ve seen. Keep on swinging 2010; you’re not done yet…

Highest Scoring Albums of April - June Quarter

1. Sleigh Bells – Treats
2. Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record
3. Radio Dept. – Clinging To a Scheme
4. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
5. Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo
6. Roky Erickson with Okkervil River – True Love Cast Out All Evil
7. Tame Impala – Innerspeaker
8. Coco Rosie – Grey Oceans
9. Cloud Control – Bliss Release
10. Caribou – Swim

Honorable Mention: The National – High Violet

Darren Levin
Editor, Mess+Noise (www.messandnoise.com)

Richard In Your Mind – My Volcano
Crow – Arcane
Gin…

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“The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” - Isak Dinesen

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.” - Edvard Munch

In Augie March's 2000 debut album Sunset Studies there is to be found poetry arguably unparalleled in popular song lyrics. Singer/songwriter Glenn Richards’s vision pieced together moving re-imaginings of Biblical stories, classical Greek philosophy, and Anglo-Celtic folk music, and wove antique images of war, flowers, the song, and the sea into meditations of perennial literary and philosophical themes, including human relationships, the notion of work, and the inevitability of death. The focus of this essay is one of the album’s masterpieces, ‘The Good Gardener (On How He Fell)’, the album's most poetically dense song with its Miltonian use of language, and one that years later still sparks curious discussion over its meaning.

A light reading of the extended metaphor that runs throughout the song reveals a heart-wrenching story about a man whose lover chooses to have an abortion despite his passionate protest. However, once one begins to excavate the arsenal of symbolism, word etymology, figures, tropes, mythology, and philosophy that Richards threaded together, it becomes a lament of man's desire for eternity and immortality, and his fear of death and the oblivion that comes with it.

Richards found a perfect convergence and representation of these existential problems in the topic of abortion, and heightened the language to the point of vertigo by relentlessly cramming these ideas into every line of the song with the above literary devices. The words he chose often give the lyrics double or triple meanings, at least one of which is almost always botanical, and lengthy lines convey…

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Continued from Part 1...

The gardener may be interpreted three-fold: literally, as someone whose job is to tend the lover's garden, and with whom housewives stereotypically cheat on their husbands; as a lover with the extended metaphor of the garden as the womb, and the gardener as he who fertilises and brings forth life in the woman; and as mythological reference to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis. This last meaning carries a couple meanings itself.

The first, in reference to the parenthetical title "On How He Fell", alludes to The Fall of Man. Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, mankind was made by God to live forever; as a consequence of his Fall he become mortal.

Conversely, procreation has long been poetically regarded as the means to a kind of immortality in the form of one's descendants. Notably, the first 17 of William Shakespeare's sonnets, sometimes referred to as "the procreation sonnets", are written to a young man, encouraging him to marry and propagate so that he may defy time and death, with his beauty living on in his children. Thus, an abortion may be seen as a nipping of such a bud, the opportunity to attain something eternal wasted, and is therefore the gardener's Fall, his seed being "cast out" of the woman's womb, his immortality seized.

Lacking the structure of a common pop song, it may be divided into four parts for the purpose of understanding its narrative technique. The first part consists of lines 1-8. The song sets its mood immediately with its unsettling guitar picking: F# B A# B A B A# B. Built…

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Continued from Part 2...

9 I saw twilight car waxers, corpulent dog walkers, clean canny couples on the sunset strip,
10 From a tower forty miles to the east of Augusta saw a plague on the Indian a'coming on a windship,
11 You were in the garden when the wind swept up and took the foul words from your mouth
12 Now you know what your sarcasm really really means
13 It's the tearing with your teeth of the flesh from the bones of your brother -
14 Kill the shrub to fertilise the flower,
15 Did I hear you saying that the form doesn't matter?
16 Well form into matter, the matter is forever, but only in a good garden.

Going back to his time in his girlfriend's garden, line 9 describes the various people the gardener saw passing by as he worked. Line 10 progresses from the gardener observing the outside physical world to an internal one, perhaps of poetic vision and not unlike the imagined underwater garden.

It has been speculated the "plague on a windship a'coming on the Indian" may refer to an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Fremantle, Western Australia in 1903 ⁽²⁾. In an album where many songs engage in issues concerning contemporary Australian society and Australian history, this would be the only historical allusion in "The Good Gardener", and would be consistent with the motif present throughout Sunset Studies of poetically recreating Australian history. It may be seen as another example of Richards interjecting the stream-of-consciousness element of his poetic process into the consciousness of the character, in a way becoming a part of him; one is almost tempted at this point…

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Continued from Part 3...

Nature is too willing to consume everything in death, the gardener passionately argues, so why fault him for wanting to make life, something human beings are born to do?

23 When I was her good gardener.
24 Sing of the Summer sham,
25 O see them grow tall, see them in their rot, see them go to seed in the cemetery plot
26 I was your good gardener
27 Sing to bring on Spring
28 O ice of Winter would crackle and splinter with my love in everything
29 Ice of Winter would crackle and splinter with my love in everything
30 I was your good gardener...

"When I was her good gardener/Sing of the Summer sham," the song progresses, shifting back into metaphor, but this time with the listener's understanding of its true meaning. "Summer sham" suggests a summer fling or a relationship valued differently by the man and the woman. It's also the right time of year for the conception of a birth that would have occurred in spring.

"O see them grow tall, see them in their rot, see them go to seed in the cemetery plot," a submerged metaphor, sees the flowers in their cycle of life in the first two phrases, juxtaposed with the irony of them going to seed in a cemetery plot, implying their reproduction has been disabled. The cemetery plot also alludes to the metaphor's literal meaning, a human life truncated before it could sprout. "Go to seed" itself has a second and divergent meaning "to decay", making the phrase doubly ironic and an even more poignant description of the aborted child.

Line 28, "O ice of…

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Little Red – ‘Rock It’

This was always going to be interesting. After the sugar-sweet debut Listen to... and the even sweeter first EP Get Ready, Little Red became Melbourne’s band du jour. A sketchy overseas tour later and they’re back in our ears with ‘Rock It’: a song that wouldn’t have made the cut on their debut full-length for stylistic reasons only. Instead of The Beach Boys-lite, this is The Band. ‘Rock It’ has an unashamedly funky piano line, a seriously infectious chorus, but is a lot less blatant than previous Little Red. Despite the MGMT break-down midway through, ‘Rock It’ is a beautiful, textured little song.

Carnation – ‘Gone’

It used to be cool to sound like Interpol. It was even cooler to sound like Joy Division. Since The Wombats ruined that for everyone with their ‘celebrate the irony’ rubbish, it’s become a whole lot less cool, and a whole lot less ingenious a move to channel the Manchester sound. Carnation didn’t get the memo. Not terrible, just a little tardy.

Dead Letter Chorus – ‘Covered By Snow’

A nice squeaky girl singing the harmonies always serves a song well. Dead Letter Chorus (whether they were around the traps before Dead Letter Circus matters not, it’s an unfortunate coincidence) is a little Counting Crows/Emmylou Harris concoction hailing from one of Australia’s lesser music towns, and it shows – a sound like this wouldn’t get half the attention they’re getting if they were in, say, Melbourne. A little folk, and nicely executed, but bland. Bland like a piece of toast with no delicious vegemite.

Icarus Himself – Mexico

The character of Icarus – a favourite for metaphor-lovers the world over – has survived centuries of bastardised, propagandistic misuses over a couple…

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65. R.E.M. - Automatic for the People

In 1992, R.E.M. wrong-footed everyone. Prior to Automatic for the People they had plied their trade of large-scale, upbeat folk-rock; a 1980s precursor to Arcade Fire, if you will. In particular, Out of Time, with ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Shiny Happy People’ leading the way. But the superfluous mandolins and digressions into hip hop were set to step aside for something much more understated, human and timeless.

Maudlin, obsessed with death, but resolutely optimistic, Automatic for the People was a revelation; six singles, mostly hits, many of which still dominate REM’s live shows. Lead single ‘Drive’ was an inspired if surprising choice, setting the tone that was to pervade the record, and with its forceful, rhythmic lyrics, it was a huge success. ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight’, while referencing the perennially cheesy afrobeat number it borrowed melodically from, was a roaring success. And nothing was more memorable than the two monster numbers, ‘Man on the Moon’ and the stunning, ever-hopeful ‘Everybody Hurts’, with its eternally memorable guitar arpeggios.

The record was pieced together from recordings across the USA – ‘New Orleans Instrumental Pt I’ is a wordless testament to the freedom this gave the band. While brief, it speaks volumes of a band liberated from the shackles of its earlier incarnations, exploring new corners of its psyche – dark and light alike – and taking them places that no one else could possibly hope to.

64. The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street

The ‘60s’ - a now-mythical period of music history when drug addiction was a radical lifestyle choice not a prerequisite to fame. A time when the rules of pop were…

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70. Led Zeppelin - IV

It really doesn’t get much more iconic than this. There is barely a moment on Zeppelin’s magnum opus that is not instantly recognizable. From the guitar-vocal call and response of the dirty, bluesy ‘Black Dog’ to the medieval mandolin of ‘The Battle of Evermore’ to, of course, that most iconic of iconic songs, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Zeppelin’s IV, is the prototype record for bands looking to step from small-time cred to stadium deification.

And speaking of ‘Stairway’, it’s sometimes hard to move past it when talking about IV. If every repeat of that song ever played on US radio was looped, it would play for over 55 years. Indeed, some urban myths suggest that it would never end, as the song is always being played somewhere, by someone. But, awesome as that track is, it is hardly the only weapon in Zeppelin’s arsenal.

After the somewhat lukewarm critical reaction to III, Zeppelin made a conscious decision to simultaneously branch out and focus on their strengths. As such, the bouncy keyboard pseudo-pop of ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ rests comfortably alongside the bruising ‘Black Dog’. Elsewhere, ‘Four Sticks’ plays like old-fashioned Led Zep played by Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, with Hendrix on guitar.

This is the album that turned Zeppelin into the world’s biggest band in 1971. Without it, perhaps I, II and III would fail to get the attention they deserve. Without it, there would be no template for bands to take their sound to a new level, one that could fill arenas to their 40,000 capacity. Without it, rock and roll would be an entirely different beast altogether. Zeppelin rule.

69. My Morning Jacket - Z

My Morning Jacket were one of those bands. Touring…

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75. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

Debut albums are a breed apart. They represent a new voice – a bunch of upstarts yet to be bogged down by years of operating in the ‘business’. The sound is vibrant, alive, and represents a new generation of musician. And few new voices have been so clear, so confident, as Bloc Party’s explosive first record. Silent Alarm emerged as a clarion call to young music fans everywhere in 2005, a tightly constructed indie rock album that didn’t shy away from the mass audience, from a band that had absolutely no trouble taking itself seriously.

Frontman Kele Okereke, with his Robert Smith-esque nasal intonations, happily admitted to a love of ephemeral modern pop of the Britney Spears variety equal to the more cred-worthy albums in his collection. And, despite the manic intensity and earnest social commentary of Silent Alarm, a fierce pop ethos shines through.

So, while ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ reprises innocuous 80s pop synths and guitars of the band’s new-wave forebears, on much of the album, Okereke rails against political and social incompetence and inequality, all the while held together by Matt Tong’s thunderous, yet incredibly precise and nuanced drumming.

There is a moment on ‘Positive Tension’ when the band drops out, only momentarily, and Okereke wails “Why’d you have to stay so fucking useless?” That brief pause lends mountains of power to his question, almost as though it was directed at their contemporaries, unwilling to adopt the same combination of dancefloor-filling beats, pop production and deadly earnest indie rock. For sure, no one else has come close to the combination achieved by Bloc Party on Silent Alarm.

74. U2 - The Joshua Tree

So often pilloried by…

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80. Sigur Ros – ( )

Sigur Ros have always been enigmatic. Emerging from their isolated, arctic island home, they materialized onto the scene in 1999 seemingly fully formed, delivering an astonishing burst of unique magic in Agaetis Byrjun. Partly sung in Icelandic, partly Hopelandic, taking conventional song structures and instrumentation and twisting them into their own majestic compositions, the four unassuming gentlemen rewrote the book on large-scale emotive rock. And never have they been more enigmatic than on ( ).

By dispensing with crazy notions like naming songs and providing liner notes of any kind, Sigur Ros were undoubtedly leaving themselves open to accusations of pretentiousness. However, such self indulgences as these ought to be forgiven, because the album is a masterpiece.

If Agaetis Byrjun is challenging, ( ) is positively impenetrable. Sung entirely in Hopelandic – utter gibberish, according to its creator, singer Jonsi Birgisson – the record saw the band wholeheartedly embrace digital manipulation to enhance the ethereal nature of their sound. And that sound – which is routinely compared to glaciers and plateaus, was never more elemental than on this album. Ice, fire, earth and wind, each is as much a part of proceedings as Birgisson’s angelic wail or Kjartan Sveinsson’s tinkling piano.

( ) is the Sigur Ros album that is likely to slip under the radar. Dense, tough, confronting and incredibly dramatic, it is an experience to listen to. Against more majestic and quirky offerings, like Agaetis Byrjun, or more accessible, less grandiose records like Takk…, ( ) is the one that will get picked up by future generations and worshipped as the ghostly, powerful masterpiece that it truly is.

79. Pearl Jam - Vs

While in 2009, nearly 20 years after the…

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What is it?
What we've done is create an ongoing user poll that runs across all the albums reviewed on site. The site randomly selects two albums from our catalogue of reviews and you decide which one you prefer.

How Do I Use It?
If you look at the bottom left hand side of any page on WB, you'll see two album covers, for example as we are writing this it's Album by Girls vs Sings the Greys by Frightened Rabbit. To vote for the album you prefer simply click on either ‘This One’ or ‘That One’ icons under the album of your choice.

Note: If you click on the album cover you’ll be taking to the record’s review and no vote will be calculated.

Another month, another chance to feast on the discs we’d be taking with us on our desert island exodus. Here are the highest vote getters.

Top 5 Total:

1. Radiohead - Kid A (39 votes)
2. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest (38 votes, up 3 places)
3. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (38 votes, up 6 places)
4. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (37 votes, down 3 places)
5. Blitzen Trapper - Furr (37 votes, down 2 places)

Cassadaga has been booted from the list by Wilco’s classic YHF. Just missing out on top five action were Dr Dog with 2008’s Fate, Springsteen’s behemoth Born to Run and Department of Eagles In Ear Park.

Big Movers:

1. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park (9 votes this month, 33 total)
2. Dr Dog - Fate (8 votes this month, 36 total)
…

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85. The Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols

For so many young music fans, their formative musical years were all about punk. If something was good, it had to be punk. If something wasn’t punk, but was good, it was down to its punk spirit. And for so many teens, a love of power-pop moved into a love of pop-punk, which then turned into a search for the inception point – the punk singularity, if you will. In Never Mind the Bollocks, they found it, and The Sex Pistols were a revelation.

Songs about bondage, about the Monarchy, about anarchy, the Pistols even had a song about their record label (‘EMI’). Listening now, it’s strange to realise it was all a bit of a laugh and that the group wrote songs like ‘Submission’ (with the lyrics ‘submarine mission’) as much to take the piss out of their manager, the enterprising Malcolm McLaren, who squeezed the band into his idea of edgy upstarts.

Today, people say they couldn’t play, that Jonny Rotten couldn’t sing. That it was all McLaren’s idea, a big sham. People talk about Sid and whether or not he killed Nancy. Nobody talks about Steve Jones’ brilliant guitar playing, Rotten’s unbelievable melodic and rhythmic sense or the sheer sense of adventure and comedy in their music. In 1977, the Sex Pistols had a UK #1 album in Never Mind the Bollocks and a #1 single with ‘God Save the Queen’, which reached the top spot during Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee but was famously kept off the chart listing. In 2008, the biggest rock band was Kings of Leon. Pop music was never so edgy, or…

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90. Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water

Bridge over Troubled Water is the music from your childhood you can never leave behind. As the years go by and one musical phase bleeds into another, your hair is long and then short and then long again and you grow up and finally understand what Paul is actually singing about, you can always return to Simon and Garfunkel. From the joyous pop sing-a-long ‘Cecilia’ with its percussive chorus and irresistible refrain, to the subtle, understated beauty of the title track, one of the most sincere pop ballads to come out of the 1960s, Bridge… is flawless, an ode to gentle, moving beauty.

‘The Boxer’ is the real centerpiece of the album. A five minute requiem from the point of view of a struggling New York City boxer, it is one of Simon’s most effective autobiographical songs. Its doleful chorus (“lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie-lie-lie-la-lie”) is one of the most chilling of its kind, and never fails to send shivers down the spine.‘The Boxer’ is the song Bob Dylan wishes he wrote.

Bridge over Troubled Water is one of the finest vocal albums in folk history. Each track reveals another level and layer to the talents of Simon and Garfunkel: from the subtle caress of ‘El Condor Pasa’ to the elation of ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ to the sheer power of the stand out ‘The Boxer’ and ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’. Things change, people change, hairstyles change, interest rates fluctuate. There will always be Simon and Garfunkel. 

89. John Lennon – Imagine

Imagine, John Lennon’s second solo album after the explosion and then implosion of the Beatles, has left an indelible mark not only on music but on culture like almost no other album. Remembered by most for…

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