I'd Love to Turn You On #222 - Tune-Yards - Bird-Brains

 2009 was an interesting year for music. There were no real game-changers in 2009, but there was at least one album that presaged a dominant mode of music-making in the 2010’s: Tune-Yards’ Bird-Brains. The debut record from Merrill Garbus’ discordant pop outfit is an outstanding record, not only for how it set the stage for Tune-Yards’ continued growth, but also for how it weaves the mid-00’s indie rock sensibilities with the out-there, lo-fi, rhythmic production styles that rose to even greater prominence in the recent teens. Add in some seriously engaging political rhetoric, and it’s easy to see that Bird-Brains is well worth your time.

            Recorded entirely on a handheld voice recorder (and then released initially on recycled cassette tapes), Bird-Brains has a distinctly tinny feeling. Garbus’s music offers steady, thumping rhythms that put the listener into a sort of tranced, zoned state and while the instrumentation is danceable, the lyrics are anything but; throughout the album, Garbus sings of gendered injustices, motherhood, and problems of self-image. “Hatari,” the album’s lead single, is dangerous in how much it makes you want to groove while ignoring the injustices being sung about. The lyrics and instrumentation hit that perfect sweet spot between frictional and lovely, making it easy to understand Bird-Brains as an album of contradictions and double-standards; it’s a deceptively complicated album filled with elements both harsh and tender that force the listener to listen without passivity.

Consider, for example, the interminably groovy mid-album cut “Jumping Jack.” The bass is crunchy, the xylophone seems to be hitting the upper register limits of the recorder, and the simple drum-fill takes on a Madlib-esque vocal quality. Like other great Tune-Yards songs, the lyrics rework a nursery rhyme (“Jack and Jill” here) into a modern feminist anthem that provides ample catharsis in a world overwhelmed by patriarchal standards: “Driving past in his fast car / Jill says man you are bizarre / Trying to tell me what to do / Watch out cause I’ll knock you out,” Garbus sings simply and softly, weaponizing her traditionally feminine musical impulses over the more traditionally masculine instrumentation. Garbus forces us to recognize how she’s using these musical impulses, and how the gendered presuppositions of them is ultimately a negative aspect that the music industry stands to grow from.

            There are moments like this feminist catharsis on nearly every song on Bird-Brains, and the album is better for it. “Fiya,” the album’s most well-known track, offers a nuanced, understated perspective on feminine image issues that is equal parts bitter sadness and incredible rage. Likewise, “News” attempts to critique the inherent gendered power dynamic with the act of getting pregnant; “I can get real pregnant from men and birds / Who sing much prettier than you,” Garbus conveys, undermining the masculine figure’s potential. Garbus’s lyrics are never quite heavy-handed, but neither are they understated – just like all of the gonzo rhythmic palettes throughout the album.

Yet, Bird-Brains is not entirely angry; there is a certain sweetness that pervades even the record’s harshest moments, one that, for all the rage and dissatisfaction, still envisions a better world. That stage is set by the album’s opening track, “For You,” which has Garbus sing an empathetic four bars over a tender acoustic guitar to a young girl. After she’s done singing, we hear that young girl enthusiastically playing with blueberries; there’s discovery here, an innocence yet untarnished by the overwhelmingly negative world so prominent on the rest of the album. It should come as no surprise that that young girl never comes back on Bird-Brains. Garbus could only protect her from the realities of our world for so long, but the album she made for her – whoever she is – offers a steady, helpful, groovy guide to this overwhelmingly shitty world.

So do the rest of the works in Tune-Yards’ discography. W H O K I L L, 2011’s follow-up, is a defining record of the 21^st century, expanding in interesting ways on the groundwork set by Bird-Brains. Most recently, Garbus scored one of the most emphatically political films of 2018, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, which viciously, hysterically points out the myriad of flaws in our capitalist society. Likewise, Tune-Yards’ most recent record, I can feel you creep into my private life, finds Garbus confronting the ways that she could be a better political citizen, all the while combining the powerful rhetoric with rhythmic, exuberant, groovy instrumentation. With Tune-Yards, being angry takes on a certain fun quality.

-          Harry Todd

I'd Love to Turn You On #208 - Dead Can Dance – Within the Realm of a Dying Sun

          I’m not exactly proud of what I’m about to tell you. But, there are certain bands that I cannot think about without also thinking about this particular time in my life. When I was in high school two of my best friends and I used to walk around downtown Dubuque, Iowa from pawn shop to pawn shop, shoplifting CDs, cassettes, VHS tapes and just about anything else you can think of. Not to brag, but over time, we got really, really good at it. We did it just about every weekend for what seems like two or three years straight, never getting caught and always coming away with a huge bounty. We even called ourselves the Pawn Shop Bandits, because we had so many foolproof ways to steal shit. We would steal so much in one day that I look back and truly don’t know exactly how we hid it all on our bodies. Again, not my finest accomplishment, but these thieving sessions gave us a unique opportunity to collect complete catalogs of albums by bands we were interested in. Think internet piracy but before there was an internet. So each week, the three of us would come home with entire discographies of bands like the Cure, the Ramones, R.E.M, Ministry and so many more.

            I bring this up because whenever I think about Dead Can Dance, I think about those days. They weren’t really one of “my bands” exactly (I think I maybe had one or two of their albums then), but one of my fellow PSB’s got really into them at the time and managed to collect just about all of their albums from these weekend outings. So I heard them a lot growing up and eventually they became one of my very favorite bands. My band, New Standards Men, even covered one of their songs for a spell. The album that grabbed my attention the most was their third album, 1987’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun.

            To be honest, I think what finally brought me around to Dead Can Dance was the fact that many of the death and doom metal bands I was listening to at the time cited them as a huge influence. And this is absolutely the most evident in the sound of Dying Sun. It’s ominous without being too gloomy. It’s dark without being heavy, which at 14 years old I didn’t know was possible.

            Recorded in 1985 when the band was essentially just the duo of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry (with drummer Peter Ulrich filling in), Dying Sun feels almost like a split solo record between the band’s two members. The A side is made up almost entirely of Perry compositions, while the B side is made up predominantly of Gerrard’s work. Some think that this song layout is a detriment to the album, adding a sudden and jarring shift between the two’s vastly different singing styles. I actually think that this works in the album’s favor, giving it an interesting diversity between sides. The result is both savagely beautiful and darkly ethereal. While I think the album is near flawless, personally, I probably prefer Gerrard’s songs over Perry’s. Gerrard’s vocal range is incredibly vast and she really showcases that on this album, able to go effortlessly from a deep, low range like in the gorgeous “Persephone” to a high, atmospheric pitch as in “Dawn of the Iconoclast.”

            Another thing I love about Dying Sun is that it seems to mark a kind of change in direction for the band. Gone now were the days of the simple gothic post-punk sound of their self-titled debut, as the duo began using odd instrumentation and time signatures to create a blend of neo-classical and chamber pop added to their post-rock base, a sound they hinted at on their previous album, Spleen and Ideal. Also, the band seemed more eager to take musical chances on this album, even writing songs like their iconic “Cantara,” that are, dare I say, “upbeat.”

            Again, the Pawn Shop Bandits days was admittedly not my finest hour, but I do look back on those days rather fondly. It was perhaps the time in my life when I discovered most of the music that I would later come to adore. And the way I see it, pawn shops are kind of known for ripping people off so maybe ripping them off was my way of getting even with them. Or maybe I’m an awful person. Either way, I’ve made peace with it.

-         Jonathan Eagle