Culturespill

Revisiting a theme established by the thrilling success of Wilco’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a documentary that explores the travails and ironies behind the recording of their bewildering masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Death Cab’s hitting the silver screen with a doc of their own: Open Windows, which, according to their PR people, “follows the band on their final days at home in Seattle for the band before they begin their 2008 tour.” A concise thirty minutes in length, the film also features footage about the recording of Narrow Stairs (out May 13th), complete with “interviews and performances from the band.” Check it out on Current TV here.

And in case you’re the one Death Cab fan on the planet without a ticket to their current coast-to-coast tour, which began last night in providence, RI and will take them all the way to the Santa Barbara Bowl on June 24th, here are the dates:

Death Cab For Cutie on tour

05/09/08 PROVIDENCE, RI Providence Piers

05/10/08 BOSTON, MA WFNX Show

05/24/08 BEND OR Les Schwab Amphitheater

05/25/08 QUINCY, WA The Gorge Amphitheatre

05/26/08 LEHI, UT Thanksgiving Point

05/28/08 MORRISON, CO Red Rocks Amphitheatre

05/30/08 KANSAS CITY, MO City Market

05/31/08 COLUMBIA, MO Ninth Street Summerfest

06/02/08 MINNEAPOLIS, MN Orpheum Theatre

06/03/08 CHICAGO, IL Millennium Park

06/04/08 DETROIT, MI Fox Theatre

06/06/08 MONTREAL, QC Jacques Cartier Pier

06/07/08 TORONTO, ON Olympic Island

06/09/08 COLUMBIA, MD Merriweather Post Pavilion

06/10/08 BROOKLYN, NY McCarren Park Pool

06/12/08 PHILADELPHIA, PA Mann Center for the Performing Arts

06/13/08 CLEVELAND, OH Plain Dealer Pavilion

06/14/08 INDIANAPOLIS, IN The Lawn at White River State Park

06/15/08 MANCHESTER, TN Bonnaroo Music Festival

06/17/08 GRAND PRAIRIE, TX Nokia Thetre

06/19/08 MESA, AZ Mesa Amphitheater

06/20/08 SAN DIEGO, CA SDSU Open Air Theatre

06/21/08 BERKELEY, CA Greek Theatre

06/24/08 SANTA BARBARA, CA Santa Barbara Bowl

After a forty-year run as the master of Mellow, not much has changed on Planet Donovan. It is 2004, and the wisdom is still as abundant as the weed. Poets in berets still blow saxes in the coffeehouse at night, and flowers still don heads of bushy hair in the crowd. The man himself may be a little older now, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not coming on:

If I was your lover I’d take you to the sky
If you are feeling low I will make you high
Let me be your lover baby I will be your beau

This is not exactly the language of a man taking his social security check to the bank on the way to the golf course. In fact, Beat Café is an album that delivers the urgency and freshness one might expect from the debut album of a 20-something nobody, no less a 60-something flower-child of the original Woodstock generation.

Hushed and haunted, Beat Café plays like a long, seductive whisper from somewhere within the listener’s consciousness - a knowing and familiar voice spreading the rumor that utopia is not something that happens in the external world, but rather within the self. It is a sunrise of the soul; a placid and breezy terrain the mind brings you to when the gates of its imagination are unlocked. “Gonna do all the things I’ve never done before, gonna get myself together somehow,” Donovan sings on the downright wicked “The Question.” Many of these new tunes expand upon the kind of optimism with which Donovan managed to pit himself against that brooding, bitter and more famous American counterpart, Bob Dylan.

Donovan: “Season of the Witch”

Unlike Donovan’s last album - the spare but alluring Sutras produced by Rick Rubin for American Recordings in 1996 - Beat Café explodes into a varied and distinctive musical brew. Danny Thompson’s bass playing is worthy of Apollo’s crown, and the legendary Jim Keltner turns in a surprisingly hip performance on drums and percussion, managing to keep up with Donovan as he slips in and out of beat after groovy beat.

Whereas Rubin seemed to make a Rick Rubin record of Sutras - mired as it was in his minimalist approach - John Chelew allows for the making of a Donovan record this time around. Chelew, whose resume includes work with John Hiatt and Richard Thompson, proves a more sympathetic cohort throughout this musically fascinating project, even lending a hand on keyboards throughout the set. The atmosphere is much more relaxed and suggests that the artist was allowed to breathe freely during these sessions.

The only resemblance between this latest album and Sutras is the mystic airiness of Donovan’s lyrics, an eastern spiritualism cloaked in the psychedelic lexicon Donovan continues to employ. “You yin my yang / I’ll yang your yin,” he directs on “Yin My Yang.” For an album as overtly conscious of its heritage as this one, it seems almost obligatory that Donovan would nod to Oar, Alexander “Skip” Spence’s masterpiece of psychedelic folk/rock from 1969. “I could use me some yin for my yang,” Spence sings on his “Dixie Peach Promenade (yin for yang),” “that would make everything alright.” Spence’s work is not only a direct echo of Donovan’s “Yin My Yang,” but of the entire universe Beat Café evokes - from its “beatnik café” where “the reefer blow” to the time and place where “there’ll be music in the air/flowers in your hair/life without a care.”

But where the nostalgic lyrics retread familiar territory, the music reinvents an artist in his fifth decade as a performer. The beautifully brittle “Shambala” closes the album with a moving dream of yearning, escape and resignation:

Take me home back to Shambala
where peaceful rivers flow
Take me home back to Shambala
Where seeds of love they sow

The appropriately titled “Whirlwind” - a song that wins the “coolest groove of the year” award - is dark and sly enough to suffice as the soundtrack for a land-falling hurricane. Most startling, though, is Donovan’s impassioned cover of the folk standard, “The Cuckoo” which, amid so many interpretations of the well-traveled song, ranks as one of the most commanding and memorable.

Really, though, only Donovan’s own smooth voice manages to outdo Danny Thompson’s pervasive double bass, which thumps and groans through every minute of the album, lending a jazzy depth to the distinctly international sound Donovan achieves here. Thompson raises “The Question” into a kind of frenetic street march through “the darkest hour of night,” while abrupt solos on “Love floats” or the instant classic, “Poorman’s Sunshine,” fuse these songs with the spontaneity of a particularly inspired demo. It bears mentioning that Donovan tosses some killer guitar licks of his own into the mix, most notably on the deliciously fiendish title track.

After following up a prolific period of creativity in the 70s with two decades of piercing silence, the release of a new Donovan album is unlikely enough. That the man would emerge out of nowhere with the coolest album of the year nearly forty years after his debut is nothing short of astonishing. Beat Café is further proof that something incredible happened in the decade of assassinations, flowers and weather factions, and the story is still far from over.

The first–and only–time I ever enjoyed the rare privilege of seeing Tom Waits live was back in New York City at The Beacon Theater. The last time the crazy bastard had toured was in 1987 when I was 8 years old, thirteen years prior. He leapt onto the stage from behind a curtain sporting a slanted derby and dark baggy clothes, a protruding belly hanging over his belt as he howled into a megaphone held in one hand and tossed fistfuls of golden glitter at the crowd with the other. Then he climbed an elevated wooden platform covered with sawdust and kicked it around like a mule, belting a sizzling rendition of “Hang on St. Christopher,” fittingly the opening track on an album released in–you guessed it–1987, the great Frank’s Wild Years.

Having recently been awarded the fourth slot on Paste Magazine’s list of top 100 best living songwriters of all time–with his wife (God help the woman) and apparent daemon Kathleen Brennan sharing the honors–and releasing a treasure trove of outtakes called Orphans to universal praise, one of American culture’s most traumatizing chapters continues with a rare Tom Waits tour of the continental US, beginning in Phoenix on June 17th and extending through July 5th in Atlanta. It’s a characteristically brief stint from an elusive madman who openly disdains the concept of a tour, repeatedly bemoaning the monotony of playing the same damned songs every night and, as a friend of mine learned who watched Waits on consecutive nights at The Beacon for those above-mentioned shows, telling the same damned jokes, too.

Tom Waits Explains The Glitter & Doom Tour

So to make things interesting this time around, Waits has devised a rather specific formula for routing this particular tour, which he’s dubbing the “Glitter & Doom” tour (So expect more fistfuls of that if you plan to be anywhere in the first five rows.) Explaining that the shape his route will make on his way from Phoenix to Atlanta resembles precisely the constellation Hydra, Waits also notes that the first letters of each city he plans to visit collectively form the acronym “PEHDSTCKJMBA” which, if you haven’t already guessed (like, Duh!), stands for the following: “People envy happiness. Dogs, though, sense courage, knowing jubilation means better ASSetts.” If, for some reason, you still happen to be confused, please refer to the video above. As always with any exposure to a public appearance by Tom Waits, it may be wise to locate your anti-anxiety pills before viewing and have a good nurse on call.

Tour Dates:

Orpheum
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Phoenix, US

Orpheum
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Phoenix, US

Plaza Theatre
Friday, June 20, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
El Paso, US

Jones Hall
Sunday, June 22, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Houston, US

Palladium
Monday, June 23, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Dallas, US

Brady Theatre
Wednesday, June 25, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Tulsa, US

Fox Theatre
Thursday, June 26, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
St Louis, US

Ohio Theatre
Saturday, June 28, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Columbus, US

Civic Theatre
Sunday, June 29, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Knoxville, US

Moran Theatre
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Jacksonville, US

Saenger Theatre
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Mobile, US

Alabama Theatre
Thursday, July 3, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Birmingham, US

Fox Theatre
Saturday, July 5, 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Atlanta, US

Leonard Cohen in 1969

“Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can see it in the way she smiles.”
–Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna

Not too long ago, I lived the life of an alienated lover of books and music, awakening from the baffled and brutal slumber of a high school experience largely dominated by the anxious desperation of a yearned-for belonging, a need that eludes so many who navigate those tortured and cliquish halls on the way to a college experience where the freaks find their kind and settle into an initial notion of who they are. I spent hours on end each evening trading banter with a fellow Leonard Cohen lover about the nuanced passages of obscure bootlegs of his, musical diamonds mined from the cluttered shelves of overlooked record shops on Macdougal or Thomspon in the village, a storied neighborhood in the bowels of New York City where Dylan and Van Ronk once ruled as kings of a counterculture whose reverberations we weather to this day.

No, not too long ago at all. I recall pulling off to the side of a rural road in Long Island as Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” played on the stereo, my eyes literally bloating with held-back tears as I reeled in the throes of a gut-wrenching break-up while Cohen sang softly about “The sisters of mercy who are not departed or gone,” how “they waited for me when I thought that I just can’t go on,” who “brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.” With what effortless precision had Cohen identified exactly the note and notion I needed to hear at that moment–a possibility of hope and survival found only in song. I recall hanging on the line in silence with that above-mentioned friend as we listened in reverent stillness to Cohen’s “Let Us Sing Another Song, Boys” from his devastating masterpiece of melancholy, 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate. How only our hushed but vaguely audible breaths stood between ourselves and the song, a wild whirlwind of singers twirling the tune around their haunted voices, a wiry wail as undisciplined as it is sincere.

I recall many cold nights driving through downtown Manhattan, a winter rain thrumming the windshield as I struggled again to squeeze into an only parking space in that sleepless town, fleeing my car to wade through the weather with the collar of a worn leather coat popped to keep my wet neck warm on the way to another cappuccino at Cafe Dante, the historic cafe on MacDougal just across the street from a loft Dylan lived in thirty years before. I recall how many nights that weather brought to mind the song Dylan tattooed on the American memory in a voice edged with cigarettes and dust, lines about how “the harmonica plays the skeleton keys and the rain,” or the way “Louise holds a handful of rain tempting you to defy it.”

Dylan in London, 1966

These are the lines against which any more recent songwriter’s work must be held. They are memories that only the best-made songs call us to connect our lives to, and any aspiring masters of song who shy away from that great challenge are doomed to shrink in the shadow of a history they might otherwise have enriched. When bands like Death Cab For Cutie storm the scene with hailed writers like Ben Gibbard to offer a latest gem by the name of “I Will Possess Your Heart”–the title alone one of far less subtlety and tact than anything either of the aforementioned songwriters would ever even ponder–it is this fertile heritage he confronts. Lines like “How I wish you could see the potential of you and me” or “I know you will find love” read like phantom impostors by comparison, knee-jerk lines scribbled on a napkin in crayon and shoved in the pocket of a shirt that’s later tossed to the hamper and forgotten. It is a difficult but hardly arguable fact that one commits an act of blasphemy in pairing figures like Gibbard, however sincere or loved they may be, with the predecessors that paved the way to their fame all those years ago. Such undue claims to glory suggest that younger fans mistake a catchy tune for lyrical intensity, trading substance for surface in a fit of confused adoration.

This is not to say that those capable of hanging with such esteemed company do not exist in the industry’s current and bountiful crop of songwriters. Songwriters of that magnitude are and must necessarily be few and far between, but they are apparent to those looking hard enough. Joe Henry, for example, who is married to, of all people, the sister of the Material Girl herself, continues to produce one brilliant exhibition of lyrical mastery after another, particularly the trilogy of Trampoline, Fuse and Scar, albums teeming with an abundance of gripping language dressed in Henry’s unique and ethereal jungle of sound. Henry, producer of recent projects by Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann, Elvis Costello and, most notably, a grammy-winning foray into soul that produced Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up on Me and the resurrection of Bettye Lavette, is a sought-after collaborator for a reason: he has quietly developed one of the most respectable oeuvres music has seen since Tom Waits’s Swordfish/Raindogs/Frank’s Wild Years package in the mid ’80s.

Joe Henry

“Like she was the fever I wear like a crown,” Henry sings of some sought-after love in “Like She Was A Hammer,” “Like she was the raging flower in the brick yard . . . like she was Roosevelt’s funeral in the street.” Henry plows language to dig beneath the surface of the banter that passes for songwriting in a Death Cab tune, unearthing the raw jewelry of words to convey a far more persuasive sense of the helplessness and need that Gibbard reaches for in his newest single. He so quickly finds and exposes the pumping heart of the song that he hardly leaves you a second to breathe before you’re thrown into an empty room with nothing but your own wounded memories to get you through the hour. “I wonder how you turned out the stars,” Henry sings on the spare and fragile “Lock and Key,” “I hear your laugh / like falling railway cars . . . God only knows how I love you / but God and his ghost / and his roadhouse crew / ran me out of town on a silver rail / free at last and begging for jail.” Now that’s helplessness. That’s desire. That is song.

Others, like Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, bring a maniacal abandon to the song that reduces so many to timid pretenders, singing of “the toothless kiss of skeletons / in summer hail” on his brilliant Wonderful Life LP. “I’m the king of nails,” he concludes as a grunged-up crescendo of guitars and pounding drums blasts the song to hell. Linkous’s talents are evident in the company it attracts. Tom Waits chimes in on “Dog Door,” while PJ Harvey lends her gut-deep wail to the scorching “Piano Fire.” “Every hair on your head is counted,” he whispers on Goodmorning Spider, an album recorded not long after medics literally brought him back from the dead amid a paralyzing overdose that left him nearly crippled, “You are worth hundreds of sparrows.”

Ben Gibbard

The greatest songwriters of a generation do not always fall in our laps as thunderously as they may have forty years ago, when Dylan, Cohen and Mitchell torched the world with a revolutionary fusion of pop and poetry that no one dared attempt before. In an industry far more saturated with underground talent vying for a platform than the likes of Cohen or Dylan had to contend with in their day, too often the finest talent is kept away from the radio and crowded off the stage.

The songs of Henry and Linkous will not be heard on your local FM station today, and they will never pose for the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone. But they are without argument producing work of vastly superior quality to the majority of the sludge that passes for song on the scene today. Do yourself a favor–download a tune or two by either of these geniuses. Then listen to the new Death Cab album. As beautiful and brave as Narrow Stairs may be–and it is most certainly a commendable piece of work by a good band–still I challenge you tell me who the great songwriter is. I’ll be waiting patiently for your answer.

“To be blunt, Narrow Stairs represents another bold attempt as the band continues to embrace the idea that their own smarmy drama pop should be less abrasive and grander on a scale both lyrically and instrumentally” — Michael Roffman of Consequence of Sound

With a new video out that’s about as inspiring as a night of bingo at the local Moose Lodge–our first glimpse of the follow-up to an album that some derided as the sell-out of the century–the light shines a bit uncertainly on all things Death Cab these days. The single, polished to a glossy sheen and boasting a typically ham-handed title of “I Will Possess Your Heart,” plays like an outtake that Coldplay recorded at gunpoint and burned before skipping town in a borrowed Mini, its muted guitars kept vaguely afloat by sputtering percussion as chintzy bursts of piano pepper the tune with more than a modest share of corn. Ben Gibbard tops things off with such revelatory turns as “You’ve gotta spend some time with me / I know that you’ll find love / I will possess your heart.” Pretty deep, dude. You’re killin’ me over here.

Thankfully for Death Cab fans, the album actually does get better from there–but only occasionally. And yet that’s exactly the kind of experience that most Death Cab albums deliver. “It’s comforting to know what you’re getting,” Pitchfork said of Plans, “Four or five songs you’ll treasure, four or five you’ll tolerate, and a pretty good band sticking to their guns.” This time around, though, the treasures are not so easily discovered–though there are treasures–and there’s plenty to merely tolerate. But if it’s the treasures we have to work harder to get to that we truly prize, then perhaps Narrow Stairs is on to something, delivering for perhaps the first time in the band’s career songs that are neither immediately gripping nor quickly dismissed, but rather material you need to listen to four times over before it starts to sink in like a challenging poem.

It’s both unsurprising and worrisome that Atlantic, the major label to which Death Cab signed in 2004 after a string of genuinely stirring records with indie label Barsuk, is describing their latest release as “their most daring and adventurous album to date.” Let me decode those pleasantries for you: “dude, we’ve listened to the album 30 times now, and we still have no idea what we’ve just heard nor how to market it. Let’s just call it ‘daring’ and head for the hills while we’re still in the black.” When a major label’s PR people characterize new records as “mature,” “adventurous” or “honest,” it’s usually code for “boring” or “Oh shit, we’re screwed.” So they call it “adventurous” to heighten the suspense, conning you into coughing up your gas money for an album that turns out to be a lot less interesting than they led you to believe.

Some of us who listened to Death Cab For Cutie albums before the radio told everyone else to do the same lamented the predictable excess of watered-down ballads their major label debut served up, a self-conscious “now we need to sound like the band they signed” paranoia that provoked the most claustrophobic production job of Chris Walla’s career, exchanging the bite of The Photo Album for the blather of Plans, the hard nose of “That’s Incentive” for the glass jaw of “Someday You Will Be Loved.” “It would be nice if a band reaching for a larger audience had a sound that matched that sense of ambition,” Pitchfork complained at the time.

As song after song on Narrow Stairs demonstrates, the boys heard the criticism, and they’re fighting back with mixed success. Though the album indulges some of the same water balloons and vapor the band packed into Plans, its more rewarding moments unleash a brazenness they haven’t displayed since Gibbard put out a cassette called You Can Play These Songs With Chords. “I hope this album is a bit of a surprise for those out there that think they have us all figured out,” Cab drummer Nick Harmer boasts. That’s fine, but the gripes that greeted their Atlantic debut a few years back were born not of boredom, but of affection for the band that Harmer & Friends left behind at Barsuk. Long before they turned to the ballads-by-the-numbers formula of Plans, they brewed organic indie-pop collections that sported as many teeth as tears, an occasional crunch of snotty guitar intruding to toughen the tempo. Plans, by contrast, sounded too much like a stump speech for President of Emo-Nation than a Death Cab album, drenched in the weepy whispers and atmospherics that give emo a bad name.

Confronting the confines of a major label’s conservative vision this time around, they depart more dramatically than ever from the band we knew just four years ago, with its 8-minute singles (”I Will Possess Your Heart”) and African drums (”Pity and Fear“). The frenetic “No Sunlight” exhibits an unfocused and discordant contrivance of noise that underscores the self-conscious anxiety of a band burdened by the pressures of the big time, while Gibbard sings as if someone’s waving a lit match under his ass as his voice strains to catch up to its own whimsical flights on “Cath” (a song that’s given a remarkably more moving acoustic makeover here.) “It’s a ballsy, brave effort,” James Montgomery opines at mtv.com (there we go with the code words again), “sonically every bit as dissonant and sanguine as you have heard . . . tunes that display muscle and bravado.” All true, as it turns out; but the results, while thrilling at times, are far more uneven than the band’s establishment apologists would have you believe.

Something almost engaging happens on the admittedly charming “”You Can Do Better Than Me,” a clamor of Christmas bells and organ carrying the song to destinations no Death Cab album’s gone before. And the sonically massive “Pity and Fear,” for all its theatrics and distortion, features one of the grittiest vocal performances of Gibbard’s career, the edges of his fragile croon roughened by a morbid and memorable attitude. This is clearly not the Death Cab For Cutie you listened to in high school. We can cue the usual cliches here about maturity and evolution, but whether we want to buy into the story Atlantic is selling or work with the album on our own terms, ultimately Narrow Stairs is a conflicted–if beautiful–document of divergent creative paths. Familiar shades of Plans flicker amid the flames of a visionary angst that that album hardly even sniffed, and the band seems invested enough in those newer horizons to dig up more where that came from next time around. In the aftermath of such historic transformations as bands like Wilco and Radiohead have undergone, Narrow Stairs suggests that we may be witnessing another musical metamorphosis in the making–one with the rare potential to break its own ground.