revue & review
Losing Total Awareness
Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan’s first album, Pullhair Rubeye
Pullhair Rubeye is an album that exists as its antithesis. Recorded with male and female larynx, acoustic guitars and piano, its sound would have been simple and coherent. Having heard many of these songs in their forms played live, the album would have been interesting as it was. But, one night in December a decision was made that would gain attention from those who otherwise would not have cared. Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan decided to loop the tapes backwards, speeding up and slowing tempos down, reversing the entire album. The product of this is a washed out, dizzying often ghostly energy that still holds the endearing, highly personal qualities that the songs had in a live setting.
Releasing an album in reverse brings up ideas of spontaneity (and it does seem spontaneous as Avey Tare says that the decision was made because of being stuck in New York City around Christmas time as well as seeing the new David Lynch film Inland Empire.) Releasing the album in reverse is also courageous and makes one detach from the hard work and emotions that are very specific to certain words or motifs or notes and allow your work to become something that has become recreated.
When wrapped in these eight songs it is easy to become entranced by their glitchy rhythms and ambience or the strangeness of listening to English backwards, especially the reversal of where syllables would be stressed. The English becomes a foreign language and its timbre and fluctuations become the means to understand it.
Structuralism in language exhorts the deep structure of words, could music have a deep structure too that has implications different from its surface structure? In an interview, Avey Tare mentioned Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious and the idea that music is always buzzing around us and within us and that we only tune in and out of it (analogous to traveling out of the range of a radio station and then coming back into it.) This would imply that we are taking personal credit for our art which is really a massive idea resultant of everyone.
The intimacy of these two people’s work could be sourced to something as cliché as the “they are in love” but I have learned that that is not the end of it. I am aware that music is often the product of work, work and more work. Musicians must have a fundamental understanding of each other and what they are doing to be able to morph into any kind of collectivity. In a recent interview, Avey Tare said, “I think playing live music is the closest I’ve come to an outer body experience or at least losing total awareness of myself.” This transient feeling pulls through on the record as well, as it feels as though this music is not so insularly personal anymore but rather generative of sounds morphed into musical patterns.
Avey Tare’s Animal Collective is a group that typifies what it means to be musicians and people connecting. Over the past few years, they have been playing songs live, recording them and then moving on. This is very logical because the album will be recorded after the songs have been explored and broken down or built up in a live setting with some outsider input.
Many people who were interested in the Pullhair Rubeye songs before they were reversed were disappointed in finding out that the songs had been made the opposite of what their ears loved. I believe that it is healthy to deconstruct people’s ears and minds through what is not normal or common by shifting what they expect into something that does become inherently cerebral. In this case, that isn’t a negative thing because it was not intentionally labored over that way, which can be the case with artists who attempt to create for the sake of intellectualism alone.
To get to the content of Pullhair Rubeye though is more challenging than generally writing about its controversial condition. The opening piece, “Sis Around the Sandmill” is the place that most conjures wisps of specters and barren tundras. Kria’s voice is undeniably Icelandic, down to the thick accent, which furthers the foreign feel of English in reverse. Avey’s voice is undeniably Avey, slipping from a baritone to a child’s joyous yelps and then somewhere in the middle, leaving traces of his Animal Collective life. “Foetus No-man” and “Palenka” are the two instrumental tracks as well as the shortest on the album. While they do not completely collapse, it seems as though they could have been fused together because they are too similar in their structure and tempo and they are almost indistinguishable to the aural memory. Having snuck a listen to the forward version of the whole album, these tracks withstand boldly in between the vocal and instrumental tracks. “Sasong” is eerily disorienting, with the vocal line sped up to sound like an ultra hyper Daffy Duck, this is Avey and Kria’s humorous interlude. The digital strains underneath though are tonally beautiful when concentrated on very hard for the duration of two minutes and fifteen seconds. The closing track, “Was Onaip” reminds me of cumulus clouds in fast motion and mountain water trickling up a rivulet. The song becomes smaller and smaller, as though the day is leaving to make room for the night; Avey and Kria are saying goodnight and ending in a gentle reverse bombast. All that is heard, if the stereo is cranked high, are scratches of sound under the fuzz of atmospheric noise.
Having said all this, I can only infer what the alum is speaking through what I hear; there are no lyrics to guide me or distinguishable markings that guide the listener in the direction of the creator’s intention and I presume that nor do the creators have a concrete explanation for their musique concréte. May be pulling hair and rubbing eyes are perpetual so we can never truly grasp or see exactly what it is that we are miraculously stumbling upon and claiming for our own.
*
Hand Me Down Tunes of The Avett Brothers
The Avett Brothers newest album, Emotionalism
One would think that entitling an album “Emotionalism” would presume that the album actually entailed a gush of dramatic feelings of someone else that are not needed anymore than the intense feelings felt in one’s own life. But cynicism and excess drama are not what The Avett Brothers are inviting you to partake. The experience is more of an honest down to earth one where happiness, sadness and love are confronted not as hopeless traps but as pieces of living that are both painful and joyous. This is not to say that The Avett Brothers do not dabble in the dark a bit. The first track is called “Die Die Die” but there is no death metal going on here. The actual song sounds like it could be a candidate for a Wes Anderson film because of the tinny twang of the banjo which lies under the vocal lines. Yes, the banjo is one of the main instruments played on the album along with the acoustic guitar, double bass, an assortment of percussion and the cello. Yes, The Avett Brothers are from North Carolina and are on Ramseur Records in Concord. But no, the brothers (actually brothers Seth and Scott Avett and friend Bob Crawford) are not merely recycling bluegrass or roots folk and turning it on to a younger audience, which is often the case with artists who become popular, i.e. The Strokes inverting The Velvet Underground into their own and the numerous hybrids being “re-created” from British invasion bands of the 1960’s and 70’s. Not to say that this is always terrible. I actually found The Velvets through The Strokes and it makes complete sense that I much prefer The Velvet Underground because they are the real thing.
The Avett Brothers do not sound quite like anyone you can readily conjure up in comparison to though. Acoustic instruments traditionally connoted to bluegrass played with the spirit of punk rock but the tightness of accomplished musicians who really know their instruments and their vision are the order. The lyrics are often simple with standard rhyme but still maintain a deep level of introspection throughout. There are even moments of un-cool writing sensibility such as in “The Ballad of Love and Hate”, a song which personifies love and hate in a melancholy story about their separation and longing and ultimately their rejoining. As Panda Bear declared on his ecstatic album Person Pitch: “Coolness is having courage. Courage to do what’s right.” This aphorism applies directly to The Avett Brothers approach to everything musically. Why become arrogant indie rock stars when you can rock out on banjos and vocal harmonies while still seducing everyone in the crowd?
The theme of the album is clearly an abundance of feelings that emote honesty and aim to expunge a detached air of nihilist cynical wit that has been running through indie music of late i.e. Conor Oberst. The album is uninhibited and means to converge many genres, breaking them and making them entirely new. On “The Girl From Chile”, the brothers actually trek through American musical history, beginning with folk and foothills country and segueing into Americana and Latin rhythms, and ending in hard rock with the only appearance of electric guitars on the whole album for about thirty seconds.
The official title of the album is “The Avett Brothers introduce Emotionalism”, which suggests that they are exhuming what has been repressed in music and possibly people’s lives for a while. While I have evidence to disprove my own hypothesis (just listen to Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear who both burst with emotion and passion) I really am accusing the more popular indie music scene for apathy, a disease which has crept up and seeped into the hearts of many a music maker out there who want success and fame in exchange for putting out an empty record every two years. The Avett Brothers are clearly not taking this route although they are claiming some notoriety, if playing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and selling out shows in New York City is success in the eyes of some. They also appeared in the top 200 on the Billboard music charts within the first week of the release of Emotionalism (May 15th.)
Hopefully, The Avett Brothers will be around for a while and according to their bio on their website they intend “to create music that will provoke thought, change perceptions and simply bring something new into the world.” If they continue this route, it seems like they will be.
Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan’s first album, Pullhair Rubeye
Pullhair Rubeye is an album that exists as its antithesis. Recorded with male and female larynx, acoustic guitars and piano, its sound would have been simple and coherent. Having heard many of these songs in their forms played live, the album would have been interesting as it was. But, one night in December a decision was made that would gain attention from those who otherwise would not have cared. Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan decided to loop the tapes backwards, speeding up and slowing tempos down, reversing the entire album. The product of this is a washed out, dizzying often ghostly energy that still holds the endearing, highly personal qualities that the songs had in a live setting.
Releasing an album in reverse brings up ideas of spontaneity (and it does seem spontaneous as Avey Tare says that the decision was made because of being stuck in New York City around Christmas time as well as seeing the new David Lynch film Inland Empire.) Releasing the album in reverse is also courageous and makes one detach from the hard work and emotions that are very specific to certain words or motifs or notes and allow your work to become something that has become recreated.
When wrapped in these eight songs it is easy to become entranced by their glitchy rhythms and ambience or the strangeness of listening to English backwards, especially the reversal of where syllables would be stressed. The English becomes a foreign language and its timbre and fluctuations become the means to understand it.
Structuralism in language exhorts the deep structure of words, could music have a deep structure too that has implications different from its surface structure? In an interview, Avey Tare mentioned Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious and the idea that music is always buzzing around us and within us and that we only tune in and out of it (analogous to traveling out of the range of a radio station and then coming back into it.) This would imply that we are taking personal credit for our art which is really a massive idea resultant of everyone.
The intimacy of these two people’s work could be sourced to something as cliché as the “they are in love” but I have learned that that is not the end of it. I am aware that music is often the product of work, work and more work. Musicians must have a fundamental understanding of each other and what they are doing to be able to morph into any kind of collectivity. In a recent interview, Avey Tare said, “I think playing live music is the closest I’ve come to an outer body experience or at least losing total awareness of myself.” This transient feeling pulls through on the record as well, as it feels as though this music is not so insularly personal anymore but rather generative of sounds morphed into musical patterns.
Avey Tare’s Animal Collective is a group that typifies what it means to be musicians and people connecting. Over the past few years, they have been playing songs live, recording them and then moving on. This is very logical because the album will be recorded after the songs have been explored and broken down or built up in a live setting with some outsider input.
Many people who were interested in the Pullhair Rubeye songs before they were reversed were disappointed in finding out that the songs had been made the opposite of what their ears loved. I believe that it is healthy to deconstruct people’s ears and minds through what is not normal or common by shifting what they expect into something that does become inherently cerebral. In this case, that isn’t a negative thing because it was not intentionally labored over that way, which can be the case with artists who attempt to create for the sake of intellectualism alone.
To get to the content of Pullhair Rubeye though is more challenging than generally writing about its controversial condition. The opening piece, “Sis Around the Sandmill” is the place that most conjures wisps of specters and barren tundras. Kria’s voice is undeniably Icelandic, down to the thick accent, which furthers the foreign feel of English in reverse. Avey’s voice is undeniably Avey, slipping from a baritone to a child’s joyous yelps and then somewhere in the middle, leaving traces of his Animal Collective life. “Foetus No-man” and “Palenka” are the two instrumental tracks as well as the shortest on the album. While they do not completely collapse, it seems as though they could have been fused together because they are too similar in their structure and tempo and they are almost indistinguishable to the aural memory. Having snuck a listen to the forward version of the whole album, these tracks withstand boldly in between the vocal and instrumental tracks. “Sasong” is eerily disorienting, with the vocal line sped up to sound like an ultra hyper Daffy Duck, this is Avey and Kria’s humorous interlude. The digital strains underneath though are tonally beautiful when concentrated on very hard for the duration of two minutes and fifteen seconds. The closing track, “Was Onaip” reminds me of cumulus clouds in fast motion and mountain water trickling up a rivulet. The song becomes smaller and smaller, as though the day is leaving to make room for the night; Avey and Kria are saying goodnight and ending in a gentle reverse bombast. All that is heard, if the stereo is cranked high, are scratches of sound under the fuzz of atmospheric noise.
Having said all this, I can only infer what the alum is speaking through what I hear; there are no lyrics to guide me or distinguishable markings that guide the listener in the direction of the creator’s intention and I presume that nor do the creators have a concrete explanation for their musique concréte. May be pulling hair and rubbing eyes are perpetual so we can never truly grasp or see exactly what it is that we are miraculously stumbling upon and claiming for our own.
*
Hand Me Down Tunes of The Avett Brothers
The Avett Brothers newest album, Emotionalism
One would think that entitling an album “Emotionalism” would presume that the album actually entailed a gush of dramatic feelings of someone else that are not needed anymore than the intense feelings felt in one’s own life. But cynicism and excess drama are not what The Avett Brothers are inviting you to partake. The experience is more of an honest down to earth one where happiness, sadness and love are confronted not as hopeless traps but as pieces of living that are both painful and joyous. This is not to say that The Avett Brothers do not dabble in the dark a bit. The first track is called “Die Die Die” but there is no death metal going on here. The actual song sounds like it could be a candidate for a Wes Anderson film because of the tinny twang of the banjo which lies under the vocal lines. Yes, the banjo is one of the main instruments played on the album along with the acoustic guitar, double bass, an assortment of percussion and the cello. Yes, The Avett Brothers are from North Carolina and are on Ramseur Records in Concord. But no, the brothers (actually brothers Seth and Scott Avett and friend Bob Crawford) are not merely recycling bluegrass or roots folk and turning it on to a younger audience, which is often the case with artists who become popular, i.e. The Strokes inverting The Velvet Underground into their own and the numerous hybrids being “re-created” from British invasion bands of the 1960’s and 70’s. Not to say that this is always terrible. I actually found The Velvets through The Strokes and it makes complete sense that I much prefer The Velvet Underground because they are the real thing.
The Avett Brothers do not sound quite like anyone you can readily conjure up in comparison to though. Acoustic instruments traditionally connoted to bluegrass played with the spirit of punk rock but the tightness of accomplished musicians who really know their instruments and their vision are the order. The lyrics are often simple with standard rhyme but still maintain a deep level of introspection throughout. There are even moments of un-cool writing sensibility such as in “The Ballad of Love and Hate”, a song which personifies love and hate in a melancholy story about their separation and longing and ultimately their rejoining. As Panda Bear declared on his ecstatic album Person Pitch: “Coolness is having courage. Courage to do what’s right.” This aphorism applies directly to The Avett Brothers approach to everything musically. Why become arrogant indie rock stars when you can rock out on banjos and vocal harmonies while still seducing everyone in the crowd?
The theme of the album is clearly an abundance of feelings that emote honesty and aim to expunge a detached air of nihilist cynical wit that has been running through indie music of late i.e. Conor Oberst. The album is uninhibited and means to converge many genres, breaking them and making them entirely new. On “The Girl From Chile”, the brothers actually trek through American musical history, beginning with folk and foothills country and segueing into Americana and Latin rhythms, and ending in hard rock with the only appearance of electric guitars on the whole album for about thirty seconds.
The official title of the album is “The Avett Brothers introduce Emotionalism”, which suggests that they are exhuming what has been repressed in music and possibly people’s lives for a while. While I have evidence to disprove my own hypothesis (just listen to Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear who both burst with emotion and passion) I really am accusing the more popular indie music scene for apathy, a disease which has crept up and seeped into the hearts of many a music maker out there who want success and fame in exchange for putting out an empty record every two years. The Avett Brothers are clearly not taking this route although they are claiming some notoriety, if playing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and selling out shows in New York City is success in the eyes of some. They also appeared in the top 200 on the Billboard music charts within the first week of the release of Emotionalism (May 15th.)
Hopefully, The Avett Brothers will be around for a while and according to their bio on their website they intend “to create music that will provoke thought, change perceptions and simply bring something new into the world.” If they continue this route, it seems like they will be.