It occurs to me that in my lengthy post about my particular attachment to Dolly Varden, I didn’t say a whole hell of a lot about what they sound like. That’s partly because their sound is a little bit hard to describe; for a while, they tended to get lumped in with alt-country/Americana, but that’s not really accurate. I really need to come up with a genre term that describes the style of bands like Dolly Varden and Dolorean—not that the two sound alike at all, just that they’re equally hard to describe. In the case of Dolly Varden, there’s a little twang, lots of melody, and the highly distinctive guitar work of Mark Balletto (who has a fine spinoff band of his own, My Record Player), which is capable of being both shimmery and unexpectedly crunchy, though not usually in the same song. Mostly, there are two words that come to mind when I try to describe the Vardens: “joyous” and “beautiful.” Even when the lyrics are downbeat, which they often are, there’s a sheer joy to the sound of the songs that just lifts the heart up and brings a little ache to the throat. Geez, I wish I had a better vocabulary for this kind of thing, rather than standard rock-crit cliches, but…there’s a lyric in the (happy, upbeat, joyous) song “I Come to You,” from “The Dumbest Magnets,” that goes: “And when my chest is open wide/You could pull yourself inside.” When you listen to it, you feel exactly what Steve is singing: your heart feels so big and full that it could just burst from your body. (Okay, now I’m starting to sound like the plot of “Alien.” Maybe I should quit while I’m behind.)
And beautiful: the melodies, the vocals, the arrangements. Beautiful and sometimes delicate, but in no way wispy or ethereal or frail. Just sheer gorgeousness and gorgeosity, to quote that little droogy Alex. Steve and Diane’s first band, Stump the Host, was kind of a punk band, I guess, but Steve says that it didn’t work so well for him and Diane to sing in that style because they’re both “pretty” singers. And it’s true, they are—both of them. Diane’s voice is full of color and timbre, capable of moving from light and sweet to dark and slightly husky in the same song; Steve’s is soulful and strong, but still, well, pretty.
Argh, enough trying to wrestle an adequate description to the ground. Just go listen to them: there are a number of MP3s on this page of their site.
Moving on: today’s NP list:
1. Michael Berube’s blog, because it’s been a while since I mentioned it, but also because the most recent entry (dated September 23) is exceptionally powerful. There are so many great political blogs out there (along with the crappy ones) that it’s hard to definitively say that any one of them is the best, but I will say that Michael’s is my favorite, bar none. (NB: I get to call him Michael because he was at Columbia when I was at Barnard—he was a year behind me—and though I don’t actually know him, we have mutual friends. In case anyone was wondering.)
2. The Brakes, “Give Blood.”* My online friend Ged has been pimping this UK band for months. I respect his taste, so I listened to some samples online. Liked ‘em pretty well, but wasn’t sure I was going to buy the album. But then it was released in the US, and half of the rest of Postcard starting raving about it too, so I caved in to peer pressure and bought it. And I’m very glad I did. It’s a weird little (and I do mean little: it’s less than half an hour long, which I guess is kind of a raw deal when you’re paying full CD price, but is nonetheless fine with me because I think almost every CD that comes out nowadays, including ones that I adore, is just too damn long) record, full of humor and quirks, but they’re not a novelty band by any means. Mostly, what they are is entertaining, in the best sense. Vastly entertaining, and definitely innovative. But perhaps not as innovative as…
3. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods.” I probably wouldn’t even know about this guy if he weren’t on the Delgados’ label, Chemikal Underground, because I wasn’t familiar with the band he was (is?) in, Arab Strap. Fortunately, though, I’ll listen to anything the Delgados tell me to listen to (though I draw the line at Mother and the Addicts), so I checked out Malcolm’s latest. I ended up buying his first record, the brilliantly titled “5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine” (how could you not love a record with a title like that?), and falling in love with it first, because “Into the Woods” was only available on import. When it was released here, though, I bought it right away, and it’s just genius. Maybe it would seem more ordinary if he didn’t have a heavy Scottish (Glaswegian, I think) accent, but I think the accent is only a small part of the whole picture. He takes deeply depressive but also sometimes hysterically funny lyrics and sets them against melodies that are alternately dreamy and just sort of jangly and upbeat, and his voice, which is gruff and talky and not at all sweet, is what ties it all together. Amazing stuff. Sample lyric: “You’re gonnae break my heart and I know it/And if you don’t/You’re gonna break my string of bad luck/And ruin my career.”
4. The first, self-titled David Johansen record, recently discussed here. Hearing a once-beloved record that you haven’t heard in eons is kind of like the reconnection with old friends that I’ve been dwelling on so much here lately: you wonder if memory has put too much of a shiny gloss on reality, and you question whether you’ll still have anything in common. In this case, there was no reason to worry. This is still a great album that doesn’t sound even remotely dated, and I was happy to find that not only do the killer songs that I remember vividly (”Donna,” “Cool Metro,” “Frenchette”) still sound as great as ever, some of the ones I had forgotten (”Pain in My Heart,” “I’m a Lover”) do too. And it’s another blessedly short record, even with the addition of a (totally inessential) bonus track. Of course, it’s probable that I can’t be objective about this record, because of the powerful time-and-place associations with it. But insofar as I can be, I feel comfortable recommending the record.
5. And sticking to following up on that same post, I’ve been treating myself to an episode every few nights of “Butterflies,” and I’m delighted to find that I still love it. It’s odd how much I remembered about it (and some little details that I’d forgotten, or misremembered: for my own satisfaction, I need to correct myself to note that Ria meets Leonard in a restaurant, not in the park—and it’s a very funny scene). I can’t unequivocally recommend it to everyone, I guess, for various reasons: the production values are pretty much nonexistent (I guess the Beeb didn’t have much of a budget for sitcoms in 1978), and it seems kind of stagy at times; you can sort of feel the writing behind the lines as they’re spoken. But they’re often very, very funny lines—I’ve been laughing at the show much more than I expected—as well as incisive and sometimes wistful and heart-tugging. And the acting is marvelous, even if the clothes and hairstyles are comically dated. I haven’t gotten to the more wistful stuff yet; in fact, I don’t think that cropped up much in the first season, which is the only one that’s available so far. But I do still get a little teary when I hear the theme song (a somewhat de-schmaltzed rendition of Dolly Parton’s extra-schmaltzy song “Love is Like a Butterfly”).
Um, I guess I haven’t really gotten the hang of this NP thing yet—these were supposed to be short, simple posts so that I could do them regularly without using up a whole lunch hour. More practice is required, I guess.
*(Lately, I’ve been putting album titles in quotation marks, which makes me a little uneasy, because I’m a Chicago Manual type of girl and at heart I believe that titles should be in italics. But quotes are so much easier to type…So if I decide to go back to italics, I apologize in advance to anyone who is driven crazy by such stylistic inconsistencies. Which pretty much means that I’m apologizing to myself.)