…happen to good bands: Exhibit A, the atrociously named but thoroughly delightful band the everybodyfields (lowercase theirs; also ugh). I was put on to this trio from Johnson City, Tennessee, by an online friend whose taste frequently meshes with mine, and he was absolutely on target this time. I bought their first album, the annoyingly titled “halfway there: electricity and the south” (again, stupid lowercase theirs), a couple of months ago, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of this year’s “Plague of Dreams.”
So what do they sound like? Well, I don’t like to use the largely meaningless term “Appalachian music,” though it could perhaps be more fairly applied to them than to other young bands who have been saddled with the term, since they are actually from the region. But it’s still a pointless and overloaded term, so I’d prefer to call them an alt-country band (to apply another completely useless term) with strong old-time and folk influences. Their songwriting is quiet but powerful, not at all frail or delicate, and their musicianship is solid, especially their excellent dobro player’s work. The frontpeople, Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews (who I think are a couple, but I’m not sure; haven’t really gotten into the cult of personality* with them yet), both sing, and I’ve always been a complete sucker for boy-girl harmonies; if I could be in a band, I’d want to share vocals with a male singer. I wouldn’t say either of them is an extraordinarily gifted singer or anything, but they both have clear, lovely voices (and they sing on key, always a plus in my book), and they complement each other extremely well. They’ve got a little bit of that dreamy atmospheric thing I’ve been going on about recently, but it’s more a stillness, a peaceful quality to their music, rather than anything airy or trippy. They sound like a lazy autumn afternoon in the countryside, I guess.
And it wasn’t until today—maybe the sixth or seventh time I’ve listened to the record—that I noticed how much they remind me of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They’re not derivative of Welch and Rawlings at all; I wouldn’t even necessarily assume they’re influenced by them. But they’re mining similar territory, and they’re quietly, distinctively memorable and affecting in much the same way. I’m finding that a number of my favorite records this year (e.g. British Sea Power, Brakes, Stars) are ones that I enjoy and admire tremendously but don’t feel especially passionate about, but if the everybodyfields’ new one is as good as their first, it could wind up quite high on my list precisely because it inspires real passion in me, just as the first one does. (Which is a little odd, since a lack of passion is the thing that keeps me from truly loving, rather than just admiring, much of Gillian Welch’s work—not “Revival,” which is a record I’ll always be passionate about, but most everything else.)
My friend Steve got me listening to a good band with a good name this past week, too: the Morning After Girls, from Australia. (They have an actual girl in the band, which somehow makes me like their name better.) Further investigation is warranted, but so far they strike me as a great moody melodic punkish dark-rock band. Pretty sure I’m going to have to order their new record from Australia, since there’s no projected release date for it here.
[A meta note: I realize the blog has been a little sparse and dull lately, for which I apologize. Work has been occupying most of my waking hours recently, and it looks like it's going to be that way for a while. Not that I'm complaining, because I continue to love what I'm doing, but it does make it hard to marshal the thoughts that are buzzing around in my head in a coherent way. So those thoughts are popping up in my dreams instead, mostly. I've been thinking a lot about a line from a Lori Carson song that I've probably quoted before: "Heat hangs in this room/Like pictures on your wall/Of other lives/Do you mourn them all?" It's not that I'm mourning past versions of me, not at all, but some of them have been visiting me unexpectedly (though maybe predictably, given my recent forays into playing with my past), and I'm wondering if other people carry their old selves with them much of the time, and if so, how they deal with it. But that's about as far as I can get on the introspection front tonight, with a 7:00 a.m. appointment with my trainer looming and another hour or so of work to do.]
*The cult of personality is something that’s all but disappeared for me since CDs replaced vinyl. It used to be that if I like a band, I knew the names of all of the band members and had memorized the band’s basic biography; if I really liked a band, I’d go beyond that and start gathering whatever trivia about them that I could find. (And if a band completely took over my life, as has happened only a few times, I became a font of information about them; heck, I can still tell you things about Paul Weller, for example, that there’s just no good reason for me to remember.) Nowadays that just hardly ever happens. The Delgados are pretty indisputably my favorite band of the last ten years (as long as I don’t include artists who are largely band-independent, i.e. Jay Farrar, Scott Miller, and Robbie Fulks), and yet I still have trouble remembering all of the core band members’ surnames, much less any part of the names of the various side personnel. I was a Grand Champeen fan for a good two years before I knew all of their last names for sure, and for the first year or so, I had a terrible time even remembering Channing’s first name, for some reason. I can’t even tell you some of the Delgados’ song titles, or in some cases, which record a particular song is on. And those are major favorite bands of mine; I couldn’t even begin to come up with the names of the members of bands I’m less passionate about. I blame this all on CDs, because I just don’t pore over CD inserts the way I used to over LPs. It’s probably a product of aging, too, and to a lesser extent, of not automatically focusing on a cute boy in a given band, since I so rarely do that anymore. (I’m not saying I never do it, I just don’t do it as often. It used to be pretty much a given. I remember that in the stretch during the late ’80s when I listened to almost nothing but American Music Club (Soul Asylum were practically the only exception), I was curiously proud of the fact that I didn’t have any girly interest in any of the members of AMC…which is why it particularly annoyed me that Eitzel, with whom I was reasonably well acquainted through a mutual friend, thought I had a crush on him. Yeesh. As if. But I digress.) I don’t think it’s a bad thing that in most cases, the music interests me more than the personalities; it’s just odd, and I’m still not fully used to it even after more than a decade of CD-buying rather than LP-buying.
I feel the same way about Welch & Rawlings’ oeuvre: I love Revival and merely have respect for the rest. Glad to hear it’s not just me.
It’s definitely not just you. It occurs to me, though, that I should amend that statement to say that I’m passionate about parts of “Time the Revelator” too, though not all of it. It feels more real to me than most of her work—and I hasten to add that I don’t mean “authentic,” because I find that whole argument about Gillian Welch pretty silly, I mean “real” in the sense of genuinely felt, rather than studied. So much of her writing feels like a graduate thesis at Berklee rather than anything that comes from the heart. (I’ve been attacked for that opinion before, though. I won’t mention any names, but his initials are Roy Francis Kasten.
)
I don’t get that studied feeling at all from the everybodyfields, happily. I just wish they had a better name.
I feel that way about Gillian Welch, too, mainly because of seeing Welch & Rawlings perform live so many times (I haven’t paid much attention to her recordings other than Revival and Revelator). It used to annoy the hell out of me the way she would “tune up” her voice before starting a song (“Mmmmmmm”–shut up and sing already!). The thing that finally made me stop seeing them altogether–and the same sort of perfectionism was at the root of it–was the time at the Staion Inn when she insisted that they shut off the air conditioner IN NASHVILLE IN AUGUST because it was “interfering” with the sound. The lack of air conditioning certainly interfered with my ability to enjoy her set, so I left about five minutes into it. She just seems kind of soulless to me (although I also agree that there are parts of Time the Revelator that feel real in the way you mean). David Rawlings, on the other hand, does not seem soulless. I used to love to watch him. But then apparently someone told him not to let his tongue hang out, and he started looking kind of repressed on stage.
Since moving to the land of the new, I’ve realized that a lot of what says “character” or “soul” to me has to do with imperfection–decripitude, flaws, rough edges. While I like it when singers sing on key, I don’t enjoy singing that is too perfect. That’s why I don’t like a lot of female Irish singers, though I’m not sure whether it’s the way they sing or the way it’s recorded that gives them that overly clean, polished sound. (BTW, I bought Niamh Parsons’ Blackbirds and Thrushes and love it).
Don’t be too hard on the everybodyfields. It is a stupid name, to be sure, but I’d say at this point most of the good ones are taken (cue Ian Hunter
).
David Rawlings is clearly Gillian’s not-very-secret weapon, and he seems to play with all of the joy and passion that she lacks. I mean, maybe she’s just very restrained and I’m just being uncharitable; certainly, she seems like a perfectly likeable person based on the New Yorker profile I read. But there’s just something about her…
I do enjoy singing that is perfect as long as it has something else going on, some timbre, some depth, some nuance. Otherwise, you’ve got Judy Collins. It also depends on the genre: imperfection doesn’t work so well with bluegrass, for example. (You could argue that bluegrass + imperfection = old-time, actually, but only if you were a) on P2 and b) in the mood to get massacred.)
You bought “Blackbirds and Thrushes”? Ah, my work here is done. Gosh, I love that record. I’ve been doing a bunch of exploring of unfamiliar Britfolk and Celtic artists (unfamiliar to me, that is) courtesy of the BBC’s various folk shows and the fine Website TradTunes, and I’ve got lots of new names to add to my “must buy” list. Which is just what I need, of course.
And yeah, “all of the good ones are taken,” and I suppose there are worse band names out there than the everybodyfields (although that damn lowercase business drives me friggin’ nuts). Dogs Die in Hot Cars, for example, has to rank among the worst band names ever, although they’re a pretty good band. But I like the everybodyfields so much that I’d really prefer they had a better name.
I’d be VERY interested to hear you expand on how something that arouses no passion in you can be considered “favorite.” True, there are certainly records we admire for the craftsmanship or process that went into their creation — but how could such a record get into your personal top ten? If it doesn’t move you, what’s the point?
I know there are many levels at which we enjoy music and songs (guilty pleasures, earnest critical faves we feel we ought to appreciate but frankly don’t, infectious but dumb singles, dumb but hard-rocking songs that have literal physical effects, etc. etc.) besides those that key directly into the lock of our own aesthetic sense. I think this is fascinating, and I’d LOVe to hear you talk about it in more detail.
(By the way, I feel incredibly lame linking to myself here, but I did once write about this in the process of writing a Freakwater review, so…)
Ooh, a challenge…I think it’s going to take a whole separate post to expound on this in full, so see the latest entry.
(And there’s nothing wrong with linking to yourself, especially when the link goes to a well-written and thought-provoking review.))