Down By The River - Iron & Wine

Sam Beam is a gentleman.  Softly spoken, with a light chuckle and gently self-deprecating humour, the man behind Southern indie powerhouse Iron & Wine could not be a nicer fellow to talk to.  Nor a more thoughtful one, remarking of Béla Fleck, another genre-busting trailblazer, that “it’s more about the process than the final result.  Which is like the artist’s journey to begin with, as long as you’re invested, that’s where it’s at.”

For Beam, that journey has to date been one of a gradual accumulation of texture.  The bare acoustic folk of his initial recordings was augmented with subtle electrics on the attractively pagan Woman King EP (2005).  Benefiting from lessons learnt through the Calexico collaboration In The Reins, Beam and co-producer Brian Dreck allowing the Chicano influence to infuse alongside percussive globs of rootsy Americana and African rhythms on his follow-up long player, The Shepherd’s Dog (2007), with results that attracted both critical acclaim and commercial success.

With his new record, Kiss Each Other Clean, Beam has expanded the project’s possibilities once again with some of his most creative arrangements to date, ramping up the African beats with the funk of ‘Big Burned Hand’ or the awesome groove of album closer ‘Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me’.  “It’s strange, I came to … it through minimalist pattern music of all things,” he remarks of the latter influence.  “Most people come to it through the blues or Paul Simon or whatever, but once I was really into Steve Reich … the African music just exploded from me, where it’s funky and has the same kinda crazy patterns and stuff, it’s just incredible.”

Also impressive is the depth of sound present on the finished record, dozens of overdubs incrementally added over dozens of hours being built up in thickly generous layers.  “You just treat it like painting,” explains Beam, “you make some marks and then you leave it, you go have a sandwich or a smoke or whatever and you come back a week later and listen to what you did and you react: either you make more marks or scrap the whole thing and start again.”

Indeed, of twenty or so songs brought to the studio, under the pressure of Beam’s incessant revisions, half ended up falling on the cutting room floor this time around.  The remainder are loosely united by the image of the river, his lyrical style lending itself well to a constantly unfolding stream of images – take the list of vivid sights that comprises opener ‘Walking Far From Home’, or the mantra-like incantation of names that concludes ‘Your Fake Name’, and the album itself, with a sense of unending change.

“I don’t sit and write records,” says Beam.  “I’m writing all the time and so when it comes time to put a record out, you look in your bag and see what songs you’ve got … all these songs treat it [the river] very differently, sometimes it’s a force of destruction and sometimes it was a force of redemption.  There’s all the religious, Christian stuff – baggage – that it has with it, so it was fun to have an image that was so participatory, it had a lot to offer.”

Kiss Each Other Clean certainly has depth.  Although Beam regularly allows songs to be used in advertisements, film and television soundtracks, and has recently signed to Warner in the US, a move seemingly at the forefront of indie commercialisation, he could never be accused of selling out – after all, a happily married father of five, the man has to put food on the table somehow.  “You can’t predict public taste and you can’t keep everybody happy – that’s impossible.  You put your nose down to the grind and make sure that you’re involved.”

First Published in The Brag, Iss. 396, January 24th 2011

The Treasure Hunt - CocoRosie

It’s difficult to think of a group able to elicit more strident responses than avant-pop duo CocoRosie.  Since their personal reunion after a decade of estrangement, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady have divided listeners with four albums of ferociously individualistic music.  Although many have been captivated by their visually intense live shows and adamantly eccentric explorations of sonic texture, others have been put off by Bianca’s curdled vocals or the suspicion that very little lies beneath the duo’s Bohemian posing.

Taking a break from work on her upcoming art exhibition in Japan, Bianca isn’t fazed by the pair’s critics, pointing towards the benefits of a gripe often tossed her way.  “I think it takes a lot of self-indulgence to be an artist,” she comments through a blocked nose (Southern France not being the warmest of places to spend the winter).  “Really, for us it’s a sort of ecstasy … We are the ones who are getting a lot of pleasure out of it first, I don’t think we’d be doing it otherwise, and that’s really our compass for our work, it’s based on our bliss.”

In practice, this wide-eyed willingness to throw out any rulebooks and to follow their own impulses is what defines the CocoRosie modus operandi, elements from a vast range of sources including classical (Sierra is a trained opera singer), blues, hip-hop, dub-step and electronica being assembled with results that are unerringly their own.  “There is a sort of treasure hunt feeling that we have when we’re making music,” muses Bianca.  “It’s kind of like creating a sort of alchemy of distinct parts that don’t necessarily belong together.”

This willingness to pull aspects of distinct genres into their own self-contained world while transfiguring them in the process, perhaps accounts for the instantly striking quality of their music.  While their ultra-low-fi exercise in francophilia La Maison de Mon Reve in 2004 attracted no small degree of attention (prompting Touch and Go to take the uncommon step of seeking out the sister’s signatures), it was with their 2005 follow-up Noah’s Ark that they made their mark.  While guest spots from Antony Hegarty (and subsequent touring slot with the angel-voiced androgene) certainly didn’t hurt the cause, the album is a stunning musical confrontation of the residual warping effects of childhood traumas and externally imposed religious faith, a high mark that record number three, The Adventures Ghosthorse and Stillborn (2007), failed to reach.

The twilight world of last year’s Grey Oceans presented a return to form, albeit one wrapped in foreboding, largely acoustic, clothing.  As musically diverse as ever (see the collision of honky-tonk piano, hand-claps and jungle beats of ‘Hopscotch’ for example, or the sombre piano and lush strings of ‘Lemonade’), Grey Oceans is marked by a meditative atmosphere, Bianca’s lyrics reflecting her preoccupation with the natural world, or as she puts it “the perfection of imperfection.”

Although the album is easily the duo’s most cohesive and accessible collection to date, for Bianca the process of music-making remains a laborious one, each song representing a plunge into the unknown.  “We [start with] less of a map than in the beginning actually, which is partly what took the record so long to come together … We started out with a lot of dancey, more poppy music just as a kind of a naughty exercise in a really different direction, but after a couple of years … the record became a lot more melancholic and acoustic and more stripped down – much to our surprise.  So we really improvised more than ever with this record.”

While their previous work has featured guest artists such as Antony and Devendra Banhart, with Grey Oceans the pair took the unusual step of allowing a third party into the writing process, the contributions of pianist Gael Rakotondrabe providing some extra glue.  “[It was] very luxurious to work with a musician who’s really capable of improvising in any genre of music,” says Bianca of the experience.  “I think it allowed us to travel even more quickly, more vastly into these different genres … he brought a certain fluidity to the music which made the record more musical in a sense, more melodic.”

To foster the sort of bubble in which their creative processes flourish, the sisters maintain their isolation from the rest of the world for as much of the time as they can get away with, even while on tour.  “Real life for me can be more stressful,” says Bianca.  “All we do [on tour is] focus on preparing ourselves for performing.  There’s nothing else to think about and we don’t keep telephones with us or anything, so the outside world can’t even really contact us … just being near nature in a personless landscape is what really propels my poetry and my ideas these days.”

Remaining apart certainly seems to provide the kind of uninhibited space necessary for the ongoing reinvention of the fabulous beast that is CocoRosie, with things set to be shaken up completely following upcoming Australian appearances.  “After we have our Asian Australian tour, we’re going to really completely reshape our band and kind of start from scratch, and we’re pretty excited about that.  We’re gonna really just have the two of us working together again.”

First published in The Brag, Iss. 395, January 17th 2011

Ten Years On - The Decemberists

In the world of Colin Meloy, mythic characters stride gargantuan across wild, untamed landscapes, seeking (and occasionally receiving) love, while being undone by malign authority, inner flaw or other tragic circumstance.  Unlike so many songwriters of note, the Decemberists’ scoundrel-in-chief has built his band’s reputation not on soul-baring angst but by spinning grand narratives set to raucous and insistently good-humoured folk-rock tunes.  That said, there’s a definite tendency for the guy not to get the girl and for the pair of them to wind up fish food.

“I guess I just have kind of a penchant for tragedy,” explains Meloy from his home in Portland, Oregan, ahead of the release of the group’s sixth LP The King Is Dead.  “The pathos of life in a narrative is more interesting to write about.  I find protagonists who are either tragic or have a kind of core vulnerability tend to be more dynamic and interesting to me, rather than just singing about myself – [there are] plenty of vulnerabilities there but none that I’m really interested in singing about.”

At best, his approach has produced rambling yarns that are both sophisticated parables, laden with delightfully erudite flourishes, while being instantly accessible foot-stomping singalongs.  Think the Victorian sea-shanty kitsch of ‘The Mariner’s Revenge Song’ from Picaresque (2005) or the retelling of the titular Japanese folk story on The Crane Wife (2006), Meloy revelling in rolling ballads that sometimes extend in excess of ten minutes.

This predilection for the grandiose reached its logical apex with the band’s last album The Hazards of Love (2009), a sprawling hour long rock opera complete with key characters being voiced by guest vocalists including Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) and Jim James (My Morning Jacket).  For many however, Meloy had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew, the song-writing often failing to match the album’s lofty ambitions.

Not that he seems too worried.  “I think that every time that we’ve made something big, the point [has been] to make it overblown.  I think that that’s what’s sort of clever about it, kind of funny, to toy with bigger and bigger horizons … it’s just toying with genre, toying with approaches, creating new signifiers, different places, different people, using the trappings of older kinds of music.  I think we are prepared to do that in a little more subtle way this time around than we have in the past.”

Fans overwhelmed by the excesses of Hazards will be pleased that The King Is Dead sees the Decemberists scaling things back, each song being its own self-contained entity, with only one exceeding the five minute mark.  Taken as a whole, the collection seemingly reflects more modest aspirations on the part of Meloy, the theatrical gestures of past releases giving way to more straightforward folk-inflected indie that self-consciously pays homage to one of the songwriter’s formative inspirations, R.E.M.

“I think that they’re one of the bands that first helped me create my own musical outlook,” says Meloy of the latter.  “Them and the Replacements and Husker Dü and the Smiths, those are the bands that were incredibly influential for me, not only in discovering what music was like, but what kind of person I was and my own desires creatively … Inevitably, I feel like everything I do musically is indebted to R.E.M. – I think I just wear it a little more on my sleeve on this record.”

Indeed, the album even features one of the band’s members, guitarist Peter Buck contributing to three songs including rootsy first single ‘Down by the Water’, although ‘Calamity Song’ pays more obvious homage with its unmistakable mix of drivingly upbeat melody and apocalyptic lyrics.  Meloy is enthusiastic about working with one of his idols.

“He’s a really sweet, kind man, and works very quickly, professionally and is a really fun guy to be around.  I first met him in 1991 when I was 16.  I snuck into The Crocodile in Seattle after a My Bloody Valentine / Yo La Tengo show and R.E.M. were in town – I think they were mixing or mastering Automatic for the People – and Michael Stipe and Peter Buck were both in there.  I bought a glass of red wine for Peter Buck and chatted with him.  He didn’t remember that exchange, but he still treats me very nicely.”

As well as its back-to-basics approach, The King is Dead also marks the ten year anniversary since the release of Decemberists first effort, the 5 Songs EP, back in 2001.  With a decade of music-making under his belt, Meloy seems ready to let the band sit on the backburner for a while in order to pursue other creative avenues.  “Having been at this now for ten years, it’s been pretty constant in what we’ve done creatively, but there are other things I’d like to do.  I’m not putting the Decemberists away completely but I would like to step away, take a longer time away from the band and focus on other things.”

Such as?  “Certainly working on something with theatre, but I’ve also been working on a series of books with my wife Carson, who does all the illustrations for the band and we are working on a series of illustrated novels and the first one, Wild Wood, comes out next year, so that’s probably where my head will be for the foreseeable future after the touring cycle is done.”

First Published in The Brag, Iss. 394, January 10th 2011