Fun fact: Sacramento has one of the highest unemployment rates in the United States. Given that, it’s perhaps not so surprising that friendly local psychedelic popsters Ganglians are somewhat preoccupied by the realities of life under late capitalism. ‘Drop The Act’, the track which opens their euphoric third full-length effort Still Living, is nothing short of a slacker call to arms, singer Ryan Grubbs hollering with frenzied glee: “this is a sad, sad song / for all you sad, sad people / why don’t you pick up the phone / and tell me what you’re gonna do?”
Recovering from the flu contracted on a recent tour, guitarist Kyle Hoover is chipper about the band’s situation. “Worklessness, joblessness, feeling as though you should be doing something with your life but are completely unable to do so. On [‘Drop The Act’] I know that Ryan’s trying to capture an ‘inspire our generation’ [vibe], but … there’s sort of like a mocking sort of feel, like, ‘Yeah! Let’s get together and do nothing, guys!’”
A double irony, as in a few short years Ganglians (a play on ‘Gangly Aliens’ or ‘Gang of Aliens’ – take your pick) have compiled a small but impressive discography, their most recent effort being preceded by the sprawling lysergic spatter of Monster Head Room as well as their self-titled debut. Coming together over a shared love of Brian Wilson’s sixties songwriting (particularly the creepily beautiful Smiley Smile), Hoover also cites The Millenium’s Begin – “the most perfect studio pop record of the sixties” – as a vital touchstone.
Integral to Ganglians’ take on hooks and harmonies is their incorporation of found sounds and samples, lending their songs a cinematic edge. “[We] like to give it that element of escapism,” says Hoover. “When you circulate that sound collage stuff, it makes it feel like you’ve created your own little universe … we use [samples] for that purpose, [establishing] atmosphere … But on [tracks] like ‘Things to Know’, they’re just plain silly – like you know, where the motorcycle builds up and he’s like, riding off into the distance.
While Still Living is rife with tongue-in-cheek touches, Ganglians are just as capable of offering songs up straight from the heart. “’California Cousins’ and ‘Sleep’ are much more personal songs,” says Hoover, “especially for Ryan, he was dealing with relationship issues and whatever else … Half of the album is us getting together and jamming stuff out; half the [songs] were probably written in one night,” he explains. “Then there were songs like ‘Sleep’ that took us like weeks to figure out how we wanted it to work. It’s kind of a bit all over the place.”
Despite his recent brush with the lurgy, Hoover is keen to get back on the road – anywhere’s better than Sacramento. “We’ve been stuck at home, I’m at my folks’ house and Ryan’s able to couch surf wherever we are, but there’s a large period of time where we’re both jobless and homeless. We’re like, ‘When can we get on tour again so we don’t have to worry about life!’ That said, we’ve always both known that the best part about being in a band is writing a record and being in a studio and recording,” he says. “It’s the most magical experience.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 428, September 6th 2011
Showing posts with label Brian Wilson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brian Wilson. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Panda Bear - Tomboy
Back in 2007, Person Pitch – Panda Bear’s third solo record and big sloppy hug to the world – won accolades aplenty, while steering the band from which he was moonlighting (a little thing called Animal Collective) onto the sampler-laden trajectory that produced the exploding star highlight of 2009, Merriweather Post Pavilion. Panda Bear has a new album now. It’s called Tomboy. It’s very, very good.
Gone are the samples and random snippets that punctuated Person Pitch; the haphazard-collage-of-sonic-elements kind of approach is ditched, supplanted by lushly-rendered monolithic blocs of vividly shimmering texture. Similarly, the DJ and techno influences that riddled his previous album (particularly its sprawling centrepiece ‘Bros’) have been submerged within the pop structure that defined the songs of Merriweather Post Pavilion.
But Tomboy is certainly not Merriweather MK II; Panda Bear, AKA Noah Lennox, squeezes an extraordinary range of sounds out of his machinery, forsaking the samplers in favour of a simpler trick; playing his guitar through a synth module. ‘You Can Count On Me’, a message from father to newborn son, provides an intimately heartstring-tugging prelude, before the record is kicked off in earnest with the thundering anthem of ‘Tomboy’. A regal air is struck with the leisurely stroll along the promenade of ‘Last Night At The Jetty’, while a soft climax is reached with the wind chime-laden dirge ‘Scheherazade’, in which Lennox’ tendency towards minimalism reaches its apex with gently lulling style.
Panda Bear has achieved a kind of sonic perfection on this record. The oft-made comparison to Brian Wilson has never seemed more apt, with his opulent sound achieved through an apparent compulsion to create Phil Spector-ish levels of production flawlessness. While it is possible to overdose on overwhelmingly euphoric, vibrant sound, Lennox dares you to try.
The folks over at NPR are being good enough to stream Tomboy in its entirety for your listening pleasure. Have at it!
First published as Album of the Week in The Brag, Iss. 405, April 4th 2011
Gone are the samples and random snippets that punctuated Person Pitch; the haphazard-collage-of-sonic-elements kind of approach is ditched, supplanted by lushly-rendered monolithic blocs of vividly shimmering texture. Similarly, the DJ and techno influences that riddled his previous album (particularly its sprawling centrepiece ‘Bros’) have been submerged within the pop structure that defined the songs of Merriweather Post Pavilion.
But Tomboy is certainly not Merriweather MK II; Panda Bear, AKA Noah Lennox, squeezes an extraordinary range of sounds out of his machinery, forsaking the samplers in favour of a simpler trick; playing his guitar through a synth module. ‘You Can Count On Me’, a message from father to newborn son, provides an intimately heartstring-tugging prelude, before the record is kicked off in earnest with the thundering anthem of ‘Tomboy’. A regal air is struck with the leisurely stroll along the promenade of ‘Last Night At The Jetty’, while a soft climax is reached with the wind chime-laden dirge ‘Scheherazade’, in which Lennox’ tendency towards minimalism reaches its apex with gently lulling style.
Panda Bear has achieved a kind of sonic perfection on this record. The oft-made comparison to Brian Wilson has never seemed more apt, with his opulent sound achieved through an apparent compulsion to create Phil Spector-ish levels of production flawlessness. While it is possible to overdose on overwhelmingly euphoric, vibrant sound, Lennox dares you to try.
The folks over at NPR are being good enough to stream Tomboy in its entirety for your listening pleasure. Have at it!
First published as Album of the Week in The Brag, Iss. 405, April 4th 2011
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Brian Wilson - Just Keep Breathing
Brian Wilson is a survivor. It can be heard in his voice; in a life which has overcome more than its share of turbulance, his is a stubborn yet graceful vitality that has found its purpose and expression through a persistent dedication to music. “Love means… to breath is to love I would say,” he affirms. “I’ve got a lot of love in my heart; all you gotta do is breath to love.”
At 68, the pioneer of Californian surf pop, iconic frontman of The Beach Boys and composer of one of the most influential pop albums of the sixties, Pet Sounds, isn’t resting on any laurels. Speaking down the wire from Los Angeles ahead of an extended tour of the Australian capital cities, Wilson is crisp, matter of fact and to the point. That he’s still performing at all is in no small way miraculous – but a mechanical quality to some of his responses and a tendency to repeat himself are the only audible scars of the psychological illness that has ravaged his career.
As principal songwriter of The Beach Boys, Wilson propelled the group to international fame in the early sixties with singles like ‘I Get Around’, ‘Surfin’ USA’ and ‘California Girls’. Pet Sounds, generally regarded as Wilson’s masterpiece, was released in 1966 to muted acclaim, its import only becoming clear in subsequent decades. But his lush vocals, innovative production and densely experimental arrangements did have an immediate impact on at least one other group… “Pet Sounds inspired the Beatles,” he explains with enthusiasm, “which I think – the most famous group in the whole world, influenced by us? That’s a trip for me! John, Paul called me when they heard [it] and they both said they loved it … they flipped for it.”
Tragically, from this watermark, Wilson imploded; band and label turmoil, the birth of his first daughter, the release of Sgt. Pepper (Wilson felt he was in deep and personal competition with the Beatles), and LSD overuse all combined to send him into a creative and psychological no man’s land. His follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile, emerged stillborn as Smiley Smile in 1967, Wilson only returning to complete the project as originally envisioned in the early noughties.
Releasing new material only intermittently through the 70s and barely at all through the subsequent two decades, Wilson’s creative stagnation was accompanied by an ongoing battle with inner demons. He was diagnosed with schizo associative disorder in the late 1980s, the development of which he directly attributes to his drug intake. Considering the enormous personal cost his youthful experimentation has exacted from him, it’s perhaps not so surprising that his views on psychedelic substances are these days less forbearing than in the past.
“Do I have any regrets? Oh, of course I do!” he exclaims. “I wouldn’t have taken DRUGS if I’d had a marble in my head – if I’d had a brain in my head – and thought to say, ‘Well, what does this do to you when you take this drug?’ Well, I wouldn’t have taken the drug, right? When I found out how much damage it did to my brain?” – he chuckles, drily. “Very bad. That’s what I would have not done, taken drugs – and I would advise young people who get this interview not to take drugs.”
The last decade has been considerably kinder to Wilson; his wife and four adopted children, as well as many productive collaborations, have provided him with much-needed stability. “I keep myself motivated by exercising, and I’ll play the piano and keep in touch with music, y’know? I walk about two and a half miles a day. Which is pretty damn good.”
Apart from concluding his thirty-plus year labour of love with the release of Smile in 2004, he has released two collections of original material, as well as this year paying homage to one of his own idols on Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin. The result of an alliance between the Gershwin estate and Disney (Wilson is to record an album of Disney covers as part of the deal), the collection features a dozen covers of Gershwin classics as well as two Wilson originals, constructed from fragments left uncompleted at Gershwin’s death. “It was a joy because I love Gershwin, and I love his music,” he says. “They sent us over 104 unfinished Gershwin songs, with George himself playing piano. Can you believe that? That I’d get to work with George that way? This Gershwin album was a rough album for me to make, because I didn’t want to let my band members down or anyone down with the vocals, y’know?”
Driven by a prodigious work ethic, Wilson continues to perform as much for its rehabilitative effects (“there is a therapeutic element to being on stage, it is good for you”), as for a belief that someone really needs to bring back the good vibes. “The music nowadays is not as positive and as warm, y’know? The music of this time, 2010, is very, very, very, VERY unbecoming to how I think music should be … I think people should write better melodies and sing a little sweeter, and knock off that stupid rap crap, y’know? Rap is really ridiculous.”
What matters most, though, is to just keep on breathing. “What I most want to do is I want to get my health to the point where I’m not like, ‘Oh I can’t do this, or I can’t do this tour, I can’t write songs’ you know, stuff like that,” he says. “That’s where I want to be.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 385, September 25th 2010
At 68, the pioneer of Californian surf pop, iconic frontman of The Beach Boys and composer of one of the most influential pop albums of the sixties, Pet Sounds, isn’t resting on any laurels. Speaking down the wire from Los Angeles ahead of an extended tour of the Australian capital cities, Wilson is crisp, matter of fact and to the point. That he’s still performing at all is in no small way miraculous – but a mechanical quality to some of his responses and a tendency to repeat himself are the only audible scars of the psychological illness that has ravaged his career.
As principal songwriter of The Beach Boys, Wilson propelled the group to international fame in the early sixties with singles like ‘I Get Around’, ‘Surfin’ USA’ and ‘California Girls’. Pet Sounds, generally regarded as Wilson’s masterpiece, was released in 1966 to muted acclaim, its import only becoming clear in subsequent decades. But his lush vocals, innovative production and densely experimental arrangements did have an immediate impact on at least one other group… “Pet Sounds inspired the Beatles,” he explains with enthusiasm, “which I think – the most famous group in the whole world, influenced by us? That’s a trip for me! John, Paul called me when they heard [it] and they both said they loved it … they flipped for it.”
Tragically, from this watermark, Wilson imploded; band and label turmoil, the birth of his first daughter, the release of Sgt. Pepper (Wilson felt he was in deep and personal competition with the Beatles), and LSD overuse all combined to send him into a creative and psychological no man’s land. His follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile, emerged stillborn as Smiley Smile in 1967, Wilson only returning to complete the project as originally envisioned in the early noughties.
Releasing new material only intermittently through the 70s and barely at all through the subsequent two decades, Wilson’s creative stagnation was accompanied by an ongoing battle with inner demons. He was diagnosed with schizo associative disorder in the late 1980s, the development of which he directly attributes to his drug intake. Considering the enormous personal cost his youthful experimentation has exacted from him, it’s perhaps not so surprising that his views on psychedelic substances are these days less forbearing than in the past.
“Do I have any regrets? Oh, of course I do!” he exclaims. “I wouldn’t have taken DRUGS if I’d had a marble in my head – if I’d had a brain in my head – and thought to say, ‘Well, what does this do to you when you take this drug?’ Well, I wouldn’t have taken the drug, right? When I found out how much damage it did to my brain?” – he chuckles, drily. “Very bad. That’s what I would have not done, taken drugs – and I would advise young people who get this interview not to take drugs.”
The last decade has been considerably kinder to Wilson; his wife and four adopted children, as well as many productive collaborations, have provided him with much-needed stability. “I keep myself motivated by exercising, and I’ll play the piano and keep in touch with music, y’know? I walk about two and a half miles a day. Which is pretty damn good.”
Apart from concluding his thirty-plus year labour of love with the release of Smile in 2004, he has released two collections of original material, as well as this year paying homage to one of his own idols on Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin. The result of an alliance between the Gershwin estate and Disney (Wilson is to record an album of Disney covers as part of the deal), the collection features a dozen covers of Gershwin classics as well as two Wilson originals, constructed from fragments left uncompleted at Gershwin’s death. “It was a joy because I love Gershwin, and I love his music,” he says. “They sent us over 104 unfinished Gershwin songs, with George himself playing piano. Can you believe that? That I’d get to work with George that way? This Gershwin album was a rough album for me to make, because I didn’t want to let my band members down or anyone down with the vocals, y’know?”
Driven by a prodigious work ethic, Wilson continues to perform as much for its rehabilitative effects (“there is a therapeutic element to being on stage, it is good for you”), as for a belief that someone really needs to bring back the good vibes. “The music nowadays is not as positive and as warm, y’know? The music of this time, 2010, is very, very, very, VERY unbecoming to how I think music should be … I think people should write better melodies and sing a little sweeter, and knock off that stupid rap crap, y’know? Rap is really ridiculous.”
What matters most, though, is to just keep on breathing. “What I most want to do is I want to get my health to the point where I’m not like, ‘Oh I can’t do this, or I can’t do this tour, I can’t write songs’ you know, stuff like that,” he says. “That’s where I want to be.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 385, September 25th 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)