Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow

Kate Bush is weird in the best way. 50 Words for Snow is a great winter album yeah, but it's also sort of the perfect album for this specific moment in time, this season, on the calendar but also culturally, politically and on some base level of human existence. (Let this album occupy your headspace for a while.) It all sounds totally grand but it's entirely relatable in its weirdness, familiar despite being painstakingly new. My TMT review of 50 Words for Snow (a fast last-minute entry on my Top 25 of 2011, which I'll post here soon):

Kate Bush is of a time when pop singers didn’t need faux-lesbian makeout sessions to express nascent female sexuality, when eccentricity was not some contrived aesthetic end but a consequence of the creative process itself. For Bush, the beauty and weirdness of sex — of sensuality — was the basis of art. Her early music was shocking not for any overtly explicit content, but for its desperate attempts to celebrate sensuality in an age of technology and the vicious detachment it wrought.

Read the rest here.

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Future Islands

I spoke recently with Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, who told me tales of the construction of the group's new album, the impressive On the Water (pictured). I whittled it down to 350 words for the Portland Mercury.

Synthesizers and self-flagellation were the last two things anyone expected at Pickathon, but there was Samuel T. Herring barreling across the stage, pounding his chest, gagging himself with his free hand. He was a maniacal mirage, a dense cloud of danger interrupting the idyllic panorama. "I was intimidated," Herring admits regarding Future Islands' chaotic incursion into the folky, family-friendly Portland festival. "At the same time, it was liberating, too, to get up there and do what we wanted."

Read the rest here.

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Mark Kozelek @ Aladdin Theater, Portland

Last weekend the lady and I braved the Sunday night sleepies to go see Mark Kozelek play at the venerable Aladdin Theater. It was a performance peppered with, how do I put it... uncomfortable moments. I'd heard tales of Kozelek's off-putting stage demeanor, of his impatience with excessive crowd noise and the like. The crowd at this show was impossibly submissive, hanging on every note the man played. Kozelek managed to alienate nonetheless. Still, he continues to be able to write a mean heartbreaker.

I wrote about it for Tiny Mix Tapes' recently revived live blog.

“Shit, I had a bunch of dirty jokes I wanted to tell,” Mark Kozelek deadpanned upon seeing a child in the front row of the reverent mid-sized crowd at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. It is itself a venue that demands some reverence, an aged and atmospheric place ideal for intimate performances such as this one. Kozelek’s most recent outing as Sun Kil Moon, last year’s Admiral Fell Promises, was a chilly and cartographic affair that sent listeners across the physical and emotional distances of the American West and through the tangled recesses of its creator’s wry and yet tortured headspace.

Read the rest here.

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