Our Fathers

It’s high noon on a high desert Wednesday;
the golden aureola ringing round
the sun laps at my face, its hot breath
irrupting into my mid-afternoon siesta.
I am supposed to be fixing a tire

for my father. He never taught me how
and so I ask a boy my age for help.
We share a bond, working for my father.
We work at work that’s never done, under that one
indiscriminate spotlight. We tell stories

of our fathers, or of our misdeeds, rather
and our fathers’ response. His, a solar wind;
a temperamental tempest of fiery flame,
flaring with rare intensity until it settles
for a dormant decade. I have worked

for his father too, and I have sensed the celestial
virility bubbling beneath his stoic exterior.
Worn yellow gloves adorn his hands
like sherriff’s stars. He is balding, never smiles,
only nods with tacit acceptance. Nothing

like my father, whose ivory glow I’ve come to crave.
I don’t realize what it means to me except in moments
of my misbehavior, when storm clouds obscure
my sight and I’d do anything to see
the light again.

We work until the day is done,
and watch the stars unveil themselves.
I count them all, holding their gaze,
and let each one own me in its own way.

Elliott Smith:

Shedding New Moonlight on an Old Favorite

By: Steven Waye

I’m typically wary of posthumous or post-breakup releases, because they’re usually preening attempts to electroshock a geriatric rock n’ roll dinosaur back into relevance or make an extra buck off the tragic death of an icon. I purchased New Moon, a compilation of Smith’s unreleased material, with trepidation, especially in light of all that Elliott stood for as a musician.

In reference to the title of his 2000 release, Figure 8, Smith says this: “I just like the idea of figure 8, of figure skaters trying to make this self-contained perfect thing that takes a lot of effort but essentially goes nowhere.” To me, this is the quintessential statement on artistic honesty. Smith made the music the way he wanted, because he couldn’t do it any other way, the same way he couldn’t help his squeaky speaking voice or his frightening appearance. Instead of tempering these attributes down to a non-abrasive bromide, the fierce introspection and distinctively shaky vocal delivery featured in every self-contained, perfect world he created are nothing if not univocally his.

And it for exactly this reason that, whatever it was intended to be, New Moon stands as a worthy retrospective on Smith’s lifework. You couldn’t fit Elliott Smith into a commercially viable package if you tried. This is Elliott at his best, stripped down and intimate, without the symphonic frills that weighed down some of the major-label music he made at the tail-end of his career. I’m not really into the whole, “one squirrelly dude with a guitar waling about his feelings” genre, but I’m a huge fan of Smith’s lo-fi early work because, at his core, Smith was always a punk rocker, even after he ditched his band Heatmiser in favor of a four track and fingerpicks.

There is a vibrant cynicism that underlies even Smith’s poppiest songs, and this shines through most starkly on his more naked acoustic tracks, which New Moon features predominantly. Somehow, Smith never seems sappy or insincere even when belting out his most Hallmark-worthy lines. The opener, “Angel in the Snow” is classic Smith, a plodding and infectiously repetitious bass line backing up Smith sighing, “don’t you know that I love you” with an earnestly that few others could pull off, mostly because the affection he speaks of sounds so tired and worn that it becomes nearly tragic.

“Going Nowhere” subtly displays the attributes that leaves Smith with few peers as a folk guitarist. Violently rapid chord changes shift over a jarring rhythmic pattern, and all the while Smith’s gentle falsetto lulls the listener into a daydream as he whispers about nothing at all, and the harsh reality of it.

Other standout tracks include “High Times”, “Riot Coming”, and “Whatever (Folk Song in C)”, but the best of this album for me by far is Elliott’s cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen”. It captures an idyllic sort of Leave it to Beaver era romance that contrasts so harshly with Smith’s usual invective about soured relationships that I can’t help but be moved by his pained, wistful interpretation.

Although the album sags towards the end with tracks like “Fear City” an uninspiring track left over from Smith’s Heatmiser years, Elliott dazzles and astounds new listeners and ardent fans alike with the strength of his unreleased material. I don’t buy into the idea that an artist’s legend grows after his death. It sucks that Elliott Smith took his own life in October of 2003 because he is no longer around to make beautiful music. It’s that simple. Instead of a hastily thrown together compilation of “greatest hits” assembled by dispassionate record executives, this collection is reflective of Smith’s career: understated, prolific, and sublime. New Moon shines as Elliott did in his lifetime: dull and empty, yet pregnant with the hope of a coming light.

IN RAINBOWS:

The Defining Work of a Band That Will Define Our Generation

By: Steven Waye

As a rule, few events arouse excitement within the hipster community. It’s cool not to care, unless it means caring about something that has no right being cool. Like androgyny. And soccer. With this in mind, the frenzied flocking of the indie masses to the internet this past October 10th to get their ears on In Rainbows, Radiohead’s most recent offering of sonic wizardry, was truly an event worth taking note of. It was a virtual Woodstock of sorts for a 21^st century audience, with hippies and hallucinogens being replaced by hipsters and hard-drives, and the crashing of InRainbows.com speaking just as loudly as Arlo Guthrie’s now-famous proclamation, “The New York State thruway’s closed, man”.

Yet at this point in their career, Radiohead can no longer be dismissed simply as the darling of a niche group of scenesters. The rousing commercial success of Radiohead’s outside-the-industry release is clear evidence of much more than a sporadic burst of enthusiasm by an alternative audience. Radiohead’s mass appeal is such that they have become an embodiment of the independent ethos: become universally adored by selling out to no one but yourself. The band’s airplay has stretched far beyond grungy coffeehouses and dusty basements. The estimated proliferation (1.2 million downloads the day after its release, according to a pitchforkmedia.com report) of their free-of-charge internet release supports this claim. I’ve made Radiohead devotees of Classic Rock junkies, hardcore aficionados, and Justin Timberlake fans alike. And it’s not as if Radiohead were exactly hurting for popular or financial success before In Rainbows, their seventh full-length release. Despite their artistic meanderings, they have enjoyed a wide base of support ever since the release of the critically acclaimed OK Computer in 1997. So what is it about Radiohead, despite the band’s decidedly pioneering sound, that allows them such widespread adulation?

In reference to the lyrical content on the new album, frontman Thom Yorke says, “It's about that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, ‘I’m sure I’m supposed to be doing something else’”. The sometimes dreamy, sometimes danceable beats that serve as a backdrop for Yorke’s lyrical musings about paranoia, suburban entrapment and romantic disillusionment recreate the sort of lyrical tension that the Beatles often perfected. It takes a truly gifted lyricist to write a sing-along about arson or heroin addiction, and like John Lennon before him Thom Yorke manages to reconcile dark imagery with beautiful melody more adroitly than any of his peers. In Rainbows exhibts what is easily Yorke’s best work since OK Computer. Without denying the bleak mechanical brilliance of their output from the Kid A/Amnesiac era, the band occasionally got too bogged down in their experimentation with dub and electronica and churned out material that was at times too inhuman to connect with the listener. Yorke’s haunting wail is one of the band’s greatest assets and when paired with Jonny Greenwood’s soaring string arrangements and biting guitars, the results are stunning. In Rainbows sees Radiohead laying down their synthetic drum kits and vox modulators, admitting that each new album does not have to be a complete reinvention in order to be a masterpiece. They deal with all the great inconsistencies of life by treating them exactly as they are, joyful and melancholy and beautiful and confusing and wildly celebratory all at once. Greenwood’s versatile guitar work perfectly supports Yorke’s falsetto as he strains at the edges of a universally human feeling of existential angst, and the ensuing tension is enough to make the listener simultaneously renounce life completely and fall in love with it all over again.

Track 1: 15 Step – Thom and the boys come back kickin’ on the opening track, an open invitation to the manic dance party running through Yorke’s head.

Best line: “You used to be alright, what happened? Did the cat get your tongue, did your string come undone, one by one?”

Track 2: Bodysnatchers – Greenwood lets loose on the guitar as he hasn’t done since OK Computer’s “Electioneering”. In the words of the great 20^th century poet Fred Durst, makes you wanna “break stuff”.

Best line: “Do the lights go out for you? Because the lights go out for me.”

Track 3: Nude – Lush, soaring, pop ballad. The kind of song Chris Martin dreams about writing. Their best work since “How to Disappear Completely”.

Best Line: “You paint yourself white and fill in the noise, but there’ll be something missing.”

Track 4: Weird Fishes/Arpeggi – Opens as a minimalistic fingerpicking tune, taking the listener on a full tour through Yorke’s weird ocean, full of rippling starts and stops.

Best Line: “Turn me on to phantoms I follow to the edge of the earth, and fall off. Everybody leaves, if they get the chance, and this is my chance.”

Track 5: All I Need – Crunchy synth bass line throbs over top of a thin layer of warbling strings. The quintessential Radiohead atmosphere piece. What happens when the self-deceiving suburbanite from “No Surprises” starts being desperately honest with himself.

Best Line: “I’m an animal, trapped in your hot car.”

Track 6: Faust Arp – Sticky sweet string ballad masks Yorke’s spoken-word exhaustion. Mostly filler, the eye of the storm.

Best Line: “It's what you feel now, what you ought to, what you ought to. Reasonable and sensible, dead from the neck up, because I'm stuffed, stuffed, stuffed.”

Track 7: Reckoner – Every now and then these guys write something that make me wanna just start dancing for joy, and I just don’t give a shit what Yorke is wailing about.

Best Line: “Because we separate, it ripples our reflection.”

Track 8: House of Cards – A dreamy, punch-drunk ode to the moment. Opening lyrics sound kind of like they belong in a Rod Stewart song. And I mean that in the very best way possible.

Best Line: “I don’t wanna be your friend, I just wanna be your lover, no matter how it ends, no matter how it starts.

Track 9: Jigsaw Falling Into Place – Their most straightforward rock song since The Bends. It’s refreshing to hear Radiohead sounding like an actual band instead of a cohort of manic depressive computers. Maintains the tension and edge of the rest of the album without the usual dramatics.

Best Line: “The walls abandon shape, you've got a cheshire cat grin. All blurring into one, this place is on a mission.”

Track 10: Videotape – More subdued than one expects from a Radiohead closer, Yorke sounds subdued in both his lyrical droning and his tired, repetitive piano playing. An elegy of sorts, as close to “at peace” as we’ve ever heard from the band, and we get the sense that Yorke is almost (gasp!) happy as the album rolls away into the distance to the rhythm of a firing squad drum beat. A perfect ending to a masterpiece.

Best Line: “No matter what happens now I won't be afraid, because I know today has been the most perfect day I've ever seen.”

Independence

I’m reading some awful poetry
by a painter I admire,
something about zombies
and supermarkets,
a long-winded way of saying,
“Gee, the world is sure a pretty
fucked-up place.”

Why do we feel the need to craft
elaborate fabrications
in order to convey a simple truth?
Perhaps we are simply retracing
the cosmic thread, the godhead
bridging the gulf between the pew
and the altar, between lives
too absurd in their futility and
dreams too fanatical
to be believed.

With God keeping watch like a feudal lord,
Not one of our precious inventions
or creations is ours to claim,
taken from us upon conception
like the adopted infant of an adolescent mother.
Weeping, she is comforted and told
to take solace in the fact that
it is going to a better home,
where it will be pacified
and loved, and given toys
and pretty little baby shoes.
All she can keep thinking is,
“I hope they teach it how to dance.”

I’m as needy as a cancer,
Invading, replicating,
destroying the One that gives me life…
To prove what point?

I’m a youngest son, and
I’ve just beaten my father in a game
of basketball that I know deep in my heart
he let me win. Yet
he takes me in his arms and
spins me around and tells me
that he loves me, and we both laugh
until it’s time to play again.