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Yeah, Mark returned and they wrote new music together. If you like Mark you'll like this record, about half the songs sound like his recent solo stuff with more finished production. (The other half is mixed genres done all in harmony. It's actually a really good record.)
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 31 August 2011 07:08 (twelve years ago) link
Actually, I take it back: I dunno if it's a good record or not, because I can't be objective about this band. I think it's the best thing they've done in a while, though.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 31 August 2011 07:14 (twelve years ago) link
I will definitely check it out. I saw Mark a few months ago play with just a bassist and a guy on fiddle and it was outstanding, one of the best shows I've seen all year. There were only fifteen people there, natch. Ugh.
Forapper, did you like the Olson / Louris album on Ryko? Thought that was way underrated, didn't seem to get any attention at all.
I have mixed feelings about it. I love the songs, but I find the album hard to listen to, as an album. Everything on it is fragile and tentative, and the ghostly production* reinforces those feelings of fragility and tentativeness, to the point where it sounds almost like a couple of abuse survivors got together and decided to put out an album together, or like it's set in a haunted <s>house</s> church. Saturday Morning on Sunday Street, in particular, is just this incredibly creepy song. I think it's a beautiful album, but I'm not always in the mood to be haunted, so I rarely put it on, and I can understand why it didn't take off. I think it got some decent exposure, though, from the usual supporters (Minnesota Public Radio, NPR, Paste Magazine, No Depression).
I think I read somewhere that they were inspired put it out after "rediscovering" some old demos from 1992 - the same ones that show up on the Tomorrow the Green Grass reissue bonus disk. This makes sense to me, because those are some pretty intense demos, if you know what I mean.
All in all I think I prefer the approach on the new record. There's this mostly-acoustic song, for instance, called "Pouring Rain at Dawn". It's mostly a very reasonable-sounding song about an adult relationship with boundaries - "I don't want to be ungrateful, I don't want to be unfaithful, I just want to be the one you call" - but then it veers unexpectedly into this kinda intense section where the singer** says he never should be breaking your heart again, punctuated by about 5 seconds of sad French chanteuse music... and then the song goes back to sounding reasonable again, as if nothing had happened. XD Well, I might be editorializing a bit here, as far as what's actually going on in the song, but the point is, darkness is still very much present, but it's a bit more contained. (Although I guess another way of looking at it is that the reasonableness is all on the surface, while the crazy neediness is still there underneath.)
*kind of reminds me of Pete Doherty's solo record, actually
**actually two singers, but for the sake of argument
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 31 August 2011 23:33 (twelve years ago) link
one month passes...
Absorbing the new album, but while the songs sink in the first thing that strikes me is how much I love their harmonies. I haven't heard the Olson/Louris, I need to track it down. I knew they'd been playing a lot together but honestly had lost interest. But the two of them singing together is really the key. For me they're more a sound band than a song band.
― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Monday, 3 October 2011 03:02 (twelve years ago) link
four years pass...
three months pass...
four years pass...
ten months pass...
Gary Louris continues a humble late-career resurgence. Last year’s Jayhawks album has really stuck with me. Now he’s got a solo album out and it’s quite nice!
I need to revisit everything post-Smile and reconfirm my thoughts on those records (solo and Jayhawks). I recall them all being hit-or-miss, but maybe it’s me that’s changed?
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Saturday, 12 June 2021 19:19 (two years ago) link