I know we no longer read or communicate by this blog. If we did, you would be clamoring to hear my thoughts on the new Blonde Redhead (get it) or Deerhoof (eh, whatever). You would also be putting in your two-cents on new albums, reviews, etc.
Despite our collective indifference to this blog, I have to make one final post as we bring our practicum to a close. As now months have passed, I have listened more deeply to both "Neon Bible" and Low's "Drums and Guns." The bombast of The Arcade Fire will always grab your attention over the subtle gestures and hesitance of Low, but I'm beginning to feel like a deaf man at the opera when I listen to "Neon Bible"--I see a lot of big gestures, but I don't really know what the hell's going on.
Both albums could be described as "timely", the most backhanded compliment this side of telling your obese friend what a pretty face they have. But "Neon Bible"'s timeliness is so strained and angst ridden that it's lyrical content, something I always hesitated to praise, feels insincere, if not downright childish. I cringed at the lyric "mirror mirror on the wall/ tell me where those bombs will fall" from my first listen but a friend recently pointed out the perhaps even more heinous "working for the church while your family dies/ you take what they give you and you keep it inside." Exactly what is this in reference to, other than an angry agnostic's juvenile slam at what he thinks conservative Christian America does? Not to say that evangenicals and conservatives don't have sins to atone for, but this is so tin-eared I'm lead to believe Win Butler has never been to the US. Or read a newspaper. This isn't exactly indie rock Tocqueville.
But let's look at "Drums and Guns." D&G is infused with the language of war and violence, certainly a response to our contemporary moment. But Low is less concerned with diagnosing a cultural moment (an impossible, if not arrogant act) a la Win Butler, than with simply making a good album. The tone of D&G conveys what it means to so deeply ingest the rhetoric, images, and tenor or war and violence that it affects your outlook on everything. The final track, returning to Low's favorite territory of romantic strife, begins "all I can do is fight/ even if I know you're right....pretty fingers, holding fast/ maybe it's your violent past." Just what it means to "fight" with someone you love, whether noble, necessary, inevitable, justified--- remains elegantly unclear, the kind of ambiguity that allows the listener to rethink the violence in their own emotions.
Even the more explicit and dark "Pretty People" that opens the album goes beyond mere dissatisfaction and angst. "All the soldiers/They're all gonna die"--OK, that sounds both obvious and ugly. But not only soldiers but "babies" "poets" "pretty people"; the son becomes about the firghtening inevitability of death that war images ellicit. An image of war reminds us of our own deaths. This isn't a mere slam at the Bush administration ,the war in Iraq, blah blah blah.
