OFF THE RECORD: Beck - Modern Guilt

(Courtesy of Interscope Records.)

For those critics who believe that sincerity is the last mask of a dying artist, 2002’s broken-hearted Sea Change represented the last Beck album to be greeted by near unanimous acclaim. Since that mournful effort, Mr. Hansen’s work has been met with an increasingly hostile reception. 2006’s Guero was written off as a lazy rehash of Odelay, and last year’s The Information met a similar fate, with many critics preferring to comment on the gimmick of being able design your own album cover rather than the actual music.

Lost in all this is the fact that both those albums featured some of Beck’s best and most melodic songs, from the shy and infectious “Think I’m in Love”, through to the incredibly hooky “Girl” and “E-Pro”. With perhaps one exception (the downbeat but danceable “Gamma Ray”), this trend does not continue with Modern Guilt. It’s an introspective album in the mold of Sea Change, but it wades through moral dilemmas and existential quandaries instead of heartbreak.

Before Modern Guilt’s release, there were signs we might have a classic on our hands. Since Odelay, Beck has jumped back and forth between The Dust Brothers and Nigel Godrich for production duties. On Modern Guilt, Danger Mouse of Gnarls Barkley fame was at the mixing board. A few weeks before the album was released, listeners got their first taste of Modern Guilt when a song called “Chemtrails” began streaming on Beck’s website, a thoroughly convincing slice of dream-pop that sounds like a Super Furry Animals track, and crucially, if Beck was to outrun his critics, nothing like any Beck tune that’s come before it. One moment, it’s near comatose with only Beck’s ethereal Brian Wilson-like vocals keeping the track afloat, the next it’s crashing and thrashing with Joey Waronker’s pounding drums (incidentally, the only live drums on the entire album).

Danger Mouse, for his part, brings his love of concision and 60’s pop to the fore. The album clocks in at a slender thirty-three minutes without wasting a second of runtime. He’s also developed a knack over the past few years for allowing a songwriter to express their apocalyptic anxieties without coming across as either mad or melodramatic. The sweeping flourish of Middle-Eastern strings on “Walls” eases the sting of lines like “Because you know that we're better than that / But some days we're worse than you can imagine”, while the backbeat bounce of “Gamma Ray” makes Beck’s visions of “icecaps melting down” easier to stomach.

And make no mistake, Beck is on a quest to unmask exactly what modern guilt is. He gets close on the title track, but it’s on the tenth and final song “Volcano” that he paints the most evocative picture of twenty-first century anxiety. By not only doing away with rhyme, but carefully choosing words that don’t easily fit into the rhythm of the song, Beck mirrors the anarchy of day-to-day banality.

The last photo on the inside cover of Modern Guilt’s CD insert is a shot of an exit sign. I’m not sure if Beck escapes or even exorcises the moral problems of our age on this album, but he does encapsulate it all in just over half an hour of fantastic music. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new frontrunner for album of the year.

LOCAL EXPOSURE: Cute little barn owls... of DOOOOOOM!!!

(Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras of Barn Owl spend many an hour simply gazing into their belly buttons. © 2008 Benjamin Luk.)

In an effort to cover all that is wild, wacky and new in the constantly shifting world of indie music, I found myself out at Hoko's last night catching a drone concert hosted by friends Jesse Turpin and Kris Charlton of Twee Death Presents. As new indie promoters, they happen to be doing pretty well for themselves, lining up a fine selection of upcoming shows, the most recent of which featured San Franciscan doom-and-gloom ambient music-makers, Barn Owl. (Not to be confused with The Barn Owl Band. That would just be downright embarrassing, though Catherine Miller on the far right in that photo is oddly sexy to me.)

But wait, you say. This is a "LOCAL EXPOSURE" article. What are these dirty filthy Americans doing in a Canadian article about regional independent music? Well, in this case, I'm not here to only talk to you about Barn Owl. Plenty of local talent opened up for them (though some were more talented than others), and they deserve a shout out as well.

First up, we've got Aerosol Constellations, another drone outfit out of Vancouver, and a perfect introduction to the rest of the night. As I walked in on their performance, a small cluster of scruffy hippie types had already arranged themselves in crude semicircles on the floor, sitting cross-legged, many of them with their eyes closed, as though meditating. Having had run-ins with cults before (which is a very long story, I assure you), I was about ready to run to the hills when I heard something that made me decide to stay: the deeply evocative thrumming that the musicians sitting on the stage, also cross-legged, were producing with nothing more than a few effects boards, a cracked crash cymbal and what appeared to be some sort of pitch pipe. Music that spoke not in words and chords, but in moods and images, suggesting dark dystopian futures and Gaiman-esque ruminations on technology bringing about the end of the world as we know it. So that was that. I stayed.

The next group was a little something called Orlando Magic, which may sound like a promising indie band but they're really not doing themselves any favours with a band name that, when Googled, yields nothing but basketball sites. I mean, they're not as bad as local band Basketball, but that's another can of worms entirely. Either way, remember a fellow by the name of Tom Whalen? Probably not. Well, it turns out that the guy I got to snap the photo of me and Dan Deacon back in January is a musician himself. And though his overwhelmingly gleeful mashup project gr8-2000 is a force to be reckoned with (albeit a vaguely irritating one, mostly because I never thought I'd have to hear the Vengaboys ever again on God's Green Earth), Orlando Magic was clumsy and falling all over itself trying to be a high-energy show. Mind you, it's their first ever performance. Come to think of it, that alone should tell you all you need to know about them.

(Tom Whalen of Orlando Magic, busting a musical nut all over his Les Paul.)

ahna followed that admirably, and stuck out in my mind that night mostly because they achieved both ends of the drone music spectrum; that is, at times, they were like a freight train barreling uncontrolled across a futuristic anime metropolis, and at other times, they were as dull as washing the family dog. However, I have to applaud Anju for realizing that a live concert is ultimately a form of performance art, and for following through on that realization magnificently. Watching her, trancelike, psychotically saw the bow of her synthed-up violin back and forth across her tuning pegs was almost hypnotic and once again, nearly had me running from anything even resembling Kool-Aid.

Of course, V.Vecker stuck out in my mind too, if only as a wall of noise that, well, was just a goddamn fucking loud wall of noise. On their MySpace, they have no music up and the first thing you see from them is "sometimes you have to check for blood in your shit", by way of greeting. I say, first of all, that not having any music up on their MySpace was probably a smart move, as that might dissuade anyone from coming out to see them. I also say that sometimes you have to check for shit in your music tastes. And then, you should flush immediately.

After the longest ten minutes of my life, Barn Owl finally took the stage, just two simple long-haired artistes, a guitar and a bass, and countless layers of effects and distortion. Opening on a gentle minimalist thrum, then crescendoing into what must be the sonic equivalent of walking alone along the deep, dark ocean floor, Barn Owl's music spoke of isolation, ships lost at sea and, just as they finished their first movement, hope; all without ever uttering a single word.

Meditate on that.

Special thanks to Jesse Turpin and Kris Charlton of Twee Death Presents.

LIVE WIRE: The Pemberton Experience.

(Because the weather's always better anywhere that isn't Vancouver. All photos © 2008 Sterling Wiseman.)

The drive is long. The road, filled with so many curves and orange cones, seems like a racetrack. But you make it.

You maneuver your way through hordes of cars and people waiting to park by the airport. Choosing the fastest moving lane, it still takes you over an hour to find a place for your dusty Honda Civic. In the shade of a line of shuttle buses, you swelter in the heat until a festival worker in an orange shirt approaches and tells you the buses have been delayed. Fuck.

At last, you truly make it. The festival grounds of the Pemberton valley opens its arms to you and though you are so tired from the journey you feel you should collapse into your tent, the land weaves a spell over you. Sleep becomes a distant memory, and sunrise and sunset replace any modern method of classifying time. From here on in, the linear escapes you. Everything now is measured in moments and songs.

(Emily Haines of Metric being all succexy.)

Emily Haines supplies one such moment. Looking every bit an indie rock goddess while thrashing around the stage in her shiny blue dress, she thanks the crowd and the organizers for letting Metric open the Main Stage for the weekend. They close with a downtempo version of “Live It Out”, reworking it into an acoustic ballad complete with handclaps and tambourine, and as they leave the stage you find yourself still singing “I wanna live it out” with half the crowd.

Andrew Stockdale of Wolfmother is another frontman capable of inspiring such devotion, and he looks the part, holding his hand aloft above a double guitar waiting for the right moment to unleash “White Unicorn” onto the adoring masses. But you could tell something was off. He seems bored or tired. You’re certain that the crowd is getting much more from the extended workout he gives “Woman” than either he or his band is.

The weekend also teaches you new games. You learn how to play Porta-Potty Roulette, gambling away your health and safety on the chance you won’t get one of the many Porta-Potties caked with shit and/or vomit. Frisbee dominates Thursday night as nearly all of your friends pull a muscle or trip and fall trying to catch the damn thing before some douchebag you don’t know makes off with it. (He does.)

(Interpol get especially pissed when you pirate their music.)

The Pemberton festival grounds soon become littered with all manner of refuse and strangers start becoming even stranger. A man yells at your girlfriend, “Want to have sex? I have drugs!” and you fall into your friends laughing hysterically. You curse yourself again for not bringing any booze past the practically non-existent bag check and head to a beer garden to plop down yet another $7.00 for a can of Canadian, that crisp golden lager we all know and tolerate. But a few deep-fried Oreos later, all is right with the world again. Hm, so that’s what was on the toilet seats.

And your mind is filled with visions and sounds:

• Sam Roberts invokes the rain gods, channeling a light summer shower as his Saturday afternoon show closes with an epic “Mind Flood”. “Come and wash us away now”, he sings as the raindrops fall.

• Gordon Downie of the Tragically Hip, riding his mic stand like a motorbike, breaks it (accidentally-on-purpose), and distributes its inanimate plastic remains amongst the fans in the front row.

• Chris Martin, momentarily forgetting that his band is arguably the biggest in the world, postulates allowing Shakira to join Coldplay in order to make them “unstoppable”. He lets the crowd sing the first half of “Yellow” and you have to admit as you sing along, that for all they’re lambasted, Coldplay have written some damn fine songs.

(The only reason Serj Tankian doesn't look completely Amish is because he's not currently raising a barn.)

But as their set ends, and the weekend draws to a close, you sadly realize that this too shall pass. A girl named Tiffany says to you, “We’ll never be able to explain this when we get home. People will ask ‘What was it like?’, and no matter what you say to them, you’ll be missing something”.

And in your weary bones and sunburned skin and unwashed hair, you know she’s right. The only thing they’ll ever understand about the inaugural Pemberton Festival is what they see in you as you walk back into civilization, wearing the T-shirt, a somewhat dumbfounded grin, and the sweat stains of strangers on your jeans.

* * * * *

Since Ben couldn't be there to photograph all the madness and mayhem, please check out the following Pemberton photo galleries from fellow photogs and friends of ThatRockBlog.com, Alex Ramon and Jennifer Perutka. Maybe next time, the poor fool will be able to prioritize better. "Have to shoot a wedding", my ass.