A) First-thing-first.
It’s a funny thing; this business of picking one’s favorite albums. After all, justification for cracking one’s list of top records can be (and often is) as inelegant as declaring “I just like it… a lot,” but when one does occasionally attempt to quantify that which (at best) is probably only fractionally quantifiable, one is led down some strange and dark forest foot-paths.
By what criteria should be begin to whittle down the list of hundreds (thousands?) of favorite albums? We can start by choosing those that are created of whole cloth and seem to be “of a piece.” Most good albums fit this criterion, and this is also why nearly all Greatest Hits compilations of even the best acts don’t hold up as capital ‘A’ Albums, but rather as collections of songs. This framing device is still far too inclusive for our purposes. To tighten the frame a bit here sees us straying from the foot-paths in the forest and blazing some new trails.
For me, the new criterion would start with a discussion of Mood. Although describing the Mood of a song or an album is nothing new, I would use it as a starting point in trying to define what I mean by that word. First of all, an album’s Mood can be evocative of a particular prolonged emotional state (whether that state is, or can be, named is more complicated.) For example, I certainly hear something approaching a whole-cloth singularity of Mood on Exile on Main Street, but what is the “emotional state” reflected by that album? That’s difficult to say exactly – maybe “hot, summer-day anxiety”? Or is it possibly evocative of the “got-me-a-bottle-of-wine-on-the-stone veranda-et-in-Arcadia-ego-Blues” emotions of the Stone’s communal summer spent recording in France.
And where does the Mood come from – the songs themselves? And if it is the songs, is it due to the lyrics, the vocals, the instrumentation, the arrangements? Maybe it comes from the production. Or does it come from somewhere deeper within the performers themselves? – or all of the above. Well. I want to get past Mood as a descriptor (or at least chisel away at it a little more.)
For me - I think I can say - albums that are my very favorite fit these criteria:
1) I like them. A lot
2) They exist as a whole, and are “of a piece” (not a collection of songs)
3) They have some consistency of Mood (whether the Mood evoked can be defined or not)
-And for me, probably the ultimate separator is;
4) They have some transcendent singularity which elevates them past a consistent
conscious-mind Mood and into a singular Mood-reflection of the unconscious-mind; an Orphic soundscape heard at only dusk and dawn; an aural Pleiades seen sharper in the periphery than head-on.
Example: One of my very top “desert island” albums (and one which incidentally does not appear on this community list) is Kind of Blue – the very paragon of a record which fits the above criteria.
Miles Davis’ (and player’s) masterpiece of unconscious sound-mood is undeniably “of a piece,” but like the universe itself, is unable to be seen in one glance or in a prolonged stare. There is nothing literal about Kind of Blue, (like there is with so much other Popular music) but there is also something elusive about this record that can never allow itself to be fully possessed – but in which one can become enveloped within (as long as you don’t listen too hard, too closely). There is something happening that goes much deeper than the surface; then that which is conscious.
But well, whatever. I’m not sure that I want to continue with this line of thinking. I’m here to review a record and I don’t think I’m all that much closer to understanding why I really love certain albums. But I do think there is something to that word elusive that I applied to Kind of Blue. That word might also be applied to the album up next…
B) Now that THAT nonsense is out of the way
Fever Ray by Fever Ray (2009)
About five years ago, I fundamentally changed the way I listened to music. Events conspired (I lived in an apartment with paper thin wall, my tape deck and receive both broke at about the same time, I gave away my speakers) to shift my listening vehicle from primarily analog equipment and big speakers to mp3 players and headphones – from the Public to the Private. It took a few years for me to realize the negative effect this was having – and there were some pros to the new method (I still remember how revolutionary Kid A sounded with all of its compressed majesty through a pair of ear buds.) But as time went on, the cons to this music delivery method began to mount. It wasn’t really until Fever Ray that I realized I had been missing something listening to music with these little speakers tethered to each ear. Some music – this music – needs to fill a room. And it wants to be loud. It needs to become the Environment within the room.
Fever Ray, the first solo album by Karin Dreijer Andersson of the Swedish group The Knife, loudly flowing through the speakers in a room in my new house, was alive in a way I hadn’t heard it before. It was breathing – although seemingly through a respirator – in an eerie and utterly compelling way. As the space around me was filled with this slow-burn theatrical electronica, it became more claustrophobic feeling; stifling in the way that a humid August day feels. This was an evening without air conditioning. An evening when the dehumidifier just can’t keep up – and in which you’re unsure if the beads of sweat running down your back are perspiration or some greedy insect that you’d better hurry up and swat. This is a night where the blankets have long since hit the floor and the sheet is soaked through and through.
In a similar way to certain scenes in David Lynch films being worlds scarier than anything in most movies marketed as a proper Horror movies, Fever Ray leaves you with the same unsettling uneasiness – as if something is looming on the horizon; maybe just a thunderstorm, but maybe your masked self waiting for you to confront it, nee yourself. And you may not like what you see.
The album’s Mood is unsettling and unknowable. It is a hallucinatory and visual sound. It can’t be easily observed head-on. It is cut from whole cloth. Headphones don’t do it justice. It is as elusive as Kind of Blue.
And I just like it… a lot.
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