Sweet Dreams Listening To The Radio

My new ASAP column is up, and it includes songs by Excepter, Destroyer, and DAT Politics. The new Excepter track is particularly great, so definitely go get that. I would’ve included it here, but it just made better sense to put it over there this week.

Matthew Friedberger “Up The River” – True to his word, Winter Women is Matthew Friedberger’s version of a breezy summer album. The key word in that sentence is “version” – he’s in full auteur mode at this point, so everything is filtered through his oddball aesthetic. The songs on Winter Women are discrete entities, but flow together like a suite, and I get the sense that there is a narrative here, though I can’t quite discern it without a lyrics sheet. Friedberger’s voice is soft and mumbly throughout the album, which is something of a surprise given how crisp and bold his enunciation on the Fiery Furnaces albums has been. Maybe he was just trying to keep up with Eleanor, or it could be that he’s just trying to suit the songs and the characters. This record lacks the forthrightness of the Furnaces material. Those albums stand up tall, and almost every lyric is a loud declaration. Winter Women slouches, and quietly asks a lot of questions.

As you could have predicted, the album is packed full of stray sounds, but it’s not quite as dense as usual, allowing for a certain lightness in many of the songs that sets them apart from the rest of Friedberger’s discography. However, there are several odd percussive fills that pop up throughout the record, some of which sound like a person entering a room and tripping over a drum kit. The sound of the record is consistently hummable and inviting, but there’s something about it that seems to keep me at arm’s length. Whereas the Furnaces records practically demand my full attention and gain quite a bit from that sort of close listening, Winter Women seems to be best enjoyed as casual background music. There’s not as much to unravel, but there is certainly a lot to digest. The record is packaged with the Holy Ghost Language School LP, and I strongly recommend only trying to get to know one at a time because it was a little too overwhelming for me to handle simultaneously, leading me to overlook several of the songs from the second half of Winter Women for weeks. The album is still growing on me, actually. I didn’t even notice until last night just how gorgeous “Theme From Never Going Home Again” is, and the dramatic arc of the disc is only now becoming apparent to me.

Matthew Friedberger “Seventh Loop Highway” – Holy Ghost Language School is the Rehearsing My Choir to Winter Women‘s Bitter Tea. It’s Friedberger’s second (or first? I’m not 100% clear on the songwriting chronology…) attempt at a story album, and similar to how some instrumentation and musical ideas carry over between RMC and BT, it’s very obvious that HGLS and WW was a twin birth in terms of arrangement and production style. The tone is quite different, though. HGLS is a considerably denser, darker work that is more concerned with telling its story than making it onto your mix cd. Though most of the story on Rehearsing My Choir was carried by the vocals of Eleanor and Olga Sarantos, Matthew’s narration often seems like an afterthought on this record. He relies on the music to set the scene and articulate shifts in mood, and he’s mostly quite successful. The album is like an elaborately crafted multi-room installation, with each track serving less as a chapter in a novel, and more like a distinct area in a panorama. Over the course of the piece, Friedberger touches on a range of motifs knicked from film and television scores, punk rock, funk, video games, and jazz. I find Friedberger’s approximation of jazz piano to be particularly charming, especially when those bits enter the arrangement not as an attempt to impress anyone, but rather to place a scene in a specific context.

At this point in time, I’m not completely sold on the the final third of Holy Ghost Language School. The record loses steam somewhere in the second act, and it never quite recovers. Winter Women has a far better sense of dramatic resolution, which is strange since that album does not seem to be as deliberately narrative in its construction.