Julie Byrne- Not Even Happiness

Not Even Happiness
Julie Byrne
Ba Da Bing! Records 2017

Listen on Spotify

The world can sometimes feel like an hourglass; the sand is life’s chaos, and the only assurance is that time will keep moving with or without us. It becomes increasingly difficult to parse through the clutter and decipher that which has lasting value, and conversely what serves only to detract from finding a life of meaning and purpose. Thankfully, this is where Julie Byrne comes in. A mid-twenties singer-songwriter with a prodigious sense of connecting to a higher, larger power, her second album Not Even Happiness represents a significant step forward musically, with the narrower folk influences of her first record broadening to something far more spacey, even atmospheric. Her cool, delicate voice and sparse guitar strumming pairs beautifully with deliberate allusions to the purity of nature, making the listening experience feel more like a cleanse than anything else. Thematically, we’re once again given a fascinating glimpse into Byrne’s personal journey, and more importantly, a blueprint for finding a life of contemplation and substance.

For how familiar Byrne’s music feels upon first (and fifteenth) listen, it’s funny how unconventional she is as a musician. Admittedly, she hardly ever listens to contemporary music, or music at all- the first record in her collection was her own. Instead, she’s always felt more of an affinity for poetry, making it no wonder that Bob Dylan has helped in developing her lyrical prowess. She taught herself to play guitar after her father, who she watched for years growing up, became ill and could no longer play. Rather than hindering her music, her lack of direct experience serves as a point of strength. Simple, yet glimmering, guitar melodies sound nothing but organic, and her wordy, atypical lyric structures make it difficult not to spurn the title of musician altogether and just call her a poet. Alongside her preference for the openness of nature (don’t let the fact that she lives in New York City fool you), Byrne’s personal qualities add up to the perfect storm for an album of tranquility; vivid imagery of the Pacific Northwest (“Melting Grid”) and the vastness of the Rocky Mountains (“Natural Blue”) are best enjoyed with your eyes closed, an escape into calamity and quiet.

The first three words of the album, “Follow My Voice,” are an introduction to the collective force of the record, the listener has no choice but to comply. The closing words of the opener “Beyond this light/ Beyond all the fear/ Beyond this love/ Beyond all the fear” demonstrate the power of transcendence contained within Byrne’s voice, making no mistake that the intrinsic value of the music will persist indefinitely. “Sleepwalker,” the second track, make it easy to forget that Byrne isn’t professionally trained. A surprisingly intricate melody guides a song that finds her seeking all of the right things- love, peace, solitude- only to remain lonely and in misery. The song gives the album title tremendous relevance and the listener something to consider. Perhaps happiness is a fleeting, shallow feeling. Maybe it isn’t rewarding as it might seem. Byrne sure seems to think so.

“Natural Blue,” a stunning ode to the mountain sky of Colorado, symbolizes the nomadic nature of years spent traveling around the country and the world. Byrne’s voice is drenched in ambience, and her guitar settles quietly in the background. The aforementioned chaos couldn’t be further away, as the crooning repetition of the song’s title becomes ensconced in the grandiose landscape. Her voice fades away, and the impending interlude is a fitting nod at the magnitude of such precious moments. Moments of awe, moments of feeling dwarfed by the natural powers that govern our world- they define the confines of words entirely. After an indeterminate amount of time spent pondering, the finger-picking returns, as if it had been there all along.

Some of the most daring, thought-provoking attempts were saved for last, with the album’s final two songs showcasing an impressive aura of reverb created by lush guitar effects and Byrne’s unfurling voice. “Sea as it Glides” is a powerful analogy of the grasping at a relationship, coming and going as predictably as the tides, appearing close but untethered at the same time. As the sounds of the tide persists, Byrne’s most instrumentally varied and lyrically magnanimous effort emerges. The painful honesty of mistakes once made, and brutal questions of whether it all was worthwhile sting, but necessarily. Love has escaped her, and loneliness remains. But happy or not, Byrne has journeyed to a place that is unequivocally rewarding. Not only physically to places containing the innate beauty that will far outlast humanity, but to the places in her mind devoid of shallowness and mindless hustle and bustle. No more fitting a man than the late Leonard Cohen encompassed this very idea in his poem, aptly named “Travel”:

                        Now

                        I know why men have stopped and wept

                        Half-way between the loves they leave and seek,

                        And wondered if travel leads them anywhere-

                        Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,

                        The windy sky’s a locket for your hair.

Ryley Walker- Golden Sings that Have Been Sung

Golden Sings that Have Been Sung
Ryley Walker
Dead Oceans 2017

Listen on Spotify









Guitar savant. Petulant and unserious. Genius. Each is a word or phrase describing Ryley Walker, a musical wunderkind from outside of Chicago whose second full length album somehow encapsulates the praises and critiques that have followed him throughout his career. At its best it thrives, with Walker’s intricate guitar play coalescing with a wide, beautiful array of instruments and moods. At its worst, his risks don’t pay off, his jokes fall flat, and he inexplicably strays from convention and areas of strength. Thankfully, the patient critic is rewarded; each additional listen points to another reason to respect his prowess. Or, hell, maybe even love him.

The thought process that a young musician faces when creating a second album is straightforward, albeit daunting, and the unenviable task of having to cope with an identity (either establishing, upholding, or improving) can illicit any number of responses. The sophomore effort, Golden Sings that Have Been Sung, shows flashes of all of the above, but perhaps most importantly offers a fascinating parallelism with Walker’s worldview- a duality of seriousness and triviality, control and helplessness; a competition between intricate beauty and crass ruggedness. This implicit imperfection, shown to be far more prominent than in his debut album, features throughout in the form of an expansion of Walker’s raspy singing voice. The same can be said with the introduction of edgy, grunge-heavy guitar effects in tracks like “Sullen Mind,”, a standout. This marks the most concerted effort yet for Walker to diversify his sound and avoid being pigeon-holed as a typical finger-picking blues/folk guitar player.

Boldly, the eight-song album begins with the best track Walker has ever recorded, purposely titled, “The Halfwit in Me.” A stunning ballad of failures and could-have-beens, the song is underscored by the typically adept melody of expressive guitars, exploding forward from a deliberate attempt at diversification and experimentation of sound. Varied influences of jazz, world music, and psych-rock are a precursor to a continued element of the remainder of the record. Lyrically, the first two songs establish the pairing of opposites that follow Walker around the album. In this case, Walker juxtaposes a hesitant, uncertain self with an unapologetically confident one. “A Choir Apart” begins with a warning of stubbornness “heads up for this joker/ hand on the heart/ pledge to a false flag,” and finishes with much the same “Golden sings that have been sung/ wise ass wisdom, wasted on the young.”

As impressive and intriguing as the album begins, the momentum is lost by a drastic shift downward in pace, serving only to highlight two of Walker’s weaknesses: crawling speed and bold analogy. And, thus, the album finishes with alternations of head-scratching shortcomings and sparkling talent. Among the low points are lines like “Funny thing she said to me/ I could see you giving me a child” and “I’m playing footsie with Jesus”, each feeling awkward and out of context. Herein lies the difficulty with risk and boldness: it doesn’t always pan out. While there is certainly value in efforts to diversify one’s craft, speed and songwriting in this case, Walker’s gifts of rhythm and tempo are too good to ignore, and it’s difficult not to wonder what a more consistent sense of urgency might have yielded.

Writing off the album as a dud would be a bad, bad, mistake, and he leaves no room to wonder with the dense, lush, and aforementioned “Sullen Mind”, a deeply personal tune that shines light on the dark places inside his mind, devoid of hope and prone to disappointment. The repetition of “And with a sullen mind, I’m out of here” is soon washed away by two climaxes of full-blown, eyes closed, head-nodding psychedelia. Two songs later, Walker, fittingly, returns to his roots with the kaleidoscopic tunings of his acoustic guitar, singing of The Roundabout, a literal place of vast memories, and a figurative nod at the tendency to search for the comfort and familiar when all else is lost. His voice, usually unrefined, is clear and smooth, shining in tandem with his meandering finger picking. The refinement is rewarded, the virtuoso is validated, and everything feels like it’ll be alright.

To finish things off, Walker saves the most profound for last, putting together the puzzle that makes the albums symbolism so impressive. Behind a backdrop of world music influences, the slow pace finally seems fitting, and the slow progress is almost a reflection on the journey undertaken. Whether that journey is the album, or even the life of the listener, is entirely uncertain, and for good reason. The record’s final words, “I’m beloved by the loved, who love to love/ I can still cut loose on a weekday night,” cut to the core. The album ends with a shrug of the shoulders. In light and darkness, it takes risks, has flying successes, and comes up short. Nonetheless, it carries forward and tries again. Without sounding zen or philosophical, we’re clued in to Walker’s views of the world. Of what it means to feel alive. Or maybe not to take him so seriously.

Boards of Canada- Music Has the Right to Children

Listen on Spotify

Discussions and dissections of the phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” can be traced to Aristotelian times of far greater simplicity and wonderment. Mathematically, the whole and the sum are identical. Psychologically, many would argue the whole and the parts are different entities entirely. But forget metaphysics. Musically, this phrase has never held more true than in the record Music Has the Right to Children by the electronic duo Boards of Canada. The album, a brilliant culmination of synergetic interactions between unremarkable pieces, provides a blueprint for any musician that aims to hide significance inside simplicity, and meaning inside melancholy landscapes.

With traces of influence from the electronic trailblazer Aphex Twin as well as pop-rockers Devo, Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin refuse to be typecast, instead embracing the isolation that comes with standing alone in producing their specific sound. The uniqueness of Boards of Canada stems from an unwavering focus towards a cohesive theme and purpose in their music, typically evoking a sense of nature helped greatly by a consistently searching aura. The consequence of approaching music as the broader creation of sound (a staple of genres like ambient music and lo-fi electronic), is a product that challenges convention and opens the doors of creativity. The obvious example in this case is the extensive use of sampling techniques throughout the recording process, pairing excerpts of anything from National Geographic documentaries to radio tunings with synthesizers and rudimentary analog setups. This takes the duo back to simpler times of exploration in their youth, and the intentional imperfection preserves a personal connection that allows ideas to unfold.

“Wildlife Analysis”, the opener, introduces bright, but unfamiliar territory, then quickly dissipates into an eerie interlude of layered snare drums and cloudy melody called “An Eagle In Your Mind.” As the album progresses, moods shift between downtempo and thought-provoking, and head-bobbing and rhythm-driven. In this way, one’s perception of the music’s purpose shifts in tandem, more methodical and dark sounds seem to extend infinitely and the pulse of drum machines suggests an intention to cram as much feeling into a few minutes as possible. The record’s second side opens with two songs of a similar duality, the first exhibiting an expert use of analog synthesizers, and the second song a dampened, foggy melody underscored by subtle, looping percussion.

The samples, which vary from subtle to striking throughout the record, seem arbitrary, but upon further probing are simply another cog artfully intertwined in a resolute message- that everything from the samples, to the track titles, even the band’s name, are meant to sound simple and unassuming, almost strangely so. Asked to describe why samples are so important to the sound, Eoin was quick to identify the intentionally open-ended nature of their music, stating, “The experience is different for everybody; we hope to just introduce an idea with our samples and titles that bring about some kind of further thought. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t.” This notion, that people can hear the music, completely absent vocals (excluding the samples, of course), and feel personally connected to its emotion, is what separates the album from one that only sounds good to one that also feels good.

The textures that permeate throughout, particularly on the record’s second disc, highlight an unbelievable balance struck between the individual sparks created in songs like “Rue the Whirl” and “Aquarius” and the smooth transitions that can convince the listener the piece is nothing more than a singular endeavor into unchartered sonic waters. Unchartered, in large part, because electronic music often consists of rhythm-focused, busy, and dense compositions. A concerted effort to prioritize melody over rhythm helps classify Boards of Canada, despite the pair’s resistance to more stringent confines.

In the end, the album defies confinement and convention. After all, how often is music foreign and familiar at the same time, unsettling and comforting alongside each other? It’s a walk around the block in your mind, beginning and ending in the same place but far worthless. It’s a ride through the countryside, with despair and enlightenment equally likely. It’s trivial, and irreplaceable. It’s whatever you want it to be. In each case, most importantly, rewardingly authentic and refreshingly simple.