The Alamo

Among the most beautifully composed electronic albums of electronic music history, Boards of Canada welcomes listeners literally (lyrically?) Into the Rainbow Vein, where, once inserted, we can navigate the myriad capillaries, blood vessels, lymph nodes, and other internal structures of their intensely created musical landscape.

I have certainly caught myself saying something like: I feel like Chromakey Dreamcoat right now. And I have. The track’s simple few notes of a nearly atonal electric guitar on repeat grates against nerves until a smoothness that can only, at best, remain undefined soothes the open sores like sucking on a frickin’ cactus in the desert.

And this track isn’t alone. Some Boards of Canada fans may not rank this album most highly on their list (and I don’t blame them), but the maturity that their music has reached in its depth and structure is absolutely amazing. Drawing from a vast catalogue of subtle, effected samples and purely refined synthetic tones, I can, with no exaggeration, say that the music has the ability to massage deep into my muscles, drawing out endorphins and eliminating the lactic waste like no other music you might experience. If this isn’t on your list, put it on your list. If you don’t have a list, make one and put this on it.

Remember Amelie’s soundtrack by Yann Tierson? A beautiful pairing of accordion and piano helps aid in the beautiful pairing of this remarkable soundtrack with its film. Soft, down-tempo piano ballads that lure your silent sadnesses out of the stale air depths in your bottom lung folds in quiet gasps alternate with up-tempo, uplifting compositions whose warmness burns in splintered pattens just below your skin. There are a few early-model radio recordings thrown in their too, masterfully, mysteriously fusing seamlessly with the complicated, modern classical recordings.

I may have said this before about other albums, but this album has the power to save your life. It will life you up from dark places, throw you a rope in a pit of sinking quicksand, cast shade over the fiercest sun, and provide a gentle breeze to your sailboat in a ripple-less pond. Not to be underestimated.

While we’re off format, let’s talk about this remarkable group. Their 2004 album, Riot on an Empty Street, filled with eerily clear vocals backed by bare bones piano and acoustic guitar with a smattering of other unplugged instruments. Perfect for a summer day watching those bugger hummingbirds from a vantage of a swaying hammock. Relaxing, precise, integrated melodies, involved rhythms.

Remember Sean Lennon, Friendly Fire? At first listen, it is difficult to overlook the fact he is his father’s son. It is equally difficult to avoid immediately drawing an intense emotional connection to his music.

The morose, uncomplicated lyrics fed with inspiration from his self-said greatest influences (mom and dad), give this musical savant a razor sharp edge to do some surgery on your foolish and broken heart. He can burn a hole into the center of your deepest memory, ball it up in titanium twine, and pull it out of your core to see the fresh light of day, all in a single breath!

The beautiful arrangements of music that accompany his words, have a style of their own: unpretentious harmonies, masterful two-handed piano, and classical guitar all ease themselves into and out of the intricacies of every track.

As an added bonus, this album comes with a brilliant DVD that depicts the album through short sketches. A single scene sticks out in my mind: Sean Lennon, bent under the weight of a sleeve-carrying heart is slumped on a couch, strumming the complicated chords of the album’s title track “Friendly Fire” with an ease and effortless giving of emotion. Wonderful, sublime, emotional, timid, and unique.

Remember Zero 7, Simple Things? That album that reached you in your dark place and drug you out, clear, free, and nearly unscathed?

Breath. Sigh. As one of the first places (if not the first place) to listen to Sia dominate the vocal landscape, its uniqueness, in hindsight, can be seen in this album’s minimalistic approach to her undisputed talent (and minimal use). In fact, avid listeners of this album can certainly overlook that she is even featured on it.

In fact, many of the album’s perfect 14 tracks are wholly instrumental. Flawless, intelligent arrangements keep the pace of this album lifted and airy, giving it that power that music only has to look into your face and say, “I know it, buddy. I’ve been there. But what do you really have to worry about? Life is actually beautiful.”

(Editor’s note: The above quote is not really a quote.)

Soothing Aloe strings and a drum and bass combination that provides Vitamin E smoothness traipse easily from track to track, mixing with electric piano and acoustic guitar to provide a sound that is, in every way, undefineable. Like the smell of just walking into the door at home, or the touch of sun on your skin.

Each track unpretentiously bides its time, patiently letting the complex harmonies take root over a backing beat tranquil and unruffled enough to ice skate on.

To be honest, I’ve been sitting here trying to determine the best way to do this remarkable album justice. After an emergency lifeline phone call to probe Taylor’s thoughts (who incidentally introduced me to this album), I’d like to end off with this single thought.

In the myriad of circumstances and events in my recent life that have been effected by this album, be they wholly benign, intolerably low, or outrageously ecstatic, there will never be an album that could fill each next void, each next moment like this one has and continues to do.

Remember Beck, Midnight Vultures? That album that snuck into the mix under the radar, but by the time it left, you were singing in a falsetto you didn’t know you had?

By the end of the first track, you’ll be confused as to what year it is, and, in your disorientation, you’ll be swept away by the sheer momentum of this album. The rolling bass lines, the solid simple beats, and all the sounds that can be managed to be squeezed in between!

Released in 1999 (before the Y2k panic), it shows shades of banjo, slide guitar and other remnants of the former Beck efforts, but it is fully injected with an overdose of 70s disco zeal and an abandonment that gives even the most conservative man freedom to dance, sing, and do all the silly things they usually see everyone else doing. It was the fate of this album to be the one to which all future beck albums would be compared, in terms of diversity, experimentation, and danceability.

Oh yeah, and Debra is on this disk. That’s enough reason to go rooting through the boxes you’ve never unpacked from your last move to get this disk out.

Remember VHS or Beta, Night on Fire? All the vocal power that a five-foot nothing skinny Asian man could possibly produce across unquestionably danceable tones carrying all the dignity that a funky 90s-smelling sound can offer.

Dust off this album, and if you don’t have it, take a good look in the mirror and reassess your life, dummy. The scope of the types of people that could enjoy this album range from people that never made it out of the 90s, middle-school teachers letting loose, lost teenage Louisville runaways, and anyone who owns a convertible to budding music newsletter writer/editor/publishers.

This album has been a fixture, and one of the first original danceable bands that helped usher in this era of danceable dandies!

In short, this album came out of Louisville, and carried this band across the globe on the Astralwerks label (same label as Air, Cassius, Magic Numbers, and Hot Chip to name a few), from summer trysts in Ibiza to international tours and back to the midwest. This is certainly a disc that welcomes a long return.

Remember Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene? What a revelation of music! What a revelation of the soul itself. This extremely large band leaves an extremely large impression on your understanding of music by the end of this self-titled release.

The collection of talent on this band is astounding. And, to use the expression, the combination puts everything in its right place.

The creation and execution of each track is organic, with instruments and harmonies playing delicately off eachother as if they were two trees that had grown together, their branches playing into intricate patterns as they grow seamlessly, unmistakably together.

From straightforward, rocking tracks, to songs with elaborate percussions, confusing songs about getting cortizone in your eyes or Canadian armament, and songs whose lyrics will cause a knee-jerk reaction on a first date, this album can do nothing but please the avid music listener.

Remember Radiohead, In Rainbows? Wow. And that song Reckoner? Religious. Radiohead outdid themselves again because, really, who else remains for them to out do?

Reviewing Radiohead is hard to do. What remains to be said, really, and what could I possibly add to the minds of already fervent fans, feverish first-time listeners, or those that are utterly unexposed?

Let me relate to you a story instead. Taylor and my adventure to see Ghostland Observatory in Chicago ended with a short road trip across the great state of Indiana to a lakehouse on the east side of the state. Across the way, we traded playing tracks on the iPod, where we came across Reckoner.

The minimalist presentation of this song - its full percussion sound, gently flowing simple guitar/bass melody, the scent of a piano in the distance – all presents a vast changing of the tide on an empty shoreline from which surfaces Thom Yorke’s voice, a strongly solitary presence that breaches from the waves only to retreat again before the song ends. This is what music can be.

This song leaves me breathless upon every listening. And it is just one song on an album that is inevitably crowded with songs that challenge your understandings of what a single band’s limitations are in diversity, talent, presentation, spirituality, and getting down to a personal level with a listener that they will never meet.

Remember Moon Safari? That album that so precariously combined influences from Serge Gainsbourgh, early Beegees, Van Morrison, and the Beach Boys? The album that started it all, changing the ever-present drumming beat of electronic music in popular listening to a more sublime, artistic and unmistakably French electronic wonderland.

Burn yourself a copy, dust off your old copy or buy the new re-release and pop it into your favorite stereo. You’ll be toe-tapping to Sexy Boy and Kelly Watch the Stars within minutes with a Nostalgic smile on your precious chapped or unchapped lips.

You’ll catch yourself saying things like, “I saw the Sexy Boy video late night on an MTV Amp. That was a cute little monkey.” or “The first time I got high, I listened to Moon Safari on repeat. It was soooooo French.”

This album is timeless, under-represented, and more than worthy of a daily listening.

Chip. Chipchip.

Don’t forget Hot Chip, Coming on Strong. Their first proper (to use the British word) LP and a gem (ps. it’s probably the Hottest Chip), you can hear tantalizing lyrics such as “Even Stevie Wonder can see things,” “I was stunned by your revelations, then I forgot them,” and “Riding in my Pugeot, hey! 20-inch rims with the chrome, now, hey! Blaring that Yo La Tengo, hey hey. Hey hey.” You can’t go wrong on this album, and it’s like running into an old friend at the local produce section, then running into them again later on at the Hot Chip concert.

Where’s my Chippie?

I still can’t decide if all of their references are intentional, but I think even they would say it doesn’t matter. Let it play, put your windows down, go for a drive, and try not to dress like the lead man in Hot Chip, who seems to encourage wearing inappropriate outfits in appropriate situations.

There you are Chippie…There’s my Chippie.