Soundtracking: Your Summer
Words by Jacob Barron
This column completes the quartet of seasonal soundtracking opportunities, and, appropriately, marks the column’s unofficial one-year anniversary. Happy birthday soundtracking! I know we didn’t post autumn until September last year, but whatever! I’m trying to get you a free dessert from Applebee’s, soundtracking, so shut up and be cool.
In addition to autumn, we’ve been through winter and spring, leading us inexorably on to summer, which I think is easily the easiest season to soundtrack, making this, by extension, the hardest of these columns to write. Everyone has a hot ass SUMMA JAM mix in their Jeep Wrangler, possibly stuffed to the rafters with songs about the size of their pimping (big) and queries about whether or not they like pina coladas or just lots and lots of Wham. There’s a summer sound, is what I’m saying, a brightness, or at least an absence of darkness, that categorizes this sweaty season and the tunes that come with it. A lot of the following tunes are agreeable, but none of them are boring. Some of them might even get you a momentary cockeyed stare from a skeptical BBQ-goer, but just relax, take a sip of your Corona, and trust that this person will soon catch a breeze and reconsider.
Abe Vigoda – Skeleton
Abe Vigoda / Dead City/Waste Wilderness
Every noisy guitar stab here and clattering beat there reminds me of thin, bright shafts of light shooting through tree branches in my parents’ backyard. It’s an album that sounds rushed, both in the half-shouted one-take vocals and average song length of two minutes or less (only three of them break the three-minute mark), like it’s eager to get through with this and move on quickly to the next activity, or like a kid who can only see summer as a gloriously rambunctious period of unfettered freedom, not just another season that’s just a tad hotter than the others. This is the sound of summer as the bell rings, at its most pure and exuberant.
Bowerbirds – Hymns For A Dark Horse
I was wandering around my favorite local record store one summer afternoon and this album was playing on the house speakers, about three days before it was to be released. I went to check out and they had a display with a copy of the album sitting out, indicating to passers-by that this is what they were hearing. So I asked my predictably-bearded cashier if I could buy it and he said sure, and then I never listened to anything else that summer. “Hymns” is a pretty quiet, hippie folk affair with songs that can suffer, at least at the onset, from sounding a tad too similar. After more than one listen though, once you’re whistling the melodies over and over, you’ll be hooked on the accordion, Philip Moore’s snaking Andrew Bird-ish voice and the polite bombast of the ramshackle percussion. Bowerbirds have an exceedingly limited palette, but they paint some seriously vibrant landscapes with it.
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Animal Collective / Summertime Clothes
Including this album now, almost two years after we all got a little sick of hearing “My Girls,” might seem kind of desperate, but it’s still a magnificent outdoor album, filling its cup to the very brim with Animal Collective’s trademark weirdness without spilling into inaccessibility. Seriously, a drop more and this would’ve just been another entry in the admirably experimental, though not always listenable, discography of Baltimore’s most respected sons in the indie-verse. Instead it’s thrillingly new, but somehow simultaneously familiar. If I had to pick a word to describe it, I’d say “splashy.” Everything sounds underwater, at the beach, local pool, or nearest body of water that isn’t a drainage ditch. Even the slower tunes (“No More Runnin”) are filled with an effervescent warmth that makes this ideal backyard music.
The Hold Steady – Stay Positive
The Hold Steady / Constructive Summer
As far as I’m concerned, the Hold Steady owns summer. They are the keepers of the season for anyone in their 20s, 30s or 40s who likes to tip a few back every now and then. Craig Finn spins magnificently conflicted tales over muscular guitar licks without any irony, and he does it better than anyone else. In a word, this is rock music for A-students, rock music that respects the range of human emotions and the wreckage left after a night of too much drinking. Everything here fits almost any booze-fueled social situation, but “Constructive Summer” is the most obvious connection to the season, and is a wonderful metaphor for what we all hope to get out of summer, but almost never do.
Iron and Wine – Our Endless Numbered Days
Iron & Wine / Naked As We Came
It’s a shame that this wasn’t around when we were children, because it would’ve made an extremely erudite, urbane soundtrack to catching fireflies, not like that Postal Service-aping Owl City asshole. Seriously, that guy blows. But I’m digressing…Each delicately plucked guitar string on Our Endless Numbered Days is like a blade of grass dashing between your toes as you try to catch lightning bugs, or butterflies if it’s light out. It’s not all bucolic happiness, and some of the lyrical content here is downright dark, but listening to “Naked As We Came” outside, by fire or a lit candle, right around twilight, is a stress-relieving event that only summer could provide.
Fennesz – Endless Summer
Fennesz is probably the king of ambient, instrumental, laptop-addled guitar music, and he’s brilliant wherever he shows up, but when I said earlier that these songs might get you cockeyed looks if you played them at an outdoor gathering, I was talking about this one. Really, while I love this album, I would never put it on a party playlist; no words, just bubbling sound effects, twisting guitar lines and single phrases slathered in static and repeated for ten minutes before decaying into something altogether unexpected. Endless Summer turns the concept of summer music on its head, somehow managing to make something organic out of something digital. Rather than trafficking in escapism and providing a metaphorical vacation from your daily life, from your Blackberry, your work laptop and your office’s fluorescent lights, Endless Summer seeks the sunshine in life as we know it now, with all manner of digital communication and interference. It’s the sound of all the equipment you spend so much time around all year, gently vibrating and coaxing the world into summer whenever you want to listen, over and over again, forever.
What songs do you have on your BBQ playlist? Are there songs that transport you to the beach, the ballpark, or just outside as the sun shines? What tunes will you be listening to when you drunkenly break out the Slip-n-Slide after hours and regret all of it the next morning. Leave us a comment and let us know! Wear sunscreen.
Filed under: Lists, Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan
