135. Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened
Here is what I love about this list. Look at the five previous entries. The mad genius of glitch, gods of hardcore, sultry pop songstress, two slightly less sultry elder statesman of groovspel, and frankly no frills fiddle-and-banjo roots music. And then there’s Deerhunter. I mean, I guess they have some in common with later era Fugazi, and every band owes a little bit of their paycheck to Byrne, but other than that? This is a band that can legitimately stake claim to a sensibility that has faded in the latter part of this decade: individuality.
“Nothing Ever Happened” is off their most complete album, 2008’s Microcastle, an album that runs deep with great, varied tracks. This song on it’s own can’t even decide on a single personality over the course of its “Like a Rolling Stone” it feels brief, but it’s fucking not six minutes. The first of three songs smushed together is a two minute knotty sad-sack-Pavement ditty with some verses and some choruses. The second movement, if you will, makes the song great. Starting with the lines “I never saw it coming/waiting for something, for nothing” the band starts to wrap the thick vocals and buzzy guitar lines in an envelope of this kind of shoe-gaze, ambient room production. It’s not that anything sounds bigger than it had, but it sounds, I don’t know…shinier. A little more U2. In a good way. That brief bout of production glory lasts for only maybe a minute and a half before movement three, and, watch, that is where the song becomes AWESOME. This, my friends, is the noise, electronic, jam freak out. Like if Sonic Youth got their hands on Pigpen’s acid. And also an electronics guy showed up.
The tower of power noise pile that pulls the final two minutes or so to a screeching, cacophonous halt define Deerhunter as a band willing to blow shit up and start from scratch. At this point, I’m willing to allow them to continue rebuilding from the bottom up with noise, shoegaze, jam, whatever, as long as it’s still like this.
136. Old Crow Medicine Show – Wagon Wheel
SPOILER: This is as close to Dylan as we’re getting on this list, which kills me. But it'll have to do. For those who don’t know, the chorus of this song is from a Bob Dylan outtake from around the time he did Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Then the lead singer and fiddle player from a virtually unknown bluegrass band wrote some semi-autobiographical verses, and bam. Some Bonnaroo favorites were born.
Old Crow Medicine Show released the song on their self-titled debut in 2004, obviously luftwaffing the fuck out of Top 40 charts nationwide. Or, wait. No, they play bluegrass. It climbed to the high 60’s on the country charts. But if nothing else, this song and band are proof that there is other stuff out there, beyond MGMT and LCD Soundsystem and whatever Jack White is doing right now. And they are some of the best at what they do, the right tool for the job. They make music that Beck, or any other genre hopper could not, in fact, do better.
This is American traditional music at it’s finest, a little bluegrass, a little old-timey, yeah a little country, a guitar, banjo, upright bass, fiddle, and four guys that can all obviously WAIL. People talk about Fleet Foxes like they discovered harmony, but in this genre, bands never stopped using the four part, and these guys have it pretty much perfected. Just listen to the line “But he's a heading west to the Cumberland gap/ From Johnson City, Tennessee” and tell me that doesn’t elicit some kind of stimulus in the deepest part of your gut. For me, it’s that feeling of moving on, from the opening banjo plucks to the handful of notes in the fiddle upturn on the fade out. The ending of something great, the beginning of something greater. Even if you’ve never hitchhiked, when these guys sing about thumbing their way, some general human need, emotion, whatever, tells you what that really means.
Follow the List
Polls
Loading ...Archive
- March 2010 (9)
- February 2010 (11)
- January 2010 (20)
- December 2009 (27)
- November 2009 (46)
- October 2009 (3)