See, I can look classy every now and again.

When I search for records, it’s not an easy process. I often find myself inundated with those pesky round things — be they CDs or vinyl — as I flip through album after album. It’s not always particularly easy to find exactly what you want, supposing, of course, there is something in particular you’re interested in finding. It’s often the case that I’ll search shelves with no specific end, only the means: Exploration and search.

I’m under the impression that this is an essential part of my “musical journey” — a nebulous term I’ll adapt for use under a number of different circumstances with varying success. Half the fun of getting a record is looking for it, flipping through racks and racks of music, and finding that one specific item you’re willing to drop your cash on — or that stack of records you really, really don’t need right now.

If I were to walk into a store, find the album I wanted immediately, then leave, I feel I’d be missing a vital part of the experience. Of course, there are some real benefits to this — if somebody asks if you’ve heard of a record, and you remember seeing it at the store, you can just offer a glib, “Oh, I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t given it much time to digest,” be on your way, and leave them none the wiser. Sure, you haven’t heard the record, but you’ve seen a copy of it somewhere, and that should count for something, right? Not to say I’ve ever done this… but give it a try.

Of course, you don’t have to just flat-out lie. Is your friend asking about some new album you may or may not have heard, and you want to get them off your case? Tell them they have a copy on vinyl at the local record store. If it’s the right person, they’ll rush down, pick up a copy, and give it a listen, and they’ll probably invite you over to listen to it, too. You’ve helped your friend, yourself, and your local store, all in one fell swoop.

Aside from these fantasy scenarios, though, the record store serves a number of useful purposes. If you’ve caught a couple tracks from some band whose name is on the tip of your tongue — you’d recognize it if you saw it — and you know you want to hear more, what more fortuitous a scenario can come about than stumbling across it in your weekly vinyl hunt? You may find some real gems in there.

Downloading singles — or even albums, legally or not, doesn’t provide this experience. Not by a long shot. You can’t much shuffle through album after album, find something you recognize tangentially, and give it a spin at a listening station without some real effort — though, of course, if you know what you’re searching for, it’s not hard to find it.

I don’t mean to deny that there are some very sincere opportunities for one to find something new, exciting, and innovative online: Much to the contrary, the internet has proven a great tool for that very thing. It can’t be mistaken as the only tool, though; there’s something powerful about flipping through album after album, finding that vaguely recognizable gem, giving it a spin, and realizing you’ve either found a new love or made a huge mistake.

The record hunt, as one might call it, might be a bit outmoded in terms of efficiency, and it might be tiring. Still, it’s intensely satisfying. Can one find good music without record stores? Undoubtedly. I do it regularly, and I’m no finding-new-music whiz (perhaps I’d like to be, but it’s just not the case.) That should say something.

See, I can look classy every now and again.

Revolver Records, only a couple blocks away from Circles — a short walk from the Arizona State University Downtown Campus, where the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism is located — was a different story. From my first step into the door, the atmosphere was friendly and inviting, if a little intimidating. The selection on show was impressive, considering the size of the store. After a few tense minutes of trying to discern the organizational pattern of the store — now, that was something left to be desired — I found my first record of the day: King Crimson’s 1982 classic Beat, an album I’d previously purchased, I believe, while I was still in high school. I’ve never been much opposed to owning albums in multiple formats, save a digital format.

Some more searching revealed a few post-rock and shoegaze favorites against the right-most wall in the section labeled “New Vinyl” — an ambiguous term at best, but I did my searching, insufficient labeling be damned. Pavement’s Terror Twilight immediately popped out at me, as it’s an album I’ve been listening to with real fervor in the last two weeks. Slint’s Spiderland, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless — my choices were hardly limited in the ways I usually expect. I rounded off the day of purchasing with something a bit more modern: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s 2009 self-titled album.

Seeing Circles Records & Tapes on the verge of falling off the edge of relevance — and mere blocks from the seemingly successful Revolver Records; it ought to serve as a wake-up call, one much the like I’ll be receiving (well, my phone will be waking me up with its alarm clock function, but I’m in a hotel — that’s the point!) in only a few short hours. Record stores are facing an unenviable struggle; they’re being pulled in many directions by uneven forces.

So when the black-and-white, self-affirming Manhattan opens with George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a musical masterpiece said by some to be a portrait or tribute to New York City, we aren’t really surprised. When Allen, with his wry wit and self-deprecating demeanor, juxtapositions his opening narration, a stop-start, neurotic monologue serving as the opening to the equally neurotic Isaac Davis, even obliquely mentioning Gershwin, we’re given a distinct image of the film to come.

Given Woody Allen’s filmmaking chronology, Manhattan was created in a perhaps reactionary way to his tense, uncomfortable 1978 drama Interiors, which is as intelligent as it is painful. Interiors featured a sole musical scene: a post-wedding dance set to jazz; it is a scene that serves primarily as a precursor to intensifying drama, and it doesn’t function as any actual relief it might, in a very surface reading, seem to be.

It is interesting, then, that Manhattan is so intensely musical. “Rhapsody in Blue” sets a brilliant, invigorating tone, and Woody Allen’s simultaneously emotional and light-hearted follow-up to Interiors lifts much of the tension acquired from tense drama.

Isaac Davis, portrayed by Allen himself, is emotionally unstable, obsessive, bombastic — the archetypal Woody Allen role. It is through this lens we see that Gershwin’s piece isn’t chosen simply for the Manhattan cityscape; it represents something more involved with Isaac: As equally stop-start as his narration, Isaac is specific, pointed, and emotional.

Where the introductory clarinet “Rhapsody in Blue” bursts triumphantly, Woody Allen — no stranger to the clarinet himself — the film bursts in time. The emotional highs come fast and furious, but when the calm comes — it inevitably does — we’re lulled into a sense of ease, and we soon find it’s probably a bit misplaced.

More than just metaphor for the film, though, Woody Allen uses Gershwin’s piece to illustrate something more profound. Allen’s use of “Rhapsody in Blue” starts and end bombastically, but in markedly different ways. It begins with real flare, that clarinet trill an echo for Isaac Davis and his love for New York City, but when the film comes to a close, an ethereal quiescence flits romantically into the picture.

No, “Rhapsody in Blue” is used as metaphor for life, existence, romance, social relations: Sometimes slow and brooding, others exciting with frenetic pace, Woody Allen uses George Gershwin to create something relatable and universalizable and internalizable. Specifically, the specifics of the film may not be absolutely communicable to every person; not all 50-year-old males end up dating high school students, but there’s something deeper that makes Manhattan a success.

When we start Manhattan, there’s a waxing confidence about life, but as we continue, it fluctuates boldly. The thematic elements remain much the same from beginning and the end, but the film ranges from harried and nerve-wracking to glorious and, well, fun.

Isaac Davis’s final conversation of the film, uncomfortable and nervous as it may be, is as genuine and heartfelt as anything Woody Allen has produced. As the conversation comes to a close, and the final strains of “Rhapsody in Blue” tug at the heartstrings, there’s nothing more to be said, and the film ends. In a way, Manhattan ends as it started, much as “Rhapsody in Blue.”

See, I can look classy every now and again.

Whilst listening to the latest episode of All Songs Considered from NPR — it’s on the decade defined — The Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion,” from the group’s seminal 2004 full-length debut Funeral, imparted upon me a certain unusual zeal; it is a sort of zeal, I find, that is only imparted by the occasional realization of a song’s power and the inner workings behind such power. Radiohead’s “A Wolf at the Door,” most recently, hit me the same way; for weeks, I diagrammed the structural intricacies in an attempt to understand why, exactly, the song just… worked.

“Rebellion”‘s triumphant A♯ refrain ringing through my headphones, I was struck when I realized that the piano backing the track, well, wasn’t changing. I think it was something I’d noticed before, and the song certainly isn’t a strange one to hear playing, as it’s held a distinct place in my listening habits since its release. So, my curiosity piqued, I listened more intensely, attempting to glean any value from that slightly warbly piano occupying my headspace.

However, it’s not the A♯ making the song: It’s the change making it. At the half-way point, there’s just enough of a break for the primary lyrical theme to shine before the primary musical theme makes its return. The same thing happens at various points throughout, but the flow always returns to that familiar piano.

So, then, what makes “Rebellion” unique in this? Through at least four minutes of song, there’s a reverberating piano echoing, echoing, echoing — taken on its own, it would probably be considered one of the more annoying musical ideas on the market. Taken in tandem with (A) the bouncy bass work and (B) the occasional shot toward another note or series of notes on said piano, that A♯ propels the song forward and gives the piece its driving character.

It’s not that this is particularly unusual of a musical characteristic, but it’s that realization that tickles me and has driven me to attempt to describe the way this song makes me “feel:” giddy. Oh, that’s it.

But the album-oriented Radiohead may have gone by the wayside a bit, and it seems they’ve got Thom Yorke in tow. Here’s a quick timeline, if you’ve missed it somehow:

5 August 2009: Radiohead release “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)”
17 August 2009: Radiohead release “These Are My Twisted Words”
21 September 2009: Thom Yorke releases double A-side single, “Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses / The Hollow Earth” [Stereogum]

In fact, Thom Yorke’s gone so far as to talk about the album being a thing of the past for the band — at least, for now:

None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. (via Stereogum, via The Believer magazine)

Would I be happy if Radiohead continued to release single after single, constantly feeding my desire to hear more? Of course — few wouldn’t be. After all, it’s not like Radiohead haven’t produced more than their fair share of excellent albums, and I’m still very much discovering new things to love from their distinctive catalog, but it would be a shame if some of the most prominent musicians of the 21st century abandoned the album as a singular entity.

Perhaps my tie to the album is purely an emotional one, but there’s something innately appealing about a coherent block of music arranged with the utmost of concern and care.

Still, I’d be surprised to not see another Radiohead LP someday. A boy can dream, can’t he?

Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun

While I can’t say I’ve been listening to Sigur Ros for ten years (I’m only 23, after all,) the anniversary of Agaetis Byrjun still holds a notable impact in my development of musical tastes. When I first heard this album, I was an impressionable 15-years old and only beginning to realize the breadth and depth of music at my digital fingertips (ah, a pun!)

It introduced me to a world of post-rock and soaring, dynamic soundscapes — and though I wasn’t necessarily unfamiliar with the latter, the Icelandic outfit took it to a logical extreme I hadn’t yet witnessed. This, I thought, was music that made me feel emotional, excited, happy, sad; truthfully, the state of emotion didn’t much make a difference, but the magnitude. As a happy teen listening to Agaetis Byrjun, the album took on a bright, shimmery light; as an occasionally angst-ridden 16-year-old, the album came in a more sad, depressed form. As a teen who avoided some of the emotional highs and lows of his peers (though I wasn’t without fault, by any means) Sigur Ros gave me something to feel when I didn’t want to worry about feeling other things.

Agaetis Byrjun was as much an escape as it was a gateway drug into a convoluted world of inventiveness. It wasn’t long after I started listening to the group that ( ) was released, which certainly sped things along, but this album is what kicked it off.

I’ve ascribed my first experience with a Sigur Ros live show as one of the few moments of overwhelming aesthetic arrest  — like that thing many others have called simple spirituality or inspiration, but undoubtedly stronger:

“This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It illustrates my relationship with Sigur Ros in a necessarily convoluted way: I doubt much I could put in plain words the impact the experience has had on my musical journey, lest I delve into lines of mystical nonsense.

The beautiful thing, ten years later, is that the album has held a decade-influencing impact — a decade that’s seen Sigur Ros scale musical heights with the utmost precision, clarity, and grace.

It seems the large majority of people with which I have regular conversation are inclined to form connections to music as a method of reliving emotion. I suppose I sympathise with the notion: Music, I’d argue, is a much more powerful creation than simple words. It resonates (quite literally) through us in ways undeniable, whether they are cultural, personal, or innately human. I’m inclined to think it may be the latter, but this is another topic for another day.In long discussions with friends, it seems most of them invest time into the music they are interested in so as to fulfill an emotional bond. Certainly, I have emotional bonds with music myself, though I’m of the opinion that it’s not so forward as most others. I could be wrong about that, of course, and I don’t mean to slight the notion of emotional connection.

But I’ve strayed off track a bit. I’d like to describe how I see individuals forming emotional bonds with music, and I don’t imagine it’s an easy task.

I’ve read and heard much about people forming memories associated with smells, tastes, sounds, and the like — sensory perceptions, if you will. Of course, music can be regarded as an extension of sound, but I think there’s something more at work with emotional memory and music. How often is it that you hear someone speak of loving or hating a song because of whom it reminds them? It seems quite a common occurrence, though it may only mean that my circle of friends is more emotionally bound than others — I don’t think they are, though. Is forming connections with music something more profound than forming connections with a loud bang?

Take, for instance, the notion of a war veteran reacting to the sound of unseen fireworks in a state of readiness. The sound these fireworks create is not dissimilar to the sound of, say, mortar fire, a sound to which they’ve been trained to react in a specific manner. This, I’d say, is like most psychological training and essentially Pavlovian in nature (correct me if I’m wrong, though. I’d like to know.) I think this is markedly similar — though different in some very key aspects — to the forming of emotional connections to music.

Take, for instance, then, a man whose wife has died. The couple’s favorite song may have been “And Your Bird Can Sing” by, of course, The Beatles. Would it be so unusual for him to have formed an emotional tie to the song in association with the memory of happier times? I don’t imagine it’s a jump for most to imagine, and I think it’s something most people have experienced to one degree or another.

Rather than attempting to truly assess the nature of music as a form of emotional memory, I’ll merely leave it at this and continue to ponder the idea.

“Success Level” is a fairytale invented to give journalists something to print by each deadline. It allows readers to vicariously live a celebrity soap opera about who makes it and who doesn’t. It turns the world into comic fiction that has nothing to do with music or life.

Given his experience with the music industry, one can’t really blame him for his view. Justifiably, I believe he is arguing that mainstream “success” is really not much more than “real-life” failure. The drive to create, he forwards, is falsified and made mechanical because of mainstream success — and music is the worse for it.

I’m not sure I disagree. His view reaffirms my general thought that some of the best music comes not from the majors — or even the indies — but from individuals and groups struggling with life on a daily basis. Of course, this isn’t to say that all music need come from such dour circumstances. Perhaps it’s not so much a socioeconomic condition that spawns creativity, but the generic notion of conflict and inner turmoil that forces creativity to manifest as an escape from the undesirable norm.

Take, for instance, the world-famous Beatles. I genuinely appreciate much of their music, and they, quite obviously, were not always in financially dire straits. Still, they managed to craft some revolutionary music that’s held on to the wild ride that is civilization — and it’s not something at which I’d just point at “the times” as the cause. No, while I’m sure things are a bit different than 40 years ago, I’d just as much argue that things are much the same. The methods of dissemination may have changed, but the general mindset doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps we ought just point at luck and attribute it to that, as I think that has much to do with mainstream success.

Tay Zonday makes a good argument, and in the bitter taste of success, he may be a better philosopher than even he realizes.

In so many ways I feel like I have creatively and spiritually gone nuts. Fallen into some funk. Some mental illness. Some strange aloneness where I used to rely on music to save me. But if I’m stuck in a life situation where I can not give 100% to that music . . . it just fizzles. Disappears. I can’t compromise. But life forces compromises. The artist dies when they refuse to say “fuck the world” and give 100%. I should sing my heart out until the police handcuff me and haul me off for disorderly conduct. I should not be in a self-conscious prison where I lose sight of my main joy in life for the daily grind of the calendar. But I am. And I don’t know how to escape.

Perhaps it’s hearing a few new albums that get me excited about new music being released that’s done the trick. In the last week, I’ve made more of an effort to hear new music than in the past six months, which, I must say, is a bit of a shame. Here’s a short list of a few albums that I’ve been listening to recently — perhaps reviews will come soon.

Charles Spearin — Happiness
Phoenix — Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
The Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice — Moon Colony Bloodbath
Grizzly Bear — Veckatimest
The Rural Alberta Advantage — Hometowns
Leaves — We Are Shadows

Maybe all I needed was something to be excited about again, but after an unnecessary hiatus, I’m ready to write again.

So, let me revise that: Four of you subscribe to MusicGeek.org with Google Reader. Thank you. More of you regular readers should subscribe to this site with some sort of RSS feed reader if you don’t already.

Now, I know you probably want to visit the site to view our lovely ads (which, by the way, make me little to no money — I’m quite certainly not profiting financially from running this site,) but I urge you to subscribe anyway. The formatting might not be quite as nice, but if you read through the brief bit of post and are interested in reading more, it’s a short process to click and read the rest.

Even if you aren’t a regular reader, I think you should subscribe. We don’t post so much that your reader will be overwhelmed, and we try to keep things interesting with new features exploring the world of independent music. We’ve also reported news right as it happened in the past; subscribing will pass that advantage on to you.

I recognize the fact that not all of you readers even use feed readers, so let me quickly outline what I find advantageous about using them — specifically Google Reader.

The ability to organize the sites I regularly read is a big selling point: I can quickly and easily read new posts right as they are posted rather than sort of stumbling on them during a regular visit. I still visit these sites regularly — there’s more to most than just their posts — but this allows me to read the latest in news, critique, and more.

The ability to read these feeds from more than just my web browser is nice, as well: An hour of boredom waiting for a plane can be turned into an hour of catching up on feeds — or two hours of reading and an hour of screaming because you missed your plane. Just saying.

Since really diving into RSS feed reading, I’ve gone from reading a couple web sites intermittently to reading many web sites daily: I catch more news, more entertainment, more everything. In the same time it took me to read those two sites, I can read seven, eight, or more — just because I don’t have to remember what I read regularly. Yeah, I’m forgetful. Beyond that, I can more easily skip posts I’m not terribly interested in, which rarely happens anyway.

Honestly, I can’t sing the praises of Google Reader highly enough — but don’t just take my word for it.