Just North of Something Important

Prince - “Pope”

Rachel is not a musician, but she likes musicians. If she were a musician, she says, she would be Nancy Whang, although I suspect maybe more the yelling function of Nancy Whang than the playing keyboards function of Nancy Whang.  Anyway, this is I think a good vision of how Rachel would like to be a musician. Although who wouldn’t want to be a backup singer for Prince, right?

Anyway, this is all to say that maybe Merill Garbus’ live performances are a good vision of how Rachel would like to be as a performer: basically banging on things and yelling, or just singing perceptively about TV.  “He always disliked doughnuts / but he always loved my hole.”  Yes yes yes.  Let’s leave the emotions unsaid.  “You can be the president / I’d rather be the pope.”  Sounds good to me.

tUnE-yArDs - “Lions”

BiRd-BrAiNs is a great album because it’s intentionally trying to sound like the demo version of “Mushaboom.”  That recording is a great recording accidentally because a lo-fi sound fits the emotional heft of the song a lot better than the clean studio version.  “Mushaboom” is meant to reassure you about the disappointing present by presenting a pleasant vision of a pleasant future, and as such, it’s the kind of song you sing to yourself, the kind of song that runs through your head in the morning as you walk through the rain on the way to work (“planting lilacs and buttercups / but in the meantime we’ve got it hard / second floor living without a yard”).  The demo’s traffic sounds fit that perfectly, and the physicality of the sound combined with the understated singing make you feel like Feist is breathing the words into your ear, soothing and reassuring—but also credible, because there’s too much grime there for her to be lying.  You get the sense she knows too much about disappointing realities to give you false hope.

The emotional tenor of the tUnE-yArDs album is very different, but the similarity is that lo-fi actually fits the songs.  It’s the difference between style and sound: most bands use lo-fi as a style, a way of signaling to listeners their particular taste allegiences.  And there’s nothing wrong with that as such.  Style is important!  But Merrill Garbus, the woman behind the oddly-punctuated name, has a style already just in the way she writes and plays her songs.  No further style is necessary.  Instead, she needed to present them in such a way that they would be emotionally legible, so that the meaning would come through.  And that’s why lo-fi works here.  For one thing, the same need for physical presence and closeness is present, as the songs sound not just personal but private.  The intense melodicism and the tone of her voice sounds like Dawn Weiner at the end of Welcome to the Dollhouse, singing to herself in an impossibly sweet voice on the school bus, the beauty smothered by the extroverted exuberance of the other kids.  This does not sound powerful.  It does not sound like Garbus should be standing in front of a band of amplified instruments, directing and controlling and outdoing them.  It’s too contained for that.  But it doesn’t feel like a singer-songwriter sitting along on a stool, either; it doesn’t feel confessional.  It feels, again, absolutely private, like Garbus is singing entirely—entirely—for herself, with no intention or awareness of an outside audience.

But even though it doesn’t feel powerful, it still feels incredibly intense, and that’s the other reason why lo-fi feels appropriate.  Just like, as Matthew has pointed out, the contained vocals on St. Vincent songs are the controlled public face while the wild guitar is the losing-her-grip interior life, the guitar and ukelele on Garbus’ songs are the contained bits, the feelings that can safely find exterior expression.  But the feelings are so contained that they’ve built up enormous pressure:

we can pretend it’s christmas while we’re locked here in this box
while my brother and all his friends whip out their tiny teenage cocks
if I scream they’ll hear us so let’s count along with clocks
tock, tock, tock, tock

…and that’s what the percussion sounds like: blown out and suffocated with room noise because they can’t physically sound loud enough to convey the emotion that’s underlying all these songs.  We need to scream, but we can’t, because we have to be quiet, so the drum sounds will scream for us.  Meanwhile, sweet synth lines come in like the superego’s attempts to soothe, though it doesn’t always work.  And riding that emotional crest are the vocals.  The vocals are, obviously, the key here: aside from how they convey the private nature of these songs, they are almost always the only things that change in Garbus’ songs; everything else might as well be loops.  But they change immensely, ranging from low muttering to full-throated shouting to head-voice keening, and when that’s not enough, they get pitch-shifted.  The album is immaculately constructed, but it’s also an incredible performance, Garbus taking this base she’s built for herself and wringing every possible ounce of emotion out of it.

That no one knows how to talk about this exactly is a great example of the tyrrany of style.  It’s a lo-fi album that just doesn’t sound like what we think “lo-fi” sounds like, so what is it?  Sounds aren’t just sounds; they’re associated with particular groups and particular places and times and values, which is key.  Most of the time this is great: style’s ability to group disparate elements together into something meaningful makes expressions of taste richer and more rewarding; it lets us argue about something more than just the merits.  But it can also make us unable to hear justified deviations from stylistic discourse: they become the guy in the gorilla suit.  tUnE-yArDs is one of those, and I’m very glad it’s breaking through.