Happy September, everyone! I hope you're all reading/listening to/watching something fantastic. I just found out that John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats) is playing a show Pennsylvania in November on the tour for the new album, "The Life of the World to Come." You can check out an mp3 of one of the songs here, and I've heard the whole album has leaked if you know where to look. I will definitely be heading down to Philadelphia for this show, in the constant hope that I will hear "No Children" live once more in my life.
But now the real purpose of this post: a review! A few months ago, I won a book on Twitter from Algonquin Books and I've been waiting since July to post about it. The book is Our Noise, a history of Merge records by the founders and the bands involved. Merge is a fantastic record label, with bands as diverse as Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the Magnetic Fields, and this book is an oral history of indie rock in the post-grunge era. My favorite part, by far, was the Neutral Milk Hotel section, which sheds some light on the mythical figure that Jeff Mangum became, following a circus and doing field recordings. There's also a short essay in that section by Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End, where he just raves about the album. It's a surprising moment, a well-known author letting his inner fanboy out, and I loved it.
The Spoon section of the book was really interesting because I had no idea how long it took them to really become a band. When I first heard "The Way We Get By," I had no idea they had been working for years, releasing lesser-know albums and shifting their line-up.
The Magnetic Fields section had one of my favorite explanations for what they sound like: pop music from the future, as imagined in 1960. There's a lot there about how insane you would have to be to release "69 Love Songs," and how Merge, in spite of that, released it anyway. It worked out well, with the album still popular.
The book as a whole is a celebration of the DIY aesthetic, and an exploration of how passion married with a business sense can make a small company into a major force. By treating their artists well--Merge does not require multiple-record contracts and shares profits with the bands--they have carved more than a niche for themselves. I don't know if you could say they've become a mainstream record company, but at the very least they're a small label that the big guys have noticed, the underdogs that Spoon, on their 2007 album "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga," predict will outlast the big players.
The Magnetic Fields section had one of my favorite explanations for what they sound like: pop music from the future, as imagined in 1960. There's a lot there about how insane you would have to be to release "69 Love Songs," and how Merge, in spite of that, released it anyway. It worked out well, with the album still popular.
The book as a whole is a celebration of the DIY aesthetic, and an exploration of how passion married with a business sense can make a small company into a major force. By treating their artists well--Merge does not require multiple-record contracts and shares profits with the bands--they have carved more than a niche for themselves. I don't know if you could say they've become a mainstream record company, but at the very least they're a small label that the big guys have noticed, the underdogs that Spoon, on their 2007 album "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga," predict will outlast the big players.
Final Note: Mountain Goats and Algonquin in one post? I have a feeling North Carolina is taking over. I, for one, welcome our new Appalachian overlords.
2 comments:
When the hell does John Darnielle have time to record? Clearly this is some sort of prestige-like situation, in which two John Darnielle's take turns touring endlessly while the other churns out new material.
Not to mention the third John Darnielle, who has time to keep up the Last Plane to Jakarta blog and write the 33 and 1/3 on Black Sabbath.
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