Popagandhi

It has been a good couple of weeks for music lovers. Once again, the trend continues, with little significant music of note in the first 8 months of the year, only to have one great record released after another, just as you thought it couldn’t get any better.

Ray LaMontagne — Till The Sun Turns Black
Ray LaMontagne’s Till the Sun Turns Black is a sterling example of a record that gets everything right, the second time around: his 2004 effort, Trouble, was hauntingly beautiful in its acoustic simplicity. Till the Sun Turns Black continues that acoustic legacy in many parts, but accompanying this new album, is an effort with more layers, more strings, more horns; an effort that is certainly no sophomore slump.

One of this album’s stand out tracks would be “Empty”, which LaMontagne’s fans are no stranger to, having heard the Live from Bonnaroo 2005 version, yet hearing it again is every bit like the first: raw, emotional, honest, as he sings “She lifts her skirt up to her knees/ walks through the garden rows/ with her bare feet laughing./ I never learned to count my blessings/ I choose instead to dwell in my disasters”. Raw, emotional, honest and gorgeous, should be LaMontagne’s trademarks. If there are some artistes who I can’t wait to hear how they sound like a year, two years, or three from now, because their albums simply scream “watch me”, while serving as excellent musical fodder even at the present; Ray LaMontagne is one of them.

Bob Dylan — Modern Times
As a towering figure of not just music, but of our times, when he speaks — and sings — the world is at his beck and call, uniformly astounded by how relevant, iconic, blasé, and towering this man still is. With more blues, more twang, more rockabilly, less harmonica, Bob Dylan at 65 in Modern Times is still every bit as much of a “whompin’ good time” as he was in, say, “It Ain’t Me Babe” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Just different. Still every bit as important. Iconic Dylan is probably one of the most written about characters in pop culture — it’s always hard to write about him. Few of us can out write one of the greatest poets that ever lived, so I won’t try.

Thom Yorke — The Eraser
If I could charge a dollar for everytime I hear the whine, “Radiohead sucked after OK Computer”, I will be a very rich person. Get over it. OK, so OK Computer was one of the greatest albums of our generation — I, like many music lovers, moulded the soundtrack of heartbreaks around this album; and personally wept a bucket when I witnessed a Thom Yorke solo acoustic rendition of Exit Music — but hey, like everything about this band, the post-OK Computer, “weird electronic stuff” grew on me. You could call me a blind, undiscerning follower of the band. I’m happy to be irrational on this matter.

For his solo effort, it was almost a no-brainer that Thom Yorke, once ‘freed’ from a band, would push his obsession with experimentation (read: inevitably it is more beats and electronics, in his words), even further. He doesn’t fail to spook.

The more you try to erase me
The more, the more
The more that I appear
Oh the more, the more
The more you try the eraser
The more, the more
The more that you appear

It surely isn’t easy being Thom Yorke, a man so deified by so many of his fans (yours truly included). One expects nothing less than for everything he touches to turn to gold. So does Thom, minus Radiohead, deliver? With full admission of bias (my friends will tell you how much I worship this man), it does. Detractors say his electronic experiments are but a mere pastiche, at best, and very bad electronica at worst. I don’t think Thom was ever trying to be a force to be reckoned with in electronica, the way he achieved it with rock in the 90s. He’s always played in a different league altogether, exclusive from genres or easy classification, being the same old weird but fucking brilliant Thom Yorke, in a medium that isn’t all that different as what he gained fame with, if you think about it. Get The Eraser, and the Harrowdown Hill EP (remix of The Eraser track, Harrowdown Hill, plus another song), and see what he means when he says “You cannot kick-start a dead horse/You just cross yourself and walk away.”

Other notable releases: The Roots’ “Game Theory”, Madeleine Peyroux’s “Half the Perfect World” (I’m VERY excited about this), The Dears’ “Gang of Losers”, and the re-release of John Cale’s classic “Paris 1919″ with additional material.

Why do I have a feeling I will be very broke in the month of September?