ART OF SONG
The Microphones
“Solar System”
Mount Eerie
2003 | K Records

To me, the best songs are the ones that give listeners the option to take them as far as they want intellectually. Consider “Thunder Road,” the opening track on Bruce Springsteen’s in-every-household Born to Run. You can take the Boss’s breathtaking “Hey what else can we do now except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair?” at face value and get plenty out of it. The song is plain awesome and demands attention, even if you disregard the lyrics. But if you feel like digging a little deeper, under the rock-bliss surface of “Thunder Road” lies a narrative, artfully written in colloquial, plain-Jersey language, with a focus on youth and longing. Similar things can be said about “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys, “Unsatisfied” by The Replacements, and more recently “First Night” by The Hold Steady – songs that never lose their pop sensibility, as deep as their intellectual intent may be.

So what does this have to do with Phil Elverum, and the culmination of his Microphones moniker, Mount Eerie? This an album so deeply rooted in concept, philosophy, and intention that it begins with three minutes of heartbeat (last heard ending his preceding album, The Glow Pt. 2) followed by ten minutes of building drums, meant to symbolize “the growing up time our main character spends before being born” (published by Elverum in “Headwaters: An Attempted Explanation of Mount Eerie” – that’s right, he published an illustrated explanation of every sound and word on the album; Tool fans don’t even get that). Mount Eerie is an album seemingly as dense and alienating as they come.
More on The Microphones | “Solar System”

Hidden Gem:
The Handsome Family
Through The Trees
1998 | Carrot Top

The Handsome Family, a husband/wife duo from Albuquerque, NM, sounds like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” set to music. Their sound, all acoustic guitars, autoharps and cellos, is what “alternative country” means to me. Through The Trees is a sordid collection of songs about the underbelly of American life.

Brett Sparks writes the music, revolving mainly around his gently but firmly strummed acoustic guitar. Lead electric guitar, unadorned even by reverb, moves the rhythm along with a gently propulsiveness not unlike Luther Perkins did for Johnny Cash’s Sun Records singles. Rhythm proper is provided by a drum machine, which should belie the Handsome Family’s americana sound, but rather, this idiosyncrasy instead adds to their charm. Rennie Sparks, an author in her own right, pens all of the lyrics, although it’s hard to tell which member is responsible for the dark themes prevalent on Through The Trees. On the one hand, Spark’s words, with choruses like “This is why people OD on pills/ and jump from The Golden Gate Bridge,” seem to be the source for the band’s dark sound. After all, the words, unadorned by music, would still be dark, Gothic and about death, right? But then Spark’s weird, acoustic/electronic music sounds so organically a part of the lyrics that it’s nigh impossible to pick them apart. Maybe the Sparks’ are so in tune with each other that they work subconsciously, getting their demons out together, neither acting as progenitor of the darkness.

File Through The Trees, and indeed any other Handsome Family record, directly between American Recordings-era Johnny Cash - Brett’s deep baritone is a dead ringer for Cash’s, minus about fifty years, and I See A Darkness-era Bonnie “Prince” Billy - lyrical kin, somber songs that are somehow uplifting at the same time.

by Brook Pridemore

http://www.myspace.com/thehandsomefamily