Harrison Gelber

Icons: Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine

There’s no doubt about what band you’re listening from the first second of “Only Shallow,” the opening track of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and a seminal artifact of the early 90s’ shoegaze movement. A psychedelic gush of squalling guitars and indefinable whorls of sound, one of my favorite reviews describes the song as evoking either sexy drugs or druggy sex. It’s iconic in the sense of being monolithic, like the first notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony or Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” And like Hendrix, My Bloody Valentine transformed the way envelope-pushing rock musicians approach the electric guitar. But the song is also iconic in terms of evoking a musical subculture and the identity that goes with it.

The shoegazers were a loose faction of mainly British groups who used a multitude of effects pedals to make their melodic pop-rock at once punishing and soothing (hence, the musicians spent their performances staring at the mess of delay and distortion boxes strewn about their feet). By and large, these were not the hard-partying, hotel room-trashing rock ‘n rollers of decades past. Shoegazers, and the fans who championed them, were a devoted but introverted bunch – the movement around groups like My Bloody Valentine and their peers Ride and Slowdive became known as “the scene that celebrates itself.” A song like “Only Shallow,” with its somnambulant vocals paired with martial drums and bone-shattering guitars, is redolent of the kids who daydreamed too much for the politicized vitriol of the punk and post-punk underground, but still coveted its volume and “go anywhere” creativity. If, as that one critic put it, Loveless’ opening track brings to mind “sexy drugs and druggy sex,” it’s also a keepsake and memento of a subculture of British and American young people who wore thrift-shop t-shirts and cared more about blissing out than changing the world. With Loveless, they managed to do both.

MP3:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mzjwumjjyij

Indices: I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry by Cowboy Junkies

I find it difficult to fall asleep without a little music in the background. At the risk of sounding grandiose, it’s like I need a song to play under the closing credits of each day’s TV episode. Sometimes my choice of music will subliminally reflect the kind of day I’ve had – an ambient Brian Eno record if things have generally been quiet, or a noisily lulling Sonic Youth freakout if I’m under a lot of stress. I’ll never forget the first night I spent in London last semester, and that evening will forever be linked in my mind with The Trinity Session, the sophomore album by Canadian alt-country idols Cowboy Junkies. Recorded with a single ambisonic microphone and no overdubs in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity, it’s probably one of the most immaculately engineered rock albums ever released.

I’d just stepped off of a an eleven hour flight (stretched from eight by an unplanned evacuation at Heathrow Airport), and had never felt more lost than I did as I scoured for the taxi queue with 100 pounds of luggage and absolutely no desire to interact with another human being. The nighttime city looked different than I’d anticipated – if you were to describe a building in London as “turn-of-the-century,” someone would invariably ask, “Which century?” Eventually, after a tube journey, a cab ride, and an exhausted attempt to navigate London’s unruly street plan, I made it to my hotel and passed out before my head even touched the pillow. I decided to listen to The Trinity Session that night.

For people who haven’t heard it before, The Trinity Session is far from a standard country album. The tempos are slackened until the songs become funeral dirges, and pedal steels evoke outer space rather than Midwestern prairies. The Cowboy Junkies’ version of the Hank Williams standard “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is, for me, both the band’s best song and their calling card. It comes on as slow as molasses, as slow as codeine (there’s a reason this band’s called Cowboy Junkies). Margo Timmins’ voice floats like a high oboe, and she renders the song’s familiar lyrics hauntingly new with her hushed, torch song incantation.

It may seem surprising that I associate my first night overseas with music that (although the band hails from Toronto) is so inextricably linked to the American experience. Sure, the album’s languid pacing matched well with my travel-induced burnout. But maybe I was also longing for both the familiarity of my old home, and, as the Junkies render an old classic virtually unrecognizable, an episode of my life that would be distinct from those that came before it. One semester later, I can’t listen to “Lonesome” without getting mental images of nocturnal London, empty tube stations, and winding, centuries-old streets.

MP3:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?3iontmdmmmj

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