I’m Safe, and Sounds

So I’m in So-Fla after my two-day journey through Middle America (In chronological order: Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Tennessee again, Georgia again, Florida). I did some soul searching in southern Illinois and Kentucky, but mostly I got to know some music that I hadn’t yet given fair listens (or, at least, that I hadn’t listened to in a while). Here are my findings:

• Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy is really as good as people say it is. References to Wilco’s YHF aren’t as off-base as I initially thought; there’s that same impressive mixture of continuity and variety on both discs. And musically, BSB’s stunningly deep and dark. It might not be accessible to people with bad taste in music, though.
• Will Smith’s Lost and Found is one of the five best releases so far this year. It isn’t without its inherent contradictions, but it’s refreshing to hear a rapper match (or even out-do) Eminem’s The Eminem Show without profanity. Its lyrics aren’t quite as deep in some places, but they’re a vast improvement over “Welcome to Miami” and “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit’ It”. Na na na na na na na.
• Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain must be where Ben Kweller got pretty much all of his music. Because seriously, there’s just no other expanation for the similarities and for the barely-justifiable following among indie rockers that Kweller once had (for a very brief moment).
• Damien Rice doesn’t have shit on Andrew Bird. Or Archer Prewitt, for that matter. They clearly aren’t all going for the same things, but there’s ample room to compare the three artists’ music, and Rice loses.
• Tilly and the Wall and Rilo Kiley don’t really ever get old.
• The Mountain Goats have a deep catalog of songs that are more uniformly good than I once thought. I mean, I always liked a few albums, but I was really in the mood for all of them. Maybe part of it was the scenery and people I saw, though. And Tallahassee and We Shall All Be Healed are probably the two best of the ones I re-listened to.
• Yo La Tengo’s Prisoners of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent songs presents a mix of songs that make Yo La Tengo much easier to get into than any one or two albums. I plan to give it to people who need to appreciate that band a lot more than they do.

I’ll probably write more about a few of these subjects at some point and in some venue; but right now I’m done.