The Retrographer, Issue 81 (August, 2 0 2 1)

September 09, 2021

LEALL, Nagalli, Joy Orbison, Best Available Technology, Soul Food Horns, Elijah Fox, Slug, Carmen Q. Rothwell, Big Thief, Hand Habits, Goose, Turnstile, Kanye West, the [Dixie] Chicks, and more

The Retrographer, Issue 81

Bulletins

Ten Songs for August, 2 0 2 1 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Lamentações 2:19”, LEALL and Nagalli (Spotify / YouTube) – “Father: forgive my faults and all my vanity”, Rio de Janeiro’s LEALL opens. “So much violence without purpose; Father, I swear I don't care if I die early. I realized that a black guy has no freedom, so my purpose is just to make money.”

“bernard?”, Joy Orbison (Spotify / YouTube) – Peter O'Grady picked one simple synth line and made it as big as he could; then he rode it like a mythic python deep into the center of the earth and found, as on many tracks from still slipping vol. 1, the voices of his family

“Palao”, Best Available Technology (Spotify / YouTube) – Chillwave, or vaporwave, or just a an old racing game playing through a busted CRT TV; get lost in the disintegrated loops, degraded and oscillating going somewhere and never seeming to arrive, blinking in and out of sight but never disappearing, fraying, fraying, fraying.

“Ship Has Sailed”, Soul Food Horns, Elijah Fox, and Slug (Spotify / YouTube) – A dusty piano riff and boom-bap drums, rattling with tambourine, circles behind muted horns; When the Rhodes takes the lead, it coasts.

“Nowhere”, Carmen Q. Rothwell (Spotify / YouTube) – Balancing on a metronomic bass figure, Rothwell slowly builds below her winding voice, curling like a distant cirrus cloud, until, just about three and a half minutes in, the tick-tock begins to flutter and pulse like a murmuration of starlings crossing the sky.

“Little Things”, Big Thief (Spotify / YouTube) – Adrianne Lenker has sounded many ways: lost, enamored, agog, sultry, intimate, endangered, commanding. Here, for the first time, she sounds totally free, loose of even the earthly bounds of gravity, airborne.

“No Difference”, Hand Habits (Spotify / YouTube) – Meg Duffy shuffles into the room and lays the hard truth out just as it is: “There is no difference between the two, between losing and finding you.” And moreso: “There is no difference between you and me; there is only your reflection, it's me you couldn't see.”

“So Ready”, Goose (Spotify / YouTube) – Connecticut’s hottest jam band, their crunchiest musical export since John Mayer, is surprisingly soulful; Singer Rick Mitarotonda floats through verses over the band’s sometimes garish wah and “Stash”-style guitar solo. They outclass their classification.

“MYSTERY”, Turnstile (Spotify / YouTube) – Power, precision, unforgettable melodies, stentorian vocals; Turnstile seem determined to take GLOW ON’s battering ram to any brick wall. Then the song disappears in a glitter hailstorm of arpeggiated synthesizer.

“Jail”, Kanye West and JAY-Z (Spotify / YouTube) – West made DONDA in one of the country’s biggest stadiums, and no song on his rambling, puerile, and inconsistent tenth album represents this speciation quite like this one, which scrapes the rafters with faded lead guitars and a towering lead melody.

One Album for August, 2 0 2 1  

“Fly”, The Chicks (Monument, 1999) (Spotify / YouTube) 

By 1999’s Fly, the Chicks (then called the Dixie Chicks) had been releasing music for almost a full decade: They’d gutted it out in their home of Dallas and then in Nashville; picked up a small record deal; released a trio of bluegrass albums; failed to get a major record contract; signed a development deal with Sony; dropped two founding members and picked up a new one; changed up their look; modernized their sound; released Wide Open Spaces in 1998, and went diamond, selling over twelve million copies of the album by 2003. 

The grind was slow but somehow it had paid off. Wide Open Spaces was such a phenomenal hit that it outsold all other country albums combined in 1998. They played all their cards, tried every trick, shuffled the deck, and somehow, just by staying at the poker table long enough, the stars crossed, the doors opened, and Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer, and Martie Maguire were standing onstage at the Grammy’s in February, 1999 collecting trophies. For young women, they’d already had long careers, and they were about to go into the studio again the next month.

Following a diamond album with anything comparable is among the rarest achievements a musical act can notch. For the Chicks – their first album on a major label, their first with their iconic lineup, the first that charted or achieved any sales certification at all – the band had stormed country music with their debut and immediately had to do it again.

Fly took three months to record and was out by August, 1999. It was evident before the blue CD popped from behind the album’s black cover that the group was embracing the power of their success. They’d gotten a songwriting credit on one of Wide Open Spaces’s twelve tracks; They were writers on five of Fly’s thirteen. And that empowerment paid out: the album was diamond in three years on the back of the album’s stunning eight singles, the last of which (“Some Days You Gotta Dance”) came out over two years after the album was released.

Rarely mentioned alongside Thriller, Appetite For Destruction, or Born in the U.S.A., Fly’s commercial warpath was paved with incredible, enormous songs: Feats of storytelling, character, gorgeous singing, inspired arrangement choices, classic country torn straight from the barroom and anthems as wide open as their last album. It proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the group weren’t a fluke, that they belonged alongside Garth Brooks and Backstreet Boys and a small society of others as their decade’s towering imperialists.

And yet: The album begins with Celtic fiddle and pennywhistle. A musicologist’s dream references, these sounds harken to some of country music’s origins, then give way to a whiplike snare hit and tight groove under acoustic guitar and bass and Natalie Maines’s clear, easy voice. The song meets the album’s colossal, crushing expectations with enthusiastic, fearless bravado: “I’m ready to run / all I’m ready to do is have some fun.” It has no bloat, no pretension; It opens the album like an overture, as tailor-made for opening a stadium tour as “Start Me Up”. From there, Fly doesn’t run; it flies.

No songs on Fly cross over as such; they all read as country songs, make use of Nashville-style instrumentation and the band’s iconic vocal harmonies. Songs like “Hole In My Head”, “Some Days You Gotta Dance”, and “Sin Wagon” embrace an outlaw, devil-may-care lawlessness that gives the album its playfully raucous edge. The last of those songs is one of the group’s clearest displays of prowess. At breakneck pace, Maines’s voice tears up and down her range, then meets a humdinger of country soloists – from pedal steel to Jew’s harp to fiddle – each vying for space alongside the group’s soaring harmonies.

The album’s vim and vigor come into unforgettable focus with “Goodbye Earl”, a classic story-song that goes just as far as any country tale before it. It starts in a dead-end town with an ironclad friendship and a deadbeat husband willing to abuse his new wife and therefore invite the righteous fury of her devoted friend. It ends in a gleeful bloodbath of backup vocals festooning Maines’s creative suggestions for disposing of Earl’s remains. On the way, it sweeps listeners into a jubilee of pitchforks, mobbing to chop the world’s Earls up into little pieces to defend friendship, love, and sisterhood for good.

Like a movie, it has its love stories too: Heartbreak, manifested in “Hello Mr. Heartache”, “Cold Day in July”, “Without You”, “Let Him Fly”, and “Heartbreak Town”, and its crowning achievement, the lovelorn lament “Cowboy Take Me Away”. Like “Wide Open Spaces”, “Cowboy Take Me Away” is built around a chorus as big as the western sky. When it peaks through its closing coda, the trio seem to push the very edges of the sky away, clearing the way for the journey they long to take home to their beloved. “Cowboy Take Me Away”, like “Ready to Run”, is the product of the collaboration between the Chicks’s Martie Maguire and the legendary country songwriter Marcus Hummon, and as such carries both Nashville’s imprimatur and the voice of the group in it. It could hardly be a better metaphor for the album overall.

The world was different three years later when the Chicks released Home. Natalie Maines stood onstage at a theater in England and disavowed President George W. Bush over the invasion of Iraq, and the backlash and ensuing narrative toppled the group for years. The nationalism of America’s War on Terror shattered the group’s gargantuan popularity, tumbling the then-Dixie Chicks into the country’s widening political crevasse. Their towering moment ended, a premonition of a worsening divide to come. Yet Fly remains the band’s greatest work, a shining moment of belonging built around some of the best songs of its moment. They’d come as far as they had to change things, and broke themselves beautifully in the act.

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