45 Paper Plates

Sleep - Dopesmoker

Some time ago, blues musicians realized that a man can kill a lot of time indulging in his own pain. In “Death Letter Blues”, Son House details grief after trauma as if it is fated to go on til the end of the world. “I said the good ole gal, she got to lay here til the Judgement Day,” he croaks over his dead love, refusing any possibility of eventual renewal. To House, infinity is evident like light through a pinhole, thin but absolutely definite.

1999’s Dopesmoker, recently reissued and remastered, is a 63 minute epic hung from a handful of chords and two groaned vocal pitches. It is, to a large extent, the culmination of almost three decades of niche-genre tradition. It is, to another extent, a High Times style parody story, in which various elements of a well-known plot are replaced with different nouns for cannabis. Most importantly, however, it is a delta blues song, taking House’s pinhole of infinity and ratcheting it into a yawning, shuddering abyss. It is an hour long meditation upon a single interstitial blues lick, the kind that House himself might have inserted between his moans of self-pity.

Black Sabbath’s influence on metal is so broad as to be crippling to any band that attempts entrance into the genre. Doom metal in particular, bases its sound entirely upon the template of no more than three of the band’s early songs, consisting of deep, slow, blood-curdling chord progressions. Sleep, however, doesn’t seem to suffer from the anxiety of influence that subjugated some of their peers to mediocre music. While the influence Sabbath’s riffs is clear, Dopesmoker’s riff is not nearly as sinister. If anything, the riff is dispassionate, completely unaware of the crushing power it has over its audience.

Other critics have described the album’s contents in somewhat reductive terms, labeling it as something of an ode to the band’s favorite method of wasting time. As much as I dislike the tone of this sentiment, it is doubtless that the album’s prolonged tone directly addresses a very complex relationship with a powerful drug. While this topic may not have the same sort of punch as the loss of a loved one, both “Death Letter” and Dopesmoker address the penetrating effects of extreme personal freedom. While one is purely voluntary, the other horrifyingly not, both are transient, socially destructive, and desperately personal.

One can see Dopesmoker as an attempt to make the potentially freeing emptiness of self-indulgence as enduring and convincing as possible. “Drop out of life with bong in hand” the song famously begins, cooing the listener to leave experience behind and follow the drug, a means that is also an end. That being said, those who have the attention span to reach the end know that a destination is never reached, ending as the same chord and the same call to toke fades into the distance 63 minutes after it began. It is a song that could continue forever with the same result. Weed is not salvation. All we can hope for, Sleep tells us, is a never ending journey towards Nazareth. Unfortunately, we’ll always have to buy more weed.

I call this creativity.

Beach House - Bloom

Yes, great music is very easy to see as a genre-less enterprise, but sometimes I get so high on the genius bubble that new music from artists I love doesn’t surprise me as I expect it to. Regardless of the far-reaching sublimity that much music can provide to a listener, Biggie was never going to wake up one day and start rapping like Lil Wayne. Bob Dylan is never going to sing like Sinatra. Kanye West is never going to be able to sing, period. Greatness only allows for refinement, not expansion.

Beach House’s secret to success is that they are confident in this fact. While other so-called sui generis artists are haunted by an inability to incorporate new influences and sounds (The Strokes come to mind), Beach House are quietly assured in their ability to sound like themselves. Watch any interview with the band and you will be impressed as the band slowly describes their music-making process in complex yet solidly understandable terms.

This self-knowledge, of course, all amounts to the band’s trademark restraint. Beach House has changed over the course of four albums less than some bands change between EPs. Quite frankly, they have a formula, no matter how mysterious and hard to duplicate that formula may seem. This would be a large strike against them if each manufactured cube of music their algorithm crapped out wasn’t so equally engrossing.

It all seems so simple. The band calmly finds the right button to push and they hold their fingers on that button for as long as the audience finds it pleasurable. Each song on Bloom somehow houses at least one unique, repeated musical idea. The chord sequence on “Other People”, the heavy riff on “The Hours”, the long eighth note run on “Wishes”, the broken-record breakdown on “Irene”: all sublime expressions. The band utilizes them for their exact duration of necessity.

One might say that on Bloom, in comparison to previous albums, their eye for beautiful sounds and structures has simply become more refined. That being said, it is much easier for me to look at Bloom as if it rose from the same sessions as Teen Dream, as if the two albums were the dream-pop equivalents of Van Halen’s I and II. The sound and quality of both is so similar as to be subjectively indistinguishable. It is almost unnecessary to see the band’s albums as comparable at all. Their songs must be compared on a piece by piece basis, listed on a scale from most hypnotic to least.

I have no problem with this. If, two years from now, a third full-length is sliced from these hypothetical recording sessions and released, Beach House will likely remain the best rock band in action.

“The amortized price-quality rationalization is a potent nostrum – a comforting but ultimately unsuccessful justification. The best is not the cheapest by a long shot. Additionally, for an item of clothing to last a lifetime requires a set of redundancies as extensive as the failsafes in a nuclear power plant (at least, one hopes), and relies on the premise that your tastes and dimensions won’t change significantly over, well, that lifetime.”

- Réginald-Jérôme de Mans at A Suitable Wardrobe

This piece may be the best thing I’ve read about the “buy-less, buy better” aphorism and menswear in general. I’ve been working through these ideas ever since I got into the subject, and I think he wrapped it all up pretty damn well. Of course, the conclusion doesn’t have to be so positive. Everyone has that obsession that gets them through the day, from “hope to hope” as Johnson says. Some might look down on those who choose such an expensive one.

As a former Religion major, I take Lil B’s NYU lecture very seriously. As Martin Lawrence has said, this shit just got real.