a music review: “Unessential Oils” by Warren Spicer, the guy from Plants and Animals

Montreal rolled in the 2000s, producing bands like Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, and Warren Spicer's band Plants and Animals.

 

"Unessential Oils," Spicer's first solo effort, represents a vibe more than a vision. Spicer said, "The process was the therapy of working through. The result is more a document than construction. It's what happened, not what I made happen."

It absolutely sounds like an album of therapeutic chilling. You put it on and soak.

See Spicer shaving in the tub? The album includes the downbeat song, "Suds." He sings, "And every day I'm trying to get back to that / I'm like a monk in deep meditation / Oh, I’m safe inside—oh, inside my suds, left alone with a cold beer in a hot bathtub / Send me back to sleep, and when I get on my feet, I'll be a new man."

Spicer and his collaborators coax tracks. The quiet performances emphasize delicate, shimmering percussion.

The vocal textures the sedated music with hints of strain. Spicer sings about release and holds on to his intensity.

My favorite song is the opener, "Distrust the Magician." This sounds brutally chill.

Chords ripple under slippery drums and cymbals that sound like sun through crystal windchimes. "I'm above you now," Spicer sings, sounding painfully removed. And I love how the drums syncopate in the outro. So good.

Album single "Chameleon" features a Latin jazz rhythm and numbed chords that lift the refrain's vocal melody: "Oh babe, I love you a lot / Oh babe, I need you now / And we could have a lot of fun just putting trouble on the run / I know we've got a lot to do, and you and me are trouble at the best of times / But living is a lot of fun—hiding like chameleon."

And you can relate to the words in "Solutions to My Gloom," where Spicer meditates on the sense of doom felt even in everyday, low-pressure situations. "In fact, I like it here in the waiting room / A sensе of impending doom / scroll and creep through the punctured skin / Solutions to my gloom." This, sung to the song's breathy, layered arrangement.

 

"Don't Go to Bed When You're Mad" wakes from sedation and expands time. The instrumentation gently pulls at Spicer's wavering, detached vocal. The music is a helium-filled balloon, and his voice is the little string you hold on to. A guitar picks out meandering trails of freed melodic thoughts.

 

"Unessential Oils" is an exhale—or an attempt at one. Take a deep breath.

 

Secret City Records released "Unessential Oils" on May 31, 2024.

 

Note: I reviewed an album by Plants and Animals guitar player Nicolas Basque and his bandBibi Club and the 2020 Plants and Animals album, "The Jungle."

 

about a guy like Ernest Tubb

He wears bright orange and a slick smile. His big, blue eyes closed all the doors in the building. You look out the window and see the sky making faces like feeling the rain coming.

 

(posts) a poem, "Love Poem With Toast"

Love Poem With Toast
    —Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

 

an exercise about vertigo: "I am living in hell's dead body"

The host, made by a robot and cloned a thousand times, asked me: "Do you want to see a woman without a head?" I am living in hell's dead body. She did not die here old with us; the body stopped moving, but that is in this world only.

The younger model could not be saved emotionally and was not even physically or mentally salvageable. The girl and her fetus were in the photos, and some of the photos are still for sale.

The machine sky fell, and blood and sex were currency. We slept and cried and took drugs to get through the few remaining days after that.

The 12 Triangles cannot change shape, but the silver seller's creation is 40 to 3 for new life, and to 4 without ego.

about "A Special Providence" by Richard Yates

A Special Providence folds the rite-of-passage experiences of young infantry solder Robert Prentice between scenes from his anxiety-sprained youth.

Alice Prentice drags her son, Bobby, through her unstable life. They survive mostly on alimony as she chases artistic success she can never have.

After high school, Robert enlists and finds himself overseas during the last days of World War II. He makes a pitiful soldier, getting sick on the line and overwhelmed with confusion when fighting starts.

The novel's end made an impression on me. Spoiler: Alice starts drinking a lot and pins all hope on Robert returning and working so she can start sculpting again. But Robert decides not to return to America. He sends her a little money and wishes her luck.

The novel is no comedy, but I laughed at Yates's telling of some of Robert's struggles in the war. I related to his attempts, all vain and hopeless, not to look foolish. I laughed on a crowded train when I read this part—Robert struggles to follow his platoon and make sense of the action around him:

They were in a plowed field: the ridged, uneven earth gave like sponge beneath their feet. Prentice followed the sounds of voices into the darkness, running again, while the shells rushed overhead to explode well behind him, back on the other side of the canal. And it was there in the field, slightly behind him and to the right, that he heard Sam Rand’s voice:

“Prentice? That you?”

“Sam! Jesus, where’ve you—”

“Where the hell you been?”

“Where’ve I been? My God, I’ve been looking all over hell for you!”

It was still bad, but Robert had felt a little less confused in this firefight. So when his platoon leader inevitably reprimands him, Robert fires back. But doing so only makes matters worse.

This book has so many golden moments. The prose—every humiliation, whether in the chaos of the battlefield or during a childhood encounter with neighborhood kids—swells with sensitivity.

Several years ago I read a Yates short story collection and The Easter Parade. I knew he was special, but I guess I waited a few years before reading everything else he wrote. I knew he was my favorite author probably after reading this or Revolutionary Road.

Notes: A Special Providence, published in 1969, is Yates' third book. The cover image chosen for this Vintage Books/Random House edition does not fit the books contents or themes.

about Jim in Arizona

Jim suddenly sees himself—an old man in a leather vest sitting alone on a turquoise-colored couch in a Southwestern-style living room: stucco walls, wrought iron and reclaimed wood furniture set on terracotta tile. Even a cactus by the window and an old steer skull over the TV. Hell, Jim is from Gladwin, Michigan—what is he doing here?

He met Katie at Central Michigan University, where he ended up majoring in finance and she dropped out to have Jason her junior year. Jim's modest career in accounting and Katie’s desire for warmer weather took them to northern Arizona a few years after Jason moved out. They were both 47 then.

Katie went all in on Arizona, got way into the Southwest stuff, filling the house with turquoise and dream-catchers and all that. She even started getting Jim to wear loose bolo ties on white blouses open at the neck and this leather vest. She spent $900 on this vest.

They grew old this way and Jim retired. She brought home a little white dog.

The crazy thing, Jim thinks, is he had hated all this—the décor, the vest, the fact that she spent $900 on this vest, the skull on the wall. Even the dog. Jim had hated a lot of things.

But she died three years ago, he misses her, and this is still who he is. He wears the vest almost every day, walks the little dog, and turquoise is his favorite color.

He still hates the wrought iron and reclaimed wood furniture. One piece of furniture she got right was this couch. He sleeps on it nightly. Hasn't needed to open the bedroom door in years.

about an album from Montreal-based indie pop duo Bibi Club

A blend of new wave and French pop to cool you off

Guitarist Nicolas Basque met singer/keyboardist Adèle Trottier-Rivard at a Plants and Animals recording session. They started dating and formed Bibi Club in 2019.

The duo debuted that year with an EP, followed up with a full-length in 2022, and, on May 10th, released a new album, "Feu de garde."

It opens with the downbeat "La Terre." Trottier-Rivard sings this in French, and her unfussy vocal counters Basque's wobbling, preoccupied guitars. The vocal melodies catch like a nursery rhyme. All the while, the bass stretches ahead like a sidewalk decorated in hopscotch squares of multicolored chalk.

The French pop-inspired Stereolab comes to mind. Bibi Club say they make living room party music. Up- or downtempo, it sounds great.

The cool grass of Trottier-Rivard's delivery pairs wonderfully with Basque's suggestive guitar sounds and rhythms. His guitar tone often echoes The Cure. Bibi Club knit songs with inspired, layered arrangements of easy melodies, and notes hang like ribbons in the breeze. Guitars, bass, and drums—each gives a focused performance.

On "Parc de Beauvoir," a pulse-quickened guitar rings out. The soft, seemingly superficial lyrics—"Did you see the flowers on the brick wall? Did you see how people dress? We walk around, we talk together"—belie the tension gradually building layer by layer.

"Le feu" is one of my favorites. The bass offers Trottier-Rivard space, and her breathy French does not even flinch when the rhythm section skips by. The guitar's beautiful summer tones chime over the snappy drums.

 

 

Songs like this, "L'île aux bleuets," and "Rue du Repos" sound like a nice little string of luck.

The French pop "Rue du Repos" streams up-tempo rhythms and jangly jazz-inflected chords tinted in echo and reverb. The solid bass shifts its weight with ease to Trottier-Rivard's mellow vocal. The song is a sparrow's dust bath.

"Feu de garde" is available on Secret City Records.

something for blue borg's summer

The color blue blended in paintings is brushed across a psychopathic person in quantum space physically. A color palette for operations involves less thinking. The gas mask will breath blue soldiers inside out and send the officers into a digital math death. Blue to flatten bullets and implode missiles. Threats always outward. Rare earth minerals alienate in personal radiation. Blue wants to meet and be associated with others. Four centuries ago a crater was formed and blue stored things in it. This is a calculation. A phone. A gun. Those are both there. A digital blue passively hating object programmed only to consume. A blue fossil hates better than a time-sensitive organism that pretends to still be alive.

something about David Sedaris’s "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk"

Animals play all the parts in David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, published in 2010. The characters are skillfully anthropomorphized and often find themselves jammed up in ways most humans can recognize.

 

But these animals are not just substitutes for people. They are nameless as strays and stock, and the reader rarely forgets these characters face animal fates—the farmer’s axe, the researcher’s hypodermic needle, the law of the jungle.

 

I have read several Sedaris collections and had decided I much preferred his autobiographical pieces, so I was surprised at how much I liked these sixteen shorts of humor and heart worms—and the accompanying animal illustrations by Ian Falconer.

 

I enjoyed a 2010 Little, Brown, and Company hardcover copy with patient, spacious type and thick-stock pages.

 

regrets about sound quality in 2024

Getting great picture quality is easy and affordable in 2024, but how does one get great audio?

 

Audio—music, especially—should always sound live, as if the musicians are playing right there in front of you on good equipment. But most TVs and computers have tinny little built-in speakers that face backwards. And people stream music now—shitty, compressed audio through Spotify or whatever.

 

People used to have big stereos in their homes, 12-inch woofers paired with clear tweeters. Now we have sound bars, which are okay, but still limited in comparison.

Note: CDs were good. Tapes sucked because of the hiss. People fetishize vinyl now, but I the audio quality is worse than CDs.