SECONDS: LAETITIA SADIER - "ONE MILLION YEAR TRIP"

It seems as good a time as any to do another one of these.

Laetitia Sadier - One Million Year Trip

I am a huge Stereolab fan, and Laetitia Sadier's voice is (was) obviously a large part of that band's appeal. I'm going to be honest, I would not just listen to, but pay to listen to her reading the phone book. When Stereolab announced their hiatus, I was disappointed. No more chances to listen to that lovely voice? C'est une catastrophe! Thankfully, Sadier released a solo album last year (which, along with the "outtakes" album, Not Music, that Stereolab released, made for a bunch of new material featuring her). I was initially not very impressed by Sadier's album, The Trip. It felt too subtle somehow, a kind of muted Stereolab-lite that I couldn't imagine actually wanting to listen to. The album has grown on me since then, and--although I'm still more likely to reach for Sound-Dust or Mars Audiac Quintet (my two favourite releases by the Groop)--I appreciate the craft and intimacy of Sadier's solo album.

The one exception to everything I just wrote is the semi-title track of the album, "One Million Year Trip." Written in response to the death of Sadier's younger sister, the poignant meditation on grief in the lyrics would be enough to sell the song even without the performance that Sadier gives. Gone are the restrained melodies of Stereolab. Here, she lets her voice go up and up forever, the melody ascending like it has no end, and, to make an obvious and cliche point, it is heavenly. I cannot describe the pleasure I get from hearing Sadier work through her entire range and she absolutely demands attention as soon as she opens her mouth. She never slips into the background. There is no pleasant la-la-ing and doo-doo-ing her way through a song and riding a groove. Now, don't get me wrong, she does those things better than almost anyone, but for a singer with such a phenomenal voice, it always seems a bit of a waste. She opens up on this song, and it is devestatingly good. When the song cools off for its final minute or so, her wordless vocals still feel more active than they would have in a Stereolab song. Indeed, listening to this song and then listening to the lead-off track from Not Music, it starts to seem like she'd outgrown whatever she could do within the context of Stereolab.

However, it's not just a vocal extravaganza (though it is that, too). The music is great. While it bears more than a passing similarity with Stereolab (natch), the similarities are to a Stereolab that hasn't really been heard from since pre-Dots and Loops. This is, for all the production bells and whistles (and the weird synths that twist around behind Sadier's voice are awesome and beg to be used more), a fairly simple and driving rock song. It's got a beat that's a little funkier than straight motorik, a bouncing bassline, a synth line and some guitar. That's it. (There are some heartbreakingly adorable versions on YouTube of Sadier playing this song and ba-ba-ing the bassline herself). With all that space, Sadier can put her voice to good use. The cool down at the end of the song reminds me in a weird way of the end of Four Tet's "Love Cry." The entire song is gorgeous and celebratory and transforms the quite-obvious grief Sadier feels into one of the most direct and emotional statements of her career. What a way to kick off a solo album.

SECONDS: ATLAS SOUND - "QUARANTINED"

Atlas Sound - "Quarantined"

I'm a big fan of Deerhunter (though I've largely been left cold by their past two major releases, Rainwater Cassette Exchange and Halcyon Digest) and of Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound project. Perhaps I should amend that clause to say “In theory, I'm a big fan. . .”. I really do love Deerhunter's Microcastle and their Fluorescent Grey EP (their finest release, in my mind). I like Cryptograms a great deal. Atlas Sound's second album, Logos, is pretty good. The conceptual ideas behind Bradford Cox's music, both in Deerhunter and as Atlas Sound, are even more intriguing to me than the music he's so far produced, though. I can't say that I particularly enjoy listening to Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel, Atlas Sound's first album, nor can I say that I think Deerhunter is moving in an interesting direction aesthetically. “Quarantined” is, in my opinion, the best song Bradford Cox has ever written, and it points to everything I want both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound to be, at the same time that both projects seem to be abandoning (or at least massively downplaying) the style that brought me to them in the first place.

Like most of Bradford Cox's songs, there's not much in the way of lyrics to “Quarantined.” The same few lines are repeated over and over again with various changes to the phrasing. It's those changes, though, and the way that Cox uses them to tease out over the course of an entire song all the different emotional shadings in the relatively simple lines “Quarantined and kept so far away from my friends” and “I'm waiting to be changed” that I find so enthralling. The music surrounding him is both delicate (layers of bells, mbira, and pillowy synth pads) and propulsive (a driving bassline, upfront and muscular drums), and the balance between the two adds emotional weight, even as Cox's voice turns to weightless sighs and heads skyward. Where much of Atlas Sound and Deerhunter tends to fall into either the delicate or the propulsive end of the spectrum, Cox's pitch-perfect ability to balance the two on “Quarantined” is what started my interest in his music.

That nothing else he's done is quite able to match up to this song shouldn't be surprising (“Walkabout” on Logos feels to me like a self-conscious attempt to repeat the successes of “Quarantined,” but its forced air of whimsy buries it. Noah Lennox of Animal Collective guests on the song, and I have the same problem with the majority of his band's music). On an album that disappears inside of its own dreamy reflections far too often, Cox turns one of its most personal lyrics into a plea for connection and metamorphosis that nails the really painful and ambiguous feelings of growing up. A lot of Cox's music traffics in nostalgia—indeed, it's easy to understood the mutual admiration flowing between Cox and Animal Collective—and when it succeeds, I think it's not so much because it inspires nostalgia in the listener (how many people are really nostalgic for the pain and confusion of growing up?), but because it uses nostalgia as a window through which Cox can talk about connection, hope, and love.

The sound of “Quarantined” has always made me think of crystals, and I think it's an apt image: the song captures a moment of crystallization, a point at which the need for connection and the desire to seek that connection with others comes into being. In this way, “Quarantined” strikes me as the inverse of my first Seconds entry about Bark Psychosis' “The Black Meat.” Where that song always seems to dissolve, “Quarantined” wills itself into tangibility. It forces you to hope and believe in the possibility of connection because of the fierceness of its desire for connection. In a catalogue full of songs in which people fail to communicate or connect, “Quarantined” serves as a beacon of light and hope.

SECONDS: "THE BLACK MEAT"

Back when it was a going concern, Stylus used to run a column called "Seconds," in which various writers would reflect on "perfect moments in pop" by writing short essays or reflections on particularly striking songs. I always enjoyed that column, and though I'm far too disorganized to do anything like a regular feature on my blog, I thought it might be worth reviving here as an irregular feature (especially given that my original intent when starting this blog was to write about music).

Bark Psychosis - "The Black Meat"

To kick off, I thought I'd use one of my all-time favourites: Bark Psychosis' "The Black Meat," from their 2004 album ://Codename: Dustsucker. There are many reasons I love this song, not least of which is its distinctive three-part structure. The abrupt stop followed by the eruption of the horns that heralds the second half of the song is just glorious, and the sudden dissolve into fog and moaning trumpets for the final minute and forty seconds is gorgeous. It's jazz in the way that Talk Talk's later albums are jazz (that is, not very, but it uses jazz's vocabulary in interesting ways) and it sounds amazing: there haven't been many albums better produced than Dustsucker and Bark Psychosis' earlier album, Hex (1994).

There is more to this song than arranging and production tricks, though. I love the way Graham Sutton's lyrics combine concrete detail ("I stand on the shore of a strange land / With my back to the wind on the black sand") and dreamlike suggestiveness ("Trees are ahead / One for you, one for me"). What's more, I love the feel of the song. It's sunny yet sombre at the same time, Sutton's voice full of melancholy that the horns, making playful knots and loops of the melody, counter but don't dispel. There's something tropical (particularly the downright humid first notes from the electric piano), but the end of the song feels like mist creeping over a beach in winter. The song has a deeply lonesome core, though it's one of the least nocturnal things Sutton's ever written.

Ultimately, it's this sense of ambiguity that I love about "The Black Meat." I've listened to it hundreds of times, but I'm still drawn forward every time it comes on. I want to get somewhere with it, to penetrate its melancholy, but it always evaporates before my ears and leaves me with nothing to hold on to. It's strikingly singular, and I can only hope that if Sutton ever feels like releasing any more music (perhaps in 2014, in time to celebrate over 25 years of making music with a third album), he'll write another song like this.