Nat Baldwin Kills It At Hampshire College

Well Hampshire may not be for everyone (about half of the people who go there figure out that what they actually want is a lot of guidelines because when they were kids their parents weren't strict enough with them, but there was always an emphasis on getting good grades, and then they just acted disappointed more than anything when you came home with a C in the sixth grade, and so you'd be happier at UC Berkeley), they do have a penchant for bringing in really sweet musicians for unconventional sets.

This video from 420Fest showcases Nat Baldwin's ability to hold a room in the palm of his hand, even while supporting an enormous upright bass. Baldwin is one of my favorite singer songwriters, and it's possibly because he writes and plays them all on that gorgeous upright bass without using a loop pedal. He's remarkably talented and his songs are all a little out of the ordinary but are just the right blend of sharp, strange and melodic enough to satisfy fans of The Arcade Fire, TV On The Radio, Andrew Bird, or Lou Reed. Baldwin did a stint as a member of Dave Longstreth's excellent, frantic band Dirty Projectors and he'll be joining them again for their summer tour and possibly beyond. Both bands are on the myspace and beyond. Dirty Projectors start a North American tour supporting TVOTR on the 22nd of May in Oakland, then they arch north and come back down to New York on the 5th of June, and then keep going south to Charlotte, NC on the 11th of June. Their new record Bitte Orca comes out on June 9th. Baldwin's solo records can be found here.

The Songs are: Lifted, Real Fakes, Extended Weed Jam Solo, and Weights.
His Myspace

Composition/Arrangement

I think what makes new bands stand out above all their peers is the approach they take to arranging their music once it's been written. Some bands are content to play the songs the same way again and again (now, mind you this does occasionally work), but in my experiences music becomes so much vital and exciting when the bands take the time to change the way they play them. Broken Social Scene changes the tempo of many of their songs and almost every guitar part changes at every show (not exactly the most original concept, but it saves their concerts from becoming reruns). There is one band in particular that has taken a really proactive approach to re-imagining their tunes: Grizzly Bear. It's hardly unexpected that a crew of chic artist types from Brooklyn would be so interested in turning each song into something new for every performance, but these guys do it better than nearly anyone I've seen. Seeing them live was a revelation because not only did it show me that every member of the band sings, they've all got a whole bevy of effects running simultaneously to turn the songs into a whole new fleet. They highlighted their spirit of change in the Friend EP, wherein they redid a few of their own songs, had other bands interpret their work and even did a Crystals cover (it's a faithful rendition but it's pretty amazing nevertheless). They have a style and a sound and so to hear them turn regular sounds into the heavy, crunchy Grizzly Bear sounds.

What's more every member of the band has their own personality that enters into the music. Obviously bassist/clarinet player Chris Taylor and drummer/keyboardist Christopher Bear add very unique elements to the music (Taylor's awesome backing vocals for one, Bear's light-delay heavy drums for another) but where the real difference comes in is the dynamic between lead vocalists Ed Droste and Dan Rossen. Ed has a much deeper voice and you could swim in it when it takes off. His tracks tend to be darker and sweeter. Rossen has a lighter, earthier sound and tends to accompany it with slighter instrumentation. Their voices appear equally on Yellow House, the bands first real record as a band (though technically) and the difference is at first so slight as to appear as if there might just be one voice, but, upon closer inspection the differences are made apparent. It's really cool to listen to Rossen sing his Deep Blue Sea and then hear Droste sing He Hit Me to see exactly where their styles part ways. Rossen is also a remarkable guitar player which just makes their improvisation and fascinating compositions easier to envy and impossible to turn off. What's more they seem to be completely unpretentious.

The Devil's Hands - Michael Doerksen & Jordan Robson-Cramer

The Devil's Hands is what I'm calling it when I rave about a guitar player nobody else seems to have noticed or appreciated. Canadians Michael Doerksen and Jordan Robson-Cramer are two such guitar players. Their hands are skilled in the tradition of Frank Zappa and Adrian Belew. They share guitar playing duty for the band Sunset Rubdown, fronted by Wolf Parade key player Spencer Krug. I've been using the song "The Mending Of The Gown" as a standard for speed and agility. Sunset has no shredding and none of that Post-Rock string-scrape thing. The notes, though distorted, are picked cleanly and with purpose. The fact that their rhythm parts are as complicated and intense as many guitar solos, it makes their solos all the more devastating. Take "Up On Your Leopard, Upon The End Of Your Feral Days" the standout from Sunset's sophomore record Random Spirit Lover. The album doesn't credit them specifically so it's tough to say which of the two men is playing, but he, Cramer or Robson, starts out with a part that could have been played by a violin or an organ, but he makes it his own, and in doing so makes the song both original and unforgettable. Spencer Krug's layering of keyboards makes it possible for Doerksen and Cramer to craft the slick, athletic pieces they performs pitch-perfectly. The song "Mending Of The Gown" might be the most unique non-instrumental song structured around guitar playing in a good many years. Best of all they, like Broken Social Scene's Andrew Whiteman, seems to change their parts every show. They have hands that move like lightning and parts that cut through rhythm as in "Swimming" and "Stadiums & Shrines II" from the first Sunset record Shut Up I Am Dreaming. Of course, because America is so blind to anything but shredding and cock-rock and because Canada doesn't have the same tab on its guitar players, there's a pretty good chance they're never going to have their talent recognized in that sense. Krug gets the credit for his zany compositions and worldly song structures so much so that he overshadows the other three members of his band. Not anyone's fault, but that's just the truth of it. Doerksen and Robson-Cramer deserve some kind of recognition because he's one of the most talented young guitar players. He has more flare than most of the players who end up on best of lists, but they'll remain under-appreciated by everyone but for the seven or eight Canadian indie music fans who are also guitar aficionados.


You can't see anything in this video, but listen close and you can hear the guitar, its the first thing you hear.

Last Year at Marienbad / Carnival Non Drôle

There is only one other movie that comes close to resembling Last Year at Marienbad. Last Year, directed by Alain Resnais in 1961 is about a man stuck reliving a memory differently as he tries to explain it to a girl (time and reliving mistakes, was Resnais great obsession). He's in love with this girl and tries to make her remember their time together. As he recalls it, he remembers the scene differently each time and soon the versions of the story begin overlapping. People drift from one evening to another, different clothes, same dialogue and events. All the while the man's pleading voiceover mixes with an almost perpetual organ score. The organ plays even when violins are played by musicians onscreen, making flesh the frustration at the heart of the story. It won the top prize at Cannes, and with good reason: there hadn't ever been anything like it. There is only one movie that has since come close to its haunting, dream-like, angst-ridden feel: Carnival of Souls.
As far as markets, personnel and reception are concerned the films are as close as an orange and a buffalo, but, in the reels lie similarities strong enough to make someone mistake them for brothers (albeit one elegant, the other deformed and awkward). They both feature characters stuck in a world they cannot control, alienated by the forces closing in on them, trying to probe their mind for some meaning to their suffering. In Last Year the stranger has his thoughts twisted and doubted by the woman he loves. He tries desperately to make her see that she too, once, distantly loved him as passionately as he did. The memories are clouded by thoughts of her rejecting him in the past, present and future. Carnival of Souls follows a woman for whom every aspect of her life is uncertain: she survives a car accident in which, it seems, all of her friends have been killed. She moves to a strange place and is menaced by a spectral face everytime she is alone. The people in her everyday life are intimidating and make her feel uncomfortable to the point where she doesn't feel a part of the living world. Both films have people wandering in and out of time and space. Both have a haunting face that disrupts their mental stability (Herk Harvey, our strange shadowy auteur, in Carnival; Sacha Pitoëff in Marienbad) and leads them into the darkest realms of their soul. Both films would have had to have been labours of love for their directors: Herk Harvey made only one feature length film in his lifetime and Carnival of Souls is a very pronounced vision; I say the same of Resnais simply because Last Year at Marienbad is such a strange goddamned film. Who would spend the six weeks shooting the same scene ten or eleven times over, only to lose most of the footage on the cutting room floor and have a gothic whirlwind of anti-baroque moodiness to show for it? I hope for his sake that he knew what he was doing.

The final thing that binds these films like split embryos in a womb is the soundtrack, oh yes, the soundtrack. The only music we get from either of these films is non-stop organ music. Wailing, noodling, aimless, screaming organ music from frame 1 to frame ∞. This can't be an accident. Harvey went so far as to make his heroine a church organ player; when's the last time you've seen a movie where someone goes out of their way to take a job as an organ player at a church no one is ever seen entering? Both of these men knew something and organ music was part of the plot. Personally, I like a violin or a tuba every now and again. Not these two. It's pipes or bust. Now of course Resnais had much else to represent his style and vision as a director (I highly suggest Hiroshima Mon Amour, it is the Frenchest movie of all time. And of course, a blinding masterpiece of eroticism and loss), but Harvey only had Carnival of Souls. This means that both men thought highly enough of the idea of gloomy tales of alienation to pour a hell of a lot of effort into making them. For all my jaw-clenching, these are original movies and were made by men with vision, which is more than most films can claim. Resnais was obviously rewarded more than Harvey (ed. Now both films share a Criterion DVD sleeve. Though Harvey beat Resnais to the punch by about four years).

Personally, I can't decide which one I liked better on first visit. Last Year pulled ahead lately, but you have to admire the purity of obscure vision from both films. As far as motivating ideas and atmosphere go, Harvey and Resnais are just about even in my book. Composition: Resnais wins by a mile with his nods to the geometric avant-garde films of the 20s in the garden and every sweeping run over the exquisitely crafted, but soul-crushing hotel corridors. The images themselves say as much about the facile arrogance of the rich and so it is clear that Resnais had the more hyper-active brain. The shapes and contrasts, the beautiful shot of the hotel alone at night. He had ideas about relationships other artists have never touched and his movies are a testament to the wonderful mind he's still putting to use today. Harvey had some wonderful compositions and I can't help but wonder as to whether he was a misunderstood genius or a creepy amateur with a whole lot of luck. That Harvey achieves a number of truly awe-inspiring shots is to his credit, but his background gives me pause in my appraisal of him. I've seen his other work, as a maker of educational/safety shorts, and clever though they are, they aren't exactly early Kieslowski either. One can't deny that these are unique; those great expressionistic shots of the organ; the silhouettes outside the theme park; Candace Hilligoss's hair deserves special commendation for being so photographable; the dance of the ghosts; the walk through the empty town; the infamous face. He really makes a showing of himself. He, like Russ Meyer, is one of the few men who have provided people with something else to look at other than the thing they've paid to stand in front of the camera. Intention is another matter, but such is the burden of the cinephile. Our reward is to be able to bask in the wonderful enigma of a case such as this and have both texts at our fingertips.

Both films undeniably served as an influence for The Shining. And for that we can all be thankful.