In 2007, I attended the MusicNow festival in Cincinnati. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with the Dessner brothers’ work with The National, hadn’t met the owners of Asthmatic Kitty, or known Shara well for more than a year. I went because I was tired of a long Buffalo winter. I was lucky enough to attend all three days of the festival–Clogs premiered the songs that finally this year are being released on their new album, and Sufjan played some songs that have yet to be released… so in some ways, it’s not so long ago, but the experience is contained in my mind inside a fine gauze like mold, preserved in embryonic purity like a mosquito in amber or a baby boot in metal. The buildings in that part of Cinci seemed half-drowned. Those that boxed in Washington Park were coated to the top of the first floor windows with some sterile light-blue heavy-grade paint. Probably to cover graffiti marks. The store-fronts were all empty, and I had the impression that the blue line was a watermark, like in the Erie Canal locks near my hometown–the water lowers to meet the level of the lock below, accepts a passenger, and then closes and raises to meet the level of the next lock. The walls when they drain spit and gurgle with zebra mussels deposited in the locks by passing boats. The shells of the mussels are sharp, so you don’t touch them. It was all I could think as I was walking up the long front steps to the music hall. In my memory, those front steps ascended to the tree tops and the building peeked over them, a pantheon dome, a buoy, a great cement pig belly floating in the spume. The whole three days of music was rich. Almost to illness. Three nights of feasting after near starvation for a year. On the final night, husband and wife duo Irena Havlová and Vojtěch Havel performed a tremendously tender piece culminating with a functional embrace as they worked out a piano ostinato together–she holding the inner octaves, and he reaching the highs and lows around her. This only after a full 40 minutes of minimal scrapes and drones on their cellos. In the balcony next to me, a young man stowed a can of PBR under his coat and complained about the monotonous music until that final few minutes in which all the agitation and confusion of the young audience was transformed into a camera draw.

I drove home through a blizzard — an eruption of white and wind through Cleveland. Some angels somewhere are responsible for keeping me awake during the drive. I couldn’t see more than 10 feet ahead of the hood, and the road was entirely white. I rode the rumble strip all the way through Ohio. I was exhausted and I kept the driver’s side window open so that wind would keep me awake. Three times I came in visual contact with the angel itself: first in the form of a sunfish swimming towards me through a squall just north of Dayton, about the size of a bicycle tire. The second it was in the form of a snake with antlers and it scuttled along the rumble strip in front of me. The third time it formed out of a heap of fast food trash, a fox lying on its side. It looked hurt and so I started to pull over to get a better look at it, but as I slowed to a stop, a wind picked up and I was again completely enveloped in the squall. When the winds died down, a squad of snow removal behemoths came up from behind, slow and laboring into view. I followed them out of Ohio and up over the Appalachian ridge of Pennsylvania and into New York State.

The muse is like the scent of a meal being prepared–more intense the closer you get to the source, but the muse isn’t the source itself. I wake up each morning to the smells of food being prepared a floor below me in a soup shop that shares our building. Sometimes I become so accustomed to the smells that I don’t notice them until I’ve left the house or returned from somewhere else.

“Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner” took a long time to stick. A couple years ago, I was sent this record, listened to it obsessively for a few weeks and then decided to try and write about it. Only recently did I find this rough draft of a review way in the back of my gmail drafts box. I had abandoned the little essay early on — I was trying to write about something I didn’t understand:

Let me see if I can explain this album. It sounds something like a documentary in which a group of wild gypsy teens discover their voices, their bodies and the power and terror of being alive. In the landscape there are mountains of doubt, guilt, anger and skies of glowing rumination and these frantic humans flaying this landscape with an unabashed lust for movement. It’s tiring and tough and painfully personal; it’s like standing in the stream of a powerful water canon and bearing the pain of it long enough that the sensation burns to a soothe; it’s something like watching a house full of 5-year-olds tear about at their most reckless. There are moments you can smell the Juicy Juice and Oreos on Caila’s breath. It’s a force: It’s Punk, I guess. Well, it’s punk without the posture.

It’s all hand-to-hand – rarely grand without first being awkward, rarely pretentious without first eying the listener with suspicion: children groping for a railing, flinging their bodies up the stairs, calling ahead of them as they go. There’s a dense series of cellular happenings – the drama is miniaturized over and over, often leaving the listener’s capacity to rewind and fast-forward the key to smoothing out the story-telling. The vocals are simultaneously richly self-aware and childishly guttural – Caila ‘caw-caws’ her anthemic vulnerability with such attack as you’d hear on the play ground. The balance isn’t solely in the vocals, this is the pull of the instrumentation, the arrangements – this is punk in all it’s restlessness and pomp. “The Long Indifference” and “The Taste in My Mouth” maintain a refreshingly heavy aesthetic amid the airy play.

There are very few moments when it seems that Caila is singing to you – the album is dominated by half-revealed conversation, we see the band moving from the side, almost never head-on, almost never from behind. Even on the last track, seconds after a dramatic clarinet (I guess it’s a clarinet?) line, spoken over the cluck and clamor of percussion and strings someone says “never stopping” — there’s an unresolved argument over how private to treat the music: grand sentiment about planets and “tearing matter” gets sabotaged by apology: the aesthetic is something like converging planes of dirty Plexiglas scribbled and painted on and dangled in front of grand self portraits and journal pages. We’re at once intruding and being invited. And maybe this is the most startling aspect of this album: these pieces feel formally scripted one moment and entirely improvisational at others. Improvisational in that they play in severe subtlety. Formal in that there are moments when the whole current at once lifts and heaves in another direction — collective conscience. Both sides are wonderfully effective. The improv erases the memory of the formality, and the formal erases the idea that there’s been a moment unplanned. It’s beautiful. I come away from the album each time with gaps in my experience in which it seems like my imagination has taken over. Maybe this is the best music can attempt — to foster some new music in the mind of the listener.

I discovered a lot of my favorite music in the basement of the library when I was working on my undergrad degree. It was a place I went at night when I needed a break from things. There was a music room crammed with cds arranged in some super complicated numbering system — sometimes by composer, sometimes by performer, or by city, or by symphony number, or some other desultory system. Scrawled on the walls around the listening stations were notes about great moments of music on the cds — this was a system that tried to make sense of the cataloging behemoth. I heard the rumbling timpani of Berlioz’s requiem because the numbers told me it was a transcendent moment. I heard the moan of a pianist stuttering through Satie’s Gymnopedies and fell in love with Janet Baker’s interpretation of the final song in Mahler’s art song cycle. The particle board study carol in the library basement was my Rosetta Stone. So much of the music from the last 500 years was unlocked for me by these music miners.

“Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner” required the sort of excavation that I imagine these library listening room decoders were involved in. I see Caila and the boys running to each other up out of a dark basement with their heads full of these brilliant little gestures, these little patterns and rhythms. The album revolves around miniature expressions but these moments of release are hard to recognize at first listen. It has taken me a while (2 years?!) to finish grappling with this record. There is a frenetic  and palpable straightforwardness to the process: four performers making noise into microphones, distilling their muscles into a series of rehearsed phrases. In all of its fourteen tracks, this is an album as mysterious as the body, emblazoned by experience and hope, and playing with raw youthfulness — mud in the sink and a fire in the basement.

10. Clark - Turning Dragon
9. Marnie Stern -This Is It & I Am It & You Are It & So Is That & He Is It & She Is It & It Is It & That Is That
8. Belong – Colorloss Record
7. Wildbirds & Peacedrums – Heartcore
6. Shearwater – Rook
5. Department of Eagles – In Ear Park
4. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
3. Radiohead – In Rainbows
2. Randy Newman – Harps and Angels
1. Portishead – Third

Bible Fight simulates hand-to-hand combat between some of the Bible’s most popular characters. Play as Jesus, Mother Mary, Noah, Eve, Moses or Satan in landscapes straight from the flannel-graph board. For blood and glory. or for fun. I think the game is more fun to tell people about than to actually play (and this may be true of most of the content on adultswim – cartoons more interesting in summary than in repletion) but still I’ve gone back to Bible Fight to cool off every now and then. So, it’s got some replay value.

I could imagine me and my friends in Sunday school sneaking into Mrs. Turtledove’s bag of story-telling props and applying our balmy young imaginations toward such an end as this game. We would’ve probably added our own beloved characters: maybe Mickey Mouse, Jackie Chan, Mark Twain, Tiny Tim, Barbie, Buddha, Pocahontas, Hitler, Betty Boop or the Morton Salt girl. Or maybe we’d have attempted to keep chaste our imaginations while in church and held the “seculars” out of it… or maybe the bible characters would’ve just always won. In any case, this concept would’ve enticed our fertile minds relentlessly until some moral chord snapped and the dogs of our imaginations got loose.

I remember I loved games like Street Fighter, TMNT Tournament Fighter, and Tekken when I was in middle school. We got to fight – for all the pent up aggression of the trumpet-playing band nerd, we got to fight. While the muscles in our legs and shoulders atrophied, we were Spartan, training to dominate: kool-aid fed princes of dexterity. I remember, at one point, I had played my gameboy so much I started having sharp pain in my wrists and palms – my first Carpal tunnel. I bore the pain with honor. The swan song in the litany of my youth. I digress…

While the game is attractive on a lot of levels (see the Disney style landscapes complete with quirky details like the fish flopping on the dry ground in front of Moses’ Red Sea, or the unicorn in Eden’s bushes) and has a lush soundtrack (did they commission John Williams?), the characters and their unbelievably silly special moves steal the show. Eve throws apples and can summon Adam to execute an uppercut (notice the fig leaves, how they flop around and quiver – and doesn’t Adam look like a bug-eyed Tarzan?), Moses can summon a rain of frogs or whip a couple stone tablets at his opponents, swarthy Noah can direct a charge of animals, summon a pillar of water or unleash a dove from his chest, and Jesus calls fish and bread out of the sky or brandishes his cross like a folding chair in a WCW match. The characters are endearing in their absurdity.

I stumbled upon this game late one night after an evening of furious job hunting. It came to me as an epiphany in blood and pixels. A tiny metal cross and brass knuckles. brilliant. After a few hours of work, Bible Fight serves as an ideal mind erasing tool – 10 minutes whipping Moses with a snake or calling a rain of frogs from the sky has amazing refocusing effects – and then I’m back at the task again, scratching plates, scoring lines, punching keys, ripping apart and rebuilding sentences: I fight with a resurgent energy transposed from muscle to mind. But only 10 minutes is allowed at the game lest my brain become purple and soupy from battle. But it’s enough. 10 minutes is enough. Where this game doesn’t come close to the complexity of those special-move-and-combo-packed monster games with entire perfect-bound strategy guides devoted to their possibility, it’s fun. And it’s full of the syrupy cynicism adultswim has been mustering since Space Ghost and Brak first appeared on late night TV.

I’ll spare you the other characters I’ve come up with since discovering this game, and I’ll spare you their hilarious special moves. And I’ll spare you my petty frustrations with the game – the imbalances, the quirks and glitches. It’s full of problems, but I play Bible Fight to forget about problems. Or at least to forget about the problems that can’t be solved with two buttons and a direction pad.

For all the hype about this album, the video contest, the chicken outfit, the buyers guide over at Asthmatic Kitty, I expected to be hearing more from the press upon the release of this fine album. Maybe it’s a symptom of the indie media’s cynicism, maybe the content isn’t cool enough — it’s been overlooked.

I was mostly intrigued by what seemed intense production techniques — the scattered drum fills and chirps and growls of ‘Encouragement’ — Rafter lulls over the ramparts, a calm voice over a comically stormy sea of scraggles and squawks. It’s music that kicks and soothes — it’s all hard edges, and those made cavernous by strings and choir. The production is awkward and manic. It’s over-the-top and bawdy! And every song suffers the sting of Rafter’s eccentricity.

But then every song untwists itself in the most beautiful ways.

Take for example ‘Tragedy’ — begins with an off-rhythm high hat and guitar squawk with beach boy ooo’s flying by the tent poles: after the first minute it sounds like Rafter will launch into garage band senseless passion — the drums cut out, a guitar rears up on hind legs: you can imagine Rafter’s red head bracing to bang. And then the most wonderful thing: a guitar flum-flums, a melody bubbles up and a song is formed with the most wonderful lyrics: "It’s natural to get destroyed," and you’ve forgotten that you almost skipped to the next track.

Another example: on ‘Unassailable’ — Rafter turns some machine all the way to eleven, some speakers blow, some paint is peeled and all through the first minute-fourty you’re wondering what could be made from this mess. And then a trumpet comes in — the scale is made perfect, the mess has context. This track never totally lands: it’s always a little too shiny in an over-bright sky, but if you squint just right, you can see the figure of our hero crafting something fine. Something careful.

There’s evidence that this has been heavily crafted as an album rather than a collection of songs — Rafter has a great sense of scale and audience. We’re encouraged into patience with the respite of ‘interlude’ and ‘Boy’ which tumbles and trips into a mantic coda of strings and Liz Janes speaking low — these are the landscapes and blue skies we’ve been waiting for! Now if Rafter pulled this trick on every track, or even a few of them, we’d wink and walk away. But, as I said before, he’s careful. He knows his audience.

On the second listen the anticipation is almost unbearable — and this is the life of ‘Chickens’ — these are songs beautifully crafted, glazed, polished, smashed to the concrete and rebuilt — the destruction is the process; the cracks are in the story. This is an album whose scale is persistently renewed: we grow to expect clamor and crash to bloom and slow into something wonderful. This is an album about giving the seemingly haphazard a chance to explain itself. And this album is rewarding in ways I didn’t expect.

What I want to know is Why this album was made — I don’t imagine I’ll be writing an album of inspirational songs any time soon. It seems beside the point. If good work is to be about process, it seems that songs written to give a push to the stalled ought to show more pushing: more unstalledness. What we get is an album which beautifies and validates the words used by folks attempting to avoid and disuade process. And yet there’s evidence throughout the album that Rafter understands this: and is playing with process as much as anyone.

So why the strange disconnect? Is it possible that a man in a chicken suit is in love with the process, and so much so it need not be conjured in his art?

What I find appealing in Rafter is that he’s playing with grand posture in his outrageous skin — this is not a clown feigning sadness or joy. There’s something about Rafter that denies self-parody. He’s attempting to uncover something of the core of experience by examining the poles — to the North, the honest and human, the validation of experience and need. To the South, chickens and guitars wailing and all things flippant. But he seems to be caught up in something larger — the scale is the key. Rafter’s going to weave the two extremes together in an attempt to capture everything in between. There’s something beautiful about this method. Rafter is simultaneously the scheming villain defending the nebula of his ego and our hero caterwauling through the sky.

[See Paul Brownwell's review for a different perspective on Hamilton, Ontario]

How do you solve a problem like Hamilton Ontario?

I remember our drive into the city – we were baffled by its tightness – we drove through a charred quick grove of streets: tight corners and buildings uncomfortably close to the road: I saw a woman speed-walking with a large backpack, a closed and boarded up M*cD*n*lds, piles of bloated garbage bags, and the night was thick around us in our car. Driving through an alien city is nearly always disconcerting. And in this part of Hamilton, with its wickedly unidirectional streets and narrow curves and unexpected traffic lights, with its stores that rose up and seemed to lean in over the road, I was afraid of the city. I was afraid of offending it by our foreignness. The world was feeling very strange: strange beyond Golden Arches gone black (which you must admit bodes all sorts of strangeness!).

First thing, I was the victim of a drive-by egging: Dark street, dark town, the lights of the Lebanese restaurant behind us, my friend Aileen and I made a quick stop at my car which was parked near the restaurant where we were intending to grab supper: we made for the front door and were about to enter:
me: oh! hold on Aileen…
Aileen: what, what happened?
me: something hit…look (points to sidewalk in proximity)…where?
Aileen: what is this egg (looking at ground)…what?
me: oh… (turning around, craning to see his own back) oh man…
Aileen: (laughs hard)
me: (takes off sweatshirt)
Aileen: (laughs harder, covers mouth with hands)
me: oh man! (holds sweatshirt out in order to assess the damage, looks down dark street)
Aileen: (laughs harder than David has capacity to appreciating: loses David’s respect)
me: (walks into restaurant. Aileen follows behind, begins to find composure)
End scene.

In my frazzlement, I may have insulted my waiter (that egg knocked whatever conversational cunning right out of me). I was paying for our meal, the waiter making good attempts at small talk: he asked me why we were visiting, where we were from… I leaned in, focusing on his hands, on the register (I think I was more focused on his hands than the conversation) and said “America…The Country.” Understand now that by “the country” I meant that I’m not from a big city. I guess I wanted him to know that I was out of my element: that his city was scaring me, but my courtesy by then had been replaced by distrust and surprise. I think I tried to explain what I meant, but by then he’d shrugged off the conversation and was dealing with the receipt-printing machine.

I developed a limp in my left leg, probably a muscular mutiny after our long drive from Houghton. In it’s way, though, my limp was fitting. I felt an empowerment, a swarthiness, like I’d lived hard, seen more than a man should see in a lifetime; by my nomadic resourcefulness I’d be immune to the fear of that place: I wore my limp like a purple heart, or a chest tattoo of a Dreadnought.

Our trip to Canada wasn’t entirely bogus – the show was great! Openers Pedestrian rocked the house to its foundation (I learned how to use earplugs!), with Shara joining them on stage for a couple minutes of exhilarating soul-rocking. They were only off the stage 5 minutes before the four members of Pedestrian and Shara climbed on stage again, reconfigured as My Brightest Diamond: Shara wore her shiniest silver dress, brightest thing by far in the room. And the crowd leaned in to listen. Shara exhilarated the worry right out of me, and by the time I left the venue, I was ready to love even Hamilton for making room for her music.

On our walk back to the car Aileen and I were nearly overrun by a white Canadian gang chased by a fleet of cop cars the wrong way on a one-way street (which is a frightening thing to see!: a bare street at 1 in the morning: the Christmas-tree-in-the-living-room glow of their lights apprising the dark buildings of their approach like some alien abduction…) One of the boys lost his white high-top as he ran –- it stood abandoned in stark hubris on the sidewalk. I drove over the shoe as I left the parking lot.