Daughn Gibson and the Law of Sound

DAUGHN GIBSON
Me Moan
2013

There is an intensity and drive to The Sound of Law, the first song on the sophomore album by American trucker-turned-singer/songwriter Daughn Gibson, that I have not discerned on Daughn Gibson's first (great!) record. He unleashes the word 'motherfucker' like a shotgun blaze out of nowhere.

That opener was just a fit, probably, because on the second song he is back in a more relaxed, though always slightly askew, mode. The song's calm steady beat lulls you into sleep, but then you listen to the lyrics and realize there's dead and paranoia everywhere. Daughn turns the Phantom Rider, a Marvel comic hero, into a serial killer that 'took a family'. It is the repeated coda where the song really takes off but by then, ironically, we are past the point of danger and there is nowhere to go anymore.

It hasn't turned stale yet, Daughn Gibson's mix of electronic beats and countryish croonerism. It is probably so exciting, not just because it is an original sound, but because after listening to it for more than a year now, it still defies some basic internal logic of mine. I always have the feeling that the combination does not make sense and that it will derail any minute. It is even built into the music, like when in Tiffany Lou (on his previous record) the music gets stuck in a loop for a few seconds, caught in its own unlikely web.

In the same threatening sense, you constantly get the sense he is conjuring up demons. Even when he comes closest to a normal song, as in Franco where he actually sings yearningly and the guitar sounds yearningly and the beats don't suddenly run amok but keep going in 80s drum machine fashion, you're not quite buying it. He can sing about “finding a way for two lips to collide,” and then just trail off with “I wish we had a kid who never wanted to die.” On this song, with its dreamy atmosphere, Daughn Gibson sounds like he is walking around in Twin Peaks. It is the same juxtaposition of the American yearning for the romantic 50s with the haunts of the alienated modern society.

I read in an interview that Gibson likes 'the weird', and it shines through in his lyrics. You kind of want to look away when he describes a scene such as “What's got me feeling so wrong is one shot / Grandaddy so hot / he left me in the parking lot / kissing on the blacktop,” but it's just unclear enough to also make you laugh and wonder what the hell he is talking about. Even more hilarious is All My Days Off, which sounds like it could come up on your MOR radio station; until he starts singing of a billboard with “Fucked Up Judgement Day” on it.

The cheesy is never far off but, like his 'weird' influences, Daughn Gibson is at his best when he walks the fringes.

Drama and Ginsberg and Lemon Lime Bacardi

SINGLE MOTHERS
Single Mothers EP
2011

I found out about this band through Last.FM. In the Okkervil River shoutbox, someone posted:

All the girls at this party, they're into drama and Ginsberg and lemon lime bacardi; they're into Okkervil River and trying to get to know everybody.

"Wow!" I thought, before I figured it was a reference. Last.FM poetry. I was excited, this heralded to me a new age of more inspired shouting and tweeting and all that jazz. I should have known it wasn't what it seemed.

The first thing you might notice about Canadian post-hardcore band Single Mothers is the gruff production. Since they only have glorified demos for now it might not be intentional, but the production values nicely mirror the sense of uncertainty that they express about the world around them. Awkward self-awareness raised to the level of art.

The narrator in Single Mothers songs spends a lot of time playing it cool. "This ain't a date, it's just coffee". But sometimes he admits that the whole thing is just a charade, and gets to the heart of the matter. "It's hard, I only have short term goals, and I hardly ever follow through with those." In a song called Nice Dresses he proclaims that "whores in nice dresses are still whores once you undress them". The whole world is just permanently dressed up for the occasion, and no one cares about the naked truth, for it is ugly.

Shallowness is a popular theme these days, but what is refreshing is that the singer puts himself square in the middle of it, not as a neutral external critic.

"All we want to meet is someone out there with a little integrity". Authentic is one of the keywords of the 21st century, and we have yet to agree on a definition that does not shift when you stroll around it.

Winter Coats is my favorite song of theirs. The title references to an analogy that is quite crude, but I like it anyway. He says the girls should be wearing winter coats, since they act 'so cold'. The song culminates in a mantra of ALL MY ANGELS ARE ETCHED IN SNOW, a desperate expression of always staying with the cold abstract, never being able to arrive at the realization of what you are looking for.

Cat Power

The other night I saw Cat Power perform in the Paradiso in Amsterdam. Though I am not sure if it was in fact a performance. To me, performance connotes more or less an act, taking on a persona on stage that is different from who you are. Chan behaved on that stage like I might in my weaker moments in the safe solitude of my room, mumbling to myself with all the repressed twerks and twitches creeping out. Sometimes, when she was scaling the edge of the podium, she was winking. If you would follow her line of sight you'd see that it wasn't really directed to anyone, just an affectation.

So not a performance, just a presence. She was just there. Her whole countenance was too odd to be a deliberate move, too strange to be acted out. It was what people like to call a naked performance (which, then, to me sounds like an oxymoron), and therefore revealing.

When you think about it, there is something very unnatural about a selected number of persons put on a pedestal (which is what a podium is, really) and preaching to multitudes of people (which is what a performance is, really) as if they were the chosen ones.

In light of that, someone being a little awkward and nonsensical on stage makes perfect sense to me. We prefer our rock stars with a cocky confidence, because rock is after all directly connected to coolness. But every rock star who is completely at ease when he's ‘up there’ is either a good actor or an asshole. Chan Marshall, walking around a little dazed and shellshock, is relatable. The whole night she was singing from the corner of her mouth, almost as if she was sneaking the words in. Or as if she was whispering secrets at us. Unfortunately, no one could hear what she was saying, because she seemed either not able or unwilling to properly sing in one of the two microphones she brought.

On musical grounds then, this was not a great show. As rock and roll, which works on different criteria, it was a little bit better, because provocative. As art, it worked wonders. How many people have not noted that a good criteria for art is that it gets you out of your comfort zone? That is what Cat Power, deliberately or not (probably not), does. You come out of it different than you go in. So then, interestingly enough, in a world brimming with performances everywhere ("all the world's a stage" is becoming more and more true with time), simply being becomes art.

To a Revolution of the Sunglasses

The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes:

Our children shall rise up against us
Because we are the ones to blame
We are the ones to blame
They will give us a new name
We shall be
Hypocrites hypocrites hypocrites

Noam Chomsky on The War on Terror:

“The thesis is that we are all total hypocrites on any issue relating to terrorism. Now, let me clarify the notion "we." By "we," I mean people like us -- people who have enough high degree of privilege, of training, resources, access to information -- for whom it is pretty easy to find out the truth about things if we want to. If we decide that that is our vocation, and in the case in question, you don't really have to dig very deep, it's all right on the surface. So when I say "we," I mean that category. And I definitely mean to include myself in "we" because I have never proposed that our leaders be subjected to the kinds of punishment that I have recommended for enemies. So that is hypocrisy. So if there are people who escape it I really don't know them and have not come across them. It's a very powerful culture. It's hard to escape its grasp.”

Naomi Jaffe, of The Weatherman, on their ideology:

“We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence.”