Thursday's Track: Two by Rollerball

In this new semi-regular series, I write about tracks that particularly move and impress me. Take a listen and join the conversation!

Portland, Oregon's Rollerball is one of the great and sadly neglected bands of recent years. This eclectic, unpredictable outfit doesn't get anywhere near the acclaim they deserve for their utterly unique sound, which blends avant-pop, free jazz, noisy electronics, prog rock, reggae and ethnic musics, even dashes of techno, into a surprisingly cohesive sound. They've released 13 albums since 1997 and have amassed quite an impressive, varied discography. Despite ranging all over the place from album to album and even song to song, they somehow always sound like Rollerball, no mean trick when one track might be a noisy free jazz blowout, the next a downtempo trip-hop ballad, the next a scratchy piece of improvised psych/folk. It's hard to sum up a band this diverse in one track, so I haven't even tried, instead picking two tracks that, while still not really encompassing the full breadth of this great band's oeuvre, do suggest their ability to shapeshift at will.

"Starling," off the 2003 album Real Hair, is one of the band's poppiest and most accessible songs, from one of their poppiest albums. It's a gorgeous piece of late-night pop, with dubby drums (there's an equally great remix of the song on 2004's Behind the Barber that amps up the dub elements) and a simple but sensuous female vocal that soars above the ska horns and tinkling piano. It's lush and otherworldly, like all of Rollerball's best avant-pop pieces, evocative of Julee Cruise's music for David Lynch but really existing in its own peculiar world. Rollerball's pop tendencies are laced with darkness and mystery; songs like this seem meant to be sung by witches, late at night, preferably in cemeteries, where this haunting music can drift out into the moonlight.

A somewhat different side of Rollerball is evident on "Osceola," from 2000's Bathing Music. The track opens with a scratchy violin accompanied by martial drums, slowly building momentum in a manner reminiscent of Rollerball's contemporaries in turn-of-the-millennium post-rock. But rather than mining simple loud/soft dynamics and building towards an expected explosion, Rollerball adds in jazzy horns to disrupt the solemn march, then transitions into a delicate ballad. The song is constructed modularly, though each section flows gracefully into the next so that the stylistic shifts seem natural rather than abrupt. Free jazz blowing builds out of the song form and then flows back into it, finally leading to the controlled cacophony of the climax.

These two songs are a fitting but incomplete introduction to Rollerball, one that omits the glitchy techno/blues of "Burning Light," the epic jazz grandeur of "Slits Arandas" (both from 2004's Behind the Barber), the supernatural incantations of Trail of the Butter Yeti, and the crotchety, fractured folk of Catholic Paws/Catholic Pause. This is a band well worth exploring in depth, and I hope this all-too-brief introduction will open a few more ears to Rollerball's singular sound.

Thursday's Track: David Sylvian "Small Metal Gods"

In this new semi-regular series, I write about tracks that particularly move and impress me. Take a listen and join the conversation!

On his 2003 album Blemish, one-time Japan vocalist David Sylvian collaborated with experimental musicians Derek Bailey and Christian Fennesz to create a stark, low-key accompaniment to his warm, florid vocals. His subsequent album, Manafon, released just last year, takes this approach even further, collaborating with a whole host of avant-garde musicians and improvisers to create a stripped-down, nearly bare sonic setting for Sylvian's voice. The lead-off track, "Small Metal Gods," opens with the spinning clatter of Otomo Yoshihide's record-less turntable and the hissing static of Toshimaru Nakamura's no-input mixing board, "empty" instruments that spit out abstract sheets of noise. These hesitant introductory scratches are soon joined by the spacious, reverberating notes of Burkhard Stangl's acoustic guitar and the quiet scrape of Michael Moser's cello, and then Sylvian's voice, over-ripe and thick with emotion as ever, pours into this unsettled, sizzling atmosphere. Sylvian's vocals — "it's the farthest place I've ever been/ it's a new frontier for me" are his first lines, suggesting his embrace of innovation here — are always front and center, with his collaborators filling in the niches and hollow spaces between his words. Their spare, minimalist accompaniment creates a powerful tension between foreground and background, as whenever Sylvian's voice drops out, it creates a sensation of profound absence, of negative space in which the music's scrape-and-sizzle minimalism only pricks lightly against the silence. This is music with a real sense of drama, even melodrama, akin to Scott Walker's art songs but without the bombast; Sylvian's music is resolutely dark and introspective.

Thursday's Track: Mount Eerie "Between Two Mysteries"

This is a trial run for a potential new series in which I upload a track I like and write about it. If people are interested, let me know in the comments and I'll keep the series going. I hope that this series will elicit some conversation about the songs and artists chosen. Although this site will still always be primarily about film, I also enjoy writing about music and haven't done enough of it lately. The first entry in the series is dedicated to one of the most important songwriters of the last decade or so, Phil Elverum of the Microphones and Mount Eerie.

"Between Two Mysteries" is a key track on Mount Eerie's bleak masterpiece Wind's Poem, an album inspired by black metal, by David Lynch's Twin Peaks, and by singer Phil Elverum's year of living in an isolated cabin in the Scandanavian wilds. This song makes the Twin Peaks influence explicit by cleverly interpolating snatches of the droning, eerie melody from Angelo Badalamenti's music for that series. This unsettling tune is juxtaposed against a propulsive guitar figure and hints of vibraphone accents, while Elverum's hushed vocals drift atop the dense, layered music. Elverum has always been interested in nature, in the elements, writing his psychological and emotional trials onto the harsh, cold expanse of an unblinking, uninterested natural world. His lyrics often suggest humanity's encounter with the incomprehensibility of the universe, which is why towering mountains, purifying flames and icy winds recur again and again in his imagery. Here he sings: "The town rests in the valley beneath twin peaks, buried in space/ What goes on up there in the night?" The lyrics turn around such ambiguous questions and such charged images; the "twin peaks" might be mountains dwarfing a settlement, or they might be a proper noun referring to Lynch's warped rural landscape.

This song, a delicate gem positioned amidst the at-times blistering assault of Wind's Poem as a whole, evokes sonically as well as lyrically that fragile beacon of civilization nestled within the chilly wilderness. Other songs on this album use waves of ferocious guitar distortion to evoke the roar and rage of the wind, buffeting Elverum's murmuring voice until he seems lost and afraid. "Between Two Mysteries" suggests a shelter from the storm, a respite from nature's awe-inspiring fearsomeness, even if that foreboding hum underpinning everything hints at darker ideas. For this reason, the song works best in the context of Wind's Poem as a whole, and I'd recommend that anyone who likes this song should certainly check out the full album. But even in isolation, this is a remarkable example of Elverum's rich, allusive, deeply affecting songwriting.