Tír Na HiFi

Two wonderful recent Tiny Desk Concerts from artists that produced two of the best albums of 2018.

Julien Baker:


The Weather Station:


And here are two exceptional cover versions from Phoebe Bridgers.  The first one is a cover of Mark Kozelek's You Missed My Heart and the second one is a cover of Daniel Johnston's Peek-a-Boo.  She digs deep and produces something incredibly powerful, bearing witness to songs that evidently have immense personal significance to her.

There have been many original Whistle Test episodes uploaded to YouTube recently but this one, featuring Judee Sill's complete performance of her songs, The Pearl and The Kiss, is the most precious.  These songs have been available in isolation for many years but there is something to be gained, I think, from watching Judee sing her most autobiographical song, The Pearl, and move uninterrupted into that unforgettable performance of The Kiss.  So little visual documentation is available of her that what little evidence we have of that frightening redemptive urge she released in her live performances is to be treasured.  I still wish  - perhaps in vain  -  that, one day, somebody will stumble upon some more live footage long thought lost.

This is a performance that has been sticking in the mind recently.

Phoebe Bridgers (Killer) & Noah Gundersen (The Sound):


Some other fine performances from Noah Gundersen:

(Jesus, Jesus)
(Send The Rain)
(Fear and Loathing)
(Dying Now)
(Live at BBC Celtic Connections)

And from Phoebe Bridgers:

(Smoke Signals)
(Funeral)
(Georgia)
(Motion Sickness)

This is special. Julien Baker's partial cover of The Mountain Goats' No Children prompted John Darnielle to proclaim it the best version of the song that he's ever heard and forced him to drastically re-consider his own approach to performing the song in public.

Here is the original version:


And here is Baker's rendition which segues beautifully into her own song, Blacktop:


A much slower rendition where every word is savoured and lingered over with loving care.   I love the way she sings, "I hope I never get sober", winces inwardly (as if recalling her own battle with alcoholism) and takes a breath and continues with the next line.    All of the nihilistic fury and withering anger of the origial is replaced with a deeply compassionate tone, an empathetic sense of the man's anguish and inner turmoil and an overriding sense of spiritual exhaustion.

A special artist, she seems to leave nothing behind in her deeply cathartic performances.

Vis-à-vis my comments above regarding Julien Baker's performance of The Mountain Goats' No Children, here is John Darnielle introducing his version of Baker's cover.  He tells of how profoundly struck he was when he heard her cover his song and how it made him reconnect with the words and emotions that inspired the song for the first time in many years.  It is a lovely tribute from one songwriter to another, especially when he urges his audience to listen to her version simply because "it's better".



And, for the sake of comparision, here is how he normally performs the song ("There's nothing like looking crazy to give you the edge"):

This is a performance that has stuck in my mind for quite some time.  Julien Baker performing her song, Good News, at a concert in Brisbane in 2016.  The performance is actually incomplete and missing the first half of the song but I am thankful that this fragment survives at all. 



I have never seen Baker sing this song with this level of tightly clenched intensity.  There is just something incredibly powerful about the way she hunches her shoulders as she sings the final lines and appears to contort her face, eyes wildly ablaze, and, as she finishes the song, grabs her guitar in both hands, and winces hard as if about to burst into tears.  As in all of her live performances, it all appears so naturalistic and unmannered and uncontrived and yet, she seems almost oblivious of her audience.  There is an intensity of cathartic expression at work here that is pure and unvarnished and comes straight from her heart.  

For the sake of comparison, here is another version that she sings on piano, equally heartfelt, yet not as anguished as the Brisbane version.



Good News is a song that derives its quiet power from the way it builds slowly but with inexorable force.  It comes from a low point in Baker's life, when she was desperately trying to free herself from a drug addiction.  There is a strong sense of shame and desperation flooding through this song.  She is acutely aware of how damaged she appears to her friends and yet her self-destructive impulses compel her to sabotage all of their well-meaning attempts to help her.  But there is another level to this which is strongly implied by the song's title.  Baker's sense of faith floods through every one of her songs, including this one.  The "you" she references might well refer to a friend or lover, or to herself, or to her God and the "you" that she calls upon in this song is her God.  She sees Him present at all of her lowest points, whether it is numbly staring "at the tapwater circling the sink drain" in an empty bathroom, or screaming at herself when she goes out at night.  There is the same anguished plea for God's redemptive grace here that I hear in the songs of Judee Sill and the same appetite for self-destruction that ultimately crushed Sill's life.

Superb footage of the Hedvig Mollestad Trio in concert last year.  The really great thing about this band, despite the undoubted technical excellence of Mollestad herself, is that they are very much musical equals.  Mollestad may be the nominal leader but this is very much an ensemble where each member is completely attuned to what their colleague is contributing to the musical moment.  

The textures and dynamics may recall rock and metal but the subtly of the interplay between the musicians are more suggestive of jazz.  The musical development that that they have displayed over the course of their studio albums has been incremental rather than dramatic, which is fitting, I feel, for a band more interested in exploring the elemental force of a chordal riff  -  that can both exalt the heart and stimulate the mind  -  rather than empty virtuosic posturing.  

The driving force and the heart and soul of the band remains, to my mind, the wonderful bassist Ellen Brekken.  It is instructive to isolate her foundational bass lines in one's mind and visualise Mollestad's and Bjørnstad 's multi-layered accretion of textured riffs as lines extending outward from Brekken's central core, rather like a lotus flower.  

A wonderful band and this is perhaps the best visual document we have of them right now.  

This is superb and strikes me as impressively strong work.  Andrew Bird's promo video for his new song, Bloodless, is politcally charged, to be sure, but feels much more of a genuine and very personal reponse to the current political landscape in America than Rufus Wanwright's pretentious and heavy-handed Sword of Damocles.



Here are Bird's own words on Bloodless:

"We find ourselves in a cold civil war. Everyone is playing their part too well. Certain actors are reaping power and wealth from divisiveness. Echoes of the Spanish civil war when fascists and clergy win because they put up a united front against the individualistic and principled (yet scattered) left.  We can turn this ship around but we need to step back and be honest with ourselves about what’s happening while it’s still relatively bloodless.”

Another song that has taken my breath away in recent weeks is Final by the band Wilsen.  It is a quietly profound meditation on the apparently random nature whereby our loved ones are taken from us suddenly with "no reason or no rhyme" and all we can -  and must -  do is cling to "that phantom of warmth, an outline of sorts" and take comfort in the fleeting moments that we are granted to share with them.

It is accompanied here by a superlative promo video consisting of singer Tamsin Wilson and two dancers whose beautifully choregraphed movements articulate with deeply felt yet understated intensity the sorrowful emotion that lies at the heart of this great song.



And here is an intimate live session recorded in Toronto:

This is absolutely exquisite, an achingly beautiful collaboration between two of Canada's most gifted songwriters, Tamera Lindeman (of The Weather Station) and Jennifer Castle.