The Microphones—Microphones in 2020

For Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum resurrects a long-dead nom de plume under which he recorded much of his most enduring and beloved work. Elverum has been a bold and restless artist throughout his decades-long career, which arguably came to a head with the passing of his partner Geneviève Castrée in 2016. In the wake of that loss, Elverum disparaged the mystic introspection that characterised his early work and turned to raw, brutal realism. A door had been opened, or closed, it seemed, forever.

The title of Microphones in 2020 is consciously absurd. If Elverum has outgrown soul-searching, why resurrect the project? And what place does it have in a year which has seen far greater focus on community action and the collective good than personal stability and mental health?

It’s a welcome surprise then, to find The Microphones’ sound almost unchanged from its past life 17 years ago. Very little has been ‘transformed’ or ‘modernised’; Elverum’s warm and melancholic guitar has the same old tone, his bass still buzzes and drums clip uncontrollably. The waves of distortion feel like an old friend. This plays into the lyrical content of the album rather neatly, as Elverum lists off production techniques, inspirations and aspirations of his early twenties. It’s a kind of straight-faced self-parody, almost like an experimental exercise; “can I return to this point in my life? Does it still exist?”

There’s a security that comes with age; an assured voice, confidence, balance, the ability to assert, relax, listen, make plans. Old Microphones feels like raw nerves kneaded by brass knuckles, born from the fire and confusion of troubled youth. In an edition of the podcast Song Exploder, focused on his track ‘I Want Wind To Blow’, you can almost hear Elverum’s cringing and wincing as he tries to reconcile his twenty-year-old voice with that of his late thirties. But perhaps that’s where Geneviève comes in, albeit indirectly. It’s only human to treat companions as vessels for your own stability, your own sense of self, to the point that when “the beast of uninvited change” visits, an entire life falls into disorder and must be radically reshuffled. Old doubts, fears, uncertainties and modes of expression wash back ashore, suddenly as acute as they felt all those years ago.

All this retrospection could’ve been arrogant, self-serving, self-mythologizing. You only have to look to Mark Kozelek’s recent work for that. But Microphones in 2020 is too wry and objective to fall into those traps. It explores how seriously we take ourselves when we’re young, how earnest and impassioned we can be, discussing how goofily endearing and valiant that outlook is. Elverum sings of him and his friends, “we’d go on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon”. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the popular notion that idealism and imagination die before you hit double figures. They’re visible in most of us long after that point and never die, lying dormant but rumbling, waiting to squeak out of the cracks.

Microphones in 2020 is just as confrontationally personal as 2016’s A Crow Looked At Me. It’s actually helped by its distance from Geneviève’s death, Elverum’s laser focus given permission to roam rather than firing again and again on the same open wound. There are moments of ecstatic beauty here which 2016 Elverum would not have allowed in his work. And a long-dormant sound is resurrected, every bit as fresh as it was all those years ago.

Microphones in 2020 is available for purchase and steaming here. Watch the audio/visual presentation below.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

powerpoint karaoke slideshow lyric demonstration music display photo flip audio book

Tindersticks — No Treasure But Hope

Tindersticks are industry veterans, now entering their second quarter-century as a band. Their latest album, No Treasure But Hope, arrives as its precedents: followed by a small but ardent fanbase. Musicians will cite the band as beloved influences. Among general listeners, however, they've never achieved a takeoff. Too artful for the charts, not weirdy-weirdy enough for the avant garde, Tindersticks perfectly define a niche act.

Their work conjures ancestral spirits from the annals of music history, drawing on lounge jazz, crooners and doo-wop. Understated production provides the base on which they construct their melodramatic fables. Everything about this band should be cheesy — but cheese is the very thing which, with every release, they dodge. Steeped in love for their forebears, Tindersticks are plaintive rather than parodic.

Whenever things threaten to get ropey, like the beginning of 'Trees Fall', the band yank us back on course. What resembles a Police demo in its first half unfurls at its mid-point in a gorgeous, brass-buoyed explosion.

And thankfully retained is the ineffable sadness of crooner music. 'For the Beauty' opens this album like a fairy-tale, but its delicate piano melody is soon undercut by dark, depressive lyrics. A sombre tone settles on everything that follows. 'Pinky in the Daylight' feels like Sinatra bellowed from a crackling PA into an empty Butlins bar. Blank walls spotted all colours by an impotently gyrating disco light. The stage for confessions of lonely, luckless drinkers.

This is all less dour than it might sound. Tindersticks are isolationists, but they're far from playing to an empty room. Their interiority in an increasingly performative and politicised world feels like the only protest left. Anchored by their own courage, Tindersticks have refused to engage with anyone's bullshit.

No Treasure But Hope will be released on Nov. 15th, and can be pre-ordered here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Richard Dawson — 2020

On 2020, Richard Dawson retains the extravagant and bristling sound of 2017's Peasant. And like Peasant before it, 2020 has been described as Dawson's most accessible work. Compositions have been further simplified and refined, a habit Dawson has tended towards with each successive release. This by no means portends a compromised or watered-down collection of material. Dawson has always left more than enough meat to reward attentive listeners.

In contrast to the frothing, fire-ant ridden compost-heap pastorality of Peasant, 2020 wanders into urban spaces. But it's still uncomfortable. What Dawson called its 'concrete grey' has acne scars of sad, brutalist decrepitude and quiescence. And Dawson's sound still has that timelessness to it — the result of his straddling of Britain's sonic history. One foot in the contemporary, the other in ancient British folk traditions.

Like its Celtic forebears, 2020 impresses by juggling pomp and earnestness. The LP's lead single, 'Jogging', is exceeded in honesty only by its own bombast. Songs run on for twice as long as you'd expect, muddling beautifully through their strange structures and arrangements. Dawson has a knack for swerving his material in the opposite direction you'd expect. He has always excelled in yanking the floor from his listeners, leaving them afloat and receptive.

This tailored vacuum is the scaffold under which Dawson builds his lyrics. To call his songs parables would imply they are didactic. Instead, Dawson’s tracks present focused and isolated flashes which, when combined, form a detailed whole. He does, with few and simple words, what barely any currently working songwriters can even aspire to.

Dawson never has to stretch to find the truth. He just talks about how he's feeling, and, almost by accident, keys into something universal. Lyrics which can, to new listeners, feel confrontational soon reveal themselves as affable. They find broadness in their specificity. 2020 is naked and forthright, but it's personal; never loaded with an agenda. Unless you count trying to raise money for the British Red Cross.

Richard Dawson’s 2020 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe