#i aubade

[quickdisco]

1152. Elvis Perkins - Label Pop Session (Microcultures - 2016)

Pas moins de 7 morceaux pour cette session radio enregistrée à la sortie de son troisième album, I Aubade.

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[illabel-blog]

Aaaaaand here is a new favorite from the most recent album. 

[yothisthing]

The singer-songwriter Elvis Perkins is a bit of an enigma. He’s a competent musician, extraordinarily talented, but he defies stylistic description a lot of the time. Not in relation to other musicians (a futile and overplayed exercise), but in relation to himself. Just about everything he does is good, but his three albums careen wildly from the central point of his songwriting map. He’s one of my favorite musicians of the last decade, but unlike a lot of musicians I love, whose obscurity leaves me baffled, Perkins is one that I can look at and say, yeah, I know exactly why that guy hasn’t garnered the critical praise or the audience he deserves.

I’m seeing him tonight as he tours in support of his latest album, I Aubade, which is a gloriously weird fucking album. The first time I listened to it I switched the turntable speed about 20 seconds into the first song, because I was convinced there was no way it was supposed to sound like that. It is. What it sounds like, in fact, is like something made by a bunch of very wealthy, very charming alien-raised fairies who holed themselves up in a plaster muskrat house, smoked a lot of opium, failed to have sex or connect romantically, and churned out this record. Which might actually be the case? It’s very strange, and extremely moody, and parts of it are downright beautiful. (Harps! There are HARPS on this record!) Some albums I suspect will be growers, and some I hope will be, but from the very first listen this is one I *knew* would be, and I’ve been mostly right. I really like it, but I don’t think it’s for everybody. It would never be the first Elvis Perkins record I’d play for a newbie.

That’s partly because I feel I Aubade isn’t particularly representative of his earlier stuff, though again, very little that he does is representative of the rest of his stuff. That said, there’s more of a direct throughline between his first two albums than there is between either of those and the third. The first album manages to be both delicate and heavy, beautifully heartwarm and also sad; it’s really an album of dichotomies but stands as one whole solid piece nonetheless. The second album is punchier and more boisterous and...poppier is the wrong word, but the songs strike the listener more as individual songs, and instrumentally it sounds utterly different (an obvious thing to point out, I guess, when this is the only of the three albums that’s been released under the moniker of his backing band). But there are direct correlatives between the two albums in terms of the songwriting, evidenced most clearly by two extraordinary songs.

There are very few songs that I hold up as being perfect. Certainly fewer than 10, maybe fewer than five or six. La La Love You by the Pixies is one. Marquee Moon by Television is another. I want to think that Paul Simon is likely to have one on the list, but I can’t think offhand of which of his songs that might be, which in itself says to me that he probably doesn’t, because Perfect Song is a very specific designation that I dole out (in my head) deliberately and without question. Elvis Perkins has two of them. One is While You Were Sleeping, the first track on his first album, the song he chose to introduce himself to the world. It’s just a masterpiece of songwriting: the simple but effective structure of the verses, the way the instrumentation builds piece by piece, the straightforward, direct-address lyrics that maintain just enough esotericism to keep it universal. Taken literally, I guess it’s supposed to be a wake-up song, but it sounds very much like a bedtime story, albeit very much *not* a lullabye. I’m biased, but I think a lot of the best everythings are stories, especially ones that have a structure we all recognize somehow, and this song is as emblematic of that as any I’ve ever heard.

All that said, though, on a blog where my goal is to break down songs that move me to the technical elements of why they move me musically, I’ve never been able to define exactly what makes my perfect songs perfect. All the words I’ve just vomited about While You Were Sleeping go a ways in explaining why I think it’s a good song, but I can’t articulate why I set it apart as perfect, nor can I do so for any of the rest I’ve identified as the same. It’s not that they follow a certain structure or aren’t messy or anything like that. The closest word I’ve ever been able to get to the defining quality of these songs is “airtight”. There’s something about them that feels like they were born just this way and could never be changed, that there’s no room for anything else to get in. That doesn’t even sound like a good thing theoretically, not for any piece of art, but that’s the mystery of perfect songs. They are perfect because of and despite their airtightness. I feel that they are models of technical precision and yet they push only emotional buttons.

So, I’ll stop rambling about something I can’t define and just let you listen to this song, I Heard Your Voice in Dresden, one of the most perfect songs ever written and produced as far as I’m concerned. Talk about a song that builds, that uses instrumentation to its every advantage. The crest of the song that begins around the 2:20 mark has the very unique distinction of provoking in me, a girl who is very prone to crying at songs, the most violent bawling reaction to any song there is, every goddamn time I hear it. There’s so much happening here, so many beautifully unique pieces that stand out, and yet they never feel like anything but part of the whole, and it’s unthinkable that a single wisp of sound could have been added or taken away from this song. Unlike While You Were Sleeping, this is a song without a single story, but boy, the stories in this song.

- Annie D.

[musiquedechambre]

Le fils de Norman Bates est revenu avec I Aubade il y a quelques semaines. L’album est magnifique. Hogus Pogus vous en convaincra sûrement.

[sixthandi-blog]

Elvis Perkins brings his long-awaited third album, ‘I Aubade,’ to Sixth and I

Elvis Perkins’ third record was supposed to be simple. In 2012, the rootsy singer-songwriter planned to record an acoustic album by himself in just a couple of days.

Did your ears just “perk” up? It might be because Elvis Perkins, son of Tony Perkins and Berry Berenson, brings his long-awaited third album I Aubade to Sixth & I on Tuesday, April 21 at 8:00 pm.

[fetetrouble]

"Hogus Pogus" - Elvis Perkins