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18jun8:00 pm10:00 pmFree Weekly Bar Bingo w/ Kingfisher DC8:00 pm - 10:00 pm Kingfisher DC

19jun8:00 pmLes Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo8:00 pm Wolf Trap

20jun6:00 pmRay LaMontagnePart of the Light Tour w/ Neko Case6:00 pm The Anthem

20jun7:00 pmAlexis Taylorw/ Moon Diagrams7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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Event Details

Beautiful Thing, the forthcoming solo album from Alexis Taylor, is a very new, very individualist and – yes – very beautiful reflection of a life that’s changed immeasurably since he started out in music. This is a musician, writer and singer who has carved his own unique path through the music of the 21st century, completely avoiding getting trapped along the way in dumb oppositions of pop vs avant-garde, dancefloor vs intellect, retro vs modernist and so on. He has worked with living legends from major pop stars to free improvisors from the furthest left field, played huge arenas and tiny clubs without ever privileging one over the other, and through all of it, never stopped listening and learning. And all of this you can hear clearly woven through every part of Beautiful Thing, a record which brings all its myriad influences together into something strange and personal. This is also the first time Alexis has made a solo album with a producer, that producer being Tim Goldsworthy, the co-founder of Mo Wax and DFA Recordings, member of UNKLE and LCD Soundsystem. During the recording process, Alexis and Tim found a common musical language by their discussion of ultra-diverse shared references, and worked out ways of working in the studio that could approximate some of the feelings they got from those influences.

The story of Alexis’s early days in Hot Chip and their steady growth from schoolfriends mucking about and sharing strange music, to established international force, is well documented. But it’s always worth re-emphasising how much they had to find their own way. There was no obvious niche for them to fill, and it’s partially because of that that Alexis has never taken their success for granted. Throughout Hot Chip’s career he has always concocted new and often challenging projects based on his own creative evolution, or on chance meetings with new musical sparring partners, he has never once rested on his laurels in terms of his musical processes or relationships with his audience.

“I’ve been playing with Hot Chip for years,” says Alexis, “generally on quite big stages, and felt an excitement and rush from playing electronic music and the feeling of coming together and feeling a euphoric thing as a group. But the whole time I’ve played to smaller audiences on my own, with About Group [the band he formed with long-serving improvising musicians John Coxon, Pat Thomas and Charles Hayward], with Fimber Bravo [veteran steel pan player and founder of 20th Century Steel Band], and with other things I do, and put the focus much more on song, and seen a very different way for audiences to respond. I’ve done a lot of gigs where I’m just sat down at a grand piano, the audience is seated too, and nobody dances – because that would be weird – and nobody talks and it’s almost a recital environment. That has shown me that people really are interested in the songwriting side, even if it’s on a smaller scale, and that in turn has influenced how I write.” The intimate, home-recorded feel of his solo records Rubbed Out [2008] and Await Barbarians [2014], and the pure singer-songwriter album Piano [2016] marked out territory for himself while collaborations with About Group and Fimber Bravo, alongside the mighty Scritti Politti, and playing in David Byrne’s Atomic Bomb! Band, covering the music of cult Nigerian musician William Onyeabor each taught him new lessons as he took a side-stage role to embellish the music of another unique talent.

All of the lessons from these radically different projects have come to bear on Beautiful Thing – as have Alexis’s ongoing examinations of his own emotions and dreams. He was writing songs all along, as he always has, but the form of Beautiful Thing started to take shape when he tracked down Tim Goldsworthy. Tim was semi-retired from music, pursuing academic research, and frustrated with the creative opportunities that were offered him – but the two very quickly found a strong creative connection, and began talking about influences and processes in a way that almost came full circle to the way Alexis and Joe’s first creative discussions worked. This time, the connecting theme was intimate music. Somewhere between the blissed-out drift of early Spiritualized, the perfect clean lines of George Michael’s ballads, the close-mic’ed strangeness of Miles Davis’s tape experiments, and most importantly the impossible delicacy of Talk Talk, the two found a musical language that would feed into their sessions. Not that they wanted to sound like any of those things: Alexis hastens to add, “I know I talk about influences a lot – because it’s easy to do – but it’s much more about finding common ground. The actual process, and even more importantly, the songs and the feelings they give you, are what matter.”

They began to record, with Tim building up sounds around Alexis’s demos – but the album really began to form around the title track. Alexis had words and chords for “Beautiful Thing” in his head but no idea what style to make it in, but he demoed it very roughly at home, “making all kinds of percussion by hitting my bass guitar” and sent it to Tim. But when Tim opened the digital files they didn’t line up on his computer, and everything was out of sync. This happy accident built the track up into something “clattering, and even ugly sounding for a track with that title”, and gave them a sense of “how far we could go down the experimental route without it just becoming noise”. That process opened out the record… “Every time we processed sound with something malfunctioning or unpredictable, that’s where the interesting things started to happen. It was that kind of experimentation, rather than following the obvious route, that made the record something I’m very happy with.”

Somewhere between that sense of extreme possibilities and the intimacy of Alexis’s songwriting and vocal, a wide creative space opened up. Beautiful Thing has electronic thrills, dark spaces, memories of dancefloors, heartfelt writing; it’s composed, it’s improvised, it’s accidental, it’s strange, but it’s also very immediate. So “Dreaming Another Life” opens the album feeling like a song you’ve known all your life, the folk-ish lilt and shimmering acoustic guitars riding waves of liquid electronic sound as Alexis sings of a kind of yearning we all know only too well. “Deep Cut” floats along like a vintage R&B slow jam, and is full of warmth and human connection, as Alexis reminds us “don’t get caught up in what isn’t real / make something you can feel in your heart.” “Oh Baby” is a gloriously strange bit of 1970s glam-boogie with piercing detuned synths ripping through it. That title track does indeed have “ugly sounding” elements, yet the crazed disco lavishness and bug-eyed acid house momentum that run through it somehow transform that into something giddy and glorious.

“A Hit Song”, a gently swaying piano ballad and his favourite song on the record, is partly about the process of making music, but also articulates the tensions between what is inside the artist – in dreams and emotions – and a song’s emotional impact, how it actually reaches people. From arenas to piano recitals, bedrooms to big studios, raves to avant garde improv, all Alexis’s accumulated experience is in this record, but so is that magical question around which all creation of art hinges: “all the influences and all the technique are important,” he says, “but what I’m always thinking about, and can never really be sure about is: how does it make you feel?” However much has changed over a fascinating career, some things remain fundamental, and that question of feeling – in the writing and in the hearing – is the most fundamental of all. And the crux of Beautiful Thing, the thing that makes give more and more to the listener on each new hearing, is that the technique and the feeling are inseparable. All of Alexis and Tim Goldsworthy’s accumulated years of experience are all put to work in the pursuit of something subtle and elusive but ultimately quite profound and beautifully human.

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$15

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21jun7:00 pmStory District’s Out/Spoken7:00 pm 9:30 Club

21jun7:00 pmJeremy EnigkReturn of the Frog Queen Anniversary Tour - w/ Chris Staples7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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Event Details

Three good reasons why it’s hard to remember a time when an album like Jeremy Enigk’s Return of the Frog Queen sounded shocking:

1) At the time of its release in 1996, there was no other album like it.

2) In the 22 years between then and now, its marriage of seemingly opposing sensibilities—English folk and American punk; orchestral chamber pop and progressive rock; surreal, pastoral, fanciful lyrics that burn to express personal, emotional, and spiritual quandary—has become the blueprint for so much great music that a young listener can be forgiven for thinking that things were always just like that.

This isn’t to claim some kind of Velvet Underground/Big Star status for the album, but it is to say that you can draw a straight line between Frog Queen and elements of Elliott Smith, Belle & Sebastian, Rufus Wainwright, Destroyer, the Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Sufjan Stevens, Beirut, Grizzly Bear, Joanna Newsom, Bon Iver, and many, many other artists who have come to define the past two decades of indie music.

3) It’s getting harder to remember anything anymore.

But Return of the Frog Queen is worth remembering. Or discovering. And most definitely celebrating. Though you rarely see it turn up on lists of 50 Best Things of Whatever Year We Wish We Still Lived in Because the Present Is Such a Consummate Drag, the album was an indisputable innovation in the world of ‘90s indie rock, rewriting a litany of unwritten rules about sound, subject matter, and solo identity for lead singers of successful bands.

THE BACKGROUND

As you probably know, Enigk was the singer/guitarist of Sunny Day Real Estate, the Seattle quartet widely credited as the Big Bang of the post-hardcore, indie rock variant of emo that would spend the next decade morphing into a massively commercial enterprise.

You can’t blame Sunny Day Real Estate for that, though. They were just a young, powerhouse band who happened to be several years ahead of their time.

SDRE’s debut album, Diary, and its first single, “Seven,” was a seismic event, not least in the lives of the band members. It was released in May of 1994, one month and two days after Kurt Cobain’s suicide was discovered. Diary became Sub Pop’s biggest-selling album since Bleach—a distinction that lasted until the next decade.

The story of the band’s splintering during the making of their follow-up album (LP2)—and triumphant reunion a few years later—has been well-told elsewhere. But for our purposes, it’s worth bearing in mind that the break-up drama formed the background from which Return of the Frog Queen emerged.

In the space of about two years, Jeremy Enigk had joined a band with some friends, toured the world, sold way more records than anyone had anticipated, been heralded with hyperbolic—not to say unwarranted—praise, become a significant voice to a lot of young listeners, experienced a religious epiphany that he spoke of publicly, and watched the band buckle and fall apart, much to the dismay of a public that was only just starting to figure out how to broadcast its anxious speculations and judgments on the internet.

By the time the band broke up, he had been loved, respected, celebrated, criticized, vilified, and reproached. He was 21 years old.

One might expect a person might respond to all this sturm und drang by making noisy, chaotic, electric guitar-driven music of the kind his now-defunct band made its name with. One might expect someone whose character and even sanity had been widely debated in public might want to write a definitive statement about his identity, his ideology, his id.

But Jeremy Enigk didn’t do either of those things. He made Return of the Frog Queen instead.

ENTER THE FROG QUEEN

The songs that formed the basis of Enigk’s first solo album were about as far from the sound of Sunny Day Real Estate as you could imagine—unless all you’d heard of them was “Pheurton Skeurto,” the little piano songlet that sounds (delightfully) out of place on Diary.

Spare acoustic guitar figures and solemn, almost plainsong melodies are the foundational elements, which Enigk and his two key collaborators, producer Greg Williamson and arranger/conductor Mark Nichols, build up into astonishingly dynamic worlds of sound. But for all the swoops and bends, the unconventional entrances and exits, the arrangements remain organic, and perfectly united behind the singular human voice at the center of it all.

From the very first strum on “Abegail Anne,” the music is stately, mysterious, vaguely mystical, and not even remotely interested in the ironic detachment still popular in those days.

If anything, the arrangements, and the stupefyingly strong vocals, are flagrantly theatrical. Enigk sang hard over loud instruments in SDRE, but nothing prepared you for the versatility of his voice on Frog Queen. From a raspy whisper to conversational chest voice to clearly differentiated levels of high end—choked scream, melodic scream, head voice, falsetto, whatever you want. (And just a wisp of an unconscious British accent.)

But even at the peak of crescendo, as on the staggering climax of “Shade and the Black Hat,” on which Enigk wails “WON’T YOU STAY TONIGHT?” at the top of his range while the orchestra whips up a maelstrom—this music feels unfailingly intimate, while somehow remaining intensely private.

This is the central enigma (enigkma?) of the album: How can a song be both intimate and private? How can music that feels like fearless personal revelation grow more opaque the more closely you examine at it? Consider the author, and what his life was like at the time these songs were written and recorded. It’s easy to imagine a 21-year-old rock star manqué feeling overwhelmed, overexposed, overanalyzed, hungry for a kind of solace in which sound precedes meaning.

And yet, meaning is all over the record if you’re looking.

In among the pleasing, suggestively abstract imagery—“dallow water,” and “this dubious day,” and “window morning dream paradise”—Enigk plants lines that don’t require much interpretation at all if you’ve ever been anywhere near a break-up of a band or any other relationship, ever worried about what strangers might be saying about you, ever felt unseen, ever re-ran edited versions of old arguments in your mind, ever believed in something so fiercely that you were willing to lose friendships over it.

“Wait for, wait for me…”

“I’ve heard rumors…”

“No one knows my name…”

“What I’ve seen tears me inside…”

“Then the writing on the wall
said he is only the way
You said it was bad timing
at least we had timing at all.”

These lines are crucial, but they’re also non-sequiturs, there for you to discover if you’re looking, but the songs still work beautifully if you never do.

But beyond the literal, there’s a spirit of fabulism in the lyrics—hardly a surprise on a record named after amphibian royalty. Who is this “Abegail Anne”? Where is this sleepy, enchanted “Lewis Hollow”? What does “hi, hey” mean? And how does he proceed so artfully from idle, drowsy contemplation of a lizard in a castle, observing the tremors of its “dreary heart,” to the roaring, soaring cascade of frustration bursting forth at song’s end? Who is being addressed, and by whom?

Trying to tease out the puzzle of these artfully esoteric lyrics has proven to be one of the album’s most durable pleasures (or possibly frustrations, if you prefer things spelled out). As time passes, the words might seem meaningless or profound depending on who you are, not who Enigk was.

It makes for an odd spin on the idea of self-revelation. The album unquestionably opens a window onto an unorthodox artist, pursuing an unorthodox process, to arrive at a most unorthodox production. But as with any great artwork, the real subject is the person looking at it.

ONWARD AND INWARD

Even after two decades, it’s difficult to find a name for the atmosphere conjured by the album. There are traces of Incredible String Band pastoralia, but also a strain of Pink Floydish unease. Bowie between Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory. It’s not dark exactly, but only because your eyes have adjusted to candlelight. It feels mystical, even metaphysical.

Emphasis on “physical.”

Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover nailed it in two sentences from his review:

“He pounds a piano and howls like his wife just left him for his best friend, as the violins, violas, and cellos scrape at their strings as if to break them, and the flutes, piccolos, trumpets, trombones, French horns, and clarinets blow like they were hired by a wolf to blast a few recalcitrant pigs’ houses down. The waves of classical countermelodies are extraordinary, adding on to each other to create an 1812 Overture anvil clarion call, a roar so dense, so overpowering, it’s like gasoline exploding, even more so as they back Enigk’s fevered wail as if he were long past desperation.”

Return of the Frog Queen was the very last thing anyone would have expected to come out of the singer of Sunny Day Real Estate, or really, the Pacific Northwest at that time—which was not long past a different kind of desperation.

Without knowing or intending it, Enigk and his collaborators made a record that pointed the way out of Seattle’s mid-‘90s post-boom-years malaise, which had no shortage of talent and desire, but lingering ambivalence about ambition, and no clear sense of cultural direction.

And then all of a sudden, here came an utterly singular demonstration that when all else fails, the most reliable direction is usually inward.

It’s unlikely that a generation of hopeful teenage garage bands formed as a response to eager suburban teens getting an earful of Return of the Frog Queen. Maybe it’s just a coincidence then, that in the years following the record’s release (and the breathtaking live shows Enigk played with a stripped-down version of the 21-piece orchestra that plays on the record), indie music from the Pacific NW outwards, got more expansive, more idiosyncratic, a little riskier, and a lot weirder.

But it was for sure never the same.