Listen to Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit and, just like that, you’re strolling through the snow-lined pastures of a Robert Frost poem.

It’s not easy to explain; Agalloch is a metal band. Their vocalist is a part-time growler, other-time chanter, whisperer and, very last on the list, singer. The band means business, taking out a dark but tempered sort of rage on its abused and down-tuned instruments.

But as artists — and that’s what they are —  this Oregonian fivesome care far more for the environment of their sound than whether it’s keeping heads thrashing and fists clenched. It wants you inside of it, so far within its twisted woods that once the sun sets and everything is moonlight, it’s grown too dark to follow out the bread crumbs lined behind you.

The first time I heard this band’s music, I literally couldn’t stop thinking of Hansel and Gretel.

Recorded on all analog equipment, Marrow of the Spirit plays like a record, not a CD. It has texture and grain, a low-fi and degraded kind of character. But as is the case with the rest of the band’s catalog, it’s the instrumental texturing that sets what Agalloch does apart from that of its contemporaries.

To me, there is no genre more difficult than metal. The line separating good from brutal, ominous from whiny, mature from adolescent just couldn’t be more fine. And maybe it all comes down to reserve.

Sure, there’s growling here — and, admittedly, that’s still not a device I totally “get” in music. But in Marrow, it’s just another instrument. All the while, there’s some other earthy, folk-y anchor — a guitar strum, or the echo of a woodblock, or something — grounding the piercing stabs of electric, the hisses of reverb, the relentless pulsing of bass. And then you listen to something like 2006’s brilliantly subtle and hyper-pastoral The White EP, and it’s easy to see: this band might growl, and they might drone and relish in doom, but in some strange way they do it all as a love letter to nature, in all its beautiful, horrible glory.

Take a closer look at the candy house and you’ll see it’s painted cardboard. Step inside and you’ll find the cannibal witch behind a curtain, pulling levers like Oz.

Released November of last year, Marrow of the Spirit may not be a new record, but for me it was a new kind of record. The tracks, tied together with sounds of crickets and brooks, are long — 10, 17 minutes, even — and beg to be listened to, digested and explored over and over again.

It’s rare to find metal that hates as intensely as it loves. It’s even rarer to find bands that realize, in metal, the two emotions couldn’t be more interchangeable.
 
 
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*NOTE: Weekly posts have been seriously slipping lately, but I will finish this countdown. I might miss a week, or weeks, here or there and have to play catch-up, but it will happen. To stop on the fringe of the Top 10 would just be madness.

“You’re the inspiration”

My uncle had a theory on rock ‘n’ roll.

He believed that every band had a two-part dynamic: a heart, and a soul. The heart keeps the band moving, he said, there’s something sentimental about him, he keeps the sound grounded and melodic. But the soul is different. The soul gives the band wings, makes it animate and throb. The band wouldn’t be THE BAND without each element, but the soul has more right brain priorities: creativity, risk, experimentation.

Chicago’s soul, he said, was Terry Kath.

And that’s how he explained the split in Chicago’s sound eras. For 11 records, they pushed boundaries, utilized their big band, jazz-fusion dynamic with funky, full and restless compositions. Then Kath, the band’s lead guitarist and split vocalist, shot himself in the head. Apparently, he was struggling with depression and drugs and weight problems. They say he was thinking of quitting the band anyway and already started working on solo stuff. But the bullet in his brain was ruled accidental. He was showing off his gun collection to friends, mock-blowing himself away with unloaded weapons. Except one wasn’t unloaded.

After that, Chicago wasn’t Chicago anymore. They devolved into the ballad-driven, pre-emo pop band everyone thinks of nowadays when they hear their name. They still had Bobby Lamm and Pete Cetera singing and songwriting, but they’d lost their soul.

It was Weekend at Bernie’s but with music. The band was moving, but it was cold and croaked and totally faking it.

“The whole world’s watching”

Albums like Chicago’s 1969 and 1970 CTA and II are the types that make me wish I’d been alive to experience the musical urgency of that time. That two records this dense and celebratory could be produced back to back is a special kind of achievement — forget that they were released within a year of each other and add up to nearly 2.5 hours of sound.

To call the band prolific really no-sells it, but there at bigger things at play here than productivity. To this day, I have heard no other work a wood block quite like Chicago did in their first two offerings. The word “hardcore” seems too much for wood block work, you say? Listen to “Beginnings” on CTA then talk to me.

They just get it, this band. Funk, fun, rock, surprise, excitement — they nail it all. Then they make it emotional.

The Heart & Soul theory can be stretched to other outfits — The Beatles’ heart was McCartney, soul was Lennon; in Genesis, Gabriel was all soul. And it’s a concept I agree with. But the point, I think, in listening to Chicago do what they were born to do musically in these two records, is that rock ‘n roll is a life force. It’s a bunch of guys getting on stage and having way too much fun pounding on leather, wood and wire. Because in those few minutes, speeding by like gunfire, things like depression and solo projects and fat hang-ups don’t matter. They simply don’t exist. They can’t, there’s not room enough on stage for them.

Up there, caught in the blizzard of the houselights, it’s all, and only, noise.
 
 

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Nearly four years removed from 2007’s grounded and melody-heavy In Rainbows, mood masters Radiohead have returned home, to the shiny star-clustered space station where I imagine they craft every one of their records.

Listen to The King of Limbs and it’s hard not to think about Kid A, Radiohead’s hyper-atmospheric 2000 release. Both pieces are more experience, more excursion than traditional album. You won’t find many clearly defined “hooks” on either, no predictable rises or falls. Instead, what we get are these mixed palettes of noise, both electronic and acoustic, wrinkled and rubbed together until their edges turn fluid and soft, warm and erotic, until they couple, to birth something better.

After so long —18 year’s worth of discography — it really shouldn’t be surprising. This is what Radiohead does. They don’t record and produce, they transcend and document. And after so long, they’ve earned the right to do daring and crazy things — things like give away albums for free (In Rainbows) and not worry, not even a little, if their music isn’t “accessible.”

After so long, the only thing predictable about this band is that they will be unpredictable. Listen to The King of Limbs next to The Bends next to OK Computer and there’s only one thing for sure: it was all without a doubt, 100% Radiohead. Period.

Still, The King of Limbs isn’t a revelation. Less lively and tumultuous than Kid A, it’s clear Thom Yorke and the gang aren’t so unabashedly fascinated with the toys at their disposal as they were 11 years ago. This album is content to glide, without too many bursts or blowouts. It’s happy to simply be, to exist as a cloud of feeling, a breeze laced with scents both familiar and new.

It’s ecstatic to be calm.

Running throughout Radiohead’s eighth and latest studio album (including Amnesiac, a b-sides collection), is a vibe that this band has reached a sort of plateau. Was I floored by how The King of Limbs played out stylistically? Not entirely. But I was still loving every minute of it. Comparisons can officially begin to be made within this band’s catalog, and I can’t wait to hear how they’ll use that to their advantage in the future.
 
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I have a soft spot for bands that go too far. Pretty sure it was Bill Maher who said something like, “If you never cross the line—how would you know where it is?”

In music, that idea should be Gospel.

The first modern “prog” band I ever heard, it was Dream Theater’s penchant for line-crossing and excess that drew me to them. I went nuts for just how over the top they could be. Everything from the 25-minute songs, the huge melodic bridges, the overblown concepts—I loved it all. I even loved how often they showed off in their tracks, going on these massive instrumental tangents that may or may not really have anything to do with the song’s primary melody. They did it because it sounded cool, and because, technically, they could.

They were virtuosos; they could anything they wanted. And I wanted them to.

That being said, there’s a time and place for hyperactivity. Excess can be fun, but emotional excess is better. Scenes from a Memory proves how powerful focus could be in an album. It isn’t Dream Theater’s fastest or most eclectic piece of work, but I’d say it’s definitely their best.

Trading in the “epic” formula for mood and melody, Scenes taught me that it’s possible to be proficient and grounded simultaneously. It’s a concept album, sure, but I’ve always been more concerned with the music than the story. It’s the thematic mantras that keep us moving; the narrative is just a canvas for emotion.

“What we have been is what we are”

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on Dream Theater in the past, you know how I feel about their recent output. What’s most disappointing, and genuinely upsetting, however, is how the band really seems to be completely without any sort of identity anymore. They’ve spiraled, into this nothing routine of just… making records, pumping out songs that feel more like compilations of riffs and solos they’d had in storage from older sessions. Except it’s all filtered this faux-metal veneer.

Say what you want about the band’s earlier stuff, but it wasn’t afraid to be pretty, and melodic (“Another Day,” “Space Dye Vest”). And with Scenes, they hit a climax (one they get close to in the 2^nd disc of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence), really creating some beautiful and graceful stuff. Sometimes it goes too far (“Home,” “The Dance of Eternity”), but mostly it’s focused, honest music, stuff the band really poured themselves into, body and soul. That can be said of exactly nothing they’ve produced in an easy 6 years. Closer to 8.

But, at the end of the day, I’m a Dream Theater fan. It’s just the way it is. And even if they happen to suck at the moment, maybe never even make another album worth praising, well, they’re still Dream Theater.

We’ll always have Scenes.
 
 
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Honorable Mention(s): Dream Theater – Images & Words; A Change of Seasons; Awake; Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence

Six years in the making, this self-proclaimed ex-“doom” metal band has put together something so inspirational you might wonder whether it’s being ironic. And who could blame you? With a name like Anathema (cursed, profane), gritty growl rock seems like the obvious genre. Instead, the group has used the space in their discography to evolve, moving album by album since 1993 away from angsty “gothic” themes and onto ground that couldn’t be more eloquent and adult.

We’re Here Because We’re Here is a document of 21^st Century spirituality, a melodic prayer to the gods of Struggle and Acceptance. It’s a wholly modern epiphany: basically, the idea that epiphanies in the traditional sense are overrated, the stuff of movies and melodrama. Clarity comes in embracing the unclear, it suggests.

We’re here because we’re here. And that’s enough.

Produced by progressive rock mastermind Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), there’s a lot of drama on this record. There’s a darkness, bass lines creeping below the surface of glossier rhythms, haunting piano melodies. And in a way, that prevailing mood seems to carry the brighter elements on its back, keeping the optimism from ever feeling hokey and the moments of relief that much more ethereal (“Presence” is the perfect mid-album respite; “Summer Night Horizon” builds a pretty kind of tension that permeates the entire runtime).

Through a lot of great vocal harmonies (you’ve really got to hand it to Lee Douglas for the depth of color she contributes) and some subtle and fantastic keyboard work, the album builds its atmosphere. The organs, the orchestral sections, it’s all icing after that, because although a lot is happening in these tracks, the compositions are pretty straight-forward. The musicianship is dense, but never showy.

This is not your everyday rock album.

Buried deep beneath We’re Here’s rolling piano-driven soundscapes is the suggestion that the space within us all holds the potential for divinity, the potential to love and be loved. But there’s no talk of God here—it isn’t that kind of record. It’s more about learning to be happy in a world where the concept of God is irrelevant.

“Only you can heal your life”—this line is sung over and over again (“Angels Walk Among Us”). Understanding it is the charge that keeps this album breathing.

Released last June (Kscope), We’re Here Because We’re Here could have (and maybe should have) been on my shortlist of “Albums About Starting Over” in January.  It’s recently been taking home awards (UK’s Classic Rock Magazine named it “Prog Album of 2010”), and I wanted to talk about it before getting any later in the year.

With their eighth and latest LP, Anathema—the ex-metal heads, the former “death” rockers—have made one of the most triumphant records around. It’s an experience, one that gets better on each listen. It’s also a response to the band’s earlier work—a response to itself.

We’re Here Because We’re Here may explore serious themes but don’t think it’s all ideas and philosophy. The album’s got listenability. It’s a musical diary entry, a soaring flight into the piercing light of letting go.

It’s an invitation to come along.
 
 
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When a band loses its lead singer-songwriter-composure, the reflex reaction is to roll over and die. And that would be understandable.

When Chicago lost Terry Kath, they didn’t split but they quickly took up sucking. And when Peter Gabriel left Genesis, same thing. They didn’t quit but after a few albums they weren’t Genesis anymore; they were some pale pop imitation. They figured, if Gabriel’s gone (and Hackett), so should be experimentation. “That was his thing.”

But it has to be mentioned: both bands, Chicago and Genesis, were probably way more successful commercially as pop acts than progressive. Whatever significance can be seen in that, the point is it’s hard losing a frontman, hard to stay focused and continue building a creative identity.

That’s just one reason I adore Spock’s Beard’s Octane, the band’s 2^nd release as “New Spock’s”: Spock’s Beard minus its brain and beating heart Neal Morse.

Surfing Down the Avalanche

Octane is a sort of narrative piece, taking place in the seconds following the impact of a car crash, while the vehicle and its passengers are spinning out of control in the middle of the blacktop.

It’s a kind of “life flashing before my eyes” story, but it’s focused, on moments and phases, and from the first burst of mellotron to the final optimistic flash of funk (“With a full tank how can we go wrong?”), it’s incredibly special.

Whereas the bands I mentioned earlier grew tame and directionless without their roots, with Octane Spock’s Beard blossomed. They reinvented, building a sound that was rich and truly unique to them as a foursome, a separate entity, not just an offshoot of the Morse model. Submerged in the thrill of the creative chase, Spock’s took Morse’s departure as a challenge to see if they had what it took to exist without him. If they had made another “grab bag”-styled Feel Euphoria as their #2 LP (although I don’t hate that record), part of me doubts there would have ever been a 3^rd.

In Octane “new Spock’s” found its sound, became their own band. There are slivers of what came before—how could there not be?—but most of Octane is guitar- and bass-driven, not keyboard. The energy is different. It’s more emotional, more soulful, even. And it’s obsessed with atmosphere* in a way “old” Spock’s never came close.**

*In large part thanks to Ryo’s absolutely beautiful mellotron work. Couldn’t be more key.

**Intercut between and around songs are sound samples that set the stage of where we are age-wise in the journey. The antique whine of an ice cream truck, a mother whispering “Wake up, sleepy head. It’s time to go to school. Wake up…”—this is all we need for “story” in the traditional sense. The rest are feelings, moments of significance: youth revolt, first love, adult introspection. Ideas are captured here not by words but sounds, and moods, offering a pretty startlingly rich portrait of life, a scattering of dots connected by the fractured glass of a shattered windshield.

Do I think Spock’s Beard will ever again make an album close to as good as Octane? Sadly, no. But that’s okay.

Unless a Neal Morse reunion record ever takes shape (talk about magic), I can’t imagine this not being the pinnacle “new” Spock’s will always aspire to. It’s just so focused, not a minute too long, so elegant. There’s no wasted attention pumped into being “proggy” or making “epics” here. More than the document of a new generation becoming self-realized, it’s just a truly great, honest, patient piece of music. And though it almost definitely wasn’t the case, it doesn’t feel at any moment like the band was trying to prove a thing.

This is Spock’s Beard’s, “old” and “new,” most unassuming and unique record. It’s one of my all-time personal favorites.
 
 
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Oh, Genesis, you kings of prog, you masters of mellotron, you crazy scientists of sound…. How dearly I love you.

With Selling England by the Pound, I want to get straight to the point. To me, this is Genesis’ quintessential and most fully realized album. I love Trespass and Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, but they don’t work melodically for me on the same level this album does. And Lamb Lies Down is still a record I don’t totally “get.”

Selling England was my first exposure to Genesis, in all their weirdo, relentless, and proficient glory. Peter Gabriel guides the compositions here, weaving his flute- and vocal-work through Banks’ keys and Steve Hackett’s subtle-when-they-need-to-be/awesome-when-he-wants-them-to-be guitars. The three really make an incredible combination, creating sounds as lofty and wild as they are grounded and sweet.

The River of Constant Change

I don’t remember the circumstances around my warming up to this band, but I know that once I did nearly nothing was out of bounds. Long synth epics? Been there. Non-traditional vocals? So what. Total musical culture shock? Yawwwn.

And as that—the last one: musical culture shock—is how this album is sort of remembered in my personal lexicon. It opened me up, stripped away that pre-built feature inside our ears that immediately grimaces every time it hears something out of the ordinary, something it maybe doesn’t understand.

It made me curious for more.

Say what you want about Peter Gabriel and his ridiculous stage antics, but Genesis’ work with him at the helm (the band’s “classic era”) has to be taken seriously. Hearing Selling England by the Pound for the very first time may not instantaneously make you a believer, but maybe that’s why it deserves to be listened to again.

Genesis is Genesis. For me to talk too long about why I think they’re good, and this album is good, seems like a waste of time. They’ve endured for a reason.
 
 
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*So I’m cheating again this week–and if you’ve been following this list even a little bit, you should be used to that by now.

They say in writing school that sometimes you can be “too close” to things to write about them. Usually traumas. They say that you can be too invested. But really that’s just a slogan; nobody actually waits. Because how could you? The insides are the most intense. So much nameless passion swirling around and, really, it’d be a shame to waste it.

This week’s entry, which I’m stealing from deeper in my blog (one of my first posts, actually), is one of those cases. “Too close.” I think I understand the theory better now than I did then, but I also think there’s a definite value in documenting the trainwreck instead of the aftermath. The aftermath is easy, all logic and reason and proverbs and distance. But the storm is chaos. It’s more honest, in a way–a mixed up, ADD, hyper-saturated way, but a way.

2007 was a big year for me. Not only did I get to live out my first real-life breakup, but it was also when I got to see my first Porcupine Tree show… which quickly turned into shows, plural. I related to the Fear of a Blank Planet album in a huge way. It was packed with this dark rush of adolescent angst; it was about being disconnected, locked in bedrooms and staring at screens. It was about growing up in the age of Internet.

Below I embedded a song from each album, as usual. One is an HD capture from a full, legit show, but I wish there were some footage from the We Lost the Skyline recording–since I was actually lucky enough to be in the crowd for that one, at an awesome little CD store in Orlando, FL called Park Ave.. If the piece I’m linking to this week doesn’t hint at what seeing this band live, twice, did for me that infamous summer, I hope the songs will.

CLICK HERE to read the article I wrote a few years back about experiencing Porcupine Tree during their Fear tour in the summer of 2007.

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“Stand up, stand up”

I was really into synth prog at the start of my musical journey of enlightenment.

Grand-sounding, complex stuff, too—Genesis, Dream Theater, anything Neal Morse. It’s all I listened to, the more epic the scale the better. It was a time when size more than mattered, when concepts were king. I could do 25-minute songs all day; my only criteria: they had to be grounded in something emotional.

Transatlantic was a poster child for those expectations.

Noodling for noodling’s sake is for the birds, just as much now as it was then. I was in it for the climax, the slow burn. I wanted to forget I was already 15, 20 minutes deep into a track until I stumbled across and was leveled by its payoff.

That’s how you knew you’d found something awesome.

Transatlantic is a “supergroup,” a band comprised of stars from other bands: Dream Theater’s drummer, Spock’s Beard’s keyboardist/frontman, Marillion’s bassist and The Flower Kings’ co-lead. And in that way, you could say that for me Transatlantic’s bridge was not only one across the forever of its title, but also across a pretty huge sect of the modern world of prog. After falling in love with Bridge, it’s only natural to follow around the musicians who made it, from their main bands to their many side-projects.

Look at the tracklist and right away you know you’re dealing with a doozie. There are only four tracks on the record, two over 25 minutes, one 15-minutes+, and one 5-minuter. And then it starts, with deep and elegant string work leading to a piano melody (“Duel with the Devil”) that I think I’ll forever associate with all music stamped with the “prog” label. The vocals don’t even kick in for close to 5 minutes. By then you’re ready.

“Remember life is hanging in the balance”

I couldn’t make a Most Important Albums list without including Transatlantic. These guys get right the “prog epic” formula here, mixing a retro sensibility with more modern beauty/experimentation ideals. And there’s a lot of faith in this record. Like all of Neal Morse’s writing, this is an album about believing. But it’s done tastefully, in echoes rather than the hollow thumping of religious rhetoric. It’s genuine because, as a collective piece of music, it really isn’t about religion—as in, “God’s great, here’s why.” Instead, it’s about making something beautiful, and fun, and ambitious with people you love. It’s about that creative charge, which shines through most in the traded off vocal bridges and harmonies. There’s a togetherness there (not all of these guys have the best singing voices, yet they sing) that says so much more about what this band and record is about than any passage of regurgitated gospel ever could.

It feels at times like a crazy jam session where everything just magically falls into place, is choreographed somehow, through nothing but the feel inside the studio, the guiding hum of the amplifiers.

In a lot of ways, Bridge Across Forever set a standard for me of what “progressive” music could and sometimes should be. It shouldn’t be all keyboards and half-hour-long songs—don’t get me wrong. But it should be serious (AKA: the fewer allusions to dragons, etc. the better). It should borrow from the past but look to the future.

It should be surprising.

In the canon of most memorable/influential records I own, Bridge Across Forever was like the straw that finally broke radio’s back, or, my relationship with radio’s back. Or something. It was powerful. And still, and into the future, this is a band that I’ll keep eyes on, whose new releases I’ll anticipate—especially since they don’t come around that often.

When asked after Bridge was released in 2001 when we could expect their 3rd outing (what came to be the fantastic The Whirlwind in ’09—MY REVIEW), drummer Mike Portnoy dodged the question. He didn’t want their albums to be on a schedule, he said, to be expected.

There’s a flow to this collaboration, he told a reporter. And the band wants to keep that special.
 
 
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Honorable Mention: Neal Morse – ? (“Neal Overflow”)

SPOILER: Later in the countdown, I’ll be posting on a Morse-era Spock’s Beard album. So with that review to come, and Transatlantic here, I feel like I’ve adequately covered all the Neal Morse ground I probably should for a Top 50. Still, Morse’s solo work shouldn’t be overlooked, either—especially his ? album, which proves once and for all that “Christian” rock is just a mindset, not a genre.

More recently, Morse’s God-centered writing has gotten pretty old (see: 2008’s insanely boring and unimaginative Lifeline). But there was a time, a long, dense time, when he mostly kept away from Jesus Ballads, using spirituality more as a theme, not a direct line into his church’s version of Scripture. There are still the obligatory hat tips to the ole J-man, sure (? is about the search for God, after all). But it’s also an incredible piece of music, an honest, life-affirming concept album of the deepest and most personal form. And plus, I’ve never put too much stock into lyrics. To me, if they’re lame but the music’s good, OK; but if they’re good, they only make the music better. If you’re someone who’s turned off by hearing a vocalist even utter the words “God” or “Jesus” directly (and I’ve met my fair share), maybe you won’t warm up to this album like I did. But you ask me, that kind of thinking is just as silly as the “C-rockers” who strum their acoustics and sing about bible study.

Check out “The Temple of the Living God” and “In the Fire.”

A couple weeks ago I talked about the kind of depression that Blackfield II (#24) touches on in its closing track. Lyrically, it’s apocalyptic (“the end of the world”). But stylistically there’s still a romance there, a sort of relishing in the novelty and profundity of despair. We have fun singing along—there’s a certain majesty in the downfall. And really, this is the norm in music. It’s rare to find records that truly bow to their own sense of dread, that allow it to color their tone completely gray—records that take the fun away.

Up isn’t one of those records.

An album like this, I almost can’t decide which angle to take first—there’s that much going on. First, I’ve always had a thing for analyzing artist/band progression. To see Peter Gabriel go from early Genesis—where he’d routinely paint his face, strap on a leotard and military cap (or oversized flower headdress) while pounding out elaborate, synthy prog—then to his poppier ‘80s stuff, then to film scores, then to this, is just incredible to me. The man has mastered so many different forms that to call him just a rockstar by now seems to undershoot it.

But Up stands alone. With absolutely no celebration of depression whatsoever, with every last shred of its romance stripped away, there are sections of music here that rank as the genuinely saddest I’ve heard. It’s a pretty intimate take on depression, a layered understanding you almost never see in the everyday grief album.

Listen to “My Head Sounds Like That” for one, where the verses are comprised almost strictly of listed observations, as if anything more would be obscene:

the metal jangles as the key turns
unlock the door, wipe my feet clean
oh my head sounds like that

the oil is spitting in the saucepan
i squeeze this sponge and let the cat out
oh my head sounds like that.

Passages like these aren’t vying for anyone’s attention, they’re not out to prove or legitimize their pain. They simply exist, shuffling through the corridors of Up with a bored but unaffected grace. Especially considering that pieces here were written directly in the wake of 9/11, it’s really something that Gabriel could show such refrain, not make this a “9/11 record” but one about struggling, growing up, and living with death.

“It’s just the car that we ride in”

There are certain albums like Up that because of their subject or style are difficult. Maybe dense is a better word, but hopefully you know what I mean. A movie about the Holocaust very well could be the best movie ever made—but that doesn’t mean I want to watch it every weekend. It’s still about the Holocaust.

Up isn’t concentration camp-caliber depressing (at all—this is probably a bad comparison), but it’s not exactly easy listening, either. It’s got a realness about it, something that feels aged and with a lifetime of stories under its belt. More than with head-bobbers, these are the albums I usually end up getting the most out of, though, the ones where on Listen 1 or 2 I feel something that I can’t exactly put my finger on. That something brings me back—I tell myself that this CD is “worth it”—and at some point, hopefully, that something clicks.

At some point the rest of the weight falls, and the record becomes about more than just its melodies.

You don’t have to understand an album’s lyrics, it’s “story” (if you want to call it that) to understand the album. The story’s in the sound. And to me, this piece goes through very distinct thematic movements, from innocence to adulthood, promise to despair, rock bottom to the vaguest, fleeting signs of endurance. And then there’s “Signal to Noise,” the record’s spiritual warzone. And then “The Drop,” its enigmatic outro.

Ultimately, I think what Gabriel is giving us is a battle between faith and fear. Once all structure is gone, do I have the strength to keep going, to build my own spiritual universe? Like the timid plane passenger in “The Drop,” watching bodies jump into the clouds from the cabin’s open door and wonder where they’re falling to, can I trust the unknown, or will it paralyze me?

The record is too smart to offer any real answer, but what we’re left with is enough. Depending on your mood this might be the most depressing record in your collection, but also the most profound, and wise. It’s one that makes you earn its payoff, work a little for it, endure.

And it just kills me, really, that it was made by the same guy who used to sing in funny voices and don flower hats onstage when he was younger.

Flower hats are a marketing gimmick. Up is the furthest thing from flower hats.
 
 
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