Anna Minard claims to “know nothing about music.” For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.
Chair Beside a Window
(Corwood Industries)
All right, who’s pranking me here? The weirdest albums come out of nowhere, just a casual “Here’s your next one,” so rarely with a warning of any kind. I should have known; there are signs I’m starting to learn. Black-and-white cover? Check. Name no one else has ever heard of either? Check.
The first song is all bells and underwater ghost voices, and a sss-sss-swip noise that sounds like it could be a mistake.
The next song I used as a gauge to see if the music folks were just messing with me. While listening to this at work, I’d occassionally pull my headphones out of the jack around the beginning of track two if someone happened to walk by my desk. “This is what I’m listening to for my column,” I’d announce, while out of my tinny laptop speakers, the sound of “European Jewel” rang out—a song that should’ve been named “All of Your Pots and Pans at Once.” Then I got to see their faces, which ran on a continuum from almost scared to an eyes-closed laugh attack. This made me think I was being put up to something.
On the fifth track, a harmonica—I’m 90 percent sure it’s a harmonica—that sounds like, well… it becomes many things. A bagpipe, a trumpet, a goblin. Then the words “You think you know how to score.”
On the next song, “Nancy Sings,” Nancy sings. (I don’t know who Nancy is.)
On another listen, my roommate came and asked me “what sort of banshee wails” I was listening to. Ha-ha, as if she isn’t used to it by now. Then we decided that Pots Clanging in D Minor would be a superb album name.
But I want to tell you the truth: There is some music on here that, even if you’re a bonehead like me, could make your breath catch with recognition, with that flicker-flash of feeling, the way music describes something you can’t explain fully enough, like how one breath of one scent can remind you of a whole scene in the back of your memory. Here it’s just hiding behind minor-chord dulcimer-sounding guitar intros, and it’s mostly toward the end of the album. So slog through it! “Mostly All from You” is like that. Over the crazy instrumental clang, Jandek sings low and sort of sad, “Rain on my head/And it’s mostly all from you/Laying in bed/And it’s mostly all from you.” You can’t quite tell if it’s because of the rapture of new love, the awed gratitude of true love, or a good old-fashioned moody heartbreak. But ping goes something in your middle region. I know this feeling.
I give this a “stuff contains multitudes, y’know?” out of 10. 