review of a moment: of walking upstairs at king station, listening to “lay down in the tall grass” by Timber Timbre
The first track of Timber Timbre’s self-titled 2009 album, “Demon Host,” plays from my front door to the subway turnstile. Taylor Kirk’s Randy-Newman-esque, jaunty, haunting vocals are arguably the perfect background to a mid-evening fall wind as far as I know at this moment, and as I change surroundings and step inside, so too does the tune change.
Stepping back onto the subway platform at King Station, my left earbud (with it’s plastic sheath peeling off) twists slightly in my ear, pulling away the sound of the guitar solo at the end of “Lay Down in The Tall Grass.” With it’s “I Put a Spell on You” rhythm the song was already fighting to keep my interest, despite Kirk’s lyrics being both disturbing and beautiful. But the act of shifting the guitar solo out of phase opens up a series of mental connections expanding past a staccato organ or brush drums.
The false-alarm volume fade charged my brain with the aural-recognition task of thinking of songs that end with a guitar solo and, moreso, end with one fading off into the distance. With its twangy guitar and long pauses, the solo could only remind me of of Keith Richards’ playing on “Sympathy for the Devil,” which has been my favourite Rolling Stones song since I first parroted the slurred and furious “get down, baby” that precedes Richards’ playing. Though the two solos are vastly different in tempo and volume, this tenuous comparison only brought my brain to realize that, at that moment, “this song was that song.”
Even if it was a bit presumptuous to assume that one song emulated the other, a brief dialogue ensued that brought up the usual hot topics of nu-rock critique of the last five years: the somnambulistic shuffle of music from rock-revival to garage-revival to folk-revival always seemed like it lacked originality, (or, in the words of friends that grew up only on their parents’ music and shunned all future recordings, “Just isn’t the same,” or “Blow-Up is the best movie ever.”) There was always something tongue-in-cheek about the waves of young artists in the past half-decade emulating the sound of singles and b-sides and rarities of music that none of their peers could remember, or actively listen to. There’s an elitism to this irony music that always rubbed me the wrong way and kept these bands independent from the mainstream. (When the word “indie” was coined to describe their sound and make it discernible to radio audiences, I had trouble reconciling my brain between the facts that 1) “indie” meant “independent,” and 2) that all of these bands were signed to major labels–I’m sure the followers of “Alternative” music felt the same way.) There was always a knee-jerk reaction to the quiet (and getting progressively quieter) music that has been popular lately. And while I believe that yes, the spirit-of-68 sound is a little tried, there’s something that even I missed while shunning it in favour of my parents’ records.
Revisiting “Lay Down in the Tall Grass,” I drew more comparisons to “I Put a Spell on You” than the Rolling Stones tune. In researching this song now, I find that there’s a thread of humour that runs through it. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had written it as a refined blues ballad but the producer, Arnold Maxon, “brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk,” for the recording, and this new sound was born. His wailing, snorting and warbling then plays out as accident, as the things you do on the take that you can’t take back, the things that make the song–”it’s the notes you don’t play,” after all. He posed on the single cover with his best Boris Karloff eyes, wore a cape on stage to solidify the persona the song built for him and danced around with plastic skeletons. This is a man that wrote a song called “Constipation Blues.” Bill Crandall of Rolling Stone called Hawkins “the Original Shock Rocker” for this performance in his obituary in 2000.
It’s possible then that the song, “Lay Down in the Tall Grass,” is an homage or a treatment of the rhythm and macabre themes of the Hawkins original. The series of connections that resulted from a shift in volume brought the song out in a different light and, whether or not Kirk’s appreciation of the original was intentional, it does bring in to play the “funness” of all of this tongue-in-cheek musical referencing. To appropriate the position or tone of a guitar solo from one song and the spookyscary rhythm of another, Kirk must have an ear for composition. Or familiarity.
Whether this song was written from familiarity and ironic reference, or a series of organ bursts and guitar twangs and lyrics about graves can only be answered by the composer; but its position in history places it at the mercy of critics that will constantly compare it to the vast pool of “other songs.” Myself included, this brief but dense series of neural firings had all but completely coloured my opinion of the song until the stepping rhythm I was forced into up the stairs of the subway mimicked the back-and-forth plodding of the tune. Bum-bum-bum-bum-babum-babum-babum, making me feel like a funny cartoon elephant or A&W bear. And while the song does fit into a trend of quiet, folksy indie pop rock, its spooky roots point to two very enjoyable songs, made enjoyable by playful rhythms and onstage antics. If the critics and myself state that it may be wrong to criticize something for being “elitist” and having fun with something forgotten, is the thing he creates automatically no fun? Or is it possible that we can allow the entertainment value of one thing to bleed into another and enjoy it on the same principles, even if there’s no snorting?
I rate this moment: 3 out of 5, for being brief but interesting and giving me a temporarily altered perspective on the godawful term “indie rock,” but still leaving me with little hope for irony music, as the conclusions I reached at the end are more “further thinking points” than “conclusive salvage material for popular music.”
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Tags: essay, music, non-fiction, review