MISC. WORLD for 6/23/99
The Romantic and the Ethereal
YESTERDAY, WE BRIEFLY MENTIONED potential musical role models for sensitive hetero males. My idea of such might start with the current crop of romantic troubadors, many of them from around here.
We've already talked about one of my faves, Green Pajamas frontman Jeff Kelly. Much like the now-discovered ex-Portlander Elliott Smith, Kelly makes hauntingly beautiful ballads of desire and loss. He uses intelligence to express beauty, makes pain sound pleasurable, and conveys the risks and losses of love and of the search for love as being troublesome but also important and necessary for the fully-lived life.
A similar tack is taken from a most unlikely source, former Pure Joy/Flop power-popper Rusty Willoughby. On his self-titled, self-released solo debut, Willoughby proves himself as perfectly capable of the wistful remembrance and the tender glance as he is of the peppy cynicism for which he's better known. This short, nine-song disc probably won't bring Willoughby the renown he's long deserved, but it's still a gorgeous little suite of some of the best rainy-afternoon music you could ever hope to hear on a too-hot summer evening.
Marc Olsen, long ago in the combo Sage, has been known for several years now as a solo ballad-rocker of uncommon depth and insight. His newest release, Didn't Ever... Hasn't Since, shows him re-integrating some of his former band's careful sense of strength-in-reserve. His new disc rocks louder than his last one, but that doesn't make the work any less "sensitive." Rather, the counterpointing of passionate parts and delicate parts enhances the beauty and delicacy of the whole. Olsen's clearly a man who knows you can love women without hating yourself (indeed, you can only truly love another if you at least like yourself).
On another level, and in spite of (or rather enhanced by) its rockin'-er moments, Olsen's disc is also an achingly-gorgeous work of what was known a few years ago as "ambient" listening, before that term became exclusively applied to big-beat electronica.
One of Seattle's longtime champions of ambientness, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Greinke, has now teamed up with Sky Cries Mary frontwoman Anisa Romero on Hana. While Greinke plays most of the instruments, Romero's a lot more than a studio singer here. Her compositional influence lifts Greinke from the skilled spaciness of much of his work, into something closer to the ethereal lilts of the early 4AD Records gang (while maintaining his own trademark of seemingly structureless structure). There are no "songs" here, unlike SCM's own works. Think of Hana as a single 50-minute work in eight seamlessly-connected parts. Also think of it as perfect soundtrack music to a black-and-white, expressionistic heaven-and-hell movie playing exclusively in your head.
IN OTHER LOCAL MUSIC NEWS: Management at the 3rd & Pine downtown McDonald's has started piping old-country music tapes outside. The idea, like the years-old idea of loudly playing easy-listening music outside convenience stores, is to make the joint's outside less attractive as a hangout for aimless youth.
UPDATE: The Dutch magazine writer I mentioned in Tuesday's report emailed the following addition on Tuesday evening: "I never said that women are 'too politically correct'. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women's role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site."
Tomorrow: A visual-art zine with no pictures; plus Starbucks' in-store mag Joe.
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