Caught in the Carousel

Grand Archives

The Grand Archives
Sub Pop

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It is something I have never done before. Working on really difficult four-part harmonies, trying to get them down in the studio and trying to get them just right on stage. It is a little more ambitious, I guess. Whereas, with former projects, I could just hit one note and then murmur some sad shit about a girl and call it a day. And kids will eat it up because who doesn't like to hear sad shit about a girl.

—Mat Brooke of Grand Archives

You will reach an age when the past amazes you as much as the present.

—J.P. Donleavy. The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B.

Mat Brooke's new project, Grand Archives, is a rainy chamber pop quintet. While much of the recent press likens the band to the soft rock created in Southern California in the early 1970's (The Stranger, The Seattle Times), Grand Archives crafts a far moodier and atmospheric sound on their Sub Pop debut, The Grand Archives. While the harmonies are lovely and lilting, the album's sound takes more from the Beach Boys, Blur, Burt Bacharach, the Dream Academy, Kevin Tihista and U2, particularly The Unforgettable Fire, than it does from CSNY or Joni Mitchell (for an album steeped in these sort of references, visit last year's outstanding eponymous debut from Low Stars). The Grand Archives, released on February 19th, is a West Coast album, certainly, but its sound is damp and cool, far north of the sound of Los Angeles. Imagine a Belle & Sebastian album recorded in Seattle, with assistance from Badly Drawn Boy.

The Grand Archives is a lush record, bolstered throughout with strings and horns, pedal steel and harmonica - instrumental "Breezy No Breezy" even flirts with dub. "We wanted to mess around with as many unorthodox instruments and sounds as we could," Brooke says. "At one point, we put a mic on a ukulele and played it through every effects pedal in the place."

Brooke was one of the core members of Seattle legends Band of Horses, whose debut CD - which Brooke helped write - has sold more than 75,000 copies to date. Brooke left Band of Horses shortly after the completion of the album and opened a bar, the Redwood, on Seattle's Capital Hill. After his work with Band of Horses and his tenure, prior to Band of Horses, in Carissa's Weird, it seemed Brooke wanted to spend more time behind the bar than onstage or in the studio. A short time later, however, Brooke's friend and future Grand Archives bass player, Jeff Montano (The New Mexicans), introduced Brooke to drummer Curtis Hall (The Jeunes), and the band, with Thomas Wright on guitar, recorded its first demo. Ron Lewis joined the band prior to last summer, when Grand Archives recorded The Grand Archives in Seattle with producer Ben Kersten.

There's little sad shit about girls here, but perhaps Brooke is navigating a broader, more existential sadness. The album's lyrics are elegiac, often lamenting the temps perdu of youth, the sense of loss and displacement that often accompanies adulthood and its concomitant awareness of mortality. On "Torn Blue Foam Couch," Brooke sings, "…doing the best we knew how on a torn blue foam couch, as brave as we were those days." On "Miniature Birds," Brooke sings, "I could have at least been a little wiser so long, long, such a long way to go," then, "I remember hours scraped away hospital blue point off the wall, like it would take forever." On "Swan Matches," the concept of forever seems as if, long ago, it had been tangible to the singer: "Lighting those swan matches to see just how long they'd take to burn out, like they could burn forever…how that cricket talked all night, like he could talk forever."

The next song, "Index Moon," sounds a bit like Blur's "The Universal." Brooke again returns to a time when time seemed endless: "…we all get left aside sometimes when time was all we had." In "George Kaminski," time is an altogether different concern than it is for the narrators in Brooke's other, more nostalgic, wistful compositions. According to an article published in the Washington Post on St. Patrick's Day 2005, "A Little Irish Luck Goes a Long Way," by Mary Jordan, Kaminski was, as of 2005, the record holder for the world's largest collection of four leaf clovers. Sentenced to 25 years for kidnapping, Kaminski "…started finding the clovers to show a younger inmate who was depressed that 'you can do anything you set your mind to'…He found them, one at a time, hidden in the grass of prison yards." Brooke, as Kaminski, sings: "I've done alright for myself this time around given the weight of the time…I've got these four leaves and walls." Left aside, rather than behind, time is all Kaminski has, and its weight is far different here than it is in most of the other compositions on The Grand Archives.

"Sleepdriving," arriving toward the end of the record, is the album's quiet, majestic centerpiece. Reminiscent of Radiohead's "Karma Police," it's the saddest shit about a girl on The Grand Archives and its most beautiful lyric, again a backwards, regretful look: "As through your window I stared out and saw someday we'll be too old…mirrors and smoke, yesterday's clothes, I'm sleepdriving away." It's Grand Archives' "Stolen Car." As Donleavy writes in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, "One is all alone. When you stop somewhere in your life and look at the love spilled from your hands." The song closes with Brooke, attempting to channel Art Garfunkel, singing "roads and roads and wires, sleepdriving, sleepdriving" in a round. It's the loveliest vocal on the record.

"Louis Riel" follows "Sleepdriving." Riel was a Métis, the founder of Manitoba and, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia (www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com), a central figure in the North-West Rebellion in Saskatchewan in 1885. Although Riel and his band of French-speaking, Catholic Métis had succeeded in their armed rebellion in Manitoba in 1870, the penetration of the railroad into Canada's western territories made them accessible to the federal government in Ottawa. The North-West Rebellion failed after two months, and Riel was hanged for treason in November of 1885.

In addition to his political battles, Riel was a devout Catholic who "became obsessed with the idea that his was a religious mission - to establish a new North American Catholicism with Bishop Bourget of Montréal as Pope of the New World. Riel was also a schoolteacher, an American citizen, and a prolific poet and essayist - at the time of his hanging he was writing a novel, Massinahican. He was 41 years old.

"Louis Riel" is one of the briefest songs on The Grand Archives. Brooke sings:

Silver lines are drawn wrapped in golden twine,
I've heard tell of you in ways you would deny.
Hung by a rope where the railroad will surely come by.
I've listened way too long to all your stolen lines,
the railroad soon will own all you've left behind.
Hung by a rope where the railroad will surely come by.
Hang there, all alone.

It's a poignant lyric, and quite sad - whatever Riel accomplished, time itself (in the guise of the Canadian transcontinental railroad) defeated him, as it defeats (or haunts) so many of Brooke's narrators. For further reading, see Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (Drawn & Quarterly Publications, Montréal, 2003).

There are some delightful, upbeat songs on The Grand Archives, including "The Crime Window," a raucous drinking song that starts out in the tune of Belle & Sebastian's "Like Dylan in the Movies," and "Orange Juice," a sunny love song that bounces along as Brooke sings: "If you could believe in all the things that they told you, then you could be leaving with me…You can't conquer a world that's always been good to you, but let's go out and try anyway." It's the sort of song that might have found its way onto an unbearably hopeful, romantic mix tape in an earlier, more innocent era.

But that's pretty much it. Even Pat Lewis's lone contribution, "A Setting Sun," mourns a loss: "I know your ghost is somewhere good. We haven't seen and we'll never know, where summer sleeps and the springtime goes. We only hope it's somewhere good." Perhaps it's best, then, to conclude a discussion of this sadly beautiful record with a quote from Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer, which seems to address its lyrical concerns: "It's not easy, is it, this mortal life." Let's go out and try anyway.

--David Porter