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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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The Grand Archives
Keep In Mind Frankenstein
Sub Pop Records
Monsterpieces
Where should we be if no one tried to find out what lies beyond? Have you never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud? And what changes the darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things, what eternity is, for example, I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy.
—From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1931
Imagine building your own musical monster from bits and pieces of August & Everything After, Blonde on Blonde, The Boy With the Arab Strap, Dummy, I Am the Cosmos, The Lonely Bull, Look Around, Overcome by Happiness and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Your beast would of course break its shackles, flee your laboratory and ravage the villages of American pop which, Deo gratias, still dot our musical countryside. That beast, in my estimation, was The Grand Archives' Grand Archives, released on Sub Pop in February 2008: (reviewed here)
Ravage is a strong word, perhaps. NME, Rolling Stone and the other heavyweights issued their best of the decade lists as 2009 limped to a close, but Grand Archives dented none of them. NPR called Grand Archives one of the best debut albums of 2008, but that was pretty much it—this is perhaps a sad fact for the band, but it's evidence of a vast field crowded with great records.
Grand Archives is an unsung masterpiece, one of the finest releases of the first decade of yet another hideous century and one of its most ambitious and beautiful. Its breadth, depth and force were surprising, and I wonder if Mat Brooke, founder of The Grand Archives and its chief songwriter, actually startled himself, releasing his Born to Run or Tim right out of the gate. Grand Archives was a monster, in the best sense of the word.
In 1995, Brooke fled the heat of Tucson, AZ for the cool, piney drizzle of Seattle, WA, where he formed Carissa's Wierd with Jenn Ghetto, also of Tucson, and a number of Seattle musicians. Carissa's Wierd disbanded in 2003, and Brooke and band mate Ben Bridwell formed Band of Horses. Brooke left Band of Horses in 2006 after Sub Pop released the band's debut, Everything All the Time, and opened a bar on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Sometime later, 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 recorded its first demo with Thomas Wright on guitar. Grand Archives arrived on Sub Pop in early 2008, followed by Keep in Mind Frankenstein in September 2009. Ghetto and Sera Cahoone, also a former member of Carissa's Wierd, sing backup throughout Keep in Mind Frankenstein, while Jason Kardong, another Seattle stalwart, plays pedal steel on "Oslo Novelist".
Keep in Mind Frankenstein (released on Sub Pop on September 15, 2009) falls into step with work by Nick Drake, Fleet Foxes, the Pernice Brothers, the Velvet Underground & Nico, and Wilco, particularly A Ghost is Born and Sky Blue Sky—like Grand Archives, the album mixes British psychedelia with Southern California country rock. But Keep in Mind Frankenstein floats, whereas Grand Archives drives, and its gentle, pastoral wall of sound is built with papery songs that seem to slip by in a quiet shuffle, eschewing the crescendos of Grand Archives for a ruffle here, a summer breeze there...
Grand Archives creates a far bigger sound than Keep in Mind Frankenstein. Both its music and its lyrics are denser, more forceful and more profound than Keep in Mind Frankenstein. But I don't think Keep in Mind Frankenstein is meant to build on the accomplishment of Grand Archives, nor is it meant to surpass it—it simply underlines that album's excellence without attempting to duplicate its ambitions or its density.
While Grand Archives leaned toward classic rock, Keep in Mind Frankenstein leans away from it, toward Seventies MOR, and it will remind Americans of a certain age of a time when songs like Herb Alpert's "This Guy's in Love With You", Dionne Warwick's "What the World Needs Now" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head"—as sung by B.J. Thomas on the soundtrack to Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid—were on whatever AM radio station your parents played in the car.
If Grand Archives is perfect for driving all night through sleet and darkness, perhaps down a seemingly endless interstate across the Midwest, then Keep in Mind Frankenstein is meant to be played beneath starlight, toward the middle of a lovely and perhaps somewhat haunted summer. The album's sound is reminiscent of the gentle sonic density of Travis, beginning with The Man Who...—its songs are sun showers.
Like so many great American pop bands, The Grand Archives stand in the shadow of the mighty oak of Big Star, but their sonic landscape is shaded more by Chris Bell than by Alex Chilton, and many of the songs on Keep in Mind Frankenstein, much like Bell's work on #1 Record and his solo album, I Am the Cosmos, have the feel of excursions, rather than simple, driving pop songs. They bleed together, and the effect is lovely—the album is simple, elegant and of a piece.
Brooke's lyrics aren't as cohesive or as evocative on Keep in Mind Frankenstein as they are on Grand Archives. More impressionistic than narrative, they seem like journal entries, the kind of spontaneous writing one puts down in a spurt, perhaps on a coaster or a cocktail napkin…they feel like fragments Brooke has stitched together.
The storytelling on Keep in Mind Frankenstein is far blurrier than it is on Grand Archives, and it's far more challenging this time around to find toeholds in Brooke's lyrics. However, Keep in Mind Frankenstein still hovers near the lyrical themes at the core of Grand Archives—the quiet devastation time itself wreaks, the persistence of memory, the broken bits we carry with us.
"Topsy's Revenge," inspired by newsreel footage from 1903 of Thomas Edison electrocuting a rogue Coney Island elephant, includes the lines, "I won't last long now...someday all these lights will burn down on me". Yes, it's rare to find a song sung from the point of view of an elephant executed in public, but Brooke, as he demonstrated with "George Kaminski" and "Louis Riel" on Grand Archives, will crawl inside whatever he needs to in order to tell a story and build a haunting metaphor. His blend of curiosity, imagination and sensitivity makes his lyrics worth more than a once-over.
"Witchy Park/Tomorrow Will Take Care of Itself", evokes America and Cat Stevens, particularly the latter's "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out". The song ends in a round, much like "Sleepdriving", the centerpiece of Grand Archives: "tomorrow will take care and then/it's time to learn the cold again"—it is as lovely and addictive a pop song as I've heard in a long time. "Oslo Novelist", another redolent pop song, features a soaring, echo-laden chorus, which begins, "come tomorrow/this will all be gone".
"Left for All the Strays" is reminiscent of Nico's version of "These Days" and early Simon & Garfunkel. Brooke sings, "all these days, have all gone away...I built it all to be ruined…I wrote it all to erase it…" "Dig That Crazy Grave" is the only purely country track on the album - here Brooke sings, "just the blood and the dust are left in me". "Lazy Bones", a warm few minutes of chamber pop reminiscent of Matthew Sweet's "Your Sweet Voice", from Girlfriend, slides into a quiet noise similar to some of the sonic detouring of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, while "Silver Among the Gold" begins as if in tribute to America's "Ventura Highway". The album closes with "Willoughby", a brief, haunted waltz. "Time was still", Brooke sings, "we had it all, decided that we could be strong, for a while..."
Beautiful, melancholic pop songs have been with us since at least Billie Holiday, and significant practitioners of this particular art form include everyone from Big Star to Lori Carson. Paul Simon is of course a tower upon this particular landscape, and listening to Keep in Mind Frankenstein steered me back to Simon & Garfunkel's "Hazy Shade of Winter". Simon's lyrics seem to offer a concise summary of Mat Brooke's thematic concerns:
Seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won't you stop and remember me
At any convenient time
Funny how my memory slips while looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme
Drinking my vodka and lime
Look around, leaves are brown
There's a patch of snow on the ground...
The Grand Archives recorded both Grand Archives and Keep in Mind Frankenstein at Paradise Sound in Index, WA, near Seattle, with producer Ben Kersten. In addition to Paradise Sound, Index is home to the Bush House Country Inn, which is haunted by the ghost of Annabel, a young woman who hung herself in room 9 after receiving news, later found to be untrue, of the death of her betrothed in an explosion in a nearby mine.
It's a perfect spot for Mat Brooke. The guy builds ghost towns. He must feel right at home.
—David Porter
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