The Lumineers by The Lumineers
… kind of like myself around Christmas, actually. Alas, I was a bit of a Satan Claus this last Winterholiday. While others were busy “giving back to their communities” by one self-congratulating random act of kindness or another, I was totally wasting my days away watching the same Lindsey Stirling videos for the fifth time, hoping for some new secret to materialize that I hadn’t picked up on before. In the end, the only significant act of givingback I performed that season besides writing this blog was to buy my family a lame album by this virtually anonymous trio called the Lumineers. Imagine the depths of their disappointment when they first laid eyes on this perplexingly simple B&W cover and later laid ears on the even more aggravatingly simple music within it. It really served them right: if not for their outstanding naughtiness in 2013, maybe they would have received some real music by Lorde, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or any of today’s more acclaimed electropop icons. Something with bass, brass, sex, and sizzle. Instead they got this old-timey, eccentrically unidentifiable coffee house material… with guitars, and clapping, and a cello, and real voices, and stories.
… kind of like myself around Christmas, actually. Alas, I was a bit of a Satan Claus this last Winterholiday. While others were busy “giving back to their communities” by one self-congratulating random act of kindness or another, I was totally wasting my days away watching the same Lindsey Stirling videos for the fifth time, hoping for some new secret to materialize that I hadn’t picked up on before. In the end, the only significant act of givingback I performed that season besides writing this blog was to buy my family a lame album by this virtually anonymous trio called the Lumineers. Imagine the depths of their disappointment when they first laid eyes on this perplexingly simple B&W cover and later laid ears on the even more aggravatingly simple music within it. It really served them right: if not for their outstanding naughtiness in 2013, maybe they would have received some real music by Lorde, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or any of today’s more acclaimed electropop icons. Something with bass, brass, sex, and sizzle. Instead they got this old-timey, eccentrically unidentifiable coffee house material… with guitars, and clapping, and a cello, and real voices, and stories.
This is likely the leading cause of the Lumineers’ success, that their lyrics convey characters, conflicts, and emotions which feel substantive and real while also being irresistibly singalongable. None of their compositions are especially intricate in their production or difficult in practice, as co-writer and -founder Jeremiah Fraites has stated that, “Anyone who can play an instrument can play a Lumineers song,” and lead singer Wesley Schultz has averred that the three original members are truly “minimalists at heart”. “We always just hated clutter. If there’s a sound on the record, it’s meant to be there.” Nor could anyone be blamed for misconstruing their first CD as a live concert album, as the recordings sound more or less exactly the same as the band would play them at a show, with nary a programming touch superposed over the small instrument set. Rather than emphasizing volume or arrangement as the selling point of their music, the group concentrates on vivid narration through the stirring vocal delivery of monologues both dramatic and spirited. Of what do they sing? Pretty much everything: love young and love tested, WW2 paranoia, Vietnam, flapper girls, and, most amusingly, even proper barroom etiquette. Listening to the Lumineers feels much like taking a time machine through the 20th century; while the album encompasses numerous periods and mainstay figures of American culture, Schultz and Fraites rarely inject their own relationships or experiences into the tracks, which is surprising given the sheer perseverance and daring both showed to secure a foothold in the industry, leaving New York for Denver with just the clothes on their backs and a van full of instruments and playing weekly open-mic gigs on top of their day-jobs until getting picked up by studio managers on a Youtube video of their best-selling single Ho Hey. Not ones for obtrusive self-indulgence, they set themselves apart not by mining personal anecdotes for rhymes, something any wannabe poet can do, but by crafting engaging, usually concentrated stories which rely on strong visuals and simple truths relatable not just to the author but to the listener as well.
It’s an uncommon album in the modern age where you really have to carefully chew on the words to fully appreciate the beauty of the music. The fleeting opener Flowers In Your Hair seems at first glance to be but another cheery love song on an album with a chorus vaguely mirroring that of Ho Hey. It’s indubitably cheery, and certainly a story of love, but the lyrical content delves much deeper than that simplification gives it credit. Short of being dark or downbeat and through a remarkable compression of ideas, the song muses on both the uplifting and corrupting aspects of human passion and the consequences deriving thereof when young people pursue it in folly, concluding pithily that “it’s a long road to wisdom but a short one to being ignored”. The piano- and drum-driven Submarines uses the predicament of a man who witnesses Japanese vessels and can’t persuade anyone of his sightings as a kind of a humorous representative of all those who feel as though their cautionary appeals are merely screaming into the wind, vain and fruitless attempts to impress inconvenient facts upon unheeding ears, like trying to make an internationally indifferent, part-time homeschool judge care about the unchecked flow of deadly meth and coke into the United States by narco su– well, you get it. Stubborn Love, which features probably the most powerful interplay of Neyla Pekarek’s cello and Schultz’ acoustic guitar on the record, has just as powerful a message about standing by the ones you hold dear and committing the fullness of yourself to them even when they’ve wounded you. “She’ll tear a hole in you, the one you can’t repair / but I still love her – I don’t even care… It’s better to feel pain, than nothing at all. The opposite of love’s indifference.”
The occasionally weighty themes of the tracks are complemented by Schultz’ raw and untouched vocals, which could for all intents and purposes have been captured in whatever room one’s listening from and retain the same quality. He has a bit of drawl to his voice which sometimes obscures the exact lyrics, but he never mispronounces words to create rhymes or egregiously compounds syllables to fill up time in a line (not one of the devi-i-i-ices on this album). The sparseness of the instrumental selection always makes the lyrical content the focus of the music, inviting audiences to chime along rather than just listen passively.
The occasionally weighty themes of the tracks are complemented by Schultz’ raw and untouched vocals, which could for all intents and purposes have been captured in whatever room one’s listening from and retain the same quality. He has a bit of drawl to his voice which sometimes obscures the exact lyrics, but he never mispronounces words to create rhymes or egregiously compounds syllables to fill up time in a line (not one of the devi-i-i-ices on this album). The sparseness of the instrumental selection always makes the lyrical content the focus of the music, inviting audiences to chime along rather than just listen passively.
I can’t recommend The Lumineers by the Lumineers strongly enough. Whether one sees them as relics of a lost golden age or harbingers of a coming renaissance, they harken back to a time when composing strong narratives meant more to artists than generating a catchy, radio-ready beat. The cynical among us like to mope that real music is in its dying phase, progressively usurped and extinguished by electronically aided screaming, vapid lyrics, and wannabe tough-guy rappers. The Lumineers, they say, are a dead sea, no longer relevant in the era of a president who lionizes the talent of Jay-z, Beyonce, and Ludacris. That much is true. The Lumineers are a dead sea, lifting our souls above the crashing, soulless tides and thundering noise of popular music, keeping American culture from finally sinking into the Laurentian Abyss and leaving no evidence of its former glory. Maybe they were born to be a dead sea.
The Civil Wars by The Civil Wars
Besides pricing that’s 50-100% inflated above retail value, one of the many downsides to shopping for music at Barnes&Noble instead of a legitimate record store (something that’s been so nearly hunted to extinction by digital downloads that schools could practically spin a field trip out of visiting one) is its stockers’ abject incompetence at accurately recognizing and predictably classifying basic genres. For example, while The Civil Wars by the Civil Wars is located amongst the pop/rock CDs, a branch to which it most certainly doesn’t belong, Taylor Swift’s deliciously poppy Red is stereotypically relegated to the country music aisle despite the former group’s much more prominent country influence.
The Civil Wars by The Civil Wars
Besides pricing that’s 50-100% inflated above retail value, one of the many downsides to shopping for music at Barnes&Noble instead of a legitimate record store (something that’s been so nearly hunted to extinction by digital downloads that schools could practically spin a field trip out of visiting one) is its stockers’ abject incompetence at accurately recognizing and predictably classifying basic genres. For example, while The Civil Wars by the Civil Wars is located amongst the pop/rock CDs, a branch to which it most certainly doesn’t belong, Taylor Swift’s deliciously poppy Red is stereotypically relegated to the country music aisle despite the former group’s much more prominent country influence.
Part 2 with reviews of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran will be posted shortly.
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