The Steve Reynolds Program - Buzzards and Dreadful Crows
Hello!
I'm one-tenth done! This calls for celebrating by watching another episode of McDonald & Dodds, the very British, very tame mystery series I've started. I think it fits in the cozy mystery subgenre that puts a little shame on enjoying them.
I thought it'd be funny to respond to the gross trend of edgelord comedy by announcing I was the first official cozy comedian. I'll tell jokes with no profanity and, following the rule of cozy mysteries, no traces of bodily fluids on the body. I gotta figure out how to reveal that a joke was my revenge on the constable for taking me out of a will or something like that to keep the kayfabe on the bit. Give me a couple of years to work on this. Thanks!
As usual, here's the list of songs. May your autumn be more cozy than edgelord and may your favorite sports team not collapse in the most spectaular fashion like mine.
Song #10
Buzzards and Dreadful Crows
by Guided by Voices
the lifeBLOOD
the lightHOUSE flashing!
“Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” lasts one minute and forty-three seconds. Vocals kick off the song, The first “the” is a capella with Bob Pollard’s guitar, Dan Toohey’s bass and Fennell’s drums starting along with “life.” Then Pollard sings nonstop until the last thirteen seconds where the band does a fine runthrough of the chorus to the chord you now associate with the one of “the only one.” Bob described it as “Wilson Pickett singing for The Who.” And like Pickett, your attention goes to his vocal workout. It’s invigorating and thrilling.
Now, I didn’t immediately cotton to Guided by Voices. Friends played their album Bee Thousand the summer I returned from a semester in Mexico, almost like a reintroduction to the United States. At first listen, the album seemed too much of a conceit—that sorta British accent Pollard sung polysyllabic words, the retro garage style that would fit right in between two 60's tracks on the old Nuggets comp, and how damn poppy some of the songs were. I distrusted it, thinking it was a calculated move.
I was wrong. Bee Thousand was just a moment, albeit an important one, in the decades-long process of a principal songwriter and musician with a universe of dudes, appearing and disappearing, accompanying him. His story is told better by others (Closer You Are by Matthew Cutter is one hell of a rock bio), but Bee Thousand was the one that got critical mass for the world (at least as much as they’ve ever had) to notice.
Let’s focus on this song, track two on B1000. Described in Closer You Are as “a meditation on human mortality,” with those title avian harbingers of approaching death. In transspecies similization, the birds “wait like cats” for death around them. They always do that, Bob says. Death is a part of life, a part of “this deal” (I misheard this as “the steel” for longer than I care to admit.) We’re all mortal.
Here’s a reason I love Guided by Voices/Pollard. I have had more déjà vu moments listening to their music than any other bands. In this case, the first time I heard sung “a necessary evil, I suppose” I had to stop the tape to try to remember where I heard this before. It was already familiar to me and I still don’t know why. Ten years later. I saw them play a new song on tour, "Girls of Wild Strawberries." Its melody and music already were clearly in my head. I’ve long given up achieving a rational explanation on these and a few other examples of it happening. I guess me and Bob have the same invisible antennas on our heads and he knows how to make the signals they receive palpable, like a song title of his describes it, “Gratification to Concrete.”
That’s why Buzzards gets picked over the five or six other songs I could have picked from this album I’ve played to death. It’s programmed into my head and no, I don’t really think I was the only one.
The pee esses
This week's Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is Bros by Panda Bear. Got reminded of it from listening to his and Sonic Boom's recent album. Highly recommended.
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