The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
When I finished college, I had six figures of debt, an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and a physical binder full of student newspaper clips I was certain would secure my professional future.1
I’m reasonably sure nothing in those three-ringed confines was as accomplished as Surprise Wish, the second album Zachary James has made under the name Dari Bay.2
Surprise Wish, which came together as James wrapped up college,3 is an agreeable riff-centric slab of slacker rock dappled with flecks of Midwest emo. The emo bits come into focus when acoustic guitar or James’ upper register manage to take suction-cup steps atop thrumming electric guitar gloop that provides the LP’s foundation. These moments add extra tunefulness and a sincerity to an album that mostly works within a genre known for ironic detachment.
The slacker rock piece of the equation is self-evident. Sludgy riffs ebb and flow leisurely throughout, giving songs a steady but far-from-frantic drive. Record scratching charmingly, but perhaps regrettably, appears on multiple songs.4 Listeners can expect ample reason to bob their heads but zero occasions for headbanging across Surprise Wish’s nine songs. Even “The Joke,” which stands as a self-contained Maladroit amid the rest of the album’s Blue Album-plus-Benadryl intensity,5 doesn’t quite cross that threshold. It features fun moments of dive-bombing noise but also includes lyrics about being the last person at a party, feeling lost and lonely and, crucially, taking a big hit and getting too high.
While there isn’t drastic variance in tempo among songs, James does find ways to set tracks apart. “Chevy” includes muted twinkling in its opening moments that sounds like hearing “Love is Greed” by Passion Pit drifting through a vent.6 “How Can You Tell” has a distinctive low end thanks to a guest bassist.7 “We’re Going to Be OK” evokes optimism as James produces quivering high notes with his voice and guitar. “Finder,” which opens the album, starts soft before growing louder and layered. The end result sounds a bit muddled, but the attempt to establish a majestic tone to get the album in motion is appreciated.
It’s also a handy analog to the album as a whole. Surprise Wish is a well-intentioned, reasonably well-executed album that is inoffensive even when it stumbles. It’s not an LP that anyone should reasonably expect to set the world on fire, but it’s a well-made throwback with several good songs and zero outright bad ones.
That praise is somewhat faint, but it’s sincerely meant to be praise. It also doesn’t diminish how impressive it is that Surprise Wish is essentially the work of a one-man band, self-produced and made up of songs that came together with a collegiate graduation still looming. It’s a backstory that suggests that, as solid as Dari Bay is now, James’ best music is probably ahead of him.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Superstore, Season One, Episode Four, “Mannequin”
“Not getting used to standing all day.”
“That’s not a problem for me.”
“I didn’t set out to have a baby. It came from sex.”
“Jonah, I’d prefer if you didn’t offer rides for employees to the abortion the clinic.”
“I’m Jonah! I like to eat croissants!”
“Is – is that something I’d say?”
“I already lactate as a side effect of a fungal medication I’ve been taking.”
“Cool.”
“Not cool. It’s quite disgusting actually.”
“I hope your cat has a wonderful birthday.”
“I could do the work assignments. Or I could finish my mac and cheese. I wonder what I’ll do.”
“Okay, first question: are you a pedophile?”
“Boy or girl?”
“That was good, write – write that down.”
“Well, then, I completely understand why you are attaching a shark to the leg of a mannequin.”
I enjoy Garret as the comic foil. In this case, the guy who cares about neither his job nor what people think of him. Billings but in a low-key situation. It means we’re seeing the least important part of his day.
I also enjoy that Beau comes off as the sanest one in the room for the length of a scene. My partner saw me writing that over my shoulder and remarked that, for a pair of fairly clownish comedy characters, they’re also fairly clear-eyed about what they want and how they go about it.
“So this whole day was a waste of my time then.”
*Bo (this will eventually become relevant, if only for a couple of gags about his name)
Widow’s Bay, “Seasickness”
Now that’s what I’m talking about. This is a banger of an episode, with comedy (Tom’s reaction to learning the exhumed and still-living Warren is upstairs, for one thing), horror (superb atmosphere out on the ocean + Wyck’s tale), and ownage that also serves as character connection (Tom’s quick thinking on giving Wyck the life preserver and kicking him free of the boat is cool as fuck; Patricia stealing the cop car to keep Clemmons away is the kind of total commitment even to the cost of major embarrassment that this show has thrived on; in both cases, they wind up further bonding with the people that they’re with).
“I want to see my children’s things.” Linklater is somehow incredibly sad, scary, and then funny during the “fuck you” scene.
Elementary, “End of Watch” – A cop is shot, and before he can receive the proper funeral for a cop killed in the line of duty, it turns out he was helping a gunrunner to steal from the armory in the Bronx. And then another cop is murdered, and this is actually a scheme to make sure the armory is undermanned so the gun runner can conduct a raid. A very clever plan built around the rituals of the NYPD, but you don’t kill cops and not have the NYPD come down on you. But Sherlock was slow in putting the pieces together because he was disturbed by someone else in his support group posted his words of wisdom online without his permission. That seems like an almost comic situation, but it’s handled with elegance and grace to show how much Sherlock values the privacy groups like AA offer.
This one is about as close to CBS levels of copaganda as the show gets, but the presence of a corrupt cop dials it back just a bit, temporarily. And then two days after this aired, two NYPD officers were killed in an ambush similar to the one shown when the second fictional cop dies. So this episode, juxtaposed against the real world and a moment when I felt more sympathy for the police than usual, stuck in my head.
The Twilight Zone, “Perchance to Dream” – Charles Beaumont’s first script for the show is good but not great. More to come.
Special mention: Paraguay vs Germany – I have not been watching the World Cup, since my reception is not great, but listening to a radio simulcast, which has the strange effect of making boring games sound better than they are. That happened yesterday, as this game was apparently a slog until Germany’s disallowed goal. But happily, the broadcast team did the shootout justice. (Rule of thumb: British talking heads are better than American ones.)
My wife’s been watching a lot of the World Cup, and the end of the Paraguay-Germany game definitely seemed like a highlight. Penalty kicks are nail-biters for her, but the payoff was a lot of ecstatic celebration.
PKs are exciting, but also I feel a bad way to determine games, seeing as how they remove most of the skill of the game. But since the “Golden Goal” idea sadly failed, this was what we are stuck with.
I watched the highlights of this match and the Morocco vs Netherlands one this morning, since they both occurred late night here. The penalty shootouts in both were very dramatic! And the German disallowed goal felt a little dubious to me, although they played pretty badly and didn’t really deserve to win anyway. The Morocco game seems like it would’ve been a genuinely great one to catch live, but alas, it was on at 2am in the UK, haha.
So much of the world is sleep deprived right now.
The Last Viking – dark Danish comedy-drama about two brothers: One of them has stolen a large amount of money and served a hefty jail sentence for it, and the other is Mads Mikkelsen, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder and is also the only person who knows where the money is hidden. The only way to recover the money appears to be allowing him to keep up his belief that he is, in fact, John Lennon – meanwhile, another member of the gang is after the money, and a psychiatrist proposes an unusual solution to the dilemma. This is not a film with a nuanced portrayal of mental illness, but it’s absurd enough to mostly get away with it. I’ve seen one previous film from this director-star pairing, “Men & Chicken”, and that one is another dysfunctional-family dark comedy but it went a bit too far into “desperate to offend” for my tastes. This one walks the line a bit more effectively and I had a really good time with it.
Now does Mads do a John impression? Because that sounds fun.
Heh, not exactly. But there is some very fun music stuff. Not all of it Beatles related!
Two especially nasty Tales From The Crypters from S2, “Television Terror” and “My Brother’s Keeper.” The former is basically Ghostwatch and Last Night With The Devil in miniature but not as strong, even referencing Geraldo Riviera’s vault incident with the sleazy TV host clearly based on him and maybe Robert Stack. Good ending. “My Brother’s Keeper” is a lot of fun, playing the Chang and Ang conjoined twin angle for sheer horror and over the top awfulness. It’s the kind of show where when someone gets stabbed, the blood is EVERYWHERE. Jessica Harper appears here and this is likely the only time where I’ll have seen an episode having directly talked to one of the cast members (went to a Suspiria screening featuring her at a Q&A, she came across as a cool older pro and likably self-deprecating).
What did we listen to?
Comes A Time, Neil Young
Much more country and soft than his previous albums. It’s funny to me that a guy with such an abrasive voice and taste for weird lyrics as Young also goes out of his way to make his music lush and beautiful and gentle; I prefer his weirder and more rocking shit.
… And Justice For All, Metallica
Back on exploring Metallica after, what, six or seven years? Anyway, this definitely feels like them trying to find the maximum nuance within the smallest parameters; still not my thing but I see the appeal – I like “One” the best and that’s the one that gets furthest out of those parameters.
This Metallica album is looming over the next page in my 1001 book and I’m dreading it a bit. I find them so relentlessly grey and unappealing, metal without the goofy horror-movie theatrics is a real struggle for me. Will try to keep an open mind though as I don’t think I’m familiar with much from this particular album.
If it helps, I liked it more than the previous Metallica I’ve tried.
The season finale of Hoax! probes the curious case of Jussie Smollet. No one involved with this comes out looking good, and the hosts work very hard to be even-handed but it’s not easy.
And I just cannot muster the energy for three hour long Blank Checks right now.
1001 Albums, etc.
Living Colour – Vivid: found the production on this really offputting, it’s pretty solid hard rock otherwise but it feels like every guitar has 10 effects layered on top of it and the result is really muddy and unappealing.
Mudhoney – Superfuzz Bigmuff: 600+ albums into the list and they suddenly decide an EP is eligible? Baffling decision, although I enjoyed the music a lot. I only really knew “Touch Me I’m Sick” from these guys but this EP (which was the immediate followup to that single) has a lot of fuzzy, scrappy appeal without too much of the weary angst that put me off a lot of later grunge stuff.
REM – Green: the one album from this batch that I’d heard before, it’s not a top-tier REM record for me although I’m generally fond of most of their stuff and there are some great tracks on this one. I’m particularly fond of the apocalyptic vibes of “I Remember California”.
Happy Mondays – Bummed: a band I’ve never really warmed to enough to listen to a full album before. I was pretty neutral on this overall, it’s not as annoying as I thought it might be as a bit of a Shaun Ryder skeptic, but it didn’t make much of a positive impression either.
The Go-Betweens – 16 Lovers Lane: a very pleasant band. I’ve spent some time with their best-of and also their 2000 comeback album in the past but don’t think I’d heard this one in full. It has The Hit (“Streets of Your Town”) and everything else was consistently enjoyable, but maintained the streak of them being a band I always enjoy but never quite love.
Cowboy Junkies – The Trinity Session: never really encountered these before and really enjoyed this album, which the book describes as alt-country but I found more interesting as an early slowcore record – there’s a few tracks here that sound quite a bit like Low, who I love very much indeed. Other parts are admittedly more country-leaning but I enjoyed the whole thing and will definitely return to this one.
Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman: enjoyed the familiar singles but found the rest of the album a little disappointing, although maybe other tracks would grow on me. Sweet melodies but maybe a little too soft around the edges?
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New album that has grabbed me the most this month is “Where is my Mice?” by The Three Mice, a Chinese band who fall somewhere between indie pop, shoegaze and emo. An interesting mix of sweet melodies, dreamy and fuzzy guitars, and occasional full-throated screaming. https://thethreemice.bandcamp.com/album/where-is-my-mice
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Slowly working through the Disclosure Day episode of Blank Check, surprised Griffin and David are so into this as it seemed like a real mess to me, but at least Marie and Ben are offering some dissent.
Finished the third part of the Screen Drafts Robert Altman megadraft. Truly an epic endeavour. I have so many blind spots for this guy but I guess I should be focusing on the films they haven’t reached yet, since we’re not even into the top ten yet…
I hadn’t realized the vast number of Altman blind spots I had before this draft!
Podcasts: Really good episode from Weird Studies on Alien. Monster Talk had an episode on Lizzie Borden and I’d forgotten some of the details though I’d read a Rick Geary book on the subject. (She did it right? It seems so unlikely that she wasn’t guilty.)
Hairspray The Original Broadway Cast Recording which is unironically awesome (while being itself very ironic and pastiche-y), especially the magnificence of “You Can’t Stop The Beat.”
Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 1, extremely cool; where else could you really go with rock after this except Loveless?
I checked this one out last week and enjoyed it a lot, this kind of fuzzy power-pop-leaning slacker punk is generally my jam.