Silver Ladders, Sunny

 

My first impulse to connect with music is with the lyrics. My brain is wired for symbols (i.e. words). Instrumental music thus typically falls into "background" or "ambiance" play. Set it and forget it. And so to really chew on lyric-less music like this I require a different mental pathway.

I'm reminded of a DFW quote: "...But I think it's true that here in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile—and I don't mean hostile like angry—just, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen, to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand, because—well, there are a lot of reasons—but particularly now in the computer and internet culture everything's so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes, that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know, that can live without any kind of stimulation."

I think he describes me pretty well. But why my hostility? It's still pop music, I think, rather than some nuevo-classical-experimental-whatever. The normal sweetness of pop music with its clever rhymes and addictive beats is a sort of learned stim not found here. I don't think Lattimore is trying to be hostile to the audience like Michael Haneke or anything, but not having lyrics or the usual 1-2-1-3-1(-1-1-1) is enough to throw me off kilter. And then there is something in the Harp, different enough from the normal guitar-bass-drum(machine), yet familiar with it's connotations of Heaven, to throw even further.

For me, music typically goes from words to thoughts to emotions to thoughts to words again, which I then post here so people can roll their eyes. In Silver Ladders, most of that's cut out. Yet I am not without emotion? I can tell you that "Pine Trees" makes me feel "nostalgia" for some je ne sais quoi. Or that "Don't Look" "overwhelms" and "flattens" me before "Thirty Tulips" brings me back and "revives." Or that "Til A Mermaid Drags You Under" continually "haunts" me, listen after listen.

Without the anchor of words, it makes it harder to know if what I'm saying has any purchase to anyone else. No one on Silver Ladders is singing about Xmas, or Saturday night, or police brutality. But, the more I thought about it over the week, the more I realize that's not unique. Sure, my mind craves lyrics, but it's not uncommon to just get caught on a chorus. It's also not uncommon for me to totally miss what the lyrics are saying with the music way out front ("Hey Ya" and "MMMBop" quickly come to mind, though I'm sure there are better examples).

So then, what Lattimore is singing about is already inside. Which means no one can be wrong writing about it because there's no solid fulcrum to judge upon. But then, of course, this is likely always true, for all good music and other art, even if my mind normally gets in the way and needs a gentle reminder.

The visual score mentioned in the article Joe linked invokes this too. "Visual score" is right. Unlike the normal mode, the visuals are the background to the sound. But the funny trick of this is in going around town listening to the album over and over—our world is a visual score. Flocks of birds flying round and round seemingly nothing. A truck fully engulfed in flames. Every color of light in the dusk sky. Or a plastic bag in the wind, shamelessly ripping off American Beauty.

I doubt this is the best or worst instrumental album, as I have few to compare to, but it's quite good and quite enjoyable. And certainly it's not the best or worst album from RC, but much like Go Go Diva, I appreciate something orthogonal to the norm, as how else will we expand our music palettes? And I like that just as I can enjoy poem without sound, I can enjoy sound without word.