I downloaded Maria Taylor’s “Time Lapse Lifeline” today from eMusic … not my normal style of music, but the lyrics pulled me in, and by the third turn my eyes were wet, staring at a photo of my family.  “Oh, we dreamed of life; it was just like that, just like that … and just like that it’s done.”  I realized that I’m angry, but not so much at any particular person or group of people that I might have thought … not the well-meaning but often misguided church, not the people who see the specks (and logs) in my eyes but miss the logs in their own, not the culture of manipulation and control that seems at times to be systemic around me.  What I'm really angry at is death … not just for myself, but for my family … for my brother, my dad, my mom … all already gone, and in short time my wife, my daughter, my son … and eventually whatever grandchildren I may one day have… I try to peer into the future and see their children, and theirs, and theirs, all of whom will succumb to death. … Then I step back and look up at my vast family tree, all of my forbears stretching back through centuries of time, all fallen in death, all taken after such short lives … some in the strength of youth like my brother, some wrinkled and weak in their final years, but all of them holding a lifetime of dreams, loves, memories, beauty … all these quenched by death. Damn death!

I look at their faces and feel a resolve that I’ve not felt before… Surely to be human is to be able to choose sides, to fight the enemy of love, hope, and beauty.  Yes, I want to side against death. Here is a new motivation for faith that may be stronger than any other I’ve considered … far stronger than any fickle rational basis for belief, stronger even than my yearning for love and beauty to have a significance that transcends the moments in which I experience them. If the man Jesus really was sent into the human family to lead a rebellion against the tyrant Death, then perhaps I should reconsider the call to join him in this resistance movement. Assuming, of course, that the call is still there for me. (Many of you know I was once a christian believer but have been agnostic for several years now; forgive me for wearing my spiritual ruminations so visibly on my sleeve here ... I really don't mean to make anyone uncomfortable--I just figure someone else might be able to relate).

I was challenged yesterday by a story I heard on NPR about the women’s movement in

Hey dudes and dudettes, If you haven't yet heard of SoundCloud, it's worth checking into. They've got nice widgets, cool players (with the ability to comment on people's songs at particular points in the song timeline, like at 1:23 or 3:59 or whatever), and customized groups organized around genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and whatever other organizing principle might have come to someone's mind (all groups are user-initiated). I've got the Banging My Head EP up there now ... here's the link to the title track and the free download:

Well, folks, 2009 is shaping up to be a very good year for music. You already know how enamored I was with Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album that in my thinking will hold significance well beyond this current year. Well, now I'm debating within myself whether to take the "album of the year" title away from those beloved Collective guys and award it to a newcomer who has burst onto the still developing 2009 music scene.

Who, you may be asking, has presented Trevor with this unexpected mental dilemma? Ah, Trevor will tell you: that wily DM Stith with his hauntingly brilliant "Heavy Ghost."  The album is a masterpiece centered on the thought lives of our unseen ephemeral companions, who, it turns out, are loaded with much the same psychological baggage that us on the more ... um ... substantial end of things wrestle with. Who would have guessed, for example, that a ghost might be afraid to sleep without the lights on? There's a wealth of lyrical material in this album that I haven't yet been able to digest and that no doubt will keep me preoccupied for many months of listening, but that fact aside, the musical compositions on this album are strikingly complex and beautiful. The songs are elegantly mixed, with piano, plucked guitar, and occasional hints of organ/synthesizer woven in subtle textures around a variety of percussive elements, including home-grown claps and other unidentified sounds.

The emotive background that holds the entire album together, however, is the absolutely stunning vocals: not only Stith's plaintive lead, but the multitudinous ghosts of Stith that back him up in every song, a swirling host of phantoms left and right and beyond, so present that you can almost feel them breathing down your neck as they moan and wail their way through the album. These ghosts sway arm-in-arm between the almost tribal rhythms of "Creekmouth," they walk mysteriously backwards through our consciousness in "Spirit Parade," they seems to dance round the fire in "Thanksgiving Moon," and for one breathtaking minute they sweep in and overwhelm Stith's acoustic stage entirely at the end of "Pigs." The complex vocal layering and subtle mixing is really a thing of beauty, making every song on the album a keeper. One of my favorites in terms of emotional resonance is "Fire of Birds," in which a couple parted by death reaches between the worlds to share a dance in the garden. The highlight of the album, however, may be the pair "GMS" and "Braid of Voices," which builds to a climactic refrain that I find strangely moving.

So, here I am paralyzed with the decision, should "Heavy Ghost" bump "MPP" or should I let the Collective retain their title?  Will it be DM's spectral shades or the AC's psychedelic synths? Stith and his spirits or the trippy trio?

Help me out if you can. Listen to them both and give me your opinion.

Oh, I nearly forgot to award an honorable mentions for 2009 thus far: Elvis Perkins in Dearland. It's a hard-to-describe blend of americana, rhythmic neo-folk, and alt-country. Very well done. My favorite song is the delightfully rowdy "Doomsday," in which Elvis P. proclaims "I don't plan to die, nor should you!" Very well done.