Dinner Music 55: The weekly lineup
the western acid trip of your dreams, british psych rock, stripped-bare folk
The albums this week are about stillness. They are full of songs for those moments, sitting on a porch overlooking the sky or driving the highway toward somewhere. There is a certain stillness that exists within movement. A breath in the middle of a song. Watching the numbers tick by as you’re pumping gas. It’s dynamic. It’s something you must notice, otherwise it might only be a moment that passes on by.
We begin with an album defined by a distinct minimal sound: a thorny voice over an oscillating guitar. Despite being a pioneer of folk rock, his work was long exemplified by other people. Neil wrote Everybody’s Talkin', a song made famous by Harry Nilsson and it’s inclusion in the film Midnight Cowboy. Many folk rock descendants, like Joni Mitchell and David Crosby, cite Neil as inspiration. Instead of touring fame, he chose a different life and spent much of his later years woking on the preservation of dolphins. The first song on this album is titled, aptly, Dolphin.
Escalator is a distinctly maximal album firmly placed in the psych rock of the sixties. There is a thing about the psychedelia that affects time — everything seems to move in slow motion, the way your body moves underwater. The lo-fi sound strains your ears, it makes you listen. But, you don’t think. You just hear the way it sounds in your body. You might move. You might thrash. Your mind stays in place.
Renata Zeiguer knows about the nature of the mind. Picnic in the Dark marks a downshift, from thrill to thinking. She uses genre as a tool, from country twang to ambient moodiness, to capture the unease of change. “Do you know what day it is?” she asks, cheekily. But, deeper, there is this: “heaven and hell are a place in your mind.” The quest for something richer, more still, is complicated. This complexity births the beauty of the music.
There is something uncomplicated about Songs From Down the Hall by Kevin Vicalvi, like walking into the grocery store of your childhood. The album builds on the previous ones, takes a little something from each. It’s lo-fi; Vicalvi recorded these himself with the help of friends. It’s full of backyard/basement/bedroom songs made of strong opinions loosely held. It’s about trying stuff out. Doing your best. Seeing what’s next and standing for something.
We end with the best stillness, the kind that only comes from driving down a “wideass highway.” Dougie Poole seems to get this. In 2022, I called this album the “western acid trip of your dreams.” But, it’s also deeper than that. In an interview, Poole posed a question: “How does country, this American tradition of reflective and self-aware music, become complicated by our deepening understanding of the parallel American traditions of violence, theft, and exclusion?” How does it?
Enjoy.
The playlist is here.
Monday
Fred Neil - Fred Neil (1966)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Escalator - Sam Gopal (1969)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Picnic in the Dark - Renata Zeiguer (2022)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
Songs From Down The Hall - Kevin Vicalvi (1974)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
Wideass Highway - Dougie Poole (2017)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with:
White chicken chili. Easy, peasy weeknight food. You could make this semi-fancy by adding labneh or green onion or saffron on top. You could make this very not fancy and make “healthy” sloppy joes. Options abound!
Bianco trebbiano. Chicken and white wine, for fall? How original. Really though, I never tire from pairing Italian whites with anything. They are perfect.
Donald Judd spaces. Judd had a real sense of particularity with his art that rippled through the spaces he occupied. There’s something poignant, almost like a religious haunting, in the stillness of the objects, especially in person.
Woon’s stir fry sauce. Very intrigued by this, mostly because I’m always trying to see if a stir fry sauce can be better than mixing up a sauce yourself.
Hierloom tomato candle. !!!!!
- Jason Shinder
Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.