The word given to me for this week’s “Quarantine Album Pick of the Week” was a bit tougher, especially within the current context of life. The word was “soaring”.
Ah, how we would all love to wake up and open our doors and burst out onto a beautiful morning street without reservation. Alas, we cannot. So this word makes a lot to sense when ascribed to our existing predicament and the natural yearning to be free in the open air. I didn’t take the word soaring in the literal sense, but rather in the figurative way we all desire the simple ability to freely move throughout the day, or freely make decisions, or even the quaint notion of liberation from our homes. In an even more liberal fashion, I take the word to be the freedom to be optimistic, to see around the corner into a future that each and every one of us can control. The word soaring, as well as the reality of quarantine life, reminds me of the famous line from the 1984 documentary film Streetwise. This famous quote has been sampled several times in songs to great effect, including by How to Dress Well in the song “Say My Name or Say Whatever” as well as in The Avalanches song “Zap!”:
“I love to fly. It’s just you’re alone, there’s peace and quiet, nothing around you but clear blue sky. No one to hassle you. No one to tell you where to go or what to do. The only bad part about flying is having to come back down to the fuckin’ world.”
To live above all of this in the clouds without a care for the empty grocery store aisles, the paranoid glances of passer-by on the street, or the constant barrage of social media reminding us of the new reality, is a nice dream. For a few hours a day, either when I get outside to exercise, or when I listen to a couple really good albums consecutively and uninterrupted, do I find myself temporarily in the “fly zone”. To have a bit of carefree time these days is quite lovely, and when you have a literal clear blue sky (like today in Denver), it only amplifies this fleeting bliss. Then we all must come down to the ground, back to this world and what its uncertain future holds. Some of us might actually be craving some hassling by others these days, a bit more attachment and less separation from their family and friends, but there are still some of us that just want to fly with our heads in the sky for however long we can manage.
If I may make a guarantee, it’s that the album pick this week will let you soar for at least its 42:52 running time. It’s actually an eerily appropriate album for these times from the album title to the album artwork to the musical content within. This week’s pick is the masterpiece album by English musician Stephen James Wilkinson, aka Bibio, the aptly titled Ambivalence Avenue from 2009.
I like to think that album cover looks just like most every urban street in the world right now. All the cars are parked on the street, only a casual speckling of people walking along the sidewalks, and maybe a lone walker weaving between cars, untroubled by the prospect of traffic. I’d like to look at that guy on the cover and think he’s stretching his legs for the first time after being on five straight hours of Zoom conference calls, pinned to a chair in a makeshift work from home office within a tiny apartment. Finally he found a gap between virtual meetings to flap his wings, feel the fresh air on his cheek, get a rush of blood back in those limbs. In a sense, that’s soaring in today’s world. And that album cover is today’s world. In some bizarre form, that street image is quarantine life: a vaguely desolate street where everything is either sidelined or moving slowly, with one person just trying their best to replicate what it feels like to be normal.
Oh and that album title….so perfect. If you thought ambivalence was the descriptor for the street, well I’m reappropriating it for our world right now. We are on Ambivalence Avenue. We don’t know how we feel about the current state of affairs (all of us, if we are being honest with ourselves) and we certainly have a waxing and waning feeling about what the future will be like. The landscape, in every sense of the word, is permeated by a feeling of grave uncertainty. Maybe a word with more negative connotations like dubious or suspect would be more fitting, as ambivalence is a word best served bland, but I will say that once you start listening to “Ambivalence Avenue”, the titular opening track with its glittering sun-drenched guitar and stomping affirmations of the percussion and sing-song chorus, you’ll feel a great deal more optimistic about living in a world of ambivalence.
The track comes in gleamingly bright after a short hesitation to begin the album. The melody is unequivocally reassuring, teeming with positivity. I love the lyrics to that first verse:
“In between these white hotels The parallel pavements are peaceful. The fallen leaves from flakey trees That decorate car bonnets. I had this beautiful day-dreaming moment The sun was shining strangely amber. Shouldered by flickering golden-green avenues And city-doves perching on vapour trails. Then we saw from the upper deck Watching ourselves as if seeing our future. Greeted by strangers who seemed to be Good friends and welcomed us…… That’s about then when my dream Began fading out and hearing me. Thoughts of ambivalence.”
That song says so much that can be interpreted to apply to today. These quiet streets seem peaceful, and we a reassured by the consistency of “parallel pavements” in a world seeming to slip into chaos, yet we thirst for a new pattern, a routine to make us forget about what is happening just today. We see strangers now that we want to make more familiar, if not to placate our anxious and suspicious minds. But then, much like the famous quote from Streetwise, that beautiful fleeting daydream on a “golden-green avenue” will eventually dissipate and we are stuck back in reality, post-soar back in the world.
Nearly unanimously, it has been agreed this is Bibio’s finest release out of some ten proper albums. His music has been described as “Folktronica”, for taking elements of Folk and Electronica and melding them into a textural form of music guided by colorful imagery, which can probably be attributed to the effervescent melodies within Wilkinson’s music. It does seem his sound has a unique aesthetic, one that is full of a warm energy created by lacing the more organic sounds of trebly-guitars with electronic/synth sounds that don’t follow a regimented order (the typical doctrine of Electronica and techno is usually a pretty stiff pattern and repetition of sounds). Bibio shuns the typical forms of Electronica, the cold and detached sounds, and focuses on ways to give it a comforting life-like feel. By making an uncanny alliance between acoustic sounds and synthesized sound, Bibio’s music also becomes richer and more variegated, and by these means warm texturely. What Wilkinson creates is something illuminated with a filtered light, like a street at dusk that has both glaringly bright light and shadows. This could be described as something like a wishful fantasy reminding us of those golden days – a beautiful and nostalgic aesthetic. Wilkinson himself has been quoted as saying “Electronic music doesn’t have to be so grid like, it can be elasticated, more human.” That may be what I’m responding to – those human qualities in a Electronic-Folk sound. It certainly feels bright and optimistic in a humanist sort of way. Humanist is a good sentiment here, as adding a soul to the sound or a more human aspect certainly helps us rise up from our current situation and believe that humanity can overcome and be better once this is all past. What’s more, it’s as if the positive affirmations are embedded within the sound, constantly calming us in a warm bath of peacetime reverie.
After “Ambivalence Avenue” there is the funky “Jealous of Roses” and the short pastoral snippet called “All the Flowers”. If you listen to the lyrics of either, you’ll get an uncanny sense of the relevancy to today. Both deal with taking for granted what we have, envying in the barren times, and dwelling on the past or looking too far into the future. The fourth track “Fire Ant”, which can be played above, is an odd pastiche of sound bites and Hip-Hop groove. It’s a strange track for being at once smooth and elegant with its R&B tendencies, and then choppy and unexpected in its beginning and ending. The fifth track “Haikuesque (when she laughs)” doubles-down on the Lo-Fi acoustic sound, washed so much in reverb it seems to hold an unfocused daydream quality. Yet the underlying mood of this song and the following “Sugarette” (which is a far more electronic-based song) is unflinching optimism. Both contain an element or mystery and uncertainty, but also contain a lingering sense of possibility.
“Lovers’ Carvings” is a sweetly melodic opus to love and hope. If there was one song on this album that captures the spirit of the word “soaring” in the context we have given it, it would be “Lovers’ Carvings”. The lilting guitar in the beginning, which breaks into a slowly rising cow-bell and hand-clap foray in the middle of the song, is a sound completely expunged of any ill-will or reservation – it’s all-in for beauty and optimism. Not only is it one of the more well-known Bibio tracks, but it is also one of the finest examples of the sound Wilkinson wanted for this album – a sound imparting an image of joyous reverie when consulting the past, and unbridled hope when positing on the future.
Two other standout tracks on the back half of the album are “S’Vive” and “Cry! Baby!”. In the same way that “Haikuesque” and “Sugarette” pair nicely back-to-back, the synthetic meeting the acoustic while sharing the same spirit, these two tracks when juxtaposed deliver a similar mood but with different methods. “S’Vive” is heavy in Electronica, reminiscent of Boards of Canada or Daft Punk’s Discovery sound, using computerized vocals and a complex stitch of samples, synthesizers, and field recordings (those field recordings were also used to interesting effect on “Fire Ants”). “Cry! Baby!” has that same wistful, late summer afternoon mood of “Lovers’ Carvings” except it sounds less immediate and much more casual. “Cry! Baby!” is one of my favorite tracks for that lazy Sunday feel, but to be more specific, a sunny Sunday sort. It’s a drearier kind of soaring, like you’re up in the clouds and nod off mid-flight.
Wilkinson was heavily influenced by Boards of Canada and their use of field-recorded sound and other sound bites as the off-pattern pieces that make the sound quilt. Ambivalence Avenue uses the small clips between tracks in the same way, and sometimes it works with the flow while other times it feels like it breaks the flow. Either way, I gravitated to these snippets for being like those small moments of memory, or happy remembrances of the past and wishes for the future; they come to us all now, as we ponder with mixed sentiment our current reality. What Bibio’s Ambivalence Avenue does really well is give us a friendlier form of our obscured vision. We may be uncertain of what our existence means right now, and often it can feel like we are caught in some strange daydream where lines are blurred and we feel removed from a present-future. This album says it’s okay things are a little blurry as long as in this odd reverie we can still feel the warmth of the sun and a gentle breeze on the cheek. Spring is coming, those tree-lined streets are about to bloom, and we can rejoice every once in a while (if only temporarily), and maybe soar a little bit on our own Ambivalence Avenue.
