As Big Harp's Chris Senseney sings, "You can't save them all."
In Chain Letters, the Omaha band's second album from January 2013, he's crooning about a rooftop unsteady on its studs, a rolled ankle leaning on its crutch. He's singing about an old drunk stumbling backwards searching for the wall. But as music becomes more accessible, it also becomes more easily lost, like the "yachtsman with a million in a bank, afloat on the sea like a flake in a tank."
You can't save them all. Some albums and songs with inherent value never find an audience. They collect dust, if they had the fortune of being pressed to vinyl, or saved in an antiquated physical format. Others sit unplayed on Bandcamp or Spotify, and songwriters receive paychecks totaling a few cents for their work.
So if year-in-review lists do anything, let's try to save a few. Take a look back at my favorites from 2013, and stay tuned for more "best of" collections from the Hear Nebraska staff in the days to come:
BEST NATIONAL ALBUMS
1. The Weatherman by Gregory Alan Isakov
As if it spun on a turntable without speakers, this album has been playing quietly between my ears, flipping itself from side A to side B and back again, since its release in July. Only a close listener can hear the needle traveling through my grooves, but seldomly, the sound in my head finds a voice in spurts of tumbling lines of notes as I hum, “She’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” from "The Universe" or "I never pictured you living here with the rats and the vines" from "Saint Valentine."
I’ve destroyed my fingernails as deadlines approached, but when I plug in my headphones, press play and fall into the first track's pillowy percussion, Gregory Alan Isakov turns each second sweet and slow. With a mixture of guitar, strings and a voice that never seems to land, that hovers like a hummingbird, The Weatherman is a summer thunderstorm, a warm atmosphere with just enough furled clouds in the sky to help you appreciate the porch roof over your head.
2. The Ash and the Clay by The Milk Carton Kids
Having seen The Milk Carton Kids twice now, I understand that their albums — though released for free — are missing a crucial element: banter. Whether it's Joey Ryan's winding but hilarious retelling of the ampersand's history or his partner Kenneth Pattengale playing the perfect foil, sturdy and skeptical of the jokes, this comic relief adds a spark of frivolity that doesn't find its way onto their records.
The Ash and the Clay, the California folk duo's second proper LP, is dead serious about propelling betrothed melodic lines through the air like acrobatic fighter jets. It's serious about using only two voices and two guitars to paint detailed landscapes of Promised Land (which coincidentally or not is the title of the 2012 movie the duo helped soundtrack), cities such as Memphis and the ash and clay between it all.
Download The Ash and the Clay here.
3. Repave by Volcano Choir
Justin Vernon continues to make great art. The Bon Iver mastermind stands as Volcano Choir's focal point. While 2009's Unmap skittered and hopped, with artifacts of notes popping onto the soundscape as if they respawned on a video game, Repave represents a slightly more literal lyricism and more sure-footed instrumentation.
On songs like "Tiderays" and "Alaskans," you don't have to reach out to grab the guitar lines; they hook you. And with only eight songs, each fully developed and outlasting the four-minute mark, no time is wasted: It's stretched out, its strength tested and proven.
BEST NEBRASKA ALBUMS
1. Chain Letters by Big Harp
2. MOTEL by Travelling Mercies
3. Everything Happens for the First Time by Eli Mardock
BEST NEBRASKA SONGS
1. “Body Rhythm” by Touch People
Before you listen, find a magnifying glass for your ears. Dozens of elements, like the bubbles of boiling water, percolate under Darren Keen's robotic voice as it repeats, "The days go by in the bodies rhythm / The polyrhythms, nobody feels them / The days go by and your body is with them."
The metastasizing section before another section of lyrics is what I imagine rushing blood cells to sound like. Effervescent electronics jitter and build off one another, and just when the song could come to a close around five minutes in, it powers up again.
2. “Maggie” by Kill County
Never before has an admission of worthlessness sounded so beautiful. Kill County's Ringo sings from the perspective of a man who knows he's to blame for his lost love. He says he's following in his father's footsteps, who went to prison but "never said he was guilty, he just quit taking sides."
Even in the age of cell phones, folk music survives as the narrator saw Maggie on the corner, the streetlights in her eyes, talking on the phone, her sadness disguised. What sticks the most, though, is our own feelings of guilt, that we might also be the type to love them things you can't save.
3. "Realistic Feel" by Talking Mountain
I just love songs that explode. "Realistic Feel" opens quietly somber as the first full song off Talking Mountain's Mysterious Knowledge/Unknown Colors. But right around two minutes in, the neighbors will hear a joyous boiling over that marches on through an affirming refrain: "I feel realistic."
BEST ALBUM ART
1. Hear Nebraska: Vol. 2
2. Adult Film by Tim Kasher
3. Troubledoer by Skypiper
BEST NEW BANDS
1. Oquoa
I've seen Oquoa just twice, once at Jake's Block Party in Omaha and again at Lincoln Calling. As I noted in my review of that Lincoln Calling performance at Duffy's Tavern, frontman Max Holmquist seldomly reflects his former musical self of solo folk project Great American Desert. This band lets songs unfold more slowly, and the lyrics seem to be more economical than Holmquist's previous story-driven work. Joining him in the Omaha band are guitarist J.J. Idt and drummer Roger Lewis, who most recently comprised part of the entrancing, repetitive shimmer of Conduits.
Just this week, Holmquist said the band's debut album is mixed and mastered, and is being shopped around to record labels. Here's hoping Oquoa secures a deal.
2. Halfwit
Of course this band is incredible. Made up of musicians from a few gone-but-legendary Nebraska bands — Machete Archive, Ideal Cleaners, Mother Pile and Life Of A Scarecrow — Halfwit could have leveled downtown Lincoln if it wanted to last summer, when the four-piece played Hear Lincoln at 13th and O streets. If our capital city experiences any seismic shifts in 2014, we'll know who to blame.
3. Routine Escorts
Look for a mistake on the five-song EP by Jon Tvrdik and Tom Flaherty. I dare you. This Omaha band produced one of the most pristine first efforts by a Nebraska band in 2013. It's danceable music with value beyond the beat, and it's hopefully just the beginning.
BEST CONCERTS
1. Hear Nebraska at the 1200 Club in Omaha
The way Kill County's Josh James asked his band a handful of times if they were ready to play.
The way Big Harp's Chris Senseney and Stefanie Drootin-Senseney kissed sweetly but quickly in between songs.
And the way Digital Leather's Shawn Foree warned the crowd at the Holland Center's 1200 Club, "It's gonna get weird."
These snapshots tell only slivers of the story written by the three Nebraska bands booked for the first-ever Hear Nebraska: Live at the 1200 Club. But they are slivers of a story that could be part of television shows that live long past Friday's concert.
NET filmed the performances, expertly maneuvering cameras through, over and around the crowd and musicians onstage. As shown in our photos below, the crew directed the show from their massive, tech-filled truck just outside the Holland Center.
Having partnered with Omaha Performing Arts and NET, we at Hear Nebraska watched the story unfold among a crowd of fellow journalists, musicians, festival organizers, record label employees and fans. It was a wonderful night.
photo by Bridget McQuillan
2. The Thermals at Peckerheads
Listen to my slideshow review of the South by Southwest concert here.
3. Criteria at Maha Music Festival
[from my review of their set, originally published on Aug. 19]
Criteria is the bulging veins in frontman Steve Pedersen's neck when he sings, "You're preventing the world from hearing my songs."
It's Aaron Druery's guitar, with more angles than a geometry quiz, jutting out into a Maha crowd of mostly men close to the local stage. It's A.J. Mogis on bass and Mike Sweeney on drums cementing a rock-hard rhythm section.
Criteria is an Omaha band that plays like a well-placed exclamation point. And considering their somewhat rare shows, those fist-in-the-air punctuation marks are often surrounded by ellipses.
BEST MUSIC VIDEOS
1. “Where Are We Now?” by David Bowie
2. “This Reign is Ours” by Criteria (produced by Love Drunk)
3. “Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska's managing editor. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… oh, I didn't notice you were still here. Reach him at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.