#kidsticks

#tbt @bethorton at Manchester Cathedral this day in 2016 #galaxyfullofemptiness #kidsticks #bethorton #manchestercathedral https://www.instagram.com/p/Bof1ftDlOWG/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=nz7ourp0hr5f

My photos of #littledrummer with #electronicdrumkit #yamahaDTX430K and #kidsticks #VicFirth on sale on #istock #DrummerGirl #DrummerKids #FemaleDrummer #KidsDrumming #LittleDrummer #KidsRockin #yamaha #DTX430K #music #rock #scheleton #band #concert https://www.istockphoto.com/gb/photo/little-caucasian-girl-drummer-with-multicolored-hair-playing-the-electronic-drum-kit-gm873870162-244024055

All tracks: http://bit.ly/dailynotes2016

-- 1. When I was a teenager I wasn't edgy. Like, at all. After 9th grade, I was kind of content, because I had friends, and not too many kids made fun of me anymore. Those in a position to do so thought I had / could get them weed. I didn't / couldn't. I didn't do that kind of stuff. I never even drank. I think it was my clothes and how I talked. My ox-blood Doc Marten's. Before this, for a stretch, I didn't really have any friends. Once, just after middle school, my friend's mom decided we couldn't hang out anymore. She decided this before a weekend camping trip. She thought I had weed. I packed carefully, everything I would need. I had a new Discman. I never had a CD player before. It cost twenty lawns. All my stuff was in a backpack sat in the driveway. I waited for hours to be picked up. They never even called. I never saw that friend again. I was 14, dreading the start of high school. 2. I didn't actively start seeking out music on my own until I was about 16 or 17. Before that, I gravitated towards whatever was around--the hardcore punk and hip-hop of my older cousins and other skate kids, my parents' records, whatever seemed "good" on "alternative" radio. For a little while, I tried to like bands that other kids seemed to like: Sublime, 311, the Chili Peppers, etc. There’s a copy of 40 Oz. to Freedom sunk in a swampy Michigan ditch, moldering in testament to this failed experiment in populism. Eventually, I tried to really care about some things, in the way others seemed to really care about them: grunge, Zep, The Beatles, Dylan, The Who, classic rock radio, etc. I felt whatever. I loved the first Weezer record and went to at least two (probably terrible) Warped tours. I loved Paul Simon and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Madonna and Prince, held-over from childhood basement televisions. I went to 1,000 (probably terrible) ska-punk shows. Mostly bands of slightly older teens whose appeal was so short lived, the infinitesimal half-lives of those elements only observable in labs. Bands that only exist in a certain present, and only for teenagers. 4. I am outside being bitten by black flies trying to remember when I bought my first issue of Spin. Or AP. As if this is important. But I am sure that's how I found out about Beth Orton. She was not a Columbia House accident. Like that Boston CD, still sealed, unloved. I am waiting for my dog. These black flies are killing me. 5. Trailer Park came out on 19 October 1996. Central Reservation on 9 March 1999. I know this because the internet told me so. If you had asked me five minutes ago, I'd have said 1994 and 1996, respectively. I would've also told you that I bought them both at the same time, from Record Time in Roseville, MI, sometime around my 17th birthday, October '96. This would have been wrong, but what feels true is me, up in my room, listening to both albums back to back ad nauseam through portable speakers attached to a now beat-to-shit Discman, the songs’ dusty, sun-bleached vistas spread out wide. Me, inattentively playing video games on a barely functional black-and-white TV I rescued from the basement. Another basement television. In the world these songs inhabit, it has never rained. Scenes in America Deserta. (Or maybe England Deserta?) Art Bell on the radio all night long. 6. These records are impossibly intertwined in my memory. 7. I’m thinking of a too-full glass, a meniscus curve. Surface tension. There are bugs that live their whole lives dancing on top, a whole world below. To the bugs, it probably seems infinite down there, inky, strange and dangerous. I wanted something to break that surface tension. I wanted to sink all of a sudden. To drown in things I didn't know. 8. Before I heard Trailer Park, I didn't know who Andrew Weatherall was. William Orbit, too. When I heard Central Reservation, I had to find out what this Ben Watt guy was all about. To me, then, Everything But The Girl was just one of those bands with one of those songs. I must've bought dozens of CDs, discovered dozens of bands, because of these two records. 9. Two lights illuminating a well. More water bugs. They're skating on the surface. I still can't make out the bottom, but for the first time I have a sense of how deep down it goes. 10. I'm driving around Metro Detroit. It's the summer. 2016. I'm nearly 37. The car's thermometer says it's 103 degrees. It gets a little overexcited, but it's hot and humid and it won't rain. I'm listening to the LPs in question, and it occurs to me that they've managed to avoid becoming relics of the mid-to-late '90s in the way that some of the players on the records haven't. There's a timelessness, which boils down to two things, I think: the exemplary songwriting, obviously, and the deft production from her collaborators that drew on certain genres destined to be forever linked to 1996, but somehow managed to suss out the elements of those genres that would transcend the era. So: trip hop, mid-to-late 90s electronica and folk. They’re in there, but not, I don't think, in such a way that their presence distracts from the records now. I’m playing them loudly. The sun is positioned so that, even though the A/C is set too high, I'm still baking. I'm reminded of tooling around the desert in Southern California. It's dusty. Needs to rain. Scenes in Michigan Deserta. 11. Beth Orton is one of those people who's absolutely adept at choosing her collaborators. Unlike some of those people, that's not her greatest talent. 12. There's a circuitous through-line that runs from these early albums to Kidsticks. There's the feeling of an artist coming full-circle without repeating herself. A sense of outré collaboration, experimentation, and cross pollination. If there's a key difference between then and now, it's that Kidsticks lacks the manners of those first records. Its is a feeling of abandon. It has sharp corners and exorcisms. A lot of this has to do with the pedigree of her primary collaborator, Andrew Hung. Hung wrings crushing beauty from savage noise as one half of Fuck Buttons, builds day-glo Rave Caves with GameBoys on his own. He exists in a space unique to Orton's collaborators thus far, and the two have created an LP that does the same. 13. "1973" is Orton's roller rink anthem, three minutes of wall to wall hooks buoyed by dime-store synths. "Snow" rides percussion that wouldn't be out of place on an African Head Charge LP, while Orton delivers a terrifically loose and expressive vocal performance. "Corduroy Legs" is a sweet, almost ambient spoken-word piece that segues perfectly into "Flesh and Blood." The album's expansive closing statement, it rewires pastoralism as a silky slow jam. “Kidsticks” acts as a coda, a brief clattering of synths and percussion. The album's definitive moment is its centerpiece, "Dawnstar," a bittersweet, smoldering ember of a song that obliterates the listener with its weeping-at-the-prom, Take-My-Breath-Away power vibes. 14. Her voice and the songs themselves are still always, always the focus. 15. There's this thing you hear a lot in art history: artists mature and reach what I like to call their "fuck it" phase. They're so confident at this point that they know exactly what they want, how to achieve that result in the most direct, elemental way possible, and see experimentation as a matter of course. Now, the thing is, I think that this is purported to happen more often than it actually does. Sometimes, the human body forces the issue, requiring an exceptional artist to work around its failings. Usually, your average artist just settles into a rhythm, and gets comfortable doing what they do, which is fine, whatever. That doesn’t necessarily mean the work is bad. But it's a rare and beautiful thing for an artist to reach this phase of their own volition. 16. Kidsticks is Beth Orton's "fuck it." 17. If you had told me, nearly twenty years ago, that both Beth Orton and Underworld would release two of the best albums of their respective careers in 2016, I probably would have said, "Of course they will." But I was a lot less cynical then. And of course I'm hopelessly biased now. Theirs have somehow become more than just records. 18. Driving again. Towards home. Along the river. I listen to “Snow” and “Moon” and “Waves.” It occurs to me that Kidsticks is Beth Orton having long ago left Scenes Deserta far behind. -- Kidsticks is available now at any good record shop. -- Bernie Brooks edits and blogs for A Ship In The Woods. Email him: bernie [at] shipinthewoods [dot] com

Read the full interview above!

Beth Orton calls up Kyle Meredith to discuss Kidsticks.

Moon by Beth Orton from Kidsticks.

CONTEST TIME! We've got @BethOrton here on Monday night and we're going to hook up one lucky fan with a pair of tickets to the show AND a copy of her new album 'Kidsticks' on vinyl! To enter, tag the friend you'd like to bring to the show in the comments below and tell us why you want to see the show with them. The world is really jacked up and depressing right now, so the most heartwarming, tear-jerking response will be selected at 6pm on Friday 6/17, so get crackin'! #SF #BayArea #GAMH #BethOrton #Kidsticks (at Great American Music Hall)