Nick Drake, Father John Misty, and concise, perfect catalogs

No. 1406 Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

In the life of any record collection, there are not just essential albums but essential discographies to be crossed off early. Joy Division for one, at only two albums and one, arguably two necessary compilations. My Bloody Valentine for another, with three outstanding albums. And of course The Velvet Underground, whose discography stops at Loaded (Squeeze doesn’t count, because there’s not a single original member on the album, despite Doug Yule’s admirable but failed efforts to keep the band alive.) But my easily distractible nature means that I don’t always live up to my own rules; I only in 2025 finally got that fourth and final Velvets album (which is arguably my favorite … don’t look at me, I’ve got nothin’). Also Portishead, though I’m still missing one. It’s probably the one you think it is.

Nick Drake is another; last year I started a project where I was making 90-minute playlists of 100 of my favorite artists. Nick Drake could have been part of that list, but the fact that his entire three-album catalog tops out at about 106 minutes means you could fit almost the whole thing on there, which seemed pointless. Just listen to all three, perfect albums, and you’re good. In any case, for a good eight years, the only album of his I actually had was Bryter Layter, under the old excuse that “I’d get around to the others eventually.” All I needed was the right opportunity; all three were in the used bin at Plan 9 one fateful day, making it that much easier for me to complete the trio. 

And then of course once I put them on, I think “damn, I’m stupid for not having this earlier.” Because, like I said, they’re perfect. I almost don’t need to go into the actual music on this album, because you know it’s perfect. I’ll never not be enchanted by songs like “River Man” and “Cello Song,” their blend of intricate folk and strings, their reminder that I’m woefully inadequate at playing fingerstyle guitar. (I’ve never really put in enough time to practice to be as good as Drake was, but man, he was good.) It’s all just stunning. 11 out of 10. Obviously. Rating: 10

Listen: “Cello Song”

No. 1407 Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Pink Moon is the third Nick Drake album and completed the trifecta along with Five Leaves Left when I found them together, and yes, this was long overdue. Who waits this long to get perfect, in-print records? Me I guess. There’s always a shiny new object, can you blame me?

Pink Moon most certainly is a perfect record, even if it isn’t my favorite Drake album. (That’s still Bryter Layter—can’t help but love the lusher arrangements.) In relistening to it at night, when all is quiet (well, for the most part), it comes to life and reveals its subtly beautiful charms. It truly is a nighttime album, and not merely because it has “moon” in the title. It’s stark and stripped-down, just Drake and his guitar, without the strings or live band arrangements of his previous albums. 

That starkness, coupled with the proximity to his death not long thereafter, tends to make people see this as some kind of bleak harbinger of his mental state. Maybe it is, that’s not for me to say. But while there’s darkness, much as with Elliott Smith, I don’t see it as bleak, but rather as a glimpse of how someone was, for a brief time, able to capture something magic with relatively simple means. I don’t hear this album as heavy or devastating, but as something remarkable in its complexity despite the fact that it’s just one guy and his guitar. There’s so much depth to a song like “Things Behind the Sun” that I’m almost shocked there isn’t more to it. It’s obviously a highly influential album, and when Treble did a history of/best of indie folk feature a few years back, we chose it as the origin point, seeing as how Island was an independent label at the time. (Side note: Another artist featured on that list in the past year lost their shit at us about a fairly polite review—didn’t see that coming, honestly the most invective we’ve ever received for such mild criticism.)

Anyway, when I hear Pink Moon, I simply hear a beautiful set of music that almost demands 100 percent attention—no distractions, no conversation, just the night, the music and you. Rating: 10

Listen: “Things Behind the Sun”

No. 1408 Father John Misty - Fear Fun

Sometimes it takes me a while to come around on an artist. There will be many more examples of this in future installments. Some where I simply didn’t bother to do my homework, some in which my skepticism was unfounded, and some in which I simply changed my mind. I would like to take this moment to say that I think this is not just healthy but actually good—in the age of algorithmic curation (barf), there’s not enough of simply sitting with an artist’s music, getting comfortable, or uncomfortable, with it, and thinking or processing or simply absorbing beyond surface level aesthetics. Immediate reactions can tell you something sometimes, but I prefer to be able to get to know music slowly over time. That’s the music that sticks with me.

All of which is to say: It took me a minute to get into Father John Misty. I already wrote about I Love You Honeybear, an album that’s not just one of my favorites of the past, well, ever, but one that’s genuinely important to me on a personal level. So personal that I get annoyed when people can’t get past an idea of Josh Tillman as some kind of media troll. (An image that’s now at least seven or eight years out of date—though his alleged “liberation” of a crystal in L.A. was genuinely hilarious.)

But his debut, Fear Fun, passed me by when it was released. I knew OF him, that he used to be the drummer of Fleet Foxes, which was a data point that didn’t necessarily work in favor of me wanting to listen to the album. But chalk it up to hearing him play a bunch of these songs live year later, particularly “Nancy From Now On,” “I’m Writing a Novel” and “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”, and well, here we are. Fear Fun is a good album, not necessarily a great one, but its highs are extremely high, showcasing the kind of witty and infectious songwriting that would come to mature on Honeybear, God’s Favorite Customer and Mahashmashana. He’d eventually take more cues from songwriters like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Jeff Lynne, (and Serge Gainsbourg, etc.). These songs are a little simpler, but you can hear the greatness in the making. Though clearly his star was rising early and Sub Pop knew it; “Hollywood”’s video features Aubrey Plaza, for instance. But I’d call it an investment that paid off. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”

No. 1409: Tortoise - TNT

When people think of “post-rock,” they most likely go to something like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky, or maybe Slint or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. A sound with roots in rock, but which isn’t rock—not exactly. Dramatic crescendos, epic, cinematic sound and so on. These bands don’t all sound the same, but they embody a similar spirit. But for me, “post-rock” will always make me think of Tortoise.

I brought this up in a recent review of their first album in nearly a decade, Touch, but Tortoise was my first exposure to what we might call “post-rock,” and their sound isn’t anything like a band like Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, other than being instrumental. They collaborated with groups like Stereolab and Mouse on Mars, feature guitarist Jeff Parker, who is perhaps better known for contemporary jazz by this point, and often have a playful sense of melody to their compositions. 

TNT is the only album of theirs I own on vinyl, an impulse buy at Plan 9 during the same trip that found me taking home those two Nick Drake albums, and it might not even be my favorite—that’d be Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which is a damn masterpiece. (And in parts sounds more like Slint, whose David Pajo was for a time a member, than any of their other records afterward.) TNT is more colorful and diffuse, at times sounding like an epic kind of jazz rock, like on the title track, or glitchy electronica, like on “The Equator,” or Morricone-esque cinematic landscapes on “I Set My Face to the Hillside.” They cover a lot of ground on this album—it’s ambitious, fun and far-reaching, and it got a lot of spins from me in high school. And if you think it’s weird that I was listening to this in high school, well, you clearly haven’t gotten to know me well enough. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “TNT” 

No. 1410 High Vis - Blending

Most of my friends can attest to the fact that I can be a bit of an evangelist with music that I find thrilling and that I don’t think enough people have heard of. I’m not going to knock on people’s doors to tell them that Kendrick Lamar has a new album out because they almost certainly know that. But I was pretty sure that none of my friends had heard of High Vis back in 2022, and I made a point to change that. 

Certainly, I wrote about this band a lot that year, including writing a review of Blending, and interviewing their vocalist, Graham Sayle, who was as funny and charming as you could hope for. (I mentioned something about their musical backgrounds, and he said “We don’t have musical backgrounds, we come from hardcore.” ZING!) But even just having drinks with people who liked music anywhere on the spectrum of shoegaze to hardcore, I’d tell ‘em to listen to High Vis.

Now, three-plus years down the line, it might not be my favorite album of 2022 (that one’s in a few posts) but it’s a very close number two at the very least. This album doesn’t lose any of its intensity or immediacy, or its headphone-worthy tangle of sonic layers. The lead single, “Talk for Hours,” won me over long before the album was even announced, its tangle of post-hardcore intensity and soaring, Britpop chorus adding up to a unique hybrid that spoke to some very specific interests of mine. It also in a roundabout way led me back to revisiting some of my favorites of the ‘90s and late ‘80s—like The Stone Roses, whom I wrote about recently. 

There’s an impressive amount of diversity among these nine songs, from the roaring post-hardcore of “E0151,” to the dream pop/shoegaze of the title track, to the Manchester jangle of “Fever Dream,” all of which are just phenomenal songs. There’s also “Trauma Bonds,” which shows that, for a band with hardcore backgrounds, they don’t really go for the tough guy stuff—my wife made a comment about how moving it was to see a room full of punks singing along to a song about working through trauma when the band played in Richmond a couple years back, and it was. But also they just kinda kicked ass. Because that hardcore energy is still very much a part of who they are, even if they can write a hell of a pop song. And if you give me the chance, I’ll talk your ear off about this record. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Talk for Hours”