No such thing as an album for all seasons

I can only assume that associating an album with a particular moment of time is a collective experience. Sleater Kinney's The Hot Rock encapsulates the fall of 2000, Creeper Lagoon's Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday will forever trap me in the winter of 2002, Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News might as well be a bona fide transporter stuck on the spring of 2004. Setting aside the apparent affinity for seasonal album association in even-numbered years, the formula for this phenomena is pretty damn predictable - obtain an album and play it relentlessly, almost to the point of physical dependence. Whether because of the ipod, the emergent tendency to download songs or merely a sustained period of insulation from new music (there was something of a dark ages for me between, say, Cat Power's You Are Free and The Kill's Midnight Boom) , it had been a while since I'd experienced that kind of obsessive temporal association with a record, until this summer's Rearranger from Mates of State.

I adore this album. It's cohesive, it's uplifting without being sappy and there's a mythology to the production of something pretty but not (totally) simplistic that maybe makes you think married couples can consist of two intensely creative people in a way that provides a helpful alternative to the Sartre-de Beauvoir model that I personally find so unlikely. Or intimidating. Or debilitating.

So thanks, Mates of State, for providing a model marriage and producing an album that I can presumably use for some time to transport me back to this past summer, which is becoming ever-more necessary as the cold progresses and the temptation to cocoon myself in Elliott Smith's From a Basement on a Hill (winter 2004!) threatens to ensure a low-level melancholia. Rearranger goes on the list of temporal transportation, which consists of records that matter not so much because they're brilliant (although some of them are) but because they illustrate, for me, the extent to which a relationship to an album (or band, or song) is so malleable over time. I wasn't ready to love Kid A when it came, but now I'm much closer to getting it. My affection for Pretty Girls Make Graves was much shorter than I would have thought, given my initial wave of obsession. Like books, musical artifacts come in and out of your life in weird and unpredictable ways. But even when an album that is perhaps not so great comes to be entwined with a particular period of time, it is perhaps more useful as a (psychological, emotional) time capsule, even if not as a representation of musical mastery.