Dark Was the Night sets goal for a bright future

By Eric Doctor     2/19/09 6:00pm

I had the pleasure of meeting Bryce and Aaron Dessner when The National came to play here for the All Rice Picnic during homecoming week. They are both rather subdued and unassuming - almost awkward, perhaps. They both sport unshaven faces and unibrows - not the look that one would expect out of indie rock's unofficial curators.The Dessners have assembled a veritable who's-who list of indie darlings - Sufjan Stevens! Bon Iver! Yeasayer! Feist! That guy from TV on the Radio! - into Dark Was the Night, a charity compilation album whose profits go towards the Red Hot Organization, a group committed to fighting HIV/AIDS through pop culture. Since 1989, Red Hot has released 20 compilation albums to raise both funds and awareness. It's kind of like Product (RED), except without the sweatshop controversies and expensive corporate branding.

Red Hot released their first compilation, Red Hot + Blue, in 1990. David Byrne (of Talking Heads) brought together some of the biggest names in late-'80s alt-rock - Sinead O'Connor! Tom Waits! Iggy Pop! Annie Lennox! U2! - to cover Cole Porter songs in what was one of the first major AIDS benefits in the music industry. It is fitting, then, that Byrne contributes the opening track, a collaboration with Dirty Projectors, to Dark Was the Night.

Compilations are struggling to stay relevant. In the iTunes age, we can download singles independently of albums, allowing anyone with white bread musical taste to have a multigrain music collection. Now That's What I Call Music, which is now on its 29th iteration and represents everything wrong with mainstream music today, has seen steadily declining sales over the past few years.

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Now follows a formula that worked through the late '90s: Take whatever singles Top 40 radio stations are playing on repeat, slap them together, sell them at a premium to middle school girls who couldn't care less about the deep tracks their "favorite singers" put out, profit. This approach is certainly profitable, or at least once was, but it contributes nothing new to the music world. It is driven by commercialism and commercialism alone.

Dark Was the Night deviates from this tired strategy completely. First and most obviously, the "profit" step is cut out entirely since it is a charity album. Second, this is not a compilation of these artists' most successful and well-known singles; the album is chock-full of exclusive goodness.

The obvious pitfall to featuring "exclusive tracks" is is that artists tend to submit their b-sides and rejected tracks to compilations, saving the good stuff for the albums. While Dark Was the Night is not immune to this, it avoids redundancy through the inclusion of lots of collaborations and covers. The collaborations are what give the album its vivacity.

Byrne and the Dirty Projectors' opening track "Knotty Pine" has a driving force that is decidedly David Byrne, but with a certain avant-garde flair that the Projectors add. Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon contribute "Big Red Machine." A National-esque, mellow rhythm piano pushes the song forward behind airy Bon Iver vocals.

And while there is nothing particularly spectacular in the individual artist tracks (with the exception of Sufjan Stevens' cover of the Castantets' "You Are the Blood," but since when was Sufjan one to follow rules?), all of them are particularly listenable. Arcade Fire's "Lenin" is not mind-blowing, but its melody is frustratingly catchy and is marked with the band's signature energy. The National's "So Far Around the Bend" evokes Stevens with its woodwind rises.

As an album, Dark Was the Night is acceptable; as a collection of singles, it's wonderful. Besides raising money for a good cause and compiling some really great music, Dark Was the Night provides a snapshot of a certain corner of the indie music world right now. By contributing to the musical fossil record in this way, it becomes simultaneously current and timeless.

Eric Doctor is a Lovett College junior and Backpage Editor.

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