Human After All

housekeeping: Best of 2007 track-list, linkage

2008-08-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

Figured I might as well throw this up here. Before I got a new computer, my old one's burner wasn't working, so this doesn't really exist except as a .zip file a few friends got. Notes as the whim strikes me.

Disk 1:
1. "Swim Team" Baby Teeth (The Simp)
2. "Silently" Blonde Redhead (23)
3. "D.A.N.C.E." Justice (Cross)
4. "Octet" Deerhunter (Cryptograms - only good song, really)
5. "Cult Status" 1990s (Cookies)
6. "Restorative Beer" The Fiery Furnaces (Widow City)
7. "My Eyes" Travis (The Boy With No Name — same deal as Deerhunter)
8. "Scythian Empire" Andrew Bird (Armchair Apocrypha — maybe my song of the year)
9. "Sucking Punch" Fujiya & Miyagi (Transparent Things)
10. "C.O.L.O.U.R.S" Bentley ft. Pimp C and Lil' Wayne (Can't Tell Me Nothing: The Official Mixtape, but will presumably resurface on Bentley's debut, whenever the hell that finally surfaces; fingers crossed)
11. "Northern Whale" The Good, The Bad & The Queen (The Good, The Bad & The Queen)
12. "Down In The Valley" The Broken West (I Can't Go On, I'll Go On; their new album is a real bummer)
13. "Photograph" Air (Pocket Symphony - God, that album really didn't go anywhere, did it?)
14. "Say It To My Face" Young Buck ft. Bun B, 8 Ball and MJG (Buck The World; credit or execration for this song's presence goes to my G-Unit loving pal Eugene)
15. "The Underdog" Spoon (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga)
16. "Muscle 'n Flo" Menomena (Friend And Foe)

Disk 2:
1. "Take Tha Hood Back" UGK ft. Slim Thug, Vicious and Middle Fingaz (Underground Kingz)
2. "Reunion" Jason Collett [tagged as Stars b/c it's a cover] (Do You Trust Your Friends?)
3. "Sarah T." The Comas (Spells)
4. "Turn On Me" The Shins (Wincing The Night Away)
5. "Hands In The Snow" Saturday Looks Good To Me (Fill Up The Room; awesome live show, btw)
6. "Nude" Radiohead (In Rainbows)
7. "The Temptation of Adam" Josh Ritter (The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter)
8. "Brunettes Against Bubblegum Youth" The Brunettes (Structure And Cosmetics)
9. "Help Is Coming" T.I. (T.I. Vs. T.I.P.)
10. "Ddiamondd" Battles (Mirrored)
11. "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" The White Stripes (Icky Thump; the fact that this is a freakin' CAREER BAND continues to amaze me)
12. "Hate It Here" Wilco (Sky Blue Sky)
13. "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" David Byrne (Live From Austin, TX)
14. "Sunday Sounds" The Apples In Stereo (New Magnetic Wonder)
15. "Here Comes The Heartbreak" Emma Pollock (Watch The Fireworks)
16. "Bittersweet Poetry" Kanye West ft. John Mayer (Graduation; bonus track > whole album)
17. "Do I Disappoint You" Rufus Wainwright (Release The Stars)

Disk 3:
1. "Intervention" Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)
2. "Roc Boys (And The Winner Is...)" Jay-Z (American Gangster)
3. "Totems On The Timeline" Klaxons (Myths Of The Near Future; this track is basically indistinguishable from the rest of the album; better in the mix)
4. "Hands In The Dark" Chromatics (After Dark compilation; still haven't listened to the rest of it)
5. "Take It To The Top" Prodigy (Return Of The Mac)
6. "Rain" Bishop Allen (The Broken String)
7. "The New Science" Ola Podrida (Ola Podrida)
8. "Job Song" Consequence (Don't Quit Your Day Job!)
9. "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" Of Montreal (Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?)
10. "Dashboard" Modest Mouse (We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank; never heard the rest of this)
11. "This Time" Jason Falkner (I'm OK, You're OK)
12. "Prospectors Arrive" Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood sdtrk.)
13. "Blood Red Blood" Voxtrot (Voxtrot)
14. "Upgrade" Lil' Wayne (Da Drought 3; in retrospect, clearly should've used "Ride 4 My Niggas" instead)
15. "Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like
Clever Girls" Pelle Carlberg (In A Nutshell)
16. "Fake Empire" The National (Boxer)
17. "New Routine" Fountains of Wayne (Traffic & Weather)

Two I forgot: Band of Horses, Los Campesinos! Dammit.

AV Club stuff: Jim White, Old 97's, The Kooks, Firewater, Aimee Mann, The Futureheads, Eef Barzelay, Tilly And The Wall, Sunny Day Sets Fire, Dr. Dog, The Notwist, Dan Friel, The Airborne Toxic Event (freakishly contentious comments thread), The Silent Years, The Dandy Warhols.

links round-up

2008-04-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

"Indie 500":
3/13: Los Campesinos!, Re-Up Gang, The Promise Ring, The National

3/27: Willie Nelson, No Kids, Band of Horses

Onion A.V. Club: The Born Ruffians, She & Him, De Novo Dahl, Tapes 'N Tapes

The best is yet to come.

round-up

2008-02-28T05:33:00.000-08:00

More for me to keep track of all the linkage as it proliferates than anything. This blog is apparently dead otherwise, sorry.

Indie 500:
12/27: 1990s, Burial, The Brunettes

1/10: Top 10 of 2007 + Remainders

1/24: Radar Bros., The Magnetic Fields, Cardinal

2/7: Vampire Weekend, Cat Power, The Dø

2/21: Beach House, There Will Be Blood, Rock Band + the return of eternal troll Brandon Soderberg

Onion A.V. Club (the so-called big news, although I'm personally rather thrilled):
Eric Matthews, The Whigs, The Shackeltons, Barton Carroll, Morcheeba

I'll be in Paste soon too. Weird.

12/13 Indie 500

2007-12-15T09:03:00.000-08:00

David Byrne, Elliott Smith, Daft Punk and Andrew Bird.

More big news coming January-ish. Hopefully.

catching up with Indie 500

2007-12-09T18:35:00.000-08:00

11/15: Radiohead, Vampire Weekend, Saturday Looks Good To Me here

11/29: The Comas, The Clientele, Battles and Primal Scream here

Indie 500 11/1

2007-11-01T10:50:00.001-07:00

is here. This week: Kanye West, Swizz Beatz, Joy Division, and Pale Young Gentlemen. Knock yourself out.

Indie 500

2007-10-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

News, as promised:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/10/indie-500-emma-pollock-ugk-fiery.html

Thanks to House Next Door editor and all-round nice guy Keith Uhlich, I'm now on board as a biweekly music blogger. The format's a little different — gotta explain who some bands are for the folks at home, as opposed to just spouting off whatever I think here without context — but hopefully nothing too jarring for you, my 4 fans. I'll be posting links here regularly, as well as some other stuff (best-of mixes, some housecleaning, etc.), so no worries about this disappearing. Here's to a bigger audience, fame, fortune, free-lance fees, etc. (No, I'm not getting paid, but it's more than worth it for the increased exposure.) The title is a nod to that fine Wrens song; this week's bands are Emma Pollock, UGK, Fiery Furnaces and (blast from the past) Superdrag.

more house-cleaning: Apples In Stereo, Arcade Fire

2007-10-16T07:23:00.000-07:00

A little more house-cleaning, big news soon etc.:

The Apples In Stereo, New Magnetic Wonder - The first time I've checked in with the band since 1998's Tone Soul Evolution - a listening choice semi-reluctantly foisted upon me by an ex-girlfriend that proved about 2/3 solid. Still, I could never escape the sense that the AIS are the most pastiche-ridden band out there: Robert Schneider always seems more excited by the option of perfectly recreating a particular pop mode than in giving it a new gloss or tweaking it even in the slightest. Seems like hypocrisy on my part, I know (I'm the man who's enthusiastically endorsing The Broken West; what can I say, that sound appeals to me more than this), but it's just not exciting. Here as before, Schneider's at his best in either full on excitable-puppy-dog mode (perfect opener "Can You Feel It?") or inexplicably melancholy ("Play Tough," "7 Stars"). The rest of the time, something always seems to be missing: see "Open Eyes," a would be 5-minute epic stranded somewhere between The Verve's histrionic psychedelic guitars and large string arrangements and the coke-addled sneer of latter-day Oasis. Plenty to enjoy here, but little that sticks in the mind; it all sounds too familiar.

Arcade Fire, Neon Bible - I'm gonna come right out and say it: Arcade Fire are the Coldplay of indie rock, which is not intended as the diss it probably sounds like (remember, I like Coldplay). Seriously, listen to the opening minute of "No Cars Go" and tell me how it's substantively different from the riff or execution of "Talk." Add to this a proclivity to think of emotional gut impact as more important than melodicism and pretty terrible lyrics (Chris Martin is a thousand times worse, but "Mirror mirror on the wall/show me where the bombs will fall" isn't far behind), and welcome to the most "inspiring" band of the mid-decade. As a band, Arcade Fire remain uniquely talented: they have a ferocious unified attack and distinct approach to instrumentation that understands how to integrate, say, a trumpet into a song and make it sound as natural as a guitar line. Another plus: "Intervention" is basically a gimmick, mixing an acoustic guitar to the same volume level as a church organ, but the song is solid enough to transcend gimmickry. They're not bad, really they're not, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with. But they're also not a fully developed band, as many people seem to be convinced: they're a band with potential, one that needs to think more about hooks and less about repeating the same riffs over and over with increasing volume in the hope that energy will be generated, and definitely one that needs to lay off the overly-emo lyrics. Like everyone else, I've heard these guys have a shitkicking live show; I can't afford to find out, unless someone wants to make a PayPal donation.

catch-up: T.I., Ola Podrida, Fujiya & Miyagi

2007-10-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

A little housekeeping on this backlog I have...I basically stopped listening to anything but Sky Blue Sky and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga for the last month, so new listening has been slow. There's gonna be a few more updates relatively quick to take care of it, for reasons to be explained in a few weeks, at which time I will hopefully have a much bigger venue. Anyway.

T.I. T.I. Vs. T.I.P. - It's not that bad, really. A sequencing nightmare, T.I. Vs. T.I.P. aspires, in its own sloppy way, to be rap's own Quadrophenia, or something like that. Act I ("T.I.P.") is a bit of a mess: typically catchy songs like "Da Dopeman" can't conceal the fact that T.I.'s bravado is stumbling lyrically for new ways to express itself, resorting more than ever to blunt threats. It also has the only truly insufferable song: "Watch What You Say To Me," which has the double pain of another awful late-period Jay-Z verse and an incredibly annoying, drawled out hook: it sounds like a cough syrup fiend trying to rouse himself out of a stupor long enough to find his gun. But "Act II" is a barnburner, kicking off with "Help Is Coming," a typically immaculate Just Blaze production that finds a massive cathedral organ and exciting drum programming making up the year's biggest sounding rap song (theory: rap is the new Dave Fridmann in terms of booming, epic songs). There's also two unexpectedly decent contributions from presumably played out sources: potentially cheesy dance-crossover "Show It To Me" gets a revved-up Nelly verse. Even more interesting is "Touchdown," an Eminem-produced track that has to be some kind of perverse joke: "Southern boys love that bass," he notes, but there's almost none. It's tinny and snide, and Eminem pulls out his first decent verse in three years. Keenly aware that he's no longer the shocking center of attention, he envisions himself killing people inadvertently, bodies flying like krump dancers off his car as he's trying to drive; he just can't help it. Act III is a bit of an anti-climax, but T.I. remains the finest in pop-oriented rap.

Ola Podrida, Ola Podrida - Instigator David Wingo has done time composing scores for David Gordon Green, and it shows: Ola Podrida's debut has the kind of hazy ambience that begs to be accompanied by flare-smeared frames of woozy languor. Opener "The New Science" is a quiet stunner, its slowly-rising organ and gentle vocals conjuring up heartbreak and reconciliation as vividly as All The Real Girls. It's all a bit downhill from there, or at least just more of the same: song titles like "Pour Me Another" tell pretty much the whole story. Unlike a fellow traveler like M. Ward (or maybe like a Southern Elliott Smith without the anger), Wingo doesn't really have the range to pull off a whole album of this stuff: his songs sound like 11 variations on the same theme (pour me another indeed), avoiding bold chord changes, loud instrumentation (I can hear some trumpets pushed way to the back of "Instead," but they're even quieter than the glockenspiel), or anything rising above the energy level of a drunk late-night singalong. A debut well worth checking out, but if you're not sympathetic, it might sound like a slightly lo-fi version of Starbucks music. Check out that opener and "Photo Booth," though.

Fujiya & Miyagi, Transparent Things - I don't have much to add to my Pitchfork write-up. Without the live goofiness (which helps; it makes the record seem much less austere than it might otherwise come off), F&M prove to be really good at a kind of music I don't listen to much: krautrock without the droning boredom, lush synth passages breaking up the minimalistic rhythms. Another 3-spin record: the grooves don't really open up much on repeat listens, but quite good all the same.

more catch-up: Fountains of Wayne, Jason Falkner, Of Montreal, Twilight Sad, Spoon, Kanye West

2007-09-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

This one's for Mike, who kept bugging me about it. Thanks Mike.

Fountains Of Wayne, Traffic And Weather - It's taken me eons to write this up; at one point, I planned an epic defense of FoW's body of work. The short version is this: Fountains of Wayne is one of the finest bands in America today. Period. Their music is an admittedly take-it-or-leave-it proposition: either you do or don't enjoy workmanlike power-pop with hooks so huge they could be bullying if you didn't like them. But their lyrics capture life in the suburbs (and, increasingly, in the tri-state area) with unerring precision and a gift for quick character sketches that makes FoW a far more "literary" band than, say, all the unquestioned resurrected archetypes the Decemberists can muster up. Colin Meloy tries to remember his undergrad survey courses; FoW do something new.

Part of their image problem is "Stacy's Mom," whose inexplicable success as a novelty single confused everyone, but mostly me. Which part was the novelty: a well-crafted Cars rip-off on radio stations in 2003, or were people just responding to the gimmicky video? Because the song is entirely of a piece with their work: it's a witty, literate piece of work about misplaced suburban adolescent lust, but it's also a song about living through divorce. ("Ever since your dad walked out your mom could use a guy like me" goes the last line before a swing back into the chorus; how did everyone miss this?) Snidely asserting that "few people are looking to this band for lyrical wit and insight" basically proves you're not a fan; that's exactly why I'm listening. (This review raises another question, one I don't even want to get into: why is it that FoW, of all bands, is so polarizing and inspires such vituperative hatred frequently? They're not exactly fucking Nickelback.)

Traffic And Weather is a multi-listen album, because it initially seems like the band on auto-pilot. Per usual, the thing is so busy with instrumentation and dense mixing that it sounds like crap on small speakers. But while the album doesn't have Welcome Interstate Managers' sprawl and ambition, the songs are almost as good. Only one track is really stomp (the merely unmemorable "Revolving Dora"). Otherwise, FoW are in top form: "Someone To Love" has a ballsy disco track to complement its dead-on portrait of big-city loneliness for those who've just moved ("Seth Shapiro got his law degree/Moved out to Brooklyn from Schenectady, 93/Got some clients in the food industry/Says it's not the money, it's the recipes" has both the feel for NYC's constant new arrivals and exactly the kind of lame joke someone might crack to patheticallyingratiate themselves). And what exactly is the problem with the constant pop-culture references? I think a lot of people are just afraid of admitting how much of daily life takes place in the detritus and ephemera of corporate mediocrity and low cultural reference points; saying that characters talk about Costco or work at La Quinta makes perfect sense to me. FoW locate real emotion in these settings - "Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim," or on a descending airplane on "Seatbacks and Traytables," a kind of less condescending version of the Talking Heads' seminal "The Big Country." I love this band; whether or not you think the knowingly campy trumpets on "Strapped For Cash" are a good idea or not is your problem, but to dismiss these guys as anything less than (at the very least) solid pop craftsmen who represent every-day lower-middle-class American life with knowing lyrics is nuts. (NB: "New Routine" may be their most ambitious lyrically ambitious song, the storytelling equivalent of Magnolia. As below with Spoon, this could be another song that would make me cry if songs made me cry.)

Jason Falkner, I'm OK...You're OK - Jason Falkner is one of those weird jack-of-all-trades who should be better known. A checkered resume includes pit stops as a session musician for Air, Beck and Aimee Mann, string arrangements for Jet, co-writing nearly half of Brendan Benson's excellent 2002 Lapalco, and participation in the allegedly seminal '90s power-pop groups Three O'Clock, Jellyfish and The Grays. His solo work isn't half-bad either, or at least 1996's Present Author Unknown, an overlooked collection of muscular and intricate pop anthems with all the right influences. I'm OK...You're OK is Falkner's first solo album of original material in eight years, and while it's not as good as my memory of Author Unknown (I don't have a copy, and it's been a while), it's still well worth checking out, if not as an introduction to the man. (It's also inexplicably a Japan-only release at the moment.) Never afraid of lengthy songs, four of the tracks here are over five minutes, and none are under three. Not entirely unjustifiable - "Runaway" has a tasty chorus, although it takes a while to hear it under the complicated layers of synths, discreet accompanying guitars, and all manners of well-mixed stuff. Mostly, Falkner avoids the direct punchy choruses and appeals to your inner studio nerd; obvious choruses are generally sacrificed for the kind of technical crafting that will probably appeal to the same people who loved Air's album earlier this year. It's growing on me, but I don't see this flowering into a classic; it's a demonstration of a craft so refined that maybe only fellow musicians can appreciate it, along with the occasional sop to the hook-happy. (Opener "This Time" is a deceptive example of the latter; with its ebullient trumpet line and harpsichords, it's as epic as pop gets short of Oasis.) It's just good to hear from the dude, frankly. Sooner rather than later next time please.

Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? - A fine, frenzied album. It's taken me awhile to come around on Of Montreal - for a while, I was suffering from the recurring delusion I get from formalist pop bands that all their songs are undistinguishable (The Apples in Stereo and The Strokes were initially barred from my iTunes for the same reason). But this was probably a good starting place for me, because Kevin Barnes has concocted the most overproduced, micro-managed pop record in years: it's not electronica, but none of it sounds real. "We've got to keep our little clique clicking at 130 bpm," Barnes shrieks, and any number of weird rhythm tracks, sounds and studio tricks take him at face value. There's been a lot of gabba about the album's alleged conceptual framework, but the lyrics are pretty straightforward, frightening glimpses into post-break-up depression and attendant promiscuity. Lyrics don't even peak on the nearly 12-minute centerpiece "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal," which has one of the album's funniest/saddest lyrics: "I fell in love with the first girl who could appreciate Georges Bataille" (hipster lit - OK, it's not just that, but you know what I mean - as foolish mating tool). A great angry album, and it's not as sugar-rush happy as it first seems - I haven't listened to it too many times, figuring I'd burn out on it easily, but no - every time, it seems stronger and more muscular.

Twilight Sad, Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters - I don't have much to say about this. I gave the obligatory three spins and gave up; it's pretty tuneless, and I'm not hearing much new or original going on with the guitar tones or shoegaze aesthetic or whatever the fuck is supposed to be cool about these guys. Nothing personal, I just don't get it.

Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga - Now it's clear that Gimme Fiction was a transitional record; at the time, the execrable "Was It You?" and rote "My Mathematical Mind" seemed like products of frustration, with Britt Daniel butting up against the limits of the Spoon sound/near-formula and not sure where to go next. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the pay-off. In some ways Spoon's most challenging, multiple-listen-demanding album since A Series Of Sneaks, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga throws up a number of challenges: almost no choruses ("The Underdog" is the exception, but it's also a single), bi-polar production that swings from the even-more-minimal-than-usual ("The Ghost Of You Lingers" comes off as a ghost of a song at first, little more than reverbed vocals and a few keyboard chords) to the relatively lavish (the swooping strings of closer "Black Like Me"), typically oblique lyrics. But Gx5 isn't just one of Spoon's richest albums musically, mastering both the 3-minute pop song and the longer-form jam; it's also one of Britt Daniel's finest performances lyrically. Look at "Eddie's Raga," a pissy grind where he announces "She told me it's hopeless I'm a slut for the New York Times." Reset some implied punctuation, and it becomes "She told me 'it's hopeless, I'm a slut for the New York Times" - aka, met a girl, wanted to date, but she refuses to leave New York. Occasionally Daniel's lyrics have in the past seemed like needlessly cryptic place-holders, but Gx5 coheres everything. (He's also in great vocal form: listen to how angry he seems when yelling "Right!" before launching into the instrumental break//chorus on "The Underdog." Jon Brion's intentionally unnerving production substitutes brass for a real bassline; it seems incomplete at first, but I came around.) Closer "Black Like Me" might be the single most affecting song they've ever done; hipster misanthropy and emotional neediness run side by side (this is a band that once produced a song with the chorus "You're pleased to meet him NO YOU'RE NOT"), but "Black Like Me" is a plea straight from the heart. "I've been needing someone to take care of me tonight," Daniel begins, in a state of perpetual indecisiveness. "All the weird kids up front/tell me that you know what you want." If songs made me cry, this one would.

Kanye West, Can't Tell Me Nothing - Kanye's surprisingly cohesive and entertaining mixtape is basically a sample of roster of every damn person Kanye has worked with this year. There's not a single dud track, and some songs are wisely chopped up into snippets under two minutes, ensuring there's never a dull moment. (Props for a judicious, seamless mix to Plain Pat, whoever he is.) Highlights include CRS's "Us Placers" - the ad hoc super-group of Lupe Fiasco, Pharell and Kanye taking Thom Yorke's "The Eraser" and transforming it into something special; also Common's "The People," a song with a beat so transcendent that for once I was able to ignore what a pompous jerk Common is. Song that most whet my appetite for the eventual album: Bentley's "C.O.L.O.U.R.S," which sounds like early OutKast and has a killer Lil' Wayne guest verse. Hell, even unknown and generically named quantities like Big Sean sound great. Kanye's occasional, unbalanced rambling between songs might be a deal-breaker for those averse to his personality, but there's a definite fascination to stuff like "Interviews," 3:31 of the man bitching about how interviews misrepresent him, how he's not politically motivated at all, and compares the infamous Jesus "Rolling Stone" cover to a college student playing Jesus in a play. Highly recommended, especially for those who aren't really hip-hop inclined here; there's something here for everyone.

TK:
The Shins, Wincing The Night Away
v/a, Do You Trust Your Friends?
The Apples In Stereo, New Magnetic Wonder
Elliott Smith, New Moon
T.I. T.I. Vs. T.I.P.
Ola Podrida, Ola Podrida
The Clientele, God Bless The Clientele
Fujiya & Miyagi, Transparent Things
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City
Kanye West, Graduation
White Rabbits, Fort Nightly
Bishop Allen, The Broken String

albums: The Broken West, Justice, Wilco + mid-year top 8

2007-08-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

Goes without saying I'm behind as usual...someone needs to start paying me:

The Broken West, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On - I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to write about The Broken West's eminently enjoyable debut, surely the finest development in by-the-book power-pop since, I dunno, Brendan Benson started writing choruses. The real question is whether or not this genre appeals to you at all: big, blatantly catchy choruses that refuse to leave your head, sneering lead singers who assert themselves like American Gallagher brothers, relentless riffs, no breathing room except for ballads. And, lest we forget, never too innovative: unlike The New Pornographers (who I mostly find too clever for their own good, what with the chord changes every two measures and completely gibberish lyrics), The Broken West don't have a whole lot on their mind besides, you know, girls and place-holder lyrics. Opener "On The Bubble" makes like a less annoying New Pornos song, spazzy with the piano chords and chord-changing chorus but not self-consciously complex. Like Oasis (whom, please note, they really don't sound anything like), The Broken West are consciously anti-intellectual, and if that makes their songs slightly more interchangeable and less interesting than the clever Mr. Benson, "So It Goes" - and despite the allusions to Beckett (in the album title) and Vonnegut (in that song title), they're not fooling anyone. They're not clever, but they're satisfying, and competent enough musicians that it's not really a guilty pleasure.

Justice, † - Justice are funny guys. On "Genesis," the opening track of their unpronouncable debut, they begin with a blast of pissy brass that sounds for all the world like the UFO-human dialogue at the end of Close Encounters gone very hostile. Then they turn it into a dance track, exploding tension into a joke. Allegedly, micro-house types are horrified by Justice's thudding unsubtlety, but I think they're kind of geniuses. (Also micro-house is boring.) Certainly this is the best dance CD I've heard (out of, like, 4) since Daft Punk's Discovery; in fact, these guys sound more like the old Daft Punk than the real article does these days. Much has been made of the boys' willingness to play hard and fast with the nasty-sounding aggressive synths, but this really isn't a harsh CD at all. Take "Let There Be Light," initially an aggressive concoction of frantic high-hats and warbling synths; after the tense opening and middle comes the lovely cooldown, where Justice pour on the baroque melodies and sound for all the world like the end of some anime apocalypse sequence, when our heroes can finally relax while everything blows up. This is pure junk, executed with lots of wit and intelligence, and I kind of love it - enough to even overlook the hipster-illiterate pretension of the title.

Wilco, Sky Blue Sky - Wilco's shockingly good late-period album has come in for a lot of whining about how Jeff Tweedy's finally indulged his inner dad-/classic-/whatever- rock tendencies. In other words, he's gone conservative, letting out his inner NPR-listening soccer dad. What crap. A few reasons that Sky Blue Sky is anything but rote, by-the-numbers classic rock redux:

1) John Vanderslice gets it exactly right: "It's very flat-sounding in a way. It's extremely neutral, instrumentation wise. Nothing's pushed in the low end." What Wilco's done is assert the primacy of recording without conscious "production," and, bizarrely, that makes Sky Blue Sky almost sound over-produced. It's been a long time since I've heard a record this dead-sounding - maybe some of Bishop Allen's EPs from last year indulge this tendency, but those are basically home-recorded demos. What's important about this neutrality is that it's the very opposite of "rocking out": there's no heavy drums, primal thudding bass, or any of what I think of as classic rock - defined here as anything that might appear on the Dazed And Confused soundtrack. Pitchfork compared this to the Eagles; listen to "Hotel California" (aka the only Eagles song anyone my age knows) and try to keep a straight face. That thing is manipulated and artificial as fuck.

2) In other words, some of the melodies and interesting might seem classic - the Grateful Dead Americana of "Walken," for example, with its interlocking guitar solo duels that trade off riffs, or "Please Be Patient With Me," an old-fashioned ballad with plaintive acoustic guitar that's nowhere close to emo confessional - but Wilco's approach might as well be labeled "passive rock." Jeff Tweedy's lyrics are every bit as unassertive as the music: songs are called things like "Please Be Patient With Me," and Tweedy's worldview is typically morose, reminding us that we're all going to die on "On and On and On" and, on album peak "Hate It Here," musing on trying to keep his life going after his wife's gone. "I even learned how to use the washing machine," he opines, before yelling "I hate it here!" This is not the stuff of rock 'n roll, in my opinion. Pitchfork labels these moments "domestic," and they mean it in a bad way, but what exactly is wrong with inverting classic rock's lyrical template?

3) These songs are fucking hard. This is not the thudding, simplistic Americana of The Band; these are intricate, well-developed songs with multiple, speedy chord changes.

4) This album is tuneful, gorgeous, absorbing, and generally wonderful. Suck it, haters; not everything needs the Jim O'Rourke finishing touch, OK? I'm as surprised as the next guy - I found a lot of A Ghost Is Born to be heavy on the rote, rock-and-solo songs - but this is just right. It's not better than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Summerteeth, but I'm frankly shocked that a band perpetually this close to bland roots rock succeeds so often.

Top 8 (this year's PRO albums):
1. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
2. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
3. The National, Alligator [grew on me in a big way, as I sort of predicted]
4. Fountains of Wayne, Traffic And Weather
5. Menomena, Friend And Foe
6. Rufus Wainwright, Release The Stars
7. The Good, The Bad & The Queen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen
8. Justice, †

TK:
The Shins, Wincing The Night Away
Fountains Of Wayne, Traffic And Weather
v/a, Do You Trust Your Friends?
Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Twilight Sad, Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters
Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Kanye West, Can't Tell Me Nothing
The Apples In Stereo, New Magnetic Wonder
Bishop Allen, The Broken String
Elliott Smith, New Moon
T.I. T.I. Vs. T.I.P.
Ola Podrida, Ola Podrida
The Clientele, God Bless The Clientele
Fujiya & Miyagi, Transparent Things
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
Jason Falkner, I'm OK...You're OK

overdue Pitchfork report

2007-07-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the 3rd Annual International Hipster Symposium of 2007, aka Pitchfork Music Festival. In a landscape with too many great, ATM-draining festivals, Pitchfork stands out by being fleeter and cheaper than the rest. The magic, expedient touch is booking a bunch of cool, hipster-approved bands that aren't overly famous yet yet. At least that's the hope - who knows how many of these bands will actually hit the big-time - but for indie scene obsessives, Pitchfork has a staggering number of satisfying appearances, absent almost any of the bands that would count as marquee names (and be attendently pricier to book) at bigger, more expensive festivals.

To be brief, Chicago (I've been here once before, for all of 2 hours - long story, but I did go to Millennium Park at least) is very cool indeed - half Austin-ish sprawl of residential areas and hipster eateries, half overblown metropolis with decent (if, to the novice visitor, extremely confusing) public transportation. Arriving off the Ashland-Green line to Union Park Friday night, however, is not very cool. You can see the venue straight from the platform, as promised, but these stations are obviously unable to streamline the passage of hipsters en masse.

Friday, 7:45 P.M. - Will call's a breeze, which is a good thing - one person away from getting my tickets (a very annoying person, I might add, who's hitting on the girl who's having trouble finding his tickets; "Maybe I'll see you inside," he says, like he has the slightest chance), the opening strains of GZA's Liquid Swords are clearly audible. Unsurprisingly, the beat and vocals are muddy and echo-y this far away, but promisingly loud and far-reaching. Once inside, me and the girlfriend briefly break up - she to get beer, I to gawk - but soon re-unite. GZA's on obvious if understandable auto-pilot, nailing every word of his 12-year old album. Problem: nearly half of that album is guest appearances, and, as he announces, "I'm missing a Wu-Tang show in Amsterdam for this," so no group chemistry. Solution: an efficient DJ who brings up every beat and guest vocal as needed. It's impressive that the fidelity is this good - but it's also kind of boring and pointless, and the GZA himself seems to perform with cool hauteur, not sweating one beat in his oversized white T. We sit on the grass and drink beer. The crowd's a predictable riot - middle-aged men with Naked Raygun and Shudder to Think t-shirts flaunting their Class of '92 college cred, pretty young hipsters of both genders, and the inevitable local frat boys for whom music fest = beer and chicks. Not that they're entirely wrong.

8:55 P.M. - With 5 minutes to go before Sonic Youth are scheduled to do all of Daydream Nation, things seem headed to an on-time set start. They've done the drum kit, so now lights are flashing onstage at random in preparation. The most annoying posse is directly to our right, their ringleader wearing a Ghostbusters ringer-T and talking loudly at everyone. Right on the dot, a middle-aged man comes out to, presumably, hype up a crowd that's more than ready to cheer on even the most oblique cue. This is good: Sonic Youth fans tend to be, as far as I can tell, people who generally like melodic pop but inexplicably enjoy SY's semi-accessible noise freak-outs and dissonant hooks without listening to any of their avant-garde predecessors or contemporaries. I've listened to Daydream Nation five or so times now, and I'm still not entirely sure many of these things are technically songs. There are riffs aplenty, and it's the work of a band at the top of its interplay, filling up every rhythmic and harmonic crevice. I'm just not sure that "Total Trash" is a song in the same way that, say, "Teen Age Riot" obviously is. Translation: I don't entirely love the album (although "Teen Age Riot," "Kissability," and "Trilogy: A) The Wonder" are obviously gold), and I feel kind of guilty about that.

The hypeman (later revealed, with a little Google-searching, to be the co-owner of a Chicago club) is an embarrassing joke - like having your mom type "LOL" or a teacher drop references to 2Pac in an attempt to relate. He's sad to watch in the way that people who want to ply on communal knowledge to build a bond - when you've obviously got nothing in common - are. "It's a middle-aged riot," he yells; "we're a nation of dreamers." This kind of talk is kind of creepy, making you feel like you've joined a cult and have some kind of inside knowledge. He will be relentlessly derided by the crowd the rest of the weekend.

There's the band and the opening notes - but where the fuck is the sound? After a few moments, heading from the gauzy strains to first rock-out, it becomes obvious that a volume boost is not on the way; it's supposed to sound like this. "Turn it up! Turn it up!" becomes the chant led by the Ghostbusters man, and I join in - this is pathetic, the quietest show with amps I've ever seen. I can kind of see why - probably noise ordinances, and the fact that there's a house literally right behind the house and across the street probably doesn't help - but it's also kind of lame. Finally, Ghostbusters leads one of those rude pushes to the front generally frowned upon, and I follow without a sense of shame.

The performance itself is a mixed bag; it sounds better live, obviously, and I notice that a lot of these songs basically lumber from one pounding, primitive riff to another (in a way, SY aren't a lot unlike the '70s rock dinosaurs they supposedly supplanted, trying to win you over by sheer heaviness and volume). They're songs after all, I suppose, or maybe just seem like it in this context. "This is the home stretch," announces Thurston before the trilogy, and suddenly it's over. With that out of the way, they return with much more energy. "Back to the 21st century," he snidely remarks, and the band seems genuinely enthused about playing tracks from Rather Ripped (a record I still haven't listened to), as Kim Gordon rocks unsteadily on her heels. The Daydream Nation performance seemed almost like classical music, with the band diligently hitting every complicated note, reveling in their interplay; this encore actually feels like an outdoor show.

Saturday, 2 P.M. - You can hear Califone's trumpets reverberating across the field as Voxtrot lackadaisically stroll through their sound-check. The Austin sensations seem unfazed to be touring with an album generally conceded to be a disappointing way to capitalize on their EPs. Maybe they just really don't know that people don't like it (although I hear this isn't the case, and Ramesh blames blog culture); whatever the reason is, they're troopers in the mid-day sun. Some of their new songs - so unmemorable in recorded form I don't even know their names - sound much improved live, or at least more direct. They don't play "Rise Up In The Dirt" - not just their best song, but the best song of 2006 as far as I'm concerned - but they do give us some of the good old jams ("Your Biggest Fan," "Soft And Warm," and "The Start Of Something" as a closer - prefaced with the wry disclaimer "This song has more words than any of our other songs, which is saying a lot for us"), although - curiously - not the two best songs from their new record, "Firecracker" and "Blood Red Blood." A couple of other things - these songs are fucking hard, and the band could stand to practice the time-changes a little more, because sometimes they lose momentum from one section to another, the tempo slowing down while trying to negotiate a changing time-signature. Also, sound board people? Turn that other guitarist (dunno your name dude, sorry) way up. He's the one actually playing the riffs, so it would be nice to hear him.

3:10 P.M. - I'm not sure why you would see Beach House live - I guess I'm trying because I've heard their record and liked it, but have never listened to Grizzly Bear across the way. Anyway, it's a bad idea - Beach House sound, I shit you not, exactly the same live, which I guess is what happens when your key components are drum machines, hushed vocals, & slide guitar - how hard could it be to replicate the tone, right? (Also, I known I say this about everything, but I swear some of these chord changes - esp. on "Childhood" - are way close to Koyaanisqatsi.) They're not bad, but you're certainly not gonna push your way through a crowd for this.

Meanwhile, astounding noises are coming from the Grizzly Bear stage - they first announced themselves with bass notes so loud I thought the mothership from Close Encounters had landed - and finally it's unavoidable - we have to see this. What they are are fairly astonishing - flawless 3-part vocal harmonies, guys switching off on lead vocals, a drummer who occasionally just plays bass; general musical showmanship that makes what are actually kind of sedate songs perfect to wow a crowd (or at least me) with. I need to listen to these guys stat.

4:10 P.M. - This is the surprise gem of the festival. Over at the "Balance Stage" (i.e., the one crammed between merchandise tents and the park fence - not enough space for hardly any people, and once again a crippling lack of volume unless you're within 20 feet), there is an unsmiling man in a yellow shirt. He has two equally undistinguished cohorts, and their equipment is kind of inscrutable. He leans forward into the mic and begins whispering "Fujiya...Miyagi" over and over again.

This is awesome. I've vaguely heard of Fujiya & Miyagi - a bunch of contradictory reviews have suggested Krautrock and Stereolab as reference points, both of which alienate me, so I haven't checked them out - but what they are are extremely quiet, chilled out sort-of electronica, variously recalling Gary Numan and Talking Heads' more expansive moments (think the closing moments of "Stay Hungry," when the expansive synths bloom over a steady drum-beat).

The music is only half the show. In person, F&M are completely hilarious, in large part because the man in the yellow shirt - a stoic stage presence who barely acknowledges the audience - spends much of his time making goofy sounds with his mouth - cars racing, a "sucking punch" sound to accentuate the lyrics on this topic, and all sorts of general radio sound effects bullshit. It's invigorating to watch a guy be this weird in public, but they had me from the opening whisper chant, which I find myself repeating sporadically for the rest of the weekend.

6:20 P.M. - I don't really care for the cheerfully hardcore idiots in Mastodon - rampaging, kill-them-all metal has never really been my thing - but I do appreciate that they're pretty much annoying the shit out of everyone who doesn't like them, blasting across the park with no competition. "They're just noise and feedback," complain the sorority bubbleheads behind me in the latrine line. "There are, like, no good bands left today." Fuck you lady; leave after Iron & Wine, why don't you?

7:00 P.M. - I've never been to a rap show (unless you count Michael Franti & Spearhead those many years ago at Austin City Limits) - in part because I've heard they suck, in part because they're damn expensive. But Clipse is the best show I've seen in ages, let alone at this festival. A while back, when enthusiastically recommending their 2006 album Hell Hath No Fury (eventually my #3 favorite record of last year, as far as these record-nerd list things go), I foolishly suggested that they seemed to be kidding; such technical proficiency (and their nasal voices) seemed to suggest that they were honing their craft on whatever was popular without really caring. I've read some interviews with them since then, and I take it all back: crack dealership goes back two generations in the family, and they allegedly spend the years between albums going back to selling crack to pay the bills. These are terrible, scary people who just happen to be brilliant.

Pusha-T emerges in the standard oversized white T-shirt with dreadlocks; Malice is the shaven-headed one. They have a DJ who doesn't do much other than serve up the beats and annoyingly punctuate the end of every song with a gunshot song. But Clipse are awesome: yelling out every line whether solo or in unison, backing each other up on the ends of lines, acting out damn every word with facial expressions. They're completely engaged, and they have the crowd on their side. There's a semi-problematic aspect here: it's been all downhill commercially since their 2002 hit "Grindin'," and right now I suspect that (outside of Virginia), their biggest fans are the skinny, white, fashionably-bespectacled Pitchfork crowd. If this bothers them, it doesn't show: the DJ doesn't play censored versions of the songs, but sort of subtly muffles "nigga" every time it comes up on a chorus that people are singing along with. Clipse aren't exactly selling blackness to an audience that - like previous generations of lily-white suburban teens loving N.W.A., the whole concept of which got sent up most excellently in Dynamite Hack's "Boyz N The Hood" cover - fetishizes something supposedly dangerous, primal and raw. The primary reason we're all here (hopefully) is that they're superb, very proficient rappers; we're not talking enjoyable idiots like Young Jeezy or Three 6 Mafia. If at times Clipse seem to be playing up their roles as aggressive, undeniably semi-menacing hoods, in the context of mainstream rap's constant threat-mongering they're hardly unique or particularly violent. That violence stands out at this largely sedate festival, but it also makes for the most energetic set of the day.

8:30 P.M. - The Balance Stage is fucked. I kind of suspect the reason Girl Talk was put on this stage was to encourage the spillover to go see Yoko Ono. Not happening; we can only get close enough to sort of see a demented jack-o-lantern decorating the top of the stage, and can't hear shit. We leave, stopping to hear the end of Cat Power's set. "She's like Dylan with tits," a friend texts me. Yes.

Sunday, 1:00 P.M. - Deerhunter are late setting up. "They're having breakfast with Mastodon," suggest the pot-smokers behind us, which strikes me as the festival's best quip so far. (Later, my girlfriend will note - after learning that Menomena's first album is an anagram - that she would love to play Scrabble with them. Put those two events together and it sounds like a perfect day to me.) The hypeman is back; he embarassed himself at Voxtrot with the yell "Are there mothers here? Sisters? Daughters? Wives?" The "yeah"s were half-hearted at best, and now he announces the performers as "Deerhoof," a pronouncement that will be shouted back at him every time he takes the stage for the rest of the day. (Addendum: apparently terrifying lead singer Bradford Cox asked him to do this, but it certainly added to the general ill-will.) I don't really care that much about Deerhunter either way, although certainly their ambient, loop-y skronk improves in person - it's the loudest set I've heard the whole fest. Cox is pretty much the whole show though - look at those photos on the link above. When he stood holding the mic in his mouth with his head down and his arms raised in a V, that may have been the creepiest, most memorable image of the festival.

2:00 p.m. - As rumored, Menomena have trouble setting up their equipment, though it's pretty astonishing that they can make all this noise with just three people. (Across the field, we can hear The Ponys as Menomena struggle to prep; good god they suck. 3 chords, a female who bobs up and down for 30 minutes straight, all-bullshit rock 'n roll. Get the fuck out of the garage guys.) Of all the bands here (with the arguable exception of Grizzly Bear) they're the ones with the most obviously manifested talent - they can all sing in flawless a capella three-part harmony, the two non-drummers are multi-instrumentalists and manage to pull together the complicated songs without relying on backing tracks - the sax solos are intact! - and the drummer is the festival's best, hitting every complicated fill beat with monstrous volume and precision (he's like one of those '70s studio drummers they kept around when you needed someone to drive the whole song). "Muscle'n Flo" is still bumpin', but "Rotten Hell" is the real stand-out - they know that sheer goodwill is easy to generate when you drop out all the instruments from a quiet song, do the 3-part a capella thing, then zoom back in to a huge chorus. Even with all this talent and great material, the set's no more than solid: it's more like a gigantic stunt to see how they'll do it than a polished show. Give them time.

3:00 p.m. - One of the few bands to start right on time, Junior Boys have something Menomena don't: showmanship. It's actually been a surprisingly good festival for performances that don't just have musical talent but charisma as well: Voxtrot was kind of lazy, mostly relying upon their cute lead singer to bounce around (he waved his hands in the air a lot), and Menomena stalled too much between songs to be anything but solid. But Clipse (more than anyone here), Grizzly Bear, Fujiya & Miyagi, and Deerhunter have all offered spectacles of some kind. Only Junior Boys, however, seem truly professional and arena-ready - which makes sense, because they would've been wildly popular in the '80s. A lot of the music has to be generated from samples, for obvious reasons, but it's surprising how much they can do onstage - the bassist has the funky one-two walk of an '80s superstar, and the drummer is an asshole of the best kind, wearing crisp business attire and sporting an aggressive shaved head. Phil Collins couldn't do better. On record, they're gorgeously mopey, hide-in-bed kind of music; live, they actually sound...kind of sexy.

5:00 p.m. - It's been dead time to drink beer, but please note that somewhere across the park, Jamie Lidell is prancing around in a headdress he apparently bought at George Clinton's garage sale. WTF.

6:00 p.m. - It must be really, really nice to be Stephen Malkmus. If Pixies and Pavement were the twin faces of the late '80s/early '90s new face of indie rock - down with '80s college rock and jangle, up with the clear, relatively pristine melodies! - I think it's clear which has aged better - and this has nothing to do with their equally formidable influence and discographies (although I do prefer Pavemen)t. On the one hand, we have the perpetually enigmatic group which fell apart without undue acrimony and the ever-appealing frontman who, to this day, looks younger than you do. On the other hand, we have the group which was perpetually underappreciated until it was infamously disbanded by a fax note, and whose frontman proceeded to grow fat and decidedly unsvelte (I saw Frank Black do an in-store a few years ago, and his appearance literally made a small child cry). Black's been restlessly re-inventing himself in perpetuum because he needs to - Stephen Malkmus hangs back and wears pink polo shirts and plays in a jam band whenever he damn well feels like it. But crucially, Malkkmus is "clever" in a way that's obvious without being immediate: it takes a while to get his sense of humor, but once you do, suddenly everything he says sounds like a joke. "Oops," he says, and the crowd roars with laughter. The set's fine - I'm kind of incapable of telling the difference between his old and new material when it's all guitar and vocals - and everyone goes nuts when drummer Bob Nastanovich from Pavement shows up for a shambolic, quasi-reunion rendition of two cuts from Slanted And Enchanted, which is admittedly pretty fucking awesome. (Snarky side note: if Pavement was all about upending conventional expectations and being charmingly self-deprecating, Malkmus may be deliberately fucking with crowd expectations. It was well known and widely expected that bassist Mark Ibold was with Sonic Youth, and, if anyone was expected to join Malkmus on-stage, it would be him, since he was already there. Instead, Malkmus threw the curveball, and then didn't add Ibold; a threesome on-stage might have ignited a riot.) Come for the music, stay for the frequent and inexplicable Lou Reed references, hero-worship and nostalgia.

7:00 p.m. - Of Montreal is a fine band that I've only recently come around on, having suffered previously from one of my recurring delusions that every song sounds the same. It doesn't, at least not on their new record, a fine, spazzy melange of overproduced (in a good way) hooks. And I'm curious: how does one play such a clearly studio-bound record live? The answer, apparently, is to steal a page from the Flaming Lips: crank up the backing tracks and make with the costumes. We get tired of the gimmickry after 20 minutes, which may have been a mistake: the guy in the black-suit dancing as Kevin Barnes' evil id wasn't doing much for me, but all I hear the rest of the night are vague, tantalizing snippets of conversation that seem to suggest a combination of an awesome orgy and cooking show: "My favorite part was the apple sauce." Huh?

8:00 p.m. - The Field sounds exactly the same live. What's the fucking point.

9:10 p.m. - Klaxons are 40 minutes late with their set-up, enough time for the pure-at-heart to run over to De La Soul like good music historians. Klaxons don't really belong here; they're like the shallow guilty pleasure Planet Terror to the festival's Death Proof. It's visceral, retrograde pleasures vs. music that's largely not mosh-friendly - and certainly not cool enough to proudly fly its Britpop derivation. And yeah, I enjoyed it, even though Klaxons run the same live-set bullshit as every British band ever - pretending to be drunker than they are, giving out sarcastic shout-outs, sweating profusely to show how hard they're working (which, undeniably, they are). In fact, I was with them almost to the end; certainly live the whole dance-rock thing makes more sense, with the Klaxons being simultaneously conventionally melodic and song-oriented while providing rump-shaking action. The crowd made good with plenty of moshing and crowd-surfing. But then, at the very end, they smashed an amp, and I got fed up. What's the budget like for these tours? "Alright boys, tonight you can smash a tom and a guitar, but leave the amp alone, we can't afford another one til tomorrow. Now go out there and show 'em uncalculated rock, dammit!"

But yeah, not a bad way to end the fest. Do it with volume next year, OK guys?

mid-year catch-up: Rufus Wainwright, Prodigy, The White Stripes, Sally Shapiro

2007-07-17T05:49:00.001-07:00

Rufus Wainwright, Release The Stars - Some artists layer guitars. Rufus Wainwright layers trumpets, and that confuses people. "Too baroque," scream all the negative reviews, "the arrangements smother the songs." Thank god for my mom then - a classical music professor without even the slightest bit of sympathy for contemporary pop music. I ran the opening tracks of this album past her, and she was unimpressed. "Very conservative," she frowned. So yes, all you carping and caviling types: these aren't Broadway show tunes (thank god) or hookless wonders. These are pop songs, and fairly glorious ones at that, with the least touch of modesty removed: Wainwright is way beyond the point of inserting a quiet, piano-and-voice ballad like "In A Graveyard." An album like Poses appears modest in retrospect. While that's still his masterpiece (the back-to-back combo of "Poses" and "Shadows" is pretty unbeatable), Release The Stars easily trumps the Want duo, which suffered respectively from some plainly shitty tracks and the goofiest damn closer on the otherwise superb Want Two. Release The Stars is consistently excellent in its songwriting and arrangements (and Wainwright proves to be a terrific self-producer), and doing those Judy Garland shows seems to have re-instilled some welcome grit and aggression unseen since "California" aspired to be a single. Particularly weird case in point: "Between My Legs." Wainwright's said that hearing Franz Ferdinand on the radio made him want to start a song in chaos and then bring into his own kind of order. The premise is dubious (if Rufus thinks this is disorder, god help him when he hears Sonic Youth), but the execution is genius: from clunky, shuffling full-band assault to ecstatic chorus, swooning brass nicking the only memorable riff from "Phantom Of The Opera," and what sounds like Gollum dramatically reading out Rufus's lyrics. It's not his strongest album - while never a shitty lyricist, a lot of what's here are placeholder words rather than the strong storytelling he's capable of - but I'll venture that it's his second best. The unconverted need not apply, obviously.

Prodigy, Return Of The Mac - Only recently got into Mobb Deep (The Infamous is a stone-cold classic), but of late G-Unit has destroyed all their inventiveness, turning them from strong storytellers with pungent details into rote threat-mongers. The same applies here, but the producer makes all the difference: DJ Alchemist is kind of a genius, and while this is an album good for about all of 3 listens, those are 3 very entertaining spins. Prodigy mumbles, sounds vaguely 50-ish, and offers to kill you on the slightest provocation, but Alchemist recontextualizes this, offering up not lazy synths and drum machines but lush '70s samples. The idea of blaxploitation-ish rap is nothing new, of course, but on the two best tracks - "Mac 10 Handle" and "Take It To The Top" - it comes to vigorous new life. The former is Prodigy's strongest lyrical performance; he sits in his room, staring at candles, scheming on niggas, and watching Hard Boiled, which seems to be a good night for him. "Take It To The Top" is the strongest track - at first it seems like sliding bass notes, whistles and bongos are all that's gonna happen, but 40 seconds in, stabbing strings and flutes comes in to accentuate every line. It's a well-considered blend of the interplay between flow and production, even if Prodigy has nothing to say ("God bless you and all of your friends/cuz I'm on some bullshit and I'm ready to flip"). Rest is fun, but those are the two tracks I keep coming back to.

The White Stripes, Icky Thump - Of course this is a heartening return to form; it would be nice to pretend that Get Behind Me, Satan being "adventurous" was fun for anyone but Jack White, but most of those songs were a drag. The first four tracks here are as strong as any White Stripes first half; the bizarro freak-out of "Icky Thump" is initially confounding, but with repeated listens the wanky guitar solos and twisty time-changes make sense. White sounds as pissed off as he's ever been - which is a good thing, make no mistake - and then he settles into "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)," one of their most conventional and satisfying stompers, up there with "You're Pretty Good Looking (for A Girl)" and other, non-parenthetical songs. "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues" has White indeed pouring his little heart out (no traditional blues chords though, just mellow strumming), and "Conquest" is a pleasingly bizarre mariachi track. There's some missteps along the way - two bagpipe tracks back to back, egad - but Icky Thump is pretty damn satisfying, even if the middle third occasionally turns into sludge.

Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance - I'm not sure why I don't care much for this; it's basically a wintry, unadventurous Saint Etienne. All I got is that Shapiro's voice is kind of unremarkable, and the arrangements more mood music than stick-in-your-head hooky. I have a feeling there's lots of CDs floating around like this, and I'm not sure why I should care about this one in particular.

TK:
The Shins, Wincing The Night Away
The Broken West, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On
Fountains Of Wayne, Traffic And Weather
v/a, Do You Trust Your Friends?
Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Twilight Sad, Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters
Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Kanye West, Can't Tell Me Nothing: The Official Mixtape
The Apples In Stereo, New Magnetic Wonder
Bishop Allen, The Broken String
Elliott Smith, New Moon
Justice, †
T.I. T.I. Vs. T.I.P.
Ola Podrida, Ola Podrida
Wilco, Sky Blue Sky

catch-up: Voxtrot, The Field, Menomena, Travis, The National, Klaxons

2007-06-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

Voxtrot, Voxtrot - 2007 probably won't cough up a more underwhelming debut than Voxtrot's first full-length effort. On their stellar Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP and Your Biggest Fan CD-S, the Austin blog-buzz band put together stunningly ambitious songs whose complex structures built from unexpected climax to climax: the results weren't just satisfyingly hooky, they were downright cathartic, with all the emotional power people normally (mistakenly) attribute to The Arcade Fire. While their full-length keeps the sophisticated arrangements (they have an undeniable knack for string and brass arrangements that never smother the song), Voxtrot is finally recording with professionals at the board. Big mistake: instead of the lovely, wide-open spaces of their earlier songs, every song here is mixed and mastered to leave no gaps, a suffocating tidiness that leaves every song at the same volume and level of intensity. The songs always seem to be building to a climax that never arrives, and while the album is eminently listenable, it's kind of a drag, never hooking you in. "Firecracker" - one of the would-be fiercest tracks - has the exact same chorus chord changes as Babyshambles' "Fuck Forever" without half of the raw energy; you know things have gone bad when Babyshambles vs. anyone is a victory for Pete Doherty. It's hard not to thrash your head occasionally, but the hooks never stick. The exception is closer "Blood Red Blood," which ups the arrangement ante with a wildly chromatic climactic string-and-saxophone thrust that finally finds the jugular Voxtrot were formerly so good at locating. I'd say that the next time is what we should be looking forward to, but frankly, as far as I'm concerned, they're already firmly in my personal canon, so whatever.

The Field, From Here We Go Sublime -In an effort to provide you with only the best & most-researched in 6-months-late (or more!) music blogging, I'm starting to write this while in an airplane descending over Sweden, listening to The Field's minimalist Swedish techno. OK, I didn't do it on purpose, and the IKEA-esque furnishings aren't helping much to understand this, my annual dip into electronica. Minimalist glitch stuff is better approached on drugs or while driving if my experiences hold true, and while The Field is hooky enough in a way that I can't explain (it gets stuck in my head, but I can't follow the track structures), it fires for me as more than background music only on rare occasions. A weird example is 2nd track "A Paw In My Face," which slices-and-dices a Lionel Richie track I've never even heard, but there's still something compelling about hearing a saccharine '80s guitar tone examined in microscopic perspective, with a sudden release into a full-on sample of typical Richie sleaze at the end. A lot of times I just don't have that kind of in or innate comfort level with the music (although I dig freak-outs that occur on "The Deal" and "Sun & Ice" - the guy mixes the tracks live, which leads to some weird moments of feedback that are the coolest thing here). One for the specialists and not a general-audience-friendly cross-over, no matter what the high Metacritic score suggests.

Menomena, Friend And Foe - I passed on Menomena's first album I Am The Fun Blame Monster for several reasons, which basically boiled down to the fact that both their album title and band name seemed to suggest an annoyingly cutesy sensibility. Preparing for getting the most for my Pitchfork Music Festival money means it's worth at least sampling everything on tap, though, which leads me to the embarrassed conclusion that I almost missed out. Menomena are one of the few bands that can actually be legitimately compared to the Flaming Lips ('90s Lips, before they started sucking on the albums and concentrating solely on spectacle): they've got the same sense of sonic depth that occurs when you pair up extremely deep, treated booming drums with high trebles and don't put anything in-between. Opener "Muscle'n Flo" is as majestic as they come: first a basic bass line and vocals, then a tentative slide guitar that, combined with the lyrics, feels like a morning sun opening on an infinite expanse. By the time an organ kicks in, it's hard not to feel chills down your spine.

Menomena have one of the best back-stories of any band on their recording process: to avoid squabbling over accusations of control, everyone plays/records riffs separately, then they assemble them on a computer. You couldn't compose shifts in instrumentation this dense no matter how you tried: Menomena's songs grind on for a while in fugal fashion, but they never get old, because there's simply too much variation in the cycles. They're not particularly experimental despite all this - these are tight songs, albeit with perhaps slightly more saxophone emendations than most. It's also the rare album that perfectly changes its emotional trajectory from aggression to gorgeous resignation in no time. (And if you want to try to dig into the lyrics, this is not only wildly entertaining but explains a lot about the seemingly left-field religion-concerned motifs. That opening track is like secular gospel.) Thanks Pitchfork! Now I have even fewer original tastes than I did before.

Travis, The Boy With No Name - Explaining why you like Travis to people who, like you, basically code themselves as indie-rock-fucks is always an uphill struggle. Once, some friends assumed that when I said I liked Fountains of Wayne, I must be being ironic, and Travis fall into the same boat - so hopelessly uncool that claiming some affinity for them must have some kind of weird ulterior motive. The answer, basically, is that I was a super-angsty high-schooler, and I thought The Man Who was the best morose music ever, Elliott Smith aside. I've barreled through all their albums after that with varying results: thanks quite a bit to Nigel Godrich's brilliant production, The Invisible Band has some killer tracks. I'm listening to "Side" right now, and the guitar tones sound like they weren't recorded live but were instead played over and over again by some kind of avant-garde weirdo who enjoys finding the exact right tone (I'll stop short of a Sonic Youth comparison, but you get the idea). I honestly believe that some of the best work in Godrich's formidable resume is in making Travis sound so full and carefully assembled. That metronomic, hermetic obsessive regularity was one of Travis's best assets: The Man Who begins with a count-off, and there's not a note on it that couldn't be plotted on a grid (and I love it that they used a banjo, of all things, to keep strict time on some songs). This squareness works well for Travis - Invisible Band and 12 Memories don't work start to finish, but they have definite jangly highlights.

The Boy With No Name is an unexpected, almost disaster: political protest songs couldn't keep Travis from being catchy, but here they're not even that. There's exactly two good songs here - "My Eyes" and the expected hidden track (stop it already). Both stick religiously to Travis's well-established template - rigid arrangements, clean recording, jangly guitars. I love these songs, and I will keep listening to everything they put out; if nothing else, they can't stop themselves completely from producing MOR jangle for fools like me. Apparently, though, the boys thought they should become a "real" band and experiment. Big mistake. Pretty much every review has noticed that the potentially decent "Selfish Jean" inexplicably swipes the drums from "Lust For Life"; they might as well have sampled it, but the effect is anything but exuberant. Travis may have broken through with a single about wanting to rock, but their attempts at balls-out play are nearly always embarrassing, and this is no exception. Elsewhere, "Out In Space" transforms a probably OK maudlin ballad into unlistenable shit by throwing in banged atonal piano chords for no good reason; presumably this is "experimentation." Spare me. Not to mention that all this tomfoolery draws attention away from whatever hooks are in there and to Fran Healy's lyrics, which remain excruciatingly cliched as usual. At one point, we're advised of the necessity of grabbing the bull by the horns, and Healy sounds like he might as well be an inspirational wall poster.

The weird thing? Travis have already written a handful of decent songs that don't depend upon jangle. I'm thinking mostly of the fierce closing track on The Man Who, which depicts an abusive father ("Talk to your father in that tone of voice/there's a belt hanging over the door") and his effects on a household, down to the final arson and murder, without a trace of pity - it's a driving near-rock song that's among the best things they've done, and an unnerving way to close the album. I'm not saying that Travis shouldn't ever deviate from their bland but (to me) super-pleasing jangle-formula at all: they've shown at least that once they can pull it off. This just isn't the way to go about it.

The National, Boxer - Internet consensus on the National has become unnervingly unified since Alligator dropped. At the time, I wrote it off as a skilled, occasionally gorgeous but overly self-dramatizing album; since then, of course, I swallowed my pride and accepted what a good band these guys are, even if they're far too prone to wallowing in lyrics about drinking and depression. Like seemingly everyone else, I concede that the National are the ultimate example of a band that has to grow on you (a Village Voice profile pointed out that the band are fans of album tracks that grow on you and deliberately trash anything instantly catchy as "trying too hard"), and Boxer is even more trying than Alligator in this respect. There's no howling "Mr. November" catharsis here, just understatement and more understatement. It took me three or so listens just to discern different songs, but it was worth it. I say now (I may regret it later) that while Boxer doesn't have the versatility of Alligator, it's a damn fine atmospheric soak that culminates in "Gospel," a song all the more gorgeous for being really the only immediate song here.

Klaxons, Myths Of The Near Future - Enough people have pointed out already that the whole "new rave" tag is bullshit: these are dance-y songs with more emphasis on rhythm than melodic hooks, to be sure, but they're definitely songs you can stand and nod your head to, not people-movers. Some are hookier than others ("Totems on the Timeline" would have a fine shout-along chorus if the words weren't some regurgitated schoolboy bullshit about Julius Caesar), but the high-energy approach carries the whole disk, even if you get the feeling this works better live. Fine work, fun to listen, kind of forgettable (especially in the back half), and infinitely preferable to the Arctic Monkeys.

long overdue update

2007-05-12T01:33:00.000-07:00

Still catching up on 2006:

Peter Bjorn & John, Writer's Block -Because I am extremely suspicious of any band that's basically obscure (or was previously, and hence new to me) and not personally recommended, I ignored this album for ages until I was having lunch in quite possibly the most hipster-friendly Mexican restaurant in all the world (or at least Williamsburg) and "Young Folks" came on the ridiculously on-the-curve mixes that were playing. It's the rare song as irresistible as the hype claims, a cute hook that plays out as a mating call for hipsters, framed as it is as a whistle duet (!) floating over judicious bongos. It's not too cute, and the rest of it is a calling card of pop sub-genres: these are exactly the kind of all-round dork-hipsters who don't just think it's fun to give shout-outs to New Zealand pop bands beloved only by music critics (naming a song after "The Chills") but name their closing song ("Poor Cow") after a Ken Loach song. Woah. Super-solid stuff, and it's not even necessarily true that "Young Folks," while the most immediately catchy of the bunch, is the best track: that might be "Amsterdam," a bizarro deep-voice excursion with whistles over way deep bass drums, or more straightforward Phoenix-esque exercises like "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off."

Brakes, The Beatific Visions - This is a relatively disappointing follow-up to Brakes' galvanizing debut Give Blood. On that album, 30-second snarky rave-ups only stopped for even better country covers (their version of "Jackson" tops Johnny Cash in my opinion), and the slow songs were tense and odd rather than soothing. The Beatific Visions is more of a traditional album - possibly because Brakes is no longer a one-off side project that blows of steam for a few of the band members, who've made it their musical day job - and that means some songs that don't go straight for the jugular. It's not that "Mobile Communication," for example, is a bad song - it's actually pretty good - but it doesn't take a band like Brakes to make it. Then there's semi-rote sort-of-country-ish songs like "Spring Chicken," which may be a fun challenge for a British band but has nothing to offer American listeners, and the acoustic fragment (it's too sketchy to be a ballad) "Isabel" is pretty useless. I feel weird saying this, but being a semi-novelty band suited Brakes; it gave them a freshness missing here in large part, though present in a song like "Porcupine or Pineapple," which barely cracks a minute while yelling the title over and over. It's also the only song which really counts as a must, though the album is perfectly pleasant. Go back to not caring guys.

and now on to 2007:
The Good, The Bad & The Queen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen - Huge Blur fan, never listened to Gorillaz; I didn't actually think "Feel Good Inc." was catchy until about the 10th time I'd heard it, so I didn't bother. The songs here also aren't actually catchy until the third time, but I guess the difference is...ah fuck it, I'm just a lazy snob who prefers the unpopular. Anyway, with those caveats, this is my favorite Damon Albarn product since the last Blur album: conceptually, Albarn's made it easy by calling it his follow-up to Parklife, substituting a variety of upbeat, showily artificial pop songs for a mood exercise. The Good, The Bad & The Queen ebbs and flow, but it doesn't actually rock in any meaningful sense until the closing title track which, at an even 7 minutes, is amazingly perhaps the best track. It's an album that sounds dull and hermetic at first listen, then worms its way under your skin; perhaps my favorite kind. The 5th Beatle is definitely Danger Mouse in the producer's booth, who works all kinds of subtle trickery that doesn't immediately become obvious; at one point, Albarn is double-tracked, with one vocal several registers higher. It's either pitch-shifted or he had Albarn sing really slow and then sped it up, I don't know enough about studio trickery to say which; regardless, tricks like that are the icing on these brilliantly simple songs.

Air, Pocket Symphony -Occasionally Pitchfork gets it exactly right: "Air can very capably write terrifically catchy songs when so inclined; here, they'd rather create finely-wrought furniture music." Pocket Symphony is Air's first truly ambient record: for all their instrumentals, Moon Safari and even Premiers Symptomes deliver the hooks eventually. Pocket Symphony finds Air's natural technical fixation combined with Nigel Godrich's obsessive studio cleanliness, and while it's easy to appreciate things like the unique roundedness of their percussion sounds, subtle, atmospheric strange arrangements and delicate-sounding acoustic guitars, the songs themselves rarely stick in the memory, making for the first major yet non-essential Air album. (That Baricco collaboration was an oddity I've never heard.) They make with the exquisite sporadically: "Photograph" has a brilliant fake-out minor-key intro that makes the sweet actual song even better, and "Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping" benefits from Neil Hannon guesting on vocals. I've always had the vague feeling that Moon Safari and Talkie Walkie were Air's concessions to a world that wanted something pretty and accessible (including, admittedly me): left to their own devices, every other album comes out weird. And this is no exception, but their restlessness is definitely admirable; it's my fault I'm not as disciplined a listener as they sometimes require.

Baby Teeth, The Simp - Baby Teeth combine hard-rockin' '70s rock with guitars swiped from Queen and strings from ELO. This is better than it sounds. Baby Teeth don't seem to have an ironic bone in their bodies: the music might be at home on classic rock stations, but the lyrics steer clear of rote Let's Rock tropes. "Swim Team" is the stand-out both musically and lyrically: I have no idea what the song is actually about, but it sort of seems like an 8th-grader throwing a temper tantrum because the girl he's crushing on is ignoring him for another guy, and uses the excuse of her neglecting swim team to yell. Seriously: lyrics include "When someone comes to lunch you think that's hot/It's only twice a week, well that's a lot/You're either on the swim team or you're not," all yelled at top volume. Baby Teeth can also do rootsy stuff without getting boring ("Looking For A Road," whose title should clue you in to exactly what it sounds like), and they're all-round top-notch synthesists of their influences. 1 dud track: "God Girlfriend" ditches the guitars for rote laptop pop and comes out empty at 5 minutes. Highly recommended, and inexplicably slept on so far

Deerhunter, Cryptograms - I don't have a whole lot to say about this album, mostly because I don't generally listen to albums like this. Deerhunter come from a freaky world where 3-minute pop songs are anathema and Sonic Youth is presumably as mainstream as it gets; if you've read this blog at all, you know I don't have the right background for this. Only a personal recommendation sent this over my way, and I'm kind of glad it broke through. I can't really claim to "get" first-half interstitial tracks like "White Ink" or "Providence" - loops! reverb! fuzz! - but they sound nice enough when bridging stiff little rockers. I'm not particularly crazy about the vocals - the kind of spoken, would-be tense distorted stuff that's supposed to be dangerous, I guess - but I'm uncharacteristically unenthused by the wordless, nearly 8-minute "Octet," a tense little series of fluid bass riffs that get faster and faster and faster. As widely noted, the album's much-poppier back half gets into shoegaze territory, which basically means that "Strange Lights" sounds like 3rd-rank Britpop - hardly unpleasant, hardly exceptional. I would recommend this album to the kind of person who would be unlikely to read this blog in my opinion. (Noted: the Fluorescent Grey EP is the same shit in my opinion, except without "Octet." Oh well.)

Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha -Not as unvaryingly sublime as The Mysterious Production Of Eggs (what is?), and therefore disappointing in a relative kind of way. That album opened warmly and invitingly with the slow string intro of "/ = /" and lullaby of "Sovay." Armchair begins with the Wilco-esque "Fiery Crash," whose smeary keyboard strings and punchy chorus invite comparisons to Summerteeth and suspicions that this album goes pop. Suspicions may be confirmed by the next track, "Imitosis" - a reworking of "L" from 2003's Weather Systems which ratchets up the tempo and adds friendly guitars to a previously semi-austere song. Armchair, though, is a considerably darker and less self-consciously pretty album than its predecessor. Bird creates songs whose choruses are less obvious and whose structures are more meandering; the whistle hooks keep coming, but they're the only overtly catchy thing at times. After 5 or 6 lukewarm listens, I put the album out of mind for 2 weeks and came back to find it better than I remembered, more of an atmospheric soak than what came before but still every bit as thoughtful in its arrangements and structures. First impressions do prove correct on one front though: the best song really is "Scythian Empire," completely of a piece with previous peaks like the entirety of Eggs and the gorgeous "Action/Adventure." Vivaldi-esque pizzicato strings call up memories of "The 4 Seasons" while the whistle hook and tamped-down keyboards play around with subtle electronic beats. And since it is the best song on an Andrew Bird album, it is therefore the best song of the year thus far.

Blonde Redhead, 23 -The logical, slightly punchier follow-up to Misery Is A Butterfly can basically be described as "Knives Out" 10 times in a row. Unlike Misery, which is basically a gorgeous mood piece, it's slightly easier to tell the songs apart, but if you don't like baroque chord changes, extremely treated drums (including a nod to '80s kits on "Silently"), lots of strings and brass arrangements, and general pussy-ness of all kinds, you're not going to like this. Naturally, I love it. And that's about it, really.

TK 2006:
Dosh, The Lost Take
Adem, Love & Other Planets
Midlake, The Trials Of Van Occupanther
AFX, Chosen Lords
The Pipettes, We Are The Pipettes
Justin Timberlake, Future Sex/Love Sounds
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Broom

2007:
The Shins, Wincing The Night Away
The Broken West, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On
Fountains Of Wayne, Traffic And Weather
Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance
Voxtrot, Voxtrot
The Field, From Here We Go Sublime
Menomena, Friend And Foe
v/a, Do You Trust Your Friends?
Travis, The Boy With No Name
The National, Boxer
Klaxons, Myths Of The Near Future
Rufus Wainwright, Release The Stars

it is still 2006, apparently

2007-03-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Um, yeah. So it's already the MIDDLE OF MARCH and I'm still wrapping up the '06 capsules. I'll try to dispatch these speedily - I'm on Spring Break and not doing much, so it's not that hard - so I can get back to being behind on '07 releases.

The Whitest Boy Alive, Dreams - Respectable but monotonous, The Whitest Boy Alive would easily fit into that series of Domino post-punk re-issues (Orange Juice, The Fire Engines, Josef K, etc.); it's all fluid basslines, a single guitar that has to lay down both the hook and the choppy rhythms in-between, and precise, unwavering drums. "Patience is just another word for getting old," "Fireworks" blandly announces, suggesting that this album might snarkily get somewhere if it wasn't so boring. But it is, and I barely remember what it sounds like at this point. It would probably make good music for an American Apparel store.

Jarvis Cocker, Jarvis - When I get old and (maybe) have kids and can no longer afford to be angry and righteous all the time, I want Jarvis to teach the hypothetical kids in third-grade or so. "Running The World" - first a MySpace single, now the hidden track capping off this solo debut - minces no words. Like Billy Wilder in song, Jarvis has the lack for heavy-handed satire that hits its target rather than seeming overbearing. For anyone who's ever felt that the world, by and large, is run by people who don't have our best interests at heart, Jarvis sums it up: "Cunts are still running the world." The song is anthemic like "Common People" and even more inspring. Still, Jarvis needs bandmates: the album proper is a mixed bag, with acerbic lyrics often weighed down by unremarkable arrangements and lackluster hooks. 2 big exceptions: penultimate song "Big Julie," whose string arrangement adds weight to the possibly sociopathic title character, and "Heavy Weather." Oddly, it's the least characteristic thing on here: the lyrics could charitably be described as indebted to "Bad Moon Rising" and all those other stormy weather = metaphorical trouble songs, but it's got a tense verse that leads to an explosive chorus. Other tracks are better in theory than execution - "Black Magic" samples "Crimson And Clover" but the bombastic hook gets old fast, "Fat Children" is a better title than song, etc.

The Concretes, In Colour - This is a pretty mediocre record, full of meticulously produced filler in generic pop sub-genres: languid pseudo-country with fiddle ("Change In The Weather"), slow, comparatively sparse boy-girl duet ("Your Call"), etc. All are executed with varying degrees of drab, uninspiring competence. It's the kind of formalist pop that gives the genre a bad name. Naturally, there's a pair of excellent songs conveniently bookending the disk: "On The Radio," a sort of less-complicated latter-day melancholy Cardigans pop gem, and "Song For The Songs," which brings out a whole marching band and sounds bracing and uplifting rather than cheesy. Too bad bands this small don't get greatest-hits collections.

Herbert, Scale - First song "Something Isn't Right" is a killer - surprising chord changes, lush strings, Scissor Sisters percussion that's not campy, a husky female vocalist, a surprising outro that kicks in just when you think the song has blown its load. For a moment, it seems like collaborating with Roisin Murphy has rubbed off on Herbert, or maybe it's more like Basement Jaxx on tranquilizers. Things get boring fast though: "The Movers And The Shakers" begins with a blast of Herbert's patented sampled noises (a Coke can being opened, slurping, etc.) and a monotonous saxophone-enabled groove that seems to smother the life out of the music. It's not that the musicianship is off, but that Herbert's cleverness starts to seem like a defect. I'm hardly a proponent of self-consciously dumb, "raw" music, but by the time syrupy "We're In Love" kicks in, you're listening to what's basically a high-toned Whitney Houston ballad bathed in enough strings to power 5 Al Green albums. Something isn't right indeed.

Portastatic, Be Still Please - Business as usual for Portastatic, at least as I can tell (I just got aboard with 2005's Bright Ideas): another songs of well-performed songs that don't always add up. Like a lot of bands that prioritize lyrics over hooks, not everything always clicks: opener "Sour Shores" has a killer chorus but no real verse to speak of, and I can't remember what "Black Buttons" sounds like no matter how many times I play it, tasteful woodwind arrangement or not. The flip side of clever little bands like this that don't always seem to know their own strength is they do i nevitably connect: here, it's the uncharacteristically upbeat "I'm In Love (With Arthur Dove)" and the characteristically dour "You Blanks": those blanks are actually "fuckers," as in: "All my songs used to end the same way, 'Everything's gonna be ok'/You fuckers made that impossible to say." It's a perfectly calibrated blast of misanthropy in tun with the predecessor's "Through With People." (Are the demands of running a record label getting to Mac, or was Superchunk always this grumpy too?)

TV On The Radio, Return To Cookie Mountain - Obviously a massive step up from their humorless, kind of monotonous full-length debut, Return To Cookie Mountain is bigger in every way: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes opened with simple saxes, throbbing bass line, some vocals, and a hi-hat, and stuck to it for the whole first song, seemingly scared of the prospect of harmony. In its first 20 seconds, "I Was A Lover" piles on enough sampled brass, guitars and drum machines to keep Beck fueled for half an album. It's a constantly varied album that never gets too bogged down in the intricacies of its production (which sounds like nothing else out there) to bring the drums and overblown vocals. It's too long by far, an excess of ideas that makes me listen to it less than I should, but thoroughly enjoyable whenever I do actually make the effort. Highlights are definitely the soaring "Province" (with a mixed-down but crucial David Bowie backing vocal that uses his distinctive timbre to give the song a harmony it couldn't possibly possess otherwise, as opposed to merely showboating a famous fan) and "A Method," a sort of revisitation of TV On The Radio's big gimmick, the a capella track, here wisely integrating percussion and thus transcending the merely conceptually interesting. Awesome whistle hook too.

Joanna Newsom, Ys - Didn't actually hate this much as I expected to, which I guess is saying something: I turned off the shrill-voiced, nigh-unlistenable The Milk-Eyed Mender in horror after 30 seconds, but fortunately Ms. Newsom has learned to keep her vocals in the range of recognizably human utterances this time round. Nice, counterpoint-ish string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks tend to be hookier than the songs themselves, which, according to Ms. Newsom's fans, is beyond the point: these aren't pop songs, they're long-form pieces that defy genre and create their own world. There's also a retarded Pitchfork article claiming that Newsom "brings the poise and splendor of classical music" to the indie world. Bullshit: Newsom might write songs that are, basically, warped 10-minute lieder (a la Mahler, Schubert etc.), but that's a 19th-century anachronism that has nothing to do with contemporary ideas (sterile as they are) floating around in the contemporary classical music academy. More to the point, they don't work: it's intricate harp-work only a fetishist of that instrument could love + strings + endless allegorical lyrics. The latter are the crux: either you think a nearly 10-minute song called "Monkey & Bear," about the abusive relationship between the two, is better than a straightforward relationship song because it has "poetic" lines like "Your feast is to the East, which lies a little past the pasture," or you think life is too short. I'm in the latter; I've never been the most adventurous pop music fan, so I'll let it go at that. The overwhelming fanboy jizzing is getting really annoying though.

best of '06 mix

2007-02-05T05:50:00.000-08:00

I've been doing this for 3 years now. It's 2 disks; there's always at least 4 or 5 songs I'd like to have on there that get cut for space, generally from bands that, if you don't like them already (this year the cuts included Beck and Portastatic), you're not going to by this point. I'm doing the liners online this year; if there's any readers I'm unaware of who aren't already signed up for this, let me know and I might make extras. But I'm not egotistical enough to assume people will take me up on this. Notes as needed; otherwise, plow through the back issues of this blog for album appraisals, minus a few that are TK. 2006 basically over at this point, chronology notwithstanding. Incredibly geeky album listing also TK.

Disk 1
1. "3 A.M." Young Jeezy ft. Timbaland (Thug Motivation 102: The Inspiration)
I haven't listened to the whole album yet, though I intend to, but this is really here to represent Timbaland, who's had a fantastic year. Not that "Promiscuous Girl" isn't great, but this songs needs to be more widely heard.

2. "Hold On, Hold On" Neko Case (Fox Confessor Brings The Flood)
3. "You Have Killed Me" Morrissey (Ringleader Of The Tormentors)
4. "Heart In A Cage" The Strokes (First Impressions Of Earth)
5. "At The End Of The Sky" Darkel (Darkel)
6. "Queen Of The Rummage Sale" Bishop Allen (February EP)
This is part of a project releasing a 4-song EP every month; cumulatively, it's some of the best stuff of the year. More TK.

7. "Rally" Phoenix (It's Never Been Like That)
8. "Me & U" Cassie (Cassie)
Great single; never heard or even acquired the album. Why bother, seriously.

9. "As I Sit Down To Play The Organ" Sparks (Hello Young Lovers)
10. "Jimmy Robertello" Creeper Lagoon (Long Dry Cold)
11. "Benton Harbor Blues Again" The Fiery Furnaces (Bitter Tea)
12. "Leave Me Alone" Ellen Allien & Apparat (Orchestra Of Bubbles)
13. "Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" Camera Obscura (Let's Get Out Of This Country)
14. "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above" Cansei De Ser Sexy (Cansei De Ser Sexy)
Same comment as #8.

15. "I'm Talkin' To You" T.I. (King)
16. "Needle In The Hay" Eric Matthews (To Elliott, From Portland)
17. "Van Helsing Boombox" Man Man (Six Demon Bag)
18. "Porcupine Or Pineapple" Brakes (The Beatific Visions)
Haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but I love these guys and needed a short song to use as much available disk space as possible. So. I'm sure this new album is fine.

19. "Running the World" Jarvis Cocker (Jarvis)
20. "Count Grassi's Passage Over Piemont" The Divine Comedy (Victory For The Comic Muse)
21. "Louisiana" The Walkmen (A Hundred Miles Off)

Disk 2
1. "Another Sunny Day" Belle & Sebastian (The Life Pursuit)
2. "When You Wasn't Famous" The Streets (The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living)
3. "Howlin' A Gale" Howe Gelb ('Sno Angel Like You)
4. "The Funeral" Band Of Horses (Everything All The Time)
5. "To Go Home" M. Ward (Post-War)
6. "Ride Around Shining" Cliipse ft. Ab-Liva (Hell Hath No Fury)
7. "The Book I Write" Spoon (Stranger Than Fiction sdtrk)
8. "Postcards From Italy" Beirut (Gulag Orkestar)
9. "In This Camp" Midlake (The Trials Of Van Occupanther)
Comments on this album TK.

10. "A Method" TV On The Radio (Return To Cookie Mountain)
11. "Wai" Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (The Letting Go)
12. "What Does T.S. Eliot Know About You?" East River Pipe (What Are You On?)
13. "Smash Your Head" Girl Talk (Night Ripper)
14. "Devil's Pie" Rhymefest (Blue Collar)
15. "Trains To Brazil" Guillemots (Through The Windowpane)
16. "Count Souvenirs" Junior Boys (So This Is Goodbye)
17. "Doctor Blind" Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton (Knives Don't Have Your Back)
18. "Be Easy" Ghostface Killah ft. Trife Da God (Fishscale)
19. "On The Radio" The Concretes (In Colour)
20. "Rise Up In The Dirt" Voxtrot (Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP)

more remainders: Asobi Seksu, Junior Boys, Beck

2007-01-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

Asobi Seksu, Citrus - Never did get into that whole shoegaze thing - most of Ride's Nowhere strikes me as interchangeable sludge, and it took me six months of off-and-on listening to actually start enjoying My Bloody Valentine's Loveless - so forgive me if I'm less than the ideal audience for this stuff. There's plenty to suck(er) the novelty crowd in — lead vocals in both English and Japanese — but, to these ears, this album goes downhill from its Britpop first half to its meandering finish. At the start we get "Strawberries," which has a guitar riff and badass organ and all the fixings, and "Thursday," which has a little atmospheric drift at the start before launching straight in 1995 radio territory. Then we start getting cuter song titles ("Pink Cloud Tracing Paper"), and perfectly acceptable songs with 3 minutes of storm-und-drang reverb and fuzziness tacked on to them ("Red Sea"). Most of these songs have sections that I like, but surrounded by "atmosphere"; this is the stuff that makes me wish I still had an iPod, so I could produce my own version of the album and dispose of the rest, but just cutting stuff from iTunes forever seems somehow immoral. I don't really like this album, but I feel vaguely bad about that; still, some of the first half refuses to leave me alone.

Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye - Fuck the sophomore slump; most follow-ups these days seem to improve on their overhyped predecessors (this, TV On The Radio, and The Shins all leap to mind). Last Exit was good for a few tracks, and sounded great on shuffle, but it was too sparse and monochromatic a thing to listen to all the way through without severe exasperation setting in (it was kind of like - sorry kids - Beck's Sea Change that way). It takes about a minute of opening track "Double Shadow" to show that things have changed. First there's the opening gambit; it's just 3 different octaves of A, over and over, plus a pulsing drum and the usual hushed vocals, then a few A chords chopped out over and over. Slightly over a minute in, though, actual synth string harmonies kick in, a gross luxury the old Junior Boys would never have permitted themselves. They also never before had upbeat and downbeat tracks or any kind of real sequencing; it was one mood, straight-ahead. So This Is Goodbye is alternately more aggressive and more actively reclusive, and musically richer. And it's also perfect synth-pop.

Beck, The Information - Just as I give up on him, he pops back up with his first decent performance this millennium. Guero opened with the surefire Big Dumb Riff of "E-Pro"; "Elevator Music" starts with a count-off, a groove, and no real melody or hook until about a minute, and the first half of the album that follows is as strong as anything he's ever done, full of weird clattering background sounds, morose vocals, and rich instrumentation amidst some of Beck's best formalist pop songs yet. The whole thing peaks with "Nausea," one of the best songs of the year, and the only time Beck's had any urgency in his voice of late. By the time "Dark Star" kicks off with a slowed-down count-off, diminishing returns set in (although do stick around for "Movie Theme," a worthy enough b-side to Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack"); it's purposeful enough (the last song samples track 3, "Cellphone's Dead"), but less consistently rewarding. The Onion AV Club got it right: "Whereas the disappointing Guero sounded like a weak attempt to reprise every genre-confusing musical approach Beck has ever taken, the much more satisfying The Information plays like a successful attempt at the same goal." But that doesn't mean that we aren't finally having fun again. Finally.

mostly hip-hop: Plan B, Ghostface Killah, Girl Talk, Clipse...and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

2007-01-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

Plan B, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words - "You best ban TV if you want me to stop/cuz I'm so heavily influenced by the things that I watch," announces Ben Drew two tracks into his debut. "It ain't just Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs/It's Irreversible, Baise-Moi, City Of God." It ain't just movies either: a few seconds later, he decides, "Let me do what Nas did and tell this shit in reverse." Plan B is the first British rapper I've heard who actually approximates American style: the accent is thick, and the fact that Drew also writes his guitar backgrounds and sings the choruses is unusual, but the constant stream of references and straightforward raps (he does both storytelling and general threats of violence) are still closer to American storytellers than The Streets or Dizzee Rascal. And I realize that, by bringing up those two reference points as my only other knowledge of British hip-hop, I'm making it obvious that I've never listened to the allegedly seminal Run The Road grime compilations, but you know what? I don't care. My thirst for diversity will only run so far.

Drew is an undeniably dextrous, skilled rapper, even if he's a little too eager to draw attention to his sources. He's also almost completely humorless and unusually moralistic, not just opposed to crack but even marijuana (apparently it made him lazy in middle school and he had to quit). His songs can be divided into two main themes: Drugs/Promiscuous Sex Are Bad ("Dead And Buried") and, oddly, Religious Fundamentalism Is Bad ("I Don't Hate You," the nearly unlistenable "Tough Love," which chronicles an honor killing). While his conviction and flow suck you in, his relentless gloom eventually gets to you: the closest thing to a joke on here comes when the matter-of-fact approach is almost ridiculously insensitive: "There's nothing more pathetic than a cry for help/either you do or you don't wanna kill yourself," as he explains on "Mama." True, but still...Right now, Plan B is the Darren Aronofsky of rap, circa Requiem For A Dream: too talented to ignore, too one-note to completely endorse. Wait and see.

Ghostface Killah, Fishscale - How white am I? So white that I have no idea what the fuck Ghostface is saying most of the time. According to pretty much every advocate I've talked to, Ghostface is a master "storyteller," whose raps unfold detailed verite chronicles of the crack-selling lifestyle: too bad his ghetto vocabulary and thick voice mean I don't know what's going on most of the time. I feel guilty, but the often crackerjack hooks here only get me so far, uneager for repeated listens. Exceptions are confined to the back half: "Beauty Jackson," whose J Dilla hook leads into a brief story about a busstop flirtation that may or may not even have had a real basis; "Whip You With A Strap," another J Dilla joint about Ghostface's childhood; "Back Like That," as much for its soulful Ne-Yo refrain as anything; "Be Easy," a club banger interchangeable with a bunch of other dumb songs with great hooks; and "Underwater," probably the only good rap about a dream I've ever heard. But Fishscale is long, dense, and not really something I feel like making the effort for. Sorry; feel free to smugly inform me that it's my loss.

Girl Talk, Night Ripper - There's been a lot of cyber-ink spilled on this mash-up-to-end-all-mash-ups already, so I just want to make three brief notes:

1) Gillis chops up the pop songs way more than the rap songs: the rap vocal hooks are resilient enough to stick around for up to a whole minute while micro-diced drum breaks and guitar riffs swirl around them.

2) This album's greatest contribution is to make hip-hop palatable for people who still think it's all monotonous, one-note shouting best left on its own radio station (these are generally the same people who say they got bored with hip-hop after Public Enemy, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest). Every now and then, Gillis contrasts a rap song (generally something these listeners might otherwise find inaccessible) with something that most people would consider warm and nostalgic: the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait (The Whisper Song)" vs. The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," the Notorious B.I.G. vs. Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," etc. It works wonders, reminding us that rap's bellicose lyrics and tone are misleading: this is party music that'll generate nostalgia years from now, as much as (or more so than) mediocre middle-school hits from when we were all too young to know better.

3) You don't need to know where all or even most of the songs are taken from to enjoy them: the first few listens, it's inevitable to get distracted by all the sources, and how could you not thrill to hearing Neutral Milk Hotel vs. the Ying Yang Twins? But what's even better is that, after enough listens, that thrill wears off, to be replaced by enjoyment of how hooky and endlessly ingratiating it all is. This isn't one of the year's top 10, but it may be the only album that plays equally well among music geeks and people who could care less.

Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury - Late-breaking, unexpected triumph as the hype for once pays off: this really is the rap album of the year, and even if it doesn't sport the absolute, no-questions Song Of The Decade (that'd be Kanye's "Gone"), it's still more consistent than Mr. West's slightly-too-sprawled-out productions. He's still the visionary, but this is taut and unignorable. Hilariously, people can't seem to agree on whether or not the Clipse are "storytellers" (and that word, applied to everyone from Clipse to the Decemberists, really needs to go away: in the sense it's being applied, not even Ulysses would count, it seems). Pitchfork claims that "Pusha, remains star and stylist, brazenly dishing on minor details like his sunglasses ("Louis V Millionaires to kill the glare") while injecting a malevolent, almost maniacal intensity to his verses." The exact same kind of detail is noted by The Onion's AV Club as merely "bragging about watches, cars, and other high-end luxury items." Let's make up our damn minds people.

On the one hand, the Clipse are funny in a malevolent kind of way: "The black Martha Stewart/let me show you how to do it," they crow about making crack. They say all the right things, but their thin, reedy voices suggest that they're the XTC of crack rap: conviction is less prevalent than technical excellence. Ten years ago, you suspect, they would have been easily happy to be straight-up gangstas; they're just polishing their skills on whatever subject matter is at hand. On the other hand, you have the all-Neptunes-produced tracks: musically, it's the Kill The Moonlight of rap, with very few obvious instruments (there's probably more pitch-bending than actual recorded tracks) and every decision standing out the more for it. The analogy holds down to the track list: 11 taut tracks, and a longer, tension-relieving final track in a gentler mode. (Relative: "Nightmares" is about moral guilt and the constant fear of being killed, but still.) Fantastic from either end.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, The Letting Go -It's weird to follow critical reaction to each Will Oldham album post-I See A Darkness: it's as if Oldham was Bowie in '91, Darkness was the last high water-mark of Scary Monsters, and each album was striving to reach his indisputable masterpiece. I haven't kept up with the quest, having merely checked in with last year's ramshackle, unnecessarily attenuated and goofy Superwolf. But The Letting Go really may be his best album since Darkness, or at least it's almost as good, albeit calmer and nearly twice as long, making its impact understandably more diffuse. Engineered and mixed with greater clarity than Darkness' purposeful slackness, The Letting Go opens, shockingly, with a full-blown string quartet intro, indicating that this album is considerably more disciplined than the weird scattered energy Oldham frequently brings to his work. But this isn't a sterile clean-up job; it's a full-blooded product whose lyrical themes (sex, death, etc.) are the norm for him. Still, it's undeniable that the album basically splits into the elegiac and carefully arranged, and the Other (the faux-blues of "Cold & Wet," the terrifying ritual sacrifice or whatever-the-fuck of "The Seedling"), and that the album could use a little more of the latter, especially towards the end; "God's Small Song" and the untitled closer are really too slack and messy to stretch this album out to the end; they're Superwolf outtakes in spirit. Most of this is remarkably comforting without being sappy; perfect late-night music.

frantic catch-up: Howe Gelb, Darkel, Built To Spill, Voxtrot

2006-12-23T14:14:00.000-08:00

Howe Gelb, 'Sno Angel Like You - A definite grower. I'm not familiar with Gelb's work in Giant Sand, which I guess means I'm lacking context. Oh well. On first spin, this sounded like boringly sparse semi-blues with a gimmicky gospel choir kicking in at key points. Yes, gospel choirs are a much-abused tool, but Gelb exercises commendable restraint. (Too much really; you kind of wish he'd taken some cues from Blur's awesome "Tender" or Elbow's commendable "Ribcage," but whatever. And why should the Brits have a monopoly on gospel choirs anyway?) Most of the songs are terse, but the long ones really take off, starting with the third track, "But I Did Not," the title of which is the repeated response to Gelb's litany of avoided temptations. Most of the real barn-burners are in the back half (although along the way there's a brief stop for "That's How Things Get Done," which from title onwards sounds like nothing so much as latter-day David Byrne). If you're in a hurry, just try the last 5 tracks, from "Howlin' A Gale" to "Chore Of Enchantment." They do all the things gospel and blues are frequently described as doing (sounding weary and uplifting at the same time) but so rarely actually do for me.

Darkel, Darkel - This didn't get mixed reviews. It got a few passes and a ton of vitriol, and frankly I'm not seeing it. Sure, nothing here matches either the level of songwriting sophistication or audio detail on any of Air's albums (this is the solo debut of one half of Air, if you haven't heard). And? This is a solid pop album that runs the gamut from perky-without-being-annoying ("TV Destroy," "My Own Sun") - something not even Belle & Sebastian pull off all the time - to sentimental-without-being-maudlin ("Some Men," "How Brave You Are"), plus some nondescript filler and one flat-out retarded track ("Earth," a 6:37 pseudo-funk jam with lots of unnecessary echo effects as Darkel repeats "We belong to the earth, doesn't belong to us" over and over) that still isn't that annoying. All in a zippy 44 minutes. It's the guilty pop pleasure of the year: too well-crafted not to work, too insubstantial and rotely assembled to love. This is what I listen to when I want fun without effort; unlike, say, Camera Obscura, it's the same ride from first to last listen.

Built To Spill, You In Reverse - I'll keep this brief, seeing as I don't have an extensive history with BTS. When bands have a long and storied history that I'm almost totally unfamiliar with, I tend not to listen to their new albums until I have at least some familiarity with their past work; hence, I still haven't gotten around to Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped and Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass yet. But I did finally get around to Perfect From Now On earlier this year, which lived up to its title. But it wasn't a promise BTS could keep apparently: there's none of Perfect's majesty of either songwriting or production here. Instead, Doug Martsch's thin voice runs rampant over equally thinly recorded full band. It takes 2 minutes for him to arrive on opener "Goin' Against Your Mind" as the band tortures the same two chords over and over. And while it's a tribute to the band's skill that they keep these same chords for nearly 9 minutes without ever getting too annoying, they never really take off either: they offer coordinated instrumental attacks and guitar solos with and without distortion, and all the while never get close to the simple majesty of the gradually swelling opening of "Randy Described Eternity." And though some tracks fare better than others - "Traces" and "Liar" are satisfying back-to-back tracks - nothing really breaks from the pack, and eventually I'm listening to a 6-minute '70s-esque rocker called "Wherever You Go" and wondering if I'll ever even bother introducing myself to Neil Young's catalog. It's all kind of bland, establishing a few chords at the beginning of the song and then never deviating - none of the dramatic shifts of, say, "I Would Hurt A Fly," and no instrumentation as dramatic as that song's cello. ("Mess With Time" actually has a late-breaking change-up, but at that point it's too late-breaking to matter.) It's music like this sometimes makes me sympathize with what anti-rockists are going on about.

Voxtrot, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP/Your Biggest Fan CD-S - Just serving (over)due notice that these guys will easily make my top 10 for the year through devious means: the EP has 5 tracks, the CD-S has 3, and combined they form perhaps the finest half-hour of 2006 pop. Voxtrot's specialty is writing songs with double-barreled choruses: the first one is good enough, but what follows knocks it out of the anthemic park. It's a neat trick, and Voxtrot is less obvious about it than their obvious forbears in Britpop; "Rise Up In The Dirt" from the EP and "Trouble" from the CD-S both pull this off neatly, though they can also handle the elegiac/sentimental/other songs quite well, and are skilled at arranging brass and strings to boot. Basically, they're the best thing to come out of Austin since Spoon, and I can't wait for their full-length. (But skip their 2005 EP Raised By Wolves, which finds the band not yet having figured its strengths and making all kinds of mistakes: letting nearly all the songs drone on to 5 minutes instead of practicing concision, blatantly ripping off The Smiths on "The Start of Something" and, worse yet, Placebo's vocals on "Missing Pieces." Lead singer Ramesh Srivastava hasn't yet figured out that his biggest asset is his clear, piercing voice, instead occasionally cloaking it in muffled recording.)

new/oldx2: Aimee Mann, Emily Haines, Beirut

2006-12-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

Aimee Mann, One More Drifter In The Snow - The ongoing difficulty of being a singer/songwriter noted for continual pains in craftsmanship and the almost parodical sameness of melancholy body of work manifests itself in a lonely title that's exactly what you'd predict from Mann if she were to attempt a Christmas album. Sadly, this isn't exactly Holiday Music To Slit Your Wrists By, but it's a definite recovery from the bland '70s rock of The Forgotten Arm, at least partially remembering the deft, inventive production that elevated Mann above the singer-songwriter crowd in the first place. The downside of being a pop formalist is that you may be attracted to things your audience couldn't care less about; in this case, Mann's perverse desire to tap into '50s easy-listening mode leads to bland renditions of "I'll Be Home For Christmas" jostling up against the characteristic Jon Brion/Michael Penn jangle of "Christmastime," whose light and eccentric instrumentation wears better than Mann's syrup. Straining out from the sap are a perverse rendition of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" backed up by a tuba section, the less sparse but still imaginative take on the normally unbearable "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," and Mann's wise decision to close with "Calling On Mary," a typically morose original. (However, her cover of "White Christmas" isn't nearly as menacing and bizarre as what The Flaming Lips did to it a while back.) Not quite a seasonal antidote (you're still advised to keep Sparks' "Thank God It's Not Christmas" at hand), but not a bad effort.

Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, Knives Don't Have Your Back - Without Metric, Emily Haines doesn't exactly go soft. Assembling an ad hoc backing band, she mixes the drums down while swirling around in multi-tracked vocals, diffused guitars and keyboards, and, above all, piano. Which can get monotonous - without her bandmates, Haines' instrumentation isn't nearly as adventurous, making the common singer/songwriter mistake of conflating sparseness with "authenticity." After an exemplary first two tracks, Haines routinely lapses into this tepidness: the album could use more tracks like lead single "Dr. Blind," a fantastically morbid meditation on prescription drug abuse with restrained strings, or "The Lottery," which begins boldly with "I only wanted what everyone wanted since bras started burning up ribs in the '60s" before sending in swooping Scott Walker-strings (mixed down, virtually disappearing after their dramatic intro). Yet her mixing up of the piano and staid drumming over the often fairly inventive arrangements proves why Haines needs her bandmates, who realize they can't survive by moody lyrics and song structure alone. Speaking of Haines' lyrics, they're generally a step up from her work with Metric, refraining from the moronic liberal proselytizing of, say, "Buy this car to drive to work/Drive to work to pay for this car" (as on last year's otherwise excellent "Handshakes"). The kind of album that sounds better mixed into a shuffle than in one block; "Dr. Blind" is, however, essential.

Beirut, Gulag Orkestar - This threw me off from the first track, which sounds like the opening credits to some kind of lost Emir Kusturica movie. There's all manner of ponderous brass (Wikipedia says euphonium is involved live), tambourine, and vocal wailing; it feels like a great unwieldy apparatus mobilizing, and the album rarely loses that cumbersome feeling: you can tell this is a band that isn't going to be doing a lot of movement during the show, although they'd head a plausible small village parade.

Make no mistake: Zach Condon's come up with easily one of the most imaginative albums of the year to still be mistakenly shunted under the catch-all label of "indie rock." Maybe it should've been tagged differently though; the songs are cinematic and weighty, but they're not for me. Reveling in melodies that repeat over and over again (there's that parade again!) while indistinct voices back Condon's distinct, fascinating tenor, it's music that seems more ceremonial than for listening. The exception is "Postcards From Italy," whose wistful floating ukelele and trumpets sound ethereal, which is what I like anyway; then it's back to wheezing accordions and so on. (There's also "Scenic World," which is an exception in a different way, featuring some kind of stupid cheap Casio backing track. Is this irony or just aesthetic indiscrimination?) It takes too much work, but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt in a vague, abstract sort of way.

more belated capsules: Camera Obscura, M. Ward, Man Man

2006-12-05T22:09:00.000-08:00

Camera Obscura, Let's Get Out Of This Country - Camera Obscura live in some kind of pop culture vidiot universe where it is OK to have virtually damn near every song start from a reference point and build to an actual emotion: the opener "Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" is a shoutout to Lloyd Cole's "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?", followed by the punning "Tears For Affairs" and two tracks later by a heartfelt tribute to the obscurely remembered "Dory Previn."

It's all misleading frippery though: Camera Obscura aren't smart-ass formalists reshuffling modes, nor do they really mine reference points for all their worth, never truly recontextualizing them. (It's the musical equivalent of hanging obscure film poster in the background of scenes — where no one but other cultists will recognize them — for no real reason other than to score geek reference points.) They write pretty songs, but the album is challenging, densely laced with distant-sounding drums and wavery organs that sound slightly out-of-tune. Camera Obscura take long (minute+) instrumental breaks, spaces which seem empty at first but expand with repeated listens; there are few more gorgeous moments in pop music this year than the extended trumpet solo over quiet drums and interlaced rhythm guitars that open "Razzle Dazzle Rose." It all sounds like vinyl, slightly warped on the turntable.

Frequent comparisons to Belle & Sebastian are dead wrong. B&S is a more complex, ironic band; Tracyanne Campbell is self-consciously morose (check out her deadpan in the video for "Lloyd," which is one of the best of the year) as opposed to Stuart Murdoch's perpetual feyness (and recently assumed ebullience), and her brand of romantic depression is less unisex than the horny boys and girls B&S chronicle. She's definitely female in her songwriting voice ("Razzle Dazzle Rose" is the color she'll choose for courage; somehow I don't relate), which is kind of refreshing. Overall, a super-strong album.

M. Ward, Post-War - Not as strong as last year's transcendent Transistor Radio, Post-War is more organized, which is kind of a drag: I prefer M. Ward in ADD mode. (He also works better with a conceptual hook: Post-War's arc and sequencing are harder to follow.) The songs sound better out of context, but, of course, they're all pretty uniformly strong. Highlights include a storming Daniel Johnston cover ("To Go Home") and the smart-ass singalong of "Magic Trick," the best track of the include-a-sarcastic-cheering-audience genre since the Eels' "Going Fetal." A compelling album, but not a very warm one.

Man Man, Six Demon Bag - I hear this works better live. Regardless: starts off nicely enough with the gloomy "Feathers," all C-minor piano chords with a bunch of what sounds like drunk morose sailors sea-chanteying in unison. But then "Engwish Bwudd" kicks in with the same idiots yelling how all they want is to be a "shovelly-bobbly-gobbledy-boo," which is exactly as cutesy and annoying as it sounds. It almost never lets up from that point, a hyperactive cabaret of drunk, precious art school students muttering to themselves and trying hard to let loose. Maybe they really are madmen live, but this shit is just like a spazzy 5-year-old: you kinda want to smack them and tell them to relax. Gogol Bordello serves all my drunk cabaret needs, thanks. (When they push the sloppiness to extremes, as on "Push The Eagle's Stomach," they end up sounding like a peculiarly emasculated Blood Brothers, which doesn't help any.) Exception: "Van Helsing Boombox," which is lovely, contemplative, mournful and deserves your immediate attention. But it's an anomaly.

here to stay: Rhymefest, The Sleepy Jackson, Phoenix

2006-11-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

Yeah yeah, I've been gone for a while. I'm here to stay: the year-end crunch demands that I catch up as fast as possible. So here we go.

Rhymefest, Blue Collar - Conscious rap sucks, right? It's just a bunch of humorless, frequently heavy-set guys droning on and on about how hip-hop these days is about bling instead of "real shit," unlike whatever fantasy-land these guys came from where De La Soul rule the universe. Rhymefest is the antidote: instead of wasting time targeting substanceless stylists, he steals their producers and gets down to business. As the title implies, this is an album about work, and along with that unusual (for rap) topic Rhymefest throws in the dangers of unprotected sex, the War on Terror, etc., never forgetting his sense of humor or to throw a hook in. Actually he tries too hard sometimes - "Fever"'s hook is knicked from '50s striptease staple "Heatwave," and as if that isn't enough he has to announce he's "hot like hot sauce" - but, like the best rap songs (in my humble whiteboy opinion), these songs work as well as pop songs as close-listening fare.

Rhymefest doesn't have the vocal range of, say, T.I., but he can be sarcastic and fluid as needed, and the music carries the emotional range when his inflection alone can't. As far as moments (now weirdly common) where rappers feel compelled to sing: His joyously out-of-tune take on Nilsson's "One" in the middle of "Tell A Story" is outdone by album closer "Build Me Up," where the late O.D.B. revamps '60s chestnut "Build Me Up Buttercup" in indelible, drunk-outside-your-window-at-3-am fashion. Also guesting is Kanye West; rumors unclear on how much ghostwriting Rhymefest has done for Kanye besides his one acknowledged verse on "Jesus Walks" aren't helped by Kanye's inferior appearance on "Brand New," but his arrogance is continually hilarious and he knows it. And even if Rhymefest is writing all his verses, his persona is totally different; Kanye is obviously his final auteur.

So who is Rhymefest? Unabashedly horny but less confident in himself than the average mainstream rapper, he instead writes songs about failing to get laid. Suspicious of the police but equally opposed to drug dealers, his is a more pragmatic positivism, one which supposes less that black people should all become Henry Louis Gates Jr. or Colin Powell and instead should aspire to the just-getting-by mediocrity of their white compatriots: get an education, get a job, and don't forget to use condoms. What's cheering about Rhymefest - and what ultimately elevates him over T.I.'s album, since both their production is excellent and catchy as hell and happen to be two of the few rap albums I've heard this year - is the complexity of his worldview, the acknowledgment that you can be horny, conscientious, and a fuck-up all at the same time, and that this is OK.

All this talk of ethos aside, there's one purely musical moment on here that justifies the album all by itself. Producer Mark Ronson's track "Devil's Pie" begins midway through The Strokes' "Someday," as the chord change is about to lead to the main hook. "I ain't wastin' no more time," Julian Casablancas slurs; the sound is thin, and seemingly disastrous as a basis for a rap hook. Suddenly the guitars are slowed down, and "Someday" turns out not to be a tense A-major rock song, but a slowed-down G-major '70s funk track, as the guitars are chopped up into rhythmic breaks. You could get these kind of guitars from any obscure '70s sample, but if you know the original song, it's hard not to be impressed by its reinvention. It still makes me happy every time I listen.

The Sleepy Jackson, Personality - This album is so forgettable that I've listened to it 4 or 5 times and still have to play it while I'm writing this just to remember what the songs sound like. A shame: The Sleepy Jackson's 2003 debut Lovers was a great guilty pleasure, full of derivative, formulaic pop songs that worked perfectly. Luke Steele seemed then like the kind of craftsman idiot savant who could spit out 40 years of hooks in concentrated form, but he also had ADD. Lovers was in thrall to glam rock, alt-country, George Harrison, and even ridiculous but mercifully brief excursions into spoken word.

Personality suffers in part from being too disciplined; the songs and production feature none of Lovers' unexpected deviations. Instead, everything comes slathered in multi-tracked oohs and aahs, with plenty of horns and strings; lyrical content is heavy on pseudo-meaningful God vs. Devil stuff (no less than 4 song titles invoke this weak rock theology). After a glut of this album, it takes way too much discipline and effort to figure out what the song structures sound like individually; everything blurs into a weird mess of what sounds like, oddly enough, Christmas music for really chipper malls. (Maybe it's that choir and sleigh-bell intro on "God Lead Your Soul" that's throwing me off.) I'll throw a song off of this onto the best of '06 to see if it works better out of context if nothing better comes up ("You Won't Bring People Down In My Town," simply because it uses country fiddles as counterpoit rather than swathing Steele in strings that make the vocal line redundant); personally, though, this is the most disappointing sophomore slump of '06.

Phoenix, It's Never Been Like That - Totally aside from the fact that Sofia Coppola went from sleeping with Quentin Tarantino to the lead singer from this band (and dragged poor Francis Ford out to Coachella to see them in action), Phoenix is a legitimately intriguing group that's produced the most unintentionally opaque pop album of the year. They've been knocking around for a while, and I ignored them for their Air-derivative rep.

It's Never Been Like That doesn't ditch the electronics, exactly. It's a "rock" album like I've never heard, for a very geeky reason: guitar tone. Rock music is supposed to swagger and be loud; on opener "Napoleon Says," the snare hits are loud and majestic, but the guitars sound thin and reedy, in need of a few more layers at least. It's the fussiest possible approach to supposedly visceral music, but it works: I went from finding this downright dull to right0on, but it took 5 or 6 listens. Originality through engineering is a new one, but it works; Phoenix certainly don't get there through their sharp but derivative songs.

The other notable thing about Phoenix is that their lyrics actually reward paying attention. I initially thought "Rally" was an unlikely invitation to a NASCAR meeting: "Hook up with me/meet at the rally," it goes. But listen closer: the date is "April 22nd at the Avalon," aka some of 1972's more notable Vietnam protests, and a simple love song gains both political and nostalgic resonance. Sharp guys; it's worth having this grow on you.

TK (for real):
Camera Obscura, Let's Get Out Of This Country
M. Ward, Post-War
Herbert, Scale
Man Man, Six Demon Bag
Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, Knives Don't Have Your Back
Built To Spill, You In Reverse
Beirut, Gulag Orkestar
Beck, The Information
Girl Talk, Night Ripper
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
Portastatic, Be Still Please
Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye
The Concretes, In Colour
TV On The Radio, Return To Cookie Mountain
Joanna Newsom, Ys
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, The Letting Go
Darkel, Darkel

belated quickie: The Walkmen

2006-09-10T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Walkmen, A Hundred Miles Off - As widely noted, "Louisiana" is the best song; like "The Rat," it's an ingratiating, deceptive single that bears no relation to the rest of the album. They sequence it first this time instead of second to get the punters out happy early, but it really is fantastic; on the surface, the song is just generic Americana (lyrics about road trips and drinking coffee under a canopy in New Orleans), but the Walkmen dirty it up with characteristic messy mixing, reverb-heavy guitar and Hamilton Leikhauser's increasingly Dylan-esque vocals; the completely artificial piano rolls that signal the entrance of the horns are the crowning touch. Americana has never sounded both so blatantly constructed and so right.

As for the rest: if, as Pitchfork jibes, Leikhauser's increasingly Dylan-ersatz vox means that "M Is for Mmphmblgmbn," they also can help pull some ingenious tricks. "Lost In Boston" isn't really a rhyme, but it is the way Leikhauser pronounces it. The Walkmen are still seemingly sonic engineers first and songwriters second, but the songwriting here, if anything, seems stronger than on Bows + Arrows, as if having finally figured out how to master guitar tone they finally buckled down and worked on compressing the songs. After the shock of realizing that "Louisiana" bears no relation to the rest of the album, the rest establishes a coherent tone, big on thrashing, barely repressed tension. It's hard to work up the motivation to listen to it all, but once you get into it it's solid.

fuck apple

2006-08-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

I've had a long and tumultuous history with the iPod. I bought a 3rd-generation one that, after being dropped one too many times, stopped producing sound. Apple replaced it, but I was shocked at how fragile they were. When the 60GB came out, I bought it; I had so much unheard music waiting for me on iTunes, I figured it made sense.

No.

Through no fault of my own, the LCD screen went haywire; I can't see a damn thing on the iPod. The problem is, I never bought more gear for the damn thing; no protective holster, etc. It has scratches. Worse yet, I left it out in a cabin while semi-camping one night and woke up to find it covered in pollen-ish residue. So I was nervous about sending it for repair, warranty or no.

Well. No repair. And I've spent over $600 on two iPods, both defective. So fuck this shit. But what this means has broader implications: no more music on the streets. I'll basically only listen to music at night, when I'm working on my laptop. I won't be able to pull up anything on command unless my iPod (which will basically be like an external hard drive) is plugged in.

End of an era of 3 years of music on demand anywhere, anytime. Moment of silence, but my much-abused ears will probably thank me.

Coming up: The Walkmen, Camera Obscura, Phoenix, Rhymefest.

massive update: Thom Yorke, Danielson, Creeper Lagoon, Parts & Labor, J Dilla, Guillemots

2006-08-27T22:14:00.000-07:00

Thom Yorke, The Eraser - What it all comes down to is this: an artist leads a brilliant band faultlessly through over 10 years, keeping matters ambiguous and complex (and sometimes needlessly obtuse) while still appealing to millions, and you pray the day won't come when he does something as bloody literal-minded as naming a song "The Clock" and giving it churning, metronomic rhythms that are supposed to "suggest" the titular object, and top it off with a first line like "Time is running out for us." And then he does.

Yorke's description of the album was unpromising: "an accumulation of really sketchy ideas that were going around since I learnt how to use the laptop properly." And that's what the album comes down to: minor and melancholy, rehashed Radiohead melodies and vocals, with minimal loops providing a barely filled-in background. (Matthew Herbert, who does know how to a use a laptop properly, would've chopped up a real clock and made it sound like nothing on earth; oh well.) What's missing is the band, the rhythmic complexities and kinks that would make it interesting, even when some of the sounds are the same as those that were interesting 6 years ago (the fade-out to "Analyse" is so similar to "Kid A"'s that I expect to hear "The National Anthem" next every time). "Atoms For Peace" fares best out of the lot, skipping rhythmic intensity entirely and going in for resigned beauty, but it's still no "Motion Picture Soundtrack." Then again, judging by how good "Black Swan" sounds at the end credits of A Scanner Darkly, maybe this whole thing should've just been a soundtrack.

Mostly what The Eraser contributes to the world is renewed appreciation for Yorke's bandmates. This album doesn't do anything besides highlight their absence, and while some might argue that that foregrounds Yorke's songwriting and voice...nah. Side/solo projects are for band-members who feel like their voice is getting lost in the shuffle; judging by how this is just a pallid Radiohead album, Yorke has no cause to complain.

Danielson, Ships - Danielson certainly has his hardcore adherants, some of whom (Deerhoof, Sufjan Stevens) are in the backing band here. The fact that I like Sufjan but not Deerhoof (whose relentless spazziness I find irritating) turns out to matter; at times, this is like Deerhoof's chaos magnified by Sufjan's orchestra. Matters actually start quite promisingly; "Ship The Majestic Suffix" begins like some kind of sea shanty ("Before our time upon a noon there stood still a ship") before exploding into turbo-powered bursts of snare drum, glockenspiel and brass; it sounds more like a bizarre Mahler rehearsal than a pop song. And though "Cast At The Setting Sail" and, most successfully, "Did I Step On Your Trumpet" harness pure weirdness and barely stuff it into something resembling verse-chorus structure, successors like "My Lion Sleep Tonight" degenerate into howling atonal voices and digressive musical noise that couldn't be transcribed into notation no matter how you tried. It doesn't help that - even though I care almost nothing about proper vocal technique - Danielson's high-pitched screech is incredibly annoying, maybe because he seems to not use it just out of necessity but actually takes proud in it, cultivating it for all the bad attention he can get. It's a mess of the kind that hipster critics seem to be fairly in love with these days; what can I say? I don't get Animal Collective either.

Creeper Lagoon, Long Dry Cold - It's hard for me to write about Creeper Lagoon with any kind of objectivity, because their 2001 album Take Back The Universe and Give Me Yesterday was, oddly enough (given the fact that practically no one else remembers it), a formative music moment for me; I had just started downloading music off Napster, obeying the dictates of the first music critics I ever took seriously, the good people at the Onion A.V. Club. (Radio was, then and now, a mystery, thanks to my classically-fixated parents; even now, hear songs at parties that arouse nostalgia in everyone else and "What is this?" from me.) Somehow I stumbled onto Creeper Lagoon, a San Francisco act whose first full-length was produced by the Dust Brothers. I picked up Take Back at the now-defunct Sound Exchange (yes, the one name-checked by Britt Daniel on "Anything You Want"), a fierce punk institution that disapproved of pretty much everything I bought there. I listened to it obsessively, because I didn't have the money to buy many CDs; it seemed kind of alt-whiny, but gradually it grew on me. Even today, I think it's actually pretty good, but it's hard to say.

The story behind that album is almost more entertaining than the end product; given a signing advance, the band retreated to a farm with a bag of shrooms, a strategy that, unsurprisingly, resulted in only a couple of demos + a death freak-out for one of the band-members. The band then burned through a million dollars and four producers, coming out with an album that was heavily hyped but somehow failed to catch on with the alt-radio crowd. An EP was quietly released in 2002, and then presumably the group was dead, with a new offshoot named On The Speakers debuting with their EP shortly thereafter.

Guess not. 5 years after running the straight-and-narrow of '90s guitar-rock, Creeper Lagoon - on their own dime, self-released through the net - have learned how to go electronic. Though constructed from what mostly sound like real instruments, nothing sounds natural. Fierce snare drum loops propel otherwise gentle songs like "Henry Ford" and "Jimmy Robertello," while nighttime tracks like "Liquor Store" and "Gigantor" are like improved shoegazer; female vocals for a change of pace don't hurt at all. I like this album a lot; it's dreamy and contemplative without forgetting to write actual songs. But I'm mostly wildly impressed at this re-invention; though I'm far from objective, I actually kind of recommend this as an overlooked sleeper.

Parts & Labor, Stay Afraid - or, a graphic demonstration of why some things are essential to see live, no matter what you think of the album. With no foreknowledge, I saw Parts & Labor open for Oneida (who were so boring I walked out) and was blown away, deafened as I was deafened by squalls of noise so massive I hadn't heard the like since the City of Austin revamped its noise codes (I used to leave shows and wake up with my ears still ringing the next morning; those days are gone, as is apparently a chunk of my hearing, judging by how often I have trouble understanding what people are saying). Underneath thunderous organ riffs and punk drumming were simple hooks; the effect was noise piled on top of punk anthems, and the result was exhilarating. When they slowed down for a moment - i.e., bellowing over drumsticks tapping - it felt like being in the eye of a hurricane. I instantly bought their album.

Unsurprisingly, little of this transfers to CD, let alone headphones. Though the tracks are pleasant enough in their own right, little stands out about them; as befits these disguised punk songs, the melodies are simple, the words seemingly inconsequential, and P&L's interest in noise does not extend to producing different kinds and textures, just as much of it as possible. The result is fun, for a while, but it's nothing close to the exultation I got at the live show. By the very nature of what they do, the live act seems untranslatable to record; too bad. I recommend finding these guys if you're ever around Brooklyn's hipster-ier areas.

J Dilla, Donuts - Like electronica, I feel painfully underqualified to say anything about an album of hip-hop loops, although I wonder if this is exactly a genre. Seems everyone who's plunged into the fray to praise this was moved at least as much by Dilla's untimely death as the actual music; indeed, without said death, would I be seeing so many advocates claiming that the loops — mostly drums and old soul samples — represent the last frantic thoughts of a dying mind frantically shuffling through its past, that what sounds like mundane breaks missing Chuck D on the beat (Dilla's samples are decidedly old-school) are grave and disturbing? Seriously doubtful, even if he knew he was dying (although devil's advocate points out that the first track is labeled "Outro" and the last "Intro," almost a hopeful indicator that death is the beginning, not the end; whatever. Not to be cavalier about death, but it shouldn't retroactively make the music better - unless you're Johnny Cash, obviously.).

Most of this is lost on me. Most tracks clock under 2 minutes, many under 1:30. Typical track: "People" starts with someone yelling "People" over slowed-down drums and crooning a bit before the drums speed up to normal speed; breaths are drawn in repeatedly, distorted trumpets come in briefly, a far-off generic middle eastern female voice wails for a while, then the drums slow down and segue into another slowed-down soul sample, then speed up again, this time with electric organ, then the whole thing is rounded off with more wailing, breathing, and sirens (the sirens are a constant throughout the record; another argument for the death squad). If that sounds exciting to you, dig in. Some stuff tickles me slightly more than other stuff ("Lightworks" has a seriously goofy sample from some kind of '50s/'60s TV commercial), but it all sounds incomplete and not terribly infectious: hooks without hook, soul clips disassociated from soul.

Guillemots, Through The Windowpane - This is a pretty exciting and terrific debut whose impact diminishes rather than grows on repeated listens, but attention should still be paid. The great thing about Guillemots is that they're absolutely fearless, unafraid to shoot for the big orchestral ballads even though Coldplay's made them a hissing and a byword with the hipsters. Those not just indifferent but hostilely allergic to Chris Martin's U2 heirs, by the way, should steer clear: Guillemots are musically adventurous but lyrically banal. There's a song here called "If The World Ends," in which our vocalist pines that "If the world ends, I hope you're here with me/I think we could laugh just enough to not die in pain." That kind of stuff doesn't bother me, but you've been warned.

Beginning with the longest, most extended orchestral introduction since Rufus Wainwright's last salvos, Guillemots start with a song featuring solely vocals and orchestra, presumably just to scare off the rockists. "Made Up Love Song #43" pits band vs. sped-up sample orchestra and sounds like an actual single. Similar restlessness follows: they're just as likely to use an actual stand-up bass as the electric kind (shades of late-period Talk Talk), and some of the drums have the same fake-processed sound as the '80s' finest. Perilous ground, but Guillemots soar more often than fall flat, and they never outright fail. 11+ minute closer "Sao Paulo" is one of the best things on here, which is a pretty formidable achievement in and of itself, culminating in a damn-near Mahlerian explosion of brass and percussive chaos. Dead patches in the lengthy songs emerge over repeated listens, but this is still pretty enthusiastically recommended. These guys should get the Doves to produce their next record.

quickie: The Divine Comedy

2006-08-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Divine Comedy, Victory For The Comic Muse - I was confident from the first listen that others would be equally keen to affirm this as one of the year's best, but the reviews indicate that this is basically DC cultists only. That would make me an instant cultist, I guess, since I'd never listened to a whole album before. What's not to love? Neil Hannon is easily one of Indie Rock's 5 Most Erudite Men (Sufjan, the Mael brothers [Sparks], and Stephin Merritt are probably the other 4): not only can he reference Noel Coward at the drop of a hat and cook up a perfect archetypal story of an old-fashioned English lady fallen on hard times ("A Lady Of A Certain Age"), he can even pronounce Cote D'Azur correctly while admitting that he's a big enough dork to remember a show called "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World." (Shit, just remembering anything about Clarke...)

Victory For The Comic Muse effortlessly marshals a variety of tones. Opener "To Die A Virgin" is hilarious because it nails the endless angst of the Male Teen Virgin while 30something Hannon sings in his deep voice, channeling a long-irrelevant concern, but he manages not to burn out on that initial peak. Penultimate track "Count Grassi's Passage Over Piemont" summons up the 19th-century sense of exploration, traveling further and further over mountains while musing on mortality ("If I'm to die, then let it be in summertime, in a manner of my own choosing/To fall from a great height on a warm July afternoon"). When he says "Oh unfathomable firmament," a sense of long-dormant wonder from an age of seemingly greater possibilities emerges; naming Segovia and Tuscany make geography seem like a quest again. Where Sufjan finds only himself in the past, Hannon finds other and greater worlds to explore. Bridging jokey almost-novelty songs with ferocious hooks and deadly serious thoughts on mortality is no small feat, and to do it with such beautiful organization is even better. There's one dud song in the bunch ("Diva Lady"), but this is easily one of 2005's best.

quickie

2006-07-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

Ellen Allien & Apparat, Orchestra Of Bubbles - Part of what often makes electronica feel like a Specialists Only affair to me is its frequent disdain for lyrics and vocals. Without those, you're down to pretty much solely texture (hooks without vocals seem somehow pointless, so why bother?), and then you're down to people talking about 808s and granulizing sounds and I get a bit bewildered. The best song on Bubbles is the almost shamefacedly gorgeous "Leave Me Alone," which chops up a string arrangement and makes the sadly MIA Notwist proud; it's as if Ellen Allien & Apparat were ashamed for writing a straightforward pop song using almost entirely electronic tools. None of the other songs really pop out at me; they all make fine minute-to-minute listening, as loops slowly emerge and glitter with new details at every turn, but I can't really pin down any of the instrumentals aside from the beginning, just because I know where it comes temporally. This album is fine, but is it wrong to wish for more pop and less rigid electronica? Probably.

Forthcoming: Divine Comedy, Thom Yorke, Phoenix, Parts & Labor, Creeper Lagoon, Danielson, J Dilla, The Walkmen. I've been busy.

the ongoing Elliott Smith obsession

2006-07-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Just because I'm not 17 anymore doesn't mean I'm relinquishing my devotion to the beautiful/angsty sounds of Elliott Smith; I still don't think it's merely self-loathing. In the interests of re-establishing my fandom, here's a track-by-track blowdown of the recent tribute album to him To Elliott, From Portland [note: since it took me nearly half a year to finish listening to this enough times to do the write-up conscientiously, it goes without saying that this tribute album is an honorable but pretty much total failure]. Has to be noted that, in general, I'm surprised how resilient these songs are to a variety of approaches; Smith was often blamed (by his detractors, who are not to be found on this site) for being too one-note in his whispery, emotional approach, which is a) stupid but b) disproved by how these songs stand up. This is airtight songwriting:

1) "Clementine" The Decemberists — choosing to blow its wad of famous participant(s) first, the disk is front-loaded with the only band most people will be familiar with. Unsurprisingly, it's basically the Colin Meloy solo show - a dragged-out ballad which, unlike most of the covers, ditches the original picking, keeping the structure while rethinking the rhythm. That I don't particularly care for it has more to do with my general indifference to the Decemberists than anything.

2) "Satellite" The Helio Sequence — sticking pretty much exactly to the original guitar parts, the Helio Sequence add little besides some synth-strings on top. They're actually quite lovely, but every time the whole song threatens to explode into Mercury Rev-esque bombast (which the song could actually support), the Sequence back off. Frustrating.

3) "The Biggest Lie" Dolorean — a super-emotional song in its original recording, with some of Smith's quaveriest vocals (no wonder Bright Eyes covered it), here reprocessed as a much smoother country-type ballad. Nice.

4) "Ballad Of Big Nothing" The Thermals — I like what I've heard from The Thermals (i.e., a few singles), but this bratty cover contributes nothing. Original guitar parts are intact, but the crash cymbal is louder and more pronounced, hissing over everything; some of the parts go electric, and snotty high-pitched punk vocals are used. So no improvements, and no real differences.

5) "I Didn't Understand" Swords — bombast on a low budget, using cymbals, tympani and accordion. It works, but it sounds more like a prelude to a circus act than anything; file under "novelty." (Actually, it bears a freakish resemblance to the intro of Metric's "Live It Out," except not as good.)

6) "Rose Parade" Sexton Blake — judging by this cover, this guy is ready to go beyond Portland. One of the disk's two most effective moments, washing the fragile original under a wave of light static, glockenspiels, and other tools of retro-psychadelia. Lovely.

7) "Between The Bars" Amelia — This starts off as an undistinguished, by-the-book cover, the kind of thing that would be cheering to hear during an otherwise mundane opening act from some local obscurity, but slowly broadens out. Whoever Amelia is (and she certainly hasn't made Googling herself for more info any easier with her choice of moniker), she's got the Jon-Brion-arrangements-on-the-cheap thing honed: slowly stand-up bass, slide guitar, and accordion all kick in with style. Promising.

8) "Needle In The Hay" Eric Matthews — the disk's boldest and best cover. Eric Matthews is an exceedingly talented songwriter, arranger, and trumpet-player whose own work tends to get lost in overly complicated song structures and frustratingly oblique lyrics. Given a strong framework, he piles on angry guitars, a sinister trumpet arrangement, and his usual whispered vocals, which sound almost as scary as Elliott's fuck-you tribute to heroin. If you should hear one song from this tribute, this would be it.

9) "Division Day" We Are Telephone — Oh goody, instead of dignified piano and acoustic guitars we get goofy flanged guitar tones and generic c-major chords banged out on electric guitar for the chorus, with the original's restrained pacing now a definite drag. Oh, and then they alter the final chord change for no good reason. WTF.

10) "Angeles" Crosstide — Like a Junior Boys cover, but too wispy to make much of an impression, and those clanging snare drums really need to go; this song supports angularity surprisingly well, but the emo vocals aren't helping to sell that version, and where the chorus should build up fury just settles for crash cymbal hits. This needs either total rhythmic involvement or total electronic detachment; this is an unsurprising halfway compromise.

11) "Wouldn't Mama Be Proud" Jeff Trott — Unlike many of the covers here, this really does strike out on its own path; unfortunately, that means removing everything good about the original. Goodbye gorgeous slow-burn organ over brisk pace; hello mopey acoustic guitar and boring drum programming (except for the choruses, when they get inexplicably frantic).

12) "Speed Trials" Knock-Knock — Halfway decent, slowing it down a bit into half-assed trip-hop, complete with cut-rate female vocalist trying to add menace and sexuality to music which already has enough desperation to not need the former and little place for the latter. But I could see it working for the final credits of some kind of low-budget Sundance flick; the intro of jangly banjo at the end is a good call.

13) "King's Crossing" To Live & Die In LA — the only version here which could be counted as an improvement, slicings the running-time in half, omitting the unfortunate crackhead mutterings that make the opening of the original such an embarassment, and salvaging one of the most unfortunate casualties of From A Basement On The Hill - a song that had the potential to be one of Elliott's strongest and scariest, but somehow came out too shrill and melodramatic.

14) "Happiness" Lifesavas — I never liked underground hip-hop much to begin with; the song can handle the drum machines (almost all of these songs seem able to handle anything you throw at them), but the first actual rap verse inserted mid-song is pretty unacceptable.

15) "High Times" Sean Croghan — This is an unrecorded Elliott song. It's messed-up with all kinds of messy trap-drumming in the background, and I'm not crazy about Croghan's voice. Sorry, I'll stick to my treasure trove of unreleased Elliott demos/live stuff instead (thanks Courtney Loveless!). And no, I don't care if he was Elliott's friend.

addendum: Band of Horses live

2006-06-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

So last night I saw Band of Horses perform (my first live show in a while; remind me to talk about M. Ward and Parts & Labor sometime soon), mostly because a friend of mine wanted to see them and I was desperate to clear my brain from my soul-killing temp job (different blog, different entry). About bland openers Mt. Egypt and The Can't Sees, the less said the better.

After the between-set pause, suddenly the speakers stopped playing between-set filler (in this case, some kind of heinously bland funk-jam filler) and, at obscene value, started blasting "The Break-Up," one of the awesomely funny skits from T.I.'s new album ("Bitch, your hair look like a dirty tennis ball!"). The skit had nothing to do with anything; they obviously thought it was just funny. Well, so do I. The crowd was confused, not to mention in pain from the jacked-up volume, but I was pleased: if me and Band of Horses have T.I. in common, maybe we can get along after all.

They emerged to the strains of "What You Know," sat down, and got to it. Upbeat, rock-oriented songs ("Weed Party," "The Great Salt Lake") fared better than slower stuff, clarifying for me what I should cut from my iPod (even more so because live, Band of Horses don't deviate at all from the recordings, boosting the drums a token bit but otherwise leaving everything intact). Live presence is solid; lead singer Ben Bridwell has the understated grinning Southern charm thing down (though Kalefa Sanneh's observation about the Bowery Ballroom set that "No doubt some fans were wondering why he seemed so cheerful, and whether he had any more" seems an equal contributing factor), perfectly willing to actually listen to what the crowd says and talk back. The one new song they played as a full band was a massive leap forward; it had more than 3 chord changes, it moved more interestingly, etc. Between geniality and the potential of the new song, I'm willing to cut these guys some slack. For now.

new stuff, way late: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Band of Horses, Belle & Sebastian

2006-06-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones - Not a whole lot to say about this. Once upon a time, there was a much-hyped band from Brooklyn that MTV2 quickly discovered; then they played "Maps" over and over, and I was forced to admit that — despite Karen O being kinda scary, and despite the fact that I once heard them perform the most obnoxious song in the entire world on the radio once ("Art Star") — there might be something to these guys. But I still preferred Ada's cover of "Maps" to the real thing, and I never bothered to listen to Fever To Tell. Theoretically, a more "mature," "restrained," YYYs - to pluck from the most-repeated adjectives describing their follow-up to fame - would be right up my melodically-oriented alley (some days I think I'm just an MOR fan poorly disguised), but in practice they're kind of...OK. Whatever the spark is that separates competent, workmanlike indie rock from the masses is missing here; all perfectly pleasant, and "Turn Into" - the obligatory stab at a warm, forgiving album closer that has nice C-Major chords and lyrics ("I know what I know") that sound kind of generically healing - will make my Best of 2006 compilation if nothing better shows up, but...eh. Maybe I'm old and brave enough to appreciate their previous spazziness now, though Ada still owns them any day.

Band of Horses, Everything All The Time - Or maybe just (You Can Fool) Everyone All The Time. There's different levels of response to music, and the biggest rise Band of Horses can get out of me is a slow stoner head-nod; their music plods dutifully, making the band name sadly appropriate, running through familiar chord changes and providing all the pleasures of nonconfrontational familiarity. That'll only work for me if you're peddling sunshine-y pop though; I'm not big on this kind of '70s-oriented, guitar-heavy work. A lot of reviews seem to be fixated on the fact that the sound is "big" (i.e., reverb-heavy), but I'm not at all sure how that's impressive in a post-Built-To-Spill age: after hearing that kind of massive, loud and complex guitar interplay, Band of Horses' ringing power chords aren't all that. (I have to give props to "The Funeral" though, which has inexplicably gotten stuck in my head. I guess it's something to do with my increasing awareness of mortality. Or something)

Band of Horses was the first band I've heard all year that I came to completely cold; every other new CD was the work of someone I'd heard before to some extent (even Neko Case, on the admittedly slim qualifier of her work with the New Pornographers). So kudos to me, I guess, for finally breaking out of my insular little world; shame about the underwhelming results. What's happening, I guess, is that all the bands that were new and exciting and changing the world when I was in high school have now survived and hung on and matured, and now it's possible to be kept busy just by new releases from old favorites, which to someone my age means any band formed even as late as 2001. And when I hear stuff like this, it's hard to explain to me why I shouldn't just stick to new Strokes and Radiohead albums. I feel like an old fogey...already.

Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit - I've had a vendetta against producer Tony Hoffer for a while now. This has little to do with his work on stuff I like (which is actually a lot: Midnite Vultures, 10,000 Hz Legend, mixing duties on Set Yourself On Fire) and everything to do with one of the most flat-out ass-boring albums I've heard in the last 5 years (or, more simply, since I started listening to pop). The horrifically misguided sophomore Turin Brakes album Ether Song transformed an inoffensive, placid Brit-band into an overblown monstrosity whose banal lyrical sentiments (the song title "Full of Stars" says it all) were actually more offensive than Coldplay's, simply because the music was duller. And they were enabled at every turn by the grandiose embellishments of Hoffer, who appeared to think that over-production and linking every goddamn song (all of them bummers about Life and Love and etc.) together without pause would transform Ether Song into the new Skylarking. Rarely have I hated an album more.

So I'm holding Hoffer directly responsible for everything wrong with The Life Pursuit, which contains some of B&S's best songs yet combined with some throughly reprehensible production. It's as if, after the crystalline make-over Trevor Horn gave Dear Catastrophe Waitress, B&S were suddenly worried that their music would lose something in translation if broadcast on AM radio, and decided to make it all sound murky beforehand just in case. Mission accomplished. Nor am I sure who thought it was a good idea to load the whole record down with annoying '80s synthesizers, the kind I had access to on my cheap birthday-gift keyboard as a 6-year-old; is this irony, or someone's idea of a good "quirky" touch? Things spiral out-of-hand when the songwriting gets dodgy too; "We Are The Sleepyheads" is hyperactive Orange Juice, followed by the even worse "Song For Sunshine," suggesting some kind of rejected '80s sitcom theme, or maybe Dave Grusin taking a stab at '80s radio play. Either way, it's the most left-field white-boy experiment in black pastiche since Fountains of Wayne cursed "Halley's Waitress." Except I liked that song.

Bitching aside: the rest of the album is excellent. After a while, I came to terms with the production (just as with David Kahne's work with the Strokes earlier this year). "Another Sunny Day" is as jangly as anything '80s and Scottish, "White Collar Boy" continues the tradition of sounding innocuous while singing about theft, sexual insecurities, etc., "The Blues Are Still Blue" captures the collegiate mindset perfectly ("She wants to write a thesis on the population underprivileged") while punning on its title, which turns out to be about laundry (even while they get to use bluesy cowbell, which I'm sure has been Stuart Murdoch's longstanding dream for years now), and so on and so on. I'm officially a B&S fan now, I guess, though I'm all in favor of this new aggression and sunniness of theirs; it balances out melancholy like "Dress Up In You" so well. Old-school fans, of course, will continue to request that I dislodge my head from my ass.

massive update written during an overseas trip: T.I., The Streets, Sparks, Morrissey, Dirty Pretty Things

2006-05-28T00:04:00.000-07:00

T.I., King - - For a while I was aware of T.I. only as a purveyor of massive, perfect singles: "Rubber Band Man," with its taunting baseball organ hook and chorus of delinquent children, and "Bring 'Em Out," which manages to harness Jay-Z's bravado without seeming unequal to the occasion. I wanted to hear his albums, actually, but refused to pay for what I was sure would be stellar singles diluted by typically mixed filler.

And so, here's King, the first mainstream rap album I've heard in ages from which I haven't cut any tracks (and no, Kanye doesn't count). A monster collection of beats first, display of rap prowess second, and victory lap for Southern hip-hop at all times, this is massively entertaining stuff from the get-go. "King Back" starts with harsh pronouncements over ominous synths and crowd cheers: "And the prophecy read, that one day like the phoenix arose from the ashes, that a boy would be born unto a family in the slums," booms the announcer. "This boy would go on to use the knowledge he gained while fighting for survival in these streets, and in time this boy would grow to become... KING!" Couldn't ask for a better entrance than the Jesus comparison, and at just that right moment '70s funk horns, rhythm guitars and percussion all kick in. Then the trumpets squall, the drums boom, and the real beat kicks in: it's taken T.I. 50 seconds to show up on his own album, and it's worth the wait.

Next comes "Front Back," all drum machines and organs (also featuring the newly reunited UGK, now that Pimp C's out of jail); monster single "What You Know," a completely artificial synth creation, follows. And then comes "I'm Talkin' To You," a 5-minute plus swaggering beast of belligerent trombones, aggressive synth string stabs and skittering high-hats. After this, the inevitable cross-over song comes: it's the Ballad For Fallen Thugs, a staple of crack rap albums, laced with a Jamie Foxx chorus. And even that's good. At that point, you might as well stop doubting the album and enjoy the rest.

So what stands out besides the beats? T.I.'s flow is more about sounds than clever wordplay: the hilarious drawl he puts on "dude" on "What You Know" is alone worth the whole song. His vocals are multi-tracked like a hip-hop Freddie Mercury, reaching an apex on "Undertaker," with a swarm of "You know what it is: we bury niggas!" surrounding the listener. Not to say that he can't pull off bon mots (I'm particularly fond of his claim that "Niggas with dirty mouths, I got a lot of clean pistols to wash 'em out"), but it's more enunciation than diction. (Also, before I get deeper into this shit, let me mention that there's only 3 skits, and they're all hilarious and eminently quotable, provided you're in the right company. "And then you had the nerve to get your hair cut down low like a nigga. Bitch, your hair look like a dirty tennis ball!")

What's really weird and interesting about T.I. is that he manages to keep his persona not only coherent throughout the whole album (unlike a rapper like Lil' Flip, who chides white listeners for thinking all black people sell drugs on one song and boasts about his sales on the next track), but consistently anti-violence. Consider: "I'm Talkin' To You" is the obligatory battle track, in which T.I. accuses someone "so lame, you're a shame to the game" of being a "pussy nigga" etc. But instead of attacking specific attributes of this person, T.I. instead provides a long list of people he's friends with who he's specifically not calling out, basically naming everyone in the South besides Lil' Jon (David Banner, Young Dro, Young Jeezy, Trick Daddy, Paul Wall, etc. ad infinitum). You might conclude that while the battle track is a convention too strong to ignore, T.I. doesn't really want to beef with anyone in particular, a suspicion confirmed by the rest of the album. (Incidentally, he mentions in passing that he had a beef with Ludacris that they settled; anyone know what that's about? Allhiphop's documentation is scattered at best.)

On the very first track, T.I. threatens to suit up and come gunning for any disrespectful niggas before adding "But I don't want to do that cuz I respect that shit y'all doin'! I started that shit!" T.I.' s more than happy to claim solidarity with the South rather than trying to claim himself as the sole royalty in presence, something hilariously confirmed by Pimp C's spoken word contribution at the end of "Undertaker," possibly the funniest 1:55 laid to CD this year. "Young nigga T.I. jumped out there, said he was the king of the South, he ruffled a whole lot of niggas' feathers, but niggas didn't really understand what the nigga was talking about. ... What the nigga was trying to put in these motherfuckin stupid-ass niggas' faces was the fact that it's a whole bunch of kings down here, and as long as you're takin' care of your business and doing king shit, you're a king." The anti-violence rhetoric is appended to the Southern solidarity feel, maybe as a kind of plea to not explode like the East and West so disastrously did in 1995/96. Or maybe it's his 7 felony convictions that have made T.I. more cautious and ambivalent about violence: on "Live In The Sky," speaking of a dead friend's baby daughter, he notes that "she smiles just like you so cute, even resorts to violence like you." So there it is: crack sales are in, violence is out. (In light of all that, it isn't perhaps as big a shock as it might be when Common, smug and self-righteous as ever, faces off with T.I. on "Good Life," but the Neptunes beat is too strong to ruin. Common and his claims of coming up with "a verse for the people" - even invoking that great figure of altruistic, positive rap Easy E [!], as if just being classic makes your ethos good - can go fuck themselves.) And this is the first mainstream rap album I haven't cut tracks from in, like, ever.

The Streets, The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living - Just so we all know where I stand, I firmly believe that Original Pirate Material is better than A Grand Don't Come For Free. Better beats, same depth of observational detail vs. lousy beats, same amazing depth of observational detail: no contest. The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living has the best beats yet: "The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living" puts on "House Of The Rising Sun" via Ennio Morricone harpsichord arrangement, "Two Nations" is a brief but movingmeditation on the Anglo-American divide built over a poignant guitar, and lead single "When You Wasn't Famous" has a fantastic drum track. Skinner could charge American rappers for beats if he wanted to. But the raps...

Let's be clear: Mike Skinner has lost neither his technical awkwardness nor his sharp eye. It's just that some of these tracks aren't particularly enlightening or fun to listen to: "Pranging Out" tells us that being a cracked-out rock cliche isn't much fun and "Hotel Expressionism" is a smug kiss-off to trashing hotel rooms. Skinner's self-awareness about the stupid cliched lifestyle he's fallen into doesn't compensate for the boredom his descriptions induce. Better: the honest misogyny of "War Of The Sexes" expresses what 90% of all guys at bars are actually thinking with trashy glee. (Inevitable cheating remorse track "All Goes Out The Window" goes too far into the black-vocalist wailing for a minute-plus territory.) Best: "When You Wasn't Famous," his bemused, maybe-true-maybe-not (evidently a subject of great agitation in British tabloids) account of a dalliance with a British pop star ("You were so much fun I really got to like you more than you liked me" is a sentiment we can probably all relate to). All in all, not that bad of a mixed bag at all, but it's the first Streets album I've cut tracks from for the iPod. Try harder next time please.

Sparks, Hello Young Lovers - I honestly believe that Sparks are the most hateful band in pop music today. To begin with, they seem to hate the very medium they're working in, having been engaged this entire millennium in a project to actively annoy any remaining rockists by working pretty much solely without a drum kit or any of the conventional staples of a rock band, concentrating instead on tape loops, repetition, and operatic multi-tracked vocals. Their lyrics are almost uniformly snide and dismissive, particularly towards women, who the Mael brothers seem to regard solely as succubuses. And it's the fact that they're brothers who've worked together for 36 years now that's creepiest of all: they're siblings who seemingly turned their back on the world a long time ago, preferring to concentrate on their own insular jokes and obsessions.

I find those jokes pretty funny, and the music pretty compelling, though Hello Young Lovers isn't nearly as well-rounded or accomplished as 2002's criminally underrated Lil' Beethoven. The definite peaks here are 3: opener "Dick Around," mid-album "(Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country," and closer "As I Sit Down To Play The Organ At The Notre Dame Cathedral." This last track is actually kind of serious and fascinating, assuming the voice of an organist at Notre Dame bothered by the fact that his craft is always overshadowed by the Creator he's meant to be glorifying, but who takes his revenge by sleeping with the stream of feckless young women travelers just passing through. The rest is accomplished and mostly interesting, but some of the tracks (notably "Perfume," "The Very Next Fight," and "There's No Such Thing As Aliens," the last of which I'm prepared to concede is genuinely annoying) don't really need repeated listens. But the Maels are still more relevant than most groups with half their lifespan.

Morrissey, Ringleader Of The Tormentors - Never was much of a Smiths fan actually (my favorite album of theirs is easily Strangeways, Here We Come, which puts me in a definite minority), but Douglas Coupland's fascinating interview/profile/review in the Guardian convinced me to check this out. (Well, that and the involvement of both Tony Visconti and Ennio Morricone.) The music is very pleasant and kind of background-y, in that kind of mid-90s Britrock way, and Morrissey is still a miserabilist, melodramatic bastard. What this wants to be is music of power and conviction, and if I was 17 I'd be convinced; as it is, it's comforting and nice, good background music, but not much more. The exception, of course, is "You Have Killed Me," which is devastating.

Dirty Pretty Things, Waterloo To Anywhere - I've listened to this a number of times hoping that something will pop out (I was a big fan of the first Libertines album), but despite my best efforts it still sounds like basic punk-derived UK-rock, of the kind constantly promoted by the NME and correctly ignored in America. Nicely rhythmic, with a good swing, a good single ("Bang Bang You're Dead") and a tight band trying to inject interesting guitar lines wherever possible; if anything it's too ambitiously messy, trying on all kinds of weird time changes ("Last Of The Small Town Playboys" descends into sudden waltz-time, and "Gentry Cove" goes back and forth between the rhythmic basics and reggae) but coming out all strained and tense. Carl Barat still has a lyrical obsession with the decline of the British Empire ("The rude boy's on the run") and loss of Joe Strummer-derived moral imperatives in general ("No one gives a fuck about the values I would die for"; "Do you remember like I do the lost pursuit of excellence?"), but that's about it. So the first round between Barat and Pete Doherty is awarded, incredibly enough, to Babyshambles, simply because "Fuck Forever" is a monster single. But are Barat's boys, at least, better than the woeful movie they're named after? Yes, thankfully.

new(ish) albums update: Neko Case, Fiery Furnaces

2006-04-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood — Like many others, I first became aware of Case as the only remotely soulful element in the otherwise completely plastic sheen of the too-clever-by-half New Pornographers. I have some sympathy for the power-pop collective's goals (and I may actually end up liking A.C. Newman's solo work any minute now), but mostly the super-busy songs struck me as needlessly complicated in a lot of cases; without Case's belted vocals, they might've been a lost cause entirely. Of course, in the indie-rock sphere being a good technical singer (in the "American Idol" sense) is mostly a pointless cause — which is obviously a large part of indie rock's democratic appeal — but if you can actually sing in addition to writing killer songs (as opposed to being on "Idol," where singing means a multi-octave range of shit) you're almost unstoppable.

On Fox Confessor, which critical consensus seems to agree is a major breakthrough for Case, thoughtful, complicated songwriting never takes a backseat to Case's vocals, stunning though they are. The opening trio of songs is especially potent. "Margaret vs. Pauline" is a winding, seemingly easy shuffle of a song with piano solos on the fringes from The Band's Garth Hudson which — like much of the album — makes what's extremely difficult seem effortless. The melody is laid-back, but the lyrics bitterly contrast the two girls: "One left a sweater sitting on the train/and the other lost three fingers at the cannery."

Next comes lead single "Star Witness," which is impressive both for nailing the bitterness of a desperate relationship between two needy souls (a come-on like "Hey pretty baby come get high with me/We can stay at my sister's if we say we'll watch the baby" is especially heartwrenching) and because — according to a Case interview on pitchfork — the song is actually about her witnessing a boy shot to death in front of her in a misplaced instance of gang violence. I didn't know this for the first month of listening to the song, which now seems almost unbearably sad: the song's title actually makes sense, and the line "There's glass in my thermos and blood on my jeans" isn't just a testament to drunk partying but something far worse.

Coming on the tail of these two songs is "Hold On, Hold On," which proves that Case understands promiscuity all-too-well. "I leave the party at 3 a.m./Alone, thank God," she notes. I wish I'd had this song around senior year of high school, when it might've leavened some of my spring-semester embarassment, or at least offered a sympathetic response.

The rest of the album is slightly more challenging to get into, at least at first: there's two songs that are just a minute-plus, the production can be dense and obfuscatory (particularly w/regard to the guitars), and the lyrics remain largely oblique. But Fox Confessor rewards close repeated listening more than any other album this year, mashing rock guitars and string arrangements with its alt-country foundation. The results are both modest and stunning. As of now, this is the Album of the Year.

Fiery Furnaces, Bitter Tea — I don't have much to say about this album, partially because the Furnaces seem to invite so much exhaustive comment that anything I have to say is redundant. For my money, this is the Furnaces' most accessible album yet — even more so than EP — partially because Matthew Friedberger has quelled his meaningless, inexplicable obsession with pointless alliteration, and partially because there's more hooks than ever and less pure noise freak-outs. Of course, "normal" for the Fiery Furnaces is still way out in the country away from everyone else, which is a good thing: they're the token weird band that I'm really into (a role the annoying Deerhoof increasingly seem to be filling in a lot of people's lives; WTF?). There's plenty of backwards vocals, and the lyrics that are comprehensible are suspiciously obsessed with the workings of big-business (maybe an ironic reflection of the Furnaces' knowledge that they'll never hit it big); there's also squelchy techno beats from hell while Eleanor gets kidnapped by rogue CPAs ("They told me they wanted to balance my checkbook" has never sounded more sinister) and disco drums in the most inappropriate places. (None of the drums here are natural; everything's panned left and right ceaselessly.) The results are fascinating, but not as frustratingly, intimidatingly digressive as Blueberry Boat. Also features their first completely straightforward song (even "Here Comes The Summer" had weird guitars), "Benton Harbor Blues Again," which is lovely melancholy that could fit it on Beck's Mutations without anyone blinking an eye.

2006-04-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not — After a long period where every NME-hyped British buzz band could be dismissed without even listening (hi Razorlight, Ordinary Boys et al.), things got serious in 2002 when The Libertines actually struck gold and Franz Ferdinand followed suit soon after. Suddenly the British music press seems possibly semi-reputable again for something other than sheer entertainment value, and the Arctic Monkeys are their newest progeny. On first listen, Whatever sounds like pretty much every trendoid Brit band of the moment: snotty accent, punk-y arrangements, a heightened sense of social class. Not bad, but if they're wanting any level of fame higher than Stars of CCTV, they might need more, and repeated listening reveals it, to a point.

The good news is that the Monkeys display startling talent at one flash point, and provide a number of highlights in the middle of their other songs; no outright stinkers here. Said flash point is penultimate number "When The Sun Goes Down," which starts off observing a prostitute ("She don't do major credit cards/I doubt she does receipts/It's all not quite legitimate") and a potential client ("He's a scumbag, don't you know!") over mellow strummed guitar, before the tension between the breezy music and harsh lyrics explodes into disco-punk fury.

Otherwise, it's a mixed bag: just about every song has galvanizing moments of rhythmic band interplay, but few of them hold up from beginning to end. The much-touted lyrics can be sharp - "Fake Tales Of San Francisco," a weary rejection of hipster tales of travel abroad, is a keeper of a title all on its own - but they're still not worth the comparisons with the acute class analysis and storytelling of Pulp and The Streets. Word on the street suggests that the Monkeys are only getting stronger in their concert arrangements, which makes me wonder how solid this CD could've been if they'd only waited 6 months to record it. The bottom line is that the Monkeys are promising, but I rarely listen to the whole thing start to finish: there's too many similar-sounding songs back to back without the exceptional hooks to differentiate them sufficiently. But the hype has it at least half-right.

The Flaming Lips, At War With The Mystics - Once I worshipped the Lips. I discovered The Soft Bulletin sometime around 10th grade, and Clouds Taste Metallic shortly thereafter; both still seem like stone-cold masterpieces. But Yoshimi was kind of a monotonous bummer (albeit one with fantastic singles), and the intervening four years offered few clues as to what would come next; some of the songs on the Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell EP suggested a return to space-y rock, but most of the time their movements were non-committal.

Turns out their reverent live covers of' '70s rock standards - like their instrumentally note-for-note rendition of "War Pigs" on Austin City Limits, with Cat Power fucking up the vocals - were no fluke. Mystics is drenched in classic rock, from the multi-tracked vocal camp of opener "The YeahYeahYeah Song" onwards. Sometimes it's a good thing - like the soft disco rock of "Mr. Ambulance Driver" or mellow album closer "Goin' On," opening with an electric piano miked so you can hear the keys being depressed - and sometimes it's more dubious, as in the minute-and-a-half of acoustic guitar noodling that closes "It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small...Do I Stand A Chance?"

Only one track is downright unlistenable - "Free Radicals," a shrill, ill-timed Prince tribute - while the rest is generally increasingly entertaining the more you listen. The last thing the album is is monotonous, and one wonders how the legions of new Lips fans, accustomed to Yoshimi's mellow vibes, will react to such a far-ranging album, especially when things get really weird (like on "Pompeii am Gotterdammerung," whose unbelievably Floyd-ian title is matched by a cavalcade of marching flutes, or "The Wizard Turns On," a surprisingly fun Miles Davis instrumental tribute). Myself, I like it well enough, but asking the Lips to match their 90s peak at this point seems unfair - especially when the Wayne Coyne who once constructed metaphors so goofy that they hid his essential cosmic stoner questions perfectly (my favorite is probably on "They Punctured My Yolk," which uses a space mission as an exceedingly moving break-up metaphor, culminating in the hearetbreaking line "And as your ship blasts off in the distance/My world gets smaller") has proceeded to the blunt statements of this album ("They see the sun go down, but they never see it rise"). They're a different band now than when I loved them, which is fair enough, considering they're unexpectedly now one of the longest-running groups in rock history - 23 years and counting. The fact that they're still relevant and interesting at all is a minor miracle in itself.

Cat Power, The Greatest - Well, she's no Muhammad Ali. I haven't listened to much Cat Power, to be honest, but I like everything I've heard off You Are Free, so it's no surprise that my favorite song here is the stripped-down "Hate," where Marshall sings "I hate myself and I want to die" over and over. Everything else here is a concept pre-sold for music critics: white indie rock girl gets old soul session musicians, cuts a hybrid indie-soul album accordingly. Opener "The Greatest" is actually pretty lovely, mixing the old horns with a string arrangement straight out of "Moon River," but a lot of the following tracks are nice but bland, fading into interchangeable horn arrangements and bland lyrics. I differentiated the songs the more I listened, but they're still not exceptional.

Hell, I had to bash at least one critically acclaimed album in this post. So there it is.

impossibly geeky: The Top 68 Albums of 2005

2006-03-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

OK kids: as per last year, it's not just my top 10, it's all the albums from 2005 I heard, ranked in roughly preferential order (obviously, the lower it gets, the shakier the rankings are). Scarily, I have apparently written about every one of these in the last year.

As a reminder to myself/preview of things to come: 2006 stuff I've been listening to includes the Arctic Monkeys, Fiery Furnaces, Bishop Allen's February EP, Sparks, and the Flaming Lips. And I still need to write about Cat Power. Older recent listening includes Bishop Allen's Charm School and MBV's Loveless. Another time.

PRO
1. Kanye West, LATE REGISTRATION
2. Franz Ferdinand, YOU COULD HAVE IT SO MUCH BETTER
3. Brendan Benson, THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE
4. Stars, SET YOURSELF ON FIRE
5. Saint Etienne, TALES FROM TURNPIKE HOUSE
6. Josh Rouse, NASHVILLE
7. M. Ward, TRANSISTOR RADIO

Pro
8. Sufjan Stevens, ILLINOISE
9. Venetian Snares, ROSSZ CSILLAG ALLAT SZULETETT
10. Sleater-Kinney, THE WOODS
11. Bloc Party, SILENT ALARM
12. The Cribs, THE CRIBS
13. Brakes, GIVE BLOOD
14. Eels, BLINKING LIGHTS & OTHER REVELATIONS
15. The National, ALLIGATOR
16. The Fiery Furnaces, EP
17. The Game, THE DOCUMENTARY
18. Slim Thug, ALREADY PLATINUM
19. Oranger, NEW COMES AND GOES
20. LCD Soundsystem, LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
21. Metric, LIVE IT OUT
22. Roisin Murphy, RUBY BLUE
23. Matias Aguayo, ARE YOU REALLY LOST?
24. Coldplay, X&Y

Mixed
25. Spoon, GIMME FICTION
26. The White Stripes, GET BEHIND ME SATAN
27. The Tears, HERE COME THE TEARS
28. My Morning Jacket, Z
29. Teenage Fanclub, MAN-MADE
30. Stereo Total, DO THE BAMBI
31. Bodies Without Organs, PROTOTYPE
32. Clem Snide, THE END OF LOVE
33. Hanne Hukkelberg, LITTLE THINGS
34. Doves, SOME CITIES
35. De Novo Dahl, CATS & KITTENS
36. Architecture In Helsinki, IN CASE WE DIE
37. Richard Hawley, COLES CORNER
38. Graham Coxon, HAPPINESS IN MAGAZINES
39. Aqueduct, I SOLD GOLD
40. Portastatic, BRIGHT IDEAS
41. The Decemberists, PICARESQUE
42. The Clientele, STRANGE GEOMETRY
43. Bright Eyes, DIGITAL ASH IN A DIGITAL URN
44. Bright Eyes, I'M WIDE AWAKE IT'S MORNING
45. Beck, GUERO
46. Mercury Rev, THE SECRET MIGRATION
47. Lemon Jelly, '64-'95
48. The Cardigans, SUPER EXTRA GRAVITY
49. The Go-Betweens, OCEANS APART

Con
50. Busdriver, FEAR OF A BLACK TANGENT
51. Babyshambles, DOWN IN ALBION
52. John Davis, JOHN DAVIS
53. Vitalic, OK COWBOY
54. Okkervil River, BLACK SHEEP BOY
55. Crooked Fingers, DIGNITY & SHAME
56. Daft Punk, HUMAN AFTER ALL
57. 13 & God, 13 & GOD
58. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH
59. Antony & The Johnsons, I AM A BIRD NOW
60. Aimee Mann, THE FORGOTTEN ARM
61. Montag, ALONE, NOT ALONE
62. ...and you will know us by the trail of dead, WORLDS APART
63. The Dandy Warhols, ODDITORIUM OR WARLORDS OF MARS
64. Big Star, IN SPACE
65. Jamie Lidell, MULTIPLY
66. M.I.A., ARULAR
67. Out Hud, LET US NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN
68. Radar Bros., THE FALLEN LEAF PAGES

older albums

2006-03-01T22:59:00.000-08:00

In an effort to retain my sanity and interest in music, this blog will occasionally focus on albums I've been listening to not of the immediate moment. Starting now:

Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress - Why are Belle and Sebastian fans afraid of sunlight? Everything wrong with them can be summed up with two examples:

1) Over on pitchfork, Scott Plagenhoef has reviewed no less than four
seperate releases (here's the fourth review) from the fearsomely twee group. Each one hammers on the same themes with frightening repetition: once B&S were tiny, cultist and mysterious, playing shambolic live shows and refusing to engage with their audience, and it felt like they were playing for YOU AND YOU ALONE, GODDAMMIT AND WHO ARE THESE NEW FANS AND DO THEY REALLY UNDERSTAND and so on and on and on. The bottom line is that a certain kind of fan will always conflate B&S'smusical merits with the kind of kick you get out of thinking that the reason you're the only 9th-grade B&S fan at your school is that only you can appreciate them. Like hardcore Smiths fans, B&S fans tend to take what they view as diletantte incursion way too seriously.

2) A few years ago, a friend of mine was trolling around on a Livejournal Belle & Sebastian forum, and found the saddest post in the world. It was from a 20-year oldman, who said he'd love to go see the band live but his parents wouldn'tl et him. 'Nuff said.

If you're not getting the drift yet: Belle &Sebastian fans can be fucking annoying, and for a long time I didn't listen to them for that reason. I was mildly charmed by If You're Feeling Sinister when I got around to it, a record that continues to grow on me at every listen. Still, there's no denying that Dear Catastrophe Waitressis so. Much. Better. For one thing, it's got the incredibly witty production of Trevor Horn, who's ADD-addled in all the best ways - like on the title track, when Stuart Murdoch sings "I know it's no joke" and a sarcastic xylophone undercuts him, or later on the same song when Horn throws in a full, Gershwin-imitating horn/strings section just for the hell of it.

For another thing, B&S were always far more musically adventurous than their fans were ever willing to give them credit for: the divisive release of "Your Cover's Blown," with its perfectly tuned white-boy funk, proved that they're way ahead of some of their fans. Similarly, this album masters not just fragile mope-rock but a variety of aggressive pop forms, all of which sparkle so finely that even the middle-school mope of "Lord Anthony" seems acceptable. I like this album a lot, and demand to know what the fuck is wrong with everyone.

Aimee Mann, Bachelor No. 2 - I'm guessing that Mann really did peak on the fascinatingly convoluted arrangements of the Magnolia soundtrack. This 2000 album shares four tracks and Jon Brion, but it's a lot less diverse; truth be told, I rarely make it past track 7. What's there is so warm, witty and well-constructed that I'm hard-pressed to ask for more: "Ghost World" in particular is a scarily acute portrait of post-high-school slacker malaise. "All my friends are acting weird or way too cool," sings Mann, and the cinematic strings and electric guitars pound away. Still, it's hard to blame those who think a lot of Mann is too much of a good thing; I'm starting to agree, a bit, even if I just discovered 2 or 3 of my new favorite songs on this album. It's a shuffle thing.

Brakes, Give Blood - a 2005 remainder (I'll probably post a belated 2005 top 10 this weekend when I have a second). It's country-fied punk with soul, wit, and pissiness to spare, all in a terse half-hour. Some of it is just inside-baseball scenester-bashing, which is really funny if you're in the mood and catch the references (test: do you find the line "You shared a cab with Karen O! Oh oh, oooooh oh!" funny? If not, avoid "Heard About Your Band," which is probably the only song which will ever mention Electrelane.). But along with 30-second fuck-yous, there's also riches like a cover of Johnny Cash's "Jackson" that boasts a female indie rocker who might actually be able to give Neko Case a run for her money (quick: American/British Idol face-off!) and "All Night Disco Party," a distilled dose of the disco-punk which was all the rage 2-3 years ago, except more fun. Brakes sing a great deal about boredom and cocaine, but they're the real deal. And I don't care if they're a side project.

East River Pipe, What Are You On?

2006-02-18T15:42:00.000-08:00

A few words on F.M. Cornog's latest (his first album that I've heard though), which I like quite a bit (though perhaps not as much as the review would suggest - I was in a hurry). Things I still need to post about when I have a minute: albums of 2006 I've spun (Cat Power, To Elliott From Portland, William Orbit) and older albums I've been working through (Loveless, Bachelor No. 2).

The Strokes, First Impressions Of Earth

2006-01-25T13:24:00.000-08:00

Just as I was getting ready to hunker down and ignore all new music in favor of catching up with the classic past while (still) waiting for the zeitgeist to accomodate me again, I couldn't suppress my curiosity about the Strokes' latest. Lo and behold, it's not just the first release of the year, it's hard to imagine that it won't be one of the best. Metacritic's rating - hanging at 68 - doesn't reflect the real polarization the album's caused among fans. The worst reviews just suggest that the album is mediocre with moments; the worst fan reactions are considerably less kind.

The worst thing about the album is its disgusting production. Ditching Gordon Raphael in favor of perpetually employed industry man David Kahne means that the guitars, bass et al. sound like they were recorded for Incubus or some other late-90s radio alt-rock staple; full, rich, and vaguely distasteful. It takes some getting used to, as does the fact that Julian Casablancas takes the distortion and filters off of his voice; we can now hear him unprocessed, and it turns out that he sounds surprisingly like...Stephin Merritt (I'm not the only one to pick up on this), especially on "Ask Me Anything," when he rhymes "I've got nothing to say/I'm in utter dismay" over a lone Mellotron.

The next thing to distract you will be the fact that the best songs no longer sound effortless. Opener "You Only Live Once" is (choose one) a reference to Fritz Lang's 1937 classic, a snide reference to the James Bond vehicle You Only Live Twice, or just an enthusiastic cliche, but it sounds like typical old-school Strokes fare; it's a deceptive opener. The next track, "Juicebox," is the real James Bond vehicle, with secret-agent-man guitars that take guidance from Lalo Schifrin and other masters of 60s spy scores (the "Village Voice" suggests Mancini's "Peter Gunn"). Other unlikely influences peek throughout: the furious opening of "Heart In A Cage" wouldn't be out of place in a System Of A Down song, and the intro to "Electricityscape" flirts with Metallica. But throughout, the Strokes take potentially disastrous elements and force them to sound like the Strokes: inhumanly precise in the rhythm section, infuriatingly catchy and satisfying guitar lines, and Julian Casablancas dominating everything effortlessly. As always, Casablancas spits out stupid lyrics and quotables in equal measure: "Razorblade"'s "All my feelings are more important than yours" is a keeper, "Took a shit/it was fine" on "15 Minutes" not so much.

As the party line goes, this is the Strokes' "open" album. Those titular first impressions are presumably of a planet the band no longer seems too cool for; shaken by their lack of commercial success and fed up with their fickle hipster fanbase, they're not cool enough for the hipsters and inexplicably unready for the mainstream. The sentiments can often seem juvenile: on the best song, "On The Other Side," Casablancas laments: "I hate my friends, I hate them all/I hate myself for hating them/So I'll drink some more/I'll love them all/I'll drink even more/I'll hate them even more than I did before." At 17, I would've loved to have heard this song and related; as it is, I admire the craft, and sardonically relate to the sentiment, but let's face it; I like my friends. Mostly.

The Strokes may never make a classic album like Is This It? again, but First Impressions is easily my favorite. Their debut and its (equally good, no matter what anyone says) follow-up are the sound of high-school nostalgia to me (which I guess says more about what I did and who I hung out with in high school than the band's popularity), but this album proves they can go further than that. (The first time hearing "Vision Of Division," I had that rare thrilling moment where all the chord changes I predicted were the ones they actually chose.) An effortless seeming toss-off like "Last Nite" - still their pinnacle, when all is said and done - may never occur again, but I'm content with that. Die-hard old-school Strokes fans may have problems though.

2005: almost done

2006-01-14T23:20:00.000-08:00

Not that anyone ever agrees about which albums from each year have to be heard - there's certainly no fixed list of stuff you have to hear to be familiar with the year, unlike annual cineaste requirements, which are fairly clear - but, since the internet music geek group I belong to is having its top 10 awards and voting this weekend, I'll be quitting on 2005 soon. There's some fairly interesting stuff I have sitting around - Andrew Bird, Silent Alarm Remixed, The Russian Futurists - but whatever I haven't listened to by the end of January will probably fall by the wayside. Changes are coming to this blog - mostly because I'm bored with current music - but I'll figure them out in a bit. In a meanwhile, more 2005:

Matias Aguayo, Are You Really Lost - I'm just barely familiar with the work of the Kompakt label, but I find it almost comically intimidating, the kind of experts-only electronica that all sounds the same to me. I do like this guy though, because he sounds more sinuous than most: "De Papel" sounds downright seductive, even though the lyrics are gibberish (as with the whole album). The sounds are familiar ones - configurations of drum beats and loops and snare hisses and looped mouth sounds and so on and so on - expertly reworked in rhythmic configurations that keep changing in 4-measure cycles and toy with minimal resources to force you to listen closely. My favorite track is "So In Love," which jacks Angelo Badalementi's keyboards from Twin Peaks and is plausibly, if vaguely, menacing in the same way. A reminder (again!) that I really should listen to more electronica.

Jamie Lidell, Multiply - imagine Midnite Vultures with no sense of humor, or Prince without his irrepresible horniness and bizarre personality quirks, and you'll start to get the idea. This is straightforward, humorless soul crooner stuff - worked over with a wide variety of electronics, sounding like a less dated version of Prince's 80 production techniques - and it has "soul" and "authenticity" to spare. The stunt, of course, is that Lidell is a white electronica geek doing a flawless imitation, but it's a boring one, and I can't even begin to imagine why I should care. I fail to see why critics went apeshit for it, aside from that it played to their common jones for "real" soulful music, with a sheen of electronic innovation that made it seem noteworthy. As Blonde Redhead reminded us, fake can be just as good as real, and in this case it would've been preferred.

catch-up: Sufjan/M. Ward

2006-01-07T22:35:00.000-08:00

Sufjan Stevens, Come On, Feel The Illinoise - I didn't jump on Sufjan's bandwagon immediately; 2003's Michigan struck me as inordinately depressing and obscenely long, a killer combination. Where others heard exquisite sensitivity and a literary feel for lyrics, I could only hear the endless droning of depressed pianos and banjos picking their way into oblivion. It made sense, given the state's weather, but I couldn't handle it, cutting the thing into a third of its length for the iPod. Then I sat around and bitched about how the indie vanguard had left me behind.

Illinois is a vast improvement, although Stevens is still kind of monotonous if you're not sympathetically inclined. He doesn't do his own drums (one of the few instruments he doesn't play), but he's apparently only calling for a few different drum patterns: any upbeat song is likely to get the same rolling-tom pattern as the others, which is kind of annoying. But Illinois offers a greater palate of emotional ambiguity than Michigan, which was practically bipolar. Aside from the hysterical "John Wayne Gacy Jr." (a song I don't much care for, but which does uncork Sufjan's falsetto to pleasing effect), the songs don't ping back and forth between celebration and suicidal tendencies. E.g., after two short opening tracks, Sufjan plunges into the 6:45 of "Come On! Feel The Illinoise!," a song as excited about such arcane opportunities as an exposition to showcase the city and The Future as it is nervous about the applications. So it goes, a constant tension between optimism and reckoning which keeps things steady.

Stevens has done frightening amounts of research, pulling out references even I can't suss out; he's up there with Stephin Merritt vying for the title of Most Literate Indie Rocker. He also has broadened his arrangements a bit, even finding room for the occasional electric, amplified voice (even a guitar - with distortion crunch! - on "The Man Of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts") in songs that could otherwise be performed live and would already be unplugged. My favorite bit of homage is perhaps the least literate: "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!!" etc. adheres strictly to the rules and logic of a zombie film. "I know my time has come," sings Sufjan, "I'm not so young, I'm not so strong." Exactly right. That song, incidentally, sounds like the lo-fi approximation of a 70s soul recording - sweeping strings, back-up chorus, swinging drums - to go along with Sufjan's much-noted interest in drones, loops, et al.

It's much easier to jump on the Stevens initiative - "Say Yes! To Sufjan!" as his more unimaginative groupies paraphrase one of his songs - now that the songs are more universally sunny and balanced. I do wish it wasn't 75 minutes long - the world could certainly do without "A Conjunction Of Drones," for example, although then Sufjan might lose cred for ditching his higher-ground influences - and that Dave Eggers hadn't written the obscenely long song titles (I still don't know what the songs are called, technically), but I'll gladly wade through the excess now that it's not so dark. Homeboy still needs to diversify, though...Texas better not sound like this, is all I'm saying.

M. Ward, Transistor Radio - like Sufjan, Ward traffics frequently in lyrical arcana, though seemingly it comes naturally to him, without any research. His is an Americana that doesn't cloy or naggingly insist on "authenticity" as a token of quality: in other words, it's devoid of annoying extra-musical connotations of worth frequently brought to their music of choice by country/roots fans. Transistor Radio sounds like World War II love songs broadcast through a time-traveling AM station in the middle of the night. The language of the past flows effortlessly from Ward, as when he refers to "Sweethearts On Parade," practically making you salivate for an Esther Williams musical (his smoky, somewhat jazzy vocals help too). Ward's sharp-eyed blend of the past and present throws in Beach Boys covers and electric guitars as needed, but it's all one entrancing unit. It's a perfect companion to the (far messier, less coherent) All Night Radio album Spirit Stereo Frequency, which did the same thing for druggy 60s psychadelia. I like this album a lot, at least in part because it taps into a past which I'm just as home in as Ward, but it takes the musical language beyond nostalgia.

more catch-up

2005-12-24T15:31:00.000-08:00

Slim Thug, Already Platinum - There's rap artists that it's acceptable and common for white critics to treat as cross-over material and discuss extensively (e.g., this year, The Game - for his Dr. Dre pedigree, mostly - and Kanye West), who comprise a very small amount of the hip-hop released yearly in the US, and then there's everyone else. Unless you're, say, Kelefa Sanneh (who makes sure that the New York Times, of all sources, stays on top of the likes of D4L while ostensible music encyclopedia allmusic can't even be bothered to review their album), covering the vast number of unpedigreed, decidedly unlovable and frequently simple-minded rappers claiming the national scene for themselves proves beyond most mainstream publications.

Shed a tear, then, for Slim Thug's label debut. The title indicates that he peronally couldn't care less; the man's already been paid, as he often reiterates. Indeed, money is Slim's main theme, and he brings naked commercialism to the forefront in a way that few rappers can best for sheer, undisguised greed, and without any platitudes about supporting his block or the necessity of hustling either. "I got something on my neck worth more than yo house, I got something in my yard worth more than yo spouse," claims Slim on "I Ain't Heard Of That (Remix ft. Bun B)," which has to be one of the most awesome boasts of the year. The disk's other main motif is Slim's Houston pedigree, a great thing to have in the year when the scene - already familiar to me and thousands of other Texas kids (in Austin, on Hot 93.3, which did a pretty good job of playing regional artists) - suddenly blew up and gave Mike Jones, Lil' Flip, et al. the national spotlight. (Slim has beef with Flip, incidentally, but he's a far more accomplished rapper.)

Like most rap albums, Already Platinum is far too long and needs to be cut, especially because Slim's range (aptly summarized by pitchforkmedia.com as "the intertwined lyrical themes of I'm Awesome and I'm Rich, sometimes dipping into I'll Kill You or I Don't Care About Women") can be wearyingly small. Musically, Platinum is largely given over to typically weird beats from the Neptunes, who only connect with the rest of humanity about 1/3 of the time, plus some other remainders (including a bizarre Bootsy Collins tribute from Jazze Pha on "Everybody Loves A Pimp," all goofy vocal boasts and burbling bass). Guest spots are few, although there are repeated shout-outs to Pimp C (the other half of UGK, in jail for aggravated assault, although you'd never know that he'd committed any form of transgression from the repeated cries of "Free Pimp C!") and a welcome visit from the South's most charismatic representative, T.I. (Inevitably, Thug's posse - Boyz N Blue - make an appearance, with promises of a group album to come.) When this album gets its swagger on (as in the killer back-to-back coupling of "I Ain't Heard Of That" and "Click Clack"), there's little from 2005 that's more fun.

Richard Hawley, Coles Corner - Ho-hum, another accomplished album by a polished singer-songwriter who can do shuffling country ("I Sleep Alone"), 50s doo-wop as sung by sad old men ("Hotel Room"), and Scott Walker-esque string-fuelled slow-burn drama ("The Ocean") equally well. Hawley - whose voice sounds misleadingly old, and who did time in Pulp, oddly enough - has mastered the by-now classic formulas of certain kinds of songwriting and doesn't fuck with them; it's the kind of work that's easier to admire for its craft than really get into. It's also a drinking album; the opening title track has Hawley preparing to go "downtown where there's music," only to have his night go downhill from there. He keeps himself awake by playing laments like "I Sleep Alone," degenerating finally into total incoherence on instrumental closer "Last Orders," which is just a piano playing some C-major chords through a haze of reverb and basic floating synths, presumably while Hawley is off puking somewhere. Well, we've all had nights like that. I like the sweep of the opening "Coles Corner," but the rest of it is kind of an unrelieved (if undeniably well-assembled) drag. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much you like songwriting formulas to be respected.

The Clientele, Strange Geometry - Speaking of songwriting formulas...The Clientele's command of hazy atmosphere makes it hard, at first listen, to tell which of their songs are stronger than others, since they're all so damn similar. Repeated spins have led me to cut about 1/3 of the album, because I need hooks more than I need simple plaintive tunefulness. Highlights: the classic verse-chorus execution of opener "Since K Got Over Me," raising (if not fulfilling) the intriguing idea of a Britpop Kafka adaptation, the ethereal floating choir intro to "K" (probably the best intro to anything this year), the swooping string hook on "When I Came Home From The Party." Like Belle & Sebastian, it's wimpy-seeming music with a considerable amount of bitterness, sarcasm and alcohol swimming around; the songwriting isn't quite there always (particularly as the album passes the halfway point), but the sound is fully formed.

Vitalic, OK Cowboy - I always get excited when I hear the words "new Daft Punk" tossed around, but this is more Homework than Discovery, and listening to Homework has always kinda seemed like, well, work to me. OK Cowboy is all poker-faced synths and disturbingly vocodered-to-death vocals; I prefer my dance music goofier and looser, though I do like the screeching vocals (I guess - it's kind of hard to tell, what with all the processing) on "Newman," and the nihilistic drive-fast-die-young-leave-a-good-looking-corpse vocals of "My Friend Dario." Otherwise, I'm not feelin' it particularly.

catch-up: Antony & The Johnsons

2005-12-01T20:54:00.000-08:00

Antony & The Johnsons, I Am A Bird Now - now that I've finally gotten over the shock of his voice and listened to the goddamn album, it's not bad. Gracefully arranged strings interact with warm and lulling piano chords and unobtrusive drums; it's decent cabaret music with a strong gay sensibility. But the boy isn't Rufus Wainwright (but Rufus must know something I don't, since he's a huge fan and shows up here). What's the big deal here? Antony's nice enough, and I guess if I listened to his lyrics closely enough I'd pick up on all the latent transgression, but sentiments like the album-opening "Hope there's someone waiting for me when I die" seem more universal than anything. The album is OK background music, but I'm not picking up on what's so special.

catch-up: Babyshambles

2005-12-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

Babyshambles, Down In Albion - while not quite Third/Sister Lovers, Babyshambles' debut is a portrait of a band so bruised it's surprise they kept it together long enough to record even this. A mess of an album, this isn't for anyone who wasn't enamored of the Libertines when they first emerged; at an hour, it more than stretches patience. Listen to Up The Bracket again, noticing the confidence and verve with which the band tightly barrels through their songs, making nary a misstep; then listen to this, a shambolic array of songs in various levels of arrangement which frequently begin with someonen quietly messing around on an amp, or even less. The arrangements seem to have been decided upon just before recording, with no rehearsal; one fears that Pete Doherty has been surrounded by sycophants who pander to his conceit of being another blinding troubling genius whose decisions must never be challenged.

Though it's messy, Down In Albion is a fascinating listen for fans: Doherty constantly trashes the legacy (such as it is) of the Libertines in the lyrics. "Don't look back into the motherfucking sun," he proclaims, twisting the name of their well-regarded comeback single; there's also "What Katie Did Next," the unauthorized sequel to the Libertines song, and "Up The Morning," a not-so-subtle shot back at their first album title. Opener "La Belle Et La Bete" has Doherty singing about getting coked-up with an affectingly off-key, frail Kate Moss backing him; it's both vulnerable and brash, and it's fascinating. It's followed by "Fuck Forever," one of the few moments when the whole band gets it together and throws out a growling anthem. The album comes together sporadically from that point onwards, and fans should find a lot of interest. Now it's Carl Barat's turn to fire back.

catch-up: The Cribs

2005-11-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

The Cribs, The Cribs - Imagine The Strokes, only with three members, British, and frankly less talented, but compensating by being far more amiable. Bookended by songs which might throw you off the scent - "The Watch Trick" opens with a carnival-esque organ in waltz-time, and 5-minutes-plus closer "Third Outing" goes garage - The Cribs otherwise stick to all the slick, one note at a time guitar-lines and basic chords you could ask for (they've also got lo-fi recording down). They're pretty good at it though - good enough for the resemblance not to be distracting or annoying - and their vocals are far less detached. On some songs they form their own, distinctly interesting persona - like on "Learning How To Fight," when they blurt out "You took me out to breakfast!" The Strokes just get all sad and detached and wonder if this is it, or command you to meet them in the bathroom, but the Cribs aren't cool enough to be that alienated, which is probably a good thing (made nowhere clearer than on "Things You Should Be Knowing," where our lovestruck hero meets a girl: "You were drunk and unbelievably cool." Aww!). None of it is bad, and some of it is almost great.

more catch-up: The National

2005-11-25T13:36:00.000-08:00

The National, Alligator - "I'll put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile," sings Matt Derninger on "Baby, We'll Be Fine," and that one line sums up why I have trouble taking the National seriously. See, because he has a deep voice and he's singing gravely about covering up his unhappiness with fashionable dress and false cheer. Oh boy. I love my bass-vocal balladeers as much as the next guy (especially if they're the Tindersticks), but there's only so much singing of disappointing nights of drinking and unrewarding sex before I start snickering. (cf. the Tindersticks again, who know that a leavening duet or two always helps.) By the time we get to penultimate track "City Middle" and Derninger says "I feel just like Tennessee Williams," it's hard to keep a straight face. Dude could just quit drinking and get a job, you know.

The National are, however, an accomplished band, the rare unit in which every player seems to be listening to the other and thinking carefully about where the rhythms and melodic lines go. These are well-arranged songs, even without the occasional strings and woodwinds, denser than standard indie-rock. Opening duo "Secret Meeting" and "Karen" are particularly rousing, as is closer "Mr. November." Here Derninger pulls back a bit on the unhappiness: "I wouldn't go out alone into America" is a clever line, succinctly stating the New Yorker's habitual fear of fly-over country. The National sounds better when you're not paying close attention and can groove on the gravitas: close listening reveals an accomplished band that could stand to cheer the fuck up on occasion. They probably keep Livejournals too.

thanksgiving catch-up

2005-11-24T12:41:00.000-08:00

Architecture In Helsinki, In Case We Die - I didn't hear the twee collective's first CD, aside from a catchy single I can't even remember the name of. Thing being that at the time I downloaded said single, it just struck me as catchy pop; the discovery that AIH was a bunch of shaggy-haired Aussies with a propensity for getting ultra-cutesy threw me off. When I finally listened, I couldn't stand it at first: there's perky female singers who sound underage and cheap keyboards with fuzzy, cloying oomp. And what bothered me most was that I could see it working with expensive production: with booming drums and bigger choirs, AIH's occasional yen for song-suites and Life-Affirming Numbers would work much better.

And the truth is that numbers like "Need To Shout" can grow annoying, as AIH cross the line between upbeat and cloying one to many times. "Tiny Paintings," from its title on down to the lumbering bass line, sounds like a kiddie soundtrack to a movie about an ungainly but lovable dog (Beethoven 6: Charles Grodin's Revenge). But once you dig past the hippie trappings, they have more than a few moments, like two-minute wonder "It'5" (say "It's five!"), or melancholy "Maybe You Can Owe Me," where they hushedly offer a place for a friend to crash on the floor while summoning up the feeling of long late-night conversations. Bottom line: annoying ethos, decent tunes, could use a bigger budget.

Big Star, In Space - The first three tracks made me glad that Big Star came back; it sounded like Alex Chilton, if not back in top form, was at least warming up nicely. "Dony" has a nice dark hue to it, and "Best Chance We've Ever Heard" is almost quite good. But there's not much good to say about this disk, made seemingly solely for the band's perverse pleasure: the fuck-you funk of "Love Revolution" seems designed to demonstrate that you can have excellent rhythm guitar skills and still make them mean not a damn thing, and "Do You Wanna Make It" is yet another rote round of blues-rock in a time when there's already too much of it. There is one perversely fascinating track on here: "Aria Largo" is a transcription, as its title suggests, of an Italian aria, scored for two guitars, bass, and drums. It's utterly unnecessary and doesn't work, but the sheer absurdity of the enterprise is kind of fascinating. Like so many reunion CDs, this one is destined to sink into obscurity. Not In Space; Lost In Space, more like.

The Cardigans, Super Extra Gravity - I really, really enjoyed the Cardigans' shift into uber-depression on Long Gone Before Daylight, an album whose utter bleakness would've given Nick Drake pause. The album also had some forays into conventional rock to leaven, but it worked fine; instead of sounding adult-contemporary, they sounded like a band writing professional 4-minute songs. The transition doesn't continue quite as smoothly here. There's not much good to say about a song like "Drip Drop Teardrop," a drag of arcane rock where Nina Persson prophetically sings "I'm gonna sing until you hate this song" over endlessly pounding ROCK DRUMS. Fuck that.

The good: opening twosome "Losing A Friend" and "Godspell" move from melancholy to (I'm not kidding) a song declaring the Cardigans' atheism. There's also a single called "I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer" where Persson addresses her lover/dog with obvious relish: "Sit. Good dog. Stay. Roll over. Bad dog. Wooo! Down. Roll over." Sexual vamping suits her well. Before two finishing bonus tracks, there's "And Then You Kissed Me II," a lesser re-visitation of the extraordinary "Daylight" track about love as a form of abuse, and vice-versa. The Cardigans seem to have stopped being bummed-out, and now just want to be a boring MOR band. Bummer.

Metric, Live It Out - Textbook indie-rock, with jagged hooks and sweet vocal harmonies, occasionally marred by sub-Le Tigre political posture. "Handshakes" sounds like a gift from Julian Casablancas, at least until they start howling "Buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car." Whatever. The really good: "Poster Of A Girl" may be the one-night stand of the year, and "Police And The Private" rides a melancholy keyboard line for all it's worth. Metric have a particular knack for taking the minimalist instrumentation of indie rock and milking it: piano chords, synths, and fuzz are all deployed expertly. Not a stellar CD, but the very quintessence of solid indie rock.

CDs I hope to catch up with before it's list-making time: Antony & The Johnsons, Babyshambles, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & Matt Sweeney, Dirty Projectors, Fiery Furnaces, Gustav, Isolee, Juan Maclean, M. Ward, Russian Futurists, Sufjan Stevens, TTC, Vitalic. Chime in if I'm missing anything major.

this week's newspaper stuff

2005-11-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

I totally busted my ass to produce a good 2200 words of content this week. Here's 2 articles: a profile of new much-hyped kids Test Icicles, who I'll confess to being slightly underwhelmed by (but I still want to hear their debut CD), and a profile of NYU student label Village Records. This latter is of frankly minimal interest to anyone who isn't actively involved with them, but my editor asked me, and I need to prove myself etc.

catch-up

2005-11-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Oranger, New Comes And Goes - Like the title says, this is solidly crafted power-pop, no more or less fashionable than it will be ten years from now. Oranger is, according to press notes I got, a San Francisco band that's been knocking around for a while; it has the typical indie rock revolving cast of members (this incarnation, if memory serves, boasts one of the guys from Creeper Lagoon, a teen-angst fave of mine that couldn't be more different). This time, they make barely produced, sparsely arranged guitar-pop. It works. If you listen to closely, it becomes apparent that there's little room for error in this kind of stream-lined pop; a few songs (I'd suggest the primitive "Outtatoch") drag it down, but cutting them makes the album flow even better. Otherwise, not much to say: "Haeter" and "Flying Pretend" back to back means you get a great, punchy pop song (organs in all the right spots, taut drums, a right-on hook) followed by a super-fragile ballad composed pretty much exclusively of piano, vox, and recording fuzz. The good people at Eenie Meenie Records sent multiple promo copies of this, in apparent hopes that they'd get a slot in our meagerly important pages. Sorry guys; I couldn't justify catering to my pop fetish all the time in our reviews. Consider this my apology.

The Dandy Warhols, Odditorium or Warlords Of Mars - a gigantic load of crap. Evidently trying to reclaim some of the "credibility" Dig! stripped them of (as if really doing heroin instead of only pretending to had anything to do with iconic mythology, let alone writing catchy songs), the Warhols delve into one exercise after another of droning, confusing instrumentation and "jams" that go nowhere, with people playing without any real regard for one another. One song stands out as the obligatory clever new single: "All The Money Or the Simple Life Honey" has jangle and cheery horn arrangements to spare as Courtney Taylor-Taylor tells you what it's like to play "in a rock 'n roll band" where you better "do what the man says." I can't even begin to parse the layers of irony: do the Warhols (especially on this messy, thoroughly uncommerical - not to mention wretched - album) really kowtow to the man, especially considering that their biggest success came from a European TV commercial after their label faltered in promoting them adequately, and gave the label Welcome To The Monkey House's synth-pop instead of more pseudo-garage? Or does being successful and wanting to write catchy songs make you an automatic sell-out? Can you do what The Man wants and still be autonomous? Whatever. The rest of this album is well-nigh unlistenable.

Radar Bros., The Fallen Leaf Pages - gave it an agonizing three listens, then gratefully gave up. The Bros.' 2002 release ...And The Surrounding Mountains is a great album, one which builds up a mood of inexplicable, cumulative power. Songs revolved around uncles, mothers, and sons in relationships of ambiguous but unmistakable violence; the tension between the lyrics and the stately arrangements was hypnotic. This is just, you know, a bunch of slow-ass songs with no hooks and no larger conceptual framework. Fuck that.

Hanne Hukkelberg

2005-11-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

Just in time for this Friday's update, here's 250 words on Hanne Hukkelberg from last Friday. I know I still need to do a real post. Bite me etc.

My Morning Jacket

2005-10-21T09:06:00.000-07:00

It's Friday, and here's a new and exciting Student Newspaper update. This week it's My Morning Jacket, which I listened to all of three times before writing this (scroll to the bottom, although I edited all the stuff on top and will more or less vouch for it). I'm actually slightly more enthusiastic about it than I let on; it's just that I feel real cautious about warming up to these guys after three listens. I won't give them the benefit of the doubt that easy, since they do have long hair and a proclivity for jamming and Southern Rock influences and all that. I need more time to judge. It's like making friends with frat kids; you can do it, just be careful. And I mean no disrespect to my frat friends with that.

Kanye West is almost as good as he thinks he is

2005-10-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

Guess it's time to finally explain why Kanye is the man and, additionally, why Late Registration is actually an improvement on the (still awesome) College Dropout.

First, two big changes from the first album that make up at least half the difference:

1) Forget the endless, 10-minute orgy of unedited inarticulacy that closed Dropout. Instead, the amazing song "Gone" (more on this below) gives in to 30 seconds of silence, followed by two disciplined bonus tracks: "Diamonds From Sierra Leone," the first single that emerged when it still seemed like the album would meet its original June release date, and "Late," in which Kanye half-sheepishly, half-arrogantly apologizes for taking fucking forever to put out this follow-up.

2) The skits are actually funny this time. Kanye may still have his anti-education grind on, but he's focused his aim this time on frats. And we can all agree that frats are stupid. Best line: "Do you remember when your mama walked into the room and pretended she was the Christmas tree?"

So: about this whole arrogance problem some critics seem to be having. Since when has hubris annoyed writers accustomed, for the most part, to taking Jay-Z's walking on water and the Game's comparison of himself with MLK Jr. totally in stride? Maybe it's just that those two rappers tend to cut loose on their tracks but give relatively gracious interviews (esp. given that Jay-Z now has a corporate empire to run), while Kanye transfers his persona straight from track to interview. And I'm still not sure why his claims that he's single-handedly saving hip-hop are that much more arrogant than the dour, self-righteous backpackers of the 90s we don't have to take seriously anymore, who showered everyone who wasn't them with scorn. But whatever; dismissing this album because Kanye can't live up to his own hyperbole at all times is like refusing to listen to Franz Ferdinand because they get radio play. It's annoying for a certain kind of music fan, and I sort of sympathize, but it's totally irrelevant. Beulah thought they were better than Bob Dylan, but I think we're all over it.

Anyway: from its opening on, Registration is quite clearly a more collaborative album than Dropout. The most publicity has (rightfully) gone to Jon Brion, but before we even get there consider opening song "Heard 'Em Say." Here, Kanye puts his diciest collaboration (with Adam Levine of - shock/anger/disgust/etc. - Maroon 5) first (it's also presumably standing in for that John Mayer track that didn't make the final cut). It sounds like both of them, with the hook quite clearly ready for soft-rock if Kanye doesn't use it, but it meshes perfectly with him. Where Dropout kicked off with the epic, Broadway opening-number blast of "We Don't Care," Registration has nothing to prove, and starts off soft.

The next number, "Touch The Sky," is bombast like you'd expect. But it's not Kanye; it's the other crate-digging 70s-soul-sample hot-touch producer, Just Blaze, and it's a perfect example of his exuberant knack for digging out perfect horn lines and recontextualizing. Then comes "Gold Digger," the currently ubiquitous single, which is sonically on the light side and features another reference to Geico (dude really likes his Geico references, I guess). Then there's a skit. And then the album proper takes off.

What follows is basically an uninterrupted string of musical experimentation between West and Brion. Those familiar with both their work should be able to easily pin down which sounds belong to whom - they're so distinctive in their production choices. Generally, the foundations belong to West; mellotrons (and mellow/distinctive keyboards in general), subtle percussive touches, weird electronic sounds, and string arrangements belong to Brion. Together, they expand each other's musical worlds way faster than they would've working seperately. "Roses" might've made a decent Aimee Mann song, what with its minor-chord keys and general melancholy, but it's a killer when you add Kanye's substantive bitterness about his grandma dying and wailing back-up singers. It goes the other way on "Drive Slow," which could've been a rote salute to aimless teenage driving without Brion's melancholy support (which, incidentally, also makes an oddly appropriate back-up to the guest turn from Paul Wall, a dude who has absolutely nothing in common with Kanye's progressive streak but does manage to pull out a line like "The disco ball in my mouth insinuates that I'm balling").

Kanye's flow will never be perfect, which may be why he's the only rapper I can actually remember whole verses with and lip-synch along (my ineptitude with remembering lyrics and complicated flow is staggering). Occasionally he's downright retarded, as in the otherwise touching "Hey Mama" (whose sentimentality gets a big boost out of Brion's funky electronic bassline and Kanye's exultant whoop which starts each verse) when he proposes, re black poetry: "Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni/turn the page and there's my mommy," and also on "Crack Music," which proposes that the success of rap music with white audiences is some kind of bizarre revenge or counter-effect of the 80s crack epidemic, which was all the fault of white people. But West is always himself, personable, honest, and generally entertaining (his goofy threesome proposal at the end of "Addictions" is a classic). Speaking of lyrics, Jay-Z provides one of two indelible, must-hear moments on the album on "Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)" with the year's most dramatic introduction of any guest in any context: he doesn't wait for a full-blown intro, just jumping in right as Kanye asks (in the voice of his haters) "What's up with you and J, y'all OK, man?" "YUP!" yells Jay, as the music drops out: "I got it from here, 'ye, damn!" What follows are some of the most compelling 1:13 of the year.

And that other indelible moment. "Gone" is the summation of everything this album does right. In 5:30, West balances an effective soul sample against his own rapping, Cam'Ron's meaningless but fun wordplay (aside: so when did Cam'Ron becomes a surrealist anyway? One second dude is making stuff like "Hey Ma," where a compelling reason for a young lady to hook up with him is because they have their love of alcohol, smoking, and car ownership in common, which leads to a chorus of "We gonna get it on tonight," and the next he doesn't make any sense. But try not being entertained when he says "Be gone, I don't need you. Poof! Poof!"), GLC's virtuoso rhyme-stream/narrative, and Brion's incredibly dramatic, swooping string arrangement. It pushes rap production further than the last two years of the Neptunes' career.

To sum up: fuck the hatas. Kanye has made (as of this writing) the best album of two respective years. Ignoring what this says about my boredom with the current music scene, that's one righteous achievement. It's hard to tell how long he can keep it up (har har): maybe another unlikely producer collaboration is in order? In my dreams, he hooks up with Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, The Delgados) and makes the most overblown CD of any genre ever. In the meantime, ignore the boringness of his work with Common et al. This is the real thing.

stuff i should've heard/written up already

2005-09-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

The Fiery Furnaces, EP - Well yes, compared to the staggering Blueberry Boat, 41 minutes may indeed constitute an EP running-time. Smart-asses. The thing is that Blueberry Boat is a startlingly original album, which is good and bad: the Furnaces are that ultimate cliche, "one of the only new bands doing anything original" (it's always the end of an era, right?) but also so original it's hard to apply basic rules of quality/discernment to them. Blueberry Boat is the only album on my 2004 Top 10 that I'm scared of; it's massively long, and I'm incapable of telling you which songs are better than other songs, because I haven't listened to it that many times.

Anyway, for all these reasons, I was afraid of EP for a while, which was my mistake. It opens with a four-song run as awesome as anything they've ever done: "Single Again" is a taut, pissy piece of work that runs into the lovely duo of "Here Comes The Summer" and "Evergreen" (both of which are actually warm, conventional, and terrific pop songwriting - enlivened by their trademark cheap instrumentation, but still pretty in a way that totally panders to my pop instincts), and the bizarre Victorian imagery of "Sing For Me" (as brother Matthew commands sister Eleanor "Sing for me, my daughter"), which is still nice.

EP gets weirder from there, but mostly rewardingly: my favorite innovation is the background chorus of "Sweet Spots," which sounds like it was recorded live in the middle of a chattering party (as opposed to the hermetic attic the FF often seem tobe emanating from). I'd recommend cutting tracks 8 and 10 ("Cousin Chris" and "Sullivan's Social Slub"), which are unwieldy sub-Blueberry suites of alliterative nonsense et al. You'll be left with a true EP length for one thing (just about 30 minutes), and you'll also have a Furnaces record without the challenging "thematic" material that only they understand, just pop. Now if I can just brace myself for Rehearsing My Choir, maybe I'll like it.

Sleater-Kinney, The Woods - From the terrifying opening squall of feedback, S-K re-invent themselves without a trace of self-consciousness. The problem with their past work was that it was always a little too pleasant, with the band's melodic instincts blunting any fierceness that may have been intended; they sounded a little retro, theoretically raw rock for people scared of wilder, more diversified sounds. Classic rock comparisons (raised by the band themselves) seem misguided; I don't remember Led Zeppelin being this obsessed with distortion, the amount of which will warp your speakers. The record is probably one song too long, but, amazingly enough, the 10-minute jam rocks without seeming indulgent. And yes, S-K brought their pet feminist concerns - aggressive female sexuality, oppressive society - along with them, but, as before, never allow them to ruin the fun. I avoided this CD because of the classic rock stigma, but that influence ultimately seems irrelevant to me. Not quite one of the best of the year - mostly because I'm into wimp-rock, honestly - but certainly awesome in its own righetousness.

Out Hud, Let Us Never Speak Of It Again - I just want to make it clear that I have listened to this and don't remember a damn thing about it. It's incredibly bland; at least when !!! are being obnoxious they can get a rise out of me.

The Tears, Here Come The Tears - this isn't really recommendable in any meaningful sense. It's those guys from Suede, and, like most Americans, I never really saw what the big deal was - as far as 90s neo-glam goes, Placebo was both trashier and more fun. Still, I'm only familiar with Suede's debut; every review says this CD just sounds like latter-day Suede, so maybe I missed something. The bottom line is that aside from anything produced by Dave Fridmann, it's hard to find comparably ridiculous levels of overproduction elsewhere, and I fall for that shit every time. If that's your thing, prepare for an album where every song has 20 layers of guitar, a loud and distorted string section, harps, and god knows what else. Also, Bernard Butler can be a ludicrous lyricist, but he's not nearly as bad as many would have it, and he can muster up enjoyable wit every now and then (e.g., on "Two Creatures," which opens with the snipe "This country looks like one big carpark"). Even if Brett Anderson apes Bowie a bit too much, this enjoyable guilty pleasure skips the portentous doom and self-importance and goes straight for the drama-queen indulgences. It's fun in small doses, deadly in large ones, and impossible to take seriously.

briefly

2005-09-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm back at NYU, incredibly busy, etc. And frankly I haven't been listening to a damn thing other than Kanye West, who is The Man (take that, Sam Jackson!) for the 2nd year in a row. Hopefully I will write 27,000 words on why sometime soon. In the meantime, I'd like to point out that this year I'm not just a humble student newspaper staff writer, fighting with the plebes for promos: I'm the editor (because our old editor has moved on to an internship at "Spin"), and as such do whatever the hell I want. So here's my needlessly snide Fall Album Preview. Now let's see if I can land a press pass for CMJ...

2005-08-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

More recent listening:

Aimee Mann, The Forgotten Arm - Disappointing. Mann generally writes lovely, lilting melodies with acceptably depressive (if rarely profound) lyrics, but at least half of the joy is in the arrangements - those of the ever-ingenious Jon Brion, but also those of Mann herself, who can easily measure up in the ingenuity stakes. The songs on the Magnolia soundtrack are simple, but nearly unplayable live: the instrumentation is unassumingly complex. Pity, then, that Mann suddenly developed an urge to simplify: she says in press releases that she wanted to get back to basics, which means that this is a boring, ready-for-NPR slog of undistinguished 70s roots-rock. Practically every song ends with an organ fading out and features the exact same instrumental line-up. Opener "Dear John" uses the formula well, bu this is a boring genre, and Mann's songs aren't nearly exciting or ingenious enough to transcend the arrangements. The gems you may want to download (because Mann is far too talented a craftsman to completely flop) are single "Going Through The Motions" and the lovely "She Really Wants You." Oh, and the conceptual framework that makes this something of a rock opera is boring and underwhelming - Mann's lyrics can't carry it through - and it's a pathetic excuse to make the music 70s-ish just because that's the era the characters live through. The 70s were not this monotoned and boring, even in the mainstream - Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything? is the single (OK, double-) album refutation of that: you can be totally of the era without sticking to one sound.

Teenage Fanclub, Man-Made - not much to say. I was familiar only with the guitar-heavy sounds of Bandwagonesque, and assumed the stripped-down string loveliness of recent singles I'd heard on compilations was an aberration, but apparently the Fanclub no longer drowns in guitars. So this is all pretty spare, and I kept expecting it to grow on me more than it did; I ended up cutting half of it, but it makes a lovely EP. These guys have grown into elegiac mode well, although you don't need too many of their songs. So who's gonna finally have the good sense to pair their songs with a Nick Hornby movie adaptation, where they arguably belong?

Roisin Murphy, Ruby Blue - in some ways, it's the Album Of The Year in a way that makes you want to champion it, the perfect meeting of sensibilities between a sultry female vocalist with, perhaps, not a whole lot on her mind, and a normally over-cerebral producer ridiculously dedicated to his craft. Everyone wins as they meet halfway, but it's still light dance music, and as such has little staying power past a few weeks. Still, there's more new, good ideas here than on most of 2005's releases combined, like the lovely, lilting bossa nova of "Through Time" that's increasingly undercut by tape haze and distorted vocals, or the R&B-but-slightly-off single "If We're In Love," whose chilly saxes are rhythmically right on, but sounds texturally a little anti-septic (in a good way). This is also available import-only, and as such knowing about it makes you look that much cooler, if you care about those things. Still, I've stoppped championing it as much as I did a few weeks ago because of its limited listening life. Recommended.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: twisting the knife in indie rock's death-wound

2005-08-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

OK, so picture the following: it's Saturday night in San Antonio, and I'm visiting my friend Spencer. We're sitting in his shitty, ant-infested, university-provided apartment, killing time for an hour before going to see Wedding Crashers, and I turn to him. "Hey, wanna listen to that fucking Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album? You know neither one of us is gonna want to do it on our own." Spencer thinks for a second, then says "Yeah, you're right. Let's do it." I plug my laptop into his speakers, and we listen to the unimpressive sounds of yet another band who revere 1978-era post-punk, deeply unmoved. Periodically, Spencer turns to me and says sadly "My life hasn't changed yet. You?" I shake my head. Later, while driving, he will periodically stop, clap his hands twice, and offer a sarcastic "Yeah."

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah like the same albums as me, I just know it. They play so derivately that I can't hear the band themselves; all I hear is Talking Heads guitars, a strong bass-drum four-on-the-floor pounding backbeat taken from any number of current indie-rock practitioners who just want the kids to dance, and a vocalist who melds the whines of both Thom Yorke and Rufus Wainwright, with occasional yelps from David Byrne. In and of themselves, they're innofensively generic indie rock: strummed electric guitars within slightly tweaked dance structures and a vocalist who takes himself very seriously, moaning lyrics about death and life and love (to the point of a song called "Is This Love?"), a lack of memorable melodies or hooks or instrumentation or harmony or texture. But nothing, as Chuck Klosterman, is ever purely "in and of itself" and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have been required to save the entire indie generation this summer.

Apart from an impressively absurdist penultimate number called "Gimme Some Salt," which makes the title a repeated bit of litany, there's nothing too bold or outrageous about this production. It sounds prototypically "indie": thinly produced, afraid of overly dramatic gestures, always trying to make more out of less. Yet like their spiritual predecessors the Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have been anointed as not just a juggernaut of powerfully emotional music which stands defiant in the face of death and despair, but as an indisputable juggernaut at that. Check out the comment of one Bryce on metacritic, who declares that "If you can't enjoy this you can't enjoy music." I'm blaming this, as with so many other things, on the (thorougly lovable) indie agenda-setters of pitchforkmedia.com, who in their absurdly overheated review of The Arcade Fire's Funeral declared, manifesto-like:

Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance. We forget that "emo" was once derived from emotion, and that in our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing....So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance.

The implication is clear: not liking the Arcade Fire isn't just a matter of musical taste, it's a statement of cynicism. Spencer's provided a nice reductio ad absurdum of this position: "if you don't like this music, you're just cynical. And that's ridiculous: it's a version of rock history which blames Pavement for causing everyone to be disaffected slackers. It's a dull, self-righteous stance: some of us didn't go apeshit for the Arcade Fire because their outsized emotions currently outpace their melodic skills, not because we hate love and life and passion. Until indie rock gets over itself and starts prioritizing musical quality over generic emotion again, I'll devote more time than I probably should to exacting formalist pop song craftsmanship.

3 recently heard albums

2005-07-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

Okkervil River, Black Sheep Boy - What is it about this album that annoys me so much? Okkervil River should have everything going in their favor: a frontman who used to work at the video store I go to in Austin, an opening slot for the Wrens last year where they held their own (which impressed me), literate lyrics, a lo-fi approach to recording that still carefully considers transitions between songs and arrangements (a variety of trumpets, strings, cello, and ambient sound recordings). And yet. Something about Black Sheep Boy annoys me intensely. Is it (choose one):

a) the fact that the record's central conceit (the titular Black Sheep Boy, who recurs as a metaphor for failed expectations, charmed losers, and the rest of Will Robinson Sheff's cast of characters and themes) isn't nearly as flexible, all-absorbing, or clever as Sheff seems to think it is? No matter how often his name is invoked, the appropriate gravitas just won't kick in.
b) the related fact that Sheff's lyrics, while literate and etc., are not nearly as awesome as Sheff would like. "The loveliest words, whispered and heard, you like all these things/But though you like all these things/You love a stone, you love a stone/Because it's smooth" is clever enough, but I wouldn't arrange a whole, whiny-vocals song around it.
c) the fact that, though the instrumentation is as clever as previously mentioned, somehow still seems designed to highlight said unremarkable emo poetry.
d) the fact that "Get Big" is a thoroughly unremarkable male-female duet, hoping for Tindersticks heft but settling for considerably less, and boasts the repeated, obnoxious, cutesy lyric "get big, little kid," which is apparently Sheff's way annoying endearment for his girlfriend.
e) the fact that the pop grind of "The Latest Toughs" is the only song on the album that works all the way through as a song.

Yeah. Something like all of those.

Saint Etienne, Tales From Turnpike House - I'm late to the music-critic party that is Saint Etienne, which makes rumors that this may be their last album all the more troublesome. This is a concept album, which is no big deal; the concept is just the rise and fall of a particular neighborhood, which means the album revels in observational details. First there's jangly opener "Sun In My Morning," which is exactly as cheerful as it sounds like, and then there's a tour de force of different pop song types: synth-powered neo-Pulp clone "Lightning Strikes Twice," bouncy pseudo-disco infidelity narrative "A Good Thing," chanteuse ballad "Side Streets" (about the need for urban renewal, no less), minimalist instrumental interlude "The Birdman of EC1," etc. Only a few songs fail to impress ("Slow Down At The Castle" has impressive harpsichord icing but no hook, "Last Orders For Gary Stead" has an impressively surly arrangement but also no hook), but generally these guys are wicked awesome pop formalists. Apparently I've been missing out.

The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan - Ah yes: the other album that came out the day Coldplay restarted their mission to take over the world. Sounding more or less like a logical extension of previous albums, Get Behind Me stretches hard, and falls on its ass frequently. Let's see: there's a bizarro exercise in glockenspiel and falsetto that turns into an unremarkable heavy guitar workout ("Red Rain"), Meg being even more off-key than ever ("Passive Manipulation"), the irredeemably sloppy primitive blues workout ("Instinct Blues") which hearkens back to the bad old days of the first album. But also: the jaunty "My Doorbell" and "The Denial Twist," the downright jangly "Take, Take, Take," and the fun old-school country "Little Ghost." It's a drag to listen to all the way through, and breaks the remarkable streak of De Stijl, White Blood Cells, and Elephant, but it's never less than ambitious, and proves that Jack White is still far too smart to ever succomb to the temptations of rote blues rock.

Recently I picked up a used $5.95 copy of the Delgados' The Great Eastern. It is so awesome. I am bummed anew that they broke up.

In Defense Of Coldplay

2005-06-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

Until Coldplay sold 20 million records, they never particularly bothered anybody - critics who thought them a bland and pasty concoction couldn't think of any particularly compelling reasons why they were any worse than Travis or Ocean Colour Scene or a thousand other inoffensively tunerful, scrupulously non-innovative British imports, and were generally content to let them collect Perfect Single awards for "Yellow." But then A Rush Of Blood To The Head went way beyond platinum, and it became clear that what was acceptable in moderate obscurity would no longer be tolerated if it was famous.

Let's be perfectly clear about this: I like tuneful, middling, big-chorus balladry. I think Travis's The Man Who is a near-perfect mope-fest, enjoy the swing-for-the-rafters anthems of Embrace, and generally like Britpop and its unexceptional holdovers. If the entire American indie nation is suddenly going to embrace an ambitiously emotional but unexceptional-in-songwriting outfit like The Arcade Fire, the least I can do is be allowed to guiltlessly like mildly sugary hooks. The general British self-flagellation about the Britpop era (exemplified in the NME's sneering coverage of anyone aspiring to hearken back to that era, presumably to make up for all the time they spent fellating the Gallaghers) is, I think, undeserved.

And, within that tradition, I like Coldplay fine. They're lyrically mediocre, exceptionally tuneful, and they make music for love-lorn high-schoolers. I used to listen to "The Scientist" and "Clocks" over and over back-to-back throughout 11th grade, and there's nothing wrong with that. But apparently, Coldplay's status as angsty Brits with guitars means endless comparisons they can't live up to: Slate seems hell-bent on irrelevant comparisons to Radiohead. In a bizarre attack on Salon, Brendan O'Neill attacks the band for being "upper middle-class kids who mean well, don't drink or do drugs or even smoke" and perpetuates the myth that popular music can only come from self-destructive excess and hedonism (he even chides the Libertines' Pete Doherty for wanting to quit heroin, rather than crowing about its glories), which seems to miss the point, musical or otherwise. In his infamous hack job in The New York Times about "the most insufferable band of the decade," Jon Pareles was so incensed that he accused them of spawning a mawkish, mediocre-ballad "generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them," forgetting that Travis way predated Coldplay, and that the latter were actually accused of ripping off the former when they first showed up.

Comparisons to Radiohead have always missed the point: they're both British and depressive and wield guitars, but Radiohead is tense and spiky, frequently hookless, obsessed with texture, and generally far more ambitious not only in their methods, but in their goals. Coldplay just wants to soothe you, and the fact that they both started from the same template is fairly irrelevant. Blaming Coldplay for being polite seems pointless and irrelevant.

The only two legitimate complaints against Coldplay are that their lyrics suck and they're predictable. Both are undeniable; X&Y is a virtual compendium of cliches and trite rhymes ("Are you lost or incomplete/Do you feel like a puzzle/you can't find your missing piece"), when it's not being bizarrely overwrought (as on lead single "Speed Of Sound," which bizarrely, and in defiance of physics, insists that birds travel at the titular velocity), and Coldplay never met a predictably soothing chord change they couldn't use. Which means a lot of people are sincerely bored by Coldplay, and that's OK; there's certainly room to find their success inexplicable. What it doesn't do is explain the virulence of the attacks.

Obviously, part of it is that Coldplay is massively successful, and anyone whose livelihood involves writing about music gets annoyed when their pet bands remain unpatronized while a seemingly bland, unworthy outfit achieves undeserved fame. But the main issue, I think, is that people are threatened by said success and what it means, because X&Y - while ridiculously overlong at 62 minutes, weighed down by songs that continuously hover around the 5-minute mark, and relentlessly monochromatic - really isn't that much worse than A Rush Of Blood To The Head. It's musical comfort food, and nothing more or less. It's just that there's more at stake now that the band is successful.

Maybe what critics find so offensive is that the band isn't stupid. All the songs are carefully crafted, and the super-expensive production centers on making the band sound futuristic and ethereal; it claims the innovations of Brian Eno (who shows up to provide some extra synths at one point) without his ambitions, and that means that something once outsider-ish and vaguely transgressive is now so mainstream as to be on soft-rock radio, and that must surely bother early Eno adopters. On "Talk," Coldplay cop a Kraftwerk riff and change that band's chilly innovation into, as Alexis Petridis acutely observes, change a "twinkly, synthetic hook" into "a portentous, echo-laden, pained-expression guitar riff." How dare Coldplay take an innovatively inhuman band's material for their banal, sentimental ends! etc.

And yet. When you're done sneering at the band's sentimental ambitions, lyrical ineptitude, et al., you can't fault them for not meaning it. Even in the face of overwhelming fortune, Chris Martin remains immaculately depressed and worried: worried about losing love, of seeming weak, etc. And he and the band have taken the time and trouble to cook up songs with enough hooks and atmosphere to back it up: mundane, yes, but pleasant. (Special props go to the organ arrangements on "Fix You.") While there are no welcome surprises like Rush Of Blood's twangy "Green Eyes," the band works very hard to be good at what they do. And they are.

And the truth is, I like Coldplay, and I'm not sure why I have to be so defensive about it. Are they more offensive than most charting bands? Hardly. Sure, I'd love it if The Wrens suddenly became platinum-selling superstars, but in the meantime I'll settle for this on the charts: pleasant, carefully-tuned mopery from someone who cares. Sometimes, you need that.

the bored-with-an-eye-infection update

2005-06-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Eels redux - it turns out that once you have the patience to distinguish the good tracks from the unnecessary filler and tonally redundant stuff (always a problem with such a morose dude), this is actually a pretty good album. Here's my edited-tracklist, for anyone who doesn't have the patience to do it themselves:
1. Son of a Bitch
2. Trouble With Dreams
3. Marie Floating Over The Backyard
4. In the Yard, Behind the Church
5. Railroad Man
6. Going Fetal
7. Dust Of Ages
8. Old Shit/New Shit
9. Bride of Theme From Blinking Lights
10. Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)
11. If You See Natalie
12. Sweet Li'l Thing
13. Dusk: A Peach In The Orchard
14. Whatever Happened To Soy Bomb?
15. Losing Streak
16. The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight
17. Things The Grandchildren Should Know

I still resent Mr. E for making me dig through all that crap, but, at any rate, my version of his album is about half as long and quite good. I'm starting to see why someone could think he's a big deal, even though I still think he's just a minor guy with major moments.

The Go-Betweens, Oceans Apart - A slow-burning album whose charms are revealed only gradually. These are pop songs with very pared-down chord changes and careful, elaborate production; I can't speak as to their quality vs. the Go-Betweens' past work, which evidently has quite a cult, but metacritic assures me this is definitely a career peak for them. Highlights: "Here Comes A City," built around the almost impossibly archaic theme of trans-continental train travel while reading weighty books, and "Born To A Family," which is actually bouncy (the rest of the album aims mostly for intensity and gravitas). I like this album fine, though it's been wildly overpraised. which presumably has something to do with aging critics happy that some of their old college rock favorites are still agile and kicking ass.

M.I.A., Arular - On the other hand, some things are just overpraised. M.I.A. - as anyone reading this has probably heard 1369 times - is the super-innovative Sri Lankan rapper whose sound is a unique amalgamation of bhangra, dance-hall, grime, etc. SHE SOUNDS LIKE NO ONE ELSE EVER. Unfortunately for Mr. Arulpragasam, Gwen Stefani exists, and "Hollaback Girl" does everything she does in radio-single time, and better. Meanwhile, Arular is a taut but strident and noxious piece of goods, centered around the novel idea of melding rabble-rousing (if somewhat wooly) leftist protest politics with more arrogance than Jay-Z. The sound is a combination of low-end bass electronica, lots of M.I.A. yelping, and sampled "ethnic" drums, with lyrics like "I'll fight you just to get peace." Just because M.I.A. toys with Advanced Electronica For Amateurs and steals the Clash's proletarian jungle fever doesn't make her a good thing, and I find her incredibly obnoxious. Also, on "Hombre," she offers up this come-on: "I can get it squeaky so you can come up on me." Ew.

Stars, Set Yourself On Fire - Something near to a masterpiece, although it's ultimately 2 or 3 songs too long; that's what you get for being overly consistent. This is my favorite genre, namely, Pretty Songs with Bleak Lyrics: in a fashion reminiscent of the late Delgados, Stars trade-off dispassionate male-female vocals about death and romantic failure. They're also aware of sex, which is accepted as a part of mature adult life rather than treated as a source of unmixed angst and self-loathing (Cursive) or cause for hysteria (I'm looking at you, Pinkerton). Remarkably, they can do both giddy excitement ("The First Five Times," which captures the onrush of the opening stages of love perfectly) and elegiac perfectly; predictably, I'm a sucker for the elegiac ones, especially "Celebration Guns" and closer "The Calendar Girl," which is about nothing less than making peace with death: "I can't live forever/I can't always be/one day i'll be sand on a beach by the sea/the pages keep turning/I mark off each day with a cross/
and I'll laugh about all that we've lost." Lovely.

Venetian Snares, Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett - This is my kind of abrasion: insanely fast, brutal electronic drums on top of extremely dissonant chamber music. This guy could score a David Lynch film in a second. Alternately confrontational and ambient, it's fascinating if somewhat chilly stuff.

Spoon

2005-06-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

In 2002, Spoon saved music. Kill The Moonlight is a masterpiece of concision, a record that removes every inessential element, paring itself down to pure songwriting perfection: every sound counts. While the level of achievement was perhaps a surprise, the general trend towards concision wasn't: Spoon may have been the only band requested by a label (Elektra, during their ill-fated 1998 stint with A Series Of Sneaks) to actually lengthen their lead single.

So. On Gimme Fiction, there are 3 songs that top 5 minutes. They're shockingly close to dance music a la LCD Soundsystem or Out Hud, and they're not terribly good: the instrumental breakdown of "Paper Tiger" has expanded in a big way, but without the taut focus. The worst offender is "Was It You," which, for 5 minutes and 2 seconds, examines the absorbing question of whether or not one of Britt Daniel's acquaintances was walking home through a park last night, or whether it was just someone similar-looking. Maybe paring down has left Daniel incapable of the dense interweaving required for dance music, but for the first time Spoon feels like there's excess involved.

But you can see why Daniel wanted to shake up the sound: when bands like Robbers On High Street and The Natural History have sofully copped the Spoon template, why bother? The first 2 songs are among Spoon's strongest: "The Beast And Dragon, Adored" runs through slow, typically metronomic drums and an incredibly messy (but rhythmic) distorted guitar solo as Daniel laments watching all his friends move away. Next comes "The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine," which has strings(!) and is totally awesome, even if it's basically just some actor whining about a part he wants really bad. After this is the perfectly serviceable (if inexplicable choice for lead single) "I Turn My Camera On," in which Daniel adopts a momentarily shocking but perfectly fine falsetto.

Up to this point, Spoon has created yet another album I can't live without, then proceeds to wear me down. Songs like "My Mathematical Mind" sound OK on their own, but all in sequence they steadily deplete my enthusiasm. There's an exception: "Sister Jack," which, as fellow NYU-er Paul Haney has pointed out, is primed for "The O.C." The key line (as invaluably pointed out by online music geek friend Doug Dillaman) is "We were in a drop-D metal band called Requiem." The bassist actually was, and this poignant line of failed ambitions is second only to a similar line from "Anything You Want": "since you were 19 and standing on a corner waiting on a light by Sound Exchange." I remember Sound Exchange - a largly punk-oriented used record store that always treated me snidely - and I miss it. At bottom - beneath all the brisk songs and frequently engimatic lyrics - Spoon are music for courage and confidence, sympathizing with the working drone who aspires for more and moody non-conformists everywhere, and giving them a little nostalgia to boot. And Gimme Fiction - a strange, frequently misshapen, and definitely non-unified album - is, at the very least, a noble attempt to forge on in a different direction. I just wish it was more likeable.

the Sunday-night-just-before-sleeping update

2005-05-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

Busdriver, Fear Of A Black Tangent - Form vs. content, and the battle gets ugly. In one corner: a crack assemblage of producers (none of whose names I know), pouring out one gorgeous track after another. In the other: a neurotic type named Busdriver, whose self-loathing often comes so fast that all conception of meter (not to mention basic intelligibility) flies out the mirror, pulverizing the music in the process. Busdriver is the exactly the kind of rapper that makes me hate underground hip-hop, and his intrusive vocals and very dense way of saying not a whole lot get on my nerves, fast. Still, some of it is gorgeous, so you'll probably want to look out for the elegiac trumpet of "Lefty's Lament" and the floating guitar of "Unemployed Black Astronaut," where for once Busdriver has a vocal hook that gives us at least a chorus to hang onto ("I am the first black astronaut to walk the moon in my air balloon").

Eels, Blinking Lights & Other Revelations - OK, this double-album crap has to stop. OutKast is responsible for the current surge, I guess, and that goes both for 2-disk sets you can only buy togheter as well as indulgences like those two Bright Eyes concept disks, etc. Not that it makes any fiscal difference to me, since I download pretty much everything, but, collective musicians of the world, I do not have the goddamn time or energy left to edit down your sprawling nonsense. Knock it off. Please.

This album has 8 INSTRUMENTALS. And I was never that sold on the eels in the first place; I picked up Beautiful Freak back in the day and wasn't terribly impressed, and the subsequent string of singles I've heard on various samplers didn't win me over. But Blinking Lights raced out of the metacritic gate with a 91 score (which has subsequently gone down, though not enough), blindsiding me into paying attention. Whatever: the tracks you really need are "The Trouble With Dreams," which does a stellar job of making angst catchy, and "Things The Grandchildren Should Know," which actually is the kind of amazing song that the whole album is supposed to be composed of. Capping off a list of hang-ups and minor accomplishments ("I go to sleep early in the evening/People think it's strange"), Mr. E touchingly concludes: "If I had to do it all again, well, it's something I'd like to do." There's the value of understatement so sorely missing from the rest of the album. The overall appeal of the eels remains a mystery to me.

the bored-on-Friday-night album update

2005-05-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

13 & God, 13 & God - I don't think I've written about this here before, although I started listening to it maybe 2 months ago. I thought the press reception would be as chilly as my disappointed reaction, but to my surprise critics have taken the bait. I frankly can't stand the Themselves approach to rap, which is very loose ("poetic") and, to my way of thinking, unnecesarily ornate without saying much. Nor do I find much to admire in the sparse backing from the Notwist. Both parties get props for melding their styles so that the idea of a hip-hop collaboration with the Notwist isn't as absurd as when I first read about it, but I'm not terribly thrilled by the end product, and this probably has a lot to do with Themselves; I'm guesssing both parties made exactly the album they wanted to make, for what it's worth. Attention should be paid, however, to "Men Of Station," the canny choice for a first single in which the presence of Themselves is blissfully inaudible. It's the kind of gorgeous, string-laden, lyrically vague melancholy you'd expect from the makers of Neon Golden.

Beck, Guero - Both a return to form (after the catastrophically monochromatic Sea Change) and one of Beck's weakest albums, Guero is the rough equivalent of trying to merge the technique of Odelay! with the weariness of Mutations - it just doesn't work. The thing is that Party Beck is actually incredibly cerebral, working out his genre cross-breeding with infinite patience, which is why, e.g., the banjo kicking in on Midnite Vultures' "Sexx Laws" sounds revelatory the first time and amazingly galvanizing on subsequent listens, but, paradoxically, listening to Party Beck is actually more work, because he's asking you to take more leaps. By contrast, Somber Beck is an incredibly intuitive sort: he sounds both familiar and refreshing, which is why Mutations is a lot of people's favorite Beck album, including mine. There's no question whether that or Odelay! is more innovative/groundbreaking/etc., but there's also no question which I'm more likely to listen to, particularly at the end of a long day.

On Guero, being Party Beck sounds like a strain for the first time: lead single "E-Pro" deploys an incredibly catchy hook around minimal instrumentation, dense fuzz, and a "na-na-na" chorus, but the feel is closer to grimy Mellow Gold try-out than Dust Brothers-sponsored party. Second single "Girl" appears to do all the things a Beck song should: it opens with Nintendo blips, then transfers the same riff to a slide guitar, which propels the song into a self-consciously mindless chorus about a "summer girl." But Beck's typically dour vocals and the workmanlike intensity with which the song proceeds (and it totally works, to an extent) are at odds with the presumed lightness of intent.

MVP tracks are "Missing," which lets Somber Beck come out to play with some bossa nova strings and glitched textures, and "Hell Yes," which is possibly Beck's first pure dance track and is fluid and joyous and generally quite funky in a restrained way. But Guero suggests that Beck's most interesting work in the future will play towards his seemingly natural proclivity for non-melodramatic melancholy. For now, this may be thought of as the Beck album that didn't change anything, which is kind of sad and a change of pace. Still pretty accomplished though, and well worth a listen for fans. Those looking to be converted should inquire elsewhere.

John Davis, John Davis -I'd love to report that the solo debut of the ex-Superdrag frontman combines hardcore angelical Christianity with jagged hooks that could kick Sufjan Stevens' ass any day, but unfortunately it's mostly just Pretty Good. Opener "I Hear Your Voice" brings on the ersatz-Beach Boys harmonies like nobody's business, and "Salvation" and "Nothing Gets Me Down" have a perfectly respectable stomp to them, but let's face it: I was hoping that the undiluted ferocity which made Superdrag's 1996 Regretfully Yours a minor classic would team up with ridiculously melodramatic lyrics, giving us the musical equivalent in pure, jawdropping sincerity of a Vincent Gallo movie. Instead we get more of Davis' expert songwriting, which is hardly compromised by the Jesus-centric lyrics (they're rote and banal, but in his Superdrag incarnation, Davis' weed-oriented lyrics [e.g., "I could smoke a million bags/you could get me high"] were hardly any better); and though I miss the coiled-up pissiness, Davis does really sound happier. More power to him, I guess. (However, the slow numbers, except "Lay Your Burden Down," are really insufferable. No matter how happy he is, Davis isn't capable of writing a ballad.)

bride of more albums

2005-04-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

Daft Punk, Human After All - Discovery is one of the best albums ever. Whenever I hear it I become a cracked-out bundle of happiness, grinning uncontrollably, bobbing my head, and generally alarming my roommates, accustomed to seeing me only at my surliest. That said, I wasn't expecting too much from this album: part of me anticipated more of the Second Coming, but I'm also not too sold on the duo's first album, 1996's Homework, a pleasant but - to these generally non-dance-music/electronica-specializing ears - not particularly interesting disk of minimal variations of loops. And so I can't get too worked up about Human After All, which I find similarly non-offensive, non-interesting, and totally adequate background music. There's no giddy charge in either album for me, though Homework is obviously the lighter-touch album, with Human piling on the pounding riffs with a brutal intolerance for subtlety. But it's, you know, OK.

But yeah, I liked the album name, enough to name this blog in tribute. I was picturing some kind of grand anime-inspired album about ultra-sarcastic post-modern robots learning to grow human and let down their guard for a pure rush of emotion that melded electronica and humans organically, maybe like a concept album version of A.I. except more successful. But that CD already came out, and it was called Neon Golden, so I guess we're OK.

the Decemberists, Picaresque - the lyrical world of the Decemberists will teeter over into unsalvageable self-parody any minute now. In fact, it does so on "The Mariner's Revenge Song," an 8-minute plus song which has sailors, whales, adventurers, fortunes stolen, etc. It's Decemberists by the numbers (it will be soon a rule that any Decemberists song must feature at least two of the following elements: royalty, a battle, a reference to an archaic job [barrow boy, milliner, soldier-of-fortune, etc.], gratuitous anglophilia). But their melodic sense increases apace, meaning I kept about half of the album for the iPod. "The Engine Driver" is movingly melancholy, with its plaintive chorus of "I am a writer, a writer of factions," even if its guitars crib from the Smiths near-unforgivably; "The Infanta," despite its ridiculous lyrics (dessicated aristocracy and all) storms powerfully, suggesting that Chris Walla's indie-wall-of-sound approach works better here than in, say, his work for Death Cab For Cutie (his own damn band!). The undeniable highlight, however, is "Sixteen Military Wives," a super-sharp anti-Bush/war-in-Iraq song whose polemic stays angry without getting annoyingly smarmy and self-righteous, buoyed by a totally rocking sax/trumpet section and Meloy actually letting out a "whoo!" before the whole giddy thing swings into the chorus one last time. Totally awesome.

more albums

2005-04-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

Bloc Party, Silent Alarm - I held off on listening for a while, because all the Franz Ferdinand/post-punk revivalist comparisons threw me off. But these ain't no Kaiser Chiefs; what distinguishes them from the pack is their vastly expanded ambitions. The constant comparisons to Franz are misinformed about both bands, but I'll make one anyway: if Franz's goal is to pare every song down to its most vital elements and play through as tautly as possible (see their redone version of "This Fire," which cuts the running time by something like 30 seconds), Bloc Party is expansive. This has a lot to do with the drummer, a maniac who would've flourished in an 80s metal band just fine and adds a lot to the party here. The opening 1-2 of "Like Eating Glass" and "Helicopter" are galvanizing brilliance, building from one guitar sound to a bunch of swooping, anthemic guitar lines building to a chorus that actually can live up to the promise of the verse. Bonus points for making the slow songs the equals of the fast ones: "This Modern Love" has one of the saddest, most realistic come-ons I've heard lately ("Do you wanna come over and kill some time?"). The album's unwieldy at 53 minutes, far too long to support any non-killer songs, so I cut three for my iPod. But these are a promising group of guys; believe the hype, more or less.

Bright Eyes, I'm Wide Awake It's Morning - yeah whatever fuck Conor. This is a perfectly respectable album of psuedo-country, featuring lots of acoustic finger-picking, soulful back-up vocals from Emmylou Harris, etc. But frankly this shit will not fly: a Bright Eyes record filtered through any other style is still a Bright Eyes recording, and the transformation here is not on par with what, say, Beck would have done if commanded to go rustic. There is still a retarded introduction as with every one of his goddamn albums (although, to be fair, the nightmare story he tells gives me legitimate chills provided I have the patience to listen all the way through), it is still too long (even at 49 minutes), the songs have a typical lyrical mixture of the insightful ("And if you swear that there’s no truth and who cares/How come you say it like you’re right?") with inane self-loathing ("Well I could have been a famous singer/If I had someone else’s voice/But failure’s always sounded better/Let's fuck it up boys, make some noise!"), and the boy still can't write a hook to save his life most of the time. And frankly I resent having to spend my time slogging through this album just because he can't write a start-to-finish song that works without coating it in some kind of arrangement. And there aren't nearly elaborate enough arrangements here.

Final thought: a few weeks ago, for reasons that are none of your goddamn business, I was in a hospital thinking I was going to die. And you know what song was in my head? "First Day Of My Life," that's what. It's a sweet song as Conor falls in one quick glance for a girl ("This is the first day of my life/Swear I was born right in that doorway), but I resent having my unconscious on tap for this guy. So very uncool.

Final final thought: I've made this album sound better than I think it is, mostly because I've listened carefully and tried to find things that I like about it. But though they're there in my more detached-type opinion, it's still kind of a joyless slog for me. Fuck you Conor.

Crooked Fingers, Dignity & Shame - in which our hero Eric Bachmann ditches the expansive strings of Red Devil Dawn for generic "Spanish" touches - an opening instrumental, flamenco guitars, trumpets, etc. Bad move, dude (not that Bachmann hasn't mastered the arrangements, which sound OK; they just don't bring much to the party); worse move writing lyrics like "Why's everybody act so tough when all anybody wants to do is find a friend" (answer: to avoid people like you). The two songs you need: "Call To Love" and "Valerie." The rest is decent but undistinguished singer-songwriter fare. Bring back the strings.

More updates forthcoming throughtout the day probably.

albums update pt. 1

2005-04-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

First lemme note that I wasn't aware that the comments function was disabled unless you're also on blogger. I've fixed that, so anonymous types feel free to comment away now.

OK, album appraisals in handy capsule form. Alphabetical order:

Bodies Without Organs, Prototype - I was alerted to this by the invaluably trashy, dance-oriented freaks at popjustice.com. This is shameless, lurid dance-pop with lyrics like "If the angels let me try/For you I would climb the mountains high/And sing to the heaven in your eyes." Suck that up, champions of good taste. These boys go straight for the gusto with "oh-eeeee-oh" type choruses, sugary vocoder lines, etc. The result is a very potent if short-lived sugar rush - less consistent than the overhyped Annie, but more instantly invigorating. I like recommending these guys to people mostly for the outraged reaction. Also, I have no idea how much irony is involved: these guys named themselves after a concept popularized (if that's the word) by Deleuze. I'm not sure what this is supposed to tell us.

Brendan Benson live - Opening acts: Charlie Mars is pretty fucking awful, a skinny singer-songwriter doing an accoustic set in a leather jacket. His lyrics include a paean to Southern driving-around whose chorus is "The kids are alright in Mississippi, fuck yeah." He's not kidding. His allmusic entry claims that the album is actually arranged on the lines of the Verve, Coldplay et al. when you factor in the production, but I have zero desire to find out. Meanwhile, Liverpool's the Stands offer more undistinguished revivalist British fare, but they're clearly thrilled to be playing live, and their total lack of blase posing is endearing. Benson's an undistinguished live performer, hammering through his songs with little deviation; fortunately, the songs are still awesome (save an ill-advised attempt to rock out on "Tiny Spark" by adding a droning organ intro). This is the very model of an uninspired show though, save an unexpected cover of the International Submarine Band's "Strongboy" (i.e., Gram Parsons' first band), which allows Benson's guitarist to add some unexpected twang into the show. Also, Benson refuses to play his sad songs live, which are the best ones.

[FUCKING BLOGGER DELETED THE REST OF THE POST. I'LL DO THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING THING AGAIN LATER FUCK FUCK FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFADKUALKSCVJ]

update

2005-04-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

is forthcoming. I wrote a wretched review of Prototype by Bodies Without Organs, and it was even more horrific as posted. So I'm not gonna link. You can look it up if you really want.

This is mostly a reminder to myself to post about recent listening: BwO, Brendan Benson live, Bloc Party, fucking Bright Eyes, Crooked Fingers, Daft Punk (this blog's namesake), the Decemberists, M.I.A., Spoon, Stereo Total, and Venetian Snares. So. Much. To look forward to.

Brendan Benson review + Crooked Fingers interview

2005-03-26T13:27:00.000-08:00

Here and here, respectively. More when I'm not so tired, though I will admit that, having finally listened to the Bloc Party CD, it is indeed awesome.

Gawker likes me!

2005-03-11T15:38:00.000-08:00

As an update: that column about iPods has now been linked to by the seriousely awesome gossip/media coverage site gawker.com. This is Friday, but I'll update the link for permanence later. My life is so complete now.

Edit: This is a permanent link. Hear that? That's me being part of "Culture: Nightlife." Right on.

clem snide et al.

2005-03-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a surprisingly decent capsule on Clem Snide's latest, End Of Love. And bonus: here's a column I wrote (a recurring feature which the oh-so-clever editorial types have named "The V-Spot") about iPods (thanks for that Andrew Sullivan article btw Theo). And that's all. I'm in a hurry.

josh rouse + 2005 update

2005-02-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

Here's my take on Josh Rouse's Nashville; the review has both very good parts and very bad parts. I pray for real talent. And more rigorous editing. Oh well...

Brief notes on 2005's other releases that I've heard so far (weird formatting stuff, like some titles being all-caps and others in italics, are due to some of this being copied-and-posted point blank from an internet music geek discussion group, and other stuff being new, and me being lazy):

Mercury Rev, THE SECRET MIGRATION - disappointing, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly where this goes wrong. As a piece of atmosphere, it's mostly right on, since they still know their way around a studio, but there's something bland and enervated about it. If I had to venture a nutsoid theory about why this might be, it would be that the bass lines here are considerably more fluid and bouncy than on DESERTER'S SONGS (I haven't heard ALL IS DREAM, but I gather it's even more stately than SONGS, if that's possible), and that this is a bad thing because DESERTER'S SONGS uses simple bass lines to provide a foundation for a sonic chasm that develops between treble sounds freaking out all over the place and the head-nodding stoner bass. Maybe another thing to think about is that DESERTER'S SONGS is, at heart, an Americana album (those guest appearances from members of The Band give it away; just strip away the synth strings from "Opus 40," and you've got a super-simple drum beat plus organ, and that's all), and this is more of an adult-contemporary type thing. Still, I'm just barely pro on it because it makes nice background music, and because "Across Yer
Ocean" actually is a great song.

...and you will know us by the trail of dead, WORLDS APART - this CD is retarded. I'm partially handicapped because I really haven't listened to Source Tags & Codes; I liked it two years ago, but recent listens haven't done much for me. The lyrics do a lot of damage on their own: "What do you think now of the American dream," sneers Conrad Keely after indicting the usual list of MTV pop stars and deceitful politicians, and the question isn't any more stinging this time than the 12,594 times it was asked before (Keely probably spells it "Amerikan" too). But the music's not great either: opener "Overture" (no, really) cops a rip from Koyaanisqatsi, intentionally or not (along with NIN's "A Warm Place" and A.C. Newman's "The Battle For Straight Time" - weird company), and then promisingly spirals into the punishing opening of "Will You Smile Again." And then the guitars stop raging, some kind of weird stop-start balladry kicks in, and the CD never regains ground, no matter how many bad gospel-vocalist arrangements it throws in. There are isolated nice snatches of sound (I like the thunderous beat on "Let It Dive," which a bud acutely compared to Oasis, which is about right), but the thing's a mess overall. Which is a shame, because I'm normally all about boosting Austin bands. Thank jesus Spoon has a new record coming out soon.

Graham Coxon, HAPPINESS IN MAGAZINES - 10 solid rock-pop songs (11 with the bonus Astralwerks track), plus 2 deviant experiments that go very awry but can easily be cut. And if you think solid pop isn't good enough, why isn't there more of it. Why. Also Coxon can be a clever lyricist on occasion, even if his best moments are all about guitars and girls. Best song: "Bittersweet Bundle Of Misery."

Bright Eyes, DIGITAL ASH IN A DIGITAL URN - None of the songs here is disastrous, but very few of them pull together all the elements in a consistently compelling way (although "I Believe In Symmetry" and closer "Easy Lucky Free," which traffics in the kind of swooning bass-oriented doomed romanticism I'm always a sucker for, are keepers). I had to guess as to what to cut from my iPod and what to keep. Still, I'm inclined to be charitable, since I really like this whole new laptop pop thing (I refuse to play along with the "lappop" moniker assigned by pitchfork, at least just yet - I considered it myself before they started using it but come on; that's just awkward).

Lemon Jelly, '64-'95 - Lemon Jelly are both underrated (because apparently no one knows who they are) and overrated (because they really are just electronica easy-listening). But this is nice and easy, and these guys are capable of true loveliness when they feel like it (see their production for William Shatner on "Together" on his Has Been). And I'll continue to feel inexplicable loyalty for them, despite the fact that they've never truly rocked my world.

Doves, SOME CITIES - THE LAST BROADCAST is one of my all-time favorite records. Just so you know what my level of expectation was. On a few songs they act like they are not gonna save the world with uplifting, monstrously huge songs that sound like U2 if
they didn't suck, but then they realize they are the Doves and that is what they do, so we get monster anthems like "Walk In Fire," which is as it should be. However they have ditched the Sean O'Hagen string arrangements and brass and whatnot, instead embracing murkier recording techniques and especially their guitars (the emphasis on amp noise, manual-labor crescendoes, etc., occasionally reminds me of the Walkmen, if that gives you the idea, though they're obviously nothing like them). A song that should be mentioned as something quite special that does not fit the pre-established Doves template is "The Storm," which is probably the best Morcheeba song never written. There is a woozy, warm string background which is broken up with skips that add to the dreamy feel after they stop being jarring, and are therefore awesome. To reiterate: Doves lose clarity and part of recording budget, gain songs that can be played live with guitars and some awesome new rockers. Ultimately I am slightly underwhelemed because this does not focus on the anthems as much and does not have as much of the expertly arranged bombast I value so highly, but they're mature kids and get to do whatever they want, and more power to them.

The Game, THE DOCUMENTARY - pretty fuckin' fascinating. I've ignored most of the CDs put out by the Aftermath clique, because the spare production associated with the singles of 50 Cent, G-Unit, Lloyd Banks et al. holds zero interest for me (and I've recently finally accepted that I'm 90% about the production and maybe 10% about the actual flow; hence why Nas holds not too much fascination for me most days, despite his expert prowess. The exception that proves the rule is Eminem, but then again I am an angry white child of suburbia, and he did galvanize a moment back in the day.), but this - like, e.g., The Black Album - is a producer's showcase. The line-up alone is drool-worthy (Dr. Dre! Just Blaze! Kanye West! Timbaland!), and for the most part doesn't disappoint. The best and biggest news is that this is some of Dr. Dre's best work in years: on tracks like "Westside Story," standard-issue taunts about how the West Coast is back are enlivened by imaginative touches far from the spare autopilot the Dr. appears to have been on lately (and unfortunately passed on to Eminem); there's even the lush soul-string sample of "Hate It Or Love It," which will hopefully be one of the biggest singles of 2005. Kanye only contributes one track, the soulful and meditative "Dreams" (here Kanye abets The Game's hyperbolic comparisons, which are obscene even by hip-hop's outsized standards: it seems that he, like Martin Luther King Jr. - no, really - has a dream, and the sampled voice backs him up on this); Just Blaze then demonstrates that his like-minded fetish for old samples is quite a different beast, contributing two hugely energizing rave-ups built around funk beats, horns, etc. Eminem comes a cropper - no surprise there, though the little-boy-trying-to-sound-scary taunting of "We Ain't" is still pretty damn embarassing - but, interestingly, the challenge of rapping with him causes the Game to slip right into distinctly Em-esque meter. More surprisingly, Timbaland produces a boring track. Dude!

As far as the Game's actual rhyming skills, he does little to personally justify the hype - albeit a hype fully justified for the actual album, thanks to the beats - but also little to incur the taunting much of the media has given him. He's competent, with an interesting vulnerability that pops out occasionally - a curious, half-formed mixture of gangsta bravado and sentimental shout-outs to brothahoood and family - a seemingly tamped-down misogyny where he wishes to just spend time "just my, my son, and my bitch," and the occasional inspired taunt (my personal favorite: "You niggas is WNBA: all pussies"). Good stuff, with less filler than usual for a rap album. And no skits!

Aqueduct, I SOLD GOLD - totally frustrating. Well-structured pop with good hooks completely undermined by a tinny recording concept - basically just some cheap keyboards, drum machines, and thin guitars. These would sound really good re-recorded by a real band. But was it this "unique" (but bad!) sound that got Aqueduct attention in the first place? What I do like is the acknowledgement, on "Growing Up With GNR," is the admission that all indie culture started at someplace decidedly non-alternative. We need more confessions like that.

Appendix: Live Music '04

2005-02-16T21:37:00.000-08:00

I meant to write up the measly 8 shows I saw in 2004 on the exhaustive 2004 CD annotations but forgot. Some brief notes:

The Wrens were probably the best live act I saw, which is no surprise since I spent a goodish portion of the year listening to The Meadowlands over and over and slowly realizing that it was, in fact, the best album of 2003 (after 2004 really stopped compelling my attention). They took to the sweaty stage at Emo's and rocked exceptionally for 75 minutes; I only wish it had been longer. Because Meadowlands is long (and quite possibly because their previous album came out in 1996, and is out of print to boot), all but one song was drawn from there. As an expert live band, just enough of each song was changed to make it fascinating for the dedicated listener; on "Ex-Girl Collection," the drummer left so that the expert 3-part guitar attack could let its harmonies shine more cleanly, then coming back onstage. "Ready, bitches?" he asked, and they were. My favorite part, though, was accidental: Emo's is right next to a dance club whose loud beats can bleed over between numbers. When the Wrens picked up on this, they shushed the audience to hear it more clearly and played along. That was awesome.

The inverse opposite of watching the Wrens rock a small crowd of indie elitists was probably seeing Prince rock an arena. Truth be told, I'm not the world's biggest Prince fan: he's done a lot of great work, sure, but he's still pretty rarely my first choice for listening. But most arena acts suck ass, and I'd never been to an arena show and wanted the experience, and I have friends who are huge Prince fans, so I shelled out $50 (this was back before I was a college student and had money). The day of the concert Texas was flash-flooding, so the drive up to San Antonio was far longer than usual and mildly dangerous; we got there just in time to be an hour early. But a Prince show is as tight as you've heard, and the fact that the legendary Maceo Parker was in Prince's band for this leg of the tour didn't hurt at all. Purple Rain was disposed of in a quick song medley - all but that title song itself, of course, which was the final encore. In a tribute to his astonishing ego, Prince had the crowd cheering for a good ten minutes, begging for an encore which of course had to come before actually coming back out. And even I, the guy who doesn't like that song to begin with, suddenly starting screaming at about minute 8: "Come on you motherfucker! Give the people what they want! Do it already!" Prince is an expert in crowd manipulation, and he hires sax players who can look good with all their cleavage hanging out as they simultaneously dance and play; it's a good show.

When Travis came to Austin, they were originally scheduled to play the Austin Music Hall, but I wasn't terribly surprised when the show was moved to the smaller La Zona Rosa at the last minute; Travis is no longer as popular as they were, particularly in the US, and the same corporation owned both venues anyway, so it was no sweat off their back. Jason Falkner - the power-pop workhouse who, in-between multi-tracking his own albums, found the time to tour with Air, record with Beck, collaborate with Brendan Benson, and generally pop up all over the damn place with everything except for new solo material - opened, at first cranking out a few solo one-man-and-electric-guitar numbers before taking out his iPod, which pumped out all the backing tracks he needed. Travis played for two solid hours with scarcely a wasted minute, were startlingly nice and apparently sincere, and skipped most of their crappier material in favor of nearly the entirety of The Man Who, the singles from The Invisible Band, and all the good songs (and then some) from the underrated 12 Memories. Fran Healy was once quoted as saying that Travis's music is like a chair, that you can sit in it. But it turns out you can kinda rock to it too (except for when they deliberately tried to rock out with "All I Wanna Do Is Rock & Roll" and climbed on an amp; that was kinda sweet but ultimately embarassing).

The Sleepy Jackson came to rock SXSW, and played as many sets as possible; I think they actually squeezed in four, which is pretty phenomenal. Their mid-day gig at the Yard Dog Art Gallery (glorified junk yard/"amateur art" space that set up some satisfying deafening speakers in the back, with Budweiser sponsoring the whole thing with free keg beer distributed, by and large, by very nice old ladies) was very cool, mainly because they played so loud that they lost power twice. And apparently once more at their real showcase performance later that day.

And then there was Wilco. I lucked out into a ticket for the second night of their stint at Radio City Music Hall. No disrespect, but it's hard to imagine a less rock-'n-roll venue, which would be OK, except Wilco is an unreconstructed 70s rock band. This was the suspicion any person might've had after hearing most of A Ghost Is Born, and some earlier songs like "Monday" from Being There, which is basically just a redux of the Who's "5:15," horns and all, and it was confirmed in full by Wilco's set: the first thing you saw was that they had two massive keyboards bookending either end of the stage, something that I thought had gone out with the first wave of prog bands. There were also long, would-be epic, and utterly non-ironic guitar solos (the odd but lovely string arrangement on "Hummingbird" stood revealed as actually kind of an ELO-ish solo). And though they played well for a solid two hours, there was something annoying about their audience, an uneven mixture of 40-ish NPR listeners who'd finally found a rock band that spoke to them for the first time in years and slightly insecure hipsters who weren't sure if they shouldn't be running out of the plush interiors back to Williamsburg. Radio City Music Hall is large enough that they cancelled each other out, but their mutual bewilderment revealed itself during an opening set from the Fiery Furnaces: the hipsters would periodically cheer just to establish their cred, despite the fact that the act was conspicuously floating out into the void. Once the 40-somethings figured out that this was the New Face of Rock, or something like it, they wanted to feel like they were at a rock show, not Radio City Music Hall: they hoisted their $5 beers and cheered "Yeah! Rock 'n roll!" Which is the wrong answer to both acts, but whatever.

you're in the right place

2005-02-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

For convenience, the music portion of this site is now in handy blog-type format, which makes it easier for me to update at least this part of the site more often. There will be the links to the review-type things, as well as general quick comments on recent listening, and abstract thinking if I feel like it.

For now: here's every album I heard in 2004, annotated, in preferential order. Compare/contrast with your own top 10, etc. I also have a review of Graham Coxon's new album.