The Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off

The Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off
by Ian Mathers




When I pitched a defense of this record, Dan asked if I wouldn’t rather knock Bows + Arrows down a peg. I politely declined, partly because I want to mostly talk about their best album, the only truly great one they've recorded yet, not the others. And I simply don’t have much to say about the Walkmen’s other albums. The new You & Me keeps inviting the “return to form” tag, but it seems draggy and formless to me. So maybe the problem is that I don’t like their normal form. Their ostensible peak is actually from Bows + Arrows: “The Rat,” is still a blistering example of I’m-getting-too-old-for-this-town self-loathing. But beyond the rather graceful “Hang On, Siobhan,” the album fails to maintain the intensity and slips past me.

By contrast, I love red-headed-stepchild-by-acclamation A Hundred Miles Off for its confident, muscular ugliness. It’s the rare album that soundtracks the joyously intoxicated night out as well as the next morning's headache. It's frequently atonal, smeared, trebly, possibly overcompressed, and so on. And it is one of my favorite recent rock albums. Hamilton Leithauser pushes his sneer upwards into a painful semi-falsetto and into almost Dylanesque territory, while Matt Barrick absolutely murders his drums (that drumroll in the middle of “Tenleytown” goes on and on until it hurts). This is the album where Peter Bauer and Walter Martin switched instruments (to organs/keyboard and bass, respectively), possibly why they sound fresher here than they ever did.

If you're keen to this manic slop of an aesthetic, the thing's astoundingly solid–no filler in 41 minutes but for a few hazy blobs that advance the post-booze comedown feel. “Louisiana,” the most “accessible” track, eases the flow of caterwaul until Leithauser announces “I got my hands full!” and the horns start parping away. But the echoing “Danny’s at the Wedding” is more indicative of where things are going. The tempo remains distorted (if it exploded, we’d be in “Tenleytown” territory, not the last time this record will circle back around on itself) in a dead, ugly groove, building to Leithauser shrieking out “I really tried my best! I really tried my best!” His voice really is a thing of wonder here; without his piercing vociferation, these songs wouldn’t impact. I can understand why it might only have niche appeal, since that target sound is so messy and difficult.

“Good for You is Good for Me” ups the tempo a little, and brings up the first of several near-thematic mentions of dreaming (“Maybe I'll stop by/ You weren't in the dream I had last night”). The guitar is mostly a rhythmless background blur that gathers momentum as Leithauser croons, “I don’t get some people/ I don’t even try.” The approach bears fruit in “Emma, Get Me a Lemon,” which opens with such a perversely unappealing call for booze-related fixings that only that far-away guitar buzz and Barrick’s circular work make it bearable. We’ve gone from a song about moving in with someone from sheer inertia to something more twisted, impermanent and doomed (“It’s a long way home, let’s enjoy the ride” is as happy as the Walkmen's narrators get).

The fuzzier, indistinct half of the record comes to a head with “All Hands and the Cook,” and the most explicit summing up of the record's perverse belligerence: “Stop talking to the neighbor’s dog/ I got a temper when it’s late/ Break all the windows in my car
Burn down the room when I’m asleep/ Break out the bottles when I go/ I’ll dig a hole for all your friends.” Leithauser sings with less malice than just offhand menace and blustery afterthought. “Don't Get Me Down (Come on Over Here)” is even more direct, Barrick shoving the track forward to give some thrust to Leithauser’s wailed demand to “come on over here.” It’s a song of curdled lust and genuine affection soured by time and ennui.

And it leads right into the impossibly strident “Tenleytown” with a middle break where Barrick does his best to imitate a migraine. The guitars are still kind of distant, albeit doing this great almost-rockabilly figure, as the song makes like the Stooges during the more straightforwardly manic bits of Fun House. I haven’t looked at the waveforms to see how hot they are or anything, but A Hundred Miles Off has a cohesive, distinct sound that would be inadvisable for most artists, yet works wonders for this usually unremarkable unit, shoving the brash unpleasantness of their record right through your ear canal.

Ian Mathers has written for Stylus Magazine, Village Voice, PopMatters and the world's biggest Philip K. Dick fan site. He is currently finishing his Master's degree in Philosophy at the University of Guelph and wishes he had more time to write about music.

Look Back in Anger #3

Look Back in Anger #3
by Christopher R. Weingarten

What would you do differently if you could do it all over again? The intention of this column is to go back in the ol’ time machine to examine the albums that we personally named the best of a given year and see if we still feel the same way about them. Did they age well? Do we still play them? Did we leave off an album that we’re now kicking ourselves over? These are the questions we will be asking ourselves in this WWIA? Series.

This week, Christopher R. Weingarten reexamines his 2003 Pazz & Jop ballot.



This was my first Pazz & Jop list ever.


1. Kaada - Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time

2. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow

3. Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

4. Tes - X2

5. The White Stripes - Elephant

6. Blood Brothers - Burn Piano Island, Burn

7. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance

8. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album

9. The Locust - Plague Soundscapes

10. Avenged Sevenfold - Waking the Fallen


I was young, eager, green, and mostly pumped beyond pumped that Voice music editor Chuck Eddy would even respond to one of my emails, let alone converse with me for days about Lil Jon in a manic back and forth. Fueled on No New York, Company Flow, Throbbing Gristle and Tenacious D, my 23-year-old self prided aesthetic style over substance. And while all of the albums on my 2003 Pazz and Jop ballot are all still pretty fantastic in my eyes (save Avenged Sevenfold), they were chosen by someone who was quicker to support a cool artistic decision than something that simply connects with people.

1. Kaada - Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time

Totally slept-on at the time (I think I was the only writer to have it on my ballot) and pretty much slept-on now. Norwegian slicer-’n’-dicer John Erik Kaada made a mutant pop record that sounded kitschy and unique, weird and inviting. He recorded all the “samples” himself, looping trumpet sounds he made with his mouth, vocals recorded through his doorbell’s intercom, mixing doo-wop and Morricone. It was awesome—Prince Paul as Prince—but now I realize it’s maybe more brilliant in idea than execution. Still, I would never want to discourage anyone from checking out this incredible album. Start with “No You Don’t,” which is maybe the best link between old Portishead and new Portishead and maybe RZA somehow.

2. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow

In 2003 it was hard not to think of Lightning Bolt as the band destined to be this generation’s Public Image Ltd. or Wire or Gang of Four, the guys that would launch a new era in art-punk, make a Daydream Nation, maybe even influence pop music. In the end all we really got was Timbaland saying he likes Black Dice, a bunch of unremarkable bands like Pocahaunted, and a Muse cover that people on message boards still like to LOL about. Whatever, Wonderful Rainbow is still a non-stop thrill ride, the exact moment where LB melded their jet-engine bluster with classic rock precision. Still a new classic to these ears.

3. Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

No regrets. It’s a shame other people didn’t latch on to this when they should have. Buck’s been in identity crisis mode and record label hell ever since. And he was never as gripping and heartfelt when he was telling other people’s stories over banjos and fake Tom Waits clang.

4. Tes - X2

At the time it was perfect post-911 underground hip-hop. Paranoid, post-apocalyptic, cooler than you, rebuilding from pieces of pop and dub and electronic, custom-made for hipster DJs when hipster DJs still spun OOIOO records, a nasal whine that was a sui generis cry from the rubble (and that rubble was being painted by Neck Face). Does it hold up? Can’t say I ever went back to it…

5. The White Stripes - Elephant

Best major label rock band of the decade, sure. But, really, look at their competition.

6. Blood Brothers - Burn Piano Island, Burn

Too many ideas, not enough songs. Still, amazing energy and spirit. Not the best album, but we need these guys more than ever right now.

7. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance

No regrets. Bubba cuts through the gimmick and gets to the heart of his environment. Big Boi/Andre was the story of the year but Timbaland/Organized Noise splitting duties is the secret winner.

8. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album

No regrets. I will never understand why this album isn’t spoken in the same breath as The Blueprint or The College Dropout. It’s absolutely everything a rap album should be: An MC vividly breaking down how he is a product of an environment that most people don’t see, songs full of focused rage juxtaposed with songs of celebratory nihilism, an auteur’s sense of vision (he produced the whole thing too), and—duh—tons of incredible beats. If nothing, it reminds me of Willie D’s 1989 album Controversy, which was also incredible and totally slept-on.

9. The Locust - Plague Soundscapes

Still their best. but I was mostly wowed by how “extreme” it was compared to their previous albums while still keeping true to a complicated aesthetic. This band is a great execution of a vision.

10. Avenged Sevenfold - Waking the Fallen

“Eternal Rest” sounded like Angel Dust-era Faith No More. This band is totally terrible now. They tricked me.


With five years distance, here is my new top 10. New picks are in bold.:

1. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album

2. Jay-Z – The Black Album

3. Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

4. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance

5. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow

6. TV On The Radio – Young Liars EP

7. The White Stripes - Elephant

8. 50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin’

9. Jaylib – Champion Sound

10. Killer Mike - Monster

Christopher R. Weingarten was the editor-in-chief of recently deceased music site Paper Thin Walls. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, Revolver, Spin, Rollingstone.com, Decibel, The Source, CMJ New Music Monthly, Relix, eMusic and probably some other places he’s forgetting. He’s slowly but steadily working on a 33 1/3 book about Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

Bonnie Raitt - Luck of the Draw

Bonnie Raitt - Luck of the Draw
by Alfred Soto




When Juliana Hatfield made her infamous remark in 1993 about Bonnie Raitt – Raitt was the only female guitarist worth emulating – she earned more smirks than she deserved, but it was indicative. In 1993 no one was less hip than Bonnie Raitt. The creator of several well-regarded albums in the seventies on which the sensual tug of her voice foiled the precise holes her guitar punched, Raitt's triumph at the 1989 Grammys contributed one more chapter in a dime novel: she was a Survivor, a proto Behind the Music entry, and utterly out of time when the seismic changes that the Seattle scene wrought in the industry made hash out of such tropes. She'd endured drug and alcohol abuse, bad relationships, and several failed commercial compromises involving synthesizers to record 1989's Nick of Time, a solid, quaint, and dull album helmed by Don Was whose triumph at that year's ceremonies denoted a counter-revolution against the likes of the Traveling Wilburys' Volume One and (really) Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked: well-regarded musicianly studio rock pressed against the Technicolor pseudo garage rock of Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever and the radio-validated leftism of Don Henley's The End of the Innocence, the latter of which might have won in another year.

But the Raitt phenomenon wasn't as reactionary as we thought. Fast-forward two years. Widely regarded as the band's commercial if rarely its aesthetic peak, R.E.M.'s Out of Time confirmed what we already knew about them yet was no mere placeholder; to date, Mike Mills' harmonies have never sounded so charming, have never drawn the same warmth from singer Michael Stipe. You could hear a decade's worth of steadily accruing success well-spent in engineering, in Stipe's newfound determination to pin down his ambiguities with vocals whose declarative burr meshed with three other musicians willing to trade the kudzu for a more suburban plant – Spanish moss, say. Out of Time, in other words, came off as a consolidation disguised as a mercenary move.

The septuple-platinum Luck of the Draw was mercenary, alright: do you blame Raitt for taking advantage of the opportunity? But she was canny enough to understand R.E.M.'s lesson: use platinum validation to fund aesthetic outreach. The results were pretty slight next to Achtung Baby, or even Out of Time, but we don't imagine Album of the Year winners approaching the September of their years producing rock and roll as feisty as this. Dowdy, anachronistic, and probably redundant, Luck of the Draw is nevertheless essential listening for anyone who appreciates how subversive gentility can be. Ambiguity too. Raitt could play the R.E.M. Game too: “Something to Talk About” is a tease as self-assured as “Losing My Religion,” with a killer guitar part to boot. Since both Top Five singles were in the Top 40 at the same time that summer, this wasn't lost on listeners: losing your religion would be something to talk about indeed.

I admire how Luck of the Draw humbly mixes self-written compositions with covers, John Hiatt boilerplate, and L.A. songs-for-hire – a model that I wish more men would follow (there's a fascinating essay to be written about the ease with which female artists from Aretha to Rosanne Cash include their own songs almost as afterthoughts on their classic recordings; is auteurism a male obsession?). Maybe she's too damn tasteful; there's little sense that she's an artist whose well-documented personal excesses dovetail with aesthetic overreach (you'll find no Tusks in Raitt's catalogue). In any case, Luck of the Draw offers lots of pleasures. Even in high school, when The KLF's "3 AM Eternal" and Crystal Waters' "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" struggled to relieve Bryan Adams' Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves horror from the Number One slot, I thought that "Something To Talk About" was a well-deserved hit. It's sexy in an adult, fully cognizant way; you'd have to go back to Fleetwood Mac's "Little Lies" to find a Top Five hit sung by a fortysomething woman this sly. "I Can't Make You Love Me" takes static melancholia to a new peak. "All at Once" and "One Part Be My Lover" are the keepers: anchored by Raitt's own electric piano, she deepens the middle-aged euphoria of "Something to Talk About" with shrewd remarks about fights with her grown daughter and accepting the limitations of her aging body. And seven million people heard them.

I'm not sure whether NPR promoted Raitt – I was too young. Anyway, Lucinda Williams stole the alternative adult contemporary crown that Raitt molded in the early nineties. While Raitt's Grammy win has paid huge dividends – her albums are still Top 40 events which ship at least gold – her brand of sincerity has produced no heirs. Where Williams' songs and vocals have lapsed into a tremulous self-regard that makes late eighties Bryan Ferry sound like Janis Joplin, Raitt plows ahead, her restraint and simplicity a noose, and a weapon. Singing Paul Brady's “Luck of the Draw,” she invests the worn poker tropes with wonder and fear; she's tasted failure (Richard Thompson's background vocals and patented growl-guitar remind her), and she's ready to enjoy success, but warily. If survivordom imparts any lesson worth learning, this is it.

Alfred Soto is a college instructor, media advisor, and freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, eMusic, Seattle Weekly and Paper Thin Walls.

No Doubt - Rock Steady

No Doubt - Rock Steady
by Theon Weber




The best explanation for my love of Rock Steady is my dislike of No Doubt. The idea, as far as I can tell, was that they were a poppy, ska-ish band with a singer who thought women should be allowed to vote; since this was the mid-90s, we had half a million other bands for better pop, the great Bikini Kill for better suffrage, and I'm sure we had something for better ska only I don't know because I sort of hate it. (Nevertheless, I'm as fond of some of No Doubt's early apocrypha, particularly The Beacon Street Collection, as I am of Rock Steady). The Superball stutter built around "Just a Girl" is a revelation, Tragic Kingdom's title track has lyrics so crazybad (“midgets who disguise themselves as tiny little dwarves”) they make my hair stand up, which is an endorsement, and “Bathwater” we'll get to; but "Don't Speak" always bored me; “Simple Kind of Life” didn't have much besides an interestingly droning structure; and there are better ringtones than “Spiderwebs”.

There are a lot of bands like this - talented, hardworking, a genuine unit, never quite more than second-tier - and what sometimes happens on the way to their being subsumed by their leaders - I winced for Tony Kanal and company when Gwen Stefani's solo song with the line "take a chance you stupid ho" got giddier praise and doomier hate than anything they'd done together - is they turn into dilettantes for an album or two. (See Garbage, a better 90s rock band with even more anonymous non-girls, whose third album had a Phil Spector ripoff and a Nikka Costa doppleganger and a song where Shirley Manson rapped, and a lot of sort of boring people were disappointed.) Rock Steady, a pop album by a rock band fronted by a woman already auditioning harajuku girls, opens with a Neptunes dance track that grants a good long scratch to an itch the indelible bassline of "Bathwater" had previously only flicked with a nail, hustles Ric Ocasek into the studio to record a couple fake Cars songs (one of which, the half-parody "Platinum Blonde Life", is possibly the best straightforward rock song this band ever wrote), and finds time for one sublime slow jam ("Underneath It All", the best song of any kind this band ever wrote). Prince shows up near the end. The album is a band's last confused gasp before disintegrating, and it has the insouciant, voracious charm of - here's something neat - the loathed film adaptation of Tank Girl, a messy movie that can come across as slapdash exploitation of the precise third-wave-feminist aesthetic No Doubt used to be into. I sort of adore this movie, because it's the kind of movie where Tank Girl escapes from a brothel by having everyone burst into a Busby Berkeley number to "Let's Do It", and also Malcolm McDowell has an electric head.

Everyone knows what too many cooks do, but it's hard to spoil a broth you didn't particularly like, and like Tank Girl No Doubt's swan song puts the hyperactive urge to do a whole bunch of stuff above everything - above cohesion, respect, meaning, fanservice. (It should be noted that this is awfully punk.) An older friend of mine complained when it came out that No Doubt was "gradually regressing"; that the next album would have them singing "nothing but baby sounds". I'm not sure that this wouldn't be great; I'm not sure what poetry's been lost. He accused me of fetishizing bad art, which was legitimate; the 1989 Nintendo-sponsored film The Wizard is a pretty flabbergasting experience and I recommend it to everyone, but I look askance at the urge to put on a smug grin and tell you it's good. Rock Steady actually is good, not badgood, which is an important distinction because it's the difference between respecting an artist and enjoying a fluke. I respect Tank Girl because there's a part where Lori Petty asks Naomi Watts why she always covers her mouth when she smiles. I respect No Doubt because their forty minutes in a consumerist funhouse, yanking producers and synth presets and personas from the shelves like Hot Wheels, feel joyous and democratic even as the limo waits for Gwen outside - and because of "Underneath It All", which coos and flatters and sways like a half-stoned Marilyn Monroe, and ends up much warmer, much more mimetic of real snuggles and slow dances, than the vague angst of "Don't Speak". This album is the best disintegration can sound.

Theon Weber is a Stylus Magazine alumnus who writes occasionally for the Village Voice, Portland Mercury, and Blender. He lives in Portland, Oregon, on homemade omelettes.

Various Artists - lowercase-sound2002

Various Artists - lowercase-sound2002
by Jason Gross



Brian Eno may have coined the term “ambient music,” but only in the last few years has it been taken to its logical conclusion (at least so far). Sound designer Steve Roden labeled his work as “lowercase” to describe music where “there is much going on beneath the quiet exterior.” Through the advent of an online mailing list, this fascinating genre coalesced.

After soliciting contributors with an open call to the mailing list as well as hand-picking several other artists, lowercase 1.0 came together in 2000 as an elaborately packaged, limited edition (500 copies) two-CD set. As Roden explains it:

"I came across the lowercase-sound mailing list a month or so after it was started (March '99) and was very curious about what people were discussing so offered to make a list 'mix-tape' that eventually grew in scope into the lowercase 1.0 release."

This 2002 follow-up was no less intricate: it's also a 2-CD set (with an extra copy included to share with a friend no less) including liner notes printed in reverse on vellum cards for each contributing artist. Roden explained the unique packaging as such:

"I wanted to make it so that the listener had to view the text through the vellum. The 1/2 circles in the sides of the cards allow the listener to arrange them in order with the 1/2 circles going from top to bottom. The missing corner gives some room for the listener to pry the cards and CDs out of the box."

On this compilation, up-and-coming artists (Michael Schumacher, Josh Russell) rubbed shoulders with known entities of ambient and techno such as Reynols, Tetsu Inoue, and Taylor Dupree. Roden chose the artists through a combination of "open call on various lists as well as having some people specifically contacted for contribution—about 2/3 of the artists were hand-picked."

As per Roden's description, much of the music skirted the edge of listening. Even for background listening, it’s barely perceptible at times- unless you're staring at the music counter on your playback system, you might not be able to figure out where the pieces (or album itself) begins or ends. You might also wonder if what you're hearing is the music herein or some quiet detail in the particular room you're in. Headphones might appear to be the perfect solution, but even then, you'd still have to give it your full concentration to absorb the music. You could 'blast' it for yourself but that would defeat the whole intended purpose of the music. As such, it might be one of the most difficult and bizarre listening experiences you'll ever come across.

Still, it's worth the effort as a captivating array of aural collages are to be found here. Everything from bubble wrap to boiling water to bacteria freezing to beach erosion to bird chips to collapsing dams to anthills are employed through enough Powerbooks to fill a computer lab. Such expert, complex processing of natural sounds (wasn't it called “musique concrete” once?) should be the envy of any recycling plant. Odds are though that they wouldn’t be able to come up with a compelling spectrum of sound as you'd find here.

Sad to say, just like the first volume of the series, lowercase-sound2002 is long out-of-print (it was a limited edition of 1000 to begin with). The genre probably reached its apex with a favorable article in The Wire around the time of the second volume's release but since then, the label (Bremsstrahlung) has only had a handful of releases and there was very little accompanying press interest afterwards, which is not surprising given the inherently difficult nature of the music.

But seeking this music out isn't just an exercise in obscure collectorism. It's also a strange journey into the realms of what the limits and capability of our hearing and comprehension are and how hard we're willing to push ourselves to find that through this obscure art-form.

Further exploration:

Lowercase Sound mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lowercase-sound
Bremsstrahlung Records: http://www.bremsstrahlung-recordings.org
1st lowercase compilation: http://www.bremsstrahlung-recordings.org/paudio/paudio-001.php
2nd lowercase compilation: http://www.bremsstrahlung-recordings.org/paudio/paudio-002.php
Wired article: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/05/52397
Steve Roden: http://www.inbetweennoise.com

Jason Gross founded Perfect Sound Forever, the longest-running online music publication, in 1993 and freelances for the Village Voice, Spin and PopMatters among other places. He currently lives in Gotham where he crochets and makes his own ammo.