What Was It Anyway?

that's all folks

2009-01-07T15:47:00.000-08:00

I want to thank everyone who helped keep this blog going consistently for (almost) a full year, and anyone who read it. In this economy, time is a luxury. I don't blame the gracious staff (myself included) for being unable to volunteer their typed insights on a regular basis, and I appreciate them contributing (secretly some of the best music writing around) for imaginary peanuts. Todd Hutlock, for editing and guidance. Ian Mathers, for the most contributions and his unwavering enthusiasm and belief this staff. Todd Burns, the O.G., for his blessings. Our newbs, Melanie Baskins and Gillian Watson (wherever you are), you came out of nowhere to boost the estrogen quotient and kick the shit out of your elders. Do not stop. Some idols of mine! Travis Morrison, Jason Gross, Chris Weingarten, who've all been to far higher places, lowered themselves a little just for this. Orme, for coming through at the 13th hour for that Cut Copy blurb. Kronish, for the URL hookup. Bradley, for being the easiest edit. Theon, for being a pal. As many ex-Stylusers as I could rustle up for attempting to simulate what a 2008 Stylus year-end would look like. Everyone else who contributed. Any goal I could've possibly had for this blog was reached. It's 2009; onward to new vistas.

-Dan Weiss

The Best (or Worst?) Albums of 2008

2008-12-24T15:08:00.001-08:00

1. Portishead - Third

+ Generally speaking, it’s hard for artists that are at the head of a certain musical movement or subgenre to escape it. For all the benefits of being a figurehead, those same bands watch their careers disappear when said subgenre (you name it -- Big Beat, Ska Revival v5.0, and in this case, Trip Hop) falls out of favor. Reinvent yourself or die along with the scene. Portishead beat the game, however, by disappearing all on their own in 1998 after the release of their better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be live album. Far from the dated embarrassment it might have been in lesser hands, then, Third was a wall-to-wall triumph, proving that the real cream of any particular crop should (and will) rise to the top. Full to the brim with dramatic sounds, alternately chilling and totally heartfelt emotional swordplay, cinematic soundtrack wizardry, and of course Beth Gibbons’ singular vocal stylings, Third proved to be the most improbable--and successful--of all comebacks. I don’t mind waiting another decade for the follow-up if it's going to be this good.
-Todd Hutlock

- I was happy for Portishead to remain an artifact of the ’90s, represented by an exceedingly respectable and satisfyingly concise catalogue of two albums and a top notch live disc, but Beth Gibbons and cohort couldn’t stick to the script. And disappointingly, when the band reemerged this year, they left their rhythmic prowess and spy-movie intrigue behind them. On their first two discs, Portishead bolted melancholic torch songs to hip-hop rhythms so seamlessly that the pairing seemed organic. In a decade rife with instances of cross-cultural pastiche, Portishead so effectively absorbed hip-hop into their sound that more than one rap producer returned the favor, pilfering their catalogue for samples. I had hoped they might have retained their interest in hip-hop, and incorporated some of the substantial creative leaps the genre has made since the mid ’90s into their new sound, but the 2008 version of Portishead has apparently excised that portion of their history entirely. That’s disappointing, but it would not matter if they had found something interesting to replace it. Instead, when Third jettisoned the deep throb underpinning the group’s material to date, it substituted murk. The rhythms plod, and Gibbons, who once entranced with her hermetic misery, now sounds merely glum. I like the clattering beat opening “Machine Gun,” but for the most part, this is dull, dull stuff. You can’t nod your head to it, you can’t weep along; you can’t even marvel at its trickery. What use is it?
-Jonathan Bradley

2. TV on the Radio - Dear Science

+ In this space, I've said some harsh things about this band, who still appear directionless as ever. But as their songcraft has tightened, their losing the map has grown charming. And while even supporters have mocked it as too garden-variety, too "easy," Dear Science took this hater one listen to enjoy and few others to hum. There's something to be said for "garden-variety" and "something for everyone," not because there's something for everyone but because there's few for no one. "Red Dress" and "Dancing Choose" would probably annoy more people if TVOTR wasn't Important enough for the discerning annoyed to spend the extra effort to lighten up. The Pitchfork effect has its uses.
-Dan Weiss

- No one here is denying the electric drama employed by TV on the Radio. It's just that Dear Science is not the best record of the year, and yet it seems that it's been handed that distinction almost by default. True, Dear Science's art rock may most easily enable sonic parsing of any record in their collection, and it also doesn't compromise the gotcha! production of previous records. On the contrary, fizz pours out of the stereo like someone shook up a can of soda and jammed it in there. But there's a distinct sense of uneasiness. On "Golden Age," vocalist Tunde Adebimpe tarries a little too long in the verses, eventually resorting to percussive freestyle to get in another couple bars before bringing in the big hook. The record's aggressive stabs of horns, strings, organ swells and guitars seem thrown in arbitrarily in places whereas on previous releases simple swaths of fuzz bowled listener over. These guys obviously know how to write smart pop songs, but while Dear Science appears to assert the band's strengths as art-rock phenomena, it only reaffirms their tenuous and (perhaps purposefully) insecure grip on their own message.
-Mike Orme

3. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III

+ Maybe it's not really a rap record. There's no care to it, no - I was going to say no pride in workmanship, but then it's nothing but pride, a sprawling litany of Ways Weezy Wins pushed through obsessive, repetitive rhymes. Few of these songs have private subjects - "Mrs. Officer" does, and "Dr. Carter" has a plot, which is misdirection, but really they're different arenas for Wayne to show off the same moves, the order and approach changing the way you'll use Mario's wall jump a lot in this level and not so much in that one. Weezy's Biggie/Pac complex; Weezy's vague desire to be Michael Jackson; Weezy's touching conviction that poop is always funny; that time Weezy got shot (so now he's got cred and don't say he doesn't) - fixations reshuffled and redealt in shifty, savage, rambling language that makes a hundred different circles around the same points. All of which would be infuriatingly dull (no small trick) if (A) Dwayne Carter's linguistic facility - textured, precise, surprising - lacked the depth to be The Whole Point and (B) the beats, from "A Milli"'s bloody-minded prank to "Got Money"'s T-Pain exhibit to "La La"'s deranged childishness, weren't as willing as their rider to chase down obsessions until they can't run anymore. To say nothing of "Lollipop", which isn't about sex or dancing but about how far to the right you can turn the AutoTune knob before the universe disintegrates. Thus it's not really a rap record. Dwayne wants it to be a pop record but it's not that either. It's more of a record record, the most mazelike, rewarding meta of the year.
-Theon Weber

- Why is Tha Carter III overrated? Because “3Peat” is a lesser version of “I’m Me.” Because “A Milli,” overreaches and becomes dull after minute three. Because “Got Money” sounds like it was created in a test tube and under the influence of too much cocaine (not the good Berlin kind). Because “Dr. Carter,” is a great song but we act like no one ever heard Dr. Octagon. Because “Lollipop” is about as erotic as a prostate exam. Because “La La’s” beat sounds like it was made by a eight month-old whose vocabulary consists of the titular phrase.” Because “Miss Officer” is the least realistic romantic tryst since “Billie Jean,” and is about 1/00th the song. Because “Misunderstood,” features a seven minute coda that can only be considered deep if you previously thought Wayne had the brains of a katydid. Because if you have it in your Top 10, odds are you’ve listened to 10 rap albums this year. Or less. Yes, this is probably better than 75 percent of the major label albums released in the last 12 months.
-Jeff Weiss

4. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

+ What people tended to miss in the online furore (and counter-furore) over these guys was that, via Rostam Batmanglij's synths, strings and synth-strings many of these songs are just as much chamber pop as they are whatever African songform they're accused of ripping off today. And not only does Ezra Koenig write a hell of a melody, his lyrics wind up being surprisingly opaque and interesting, even moving, for songs basically about the privileged young. I'm still not sure the likes of "Campus" work unless you are or fondly remember being on an actual campus, but the result for those who buy it is one of 2008's most joyous records.
-Ian Mathers

- I'm not getting all the hate on Vampire Weekend this year, but mainly because I'm not getting all the love either. I spun the record a few times, and everything after the first listen was simply to figure out why people were obsessed with writing about it. It's a pretty nothing album: not especially creative, nuanced, exciting, challenging, charming, or anything else. I don't necessarily dislike guys in preppy sweaters, so I can't really get worked up about anything that also isn't tedious, poorly executed, badly produced, etc. The only good thing here is that the band fittingly went with "Oxford" over "serial" in the great comma debate, but when a band's choice of grammar terminology marks their highwater of interesting (and there's no schoolboy charm to make it engaging), it's just not worth talking about past a second adjective.
-Justin Cober-Lake

5. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

+ A glance at this record's cover hints at its dramatic change of pace: an aggressive punch at exploitation from an R&B oracle who once spoke hip-hop fortunes in tongues. Erykah snaps out of her trance and communicates with sharply pointed words, but as the cover illustration reveals, she has obsessed over images, with a tuning fork, an ankh, musical notes in chains, musical notes in DNA chains, religion, protest, and violence all coming right up out of her hair. Fittingly, New Amerykah is just lopsided, with Alvin and the Chipmunks vocal tricks on "Amerykahn Promise" butting up against "The Healer's" Afro-Druidic chant, and "The Cell" banging a hardcore riff right after the somber tributes in "Solidier." The big single "Honey" doesn't even appear until the end of the record after the seven and a half minute ?uestlove co-production "Telephone" winds down. Her choice typifies the power of the New Amerykah: sheer balls and a worldly tenacity coming out of a performer who once seemed lost within her own ethereality.
-Mike Orme

- At first I too thought I loved New Amerykah. It felt important sociopolitically and sounded deep; after the blaxploitation-funk sendup intro, there's no surface, just mysterious splashes of color and meaning to decipher from listens and listens preferably under the influence. This was anticipatory praise. Those colors and meaning never appeared and the resulting wash of psychedelic trip-hop - indeed one of the richer gauze blankets to receive universal acclaim in this century - topped out for me in the bottom reaches of my A-list, as impertinent, pretty sonics. After Obama won, Dear Science deepened by comparison as a big, warm, technology-brushed-but-not-drowned group hug. I've yet to reach the bottom of D'Angelo's famously smoky Voodoo. But Erykah's grooves are prepared loops bent on hypnotica, and krautrock isn't half her originality or metier. Her political philosophy is as vague as Nas' but takes far fewer risks; the latter's better record was much criticized for putting tried-and-true Neil Young opaqueness on the line. At best, this record is simple, effectively making me long to hear the mantra of just four words, "hold on/ my people," breathily intoned for days and days. At worst, it's a mesa of pleasantries decorated with Here and Now neon signs to exploit the times and inflate its self-importance.
-Gnarls Merkin

6. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

+ From the moment the car noises and synthesized Doppler shift conjured images of fading tail lights whizzing by Cut Copy's debut Bright Like Neon Love, opener "Time Stands Still" following in hot pursuit, you had to think that Cut Copy understood something we didn't. Sure enough, their little bit of introspection calls out the subtext of ethereality in electro-pop revival. This was only made clear on In Ghost Colours, when they re-wrote the actual text.

While Neon Love constructs a bleary-eyed collage of the evening's wonders (were they too inexperienced? too insecure? too inebriated?), In Ghost Colours crystallizes the shadowy pursuits of rock stars, keyboards and dance floors. Some credit goes to DFA producer Tim Goldsworthy, who coaxed out a fearless performance out of these airy Australians. But most of the praise goes to Cut Copy, whose elusive live shows spark elation in even notoriously stoic indie rock fans and whose giddily constructed dance/pop sensations ("Hearts on Fire," "Lights and Music," "Out There On The Ice," "So Haunted," etc.) constantly whizz by. You won't hear any Doppler effect here: once In Ghost Colours enters your consciousness, it tends to stay put.
-Mike Orme

- If anyone needed more convincing that 2008 really was a great year for music even if rap and actual pop hits were, heaven forbid, lacking for a smatter of months, its most overrated record is pretty good. Everyone decided biting New Order with no new angles, barely an update (a guitar here, a 2.0 tech sprig there) and not a lyric (Alfred Soto tricking me into hearing "get so horny I'm misunderstood tonight" in the one great song only proves his own cleverness) was okay, fine. But it would be polite of them to notify VHS or Beta.
-Dan Weiss

7. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark

+ I don't know, I may be in the minority here, but I loved The Warning not just for the dance beats but also the combination of that and Hot Chip's sweetly melancholic take on joy – it was the most emotional affecting electronic record I'd heard in years, and it resonated. So imagine my surprise when the follow-up not only followed up on their live prowess but also upped the emotional stakes. Not many bands can switch as fluidly as the Chip does between kinetic bangers and doe-eyed ballads – hell, most bands aren't this good at either one of those.
-Ian Mathers

On the surface, it would seem that Hot Chip were still on an upward trajectory when they released Made in the Dark; touring and writing relentlessly, with critical cache to spare and an adoring public that ate up their suddenly prolific output. But outside of the confines of the live set, where they were held up by the familiar and tested tunes around them, the songs of Made in the Dark were dramatically unmemorable. Sure, they still have their quirked-out production, mixing skills, and rock-dance chops in place, but without melodies to hang them on, it’s all just wank, isn’t it? A spin through The Warning left you with more earworms than you knew what to do with, leaping for the replay button; Made in the Dark left you wondering what you missed, leaping for the replay button. I can’t give up on Hot Chip -- they’re too damn talented, and there are still a few choice nuggets here and there on the album (the title track, for instance, and maybe “Wrestlers”) -- but they need to step up their game again, just as they did in-between their lackluster debut and The Warning.
-Todd Hutlock

8. No Age - Nouns

+ “Punk-Pop” is such a misnomer, because punk is pop. It always has been. The ethos of getting back to basics and creating something that’s fun to listen to and fun to play is at the heart of all pop music, and punk, from the thirteen year old jamming Simple Plan in her bedroom to the intense looking kids at East Coast hardcore shows with Xs scrawled on their hands, is pop music. Scrape away the sunburnt Los Angeles gunk caked over No Age’s Nouns and you find a punk record, which is to say that you find a pop record. If you don’t believe me, I forgive you; I too was once convinced this bullshit was nothing but noise interspersed with trilling feedback ambience. Then, from out of that haze emerged “Things I Did When I Was Dead,” an actually beautiful piece of work built on gentle piano chords and hangover vocals. Call it the album’s ballad. Add to that a couple of rousing small-scale shout-alongs in “Teen Creeps” and “Ripped Knees,” plus more than a little bit of blacktop-burning guitar squall, and you’ve got a damn fine half hour of punk-pop. Now I wanna sniff some glue.
-Jonathan Bradley

- I know I kept this around and listened to it at least seven or eight times before I deleted it, but for the life of me I can't remember what it sounds like. Poring over YouTube now, I get fragmented tracks (not necessarily songs per se) of hashed and reheated indie leftovers – the sloppiness of Pavement, the atonal opacity of My Bloody Valentine, the purposeful avoidance of meaning found in dozens of acts. Honestly, that description could have described something bracing, weird and necessary, but in No Age's execution it plays more like wallpaper music for people who listen to Wolf Eyes and Guided by Voices, the real indie rock equivalent of Feist. Mildly pleasant, but utterly inessential.
-Ian Mathers

9. The Kills - Midnight Boom

+ All good art is rooted in conflict. So are all good duos. Bogart and Bacall. Calvin and Hobbes. Siegfried & Roy. VV and Hotel embody this. Who cares about will they or won’t they, did they or don’t they. What the fuck do you think this is, Moonlighting? The only tension that matters is in the serrated guitars and anxious drum machines. The snarling agro-punk with Nina Simone swagger, Allison Mosshart vs. the laconic thin-lipped Englishman Jamie Hince. When they clash, it’s nothing short of War of the Roses music. Which explains why I once saw Danny DeVito catching their set at Coachella. No tiger necessary.
-Jeff Weiss

- It's not that artily empty garage-rock with a hot chick on mouth sounds is necessarily shallow, or stupid, or bad. It's that the Kills seem more a fragile projection of a particular fleeting fashion than a band. A friend who adores them claims they're the band for the girls he sees in Brooklyn cafes having pre-shoot coffees with American Apparel photographers - the band, in other words, of our generation, but then from my Portland apartment the Decemberists look like the band of our generation and I'm pretty sure that's not true either. (Meanwhile the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, whatever generation they're the band of, start with all the same pilfered touchstones, soundtrack the same porn-aspiring photoshoots, and find the real voodoo heartbeats in city sin.) All this is only sociology, of course, but I'd have found something else to talk about if could remember any of the songs.
-Theon Weber

10. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing

+ The gimmick was cute at first. Up-and-coming D.C. rapper centers his mixtape around Seinfeld. Great, now a rap album that'll make my Dad intentionally laugh. Well, after the novelty of hearing Julia Louis-Dreyfuss say "motherfucka" wore off, what we're left with is a really good rap album. Amidst a soundtrack of sharp East Coast hip-hop and savvy lyricism, Wale achieves the remarkable by utilizing the mundane. Wale forges a bridge between the bourgeois concept of "nothing" and the experience of real life in the District. It's not so much about taking what's considered "white" and applying it to what's "black," rather, it reflects the hidden pathos of modern life that get lost in the context of endless rerunning. "Men as pathetic", "a vacation from us", asserting your artistic credibility when you're neither artistic nor have credibility. "Nothing" just got a lot more substantive.
-Andrew Casillas

- As I hinted above, hip-hop heads really gasp for oxygen to fill quotas, and 2008 is one of the saddest times for that caucus ever. The Anti-Weezy contingent (big even before he was) chose from other superstars (T.I., who's back, and Ludacris, who ain't) and some half-excitable newbs (The Knux and Wale) to laud. Me, I preferred the newbs, but as is wont in the reviewing game, found both a mite overrated. The Knux had it all together sonically, but little to say. And Wale, billed as the likeable Lupe, is the inverse. The Seinfeld mixtape was indeed brimming with unpretentious thought, fresh concepts and a healthy sense of the meta. But the serviceable go-go sound is merely a promising, song-shaped sinkhole. Right, this is a mixtape, what am I asking. But blame yourselves for thrusting him into the critical eye too soon. Lord knows "The Kramer" won't be his "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance." But if he really is a pro in potentia, we can keep the drool in the pan and wait for the output.
-Dan Weiss

11. M83 - Saturdays=Youth

12. David Byrne/Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

13. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair

14. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

15. Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs

16. Los Campesinos! - Hold on Now, Youngster...

17. Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak

18. Why? - Alopecia

19. Deerhunter - Microcastle

20. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

21. The Knux - Remind Me in 3 Days...

22. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

23. Be Your Own Pet - Get Awkward

24. The-Dream - Love/Hate

25. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

26. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna

27. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life

28. Santogold vs. Diplo - Top Ranking

29. Taylor Swift - Fearless

30. Steinski - What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective

31. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter than Creation's Dark

32. Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins

33. Ne-Yo - Year of the Gentleman

34. Martha Wainwright - I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too

35. Sam Amidon - All is Well

36. dj/Rupture - Uproot

37. Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too

38. The Roots - Rising Down

39. Ashlee Simpson - Bittersweet World

40. Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords

Ballots

2008-12-18T05:47:00.000-08:00

Melanie Baskins:

1. Beach House - Devotion
2. No Age - Nouns
3. Evangelicals - The Evening Descends
4. Deerhunter - Microcastle
5. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams
6. Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville [reissue]
7. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
8. Xiu Xiu - Women as Lovers
9. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
10. Times New Viking - Rip it Off
11. Little Joy - Little Joy
12. Sigur Ros - Blah, blah, foreign title
13. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life
14. Los Campesinos! - Hold on Now, Youngster...
15. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie
16. The Walkmen - You & Me
17. Tapes n’ Tapes - Walk it Off
18. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
19. The Raveonettes - Lust, Lust, Lust

Jonathan Bradley

1. The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound
2. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
3. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
4. Kanye West – 808s and Heartbreak
5. Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter III
6. Laura Marling – Alas I Cannot Swim
7. Taylor Swift – Fearless
8. The-Dream – Love/Hate
9. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive
10. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
11. Kathleen Edwards – Asking for Flowers
12. Ladyhawke – Ladyhawke
13. Ashlee Simpson – Bittersweet World
14. Death Cab for Cutie – Narrow Stairs
15. The Knux – Remind Me in 3 Days...
16. Santogold – Santogold
17. The Veronicas – Hook Me Up
18. No Age – Nouns
19. Augie March – Watch Me Disappear
20. The Kills – Midnight Boom

Ally Brown

1. Portishead - Third
2. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
3. Shearwater - Rook
4. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
5. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
6. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
7. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
8. Y'All Is Fantasy Island - Rescue Weekend
9. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
10. Santogold vs. Diplo - Top Ranking
11. Martha Wainwright - I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
12. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
13. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
14. Super Adventure Club - Chalk Horror!
15. Santogold - Santogold
16. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
17. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life
18. The Bug - London Zoo
19. DeVotchka - A Mad and Faithful Telling
20. Monkey - Journey to the West

Andrew Casillas

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
2. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
3. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
4. Sons & Daughters - This Gift
5. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
6. Lila Downs - Shake Away
7. The Knux - Remind Me in 3 Days...
8. Julieta Venegas - MTV Unplugged
9. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
10. Los Campesinos! - Hold on Now, Youngster
11. Akrobatik - Absolute Value
12. No Age - Nouns
13. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
14. Santogold - Santogold
15. The Kills - Midnight Boom
16. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Vol. 1: 4th World War
17. She & Him - Volume One
18. Estelle - Shine
19. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
20. The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath

Justin Cober-Lake

1. Aaron Parks - Invisible Cinema
2. The Shackeltons - The Shackeltons
3. Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords
4. The Duke Spirit - Neptune
5. Marco Benevento - Invisible Baby
6. Public Record - Public Record
7. Wovenhand - Ten Stones
8. Grampall Jukabox - Ropechain
9. Avishai Cohen Trio - Gently Disturbed
10. Mavis Staples - Mavis Staples Live: Hope at the Hideout
11. Sean Noonan - Boxing Dreams
12. The Strugglers - The Latest Rights
13. Janelle Monae - Metropolis: The Chase Suite
14. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
15. Major Labels - Aquavia
16. David Crowder - Remedy Club Tour - Live
17. Shot x Shot - Let Nature Square
18. Calexico - Carried to Dust
19. Danny! - And I Love H.E.R.
20. Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog - Party Intellectuals

Jason Gross

1. Wussy - Left for Dead
2. The Whigs - Mission Control
3. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
4. Honeydripper OST
5. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
6. The Heavy Great Vengeance - Furious Fire
7. Los Campesinos! - Hold on Now, Youngster...
8. Clark - Turning Dragon
9. James McMurty - Just Us Kids
10. Absentee - Victory Shorts
11. Münchener Kammerorchester Haydn, Yun: Farewell - Symphonies Nos. 39 and 45 / Chamber Symphony I
12. Paul Westerberg - 49:00
13. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
14. GZA - Pro Tools
15. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
16. Martha Wainwright - I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
17. Lucinda Williams - Little Honey
18. The Knux - Remind Me in 3 Days...
19. Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
20. Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins

Todd Hutlock

1. Portishead - Third
2. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
3. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
4. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
5. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna
6. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig!!!
7. Fennesz - Black Sea
8. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Everthing That Happens Will Happen Today
9. Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords
10. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Sunday at Devil Dirt

Josh Love

1. Kathleen Edwards – Asking for Flowers
2. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
3. Max Tundra – Parallax Error Beheads You
4. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
5. Diplo vs. Santogold – Top Ranking
6. Girl Talk – Feed the Animals
7. Erykah Badu – New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
8. Lee Ann Womack – Call Me Crazy
9. Bob Dylan – Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
10. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
11. Portishead – Third
12. Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing
13. Ne-Yo – Year of the Gentleman
14. Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III
15. Why? – Alopecia
16. The-Dream – Love/Hate
17. Okkervil River – The Stand-Ins
18. Arthur Russell – Love is Overtaking Me
19. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark
20. Marit Larsen – The Chase

Ian Mathers

1. Sam Amidon – All is Well
2. Los Campesinos! – Hold on Now, Youngster…
3. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark
4. Stars Like Fleas – The Ken Burns Effect
5. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
6. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
7. The Kills – Midnight Boom
8. The Wedding Present – El Rey
9. Portishead – Third
10. Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
11. Foals – Antidotes
12. Populous With Short Stories - Drawn in Basic
13. Delays – Everything's the Rush
14. Earth – The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull
15. Horse Feathers – House With No Home
16. Los Campesinos! – We are Beautiful, We are Doomed
17. Paavoharju – Laulu Laakson Kukista
18. Mount Eerie & Julie Doiron - Lost Wisdom
19. The Goslings - Occasion
20. The Bug – London Zoo

Patrick McKay

1. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
2. Portishead - Third
3. Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
4. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
5. Steinski - What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
6. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
7. Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs
8. Islands - Arm's Way
9. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Everything that Happens Will Happen Today
10. of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping

Lisa Oliver

1. Portishead – Third
2. Herbaliser – Same As It Never Was
3. The Notwist – The Devil, You + Me
4. The School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
5. Dungen – 4
6. Sigur Ros - Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust
7. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
8. Adele – 19
9. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
10. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
11. Bubblegum Lemonade – Doubleplusgood
12. Noah and the Whale - Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down

Mike Orme

1. The Chap - Mega Breakfast
2. Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too
3. Max Tundra - Parallax Error Beheads You
4. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
5. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
6. Portishead - Third
7. Air France - No Way Down
8. The Kills - Midnight Boom
9. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
10. Osborne - Osborne
11. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna
12. Jamie Liddell - Jim
13. The Field - Sound of Light
14. Li Jianhong - San Sheng Shi
15. Lykke Li - Youth Novels
16. School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
17. Kelley Polar - I Need You to Hold On While the Sky is Falling
18. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
19. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
20. The Depreciation Guild - In Her Gentle Jaws

Alfred Soto

1. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
2. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
3. Robert Forster - The Evangelist
4. The-Dream - Love/Hate
5. Bob Dylan - Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
6. Conor Oberst - Conor Oberst
7. Ne-Yo - Year of the Gentlemen
8. Portishead - Third
9. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter than Creation's Dark
10. Steinski - What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
11. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
12. Randy Newman - Harps & Angels
13. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
14. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
15. T.I. - Paper Trail
16. No Age - Nouns
17. Dolly Parton - Backwoods Barbie
18. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
19. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Everything that Happens Will Happen Today
20. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

Dave Toropov

1. Sam Amidon - All is Well
2. Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
3. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
4. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life
5. dj/Rupture - Uproot
6. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
7. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
8. Immortal Technique - The 3rd World
9. Why? - Alopecia
10. JDSY - Adage of Known

Theon Weber

1. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
2. Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood OST
3. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
4. Be Your Own Pet - Get Awkward
5. Portishead - Third
6. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
7. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
8. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
9. Taylor Swift - Fearless
10. Why? - Alopecia
11. Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs
12. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
13. The Knux - Remind Me In 3 Days...
14. Ashlee Simpson - Bittersweet World
15. Bloc Party - Intimacy

Christopher R. Weingarten

1. Portishead – Third
2. Kanye West – 808s And Heartbreak
3. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
4. Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
5. Lindstrøm – Where You Go I Go Too
6. Torche - Meanderthal
7. Made Out of Babies – The Ruiner
8. The Roots – Rising Down
9. Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna
10. Harvey Milk – Life… The Best Game in Town
11. Vivian Girls – Vivian Girls
12. Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers – Bloom iPhone application
13. James Blackshaw – Litany Of Echoes
14. Boredoms – Super Roots 9
15. The Breeders – Mountain Battles
16. Extra Life – Secular Works
17. Be Your Own Pet – Get Awkward
18. Gnarls Barkley – The Odd Couple
19. Marnie Stern - This is It and I am It and You are It and So is That and He is It and She is It and It is It and That is That
20. Ponytail – Ice Cream Spiritual

Dan Weiss

1. Be Your Own Pet - Get Awkward/Get Damaged
2. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III/The Leak
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Portishead - Third
5. Conor Oberst - Conor Oberst
6. Raphael Saadiq - The Way I See It
7. No Age - Nouns
8. Stereolab - Chemical Chords
9. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
10. The Roots - Rising Down
11. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
12. Blitzen Trapper - Furr
13. Deerhunter - Microcastle
14. The Breeders - Mountain Battles
15. Weezer - Weezer [Red Album]
16. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
17. Al Green - Lay It Down
18. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
19. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
20. Nas - Nas

Jeff Weiss

1. Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak
2. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
3. Madlib - Beat Konducta Vol. 5 Dil Cosby Suite
4. The Knux - Remnd Me in 3 Days...
5. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
6. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
7. Dungen - 4
8. Elzhi - Europass
9. Portishead - Third
10. Why? - Alopecia
11. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
12. Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit - Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit are the Very Best
13. The Kills - Midnight Boom
14. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
15. Islands - Arm's Way
16. dj/Rupture - Uproot
17. Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer
18. Sic Alps - U.S. EZ
19. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
20. Al Green - Lay It Down

Beck - Sea Change

2008-10-28T03:44:00.001-07:00

Beck - Sea Change
by Lisa Oliver

For years I disregarded Beck. When “Loser” came out, I thought “novelty song” and dismissed it outright. Still, despite my best efforts via various accidental means (similar to my deal with Everyone Loves Raymond I utterly dismiss it, yet somehow I’ve seen it), I ended up hearing bits and pieces of Mellow Gold and it didn’t change my mind (see aforementioned Everyone Loves Raymond reference). Then Odelay came out and even with a few strong singles, I remained nonplussed by the key-fob sized Mr. Hanson. Plus, the cover of that album really got to me after awhile. I mean yeah, it’s kind of funny but it just looks like it’s totally aware of being a weird/funny album cover. And that kind of overly conscious, cultivated oddity works me into a right lather. Like doofuses who think it’s cool to collect John Wayne Gacy's paintings.

So I sat on the sidelines and outright ignored Mutations at the time (at the urging of my boyfriend, I recently gave it a shot and it’s not bad). Sounds like reanimated Syd Barret and a non-sucking Bowie, with dusting of post-krautrock Eno and Nick Drake's gossamer whisper. Midnite Vultures was fine, but never made it to heavy rotation; I only just realized “Debra” was on it.

Signal Sea Change. I heard “Guess I’m Doing Fine” and I melted. Then I heard “Golden Age” and was an utter goner; it never occurred to me that it was Beck. I got the whole album and I’m not really sure what the tipping point was–music, words, time in my life–but for some reason it all washed over me in a gorgeous, honey-hued haze. After further listening, with the initial infatuation gone, I realized that all the tracks have a similar aural range and the lyrics, well, aren’t great. They remind me of Foo Fighters lyrics in the sense that there are intense fragments of insight, but also an internal monologue that we don’t hear and ultimately, the lyrics and vocals end up acting as another instrument. I mean, yes, there is the obvious theme of Beck’s long-term relationship ending but the music speaks far louder than the words. The same slow tempo mimics the static blur of heartache and the mourning period that follows it. Most ballad-inclined musicians don’t realize how difficult it is to play slow music smoothly and have it land right in the pocket so it ebbs and flows seamlessly. Impressively, Sea Change flows as a body of work and sustains, like a book.

One of the reasons I moved away from big cities and back to my medium-sized hometown was that I had lost sight of the sky. In big cities, you are able to catch glimpses of it, but not whole sheathes. I still marvel at the expanse of sky now – despite the fact I’m two years into sky sightings. I played Sea Change in my car to re-inspire myself for this piece. As I was driving down the highway to go food shopping, I realized this album is like watching the sky – a thick patina of blue, white and gold. The swath of big sky, like the sea, shows no endpoint, no horizon line. Kind of like heart-break – it rolls on and on. With Beck’s help (of all people!), I can see the sky, the endpoint and the beauty of the stars. Can hear 'em too.

Lisa Oliver is a Columbia-educated writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Stylus, The Fly UK, Musicweek UK, Yahoo! Music, NME, Publishers Weekly, Domino and People.

Look Back in Anger #4

2008-10-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

Look Back in Anger #4
by Justin Cober-Lake

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, Justin Cober-Lake reexamines his Best of 2003 list.

I began my career as a music critic in 2003. I always feel compelled to simultaneously hide and confess the fact that I hadn't been a music nerd for too long before that. I didn't grow up poring through music mags or rounding up Velvet Underground. I had gotten enough of a handle on things by 2003 that I felt confident enough to start writing, but barely.

When it came time for list-making, I didn't really have much to offer. I had spent most of the year following trends, trying to learn what "good" music was. I'd have been insulted, of course, if you'd have suggested I was following the crowd, but I was to an extent, primarily by reading every article on PopMatters and Pitchfork and then downloading or occasionally buying whatever they told me to (eMusic was a blessing). When I went into my stacks to re-listen to 2003 for this article, I was struck by how much the music I had at the time could line up with the best-of lists of either particular magazines or Metacritic. Or were completely random albums I had reviewed.

Still, I think I did a pretty decent job putting together a collection of records that I liked, and it holds up reasonably well for me today (even if there's a distinct appeal to only one color/sex/style of person and no thought for spiritual music). I'll probably knock about half the list out of the top 10, but I still think they're all good records, and acceptable picks at the time. As is always the case, I didn't necessarily pick what had the most holding power, and that's one of the ways I can tell in retrospect which albums I really should have included.

Where I give myself away, though, is less with my list and more with my comments. Start with the fact that I had to include four "honorable mentions." I had probably heard 20-25 albums by the time I made my list, so it's doubtful that I needed to mention 14 of them in my top 10. Notice that for my last album, by the Unicorns, I mention how they knocked the Shins out of the final spot. It's a moment where I have to assert my familiarity with the landscape (because I'm questioning it internally), but also where I'm assuming that it's just conventional wisdom that the Shins are a top 10 pick. I need to explain not having them.

And so my list goes like that, with me trying to hide a lack of knowledge (of music in general and of 2003) and of confidence (in my taste), and secretly giving away both. One final note: I kept Broken Social Scene off my list because I was being a snob about the release date. I had ordered the Canadian release in 2002 and wanted to prove -- if only to myself -- that I knew when that album really came out.

1. Elbow, Cast of Thousands (V2)

I can stick by this pick. This was the second import CD I had ever bought (BSS being the first), and easily the most impulsive. I had streamed the album at some site online and was so blown away that I downloaded the previous album and immediately ordered this from Amazon UK. Note that it wouldn't come out in the US until 2004, but I was consistent with my dating system. I still love this one five years later, and imagine I always will.

2. Calexico, Feast of Wire (Quarterstick/Touch and Go)

Another one I don't have a problem with, and re-listening to it with this list in mind made me think that the gap between #1 and #2 here is smaller than I'd have thought. Burns and Convertino can't go wrong, but this disc just works better than the others, right from that opening line through the restlessness of "No Doze" (or, more fittingly, through the bonus tracks and "Fallin' Rain".

3. The Wrens, The Meadowlands (Absolutely Kosher)

I must have been caught up in the backstory and the different feel that this had in my louder, more raucous collection. It's a smart, beautiful album, but I've only played it a handful of times since 2003, and I can only hum two songs off it. It's an album I appreciate and respect more than I spin, and, in this case, that has to bump it down a little.

4. Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantics (Dirtnap)

Love it. This should have been the last album I bought before I got married, but… it was just before two days of driving and shortly before my stop in the music store that I read about their tragedy [only one member of the band survived a touring van accident] and, out of nervousness, bought Grandaddy instead. This kind of music sounds like it should be easy to make, but if that were so, there'd be more bands this enjoyable.

5. Clearlake, Cedars (Domino)

The first half of this album is definitely top ten. The second half holds up well, but it's just not as strong. I really dig this band, but the gushing praise I gave this as one of my early reviews and its placement at number 5 isn't quite deserved.

6. Gotan Project, La Revancha del Tango (Ya Basta!/XL/Beggars Group)

This record fit perfectly in with my explorations of electronic music at the time, and especially in downtempo or lounge-y acts. The blend here still works really well for me, and, probably because of my limited palette, I haven't heard much that does what this one does as well as it does, mixing electronics and the tango. Discovering this record was fun, as was discovering that I could really like something like this record.

7. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Hearts of Oak (Lookout!)

Clearly I gave Leo my vote for Tyranny of Distance. As much as I like Leo, I don't know how this record snuck on. I don't even remember liking it this much, even though I went through a Ted Leo phase and still dig "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?"

8. Grandaddy, Sumday (V2)

An example of me liking something I was supposed to like. "Now It's On" remains a great cut, but I played this album too much at the time, and I haven't picked it up in years. Going back over it, it really is a good record and I don't mean to disparage it, but I think it benefited from me not having heard much like it at this point. The indie world was relatively new for me and I found something here I could connect with.

9. Four Tet, Rounds (Domino)

I don't know why I like Four Tet so much, and I've even been considering doing an article on this year's release with exactly that premise. Everything this guy puts out really connects with me, even though he's not operating in a genre(s) that I usually flip for. This release just has so much going for it in so many ways. It's easy to forget how many ideas are packed in here because Hebden does it so smoothly.

10. The Unicorns, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (Alien8 Recordings)

Happy to be weird. I like that it's goofy and fun, and has some incredible pop hooks in the middle of it. I'm unsure what to do with it, because I think it's a blast and I have warm fuzzies from its appearance during the newlywed bliss period of my life. Even counting its brevity as a strength, though, it's still just a little too long. I might regret what I do with this one...

I haven't really broken away from what I recognize as circumscribed thinking from that period. My tastes expanded wildly after this point and I started listening to drastically more albums per year. Even so, I haven't shaken the connections I made with some of the albums from that period (and will confess that my Postal Service love might be influenced by the numbers of listens my new wife and I gave it on long car rides). My new list is only as fleetingly accurate as the first, but it does account for durability even if it marks a somewhat frozen moment of thinking. Interestingly, though, none of my honorable mentions even sniff this one.

New List:

Elbow, Cast of Thousands
Dave Douglas, Freak In
Calexico, Feast of Wire
Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It in People
Four Tet, Rounds
The Postal Service, Give Up
Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantics
Gotan Project, La Revancha del Tango
Jason Moran, The Bandwagon
Derek Webb, She Must and Shall Go Free

Original list

Honorable mentions: The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow; The Heavenly States, The Heavenly States; The Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music; Over the Rhine, Ohio

Justin Cober-Lake is the interviews editor at PopMatters and has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and lyrics in a variety of places, including Stylus, Pastemagazine.com, Chord, and Trouser Press. He's been writing steadily for Wrong Note Media for several years, and his work made its first appearance on CD with the release of Todd Goodman's first symphony, Fields of Crimson.

The Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off

2008-09-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-14T21:55:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-08T00:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville

2008-08-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
by Lisa Oliver

Blowjob, blowjob, blowjob. Okay, that’s out of the way.

No, wait – fuck, fuck, fuck.

Now we can discuss Liz Phair.

I’ve never been a Liz Phair fan. She’s one of those artists I like in theory (Pavement anyone?) but not in practice. I remember when Exile in Guyville came out and was touted as her reply to Exile on Main Street, which just sounds dumb. Then I actually heard the album, and it did indeed sound dumb – it’s the confused musing of a girl who doesn’t understand her vocal range and likes to get her tits out. However, I’m no stranger myself to being a confused girl who doesn’t understand her vocal range and likes to get her tits out. So occasionally I’d cut her some sisterhood slack and revisit. Its low-fi, vocal warbling just began to sound more and more dated as time went on. Plus, her pandering, whining, little-girl bullshit began to get on my tits. Or maybe it just hit too close to the tits for me. I double-dog dare anyone to find a strong-willed, self-confident woman who doesn’t silently long for a boyfriend to give her the stupid old shit like sodas and letters. I guess Liz (like the rest of us) had to learn the literal hard way that just because a boy fucks you, that doesn’t mean he really likes you. Still, you do have to admire someone who spreads one’s diary pages open as easily as spreading one’s legs open for the entire world to see.

I much prefer the Liz Phair of “Never Said,” a subtle yet wicked Liz Phair. She’s not quite the wordsmith she thinks she is but still…when she purrs that she’s clean as a whistle…that is the sound of thighs getting wet. But then she counters all the good clever stuff with her steadfast dedication to being photographed with her cupid’s bow lips parted, head tilted back, doing her best Alicia Silverstone impression pose. Got it Liz – you dig giving head. Now, can you either get your head down there or just move on please?

I’ll follow my own request and just get my head down into her eponymous 2003 affair – which paradoxically strikes me as a grown-up answer to the adolescent meditation of Exile. She should have called it Homecoming in Womantown.

Instead of begging to be some dude’s blowjob queen, she’s playing with his Xbox. She’s no longer just “6’1,” she’s “Extraordinary.” She doesn’t need some douche for a boyfriend; she’s using his jizz as her personal age-retardant. I don’t know who Liz is blowing, but I’ve never encountered “hot” cum. Sounds like a choking hazard.

Yes, some of the music is Matrix-rocker-confections, and her vocals are pro-tooled and pitch-perfected to airbrushed-centerfold perfection, but I don’t care. It sounds happy, full of life and spunk (all kinds of spunk) on “It’s Sweet” and “Why Can’t I?” She’s shed her lo-fi hair shirt, crystallizing into the true goddess she was destined to be. Its amazing how growing up can make someone so content with who they are. If selling out makes her this at ease, she should have done it years ago.

Is her answer to the male gaze the female just-open-enough-mouthed stare? No, I don’t think she is clever enough to be fully cognizant of and able to toy with academic feminism. However, her answer to herself is making the music she wants to make and men, women, and the music press can all go to hell. I raise both my glass and my rack to her.

Lisa Oliver is a Columbia-educated writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Stylus, The Fly UK, Musicweek UK, Yahoo! Music, NME, Publishers Weekly, Domino and People.

Look Back in Anger #2

2008-08-17T21:31:00.001-07:00

Look Back in Anger #2
by John M. Cunningham

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, ex-Stylus alum John M. Cunningham reexamines his top 10 albums of 2002.

It was a few days after Christmas, 2002, while on vacation with my family in New York, and I was rambling at my dad about how guilty I felt for not having seen more movies or heard more albums over the course of the year. How could I justifiably put together a meaningful top 10 list when I had so many blind spots? My dad didn't get all the agony. "You make it sound," he interrupted, "like you're some sort of working critic."

He had a point. This was months before I started a blog and a whole two years before I was deemed qualified enough to participate in the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll. I was writing for nobody. But mine was a generation weaned on Siskel & Ebert and Entertainment Weekly, and I had friends whose voracious appetites for pop culture resulted in a barrage of e-mails at year's end, trading lists of favorites. As someone who, at age 13, proudly designated winners of the 1st Annual JMC Movie Awards, I was hardly immune to these kinds of diversions. In fact, I took them embarrassingly seriously. Not long before I arrived in New York I'd had a dispute with my friend Matt, for instance, over whether or not critics' top 10s should be purposefully eclectic (he voted yes; I was put off by anything that bore any trace of dishonesty and loudly said so).

So of course I had attempted to assemble a list of my favorite albums of 2002 on the plane ride over, and a month and a half later, once I got over whatever trepidation I felt about my critical myopia, I revised it and posted it on the I Love Music message board, as follows:

1. Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

2. Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet

3. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

4. …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Source Tags & Codes

5. Mum, Finally We Are No One

6. Archer Prewitt, Three

7. Pretty Girls Make Graves, Good Health

8. The Notwist, Neon Golden

9. The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

10. Enon, High Society

There are a couple of things that make this snapshot interesting to me in retrospect. For one, though I had frequently pored over the best-of issues published by magazines like Spin, I didn't always make it a priority to actually hear the albums mentioned therein, instead choosing to follow my own increasingly rarefied tastes (by the turn of the decade, this meant mostly post-rock and lounge-pop). In 2002, however, I was reading Pitchfork more regularly than before (my brother, whom I lived with, was an intern there), and it suddenly seemed important to expand my listening habits, especially toward the guitar-based indie rock the site lionized.

The other thing is that shortly after I compiled this list, my musical taste would undergo a more significant shift, as the twin influences of ILM (discovered February 2003) and Limewire (downloaded July 2003) made me more sympathetic to hip-hop, chart-pop, and electronic dance music in particular, and hungrier to explore new music in general.

The main conclusion to be drawn here is that 2002 was a transitional year for me musically, which makes this list a perfect candidate for some ex-post-facto reconstruction. In the last couple of weeks, I've re-listened to everything above, along with a slate of more than a dozen other contenders, to determine which of these albums hold up six years later and which might be swapped out. Let's start from the top.

* * *

1.

After Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights came out, you couldn't mention you liked it without having to fend off accusations that the band was a too-chic Joy Division rip-off. I strenuously argued against this claim, partly out of a firm belief that there was nothing wrong with derivativeness per se (I defended the Strokes a year before, too), but also partly because, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" excluded, I had never actually heard Joy Division. Turns out it didn't matter. Not only is it apparent to me now that Interpol borrowed from a whole host of early '80s Anglo mope-rock bands, but even hearing their fifth or sixth supposed influence has done little to lessen the appeal of this record. The tight, insistent rhythm section provides a superb foil for Paul Banks's preposterous non-sequiturs (which, like Morrissey's, are a trip to sing along to), and there are a handful of transcendent moments: I still get a rush when the drums kick back in near the end of "PDA." Their subsequent albums have suffered from diminishing returns, but this one's a keeper.

2.

Another reason why I consider 2002 a transitional year is that I got a new iMac that summer and with it one of the most life-changing software applications I've known: iTunes. Nowadays the first thing I'll do upon buying a new CD is import it into iTunes, for ease of listening later. Back then, however, I didn't fully appreciate how awesome it would be to have my entire record collection at my instantaneous disposal, and so plenty of albums from around that time never made it onto the digital realm. Do Make Say Think's & Yet & Yet, a spacey, rhythmically jazzy Canadian post-rock record, was one of them. It's a challenge to re-evaluate something you haven't heard in several years (at some point I stopped listening to CDs altogether, and I had to dig this one out of a box in the closet), since you're never sure if your enjoyment is merely a result of enough time having elapsed to make it seem novel. But in fact, the reason I feel okay about hanging onto this album is because my recent listen wasn't surprising or revelatory at all. It was comfortable, like a lot of post-rock is for me. That expansive mix of shuffling drums and loping guitar lines seemed like something I could keep listening to for a while. So it, too, makes the cut.

3.

Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a good example of an album I probably wouldn't have bothered with but for an inclination that year to keep up with critically lauded rock music. I liked the twangy "Box Full of Letters," from A.M., which got some local radio play when I was in high school, but I thought about the band so rarely over the next few years that I was somewhat caught off-guard when friends from college began to praise Being There and Summerteeth. Here's the boring truth, though: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the best Wilco album and, despite demurrals from the likes of Robert Christgau, one of the best albums of 2002, as well. It's not because it's "weird," though I do dig Tweedy's postmodern poetry and Kotche's ramshackle pots-and-pans approach to percussion. The album's main virtue is as a stellar collection of well-crafted songs, and the best of the lot (the mournful "Jesus, Etc.") is in fact one of the most conventional. Wilco's next two records are worthwhile but flawed (however much I love Nels Cline's rippling guitar solos); given the choice, I'll stick with this one.

4.

Now here's where things get interesting. When ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's Source Tags & Codes was released, I readily cottoned to the band's noisy art-rock aesthetic, which seemed equal parts Sonic Youth ("How Near How Far") and Fugazi ("Baudelaire"). It's another record I hadn't heard in maybe five years, however, and when I tried it on again, I was struck by two things: one, how the songs still sparkled, and two, how I had unfairly maligned Sonic Youth's Murray Street. There's an attractive swagger on the Trail of Dead record, but in putting it at #4 I know I was also swayed by Pitchfork's 10.0 review (that and the review of Wilco a month later were the last two perfect scores the site would give out for new albums) and the album's undeniable ambition and cohesiveness, qualities I don't generally value as highly in today's mp3-inundated environment. Murray Street, meanwhile, seemed to fall off toward the end (my friend Emily claimed that "Plastic Sun" was the only cut she liked; I thought it was annoyingly inept) and overall didn't feel like the big best-in-10-years comeback many reviews had promised. I still think it's an imperfect record -- it mostly sounds like a rehearsal for the superior follow-ups, which carve diamonds out of that cool jammy haze -- but it's an imperfect record by one of my favorite bands of all time, and there are moments here (the tangled solos on "Rain on Tin," especially) that a band like Trail of Dead wishes it could match.

5.

In 2002 I didn't have anything against electronic music conceptually; I was just skeptical of what was played in clubs. In fact, I was thrilled to discover Múm's Finally We Are No One, since it grafted melancholic melodies onto a strain of otherwise icy, abstract IDM. I still think highly of "Green Grass of Tunnel" and "We Have a Map of the Piano," both delicately anchored by the bewitching Valtýsdottír sisters' ethereal vocals, but much of the album's second half now sounds tedious and formulaic; there's only so much lonely, sighing melodica one can take. These days I prefer Out Hud's S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D., which, dumb title notwithstanding, makes richer use of its "organic" materials (scratchy guitar, doleful cello) as counterpoint to its electronic beats. Plus, it's danceable. The band's second album is arguably stronger, but it lacks a single moment as gripping as the climax to "Dad, There's a Little Phrase Called Too Much Information," when that frantic twisted-metal synth-noise reaches a fever pitch, then simply falls away.

6.

As a fan of the Sea and Cake, I was naturally drawn to dashing guitarist Archer Prewitt's solo work, and Three didn't disappoint. More '70s orchestral pop than the stripped-down, jazz-inflected style of his usual band, the album was crammed with full-blown sunshine-filled hooks, and most tracks took a clever or unexpected zig-zag or two between start and finish. But I hardly ever listen to it today, and I think that's because, as impressive an achievement as it is, it often feels overstuffed and devoid of personality beneath the expertly constructed, complexly arranged songs. There's more life to be found in the Aluminum Group's Happyness, an equally effortless indie-pop production from fellow Chicago scenesters John and Frank Navin. After experimenting with a different producer for each of their three previous records, the Navin brothers decided to take charge themselves on this one (though John McEntire is credited as an engineer), and the result is probably the best record of their careers. These are sleek, minimalist synth-pop songs that seem tailor-made for iPod headphones (indeed, as of this album, the Navins replaced their live band with an iPod backing track), with lush, buoyant harmonies bespeaking love and loss. I honestly have no idea why I snubbed this at the time.

7.

I once wrote a treatise on emo in which I confessed that while never a full-fledged fan of the genre, I've dallied in it enough to find a few gems here and there. One such find that I somehow failed to mention was Pretty Girls Make Graves, whose 2002 debut, Good Health, wowed me from its first explosive note. It's a short album, just shy of a half-hour, but within that span it packs a lot of raw, infectious attitude, as Andrea Zollo's hopped-up snarls navigate a thicket of darting, swerving guitars. Since this sort of rough-hewn rock (emo or not) is still only an occasional pleasure of mine, and I've never even heard anything else they've done, I nearly surprised myself by deciding to keep it on the list, but recent listens sounded pretty rad. (Recommended, by the way, to those still mourning the demise of Be Your Own Pet.)

8.

In my first-ever blog post (April 2003, yo), I praised the early-decade trend of blending analog melodies and glitchy rhythms, a microgenre that Rob Mitchum, in a Pitchfork review, termed "lap-pop." The Múm album above fit my conception of the aesthetic, as did the Books' Thought for Food (which I also auditioned for this piece), but the best example I had was probably the Notwist's Neon Golden, a pristine, spacious chamber-pop album decorated with crushing, skittering beats. (For some reason a measure of wistfulness was also central to this hybrid sound, and the Notwist had it in spades.) I've gone back to this one on and off for the last few years, but hearing a track like "The One with the Freaks," in which Markus Acher's fragile vocals set up a sudden outbreak of warm alt-rock guitar, made retaining this album a no-brainer.

9.

Okay, I have to admit something now. I haven't re-listened to a lick of the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That's partly because it never made it onto my iPod, but it's mostly because I don't like it anymore and don't want to reconsider. At the time I even defended it to detractors who considered it a step down from The Soft Bulletin; as a fan since Clouds Taste Metallic, I was happy to see them forging new directions, especially the foray into drum'n'bass on "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21." But not long after, I saw the band in an auditorium with Beck and began to be irked by Wayne Coyne's dumbshit grin and huckster routine; later, what I realized about "Do You Realize??" was that it was unforgivably mawkish, and when the bland "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon" won a Grammy for best rock instrumental performance, it felt like an affront. In 2008 the band feels like a relic of my nothing-but-indie-rock past, and so I take a perverse pleasure in substituting them here with a bona fide pop star: Justin Timberlake. I've often said that "Cry Me a River" was the song that perked up my ears and taught me how to love Top 40 again (via an accidental encounter on the radio), but the first eight tracks of Justified -- from the dazzling disco workout "Rock Your Body" to the luxurious ballad "Take It From Here" -- are all so solid and engaging that they make up for the album's admittedly weak back half. Like Coyne, Timberlake's a natural showman, but he benefits from better songs.

10.

Lastly, I couldn't find much to quibble with on Enon's High Society, an album full of weird, tuneful nuggets of indie rock, some of which bear traces of singer John Schmersal's old spazz-rock band Brainiac, and others of which feature dance tempos and girlish vocals from Toko Yasuda. (My favorite cut is still the spiky "Natural Disasters.") Compared with the bulk of indie rock in 2002, Enon was plenty quirky, but if album covers are anything to judge by, let it be noted that a fun day-glo collage is one thing, but a cartoon of yourself in the form of a merman, playing the piano with your fins and the drums with your tail, is quite another. I didn't hear Max Tundra's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange until a couple of years after its release, after some glowing recommendations on ILM, but the scope of its sonic palette -- jumping from sped-up Casio jazz to spooky ambient burbles to a harmonium interlude that reminds me of Badly Drawn Boy -- drew me in immediately. Amazingly, Tundra also manages to weave in some strangely catchy melodies amidst all the hyperactivity. Six years later, and there's not much else that sounds like it.

* * *

So that's it. But there's no way I can rank these again without another prolonged bout of agony, so I'm going to be semi-scientific (and semi-bullshit) about it and list them in order of their iTunes play counts since mid-2003 (averaging out the number of tracks and not giving a shit that some of these weren't even in my library until a week ago):

1. Justin Timberlake, Justified*

2. The Aluminum Group, Happyness

3. Out Hud, S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.

4. Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

5. The Notwist, Neon Golden

6. Pretty Girls Make Graves, Good Health

7. Max Tundra, Mastered by Guy at the Exchange

8. Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet

9. Sonic Youth, Murray Street

10. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

*Yes, I've played "Rock Your Body" 44 times.

And for a sampling of each album, check out http://bestof2002.muxtape.com.

John M. Cunningham was a staff writer for Stylus Magazine and has recently written profiles of Timbaland and Miley Cyrus for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

µ-Ziq - Royal Astronomy

2008-08-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

µ-Ziq - Royal Astronomy
by Ian Mathers

If I wondered whether this generation's getting a proper grounding in the Smiths, I worry even worse if they’ve even heard of Mike Paradinas. An important component of my listening when I started getting into music was investigating what was then the “hip” “and new” trend of, well, in those days they called it electronica. Thanks to, and in conjunction with, my friend Pete, we started on Orbital and Underworld and then ventured further afield until we were digging up things that made Aphex Twin sound like pop music. Heady days, and half of the stuff we rhapsodized over appealed to us in terms of weirdness and excess more than anything else.

But not Paradinas’ records as µ-Ziq. One of the relatively few discs from that period that I still kept around, Royal Astronomy should particularly stand as a classic, one of the few proper LPs of what they used to call IDM that actually provides an interesting, intelligible listening experience today. Arguably better assembled and composed than even Richard D. James’ work (excepting maybe …I Care Because You Do), you can’t say Paradinas started many trends, but he did make the kind of album that should have ensured lasting repute.

Except he went away. Partly not his fault; after the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, etc. failed to supplant grunge or whatever as the new pop, the press visibly backed off on all flavours of “electronica.” Coupled with Paradinas’ adoption of a four-year wait time between albums after 1999, people just ceased talking about the guy anymore. Royal Astronomy received good reviews (the few I’ve found), but that’s never enough to keep anyone in the public consciousness (especially someone whose page at Astralwerks seems unduly proud of having sold “in excess of 60,000 world-wide” copies of his debut, before the days of file sharing). If we’re talking about greats of electronic music in the late 90s, you’ll hear James, probably Tom Jenkinson, teams like the Hartnoll brothers, possiblysome populists like Oakenfold (err, depending on who you’re talking to), but probably not Paradinas.

Obviously I feel that’s a shame, but why? After the memorably dense and creepy drum-and-bass soundscapes of 1997’s Lunatic Harness, Paradinas toured with Björk. Paradinas was influenced by her work with a string section during her live sets so much that he appended it to parts of his new album, as well as just heading in a relatively poppier direction. I'm guessing he also started listening to a lot of hiphop. Sound like an unholy brew so far?

The range of Royal Astronomy is best summed up by its first two tracks: “Scaling” starts the record all strings and bells and odd little synthesizer fillips, for four minutes it sounds unconcerned with any of the practical considerations that touch music made by humans. A timpani thuds away softly, the strings soar, the same little melodic figure calmly repeats—the result is sublime. Then “The Hwicci Song” dopplers into view with rapidly sawing strings and a more determined melody, only to be interrupted by turntable scratching (which does kind of sound like ‘hwicci’) and a sampled MC repeating “you want a fresh style, let me show you” until it frays. There’s a beat poking under it rather than just some percussion and it’s a fantastically busy one; Paradinas, like a lot of his peers, often suspended free-floating melodies above knotty, driving drum patterns, but does it so well he makes it fresh again.

“The Hwicci Song” alone is such a bizarre and yet pleasing collision of rough and smooth, frantic and calm, that it’s trouble to categorize. Much of Royal Astronomy does a similarly great job of combining these disparate elements: Paradinas’ experience in crafting complex drum-and-bass/abstract showcases, the strings and other orchestral elements, a canny pop sense, and rap’s sense of braggadocio and aggression.

The pinnacles of the latter are the two longest productions on the album, “The Motorbike Track” and “Burst Your Arm.” Both are hard as fuck and drop the strings entirely, deploying MCs to tell us, “That is some greedy-ass fake bullshit, know what I mean?” and “Keep on faking the funk” over wild rides of squelchy, distorted synthesizers and Paradinas’ hardest beats ever. They’re exhilaratingly brutal tracks, and only moreso given their surroundings.

One surprising peak is “Carpet Muncher”, a brief but incredible track that in three minutes shows off little bits of all of the facets Paradinas was working at, and is as close as this music can get to a killer pop. Elsewhere, Paradinas throws nearly everything at the wall—the horror movie soundtrack of “Gruber’s Mandolin,” the queasy synths of “World of Leather,” the reflective choirs of “56,” “Mentim”’s far-off explosions, the peaceful-village-on-acid video game “Slice”—and it all sticks. Part of this is cunning sequencing, opening with a string of immediate and ingratiating tracks, rationing out the harder/longer tracks over the course of the album to give some balance and heft to proceedings, throwing you just enough curves to keep you interested.

And then there’s Kazumi. A Japanese fan of Paradinas’ who mailed him a VHS tape (ah, nostalgia!) of herself singing to some of his tracks, a near impossible feat in the abstract. But she was good enough at it that he asked her to sing on a few tracks here. The closing “Goodbye, Goodbye” is nearly flawless, with Kazumi repeating the same line over and over on one of Paradinas’ most touching productions. It’s a perfect way to end the record and justifies the decision to enlist her help. But it doesn’t even come close to touching her other contribution to the album, the mighty “The Fear”.

I could write another entire essay just on how “The Fear” is one of the few truly great singles of its era and genre (as opposed to dancefloor tracks and the like) and dissecting why (plenty of which has to do with Kazumi’s performance, and plenty more to do with the music that Paradinas sets up around her), but you should really hear for yourself. It’s an utterly deranged moment of genius in the way only pop can be so weird, transmuting disparate, non-poplike attributes into something magnificent and lasting. “The Fear” comprises this strange woman muttering something you don't quite understand over a surprisingly bouncy, endlessly rising melodic figure, that develops into something else altogether and towers over its unlikely parts. It's always put me in mind of grand, heroic quests for some reason; both the feeling of setting out in a wide and dangerous world, and the bittersweet ending, when you've succeeded, but in the back of your mind regretting that it's all over.

Ian Mathers has written for Stylus Magazine, Village Voice 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.

Nas - Illmatic

2008-08-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

Nas - Illmatic
by Dan Weiss

Illmatic is good. I was supposed to write about why it’s grossly overrated, why it’s left me cold and bored since I first gave it a whirl on The Source’s suggestion, why it makes half an hour feel like a goddamn eternity. But I dug it out, and it didn’t do that. After years of trying to grok its unanimously accounted genius and coming up with total static, I put it on and it sounded both pleasurable and familiar. A good half of it I remembered pretty well: “NY State of Mind,” “Life‘s a Bitch,” “The World is Yours,” “Represent,” “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” I tried to assail it, but it’s just too damn solid. But I can’t praise it either; again, it’s just too damn solid. The worst thing I can say about Illmatic is that it is not a very tall hurdle for Nas to jump again, and that people are fucking crazy for deeming him the most chained-to-his-debut artist of, arguably the last twenty years, in rap or otherwise.

Not only every Nastradamus he releases, but also the Street’s Disciples get ludicrously compared to this pleasant piece of Tribe Called Quest-with-street-cred as if some detuned jazz pianos and universal cleverisms (“life’s a bitch and then you die,” “sleep is the cousin of death”) were impossible to attain over and over in hip hop, consistently well-rhymed and in under half an hour. It’s hardly as influential as its influencees claim though; when’s the last time a rapper showed the discipline for a nine song album? If Fat Joe or Foxy Brown, to choose some New Yorkers at random, have ever even attempted to imitate this thing, no one’s talking. And Nas himself ran from it as soon as he had the money. Not that artists are to be trusted, it’s just that no long-term rapper has aged with more grace and shown so little for it judging by his reviews. I’m not going to talk about Illmatic at all actually; it hardly merits a comment. The rhymes are consistently spirited, rarely notable; the themes buried in aesthetic, the aesthetic buried in half-hooks that don’t go the distance and are praised for their relative obscurity just because. Oh, and it’s not very fun to listen to. The bonus remixes are thankfully tacked onto the reissue, every one of them hammering its original to pieces, even “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” and especially “Life’s a Bitch.”

Illmatic is conveniently blank. It’s too cynical to be conscious, too weightless to be thug, not positive, not negative, happy, angry, aggressive, conflicted--anything. It’s whatever the novice rap scholar wants it to be, so long as he receives his course credit in return. But beyond that, don’t ask me what they do with it. Not quite made for the club or car or smoking weed or pep rallying a big battle; it’s for “Sittin’ in da Park” I guess. But sitting on the porch and reminiscing is fucking boring. I want to hear about Ghostface being chased with no shoes on, running by those people, not the bystanders shaking their head. You know, action.

There’s action in “Rewind,” on the album called Stillmatic but nothing like the retread its namesake suggests. There’s details for one thing, a full-fleshed story with swallowed nuts, holes in chests, phones to ears, and Gucci bags. Already that makes for an almost Ghost-worthy writeup. To top it off, it‘s told backward, right down to the dialogue (“Shoot don‘t please”). Of all the ink wasted dissecting what Nas is and isn’t doing right between 1996 to 2008, not a smear points out what a great novelty artist he is.

On later efforts, Nas actually leaves his comfort zone, and, as has been noted, achieves mixed results. The lows are never as egregious as sticklers say, and the highs are always better, and usually high-concept. Musically, he offsets his famous “dullness” with breaths of fresh air like Amerie’s Tears for Fears karaoke “Rule,” the Eurythmics rewrite “Street Dreams,” and two different takes on Iron Butterfly’s nasty, world-famous doom riff, the better of which excludes will.i.am. On “Bridging the Gap” he brought out his dad for the least sappy paternal love rap yet seen, namely because Olu Dara somehow makes a harmonica sound pimp. And who says he’s not having any fun? From a hit Sopranos interpolation to don’t-say-my-car’s-topless-say-the-titties-is-out to recounting which bitch used to eat his excrement and when (echoed in the similarly great “Nazareth Savage”: “I squeeze nipples like pimples to get the pus, get it?”) to goofing on his 9th grade book of rhymes (“Nah, that was weak there”) to playing hip hop detective, complete with Jimmy Caan inflection on “Who Killed It,” Nas has had bluntloads of fun that other guys never thought up over music he doesn’t get enough ear credit for. “Just a Moment” was especially gorgeous, and that’s from Street’s Disciple, the double that can fit almost three Illmatics inside it and is superior to the same amount, a rare case.

Nas also does more for the conscious crowd than Talib Kweli ever did. stic.man is fine and good at what he does, but if he’s ever gotten off a line like “I don’t even pick cotton out of aspirin bottles” by all means bring it to my attention. On his much ballyhooed new album he continues from 2004’s brutal “Coon Picnic (These Are Our Heroes)” to flog lots of obvious targets: Fox News, Katrina, racists, Uncle Toms, Bushies. The plan isn’t Dropping New Science, though, it’s Never Forget: If the targets were that easy they would’ve been stopped long ago. And unlike the grimmer and equally well-doing Roots, Nas thought to include two pro-Obama themes, both saner than Bono and one laced with Polow da Don ear candy. If those beats are too dull for you, just remember God’s Son is the one with James Brown and 2Pac unplugged, not Illmatic.

And then there’s The Lost Tapes. If you really need to reminisce on the porch, here’s your movie. Doo-rags and bloodied toilets, absentee fathers, kicking his mom in the stomach from the inside, accepting his limitations in four lines that haven’t stopped him yet: “No idea’s original/there’s nothing new under the sun/It’s never what you do/but how it’s done.” Four minutes of Lost Tapes are packed with streams of unreconstructed thought Illmatic could barely spread over 40, and these were outtakes. So yeah--Nas is inconsistent. But measure him against the future, please. He’s gone so much further than 1993.

Dan Weiss is an editorial intern at CMJ and the editor-at-large of What Was It Anyway. He enjoys questionable lifestyle choices in Brooklyn and has written for Village Voice, Stylus, Cleveland Scene, Philadelphia Inquirer and Lost at Sea.

Explosions in the Sky - The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place

2008-07-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Explosions in the Sky - The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place
by Lisa Oliver

“Post-rock” is about as descriptive a term as “walking upright.” And like “walking upright,” it’s occasionally far from accurate. Give “post-rock” a wide berth. In the same vein as “angular” or “meta,” “post-rock” serves a paradoxical purpose of inclusion and exclusion. Those in the know can smugly elevate status in their megalomaniac social hierarchy, feeling fine about not relating to the great unwashed masses that are blissfully unaware of the surrounding frowns.

Explosions in the Sky are for listening to when I’m engaged in something else: cleaning the den, snacking, having a phone conversation. It doesn’t require my full attention because it’s as captivating as a white tube sock with a hole in the toe. The hole’s there but I easily multitask beyond it as its nuisance level hums in the background. In fact, that’s a better way to describe it: EITS remind me of my neighbor’s air conditioner. I occasionally notice it, think I’d like one, then think of the expensive, then go back to cleaning, snacking, or whatever myriad bullshit task I’m doing.

Why not just call it what it is? Boring. Okay, it builds. But so does plaque and you don’t see indie folk getting all jacked up about that. Subtle but neither clever nor intricate, and it doesn’t require that much skill to just to pitch up and back down again. They stare at their instruments as if they’re faceting a diamond, but all that concentration is focused on is plunking an E string, and then re-plunking it to follow. If there are layers, it’s hard to tell; for a musical baklava, it lacks in buttery, nutty goodness.

At least Godspeed You! Black Emperor kicks out the jams muthafuckers and Mogwai belies the novelty of watching a foreign movie with no subtitles—you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s kind of pretentious, but you’ll ride along because it’s interesting. I’m not really a huge fan of either Mogwai or GY!BE, but I still hear engagement in what they’re doing.

“Hypnotic,” “elliptical,” and “delicate” are all common descriptors of this stuff, and with the right band I’m hardly an exception. But it takes a far more sophisticated aural palate than mine to use them in a complimentary way with these clowns. To really convey the sublime majesty of sustained frailty over repetition, you need to be really good at minimalism, autistic, or Brian Eno. Explosions in the Sky are none of these things. Explosions in the Sky are the instrumental version of the Ramones, riding their sound until the wheels fall off. Or until everyone forgets they put it on.

Lisa Oliver is a Columbia-educated writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Stylus, The Fly UK, Musicweek UK, Yahoo! Music, NME, Publishers Weekly, Domino and People.

Summer Jamz #9: Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock

2008-07-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

Download this mix: http://www.sendspace.com/file/58zmwc

Tracklisting:

1. Bandulu - Phase In Version

2. Delta Funktionen - Nebula

3. Two Lone Swordsmen - Turn the Filter Off

4. The Mole - Hey Girl (I Feel So Good)

5. Stephen Beaupre - Fish Fry

6. Sweet Exorcist - Clonk (Freebass)

7. Matthew Styles - We Said Nothing

8. Ernesto Ferreyra - The Last Shooter

9. Robert Hood - Master Builder

10. Slowhouse - Unknown Track 3

11. Teste - The Wipe (5 AM Synaptic)

If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix - he went so far as trying to convince me that ‘everything old is new again.’ And if that’s not a plea for a way out of a mid-life crisis, I don’t know what it is.

Old jokes aside, Hut gave me some nice surprises - “Phase in Version” is a little wonky Basic Channel rush. Todd crushes hard on this track - it probably doesn’t hurt that it was released on a Creation sub-label - and I can finally say I totally agree with him. Same goes for Sweet Exorcist. But those of us with Warp fixations already knew that. Maybe my favorite of Hut’s choices is Teste’s send-off of “The Wipe.” It’s pretty bleak for a summer jam, but the bassline nuzzles in just right.

If everything old is new again, then there’s only one constant in my selections and that’s keeping it as ephemeral as possible. Tracks like Matthew Styles’ “We Said Nothing” might be a nice little trick - detuned drums and an insistent analog synth screwdriving - but I don’t care how it ages. It’s perfect for right now. Same goes for the overwhelm-o-disco of Mole’s “Hey Girl (I Feel So Good).” But Stephen Beupre has spent the longest time as my instant-fix, from the spring deep into the summer. “Fish Fry” is nothing but modest - a slow accumulation of atmosphere, held down by just the vibrato of a meandering melody.

Ableton didn’t play nice so this “mix” is unmixed. It’s a paint-by-numbers, if you will, so make your own.

–Nate DeYoung

2008-07-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

What was it Anyway will update every Monday from now on, not Fridays.

-Ed

Summer Jamz #8: Theon Weber

2008-07-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Download this mix: http://www.sendspace.com/file/tll7no

Privately Owned

In high school, a little deranged, I called what most people call mix CDs “Grand Anthologies”, and gave each one an oblique title and liner notes written as if I had an audience of millions (if a particular Grand Anthology didn’t soundtrack my walk to school as well as I’d hoped, I’d refer in the notes for the next one to “disappointing sales”). The last Grand Anthology came out in 2004 - my senior year. It was called “Grand Anthology: The Last One”, so with this new one - which by the way is called “Privately Owned” - I join the ranks of Jay-Z, Michael Jordan, and Dick Nixon. Understand that I have since 2004 become clearer, neater, except when it comes to Grand Anthology liner notes. Because the liner notes for “Privately Owned” were written in a hurry, and I’m not sure they make sense. The album’s about summer. Just keep that in mind.

01 T H E W R E N S. surprise, honeycomb.

02 G H O S T F A C E K I L L A H. walk around.

03 T H E K I N K S. top of the pops.

04 O U T K A S T. gasoline dreams.

05 U 2. zooropa.

06 B L U R. on your own.

07 B I K I N I K I L L. i like fucking.

08 W H Y ?. fatalist palmistry.

09 T H E R U N A W A Y S. queens of noise.

10 O K K E R V I L R I V E R. plus ones.

11 T H E R O L L I N G S T O N E S. ventilator blues.

12 E M I N E M. my fault.

13 T R A V E L I N G W I L B U R Y S. margarita.

14 D A V I D B Y R N E. miss america.

15 R A D I O H E A D. palo alto.

16 F U N K A D E L I C. can you get to that.

17 T H E V E R O N I C A S. untouched.

18 Y E A H Y E A H Y E A H S. dudley.

19 T H E D A N D Y W A R H O L S. big indian.

20 L I L ‘ W A Y N E. sky’s the limit (ride 4 my niggaz)

SURPRISE, HONEYCOMB (1). I’m typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July, and what this song is about - besides picking up an old crush as accompanist for a murder spree - is summer restlessness, the desire to get something done, even if it isn’t constructive, and the (secondary) desire to get someone to do it with. But itches lead to impulses, and impulses don’t always pan out. Witness WALK AROUND (2), in which Ghostface, always the world’s tensest gangsta, shoots someone without quite meaning to, can’t get over it, and by the end is pacing back and forth, waving off suggestions and requests to chill, insisting he isn’t going crazy, and finally going back outside because “I can’t take this shit no more; it’s too hot”. Which it is.

Then again, sometimes things work out, transient or not; TOP OF THE POPS (3) chronicles the first half of what Ray Davies’ dry crankiness makes clear will end badly, but that’s what happens in summer: three months of cresting thrills and then it’s September. This song doesn’t end in September, though - it ends in, oh, early July, time to break out the hamburgers and camping permits and GASOLINE DREAMS (4), a flag-burning so severe (and festive!) we need ZOOROPA (5) to come down from it. Zooropa is all about being in Europe and looking at advertisements from behind sunglasses, which makes them look cool (polarization), and it’s probably best to keep the sunglasses on what with the light and the heat and the haze and ON YOUR OWN (6), which might make some kind of lyrical sense beyond Damon Albarn’s vague state-of-the-States, um, “tapestry” (Ross Perot is mentioned, and California, and the chorus - “my joy of life is on a roll” - appears to have been translated from something) but which doesn’t need to because vague tapestries are precisely the sort of thing to which we’re itching to pledge allegiance.

So: we’ve got a season and a country, now we need some ideology. It’s too hot to really work at this, so let’s go with I LIKE FUCKING (7), which along with “White Boy” and probably “New Radio” is the angry giggly capstone of Bikini Kill’s most attractive pyramid. The thing about this band is they were funny. Nobody remembers they were funny because we prefer it when feminists aren’t funny, but they were hilarious, contradicting and mocking and caricaturing themselves, slipping the real rightousness as much under the radar as they could considering they were called Bikini Kill and were always talking about rape. This song builds through two minutes of punchy polemic before concluding with BK’s most profound bit of sarcasm: I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, BABE - well I mean why wouldn’t you, but the answer to that’s all in the sneer, and the antidote for the sneer’s in the guitars. Drop from the heights of radical female pleasure to the depths of overarticulate male misery for FATALIST PALMISTRY (8), the song on this mix in which, though we talk a big game, a lot of us will be spending our summer: our ability to cope is directly proportional to how funny we can be about how screwed we are. This is a defense mechanism, but it’s a good one; it only falls to something like QUEENS OF NOISE (9), from the Runaways’ second album (1977), with guitars hissing from inside the postapocalyptic Haze the Stones pumped out of the fog machines at Altamont to shroud the Seventies. (I don’t think there were actually any fog machines at Altamont.) The Haze is what summer sounds like, always has been; not the Summer Of Love but whichever one Blue Oyster Cult meant. Everything inside it comes out diffused, flattened, hard to get close to. Summer lovers don’t cuddle like winter ones.

Let’s slow down for a second, then. PLUS ONES (10) is the same Haze scrubbed and mocked by some autumn asshole, remembering a garland of song titles and fiddling with them, and ah yes remember this song? that one? me too, pass the canapes while I don another sweater. It is impossible, in July, to imagine again being so sophisticated! Right now everything’s sweat and itches and barbarism, and let’s check back in with Ghostface who’s still trying to deal (geddit), and VENTILATOR BLUES (11), besides being from Exile On Main Street which understood the Haze better than any of the other albums caught in it, contains one of Mick Jagger’s wisest dumbest lines - “everybody needs some kind of ventilator” which doesn’t mean anyone’s going to get one, which is how you end up with messes like MY FAULT (12). Now this takes place in the spring, expressly, but only because “take” rhymes with “break” and “break” goes with “spring”; pretend for a second that “take” rhymes with “vacation” - which it almost could, really, and Eminem’s supposed to be a professional; why isn’t he on top of this - and it makes more sense, because stupid guys getting stupid girls to do stupid things at stupid parties is really a summer-vacation thing; spring break is when stupid guys get stupid girls to do stupid things on TV. So this girl’s taken all these mushrooms (which Em totally did mean to give her, and being so upfront about this in the first verse and such an equivocating coward about it in the chorus is why he’s funny) and she’s gonna die, and the thing is, you don’t stay at these parties, not unless whatever’s gone wrong really is your fault - you leave poor Marshall Mathers panicking in the corner over the maybecorpse of the girl he maybemeant to give mushrooms, and you’re back into the Haze, and the Traveling Wilburys, old navigators themselves of its slipstreams and dead spots, are playing MARGARITA (13), one of the oddest songs ever written. Fades in, rambles, fades out; Dylan’s probably freestyling; Tom Petty gets a closing line delivered so much like a joke it actually becomes one. “She wrote a long letter on a short piece of paper”. You’re home - the party’s over - and is it August already?

MISS AMERICA (14) is - well, pick your poison. A) the girl you’re chasing all three months; B) like those other America songs we played, but funnier, meaner; C) just that song where David Byrne says both “fuck” and “I’ll be your teenage fanclub”. Whichever you choose you can dance to it (you!) and as we coast nervously towards September sarcastic songs about girls who are also sociopolitical frameworks are the kinds of ironies we prefer with our iced teas. (”American Woman”, by the way, has the Haze, but I don’t like it as much.) Speaking of which here’s Radiohead, who never met a sociopolitical framework they didn’t want to stand next to making scary faces, sunning themselves in dystopian PALO ALTO (15), enjoying Orwell’s Indian summer. This is what the Haze sounded like in 1997. In 1971 it didn’t sound like Funkadelic because Funkadelic weren’t into haze (they more dug earth), which is why CAN YOU GET TO THAT (16) is here - as respite, and also because, remember, it’s the last week of August by now, and there’s barely any Haze any more, just weird chilly winds and a little bit of sighing less-than-green-ery, and someone’s making preparations for the coming separation, and are we about to hit the comedown? The last four tracks, the last four days.

UNTOUCHED (17), then - by a lover, by the accomplishments our serial killer dreamt of back on track one, by Miss America, but not by those Goddamn strings which really aren’t going to leave you alone, or the grasping useless wistfulness you and the Veronicas can’t shake. You’ve got wet eyes now, letting go of things, and so does my favorite active band, whose DUDLEY (18) is a nursery rhyme about loss, hot cold season gonna sink in my sweat, God I wish it was still as hot as it used to be, that the days were as long. There’s barely enough sunlight now for platitudes and summations. BIG INDIAN (19) has both - Polonial hand-me-downs from figurative fathers, end-of-song triumphalism, and OH we just hit September. It’s not summer anymore. So feel free to pretend this last song doesn’t exist. But you’re going to need it, like nuts, for the winter. You’re going to need its braggadocio - so absurd it’s noble - and its sense of apocalypse tastefully quieter than its sense of self-importance. You’re going to need to remember, like it says on laminated flyers in elementary school lunchrooms - they can’t print this stuff if it’s not true - SKY’S THE LIMIT (20). While you’re here why don’t you boast along with Lil’ Wayne - birds don’t fly without your permission. It isn’t true, of course. They’re flying south. Go ahead, let them. And hunker down.

Summer Jamz #7: Andrew Gaerig & John M. Cunningham

2008-07-16T23:41:00.000-07:00

Download this mix: http://www.sendspace.com/file/izx220

For this mix we focused on the theme of "daydreams," the kind you have while gazing out the window on the last day of school or while absent-mindedly dipping your toes into wet sand on the beach. We went back and forth, each drawing inspiration from the other's selections, which led to some nice surprises along the way. Pour yourself a drink that requires an umbrella, kick off your flip-flops, and take a listen.

1. Allá, “Un Dia Otra Noche”

The Chicago-based psychedelic pop band Allá worked on their debut album Es Tiempo for six years (I heard some early mixes, courtesy of a mutual friend, way back in 2003) but chose just the right time to release it: the beginning of summer. On this, the opening track, the busy arrangement—anchored by a restless Swedish string section—threatens to swallow up the whole tune, but Lupe Martinez’s dreamy vocals keep it as light as a swiftly floating cloud. [JC]

2. Kid Creole and the Coconuts, "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby"

Strut. Buy new hat. Strut with new hat. Wonder aloud if that too expensive "Africa '76" t-shirt from the too expensive t-shirt shop is 1. too expensive and/or 2. unacceptable on a white boy. But what if the hat matches the t? Ponder. [AG]

3. Shuggie Otis, “Aht Uh Mi Hed”

Like Stevie Wonder, Shuggie Otis was a 1970s soul-music polymath, playing every last instrument on Inspiration Information. I particularly like his use of a primitive drum machine, though, which lends yearning songs like this an intimate homemade feel. [JC]

4. Serge Gainsbourg, “Daisy Temple”

What happens when a narcissistic French crotch-scratcher rings Sly & Robbie and they take him exactly as serious as he needs to be taken, composing rhythms out of those whirl-around party favors and … bass guitar. The latter of which is pretty standard, granted. I hope these backup singers are well-compensated. [AG]

5. Calle 13, “La Jirafa”

Calle 13 is nominally a reggaetón duo, but this 2006 single, with its lush strings, conversational flow, and romantically surreal lyrics (one is translated as “I want to wrap you in a tortilla”), is miles away from the gruff shouts of someone like Daddy Yankee. As the video makes clear, it’s also perfect for lying in the grass and conjuring up some sun-fueled fantasies. [JC]

6. Rancid, “Hoover Street”

I once suggested to my high school girlfriend that Rancid’s “Old Friend” should be “our song,” which was shot down about as fast as mom used to shoot down “chocolate cake” as “our breakfast.” “Hoover Street” ain’t that song, but it has always elicited my most churlish Tim Armstrong mumble-alongs. [AG]

7. Stephen Malkmus, “Dynamic Calories”

This breezy miniature (from the Pig Lib bonus EP) finds Malkmus asking us to imagine ourselves in an ‘80s underground rock band that never quite made it, a whimsical conceit that nonetheless retains a measure of wistfulness. [JC]

8. Ugly Casanova, “Things I Don’t Remember”

Funny how attaching a good hook makes absurdum palatable. Like if Billy B. had a little more Alex Chilton in him I might’ve made it more than 30 pages through Naked Lunch. Either way, best use of “alligator” in a song since Anthem of the Sun. [AG]

9. Pinback, “Concrete Seconds”

I’m kind of a sucker for precise, crystalline indie pop (there’s a playlist on my iTunes called Clean Guitar), and Pinback does it better than pretty much anybody (though the Sea and Cake are also right up there). Once they’ve locked in to a groove, the effect becomes almost trance-like. [JC]

10. Phoenix, “Lost & Found”

Listen for the shrugging “hmph” before “You don’t know what you’re doing” and the first chorus. For those days I wish I was younger, Frencher, and cockier and my friends were younger, Frencher, and fuller of shit. [AG]

11. The High Llamas, “Go to Montecito”

Sean O’Hagan catches a lot of flak for aping late-era Beach Boys, and recent High Llamas albums have proven that he sometimes has trouble crafting songs that transcend their retro details, but “Go to Montecito” frames its melancholic summer’s-end harmonies within a bossa nova that I find impossible to resist. [JC]

12. Gilberto Gil, “Mamma”

The opening syllabic nonsense might be the daydreamiest bars of music ever recorded, in a Highlights magazine kind of way. Then dude goes on about setting off and leaving mom behind, which, come to think of it, is exactly the sort of daydream you might have when you’re part of Highlights magazine’s target demographic. [AG]

13. The Avalanches, “Two Hearts in 3/4 Time (Edit)"

Rarely have I heard a voice more weightless than the anonymous one sampled here: the descending pattern of those la-la-las even suggests a lazily drifting feather or leaf. Completely inconsequential, and totally beautiful. [JC]

14. Low Motion Disco, “Things Are Gonna Get Easier”

One of those remixes where it sounds like your vinyl is skipping in a really cool way, a way that your vinyl never actually skips after you drop it on the ground. Saying we need more edits like this is akin to saying we need more summers. Well, of course. [AG]

Summer Jamz #6: Kevin J. Elliott & Jeff Siegel

2008-07-16T01:05:00.000-07:00

Download this mix: http://www.sendspace.com/file/qrmab7

It's Not The Heat

01. Jean-Claude Vannier - L'Enfant Au Rayaume Des Mouches
02. Meth Teeth - To My Good Friend
03. Royal Trux - I'm Ready
04. Amon Duul II - Archangels Thunderbird
05. Ruth - Mon Pote (Version Courte)
06. The Wedding Present - Spangle
07. The Congos - Congo Man
08. Depth Charge - Blue Lipps
09. Gilberto Gil - Sai Do Sereno
10. Circle ft. Verde - Gerde
11. Cut Copy - Far Away
12. Depeche Mode - See You
13. DOP - Foly
14. Nomo - All the Stars
15. Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating
16. Part Timer - Only Natural
17. The Olivia Tremor Control - Jumping Fences
18. Vivian Girls - Wild Eyes
19. Natural Snow Buildings - Gone
20. The Pizzas - Hideous Fashion
21. Sian Alice Group - Motionless
22. Cristina - Drive My Car (Long Version)
23. Frank Black - Headache
24. Jack Rose - Kensington Blues

Here in greenhouse NYC, our only real theme is "sweltering," so this mix is a reflection of soupy, unrelenting humidity. A heat mirage. A little dancing, but not too much, because we must lie down and rehydrate. Ready the sweat-bucket.
--Jeff Siegel

This mix started from my end -- where in the fickle Ohio heat and rain and wind, I'm forced to celebrate summer with a "home" vacation. That is, with the price of gas and food and alcohol going through the fucking roof, trying to conjure up a seasonal fever dream is confined to the basements, backyards, and dive bars of Columbus. So excuse the randomness, the scruffy edges, the teenage nostalgia. I don't have beaches or skyscrapers or foreign flights to pad my imagination this year, only scuzzy, cigarette stained hangovers, bong rips, and lo-fi escapism. Jeff did a wonderful job juxtaposing my trash heap -- giving us the soaring solar to my claustrophobic nocturnal.
--Kevin J. Elliott

Summer Jamz #5: Stewart Voegtlin & Jayson Greene

2008-07-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

Download this mix: http://www.mediafire.com/?dmyjnlwnpup

KISS "Love Gun"
RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS, “Love Comes in Spurts”
AC/DC, “Rising Power”
ROLLING STONES, “Stray Cat Blues”
LED ZEP, “Lemon Song”
BUZZCOCKS, “Orgasm Addict”
STOOGES, "Shake Appeal"
Nirvana – “Moist Vagina”
ZZ TOP, “Pearl Necklace”
GHOSTFACE KILLAH, “Wildflower”
FLIPPER, “Sex Bomb”
LIZ PHAIR, “Flower”
SIR LORD BALTIMORE, “Aint Got Hung On You”
PJ HARVEY, “Sheela Na Gig”
SOUNDGARDEN, “Big Dumb Sex”
WEEZER, “Tired Of Sex”
MC5, “I Want You Right Now”

Threaten to follow a question with more of the same.

Q: Chastity? Q: In the full-tilt swing of summer?

Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran? When the cheep swill, greasy food and sticky gropes marked the day-to-day as hounds pissin’ upon hydrants? Shit, I know I did. Shoulda, woulda, coulda kept at bay with lock & key. A big motherfuck to camp, stuck-inside jobs or dreaded “college resume building” interning. It was odd-job-ad-hoc that allowed that ol’ initial momentum, then the arc. And as logically follows: the denouement—all limp, all feverish, all photo flash instant, 1,000 words past.

Never really gave much thought to what was playing on the hi-fi in those swipe-the-ticklers-français from the Rx counter. Never really cared.

Guesses are mostly good: A mélange of Metal and Anthem Dandied? —Voivod and Slayer. —Roxy Music and Bowie. —Maybe the Velvets. They all “worked.” Sound-tracking the pre-party partying, a mixtape crammed into a mom’s minivan and wailed away while nitrous oxide brought ye knuckle-draggers one less grunt closer to Quest for Fire. Agh! Agh! The admitted—no, really—the brandished Weltanschauung was all cock and cunt and some things “worked” better than others.

The 70s worked mostly for me. A taut opalescent boil of Heh-Vee Psych grime slicked with STP und jissom, inflated with self-worth, self-loathing, an impending eruption just a motherfuckin’ given. Plant & Page, Stanley & Simmons, Kramer & Smith, et cetera, et cetera. Here was majik, real check-the-tophat stuff. No bunnies. No bullshit. But we were mostly worried we’d find gods. —Perhaps the whole fuckin’ pantheon. Dive into that dark headfirst. The most unusual suspects for more of the same summer sportfuckin’. Nothing so different from handjobs-to-blowjobs-to-vaginal-to-anal. (Incidentally, I recall a particularly unsavory memory involving Miracle Whip as lubricant…)

What is it supposed to say? Why were we playing this shit and why must we continue to do so? These are questions best left unanswered. There’s just not enough mystery nowadays anyway.

And so, anywho, the boudoir ambient: Kiss wields the pistol of ess-eeee-eks and its inevitable entelechy: Trouser snake as shapeless Platonic Form. A quality never agreed upon, since it seemed to never change—only reoccurring in different gradations of strength and weight. Like the Washington Monument’s obelisk erect. The great phallic wand of megadeath, its palpitating apex revived and died a billion times. Might as well not exist: Plant’s paean to his prick. Like the Sumerian calendar. Like fuckin’ Vico. Like the rouge of Eve that clouds as a spoon of currant jam in a tumbler of tap. Oh, Iggy Stooge: ass-shaker of ill repute, butt-plugged and dolled-up for the stage, vein-tapping into Little Richard and all the other folks’ boogie-woogie pathos he managed to rip off to excellent effect. Then there’s The Top channeling the pre-pubescent white boy blues for boys who never had none of neither. There are not-so-hidden connections. “Pearl Necklace.” Speak it to yourself. Write it out. Say it aloud. It comes with a single breath, flung from the palate as ah bucket of gullshit. Say it again. Sheesh. Like a loogie. Each vowel upon a raft of flan-hued snot… There are nudged winks as plentiful as locker-room underarm farts. Remember: The same river, always the same river. —And yet always different water. Then there’s Flipper, with the most un-Flipper bit ever branded upon quarter-inch tape, nothing less than the throne of Mighty Egypt left warm for the next pair of Pharaoh buns. Smarmy gear-headed come-ons from rock’s community chesta has-beens the Lord Balt and then some oh-so superlative lyrics from Chrissy Cornell. To wit:

JAYSON GREENE: BIG DUMB SEX!!!!! Fucking awesome. The last time I heard "Louder Than Love," my hair was cut into a bowl shape and I had braces.

STEWART VOEGTLIN: You are insane. That song is so fucking dumb. But so incredibly wonderful. I saw them on the LTL tour, opening for VOIVOD.

JAYSON GREENE: Wait, so why am I insane? We agree on "Big Dumb Sex," right? That's it's awesome?

STEWART VOEGTLIN: Your bowl cut and braces. That's insane. Yeah we are in ACCORD.

And so The Motor City Five pull it slow(ly) into the station and leave us wonderin’ who ever thunk the Whip wuz dressing for salad greens after all. A sketch, roughshod and rapid. Not so sweeping. Not so “encapsulating.” But what is? And on the fly? Surely not.

11:19 AM me: I didn't know we had to actually "write" stuff for this. WTF.
11:20 AM I have ZERO time to do this. Should we just submit our e-mails... Hahaha.
Jayson: We could both write 150 words or so?
I could probably scratch it out tonightish
11:22 AM me: Jesus...
OK. Maybe. MAYBE.
11:23 AM Jayson: write three sentences about wanton lust, and I'll write three or so about the slimy underbelly easy
11:25 AM me: Yeah. Sounds good.

It does. Three sentences metastasized as they always do. So. As Heraclitus offered, the gift of what is, is not. Put it all together and drink it deep(ly). I did/do.

[Stewart Voegtlin]

“Three sentences about wanton lust.”

This was Stew’s assignment, and he took it about as far into the gnarled, dirt-clump roots of his humid brain as he could. As a result, we have the above magnificent testament to tantalizing mythical hoodoo: I could spend eleven months in a cabin in the Montana woods, drinking nothing but absinthe and reading the collected works of Bangs, Meltzer, Faulkner, and Hubert Selby, Jr., with only a blotter of acid and multiple bags of irregular pork rinds for sustenance, and not produce a single sentence that radiated that level of grizzled insanity.

So let’s, instead, quote Nick Tosches, on The Killer, Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis, whose shoes were once smudged by the reverent lips of a supplicant John Lennon, who once shot his bass player in the chest with a .357 Magnum, who in 1976 arrived impromptu at the gates of Graceland armed with a .38-caliber Derringer at 3:07 a.m., yelling for Elvis:

“Of all the rock-and-roll creatures, he projected the most hellish persona. He was feared more than the rest, and hated more too. Preachers railed against him, mothers smelled his awful presence in the laundry of their daughters, and young boys coveted his wicked, wicked ways … Believe it: Jerry Lee Lewis is a creature of mythic essence, a Set, a Baptist Dionysus aflame with glorious cowardice and self-killing guilt.”

There ain’t no more to say: this mix finds the queasy, certainly fluid-slicked middle ground between Robert Plant, exulting at length about the juice running down his leg, to the leering, self-punishingly sexless rictus of Richard Hell, mirthlessly mocking you for buying into the brief glow of good will that follows the few minutes immediately after orgasm.

[Jayson Greene]

Summer Jamz #4: Ian Mathers & Paul Scott

2008-07-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

Download this mix: http://www.mediafire.com/?ubxavz2ny20

For our summer mix, Paul Scott and I decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: I hate summer. Paul decided to take a stab at changing my mind, and so we volley competing versions of the hottest summer at each other along with the songs. We also got started a bit late, and after jokingly discussing which one of us would get to including a Los Campesinos! track first, I got the ball rolling by declaring “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” the opener. Events preceded, or degenerated, from there. --Ian Mathers

01. Los Campesinos! – “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” (4:29)

02. Ola Podrida – “Jordanna” (4:50)

Paul:

Okay, so, the thing is, I'm a little drunk, but we have to get moving on this; in addition that particular Los Campesinos! track (*key lyric: "When the small picture's the same as the bigger picture, you know that you're fucked" - which is pretty much the way I feel whenever the heat sets in, sadly), I mostly tend to retreat to slow, draggy, oppressive music this time of year. My bedroom doesn't have a window and as a result the heat in here is brutal - something like Ola Podrida's self titled debut suits me best right now because on the one hand it doesn't require any real heat on my part in loving it, and partly because it sounds like it was recorded in an oppressively hot room. So I would kind of like to lead off with “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” and its desperation (that’s me when we get our first intolerable days every year!), and then go from there. Here's "Jordanna", by Ola Podrida – definitely the next track I'd think of putting on the mix. He sounds pretty exhausted, really.

Ian

03. Saint Etienne – “London Belongs to Me” (3:58)

Ian

This Ola fellow, he sounds pretty beat. Is this fear of summer a Canadian thing or just a you thing? Over here in England the summer is a weird, unpredictable thing. May was gorgeous but now halfway through June the sky seems to be permanently grey. It's funny you say you have a bedroom with no windows. Mine has, let me count them, four. The next song for the mix is a counterpoint to the heavy, heavy sounds of Ola Podrida. Saint Etienne's "London Belongs to Me" sounds so light that on a couple of occasions it almost floats away. It captures the feeling of getting the tube on a warm summer night and being hit by a blast of cool air rushing its way up from somewhere deep underground. It feels like coming up without touching any kind of chemicals. It feels like someone has opened a window, let the light in, let some cool air in. In its own blissed out way – even as London skies, in their usual way, turn to granite – says "this is gonna be the best summer ever".

Paul

04. Spacemen 3 – “So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)” (2:39)

P,

Fear is the wrong word – that implies some level of the unknown. I know what summer here in Guelph is, and I fucking hate it. It is indeed unpredictable – it was cold enough here last night that I needed a hoodie! – but we can look forward to (and have already experienced one of) these periods of just blastingly intense heat and humidity. I forget if you guys use proper temperatures or what, but with humidity it can hit 45 degrees or more here, outside (to say nothing of my room – that's around 115 for the Americans, by the way), and given that we're also used to seeing temperatures dip into the -40s with wind chill in the winter (which works out to around -40, funnily enough), suddenly having that amount of heat trapped between the blue-but-solid sky and the fucking pavement is just ridiculous. It also doesn't help matters that I am, as John Cunningham once told me, a pale, easily burned motherfucker. Standing in the direct sun for even a minute makes me feel like my skin is being cooked off, it's ridiculous. I liked that St. Etienne track, but it's like you say – because it summons up not summer for me but that blast of cool air that means a fan, air conditioning, a cold snap. The other solution, of course, is to go swimming – as Jason Pierce sings in my next pick "I just want a river, just want the ocean." And it's called "So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)," which is thematically appropriate at least. The slow motion crawl of the track makes me think of summer, Pierce sounds pretty oppressed, and while he may be talking about heartbreak, when they sigh out "so hot...." I can easily turn the song into a lament for a Guelph summer, at least in my head.

I

05. Lindstrom – “Music in My Mind” (4:51)

I,

I think, in a sense, I agree with you. Summer, as an idea, sometimes seems oppressive. The feeling that just because of a metrological shift one should suddenly be happy. I like the Spacemen 3 song, did J Spaceman use that tune again on a Spiritualized album? I certainly know a version of it. Yes, it's track 4 on Pure Phase, that's one hell of an album. Opiated, beautifully sad summer jamz from a parallel universe. Enough of this heartbreak! Let's have some disco. Yet even here, amongst the flashlight and explosions, we can't quite let go. Lindstrom's "Music In My Mind" is certainly a lot more lithe and – let’s be honest – sexier than J Spaceman's blues. But, it's fueled by the same fever. It's there, just under the surface, somewhere between the beat and bass. The vocalist, she sounds cool but listen closer: "your eyes kill me": she seems to be surrendering. There is no cold snap here, no summer breeze: the beat goes on. You can't argue with caprice of metrology. Here, as oppression and exultation entwine - much as it did for J Spaceman - we see, sometimes, summer makes masochists of us all.

P

06. Scannerfunk – “Cosy Veneer” (6:39)

P,

Well shit, don't let me convert you or anything... and yeah, I forgot Jason recycled that one, but he did. I think I prefer this version, actually, and it does make a surprisingly good segue into the slinky as hell "Music in My Mind." Damn, that tracks burns – but in a way that makes me think of summer nights, which I much prefer to summer days. It's a bit cooler, the sun can't burn you – but some nights it's still sticky and close and you just want to jump out of your skin. Or at least I do. But you can't always manage that, so the night just goes a bit hazy instead, everything slides, indistinct, you wake up the next morning not quite sure where the hours went. That's the kind of night where I pull out the Scannerfunk record, precisely because of tracks like "Cosy Veneer." Fuzzy, shifting, low key - it makes a decent afterparty for the Lindstrom track, but it also takes us deeper into the muggy night, away from all that inconvenient solar radiation. You can still feel that heat, though, and it even sounds a bit mournful in places.

I

07. Air France – “Collapsing at Your Doorstep” (4:34)

I,

Through the night and out the other side. I've been working night-shifts. The sun starts to rise between four and five: if you're in a negative frame of mind Radiohead's "Lucky" sort of captures it. That guitar part mimicking the first oppressive break of the horizon, the histrionic proclamation of "it's going to be a glorious day", lacquered with bile: it's almost apocalyptic in its portent, a summer morning recast as the rapture. But, I'm younger than that now. Yes, the sun is rising, yes it may be oppressively hot later in the day, but for now it's perfect. It's not too hot yet, the sky is turning from grey to deep blue and the cynics have yet to get out of bed. "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" by Air France captures this feeling exquisitely. "It's all like dream" a little looped voice chirps and it is. It's indistinct yet somehow lucid, there is a certain clarity you just don't get at any other time of day. Then the main theme swoops in, the curtains are flung open, the horizon breaks: "this place is amazing". You can say "it's going to be a glorious day" and mean it. You can go to bed now safe in the knowledge you've seen the best part of the day.

P

08. Stina Nordenstam – “Crime” (5:41)

P,

Yeah, Air France captures that poignant clarity of the early morning quite well, I'd say - but I tend to see that time of day because of insomnia, not the night shift (you're making it harder and harder for me to play the curmudgeon, but I'll do my best). "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" works perfect for going to sleep that night, but what about when you get woken up an hour later and have to go to work? Strangely, it's the kind of precisely placed minimalism you find in Stina Nordenstam's "Crime" that most sums up how my head feels at those times, waiting for the sun to hit (hmm... some Slowdive later, maybe?). Except for the opening "Whatever made me cold, it's gone now" nothing in "Crime" speaks directly to the summer, but there's this desire, the obverse of Thom Yorke's plea for invisibility in "How to Disappear Completely": "You know it wasn't really me, you know I wasn't really there" – please, just forget that you saw me. Let me stay down here, out of the sun. The necessary, for me, postscript to "this place is amazing," at least when it's muggy out.

I

09. Christopher Cross – “Sailing” (4:17)

I,

That song is cold. Really cold. There's a motif at the beginning that reminds me, somewhat, of Christopher Cross's "Sailing", albeit with all the blood, all the warmth drained out. So, lets put some colour back in. It's cool but it's not cold. It's a groovy kind of melancholy; this man is, as someone once said, swimming in sadness. He's alone out on that endless ocean with nothing but his memories and the breeze. Where Stina shuts the curtains across and hides from the heat, Christopher – the not-so-rugged-individualist – slips on a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of loafers and sets sail. Perhaps, instead of curling up and hiding from those rays, the trick is to face them head on, curls those fingers into a fist of pure emotion, pour a margarita and man up. In the smoothest possible way, of course.

NB: Please see the following video for more on the creation of this piece of music.

P

10. Steely Dan – “Time Out of Mind” (4:13)

P,

Using Christopher friggin' Cross to chide me in terms of 'manning up' is a bold move indeed, and if "Sailing" wasn't so smooth I might even take offense. Of course, as the supplementary material shows, even that song isn't all sunshine and puppies. It did make me think of Michael McDonald, though, and Michael McDonald and summer make me think of one thing: Steely Dan. Especially Gaucho, their most "summery" album (because it's their LA album, and I've never been there so in my mind it's always summer down there). McDonald only provided backing vocals on one track there, the heroin ode "Time Out of Mind," but what backing vocals! Becker and Fagen's evident relish at making the smoothest possible backing for what are fetid, misanthropic tales of human folly and suffering is kinda funny - at least if you're still drawing those curtains, like I am. Perfect for air conditioned night clubs where everyone disappears to the bathroom twice an hour.

I

11. Bill Bragg – “Lovers Town Revisited” (1:18)

I,

It's getting so smooth here, it's almost decadent. I never suggested "Sailing" was "all sunshine and puppies", it's about dealing with the pains of summer not denying them. Now, another coping strategy. We're still in the club, or perhaps outside, but we're a hell of a long way from L.A. Billy Bragg's "Lovers Town Revisited" crackles with a parched, nervous energy. The shards of solo electric guitar sound like the tense heat of a summer Saturday night in some provincial British town centre. This is not the Dan's world of coke and hipcats, it's ale and skinheads. And, there in the centre of it all, the young William Bragg. He's weighing up his chances, just before he makes the great leap. He really is looking for a new England, but the savagery of a Summer night – "boys outside preaching genocide" indeed – is almost enough to make him just forget it, just turn and run away from it all. It's the antithesis of The Smiths "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others", yeh it's the same shitty provincial Britain but Bragg wants, though he knows it is perhaps impossible, to "save the world". Unlike moz though, he is unwilling to just give up, but at this moment he could just give in. It's a sublime moment of faith in doubt. These things, Ian, are sent to try us.

P

12. Jason Molina – “Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go” (6:40)

P,

Really? Christopher Cross is sailing into some sort of yacht rock fantasyland, not sure how he's dealing with the pains of summer! Bragg definitely is, though. Such a sublime depth of effort and pain packed into less than 90 seconds. But if I think of a man and an electric guitar, standing outside of a bar after a fruitless night with a stifling, moist heat in the air, I'm more likely to turn to Jason Molina and his claustrophobic solo album Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go. It was recorded by dint of the man hiding himself away in a small studio for three days, and you can tell; the subtly cataclysmic title track alone makes it feel like it's at least thirty degrees in the room. It's actually a little less sparse than the rest of the album, what with the muted drum machine in the background. For about a week here, between the punishing heat and the way rapidly rising gas prices made our broke asses unable to travel anywhere (oh, for a mass transit system like the UK's!), this summer felt like the end of our comfortable way of life, in a small, overly dramatic way. Which is exactly what this song feels like.

I

13. The Jazz Butcher – “Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)” (4:58)

14. Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – “Casino Royale Theme (Main Title)” (2:38)

15. Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – “Casino Royale Theme (Vocal)” (2:21)

I,

Maybe C. Cross isn't really coping, but he's dealing with it. Perhaps, it's only denial. The Molina track is making the walls close in just listening to it. Heavy, heavy vibes. The skies over London have gone grey and I'm blaming you. If there's one thing that typifies the reality of the English summertime it's afternoons like this, wasted holidays spent indoor looking out as the rain drizzles down. That's probably why our beaches fill on days the average Australian or Californian would describe as "a bit on the chilly side". It's like our national football team (soccer to you guys?); we don't win very often – sometimes we even fail to qualify – so even the smallest victory becomes a momentous triumph. It's that same spirit that fuels The Jazz Butcher's "Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)", sure he has no truck with the Hollywood ideal of summer ("Oh, look- in California, everyone's got a swimming pool in their backyard / Well-Me and Max and Davey Jones- we think you ought to get out there and stop it") but he's still hoping, still reaching for something. It's the archetypical eighties indie tune: jangly guitar, proto-shoegaze swirly guitar, organ, bouncy momentum and most of all a lyric that speaks of a desire to connect. It comes from the same place as The Smiths' "Ask". Sure, Mozza may have been "spending warm summer days indoors" but he was still "writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl Luxembourg". In their own wayward ways the OG indie kids were after pretty much the same things as everyone else in the universe: it was just that the thoughtless "fuck you" hedonism of the yuppies and thatcherites was giving contentment a bad name. It's a song about getting out there, a song that put its faith in the theory that thousands of people have got to be O.K. He's thwarted by distance, by reality - but he's putting the words out there, 'cos well someone might just listen. It may be using 7 inches of plastic, fanzines and the letters page of the NME - no internet in those desperate, desperate times- it doesn't matter, it's all communication, just different ways of getting out there. Meeting people can be easy! And hell, if not having to put on three layers makes it easier to get out there, then all the better!

Perhaps I have convinced you summer ain't so bad, perhaps not. Hell, the amount of sunny days I've spent indoors. Doesn't really bear thinking about y'know. Not that you have to go outside to have fun. I mean wasting Bank Holidays watching Bond films you've seen a few hundred times before isn't the worst way to spend time. And, with that rather ungainly bit of shore-horning out of the way, my final song: Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass performing Burt Bacharach's "Casino Royale Main Theme". A piece of music that very possibly drove some hepcat to invent the words "groovy" and "swinging" simply to describe the riotous collision of easy listening kitsch and blockbuster bombast. I've included both the instrumental version and the none-more-ridiculous vocal version performed by Mike Redway. After all that heat, angst and indie moping it's only fitting to end with a track that manages to be at once sublime and not in the least bit serious.

P

P,

James Bond films! Herb Alpert! Herb Alpert doing the theme to a comedy James Bond film! I've tried hard to be the negative one here, but I can't say no to that. Well, your music and the relatively cool weather we've had here recently. I give up, it's not so bad - I'm going to go listen to "Don't Falter" by Mint Royale ("when you're with me, it's always summer") and pet my cat. We should try this again in the winter... assuming you don't like the cold. It'd be nice to be rooting for the season next time.

I

PS. Is the rest of the Air France album as good as that track? I'm a little in love.

Total running time: 59:53

Look Back in Anger #1

2008-07-11T09:54:00.001-07:00

Look Back in Anger #1
by Todd Hutlock

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 new WWIA? Series.

First up is Todd Hutlock’s look back at his 2002 Pazz and Jop ballot.

On first glance, the most glaring thing about my Pazz and Jop ballot in 2002 is that I only named nine albums. I honestly can’t remember naming less than 10 on any other ballot, so this quickly reminded me of something about 2002: I don’t think I was really feeling it. Personally, I was coming to the end of my tenure as an editor at the soul-sucking Alternative Press magazine, and from looking at my choices, the time there had clearly started to take its toll. Listening to a lot of music is one thing; being required to listen and form opinions on literally endless amounts of music not of your own choosing day in and day out is a whole ‘nother thing. Playing music for pleasure was becoming a chore in and of itself. Think about it: If you had to, say, cut hair all day, would you want to come home and relax in front of the TV and cut six or seven more heads for fun?
Anyway, that was my first thought glancing at the ballot. My second thought was, “How in the hell is it that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not there?” That’s an easy one: I didn’t even hear it until two years later. But if I could do it all over again, it would be number one with a bullet. Or Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight? I have no easy answer for that… But hey, we can’t all hear everything that comes out in a certain year that same year, right? I just don’t have any explanation as to how I ignored two records that I now love to pieces and most definitely was sent promo copies of at the time. Shit, I didn’t even break the shrinkwrap on Summerteeth until 2005…

Anyway, without further ado, here’s my original 2002 ballot in full:

#1. Clinic – Walking With Thee

If memory serves, I had also highly rated Clinic’s previous album, Internal Wrangler, placing it in the upper reaches of the previous year’s Pazz and Jop (possibly even at numero uno, but I’d have to look it up to be certain). I found Walking With Thee to be a more mature, more diverse follow-up, and so naturally, I rated it rather highly, as well.
Little did I know at the time that it would serve to be their high-water mark and that they would spend the rest of their careers making endless Xerox variants of the first two albums. This takes the shine off of Walking a bit for me, but not much. I would still place this firmly in the top five for 2002, but likely not at the summit.

#2. Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World

Wow, what the fuck happened to these guys? Again, this was a great pop record, full of modern psych sounds and tunes out the ass. I can’t say that I’ve played it much in subsequent years, but that owes more to the fact that the band haven’t exactly held my attention than to the quality of this album. The title track is a fantastic Beach Boys-style romp, “Juxtaposed With U” is the Beta Band’s great lost hit, and the rest is equally charming if a bit overlong. Again, this still firmly sits in the top five, although likely shifted down a spot thanks to Wilco moving into the penthouse. But yeah, I need to dig this one out soon.

#3. Playgroup – Playgroup

Now this is a record that I think I would actually move up if I could, and if anything rivals Wilco for that top spot, it’s Trevor Jackson’s star-studded homage to the favorites of his youth. I adore this album, and I’m not quite sure how I wound up putting it down at three rather than one in the first place (other than maybe I was on the fence and drew lots or something).

If you aren’t familiar, former Output Recordings boss and perpetual hipster Trevor Jackson assembled a supergroup of sorts (including Edwyn Collins, Roddy Frame, KC Flightt (!), Kathleen Hanna, Kyra, Shinehead (!!!), and Peaches, among others) to make an album of 1981-83 vintage alternative disco punk funk hybrid stuff. Being a huge fan of the sounds he was channeling here, I bit this one hook, line, and sinker, and because it was already retro-minded upon release, it has aged quite well. Of the albums on the list, I can honestly say this one has gotten the most plays in the years since and likely will remain that way. So yeah, number two, but with a bullet. On a given day, I might even give this the pole position.

#4. Sigur Ros – ( )

So now we start to get into the region of the list where I have a bunch of good-not-great albums. It tells me something that this is the Sigur Ros album I go back to the least, and yet it ranked the highest on year-ends for me of all of them. I think this would still finish top 20 for me, but certainly not this high. Nice packaging, though, which honestly may have influenced my ranking at the time. I’m a sucker for a nice package.

#5. Beth Orton – Daybreaker

Another album that just sort of blurs into the artist’s back catalog for me (more to come on the list) that I think I selected because I was at a loss at what to rank and I was looking for something solid, reliable, and uncontroversial. Orton eclipsed this one a few years later with Comfort of Strangers, but I still stand by Daybreaker as one of her stronger efforts. I admit that I had to look up the tracklist on Amazon to see what songs were on this, however, and that’s never a good sign. Any other year, this slides top 20 easy but likely not top 10. For 2002 (which was clearly a down year for me, if you haven’t guessed by now), though, I’d put it in the seven-nine range. I fully admit that my love of this album was also influenced by the presence of my hero Johnny Marr on a few tracks and the Four Tet remix of “Carmella” which I still find to be wonderful.

#6. Elvis Costello – When I Was Cruel

See that part above when I mentioned choosing some things because they were from safe, reliable artists that I loved in the past? Yeah, that’s this one all over. I suppose the fact that it didn’t’ suck as hard as some of his other post-Attractions work made me like it more, but in retrospect, this isn’t even a top 10 Costello album, let along the top 10 of 2002. Maybe would scrape the top 20 now. But that’s a big maybe.

#7. Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

A bit of a strange fish here. This album is brilliant and slightly creepy, and I think the uncomfortable sound of it may have made me rank it a bit lower than I should have. It wasn’t the “pleasant” listen of previous BOC records, though I think it stacks up very well in terms of quality. The fact that it didn’t give me good vibes when I played it likely had more to do with my own headspace at the time than anything else. So I would slot this up a few places, even though I do have to be in a certain mood to play it these days. But just because I’m not always in the mood for demented electronic fairy tales doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of my praise.

#8. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Plastic Fang

Wow. Yeah, this would not sniff my top 10 again. I still love the opening depth charge of “Sweet and Sour” and “She Said,” but I can’t even remember any of the rest of the tunes here. I still think JSBX are a fuckload better in their prime than the White Stripes and their ilk will ever be, but this is not one of their stronger efforts. I am pretty sure I don’t actually own this album, save for my original Matador promo in the card sleeve, but again, I love the packaging of it, especially the LP version. So bonus points there. Sadly, I don’t think Spencer has done anything even this good since. I miss him.

#9. Liars – They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top

Another “reaction” choice here, as Liars’ sound here was a giant breath of fresh air compared to the nu metal/kiddie punk/gothy goth bullshit I was forced to endure at work every day. It turned out Liars had much better work in them to come, but I still like the crazed energy and fractured attitude of the debut. Number nine seems about right to me. So I got one right!

ADJUSTED 2002 PAZZ AND JOP BALLOT

1. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2. Playgroup – Playgroup

3. Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

4. Clinic – Walking With Thee

5. Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

6. Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World

7. The Notwist – Neon Golden

8. Missy Misdemeanor Elliott – Under Construction

9. Liars - They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top

10. The Delgados - Hate.

Todd Hutlock is an editor at some bullshit website.

Best of 2008 Thus Far: Jan-June

2008-07-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

Best of 2008 Thus Far: Jan-June
by WWIA staff and friends (though mostly Nick Southall)

Melanie Baskins

Albums:
1. Beach House - Devotion
2. No Age - Nouns
3. Evangelicals - The Evening Descends
4. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams
5. Times New Viking - Rip it Off

Singles:
1. No Age – “Teen Creeps”
2. Xiu Xiu – “I Do What I Want When I Want”
3. Beach House – “Home Again”
4. M83 – “Couleurs”
5. Destroyer – “Blue Flower, Blue Flame”

Jonathan Bradley

Albums:
1. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
2. Vampire Weekend
3. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
4. Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim
5. The-Dream - Love/Hate

Singles:
1. B.O.B. ft. Lil' Boosie & D.G. Yola – “Fuck You”
2. Usher ft. Young Jeezy – “Love in this Club”
3. Goldfrapp – “A&E”
4. Bun-B ft. Lupe Fiasco – “Swang On 'Em”
5. The-Dream – “Nikki”
6. Be Your Own Pet – “Becky”
7. Miley Cyrus – “See You Again”
8. Mike Doughty – “Like a Luminous Girl”
9. Taylor Swift – “Picture to Burn”
10. The Hold Steady – “Sequestered in Memphis”

Ally Brown

1. Portishead - Third
2. Hercules and Love Affair
3. Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
4. Y'All Is Fantasy Island - Rescue Weekend
5. Beck - Modern Guilt

Justin Cober-Lake

1. The Shackeltons
2. The Strugglers - The Latest Rights
3. The Duke Spirit - Neptune
4. Marco Benevento - Invisible Baby
5. Flight of the Conchords

Todd Hutlock

Albums:
Portishead - Third
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
M83 - Saturdays=Youth
The Mole - As High As The Sky
Autechre - Quaristice

Singles:
Ricardo Villalobos - Vasco EP Part 1
Sigur Ros - "Gobbledegook"
M83 - "Couleurs"
Rhadoo - "Dor Mit Oru"
Portishead - "Machine Gun"
Goldfrapp - "A&E"
Spiritualized - "Soul on Fire"
Be Your Own Pet - "Becky"

Ian Mathers

Albums:
1. Samamidon - All Is Well
2. The Kills - Midnight Boom
3. Delays - Everything's the Rush
4. Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid
5. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark

Singles:
1. Goldfrapp - "A & E"
2. Samamidon - "Saro"
3. Los Campesinos! - "My Year in Lists"
4. Coldplay - "Viva La Vida"
5. Snoop Dogg - "Sensual Seduction" (or "Sexual Eruption," if you're nasty)

Patrick McKay

1. Deerhunter - Microcastle
2. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Metaform - Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
4. Islands - Arm's Way
5. Portishead - Third

Travis Morrison

1. Sara Bareilles – “Love Song”
2. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
3. Kanye West – “Flashing Lights”
4. Travis Morrison Hellfighters – “Cruisin'”
5. Roxy Music - Country Life (I know it's old, but I popped it in the other day while cleaning the apartment and just rocked the fuck out)

Lisa Oliver

Albums:
1. Portishead – Third
2. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Lie Down In the Light
3. Herbaliser – Same As It Never Was
4. The Notwist – The Devil , You + Me
5. Los Campesinos! – Hold On Now, Youngster

Singles:
Duffy - "Mercy"
Gnarls Barkley – "Run"
DeVotchka – "The Clockwise Witness"
The Duke Spirit – "The Step and the Walk"
Death Cab for Cutie – "I Will Possess Your Heart"
Jim Noir – "What U Gonna Do"
Al Green – "Lay It Down"
Sigur Ros – "Gobbledigook"
Black Angels – "Doves"

Ned Raggett

"Honestly I'm at a loss. I have no top albums at all this year -- there have been some great ones to be sure but I could probably only name the Portishead as a key one."

Al Shipley

Albums:
1. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: 4th World War
2. Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
3. Evangelista - Hello, Voyager
4. Raheem DeVaughn - Love Behind The Melody
5. Jonathan Richman - Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild

Singles:
1. Jordin Sparks f/ Chris Brown - "No Air"
2. Sara Bareilles - "Love Song"
3. Hot Stylz f/ Yung Joc - "Lookin' Boy"
4. Jazmine Sullivan f/ Missy Elliott - "I Need U Bad"
5. Ne-Yo - "Closer"
6. Paramore - "That's What You Get"
7. Snoop Dogg f/ Too $hort and Mistah F.A.B. - "Life Of Da Party"
8. Ryan Leslie - "Diamond Girl"
9. Coldplay - "Viva la Vida"
10. Cherish f/ Yung Joc - "Killa"

Nick Southall

1. Shearwater – Rook
2. The Dø – A Mouthful
3. Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
4. The Notwist – The Devil, You & Me
5. Four Tet – Ringer EP

The order's not entirely arbitrary, and also not exactly written in stone. But these things never are.

The debut album by The Dø, a Franco-Finnish alt.pop duo with their roots in jazz and their branches in hiphop, is probably my most-listened-to album of the year thus far; their eclectic blend of Björk, Eminem, PJ Harvey and delicate, dexterous indiepop is beguiling and moreish. Astonishingly, infuriatingly, it’s not had a proper release in the US or UK yet – head to France to pick it up.

Less listened to but more explored is Shearwater’s magnificent Rook, which explores mysteriously profound areas of experimental, powerful folk and rock; the stripped production aesthetic and intricate, dynamic arrangements makes for an exhilarating listen that’s as emotionally draining as it is rewarding. It’s also focused and cohesive (just 38 minutes in length), yet at the same time seems epic, important.

Somewhere between the two is Elbow’s fourth album, which traverses moments of great emotional weight and obtuse beauty (“Weather To Fly”) as well as intricate, light-hearted but artful diversions (“The Fix”). Self-produced, it might be their best album yet – in “One Day Like This” it certainly boasts one of the most fully formed blue-skies festival anthems of recent years.

The Notwist’s new album, their first in six years since the quietly immaculate Neon Golden, occupies an important function for me – it’s beautiful, it’s absorbing, it’s almost completely lacking in ego, it’s adventurous without being ornery, and it sounds absolutely exquisite. The German nation seem to engineer everything that little bit better than anyone else, and The Notwist’s technologically assisted indiepop is no exception. Any time, anywhere, any mood – this works.

Not strictly an album, Four Tet’s Ringer EP clocks in at only a few minutes less than Rook despite having six fewer songs. Largely this is because the eponymous opener spans ten minutes, as well as ten years of electronica – almost bereft of the ‘folktronica’ signifiers (apart from a welcome jazzy drum break towards the conclusion of its evolution), Kieron Hebdon has embraced 1996-style techno and updated it beautifully. The rest of the EP doesn’t disappoint, mixing in ambient elements to his fond reinterpretation, and near reinvention, of a genre that some might consider tired.

There are plenty of other records bubbling just outside this list – Seu Jorge’s awesome America Brasil (apparently a follow-up to Jorge Ben’s 70s classic Africa Brasil), the harmonic debut by Fleet Foxes, Youthmovies’ frenetic, brass-led postrock, Portishead’s return, the new Why? album, Breeders, Vampire Weekend, Hercules & Love Affair…

Theon Weber

Albums:
1. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
2. Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Be Your Own Pet - Get Awkward
4. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
5. Ashlee Simpson - Bittersweet World

Singles:
1. Ashlee Simpson – “Little Miss Obsessive”
2. The Magnetic Fields – “The Nun's Litany”
3. Los Campesinos! – “My Year In Lists”
4. Lil' Wayne – “Phone Home”
5. The Mountain Goats – “Michael Myers Resplendent”
6. Be Your Own Pet – “Becky”
7. M83 – “Graveyard Girl”
8. Why? – “The Fall Of Mr. Fifths”
9. The Mountain Goats – “Autoclave”
10. tie: Death Cab For Cutie – “Cath…”
Katy Perry – “Waking Up In Vegas”

Dan Weiss

Albums:
1. Be Your Own Pet – Get Awkward/Get Damaged
2. Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter III/The Leak
3. The Roots - Rising Down
4. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
5. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark

Singles:
1. Be Your Own Pet – “Food Fight”
2. Ashlee Simpson – “Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya)”
3. Ponytail – “Beg Waves”
4. Be Your Own Pet – “Becky”
5. Mike Doughty – “Like a Luminous Girl”
6. Big Boi feat. Andre 3000 & Raekwon – “Royal Flush”
7. We are Scientists – “After Hours”
8. Lil’ Wayne – “A Milli”
9. Hot Chip – “Made in the Dark”
10. Lil’ Wayne – “Lollipop”
11. Vampire Weekend – “Oxford Comma”
12. The Breeders – “We're Gonna Rise”
13. Fleet Foxes – “White Winter Hymnal”
14. Katy Perry – “Waking Up in Vegas”
15. The-Dream feat. Rihanna – “Livin' a Lie”
16. The Hold Steady – “Sequestered in Memphis”
17. Death Cab For Cutie – “Cath…”
18. Panic at the Disco – “Pas De Cheval”/“Nine in the Afternoon” (tie)
19. The Roots feat. Malik B & Dice Raw – “Get Busy”
20. Portishead – “Machine Gun”
21. The Magnetic Fields – “Too Drunk to Dream”
22. Jay Reatard – “Don’t Let Him Come Back”
23. M83 – “Kim & Jessie”
24. Old 97’s – “Dance With Me”
25. Cut Copy – “So Haunted”

Christian John Wikane

"I can't say I'm really wedded to a list yet...still absorbing so much!"

Have a good 4th.

Throwing Muses - Hunkpapa

2008-06-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

Throwing Muses - Hunkpapa
by Gillian Watson

Hunkpapa is far from the highlight of Throwing Muses’ varied career. Almost universally panned, and disowned by head Muse Kristin Hersh, Hunkpapa saw the young band cajoled by their record company into straightening out their songwriting and adding glistening keyboards and horns that stood in stark contrast to the visceral, countrified post-punk of earlier albums, sounding tame in comparison. And yet I am constantly drawn back to it, perhaps moreso than any other Muses album.

We might put it down to nostalgia. Hunkpapa was my introduction to Throwing Muses; the odd melodies slowly wound their way around my head until I could anticipate every note, and now they tend to carry me away to seasons past. Yet Hunkpapa is the album that keeps on giving: interesting to approach cerebrally but still best experienced from the gut. Listening to it for the first time was a distinctly unsettling experience. This fourteen-year-old, who thought “Here Comes Your Man” was the epitome of punk, had no idea what make of this awkward conflation of commerciality and madness. The music reminded me of the budget country-and-western compilation they played in my parents’ favourite Ayrshire roadside café: dated, distant and yet recognisable; but the vocals were unmistakably out of the ordinary. Hersh sounded at once like a bitter, washed-up diva and a hopeful teenager, repulsive with the naked emotion and beguiling with cooing harmonies.

It was a while before I was able to pinpoint what fascinated and confused me so deeply: the confrontation between urban and natural soundscapes. Metallic clangs and horns collided awkwardly with sunshine yellow guitar; the imagery and melodic runs on “Bea” recalled rainy fields at night. This awkward combination was perhaps the natural conclusion of an evolution in sound which began with the barnlike echo of the Chains Changed EP and the panoramic sheen of House Tornado. Unfortunately the dark, disturbing nature of that album’s knife-like edge is dimmed by the sequel’s overproduction. On the first two records, nature is present in the music like day-to-day life in the countryside, and Hunkpapa is the country seen through a car window: a balance struck more successfully by “The Big Country” on Talking Heads 77. This uneasy balance between the urban and the pastoral struck a personal chord with me, a teenager who’d grown up in the city but with roots in the country. I found it difficult to reconcile the two sides.

By contrast, the commercial sound adds a delicious narrative to the band’s career: Throwing Muses vs. Sire Records, an age-old conflict to which any critic can quickly attribute Hunkpapa’s central flaw: the emasculation of the two bandleaders. The first time I listened to the album I noted with sadness that it was, well, girly. At the time I’d wondered how the Pixies could have toured with them, as I still unaware of their older albums, the ones that touched on unexplored backwaters of the female experience with toughness and energy. On Hunkpapa, the edges that made Hersh and Donelly one-offs rather than identikit girls-with-guitars are sanded away. Hersh’s voice swoops ethereally but rarely rasps. The effectiveness of her songs here are, at best, dulled by the production (“Mania”’s funny, vivid representation of bipolarity shakes out into an incoherent rave-up) and, at worst, rendered downright annoying (“The Burrow” sounds like a polite hoedown at a high school sleepover). Donelly’s “Angel”, while pretty, veers closer to Adult Contemporary than anything else in the band’s career.

Yet slicker production didn’t dull the band’s edginess completely, and intermittently serves to accentuate its angles here instead. Take the minimalism of songs like “Devil’s Roof”, which sounds almost like a mathematical formula for the Muses sound: Hersh’s cantering rhythm guitar, Donelly’s liquid leads that surface and disappear again like fish, Leslie Langston’s talkative bass and David Narcizo’s boxy drums. The clear, spacious production reveals the band’s individual personalities much more effectively than 1991’s colourful, but unfocused The Real Ramona. Look at the back cover: four wispy, thoughtful faces in sepia thumbnail prints. You could almost see them as a family on a day trip: Leslie quietly steering, David tapping on his knees, Kristin bitching and Tanya staring out of the window in a daydream. This almost dated notion of what makes a band “sell,” the presentation of the band members as personalities, as well as the glossy ‘80s production, makes it much more interesting as a quaint museum piece than 1995’s University, which led to more quantifiable success but is a lot less endearing.

Take away these arbitrary arguments why Hunkpapa is such a fascinating record. It’s ultimately no easier to analyse than any other Muses record listening to the songs themselves, which follow the wanderings of Hersh and Donelly intriguingly and resist artificial sweetening. Sure, the horns on “Take” are unnecessary, but listen to the dolorous, keening voices behind them. Every Throwing Muses song rests on the an idiosyncratic melody that worms its way in. You can only wonder to figure out why you like it; each time I tried to do so in this review, I came up against another dead end. I can’t fully explain why I fell for an album that goes against every beef I have with overproduction, and that the arists themselves have disowned. Kristin Hersh hates “Dizzy,” whose lyrics, rumour has it, she researched at a library. She has denounced it as a cynical move to appease the suits at Sire, that it came from her head and not her gut. She’d probably rather be remember solely for her authentic work. Tough. That’s her curse: even when she constructs a “stupid song” to appeal to the mainstream she comes out with touching music. The beauty of Hunkpapa: it transcends petty niggles about production values and “selling out.” After all, what was that critical stuff anyway?

Gillian Watson has written for What Was It Anyway?

Summer Jamz #3: Jonathan Bradley

2008-06-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

Download this mixtape: http://www.mediafire.com/?ey1wsfnylgy

Dear Summer,
I know you’re missing me. We don’t always go together like Nike Airs and crisp tees, but when the temperature is just right, the sun’s going down, and I’ve got a cold one in my hand, we don’t look too bad together. I don’t have any up-tempo party tracks for you, summer, no pounding beats or sweat-drenched rock ‘n’ roll. My mix is for the times everything is still and quiet and perfect. The times when the sunshine is warm rather than baking, and the biggest decision I have to make is whether to start reading the newspaper from the front or the back page. I haven’t included any yacht rock or Eagles tunes in this mix, but that’s all I can guarantee. From the depths of the cold southern hemisphere, I hope you’re showing the same love to my friends.

Not this Summer

01. The Promise Ring – Wake Up April
Promise Ring frontman Davey Von Bohlen must be synonymous with summer in my mind. After all, I put his band’s perfect season closer “Jersey Shore” on my 2006 Summer Jamz tape, and once again Mr Von Bohlen has found himself on one of my mixes. “Wake Up April,” from the unreasonably maligned 2002 album Wood/Water, is dedicated to the beginning of summer; its gentle pace sounds like the welcome warmth of the first days of the season, when the sunshine is still a pleasant novelty. Von Bohlen lays out his instructions for enjoying such a time in the opening verse, and you should heed his advice as a guide to properly enjoying the rest of this mix: “You’ll be sipping your morning coffee in the afternoon.” His languid strumming smears across the track like dappled sunlight, its gentle pace befitting an indulgent afternoon filled with nothing more pressing than coffee consumption.

02. Fleetwood Mac – Gypsy
In Fleetwood Mac-land, it’s always summer, but they wouldn’t know, because the band is cocooned from any harsh realities that might intrude on its crystalline perfection. “Gypsy” exists in a temperature-controlled bubble in a sweltering Los Angeles, Stevie Nicks’ unearthly vocal gliding over hermetically-sealed, surgically sterile instrumentation. The arrangement is so precise that it seems to encase the singer; Nicks sings like she’s completely alone, never imagining anyone could be listening in on her self-examination.

03. Donna Lewis – I Love You Always Forever
Where Nicks’ bubble is cool and private, “I Love You Always Forever” is a moment shared between two people: Donna Lewis, and you, the listener. Apart from a few house-reminiscent piano chords that enter toward the end, the entire song, including Lewis’ dreamy coo, is a soft-focus throb. The disparate musical elements coalesce into a pillowy bed of sound, deliciously warm, Lewis and you under the covers.

04.Wilco – Either Way
“Either Way” is a glimpse at what an engaging record the disappointing Sky Blue Sky could have been. Jeff Tweedy is entirely passive in this song, singing, “Maybe the sun will shine today, maybe it won’t” and later, “Maybe you still love me, maybe you don’t,” seeming to suggest he has no more power to affect the latter than he does the former. His paean to surrender is an inviting one, and Tweedy has never sounded more middle-aged than here, where he finds happiness in a cloudless day and the acceptance of his powerlessness. As if to accentuate its flabby aging, the band colors the latter half of the track with an entirely purposeless guitar solo, an ostentatious piece of trilling that flutters over the song like sail boats on a lake. It would be disgraceful, save for the fact that it seems right that the aging Tweedy would enjoy nothing more than a summer picnic on the shore of Lake Michigan, the wind ruffling his hair like the notes of Nels Cline’s guitar.

05. Mariah Carey – Always Be My Baby
But if “Either Way” had you thinking too much about your pension, Mariah Carey’s “Always Be Your Baby” will have you feeling like a twelve year old again. She sings this buoyant expression of puppy love with such joy that it is easy to forget it is a break up song; the guy who Carey says will always be her baby has just left her. Few actual love songs are this jubilant. It’s not hard to share her optimism, though; the vaguely Motown beat and playful piano chords are as carefree as Carey herself.

06. Cut Copy – Feel the Love
Finding the common interest in psychedelia shared by rock and dance music, Cut Copy’s “Feel the Love” mixes shimmering acoustic guitar and shimmering synth lines so expertly that it becomes irrelevant which is which. Music festivals throughout 2008, if they’re any good, will sound like this.

07. Debbie Harry – French Kissin’ in the U.S.A.
The strident way Harry sings the title makes it sounds like a political slogan, but the graceful synths and Springsteen-esque saxophone confirm she’s concerned only with having a good time. Mixing French and English, pop and pleasure, the only excuse for not enjoying this tune is if you’re filling your summer days with actual French kissing in the U.S.A. Paris is calling indeed.

Not this Paris

08. Rilo Kiley – Silver Lining
Blake Sennett bites George Harrison’s guitar sound and the rest of Rilo Kiley embraces ’70s sheen on the opening track to 2007’s Under the Blacklight; the result is pleasure pursued so mercilessly that it’s amazing the result sounds so easygoing. Jenny Lewis’ airy vocal conjures up summer with the lines “the grass it was a-ticking, and the sun was on the rise,” even while she adds a hint of darkness, admitting that she “never felt so wicked when she willed our love to die.” If that’s the cloud, the silver lining is worth it; as pop goes, this is solid gold.

09. The Sleepy Jackson – Good Dancers
George Harrison finds himself robbed again, this time by Perth act the Sleepy Jackson. Luke Steele pilfers Harrison’s slide guitar, and in an inspired, if obvious, move, floats an unearthly falsetto over the top. When this was released in 2003, Australian critics got cute and called the result West Coast Country, even though there’s only a hint of twang and the West Coast was that of Australia. Still, the description was more than appropriate; Steele’s uh... sleepy melodies suggest California as easily as Western Australia. An ideal accompaniment to a lazy summer Sunday spent anywhere from Fremantle to Fresno.

10. Ben Lee – Begin
Over his past few albums, Ben Lee has embraced an unyieldingly optimistic outlook, and the results have tended toward the nauseating and lobotomized (“Catch My Disease”, “Numb”). Occasionally, however, this unrelentingly cheery approach results in inspired sincerity, as it did with “Begin.” From his 2005 album Awake is the New Sleep, which was released after a three year hiatus, the song sounds like a rebirth, Lee putting himself back together after losing his ultra fashionable record company (Grand Royal closed its doors in 2001), his celebrity girlfriend (he broke up with actress Claire Danes in 2003) and his status as burgeoning indie prodigy (no one was really checking for Lee in ’05, were they?). Having returned home to Sydney he sings about his old residence of New York from the perspective of a visitor: “I’m walking through Central Park/I’m in a foreign country.” The quiet hum of the song and Lee’s softly sung affirmations (“I’m thinking about the city/It’s living proof people need to be together”) are a salve, the warmth of summer tinged by a memory of a winter still recent enough to prompt a shiver.

11. Loudon Wainwright III – Grey in L.A.
“Grey in L.A.”? As a summer song? I knows that Los Angeles has a Mediterranean climate, which means that its grey days usually coincide with its winter months, but Wainwright’s treatment of the city’s unusually wet weather is so welcoming and sunny (He even seems happy that the town “smells like a wet dog”!) that I can’t help but think of it as a summer song. It helps that in my decidedly non-Southern Californian climate, there are plenty of wet summer days, and they are exactly as relaxing and refreshing as this tune sounds.

12. Manitoba – Jacknuggeted
But if Wainwright’s brief sojourn out of the sunshine had you worried, feel free to relax. If a Los Angeleno can be counted on to rejoice in overcast weather, Canadians like Dan Snaith dependably celebrate moments of sunshine. The gorgeous “Jacknuggeted” bursts into life with a dazzling wash of synths and acoustic guitars, while the mantra-like vocal glimmers from odd corners of the track like sunshine breaking through storm clouds.

13. Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant
And if things weren’t sunny enough after the Manitoba track, Seattle’s Fleet Foxes have some folky, hippie bullshit that sounds like it was made of sunshine itself. “What a life I lead when the sun breaks free,” they sing in a cappella harmony, as if they were at one with the natural world. Damn hippies. Good song, though.

Fleet Foxes: Pitchfork gave these guys a 9.0

14. The New Radicals – Someday We’ll Know
The New Radicals, of course, were responsible for that classic ’90s one hit wonder “You Get What You Give.” Less reliant on Clinton-era cultural detritus (Beck, Hanson, Marilyn Manson), and over all a better tune, is the unashamedly soft rock “Someday We’ll Know.” Gregg Alexander spews claptrap questions (“Did the captain of the Titanic cry?”) and somehow manages to make them sound meaningful. It should be the kind of tune that the radio throws on after a parade of current hits, triggering instant nostalgia for summers gone, except radio didn’t play it much when it was released, and certainly does not play it now. Since the song sounds as if it were written for them, it makes all the sense in the world that Hall and Oates covered the tune for their 2003 album Do It for Love. If anyone has a copy of that recording, I would love to hear it.

15. Neil Young – Everybody Knows this is Nowhere
Perhaps not quite as smooth as the preceding tracks with its distorted country rock guitar, “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere” is nonetheless a fitting closer. Not only does Neil Young give the song a fair amount of smoothed-out ’60s sunshine of the sort he was pursuing with Messrs Crosby, Stills and Nash around the same time, he also sounds like he’d like to spend his summer exactly as I would. “I’d like to go back home and take it easy,” he sings. “I gotta get away from this day to day running around.” Neil, when you do, play this tape. In summer there’s nothing like having nothing to do, and where better to do nothing than nowhere?

Summer Jamz #2: Mike Orme and Nick Southall

2008-06-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

Our mix is called State of the Union, Jack and features two "sides":
Nick's "Mike Orme's summer dance bum-out!!!", and
my "Nick Southall's June Evenings"

It can be found here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?nvzzexqvjdn

State of the Union, Jack

Two former Stylus Magazine compatriots, Exeter UK’s Nick Southall (also of The Guardian and Paper Thin Walls) and Oakland’s Mike Orme (also of Pitchfork Media), celebrate the summer by splitting halves of a mix CD, each trying to fill their side with songs the other writer would put on a summer mix. In the process, they hope to reconcile musical tastes separated by the sides of a record, not to mention the Atlantic Ocean. While they’re at it, they might get around to revisiting the whole the 49th parallel issue and whether “chuffed” is a positive or a negative.

Side One: Mike orme’s summer dance bum-out!!!
(As chosen by mister nick Southall, esquire)

01. Guillemots – she’s evil
02. The field – a paw in my face
03. Four tet – ribbons
04. Von südenfed – the rhinohead
05. Vitalic – la rock 01
06. Studio / kylie – 2 hearts
07. Lcd soundsystem – Hippie priest bum-out
08. Young gods – strangel
09. Akufen – jeep sex

Why the hell did I suggest picking tracks in the manner of each other? I’ve never really spoken to Mister Orme and he’s a; not been around the Stylus ragtag band for all that long, and b; tastefully eclectic enough not to be able to be pigeonholed into easy mimicry. Potentially hoist by my own potato, I decide to go with a theme; many of Mister Orme’s favourites from the last two years show a fondness for supremely stylish, textured dance music with an alternative bent… and so the SUMMER DANCE BUM-OUT is born…

Things start out kind of weird with an odd number drawn from the semi-rare Guillemots “Of The Night EP”, wherein the finest purveyors of indie-jazz-pop suddenly go all LCD Soundsystem on us and get freaky with the fuzz-bass and 4/4 beats – it’s something to do with the guitarist, I think. I doubt Mike has this track, but I expect he’d like it.

Then we take a turn for the familiar with The Field’s exquisite “A Paw In My Face”, one of Mister Orme’s favourite tracks from last year, and one of mine too; it’s doubly apposite at the moment, because my kitten is mental. And I’m getting another soon. WHY?!

Now for a foray into the uber-new, with the second track off Kieron Hebdon’s latest EP, “Ringer”, which sees him largely ditching the folktronica tag of his previous work and going all 90s techno on us, sort of. What Mike’s digging right now I’m not sure, but this should certainly be involved somewhere.

Mark E Smith and Mouse On Mars, in their guise as Von Südenfed, step up next, with the exquisite Motown-gone-big-beat dancepop of “The Rhinohead”; I’ve not seen Mike mention this collaboration anywhere, but it surely MUST be up his street?

Next to my favourite house / dance / wtf tune of a few years ago, and Vitalic’s exquisite “La Rock 01”; released before Mike was on-staff here, I can’t imagine he’d be anything less than into this.

Likewise this Kylie remix by Studio from Yearbook 2; I know Mike was chuffed with Yearbook 1 last year, and Studio continue to wow with their Balearic postpunk disco. Or something.

Next the title track for this side of our collaborative mixtape, which I picked up on the CD release of 45:33. Minimal by Murphy’s standards, this is nonetheless classy, just like Mike’s dapper pink slacks on his Facebook profile picture.

And finally we get the insane “Strangel” by Young Gods. Does Mike like deranged Scandinavian sampledelic dance-metal? Fuck knows, but that’s an awesome riff and beat…

[MO note: In true music nerd fashion, Nick added a track to the end of his mix after he sent me his side and his write-up. The ninth track on “Mike Orme’s summer dance bum-out!!!” is “Jeep Sex” by Akufen, a Montreal based microhouse-ish artist who is known as Marc Leclair by day. This lovely track utilizes a number of punchy samples to drive the beat, with strings, an R&B crooner, pianos, and funk guitar each from separate samples, seemingly contributing one note apiece to the groove’s melody. I always love this kind of sampling wherein the cuts between samples provide as much percussion as the beat itself. Nice work, Sick Mouthy!]

Side Two: Nick Southall’s June Evenings
(As chosen by Mike “Freedom Fries” Orme)

10. Battles – Race In
11. Patrick Wolf – Accident & Emergency
12. The Chap - Surgery
13. Air France – June Evenings
14. Fennesz Feat. David Sylvian - Transit
15. Brian Eno – Another Green World
16. My Bloody Valentine – You Made Me Realise
17. M83 – Dark Moves of Love
18. Phoenix – Definitive Breaks

I’ve always respected Nick Southall’s writing and his uniquely acerbic take on music and listening. In his Stylus articles, Nick always attempted to elucidate the struggle between the intangible pleasures of pop music and the corporeal concerns of actually listening to it. Nick is an audiophile and his Stylus Magazine writings, including the Da Capo-honored Imperfect Sound Forever, chronicle his quest to save the world one pure audio signal at a time. Anyone familiar with my tastes, which sometimes run into the overdriven worlds of noisy, electronic fuzz, might think that Nick and I wouldn’t get along musically; however, Nick’s collection of favored records intersects with mine at some significant vectors. I’ve attempted to explicate those cross-references by mixing together a couple nice tracks Nick might select to accompany him on one of these serene June evenings.

We begin with “Race In” by New York math rock group Battles. I’ve always thought of this group (and this opener to their album Mirrored in particular) as a mutated synthesis of Discipline-era King Crimson and the choral German 60s pop chronicled on the In-Kraut series. Nick called Mirrored his tenth-favorite “postrock” album of all time in a Stylus Top Ten which explored the meaning of that nebulous genre, and I wholeheartedly agree that their progressive, meandering pixie jazz inhabits the post-rock style just as thoroughly as their more tranquil counterparts.

If Nick suspected from the Battles selection that I’d be trotting out his obvious favorites, he’d be right! Next is “Accident & Emergency” by Patrick Wolf, one of Nick’s favourite artists. (Note: I love that this Microsoft Word document, in which I am appending my humble liner notes to Nick’s descriptions, automagically added the “u” to my boorish American “favorite”) I’m always a sucker for cut-up vocals and wonky, sequencer-driven synthesizer counterpoints, but to be honest I didn’t really get into Patrick Wolf until last year’s The Magic Position, on which this cut appears.

I like to think that the London-based pop group the Chap has a bit in common with Wolf’s flamboyant and subversive personality, and so I’m veering away from Nick’s canon with “Surgery” from the Chap’s recent release Mega Breakfast. The track is a sedate anthem, recalling Skylarking-era XTC, but as with all Chap recordings, there’s a curious DIY aesthetic to their electronic production, like they got their drum machine at a liquor store for ten quid. I’m sure Nick would enjoy the Chap’s heavy-handed but marvellously fun lesson in popposition.
Nick might be unfamiliar with the next cut, “June Evenings,” as well, but seeing as how we share a love for Swedish group Studio and the recent Balearic rock movement, I’m sure he would quickly glom onto this track off Air France’s recent EP No Way Down. Air France also hail from Studio’s hometown of Gothenburg and also indulge in the beach-loving synthesis of disco beats, Krautrock’s motorik rhythms, and Manuel Göttsching’s funky techno guitar.
As this evening mix progresses, the pace slows down considerably with “Transit” off prepared guitar technician Fennesz’s 2004 album Venice. This reflective cut features David Sylvian’s baritone and lyrics concerning the memory of European travels as a vehicle for explaining a sense of loss. This collaboration came on the heels of Sylvian’s 2003 starkly-composed solo album Blemish, recorded as his marriage was coming to an end, and put a coda to that brooding, experimental period in his career.

Nick and I may agree most heartily on the radiance of Brian Eno’s last two solo albums, Another Green World and Before and After Science, before the commonly accepted beginning of his “ambient” period. Next up is the title track from the former, a short, repeated guitar and organ figure that fades in and out in the space of little over ninety seconds. It’s one of my favourite transitions in the whole of popular music.

The pace picks up a bit with “You Made Me Realise” by My Bloody Valentine, an unexpected beloved of Southall. One of the group’s relatively early recordings, the track appears on their first Creation Records EP. This recorded version fails to capture the band’s crushing live performances of the song, in which MBV often extends the chaotic “bridge” (consisting of one pounded, noisy chord) for fifteen or twenty minutes before returning to the closing chorus.

I may be accused of heavy-handedness by transitioning from My Bloody Valentine directly into M83, so I beg the forgiveness of both Nick and the readers. “Dark Moves of Love” is a penultimate track (off their new album Saturdays=Youth), a sequencing position I hold dear to my heart. Although M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzales has nudged his project in an airy and nostalgic (though no less salient) direction, this track is classic Dead Cities M83. It’s basically a three-minute chorus of guitars and female vocals that repeats an abstract and insistent message of reconciliation across great times and distances, building to a climax marked by a simple five-second drum fill. Then, it all fades down into an oceanic synthesizer hum, which I’ve transitioned into…

“Definitive Breaks” by Parisian quartet Phoenix closes their 2000 debut United, an album whose blue-eyed synthpop has been praised by both Nick and myself. My relationship with the group began during a period living in Japan, during which time I would frequent a Kyoto club called “Metro” located in a subway station just off the Kamogawa river. The DJ at the Tuesday 80s night played United’s second track “Too Young” one fateful evening and that was it. Ill-advised Zima hangover be damned, I rushed to the Tower the next morning, picked up United, and never let go. I thought I was keying in on something elemental, something special. And then Sofia Friggin’ Coppola had to go and use the song to give Bob and Charlotte the same revelatory clubgoing context in Lost in Translation a year later.

Summer Jamz #1: Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss

2008-06-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

The irony is, we're in the thick of winter here in Australia. It's cold, wet, and, as I type these words, I'm trying to prevent little icicles from forming on the tips of my fingers. Maybe that's why I've always enjoyed the series of annual summer-inspired mixtapes the sadly defunct Stylus Magazine would present at this time of year, starting in 2002 and continuing right until it closed its doors in 2007. These playlists, which would encompass a variety of styles and perspectives on the season never failed to warm my short winter days.
Although Stylus no longer publishes, summer continues to shine, and so this year, as June approached, I called up some of the old Stylus writers and asked them to contribute a mix of songs to soundtrack their summer. Amazingly, they agreed, even the ones who are getting married, hate summer or live in places like Miami and Los Angeles, and, by all rights should be too busy picking up models and partying to be constructing mix tapes.
Starting today, the first day of summer, and continuing each day for the next week or so, Screw Rock 'n' Roll, The Passion of the Weiss and What Was It Anyway? (along with a few other locations across the Internets) will be posting these Summer-inspired mixes for your listening pleasure. Working or partying, relaxing or vacationing, these are the sounds of our summer. Join us and enjoy.
-- Jonathan Bradley

And while you do so, check out Stylus's archived Summer Jamz:
Stylus Summer Jamz '02
Stylus Summer Jamz '03
Stylus Summer Jamz '04
Stylus Summer Jamz '05
Stylus Summer Jamz '06
Stylus Summer Jamz '07

* * * * *

Download Summer Jamz #1: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1U19FJYG

1. The Reputation - Face It
2. Arthur Russell - That's Us/Wild Combination
3. Cut Copy - So Haunted
4. Yo La Tengo - Today is the Day
5. The Cure - A Japanese Dream
6. Be Your Own Pet - Super Soaked
7. Lil' Wayne - I Feel Like Dying
8. Belinda Carlisle - Heaven is a Place on Earth (Heavenly Version)
9. Mike Doughty - Like a Luminous Girl
10. Hercules & Love Affair - Shadows
11. Pet Shop Boys - Minimal
12. Katy Perry - Waking Up in Vegas
13. Wussy - Soak It Up
14. Kathleen Edwards - The Cheapest Key
15. Jens Lekman - A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill
16. Bryan Ferry - The In Crowd
17. Weezer - Everybody Get Dangerous
18. Al Green feat. John Legend - Stay With Me (By the Sea)
19. Duran Duran - Meet El Presidente (7" Remix)
20. The B-52s - Eyes Wide Open
21. We are Scientists - After Hours
22. Liz Phair - Lazy Dreamer
23. Rosanne Cash - Hold On
24. Bob Dylan - Clean-Cut Kid

Mixing this was a necessary challenge. I'm in constant worry that the constant tide of new sounds to parse will eventually swallow my instinct for putting music together or catching the hairpin logic of a loop in potentia. I'm really proud of these results, though. Alfred is a natural collaborator for me because he's one of the few critics of my time who zeroes in on melody, rhythm, songwriting...the boring essentials that some people will go as far as SunnO)))) records to avoid. I can count on him to present me with a new way to hear E-A-B-C# again (Kathleen Edwards' brilliant Amy Rigby stunt "The Cheapest Key") or discern visceral arguments of longevity from inscrutable favorite-band-ism (Pet Shop Boys' "Minimal," as exciting as they've ever been in 20+ years). I was delighted by his picks, nearly all of them unknown to me. In fact, his choices set the bar so high I went back and redacted a few of mine that I fear relied too much on my weakness: classic alt-rock comforts. Even still, no summer can jam without Weezer, Weezy or Belinda Carlisle. Thanks for luring me out of the cheapest key.

-- Dan Weiss

After studying our mix, I noticed that we were most concerned with space -- how artists and shrewd remixes suggest vastness. In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly, and the moral sinecures they provide by necessity, against which we strain with some success, and towards which we return as the days start to shorten, and bank balances begin to shrink. These songs are guideposts: towards danger and release.

-- Alfred Soto

congratulations

2008-06-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

WWIA? wishes to congratulate co-founder/senior editor Todd Hutlock and his bride Mel, who are getting hitched on Saturday! Shower him with rice and shit.

Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant

2008-06-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant
by Melanie Baskins

Who would have thought a band as ultimately inoffensive and pleasant as Belle and Sebastian could have such a tempestuous relationship with fans? Their first album Tigermilk made them unlikely heroes to a generation of Lisas and Judys, and their second album, 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, perfected their sound and leader Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting, consolidating the spiky experiments of their then little-heard debut, with a more full-bodied, yet streamlined approach. Following the overly familiar and more tepidly received The Boy with the Arab Strap, Stuart and Co. knew that moving forward was essential to staying vital, and what resulted was what most B&S disciples consider the nadir of the band’s first stage, the clumsily titled Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant. It’s the album where the band ran its previous ideas into the ground, but it’s also a fucked up sort of masterwork, a fuck-up greatest hits, if you will. It features the band’s best ideas on an epic scale and some interesting new ideas they thankfully thought to capitalize on in the second phase of Belle and Sebastian’s career.

In interviews, band members have stated that the album's tracks were picked out of a group of songs based on how they sounded together, but for the most part, Fold lacks lyrical and sonic cohesion. This, despite the fact that their first three albums held together only through similar thematic concerns, doesn’t prickle my ears besides the inclusion of the “pastoral” “Beyond the Sunrise” and the “Stars of Track and Field”-on-steroids opener “I Fought in a War.” But this was also the period of the band at their most democratic, choosing to include songs written by Stevie Jackson, Isobel Campbell, and Stuart David as well as Murdoch’s usuals in the collection. The collaborative effort provides some interesting contrasts and textures not seen before on a B&S record. Campbell’s “Family Tree” has its defiant female narrator declaring “If you’re looking at me to start having babies/ than you can wish because I’m not here to fool around.” The next song, Murdoch-penned closer “There’s Too Much Love” provides the fearsome retort that “I’m honest, brutal and afraid of you.” “There’s Too Much Love”’s lyrics, most particularly the line “I can’t hide my feelings from you now/ there’s too much love to go around these days,” when compared with “Family Tree,” make up an almost he-said/she-said whole documenting both Murdoch and Campbell’s disintegrating relationship as well as the internal strife of the band reaching a breaking point. This is entirely subjective; “Family Tree” was written by Murdoch before the band was fully formed, but the decision to put these tracks back to back provides a small hint that they knew what they were doing when they sequenced the album.

Even when listening to Belle and Sebastian’s worst songs, you never feel sorry, and you’re never embarrassed for the band. This is the album’s saving grace: “Women’s Realm” blatantly rips the hand claps and stuttering piano of “The Boy with the Arab Strap,” but you can’t blame these guys—it was then and remains a great fucking idea for a song (the best on its respective album, matter of fact). And while “Nice Day for a Sulk” is a pleasant if self-parodying throwaway, there are plenty of great songs here. The oft-derided “Beyond the Sunrise” features an epic narrative nicely contrasting Stevie Jackson’s uncharacteristic baritone with Isobel’s paper-thin whisper and could logically take place in the aftermath of the equally brooding “I Fought in a War.” The bubblegum pop of Jackson’s “The Wrong Girl” puts the lie to the theory that Trevor Horn was their savior on Dear Catastrophe Waitress (an album that I am at a loss to defend like this one). Horn may have helped the band take a large step toward pop, but they were headed in that direction anyway. Fold, however, has the distinct flavor of a transitional album: half of its songs are familiar and another half is uncomfortably unfamiliar, yet it’s masterful at demonstrating what they’re best at as well as what they would become best at on 2006’s The Life Pursuit. The consolidation of their strengths, new ideas, and that album cover make it a worthier and more essential entry in Belle and Sebastian’s catalogue than sees its due.

Not much is known about Melanie Baskins other than she's a fan of the blog, claims to be "almost 19," and sent us this Belle & Sebastian piece!

The Pointer Sisters - That's a Plenty

2008-06-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

The Pointer Sisters - That's a Plenty
by Christian John Wikane

“Hot damn–them girls is black!”

That was the response from one astounded audience member when Ruth, June, Anita, and Bonnie Pointer took the 1974 Grand Ole Opry stage to sing “Fairytale,” then a Top 40 country hit.

Right, country, pedal steel, fiddle ‘n all. You see, ten years before the Pointer Sisters dominated the airwaves with their Richard Perry-produced Break Out, they were confounding industry executives and delighting audiences with a remarkable blend of scat singing, bluesy wailing, and funk fabulousness on a set of albums they recorded for Blue Thumb Records. In the process, they set a precedent that’s yet to be equaled by any another female vocal group (don’t even think of putting the Puppini Sisters in the same class). They spun 180-degrees between musical epochs in thrift store threads and effortlessly navigated through different styles without losing their core soul and gospel-rooted sound.

That’s a Plenty (1974), which includes “Fairytale,” is the apex of the remarkable first phase of their three-decade career, a period since overshadowed by the ubiquity of their more commercially successful late-‘70s to mid-‘80s string of pop and R&B hits. Singles like “I’m So Excited” and “Jump (For My Love)” are usually the default associations that listeners make about the Pointers Sisters. I propose that That’s a Plenty, though not entirely obscure (it earned a gold record), deserves a moment or two to be reconsidered as an integral, defining moment of The Pointer Sisters’ career.

When That’s A Plenty hit shelves, introducing the group’s silhouetted flapper cover logo, The Pointer Sisters were still celebrating the impressive success of their self-titled debut and monster hit single, Allen Toussaint’s “Yes We Can Can.” The Pointer Sisters (1973) set the blueprint for That’s a Plenty’s motley mix: their canny ability to traverse a wide terrain of influences, refined by David Rubinson (who later produced the groundbreaking funk-rock of Labelle’s Chameleon). Rubinson helmed the production and assembled a dream roll call of session musicians and players, including Bonnie Raitt and Herbie Hancock. He steered the Sisters through nine songs that ranged from the swaggering blues of “Grinning In Your Face” to the exuberant jazz of “Little Pony” to the tongue-in-cheek nostalgia of the album’s opening “Bangin’ on the Pipes”/”Steam Heat” medley.

But a scatting excursion around Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” is what sets the album’s genius in plaster. The deftness of each Sister’s rhythm and timing could blow 95% of any living popular female vocalist off the stage. Gaylord Birch’s frantic drumming sets the tune off and the Pointer Sisters pack an average twenty words into two-second phrases. The incredible words-per-second count never ceases to astound, especially if the lyric-printed sleeve is at your disposal. Even more impressive is that the Pointer Sisters replicated this performance on Live at the Opera House (1974), an album well worth a visit to hip-oselect.com. (Note: they were the first pop act to perform at the famed San Francisco venue.)

Both “Shaky Flat Blues” and “Fairytale” showcased how the Sisters’ natural songwriting affinity translated to different musical environs. The former matched the Sister’s tale about the woes of city living with a cool bass-drum-piano-guitar arrangement and slinky solos by Harry “Sweets” Edison on trumpet and Britt Woodman on trombone.

But the distress of smog and sirens gave way to the tear-in-my-beer sentimentality of “Fairytale.” Written by Anita and Bonnie, and sung with a trace of twang, “Fairytale” is as authentic a country ditty as anything Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner recorded at the time. Rubinson even brought the quartet down to Quadraphonic Studios in Nashville to record the song, giving “Fairytale” an even more direct relationship to its country DNA. Appropriately, they were awarded a Best Country Performance by Duo or Group Grammy for the song.

In its remaining nineteen minutes, That’s a Plenty finds Bonnie Pointer laying down a riveting solo performance on “Black Coffee” that would make Peggy Lee proud while all four sisters vamp it up on the album’s breathless tribute to Dixieland, “That’s a Plenty/Surfeit U.S.A.” (Ruth is especially charismatic here in mastering vocal guises underneath the frenetic arrangement.) Closing the album is an eight-minute explosion of shekere, talking drum, and congas on Gamble & Huff’s “Love in Them There Hills.” The liberation of sexual mores only implied in the lyrics came alive in the underground gay clubs that embraced the song. Hot damn—this was the same Pointer Sisters who were regularly featured on Sesame Street and Carol Burnett.

Though the Pointer Sisters ultimately felt restrained by the outlandish Carmen Miranda-like costumes and Andrew Sisters comparisons, and turned to a more mainstream R&B sound by 1977’s Having a Party, That’s a Plenty provides compelling hindsight: They were true innovators and this album documents the blazing embers they left behind to get there. Three and a half decades later, That’s a Plenty remains a gleeful thrill ride.

Christian John Wikane is a contributing editor for PopMatters. He also writes for SoulTracks and David Nathan’s Soulmusic.com. He resides in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC.

Mos Def - The New Danger

2008-06-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

Mos Def - The New Danger
by Dan Weiss

If I’ve observed it correctly, the rule is that rap-rock only sucks when the rap is conceived by a rocker first, because rap is harder to emulate than rock. Say what you will about Ice-T’s Body Count, but they sounded closer to what a rock fan would listen to in 1991 than what Fred Durst (Method Man collab aside) presumed rap fans would tolerate in 1999. The only two (white) rap-rock bands everyone can agree on are Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys, because neither (thankfully) tried to sing. They were strictly rappers with rock backup. And as such, they were free to explore artificial environments like a rapper does, moving from siren sounds here to a Hendrix quote there to faux-harmonica or what have you.

And then look at the history of rock conceived by rappers: Jay-Z on “99 Problems” (or practically duetting with Jim Morrison on “Takeover”). Nas and his dad on “Bridging the Gap.” Public Enemy on Anthrax (or better, over Slayer’s “Angel of Death” on “She Watch Channel Zero”). Run-DMC on “My Sharona.” A few flimsy ones come to mind—Busta Rhymes remaking “Iron Man” with Ozzy himself, Diddy (then Daddy) lifting Zep and Bowie wholesale. But let’s be honest…Beanie Sigel’s hostile “War Pigs” flip last year plugged the Sabbath gap, “Been Around the World” is an okay song for a guy who’s not much of a rapper to begin with, and the idea of rap-rock is still the coolest thing ever.

I think. It’s hard to tell whether people are getting their Dickies in a bunch over the real problems like the inevitable valleys of riff-to-riff songwriting or if the crunch itself embarrasses them. But I have my theories: The New Danger embarrassed people, and The New Danger is great. I like to chalk it up to reverse rockism; Danger came out in a particularly unfashionable year for alpha male slab-guitars, the one when Franz Ferdinand and Modest Mouse and Scissor Sisters scored hits with needlepoint guitar and disco rhythms. You’d think considering who won the election that year that Mos Def’s sausage-fest lollapalooza would’ve made some fans. “Quasi-homosexuals are running this rap shit!” he complained.

That’s the worst remark on the CD so let’s start there. “The Rape Over” isn’t quite “Meet the ‘G’ that Killed Me,” so it’s annoying that he ruins a pretty ballsy (calls out Viacom!) one-minute rant fashioned over Jay-Z’s “Takeover” beat with just seconds to go. I listen to it the same way I do Common’s “circle of faggots” epithet on Like Water For Chocolate or “Meet the ‘G’ that Killed Me” itself, as a little pinch in the middle of a great experience to remind me that hip-hop needs better terminology for pussy targets (and “pussy” isn’t much more progressive…dudes get angrier about that one than calling them a “dick”—wonder why?).

The New Danger is worth the pinch. It gets slammed for its incoherence and lack of The Source-credible quotables and treated like a failed experiment, but these complaints are daft about the music. Would it have been possible for Dante Smith to have made a good rap-rock album in these critics’ eyes? What would it have sounded like? If you’re open to the possibility at all, you’d say it would sound like this. The beats on the strictly hip-hop ones, “Life is Real,” “Sunshine,” and the widescreen “Sex, Love & Money” are dead serious and the samples are sharp. The flute that snakes through the fog of war-dance percussion on the latter is worth the price alone. And the rock half, especially the scorching “Zimzallabim,” the threat-posing “Ghetto Rock,” and the black-and-blue speakeasy jam “Black Jack” split crunch and extended groove with the “underneath” sensibility that every member of Mos’ Black Jack Johnson band—a supergroup featuring Dr. Know of Bad Brains, P-Funk legend Bernie Worrell, and two Living Colour alumni—perfected during each of their respective heydays.

Mos is great at call-and-response mantras, something rarely mentioned as a suitable replacement for lax approach to lyrical content here; if he’s in a jam band, so be it: “Y-E-A” versus “Yeah yeah” and “Black Jack Johnson NYC/R-O-C-K-I-N-G,” would be enough, but the haunted torch soul of “The Beggar” lays down a deeper foundation for the bandleader to mess around with melismas on, and the result is great. Mos Def is actually a great musician (recheck his oddly pretty bridge to Kanye’s “Drunk and Hot Girls” last year), but people tend to go on auto-rampage towards rappers trying to branch out, and look, not every song is “Hailie’s Song.” This guy’s been singing since “Definition” and “Umi Says”…he’s never conceived music without natural side outlets, because he knows he can.

What does it all mean? With a scarf wrapped around his face on the cover like a surgical mask, I could argue that Smith spliced everything he knows into a mad-scientist mixtape for the damned, but that’s giving a confused guy too much credit (I will certainly not ride for the even more stillborn Tru3 Magic that seems to have been released on accident in 2006, with no artwork even, and since been eradicated entirely). The New Danger plays like a glorious and long-grooving accident, and more likely Smith spent five years trying to make a rock album and a rap album and got stuck halfway. With sounds—not songs—this rich and powerful, sometimes it’s okay to get jammed in the middle.

Dan Weiss is an editorial intern at CMJ and the editor-at-large of What Was It Anyway. He enjoys questionable lifestyle choices in Brooklyn and has written for Village Voice, Stylus, Cleveland Scene, Philadelphia Inquirer and Lost at Sea.

PJ Harvey - Dry

2008-05-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

PJ Harvey - Dry
by Lisa Oliver

Dry makes me feel like a loser. And it’s confusing. Not confusing like physics (if you throw a Toyota Yaris and a Hummer off a high-rise–they’re going to hit the ground simultaneously?), but confusing because people who I think have great taste love Dry. When I say I don’t like it, they give me the old stink-eye-to-eye-roll-to-exhale-of -pitying-air routine. Their non-verbal condescension speaks volumes; It says, “You are a rock charlatan.” To my uncouth ears Dry sounds like a dog yelping for air in a poorly-ventilated hatchback. And that dog can’t play guitar.

Much of the press for Dry praised its ability to challenge female sexuality. This album’s challenges to female sexuality are on the same level as a female comedian joking that eating a whole cheesecake over a kitchen sink with her hands gives her more pleasure than a man can. So many of Harvey’s lyrics remind me of the film Carrie: first comes the blood, then the boys. Is sex dirty? Am I dirty for wanting sex? Does my over-articulated sexuality make my hips look big? Do men make me unclean? Can I move things with my mind? Blah blah blah. Just own your bull’s eye, Polly Jean, and stop the hand-wringing. De Palma should remake Carrie and insert Harvey performing “Happy and Bleeding” into the shower/period scene with Harvey becoming a human shield against all those tampons being chucked at poor Sissy Spacek. And Stephen King deserves royalties for “Sheela-Na-Gig” because Harvey gives him the “dirty pillows” shout-out. Although I do have to admit “Dress” and “Plants and Rags” are decent because they sound the most fully fleshed and crafted. Plus she sings, as opposed to throttling them.

I’ve developed a theory researched with small empirical data sets–hello, academic credibility–postulating that P.J. Harvey is popular because she’s sexual, plays guitar, and isn’t unattractive. My algorithm goes: female ≥ attractive (fuck + guitar) = gentlemanly ear pricking.

Harvey is often lumped into the 90s women-in-rock movement. Erm…no. She doesn’t fall into the scented candle, furrowed brow school of Sarah McLaughlin, the bruised Pagan dream-catchers of Tori Amos, or Ani DiFranco’s tomboys-wearing-tank-tops-and-Doc -Marten’s coterie. (I do dig this movement, but I’m not a fully-paid up member.) But Polly doesn’t care about being an empowered WO-MYN. Her frisson of perplexed vulnerability makes that clear. She’s a lithe live wire of neurosis; anxious conflagration blazes out of her sinewy tendons.

John Peel’s (one of her biggest champions) review of her first single pointed out that her work is “admirable if not always enjoyable” –a very fair assessment–despite the fact Peel’s rationale is not the same as mine. He finds her emotional geyser uncomfortable to listen to whereas I find it a cheap and easy shot at intimacy. I find the clumsy cacophony of plinked, plunked notes and novice smoke and mirror time signatures to be not enjoyable. Still, there are things to admire. Despite the sonic miasma efforts, I still hear the bones of blues and punk–and that’s admirable. Also admirable is the fact that Dry is genuine musical footprint. It’s like looking at someone’s baby picture when they’re grown–you can see where that matured adult face came from. You can still hear the nascent yowling and fat guitars in later work, but her skill set, along with her confidence and self-actualization, has bloomed. Finally, Dry is admirable, if not enjoyable because it begins to set in motion P.J. Harvey’s ability to purge her pussy issues for inspiration, as opposed to flagellation.

Lisa Oliver is a Columbia-educated writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Stylus, The Fly UK, Musicweek UK, Yahoo! Music, NME, Publishers Weekly, Domino and People.

apology

2008-05-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

I owe Ian and readers an apology for delaying his post by a day. Happy Memorial Day.

Butthole Surfers - Electriclarryland

2008-05-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

Butthole Surfers - Electriclarryland
by Ian Mathers

Maybe they just should have changed their name? The one common thread I've heard or read in fans' reactions to Electriclarryland is that they find it wanting compared to the Butthole Surfers' earlier, crazier material. Which is fair to an extent, I suppose; Electriclarryland is a rock album (albeit a weird one), as opposed to the band's roots in weird music (albeit with rock tinges). I didn't have the opportunity to check out the Buttholes' lengthy discography until years after my "Pepper"-loving teenage self bought Electriclarryland (and initially found it off-puttingly “difficult,”). I’m still not sure what I think of all that, but it's hard for me to fault this album for not being something it was never meant to be.

I mean, yes, if you were a diehard fan of the insanity that Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary, King Coffey and whoever else they could rope in produced on a regular basis, and you were expecting Electriclarryland to be more of the same, I could see it being a nasty shock in 1996. But get over it. Unless you're going to claim that bands just shouldn't change or try on a more conventional sound, it's kind of invalid to criticize this one from being different from the rest of the band's discography. I don’t expect diehards to like it, but isn't it more interesting to look at whether the album succeeds on the terms the band chose? Don’t fault the terms.

I don't care if Gibby and co. made this record because they bowed to pressure or not, actually; I like parts of the rest of the Buttholes' career (“Whirling Hall of Knives” and “Cherub” are the kind of menacing, fog-machined stomps I can really get behind), but too often their weirdness feels tossed off for the sake of being difficult or making inside jokes or general goofiness I can’t get behind. On Electriclarryland, Haynes still spouts nonsense, scatology and shaggy dog stories, he just does it over a relatively concise, heavy and tuneful set of songs. Real songs. With choruses.

And the thing about Haynes, guitarist Leary and drummer Coffey; during their years creating "Gibbytronix" vocal effects and spotwelding fantastically weird and often evil sounds together, they turned into pretty shit-hot musicians. Haynes in particular has a perfect rock singer voice in a way the first Butthole Surfers EP way back when would never lead you to believe was possible. Hearing him scream, bellow, howl, hiss, moan and rave about solving all of his problems with a gun or wanting to fuck his brother in the ass or how much he hates cough syrup (or hell, being in lust with Christina Applegate) is bracing, hilarious, creepy, fucking awesome. He's probably the only guy who could make me revel in lines like "Well, I met her on the street where she beat me like a poodle / Then she got me accepted to an Ivy League school." On that song, the indelible "The Lord is a Monkey," Haynes stream of consciousnesses some doggerel while occasionally the track erupts into greasy torrents of guitar on cue. The cue is the line “and a dope up her ass.” It's much closer to mid-period, ‘classic’ Buttholes than most partisans would be willing to admit, and like many others here, proves that Electriclarryland isn't a sellout really, just the band assfucking hard rock until it turns into something strange.

Electriclarryland is also impeccably sequenced, to both fuck with old fans and lure in new ones: “Pepper,” the heavy-Beck mutant that unexpectedly went to #1 on the Modern Rock charts on the strength of some drum machines underpinning Leary's guitar scree and Haynes ranting deadpan about drugs, mutilation and people being assholes (plus an all-time non-sequitur chorus) doesn't come until track three, cushioned two deep on either side with blistering, hooky sprints. In one corner, “Birds” sounds like a band finally updating the Stooges (keep in mind this was 1996, half a decade before Is This It would repopularize garage), and “Cough Syrup,” some deranged mix of roots- and indie-rock with a cello coda (I kind of want “they can have my legs/ just leave my mail alone” on my gravestone). And bookending, the kind of gutbucket stomp that only the ‘90s would imbue with echoed guitars (“Thermado”) and something that could probably pass for basic ‘90s alt-thrash if not for the fact that Gibby Haynes is growling in your ear “ever felt a gun for the trigger? / ever gone so fast you could die?" (“Ulcer Breakout”). So far, relatively conventional, and at least internally consistent; even the dancey, zen “Pepper” fits into the milieu.

Which is why the next song, “Jingle of a Dog's Collar,” is so hilarious. Gibby croons—croons!—“what do they know about love, my friend?” over a sunny jangle-pop arrangement, with random haunted organ interjections, sounding like he just popped a couple Valiums. The only time the mask slips a little is when he lets a little strain of urgency into the chorus: “the jingle of a dog's collar would be good right here/ the jingle of a dog's collar would be fine.” It's a bit like the old Surfers song that Orbital sampled on “Satan,” only the ‘50s domesticity never shatters, the other shoe never drops. The song even ends with the sound of a friendly dog. And it goes into the pedal-steeled, Eagles country of “TV Star,” which at least lets Haynes' libido back into the proceedings. But the whole thing is curiously placid.

Those two tracks, much hated even by people who seem to like the heavier parts of Electriclarryland, sound genius once you get used to having the rug pulled out from under you. It's interesting to find out that the Butthole Surfers could have been a catchier, cleverer Cake if they ever wanted, and while you never wish they'd taken that route, the way they dip into it here as a detour to the weird part of the album is masterfully done. When “My Brother's Wife”—a Gibbytronixed slab of zooming atmospherics, martial drumming and bad acid coveting scenarios—gurgles to life, the album drags hard to the left. As a teenager looking for more “Pepper” or at least “Birds,” it confused and unsettled me; now I can just enjoy it the same way I do “Whirling Hall of Knives,” only done on the fancier equipment those label bucks bought the band.

Perversely enough, they leave “Ah Ha” lodged between that slice of hell and “The Lord is a Monkey” (which could be an old track like “John E. Smoke” if not for the drum machine), as “Ah Ha” is both the most conventional thing the band has ever done and perversely, one of the best. Even the lyrics are relatively straightforward and normal. But it's… anthemic. Even as a kid who only knew the band by reputation, this seemed weird. I mean, it's no “Jimi,” but listen to “Ah Ha” in a speeding car on a highway in the middle of summer with the windows down. It's unexpectedly incredible. And while anthemicity is hardly a quality to expect from this band, that only makes it any less glorious.

After the hobo apocalypse of “The Lord is a Monkey” and the gentle comedown of "Let's Talk About Cars,” the band wraps up with “L.A.” and “Space.” The former is another surging, metallic rocker (the band is surprisingly adept with those here), but the latter starts out sounding a bit like Mogwai with Gibby laughing like he's on Dark Side of the Moon before gathering speed and really sounding like Mogwai. It's a fittingly off-kilter end to Electriclarryland. Given the band's oddball credentials, it's not surprising the album is one of the more confounding semi-breakthroughs by one of the most cult of cult bands. I guess it's technically a shame it got that way just by virtue of good songs in the traditional sense, in having their previously idiot-savant-like sense of songcraft meet their shit-disturbing tendencies halfway. But let’s take it on the band’s terms, not against them: if you're looking for nothing more than a catchy, funny, occasionally dirty album—and you can get past their name—the 90s offer few better candidates. Oh, and weird. You need to be looking for weird.

Ian Mathers has written for Stylus Magazine, Village Voice 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.

Cappadonna - The Pillage

2008-05-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

Cappadonna - The Pillage
by Jonah Flicker

The road from top-tier Wu-Tang Clan affiliate to disenchanted, broke-ass gypsy cab driver is apparently a lot shorter than one might think. Just ask Darryl Hill, aka Cappadonna, aka Cappucino, aka “dancehall general, party fanatic colonel.” After knocking it out of the park with guest appearances on Raekwon’s Only Built for Cuban Linx and Ghostface Killah’s Ironman—the latter featuring his incredible extended verse on “Iron Maiden”—he received the esteemed “featuring” credit on Wu-Tang’s 1997 double LP, Wu-Tang Forever. One year later, he released his debut solo album, The Pillage, one of the most sorely overlooked albums of the extended Wu-Tang family. Things descended into disarray from there, culminating in his being airbrushed off the cover of Wu-Tang’s Iron Flag; but these days, Cappa’s relationship with the Clan is back to amicable. And The Pillage remains the best work of this illustrious MC’s career.

Cappadonna specializes in making fast raps sound slow by deftly connecting stream-of-consciousness phrases; the results might sound cut-up and choppy out a lesser MC’s mouth, but flow naturally and precisely when Cappa’s jovial baritone enunciates. The best example is The Pillage’s lead single, “Slang Editorial.” Take a look: “My slang is editorial / Explicit material / Briefcase, yo, live in stereo flow / Feel me, Donna realty / Set the black people free / Killer bees got the best stee.” If that read simplistic and disjointed, it sounds just the opposite over Tru Master’s orchestral funk.

The production on Pillage is above and beyond anything you might hear from the RZA these days, especially in his current “hippie” incarnation. He outsourced most of the beats to a crew of producers: the aforementioned Tru Master, Goldfinghaz, 4th Disciple, and Mathematics. But a track like “Blood on Blood War,” one of the few produced by Mr. Diggs himself, makes one pine for his grimier work of the late ‘90s. “Old Special Ed with the plate in my head / Bad bread, spare life, KKK on the mic,” raps Cappa over RZA’s sinister banger.

But Cappa isn’t limited to word association; for all the accolades Ghostface earns for his tales of crime and life on the run, Cappa was already spinning detailed narratives back on his debut. Though “Run” bears the same title as Ghostface’s 2004 track from The Pretty Toney Album, Cappa’s take on the subject matter is actually more unique and visceral.

As usual, fellow Wu-Tang members are peppered throughout The Pillage—Method Man, Raekwon, Ghost, U-God—but Cappa shines best handling his own business. “Milk the Cow” is such a moment (though Meth does rap the chorus). This is Cappadonna’s version of “walking these dogs to represent Wu,” a reminder of the industriousness one needs to make it in rap. The song also sounds like it could have provided inspiration for M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” as a gun cock and blast matches each call-out of “Park Hill projects/ Chicka-pow!”

At sixteen songs, the album has some inevitably weak moments, but those failings are minor. Usually though, shit is just nice: “Everything is Everything,” the stuttering “Splish Splash,” the sentimental “Black Boy.” And what other Wu-Tang member actually had Tekitha rap instead of sing on an album? Never again did Cappadonna manage to match the creativity and intensity he showed here; his two subsequent solo albums were basically a wash, but things are different now than they were in the late ‘90s for both hip-hop and the Wu. Cappadonna shared some strong moments on 8 Diagrams, sure. But it would be nice to hear him shine on his own again, as he has already proven himself more than capable.

Jonah Flicker lives in Los Angeles and has written for Pitchfork Media, LA Weekly, SF Weekly, LA Times, Soma Magazine, and more. He enjoys taco trucks and long walks on the beach.

a-ha - Scoundrel Days

2008-05-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

a-ha - Scoundrel Days
by Ned Raggett

Theoretically any album with a line near its start that goes "Cut my wrist on a bad thought/And head for the door" would have me following the narrator out, then running away. So much for theory.

Scoundrel Days, the second album by the Norwegian trio a-ha, probably ranks up there, somewhere, in my ‘most played albums’ list, assuming some gremlin has been following me around copying down this information. Gremlins are that way, but the larger point stands: This 1987 effort is pretty close to impressed into my skull. Somewhere, somehow, there's a part of me that wishes I was Morten Harket, former Lutheran priest in training, now worldwide pop icon, even if only for a little while, standing above a landscape not dissimilar to the wider-than-widescreen landscape of green fields, distant hills, and blue but cloudy skies on the cover of the album, a fjord behind me or something, filming a video for the soaring title track quoted above and therefore getting the chance every so often to let fly with a huge, pure, perfectly sung, "And SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

You laugh, but you're not me.

It's different in Europe, I gather, for a certain generation—there a-ha was a reliable pop fixture for most of the second half of the 80s, one of those simultaneous boy-band/actual-band incarnations that the 80s was littered with (see also Duran Duran and Guns 'n' Roses—and don't give me that look). In America, ask most people about a-ha's second album and you'll be lucky to get a “What?” Heck, ask about the first album and you'll be lucky. Go, "Look, you know, 'Take on Me,'" then while people go "Oh yeah, that video!" in response, take advantage of their distraction by stealing their wallets and figuring out their PIN numbers. These are troubled times after all, might as well take advantage.

I sorta half-remember "I'll Be Losing You" surfacing on MTV briefly in an attempt to make a-ha's initial burst of fame in the States last, but it didn't quite work. It's at once a pity and somewhat understandable—it's a strange song still; in fact the whole album's a little strange. But this song in particular substitutes the clean charge of the first album's impact for a shuffling, roiling punch, driven in part by secret weapon Michael Sturgis, a session drummer whose three appearances here helped cement this album into the pantheon (well, MY pantheon, which is all that matters). The distorted brass samples are like a cleaned-up Yello, but buried in the mix that much more, while Harket himself sings against his overdubbed self, as well as huge samples of sighs and breaths. He eventually delivers what seems like an ending before Sturgis unleashes a massive drum roll and BAM we're back.

I only first heard this album in full when I went to college in 1988—one of the guys on my dorm floor had it, Scott Rafferty by name (if you're out there somewhere, drop me a line). I heard it from him enough times to want to pick it up, which I did on clearance or something at some point that year. Now there's a huge amount of stuff from that time, which I read, listened to, or watched that you couldn't get me to touch now. Scoundrel Days, though, I'll play that whenever. It's a standby album. It's like, I dunno, the Cure's Faith or Lull's Cold Summer—reliable, something that'll make me happy.

I figured out this album had a certain cachet a few years back thanks to a cover version from another Norwegian band. I guess the Kings of Convenience are only remembered now as being some sort of transitional figures for the fame of Peter, Bjorn and John or something similar, but I remember reading a live review that said they covered "Manhattan Skyline," the centerpiece of Scoundrel Days. It's a-ha’s big ol' rock song, riffs piled on in the first part of the chorus after serenely tense verses, Harket's seemingly calm take on a breakup suddenly turning into rage. But this is well-sculpted (very well-sculpted) rage; he doesn't growl or scream in those verses. He wails in perfect counterpoint, which makes the second part of the chorus, when the feedback drops back, the tempo slows down and he turns everything into an operatic aria in miniature (or is it Roy Orbison? Scott Walker? someone else entirely?) I can’t imagine the Kings of Convenience reached those levels—but you know, they recognized “Wait, this song is great!” at least. Which it is.

And yet there's other material on here that is all the more curious. "October," for instance—demi-lounge jazzy synth-pop that begins like calm Organisation-era OMD, but there's still a core melody at heart, at once a swinging tune and something cold and fragile. Harket's whistle during the break gets lost somewhere in the softly drawing murk, confident and chilly. Then there's much of the second half of the album, which isn't filler at all but also is...well, of its time. Things start to blend into each other a bit more, at least structurally, so I focus in on the variations. For instance, the way that the massed vocals on "The Weight of the Wind" work way more for me than the comparable moment on "Cry Wolf." I want to assume that the title of "We're Looking for the Whales" is a result of the band not having English as a first language, but then again perhaps that's just Anglocentric. I'll take the flutes-as-whalesong and the soft synth-beat shuffle starting it all off over a lot of other hoohah out there.

The album’s ending saves it all, though—"Maybe Maybe" is the definition of a perfect trifle, two-and-a-half minutes of sprightliness that I bet the St. Etienne folks have on secret replay somewhere (I'm pretty sure I remember Bob Stanley once praising the first two a-ha albums, so I wouldn't be surprised). "Soft Rains of April," though, there's your album ender, as melodramatically perfect as "Manhattan Skyline" and a bookend to the title track; slow, majestic, a waltz of sorts, but one where one partner is miles away from the other and is so utterly desperate. Hell, Morrissey could have sung this, writing letters, counting down days, years. Everything wraps up with all the music cutting out right after Harket sings one last "The soft rains of April are over," leaving nothing but one repeated, purred "over" that could have ended a contemporary Prince album. (In fact, this came out a couple of years before "Batdance." Conspiracy!)

I haven't mentioned the third song, "The Swing of Things," because I talked about it here already. So read that. Yeah, lazy, I know, but I already said it all once before! And the song’s that good!

Ned Raggett gets all his work—for the All Music Guide, the OC Weekly, Plan B and wherever else he writes far too earnestly—confused sometimes. Then there's his blog, where all the confusion gets worse.

The Dandy Warhols - Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia

2008-05-02T00:08:00.000-07:00

The Dandy Warhols - Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia
A conversation between Theon Weber, Dan Weiss and Ian Mathers

Dan: STUD
WHO'S DEEP

Theon: i like your babydoll tee

Dan: and off to the fucking side
i only wear babydoll tees
the best thing that ever came out of dating linda
she bought me a shirt from a dandy warhols show she went to with tracy
that can only fit like a toddler
and says on it
YOU DRIVE FAST, I'LL DO THE DRUGS
in trippy 60s font
with a car

Theon: hahahahahahahaha
oh the dandy warhols
they're almost endearing
everyone here hates them so much

Dan: ok group. i like when they do full-on reed impressions

Theon: thirteen tales is in many places great.

Dan: if these many places are nearly all on side B we're talkin

Theon: actually they're pretty evenly distributed sidewise
like, godless is great

Dan: "shakin" "get off" "bohemian like you" "sleep"

Theon: one or the other of mohammed or nietzsche is great, i can never remember

Dan: godless is good
i'm not big on the slow intro songs after godless

Theon: shakin is good. sleep is good. bohemian like you... god, the brown sugar thing bothers me so much but it's good.
big indian is pretty good.
i like horse pills.
that "country" "song" sucks incredibly.

Dan: wow holy shit, i never noticed brown sugar thing until you just said it
bad rockcrit

Theon: good, now try to enjoy the song again

Dan: "horse pills" is great

* * *

Theon: this album has become funnier for me since moving to portland
this "urban bohemia" shit
ok courtney
i live in your fucking city

Dan: taylor-taylor
what an asshole

Theon: i mean in one sense it really is perfect

Dan: i just assumed they were from new york

Theon: because portland is to new york exactly what the dandy warhols are to the velvet underground

Dan: HAHAHA
ok, can we just do this
i don't feel like editing ned raggett's piece at 2:47 am
can we just make this convo an OST for the dandy warhols

Theon: you're always threatening to do this

Dan: i'll leave all this in, even the part about not wanting to edit ned's piece
it was supposed to be fucking hutlock anyway
but he's somewhere
probably in line for fucking space mountain

Theon: hahahahaha

Dan: don't stop talking about the album now!
you were on a roll
portland : new york :: dandys on with it

Theon: i'm listening to it now. see the thing about "country leaver" is
you wouldn't think a parody having contempt for its subject would be bad but it totally is
like these fucking rooster noises

Dan: haha

Theon: is naming the song "country leaver" and also having it be a country song not enough to get the country thing across

Dan: bad country jokes beat bad rap jokes

Theon: would you classify "solid" as a bad rap joke or is that just a lou reed bite
by the way i have listened to that song while "walking around Old Town"
and i had to stop it because i felt like an asshole
someday i'll go back

Dan: why don't we split the difference and say it's an impression...a bad one...of lou doing that rap song of his
what's it called
"the original wrapper"
hahaha

Theon: now that i know we're being watched i can't tell if you're making shit up

Dan: no, i swear
holdon

Theon: is it like christmas wrapping

Dan: christmas wrapping is classic
this is not classic
in fact, it's pretty humdrum
which is odd
because lou reed rapping shouldn't sound like business as usual

Theon: you really don't have to sendspace me this

Dan: no i'm not
just looking for the lyrics

Theon: so that stuff in dig where the dandies are painted as eagerly appropriating the brian jonestown massacres Real Druggies thing
having a photoshoot in their trashed hotel room, etc
like, i don't want this to bother me
and what's more i'm sympathetic towards it because i have exactly the same poser's hangups about drugs!

Dan: this is so bad...i've owned dig for years and haven't watched it yet
although
i appreciate you italicizing dig for me now that we're being all meta

Theon: i do that anyway
i used to IM very properly
Hello, Dan. The Dandy Warhols' 1997 (whatever) album Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia etc
but i atrophied
now i just send text messages like that
god you're right, this opening triptych sucks.
i bet he calls it a triptych too

Dan: isn't it just like the worst paced thing?

Theon: emphasis on the TRIP

Dan: like, HAI WE'RE ON DRUGS, WATCH THE FIRST UPBEAT COME IN ON TRACK FIVE
that's supposed to be "upbeat song"
but i like how abstract it came out

Theon: it's just so cheap making fun of the dandy warhols for thinking their drugs are cooler than they are
can't we take the dandy warhols on their own merits
let's talk about "sleep", that's a good song

Dan: the dandy warhols think everything is cooler than it is

Theon: hmm!

Dan: "sleep" is beautiful
but it's lazy!

Theon: oh my god that's portland

Dan: it loops the same thing for five minutes right? i'm not playing the album right now but i should be

Theon: my ex-girlfriend is with a bike snob and has gone into bike overdrive
portland thinks things are cool that aren't
sonic youth is not going to emerge from a town that recycles

Dan: who's that guy just hanging at your pad
yeah he's lookin pretty bored yeah you broke up that's too bad

Theon: song's so mean.

Dan: they're real snots
i mean
are they on drugs, mocking drugs, mocking themselves on drugs, too smirky to give us a hint
there's a word for this
arch

Theon: "horse pills" is a good song because there's these backup vocals that just yell "PILLS" every measure, and you feel like that should happen in all of these songs
arch implies a certain urbanity that really isn't here.

Dan: hmm

Theon: like, they're at their best when they realize they're this close to the bloodhound gang
"horse pills" has the line "in your itsy bitsy teenie weenie riding up your butt bikini" and in the background someone yells along with riding up your BUTT!

Dan: that sounds like cake!
UP! YOUR! BUTT!

Theon: but see cake is

Dan: take it to the trumpet

Theon: well this is possibly true.

Dan: now cake is arch.

Theon: cake is arch.

* * *

Dan: you know what's strange about this album?
the production is fucknomenal.
like so undeservingly
where did they get this money?
for the space and depth and oddball instruments

Theon: do you know about THE ODDITORIUM

Dan: the most recent album?
or an actual odditorium?

Theon: yeah but it's named after
their giant studio here
THE ODDITORIUM

Dan: who gave these people a studio?
oh, guess what this is from :
I was sittin' home on the West End
watchin' cable TV with a female friend
We were watchin' the news, the world's in a mess
the poor and the hungry, a world in distress
Herpes, AIDS, the Middle East at full throttle
better check that sausage, before you put it in the waffle
And while you're at it - check what's in the batter
make sure that candy's in the Original Wrapper

Theon: herpes
oh my god that could be great
see if that were a dandy warhols song, it would be better!
"a female friend"

Dan: he calls a vagina a waffle

Theon: does "the gospel" suck as much as it did last time i didn't stop after "big indian" which was like three years ago when i had a burned copy of this and my friend brian and i were driving silently back from filming some scene for some movie in the middle of nowhere
and after it trickled into silence brian said "is it over yet"
and put on classic rock radio

Dan: i don't even remember it, that's the final track?

Theon: yeah it is
get this
a gospel takeoff

Dan: snap

Theon: you're right about the production. i really like how clean the beat on "sleep" sounds, between the cracks of all this pseudovelvet hiss.

Dan: yeah!
and the harmonies just lazily pile onto it

Theon: actually you know who's into this
hold on

* * *

Theon Weber has invited you to a group chat. Click here to join the conversation:

In the chat room: Ian Mathers, Theon Weber

Theon: ian can sing the praises of the opening triptych
Dan: haha
Theon: and about the production in general, i think.
Dan: hey ian
Ian: what
Theon: okay this should be explained really. ian we're having this involved conversation about thirteen tales from urban bohemia that may or may not be edited into a thing for dan's blog
Ian: oh god
guys
it's 3 am
i have to go to work tomorrow
Theon: awww iiiiiiiiiiiiian
Ian: also i am drunk
any other time I would be on this like brown on rice

* * *

Meanwhile…

Theon: julia also signed on for like ten seconds then vanished

Dan: hmm

Theon: i was going to invite her in as a Representative Of Portland Cool
no i'm lying, i wasn't actually

Dan: i was gonna say
i really hope ian can join in because i'm setting up the blog entry now
and for the bio
i want to just put that we're the three stylus writers who know how to eat pussy
that that's our thing

Theon: i am not sure i am behind this

* * *

Dan: ian! quick! just give us a sound bite!
Ian: uh uh uh
Theon: i actually like the "guys, it's three am. bye."
Dan: as long as we can complete the triptych of oral pleasers
Ian: i really love the first three songs, but i'm disappointed that they didn't herald the dandy warhols' first shoegazer album
Dan: ian that statement is way too cogent for a drunk fellow
Ian: well
i've been dancing for the last three hours, which clears the head
Dan: neither of us can remember
does "the gospel" suck
Ian: no
it's lovely
Theon: it's rather gauzy, i think, ian might -
yeah, there we go
Ian: i think, anyway
i didn't keep it
it should have ended with "sleep", really
Dan: the whole album should've been "sleep"
and don't think they couldn't
Theon: but with godless interjected occasionally for the sake of the druggy mariachi horns
Ian: well, sleep, godless, mohammad and especially nietzsche
that track is a beast
Theon: that stuff i was saying earlier about not being very comfortable in portland - i feel like i'd have more definite feelings about this album if i did.
i've never met anyone who likes this album.
here, i mean.

* * *

Theon: take out the more irrelevant bits
i mean, don't be seduced by Wacky Banter cause it won't be funny in the morning

Dan: right
i'm thinking i'll save it now
and read over again in the morning and publish

Theon: good call
i'm going to bed.

Dan: yeah same
later

Theon: let's leave the cunnilingus thing alone though
dan

Dan: hahaha
that's already handled
you'll see
well, this is off the record now so i'll show you:
Theon Weber, Dan Weiss and Ian Mathers are like the Three Musketeers of Critillingus

Theon: hmm

Dan: that way it just sounds like clever wordboxing
but we know the truth

Theon: that way it just sounds really gay

Dan: gay like kelly polar gay?

Theon: i am laughing
christ on a crutch

Dan: yeah i'm laughing too honestly
a good sign
ian won't even remember this
he's gonna be like what the fuck
i'm starting it with my stud pic

Theon: yeah i was going to ask about that

Dan: i'm clipping out korey and "better black days"
so it's just "linda bought me a shirt"
fuck how do i ditch the time
before like every line

Theon: HAVE FUN

Dan: ugh

Theon Weber, Dan Weiss and Ian Mathers are like the Three Musketeers of Critillingus.

Toadies - Rubberneck

2008-04-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

Toadies - Rubberneck
by Joel Chaffee

Todd Lewis should’ve been raised by religious zealots and punished in tiny closets and other frightening Bergmanesque scenes. On achieving adulthood, he’d escape the house with his heart/soul/brain on fire. Fleeing to some place in Texas, he’d start a band that wrote a huge hit which nobody could totally comprehend that everyone said was about vampires. Only that last part exists outside my imagination actually, but damn, can’t you just see the rest?

My friend summarizes Rubberneck, for a long time Toadies’ only record, with a chuckle: I am angry and I don’t love Jesus. The first lyrics on the album ask, “Are you gonna save me?/Can you save me?” Lewis, over the course the album, fights to live in relentless opposition to salvation. Hardly a new rock and roll trope, this could be tiresome over an entire career, but in 36 minutes will certainly do.

Opener “Mexican Hairless” is all fast, cyclic power-chord riffs via Darrell Herbert’s lead guitar (as mean as Kanna and jubilant as the devil). Combines with second track “Mister Love” it makes a hectic monster of an intro, which heralds the threat, “We gonna show you a thing or two about love.” And still, the album doesn’t really start until song three, the torrential shuffle “Backslider.” The LP finally tells a story, about baptism and the fear of reversing one’s salvation: “And I threw up my hands/And I heard ‘Amen’/And I prayed 'Sweet Jesus, don’t let me become a backslider.’”

While the lyrics are angry, the riffs are positively buoyant. Like another dollar-bin favorite, Dandelion’s Dyslexicon, Rubberneck is the sound of a band as ballsy and visceral as punk but accidentally formed into hugely melodic pop. Perhaps there is a weirdness about the albums that set them apart. I find it difficult to name a band when prompted that “sounds like” the Toadies.

Perhaps the artistic success of Rubberneck is the simultaneity of its angriness and its joy. There are hooks all over the place; just about every rhythm, lead and bass guitar part is a hook. But the hooks snag like barbed wire; what's more, they like it. All Music Guide complacently compares the Toadies to standard-bearers Pixies and Nirvana; yes, Rubberneck is in the neighborhood of punk, and also of pop, but sounds nothing like pop-punk (a distinction they join with, ironically, Pixies and Nirvana). But all these references are fatuous and misleading. Rubberneck is its own entity; like a well read novel or well tread memory.

On “I Come From the Water,” Herbert squalls and sparks off harmonics through a jaunty progression just as “Mexican Hairless” earlier found him blistering high notes. His (and often Lewis’) strings are constantly bent and pulled and whammied and in all ways compellingly fucked with. The complications of little stutters or additional half-measures work themselves into the Toadies’ structures to throw the listener off; they are not writing hymns.

But it’s not all noise and pyrotechnics. “Tyler” is a sweet, creepy seduction. “I found a window in the kitchen and I let myself in / ...I stumble in the hallway / Outside her bedroom door / I hear her call out to me / I hear the fear in her voice.” This terrifying-yet-softhearted tale of lovers losing their virginity is the climax of the record. It is Lewis at his most articulate and primal, howling defiance—of culture, fear, religion. In case you did not hear, he comes from the water.

Near the album’s close is “Velvet,” as violent and wounded as the record gets with its opening cry, “Get away! / Get away!” over a hammered octave as Herbert snakes his way up the neck and the rhythm section builds towards “You hurt me, you fuck/cunt” verses. The sinister “Happyface” screams through choruses of “No no no more son of a bitch / No more happy face.”

There is redemption in closer “I Burn,” and the only acoustic guitar. The song’s dark bombast is as euphoric as a crippling accident. “Stoke the embers / Cleanse the spirit / A prayer in every spark / Feel the lick of bad religion.” The cleansing here is scary but how satisfying. No more backsliding or quitting or son of a bitch. “Fire is bright / Fire is clean / Efficient and divine.” It is real and definitive as a burn.

And of course, I still celebrate the big hit, “Possum Kingdom,” as fondly as the first time I heard it. “Do you wanna be my angel?” is dopey innocence and as direct as the songs’ initial command to “Make up your mind / Decide to walk with me / Around the lake tonight / ...I’ll show you my dark secret.” The song’s final and oft-repeated question, “Do you wanna die?,” sung in Lewis’ snide, satyr-like voice, is the most fun the record has this side of the water. “Do you wanna die?” It is less a question than a command. Yes, of course you do. Behind the boathouse. What is the dark secret? “I Burn?” Maybe. Something tells me it’s a lot more fun—and a lot scarier.

Joel Chaffee is a writer of prose, music, and poetry and the founder of artist collective Charity Case. He is 27 years old and in collegiate exile in Rochester, NY.

Pitches

2008-04-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

WWIA is currently looking for more staff writers, guest writers, celebrity guest writers, and musicians whom Pitchfork has emblazoned with a sharp, red "0.0" across the chest.

If you have something (barely) competent to say about a snubbed fave or personal dartboard, please email me or Todd Hutlock (contact links to the right) with proof that we can entrust 500-1000 words to you every few weeks.

We also need guest writers who voted in Pazz & Jop more than eight years ago for a new column. Contact me for more details if you've got the credentials.

-Dan

Mike Jones - Who is Mike Jones? (Screwed and Chopped by DJ Michael “5000” Watts)

2008-04-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

Mike Jones - Who is Mike Jones? (Screwed and Chopped by DJ Michael “5000” Watts)
by Jonathan Bradley

Kingdom Come. Encore. Electric Circus. It’s no secret that good rappers can make bad albums. Talent on the mic has never been any insurance against dismal studio output. But just as true, though far less recognized, is the converse: Bad rappers can and do make good records. As rappers go, Mike Jones is one of the worst.

Jones, the loud, graceless Houston MC, is a terrible rapper. It is useless to even try to evaluate him by the standards of good rap, because he does not conform to them. How do you judge the wordplay of a rapper who has none? How do you consider the metaphors and imagery of a rapper who gives no indication that he understands what those words mean, let alone how to use them in his music? The kindest thing that could be said for Jones’ microphone talents is that he appears to be genuinely in love with rhyming. That is not to say that he shows admirable dedication to his craft, spending a lifetime fine-tuning his phrasing, poring over his verses and pouring creativity into the construction of his couplets. No, Mike Jones sounds like he never got over being fascinated by the simple fact that he can highlight the similar ending sounds of certain words by placing them in close proximity with each other. Even if the endings aren’t particularly similar. Even if the words in question are actually exactly the same word. Jones sounds like he’s having the time of his life hollering them out anyway.

When toward the end of 2004, major labels turned their attention to the thriving independent Houston hip-hop scene, the city possessed a wealth of talented artists of a variety of styles. From veterans like Scarface and UGK’s Bun-B to the thoughtful, introverted cousins Z-Ro and Trae; from the weed-whacked weirdo Devin the Dude to the easygoing, poppy Lil’ Flip and to mixtape maestros Lil’ Keke and Chamillionaire, Houston was a city brimming with talent. For the first time since the heyday of the Geto Boys, out-of-towners were paying attention. And yet somehow, whether through hustle, business acumen or pure good fortune, the task of introducing the legacy of Texas hip hop to the nation fell to Mike Jones.

Who?

Mike Jones.

And yet Jones didn’t stumble. He refused to allow megalomania or arrogance to derail his hometown’s opportunity. Quite the reverse: Who is Mike Jones? is a missive from a relatively humble ambassador for his local culture, one who was smart enough to let his more talented and more deserving peers grab the attention while he took a back seat. His album serves as a kind of companion piece to a prior, independently released Houston primer, the Swisha House mixtape Major Without a Major Deal (The Day Hell Broke Loose 2), which also featured him prominently.

The first single from Who is Mike Jones?, the song that first focused national attention on Houston, particularly Swisha House’s slice of Houston, was the stunning “Still Tippin’.” The track, a dark, crawling banger built on a mournful string figure and a slowed-down vocal sample — a technique that was, at the time, rare outside the city —had been floating around on mixtapes, including Major Without a Major Deal, for quite a while. It could be credited to any of the three rappers who contributed verses: Slim Thug, Mike Jones and Paul Wall. There was even an alternate version with a different beat and a verse from Chamillionaire.

That Jones, the least impressive rapper of this collection, ended up with the song as his first single could be attributed as underhanded opportunism on the rapper’s part, and perhaps it was. But it could just as easily have been the result of admirable selflessness. “Still Tippin’” gave national exposure to two superior rappers who outclassed Jones, as he must have known they would. Even with his inclusion of reasonably dexterous localisms like, “catch me lane switchin’ with the paint drippin’/turn your neck and your dame missin’/Me and Slim we ain’t trippin’/I’m finger flippin’ and syrup sippin’/Like Do or Die, I’m po’ pimpin’,” this was a Mike Jones track in name only. As far as its impact was concerned, and as far as many first time listeners were concerned, this was a single credited to the city of Houston.

And Who is Mike Jones? scaled this approach up to album length. Jones does all he can to disappear into the background and to act as, at best, master of ceremonies for his own city’s coming out party. It is as if he understood his limitations, and did all he could to offset them. He opens the album up to a number of local luminaries and these rappers, like Bun-B, Lil’ Keke and Killa Kyleon, all effortlessly put their host to shame. Jones’ most gracious move is the laid back highlight “Flossin’,” which sounds exactly like it might be a Big Moe solo track, even though Moe only sings the hook.

The production of the album is also fiercely local, with the few interloping beat makers (like Three 6 Mafia, responsible for the superb “Got It Sewed Up”) adjusting their sound to conform to the prevailing aesthetic. Where the far more talented Slim Thug sprinkled his major label debut with expensive Neptunes beats, Jones understood that the bizarre Houston sound was one of his best selling points, and there was little point diluting it with production that could have come from anywhere.

And with beats like the frenetic “Turning Lane,” or the sparse, reggae-tinged “Know What I’m Sayin’” Jones doesn’t need to say much of interest. While his rhymes may be entirely lacking in creativity, he can flow, and he never embarrasses himself with the kind of clumsiness Rick Ross is apt to exhibit. He shouts his lyrics with boyish enthusiasm, and his generally good-natured outlook makes him an easy rapper to listen to. When not dwelling on his favorite talking points — his name, his phone number, his staggering wealth — he sticks mostly to running through local cultural signifiers like candy paint, prescription cough syrup and screwed music. The album’s sense of place is so strong that you begin not to mind the over-excitable tour guide.

Even the few songs that do broach less standard themes succeed. “Scandalous Hoes” morphs from boilerplate misogyny into an account of distrust and rejection. Jones sounds genuinely hurt when he complains that women “don’t want me for me,” which taken with “Back Then,” in which he explains that the girls he liked had no interest in his chubby frame when he didn’t have any money, almost hints at a complexity you wouldn’t believe possible from a rapper who seems most interested in shouting his name and his phone number at you. And “Grandma,” Jones’ ode to his deceased grandmother doesn’t have much pathos, but it doesn’t have much bathos either. Jones doesn’t stop shouting for this elegy, but his uncomplicated approach works in his favor: he sounds like he wants nothing more out of the track then to tell you how awesome he thought his Grandma was.

(Incidentally, Jones’ Grandma is a great minor character on this record. She appears to be part mentor and part consigliore for Jones, a role that has her advising him on how best to market his record in strip clubs, and warning him to be wary of unscrupulous women.)

The original Who is Mike Jones? is a fine album, but in proper H-Town fashion, it is best appreciated in its chopped and screwed form. On its original release, the album came packaged with this slowed down edition as a bonus disc; the remixed version can still be purchased separately.

The chopped and screwed technique offers DJs a place in contemporary hip hop other than curator (DJ Drama, DJ Khaled) or niche-audience technical wizard (DJ Shadow). Michael Watts approaches his remix of Who is Mike Jones? like he’s performing a set, and the album follows a natural progression. He drops elements from tracks into others, creating an uninterrupted listening experience, and subtly reorders songs to improve their flow. Mike Jones’ verse in “Still Tippin’,” for instance, is moved to the end of the track, meaning the repeated lines “Back then hoes didn’t want me/Now I’m hot they all on me,” blend seamlessly into “Back Then,” which samples that lyric as its hook. Likewise, he introduces the syncopated melody line from “Screw Dat” halfway into the previous track, and, after the track begins, augments it subtly with the sampled yodeling from “Cuttin’.” Watts’ scratching and chopping is not flashy but it is effective, and adds to the disorienting ambience already induced by the pitched-down music. Jones voice becomes a dragged out bellow, just one more sonic element in this mix, and his fondness for repetition coalesces with the favored screw technique of repeating phrases. The individual tracks cease to have rigid structure and dissolve into an uninterrupted volley of beats and flow, perfect for long, slow drives down packed freeways in the hot sun.

Mike Jones has had a tough time getting his follow-up album released, despite a few likable singles (“Mr. Jones,” “My 64”) that were apparently not liked by enough people. There’s every possibility that Who is Mike Jones? could end up being his only major label release, and it may even be better for his legacy if it is. On mixtapes leading up to Who is Mike Jones? release, Jones shouted gleefully that this album would be arriving in stores shortly; these lines remain preserved on the album that actually hit stores. His whole career seemed designed to lead up to this release, and when he did release it, he helped elevate his entire community. Texas rap’s star isn’t shining quite as bright as it did in 2005, but the city is now considered a major hip hop center, a status it decidedly lacked before Who is Mike Jones? hit stores. If, in the future, Jones slips into obscurity, and “Who is Mike Jones?” become a question few are able to answer, his album will still have done its work.

Jonathan Bradley has written for Stylus Magazine, Lost at Sea, Volume Magazine and the Western Front, and rules over his own miniature Internet fiefdom, the Screw Rock 'n' Roll blog. Although it's not widely known, he is Australia's best music critic.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

2008-04-10T23:44:00.000-07:00

Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is Not That Great
by Mike Orme

Putting it mildly: Neutral Milk Hotel poisons everything.

A genre-spanning clusterfuck of traditional instrumentation working within the medium of ‘90s college rock, an indulgent yarn about an inspiring but complex WWII, a jewel in the crown of a much-loved Southern pop music commune, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea stamped a punctuation mark on the 20th-century underground and inspired emotional acres of musical prospectors. Its followers (we’ll call ‘em the ‘98ers) furiously mine the human condition while excavating from a rich quarry of disparate musical influences. To say that NMH begat the obtuse experimental folk movements which include Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom is not a huge overstatement. It’s a shame, then, that Aeroplane has wasted the time of so many worthy music lovers.

From the outset, Aeroplane declares alliance to simplistic usage of the American folk tradition and a vomitous affinity to Eastern European gypsy music. Frontman Jeff Mangum’s—d’oh—mangum opus, a loose concept album about, kinda, Anne Frank, has acted as a gateway drug for many into the beguiling and ill-defined world of indie music. But ten years later, his legacy remains the tacit permission to afford musicians the right to musical tourism. Mind you, I’m not a poseur hater: Everyone deserves the freedom to explore music for which the challenge is determined by their own willingness to open their ears and to traverse the intellectual continents—it’s just… where’s the respect for history? Culture? Why do we continue to think we have the mandate to belittle everyone else?

History puts the record’s excessively discussed beginning at “The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1” and the blandest of acoustic chord progressions that seems to recall a pop pretender as transparent as Jack Johnson. Of course, Mangum develops the progression into a complex and memorable ditty, but one marred with the same kinds of problems that dot the entire album. Mangum, predictably, carries his nasal and quite grating voice somewhat like Bob Dylan fronting the Pixies: He picks rather obvious canonical folk hooks for his verses (for the uninitiated: they’re difficult to grasp, easy to apply, quick to be tired of), and then raises his voice an octave on each chorus (“Carrot Flowers” as an example, is just the first of many). Great, just what we need to close out the 90s—the vocal equivalent of Kurt Cobain’s (and Mike McCready’s, and Gavin Rossdale’s, and Daniel Johns’) DOD-brand “Grunge” distortion pedal. Seriously, was this not incredibly obvious to any old sad-sack open-mic singer-songwriter who came before him, let alone the Conor Obviourst-ish folks who copied him?

Well, whatever. As I said above, opening people’s minds to folk tradition is not a bad thing. Certainly the Athens, GA-based Elephant Six collective has opened doors not only to their Southern compatriots but to indie fans and dilettantes alike by rhapsodizing the canonical elements of capital-W Western pop. They did it admirably not from a well-funded Motown or Nashville recording studio, but as an ill-funded Dixie hippie colony recording out of their bedrooms. The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by E6’s loose leaders Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, channeled the voracious musical appetites of the Brian Wilson and Paisley Underground types by probing for striking melodies in Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle while engaging in a conversation between psychedelic pop and ambient textures of the “Green Typewriters” suite. There’s no denying that the Elephant Six has reeled in a number of fans with the panacea of classic pop and has helped broaden listeners’ horizons by subversively injecting challenging elements of ambient music.

Yeah, so you could understand that people could immediately appreciate Mangum’s sparse folky wail—I mean, if decades of folk tenors did it and created an American songbook, and Dylan did it badly and became a legend, why not Mangum? What’s a shame is that his voice has become a mimetic signifier to dozens of well-known low-fidelity warblers, each of whom revels in their vocalic cacophony and each of whom expects the poetry and ambience to carry the song.

Well, never mind the poetry—I concede that Mangum is a starkly kaleidoscopic imagist, capable of claustrophobia and galactic poetry in practically the same breath. I’m currently concerned with Mangum’s gypsy fetish. This guy wears his Balkan horns like a badge. Seriously, how many mildly talented sackbut players do we need to bear before acknowledging that this is all an exercise of either boredom (likely in NMH’s case) or the paralyzing need for attention (as is the case for every horn-toting band following them)? Is it really important to lionize multi-instrumentalists who affect Renaissance airs, swapping instruments with glee, reveling in their own self-styled virtuosity, when only half of them can even play their four instruments?

The natural counter-argument here is that it doesn’t actually matter how well the players play their instruments. The music composed and played on this album contains elements from ambient and free jazz, and what’s more important than the ability to play the instrument is the ability to play the sound of the instrument, adding to the piece with texture more than virtuosity. And certainly Aeroplane, like all the great Elephant Six records, presents a varied palette of continent-spanning hues, from the dusty golds of American folk to tarnished Eastern Bloc reds. The record’s gypsy affinity actually brings up an interesting question—Did it predict the Bulgarian wedding music movement that has made so many waves in post-9/11 Europe? Or, more likely, did it beget that godawful gypsy-punk-tourist scene that has some New Yorkers named Gogol Bordello [Mike, you’re dead –ed.] and a New Mexican named Beirut the darlings of the nebulous haze of the blogosphere?

The fact that Aeroplane is even mentioned in the same sentence as these phenomena is testament to its tourist sensibilities and the quainster* ideology—that which seeks out the world’s facile pleasures and marginalizes them into semi-ironic indulgence. You all know that guy: the dude who studies abroad in Japan and only brings back post-apocalyptic comics about some sort of sexual nuclear war for cheap laughs with his buddies, not understanding the complex cultural and political theatre that has led to a society which condones it. Mangum has professed his love for old-time circus imagery—the cover for this particular atrocity was lifted from a European circus postcard—and songs documenting intricate plights like the overly charming “Two Headed Boy” only underscore his appropriation of the marginalized freakshow of the gypsies, the Jews, and other less-than-perfects that certainly would have been targeted by a Final Solution. But apparently now Lebanon can be reduced to a few horn spurts (as with Beirut), the millions lost in the Soviet fight can be summed up with a gruff voice (Gogol Bordello), and the Anne Frank’s tale can be channeled into a time-machine wish (N-M-friggin-H).

God, even my Holocaust argument is dubious: the 20th-century European plight is far too complicated for me to fix anything by stressing reverence for six million Jews (or the five million gypsies, or the 20 million Soviets). Perhaps, more importantly, the greater lesson of the 20th century is that it’s dangerous to use aesthetic as meme, even worse to use aesthetic as weapon. Much is made of Mangum’s gift for melody on this record, but what seems more appropriate is that it’s a record of outsourcing. The melody is lifted from the folk tradition, the story is swiped from 20th-century lore, and the horns lifted from the same peoples who had to endure that painful chapter in the heavy tome of European civilization. Granted, all indicators seem to place this as a heartfelt and soulful account of a bittersweet and, in retrospect, masterfully chosen subject that reflects Mangum’s own insecurities. That, in turn, has empowered the insecure public to embrace and strengthen the independent music scene.

I dunno. Perhaps the worst part of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is that it is actually a very good record, constructed with a certain reason and a worldliness that is almost unthinkable for those without an understanding of the intricacies of the Deep South, or more broadly, of our own human weakness. This may be the first real record to herald the everything-at-your-fingertips world of the Information Age, fer chrissakes. And yes, yes, I’m picking nits, because Jeff Magnum’s magnum opus is deeply flawed in its underlying selfishness, but more importantly, I just don’t (forgive me for a breach of objectivity) like it. All that I can be left with is faith that this record was constructed, by some sort of design, to make me unhappy about the smugly scientific future of music.

* Quainster = “quaint” + “hipster,” which equals SUCK.

Mike Orme has written for Stylus Magazine and Pitchfork Media, and currently works on technologies enabling you to have involved conversations with your car stereo.

Diana Ross - The Boss

2008-04-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

Diana Ross - The Boss
by Christian John Wikane

Why doesn’t the critical cognoscenti consider Diana Ross an album artist? Diana Ross is scarcely represented in the canon of popular music by anything other than singles —but with good reason. Her solo efforts at Motown, by and large, varied in quality and didn’t always build on the strength of her biggest hits. For every “Touch Me in the Morning” or “Love Hangover,” there were two tracks of filler. Quite often, her albums were even padded with songs recorded from sessions up to five years old. With an average two album a year release schedule during the 1970s, inferior tracks were inevitable. You can almost forgive the oversight of Ross’ albums during that post-Supremes era.

“Almost” is the key word. Of the seventeen albums Ross released for Motown between 1970 and 1981 (excluding two compilations), four contain consistently superb material: Diana Ross (1970), Surrender(1971), The Boss (1979), and diana (1980). Each record paired Ross with individuals whose writing and producing styles pushed her to give the strongest performances of her career. Not coincidentally, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson produced three out of the four (the latter was produced by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards). From the outset of Ross’ solo venture, the dynamic songwriting duo gave her two signature songs, “Reach Out and Touch” and her masterful reworking of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” It figures that they’d also create the gold standard against which any Diana Ross album should be adjudicated—The Boss.

In his Rolling Stone review of The Boss, Stephen Holden wrote, “Diana Ross looks and sounds like a sexy human being instead of a gaunt mannequin.” His observation is not without merit: Ross’ previous three studio albums, Diana Ross (1976, not to be confused with her 1970 debut), Baby It’s Me (1977), and Ross (1978) depicted the singer with an alluring but chilly visage. The music itself ranged from sublime dance floor cuts to beautiful, understated ballads to second-rate disco to forgettable schmaltz.

Ross had also starred as Dorothy in The Wiz (1978), a known flop. Suffering a critical and commercial blow was difficult for the star, but the film actually worked to Diana Ross’ advantage. Singing a vocally demanding song like “Home” strengthened her voice and expanded her vocal range exponentially. By the time The Boss sessions commenced, she was in command of her voice like never before. When the album hit record store shelves in May 1979, listeners saw and heard a completely confident and reinvigorated Diana Ross.

Track for track, Diana Ross brings sensuality and sensitivity to Ashford & Simpson’s pop-soul gems. Whether shouting with defiance or screaming with elation, there’s a vitality jumping out of her performances. Within seconds of “No One Gets the Prize,” the album’s sizzling opener, Ross unveils her newfound vocal prowess with a prolonged cry that intimates a kind of catharsis. Her muscled, exuberant timbre is the defining quality of the album. Ashford & Simpson made her sing harder and sassier than she’d ever sung before. “Back off,” she hisses to a backstabbing girlfriend. “I was denied the love that satisfied,” she cries towards the song’s conclusion. Though Ross plays the victim on “No One Gets the Prize,” her performance is triumphant.

Slowing the BPM count down a few beats, “I Ain’t Been Licked” contains Ross’ winning recovery from heartbreak. Ashford & Simpson weave a little gospel into the refrain, “They keep a-holdin’ me down but (I) rise.” The duo’s soaring background vocals, along with Ullanda McCullough and Raymond Simpson, complement Ross’ vocal elasticity here and on the album’s seven additional tracks.

“The Boss” is the exclamation point that closes side one. In fact, it was the only cut from the album to dent the both the pop (#19) and R&B (#12) charts. The winning combination of lush strings, punchy horns, Anthony Jackson’s winding bassline, and the propulsive kick-drum by John Sussewell could hardly be accurately transmitted through radio. This song was meant to be played loud in a club. (Interesting note: Ashford & Simpson’s own “Found a Cure” unseated “The Boss” in the number one spot on the dance charts.) “The Boss” is arguably Ross’ greatest performance, if only for the incendiary vocalizing she unleashes midway through the song.

The first-rate production by Ashford & Simpson, of course, is the album’s other star. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the gorgeous ballad, “Sparkle.” Buoyed by Valerie Simpson’s piano, the instrumental track is tinged with exotic flair. Ross’ voice rises from a misty backdrop of flutes, muted bass, cymbal brushes, harp, and percussion. Michael Brecker’s sax solo and Ross’ “ooh-ooh-whoo” intertwine for a sexy climax. Ashford & Simpson layer all the ingredients to underscore Ross’ longing in a way that’s both romantic and erotic.

Even though the album is chock full of such exceptional moments, The Boss narrowly missed the Top 10 (it eventually earned a gold record) and didn’t spawn a string of hits outside its incessant club play. Allegedly, the lack of promotion stemmed from Berry Gordy’s resentment that Ross was boldly stepping out from under his protective wing. The self-reliant spirit of the album foreshadowed Ross’ ultimate departure from Motown one year later, but not before she released the most commercially successful album of her career, diana, a masterpiece of a different kind.

What makes The Boss special is that every song is a vessel for Diana Ross’ gifts. Whereas other producers approached the singer like a fragile pearl, Ashford & Simpson treated her like a rough diamond. Whether the flirtatious charms of “It’s My House” or the tension of carnal desire and fulfillment that paints “Once in the Morning,” The Boss holds its own nearly thirty years later and dismantles any notion that Ross was only capable of hit singles, Classy, thrilling, and eminently soulful, the album remains a stunning musical achievement for Diana Ross.

Christian John Wikane is a contributing editor for PopMatters. He also writes for SoulTracks and David Nathan’s Soulmusic.com. He resides in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC.

The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come

2008-03-25T03:15:00.000-07:00

The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come
by Ian Mathers

So what is the reputation of the Smiths like these days? I once read a theory (of whom I can’t recall) that the Cure had mysteriously turned into one of those bands that all budding music fans make their way through eventually, via old reviews and older kids, but do the Smiths receive same? Has Louder Than Bombs been pressed on anyone you know?

I'm genuinely curious, because they certainly didn't make up part of the milieu I began to get introduced to in high school, and because if the store I work at is any indication, there's not a lot of turnover in Smiths albums. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and yes, the Cure, all have high turnover here in Guelph: people selling the albums once they're older and have less use for music, replacing them with new remastered copies. Young people snatch them up out of duty rather than devotion.

Part of it is that Smiths fans don't part with Smiths albums. Maybe if I worked in HMV I'd think the band was more a part of the current ad hoc canon, but as far as I’ve personally witnessed, the Smiths aren't much of a touchstone for generations past mine. This could be due to the fact that most of their albums nearly suck.

I'm not knocking the Smiths as a band; their Singles collection is one of the more perfect discs on my shelf, the true and lasting corpus of one of the great British bands of the 20th century. Anyone wondering what I'm on about would do well to check out Mark Simpson's faintly outrageous Saint Morrissey, which in addition to being entertaining correctly and lucidly posits the Smiths as the last in a particular lineage of British band. Among other things (and I know What Was It Anyway? uber-editor Todd Hutlock is with me on this), this entails that the Smiths were among the last bands whose the singles were the really important bit – at least as consumed objects. The albums weren't bad, but they're definitely cases of frustrated potential.

The Queen Is Dead seems to be the canonical choice, but to my mind it's the hardest to sit through because it indulges the Smiths' worst tendencies. Morrissey is so interested in being clever that he forgets to be either funny or touching: “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” tower strikingly above the rest of the album (both singles, naturally), and if the Smiths had never released “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” “Vicar in a Tutu” or “Some Girls are Bigger Than Others,” I would like the band much more. This is the tic that would go on to swallow Morrissey's solo career whole, and the reason his solo albums tend towards the insufferable (True Fans bleating about the lack of Marr notwithstanding). The Smiths is promising, both a great debut and very uneven, despite boasting “Still Ill,” one of the few truly great Smiths deep cuts, and the less said about Meat Is Murder, the better.

Strangeways, Here We Come, the one that even Wikipedia disses (“had this not been the band's final album, it would have been considered a transitional effort”), actually holds fine. Fittingly enough for such a perverse band, their finest record is also their most atypical.

The glaring thing that rarely gets mentioned, is that this is the least “Smiths-sounding” Smiths album. Again, Marr does all the synthesized heavy lifting under a dumb pseudonym, but those keyboards, synth strings and faux saxes make up a much larger chunk of the sound, to the point where the main sonic interest of “The Death of a Disco Dancer” is the vertiginous one-finger keyboard riff that grates through the back of the track.

Not that the sound is the only appeal; Strangeways, Here We Come is the album where Morrissey is at his funniest mainly because he takes all the songs straight instead of trying so hard to be witty. “Paint a Vulgar Picture” is more than glib record company shenanigans; coming directly after a song where the protagonist commits suicide, the beginning of the track appears to indicate a from-the-grave Morrissey imagining his reception after he's gone, before the rather bravura perspective shift halfway through. The Wiki-ilk must have missed the genuine anguish (some of Moz’s finest!) in “I touched you at the soundcheck / you had no real way of knowing” and the knowing venom in “This was your life, and when it fails to recoup / well, maybe you just haven't earned it yet, baby.”

It's an album chock full of death, a subject Smiths records hardly shrink from (“I Know It's Over,” “Suffer Little Children”), but it's never pervaded like this before. The survivor's/cad's guilt of “Girlfriend in a Coma,” the queasy, broken “Death of a Disco Dancer,” with it's devout hope for peace and love “in the next life,” the romantic homicides of “Unhappy Birthday” and “Death at One's Elbow” – it winds up infecting the rest of these songs as well, so that Morrissey's panicked assertion that he never lied to her in “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before” feels like the same backpedaling exhibited on “Girlfriend in a Coma.” The immortal “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” (covered to great effect by Low) would have sounded deathly in any circumstance (and still does on Singles) but here it's positively funereal. Even the two more active tracks that begin the album that feature some of Moz’s campiest growling are more dour than the band’s usual.

And that's the key to my affection for Strangeways, how successfully it sustains mood. The singles here, “I Started Something I Couldn't Finish,” “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before” (unreleased in England, due to a reference to mass murder and unfortunate timing) and “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” don't stick out in the egregious way they do on other Smiths albums; I didn't hear Strangeways until long after Singles was assimilated and yet the whole thing flowed from first listen. There's a little sonic variety, some short up-tempo numbers, some lugubrious ballads, dissonances, consonances, and whatever the hell “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” is. But the deaths and leavings strewn throughout resonate in odd ways, rendering Strangeways, Here We Come bigger than the sum of its parts, a difficult mastery that the Smiths sadly learned only as they themselves broke apart.

Ian Mathers has written for Stylus Magazine, Village Voice 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.

The Clash - London Calling

2008-03-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

The Clash - London Calling
by Travis Morrison

I really do like the Clash a lot, but I cannot sit through London Calling and I have never witnessed anyone do it with my own eyes.

The Clash were a great pop singles band—the kind of band that is good for the two-CD box set. I think The Story of the Clash, a two-CD box set, is hot: I can listen to that the whole way through. Buddy Holly and the Police are two acts that also shined in the two-CD box. Smart pop overachievers are great on these, and yes, the Clash are smart pop overachievers like Buddy Holly and the Police. The rebel-chic thing is only a sign of how smart they were.

But like most smart pop overachievers—the Police!—the quality gulf between their hits and their other songs is big. This is why they don't deserve three CDs like Prince, or like nine or whatever is in that Ray Charles box. When Prince and Ray Charles exhale a bit and do some fucking around, they are such virtuosos that it'll be cool. That's why Prince's catalog is stuffed with hidden gems. That's why Prince's Sign ‘O’ the Times is the double album. Not all of it was built to dominate the culture, yet it all scores big. "Starfish and Coffee?" "Ballad of Dorothy Parker?" "Hot Thang?" Private and light music, no doubt. Not out to make headlines. But each one distinctive of its own merit, and worthy of anyone's time.

But bands like the Clash...when they don't have that dominate-the-culture wind in their sails that leads you to write big hits, they fall off. They don't have a lot of cold classics you don't hear in the street. What they do have is a sea of album tracks that sound the same. Would anyone really get excited to hear a mix CD that has this lineup:

"Brand New Cadillac"
"Jimmy Jazz"
"The Right Profile"
"Wrong 'Em Boyo"
"Koka Kola"
"The Card Cheat"
"Lover's Rock"
"Four Horsemen"
"Revolution Rock"

That's not a great set of songs. And that's half of London Calling.

The other half is amazing, no doubt. But if you're going to give me nine throwaways, I need to think, "you're throwing that away? Can I eat it?" like I do with Sign ‘O’ the Times, instead of, well, “that sounds like thirty of your other songs,” which is what I think as London Calling drags on.

I know it was a big thing for its time. I know, more-than-the-music, la la la. But that was then and this is now. I can't plow through that whole record and I've tried. I just pick and choose tracks, or wait for that new modern-classic-rock radio format to play the singles where they sound the best—in my car.

Travis Morrison fronted the revered D.C. quartet The Dismemberment Plan and currently leads the Travis Morrison Hellfighters.

Radiohead - Kid A

2008-03-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

Radiohead - Kid A (or How Radiohead Stole the Future of Music)
by Todd Hutlock

I’m fully aware that my strong dislike for Radiohead is almost entirely irrational. I don’t find them offensive or really annoying or anything like that. In fact, I don’t really think of them at all; I find them to be pretty boring, all told. With each successive OMG LIGHT YEARS AHEAD OF ROCK, BETTERTHANTHEBEATLESJAMMINGWITHCANJAMMINGWITHMILESDAVIS moment heaped upon their heads, my dislike grows exponentially. They’re okay. They aren’t bad. They have a few crafty-kinda tunes and they write a legit single every fifteen years, but beyond that, what exactly are they doing that hasn’t been done before? Often?

No, I think I dislike Radiohead so much because all of my peers, along with millions of record buyers and downloaders, are just absolutely sucked into their schtick and I just don’t get it. I never have. I was working college radio when “Creep” hit, and I liked the tune well enough, but by the time The Bends came out, they had lost me. Again, I didn’t dislike them; they just didn’t grab me, or even turn my head. I can’t even count the number of times I saw the “Fake Plastic Trees” video on MTV, wondering why in the name of fuck it got so much airplay. Where was the tune? It sounded, remarkably enough, both “fake” and “plastic” to me. Weepy Brit with goofy eye emoting for a few minutes with some marginal, blah stuff going on in the background that impressed some engineers. This is the future of music? I didn’t believe it, but as it turns out, I was wrong. It was exactly that. I fell victim to the backlash that never was.

The thing that really pushed me over the edge was the coronation of Kid A. Let me get this straight then: this is the future of music. Not the last one. Oh, okay. Straight in at the top of the charts without so much as a sniff of a hit single. It was like the world just decided they were sick of everything else. Melody, tunes, incentive to make records that make you feel good. Out. What the public wanted now? Well, let’s look at the public that wanted it:

a) disenfranchised indie kids looking for hope against the corporate machine
b) lonely, collegiate virgins looking to bond outside their lonely dorms, and oh,
c) aging critics looking to hang their hats on a Band of Their Very Own Generation before teh internetz showed them the door.

All the curious teens who check things out because their friend who’s “into” music said it was good, they bought it, hook, line, and sinker. But who listened first? Who decided this was good? Online leaks weren’t yet a given, and I can tell you from experience that advance copies were difficult to obtain, to put it mildly (fuck you very much, Nasty Little Man). But the thing flew out of stores without advance singles or anything other than a massive, stifling wave of hype from all the “right” channels.

Someone decided for us that this was great and revolutionary and sold you all a bill of goods. It angered me. This is not a great album. It’s not even Radiohead’s best album. Is it good? Well. It’s got interesting noises, the guitar player does some neat stuff, Thom Yorke doesn’t sing so much as mew, and they’ve been basically treading water since. Yeah, it’s good. But not nearly as good as its timing was. The time was the key. At the head of the decade, the music world decided they badly needed a Radiohead.

The only alternatives were nu metal, and teenpop, which hadn’t yet gained the stature in irony for Indie Love. What else was there for young white listeners looking to forge their own identity alongside all the other young white listeners? What could they unite over that still made them look independent-minded? As much as nu metal’s or teenpop’s, Radiohead’s audience was ripe for the picking and pick it they did. I can hardly blame them. I mean, Christ, if someone said I could wank around in a recording studio and release whatever I wanted for the rest of my life and making millions besides, I’d certainly take them up on it. Someday, more people will wake up and see what I see, that the last thing that made Kid A a hit was Kid A itself. The emperor has no clothes.

Todd Hutlock is an editor at some bullshit website.

Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music

2008-03-06T09:39:00.001-08:00

Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music
by Dave Toropov

I look out into cyberspace and can see the eyes rolling already. Billy Corgan & Co. have certainly taken a nosedive in street credibility in the past year or so, what with a ham-fisted Corgan gravedigging his old band from the burial grounds of rock’s retired and respected veterans. When finally unearthed, the body of his legacy turned out to be crippled and sans a limb or two (James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky), but Corgan decided to Frankenstein the group back together anyway with another token girl bassist and a quiet, compliant guitarist, tour the world, and release Zeitgeist in fan-manipulative fashion, with more exclusive and special editions than Terminator 2. It’s odd then to think back to the year 2000 and the single-finger salute to the record company establishment that is Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music.

For however heinously Zeitgeist’s release was executed by Corgan, Machina II’s deployment into the alternative community’s consciousness was honorable and a significant precursor to Radiohead’s In Rainbows digital release commotion. Without the record company’s confidence that they could sell Machina/The Machines of God as a double album a la Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in the twilight of the Pumpkins’ popularity, Corgan, in frustration, benevolence, or some concoction of the two, independently released Machina II on his own Constantinople Records, limiting the pressing to a strict count of 25 vinyl copies of the double LP release, with a collection of three 10-inch EPs to accompany it. Corgan then mailed the records to significant members of the Smashing Pumpkins fan community and told them to distribute digital copies of the album on the Internet for free.

What a fantastic story – nevermind that the album itself is one of the best things the band ever released. It’s a shame that 99.9% of the world will never know this album exists, because you would be hard pressed to find a more transcendent song in the Pumpkins’ catalogue than “Home,” a better Iha contribution than “Go,” or a moment that the group sounded more excited to rock out than the first ten seconds of “Dross.”

In the interest of not getting ahead of ourselves, this is not the Pumpkins best album. They never shattered skulls with the ease of Siamese Dream again, but Machina II is definitely their most intimate and charming hour. The Pumpkins have always been like a lion at your local zoo – an impressive, toned, beautiful animal that you could never be close to. Whether its because of the subtle clicks and pops of the endearing lo-fi distortion of the vinyl source or the audible studio banter between tracks, Machina II removes that veil, and as such the music within seems just a little bit more honest than that which came before it.

There is no doubt in my mind that even fans will skip a couple of the release’s combined 25 tracks – “White Spyder” sounds like a half-finished and formulaic chug-rocker and “Heavy Metal Machine” is pretty much a droning, self-indulgent mess. As a result, I defy anyone to get through the entire hour and a half of this effort in one sitting without at least considering putting something else on, but I also am positive that Billy Corgan wouldn’t be offended. Machina II is, more than anything, a love letter to fans, and the few duds present on the Pumpkins’ swan song are there in the interest of getting as much music out as possible before calling it a day. If anything, the group sounds liberated and confident without the pressure to produce a commercial record.

“Let Me Give the World to You” was apparently the album's intended single, and it shows all the hallmarks of a standard Pumpkins hit, with dreamy post-shoegaze chord progressions, whiny, yet oddly charming sighs and a chorus that sticks in your head despite sounding like every “1979”-esque Pumpkins chorus that came before it. However, the underground classic here is “Home.” For whatever “Let Me Give the World to You” achieves formulaically, “Home,” by contrast, sounds honest and touching, drawing from an aching, inevitable line like “Love is everything I want” repeated throughout. In its simplicity, “Try, Try, Try,” a track also released on the original Machina sounds exceptional in this context. While the alternate version of “Cash Car Star” that is provided sounds incomplete and bare in comparison to the final take, this version of “Try” benefits from less studio sheen, more acoustic guitars, and allows fantastic lyrics which Corgan unfortunately changed in the final version to shine.

For all it’s worth, it’s a shame that Billy Corgan couldn’t leave his band’s legacy well enough alone, because there’s no better way to walk out into the sunset than this album. It might not be their most important or influential record, but given the proper chance, it’s easily their most lovable, and at its heart Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music showcases the Smashing Pumpkins at the very top of their game with some of the best songs they ever recorded. And it’s fucking free, for God’s sake.

Dave Toropov is currently a student at Bard College and a staff writer for Lost at Sea.

The Go-Betweens - Send Me a Lullaby vs. 16 Lovers Lane

2008-02-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Go-Betweens - Send Me a Lullaby vs. 16 Lovers Lane
by Gillian Watson

Send Me A Lullaby is the Go-Betweens’ most maligned album, but “maligned” is too strong a word. It’s usually ignored, or patronised. Critics and fans don’t like it because isn’t “true” to the band’s “classic” lush, dreamy sound. They argue that the album is marred by its reliance on a gawky imitation of the Go-Betweens’ heroes, Talking Heads, and that it convulses unnaturally rather than flows. This is a fallacy: Any Go-Betweens album would be barely competent humdrum rock if not for the colour of the members’ personalities brightening the rudimentary guitar/bass/drum sound. Their music became literary and romantic as they did, and by the same logic, Send Me a Lullaby is as pretentious and clumsy as the youths who made it at the time. Robert Forster and Grant McLennan devoured music and films; they wanted to emulate their idols. And in turn, Send Me a Lullaby, their debut, is the awkward teenage cousin of their canon: Too old to be cute (no more songs about girls in libraries), they weren’t accomplished and confident enough to carve out a convincing sound of their own (that wouldn’t happen until 1983’s Before Hollywood). Lullaby is certainly ungainly, sometimes even ugly; it barely holds together, and yet, it could be my favourite, primarily because of its gaucheness. The band were at the same stage I am now—that period in your youth when everything starts getting complicated, when you love things with an ache you haven’t experienced before and don’t quite know how to cope with, when you’re old enough to have memories, when you’re old enough to realise that everything won’t turn out how you want it to. It’s painful and pretty.

Those words appropriately describe “Your Turn, My Turn,” Lullaby’s opening song. It’s an odd choice for an album opener—it’s meandering and maudlin rather than punchy and peppy. Robert Forster hesitates before he opens the door and then walks in, starts pacing in clumsy circles, disconsolate. A doleful piano and tense bassline that hint at anger and recrimination follow. The tune is awkward and aching, and yet, there’s a stylized quality to it—like the soundtrack to a lost detective TV show in black and white. It’s the sound of adolescents waking up to the simultaneous beauty and awfulness of life, but with the youth’s awareness of how romantic their own misery must look from the outside. It’s one of the album’s rare occasions where Forster displays the knowingness that was later to become his trademark. Listen to “Careless,” where he reflects on a relationship that’s got too grown up too fast: “It used to be fun/something to share/but now we’re both jealous/’cause now we both… care”. There’s none of the winking playfulness of later Forster compositions in his muted delivery—only weariness, a resigned sigh over paranoid bass and guitar that sounds like someone being shaken, a cathartic sound that signifies equal distance between beauty and suffering.

When Send Me a Lullaby was recorded, relationships in the band were constantly shifting; Forster was torn between McLennan, his jealous friend, and Lindy Morrison, his new lover. It didn’t help that Forster’s respective partners in music and romance shared an intense dislike of each other. This tension leaves its mark all over the album, from the stilted, taped-together art-funk of “The Girls Have Moved” to the album’s menacing, jarring core, “Eight Pictures.” The latter track sounds nothing like anything that follows or precedes it, yet it sums up the album’s entire mood somehow. “Eight Pictures” is Forster’s first struggle with the pain of memory: “I was working at the ice rink/Spring and summer that year,” he stonily recalls. McLennan’s bass throbs sympathetically. What makes “Eight Pictures” so singular, so extraordinary, however, is Morrison’s cameo role as the woman who has wronged Forster. Her angry, incoherent, arrhythmic drum solo storms into Forster and McLennan’s little boys’ misery party, slaps them in the faces, tells them to wake up and realise that life isn’t a Hollywood movie from the ‘40s, that human relationships are messy and complicated. “Eight Pictures,” exemplifies the whole album as a noisy and necessary argument set to music.

Perhaps if the Go-Betweens had a younger fanbase, Send Me a Lullaby would be the fan favourite. But most Go-Betweens fans have followed the band’s progress as people and grown old with Forster/McLennan. So the final album in their best-known incarnation, 16 Lovers Lane, is recognised almost universally as their masterpiece, the realisation of “that striped sunlight sound.” I hate it, but hate is too strong a word. I admire the songcraft, and the subtlety and complexity of the arrangements, of course. And the band sounds confident as ever; you’d never know it was to stand as their epitaph for a decade. But 16 Lovers Lane is the smug, annoying friend who gets into a serious relationship before you and suddenly believes she now owns the key to the universe and all its mysterious holdings. The awkwardness, the jealousy, the self-consciousness—that’s all been banished. Grant and Lindy still hate each other, Robert and Lindy are still licking their wounds after a messy break-up, Robert and Grant are still fighting to be leader, except they’ve realised they don’t need to be there any more or deal with this shit, they can get out whenever they want. The sound of 16 Lovers Lane reflects this—it’s light and diffuse, and the many professional-sounding layer all sound a mile away from each other. The group’s most abrasive (and interesting) personalities, Forster and Morrison, are silenced or dulled.

16 Lovers Lane is a Valentine’s Day album; from the title (I don’t care if it’s ironic, it’s fucking awful) to Forster and McLennan’s lyrics, which have gone from pinpointing indefinable emotions to rolling around in cliché and meaninglessness like pigs in shit. What is a “quiet heart”? Where is the wit and originality in lines like: “No matter what you say/no matter what you do/I wanna be the one/and love is a sign”? Forster isn’t in a relationship; he’s watching on the sidelines while his best friend’s bathing in the glow of first love, and the best he can muster is a limp “I’m all right”? 16 Lovers Lane makes me feel nothing, and it hurts me more with the Go-Betweens than anyone else, because their songs grow from emotions. They’re not about interesting dynamics or danceable basslines. Without emotion, there’s nothing. Except, of course there must be emotion in 16 Lovers Lane—just not a one I identify with. It must capture the sound of being in love, otherwise so many adults I respect wouldn’t champion it. It has been much more successful than Send Me a Lullaby, and not just critically, but it’s actually reached people. It’s easy to find; by contrast, I had to pay £17 for an Australian import of Send Me a Lullaby that took two months to arrive. Even if I played Send Me a Lullaby to my friends, I doubt they’d be interested—it’s too self-conscious, too monochrome, it doesn’t “rock out” enough. Play 16 Lovers Lane to anyone who likes a good tune and they’ll come round. But for me, Send Me a Lullaby is the most successful Go-Betweens album. It perfectly captures this period of my life: jealous glances and doors slamming and mattresses heard creaking from the other side of a wall. 16 Lovers Lane sounds like receding hairlines and stonewashed denim and pleasant drives with your attractive wife in a saloon car. It’s the sound of slippers warming by the fire. I have nothing against warm slippers; there will come a time in my life where I look forward to putting them on. But right now, that’s not what I’m looking for.

Gillian Watson is about twelve and therefore has written fuck-all, apart from a news story about Castlemilk that she wrote for her work experience at a free newspaper two years ago. [actually, she's sixteen -ed.]

Long Fin Killie - Amelia

2008-02-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

Long Fin Killie - Amelia
by Nick Southall

You probably haven’t noticed because you probably don’t pay attention to bylines, and I have no idea who’s reading this blog anyway [please tell us! –ed.], but I’ve pretty much retired from music journalism since Stylus closed its doors last Halloween. There are a few reasons – mortgage, kitten, increasingly demanding day job – but primarily I have no desire to write for anywhere else about anything new. Maybe I’m getting old.

Perhaps because of this I feel ever so slightly… emancipated, in terms of my music listening. Free from the pressure to keep up with what’s current or exciting, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time over the last three months or so listening to old music – be it Ethiopiques, ‘60s British jazz, Tropicalia, or ‘90s post-rock – no longer feeling any impetus to stay abreast of new releases, and instead listening to things I generally already know, as and when the whim takes me.

Guilt and panic are occasional bedfellows; sometimes I’ve felt culpable for listening to the same thing over and over again like I used to a dozen years ago. Other times the endless shelves of CDs have over-faced me, left me totally befuddled as to what to listen to or how to even choose.

All I’ve listened to lately has been Caribou and Long Fin Killie. A year ago I’d have been distraught by this. Today… I luxuriate in it. So when Mr. Weiss asked me if I’d like to throw something his way for these pages, it was an easy choice; I always meant to write something substantial about Long Fin Killie for Stylus, but ran out of time and heart. So here goes.

A (very) quick history: Too Pure courted Luke Sutherland, Long Fin Killie’s black, gay, Scottish bandleader, for two years during his tenure fronting orthodox guitar-shakers Fenn, but were never quite convinced enough to sign them. Eventually Sutherland told them Fenn was over, that he’d been working on another band in secret, that they were the real deal, and finally ready to be heard. And so Long Fin Killie emerged, precocious and practically fully formed, with a tune called “The Lamberton Lamplighter,” an extraordinarily weird, homoerotic pop song. An album followed, its aesthetic composed of ancient woodcuts, poetry, guest appearances by Mark E. Smith, elongated and indulgent musicianship, dulcimers, violins, thumb pianos, mandolins, bouzoukis; pastoral postrock meets shoegazing prog. 1995; 1996; 1997; three albums in three years, lots of touring. That’ll do.

Amelia, like Long Fin Killie’s previous two albums, was named after a tragic hero – Ms. Earhart followed Harry Houdini and Rudolph Valentino – and is clearly still the work of Long Fin Killie. Intricate, intelligent, intuitive, indulgent and intense, but also very different from what the band had done before, the album was the result of a conscious attempt to produce something more concise, more industrial, more muscular, less pastoral. Gone from the sleeves are the lithographs of earlier releases, for instance, instead replaced my ultra-modernist impressions of architectural shapes, the monochrome sweep of something that might be a drawing of a space station or an abstracted photograph of an improbably engineered suspension bridge swooping across the cover. This modernisation is reflected in the music.

Amelia features none of the extended, minimalist grooves that had LFK lumped in with the postrock crowd at times; barely anything stretches past four minutes, and the multi-layered, pointillist tapestries of instrumentation are subsumed into something different. Guitars chug and grind in aggressively repetitive patterns, bass is deep, deep and deeper still, informed more by techno’s slickened textures than rock’s organic pastures – many of the electronic elements that would inform Bows, Sutherland’s post-LFK group, were introduced here.

After Valentino, for reasons unbeknownst to me, Long Fin Killie acquired a new drummer: the merely amazing David Turner replaced by Kenny McEwan, who was, improbably, even better. As a result Amelia is characterised by the relentlessly skittish, drum ‘n’ bass-esque rolls and tumbles of his breakneck time-keeping, the sonic positioning of tom-tom strikes and rattling snare rolls a superior precursor of the kinds of rhythms that would make Bloc Party’s debut seem so out of the ordinary eight years later.

But beyond the tightening of arrangements and quickening of already-quick tempos, the bones of Long Fin Killie’s songwriting – intelligence, irreverence, an unpredictability that manifests as surprising catchiness – remain almost intact, if made more sophisticated by the increased brevity. Let’s take “Kismet” – there’s something suspiciously like a cowbell being hit on an extraordinarily kinetic offbeat beneath the inspirational scree and metronomic tumble, the tune starting with a foreshadowing guitar riff and double-note bass pulse that could start hearts in a coroner’s lab – drums flying everywhere, towers of noise emanating from brass, the most insistent rhythm driving everything while oceans of sucking, squalling, wild guitar and Sutherland, the beautiful, passionate centre of it all, spit inspiration and bile back at the haters – “Jungle rhythm in the DNA / Disco in the gene pool but I’ll put my dancing shoes away.” Complex sentiments and more complex arrangements that would previously have unfurled over six or eight minutes are here rammed into barely four.

“Kismet” is followed by “Resin”, a beautiful repeating build that finds itself subsumed by resonant violin timbres, the riff moving upwards in beatific contrast to its predecessor. It’s moving, emotive, gorgeous – and finished in a little over three minutes. Horns gather and grow throughout “Chrysler” as Sutherland speaks out a list of something, an indictment or diatribe – the lyrics aren’t included in the sleeve and the musicianship and arrangements are so staggeringly attention-grabbing that it takes a superhuman feat of concentration to decipher his poetics at any given point.

What else is there? So much to mention – “Lipstick” is something akin to live drum n bass as performed by too-precocious Scottish kids – the rasping, sexy refrain of “ah yes”, the “ah” strung out, the “yes” swift, sibilant. The album version features programmed drums courtesy of remixer Grant Macnamara, but the original (included on the single), was no less percussively impressive. Gasped whoops make up the infectiously wordless second half of the exploding, desirous chorus of the staggering “Headlines”; get a load of those amazing, accelerant guitars as the tune climaxes. Wow! And the breathy vocals, distantly groaning guitar bows and off-beat tom hits of “Ringer”…

Perhaps the key thing about Long Fin Killie, and in particular their extraordinary musicianship, is the fact that nowhere in their entire career is their consummate skill manifested in the kind of “look at me, ma” soloing that tips so much music beyond acceptability; sure, Sutherland, Colin Greig (bass), Phillip Cameron (guitar) and Kenny McEwan (like David Turner before him) play like virtuosos, but it’s all about teamwork, about balance and subtlety, about being a group. Sutherland may have ostensibly been the bandleader and frontman, but his vocals are often blurred and hidden behind chiming and roaring guitars and rumbling bass – even when they suddenly take centre stage in “Yawning at Comets”, it’s to further the reason of the tune rather than become the reason.

Have I tempted you into either revisiting or newly investigating this yet? Aside from the brain-boggling musicianship, awesome arrangements, and intriguing lyrics, maybe I should mention the outstanding engineering, mixing and mastering on display? Long Fin Killie’s records were always exquisite on the ear in terms of detail, space, drive and timbre, but on Amelia that exquisiteness is blasted into the future in a way that very few boys with guitars were even comprehending in 1997. One might mention Radiohead and that ornery albatross, but their records were always polished off with an impersonal, mass-production sheen. In fact, more than a decade later, barely anyone even now is managing to sound like the future without that future being the one with the boot stamping on a face forevermore. Ah, fuck it; Long Fin Killie are the best band to ever come from Scotland.

Nick Southall has written for Stylus Magazine, The Guardian, LA Weekly, East Bay Express, Grooves Magazine, among others. His article “Imperfect Sound Forever” was selected by Da Capo for the 2007 edition of their Best Music Writing anthology.

TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain

2008-01-31T21:47:00.000-08:00

TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
by Dan Weiss

I wanted so bad for TV on the Radio to be what everyone insisted they were. A racially diverse quintet with convictive 9/11-wake politics prone to Pixies and They Might Be Giants covers when they’re not rewriting the (Mac)book for Radiohead’s thinking-man’s-stadium-rock? They even have the word “radio” in their name! What’s not to throw your byline behind?

Unlike flippables on the peerline of say, Deerhunter or Menomena, TVOTR were never an “indie” phenomenon, contained to a few thrilled writers in well-rated Alexa positions. They skipped right past Stereogum to an “A” grade in Entertainment Weekly, a deal with Interscope after only one album (this ain’t Vampire Weekend; I don’t know anyone who’d heard CD-R debut OK Calculator before they were famous) and finally topping the critics’ poll with, arguably, the more activated consensus. I wish Dylan would’ve taken their asses like he did to the far more beloved Strokes and Radiohead in years before, but it was not to be. Say what you will, Pazz & Jop, no album received more unanimous acclaim in 2006 than Return to Cookie Mountain. I remember because I was really, really mad. Mad that the relatively lazy, conservative winner (Dylan’s less-enthuisastically-received-than-some-elder-statesmen-would-have-you-think Modern Times) was brisker and more dynamic than the youthful, “futuristic” underdog.

Maybe the Bush years have drained the consensus’ expectations, but not mine. What I heard were bad singers of the uncompelling variety moaning and hooting through poorly arranged “soundscapes” with a lot of trudge as lacking in complexity as they were in tempo. Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes was a turgid antithesis to rock and roll that won only slightly less acclaim in 2004 than Return did in 2006. The most exciting thing about it was that vigorous album title. Would I love to love an album named that? Well, fuck yes, I mean, it sounds hella more corrosive than Pink Flag or Wild Gift. But my hopes dashed once I heard it. To the ether marched the promising “The Wrong Way,” an awful Jack White impersonation juxtaposed against jazzy horn charts and brick-viscous distorto-bass. “Staring at the Sun” and “Dreams” followed with embarrassingly generic melodies and cheap drum machines inefficiently shading a limited album that could barely keep itself from wetting to mush. To this day, that album sounds like a slug in a salt mine, too weak to dig itself out.

I shook it off, because nothing that unsure of its footing stays long in the genre. The Dears still make albums I presume, and I’m free to never remember their release dates again. TVOTR was a comfortable cast-aside for a minute before Return to Cookie Mountain grievously doubled their acclaim in the eyes of people lacking for “punk” or “exhilarating” music ever since garage and dancepunk went to the 15-minute bins. When your media center stubbornly stays dialed to Devendra Banhart, these things happen, I guess.

What outraged me wasn’t that Cookie Mountain was another overrated album by another oversold band, but that these supposed thought-crimefighters were selling the same tricks twice. One of the album’s three songs I actually like, “Playhouses,” sounds exactly like Babes’ “King Eternal,” except it subtracts the slightly prettier buildup for funkier drum work. Because it’s the same song, the harmonies still choke me up when they sing the same pitch near the coda, and I won’t cavil about improved percussion. But it’s the same song.

“I Was a Lover” isn’t so literal, but fires the same weapons as “The Wrong Way.” Again, the group gets their juiciest sound effects out of the way first, for a truly ugly, clashing opener, this time rendered with actual tension so that the tuneless horn squawks and intentionally choppy sampling sound like two magnets being hopelessly pushed together. It’s the only song here to grow on me in the following year, probably because the acrid soundplay is actually interesting.

The third and final song I can stand is “Wolf Like Me,” almost as annoyingly facile a melody as “Staring at the Sun,” with the added baggage of providing TVOTR fans their occasional “rock” song, to ensure the “exciting” banner stays in their reviews. It’s a stupid song about a werewolf; nothing so cheerfully boneheaded could evade my willing earshot for long, though I cringe to note it’s also the group’s most sexual song, easily.

And then there’s…the rest which bleeds together. Circular “chants” that go nowhere (“A Method”), a godawful attempt to groove that only proves how horrible Tunde Adebimpe’s singing voice really is (“Blues From Down Here”—dig the patience-trying first 30 seconds), and, oh God, I knew it was coming to this…“Province,” the least tolerable thing these weary souls have yet put to tape. If I have to tolerate Adebimpe’s awful falsetto “hooooo…hoooeeeeeehooooo” lines again, I’m personally bludgeoning him with the dull end of one of his band’s own drum loops. Pray that they hold out their DIY ethos long enough that this song’s intro doesn’t surface in ubiquitous TV commercials until after I die.

Lastly, TVOTR don’t strike me as very likable people. Sure, they hate Bush, so does Ron Paul, and if I give their embarrassing Web-only blip “Dry Drunk Emperor” credit, I have to give it to Incubus, who also compared him to Christ in equally tactless measure. But their most explicit public rants have less to do with politics than biting the hand that overfeeds them. Note to David Sitek: Tripping balls on a MySpace blog about your album leaking is so 2005, dude. Welcome to major labels.

Even more offensive is the statement of disapproval they gave the Village Voice for printing a drawing of Bob Dylan running over Kyp Malone, a caricature of their silver medal victory pointed up as a show of racism—by a paper with a notorious history of racism, right? Oops—when they’re actually the first black artists to not win the poll since Wilco in 2002. The Voice ended up apologizing for the misconceived depiction, which is fair, but somehow I doubt they would’ve complained of a vice versa drawing of Dylan getting run over had they won. Right, I’m only supposed to evaluate the music, but the music is so vague on feeling and sentiment that these rare shows of expression can be the dividing line on second chances. I don’t really want to know their aesthetic if it’s as miserable and toothless as they are. At least Britney Spears’ pathos is a captivating study.

If 2006 really needed a politically-correct rock savior, Be Your Own Pet’s nay-selling debut goes cheap on Amazon and gets far better use of the same American Fatigue TVOTR supposedly made something of simply by ignoring it, proving their teenage potency by rocking out on two-wheelers and going for ice cream. When Jemina Pearl discards her boyfriend in the swamp, it’s far more gratifying than any target TVOTR supposedly dispatches somewhere in their underproduced fog.

Dan Weiss is an editorial intern at CMJ and the editor-at-large of What Was It Anyway. He enjoys questionable lifestyle choices in Brooklyn and has written for Village Voice, Stylus, Cleveland Scene, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Lost at Sea.

The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin

2008-01-23T23:21:00.000-08:00

The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
by Ally Brown

There was obviously a bit of negotiation required at All Music Guide over the evaluation of the Flaming Lips' 1999 opus The Soft Bulletin. Despite being breathlessly summarized by reviewer Jason Ankeny as "the best album of 1999," and "might be the best record of the entire decade," it didn't earn the full 5-star rating, nor did it wrestle the “AMG pick” tick away from 1993's Transmissions From the Satellite Heart. There must have been a dissenting sub-editor there, who wasn't persuaded by Ankeny's rhapsodic review, the rare 10.0 granted by Pitchfork, or the year-end charts of NME and Uncut, both of which placed The Soft Bulletin at the summit. The final year of the millennium wasn't a great year for music, but the AMG subber was right to be guarded. The Soft Bulletin featured too few melodic ideas for a classic, but managed to hide that from many critics by smothering everything with saccharine production trickery. But for a few moments of inspiration, The Soft Bulletin was mutton dressed as lamb.

Think of it this way: We all know it's easier to tell a pretty lady when she's not wearing make-up. When a photo has been severely airbrushed or when a woman is drowning in foundation and blush, there's always cause to be suspicious of the hidden. Naturally fair maidens don't need embellishment, and there's a similar rule with pop music, the best of which retains its prettiness even after it's been stripped bare. Sometimes we enjoy the enhancements viscerally, as with much shoegaze, but as Scott McKeating said of Loveless , if that polish doesn't thrill you then there's got to be something like a melody underneath. If not, you're left with a minger caked in make-up trying to fool you into falling for her. But you're too smart, aren't you, to be duped by "Waitin' for a Superman"? Despite flowery piano-tinkling and dramatic synth-strings, it has a melody as sludgy as the bass drum it's tied to. The stereo-effect-shattering drum fills of “Slow Motion” are great, but they can't hide the badly-sung dirge beneath. Listen to the vocal melody of “What is the Light?” Isolate it from the endlessly shimmering piano, the digital-watch beep, the game-show button alert, and all the other clobber that surrounds it, and you could sing that melody in your sleep.

Well, I could sing it in my sleep, but Wayne Coyne is belting it as hard as he can and it's still barely penetrating the mic. I know you don't have to be able to sing to be a singer; but you have to be able to sing . Did the Flaming Lips scrimp on auto-tune software in favor of more instrumental studio trickery instead? "More make-up cake boss, we’ll need more if we’re gonna hide this fugger." Or were they running the auto-tune off a 486 with less megabytes of RAM than there were candles on Wayne's cake? Listen to this bit at the start of "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton"; the fairytale princess skips through the forest, shedding glistening sparkledust over pink bunnies and golden bricks, singing, "They lifted up the sun/A million came from one/They lifted up the s u-u-un". Except she's no fairyland princess, she's a bearded man caked in make-up with a hand up a nun's skirt! (It's only the live-show hand puppet, thankfully). Listen to "The Gash". It's one of the stranger tracks on the album, thanks to the apocalyptic opening, the bouncy, playful bassline, and combined choruses of freaks both human and zombie. I like it a fair bit, but then comes Coyne's verse, a terribly weak link among all this drama, acting as an unwelcome interruption rather than a useful addition. Who invited this guy, and why hasn't his voice fully broken yet? Nobody is asking Coyne to be melismatic like Mariah, or to phrase like Frank, or to have a range like Aretha. Just give us “competent,” instead of relying on that old “characterful” get-out clause. My h*cking cough is characterful.

The Soft Bulletin isn't a minger of a record, I'll concede that much. She even has some nice features, and she can bat her eyelashes pretty sweetly. But it's drunk talk to believe she is some model to be held up, a totem for the decade, a perfect album to love and love and love. The Soft Bulletin is a six-drinks girl, and she's putting on more lipstick and sliding you another vodka. Sure, go for it. But in the cold light of day, don't say I didn't warn you about the letdown.

Ally Brown has written for The Skinny and Stylus Magazine, among others.

Everclear - Sparkle and Fade/So Much for the Afterglow

2008-01-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Everclear - Sparkle and Fade/So Much for the Afterglow
by Jonathan Bradley

Everclear’s “Loser Makes Good” isn’t just a song; it’s a summary of frontman Art Alexakis’ entire ethos. For most artists, a limited repertoire is a crippling hindrance; for Everclear, nearly everything that ever made them worth listening to derived from those three words. And the “makes good” part was often barely necessary.

Everclear was an anomaly of the second-wave grunge acts who retained the punkish simplicity of the genre’s standard bearers, but rarely possessed their melodic acumen or forceful presence. With Sparkle and Fade released the year after Sixteen Stone, by that touchstone of alt-mediocrity, Bush, Everclear was not optimally positioned for critics to welcome them or for pop-historians to remember them. They deserve better; Alexakis colored his fiery riffing with a distinct country edge, and his lyrics were vivid and delivered in a weary, commanding voice. So Much for the Afterglow actually improved it; the band experimented with innovations that mostly worked, such as the harmonies on the title track, the siren-like guitar hook of “Everything to Everyone” or the rustic sparseness of “Why I Don’t Believe in God.” Failures like the unnecessary (yet inexplicably Grammy-nominated!) instrumental “El Distorto De Melodica” were rare.

Over the two nearly stellar albums that bookend the band’s golden years, the 1995 breakthrough Sparkle and Fade and 1997’s So Much for the Afterglow, Alexakis devoted himself to depicting a parade of lovable junkies, no-hopers and fuck-ups; societal outsiders who found comfort in substance abuse and each other. A large number left unspecified troubles back home to find a new life and new troubles on the West Coast. There’s the “loser-geek, crazy with an evil streak” of “White Men in Black Suits” who moved to San Francisco to work in a record store and hook up with a stripper, or Amy of “Amphetamine” (her designated moniker) who “looks like a teenage anthem,” but can’t find happiness in pills or Pacific states. To say that Alexakis romanticized these characters and glorified their lifestyles isn’t a criticism; his pulpy, luridly exploitive treatment is exactly why these albums are so enjoyable.

The band’s songs from this period, even the ones that end in tragedy, are far from cautionary. The single “Heroin Girl” is probably the most grim of these albums’ tracks — the titular character dies of an overdose two thirds of the way through the song — but even this grisly theme is ameliorated by the joy in the characters’ lifestyle: “I’m happy in hell with my heroin girl,” Alexakis growls. And why not, when life in “hell” is described by the lines, “We drink that Mexican beer, we live on Mexican food.” Alexakis doesn’t underplay his companion’s death, but his narratives shift quickly to outrage at the callous indifference of the local law enforcement rolling their eyes at “just another overdose.” Less dramatic, but equally mesmerizing, “Strawberry” is a relapse narrative sweetly sung over a lone, undistorted guitar. “Ten long years in a straight life,” Alexakis sings. “They fall like water/Yes, I guess I fucked up again.” It’s a sad tale, but the insouciant disintegration of Alexakis and a cohort who proffers “a couple of bags down in Old Town,” accompanied by a sweet guitar lapping around his words makes the failure sound like the most inviting thing in the world. Sparkle and Fade and So Much for the Afterglow are trap-hop at the other end, frontline reporting from the addicts rather than the dealers, and Alexakis’ own history of substance abuse lent authenticity to his narratives. The thrill isn’t the stories his characters tell, it’s getting the front row seat to the drama going down.

Alexakis’ losers dreamed of making good, and often the dream was enough. “Santa Monica,” another fantasy of West Coast renewal, expressed just enough hope in the ambition to “live beside the ocean” and “watch the world die” to make the song sound optimistic. When the dreams weren’t achievable, Alexakis could fall back on that ability to make self-destruction sound seductive. It’s hard to believe him when he sings that he “doesn’t want to die with you,” just after admitting “I like to let the arms of a bar wrap around me tight,” and making it sound like the most beautiful thing in the world. “Man, we got to grow up,” he insists, but the churning guitar makes giving up sound much more inviting. Such is the dominance of this aesthetic in the band’s work that even the songs about nothing more than romantic disintegration contain the suggestion the characters have other problems afflicting their relationships. The couple falling apart in “So Much for the Afterglow” could be separating for any reason, but alongside songs about poverty and addiction, it seems perfectly reasonable that this couple, like others on the record, is being pulled apart by substance abuse.

Unfortunately, as good as the band was at this stage, they couldn’t quite produce a perfect album. Sparkle and Fade has a few anonymous pop-punk tracks cluttering up its second half, but worse, it has “Pale Green Stars.” A hint at the mawkish depths Everclear would plumb later, the song is a manipulative account of a divorce with a child at its center that makes Blink-182’s “Stay Together for the Kids” sound sophisticated. “It’s hard on a young girl/She thinks it’s all her fault,” is maudlin enough, but seems particularly sensational following Alexakis’ contrived portrayal of her innocence, describing a “scared little girl watching Aladdin on TV.” Even worse is the allusion to pubescent menstrual cycles (or perhaps teenage pregnancy) suggested by “It’s hard on a young girl when the blood won’t come when it ought to come.” Coupled with some pathetic pleading to the girl’s mother (“Amanda always cries when you yell at me/please don’t yell at me,”) the song is a thorough disaster from beginning to end. That it immediately follows “Queen of the Air,” a tawdry, rather than compelling, family drama, makes this section of the album particularly rocky.

Alexakis must have recognized that he could not mine heroin chic indefinitely, but other than enthusiastically sneering putdowns like “Local God,” from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and “Everything to Everyone,” he seemed to have little idea as to how to effectively expand his palette. His penchant for sentimentality was kept mostly in check on these earlier records, though “Father of Mine,” from So Much for the Afterglow is another misstep, too self-pitying to succeed as the screed it wants to be, undermined by simple moralizing.

By 2000, when the band released the nauseating single “Wonderful,” a sappy and manipulative soliloquy sung from the perspective of yet another child of divorce, anything interesting about Everclear had evaporated entirely. Alexakis announced his optimism with the awfully titled Songs from an American Movie: Learning How to Smile, but failed to discuss domesticity in the engaging manner with which his debaucheries were once detailed.

Of this decade, probably the only Everclear song worth mentioning is “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom,” a petty but amusing diatribe against “blond, bland, middle class Republican[s]” living in the suburbs. This excursion to the red states had potential, but Alexakis made no attempt to understand the characters he sang about, and so the song was little more than a humorous sneer. In the ‘90s, he allowed the strippers and junkies more nuance.

Unfortunately, that rare latter-day highlight demonstrates why the band couldn’t take that next step. When Alexakis ran out of losers trying to make good, he suddenly found he had very little to say.

Jonathan Bradley has written for Stylus Magazine, Lost at Sea, Volume Magazine and the Western Front, and rules over his own miniature Internet fiefdom, the Screw Rock 'n' Roll blog. Although it's not widely known, he is Australia's best music critic.