Wednesday, April 27, 2011

An In-Depth Analysis of Hollerado's New Video for "Got To Lose"



It's Awesome!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Does it Rock? Pink Spiders, "Busy Signal"

New concept, folks. I was up late one night surfing the YouTubes looking for new shit that hasn't been talked to death, and I came across this song called "Busy Signals" by the Pink Spiders. Have a listen.



Now then. On the one hand it sounds like a whole lot of whiney, pseudo-rapping pop-rock that I hear way too much of on the radio at work lately. On the other, occasionally they work some weird, cool, scraggly guitars into the mix, along with a delightfully tense undercutting of synths that aren't too-ironic-to-function and help propel the song decently.

I've never considered myself the paragon of culture. I like what I like, and I feel like I can only hope, at best, to articulate that for your benefit. But with this, I truly don't know. It's catchy, but is that always a good thing? The song isn't extraordinarily-impressively-written, but it was worthwhile enough for me to listen a few times and wonder the driving question of this article: contrived or original, catchy or not: does this rock?

I'm curious what you think (hey, look at me, fishing for a comment here now,) don't let me influence you. Every so often we need to refresh what we consider "good" and examine what we like about music. Leave aside whether you think it would be cool to like this band, does it do anything for you?

For what it's worth, they have another song, called "Seventeen Candles" that is an 88-style power pop effort I really liked, and a metallic jam, "Gimme Chemicals" that also speaks in their recommendation. But as for "Busy Signals," what do you think? Specifically, the song above: does it rock?

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Neil Young: Le Noise

It's probably not a coincidence that I was thinking of the My Bloody Valentine album when I was looking to review this most recent release by Neil Young. MBV worked so hard to generate its sound you can't help but notice it as much as the songs themselves. Likewise, here Neil Young works with a sound that is more noteworthy than the songs it is attached to. Leave it to him to complicate the idea of simplicity.

Mostly, the album is just a voice and an electric guitar, something that is rarely done. Sure, you can go unplugged with an acoustic and strum away, it'll sound beautiful and delicate, but to plug in and let it roar while you warble echoey, sometimes impenetrable lyrics? That's a new one on me. Oftentimes throughout the album, all you can hear is the lack of anything else, as much as the repeating riffs or the vocals. They're not songs so much as exercises, sonic events. They don't welcome you in.

Sometimes it's vague, sometimes it's heartbreaking. Sometimes he does switch down to the acoustic (as on "Love & War," a self-reflexive meditation on his own songwriting and "Peaceful Valley Boulevard," a largely conventional folk tune about social change and the environment.) Fittingly, some songs like "Hitchhiker" and the unnaturally-moving "Someone's Gonna Rescue You" preach about needing others. Coupled with the rumbling, half-empty sound of the album, underscores how lonely life can seem.

An album like this doesn't need to be loved -- I'm not sure I do, for its difficulty and rawness -- but it does command respect. Unlike a lot of music, but like a lot of art, it doesn't need to be "good" to justify its existence. It's enough that someone, particularly Neil Young, would go and make an album this way, because for whatever reason people forget how multifaceted his music is. In this case, it's as much about the message as how it's being communicated. He's never grown too comfortable with letting people think what a "Neil Young record" should sound like.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Thursday, April 21, 2011

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

A lot has been said about this piece, by way of interpretation and remarking on its mystique, but I intend, at the very least, to explain its appeal by way of what it has done for me. It's possible that without this album, I wouldn't be blogging for you today. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on whether you're actually reading these words, or if you clicked away when I said "by way of interpretation." I can be a pretentious douche sometimes.

I first sampled tracks from this album in 2009, looking for something new to listen to. As elitist as this sounds, I don't really think I was "ready" for it. I was still very much on the defensive about what I wanted from my music, and if something didn't hit that sweet spot of pop composition and artistic intent, I wasn't for it. If it was too poppy, it was trash, and if it was too artistic, it was bullshit. This was, naturally, on the latter side of things. The sound was all fuzzy and indistinct, the vocals were drowned out by nothingness, the guitars were abrasively weird... it was not for me. And I can't say I blame myself for thinking that, because hey, it did not suit my taste at the time.

But for whatever reason we do these things, I revisited it about a year later, this time taking the plunge by buying the album, knowing only the vague remembrance of "weird" music. Instead of sampling, of course, I let the album unfold as it was meant to be heard: as "Only Shallow" gave way to "Loomer" and "Touched" and so on, I became absorbed. I now appreciated the sound for ins otherworldliness, for all the work that went into making the songs sound not like songs, and not like symphonies, but like... dimensions in space and time, impossible to verbalize. My mind had been opened that much wider. I heard it as beautiful and evocative, without being chained to the concreteness of other music I know and still love. The album became a place I could keep visiting, and never see the same way twice.

What I'm getting at here is that this album opened up a lot of possibilities for me, and caused me to reconsider both the limits I had placed on what "music" could be, and the criteria by which I judged it. I'm still getting the hang of it, as you're seeing on this blog, but since allowing this CD into my life, I've become friendlier to music, more willing to accept each album on its own terms, and it's led me to a lot of neat places. And that's why I blog about it now, because I'm eager to challenge myself, to uncover more, to break limits I put on myself. You don't have to love this difficult, strange album, you just have to be willing to listen when music comes into your life.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Tuesday Special: Pixies/Marvin Gaye, "Get It On My Mind"



Admittedly, this goes on a fair bit longer that it needs to, because of Marvin Gaye's vocal track... considerable as his sexiness is, nobody really knows much about his song beyond the first 45 seconds or so. Yet combining it with the Pixies of all things makes it that much sexier. How weird!

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

I decided this would be a good case to try my hand at briefer reviews. I do love to ramble, but in some cases, for one reason or another, there's only so much I can add to the discourse about it. However, because I'm all ego like that, I still think what I have to say is as important as what's already been said. Or at least as important as anything else I say on this site. I picked up Whatever People Say I Am for the first time earlier this year, when I began re-examining a lot of the music I'd skipped over the past decade. I found that a lot of the contemporary reviews were problematic... either you're caught up in the hype, or you're caught up trying to diffuse the hype. Either way, it's less about the music than it ought to be.

The truth, as far as this music-loving a-hole is concerned, is that this album is worth every spot of ink it was splashed with on its release, and every "decade classic" notice it's gotten in retrospect. You could look at it as the culmination of the guitar revival of the mid-00's, as the early pre-In Rainbows high water mark for online marketing, but divorced from context, it's still utterly effective, barnstorming rock and roll.

It's all energy and show, rather than gazing inward at the self, sincerely or not, it looks outward at the world and presents what it sees. That's why it sounds so fresh, so lively, because it's heedless and reckless and caught up in the moment. The songs are so catchy, so blistering, that they keep me up at night humming them after two weeks of repeated listening, and they compete with each other for airtime in my head. Like anything they could be picked apart according to this criteria or that, but they hang together remarkably well so that if you like a couple songs, you love the album. This isn't art for art's sake, this is a fucking night out, no regrets in the morning. They do it all so naturally, it works so well, the band is like an organism.

The songs work within a niche together but don't repeat themselves too hard. The major repeating factors are the punk-funk guitars and motormouthed vocals with lyrics about nightlife, whether standing in line, spotting a chick across the dancefloor, learning when to call it a night or drinking somewhere you shouldn't. All of them, aside from the conspicuously low-key "Riot Van" are played either at blistering pace, or at swaggering tempo. Sometimes both interchangeably or simultaneously (neat trick, that.) They marry form to content so well the album becomes, in the words of some, an unofficial concept album. And in that capacity, it's better than most official ones. Without the trappings of narrative, it becomes a sort of Joycean everywhere thing. There's commentary here and there, such and a lot of character.

"I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" becomes one of the decade's best singles, with its insistent "bang-ba-ba-bang" outburst. It's supported by an album's worth of equal or better material. "Mardy Bum" for example, is the best song ever hooked around the phrase "cuddles in the kitchen," although I might have to double-check my research. It's all tossed off so casually, so naturally, you can buy into it, because they don't try to be badass or too cool for school. They present as a group of everydudes, who win some and lose some, and play with a self-accorded confidence in their ability, which sounds rock and roll enough for me. They also make the Northern English accent as cool as the American twang most bands sing in.

You can quibble all you want about its place in the history books, or about what it might all add up to, whether it means anything for society and what, but for me, as always, it begins and ends with a CD. And this is one bitchin' set of tunes.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Tuesday Special: The Spoons, "Romantic Traffic"



I couldn't put my finger on where I had heard White Lies' album before until I started humming the chorus to this song, probably the best Canadian entry into the New Romantic movement, by virtue of being the only notable one. It's a bit poppier than White Lies, but the synth-guitar combo, along with the chant-along chorus and thin lyrical conceit about love and romance in a dreary urban setting, provides a basis for the type of sound White Lies emulates. The difference, I think, is that this is a bit more fun. Yes, it seems they mean it seriously from the verses, but the peppy "doot doot doot doot" chorus seems to be a nod and wink moment, which ties the thing up rather nicely. The video appears to have been shot on the TTC subway somewhere, which is a bit odd considering the lyrical concept is specifically about cars. Well, I guess they couldn't have shot the damn thing on the QEW.

Then again, if you see below, it's clear I have pinpointed White Lies' true inspiration...

Tuesday Special: Seona Dancing, "Bitter Heart"



Man, I could not believe it. In the 80's, a young, David Bowie-looking Ricky Gervais was in a New Romantic band. Weird how time changes people. Thank goodness he grew out of it. The two singles this group released were not even remotely hits, and they never released an album. We're all better for it. I mean look at that video again... there are no words. Even if you think it's good, you have to admit it's pretty friggin' weird.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

White Lies: Ritual

A lot of the time, I listen through an album the first few times, and wonder "Why this?" Why is this artist expressing themselves in this way? In the case of White Lies, it entails drudging up a classic postpunk sound from the early 80's, flush with giant synths, faux-symphonies, and a stilted crooning vocal style. The sound wants to be big, to the point of near-parody. Every lyric on this album wants to be the most important feeling in the world, and a lot of it comes off as heavy-handed, if sophisticated, high school poetry. The music backs it up by sounding blown up.

I resisted. It didn't feel like it meant anything, even as it attempted to mean everything. I could see it working toward being dire, dejected, severe, serious, romantic, melancholy, morose, melodramatic, and a shitload of other adjectives. If White Lies have anything honest to say, I wasn't willing to hear. It was all too dressed up.

But the more you listen to an album, you're either going to like it more or get sick of it, and I didn't get sick of Ritual. I still think it's a bit silly (like how the CN Tower is a bit pointy,) but I at least find its melodrama charming. It's partly in the way they build their sounds, usually starting with a small lead in and culminating in a huge clattering of synths or orchestral strings or even guitars. A good example of this is "Is Love," which absorbs me every time I hear it, even though I don't like its ploy of a modest opening section. Once it embraces that it wants to be a huge dance song, it works better. Most of these discrete tunes work the same way, resetting the meter to the bottom and building back to the upper limit. Only album-closer "Come Down" whirls onward at the same tone. Sometimes, then, the album comes off as repetitive, but the good ones are all equally good, and the bad ones are at worst still inoffensive, and it would take a listener's subjective opinion to determine which was which.

Because after all, in that melodrama and exaggerated sense of self-importance -- if it's intentional or not, if it's meant to be serious or not -- is escapism. It blows up all the problems of its singer's narrative to be huger than conceivable, every feeling becoming a matter of life and death even though the listener knows love is not usually so cut and dried. Lots of "nevers" and "alwayses" and "everys" and "nothings" take me out of the lyrics' reality, but it somehow works as image, as flash and sensory input rather than food for thought. I feel like there's a lot of nonsense in here, but it's somehow entertaining nonsense. The grandiosity becomes an attraction. I can't take it seriously, but I can take it.

This is a backhanded compliment. I freely admit that. It's probably not what the guys in White Lies were going for when they began penning "There's nothing stranger / Than to love somebody." I couldn't recommend the album on those merits, and quite frankly I'm still not, but I am interested in exploring its strange appeal to me, because I found myself gladly spinning it again and again to observe these sentiments, completely unironically, and yet knowing that I don't think it's very good, or at least good in the way it wants to be (the gray-clad creepy twins on the cover seem like a giveaway.)

This is not my finest moment as a critic, but luckily, I'm just some arse with a keyboard. I almost didn't write this review, but like going back to the beginning of "Is Love," I did, because I had to get through it, and like this album, I'm unsatisfied with the result, but at least I tried to say what I meant.

But whatever, man. It could very well be a postpunk triumph, and its deadpan nature is its strength. I'm as open to that as I am the negative interpretation. I wouldn't be afraid to like this music, although I wouldn't brag about it either. Sometimes things don't work out the way you plan, sometimes music you don't think you should like ends up having value to you. I'm not dogmatic, and I'm not desperate to fling some meaning on this. What I've learned to be the place of the reviewer is to guide the reader. I can tell you how you might enjoy something, but I can't overrule you. This album is a bit like an MST3k movie. "Did he just say Bad sex and ethanol?" Yeah, and he meant it. Isn't that weird?

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Cage the Elephant: Thank You Happy Birthday

During my initial listens to Thank You Happy Birthday, I couldn't help but think of Beavis & Butt-head. Back around the peak of that show's popularity, they released The Beavis and Butt-head Experience, a collection of random songs from early-90's hard rock bands as diverse as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus, Megadeth, Nirvana and Aerosmith, as well as Sir Mix-a-Lot and, bafflingly, a cooler-than-it-ought-to-be duet with Cher. (In fact, it was this connection that led me to post the cover found below.) I listened to that tape pretty endlessly as a kid and pretty well encapsulated the early 90's for me: a lot of self-destructively raucous, pissed-off music that went out of its way to be abrasive in new ways (the Nirvana song was, after all, "I Hate Myself and Want To Die.") Importantly, it maintained B&B-h's humour with skits wedged between the often-inexplicable tracks (Aerosmith's contribution: their third-sappiest power ballad of the day.) Its quirky edginess, if crude, was totally emblematic of the time, and connected to my little 7-year-old self in a way most child psychologists would probably characterize as "damaging."

Without meaning to fling around the argument of homage-ripoff-influence, Cage the Elephant capture the spirit of that moment pretty well for a 2000's band, with a wry, detached, 21st century angle. They know how to work a hook, but aren't consumed by the desire to be radio-friendly. That leads them to take a lot of risks with their music, some of which succeed in giving the album broad appeal, some of which succeed in alienating the listener, and pretty much all of which make this a damn good listen.

To begin with, we have "Shake Me Down," probably the most accessible thing on here, manages to balance correctly between a most shimmering guitar intro and a riffy chorus. On first listen there doesn't seem to be a ton to it, and that it's an easy write-off, but vocalist Matthew Shultz does the heavy lifting with his voice. It's a distinctive voice that sounds like a pop-punk Black Francis, a comparison that does the band well in some of the best tracks on the album. "Aberdeen" as he busts a flow on the refrain, then wails the title phrase like Francis wailing "Gouge Away." That song, like much of the album, features a chorus that would be very singable if it weren't so vocally intensive, and if the guitars didn't strive to kill your ears. This is pretty much a good thing, in context. The bass thumps along dutifully while the six strings seem to drown. They revel in their meltdown-pop on "2024" and "Around My Head" (refrain: "Ooh ooh ooh ooh aah aah aah aah ooh ooh ooh ooh aah aah aah aah!")

They do frustration, commentary, observation and criticism well, or at least enthusiastically. They may not be the Clash (nobody is) but there's value in the parodic crash-bang of "Indy Kidz" and "Sell Yourself," which sounds like an artist caught in a beartrap without any other options left. I can't tell sarcasm from sincerity on that one, but I sense the urgency in the dilemma. A couple of back-end numbers, "Sabertooth Tiger" and "Japanese Buffalo" reassure us that it's very loud and violent inside the heads of the heads of Cage the Elephant's members. They're noisy and joyfully pissed off and cinematic (in a chase scene kind of way.)

They're not dumb brutalists, though. "Shake Me Down" is a slice of observational cleverness that was already revealed in the opening track. "It's Always Something" winds an ominous, Tales-From-The-Crypt-like melody around wry, ironic vignettes about cheating spouses and murderous hobos. It's sort of a descendant of their earlier hit, "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked," which did the same, but with a more conventional (perhaps overly-so) R&B rhythm that for whatever reason didn't make me as interested as it should have. Sure, oftentimes on the record they just let the shit fly, record the results, and get by on ferocity, but when they set to it, they write some damn good songs.

One segment of pop aspiration comes through in the middle of the album, with the gentle, singer-songwritery "Rubber Ball," and the pop-punk anthem "Right Before My Eyes," which is, if a tad on the corny side, still way better with its honesty than anything of its kind on the radio in my teen years. In fact, there are so many great bands in their 20's right now, I might conclude they learned what not to do with music from the stuff that was popular from 1998-2004. (Oooh, unnecessary cheapshot, but you had it coming, blink.) "Right Before My Eyes" is reprised at the end of the closing track "Flow," itself very 90's radio-safe. Think Filter's "Take a Picture," if you're desperate for comparisons. So the band has a gentle side, indicating a level of thought being put into production you may not necessarily suspect on the first go. I like the subtly awkward title of the album, as if blurted out: "Thank You Happy Birthday" the band may seek to please and provide pleasantries, but does so in a distinct, roundabout way. The band's name, even, signifies this: attempts to compress something far too big into something manageable.

All this adds up to a record I really dig. If the songs aren't always terrific, the performance and overall atmosphere definitely is. It captures that sarcastic, outwardly-concerned eagerness to be utterly irritated to the point of explosion I remember from the early 90's. I don't think it would be fair, however, to say the band is hamstrung by its debt to those bands, because as I say (maybe I haven't before bu I do now,) all music is influenced by something, obvious or not. What time-comparisons give us is the benefit of hindsight and a new generation of frustrations to express. It all comes out in music that is loud and angry, but smart about its anger, and melodic about its intelligence. I like the way Cage the Elephant is navigating the rock and roll game: they know the rules but they still play their way.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Cover: Cher and Beavis and Butt-head, "I Got You Babe"



Right around the time I noticed this music video features Beavis & Butt-head playing in that virtual reality that existed in early-90's entertainment, I realized how long ago 1993 was. But that may just be because Beavis & Butt-head's existence was predicated on a time when music videos were readily available on television. This cover (inasmuch as it can be a cover while involving the original artist) comes from the Beavis & Butt-head Experience, a random collection of B-sides and misfit tracks recorded by Geffen artists in the early 90's, strung together by vignettes involving Mike Judge's cartoon slackers. (Also along for the ride, Red Hot Chili Peppers, White Zombie, Nirvana, Sir Mix-A-Lot and Aerosmith.) It was kind of a risk, having the big featured moment (this is one of only a couple tracks where B&B "sing") involve a cover of a pretty lame-if-classic 60's pop hit, and Cher, whom I doubt was favoured by Beavis & Butt-head's target audience of 13-year-old future drug dealers. (Okay, I loved them, but you've gotta admit, a lot of kids watching probably grew up to be drug dealers.)

Cher, to her credit, does a good job signifying she's in on the gag, although the banter toward the end is a bit awkward. Still, although the song doesn't sound like it belonged on that album, it wound up good enough... and in its way an improvement on the original, inasmuch as I'd rather hear Mike Judge attempt to sing than Sonny Bono. The song works pretty well rocked-up, providing a nice moment of rocker-chick-coolness for Cher between Moonstruck and "Believe." The whole thing was just ridiculous enough to work.

Cover: Nirvana, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"



Had I realized sooner that the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death fell on a Tuesday, I'd have saved some of those covers I've already posted for today, because you know I'm all about timeliness (which is why I keep posting videos from a 17-years-dead grunge act covering songs from before he was born.)

A friend of mine is obsessed with that look he gives just before the last note.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

The La's: The La's (Remastered)

I grew up on Oldies Radio. This is a format that has largely been displaced by "Classic Rock," which uses as much from the 70's and 80's as from the 60's -- and unlike "Oldies," very little from the 50's, but for the first decade or so of my life, the only songs I really knew were the ones from my parents' youth. I knew the Beatles' songs before I even knew I knew the Beatles' songs. This is so true to the point that when I heard the song "Eleanor Rigby" when I was 16, I couldn't remember any specific incidence of hearing it ever before, and yet I felt it was the most familiar thing. These songs have a way of feeling familiar, perhaps because they form the basis of the entire notion of radio pop.

So we have the curious case of retro pop, and in particular The La's. One might ask "If we already have the Beatles, what's the use of a band 30 years later that sounds like the Beatles?" That's a pretty dumb question, but a fair one. After all, the Beatles stopped sounding "like this" in about 1966, and all other bands similarly changed their sounds in the closing years of the 60's. The Rolling Stones of "The Last Time" became the ones of "Satisfaction" and then of "Tumbling Dice" and "Miss You." The Who of "Substitute" because the Who of Tommy and "Baba O'Riley." The Kinks, the Hollies... and the American equivalent bands like The Beach Boys all changed with time, and then rock kept mutating until it gave us Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Kiss, the Ramones, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Nirvana... by 1991 it's hard to blame a band for wanting to recapture that 1965 sound.

So there's the case of "There She Goes," a song that, like Beatles '65, you feel like you've already heard all your life the first time you've heard it. The lyrics are delightfully, memorably simple, yet convey a complex idea. "There she goes..." Lee Mavers sings plaintively. It's a simple observation, but one that connects the song to vintage songwriting. It could have been "Here she comes..." just as easily, but that's an entirely different thought. With that lyric choice, and all those that surround it, Mavers says a lot about the unattainable desire, the yearning, innocent or otherwise, that underlay the songwriting of olden days. With its jangly guitars and sweet background harmonies, the song sounds like it was ripped directly from the mid-60's.

And for most of my life, that's all there was to the song. A pleasant, retro-sounding tune that sometimes showed up in movies (such as So I Married an Ax Murderer) and got a decent cover treatment by Sixpence None The Richer. It was likely to get stuck in your head after hearing it, yet you could go years without going back to it.

Then a couple months ago I bought an issue of Q Magazine whose cover story was the Top 250 Albums of the Q Years (the oldest album on there was Paul Simon's Graceland, for reference's sake,) looking to get material for this blog outside the past couple years. Somewhere in the bottom half of he list was this album. I've heard some praise about it here and there, but it never really piqued my interest, because I figured if I'd heard that song, I'd heard the main event. But the story, as laid out in the magazine, was of a troubled visionary Lee Mavers, who took years to record this seemingly-simple album, rejecting takes he viewed as "imperfect," trying desperately to match the tunes he had in his head... so specific, yet the genesis of a song like "There She Goes" could be found in a late-night jam session where Mavers got strung out on drugs and played his guitar into a tape recorder, and, unbeknownst to him, wrote his biggest hit completely unconsciously.

And that, I thought, was a great way of looking at this album. The pop contained on it seems to go beyond merely paying tribute to vintage pop, but as a recreation from the foundation up: a record out of time. I think it's possible these songs were ingrained in Mavers' head the way the Beatles' have become for the rest of us, and his obsession over their exactness was because he envisioned this album as a collection of covers that didn't have originals. He wanted to be faithful to recordings that existed nowhere but his imagination. Which, in a twisted way, is brilliant.

The album is made up of good-to-great sunny pop strummers like "Son of a Gun," the bitter "I.O.U.," the criss-crossing "Way Out." One great track is the protest-against-complacency "Doledrum," which seems to be a descendant of Kinks songs like "Well-Respected Man." Many of the lyrics point to an uncertain, unspeakable anxiety under Mavers' skin, like "Feelin'," or the frustrated, roaring, over-enunciated "Failure," and of course "There She Goes," with its vaguely-sketched, economically-detailed desire.

Then there are a couple of truly excellent songs that are what convinced me this album was for me. One was "I Can't Sleep," a jubilant explosion of Pete Townshend "I Can't Explain" guitars, overlaid on each other and brimming with fire and life. The other is "Timeless Melody," which I've never heard a song like. Fitting for its polymorphous form, which seems to create its own place outside time, it seems to be about having a song stuck in your head, with great lyrics like "Even the words they fail me / Oh look what it's doing to me / I never say what I want to say..." which do a better job of encapsulating the feeling of being struck for words than, even, say, Nirvana's "On a Plain" (great song, that.) Cobain is an unlikely comparison to Mavers, if one looks at their output, but neither was stranger to digging deep into one's influences and extracting something utterly original.

A couple oddities round out the album, slinky downtempo numbers like the jaunty "Liberty Ship" and the gypsy-island-tinged "Freedom Song," as well as the musically-impressive prog of "Looking Glass," which pulls the album away from the 60's and into the excesses of the 70's, maybe sort of where the British Invasion becomes concept albums and 8-minute Led Zeppelin electric-folk songs. That one builds so subtly and powerfully that you barely notice what's going on. They're all good songs, but they aren't why people are getting into the album. The La's are at their best in jangly 3-minute speedy guitar bashes.

Sometimes in cases like these I wonder why the band never got it together to have a second hit or a second album. The more I learned about the La's, the more I understood this was impossible. The very fuel for Mavers' creativity was also kind of destructive. You could blame drugs -- "There She Goes" is often, and probably not wrongly, interpreted as being partly or wholly about heroin (I think partly at most -- like the similarity between addiction and romantic desire.) Whatever it was that drove Mavers to write such a great set of songs also prevented him from functioning in all the other aspects of a successful musician. He had the band disown the finished product of this album, and they broke up a while later. After their 2005 reunion for the Glastonbury Festival, the group rediscovered its love of playing together and the idea of recording a new album was floated. Mavers was apparently very into the idea, but noted they had to finish recording the first one first.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Friday, April 1, 2011

Plurg: Sex Panic III

This is the 11th studio album from Finnish-Australian-African-American Folk-Blues-Metal octet Plurg in 4 years, and their 13th overall, following a 6-year break largely motivated by grief over the death of Ronald Reagan. One can't help but sense creeping burnout to Plurg's chief songwriter, vocalist Rikard DiCole. This is an imperfect album, unfocused and overly clean-sounding. However, it's also a landmark, watershed moment in music, the likes of which come around maybe once in a lifetime. If their previous album, Vagina Terrorist, was Plurg's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, this is most definitely their White Album, as well as their London Calling, their My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, their Loveless, their Get the Knack, their My World 2.0 and their Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em. It's like if Radiohead forgot how to be Radiohead and instead was a Madonna tribute band. It's a revolution in music, a towering achievement. At 56 tracks, it may seem daunting, but about a dozen of those are under a minute long, and one track named on the CD jacket does not even appear on the album, throwing the entire track list out of order.

For the most part, themes of sex and mindless violence continue to dominate the album, as with previous Plurg outings, although DiCole does bring back some of the existential yearnings of Sex Panic II without forgetting the pop sensibility that defined the original Sex Panic and its follow-up, The Strange Case of Black Dakota Fanning!!. By and large, they stick to their original "Reba McEntire meets Deep Purple" sound that has defined them, except when they deviate from that style, which is most if not all of the time.

The first single, "Dainty Things," written from the perspective of a well-used pair of panties, chronicles the joy of a new relationship after one thinks one has forgotten love. It's haunting in its way, as is "Killer Inside You," wherein DiCole refers to himself as the Killer. More fun than that is the playground stomp of "School Bus Ride," an autobiographical track describing DiCole's first sexual experience. DiCole also proves himself a first class imitator, as he sounds more or less exactly like Frank Sinatra getting a blowjob on "Frank Sinatra Gets a Blowjob." But the first climax of the album is most definitely the Queen plus Coldplay divided by Dexy's Midnight Runners sound of "Basement Dweller," where the singer recalls the story of how he seduced the girlfriend of a guy who writes for a music blog. But the joke's on him because I didn't like her that much anyway. Skank.

DiCole waxes poetic on "Bechdel Test," the groundbreakingly misogynistic eighth track, featuring Sarah McLachlan on harmony vocals. The album also features a trio of covers: their nihilistic take on The Monkees' "I'm a Believer" sounds like the Rankin Family being waterboarded, and a gender-flipped version of "Leader of the Pack," which includes a rewrite: like most Plurg songs, it contains a graphically-described sex scene at the end. And their Nickelback-esque take on the theme song to Boy Meets World is every music critic's holy grail: that rare mix of toughness and vulnerability that says to the world: "Here I am."

Let it never be said, however, that the band is not inventive. The seven-minute interlude, "Sandwich Break," features guitar noodling in the background while lead tambourine player President James Buchanan eats a BLT audibly over a microphone. Most of the innovation however comes from DiCole himself, who makes Plurg into a one-man show, often literally by playing every instrument himself while the other seven members are forced to watch at gunpoint and applaud, as on "Seven Guitars Playing the Same Riff." (The recording of that song famously took a month and a half and was captured in the award-nominated documentary, "Stop Playing That One Song, Asshole.")

That's not to say DiCole is the ultimate control freak. No fewer than three hundred and five writers, producers, engineers and pizza delivery boys were involved in the making of this album, all credited (with most of their personal information being listed in the liner notes,) although there are several Alan Smithees. One can't help but think this might lead to some redundancies, as the 15th track, "I Want You" is exactly the same as the 21st track, "I Would Like You," with a minor lyric change. And "Me On Take" is pretty much a-ha's "Take On Me," played in reverse. That is to say, with all the words and chords played in the opposite order. The effect is nothing short of stunning and says way more about the political themes of 1980's Sweden than the original ever could. Near the middle of the album he gets into politics with a stripped-down punk track called "Whores," and another called "WHORES!!" which is the same but louder. DiCole & Co. call up numerous collaborators, including a pre-fame Rebecca Black, whose work on this album has more in common with her celebrated indie work than her recent output. She appears on the a capella "Work Of Art in the Age Of Mechanical Reproduction," which is like the musical version being told by your parents that you're not special and nothing you do will ever measure up. And they're completely right.

Amidst the ruckus is the U2-esque "Get On Your Rape Boots", wherein drummer Jonathan Taylor bin Laden pushes a high school orchestra past its limits winding around DiCole's lyrics, which force us to wonder: Who is the true rapist? (The answer, it turns out, is the members of Plurg.) They also incorporate improvisation, as on the track "Meat Girl," which apparently includes the sound of a woman spontaneously giving birth in the studio. Then there's the storytelling on "The Boy With the Re-attachable Penis," which is apparently a childhood campfire song half-remembered by collaborator Louie "Not The Former Host of the Price is Right" Anderson.

Tracks 30-39 are a suite of tracks entitled "Marty McFuhrer, parts I-XII," a concept that reimagines the entire story of the Back to the Future trilogy with Adolph Hitler as the protagonist (and of course, in Plurg's version, the time traveler gets to third base with his mother.) The mini-opera takes a couple of chances, most of which pay off, especially re-creating the performance of "Johnny B. Goode" on Banjo and Clarinet.

Track 42 is a sprightly, Randy Newman-inspired romp that paints a detailed picture of a post-apocalyptic, "Children of Men"-type world where everyone on the planet has died a slow and very specifically, elaborately blood-soaked coughing, shitting death, appropriately entitled "Cotton Candy." What really sells it are the insistent handclaps and the sunny hook that goes "Everyone you love is dead, la la la la la! / All human achievement means nothing, la la la la la!" It's one you'll be singing in the shower.

The real opus, however, is the penultimate track, "Vulvae," an 86-minute epic that takes up most of the second disc and some of the third. It plays like a cross between Nirvana's "I Hate Myself And Want To Die" and Cyndi Lauper's "I Drove All Night," with a touch of Brian Eno. The song gets its name from the blistering solo played by third-guitarist Daisy Fuentes, on her crotch. The concluding track, ending the album on a strong note, is "Crying and Masturbating," which has to be heard to be believed.

With every album, Plurg increases its foothold over the pop, rock, hip hop, dance, electronica, country, classical, metal, punk, reggae and soundtrack genres, to the point where it feels like no band that has ever existed is not derivative of Plurg. If they keep improving their sound and fine-tuning it, and maybe start really exploring their abilities as musicians, they might someday record a classic album. This release is content to be merely a masterpiece, all things to all people, with broad ranging appeal and serious artistic concern. Despite not being particularly pleasant to listen to, it's nothing short of the greatest album of all time. Perfect. 7.4/10

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Note: As public decency laws make it illegal to actually inflict Plurg's music on others, here is an effective summary of their sound: