Wednesday, June 29, 2011

#1 - Aerosmith: Rocks

Music is art, that much is true, but this blog isn't devoted to the idea that music is something you put on a shelf and admire while it gathers dust. I wouldn't feel right selecting, as my favourite album, something that could be admired from a safe distance, dissected for its socio-historical importance or its place in history. If something is going to be my favourite, it's going to have to punch me right in the gut, toss me around the room, and tell me it won't be ignored. 26 seconds into the album opener, "Back in the Saddle," Steven Tyler howls "I'm BAAAAAACK", emphasis on the "ack," and it's impossible to escape.

It's guttural, it's visceral, it's direct. One guitar gallops along in a low growl, the other flies off like sparks. If you dissect it, it flies in the face of by-rote rock construction we now take as fact. The album completely fucks around with the idea of verses and choruses and solos as they've become codified, instead having a ragged, brisk, in-the-moment feeling. And yet it never sounds jammy. For one brief moment at the apex of their 70's career, before the drugs swallowed them whole, these five guys were visionaries. And they walked out of the studio with an album I find impossible to deny.

"Back in the Saddle" is the no-bullshit "looking for a fuck" song that, if you were about high art, you might look down your nose on, but their ability to so wholly commit themselves to the nasty urges that lie within us is precisely where the brilliance of the album lies. Despite what cliche holds about this band, this is not an uncomplicated, shallow piece of work. I said earlier that just about every album on this list could in some way be construed as a concept album of some kind. The concept here is how deep one can dive into one's vices before they destroy you completely. As early as the second track, Tyler yearns for "home sweet home" in South Tallahassee.

"Last Child" has a false beginning, a rare device that pulls you into the song, makes you feel you've slipped into a idyllic fantasy before being smacked out of it, pulled back to the gray, urban life by that clockwork funk riff that so perfectly replicates the world of traffic and pedestrians and steel and glass. The sinking guitar riff in the "home sweet home" refrain is so sentimental, but lets you down knowing the past is gone. The proto-rap vocal delivery proves the band's rhythmic strength that would help haul them out of oblivion a decade later. The song fades out in sirens and a whirring slowdown of the disc that leads into the manic "Rats in the Cellar." Something about this song says to me "You're fucked now." It's so turbocharged and claustrophobic, the city is starting to win. Weird harmonies appear abruptly then fade away like ghosts of psychedelia. There's almost too much going on in this one song to comprehend. It ends with a dangerously fleet-fingered guitar solo that seems both meticulously composed and dangerously unstable, adding to the nuclear meltdown feel of the album. After a minute and a half of pure instrumental mayhem, the song grinds to a halt in drums.

Side 1 ends with "Combination," a Joe Perry song that feels like walking around at daybreak trying to find a friendly face (or at the very least, someone to buy drugs off of.) The guitar riff speaks to me, because it's so circular, up and down, indicating how inescapable this predicament is. Perry and Tyler do dual vocals here, making it sound utterly inhuman. The voices themselves are identifiable, yet in some kind of weird blended uncanny valley where it just doesn't sound right. And that wrongness is sublime. It doesn't help that the lyrics are so obscure and ominous. And that riff just won't stop churning.

Side two begins with a pair of crucial songs to the albums "personal disaster" aesthetic. The opening guitar sweep of "Sick as a Dog" is grand and orchestral, like a beautiful mist, before sharpening into focus with an unsympathetic Greek chorus riff. This song wears its heart on its sleeve, with opening lyrics "Pleeeeeease / I've just got to talk to you." The lyrics here, as throughout the album do a great job making a statement without grinding it into dust. Unsubtle but not obvious. Not something just anyone would have written, not a KISS or Journey or Foreigner song. Here is a way of throwing yourself on the floor and begging for forgiveness, for release, for redemption, but being denied. "You'll be sorry / 'Cause you really ain't that young." Like many of the songs on this album, it ends with about a minute-long guitar workout that leaves you to contemplate what's been brought to your feet. That there might not be much time left is indicated by the fact that this hymn to redemption bleeds into one of the first great sound-pictures of Armageddon ever committed to tape. On "Nobody's Fault," Tyler steps up his vocal performance to a previously unheard level of histrionics. The song is too big for words, looming over the listener (and, sounding more than a bit like Black Sabbath but with heart, informing much heavy metal in the decades to come.) "Saw-rry / You're so saw-rry / Don't be sawr-r-r--ry!" those inhuman harmonies return, "Man has known it / now he's blown it / Upside-down and hell's the only stop / We did an awful job / And now we're just a little too late." The song takes on the fire and brimstone of a sermon, but never names names. This track forgoes all the bluesy swagger, the inflated ego and self-importance and comes apart at the seams.

But if nothing else, there's still rock, and the album forges ahead with "Get the Lead Out," a fairly good rocker that, in the context of this album, seems merely adequate. It's followed by the utter pure rockingdom of "Lick and a Promise," a song that is even dirtier than it at first seems. It seems like a celebration of the rock star lifestyle, but like a good work of modernism, it hides inner truths about the hollow pleasures down that path. For all its glamorous riffs, and clever lyrical turns, the hook says it all just by going "Na, na, na, na, na!" It's an invocation of the loneliness and self-destruction at the heart of excess and stardom. It shines and lures, but it's hollow. I think that's why those syllables echo so distantly in my head, because I happen to be aware, with the gift of hindsight, that success did utterly swallow them whole for about a decade following the release of this record. First they took the world, and then the world took them. It gets better knowing the story that unfolded, but taken for itself it's still brilliant. One more cacophonous, pitiless, incredible solo later, we're on our way out the door.

The album is capped off by "Home Tonight," which comes from a time when the downtempo tracks on Aerosmith's albums weren't meant merely to be hits on disaster movie soundtracks, but were actually a novel touch. This impressively spare yet altogether grandiose statement of devotion features a staggeringly excellent instrumentation and an impassioned vocal performance. The thing about Steven Tyler, especially in the 70's, is that his voice carries that undefinable quality of authenticity that's usually associated with old type blues singers, and it's clear how seriously he puts his all into these recordings, the man practically seems to be choking with sentiment rather than just turning out a reading that seems pretty. You don't get that anymore. It seems impossible. (The last one I can ever remember would be Cobain.) It's not rough n' ready like Bon Scott, and it's not operatic like Mercury and it's not whimsical like Bowie, but he hits places in the heart, head and balls few other vocalists could or would.

At only 9 tracks and 35 minutes, Rocks is a brief yet thorough tour of the darkness that exists inside all of our desires, that too much of a good thing is definitely destructive. What it might sound like to be too far gone. I first heard this album when I was a preteen, beset by hormones, the best time to listen to loud music, because everything you're feeling seems so much bigger. The allure of hard rock is that, while maintaining catchy riffs and identifiable rhythm, it breaks its own constraints to make itself seem louder than it could possibly be, to magnify every bit of anger and hatred and feat and regret, as well as joy and lust and anticipation and seduction. It was a fine line to walk before becoming caricatures (as they literally did on the cover of their next album,) but here the right balance is struck, oddly enough by getting off balance to the right degree. Like I said, some songs are built contrary to what we expect from formal conventions, but we never notice, and then they bear the burdens of impossibly erratic solos totally enveloping them. There is much panic in this world, inside and out, and this album objectifies it excellently.

Everyone should be so lucky as to have an album in their lives that does for them what Rocks does for me. I didn't put it at the top of this list because I think, objectively, it's the best, or because I think everyone should love it the way I do. I just hope you love something the way I love this. Some years ago I wound up at this party talking to some dude about music. Eager to get into a music cred pissing contest, he asked what my favourite band was, probably expecting some tried-and-true answer like the Velvet Underground or the Pixies, or an acceptable recent contenders like Arcade Fire or Radiohead. But no, for the love of music, I couldn't forsake this band, and when I said Aerosmith, he scoffed. And isn't that just a little sad? Because, the stereotypes they later embraced aside, you'd have to be utterly numb inside not to be rocked by the content of this album, not to feel the highs and lows invoked by this madness. But even if it's not your thing, I just think it's sad not to understand how it could be somebody's.

But that's what a favourite is. It's something that means something to somebody, something that forms the bedrock for your tastes and says something about who you are as a person. In a kinder world I wouldn't have to defend that, but here we are.

That said, I do happen to hold this album in high esteem because not only is it personally meaningful, but also a significant moment in hard rock. I'm not a man of extreme tastes, I like music that manages to go utterly insane without sacrificing rhythm and melody. As deep and dark as Rocks is, it is never without that loose, easy swagger that tells you why a walk in the darkness is so inviting to begin with. It isn't that this album speaks to me because I know where it's coming from. It pulls me out of my life and blows everything I've ever felt or known up to an impossible proportion. This is a crushing testament to the power of guitar music.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Monday, June 27, 2011

#2 - The Clash: London Calling

I am unimportant. I am small. I am a microbe, a mite, a molecule, standing in the towering shadow of this album. I am daunted, I am overwhelmed, by the mere contemplation of attempting to put this work down in words, this towering achievement. It is times like these that you realize exactly how good music is at speaking for itself, and how fruitless it really is to attempt to make them any better by talking about it.

But fuck it. Let's do it anyway.

Here is where I learned there are no limitations. There is always a choice. There is no essence to which you are bound. You can change, you can transcend, you can revisit, progress, revert, mutate. My first full listen to London Calling, after my 15th birthday, was a moment of clarity in my young life, opening the doors to my mind. It begins so simply and eloquently with that punk anthem, the title track, a warning call from the brink of catastrophe, a signal that things are going to have to change. It was a fusion of urgency and perceptiveness, a lot more sophisticated in both message and form than simpler punk anthems. Relative to the Sex Pistols, The Clash were there to repair what other punks would destroy: they were about improvement, even in the face of disaster. By the end of the first side, it is clear that the supposed normal "rules" of punk no longer apply. We hear saxophones in "Jimmy Jazz," a humming organ on "Hateful" and ska-inflected horns on "Rudie Can't Fail." Distinctions are not important anymore. Divisions don't exist here.

The second track reaches back to twelve-bar blues rock, "Brand New Cadillac," an archetypal rocker from the halcyon days of the 1950's. Punk of course has much in common with the roots of rock and roll, its "back to the basics" approach being indicated by the Elvis-referencing cover art and the image of guitar-smashing. I love that cover, incidentally, to destroy the very thing you're using to create, to destroy your limitations and free your mind. Punk may have much in common with "Brand New Cadillac" but it has considerably less in common with Jazz, but the second track has a slinky, sinister tone, and "Hateful" is confident in its breakneck pace. The Clash aren't shy about their stylistic flourishes. They own them. That's what's so punk. That side culminates in "Rudie Can't Fail," one of the first indications that the album is leaning toward growing up and getting responsible but not losing your edge. The horns and guitars chirp feistily.

This panoply (good word) of styles makes London Calling a mythical figure in rock critic circles. It's so easy to listen to and so hard to pin down in words, because there's just so goddamned much of it. Records didn't typically go an hour-plus, so if you were going to press two LPs worth of music, it had better be worth the effort (especially since, at the time, the band actually managed to outsmart their label into getting it priced as a single-disc!)

Turn disc one over and you're treated to "Spanish Bombs," a romance of sorts set against the Spanish Civil War. Even leaving beside the great lyrics, here is an excellent song, with its recognizably lamenting guitar rift, diving like bombs, and vocal interplay between Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. The blending of love and war is a good indication of the breath of this album's all-seeing eye, wrapping everything together perfectly, here and there, in single songs and between tracks. Following that is "The Right Profile," which swaggers with amazing big city horns, and features Strummer at his most uncontrollable on vocals. The man could wail, and his voice was perfect to represent a man's life coming apart. The man in question is now largely-forgotten Hollywood star Montgomery Clift, depicting the night he smashed his face in an auto accident. There's a pattern here of privileging what some theorists call the "ex-centric" figure, those often left behind or minimized in conventional narrative. It rips history apart at the end with a howl best rendered as ARRBSSSURGH JUH SUFFFURGUHHH ARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!

I like that about this album: at a time when rock was either proggy or punky, it was privileging all these alternative song forms. "Lost in the Supermarket" manages to be a disco-punk tune that's heart-rendingly introspective, one I often find myself humming on my lonely days. It's got this galloping bassline and kick drum drive that leaves Mick Jones' narrator behind. The side ends with another great global moment, Paul Simonon's "The Guns of Brixton," a heavy reggae lament for the Afro-Caribbean area of London plagued by violence. But before this, there's one f the greatest punk stompers in the canon, "Clampdown." How great is this album? So great that "Clampdown," with its lyrics calling for self-determination and resistance to all forms of control (whether by governments or corporations) its anthemic call-and-answer lyrics, its masterful guitars, and its overall excellent encapsulation of musical rebellion, it's still an underdog in the question of "Best song on the album." Of course there's no objectively correct answer to that, but there's so much going on that the competition is stuff.

If London Calling consisted only of that first disc, those ten tracks, it would be an extremely powerful 33 minutes of music, but this one proves it has much more to offer and spreads its view wider, celebrating Stagger Lee in horns on "Wrong 'Em Boyo" and uniting historic conflicts under "The Card Cheat." Strangely, although the first disc would have made a great album on its own, the second disc feels best like an expansion pack to the first. That's not to say they're inferior, only that they belong in this context. You get a great sense of why these tracks all needed to be heard together. Implicitly, they further and resolve the globe-spanning, all-encompassing route set out on that first disc. The middle of side three contains two great tracks, the bracing corporate piss-take "Koka Kola" and the excellent "Death or Glory," probably the most nuanced depiction of punk fury there will ever be. Is it all worth the effort when it becomes "Just another story?" Anthemic in every sense of the word, and probably the song on the album most responsible for imitators, this is yet another strong contender for best track on the album.

After all this brilliance and creation, the album aptly settles back into modest punk rock mode in what can be taken as either a disappointing last wheeze or a great case of coming full circle. "Lover's Rock," "Four Horsemen" and "I'm Not Down" are either "merely" good rock, or they are "fuck, yeah!" good rock. They help the album along in their own way, even if I don't consider them standouts. More notable is the Caribbean-tinged horn-and-shaker cover of "Revolution Rock," which begins to bring the album to a close, paradoxically considering its opening lyrics, by saying "Everything's gonna be all right." And for some reason, coming from Joe Strummer, you fucking believe it.

And just when you think the album has spent its last dime, said everything that can be said, that glorious fade-up brings us back. "Train in Vain (Stand By Me)" provides a final triumph for the album, proving that for all their globetrotting and philosophizing, they can put everything into a 3-minute pop song, too, and make it seem like the most natural goddamned thing in the world. "Train in Vain" is excellent, a punking-up of British Invasion sounds. It's notable that "Train" initially went unlisted due to the haste with which it was added to the record, but lore holds that it was because the Clash were afraid of being seen as too commercial (that would come later in the wake of "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go.")

For me, London Calling isn't about the message anyway, but about the representation. I remember the exact moment I realized what sort of album I was dealing with. It was very immediate and very complete. It was my very first listen, I was on my bike, it was a warm spring day and the CD had made it to the end of "The Right Profile," the horns were swinging this way and that and I felt as if I had known this song all my life, deep inside my bones. In my experience especially since starting this blog, you don't always get that, where an album becomes part of you so immediately. A lot of them take repeated listens to really dig. Some are up-front but never make that deep a connection. Some never even come close. But you know you've got a great album when it feels like something you've been waiting to hear all your life.

The beauty of London Calling isn't that it has something for everyone, but that it has, in fact, everything for everyone. This isn't a mere sampler, it's a complete work. That's why it has become so monolithic, probably, because it's impossible to pick apart, even despite or perhaps because of its impossibly high quantity of different styles. They all eminate from the center and speak to the universality of the Clash's messages. And everything they do on this record, they do so well.

This album manages to make it near the top of a lot of lists, and I'm not thinking myself revolutionary by putting it on mine. It's very obviously a masterwork, and has obtained that rare critical standing of being unassailable. I've never heard a bad word against it, and I doubt I will by any sound-minded critic. In a weird way, it outshines its fellows on those lists. You could say "Sgt. Pepper is overrated" or "I don't really care for Bob Dylan" or "Exile isn't the Stones' best," but if you listen to this album there's nothing you can justifiably say is wrong with it except that it eventually ends. What happened to me when I first heard it at age 15 is what I think happens to everyone when they listen to this album: my very definition of "great music" redefined itself to be centered on this album. I don't mean to make it anything more than a great record, but it's as great a record as anything ever made, and deserving of all the praise.

It is, as much as music ever can be objectively (and to be clear, it can't, but bear with me here) perfect.

So your next question may be, if it's so perfect, why is it #2 and not #1? I'll tell you soon enough.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Friday, June 24, 2011

Mario Paint: Offspring, "The Kids Aren't All Right"



To be honest, this is a pretty obscure tune to go with. Offspring isn't an obscure band by any means, but this track off Americana isn't of the iconic level that would normally warrant the Mario Paint treatment -- usually used to condense suitably epic or legendarily popular songs to glorious 8-bit (I got a prescription, and the only prescription is more Baby!) But it's actually one of the best punk anthems of the intermediate time between Dookie and Blink-182's ascent. Okay, I'm not the authority on punk, but anyway. The amazing thing about the Mario Paint version is that is manages to crank up the intensity with every verse and chorus, rather than just repeating the exact same arrangement, a few elements get added every pass, or at least it seems that way.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

#3 - Joel Plaskett Emergency: Ashtray Rock

Yeah, I loved our band, I don't have one regret
I even loved our first two records on cassette.
They were the soundtrack for the night
You and me had that fight
Out in the woods, over some girl we met.

-- "Introduction"

Going back to what I was saying about Pinkerton. If that album's raw, abrasive feel gave it the look of an document of honest, unpolished heartache in progress, here is an album painted generously with a nostalgic sheen, which only highlights rather than obscure the sadness at its core. Its high level of production, beautiful instruments and tight construction draw attention to, rather than distract from, the difficulty of the human heart. I don't have much tolerance for one-dimensional songs of love or heartbreak, and here is an album that manages to hit the double-life of both feelings, the beauty and pain.

I would say that every album on this list could be considered a "concept" album in some sense of the word, bound with underlying themes or motifs. All the albums I've chosen are very deliberate constructions rather than merely collections of songs. This is the only one, though, that is openly conceptual. It tells a story, or at least circles around a loose narrative, outlined in those opening lines: two friends are torn apart when they both meet the same girl at a party in the woods. The reflective tone of the "introduction" informs us we're about to look back to when it all happened. The actual events of the narrative: who did what, hurt whom, remain obscure to me even after 50-odd listens over the past year, but that's not important, because the storytelling here is so strong that I don't have to do too much work to construct the story in my head. All one needs is the suggestions of emotional beats, all of which are hit excellently.

The "Introduction" leads into the wonderful scene-setter, "Drunk Teenagers," which brings us to "Ashtray Rock," a spot in the woods where high schoolers gather to drink whatever booze they could scrounge up. I miss that "getting away with something" feeling of underage drinking, especially since I didn't start drinking until I was 18 anyway. I always get a chill up my spine when I hear that opening zap of fuzzed-over guitars, like a cinematic tracking shot downward over a snowy scene of gathered teens. It's very "In fair Verona where we lay our scene." We get snippets of conversation, including discussions of who can acquire beer, and various drunken ramblings. It's delivered with an anthemic rocking quality that sums up the scene quite nicely: "DRUNK TEENAGERS! Let's start a fight / Out gettin' wasted on a Saturday night!" reveling in the glory of it all. It's beautifully archetypal, tells you exactly what sort of story you're getting. A celebration of the past, for all its dumb parties and heartbreak, a time jsut before you learn you're not invincible.

After another snippet, the Abbey Road-like title track that contains the first indication of how the story goes, "Later on, I see you talking to the beauty / I'm right beside her but you're lookin' right through me." "Fashionable People" then arrives as a character study, a sarcastic appraisal of the kids who have the time and freedom to get loaded in the woods. "The dancers need a dancefloor / The swingers gotta swing, / Fashionable people / Doing questionable things." It and "Penny For Your Thoughts" give us these fragments of narrative but also function well as songs in their own rights with singalong choruses and catchy hooks. Joel Plaskett is one of the single most exceptional songwriters my country has ever produced, because all through this album, and even in individual songs like these, there are so many diverse elements, instruments, verse-chorus structures, that are being put in place, and he pulls the strings perfectly. By the end of these songs, we feel as attached to the characters as they do to each other, even though we aren't watching a movie or reading a book.

The chugging, sinewy, riff-driven "Snowed In/Cruisin'" follows, into the first of three emotional climaxes on the album, the astounding "Face Of The Earth." I would like to break from protocol and define my love for this song by examining what it is not: a wistful, sighing lament, a quiet moan. No, it is as furious and frustrated and pissed-off as anything off Pinkerton. On the page (and in various acoustic versions I've heard,) you could play it low-key, but the Emergency goes balls-out here and makes it a knockout. there's something so defiant about the way the music drops out in the "Rolling thunder" refrain that heightens the tension, the drama, the tragedy. The chorus features guitars the fall like light rain and drums that kick like distant storms. It climaxes with the amazing protest chant "TEARS ROLL DOWN / THE FACE OF THE EARTH! / TEARS ROLL DOWN / THE FACE OF THE EARTH!" where our teenage protagonist demands the planet itself acknowledge his suffering. That shit is straight up Lear. Yes, somehow I've managed to work two completely separate Shakespeare allusions into this review. 'Bout time that degree starts earning its way. It's one of those times in music when you just fucking... feel it.

The next track, "The Glorious Life," is a bit more of a narrative weight-bearer than a song, but it leads into the second climactic moment, the tremendously-worded fuck off, "Nothing More To Say," an anthem of the cold shoulder. "Don't call me up when you figure it out / I got nothin' more to say to you / You had your chance when the truth came out / I got nothin' more to say to you." It's just pure, unadulterated "Fuck this shit!" And while he hammers bitterly against the guitars, the piano underneath the track begs forgiveness, because there's something so sweet and blameless about those ivories.

But for all that slamming of the door, there's another way through, with the bridge-mending "Chinatown/For The Record," which speaks to the power of music to see into the hearts of others, and "The Instrumental," which carries all the power of any other song without the need for words. The amazing thing about music is that pure feeling of feeling without being told in language. It does contain an important spoken-word segment and a few rhyming couplets at the end, but the powerful bit is the lyricless jam.

That brings us where we came in. The third and final peak of the album, the excellent "Soundtrack for the Night," whose opening lines we previously heard as the "Introduction," giving us that emotional resolution, that sense of full-circle. It also contains the best rock and roll usage of castanets ever but that's beside the point. The song absolutely soars, and swoops in for a delicate landing in that last verse that turns the intro on its ear and tells us it wasn't really about the girl as much as it was about the friends.

The album actually has its own "Her Majesty" moment, after a lengthy pause, an "Outroduction" pulls us back out of the narrative, offering a weirdly skewed vantage point and telling a strange anecdote about the time Dave Boyd ran for school president. To me, I guess, it's a weird reminder that no matter how important your problems seem to you, there's a whole world going on around you at the same time.

There's so much to say about this album. It has that perfect blend of personal and universal that all great music must, with the oddly detailed songwriting and very specific song structure blending with timeless themes of heartache and lost friendships, deception and betrayal and in the end, forgiveness. It's ornate and decorated with accessories because that's the way we view the past, but Plaskett never forgets that the good old days never really were that good.

Here is one of the greatest albums of our decade. It doesn't struggle to wrench emotion out of cliches, and it doesn't sentimentalize and it doesn't deny feeling in order to seem cool. Wisely, it finds that sweet spot to signify just enough of its own meaning and let you feel it for yourself. I often have emotional responses to music, but Ashtray Rock is the one, probably the only one, that gets me every time. I swear, every fucking time. That's what's so great about music, like a memory, it allows you to revisit those same feelings over and over, and it's so rewarding, when it's drawn so well as this one, that brings it all out and lets it all go. There will always be a place for this album.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Sunday, June 19, 2011

#4 - The Beatles: Abbey Road

What more could you want?

Maybe Abbey Road gets better the more you think about its context. Few bands get to record their final album knowing it will be their last. The most important band in pop music history was determined to end their tenure together in 1969, but wasn't going to let it go with the rather unfortunate, then-abandoned Get Back sessions, which became Let It Be. There may not have been complete certainty at the time, but looking back, it seems so inevitable, and it's hard not to sense they know what's up. You could analyze the implications all day, but you know that's not what we do here. What I what to know is, how does a band on its last legs get the motivation to make something this goddamned good? They must all have been eying solo careers at this point, why not keep your best stuff for yourself? I guess because when you have the personnel of the Beatles and the crew at Abbey Road, you want to make the most of it. But if you just pick up this album with four nameless guys crossing a street, what does it all mean to you? I'll never know.

I always come back to "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." It's a marvel this song even exists. I alternate between thinking it's terrible and hilarious. I think it was Paul's determination to get this song out into the world that tore the band apart. Why fight for it? You wrote "Yesterday" for hell's sake, and more importantly, "Eleanor Rigby," "For No One," "Hey Jude" and "I Saw Her Standing There." So why obsess over a song about a guy going around killing people with a hammer? Is the lyrical gag that amusing? Is the contrast between the sprightly singalong tune and the darkly-humorous subject matter that entertaining? Why push it instead of recording, like, "Teddy Boy" or something? And yet, even if I think this is the dorkiest song the Beatles recorded, why doesn't that stop it from being incredibly cool?

Because by this point, of course, the Beatles were done stumbling around in the dark. They'd been through the wars. They weathered the miserable conditions of Get Back (there I go again mythologizing) and emerged even more competent and capable than ever before. If they were going to do something as bizarre as "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" they were going to do it like pros. And bizarre sums it up well, because Abbey Road may be the strangest of all the Beatles' albums. Revolver was very upfront about its experimental quality. Sgt. Pepper reveled in turning the past into a kaleidoscope. The White Album proved you could be both stripped down and overblown. Abbey Road is fucking insidious. It's not strange until you think how strange it is, both the songs in and of themselves, and the way they match up, and yet it seems so pure, so natural.

I could individually write an essay about each of them and it's going to be difficult not to. Consider "Come Together," which beckons you into the album, slithering in and making that bass fucking earn its pay. Is it funk? Soul? Jazz? This was the Beatles had done to rock music by the end of the 60's, made it overlap with everything. They had done with experimentation and set to work making those experiments pay off. The lyrics don't mean a goddamned thing but they sure as fuck feel like they do, and not for the last time on the album. And that solo splits you in two. And subtly, so subtly you don't even notice it, but on this album Ringo proves why he drummed for the best band.

The first side contains three excellent love songs of different but overlapping flavours. There is "Something," that lovely, vaguely sweet in just the right way ode to that special someone. Even loving songs like "Taxman" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and respecting "Don't Bother Me" and "Blue Jay Way" more than typical Beatle reviewers, I might not have thought George was capable of his contributions to this album. They don't strive to be spiritual, and yet they are, because "Something" raises its awe at the beauty of its subject to a form of praise and worship always striven for in songwriting yet rarely achieved. Oddly enough, it doesn't feel like Lennon or McCartney could have written it. It was something about being comparatively unstudied about his own songwriting that enabled George to finally unleash this burst of creativity at the tail end of the group's career.

"Oh! Darling" is just a song that works. If Paul's rawness isn't as raw as John's (on say, "Don't Let Me Down") it's still powerful enough to do this song right, and goes along with subtly thundering drums, bluesy swaggering piano, guitars that stab in outrage, and that bedrock bass. I think, strangely, part of the point of Abbey Road (if one feels confident making such statements or taking them seriously) is to show that Paul can write something like "Oh! Darling" and something like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and set them next to tracks like "Come Together" and "Something" and go "See? Same four guys, same band." Even Ringo gets in on the action with "Octopus's Garden," one of the stronger whole-band efforts, with its bitchin' George Harrison solo and cute harmonies. George said it was unintentionally spiritual, and I must say I agree. It's actually a great piece of songwriting not because it's a charming little song about an octopus, but because the octopus's garden seems to stand in for whatever that place is we'd like to escape to when shit just piles too high for us to bear, as must have been the case for the Beatles in '69. That's the point of escapism, of metaphor, of narrative, of music, to stand in for saying exactly what you're talking about.

Bringing us to the end of the side is "I Want You (She's So Heavy,)" one of the most interesting exercises in the piece, which understandably has its detractors. Lennon explained it that, when you're drowning, you don't call out "Excuse me sir I would really appreciate it if you would lend me some assistance!" You fuckin' yell help! So this is a beautiful study in minimalism, while also exploding it out to... maximalism? The song is nearly 8 minutes of the same-ish riff and contains like twelve different words. It's impressively direct and hypnotic, bordering on obsessive. John was, of course, well past the point of being hung up on ordinary lyrics or conventional structure. But as repetitive as it is, it manages to modify itself very connivingly, with its burst of organs and limber bass. Then for the last three minutes it creates this darkening, plummeting descent, this never-ending sinking feeling in the listener, this inescapable dread from being obsessed. Do yourself a favour and don't watch the progress bar while the song winds out. Don't wait for it. Just let yourself get absorbed. This is a great song for night driving. As the wind begins to kick up a storm, the "swell out" lasts and lasts and lasts, holding you, pulling you, dragging you down, further and further until... click.

It ends at this perfectly wrong spot. I've only ever listened to it on LP once, and it's a shock. Truth be told, it might even be better on CD because it leads, after a fair gap, to the beautiful, excellent, "Here Comes The Sun." This is the track that makes the album for me, really, although "Something" gets more love, being a more conventional love ballad. The first thing you hear after that jarring, disturbing cut is the angelic opening of George Harrison's song. Just that opening lyric, "Here comes the sun / And I say / It's all right" executes a damn-near-perfect symbol for waiting for troubles to pass, anticipation of that time when things will be better. I've often thought, with this song as the center of my theory, that the album was in a way a concept album about the end of the Beatles, but we need not impose meaning to enjoy it. The instrumentation of this song is also impeccable, using the "Badge" riff (lifted from a song by that name by Cream, which Harrison helped Clapton write.) In fact, arpeggio riffs like this one (am I doing this right?) permeate this album, in places like "I Want You" and "Because," as well as subtly beneath "Oh! Darling" and later callbacks to "Here Comes The Sun." The album is sneakily clever in the way it revisits itself, and the arpeggios sound, to me, like this aura of inevitability and inescapability, a self-sustaining cycle of sorts.

The song is beauty distilled in pop form with its rising harmonium and handclaps. "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes!" Fuck yes. After this, the eerily cool "Because" provides a sort of breather moment. It's not one of my favourite songs on the album, but you've gotta dig the simple yet clever turns of phrase that comprise its lyrics, its transcendent harmonies and its Beethoven-in-reverse structure (the song, famously, is based off the Moonlight Sonata, and indeed feels bathed in darkness.) But there are those lighter-than-air harmonies, and in fact the Beatles reportedly sing together more on this album than any other, which is intriguing in light of what I've already said about knowing it to be their final album going in.

A twinkling of piano keys announces the intro to "You Never Give Me Your Money" and thus the "Abbey Road Medley" that sends the album and the group into its final sprint to the finish line. After a bar, the guitar sits down next to it and hums sympathetically along. Then that mournful opening line that would be welcome in any lounge, cafe, concert hall, any venue at all: "You never give me your money / You only give me your funny papers / And in the middle of negotiations, you break down." The Beatles were no strangers to self-mythologization (well, deliberate or not, it happened) and this song frames the business deals that tore the group apart as a lover's spat. The song is multifaceted, it morphs from a ballad to a boogie-woogie tune (a la "Lady Madonna") to a more modern rock tempo during the "One sweet dream" segment. This is not unlike the great "Happiness is a Warm Gun" from the White Album, which moves through phases rather than through verses and choruses, a format McCartney later used to great effect on "Band On The Run." But this tune probably unites its pieces better than any of those, and serves as a preview of the seven or eight tracks to come, how anything is possible and the future looks bright. The lyric "One sweet dream / Pick up your bags and get in the limousine / Soon we'll be away from here / Step on the gas and wipe that tear away" is an excellent way of looking at moving on with one's life. Oddly, it sits as the first piece of the "Medley," comprised of mostly under-two-minute tracks that bleed from one to the next, despite being the third longest individual track on the album.

The ensuing tracks, unlike "You Never..." are wonderfully single-minded sketches, a process of "clearing out the attic" for the greatest pop songwriters of their generation. There's no reason a song like "Sun King" or "Mean Mr. Mustard" should be expect to sit in the midst of an album and speak for itself, and yet, grouped together and promoted as one, the fragments become something no individual song could ever be. There's an impressive everythingness about the medley that befits a band like the Beatles.

So there's "Sun King" with its gloomy, bluesy, guitars, singalong nonsense phrases and chirping crickets buzzing around. The album becomes less about making a statement than deciding how to state. "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" are delightful Lennon-flavoured character sketches (and Paul edges one in with "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window") both of which feel nearly complete unto themselves despite consisting of about one verse, no chorus, and in "Pam's" case, a pretty wicked solo. There's that moment (at the beginning of the "...Bathroom Window" track) where the guitar is readying itself to transition to the new song and one of the guys (John I think) says "Aw, look out!" that feels like a neat switch-off between the John song and the Paul one. The two didn't write together anymore, but they weren't isolated, they still had to play together. The songs practically feel like responses to one another, a sort of "Oh yeah? Top this!" of dashed-off half-songs. They're all great.

The medley is traditionally broken up in two pieces after "...Bathroom Window." he second half begins with the lullaby "Golden Slumbers," with its deliberately over-wrought vocals. There's something really touching about the lyric "Once there was a way to get back home" in this context. As I say, I often see the album as being "about itself," (I think it's indisputable, but how important or pervasive it is is up for debate.) It's about not going back, and of course "Carry That Weight" (with its callback to "You Never Give Me Your Money") is about moving forward, and about the burden of the past. It serves as the "Eleven O'Clock Number," rousing the audience back to attention. And then in one last frenetic burst of energy, spirit, camaraderie and love comes "The End," which ends fittingly with that exchange of solos (including a hot-damn drum solo from Ringo.) Somehow, without the aid of more than five lines of lyrics, the group manages to sum up with their instruments exactly who they were and what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. It ends with a sweet flourishing bit of fanfare, a gloosy farewell photograph from four of the best musicians ever known.

Psych! It ends with Paul McCartney noodling on his guitar about how he wants to bang the Queen. "Her Majesty" is a clever accident, like the feedback that they left stuck on the beginning of "I Feel Fine" or the "Fuck!" in "Hey Jude." This weird, deliberate undoing of their own grand finale is so delightfully self-deprecatingly Beatley.

And so it goes. The Beatles were smart enough to know what few realize, that all great things must end, you might as well write your own. The four boys who had formed the band a decade earlier had grown into four very different men, to paraphrase John. Even by this point they had traveled out in their own directions, and this album was the last possible chance for them to harness it together, to bind themselves in unison and work on something that could be great. I'm not saying it's objectively the greatest Beatles album, but it gives me that unique thrill as a Beatles fan to know they ended without fucking up. That you could seize control of your own narrative, offer something so unlike what you've already done and yet so comfortably within your element... I don't know, it's enviable. The songs are excellent, even "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" in its way, and even if not, by the end of "The End" you feel like you've traveled so far from it that it doesn't matter. It feels complete, like a true journey of sorts. It elicits far more varied responses from me, and far more personal than those invoked by Sgt. Pepper or the White Album or Revolver or Rubber Soul, even if the songs on those albums are mostly just as good or better.

All in all, for all the pomp and circumstance, it feels exceptionally natural. Unlike Let It Be, recorded earlier that year, Abbey Road isn't a forced attempt to get "back to basics." Here they indulge their own interests. Having started experimenting over the past four years, they now see those experiments through to the end, taking each of their vantage points as far as they could before it was time to break away. This is where the Beatles ends and John, Paul, George and Ringo begin. Despite obviously being the work of four different sets of hands, this is the culmination of the Beatles as a band, and it's as great as anything they'd done.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Tuesday Dance-Off, Technotronic vs. Deee-Lite

Get your booty on the floor tonight.





Oh Lordy, if I keep allowing myself to revisit old dance music from the 90's, this blog is in danger of becoming a parody of itself.

Make my day.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Talkin' Favourites

So, I have my favourite albums of all time lined up, and I thought I would throw the topic open, since I know there are people that read this, even if we don't always converse.

So Iwas wondering, dear readers, what are your favourite albums? Doesn't have to be five, it can be ten or two or 15 if you so determine that's how many favourites you have. What do they mean to you, why did you pick them up, how did they become your favourites, what makes an album worth favouriting?

Drop me a comment, tweet at me, shoot an e-mail my way. If I like what you say (and I probably will) I'll post some responses here, and we'll start dialoguing about it. I might even end up picking stuff up just on your recommendations.

Let's do this. I wanna hear it.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

#5 - Weezer: Pinkerton

In which Rivers Cuomo, heartbroken weirdo and ace pop song writer, throws himself on the floor and yells out "What the fuck am I supposed to do?"

Write-ups of this album usually put a lot of consideration of its place in the Weezer discography. To hell with historical contextualization, let me tell you about this album and me. It was the spring of 2008 and I don't know why but I decided to finally spin it the whole way through, after knowing a couple of songs. I knew the general story (difficult, emotionally raw second album, largely disliked by the public but later vindicated by history) but until that point of my life was not keen to see if it lived up to the hype. At the end of my first year at university, I was dried up and embroiled in an ongoing mess of a non-relationship. Everything hurt like I was still in high school. It was the right time to embrace this album. I wanted something that sounded like destruction... not blind rage music, but something obviously in touch with the stupid form of heartache I was feeling. I was upset, and upset at myself for being upset. It's this contradiction of feelings that Pinkerton hits so well. It's pretty and vulnerable, but it hits all these sour notes of selfishness and neediness and bitterness, that makes it sound "real."

The first four tracks lay out a pretty direct strategy, using all these churning guitar noises that sound like somebody trapped in their own problems, like "Tired of Sex" and "Getchoo," and coming apart at the seams with squeals both vocal and instrumental. The lyrical conceit of "Tired of Sex" is pretty brilliant, because if you can't enjoy that most basic human pleasure, what have you got?

I don't often engage in lyrical analysis because a lot of albums I've been listening to go for the abstract and it would be wrong to try to impose my own interpretation on you and say this is why it's good or bad. In the case of Cuomo's writing here, at least it generally stays quite open with its meaning -- with one considerable exception -- so you can say "this song is about X, that's song is about Y," but it leaves things distant enough that the listener can decide for himself what X and Y in these cases really mean. Is "No Other One" a cry of defiant admiration for the flawed relationship, or a sigh of resignation to it? And I think "Why Bother?" speaks for itself, and it says a lot to me that Rivers could dig down and pull out something so harsh and resentful.

The album breaks open right around here. After four tracks of intensive guitar exercise, we get a breather to begin the first truly great track of the already-impressive album, "Across the Sea." Here is a breather, which affords a bit more introspection after raging against the world and the self. The verses bop along in this off-kilter, run-on-sentence rhythm, with a bouncy piano and some chipper drums, but as the song goes on, the background vocals (as throughout the album) fall out of sync, Cuomo's voice gets agitated again, and the hook of "I've got your letter / You've got my song" becomes more desperate and sad. It is, to me, the defining track of the album. Your best chance for happiness is unfathomably far away, it's killing you.

Starting with that track, the latter half of the album largely plays on the theme of wanting something you can't have and wanting to be something you're not. Take "The Good Life," the second in the string of the album's five consecutive excellent tracks, where Cuomo makes oblique reference to his time at Harvard following his corrective leg surgery (walking with a cane and growing a beard,) when apparently he was walking around amongst college kids wearing Weezer shirts for months without being recognized (and if true, wouldn't that bother you just a little bit?) That story may be apocryphal, but it's the sort of frustration the song indicates with its strangely-articulated lyrics. "I don't wanna be a nomad anymore / It's been a year or two since I was out on the floor / Shakin' booty, makin' sweet love all the night / It's time I got back to the good life." And how sad, "Makin' sweet love all the night" was the thing he was tired of half an album ago.

Speaking of strange articulation, there's the stream-of-consciousness "El Scorcho," which hangs on its chorus of "I'm a lot like you so please / Hello, I'm here, I'm waiting / I think I'd be good for you / And you'd be good for me" as the only indication what Cuomo's trying to get at, the feeling of a first impression, trying to get someone's attention that obviously isn't giving it out. The song doesn't take much pain to rhyme or sound like song lyrics: very Lennonesque, all patchwork digressions and references and non-sequiters. I can barely even call up anymore how strange it sounded to me the first time I heard it, having been normalized by about 3000 listens in the years since, but to listen with a critical ear, it's still very strange, with its unusually tempo and "bloop-da-bloo" riff. Importantly, I've gotta stop and wonder whether the narrator persona in this song is worthy of the attention he craves.

There's a bit of prettiness, though, linking this grit to "Pink Triangle," a song not only literally about falling for someone with incompatible sexuality, but with anyone you can't have in general, because you've always gotta ask "Why?" As insensitive to the LGBT community as it seems now -- and maybe things were less touchy in the 90's, maybe not -- the logic of "Everyone's a little queer / Can't she be a little straight?" is perversely solid, if still incredibly stupid. No, it probably doesn't work like that, but it does a good job indicating the level of hopelessness in our hero's story. Incidentally, I chose this song for an assignment in Grade 10 when my English teacher asked us to pick a love song to discuss, when we were studying Romeo & Juliet. What that says about me, I'll let you figure out.

Mostly the album sounds all the same, which is more important to building a great album than you might suspect, because it's never boring or repetitive because of it, but it builds a concentrated atmosphere. It's a sort of concept album, an indirect one linked together not by narrative progression as such but definitely by exploration of themes. The negativity expressed in all these songs very reluctantly turns to measured optimism as the narrator voice gets what he's been pining for and finds himself confronted by his own uncertainty. "Can't believe how bad I suck, / it's true / What could you possibly see in / little ole three chord me?" is such a fucking great lyric it hurts, but ultimately concludes, with guitar flourishes that sound like fireworks, "I'm ready, let's do it baby!" It's such a great song, really, both rough-hewn and catchy, it captures those contradiction of anger and delight, of pleasure and pain, of wanting to be honest, but wanting to have control over the story (and thus lying anyway.) The confounding thing is that quiet, acoustic closing song, "Butterfly," which seems to me to finally be the point of acknowledgment that other people have feelings, and sadly, Cuomo-narrator has been stuck in this unstoppable cycle of behaviour of hurting people without considering it, and might never be able to quit it. It's so sweet and so sad and so dark.

I often praise albums that provide some sort of catharsis... break down a mood and build you back up. An album maybe doesn't have to do that, but it always enhances the listening experience when you have a reason to listen all the way through, because it's put you someplace and you need it to pick you back up again. The appeal is, when you're feeling like a dickhead, there's music out there that resolves the tension for you, in melody and lyric and properly-abstract screaming noise.

This is an album for anyone who has had a relationship end and only had themselves to blame. This is an album for anyone who has been left by someone who didn't even know you wanted them to stay, and for anyone who has had something just too far out of reach. Rivers Cuomo, in retrospect was at a crossroads, a dilemma of being a very talented songwriter and musician who needed to work out his own issues before he could make the music people wanted him to. Strange, and I guess he has a right to be embarrassed by it, but this is the album that means the most to the most people, even if it's also "for" the least. It's ugly, and brutal, and if it's too honest, then it's a kind of honesty you don't hear much of. Few people are willing to plunk down a record that says "Maybe it's everyone else's fault, or maybe I really am the asshole." Uncomfortable truths. That's reality, and it's rarely sounded better.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Friday, June 10, 2011

All-Time Favourites: Introduction

I nearly convinced myself not to do this.

"They're safe," I said, "These are all safe picks, and nobody's going to learn anything from them." I was thinking about my five favourite albums of all time, and how they'd find right into any standard "best albums ever" compilation article, and, in and of themselves, say little about me.

I thought, at the beginning of the site, it would be useful to get out in the open my listening "background," to help contextualize my opinions by letting you know what music I already thought was great before I considered myself King Fuck of Blog Mountain. But the music I think is great is music most people already think is great, so knowing while album-X ranks third on my list isn't going to help you understand what I like so much about Lissie or Marble Index.

But I realized yesterday, it didn't matter if it helped you... it was going to help me.

Kids, I have been fried lately. While the main obstacle to review writing has been time -- I'm consumed with schoolwork and jobwork -- it's also a problem that when I do sit down to write, I agonize over my every word and usually hate the product. And while a certain amount of writer's angst is healthy, I was gradually losing sight of the ideas I had laid down as the basis of this blog back in January: to slap my filter on some music and say "I like this because..."

It can't apply to every album ever. Some of the albums I've reviewed are truly my thing. Some aren't, but I could recognize them as good and reviewed them anyway. There are some albums I've bought and then couldn't bring myself to write up because they just did nothing for me. It happens.

Yesterday I used a new pair of earbuds for the first time: Sennheisers, top-of-the-line stuff, instead of my cheapo JVCs. I was not prepared for the difference in sound when I tested them out with one of my "top 5s." It was a rare gift, to be able to hear something you've heard thousands of times since you were 15, with fresh ears. I wasn't hearing anything new, but all the familiar sounds had regained a sense of brightness and luster that had faded over time.

I don't rate my reviews, I don't pretend to make objective claims and I don't generally make ranked lists, but I'm about to write up my "Top Five Favourite Albums" of all time. (NB: Though the top two are locked in, the other three are rather changeable.) "I think it's great because ____" and "I love it because _____" are two related-but-separate statements, and as tempting as it always is to play impartial are go for the former, here is a case where the point is the latter. The central question will be, as I hope it usually is, "What does this do for me?" And when it's over, I will hopefully have trained myself to better keep an eye out for the answer to that question in albums I haven't been humming for a decade. And hopefully, if we're lucky, in the course of these five (excellent by any criteria) albums, I'll have made you think about something you hadn't before.

Hopefully, this helps me on my way developing the voice of this blog. Even if it doesn't, it's useful just to step back and think about what you know you like and try to remember why.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Tuesday Special: Roy Orbison, "Ooby Dooby"



Just for the fuck of it: Do the Ooby Dooby with all of your might!

Don't worry about the directions being vague. I think it's pretty easy to understand exactly what he's talking about.

Does It Rock? Duran Duran, "All You Need Is Now"



Prior to the past few months, if you'd asked my top five Duran Duran tracks, I would have said:


  1. "Rio"

  2. "Hungry Like The Wolf"

  3. "A View To a Kill"

  4. Their ill-advised yet utterly awesome cover of "White Lines" by the Grandmaster Flash.

  5. Vacant.



I should note that I don't particularly care for "The Reflex" so that's why I omitted it in favour of a vacant slot. In any case, DuranX2 has always struck me as one of those bands that had a brief moment when they were huge, and their tunes were too good to obscurity, but as a band they were incapable of going any further. In that way they were precursors to INXS, Oasis, and Mumford & Songs (prove me wrong, Mumford!) They got to the point where if you were having a conversation about them, and the other person said "Man, I can't believe they all died in a boating accident 8 years ago," you'd just pretend you knew that happened instead of questioning it.

My point is that D-Squared was low on my list of 80's acts I expected to make a comeback. Scratch that: they can make all the comebacks they want. Shit, Kids in the Hall is now touring with Backstreet Boys under the brilliant name "NKOTBSB" (what does the first B stand for??) Anyone can make a comeback, but what I didn't expect was for this particular one to be this good.

I don't think I had any reason to. "Rio" is a pretty decent tune, but it's a product of a certain magical time and place called the early 80's, where whirring synths and toned-down saxes made anything into a hit. As time and taste got further from that era, there was less reason to believe they could do anything. They even had a release in 2005 that was not so great, despite the fact that you had The Killers out at the time pretty much operating as a Duran Duran tribute band.

And then, for whatever reason, they did this. And somehow, they managed to make this not only as good as those old songs, but maybe even better, at least by virtue of being new AND good. It's dancey, and delightfully detached, but the hook in that chorus just digs right into you and makes you want to move. I've heard it about forty times by now and I cheer up every time it comes on the radio. Somehow, they've managed to bridge those years without trying desperately to recreate the past. It's very much a 2011 tune, played with the gusto of 1984. Ringo Starr beard aside, Simon LeBon & Co. finally seem to have figured out how to do Duran Duran in the new millennium.

So yeah, that rocks.

Cover Tuesday: Duran Duran, "White Lines"



BEHOLD!!

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Gemma Ray: Lights Out Zoltar!

Better(-informed) critics than I will do a great job of untangling Gemma Ray's influences and musical touchpoints. I'm hesitant to do that lame shtick all reviewers do pointing out "You might expect something like Winehouse or Lily Allen, but (female artist) is a true original!" Everyone who's any good is an original, don't be a maroon. It's just that Gemma Ray's way of being original is more original than other originals. It's not a pastiche or a callback: this album would be out-of-place in any time period, except this one, where time doesn't really exist anymore and you can sound any way you damn well please. It's too lush and wall-of-soundy for nowadays, but too weird and dark for olden times. It's not cafe music and it's not quite psychedelia.

Take the windy Ennio Morricone-style strumming from "100 mph (in 2nd Gear)," which sweeps you up in itself, turns you around, and leaves you wondering where you've been. Or the disquieting Stepford quaintness of "Tough Love," or the wilting wailing guitars of "1952." There's something dark and unseemly laced all throughout this album, like it has buried ill intentions, peeling back the covers on romance and nostalgia and innocent girlhood pledges of love. The meanings of songs like that are obscure, jumbled up lyrics that send a negative vibe with sweetened vocals that seem to be longing for something far beyond reach. Some, like "(You Got Me In A) Death Roll" are more overt, chugging along ominously with those dark male background vocals and quivering harmonicas in the mix, it chants like a chain gang song, but Gemma's breathy vocals seek relief. Then it ends abruptly and leads to the arcane, nervy "Goody Hoo." Later great moments include the spooky, bluesy "Dig Me a River," and the empty-sounding "If You Want To Rock and Roll" provides, if not the most gripping pop musical moment of the disc, an atmospheric break between the ever-swelling tide of sound surrounding it.

The album is consistently good, and plays well with its musical style. All the songs sound distinct without seeming to come from different sources. Despite this consistency, there are two tracks that stand high above the others for me, that if I felt I could leave the rest of the album behind, I'd still want with me. "Fist of a Flower" is the apex of Gemma's darkly orchestrated self-harmony, as she slides some really twisted, unnatural-sounding Beach Boys "oooo-oooos" in under her own chorus, echoes calls and answers herself, and creates this massive, claustrophobic feel like all the music of the world is slowly closing in on you. The other is the sweet, soaring "No Water," which rises above somehow. It's Gemma's best vocal performance on the thing. The thing about her, unlike many female vocalists, is that while she sings extremely well, her voice isn't the attraction itself. It's always part of the larger sonic texture, hence all the harmony, the double-tracking, the studio sorcery. The refrain of "No Water" is a beautiful incantation, obscure like the rest of the lyrics (to my ears anyway,) but never meaningless, thanks to her delivery and the arrangement.

It's hypnosis. It's mind-control. It grabs you on some deep level so that you zone out and don't even completely remember what you've heard. It's not easy-breezy pop, it's full bodies and rather intense. The closing track, "So Do I" is one of the few apparently-affirmative tracks on there, the one that sounds most like the Shirelles, but also has those pounding drums to go with the sweeping strings and the infinite harmonies. I always love albums that feel like they end with a sense of resolution, catharsis, elimination of demons... and this one manages to spend the preceding 35 minutes gathering those demons into one place.

If it were what they call a "retro" act, it would do more to invoke a specific time and place. Gemma borrows freely from wherever, inventing new tactics of using the sounds as she pleases rather than follow orthodoxy of pop. She's not working to recreate someone's ideas, she's looking to take you into her own, and it works. It hangs together amazingly well, and the songs string into one another beautifully.

I like it. Like everything I enjoy, it fit a everyone's pre-arranged notions of what they'd enjoy. It didn't fit mine. But of course the point of this blog has been for me to push against my own boundaries, and of all the albums I've bought that I wouldn't otherwise have glanced at, this one surprised me the most. I came in with zero expectations... a vague remembrance of how "100 mph" sounded and the impression that this was some sort of retro-pop affair... but coming out of it, I found something more satisfying by miles than just a tribute or rehash of old styles. It's moving without being obvious about it, evocative without ever laying out what it's trying to tell you: difficult to truly feel like you've got a handle on it, but not resistant or off-putting in the least. Great music often does that, and leaves you feeling different than you were before.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Thursday, June 2, 2011

What I Dig

Music appreciation ain't any big thing. That's the truth. You don't need to be academic to "get it." You don't need to understand a hundred points of reference or build up a studied comprehension. Most music, especially if it's any good, creates a context for itself. You spin the disc, the music comes to you, and you either get it, or you don't, and nothing can change that, except sometimes repeated listening.

It's the simplest feeling in the world. Enjoy good music.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Serious Contenders: Bran Van 3000, "Drinking in LA"



Because I've got nothing going on tonight, enjoy this classic from Montreal supergroup Bran Van 3000.

To me it captures 90's ambivalence really well: finding interest in small, quirky moments, and then repeating them minimally but with flourishes of window-dressing: half-hip hop, half-samples that come from nowhere, yet wholly itself.