Tuesday, July 26, 2011

"Weird Al" Yankovic: Alpocalypse

Alpocalypse feels like a crucial release for Weird Al. His last release, Straight Outta Lynwood, had the surprise internet sensation "White & Nerdy," sort of a perfect storm combining Al's newfound knack for Internet marketing (just about every song is now a potential viral video) with a deft parody that reminded us why we liked him so much as kids. But added to the pressure of topping himself is the fact that in the five years between Lynwood and Alpocalypse, Pop Culture itself has gotten, well, weirder. To say nothing of all the Gagas and Ke$has, Disney has been spinning out tween stars at a steady pace for the last half-decade, the Internet now has an even firmer hold on our lives, reality TV is melting our brains and celebrity "journalism" tells us more than we could ever possibly want to hear about Snooki or the Twilight stars' love lives. Simply put, what was once obviously absurd has become normalized, and we need Al, more than ever, to point out exactly how odd it all is. That's a lot of responsibility for a 50-year-old parodist who made his name rhyming off foods and television shows to the tune of 80's hits. Especially when you consider how many comedy musicians have cropped up lately (The Lonely Island, Flight of the Conchords, your idiot friend with a 90's Casio) whose approaches are a bit more contemporary.

Fortunately, inspiration struck. B the time of Born This Way, Gaga was undeniable, and the song itself would've been too obvious not to parody. Al doesn't squander the opportunity, either, using the song as an examination of Gaga's overall persona, much in the way he used Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to deconstruct them in a good-natured way. That song holds up better than most Yankovic parodies, and this one will too so long as people remember Gaga actually did wear a meat-dress.

Amazingly, it doesn't sound like the rush job it apparently was. The lyrics, like Al's best, are well-observed, suited to the original, and memorable in their own right. ("I'll wear a porcu-pine on my head / On a W-H-I-M...") They provide a neat little insight into their subject and get some laughs out of it. One wicked touch, though, which was not needed but hammers this parody into the stratosphere, is a brief background snippet of a Madonna soundalike attempting to wedge "Express Yourself" in between the lyrics. Cheeky.

Now here's where things get good, because the other four parodies are all pretty much up to the same standard as "Perform This Way." "TMZ," set to the tune of Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" skewers both the celebrity journalism nonsense I mentioned above as well as the celebs they care so much about (from the bridge: Everything celebrities do is FASCINATING!!) with many real-life examples alluded to. And "Party in the CIA" takes the starry-eyed enthusiasm for life of Miley's original and applies it to the world of waterboarding and toppling regimes. His same-titled parody of T.I.'s "Whatever You Like" is sold by the sheer confidence of Al's "character." And "Another Tattoo" (a take on B.O.B./Bruno Mars' "Nothin' on You") I think is better than it has any right to be based on the premise, largely because Al has a knack for free-associating absurdity that really explores the limits of a premise like "what's the most ridiculous thing someone could ink on themselves?" A good hip hop parody (or two) is a gift, because rap lends itself to comedy better than other forms of song. Al's comic timing on both of these is impeccable.

All of this top 40 radio madness is summed up quite nicely, as usual, on the stalwart polka medley, always one of the highlights of a Weird Al album: breathing a little life into songs that often have become passe by the time the album rolls around, and usually providing the improvement of being performed with accordion-fueled gusto. Speaking as the guy who's selling these songs on a regular basis, I can tell you in many cases it's the most fun I've had listening to them. for whatever reason, his renditions of "Blame It On The Alcohol," "Replay" and "Tik Tok" bring a smile to my face in particular. They're great for the kids, too, because unlike Mini Pops, they acknowledge the twistedness of performing something like "I Kissed A Girl" for 11-year-olds, reveling in the inappropriateness. I heard a lot of songs for the first time as part of a Weird Al polka, including but not limited to "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails and "The Humpty Dance" by Digital Underground, the greatest rap song of all time.

Truth be told, though, it's the originals that always get my attention. Pop song parodies have certain limitations: find a good subject matter, weld it onto the original, hope for the best. But in his originals, Al has the chance to play around, to mix and match (often indulging in style-parodies,) without being as in debt to any particular concept. He's free to muck around and "Dare to be Stupid," if you will. I may be biased because I have such fond memories of the originals on my first Al album, Bad Hair Day. I still listen to "I Remember Larry" and "Everything You Know is Wrong" and "I'm So Sick Of You" long after I've stopped caring about "Amish Paradise" or "Cavity Search" or "Phony Calls."

Al looks to have embraced tech culture as his permanent muse after dabbling successfully over the past few albums. There's a bit of overlap, but it's nice to get away from the "food and TV" phase of his career. It brands this album as a product of its time, for good or ill. Since so much of our lives is lived on the internet, it's only fair. Most of the trends he uses for material will probably still be relevant for a while. "Craigslist" does a great job exploring the insanity that lurks that website, where cranks complain about their "snotty barristas" and the desperate weirdos of the world post their missed connections. (No comment on whether I've ever posted there... cough cough.) That one is done "in the style of" the Doors, bringing Ray Manzarek in to play some awesome Ray Manzarek keyboards while Al outdoes Jim Morrison's croony screaming. "Ringtone" is a peppy ode to the way an annoying ringtone can affect one's life. It's a bit of a one-note joke saved by a couple good lines and a strong effort at replicating Queen at their most operatic. I also think that as an album closer, "Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me" is not very strong compared to the rest of the album, providing in a lot of cases more general versions of jokes he's already done. But it can't be easy being the Weird one, and thankfully there are some really strong originals here.

"CNR" is Al's response to the Chuck Norris memes (again with the internet!) proving his gift for randomness is still up there wit anybody as he ascribes impossible feats to Charles Nelson Riley. I think it's a lucky thing kids are smarter than most people think. No, most 11-year-olds listening won't know who Charles Nelson Riley is (or what a "Matchgame" was) but inserting overly-obscure old references has always been Al's thing and if the kids are anything like I was (savvier even, I would bet,) it'll just make them want to find out. Besides, the beauty of these memes is that you don't have to know anything about what's being referenced to understand what the joke is. Knowing just makes it better. "CNR" also happens to be a top-notch White Stripes pastiche, authentically recreating in a sly parodic way Jack's crunchy blues guitar and histrionic vocal delivery from tracks like "Icky Thump." "If That Isn't Love" is a cutesy generic pop parody (think Hanson or Train) that pretty much tells you right away what the joke's going to be, and then does it well and manages to be super-catchy, which is the property of parody: to take on the qualities of the originals in excess. All of those originals do that well. But then there's one that sticks out.

"Skipper Dan." Oh, God, "Skipper Dan." This story of dreams gone wrong is, strangely, a perfect fit for this album. The same wit that enables Al to spoof popular artists also grants him a great insight into regular everyday characters like this. It's a triumph of songwriting, even beyond whatever comedic value it may contain -- it's more "dark and depressing" than "funny," but Al gets away with it because he is, after all, the "Weird" one. He manages to make a statement like this, to let this story unfold with a touch and tone any number of "serious" artists would like to have found. In his writing, Al often transplants dark themes onto the typically light and shallow mode of parody songwriting... I was what, ten, when I bought Bad Hair Day and heard "I Remember Larry" and "The Night Santa Went Crazy" as well as a couple of great anti-love songs on that album. The originals on that one (designated as a reference point for me because that was the "current" one when I was a kid and he slowed his output to one every few years) hold up better than the parodies (it was an awkward transitional time for pop music.) "Skipper Dan" being the highlight of an album that would have been great without it indicates the Alpocalypse may be, as a unified effort... Al's best work.

We needed a home run and we got one. Al deftly capitalizes on the strangeness of the moment for music, writes jokes that are either unlike those found on previous albums, or better versions of common ones, has fun, picks all the right targets, and in his originals, has way more hits than misses. He shows he's got as strong a mind as ever, maybe better, for pointing out the weirdness that creeps by in our lives often unnoticed. It feels current, but it also feels like it encapsulates the things about our current times that will still be remembered ten or twenty years on. Maybe. I can only speculate.

The point is, it's a funny album with all its parts working at maximum capacity. The parts that won't make you laugh out loud will at least make you grin. And besides, who among us hasn't considered picking up a trashcan's worth of styrofoam peanuts from some dude on the internet?

Buy this album now: iTunes // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca



Sunday, July 24, 2011

Cover: Amy Winehouse, "Valerie"



I first heard this song as performed by Glee, and its original form by the Zutons went on to become one of my faves over the winter. However, it was Winehouse they were covering, and her version signifies her talent for sexy, soulful arrangements that complement her voice: dark and sultry, yet wistful and with no unnecessary embellishments.

I'm not going to pretend I have much to say about her life and death. I'm not a pundit or a preacher. But hey, a talent is gone.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Cover: Cowboy Junkies, "Sweet Jane"



If Johnny Cash's "Hurt" is the greatest cover anyone ever did of anything... and I'm not one to rank such things, but it has a strong claim to that honor, if it's possible... then here's a notable runner up. It takes the ragged, streetwise character sketch and turns it into a glossy, dreary romance, and sounds gorgeously sad.

Sweet, sweet Jane...

Friday, July 22, 2011

Exploding Hearts: Guitar Romantic

What an awesome title. Guitar Romantic. Without getting too thinky, the album does have a capital-R Romanticism about it, how even the most twisted situations and hopeless heartbreaks attain a larger-than-life quality. Such is the power of a good-goddamned guitar rock record, to say it without saying it. To be brash and earnest at the same time. But that's not what you're thinking about when you're actually listening to it. That comes later if at all. When the record spins, all you can think is how much it fucking rocks.

With a vintage swing, accented by a very appropriate soundbreaking low-fi loudness, the band pumps up New York Dolls an MC5 punk riffs, and attaches them to the black-and-white teen-dream lyrical motifs of the 50's, with a few small street-level augmentations like glue-sniffing and torn posters. Vocalist Adam Cox sounds a little like Joey Ramone and a little like Buddy Holly. His bandmembers join in when appropriate on call-and-answer lyrics to lend a sympathetic ear to the heartbreak of a song like "Sleeping Aides and Razorblades." Under "Throwaway Style" there's a cute little piano counter-melody beneath the stammering guitar riff.

I can't even really talk about it. It's not worth over-examining because that misses the point of the immediate joy of the loud, crazy killer feeling you get when you're in the midst of it, which of course is what makes good music so goddamned hard to talk about. On "I'm a Pretender," Cox sings "21 but it ain't no fun / Life's going by but it's just begun." The ten tracks manage to maintain this urgent immediacy, the complete and total devotion to the moment and the feeling that whatever's important at that moment -- either romantic pursuit or romantic rejection -- is the most important thing in the world. No time to linger, though, there's another one coming along in two and a half minutes.

The Exploding Hearts are no slouches here. They keep their lyrics uncomplicated because there's nothing that needs to be said more complicated. They paint some great lyrical sketches and fire them off, rattled along by razor sharp riffs and pounding drums. Their brand of punk is sneakily intelligent because it doesn't try to be smarter than it is, and results in a great direct statement. They let a few bits of sophistication sneak in, wisely: those couple piano riffs under some late tracks, the evocative Travis-picked intro to "Jailbird" and the overall harmonies and interplay say more than a better vocabulary ever could. The great thing about music is that if you play it well enough, you don't to string it to overly poetic lyrics, because a good rock chord progression always speaks for itself. That's not even a knock against the lyrics, because I'd rather these guys rhyme "Hard" with "Retard" than try to force some elaborate metaphor that isn't any deeper or more meaningful. "Jailbird" is a particular favourite of mine, but "Sleeping Aides" is the real juggernaut, and every song offers its own thrill.

So it walks this line, skilfully, between artful construction and punk sloppiness. It's not one or the other, it just happens that the chaos falls into place perfectly and so it becomes clean pop wearing the skin of raucous punk. It's both and neither, a beautiful mess of hooks and choruses, with, most importantly, a good goddamned sense of humour and vitality. So they fall back on the old chords, big whup. Better than settling for the new ones everyone else was using at the time.

After "Still Crazy," one of many real rave-ups, the album ends at only 28 minutes. A shame, but appropriate. The album, like youth, like many relationships, and tragically like the band itself, is not meant to last too long. Music like this makes important material out of unimportant heartaches, makes every little thing count, and lets you go in the nick of time.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Monday, July 18, 2011

Serious Contenders: A-Ha, "Take On Me"



Presaging the rise of Phoenix and Foster the People, here is your synth pop in its vintage form. This song represents the 80's in every positive sense of the word, with its strange, vaguely romanticist lyrics, high-pitched "hooo" and of course that unstoppable synth riff that you will now be humming to yourself for weeks. This song is notable not only for its slick video, but for being plain old awesome.

Serious Contenders: Dion, "Runaround Sue"



Nothing's more rock and roll than lamenting a heartbreaking chick. It's hard to imagine, in 2011, that a vocalist could ask you to brace yourself to find out that she goes........ "out with other guys!!" This song is a damn rocker, with those wicked "Heyp, heyp, bum, da heyda-heyda-heyp!" backing vocals and that fanfare "Awwwww" from the Belmonts. There's also a pretty notable double-standard at work here, since this was the guy who recorded "The Wanderer."

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Paul Simon: So Beautiful Or So What

About the time I started this blog, I sat down with my aunt to have a talk about music and exchange some CDs. I gave her Zeus and She & Him and the Black Keys, and she made me a mix and lent me a Dinah Washington CD and her copy of Graceland by Paul Simon. When I finally got around to checking Graceland out, I found that the CD case was empty. I still haven't heard it in its entirety.

I like a lot about this album. I like the title, a neat turn of phrase, and I like that the title track comes at the end, positioning it fittingly as a culmination. I like the cover, a helixed blur of motion, an abstraction of brightness in darkness that ties into and represents the album's themes. The guitar sounds like that image, refracted and echoey and delicate and warm and mellow. "Getting Ready for Christmas Day," not a holiday song per se, zigzags and doubles back in on itself over excerpts from a call-and-response sermon between the vocals. "The Afterlife" is pleasant and spacey, with a lot of warmth and humour in its tale of heavenly bureaucracy and being the "new kid in school." "Dazzling Blue" is sweet and Indian-flavoured, with tablas and mystic strings and sweet harmonies. It's one of various songs here that seems to marvel at the beauty of the universe, a greater love beyond ourselves. "Love & Hard Times" is directly spiritual, with the amazing lyric, "There are galaxies yet to be born / Creation is never done," before changing its view to love at first sight. "Love is Eternal Sacred Light" is one of the handful of rocked-up numbers, and it while on paper its near-snarl might seem mismatched to the "marvels of the universe" lyrics, it works because in that snarl is joy. It's a twisting around of songwriting and performance mores, a wicked execution. The title track has a nice bluesy flavour, deciding finally "Life is what we make of it, so beautiful or so what?" It has a kind of cosmic logic to it.

This is an album with a quiet sort of beauty. It's not overly preachy, but the lyrics are often explicitly spiritual, and most of the rest of the time implicitly spiritual. The sound of the album is well-matched to the subject matter. Delicate at times, and lush others, usually very personal and direct, playing between darkness and light. It sounds very much to me like a man giving great consideration to his place on Earth and in the vastness of the universe, and his realization of things on a grand scale. That would indeed be a very large and yet very small thing to have to confront in song, and Simon does it extremely well. There are no resolutions of course, it is a difficult path to talk, and music is often its own solution. It should be enough that these thoughts were brought to mind, and in such a pleasing way. The history of pop music becomes a universal language: "Be-Bop-A-Lula."

Joe Strummer once said that he only trusted albums made by adolescents, with the exception of Graceland. I think Simon has definitely got a knack for making the kids of albums you can only make after you've been around a while. Many other reviewers have noted, rightly and relieved, that this is not a dire reflection on mortality. That would be too easy and not in the right spirit, celebratory instead of somber. He seems secure in his place in the world, even if his place is only to wonder what his place might be amidst all this beauty, to keep it from becoming "So what?"

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Cover: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"



If nothing else, this exists to showcase the evocative beauty of the 12-string guitar. Goddamn.

Someone I know online one wondered how Bob Dylan must feel that so many of his songs' definitive versions are done by other artists. My guess is he's okay with it. Because shit, that's what folk's about, isn't it?

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Serious Contenders: Beck, "Loser"



I resent the idea that this song is a "slacker anthem," not the least which because I'm too much of a slacker to know what that's supposed to mean. What it is is a testament to how gloriously weird music was getting in the wake of the alternative explosion in the early 90's. Beck was not only inventive and experimental with his sound, with that patently intuitive blues riff underlining the song's hip hop beat, but meticulous in his nonsense. Those lyrics of course don't have any reason to mean anything, but they have a freewheeling logic to themselves that feels as strong and relevant as "Like a Rolling Stone."

Friday, July 8, 2011

Serious Contenders: Question Mark & The Mysterians, "96 Tears"



By 1966, the fiery opening riff of Chuck Berry songs had been replaced by the tinkering opening organ of this song. It was less about pulse-pounding in-the-moment rocking as it was about setting up a riff and then fighting against it. This establishment of boundaries in order to transcend them was the basis for the psychedelic movement. Soon Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane would come, eventually to be followed by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and the Ramones. This song is one of many great mid-60's tracks that exemplifies this transitional moment when rock really started branching out. It doesn't embody the later forms of rock, but it does seem to carry the seeds.

In any case, it's a great listen. This one is actually one of the first songs I remember liking. My 6-year-old self would get really pumped when it would come on the Oldies station my parents listened to in the car. Maybe because that sinister, seemingly-palindromic organ riff is so distinct, both welcoming and bitter. It fits so well with that straight-forward "fuck you"-ness of "You're gonna cry! Cry, cry, cry!" Johnny Cash had used that lyric about a decade earlier, but here it sounds so much punkier, so much more careless. This is a great song, I think, because it shows the correct reaction to heartbreak isn't always "I'm sad now," but sometimes, "Fuck off!"

Also, it's a very specific number.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Marble Index: Watch Your Candles Watch Your Knives

A few months back, I brought you the unfortunate story of The Marble Index, who made a great debut record sometime last decade, and are now no longer together. I lauded that one for its direct, bracing rock attack. The instruments sweep up and overflow the sound, drowning out vocals and letting whatever hooks emerge through the din, rather than be finely crafted around them. It was a great way of boiling down exactly what guitar music can be, without sounding stark or stripped. Very full, in fact.

But nothing on that record could have prepared me for their follow-up, Watch Your Candles Watch Your Knives. Here, they step up their game and level up to the standards of the greatest popular rock acts of the past decade. And that's when it becomes a fucking travesty that nobody you know owns this record (except, I suppose, me.) While the last one was pretty stonewalled, take-it-or-leave-it cellar rock, this music was meant to reach ears.

It begins modestly, with the toe-tapping Morse code riff of "Everyone Else," with a bit of call-and-answer lyrics. It wiggles up and down chord progressions subtle, getting a weird, secretly ingratiating hook and a refreshing no-bullshit chorus, much like the previous album. But immediately there's a difference. The instrumental aspects separate themselves out pretty clearly, and Brad St. Germain's vocals are pushed to the fore. Rather than seeming to sing along with the guitars, the guitars are now following his vocals' lead. Note that St. Germain is both the signer and guitarist for the band, doing a great job with both.

While that opening track hints at a bit of growth, they really let loose with the second track, the raucous "All That I Know," which swings an easy-breezy twisting British Invasion swagger. The song is an immediate call to attention, building to an intense climax. What this song signifies, which is borne out on the rest of the album, is that as proficient as the band was with its instruments on the debut, here they have totally refined their songwriting. While those earlier songs had a purity that must have emerged from garage type jams , here we have a real sense of songwriting logic pulling each track through hooks and refrains that really ingrain themselves to the listener. "Couldn't Do Without" has a particularly interesting one, with its spiking guitars creating tension and a chorus that seems to descend just a half-note too little (I don't know theory so good so bear with me if that's not correct) which seems to stretch it out, prolonging the angst, before finally resolving in the last pass.

Other great songs dotting the album, which might have been exemplary tracks on the previous, are the dreamy ode "Let Me Be The One," the lavalike "What We Need" and a couple of venomous late-album cuts, "Not Impressed" and "Same Old Lie," which really catch fire. Here, they're merely decent goes, fleshing out the twelve tracks with character and spirit without stealing the show. After the excellent "All That I Know," there are five other tracks that compete for best of the album. So that means half the twelve tracks are great, and the other half are as excellent as anything I've heard all in my 6 months of blog-musicking.

"Same Schools" hits this awesome anthemic riff that perfectly invokes nostalgia and hope for the future. There's something really great about the way the lyrics are delivered, "We went to the same schools / Were told to follow all of the same old rules", wondering how people diverge over time. At least I assume so, since no lyrics available. In any case, that's my interpretation. It rings out like a souped-up Big Star. (Drummer Adam Knickle, whom you may recall I worked with for a while, convinced me to buy their first two albums, so I don't think it's a stretch to call them an influence.)

I think "Same Schools" is a great song, but even that can't prepare for the pure roaring hookiness of "We Always Complain," whose only flaw is that there isn't another chorus or two. It's one of those great songs you feel like you know, not because it's cliche but because it works in a classic sense and renews what you like about those similar songs. And lurking just around the corner after that is the wicked wild west disco of "I Don't Want To Try To Change Your Life," which unwinds in such a sinister way before erupting in another blaze. Its chugging bassline and shout-along middle eight proves exactly how interested the band had become in wrapping its songs into new forms that still set comfortable in the roaring rock of the album. And this leads right to the roaring, stomping "Anytime," which is as joyful and celebratory as it gets for this band, and asks "Now that you've filled your heart with blood / Is there any room for love?"

The set draws to a close with the skillfully-built "Never Ends," winding around a riff that seems like a burning fuse leading to a glorious cut-loose vocal that blends punk screaming with smooth crooning. Eventually it brings the record to its close with a refrain that winds out into echoing darkness, pounding with drums and guitars all right on. It's a great cap off to an album that starts like a brick wall and then allows itself to crumble brick by brick and it devises new ways to reach the listener.

My issue with the first album was that as strong as the music was, it was a bit willfully reckless and obscure. It lacked those ear-catching hooks that most listeners need to be drawn into a song, that will get it pushed out on the radio. Perplexingly, this album has those in spades, with tight songcraft and energetic musicianship, singalong choruses and muscly riffs, way more substantial than what you typically get on a hit "modern rock" record, crafted from vintage plans yet with the spirit and energy of the new. And it still went mostly unheard.

The legend of Big Star's first album, #1 Record, was that any song on it could have been a hit, but the record company dropped the ball on actually getting the album in stores, so it remained undiscovered. This may turn out to be the case of this record, which is a shame. This is sort of the reason I started doing this blog, to catch the music I'd been missing out on all along. I hope that, even if not with this album in particular, then at some point I steer you toward something you wouldn't otherwise have heard. Every time that happens, I feel like I'm doing it right.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Serious Contenders: Marcy Plaground, "Sex & Candy"

I love music, and I love thinking about music, but I'm not such a huge fan of ranking music. When you're thinking about making a list of great songs, you start with the obvious choices. "Satisfaction" here, "Like a Rolling Stone" there, "Respect" after that, "Hey Jude" in between... by the time you get to songs that are sort of outside the "canon" of great music that exists, there's no time to think about them.

My objective with this series is to take songs that are outside the spotlight, or in many cases just on the edge, and shine on them. Songs you know are great but never had a cause to think were "Serious Contenders" for such a list. Stay tuned.



I love this song very much. It's impossible not to bob your head along to. I think it's the closest anyone got to another "Come Together." There's no reason we should know exactly what "Disco lemonade" is, but for some reason the lyrics all just fucking work. Hell, the "serious contenders" series could just all come from the 90's, it was a real fertile time for awesome music that we're just now rediscovering and dusting off.

Tuesday Special: Three Great Songs about Stagger Lee

For kicks, please to compare these three bitchin' tunes relating the story of Stagger Lee, American folk hero and outlaw hat enthusiast.





Friday, July 1, 2011

Happy Canaday Everyone!!

That's now the official abbreviated form of Canada Day. Thanks Meggo!





And this tragically forbidden-to-embed Beaver song.