"Hey now, cut that out, Scotto. Quit posting lame old '90s boy band songs. You love rock, you love Arcade Fire and Nirvana!"
Yes. Absolutely, and I wouldn't be caught dead holding an NSync CD, but y'know, I was not in their market so they probably would've been okay with that. If you had told 14-year-old me in 2001 that in ten years' time I would think Justin Timberlake was a pretty all right guy, that I would look forward to his appearances on Saturday Night Live or that he could go on TV and perform Eminem and Jay Z (and the Digital Underground!!) with utter impunity I would be shocked. Shocked, I tells ya! But here we are, it's 2011, I write about music, and Justin Timberlake seems like a really cool dude.
I don't have to like old Boyband songs, but they were exactly what they needed to be: groups of dudes singing and dancing in unison, to make girls between the ages of ten and 17 scream. And sometimes, it was better than it needed to be.
"Pop" is exactly what it claims: three-odd minutes of undiluted musical candy (plus a tag of weird beat-boxing thing.) But "Did you ever wonder why this music gets you high?" Sometimes, yes. I know now that Timberlake has a sense of humour about himself. What I couldn't have figured was that the whole NSync project had a vague air of self-awareness about itself, that they knew what they were doing was maybe not a stab at great art, but it was effective and fun. They took not taking themselves seriously pretty seriously, and it resulted in, yes, fairly disposable dance pop, but nothing you would look back at ten years later and recoil in disgust.
This type of music will always make up a certain segment of the musical tapestry. At times bigger than others. At the time I was very much of the opinion that none of it could ever be good. That's wrong. As with anything, it absolutely can be good, when you take care over it.
In 2001, when Bran Van 3000 released their sophomore album, disco hadn't yet enjoyed its brief early-2000's revival under Kylie Minogue, the Mamma Mia stage show, and later Madonna. So Bran Van couldn't be accused of jumping on the bandwagon, but they also weren't in a place to influence anyone else, so it was just an oddity.
There has always been dance pop, of course. It's not usually a subject music critics broach with much enthusiasm. Generally, it's made to order, according to specifications, rhythmic and repetitive. But ten years after this album we have Foster the People, among a host of others, applying rock philosophy to danceable music. So it's not like the entire concept is un-salvageable. Music like this has the capacity to be really fun, and at its best, get away with some weird stuff.
Legend has it, Curtis Mayfield's final recording session was for his part in this song. He had been paralyzed for most of a decade, but still wrote and recorded music, painstakingly line-by-line from his bed. Imagine being unable to move yourself, but still having the power to make others. I dare you to keep your head and feet still during this song.
Talk about exploring a sound: this band does it very thoroughly on their stark debut album. In the darkness, there could be anything. Love, desire, longing, heartache, wistfulness. Loneliness, togetherness. There are two voices, those of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. They mutter and hum, moaning and stumbling a little over lyrics. There's nervousness and resignation. Sometimes they are intertwined, sometimes they are separated by a thick, thick barrier.
There's no hiding, and the sound is reduced to mere elements of percussion, a bit of humming, droning instrumentation (usually guitar, but sometimes keyboard,) and those voices in the darkness. Modest, but honest. Two figures trying desperately to find each other blindly. It's remarkable how much is suggested by the music, which is what makes it so effective. They play moods as much as notes. Hypnotic, but knowing and ear-catching all the same.
The few elements split and recombine throughout the 11 tracks, all of which are good and some of which stand out, but which mainly exist as part of a whole. I love albums that work as complete projects. You can't pick this album apart and look at its elements. It's a solid slab. It's a brick. You crack it open, inside is only more brick.
I think what I like about is that it isn't a put on. It's melodic, it's real music, and yet, it isn't showy. It's like a real person, guarded, with a tone matching its contemplative, simple lyrics. It's relaxing and meditative. I like that it's a very artistic statement that remains obscure, capturing that moment where you're still struggling to express something, and ultimately being the best expression of that something, that ineffable something. Half of it is built in your head and the other half was already there waiting to be uncovered. You get out of it what you bring.
A good cover reveals the compositional strength of one artist and the performance strength of another. Already fairly minimalistic, "Crystalised" by the XX becomes under Damon Albarn's touch an even lonelier, more haunting plea, like something Danny Elfman would write for a suicide scene. Albarn's instruments are lighter than the XX's, but his vocals are also weightier, so he pushes further it in both directions.
You could call it a Disco song, if you need to, but the Rolling Stones have a good enough sense of the veins of musical history that they know where the common root is between rock and Disco. It's pretty funky, but it's also lascivious and worn-out, very urban and dark, in its way bluesy. Like Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," (another Serious Contender) it creates a context for itself outside of trends and genres. It's more like Michael Jackson than it is ABBA. Mick sounds like a slithering sexual predator, and that bass riff, that harmonica, the whole deal all backs him up. I love songs that seem to come from the fringes, and this one is definitely out there. It's a pretty popular song, and yet, I don't think anyone would call it one of the Stones' very best. But if reminded, they would.
As you might have noticed, I'm in the business of lifting the music of the 90's up amongst the rest of music history, and not just for Nirvana and Radiohead. Half the future installments of "Serious Contenders" are from the 90's, simply because it's been long enough that my relatively impartial memory -- around but unaware during the time -- feels suited to the task of sussing out what should survive, what should be remembered and enshrined.
You never know what's going to sum up a time or place. I thought, when I was a kid, it was just some dumb pop song, but it's actually pretty bang-on for that 90's feeling of sunshine on the outside, turmoil on the inside. It's this feeling of seeming happy but knowing inside something's wrong. So Third Eye Blind married the sunniest goddamn hook you could think of (Doot-doot-doot, doot-do-doot-doot) to wry, lamenting lyrics about addiction and emotional instability, delivered at a pace that indicates how in-touch with hip hop "alt-rock" was or felt at the time (one of many examples, most of which will probably end up here before long.) It even has that eye-of-the-storm middle eight, "I believe in the sand beneath my toes," etc, that seem to indicate the late 90's were just a big ole beach party, but one everyone was ready to leave.
Music can be, and in this day and age frequently is, anything. There are no limits to what can be put on a record, not by genre, lyric, or instrument. You're not beholden to any standard or expectation, not in any important way. You've got nothing holding you back except your imagination, and since you've made it that far, that attribute must be particularly strong. See, that's something music reviews seem to disregard. The most amazing thing about some albums is that they happen at all. Someone made this. They made it to say something, they made it to show themselves, they made it to sound this way. Forget what it could be or isn't. Here we are.
The first half of Arcade Fire's debut album, Funeral, seems to be bursting at the seams with anythingness. Of these five tracks, four are numbered "Neighborhoods." #1, #2 and #3 are all manic, tied together by Win Butler's excitable vocal delivery, more expressive than it is melodic. Like there's simply too much going on in his head and heart than can be rationally related. "Tunnels" is accompanied by a twinkling, swelling piano. "Laika" pulses, setting street-accordion and strings against a clanging guitar. "Power Out" is the most agitated, thundering and percussive, but set against sweet baroque strings. Here, Butler screams himself hoarse, seeming to be against the wall and running out of time (or faith in humanity.) The first respite comes between #2 and 3, a much dreamier and romantic power outage, "Une Annee Sans Lumiere," a bilingual duet between Win and wife Regine, delicate and twinkling like a streetlight on newly-fallen snow, warm like an embrace. "Kettles" provides the closing note for the first half of the album, a campfire strumming ballad of patience and timing, with some of the best lyrics to this point of the album. "Power Out" gets all the glory, but "Kettles" and "Crown of Love" get credit from me for their "eyelids" imagery (My eyes are covered by my unborn kids / But my heard keeps watching through the skin of my eyelids in this one.) The piano and guitar click along like pacing footsteps, while the strings swell up like whistling kettles (as do actual kettles.)
The eyelid imagery carries to "Crown of Love" with one of the best lyrics on the whole record: "I carved your name across my eyelids / You pray for rain, I pray for blindness." "Crown of Love" is a work of staggering beauty, climbing directionally, instead of sprawling like three of the neighbourhoods, or settling into itself like "Kettles" or "Une Annee." The second half of Funeral engages in a lot of building up and breaking down, journeys in certain directions. Both the Arcade Fire albums I've tackled here seem, appropriately, like locations as much as sounds. Places you can visit, explore and leave.
While the first half of the album is good-to-great, "Crown of Love" kicks off an excellent streak that may encompass that entire run of five tracks (depending on your opinion of a few of them.) I love the revving guitars and towering choral refrain of "Wake Up," Win Butler as preacher to the youth ("If we don't grow up / Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up... I guess they just have to adjust...") In these five, whether you like them more or less than the first five, certainly seem more planned out and steady in their direction, even as they too chart odd directions. There's the Disco segment at the end of "Crown" and "Wake Up" has a Bo Diddley-like segment. "Haiti" is an area of isolation, like an island of its own, as the strumming guitars create an almost unnaturally calm tide, under which danger lurks in Regine's distant, drowning vocals. Waves lap calmly, but the waters are full of blood.
This drifts into the titanic "Rebellion (Lies,)" the arguable centerpiece of the album, probably both the best song, and biggest showpiece for what the band is capable of when it focuses its energies. I don't mean to belittle the earlier half of the album, I wouldn't have changed a note, but there's simply no touching "Rebellion." I often find that the songs I like best are the ones I can describe least, because my appreciation for them goes beyond my ability to verbalize. And for me, that's saying something. The last track, "In the Backseat" ends the album on a suitably operatic note, going from the quietest moment of the album to, if not the loudest, then certainly among the most intense, climbing slowly and unpeeling Regine's emotional vocal.
Looking back, Funeral is an amazing opening gambit. Arcade Fire introduces themselves by roughly defining their sound, and showing what it can really do. The sound is constantly mutating, depending on what needs to be said and how. Importantly, it always sounds like itself. I think there's a definite validity to liking an album that seems to create a language of its own, especially like this one, that doesn't lose its audience along the way. Great music works off what you've already heard, then shows you something you couldn't have dreamed up. That's probably what I love about this album. Somebody had to dream it up, and I can't even imagine how you would do that, and make it work so well.
I once observed that, if you're meeting new people, just mention that you like Arcade Fire. Either they'll agree, and you'll have a new friend, or they'll disagree and you probably won't want to talk to them anymore. (This also works for the TV show Arrested Development.) In its grand design, it has a very unifying feeling to it, something that brings people together.
It is, I think, physically impossible to review the latest Strokes album without mentioning how awesome Is This It was. I would love to be reviewing that album, as I think even ten years later it stands as a shining example of rock in the 21st century. But time has passed, the Strokes have released a few albums of varying quality, and returned with their fourth effort, which forges in a different direction. It is different from Is This It, that's for sure. And I, personally, would never see "not being that album" as a flaw that would keep me from enjoying it. While that's a valid approach, it's one that has been done every way possible. I'm too interested in talking about this particular album to drag that one back up.
There are a lot of criteria you can consider when judging an album. Some have a particular statement they want to make in songwriting form. Some have a sound to explore across various tracks. Some just have a few bona fide hits/highlights and the filler is merely not bad. The latter approach, I think, is an underrated way of scoring an album, and it has been the case with a lot of albums I've loved this year. I know where my favourites are, and I'm happy to listen to the tracks in between to get to them. Among Angles' ten tracks, we have four, five, maybe six real highlights, and the in-between tracks never feel tacked on, boring, bland, rote, phoned-in or weak. This is an album of definite craft, which manifests even when a real catchy hook is absent.
It begins as strongly as anything I've heard all year, with "Machu Picchu," crystalline rhythm establish the album's dark dancefloor aesthetic. It builds to one of many great Casablancas choruses on the album, where he shows off he's not just a garage punk screamer, he can do a good Jim Morrison croon, showing a cocky swagger with a poetic distance. This is followed by a crashing guitar echo that reminds me of running lines on the school gym floor. It gets your pulse going. "Under Cover of Darkness" has the band at real top form, with a spiky opening riff unlike anything I can recall (truly "angular,") and swinging like the bigger brother of the earlier "Someday," with its soaring chorus, those scribbling choked-up riffs, and that solo which does as any good solo should, takes the driver's seat and seems to sing the song in microcosm without words. I can't praise the guitars on this album enough, nor the drums, which crash and bang and cut loose when they need to, but also restrain and keep a tight funk beat when called upon.
Speaking of funk, there's "Taken for a Fool," which is an otherworldly, shadowy bass workout, one of the most focused and driving individual tracks on the set. All the pieces seem to come together, and it's a really gripping tune that can easily get people worked into a frenzy. It sits between the buzzing, muttering "You're So Right" and the moaning "Games." There's a definite sound on the album, with the band sounding almost inhuman, disaffected, beaten down, defeated and robotic. It's played out through these tracks between the "highlights," and sometimes within them, since music is often a balance between the two (read: rhythm and melody, doy.) Then sometimes, they switch back to too-human versions of themselves, bristling with life, rage and romance. "Two Kinds of Happiness" is a highlight in this regard, which I could see some disagreeing on. It starts out bouncy, but with a weary vocal, until Julian's voice seems to get completely overtaken by his bandmates sending out a soaring, anthemic, almost U2-like (but in a good way) score. It also has some of the most thoughtful lyrics ("One's devotion, one's just a ring,") even for a band known for being clever and observational.
There's also "Gratisfaction," with its "Never gonna get my love" riff, which is among the more pop moments for a band that has always delighted in blurring the lines between songwriting and pure rock. It's a groove you can take home with you. It's glitzy, and as with many Strokes songs, it seems to be about the darkness lurking beneath. This is preceded by the shimmering, passive aggressive quiet of "Call Me Back" (opening lyric: "Wait time is the worst / I can hardly sit.") which never builds the way you'd hope, but has a really nice moment in its "I don't know why I came down ... I hear a voice..." refrain, in a way romanticizing impatience. It's a fair bit more experimental than even the rest of the album. It's another track that indicates the band's interest in creating moods beyond merely making barnstorming rockers... an interest that was indicated, frankly, by the opening track of their first album. Its gentle conclusion leads perfectly to the crash-and-bang of "Gratisfaction," showing just how key sequencing can be.
The band then lays it all on the table with the ruthless, ominous "Metabolism," whose backing track reminds me of a Bowser battle from a Mario game, and a mean vocal. The song itself is not as great as other tracks as a composition, but like "Call Me Back," and others is a triumph of performance, shows the breadth and strength of their abilities. "Life Is Simple In The Moonlight" ends it on a high note (although even the albums "low notes" are pretty damn good,) playing an damn effective "quit-loud" dynamic for all it's worth, between vulnerability and toughness, freedom and restraint. Most of these songs don't sound like Is This It, but most of them manage to be quite awesome. They go for a setting and mood, and explore the appeal within them: then come the hooks and solos.
The more I listen to it, and the more I think and write about it, the more I like it. The Strokes are magicians, distracting you with songs that seem normal, but hit you in ways similar, lesser ones on the radio don't. They not only know their craft, their strengths and their scope, they're interested in expanding outward. They're a bit like 1970's David Bowie now: you feel like you know what they're up to, but they have hidden reserves, tricks up their sleeves. The point, which I always appreciate in my rock & roll, is that there is a point: they're reaching for something, rather than resting on what's expected, and they do it marvelously.
One of the most famous cases of a cover ever. The Patti Smith version of "Gloria" contains enough new lyrics that it arguably could have been considered a different song from Them's original. But it's important that not only was the basic guitar kept the same, it also included the distinctive chorus. While it takes forever for that big final moment, the preceding minutes are all build and tease, truly seductive and even mystical, from the assertion that "My sins, they belong to me," to her manci chanting of "And her name is! / And her name is! / And her name is! / And her name is!" that, to me, always sounds like "And the nightmares! / And the nightmares!" Which shows you the power of delivery, maybe.
And then at long last, the name is said, the song explodes. Patti seems to take such delight in drawing out the spelling, relishing every moment of that release. This version of the song is truly a piece of work, one that propels itself on intensity and desire.
I have said, repeatedly and obnoxiously, that "Perfect Situation" may in fact be the best song Rivers Cuomo ever wrote. Even above the fun quirk of "Buddy Holly" or the raw confessionality of the Pinkerton tunes, I think this is the one that hits it best. It's specific, yet intimately relatable. The lyrical content is just spot on, from the first verse's baseball metaphor, to the straightforward bitterness in "Can't ya see that she belongs to me? / And I don't appreciate this excess company," it nails that "so close yet so far" romantic-longing that Weezer does so well, not at all undercut by the bouncy piano and wailing guitars, which help emphasize the song's points.
The real star, though, is the "Ohh, ho" chorus. I've long admitted my fondness for non-lexical expressions in songs. Well placed and well delivered, they say more than real words ever can, and this sigh, this cry of resignation, this "What can I do?" feeling is so spot-on it hurts, and yet it sounds so warm. Such is the gift of great pop music.
In championing this as one of the best Weezer songs, I'm fighting what I call (for lack of a snappier name) the "Pinkerton Effect." That time after a career-defining work when releasing music that is merely very good or great is not enough for the fans. The album from which this song comes, Make Believe, is not as good as Pinkerton or The Blue Album, but several of its songs were good enough that it shouldn't matter a whit. Instead, a lot of people hold it against Weezer that something they did was so excellent, they fail to realize they're still releasing music that's better than most of their contemporaries. Even Hurley, which I reviewed early this year, had a lot going for it.
Maybe you really don't like this song, or any other post-Pinkerton releases. That may be fine. My frustration is that oftentimes, backlash prevents people from really giving the songs a listen and appreciating them on their own terms. As time goes by, I grow less and less fond of the idea that every artist's work should be measured strictly against their earlier stuff. I always prefer to listen to a song or album in its own context first, and not holding against it that "it's no Pinkerton."
I don't expect this to be one of my deeper, more thoughtful reviews. Good hard guitar rock isn't meant to be examined, but felt. It either grabs you or it doesn't, and while there are obvious traits a great rock album should exhibit, it's ultimately that ineffable, visceral feeling that determines whether it has done its job properly. It's funny. Biased as I am, bad rock is as painful to me as a bad example of any genre, and every generation goes through its uninspired radio hits. But a good rock album like this feels like a real achievement. Not because it's groundbreaking -- in fact, there's a surplus of precedent for an album like Wasting Light -- but because it manages to work its influence into something that is both new and classic-sounding. The miracle of Wasting Light isn't that there's a rock album that sounds like this in 2011. It's that just two years ago, Foo Fighters released their greatest hits covering a decade and a half of recording. That seemed like a pretty concise summing up of their career and underlined how consistent they've been, how nicely "I'll Stick Around" (actually omitted from the Greatest Hits) or "Monkey Wrench" sits next to "Best Of You." The miracle is that two years later they release an album of original material that creates an equally enjoyable listening experience in and of itself -- that takes all the best parts of the Foo Fighters sound and works them for all they're worth.
It's perfectly conventional and that's perfectly all right. Awesome, in fact, because when all the gears are in place, the rock machine is an incredible one to behold. Kurt Cobain mused (bluntly and not wrongly) that every song was just "verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo, chorus." Grohl is a fair bit more nuanced about it, knowing exactly what riffs best introduce each songs, how to use a prechorus as a teaser to the chorus, and occasionally, write a really good lyric. The dude seems, on this album to be a veritable fountain of hooks, and they're damn sharp. They hit that center of your brain that makes you want to absorb the song, and keep listening to the album. And then the album performs the enviable feat of never letting up, over 11 songs that never cause the listener's interest to wane, from the opening chunk of "Bridge Burning" to the last note of "Walk." I'm often wary of songwriting that seems to obviously hooky, but to be fair, Grohl & Co. seem to come by it honestly. the stretch of "You got a lotta neee-eeee-eeee-eee-eeeerve" in "Back & Forth" uses the kind of descent (or some musical theory term) you would avoid if you were trying to write a hit, but it grabs exactly how it's supposed to. In fact, I find it interesting that for radio singles, they led with a couple of the less obvious hits. "Rope" is pretty manic, with its skittering guitars, droning verse and panicked chorus. "Walk," the second single, starts off seeming like it might be either a ballad or a rewrite of "Learn to Fly," but instead of rising and falling, it just keeps rising, until everything seems to collapse in on itself due to excessive rockitude, and Grohl's voice becomes a wail to rival Steven Tyler or Axl Rose as the needle gets buried in the red. They were both unlikely commercial singles, but have real character, and in the context of the album, stand out even further than the more hooky, catchy, ones.
The scream, of course, had previously been on display on the breakneck "White Limo," itself sounding largely like an earlier Queens of the Stone Age track. These, with the bluesy "I Should Have Known," provide alternative reference points for the character of the band and the album, beyond "able to produce catchy-as-fuck hard rock songs at the drop of a hat." When these moments come out, they overpower the surrounding tracks, but wind up as accessories to the real story of the album which is, as I've previously mentioned, all those fucking hooks!
Grohl's voice has become one of the great rock vocals. He can sing just enough, he can grumble and scream. He's got both the badass swagger and the vulnerability, and he sounds wiser with age but not jaded or exhausted. Many, maybe even all of the songs, deal with the passage of time, letting go of the past, forgiving, forgetting, regretting, lamenting, and looking toward the future. It's mature, but not stodgy, and would be a great album for a teenager to get his hands on, but an older listener will find it just right too. It carries a weight, and works as a great example of how good rock can sound when you take care over it, when you have a good intuition with your instruments. Grohl the former drummer can structure a song according to its rhythm, and has a great bunch of bandmates carrying it out; Taylor Hawkins may in fact be the best drummer in rock. But I don't know much about drumming. Or guitarring, for that matter. All I know is that certain flourishes in "Dear Rosemary" and "Arlandria" (perhaps the most masterful track on the piece) could probably be traced to that, and as a result give the album a lot of heart and soul to back up the world-beating riffage.
So... why does it work? Or how? How do they escape the morass of post-grunge radio rock lameness, without swerving too hard in the other direction (even on "White Limo")? If you had played me the greatest hits, and said "Sure, this band is good, but what is it they are missing?" I probably would not have said "Another guitarist." And yet, on Wasting Light, you have Grohl, Chris Shiflett, and a returning Pat Smear, all credited with "lead and rhythm guitars." And that definitely seems to make a difference, fleshing out and defining the sound without making it seem crowded, somehow. You can hear three guitars (along with the bass and drums!) at various points on the album, sometimes in harmony, sometimes doing their own thing. It could be a mess. Instead, every guitar knows where to go to keep the song from getting pedestrian, keeping the rock alive and breathing by adding that extra element, creating that unstoppable force of rock.
The thing is, these are all exceptionally talented musicians working on the same page. Smear was in punk bands a decade before his brief tenure in Nirvana. Shiflett also plays in the greatest cover band in the world, Me First & The Gimme Gimmes. They know the steps and they haven't grown tired of playing them. Between the five of them, they've lived the lifetimes of approximately seventeen musicians, and are, in 2011, among the most invigorated bands out there. There are a lot of traps inherent in creating an album like this, and they avoid them all. Each track is a gem and fits perfectly with the next. By the time you get to "A Matter of Time" and "Miss the Misery" you might be too thoroughly absorbed to even notice how long you've been listening.
This is the beauty of a great rock album. All the pieces seem familiar enough, but when you get them all together in the right way, in just unique enough a way to sound fresh, it's a thing of beauty. Guys, this album is pretty much the reason people still learn guitar.
// 
// 
// 
// 