Monday, June 25, 2012

SOTW Presents: The Smithery

The Smithery will be going through Aerosmith's entire chronology, with posts every weekday, all Summer long.

As I've mentioned before, and occasionally taken a few jokes for it, Aerosmith is my favourite band. If you get me talking about them, it's hard to stop. But the truth is, they don't really fit into the narrative of this blog, which is mainly about the discovery of something new (or rediscovery.) For a long time I felt it simply wasn't worth it to try to force my love for this 40-year-old band on the readers of SOTW, who are hopefully interested in finding something new to hear.

With their 16th studio album due out later this Summer, they are finally "current" again, so I could be forgiven for talking about them here a bit. But "a bit" wasn't going to cut it. I finally wanted to dig in. I wanted to take everything I've learned about talking about music, and apply it to these songs I've been listening to, in some cases, for two decades of my life. I wanted to share that love, and examine it warts and all.

Everybody should love something, as much, and for as long, as I have this band.

So if you're interested, a fan, or if you just want to see what it looks like when somebody completely geeks out about something, check out The Smithery every Monday through Friday this summer.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Sunday, June 10, 2012

James: The Night Before/The Morning After

There's beauty in this set, but not a pretty, precious beauty. A heavy, at times difficult-to-stand type of beauty. Sonically, it has a lot in common with Coldplay, and should theoretically appeal to the same audience, but somehow I can see them being turned off by how much more "real" this band is. They pitch their music on the same grandiose level, but back it up with thrilling, satisfying substance that makes for a compelling set that gets better with each listen as it absorbs you and gradually reveals itself. James' singer, Tim Booth, sings with conviction, maybe even romanticism tempered by realism. Like a grounded, worn out Bono.

The Night Before & The Morning After are a set of complimentary mini-albums. They're consistent enough that they can easily be heard together, but distinct enough that you can see why they are kept separate. The former is fittingly mysterious: a tease, grandiose and confident, shielded by the night. The latter is more subtle, detail-oriented. There's one song on it, "Kaleidoscope," which seems to be about one thing, then reveals its true nature and hits you right in the gut. Morning After ends with a lonely, quiet track called "Fear," which lingers a whole on its way out the door. If you opt to listen to The Morning After second, you will be left a-quiver. But it might be even too jarring to go from that to The Night Before's opening number.

The Night Before begins with a charging, rousing number called "It's Hot," creating a lyrical ballet out of cellular division. Like a lot of songs on Night Before, it goes for the high and fast. Of the two, it's easily the more crowd-pleasing. None of the 15 tracks are bad, but the ones you'll find yourself humming along to are all on Night Before: "Crazy," "Ten Below" and "Shine" all have distinctly catchy qualities, yet don't lack for musical sophistication. "Hero" could be in commercials for medical dramas based on its hook, but still has a lot more to recommend it. And the fact that "Porcupine" sounds like a potential hit to me probably explains why I am not actually working in the music industry.

Then there's the most positively addicting song on the whole experiment, "Dr. Hellier." I don't necessarily mean it's the best, only that those "Ahn-an-ahn-ah-na-na-na" chants get under your skin in that way that happens when a song just fucking grabs you. It's delivered with life, exuberance, and yet also desperation and despair. I've always been a big fan of what's called "non-lexical" lyrics, those nonsense words that imply more than actual words could say, or leave the mood open to interpretation. Lyrically, it's pretty fascinating too, using the Fantastic Voyage (the classic sci-fi about shrinking down into someone's body - like that Magic School Bus episode) to tie into other themes explored on the album, particularly in its second half, where a track like "Dr. Hellier" would disrupt the sombre mood.

The other half begins with the staggering stomp of "Got The Shakes." Built on an ominous slide guitar, and Booth's pleading voice, it makes a good transition between the sounds of the two halves. It's not as huge as the other half, not as dreary as the rest of this one. And I mean dreary in the best way. The piano-based "Dust Motes" is one of my favourite of the 15 songs, and it contains lyrics like "There's a vulture at the end of my bed / It's 5 AM, it thinks I'm dead." Then there's "Tell Her I Said So," which is one of the most distressing songs on here, despite its choral chant of "Here's to a long life," because the "her" in question is death, and we have the still relatively young men of James contemplating euthanasia with off-putting vigor.

It's all a very somber affair, laid out with delicate style, and as I said earlier, beauty. The music is an engaging listen, and if it doesn't exactly tell a story then it's certainly got a through-line you can hold on to while the tunes all swirl around you. It just skirts the line of sentimentality and melodrama without ever getting sucked down into it, keeping a distance from its subject matter while still keeping all the details in crystal clarity. And the music is damn well-done.

I'm still not entirely certain how these two halves are meant to go together. If you buy only one you're getting only half an experience, but to listen to it all at once is almost too much to handle. For what it's worth, it's being sold on iTunes as a single package with the tracks interlaced in a way that will give you a different reading of the album than I'm providing. I, however, like the division. I like the idea that even if there's no prescribed way to listen to these pieces of music, it comes in two big chunks that somehow complement each other, fleshing out feelings and sounds conspicuously absent from the other.

The Night Before and The Morning After comprise a great project of music. They take on that huge Colplay-U2-Fray sound and dig into what's supposed to be beneath the commercial sheen, holding out its guts and bones and confronting you rather than comforting you. This is exactly the kind of project I figured this site was designed for.

Buy The Night Before: iTunes Canada // Amazon.ca


Buy The Morning After: iTunes Canada // Amazon.ca

Buy The Morning After The Night Before: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com





Saturday, June 9, 2012

Does It Rock? The Offspring, "Days Go By"



Maybe a little too slick. Maybe a little too anthemic. Maybe a little too comfortable. Maybe a little too familiar. Maybe even a little out-of-character for The Offspring, one of the heroes of 90's punk revival, whose music was characterized by smart-assery (on "Self Esteem" and "Pretty Fly For A White Guy") balanced with just the right flavour of sincerity (on "The Kids Aren't All Right" or "Gone Away.") "Days Go By" might seem like the work of too many other bands, but not sounding the same as any other Offspring song doesn't mean this isn't a good version of this song. It's the sort of general "good feeling, put the past behind you" that a band has the right to record after a few decades, and bless 'em if they do it this good.

Offspring aren't a young, dangerous band anymore and my recollection of their last set, Rise & Fall, Rage & Grace, was that their old sound just didn't have the same verve. Dexter Holland is now in his mid-40s. He can still rock, but he maybe can't be a California punk brat joking about chicks with issues and mooching girlfriends. Shifting into that higher-octane, arena-ready (and Top 40-amenable) sound seems to be working. I can believe this song is the work of a band that has been around for 20 years, more than I would believe in another "Original Prankster" or "Hit That." There's no blueprint for how a band is supposed to age, but the sooner they recorded this song, the better.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Serious Contenders: Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"



The Beach Boys are touring again. And although there's no word on whether John Stamos will be filling in for one of the departed Wilson Brothers, the fact that both Brian Wilson and Mike Love can stop trying to destroy each other long enough to collaborate on an actual album is pretty heartening.

This is one of my favourite Beach Boys songs, right behind "Good Vibrations" and maybe ahead of "Wouldn't It Be Nice," both of which were in the somewhat distant future when this song was conceived. The Beach Boys were already known for the way they combined Chuck Berry rock & roll with Four Seasons-style harmonies. If this isn't the best example of them, it's certainly one of the best usages, as the voices intertwine and underscore this plea for "Help." Serious, the harmonies on this may not be immaculate, but they're gorgeous for rock and roll, and really serve the song well, as does the lead vocal. The way Al Jardine chants the title phrase stretches the boundaries of what, in 1965, a radio pop hit single would be. Shit was getting real.

I have a weirdly personal attachment to the song. Oldies radio was always on when I was a kid. I had a vague knowledge that this music came from a different era, but it seemed very present to me. Mostly, songs from the 50's and 60's were not hard for a 6-year-old to comprehend: Herman's Hermits sang about meeting a girl and being "into something good." Chuck Berry lamented being unable to unfasten his safety belt in "No Particular Place To Go." But my wee brain couldn't exactly figure out who "Rhonda" was supposed to be, or how she was going to help "get her outta my heart." When this song came on, I would try to explain my grasp of the meaning of the song, and my dad would tell me I didn't quite have it right. I think I thought it had something to do with cheating, which I knew from a hundred other songs, but that's only incidental. It's basically an ode to a potential rebound.

In retrospect, it's not an overly complex narrative: "She was gonna be my wife and I was gonna be her man / But she let another guy come between us an it shattered our plans / But Rhonda, you caught my eye..." but it's a great demonstration of how to deal with character dynamics and complicated emotions in a 3-minute pop song. He doesn't want to marry Rhonda, he just wants to forget his ex.

A few months later, a certain popular group from Britain would release a song asking for a different kind of "Help!" sparking a pop songcraft arms race that led both bands (and many others) to record their definitive work of the decade.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

St. Vincent: Strange Mercy

If you've been reading this blog long enough, you'll remember I don't spend a ton of time discussing lyrics. As much as a good lyric can really make a song, my way of thinking about music doesn't really depend on them too much. There have been a lot of extremely lyrically-well-written albums on this site, whose words I just didn't pay much mind to. I missed a ton of the nuance in The Hold Steady's Stay Positive. And after reading numerous write-ups of Arcade Fire's Funeral, I still don't quite "hear" what they're singing about, and that's one of my favourite albums I've written about yet. It's a bit of a shame, that lyrics often make up a huge amount of the work that goes into an album, and yet they comprise so little of the listening pleasure for me. St. Vincent's lyrics, for instant, are weirdly brilliant. They're often abstract, or impressionistic, (and often directly confrontational) and intricately-crafted, woven into the art of the album, to the point where they cross-reference each other on a few tracks. The lyric sheet of this album is quite frankly drowning with brilliance.

But I don't love it because it has great lyrics. Even knowing how great they are, I pay more attention to how they're put together, delivered, and fused with the sonic landscape of the album. St. Vincent has put together a very deliberate thing here, playing off novel takes on moods and idiosyncratic rhythms and shifts in tone that combine into this one specific thing in a very precise thing. Unconventional isn't quite the right word, because that sounds like she's just being random for the sake of random. In places, it might even be counter-intuitive. The opening track "Chloe in the Afternoon" repeats its title phrase in a clipped, wedged-together way that you wouldn't do by accident. Much of the album has a quiet, funky slant to it, like "Surgeon," "Dilettante" or "Neutered Fruit," which also has what sounds like a gospel choir beneath it, or a synthetic facsimile. In these places, the album reminds me of Bowie's work in plastic soul, circa "Golden Years" and "Fame." The pulsing wah-funk coda of "Dilettante" is one of the album's most enjoyable side trips. Elsewhere she opens up dark, XX-like fits of soulful quiet, like "Champagne Year."

When the album develops a galloping pace, as it does on "Northern Lights" or "Hysterical Strength," it really gets a good thing going. The climax of "Surgeon" is one of many great examples of repetition with growing intensity. Every so often it will find a direction with a song and pursue it, like the synth break in the title track, which feels like restless pacing in thought, bridging into a very intense second half ("If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up...") which showcases the performative qualities of her vocal.

For me, the finest cut on the album is "Cruel," which has every aspect you might enjoy about the album in microcosm. St. Vincent's voice is in its finest form in the chorus, joined with a crisp, grasshopper riff that grows ever more unstable, until it's a lawnmower. It even has a bit that sounds perversely like the Andrews Sisters. The same (minus the bit about the Andrews Sisters) could also be said about the thunder-and-lightning "Cheerleader." If "indie rock" is a genre, and it's what St. Vincent does, then it might be defined by taking prog rock's capability to stretch beyond normal instrumentation and structure, but to compact those extreme constructions into a 4-minute pop song. Tracks like "Year of the Tiger" create their own strange worlds, and the album strings them together on those shared moods, themes and ideas.

I like the way St. Vincent does things. Her voice is great: at times vulnerable, defiant, or prophetic. On many tracks, like "Northern Lights" and "Cheerleader," she reaches positively operatic levels of expression. The music sets a messy, often abrasive, or else grandiose and imposing landscape on a solid basis of clean pulsing funk. What St. Vincent has here is a very driven desire to have things her way, to break free from the trappings of the norm.

As I said, I'm always less about what an album says than how it says it. Whatever this album says, it does so with extreme personality. There's no mistaking it for anything else. It reminds me of Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks' Mirror Traffic, the way it creates a language of its own. If it's enough to recommend an album because it is interesting just to hear the way it all fits together, then I can do that here. But luckily, this isn't just a curious piece of auteur indie pop. It's also a damn good piece of music that is a joy to listen to the whole way through. It can be a bit alienating, but gratifying to sit down and figure out. Those various pieces combine into a full statement worth getting to know.

Buy this album now! iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com

Cover: CAKE, "I Will Survive"



Some cover versions almost go to the point of parody, just by mismatching the original with the cover artist's style. Sometimes it works to undercut (or strengthen) the original's meaning, and sometimes it's just a fun experiment. And so we get the sardonic, laid-back yet deliberate funk of CAKE doing its take on Gloria Gaynor's impassioned disco anthem. A while back it occurred to me that vocalist John McCrae is the musical equivalent of H. Jon Benjamin, getting maximum mileage out of a very specific way of performing. Something feels so right about doing this song this way. It probably couldn't have been any other disco hit.

Serious Contenders: CAKE, "Short Skirt/Long Jacket"



Maybe it's the case that every CAKE song sounds the same, and maybe it's the casethat this is the best example of that, or maybe this is just a singular moment from the pop charts years ago. I love listening to this song, its laconic energy, John McCrea's weirdly specific descriptions of his dream girl, the muted background vocals and trumpet, and ever-funky bassline. I think CAKE is based around a certain kind of specificity in its sound, what it intends, and if you get it, it really works for you, and if you don't, you can just move along.

And how very like CAKE to include all these completely idiosyncratic comments along with the song, many of which are not so complimentary.

Serious Contenders: Del Shannon, "Runaway"



One thing I got from watching this video of Del Shannon discussing the origin of his big hit was how unusual and ominous that chord progression he uses is. True, he's the one drawing attention to it, but it's commendable because it adds an undercurrent of danger and fear that characterizes the song, underscoring the motif of constantly being unsure of where your lover is.

The other notable things about the song are how he starts off singing like an average teen crooner, but breaks it up by going rough on the "Tears are fallin'" bit, then going falsetto on the "Wah-wah-wah-wah wonder" refrain, showing a fairly full range of tones. I'm always interested in seeing when artists make these kinds of choices. Lastly, that whistling keyboard solo is utterly cinematic, practically Hitchcockian.