Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Beatles, "I Feel Fine" / "She's a Woman"



Lyrically, "I Feel Fine" is one of the most basic tunes the Beatles released, especially right after A Hard Day's Night. But for that simplicity, it was a powerhouse, same as "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Where the past year or so had proven they had nailed down a winning formula, and were learning to produce it at a higher rate (more songs on A Hard Day's Night sound like potential hits than on With The Beatles, for instance) they were taking extra care that the songs that were singles sounded particularly excellent.

Musically, this is one of the best things they did before Rubber Soul. As much as I love the arresting "clang!" that begins "A Hard Day's Night," the fuzzy, feedbacking "geeeooooonnnngggg" that begins this song might be the better touch. It hits just the right level of discord for rock and roll, then last just long enough for the listener to take it, sustaining until the song's main riff, that jittery, jumpy, excitable one that seems so much more involved and particular that the ones that came before. Maybe that's the point - Lennon wrote some of the most basic lyrics possible, with just the right harmonic hooks in the right places to make it sound so smooth, then laid it out over this very intricate, very particular riff, marrying complexity and simplicity into one two minute burst of awesomeness. The music says stuff the lyrics can't. It's exactly the kind of some you want to listen to over and over - just like a hit single should be.

In a way, that complex-simplicity dynamic is what I feel both love and music should be like... it should take a lot of work, but appear easy and natural.



The b-side was "She's a Woman," which actually sounds more like a cover than an original, aping late-50's R&B that the Beatles would have devoured in their youth. To modern years it kind of sounds like CCR, who were years away -- which kind of gives it a timelessness in addition to feeling like a very specific era.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Cover: Bettye Lavette, "Crazy" & "All My Love"



Speaking of Gnarls Barkley, soul singer Bettye Lavette takes their hit "Crazy" to new places by stripping down its production to a slinky nightclub number and really wrenching the vocal phrasing as wide open as she can. The result is quite fantastic. It goes from being a piece of unstoppable momentum, to one where you just hang on every word.



The last few years have seen Lavette on a tear, making up for lost time (look her up on Wikipedia.) One of the best examples of her power is what she does to "All My Love," probably the most-maligned song in the Led Zeppelin songbook. By transforming the tense synth they used on their recording with a much broader piano stroke, she lets the emotion pour into it, and while the song doesn't sound as mournful as it was originally recorded, it also doesn't sound as cold and cut off. Staggering.

Cover: Gnarls Barkley, "Gone Daddy Gone"



Before Cee-Lo was that guy on the Voice with the "Fuck You" song, he was of course part of Gnarls Barkley, who had a hit with "Crazy." Also on their debut album St. Elsewhere was this cover of Violent Femmes' "Gone Daddy Gone." The ragged, nervy College Rock production is cleaned up and made a bit sinister with its charging bass and Cee-Lo's vocals, and the xylophone effect (held over from the original) adds to that tension. A great instance of a cover not changing the form, but still managing to put their stamp on a cover.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Walkmen: Heaven

On "The Love You Love," drummer Matt Barrick hammers out a racing beat while while one of the guitarists strums away heedlessly, and vocalist Hamilton Leithauser wails away to the heavens: "Baby it's the love you love / Baby it's the love you loooooove / Not me." This is an objectively upsetting thing to have to say, but it's delivered with such affirmation, such a good, clean feeling, you enjoy it. They have a sound that sounds so familiar and yet owns it so distinctly. Those guitars are so clean, even when they're ragged. Leithauser's vocals are so pure, even when you can hear his throat straining. It's that balance of sweet and sour that makes so much of this album irresistible to me. The determined way he sings the chorus to "Song For Leigh," with the music forming a brick wall to help him stand his ground, is one of the best individual songs I've heard all year.

Leithauser has a very strong voice. He carries half of "We Can't Be Beat" almost totally on his own, with a bit of light backup. That's as much a triumph of construction as talent, since the moment the rest of the band really kicks in is like a breakthrough. The album is loaded with deftly-executed vocal hooks, and besides those crystal-clear-picked guitars, there is also the twangy "Love Is Luck" and the skittering, ringing "Nightingales." "The Witch" is led by an appropriately haunting organ. The instruments seem supernatural while the vocals are very Earthly. It's a good mix.

In my review of Of Monsters & Men, I mentioned Mumford & Sons, not to compare the two but to point out that the latter's popularity has made the terrain safe for a certain type of act. The Walkmen don't quite carry that twangy, country folksiness (nor OM&M's Icelandic spiritual nature) but their hopeful, good-natured, indeed Heavenly sound plays very much to the same audience. This is good honest music and a great piece of work.

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

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Beatles: A Hard Day's Night (1964)

The soundtrack album for their first movie was the only all-Lennon/McCartney affair in the whole Beatles catalogue. It shows them at the apex of their Beatlemania songwriting period, as Lennon was about to enter his "fat Elvis" period, where he grew understandably disillusioned by the machine. In the meantime, of course, the order was to find enough ways to sing about being in love - or alternatively being hurt - to fill an album with the spirit and verve that the Beatles were known for. As a result, more than any of the Beatlemania-era albums, this is 100% Pure Beatles.

The album benefits from the presence of the blockbuster singles "Can't Buy Me Love" and "A Hard Day's Night," but the album tracks showed they were hitting the mark more and more, as "Any Time At All" and "When I Get Home" are only a degree or two off in quality from those, with the same confidence and energy and maybe just a bit more grit. "When I Get Home," in particular, matches those Beatles screams with an Elvis-like swagger in the middle eight.

The standard narrative holds that John's stuff started getting darker on the next album, but you can see him start to give more voice to negative feelings - self-doubt, paranoia about the world around him - on these otherwise conventional pop songs. "I Should Have Known Better" is an interesting case. On one level, it's a pretty genuine declaration of devotion, but it uses that title phrase as a half-kidding accusation, like despite the positive feelings, someone got one over on him. Then there's the demanding "Tell Me Why" ("Tell me whyyyy you cry, and why you lied to me"), the vengeful, shamed, country-tinged "I'll Cry Instead" and the outright violent "You Can't Do That." It doesn't necessarily make these songs any better to know John later expressed darker feelings toward himself and others, in his music and interviews. But at the time they must have seemed like relatively innocuous pop statements, and he was starting to open up the formula a bit, finding ways of expanding the whole language of the Beatles popsong, while never breaking it. And album pitched at this level for a half hour would need that much extra effort. And they make it seem, like I said of the title track, effortless.

Then there's "If I Fell," which is practically a longform poem, expressing doubts in one's ability to fall honestly in love - there's that insecurity again, put into an excellent song. And Paul, for his part, writes some of his best work to date. With "And I Love Her" he outdoes the covers he had laid down on previous albums, creating something that, although a bit lightweight, has the exact sound it needs: an early example of his skill as a musical composer. Even better, though, is "Things We Said Today," which takes the opposite route of the Lennon songs. Outwardly, it sounds almost perilous, but ultimately becomes reassuring: it calls up that suppressed darkness from elsewhere on the album and beats it with that beautiful lyric: "Someday, when we're dreaming / Deep in love, not a lot to say / Then we will remember things we said today." Then that middle bit becomes quite spine-tingling. Rock-solid, and unlike anything else on the album.

By mid-1964, when this album was released, there were expectations of what the Beatles were, and what they were supposed to bring people. This album's mission was to deliver that for two solid sides. It does, and in places subtly advances their progress as artists, which we now know to be inevitable but was then thought limited. They never did record another album like this one, nor should they have. Like I said: this was the highwater mark of Beatlemania. The next 12 months would see the band try to find ways to move beyond that in an awkward but worthwhile transition. Think of it this way: If you were trying to take a snapshot of "The Beatles," this would be the first clear one without any motion blur.

Buy this album: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com




The Beatles, "Can't Buy Me Love" & "A Hard Day's Night"



Maybe it was a sign of their maturing attitudes, or the circumstances of their lives, or just a coincidence, that these two consecutive Beatles hits, the first two written after their visit to America, matched love (the ever-present theme in all the early Beatles singles) with real-world concerns like money and work. "Can't Buy Me Love" is a step up, lyrically, from "I Want To Hold Your Hand" but it's still probably not worth drooling over the sophistication of its message. The idea that love is more important than money is pretty standard pop stuff, but it was a very well-written version of the pop stuff. It's a great song, don't get me wrong, and with the benefit of hindsight you can point out it's kind of embryonically hippie, but it's only revolutionary because it's just so good. But they did have to learn how to advance their craft by finding new angles to approach it from, and this was the next step of that.



The thing I've always thought about these Beatles songs from pre-1965 is that they hardly even seem to have been written: like they just happened. You don't think about them in the same way you think about "In My Life" or "Strawberry Fields Forever," and sure they didn't require as much work or personal expression as those, but there was a time before John Lennon sat down and conjured up the title track to their first movie. It wasn't really just always there. Although not everything they wrote was as good as this, this song was sort of the proof that the Beatles - specifically Lennon-McCartney - had a clearer vision now than ever of what a Beatles song was.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Cover: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"



As originally rendered by the Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction" is the ideal rock song: the relationship between Keith Richards' opening riff and Mick Jagger's chorus is the idealized singer-guitarist relationship in rock music. They are symbiotic.

With the guitars transformed to horns on Otis Redding's version, the weight shifts a lot further in the direction of the singer, which is what marks the soul version against the rock version. On an Otis Redding record, your only job is to make sure Otis comes through loud and clear, not that he needs too much help. The horns are more of an accent, to bounce the song along as he bebops and scats his way through the end of the song.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Of Monsters & Men: My Head is an Animal

I might not have to spill too many words on Of Monsters & Men's debut. It does something very specific, very well, for 12 tracks, and anyone with an interest in what constitutes good music these days has probably already heard it. If not, it should be an easy sell. Enough people came to me asking about it after only one or two listens to the lead single, "Little Talks." That single speaks to OMAM's appeal very quickly. It rolls in on a brassy little bit of fanfare, which establishes their flare for dramatic, airborne music, and then for the verses narrows its focus to the vocal interplay of Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar "Raggi" Þórhallsson, two names I obviously copied and pasted from Wikipedia. And yes, like many indie bands, they have the male vocalist who seems to feel too little and the female vocalist who seems to feel more than normal. The subtle hints of accents in the delivery add that sort of foreign feeling. The band is from the mystical island of Iceland, where geographic isolation and Scandinavian heritage are a potent mixture for creative types. This music has an almost mythic, mystic, giant-slaying quality to it, even though it is most often about the usual stuff: lover's spats, loneliness, magical kings. Dig "From Finner" with its dramatic swoops, or the folksy, lonely, "Your Bones."

"Little Talks" is a terrific song, and if it is indeed your jam I can comfortably recommend the rest of the album. It isn't that every song sounds the same; they move quite comfortably within their style, from hard-hitting anthems like "Six Weeks," to soft candlelight tunes like "Slow and Steady." But it all comes from the same garden, grown organically and harvested right at the time. Pardon the agricultural metaphor. Something about this music just feels so Earthy and holistic. And yet it's not distant at all from pop sensibility: "Mountain Sound" proves that for sure.

It's tough, to work consistently within a style without repeating yourself too much. They fit well with the post-Mumford & Sons fervor for good-natured, dependable, welcoming music with a rustic, rugged bent to it: not overly polished, but very clean and positive. Lots of back up vocals, to reinforce this feeling of community you get just from having it on in the background.

Beyond being a band with a great sound, the individual moments have a lot of pleasures. Probably my favourite is "Love Love Love," a solo spot for Nanna, as she croons softly, guiltily, that "You love, love, love / When you know I can't love." Almost every note in this song sounds pained. It's an exercise in restraint that proves the band has a lot to offer and isn't just hitting at the right moment.

It's tempting to chalk it up to "the times," but if this is the trend - that Mumford thing I alluded to earlier - then I'm happy to have it. This is good, honest, human-feeling music, but has a spark to it beyond mere pop. This is good work. It hits the sweet spot.

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

Thursday, October 11, 2012

The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights

On this live album, Jack White makes an addition to "The Union Forever," his song constructed entirely out of quotes from Citizen Kane, incorporating perhaps the best single line from the film: "It's no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money." This line rings especially true to me given what I was saying about Jack's solo debut earlier this week, how he managed to make a record people would want to hear without designing it as a record meant to be purely commercial. This guy has clearly always had his mind on more than merely taking from his audience's wallets. If he was just there to collect ticket fees, he probably would play his songs more faithfully to their studio recordings. Here is a live recording that does not merely contain a few rough edges. This live recording is constructed deliberately out of rough edges.

Live, the White Stripes played recklessly, like Jack's guitar was literally on fire and he needed to stamp it out with his fingers. That poor six-string is going to need trauma counseling after the way Jack treats it. In he moment, with the energy of a live presence, Jack finds new places in his songs to make them all raggedy and unconventional. Not only does his guitar wail out in pain, Jack himself screams like a maniac, possessed by the music rather than performing it. This is a double-faced album: it's unpolished, but it goes out of its way to revel in its lack of polish, makes a spectacle out of it.

While some songs are played with breakneck ferocity, others are transformed in other ways, like the abbreviated, altered, organ-based "Ball and Biscuit," arguably preferable to the original studio version. "Blue Orchid" is allowed to come alive in a way it didn't on Get Behind Me Satan, and they really bring the audience into the sinews of "I'm Slowly Turning Into You." Being that this was during the tour to promote Icky Thump, tracks from that album are the most faithful; the blemished twang of "300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues" is even better live with hardly a moment changed, and "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" is gorgeous. Speaking of gorgeous, there's "We're Going To Be Friends" and the always-showstopping cover of "Jolene." The harsher moments make the smoother ones that much better: the slowed-down version of "Fell In Love With a Girl," sounding like Joss Stone's cover, is another highlight. Ultimately, this winds up as a full-bodied performance that explores all the various extremes the band inhabited.

One of my favourite live moments on any album was on Nirvana's Live at Reading set, when they played "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with their disdain for the hit well displayed, intro-ing it with Boston's "More Than A Feeling" and deliberately fumbling through it. Jack tests "Seven Nation Army," arguably his greatest creation (not necessarily his greatest song, but the work that will always loom largest) by taking it to its brink, turning it into a monster and then slaying it. If it were recorded that way in the first place, Elephant would not have been the blockbuster record it was, but to an eager crowd, it's irresistible. You buy a studio album because you like the songs, but you buy a live album because you like the artist.

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


Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Beatles: Long Tall Sally EP



Between With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles released the Long Tall Sally EP, featuring three covers and one original not released anywhere else in the Beatles discography (now available only on the Past Masters discs.) The title track, a Little Richard classic, is one of the great covers of the whole Beatles canon, up there with "Twist & Shout" and "Money (That's What I Want.)" A Larry Williams cover, "Slow Down" is no slouch either, and "Matchbox," originally by Carl Perkins, helps Ringo's transition from screamers like "Boys" and "I Wanna Be Your Man" through rockabilly and boogie-woogie, which ended up in sprightly tunes like "Yellow Submarine" and "Octopus's Garden." Not that there's anything wrong with that. This is just the first time his distinctive tone was heard clear.



But for me, the highlight is "I Call Your Name," an early peek at the songwriting growth between With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night. Lyrically, this is one of John's best, and while it's upbeat, it has this measured exasperation to the phrasing "I can't sleep at night - but just the same - I never weep at night - I call your name!" And the band sounds so good, with the unsympathetic percussion and tangled guitars.

The Beatles, "I Want To Hold Your Hand"



I love this song unquestionably. The case for it as the best pop/rock song of all time rests on its perfect realization of its purpose. Sure, the Beatles later developed into revolutionary artists, but in 1964, they were hitmen, trying to keep their career at its height, and to do that they just needed to make sure they topped themselves and never faltered from the main principles of pop songwriting. Pretty easy, right? Don't answer that.

But it so perfectly captures that Beatles enthusiasm I remarked about in my write-up of "She Loves You," that simple yearning desire for contact. It's not that they genuinely believe hand-holding is the apex of expression for a relationship, it's that when you're a kid, and you don't know better, that desire is so loaded you don't know how to express it. So when a song like this comes along and gives it a voice and a form: "I wanna hold your HAAAAAAAAND!" it just clicks! It does, moreso than "Please Please Me" or "She Loves You," great songs as they are. This one manages to hone in on a moment, a motion, a feeling, a position that is very real and tangible, and yet so impossible to describe. That's what music is for, especially pop music. It isn't there to outsmart its audience, or bring them higher. It's just there to sit next to them and nod along. It's there to hold their hand, and all that that implies.

See what I did there?

The oft-repeated line about The Beatles is that they "invented" the idea of the "rock band." In the past it was Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Bill Haley and his Comets. Pros whose job it was to make the frontman look good. But there was no frontman for the Beatles, there was four guys who all had to shine all the time. Everything on this song is a testament to that. The guitars are living things bouncing off each other, the bass weaving between them. A classic dual-lead from Lennon and McCartney emphasizes the song's soft-loud dynamic, jittery in the verse, gradually building confidence for the excited chorus, and dreamy and wistful in the middle eight. It's everything a pop song can be. Ringo even pounds those drums with extra zeal under that first scream of the title phrase. Everything about this song is put in place for a purpose, there's no background. Right from that opening riff, which puts the listener on alert that this is something new, this song is practically an opera.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Live Moment: Dexy's Midnight Runners, "Come on Eileen"



When I was about 13 I got a copy of Dexy's Midnight Runners' Too-Rye-Ay album, because that was the way I operated back then. One of the bonus tracks was a live recording - I believe this exact one - of "Come On Eileen," and it always impressed me how they were able to use the dynamics of the song to really work the audience - sure they were just stretching it out a lot, but that audience is with it, man, and it was one of the first indications I got of the power of music to move and join people.

The Other One: Dexys Midnight Runners, "Geno"



Before they were the "Come On Eileen" band, Dexy's Midnight Runners were, at least in the UK, dangerously close to being the "Geno" band, because their first hit there was with this catchy-ass tune about soul singer Geno Washington. I actually read where a lot of contemporary reviews hated the band, and I guess they got the last laugh in the end, but fair's fair because this song has something to it, and in hindsight, is just as rocking as the later hit (which is objectively one of the best songs ever written, says I.) Like the later hit, it depends on certain elements of character which might not have jived with the times, but mark it as distinct from its influences, as does Kevin Rowland's always completely impossible vocals. What survives is the groove and spirit of it, which I dig.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Jack White: Blunderbuss

As I see it, my job is as follows: Explain why, if you like the White Stripes, (or Jack's other projects,) you might like this solo album. And why, if you didn't like the White Stripes (or Jack's other projects,) you might like this solo album. That's the objective, and as a reviewer, it can be so easy to get caught up in the minutiae of Jack White's career, his transformations and mutations and identity games, to get distracted from the fact that there's music going on here. This is my third start. This is too good of an album to get turned around looking at the scenery.

Of those two groups, the longtime fans will be the easiest to convince. It isn't that the music sounds much like those other bands. "Sixteen Saltines" bears a passing resemblance to "Blue Orchid," and there are traces of Stripes album tracks here and there, but that's about it. It's just that I think Jack has earned a certain amount of goodwill from his fans. His brand, with them, is that of a rock eccentric always finding some new toy to play with 'til it breaks. It's the best kind of artist-listener relationship, where trust, and maybe a bit of patience, are rewarded with consistent quality that never forsakes individuality, never goes sterile on the altar of "giving the people what they want."

The opening track, "Missing Pieces" is built on a tensely-pecked electric piano, soon joined by guitars and drums to put it in a real funky groove, while Jack wails lyrics about being taken apart, bit by bit, by people who claim to love you. There is a theme of bitterness running through this album, like on the simmering "Freedom at 21," or the fiery "Hypocritical Kiss."

That's good news for both the faithful and non-believers alike, because this album is far from an excuse for Jack to indulge in all those things that might have turned you off his other work. The music of Blunderbuss is gorgeous and ornate and very disciplined - after all, this is Nashville, where music is serious business (isn't it everywhere?) There's no art-rock abstraction here, it's all classicist, rootsy boogie and clean arrangements. This reaches its apex on "Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy" which seemed like a silly, gimmicky song, until I realized people were actually buying the Zac Brown Band album with "The Wind" on it, and now I get it. It's a testament to my personal aphorism that the best country music is often not found in the Country Music section. There's the pretty, nervy, weary "I Guess I Should Go To Sleep," and a few absolutely gorgeous tracks like the title track, and the slinky, bass-led "On and On and On." Not only is this not a one-man show, Jack brings along more musicians and more instruments than he's ever had on a record before.

But of course nothing Jack does is pure and simple by the rules. It has flashes of style and self-assertion that you will surprise you if you're just looking for something mellow to listen to. One of the best tracks is "Weep Themselves To Sleep," where Jack brags on himself as a guitarist, in hip hop form, in a song based around a piano riff. It's a song where Jack sounds eminently like himself, with his raggedy, squawky vocals intact and underscoring the message of the song, and combines so much of the greatness of the album in one place, with pristine piano work, a little dramatic flair and yes, one of those staticy sounding guitar solos.

In my reviews for Joel Plaskett last week, I noted that an album can be personal without being confessional. The one thing I know about Jack White, for what it's worth, is that he uses his music as a constantly shifting representation of himself: not a confession, but a demonstration of his interests, tastes, and attitude. He includes a cover of "I'm Shakin'" that fits with his originals because he's absorbed the old blooze so well, and because the lyrics sum up his worldview as succinctly as anything he could write himself.

It's a gift, to have an artist this far into his career who still has this much to reveal of himself. It doesn't feel like he's changed, only that he's worked out a new way to be himself. Like any piece of artwork, it requires the artist to make choices about what he wants to say about himself and the world he's in. He has taken on all these elaborate musical companions and bent them to his will in a way we've never heard from him, or anyone else, before. That's worth a look from anybody. And I can't heap enough praise on a track like "Love Interruption," which like the album overall, seems so familiar, and so right, and yet so fresh and exciting to hear.

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



Thursday, October 4, 2012

Joel Plaskett Emergency: Scrappy Happiness

Here we check back in with Joel Plaskett & Co. nearly a decade after Truthfully Truthfully, and times have changed, but the music is as bright and wonderful to listen to as ever. The earlier album showcased Plaskett's personality by matching his self-effacing wit with his rock bravado. Scrappy Happiness is a record by the same artist now in his mid-to-late 30's. He's mellowed out some and tamed his incorrigible nature to that of a sly, knowing elder. It's not often I feel like I know enough about an artist just from music that I can go on like this in a review, but Joel Plaskett albums have a welcoming quality to them. It's not that they're autobiographical or confessional, per se, but they're open and honest about what he thinks of the world: he has taken whatever's inside him and made some damn good music out of it. Whenever I think of his music, I think of what Roger Ebert said about David Byrne in Stop Making Sense: "He seems so happy to be alive and making music." On “You’re Mine,” an ode to youthful exuberance, he breathlessly proclaims his love for Husker Du, declares he's Traveling through space and time / To keep my love alive" and screams like a triumphant warrior, "It's 1995! / I'm yours and you are mine, mine, mine!"

This is a warm, good-natured, even nostalgic record. There isn't a speck of bitterness in Plaskett's voice, he's still the earnest, amiable fellow he was on Truthfully, but he's been around. Remember, he started out in the 90's with Thrush Hermit and has spent the time since then grinding away as a rock auteur. Aside from relative obscurity in America, I'd match his career up against anyone who started out in that era. So it's fair to say he's got plenty to look back on. His positive outlook on the past is exemplified in the lyric from "Old Friends" "Sour grapes turn to fine wine / After a few years on a winding vine."

The album's warmth is most explicit on tunes like the dreamy "Habour Boys" and "Slow Dance," which have a timeless quality to them. Plaskett's theme on this album is how music can bind us together, and tie us to a place and time. On the former he proclaims "I came here to bring the noise / To the island girls and the harbour boys." On the latter, he cautions "Is the slow dance my one and only chance to find me a little bit of romance?" After that line, the music of the song kicks into high gear. Joel knows how to build a song, as I praised in my earlier review this week, so that it's not just into-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo, but never too abstract to keep away pop appeal. He's just one of those songwriters who knows the rules well enough to break them properly. "I'm Yours," the delicate, strummy inverse of the snarling "You're Mine," is a sweet, faithful ballad, which looks fondly back at the moment a young couple knows they belong together.

Half the album is mid-to-slow tempo tracks rather than outright rockers, and the album's strength is that they're all distinguished, never repeating a trick. One of the most insidious tracks, this way, is "Old Friends," which begins as a slithering, hypnotic, night club-size torch song, subtly expanding until it's absolutely crushing.

The album reminds me a fair bit of Big Star's #1 Record, the way it matches sweet pop ballads with gut-instinct rock. It has that same spirit that Chilton and Bell infused in their music, the way you can when your love of making music is equal to your love of listening to it. This might even be an album that gets better the more music you listen to. It's not hard to see a connection between the ballads on this album and "Thirteen," the way they look back to youthful experiences with music to find importance in their lives, but even beyond that. "Tough Love" and "Time Flies" have a modest garage funk appeal reminiscent of Big Star's "In The Street" or "Don't Lie To Me." "Somewhere Else" has tinges of R.E.M., which is helped by the fact that Joel can rock a mandolin and vocally isn't that far off from being a Nova Scotian Michael Stipe.

The strength of Plaskett's songwriting - and truthfully, the band's altogether playing - comes at the beginning and end of the album. It opens with a song called "Lightning Bolt," which is a pure visceral thrill to listen to. It's structured to sound almost onomatopoeic, the way it flickers at the beginning like a distant storm, building into rolling thunder, and finally thrashing and wailing like the midst of a heavy electrical storm. The album's closer, "North Star," contains a lot of that self-effacing humour from his earlier albums, as it bops pluckily along, detailing stories of getting hammered and throwing up while talking endlessly into the night about music, which is an experience that is incredibly familiar to me. Its strength is the way it seems like a true denouement for the album, building from the ground up to a great height.

The guy knows his stuff, I'm saying. The fact that this album, and all of his albums, hits so many notes right on, speaks to his abilities. Damnit Joel, why do you do music so good? It's just that his albums are such likeable, friendly things, and kind of overachievers. Even without outright setting up a concept (as he did on Ashtray Rock and more loosely on Three) he puts out a disc of enjoyable, thematically consistent and musically cohesive songs just because that's what he does. That's what experience gets you. Some rockers, when they get older, try too hard to recreate the past. The good ones use it to create the future.


Buy Scrappy Happiness Now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca //

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Beatles: With The Beatles (1963)

Near as I can figure, the objective of With the Beatles was to keep the party going. In 1963 there was absolutely no telling when the gravy train from a pop rock quartet was due to stop, so the best you could hope to do is repeat the same formula as last time and hope lightning struck twice. Luckily, the magic was far from gone. It certainly helps that they were indeed "The Goddamn Beatles," full of life and energy and charm. Their singles, like "She Loves You," required them to be commercial, upbeat and energetic. On the album, they could explore their own character a bit more through covers and downtempo tracks that didn't play to the idea of what "The Beatles" were on the radio.

The album begins almost in medias res with "It Won't Be Long," an album that is just a bit too raucous and disorderly to be a single, yet misses the mark of being the next "Twist & Shout" by a hair. It's good, a lot of fun to listen to, as is the later "Hold Me Tight" but I've never heard the band speak favorably about it. In the case of that one, it also gets the knock that the band is playing a bit wonky and Paul's vocals are off-key, but to my ears, that's just part of the beautiful imperfection of rock and roll. Maybe not worthy of a single, but still worth girls going gaga. I often get the sense that on early albums, the pressure of writing "Beatles Songs" was tiring for John and Paul, if they knew a song was just going to end up as album filler rather than a single. Yet since there was no roadmap to writing songs like "In My Life" and "Strawberry Fields Forever," not to mention no audience for them yet, the Beatles take only a few timid steps out into the broader world on this one. "All I've Got To Do" is a Motown-like tune based on a staggered rhythm, providing a bit of a breather and managing to emphasize the lyrics a bit more, while also playing to the base with its "You've just gotta call on me" refrain, which seems like an upgrade on "From Me To You." It's a great song.

There are three other truly excellent originals on this album, although two of them aren't what you think. One is "I Wanna Be Your Man," another pulse-pounding showstopper with Ringo on lead vocals after "Boys." It's hard for me to get how his songs ended up sounding like "Yellow Submarine" and "Octopus's Garden" all the time, when they started out giving him these throat-shredders. Maybe he got tired of them and decided John could do them better. Anyway, as simple and throwaway as this song is, it's one of those songs that just accomplishes exactly what it's meant to. The second is "Don't Bother Me," the first George Harrison-written tune on record. I think I'm probably the only person in the world who really likes that song, but I like it enough for everybody. It's terrifically dark and gloomy, uncommon in the early Beatles, with its demand for solitude. It's lyrically smart, a brooding breakup song, where the narrator doesn't want to talk to anyone at all because his girl has broken his heart so bad. It's an approach on a well-worn pop subject that freshens it up because it just sounds so bitter. "I'm sad, so fuck you." George also does an affable job leading the band through a pleasant version of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" that helps up the album's balls-out rock quotient.


The other excellent original of course is "All My Loving," which seems simple, but sounds so gorgeous. It's one of those real killers that shows why the early Beatles remain so great to listen to. You just don't get a vibe like that anymore. It's a bit of an inkblot, too, because the way Paul plays it, I can't tell if it's sad or happy, upbeat or slower. It has a life of its own depending on the day. "Not a Second Time" is not especially noteworthy, but worth a few listens, providing a breather along with "Devil in Her Heart" amidst the largely raucous second side.

As for the covers, they're mostly well chosen, with a few missteps that haven't aged perfectly and seem very stuck in their time, like "Devil in her Heart" and the already-aged "'Til There Was You," which signaled Paul's interest in the distant past and old persony things. That one is notable for students of the band, who want to understand the breadth of influences and interests that went into making up their sound, but isn't much good to a kid like me who just wants to rock out, even if I can normally stomach ballads just fine.

That leaves "Please Mr. Postman," "You Really Got A Hold On Me" and "Money (That's What I Want.)" All are faithfully done, like the professionals they are. "Please Mr. Postman" is exactly the kind of star-eyed pop number they needed to load onto their albums, especially because of its theme of making contact (see also: "All My Loving," "It Won't Be Long," "All I've Got To Do.") They were marketing devices, sure, the subtle indication that the Beatles were accessible and longing to hear from you, but they were also great songs. "You Really Got a Hold On Me" is the perfect slow jam for the album, and "Money (That's What I Want)" is one of the best pop/rock/soul songs ever written, and is almost impossible to fuck up, so the main thing is that it gives John a chance to scream his head off.

The Beatles were blooming at this point. It wasn't quite the case yet that their future was assured, so it was smart to record an album that just sounds like a more polished version of their previous. There were a few innovations but few seem like risks in hindsight. They were just getting started, rolling up their sleeves and seeing what they could pull off.

Buy this album: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com








Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Joel Plaskett Emergency: Truthfully Truthfully

The first song on Joel Plaskett's 2003 album, Truthfully Truthfully, begins with a tangled, twangy sounding guitar, before thickening into a heavy riff that marks the influence of 70's rock that threads throughout Joel's rock songwriting. On Truthfully, there's a confidence to the music that almost kids the listener, matched with the way the lyrics show a very Canadian interest in self-deprecation and suspicion of success. Truthfully, Truthfully almost has two lives, that arena-rock bravado and that shy earnestness. Joel's songwriting keeps the subject matter light and several degrees away from anger or melodrama, but there are gentle putdowns, beginning with that first track, where his admission that "I've got trouble written all over me" sounds less like a boast than a complaint. Another great track is "Mystery & Crime," where Plaskett muses over a relationship gone horrible wrong, where he is the "guilty" party, but still feels put-upon as the situation gets blown out of proportion ("I go to all the parties / And I never have a good time / It's like we're acting out a movie / Mystery & Crime / I never meant to hurt her / Now everybody's screaming murder, murder, murder...") Truth is, on this site, I tend not to fixate too much on lyrics, because I review a lot of music where the lyrics aren't inherent to the enjoyment of the song. But Joel is a for-sure true-blue songwriter. He knows how to turn a phrase, and how to craft a song that will service that.

Looking at songs like "Work Out Fine," "Extraordinary," and "Come on Teacher," are testaments to this. They are loaded with quirky lyrical details to push their stories and characters along. On "Work Out Fine," Plaskett takes a zen approach to the various inconveniences in his life, determined that "Everything will work out fine" just because he says so, while the music is simultaneously at ease and tense. "Extraordinary" is almost parodic, and testifies to Joel's background on the 90's indie rock scene with Thrush Hermit, seeming like something that could have come from a band like Cake or Sloan.

That first half of the album is loaded with character and added value. The second half is very much straightforward, often earnest and in-the-moment rock, exercises in Joel's ability with classic riffage and arena-sized ballads. The piece pivots on ominous "The Red Light" and "Radio Fly," which cracks open Joel's sentimental side with a chorus as big as all outdoors. "You Came Along" is a doe-eyed ballad ballasted by a swaggering rhythm section. "Lights Down Low" is a vintage rocker. Each of the songs have individual flourishes to distinguish them, like the gorgeous guitar break in "The Day" and the way that "All the Pretty Faces" builds to its first chorus and takes off from there. I particularly love the album closer, "Heart to Heart," though, a raggedy minor-key rocker that sounds a bit like Neil Young & Crazy Horse. The way it slips away from the listener ends the album almost as an ellipsis, like there's still more to come... but later.

In the years since this album's release, Joel Plaskett has proven himself one of the most distinctive talents Canada has produced, probably ever. He's earned this distinction, which I just bestowed on him, largely through his more ambitious projects like Ashtray Rock and Three, which show his commitment to developing his craft and setting new projects for himself. But his regular-ass albums are no less appealing, because he's just so goddamn good at what he does. He may play awkward and goofy, but he is most definitely very assured in his artistic talents. When I listen to an album like this, I feel like I "get" the author's voice, that he has really put himself into the work. And while putting yourself into your music doesn't inherently make it better (there are plenty of embarrassingly personal albums that are also awful) when you get someone who knows their work like Plaskett, that self-assurance provides a deep well of material. The songs on this album are so varied, and yet they all have their charms, and all clearly come from the same mind. Terrific.

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


Monday, October 1, 2012

The Other One: Semisonic, "Chemistry"



On a recent edition of their podcast, my colleagues at Comics the Blog made reference to the Semisonic 20th Century Masters collection, which contains "that one song you know, and that other song you should know." You've surmised that the former is the classic ode to life as a fetus, "Closing Time." I believe latter is this one, which I always thought deserved to be a hit. It's catchy as all hell and a bit less specialized than "Closing Time."

That's probably why it didn't take off. Back in the late 90's, you got one chance to make an impression, and few acts were given a chance to flourish. Once you were pigeonholed as "the 'Closing Time' guys," that was your thing. Your song would play over the final montage of any dramedy to add weight, or the closing credits of any vaguely somber movie. "Chemistry" is just a cool song about growing up and figuring out romance, and quite honestly its lyrics are among the most clever of its era. And like I said, catchy as hell. You should know this one.