Monday, September 30, 2013

Mazzy Star: Seasons of Your Day

Heck of a year for returning bands. My Bloody Valentine dropped their first in two decades on us, the Pixies have an EP, the Replacements are touring again, even David Bowie came out of semi-retirement. Mazzy Star's legacy may not be as bombastic as those heroes, but they have their place, their niche neatly carved out, with the gentle, soft-focus guitar of David Roback and the sweet, whispery vocals of Hope Sandoval. Their new album, Seasons of Your Day is just a really lovely 50 minutes of that. It'll sit nicely on my shelf with recent releases from the xx and Feist, and classics from the likes of Nick Drake and Richard & Linda Thompson. It's power might be the exact thing that people who like Lana Del Rey's music get from her. It's a thing of measured beauty, subtle and low-key, restful and relaxed. Sandoval's cooing voice carries a distant, enigmatic sweetness. The slight instrumentation - full of instruments, but with everything operating at the lower end of the power gauge - takes you in and wraps the whole affair around you. Dusky steel slide blues guitars add weight, a shamanistic feel here and there.

There's a real human spirit at work here. It suggests itself, rather than taking a concrete, knowable form, leaves us to ponder and interpret and to take from it what we can, depending on what we brought in. Personally, tonight, I needed something with this distant glow. This introspective comedown.

I was talking with an aunt tonight about meditation, and about "being present." For all the talk one might sling about putting on an album like this and "drifting away," the question remains where you drift to: deeper inside yourself, it seems. You listen to an album like this and you are forced to just sit there with yourself and take it all in. Think about yourself, think about the world around you, and the one inside.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Sonic Sandwich: Rival Sons and Queens of the Stone Age



Safe to say, 70s-flavoured retro-rock is an increasingly prominent part of the great musical tapestry. For a long time now, there's no shortage of bands in their 20s who grew up listening to music from before they were born and learning from that. I've expounded before on how good it is that these bands exist. They crystallize everything that holds up about Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Foghat, et al, and remove it from context. Meaning, I'm guessing bands didn't have much of a conception that they were doing "70s rock" at the time, they were just trying to find the way forward from what had been done in the 60s, and what was popular at the time. Now it becomes a conscious decision, a statement of identity. And we've seen enough of it that it's not enough for it to be a novelty or a gimmick. You have to live it.

Rival Sons are a band whose work I am always quick to steer people toward if they're looking for something fresh but familiar. I'm thinking of calling it "New Old," and it goes in a category with The Sheepdogs and Monster Truck. On Head Down, they hit all the major hallmarks of a classic rock album, to the point where no classic album might actually sound just like this. There are pummeling party anthems like "Until The Sun Comes" and "Wild Animal," soaring anthems like "Run From The Revelation," and George Thorogood-like bar rock like "All The Way." Beyond being competent imitators, they find their way to some of the more eccentric corners of their chosen era, like "The Heist," which has the most classic of choruses, the Led Zeppelin III style campfire psych jam "TRUE" or my personal favourite track on the album, "Jordan," which calls up the kind of spirituality not typically used in rock music anymore and almost on its own validates the whole deal. An album like this at first feels comfortable and recognizable, then it's impressive that they got it "so right," then at last it just has all the same pleasures as the actual old music. It strikes that balance between repetitive/consistent and wild/energetic.

There's a difference between, say, a 70s-influenced band like Queens of the Stone Age or Foo Fighters, and a real retro-rocker like Rival Sons. The former camp takes the old ways as a starting point and then moves forward, tracing rock back to a certain point and then taking off from there. QOTSA's new album is very much a 2013 affair, offering an alternative representation of rock from what is typically offered to the Top 40 (as if there's any rock on the Top 40.) Their music is loaded with stylistic decisions that are informed by both decades of nostalgia and a generation of experimentation. It has classic appeal and modern sheen. It takes chances that may in fact alienate fans of the old ways, simply by being modern. That's the downside. The upside is that you get the freshness, the inventiveness of a defined artistic voice. If it scares people off who are looking for comfort, so much the better, because the people who prefer it will like it more. For instance, "The Vampyre of Time and Memory" sounds like something that could have been recorded in the 70s, but doesn't sound exactly like something we know of that was recorded in the 70s. This is the rock that is dedicated to pushing the form forward, or at least keeping it alive in the now. They're not just paying tribute, they are taking up a cause. For shit sakes, Elton John appears ("You need an actual queen on the record!") on the awesomely proggy "Fairweather Friends."

The common denominator to both these albums is that they cut the bullshit that's piled up in rock over the last few decades: the accumulated cultural memory of hair metal, post-grunge, and rap-metal. They use pulverizing riffs and power-fantasy lyrics to assert a huge sound that is completely carefree and escapist. This is headbanger paradise.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Movie Night: Wayne's World

Wayne's World is probably one of the first movies I ever saw that was explicitly about music, and more importantly about people who enjoy it. It came out when I was 5 and theoretically too young to understand its humour, but as early as Grade 2 I remember walking around the playground trying to remember all the words to "Bohemian Rhapsody."

The movie was based around a popular skit from Saturday Night Live, so they didn't have to do a lot to establish the characters. It opens with a scene of Wayne and Garth doing their show, Rob Lowe's character hatching a plot to commercialize them, and then a monologue where Wayne turns to the camera to fill the audience in on the details of his life that might not be obvious from the setup. Then Wayne, Garth, and their two cameramen buddies go out for a drive and listen to "Bohemian Rhapsody," which is cued up to about halfway through.



They just drive around and sing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody." Early in a comedy movie, when most writers would be looking to cram in as many jokes as possible. And that is just the perfect song choice for this type of scene. In general, the usage of music, the way the characters think in terms of classic rock songs, is pretty great: Garth's sex fantasy is set to "Foxy Lady" by Jimi Hendrix, Wayne's pining for Cassandra is set to "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright, and there's a scene where Wayne can't help but sing "Hey Mickey" by Toni Basil, because it was the last song he heard before he left the house that morning.

One of the movie's best scenes occurs when Wayne and Garth get backstage passes to an Alice Cooper show; Alice was enjoying a revival at the time and performed his then-recent cut, "Feed My Frankenstein." He also gets to show off his considerable knowledge of Native American peoples.





The musical crux of the movie, though, is Cassandra's band, whom Wayne helps win a record contract with their cover of Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz." The cover choice gets across exactly what kind of band they are, emphasizing Cassandra's glammy sex appeal. Notably, it's a song about music, about a party getting out of hand, with crazyass rock imagery. The version of this song that appears in a comedy movie is considerably less silly than the original take by Sweet, though.



Wayne's World is not only a really great movie based on a popular skit, it's a savvy movie about music, both the people that make it and listen to it. Wayne and Cassandra both struggle with the implications of success in their respective media, dealing with the compromises it entails. In the end, the movie isn't against success, but prefers it on one's own terms.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Does it Rock: Babyshambles, "Nothing Comes to Nothing"



I'll admit that I'm not overly familiar with the Pete Doherty songbook... The Libertines are one of those bands that I "get," and appeals to me, but I want to like a bit more than I do. That said, the songs I've heard off this Babyshambles album have really hit the spot for me. It's like Vampire Weekend's instruments being played by Cage the Elephant, or Joe Strummer covering the Gin Blossoms (or... Pete Doherty covering the Gin Blossoms.) It's not overly sophisticated stuff, power-pop chords and a real messy delivery. Absorbing stuff here. It rocks.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Tame Impala: Lonerism



Lonerism might actually be the platonic ideal of an indie record in the 2010s. The lyrics carry obscure meanings that are left to the listener to decipher. The music soars with synthy, loopy goodness. The structures of the songs seem to change abruptly, and tracks seem to flow directly outward from one another, only leaving a change in mood to determine that a new song has begun. It follows its own path, basically. It has that "Dude, you must have been so high when you made this" quality, but I suspect they weren't. It may be strange and warped, but you have to be pretty focused and clear-headed to get it all just right like they do here. The songs are grounded by a backbeat that sometimes invokes Motown or 70s funk. I definitely hear where people are comparing this to Revolver-era Beatles (the lyrics seem like an extrapolation of "She Said She Said") but that's only part of the equation, so I would say it's also got something to do with Curtis Mayfield. It has that basis, but it's way down there beneath the spaceyness. It's like a sunnier Dark Side of the Moon.

It can be hard to be patient with an album like this. I bought it on a whim and listened to it once and I really did not understand what I was hearing. It can be challenging to give the necessary due to a band that so fully follows its own whims. I bring a certain amount of baggage to every album, as I think most listeners do, and its up to us to be able to put it away and stop resisting, stop expecting to be impressed with yet another expected version of something we know. At first I thought, "shit, these guys are just noodling around with loops," but there's a real solidity to the construction of this album, a genuineness of purpose. It isn't just "One weird thing after another." If you let yourself be carried by it, it will take you someplace interesting.

That's not to say, at long last, there aren't tunes to go with it. "Elephant" is a standout, not the least because its gritty, pared-down, menacing psychedelia hardly sounds like the rest of the album's ostentatious attack, but it's a natural curb on the album's flightier tendancies, especially coming off "Keep on Lying," which is kind of the definitive track here, the way it builds to a trance-inducing coda. Kevin Parker's voice really comes out on "Why Won't They Talk to Me," and "Apocalypse Dreams" is the early standout to get you into the album. Check out the bass and drum groove of "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards," the way it sets against the leads and vocals.

The upside of an album like this is that though it puts up a difficult front, if you stick with it, multiple listens reveal a lot of greatness. And then, because there is so much scenery, that greatness feels fresh every time you listen to it.

Friday, September 13, 2013

The 5: The Who (Non-CSI)

When I was deciding how to do my second "The 5," the list of potential topics was topped by the Who. I love the Who's music, but more than that their discography is pretty pliable: do you love the rough-edged 60s post-mod club rock singles, the rock operas, the ambitious setpieces, the proto-punk, the ballads? The Who hail from a time when bands were obliged to try everything, and they did in their own style, with the unique skillsets each band member brought to the table. Compounding this were the frequent mental and emotional breakdowns suffered by chief songwriting voice Pete Townshend, who constantly doubted his own spiritual direction and the entire purpose of creating music to begin with.

Things get somewhat more frustrating when you realize that an objective list of their best songs starts to look like a list of TV theme songs, with their discography having been adopted by the CSI Franchise. And that's all well and good, but those songs, particularly "Won't Get Fooled Again," are so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness in that context that it becomes difficult to talk about them outside of it. Not impossible, mind you, but those three songs would be an easy shortcut to constructing this list, because nobody would argue. So right at the outset, I am ruling out "Who Are You," "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley" from this list... which is a shame, because as I said they are three of the band's best tunes, and the last one is my absolute favourite song of theirs. But crazy, arbitrary limitations are what The 5 is about, so let's look at what's left:



1: "My Generation"

Let's start with something simple. Basically the entire concept of punk can be traced back to this seminal single, which signalled the Who's rougher, more belligerent take on British Invasion-era rock. A lot of attention gets paid to Daltrey's stuttering delivery of Townshend's perfectly rebellious lyrics, but my ear always goes right to John Entwistle's bass and Keith Moon's drums, which are the more prominent part of the sound through most of the song, upending the traditional rock group dynamic we're used to. This is a song that puts its money where its mouth is.



2: "The Kids Are Alright"

This is almost the inverse of "My Generation." Where that was a song of brashness and self-assurance, this is one of modesty and self-erasure. It's a song about letting other guys dance with your girl. It's not as raucous or incendiary as "My Generation" by a longshot, it's all jangly and restrained. It's The Who as hep, too cool for school mod pop act. Yet it takes balls to be that modest, to send your girl off with other guys (because the kids are "alright.") The individual powers of the band don't really assert themselves as much in "Generation," but they're all here, from Moon's drums to Entwistle's fleet-fingered bass, and a tight, pummeling guitar break from Townshend, to a surprising amount of harmonies accompanying Daltrey's resigned everyman vocal.



3: "A Quick One While He's Away"

Either you get it or you don't and either way is fine by me. The Who's first stab and longform songwriting/storytelling in song is this cute little ditty about a housewife being seduced by a train driver while waiting for her husband to return from a yearlong absence. And while it's not essential enough to The Who's discography to make it onto any of their Greatest Hits compilations, it captures them basically at the moment between being the band that recorded "My Generation" and the one that recorded Tommy. It takes balls to attempt a gag like this, and for me it's an indication they could pull it off even bigger. "You are forgiven / You are forgiven / You are forgiven..."



4: "Behind Blue Eyes"

As the villain song for the abandoned Lifehouse project, "Behind Blue Eyes" carries a lot of weight to it. It grounds and humanizes the point-of-view character of the piece, now just a random moment on the Who's Next album. It's confessional and sincere, and yet its character remains frustrated and angry, succumbing to his baser nature. The build of the song, that moment when it kicks into higher gear, is spot-on, and all of the bandmembers are working at full tilt here (as if they ever weren't, but still.) A classic rock gem in the truest sense.



5: "Love Reign O'er Me"

The Who are a band that wore their spirituality (well, Townshend's spirituality) openly, while managing to weave it into their rock aesthetic. Ultimately it was about freedom and release through music. I could have put in "Join Together" or "This Song is Over," or perhaps even "Bargain," which is superficially about winning over a girl and yet very clearly about spiritual gain. But the hitch with "Love Reign O'er Me" is the simplicity. At this moment in the Quadrophenia project, Townshend's tendancy toward gangly, specific lyrics give way to a general sentiment that captures and enraptures, and Daltry knocks it out of the fucking park. This is my favourite part of any rock opera they did, because it was both among the rockiest and most operatic.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Cover: Kings of Leon, "Dancing On My Own"



The King of Leon are not really on my radar. I say that because they are a band that people get really upset about, for whatever reason, I guess because they have a bunch of hits, and those hits I guess don't sound a lot like their early stuff, and yadda yadda you know that same old song and dance. I never found them offensive enough to get upset about, and wasn't wowed by them enough to defend them.

But this. This.

It's a known fact that I happen to think Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" is one of the great beautiful dance anthems of our time, and I was hitting that drum way back at the beginning of this blog, and this cover does exactly what a great cover ought to do and wrenches every essential bit of goodness out of that original, and then filters it through the new band. This is some amazing shit. I wish they had gone a bit bigger, (they are an arena rock band, after all) but it's still rad as all hell.

If/Then: Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers

Nicki Bluhm and her band evoke plenty of rustic-polished acts from across the generations: Sheryl Crowe, the Eagles, the Band, Eva Cassidy, Fleetwood Mac, Dawes, Band of Horses... basically, if you are my dad, you'll probably like this album. In fact, I dig it myself, it's a thoroughly clean good time with just enough rock and soul, and they find enough routes into their sound to keep the album interesting track after track.



Monday, September 9, 2013

Franz Ferdinand: Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions

Franz Ferdinand's new album comes to me as a breath of fresh of air. It actively excites me. It carries a verve and spirit that sets it apart from the current crop of rock acts. I say this because this is my third draft of this review and in the previous two I was driven to tangents complaining breathlessly about things I don't like about other bands. But none of that's important because what I do like is this album.

Franz has concocted an effective new batch of their particularly dance-tinged, kinetic rock music. It feels right to me, like they didn't need to study up on how to sound like themselves, or work too hard to infuse their music with obvious hooks. Working too hard is the enemy of rock music. You can get bogged down. Instead, this music contains a lot, does a lot, has a lot of ideas, but is never overworked or overly tidy. It's messy and beautifully imperfect: Alex Kapranos' voice sounds a bit thinner and wavers more, almost like a karaoke singer who's had a few. I feel like if you isolated the vocal track to this album you would be mostly unimpressed with the efforts. But he's from the David Byrne school of histrionics, and its his energy that really sells it, definitely matching the overall calamitous musical atmosphere. Altogether, the band plays with an unstudied ease that would be at home in any era: they retain the timeless immediacy of their earlier singles. It takes balls to be this unpolished. It retains a character and humour about itself, while never getting tripped up and leaving the moment behind. "Right Action" is one of the bassiest, self-assured singles I've heard this year.

It all comes out thrillingly because they know the difference between "a fun pattern" and "mind-numbingly repetitive." There are enough change-ups, as in the melancholic "Stand on the Horizon," the easy-breezy croon of "Fresh Strawberries," and the motor-mouthed "Bullet," which all come one after another. Some of the intros kid the listener, but gradually unfold the song to reveal how it works with the rest of the album. It all adds up to a really consistent listen. You can put this whole album on a loop at your next party and never have the energy falter. I just love this energy. You can't teach this. You can't fake it. You can only hope it comes out the way it's meant to when you're done making it.

Friday, September 6, 2013

The 5: Nirvana

Let's have an argument.

I think, in the ~3 years I've run this site, I haven't said many controversial things. Generally, when you consider your job to be "point people at awesome music," there's very little room for dissent. It's true! Maybe I just have great taste, or maybe there's no point in going "No, that new David Bowie album isn't as amazing as you think it is" (because it is) or, most likely, because I'm just not doing this on a big enough scale to stir up any ill-will from anybody at all. This lame little site (amazing as it is) is mainly for me an my friends and nobody else sees it except when I happen to get retweeted by an artist I cover. (And their fans never stick around anyway.) My co-worker Stacie has said that she never even has to read the site, because as soon as I tweet a link, she just shrugs and goes "Okay, he liked that."

True enough.

The 5 is an idea I had a few weeks ago when I was having my bi-monthly internal struggle about whether to stop doing SOTW altogether. Except it wasn't internal because it was on Twitter. It kind of comes out of the same place as the Best Song Ever tourney, which I never did finish #2, which is that I'm interested in trying ways of praising or quantifying my enjoyment of music that don't get tried often. What I came up with this time was "The 5." That's 5 items in a category, not ranked, but five items that make up the core of that topic. The initial idea is to be songs by bands, but it could end up being bands, lyrics, bandmembers, albums, riffs, in categories like years, genres, geography, scenes, or some other selection. But let's start off slow.

I picked 5 because that is objectively too few to be complete. It is prohibitively restrictive, and nobody is going to be happy with the result. I don't think there is a single thing worth discussing that can be summed up with fewer than 5 examples, and I want to pay special attention to what makes the cut and what doesn't. Because there will be room for argument, room for error, room for complaint. Or maybe it will end up just being so succinct that 5 will be enough. And I'm starting with Nirvana because in their few active years they produced so much that is so diverse and so ardently defended by its fans, and I'm cocky enough to think I know enough to distill it perfectly. Even though you could fill this list up with 5 tracks from Nevermind and be done.



1: "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Let's start with the obvious here. A few years ago I worked with a guy named Trevor, and we bonded over our love for Nirvana, but every time we would listen to Nevermind he would express his dislike for "Smells Like Teen Spirit." He liked every single other thing Nirvana ever recorded, but this tune was anathema to him. I called him out on hipster exclusionism, that he hated it because it was a "hit," and he denied it. He genuinely thought this song was in some way inferior to all of the rest of Nirvana's songs. Even, like, "Hairspray Queen."

So let's cut the bullshit and all acknowledge that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a genuinely amazing song in the context of being a pop single. It is the outsider breaking in. It is a nasty, skanky attitude dressed up with a shiny hook that melts and destroys everything else on the radio just by being next to it, it carries a sarcastic, revolutionary rhetoric, and is essentially poison, and yet by virtue of being catchy and memorable, is totally fit for public consumption. When you cut through the mythology of some kind of overnight rebellion in rock music, it holds up to the myth astonishingly well.



2: "Sliver"

A few years ago, Gaslight Anthem did a faithful cover of this song on their album Handwritten, and it came off about as well as Gus Van Sant's version of Psycho. They got all the notes right, and Brian Fallon's voice is kinda like Cobain's - he can even scram a bit! But it just felt like the cover your friend's band plays and highlights how badly Gaslight Anthem are not Nirvana. Even while being faithful, it lacks Cobain's childish impudence, sarcasm and charm, the idea of writing a punk song from the perspective of a bored whiny child. The nuance of the idea is just lost. If they had covered "In Bloom" or "Lithium," they could have done justice, but they picked something that was just beyond their grasp and really gives such a great insight as to why Nirvana is Nirvana.



3: "Polly (Unplugged)"

Their MTV Unplugged set will always be known as one of those amazing moments in rock history, and I could have selected any number of cuts, including several incredible covers and a number of amazing renditions of mostly lesser-known songs. It's up to you whether this version of "Polly" is better than the original, or whether it was one of the best songs of the night, but I think it bridges between the two at the place where Cobain was a writer and artist, and not just a noisemaker.



4: "Serve the Servants"

Here's the curveball. I think everyone's got their own favourite Nirvana deep cuts and there are a lot of options here. As the opening track for In Utero, "Serve" does a lot to displace the perceived notion of Nirvana as a glossy put-on, punk-metal imitators getting rich off fake angst. Or at least, it directly addresses it in the lyrics, "Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I'm bored and old." I think this is one of the most formidable songs Kurt wrote and sets the stage for the very challenging In Utero album as a whole. The strange thing about this choice, I guess is that in a weird grungey way, "Serve the Servants" is perfectly catchy and hooky, but that does nothing to dull its message or impact. It's still full of sour, discordant notes.



5: "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"

It really couldn't have been anything else, could it? For the last act on their Unplugged show, Kurt & Co aligned themselves with Depression-era bluesman Lead Belly and it sounded like the most natural thing in the world, invoking a kind of eternal misery that carries down from generation to generation and lingers with us still. But attempts at profundity aside, it's an amazing fucking performance. This cover is kind of exactly what you want from this band.

So there's my attempt to put Nirvana into five very different songs from five different stages of their career. I'm not saying this is definitive, I'm saying it's not. You could build an entirely different set of five, or even two or three, out of great songs I left off.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Dinosaur Jr.: I Bet on Sky



I'm not going to pretend like I'm the authority when I'm not. I'm the newcomer here, as I have the good fortune to be often. Like, that's the thing I actively do with this site: to find bands I haven't checked out yet, for whatever reason, and get into them if I can. Since I'm pretty selective in what I let get near me, it usually works out well (when it works at all.) So no, I'm not going to pretend I am the expert on Dinosaur Jr. and their multi-decade body of work, and how this album fits into that. I am just going to tell you that this is a fucking great album.

I named my site "Sound of the Week," basically to foreground the fact that I'm just really interested in the way things sound. The way it comes together. The sound of this album - the glamlike tone of the guitars, the hammering drums and the dried-out sound of J Mascis' voice, is just exactly what I want to hear. The highly charged opener, "Don't Pretend You Didn't Know," is a meal in and of itself. "Stick a Toe In" has a tense melancholy to it, with its tapped-out minor piano in the background and one of Mascis' most wizened, sorrowful vocals. "Watch the Corners" and "I Know It Oh So Well" are pretty breathtaking too, and then "See It On Your Side" puts it all together as an epic final exam. It's like a jam between Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars and Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

This is exactly the kind of album I always want to hear. On the one hand, the instruments, the music itself is grand, melodic, fiery, lively, passionate... but they're grounded by the vocals and lyrics, hitting the dimmer on their brightness, stifling their flame and adding a note of sour to the sweet. As observations about Dinosaur Jr. go, these may be pretty pedestrian, but they're also accurate, I think, and speak to what I believe is the simple pleasure of listening to truly great music. There are so many excellent, elegantly realized nooks and crannies on this album, you could just move right in and live in it, or at least rent it out for a while.