Big Star's second album finds them a lot less eager to sound pretty. There were some reasonably rough-sounding moments on #1 Record, sure, with "Feel" being an impressionistic simulation of the insanity of being in love (or something,) or the confrontational "Don't Lie To Me," but it was generally defined by tenderness, hope and sensitivity. It was mostly lush and clean and simple, and we loved it for that. And Radio City is a fucking wonderful mess. My best hypothesis is that without Chris Bell around, Alex Chilton's darker instincts were allowed to roam unchecked. That probably how the guy who penned "Thirteen," one of the sweetest and prettiest songs ever, was now hissing "You Get What You Deserve," on one of the album's many excellent tracks, not to mention the later "You're gonna die / You're gonna decease."
This album has a particular kind of craziness. Because the three remaining members seem to have such a perfect instinct for pop-rock songwriting and playing, they go absolutely crazy trying to break the sound of their first down into shattered pieces, knowing it will all still fit together in the end. I always think of the insane instrumentation on "Life is White," culminating in a hurricane of battling instruments that barely even seem to belong in the same song: jolly piano, raunchy guitar, whining harmonicas thrown in for good measure, all wrapped around a perfectly twisted hook ("I don't want to see you now / 'Cause I know what you're like / And I can't go back to that now.")
It's actually only 36 minutes long, but it's a lot of music in that 36 minutes. A very busy set of unrelenting pop chaos. It goes breathlessly from "O My Soul," every bit the arch 70s anthem that "In The Street" was, to the wild and wooly "Daisy Glaze," and beyond, pummeling you the whole time but always managing to fall back on the safety net of pop instinct. More like a crash pad, which they hit at terminal velocity. Even one of the cleanest-cut tunes here, "September Gurls," which never seems to stray too far off the beaten path, has a certain pumped up alchemy to it, and a skewed sensibility. Not every song can nail the simultaneous joy and sorrow of romance, and Big Star does it often.
Maybe that's really it. Radio City is an album of contradictions: of joy and sorrow, bitterness and hope, all the things we really want out of music, preferably all at once. Mixing it all together in this chaotic way produces something that feels genuine, something we can comprehend but still be utterly surprised and thrilled by. The best music seems to be easy and hard at once: rough and clean, sweet and sour. Even the sweet, tender, strummy ballad "I'm In Love With A Girl" seems to be loaded with doubt ("I'm in love with a girl / The finest girl in the world / I didn't know this could happen to me.") I may not personally think that Radio City has the tunes the way #1 Record does, but the way it exceeds in every possible facet gives it a character, a power of its own.
This album delivers very fully on the premise of its subtitle. It contains exactly 12 songs on the subject of desire. Not a novel concept, sure, since "desire" in its many forms, has been grist for the creative mill since the dawn of man, but to draw attention to it is. Mark Oliver "E" Everett takes the dozen songs to approach the notion, that classic backbone of pop music, from its many vantage points. There are times when E's narrator voice is cocky, self-assured, even predatory (as the title, derived from the song "Tremendous Dynamite," suggests.) Then there are times when he is envious, frustrated, put-upon, dejected, regretful, hopeful... smitten, innocent, and guilty. The album is split about halfway between upbeat numbers and downbeat ones. It begins with the somewhat oblique, rock-on-your-heels "Prizefighter," probably the least direct of the lot, but an effective curtain raiser.
At times, they come on strong. "Lilac Breeze" is a heady, strong-in-love thundering beat, with a dirty fuzz riff that brings to mind Death From Above 1979, but it's playful. Besides the pumped up kick of "Tremendous Dynamite" there's the lip-licking "Fresh Blood," which furthers the wolfman conceit with a dark prowling sound, highlighting the dangerous, sexy, seductive side of desire. There's a simple, straightforwardness in these songs that even manages to outdo other primativists like the Black Keys by saying as much as humanly possible with the simplest of guitar licks. E and his company aren't showoffs, they're communicators. "Tremendous" reminds me a bit of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk."
It became pretty immediately apparent that I was listening to something great during the second track, "That Look You Give That Guy," whose lyrics demonstrate the pinpoint accuracy shown all throughout the album, to show how you can look at the subject in many different ways. This one is so exact and so perfect. "That look you give that guy I wanna see / Looking right at me / If I could be that guy instead of me / I'll never let you down." The first of many heartbreaking moments, setting E's gruff, worn-thin vocals against a soft focus, lightly strummed idyllic fantasy scape. That feeling threads through "In My Dreams," which could be a forgotten British Invasion single breathed new life, a Herman's Hermits track or some such (even though yeah, E and Peter Noone have as little in common as two vocalists ever did.) Then there's the resigned, "My Timing is Off" and the heart-filling, distant "Alll the Beautiful Things" ("Birds come down from the sky so blue / See all the beautiful things you do / Why can't I just get with / You?") You really feel for this guy, and you feel it yourself, because everybody's been there. The sensitivity reaches its apex on "The Longing," a haunted waltz that sounds so put down, so rejected and depressed that E can barely manage to sigh the words. Some of these songs will really put you through the wringer, depending on your emotional state.
This is a no-bullshit record. They make no effort to transform the subject into an abstract artistic statement: the mere act of making it takes care of that, meaning the whole thing is elegant in its simplicity. There's not a lyric on there that I'd second guess, not an instrumental flourish I wonder why they did. It's terrifically balanced and constructed. The tension of the heavy material is eased by the more fun ones. The meaner ones are undercut by the sensitive ones, and manage to sit next to each other, with their lo-fi production and precise performance, with those specific instruments and that sledgehammer vocal. It's crisp yet perfectly distorted. They all belong as part of the whole. When it's on the hunt, it's fierce. When it's hurting, it's raw. "What's a Fella Gotta Do" blends the two, as the narrator frantically searches for the key to a woman's heart, but he's he's game for it. The two final tracks, "Beginner's Luck" and "Ordinary Man" serve as alternate endings: one together, one alone, sewing up the very thorough examination of the subject matter.
Pop music doesn't always have to be about desire, about love and loss and longing and the thrill of a new romance. But there's a reason we keep seeing writers of every stripe going back to it. Nobody is above it. Nobody is immune. And if you're a musician really worth your salt, you'll never stop trying to find a way to articulate it.
Surprise, surprise, guys: a very good band focusing in on a time-honoured and fertile subject matter results in a pretty incredible album. Eels are a skillful group, although their other albums have never quite grabbed me as much, at least as immediately, as this one did, but they are on point all the way through here. This one is worthy of its title: all twelve tracks come together to form a great 40 minute listen.
Between the quality of the music and its legacy of innovation, Revolver is probably the most accurately praised Beatles album of the lot. There's no risk of over-praising it because there was no precedent for what it did, and it delivers on the promise of art pop you can really listen to. There's absolutely no room to overestimate this one, and its pleasures are apparent enough that it doesn't get underestimated either.
This album runs 34 minutes and 40 seconds. There are entire worlds in the songs on this album. "Eleanor Rigby" is only 2 minutes and 6 seconds and hardly contains enough words to convey its plot, but those few scraps, along with the dynamic strings that propel it, are enough to tell you more than almost any song you can name. The track that follows it is the first clanging, jangly step into John Lennon's dreamworld (well, the second after "Rain.") It has those yawning reversed guitars that perfectly put you in mind of both peaceful relaxation and fearful loss of control to imagination. It has those ghostly back up vocals that ooh and ahh and fade in and out. Many of the songs on this album, like that one, suggest or create entire worlds just for their own duration. Lennon went on to create numerous other ones soon after. Whatever they were on at the time (LSD, mostly,) allowed them to discard precise notions of pop songwriting that had gotten them where they were. They were emboldened to trust their (newly chemically enhanced) instincts, and it was paying off. A song about sleeping could now sound like a dream.
John, on his contributions to the album, is intent on translating the experience of taking LSD into music. Which is thoughtful, since I don't plan on ever taking LSD myself. So "She Said, She Said" will have to do, with its lapping, distant vocals and snarling, ringing guitars that shimmer like the stars themselves. John's songs, dotting the landscape of the disc, are a consistently unsettling yet serene experience, one of a grandiose otherworld where things are huge and distant and foggy yet clear. That song recounts a bizarre encounter with Peter Fonda (transformed into "She" to make the song even more enigmatic, to strange effect.) His love for strangely accurate dialogue comes in: "She said, you don't understand what I said / I said no, no, no, you're wrong." But mysterious all the same: "'Cause you're making me feel like I've never been born." A whole album that sounds like this would be one thing, a very welcome thing, but it's not. John broadcasts intermittently from that dimension, the feed coming in between Paul's next genre experiment. In the Lennonverse, things are familiar yet intimidatingly unusual. The most conventional of the lot is the loopy "Doctor Robert," the ode to the drug dealer that makes him a folk hero. The one that rattles me most, in a good way, is "And Your Bird Can Sing," because it rocks with that spiraling guitar winding through it. It's also completely insane - where "She Said She Said" is a recounting of a conversation that makes no sense, "And Your Bird Can Sing" sounds like one side of a conversation that makes no sense, even to the people having it. The meaning of the metaphor - if there even was one - is completely lost to time. And I think that's fine. It's a nice monument to the way Lennon could pick a stray thought or turn of phrase and make a whole song out of it.
While Lennon was out exploring his own dimension, Paul McCartney was mapping this one. "Yellow Submarine" gave him a bright, vivid palette to work with, and it resulted in some great splashy tunes like "Good Day Sunshine" and "Got To Get You Into My Life." "Sunshine" is built on a rumbling low-key piano riff, paradoxically low and bouncy, like a jovial fat guy. "Got To Get You Into My Life" is a declaration of romantic love and devotion to pot, marked by its indelible horn fanfare. If you ever have to pledge devotion to something, make sure there are trumpets nearby.
But aside from celebrating the simple pleasures of life, Paul was also finding a knack for enunciating its darker moments. I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who sees "Here, There and Everywhere" as a sad song. Not a tragic one, like "Eleanor Rigby," but with its cooing background vocals and minimal instrumentation, it hits on a certain kind of sadness, a fearful vulnerability in being that in love with somebody. I don't think of this as being an "at ease in love" song. It's a song about the pain of need.
But if we're talking about pain, we have to talk about "For No One," one of the best screenshots of a breakup committed to tape. Every element of this song is calculated, or at least moves intuitively, from its lonely staggering waltz tempo, and its mesmerizing piano under the chorus, to its solitary, just off in the distance French Horn solo (motherfucking French Horn solo!) It also has those amazingly pointed lyrics: "Your day breaks / Your mind aches / You find that all her words of kindness linger on when she no longer needs you." ... "And in her eyes you see nothing / No sign of love behind the tears / cried for no one / A love that should have lasted years." It's also written in the second person - accusative and judgmental, daring in its own way for a pop song. It deserves every bit as much accolades as "Eleanor Rigby," but is maybe a bit less beloved because instead of a profound statement, it hits on a very ordinary sort of pain, the kind that was the darkside of the pop music they were already performing for years. But they never captured it like this before.
George gets in on the action with three very good songs. "Taxman" manages to outdo the sardonic tones of "Day Tripper" or "Drive My Car" by airing real grievances and loaded with acidic humour, delivered in a sludgy form of funk that casts an exactly slimy type of character: if psychedelia was about the liberation from Earthly pursuits, here was the villain song. "I Want To Tell You" is about the way the mind sometimes cheats you out of what you want to say (a feeling familiar to me,) built on an inspiredly simple, slithering riff. The other, "Love You To," was George's first full-fledged attempt at an Indian raga. I was never a fan, I think you had to be there, but there's something charming in the clash between the mysticism conjured up by the sitar and the very earthly, very human voice of George Harrison.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" is shocking, with its thundering drums, skittering sound effects, distant vocals, laughing seagulls, like that whole world Lennon built rushing past you in three minutes. It seems like the culmination of the experiments conducted throughout the recording process, but it was in fact the first song recorded. It cuoldn't have gone anywhere at the end. Its lyrics, ripped from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, give the listener something to chew on, and provide an act that cannot be followed - or so you'd think. Turns out they were really only beginning.
The obvious selling point of Revolver is its eclecticism. They really do get away with a lot of stuff in only a half hour. What unifies it is its problematic relationship to reality. John scatters it with sound effects and scenery. Paul heightens it with judicious usage of genres, whether it's sunny pop, kids songs, classical waltz, or Motown. Paul's songs here show you the logical extension of your feelings. John's become something of an inkblot - you can see anything you want in them. One shows us a world we've never known before, one shows us a world we didn't realize we were already looking at.
About a year ago, I was talking to a friend who isn't much of a Beatle fan. It was weird to me that someone wouldn't "just be into them" as a natural state, that anyone would ever need to find a way in. Nobody could tell her for sure which one would help her in. After a moment's thought I realized Rubber Soul was the one. The simple explanation for that is that its pleasures are the easiest to understand. Yes, there's a greatness to those first five albums, mostly within the sub-genre of "Beatlemania" music, which they were just starting to transition away from on the previous record. The sad truth, which I have suppressed in my reviews, is that if you're not into that music, if you don't just get "A Hard Day's Night" or "Ticket To Ride," there's maybe no reason you would start. And those later albums are brilliant and brimming with invention and ideas... but they can be a little off-putting. Try to convince someone the greatness of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" or "A Day In The Life" or "She Said She Said" or "Across The Universe" or "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da," and again, they might balk. But, catching them at the precise moment they were kicking open the doors of creativity and inspiration, Rubber Soul is the most accessible, most evergreen album in the longview Beatles catalog. Its appeal is so basic yet so deep.
And the reason, I guess, is that this is still recognizable pop music, and if it was revolutionary at the time then it was a call from the future form that pop music would settle into. I've been thinking a while about some of the points I've made about "authenticity," and about how experimentalism and sensing the character of the author in the music became essential in rock music after the Beatles. As each Beatle pursued their own interests, it added up to a collection of 14 great songs with their own voices, together yet apart - a quality that would be blown up to epic proportions of subsequent records. Here, though, John's "In My Life" and "Girl" sit well with Paul's "Michelle" and "You Won't See Me" and it's all of a piece.
I think that because this album isn't as up-front about its brilliance, and subtler in its pop appeal, it's the most underrated Beatles album. It has rough points - the closing number, the unabashedly misogynistic "Run For Your Life" despite being catchy, is one of the most embarrassing things the Beatles recorded. Literally, I get embarrassed for listening to it. (John stole the opening lyric, "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man" from an Elvis song called "Baby Let's Play House," but the King managed to wait a whole song and build up to that statement so you wouldn't take him too seriously, whereas John put it right up front so you would.) "Wait" is considerably better, if simplistic by mid-60's Beatles standards. It has a zen-ness to it, in its shaking tambourines and softly bent guitars. "But if your heart breaks, don't wait, turn me away / And if your heart's strong, hold on, I won't delay." It would have been considered excellent just two years earlier. "What Goes On," the obligatory Ringo tune, shows how his microcosmic career within the Beatles was diverging, keeping true to that Western twang he displayed on "Act Naturally." Kind of a neat diversion in this folk-tinged proto-acid album. And in any case, it fits well with the album's undercurrent of trying to see into the hearts of others.
George Harrison's two contributions, "Think For Yourself" and "If I Needed Someone" both enhance his songwriting profile. Lyrically, they're extrapolations of his earlier efforts, putting a somewhat "iffier" spin on boy-girl narratives, wrenching open the quirks that tend to get missed out by mainstream writers. Sonically, they're lavish bits, with the roaring fuzz bass on "Think" and the commanding Byrds-esque 12-string on "Someone." He only got a few spots per album, but he made good use of them, drizzling each with special features.
A bunch of the songs, mostly Paul's, were really forward-looking pop numbers: smart but not psychedelic, meaningful but playful. "Drive My Car" doesn't get enough love. "You Won't See Me" and "I'm Looking Through You" are other great solid pop pieces that fill in the gaps of this album, do the heavy lifting, the way "The Night Before" and "You're Going To Lose That Girl" did on Help. Except they're way better. Every inch of "You Won't See Me" is slathered in greatness, from the backing vocal to the spiky guitar to the title phrase, which has been noted seems like the next step up the evolutionary scale from Help's "Tell Me What You See." It takes that John-esque angst from "No Reply" and replaces it with Paul's common touch. Dig also the scattershot guitar bursts in "I'm Looking Through You," it gets my heart racing. That these are the relatively minor tunes, not the blockbusters, shows how on-top-of-their-game this band was.
The album is laced, however, by several extreme highlights, mostly "Lennon" songs, although one really sweet spot is "Michelle," whose success is in being very simple without being simplistic, sweet but not saccharine, minor but not forgettable. Think about how it exemplifies the difficulty in communicating feelings. McCartney's songs on this one have a throughline of romantic disconnect. Lennon's are more observational. "Norwegian Wood," one of my favourite Beatles songs ever, is a perfect short story which offers no insight or explanation for the behaviour of its characters, it's just stuff that happens and speaks largely for itself. The sonic landscape, based on acoustic guitar and sitar (my favourite use of that instrument on a Beatle song) sweeps the listener up in the tale, then drops us back out of it, leaving uswondering what we've peeked in on. And in the long run, it's part of the Beatles' charm that sometimes they did things like this, just once, so perfectly, then never went back to it again. Because they had more stuff to try.
Then there's "Nowhere Man," which honestly always shocks me with how good it is. It shows how much they'd learned, from everything they'd been through, from themselves, from Dylan and other musicians along the way. It's a song about how useless and apathetic Lennon thinks everyone (including himself) is. It manages to be both catchy and meaningful -- and features a bitchin' guitar break that, like all great solos, seems to underscore the song's meaning. This was one of the first pop songs you really had to think about. Likewise, there's "The Word," one of many "Love will set you free" type anthems the Beatles penned, and for the first time it seems fairly obvious they're not really talking about romantic love. It's an anthem for the dawn of hippyism that is maybe a tad naive (though far from being "All You Need Is Love,") it's actually a bit practical if vague. Still, it gets its message across and is funky as hell, with Paul's bassline. With songs like these, they were either pointing their formerly teen audience into adulthood, or moving along with them.
And when you talk about "mature pop," you get to songs like "Girl," which espouses complicated emotions of a true love-hate relationship with a well-formed, dynamic female character (although she doesn't come off well,) and "In My Life," which depicts the strange balancing act between the past and the future for anyone in their mid-20's, who has lived some but still has a lot of time ahead. John Lennon was the same age when he wrote this that I am now, and it freaks me right the hell out. As on "Help," he digs down deep and comes up with something very personal, and specific yet extraordinarily relevant to listeners. This is his version of a "Yesterday."
Rubber Soul is one of my very favourite Beatles albums to listen to, one of the least susceptible to changing tastes and times. It's very chance-taking, and yet not in the sense that it's extreme... the music is lively and meaningful at once without ever being too loud or too low-key. All of the songs distinguish themselves with unique features, yet because of where the band was "at" at the time, they sound like they belong together. Here is a thoughtful band, with ideas about their music, writing tunes that have well stood the test of time.
For a while now it had seemed clear that each album was a chance to check in on the band as they moved through their lives and careers. That would only grow stronger as time went on, but here is where "who they are" begins to become crucial to what music they made and how it defined them. This is album is full of that extra ingredient, that sense of "who made this" that makes all great rock and roll what it is.
There's an old jazz saying that goes "There's some folks, if they don't know, you just can't tell 'em." There's a certain instinctual nature to music, and while there are plenty of acts I could probably build a case for an explain the appeal, DFA is simply not one of them. You're either on board, or you're left behind. And there's no shame in that, but it definitely speaks to your tastes. I guess, in embracing this album, I surrender my right to joke about dubstep, because this album's appeal is a lot like that subgenre's - hard to "get" from the outside, but ravenously consumed by those who are "in" on it. Even today in my store, people will grin and rub their hands when they think about this album.
Death From Above's landmark 2004 release is everything that frightens people about music. It obeys nothing but its own wild impulses, grooving, crashing, bashing, squealing and yowling with complete disregard for who might be listening. This is a high water mark for raucous, noisy, abrasive, disruptive, unpretty music. When you record something like this you take a huge risk, because it throws so many conventions in the garbage. It speaks to an audience that feels like there's nothing loud enough for them, nothing messy enough, nothing freaky enough, nothing elemental enough. It isn't punk, although its very existence is an act of punkish rebellion. It isn't metal, but it's certainly metallic in its hardness and heaviness and disregard for humanity. It isn't electronic, but it's definitely mechanical... if a bit haywire.
Here in fuzz and feedback and megaphoned larynx-testing vocals, is the continuation of the work that Iggy and the Stooges began once upon a time: hard, heavy, fast, repetitive, basic, sense-overloading, unsafe. Bombastic and uncontrollable from the get-go. This is the thread that was later picked up on the first Sleigh Bells album. This is music for young motherfuckers who are sick of being told what a song is supposed to be like.
Is it totally impenetrable? Not at all. Just because it goes for the rough edges doesn't mean it's without rhythm and melody. To my ears this is most definitely music. Those that get it get it, and nobody else needs to.
I should never claim to be an expert. There are too many things I know I don't know. But what keeps this blog going is my curiosity. I'm not here to preach at you, I'm here to learn. Up until this year, my experience with Sonic Youth was that I knew the song "Kool Thing" from Guitar Hero, and their cover of "Superstar" from Juno. I knew that by and large, their sound was experimental and generally seemed like something you really needed to be prepared to hear. You can't listen to Sonic Youth like you would to a normal radio-friendly pop group. They will twist you around, chew you up and spit you out in all their wild, mercurial, feedback-laden experimental glory.
So that's the sense in which a compilation album - not really a "Greatest Hits" by traditional standards - comes in handy, because I honest to God would never know where to begin with Sonic Youth. The format of this CD is brilliant in that regard, because instead of picking chart singles, an irrelevant measure of success for this band, they contacted famous fans of their music and got them to pick a song for inclusion. More bands should imitate this cherry picking form of a package.
It doesn't quite reveal anything I didn't already think about Sonic Youth: I was prepared for the squealing, halting crunch of "100%" and the bracing, melted-down grunge of "Sugar Kane." And while I didn't necessarily think of this band for the whispery, soft-focus "Shadow of a Doubt," it makes a nice tension-breaker and shows how well they play moods, not just loudly. At 16 tracks, an hour and 16 minutes thanks to some of the lengthier jams on here, the compilation hangs together in a surprisingly gripping, cohesive experience. As many thrashy, off-kilter experiments as they whip up, it's always ear-catching, never tedious or laborious. It's one thing to be an adventurous, experimental group, it's another to be one that really sounds good for 75 minutes of tracks culled from a 25-year career. If you're looking to become a fan of this band, or convert someone you know, this set will do the trick. It doesn't feel like a club I have been shut out of, it feels like a vital part of my everyday listening now.
The highlight of the album from me is the sublime "Stones," which has a great two-minute build, proceeds as an only-slightly-off-center pop song for a little bit, before exploding into one of the simplest, yet most effective final three minutes on the album. Also great is the utterly mesmerizing near-instrumental "Rain on Tin." These songs highlight exactly what this band does so well, taking rock and breaking it out of its shell.
When I was in grade 12, I was friends with a girl who had a Pretty Girls Make Graves pin on her backpack. I was always afraid to try bands my friends liked, especially obscure indie groups, because for whatever reason I was worried that whatever they sounded like, it couldn't live up to what I imagined they sounded like. This is, in case you didn't realize, an incredibly stupid way to go through life. I didn't try a lot of things. I had long gotten over this fear by the time I was in a used CD store this year and I saw this one filed under "Staff Picks." I thought of that girl from my high school and it seemed like there was no way I'd be steered wrong. I was delighted to find it sounded exactly like I thought it should, and yet like nothing I could have imagined.
This is a busy, frantic, nerve-wracking version of indie rock. There's so much going on here, such fidgety, jittery guitars, thundering drums and skittering hi-hats. Laid on top of it is the sweet, ominous, sometimes hair-raising vocal of Andrea Zollo. The opening track, "Something Bigger, Something Brighter" sets the stage exactly, taking over a minute to unfold, bubbling under the surface, until its fussy guitars and keyboards kick in under Zollo's chorus "Make it electric, make it electric!"
The production adds to the chaos, as parts dodge in and out, creating a rock solid sound collage made up of very particular parts. The ear catches on level after level of the mix, as each instrument does whatever it needs to, yet the whole project never succumbs to the risk of collapse under its own energy... take "The Grandmother Wolf," "All Medicated Geniuses," or "The Teeth Collector." Tough stuff but easy to swallow, because as confrontational and unrelenting as it often is, it's got such good energy, such performance, and such impeccable construction. It's pretty wonderfully ordered chaos. Take "Holy Names," with its smooth, soaring hook, underpinned by that nervy guitar, leading into the title track with its hyperactive MIDI-like hook, one of the best rhythm rock exercises in the set.
I'll never know how I would have felt about it in 2004. Odds are split whether I would have been impressed without really getting it, or dismissive for no good reason. What I know is that I love the slow burn of "Blue Lights" and the pulse-pounding punk-funk pay off in "Chemical, Chemical." What I do like it is that I liked it a lot when I finally did hear it in 2012, that somehow all this sound speaks to me.
Even though "fast-paced synth rock with a female vocal" has become a pretty well-trod ground in recent years, hearing this for the first time really felt fresh. This is a distinct thing, so wholly itself as to be inimitable except in its broad strokes. That kind of thing tends to stand the test of time, as scenes and trends fall away.
One of the understated pleasures of Help! is that it brings a level of polished pop that isn't found on most other Beatles albums. They're now at the height of their pop songwriting abilities, and starting to dabble in genre-expanding exercises that would define their later career. In between exhilarating singles like the title track and "Ticket To Ride," and other songwriting high water marks, there is a surprisingly good mid-60's pop album, marking this one as a strangely underrated Beatles piece.
Underrated not without cause, because nobody is coming around for "The one with 'I Need You' and 'Another Girl.'" They represent a jangly, soft-bellied version of album-filling pop not present on the previous albums and not quite realized on the previous, mostly rockier ones. The latter of those is has a good, swift-paced twang to it, which shows that the Beatles at their worst are still as good as most bands. "I Need You" marks George's return to songwriting, his first since the universally underappreciated "Don't Bother Me" (which got to John's place Beatles For Sale mood a year early.) Really, George's better song here is "You Like Me Too Much," which like "Don't Bother Me" has a rather specific take on an otherwise generic scenario. He had d a gift for pointed lyrics, when he pushed himself. It's almost a taunt - "You're not going to leave me, no matter how I treat you. You like me too much." It's the kind of thing you couldn't get away with nowadays.
Likewise, nobody's going to point to "It's Only Love" as one of John's best lyrics, but it's one of his best-sounding songs to this point, hitting home a note of nervousness and self-consciousness at being in love that the lyrics don't quite live up to. It benefits from the fact that, as I've said, the band just sounds so good on this one: there's a certain beauty to it. The same can be said for "Tell Me What You See," whose climactic callout of the title phrase is really boss. Again, not one of their best taken at face value, but with hindsight it's an early clue to their growing fascination with perception and identity. Maybe, a little? No? Maybe not. But it's an A-moment in a B-song, pointing to the Beatles' growing ability to build their tunes around unique sounds rather than merely being songs for their own sake - soon they would lavish enough attention on even the minor songs that the minor songs would cease to exist. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The two most telling songs about the Help album aren't the very best ones, but give a good sense of how far along their basic pop craft had come: "The Night Before" is a rollicking McCartney number based around an electric piano boogie that has a more innocent, affable take on similar terrain as Lennon's earlier "No Reply." It was a curiously off-kilter, funky guitar solo on it, courtesy of McCartney. Then there's Lennon's "You're Gonna Lose That Girl," based on a lightweight bongo tapping percussion, and "girl group" harmonies reminiscent of With The Beatles, but compositionally far beyond most of that record. Great album tracks like these did the heavy lifting while they explored new directions elsewhere. Not every track was a home run, but the ones that weren't were getting better.
As an album, bolstered by two bona fide hit singles (a rarity in the Beatles catalog) this album also has several other genuine blockbusters. One is Paul's motor-mouthed "I've Just Seen a Face," which perfectly captures in song that heart-pumping adrenaline feeling of meeting someone and instantly falling in love. Paul's narrator barely has time to collect his thoughts before spilling them all out. Then there's Lennon's Dylanesque acoustic heart-stomper, "You've got To Hide Your Love Away," which was one of the best indications that the band's sound could take on new, unprecedented dimensions and thrive. It succeeds in being "folk" because for all its being a song about isolation and dejection, it's still rousing and somehow unifying. Makes you want to link arms and sway.
And then of course there's "Yesterday," sitting like a sneak attack toward the end of the album. It marks a significant moment for Paul because it reveals a path that only he could follow, writing a song that nobody else could have. It's a perfect pop piece, the way the lyrics and vocals invoke sadness and sorrow without ever attaching it to an important concrete storyline: "Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say / I did something wrong now I long for yesterday." The strings are key: they're soft and understated, not melodramatic. This isn't a teen car crash song, this is something a bit more sophisticated. It could be anybody's pain. And though it's very sad, it's not so hurtful to listen to as it is sweet, because this pain is wrapped so neatly all together. Great pop music gives a voice to those things you can't necessarily sort out for yourself.
This album is filled out by two cover versions that basically shut the door on the idea of the Beatles as a cover band. "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" doesn't have the juice of a "Twist and Shout" or "Rock and Roll Music," no matter how forcefully John growls on it. "Act Naturally" at least makes better use of their instrumental dynamics with its reverberated twang. It's a perfect Ringo song, casting him as the likeable, put-upon everyman. It feels at least a bit more natural (har har) than the Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly covers from Beatles For Sale. Looking back, these covers are a farewell to the roots of the Beatles as they move to concentrating on engineering the future of music.
Help! is the growing pains album. They were mostly out the other side of it by the next LP, but for now they were still sorting out exactly what the way forward was. With Help!, things started falling into place, setting up the domino effect that would carry them through the rest of the 60's, the most even mix of rule-bending experiments and pop pleasures. So it gets forgotten a bit, left behind in ways, because it is an awkward part of the "narrative:" an album without a specific character. But in that split, it excels twice. So there.
Something I say a lot is that the best Country music is often made by artists not found in the Country section, ones that owe no debt to the genre's conventions and have no desire to appeal to that genre's main followers. They're more interested in the feelings invoked by classic country: of loss, distance, the passage of time, vulnerability, and fiddles and steel guitar all over.
On the ominous opening track, it's clear that Cuff the Duke have the interest but not the allegiance. The fiddle squeals like a warning sign while the guitars kick up behind it and Wayne Petti comes in like Tokyo Police Club doing a Johnny Cash tribute, laden with weariness and resignation. That combination of the unconventional and the traditional makes for some of the album's best moments. Take "Failure To Some," with its gorgeous chorus, expressing a rather nuanced worldview, and its lengthy psychedelic wailing guitar coda letting you ruminate for four minutes or so.
There's a lot of contemplation, and a lot of melancholy on this album. It's baked into the band's sound, but they really explore it with their songwriting, on tunes such as "Remember the Good Times," "The Ballad of the Tired Old Man," "Rossland Square" which deal in their ways with time, change, and loss. The first is reluctantly celebratory, in its Byrdsy way. "The Ballad of the Tired Old Man" is an anti-war parable, "Rossland Square" is a light jab at urban development and the way our hometowns alter themselves if we're gone too long: it's an ode to Oshawa, which is on the other side of Toronto from me. (Great lyric courtesy of their tourism board: "Prepare to be amazed / That's the slogan of the city where I was raised.") This album is not made of pick-me-ups. Highlights include the crystalline, haunting "When All Else Fails And Fades" and the intimate "Confessions From a Parkdale Basement." My personal favourite song here is the barnstorming "By Winter's End." Let also let their character show with moments of quirk like "Surging Revival" and "Long Road."
And yet despite its bleak imagery and tone, I don't consider this album to be a bummer. It's refreshing, because it's a big, rustic production that never feels like it's kidding you. It's honest and sincere, eyeball-to-eyeball with the listener, laying out all these fears and doubts and wrapping them up in great sounds, confessional but not without sweetener. I don't know how much of the sentiment expressed is "authentic" or "real," but it succeeds in stirring something up in me and attaching it to some damn fine music. Sometimes it's one or the other, but in the best cases, it can be both.
Beatles For Sale is one of those hole-in-one shots for music critics. We like to write about it because it boils to two key points:
The Beatles, exhausted by the rigors of Beatlemania, were starting to get worn out, resulting in some negative music.
The music itself was still pretty awesome; the Beatles were approaching yet another creative peak, despite or perhaps because of the stress.
The Beatles, short on time and demanding too much of their new songs to crank out 14, went back to using covers to bolster their albums after the all-original A Hard Day's Night. By and large the song selection doesn't add to the narrative that Beatles For Sale was deliberately a negative album: "Words of Love" is very pleasant, and it's hard to read much into "Rock and Roll Music" and "Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey." But the presence of covers at all, even competent, high-quality ones, is looked at as a surrender or a concession: "We have to crank out another album, but we'd need more time to write 14 songs of our own." This might not be the case exactly, but it's hard to blame them for digging down and pulling a few standbys from the back pocket.
My personal favourite is the much-maligned "Mr. Moonlight," which is if nothing else the most interesting. I love the vocal interactions built into the song, which suits the Beatles so well, the slight but jittery guitar work, and that muddy-sounding organ solo. And yet everyone else hates it.
As well, there are a few original tracks on Beatles For Sale that are not considered exceptional. You won't find too many people placing "Every Little Thing" on top of their list of favourite Beatles songs, same with "What You're Doing." And yet the truth about the Beatles at this point was that, for what they were putting out, even their less notable songs are still pretty awesome. "What You're Doing" has a sublime, muscular riff that perfectly sits in the mid-60s vibe. "Every Little Thing" has a good chorus, if not a hit-caliber one, bolstered by that little dramatic drumroll there. They are, it's said, "better recordings than songs." Not great on the page but really come alive in the studio. "I'll Follow The Sun" gets some love - Paul was responsible for all three of these songs, and this one apparently even dates back to the early years. I find that odd, since its light, sensitive lyrical matter, about moving on confidently after a break-up, sounds very "current" for the Beatles at the time of this album. While John was gaining a gift for introspection, Paul was mastering the art of writing a catch-all, the exact right level of vagueness appropriate for a pop song.
"Eight Days a Week" wasn't released as a single in the UK but was just too obviously a hit not to be one in the States. That's the kind of song you want all over the radio, with its glorious fade-in (who even does that?) It sounds like it's coming up over the horizon, a big towering thing. Lyrically and structurally, it's classic Beatles, catchy and pleasant as all hell, with a few interesting quirks to set it apart. I've also always loved the way they deliver the title phrase, keeping the pitch sharp, maintaining some giddyness. It's an oasis of positivity on this otherwise bleak album.
Bleak, I say. Not that this is a bad thing. Lennon's contributions, the oft-discussed opening trilogy of "No Reply," "I'm a Loser," and "Baby's in Black" as well as "I Don't Want To Spoil The Party," all explore negative emotions and occurrences, like rejection, doubt, frustration, and paranoia. It's hard to tell which is the best. "No Reply" has those dramatic crashes under the title phrase. "I'm a Loser" has one of the single best choruses, "I'm a loser / And I've lost someone who's near to me / I'm a loser / And I'm not what I appear to be." which is maybe a more revealing statement than was usual for a pop song.
And maybe the greatness of it was that it was still pop music. That these were still technically the friendly moptops who had only just taken America by storm less than a year earlier. In some ways it's like meeting someone really nice at a party, but an hour later they're spilling their guts about their recent party (and hey, I just told you there was a song about exactly that.) And yet somehow, they're so friendly, and charming, you hang on every word. These songs are easy to get caught up in, never overly melodramatic or bogged down by the negativity that runs through them. They aren't good because they're darker: they're good while being darker.
This is where it becomes important that the Beatles write their own material. From the shellshocked-looking cover to the title, the Beatles clearly enjoyed kidding their image a bit, apparently aware that people buying their albums were, in a sense, checking in with them every few months, and if they were being honest, this is how they felt: not like superstars but like refugees. They could form that kind of dialogue with their audience, even if it was primarily screaming girls. Maybe they knew I'd still be here 50 years later overanalyzing it. That level of openness and "authenticity" would be a defining aspect of rock and roll from then on. Rockers who don't somehow seem genuine don't get taken as seriously as the ones that do. That's why the Monkees aren't in the hall of fame.
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.
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.
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.
Because I was so satisfied with the results of my Aerosmith blog, I thought it might be fun to repeat the experiment, on SOTW-proper, with a band whose work is a bit closer in line with my readership's tastes. Every Wednesday, from now until I run out of stuff, I'll be running through the Beatles catalog in chronological order, examining each album, single, and a few other essential tracks. Enjoy!
It's tough not to make this a history lesson. Believe me, as much as I know about the Beatles, I am not the guy to give that lecture, and you can find it in any number of excellent books (and several that suck.) I don't want to spend my breath running down what a monumental moment this turned out to be for pop music. The narrative is well known. It's common knowledge that the bulk of Please Please Me was recorded in a day, and you can hear it. You can practically feel the guitars being picked up, the microphones being passed around, the endless lozenges used by a soar-throated John Lennon. This record is a record of rock & roll as a living, breathing thing, just like those stage shows in Hamburg and Liverpool.
For such an earnest beginning, the album has its fair share of classics. "Love Me Do" was already a hit, as was "Please Please Me." The former was primative even by early 60s standards, which was maybe the point, to boil everything down to its basics. "Love me do, you know I love you, I'll always be true, so please love me do." Cue the harmonica. "Please Please Me" was the first of the truly irresistable Beatlemania hits, with its buoyant guitars, infectious momentum and undeniable charm. After the 1000th listen I realized the Beatles songs contained so many "woah yeahs" because they were just unstoppable.
The rest of the album is filled out with great working band rock. Songs like "Anna (Go To Him)" and "Chains" are easily marked as covers, a bit too constructed (with due respect to Carole King, Gerry Goffin et al, who knew what they were doing.) For what it's worth, Lennon has an awesome vocal performance on "Anna." And their vocal charm is likewise the hook on the bouncy "Chains" and the original "Misery."
One of the highlights of the second side, for me, is "There's a Place," one of the first lyrically smart songs John wrote, which hints at seeking solitude and privacy when he feels low, and carrying some weighty material without sacrificing an appealing, poppy tempo. The album is actually kind of a fascinating patchwork, with a ton of gentle moments like "P.S. I Love You" and "Baby It's You" filling out the spaces between the raucous numbers. Ringo's take on "Boys" often gets forgotten about, despite being the one cover that can compete with "Twist & Shout." It's known more for its odd lyrical content (unchanged from the girl group original) than for the fact that it kicks total ass. "Twist & Shout" still sounds utterly now, with its commands to "Work it on out!!!" and the way the harmonies resolve into an utter shriek of rock excitement. Lennon sounds like a monster from the id in that one. And "I Saw Her Standing There" is the best non-single original on the album, a bit too ragged to be a radio hit, raw enough to show you exactly what the Beatles were all about. "She was just seventeen / You know what I mean."
Never forget that The Beatles were very much an early model for the boy band. There were upbeat dance numbers and downtempo lovey-dovey ones. But they were also the Beatles, which means that so much of this album is slathered in awesomeness, even in the moments you don't remember. They were already figuring out not just how to copy their influences, but to move their craft forward. Soon the Beatles albums sounded a lot less like "Chains" and "Boys" and "PS I Love You," but more like "Please Please Me" from top to bottom.
In spite of its origin as an album of filler - studio creations cobbled together on the spot between albums - the Coral's 2004 rag-and-bone set is probably the album of theirs I have spent the most time with. Without the constraints of sounding commercial or poppy, the coral turned out a set that was remarkably, invitingly dark and lonely. Most of the best songs are alienating in their weirdness, like the eerie "Song of the Corn" or the echoing, shadowy funk of "Grey Harpoon." The latter song pleads "Please don't let the light through my window / Keep the curtain shut, it brings me good luck." "Keep Me Company" is one that drags you over the coals, with its plodding pace and quivering vocal. There's such a sweet contrast between the defeated verse and the hopeful chorus: "But you could keep my company / Like an old memory..."
Elsewhere, the band cuts loose on a few speedy jams, like "I Forgot My Name," "Auntie's Operation" or "Migraine," where they sound ragged and ready to collapse. The opening tracks, "Precious Eyes" and "Venom Cable" are the slickest, most "complete" or conventionally good, and even they're pretty odd. And the album ends with what sounds like an old Victrola recording from the interwar years, "Lover's Paradise," painting an almost psychedelic ideal to leave off with.
This is a brooding, sullen, not-very-inviting album. It's not the first call when you want great songcraft or impressive musicianship, but for mood it almost can't be beat. I love to walk around listening to this album on rainy nights, because this album is very much what loneliness sounds like to me. And that's what music ultimately should be, an attempt to evoke moods and feelings and memories, through all the means available. This album wasn't intended to be much, but probably because of that it succeeds in offering a lot to anyone who's ready to put up with some weirdness.
Something I don't like to talk about very often is the very real social aspect of listening to music. There are a lot of thorny sociological issues that go along with any album, stuff that I'm aware of, but not as comfortable or competent in talking about. My policy has always been to look at an album stripped of its baggage and determine, based on my subjective (but critical) tastes, what's valuable about it and if people should hear it. That said, there will always be that aspect of what your music says about you, and who you are able to talk about it with. There's the case of Big Star. I was going to say "There are two types of music geek, those who've heard Big Star and those who haven't" but the thing is, I'm not even sure I can recognize you as a true music geek if you're not familiar with this record.
That's not a statement that has anything to do with Big Star's music, what it sounds like, or what it means to me. You could hear this album, dislike it, and still call yourself a music geek. Big Star as a band and a musical entity has two lives: Its content and its reputation. It has a marginal place in mainstream music history, but has been taken up by music writers like myself with great passion. Finding it, and making the decision to listen to it (not even liking it, just hearing it at all) means you have done some serious digging, and are trusting tried-and-true devotees in their opinion, and have the right frame of mind to judge. Basically, to me, the moment you decide Big Star is something you need to hear even once, is the moment you truly dive into the great depths of popular music. There's a lot of dialogue about this band and shockingly little of it has to do with what they actually sound like. When I first got the disc, I was worried that nothing it contained could justify that reputation. But if you take that leap, you will be rewarded.
At the time this CD, which comprises Big Star's first two vinyl releases (#1 Record and Radio City,) found its way into my hands, I was a more guarded listener than I am now. I had seen it listen on numerous lists of greatest, favourite, and most influential albums, and I was afraid to peel back the curtain. I wasn't sure, based on what I knew about music history and music of that era, what could have been so revolutionary and yet remain so obscure. And the truth is, when I first heard it, I didn't quite get it. It was so unassuming, so in-line with what else was being done at the time, and so overshadowed in my mind by what came later. I had a hard time believing the album I listened to had the reputation it did. I realized later that it was simply that good at being what it was. Albums aren't generally recorded with the intention of revolutionizing pop music or being mind-expandingly brilliant (albums that are usually end up as a chore to listen to.) Sometime later, I realized that an album can be that great merely because it is so enjoyable to listen to.
The standout track for any new listener will be "In The Street," which is familiar as the theme song to That 70's Show. At first I thought the cover improved on the original. Where Cheap Trick were one of the great late-70's stadium fillers, who knew how to build an anthem, Big Star sounded stuck in the garage, much smaller and quainter. But of course, it is small and quaint and garage-sized. It's about being a bored teenager, and Alex Chilton's voice reflects that so well: how else are you supposed to sing, "Wish we had / A joint so bad?" but in the frustrated whine of youth?
All through the album, lead vocals (by either Chilton or Bell depending on the track) are spot-on for rock and roll. It's not that they're technically accomplished, but that they're "in character" for the song. When theyneeds to sound young and exuberant, they do, and then when they needs to sound aged and wizened, they do that too. By 1971, he was already an old pro from his time in the Box Tops, now playing his own material for the first time. The songwriting is acutely aware of what it's like to grow up listening to music, and to find yourself in a world where it's possible to make those records for yourself. The style of a blend of post-hippie early 70's folk and pre-arena hard rock: a blend we'd now call power-pop, but was at the time not recognizable as anything but "music."
It immediately announces itself with the first track, "Feel," a blend of post-psychedelia and garage rock, with the vocals seeming to melt all over the song while the guitars (and saxophones and other instruments) claw their way up from a deep chasm. This is, I think, one of the album's most inventive songs, while also having somewhat rudimentary musical theory. A great show of bombastic rock misery. You can also see a different sort of late-psychedelia in the mellotron-led "India Song," a Lennonesque bit of escapism, idealizing British colonialism, hopefully sarcastically. It's a good example of how Big Star was taking what their heroes did and remade it with their own quirks intact. They were, again, that first post-Beatles generation, who had learned to play because of them.
That exuberance is on full display on tracks like the shout-along "Don't Lie To Me" and the stomping "When My Baby's Beside Me." If this were a fair world, we'd be hearing these tracks on the classic rock radio every weekend between Bad Company and Rush. The guitar break on the former is pure rock, and the latter is one of the last vestiges of a time when writing a "rock song" meant aiming for Chuck Berry: the missing link between Lieber/Stoller and Free. "My Life Is Right" is a hard one to pin down. In fact, it closely resembles an extremely epic version of the theme song to Cheers, with its earnest, melodic verses and its humongous, drum-led chorus, and more gorgeous harmonies. It seems like a roadmap for a lot of power-ballads, although it isn't one, again you can see Big Star bridging the gap between the styles of eras. They could be the common denominator between Whitesnake and the Replacements, and isn't that just totally fucked up?
There is a run of ballads leading up to the end of the album. "Give Me Another Chance" is yet another perfect deployment of harmonies. Chilton starts on his own, then the rest join in on the chorus, deepening and strengthening his longing, "Don't give up on me so fast / I see it's me who's wrong at last / Give me another chance..." what you see here is a spot-on understanding of what background vocals are for, what they add to a song. By comparison, "Try Again" is stark and haunted, simply worn out but determined, pushed forward by those steady-beating guitar strums. "Watch the Sunrise" comes as a relief after it, ebullient and sweet, like Chilton and Bell's own "Here Comes The Sun," especially that little giddy-up riff.
The real superstar ballad on this is the beautifully earnest hymn to childhood music love, "Thirteen." With a gently-picked guitar and a trembling voice, Chilton recounts the timid movements of a preteen during the British Invasion, crystallizing a moment when music suddenly becomes important as a means of expression, reflecting on the very reason for this album's existence. The modest songwriting includes a brief guitar break that says more than words could, although the heart still lies in lyrics like "Won't you tell your dad, get off my back? / Tell him what we said 'bout Paint It Black." Suddenly, you speak a language your parents don't, and everything starts falling into place.
As you can tell, I certainly believe in the greatness of this album. It's all over the place, infusing every track with musical love and a blueprint for the future. I can still remember the exact moment I realized this was an excellent, singular piece of work, not just a collection of songs I thought were pretty good. It was in that moment when Chilton's voice hiccups just a little bit on "The Ballad of El Goodo," when he sings "At my side is God", and you can feel he's getting just a little twinge of barely-suppressed excitement in anticipation of jumping into that chorus, that indelible, unforgettable round: "And there ain't no one going to turn me 'round." This album is absolutely teeming with love for its craft, the desire to match its influence in greatness, to be to the future what those old records were for them.
But wait: There's more. As I mentioned, #1 Record is now only available on CD as a package deal with Big Star's second record, Radio City. It is absolutely loaded with great moments, and is in many ways an even more interesting piece of work than its predecessor. It also was recorded amidst frustrating conditions (always a plus for great art) and without guitarist Chris Bell, who brought much of the mellow, folk sensibility, leading to something a bit more raw. But it's definitely a different record, one that I feel deserves more attention than a tacked-on summary in this review.
For people like me, it feels fresh an exciting because it's an excellent, new version of music we already liked. What's more, it's a window into an alternate dimension, because it was created at a time before "how to sound like The Beatles" became codified in our minds. Big Star wanted to make music that would appeal to a lot of people, but we'll never know exactly how it could have been, because a bad business deal basically ruined anyone's chances of hearing this album. They were making music very few people were destined to hear, falling through the cracks of history. But since picking it up, the music journalist community has protected it fiercely, examined it, lauded it, and rediscovered it every time a young curious soul reads an article like, well, this one, I hope. If nothing else, it feels excellent because it was made by people with the same level of love for music as the people now most likely to discover it.
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