We can take as a given that there are a lot of great songs on R.E.M’s two-disc retrospective, which has seen considerable airplay on my iPod since I picked up a copy late last year. They were around for 29 years, frequently touted as one of the best and most popular alt-rock bands for no less than a decade of that, and cranked out a series of singles from 1987 through the mid-90’s that reads like a murderer’s row: “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine.)” “The One I Love.” “Stand.” “Orange Crush.” “Losing My Religion.” “Everybody Hurts.” “Man on the Moon.” I don’t have to sell these songs to you, or expound about their qualities. If you know them, you know whether you like them. They comprise an amazing, individualistic, diverse discography of singles in and of themselves. Their fifth album, Document, came out the same year I was born; these songs have literally been in the background of my entire life. I have a strange affection for “Shiny Happy People,” as much as certain parties hate it (even within the group, I hear.) This goes back to when I was in grade 5, and I heard it on an episode of “Beavis & Butt-head,” and I then taught it to my friends as simply going “Shiny happy people / Shiny happy people, baby / Shiny happy people / Shiny happy people, baby...” endlessly. I wasn’t even that far off. My version might be better. My point is that R.E.M., when the spotlight was on them for that certain period, between Document and the departure of Bill Berry due to health issues in 1997, took the opportunity to lob some of the most incredible singles to hit the Top 40, which endure today. So for that reason alone, getting all these songs gathered together in one place, this album is probably already worth your time and money. (Hint: You can buy it for only ten bucks at the store where I work.)
The set is also a great opportunity for casual listeners like me to delve deeper into the back catalogue, with a significant portion of Disc 1 devoted to the pre-Document years, where the band first became college darlings. What I kind of expected was a slow ramp-up in quality, an attempt to find the template that netted them success, a band emerging from obscurity to distinguish themselves. But really, it’s pretty damn great from the word “Go.” Sure, the early ones carry a different weight to them. Michael Stipe’s vocals are shyly mumbled and obscured, awash in jangling, cascading guitars and propulsive pop rhythm, with a shadowy, nervy mood cast over the whole thing... but right from “Gardening at Night,” they are a great band, and a damn unique one whose songs don’t seem to have lost any lustre in age. Hearing them pretty much all for the first time in the 2010s, I hadn’t quite heard anything like them before. It was a “Holy shit, they sure don’t make ‘em like this anymore” moment for me. They didn’t need to come of age: they were maybe even just a little ahead of their time. They have a great measure of “down to earth” and “sweeping grandeur” that just marks them in their early form as a great thing apart from other things. My particular favourites are “Radio Free Europe,” “Driver 8” and “Life and How to Live It.” A lot of what made those later singles great is present here, but it’s in embryonic, uncultivated form. Undiluted, even. If there’s only subtle developments between tracks at this early stage, it sets off a great deal of diversity in those later songs, where they made sure to pursue some new idea or angle with each major song.
The part of the set that examines their major label hit years also treats us to a great few tracks I had not had the fortune to encounter before. The wry “Pop Song 89,” the fun “Get Up” and “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,” and the deadly yearning of “Country Feedback.” Hell, this era is so prolific for the band that they had to leave out a few notable charting singles, like “Drive” and “Bang & Blame,” which I think is fair game. The particular ones I know to be left out have not been worn by time as well as most of what’s included.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The “hits” peter out somewhat early on the second disc (I would say the last bona fide was “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?” also the last representation of the band as hard-rocking for a while.) This allots a great deal of real estate to a period that the band might be tempted to disregard altogether. Instead of merely concentrating hard on the boom years, the set goes an extra mile and cherry picks fairly evenly from the band’s later years, doing a good deal of rehabilitation on a series of albums that never had much public traction. “New Test Leper” and “Electrolite,” both from the last Bill Berry album, are both mature, contemplative, downtempo tracks. They may not be there to get the party started, but it sees R.E.M. leaning into their reputation for sensitivity and intelligence, and coming up with winning results. “The Great Beyond,” from the Man on the Moon soundtrack, is a mini-masterpiece of wonderment at the universe, and “Imitation of Life” nearly rivals it. The band shows off their gift for inventive sonic textures and poetic lyrics. On “Leaving New York,” their particular brand of shy, self-effacing, circular atmospherics proves useful in evoking the tragedy of 9/11 without ever explicitly memorializing it. Considering the album that contains it, Around the Sun, is considered the band’s worst, this is a shockingly great song. Disc 2 also treats us to “Bad Day,” a fleshing-out of an 80’s outtake that later became, in a roundabout way, “End of the World.” Just like that, the juice is back: the venomous "Living Well Is The Best Revenge," the playful "Supernatural Superserious," the utterly airborne "Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter." The latter is one of three tracks bestowed from their final full album, Collapse into Now, which seems to indicate a partiality. Also included are the melancholic "Oh My Heart" and the tense "Uberlin," all latter-day highlights. Three previously unreleased songs round out the set. "A Month of Saturdays," I think, shows their dry sense of humour again, and you would be hard pressed to engineer a better closing bookend than the mesmerizing "Hallelujah" or the absolutely 100% stunning "We All Go Back To Where We Belong."
Fans will like it for the way it captures the narrative of the band's beginning, middle and end. New or casual fans will be attracted to the depth and breadth of songwriting quality that rings throughout. People who are, for whatever reason, opposed to the willfully difficult nature of the band, will probably just have to go on with their lives, although I have to believe there is something on this album that will resonate with them. They are that good.
I don't have any great insight as to what this band really was, or what spurred them to create all these amazing songs. I'm just as baffled by what they were capable of now as when I only knew 9 or 10 of them. They just seem like a restlessly creative band of smart, sensitive dreamers who loved music and wanted to make the best possible versions of it that they were capable. They were exceptional when they were underground, they were working on their own level when they were pop icons, and they continued to push themselves when they had faded. That last era is of the most interest to me, because it seems like they struggle, sometimes, with understanding who they were supposed to be, as a lot of great bands do. Surely there were missteps, and if the wide net cast over their final 15 years is an indication, a lot of them, but there are those diamonds in the rough, especially at the end of the set. From beginning to end, they were onto something, something all their own. I can't understand the mindset that creates "Gardening at Night," "Orange Crush" or "Uberlin," all these songs when I examine them seem to have come from another universe. But they've been so deeply ingrained in ours, just by lasting this long, that we take for granted that this is just what music sounds like sometimes. Sometimes we know the songs, but we forget to listen to them. Putting it all together, you really see what a body of work it is. "Definitive" is really the word for this one.
This doesn't exactly sound like a veteran's album, although there aren't many who have been around the pop game longer than McCartney so I guess he's setting the pace about how good you can be 50 years into your career. You expect sappy old man music, but this isn't it by a long shot. The litmus test I have applied to New is, "What if this were the debut album from some other artist?" Discounting the defensive-reflective "Early Days," you could almost buy into it. And this hypothetical artist would be onto something. He would be lauded for getting to a Paul McCartney-like sound while also adding something new into the mix: as someone with an advanced knowledge of pop songcraft and the way things used to be/ought to be, but with their own spin and atmosphere. That's what gets me. There is a safe way to "do Paul McCartney," a certain way we expect our rock vets to comport themselves. And maybe there's some of that here: a good-natured safeness creeps in at times...but by and large it's almost daring how nakedly poppy it is. We're talking full-bodied, all-rhythm, hooky wall-of-sound classic pop. Not in a cloying way, either, but a real brassy one.
Paul McCartney has not reinvented himself by any stretch. When you've been around this long, and have done that much that is so varied, it's really just a question of which aspects of your style are you going to present at any given time? What you don't really expect, at least not right out of the gate, is an opening track like "Save Us," a buzzy, bracing, breakneck rocker that reminds us that yeah, "Cut Me Some Slack" happened. He's well aware of his toolkit, and he's not afraid to mix and match that kind of growling guitar with his quirky self-harmonizing on "Alligator." There are tracks like the Brian Wilson-like title track or "Early Days" that celebrate and acknowledge the past, and then there are ones like "Queenie Eye," which are just fun. There's an abundance of songs that sound like a way forward, like the thumping electronic "Appreciate," the grooving "I Can Bet" or "Road," which sounds lightly Arcade Fiery. Whether your enjoy this album or not, you can't accuse it of trying too hard to rehash past successes. It wins or loses on its own merits, here and now. The win column, though, for me goes on and on. "Everybody Out There," sounds like a mid-era Beatles tune covered by a modern band. "Looking At Her" is just nuts.
It announces right up front that Paul McCartney is not just interested in putting us through the paces of "being Paul McCartney." He wants you to remember that he is Paul fucking McCartney, and he has forgotten more about writing awesome music than most people ever learn. Every single type of song conceivable, he's already done. Even amidst today's diverse and experimental crop of indie popsters, one of the biggest compliments you could level is still "Hey, that sounds like something Paul McCartney did." So presented here, to take or leave, is what Paul McCartney is doing. Writing Paul McCartney music for 2013. He manages to avoid being stuck in his ways, while showing the virtues of the first principles. There are flaws if you look hard enough for them, and sometimes it feels like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, for the most part it works within his strengths, and it's nothing I wouldn't forgive when I'm having a good time. Believe me, I'm no blind devotee: I wasn't going to like this album just because it existed and applaud Paul for just getting up in the morning. I had no intention of even checking it out until I started reading the reviews.
Albums like these are fascinating cases to write about. It's won't win new fans, and it's not designed to appeal to old ones per se, just to wake them up, to test them and see if there's room in their hearts to grow along with him. Maybe, in fact, it's for me, the 26-year-old avowed lifelong Beatlemaniac and music nerd, who wants to see what the old fella has left in him. I return to my original premise. As a Paul McCartney album in his overall discography, it's somewhere in the middle, sure. As a Paul McCartney album in 2013, it's great. If it were the same album by a new 26-year-old artist, you'd think he was a damn genius. So there's that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm impressed. Really. I feel like this is an album, a piece of work, that Billy Corgan has known he had inside of him for years, and that he has tried to coax it to the surface in a lot of different ways, but for some reason it only just came out now. That he always saw his music as being huge and grandiose - even when trends dictated otherwise - with movements rather than verses and choruses, with symbols and ideas as much as emotions and actions. Maybe it doesn't have "the songs" the way Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie did, but I think it might be more the cohesive achievement, the fully realized vision. It's such a strange damn thing. It's recognizably Smashing Pumpkins: Corgan's voice is unmistakable (for better or worse) as is his ear for details, his particular placement of every loop and layer and drumbeat and instrument, and his vocals, (again for better or worse.) Yet it's fresh, not at all an attempt to retread or cash in on the cache that his band name carries. If you told me that in 2012, the Smashing Pumpkins could be a relevant musical force, I would have backed away slowly. Zeitgeist was more than a bit of a compromise between Corgan's vision and what it was believed they needed to provide. Here they are telling you what it is you really need from them. That might be the only condition under which art can be made.
Yeah, art. Corgan is that most arty of rockers, fussily putting everything where he feels it belongs, devouring each new toy, letting his work exist as a growing organism. As with most topics, I wouldn't consider myself to be the final word on the subject, but that seems to be a fair assessment. It was what set him apart in the 90s, when alt-rock either meant slashing and burning or being cutesy. I think that when Corgan has met his best success, he has found that narrow path between singular personal vision and crowd-pleasing populism. Go too far toward the former and the music becomes insufferable, the latter it becomes bland. Oceania walks that line for 60 minutes.
The sound of this album is big, wide-open and full. There is always something going on, usually a lot. Even the soft parts are kind of loud and heavy, and usually build to some huge climactic moment. This is an album loaded with musical instruments played like musical instruments, not as vehicles for hooks and solos. There is beauty in that, genuine sincere beauty. Here is an album by a 90s band in 2012 that doesn't sound like it belongs in either time period. What's more, it's a damn cohesive album: each track feels like it needs to be heard after the last. It's weighty, but never a slog to listen through. This is especially ironic given that Corgan has mulled over the idea of abandoning albums and releasing songs each on their own. As it turns out, he does one of the best justifications for the full album statement in the 2010s.
What's key about this album are the vocals and how they do not override the gorgeous symphonics of the music. If you let them, they become part of the sonic palette, his nasal voice a roughened counterpoint to the immaculate instrumentation. The music isn't there to back up the vocals, the vocals follow along, he seems to be singing along to the sounds in his head, and the actual lyrics in there are just to hit the right rhythm and inflection. On the printed page, the words might seem like clumsy spirituality, or overwordy new age ramblings (philosobabble?) but as delivered they become mantras and keys to another dimension, one that lives inside Corgan's head and far, far out in space. This is real heavy prog stuff, man. Such grandiose music demands such extreme subject matter. No "The world is a vampire" here.
Does it amount to anything? Is it deep or profound? Does it matter? Does it matter if it matter? Because Goddamnit, it sounds good. It sounds probably exactly the way Corgan envisioned it and I have enjoyed listening to it many times over since I acquired it last fall. It could have gone way, way off the rails, but it works too damn well to be ignored. It wants to be a very specific thing: a huge, outsized epic album that sounds like nothing else sharing shelf-space with it (only the recent Queens of the Stone Age album can compete, and that came out nearly a year later.) And it succeeds overwhelmingly at that. It's liberated from the idea that rock just needs to be rock: with titles like "The Celestials" (which I want to believe is a shoutout to Jack Kirby) and "Panopticon," this wasn't going to be a modest item. Its entire attack is on point, validating Corgan's instincts, his impulses, his dreams, his desires. Unlike Nirvana or Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins was never really a band, but a project, and that project was to build albums like this. This might even be a truer realization of that project than the earlier, arguably better SP albums. Back in those days, he was aiming for huge music at a time when it was not cool to do so. Now, with the internet and the splintering of audiences, the conditions have changed so that you can do anything you like, and people will be into it so long as it's good. For SP, this is the uber-album, the mother lode. If you think this is something that might interest you, don't waste any more time reading me talk about it.
This is my dumb review blog, so I'm going to tell you something about my dumb life for this dumb review of The Vaccines' very good first album. Every so often, my family has a boozy night. Sit around, rehashing old stories, reminiscing about dead pets and old houses and the 90s and old times. This is a recent development. My family never used to care about old times. There weren't any old times to care about. Now I guess there are, and some of them relish the chance to drudge it all up, telling all the old stories like they contain profound revelations that haven't been rediscovered dozens of times in the last year. The tone of these nights is so sincere and so earnest and so desperate to feel. And I'm not one for those. I sit there while members of the family force themselves to feel deep and think about how profound it is that we've been through such things... and I just shrug. I roll my eyes. I'm not into it. Maybe it's because I don't happen to be drinking. I chip in a sarcastic remark every now and again when things get too intense, just to insinuate myself and undercut the melodrama and maybe, unsuccessfully, deflate the scenario to a level that I'm comfortable with. That's me. For all my big talk on the blog, in my day to day life I'd rather be living my day to day life, complete with snide remarks and an acknowledgment that my pain is pretty mundane. I'm a heartless bastard.
I see myself, that part of myself, in The Vaccines. If an album can be as snide as I tend to be at family dinners, this is. There are big grandiose movements in the music: intense punky energy, operatic U2 moves, power pop, the whole shebang, and then Justin Young undermines the whole thing with his vocals. I don't know how to describe it, his delivery is so bored of emotion, so unconvinced by emotionality, he's the reverse Bono. He makes the music work to win him over. He sneers, "What did you expect / From post-break-up sex?" and it sounds more revolutionary than anything I've heard in the punk section lately. The opening track, "Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra)" is a lie. He brings this proper dry British sensibility to the music, this stiff upper lip punk that simply will not give. So removed.
Meanwhile, the music itself is quite great: there are hooks, there are riffs and licks and rhythms worth banging one's head to. It's just all disrupted, happily, by the clash between the sound and the voice. The message and its delivery.
And yet it's not cold. It's not like an icy Canadian indie pop album, not a whimpering postpunk, not a brash garage band. It's something more difficult to classify, more difficult to read. It's so flummoxed at the idea of feeling and dealing with other people and searching for that profundity that everyone else seems to access so easily, looking hopefully for things to get so pumped about, as on "If You Wanna" or to be anthemic about on "Wetsuit." It's the audio equivalent of a Greg Daniels TV show: sincere and earnest and whimsical at times, but willing to accept that sometimes things are worth observing because they're so normal. And normal things include meeting people, falling in love, having sex, being bored, getting your heart broken, moving on and wondering why it happened. For all the capacity pop music has to make these events into golden coins, here's one that seems to reveal them, to me at least, as the basic plain bricks that build our lives. When he urges you to "Blow, blow, blow it up" it sounds more like a polite suggestion than a command. When he cries out for "E-e-elenor" it's less pleading and desperate than it is casual and curious. Is there anything worth getting worked up over?
It mashes together the observational quality of The Hold Steady with the Gen-Y passivity of Tokyo Police Club and the "show me something" restlessnes of the Strokes.
Normalcore. What an innovation. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just looking for a way to normalize and understand my own situation, but I think it's worth noting that I got this out of this album, and that that feeling feels so unique. Unique, and yet... ordinary.
PS Guys please don't ever tell my family I talked about them in a music review, I don't want to have that conversation either.
Truism: Find an album with a good title and half your work as a reviewer will be done already. Matt Mays called his 2012 album Coyote, a figure often invoked in Native American tales of mischief and magic, but also a perverse kind of wisdom and savvy (if I've got my Thomas King right.) Mays' music seems to come from a hot, dusty, sunset desert landscape, half a continent away from the pastoral fields of the Sheepdogs' version of a throwback, the steel and glass of Gary Clark's blues, or the swamp of Alabama Shakes. Like that collection of retro artists, Matt Mays' music seems to come from another era, a remixed and refined version of 70s outlaw rock, with a hint of otherworldly vision. It's a whirlwind of thundering guitars, brutalist riffs, and rasped missives from a dimension soaked in peyote. It isn't really about showing off or songform, it's about tapping into another state of mind. There are solos buried underneath thick hurricane percussion of "Take it On Faith" but it's hard to grab ahold of it. The music never really stops for you. It pushes you around, commands you, and requires repeat visits.
There's some really great rock on here, in addition to that bracing track, we get the swaggering curtain raiser of "Indio" (named for a border town: the album situates you in geography by calling up other disparate corners like Santa Fe and Portland Street, which is in Matt's hometown of Dartmouth, NS.) "Ain't That The Truth" whirs with menacing organs and a pleading vocal: "He said to me the devil can't get you 'cause he ain't got proof / And I said aaaaaaaaain't that the truth." He sounds like someone who's be somewhere and seen something, and he's trying as hard as he can to explain what, exactly, it was. There's the jangling, unsubtly named ode to San Francisco "Stoned" and the towering, Chris Bell-era Big Star-like "Zita." There's the electric eel of a riff that opens "Drop the Bombs," where he sermonizes, "Brothers and sisters hear what I say / Drop the bombs on yesterday!" before exploding into a wild storm of sound. You nevr know when this album is going to freak out, as when "Drop the Bombs" becomes the wild "Rochambo," or "Airstrike," the frantic bridge between "Indio" and "Ain't That the Truth." On the throwaway "Madre Padre," he seems to channel Beck.
You don't see a lot of this distance, this rock and roll mystique anymore. Most artists want to either reveal as much of themselves s they can via stripped-down confessionals, or gloss over it with shiny pop pieces and pastiches. With this album I always feel like the truth is an elusive thing, that it's not put out there for me to absorb, but off on the horizon for me to search. Here's an album for a wandering heart.
He's got a great skill with the ballads, too, using steel guitar the way it was meant to. There's the shattering "Loveless," the somber "Dull Knife" and the weary, dim closer "Chase the Light," which sees the album off into the distance, set for parts unknown. All of them seem sincere and vulnerable, but never betray Mays' outlaw outcast loner preacher searcher imagery. It's intuitive, not obvious.
It's all pretty effortless, but based in a tactful deployment of Mays' rock philosophy. He knows when to barrel on and when to ease off and let the sound take over. It's a journey, not a destination.
I think it’s pretty neat that, when Feist was ready to capitalize on the popularity of her appearance in an Apple commercial, she went and released an album like this. Specifically, it sounds to me like a Feist album, although it’s the first one I’ve ever listened to, it’s exactly what she should be doing. If there was any pressure to write another giddy-in-love pop tune like “1234,” she didn’t bow to it. And at a time when big voices and big production are the big ticket for female vocalists (as if they ever weren’t?) Leslie Feist releases a soft-focus, broken-down, weepy, whispery lo-fi affair that shows off the unique skillset she’s got, that no one else on the scene really approaches.
It’s got the courage to be quiet, the strength to be sad. And not grandiose, melodramatic, “Someone Like You” sad, although that has its place (as the market has proven!) but quiet, contemplative, sulky, sullen sad, the kind familiar to moody teens and adults alike. She evokes this with her voice that creaks when she pushes it, her phrasing and lyrics, which are the kind of poetry that could easily line notebook margins: all concerned with desolate nature and weather and the world around. There’s also the very, very well-done instrumental arrangement of soft horns, light strings, and discordant olde blues guitars that twang and blare at just at the right time. Sometimes, Feist’s voice disappears right into it. “Undiscovered First” is built around a tambourine that hisses like a rattlesnake, before building to a hymnal war chant. You can tell she comes from the indie world and not the pop one because she’s not afraid to let her songs develop beyond a traditional “hook.”
My favourite tracks are the sultry “How Come We Never Go There,” which like the best points of the album is built around restraint, the mesmerizing “The Bad in Each Other,” the rhythmic “Comfort Me,” and the dusty, willowy “Graveyard.” In general, I like how increased exposure only made Feist want to keep writing Feist songs, being Feist, doing Feist. It’s not easy to be this defiantly yourself. This is some heady stuff and it will not be for everyone. It reminds me of the Low album I reviewed last year, C’mon: it takes patience and intense listening, although it also works in the background as well.
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.
If you're the type of person who is worried that excessive praise will turn them off from listening to an album, I will save you some time: White Paint by Hollerado is very good and you should buy it. You can skip the rest of the post. Have a great day. For the rest of us...
Well, between you and me, I have come to feel, in the three years since I first heard their debut, Record in a Bag, that Hollerado is one of the best things going. That's just a an unqualified fact. They rock harder than most contemporary rock acts and seem to have a lot more fun doing it. They are are as smart about their music as any art group to hit the scene, writing lyrics that are not only insanely catchy and memorable, but thought-provoking and original. The lyrics on this record take you from a scrap picker in Fresno to the Pinta Island home of the late Lonesome George, from the occupation of The Netherlands in World War II to the deepest chambers of the human heart, and it begins and ends, in a sense, in deep space. Not only do they have ideas about promotion and packaging (hand painting the entire pressing run so that each case is unique) they have a lot of ideas about their music, and they all work.
The music takes the form of sweet, raggedy garage power pop, putting Hollerado in the tradition of Weezer, Sloan, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Big Star. They sound like guys who just love music so much and want it to always be good: "Desire 126" sets a peppy, Cars-like riff against a lyric "Desire / Is just a chemical / It goes and it goes and it goes... / Desire, sometimes it's good enough..." acknowledging, dismissing or even celebrating the sad contradiction of that statement. Likewise, "Thanks for the Venom," declares "You were my friend, but you are a rattlesnake / Thanks for the venom!" The whole album seems to be gloriously built out of the contradictions inside us. "Too Much to Handle" is a great piece of hyperkinetic danceable rock that really shows off their skills in coming up with, then pulling off, musical tricks no other band would even dare attempt.
The band has also always shown a flair for the dramatic. The spacey first track, "Wonder, Velocity, Charlie and Me" blends into "Don't Think" to create a mini epic that includes phrases like "Levitation is made out of jet fuel and patience" and "I remember the time we went to the museum, slow, I said dinosaurs look said, you said just some thinking." The lyrics in the liner notes, unlineated, seem like the inspired ravings of a lunatic. 90% of the verbiage on here would never appear on another band's album. Then there's "Lonesome George," the tribute to the late Galapagos tortoise, in the way this band often writes, doesn't specifically refer to its subject but opens it up to make a grander statement, with its somber tone and great lyric: "You got no way to break my heart ... walk over me."
Everything in Holleradoland is a potential song. A while ago they posted the story behind "So It Goes" on their Facebook page, which is about uncommon kindness shown by a German soldier to one of the bandmember's grandfathers. It would be an exceptionally dynamic song even without that dimension. They also really flex their muscles on "Fresno Chunk," a spellbinding darkened funk rocker with bizarre, colourful lyrics, portraits of desperate people making due with what they can scrape together by picking through junk piles.
But probably the finest moment of the disc comes in the form of "I Want My Medicine," one of the finest odes to the devotion to music I have ever heard. In another band's hands, it simply would not have worked, but they sell it and imbue it with heart and pathos and grandiosity that is uncommon - seemingly impossible - from a guitar group in 2013, but here we are. You would hardly even know what the song was really about if you weren't following along, but when you start catching stray details in the lyrics, you put it together, and it becomes the most gorgeous, tragic thing. That phrase: "I want my medicine" is one of the heaviest, most honest things I have ever heard in my time reviewing for this site, because it's just such a concrete statement that emphasizes the gravity of the situation. I do not often get choked up when I listen to music, but I will freely admit when something gets to me and buddy, that hit hard. It's all in the execution. And then, before you collapse from the strain, the song comes to its end, and you get a little buffer in the form of the rollicking "Pure Emotion." Love it.
The album wraps up with "Pick Me Up," which is a wild power pop gem that sums up everything that is great about this band, not only their great music, but their worldview: We are young and in love / We are twirling through space / On the luckiest rock, in the loneliest place.
The sound of the album is polished, with clean bouncy hooks and grand production, but it still carries a "live off the floor" quality, a willingness to be imperfect or weird. It's exemplified by the often angular guitars and Menno Versteeg's unpolished rocker-next-door vocals. Some of the lead vox are handled by Nixon Boyd, whose deliveries are marked by reckless abandon compared to Versteeg's earnestness.
I love this band. They give so much value for your record-buying dollar. They convey, through their music, a curiosity and wonder at the universe and the people and things that fill it, the stories that every person, every animal, every item carries inside it, and the belief that people are good and things can get better, without seeming blindly optimistic about it.
More than that, they care about their music. They seem to put a lot of work and a lot of themselves into every lyric, every riff, every drumbeat. It resembles a lot of things but stands out as its own.
Hollerado has made two albums that belong up there with any two albums from any band ever. I really think that. Both Record in a Bag and White Paint bring such life and spirit to a listening experience that their quality simply cannot be denied. When I listen to music, all I want is to be taken out of my life, the world I think I know, for forty minutes or so, and shown something amazing. Hollerado does that with joy.
As we crawl slowly out of this winter of 2013, I find myself thinking of this very good Stars album, which came out toward the beginning of it and seems to capture its character. On the title track, Torquil Campbell sings, "It's so cold in this country... every road home is long." That seems to sum up the album pretty well: although it's fairly lushly instrumented and accessibly hooky, the sound is very minor and subdued, with the wall of sound working to overtake the moody, theatrical vocals. The backdrop is pale but deep. The singers are hushed and aching, lonely and isolated and singing about it.
It's an interesting item after the band's previous album, The Five Ghosts, which I reviewed early enough on that I can't bear to look back on what I said. There were a number of powerful, mold-breaking moments on that album, and a number of wide shots that didn't land with me. The North has a higher floor and lower ceiling: they don't go out of their range as much, and as a result they wind up with an album that is a more consistent and overall enjoyable listen, but one with a less thrilling upside. I can listen to it the whole way through, and only a few tracks will stand out as being high points, and even fewer will stand out as being lesser ones.
It's made mostly out of chilling, frozen pop, which like much of Stars' music skirts an 80s-like line between dance and rock. "Backlines" transmutes from a guitar riff to a synthy chorus and builds string-laden denouement. The elements never clash because they are all with a single purpose. Their command over tone on this album is impressive. The liquid "Lights Changing Colour" and mystic duet "Loose Ends Will Make Knots" are among the finest, most Starsy in atmosphere. "Progress" improves on some of the stilted indie-beat of The Five Ghosts, revealing one of many moments where you really see the heart of the album. "Through The Mines" feels like a reminder that as good and popular as Of Monsters and Men is, Stars got there first and are capable of doing it as well as ever. Amy Millan's voice is a beautiful coo. As more and more top acts feature female vocalists, none has quite the bittersweet earnestness of hers.
Nestled between these moody atmospherics are some nimble indie pop tunes that are bright and upbeat but don't quite break the tone of the album, helped by Campbell's stately delivery. "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When Give It" benefits from this restraint, with the music swelling beneath him and gradually overtaking him. "A Song Is A Weapon" is my favourite individual moment on the album, balancing the precious tone with a catchy beat and good lyrics.
The album cinches up its mastery of tone, its command of "swoony indie rock balladry" with the closing tracks, the staggering "The 400" with its choked up refrain of "It has to go right this time", and the tactful dubstep-lite of "Walls" with its call-and-answer vocals. Ultimately, the album leaves more suggested than outright stated, which is where it has the edge over its predecessor.
Stars are a good band, but sometimes hit and miss with their album packages. Here it all seems to come together. The songs stand out from each other but also stand together into a 43-minute piece that plays very well in a single sitting. I think none of the songs on it will be as well-regarded, years down the line, as "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" or "Reunion" or, for me personally, "Wasted Daylight." But this is the set they've probably been hoping they would put together for many years. Each song isn't a knockout, but as it goes on all the pieces go into place and the individual moments assert themselves for what they are. Pick it up if you were thinking about it, and you'll be glad you did.
What am I supposed to say? What does it matter? Last week, My Bloody Valentine King-Of-Limbsed us with a new album. I don't know if there was any advance press for its release, I didn't hear it was happening until it was suddenly available for download, and then I downloaded it and suddenly I was listening to it. I did not know when I woke up that morning that I was going to end the day by listening to the first album this band has done in 22 years. Twenty-two years. That's a long time for expectations to build up. A lot of people have a lot of themselves tangled up in that previous My Bloody Valentine album, including me. I've listened to it many times in the past few years. I even wrote about it sometime early in this blog's run. And I was then and still am without a perfect expression for how much I love that album. It's spacy and distant and imposing and yet raw and personal and up-close. It seemed almost impenetrable, and then one day I got it. Maybe I don't understand it, but I get it. But this isn't Loveless we're talking about. This is what happens after an album like Loveless. 22 years after. Maybe that entails a certain amount of baggage, and if that keeps you from enjoying the new album, m b v, then I guess I can understand that but I don't agree. If anything, the years have improved this album for me, because it helps avoid the context, trimming the fat away from the usual expectations of a follow-up. It may have two decades of anticipation, but its arrival may have given it amnesty.
I think if they had come out with a new album within two or five years of Loveless, a lot of people would have had their ideas about what MBV should have done. What directions form Loveless were worth pursuing further, what should be discarded, what new avenues were or weren't worth pursuing. There's a lot that can go wrong with a follow-up project, especially something whose appeal is so nebulous yet all-consuming as Loveless's. People think that it belongs to them, that their interpretation of it, their idea of it is the correct one, and the follow up is a perversion of that. It's a no-win scenario so for years we got used to the idea that there would never be another My Bloody Valentine album. Then suddenly there is one. And you guys, it's really, really good.
It has that distance, that rawness, that coldness yet warmth, that slow-spinning hurricane of everythingness sounds, it has sounds that Loveless did not have and it lacks sounds that Loveless did have. At times it feels more rhythmic and maybe even more structured, but it also has "nothing is" which is a churning, mechanical sample for 3:34 very unpleasant-to-listen-to minutes but for some reason I keep letting it play instead of skipping, because it is part of the set and sitting at the end of this album it feels somehow earned. There are bits on this album that I love more instantly and completely than bits of Loveless, like that sad, staggering riff in "only tomorrow," which sounds like exhausted glee, excitement about being depressed, the million contradictions that MBV's music seems to inhabit. Delicate and brutal. "new you" is almost the pitch perfect MBV song you didn't know you were missing.
My Bloody Valentine has a monopoly on a certain sound... scarcely imitated and even more rarely duplicated. That they can play around within it, still sounding faithful and fresh, is very exciting. They took their time and were able to labor over this one for two decades -- okay I do not know how much of that time was spent literally working on music, but my point is they were given breathing room to decide exactly how an MBV album sounds and this is it. This is one. They are the makers of this music that I still don't fully understand but will revisit time and again to experience, to be in awe of the choices they made in creating it, the particular ways the guitars warp and drums chunk and vocals mutter.
Few things account for themselves as well as this band, these records. I have absolutely no business telling My Bloody Valentine how to make their records, nor telling people they should be into MBV. Quite honestly, not everybody has to. As much as it feels nice to be in this club, the point is that it definitely does not need to be for everybody. It's different from other things and as enjoyable as the only other albums by this band, which is what matters to me. It's a matter of taste and this satisfies mine, far above and beyond the call of duty.
My only gripe is that they didn't wait a couple of weeks to release it on My Bloody Valentine's Day. But if that means I got to hear it sooner so be it.
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.
Gary Clark Jr.'s major label debut is the easiest recommendation I have made in my entire time selling music to people. I have never felt more comfortable putting a CD into peoples' hands. There have been CDs I liked more, ones that were more forward-thinking and artistically progressive, but few that I've been more sure more people will like. There also haven't been that many CDs I've liked more. In terms of musical recommendations, this is the mother lode.
The basis of the album is Gary Clark's guitar chops. That means huge, walloping riffs that give Auerbach a run for his money, and mind-warping solos in the Hendrixian tradition that seem to last decades in a minute. If Guitar Hero was still a thing, I could see "Numb" appearing somewhere near the climax of the game, or "When My Train Pulls In," both highly gloomy, thundering testaments to modern six-string pyrotechnics. Tracks like these capture the way a psychedelic blues song can pump emotions up way beyond their dimensions, and other ones like "Glitter Ain't Gold" and "Ain't Messin 'Round" remind of the smooth-roughness of a good blues rock song. Comparisons could be made to Cream or ZZ Top, but he isn't a copycat playing by rote: the style is all his. He's also got a good, soulful voice to go along with it, sometimes reminiscent of John Legend as on the swaggering "Bright Lights," where he boasts "You gonna know my name by the end of the night." And by the time of that track, the fourth one on the set, you believe it. The boasts of someone who knows he has something to prove, and the muscle to back it up.
But Clark goes one step further by bringing classic guitar workouts face to face with post-90s Fugees-esque R&B/Rap, "The Life," the Al Green-esque "Things Are Changing" or the smooth, lo-fi title track. He can switch styles between each song, always sound like himself, and not need to blur the lines by forcing his other talents into each piece. He's not a postmodernist mix-and-matcher; when he takes a genre, he takes it for what it is but makes it gold by linking it with common elements to all music, not infusing it with things that don't belong. In this way, he innovates subtly, disguising himself as a throwback while always moving forward. "Travis County" earns praise for being the "Chuck Berry" moment, but he doesn't have to make too much of a detour because he knows how much Chuck Berry there is in everything. Another highlight is the opening raveup, "Ain't Messin 'Round," a horn-tinged triumph of composition, playing, and production. Likewise, an entire history of psychedelia, soul, and hip hop are blended together in a combination of "Third From The Stone" and "If You Love Me Like You Say" that is absolutely seamless.
I will praise this album endlessly. It reveals new things about the potential of each genre it calls up, and of course is a showcase for a dynamite singer/guitarist. It's exactly what a lot of people are looking for every day of their musical lives: Something that sounds like stuff they already like, but surprises with the thrill of the new, shocks them out of their familiar old Hendrix and Clapton albums. It seems like a cheap trick to just do a new version of what others have done, but trust me, if there's one thing I know about music (and there may just be only that) it's this: If it were as easy as it looks, everyone would be doing it.
Some bands make it so easy. They are so good and consistent at what they do that I certainly don't need to over-exert my muscles by explaining to you exactly what is so awesome about them. Usually, they are bands with a "sound." Lately on this site, I've been targeting acts like this, whose sound is, for one reason or another, particularly appealing and strong, compared to, say, writing a well-realized and broad scope of songs. Neither approach is guaranteed to produce better results, one is just easier to talk about. Before the New Year's break I wrote about Japandroids. Here's another side of that coin.
Fang Island, man, they really know what to do with their guitars. "Dooney Rock." "Chompers." Come on, guys. I do not need to tell you anything about this band other than I can safely get out of the way, let them find their way to the people who are going to want to hear it. Which should be everybody, or at least everybody I let know about this blog.
What is this sound? This majestic quality that speaks for itself? It's maid with mountains of sharp, clean, orchestral levels of guitars, playing riffs that are exuberant and full of enthusiasm for life and creativity. This is fun, joyful music, not terribly different from that of Japandroids in philosophy but far apart in execution. Instead of ringing, brutalist concrete garage anthems, we have delicate, pinpoint riffs that reach very specific peaks and valleys, cresting and crashing all over each other, almost too shiny and perfect to exist. Also appearing sometimes are pristine, refined pianos, on the curtain-raiser "Kindergarten" and closer "Victorinian," lending some class and dignity to the affair. It's highly managed, far from my own conception of what rock "should be," in its raw and untamed state. Yes, I have my own ideas about that, but I am not closed-minded. There are also propulsive drums and usually cheerful vocals.
It's definitely art-rock, with emphasis on rock, and with more of a classical interpretation of "art." The members of Fang Island are obviously extremely talented players and they are not afraid to show off - there is so much going on on this record it surprises me on listen after listen. But they also manage to avoid the pitfalls many technically skilled players risk when it comes time to create a piece of music. They get out of their own way and let the music do the talking, sometimes obscuring their obvious skills behind a talent for finding the right level of simplicity.
The songs are not quite songs but compositions: there are vocals and sometimes verses and choruses, and definitely some structure, but it's all mostly just there to provide some frame of reference, scenery, a skeleton to hang the absorbing riffs and vibrant, towering solos over. I don't want to dismiss their lyrical acumen (they prove a vital part even when it's as simple as "All I know I learned in / Kindergarten" or "I hope I'll never understand") but it's clear they have their priorities in order. Through their music, Fang Island does what most great bands aspire to, and that's reach someplace nobody's ever explored before. Glad to have them as guides.
We can take as a given that there are a lot of great songs on R.E.M’s two-disc retrospective, which has seen considerable airplay on my iPod since I picked up a copy late last year. They were around for 29 years, frequently touted as one of the best and most popular alt-rock bands for no less than a decade of that, and cranked out a series of singles from 1987 through the mid-90’s that reads like a murderer’s row: “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine.)” “The One I Love.” “Stand.” “Orange Crush.” “Losing My Religion.” “Everybody Hurts.” “Man on the Moon.” I don’t have to sell these songs to you, or expound about their qualities. If you know them, you know whether you like them. They comprise an amazing, individualistic, diverse discography of singles in and of themselves. Their fifth album, Document, came out the same year I was born; these songs have literally been in the background of my entire life. I have a strange affection for “Shiny Happy People,” as much as certain parties hate it (even within the group, I hear.) This goes back to when I was in grade 5, and I heard it on an episode of “Beavis & Butt-head,” and I then taught it to my friends as simply going “Shiny happy people / Shiny happy people, baby / Shiny happy people / Shiny happy people, baby...” endlessly. I wasn’t even that far off. My version might be better. My point is that R.E.M., when the spotlight was on them for that certain period, between Document and the departure of Bill Berry due to health issues in 1997, took the opportunity to lob some of the most incredible singles to hit the Top 40, which endure today. So for that reason alone, getting all these songs gathered together in one place, this album is probably already worth your time and money. (Hint: You can buy it for only ten bucks at the store where I work.)
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